Broadly speaking, both the sciences and archaeological fieldwork are often fueled by the search for discoveries that provide new, inescapable points of reference. By contrast, the canonical narrative of art history isn’t designed to be reshaped periodically by fresh discoveries. Instead, classic major monuments continue to delineate the canonical narrative, originally chosen to best represent the standard model for the development of medieval art and architecture. Over the past several decades a variety of thematic studies have been incorporated to reframe such narratives, adding topics such as patronage, labor, use, materiality, and sensory studies. These new contexts have largely nuanced how major canonical monuments are read rather than necessarily adjusting the canonical narrative itself. As a result, the currently accepted narrative of medieval art history combines novel historical insights into an archaic and often problematic canon, unintentionally perpetuating some of those biases. Alison Locke Perchuk’s book The Medieval Monastery of Saint Elijah: A History in Paint and Stone reverses this fundamental problem by investigating a new noncanonical, marginal building and closely analyzing its material/visual fabric in order to address what themes and ideas were relevant to its historical patrons and audiences. In this way, Perchuk’s conclusions offer substantial waypoints for how the canon of medieval art history could be reframed based on the intellectual world of its makers rather than nineteenth-century historians. The Monastery of Saint Elijah (built in northern Lazio ca. 1122–26 CE) provides an eloquent historical voice for what was considered important in the design of twelfth-century art and architecture. By beginning from an ensemble with a relatively small historiographic footprint, Perchuk magnificently foregrounds the period’s historical issues and contexts raised by the corpus of Saint Elijah rather than the presuppositions of canonical narratives or thematic expectations. The result is a compelling contribution to medieval art history, showcasing how one complex monument activated a variety of thematic and interpretative approaches rooted in medieval culture.

In The Medieval Monastery of Saint Elijah, Perchuk examines how fundamental patterns of medieval thought informed the design and execution of a monastic visual complex. As Perchuk states in her introduction, the monograph’s method is rooted in historical anthropology and visual archeology, which builds across seven chapters through close formal reading of the art and architecture through the sensory and intellectual frames of reference available to its twelfth-century builders and residents. While considering art history as a form of theological exegesis is a key component of Perchuk’s methodological approach, she doesn’t narrowly apply this interpretive framework. Perchuk routinely places such exegetical analyses amidst other forms of historically grounded analysis, drawing from theologians, folk culture, and secular historical sources, all of which powerfully combine to reinforce her conclusions. The result is a network of medieval associative thought that frames and activates the monastery down to its smallest details, allowing us as modern viewers to appreciate the epistemological totality of Saint Elijah, which is quite fundamentally different from our own (canonical) expectations.

The introduction and chapter one hinge on questioning the historical layers of the monastic complex. The introduction accomplishes this task by considering how one approaches and understands historical difference methodologically (as discussed above), while chapter one addresses the physical fabric of Saint Elijah. Perchuk peels back the various early modern renovations of the church to reveal which material elements are reconstruction and which are twelfth century, clearly identifying the physical remains that will provide the basis for her subsequent analyses.

Chapters two and three shift to considerations of the various ways in which the monastery used art and architecture to connect the monks with the golden age of Italian monasticism, the sixth century as described by Pope Gregory the Great (reigned 590–604 CE) and associated with Saint Anastasius (mid-sixth century CE), the legendary founder of the monastery. The memory of Anastasius permeated the twelfth-century rebuilding of Sant’Elia by Abbot Bovo (fl. 1100–1126 CE), influencing the daily life of the monastery through the altar of Anastasius and its decoration in the church’s south transept. Chapter three turns to the medieval materiality of memory at Saint Elijah, demonstrating how Bovo deployed early medieval sculpture on the façade and frescoes in the crypt to erase the temporal distance from the world of Anastasius. Such use of material typologies was accompanied by allegories of salvation and apotropaic functions, particularly through the use of interlace carving as a materially efficacious defense against both envy and the devil as the envious one. The eye of envy (often associated in medieval theology with the Devil) becomes ensnared, “trapped in the unsolvable interlace and so is unable to render harm,” (166).

Chapter four considers the fresco cycle in the transept depicting Elijah and other Old Testament figures. The Old Testament prophet Elijah is an unusual subject in medieval painting. Perchuk sets Elijah in the context of early Christian and golden age monastic writings which establish him as one of the exegetical models for monks as well as a paragon of prayer. Understood through these lenses, Elijah becomes a model for how contemporary twelfth-century monks should live their lives, advocating for righteous orthodoxy and Christianity as the True Israel, fulfilling the promise of the Old Testament covenant. As such, the Elijah cycle neatly exemplifies how medieval thought connected a figure or trope with a moral principle that guided mental habits. Set in parallel with Anastasius at opposite ends of the transept, the church of Sant’Elia collapsed the historical times of Elijah, Anastasius, and Abbot Bovo down to the contemporary moment of viewership, actively shaping the inner and outer lives of the medieval faithful.

Chapters five and six address the apocalypse fresco cycle of Saint Elijah. As Perchuk demonstrates, Saint John’s eschatological vision closes the circle of prophesy and monastic striving at Saint Elijah, presenting a vision of Heaven reached through the church’s liturgy, intertwining with the ceaseless liturgy of Heaven. Rooted in the celestial liturgy described in Revelation chapter four, where the four tetramorphs of the Evangelists and the twenty-four Elders of the Apocalypse offer eternal praise to God, the liturgy performed by monks in the church was both modeled on and contributed to the liturgy of Heaven. Further, the cycle emphasizes apocalypse as an allegory of war against heresies, both within and outside the church. For medieval thinkers and views, the images affirmed monastic obedience as spiritual warfare leading to personal salvation but also tied into the monastery’s role as a bastion of righteousness against heresy leading to general salvation.

In chapter seven, Perchuk compellingly addresses the wider socio-political context of the monastery through a consideration of papal politics and ecclesiology. The placement of a Traditio Legis fresco in the church apse depicting Christ handing a scroll of law to St Peter naturally linked the monastery with the fresco’s model in the apse of Saint Peter’s in Rome. Further, the Traditio Legis evoked the source of supreme papal authority from Christ amidst the Gregorian Reform (ca. 1050–1150 CE) and the Investiture Controversy dispute with the German emperors (1075–1122 CE). Perchuk deepens the significance of such links, reframing the Traditio Legis as a theophanic vision of the apocalyptic prophesy of Isaiah, transforming the altar into a mystical altar of Heaven linking the salvation of all righteous souls to those of the congregants within the church. Combined with the romanitas or roman-ness of the architecture as the visual language of the pope’s legitimacy, Perchuk argues that the monastery was an emplacement of contemporary papal authority along the northern border of papal territory facing imperial territory of southern Tuscany to the north.

In The Medieval Monastery of Saint Elijah: A History in Paint and Stone, Alison Perchuk convincingly demonstrates the complexity of the multivocal program of the monastic church of Sant’Elia. The disposition of the imagery addresses both the resident monks and visiting laity in their different spaces within the church. Old Testament and apocalypse imagery dominate the transept for the monks. Christ, the saints in Paradise, and the Virgin Enthroned center the apse for the laity in the nave laying out the basic tenets of Christian belief. Perchuk’s analysis doesn’t merely explain what the church’s paintings mean. Rather, her work reveals the mental world(s) that structured how the patrons, artists, and congregants understood themselves through the art and architecture of the monastic church. The church wasn’t simply a series of paintings on masonry but it was a highly complex, multifocal, and multisensory articulation of the relationship between God and humanity. Herein lies Perchuk’s methodological contribution, which shifts the grounds of analysis to medieval epistemologies and forms of knowledge. While this is not per se a radical shift in method, it is neither traditional iconographic nor contextual analysis. Rather, the richness and variety of historical structures of thought Perchuk brings to light through all the facets of one monument result in a fundamentally medieval investigation of art and architecture which demonstrates by example how we might begin to rethink the bases for the canon of medieval art.

This monograph should be read by art historians interested in medieval art, the epistemology of art, and the historical anthropology of art. It is clear and well-written, skillfully blends too wide a variety of topics and methods to be summarized in a single review, and is beautifully published by Brepols. One of my few criticisms of the book is that I would have preferred a plan of the church which included a reconstruction of the liturgical furnishings for the monks, which were discussed but not illustrated. Such is a small quibble for so substantive and compelling a work, which should become a new benchmark for medieval art history.