Barbara Schellewald:
Addressing the beholder in Georgian and Byzantine wall paintings

Viewers are addressed differently by changing the constellations of images, developing complex narrative strategies or alternative visual concepts. Painters modified their concepts during their working process, which underlines the diagnosis that they were composing their scenes according not only to the specific situation of a sacred space and the available wall and vault areas, but by considering the perception modes of the beholder. The lecture will focus on these phenomena, also by relating Georgian and Byzantine paintings to one another.

From 2004 to 2020 Barbara Schellewald was professor for Art History of Medieval Times at the University of Basel, having previously been Professor for Medieval and Byzantine Art History at the University of Bonn. From 2008 to 2017 she was a member of the executive board of the National Center of Competence in Research (NCCR) „Eikones“ with her research on Revealing and Concealing. In 2019 she was appointed Warburg Professor of the year at the Warburg Haus in Hamburg. For the term 2021-2022 she is Visiting-Professor at the Humboldt-University in Berlin. Since 2006 she has been part of the collaboration between the Max-Planck-Institute in Florence and the Chubinashvili-Institute in Tbilisi. Her current research focuses on the materiality of mosaics as well as specific pigments in wall paintings and the modalities of perception of images in East and West.