ABSTRACT
In his monumental 1948 monograph on the iconography of Ravennate church imagery, Otto von Simson postulated a mystical rapport between the procession of martyr and virgin saints on the nave walls of Sant’Apollinare nuovo and the experience of the congregation in the nave below: ‘The congregation assembled in the basilica knew these saints to be with them in the hour of the mystery’.1 In 1965, in his equally engaging monograph on the Orthodox Baptistery in Ravenna, Spiro Kostof hypothesized that the dome mosaics were intended as a reflection of the spiritual and liturgical experience of the neophytes undergoing baptism in the font below; that the purpose of the mosaics was to echo and magnify the experience and embody the eternal nature of the transitory experience of baptism.2 Sadly, the implications of these groundbreaking readings were not initially taken as the springboard for new interpretations of mural imagery in churches; indeed, Kostof himself distinguished between the experiential imagery of the Baptistery and what he saw as the primarily instructional intent of imagery in early churches.3 Art historians continued to consider the role of mural art in enhancing the value of churches as liturgical performance space primarily at the level of instructional textual parallels between the liturgy and putatively available exegetical readings of the biblical narratives on the walls, generally avoiding the question of the accessibility of such texts to contemporary audiences, particularly the laity, for whom literacy, let alone access to specific books, is an open question for much of the medieval period. However, more recently von Simson and Kostof ’s arguments that the placement of imagery in sacred space might also reflect the anticipated use of space during the liturgy have begun to be examined with regard to a number of churches, as in the work of Tom dale and John Osborne.4 My intention here is to take this question a step
1 O. von Simson, Sacred Fortress: Byzantine Art and Statecraft in Ravenna (Chicago, 1948), 99. 2 S.K. Kostof, The Orthodox Baptistry of Ravenna, Yale Publications in the History of Art 18
(new Haven and London, 1965), 121-3 and passim. 3 Ibid., 122. 4 T.E.A. dale, Relics, Prayer, and Politics in Medieval Venetia: Romanesque Painting in the Crypt of
Aquileia Cathedral (Princeton, 1997); J. Osborne, ‘Images of the Mother of god in Early Medieval Rome’, in Icon and Word: The Power of Images in Byzantium; Studies Presented to Robin Cormack (Aldershot, 2003), 135-56. Professor Osborne was also most generous in allowing me to review a prepress
further by the consideration of the placement and sight lines of the laity in the liturgy at Rome and elsewhere, and set out a potential directional marker for further study.
