Conférence : Oren Margolis, “In Search of the pontifex maximus in Quattrocento Rome”, Rome, Ecole britannique de Rome, le 14 janvier 2026, 18h.
In the roughly 1000 years after its supposed rejection by the emperor Gratian as ‘unlawful for a Christian’, the pagan title pontifex maximus was only rarely used of the popes and never by the popes themselves. The explosion of its use in papal epigraphy in the later Quattrocento has usually been interpreted as a sign of the Renaissance papacy’s imperial ideology, though in reality it owed significantly to the impact of Florentine humanism and its project of...
