ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with Italian misunderstandings of Byzantine cultural imports and explores how cultural capital must be seen in context. Lymberopoulou discusses the relationship between Byzantine and ‘renaissance’ art, thus demonstrating that, when seen in a wider perspective, the notorious ‘renaissance’ difference from its Byzantine forebears is an invention (as neatly shown by a close reading of El Greco’s notes on Vasari’s Lives of the Painters).
