TY - JOUR
AU - Eastmond, Antony
AB - 918 Book Re vie ws The Vision of the Palace of the Byzantine Emperors as a Heavenly Jerusalem, by Maria Cristina Carile (Spoleto: Fondazione Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, 2012; pp. 226. $145). In the middle Byzantine period the earthly court of the Byzantine emperors was regarded by contemporaries as a mirror of the heavenly court of Christ. Maria Carile’s thesis in this book (based on her 2007 Ph.D.  dissertation) is that we can trace that idea back to the Late Antique period. As evidence for this, Carile looks to the palaces of the period. She brings together the (very limited) archaeological record of Late Antique imperial palaces with ekphraseis of palaces and, above all, with images of palaces and cityscapes in mosaics of the fifth and sixth century. As a book that seeks to look for an analogy between the earthly realm and the divine this is not a positivist attempt simply to reconstruct what we know about the physical environment of the emperors of Late Antiquity. Instead, as the title announces, it is a study of the ‘vision’ of the palace. Carile is interested in this symbolic power of palaces, how they were imagined and conceived, 
TI - The Vision of the Palace of the Byzantine Emperors as a Heavenly Jerusalem, by Maria Cristina Carile
JO - The English Historical Review
DO - 10.1093/ehr/cet178
DA - 2013-08-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-vision-of-the-palace-of-the-byzantine-emperors-as-a-heavenly-abyye33f6U
SP - 918
EP - 919
VL - 128
IS - 533
DP - DeepDyve
ER -