The Fresco Art of San Gimignano

Dr Kathleen Olive

San Gimignano is a World Heritage-listed Tuscan town, best known for the dozen or so defensive medieval towers that dot its skyline. This small hill town originally had more than 70 such towers, evidence of the factional conflict that divided the Italian peninsula in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The towers also demonstrate San Gimignano’s wealth and status, partly due to its location on the Via Francigena pilgrimage road and partly due to its cultivation of a luxury local saffron crop.

Halfway between the more powerful Siena and Florence, San Gimignano’s history is one of the struggle to maintain independence. The Black Death of 1348 had a particularly harsh impact here, but while San Gimignano never recovered its former status, it remained a significant training ground for successive generations of artists. Most visitors to the town are less aware of this – since Mussolini’s time, tourists have been encouraged to see the town as the ultimate example of medieval Italian architecture. But there is a lot to attract an art-lover to San Gimignano, too.

Some of the most important fresco cycles of medieval and Renaissance Italy are preserved here. Fresco is a difficult medium that involves painting small patches of jigsaw-like colour into rapidly-drying sections of plaster, and it’s highly specialised work, too. Fresco artists are partly chemists, understanding the chemical reactions that can transform pigments and metals when applied to lime-rich plaster, and partly god-like, able to hold the completed work – often on a huge scale – in their mind’s eye as they labour over a tiny and almost abstract section of it.

In stable climatic environments, medieval fresco cycles became almost one with the masonry. When not damaged by rising damp, earthquakes or structural changes, they were enduring, and their suitability for covering large, blank spaces made them a preferred medium for the Franciscans and Dominicans, whose numbers grew exponentially from the thirteenth century. These orders also felt a deep need to educate the faithful through story-telling, and thus fresco became a preferred medium of decoration for the large churches and monasteries that began to be built. Often referred to as a Biblia pauperum, or paupers’ Bible, medieval Italian frescoes tend to be narrative, dramatic, colourful and persuasive.

San Gimignano’s collegiate church of Santa Maria Assunta provides two excellent examples of this kind of medieval fresco. Its two long walls, alongside the nave, were entirely covered in scenes from the Old and New Testament. From the creation of the world, as recounted in Genesis, down through the stories of Cain and Abel, Noah, Abraham and Joseph in Egypt, church-goers could ‘read’ Mosaic law as far as the tale of suffering Job. Turning from their left to their right, they would then encounter key moments in the life of Christ and the institution of the first church, from Gabriel’s annunciation to Mary until the arrival of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

These frescoes are large, almost life-like, and their people gesture clearly, chatter amongst themselves and contort their faces in various emotions. They are richly coloured, with lots of contemporary detail that still holds a viewer’s attention. At the parting of the Red Sea, a monastic-looking Moses in a rough brown robe watches as Pharaoh’s army – with carefully-detailed medieval armour – drowns and their horses plunge wildly around them. Joseph, dreaming prophetically about abundant harvests followed by years of drought, sleeps soundly under a green and yellow tartan blanket that looks like it was made in the 1970s by Onkaparinga. Exotic and angry camels parade, Pharisees plot against Jesus, and you can still identify the individual dishes in front of the disciples at the Last Supper.

In the twentieth century, these Old and New Testament frescoes prompted a fierce academic debate. Since the Renaissance, the New Testament cycle had been attributed by sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti and art historian Giorgio Vasari to a shadowy artist called Barna da Siena. Modern scholarship has identified that they were mostly likely painted by Lippo Memmi, the brother-in-law of Sienese artist Simone Martini, immediately before the Black Death. The Old Testament cycle was painted almost immediately after it, by Bartolo di Fredi, and efforts have been made to find a distinctly pre- and post-plague attitude in the two works.

Lippo Memmi undertook other frescoes in San Gimignano. Together with his father, Memmo di Filippuccio, he decorated a council chamber in the town hall with a wonderful fresco of the Madonna in Majesty. This Maestà, completed in 1317, is directly inspired by Lippo’s brother-in-law Simone Martini’s fresco on the same subject, still in Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico. Lippo’s queen of heaven also sits like a courtly lady under a heavy tapestry baldachin, with flowing gilded robes and heavy jewels, and a stern yet adoring entourage of saints on either side of her.

Provincial Italian towns preserve so many unsung masterpieces, and it’s fascinating when you can compare like for like, as you can in San Gimignano. Only a few steps inside the Collegiata and you’re confronted with a major fresco cycle by Sebastiano’s brother-in-law, Domenico Ghirlandaio. In the thirteenth century, a local girl called Fina became the centre of a San Gimignano cult, when she patiently bore up under a paralytic condition, experienced visions and worked posthumous miracles. At the exact moment of her passing, San Gimignano’s church bells spontaneously rang out, and when Fina’s withered body was removed from the wooden pallet on which she’d suffered, violets burst into bloom.

Fina was never officially canonised, but the anniversary of her death has been a public holiday in San Gimignano since 1481. From 1477-1478, Ghirlandaio commemorated her in fresco in the Collegiata, in a small chapel designed to hold her relics. A true jewel of the Renaissance, the cycle lends Fina and her local devotees a serene gravitas, thanks to the classical architecture of their surrounds, an almost Flemish attention to detail, and an Italian love of narrative. As Fina lies stoically on her hard wooden stretcher, for example, Gregory the Great appears, startling one of Fina’s faithful attendants while another tirelessly supports her head. Beneath her body, violets begin to bloom, and a ripe and symbolic pomegranate bursts open under the window. Hiding under the bench is a rodent, a reminder that Fina was so immobile on her pallet that mice and rats came fearlessly to investigate her.

Fina’s is an unusual story, and fresco was the perfect medium for conveying all its mystery. San Gimignano’s Palazzo Comunale, or town hall, preserves another very unique fresco cycle in the Chamber of the Podestà. The podestà was a magistrate called in from neighbouring cities during the Middle Ages, a mayor-like law enforcer thought to be immune to any local factional strife. In San Gimignano, his private room was decorated in fresco in the early 1300s by Memmo di Filippuccio, and shows stories of profane love. A man and woman sit naked in the bath and then – scandalously – climb into bed together. (Note the return of the tartan blanket from the Collegiata.) Public bathing was associated with immoral behaviour, so these scenes were presumably designed to instruct the podestà in the situations he should avoid. Even the great Aristotle was not immune to the wiles of women, however, as Memmo shows. Watched closely by his student Alexander the Great, the philosopher is publicly humiliated, whipped through the streets by the great seductress Phyllis in a spurious tale much loved in the Middle Ages.

Great art is always appreciated in multiple ways, and the podestà must have tittered at his bedroom frescoes as much as he was admonished and titillated by them. The messages of Benozzo Gozzoli’s fifteenth-century frescoes, in San Gimignano’s Collegiata and Sant’Agostino church, are decidedly less equivocal. Benozzo is perhaps best known for his fantastical frescoes in the Medici family’s Magi Chapel in Florence, but he travelled widely in Umbria and Tuscany late in his career, and spent a significant amount of time in San Gimignano to escape an epidemic in Florence. He painted seventeen episodes from Augustine’s life here, as well as a fresco of Fina, another of St Sebastian absorbing quantities of arrows – a powerful plague image designed to bring comfort  – and a cranky-looking St Geminianus holding a model of the town renamed in his honour in the fifth century.

Benozzo Gozzoli is one of Italy’s finest artists in fresco, and it’s fitting that we end our exploration of San Gimignano’s works with him. His expert technique and rich, expensive blue, red and green pigments have stood the test of time, along with the painstaking details – such as eyelashes and rosy cheeks, gilded details on equestrian paraphernalia, and diaphanous veils – that he and his assistants applied when the frescoes were dry. His crowds of onlookers are composed of individuals, portraits from life of local San Gimignano folk. His scenes are convincingly three-dimensional, and he rewards the viewer with entertaining detail as much as religious instruction – such as the puppy sitting at the young Augustine’s feet, while he teaches a crowd in Rome.

So while great Italian fresco cycles in Rome, Assisi, Florence or Padua will rightly continue to draw the crowds, it’s well worth turning your gaze from San Gimignano’s famous towers to look more closely at the wonderful and well-preserved frescoes inside many of its buildings.

DR KATHLEEN OLIVE

Kathleen Olive is a well-known cultural tour leader and has led groups to Italy, France, Spain, the USA and Japan for over fifteen years. She regularly offers popular lectures on art, history and culture, including for the Australian Decorative and Fine Arts Society (ADFAS). READ MORE

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