The Concept of<i>Spolia</i>
Dale Kinney
As a label, spolia is both metaphorical and anachronistic. A Latin word meaning “spoils” or anything “stripped” from someone something, “spolia” was coined as term for reused antiquities by artist-antiquarians active in Rome around 1500. Spolia are not an exclusively medieval topic; on the contrary, reuse universal response to limitations of technology resources. Rather than coherent category, might better be considered theme categories like architecture sculpture, that tends brought up conjunction with other themes survival Classical Antiquity renovatio. also resonate prominent post-modern cultural criticism, such appropriation, bricolage, historicism, fragment, ruin. An ever widening spectrum interpretive methodologies bear these assemblages.