Introduction: The Sensibility of a Civilization

Summary

We must look for the ways in which a given epoch solved for itself aesthetic problems as they presented themselves at the time to the sensibilities and the culture of its people. Then our historical inquiries will be a contribution, not to whatever we conceive ‘aesthetics’ to be, but rather to the history of a specific civilization, from the standpoint of its own sensibility and its own aesthetic consciousness.

Umberto Eco

As the focus for much of the greatest cultural, theological, and political activity of the medieval period, the city of Rome offers opportunities to look for the kinds of answers to which Umberto Eco alludes—the aesthetic solutions that define a culture. One of those major questions is about the nature of the relationship between Rome and the Eastern Empire, the Byzantine Empire. Was it one of antagonism? Dependence? Influence? Deference? Artistic evidence provides a lens into the terms of this relationship as they shifted between the fourth and the fourteenth centuries. But it is important to recognize that the very posing of this particular question implies an assumption of difference, even of cultural incompatibility. In fact, although the East and the West did not consistently share political or theological views, the veritable outpouring of paintings, mosaics, reliquaries, and architecture in Rome during the medieval period tells a story that is characterized by sharing and exchange, not by a cultural differentiation.

The church of Santa Maria Antiqua is an example of the ways in which assumptions about a separated East and West obfuscate the truer, and, frankly, more interesting cultural dynamics at the core of this pan-Mediterranean medieval period.

In 2016, an exhibition opened within the walls of S. Maria Antiqua, a church in the Roman Forum that had been partially destroyed by an earthquake in 847, forgotten and then lost until the nineteenth century, sought for a year, rediscovered in 1900, and then closed for 116 years for conservation. Frescoes, ranging from the sixth to ninth centuries, line the church—along the side aisles and the low-lying walls of the space preceding the choir, all along the walls of the choir and in the two side chapels on either side of the apse.