Un viaggio disegnato: Aubin-Louis Millin e l’arte bizantina in Italia (1811-1813)

While travelling in Italy (1811-1813), the French archaeologist and art historian Aubin-Louis Millin felt a completely new urge to study medieval monuments. They included many Byzantine monuments in Rome, in the Kingdom of Naples and Venice, which until then had been scarcely known if not completely unknown. Through a sort of post-mortem observation and with the help of his drawing skills, works of architecture, sculpture and sumptuary arts were documented – often for the very first time – with painstaking philological accuracy. This is for instance the case of the precious Paleologue “dalmatic” from the Treasure of St Peter’s and Joshua Roll from the Vatican Library in Rome, the so-called Cattolica church at Stilo and the Abbey of St Maria del Patir in Calabria; the items in the Treasure of St Mark’s and the marble statues outside St Mark’s Basilica in Venice. The materials put together by the author are of outstanding importance, since they also help us understand the extent of the artistic heritage of regions that, over the following decades, would have seen their heritage heavily pillaged or sold.