'New Light on the “Bright Ages”: Experiments with Mosaics and Light in medieval Rome’

In this article I introduce and discuss a new and experimental way to use glass tesserae in medieval Rome, paying special attention to the artists’ particular manipulation of the material, unnoticed by scholars. The first part of the article is devoted to a broader discussion of mosaics and light in medieval Rome, a subject which has hitherto been largely overlooked. My general argument is that, in order full to understand the subject, it is necessary to combine different approaches, from the archaeological and technical, to the historical (considering both the context in which the work was commissioned and produced, and the later documentary evidence for alterations and changes), from the exegetical to the philological (paying special attention to the inscriptions that accompanied the artworks), to issues of perception and reception.
I then move to dismantle a traditional interpretation according to which in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries artists seem to have become less interested in the mosaic medium as a perfect vehicle to materialize divine light, whereas – in the wake of a new taste for realism – they had become primarily concerned with painting.
However, I have identified some mosaics that drastically from this pattern, revealing an extraordinary innovative way of experimenting with glass mosaic, in order to express not only the idea of divine light (and illumination), but also notions of time and space, and even of change across time and space. I therefore demonstrate, through an unprecedented visual analysis, that in these artworks the ‘material’ is used to express ideas which are traditionally visualized through ‘form’, that is, primarily through architectural or figural elements.
Also published as the result of an international peer-reviewed conference this article offers a new approach to the understanding of the significance and potentials of the use of the mosaic medium in art.