Time pursued by a Bear: Ursa Major and stellar time-telling in the Paduan Salone
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2017-05-16

This paper focuses on the images of four bears found along the top register of the fresco scheme of the first-floor Salone of the Palazzo della Ragione, Padua, Italy. To ask why bears appear in this register is to question how bears were viewed in the medieval period. Previous scholars have described these Salone images as representing qualities, such as ‘wicked and hot tempered’. Nevertheless, as my previous research has shown (Gunzburg 2013), these top register images are reflective of the constellations that dictated the seasons and the cycle of the year as seen over Padua c.1309. Thus a more likely candidate is Ursa Major, the Great Bear. This presentation creates four sky maps at midnight, which was relevant for time telling by the sky at this time (Vincent and Chandler 1969: 375-376). The sky maps are created for Padua specifically for when the sun ingressed into the zodiac signs of Taurus, Leo, Scorpio, and Aquarius. They reveal the changing rotational pattern of Ursa Major from ‘hibernation’ to descent. These sky maps are then connected with the position of the bears in the Salone fresco scheme. This concept of the constellation of the Great Bear Ursa Major in its four positions as seasonal markers in the sky sits within the philosophy of time telling by the stars (Hannah 2009:14). Finally, this paper argues that these older time-telling strategies (Reeves 1916: 441; McCluskey 1990: 14; McCluskey 1998: 111) not only had practical applicability but that such knowledge-practice continued across cultures and time. Their appearance on the walls of the Salone in the ‘elite’ visual language of this fourteenth-century Paduan fresco offers evidence for that practice continuing into the late medieval era.
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Darrelyn Gunzburg, University of Wales Trinity Saint David