Art historians have long characterized small Embriachi boxes as items made for the popular market, yet inventories and personal letters suggest that they circulated in fifteenth-century European courts in large numbers. Embriachi boxes therefore present an instance in which modern materialities, or ways of perceiving and categorizing objects, conflict with early ones. To explain how these early communities arrived at estimations of value so different from modern ones, I recount the design strategy of the first owner of the Embriachi workshop, Baldassare degli Ubriachi, who referred to several Mediterranean luxury industries when he assembled his serially made boxes. His approach created an eclectic product that offered court communities with disparate visual stylings something that was simultaneously familiar and foreign, conventionally prestigious and unexpected. Estimations of value emerged within social space, however, and I explore how the interpersonal dynamics of sale and circulation tended to elevate the status of these objects at court. Finally, analyzing the additions and repairs made to Embriachi boxes demonstrates that early systems of valuation left physical traces, embedding the social dynamics of early materialities into the materials themselves.
In 1990, a restoration campaign in Santa Restituta, the cathedral of Naples until the late thirteenth century, uncovered the remains of a medieval mural program in the apse that depicted a monumental image of Christ in Majesty surrounded by four angels and the four Evangelist symbols. The mural incorporates a wooden panel painted with the face of Christ. Originally, it likely also included similar panels depicting the faces of the surrounding figures. The presence of the panels had a fragmenting effect, dividing the painted figures into two distinct material parts that nonetheless comprise a unified entity. I examine the simultaneity of the apse's intermedial parts in light of contemporary enshrinement strategies for privileged images and twelfth-century debates concerning the mutability of form. I argue that Santa Restituta's apse served both devotional and theological purposes at a critical moment when Archbishop Sergius III likely sought to rehabilitate the Church of Naples after a twenty-four-year episcopal vacancy. Challenging conventional taxonomies of genre and medium, the apse presents an important revision of traditional accounts of monumental decoration in medieval Italy, one that allows for hybridity, disruption, and material difference as modes of producing meaning.
Scholars of late antique art have argued that there is relatively little trace of Arian Christian theology in surviving Arian works of art, all of which are found in Ravenna; this is largely because anything obviously "Arian" was replaced by representations acceptable to Orthodox Christianity when the churches were converted after the 560s. This article argues that we can see evidence of doctrinal difference between the labeled depictions of the twelve apostles in the Orthodox Baptistery and the unlabeled depictions of the twelve apostles in the Arian Baptistery. Not only are two apostles who are visually different-Jude and John-significant doctrinally, but the very fact that the Arian figures are not labeled implies an awareness of these differences and shows their importance for our understanding the role of apostolic authority in the Arian-Orthodox controversy.
This article analyzes two extraordinary depictions of ancient Roman history in a fifteenth-century French chronicle (Paris, Bibliotheque nationale de France, MS fr. 64). The first shows Julius Caesar destroying a grove and cult statues sacred to the Gauls. The second depicts Romans constructing by day a colony that Carthaginian corpses dismantle by night. These two scenes of eco-violence and cultural violence, which are published here for the first time, are analyzed through ecocriticism, monster theory, translation theory, and postcolonial theory. Together they reveal the muted voices and cultural traces of the conquered through forms that are almost human.
In a remarkable letter written in 1157 to Peter of Celle, John of Salisbury describes a silver salt cellar sent as a gift alongside the missive. Teeming with puns and theological references, his sensitive ekphrasis draws a series of curious connections between the object and its recipient. His account of the vessel thus suggests a range of ways that a medieval work of art might stand for a person by means other than mimetic representation. When read in light of the long correspondence between John and Peter, the passage reveals how the world of elite epistolary exchange became a site in which theories of figuration and resemblance were forged through formal and metaphorical play. Exploring the rhetorical strategies of high-medieval letter writers, who wove ekphrases and disputes about spectatorial interpretation into their self-consciously artificial documents, suggests the need to revise the long-standing disciplinary trope of comparing medieval artworks to letters.
