Art historians have long viewed southern Italy, especially the Salento region in Apulia, as a Byzantine artistic province even centuries after Byzantine rule ended there in c. 1070. The Orthodox monastery of Santa Maria di Cerrate, near Lecce, is widely considered to possess some of the region’s “most Byzantine” paintings (twelfth to fourteenth centuries). Yet a close examination of these frescoes reveals significant iconographic and stylistic differences from alleged Byzantine norms. A historiographic synopsis and review of problematic definitions of “Byzantine” (...) art are followed in this article by a critique of reductionist labels. Embracing the concept of vagueness offers an alternative way to think about Cerrate and similar borderline cases—not in terms of fixed categories (“Byzantine” or “Western”), but as points on an art-historical continuum that is enriched by acknowledging complexity. (shrink)

Can women narrate the Nation? Does woman have equal claim over „historicity‟, and over „being historical‟? Moreover is she allowed the vocabulary to express her desires for contesting for historicity? Or they are interpreted as not wanting to be historical in the backdrops of historical events? Or are these denials camouflaged under garbs of tradition, which is perpetually attributed to women? Or is it the narrative‟s vocabulary, choice of expression and imagery that exalts and portrays man as historical and public (...) and the woman as personal and private and willingly hiding behind constructed social and gendered roles? Or perhaps it is the norms which declare a man as historical and are mostly attributed to his nationalistic or patriotic inclinations, including his bravado in wars, revolutionary ideology etc. Could it not be that the narrative of the history of creation of the Nation eclipses that of the Woman? (shrink)