Dreaming in public : art, politics, and power in late medieval Rome
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- In the thirteenth century, the city of Rome was adorned with frescoes, mosaics, and sculptures of dreaming figures: images that frequently depicted a sleeping figure amidst an oneiric scene. This dissertation argues that these dream depictions were a powerful visual tool in the period, one that used the intimate qualities of dreaming to address its audience in profoundly personal terms. These dream images in medieval Rome assimilated scientific conceptions into the visual arts, drew on popular cultures of dream interpretation and divination, illustrated both contemporary and historical political aspirations as well as theology and eschatology. Ultimately this powerful medium, I argue, became a carefully crafted political tool, one that the papacy wielded to great effect in the thirteenth century to illustrate the extent of its role in the life of the faithful, a doctrine clearly espoused by the church beginning with the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. The first chapter explores the roots of this visual phenomenon, examining the political context and history of how an image of Emperor Constantine dreaming became a central visual device in a small and heavily fortified papal chapel at the Basilica of Santi Quattro Coronati. The second chapter focusses on dream images in the public square: arguing that a scene of a dream depicted on the façade of the church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli served as an overt political statement precisely by appealing to popular practices of dream interpretation. The third chapter considers the city's most prominent dream image, the façade of the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, within the intellectual and scientific culture of the period, arguing that the peculiar image functioned as a kind of diagram of cutting-edge dream science. The final chapter examines thirteenth-century conceptions of dream interpretation, reassessing now-lost frescoes of the Basilica of San Paolo fuori le mura as like a dream to be interpreted by its viewers. A further conclusion reflects on the ethics and politics of this kind of Art History, considering dream interpretation as fundamental part of art historical analysis and methodology. By considering these dreams images as the fundamentally visual nexus of scientific discovery, mass culture, popular religious practices, and political histories in the city I argue that these prominent images of the oneiric were a powerful and political visual medium in medieval Rome that has been largely overlooked in histories of the city.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2021; ©2021 |
| Publication date | 2021; 2021 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Smith, Daniel Stanley |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Pentcheva, Bissera V |
| Thesis advisor | Pentcheva, Bissera V |
| Thesis advisor | Derbes, Anne |
| Thesis advisor | Lugli, Emanuele |
| Degree committee member | Derbes, Anne |
| Degree committee member | Lugli, Emanuele |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Art and Art History |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Danny Smith. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Art and Art History. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2021. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/ph281xs0428 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2021 by Daniel Stanley Smith
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC-SA).
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