I višap armeni. Appunti per una storia della ricezione

Vishaps are large-scale prehistoric stelae decorated with animal reliefs, erected at secluded mountain locations of the South Caucasus. This paper focuses on the vishaps of modern Armenia and traces their history of re-use and manipulations, from the end of the third millennium BCE to the Middle Ages. Since their creation at an unknown point in time before 2100 BCE, vishaps functioned as symbolic anchors for the creation and transmission of religious and political messages: they were torn down, buried, re-worked, re-erected, transformed and used as a surface for graffiti. This complex sequence of re-contextualisations underscores the primacy of mountains as political arenas for the negotiation of religious and ritual meaning.

On New Paths for the Exploration of the Armenian Art

During the last centuries, numerous books and papers were published on Armenian art in different collections of the world. Still there is an ocean of work to do in this field to fill in the gaps of the history of Armenian art. The members of the Chair of Armenian Art History and Theory at Yerevan State University were the first to carry out a systematic work in Romania in 2011-2017 and Iran in 2015-2019 exploring the Armenian miniatures, icons, wall paintings, silverwork, textiles etc. The results of this work were presented as papers during the conferences and published as articles.

Armenia – Georgia – Islam A Need to Break Taboos in the Study of Medieval Architecture

Two important spheres of the history of medieval architecture in the Anatolia-Armenia-South-Caucasian region remain insufficiently explored due to some kind of taboos that still hinder their study. This concerns the relationship between Armenia and Georgia on the one hand, and between Armenia and the Islamic art developed in today’s Turkey and South Caucasus during the Seljuk and Mongol periods, on the other. Although its impartial study is essential for a good understanding of art history, the question of the relationship between these entities remains hampered by several prejudices, due mainly to nationalism and a lack of communication, particularly within the countries concerned. The Author believes in the path that some bold authors are beginning to clear, that of an unbiased approach, free of any national passion. He calls for a systematic and dispassionate development of comparative studies in all appropriate aspects of these three arts. The time has come to break taboos.

The Culture of Julfa khachkars and their Repatriation Movement

The destruction of Julfa khachkars by Azerbaijani authorities in 2005-2006 at the state level became a stimulus for a unique awakening aimed at the proclamation and dissemination of Jugha classic khachkars. Today, if the number of Julfa original khachkars in the world does not exceed three dozen, the number of their replicas exceeds three hundred. The article presents the khachkar culture of Julfa, the process of copying the destroyed khachkars, the experience of digital repatriation.

Un caso di studio attraverso le carte d’archivio

On 27th October 1968 the architect Adriano Alpago Novello opened the photography exhibition Armenian Architecture. 4th-18th Century, organised in collaboration with the Department of Humanistic Studies of the Milan Polytechnic University. In light of the documentation of CSDCA’s (Study and Documentation Centre of Armenian Culture) Archive, it is possible to assume the curatorial choices that made this exhibition, which passed by thirty cities of three different continents, a large international success. The paper aims to examine this particular case of study that covers an important step in the overview of the Italian historiography on Armenian art studies.

Gli studi sull’arte armena a Venezia. Alpago Novello e le prospettive di ricerca

This paper aims to retrace the Armenian Studies’ tradition in Venice. This tradition moved from the firsts scientific publications edited by the Mechitarist Congregation of San Lazzaro to Ca’ Foscari University’s first chair of Armenian Studies, led by father Levon Zekyan in 1976. During that year, Adriano Alpago Novello founded the Study and Documentation Centre of Armenian Culture that in 1992 moved from Milan to Venice. The present paper focuses on the legacy of Alpago Novello through the analysis of his working methods and results in the context of the history of Armenian art and architecture. His methodology belongs to the field of the ecology of art.

Percorsi di architettura armena a Roma Le missioni di studio e la mostra fotografica del 1968 tra premesse critiche e prospettive di ricerca

In 1966 a team of Italian scholars coordinated by Géza de Francovich inaugurated a series of study trips to the historic regions of Armenia, with the aim of collecting extensive photographic documentation of medieval churches and monasteries. The first result of these study trips was the photographic exhibition Architettura medievale armena (Rome, June-July 1968), a pioneering event that helped in spreading knowledge of Armenian art and architecture among a broader public in Italy and that became a springboard for new research projects in the eastern Mediterranean territories. This paper provides a critical reconstruction of the context and circumstances that led to the organisation of this exhibition.

L’arte degli Yovnatʽanean. Stato degli studi e proposte di ricerca

This text is about the main artistic production of the Armenian family of painters Yovnatʽanean – named after its forefather Nałaš Yovnatʽan – and it focuses especially on the state of the art of this subject. As leading figures of the origins of ‘modern’ Armenian painting, the Yovnatʽaneans represent a central phase in the artistic path of their people. Moreover, they allow us to address some more general historiographic issues linked to studies on Armenian culture and to the development of art in Southern Caucasus and in Central Asia between the 17th and the 19th century.