FINE ARTS NETWORK SYMPOSIUM

Art & Culture in Renaissance Tuscany: New Directions in Research

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Abstracts

Anabel Thomas

The Significance of the Pig. Interrelations between Artistic Practice and Local History

Reporting on  new directions in her own research, and in particular on the methodologies involved in analyzing the demography, topography and cultural contexts of communities and institutions in the southern Sienese contado during the early modern period, Anabel Thomas considers the varying interpretations  of Ambrogio and Pietro Lorenzetti’s frescoes in the Sala della Pace in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena presented by scholars during the last five or six decades.    Thomas explores interrelations between artistic practice and local history against the background of the post-modernist art historical theory that influenced the discipliine during the last years of the twentieth century.   Rejecting contemporary notions that the modern art historian need be beset by ‘insanity-inducing despair’, since deconstructivism allows for no settled or final answers, and no seen thing is what it seems, Thomas, while admitting that language is treacherous when attempting to re-construct the past through the analysis of the visual image, considers how changing methodologies, rather than new directions in research, affect our understanding of the past.   She argues that there are in effect four interrelated factors:  the conceptual frameworks employed, explicitly or implicitly;  the subject or locus of research interest which to some extent flows from the conceptual framework, and in turn predicates the research methodologies adopted; and the findings, that point to new directions in approaching the subject and analyzing the surviving visual material.

Bill Kent

Some Reflections on Recent Research on Art and Culture in Renaissance Tuscany

This brief paper will discuss the writer's recent, somewhat  tortuous, attempts to draft an historian's  ‘framing’ chapter for the forthcoming  Cambridge Companion to Florentine Renaissance Art, ed F. Ames-Lewis; with particular reference, among other recent work, to the newest publication in the field, Renaissance Florence: A Social History, ed. R. Crum and J. Paoletti (2006), the contributions to which seek to exemplify novel directions and methodologies.

Robert Gaston

Meditations on Space, Place, and Recent Florentine Art History

The recently published volume, John Paoletti and Roger Crum (eds.), Renaissance Florence: A Social History, Cambridge, CUP 2006 is one of several books published lately that document a bridging over from art and architectural history to social history in some of its manifestations. The paper is a series of reflections arising from the creative yet troubled genesis of this collection, concentrating on the author’s own contribution on Florence’s churches. It explores how writing this chapter along the lines suggested by the collection’s original manifesto (‘space in Renaissance Florence’) was in fact thwarted by the evidence that came to light in the research process. This raises the issue of how a research paradigm can have a heuristic value—opening up the field to valuable investigation—but might still be found wanting in a concrete instance of applied research.

Peter Howard

Preaching and Painting in Renaissance Florence

Embedded in the Summa Theologica of Archbishop Antoninus of Florence (d. 1459) is a sermon preached by him around the scripture fragment ‘Adorabo ad templum sanctum tuum’ (I will worship in your holy temple), the middle phrase of a verse of Psalm 5:8. This prominent and influential preacher draws striking parallels between the methods used by both preachers and artists to develop their themes, and goes on to examine the stance of the viewer to an image: ‘One should adore, however, with the soul through devotion … with the body by genuflecting, prostrating and suchlike …’. This paper examines the sermon in detail as a unique entrée into the perceptual world of Renaissance Florentines, at least as envisaged by that city’s/their archbishop. The study will examine the roots and developments proffered by the preacher’s psychology of representation and its implications for our understanding of developments in devotional art in the fifteenth century. By respecting the text in its entirety as a sermon, the article argues that Creighton Gilbert’s use of snippets of Antoninus’ texts (1959 and 1990) skew the archbishop’s understanding of the appropriate subject matter of images and neglects the broader context of their role in Florentine devotional life in the mid-fifteenth century. The paper will pay particular attention to the implications of sermon studies for ‘a reading’ of the frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel at the Church of the Carmine.

Louise Marshall

The Saint and the City: Identifying the Subject of Giovanni di Paolo’s Vienna Miracle of Saint Nicholas of Tolentino

This paper aims to resolve scholarly confusion regarding the subject matter of a panel by the Sienese artist Giovanni di Paolo now in Vienna (Akademie der bildenden Kunst). Art historians are in general agreement regarding the reconstruction of the original altarpiece of to which this narrative once belonged, but remain curiously divided regarding the identification of the specific miracle represented. The Vienna panel has long been associated with another work of almost exactly the same dimensions, depicting the recently canonised Augustinian friar and famous miracle worker Nicholas of Tolentino (d. 1305, canonised 1446) saving a ship at sea (Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art). The two narratives would have flanked a central panel of the standing saint, which still survives in situ in the Augustinian church at Montepulciano, signed by the artist and dated 1456. Drawing on my research into Nicholas’ cult as a plague protector, I will argue for the identification of the scene as Nicholas saving a town from plague.

Diana Hiller

‘Do You See What I See, Brother?’  The Gendered Conventual Gaze and Judas in Florentine Last Supper Frescoes

Contemporary theoretical positions concerning the gendered gaze are very different from fifteenth-century notions of the use and perception of images.  However, if all such standpoints can be seen as historicised constructs dependent upon situation and culture, it may be that a number of the perspectives can be drawn upon in order to shed light on the way that some images were perceived in the early modern period.  Images of Christ’s Last Supper were to be found in most conventual refectories in fifteenth-century Florence.  The male and female religious observers of the monumental frescoes not only brought a gendered perspective to the viewing process, but also gazed on the images in a profoundly gendered cultural environment.  The paper focuses on the figure of Judas in the images in an attempt to explore how context and gender may have contributed to different perceptions of these works.

Hugh Hudson

Beyond Florence: Paolo Uccello in the Contado and Further Afield

Research into the career of the early Renaissance artist Paolo Uccello took an unexpected turn in 1979 when an unknown mural painting of the Adoration of the Child emerged from under a layer of whitewash during restoration in the sacristy of the church of S. Martino Maggiore in Bologna. A partially legible date shows it was executed in the 1430s, spurring art historians to reconsider the virtually impenetrable subject of Uccello’s early career. It was also a reminder of how much work remains to be done to explain the activities of itinerant early Renaissance artists. Due to the relative abundance of archival material in Florence, art historians have often overlooked the extent to which early Renaissance artists like Uccello travelled, and in spite of new discoveries, much remains to be done to explain the social, religious, political, cultural, and financial networks that facilitated artists undertaking distant commissions, and to explain why patrons looked far afield for artists to execute their commissions. This paper proposes that there remain areas of research to be explored and new methodologies to be exploited to illuminate the subject of Uccello’s itinerant career in the Florentine contado (sovereign territories) and the cities of Venice, Prato, Bologna, Padua, and Urbino, amounting potentially to a significant addition to the familiar image of Uccello as a quintessential Florentine early Renaissance artist.    

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