T he M edieval M onastery of S aint E lijah A History in Paint and Stone
Alison Locke Perchuk (Ph.D. Yale University) is an art historian specializing in medieval Europe and the Mediterranean. Her work on the Monastery of Saint Elijah received the 2018 Van Courtlandt Elliott Prize of the Medieval Academy of America and she has held fellowships at CASVA (2016) and the Institute for Advanced Study (2018–19). Currently Associate Professor of Art at California State University Channel Islands, her next projects are on medieval Italy’s sacred landscapes and medievalism in California.
Nino Zchomelidse, Johns Hopkins University
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Alison Locke Perchuk
The Medieval Monastery of Saint Elijah: A History in Paint and Stone offers a new and transformative type of conceptually driven monograph. Starting from close readings of the complex and fragmented body of the archaeological and visual material as well as the specific landscape of the site, Alison Locke Perchuk’s methodologically ambitious, historically meticulous, and highly erudite study paints a fascinating picture of the various ways in which the medieval community of the monastery as well as later antiquarians and learned renovators up to the nineteenth century engaged with its past. The book is a distinguished contribution to studies on medieval art and intellectual history of Rome and its orbit.
T he M edieval M onastery of S aint E lijah
T he M edieval M onastery of S aint E lijah A History in Paint and Stone Blending innovative art historical analysis with archaeology, epigraphy, history, liturgy, theology, and landscape and memory studies, The Medieval Monastery of Saint Elijah: A History in Paint and Stone is the first comprehensive interdisciplinary study of a deeply intelligent yet understudied male Benedictine convent near Rome. The only monastery known to have been dedicated to the prophet Elijah in the Latin West, it was rebuilt ca. 1122–26 with papal patronage. Today, the monastery is represented by its church of Sant’Elia, a stone basilica endowed with its original Cosmati marble pavement and liturgical furnishings, early and high medieval sculptures and inscriptions, and vibrant wall paintings that include unique depictions of the prophet Elijah and the twelve tribes of Israel as warriors, an apse program with a distinctly elite Roman origin, and an important narrative cycle of the Apocalypse. An outlying chapel marks the site of a theophany that sanctified the landscape and gave the monastery its raison d’être. The Medieval Monastery of Saint Elijah makes significant contributions to current art historical debates concerning communal identity and the construction of social memory, artistic creativity and processes, the multisensory and exegetical capacities of works of visual art, intersections of topography and sanctity, and the effects of medievalism on our understanding of the Middle Ages.
A History in Paint and Stone Alison Locke Perchuk
432 pages, over 160 illustrations in color, bibliography, index