The Papacy and the Art of Reform in Sixteenth-Century Rome: Gregory XIII's Tower of the Winds in the Vatican (review)

The Tower of the Winds was built and decorated in the early 1580s for Pope Gregory XIII by a team of artists including the mathematician and cosmographer Egnatio Danti, the architect Ottaviano Mascarino, and the painters Nicolò Circignani and Matthijs Bril. A curious edifice consisting of six small rooms arranged in three stories fronted by a larger room with a recessed roof terrace and balustrade, it overlooked the Cortile del Belvedere and was linked to the old Vatican Palace via both indoor and outdoor routes. In 1581 Danti dedicated a little work titled Anemographia (The Wind Treatise) to Gregory. In it, Danti told the pope that his tower was inspired by a famous monument, the marble tower of Andronicus of Cyrrha located in the Athenian agora. Its prominent position and its venerable prototype suggests that the Tower of Winds was an important element in the additions Gregory made to the Vatican Palace, but it has received little attention from art historians. In this book, Nicola Courtright aims to rescue the tower from its historical oblivion and to reconstruct the "designers' intentions in making the program, and the way the tower would have been understood by its patron, the pope" (5).

Courtright's reconstruction is comprehensive and definitive. Using sixteenth-century plans and documents and the excellent drawings of Kristen Giannattasio, she presents a precise and detailed description of the architecture of the tower and of the layout of fresco cycles that ornamented its various rooms. The third part of the book consists of a catalogue of all of the tower frescoes, and an appendix that publishes Amanda Collins's edition and translation of Danti's Anemographia. The publication of these materials now makes it possible to study the tower in many particular ways; this is in itself an important contribution, especially to the fields of art and architectural history.

However, this book also operates on another complex level that should be of interest to a broader range of scholars. Courtright believes that the Tower of the Winds was meant to be understood as a kind of symbol of the public persona promulgated by Pope Gregory as Vicarius Christi and of his vision of the reformation of Christianity. This public persona, at once the pastor of the universal church and temporal ruler of the patrimony of Peter, possessed unique spiritual and temporal powers.

The architecture of the tower recalled the towers or elevated apartments known as diaetae, which ornamented the ancient villas built by the Romans as escapes from the burdens of public life. Courtright shows that Gregory cultivated a kind of "iconography of retreat," a Christian villeggiatura, which adapted the Roman practice of otium to the display of his personal piety, shaped by Carlo Borromeo, Filippo Neri, and other reformers. In other words, the Tower of Winds "was presented to the public as a certain kind of retreat, one for the reformed leader of the faith, rather than simply a pleasure garden" (59). Two of its rooms, The Room with Topographical Views and the Room of Imaginary Views, are frescoed with idealized landscapes which evoke both the primitive church (understood in part through the art of the recently excavated catacombs) and the promise of a future paradise.

The tower also instantiated an "iconography of rule." Its architecture and its prominent position overlooking the Cortile del Belvedere commemorated the imperial box built by the emperor Constantine to overlook the hippodrome in Constantinople and signified the centrality of Constantine as a model for Gregory. Gregory's association of his person with that of Constantine was not simply a reaction to contemporary attacks on the "Constantinian Church" and the document known as the Donation of Constantine; it was fundamental to his vision of the reformation of...