From Creation to the End of Time: The Nave Frescoes of San Gimignano's Collegiata and the Structure of Civic Devotion

The nave frescoes of San Gimignano's Collegiata remain one of the most impressive ensembles of trecento mural decoration in Tuscany. Produced over a period of seventy years, sixty painted episodes extend the length of the aisle walls, the reverse-facade and the first bay of the central nave. On the north wall twenty-seven separate panels trace the history of the New Testament in three horizontal registers. Thirty Old Testament episodes on the south side of the nave repeat the basic format of the opposite wall. By the end of the fourteenth century the paintings of the nave visually proclaimed the church's status as the preeminent ecclesiastical institution in San Gimignano, a structure that intermingled the sacramental and civic aspects of communal life. This dissertation examines the architectural, religious, and historical circumstances surrounding the construction of the church and the execution of its frescoes. Examination of the institutional history of the building indicates that the church's canons exerted considerable influence over the fabric of the building during the period of the nave's adornment. As a result, the frescoes can be seen as an expression of their role in the cura animarum of their parish. Interpreting the frescoes together with the evidence provided by contemporary liturgical rites, communal statutes, and civic literature provides an historical framework for understanding their reception by contemporary audiences. As pictures designed for a specific space, the murals and the various installations they accompanied played a constitutive rather than purely representational role in the structure of civic devotion. Though the textual sources of these images were important, the visual language of the pictures-their surfaces, their disposition along the wall, and their relationship to the architecture of their setting-were equally central in enhancing the devotional experiences of fourteenth-century church-goers. Ultimately, by calling attention to the dialogue between sacred history and its periodic re-enactment in the Pieve, the murals of the nave spoke directly to the Pieve's role as the mother church of the parish, the site that most effectively dissolved the boundaries between past and present, universal and local.