Late Antique artefacts, and the images they carry, attest to a highly connected visual culture from ca. 300 to 800 C.E. On the one hand, the same decorative motifs and iconographies are found across various genres of visual and material culture, irrespective of social and economic differences among their users – for instance in mosaics, architectural decoration, and luxury arts (silver plate, textiles, ivories), as well as in everyday objects such as tableware, lamps, and pilgrim vessels. On the other hand, they are also spread in geographically distant regions, mingled with local elements, far beyond the traditional borders of the classical world. At the same time, foreign motifs, especially of Germanic and Sasanian origin, are attested in Roman territories. This volume aims at investigating the reasons behind this seemingly globalised visual culture spread across the Late Antique world, both within the borders of the (former) Roman and (later) Byzantine Empire and beyond, bringing together diverse approaches characteristic of different national and disciplinary traditions. The presentation of a wide range of relevant case studies chosen from different geographical and cultural contexts exemplifies the vast scale of the phenomenon and demonstrates the benefit of addressing such a complex historical question with a combination of different theoretical approaches.

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• I. Dynamics of provincial visual cultures in the late Roman empire
  • 1. Becoming glocal! Glocalisation, the victorious charioteer from the villa of El Pomar (Hispania Baetica) and the emergence of a regional visual koiné in 4th-century Augusta Emerita (Lusitania)
  • 2. Clothing differentiation in a shared visual culture: Dress imagery in mosaic iconography
  • 3. Act locally, think globally: Late antique funerary painting from the territory of present-day Serbia
  • 4. The emperors in the province: A study of the Tetrarchic images from the imperial cult chamber in Luxor
• II. Iconography- or genre-related case studies
  • 5. Images of the rider on horseback in the eastern Mediterranean in the 1st millennium AD
  • 6. The ‘child with grapes’ from Britain to Bahrain: Shared iconography, meaning and mobility on funerary monuments, AD 100–500
  • 7. Baptism and Roman gold-glasses: Salvation and social dynamics
  • 8.‘First-generation diptychs’ and the reception of Theodosian court art
• III. Connections with Roman visual culture in extra-Roman and post-Roman contexts
  • 9. Buckles and bones: Central Asiatic influences and the making of post-Roman Gaul
  • 10. South Arabia in Late Antiquity: A melting pot of artistic ideas
  • 11. The mosaic pavement beneath the floor of al-Aqṣā mosque: A case study of late antique artistic koiné
• IV. Modes of transfer: iconographies, motifs, objects
  • 12. Circulating images: Late Antiquity’s cross-cultural visual koiné
  • 13. Bracteates with Byzantine coin patterns along the Silk Road
  • 14. Small worlds of long Late Antiquity: Global entanglements, trade diasporas and network theory
• Plate section