The Spanish Chapel was commissioned as a burial chapel for the Guidalotti family, but also served as the chapter house for the Dominican community, housed at Santa Maria Novella.  All four walls and the ceiling were frescoed with scenes related to the power and authority of the Dominican Order. Probably few people outside of the Order saw these images, which tie religious leaders to secular intellectual concerns.

The Triumph of St. Thomas shows the premier Dominican saint flanked by virtues and exemplars of divine inspiration at the top.  One of the central emphases of the Dominican Order was education, so the lower part of the fresco illustrates aspects of knowledge (indeed, the whole fresco is sometimes called Christian Learning).  Fourteen enthroned female figures personify concepts within the categories of Theology and the Liberal Arts (i.e., Ethics, Dogma, Arithmetic, Rhetoric).  At the foot of each personification is an historical personage who represents that area of study.  Thus, in the detail at lower right, Pythagoras sits at the feet of Arithmetic, Euclid is before Geometry, and Cicero before Rhetoric.(9) The figures appear like actors on a stage, in a single unified (if very shallow) space, on display for our benefit.  They are not particularly individualized, and have a limited appearance of physical mass.

The cycle comprises three Florentine poets (Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio), three leaders of the Florentine army (Pippo Spano, Farinata degli Uberti, and Niccolò Acciauoli), and three women from mythology and the Bible (the Cumaean sibyl, Esther, and Tomyris).  The patron, Filippo Carducci, was an important Florentine official and the chauvinistic bent of the iconography surely reflects his political interests and his desire to demonstrate the glory of Florence. These were private secular images, viewed only by guests of the patron.(10)

The figures are arranged in a row in niches formed by illusionistic piers under a painted lintel.  There is no implication of space behind them that would suggest they exist in a coherent three-dimensional world.  Hence they appear almost as colored statues, set across the wall for the viewer to observe.  The figures do, however, appear to look and gesture toward each other across the piers, within our space, so there is some element of lifelikeness to them.  Each is carefully individualized to suggest a portrait-like quality.

The Arte del Cambio was one of the central institutions in the governance of Renaissance Perugia.  The guild hall was acquired in 1441 and the decoration of the Audience Hall was undertaken in stages over the last third of the fifteenth century.  

The complex program is influenced by a number of different pictorial traditions.  Rather than a single fresco cycle, it consists of a variety of symbolic and narrative images that relate to the notion of virtue in governance.  On the ceiling are the Seven Planetary Gods, and the Twelve Zodiac Signs, while the wall frescoes represent the Four Cardinal Virtues with Twelve Famous Men from Antiquity, Prophets and Sibyls, The Adoration, and The Transfiguration. The frescoes were public (although it is not clear how many people had general access to the sala); they link religious beliefs to intellectual history and common wisdom as a model for good rule.

The Famous Men stand before a deep landscape with personifications of virtues and admonitory inscriptions floating above their heads.  Although they are rendered naturalistically -- the space is believable; forms are illuminated from a single direction; figures have weight, individuality, and substance -- they carry no psychic realism.  That is, there is no sense of them actually "being together" at a moment in time (unlike Castagno's figures, who appear to converse); they simply are on display.  The display character is reinforced by an identifying inscription below each figure.

Prudence, above;
Fabius Maximus, Socrates, & Numa Pomphilius