Alice Isabella Sullivan

The project centers on the painted and fortified Orthodox monastic churches of late medieval Moldavia built in the decades after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. These churches offer an unprecedented mixture of Byzantine, Slavic, western Gothic, and even Islamic architectural and iconographic features integrated with local forms and developments. In engaging with the architecture, image programs, and functions of the Moldavian churches in the context of religious politics and patronage, the Orthodox liturgy, the cult of saints, and the theory of images, the project illuminates the various dimensions of Orthodox religious spaces and charts the complexities of cultural contact in eastern Europe during the late medieval period. Notions of history, cultural memory, artistic integration, spatio-temporal experiences, kinds of cross-cultural rapport, and modes of translation are among the study’s central concerns.