Marco D’Attanasio
University “G. d’Annunzio”, Chieti, Italy
Pope St. Leo the Great (440–461) commissioned a New and Old Testament cycle and Prophets and Apostles to decorate the walls of St. Peter’s Basilica and St. Paul’s Outside the Walls. These paintings became a reference model over the coming centuries, especially between 12th and 13th century. After the Gregorian Reform, that system of images was imitated in many churches in Rome as well as in the dependent territories of the Holy See, thus starting the figurative tendency known as Renouveau Paléochrétien — as Hélène Toubert called it.
The reference to a pictorial model from the Early Christian age was a markedly symbolic operation, that is to say, such a reference suggested a close connection with the traditional values. This idea is even stronger in pictorial cycles made outside Rome, so that art became the privileged way to spread a specific meaning: the cultural and political belonging to the Holy See.
At the eastern end of the Patrimonium Petri there was the March of Ancona, a region that popes and emperors vied for its control since the assignment by Charlemagne to Pope Adrian I. One of the most important towns of the March of Ancona was Ascoli Piceno, where there are only a few frescoes dated back to the second half of the 12th century: the fragmentary New Testament cycle in Sant’Ilario and the Prophets in Sant’Angelo Magno. My paper will argue that both those frescoes recall the iconography of St. Leo’s painted cycles in Rome and reproduce the formal point of view that can be found in Rome: the painted architectonic frame that separates the episodes of the Passion of Christ is a poor translation of the frame in stucco present in the painted cycle in St. Paul’s and probably in St. Peter’s Basilica, whereas the Prophets in Sant’Angelo Magno are stylistically similar to the Elders of the Apocalypse painted in the presbytery of the roman church of San Giovanni a Porta Latina.
Therefore, it is possible to recognize in both painted cycles two important cases of Renouveau Paléochrétien, as they are figurative evidence of the way in which Rome was capable to exercise its power also in its peripheral domains.