The Apse Mosaic in Early Medieval Rome
Time, Network, and Repetition

This book focuses on apse mosaics in Rome and engages topics including time, intercession, materiality, repetition, and vision.

Erik Thunø (Author)

9781107069909, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 20 April 2015

358 pages, 104 b/w illus. 25 colour illus.
26.2 x 18.8 x 2.3 cm, 0.95 kg

This book focuses on apse mosaics in Rome, which were commissioned by a series of popes between the sixth and ninth centuries CE. Through a synchronic approach that challenges current conceptions about how works of art interact with historical time, Erik Thunø proposes that the apse mosaics produce an inter-visual network that collapses their chronological succession in time into a continuous present in which the faithful join the saints in the one living body of the Church of Rome. Throughout, this book situates the apse mosaics within the broader context of viewership, the cult of relics, epigraphic tradition, and church ritual while engaging topics concerned with intercession, materiality, repetition and vision.

1. Repetition: saints, popes, and golden texts
2. Transformation: from material church to spiritual body
3. Incorporation: becoming a living stone
4. Networking: building a communion sanctorum
Afterword: meaning and presence
Appendix.

Subject Areas: Early history: c 500 to c 1450/1500 [HBLC], European history [HBJD], History of art / art & design styles [AC]