Author : Erik Thunø
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 361 pages
File Size : 34,57 MB
Release : 2015-04-20
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 1107069904
This book focuses on apse mosaics in Rome and engages topics including time, intercession, materiality, repetition, and vision.
Author : Liz James
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 1748 pages
File Size : 11,73 MB
Release : 2017-10-05
Category : Art
ISBN : 1108508596
In this book, Liz James offers a comprehensive history of wall mosaics produced in the European and Islamic middle ages. Taking into account a wide range of issues, including style and iconography, technique and material, and function and patronage, she examines mosaics within their historical context. She asks why the mosaic was such a popular medium and considers how mosaics work as historical 'documents' that tell us about attitudes and beliefs in the medieval world. The book is divided into two part. Part I explores the technical aspects of mosaics, including glass production, labour and materials, and costs. In Part II, James provides a chronological history of mosaics, charting the low and high points of mosaic art up until its abrupt end in the late middle ages. Written in a clear and engaging style, her book will serve as an essential resource for scholars and students of medieval mosaics.
Author : Hendrik Dey
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 956 pages
File Size : 20,46 MB
Release : 2021-10-14
Category : Art
ISBN : 1108985696
Integrating the written sources with Rome's surviving remains and, most importantly, with the results of the past half-century's worth of medieval archaeology in the city, The Making of Medieval Rome is the first in-depth profile of Rome's transformation over a millennium to appear in any language in over forty years. Though the main focus rests on Rome's urban trajectory in topographical, architectural, and archaeological terms, Hendrik folds aspects of ecclesiastical, political, social, military, economic, and intellectual history into the narrative in order to illustrate how and why the cityscape evolved as it did during the thousand years between the end of the Roman Empire and the start of the Renaissance. A wide-ranging synthesis of decades' worth of specialized research and remarkable archaeological discoveries, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in how and why the ancient imperial capital transformed into the spiritual heart of Western Christendom.
Author : John Osborne
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 313 pages
File Size : 15,94 MB
Release : 2020-07-09
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 1108834582
A history of Rome in the critical eighth century CE focusing on the evidence of material culture and archaeology.
Author : Annie Montgomery Labatt
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 367 pages
File Size : 22,44 MB
Release : 2019-10-23
Category : History
ISBN : 1498571166
Emerging Iconographies of Medieval Rome examines the development of Christian iconographies that had not yet established themselves as canonical images, but which were being tried out in various ways in early Christian Rome. This book focuses on four different iconographical forms that appeared in Rome during the eighth and ninth centuries: the Anastasis, the Transfiguration, the Maria Regina, and the Sickness of Hezekiah—all of which were labeled “Byzantine” by major mid-twentieth century scholars. The trend has been to readily accede to the pronouncements of those prominent authors, subjugating these rich images to a grand narrative that privileges the East and turns Rome into an artistic backwater. In this study, Annie Montgomery Labatt reacts against traditional scholarship which presents Rome as merely an adjunct of the East. It studies medieval images with formal and stylistic analyses in combination with use of the writings of the patristics and early medieval thinkers. The experimentation and innovation in the Christian iconographies of Rome in the eighth and ninth centuries provides an affirmation of the artistic vibrancy of Rome in the period before a divided East and West. Labatt revisits and revives a lost and forgotten Rome—not as a peripheral adjunct of the East, but as a center of creativity and artistic innovation.
Author : Maya Maskarinec
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Page : 304 pages
File Size : 11,74 MB
Release : 2018-04-10
Category : History
ISBN : 0812250087
City of Saints explores how Byzantine Rome naturalized saints from throughout the Mediterranean world to build a new sacred topography. As a result, an exhausted city with a limited Christian presence metamorphosed into the spiritual center of Western Christianity.
Author : Francesca Dell'Acqua
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 521 pages
File Size : 46,89 MB
Release : 2020-05-07
Category : History
ISBN : 135181110X
Between the late seventh and the mid-ninth centuries, a debate about sacred images – conventionally addressed as ‘Byzantine iconoclasm’ – engaged monks, emperors, and popes in the Mediterranean area and on the European continent. The importance of this debate cannot be overstated; it challenged the relation between image, text, and belief. A series of popes staunchly in favour of sacred images acted consistently during this period in displaying a remarkable iconophilia or ‘love for images’. Their multifaceted reaction involved not only council resolutions and diplomatic exchanges, but also public religious festivals, liturgy, preaching, and visual arts – the mass-media of the time. Embracing these tools, the popes especially promoted themes related to the Incarnation of God – which justified the production and veneration of sacred images – and extolled the role and the figure of the Virgin Mary. Despite their profound influence over Byzantine and western cultures of later centuries, the political, theological, and artistic interactions between the East and the West during this period have not yet been investigated in studies combining textual and material evidence. By drawing evidence from texts and material culture – some of which have yet to be discussed against the background of the iconoclastic controversy – and by considering the role of oral exchange, Iconophilia assesses the impact of the debate on sacred images and of coeval theological controversies in Rome and central Italy. By looking at intersecting textual, liturgical, and pictorial images which had at their core the Incarnate God and his human mother Mary, the book demonstrates that between c.680–880, by unremittingly maintaining the importance of the visual for nurturing beliefs and mediating personal and communal salvation, the popes ensured that the status of sacred images would remain unchallenged, at least until the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century.
Author : Joanna Story
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 428 pages
File Size : 36,82 MB
Release : 2023-04-28
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0192575058
Charlemagne and Rome is a wide-ranging exploration of cultural politics in the age of Charlemagne. It focuses on a remarkable inscription commemorating Pope Hadrian I who died in Rome at Christmas 795. Commissioned by Charlemagne, composed by Alcuin of York, and cut from black stone quarried close to the king's new capital at Aachen in the heart of the Frankish kingdom, it was carried to Rome and set over the tomb of the pope in the south transept of St Peter's basilica not long before Charlemagne's imperial coronation in the basilica on Christmas Day 800. A masterpiece of Carolingian art, Hadrian's epitaph was also a manifesto of empire demanding perpetual commemoration for the king amid St Peter's cult. In script, stone, and verse, it proclaimed Frankish mastery of the art and power of the written word, and claimed the cultural inheritance of imperial and papal Rome, recast for a contemporary, early medieval audience. Pope Hadrian's epitaph was treasured through time and was one of only a few decorative objects translated from the late antique basilica of St Peter's into the new structure, the construction of which dominated and defined the early modern Renaissance. Understood then as precious evidence of the antiquity of imperial affection for the papacy, Charlemagne's epitaph for Pope Hadrian I was preserved as the old basilica was destroyed and carefully redisplayed in the portico of the new church, where it can be seen today. Using a very wide range of sources and methods, from art history, epigraphy, palaeography, geology, archaeology, and architectural history, as well as close reading of contemporary texts in prose and verse, this book presents a detailed 'object biography', contextualising Hadrian's epitaph in its historical and physical setting at St Peter's over eight hundred years, from its creation in the late eighth century during the Carolingian Renaissance through to the early modern Renaissance of Bramante, Michelangelo, and Maderno.
Author : John F. Romano
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 321 pages
File Size : 38,83 MB
Release : 2016-05-06
Category : History
ISBN : 1317104080
The liturgy, the public worship of the Catholic Church, was a crucial factor in forging the society of early medieval Rome. As the Roman Empire dissolved, a new world emerged as Christian bishops stepped into the power vacuum left by the dismantling of the Empire. Among these potentates, none was more important than the bishop of Rome, the pope. The documents, archaeology, and architecture that issued forth from papal Rome in the seventh and eighth centuries preserve a precious glimpse into novel societal patterns. The underexploited liturgical sources in particular enrich and complicate our historical understanding of this period. They show how liturgy was the ’social glue’ that held together the Christian society of early medieval Rome - and excluded those who did not belong to it. This study places the liturgy center stage, filling a gap in research on early medieval Rome and demonstrating the utility of investigating how the liturgy functioned in medieval Europe. It includes a detailed analysis of the papal Mass, the central act of liturgy and the most obvious example of the close interaction of liturgy, social relations and power. The first extant Mass liturgy, the First Roman Ordo, is also given a new presentation in Latin here with an English translation and commentary. Other grand liturgical events such as penitential processions are also examined, as well as more mundane acts of worship. Far from a pious business with limited influence, the liturgy established an exchange between humans and the divine that oriented Roman society to God and fostered the dominance of the clergy.
Author : Emilie M. van Opstall
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 390 pages
File Size : 30,14 MB
Release : 2018-07-10
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 9004369007
Sacred Thresholds. The Door to the Sanctuary in Late Antiquity offers a far-reaching account of boundaries within pagan and Christian sanctuaries: gateways in a precinct, outer doors of a temple or church, inner doors of a cella. The study of these liminal spaces within Late Antiquity – itself a key period of transition during the spread of Christianity, when cultural paradigms were redefined – demands an approach that is both interdisciplinary and diachronic. Emilie van Opstall brings together both upcoming and noted scholars of Greek and Latin literature and epigraphy, archaeology, art history, philosophy, and religion to discuss the experience of those who crossed from the worldly to the divine, both physically and symbolically. What did this passage from the profane to the sacred mean to them, on a sensory, emotive and intellectual level? Who was excluded, and who was admitted? The articles each offer a unique perspective on pagan and Christian sanctuary doors in the Late Antique Mediterranean.
