Treasuries, Invention, and the Teodelinda Chapel in Monza Open Access
Somenzi, Laura Maria (Spring 2020)
Abstract
In the sixth century, the Longobard queen, Teodelinda, founded and dedicated a Basilica to Saint John the Baptist in Monza, a town fifteen kilometers north of Milan. Starting in the year 1300 and proceeding over the course of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, the Basilica was entirely reconstructed, at which time Teodelinda’s body was exhumed, deposited in a stone chest and placed in the chapel dedicated to her memory where her death anniversary was celebrated each year through liturgical rites. This chapel was decorated between 1441 and 1446 by the Milanese Zavattari family workshop, and is the focus of this dissertation.
Although the architecture and its decorations were new, the Basilica had a store of treasures and relics that, during the Late Middle Ages, were associated with Teodelinda and her endowment. For Monza, Teodelinda was central: she was the grounds on which the city’s sacred past was built and the guarantor of its present civic and ecclesiastical status and privileges. Although she was never officially canonized, Teodelinda was locally venerated as a saint.
This dissertation considers how the Zavattari, in decorating the queen’s chapel, intersected, reworked, and dialogued with Teodelinda’s material and immaterial heritage. The dissertation argues that the relics and treasures donated by the queen were reimagined in the painted cycle of her life, and it analyses the structure of the paintings in relation to the devotional and liturgical ceremonies performed in the Basilica. The contention is that by bringing together the objects and history of the Basilica, set in relation to Teodelinda’s relics, the Zavattari’s paintings activate the presence of the queen in the very space that housed her body. Furthermore, it is argued that the Zavattari’s techniques for making large-scale and multi-media wall decorations are integral to the function of the chapel as a place where a sacred past might be made newly visible and tangible.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents.
Abstract
Acknowledgements
List of Figures
Introduction………………………………………...…………………………1
Chapter One. Monza, Teodelinda, and the Invention of Sacred Space……. 35
Chapter Two. San Giovanni in the Fifteenth Century…………..…………..67
Chapter Three. The Zavattari Workshop and the Teodolinda Chapel………89
Chapter Four. Treasury as Model and Metaphor……………………….….126
Conclusion…………………………………………………………………146
Bibliography……….……………………………………………..………..157
Illustrations…………..………………………………………………….…181
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