Qusayr ‘Amra as a pictures box
Résumé
Year after year, the wall paintings of Qusayr ‘Amra bring new evidence on Umayyad art. Thanks to the ISCR-DoA-WMF program, the colored compositions of the west aisle of the audience are visible for the first time. Fifteen years after the “state of conserva-tion” published by the DoA and Ifpo, the International Conference in Rome (2014) gave me the opportunity to propose new iconographical approaches. The bay opened on the west aisle of the audience hall offered a rich iconographic panorama, as if this aisle was a kind of box full of pictures. How had the owner organized them and how can we de-scribe and finally represent this aisle? I found an “answer” in a Byzantine manuscript, “The Christian Topography” attributed to Kosmas Indikopleustes, around the idea of boxes of pictures. The change from miniatures to an architectural size and megalog-raphy, could explain an evolution through the Umayyad califate. Qusayr ‘Amra evoca-tions make echoes of stories that were impossible to think about before the recent surface cleaning interventions. In five points, I will try to open a new field of research, though not without considering that the next restoration will find other new evidence.