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Worlds of Byzantium offers a new understanding of what it means to study the history and visual culture of the Byzantine empire during late antiquity and the Middle Ages. Arguing that linguistic and cultural frontiers do not always coincide with political ones, it suggests that Byzantine studies should look not only within but also beyond the borders of the Byzantine empire and include the history of Christian populations in the Muslim-ruled Middle East and neighbouring states like Ethiopia and Armenia and integrate more closely with Judaic and Islamic studies. With essays by leading scholars in a wide range of fields, it offers a vision of a richly interconnected eastern Mediterranean and Near East that will be of interest to anyone who studies the premodern world.
This chapter explores the complex networks and varied kinds of movement of people, ideas and objects that shaped artistic creativity in the early Byzantine empire. As part of a historiographic review, centers of cultural production, ethnicity, identity, style, and decorum are considered. Decades of largely futile attempts to locate the places of production of portable luxury media, especially silver, are presented. High-quality styles can be illusionistic, but can also be based on very different criteria. A more complex and nuanced model for understanding the process of creation is proposed. This chapter concludes with some remarks about Egypt’s significance in the empire, and what the visual record tells us about the distribution of artistic creativity.