ON THE MEANING OF PINTURICCHIO'S SALA DEI SANTI

The visitor who passes through the Vatican apartment of Alexander VI does not usually remain long, for greater rewards await him on the floor above. Regretfully, art historians or more precisely, iconographers have participated in this neglect, leaving unex­ plored an elaborate pictorial programme found in one of its rooms, the Sala dei Santi. Rectangular in plan and roofed by two Late Gothic cross-vaults (plate n ) , the Sala was decorated by Pinturicchio and a small army of assistants who moved through the suite in 1492-4, leaving behind on the walls a dense residue of embellishment, of fresco, stucco and gilding. This bright excrescence fills the upper half of the walls, which are shaped into lunettes by the vaulting, and covers the vaults as well. Upon entering the room, one sees above the opposite doorway The Visitation, and then, moving counter­ clockwise around the walls, five scenes from the lives of various saints (fig. 1): Sts Anthony and Paul, St Catherine, St Barbara, St Susanna of the Hebrews, and St Sebastian. The serial combination of these subjects is puzzling enough; but still more curious overhead, in the two cross-vaults, glittering small-scale against a deep blue background, wheel mythologies of ancient Egypt, of Isis and Osiris (plates 12 and 13). It is a complex and unique programme, obviously one of some special thrust which in­ sists upon the importance of its meaning. But after four-and-a-half centuries closed off from the world (the rooms were virtually forgotten until 1897), the frescoes have seem­ ingly lost their power to speak.