Blog Post # 1: Please respond to the following prompt by 5:00 pm on Friday, September 4

This semester, I hope to pair our coursework in the theories and methodologies of art history with Professor Alicia Walker's course "Surveying Byzantium" in order to extend and strengthen my foundational knowledge and research experience in Byzantine art history. Previous coursework and independent research with Professor Walker on this field have informed my familiarity and confidence in it, and this summer, my work as a curatorial intern in the department of Byzantine art at the Met gave me insights into the curation, presentation, and manipulation of Byzantine artifacts in and beyond their intended, original contexts. There are still so many gaps in my knowledge, since this empire spans a massive temporal and geographic scope, and though I was at first very wed to studying Russo-Byzantine syncretism because of my Russian minor/language coursework, I am now more hesitant to limit myself to this particular geography due to my other regional interests, especially in Venice and the Kingdom of Aksum. Generally, I am interested in spoliated re-use of Byzantine art and relics in international, later medieval and early modern contexts and collections, and currently, I am especially excited about the afterlives of Byzantine glyptic arts: engraved gemstones and glass imitations. Two striking examples about which I am especially curious are near-identical chalcedony cameos of the Archangel Michael, incorporated onto the Buch Chalice by Catherine II in the eighteenth century, and onto the St. Vitus Reliquary Cross commissioned by Charles IV in the fourteenth. The most scholarship I have found connecting these two objects is in a footnote of a dissertation on Byzantine cameos from a few years ago, so I am interested in potentially addressing this research gap. Because of my interest in engraved gemstones, I am also taking a class on Greco-Roman Magic, in which we will cover subjects such as magical amulets, intaglios, the properties of stones, and alchemy, all subjects I hope to bridge to answer questions about the transformation of these miniatures and materials and their reception in circulation.