Category 1
This is the location of the Great Mosque.
What is Cordoba, Spain?
This was a plague that would ultimately kill perhaps a third to half of all Europeans within a few years.
What is the Black Death?
This structure radiating corridors and ramps beneath the seating, built using barrel vaults and groin vaults, which allowed the entire audience to enter and exit with remarkable efficiency in only a matter of minutes
What is the Colosseum (Flavian Amphitheater)?
This became the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, eventually the Byzantine Empire.
What is Constantinople?
This is the material most widely used for Greek and Roman architecture and statues.
What is marble?
This Frankish king was crowned emperor by the pope in 800 CE, but after his death his territory fragmented, and for the next two centuries much of Europe suffered.
Who was Charlemagne?
This structure had enormous expanses of stained glass, including the cathedral's famous deep blue windows, whose colored light was understood by medieval worshippers as a physical manifestation of God's divine presence.
What is the Chartres Cathedral?
This Byzantine Emperor commissioned a sweeping legal codification, the Corpus Juris Civilis, that would shape European law for centuries.
Who was Justinian?
This church uses closely spaced ring of windows that lets in so much light that the entire structure appears to hover rather than rest on solid support.
What is the Hagia Sophia?
This work shows visible signs of age as a kind of moral advertisement, as dignity and authority earned specifically through decades of public service.
What is Head of a Roman Patrician?
The purpose of this German work was to provoke an intense empathetic identification with Christ's and Mary's suffering.
What is the Röttgen Pietà
This Jewish-commissioned work shows the distinctive character of medieval Spain, where Jewish, Christian, and Muslim communities lived in close enough contact to share artistic techniques and conventions.
What is the Golden Haggadah
In this structure, four water channels radiate outward to divide the courtyard into quadrants, an arrangement widely read as evoking the four rivers of paradise described in both the Quran and the Bible.
What is the Alhambra?
These small artifacts showed how Frankish elites displayed their wealth and rank directly on their own bodies, through dress, jewelry, and weaponry crafted by highly skilled metalworkers.
What is the Merovingian Looped Fibulae?
This work shows a visibly damaged, exhausted face captures a distinctly Hellenistic sensibility, one interested less in flawless heroic idealism than in the physical and emotional toll of lived human experience.
What is the Seated Boxer?
In this groundbreaking fresco, figures have real physical weight and volume, modeled with light and shadow, occupying convincing three-dimensional space and expressing genuine, legible human emotion.
What is the Arena (Scrovegni) Chapel and the Lamentation?
The ivory used for this simultaneously advertised access to long-distance trade networks and the technical mastery of the royal workshops that produced it in Spain.
What was the Pyxis of al-Mughira?
This embroidery narrates, in a continuous horizontal strip of scenes labeled with Latin captions, the events leading up to the Norman Conquest of England.
What is the Bayeux Tapestry?
This piece of art shows the enthroned Virgin and infant Christ flanked by two military martyr-saints, while behind them two angels gaze upward toward a beam of light descending from the hand of God.
What is Virgin (Theotokos) and Child between Saints Theodore and George?
This statue shows a Roman emperor not as an aging statesman in the veristic Republican mode, but as an eternally youthful, godlike military commander frozen at the height of his physical prime.
What is Augustus of Prima Porta?
This building is densely packed with over a hundred vivid, frightening images which confronted every pilgrim as they arrived, offering a stark visual reminder of the stakes of the spiritual journey they had undertaken and of the eternal reward or punishment awaiting them.
What is the Church of Sainte-Foy?
These gospels use insular, a distinctive hybrid style produced across the British Isles that fused Irish and Anglo-Saxon decorative traditions with visual conventions borrowed from Mediterranean Christian manuscripts
What are the Lindisfarne Gospels?
This was the largest imperial fora, public squares built by successive emperors adjacent to the older Roman Forum.
What is the Forum of Trajan?
This French Gothic work is a vivid record of how royal power, religious devotion, and staggering material wealth intertwined at the very top of medieval European society
What is the Dedication Page with Blanche of Castile and King Louis IX?
This presents an overwhelming, densely packed battle between Roman soldiers and bearded, wild-haired barbarian enemies, likely meant to represent Rome's Gothic adversaries.
What is the Ludovisi Battle Sarcophagus?