Five - Visual and Material Entanglement in the Anagni Crypt

Summary

The same painters who decorated Conti’s great hall at Santi Quattro Coronati produced the sprawling network of paintings in the crypt of Anagni Cathedral just a few years earlier, during the reign of Anagni native Pope Gregory IX (1227–41). This vast expanse of frescoes represents one of the best preserved and most complex figural artworks of medieval Italy. Nearly 6,000 square feet of murals cover all available surfaces of the crypt’s interior, including its walls, apses, vaults, window ledges, pillars, columns, and capitals (Figure 5.1). The crypt’s mural program presents a strikingly diverse iconographic repertoire encompassing most categories of medieval imagery, from biblical and hagiographical narratives and iconic representations of saints to diagrams visualizing cosmological, medical, and theological concepts. A number of innovative pictorial motifs and compositional devices appear within this scheme, including in the sequence of frescoed vaults above the central aisle, which narrate the travels of the Old Testament Ark across the Holy Land in a distinctly diagrammatic compositional mode. Adding to these innovative pictorial narratives are the unusual cosmological diagrams near the crypt’s entrance. This collection of erudite motifs comprises diagrams of the microcosm, the zodiac, and planets, along with a schematic “syzygy” figure outlining the connections between the four elements and their properties (see Figure 1.10). The three cosmological diagrams are accompanied by two frescoed lunettes featuring portraits of four astrologers (no longer identifiable), and the ancient physicians Hippocrates (ca. 460–ca. 370 BCE) and Galen (ca. 129–ca. 216 CE).