Theodoric the Great was one of the most influential and charismatic sovereigns of the post-Roman period, but only one image of the king has survived into the modern era. During the Ostrogothic period, images of Theodoric abounded, particularly in his royal capital at Ravenna, and the body and face of the king were likely familiar to many within the Ostrogothic kingdom. After the conquest of Ravenna by the Byzantines, most of the images of Theodor within the capital were destroyed or altered beyond recognition. Along with his empty mausoleum, the ghostly remnants of Theodoric’s image leave modern scholars with a figurative and literal hole where the king’s body and visage should be. This paper examines the phenomenon of erasure and damnatio memoriae within the geo-political context of the mid-to-late sixth century while attempting to reconcile our  modern understanding of Theodoric as a Great Ruler with our lack of visual material related to the famous, and famously missing, king.

The church of San Menna is the most famous medieval building in Sant’Agata de’ Goti. Constructed before 1110 by the town’s Norman count Robert Drengot, the three-aisled basilica is typically studied as a small-scale reproduction of the legendary Benedictine monastery of Monte Cassino built by Abbot Desiderius circa 1070. As such, decorative features that correspond with this now lost prototype—including but not limited to its impressively intact opus sectile pavement—garner most scholarly attention. Presenting new historical and material analysis, this paper builds on work by Graham Loud, Dorothy Glass, and Ruggero Longo to explore how Robert strategically evoked the Lombard past at San Menna to further his political ambitions.

As its name suggests, Sant’Agata de’ Goti was inhabited before the Normans arrived in southern Italy in the late eleventh century. Indeed, my research reveals that one of Robert’s comital predecessors was Landulf, the second son of the Lombard co-prince of Capua and Benevento. Because this count of Sant’Agata managed to usurp members of his family to ascend to the throne of Capua in 1000 CE, I argue that his legacy directly inspired Robert to relocate his court and build San Menna as he challenged his Norman cousins for the same title a century later. In this context, his translation of the relics of Menas of Samnium (a local sixth-century hermit revered by Lombards) as well as the placement of spoliated, geometrically carved capitals on columns near the church’s main altar take on new ideological meanings. Comparing this building project not only to Monte Cassino but also Santa Sophia in Benevento in terms of its art and history, I propose a new interpretation of Robert’s patronage of San Menna that epitomizes the multifaceted promotion of the Lombard afterlife by conquering Normans in mainland southern Italy.

Academic tradition has long assumed that in Italy the historiographical appropriation of the Lombards (ancient Langobards), is straightforward and monolithic, beginning in the nationalist vision established in the 19th century by Alessandro Manzoni. Scholar and senator of the newly founded Kingdom of Italy, Manzoni spread a master narrative according to which modern Italians were the offspring of the ancient Romans. Conquered by invading armies, but never actually vanished from the peninsula, they would remerge in specific historical conjectures considered as distinctively Italian: the Age of the Communes, the Renaissance and the Risorgimento. The Lombards were seen only as one of Italy’s many foreign conquerors, albeit particularly fierce ones. This understanding has been challenged in the aftermath of the so-called First Republic (1946–94), in the formation of new political parties rooted in regional identities and in the creation of the European confederation from the Schengen agreement (1985) onwards. The very idea of Italy and of an Italian identity has undergone substantial transformations, while the Lombards have come to be interpreted as transnational agents, key to the construction of a unified proto-European Union. A similar re-semanticization following a political crisis is observable even after the unification of Italy (1861), when the emergent national state and its newly incorporated municipalities competed to (re)affirm their reciprocal institutional roles. In this very context, the Lombards were celebrated as illustrious founding fathers by several local communities, as opposed to the sole image of foreigners retained by them in official national narratives, a position furthered by spectacular archaeological finds from the early medieval period. By framing historiography and archaeology in their political background, this paper sheds new light on the uses and abuses of the Lombards in Italian cultural memory, and the multi-dimensional appropriations they underwent, while contributing to a developing debate in international scholarship.