What do we imagine the city of Rome to have been like in the 8th century AD? With the supremacy of Constantinople as the political and administrative centre of the empire, the Rome of this period – its buildings falling into disrepair and bedevilled by threats from the north – is popularly considered to be something of a vacuum, a place whose nature is difficult to assess due to the absence of documentary evidence.
In this new book, John Osborne seeks to develop a more rounded and informed view of this underexamined period in the life of the city, using visual culture as documentation. Osborne considers different types of buildings and their decorative schemes in order to interrogate the nature of Rome during the 8th century and to establish if the city had become a cultural and political backwater or, conversely, whether it was beginning to establish a completely different identity.
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Rome In The 8th Century: A History In Art
John Osborne CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, £75 HARDBACK - ISBN 978-1108834582
