Site, seeing and salvation in fourteenth-century Avignon

This article explores anew the well-known frescoes by Simone Martini above the entrance to the Cathedral of Notre-Dame-des-Doms in Avignon. A new reading is facilitated in three ways: by considering the full range of possible iconographic and stylistic sources for these frescoes; by considering the content of the lost side-wall frescoes as well as the surviving frescoes; and by calling into question the methodologies and assumptions about influence and sources that have normally been brought to bear on the paintings. The whole ensemble is seen as a monument specific both to its time and its place, in which the patron, the Roman cardinal Jacopo Stefaneschi, expresses his hopes for salvation using the metaphors of vision and sight.