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January 27, 2008
Friday church going
I spent most of Friday afternoon at Sta. Pudenziana, Sta Prassede, and Sta Maria Maggiore, 3 of my favorite churches in Rome. At Sta Pudenziana I got to take this picture of the apse mosaic from the organ loft - it pays to chat up tour guides!
This is the earliest surviving apse mosaic in Rome and quite interesting. Christ is seated on an elaborate, gemmed chair which is NOT an imperial throne (well, if you believe T. Mathews The Clash of Gods argument), but a divine throne similar to the one the Phidian Zeus sat on at Olympia. My students are going to learn it that way, since they brought Mathews with them - one of the big course threads is looking at how unstable and diverse the early images of Jesus are and how they settle down at the end of the period.
Then there's the text in the mosaic, which is also appropriates soemthing from Jupiter/Zeus, this time one of his titles. The pages of the codex Jesus is holding read:DOMINUS CONSERVATOR ECCLESIAE PUDENTIANAE (sorry it's a little hard to read - my details from Friday didn't come out well enough to post). A really clever article a while ago argued really convincingly, and in advance of Mathews on iconography, that the use of CONSERVATOR is a lift from Jupiter conservator urbis and helps us date the mosaic to just after the 410 Visigothic sack.* Someone is paralleling Christ's preservation of churches, which were not sacked, with Jupiter's earlier title. In the context of conservative, pagan Rome that was quite a pointed usage.
*Schlatter, F.W. "The Text in the Mosaic of Santa Pudenziana." Vigiliae Christianae, Vol. 43, No. 2. (Jun., 1989), pp. 155-165. I didn't pull that out of my head - JSTOR is my friend.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at January 27, 2008 1:00 PM