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Die Galleria delle Carte Geografiche im Vatikan: Eine ikonologische Betrachtung des Gewolbeprogramms. - book reviews
Art Bulletin, The, March, 1997 by Nicola Courtright
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.
