1st Edition
Iconophilia Politics, Religion, Preaching, and the Use of Images in Rome, c.680 - 880
Introduction
Chapter 1. Before Iconoclasm and its Early Echoes (680s–750s)
Chapter 2. Words, Images, and Religious Practices in the Iconophile Discourse (754–790s)
Chapter 3. Textual Icons. Iconophile Thinking and Preaching in Central Italy
Chapter 4. A Glimpse of Salvation. Christ as Light
Chapter 5. Christ Child – the Lamb of God – on the Altar
Chapter 6. Figuring Intercession. The Assumption of Mary
Appendix 1. Mary as Queen of Heaven
Appendix 2. Mary as Gate of Heaven and Ladder to Heaven
Epilogue
Biography
Francesca Dell’Acqua is Associate Professor in History of Medieval Art at the Università di Salerno. She received her Ph.D. at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. She has since held research fellowships at the American Academy in Rome, the Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies, and the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham, where she was Marie Sklodowska Curie Fellow of the European Commission.
‘This is an enormously wide-ranging study. The author has deep knowledge of the theological debates, their various protagonists, and the surviving written texts, and this extends impressively to both Latin and Greek authors. In juxtaposing the two categories of document – writing and monument – Dell’Acqua offers an insightful view into early medieval Italian thinking about the orthodoxy of images and their role in contemporary religious practice’ - Early Medieval Europe, 30 (2), 2022.
‘This is an ambitious book on an important topic, in which the principal arguments are laid out with laudable clarity – no mean feat given the ever-expanding thicket of scholarship on Byzantine iconoclasm and reactions to the controversy in the medieval West … Dell’Acqua’s research makes a major contribution to the study of the rise of the cult of the Virgin in the medieval West, underscoring the role of images in its formulation and promulgation … All in all, Dell’Acqua’s study serves as a reminder and reinforcement of the extent to which the period in question established the foundations for habits of figuration that collectively served as the cornerstone of western religious art – and hence of western art as a whole – for much of the following millennium’ - The Burlington Magazine, January 2022.
