An extraordinary masterpiece of medieval fresco has been rediscovered and restored in the Santa Maria della Scala Museum Complex in Siena. The Thebaid, a cycle of frescoes created by Lippo Vanni in the early 1340s, returns to public view on Friday, November 7th.
The frescoes had been whitewashed over centuries ago. The first signs that there was surviving painting underneath the whitewash emerged in 1999 restoration. Two years later, the removal of a false ceiling revealed large intact portions of the frescoes, albeit mostly covered in layers of whitewash. It took another 20 years for the complete uncovering and restoration of the surviving frescoes to begin.
The Thebaid is an epic poem by the 1st century Roman poet Statius that recounts the mythological civil wars of Thebes in several episodes. It wasn’t hugely popular in antiquity, but it was very influential in the literature of the Middle Ages. There are no mythological scenes or any references to the ancient epic in the fresco cycle, however. Like the poem, it is episodic in layout, but the Thebes it depicts is the one in the Egyptian desert where the early Christian hermits known as the Desert Fathers live lives of repentance, prayer, manual labor and ascetism.
It decorated the entrance hall to the headquarters of the Compagnia dei Disciplinati (“Company of the Disciplined”) religious confraternity in the cellar of the Spedale di Santa Maria della Scala, one of the oldest hospitals in Europe located in front of the Cathedral of Siena. The Compagnia dei Disciplinati was a lay brotherhood devoted to public charity, prayer and repentance through observance of strict rules and an austere lifestyle. They employed the flagellum, the whip, to scourge themselves while repenting their sins. The brothers mortified their flesh in the oratory, the room next door to the frescoed entrance hall. The examples of virtuous hermits and saints on the walls helped them prepare spiritually for their penitential self-harm.
The iconography was drawn from the “Lives of the Desert Fathers,” a late 4th century A.D. combination travelogue and hagiography that was translated from ancient Greek into the vernacular around 1330 by the Pisan friar Domenico Cavalca. The frescoes were painted barely a decade after the translation brought the ancient text to refreshed prominence in Tuscany.
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