Italian Mosaics 300–1300 (review)

This book is clearly intended to be appreciated more for its illustrations than for its text, since these take up the lion’s share of the 431 pages that are bound between the two covers. In fact, they appear mostly twice—first as a set of thumbnails at the end of the textual entry on each individual monument and then as full-page illustrations in the section that follows. This arrangement seems strangely Web-like, and the inspiration for it may have come from the kind of online catalogue often encountered on the Web, with an index of images in the form of thumbnails that may be enlarged. The images are gorgeous, and they bear eloquent testimony to the grandeur of this supremely medieval art, which has been preserved in Italy more than anywhere else in the Mediterranean or European world.

The close-up details published here make the mosaics perched high up on the walls of churches available for a tessera-by-tessera analysis. Viewing them in the book is almost as good as looking at them from scaffolding. At the same time, the illustrations tend to minimize or even eradicate the spatial complexity of the mosaics, especially when they cover the curved surface of an apse or a dome, reducing them to the square or rectangular format of a panel painting. The mosaics in situ envelop the viewer in space and, as reflective surfaces of gold and colored glass and stone, surround him or her with the scintillating effects of the movement of light. There are diagrams of some of the more complicated pictorial programs in the book, but these are hardly optimal in orienting the viewer and can be misleading. In addition, the colors of the images are so saturated that it causes the reader to wonder if they have been digitally enhanced, although this is not noted in the introduction.

This book is divided into nineteen sections, each devoted to a single monument from Rome, Ravenna, Sicily (Palermo, Cefalù, and Monreale), Venice, and Florence, and these are arranged in a trajectory that is basically chronological. The monuments are all churches, with the exception of two mausolea (Santa Costanza in Rome and Galla Placidia in Ravenna) and two baptisteries (Ravenna). Each section of illustrations is preceded by a short text describing the monument in question, with relevant historical data and a discussion of some of the scholarly debates about them. These texts seem rather dry, especially in contrast to the visual exuberance of the illustrations. The author is unusually devoted to the intricate problems of chronology, which are treated at length, and averse to any kind of visual characterization of the work in question (what might have been called, at an earlier point in art history, stylistic analysis). But this also is important, since it speaks to the difference between a presentation of the material in a book in print versus the Web. These texts, through a sensitive reading of visual phenomena, could have helped shape the reader’s (viewer’s) response to the works or at least directed his or her attention to salient features, over which the reader could linger.