- Ingrid D. Rowland –
the city’s Egyptian roots. It had been founded as an Egyptian colony by Osiris and his
nephew Italus Hercules with the name “Biturgion,” an ancient title still echoed in the
name of the little river, the Urcionio, that divided Viterbo in two until the 1930s.
Magister Giovanni’s foundation myth may have been inspired in part by a tomb on
the high altar of his own convent of Santa Maria in Gradi, adorned with a beautiful
marble sphinx, signed and dated by the artist, Master Pasquale of Rome, in 1286 (Fig.
61.4). Several ancient Egyptian artifacts were on public display in thirteenth-century
Rome, and Master Pasquale’s fi gure is only one of several thirteenth-century sphinxes
sculpted in a consciously antique style to decorate churches in the Eternal City and its
environs. For many fi fteenth-century scholars, artists, and architects, moreover, twelfth-
and thirteenth-century works in the classical style were as important for inspiring their
own designs as objects and monuments created a millennium earlier – in effect, these
medieval, Romanesque works “counted” as classical antiquities.^11
This Renaissance borrowing of Romanesque motifs stemmed from a certain broad-
mindedness rather than ignorance about the past. The basic principles of classical design
had not changed signifi cantly before or after the advent of the Christian era; harmony,
proportion, solid construction and human scale could be interpreted in various ways,
but certain basic ideas about comfort and beauty provided working principles as durable
as the law of gravity. Furthermore, in many ways Italian cities like Rome and Florence
experienced a genuine classical revival in the late Middle Ages, with new urban layouts
featuring long colonnaded streets, elaborately carved classical cornices, capitals, and
friezes, statues and relief sculptures.^12 Thus Master Pasquale’s crouching Sphinx may have
dated from 1286, but the civilization it symbolized was older than Moses, and that fact
must have been as clear in the late-thirteenth century to Master Pasquale and his patron
Pietro di Vico as it was to Magister Giovanni two centuries later.
Very little information about Giovanni Nanni’s public lectures in Viterbo survives,
and some of what has survived is highly unfl attering. But the friar also produced a short
written history of Viterbo in 1491, a manuscript pamphlet dedicated to a local baron,
Ranuccio Farnese, whose family kept a palazzo on the same hill as Viterbo’s cathedral
of San Lorenzo, incorporating an ancient Etruscan wall (still visible) and overlooking
Figure 61.4 Master Pasquale of Rome, Sphinx, signed and dated 1286, from the tomb monument
to Giovanni Di Vico, Prefect of Rome, formerly in the church of Santa Maria in Gradi, Viterbo
(destroyed during the Second World War by Allied bombs, 1944). Museo Civico, Viterbo.
Photograph: Museo Civico, Viterbo.