In the Iconographer's studio. The fashioning of the new motif types in Pre-Iconoclastic art.

Abstract

What was the part played by the artists (the craftsmen/painters) in the making of new iconographical types in the Early Middle Ages? Were have they given the design of what was to be illustrated all drawn up and ready for the hands of the program-makers? Or did they participate also in the work of selection from Scripture of the episode destined to be given pictorial form? This problem is rarely reflected upon in the literature on the period, yet it calls for a clarification. A cluster of newly created or revised New Testament scenes occurs in the art of Rome shortly after the year 700 A.D., a phenomenon which opens for a study of the collaboration which took place between the artists/craftsmen and the other partakers in the process of image-creation. This is the rationale for a renewed inspection of this extraordinary series of iconographical innovations, which as must be accentuated, were o leave their imprint on Byzantine art of the successive centuries.

Keywords

• art history
• Byzantine art
• painting
• iconography