The Sistine Chapel Walls and the Roman Liturgy

It has long been understood that the fifteenth-century pictorial cycles on the walls of the Sistine Chapel bear a freight of symbolic meaning beyond the narrative they convey. Professor Lewine now proposes that the frescoes encode the text and themes of the Lenten and Easter liturgies celebrated in the papal chapel. As a scholar of early medieval art, she brings perspectives to bear on the problem that may be somewhat less familiar to students of later art.

Her approach to...
More Description

It has long been understood that the fifteenth-century pictorial cycles on the walls of the Sistine Chapel bear a freight of symbolic meaning beyond the narrative they convey. Professor Lewine now proposes that the frescoes encode the text and themes of the Lenten and Easter liturgies celebrated in the papal chapel. As a scholar of early medieval art, she brings perspectives to bear on the problem that may be somewhat less familiar to students of later art.

Her approach to the interpretation of visual images in terms of their liturgical significance is in itself important and her argument, grounded in close visual inspection of the paintings, is ingenious and provocative. Her analyses of the interactions among narrative and symbol, text and image, form and meaning, offer stimulating contributions to quattrocento studies and encourage further consideration of all the decoration of the Sistine Chapel, together, as parts of an evolving ensemble.