Nicole and Jean-Michel Thierry Collection – Ani and its Surroundings Item Info
- Description:
- While left largely unprotected from predictable damage coming from people and the elements, the ruins of Ani and its surroundings continued being studied by scholars during the second half of the 20th century. Noteworthy research was carried out by the Italian architect Paolo Cuneo, in collaboration with diaspora and Soviet Armenian architects and scholars such as Gabriela Uluhogian and Armen Zarian. These activities led to the 1984 book on Ani in the architecture series published by the Center of Study and Documentation of Armenian Culture established in Milan in 1967. Among the contributors to the 1984 volume were Nicole and Jean-Michel Thierry, French physicians and scholars of medieval Armenian, Byzantine and Georgian art, who were frequent visitors of the ruins of Ani. From their first visit in 1959 to 1998, they accumulated vast material about its various structures, which they used to publish scholarly studies. The archive that Nicole and Jean-Michel Thierry amassed across decades, housed in the French National Institute for Art History (INHA) in Paris, is highly significant for providing us with meticulous data on the ruins of Ani and its surroundings. It acquired even more value after a series of damaging 'restoration’ works that were done in Ani in the 1990s. We highlight this by juxtaposing late-19th and early-20th-century photographs of the ruins of Ani and its surroundings with those from the Nicole and Jean-Michel Thierry Collection from the second half of the 20th century and more recent photographs. In doing so, we hope to give voice to the ruins of Ani.
Citation:
"Nicole and Jean-Michel Thierry Collection – Ani and its Surroundings", Ani, Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO), /items/ani_144.html