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SITE, SEEING AND SALVATION IN FOURTEENTH‐CENTURY AVIGNON
Author(s) -
WILLIAMSON BETH
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
art history
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.1
H-Index - 19
eISSN - 1467-8365
pISSN - 0141-6790
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-8365.2007.00530.x
Subject(s) - fresco , painting , art , reading (process) , art history , visual arts , sight , performance art , philosophy , linguistics , physics , astronomy
This article explores anew the well‐known frescoes by Simone Martini above the entrance to the Cathedral of Notre‐Dame‐des‐Doms in Avignon. A new reading is facilitated in three ways: by considering the full range of possible iconographic and stylistic sources for these frescoes; by considering the content of the lost side‐wall frescoes as well as the surviving frescoes; and by calling into question the methodologies and assumptions about influence and sources that have normally been brought to bear on the paintings. The whole ensemble is seen as a monument specific both to its time and its place, in which the patron, the Roman cardinal Jacopo Stefaneschi, expresses his hopes for salvation using the metaphors of vision and sight.