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

Nicola Courtright

3 vols. Modena Italy: Franco Casimo Panini, 1994. Vol. 1: 595 pp.; 790 color ills. Vol. 2: 534 pp.; 120 b/w ills. Vols. 3: 40 loose-leaf maps. L 1,000,000

Many a scholar, impatient to see the newly restored Sistine Chapel, races through the subject of these two books, the Gallery of Geographical Maps in the Vatican Palace, and remains largely impervious to its - until now - almost impenetrable appeal. What seems an overlong, overbright corridor impeding the speedy attainment of one's goal is as crowded with gilded, framed decoration on its walls and vault as it is with dazed tourists clustered around their guides. These books have provided a great service to the history of art and, indirectly, to the future 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 the Counter-Reformation pope Gregory XIII (1572-85), the same pontiff who promoted the current calendar named for him.

Beginning around 1578, Gregory XIII built a new story 120 meters long atop a corridor flanking the Belvedere Courtyard, which Bramante had built under Julius II (1505-13) to convert 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 complex that celebrated the goals of the Gregorian papacy: a papal apartment commemorating the calendar reform, the Tower of the Winds, served as the culmination of the new passageway from the ceremonial core of the Vatican Palace out to the garden courts. Just as the reform of time's measurement under the pope's leadership was presented in the Tower of the Winds as a sign of metaphysical unity that resolved earth-shattering conflicts within the Church after Protestant upheavals had cracked the bedrock of that institution, so 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 Church with the pope as its unifying head.

The dazzlingly complex decoration of the new papal ambulatio resolves itself into two related parts that knit together the appearance of geographical and spiritual harmony. First, running down both walls, alternating with windows, are huge maps of all the provinces of Italy, many surveyed expressly for this commission. Regions such 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 on the wall roughly corresponds to the geographical position of the region it represents on the peninsula; the separation of the scheme by the central passageway reflects, as an inscription indicates, the peninsula's division by the Apennine mountain range down its spine. Second, crisscrossing the vault are patterns of interlocking framed narratives containing manifold scenes from Church history, many of miraculous victories over life-threatening enemies, that took place in the regions depicted below. A welter of other subjects in the vault, from Old Testament sacrifices attesting to the antiquity and sanctity of the Christian mass that had been assailed by Protestants to the rich variety of birds native to Italy - styled here as nature's paradise - contributes to the overall program. The staggering multiplicity of images in the vault can be understood in part by 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 purpose. The quantity of episodes from the post-biblical history of the Church that are linked to the physical locus of their occurrence, almost as documentary proof, likewise countermands, by chronicling the Catholic version of sacred history, the shrill objections of Northern reformers to the Catholic belief in nonscriptural tradition that was reavowed by 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 monument in the past, for a few 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 depth. I hasten to point out the earlier date of Margret Schutte's book, for the authors of the publication edited by Lucio Gambi and Antonio Pinelli make profitable use of her observations and, if truth be told, owe her a great deal in cracking the particularities of the program. Regrettably, they do not adequately acknowledge her labors in this neglected vineyard, a subject to which I shall return. That said, it is fortunate indeed that these books can be consulted simultaneously, for they complement one another to a degree. The Gambi and Pinelli monograph is an impressive contribution from the point of view of visual documentation alone. The first of the three volumes, called the Atlas, is filled with a stupendous and costly range of illustrations that treat the monument with a respect usually accorded the Sistine ceiling: 790 color photographs of virtually every view and detail one might wish to see and, in addition, a helpful variety of diagrams to make the difficult decorative scheme comprehensible. Supplementary illustrations of high quality enrich the text volume, including preparatory drawings, related printed maps, and little-known imagery from the Gregorian papacy. As if that were not enough, a third volume contains larger loose-leaf reproductions of each map in the Atlas and, considerately, a small magnifying glass. This focus on the riches of the visual material is intentional, according to Salvatore Settis, editor of the series Mirabilia Italiae to which these volumes belong.(2) He writes in his introduction (pp. 7-8) that the point of this new series is to reverse the traditional relationship in books between text and image. The illustrations, which progress through the Atlas volumes in the "proper order," according to Settis, are not scattered as a consequence of the imperatives of an argument. In effect, the text supplements the images rather than vice versa. Indeed, the illustrations are faultless; however, given the limitations of the book format, there is no way to reproduce literally the "proper order" that the beholder experienced or experiences in the gallery, for the maps are grouped in a separate section from the related scenes in the vault. The modest production of Schutte's publication, a revised dissertation, cannot hope to compete with this monolith. Because her scant and barely legible illustrations are insufficient for understanding her argument, let alone gaining an appreciation of the gallery, the Gambi and Pinelli Atlas becomes an essential companion volume to her text.

Although Settis writes that the Mirabilia Italiae series was intended in part to attract the nonspecialist (and who else could afford it?), this book is clearly ambitious in its scholarly alms as well, and it is worth considering from this perspective. The bilingual text volume contains a collection of eight wide-ranging essays by noted Italian scholars. The first, by Antonio Pinelli, "The 'bellissimo spasseggio' of Pope Gregory XIII Boncompagni" (pp. 9-71), treats the political and religious themes of Gregory's papacy and his building program in Rome and the Vatican and offers a detailed chronology of the gallery's building and decorative campaign. Lucio Gambi's "Egnazio Danti and the Gallery of Maps" (pp. 83-96) is a biographical account of the Dominican mathematician, geographer, and papal cosmographer to whom the maps were entrusted, and to whom the program as a whole has been attributed. Marica Milanesi, in "The Historical Background to the Cycle in the Gallery of Maps" (pp. 97-123), goes further than the title of her essay suggests, for in addition to analyzing the maps within the context of earlier palace decoration, she considers their unique cartographical character and purpose in the gallery and debates the program's larger meaning as well as the identity of its author (Danti with the assistance of the Church historian Caesar Baronius). Another essay by Pinelli, "Above the Earth, the Heavens; Geography, History and Theology: The Iconography of the Vault" (pp. 125-54), offers a detailed new analysis of the decoration of the ceiling and, like Milanesi, discusses who might have been responsible for the program. "The Gallery of Maps and the Wider World" by Paola Sereno (pp. 155-67) uses published documents and contemporary accounts to examine the largely negative critical fortune of the gallery. The frequent and, for someone trying to reconstruct the original program, troublesome restorations and reworkings of the gallery are chronicled by Claudio Franzoni (pp. 169-74). A particular bonus is the brief piece by Rolando Ferri, in "A 'Walk through Italy': The Anonymous Ambulatio gregoriana" (pp. 73-81), that transcribes, analyzes, and translates a Latin poem written in Gregory's lifetime that lauds the gallery. The culmination of the text volume is an extensive catalogue (modestly and, for an English-speaking audience, misleadingly designated "Notes") that, over the course of 327 pages, provides 445 entries for all of the maps, their inscriptions, and accompanying city plans, 236 for the images on the vault, and 106 for the antique amphorae and herms that were placed in the passageway beginning in 1816. The authors of the essays wrote the lion's share of these entries: Gambi, Milanesi, and Sereno presented most of the material on the maps, and Pinelli wrote all of those on the vault. These entries more often than not contribute something new to the vast body of little-studied imagery in the gallery.

Schutte in turn proposes a new author for the program (the head of the Vatican Library, Cardinal Sirleto, in consultation with the humanist Fulvio Orsini), briefly treats the historical tradition of map rooms and the gallery's place in it, and for the greater part of the book gives a section-by-section description and analysis of the scenes and figures in the vault, many previously unidentified, and their overarching themes. The serious attention lavished on this heretofore slighted monument is enough to satisfy any specialist in the field.

But these publications are of interest not only to the small club of art historians devoted to the late 16th century. The whole idea of publishing this monument has larger intellectual purchase, particularly in the current scholarly climate. These books, in short, open a window on a world that is not the usual canonical one. The gallery, planned and painted by little-known artists, is a vast and important but misunderstood project from a period usually disdained in art history, the Counter-Reformation. For the first time, thanks to Gambi and Pinelli, one can actually appreciate the contributions of the artists as well as begin to see a possibility for attributing a body of work to these forgotten masters. Comparing the perspectives of many authors provides the potential to regard the material in multiple ways, in itself a praiseworthy goal to many scholars who question the validity of a single interpretive position. (I must quickly acknowledge, however, that the authors, including Schutte, share basically the same methodology, so that differences of opinion tend to be about the intentions of the makers or concern the interpretation of the patron or contemporary viewers.)

Apart from the contribution that the invaluable identification of many unknown figures and the discussion of the individual meaning of obscure historical scenes and maps provide, many stimulating ideas emerge from both publications. The ones I found most absorbing were those that suggested how the assertion of absolute power, which dominated many Counter-Reformation papal programs just as the pontiffs' direct political force waned, was constructed through imaginative visual means. Milanesi discusses the implications of the fact that this is the first map cycle depicting Italy, instead of the world or, conversely, a single territory. A recollection of ancient definitions of the political body of Italy that was revived in the Renaissance, this focus in a papal program, reinforced by paired maps of identical regions representing "Italia antiqua" and "Italia nova" on the gallery's walls, stresses the wish of the Gregorian pontificate to claim ancient imperial prerogatives for itself. The book by Schutte and both essays by Pinelli demonstrate that Counter-Reformation themes that become commonplaces in Baroque imagery were crafted here: the centrality of salvation and the sacraments, the mission of the Church that was introduced by the Apostles and carried out by subsequent followers of Christ. They clarify fundamental themes of Gregory's papacy in particular, such as the insistence of papal primacy over temporal leaders and Constantine's pivotal role in that assertion, and the miraculous assistance of God in times of trouble to demonstrate faith and to grant primacy to the Church and to the pope.

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)

For all of the authors' hard work, these monographs often come up short in terms of what constitutes desirable scholarship. The authors in Gambi and Pinelli, owing perhaps to constraints of time, rely primarily on published sources instead of providing new information from archives and libraries. For example, because Sereno uses partially published avvisi and accounts of the Masters of Ceremonies in her article on the critical fortune of the gallery rather than consulting the easily accessible volumes in the Vatican Library, it is hard to trust her assertion that there was a "lack of contemporary interest" in the gallery (p. 157). Even if the function of the gallery or its popular reception is not mentioned in the resources or guidebooks that she read, it is a big leap from that fact to her inference that the gallery was not understood or was not influential. Important audiences other than the ones addressed in those sources existed: artists, ambassadors, Catholic theologians. Schutte, who did find original material to assist her interpretation of the gallery, too often refers to old secondary literature, such as Pastor's History of the Popes, to support her historical conclusions. Although a compendium of dispersed information is always useful, I regret the opportunity these scholars missed. Just as disappointingly, Schutte and Pinelli rely solely on a one-to-one correspondence with a few texts for their iconographical conclusions and do not propose visual comparisons for the scenes they analyze as a tool for interpretation. In the case of Schutte, I think this neglect contributes to her problem with the iconography: an allusion to the sacrifice of the Crucifixion is often one of many general associations a subject may have had, but it is hard to accept this as the overriding emphasis when she supplies no visual reading whatsoever.

Especially disturbing is the appearance of haste and lack of editorial oversight in the Gambi and Pinelli volumes. The authors seem to have been working so independently that they never consulted with one another, and they therefore annoyingly and continually repeat material in each essay that another had covered. Although laudable in a certain way, for they have different opinions on the same questions, such as the authorship of the program or the meaning of the maps as a whole, it becomes wearisome to read the same evidence cited over and over. Frustratingly, the volumes offer virtually no internal references to the other authors' contributions. Further, even though the catalogue is a font of useful information, the entries are rambling, obscuring a key point of argumentation or major fact embedded somewhere within; some contradict themselves over the course of the entry.(5) The catalogue is less useful than it might be in other ways, too. For example, all of the scenes of Church history and allegorical figures are left out of the index, which is limited to names and places, so in order to find them one must scour the diagram of the whole scheme, or leaf through the 700-odd illustrations. Too many small errors of fact, as well as mistranslations and careless proofreading, mar this lavish production.

Finally, Pinelli in particular is curiously erratic about acknowledging the sources of his ides - sometimes very carefully, point by point, sometimes completely disregarding major contributions. In his catalogue on the vault, for example, he rarely mentions Schutte's previous identifications of the figures (which he knew well, as is evident from other passages), but then proceeds to use the primary sources she employed in his entry, with (it must be said) helpful additions of his own. He makes use of my own work on the gallery and the Tower of the Winds, both published and as a thesis, with much the same informal, hard-to-figure system alternating between non-acknowledgment or credit when it suits him.(6) Although I suppose that the minor documents that Schutte and I found on the gallery are there for the taking, I have mixed feelings about encountering not only the overarching ideas that I had proposed for the changes in the Belvedere Courtyard under Gregory but also the particularities and sources of my argument published without adequate acknowledgment (for example, p. 40). It is indeed delightful that Pinelli found these ideas so convincing as to repeat them eloquently and in detail, but his appropriation, for all that it is surely not ill meant, is symptomatic of the lack of scholarly meticulousness in the project as a whole.

Despite their shortcomings, these ambitious publications are real contributions, and not least of all owing to the fact that they take this neglected monument utterly seriously. They also suggest a shape that future scholarship could profitably take. For example, it becomes clear from the evidence offered by the authors that the program of the gallery emphasizes the specifically Constantinian hegemony over Italy, not just the generically Roman or imperial one. This distinction surely had political import for a Counter-Reformation papacy in general, and Gregory's in particular. Beginning with Gregory XIII, Counter-Reformatory artistic programs once again focused on Constantine as a means of claiming the imperial prerogatives that the papacy asserted this ruler had historically given them.(7) As the authors of these monographs have shown, the gallery's program demonstrates that this Counter-Reformation pope unmistakably wished to assert absolute temporal and spiritual unity under his leadership. What makes this different from the high-flown High Renaissance alliances, in visual and programmatic terms, with the first Christian emperor? As Schutte and Milanesi aptly infer (pp. 6 and 115, respectively), Boncompagni and his advisers are careful not to associate his portrait or person directly with an imperial genealogy, in contradistinction to the custom of his predecessors. After all, the imperial papacy had been one of the shoals on which the ship of the Catholic Church foundered during the tempest of the Reformation.

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).

Any future scholar working on the Gallery of Geographical Maps will gratefully depend on these two monographs. I also look forward to more volumes in the series Mirabilia Italiae; with less haste and more editorial supervision, they would be a spectacular contribution to the study of overlooked monuments of Italy. May the series flourish.

NICOLA COURTRIGHT Department of Fine Arts Amherst College Amherst, Mass. 01002

1. A selection includes the in-depth analysis of the maps by Roberto Almagia, Le pitture murali della Galleria delle Carte Geografiche, Monumenta cartographica vaticana, III, Vatican City, 1952; Juergen Schulz's discussion of Renaissance map rooms, "Maps as Metaphors: Mural Map Cycles of the Italian Renaissance," in Art and Cartography: Six Historical Essays, ed. David Woodward, Chicago/London, 1987, 97-122; and Iris Cheney's thoughtful article on the vault, "The Galleria delle Carte Geografiche at the Vatican and the Roman Church's View of the History of Christianity," Renaissance Papers, 1990, 21-37.

2. The second in the series is Antonio Paolucci, ed., The Baptistery of San Giovanni, Florence, Modena, 1994.

3. Indeed, a good case could be made that it was Urban VIII's change of subject that necessitated the repainting of the entire central scene in the vault. Unlike Romanelli's work, all other restorations in the gallery had retained the style of the Gregorian scenes, and Urban VIII favored the theme of "Feed My Sheep" in his other projects; see Nicola Courtright, "Feed My Sheep," in Drawings by Gianlorenzo Bernini from the Museum der bildenden Kunste, Leipzig, by Irving Lavin et al., Princeton, N.J., 1981, 78-85.

4. A stimulating new book that demonstrates the kind of thought and rhetoric developed in Gregorian Rome that helped to shape the image of the papacy is by Frederick J. McGinness, Right Thinking and Sacred Oratory in Counter-Reformation Rome, Princeton, N.J., 1995.

5. For example, the author of the entry on the map of the Marches notes first (p. 339) that it is unlikely that the map was restored by Holste, then later suggests (p. 340) that it "underwent substantial revision" by Urban VIII's restorer.

6. Nicola Courtright, Gregory XIII's Tower of the Winds in the Vatican (Ph.D. diss., New York University), Ann Arbor, Mich., 1990; and "The Vatican Tower of the Winds and the Architectural Legacy of the Counter Reformation," in IL 60: Essays Honoring Irving Lavin on His Sixtieth Birthday, ed. Marilyn A. Lavin, Italica Press, New York, 1990, 117-31.

7. Jack Freiberg, "In the Sign of the Cross: The Image of Constantine in the Art of Counter-Reformation Rome," in Piero della Francesca and His Legacy, ed. Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, Studies in the History of Art, 48, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Symposium Papers XXVIII, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1995, 67-87; and for the later papacy of Clement VIII, idem, The Lateran in 1600: Christian Concord in Counter-Reformation Rome, Cambridge, 1995. Freiberg points out that following the dedication of a major room in the Vatican Palace to Constantine during Leo X's and Clement VII's pontificates, the Sala di Costantino, there was a hiatus in Constantinian associations with the papacy.

8. In Herrmann Egger, Codex Escuraliensis: Ein Skizzenbuch aus der Werkstatt Domenico Ghirlandaios, Vienna, 1905-6, I, pl. III.

9. Nicole Dacos, La decouverte de la Domus Aurea et la formation des grotesques a la Renaissance, Studies of the Warburg Institute, XXXI, London/Leiden, 1969; and Bernice Davidson, Raphael's Bible: A Study of the Vatican Logge, College Art Association Monographs on the Fine Arts, XXXIX, University Park, Pa./London, 1985. Pius IV's and Gregory XIII's expansions of the Logge anticipated these allusions to a Christian imperial residence based on the Domus Aurea.

10. The fact that they are physically the reverse of their true geographical location (Genoa and Venice on the south entrance wall, Malta and Corfu on the north) indicates that within the gallery the visitor is meant to travel from the north of the peninsula to the south.

11. These details were almost certainly painted primarily by Matthijs Bril, who was active in the adjacent Tower of the Winds shortly afterward, rather than by his neophyte brother Paul, as the authors in Gambi and Pinelli assert.

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