California Italian Studies

When confronted with pictorial details emphasizing such bodily actions as singing, observing, gesturing, or moving in other ways, art historians typically follow one of three interpretive approaches, either using the details as signs of a specific iconographic source or markers of a particular artistic style or understanding them as generic flourishes designed to lend vivacity to an image. The field’s recent expansion to consider sensory dimensions beyond the visual or spatial offers new pathways to making sense of such elements in painting and sculpture. This article argues that images of open mouths and gesturing hands within a set of twelfth-century frescoes preserved in the monastic church of Sant’Elia near Nepi (VT), built and decorated ca. 1125 to serve as the abbey church of a male Benedictine community known as the monastery of Elijah, guided medieval audiences (and should guide modern scholars) into a world of gesture, movement, ritual, and voice. These paintings were inseparable from daily ritual, from liturgical elements spoken and sung at specific times, and from commemorative practices followed on such occasions as the feast days of saints and the deaths of terrestrial leaders—in sum, even if presenting themselves initially as motionless two-dimensional images, these images were profoundly intertwined with the monastery’s existence as a lived ritual site. These links between image and site served a further purpose: to establish and promote a distinct communal identity among the monastery of Elijah’s brethren by depicting and then activating specific concepts regarding their community’s sacred history, the history of monasticism more generally, and appropriate monastic behaviors and aspirations. Crucial in this regard were a series of images depicting the monastery’s local saint, the abbot Anastasius, and its exceedingly rare titular saint, the Old Testament prophet Elijah. While the process of generating communal identity may have begun at a visual level, it was only effected through, first, the use of mediums including, in addition to painting, architecture, furnishings, pavement, inscriptions, and topography, and, second, the activation of multiple bodily actions and sensations, including physical movement through the monastery’s wider landscape. Likewise, a scholarly discussion that begins within the field of art history necessarily expands to encompass history, liturgy, and theology, but always with a close focus on twelfth-century Italy.