Le arti nella Langobardia meridionale, VIII-IX secolo. Sviluppi e indirizzi, in Lingue, scritture e società nell’Italia longobarda. Un percorso di sociolinguistica storica, E. D’Argenio, R. Delle Donne, R. Sornicola (eds.), Naples, 2025, 1–44.

This chapter offers a succinct overview of studies concerned with the visual arts in southern Langobardia in the eighth and the ninth centuries. It treats long-debated historiographical questions, such as the tendency to label the arts of southern Italy in terms of ‘Benedictine’, ‘Beneventan’, ‘Longobard’, ‘Byzantine’, or ‘Siculo-Arabic’, and the ensuing fragmentation of studies, within the context of a wider approach to culturally complex contact-zones. The chapter also highlights how the visual arts of southern Langobardia cultivated a relationship with the heritage of late Antiquity, the eastern Mediterranean, and northern Langobardia. The recent application of archaeometrical analyses to some painted cycles of southern Italy has revealed a somewhat different picture from the one offered by stylistic comparison – one involving distinctive techniques and working practices; in fact, these analyses point towards the existence of multiple workshops operating independently from one another while still referencing the arts produced at the courts of Benevento, Salerno, and at Rome. The concluding section indicates how the direction of future collaborative research pathways might better contextualise the extraordinary legacy of Langobardia minor.