Title: Bulletino di archaeologica Cristiana, 1863-1922
Description: The Bullettino di Archeologia Cristiana (1863-1922) was one manifestation of the broad swath of initiatives carried out by Pope Pius IX in response to threats posed to the authority of the Roman Catholic Church and the sovereignty of the Papal States by nineteenth-century revolutionary upsurges and the national movement to unify Italy. According to Jamie Beth Erenstoft, author of "Controlling the Sacred Past: Rome, Pius IX, and Christian Archaeology" (2008), Pius IX established religious institutions, sponsored the renovation of churches, and launched a program to excavate and restore ancient Christian monuments, including the catacombs, in order to provide the ideological justification for the spiritual and temporal power of the papacy. In this latter endeavor the pope was guided by the archaeologist Giovanni Battista de Rossi, who had recently discovered a slab with an inscription from the tomb of a pope martyred in the third century. The founding of the Commission for Sacred Archaeology in 1852 broke with 400 years of papal humanist orientation to the remains of ancient Greece and Rome and turned toward the Christian art and architecture of the Late Antique period (third through seventh centuries). In 1854 Pius IX established the Pio Christian Museum to house these antiquities. The Bullettino was founded to document the archeological discoveries. Edited by de Rossi until his death in 1894 and subsequently issued by the Commission as the Nuovo Bullettino, the journal carried scholarly essays, with citations, about Late Antique Christian objects, sites, and inscriptions. Articles were authored and edited by many of the best-known Christian archaeologists, art historians, and paleographers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including Giuseppe Marchi, Franchi de' Cavalieri, Giuseppe Bonavenia, Rodolfo Kanzler, Orazio Marucchi, and Giuseppe Wilpert. Commentators committed to the restoration of the authority of the Vatican provided appreciations of the most important finds of the project. These range from explorations of the artistic program of entire catacomb chambers to close readings of tiny early Christian devotional medallions. The issues selected here will be fascinating to students researching the impact of nineteenth-century revolutions on religion, the Roman Catholic Church in this period, art history, archaeology, and cultural studies.
Subjects: Christianity and art, Periodicals, Catholic Church, Early Christian Art, Christian antiquities, Church architecture