This book celebrates John Mitchell on his 80th birthday. The festschrift brings together some of his army of undergraduate and graduate students, his fellow-travellers in the bi-ways of art history, his companions and colleagues on archaeological excavations and also a few admirers who have simply revelled in his friendship. The breadth of papers speaks volumes. John Mitchell describes himself as a jobbing art historian. It is a modest explanation to his peers as to why, while still working on the art historical canon from Anglo-Saxon bibles and crosses to Rembrandt, he has ventured far and wide into a field that he likes to describe, with a chuckle, as knick-knacks. This cornucopia of interests, as this volume attests, is quite simply remarkable. He has mastered Roman mosaics, late antique architecture and amulets, Umayadd painting, the familiar and unfamiliar quotidian objects of the early Middle Ages from nails to trap-door hinges and, if occasion demanded, flints used in Lombard contexts, as well as coins of all periods. It is not at all an exaggeration to describe him as a polymath. His excitement about the past is infectious. These are the hallmarks of someone who thrillingly pursues meaning in everything as far as it is possible. No matter what the object might be, his eye dwells longingly on its creation and its wider social significance. In sum, John Mitchell defies categorisation in the age of the corporate academy.
Preface
Finding meaning in images, objects and buildings
You just have to look closer: a partial biography of John Burnett Mitchell
Elizabeth Mitchell
Flower Power: the Garland as a Floating Signifier Jane Chick
Hexapteryga: The Versatile Deacons of Byzantine Cyprus Richard Maguire
Selecting, Arranging, Dressing and Aging the Saints in S. Apollinare Nuovo
Bryan Ward-Perkins
The Church of San Zeno at Bardolino, the Carolingian Renaissance, and the
Sources for Simulated Architecture in Court School Manuscripts John
Osborne
Trittico Siciliano.
3. Il modello inglese nei codici da Messina della
Biblioteca Nazionale di Madrid (ed altri) Valentino Pace
Diasporic artefacts re-connected: the case for St John and the Sea T. A.
(Sandy) Heslop
Under Construction: On Two Twelfth-Century Images of Book Production
Beatrice Kitzinger
The Triumph of Earsham Paul Williamson
Michelangelo and Spolia Joseph Connors
The Past and the Palette: Art, Archaeology, and the Plausible Realities of
the 17th-Century Dutch Republic James Symonds
Connoisseurs and Antiquaries, or early histories of caricature in Britain
Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius
Victorian and Edwardian House Names in Southeast England, or Queen Victoria
in Bungay. A Preliminary Study Stefan Muthesius
Small finds: the point of the needle Victoria Mitchell
From Combs to Churches: The Archaeology of Northern Europe
From Roman Town to Anglo-Saxon Church: the origins of St Edmunds at
Caistor-by-Norwich Will Bowden
Ever decreasing circles and other pictorial mysteries at Tintagel, Cornwall
Jacqueline Nowakowski
Combs, Beads and Protection: Grave 210 from Eriswell, Suffolk Ian Riddler
Voyager et échanger entre les VIIe et XIe siècles : des objets francs en
Angleterre / des objets anglo-saxons en Francie Amélie Berthon
A new Virgin Mary in Mercia: The Platytera at Deerhurst (Gloucs.)
Francesca DellAcqua
The Sheffield Cross biography and significance John Moreland
Status and planning of architectural groups in early medieval England
Anastasia Moskvina
Urban parish churches dedicated to St Cuthbert in eastern and northern
England: exploration of a curious phenomenon Brian Ayers
Exploring the Archaeology of the Mediterranean and Middle East
Aphrodite Anadyomene: A Roman hairpin (acus crinalis) finial from the Roman
Forum at Butrint David R. Hernandez
Is it a kind of magic? A bronze magic nail from the environs of Sofiana
(central-southern Sicily) in its archaeological context Emanuele Vaccaro
Soft stone items found in Yughb, a site of the early Islamic period in Qatar
José C. Carvajal López
The Ninth-Century Monastic Treasury at San Vincenzo al Volturno? Richard
Hodges
The Octopus that turned into a Flounder and two Eels The story of the Vrina
Plain Basilica mosaic Simon Greenslade and Sarah Leppard
Bombs, Beer, or Body Lotion? New Light on an Enigma in Islamic Archaeology
Joanita Vroom
Elementary, Mitchell: the Lombards, Anselm of Nonantola and the invention of
mortadella. Cesare Poppi
Not just for decoration. The ceramics on the bell tower of Santa Maria
Maggiore in Rome Sauro Gelichi
Full Circle: Recollections and Reflections of Herbert Samuel Toms and the
Pitt-Rivers way of Archaeology Oliver Gilkes
An archons tower at Middle Byzantine Sopot, southern Albania Nevila Molla
Reflections
From Correctness to Communities of Friends: aesthetics and the end of getting
art right at the origins of modern art criticism, or, chapter 1 of an
unwritten history of art criticism Sam Rose
Behind Closed Doors: Transparency and Legitimacy in Public Policy Making
Polly Mitchell
Three historical oddities: the fall of the Roman Empire in AD 476, the year
zero at the BC/AD divide, and the continent of Europe Eric Fernie
What John Mitchell doesnt know about Bells Elisabeth de Bièvre and John
Onians
Jane Chick is an Associate of the School of History and Art History at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. She has published on late antique mosaics and is Honorary editor of the journal Mosaic.
Richard Hodges is the Emeritus President of The American University of Rome, who has excavated at Butrint, Albania and San Vincenzo al Volturno, Italy, and published on early Medieval economics.
Ian Riddler is a material culture specialist who has published widely on objects and waste of antler, bone, horn and ivory of Neolithic to medieval date.
