Book Description

Some decades before Michelangelo began work on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, such masters as Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, Perugino, and Signorelli were called to Rome by Pope Sixtus IV to decorate the walls. By 1483, these painters had completed two monumental fresco cycles illustrating the lives of Moses and Christ - works of complex, and sometimes puzzling, iconography. Carol F. Lewine shows that many long-standing questions posed by these Renaissance masterpieces can be resolved by systematic investigation of their undoubted links with the Roman liturgy. Her reconstruction of the scheme by which liturgical themes of the weeks between Christmas and Ascension Thursday are mirrored in the subjects of these frescoes has revealed, unexpectedly, that within this program the primary emphasis is on the liturgy of Lent, often on the Lenten liturgy of the early church, and on such Lenten themes as baptism and penitence. The discovery that these frescoes also refer to the Babylonian Captivity of the Jews, another ancient Lenten theme, suggests that Sixtus IV created the papal chapel that bears his name in order to commemorate the return of the popes from their "Babylonian Captivity" at Avignon. This exile ended in 1377, approximately one hundred years before Sixtus began to plan the major artistic enterprise of his pontificate. Lewine's approach to the interpretation of visual images in terms of their liturgical significance is in itself important and her argument, grounded in close visual inspection of the paintings, is ingenious and provocative. Her analyses of the interactions among narrative and symbol, text and image, form and meaning, offer stimulating contributions to quattrocento studies and encourage further consideration of all the decoration of the Sistine Chapel, together, as parts of an evolving ensemble.