Team

Alice Isabella Sullivan (PhD, Assistant Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Department of the History of Art and Architecture, Tufts University) specializes in the artistic production of Eastern Europe and the Byzantine-Slavic cultural spheres in the period between the 14th and 16th centuries. She has published on art historical topics related to the history and visual culture of medieval Moldavia and their connections with Byzantium and the Latin West in the post-Byzantine period. She is the author of the award-winning book The Eclectic Visual Culture of Medieval Moldavia (Brill, 2023), Europe’s Eastern Christian Frontier (ARC, 2024), and co-editor of several volumes. Through her collaborative efforts, Alice aims to bring scholarly and public attention to the northern frontiers of the Byzantine Empire in Eastern Europe, especially after 1453.

Vladimir Ivanovici (PhD, Lecturer, Mendrisio Academy of Architecture & Researcher, University of Vienna) studies the strategies ancient and medieval traditions used to flesh out the divine through the careful integration of built space, iconographic programmes, ritual actions, and sensorial engagement, with particular attention to the use of light (Manipulating Theophany: Light and Ritual in North Adriatic Architecture (ca. 400–ca. 800). Since these traditions developed notions of embodied holiness, which they also held to manifest in the form of light, he integrates the presence, aesthetic, and movement of living persons in the art historical analysis of the spaces (Between Statues and Icons. Iconic Persons from Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages).

Combined, our complementary expertise reveals the complex implications of the space preserved at Pătrăuți for our understanding of the liturgical experience, as well as the design, building, and decorating sequence of the church, and of the cultural dynamics that produced it.