On April 9–13th, a lecture series/block course by Katharina Meinicke (Universität Wien) titled The Umayyad Visual Culture between Continuity and
Change took place in the Hans Belting Library. The course presented an overview of the visual culture of the empire of the first islamic dynasty, the
Umayyads (AD 661–750), which was, figuratively speaking, a superpower on the crossroads, in the sense of both geography and history. As far
as geography is concerned, the Umayyad imperium stretched from the Iberian peninsula all the way to the borders of China, and so it encompassed a number
of centers of late-Antique artistic production. From the historical perspective, it was a period of transition between Late Antiquity and the
Middle Ages.
Katarína Kravčíková
