Hortus Artium Medievalium

Progressive loss of Roman utilitarian buildings and public complexes, as well as their later reuse were one of the essential features of the urban transformation during Late Antiquity. The phenomenon that followed this process was the spoliation of both constructive and decorative materials. In Roman Hispania the reuse of public buildings affected most of the mainland cities, especially from the 4^th c. The emergence of this practice can be traced in the weakening of the local institutions and the administration, but mostly in the rise of Christianity. The new religion stimulated building activities, which resulted in dismantling of the ancient buildings for the construction of new ones. Although the spoliation is easy to identify, it raises many questions. With the aim to answer some of them, and to identify possible common characteristics of the same process that later lead to the emergence of the medieval town, the authors give an overview and the interpretation of the important examples of spolia in Hispania.

The topography of Roman Pula established the existence of a large imperial necropolis stretching along the roads leading to and from the city. Necropolises were also situated between the Flavian road (via Flavia) and the seashore, west of the amphitheatre, following the roads leading to Trieste (Tergeste), Nezakcij (Nesactium), Medulin and Premantura (Promunturium Polaticum). In the turbulent period between the 4^th and the 6^th cc, the most luxurious part of the necropolis in front of the city gates was a source of construction material for the double reinforcements of the city walls and towers. What catches the eye even today on the outer side of the defensive structures are stone steps and smooth columns and their bases, architraves, friezes adorned with floral and figural motifs, which were built into the fundaments and lower parts of the external, then newly added and reinforced belt of fortifications encompassing the city. A part of the spolia from Roman necropolises along the roads leading to the suburbium (decorative stelae, tomb epigraphs, fragments of sarcophagi, column capitals) were built into public and private buildings throughout the 16^th to the 19^th century.

The construction of the complex of San Lorenzo in Milan represents one of the most difficult and demanding enterprises of the Theodosian Italy. The church was the city's most impressive building for ten centuries, until the end of the 14^th century, when the construction of the monumental cathedral begun. The church provides an extraordinary variety of evidence demonstrating the importance of re-use of materials and artefacts in the world of construction, even within the special case of imperial commissions. During the laying of the foundations the construction site enjoyed the highly unusual privilege of having access to the materials recovered in the dismantling of the amphitheatre, but it could also reutilize the columns of monumental colonnaded public buildings for the construction of the propylaea and important elements of the interior, such as the angular columns of the martyrium. It must be emphasized that a high percentage of bricks appears to be re-used, with many unusual examples. There is also evidence suggesting the re-use of materials obtained at greater distances, such as the passageway of Sant'Aquilino, which perhaps followed a path similar to that of the relics of the Roman saint to whom the church is dedicated.

The elevation of Ravenna as a new Imperial capital, at the beginning of the 5^th century, determined a redefinition of the housing space and the creation of new buildings destined for the Court and for the display of the Imperial power. In this extensive urban renewal programme, materials and structures of the earlier Roman city came to be consistently reemployed. Reuse of tiles and architectural material was considerable, due to economic reasons and the necessity for immediate or rapid provision of necessary materials and structures for the Imperial bureaucracy. The re-employment of ancient materials (spolia) was so vast that most of the buildings of the previous Roman city were demolished and destroyed – even the larger public monuments. Temples, the area of the Forum, buildings for the administration and the civil basilica were all completely absorbed and turned into the Late Antique urban fabrics, without leaving any material evidence. In this contribution we will consider spolia as a material of common use involved in this process of transformation of an ancient city into a Late Antique one. The main goal is to show that in this operation of spoliation of the past and the reuse of building materials during the Late Antiquity there was no ideological intention – unlike the strategic use of spolia in the form of statuary and architectural works employed at Constantinople to identify this as the new symbolic capital of power.

The archaeological excavations carried out from 2006 until 2008 in Piazza XX Settembre in Comacchio allow us to comprehend relative phases of the medieval Episcopal complex. Investigated contexts can be dated from the 6^th c. to the Modern Age. The archaeological data concerning the first Bishop’s church refer to the mid-eight century, proven by excavated cemetery area and porch. Original chapel was certainly placed under the modern Cathedral. Excavations brought to light several architectural elements and fragments of floor material, parts of the 8^th and 9^th century church, some reused in the later building. Different architectural elements of the first church (columns, capitals, marble slabs) were part of more ancient buildings, not necessarily of local origin. During the Carolingian period this early church was supplied with an altar screen. Between the end of the 10^th and the beginning of the 12^th century in front of the church new rectangular building was erected. By its shape, size and quality of used material, we can suggest that it corresponds to a part of the Romanesque Bishop’s palace. Its walls were built with numerous spolia - parts of the earlier church. This demonstrates that the church itself has been completely reconstructed. The research of the architectural fragments and the data concerning some groups of architectural elements allows us to comprehend the quality of the early medieval church furniture. It is also possible to examine activities of re-use on a Romanesque construction site.

Different kinds of antique material were re-used in the Limousin region during the middle ages. In this article the authors will mostly focus on the big ashlars located in the ecclesiastical rural sites. More and more of these specific kinds of spolia are now known. Around 50 sites are identified where they were used in churches or in their surroundings (mostly sarcophagi). In most examples only few pieces were used. Nonetheless, in seven cases those blocks are numerous, and in three of them parts of antique buildings – using monumental ashlars – are incorporated into churches. It is highly probable that the spoiled monuments were mausolea. At least two of them were re-used for a Christian purpose during the high middle ages. According to different indications it can be concluded that this was not such an uncommon practice. In other parts of France, the reuse of antique sites for Christian purposes – churches or cemeteries – has been studied recently. Yet it is still difficult to identify the type of structures to which these buildings belong (private or “parish” churches). One can suppose that part of the ecclesiastical landscape of the high medieval Limousin region was made of “haphazard churches”.

The author discusses the origin and the reuse of antique white marble in medieval architecture of Catalonia and Mediterranean Languedoc. The main emphasis is on the Roussillon area and its close neighbourhood, where reused marble material, considered to be made of Carrara marble, was namely attributed to the Capitol of ancient Narbonne. In the light of new research, the author re-examines the origin of material in question, mostly through the analysis of preserved sculptural fragments - fragment of the chancel screen kept in the church of Saint-Saturnin of Pézilla-la-Rivière; fragment of the main altar from the church of Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa and the baptismal font of the cathedral of Saint Jean of Perpignan.

Reflection upon re-use practices naturally implies the one about the future-being of buildings between Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Invariably, the question remains the same: in what ways and for which reasons do these re-use practices set up? The studied space, the Velay, reveals ambivalent attitudes which complexify the systematic study of re-use practices. Indeed they seam to oscillate between, on the one hand, ideological motives, and on the other hand prosaic reasons of raw materials management. Between memory and oblivion the goal was to consider these materials as products and benefits.

Byzantium inherited from the Late Roman Empire various beliefs regarding ancient monuments, especially statues. Superstitious beliefs were rooted in ancient Greek and Roman tradition: statues were assigned supernatural power to avert evil, they were inhabited by spirits and their destruction was considered an omen for future misfortunes. Such beliefs were maintained in Byzantine literature throughout the centuries and are particularly stressed in the Patria and related texts. Statues were collected by early Byzantine emperors in Constantinople to decorate their capital and stress the Roman political legacy and the continuity with Greek cultural tradition. In their works, Byzantine authors artfully used the theme of the statues to convey either a political message, namely the Roman and Greek identity of the Byzantines, or the hope of Constantinople’s salvation after 1204. In more personal texts, such as letters, aesthetic considerations are emphasized with a didactic and moralizing tone. While the literary tradition of each genre provided the Byzantines the model for approaching the statues, at the same time the cultural environment and the historical circumstances of each historical period offered a different orientation to their understanding of antique art.

The re-use of ivory items in the Western Early Middle Ages is the result of drastic shortage of raw material (the Muslims having control, then, of all supplying counters). So, Late Antique pieces might be re-employed without any change; but more often they underwent re-carving. First we have to deal with tablets, at the back of which lists of saints, bishops or donors are written. Sometimes too, a diptych becomes incorporated in a reliquary; and perhaps, some pyxids served for hosts stocking. But, from the 8^th century onwards, the main use is for book binding ornamentation. Beyond this “utilitarian” character, re-uses of ivories should also be considered as references to the prestige of what had been created during Antiquity, or, for the Ottonians, to the prestige of pieces of Carolingian or Byzantine origin. So, regarding the five centuries here taken into account, the destinies of these items perfectly reveal the various valuations involved by the re-use phenomenon.

The church of San Lorenzo in Tenno (Trentino, Italy) has an extraordinary collection of early medieval sculptural fragments reused in its Romanesque apse. The number of those sculptural fragments and the kind of reuse represent an unicum for this territory. In this work sculptural elements have been studied, divided by function, and finally a hypothetical re-construction of their original position has been proposed.

All over the time, re-using ancient elements is customary, in every kind of art: literature, goldsmith’s trade, manuscripts, architecture. For this last one, re-use can be considered as a relic put in a new building, to show continuity with the first construction and the subsequent ones. It can also be a quotation, as a proof that the sponsor, the believer and the visitor share the same culture and are able to understand the meaning of the re-use. In art history, the re-use caught the attention in itself, as an object: identification of the re-used piece, research on its origin, situation in the history of the building and the institution. But re-use can also be staged, as a theatrical character. The existing links between the re-used piece and the building must be precisely examined: situation of the re-use in masonry, its position in the organization of the ecclesial space, its entire or partial visibility. In the crypt of the martinian prioral of Anzy-le-Duc (France), antic supports are awkwardly re-used to inscribe themselves in a general staging, in order to give the impression of a building older than it really is, as if it was the vestige of the first church from the X^th century.

Opinions on the meaning of the reused objects known as spolia range from Michael Greenhalgh’s position that in 95% of cases, reuse was purely pragmatic to Maria Fabricius Hansen’s claim that the spolia in fourth-century church colonnades represented a Christian worldview in which spolia were potent metaphors of a new world order. Studies of twelfth-century Rome have tended to interpret the use of spolia as an expression of papal ideology and the spirit of the twelfth-century renovatio. This essay evaluates these alternatives and proposes an interpretation informed by semiotic theory but grounded in contextual terminology and the physical and intellectual ambience of the time and place of reuse. It appears that in twelfth-century Rome, reused objects were thought of in their original capacities (as columns, sarcophagi, etc.) and as antiques, rather than as spolia. Semiotic theory offers models for reconstructing the connotative and affective meanings of such antiques, while Biblical exegesis confirms that metaphor was a predominant mode of interpretation in the twelfth century and is especially relevant to Roman church interiors.

The authors examine the re-use of antique material in regional/Dalmatian medieval architecture. The main subject is the church of St. Elias located on the Western part of the island of Brač (Dalmatia, Croatia). The church is dated in the Romanesque period – earliest phase of Dalmatian Romanesque (from the end of the 11^th c.). In the church interior and on the exterior walls, as well as in the church surroundings, many, mostly antique spolia and ruins of monuments of sepulchral character are found. The phenomenon of violent degradation of Roman monuments as a source of building material for the new sanctuaries in the area rich in stone, and in the time when nearby Roman quarries are back in use, confirms the fundamental principals of negation of antiquity

The aim of this paper is to introduce several fragments of carved stone elements dated to the Middle Ages, found in the area of northwestern Croatia (Varaždin County). In this study, fragments of sculptures or architectural decoration are analyzed, and some of them are now published for the first time. The examples provide an important addition to material from continental Croatia that belongs to the Middle Ages, although analogies are difficult to find within Croatia.

The peninsular Middle Ages, marked by its character of political, religious and cultural frontier, knew an interesting phenomenon of accommodation and transformation of architectural structures for two societies of different creed: the Christian and the Muslim. This article deals with the conversion of mosques into cathedrals from the beginnings of the Iberian Reconquest up to the 15^th century and with the problems that carried the adequacy of a space, conceived for a concrete liturgical need, into another one.

The re-use of sculptured portals is by no means marginal or trivial phenomenon. It concerns several major ecclesiastical buildings of the Gothic period. This article especially considers the concrete condition of former realizations, and the true significance of it. All five selected examples (abbey churches of St. Denis and St. Bénigne, Dijon; Bourges, Laon and Paris cathedrals) involve a project of renewal of early medieval, or Romanesque, fabric. The main objective of the investigation is to show that, during the 12^th century, the progress of sculpture evidently anticipated the one of the architecture. Also, it reveals that the re-use of some half-a-century (or little more) “aged” portals was at that time not perceived as inconvenient by patrons and master builders. On the contrary, the message delivered by the iconographic program in this way seems to have been rather valuated.

Central building of the spatious late antique complex situated in Polače bay on the island of Mljet (Croatia) has been subject of numerous studies. However, none of them offered definite conclusions about the dating of this monumental late antique edifice situated in the midst of an elaborated architectural complex. In this article a new dating and interpretation of the central building of the complex is proposed, based on the formal and historical analysis.

The subject of the article is an early medieval relief from the town of Split that was once in possession of J. Strzygowski and was first published long time ago. It was forgotten since and its destiny and present location ase unknown. Being made of wood, the relief is considered as an exceptional monument of the Middle Ages in Dalmatia, but such findings are equeally rare elsewhere. Its carving technique and stylistic characteristics define it as a high quality work influenced by middle-Byzantine art and inspired by textile motifs. An icon depicting Mary and Christ painted on its back side, atributed to the “Split painting school” from the second half of the 13^th c., ads to its value. Considering historical and other circumstances of the medieval Split, the relief can be dated in the second half of the 11^th century. It is assumed that it was originally a part of the wooden doors of the southern portal of the Split cathedral.

The main results of the 2011 excavations campaign on the site of the Guran in the south Istria are presented in this article. Theses concern the fortified early medieval settlement the origin of which is dated in the Carolingian period and which was abandoned in the late Middle Ages, and the church of St. Cecilia situated some few hundreds meters to the north of the settlement. Main objectives of this international project are the analysis of the origin and the architectural development of the church erected on the site of a roman villa, as well as that of the settlement, combined with the study of the territorial and ecclesiastic organisation of this part of Istria during the Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages.

The subject of the article is the abbey church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, seen in the context of the innovation and tradition in the architectural and artistic production of the period ‘at the turn of the first millennium’. The emphasis is placed on the rebuilding of the church initiated by the abbot Morard (990-1014), as well as on his role as commissioner. As seen by the authors, Morard’s architectural project - following the Carolingian tradition and embracing the reform initiated by Carolingian rulers - competes with one of the best monuments of the period.

In this article the main results of the 2010 excavations campaign on the site of the monastery of Saint Peter in Osor are presented. Theses concern the medieval cemetery and some late antique dwellings situated east of the church’s sanctuary. Further more, the test probe north of the basilica of Saint Peter led to the discovery of a late medieval craft workshop zone (fulling mill?), and the one on the south provided supplementary information about the connections between the church and other, previous or later, buildings. The combination of different approaches (archaeological excavations and analysis of the elevations, geophysical and documentary research) enabled us to propose a new working hypothesis on the origin of the church (6^th-7^th c.?) and the first sketch of the medieval topography of the monastery.

The iconographic theme Traditio legis et clavium, of early Christian origin has been reused and transformed during the Romanesque period according to the historical context of the end of 11^th and the first half of 12^th century. Wall painting in the apse of the chapel of Berzé-la-Ville, showing the Traditio legis et clavium, reflects Cluniac ecclesiology, probably in the relation with the Investiture conflict. In this article the author gives a synthesis of early Christian and Carolingian models, which were readapted according to the preoccupation of the time and the place. The French examples (Arles, Nevers, Andlau, Saint-Gilles de Montoire) as well as the Italian ones (Rome, Milano, Pavia, Civate, Farfa, Castel S. Elia, Tivoli) are all found in places touched by the reform of the church.