«Nihil mihi Plato … contulit». Ambrogio Autperto, il rifiuto di Platone e l’eco dell’Iconoclasmo bizantino

The monk and briefly abbot Ambrosius Autpertus († 784), active in the central Italian monastery of San Vincenzo al Volturno, was of key importance in shaping a new image of Mary in the early medieval West, and is believed to have inspired an innovative Marian iconography in medieval art. This notwithstanding, the cultural and theological roots of his theology have never been investigated, nor have they been connected to the contemporary ‘image struggle’. He has been marginalized by historiography as a consequence of the fact that he lived and worked in a cultural niche, i.e. southern Lombardy, and could not be pigeonholed in the so-called ‘Carolingian Renaissance’. This paper will address his rejection of Plato and the Classical heritage in order to understand his distance from contemporary authors more inclined to plunge into it. As it will be demonstrated, a reassessment of Autpertus’ position in the Kulturgeschichte of the early medieval West is needed to understand the theological and visual developments of the ‘image struggle’ in the West.