The Art Bulletin

The moon in Lodovico Cigoli’s Immacolata fresco (1610-12) in the Pauline Chapel, S. Maria Maggiore, Rome, departs radically from tradition, appearing not as a perfect crescent but as a crater-pocked sphere, just as Cigoli’s friend Galileo had observed it through his telescope and had published it in 1610. This study focuses on the reception of Cigoli’s and Galileo’s moon in light of Christian lunar symbolism and astronomical theory. At issue are the theological implications of a maculate moon within an image of the Immaculate Virgin in a papal chapel and how the Church accommodated the new cosmology to theological traditions.

This essay presents a detailed study of eight well-known School of Fontainebleau prints, Justice and the Seven Deadly Sins, etched by Leon Davent after the Franco-Italian artist Luca Penni. Some of Penni’s borrowings from earlier graphic works are analyzed, in particular Sebastian Brant’s Ship of Fools, a key source of inspiration. The prints are situated in the religious, social, and economic context of mid-sixteenth-century France, and the gender and ideological content of what may well be Penni’s artistic testament is scrutinized. The series is interpreted as actively sustaining the creation of the early modern state.

The nature of Lorenzo de' Medici’s artistic patronage in the Palazzo Vecchio is considered in this essay. By constitutional means and through political patronage, Lorenzo shaped the building committee of the Palazzo Vecchio into an instrument of his artistic patronage. The process by which work was commissioned and supervised by the members of the building committee under the direction of Lorenzo is revealed by a study of the fresco decoration of the Sala dei Gigli (1482-90). Lorenzo’s influence and interests are demonstrated in the form, iconography, and progress of this work.

All that remains of the Mappamondo that Ambrogio Lorenzetti painted in 1345 for the Palazzo Pubblico, Siena, are the markings left by its installation on the wall opposite Simone Martini’s Maesta. Disturbingly absent/present, this ghost of a work does not have to remain a casualty of endless debate on the fresco of Guidoriccio above. Medieval cartographic genres and traditions of map display can be applied toward a fresh interpretation of the lost Lorenzetti. By the same token, the wheel map opens discussion of the processes by which a changing configuration of images articulated a mythology of the Sienese state.

The death of a queen in childbirth in 1156 and the grief of her bereaved husband are represented on her sarcophagus. His lamentation, reenacted in the reliefs, constitutes a prayer for her soul and a device to assure the salvation of both queen and king. As part of Blanca’s memorialization, the sculpture describes her salvation in feminized terms; the value of a good mother and her sacrifice are expressed by interweaving images of maternity, martyrdom, and judgment. Court culture, and liturgical, literary, and artistic sources for the images are explored, as is the political significance of the queen’s burial site.

The narrative imagery carved on the sides of the White Obelisk in the British Museum is shown to be a direct copy of a program that lined the walls of a long, narrow room in a palace of an unknown Assyrian king. As a record of a lost architectural program the Obelisk composition is used to illuminate the poorly known beginnings of Assyrian visual historical narrative in the late Middle Assyrian period of the twelfth and eleventh centuries B.C.