“The pope plieth in an old palace of the bishops of this city [Orvieto], ruinous and decayed. . . . The place may well be called Urbs Vetus. No one would give it any other name. Cannot tell how the Pope should be described as at liberty here, where hunger, scarcity, bad lodgings, and ill air keep him as much confined as he was in Castel Angel. His Holiness could not deny to Master Gregory that captivity at Rome was better than liberty here.” (107)

This description of the papal residence in Orvieto written by Henry VIII’s representatives to the papal court in Orvieto, where Clement VII took refuge after the Sack of Rome in 1527, is one of the multitude of rich insights into the spaces and character of papal residences included in Pierre-Yves Le Pogam’s remarkable and monumental study of the history of papal palaces from 1254 to 1304. Begun as a doctoral thesis at Université Paris 1 in 2002, the project was developed while the author was at the École francaise de Rome in 2002–2003. An additional aspect of Le Pogam’s research concerning the organization of papal building projects and the workforce was published in another exemplary study on papal building sites: Les maitres d’oeuvre au service de la papauté dans la seconde moitié du XIIIe siècle (Rome: Collection de l’École française de Rome, vol. 337, 2004). These volumes in combination immensely enrich our knowledge of the design and construction of large building enterprises in thirteenth-century Italy, and not just papal ones.

The book under consideration here is divided into two parts. The first is largely focused on monuments and discusses eleven palaces, some of which have been well-studied and published previously (the Lateran, the Vatican, and Viterbo), while others, in spite of their historical importance and their architectural prominence in the cities in question, have remained largely unpublished (Orvieto, Anagni, Perugia, Rieti, Montefiascone, Soriano, and the papal residences of Sta. Sabina and Sta. Maria Maggiore in Rome). The latter group is the primary focus of the volume, although Le Pogam’s introductory chapter on the Lateran and Vatican palaces is also an immensely useful summary of the literature and the central questions regarding the various phases of construction and remodeling of these imposing structures.

Yet this book is much more than a scholarly catalogue of the monuments, for Le Pogam’s thoughtful, thorough, and immensely rich study of the buildings is not only embedded in an analysis of both the primary and secondary sources and the material facts of the monuments, but also includes a detailed and important discussion of the surviving programs of sculpture and painting. He concerns himself with the identification of the various parts and phases of each building complex as well as with issues of attribution, dating, restoration, and reconstruction. The extended discussions of the modern interventions on these structures is fundamental, for the palaces were heavily restored (reinterpreted?) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in particular the two best-known papal palaces in Viterbo and Orvieto. The squalid conditions described in 1527 are long gone from the sanitized spaces we see today.

Le Pogam based his list of monuments on the length of papal sojourns at each site. Yet the fact of the pope’s residence is not a simple matter; various officers of the papal court did not necessarily move with him, at least not in a timely fashion: Le Pogam notes that sometimes the papal chancellery lagged behind by at least a month.

One of the merits of this magisterial study is Le Pogam’s broad and generous review of the historiography of each palace, which includes and roams into other important issues in the field of medieval architecture, such as the role of well-known master masons. Among them is Arnolfo di Cambio, who has been associated with the famous loggia of the Lateran palace, an attribution that Le Pogam dismisses. His bibliographic introductions to each monument present the reader with a survey of the literature and previous scholarship on each site, summaries which are a useful contribution to the reader who is not a specialist on this topic. At the end of each chapter, Le Pogam includes an appendix with transcriptions of the relevant documents for each palace. Thus each chapter is constructed with the backdrop of the literature and history of the monument, framing the author’s contributions with elegance and authority.

Le Pogam’s discussion of the Sancta Sanctorum is a useful example. Although this part of the Lateran palace was recently well published after the completion of the restoration (Sancta Sanctorum, ed. C. Pietrangeli and A.-M. Romanini, Milan: Electa, 1995), Le Pogam’s detailed review of the excavations and historiography provide a broader context for this remarkable monument. In particular, he notes that even though Nicolas III rebuilt the structure, he did so while following Innocent III’s affirmation of the spiritual and hierarchical primacy of St. Peter as mater omnium ecclesiarum (a term that after Innocent III had designated the Lateran). Le Pogam makes a convincing argument for an attribution of the 1277–79 project to Cosmas (who, after all, signed his work in an inscription), and he affirms the view that the decoration of the chapel was not only a celebration of the pope Nicolas III, but also, through the imagery relating to Saint Peter, a recognition of the supremacy of the Vatican.

Although the first part of the volume is rich with new material, it is perhaps the second part of the book that is the most stimulating and innovative, for here the author expands into the ramifications of his subject. These extend from the details of the character of daily life in the papal court (who slept in the pope’s bedroom, for example) to a number of broader topics including the notions of “politique architectural,” the palace as a statement of authority, issues of public and private space, the location and function of the pope’s chambers and chapels, the urban context, and the architectural politics of the popes. In the process, the author gently and elegantly dismantles a number of scholarly tropes, including the oft-repeated formula in Italy that Cistercian masons were responsible for almost anything and everything in Italy that seems remotely “Gothic.” Indeed, one of the important elements of Le Pogam’s book is his insertion of these numerous palace projects into the context of local workshops and local building practice. This might seem logical to many of us (and is one of the central points of my own work on Angevin architecture in Naples), but in a field that has for decades been haunted by the myth of the ubiquitous Cistercian builder (not to mention Arnolfo di Cambio’s apparent and inexhaustible presence in every workshop), Le Pogam’s vigorous yet gentlemanly assertion of the primacy of the local building trade is a vital component.

De la cité de Dieu is full of fascinating and useful discussions of ancillary information. In the second half of the volume, for example (635–43), he discusses hagioscopes, the openings constructed through the thickness of a wall to permit a private and individual vision of the elevated host during Mass. Boniface VIII seems to have been among the first to incorporate such openings into the private spaces of his papal palaces and chapels, as is revealed in some of the accusations against him brought by Cardinal Pietro Colonna in a memorandum of 1306. Le Pogam develops this theme to explore the topic of private devotion as well as speculate on the development of optics and perspective in relation to distinct angles of vision.

Among the many deeply fascinating aspects of Le Pogam’s work is his insertion of the palaces into the complicated fabric of papal-communal relations in the thirteenth century. During his stays in various palaces, Saint Peter’s representative was often persona non grata, either in Rome or elsewhere: in 1234 people of Rome revolted against Gregory IX, who was forced to flee, and in his absence the Lateran palace was sacked. The pope in exile declared war on the people of Rome, and had all the family towers around the Lateran palace destroyed on his return. The famous loggia of the Benedictions was a statement of papal authority—a “victory cry” over the defeated Colonna family—after one of these violent confrontations. The squabbles and riots go on and on (for example in Orvieto in 1283), so that one is tempted to interpret the palaces as symbols of power and authority in a frequently embattled theatre of civic-papal relations. In this context, Le Pogam’s work is a splendid successor to Maureen Miller’s discussions of such tensions in The Bishop’s Palace: Architecture and Authority in Medieval Italy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000).

Le Pogam has written a magisterial volume, a splendid contribution to the study of Italian medieval architecture that will be a lasting contribution to the field. Its publication by the École française de Rome is a testament to a long tradition of major studies in Italian art and architecture that go back to the late nineteenth century and include fundamental studies from the “aggiornamento” to Émile Bertaux’s magisterial L’art dans l’Italie méridionale of 1903. Bravo: the French have done it again!