Art in the communal court: San Gimignano

This dissertation investigates courtly culture in the Tuscan communes. Its central aim is to define the circumstances that engendered the late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century decorations of the Communal Palace in San Gimignano, and thereby to explain the presence of the surprisingly erotic narratives found in the chamber that was the podesta's bedroom.;The first chapter traces the emergence of San Gimignano as a political and cultural entity. The second chapter describes the history of the building and decoration of the Communal Palace, bringing to bear evidence from the communal archives. The primary purpose of this chapter is to arrive at a general understanding of the form and function of that building in the years around 1300. The third chapter describes the late thirteenth-century frescoes of the council chamber, revealing their specific political context. The chapter discusses the ancient heritage of the imagery in imperial triumphal art, and its contemporary interpretation according to the norms of a courtly ideal. This ideal, referred to in the present study as the "communal court," informed the chronicles, poetry and civic festivities of communal Italy, and stands behind not only the Sangimignanese frescoes, but also their later relatives in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena. The fourth chapter investigates the sources and meaning of the frescoes that adorned the podesta's bedroom (the tower room). The discussion takes the form of a comparative reading of the painted narratives and their closest literary relatives, especially Boccaccio's Decameron and its medieval sources. The conclusion offers an answer to the problem of how to understand the humorous and erotic subject matter of the tower room frescoes in the larger context of communal art, suggesting that such imagery would have been considered to be the kind of humanizing diversion appropriate for an ideal courtly ruler.