Short Description

The project addresses the visual culture of the city of Rome between the Vth and the XIth ct., a period considered as a real 'black hole'; in Roman artistic historiography starting from Renaissance tradition.
The project is rooted in the city's extraordinary function as a ‘melting pot’, a crossroads where Goths, Byzantines, Franks, Germans, and Lombards met. In these centuries, Rome became the setting for one of the most breathtaking experiments in visual communication, carried out by the Church in sacred and secular spaces, which can even help us understand the actual dynamics of communication and 'persuasion'. Considering the scattered, sometimes disappointing, and often outdated literature, this project aims to fulfil three basic objectives using an interdisciplinary approach (art history, architecture, archaeology, archaeometry, liturgy, epigraphy). The first goal is to carry out a complete inventory of the relevant pictorial heritage, preserved or lost, without which an overall view of the issue is impossible, potentially leading to incomplete conclusions. The second is to place this knowledge of paintings and mosaics in a broader context, according to new inquiries into sacred spaces. The third
to put the examined and contextualized paintings and mosaics into a long-term time frame, from Late Antiquity to the dawn of the Gregorian Reformation, in order to understand the massive tool of visual communication that the Church continuously developed. The resulting publications and database are intended to offer a new image of Rome as a cultural melting pot, at the heart of the creation of post-antique Europe.