“I will yet make instruction shine forth like the dawn,

I will make it gleam far into the distance” (Sirach 24:32).

13 February 1278: Perugia is gathered, in spirit and with one voice, in the Piazza Grande, onto which looked the cathedral, the bishop’s palace and the palaces of the Consuls, of the Podestà and of the Captain of the People, to celebrate the completion of the works on the aqueduct from Monte Pacciano, which brings the water into the city, and on the Fontana Maggiore, which displays those waters.

Paraphrasing the praise of Wisdom written in the Book of Sirach (24, 30-34), the “living water” (Rev. 22:1; John 4:11), source of life and of wisdom, which flows in abundance from the Fontana Maggiore, “waters the garden and irrigates the flower-bed” of the Augusta city of Perugia, lending lustre to its civic greatness and to its political and cultural ambitions: “ut civitas Perusii sapientia valeat elucere” (so that it may shine forth in wisdom), one reads in the wish set down in the Statute of 1285, a wish aimed at the founding of the Studium[i].

In the superb artistic and iconographic kaleidoscope of the reliefs and statues that give soul and form to the political and theological narrative of the Fontana Maggiore[ii], there emerges, vivid for the symbolic value of the carved image, the depiction of Saint Benedict of Norcia (480-547), inspired by an angel, as he entrusts his Regula monachorum to a prostrate disciple. Indeed, in the illustrated surveys of the Fountain’s iconographic itinerary this sculptural group is catalogued as a single effigy of the father of Western monasticism, and only in isolated cases is the presence noted of the kneeling figure of Saint Maurus (c. 512-584); this despite the fact that, on the pages of the open codex, in order to heighten the solemnity of Saint Benedict’s gesture and to identify the scene represented, the sculptors incised the spoken exhortation addressed by the patriarch to the Roman monk: “AUDI FRATER MAURE”.

Reconnecting the thread of the Benedictine iconographic tradition, then, it is clear that Nicola and Giovanni Pisano meant to depict one of the central moments in the account of Saint Benedict’s life: the handing of the Sancta Regula to Saint Maurus, as he was setting out for Gaul. In the year of his death (547), the patriarch received at Montecassino a delegation sent by Innocent (533-559), pastor of the Dioecesis Cenomanensis (Le Mans), who asked him to promote the founding of a monastic community on a local diocesan estate. Sustained by divine inspiration, Benedict agreed, urging Maurus to undertake the journey to Gaul. After a fortunate passage, studded with the gift of several miracles, the monk founded at Glanfeuil (Angers) the first French Benedictine abbey, where he lived until his death.

The scene showing the handing of the Regula to St Maurus is part of the symbolic narrative of the East side of the fountain, articulated around the statue of the prophet Solomon – the other cornerstones being the figures of Rome to the West, Euliste to the North and Augusta Perusia to the South –; this group also includes the images of the prophets David and Moses, of St John the Baptist and of the princess Salome who displays his head.

In the fountain’s communicative programme, the iconographic group just mentioned embodies the supreme divinatory value of “prophecy”, ideally opening the scene onto the statues that celebrate the fertile history and identity of the Augusta city and of the Churches of Rome and Perugia. The wise Solomon, last sovereign of the unified kingdom of Judah and Israel, in this symbolic context evokes an ancestral age, prosperous and happy; associated with the prophet are the statues of his father David, from whose line descends the putative father of Jesus; of the precursor of the Messiah, with the iconographic testimony of his martyrdom; and finally of Benedict and Maurus. The prophetic value of the figure of St Benedict is underscored also by the inscription that accompanies his statue: SANCTUS BENEDICTUS-HABENS SPIRITUM PROFEKIE.

In the scene to be seen at Perugia, Benedict, aware through divine prophecy that his return into the light was imminent, hands the Regula to his beloved disciple and ideally entrusts to him his spiritual inheritance. The venerable one, moreover, chooses France to inaugurate this new phase of Benedictine monasticism. In the Baptist and in the national saint, the Pannonian soldier and bishop Martin of Tours (316-397) – father of monasticism in Gaul – he venerated his chief models of inspiration in the ascetic life. Gregory the Great, indeed, in the Vita S. Benedecti recalls that the patriarch, at Cassino, upon the vestiges of the temple of Apollo, founded the oratory of St Martin of Tours and the chapel of St John the Baptist, where he chose his burial place.

Whoever conceived (one man or several) the iconographic programme of the Fontana Maggiore, then, in choosing to have Benedict depicted together with the prophets, meant to exalt his role as guarantor of a golden age in the history of the Ecclesiae Universalis. At the same time, in the eyes of the Perugian patrons, to represent the beginning of Benedictine history beyond the Alps was a possible homage to the French nation. Perugia, a Guelph commune, was a natural ally of the House of Anjou, and, as was the custom, to this pro-papal and pro-French line belonged the podestà and the captain of the people pro tempore in office during the year 1278: Matteo da Correggio (c. 1230-1290) and Ermanno da Sassoferrato (d. post 1285)[iii], immortalised by their portraits in the second register of the fountain. These relations between the city of the griffin and the royal house emerge with full clarity precisely in connection with the fountain’s building site when, in 1277, the commune asked Charles I of Anjou to authorise master Arnolfo di Cambio, engaged in the service of the king of Jerusalem and of Sicily, to travel to Perugia to adorn its emblematic monument[iv].

The iconographic programme of the middle basin of the Fontana Maggiore, after the allegorical and moralising figurative cycles of the lower basin, devoted chiefly to nature, to the history of humankind and to the liberal Arts, fully manifests its political physiognomy. The fountain and its sculptural decoration were conceived to symbolise Perugian identity and pride, representing the civic self-awareness of a flourishing present and a thousand-year-old past, and proclaiming the strategic alliances that sustained the political and cultural ambitions of this great commune.

In particular, during the building of the aqueduct and the fountain, the election of Giovanni Gaetano Orsini to the chair of St Peter (25 November 1277) must have lent further impetus to this enterprise and may perhaps have suggested to the patrons an adjustment of the iconographic programme. In this light, in the middle basin, we may think of the exaltation of the Ecclesia Romana; a natural theme for a Guelph city, which acquired further significance within the political design of the pontificate of Nicholas III (1277-1280), aimed at recovering the centrality of Rome.

Giovanni Gaetano Orsini, a traditional ally of the Angevins together with his family clan, became pope after spending thirty-three years wearing the galero. The dean, from 1261, was also the cardinal protector of the first Franciscan order (of the second, from 1263); the dealings, therefore, between his curia and Perugia and the other Umbrian lands must have been intense.

Among cardinal Orsini’s curiales was the Franciscan theologian and inquisitor Benvenuto da Orvieto[v]: bishop of Gubbio (1278-1295), nuncio of Nicholas III and the man responsible for collecting the tithes in the March of Ancona, in the Patrimony of St Peter, in the Duchy of Spoleto and in the Romagna. To the group sharing the purple of Sancti Nicolai in Carcere Tulliano belonged also Bartolomeo di Amelia (bishop of Grosseto, 1278-1291)[vi], to whom Nicholas III entrusted the fruitless mission to the court of Michael VIII Palaiologos at Constantinople, in order to heal the discord between the Western and Eastern Churches (1279); the Parisian pupil of Bonaventure of Bagnoregio and the saint’s successor as minister general of the Franciscans (1274-1279), Girolamo da Ascoli (Nicholas IV, 1288-1292), likewise a papal nuncio; and Bentivegna da Todi (bishop of Todi, 1276-1278; cardinal-bishop of Albano, 1278-1290)[vii], who was friend, chaplain and confessor to the wearer of the galero and of the tiara. For the friars Girolamo and Bentivegna, together with three of the pope’s kinsmen, the way to the cardinalate opened as well on 12 March 1278, created to reinforce the scanty College of Cardinals of Nicholas III.

Scholarship, with regard also to the history of Perugia, has investigated the steady and significant consolidation of the Franciscans within the municipal institutions during the second half of the thirteenth century, to the point of their becoming “fully a part or an instrument of those ruling elites to which, in the final analysis, they are homogeneous”[viii]. In particular, in view of their relations with the curia of Nicholas III, two Perugian friars stand out: Angelo, inquisitor and minister provincial of Umbria (1274-1280, 1292-1295), and Filippo (minister provincial of Tuscany, 1280-1282; bishop of Fiesole, 1282-1297)[ix]. The latter, noticed for his intellectual stature by the cardinal protector Rinaldo di Ienne, who wanted him in his curia, after his mentor was consecrated as Alexander IV (1254-1261), was sent by him to the Franciscan studium of Paris to take his doctorate under the magister cathedratus Bonaventure of Bagnoregio (1254-1257). Having obtained the title of lector, Filippo taught in various conventual schools before serving cardinal Orsini, of whose household he was a member, later becoming a papal nuncio (he also took part in the mission to Constantinople of 1279, led by Bartolomeo da Amelia).

Filippo da Perugia’s cursus studiorum and his Roman connections make him an interesting candidate for weighing his possible involvement in the definition of the Fountain’s iconographic programme. In this light, it is likely that the podestà and the captain of the people of Perugia were flanked by one or more learned advisers, since fra Bevignate da Cingoli, the deus ex machina of this extraordinary undertaking, must have been engaged principally in the essential work of coordinating the building phases and the workforce involved, together with the management of the available financial resources (in the dedicatory inscription carved on the lower cornice of the second basin, his role as deviser and director of the building project is made clear). The same office of overseer would see him at work in the grand building site of Orvieto cathedral (c. 1295-1310)[x].

The central role in the Perugian project of fra Bevignate, a monk of the Silvestrine congregation, has prompted the hypothesis that the Benedictine had a hand in the choice to have his patriarch carved among the figures of the middle basin, preferring him to depictions of other saints then equally popular: Francis of Assisi and Dominic of Guzmán above all. The absence of images of these two extraordinary figures of sanctity is to be ascribed, we believe – as argued above – to a precise communicative choice adopted by the theologian who defined the fountain’s iconographic programme, who expressly preferred to exalt the historical pre-eminence and centrality of St Benedict in the founding of a “new Church”. As has been established, it was precisely from the wellspring of Benedictine monasticism that the mendicant families too were born, protagonists of another ‘religious revolution’.

Fabio Marcelli

Notes

[i]The earliest documentary evidence of Perugian civic teaching for the studies of Law and the Liberal Arts dates to 21 September 1276, anticipating the bull Super specula issued by pope Clement V (8 September 1308), which raised the communal Athenaeum to the rank of Studium generalis.

[ii]For an essential overview: K. Hoffmann-Curtius, Das Programm der Fontana Maggiore in Perugia, Düsseldorf 1968; J. White, The reconstruction of Nicola Pisano’s Perugia fountain, in “Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes”, XXXIII (1970), pp. 70-83; C. Santini (ed.), Il linguaggio figurativo della Fontana Maggiore, Perugia 1996. On the history and civic role of this undertaking, within the framework of the broader urban renewal of the city’s platea magna : M.R. Silvestrelli, Le opere del Comune di Perugia, in Opera, carattere e ruolo delle fabbriche cittadine fino all’inizio dell’età moderna, Florence 1996, pp. 137-156; Id., “Super aquis habendis in civitate”. L’acquedotto di Montepacciano e la Fontana Maggiore di Perugia, Perugia 1996, pp. 73-161.

[iii] G. Montecchi, s.v. Correggio, Matteo da, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, 29, Rome 1983, pp. 462-464; P. Monacchia, s.v. Ermanno da Sassoferrato, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, 43, Rome 1993, pp. 212-213.

[iv]A.M. D’Achille, “de concedendo magistro Arnulfo de Florentia pro vestri fontis opere postulatis”. Ancora qualche considerazione sull’attività di Arnolfo a Perugia, in A.M. D’Achille, A. Iacobini, P.F. Pistilli (ed.), Domus sapienter staurata. Scritti di storia dell’arte per Marina Righetti, Cinisello Balsamo 2021, pp. 455-468. On 27 August 1277 (Perugia, Archivio di Stato, Consigli e riformanze, 5, 3, ff. 24r-24v) Arnolfo di Cambio was pressed to travel to Perugia to work on the Fontana Maggiore, the licence to make the journey having been obtained from Charles I of Anjou, from whom the Perugians had requested it. This first invitation probably went unheeded, and only in 1281 would he undertake the construction of the fountain in pede platee.

[v]D. Waley, s.v. Benvenuto da Orvieto, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, 8, Rome 1966, pp. 694-696.

[vi]V. De Donato, s.v. Bartolomeo da Amelia, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, 6, Rome 1964, pp. 684-685.

[vii]D. Waley, s.v. Bentivegna, Bentivegna, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, 8, Rome 1966, pp. 587-588.

[viii]Quoted from A.I. Galletti, Insediamento e primo sviluppo dei frati Minori a Perugia, in U. Nicolini (ed.), Francescanesimo e società cittadina: l’esempio di Perugia, Spoleto 1992, pp. 1-44: 18. On this subject, see also: A. Czortek, Frati Minori e comuni nell’Umbria del Duecento, in A. Musco (ed.), I Francescani e la politica, I, Palermo 2007, pp. 237-269.

[ix]A. Bartola, s.v. Filippo da Perugia, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, 47, Rome 1997, pp. 754-756.

[x]The name of fra Bevignate, who belonged to the Benedictine congregation founded on the Montefano of Fabriano by Saint Silvester Guzzolini (c. 1177 – 1267), is also linked to one of the most important Franciscan buildings of the thirteenth century in Umbria, the church of San Francesco at Gubbio.