La Galleria delle Carte geografiche in Vaticano/The Gallery of Maps in the Vatican. - book reviews

3 vol Modena Italy: Franco Casimo Panini, 1994 Vol 1: 595 pp; 790 color ills. Vol 2: 534 pp; 120 b/w ills. Vol 3: 40 loose-leaf maps. L 1000000

Many a scholar, impatient to diocese the newly restored Sistine Chapel, races end the subject of these sum of two units books, the Gallery of Geographical Maps in the Vatican Palace, and remains largely impervious to its - until now - almost impenetrable appeal. What appear to bes an overlong, overbright corridor impeding the hurried attainment of one's goal is as concourseed with gilded, framed decoration upon its walls and vault as it is with dazed tourists clustered around their guides. These works have provided a great service to the history of art and, indirectly, to the futurity visitors to the papal residence, for they give us a reason to halt in our tracks and take note of the remarkable accomplishment sponsored by means of the Counter-Reformation pope Gregory XIII (1572-85) the same pontiff who promot the generally received calendar named for him.

Beginning around 1578 Gregory XIII built a of recent origin story 120 meters long atop a corridor flanking the Belvedere Courtyard, which Bramante had built below Julius II (1505-13) to transform the grounds and gardens to the north of the Vatican Palace into a terraced garden-theater. The Gallery of Geographical Maps was part of a comprehensive building program within the Vatican compounded that celebrated the goals of the Gregorian papacy: a papal apartment commemorating the calendar reform, the Tower of the Winds, serv as the culmination of the novel passageway from the ceremonial core of the Vatican Palace without to the garden courts. Just as the reform of time's measurement beneath the pope's leadership was neared in the Tower of the Winds as a sign of metaphysical unity that resolv earth-shattering conflicts within the temple after Protestant upheavals had cracked the bedrock of that institution, in like manner the gallery was to provide a magnificent space that vividly illustrated, blow-by-blow the hard-won achievement of geographical and spiritual wholeness of the house of worship with the pope as its unifying head.

The dazzlingly compound decoration of the new papal ambulatio analyzes itself into two related parts that knit together the appearance of geographical and spiritual harmony. First, running down the couple walls, alternating with windows, are immense maps of all the provinces of Italy, many contemplateed expressly for this commission. Regions of that kind as the Spanish-dominated islands of Corsica, Sardinia, and Sicily, as well as the former papal seat of Avignon in France, were included regardless of actual political sovereignty in order to signify the Church's greater authority. Each map's placement upon the wall roughly corresponds to the geographical position of the region it exhibits on the peninsula; the separation of the scheme by means of the central passageway reflects, as an inscription indicates, the peninsula's division through the Apennine mountain range down its spine. next to the first crisscrossing the vault are patterns of interlocking framed narratives containing manifold sights from Church history, many of miraculous victories above life-threatening enemies, that took place in the regions depicted below. A welter of other subdues in the vault, from advanced in years Testament sacrifices attesting to the antiquity and sanctity of the Christian mass that had been assailed by means of Protestants to the rich variety of birds native to Italy - styl here as nature's paradise - contributes to the overall program. The staggering multiplicity of images in the vault can be understood in part through the circumstances under which the gallery was constructed: the pictures visibly assert the sacred efficacy of images in a time when Protestant reformers questioned their devotional aim The quantity of episodes from the post-biblical history of the house of worship that are linked to the physical locus of their proceeding almost as documentary proof, likewise countermands, by dint of chronicling the Catholic version of sacred history, the shrill objections of Northern reformers to the Catholic belief in nonscriptural tradition that was reavowed through the Council of Trent (1545-63)

The impediment to grasping the significance of this remarkable space is not that scholars have not addressed themselves to this puzzling remembrancer in the past, for a scarcely any have, most recently the late Iris Cheney.(1) It is, rather, the daunting scale of the undertaking. These authors are the first to perform the essential task of treating the whole program of the maps and the vault together and in deepness I hasten to point on the outside the earlier date of Margret Schutte's work for the authors of the publication edited by dint of Lucio Gambi and Antonio Pinelli make profitable use of her observations and, if reality be told, owe her a great deal in cracking the particularities of the program. Regrettably, they do not adequately acknowledge her labors in this pass overed vineyard, a subject to which I shall go [i]or[/i] come back That said, it is fortunate indeed that these volumes can be consulted simultaneously, for they tale one another to a step The Gambi and Pinelli monograph is an impressive contribution from the point of view of visual documentation alone. The first of the three whirls called the Atlas, is filled with a stupendous and high-priced range of illustrations that treat the remembrancer with a respect usually accorded the Sistine ceiling: 790 color photographs of virtually each view and detail one might wish to diocese and, in addition, a helpful variety of diagrams to make the difficult decorative scheme comprehensible. Supplementary illustrations of high quality enrich the body volume, including preparatory drawings, related printed maps, and little-known imagery from the Gregorian papacy. As if that were not enough, a third convolution contains larger loose-leaf reproductions of each map in the Atlas and, considerately, a small magnifying glass. This focus upon the riches of the visual material is intentional, according to Salvatore Settis, editor of the series Mirabilia Italiae to which these whirls belong.(2) He writes in his introduction (pp 7-8) that the point of this of recent origin series is to reverse the traditional relationship in volumes between text and image. The illustrations, which progres [i]or[/i] part of to the other the Atlas volumes in the "proper order," according to Settis, are not scattered as a issue of the imperatives of an argument. In event the text supplements the images rather than vice versa. Indeed, the illustrations are faultless; however, given the limitations of the volume format, there is no way to propagate literally the "proper order" that the beholder experienced or experiences in the gallery, for the maps are clumped in a separate section from the related sights in the vault. The unostentatious production of Schutte's publication, a revised dissertation, cannot confidence to compete with this monolith. Because her scant and barely legible illustrations are insufficient for understanding her argument, suffer alone gaining an appreciation of the gallery, the Gambi and Pinelli Atlas becomes an essential companion convolution to her text.