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La Galleria delle Carte geografiche in Vaticano/The Gallery of Maps in the Vatican. - book reviews
Art Bulletin, The, March, 1997 by Nicola Courtright
This association is made through other, more subtle means, visible in the vault of the gallery. Curiously enough, to my knowledge no one has yet observed that the system of decoration in the vault depends in large part on one of the rooms in the antique Domus Aurea. The appearance of the so-called Gilded Vault of the emperor Nero's lavish imperial villa was faithfully recorded in the sixteenth century by the Portuguese amanuensis of Michelangelo, Francisco de Hollanda.(8) The design of multiple geometric frames containing small allegorical figures floating illusionistically in the heavens, delicate grotesques, and monochrome scenes that all cluster and interlock around the dominating central frame recalls the underground chamber in a striking way. This recollection is converted more emphatically and directly into Christian terms in the gallery than in any Renaissance allusion to this famous monument. All of the narratives depict Church history or Old Testament sacrifices; unlike the earlier projects that allude to the Domus Aurea, like Raphael's Logge, the subsidiary decoration - the allegorical figures in the grotesques - also become Christian virtues or Biblical characters.(9) Surely Gregory XIII and the program's makers wished to impress visitors with the Vatican ambulatio's evocation of an ancient imperial domicile in order to recall and claim imperial temporal authority. The fact that the grotteschi and the other subjects of the decorative scheme become explicitly Christian, however, suggests that Gregory and the program's makers wished to give the appearance of transforming the imperial legacy, just as Constantine had done, to serve salvational, Christian ends.
One previously unobserved way in which the program departs from this retrospective impulse is the striking demand it places on the participation of the spectator in the scheme, a phenomenon Pinelli touches on in passing (p. 130). Instead of creating only the impression of flat maps hung on the walls as if they were pages detached from a giant atlas, the makers of the program simultaneously crafted another, more potent sensation for the space. Because the maps are sited so that their placement in the gallery accords approximately with the geographical position of the regions they depict, the scheme places the viewer in the center of Italy: on the peaks of the Apennines, regarding the country spread out below to either side. The ports and islands portrayed at the beginning and end of the gallery enhance this sense of the spectator's physical location in the scheme, for they also correspond with their actual geographic situation: Genoa and Venice are at one end, Malta and Corfu at the other.(10) The fact that they are represented as views rather than maps heightens the beholder's illusion of a vista of Italy. Additionally, the decision to use so-called chorographic maps instead of more schematic diagrams reinforces this impression, since one effect of chorography, which mixes in physical details of a region with measurements of scientific accuracy, is to familiarize the spectator with particularities of the region that he or she might hope to experience. Many of these maps invite the viewer in, as it were, by means of rustic figures in landscape - shepherds, pilgrims, or wildlife traversing paths through hilly forests - seen from close up on the maps' lower borders.(11) The wish of the program's makers to engage the spectator's visceral participation in the decorative scheme is one that anticipates much 17th-century illusionistic art, be it for religious or political ends. Consequently, if I am right, this construct appears to be a real artistic and conceptual innovation of the program, which contrasts with the all-too-doctrinaire impression that the authors give of the subject matter (a point of view they share, however, with most writers on Counter-Reformation art).
