Hell in the Sweet Land: Reflections on Last Judgments in Latin-rule Cyprus, lecture by Annemarie Weyl Carr (Southern Methodist University, emerita), Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute, Nicosia, January 30, 2020, 7:00 pm

Along with two icons, Cyprus' painted churches preserve 22 versions of the Last Judgment from the Byzantine and medieval periods. All but one belong to the centuries of Latin rule. The consistency with which their imagery adheres to Byzantine tradition is well recognized, but their ways of presenting the fate of sinners do shift. These shifts are what interest me. One might expect the contrast between the Latin Hell and the Greek Kolasi to come into play here, for medieval Cyprus was a significant theatre of doctrinal dispute about this. But doctrine is a process of boundary formation. The paintings arise from the sturdy, variously fertilized ground of imagination that stretches in between. Focusing on a few examples, the lecture explores shifts in the way the paintings invited viewers to imagine the fate of sinners at the Last Judgment.

Annemarie Weyl Carr is Professor Emerita of Art History at Southern Methodist University. She has published on Byzantine and post-Byzantine painting; on art and issues of cultural interchange in the eastern Mediterranean Levant, above all on Cyprus; and on women artists in the Middle Ages.