Introduction: A Globalised Visual Culture? Towards a Geography of Late Antique Art

The paper provides an introduction to the problems discussed in the volume. The first section includes an overview of previous geography-based approaches to the visual culture of late antiquity; the second part discusses several theoretical approaches to the transfer and mingling of cultural characters developed in recent decades, examining their strengths and weaknesses. In the end, a new theoretical framework is proposed, which takes into account the many factors shaping the complexity of late antique visual culture, as well as the multiple possibilities of interaction between them.