ABSTRACT
This chapter examines a mosaic commissioned by Pope John VII for his burial oratory in St Peter’s, which will be reconsidered in the light of contemporary interpretations across the Mediterranean of Mary’s intercession. Mary as orans combined with an inscription which speaks of her Assumption into heaven appears on a fragment of white linen brocade from Merovingian Gaul. The earliest and explicit visual and written references to the Assumption of Mary in the West hint at the circulation of objects, beliefs, and texts between East and West. Despite sporadic and isolated evidence in earlier centuries, pictorial images of Mary’s transitus to the celestial life burst forth ‘almost abruptly’ in the West between the eighth and the ninth centuries. In the mosaic of S. Maria in Domnica, Mary is the figure that helps Pope Paschal I climb to heaven, but also marks the threshold of heaven.
