Department of English
- Monday, April 6, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm
Class of 1978 Pavilion, sixth floor of Van Pelt-Dietrich Library
We are thrilled to welcome Ivan Drpić (University of Pennsylvania) for a talk titled “Painters at Play: The Excessive Epigraphy of a Late Byzantine Church.”
Professor Ivan Drpić writes:
"Byzantine fresco-painters rarely marked their works with personal inscriptions. One notable exception to this pervasive anonymity is the Church of the Virgin Peribleptos in Ohrid, North Macedonia. The mural decoration of this church, completed in 1294/95, features at least eight written marks left by the painters, the chief among whom were members of the Astrapas family from Thessaloniki. What is striking about these written marks is not only their sheer number—an idiosyncrasy otherwise unparalleled elsewhere in the Byzantine world—but also, more crucially, their strategic placement. Fully integrated into the painted scenes and figures, the “signatures” of the Astrapades take on the guise of epigraphic parerga gracing a variety of objects represented on the walls—garments, weaponry, tableware, and architecture. Rather than being external appendages to the frescoes, these written marks are, in other words, an integral part of their pictorial fiction. This lecture argues that the ostensible furtiveness of the painters’ personal inscriptions at the Peribleptos invited the beholder to participate in a game of visual hide-and-seek. In the process, it created conditions for an alternative mode of viewing, one in which the subject matter of the murals could be downplayed or even ignored at the expense of its artful rendition. As though refusing to exhaust itself in the task of depicting sacred truths, the art of the Astrapades proclaimed itself to be a source of visual pleasure."
Ivan Drpić is the Cecil L. Striker Associate Professor of History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. He specializes in the art, architecture, and material culture of Byzantium and its Slavic neighbors in Southeastern Europe. Drpić’s first book, Epigram, Art, and Devotion in Later Byzantium (Cambridge University Press, 2016)—the winner of the 2017 Runciman Prize and the 2019 Karen Gould Prize—explores the nexus of art, personal piety, and self-representation in the last centuries of Byzantium, focusing on the evidence of verse inscriptions. Drpić is currently at work on a second book project, The Enkolpion: Object and Self in Medieval Byzantium, which investigates the dynamics of subject formation through the lens of material culture. His scholarship has received recognition from a number of sources, including the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.