1 Paola Zancani Montuoro

1 Paola Zancani Montuoro (1901 - 1987) by Licia Vlad Borrelli Before the unification of Italy, Naples had been the great capital of a kingdom and, up to the end of the nineteenth-century, it was considered the second most important city in Europe after Paris. The signs of this ancient prestige were still visible in the first decades of this century. A pleasure-seeking aristocracy occupied its splendid palaces with Spanish-like splendour, while an enlightened bourgeoisie produced an independent culture and established relationships with the most advanced intellectual movements north of the Alps. Benedetto Croce united the tradition of a Neapolitan philosophical school that was open to the lesson of Hegel with his “philosophy of the spirit.” Generations of young scholars would nourish themselves from his teachings and his home would become a meeting place for free spirits during the Fascist era. At the same time, brilliant journalists endowed with strong and assertive personalities like Eduardo Scarfoglio and Matilde Serao, founded newspapers, fought political battles, and highlighted the vices and virtues of city life. The painters of the school of Posillipo, poets like Salvatore di Giacomo, and actors like Eduardo Scarpetta and later the De Filippo brothers, depicted the images of a Neapolitan reality that would soon be canceled by urban demolition programs and the ravages of war, or would be weakened by the transformation of Italy at the hands of the Piedmontese and by the subsequent homologation of customs. This was the ambience, full of lively cultural ferment, into which Paola Zancani Montuoro was born in Naples on February 27, 1901. Her father, Raffaele Montuoro, was an inventive journalist, her mother, Clotilde Arlotta came from a wealthy family of politicians, industrialists and bankers. Her love of studying led her to the classical lyceum and then the Faculty of Arts of the University of Naples, a fortunate deviation from the customs of a city which generally excluded young women of her social standing from entering high school and prepared them to become gracious ornaments in its salons. This was also symptomatic of the learned, open and enlightened environment into which Paola Zancani had had the fortune to be born. Among the teachers that had a stimulating influence on her we must mention Antonio Sogliano and Giulio Emanuele Rizzo. The 2 former had dedicated himself to excavating and restoring the monuments of Pompeii, while the latter, in his complex and fertile scholarly activity, had tackled one of the great themes of the history of ancient art in his book on Praxiteles and then had gone on to publish his monumental volume on the coins of ancient Sicily. We will see how both these aspects of archaeological research would emerge in the work of Paola Zancani Montuoro. She obtained her dottore di laurea magna cum laude degree with Rizzo in 1923. The same year, she took part in the competition for the schools of specialization in archaeology of Rome and Athens. She won both competitions and left for Greece in 1927 after having married Domenico Zancani, who was also a student. Zancani later became an assistant professor to Rizzo and returned to Athens to continue his second year. The Italian Scuola Archeologica di Atene was and still is the most prestigious source for the best of Italian archaeology. Other fellow students taking part in the course with the Zancani couple were Luciano Laurenzi, Domenico Mustilli and Margherita Guarducci, who would all become illustrious teachers and renowned scholars. Zancani died in Athens soon afterwards from an epidemic of typhus and his young wife carried on his scientific heritage by dedicating a large part of her archaeological work to the study of the pinakes of Locri, a subject which Domenico Zancani had treated in his thesis. The Director of the Scuola di Atene was Alessandro Della Seta, an eminent archaeologist with vast and varied interests. At the time, he was particularly interested in the study and development of the anatomical and naturalistic knowledge of the Greek representation of the human figure which would result in the publication of Il nudo nell’Arte (I, Arte Antica, Milan, 1930). The lessons of Emanuele Loewy, who interpreted artistic development in evolutionary terms, were taken up by Della Seta and, in turn, transmitted to his own students. This influence even appeared in L’origine della decorazione frontonale (1925), the first work Dr. Zancani published that showed proof of her capacity for synthesis and acumen. In a self-assured manner, she tackled a subject rendered particularly current by recent discoveries and refuted commonly held opinions that pediment decoration in Greece had originated from painted scenes with figures on the tympanum area, which was gradually transformed into a relief. The examination of the clay gorgoneion belonging to the temple C of Selinunte discovered by Gabrici, and of other gorgoneia from Sicily, Calabria and Campania, as well as of numerous 3 comparisons with other figurative depictions led her to conclude that the most ancient pediments were decorated with clay apotropaic images of the gorgoneion which covered the head of the main roof beam. A later stage was represented by the pediment discovered at Garitza (Corfù) a little over a decade earlier. Here the Gorgon, located at the center with Chrysaor and Pegasus, was flanked by two panthers, while at the extreme margins were two mythical scenes, the killing of Priam and Zeus fighting the giants. The medical symbol of the Gorgon was later moved from the tympanum to the acroterion and the tympanum filled with scenes of figures. Based on brief and pertinent arguments later confirmed by other studies and discoveries, Dr. Zancani identified the place of origin of this fundamental component of the Greek temple as Corinth, dating it from the second half of the VII century after Christ. The attention Paola Zancani dedicated to the artifacts of Magna Graecia already denoted her choice of a precise field of studies. Another fundamental aspect of Paola Zancani’s personality to emerge and further confirm this direction was her civil commitment to the protection of artistic patrimony. The “Persefone” di Taranto (1933) reconstructed the history of a sculpture that had been clandestinely smuggled out of Italy and had found its way into museums in Berlin. With great rigor, numerous comparisons and analogies she was able to refute the assumption that the statue was false and attribute its origin to Taranto instead of Locri. Finally, she hypothetically identified the statue as a cultic representation from the sanctuary of Persephone that was located in Taranto. The publication of this study marked the beginning of a collaboration between Paola Zancani and the Società Magna Grecia, an independent entity founded in 1920 by Umberto Zanotti Bianco, an antifascist philanthroper, who had dedicated his life to the historical, social and economic development of the South. The archaeology of Magna Graecia, still at a pioneering stage then, was led by the work of the great southern scholar Paolo Orsi (Rovereto, 1859-1935) and his scientific heritage was inherited and carried on by Zanotti Bianco first and Paola Zancani later. However, the discovery that placed Dr. Zancani among the great names of archaeology was that of the Heraion at the mouth of the Sele river. From her very early 4 studies, she had questioned the interpretation of the sources and, in particular, the interpretation of two passages from Strabo and Pliny which mentioned the presence of a sanctuary founded by Jason and dedicated to Hera Argiva, at the mouth of the Sele river. In 1934, thanks to a subsidy from the Società Magna Grecia, Paola Zancani and Zanotti Bianco began to explore the plain of the Sele river. At the time, the area was desolate and infested with malaria and the two scholars had to deal with the discomforts of an inhospitable site. Furthermore they also had to bear the constant presence of policemen who kept watch on the antifascist Zanotti. It was later revealed that the Ministry, which was hostile to both dissident archaeologists, had only authorized the excavation until the sum of eight thousand lire was spent, which was the contribution given by the Società Magna Grecia. Since the statement of expenses had to be sent to the Superintendency on a regular basis, Zancani and Zanotti invented a most unusual accounting system that allowed them to continue excavating. They spent one thousand lire and recorded only one hundred or ten lire...The results of the excavations, which the archaeologists carried out in the company of their most unsual chaperones into 1940 and resumed after the war in 1949 and in 1958, were extraordinary and were hailed, from the historical, religious and artistic points of view, as the most important discoveries to have taken place in Italy in fifty years. Just as Strabo had indicated, the remains of a great archaic sanctuary dedicated to Hera were located right after the mouth of the Sele river, fifty stadia (approximately nine kilometers) from Poseidonia (Paestum), near the left bank of the river, at approximately one-hundred and fifty meters from its mouth. In fact, numerous votive statuettes representing the seated goddess holding a child on her left arm and a pomegranate in her right hand were further proof of this. The more ancient statuettes dated from the VII century B.C. The iconography was the same as that of the Madonna venerated in the nearby church at Capaccio and still maintained the appearance of that ancient cultic image after so many centuries. The sanctuary encountered its greatest prosperity in the archaic period. The more ancient building, a stoà perhaps, whose elevations were probably in rough brickwork, dated to the first half of the VI century B.C.

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