Download PDF | Michael Greenhalgh - Marble Past, Monumental Present_ Building With Antiquities in the Mediaeval Mediterranean (The Medieval Mediterranean) (2008).
653 Pages
PREFACE Overview
This book surveys the various uses for which marble and antiquities were employed, structurally and decoratively, over the whole of the Mediterranean during the Millennium following the Emperor Constantine. It is a broad survey, through the telescope not the microscope.1 Frequently its contents rely on the detailed work of other scholars, and the work’s timespan has so many broken threads and obscurities that it offers only general rationales about why marble was used, and to what possible political or religious ends.
In areas with the heavy footprint of Roman marble—and areas in which the search for sophisticated building supplies paralleled population expansion, marble is a tie, binding Venice to Alexandria, Damascus to Córdoba, and Constantinople to Aachen. Yet more links follow: Jerusalem cannot be dealt with without reference to Rome, Córdoba without Syria, Damascus without Kairouan, or Istanbul without Cairo. Its use is a barometer in the Christian world of the continuing workings of Early Christian architecture (and sometimes perhaps of nostalgia for pagan Rome), and in the Muslim world of constructions which in our period outranked most of those in Christendom until c.1100.
Much work over the past few decades has been concentrated on the re-use of antiquities in specifi c sites or cities, but the focus has been on Italy, then France and Germany, with much less attention paid to Byzantium, Visigothic Spain, or anywhere in the Islamic world. But marble was spread all around the Mediterranean by the Romans, exercising its spell not only in Western Europe, but on the southern and eastern shores of that sea as well.
And since marble-rich sites and cities were connected together at various times and in varying degrees by trade, war and diplomacy, as well as the imperatives of religion, this book views the area as a whole: far from being invidious, such an overview is essential if we are accurately to assess achievement (and perhaps get at least a glimpse of intention) in a period when it is frequently demonstrable that much was known to rulers (mosaic-glitterati?) about what was happening a thousand kilometres away.
Hence a main feature is to attempt an even-handed assessment of how Islam and Christendom use attractive marbles and other antiquities in new buildings, without canting the available evidence (which is usually weak) or reading it backwards from what should have happened. Making available data fi t a theory (rather than vice versa) gives an importance to Carolingian architecture that its remains or accounts of them cannot support, and suggests that Venice must have obtained the materials for San Marco during the Sack of Constantinople, rather than earlier.
Layout of the Printed Book Some chapters have been grouped geographically (Italy, France), some thematically (Quarrying and Transport, Looting and Trophies), while the two chapters dedicated to Islam necessarily criss-cross the Mediterranean, tracking inspiration and infl uence. The text of the book gives an overview of the topics involved in the study of marble in the Middle Ages and, in order to keep matters brief, the footnotes often try to cite recent studies with good references to the literature rather than attempting full bibliographies for all the features of this very broad survey. When they fi rst appear in the notes, books and papers are cited in full, except for those frequently cited (cf. bibliography), which always appear in their abbreviated form. Books or papers with especially useful bibliographies in their particular area are prefaced by an asterisk.
All the works cited in the footnotes appear again in the bibliography; journal-names common in Western art history and archaeology are abbreviated. No Arabic diacritics have been used; spellings for commissioners and architectural terms are generally those found at Many of the dates (which on the DVD refer to the building, not the re-used material) are rubbery. Sometimes more than one date is given, to indicate the likelihood of re-use which is a theme of the book.
The World Wide Web This book routinely quotes material from the World Wide Web, and includes a DVD of images, viewable within a web browser. In its 15 years or so of growth, the web has become a very useful research tool in its own right, not only for images and bibliographies, but also for increasingly substantial quantities of source-texts (including large collections such as the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, the Acta Sanctorum and the Patrologia Latina), scholarly articles, which are often advanced preprints, and (digitized) printed books, some completely text-searchable. To present this book without such digital references would be to look at the subject with an obscuring eye-patch, since the reader as well as the author benefi ts from the ability to search what are now enormous collections online,2 and which could be used to extend the reach of some of the topics I discuss. Hence this book’s references and bibliography include web URLs of collections. However, readers should bear in mind that the web is a protean being, and it cannot be guaranteed that material in existence at the end of an URL when last checked by the author will necessarily still be drawing digital breath when the reader clicks the same hotlink.
The DVD To access the DVD, which should appear as marble_past under the drive letter allocated to your CD/DVD drive, click the icon to open, and then click on the fi le click_here.html. This will give you the top-level menu, from which both the discussions and images on the disk can be accessed. The majority of monuments mentioned in the body of the text (but not necessarily in the footnotes) are illustrated or referenced on the DVD, which contains over 5000 images. Usually these are images of which I hold the copyright (which I waive for re-use for any academic or scholarly purpose by readers of this book).
Other images are out-ofcopyright because of age or because they have been explicitly placed in the public domain. Occasionally there are images for which I have received permission from the copyright holders. The great capacity of a DVD means that many of the monuments discussed in the book are illustrated by multiple images—and some monuments that are relevant to the broader picture but are not discussed are also included, since the topic is broader than my printed text. And since the book is about the continuing fascination with the beauty of the material, the DVD also contains images of marble samples, which illustrate the wide variety of colours, veinings and effects available to builders and re-builders. Generally, I offer only a restricted number of images from well-known monuments, and have included a greater quantity from less-well-known monuments or sites.
I thank the following for permission to include their images: Katherine Branning;3 Dick Osseman;4 Mauro Piergigli;5 Frederik Questier;6 and the UCLA 3D Modelling Lab,7 and various authors on Flickr, for placing their images under the Creative Commons licence.8 In a very few cases, I have been unable to locate the copyright owners. Most of the images are of high quality, but many were taken under far-from-perfect conditions. The long-and-narrow thumbnails are usually panoramas, and users should note that the projections used distort straight lines (such as entablatures) into curves. All images are intended for viewing using a web browser, which will show the image full-size or reduced to the browser window dimensions. The bibliography includes occasional picture-books, to compensate for the diffi culty of getting images of certain buildings, or gaining access to them.
The images on the DVD are all in one database, and may be examined according to any of the following groupings which are simply different views of the same data: 1. Complete, all countries Algeria to Turkey; 2. By individual country; 3. By monument-type, viz. baptisteries, bases, campanili & minarets, capitals, columns, fl oors, fortresses & city walls, funerary, marble, mihrabs, mosaics, palaces, porphyry, pulpits, sarcophagi, temples and veneer. Evidently, several of these categories overlap; and I have not thought it worthwhile to include such broad ones as “church” or “mosque.”
Just as the printed book stands alone, so the DVD might also be treated as a survey of the “marble horizons” which the book covers. But it also serves as a companion to the printed text, because I have included on the DVD several discussions dealing with some of the monuments and problems addressed only in general terms in the printed book. Were they to have been addressed there, they would have overbalanced the text. Each of these is fl agged in the footnotes, beginning “dvd”—such as dvd_ibn_khaldun_extracts.doc.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق