Six - Conclusion

Summary

The preceding chapters have argued that the Anagni and Santi Quattro Coronati frescoes are products of the significant cultural and intellectual expansion that occurred in Rome and the papal state during the middle decades of the thirteenth century. In their own distinct ways, the two monuments brought together worldly and religious knowledge within stylistically uniform and spatially immersive pictorial programs. As assemblages of varied forms of learning, the two mural cycles invited reflective viewing, and in many cases required viewers to make interpretive connections between spatially distant images. Such dynamic interaction between educated viewers and architecturally embedded images could generate combinatory and associative interpretations that granted individual motifs new levels of meaning based on their relation to other images within the cycle. In this way, each monument functioned not only as a monumental image of the world’s knowledge but also as an interactive tool for philosophical thinking.