Idola Fregit? Revisiting Iconoclasm on Leodegar’s Tombstone in Northern Italy (752 CE) Available to Purchase

Scholars have traditionally interpreted the reference to the “destruction of idols” in the funerary epigraph on Leodegar’s tombstone (752 CE) from the historic diocese of Luni and the nearby discovery of anthropomorphic stelae dating to the Copper Age as evidence of the persistence of paganism in the rural environment of northern Italy in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. However, current theoretical interventions on the process of religious change in antiquity along with recently discovered archaeological evidence strongly undermine this thesis. Consequently, I propose an alternative hypothesis: that the epitaph is best interpreted discursively, as a narrative inspired by late ancient hagiographic traditions of clerical-led iconoclasm, such as those associated with St. Martin of Tours. Leodegar’s tombstone, I argue, seeks to commemorate the eighth-century dedicatee as an exemplary Christian who destroyed pagan idols at a time when the “survival” of ancestral cults among the population was more polemical fiction than cultural fact.