Antelami’s Cycle of Months in the Baptistery of Parma

The year started in March, together with its zodiac sign, Aries; and it should be remembered that March also begins the similar Cycle of Months on the archivolt of the central portal of the nearby Cathedral.

The first season than is Spring, above the main altar, with features not unlike those of the Queen of Saba on the exterior, as she holds the cloak that the March wind seems to lift. March, blowing into a horn and with curly hair, is the incarnation of whirlwinds; its zodiac sign is carved underneath.

April, wearing a crown, holds the sceptre like a king, and in the other a flower, with a gesture that recalls that of the nearby Spring sculpture (will the fruit be dates or, rather, olives in a reference to the Easter period?). In a frontal position (which in the Cycle it shares only with Winter and January), it shows us a figure from an upper rank of society, rather than humble peasants at work: almost as if nature’s months of rest were not quite allowed to the working classes, and not quite suitable for symbolizing the doctrinal equation between work and redemption so much in evidence elsewhere.

May is a knight on a horse, holding the sickle he will use to cut fodder for his horse, during the journey that will take him to the “field of May.”[1] A miniature of Sachsenspiegel (a legal text of the first half of the 13th century), explains the role of that tool: people were allowed to cut other people’s wheat for one’s one horse as far as the length of one step from the border of the roadside. Summer, which is missing, should have been next.

In June, a farmer cuts the wheat; in July a youth threshes the wheat in the courtyard by having horses trample on it (this technique – replacing workers beating piles of wheat with a flail – was really in existence, but as far as its iconographical use is concerned, it was an innovation by Antelami, which others picked up in their sculptures of the Months in the cathedrals of Cremona and Ferrara).

In August the grape harvest starts: a youth closes the barrel’s staves in preparation for the wine of Autumn (a season that is also missing). In September, a man with his head covered with a cap picks up the bunches of grapes and throws them in the vat, immediately above the sign of Libra; the year grows old and October is a dignified elderly man that scatters seeds from his cloak; the sign of Scorpio stands out on the oak tree in the background (this is the time of year when pigs look for acorns).

November is again a mature man, this time digging turnips out of the ground, with Sagittarius over his head, the symbol of the zodiac sign and an allusion to hunting.

Winter follows, an old man with a long beard, half dressed and half naked to signify the connection between sleep and the reawakening of nature (there is also ambiguity in the two faces of January, marking the end and the beginning of the cycle).

In December a farmer stocks up on wood. In February another one is breaking up hard clods with a spade, and above him two fish, symbol of the zodiac sign, also refer to fishing.

The “lofty” location of the Cycle of Months seems to me to be of particular significance now that the content of the dome as a celestial Jerusalem[2] has been highlighted: at the end of the Apocalypse, the holy city is transformed into the site of the everlasting kingdom and holy life in very evocative terms. The symbols of the new Eden are “the river of the water of life [ … ] coming from the throne of God and of the Lamb” and “the tree of life bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month [ … ] there shall be no more curse” (22.1-3). That water in the Baptistery is clearly the blessing of baptism, and viewing Antelami’s sculptures immediately under the celestial Jerusalem we can understand them as the splendid crown of fruit mentioned in the biblical text.

Almost as if the work in the fields had gone back to the happy conditions it used to have in a corner of the earthly paradise, when God led Adam there ut operaretur et custodiret illum (so that he might cultivate it and look after it) (Gen., 2.15) – here in Parma, that labour loses the punitive connotations associated with God’s imposition of work on Adam after the fall.

[1] The ancient custom of the Field of March, the traditional gathering of the Frankish army, was moved to May in 755, probably because by then the number of knights attending required more fodder than was available in March: mutaverunt Martis campum in mense maio (they changed the Field of March to the month of May): L. White, Tecnica e società nel Medioevo, Il Saggiatore, Milan, 1964, pp. 53 and ff.

 

[2] A. BIANCHI, Il ciclo pittorico del Battistero di Parma: la cupola, Abramo, Giovanni Battista, i Profeti, la Gerusalemme celeste, in “Felix Ravenna” (1986), Edizioni del Girasole, Ravenna 1987.