A Globalised Visual Culture? Towards a Geography of Late Antique Art

Late antique artefacts, and the images they carry, attest to a highly interconnected visual culture dominating the Afro-Eurasian world from ca. AD 300 to 800. On the one hand, the same iconographies and decorative patterns are found across various genres of visual and material culture, irrespective of social and economic differences among their users. On the other hand, these very motifs are also spread in geographically distant regions, far beyond the traditional borders of the classical world, where they are mingled with local elements, while foreign motifs, especially of Germanic and Sasanian origin, are attested in Roman territories. But why were certain images attractive to patrons of such diverse geographical and cultural origins, and how were they transferred from one area to another? This book aims to investigate the reasons behind the seemingly globalised visual culture spread across the late antique world, both within the borders of the (former) Roman and (later) Byzantine Empire and beyond. Its 14 chapters, written by specialists in various fields of late antique studies, cover a wide range of case studies chosen from different geographical, chronological and cultural contexts, from Roman mosaics and tombstones to Lombard stucco works. They exemplify the vast scale of the phenomenon, demonstrating the benefit of addressing this period through a combination of theoretical and methodological approaches characteristic of different national and disciplinary traditions. The focus on regional developments, together with the systematical analysis of the complex interactions between geographical areas and the social, cultural, religious and ethnic groups active within and across them, represent a first step towards a more integrated study of late antique visual culture – towards a geography of late antique art.