One of the most important documents for dating Santi Quattro Coronati’s extensive ensemble of mural decorations is the marble slab embedded in the south wall of the Sylvester Chapel (Figure 3.1). The neatly chiseled inscription records Stefano Conti’s patronage, and lists the numerous relics contained in the oratory’s altar. It also reveals a great deal about how time was measured in papal Rome during the thirteenth century:

Visitors to Cardinal Conti’s great hall would enter through the principal doorway in the south bay and find themselves greeted by the figure of King Solomon, who stands, flanked by two small windows, at the center of the north wall (see Figure 1.1). Dressed in the manner of an ancient emperor and accompanied by an army of triumphant virtues, Solomon stands as a symbol of justice and wise rulership. It is possible that Stefano Conti’s throne was placed directly beneath the biblical ruler. If so, the cardinal would have sat as a self-fashioned heir to Solomon’s wisdom and jurisprudence, and as a viewer of his newly commissioned fresco cycle. From his position at the north end of the hall, Conti would look toward the south bay, whose pictorial decorations are conceived as a model of the cosmos. The south bay vault, under which his visitors would be standing, features a vast celestial diagram with the twelve signs of the zodiac and other mythologically significant constellations from the northern hemisphere. In the spandrels of the vault are personifications of the four seasons depicted as men of increasing age, each surrounded by the winds rendered as winged heads with puffed cheeks. The four seasons serve to connect the vault fresco – both physically and thematically – to the calendar cycle on the walls below. The calendar represents the twelve months as scenes of agricultural activity: grain threshing, seed sowing, grape treading, livestock butchering, and so forth. Situated between these images of cosmic temporality, in the three lunettes, are representations of five liberal arts: grammar, geometry, music, arithmetic, and astronomy. This sequence of liberal disciplines, the only such surviving cycle in medieval Roman art, visualizes the educational curriculum through a combination of personifications, historical figures, inscriptions, and technological instruments (see Figures 1.2–1.4). Seen in relation to the surrounding imagery, the liberal arts cycle situates the intellectual pursuits of the nobility in contrast with the manual labor performed by the peasantry in the agricultural calendar. The artes liberales also establish an important thematic link to the frescoes in the north bay. The clerestory level in the north bay features a remarkably complex cycle of virtues and vices that combines allegorical figures with historical characters. The historical characters in the virtues cycle – a diverse selection of saints and sinners drawn from ecclesiastical history – serve as exempla of the virtuous and vicious qualities with which they are paired. Similarly, each image in the arts sequence features a historical character that was meant to be understood as the ancient progenitor of the discipline in question. Finally, in their emphasis on intellectual heritage from antiquity, the scientific progenitors in the arts cycle also complement the images in the north bay lunettes, where representations of Roman antiquities foreground the material and iconographic inheritance from the ancient world.

The same painters who decorated Conti’s great hall at Santi Quattro Coronati produced the sprawling network of paintings in the crypt of Anagni Cathedral just a few years earlier, during the reign of Anagni native Pope Gregory IX (1227–41). This vast expanse of frescoes represents one of the best preserved and most complex figural artworks of medieval Italy. Nearly 6,000 square feet of murals cover all available surfaces of the crypt’s interior, including its walls, apses, vaults, window ledges, pillars, columns, and capitals (Figure 5.1). The crypt’s mural program presents a strikingly diverse iconographic repertoire encompassing most categories of medieval imagery, from biblical and hagiographical narratives and iconic representations of saints to diagrams visualizing cosmological, medical, and theological concepts. A number of innovative pictorial motifs and compositional devices appear within this scheme, including in the sequence of frescoed vaults above the central aisle, which narrate the travels of the Old Testament Ark across the Holy Land in a distinctly diagrammatic compositional mode. Adding to these innovative pictorial narratives are the unusual cosmological diagrams near the crypt’s entrance. This collection of erudite motifs comprises diagrams of the microcosm, the zodiac, and planets, along with a schematic “syzygy” figure outlining the connections between the four elements and their properties (see Figure 1.10). The three cosmological diagrams are accompanied by two frescoed lunettes featuring portraits of four astrologers (no longer identifiable), and the ancient physicians Hippocrates (ca. 460–ca. 370 BCE) and Galen (ca. 129–ca. 216 CE).

In 1995, on the Celian Hill in Rome, a team of conservators led by Dottoressa Andreina Draghi made a remarkable discovery in the fortified tower attached to the basilica of Santi Quattro Coronati. Concealed behind layers of whitewash in a vaulted hall were the remains of an extensive thirteenth-century fresco cycle (Figure I.1). The tower and hall originally formed part of a palace complex built for Stefano Conti, a high-ranking cardinal of the papal Curia who lived there from the early 1240s until his death in 1254. During this time, Cardinal Conti sponsored a vast program of murals that included the newfound hall frescoes, the well-known series of narrative paintings in the small chapel dedicated to Saint Sylvester, and a painted liturgical almanac in the chapel’s antechamber (Figures I.2 and I.3). To realize this program of fresco decorations, Conti hired the same teams of painters who had completed the large cycle of murals in the crypt of Anagni Cathedral a few years earlier.

The allegorical cycle of Santi Quattro Coronati’s north bay is dominated by ten triumphant virtues arranged on the same register as the calendar in the opposite bay. Each personified virtue carries a saint on its shoulder while trampling two smaller figures. The small-scale vanquished figures represent each virtue’s corresponding vice and a historical character who exemplifies it. The saints and the trampled villains serve as historically real exempla of the moral qualities represented by the personified virtues and vices. Inscriptions identify all figures, several of which display scrolls with textual citations drawn from scripture, proverb collections, and classical poetry. The representation of virtues as female knights combating vices conforms to a visual tradition that can be traced back to the ninth-century manuscript illustrations of Prudentius’s Psychomachia. The Quattro Coronati frescoes, however, bring the conventional motif to new levels of pictorial complexity.

Chapter 6 charts Pisani’s construction of a second house as a waystation on the route between Venice and Montagnana. It analyzes this building in relation to concepts of mobility and the residential system and compares Pisani’s living situation to that of other Palladio patrons.

Chapter 4 demonstrates the gradual entrenchment of the Pisani family in the Bassa Padovana region of Venice’s mainland territories, showing that Villa Pisani formed part of a long-term strategy of estate building. Francesco Pisani’s construction in 1553–54 of his Palladian villa outside Montagnana culminated a multi-generational process of developing the family’s agricultural possessions.