364 Georgopoulou
excavated in Thebes not far from the castle of St Omer,108 and in the area of the
Athenian Agora.109
Conclusion: Public Official Monuments and Local Realities
Uncovering the symbolic meaning of public monuments is important for
appreciating the intentions of the rulers. Nonetheless, practical matters must
also be considered: issues related to materials, patronage, and the available
workforce. Assuming that the availability of building materials and local
workers define to some degree the materiality of the monuments that will
be built, it follows that the workforce, the technical skills of masons, and the
presence of an imported or local master builder are critical for the outcome.110
Until recently the art of Latin Greece had been interpreted as a colonial art,
sponsored and executed by non-indigenous people who ruled over a foreign
territory.111 Such a binary hypothesis promoted a polemical discourse between
the two communities by stressing the alterity between the overlords’ high
artistic pedigree, the Gothic style, and the indigenous, Byzantine style.112
According to this reasoning, artistic production is intertwined with a search for
ethnic identities in relation to political ideologies. In this scenario there is no
room for a fully developed local artistic school that would incorporate imported
and indigenous elements; masterminds and techniques have to be imported
from abroad and local masons trained (hastily?) on the spot by foreign mas-
ters; finally, there is virtually no room for an indigenous patron of means. No
108 Pamela Armstrong, “Byzantine Thebes: Excavations on the Kadmeia, 1980,” The Annual of
the British School at Athens 88 (1993), 295–335.
109 Theodore Leslie Shear, “The Campaign of 1933,” Hesperia 4 (1935), 451–74; and Kenneth
M. Setton, “The Archaeology of Medieval Athens,” in Essays in Medieval Life and Thought,
Presented in Honor of Austin Patterson Evans (New York, 1955), pp. 227–58, repr. in Kenneth
M. Setton, Athens in the Middle Ages (London, 1975), I. For the most recent excavations of
Byzantine levels at the Athenian Agora see John McKesson Camp ii, “Excavations in the
Athenian Agora: 2002–2007,” Hesperia 76 (2007), 627–63, esp. 646–48.
110 Robert Ousterhout, Master Builders of Byzantium (Princeton, 1999).
111 This 19th-century point of view is exemplified in the studies of Camille Enlart, Gothic Art
and Architecture in Cyprus and idem, “Quelques monuments d’architecture gothique en
Grèce,” Revue de l’art chrétien 8 (1897), 309–14.
112 Charalambos Bouras has also noted the conservatism of Byzantine architecture vis-à-vis
the challenge of the development of 13th-century Gothic architecture in Charalambos
Bouras, “The Impact of Frankish Architecture,” pp. 247–62.