<p>This cross-cultural, interdisciplinary project examines aspects of Byzantine art in the eastern Mediterranean during the thirteenth century through the scope of cultural translation theory. It brings together, for the first time, monumental painting, sculpture and archival sources to probe trans-cultural and trans-doctrinal visual idioms across the Levant and southern Italy. In particular, it investigates a cluster of churches belonging to an exiled female sisterhood originally based in Palestine who played a key role in the translation of Byzantine art and Islamic and western Christian visual languages into new artistic vocabularies. The project builds on my doctoral dissertation, which has established the existence of a visual-arts commonwealth, involving Cyprus, the Holy Land and former Byzantine themata in southern Italy in the thirteenth century . </p>