Pictures and Reality: Monumental Frescoes and Mosaics in Rome around 1300 (review)

Pictures and Reality: Monumental Frescoes and Mosaics in Rome around 1300. By Jens T. Wollesen. [Hermeneutics of Art, Volume 8.] (New York: Peter Lang. 1998. Pp. xxix, 432. $64.95.)

This book represents a reworking of the author's 1985 Munich Habilitationsschrift, translated into English. Its subject is the flowering of monumental painting and mosaic in Rome at the end of the thirteenth century. In the preface and an introductory chapter entitled "Prerequisites," the author explains that he does not intend to pursue a traditional art historical study based on documenting a progression of styles or the oeuvre of individual artists. Instead, he proposes an approach which he calls "pictorial history," as opposed to "art history," explaining this as a contextual examination of the works in question in terms of their location and function, with an emphasis on their commissioners and their audience, as well as the traditions of pictorial display which were current in the later Middle Ages. Wollesen's particular focus is on those monumental decorations that graced the exteriors of buildings, and thus were arguably intended for a broader and possibly non-clerical audience. These he divides into two groups. The first, related to the pontificate of Nicholas III (1277-1280), is exemplified by the murals formerly in the entrance portico of St. Peter's and by the mosaic frieze on the exterior of the Lateran portico; the second, a generation later at the end of the century, is represented by the portico murals of S. Lorenzo fuori le mura, the Loggia of Boniface VIII at the Lateran Palace, and the façade decorations of S. Maria in Trastevere, S. Maria in Aracoeli, and S. Maria Maggiore. The underlying thesis is that, on the eve of the Renaissance, and under the strong influence of the narrative cycle of the life of St. Francis developed at Assisi, monumental arts in Rome moved away from traditional practices in order to attempt "the pictorialization of reality," based on the visual experience of the viewer. The culmination of this process is seen in the surviving mural fragment from Boniface VIII's Lateran loggia, which depicts an actual historical event.

This attempt to escape a "Florentine-based" art history is laudable and welcome. Unfortunately, however, what follows leaves much to be desired. There are numerous digressions, to describe fragmentary frescoes in some detail, or to discuss issues of date and attribution, and these inevitably result in the loss of the main thread of the argument. Typographical errors abound, including a number of erroneous figure references. And it is not very useful that most quotations from medieval sources are cited at second hand, rather than from the original. But the most serious problem concerns the scholarly apparatus on which this study is based. The topic is one which has engaged a wide variety of art historians in recent years; yet this is not reflected in a bibliography which is puzzling at best, sporadic for the years since 1985, and seemingly non-existent after 1990. For example, completely missing are the 1987-88 aggiornamenti to Matthiae, the work of Brenda Bolton on Innocent III's use of images, or Catherine Harding's important studies of façade mosaics, as well as any reference to the work of scholars such as Ingo Herklotz, Sible de Blaauw, Serena Romano, and Valentino Pace. For example, any study of the Lateran façade mosaics which does not even mention Herklotz's exhaustive study in the 1989 Römisches Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte is bound to raise some scholarly eyebrows! Ditto for a discussion of the Vatican portico frescoes without reference to Alessandro Tomei's entry in the 1989 Fragmenta Picta catalogue, or the thirteenth-century restoration of the Early Christian murals in S. Paolo fuori le mura without mentioning the 1985 article on this topic by Luba Eleen. In part these omissions stem from the enormous delay in getting...