Les diagrammes cosmiques, l’apocalypse et la Jérusalem céleste
Cosmic Diagrams, the Apocalypse and the Heavenly Jerusalem

Summary/Abstract: In this article, we have discussed some ways by which the religious representations of the Early Middle Ages were being invested with geometrical patterns rendering their composition much more schematic and bi-dimensional in comparison with early Christian visual examples. The biblical scenes particularly concerned with theses tendencies are those where a shift of accent from ecclesial to eschatological interpretation can be observed. These processes were merely the result of the intensification of apocalyptic expectations in Christian societies at the turn of the first millennium and, more particularly, within the Carolingian Empire in the 8th–10th centuries. Early medieval representations relating with the text of the Apocalypse provide us with a rich and relevant iconographic material for observing these new visual and exegetical interpretations which will concern, in the Later Middle Ages, several other themes of Christian iconography.

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