The School continued with the presentation of Professor Alexandros Alexakis (University of Ioanina), "Learning Networks Connecting Palestine, Rome and Constantinople in the Course of the Seventh and Eighth Century", which aimed to transmit the profane texts and the first Church Fathers of the three key places of Christianity - Palestine, Rome and Constantinople - during the so-called "dark ages", marked by the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem (638), the Lateran Synod (649) and the last ecumenical councils (680-681, Constantinople, respectively 787, Nicaea), who condemned, in turn, monothelism, and then iconoclasm. The lecturer showed the way in which Greek literary, philosophical and scientific fragments were preserved and circulated, through florilegia, together with the great texts of the Church Fathers from the first centuries.
This was followed by a presentation by Dr. Antonio Pio di Cosmo (Universidad Católica de Cuyo, Argentina), entitled "Rethinking the Heaven: the Cretan School of Painter and the Survival of the Soul. The Reinterpretation of Michael Damskinos", which followed the osmosis between art Venetian iconography and the Orthodox Christian imaginary in the reinterpretation of paradise and the afterlife.
