Bryan Ward-Perkins has a new book out on The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization. I got it just before I came over from Denmark and finally had time to finish it last night. He uses an empire-wide perspective to show that the 4th-6th centuries CE were indeed periods of decline that resulted […]
Category archives: Thesis Rant
The Problem of Dating
Dating is esential for an archaeological study of iconoclasm. Statues were destroyed for many different reasons both before and after the fourth century CE, and just how tricky this issue can be is well illustrated by a monument known as the Charonion in Antioch, modern Antakya. It’s usually dated to the Hellenistic period and related […]
Peter Stewart on Iconoclasm
Peter Stewart’s Statues in Roman Society is one of the most interesting recent art historical syntheses of Roman sculpture, and my work on the thesis would have been a lot more difficult without it. He has also written a good, short introduction to Roman art in general for the New Surveys in the Classics series. […]
On Fragmentation Theory and Some Recent Works on Iconoclasm
Two interesting works on iconoclasm appeared in 2003. One was a book-length study on The Archaeology of Religious Hatred by Eberhard Sauer, now in Edinburgh. The other was a short article in Britannia entitled ‘Iconoclasm in Roman Britain?’ by Ben Croxford, a PhD student at Cambridge. Reading Sauer’s book when it came out was actually […]
Late Antique Countrysides and Rural Iconoclasm
Although most studies of late antiquity have concentrated on urbanism, the recent upsurge of interest in landscapes and countrysides has also left its mark on late antique archaeology. The recent volumes edited by William Bowden et. al. and Neil Christie are good examples of this shift. In the former there’s a really good paper by […]
Iconoclasm and Damnatio Memoriae
During the Roman empire there were two different kinds of iconoclasm. Broadly speaking, these can be termed secular and religious iconoclasm, but the spheres of religion and politics were closely intertwined in antiquity. For that reason, the separation between the two cannot be made so easily, and must be treated with some caution. I will, […]
Welcome to iconoclasm.dk
Welcome. This blog tracks work on my thesis that investigates the phenomenon of iconoclasm in the late antique period, mainly 4th century CE. I’ll cover topics that are related to the study of iconoclasm as well as give some case studies. My main area is Roman sculpture, but all kinds of media were victims of […]