“Longobard and Papal Italy”: The Chapel of Theodotus
I have not posted course content for quite some time. As a reminder, we were last in the duchy of Bavaria.
After some time north of the Alps, at last we return to Italy and to Rome, and yet again, to Santa Maria Antiqua, not to the palimpsest wall, but to the Chapel of Theodotus. In contrast to print resources, which abound, digital resources for the Chapel of Theodotus, more or less, do not exist. The Soprintendenza offers two smallish photos, of the Crucifixion in the niche of the main south wall and of the interior with an angle toward the west wall. Wikimedia Commons offers a larger image of the Crucifixion.
Other than these images, the internet turns up little else. Needless to say, I am eagerly awaiting the digital reconstruction of Santa Maria Antiqua. In the meantime, the next time I go to the library, I will take my own scans from Wilpert’s corpus and will make them available here.
The Chapel of Theodotus presents a complex assemblage of images. The Crucifixion in the niche references traditional imagery from the Holy Land, while a cycle of the martyrdoms of Quiricus and Julitta running along the east and then the west wall offers one of the earliest surviving exemplars of this type. The threefold appearance of Theodotus then makes the decoration of the chapel highly personal. In a general survey of early medieval art, one probably does not have the time to delve into the various interpretations of precisely what the chapel meant to Theodotus, but questions of context and placement would stimulate a fruitful discussion of the function of images in early medieval churches.
On a side note, a search of Flickr turns up a new photo of Santa Maria Antique, uploaded on the 14th of June: a view into the presbytery with the panel of the Maccabees partially visible.