Art

The twelfth-century Basilica at Castel Sant’Elia (VT), Lazio, is an important example of Romanesque art in the vicinity of Rome, Italy.  Built and decorated circa 1126 to meet the needs of a male monastic community living under the Benedictine Rule, the church largely retains its original architecture.  It also preserves large segments of the wall paintings that once covered its transept and apse; the earliest extant Cosmati pavement, altar, and ciborium in northern Lazio; and numerous relief carvings and inscriptions, including several from the early medieval era.  The richness of the Basilica’s material remains is paralleled by an almost complete loss of its textual apparatus.  Scholarship has focused on the style and dating of its architecture, pavement, and frescoes, and on the iconographic affiliations of a rare narrative cycle of the Apocalypse.

This dissertation takes a different approach.  Inspired by recent work addressing the role of the arts in the generation and communication of medieval institutional identity, it asks how the monks responsible for the Basilica’s construction used its fabric to create, preserve, and promote the antiquity, history, and current social position of their monastic community.  Liturgy, including chant, is seen as crucial to this process; the intersection of art and liturgy remains a theme throughout this study.  Chapter one analyzes medieval and modern documents and examines the standing structure to isolate authentically medieval elements from Counter-Reformation and nineteenth-century modifications, including the work of Virginio Vespignani for Pope Pius IX.  Chapter two considers how the monks used painting, epigraphy, architecture, and topography to link their monastery to the local saint Anastasius, discussed in the Dialogues of Gregory the Great.  Chapter three looks at the use of early medieval spolia within the church.  Chapter four examines the monastery’s dedication to Elijah the Prophet, identifying Elijah as an exemplar for monastic behavior.  Chapter five probes the frescoes’ Roman iconography, especially a rendering of the Madonna della Clemenza, the icon from Santa Maria in Trastevere.  Chapter six places the romanitas of the Basilica’s paintings, architecture, and furnishings within the context of the Gregorian Reform and the papacies of Callixtus II and Anacletus II.

Recent scholarship recognizes that image-text connections exceed the merely iconographic.  Within ecclesiastical environments, the performance, sound, and meaning of words pronounced before images affect the perceived content of those images and their relevance to persons engaged in liturgical activities.  Spatial organization undergirds this process, determining visual and physical access and structuring relations among images, altars, and bodies.  This works-in-progress talk, part of a larger book project titled The Monastery of Elijah near Nepi: A History in Paint and Stone,  examines how these processes intersected with the creation and use of the basilica of Sant’Elia, a twelfth-century monastic church located outside of Rome.  I argue that the church’s architecture, furnishings, and frescoes constituted a flexible site for complex recollective processes that operated differently during daily liturgy, on feast days of specific saints, and at the death and annual commemorations of the monastery’s abbots.

What are the limits of iconography, as a term and as a scholarly objective?  Certainly it seems convenient shorthand, as in this conference’s subtitle, “Architectural Space and Iconographic Programs.”  Yet as currently understood, iconography is both the study of the content and meaning of images as per Panofsky, and that content and meaning itself.  The latter might hew closer to the term’s ancient origins as a sketch or description, but the weight of Panofsky’s pronouncement strongly favors the former.  What are the consequences of this conflation?  Might we now be mistaking our method for its object?

The question is urgent not just for the specter of categorical error, but because of iconography’s basic move: to identify figures, scenes, and stories by recourse to external texts, objects, and images.  For some time it has been evident that this is only a beginning, as demonstrated by the excellent work done in what we might wish to call an expanded iconography: one that accounts for spatialization, materiality, ritual.  But still we contend with a term whose etymology encourages equivalences between drawing and writing, image and text, viewer and reader.  At its core, the iconographic method entails a displacement of meaning outside of the object in question, a deracination that should be troubling in general but that is exceedingly problematic for the decorated churches of medieval Christianity.  As a corollary, despite correctives from architectural history and epigraphy, iconography continues to privilege the figural arts; given Christian churches’ ritual purposes, this hierarchy may prove untenable.

I argue for iconography’s limits based on extensive study of the Basilica of Sant’Elia, a twelfth-century monastic church located in Castel S. Elia (VT).  Scholarly interest early settled on its transept frescoes, identifying scriptural, hagiographic, and liturgical sources and suggesting dependencies on other monuments.  The resulting displacement meant that a church that originally responded in very specific and intelligent ways to its community and saints became instead a generic and provincial building.  While one might argue that this is a failure of the researchers rather than the method, I contend that the Basilica’s particularity is simply not recoverable within a strictly iconographic framework.

An unprejudiced examination of the Basilica reveals a complex environment of architecture, painting, sculpture, furnishings, inscriptions, and landscape, in the service of specific rituals and beliefs.  More effective, then, for exploring the Basilica in its fullness and particularity is an approach that can encompass both environment and experience.  Here I will present a single example, the Basilica’s multifaceted relationship to its local saint, the sixth-century abbot Anastasius.  Wall paintings spatialized within the Basilica were only one part of this project, which spread to encompass inscriptions located across the monastic precinct, the architectural articulation of that precinct, even the natural topography of the site, all bound together through liturgical practices and commemoration of the dead.  The Basilica, sacralized originally through the pious life of Anastasius, was sustained through the presence of his cult and his relics: the anti-iconographic Christian object par excellence.

This talk will delve into the connections among memory, collective identity, and the visual arts and architecture as expressed in the monastic community of Sant'Elia in central Italy.  While all of this community's archives have been lost, its abbey church remains, offering a rich corpus of painting, sculpture, epigraphy, architecture, and landscape through which we may explore how the community's sense of its own history permeates its surviving material culture.

PDF online at https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.1086/685925. In 1989 the Getty Research Institute acquired Record Drawings of Ancient Monuments, 1825–1833, an album of early nineteenth-century architectural drawings ascribed to the French architect Simon-Claude Constant-Dufeux (1801–71) (Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute, 890252). Amid numerous drawings of ancient structures in central and southern Italy is a folio containing a plan and two sections of an unlabeled medieval church. This article, the result of the first study of the album since its arrival at the Getty, identifies the church as San Pietro in Tuscania (Viterbo), constructed circa 1093. The artist’s use of architectural rendering techniques resulted in a high level of precision within the images, which are the earliest-known technical drawings of San Pietro’s plan and interior. As such, they serve as valuable witnesses to the church’s appearance following restorations undertaken circa 1800–26 and prior to the arrival of photography in Tuscania at the end of the nineteenth century.

Religious and secular structures of the Middle Ages were decorated in a range of ways: sculptures in relief or in the round; textiles hung from walls or colonnades or draped over objects; marble paneling and pavement; furnishings of wood or stone; manuscripts; objects in metal, jewels, ivory, or wood; painted wooden panels; and large-scale mural decoration, whether created in paint or mosaic. This article concerns only the last: imagery placed on a natural or manmade mural surface and executed through the application either of pigment dissolved or suspended in a liquid medium or of small pieces of stone, tile, or glass (tessera, pl. tesserae). Continuities in style, content, placement, patronage, and function of paintings and mosaics have led scholars to study the two mediums together under the rubric of mural decoration. Mural decoration has formed part of the artistic life of the Italian peninsula and islands since Antiquity; this article will consider paintings and mosaics created between the late Antique advent of Christian and Jewish art, ca. 200 CE, and the end of the Middle Ages, understood here as ca. 1400. Italian monuments may contain single images or extensive ensembles encompassing narrative cycles, non-narrative images, icons, symbols, and/or ornamental elements. The adjective “Italian” properly refers to the modern nation-state of Italy; its relevance for the Middle Ages is debatable. This article focuses on regions that roughly correspond to modern Italy, and some entries challenge these geographic parameters. Because the internal divisions of modern Italy determine the organization of governmental archives and of much Italian research, scholars will find it essential to know a monument’s specific region (regione) and province (provincia, indicated with a two-letter abbreviation). The study of Italian mural decoration has historically emphasized the city of Rome and the regioni of Lombardy (Lombardia), Umbria, and Tuscany (Toscana), though such monuments as Aquileia Cathedral (UD), San Vincenzo al Volturno (IS), and Sant’Angelo in Formis (CE) also attract significant attention. Local studies, typically organized by town (comune) or province and almost invariably written in Italian, are often the only sources for lesser-known districts and monuments. This article is organized into two sections. The first offers an orientation to resources; the second presents issues and methods within the field, first as a brief survey and then in relation to significant monuments of medieval Italian mural decoration, ordered temporally.

Regardless of our particular discipline, as scholars of the Middle Ages many of us find ourselves faced with the same challenge: our training and our research interests may be highly specialized, but our teaching assignments demand breadth of knowledge and pedagogy.  This is particularly true for those of us who teach some or all of our courses in a general education (GE) context.  GE courses must be accessible in content and method to non-majors, while in many instances still providing solid disciplinary training to majors.  At smaller schools or in smaller majors even upper-division courses may have no prerequisites, potentially inhibiting the sequencing of knowledge and training.  Faculty in writing and foreign language programs face a related challenge of determining whether and how to bring medieval content into the classroom.  Finally, in an era in which course enrollments matter seemingly more than ever, how can we do all this while also drawing students to courses on a time period that many are inclined to write off as boring and irrelevant? 

This roundtable seeks to help us navigate these challenges by bringing together faculty from a range of disciplines and institutions to discuss their experiences in the GE classroom and some of the ways in which they have invigorated their teaching of the Middle Ages to bring benefit to GE and major students alike.  We hope to engage participants from a range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, including writing and foreign language programs, and from two-year and four-year institutions, all of whom are interested in sharing experiences, approaches, and strategies with their medievalist colleagues.

Organizers: Amy Caldwell, Lecturer in History, and Alison Locke Perchuk, Assistant Professor of Art History, California State University Channel Islands.

Participants: P. Scott Brown, Art, University of North Florida; Andrea Harbin, English, SUNY Cortland; A. Keith Kelly, English, Georgia Gwinnett College; Kristine Larson, Astronomy, Central Connecticut State University; Marilyn Lawrence, French, New York University; Heidi Marx-Wolff, Religion, University of Manitoba; Susan Taylor, History, Independent Scholar

On November 15, 1215, Pope Innocent III consecrated the church and altar of Sta. Maria in Trastevere in what can only be described as a liturgical spectacle of the highest order.  One of two such splendid events, the other being the elaborate liturgical celebration of Saints Peter and Paul held a few days later in Old St. Peter’s, the Trastevere ceremony placed Innocent III in ritual dialogue with his namesake, Innocent II, who both donated and was depicted within the mosaic over the altar.  Drawing on recent work on art, architecture and liturgy in Rome, I argue that the indexing of altar to image and pope to pope in Sta. Maria in Trastevere was but a node in a broader network operating within and across Rome’s major basilicas, a dynamic only intensified during the Lateran Councils.  Central to my understanding is the apse composition in the St Nicholas Chapel of the Lateran Palace, generally held to be a joint product of Calixtus II and Anacletus II.  Reexamining the chapel within these networked dynamics reveals it as a wholly Calixtine creation designed to instantiate eternally, within the papal residence, the temporally discrete actions of Calixtus’s renewal and consecration of the altar of Old St Peter’s, the primary liturgical spectacle of the First Lateran Council.

The production of individual and communal identity is a complex process operating at the intersections of exterior and interior, of physical environment and mental structures, of bodily comportment and spiritual and intellectual practices. Through research in art and architectural history, political and social history, theology, liturgy, literature, and memory and landscape studies, this book project offers a new understanding of this process at work within a medieval European monastery, the monasterium s. Heliae, or Monastery of Elijah, located in Castel S. Elia (VT), Italy. It reveals a community deeply invested in dominant political and social discourses emanating from Rome, yet also engaged in establishing its own sense of place and identity, rooted in its landscape and its sacred patrons, including the prophet Elijah. It also offers an example of how to tell history in the absence of texts, and indicates how seemingly peripheral monuments can offer ways through scholarly impasses concerning objects and events deemed more central.

Session Overview
In the past decade the medieval humanities have opened up new perspectives on the past by focusing on questions of materiality, agency, temporality, spatiality, cross-cultural interaction, and ecocriticism. These new approaches, many of which are informed by interdisciplinary research and contemporary cultural interests in the natural and built world, are fundamentally reshaping how we conceive of and study medieval architecture and urbanism. This panel will examine how new methodologies and theoretically informed approaches are changing our understanding of the architecture and urban forms of Rome from the end of the Gothic War (ca. 554) to the re-establishment of the papacy under Pope Martin V (ca. 1420). The city of Rome has long occupied a particular place in scholarly narratives as the seat of the papacy, as a destination for pilgrims, and as a mythical symbol of past grandeur and decline. Historians of Rome’s medieval architecture and urban fabric have traditionally focused on such issues as the distinctively retrospective character of the city's basilicas, the relationship between architecture and liturgy, the reuse of ancient materials, the topographical distinctions between the city’s inhabited and uninhabited regions, or the polemical character of Rome’s baronial tower houses. This session inquires into the current status of medieval Rome, both within the field of architectural history and in relation to the broader discourses of the medieval humanities.

Schedule
Marius Hauknes & Alison Perchuk, “Introduction” (8:30 AM)
Nicola Camerlenghi, Dartmouth College (U.S.A.), “Mapping Medieval Rome” (8:35 AM).
Christina Videbech, University of Bergen (Norway), “Fora as Sites of Collective Memory in Gothic and Post-Gothic Rome” (8:55 AM). 
Joan Barclay Lloyd, La Trobe University (Australia), “The Dominican Church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome” (9:15 AM)
Katherine Rinne, Independent Scholar (U.S.A.), “The Power of Thirst: Water and Power in Late-Medieval Rome” (9:35 AM)
Melissa Fitzmaurice, Binghamton University (U.S.A.), “Fascist Medievalism: Architecture, Authority and Dissent in Rome” (9:55 AM)

Scholars of Christian monasticism are familiar with the importance of the prophet Elijah to the desert fathers, with the development of his cult in the Greek- and Syriac-speaking churches of the eastern Mediterranean, and with his role in the forging of Carmelite monastic identity in the context of the Crusades. Much less is known about Elijah’s place in the medieval Latin church. This paper is part of a
project that seeks to redress that omission by examining the handful of known medieval churches dedicated to Elijah in the Latin West, all located on the Italian peninsula. Taking as its point of departure the twelfth-century Monastery of Elijah near Nepi (VT), and drawing on evidence from art history, liturgy, theology, and landscape studies, this paper presents Elijah as an effective monastic exemplar within the Latin church, whose life of isolation, abstinence, and prayer served as a behavioral model while his heavenly ascent and encounters with God validated their desire to reach God. The position of these foundations in central Italy and on Sardegna suggests a basis in a shared Mediterranean culture, though with varied ramifications— including different feast days—East and West.

How do we create community? Typically we think of communities as
arising naturally around some shared bond: family, religion, politics,
favorite activities or sports teams. But for a community to really cohere, it needs to have a concept of its own individual identity. In this talk, I explore how one twelfth-century Italian monastery used the visual arts,
architecture, and landscape to create a sense of its unique identity—and
how we can apply these lessons to understanding our own world today.

This lecture, written for a general audience, uses medieval art to address three popular stereotypes: that art means painting and sculpture, that art expresses the artist's emotions, and that medieval art is static and irrelevant. Through presentation of three different medieval artworks — the Cappella Palatina, the Morgan Beatus, and the church of Sant'Elia near Nepi — I suggest ways in which medieval art operated as multimedia art, engaging a range of senses as it communicated important concepts of communal identity, secular power, and religious aspirations to its audiences. I also examine some of the lessons that we can draw that can help us to better create and navigate our twenty-first century, image-saturated environment.

PDF free at https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.1086/687153.  The ecclesiastical art and architecture of early twelfth-century Rome are often interpreted as communicating political positions in a period of conflict between the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire. This article addresses the processes and ramifications , medieval and modern, of this politicization of Rome's ecclesiastical landscape through three interwoven cases. The first is the monastic church of Sant'Elia, built about 1125 near Nepi. Earlier studies of Sant'Elia's architecture, frescoes, and Cosmati marble work generally dismiss the church as a provincial emulation of Roman structures, but art historical and historical evidence reveals a fully Roman church built by an important patron to demarcate the northern limit of papal territory , a meaning lost through both historical change and scholarly bias. A fresco in Sant'Elia of the Madonna della Clemenza, the famous icon of Sta. Maria in Trastevere, is a primary sign of the church's romanitas and connections to the early twelfth-century popes Calixtus II and Anacletus II. Examination of the icon's history demonstrates how it came to symbolize Calixtine and Anacletan authority and the repercussions of this link after Anacletus's postmortem redefinition as antipope to Innocent II. Applying the results of these two cases to Sta. Maria suggests that the Trastevere church was built by Anacletus to honor its icon but was later claimed by Innocent through the insertion of an apse mosaic that both annulled the icon's Anacletan symbolism and replaced that pope's patronal memory with that of Innocent—an act of historical erasure perpetuated by medieval and modern authors.