Foreword
The medieval city of Perugia, the part we now call the ZTL, developed during the Middle Ages into five districts, each dependent on one of the main gates, which lent it a graceful star shape. Each gate had its own emblem and colour: a Sun on a white field for Porta Sole, a Bear on a deep-blue field for Porta Santa Susanna, a Horse on a red field for Porta Sant'Angelo, a Stag on a green field for Porta Eburnea, a Lion on a yellow field for Porta San Pietro. Over time many other monumental gates were added, each marking a stratigraphic layer in the city's march toward the future. The age-old question of the gates' iconography goes back to the moment when the inhabitants of Porta San Pietro realized they had never actually seen a lion. By then the historical emblems must already have been replaced: by the saints for whom the gates are named, or by the saints to whom churches within the gate's precincts are dedicated, or else by objects tied for particular reasons to the districts themselves. It seems the broad range of possibilities neither frightened nor in any way confused the illuminators and stonecutters of the day, even if the latter kept wondering, right up to their extinction, what exactly their job was. Porta Sant'Angelo, so named after the early Christian temple dedicated to Saint Michael, is represented by the archangel in the guise of a warrior. Sometimes the figure of the archangel is merely evoked by a winged sword on a red field, which one suspects may once have carried a scroll reading back soon. Finally, in rare cases, the gate is symbolized by a club, perhaps because most of the city's firewood entered through it. The distillation of the saint's traditional iconography amounts to an abbreviation of the smallest unit of meaning used by artistic language, the icon: that is, the instrument by which a sender transmits information to a receiver. For a long time the powerful made use of art to interact with the illiterate populace in an immediate and direct way; then television was invented. The set of icons makes up the code through which language is conveyed. Icons follow fixed formulas and may be called signifiers, while their meaning, which varies, depends on the context in which the icon appears. In linguistic terms we would describe the artistic code as a secondary iconic code, though in many cases it has also been described as a colossal bore. The term iconic is conventionally used for a code in which the expression resembles the content it conveys, as in the signs that mark the presence of toilets, forbid entry to certain premises, or warn of the danger of a crossing by means of exclamation marks. The adjective secondary implies that a code has as its content the expression of another code, as happens, for example, with Morse code. Finally there is syntax, that is, the way in which words – images – combine into higher-order units to stave off boredom. In spoken language, syntax underlies the construction of sentences. In art it makes the coexistence of several figures within a single scene take on complex meanings: for example, thirteen well-fed men waiting to find out who will pick up the tab can be identified as the twelve apostles and Jesus Christ at the Last Supper; a winged man and a woman gazing intently at a column are an Annunciation, and so on. Another fundamental function of syntax is to reduce the ambiguity of the message, thanks to features such as linearity and structure. Structure is the internal organization of the linguistic construction, while linearity characterizes the so-called "linguistic chains": structure does not deprive them of their meaning. In art, linearity means one can build a fresco cycle without having to reintroduce the overarching theme of the stories in every scene. In short, iconography studies the syntax of works of art and how it changes over time.

Saint Michael
Saint Michael first appears in the fiction titled "The Old Testament" as the defender of the people; in the New Testament his role is defined as the bearer of a divine message of supreme importance, the representative and executor on earth of the divine will. Descriptions of angelic apparitions in prophetic and apocalyptic literature had a decisive influence on medieval art before being supplanted by UFOs. In John's Book of Revelation, Saint Michael is the commander of the heavenly host that defeats evil. He stands ever in the presence of God, unlike Gabriel, and has been adopted by the Church as the patron saint of the militant Christian. His origins probably go back to the religion of ancient Persia, whose pantheon was founded on the principle of the opposition between good and evil, before it was placed under copyright. Saint Michael appears frequently in religious iconography: he is portrayed as a young angel wearing armour and often a short tunic. While he conventionally grips a sword in his right hand and holds a pair of scales in his left, at times he is marked by other attributes: the shield, a lance, and in rare cases a globe. Satan, depicted either in anthropomorphic form or as a dragon, lies at his feet. The archangel is often shown attending to the so-called "weighing of souls," or "psychostasia": on each pan of a balance rests a soul, portrayed as a tiny naked human figure. The soul of the elect is light, being free of the weight of sin, while that of the damned is heavy, burdened by the evils that afflict it and by poor digestion. In many depictions a devil is shown slyly dragging toward himself a soul bound for Paradise. In his role as weigher of souls, Saint Michael plays, when present, a central part in scenes of the Last Judgment, in which he seems to ask God: "what should I do, let it go?" This scene has equivalents in other religions. In the Greek one the task fell to Hermes, who led the souls of the dead down to the underworld to Charon the ferryman and weighed those of the heroes on a balance. An engraved gem, datable to the early years of Christianity, shows Saint Michael with the caduceus and the petasus, the classic attributes of the Greek god. Sanctuaries dedicated to Saint Michael are often set on hilltops or high places where temples to Mercury had previously stood, as in the case of the sanctuary on Monte Gargano, one of the oldest dedicated to the Archangel, dating to the fifth century AD. In the Egyptian religion the psychostasia was the entrance test to which the deceased was subjected before being admitted to the afterlife. The deceased implored fourteen judge-gods while being led by the hand by Anubis, god of embalming, toward a balance. Anubis placed the heart of the deceased on one pan of the balance, while on the other lay a feather: Maat, goddess of truth and justice. Thoth, the god of wisdom, recorded the outcome of the weighing: if the heart – which registers every action, good or wicked, performed during life – balanced the feather, the deceased passed the selection for the kingdom of the dead; otherwise the heart ended up in the bowl of Mermeth, she who devoured the deceased and never cleaned the bathroom. The depiction of the Last Judgment appears in the ninth century but gains importance in the thirteenth, after a long apprenticeship. As late as the twelfth century it was not deemed indispensable. Around the year 1000, the custom spread in the West of placing it on the counter-façade of the church, as a warning to the faithful on their way out of the building. Classic Gothic consecrated the western rose window of churches to the Judgment. Many depictions of the Judgment do not include the scene of the separation between the elect and the damned.

Iconographic Analysis
The image of the saint is in itself a scene, a combination of signifiers that, coordinated with one another, make a fine impression: some are fixed, others vary from saint to saint. The first step of iconographic analysis is to relax and define the role of the figure to be identified: while at the perceptual level our first encounter with the figure leads us to determine its sex and, immediately afterwards, to yawn, iconological study calls for a thrilling top-to-bottom scan that establishes, according to the presence or absence of elements such as the golden nimbus and the wings, whether we are dealing with a saint and, if so, whether he is also an angel. From the cut of the garment one can tell whether the saint belongs to a monastic order, a chivalric order, or an ethnic group. The garment makes it possible to assign the saint to a category – "warrior," "Church father," "penitent," and so on – and to attribute a hierarchical value to the roles with which he is invested. The deconstruction of the figure to be identified requires an examination of the hands. The right hand, traditionally recognized – ceci n'est pas une blague – as the "hand of action," carries an "active" meaning. The left, called the "hand of the symbol," conveys a "conceptual" meaning. Several contexts aid identification: the one in which the figure is placed within the work, the one for which the work was commissioned, and the one in which the work is displayed. The position – as protagonist, as supporting figure, in the retinue, in the background – is defined by the amount of space the figure occupies, while the physical location of the work reveals, besides details useful for filing, inventorying, and cataloguing, its devotional relevance and its correspondence, however relative, to the predominant motifs of the place, the time, and good taste. In order to grasp the message conveyed by the scene, any other figures that make it up must also be interpreted and assessed, both those that act together with the character and those that round out the narrative picture with independent actions. Saint Michael is always portrayed as a youth of agile, athletic appearance. Above the head sit the halo and the wings. The halo – or nimbus – is the luminous glow that, until the advent of the Futurists, surrounded the heads of divine or holy figures. Later it became the mark of streetlamps. The ancient Indian and Chinese deities were depicted with low-quality halos. It was an attribute of solar deities – Mithras, Helios, and Apollo – and was shown as rays of light radiating from the head. With all humility, it was used for the iconography of deified Roman emperors. The nimbus makes its appearance in Christian art around the fifth century. At first it was reserved for the figures of the Trinity and for the angels, then it was gradually extended to the apostles, the saints, and other figures, and finally it ceased to be a status symbol. In the Eastern regions it was a symbol of power rather than of holiness, and in the earliest Byzantine art it is found applied even to the figure of Satan. It can take various forms: 1) the cruciform is generally reserved for the head of Christ, although it occasionally turns up in depictions of the Father and the Holy Spirit; 2) the triangular alludes to the Trinity and is used exclusively for God the Father; 3) the quadrangular is found on the heads of living contemporaries, both lay and religious, such as the emperor, the pontiff, and in some cases the Prime Minister; 4) the hexagonal marks the Theological and Cardinal Virtues and other allegorical figures; 5) the circular belongs to the Madonna, the angels, and the saints. In late-medieval art it was a flat golden disc and, especially in the thirteenth century, bore the name of the figure who wore it, along with their tax code. In the early Renaissance it became a ring seen in foreshortening. Thereafter it enjoyed less and less favour, and in post-Renaissance art it appears more rarely. A halo of light may radiate not only from the head but from the entire figure depicted: this feature belongs to the divine figure and is reserved for Christ, above all in the Transfiguration, and for the Madonna. Wings are the proper attributes of the messengers of the gods of Greco-Roman mythology: Victory, Mercury, and Iris. These descended from older winged figures of the pre-classical age. From the Roman Victory derives the Christian figure of the angel, messenger of the Almighty, which first appears winged in the mosaics of the sixth century. Turning to the examination of the figure in the strict sense, one analyzes the head. Some figures are identifiable by their hair – in the classical sphere Samson, Semiramis, and Venus Anadyomene; in the Christian sphere Mary Magdalene and Mary of Egypt – by their eyes – Argus, Polyphemus, Saint Lucy, God – or by their hat. In ancient Greece, the headgear of the humble peasant and of the traveller was the petasus: a round, shallow cap fitted with a brim. The winged petasus is an attribute of Mercury. In various forms the headgear stands for bishops, cardinals, priests of various cults, wizards, kings, emperors, and house painters. The helmet is part of the warrior's typical equipment: it belongs to Alexander the Great and to the goddess Minerva, and it is used to characterize Faith and Fortitude. Armour is the whole set of defensive elements worn by the warrior. Specifically, the cuirass is the part of the armour that protects the chest and back, and it is typical of Mars and Vulcan. In narrative works the soldier's weapon is the sword, and it usually represents the authority and justice of the one who wields it. It is the involuntary attribute of many martyrs, being the instrument of their martyrdom. It appears in the iconography of Saint Paul, Saint James the Greater, Saint Agnes, Saint Justina, Saint Euphemia, Saint Lucy, Saint Peter Martyr, Saint Thomas Becket, Saint Boniface, Saint Adrian, Saint Protasius, Saint Martin of Tours, Saint Julian the Hospitaller, and Saint Michael. Seven swords pierce the breast of the Madonna in the scene of the Seven Sorrows of the Virgin. The sword also appears beside the face of Christ the Judge in the Last Judgment. Among the allegorical figures, those equipped with a sword are Justice, Constancy, Fortitude, Wrath, the city of Venice, Rhetoric, the muse Melpomene, Temperance, and Despair. The lance is the weapon of the mounted soldier or of the hunter. As an attribute it is typical of and identifies Longinus and Jude Thaddaeus; broken, it identifies Saint George. A lance is also held by the goddess Minerva, Fortitude, Constancy, and the allegorical figure of the Bronze Age. The flaming tip of a lance pierces the breast of Saint Teresa, and several lances strike Saint Thomas as he embraces the Cross. As a rule, the weapon is depicted in the field of action: the right hand.

The globe, clutched by a monarch, signifies sovereignty over the world. It was first used with this meaning by the Roman emperors. In Christian times, surmounted by a cross, it became the symbol of the Holy Roman Empire and later the emblem of the kings of England after Edward the Confessor. In sacred art it is held by Christ in the role of Salvator Mundi or by God the Father. The globe features in many allegories, from the Virtues to the Liberal Arts, and as a symbol of the universality of certain pagan deities. It appears in the hands of Truth, Fame, Abundance, and Justice. It serves as a pedestal for Philosophy and, in the same position, has represented the instability of Fortune, in contrast to the firmness of Faith's cubic pedestal. The same iconographic contrast appears in the depictions of Occasion and Nemesis. In the divine sphere the globe is attributed to Apollo, Cybele, and sometimes Cupid. The terrestrial globe features in some still lifes, while the celestial one belongs to Urania, muse of astronomy, and to the personification of Astronomy itself. Finally, doubled, oversized, and transfigured by spoken language, it represents deadly boredom. The balance is the favourite symbol of judgment, since it serves to weigh good and evil, wrong and right. Since Roman times, together with the sword, it has been the attribute of personified Justice and, in sacred art, of Saint Michael in the role of "psychopomp archangel." Among the Liberal Arts, Reason uses the balance to assess the true and the false. Occasion holds her balance poised on the edge of a blade. One of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse sometimes holds a balance. The young Maurus, disciple of Saint Benedict, also numbers a balance among his attributes. Brennus, chief of the Gauls whose armies attacked Rome in 390 BC, is depicted in the act of throwing his sword onto a balance in order to raise the ransom price for the City's freedom. As defender of the faithful, Saint Michael is often equipped with a shield. Usually, in art, shields bear a decorative motif that helps identify the figures who carry them, as in the case of the goddess Minerva, who bears a shield adorned with the head of Medusa; of Fortitude, whose shield shows a lion or a bull; and of the allegorical personification of the Iron Age, on whose shield appears a serpent with a human head. The shield is among the attributes of Rhetoric and of Chastity, who uses it to shield herself from Cupid's arrows. Saint Michael's shield calls for no specific design, although it is sometimes shown bearing a large cross, to signify his role as protector of the faithful. Demons are often depicted alongside Saint Michael. They are the messengers of Satan as the angels are of God, and they lead the souls of sinners to hell as the angels carry those of the righteous to heaven. The image of evil as a composite zoomorphic creature belongs to the Egyptian and Persian religions and recurs often in curses. The many-headed monsters of the Revelation and the figure of Satan are the product of Eastern and Byzantine influence. Western medieval artists altered this image, turning it into an essentially human figure while preserving certain bestial traits: claws in place of hands and feet, a tail, wings, and a foul temper. In the Renaissance, artists drew inspiration for their depictions of the devil from the satyr of antiquity, furnished with horns and goat's feet. Satan sometimes appears disguised as a monk or a wayfarer, but the goat's foot or the claw peeping out from beneath the cloak betrays his identity. Just as well they didn't take their cue from Priapus. Satan appears in the Fall of the Rebel Angels, the Temptation in the Desert, the Descent into Limbo, and the Last Judgment. Devils appear in the iconography of Saint Anthony the Abbot, Saint Bartholomew, Saint Benedict, and Saint Zeno. A demon lies at the feet of Saint Geminianus and of Saint Catherine of Siena. In some depictions of the Last Judgment and in those of Saint Michael, one or more demons try to tip in their own favour the pans of the balance weighing the souls of the dead. In the Crucifixion they carry off the soul of the unrepentant thief. In depictions of the myth of Orpheus they drag the soul of Eurydice down to the underworld. A demon whispers in the ear of Judas Iscariot; another snuffs out the candle of Saint Genevieve. Some demons kill the children of Job. Simon Magus hovers in the air, held aloft by demons. Demons flee from Christ in the Descent into Limbo; from Saint Ignatius of Loyola as he preaches; and from a ship, on the storm-tossed sea, driven off by three saints: Saint Mark, Saint George, and Saint Nicholas. An alternative to the demons is the figure of a Dragon, or serpent, or monster. In the ancient East it is a beneficent deity connected with the watery element. In Christian culture, by contrast, it is a symbol of Satan. Medieval and Renaissance artists depict Lucifer in the jaws of Leviathan, sometimes painted as a dragon. The Latin term "draco" means both dragon and serpent, so the two images may be considered interchangeable. A dragon chained or crushed beneath the feet of a saint is a symbol of the defeat of evil. It thus appears beneath the feet of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception and as an attribute of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, Saint Martha, Saint Sylvester, and Saint Margaret of Antioch. The last may be depicted stepping out of the belly of the beast or leading it by a halter. The "ancient serpent" is cast into the abyss by an angel in the Book of Revelation. In tradition, several figures defeat and slay a dragon: Saint Michael in the War in Heaven of the Book of Revelation, where the dragon is in fact Satan transformed; Saint George; the Greek hero Perseus; and the pagan knight Ruggiero. The dragon is an attribute of Saint Theodore, and two dragons draw the chariot of Ceres, causing traffic disruptions. The dragon is also an attribute of Vigilance. The serpent, besides being a symbol of evil, is used as a symbol of fertility, of wisdom, and of medical science. The Virgin is depicted in the act of crushing the serpent's head, an image representing the defeat of sin or, in Baroque art, of Protestantism. The serpent may appear at the foot of the cross. A serpent in a chalice is among the attributes of Saint John the Evangelist, and one in a loaf of bread among those of Saint Benedict. Envy, too, has a snake as an attribute. A woman whose hair is made of serpents is Medusa. Minos, judge of souls in hell, wraps his body in the coils of a serpent a number of times corresponding to the infernal circle to which the damned soul is bound. Cleopatra brings a serpent to her breast to put herself to death. Eurydice often has a serpent coiled around her ankle; Cadmus, legendary founder of Thebes, is shown gripped by the coils of a great serpent during a furious struggle. Laocoön and his two sons are killed by two sea serpents; the infant Hercules kills two serpents with his bare hands, and as an adult he slays the Hydra of Lerna, sometimes portrayed in the guise of a dragon. Apollo kills a python with his arrows. The apostle Saint Paul is sometimes depicted in the act of casting a serpent into the flames.

Conclusions
The traditional iconography of Saint Michael must have taken its definitive shape over the course of the Middle Ages, when Umbria was divided between the territory known as the "Byzantine corridor" and that belonging to the Duchy of Spoleto. We know that in Byzantine art great importance was given to the hieratic quality of the figures represented and to their isolation from the setting and from neighbouring figures, achieved by depicting the subjects far apart from one another or by emphasizing the outline so as to bring out their detachment. Of Lombard art, on the other hand, we know the tendency toward horror vacui and the resulting decorative excess. To sum up and simplify – almost to excess – we may say that Byzantine art predominantly portrays "motionless" figures, while Lombard art immortalizes them "in movement." Basing the study on samples drawn from a span of time running from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century, it is likely that the survival of these traits is due not to direct descent from one type or the other, but often to random and variable factors such as the skill or the cultural training of the artist. Nevertheless, two contemporaries such as Niccolò Alunno, active mainly in the Spoleto-Foligno area, and Pietro Vannucci, who instead moved through the territories that had once formed part of the Byzantine dominion, paint Saint Michael in ways that seem to reflect this observation. Niccolò Alunno's archangels Michael are tense, trampling the devil almost as if leaping or dancing upon him, whereas Pietro Vannucci's are always motionless, firmly anchored to the ground. In this case we are dealing with two great masters, and I think one may state that the difference in the arrangement of the images is not the product of a quirk of the two artists' personalities, but can be traced back to genuine iconographic "types," which originally developed differently in the two areas of the region and then became the object of a cultural exchange that made them interchangeable and at times fused them together. This observation is largely confirmed by the dedication miniatures that adorn the guild registers of Perugia. In every case in which Porta Sant'Angelo is represented by Saint Michael, he appears portrayed with legs astride, firmly planted on the ground, motionless and victorious, striving to fill the pictorial space. We have spoken of attributes that "characterize" the image. The figure we read as "Saint Michael" is made up of several signifiers that, like words and conjunctions in spoken language, work together to build a sentence. This sentence may itself become a signifier, and so convey a meaning different from the sum of the signifiers that make it up. To give an example, take Jesus Christ: wherever he is depicted, he is clearly identifiable. And yet he does not always carry the same meaning: Nativity scenes convey a different meaning from those of the Passion, Crucifixion, Resurrection, and so on. For these scenes Christ is an intensifier, a symbol that broadens and magnifies their meaning. The same holds for other major figures of the Christian world, including the archangel Michael. The problem is to identify the role the saint plays on each occasion. The formal arrangement seems to make no further difference to the meaning; otherwise the iconographic distance between the various representations would be greater. What instead characterizes and defines the meaning of the image are the combinations of attributes. Given that the halo and wings are present in every depiction, we may say that they characterize the image of Saint Michael in a generic sense and have no bearing on the role he plays.
Having succeeded in proving nothing, over and out.

Works consulted
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Ernst Gombrich, Immagini simboliche. Studi sull'arte del Rinascimento, Einaudi, Torino, 1978.

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Rudolf Wittkower, Allegoria e migrazione dei simboli, Einaudi, Torino, 1987.

Filippo Todini, La pittura umbra dal Duecento al primo Cinquecento, Longanesi, Milano, 1989.

Ernst Gombrich, La storia dell'arte, Leonardo Arte, Milano, 1995.

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Marina Subbioni, La miniatura perugina del Trecento, Guerra edizioni, Perugia, 2003.

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Antonio Senatore is a writer and art critic. He has collaborated with magazines and museum institutions both in Italy and abroad. He currently works within the network of Perugia's civic museums and teaches History of Design at the NID – Nuovo Istituto di Design.