Early Italian Art 1250–1400: Little-Known Fresco Cycles from Pomposa to Trento


Excellent study day organised by the London Art History Society as the last in a series on early Italian art focusing on lesser-known fresco cycles.

Other study days in this summer series had looked at specific cities but this final session swept up other art which wasn’t in those three major centres. We also had a different lecturer for this session and Clare Ford-Wille took us on a lovely tour of Northern Italy and added lots of towns to add to my list of places I want to visit.

Most interesting was her tour of the abbey at Pomposa which I had not come across before. Various abbots had commissioned cycles to promote the church. Sadly none of the artists are known but there seems to have been a fashion for depictions of the Last Supper at circular tables.

We then looked at cycles in Padua which are overshadowed by the amazing work by Giotto which we had studied in the previous session. We started with the work of Giusto da Menabuoi in Baptistery commissioned by Fina Buzzacarina, the wife of the city’s ruler, who wanted to transform the space into a family mausoleum.  We then moved onto the Oratory of St Giorgio with scenes from the lives of St Lucy and St Catherine.

We ended by looking at two wonderful secular cycle from the Saluzzo and Trento. One had a wonderful wall devoted to the idea of a Fountain of Youth with wonderful old figures transforming into youthful ones with Heroes and Heroines on the opposite one. The heroines were like fashion plates. Another showed the labours of the months like a giant Book of Hours.

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