‘Picturing a Lost Empire: An Italian Lens on Byzantine Art in Anatolia, 1960–2000’ exhibition focuses on the research on Byzantine art carried out by Italian scholars in the second half of the twentieth century and examines its mutual relationship with the history of Byzantine art historiography in Türkiye. Featuring a selection of previously unpublished archival photographs of extraordinary monuments preserved in Anatolia, the exhibition can be visited at ANAMED in Istanbul.
Between 1966 and 2000, Italian art historians traveled across the historical regions of Türkiye in order to explore the architecture surviving from the Middle Ages (400–1400 CE). These trips resulted in a substantial number of photographs, later collected in the Center for Documentation of Byzantine Art History of Sapienza (CDSAB). Curated by art historians Livia Bevilacqua and Giovanni Gasbarri, the exhibition offers a look into the holdings of CDSAB for the first time.
The exhibition draws extensively on the photographs and other archival materials of the CDSAB, focusing specifically on four historical regions: eastern Türkiye; Lycia; Mesopotamia and Tur ‘Abdin; Cilicia and Isauria. These outstanding materials, gathered over the course of almost fifty years, attest to the story of monuments and artifacts that, in many cases, have since been radically transformed or have even vanished. The exhibition invites visitors to follow this unique route from Rome to the East, to rediscover the remains of a lost empire, and to step into the scenic landscape that surrounds them.
