2 June

to be announced

23 June

to be confirmed

workshop with two twenty-minute papers

27 October

Franka Horvat, independent scholar, Zadar, Croatia

lecture of 40 minutes followed by q & a plus discussion

Not Set in Stone: A Reinterpretation of Stonework from the Elaphiti Islands
The Elaphiti Islands off the coast of Ragusa (mediaeval Dubrovnik), are well attested in archival documents and are rich in mediaeval material remains. They  preserve fifteen churches dated from the ninth to the thirteenth century, as well as architectural traces of settlements. In previous scholarship these small single-aisle structures were analysed in the context of ethnogenesis and Christianisation, and attributed to wealthy landowners from the mainland. Conversely, I consider the churches from the islanders’ perspective and study them through the changing social conditions and cultural connections of the islands. In this talk I focus on the sculptural program of the Elaphiti churches, which were found in and around all of the churches, as well as scattered around the islands and reused as building material in secular contexts. I examine the collection from the Parish church on Koločep, which houses some of the best-preserved examples of liturgical furniture of the archipelago: the fragments which come from the church of Saint Nicholas on the aforementioned island. The exhibits include pieces of a reconstructed altar screen which contains the only preserved donor inscription in any of the Elaphiti churches, which has been link to Queen Helena of Hungary. I propose a different interpretation of the inscription and a re-evaluation of patronage patterns on the islands.

Franka Horvat is an art historian specialising in medieval art in the Mediterranean, particularly the intersection of art and socio-economic conditions in the periphery of the Byzantine Empire, with a special focus on archipelagos, insularity and small islands. Using an interdisciplinary approach which integrates art, architecture, archaeology, archival records, ethnographic evidence, literary and cartographic sources, she reevaluates the roles that small islands played in medieval Mediterranean networking systems. Her work includes the study of non-elite and marginalised people, village men and women, foreigners, and enslaved people – in short, the “other” ninety five percent who so often fall between the cracks in historical analyses. Franka completed her PhD dissertation “Insular Power: Reconstructing the Social, Economic and Artistic Networks of the Elaphiti Islands, Croatia,” at the Department of Art History at UCLA in June 2022, after which she taught six courses on medieval art at the same institution. She currently conducts research as an independent scholar.