In his monumental publication on the Cathedral of Orvieto, Luigi Fumi stated that full understanding of the imagery of the early-fourteenth-century Tree of Jesse on the facjade (Fig. 1)1 would be achieved only after prolonged research.2 Indeed, its enigmatic character precluded anything more than tentative and often incomplete results until 1936.3 In that year, however, Antonia Nava drew attention to the fact that the Jesse Tree at Orvieto was not a unique survival, as had been supposed previously, but that other Trees of the same type could be found among the murals of the monasteries of Lavra and Dochiariou on Mt. Athos and on the exterior decoration of five Bucovinian churches, all dating from the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.4 At first Nava's discovery seemed to solve nearly all of the problems which had frustrated Fumi and others, for most of these painted Jesse Trees bore legible inscriptions which identified the various scenes and figures. However, Nava herself was aware that a number ...
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