Four - Allegory, History, and Political Eschatology

Summary

The allegorical cycle of Santi Quattro Coronati’s north bay is dominated by ten triumphant virtues arranged on the same register as the calendar in the opposite bay. Each personified virtue carries a saint on its shoulder while trampling two smaller figures. The small-scale vanquished figures represent each virtue’s corresponding vice and a historical character who exemplifies it. The saints and the trampled villains serve as historically real exempla of the moral qualities represented by the personified virtues and vices. Inscriptions identify all figures, several of which display scrolls with textual citations drawn from scripture, proverb collections, and classical poetry. The representation of virtues as female knights combating vices conforms to a visual tradition that can be traced back to the ninth-century manuscript illustrations of Prudentius’s Psychomachia. The Quattro Coronati frescoes, however, bring the conventional motif to new levels of pictorial complexity.