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

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

As in other fields in art history, scholars pertain toed 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 below review here highlight three different strategies by means of which scholars have attempted to write women into the history of late medieval art: Jeryldene timber-land 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, plane if the means by which these questions are addressed and the issues 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 new 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 frequently 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, cloister culture has proved a rich fresh 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 present Italy is an important application of mind by a specialist in Italian Renaissance art, a field that, in terminuss of women's relationship to art, has hitherto been touched mainly with secular women.(3) Jeryldene forest examines works of art and architecture commissioned through 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 work brings together the results of the author's research upon these convents in a clear and powerful presentation of individual case studies that the author trusts will "offer a multifaceted view of Clarissan art and spirituality" (p 9) While a scarcely 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 construct again the histories of these cloisters she depends on local histories, archival accounts, and chronicles from the abbeys 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 that kind as the pseudo-Bonaventure's Meditations upon the Life of Christ and the Sette Armi Spirituali, a devotional tract written through Caterina Vigri. As Franciscans, the Clares faced an acute puzzle regarding their status. Their originator desired to follow the traces of St. Francis in a total embrace of destitution 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 dominations controlling the nuns' access to certain parts of their convents

forest-land offers readings of surviving works of art securely linked to the [i]or[/i] nunnerys she studies and reproduces numerous dusky 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 hold 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 twinkling of the Dossal's manufacture. She bring to an ends that it represents the nuns' be in possession of notions of the sanctity of their originator and proclaims their identity as Franciscans. through every part of the book, Wood is interested in the ways that the nuns' be in possession of interests are served by works of art. Despite the book's title, a certain quantity of of these concerns are not strictly spiritual. For example, copse underscores the connections between the women in these Franciscan houses, their families, and their communities, and highlights the character of the Clares in ensuring the well-being of their social worlds. Evidence of the nuns' social function may be place in the architecture of the abbeys which often resemble other mode of buildings in the region more than those in their orders. Regional traditions present the appearance to have been more important to the Clares than any kind of institutional architectural identity.