Emerging Iconographies of Medieval Rome

This study examines Rome as a center of new artistic production, a laboratory of emerging iconographies. This is in contrast with the views of some prominent scholars who made an a priori assumption of a bifurcated East and West, which turned Rome into a peripheral adjunct of the East. Annie Montgomery Labatt uses new applications of evolutionary thinking to appreciate the significance of `good tries’ that had a momentary `fitness.’ In other words, individual iconographies operated in a `complex adaptive system’ that led some imageries to be replaced by other, more successful ones. Through this lens, the book explores more specifically art in Rome during the eighth and the ninth centuries and four innovative and creative iconographies: the Anastasis, the Transfiguration, the Maria Regina, and the never-recurring Sickness of Hezekiah, the only one of its kind. The book offers a close analysis of the earliest surviving examples of these different iconographies that have been traditionally called proto-Byzantine and shows how their Roman presence is essential, and considers the placement of the different examples in the different spaces of the churches as a way of showing the experimentation occurring. In so doing, the book provides an innovative look at the artistic vibrancy of Rome that was a fertile design landscape, a Rome that allowed varied and vital evolutionary experimentation. Labatt’s insightful reflections break new ground in how scholars should think about Rome in the early medieval period. -- Grazia Maria Fachechi, Urbino University