Il tempo sulla pietra

The representation of the months of the year has a long history, and while its origins are to be found in Antiquity, it is the Middle Ages that sees the subject’s fullest development. It was only in the late eleventh century, when sculpture became the preferred medium for the Church to promote great figurative programs whose goal was to present the faithful with the key to their salvation, that the months were included in the decoration of important sacred buildings, creating a dialogue with stories from the Old and New Testament, to illuminate the temporariness of human life. This book underlines the importance of sculpture as a mass medium for the diffusion of the cycles of the months in the Europe of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and to emphasize the richness of meaning they contain. In the merely descriptive appearance of seasonal activities that mark the passage of time, these images, corresponding astonishingly (which astonishingly correspond) to proverbs still in use today but whose original meanings have been lost in the mists of time, were capable of evoking a gamut of multiple associations. However, in this wide and polysemic scenario, there is still room for a new interpretation, which is based on both symbols and precepts and somehow tied, surprisingly, to the sudden climate change phenomenon defined by scholars as the Medieval Climactic Anomaly or Medieval Climate Optimum.