Michele Bacci
(Ph.D., Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, 1999) is Professor of Medieval Art at the University of Fribourg and a member of the Academia Europaea. He is the author of numerous studies on the cultural and art-historical contacts between East and West in the Middle Ages and on the history of the religious practices associated with cult objects and holy sites. These include Il pennello dellâEvangelista (1998), Pro remedio animae (2000), Lo spazio dellâanima (2005), San Nicola il Grande Taumaturgo (2009), The Many Faces of Christ (2014), and The Mystic Cave. A History of the Nativity Church in Bethlehem (2017). His new book, Veneto-Byzantine Interactions in Icon Painting (1280â1450), was published in Greek in 2021 by the Academy of Athens.
Nicolas Bock
is Professor of Medieval and Early Modern Art History at the University of Lausanne. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Heidelberg and has held fellowships at the Bibliotheca Hertziana â Max Planck Institute for Art History, Rome; the University of Heidelberg; and the National Humanities Center, North Carolina, United States. He has held teaching positions at the Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences; Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic; and the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. He publishes on Italian Gothic and Renaissance art, especially that of Naples and southern Italy, with interest in text-image relations, art and liturgy, and social and economic topics in art history.
Gerardo Boto Varela
is Professor of Medieval Art at the University of Girona (Spain), leader of the international research group templa, scientific editor of the journal Codex Aquilarensis. Revista de Arte Medieval, and co-director of the annual international colloquium Ars Mediaevalis. His research focuses on spatial, pictorial, and liturgical aspects of Spanish architecture from the 10th to 13th centuries as well as on dynastic tombs and memorial culture in medieval Iberia. He co-edited the volumes Romanesque Cathedrals in Mediterranean Europe. Architecture, Ritual and Urban Context (Brepols, 2016) and Emerging Naturalism. Contexts and Narratives in European Sculpture 1140â1220 (Brepols, 2020).
Branislav CvetkoviÄ
is an art historian (Ph.D., University of Belgrade, Serbia) and the curator of the collections of icons, fresco fragments and copies, epigraphs, manuscripts
Sofia Fernández Pozzo
studied Art History at the Complutense University of Madrid (2011â15) and later completed her M.A. in Medieval Art & Medievalisms at the University of York, United Kingdom (2017â18). During the interim (2016), she was part of the Education Department of the Museo Lázaro Galdiano, Madrid. After completing her degree at York, she began her Ph.D. as a co-advisee of Professor Michele Bacci at the University of Fribourg and Professor Marta Serrano-Coll at the University of Rovira i Virgili. Her research focuses on the propagandistic uses of the of the body of the kings of Aragón between 1164â1291.
Gohar Grigoryan Savary
is currently a Swiss National Science Foundation postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Art History of the University of Fribourg. She obtained her Ph.D. from the same university in 2017 with a dissertation called Royal Images of the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia (1198â1375) in the Context of Mediterranean Intercultural Exchange. She previously worked at the Matenadaran Institute of Ancient Manuscripts (Yerevan, Armenia) in the Departments of Codicology and Art History and was a research fellow at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa.
Elodie Leschot
earned her M.A. in Art History at the University of Lausanne and is currently finishing a joint Ph.D. between the University of Lausanne and Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. She has worked as a graduate assistant for the University
Vinni Lucherini
is Professor of Medieval Art History at the University of Naples âFederico ii.â She is the author of two books in Italian on the cathedral of Naples (2009) and the abbey of Bominaco, Italy (2016). She has published widely on the tombs and funerary practices of the Angevin kings of Naples and Hungary, the figuration of medieval power, medieval textual sources for art history, and the Italian, Hungarian, German, and Catalan art historiography of the 19th and 20th centuries. She is the editor of the series Quaderni napoletani di storia dellâarte medievale. Her monograph on the Hungarian Illuminated Chronicle was recently published in the Bibliothèque dâhistoire médiévale series of the Classiques Garnier, Paris.
Ioanna Rapti
is Professor of Art History and Archaeology, of Byzantine world and the Christian East, at the Ãcole Pratique des Hautes Ãtudes (ephe) â Paris Sciences et Lettres and the Director of the ephe Christian and Byzantine Collection (Gabriel Millet photo archive). Rapti has been involved in several major exhibitions, including Armenia Sacra (2007) and Sainte-Russie (2010) at the Louvre. She studies various aspects of Armenian art, with particular interest in the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia and issues of iconography and liturgy, the visuality of inscriptions, and visual rhetoric and narrative. With Jannic Durand, she is editing the journal Cahiers archéologiques.
Juan Carlos Ruiz Souza (â )
obtained his Ph.D. in Art History from the Autonomous University of Madrid with a dissertation on medieval architecture in the Kingdoms of Castile and Granada during the 14th century. He was active in numerous research institutions, such as the Centre dâÃtudes Supérieures de Civilisation Médiévale in Poitiers; the Hispanic Society of America, New York; the Institut Français dâÃtudes Arabes in Damascus; and the Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo, Ãcole Française de Rome, among others. Until his untimely death in 2021, he was a professor in the Department of the History of Art at the Complutense University of Madrid. His research focused on the artistic interactions between Al-Andalus and the Crown of Castile. Within this framework, he published on the Alhambra in Granada, the Alcázar of Seville, the synagogue of El Tránsito in Toledo, the monastery of Las Huelgas Reales in Burgos, and the cathedral of Toledo. In addition, he analysed
Marta Serrano-Coll
teaches in the Department of History and History of Art at the University of Rovira i Virgili. Her lines of research focus on the use of art as a tool of prestige and power by the kings of Aragón, although she has also addressed other issues in the framework of the research projects in which she participates. Serrano-Coll has published in national and international journals, has collaborated on and co-edited several collected volumes, and is the author of various books, the latest of which, published in 2021, is a history of the kings of Aragón.
Lucinia Speciale
is Professor of Medieval Art at the University of Salento. Her research topics range from the history of book illumination to medieval iconography. She has published numerous studies on the representation of power in southern Italy and several articles on the history and symbolism of chess in the Latin West. Her most recent publications include Immagini per la storia. Ideologia e rappresentazione del potere nel mezzogiorno medievale, Testi, studi, strumenti, 30 (Fondazione Centro Internazionale di Studi sullâalto medioevo, 2014); âIl gioco come status-symbol. Gli scacchi tra formule rappresentative e testimonianze materiali,â in Il gioco nella società e nella cultura dellâaltomedioevo (conference proceedings, Spoleto 2018); âyÏοθεÏÎ¹Ï ÎºanονοÏ. Il ciclo evangelico del Codex Purpureus di Rossano: unâipotesi di ricostruzione,â in Atti della Pontificia Accademia Romana di Archeologia (serie III), Rendiconti, xci (2019), pp. 377â431.
Manuela Studer-Karlen
(Ph.D., University of Fribourg, Switzerland, 2009) is a Swiss National Science Foundation (snsf) professor at the University of Bern. Her research has been funded by fellowships from Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D.C., snsf, and the Alexander S. Onassis Foundation, among others. She is the recipient of the 2017 Franz Joseph ii Liechtenstein Prize (University of Fribourg) for her habilitation work on Christ Anapeson. Her research centres on the history of visual-cultural processes in late antiquity, the interactions among text, image, and space in Byzantine churches, medieval Georgian art, and Gothic ivories.
Mirko Vagnoni
studied at the University of Siena (2004) and the University of Florence (2008). He has held positions as a researcher at universities and research institutes
Edda Vardanyan
(Ph.D., Art History, Ãcole Pratique des Hautes Ãtudes, Paris, 2001) is a senior researcher at the Matenadaran Institute of Ancient Manuscripts and an associated scholar in the research unit Orient et Méditerranée (umr 8167, Centre national de la recherche scientifique, University of Paris 1 & 4) at the Centre dâhistoire et civilisation de Byzance. She is the author and editor of numerous publications on medieval Armenian art and architecture, including Hoá¹omos Monastery: Art and History, Monographies, 50 (ACHCByz, 2015), edited by her; The Church of the Holy Cross of AÅtâamar. Politics, Art, Spirituality in the Kingdom of Vaspurakan (Brill, 2019), co-edited with Z. Pogossian; and Hakobâs Gospels: The Life and Work of an Armenian Artist of the Sixteenth Century (Sam Fogg, 2016), co-authored with T. Greenwood. In Paris in 2007, in the context of the cultural programme of the Year of Armenia (âArménie mon amieâ), Vardanyan curated an exhibition on medieval Armenian art and culture, Les chemins de lâArménie at the Musée Arménien de France. In Avranches, France, in 2012, she curated Reflets dâArménie : manuscrits et art religieux at the Scriptorial dâAvranches â musée des manuscrits du Mont Saint-Michel. She is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board for the European Research Council Project Armenia Entangled: Connectivity and Cultural Encounters in Medieval Eurasia 9th-14th Centuries (Principal Investigator Z. Pogossian, University of Florence).