Obesity and the Politics of Taddeo di Bartolo's Inferno

ABSTRACT This paper examines Taddeo di Bartolo's depiction of Hell in the Collegiata di Santa Maria Assunta, the mother church of San Gimignano. In a striking departure from similar scenes of the period, the fresco, painted in the early fifteenth century, emphasizes the obesity of the sinners—suggesting a deliberate visual critique. I argue that the fresco functioned as a public denunciation of the Dominican order, which sought to control religious institutions and appropriate the ancient church of San Lorenzo in Ponte after being forcibly relocated nearby. Parishioners, aware of the conflict and the friars' opulent lifestyle, likely associated the grotesquely corpulent sinners—particularly the bloated friar at the gluttons' table—with the Dominicans. Sophisticated viewers would have linked this imagery to Aquinas' condemnation of gluttony and Dante's Inferno (Canto XI) , where the Dominicans were explicitly criticized as ghiotti , symbolizing moral and spiritual decay. By situating the fresco within contemporary religious politics and evolving conceptions of corpulence as a moral failing, this study offers a new insight into the intersection of artistic representation, theological discourse and literary tradition in early fifteenth‐century Italy.