Refiguring the Post-Classical City

In Refiguring the Post Classical City, Annabel Wharton reconsiders the "Christianization" of the classical world between the third and sixth centuries C.E. From Sacrifices in the Temple of Bel and rabbinic discourses in the synagogue of Dura to the baptismal rites of Ravenna, she investigates the architecture and decoration of specific sites in an effort to reconstruct the power of post classical space and representation. That power, Wharton argues, was fundamentally political. The establishment of Christian hegemony left marks of its brutality and violence in the urban landscape like the spectacularized ruins of the Temple of Jerusalem and the severed body parts in the mosaics of S. Apollinare Nuovo. Wharton's book not only uncovers the political ground on which early Christian monuments were constructed, but also discloses the ideological nature of their restitution in the histories of Western culture, demonstrating that the art of the past has a significant political role in the present.