The Fictive Mosaics of Medieval Serbia

The most important royal churches in thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century Serbia were adorned with what may be described as “fictive” mosaics. The backgrounds of the frescoes gracing these shrines were originally covered with gold leaf and patterned in imitation of mosaic tesserae—an expensive and fragile form of decoration of which only traces now survive. Best construed as products of an attempt to remediate mosaic by means of gilding, these extraordinary mural ensembles bear witness to a moment of heightened metapictorial reflection, unique in the history of Byzantine monumental art. The fiction enacted in the gold-clad frescoes enabled painting to define and assert itself in relation to the more exalted medium of mosaic and, in the process, to establish a sense of its own history.