| The Chiostro Grande or Great Cloister of the Abbey of Monte Oliveto, a Benedictine Abbey, is decorated with a fresco cycle depicting the life of Saint Benedict who lived approximately between 480 and 547 C.E. This fresco cycle was painted by two Italian Renaissance artists, Luca Signorelli (c.1444-1523) and Giovanni Bazzi, called Il Sodoma (1477-1549). It is the most comprehensive fresco cycle of the life of Saint Benedict painted in Italy during the Renaissance period and it can be considered an artistic masterpiece and treasure of the Renaissance. In this thesis, I examine the distinct characteristics of the fresco cycle. I demonstrate that the painters of this fresco cycle, Luca Signorelli and Il Sodoma, were influenced by humanists of the period, and in particular, by Leon Battista Alberti's treatise, On Painting. In this writing, Alberti identifies the ideal painting and its composition. I show that Signorelli and Il Sodoma incorporate rhetorical theory as a model for painting. The fresco cycle was constructed using Albertian ideals of painting, and it was meant to perpetuate the Benedictine Rule as originally composed by Saint Benedict. The fresco cycle is an expression of idealism: an ideal spiritual way of life composed by ideal principles of painting communicated by Alberti in the mid-fifteenth century and painted by Signorelli and Il Sodoma in the late fifteenth century. A discussion of monasticism and the Benedictine observant reform movement is included. |
