Sample Pages: The Medieval Monastery of Saint Elijah: A History in Paint and Stone

T he M edieval M onas T ery of s ain T e lijah

A History in Paint and Stone

Alison Locke Perchuk

Alison Locke Perchuk

T he M edieval M onas T ery of s ain T e lijah

A History in Paint and Stone

Detail of Fig. 2-7. Interior, transept, Sant’Elia. View from northwest corner toward southeast, showing frescoes and altars in apse and in south transept. Photo: Author, 2017.

Introduction 1769/2019

The aforementioned Vicar General commanded master Ignazio Viventi, mason of Castel S. Elia, […] that he open the altar from the rear, using the appropriate implements […] and in that opening […] they found an ancient slab of terracotta […] which, in the presence of the author, was lifted and the following discovery was made: A cavity used as a tomb […] and in that tomb, numerous bone fragments from the cranium, the humerus, and all the other bones of the human body […]. These bones, deemed to belong to St. Anastasius, were censed by the Vicar General and, the customary antiphons having been sung and the appropriate prayers recited, were extracted by the same from the tomb.

From the act of recognition of the body of St. Anastasius, abbot 1

On 27 April 1769, a solemn procession wound its way up the steep side of a ravine toward Castel Sant’Elia, a small village in central Italy. [Map 1.] Earlier that day, a group presided over by vicar Enrico Saetta, delegate of Monsignor Mornati, bishop of the diocese of Nepi and Sutri, and comprising village governor Leopoldo Passalacqua, numerous clergy from Castel Sant’Elia and neighboring Nepi, the medical doctors Domenico Galeotti and Costantino Amadei, and the mason Ignazio Viventi, had carefully extracted a set of bones from within a stucco altar in the crypt of the twelfth-century church of Sant’Elia.2 These bones were the remains of St. Anastasius, who during the sixth century had served as abbot of the monastery for which the church had been built, and whose virtuous life and miraculous death had been recorded in the late sixth- or early seventhcentury Dialogues of Pope St. Gregory I the Great (d. 604). Having placed the precious bones in a sealed reliquary, the cortege carried the relics to the parish church of Sant’Antonio Abate, their new home inside the village’s walls. Seven years later, on 5 March 1776, Monsignor Mornati himself presided over the opening of the other altar in Sant’Elia’s crypt, that of the monk Nonnosus, whose life was also recorded in the Dialogues and who had, according to local legend, succeeded Anastasius

Fig. Int.-1. Site of the Monastery of St. Elijah: Sant’Elia (below) and San Michele Arcangelo (above). The Cimitero comunale occupies the former cloister area. View from Castel Sant’Elia looking east. Photo: Author, 2017.

as abbot of the Monastery of St. Elijah. Nonnosus’s cranium was taken to the parish, where to this day the two saints continue their joint repose. Its altars deconsecrated and its relics removed, the venerable church was left to descend into ruin.3

Why begin a book about a medieval monastic church with an account of its demise, some 650 years after the period in question? This anecdote, so specific in its temporality, opens onto several fundamental assumptions that govern this work. First is the need to account not merely for the short moment in the twelfth century that is the chronological center of my investigation into the Monastery of St. Elijah, but for the long life of the monastery and the church that represents it today. This life began seemingly before 557, when an abbot Anastasius and a church of “Sancti Aeliae” are recorded together in a papyrus issued in Nepi and now preserved in Ravenna, and it continues some 1500 years later in the weddings and funerals, guided tours and cultural events, and annual patronal feasts that take place at Sant’Elia today.4 The basis of this need is intellectual and ethical: intellectual, because to understand the twelfth-century phase of the monastery as represented in Sant’Elia and the surrounding landscape we need also to understand the earlier structures that form part of its foundations and the later modifications that gave it the form we see today; and ethical, because the church has had a long and full life, and we should respect and honor the fullness of that life, not merely the one moment in the early twelfth century that art history has decided to privilege. Although my engagement with the longue durée grew out of readings in the archaeology of standing structures and landscapes, in particular the British School at Rome’s South Etruria survey,5 an investigation of symbolic and aesthetic intents and effects places my scholarship in dialogue with such recent works of Italian architectural history as Nicola Camerlenghi’s study of the Roman monastery and church of San Paolo fuori le Mura from the fourth through the twenty-first centuries.6

A privileging of Sant’Elia’s twelfth-century phase is not entirely the fault of art history. The most compelling aspects of Sant’Elia’s appearance today — its dramatic siting in a ravine below Castel Sant’Elia, warm-brown tufa and marble architecture redolent of Rome, richly colored Cosmati pavement and liturgical furnishings, and brilliant Romanesque frescoes, including the earliest

Fig. Int.-2. Site of the Monastery of St. Elijah: Sant’Elia. View from San Michele Arcangelo looking west. Photo: Author, 2011.

extensive narrative sequence of the Apocalypse — derive from the twelfth century. [Figs. Int.-1, Int.-2, Int.-3, Int.-4.] This era was further baked into the fabric of the church during its 1855–56 restoration by Virginio Vespignani, one of the leading architects of Pope Pius IX (r. 1846–78), whose papacy saw the dissolution of the Papal States into the new Kingdom of Italy. Chapter One: Recovering the Romanesque Monastery demonstrates that an analysis of these noncanonical phases is essential to our understanding of the medieval appearance of the church and monastery, construction of which this book dates precisely to 1122–26. This chapter, which begins with a detailed description of the church as it exists today, concludes with a presentation of the material evidence to be investigated across the book’s six subsequent chapters. Readers less interested in the modern era may skip to the

Fig. Int.-3. Interior, nave, Sant’Elia. View from entrance toward apse. Photo: Author, 2019.

Fig. 1-2. Exterior, apse and transept, Sant’Elia. View from southeast.

Photo: Author, 2011.

Fig. 1-20. Unknown artist, untitled painting of the miraculous summoning of Anastasius showing the Monastery of St. Elijah, terminus post quem 1737, Sant’Antonio Abate, Castel Sant’Elia. Photo: Vittorio Maria Perucatti © 2021 – @victshot.

would have been part of the monastic community’s liturgical processions. The plateau on which the church is constructed slopes downward from northwest to southeast such that even at the time of the church’s construction, both the nave portals and the crypt were positioned at ground level. The south entry is at present more than a meter above ground level; my sense is that it opened onto the ground level of a cloister built on an earthen podium and enclosed to the east by a dormitory structure with a walk-out lower level, but this is merely a hypothesis. The portal remained open until at least the later fifteenth century, as attested by the fact that the series of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century paintings on the south aisle wall break their continuous sweep from the base of the campanile to the transept to accommodate the portal, providing a terminus post quem of circa 1500 for its closure.126 [Fig. 1-21; see Fig. 1-7.] A terminus ante quem is indicated by the 1792 deed of emphyteusis, which describes the church as having only one entry. The apostolic visit of 1574 mentions two entries, though the location of the second is unclear, while subsequent visits are mum. Either this doorway was blocked as part of the church’s transformation from canonry to parish church circa 1540 and the nearly contemporaneous liturgical reforms promulgated by the Council of Trent, or it was closed at a later moment when the conventual buildings were abandoned if not destroyed.127

The fourth change was the addition of the chapel of the Madonna of the Rosary in front of the south portal. It was a swift reaction to the establishment in 1572 of the eponymous feast, as it was the

Fig. 1-21. Interior, south aisle, showing 14th- and 15th-c. wall paintings and blocked cloister entrance, Sant’Elia. Photo: Author, 2004.

central steps, the western edge of the presbytery and the steps in the side aisles are paved in the crude mixture of brick, irregularly shaped marble, and fragments of relief sculpture noted in the repaired areas of and encircling the schola cantorum.134

The central transept is entered through a triumphal arch, accentuated by a pair of grey granite columns with white Corinthian capitals supporting a set of secondary voussoirs. [Fig. 1-25.] These columns were recorded in the 1792 deed of emphyteusis, but they are not medieval.135 Rather, they stand partly atop the chancel barrier, which obscures the inelegant and overly thick marble stumps that are their primary supports and that rest in turn on the twelfth-century pavement. The narrow inner voussoirs are like those employed in the 1607 repairs to the north colonnade. Fragments of red-painted plaster, typically used in medieval painting to mark edges and boundaries, extrude from beneath these voussoirs, and painted socles, pilasters, and capitals are visible behind the columns on the interior face of the transept piers. This ornamental entrance, which both shields and draws attention to the high altar, is part of the Tridentine modifications to the church’s interior and cannot be taken, as has been proposed, as a marker of a twelfth-century link to such Roman monuments as San Crisogono and Santa Maria in Trastevere.136 These certainly inspired the accentuation of the triumphal arch, but only at a postmedieval moment. [See Fig. 1-4.]

One of Sant’Elia’s great treasures is the series of twelfth-century frescoes that flow from the apse to wrap all four walls of the transept, including the soffits of the windows and entrance arches, with vivid color. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries a set of nonnarrative images stretched across the previously unadorned south aisle, around the base of the campanile to the west, and into the transept to the east; a similar series likely covered the lost north aisle wall. In the transept, these images were layered over the eye-level paintings on the piers and on the east wall of the north transept, but not of the south transept nor in the apse. This decision suggests that certain aspects of the monastic paintings, including scenes from the life of St. Anastasius, maintained their relevance.137 Only one image was added in the apse: the northern apse window was blocked during the postmedieval era and on it was painted a figure of John the Baptist, datable to the sixteenth century.138 [Fig. 1-26.]

Fig. 1-26. Unknown artist, John the Baptist, 16th-c. wall painting over blocked north window in apse, Sant’Elia. Photo: Author, 2019.

[Plan 3.] The south transept altar stands before the fresco, which in turn envelops and partly overlaps an arcuated niche built into the wall behind and on axis with the altar.37 With the exception of this aperture, the fresco comprises a discrete rectangular panel presenting three scenes. There is no evidence that the image was accompanied by tituli. The panel is divided in half vertically, below by the niche and above by an image of a three-storied, freestanding salmon-and-russet colored campanile. Three pale bells occupy the tower’s upper stories, while a small, yellow-clad sexton is visible inside the campanile’s lowest story, vigorously pulling the ropes to ring the bells. This image connects to all three of the scenes represented. In eleventh- and twelfth-century liturgical practice, bells would have been tolling constantly during the funeral mass of Anastasius, to the left, and the entombment of the monks, to the lower right.38 The painted campanile instantiates the monastery’s soundscape: the expanse of sound defined the monastery’s immediate topography and drove demonic actors from the landscape under its coverage.39 It is also the one element attested by neither the archaeological nor documentary record; indeed, the lack of evidence for a Carolingian-style freestanding tower as depicted suggests that the monastery’s first campanile was the one erected by the canons in 1260.40 It also indicates that prior to the casting of “Ave Maria” in 1276, the Monastery of St. Elijah did not possess a grand bell of the type known from other Italian monasteries but rather made do with smaller bells or signacula, sounding boards or clappers typically made of wood, relying on the steep cliffs of the narrow ravine to provide needed amplification of sound and to thereby place its territory

Fig. 2-4. Johannes, Stefanus, and Nicolaus, Christ with saints, fresco in apse conch, c.1125, Sant’Elia. Photo: Author, 2011.

The Medieval Monastery of Saint Elijah: A History in Paint and Stone offers a new and transformative type of conceptually driven monograph. Starting from close readings of the complex and fragmented body of the archaeological and visual material as well as the specific landscape of the site, Alison Locke Perchuk’s methodologically ambitious, historically meticulous, and highly erudite study paints a fascinating picture of the various ways in which the medieval community of the monastery as well as later antiquarians and learned renovators up to the nineteenth century engaged with its past. The book is a distinguished contribution to studies on medieval art and intellectual history of Rome and its orbit.

Nino Zchomelidse, Johns Hopkins University