Boundary Stones and the Rebellion of Nature

Res: Anthropology and aesthetics

LIMES- TRĀNSITIŌ. Images of liminal and transitional spaces in the Classical World II Workshop on Classical Iconography (GREIGA: Research Group on Ancient Greece Image) Call For Papers. Deadline: January 15, 2020 In classical art, the conception and articulation of the space and, consequently, of the world, has recently become an important subject of study for research. The term "landscape" is understood by recent historiography as a historical, social and cultural dynamic category in constant interaction and transformation, resulting from the reflection of a society who creates it like a sign of its own identity. The landscape contains, on the one hand, the physical realities and, on the other, concepts, personal and social perceptions of itself, as well as socio-political and economic interests or religious beliefs. Thus, the landscape depends on perception and does not exist by itself since it is a space created by us. In ancient Greece and Rome, there were various liminal landscapes and spaces of transition in which social, cultural and power relations were developed. Their figuration and representation, through different materials and artworks, offers a wide range of scenarios. Firstly, the representation of real and physical landscapes that refer to specific locations; secondly, the conceptual ones that suggest created, symbolic and ethereal spaces; and finally, the spaces of the psyche, that is, those emotional spaces that take place in the human mind, and involve a change or a psychic or physical transformation towards a new status or towards a new condition or category. The study of this heterogeneity of spaces is essential and necessary to better understand the cultural and ideological constructions of ancient societies, and their own causal determination to conceive the world around them.

Res Anthropology and Aesthetics, 2010

This article concerns iconoclasm in the German provinces of the Roman Empire. Scholars have generally blamed ‘barbarians’ from outside the empire for violence towards images in this border region. Drawing on visual, epigraphic, and archaeological evidence, I argue instead that Late Antique Christians were responsible for the most extensive and destructive attacks. This has important implications for our understanding of the reception of religious images in Roman provincial society. In addition, it offers an illuminating case study of the workings of iconoclasm in a well-documented but neglected period.

Santiago de Compostela: Pilgerarchitektur und Bildliche Repräsentation in Neuer Perspektive/ Pilgrims Architecture and Pictorial Concepts in a New Perspective, 2015

2023

This book argues that Romans credited certain living persons with the capacity to function as cult statues, that is, as images and vessels of the divine. After addressing the cultural context that produced the idea that humans can become images of the divine, the text shows how emperors, bishops, and others imitated the aesthetic, immobility, and material setting of statuary to establish themselves as iconic and how their role as mediators with the divine was eventually transferred to new categories of material objects, such as relics and icons. The figure of the iconic person thus is shown to have bridged the cult statues of Antiquity with the new mechanisms of interaction with the divine that Christians used for the following millennium. By integrating living persons in the art historical analysis of the spaces and advocating for the need to consider the animation of artefacts together with the reification of bodies, this study marks an important development in the study of the past.

2016

Journal of Late Antiquity 3.1, 2010

This study focuses on an unusual and underappreciated group of city walls built in north-central Gaul beginning in or shortly after 275 CE, all of which featured elaborate polychrome patterning in their exterior facades. Without discounting the capacity of these walls to regulate ...