DRIVING to Pomposa on the main road from Chioggia to Ravenna, it is at first almost impossible to believe that the area was once a wilderness. But even now, particularly when approaching from the south, as the prodigious brick campanile rises above the poplars that now flourish on reclaimed land, one has a sense that the great Benedictine monastery was indeed a place apart. Apparently founded in the seventh century although not recorded until the ninth, Pomposa flourished in the eleventh century and became a notable centre of intellectual life. The abbots exercised temporal power over a considerable area from the eleventh-century Palazzo della Ragione, altered in 1396, opposite the monastery, which now serves as the ticket office. Decline began to set in during the thirteenth century; the area became unhealthy and the last monks left in the sixteenth century. The buildings were abandoned to agricultural use and only restored in the late nineteenth century.
To the left of the church is the campanile, in nine sections and forty-eight metres high, which was under construction in 1063. The brickwork is relieved by marble and by friezes, also in brick, and most unusually by circular Fatimid plaques, presumably imported from Cairo. The relationship of the openings of the upper levels is particularly happy. The body of the church, dedicated to the Virgin, was completed in the ninth century, but subsequently extended westwards by two bays, to which the atrium was added before 1026 when the building was reconsecrated. The front is richly decorated, and the frescoes of the nave constitute the most extensive extant scheme of the kind of the mid-fourteenth-century school of Bologna. The Last Judgement is shown on the entrance wall, and scenes from the Old and New Testaments and the Apocalypse in three tiers above the lateral arcades. The imaginative detail of the Apocalypse scenes is particularly striking. The apse of the raised presbytery was frescoed in 1352 by the most winning and sinuous of the Bolognese of the time, Vitale da Bologna, with Christ in Majesty above representations of the Evangelists, the Doctors of the Church and the Life of Saint Eustace.
To the south of the church is a large court, with the chapter house on the east side with frescoes of the Crucifixion, of saints and of prophets by a painter strongly influenced by Giotto, whose work was familiar to the emergent painters of the city of Rimini further down the coast. One of the noblest, Pietro da Rimini, was called in, about 1318, to supply three murals for the refectory on the south side of the courtyard: the Madonna with Saints between the Last Supper and the Miracle of San Guido degli Strambiati. Because so much has been lost at Rimini itself, these rank with Pietro’s cycle in the Cappellone di San Niccolò at Tolentino among the most ambitious extant schemes of what was, if only rather briefly, a significant local school. Distinguished as the murals are, it is less for these than for the scale of the complex, and the way this rises up from the inexorable level expanse of the plain as it nears the coast, that Pomposa is most memorable.
Abbazia, façade, detail of a window, and the Campanile.
