Emblematic narratives in the Sancta Sanctorum

• Autores: Marius Bratsberg Hauknes
• Localización: Studies in iconography, ISSN 0148-1029, Nº. 34, 2013, págs. 1-46
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • In this study I offer an analysis of the narrative frescoes of the Lateran's papal chapel, commonly known as the Sancta Sanctorum. Built and decorated around 1280 for Pope Nicholas III (1277-80), the small oratory features amongst its rich decoration six painted narrative scenes on the upper sections of the chapel's four walls, elevated more than seven meters from the ground. This elaborate fresco program depicts the martyrdoms of the most imortant early Christian saints: Peter, Paul, Lawrence, Agnes, and Stephen. Added to these is a scene from the life of St. Nicholas and a so-called "donor image". While the iconographies of these frescoes are relatively conventional, their narrative structure is quite unexpected. Separated by a slender central window and surrounded by a lavish painted framework, the hagiographical scenes are juxtaposed in pairs on the interiors lunettes. In contrast to the conventional layout of pictorial narrative in Rome's medieval churches, there is no chronology or prescribed order of viewing at the Sancta Sanctorum. Each episode appears to have been lifted out of its larger hagiographical context and transposed onto the walls of this small, cubic space. In what follows I discuss the rhetorical effect of this complex decorative system and advance the thesis that the juxtaposed organization of the painted scenes alters their narrative identity. The isolation of a singular scene, as if it were an inserted emblem, invites a visual reading that looks beyond the literal sense of the narrative episode and accentuates the allegorical contents of the image. Considered against the wider tradition of wall painting in the churches and chapels of medieval Rome, the frescoes in the Sancta Sanctorum call for a reconsideration of the conventional categorization of painting into two main types of medieval pictures: images (imagines) and stories (historiae). The "emblematic" mode -so this paper argues- poses a challenge to the icon-narrative dichotomy.