NO OTHER medieval emperor was quite like Frederick II, and no medieval castle exercises so compelling a hold on the imagination as his Castel del Monte; the one extant document for its construction is of 1240. Castel del Monte on its hill is visible from afar. No traveller on the way to Bari or the south could have failed to see this, a gleam of white stone or, as the fall of light dictated, a dark silhouette brooding over the bare landscape. It still does.
Frederick II was the heir through his father to the imperial house of Hohenstaufen and through his mother of the Norman kingdom. He was crowned as Holy Roman Emperor in 1220. Ruthless and demanding, this stupor mundi – wonder of the world, as a contemporary chronicler described him – would have stood out in any age. His intellectual curiosity was matched by the sophistication of his taste. Castel del Monte was unlike any of its predecessors and indeed any of the numerous fortresses the emperor had willed into construction elsewhere. It is of octagonal plan with a central courtyard; at the angles are eight towers, false octagons in that their two inner faces do not exist.
The main entrance is on the east, a Gothic portal flanked by fluted pilasters with a pediment above, below a bipartite Gothic window. The sharp masonry is relieved by these enrichments, by the string-course that serves in visual terms to bind the towers to the central mass, by the postern of one façade and, on the others, a single window high on the ground floor, by the larger first-floor windows corresponding with that above the entrance, and by the numerous arrow slits.
The entrance leads to the first of eight soaring trapezoidal vaulted rooms on the ground floor. In the second of these is a door-case of deep-red breccia, the first evidence of what was evidently a lavish use of precious marbles in the castle. Before they were pillaged, the great rooms at Castel del Monte must have been among the richest secular apartments of the age. This second room leads into the courtyard, a noble space enriched by door-cases and window-frames, and not least by the blind arcade – in effect a trompe l’oeil loggia – of the upper storey. This is reached by stairways in three of the flanking towers. Here the rooms were yet more richly decorated. Acanthus abounds and ball leaf is found in two rooms; on the inner walls of three rooms were massive chimneypieces. Particularly memorable is the hexagonal vault above one of the stairways, which rests on brackets of crouching nudes.
In 1249, a year before Frederick II’s death, his natural daughter, Violante, was married at Castel del Monte. Later this served as the prison of her brother Manfred’s sons. The emperor clearly intended it for a very different purpose. Had he wanted to build a conventional fortress, he would have done so. The design of the entrance, and the use in some of the upper rooms of a technique akin to the Roman opus sectile, suggest that Frederick II – who was fully aware of the antiquity of his own title and also interested in classical texts – must have aspired to create a monument that would hold its own with those of ancient Rome. And in this, if not in his epic struggle with the papacy, he unquestionably succeeded.
Castel del Monte from the south-east.
