{"id":2741,"date":"2017-12-11T10:00:01","date_gmt":"2017-12-11T14:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/rbsc\/?p=2741"},"modified":"2026-07-01T16:02:33","modified_gmt":"2026-07-01T20:02:33","slug":"recent-acquisition-a-christian-archaeologists-work-on-medieval-mosaics-in-churches-of-rome","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/rbsc\/recent-acquisition-a-christian-archaeologists-work-on-medieval-mosaics-in-churches-of-rome\/","title":{"rendered":"Recent Acquisition: A Christian Archaeologist’s work on Medieval Mosaics in Churches of Rome"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Rossi, Giovanni Battista de.\u00a0Musaici cristiani e saggi dei pavimenti delle chiese di Roma anteriori al secolo XV:\u00a0Tavole cromo-litografiche con cenni storici.<\/em> Roma: Libreria Spith\u00f6ver de Guglielmo Haass, 1899.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

by Marsha Stevenson, Visual Arts Librarian<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Giovanni Battista de Rossi (1822-1894) was a distinguished scholar of early Christian archaeology.\u00a0Born in Rome, he attended the Collegio Romano and La Sapienza, earning a doctorate.\u00a0After finishing his studies he was appointed scriptor at the Vatican Library, where he cataloged manuscripts.\u00a0In addition to his expertise in archaeology, de Rossi was skilled in epigraphy and was an authority on the topography of ancient and medieval Rome.\u00a0His studies of the apse mosaics in Roman churches continue those of the seventeenth-century scholars Jean l\u2019Heureux and Giovanni Giustino Ciampi.\u00a0He travelled widely and was acquainted with the foremost European scholars of his day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

De Rossi was a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Antiquarian Society. A devout Catholic, he heard Mass every day. As his health failed, Leo XIII gave him use of an apartment at Castel Gandolfo, where de Rossi died in 1894.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Detail from Plate 10 showing the winged lion of St Mark.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

De Rossi published a number of works in the second half of the nineteenth century, among which is this recent acquisition by the Hesburgh Libraries.\u00a0The Musaici cristiani e saggi dei pavimenti delle chiese di Roma anteriori al secolo XV<\/em><\/a> [\u201cChristian Mosaics and Specimens of the Floors of the Churches of Rome Prior to the 16th Century\u201d] originally was published in 27 fascicles between 1872 and 1896.\u00a0The Libraries\u2019 set is bound into two folio volumes, the first being the text and the second featuring 53 plates of illustrations. William Jackson of Aberdeen, Scotland was responsible for its binding.\u00a0This set was presented to a monastery library by Lady Cecil Kerr (1883-1941), a Catholic author who wrote historical and devotional works.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Plate 10: Abside di Sta Pudenziana<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

The illustrations in the second volume are fine examples of chromolithography, which was a technique developed in the nineteenth century for the mass production of color images. The process of chromolithography used multiple blocks or stones, each of a different color, which were printed successively to develop each image. The Libraries\u2019 copy includes some highlights in gold.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Plate 13: Arco di Placidia nella Basilica di S. Paolo e Frammenti della Medesima Basilica<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n
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Plate 18: Abside di Sta. Agnese fuori le mura<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License<\/a>.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Marsha Stevenson, Visual Arts Librarian Giovanni Battista de Rossi (1822-1894) was a distinguished scholar of early Christian archaeology.\u00a0Born in Rome, he attended the Collegio Romano and La Sapienza, earning a doctorate.\u00a0After finishing his studies he was appointed scriptor at the Vatican Library, where he cataloged manuscripts.\u00a0In addition to his expertise in archaeology, de Rossi … Continue reading Recent Acquisition: A Christian Archaeologist’s work on Medieval Mosaics in Churches of Rome<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1936,"featured_media":2752,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[75059,75061,12646,75056],"tags":[77938,75749],"class_list":["post-2741","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fine-printing-book-arts","category-modern-european-cultures","category-miscellaneous","category-theology-church-history","tag-book","tag-recent-acquisitions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/rbsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2741","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/rbsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/rbsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/rbsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1936"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/rbsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2741"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/rbsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2741\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11842,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/rbsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2741\/revisions\/11842"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/rbsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2752"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/rbsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/rbsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/rbsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}