Педоне Сильвия
Римский Университет Ла Сапиенца, Италия
The topic which the present paper aims at discussing concerns the art historical (and historiographic) problem of the transmission and reception of ancient models and spoliae during the empire of Theophilus, in a particularly difficult moment, between the iconoclastic age and the Macedonian one. In the millenary history of Byzantium, the Macedonian period has been seen as the most favorable to a rebirth of classical antiquity, as it was shown and ideologically attested by artistic display.
However, the preceding phase of the affirmation of the Macedonian dynasty has been rather underestimated, and specially the very attitudes of the emperor Theophilus toward art, which are somewhat more complex from an art-historical point of view. Indeed, in the Byzantine art of the period, at least in Constantinople, it’s possible to discern a transition from an experimentation and appropriation of exotic features, as some stylistic elements of Islamic art, to a programmatic rebirth of a kind of “classicism” aiming at strengthening the continuity of political power. Thus, besides a taste for experimentation, we find nonetheless an opposite polarity, so far not sufficiently explored, open to a more instrumental or ideological visual strategy, through the resemantization of classical art forms because of their “authoritative” association with imperial dignity. In such a perspective, an interesting case is that of the roman door of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, the so-called “Beautiful Door”, on which Theophilus placed his own monograms to ratify the endurance of both political and religious authority, on a highly symbolic threshold for Byzantine imagery of power.