The late medieval visual culture of Eastern Europe—which developed at the crossroads of the Latin, Greek, Slavic, and Islamic cultural spheres—has been little explored within art history, medieval studies, and Byzantine studies. Yet the material evidence from regions of the Balkan Peninsula and the Carpathian Mountains speaks in ever fresh way to the kinds of cultural contacts and transfers of knowledge that extended across Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in particular. My lecture focuses on several examples of art and architecture from the former principality of Moldavia (today in modern Romania) that exhibit an eclecticism with the respect to sources, with features adopted from Gothic and Byzantine-Slavic models alongside local forms. The study of these objects and monuments reveals the complexities of cultural exchange and the processes of visual translation in this east Carpathian region during the late medieval period, while offering models for how other plural visual cultures could be approached.

Alice Isabella Sullivan, PhD ist Stipendiatin der VolkswagenStiftung und Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities und in diesem Jahr Gast am Dahlem Humanities Center der Freie Universität Berlin.