Ars una. Il dialogo tra arti e tecniche nel trittico di Alba Fucens

The triptych of Alba Fucens provides a privileged viewpoint for investigating the relationships and exchanges that took place in the late Middle Ages between manuscript illumination and the other arts. Despite its small size, the work appears as an exceptionally complex machine, combining a variety of materials and techniques: painted wooden bas-relief, silver repoussé, filigrees with pearls, gems and semi-precious stones, small tempera paintings on gold leaf, and miniatures on parchment under thin plaques of rock crystal. In art-historical publications, the triptych has been the subject of diverging assessments. Many scholars, starting with P. Toesca, have considered it to be a product of 13th or 14th-century Venetian art imported ab antiquo into Abruzzo. Others have suggested it to be either a work of Abruzzese or Umbro-Abruzzese origin dating back to the 13th or 14th century (É. Bertaux, F. Hermanin, E.B. Garrison) or an artefact of a Campanian workshop of the first half of the 14th century (A. Lipinsky). The line of 'autochthonous' interpretation has recently been revived by A. Tomei, who has proposed an attribution to "a yet-to-be-identified center of Angevin Abruzzo", invoking comparisons with both wooden sculpture and illumination in the region in the mid-14th century. In this paper, the vexed question is re-examined through stylistic, technical, and iconographic observations that point to the work’s production in a Venetian workshop in the 1270s. First of all, the close formal links of some evangelical scenes of Alba Fucens with those appearing in a Venetian artefact of the same period, namely the diptych of Chilandar on Mount Athos, point in this direction. Also from Venice is a technical detail of the triptych: the partial finishing of the outlines of the figures and some details of the scenes are made of mordant gilded relief lines. This is a procedure, whose visual effect seems to be inspired by the so-called enameled glass produced in the Venetian lagoon in the 13th and 14th centuries. The attribution to Venice is further supported by an iconographic detail that has so far gone unnoticed: the tiny scene under crystal with Noah releasing the dove from the ark, placed to the left above the Adoration of the Magi. This image follows closely the ancient prototype of the early Byzantine codex of the Cotton Genesis, the model that inspired (directly or indirectly) the 13th-century mosaicists who worked in St. Mark’s atrium. The shape of the ark in the triptych (a parallelepiped with a shallow roof) is in fact the same as the one in the miniatures of the famous manuscript and which we can see reproduced on a large scale on the vaults of St. Mark’s Basilica.