Exploring medieval travel along Italy's pilgrimage routes

By PATRICIA DONOVAN
News Services Editor

The author is Dorothy F. Glass, professor of art history at UB and a distinguished historian of the Italian art of Europe's Middle Ages.

The book is the first study of several of Tuscany's most important and richly evocative church portals. Their complex religious and secular iconography is interpreted by Glass as a depiction of events and places along medieval Italy's pilgrimage routes to Rome.

"Portal" is the name given to the whole architectural composition surrounding and including the doorways and porches of a church. Its statuary and often elaborate and multi-leveled friezes are rife with encrypted information about the life and times of the period and region in which and for which it was created.

Glass focuses on the activities and personages represented on nine important 12th-century portals from churches located in and around the cities of Pisa, Lucca and Pistoia-sites at the nexus of medieval trade, travel and pilgrimage. She drove 12,000 miles in Italy and France during two summers to do research for the book.

These portals are all in situ except one from the church of S. Leonardo al Frigido, which is installed in the Cloisters museum of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Glass spent the 1991-93 academic years studying the S. Leonardo portal at the Cloisters as the museum's Jane and Morgan Whitney Senior Research Fellow.

The material she interpreted, Glass said, can be seen as a series of stories, meditations, warnings and news items addressed to many audiences at once, particularly to local citizens, crusaders and pilgrims. Its imagery owes much to the artists' knowledge of the history and politics of that time and of medieval theater, trade routes, relics and pagan antiquity, all of which found voice in church portals.

The new book is important to art historians like Professor Deborah Kahn of Boston University. A scholar of Romanesque friezes, she called Glass' interpretations "entirely new" and noted that her examination of little-known and scantily-published materials has turned up what Kahn called "information of utmost interest and importance."

It is important because although pilgrimages and crusades were endemic to medieval Europe, until now only pilgrim roads through France have been traced.

Glass explained that this is because the study of medieval art began in France early in the early 19th century and the first major publications on pilgrimage routes were written in French about the French routes. These appeared around 1934-35 and have continued to interest historians. In Italy, most art historians have focused their attention instead on the country's rich resources from the Classical and Renaissance periods.

Jeroslav Folda of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a noted historian of 12th-century art, called "Portals, Pilgrimage, and Crusade in Western Tuscany" one of the best art history books he has read in 10 years, noting that Glass has opened the way for future research in art history.

Glass has received a number of major fellowships and grants during her career, including the SUNY Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching and fellowships from the Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies and the American Council of Learned Societies. In 1985, she received the Rome Prize, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, from the American Academy in Rome and this spring was the Erna Tilley Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Puget Sound, Wash.

A 1964 graduate of Vassar College, Glass received a doctorate from The Johns Hopkins University. She has been a member of the UB faculty since 1974 and has taught and lectured at universities throughout the United States and Canada.

Glass is the author of several books including "Romanesque Sculpture in Campania: Patrons, Programs and Styles" and "Studies on Cosmatesque Pavements." She is a former consulting editor for "The Dictionary of Art," a 28-volume edition published by Macmillan and by Grove's Dictionaries and in 1984 and 1988 was a panelist for the National Endowment for the Humanities. She has also been a reader for several journals including Medieval Studies, Gesta and Art Bulletin.