The architecture in/of the book during the Late Antiquity: the ornamentation of the first latin christian codices

ABSTRACT

A few years ago, to illustrate the transforma tions in Late Antiquity, Peter Brown did not use image or metaphor, but a specific case: the book as we know it today. As he summed it up, only around 300 the book as a codex supplant ed the roll; only around 600 its writing began to be similar to ours, with separated words; and only around 800, the texts were ponctuated, divided into paragraphs and written uniformly. But it was not all changes: the predominant languages continued to be Latin and Greek, and many of these books were decorated with im ages. One of the most frequent patterns were architectural ones: columns, arches, capitals, towers, buildings and so on. Combining a clas sical, pagan heritage with christian ideas, this architectural ornamentation served different purposes - not only iconographic ones, but also contributing to the organization of the book. In order to understand the uses and the modus operandi of this ornamentation, we will analyze a corpus of Latin christian manuscripts produced notably in Rome, the British Islands and in Gaul from the Vth until the end of the VIIIth century.

Keywords:
Images; Manuscripts; Architecture; Ornamentation; Late Antiquity