Jane Chick - Böcker

From Wilderness to Paradise presents an in-depth study of the large mosaic pavement in the East Church at Qasr el-Lebia in Cyrenaica, Libya. The pavement, which survives almost in its entirety, consists of fifty panels, each containing a different image. Despite being described as ‘the finest and most interesting set of Christian mosaics yet found in Libya’ (Illustrated London News, December 1957), subsequent studies have generally dismissed the pavement as a random selection of images with no symbolic meaning and no overarching scheme. This book argues that the remarkably rich and complex mosaic should be understood as a coherent whole.A discussion about reading imagery in Late Antiquity precedes a meticulous iconographical study. Within the pavement’s overall coherence, the grid layout allows the panels to be read in different directions, rather like a crossword puzzle, their meaning shifting with each change of focus. Particular attention is paid to small groups of images related either by subject matter or location, and the discussion shows how the placement of certain panels impacts the surrounding imagery, giving meaning over and above the significance of individual motifs. The iconographical study concludes by considering the mosaic from the viewpoint of those moving across the pavement and the phenomenological responses this interaction may have elicited. It suggests that as the images passed fleetingly underfoot, a journey unfurled and one was led from a chaotic oceanic wilderness in the east, to a more orderly paradisiacal world further west.

This book celebrates John Mitchell on his 80th birthday. The festschrift brings together some of his army of undergraduate and graduate students, his fellow-travellers in the bi-ways of art history, his companions and colleagues on archaeological excavations and also a few admirers who have simply revelled in his friendship. The breadth of papers speaks volumes. John Mitchell describes himself as a jobbing art historian. It is a modest explanation to his peers as to why, while still working on the art historical canon from Anglo-Saxon bibles and crosses to Rembrandt, he has ventured far and wide into a field that he likes to describe, with a chuckle, as knick-knacks. This cornucopia of interests, as this volume attests, is quite simply remarkable. He has mastered Roman mosaics, late antique architecture and amulets, Umayadd painting, the familiar and unfamiliar quotidian objects of the early Middle Ages from nails to trap-door hinges and, if occasion demanded, flints used in Lombard contexts, as well as coins of all periods. It is not at all an exaggeration to describe him as a polymath. His excitement about the past is infectious. These are the hallmarks of someone who thrillingly pursues meaning in everything as far as it is possible. No matter what the object might be, his eye dwells longingly on its creation and its wider social significance. In sum, John Mitchell defies categorisation in the age of the corporate academy.