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

Unfortunately, both monographs betray drawbacks - not in their idea, certainly, but in their execution. Their basic approaches to the material have difficulties. Schutte, whose text is by and large insufficiently altered from the form of the dissertation and consequently suffers from too much dry enumeration and stultifying academese, creates a rigidly confining interpretation that is faulty in many details. Some of her readings of the vault's iconography, which hinge on seeing everything as referring in one way or another to the Crucifixion and salvation, are simply not believable. Pinelli alternates between positions. Following Schutte's (unacknowledged) suggestion that the central scene in the vault, a "Feed My Sheep" painted by Romanelli under Urban VIII in the early 1640s, was based on the same original subject in the Gregorian program, he propounds an elaborate iconographical system that utterly depends on this hypothesis (pp. 132-33).(3) Subsequently, however, he argues against a conclusive interpretation of the program, maintaining that the makers of the program foresaw their failure to transmit sophisticated messages. He deals with its complexities by suggesting that the imagery was intended to be like published collections of allegories that admitted multiple interpretations, or like a modern hypertext, "in which a diversity of narrative choice invites the reader to construct alternative solutions" (pp. 150-51). A stimulating and current suggestion, to be sure, but this sudden placement of modern literary critical tools in the hands of the program's makers merits further elaboration in his text. For example, an open-ended fashion of reading imagery in this period would surely only be valid for certain kinds of subjects. In all likelihood, the program's creators and its patron did not mean fundamental questions of faith and papal political claims to remain wide open to interpretation, much as this approach appeals to subsequent generations. In fact, the visual and iconographical links in the vault's pro, gram and its integral relationship to the walls militate against the program's likeness to a dictionary of unrelated allegorical concepts; these images are formally (and I think conceptually) interlocked, whether the modern viewer understands every facet of them or not.

I missed a consistent and historically up-to-date approach to the position of the patron, as well. All of the authors vacillate in their evaluation of the pope, whose personal values they regard as reflected in the project. Schutte sees him as a sincere proponent of reform who wants the best for the Church; the authors in Gambi and Pinelli, even within a single essay, waver between seeing the art as disagreeable propaganda and as the high-minded expression of papal power. All would have profited, in my view, from treating this commission more consistently as a purposeful construction of political and spiritual power, not merely the artistic emanation of Gregory's idiosyncrasies.(4)