Università Roma Tre

From gesta to monumenta: the Liber Pontificalis as a source for the study of patronage in Rome in the early Middle Ages.

Written from the sixth century onwards, the series of biographies of the bishops of Rome known by the conventional title of Liber Pontificalis represents, especially for the early medieval centuries, the most important source for the history of the Church and the city of Rome.
After illustrating the stratified editorial history of the work, the history of its manuscript transmission and the modern projects of critical and popular edition, the course intends to focus on the more properly historical-artistic informative contents of the biographies, examining in particular the life of Paschal I (817-824). The Rome of Pope Paschal - marked by turbulent relations with the Frankish aristocracy and the Carolingian sovereigns and by the reflections of a renewed iconoclastic phase in the East - enjoyed substantial economic resources and the advantages of the reorganisation of the craftsmen (painters, mosaicists, sculptors, carpenters, master glassmakers, architects and goldsmiths) who had been working for generations in the service of the Church of Rome. By integrating historical and art-historical knowledge, the parallel reading of the monuments and biography of Paschal I will be an opportunity to experience how every ancient text is not "a storehouse of variants" but an exciting "mine of stories" (G. Billanovich).

Bibliography (in progress)
A.Ballardini, Stat Roma pristina nomine. Nota sulla terminologia storico-artistica nel Liber Pontificalis, in La committenza artistica dei Papi a Roma nel Medioevo, a cura di M. D'Onofrio, Roma 2016, pp. 381-439.

Biografia di Pasquale I in Le Liber Pontificalis. Texte, Introduction et commentaire, par l'abbé L. Duchesne, II, Paris ed. 1955, pp. 52-68

Grata più delle Stelle. Pasquale I (817-824) e la Roma del suo Tempo, a cura di S. Ammirati, A. Ballardini, Giulia Bordi, voll. 1 e 2, Roma 2020.

SVMMA n. 9 (Primavera 2017), contributi: Verardi; Caperna, Carpiceci, Ballardini; Mancho-Bordi-Velentini, scaricabili on line.

A.Ballardini, Dai gesta di Pasquale I secondo il Liber Pontificalis ai monumenta iconografici delle basiliche Romane di Santa Prassede, Santa Maria in Domnica e Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, in Archivio della Società romana di storia patria, 122 (1999), pp. 5-68.