The articles in this volume seek to shed new light on frequently overlooked archaisms and acts of spoliation. This book is about ideas, style, and material objects, their reuse and repurposing in the Eastern Roman Empire and after its end in 1453.
In the absence of textual evidence, art historians and archaeologists often rely on dating artifacts based on an assumed linear development of artistic styles, visual or paleographic forms. This modern predisposition has long hampered our understanding of how people used and referenced the past through stylistic and material spoliation.
The long-standing interest of art historians and archaeologists in spolia resonates with and informs the more recent scholarly focus on cultural heritage. At their core, both spolia and heritage are about acts and processes of the transformation of material and meaning. Cultural heritage studies do not ask what something signified at the moment of inception, but rather how objects and ideas were reshaped, reused, and reinterpreted over time. Spolia – reused and reworked fragments from the past – are material expressions of these same categories and manifestations of transformations over time. Both spolia and heritage trace how the relationship between the past and the present was continually negotiated, how the past was used.