| Budget Amount *help |
¥2,522,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,940,000、Indirect Cost: ¥582,000)
Fiscal Year 2010: ¥1,196,000 (Direct Cost: ¥920,000、Indirect Cost: ¥276,000)
Fiscal Year 2009: ¥1,326,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,020,000、Indirect Cost: ¥306,000)
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| Research Abstract |
The Romanesque style is said to be the first universal style in Europe. From my previous research on the Tapestry of Creation in Girona, Spain, I observed a significant change in the form and the choice of motives in the images of eleventh to twelfth century Europe. Such dramatic change are said to happen in Gothic period, as Panofsky discussed in his notorious essay. So called Twelfth Century Renaissance is said to be inspired by the translations of Arabic Ancient Greek texts into Latin. However, this notion seems to be in need of re-suspection since the symptoms of such change appear before twelfth century. In art and architecture, I observe a change already in the Romanesque period.
To gain the evidence for such change and see what is causing it, I have concentrated my research on the study of floor mosaics. As the Roman Empire falls, Byzantines, Islams, Jews and Europe, grew their own art and architecture out of the Roman tradition. Each owes heavily on the Roman Hellenistic culture
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. But by what extent and in what way the Romans nurtured their offsprings in different culture? To solve this, I focused my project on floor mosaics in mediterranean area. If all the floor mosaics in ex-Roman empire region, of different period (from Roman era, Byzantine, Islam, Jewish, early Christian, and Romanesque), are catalogued, it must be much easier to compare and discuss the changes in technique and iconography. So, I planned to build a digital corpus on these mosaics.
Through the investigation in UK, Italy and Israel, I realized there is a bulk of papers and new findings on this topic, due to the recent archeological findings. More time and work is needed to build a corpus. Probably, a bigger project with researchers in various field, i.e. Roman, Islamic and Jewish and Byzantine, may be necessary.
To achieve the better understanding of the "Romanesque", I have tried another approach. The iconographical study of the floor mosaic in Otranto Cathedral, Apluia, Southern Italy. In the floor mosaic of Otranto, we can find non-christian images, such as Alexander the Great flying with griffins, King Arthur, various monsters and a chess board. Through the survey in Apulia, the mosaic in Otranto Cathedral seems to have a close connection with those in Bari, Bitonto, Brindisi in technique and the type of tesserae used, but different from those in S. Nicola on Tremiti Islands. Iconographically, some of the motives, especially, non-Christian images seems to be in common with the floor mosaics in the Adriatic regions, such as Murano, Ravenna, or Pesaro. More study is needed to conclude. Less
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