Author: Gavriil - Ioannis Boutziopoulos

This one-day online workshop, organized by Liz James, Rowena Loverance, and Shaun Tougher, will focus on the interest of members of the Bloomsbury Group in Byzantium, especially Byzantine art. Both Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant demonstrated an interest in Byzantine art, in terms of their aesthetic concerns and their subject matter; in 1912 Vanessa Bell painted a work entitled ‘Byzantine Lady’ and Grant painted a similar work entitled ‘The Countess’, and their Famous Women dinner service, commissioned by Kenneth Clark in 1932, featured the Empress Theodora as one of the twelve queens depicted on the set of fifty plates. However, the Bloomsbury Group’s interest in Byzantine art was more profound than this. Byzantium had a vital place in Clive Bell’s Art (1914); Clive, art critic and husband of Vanessa, declared ‘since the Byzantine primitives set their mosaics at Ravenna, no artist in Europe has created forms of greater significance unless it be Cézanne’. His enthusiasm was shared by Roger Fry, both artist and art critic (and collaborator with Vanessa and Duncan in the Omega Workshop, 1913-1919), who initially labelled Cézanne and Gauguin as ‘proto-Byzantines’ before adopting the term ‘post-Impressionists’. Boris Anrep, who worked in mosaic (e.g. at Westminster Cathedral), knew Fry (Anrep’s wife left him for Fry), Lytton Strachey, Maynard Keynes and Virginia Woolf.

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the work of Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and Roger Fry. In October 2024 there was an exhibition at the MK Gallery on Vanessa Bell, A World of Form and Colour, Charleston (Vanessa and Duncan’s Sussex home) has recently opened an exhibition devoted to Roger Fry (15 November 2025 – 15 March 2026), and in 2026 there will a major exhibition at Tate Britain on Bell and Grant (12 November 2026 – 11 April 2027). Thus, this is an opportune moment to turn the spotlight on the interest of the Bloomsbury Group in Byzantium.

The workshop will feature a series of talks by scholars, as well as discussion sessions. Contributors include:

• Elizabeth Berkowitz, “A Modern-made Byzantium”?
• Niamh Bhalla, More than a Method? Boris Anrep’s St Patrick Mosaic at Mullingar and the Dialectics of Universalism, Continuity and Irish Particularity
• Rowena Loverance, “Degraded and conventional” or “awfully swell”? Roger Fry’s Use and Abuse of Byzantine Art
• Chris Reed, Byzantium in/as Modern Art; or, How to Avoid “A Nasty Wooly Realism about the Sheep”
• Jane Williams, “A breath in the modern world.” Boris Anrep’s Mosaics: A Russian Contribution to the Enthusiasm for Byzantium

The workshop is open to members of the Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies (reduced fee), but also to non-members (full fee). The reduced fees also apply to members of the British School at Athens. To find out more about how to enroll or contact details, please click here.

It is with great sadness that we pass on the news that John H. Pryor, Emeritus Professor of Medieval History at Sydney University, passed away early on Tuesday March 24th. Professor Pryor’s son Sean has indicated that although his father’s death was somewhat sudden, he had been unwell for a long time. Nonetheless, John Pryor had been down at the family’s holiday house south of Sydney until the morning before he died and had walked out along his favourite beach a few days earlier. Characteristically, he had asked not to have a funeral or memorial service.

Professor Pryor will be very well known to many scholarly audiences for his pathbreaking scholarship which brought together the study of the western Middle Ages, the Islamic world, the Crusades and Byzantium. The focus of his research was on maritime history, particularly in the Mediterranean. Author of multiple publications which combined analyses of the practicalities of sea-faring, trade and naval warfare, his most notable book was Geography, Technology, and War : Studies in the Maritime History of the Mediterranean, 649-1571 (Cambridge, 1988), a widely reviewed volume which was regarded  as soon as it appeared as a landmark publication. Integral to JP’s analysis was his identification of the fundamental significance of the counterclockwise current in the Mediterranean for shipping, trade and conflict across the medieval centuries. Professor Pryor was notable for his focus on Byzantium as a central component of a complex Mediterranean world, with his collaboration with the late Professor Elizabeth Jeffreys leading to another landmark publication The Age of the Dromon: The Byzantine Navy ca. 500-1204 (Leiden: Brill, 2006). He was a regular participant in Byzantine conferences including the Spring Symposium. And he was still publishing important articles and book chapters into the 2020s. An index of the significance of JP’s scholarship was the 2016 Festschrift, Shipping, Trade and Crusade in the Medieval Mediterranean, published by Routledge, which ran to more than 400 pages and included contributions from twenty of the most significant scholars in the many fields on which he had made such a profound impact. His students will remember him as an extraordinarily generous, stimulating and intellectually rigorous teacher, whose enjoyably sardonic humour came with great warmth.

Catherine Holmes, Amanda Power