In the beginning of Trecento Pictoriality: Diagrammatic Painting in Late Medieval Italy, Karl Whittington invites us to step inside the Spanish Chapel, the chapter house of the Dominican friars of Santa Maria Novella in Florence. Through descriptive language and carefully chosen photographs, he transports us to this gem of a medieval building and an oasis of quiet in a bustling city. Dwarfed by the towering murals that Andrea di Buonaiuto painted there in 1365–67, we stand with Whittington in the rectangular chapel. Wall by wall, he leads us through the fresco program and draws our attention to the variety of pictorial modes that the artist used in one space. On the south wall are narrative scenes of the Life of Saint Peter Martyr; on the west wall a diagrammatic painting of the Triumph of Saint Thomas Aquinas; on the east wall the Via Veritatis, an allegory with both narrative and diagrammatic elements; and on the north wall the Calvary scenes that function as a devotional painting. Throughout the rest of the book, Whittington offers new ways for us to understand why, how, and to what effect these different visual modes were used in fourteenth-century Italian art, either alone or in dynamic combinations exemplified by the Spanish Chapel frescoes.   

The Spanish Chapel is not the most famous artwork of the Trecento (the Italian term used for the fourteenth century). Far from it. That honor instead goes to the Arena Chapel in Padua, a site so popular that it now needs timed tickets to limit its visitors. From 1303–05, Giotto lined that chapel’s interior with colorful frescoes of the Life of the Virgin and the Life and Passion of Christ, and those scenes filled with naturalism and emotions have justly earned the artist a reputation as one of the finest storytellers in the history of art. Grisaille allegories of Virtues and Vices complete Giotto’s program. The Arena Chapel has been the subject of many major books in the past two decade alone. Its murals and other examples of narrative and allegorical painting dominate our view of Trecento art, together with devotional altarpieces and icons.     

Whittington identifies the diagrammatic mode as another significant category of Trecento painting worthy of analysis. Employed in some of the Spanish Chapel frescoes but absent from the Arena Chapel, this mode has been previously studied monographically but never holistically across the entire century. The author arrived at this subject after having dedicated his doctoral dissertation and first book to a fourteenth-century Italian priest named Opicinus de Canistris, who left behind more than one hundred drawings, many of which take the form of fascinating diagrams. In this new book Whittington continues studying diagrams but changes his focus to monumental examples painted on walls and panels in public spaces. By foregrounding this underestimated category of Trecento art, he complicates our understanding of the period and shows it to be much more than just a transition from the icons of Byzantium to the narrative, perspectival paintings of the Early Renaissance.  

This is an ambitious and impressive book written as a thought experiment. Whittington positions it on the cutting edge of ideas. His bibliography is populated with publications dating mostly from the last thirty years and throughout the text he engages with, and builds upon, the work of some of the most original scholars of our time, among them Hans Belting, Lina Bolzoni, and Mary Carruthers. From Whitney Davis, his PhD advisor, Whittington adopts the theoretical concept of pictoriality, how a painting operates as a picture, and similarly applies it to case studies. Diagrams are a hot topic in art history, and Trecento Pictoriality joins other major new books dedicated to medieval examples of them, including most notably The Diagram as Paradigm: Cross-Cultural Studies (Harvard University Press, 2022), edited by Jeffrey Hamburger, David Roxburgh, and Linda Safran.

Whittington divides his study into nine chapters, four of which were published individually, at least in part, as articles or essays first. One quirk of how they are gathered here is that the chapter that explains how difficult it is simply to define what a diagram is and provides vital context specific to late medieval Italy appears not first but third. Some readers, therefore, might want to start with chapter three. Whittington’s case studies come from across Italy in settings that range from baptistries and cemeteries to town halls. The broad sweep is remarkable and unusual in Italian studies, which tend to be hyperspecialized. His comparative approach results in many fresh observations. He surprises us with his expansive application of the term diagrammatic to include such paintings as monumental crucifixes (chapter 2) and sacred scenes with radiant light beams (chapter 7). The author and publisher are to be commended for synchronizing the text and images and keeping the endnotes brief, which, combined with the author’s engaging style of prose and abundant color illustrations, make the argument easy to follow.

While art historians traditionally have sought to read images, Whittington advocates throughout his book for another way of approaching fourteenth-century Italian paintings that emphasizes imaginative viewing. Artists and patrons in this period employed various visual modes to create images that were not static but rather provided avenues for viewers to inhabit mentally a multitude of possible ideas. Trecento paintings thus held the capacity and potential to generate many different meanings for their audience. This was especially true and important for works of art subject to repeated viewings, as frescoes and panel paintings in public settings typically were. The Spanish Chapel frescoes, which confronted the medieval friars of Santa Maria Novella at least once a day, are a prime example. The murals activated viewing practices that enabled the friars to follow various pathways and engage with the imagery in such roles as witness, participant, teacher, student, preacher, guide, or devotee.

Chapter eight, focused on Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Allegory of Good and Bad Government, is the most intriguing of the entire book. These frescoes were painted in 1338–39 in the Sala dei Nove, the chamber in Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico where elected officials known as the Nine met daily. There is a vast literature on these paintings, yet their meaning still seems mysterious and elusive. Perhaps, Whittington posits, this is by design. He leans into the notion that the murals are “saturated with multivalence and ambiguity” (246). By placing the burden of interpretation on viewers, the paintings acted as prompts for the Nine to think about good and bad government, not just to observe it, and to spark debate among the council members. Applying his method to these frescoes, Whittington identifies how the diagrammatic mode and narrative are used in combination with each other and to what ends. He compares the hierarchical organization of the figures to medieval stemmata and shows how vignettes, such as the dancers in the peaceful city, also generated a multitude of ideas. He vividly describes how all this encouraged viewers to change the fresco cycle in their minds, “to play with it, edit it, pick it apart, and recombine it” (259). This represents a real breakthrough in our understanding of these important murals that will reshape the way art historians discuss them from now on.        

Given the great number of novel ideas the book puts forward, its conclusion might have been even stronger. Here, Whittington explores two more case studies and uses them to argue his bigger point, which is that monumental diagrammatic paintings were created in fourteenth-century Italy to serve as vehicles for authority in public spaces. Something that gets lost in the final analysis is that most of the author’s case studies come from mendicant contexts. Indeed, without the Augustinians, Dominicans, and Franciscans, he would have had a significantly slimmer book. He consistently refers to the mendicants as monastics, which is technically true, but which overlooks the disruption to traditional monasticism that the mendicants represented. Coming at the end of the Middle Ages, mendicant friars did not live cloistered in the countryside like monks but rather primarily in cities and towns, preaching and ministering to the laity. Many friars were university educated (and used books with diagrams). They created a tremendous demand for art, much of which was monumental, as part of their new way of life. Whittington’s book on diagrammatic painting gives abundant further proof of how innovative, sophisticated, and significant the mendicants were. In the conclusion, more credit for their contributions to the flourishing of this mode in Trecento art could have been given. Civic spaces were the other major context for these diagrammatic paintings, and additional examples of those might have been explored to provide a better balance between religious and secular art in Whittington’s case studies. Ultimately, the author shows that the audience for monumental diagrammatic paintings was groups of people, and that makes them fundamentally different from the private devotional paintings of the period.

Whittington calls Lorenzetti’s Allegory of Good and Bad Government a work of art “to sit and think with” (243). The same can be said of all the diagrammatic paintings in his compelling study. We owe it to him for demonstrating how rewarding that intellectual exercise was for medieval viewers and still can be for us today.