The Movement of History: Negotiating the Path to the Future in the Twelfth-Century Crypt Frescoes at Anagni Cathedral

This article studies the crypt frescoes underneath Anagni Cathedral in relation to medieval concepts of time and linear teleology. It argues that the frescoes are not part of one coherent painting campaign but were rather executed in two distinct campaigns in the course of the twelfth century. The first plan envisioned the typological juxtaposition of scenes from biblical and postbiblical history. By contrast, the second phase demonstrates a teleological understanding of time and history, one in which biblical, postbiblical, and future events are arranged in a linear progression toward the future. Fusing new and older images together, the artists working during this second phase organized the images so that they almost seamlessly progress from the biblical past all the way to the threshold of the eschatological events at the end of time. The images thus preserve the record of an active intellectual process of negotiation regarding the understanding of history. They sit at a critical historical juncture, marking the shift toward narrating history as a succession of causally related events, guided by linear teleology. While this article does not aim to identify any one author whose ideas lie behind the conception of such a teleological vision of history, it does place the paintings’ execution within the ideological setting of the middle and the second half of the twelfth century. In particular, Anselm of Havelberg and Joachim of Fiore, both of whom had close connections to the papacy, mobilized the idea that history moves along a predetermined path from the past to the future, outlined in the Book of Revelation. The article demonstrates the productive synopsis of historical and visual sources, all of which record the desire to engage with these novel ideas about time and history.