NEW YORK—On Tues., April 17, Thomas F. Mathews, John Langeloth Loeb Professor Emeritus in the History of Art at New York University, will give an illustrated lecture on “Armenian Art on the International Stage,” at Columbia University. The event is sponsored by the Armenian Center at Columbia University and the department of art history and archaeology in association with the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR).
Mathews will explain how recent scholarship on Armenian art is re-positioning the subject in the grand “Christian Crescent,” which stretched from Alexandria around Palestine and Syria to Constantinople. On this cosmopolitan international stage, Armenia kept pace with the latest developments in architectural design, manuscript painting, church decoration, and the art of icons. The image theory developed by Vrtanes of Dvin was well in advance of Greek theologians Leontius of Neapolis and John of Damascus.
Mathews is an acknowledged expert in the field of early Christian and medieval religious art, with a focus on Armenian church architecture and manuscript illumination. He has held many prestigious fellowships and honors—with the Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Humanities, Samuel H. Kress, J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Institute for Advanced Study Princeton, among others—and is the author of numerous books on Byzantine art, including The Clash of Gods and The Byzantine Churches of Istanbul. Earlier he curated an exhibition spanning the whole medieval Armenian tradition of manuscript illumination under the title “Treasures in Heaven” at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, with accompanying catalogue and collected essays published in Treasures in Heaven. His most recent book, Byzantium: From Antiquity to the Renaissance, was published by Yale University Press in 2010.
The talk will take place at 6:30 p.m. on the Columbia campus, in Room 612 of Schermerhorn Hall, 1190 Amsterdam Ave., New York. It is free and open to the public, and will be followed by a reception in the Judith Lee Stronach Center Lounge on the 8th floor of Schermerhorn Hall. The talk is part of an ongoing series of events sponsored by the Armenian Center.
For information, contact the department of art history and archaeology by calling (212) 854-4504 or e-mailing eag43@columbia.edu; or Armen T. Marsoobian by calling (203) 392-6788 or e-mailing am3766@columbia.edu.
I finally have my own copy of “Treasures in Heaven.” I had borrowed my university’s copy so often, that they helped me to locate one for myself! It is an exceptionaly beautiful book; the colour reproductions are brilliant, and the black and white ones have been meticulously reproduced. Dr. Mathews, I am so very grateful to you for publishing pigment analysis, metal ornamentation, the exact methods of tooling and binding. I made paper by following Chapter 8. I then made the ruling frame as you have shown, and finally located carbon ink. Thank you so much for the informative Cilician palette discussion. I bought insects from India and tried to make red lake as you have noted, but the colour is fugitive. What is the mordant for it? I was going to use it instead of bole under the gold. I confess to actually trying to make parchment by following your book. I washed lamb skins in a washing machine and nailed the skins to a barn door to dry in the sun. I scraped as you have written. oh, God, I will never do that again! I still make paper, sometimes from linen. I space the notched gatherings as you have shown. How I wish I could attend your lecture. Is there any possibility that it will be available in hard copy or video for sale? I thank you and all the article contributors for “Treasures in Heaven.”
Dr. Mathews; I should also have mentioned that the information about colophons in your book was so interesting that I followed it up by reading Sanjian’s Colophons of Armenian Manuscripts 1301-1480. This is a very exciting and revealing area of study, and I am hoping more will be published. Many thanks for the writing in your book on colophones. I just noticed that my university has two copies of your new book.