Among the winners of the National Science Centre (NCN) Sonata 19 competition is Dr. Julia Burdajewicz’s project “Wall painting and stucco decoration of the Lower Basilica at ‘Marea’/Philoxenite as a testimony of the decoration of Alexandrian churches. An iconographic, stylistic, and technical study.” She will carry out this project within the consortium of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and the Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology, University of Warsaw.
Dr. Julia Burdajewicz is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Conservation and Restoration of Works of Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. She specializes in the study of wall paintings, floor and wall mosaics, and other techniques of monumental art, particularly from the Hellenistic to Late Antique periods. Her doctoral dissertation, which resulted from several years of research on Late Antique wall paintings from Porphyreon (Jiyeh, Lebanon), was published as a monograph “Late Antique Wall Paintings from Porphyreon in the Sidon Hinterland” (Polish Publications in Mediterranean Archaeology 7, Peeters Publishers).
Her latest project focuses on the remnants of wall paintings and stucco decorations from the so-called Lower Basilica in “Marea”/Philoxenite (late 5th century). The project aims to reconstruct the appearance of the wall decorations of the building through iconographic, stylistic, and technological analyses.
The research will address issues such as the composition and architectural context of the decorations, overall aesthetics, and the relationships between the paintings and stucco work. An extensive archaeometric research program will characterize the execution technique of these decorations. The Lower Basilica likely originated from an initiative by the Bishop of Alexandria, and the artists commissioned to decorate it probably came from Alexandria. Therefore, these remnants, though incomplete and preserved in thousands of fragments, provide invaluable material for studying the appearance of Alexandrian churches, which lack any surviving material evidence or descriptions of their decorations.
- Find out more about PCMA UW research in ‘Marea’/Philoxenite
- Find out more about PCMA UW research in Alexandria