Art, Knowledge, and Papal Politics in Medieval Rome

Discovered in 1995, the remarkable thirteenth-century frescoes in the great hall, or Aula Gotica, of Rome's Santi Quattro Coronati complex are among the most important vestiges of medieval Italian painting. In this volume, Marius Hauknes offers a thorough investigation of the fresco cycle, which includes allegorical representations of the liberal arts, the virtues and vices, the seasons, the signs of the zodiac, and the months of the year. Hauknes relates these subjects to the papacy's growing interest in fields of worldly knowledge, such as music, time, astrology, and medicine. He argues that the Santi Quattro Coronati frescoes function as a large-scale, interactive encyclopedia that not only represented secular knowledge but also produced philosophical speculation, stimulating beholders to draw connections between pictorial motifs across architectural space. Integrating medieval intellectual history with close attention to multi-sensory and architectural conditions of fresco Hauknes' study offers new insights into religion, art, science, and spectatorship in medieval Italy.