The Tempietto del Clitunno near Spoleto

**********__The Tempietto del Clitunno near Spoleto__ has two volumes, text (446 pp.) and illustrations (14 plates with a stone-by-stone survey of the building plus 218 b&w figures). *Part One: Starting Points* begins with a description of the building (chap. I), then proceeds to analyses of the literature on the Tempietto (chap. II), the written dcouments (chap. III), and the visual documents (chap IV). *Part Two: Archeological Analysis* provides a structural history (chap. V) and reconstructs the building’s two distinct historic phases (chap. VI). *Part Three: Form, Meaning, and History* takes up the building’s various Corinthian column screens, i.e. aediculae (chap. VII), then proceeds to the carved marble tympanum reliefs decorating the pediments (chap. VIII), the Christian Latin texts cut into the friezes of the three exterior aediculae (chap. IX), the frescoes decorating the apse and apsidal wall (chap. X), and concludes with a chap. XI on dating the Tempietto. Emerick argues that the building could conceivably have been put in use by leading men from the duchy of Spoleto sometime during three distinct periods—(1) during the seventh or early eighth century when Lombard dukes reigned independently in Spoleto; (2) sometime between 729 and 779 when the duchy fell under royal Lombard sway, and then under royal Frankish control; or (3) sometime during the later eighth and the ninth century when the duchy was ruled by Frankish counts.
**********Reviewers of Emerick’s book have faulted him for not having decided finally which of the three dating possibilities best fit the evidence. In an appendix, to be sure, Emerick reports on the Carbon-14 tests of the building’s lime mortar carried out in 1982-83, which showed that Phase One mortar might date to CE 712 ± 34 years, and Phase Two mortar to CE 658 ± 55 years. These results would suggest that the Tempietto originated sometime during the seventh or early eighth century. But Emerick warns that the dating of lime mortar by the C-14 method is highly experimental and problematic; it can provide only the softest of evidence for the actual date of the building in question. Moreover, to fasten on the C-14 evidence to the exclusion of the art historical (to speak quickly) is to miss an important point, namely, that historians cannot fix some (many?) visual forms in time precisely. The Tempietto’s Corinthian decorative system for one, and the icons of Christ, Peter, Paul, the archangels, and the cross frescoed in the Tempietto’s apse and apsidal wall for another belong to a category of visual forms or motifs that people treasure and take care to repeat faithfully and precisely every time they invoke them or use them. Of course, the motifs in question get constantly revalued by their various users. Corinthian aediculae, once a symbol of Roman Imperial hegemony, were boldly pressed into service under Constantine for “non-traditional” purposes in the new public Christian sanctuaries (e.g., Old St. Peter's). Emerick attempts to show just how such motifs at the Tempietto del Clitunno could fit into a series of possible politico-religious scenarios in early medieval central Italy. What is so striking about the Tempietto del Clitunno visually/formally is how exceedingly normal it is. That normality, that “art historical generality,” ought not be missed by critics!
Judson J. Emerick
5 February, 2007

(N.B.: This is NOT a "governmental publication" despite what WorldCat says.) **********Emerick's study counts as the first full publication (1998) of the enigmatic early medieval church near the river Clitunno in central Umbria. For centuries scholars have puzzled over the chapel’s lavish Corinthian column screens, the crosses surrounded by Neo-Attic vine scrolls in its pedimental reliefs, and the Christian Latin inscriptions in huge Neo-Augustan block capitals from its friezes. The sixteenth-century humanists who named the building the “Tempietto del Clitunno” treated it as an ancient Roman temple that the Christians later converted. But modern art historians, learning that the Tempietto had been built from the ground up as a chapel, declared it an anomaly, the product of a most startling and unexpected Early Christian and medieval classical revival. **********Emerick intervenes by critiquing the notion of classical revival in medieval architecture. Impatient with the old Enlightenment historical plot that makes the Tempietto into a dark-age prodigy, Emerick boldly redescribes the architectural record to take away the Tempietto’s strangeness. He shows conclusively that the chapel’s orders, pedimental reliefs, and inscriptions conform to ancient Roman Imperial Corinthian standards, but he then goes on to show that just this Corinthian decorative system was frequent, even normal in festive, public, Christian cult rooms from Constantine’s day down through the twelfth century. **********History of style as an end in itself yields here to style treated as political phenomenon. Emerick turns to the frescoes on the Tempietto’s rear apse wall for clues to the builder’s political goals. He explains how grandees from the medieval Lombardo-Frankish duchy of Spoleto, full participants in a Christian theocratic state, set up an array of Mediterranean icons inside the Tempietto (of Christ, Peter, Paul, two angels, and the cross) to enhance their social and political control. The church’s Corinthian decorative system, he concludes, must be integral to this political program. Judson J. Emerick February 5, 2007