The Parma Baptistery and Its Pictorial Program

In The Parma Baptistery and Its Pictorial Program, I examine how in 1233 the painter responsible for the extensive decoration of the Baptistery at Parma, Italy, adopted and redeployed Byzantine sources to promote the religious and political agenda of the Franciscan preacher in control of the city government. I read the sixteen-sided, domed interior of the Baptistery, built largely between 1196 and 1216, as a synthesis of late antique and early Gothic architecture. The iconographic program laid out in this idiosyncratic space depicts Heavenly Jerusalem in the dome, the Baptism of Christ in the apse, and an array of figures and scenes in the other niches. Through an analysis of the functions of the building and the connections between the iconographic program and the city's political context, I identify the preacher Gerard Boccabadati, an early disciple of St. Francis, as the patron of the pictorial decoration. The painting of the Baptistery is thus dated to 1233, at the height of the religious movement known as the Alleluia, or Great Devotion, which spread from Parma throughout the cities of northern Italy in that year.