Nonantola 4 – L’abbazia e le sue chiese

Description

Introduction

This is the fourth volume of the series on Nonantola, the penultimate one planned. It is a volume that continues the project of gradually publishing the works that, over time, the Ca 'Foscari University has carried out in collaboration with the Municipality of Nonantola and in agreement with the Superintendence for Archaeological Heritage of Emilia Romagna.
A volume that combines new and recent works and pays off some old debt.
The new works essentially concern the church of San Silvestro, a pivotal monument of the Po Romanesque (if only for the splendid sculptured porch), which clearly bears the wounds of the time, although camouflaged by the restorations that have affected it. Work studied and carefully analyzed by almost all those who have dealt with medieval architecture and art in the past century; but a work that still speaks a difficult language in the monotonous brick equipment, in which the different construction phases alternate in a handkerchief of years. For this reason we thought, perhaps a little fideistically, that only a stratigraphic analysis of the elevations would have clarified all those problems, and there are still many, concerning its genesis and its evolution in the central centuries of the Middle Ages.
The church of San Silvestro had never been stratigraphically analyzed. Therefore the first of the researches published in this volume concerns precisely the analytical study of the elevations of the abbey church, at the time the subject of a degree thesis by Francesco Dall'Armi. This is followed by an article on re-uses from the Roman era, one on impromptu graffiti engraved on the apses (together with those of the church of San Michele Arcangelo), an old (unpublished) work of mine on detached ceramics and, finally, a brief account of the restorations on the church . Basically, a sort of synthetic 'summa' on the most representative building, perhaps also because it is the best preserved, of the ancient monastic complex. Unfortunately, many of the problems concerning this factory remained unsolved, also because its analysis, however careful and precise, was not able to reach those certainties, especially chronological, which have long represented the real sore point of the scientific debate. on the monument (very well contextualized in a concise final contribution by Mauro Librenti). In essence, the analytical decomposition of the monument gives us a more precise relative sequence of the activities, but it does not help us to clarify their chronology, if not perhaps for that part of the apse where the architectural ceramics, detached at the time, offer an important terminus ad quem towards the middle / second half of the XII century. A factory, however, which revealed a close sequence of activities between the 1117th and XNUMXth centuries (separated from the earthquake of XNUMX?), A crucial moment in the history of the monastery before its definitive decline.
The old debt, to which I was referring, instead concerns a better and more detailed edition of an excavation that towards the end of the 80s of the century I had the good fortune to follow in Nonantola. The excavation had revealed the remains of an early medieval church, the one that had been built by Abbot Theodoric during the period of his abbey. The sequence was published in a very concise form and above all dedicated to discussing the oldest church, in the following years there was no more opportunity, nor time, to recover and publish the rest as well. The opportunity to publish a volume expressly dedicated to the abbey of San Silvestro advised me to resume and, in the forms in which it is possible after so many years, to publish a less synthetic version of that excavation.
As usual, I am pleased to express all my thanks to the Municipal Administration of Nonantola, which for years has been our partner in this research, to the Superintendence for Archaeological Heritage of Emilia Romagna, which from the beginning has followed with attention and with availability our research, to the Archiepiscopal Curia of Modena and to the Direction of the Nonantolano Archives and Museum, for all the help and collaboration provided over the years; and, finally, to the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Modena, which also in this circumstance wanted to help us carry out our effort.
Sauro Gelichi, Venice, June 2013