This is a Christian funerary chapel: the Cathedral chapel of St John of Trogir (also known as Bishop Giovanni Orsini) in Croatia. From 1468 onwards, it was enlarged by Niccoló di Giovanni Fiorentino, with the collaboration of the Dalmatian artist Andrea Alessi, and is a beautiful synthesis of antique and Renaissance elements. The coffered ceiling echoes the Palace of Diocletian in Split; sculpted saints and apostles line the sides of the chapel, with putti dancing above them; higher up are roundels of light. In the lower range of twenty-one bas-relief panels, spiritelli (sometimes also called ‘genii’) bear flaming torches as they emerge from half-open doors. In the Old Testament, such torches signal the presence of the Deity, as with the torch-like sword at the gates of the Garden of Eden (Genesis 3:24) and the torch in Abraham’s covenant with God (15:17). 

In Roman art and sculpture, the genius of death is often shown holding a torch upside down, extinguished. The spiritello in this panel is depicted blowing out the flame of the torch he carries.

In extinguishing his torch, the spiritello could be interpreted as emerging from the darkness of the underworld, as in a former pagan world-view, into the light of the Christian hope of resurrection.

On most Etruscan urns, there is nothing to indicate anything but that passing through the portal to Hades is an irrevocable farewell. In late antiquity, many persons influenced by Greek conceptions and Oriental mystery cults gradually came to entertain a hope of life beyond the grave. From a vague and melancholy notion of the dead dwelling together in the depths of the earth came a sense of a transformation by means of the portal of life/death, an opening out toward a celestial beatitude. The soul moves beyond, and upward.

The Lukan passage that is the subject of this exhibition has us picture a man knocking at a closed door. This bas-relief offers instead a portal that has been opened; it is not clear by whom. Perhaps the emerging spiritello, having knocked from within, has found that knock answered; an entry is now possible into the illumination of faith, the substance of hope.

References
 

Bialostocki, Jan. 1973. ‘The Door of Death: Survival of a Classical Motif in Sepulchral Art’, Jahrbuch der Hamburger Kunstsammlungen, 18: 7–32

Haarløv, Britt. 1977. The Half-Open Door: A Common Symbolic Motif within Roman Sepulchral Sculpture (Odense: Odense University Press)

Stefanac, Samo. 1996. ‘Niccolò di Giovanni Fiorentino e la Cappella del Beato Giovanni Orsini a Traù: Il progetto, l’architettura, la decorazione scultorea’, in Quattrocento Adriatico: Fifteenth Century Art of the Adriatic Rim, Papers from a Colloquium held at the Villa Superman, Florence, 1994, ed. by Charles Dempsey (Bologna: Nuova Alfa Editoriale), pp. 123–41