Conferenza celebrativa in occasione dei 125 anni del Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz

Another Renaissance? Art Between Two Worlds c. 1500

Arising from the project and volume The Land between Two Seas (Brill 2022), this talk takes as its focus Eastern Europe in the early modern period from the Adriatic, the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov all the way to Muscovy, Poland and Lithuania. A region with a complicated history as battleground between empires, it was connected by strong riverine ties to the "center" of Mediterranean culture and participated in its artistic and cultural melting pot. Although scholarship has essentially relegated this "hinterland" to a twilight space of "Byzantium after Byzantium", its artistic production raises important questions about center and periphery, hybridity, and the sites of artistic innovation. Concentrating on a cathedral in Wallachia (c. 1512–1517) Alina Payne will look at this liminal zone mediating between Western Europe and Central Asian cultures, that, she will argue, was neither periphery nor center but a world onto itself, fluid and unstable and therefore more flexible and elastic in art, manners, tastes and even faiths.

Alina Payne is Alexander P. Misheff Professor of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University and Director of Villa I Tatti (Florence). Most recently she published L’architecture parmi les arts. Matérialité, transferts et travail artistique dans l’Italie de la Renaissance (Hazan/Louvre 2016), and edited The Renaissance in the 19^th Century (with Lina Bolzoni; I Tatti/Harvard, 2018); The Companion to Renaissance and Baroque Architecture (Wiley/Blackwell, 2017); and Histories of Ornament: From Global to Local (with Gülru Necipoğlu; Princeton, 2016). In 2006 she received the Max Planck and Alexander von Humboldt Prize in the Humanities and is Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has held visiting appointments at the GSD (Harvard University); Villa I Tatti, Florence; École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris;  Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max Planck Institute, Florence; Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History, Rome; Università Roma II and Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin.