The Rule, the Bible, and the Council: The Library of the Benedictine Abbey at Praglia.

Diana Gisolfi and Staale Sinding-Larsen. The Rule, the Bible, and the Council: The Library of the Benedictine Abbey at Praglia.

(College Art Association Monograph on the Fine Arts, 55.) Seattle and London: College Art Association and University of Washington Press, 1998. xiii + 4 pls.+ 74 figs. + 201 pp. n.p. ISBN: 0-295-97661-8.

This contribution to Renaissance art history concerns the painted decoration of the small library of the rather obscure Abbey at Praglia, an off-shoot of the better known Benedictine Cassinese house at S. Giustina in nearby Padua.

What makes the study of interest is not the artistic quality or the art-historical importance of the decoration by Battista Zelotti (ca.1526-1578), which has received little attention even in monographs devoted to that painter, but the authors' attempt to reconstruct and interpret the iconography of the library's decoration as a whole within the larger topic of Church reform in the Renaissance. It was at S.Giustina many years earlier in 1409 when Ludovico Barbo became Abbot that Benedictine reform had begun, and by a century later it had included all Italian Benedictine houses, including that of Montecassino, consequently known as the Cassinese Congregation.

Given that the decoration was for a library in a monastery, and that it was conceived and carried out ca.1562-1570, i.e., within a few years of the conclusion of the Council of Trent, it would be reasonable to see it as conditioned by the Council's decrees. But the Cassinese Congregation's traditions suffered a major defeat at the Council and according to the argument presented in this study, the prime motivating force for the iconography of the library's decoration did not come from the Council, but from the continuing Cassinese reform movement.

As not all the paintings are in situ, the authors had to reconstruct the position of each of the twenty-four canvases on the walls and ceiling. This was done by using not only the now standard methods of measurements, documents, formal and iconographical relationships, and comparisons with known Renaissance rooms of similar function, but also by computer technology which allowed for reconstructions from different viewpoints.

This reassembly then enabled the authors to attempt an explanation of the deeper meaning of the library's decoration that Zellotti's learned Benedictine patrons had devised for him to give pictorial form. The authors contend that this can be best done when it is seen in relation to biblical, Patriarchal, and Benedictine texts, as well as the liturgy of the Divine Office and the Mass. They do not, however, exclude Tridentine influences in what they regard as a strong re-affirmation of sacramental and Benedictine monastic traditions.

Much information is pieced together from specialized studies on Cassinese reform as well as its reversals at the Council of Trent, but all this is presented and the interpretation argued with exemplary organization, brevity and clarity. These qualities enable the sometimes weighty scholarly explication to be borne without strain. The reader is thus given the general meaning of scenes and their interrelationships in a confident and straightforward manner, but the analysis is not a detailed one and this is sometimes disappointing. For example, there are very general comments on the iconographic tradition of the Sibyls in Christian art, but no discussion of the two depicted in the library, nor of the inscriptions they hold.

As the Praglia house was so closely linked to the important and more artistically endowed one of S.Giustina, it is with that abbey's painted decoration that the comparison is most strongly made, especially the late-fifteenth-century frescoes in the Chiostro Grande. Although it is stated that the plan of the thematic structure of the S.Giusrina frescoes is based upon an early seventeenth-century manuscript description, there is no mention of the classicizing hieroglyphic borders that surrounded some of them. Only fragments of these have survived, but we do have Francesco Mengardi's eighteenth-century engravings and they show that the fifteenth-century S.Giustina decoration was presented in an intellectual and artistic context that included Francesco Colonna's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili], a very different one from that at Praglia.

The authors do not regard the results of their labors as other than a complex, working hypothesis as they state that no sense of completion emerged from the assembling of the material. The monograph is therefore offered both as a specific case study and as a methodological contribution whose materials and achievements may possibly be re-used by others who wish to propose different interpretations. While it must be acknowledged that the library's decoration is unlikely to engender many further interpretations, one hopes that other scholars will be inspired to re-examine sixteenth-century monastic art in terms such as those employed here, and with the same standards of scholarship.