Four Mediterranean Capitals: Rome, Constantinople, Palermo, Venice: Essays in Architecture and Visual Experience - Hardcover

Brings together insights into four major late ancient and medieval capitals - Rome, Constantinople, Palermo, and Venice - to uncover their common visual vocabulary of civic space, architecture, and symbolic meaning.

Drawing on decades of his own and others' previous research and publication, Tronzo offers new approaches into well-known urban contexts and architectural settings, delving into the viewer's experience of mosaic, sculpture, drapery, revetment and stone, of wall, dome, and portal, of street and forum to reexamine how historic buildings helped shape the experience of the civic, the imperial, and the divine manifested in urban life and daily movement.

The images at the center of this text include the Hadrianic roundels on the Arch of Constantine in Rome, the emblemata of patterned marble revetment in Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, the ornamental borders in the mosaics of the Cappella Palatina in Palermo, and the figures of the Tetrarchs on the corner of the facade of the Treasury in the basilica of San Marco in Venice.

These four cases fall into the category of monumental art, which allows us in turn to engage the relationship between the history of architecture and history of art. Architectural history concerns itself with the built environment: structures and functions and their relationship to one another; art history with images, which can also be defined as a relationship between the study of surface and space. Surface is the predominant arena of the image either in material substance or in dissemination.

But the image always occupies space, which is amorphous and extends across and blends interior and exterior in a continuum. This book argues for a dynamic interaction between outside and in that leads to forward movement in the creation of culture.

216 pages. Introduction, notes, bibliography, index.

68 color and black & white illustrations.

Art and architectural history, aesthetics, cultural studies, urban studies.