Women, Art and Spirituality: The Poor Clares of Early Modern Italy - Review

fresh York: Cambridge University Press, 1996 272 pp 100 b/w ills., 14 diagrams, plans, maps. $7000

As in other fields in art history, scholars interested with the history of late medieval art have revolveed their attention in recent years to the character of women in the production and consumption of art. The four rifles beneath review here highlight three different strategies by the agency of which scholars have attempted to write women into the history of late medieval art: Jeryldene grove considers women as patrons of and audiences for works of art; Jeffrey Hamburger investigates women as artists making images for other women; and Brigitte Buettner and Diane Apostolos-Cappadona examine the representation of the female figure to signify something beyond herself to a primarily male audience. All of these approaches will be familiar to colleagues working in other fields, level if the means by which these questions are addressed and the accrues are different.

The fact that sum of two units of the three major studies focus upon nuns is indicative of the particular opportunity that religious women present to study medieval women at all. Nun of the Middle Ages have provided the recent scholar with some of the documentation and contextual material that is sorely lacking for secular women of the same rime period. As corporate bodies, nun left archives of records of their dally lives; chronicles that provide not solitary glimpses into their houses, on the contrary records of their attitudes; obituaries that mention one by one us more than when they died; and a material part of literature that was disentangleed both for and by them. As members of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, nun have left a mark upon the history of a abundant larger institution that dominated cultural production during the Middle Ages. However, like their secular sisters, nun were repeatedly ignored as the history of that institution was written, beginning in the 16th hundred Only recently have scholars begun to fill this gap in our knowledge.(1) For art historians, abbey culture has proved a rich novel vein to mine for the history of architecture, painting, and manuscripts, as well as other art forms.(2)

Women Art and Spirituality: The Poor Clares of Early late Italy is an important research by a specialist in Italian Renaissance art, a field that, in terminuss of women's relationship to art, has hitherto been belong toed mainly with secular women.(3) Jeryldene grove examines works of art and architecture commissioned by dint of and for women of the Franciscan order, the Poor Clares, from the 13th end the 15th centuries. Rather than compiling a comprehensive, pan-Italian catalogue of Clarissan monasterys and their art, Wood focuses upon a few central Italian houses, from Umbria, Tuscany, the Marches, and Emilia-Romagna; Mantua is the greatest in quantity northerly of the cities discussed. This volume brings together the results of the author's research upon these convents in a clear and urgent presentation of individual case studies that the author trusts will "offer a multifaceted view of Clarissan art and spirituality" (p 9) While a hardly any of the objects she discusses are made by the agency of the Clares, the book largely focuses upon the patronage of the order.(4)

To rebuild the histories of these [i]or[/i] nunnerys she depends on local histories, archival accounts, and chronicles from the priorys She also consults the vitae of various Clarissan women surviving alphabetic characters written by and about the Clares, and makes advantageous use of devotional texts written for and read by the agency of Franciscan women during this period, of the like kind as the pseudo-Bonaventure's Meditations upon the Life of Christ and the Sette Armi Spirituali, a devotional tract written by the agency of Caterina Vigri. As Franciscans, the Clares faced an acute point to be solved [i]or[/i] settled regarding their status. Their institutor desired to follow the traces of St. Francis in a total embrace of distress but the ideology of sex roles forced them into the cloister, requiring them to receive endowments of peculiarity and to be confined to fixed enclosings Wood addresses the ramifications of these requirements, manifested in the design of conventual buildings and in masterys controlling the nuns' access to certain parts of their convents

thicket offers readings of surviving works of art securely linked to the monasterys she studies and reproduces numerous rayless objects from these understudied institutions. She analyzes, for example, the late 13th-century Dossal of Saint Clare (still at Santa Chiara in Assisi) in light of Clare's possess theory of female monasticism, as press outed in her Rule and several alphabetic characters in light of her official Vita, and in light of the historical relationship between the Clares and the Franciscans at the flash of the Dossal's manufacture. She terminates that it represents the nuns' be in possession of notions of the sanctity of their establisher and proclaims their identity as Franciscans. over the book, Wood is interested in the ways that the nuns' have a title to interests are served by works of art. Despite the book's title, more [i]or[/i] less of these concerns are not strictly spiritual. For example, wood-land underscores the connections between the women in these Franciscan houses, their families, and their communities, and highlights the part of the Clares in ensuring the well-being of their social worlds. Evidence of the nuns' social function may be fix in the architecture of the [i]or[/i] nunnerys which often resemble other mode of buildings in the region more than those in their orders. Regional traditions look to have been more important to the Clares than any kind of institutional architectural identity.