Tommaso Castaldi profile picture

Programme:

History of Art - MPhil/PhD/MSc by Research

Start date:

Sep-18

Mode of study:

Part time

Research title:

Virtues and Vices. Communal art and secular art in Italy in the Late Middle Ages (1300-1450)

Research

My Ph.D. dissertation investigates the depiction of the Virtues and Vices in secular art of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in Central Italy, especially in the Umbrian towns. The research starts from a critical re-examination of the portal of the Palazzo de’ Priori of Perugia, completed in 1326 under the supervision of Ambrogio Maitani. Hitherto published studies on the portal have limited investigation to its style and to an overall identification of the figures in the reliefs; in-depth examination of the figures, their relationship, and of the historical and iconographic links between the portal’s frieze and the heraldic cycle in the lunette are still missing. The latter aspects are being tackled in my project, together with an examination of the role that memory, led by the preachers’ words, had in constructing inner images in the viewer, aiming to impress in the audience an ethical meaning conveyed by the figures, which played an education role. 

The second step of my research involves the examination of how the subject of the Virtues and Vices is appropriated, between the late Trecento and the first half of the fifteenth century, by secular patrons for their painted rooms. What did the personified allegories of Virtues and Vices meant to an early Renaissance man to be painted in his houses’ Staterooms? What did these paintings mean to the audience since they were accessible by a larger audience than the house’s inhabitants? The second case study of my dissertation was launched by the study of four detached Virtues now in the Cagnola Collection at Gazzada Schianno (Varese), which provenance is from the Palazzo Beni of Gubbio. My research highlighted the survival of other figures in the Stateroom of the palace of Gubbio, now used as residential and closed to the public, whereas other Virtues and Vices could be still hidden behind the whitewash. I reconstructed, even through virtual means, the 1424 painted cycle by Ottaviano Nelli, and examined the history of patronage by identifying the paintings’ patron in count Luca Beni della Serra, an eminent Statesman in Gubbio, in the years when it was the second city of the Montefeltro Dutchy. Beyond the news of the reconstruction of the history of the palace and of its painted cycle, the case study aims to investigate in what form and to what extent the allegorised figures of the Virtues and Vices were chosen as the subject of a painted room in the early Renaissance, thus entailing discussion about private and public art.