Identity Markers in the Art of 14th and 15th Century Famagusta

In the late Middle Ages the port-town of Famagusta proved to be one of the most cosmopolitan and multicultural centres of the Mediterranean world. Different artistic traditions coexisted locally, including Crusader, French Gothic, and Armenian architecture, as well as the religious painting of Byzantium, the Latin West and the Arab Christian world. The repertory of forms worked out by each of these traditions happened frequently to be selected and appropriated by the groups settled in towns in order to promote their own social prestige; yet this resulted more often in a juxtaposition of different formulae and patterns in the same space, than in a manifestation of artistic synthesis or “hybridizations”. The paper will focus on the dynamics of interactions between patrons, artists and audiences in such a multicultural context: emphasis will be laid on the remnants of murals and furnishings in the extant church interiors, which bear witness not only to the cross-cultural circulation of different artistic schemes, but also, and more precisely, to the widespread appropriation of decorative and typological models originating in the Latin West and being instrumental to the expression of the individual’s quest for one’s soul’s sake.