L’ imperatore, San Michele Arcangelo e la spada. Dialoghi iconografici e strategie figurative a difesa di Costantinopoli

Authors

Andrea Torno Ginnasi
ORCID logo https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2956-6350
DOI: https://doi.org/10.54103/milanoup.198
Keywords: Byzantine emperors, History of byzantine art, History of medieval art, Saint Michael the Archangel, Swords

Synopsis

The volume investigates the divine origin of the military power in the Byzantine culture through the analysis of the relationship between the emperor and the Archangel Michael. The research involves visual case studies, along with the exam of textual and ceremonial sources, in order to enlighten the “iconographic dialogues” and the “figurative strategies” the two protagonists carry out jointly for the defense of the empire. The sword is the cornerstone of the study. This is considered not as a weapon but both as an imperial insignia and as a symbol of the aid bestowed by the archangel, and then extended to the subjects. The book is structured in three parts. The first one concerns the emperor, the second one the Archangel Michael, whereas the third part shows the two figures acting together.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biography

Andrea Torno Ginnasi

Andrea Torno Ginnasi is assistant professor (RTD B) of History of medieval art at the University of Milan. He obtained the Ph.D. in History and criticism of artistic and environmental heritage at the same institution with a dissertation on the imperial coronation in Byzantium (2013), and then he led a three-year post-doc research on the imperial military imagery (2015-2018). He cooperates to the cataloguing of the Medieval Italian coins kept at the Ashmolean Museum Oxford. He is co-director of the book series Ύρια. Fonti storiche, artistiche, archeologiche e documentali della Puglia (Edizioni D’Andrea) and member of the editorial board of the open access journal Fenestella. Inside Medieval Art (Milano University Press). His field of research concerns Byzantine visual sources with a particular focus on the imperial imagery, luxury art and numismatics.

pdf
Published
April 1, 2025
Categories
Copyright (c) 2025 The Author(s)
License Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Details about this monograph

ISBN-13 (15)
979-125-510-197-0