Vaticinia de Summis Pontificibus

The series of some thirty prophecies, based on Greek prototypes, was "most probably conceived in order to influence one of the ongoing papal elections,"[2] written in opposition to the Orsini and their candidates.

Their poems and tempera illuminations mix fantasy, the occult, and chronicle in a chronology of the popes.

Each prophecy consists of four elements, an enigmatic allegorical text, an emblematic picture, a motto, and an attribution to a pope.

The series was augmented in the fourteenth century with further prophecies, with the incipit Ascende calve ("arise, bald one"), written in imitative continuation of the earlier set, but with more overtly propagandist aims.

By the time of the Council of Constance (1414–18), both series were united as the Vaticinia de summis pontificibus and misattributed to the Calabrian mystic Joachim of Flora, thus credited to a pseudo-Joachim.