Scultura altomedievale e analisi delle corrispondenze: l’atelier Piemontese-Provenzale (o la ‘Bottega delle Alpi Marittime’ quarant’anni dopo)

Abstract

In this paper, the statistical method of the correspondence analysis - already abundantly employed on several classes of archaeological finds - is applied, for the first time, to the Early Medieval church architectural sculpture, which is mainly found in fragments, owing to later reuse as building material. The correspondence analysis, in particular the seriation, allows to study the sculpted fragments in a systematic way, and to achieve solid and verifiable typological grouping. The typological grouping is extremely useful to ascertain the relative and absolute chronology of large sets of sculpted stone items, but can also be exploited for detecting, characterise and distinguish from one another the sculpting workshops operating in a given macro-region during a certain period. The ‘sample’ chosen for performing the seriation is a very significant group of sculpted fragments from nowadays South-Eastern France and North-Western Italy, which are not only particularly suitable to this kind of research, but also required a global, comprehensive reassessment in the light of the advancement of knowledge in archaeology and history in the last decades. Among other results, the study led to the identification of an itinerant group of sculptors who worked in thirteen locations towards the last quarter of the 8th century.