The rediscovery of Christian archaeology between 1860 and 1930. Volume I
This book is first product of the international online workshop series “Revealing Christian Heritage. Talks on the rediscovery of Christian archaeology between 1860-1930”. It collects different case studies of rediscovery of Christian antiquities between 1860-1930 in Europe and the Mediterranean basin, in order to stimulate reflections about the impact of these rediscoveries on our culture in a period of great political transition.
By turning the light on lesser-known stories on a wider European and Mediterranean horizon (Greece, Holy Land, Eritrea, Malta, Norway), this book gives a strong contribution to the history of Christian archaeology. All articles deal with many topics of the field (museology, cultural heritage protection law, history of religious orders, field archaeology, military explorations), and therefore offer a strong interdisciplinary cut.
Among the dissemination activities of the Conex-Plus Project LIT!, we will celebrate the second talk of the series “Revealing Christian Heritage – Talks on the rediscovery of Christian archaeology between 1860 and 1930”. This year, the workshop will focus on the rediscovery of Christian antiquity in Spain in late 19th-early 20th century.
The first talk took place in September 2021 (more info here and here) and the publication of the proceedings will be announced soon.
After the summer break, the first two months of this academic year have been devoted to results dissemination. I will dedicate a separete blog post to online or on-person activities (stay tuned!), but first I would like to share the latest publications regarding the LIT! project. All in open access!
On October the 5th, the volume 32 of the Anales de Historia del Arte came out with the title Arte y Archivo. I contributed with the article “Catacumbas en museos: archivos documentales y fotográficos para la historia de la museografía” (“Catacombs in Museums: Archival Texts and Photos for the History of Museums”).
Bonus: my latest article about German researchers in the early Christian Catacombs of Malta finally saw the light this September. I wrote this article during the first months of the pandemic outbreak and I am very fond of it. It was published in the Römische Quartalschrift Band 117, Heft 1-2.
Over the past two months, news that Tarragona will receive seven millions for the restoration of the Early Christian Necropolis museum has brought this unique museum back into the local and national news. More on the news here.
It seems a happy coincidence that this news arrived precisely during the period of investigation I am conducting on this museum. It is not only the most interesting case of a museum of early Christian antiquities in Spain, but also one of the very few surviving examples of 1920s museum settings in Europe.
The museum was created and managed by the discoverer of the necropolis of Tarragona, Monsignor Joan Serra i Vilarò. Its contruction begun in late 1929 with the approval of the national government, and it was inaugurated in October 1930. It is a building in neo-classical style, built above part of the necropolis. The innovation of this museum lied in its being on-site, keeping the find close to the excavation site and preventing them from being taken to the national main museums, far from Tarragona. In this, as well as in the continuous publicationof excavation results, Serra i Vilaró was a true pioneer.
The collection was displayed in three rooms. In the basement, a part of the necropolis was visible, then amphorae, some sarcophagi and other materials were arranged. On the first floor, a long corridor surrounded the central hall. The corridor was used as a gallery and the main decorated sarcophagi and some of the funerary mosaics found in the necropolis were displayed there.
The central hall is certainly the most interesting. Its layout is very reminiscent of the Roman museums of the time (in particular the lapidary galleries of the Vatican Museums): all the epigraphs found in the necropolis, including the smallest fragments, are arranged on the central part of the walls. In the centre of the room, several wooden showcases held the smaller finds from the tombs.
The museum and its layout were very similar to many other archaeological museums in the Mediterranean (an example can be seen here). But its uniqueness today lies in the fact that it has never been modified: the life of the museum after the turmoil of the civil war of 1938-39 (in which the museum was emptied and the collection temporary evacuated) was very quiet and the layout was never radically changed. In the last 30 years, on the contrary, it has been closed and abandoned, despite the modernisation of the necropolis. For many years now, public access has been prohibited for security reasons. However, this has allowed the interior rooms to be preserved exactly as they were.
So what can we expect from the new incoming funds? That it will be possible to maintain as much of the original layout as possible, so that 21st-century visitors can live and understand the original experience of 1930s.
On 14 July, I presented some of the results of my research stay in Tarragona (as Conex-Plus secondment) during the conference “La arqueología cristiana en Tarragona a principios del siglo XX. Descubrimientos, estudios, museos y la relación con Roma” at the Museu Biblìc.
Many people attended this talk on the cultural and museographic relationship between Rome and Tarragona in the early 20th century. Thank you Tarragona for such a heartfelt participation!
In the last issue of the online Journal of Art Historiography (Number 26, June 2022) the is the most recent output of the Project LIT!
The study and dissemination of an iconography: banquet scenes from the catacombs of Rome to the facsimile catacombs of the nineteenth century
In general, the text traces the discovery and the history of two important banquet scenes from the Roman catacombs (from the Catacombs of Callixtus and from the Catacombs of Priscilla). It focuses on the fortune of these scenes in Europe. this fortune developed in their reproductions found in various churches and chapels up to the middle of the 20th century. This overview helps in understanding how the study and reproduction of a single iconography can contribute to a general reconstruction of the development of the discipline of early Christian art history.
The Catalan city of Tarragona is one of the central places for the history of Christian archaeology in Europe and for the history of museums of Christian antiquities.
The early Christian Necropolis of Tarragona (3rd-5th centuries AD) is one of the most important and extensive necropolis of the Christian ancient world, with more than 2,000 documented burials of many different types. The necropolis stretched around a very important martyr centre, the funerary basilica where the remains of the three most important local martyrs rested: the bishop Fructuosus, and his deacons, Augurius and Eulogius. The three saints were burned alive in the arena of the amphitheatre of Tarraco in the year 259 AD.
Their remains were collected and buried in the outer area on the banks of the River Francolí. There, at the beginning of the 5th century, a basilica dedicated to the memory of the saints was built in the area of their tombs. In this same period, another basilica up northern was built and this area became an important Christian centre until the 7th century.
Current exhibition on site of the most important findings
But what interests us the most is the incredible musealisation of the area made in 1929-30. The necropolis was accidentally discovered in 1923, and in 1926 Monsignor Joan Serra i Vilaró took the lead of the excavations. He was an archaeologist who was well known for his documental rigour and for his desire to preserve and disseminate the remains. So in 1930 he opened a museum to explain the Early Christian Necropolis of Tarragona, which is, so far as we know, the first monographic museum in Spain dedicated only to Christian archaeology.
The museum and the necropolis today
We have many old photographs of the museum and it is still preserved, although not open to visitors. It was conseived with features very typical of early 20th century museology. The building, in classical style, had a perimeter corridor where the gracious stone sarcophagi were displayed. The central hall had display cases in the centre and thousands of epigraphs on the walls: this was the most important epigraphic display in the Italian style on the Iberian peninsula. In addition, it was constructed in such a way that the visitable underground hall could serve to preserve parts of the necropolis.
We are going to dig deeper in the history of this incredible museum in the following weeks. Stay tuned!
On March 26th, the project LIT! was presented during the online Poster Session 6 (Humanities and SPR) at the 2022 Marie Curie Alumni Association Annual Conference. The conference was held in Lisbon and online in hybrid mode.
This year’s theme was “Sustainability and the post-pandemic workplace”, and my contribution was titeled “Catacombs, facsimile copies and museums between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: How digital archives and open access amplify the post-pandemic workplace of a historian”.
It was a good occasion to reflect on how the archive and bibliographic work of historians has changed due to the pandemic. I had the possibility to briefly present my poster with a 3-min speech and two slides.
The poster will be shared here in the following days.
It was an inspiring experience, the whole event was truly thought-provoking and it was great to connect with MSCA peers from all over the word!
Catacombs rediscovery 