Painter and Priest: Giovanni Canavesio's Visual Rhetoric and the Passion Cycle at La Brigue (review)

Véronique Plesch's study of Giovanni Canavesio's Passion cycle in Notre-Dame des Fontaines, a pilgrimage church just outside the town of La Brigue in the southern Alps, might appear to be of limited interest even to a scholarly audience. The painter, who was active toward the end of the fifteenth century, cannot be considered a pivotal figure in the history of late medieval art. The region in which he worked, the duchy of Savoy, is similarly peripheral. But Plesch draws the reader in with her lively account of the fresco cycle and its larger cultural contexts. The frescoes are beautifully illustrated, with a generous allotment of color photographs, many taken by the author. And the images are quite striking: Canavesio was a priest as well as an artist—a critical point for Plesch's argument—and his vivid, expressive figures must have engaged their audience as thoroughly as a charismatic preacher's words engaged the congregation.

The book opens with a painstaking overview of the painter's oeuvre, then turns, in the second chapter, to the church of Notre-Dame des Fontaines and its extensive iconographic program. Virtually every available inch of the church is frescoed. The early life of the Virgin and the infancy of Christ appear on the triumphal arch, the later life of the Virgin in the choir, the Last Judgment on the entrance wall; on the walls of the nave is the surprisingly comprehensive Passion cycle, twenty-six episodes in all—the subject of this study. Chapters three and four focus on art-historical concerns—a characterization of the painter's style, his pictorial sources and method. Plesch next takes up the program of the Passion cycle, noting that the cycle is unusual in several respects, in particular its emphasis on the torments of Christ and on the role of Judas in the Passion. This, she argues persuasively in chapter six, suggests a preoccupation with sin, repentance, and despair—a topic to which she will return in the concluding chapter. In chapter seven, Plesch introduces some of her most interesting material: the Latin tituli that, exceptionally, accompany the Passion scenes. As she notes, these texts refer repeatedly to the Jews, insistently ascribing Christ's suffering and death to Jewish malevolence.

The conclusion is less a summing up of previous arguments than an amplification of ideas introduced earlier and an introduction of new material, much of it quite compelling. Plesch returns to the theme of penitence, noting its aptness for a pilgrimage church and arguing that several frescoes function as a kind of visual call to repent. She then turns to a fuller examination of the anti-Semitic polemic she noted earlier, offering visual evidence that corroborates her thesis. She also suggests one local context for the hostility to the Jews: the establishment of the monti di Pietà, banks intended as an alternative to Jewish money-lenders, in this region during the second half of the fifteenth century, when the church was frescoed. Plesch concludes with provocative thoughts on preaching, medieval religious theater, memory, and visual images. This study, then, ultimately rewards the reader with a broad contextual reading of these frescoes and a thoughtful analysis of issues that reach far beyond late medieval Savoy.