Project leader : Cecilia Olovsdotter

Email: ceciliao@sri.org.tr

Architectural motifs such as arches, portals, aedicules and fastigia constitute some of the most frequent and visually prominent features of Late Roman and Early Byzantine art. Forming part of Roman commemorative tradition from the earliest times, they chiefly appear in works celebrating events of a transitional or cyclic character in the lives of individuals and of the state, such as betrothals, deaths, victories, official and imperial accessions and anniversaries, but also in works of sacral art, polytheistic as well as Christian. In late antiquity, the architectural motifs, along with a range of transcendence symbols with which they are regularly combined, become routinely employed as tools for dignifying, immortalising and ‘apotheosising’ subjectmatter in art. The project Virtue, status, and immortality: on the applications and meanings of architectural motifs in Late Roman and Early Byzantine imagery (c. 180-600) is the first to attempt a systematic and contextual study of the architectural motifs as a late-antique artistic phenomenon. The thematic correlations, application patterns, intercontextual migrations and Christian adaptations of the architectural motifs are analysed with the aim of revealing the mechanisms and purposes—historical, religious, social—behind their intensified use, and behind the symbolisation of art in general, in the transformative last phase of the Roman empire.