The Embedded Portrait: Giotto, Giottino, Angelico 9780691244266, 9780691254609

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The Embedded Portrait

Christopher S. Wood

The Embedded Portrait Giotto, Giottino, Angelico

Princeton University Press Princeton and Oxford

Copyright © 2023 by Princeton University Press Princeton University Press is committed to the protection of copyright and the intellectual property our authors entrust to us. Copyright promotes the progress and integrity of knowledge. Thank you for supporting free speech and the global exchange of ideas by purchasing an authorized edition of this book. If you wish to reproduce or distribute any part of it in any form, please obtain permission. Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to permissions @ press.princeton.edu Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 99 Banbury Road, Oxford ox2 6jx press.princeton.edu Front cover: Giottino, Lamentation over the Dead Christ, after 1363. Tempera on panel. Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi. Back cover: Giotto, Entombment of Christ, 1310–20? Panel. Settignano, Villa I Tatti. isbn 9780691244266 (hardcover) isbn 9780691254609 (ebook) All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Wood, Christopher S., author. Title: The embedded portrait : Giotto, Giottino, Angelico / Christopher S. Wood. Description: Princeton : Princeton University Press, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2022058357 | isbn 9780691244266 (hardcover) Subjects: lcsh: Portraits, Italian. | Portraits, Renaissance — Italy. | Benefactors in art. Classification: lcc n7606 .w66 2023 | ddc 704.9/42 — dc23/eng /20230114 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022058357 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available. Design by Julie Fry This book has been composed in Legacy. Printed on acid-free paper. ∞ Printed in Italy 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my sons, Simon and Raphael

Contents

Introduction  1

i  Franciscanism, the Laity, and Portraits  19 The Munich Crucifixion — Giotto and the portrait — The Franciscan impulse — On Francis and self-loss — Incommensurability of human and divine spheres

ii  The Democratization of the Portrait, 1270–1320  43 Varieties of supplicant portrait — Hegel on embedded portraits

iii  Historiography and Method  67 Rumohr and Burckhardt on Giotto — Twentieth-century views of Giotto — Sociologies and anthropologies of art — The art of praise — Art and beauty — Allegories and narratives — Sacred art and secular modernity

iv Witnesses  113 The Presentation of Christ in the Temple — Witnessing and recognition — Witnessing and the portrait — The midwives — The Lamentation over the Body of Christ — Proto-portraits

v Interlopers  157 Vasari on the Trecento — Stefano Fiorentino and Giotto di Maestro Stefano — The San Remigio Pietà — The Ponce Annunciation — The Lamentation on panel — Vasari on the three manners of Trecento painting — Giottino and compagnia — The mourners — I Niccodemi — The original installation of the panels — The funerary image — Harmony and discord — Doublings and merisms — The superimposed chessboards — Unity of person and unity of picture — Opacity of the embedded portrait — Open and closed form

vi  The Classic Art History of the Portrait  233 Erwin Panofsky, 1953 — Bridget of Sweden and iconography — Alois Riegl, 1902 — Erich Auerbach on realism — Aby Warburg, 1902

vii  Fra Angelico and the Portrait  263 Giotto, Giottino . . . — Fra Angelico and Rogier van der Weyden — Vasari’s “Giottino romance” — Last remarks on the modern sacred art

Excursus: Reference and Likeness  295

Acknowledgments   312 Notes  314 Index  357 Credits  366

Detail of ill. 0.4

Introduction

Two Florentine paintings, roughly contemporary, depict, alongside the holy personages, modern supplicants—decorous, attentive figures, kneeling, with palms pressed together in prayer. In the altarpiece by Agnolo Gaddi from the Dominican church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence and now in Parma, dated 1375, the outsider is a small kneeling woman in the lower left in a grey robe and white wimple. She is recommended to Christ, by way of his mother, by St. Peter Martyr (ill. 0.1).1 The saint, blood still dripping from his wounds, signals his sponsorship of the supplicant with an inclusive gesture of his right arm. Mary acknowledges the request and relays it to Christ with a similar gesture. On the right side of her throne, a kneeling St. Thomas Aquinas mirrors Peter Martyr’s gesture. But the place he points to is unoccupied. Perhaps the painter left an open slot for a future, still undetermined candidate.2 The painter has adjusted the sizes of the beings such that there are four or even five different scales. Mary, should she stand up, would tower over everyone. The standing saints — Dominic, the two Johns, and St. Lawrence — are larger than the kneeling Dominicans, Peter Martyr and Thomas Aquinas. The angels are pint-sized, and the female supplicant still smaller. The variations in scale give the artwork a pulsing but discreet musicality, and a sense of hier­ archy and artificiality sustaining the overall solemn, expectant tone. The supplicant inhabits a shallow layer of pictorial space, secured by a strip of ground plane (detail, p. x). Her capacity to share that space symbolizes access to the sacred figures, who are presented in a state of alertness, as if in audience. The depicted or virtual space does not describe any place: it is just a painting, a way of making available to the senses an ideal or desired relation between this world and another. The painting diagrams the opening of lines

Detail of ill. 0.1

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0.1  Agnolo Gaddi, Madonna and Child with Saints, 1375. Panel, 159 × 198 cm. Parma, Galleria Nazionale.

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of communication between the living and the dead, and between the profane and the sacred spheres. Agnolo’s altarpiece is a large work, measuring two meters across, and would be larger still if it had not lost its old frame, the gilt and carved wooden pinnacles that once enclosed the three arched compartments. The work once stood on an altar. An older-style altarpiece would have been literally compartmentalized, figures penned in by internal frames. Agnolo and his patrons dispensed with the internal furniture, such that the figures occupy a unified space. Still, the values of surface pattern prevail; the pendulum-like arms, the tilting flower, staff, sword, and book, and the cut of the robes all create pattern, giving the picture its hieratic yet gravely animated tone. The painter learned this art of pattern from the magnificent Strozzi altarpiece (1354–57), also at Santa Maria Novella, by Orcagna (ill. 5.7). One is reminded of the writer Harold Acton’s admiration for the “rhythmic movement . . . strength, swiftness, grace and, in a word, significance of line” of the Trecento painters: “With the simplest means they achieved the most powerful effects.”3 The stiffness and limited interaction — the non­ psychological character of the encounters — is a vestige of the old physical compartmentalization. The figures ease into the space now opened up for them, as if awakening brightly from a slumber. The small kneeling woman in grey wears what appears to be clerical garb (detail, p. x). But costume can be misleading. This was also the typical dress of a Dominican tertiary — a kind of adjunct member of a religious order — or a member of a confraternity, a community of lay devout. An inscription still visible in the eighteenth century said that the painting had belonged to a suppressed compagnia associated with Santa Maria Novella, a term referring perhaps to a confraternity, perhaps to a trade association. In the second painting, in Ponce, Puerto Rico, the man in blue is also diminished in scale (ill.  0.2). This picture is similar in size to the work in Parma, but it is completely different in kind.4 It depicts not a hierarchical company of saints, but an event: the Annunciation to Mary. Values of pattern give way to a drama of the relation of bodies, and an experience of encounter and shock hinted at by postures and gestures. The kneeling figures, angel and man, and the enthroned Virgin are not submitted to a compartmentalized design, but rather plausibly placed on a ground plane, occupying a convincing space that is interrupted at the rear, however, by a sheer wall of gold. The painting’s original location as well as its author are unknown. The work may have stood on an altar mensa, for by this time the Annunciation was established as acceptable subject matter for an altarpiece. But it may also have been mounted independently, on a wall, perhaps in association with a tomb. The painting is in poor condition and has been heavily restored. But its concept is legible. The person kneeling in the center is a layman. He wears a hooded blue cloak over a blue tunic. He presses his hands together in prayer, facing the Virgin Mary seated on a throne. Behind the man looms the angel Gabriel.

0.2  Jacopo di Cione, Annunciation, 1370s? Panel, 131.5 × 132.1 cm. Ponce, Museo de Arte.

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The supplicant is stationed between the two historical actors, conveying the vividness of the man’s mental recreation of the biblical event. The picture publishes an increasingly widely shared tendency among laypersons no longer to be content with formal submission to rite and custom, symbolizing subordination to God, but instead to cultivate — as clerics did — religious experiences. Neither angel nor Mary takes any notice of him — it would be unthinkable! Narrative pictures such as this one never depict, as Agnolo Gaddi’s altarpiece did, interaction between a modern intruder and the historical actors. The hooded man in blue is lodged in the scene — not just perched on the edges and spying in his mind’s eye on the event, but right there, really occupying space on the floor. There is no depicted interaction in the Ponce Annunciation because the modern mortals and the historical characters occupy the same space. The unreal, abstract space of the Dominican polyptych, by contrast —  and paradoxically — permitted just such an interaction. The supplicants in both these paintings are barely particularized, if at all. Yet they are not generic or symbolic worshippers but rather the images of real persons. Images that refer or point to real persons are called portraits. The incursion into a narrative scene of a portrait of a modern devout is not a depiction of time travel but rather an affirmation of the worshipper’s psychic and emotional involvement with the scriptural stories. Both pictures also represent the urgent pleas of their patrons — the woman in grey and the man in blue very likely paid for these works — for recognition by the saints and an ensuing salvational preferment. Agnolo Gaddi’s work depicted a hierarchical system, a cosmos, within which all entities have their place. The structure of this system is immutable, but the occupants are in motion. The living are always becoming the dead. There is the triage of the saved, the damned, and those sent to wait in Purgatory. The woman’s prayer and its acknowledgement by the saints represent a short circuit in the system, an attempt to jump the queue and win an early guarantee of salvation. Contact is made between one vessel or compartment and another, compartments that — according to some theologians — ought to remain separate. The physical partitioning of the old polyptychs represented the distinctness and independence of the levels of reality. In Agnolo’s modular painting, the short circuit or contact is represented by a transgression of the boundaries between the painting’s compartments, now no longer enforced by carpentry. In the Annunciation in Ponce, by contrast, the devout patron’s bid for advancement is represented by a sharing of virtual space that interferes with the realist logic implied by that space. The Annunciation in Ponce is usually attributed to Jacopo di Cione, one of the brothers of Andrea di Cione, known as Orcagna, author of the Strozzi altarpiece. At least one authority, however, Raimond van Marle, assigned it to Agnolo Gaddi, the painter of the Parma altarpiece.5 Agnolo and the brothers Cione were collaborating in these years. The merchant of Prato, Francesco Datini, commissioned works from both Jacopo di Cione and Agnolo Gaddi. They represent the

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second generation of the succession to the pioneer Giotto, the fountainhead of the Florentine tradition. Jacopo had been trained by his older brother Andrea, who had worked under Giotto. Agnolo was the son of Taddeo Gaddi, Giotto’s principal disciple, and he himself was the teacher of Cennino Cennini, the painter and author of a treatise on painting, the Libro dell’arte. The big breakthroughs in the democratization of portraiture came during Giotto’s lifetime. Since antiquity, likenesses had been fashioned only of the most worthy and distinguished subjects. Elites were portrayed, more or less lifelike, on tombs, in the mosaic apses of churches, and in illuminated Books of Hours and other prayer books. Beginning in the late thirteenth century, affluent but non-noble Christians could for the first time also aspire to portrayal. Paintings and sculptures pictured for the first time the pious longings of lay worshippers. Inscriptions specifying prayer formulas were sometimes in the vernacular. What do we call these people? They are patrons, donors, founders, owners, supplicants, petitioners, votaries, or witnesses, depending on whether they are paying for something, giving something, asking for something, hoping for something, or testifying to something.6 Communication between the living and the dead was achieved by prayer, meditation, and participation in ritual. Now for the first time these existential engagements were fixed and broadcast as images.

This book tracks the portrayals of modern devout appended to or embedded in sacred painting, especially in Florence and Siena, throughout the fourteenth century and into the next. The embedded portrait is read as an index of the pressure of laywomen and laymen claiming for themselves what for centuries had been the privilege of a superelite, princely and cleric. Artists were asked to accommodate the portrait of the layperson, which enters sacred painting alongside the image of St. Francis of Assisi, carrying with it the tumultuous impulses introduced into religious life by Francis. Artists later on will learn to lean into those impulses, may even locate art’s vocation in confusion or move to the arrhythmy of the inner chaos; but at this point, not so much. Religion could only tolerate so much freedom of the divergent, formless sort, as opposed to the convergent freedom associated with “truth” (ἀλήθεια, the unconcealed) in John 8:32. The narrative of this book moves from Giotto at the start of the fourteenth century, to the powerful but little-understood mid-century painter Giotto di Stefano (known as Giottino, an artist who worked side by side with Agnolo Gaddi and perhaps as well with Jacopo di Cione), to Fra Angelico, the Dominican friar-painter who carried themes and techniques from Giotto’s century into the next. The book is not a catalogue or survey of this material, but an argument about fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century painting structured around the concept of embedded portraiture. There are,

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0.3  Paolo Veneziano, Madonna and Child with Saints, 1339. Panel, 145 × 223 cm. Venice, Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari.

in fact, innovative and significant examples from all over the Italian peninsula, and in the interest of telling a coherent story I have not done justice to them. A famous example is the lunette-shaped panel by Paolo Veneziano (1339) mounted on the tomb of the Doge Francesco Dandolo in the church of the Frari in Venice (ill. 0.3, and see below, pp. 20, 198). St. Francis, bending inward with the frame, presents the Doge. The infant Christ offers recognition and blessing. Mary looks out at us and points to the Doge. On the right, St. Elizabeth of Portugal (or Hungary) presents her protégée the Dogaressa. Angels stretch a cloth behind the Virgin. There is also important fourteenth-century material from beyond Italy, especially in Avignon, Spain, and Bohemia. But the Tuscan focus of this book is not arbitrary, nor is it, I hope, an unthinking historiographical reflex. It is justified, I believe, by the radicality and often priority of the extant Florentine examples, and the many variations on the new formulas that relayed the problem of the portrait forward into the fifteenth century and beyond. The topics of the revival of portraiture in the late Middle Ages as well as the phenomenon of lay piety have hardly been neglected by recent scholarship. The desires, the aspirations, and the initiatives of the laity, as well as of the ordinary, nonaristocratic clergy, have been the focus of arguably the most innovative research in the entire field of late-medieval art history over the last decades. The present book builds on this scholarship.

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Art history is also the history of artistic form. Whatever contribution to culture (collective mentalities, symbolic economies, ideology) an artwork makes is accomplished by form. Artistic form, in premodernity, was above all beautiful form. The purpose of a sacred artwork was to present an image of a beautiful reality (the divine sphere), to adorn and so upgrade prosaic environments and routines, and finally to translate the dramas and conflicts of history and myth into the language of form — good form and bad form, harmony and dissonance. Artistic beauty is anything but a simple affair. It is difficult to create, and it is difficult to assess. Broken forms, grotesque or diabolical affronts to harmony, may also contribute to the overall and decisive beauty of the work. The purpose of artistic beauty, the purpose of art itself, was (and in many ways still is) to stir the emotions. At the heart of the book is a famous painting by the painter known as Giottino, a Lamentation over the Body of Christ, or Pietà, a work that emerged, I will argue, out of a milieu of innovation in the middle decades of the fourteenth century in Florence, involving an exchange of ideas among several painters including Giovanni da Milano and the brothers Cione, among them Jacopo di Cione, the presumed author of the Annunciation in Ponce. I will further propose that the Ponce Annunciation was a complement or even a pendant of Giottino’s Lamentation. The work by Giottino was extravagantly praised by Giorgio Vasari, the sixteenth-century historian of Italian art (ill. 0.4). The beauty of the painting for Vasari was its unity, a melding of tones and softening of contours overriding the contrasts between the composed and the distressed figures, and between the competing psychological themes of anguish and resignation. The artist introduced into his work the portraits of two modern female figures. Vasari, in his description of the painting, did not mention the portraits, as if they did not properly belong to the work. The rebus-quality of some devotional pictures, the diagramming of devotional commitments, the patrons’ desire for publicity — all this may conflict with an artist’s will to beauty. The portraits interrupt the beautiful surface, for modern votaries, no matter how finely clothed or decorously posed, can never compete with the holy personages. The petitioners, by barging in, risk adulterating the very artifacts they have sponsored. The referential anchor of the portrait mars the works. The portraits’ content is supposedly the humility, even the nullity, of the devout, especially in the Franciscan context. This clashes with the basic drive to create fine artifacts. By the same token, however, the disjunction between the portraits and their pictorial hosts figures an unbridgeable chasm between humans and God. So, the artworks are expressions of a longing to communicate with divinity, expressions that also suggest the futility of such attempts. The translation (< Latin translatio, a carrying across) of the devout’s body into the painting both measures the distance and concedes the immeasurability. This corresponds to the distinction between the literary translation that strives to close the gap between two languages, and the translation that honors that gap by making it visible.

0.4 Giottino, Lamentation over the Body of Christ, after 1363. Panel, 195 × 134 cm. Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi.

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Vasari prized the unity of an artwork, and the embedded portrait threatened just this. Referential, undercoded (because striving for fidelity to appearance), and a direct link to reality, the portrait threw into relief the symbolic, overcoded (because governed by conventions), and unreal quality of the depictions of Christ, Mary, and the saints. The portrait was linked to a lifeworld, a real world either directly known to the painting’s first beholders or more or less imaginable to later beholders or even to us today. By contrast, the rest of the picture renders personages, situations, and events completely unknown to any of us, glimpses of a mythic reality or, if you prefer, a more real reality beyond the sensible phenomena. The portrait creates a schism within a religious painting, splitting it into hierarchically organized levels of reality. The embedded portrait provokes, even awaits, a levelling by art, a flowing together on the level of painted form of the sacred and the profane. The painters will seek to integrate the portraits into art. Increasingly dissatisfied — or responding to the dissatisfaction of their clients and patrons — with the collage or modular approaches, and with the unreal discrepancies of scale, artists will learn to fold the portraits not only into the scene, but also into the composition. The artists will learn to modulate the patron’s ego-driven requests by merging them into the formal logic of the artworks. The reconciliation of sacred and profane will be justified by style, pattern, harmony, and the beauty that was the essential content of even the simplest sacred pictures, whose basic responsibility was to praise God. Beauty was an offering. In the long run, under the pressure to unify the depiction as an artwork, the patron will just have to withdraw. She or he is all too present and too competitive with the artist. The conflict of wills between patron and artist, still latent in the Middle Ages, emerges into the open in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The resolution of this struggle in favor of the artist — this we call modern painting, and eventually Modernism. A modern painting is entirely under the control of its maker. Symbolic of this principle is the integration of all forms and depicted bodies into a single overall gestalt. Already the Mannerist painting of the sixteenth century and its spokesperson Vasari strove for such an integration. The first art theorist to spell out this ideal clearly was Roger de Piles in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. De Piles wrote of a work’s “unity of effect” and of the aesthetic impact of the tout ensemble. Thomas Puttfarken in his commentary on De Piles makes it clear that the threat to the unified composition was the depicted body. The composition called for an “overall way of looking — aspective, perspectival, au coup d’oeil, an artificial kind of looking — while an illusionistically present body would not.”7 The image of the body, borrowing its presence from real bodies, makes a claim upon a form of attentiveness that would detach the body from its less interesting surroundings. The potential insubordination of the body becomes for some modern painters a theme. They make paintings that hang together but are threatened by rifts between body and surroundings, or between body and body. I am

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0.5  Diego Velázquez, Feast of Bacchus (The Drunkards), 1628–29. Oil on canvas, 165 × 225 cm. Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado.

thinking of a work such as the Feast of Bacchus by Diego Velázquez (1628–29) (ill. 0.5).8 Bacchus, god of winemaking and of festivity, and another seminude figure hold court in the lordly manner known from depictions of the Greek and Roman myths. They preside over a rowdy company of modern working-class men as well as two or three soldiers and a beggar. The painting’s other title is Los Borrachos (The Drunkards). Velázquez restores anachronistically the modular, paratactic, and hierarchical approach to composition that we saw in Agnolo Gaddi’s altarpiece in Parma (ill. 0.1). The painter draws a distinction, within his painting, between the less real and the more real, so exposing the fault lines concealed by the axiom of integrated composition. The painting’s overall formal coherence is secure. The rift opens on the level of content. The drinkers are avatars, or beings who have “crossed over” from another sphere. The picture generates the uncanny effect of an entanglement of levels of reality, a confusion and contamination that — this supreme artist is telling us — is not an exceptional trick but the very nature of art. The art of painting, according to Velázquez, is built around the gradient between more and less fictional realms. Velázquez summons the memory of the sacred paintings breached by lay donors.9 He goes on to suggest that creativity itself is bacchic, a sacred intoxication encouraging a disrespect for borders, and a habitation, all at once, of real and more real spheres. The exposure of the seams in this painting reveals both the holistic power of the aesthetic force field — the capacity of

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an image to hold it all together — and the artist’s answering power to switch off that force field if he so desires. In general, this book is an attempt to think about portraits from the point of view not of the patrons but of the artists.

What follows is the plan of the book — perhaps better, the floor plan. The reader may choose to linger in one room, then cross the hall and explore another room, avoid some rooms altogether, and so forth. Chapter 1, “Franciscanism, the Laity, and Portraits,” presents a painting attributed by some to Giotto himself, by others to his workshop: a Crucifixion with St. Francis of Assisi and two modern worshippers, depicted in the same scale as the historical figures. This relatively small picture introduces several of the book’s themes: the new desire of nonaristocratic laity, as well as non-elite clergy, to see themselves portrayed; the technical achievement of the depiction of physiognomic likeness — or even the appearance of clothes, because a man or a woman’s robe may also be portrayed; and Francis’s teachings as a paradoxical context for many early portraits, encouraging the individual to picture for herself or himself the sacred personages, to join them in their sorrows and their trials, and yet to draw from those inner experiences the lesson of one’s own lowliness. The portraits seem to acknowledge the fragility of a public, social self even as they present an ordered image of that self. Chapter 2, “The Democratization of the Portrait, 1270–1320,” sketches the emergence of the institution of the supplicant portrait in the last decades of the thirteenth and first decades of the fourteenth centuries. The basis was the portraiture of superelites, lay and clerical, especially in the circles of the French royal court in Paris and the Île-de-France, and of the papacy in Rome, in tombs, mosaics, ivories, and illuminated manuscripts. Nonaristocratic (though still privileged and affluent) devout encroach upon this domain, commissioning similar if less splendid works. The chapter concludes with a discussion of comments by G. W. F. Hegel, in his Lectures on Fine Arts (1820s), on a sixteenth-­ century Dutch religious painting with several portraits of devout patrons. Hegel saw the faces of these moderns as divided between piety and worldliness. This equivocality interferes with the artwork’s essential function, which was to express Spirit as carried by the Christian faith. The depicted apostles and other saints with their single-minded fervor do this more ably. The partial failure of the portrait is for Hegel emblematic of the predicament of a “Romantic” or modern Christian art, which must fall away from the Ideal because Christianity itself is no longer confident that beautiful artistic form is capable of conveying Truth. Modern art’s best chance of expressing Truth is to take as its models the most spiritual faces found in real life, and, failing that, to represent the traces of the Truth in Christ’s life on earth, namely, his Passion and destruction and the laments it provoked. Christianity no longer supports beautiful form. Hegel thus frames the modern attitude to religion and art:

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art is still capable of beauty but no longer has a high calling. The portrait of the patron brings this all out. Chapter 3 comprises a series of reflections on historiography and method, which may be read as a response to Hegel’s challenge. The first part of this chapter is about the nineteenth- and twentieth-century understanding of Giotto. I do not wish to give the impression that this book is mainly about Giotto. It is not — but the reception of Giotto, the most famous artist of his century, is revealing of more general modern attitudes to premodern sacred art. Modernity, increasingly alienated from the content of sacred art and ever less likely to interact with it in ecclesiastical or devotional contexts, developed new criteria for evaluating Giotto. In the nineteenth century, he was depreciated as a mere realist and storyteller; in the twentieth century, he was prized first as a pure painter, a poet of masses and volumes, and later as a humanist, a poet of human nature. More recently still, however, scholarship on late medieval and early Renaissance art tends to set Giotto aside and instead chart the movements of images and artifacts within the entire social scene of devotion, stressing the psychological and behavioral impulses that drove piety. The artistic qualities of the best paintings are left unarticulated because the later privileged reputation of those works interferes with a description of the real historical practice of piety. To escape the impasse of a modern historiography of sacred art that is hesitant to approach art as such, I turn to two modern thinkers, Shoshana Felman and Bruno Latour, who, in their respective interpretations of a work of narrative prose dealing with ghosts and of a work of art dealing with the resurrected Christ — works that prompt their readers or beholders to take a position on the reality of ghosts — encourage us not to try to settle this question from the outside, but rather to plunge right into the works, recreating through our interpretations something of the initial psychic and libidinal cross-wirings that gave rise to the works in the first place, so putting us in a position to re-pose the problems of the reality of ghosts or deities from somewhere else, namely, from the vantage point of a non-place inside art. The origin point of this train of thought — for me, at least, if not for Fel­ man or Latour — is St. Francis’s relativization of everything human. Francis did not take seriously any human pursuits outside surrender to God. His teachings deconstruct the very devotional habits of mind and behaviors that were meant to respond to those teachings. I stress the negativity of Franciscan art. I am not saying that we should read sacred images as if they were modern artworks whose negativity, paradoxicality, or criticality is constitutive. That would be anachronistic. The artistic qualities of these images lie elsewhere (wholeness, brightness, balance, pattern). The shortfall of the images is a matter of their having been produced under conditions of alienation from God. To think this way about God, as the indispensable hypothesis without which the nullity of the individual is impossible to grasp, is no anachronism, for the crisis of humanness, alienated from its only possible ground, is not a historical phase but a permanent reality.

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Chapter 3, on historiography and method, and on theology, is conceived as a parenthesis, and therefore not indispensable to the main argument of the book. A reader impatient to look again at paintings can skip straight from chapter 2 to chapter 4, entitled “Witnesses.” That section begins with an interpretation of a mural painting in the Lower Church at Assisi, the Presentation of Christ in the Temple, part of a narrative cycle attributed to Giotto or his workshop. The key figure in this composition, it is argued, is a young man who kneels and hails the infant Messiah. Such a witness-bearing figure, who is not mentioned in any scriptural or apocryphal narrative and indeed does not seem to appear in any surviving prior depiction of the scene, is connected to modern witnesses outside the picture. He anticipates and, in effect, “holds the place” of a future lay patron. He tests the ground for an embedded portraiture. The motif of the character in a scriptural narrative who seems to stand in for lay involvement with the scenes is pursued to Siena, in a discussion of marginal figures in a work by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, and in several works involving the figure of Nicodemus, a biblically attested layperson who participated in the preparation of Christ’s body for the tomb, alongside Joseph of Arimathea, another layman. These two men are the counterparts of the two midwives who prepared Christ’s newborn body, and who in their own way modelled the choice between skepticism and faith. Such examples attest to an interest on the part of the artists in liminal figures who model not exemplary devotional constancy but rather more ambiguous states of mind like hesitation or perhaps open-­mindedness, states of mind documented in canonical and apocryphal texts. Chapter 5, “Interlopers,” is the core of the book. Here the Lamentation or Pietà once in the church of San Remigio and attributed by Vasari to the painter Giotto di Stefano (Giottino) is interpreted at length. In a sense, the entire book is a gloss on this one painting. It is hardly an unknown painting, and indeed is increasingly an object of attention in both the Italian- and English-language scholarship. My hypothesis that the picture’s pendant at San Remigio was the Annunciation in Ponce is new, however. The significance of the San Remigio Pietà is manifest in Giorgio Vasari’s laudatory account, but also latent in the sketch of a history of Trecento art with which Vasari opens his Life of Giottino. I read Vasari’s Life of Giottino as a counternarrative to his own main story. Vasari’s overall history moves forward by sudden leaps: Giotto, Masaccio, Leonardo. The alternative story glimpsed in Vasari’s Life of Giottino allows for more continuity between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. My own reading of the San Remigio Pietà, in a nutshell, is that the painter, profound innovator that he was, found two ways to knit together his composition: first, a soft blending of colors creating a continuous surface of smooth transitions carrying emotion from body to body — this is what Vasari found precocious — and second, an infrastructure of doublings and rhymes among the personages, heightening the sense of the great meaningfulness of

int ro du c t i on 15

the pictured event. Symmetrical as well as unequal, imbalanced doublings, reproducing the binarism of sacred and profane, are the key to the painting. Such integrating devices pull the portraits of the modern patrons into the compositional mesh. This fusion of sacred and profane, and the convergence in appearance of the historical characters and the modern interlopers, prepare the defining challenge of the sacred painting of the next century. The book tries to assess fourteenth-century portraits without looking ahead to the future. But that is hard to do. The embedded portrait plays a major role in Renaissance art. In the fifteenth century, the potential of the device was unleashed by oil technique. All at once, it seems, there is likeness. Ambiguities proliferate because the historical personages — the saints and the witnesses — also take on a quality of likeness, or rather a rhetoric of likeness, for the painter did not know what these personages actually looked like. Chapter 6 is a discussion of fifteenth-century embedded portraits framed by a consideration of the outsized role the device of the embedded portrait plays within the modern historiography of Renaissance art. The centerpiece — and the frontispiece — of Erwin Panofsky’s magnum opus Early Netherlandish Painting (1953) was the portrait of the patron Pieter Bladelin introduced by Rogier van der Weyden into a Nativity triptych (c. 1450). In his pages on this painting, which in effect consign the destiny of modern art history to the bourgeois subject with his or her inexhaustible capacities for introspection and imagination, Panofsky was responding to the pioneering researches of the turn-ofthe-century art historians Aby Warburg and Alois Riegl, who dedicated some of their most innovative pages to the embedded portraits of the members of the Medici and Sassetti families by the Florentine painter Domenico Ghirlandaio (early 1480s), and the embedded portraits of the brothers of the Order of St. John in Haarlem by Geertgen tot Sint Jans (1480s). Here, Hegel’s thesis that Spirit in modernity has migrated into subjective consciousness is tested. Riegl stressed the corporate identity of the Johannite patrons. Warburg ascribed an atavistic, quasi-magical potency to the Medici portraits. In Panofsky’s narrative, by contrast, the modern person’s piety, his meditation on the mystery of Christ’s Nativity, becomes an aspect of his more generally introspective, self-aware disposition. The patron no longer seems troubled by God’s absence. Panofsky himself, anthropocentric, welcomed such signs of the loosening of the grip of the phantom “God” on the European mind. The “New Man” of the fifteenth century had other preoccupations. In this way, the embedded portrait, although barely acknowledged as an art historical category, is written into modern Western self-understanding. Faith and fear are replaced by “religion,” a mere suite of behaviors, a repertoire of states of mind, such that the events and the eschatology described in scripture come to seem like the mere content of someone’s religious experience. The only thing left out of Panofsky’s account is the ongoing, compounding, indeed confounding afterlife of the artwork itself, which may yield the stored “knowledge” of the world it emerged from only many years later, in the

16

plurality and infinite differentiation of its reactivations by its future beholders. By letting the mural or the retable unfold in our presence as an artwork, we give ourselves the chance to recapitulate the originary conjectures, fantasies, and misprisions out of which any artwork emerges. The imperfection of the translatio of person into artwork represented by the supplicant portrait is our opportunity. The sovereign painting by Velázquez, invoked above, oscillates like all modern art around the caesura between reality and fiction, between characters known too well to the artist, and characters known less well. Chapter 7 revolves around Fra Angelico, whose innovations were mysteriously doubled, in a way that history cannot fathom, by Rogier van der Weyden. Among Angelico’s many schemes, whose boldness is masked by the conscientiousness of his painting manner and the sweet sincerity of his tone, was the integration of the portrait into the sacred image, made possible not only by Fra Angelico’s own direct studies of the physiognomies of live models but also by his soft and blended handling of colors not so very different from Giottino’s. Again, a close reading of Vasari reveals that he was well aware of this through line connecting the Trecento and the Quattrocento. An attempt to define the early portrait, and a comment on the recent historiography of late medieval portraits, are placed at the end of the book as an excursus entitled “Reference and Likeness.”

Detail of ill. 0.2

i Franciscanism, the Laity, and Portraits

Just as the Roman Empire absorbed the peoples it conquered by declaring them citizens of Rome, just as the Church absorbed, instead of condemning, St. Francis of Assisi and his antiestablishment message, so too did the sacred artwork of the late Middle Ages admit the profane supplicants pressing at its borders, laymen and laywomen petitioning for salvational preferment. The paintings legitimated the passionate but unconsecrated desires of the laity by engulfing them, drawing them inward into representability.1

The Munich Crucifixion The patrons are “uncanny guests” inside paintings that they themselves had paid for. In this picture, a man in an elegant green coat with gilt embroidered trim and a woman in a plain dark robe with her hair covered kneel at the foot of the Cross (ill.  1.1).2 The causes of the painting reappear inside their own effect. The picture is painted on a square wooden panel, about seventeen inches on a side, one of a series of seven scenes of the life of Christ that once belonged together, though it is not clear how, perhaps as an altarpiece.3 The pictures were painted by Giotto, or by painters working in his shop and under his supervision, probably after — maybe as much as a decade after — the completion of the mural cycle in the Arena Chapel in Padua in 1305.4 The man’s costume has been interpreted by some as the ceremonial robe of a cleric.5 It somewhat resembles garments worn by figures in other paintings by Giotto — an angel in the Ascension in the Arena Chapel, for example, or one of the kings in the Epiphany in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But a clergyman does not dress like an angel, or like a king, for that matter. The cut of the man’s robe — the narrow sleeves, the high collar — suggests a devout Detail of ill. 1.1

19

20

1.1  Giotto and workshop, Crucifixion, 1310–20? Panel, 45 × 43.7 cm. Munich, Alte Pinakothek.

lay­person (detail, p. 18). The problem is inherently difficult to solve because lay and clergy in this period were not alternatives, but points on a spectrum. To take one example: the Dandolo tomb lunette by Paolo Veneziano, discussed in the introduction (ill.  0.3), depicts the Dogaressa, Elisabetta Contarini, in nunlike garb. But Elisabetta had not taken orders: she was simply the very pious wife of the Doge and chose to have herself portrayed as a Franciscan tertiary, like her patron saint. Of course, at this point she was also a widow, and widows dressed like nuns (more on this later).

f r anc isc a n i s m , t h e l a i t y, a n d p ort r a i t s 21

This ambiguity reminds us that the very first icons — worshipped portraits — were images of revered leaders or loved ones, that is, laypeople. Only later were these individuals promoted to saintly or quasi-divine status, and at that point their cherished portraits came to be called icons. When new waves of devout laity arrive — all potentially candidates for hero or saint status, for there are no upper limits (anyone can become a saint!) — they implicitly challenge the icons. Portraiture of lay devout is just a matter of creating candidates for sainthood and for iconicity.6 Who is the figure immediately to the left of the Cross in Giotto’s panel? Was he present at the Crucifixion? Of course not: he is St. Francis, who died in 1226.7 Francis was a modern man, born in Assisi in Umbria into a worldly, affluent family. Francis rejected that world and invented a completely new form of spirituality based on the unconditional imitation of Christ, above all his poverty. Francis modelled a stark, non-negotiable humility. At the same time, he realized that the imitation of Christ was a project that most people would have to carry out within the secular sphere, on an everyday and not merely ceremonial basis. Francis and his followers cleared out a new space, hosting new forms of life, between the lay and the clerical spheres. The Greek word laikos, “of the people,” does not appear in the New Testament. The distinction between the laity and the clergy was formally established only later, in the Middle Ages. The laity were defined by the medieval Church negatively, as people who were allowed to engage in activities forbidden to clergy. The distinction between clergy and laity was hierarchical, mapping onto heaven and earth, soul and body, the vita contemplativa and the vita activa, Mary and Martha.8 Later, the Church drew a distinction within the clergy between “regular” (members of a monastic order) and “secular” clergy (involved in pastoral duties but living partly in the secular sphere). The humanist scholar Coluccio Salutati in his treatise De seculo et religione (1381) made a tripartite classification: Christians who “sow in good soil” (i.e., ordinary pious folk) will reap thirtyfold fruit; clerics (i.e., the secular clergy) will reap sixtyfold, and the truly religious (i.e., the regular or monastic clergy) will reap a hundredfold.9 Over the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and nowhere more so than in Italy, lay dedication to ritual and observances intensified. Many lay Christians, troubled and inspired by Francis of Assisi, joined confraternities, or lay societies or “clubs” organized around religious devotions and projects.10 Such associations of devout laity were partly absorbed into the Franciscan Order as a so-called Third Order; the affiliates were known as tertiaries. By the mid-thirteenth century, the Church was obliged formally to recognize a new category, the laicus religiosus — in effect, if we were to use Salutati’s taxonomy, a fourth category, between the ordinary laity and the secular clergy.11 So, it may not make much difference whether the kneeling supplicants in the Munich panel were secular clergy or religious laypeople.12 We could call this man and his wife or sister donors, if they gave the altarpiece to a chapel; or patrons or clients, if they commissioned this work from

22

the artist; or we could simply call them devout, supplicants, or witnesses, without making any assumptions about who paid for the work.13 We do not know their names. They may have been identified by an inscription or a coat of arms on the original frame of the dossal or altarpiece the panel belonged to. At that time, laypeople were not very often portrayed inside sacred pictures, and nor for that matter were clerics.14 The figures are only a few inches high, and yet there they are, present at the Crucifixion, placed among historical actors in depicted spaces, as if sharing the experience of a moment. They occupy virtual space in a depiction of a historical scene. They test the ground, not merely at the margins but inside an event, and inside a work of art.15

Giotto and the portrait The kneeling man in this picture, perhaps more than the woman, has a distinctive physiognomy and coiffure (detail, p. 18). Would we recognize him if he came toward us on the street? The answer is by no means clear; but it feels as if we might. Some people who saw this painting — family members or friends of the patrons, members of their community — would surely have recognized the couple. Before the widespread use of writing and the individualized seals and signatures that authorized documents, showing up in person to be recognized was the main way of doing business.16 The individual as a legal entity was based on facial recognition. This concept of individuality, rudimentary by modern standards, was still current in the lifeworld of a Florentine elite around 1300. The couple, perhaps Florentines, turned to the Florentine Giotto and involved themselves with the phenomenon of Giotto, the painter who in his own lifetime and for a long time afterward was praised as the first painter since antiquity to depict things as they really looked. Dante mentions him in the Commedia, written at the time this painting was painted, as the currently most acclaimed painter: Credette Cimabue ne la pittura

In painting Cimabue thought he held

tener lo campo, e ora ha Giotto il grido,

the field, and now it’s Giotto they acclaim — 

sì che la fama di colui è scura.

the former only keeps a shadowed fame.17

(Purgatorio 11: 94–96)

(Trans. Mandelbaum)

The philosopher and physician Pietro d’Abano, in a commentary of 1310 on a pseudo-Aristotelian text, wrote that “by means of images of the face is represented the dispositio of that person. . . . When it is painted by a painter capable of producing a likeness in all respects — for example by Giotto,” we attain knowledge of that person such that if we met him, we would recognize him. By dispositio Pietro d’Abano seems to have meant something like temperament or character.18 The scholar may simply have been invoking the name of a famous contemporary artist. He may also have been thinking of the characters

f r anc isc a n i s m , t h e l a i t y, a n d p ort r a i t s 23

in Giotto’s narrative art, which often display distinctive features that seem to register emotions or thoughts, but that were not portraits — not images of actual individuals.19 Giovanni Villani, in his Nuova Cronica, written before 1348, described Giotto as il più sovrano maestro stato in dipintura che si trovasse al suo tempo, e quegli che più trasse ogni figura e atti al naturale (“who drew every figure and action from life”).20 Giorgio Vasari said two centuries later that Giotto “revived the modern and excellent art of painting, introducing good drawing from live natural models, something which had not been done for more than two hundred years” (risuscitò la moderna e buona arte della pittura, introducendo il ritrarre bene di naturale le persone vive, il che più di dugento anni non s’era usato).21 Neither Villani nor Vasari necessarily refers to portraiture, which is the depiction of specific, named individuals. Vasari’s word ritrarre could also mean simply the practice of working with live models, or even more generally the grounding of his art in the close study of people’s appearances, in order to generate more lifelike and convincing images of historical characters such as saints, apostles, and all the nameless extras in narrative painting. Giotto was able to create lifelike but fictional faces, even if less effectively than today’s generative adversarial networks (GANs). But Vasari went on in his Life of Giotto to list eighteen portraits by the artist, including two self-portraits. Many of these probably never existed — that is, were misidentified as portraits by Vasari — and none survives.22 Vasari does not mention the three people whose portraits by Giotto do survive: Enrico Scrovegni, Jacopo Stefaneschi, and Teobaldo Pontano, bishop of Assisi; some would add Boniface VIII.23 Giotto’s portrait of the banker Enrico Scrovegni, the donor of the Arena Chapel in Padua, was exceptional: Scrovegni is a rare example of a non-­noble who had himself portrayed in a major and visible commission. Scrovegni was uncommonly ambitious, and he spent sums of money and time attempting to overcome his father’s reputation as a usurer, squaring his own standing with the Church, through penitence, and acquiring a minor aristocratic title.24 Scrovegni had Giotto place his painted likeness at the edge — but clearly inside — the representation of the Last Judgment in his chapel, kneeling and presenting a model of the chapel to three haloed figures, one of whom may be the Virgin Mary (detail, p. 41).25 Scrovegni is depicted in the same scale as the holy personages, like the supplicants in the Munich Crucifixion. The architectural model is shouldered by a cleric, perhaps a local cleric acting as a kind of trustee, or perhaps not a particular person, just a generic cleric standing for Scrovegni’s partnership with the Church.26 There were also two life-sized carved images of Enrico Scrovegni, one standing and one recumbent. An upright sculpted image of a person is a statue, an independent portrait perpetuating the life of the individual. This was a format known from surviving examples from Greek and Roman antiquity as well as from the written accounts by Pliny and others of hundreds more. The statue of Enrico Scrovegni now in the sacristy of the Arena Chapel stands

isolated and with hands pressed together in prayer. The original placement and function of the statue are unclear.27 Scrovegni was also represented in the format of the effigy or substitute body, a double of the corpse hidden below, in the tomb. Laura Jacobus argues that the statue was based on close study of the live model, perhaps by Giotto himself, or after a drawing by Giotto, and that the tomb effigy was based on a cast of his face, a so-called death mask, made at Scrovegni’s death in 1336.28 Jacobus argues that the scholarship has not recognized how many fourteenth-century sculpted portraits were based on facial casting, a mechanical capture of exact physical likeness; she calls these facsimile portraits.29

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1.2 Giotto, Last Judgment, 1303–5. Fresco, approx. 1,000 × 840 cm. Padua, Arena Chapel. 1.3  Giotto and workshop, Teobaldo Pontano and Mary Magdalene, 1310s? Fresco. Assisi, Lower Church.

Most painted portraits gave the three-quarter view, the head seen at a forty-­five-degree angle, more or less — perhaps to suggest, in emulation of sculpture, mobility. In the Munich Crucifixion, however, the man is in pure profile, a format recalling ancient coins bearing portraits. The profile format ordinarily suggests the abstraction of a worshipper from his surroundings, a non-belonging. The figure in portrait sees with his inner eye; his head does not move to track the bodies around him. Here the painter has modified this convention by having the man look upward, toward Christ. The profile format removes him from the scene. But his upward tilted head suggests that he is seeing with his eyes and not just his mind’s eye. Two portraits often attributed to Giotto, near the Chapel of the Magdalene in the Lower Church at Assisi, are also in pure profile. The two kneeling figures resemble one another, and they are not implausibly identified as portraits of the chapel’s owner, the bishop of Assisi, Teobaldo Pontano. In one, a cleric in bishop’s robes kneels before a figure of St. Rufinus; his hands are pressed together, and the saint places a hand on his head. In the other, a cleric in a Franciscan habit kneels before Mary Magdalene and clasps her hand (ill. 1.3).30 The paintings may date from before 1309, although others say a decade or more later. Mary Magdalene herself is shown in profile in the Noli me tangere in the narrative cycle in her nearby chapel. Her encounter with the Resurrected Christ in the Garden is the template for these portraits. Alexa Sand pointed out the rarity of the profile format in the material she treated in her

26

book, which focused on thirteenth-century French devotional manuscripts portraying elite women in conference with the Virgin Mary.31 The women had themselves depicted in imaginary spaces that involved placement in space and a three-quarter view of the head. The three-quarter view suggested a dynamic meeting and spatiotemporal continuity. Sand argues that the premium on portrait likeness only emerged in the fourteenth century when men began for the first time to have themselves portrayed in the reflexive manner pioneered by the aristocratic laywomen of the previous century. The men introduced the profile portrait, which made them appear flattened, emblematic, abstracted from the world. Sand argues that the elite male devout changed the meaning of the supplicant portrait: instead of a “dynamic and transformational relationship to the depicted bodies and gazes of sacred subjects,” the male figure was now transferred to a “timeless parallel universe.”32 Male patrons, she argues, creating modern versions of the ancient coin, wanted to see themselves painted on independent panels, where the three-quarter view, associated with scenic interaction, no longer made sense. Profile had a diacritical power: it read as not the three-quarter view.33 In votive paintings throughout the fourteenth century, the profile format keeps the modern mortals firmly in their allotted time frame. Strict profile, ruling out sensory interaction with the sacred personages, keeps the levels of reality distinct.

The Franciscan impulse The most important precedent for the induction of the image of the lay devout into religious paintings was the image of St. Francis. Such images were promulgated within years of his death in 1226. Francis, along with his coeval Dominic (d. 1221), founder of a rival order of mendicant or “begging” friars, were among the first modern people to be portrayed on panels, in the format of the icon — indeed they were canonized within a few years of their deaths.34 The oldest surviving images of Francis are standing figures in fresco or in panel.35 Later, Francis was depicted kneeling or prostrate at the base of the Cross in scenes of the Crucifixion, or literally at the base of large, in fact lifesized cross-shaped panels depicting the Crucified Christ. Francis was a target of devotion who could himself appear as a devotee. The earliest image of Francis at the foot of a cross may be the Crucifix over the high altar at Santa Chiara in Assisi with Francis, Chiara (Clare) (d. 1253), and Abbess Benedicta (d. 1260) at the base.36 These poses were prepared by Mary Magdalene, the most passionate of Jesus’s female followers, who in her grief flung herself — according to the paintings — at the base of the Cross, so reprising the episode where she anoints Christ’s feet ( John 12:3).37 There were early medieval precedents for the lay devotion to the Cross: Julius von Schlosser published illuminations from Carolingian manuscripts that already depicted supplicants kneeling at the base of the Cross.38 But

27

1.4  Master of the Magdalen, Crucifix, 1280s? Panel, 129.1 × 108.1 cm. Worcester Art Museum.

the Franciscan Crosses opened a new path to the Cross for lay devout. The painted Crucifix attributed to the Florentine Magdalene Master (1280s?) in the Worcester Art Museum makes room at the base for two secular figures, a man in worldly costume and a woman in pious black and white, beside Mary Magdalene, who is crouched and showered in blood (ill. 1.4).39 At the base of a Cross in the Accademia in Florence, attributed to the Master of the Corsi Crucifixion and dated 1310–15, kneels a layman in a green striped robe. Compare this to the robe of the male supplicant in Giotto’s Munich Crucifixion. This Cross is modelled on the Cross by Giotto at Santa Maria Novella.40

28

Francis and Franciscans also appeared in scenic Crucifixions. In his Crucifixion fresco in the south transept of the Upper Church at Assisi (late 1270s), Cimabue depicted Francis kneeling and bending at the base of the Cross.41 In the north transept of the Lower Church, just to the left of the enthroned Madonna and Child by Cimabue, the Madonna of the Angels, there is a Crucifixion by Giotto (ill. 1.5). In addition to eight members of Christ’s inner circle (seven women plus John) on the left, and two groups of onlookers (nine in all) on the right, there is Francis kneeling and reaching out his arms toward the Cross. Behind him are four Franciscan friars kneeling in two rows of two. In each row the figure behind is mostly obscured. But the figures in the foreground are given distinctive features. The visible friar in the second row, a corpulent man, has a halo and is very likely St. Anthony of Padua. The swarthy man in the first row has no halo. Among the modern religious heroes, however, Francis is the only one who imitates, in a picture, the self-abasement of Mary Magdalene. Francis’s anachronistic gate-crashing — the introduction of his image, in full-scale, in depictions of a historical event — did not go unremarked. In the Little Flowers of St. Francis, a fourteenth-century compilation of stories about Francis and his band of followers, we learn that a Friar Peter was one day pondering most devoutly on the Passion of Christ, and how the most blessed Mother of Christ, and John the Evangelist, the most beloved disciple, and St. Francis, were all painted (dipinti) at the foot of the cross. . . . A desire came upon him to know which of those three had suffered greatest sorrow in the Passion of Christ.

St. John then appeared in a vision and told Friar Peter the answer: Mary and John had suffered most, but Francis nearly as much!42 The author apparently felt that he needed to reassure his readers that Francis did not overestimate the significance of his own spiritual project. It is notable for our purposes that, when Friar Peter pondered the Passion, he was in fact thinking about paintings of the Passion. Not that he took them literally: he understood that Mary and John had really been there, while Francis had not. In wondering which of the three had suffered the most, Peter was in effect responding to doubts about the legitimacy of Francis’s presence — the presence of his image — inside the painting. Francis set the example of an ideally fervent piety and so licensed the introduction of devout lay patrons into the scene. Francis, too, was once a layman. The lay petitioners in the Munich Crucifixion, however, do not hurl themselves at the Cross. They are stiffly posed, hands pressed together. The man is proud in his robe, unlike Francis, whose father was a merchant in silk, and who gave his robe (the whole robe, not just half like St. Martin) to a beggar. Lay patrons portrayed in paintings are always decorously clad, if not in expensive decorated fabrics — offered, as it were, as a tribute — then in severe and modest black or grey signifying withdrawal from worldly sensuality. The couple is like a pair of birds. Such pairings of the worldly and the retiring,

29

1.5  Giotto and workshop, Crucifixion with St. Francis. Fresco, c. 1320? Assisi, Lower Church.

the profane and the sacred, are common in the corpus of early portraits as well as in sacred narratives generally. In painting, it seems, the worldly figure must be chaperoned, his splendor tempered. Patrons never appear in disarray. On a Processional Cross by Lorenzo Monaco (early 1390s) there is a kneeling bearded man at the left, evidently a modern person, not a historical figure, wearing only a loose brown sleeveless shift. It is unthinkable to identify him as the patron of the work. Laurence Kanter suggests instead that he may be the hermit Boldrone, a twelfth-century pilgrim.43 In the Munich Crucifixion, Mary Magdalene is not clearly identified; she is presumably one of the women supporting Christ’s mother at the left. It is as if she has been held back to make room for Francis. A time traveler, Francis embraces the feet of Christ nailed to the suppedaneum. Unlike other clergymen, he does not “manage” the relation of the laity to God but just plunges in naively.44 There is nothing abstract or incomplete about Francis’s participation in the scene. He is just about as remote chronologically from the event in Jerusalem as the lay supplicants are, and yet unlike them, and wearing a brown shapeless habit not of ancient design but nevertheless marking him off both from the ancient figures and the worldly moderns, he grasps the feet of Christ and the base of the Cross and approaches with his lips as if he desired the Cross — as he must do within the concept of his conformity with Christ, which also included his miraculous sympathetic stigmatization.

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On Francis and self-loss Why are the patrons so self-possessed and inscrutable? After all, they may have been early readers of the Meditations on the Life of Christ, the popular devotional manual that retells the story of the life and death of Christ in extravagant detail, much of it unattested in scripture canonical or apocryphal, stirring up strong sympathies and exhorting readers to enter imaginatively into the passions and predicaments of the holy personages. These emotions shaped the preparation of the soul for salvation. The date of composition of the Meditations on the Life of Christ has not been established. The author was a Franciscan. Some scholars believe that the Latin text was composed no earlier than 1336 and perhaps some years later, and that an Italian translation followed. Others believe that the earliest version, perhaps in Latin, perhaps in Italian, was composed at the beginning of the century.45 The Latin text narrates the arrival on the scene of the Crucifixion of the benevolent laymen Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus. John runs hurriedly to meet them: “They tearfully embraced one another; but they were unable to speak to each other for quite a while because of the tenderness of their feelings and their copious tearful laments.” When they arrived at the Cross, “they knelt and wept, and adored the Lord. Approaching closer, they were received graciously by the Lady and her companions with a curtsey and very low bow. They curtsied in the same way, and with loud lamentation remained there for quite a while.”46 In that Latin text there are many interpolated passages by or attributed to the twelfth-­century Benedictine Bernard of Clairvaux that strike a more disciplined, theologically inflected note, but that also seek to summon a reader’s empathetic response to the terrible event: Think, says he, about the positioning of the crucified body, and see if there is anything about it that does not cry out to the Father, cry out to the Father on your behalf. That divine head, already covered densely with multiple thorn pricks, is pierced through nearly to the brain’s pulp whenever a thorn is pressed on. . . . So that your head would not suffer pain, so that your sight would not be wounded, his eyes were glazed over in death, and those lamps which light the world were extinguished at the appointed time.47

Better readers than the laity were the three friars who bend at the feet of the Enthroned Virgin in the small panel known as the Madonna of the Franciscans and attributed to the great Sienese painter Duccio di Buoninsegna (c. 1285) (ill. 1.6).48 They are all three identical in appearance, in increasingly crouched postures, like three frames of a film. They present themselves as “creatures of lack,” abject, formless. The style of the painting is total, wall-towall, closed on itself, inhospitable to alien form. The three friars collapse in praise, crushed under the pressure of Mary’s style. Pliable and crumpled, they participate in the overall gestalt of the picture. Whereas Giotto’s supplicants, in the Crucifixion, are rigid, importing their own disciplined style into the picture. The unreal, dominating form of Duccio’s painting is the symbolic form of an agitated, even traumatized response to a sacred reality. The painting

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1.6  Duccio di Buoninsegna, Madonna of the Franciscans, c. 1285. Panel, 23.5 × 16 cm. Siena, Pinacoteca Nazionale.

says: this is what you see when you are overwhelmed. The picture is the image of an experience of self-loss in the presence of divinity. Perhaps Giotto’s clients knew the ecstatic devotional poetry of the Franciscan Jacopone da Todi (ca. 1230–1306), in Umbrian dialect. There are no worries about the dating of Jacopone’s Lauds:

32 L’Amore sta appiso

Love is fixed to the cross — 

la Croce l’à preso

The cross has taken Him

e non lo larga partire;

and will not let Him go.

vocce currendo

I run and cling to that cross

e mo mme cci apendo, [sic]

That my anguish

ched eo non pòzza esmarrire;

may not drive me mad.

cà lo fogire

To flee would lead me to despair,

farìame sparire

For my name would be canceled

ch’ eo non forìa scripto enn Amore.

from the book of Love.

O Croce, eo m’ apicco

O cross, I fix myself to you

e a tténe m’affico,

and cling to you,

ch’eo gusti morendo la vita!

That as I die, I may taste Life!49

The painting gives us no sense at all as to whether such turbulent thoughts are coursing through the minds of the patrons. Yet, they might equally have read the harrowing Memorial of the Franciscan tertiary Angela da Foligno (1248–1309) — a spiritual autobiography composed in the 1290s and immediately widely disseminated: I was moved to seek the way of the cross, so that I could stay at the foot of the cross, where all sinners take refuge. And the way of the cross was illuminated, demonstrated, and taught to me in the following way — that is, it was revealed to me that if I wanted to go to the cross, I should strip myself, become lighter, and go naked to the cross; in other words, I should forgive everyone who has offended me and strip myself of everything earthly including all men, women, friends, and relatives, and all other things, such as my possessions; I should even strip away my own self; and I should give my heart to Christ who had accomplished so much good for me.50

Angela was a layperson who “asked God” that her husband and children should die so that she could join the Franciscan tertiaries and devote herself to Christ. She reveals this immediately after the passage just quoted. In the devotions and crises recounted in her Memorial, Angela dismantled and then rebuilt her entire personhood. Do the Franciscan patrons in the Munich painting, taking refuge like Angela at the foot of the Cross, look capable of such self-nullification? The nineteenth-century scholar Ernst Renan wrote: “It seems at first glance that the dream of Francis of Assisi would have brought about the end of every art and every noble life. Strange, this sordid beggar was the father of Italian art.”51 It is ironic that Francis, who tore down the barriers between himself and others and between humans and nature, should have encouraged the emergence of lay portraiture. How could the denial of self serve as the matrix for self-assertion? Erich Auerbach dealt with this apparent contradiction by arguing that Francis’s personality “awakened and sharpened the sense of the originality and distinctiveness of the individual, just that sense whose great monument is Dante’s Commedia.”52 Francis showed how to deconstruct the self. Franciscan-leaning patrons of artworks, however, impressed as they might be, were unable to advance their dramas of conscience into representability.

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In the first place, they were reluctant to violate conventions governing public self-presentation. In addition, they may have felt that their very recognition of Francis’s exceptionality distinguished them from their neighbors or colleagues, and saw no contradiction therein. We know from textual evidence that in life, in private and public devotions, lay Christians in Giotto’s Florence, including the affluent and respectable, were perfectly capable of extreme displays of penitential piety involving loss of composure and ecstatic remonstrations. Flagellants — lay confraternities devoted to ritualized public self-scourging — were only the most extreme.53 But in paintings, lay as well as clerical supplicants are almost without exception depicted as poised, indeed motionless, and emotionless. They are attentive, and yet at the same time do not seem to react to what they are seeing. If such paintings were to show us how Christians really look when submitted to the crushing pressure of the spectacle of the Crucifixion, they would look more like the figures in Francis Bacon’s triptych Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944). But they don’t, and this contributes to the impression we have of the lay patrons’ non-belonging to the scene. They are complying with a code of decorum that spells out what is appropriate and seemly. A display of emotions was acceptable within the conventions of a ritual or performance; a painting, however, fixes a pose or a facial expression for all time. In the painting, inner chaos is suppressed. Perhaps the supplicants were mindful of the Sermon on the Mount: And when you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they will be seen by people. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. But as for you, when you pray, go into your inner room, close your door, and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you. (Matthew 6:5–6)54

Praying behind closed doors — of course, this is exactly what these laity, in parachuting into a painting, are not doing. The man and the woman in the Munich Crucifixion do not lament as do the members of Christ’s family and entourage. They do not mirror the behavior they observe. They are “switched off,” as if they were placed not before a dramatic and violent incident at all, but rather before a representation of that incident — indeed, as if they were kneeling before a painting. They wished to be seen in the attitude of those who pray in public before an image, like these three kneeling people, two men, one bearded and one not, and a woman wearing a red hooded robe and a wimple, worshipping an image of the Virgin Mary at the church of Orsanmichele in Florence (ill. 1.7).55 This is an illustration in a manuscript of the Nuova cronica, the history of Florence by Giovanni Villani quoted earlier. Represented is a painted image of an enthroned Madonna and Child, a substitute for a late thirteenth-century image associated with miracles. That original panel or fresco was destroyed in a fire in 1304. It was replaced by a copy, and then in 1347, definitively, by still another copy, this time painted by Bernardo Daddi; the latter painting is still in situ. The manuscript

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1.7  Anonymous Florentine painter, Miraculous Madonna of Orsanmichele and Worshippers, c. 1348. Giovanni Villani, Nuova Cronica. Vatican Library.

shows people paying homage to one of the versions of the cult image housed in a stone altar-like tabernacle, the predecessor to the marble tabernacle by Orcagna (1359). There are four candles on the ledge or mensa. The scene resembles contemporary paintings depicting supplicants before the enthroned Madonna and Child, like the large panel in Avignon by the so-called Pistoiese Master of 1310, which depicts an over-life-sized Virgin and Child flanked by six angels with male and female patrons kneeling below (ill. 1.8).56 Here the conceit is that the people kneel in the presence of the saint herself. But the form before them is also the conventional form of a Marian image. The Virgin appears to the devout in the form of a cult image. The Avignon panel represents two supplicants kneeling before an image very much like the Ognissanti Madonna of Giotto, except that they occupy the positions of the two kneeling angels in the foreground of that work (ill. 3.6). The discrepancy in scale between Giotto’s over-life-sized Virgin and the angels is reproduced by the discrepancy in scale between the Virgin and the patrons in the Avignon image. The supplicants in Giotto’s Munich Crucifixion are also placed before a conventional form: the Crucified Christ, who in the great painted crosses appears with little accompaniment, as a self-sufficient image (ill.  1.4). The moderns in the Munich panel worship such a Cross. The panel’s gold ground says clearly: we are not seeing the event as it happened, but rather a set of forms that we know from other paintings, arrayed on an abstract gold field. The man and the woman approach such a form. There is no landscape-like space but only a narrow shelf of ground supporting all the figures. Yet in the end it is a space, a virtual space, and the modern supplicants share it with the historical actors. If we see the picture as the representation of a historical

35

1.8  Master of 1310, Madonna and Child, 1310. Panel, 215 × 132 cm. Avignon, Musée du Petit Palais.

event unfolding in time and space, then the modern supplicants are inside that event. The virtual space invites them in, and then immediately makes them look like intruders. The ambiguity is piquant because Giotto, though he could have, does not make sharp distinctions between the levels of reality through either form or style. All levels are treated the same way. This is topological indeterminacy: the supplicants are both outside and inside the painting at once. It is as if a writer, in order to represent the activity of reading a book, wrote a book in which the book’s reader, or the book itself, appeared inside the book. In that case a reader of the book would come across herself as one of the characters in the book. This happens in children’s books, by way of advertising the immersive quality of reading.57 Annemarie Weyl Carr has shown how Byzantine icons of the Palaiologan era, which typically did not develop virtual space, also did not invite real-world supplicants onto their surfaces, but rather left them outside, on the margins, in fact literally on the frame.58 The patrons can be understood, she argues, as figures who look not at the deity but at a painted form. They are shown worshipping an icon, like the figures in the Villani manuscript. Such objects were icons of icons.

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In the Florentine pictures, topological indeterminacy is mitigated by a discrepancy in scale between modern patrons and holy figures. Difference in size prevents us from having to take too literally the picture’s proposition that the patrons were really there at the Crucifixion. But miniaturized people make for a somewhat unsatisfactory solution, or at least Giotto seems to have thought so, for he designed his modern figures, in the Munich panel, in full scale, so rendering the topological ambiguity unavoidable. A devotional disposition is both the source for and the destination of pictures such as the Avignon Madonna and Child or the Munich Crucifixion. A new beholder arrives — you or I, for example — and cannot escape the feeling that the painting has been pre-beheld. The deferential receptivity expected of a beholder of the picture has already been depicted in the picture. The picture seems to expect that its beholders will mirror the depicted, embedded beholder, reinforcing that dissociation of abstract codes of behavior from any subjective state of mind that was the very premise of ritual. In the premodern world, there was no assumption that ritualized behavior or obedience or deference or compliance with custom or decorum was underwritten by the subject’s firmly held or hard-won convictions. Ideas, good and bad, were the property of everyone and no one. You could participate without commitment. The survival of this principle of dissociation in modernity is often farcical: Horoscopes are consulted by people who are well aware that astrology is not a science. A laughtrack tells television viewers that someone has already found this program to be funny. Paid actors, in advertisements, not even bothering to pretend that they are not actors, speak of their experience with pain medications. In premodernity, however, no shadow of inauthenticity fell upon the dissociation of forms from subjective consciousness. In Greek antiquity, the chorus that commented on the events of the tragedy relayed collectively held wisdom. In the late Middle Ages, the votive image modelled a decorous piety. This distribution of an ideal or socially desirable receptivity across a community, without calling on any individual to confess or witness to that state of mind, is called interpassivity.59 There was tension, however, between the “interpassive” dissociation of actions and beliefs, still the basis of liturgy in the fourteenth century, and the new desire on the part of devout laity to have intense, inalienable experiences of an approach to the sacred of the sort some clergy seemed to have. This was a tension between two different ways of making the temporality of experience perceptible. Time as such is impossible to grasp. Liturgy makes time concrete and tangible by defining itself against quotidian time — by denying its significance. To submit to the rites is to enter into a temporal parenthesis where the rhythms of the rite enjoy absolute dominion. The enforced suspension of everyday instrumental actions reestablishes the proper hierarchy between profane and sacred. The private, improvised devotional exercise, by contrast, a flexing of the imagination and an auto-stimulation of the emotions, is not exactly an egress from everyday time, but more like a disciplining of the faculties of desire, will, and memory designed to heighten the sensation of living.

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The religious experience, unlike the submission to liturgy, differs not in kind from everyday experience but only in quantity. Private, poeticized prayer recognizes the sacred and the profane no longer as categorical opposites but as two points on a spectrum. Liturgy and private devotion thus represent not only two different ways of making the time of experience perceptible, but also two different valuations of subjective experience. The theme of the legend of Francis of Assisi is the chaos just below the surface of the public and social person. In the early collections of stories, Francis and his disciples often indulge in clownish and reckless behavior. While still in secular habit, Francis used to go about dressed meanly and in a penitential mode, and for this was “by many held to be a fool” and even “mocked and hunted as a madman.”60 He dramatized his contempt for fine clothes by sewing pieces of rough sackcloth on his tunic.61 One day at a crossroads, to determine which direction he and his followers would choose, Francis made the brothers “turn round and round as children do, and . . . not cease turning until I bid thee.” He made them continue spinning even after they had become dizzy, making fools of them in public.62 On Francis’s command Friar Ruffino strips down to his underwear and mounts a pulpit in a church in Assisi to preach. “The children and the men” (not the women?) laughed at him.63 Friar Masseo, when he had attained the state of grace and humility, would “many times make a joyous sound like the cooing of a dove, ‘Coo, coo, coo!’ ”64 Friar Juniper, the “jester of God,” stood in the marketplace of Viterbo in his underwear. “To abase himself ” (vilificarsi) before a crowd of his Roman admirers, Juniper removed a child from a seesaw and took his place; and then went on seesawing for a very long time until the devout lost patience.65 The first, “unedited” life of Francis, by Thomas of Celano, reports that whenever Francis and the friars “saw a church, even indeed if they were miles away and could only see it from a great distance, they would prostrate themselves on the ground towards it, showing it reverence both spiritually and physically. . . . And, what was no less remarkable, whenever they found a cross, or something in the shape of a cross, whether on the ground or on a wall or in the branches of trees or in the hedges along the roadside, they performed the same obeisance.”66 Subversive, transgressive, yes, but also simply antic, carnivalesque, foolish, meaningless. Francis urges upon his followers irresponsibility as such: “Take no thought for the morrow” (Matthew 6:34).67 In the only extended discussion of pictorial art in the Commedia (completed 1320), Dante had Virgil show him three marble reliefs on biblical and pagan themes involving humility, imagini di tante umilitadi (Purgatorio 10.98). The lesson is quickly grasped: O superbi cristian, miseri lassi,

O Christians, arrogant, exhausted, wretched,

che, de la vista de la mente infermi,

whose intellects are sick and cannot see,

fidanza avete ne’ retrosi passi,

who place your confidence in backward steps,

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non v’accorgete voi che noi siam vermi

do you not know that we are worms and born

nati a formar l’angelica farfalla,

to form the angelic butterfly that soars,

che vola a la giustizia sanza schermi?

without defenses, to confront His judgment?

Di che l’animo vostro in alto galla,

Why does your mind presume to flight when

poi siete quasi antomata in difetto,

you are still like the imperfect grub, the worm

sì come vermo in cui formazion falla?

before it has attained its final form?

(10: 121–29)

(Trans. Mandelbaum)

Humility is the ground that will support the rebuilding of the person.68 Christian Duquoc argued that Francis’s story, the acts and episodes, cannot be absorbed into an essential philosophy of poverty, nor can it be assimilated to the “eternism” of classical theology. Francis’s acts were scandalous, unrepeatable — if they were repeated, they would be mere theater, “a relapse into the order of representation.” His life was a series of unforeseeable interventions that inhabit lived time and promote the unforeseeable in other domains — the “revolt against the logic of a class or a civilization,” for example.69 The stories collected in the early lives of Francis do not so much support a teaching about the nature of God as they reveal a primordial instability in human nature, which nevertheless must be made to serve as the ground for an entirely new concept of personhood. The Franciscan renunciation of social answerability exposes the lawlessness lying just below the outer, social shell of subjecthood. Francis projects the rebuilding of a Christian life upward from this chaotic ground. This presents a challenge to lay devout, who cannot but be impressed and yet are unable to carry out the entire renunciation. They stop at the threshold, containing the chaos with their rigid postures. There was nothing artificial about the bearing of the patrons in Giotto’s Crucifixion. In fact, they are the only depicted figures who are real: all the rest are mere tokens, citations from other paintings that have been assembled according to familiar conventions. The portrait, with its anchorage in a modern person’s real existence, modest as it may be as an image, nevertheless drains the surrounding figures of some of their vitality. The painted figures of Christ, Mary, and Francis have been summoned, one might say hired, for the benefit of the modern patrons. Their performances within the artwork are tightly circumscribed by a script. The portrayed patrons are the only figures in the sacred painting whose steadfastness is contingent; they could go off the rails, they could turn away from God. The historical figures — Mary, John — don’t have this freedom. They once did! But now they are safely embalmed inside the painting.

Incommensurability of human and divine spheres The phenomenon of embedded portraits was driven mainly by the desire of devout laity to take part in what they saw as the orderedness of the artwork, which itself reproduced the hidden orderedness of reality, the real reality behind

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the disorder of the phenomena. An artwork was understood as a precinct of order in an entropic world. Francis revealed that the disorder was not merely a shortcoming of the experienced world but was intrinsic to our own inner natures. The artwork and its style contained, and in doing so acknowledged, the anarchic impulses just below the surface of public personhood that were the sources of all worldly and spiritual misfortunes and at the same time — Francis revealed this, too — the indispensable resources of a possible renewal. Giotto’s Crucifixion does not seem an especially ordered or patterned work (ill. 1.1). But the familiar quality of the composition is deceptive. The painting is governed and animated by low-key patterns. Note the symmetry of the hovering angels and the blood dripping from hands and arms. Note the internal symmetry of the group of women at the left, Mary’s slack, failing body supported by a tightly knit trio of women, united, their mute intimacy foreshadowing Mary’s embrace of her son’s corpse, soon to come — and note the subtle asymmetries animating the group.70 Note how the frontality of the scene brings out, diagram-like, the juxtaposition of self-loss (Francis) and self-­possession (the moderns) at the base of the Cross. There is little sense of a depicted space in which a complex event has unfolded. Instead, there is a reduction of the scene to the sacrificed body of Christ and the body language of immediate reaction. Only now do we become fully aware that the kneeling figures, Francis and the patrons, are not only taking up space in the picture — overlapping with their bodies the bodies of the saints — but are also part of its structure. If they were removed, there would be gaps in the picture, empty spaces to fill. The interpolated figures are part of the very pattern which they long for, and which they feel they lack. The modern devout delegate painted images of themselves to merge into that iconographically predetermined but artistically enhanced pattern, and in this way, themselves become a pattern. This strange loop, or tangled hierarchy — the impossibility of deciding what is inside the artwork and what is outside — is the whole interest of the phenomenon.71 The painting’s square format enforces an invisible grid that renders every movement legible: John’s agonized rightward leaning mirrors the Virgin’s outward sway on the left; these two, the most intimate with Christ, bend away from his body in their grief. The rightward leaning of the two men at the far right, behind John, however, takes on quite a different meaning. Who are those two men without haloes? They seem actually to turn away from the event. One is just half a face, an onlooker. He is partly masked by the burly man in red, with a great grey beard, the only strongly masculine figure in the composition. Frowning, he seems to look back over his shoulder before turning away, as if still in some doubt about what he has seen. Is the crucified one who he said he was, who his hysterical followers say he is? Is the grief of the man’s family not only grief but also a form of knowledge? His raised hand suggests a summoning of his thoughts and a coming to a decision, a gathering of himself to himself. His rightward inclination and backward glance signify a hesitation on the threshold of faith, at the moment of truth when it was not yet determined

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whether Christianity would be an esoteric or an exoteric religion: a cult for the initiated, or an open, expansive religion.72 The eloquent body language of these men and also of John — his hunched shoulder — is masterful and reinforces the hypothesis of the painting’s proximity to Giotto. Economical, Giotto brings out emotion with the most negligible of gestures, the incline of a shoulder or the curve of a back. In his immediate succession, only Maso di Banco can do this.73 All the greater is the contrast with the undividedness of the kneeling supplicants, the placid confidence they project in the truth of the Christian myth. Any cares they may harbor about their own personal salvation are not represented except in their attitudes of submission, attitudes these people were otherwise unlikely ever to assume in life outside religious observances, unless a display of fealty to a noble superior were called for. The fanciful, still-­pagan model of a society structured by a vertical chain of subordination, by ties of loyalty and obedience, an image projected by the courtly epic poems, was not the reality of Giotto’s Florence, where wealthy and talented non-nobles might well refuse to kneel to anyone. Nevertheless, the iconography of religious obeisance was informed by the symbolisms of secular subordination.74 The nobleman, an ideal configuration, was ultimately a pagan concept: he was undivided; he did not question or doubt; he observed the rites and respected the hierarchies, without cavil; and the price of his superiority was his readiness to acknowledge his own inferiority to someone on a higher rung of the ladder. Christianity, by contrast, acknowledged the threat of worldly detachment from the mysteries and, in principle if not in practice, called into question all mundane hierarchies by locating all men and women on a plane very far, immeasurably far below God, and so in effect all on the same level. Order and pattern in art, a sublimating beauty: these are the symbolic forms of immortality, redemption, and infinity. Sacred art was expected to reproduce the orderedness of the real reality. Our own mean lives take place at a great distance from such forms. Art was asked to assert and praise order over our own formal indigence. But once the painting was understood as a window onto a scene that itself involves figures who observe and witness, for whom events are a scene, the lay devout may invite her- or himself into the painting. The layperson carries her own fear and pride into the scene; she brings the prospect of death, an absolute loss of form — the real death she cannot grasp, not the already-­ occurred and therefore comprehensible deaths depicted in the sacred histories. The portrait falls into the picture, blighting the very order the patron craves. Hybrid artworks like the ones we have been considering, which force a meeting of the divine and the human on a shared ground, allotting them each space on a picture surface, would seem to be trying to measure an immeasurable distance. The patron stylizes herself, aims not to disrupt but simply to be there, and yet — the depiction was already complete before her portrait arrived. Formally, the portrait is a surplus. Detail of ill. 1.2

ii The Democratization of the Portrait, 1270–1320

Until the last decades of the thirteenth century, portraiture was a privilege enjoyed only by a superelite, nobility and high-ranking clergy. Dominic Olariu has argued that the quest to fabricate convincing likenesses in sculpture and painting derived from the practice of embalming and displaying the corpses of emperors and kings, funerary customs rooted in Roman antiquity, sustained by the Byzantine emperors, and reintroduced in western Europe around 1200.1 The privilege of the likeness was granted only to those draped in the mystique of nobility, virtue, and dignity. The quest for likeness was most advanced in the medium of tomb sculpture. The techniques migrated to architectural sculpture. The tympanum of the Porte Rouge on the north side of Notre-Dame in Paris (c. 1260) depicts in relief the Coronation of the Virgin flanked (presumably) by the two royal donors, Saint Louis and his queen Marguerite de Provence, kneeling and in near full scale.2 This format in turn migrated from the cathedrals to small-scale ivory reliefs depicting noble or princely patrons in devout proximity to Mary; perhaps Giotto’s patrons had seen one.3 The nobility had themselves portrayed also in mosaic, stained glass, and manuscript illuminations, albeit often with minimal likeness. On the tomb and beyond, the aim was mainly to memorialize and praise the subject. The portrait of the founder of a monastery visualized a historical or at least a desired past. The portrait of the supplicant in the presence of a receptive deity visualized a desired result. France was a major source of Giotto’s art. France and French art and poetry were held in high esteem in Italy, a point of view encoded in the very life of Francis of Assisi, whose birth name was Giovanni but who was called Francesco, “the Frenchman.”4 In the First Life of St. Francis by Thomas of Celano, we Detail of ill. 2.3

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encounter him “walking about half naked and . . . singing praises to the Lord in French as he passed through a wood.”5 Francis may have learned French from his father and may have cultivated, in his secular preexistence, a certain Francophilia. The most innovative field for portraiture in the thirteenth century was illuminated prayer books, especially in the Île-de-France and England and in the proximity of the royal courts.6 At first, patrons and owners of precious manuscripts had themselves depicted, in the book, presenting the book itself to a divine personage. Later they might prefer to see themselves depicted in attitudes of prayer, typically before the Virgin Mary. Giotto or his Florentine patrons might well have seen a luxury manuscript from France, a Book of Hours which included a full-page image of the book’s owner — most likely a woman of noble rank — kneeling before the enthroned Virgin Mary. Exemplary is the image of the patron in the Psalter-Hours of Yolande de Soissons (Amiens, late thirteenth century), the starting point of Alexa Sand’s monograph on visionary experience in elite devotional culture.7 But neither Giotto nor his clients needed to seek out such luxury objects from afar. The great Italian manuscripts also referred back to their owners. In her monograph on a single Genoese prayer book, dated 1293, Amy Neff calls attention to several images of praying figures lodged in initials. A male figure, for example, kneels on a platform supported by an abject telamon and stretches his arms upward in prayer to the Madonna and Child in an initial higher on the page. This may be a portrait of the book’s scribe and possible owner, one “Manuel,” a clerk or notary, probably an aristocratic prelate with Franciscan “leanings.” On other pages there are two apparent penitents adoring the Cross, and a man and a woman kneeling below an image of Christ. None of these images bears distinctive facial features. Are they referring to specific people? Or do they simply present a generic “model of human behavior, demonstrating the universal necessity of prayer”?8 A comparable example is the cutting from a Bolognese antiphonary, an initial, formerly in the Robert Lehman collection (c. 1290–1300). Depicted is a kneeling female devout receiving Candlemas candles directly from the hands of the Virgin.9 Nigel Morgan presents English manuscripts for aristocratic laity with similar initials containing praying figures who cannot be identified, and may “represent in general various types of person in prayer.” He gives several examples, in generic costumes and attitudes, wondering whether they could even have been generated from patterns. Most kneel before images of Christ or Holy Trinity.10 Above all, the great works of the Tuscan sculptors were Giotto’s textbooks. On the tomb of Cardinal de Braye by Arnolfo di Cambio (after 1282) in the church of San Domenico at Orvieto, the deceased is depicted kneeling before the throne of the Virgin; he is presented by St. Mark.11 Arnolfo had worked in Rome for Charles of Anjou, the brother of Saint Louis, the king portrayed at Notre-Dame. Such images were often coupled, as here, with a sculpted effigy

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of the dead person laid out on the tomb itself. In Pisa, Giotto saw the tomb-­ altar of San Ranieri, a twelfth-century saint, by Tino da Camaino (1291–1306): here the lay and clerical patrons kneel before a Madonna and Child, one on each side.12 For Giotto and all Tuscan artists, the most prestigious repository of elite supplicant portraits was Rome. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, on the facades and in the apses of the exalted basilicas of Rome, popes or cardinals were often portrayed standing or kneeling alongside holy personages.13 A good example is the mosaic by Jacopo Torriti in the apse of the Lateran Basilica (1291, with additions c. 1294, and reconstructed in the nineteenth century) depicting Pope Nicholas IV, the first Franciscan pope. Nicholas is shown kneeling, diminutive in scale — about two-thirds the height of the Virgin Mary, were he to stand up — with St. Francis standing just behind him, measuring about the same, and Sts. Peter and Paul farther back, in full scale. St. Anthony of Padua is on the other side (ill. 2.1).14 The Virgin places her hand on the head of the Pope and looks toward Christ, recommending the fortunate candidate to her son. The portrayed is placed on a shallow strip of ground plane symbolizing access to divinity. A late twelfth-century mosaic on the facade of Santa Maria in Trastevere depicts the Enthroned Madonna and Child flanked on each side by five virgins; two unidentified earthly figures, one tonsured, were apparently added a century later.15 In the mosaic cycle of stories of the Virgin by Pietro Cavallini (1291), in the same church, Bertoldo Stefaneschi, a nonclerical nobleman, appears in a central dedicatory panel kneeling before a Madonna and Child in a tondo.16 There are many similar examples of aristocratic portraiture in the Roman churches.17 Even the cardinals and popes in the apse mosaics were almost always reduced in scale, mere dwarves, two-thirds or half the size, at most, of the sacred figures. Arrogant in life, no doubt, they professed their humility before God in the language of images. Contrast this with the kneeling figures in Giotto’s painted Crucifixion panel in Munich, in full scale. The noble Roman settings were the immediate matrix of Giotto’s art, for Giotto (born around 1267) was very likely working in Rome as a young painter, probably 1285–88.18 Giotto returned to Rome in 1300 and made a painting of Pope Boniface VIII proclaiming the Jubilee.19 The prototype for Giotto’s painted portrait of Scrovegni at Padua was the portrait of Nicholas III, in a fresco of 1278–79 in the Sancta Sanctorum in the Lateran Palace, presenting a model of the structure and flanked by Sts. Peter and Paul; Paul helps the Pope hold the model.20 Only a fragment of that fresco survives. And then again in 1313, he was in Rome and there designed the mosaic of the Navicella on the facade of St. Peter’s in which the patron Jacopo Stefaneschi appeared as a tiny figure in the corner.21 One of Giotto’s models for the placement of the patron in the Navicella may have been the apse mosaic in a church he knew well, San Miniato al Monte in Florence, where the figure of a diminutive cleric or nobleman appears to the far left of the Christ in Majesty.22

2.1  Jacopo Torriti, Worship of the Cross, 1291, and reconstructed in the nineteenth century. Mosaic. Rome, San Giovanni Laterano.

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How did elite laity clear out room for themselves in the overdetermined public spaces of Rome? There may have been a long but now lost tradition of lay devotional portraiture in Rome. In the lower basilica of San Clemente, the portraits of Beno de Rapiza and his wife Maria are appended to mural depictions of scenes from the legend of St. Clement. These date from the late eleventh century. The Mass of St. Clement involves a married couple, mirrored on the left of the scene by the standing portraits of the patrons, in half-scale, carrying offerings and candles and followed by two clerics and two deacons. The inscription is in Beno’s voice. The second scene is the Miracle of Cherson. In a lower zone, separate from the scene, Beno and Maria and their children are portrayed on either side of a tondo with Clement. We know practically nothing about the Rapizas except that they were affluent Romans and their costumes were splendid in a Byzantine way.23 But the Rapiza frescoes were invisible in Giotto’s time, buried below the new basilica of San Clemente constructed in the early twelfth century. The evidence suggests that elite lay portraiture commenced or recommenced in Rome in the mid-thirteenth century. In 1256, Giacomo di Giovanni Capocci and his wife Vinia commissioned an elaborate tabernacle in Santa Maria Maggiore. This structure, containing an important reliquary altar, was dismantled in the eighteenth century. But the rectangular panel depicting Giacomo and Vinia kneeling before the enthroned Virgin and Child survives in the church of San Michele in Vico (Lazio).24 They present a model of the tabernacle itself — this is a true donor portrait. An inscription affirms that they gave the gift pro redemptione animarum suarum. The panel supporting the mosaic itself is a recycled marble slab from an early medieval screen. Another example is the mosaic panel in the Cappella di Santa Rosa at Santa Maria Aracoeli, depicting St. Francis presenting a kneeling patron to the Madonna and Child, who acknowledge the bid, and on the other side, John the Baptist (ill. 2.2).25 This patron, in senatorial costume, has also been identified as Giacomo di Giovanni Capocci, but this is not certain.26 Alessandro Tomei attributes the work to a late thirteenth-century mosaicist, skilled technically but artistically not at the level of either Pietro Cavallini or Jacopo Torriti.27 Serena Romano, who dates the work to the beginning of the fourteenth century, says that without an inspection of the back side we cannot assess the original placement; she suspects a funerary context, however.28 Lay votive portraits appeared also in the medium of panel painting. A panel now in Grenoble with a full-length, in fact life-sized, hieratic image of St. Lucy includes at the lower edge the image of a prayerful woman in black, with white kerchief, whose name, for once, we know: this is angilla uxor odonis cer/ro/nis, Angela the wife of Oddone Cerroni (ill.  2.3 and detail, p. 42).29 Hinges suggest that this was the central panel of a triptych. An old inscription attached to the panel says it was from the church of Santa Lucia in Selci in Rome. St. Lucy holds a lamp, an attribute. Her crown with pendulae, necklace, and tunic, and her diagonal green dalmatic and red mantle, and the picture’s

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2.2  Anonymous Roman mosaicist, Madonna and Child with St. Francis and Patron, c. 1300. Mosaic, 125 × 104 cm. Rome, Santa Maria Aracoeli. 2.3  Anonymous Roman painter, St. Lucy, 1290s? Panel, 170 × 64 cm. Musée de Grenoble.

strict frontality and “expressive immobility” suggest to Tomei a Roman painter with Byzantine connections.30 The painting, a refined and exalted specimen, summons the remote grandeur of Constantinople. Two thurifers descend from the corners. Away from Rome, where survival rates may be higher, there are ample traces of elite lay self-representation in the sacred context. Michele Bacci gives several examples of late thirteenth-century frescoes with portraits of lay donors or patrons. In Viterbo, long in the papal orbit, at Santa Maria Nuova, there is a fresco of a symbolic Crucifixion with the patron Monaldo Forte­guerra (d. 1293) in rich red robes; Mary grasps his wrists. In Ascoli Piceno in the Marche (also papal lands), a kneeling figure at the foot of a mural Cross is labeled: Iacobus est hic. In the same church, there is a mural Lamentation with two kneeling supplicants (possibly clerical) in the foreground (c. 1280).31 Bacci observes that the first burials of laypersons in the cloisters of convents were notable enough to be mentioned by chroniclers. He gives the example of a case at Sant’Eustorgio in Milan (1294), as well as the contested arrangements for the burial of Bonagiunta Tignosini at San Francesco in Lucca. Tignosini had his tomb and the accompanying mural lunette made already in 1274; his death in 1286 ignited further controversy.32

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Now, for the first time, nonaristocratic individuals, both lay and clerical, felt entitled to have themselves portrayed, albeit mostly in marginal, diminutive fashion. The wonder and power of the portrait was democratized. But there were limits, of course: all the early lay patrons, as far as we can tell, were notables: bankers, merchants, professionals, successful artisans.33 Bacci also presents several examples with inscriptions in the vernacular, for example the exceptional painted bed in Pistoia, Santa Maria delle Grazie, evidently meant for a hospital; on both headboard and foot is depicted a Madonna and Child with a kneeling man in black and behind him St. Lawrence: Pregate Dio per l’anima di Condor (di) Giovanni da Montechatini, a.d. 1336.34 There is no reason to wonder that affluent and devout laymen and women shared the desires of princes and prelates to place their bodies and their images as near as possible to a tomb-shrine or an altar. The image at once commemorated an individual in this world and presented a candidate for salvational preferment. The well-buried were like privileged audience members who sat on the stage in premodern theater, sharing the boards with the actors and therefore also in full view of the rest of the audience. The patrons’ desire to get inside the frame prefigures the modern cults of publicity and celebrity. Desire for proximity to the sacred target was folded into desire for prominent placement in society. In a public work, as opposed to an illuminated manuscript, reference was essential. It mattered entirely who was being remembered or recommended.35 Such reference was traditionally secured orally, for example in the recitation of masses for the dead.36 No link is more secure than naming out loud — there can be no withdrawal or canceling, no corruption through transmission. The name goes straight to Christ’s or Mary’s ear. Compared to the oral recitation of the name, an image of the individual was a weak appeal to the deity. But now in the fourteenth century, supplicants wanted to be seen and not just heard. The making present of individuals near altars, shrines, and tombs by pictorial means, the project of self-commemoration through visual spectacle, came relatively late.37 In most such pictures, the patron projects her- or himself as a petitioner, as one who asks for something, usually chaperoned by a saint. Sometimes an inscription spelled out the precise request. Such requests were licensed by the theological hypothesis of intercession, or the advocacy of the saints on behalf of Christians seeking favor from God, also known as patrocinium, invocatio, and synaxis. The worshipper, hopeful of preferment, which may lead to a reduced period of time spent in Purgatory, submits a request to the Virgin Mary, who, in her tender mercy and indulgence, may agree to relay the request one step farther, to her infant son (for even she is somewhat intimidated by her grown and celestial son). Such a supplicant asks the Virgin Mary to intercede with her son on his or her behalf. One may also ask a patron saint, who will relay the request to the Virgin. An example was the mosaic by Torriti in the Lateran depicting Nicholas IV recommended by Francis to Mary, and then in turn by

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Mary to Christ (ill. 2.1 and detail). André Vauchez says the laity in Italy had internalized the doctrine of Intercession already by about 1250, a generation or two earlier than anywhere else.38 One could almost say that the entire mainstream devotional economy was driven by hopes for intercession. But unless there is an explanatory inscription, there is no need to assign a too-specific content to the supplicant’s plea. The idea of the embedded portrait is simple: the devout offers her whole person to Christ.39 This is why the early supplicant portraits almost always render the entire body, not just a bust. A devout woman’s self-donation rhymes with the concept of the artwork as a whole, for it too is “offered.” She gives an artwork and inside the work depicts herself giving herself. In having herself depicted, the individual seeks recognition — from the saints, and especially the Virgin Mary, but also perhaps the recognition of her contemporaries, recognition as a devout and observant person. This impression is produced by the formal correspondences and rhymes between the bodies of the devout and the depicted bodies of those models of pious behavior provided by the sacred stories themselves — the Virgin Mary receiving the message of Gabriel; the kings from the East who venerated the child Christ; the mourners at the Crucifixion and at the tomb of Christ.40 The possible contents of a portrait in a condition of mindful worship are multiple: supplication, yes, but also veneration, admiration, and praise, as well as compassion. The devout wants something, yearns for something; the picture expresses and attests to this yearning. The generic term votive image allows for this indeterminacy of motivation and script.41

Varieties of supplicant portrait The size and format of some of the paintings we have looked at so far suggest that they were mounted in public or semipublic spaces, even if privately commissioned: in chapels within churches, for example. The painted Cross in Worcester, for example, with its diminutive lay but Franciscan-oriented patrons (ill. 1.4); the Cross from San Pier Scheraggio; or the large, enthroned Madonna and Child in Avignon by the Master of 1310 (ill. 1.8); as well as Giotto’s Munich Crucifixion, which along with six other panels stood on an altar. The panel with Madonna and Child and saints in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, attributed to the Florentine Magdalene Master and datable to the late 1270s, with kneeling male supplicant, is large enough to have been mounted on an altar in a church.42 Others are so small that they must have belonged to individuals and were preserved — perhaps displayed, perhaps packed away — in dwelling spaces: Duccio’s Madonna of the Franciscans, for instance (ill. 1.6). The latter belongs to a class of works that Jens Wollesen, building on the theses of Hans Belting, called interactive or dialogic panels, depicting synchronic (by that he means that the patron is also the owner of the work) conferences between (usually) the Virgin Mary and that patron, often involving a virtual exchange of glances

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2.4  Anonymous Sienese painter, Madonna and Child with Angels, 1300–1310? Panel, 37 × 25.3 cm (central panel). Oxford, Christ Church Picture Gallery.

and gestures as well as inscribed verse and prayers, sometimes in the vernacular.43 Belting had credited the Byzantine painters with the introduction of what he called “living painting”: icons animated by hand gestures and angles of the head until they seemed almost to speak to beholders. The Tuscan painters of the thirteenth century adopted and developed this model of “rhetorical” painting, creating figures who “came alive when they revealed emotions such as grief or love and when they performed the gestures of speech.”44 If the great public paintings opened onto absorptive visions of another world, these artifacts, held in the hands, shared in the everyday life of their owners, like fetish objects or dadas, like puppets. Wollesen considered this a completely new kind of painting that traditional art history was unprepared to deal with. A good example is the small triptych at Christ Church, Oxford, with an enthroned Madonna and Child and six angels (1300–1310?) (ill.  2.4).45 Christ himself, from his perch in his mother’s lap, gestures toward the kneeling female supplicant. This was a Franciscan picture, and close in style to Duccio and his Rucellai Madonna. Another Sienese painting depicting a sacred audience is the Madonna and Child by the Ducciesque Goodhart Master in the Metro­ politan Museum: the woman on the left is smaller than the man on the right, but Christ is gesturing to her.46

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Most of the earliest examples were small and artistically undistinguished. Yet one of Wollesen’s key insights is that the supplicant figures were not just added to preexisting pictorial formulas. Rather, their presence produces the Madonna’s or Christ’s interactive response. The deepest implication of Belting’s and Wollesen’s theses is that, from this point on, once the Byzantine institution of the dialogic devotional panel had been absorbed into Italian pictorial culture, the patron or supplicant is anyway “always there,” even when not literally depicted. In many Florentine and Sienese interactive panels of the first decades of the century, the enthroned Virgin Mary or Christ acknowledges the diminutive petitioners.47 One of the most sophisticated is the so-called “Madonna dell’ Opera” by Bernardo Daddi, whose play of frames rivals the elite illuminated manuscripts (ill. 2.5).48 The panel depicts the Virgin Mary holding a book

2.5  Bernardo Daddi, Madonna dell’Opera. Panel, 131 × 116 cm. Florence, Museo dell’ Opera del Duomo.

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but no Child, half-length, flanked by standing saints, and seemingly behind or at an altar (the text on the book mentions a well-known miracle-working cult image, the Virgin of Bagnolo), holding out her hand to one of two diminutive female figures (one worldly, one profane) kneeling before that altar. A smaller male acolyte holding a large candle is off to the right. There are countless examples of intercessional and memorial portraits throughout the fourteenth century, in all different media.49 The conventions of the donor and memorial portraits handed down from the elite are adapted to lay and private commissions. The innovations of the private panels are projected back onto public pictures. The conventions established during the lifetime of Giotto evolved slowly, remaining mostly stable. No comprehensive inventory of the images has ever been undertaken, nor does this book attempt such a task. The supplicants are usually diminutive kneeling figures at the margins of sacred scenes, more seldom integrated into the scenes, and rarely in fullscale. Some exceptions to this rule may involve persons with near-saintly status, modern holy women. A Crucifixion by Bernardo Daddi in Boston depicts Mary Magdalene clutching the Cross (ill. 2.6). But just to the right of the Cross, in front of a group of men, is a kneeling, praying woman in violet robe and with a gold fillet in her hair.50 She looks quite like a modern devout, except that she bears a nimbus. The man behind her treads on her robe, just as the angel will tread on the blue robe of the man in the Ponce Annunciation, as if to emphasize her real presence at the scene. Another enigmatic example, again involving a woman who not only witnesses but seems to participate in the event, is the diptych at the Fondazione Cini in Venice, attributed to the Umbrian Maestro della Croce di Trevi (ill. 2.7).51 The woman who flings herself at the feet of the Flagellated Christ lacks a nimbus and wears a black robe and white veil. She appears to be a nun.52 A tabernacle by Pacino di Bonaguida in Tucson depicts in the central tall and narrow panel a schematic Crucifixion against a black ground, with Golgotha’s hill of rocks, Mary Magdalene embracing the Cross, and a pair of supplicants in full-scale (ill. 2.8).53 On the left is a woman in a brown Franciscan habit. On the right is a man in a simple hooded garment, a layperson. The tabernacle comprises five hinged panels — portable when folded up. A small triptych attributed to a follower of Duccio, now in Memphis, depicts in the lower part of the left wing a kneeling patron in a brown robe and cap, hands pressed together (ill.  2.9).54 Exceptionally (uniquely, to my knowledge), he occupies a painted compartment of his own, equal in size to the compartment above him containing a bishop saint. This somewhat presumptuous layperson leans slightly forward toward his target. Some pictures depict — portray? — multiple secular and clerical supplicants: the dossal by Giuliano da Rimini in Boston, for example, signed and dated 1307, made possibly for a Clarissan convent in Umbria, but also possibly for a lay confraternity, to be mounted in the Minorite church in Rimini (ill. 2.10 and detail, p. 65). Eight women — members of the order as well as lay

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2.6  Bernardo Daddi, Crucifixion, before 1328. Panel, 40.3 × 32.1 cm. Boston, Museum of Fine Arts.

patrons, or members of the confraternity — are clustered on either side of the enthroned Virgin. This picture was painted under the direct impact of Giotto.55 Beneath her swelling cloak, meanwhile, the Sienese Madonna della Misericordia shelters a couple of dozen moderns, lay and clerical.56 The panel by Bernardo Daddi in Washington, dated 1333, represents a giant St. Paul with supplicants (ill. 2.11).57 This painting may have been mounted on a pillar in the Florentine Ospedale di San Paolo, or the nearby church of San Paolino. There are six women and six men, likely a lay confraternity. Supplicants pictured in the margins of an artwork, doll-like figures, sharing a physical surface

2.7  Maestro della Croce di Trevi, or Maestro del Dittico Poldi Pezzoli, diptych with Crowning with Thorns, Flagellation, and Cruci­fixion , c. 1330–35. Panel, 45.5 × 58 cm. Venice, Fondazione Giorgio Cini.

2.8  Pacino di Bonaguida, tabernacle with Crucifixion and scenes from the Life of Christ, c. 1325. Panel, 44.7 × 63.5 cm (overall). Tucson, University of Arizona Museum of Art.

2.9  Follower of Duccio, triptych with Madonna and Child, 1300–1325. Panel, 26.4 × 42.5 cm. Memphis Brooks Museum of Art.

2.10  Giuliano da Rimini, Madonna and Child with Saints, 1307. Panel, 164 × 300 cm. Boston, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

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2.11  Bernardo Daddi, St. Paul, 1333. Panel, 233.5 × 88.8 cm. Washington, National Gallery of Art.

with the sacred personages but brought low by their diminished scale and submissive bearing, create an effect of human insignificance. Intercessory and votive images represent human will not as something mutable but rather as a yearning energy pulsing in a single channel. Thus, the lack of volume of personality in these portraits. The bland, composed features distinguish the portraits from the striking and expressive visages of bystanders or extras in narrative frescoes. The single psychic channel gives an impression of undividedness. The fission of the self is stemmed at the start with the fiction of an undivided soul.

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Hegel on embedded portraits G. W. F. Hegel, in his Lectures on Aesthetics (1820s), unexpectedly makes a comment on portraits of patrons embedded in sacred images. Writing about a painting of the early sixteenth century, he is struck not by the undividedness of the modern faces but by the inability of the painter to disguise their true dividedness. Hegel draws a contrast between the pious visages of the depicted saints, bespeaking an integrated mind, and the all-too-human faces of the modern patrons. This comparison leads him to doubt that a modern art, now no longer able simply to copy the perfect forms of ancient art, but rather forced to derive its forms from reality, can ever give visible form to the Ideal, which for Hegel is the purpose of art. We may or may not agree with him that this task defines and exhausts art’s purpose. But his observations help us think about the implications, for a sacred art, of introducing portraits of lay devout directly into its body. The passage occurs in a long discussion, early in the Lectures, of the nature of artistic beauty, which he defines as “the absolute Idea in its appearance in a way adequate to itself.”58 The Ideal or absolute Idea, which he also calls Spirit, is not found in nature, which is finite. Human beings know the Ideal, however, and they describe it in their religious thought and in their poems. The Greeks created their gods in a poetic spirit, and as a result the content of the Greek religion was the most amenable to artistic representation.59 The Christian God, however, became a man, and the theme of his cult is his humanity, vulnerability, and suffering. Christian art, therefore, works with broken, imperfect, and even ugly forms. Spirit or the Ideal no longer assumes a beautiful outward appearance but rather is something inward, hidden, and felt; it is enclosed within the sensations of submission, rapture, and grief. Because Christianity values so highly the inner emotional life, its alliance with art can only go so far. For Hegel, Christian art cannot achieve the perfection of Greek art because its content is Christ’s humanity and capacity for suffering. The Christian content is nevertheless deeper than the Greek, allowing ultimately for a greater spiritual freedom. In the modern or “Romantic” era, the path to the Ideal runs not through painting but through poetry and music. It is true that the painter may achieve something like ideality by simplifying and purifying natural data, removing them from time. The painter filters reality through his imagination, eliminating as much as possible the imperfect and the irregular. Portraits, for example, must necessarily flatter their subjects.60 But this ersatz ideality goes only so far. The best hope for painting, finally, is to locate and imitate expressions of Spirit in reality, in real human faces: The existing natural forms of the spiritual content . . . have no immediate value in themselves; on the contrary, they are an appearance of the inner and spiritual life which they express. This already, in their reality outside art, constitutes their ideality in distinction

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from nature as such, which does not display anything spiritual. Now in art, at its higher stage, the inner content of spirit is to acquire its external form. This content is there in the real spirit of man, and so, like man’s inner experience in general, it has already present there its external form in which it is expressed.61

Empirically, it might be possible to find readymade faces and bodies in nature that could be directly copied into art, so producing great art. But this is rare. We do find in reality faces that express piety or inner serenity, but these faces inevitably also express other, less suitable contents, such as the modern person’s prosaic distractedness, earthbound concerns, and inner motives and conflicts, indeed dividedness: Now in the real world confronting us such a meaning may indeed also find its expression; as, for example, there is hardly any face which could not give us the impression of piety, worship, serenity, etc.; but these features also express besides in thousands of ways as well what either is quite unsuited to portray the fundamental meaning to be impressed on them or else is in no nearer relation to it.62

Christian art invents its saints, with their admirable singleness of mind and emotion. But real faces copied directly from nature into an artwork are unlikely to give the impression of ideality. Was there any real need for these portraits? They contribute nothing to the works as artworks. They are neither spiritually unschön enough, nor ideal. To make this point, Hegel asks us to call to mind those “early German and Netherlandish pictures,” where we often find the donor depicted along with his family, wife, sons and daughters. They are all supposed to appear sunk in devotion, and piety does actually shine out of all their features; but beyond that we see in the men valiant warriors, perhaps, men of vigorous action, well-versed in life and the passion for achievement, and in the women we see wives of a similar vigorous excellence. If we compare the expressions in these pictures, which are famous for their true-to-life likenesses, with Mary or the saints and Apostles beside her, then on their faces we read only one expression, and on this one expression all forms are concentrated, the build of the bones, the muscles, the traits of movement or rest. It is only the appropriateness of the whole formation which marks the difference between the Ideal proper and the portrait.63

Hegel is not really interested in the institution of the embedded portrait. He simply turns to the old picture as a way of demonstrating as clearly as possible the distinction between the images of Mary and the apostles, in whose faces he found qualities of concentration and intensity, and the modern portraits, whose faces lack “the appropriateness of the whole formation.” The patrons ruin the painting because their faces reveal that they are genuinely split between their worldliness and their piety, and that both aspects of their existence are equally true and neither role is a mere role. Such ambiguous faces are readily available all around us, and while it may be a technical achievement

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to import them into a painting, it is no great artistic achievement, in Hegel’s view. The ideality of art is diminished by the embedded portrait, a swatch of unconsecrated reality sewn into the unreal fabric of the image. Hegel had in mind a painting like this, perhaps this very painting, a Lamentation over the Dead Body of Christ in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich attributed to the workshop of the Dutch painter Cornelis Engebrechtsz, dating probably from the 1520s (ill. 2.12).64 The painting belonged to the brothers Sulpiz and Melchior Boisserée; Hegel knew well their collection of early Netherlandish and German paintings in Heidelberg, where he was professor between 1816 and 1818. The painting was purchased by King Ludwig I of Bavaria in 1827. In a shallow strip of foreground space, there are twelve kneeling people. The paterfamilias appears to be the gentleman in a dark brown robe at the right of the group of men. There is no wife, it seems, unless she is one of the four nunlike women at the right, withdrawn into their black habits. The two men immediately on the patron’s own right hand are also clerics; the man at the far left and the younger man behind him are possibly worldly. There are three children, in red. It is not clear whether everyone belongs to the family or whether the family is allied with a clerical community. The modern persons are not looking at the Lamentation over Christ but across the picture, at each other. Behind the men stands St. Andrew, behind the women St. Agnes — the saintly sponsors or recommenders of the modern devout, though they cannot be understood as making, at this very moment, an intercessional request.65 Perhaps they are just showing the patrons the scene. The gestures and costumes of the supplicants, their rosaries and books, are modern. It is easy to see why Hegel thought the patrons added nothing to this compartmentalized, confusing picture.66 Of course, this is very unlike a painting of the fourteenth century. The portraits in Giotto’s painting and for many years afterwards display little psychic dividedness. Would Hegel have said about the kneeling worshippers in Giotto’s Crucifixion what he said about the twin phalanxes of modern people in Engebrechtsz’s Lamentation, namely that their various passionate excellences in the dynamic spheres of business and society shine through and interfere with a no-less-genuine impression of piety? Yes, presumably, because the unnamed Italians in Giotto’s picture, although two centuries older than Engebrechtsz’s burghers and therefore pioneers, not latecomers, in their category, signal in the very same way that they are ready to set aside their mundane concerns and show us, by their disciplined, self-abnegating demeanor, where their priorities lie. In each painting, norms govern posture, gesture, and facial expression. The men and women have chosen to comply with these norms and have contracted a painter to bear witness to their choices. Kneeling itself immediately implies a change of state, even a negation of a natural standing position. The etymology of “supplicate,” by some accounts, contains the bending of the knee. Kneeling is a Christomimetic gesture and associated with penitence.67 Hands are poised in coded gestures of dedication that mean



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2.12  Cornelis Engebrechtsz, Lamentation over the Dead Christ, 1520s. Panel, 114.8 × 124.9 cm. Munich, Alte Pinakothek.

only one thing and render those hands useless for any other purpose. In the supplicant’s unfocused attentiveness, his thousand-yard stare, one reads all the pressures of existence, negatively. Hegel is bothered by this because he perceives the worldliness pushing itself to the surface, as if the piety were mere pretense. The patrons’ performances, their artificial organization of life’s complexity into a pious pose, dismay him. Hegel did not know firsthand many early Italian paintings, and he never traveled to Italy. But he was well aware of Giotto, about whom a younger contemporary, the art historian Carl Friedrich von Rumohr, had written illuminating, opiniated pages. As a matter of fact, Hegel might well have seen the Crucifixion by Giotto, because it was purchased by King Maximilian of Bavaria (Ludwig’s father) in 1813.68 In his Lectures on Aesthetics, Hegel relied on Rumohr for his remarks on early Italian painting. Following Rumohr, he expressed a relatively dim opinion of Giotto. He conceded that Giotto, drawn

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to the “present world” and the “forms and sentiments” of life as he found it, and as embodied in the life of St. Francis, was skilled in the depiction of specific characters, actions, passions, situations, postures, and movements. But what was relatively lost in Giotto’s attempts was that great and holy seriousness [ jener grossartige heilige Ernst ] which had been the basis of the previous stage of art. The world wins a place and development, as after all, Giotto, true to the sense of his age, gave a place to the burlesque as well as to the pathetic, so that Rumohr justly says “in these circumstances I cannot understand how some people who have given the whole strength of their attention to the subject, praise the aim and achievement of Giotto as the most sublime thing in modern art.”69

For Hegel, Giotto “always remained on the whole at a lower stage of painting’s development.” The problem was that any “higher development” would entail more skill and subtlety in describing faces and what they disclose of the interior. Every gain in psychological realism, and so access to the spirit, would be accompanied by a disintegration of the work, an erosion of the bases of its wholeness, and so its ability to symbolize Spirit; and a dispersal corresponding to the instability of the human mind. The sacred art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries will strike powerful notes, attaining “a still far loftier and more complete expression of spiritual inwardness” than the art of the early Renaissance. But the compact between painting and religion is increasingly threatened. The embedded portraits foreshadow this. Unlike the Holy Family and the apostles, whose piety wells up from deep inner sources and fully floods their existence, the mortal petitioners carry their contradictions around with them, live with them, reveal or mask them as they can, make choices, and balance multiple responsibilities (to family, to society, to God). They are free, as are we all, to stray from our scripts. And that is the whole meaning of St. Francis. Hegel was right to worry about the effect of introducing this anarchic moment into a work of art expected to picture the overcoming of contingency. He saw that a portrait at the edge or even inside a depiction of an event in sacred history is alienated from everything else in the picture. The portrait is a narrow channel leading straight to an individual. It is understandable that someone might not be prepared to accept that individual’s existence as the platform for an artwork. All the other elements in the picture — the brave and pious saints, the bystanders and witnesses, the depicted animals and vegetation and buildings —  open onto the wide uplands of shared experience, spiritual aspiration, yearnings for insight or assurance. The portrait is a wedge that splits the picture: what was once homogenous is now discontinuous.

Detail of ill. 2.10

iii Historiography and Method

Modern scholars have difficulty assessing the various compacts between Christianity and art, for even the most spiritually inclined among us have been shaped by several centuries of Western skepticism, condescension, and even hostility toward the Christian hypothesis. This chapter asks: is it possible to grasp premodern sacred art from a vantage point that considers sacrality to be a human invention? I approach the question by reviewing modern assessments of Giotto and his art. Giotto and his reputation are exemplary because in the literature of art since Vasari he has stood for that profanity that welled up in the early Renaissance from within the project of sacred painting. Giotto showed us, supposedly, the world as it looks and even feels, validating the evidence of the senses. He was esteemed from the start as a technical pioneer. But until the twentieth century there was no available language to describe his work as absolutely, and not just relatively, valuable. Before the twentieth century, a Christian painter whose great achievement was the convincing description of the material world was considered an incomplete painter.

Rumohr and Burckhardt on Giotto The patrician polymath Carl Friedrich von Rumohr (1785–1843) had introduced in his Italienische Forschungen (1827, 1831) a new level of thoroughness and precision in the use of archival documents, a conscientiousness that did not interfere with his penchant for decisive evaluative opinions about artworks.1 For these reasons he impressed Hegel, as we have seen, and many others. Rumohr acknowledged that Giotto was a pioneer, but he also pointed out that the disposition of an innovator was likely to be “unholy and sacrilegious” (unheilig Detail of ill. 3.2

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und frevelhaft).2 Such an artist was apt to discard too hastily the accumulated achievements of civilization. Giotto, according to his contemporaries, to Vasari two centuries later, and to nearly all subsequent historians of Italian art, had liberated Christian art from the rigid conventions and abstract, uningratiating manner of the “Greeks,” that is, the style of painting brought to Italy by painters fleeing Constantinople in the wake of the sack of that city by the Crusaders in 1204. These authors emphasized the break between the convention-bound, backward-looking mosaics and paintings of the late thirteenth century, and the new, living art of the fourteenth century. Rumohr, too, believed that Giotto had broken with the technique and style of the Greeks. But, in his view, Giotto had also discarded the greatest gift of the Byzantine heritage, for the Greek painters “had preserved the types of many concepts and characters developed in earlier, happier stages of Christian art.” The “grandeur and intense beauty” of the Byzantine forms, Rumohr says, did not escape Giotto’s contemporaries Duccio and Cimabue. Giotto, however, a more prosaic sensibility, was unable to grasp those ideas. “He cast off the rust of the antiquated manners, but discarded at the same time that high, genuinely Christian, and genuinely artistic spirit which still shone forth out of those variously stunted pictures.”3 In doing so, he “encouraged that gradually advancing and ever-increasing alienation from the ideas of Christian antiquity.”4 Rumohr argues that Giotto fell under the sway of the Franciscans, who encouraged an earthy, anecdotal form of pictorial storytelling, which stressed animation, movement, and plot, even descending into burlesque, suppressing the edifying representation of lofty characters and the “serious meaning” of the earlier art.5 Rumohr, describing the Baroncelli polyptych in Santa Croce (ill. 3.1), dismisses the design and motifs of the central scene of the Coronation of the Virgin as “modern,” and “probably of Giotto’s own invention.” The side panels, however, with their serried rows of saints — repetitive, hieratic, yet graceful — he rated higher. Still, he says, we should expect more from a painter “who for a long time was preferred by his successors to Taddeo Gaddi, Giottino, Arcagnolo [Orcagna], Giovanni da Milano, and other masters, whose surviving works still awake admiration and delight.”6 This sentence needs to be read twice before its meaning hits home, for the modern reader may be surprised to realize that Rumohr finds it strange that Giotto was “for a long time” preferred to his fourteenth-­century followers. For isn’t Giotto still to this day universally “preferred” to his followers Taddeo Gaddi, Giottino, Orcagna, and Giovanni da Milano? There is no mistaking Rumohr’s meaning. He is not just saying that Giotto’s predecessors were better and loftier religious artists than he was. He is also praising the artists who came immediately after Giotto, who — Rumohr seems to think — restored at least some of art’s high purpose. Evidently, Rumohr’s attempt to shift taste failed. In very few, if any, twentiethor twenty-first-­century histories of Italian art are Giotto’s Trecento successors judged to have surpassed him.

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3.1  Giotto, Baroncelli Polyptych, 1328. Panel, 185 ×  323 cm. Florence, Santa Croce, Baroncelli Chapel.

Although Jacob Burckhardt (1818–97) would not have feigned piety, he, too, had a notion of what ideality was. Burckhardt was also stinting in his praise for Giotto as Rumohr had been. The Swiss scholar, author of the Civili­ zation of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), conceded that Giotto was a powerful storyteller. In an 1849 lecture, he said that Giotto represented “a great step forward in the definite and the vivid.”7 He attributed the “immediacy” of Giotto’s narratives to his grasp of individual character and the expressive potential of the human form. Burckhardt noted in his Cicerone (1855) that not only the protagonists but also the “attendants,” the civilian witnesses, were for Giotto “essential means of clarification; reflexes without which the plot would be less expressive.” His genre figures had the capacity “to sensualize a locale or an existence.”8 But in the manuscripts of his unrealized History of the Renaissance, Burckhardt listed examples — examples already noted by Vasari with mild disapproval — of certain “garish” or “anecdotal” qualities in Giotto, a tendency toward the merely “momentary.”9 Burckhardt writes of “the limited capacity for beauty of the Giottesque and older Sienese painters,” inferior to the sense for beauty exhibited by the poets of their era.10 Already in the lecture of 1849 Burckhardt ranked Giotto’s forms “below many northern works of the thirteenth century.”11 What was he thinking of? Perhaps of the frescoes in the churches of St. Gereon and St. Ursula in Cologne, about which he had written admiringly several years earlier.12 About the Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane then in the Uffizi Galleries (ill. 3.2), which he believed to be by Giotto, Burckhardt wrote (in the Cicerone):

3.2  Lorenzo Monaco, Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, end of the fourteenth century. Panel, 222 × 109 cm. Florence, Galleria dell’ Accademia.

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“Inhospitable, seemingly devoid of light effects, individualization, or expression of the soul, the picture immediately repels thousands of visitors. And when you look at it with the magnifying glass it does not become more beautiful.”13 At the time, this panel more than two meters tall was the first work you saw entering the Uffizi. Today the picture is no longer attributed to Giotto but instead to Lorenzo Monaco, a Florentine painter who lived a century after Giotto.14 It may seem surprising that Burckhardt was unable to distinguish Lorenzo Monaco from Giotto.15 In fact, however, until the early twentieth century everyone considered it a work by Giotto.16 The art of this school, Burckhardt goes on, “does not speak to the distracted or surfeited eye; thought must accommodate the art. There is no special ‘connoisseurship’ required, just some work.”17 You have to apply yourself — Burckhardt says — if you wish to grasp Florentine painting of the fourteenth century, or what he called the “Germanic” style, a term he took over from his teacher Franz Kugler and that designates the supposedly uninviting painting manner that prevailed in Florence and whose apex he considered to be the art of Fra Angelico.18 Burckhardt was not responsive to the “closed” form of Lorenzo’s panel, the formal envelope that gathers all the figures into a single coherent shape, a shape rhyming with its own components. On the left, every form repeats the slanting, trapezoidal, upward-seeking form of Christ’s questioning body: the rocks, and the lay supplicant kneeling in the lower corner, prompted by the very passage, Luke 22:41, illustrated here, the model of all kneeling prayer (ill. 3.2 and detail, p. 66). (That modern witness went unmentioned by Burckhardt.) On the right, the pyramids of the dozing apostles are doubled by the rocks. This is a monistic and holistic approach to form that pulls everything in the picture into the common project. The overall form of the painting is a cipher for the submissiveness of the supplicant. His entire being is swept into a narrow psychic conduit. Jacob Burckhardt was not very interested in identifying an early Renaissance art that protected the ideas of Christian antiquity. Instead, he was impatient for a neo-paganism — the style of the so-called High Renaissance, the art of Raphael and Michelangelo — which would allow for a reacquaintance with ideal beauty. For Burckhardt, Giotto had not yet grasped the beautiful ideal. For Carl Friedrich von Rumohr, meanwhile, who lamented the premature onset of secularization, Giotto was no longer capable of producing a noble Christian art. That in a nutshell is the ambiguity of Giotto and the art of the Trecento.

Twentieth-century views of Giotto In the twentieth century, both Burckhardt’s bourgeois yearnings for the Greek ideal and Rumohr’s disapproval of profanity fell out of fashion. The new century, convinced of the independent value of medieval art, no longer prized Giotto as a pioneer, for that would imply that the art that came before was deficient. He was now seen as a master of absolute eminence

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who anticipated by six centuries the irrevocable achievements of Modernism. He is a philosopher who strips away the conventions and gives us the truth in painting, raw, natural vision. Bernard Berenson had written in 1896 that Giotto possessed “the power to stimulate tactile consciousness” with the result that his paintings convey “a keener sense of reality, of life-likeness than the objects themselves!” Giotto intensifies the pleasure we take in the forms of objects by stimulating our “tactile imagination.” In the tradition of painting that he initiated, “form is the principal source of our aesthetic enjoyment.”19 In the years after Berenson’s publication, this virtue was associated with the art of Paul Cézanne, whose great fame dates from the retrospective in Paris of 1907, a year after his death. In 1912 Friedrich Rintelen, in his monograph on Giotto, was reminded by a cluster of five standing figures in the scene of the Naming of the Infant John the Baptist, in the Peruzzi Chapel in Santa Croce, “of the great calm and bold luminosity of the still-lives of Cézanne.”20 Rintelen sees in both a reduction to essentials, an almost bodily grasp of matter, balance, and gravity that supersedes all received formulas. Avant-garde taste overlapped with the new appreciation of Giotto. Clive Bell, in Art (1914), wrote, “Go to Santa Croce or the Arena Chapel and admit that if the greatest name in European painting is not Cézanne it is Giotto.”21 The ex-futurist painter Carlo Carrà wrote in 1924 that “in the so-called formal incapacity of Giotto, we find a precious hint to teach us to be in our turn genuinely sincere toward ourselves.”22 Only the designs of the Italian Primitives, wrote Roger Fry in 1927, have Cézanne’s “monumental gravity and resistance.”23 In the world created by the Second World War, however, Giotto’s synthetic recreations of sensations of plasticity no longer seemed a stable enough base on which to build the artist’s reputation. Once Cézanne was no longer seen as the culmination of world art history, then Giotto risked again being seen as a mere technician and pioneer. If your art is technical, then you will be surpassed. To sustain Giotto’s exemplary status after the disappointment of Modernism, there had to be a new reckoning with the paintings’ content, and no longer in Christian terms. Giotto was discovered as a storyteller and as a poet of the human condition. No earlier commentators on Giotto — not his contemporaries, not Vasari, not the Romantics or the Modernists — had ever said quite this. In the mid- and later twentieth century, Giotto is said to carry the spirit of the profane or secular as such, and this is said without condescension, as if only now, after the internalization of the Enlightenment, but in a period of healing when humankind seemed so needy of consolation and a common language, could Giotto truly be understood. Here the emphasis fell on the psychological realism of Giotto’s narratives. In the cycles of the Arena Chapel in Padua, especially, Giotto gives us for the first time a window onto the inner life of the individual and his emotional predicaments. The elevation of the inner psychic life to the status of an independent sphere where meaning and value are continually reassessed is associated with Immanuel Kant, who said in the Critique of Practical Reason (1788) that the human being belongs to two worlds: the “sensible world” (Sinnenwelt) of empirical existence, but also an “order of things”

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accessible only to the understanding, where practical moral laws are given by reason directed by a free and independent “personality.”24 Giotto’s lucidity and sympathy were seen by mid-twentieth-century criticism as compatible with, perhaps helping to prepare, the outlook on life that accepts that human existence is the outermost framework for meaning. The great mid-century scholars Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and Eugenio Garin, expressing their sense of kinship with those original humanists, acclaimed their philological and theoretical achievements. However, the humanism of the twentieth century was no longer congruent with the original humanism and should properly be called a neo-humanism. The fourteenth- and fifteenth-century scholarship and philosophy supplemented, not replaced, faith in God. The neo-Kantian and neo-humanist scholar Erwin Panofsky, by contrast, could in 1927 describe the mathematization of painterly perspective in the Renaissance as the first step toward what he called modern “anthropocracy.”25 Even Millard Meiss, less inclined to philosophize than Panofsky, would ask of the successors to Giotto: “Which of these masters subscribed without equivocation to his conception of the divine immanent in an exalted and profoundly moral humanity?”26 Neo-humanism amounts to the twentieth century’s reconciliation with the legacy of the nineteenth century, as if Rumohr’s perception of Giotto’s mundanity were reconciled with Burckhardt’s longings for a post-Christian ideality. The neo-humanist version of Giotto rests on the premise that the aim of art is to deliver a truer, more meaningful picture of human nature and experience. And it rests on a confidence that an artwork, insofar as it succeeds in this task of seemingly self-evident value, will speak to people across space and time, transcending the circumstances of its origin-moment. Much recent art historical scholarship is by contrast art-skeptical, that is, not confident that art ever delivers more than local truths and local satisfactions, and is equally doubtful that artistic form, once it has drifted free of its historical moorings, can ever transcend its usefulness as evidence and instead become again a source. Recently the great historian of Modernist painting T. J. Clark has written eloquent pages on Giotto that extend the last century’s neo-humanism. Clark is interested in the ways Giotto reads and rereads the old stories about the life of Mary and the life of Christ. According to Clark, these stories address the psychology of doubt. Doubt about divinity, in Clark’s telling, is the germ of the modern worldview, which will eventually cease to credit any reality other than the thoroughly material one we grasp with our senses, as well as the intimations of spirit that seem to flicker inside us and inside others, in the form of self-awareness, a sensation of self-doubling (doubt < Latin dubitare < Latin duo < pie *dwo-, two). In a long and searching reading of the scene known as Joachim’s Dream in the Arena Chapel (ill.  3.3), Clark says that Giotto “seizes and dwells on Joachim’s doubt.”27 What doubt? There is no textual basis for interpreting Joachim’s Dream as a pictorial meditation on doubt. According to the text, the apocryphal gospel known as the Pseudo-Matthew (probably first quarter of the seventh century), Joachim has taken to the wilderness in despair

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3.3 Giotto, Joachim’s Dream, 1303–5. Fresco, approx. 200 × 185 cm. Padua, Arena Chapel.

because his offering at the Temple was refused, on the grounds that his wife Anna was unable to bear children. Meanwhile an angel has visited Anna and told her she will after all bear a child (Mary). The same angel visits Joachim and tells him the news. But Joachim inexplicably balks, and instead of rushing back to Jerusalem, he lies on the ground in prayer for half a day. And then while Joachim hesitated and wondered to himself whether he should go back, it happened that he was overcome by a deep sleep. And behold the angel who had already appeared to him while awake now appeared in his sleep, saying: ‘I am the angel whom God gave you as a guardian. Go down with confidence and return to Anna.’28

And this time he does go. The story is affecting and psychologically penetrating, but it does not raise the question of doubt about God. Clark knows this; at one point he admits that “doubt” may be the wrong word. He is well aware that neither the author of the text nor the painter Giotto harbored any doubts about the reality of divinity or “heaven.” Clark is interested in doubt as such, and in the artist’s protective approach to Joachim’s capacity to doubt. “Inwardness, barrenness, irresolution,” yes, these are Giotto’s gripping themes. Joachim may well wonder whether to trust the words of the angel. But Joachim does not doubt that there is a God who may or may not choose to help him. Yet Clark persists, “seizing and dwelling on” (like Giotto himself ) the concept of doubt because doubt about God’s existence is modern. The Giotto of the

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twentieth century was already secular, profane, realist, and materialist. If he is to be redeemed, then he is given a tragic sensibility, the capacity to feel and to relay on to us the predicaments of conscience. Clark carries off his interpretation of Giotto’s humanist art with his observations on the form of the paintings, customized by Giotto to his subject matter. Giotto is a realist about human nature in the sense that he is concerned about how the human being fares when reduced to his own psychological resources. He is a realist as a painter in that he devises onetime formal solutions, minimally indebted to conventions, to the challenges posed by the text. I am sympathetic to Clark’s existentialist Giotto. Like Clark, I expect art to dedicate itself to the unanswerable questions, which remain always the same. I would only not give up so soon on the attempt to reconcile our modern preoccupations with the historical Giotto. Clark knows what it would mean to think historically, to “think with Giotto,” but professes pessimism about that enterprise. Enlisting Walter Benjamin to his cause, he rejects “the pretense of the historian to enter the ‘lost’ mental world of a long-ago maker as a hopeless fantasy.” “I do not believe it can ever be me,” he says, “who time-travels to the Trecento.” Instead, Clark says that either he must concede that his claims about the painting are naive and that the painting (history, in other words) “resists” those claims, or he must “settle for that far flight of historicist fancy called ‘looking with a period eye.’ ”29 But there is nothing fanciful about the attempt, underwritten by research, to enter imaginatively into the minds and the sensoria of long-ago people. Clark himself knows that for Giotto and his contemporaries God was distant but real, and so could neither be known nor doubted: “Giotto seems to have felt instinctively for a way to establish, as part of the stillness, that the distance between his two main actors — between heaven and earth, or a body in the world and one ‘appearing’ to a mind turned in on itself — is, precisely, immeasurable.”30 In the present book I make a similar claim, except that — in an attempt really to grasp Giotto’s world — I try to avoid or at least postpone asserting that an angel is just something that “appears” to a “mind turned in on itself.” For my own desire to surpass the neo-humanist reading of Giotto and fourteenth-century art generally is provoked by my own uncertainty that the “immeasurable distance” is just a phantasm of the “mind turned in on itself.” The intuition of a god seems to me to be coming from some place very far from us, even if not from God. That place is otherness as such; and yet we feel implicated by the signal it sends. Art enters into that paradox, luring us into the psychic exchanges that derange existence. And so, by way of treating Giotto, seemingly ahistorically, as an artist, we in an indirect way come closer to his faith.

Sociologies and anthropologies of art T. J. Clark, impatient for meaning, does not waste time writing about lesser artists, so rarefied are the effects he is after, generated by the alembication of

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precious stable meaning out of seemingly fugitive and arbitrary forms. The neo-humanist reading produces the most exceptional version of Giotto, and the one whose implications radiate the farthest beyond Giotto’s world. Clark identifies a capacity of art to dominate its subject matter, not simply to broadcast meanings prescribed by others. Artists “image” things such that they are both more clear and less clear. From that point on, there is a little bit of Giotto in all artists. In this way, Clark’s book resists the sociological and anthropological tendencies within the discipline of art history that have produced what might be called the millennial style of art history, the prevailing mode of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The main styles of thought today tend to allow Giotto to recede back into his “culture.” The Modernist reverence for this artist, and preoccupation with the birth moment of modern art (its horoscope?), have given way to the composing of more comprehensive pictures of the life of artworks in society and in people’s experience. The study of fourteenth-century art has shifted its focus to the roles that paintings and sculptures played within private and public life: how images and artifacts guided religious devotion, advertised civic or dynastic power, and shaped communities. New directions were first signaled not by art historians, but by historians of religion and society, who already had little investment in protecting a transhistorical concept of art. Richard C. Trexler argued in a brilliant article of 1972 that modern scholars, self-appointed heirs to the Renaissance humanists, tend to repeat the error of the humanists in conceiving of religion as a system of doctrines or as a cosmology rather than as a mode of behavior.31 This privileging of thought over action prevented modern intellectuals from understanding the mentality of the fifteenth-century Florentine businessman, whose outlook on life was realistic and pragmatic and yet who participated with enthusiasm in public cults surrounding miracle-working images. Trexler was surely right about the scholars’ bias. Heeding his call, historians of religion and society over the last half-century have corrected that bias. Religious behavior in the context of family and civic life has been amply studied. Traditional esteem for the intellectual project of scholasticism, an assimilation of theology to philosophy, has been displaced by the emphasis on the emotional, bodily, pragmatic but also irrational aspects of religious experience. Caroline Walker Bynum, André Vauchez, Robert Scribner, Chiara Frugoni, Bernard McGinn, Barbara Newman, Jeffrey Hamburger, Gabriella Zarri, and many other historians of religion, society, art, and literature in the last decades have given the cultivation of fervent emotional ties to saints and the involvement of the body — eating and fasting, ecstatic prayer and self-castigation — a central position in our picture of late medieval religious life. There has been a stress on vernacular mysticism, lay saints, lay piety, “sacramentals” or doctrinally unsupported practices, the traffic in ex-votos, confraternities and tertiaries, folkloric cults of modern holy women and men or beati, ecstatic devotional

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poetry. There was so-called “popular religion” already in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, to be sure, practices only loosely authorized by Church doctrine, including pilgrimages and shrine cults.32 But everything changed with St. Francis, who lived and preached a more radical, not merely episodic, imitatio Christi. Devotion became more personal, even customized, less closely monitored by the Church, and more independent of theological orthodoxy. It is fair to say that today a majority of art historians, especially in the United States, the UK, and Germany, distance themselves from modes of art history-writing still too closely wedded to the idealist “religion of art” established in the nineteenth century and (according to J. W. von Goethe) amply replacing the old religion. For an art historian in league with social and religious historians, the differentiations and genealogies that have mattered to art historians at least since Vasari — the comparative virtues of Giotto’s pupils and followers, the relations between the Florentine and the Sienese — all now seem beside the point. The majority of art historians are ready to leave the sorting of schools and workshops and the adjustments of attributions to a shrinking population of connoisseurs, who add to and subtract from the roster of significant artists as it was once established by Lorenzo Ghiberti and by Vasari. (In defense of connoisseurship, I would say that the value of art historical writing focused on attribution and dating is not exhausted by its contribution to the factual record. The quest to establish a work’s true author, often futile, is a means of achieving a sympathetic intimacy with the artworks. Like theology, also circling round and round a possibly nonexistent object, connoisseurship is a self-referential and seemingly esoteric discourse that serves for its participants as a medium for talking about many other things.) Once art historians agreed to set aside traditional concerns with art’s essential nature and history, and once historians agreed to stop privileging the intellect over the emotions and the body, old walls between the disciplines began to collapse. Historians of religion, society, or literature (Bynum, Vauchez, Frugoni, Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Jean-Claude Schmitt, Lina Bolzoni) contribute to the history of art; historians of art (Hamburger, Hans Belting, Gerhard Wolf, Michele Bacci, Megan Holmes, Joanna Cannon, Fredrika Jacobs, Amy Neff, Donal Cooper, Alexa Sand, Holly Flora, and these lists are far from complete) contribute to the history of religion. Historians and art historians now ask similar questions about the interactions between artifacts, texts, minds, and bodies. Individual paintings may still hang on the walls of museums, isolated one from another by blank wall-space, but in the pages of the scholar’s monograph they recede back into intricate ecologies of devotion. The modern concept of art as autonomous, fictional, and open-ended, many now argue, obstructs inquiry into the real historical situations of premodern art. The modern concept of art interferes with our comprehension of medieval sacred art because that concept of art was designed precisely to justify the liberation of painters and sculptors from the traditional subservience to scripture and liturgy expected of them by patrons. An artwork, according

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to the fully developed modern aesthetic ideology, is unsuited to carry out any practical functions because it trades in illusions and fictions, and because its impact on beholders cannot be predicted. The functional approach to premodern images favored by recent scholarship defuses such aestheticist edicts and reveals the susceptibility of the bourgeois religion of art, cultivated in Europe and America since the nineteenth century, to unhistorical affections and favoritisms. One is now wary of Giotto because his reputation is a magnet that distorts all the scholarship on fourteenth-century Italian art. To reconstruct the roles really played by sacred images in premodern life, functionalists argue, we must resist the psychic authority exerted by the great art museums that gather premodern cult objects and modern, autonomous artworks under the same roof. A watershed in the modern tradition of functionalist research was Hans Belting’s 1981 book Das Bild und sein Publikum: Form und Funktion früher Bildtafeln der Passion (The Image and its Public: Form and Function of Early Panel Paintings of the Passion).33 Belting’s starting point was an essay of 1927 by Erwin Panofsky on the iconography of the Man of Sorrows, known as the Imago pietatis: images of a wounded and melancholy Christ, perhaps accompanied by the instruments of the Passion, perhaps supported by his mother, that focused emotional devotional attention. These emblematic portraits of Christ were extracted from narrative context. Panofsky distinguished two stages in the development of such images: an earlier, more straightforward type, compliant with theology, which he called the Repräsentationsbild, and a later and more rhetorically manipulative type which he called the Andachtsbild, a modern and invented (though not by Panofsky) term meaning “devotional image.”34 Belting argued that conclusions about how images were used by the devout cannot be drawn from the forms or formats of paintings. An orthodox narrative image of the Lamentation could incite the most acute emotions; a dramatic close-up on the suffering Christ could provoke a theological reflection. Belting argues that Panofsky, in favoring the sophisticated Andachtsbild, was not identifying a real historical convergence of an iconography and a function so much as providing a genealogy of certain tendencies in Renaissance art. A genealogy, since it works back from a known destination, constructing a narrative backwards on the basis of its outcome, always does violence to history because no one in the earlier times knew where history was heading. A superior example of an Andachtsbild was the Pietà in the Accademia by Giovanni da Milano (dated 1365), a hybrid of an icon or portrait of Christ and a narrative image depicting the Entombment of Christ (ill. 3.4).35 This painting with its innovative composition and sensitive treatment of gesture and expression is already a work of art no less powerful than the paintings of religious subjects painted by Andrea Mantegna and Giovanni Bellini a century and more later, paintings that explored sacred themes in an allusive and poetical fashion and were often designed not for churches but for private spaces. But Giovanni da Milano did not know that he was pointing forward

3.4  Giovanni da Milano, Pietà, 1365. Panel, 121 × 63 cm. Florence, Galleria dell’ Accademia.

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to Giovanni Bellini. Thinking genealogically, Panofsky omitted from his narrative a hidden corpus of pictures, the often humble private devotional panels, Italian adaptations of Byzantine models of the thirteenth century, which invited pious beholders into imaginary dialogues (discussed earlier, pp. 51–52). From the vantage point of modernity, knowing the religious paintings of Mantegna, Bellini, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Titian, one must be struck, while looking through the catalogue of thirteenth-century Italian panel paintings assembled by Edward Garrison, by how homely and unimposing most of them are. The Crucifixes are magnificent: images of serene triumph over death or abstract, torqued hieroglyphs of pain. But many depictions of the Virgin Mary holding the infant Christ on her lap, as well as the compact narratives in the rectangular fields flanking the Crucifixes, are simple and ingenuous. Such works sacrificed beauty in order to clear out space for different conceptions of art’s usefulness. This was an aesthetic of humility. The makers of the works illustrated by Belting in his book were not perfectionists. From the aesthetic, universalizing point of view, which is also a position of judgment, these images are just homeless: they were already art, but not yet good art. Today, even humble, unprepossessing pictures are assigned positions of great importance in our histories of art, and rightly so. As Belting says somewhere, these works are more significant than they look. Rhetoric prevails over form. The paintings functioned as valves connecting the divine and human spheres. They are the very pictures that invited supplicant portraits. The devout entered into imaginary intersubjective dialogue with their imaginary painted partners. The paintings gave them access to the mysteries.36 Belting stresses the evidence for an increase in private ownership of pictures, both clerical and lay.37 The imaginary access to the divine that these pictures offered was personal, even individualized, in contrast to the cathedral, which presents a cosmos, ordo, and does not wait for an answer. Belting himself concedes that the staging of a virtual intersubjectivity and the increasing complexity of the semantic content and the pictorial syntax prepared the ground for the sophisticated enigmas of Bellini and Mantegna, involving allusions to classical poetry and veiled metaphors.38 Belting’s account is symmetrical to Panofsky’s: he, too, believes that sixteenthand seventeenth-century art — “Renaissance” and “Baroque” art — is different in kind from the earlier images. But Belting sometimes speaks of the Renaissance and Baroque art protected by Vasari’s artist biographies and his theory of disegno, which justify the art of painting as a privileged form of knowledge, with a certain disapproval, as if the Renaissance were a fall from grace. The very cognitive and emotional distance from art that for Panofsky permitted the refined spirits of the Renaissance and, ever since, all the rest of us, to take personal possession, each of us, of the greatest artworks, signaled for Belting a fatal dislodging of art from the shared lifeworld of European Christians, a loss of art’s indispensability to life, leading in the end to a decadent

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aestheticism. Belting’s apathetic, unconvinced attitude to Renaissance art is aligned with the artistic Postmodernism of the moment of Das Bild und sein Publikum, but perhaps also with the neo-avant-gardes of the 1960s and 1970s, which debunked elitist myths sustaining Modernism in art, and proposed a new art unafraid to climb down from its perch and engage with real life and real problems. This debunking entailed a corresponding disenchantment with Renaissance art, privileged by academies old and new, and a revived curiosity about medieval art, a more authentic form of art because so firmly embedded within the lifeworlds of ordinary people, or so it seemed. Thus, Belting apologizes whenever he slips and makes a remark about the aesthetic qualities of a Trecento painting.39 What does the functionalist or behaviorist approach to premodern religious art omit? Behaviorism, a doctrine that originally directed itself against depth psychology, is precisely a deferring of the imponderable questions. It is an economical approach to knowledge: let’s learn what we can and resist the temptation to speculate about the rest. Behaviorism is an extreme mode of empiricism that is unwilling to risk error. As a result, patronage and function studies are anti-idealist. They reflect a collective loss of confidence or hope on the part of scholars, who deride a general public still seeking the Ideal in the museums and churches. In scholarship, realism prevails. Yes, there is intense interest in the extreme, nonnormative experiences reported by mystics and other most fervent devout. But our own modern world prepares us to take seriously and to train interpretive or diagnostic attention on a wide range of behavior. The functionalist account of premodern religion is psychologically realist in the sense that it assumes that at some level this behavior, all behavior, makes some sort of sense. The dialogic mode of faith, pulling God into the sphere of human psychology, recreates the divine as an effect of emotion. There is no denying that the affective piety of the fourteenth century seems — misleadingly — to resemble some modern neuroses. Nor do we have any trouble understanding the civic politics or the family and business rivalries of Trecento people. The prosaic, realist approach to life tends to colonize any field it comes across. Realism is totalizing. The devotional imagination is rationalized as a fantasy that fills a lack, seeks an answer, slakes emotional thirsts. The pious ones of the fourteenth century may measure the distance between humans and God any way they please: for the modern realist it makes no difference, since God does not exist. Such fictions as God, like the ones we ourselves live by, are nothing more than coping mechanisms or adjustments to reality. The affective worshipper is vulnerable and searching but is also a kind of author, writing him- or herself into an ongoing and cumulative relation with divine interlocutors. The fourteenth-century devout who is the protagonist of so much modern historiography is endowed with a high degree of agency, such that one could see this tendency in scholarship not as a refutation but as a confirmation of Jacob Burckhardt’s original concept of the Renaissance as the emergence of the individual.

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In an essay of 1965 Susan Sontag wrote that art “arose in human society as a magical-religious operation, and passed over into a technique for depicting and commenting on secular reality.” In our own time, she continues, art has “arrogated” to itself a new function, neither sacred nor profane. “Art today is a new kind of instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility.”40 This fine definition would be acceptable as a general definition of art, I feel, by many scholars today who study the place of art within premodern religious life. To treat historical religious experience in realist terms is to defer the question of ideality by allowing that question to be absorbed without remainder into the question of the reality of God. That latter question, for moderns, seems easy to answer. Many modern scholars — this generalization seems safe — are skeptical about the reality of God, and so they discreetly dismiss a culture of art organized around the praise of God and his heaven, and the lament over the destiny of Christ, for no better reason than that it is grounded in error. The excesses of late medieval affective piety, by contrast, are perfectly intelligible because they are grounded in real, even familiar, states of mind. Thus, Giotto and his time are treated by historicists as a period in which God was already dead and art was not yet invented. A behaviorist historian might say that the neo-humanists Panofsky and Clark, by relocating God within the human mind, reproduce the vulgarity of religious kitsch, or the art in modernity that persists despite everything in trying to represent the sacred. Kitsch, a twentieth-century concept, is a derogatory term used by elites to describe the objects of the bad taste of the uninitiated. Contempt for kitsch expresses the elitist view that philistines and other uninstructed people who admire crude imitations of modern art are underrating the difficulty of modern art. Religious kitsch is the religious art of modernity, which is art that underrates the distance between God and man, and overrates the possibility of communication with God. It often involves a humanization of the image of God and an attempt to incite fond and tender emotions.41 Those who believe, with Panofsky and Clark, that God is in us, or nowhere —  so the argument might go — have fallen into a kind of idolatry, or self-love. The neo-humanists might respond that the true kitsch is the reduction, in the name of a rigorous historicism, of the open-ended journey of faith to a form of behavior, or a mere emotional experience like any other. A behavioral, psychological, anthropological, or sociological approach assimilates faith to other states of mind and so naturalizes it. The historians of religious behavior, or piety, or the functions of images within religious and social life, it might be argued, have limited themselves to drawing conclusions only from those aspects of past lifeworlds that were representable. The behaviorist approach to historical faith is the equivalent of accepting that all we humans can know of God is what was packaged for us in Christ. A neo-humanist, or indeed any modern idealist, might also say that late medieval affective piety itself, including the artworks that supported it, anticipated the modern phenomenon of

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artistic religious kitsch. And this is in fact exactly why the “philosophical” art history of modernity, from Rumohr to Burckhardt to Panofsky to Clark, has mostly ignored the humble corpus of repetitive images of the Virgin and Child with their attendant saints and supplicants, simple expressions of faith. This contempt for an under-intellectualized faith also fuels the critique of some modern theologians, not of late medieval art, but of late medieval theologians. Hans Urs von Balthasar found Bonaventure’s descriptions of the Passion “sentimental” and questioned whether Bonaventure took “sufficient account in his Christology of the inward suffering of the Son abandoned by God on his cross.”42 Balthasar, who is a major modern theologian, not a marginal figure by any means, was mistrustful of excessive emotional expression as a mode of theology, arguing that prayer was not the sentimental so much as “the realistic attitude in which the mystery must be approached.”43 The very concept of piety was considered by the Crisis theologians, Balthasar’s Protestant contemporaries and counterparts, for example Karl Barth, to be a weak, accommodating concession to humanity. Such concerns resonate with the critique of the historian Alain de Libera, who in his book Penser au moyen âge strikes back against recent scholars who, overcompensating for traditional and even dogmatic ahistorical readings of medieval philosophy, treat scholasticism and its institutions mainly as sociological phenomena. In doing so, de Libera argues, they too hastily discount the content of scholastic philosophy and underrate its intellectual significance and innovatory force.44 But non-intellectualized piety was not only recognized but also endorsed already by scholastic theologians. Bonaventure told the readers of his Journey of the Mind to God (Itinerarium mentis in Deum) (1259), after he had led them step by step to a more perfect understanding of God’s nature, if you wish to know how these things may come about, ask grace, not learning; desire, not understanding; the groaning of prayer, not diligence in reading; the Bridegroom, not the teacher; God, not man; darkness, not clarity; not light, but the fire that wholly inflames and carries one into God through transporting unctions and consuming affections [ardentissimis affectionibus].45

And by the same token, the critique of the affective mode — that is, the view that an emotional, personal relation to God is no indication of an intimacy with God — is also no modern invention. The heretics of the thirteenth century, the Cathars and Waldensians, who denied that the living could communicate with the dead, and their successors, the heretics and proto-Reformers John Wycliffe and Jan Hus, all insisted, against the established Church, on the distance between God and humans. They would have dismissed the emotional attachment to paintings of the Madonna and Child as religious kitsch. Which modern camp of historians is most guilty of a naturalized or “kitsch” attitude toward late medieval sacred art? The neo-humanist says that the functionalist inquiry into affect as such never transcends Dasein, mere

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existence, and that the functionalist’s bracketing of God reduces the involvement of the devout with artworks to a game of fort-da — a repetitive acting out of intermittent presence and absence. The functionalist says that the neo­humanist asks too literally after God, and as a result ends up creating a substitute God, a little god, an idol, inside the human soul; better to focus on what we can know and what meanings we can generate on the plane of existence. There is no easy way to resolve this. The modern student of late medieval religious behavior could respond to the neo-humanist intellectuals as follows: You are overly concerned, Kantians that you all are, with belief as a commitment assumed by a subject. You are suspicious of people who appear to believe fervently in entities that you yourself know to be fictional. Such believers, from your point of view, are contenting themselves with anthropomorphized surrogates for a God who — if he exists at all — exists beyond the limits of human apprehension. More likely, in your opinion, he does not exist, and the believers, instead of playing with dolls, would have spent their time better introspecting or reading literature. This is how the historian of religious experience and behavior might render the position of the modern, rationalist neo-humanist. The historian of religious experience might continue: The very idea of a subjective, freely chosen position on the reality and nature of God is an anachronism. “Affect” is not a modern invention but a period term; Bonaventure spoke of affectus, affectio. According to Amy Neff, affect “in theological parlance signifies a movement, disposition, or inclination — the soul’s capacity to be moved, transformed, and united to God.”46 The object of that inclination can be brought near or kept far without risking any sort of inauthenticity precisely because that object’s true nature is unknown and because its reality is unquestioned. Any concrete or articulable or picturable target of pious emotion is a screen for an unknown. The forms of the sacred claim no adequacy to a real object. They are of course accommodations to the human sensorium. The embedded portraits of devout supplicants do not decide the matter either way. What appears to be a picturing of an approach to God may in fact picture an unbridgeable distance, and a futile longing. Such breakdowns, shortfalls, shorthands, circumlocutions, and re-codings are inscribed into artistic form, just as they are into the language of the devout, and beyond those forms and those words, there is no deciding. Here is the incomparable Angela da Foligno, who “saw God in a darkness” (in una tenebra) because he is so much beyond our ken: in a darkness because God is a greater good than can be conceived or understood; in fact, nothing that can be conceived or understood touches or even approaches that goodness. . . . When God is seen in this darkness, it does not bring a smile to one’s face, nor does it bring about devotion, fervor, or fervent love, because neither the body nor the soul tremble or are moved, as they usually are. Rather, the soul sees nothing and it sees everything, the body sleeps, and speech is stifled.47

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To approach God is to enter into a zone of darkness. Bonaventure says something similar. The spiritual itinerary Bonaventure maps also begins in darkness, for the human being since the original sin is “blinded and bent over, sits in darkness [incurvatus in tenebris] and does not see the light of heaven.”48 But the destination of that journey out of the darkness is itself a kind of darkness. Bonaventure asks the Triune God to direct us “to the most sublime height of mystical knowledge”: There new mysteries — absolute and changeless mysteries of theology — are shrouded in the superluminous darkness of a silence that teaches secretly in a most dark manner [absconduntur occulte docentis silentii caliginem in obscurissimo] that is above all manifestation and resplendent above all splendor, and in which everything shines forth — a darkness which fills invisible intellects by an abundance above all plenitude with the splendors of invisible good things that are above all good.49

The art of praise Few sources give us the sense of eavesdropping on fourteenth-century people talking about painting. A famous story by Franco Sacchetti (1390s), of uncertain documentary value, looms large. Sacchetti recounts a conversation at the monastery of San Miniato al Monte in Florence among a group of painters, including Taddeo Gaddi and Orcagna, who had died in 1366 and 1368, respectively.50 At the table, after lunch, Orcagna poses the question: which master of painting was the greatest of all, aside from Giotto? Several names are mentioned: Cimabue, Stefano Fiorentino, Bernardo Daddi, and Buonamico Buffalmacco. Taddeo, for his part, is unimpressed and remarks that, in any case, “this art has grown deficient, and continues to [grow more so] every day.” Another artist, a sculptor Alberto, disagrees. And the conversation flows on to its humorous climax. The interest from our point of view is that in the general discussion no criterion is named for judging who is the “best” painter, and Alberto names only one: the artist’s skill in correcting the defects of nature. This theoretical impoverishment is perhaps just what we should expect — according to Sacchetti — when we eavesdrop on artists. What did Orcagna and Taddeo Gaddi know of Rumohr’s “ideas of Christian antiquity”? Perhaps quite a lot; but that is not the picture Sacchetti paints of their conversation. On the other hand, we should perhaps not take the story too seriously, because the conversation is really just a vehicle for a punch line. Alberto’s jest is that the best painters today are the women of Florence who practice the arts of cosmetics in order to overcome their aesthetic shortcomings. Too deep a discussion of the art of painting would have spoiled this joke.51 I would propose that in Giotto’s time many theologians and clerics, as well as lay worshippers — from the prince to the pauper — were not so very interested in the question that occupied Sacchetti’s painters, namely: who is

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the “best artist”? Instead, I suggest, they admired the most noble, imposing, and beautiful works, even if they could not or did not express these desires in words. Evidence for this is primarily the great expenditure of resources, the collective investment of skill and pride in the fabrication of beauty, and the grandiose constructions and displays that shaped public and communal life. I am speaking of the eschatological diagrams, or images of the heavenly court, on the sculpted facades of churches, for example, or on the inner surfaces of vaulted apses, in the medium of fresco or mosaic. Among the greatest projects of the day in Florence were the mosaics on the vaults of the Baptistry (second half of the thirteenth century), with rows of angelic hierarchies, a Last Judgment, and a colossal, enthroned Christ. This is the art of panegyric and tribute, but also sacrifice, for praise is a form of sacrifice: “Through Him then, let’s continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips praising His name” (Hebrews 13:15).52 We are speaking also of Giovanni Pisano’s pulpit in the cathedral at Pisa (1302–10); the facade of the cathedral of Siena, an intricate fabric of sculpture and architectural elements, by Giovanni Pisano (begun in the late thirteenth century); and the enormous round window in the choir wall of that cathedral by Duccio (1287/88), with its depictions of the Burial, Assumption, and Coronation of the Virgin in its central vertical register.53 Some of the artists who created such works are remembered. But most are not, and even at the time, the artist celebrated by the whole society was the exception, not the rule. Artists knew who the best artists were, but few others did. These works and many others, and many more that do not survive, were animated by those “ideas of Christian antiquity” Carl Friedrich von Rumohr required; they cannot be accused of meandering off into the prosaic or the anecdotal and they are uninterested in the hidden creases of human psychology. These works proclaimed the excellencies of God, but also his immeasurable distance from us. They strove to reproduce — in infinitely diminished form — an experience of Paradise itself, in the sense that Paradise was understood as staring at God. Of course, Paradise or Heaven was depictable only because it was an anthropomorphism devised by God.54 A votive portrait was the image of an attempt to make contact with that God. The proclamation of God was shadowed by an awareness that the conversation between human beings and God is one-sided. To speak of God’s distance was already to fall into metaphor, for the difference between God and us cannot be marked off in units. The reality of God is incommensurable with your or my existence. God condescended to humankind by sending an avatar of himself, Christ, who was precisely measurable. A high stone table preserved in the Lateran Basilica in Rome, according to legend, recorded Christ’s true height.55 Manuscripts and prints published unit measures for calculating that height.56 Artists had no trouble depicting the incarnated Christ, whose body had been divinely formed, and his divinely guided actions and words. The doctrine of the Incarnation was an anthropological accommodation, a massive

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“commensuration.” But the Incarnation was only ever a half measure: it did not bring all aspects of God close. Of God himself, we have nothing but his words. Divinity as such was not depictable or describable. Coluccio Salutati in his treatise De seculo et religione (1381) put it this way: “God is indescribable [inenarrabilis]; as Cicero says, it is better that I say what is not true of him than what is.”57 To praise God — this is the only legitimation of art offered in the entire New Testament: “be filled with the Spirit, speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody with your hearts to the Lord” (Ephesians 5:18–19; see also Colossians 3:16). The psalmodic imperative was established in the Old Testament: “You are holy, You who are enthroned on the praises of Israel” (Psalms 22:3). But an image is not “the word of God” — only a text, a sermon, can proclaim in human terms that word. The image can only show, and praise.58 The imagery once central to religious life, work based on pattern and symmetry and expressive of hierarchy, is now marginalized by the scholarly focus on the psychosomatic bonds between worshippers and images, on psychology and the emotions, and on the often idiosyncratic practices of the devout. The most highly conventionalized works now seem remote and forbidding: the throngs of angels or saints, too numerous to count, row after row of inexpressive bodies, as painted by Giotto in his Last Judgment in Padua (ill. 1.2), by Nardo di Cione in the Paradise of the Strozzi Chapel in Santa Maria Novella (1354–57), or by Giusto de’ Menabuoi in the Baptistry at Padua (1375–76). Repetition pleases in music but not so much in painting. Such works, especially those with Christological themes, dominated their beholders by creating an effect of katalepsis, or immediate grasping. Repetition in the plastic arts is an assertion of power. Hierarchy and repetition are the structure of liturgy, whose point is to remove the person from the occasionalities of inclination. As Gertrude Stein put it, repetition is insistence, and “each civilization insisted in its own way before it went away.”59 We may know this mode of art from the scriptural rhythms of psalm and hymn, or from the public, ceremonial poetry of pagan antiquity. The Greeks cultivated an exalted poetry of celebration, felicitation, jubilation, and triumph, expressed in the modes or genres of paean, panegyric, and epithalamion. Pindar was not yet a reference point for the fourteenth-century scholars, but his stately, fulsome, and trance-like verse, its relentless piling on of gorgeousness, gives us, at least, an idea of what the painters, with their own means, were attempting. The painters even had means not available to Pindar, who was obliged merely to name and describe gold when invoking fire and light, inflaming souls and minds, casting the light of fame; whereas the painters could give you gold.60 One may say that this objective, nonnegotiable mode of art, which seems to show no regard for its audiences, was spoken in the third person. Northrop Frye, writing of the most basic forms of lyric poetry, said that

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in the more public type of religious lyric represented by the Apollonian paean, the Hebrew psalm, the Christian hymn, or the Hindu Vedas, the rhythms become more stately, simple, and dignified, the “I” of the poem is one of a visible community of worshippers, and the syntax and diction become less ambiguous. Here the emphasis is usually thrown on the objectivity and ascendancy of the god, and the lyric reflects the sense of an external and social discipline.61

During Giotto’s lifetime, the painted altarpiece or retable — the decorated panel mounted on the rear of the altar — expanded into a field for repetitive, symmetrical imagery. The altarpiece became an occasion and venue for the art of praise. The center of attention was most likely to be the Virgin Mary. The surviving works in this format are cornerstones of modern painting: the Louvre and Uffizi Maestàs by Cimabue (c. 1280); the massive Maestà painted for the cathedral of Siena by Duccio (1308–11); and the same painter’s Rucellai Madonna (1285) — painted for a lay confraternity — who swivels like the much smaller Madonna of the Franciscans (ill. 3.5, and cf. ill. 1.6) but in the other

3.5  Duccio di Buoninsegna, Rucellai Madonna, 1285. Panel, 450 × 290 cm. Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi.

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direction, sending ripples of asymmetry outward, modulating the dominant pattern. But any deviation is held in check by the overall theme of repetition, the cadences of a sacred arithmetic. To this formula Giotto added, as everyone knows, corporeal volume. In his Madonna for the church of the Ognissanti in Florence (hard to date, perhaps c. 1310), Giotto strove for the immediacy and presence of polychrome cathedral sculpture (ill.  3.6). The sculpture of the thirteenth century was his great model: the heavy realism of the French cathedrals — Cesare Gnudi points to the jubé of Bourges.62 Giotto was never in France (as far as we know — Vasari did say he went to Avignon). He learned this language from the Tuscan sculptors Arnolfo di Cambio and Giovanni Pisano. In translating the sculptural masses into paint, he strove for nothing other than what Duccio had achieved in the Rucellai Madonna, but with greater intensity. Here there is no contradiction between the hieratic and the “lifelike.” Giotto is attuned to matter, but he is no materialist. Many of Giotto’s compositions reveal his study and apprehension of old models, Byzantine and Roman. The nineteenth-century art historian Alexis-

3.6 Giotto, Ognissanti Madonna, c. 1310. Panel, 325 × 204 cm. Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi.

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3.7 Giotto, Dormition of the Virgin, c. 1310. Panel, 75.8 × 179.7 cm. Berlin, Gemäldegalerie.

François Rio (1797–1874), disputing Rumohr, said that at Santa Croce Giotto had borrowed the compositions of the Transfiguration of Christ and other scenes from “ancient mosaics.”63 The most direct way to instill the old rigor and urgency in a modern painting, certainly, was to build the work around Christ or John the Baptist, drawing upon the severity of the traditional formulas. The painted Crucifixes by Giotto — at Santa Maria Novella (c. 1300) and Rimini (c.  1305, or 1310s, though Giotto’s authorship is contested) — strike stark, somber notes. When the setting called for it, Giotto was by no means unwilling to set aside his narrative gift and instead paint rows and rows of angels. We have already mentioned twice The Last Judgment at Padua, the entire west wall, with more than 140 angels in the upper part, a copious assembly of figures coordinated in permanence by Christ (ill. 1.2). The altarpiece for the Baroncelli Chapel in Santa Croce, begun perhaps in 1328 (the date of the establishment of the chapel) and inscribed Opus magistri Jocti, with five arched compartments, depicts a hundred saints of varied aspect and two dozen music-making angels witnessing the Coronation of the Virgin, each wrapped in a festive robe — but paintings and mosaics were themselves like festive robes adorning a place or a space. The melismatic abundance expresses limitlessness. The repetitive throngs of angels and saints were an aspect of the old art whose appeal was not lost even on the not overly pious Vasari. About the predella of Fra Angelico’s high altarpiece for San Domenico in Fiesole (1421–22), Vasari said: “Their countless little figures displayed in a Celestial Glory are so beautiful that they seem truly to be in Paradise, and no one who approaches them can have his fill of them [né può, chi vi si accosta, saziarsi di vederle].”64 Vasari also reports that Michelangelo praised the truthfulness of Giotto’s Dormition of the Virgin in the Ognissanti with its chorus of blithe angels (ill. 3.7 and detail, p. 111).65

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Rumohr, as we saw, noted the beauty of the rows of saints in the Baroncelli altar. Alexis-François Rio a generation later offered the highest praise for the Stefaneschi altarpiece: l’influence Byzantine se fait encore sentir. The figure of the Virgin in the predella rappelle les anciennes mosaïques des basiliques chrétiennes.66 Even Roger Fry in the twentieth century could see that “in designing [the Stefaneschi altar] with its narrow cusped arch and gold background, the artist’s first consideration must be its effect as mere pattern when seen on the altar at the end of a church. In his frescoes, Giotto’s first preoccupation was with the drama to be presented; here it was with the effect of sumptuous pattern.”67 (ill. 3.8) The Stefaneschi polyptych was after all the high altarpiece of St. Peter’s Basilica.68 Julian Gardner has stressed the work’s mimetic relation to the most splendid metalwork, as if it were a great reliquary come to life. He sees links to the acheiropoietic Sancta Sanctorum icon and other archaic

3.8  Giotto, altarpiece of Cardinal Stefaneschi, 1320? Panel, 220 × 245 cm. Vatican, Pinacoteca.

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models. Angels crowd around the throne; angels hold hands (cf. the angels in the Glory of St. Francis in the Lower Church at Assisi).69 Hierarchical art reproduces cosmic order. In archaic, priestly-monarchic societies, that same order is replicated throughout the lived environment and society: the city plan, the temple, the protocols and ranks that maintain social order. This concept of a human sphere reproducing cosmic pattern persisted into the world of the Old Testament: the description of an ideal Jewish Temple in Ezekiel 40–48 shows how hierarchies of power were built on a series of nested distinctions between sacred and profane that all ultimately reproduce the distinction between heaven and earth.70 Such homogeneity of patterning was not easily maintained in the more dynamic society that was developing in Europe between the fourteenth and the twentieth centuries. And yet, a consensus about the desirability of order and pattern endured. For a long time, it was hard to imagine the opposite — disorder, formlessness — in positive terms. Not even every Modernist automatically valued disorder: Vincent van Gogh wrote in a letter to Émile Bernard (1888): Giotto, Cimabue, as well as Holbein and van Eyck, lived in an obeliscal — if you’ll pardon the expression — society, layered, architecturally constructed, in which each individual was a stone, all of them holding together and forming a monumental society. I have no doubt that we’ll again see an incarnation of this society when the socialists logically build their social edifice — from which they’re a fair distance away yet. But you know we’re in a state of total laxity and anarchy. We, artists in love with order and symmetry, isolate ourselves and work to define one single thing.71

Some modern scholars push this psalmodic and patterned dimension of Giotto’s work to the margins, as if troubled by it. Neither the late polyptychs nor the Franciscan allegories in the Lower Church at Assisi contributed to any of the modern readings of Giotto reviewed earlier. Yet everywhere in Giotto there is an investment in hierarchy and in ornament, from the Cosmatesque bands on the Ognissanti Madonna to the embrasures of the Peruzzi Chapel. His lettered contemporaries did not mention this aspect of his art, presumably because they did not see Giotto as an innovator in this field. For modern art historians, incredibly, the unpopularity of the hieratic art of praise becomes a negative attribution criterion. That is, scholars decide what Giotto is essentially like based on what they like — narration, psychology, emotional generosity, stimulation of the tactile imagination, or fictions of space and volume — and then attribute paintings to the master on that basis. Works that lack the admired qualities are attributed to lesser painters. Some hesitate before the Stefaneschi altarpiece and would balk at the Baroncelli polyptych if it were not signed.72 The art of praise unfolds even on a small scale. The gravity and the enormity of the task are brought out by the great illuminated manuscripts of the period — for example, the stately full-page figures of Christ and the Virgin in the Carmina regia (1335–40) by Pacino di Bonaguida; Pacino’s Tree of Life in a

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Bible (1335–40); or the All Saints image in the Laudario of St. Agnese (c. 1340) by the Master of the Dominican Effigies.73 These images are evident, in the classical and rhetorical sense: ineluctable, unmistakable, immediate; self-evident, not subjective. They are evidence of orderedness. Such “cosmic” images (< Greek kosmos, order, good order) were the major works of pictorial art of their day, even if today they are not always the bestloved or best-understood works. They presented something real but not normally visible: “The kingdom of God is at hand” (Mark 1:15). What they seek to represent is not a “subject matter.” There was no free choice of subject matter. Artworks were not yet “about” anything. Five hundred years later, Goethe said that “religion stands in the same relation to art as any other higher interest of life. It is simply to be considered subject matter, with the same rights as the other subject matters. . . . A religious subject can be a good object for art, but only if it is generally human,” for example a young woman and a child.74 But from a fourteenth-century perspective, the perspective we are trying to understand, Goethe was wrong: religion was not just a subject matter. In the fourteenth century, religion was the unquestioned framework for everything. To choose for oneself, to choose one’s own preferred doctrine, was precisely heresy (< Greek airesis, to choose for oneself ).75

Art and beauty Beauty, or the improving alteration of the natural datum in the direction of a pleasure-giving pattern, is an attribute seemingly fundamental to art, especially the art of praise. And yet the term, or terms like it, were seldom used by the humanist and other contemporary commentators on Giotto’s art or the art of the fourteenth century generally. An exception is Filippo Villani’s comment on Maso di Banco, even if the nature or factors of this beauty are not explained: “The most pleasing [delicatissimus] of all, painted with marvelous and incredible beauty [venustate].”76 The chronicler Filippo Villani, the nephew of Giovanni Villani, is the most interesting commentator on painting of his century. He takes the trouble to distinguish among the styles of Giotto’s disciples. But such comments are rare. Robert Brennan argues that the point the character Alberto is trying to make in Sacchetti’s tale is that paintings depicting more beautiful people are the more beautiful paintings. This is the simplest possible aesthetics, one that just shifts the problem of artistic beauty over onto natural beauty. Brennan suggests that this was one of the ways Trecento painters made their paintings more beautiful: by depicting more young women who were considered, by the standards of the day, beautiful. And, in turn, real beautiful women were described as if painted by Giotto.77 As a matter of fact, currently fashionable clothes and hair styles started to appear in religious painting around midcentury.78 Leon Battista Alberti, decades later, says that paintings must be beautiful, and the way to make them beautiful is to find beautiful people in real life:

94 Nella pittura la vaghezza non meno è grata che richiesta . . . Per questo gioverà pigliare da tutti i belli corpi ciascuna lodata parte e sempre ad imparare molta vaghezza si contenda con istudio e con industria.79 In painting good looks are not only attractive but required . . . It is helpful to take each praiseworthy part from all beautiful bodies, and one should work with study and labor to learn what is good-looking.80

Vasari will sometimes praise not the beauty of a fourteenth-century painting but the beauty of the people represented in the painting: the frescoes of the life of Mary Magdalene in the Rinuccini chapel in Santa Croce, for example, which he attributed to Taddeo Gaddi: con belle figure e abiti di que’ tempi bellissimi e stravaganti.81 Even if there is a disturbing grain of truth in such comments, they are quite inadequate as theories of artistic beauty. If the learned and lettered do not speak much of artistic beauty, the laity in their laconic expressions do. The contract for Duccio’s Rucellai Madonna, commissioned in 1285 for a chapel at Santa Maria Novella by a lay confraternity, does: Duccio will be compensated ad pingendum de pulcerima [sic] pictura, that is, “for painting with the most beautiful picture” a certain large panel, and he is expected “to do each and every thing which will contribute to the beauty [ad pulcritudinem] of the said panel” (ill. 3.5).82 The testament of Ricuccio di Puccio (1312) mentions the pulcra tabula by Giotto that he commissioned for a church in Prato.83 The lay and clerical devout who paid for sacred paintings valued beauty. Can one, following Franco Moretti’s revisionist account of the history of the modern novel and its readers, speak of a “social canon” of fourteenth-century painting that does not match the “academic canon” constructed by the humanists?84

Allegories and narratives Again, it is the Royalist and ultra-Catholic champion of the Primitives, Alexis-François Rio, who finds the phrases to praise Giotto’s allegories. Writing of the compositions mystiques, historiques, allégoriques et légéndaires qui ont immortalisé son pinceau, Rio says, il ne faut pas oublier la coïncidence heureuse, mais nullement fortuite, par laquelle l’art renâquit dans le même siècle où de grands saints et de grands poëtes se montrèrent si préoccupés, chacun à sa manière, de la recherche de l’idéal. Of the Franciscan allegories in the crossing of the Lower Church, the so-called Vele or vaults, he says: Il faut remarquer que Giotto n’avait ici le secours d’aucune représentation traditionelle, et qu’il avait à se frayer une route à travers toutes les combinaisons dont ce sujet, à la fois si neuf et si poétique, était susceptible. Impenetrable, diagram-like, they represent the virtues of Obedience, Chastity, and Poverty. The proof for Rio that Giotto was satisfied with his solutions is that he repeated his allegories, in shorthand, in the vault of the Bardi Chapel.85 The setting of the allegory of Obedience is the chapter house of a convent, divided by arches into three compartments (ill. 3.9). On the rear wall of

3.9 Giotto, Allegory of Obedience, 1310s? Fresco. Assisi, Lower Church.

this complex construction, we see the underdrawing of a Crucifixion. In front, there is a strip of the cloister covered by a roof supported by slender columns. The winged figure of Obedience, with square halo, holds a finger to her lips. A monk accepts from her the yoke. On the sides there are two further allegorical figures, with hexagonal haloes: on the left, Prudence, seated behind a desk and looking at a mirror, as in the Arena Chapel at Padua, and with a second, older face on the back of her head;86 and on the right Humility, holding a candle. The names of the three virtues are written on the back wall. There are kneeling angels on the left and right, the outermost holding cornucopias signifying the recompense. Standing on the roof is Francis, flanked by angels, and lifted by two hands from above, by strings attached to his yoke. On the right, on the strip of lawn in the foreground, a centaur personifies disobedience, unruliness, and presumption. On the left, two kneeling figures are presented by an angel (ill. 4.1). Martin Gosebruch describes the subtle successive variations in the postures and gestures of the angels, expressing their modesty and humility, and building to the climax of the more eager and assertive attitudes of the two kneeling expectant mortals. He points out that if such nuances escape

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most modern viewers, they were much admired by a late sixteenth-century commentator, Ludovico da Pietralunga.87 St. Francis, who is customarily a humble, nondescript presence, occupied with his devotions and his ministrations, embodying the three virtues just named, is depicted in the fourth vault enthroned like a gilded idol, eyes staring forward: this is the Glory of St. Francis. The Vele are unloved by moderns, and this may have contributed to scholars’ reluctance to attribute them to Giotto.88 Vasari did, because he at least understood allegory. One need only read his enthusiastic and detailed description of the lost Gloria Celeste by Stefano Fiorentino in the Lower Church at Assisi.89 Erich Auerbach, in his essay on Dante’s presentation of Francis in Paradiso 11, points out that for some premoderns, at least, “allegory meant something more real than it does for us; in allegory people saw a concrete realization of thought.” In his compressed life of Francis, the conceit of which is that Francis marries an unloved woman — Poverty — Dante combines the abstract mode of the allegory of Poverty in the Lower Church with his own characteristic sense of the vivid and the particular.90 Franciscanism, which held that mankind’s feeble self-assertions were incomplete, was by no means incompatible with the art of praise. Lotario dei Segni, who later as Pope Innocent III would legitimate St. Francis and his followers by approving his Rule, wrote in the 1190s a treatise entitled De miseria condicionis humane.91 Lotario never managed to write the planned pendant on “the dignity of the human condition.” Nor did anyone attempt to “answer” him, as Petrarch noted in 1366.92 For expressions of contempt for lowly mankind and awe in the face of the gulf between mankind and God, there is no need to look backward to Augustine or Arnobius, or forward to Karl Barth: readers of the Meditations on the Life of Christ could ponder this prompt to devotion by the eleventh-century theologian Anselm of Canterbury, attributed in the text of the Meditations, however, to Bernard of Clairvaux, and laced with allusions to the Old Testament: And I, a man, but dust and ashes, a cheap counterfeit at that, what kind of gratitude can I show you, Lord Jesus, intensely jealous lover that you are? What ought you have done for my salvation that you did not do? All the way from the soles of your feet to the crown of your head you immersed yourself in the waters of sufferings so you could pull me out of those waters. And the waters gushed up even to your soul. In reality, you lost your soul to death, so that you could return my lost soul to me.93

Narrative, even realism, can also proclaim. It would be a mistake to consider the painted Legend of St. Francis in the Upper Church at Assisi or the narrative cycle in the Arena Chapel in Padua as the realist, profaning complements to the symbolic or allegorical sacred works we have been discussing. God guided the events recreated in the narratives. The narrated lives were traversed by God and testify to his greatness. A sacred art can be serial as well as the fixed focus of prayer or ritual. Andrew Ladis has argued that

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an appreciation of the Arena Chapel’s “unaffected visual prose” risks missing the theological meaning of the cycle; it is a pictorial “treatise on salvation.”94 A saint’s life was not simply an entertaining narration of a Christian hero’s exploits, but rather the account of the “hidden thread of the presence and intervention of God within a human life.”95 The saint’s life or legenda belonged to the rhetorical genre of the literature of praise. The mural paintings in the Upper Church at Assisi narrating Francis’s life do strictly follow the account in the authorized biography by Bonaventure, the theologian and Minister General of the Franciscan Order. In the Prologue to the Legenda maior (1263), Bonaventure describes Francis as vir hierarchicus: not just a preacher of love, simplicity, and poverty, but an “angel” “enriched by the merits of triumphant virtue; filled with the spirit of prophecy and appointed unto angelic ministries; thereafter, wholly set on fire by the kindling of the Seraph, and, like the prophet, borne aloft in a chariot of fire”; for “he came in the spirit and power of Elias.” There was no tension or suppressed contradiction between the symbolic and the biographical approaches to the phenomenon of Francis. Nested within the narratives were the episodes involving grieving and lamenting. This is another family of lyric expression that complements the psalmodic art of praise: threnody, elegy. The subject of the Lamentation over the body of Christ is the Christian version of the elegy for the dead hero.96 The art of praise does not hold the interest, seemingly, of humanists, then or now. The original humanists were the scholars and writers who already in Giotto’s century in Italy described themselves thus because they professed the studia humanitatis, or the study of the grammar and style of the best classical authors. The humanists had little to say about the religious content or functions of Giotto’s art. They praised him almost exclusively for his technical ability to render the look of things. The humanists seem to have adopted the pragmatic, technically oriented views of the artists themselves, and perhaps they were proud of just this self-alignment with the artisans, the mark of their “insider” knowledge. They do not speak of the content of sacred artworks.97 This is not to say that the fourteenth-century humanists were secular thinkers. For them God was still the outermost framework of meaning. The humanists were born into religion; their humanistic attitudes and pursuits, by contrast, were chosen. They took a historical perspective on religion; they read the pagan poets as allegorists of moral and religious beliefs. They sought the proper relation between pagan philosophy and Christian ideas.98 The humanists knew about God, and they knew about the functions of artworks, whether they stood on an altar, for example, or had been commissioned by a lay confraternity. They did not have to spell any of this out. They speak only about whether an artwork is well-made, realistic, beautiful, and so forth. Perhaps because the contemporary commentators took the religious content and function of Giotto’s works for granted, their silences have misled modern historians of ideas. In his history of medieval theories of beauty, Rosario Assunto discusses in one chapter the writings by Thomas Aquinas

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and Bonaventure on beauty as an attribute of divinity, and then in the very next chapter represents the whole Trecento with Dante’s theory of poetry as a liberal art, and with the ideas of Cennini and Villani, which presented the art of painting as the technical production of artificial imitations of nature. There is no mention of God or the divine in Assunto’s chapter on the fourteenth century. Assunto takes the sparse comments of Cennini and Villani as evidence of a decisive move in that century to an artist-based aesthetics.99 The artifex endowed with ingenium is understood as the cause of the artwork, Assunto says, now admired not for the beauty of the things depicted but for its quotient of technical skill. And “as soon as the requirement that depictions simulate nature is asserted without contradiction, the notion that art metaphorically means something other than itself begins to disappear.”100 The humanists may also have misled Vasari, who said, for example, that Masaccio finally “realized that painting is nothing other than the art of imitating [un contraffar] all the living things of Nature.”101 But Vasari knows perfectly well that the art of painting involves more than imitating all the living things of Nature. Even Cennino Cennini had said that painting “calls for imagination [ fantasia], and skill of hand, in order to discover things not seen”!102 In sum, early Renaissance writers, nineteenth-century Christian and neo-pagan idealists, and twentieth-century realists including Modernists all agree that Giotto’s art was undercoded, that is to say, symbolically deficient; they only disagree in how to evaluate that undercoding. In addition, they all misrecognize or overlook Giotto’s involvement in the project I call the art of praise, the central and most prestigious idea of sacred art in this period. The art of praise is also undercoded, but in a different sense, for repetition, sheer scale, splendor of light and color effects, not necessarily shaped by “ideas,” and producing an impression of immobility and exemption from time, were designed directly to elicit awe and a sense of distance and mystery. The concept of praise allows us to differentiate between two principal “streams” of portraiture in premodern Europe, the memorial and the votive. The memorial portrait brings to mind an absent person. It substitutes or stands in for that person.103 Such surrogates cannot do all the things we might expect from a person but may well be able to do some. The sculpted tomb effigies that replaced the temporary wax effigies that in turn had replaced the corpse itself — these were substitutes indispensable to ritualized performances of homage to a ruler. The portrayed person is one praised by the world. The research of Dominic Olariu into the early textual mentions of portraits shows that the texts always bring out the noble, magnificent, and impressive aspects of portraits — the homage they do, in their elaborateness and mastery, to their subjects. Portraiture is the art of praise — the art of self-praise.104 The love portrait, whose exemplar is the portrait of Laura supposedly painted for Petrarch by Simone Martini, is meant to inspire amorous feelings much as the presence of the beloved might do. The independent panel portrait as it emerged in the beginning of the fifteenth century, which Belting has convincingly

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derived from the heraldic arms painted in shields, was a stand-in for its subject. All these categories of portrait are designed to win praise for their depicted subjects. Votive portraits also memorialize. But they present the subject not only as an object of praise but also as one who praises. The sacred artwork praises God; the portrait carries the sponsor of that praise across the frame and into the work. The votive portrait creates an inside-out topology, which we already know from any depiction of the Lamentation over the Dead Christ, and which by definition includes not only the body of Christ but also the images of those who lament. These artworks give us the entire scene of praise or mourning, which in both cases, happy and sad, is also sustained by angels. And neither the one who praises nor the one who mourns is herself or himself an object of praise; on the contrary, the embedded votive portrait is a picture of humility. To introduce an image of the one who proclaims God’s glory is to raise a question perhaps best not raised: is the source of the proclamation in a person’s soul? The traditional art of praise was objective: God is praised. One has no choice but to add one’s voice to the chorus. And this idea is adapted by the noble tomb portraiture. The miracle and honor of a lifelike portrait compelled admiration. Now, with the portrait of the devout patron, there is a shift from the third person to the first person. I become godly by praising God, but not in the sense encouraged by the pagan art of praise. For in Pindar’s world, the godly man becomes like a god; the goal of worship and of panegyric is to resemble the gods.105 The votive context is unstable and courts compromise. For it may emerge that the supplicant is not simply helplessly and noninstrumentally expressing wondrous admiration but is ultimately asking for something. The self-dedication is contaminated by worldly motives: the supplicant hopes to be admired in his community precisely for that recognition of his own insignificance attested to by the painting. His praise is also a token in a quid pro quo with God. As if to ward off this unwelcome questioning of the devotee’s motives, the supplicant portrait for a long time symbolized the subject’s humility and insignificance by a diminution in scale. The worldly aspirations of Cardinal Giacomo Gaetani Stefaneschi are at the same time advertised (there is no avoiding them, the splendor of the setting and the costumes speak for themselves) and diminished, relativized (ill. 3.8).

Sacred art and secular modernity The adjective “secular” (Latin saecularis) in late antiquity, and in Christian usage, designated an incompleteness of knowledge. St. Augustine in the City of God said that “we” Christians call the erudition of the encyclopedist Varro (first century bce) “secular,” whereas “they,” the pagans, call it “liberal,” or free, not mechanical. Augustine considers secular learning to be deficient; it is missing something. The liberal arts (grammar, logic, arithmetic, etc.) are free

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in the sense that they are not governed by their ends, or telos. But for Augustine, this was a false freedom, a merely negative freedom, a freedom from a condition but not a freedom toward anything valuable. The adjective saecularis derived from saeculum, a span of time, a word corresponding to one meaning of the Greek aion, meaning this world, the temporal world, a world whose time is measured out in lifetimes. The measure of the saeculum was provided by the longest lifespan, one hundred years.106 The concept of the secular rests on the metaphors of the linking of generations. It is a horizontal arrangement, meaningful only to men on earth — the gods are not involved. To accept that we measure out reality, finally, with our own lifespans is to think historically, as the fourteenth-century humanists began to do.107 An art of praise is incomprehensible today because it rested on unquestioned assumptions about the hierarchical structure of society, of the created world, of heaven itself, whereas modern people tend to see everything horizontally, in relation to everything else at once. In the Fioretti di San Francesco, a fourteenth-century collection of stories about Francis and his followers, laypeople are referred to as i secolari.108 Francis’s followers were not really clerics in any traditional sense — so, what were they? They were not secular. The secolari, from the point of view of a Franciscan friar, who may himself have quit the lay sphere only weeks earlier, are people who lack something. The secolari do not understand; they fall short in comprehension. In Luke 2:38, the prophetess Anna, witnessing the Presentation of the infant Christ in the Temple, spoke “about Him to all those who were looking forward to the redemption of Jerusalem.” The apocryphal gospel of Pseudo-­ Matthew, retelling this story, rendered the last phrase as redemptio saeculi, the redemption of the world, the worldly ones.109 We scholars, today, are the secolari, the worldly and timely ones, who cannot be forgiven as one might forgive the pagans, who had not heard the news. Our secularity is a falling away from knowledge, a forgetting. To study sacred art is to come face to face with an outward sign of what has been forgotten. One may ask: Who are the non-secular today, who know something else? Or does secularity entail the denial that Francis and his brothers, the non-­ seculars, ever knew anything we don’t know? In his provocative essay No Idols: The Missing Theology of Art, Thomas E. Crow argues that secular reckonings with art, even with some modern art, are incomplete.110 These reckonings are disrespectful of theological answers to existential and artistic questions. Crow is not just pointing to differences across contexts or mentalities or worldviews. He suggests that you have to enter into theological concerns to get anywhere with the art. He is not simply talking about modern religious art but rather Modernist or “legitimate” modern art, art that meets all the expectations of a Modernist aesthetic and yet also broadcasts on some wavelength inaudible to that ideology. Is there any way out of this impasse? Perhaps the conservative religious thinkers, in their modern agony, offer some clues — so strange and unexpected

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are their investments. For the theologian Louis Bouyer, the late Middle Ages were already irremediably alienated from the original, early Christian liturgy, which he describes as a nontheatrical, non-experiential mode of making real again the “mystery” — in other words, the Passion, the Redemption, and the Consummation, or ultimate end. He identifies liturgy as the mode of religion he favors (“religion” being the set of human practices designed to maneuver us into some relation with God), because liturgy symbolizes and even attempts provisionally to enact a nonhuman concept of time, a suspension of time or an exteriority to time. The popular and human-scaled devotions of the mendicant orders (Franciscans and Dominicans), in his view, did nothing to recover this original sense of the liturgy. But, he argues, at least the friars staved off “paganism,” and by this Bouyer means the profane sentimentalization of courtly love, and Manichean Neoplatonism and Averroist Aristotelianism. Bouyer has little regard for the ingratiating accommodations of such “paganisms.” If not for the mendicant friars, he says, “the pagan Renaissance would have triumphed three centuries earlier.”111 Bouyer’s overall position is Augustinian: he favors the early Church, and he is worried about paganism. Sailing by these stars, he develops an ambivalent view of the mendicants, but one that is quite different from a typical modern, secular ambivalence about Franciscanism. Only the roadblock to paganism, defined as the proud cultivation of human prowess, endears the Franciscans to him. For Bouyer, the Franciscans were too indulgent toward inward experience and a certain pious creativity. Karl Barth also questioned the propriety of the late medieval approaches to the divine. A Calvinist, Barth put no stock in liturgy. But he was unimpressed by religion’s accommodations to human nature, inviting fantasies of communication with God. He would not have disapproved of Francis’s low opinion of the human, which challenged humanist pride. Religion even in its most courageous, powerful, and impossible “variety,” Barth argued, “is after all no more than a human possibility.” Religion is just “the culminating point of humanism.” That humanism was already overcome by the death of Christ, the death according to the law, when “the possibility of human piety and belief and enthusiasm and prayer, is fulfilled by being evacuated.” “In the slain body of Christ, we perceive the non-existence . . . supremely of religious (!) men.”112 So, for Bouyer and Barth, the fourteenth century was already quite secular. A historical bird’s eye view, taking in Francis together with a truly archaic culture like the one that produced the Sanskrit scriptures, the Vedas, supports the same conclusion. In his book on the ancient Hindu rites, Roberto Calasso said that it is easy “to forget that the West, if that is what we want to call something which was born in Greece, has been secular from the very beginning. Without a priestly class, exposed to the continual risk of being excluded from the light, with no prospects of reward or redemption in other worlds, the Greeks were the first wholly idiosyncratic beings. . . . That which is idiosyncratic acts as the very backbone of secularity.” In this respect, ancient Greece is the opposite of Vedic India. Not that the Greeks did not know their gods:

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“For the Greeks an átheos was, above all, someone who is abandoned by the gods, not someone who refuses to believe in them, as the moderns proudly claim.”113 Christian Italy was also secular compared to the contemporary, fourteenth-century Inca society, for Christian art was no longer sacrificial, nor did it propose a “substitutive presence,” as David Summers would say, as the addressee of ritual supplication. Though Christians still made art respecting what Summers calls “hierarchical planar decorum” (the art of praise), their art would have been incomprehensible to the Incas, whose art was “grounded in substitutive, real spatial values, art that instead of making the past present, was meant to articulate the indisputably present.”114 The fervor of the Franciscans and the ensuing personalization of religion, the passionate devotion to images and shrines associated with miracles, and mounting frenzy about prophecies and millennial disaster, hardly heralded an epochal turn toward a skeptical realism. Quite the contrary, the sacred art of the period seems to register an intensified cognition, a making more real, of the divine sphere, and a making accessible of truth. If many Europeans did eventually come to doubt the reality of God, that process took a long time. No one in the fourteenth or even the fifteenth century was an atheist.115 Society took few steps toward liberating itself from a divinocentric worldview. “Belief” is not even the right word: people simply knew there was God. Although profane ways of life and thought were always present, divinity remained until at least the seventeenth century the unquestioned framework for life and for art. Martin Luther hardly presented himself as a secularizer, quite the opposite. The heretics and later the Protestants disdained or condemned “interested,” instrumentalized, or superstitious religious practices. But they were not pointing forward to the Enlightenment. Rather, they were echoing the views of Seneca or Augustine. Was it a sign of the advent of a realist worldview when the Cathars and the Protestants denied that the living can communicate with the dead? Just the opposite: for was it not the anthropomorphizing doctrine of intercession that was realist? The proliferation of intercessors assured the laity that there were channels of communication open to God. The procedures for submitting requests were clear. Heretics and Protestants asked people to abandon those spurious middlemen and instead face God on their own, recognizing the enormity of the gulf separating them from God. Is that a “realist” attitude? The hypothesis of an infinitely remote God? If the heretics had gotten their way, then the gulf would have come to seem too overwhelming and people would soon have lost interest. In the long run, though, didn’t the heretics in fact prevail? What the orthodox theologians who persecuted the heretics had feared came to pass. In the face of the impossibly long odds of connecting with God, people did just drift off. The historiographical “problem of God” is that even to grasp faith intellectually you have to have it. The absolute and unquestioned confidence of the devout, which is not an idea that you can ponder but rather a holistic way of being, cannot be apprehended from the outside. The inability to grasp

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someone else’s faith in God is equivalent to the inability to grasp God and may not be much different from our absolute inability to grasp our own death, perhaps because to surrender unconditionally to God is a kind of death, a death of an inauthentic version of yourself. The gulf between fourteenth-century devout and ourselves therefore poses an insuperable historiographical problem. We cannot help but translate the old sacred art into naturalistic or otherwise psychologically intelligible terms. Any history of fourteenth-century art is probationary and speculative. An authentic involvement with art, no longer controlled and objective, not entirely scholarly, a less regulable and repeatable form of understanding, an involvement that is implicating and difficult to communicate or teach — such an involvement may simulate aspects of premodern religious experience. By “implicating” I mean art’s capacity to force an immediate but non-clarifying encounter. In this predicament, we may seek help from unexpected quarters. Here I call on Shoshana Felman and Bruno Latour to suggest that the implicating aspect of art transcends history, and that to submit to that implication would be the first step toward a desecularized art history. A rereading of Felman’s celebrated analysis of Henry James’s ghost story The Turn of the Screw (1898) is instructive.116 The Turn of the Screw is about a governess looking after two small children at a large country estate. The governess several times glimpses a man and a woman who she learns, from the other employees, once worked at the house but are now dead. She believes that the children in her charge are also seeing these specters. The story itself does not provide evidence that would allow us, the readers, to decide whether the mysterious man and woman are ghosts (restless dead), or just figments of the governess’s imagination. Felman says that traditional belletristic criticism of the early twentieth century accepted Henry James’s own statement that the tale was nothing more or less than a ghost story. The position of the book’s early critics was that the genre of the ghost story involves ghosts, and that when we read such a story it is unproductive and misguided to worry generally about whether ghosts are real or not. Edmund Wilson, however, in an essay of 1934 entitled “The Ambiguity of Henry James,” objected to this passive attitude toward the story and argued instead that the story was obviously about the hysterical amorous fantasies of the governess, and that the “ghosts” were manifestations of her unbalanced mental condition. Felman sees Wilson’s interpretation as an early example of a psychoanalytic reading of a fictional narrative and takes his criticism as the starting point for her own extensive meditation on the limits and possibilities of such readings. I propose that the approach of traditional art history to late medieval sacred art (i.e., a concern with attribution, artistic form, and iconography) is comparable to the approach of the traditional, pre-psychoanalytic literary critics to James’s story. Traditional art historians accept the Christian framework

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as if it were a “simple ghost story.” Christian art posits a Christ and a God. But for an art historian working in the traditional or classic mode, questions about the reality of these divine entities just don’t arise. God is placed in brackets, as it were. Edmund Wilson’s approach, by contrast, is comparable to the “affective piety” approach to premodern religion. The modern, functionalist mode of art history explains religious behavior as a pathology — with no moral judgment implied, of course.117 The crucial point about the modern scholarship that translates religious behavior into psychologically intelligible form is that it does not simply set aside the question of the reality of God, as the pre-­psychoanalytic critics of The Turn of the Screw set aside the question of the reality of ghosts, or the traditional art historians set aside the reality of God. Rather, it disbelieves in God, every bit as much as Edmund Wilson disbelieved in ghosts. The behaviorist approach to Christian art understands “belief in God” as a symptom of a disorder that the patient herself has no name for. Shoshana Felman herself, of course, believes neither in ghosts nor in God, but finds a way to transcend the opposition between Wilson and the traditional critics by interweaving her interpretation of James’s story, and of James’s own later statement about the story (in the preface to the New York edition) with an analysis of the process of reading itself — reading fiction, reading this fiction. And that is just what I wish to do — transcend the opposition between the traditional and the behaviorist art histories. James’s story is built around a series of misunderstood narratives. The governess listens to the accounts of the father, the servants, the children. The characters in the frame narrative hear the governess’s written narrative read out loud. The misunderstandings are symptoms of emotional entanglements among the characters developing below the level of the described actions. Felman argues that the characters’ misrecognitions are produced by transferences and libidinal displacements that are in turn reproduced in a reader’s engagement with the story. This structure of repetition rules out an objective diagnosis of any pathology interior to the story from a vantage point outside the story (such as Wilson tried to do). The repetition of the story’s genesis on the level of its reading equally rules out any attempt to escape into objectivity by means of a simple invocation of the conventions of the genre of the ghost story that would “bracket” the ghost — in other words, decline to decide one way or the other about the reality of the ghost. For the ghost (God) is neither an entity that one might get to know outside the text, nor a phantasm of the agitated governess, but rather an event immanent to the exchange between storyteller and listener/reader. Felman presents reading as an infinite regress of self-awareness of one’s own implicatedness in the investments that generated the fiction in the first place. In The Turn of the Screw, such investments come into play at several levels: the text written by the governess, the character Douglas who reads this text to his friends after dinner, an unnamed narrator (“I”) who relates all of this to us,

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and of course Henry James himself. The attentive reader’s extreme degree of vigilance, an unwillingness to be “duped” by anyone’s tale, perpetually postpones the coordination of any of these nested texts with an extra-fictional reality. Felman is working with the psychoanalytic concept of transference, or the assignation of authority to a listener by the unconscious. Transference confers knowledge upon that listener that is in fact the speaker’s own knowledge, knowledge of her own story. Transference as the “acting out” of the unconscious is not only the destiny of patient-analyst relations but also the basic structure of all love-relations. Felman notes that all the author-reader relations enclosed by James’s text are so structured. In the context of James’s tale, she is able to identify the addressee of the unconscious as the “ghost.” If the readers in the text are ghosts in this sense, then so too is the real-life reader of The Turn of the Screw (you or I). This is the sense of James’s assertion that prodigies “keep all their character by looming through some other history.” The prodigy is narrated in and through the “other,” Felman adds, “and that ‘other’ here is the reader.”118 The reader in turn invests authority in the narrator, “who through the dreamlike narrative which he puts in motion out of his own transferential illusions, can only wake us into his own sleep: into the transferential dream which becomes our own.”119 To transpose Felman’s terms into our own: art is a series of illusions that are never finally exposed as illusions. God looms through other people’s stories. Felman is saying that if you are invested in the aesthetic institution of fiction, and you know that fictions are generated by false assignments of narrational authority that resemble affective ties and that systematically fail to recognize the unconscious as the true “authority,” then “reading” never comes to an end and the story gives no satisfaction. A good reader does not try to close the case by matching the text to reality. But the historian, when confronted by the fictions produced by historical actors, is supposed to do just that. Here is the conflict between our identities as readers (beholders of art) and as historians. The historian is expected to “settle up.” But how can you, once you are “woken” into the dreamlike intimacy with God of the historical devout, or once you enter into their intimacy with painted images? You are implicated, if not by the preacher, then by his semblable, the artist. There is no stable platform from which to make a diagnosis, or a historical judgment. If we write good history, our relation to the artwork is spurious because prematurely completed. To instead leave “God” in place, as Henry James in effect asks us to do when he wants us to suspend our skepticism about ghosts, is to set in motion (not cut short) a transferential involvement with his novella. To leave God or the ghost in place keeps the painting or novella open as an artwork, and gives us a sense of what the initial historical involvements were, when religious and aesthetic relations to art were still intertwined. Reading, for Felman, is not a devotional exercise. On the contrary, reading for her is a matter of maintaining vigilance against deception, of avoiding

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being the dupe. To read or listen is to make decisions about the storyteller’s trustworthiness. Faith is always on trial. The pious one knows skepticism —  she is skeptical, for example, about other peoples’ gods! She suspects others of hypocrisy. Practical realism coexists with faith. Felman shows how the reality of ghosts is sustained by relays of telling and listening, fed by a continuous differentiating intelligence and never quite confirmed or refuted by reality. This is what sacred art did.

Bruno Latour, for his part, has written a heartfelt, agitated, and provocative essay about his own worries: by submitting to what he calls “the demon of rationalization” he is no longer able to understand, let alone contribute to, “religious speech” (la parole religieuse), the professions of faith that to modern, enlightened ears are simply embarrassing. He tries to stand by his convictions as a rationalist intellectual and at the same time acknowledge without condescension that religious speech is trying to say something terribly urgent, something not heard from any other corner. Near the climax of the essay, Latour wonders whether art might yield the answer. He begins by saying that art is able to convey a sense of what might lie beyond ordinary experience and cognition: art “turns our gaze towards the remote, towards the distant, towards the foreign,” suggesting mystery.120 But unlike religion, he goes on, art “never worries about exercising control over the places it allows us to reach.” Art gives us what Latour calls an “accessless access.” In the end, art is “too enigmatic, too innovative, too perverse as well to accompany religion long in its meanderings.”121 Sooner or later, art will go its own way, leaving religion behind. This is a modern intellectual’s way of accounting for the divorce between religion and art, a foundational schism of European modernity. Art is associated with innovation, perversity, ambiguity — all features of modern art, of course. Art is independent — all art, Latour implies. His formulation looks at first like a neat solution to the puzzle: art just strikes off on its own, self-propelled. Religion is left behind, lamely “meandering.” Roberto Calasso, we noted, considered “idiosyncrasy” the hallmark of secularity, and inevitably if one comes across a premodern painting which seems “idiosyncratic,” one will see it as proto-secular, proto-modern. Northrop Frye — who was a Christian — said that art and the real (e.g., God) are sealed off from one another. “The universe of poetry . . . is a literary universe, and not a separate existential universe. Apocalypse means revelation, and when art becomes apocalyptic, it reveals. But it reveals only on its own terms and in its own forms: it does not describe or represent a separate content of revelation.”122 In modern times, art’s participation in religious life is optional. For Latour, Calasso, and Frye, art can never be a reliable contributor to religion, because art is irresponsible. Art has traveled with religion, traveled with power, traveled with

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3.10  Fra Angelico, Resurrection and the Three Marys at the Tomb, 1440–42. Fresco, 181 × 151 cm. Florence, Museo di San Marco.

science; today it travels with political activism. But it is not answerable to any of those projects. Latour does not let the matter rest there, however. He considers the Resurrection and the Three Marys at the Tomb by Fra Angelico, a mural at San Marco in Florence (1440–42) (ill. 3.10). He begins by confessing that his dutiful efforts, as a well-informed tourist, to identify the iconography and to place the work in its historical context are leaving him feeling a little flat. Since he cannot accept the reality of Christ’s Resurrection, there is nothing left for

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him but historical knowledge about Quattrocento Florence, plus “aesthetic” enjoyment. Then gradually Latour starts to register the deep strangeness of the story and the image: the holy women arrive at the tomb, but it’s empty and they see nothing; an angel sits, indicating the hollow tomb with one hand and, with the other, pointing to the apparition of Christ risen bearing the palm leaf of the martyr and the standard of salvation — but the women can’t see this apparition, since they have their backs turned to it. “He’s not here,” says the angel in the text. Where is he, then?

Latour notices the kneeling Dominican friar at the lower left corner, a figure possibly borrowing the features of a particular friar, though not a portrait of a modern man, for he bears a halo. This is a portrait of St. Dominic but also an image of Dominican piety generally. Latour understands that the friar, half in the picture and half out, looking toward the tomb but not seeing, implicates him, Latour, in this curious story in which no protagonist sees anything directly: neither the women, nor the angel, nor even the monk — nor me as a result. Yet I’m the only one to see, behind everyone else, the painted apparition of Christ.

The embedded portrait initiates a nesting of author-reader pairings. The portrait makes a question of our relation to the apparition of Christ, then defers the answer, just as the nested narratives in James deferred the question of the reality of the ghosts. Latour begins to grasp what is happening. He had been looking for the meaning of the painting in the past, in history. Instead, “the meaning must be sought now, for me, here.” “The image begins to crackle.” Cutting across and nullifying the painting’s apparent message is a further message, a set of instructions for use, or a meta-message, advising us not to look in the tomb but to look straight in front of us: here he is. The painting does not represent; it presents again. And this forever pulling forward of the true sense of the story, this extraction of that sense from history and instead pushing it upon the present — that is religious speech: There exists a form of original utterance that speaks of the present, of definitive presence, of completion, of the fulfilment of time, and which, because it speaks of it in the present, must always be brought forward to compensate for the inevitable backsliding of the instant toward the past; a form of speech whose sole characteristic is to constitute those it is addressed to as being close and saved; a kind of vehicle that differs absolutely from those we’ve evolved elsewhere to accede to the distant in order to control information about the world.123

This is the opposite of Felman: where she sees “faith” in the resignation to the deferral of meaning, Latour recklessly identifies a moment of presence, a “bringing forward,” which empiricism and analysis will never reach, but that art, when most art-like, may afford. Two theologies. What is especially interest-

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ing from our point of view is that Latour senses the disrupting advent of this second, encoded message in the painting’s semantic feints and discontinuities: Through a series of minuscule inventions, tiny shifts, little visual nudges, paint smears, the fresco reinterprets the text which is in turn made up of other inventions, other elaborations, other discrepancies, improbabilities, interpolations, oddities that make them both — the text that revives other tales and the fresco that illustrates it — capable of signifying something else entirely from what they explicitly say.124

Latour has his cake and eats it: for can we not describe “Modernism” as a negativity and a disturbance created by the effort to maintain presence within an always-renewing Now? The sense of frustration, paralysis, incomprehension, and confusion that the artwork so eloquently induces is what Latour has been looking for all along, namely, a positive account of the embarrassment he experiences when confronted with religious speech. He compares it to the language of love, “a scale model of the felicity conditions” for religious speech.125 Lovers similarly “multiply the dissonances and the discrepancies, the dissimilarities and the twists, to make felt properly the fact that they’re not talking about ordinary, accessible, manageable things, but that, look out! they’re starting to talk about dangerous, difficult, complicated things.”126 Religious speech does not convey information but rather involves the overcoming of crises and the preparation for the next crisis. This finally gives Latour a sense of what kind of experience religious experience might be and why it is impossible to talk sense about it. Wonderful — but isn’t Latour just refashioning Fra Angelico as a modern artist who traffics in ambiguity and indirection? In this way, the art of Fra Angelico lives for a modern art-attuned beholder without entirely wandering free of its original determinations. Latour has a fine sensibility for breakdowns of communication — of course he does! He was raised as a Catholic, no doubt, but also in refined and elite twentieth-century subcultures where art is practically as all-enveloping and inescapable as religion was in the fourteenth century. Was there no medieval Christian art that was not innovative, perverse, idiosyncratic, independent, and self-defeating — in other words, already modern —  and that one might yet recognize as art? Of course there was, and all it takes is for someone to call it out. This identification of art by acclamation, as it were, would seem to be inextricable from a concept of art. To speak of art at all is to say what you think art really does. There is no authentic involvement with art that is non-essentialist. “Art” names the individual’s freedom to define art — as transgression, criticality, jouissance, difference, whatever. It is not the art that is free, it is the person who chooses which art to value. The implication of this thesis is that a strictly historical approach to the past, one that avoids projecting on a culture anything external to the culture, will categorically be unable to grasp art. Strict historicism would have to set art aside by paraphrasing it, renaming it — which is exactly what many historians, including art historians, do.

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The behavioralist approach congratulates itself for replacing the ideal of stable, balanced personhood supporting modern neo-humanist scholarship (Panofsky is the paradigm) with a more realistic, psychologically acute concept of personhood with all its discontinuities and contradictions. But these two models of personhood are just two sides of the same coin. They are both anthropocentric and rationalist. They both leave out the nonhuman and condescend to faith when they attempt to re-diagnose its symptoms. We have described the functionalist approach to sacred art as skeptical about both God and art. God is set aside by renaming him, explaining him away as the unreal target of real emotions. This is just the error which Latour tries to avoid, and almost does avoid. For him, God and art both name the unexpected as such. They can only be grasped by direct, uncalculated apprehension. A new definition of God: a vantage point so remote that the gap between historical art and its modern student, viewed from that point, diminishes to imperceptibility.

Detail of ill. 3.7

iv Witnesses

The sacred legends are populated by many characters who anticipate the encounters of the modern laity with the divine: the unalloyed, grief-stricken self-surrender of Mary Magdalene, for example, or professions of reverential fealty of the Magi or wise men from the East. Such characters marked the fault lines inside the stories where historical persons faced decisions or were asked to assess an unfolding sequence of events. The stories of the early Christian martyrs (< Greek μάρτυρ, witness) are only the most dramatic stagings of such existential predicaments. In the paintings, these characters were proxies for the lay beholders on the outside of the picture and served as placeholders for eventual tactical portrayals of those beholders on the inside. They belong to a history of the embedded portrait. A placeholder in language is a word marking the place in a sentence where a reference to a specific individual or place might later be inserted. Examples are: What’s-her-name, or Anytown, USA. The variables x and y in a poly­nomial equation are placeholders. Here I am calling a placeholder an unnamed figure in a narrative scene who is iconographically coded, within the scene, as a layperson, and thus an outsider, an uninitiated, who stands in for the real lay beholders of the image. The point of the placeholder was not only to model exemplary behavior but also to suggest the predicament of the layperson faced with the mysteries. The layperson, in Christ’s time but no less so in modern times, must take a position, adapt to the divine. Such placeholders or proxies, facing a choice or moment of truth, can serve as blank screens onto which beholders could project their own situations. In the Last Judgment by Francesco Traini or Buonamico Buffalmacco in the Camposanto at Pisa (1336–41) wealthy citizens in fine clothes resist their fate in vain. Any merchant or nobleman could see himself in those figures.1 Detail of ill. 4.3

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The Presentation of Christ in the Temple In a letter to his teacher Jacob Burckhardt, the Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin complained that “the good trees in art history are already shaken.”2 This was in 1893. Undaunted, we climb the hill once again to the Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi. In the vaults of the transept of the basilica’s Lower Church, among the Franciscan allegories painted probably by Giotto and his workshop in the 1310s, one may point to the two kneeling figures in the allegory of Obedience (ill. 4.1). These figures are remarkably blank and featureless, so much so that there is doubt about whether one of them is a man or a woman. Some have seen them as portraits.3 I believe, rather, that they are generic initiates. The two figures stand in for any layperson faced with the injunction of obedience. The theme of many of the narrative paintings in both the Upper and Lower Churches at Assisi is the breaching of the frontier between the sacred and the profane. The predicaments of religiosity are presented topologically, that is, literally as a matter of moving from one space to another. This acknowledgement

4.1 Giotto, Allegory of Obedience, detail of ill. 3.9. 4.2  Giotto, Early Childhood of Christ cycle, c. 1320? Fresco. Assisi, Lower Church, north transept.

of the essentially spatial nature of the concept of the profane (< Latin profanus < pro fano, out in front of the temple) is suited to the stagelike or scenic approach frequently taken in mural painting, as opposed to the altarpieces and other panel paintings that often simply “showed” the sacred without acknowledging its other. In the north arm of the transept of the Lower Church, there are nine scenes narrating the birth and early life of Christ (ill. 4.2). The Annunciation, setting the cycle in motion, is on the end wall, flanking the entrance to the .

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Chapel of St. Nicholas. Above, lining the semicylindrical vault, there is the Visitation, the Nativity, the Adoration of the Magi, and the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple. Below these two scenes are the Crucifixion with the Franciscan portraits and the so-called Madonna of the Angels by Cimabue, with the full-length portrait of St. Francis. On the other side of the barrel vault are the Flight into Egypt, the Massacre of the Innocents, Jesus and the Doctors in the Temple, and the Return of Jesus to Nazareth. With the exception of the last, these are very commonly depicted scenes. All but that last episode were included in Giotto’s cycle in the Arena Chapel at Padua. There is a formal, almost diagrammatic quality to these scenes. Many of them are shown in strict frontality. This reflects the fact that the scenes are stacked on a barrel vault and are readily viewed head-on. It is the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple of Jerusalem that interests us here (ill. 4.3 and detail, p. 112). Simeon, a pious elderly man and a visionary, holds the baby Jesus in his arms and appears to speak. This unscheduled encounter took place on the occasion of the ritual Purification of the mother through an offering of animals, a requirement spelled out in Leviticus 12:2–8. In the rendering of this scene at Padua, Giotto had depicted the Child reaching back toward his mother (ill. 4.4). This motif was singled out by John Ruskin as a “false” religious idea. No previous painter, he wrote, would have dared to depict Christ so, behaving like a real child, or the Virgin stretching out her arms like a real mother. “The idea is evidently a false one, quite unworthy of the higher painters of the religious school.” How could Giotto “stoop so low”?4 In Assisi, by contrast, Jesus is tightly swaddled, expressionless. At Padua, the visage of the prophetess Anna, at the right, was as if distorted by her dark insights. At Assisi she is expressionless. Giotto tended to indicate divided states of mind not through facial expression but rather glances, gestures, and body language. In the story of Joachim and Anna at Padua, for example, he shows us shepherds and servants exchanging glances, communicating silently when faced with the incomprehensible singleness of purpose and inner directedness of the holy personages. Those holy people, the protagonists, remain mostly physiognomically impassive and express single, strong emotions in a ponderous somatic and gestural dialect. Perhaps this is what the Sienese scholar Gugli­elmo della Valle (1785) meant when he said that Giotto’s figures, in contrast to Simone Martini’s, look “half-awake.”5 Giotto passed up opportunities for expressivity provided by the texts. For example, the evangelist Luke reports that Mary and her husband were “amazed” by Simeon’s prophetic words (Luke 2:33) (though one might wonder why the visit of the Three Magi to Bethlehem had not prepared them for the news!). Why not show this emotion? Because it would be indecorous and would not conform to audiences’ picture of Mary. Unless this is the sense of Mary’s reaching out to her child. Among Giotto’s narrative cycles, however, the least expressive is this one, the Early Childhood of Christ in the Lower Church at Assisi. There is a wider

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4.3 Giotto, Presentation of Christ in the Temple, c. 1320? Fresco. Assisi, Lower Church.

range of emotional and mental states depicted in the Legend of St. Francis at Assisi, the Arena Chapel, and the Santa Croce cycles. In the Tosinghi-Spinelli chapel at Santa Croce, Vasari reports, Giotto painted a Presentation of Christ (this painting no longer exists). Unlike Ruskin, Vasari was not offended by the motif: “A most beautiful work, because aside for the great affection which is evident in the old man who received Christ, the gesture of the Child, who is frightened of him and who stretches out his arms and turns towards his mother, could not be more tender nor more beautiful.”6 The relative inexpressivity of the Early Childhood frescoes at Assisi has sown doubt about the attribution; also about the attribution of the nearby Franciscan allegories, even though Vasari said they were by Giotto.7 Giotto parsed the Early Childhood subjects in measured, stately rhythms. If he knew the Meditations on the Life of Christ, he was not tempted to bring in the affecting details described there, such as Christ’s blessing on Simeon.8 He adds new figures and yet keeps the scenes clear of that anecdotal byplay that might have irritated Carl Friedrich von Rumohr or John Ruskin — indeed, he seems to be trying in this cycle to bring out the gravitas of the “ideas of Christian antiquity.” He resists the tendency to narrate the life of Christ as if it were a saint’s legend. Instead, he

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4.4 Giotto, Presentation of Christ in the Temple, 1303–5. Fresco, approx. 200 × 185 cm. Padua, Arena Chapel.

shows us a formalized ritual. The relative expressionlessness of the characters allows the picture to draw on the gravity and inevitability of the ritual it depicts. In this respect, the Early Childhood cycle is cognate with the allegories of the Vele, the Stefaneschi polyptych, and the Baroncelli polyptych, as well as the seven “dossal” panels including the Munich Crucifixion, even if Giotto himself did not paint these latter works with his own hand. The paragonal status of the Arena Chapel and the two surviving chapels in Santa Croce affects all attributions to Giotto. Many modern viewers also dislike the naive, irrational, dream-like architectural settings in the Legend of St. Francis on the walls of the Upper Church, which create a sense of mystery and poetry. Many do not consider these painted by Giotto at all. From the perspective of Padua and the Peruzzi and Bardi chapels, the Legend of St. Francis cycle in the Upper Church appears too folkloric, naive, and fantastical, and the Early Childhood cycle in the Lower Church, like the Allegories, appears too static and theoretical.

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Thus, despite the originality and eloquence of the compositions, few scholars attribute the Early Childhood cycle wholeheartedly to Giotto.9 Its pieces are more often credited to painters working under his supervision, and this explains why they have received relatively little attention. I doubt that Giotto would have entrusted the execution of these compositions, let alone the design, to an unsupervised workshop. The location was too important, his own reputation too high, to take any chances. Thus, I consider them designed by Giotto and executed perhaps partly by him but at any rate under his watch. It is impossible to date and attribute the scenes of the north transept with certainty. They come after the Arena Chapel at Padua (complete by 1305) and before the decoration campaigns at Assisi come to an end around 1320.10 All dates in between have been proposed, but there is some consensus around the early 1310s.11 However, the rationalized architecture, the tendency toward symmetry, the tamping down of the emotions conveyed through gesture, and the absence of clues to innermost thoughts signaled by facial expression suggest to me something like a realized manner of Giotto — not necessarily literally the latest or last style, though I can easily imagine these painted around 1320. In the Presentation, Giotto shows us one of the moments in the life of an ordinary family when they come into direct contact with the priestly hierarchy. Through ritual, the family affirms the subordination of their existence to an abstract law. In the account given in Luke 2: 22  And

when the days for their purification according to the Law of Moses were com-

pleted, they brought Him up to Jerusalem to present Him to the Lord 23 (as it is written in the Law of the Lord: “Every firstborn male that opens the womb shall be called holy to the Lord”), 24 and to offer a sacrifice according to what has been stated in the Law of the Lord: “A pair of turtledoves or two young doves.” 25  And

there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon; and this man was righ-

teous and devout, looking forward to the consolation of Israel; and the Holy Spirit was upon him. 26 And it had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord’s Christ. 27 And he came by the Spirit into the temple; and when the parents brought in the child Jesus, to carry out for Him the custom of the Law, 28 then he took Him in his arms, and blessed God, and said, 29 “Now,

Lord, You are letting Your bond-servant depart in peace,

According to Your word; 30  For

my eyes have seen Your salvation,

31  Which 32  A

You have prepared in the presence of all the peoples:

light for revelation for the Gentiles,

And the glory of Your people Israel.” 33  And

Him.

His father and mother were amazed at the things which were being said about

34  And

Simeon blessed them and said to His mother Mary, “Behold, this Child is

appointed for the fall and rise of many in Israel, and as a sign to be opposed — 35 and a

120 sword will pierce your own soul — to the end that thoughts from many hearts may be revealed.” 36 And

there was a prophetess, Anna, the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Asher. She

was advanced in years and had lived with her husband for seven years after her marriage, 37 and

then as a widow to the age of eighty-four. She did not leave the temple grounds,

serving night and day with fasts and prayers. 38  And at that very moment she came up and began giving thanks to God, and continued to speak about Him to all those who were looking forward to the redemption of Jerusalem. 39

And when His parents had completed everything in accordance with the Law of the

Lord, they returned to Galilee, to their own city of Nazareth.

The text is unclear about which ritual is being observed. Verse 22 speaks confusingly of “their” purification. Verse 24 mentions the sacrifice of two doves to complete the purification of the mother, in compliance with Leviticus 12:8: “But if she cannot afford a lamb, then she shall take two turtledoves or two young doves, the one as a burnt offering and the other as a sin offering; and the priest shall make atonement for her, and she will be clean.” (As scrupulous as ever, Jacopo da Voragine, in The Golden Legend, speculates about why Mary was so poor so soon after receiving a large sum of gold from the Magi!)12 This ritual was to be carried out no earlier than forty days after the birth of the child. But verse 22 also speaks of the “presenting” of the child to the Lord. According to Exodus 13:2, the Lord expected all firstborn sons to be sanctified, that is, given to the Lord as priests.13 After thirty days, the parents were required to present the child at the Temple; they could, however, redeem or ransom him, as it were buying him out of his destiny as a priest, for the sum of five shekels (Numbers 18:15–16).14 Already in early Christian times, the two rituals, Presentation of the child and Purification of the mother, were commemorated together, on February 2, at the liturgical ceremony and feast known as Candlemas on account of the candles brought by devout to the church, for reasons unclear. Luke’s account was authority enough for the early Church’s festive conflation of the two ritual events. But the custom of discharging both duties at once may have preceded Christianity. One can imagine that the Holy Family might have preferred not to make two separate trips from Bethlehem to Jerusalem. In depictions of the Presentation of Christ, the encounter between Mary and Simeon nearly always takes place before or over an altar. Sometimes the enclosing structure, the Temple of Jerusalem, is represented by a series of arches and hanging lamps. The painting by Giotto at Assisi is the first, however, so as far I know, to represent the Temple in forms that resemble modern architecture. He stages the encounter in what appears to be the three-aisled presbyterium (choir or sanctuary; the site of the altar) of a Gothic church, with ribbed vaults, polychrome inlaid ornament, and an altar. The two side aisles end in flat walls perforated by lancet windows; the center aisle or nave, supposedly taller, continues into a polygonal apse that resembles, on a smaller

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scale, the apse of the Upper Church at Assisi itself. The Ark, or container for Torah scrolls, resembling a Christian reliquary shrine, is mounted on a twisted column with a Corinthian capital rising up behind the altar.15 The painter suspends the building between two arguments. On the one hand, Gothic architecture, with its attenuated, aspirational vaulting, symbolically coded articulations, and soaring interior spaces drenched with glass-filtered light, could be understood as the fulfillment of the promise of ancient sacred architecture. A Gothic church would therefore not really count as a modern building at all, and so could serve as a perfectly appropriate model for an imagined Jewish Temple. On the other hand, to displace the biblical event to a modern and familiar setting was to invite the viewer to enter imaginatively into the world of the Gospels. Both arguments can be supported; neither we nor the historical beholder is forced to choose. The essential point is that the scene unfolds at the tangent of the sacred and the profane. That encounter is regulated by the ritual of the Presentation. The disruption of that ritual by an unscripted prophecy unmoors everyone and forces choice. The outsiders are on one side, the insiders on the other: the family from Bethlehem on the left, the priests or elders of the Temple on the right. And Simeon is in between, standing before the altar on the right, an ambiguous character. Simeon is a hoary and venerable figure, but he is not a priest. The text suggests that Simeon was an old man of the community given to visions and prophecies; perhaps — if we are permitted to imagine a reality behind the biblical account — he was considered by some an eccentric and marginal figure. Luke tells us that Simeon, confident that he would not die before having laid eyes on the Messiah, “came by the Spirit into the temple” at just the right moment (verse 27).16 He commandeered the ritual by taking the Child into his own arms and addressing a psalm of thanks to the Lord. In his improvised ritual, Simeon stands in for the missing rabbi, indicating that Christ will never be at home in the Jewish establishment.17 Simeon welcomes Jesus into an alternative, not yet existing Church that he alone dimly glimpses. The Purification of the Virgin, the offering of the doves, meanwhile, is overshadowed by Simeon’s intervention. Simeon, understandably, would have no interest in that transaction. In fact, the second speech he delivers, an oracle addressed to Mary, could be interpreted as a sign that Simeon recognized that her Purification was unnecessary, as indeed many theologians later considered it to be.18 The Presentation of Christ in the Temple is a scene easily reducible to a compact, elemental pictorial formula. If the meaning of the scene is Simeon’s hijacking of the ritual, then the triad Mary-Jesus-Simeon represents most dramatically the failure of the established clergy to grasp the significance of the event. The “wild” holy man Simeon steps in, elbowing aside, as it were, the chief priest, and overriding tradition and hierarchy. But a three-character Presentation is rare.19 Most depictions included two additional figures: Joseph, carrying the pair of birds, the minimum acceptable offering for those who

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4.5  Pietro Cavallini, Presentation of Christ in the Temple. Mosaic. Rome, Santa Maria in Trastevere.

cannot afford to bring a lamb; and the prophetess Anna, the pious widow. In Giotto’s Assisi fresco, Anna is the figure on the right standing before a pier, like Simeon adorned with a halo, in a blue robe and holding a scroll bearing illegible words in an Eastern script.20 Several important depictions of the scene in Rome and Tuscany and dating from the last decades of the thirteenth century — Giotto knew them all well — depict only this nuclear group of five participants: the mosaics by Jacopo Torriti at Santa Maria Maggiore and by Pietro Cavallini at Santa Maria in Trastevere, each arranging the figures on either side of an altar covered by a canopy or baldachin and flanked by a pair of schematic structures that stand for the Temple (ill. 4.5); and the panel on Duccio’s Maestà in Siena, with Gothic architectural elements anticipating Giotto’s.21 This was the roster also in the panel in the Gardner Museum in Boston, which belongs to the series of seven square panels that includes the Crucifixion panel in Munich. In Boston, the scene is reduced to an archaic rebus. A wall of gold obliterates, in a blinding flash, the entire material world but for the altar (ill. 4.6).22 To achieve the elemental, diagrammatic simplicity of the Gardner panel, the painter reached beyond Torriti and Cavallini and back to precedents in Byzantine manuscripts, like the miniature in the tenth-century Menologium of Basil II (in the Vatican) reproduced by Dorothy C. Shorr.23 He reproduces the symmetry and planarity of the monumental models as well as an upright or square format. The Gardner panel takes a frontal approach to the scene modulated only by the altar and the “Temple” structures, tilted a

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4.6  Giotto and workshop, Presentation of Christ in the Temple, 1310–20? Panel, 45.2 × 43.6 cm. Boston, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

few degrees to clarify their structure; also rotating the figures in space, such that Joseph on the left stands close to the front plane while Anna on the right stands farther back in space. In the Boston panel, more than in any other Presentation by Giotto, there is the attempt to convey the sheer presence of the fulfilled Word such as Simeon is experiencing it — what we could call the “now” of his canticle, known as the Nunc dimittis after the Latin for his opening words. But even here, the slight diagonality, reminding us that our point of view on the event is contingent and in fact has been chosen by the artist, interferes with the rhetoric of immediacy. If, however, the meaning of the scene is thought not to be exhausted by Simeon’s intervention, but rather also includes the witnessing of the community — the reactions to the prophecy across a spectrum of hearers — then a horizontal treatment may be better. At Padua, Giotto expanded the company to six, adding a servant girl at the left edge (ill. 4.4). He introduced the unusual motifs of an angel in the sky and a candle in the hand of that young woman at the left. There is the same subtle rotation in space, creating an effect of psychic interaction missing from the Roman mosaics, but which we see in the Boston panel. The Presentations in Padua and Boston both contain the motif of the child reaching back toward his mother, mentioned by Vasari in his description of the lost Santa Croce Presentation. At Assisi, Giotto banished the angel and added several more figures, spreading them all out laterally and framed by a strict frontal view of the interior architecture. The perspective is carefully constructed. Decio Gioseffi judges the Presentation and the Christ Among the Doctors in the Lower Church the

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closest approximations to a mathematically correct one-point perspective achieved in the entire Trecento.24 These two pictures are related in several ways. They face each other at the same height across the barrel vault of the north transept. In both scenes, the figures are placed not against the back wall but in an intermediate zone within a layered space extending back into depth. The perspective in each of these scenes may be well-measured, but there are structural incoherences in the depicted architecture. In the Presentation, the front arch is oddly truncated and its relation to the rear pointed arch, the arch framing the apse, is unclear. At the top edges of the side arches, one sees the beginnings of buttresses supporting the central arch, which however is not high enough to require such support. Francesco Benelli concludes that the painter was more interested in crafting a virtual space to host his narrative than in the logic of Gothic architecture.25 The architecture may not be completely thought through but, at prima vista, does not read as fantastical or impossible as so many buildings in Giotto’s frescoes do. The frontality and symmetry signal an intention to explain as much as possible and reinforce the solemnity of the ritual. The clear layout could be understood as a reversion to the archaic simplicity of Cimabue or the Byzantine muralists. Within Giotto’s trajectory, Assisi “corrects” the skewed viewing angles of Padua and Boston. Calculated perspective changes the meaning of a frontal point of view. A virtual space constructed according to the laws of perspective is a space as it appears from a single point of view. It shows you exactly how things would have looked — the relation of one body, one object, to another — if you had been standing in such and such a spot. To that extent, perspective delivers a subjective report. No other eyewitness but one standing in that same spot would deliver the same report. But the relation of objects and bodies to one another, as perceived by that subject, has been projected onto the picture plane mechanically, according to the laws of geometry. To that extent, perspective delivers an objective report. A point of view is always only one point of view among an infinity of points of view. But if the view from each point is rendered according to the same binding laws, then each view is equally objective. Compare the verbal account of the Presentation in the Gospel. This is also supposedly a report on what happened. It is not perspectival, however, because everyone present at the event, no matter where they were standing, could have delivered the same report. The content of the description does not shift depending on your physical point of view. The verbal account does not reveal the source of its own authority. By contrast, a perspectival painting is a report on how things looked from one person’s vantage point. This is the paradox of perspective: if you wish to measure the space, and so make it more objective, you will have to establish a viewpoint. But the viewpoint creates a viewer, whose point of view on the event is her very own. (This does not mean, by the way, that you as beholder of the picture have to stand in a certain place

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in order to see it properly: the brain adjusts to any viewing position, correcting distortion such that you can read the virtual space correctly.)26 The depictions of the Presentation in the older mosaics and manuscripts that we have been considering did not give you anyone’s point of view. They did not place you in or before the scene, and they did not thematize vision. The pictures were assembled in the way the painters saw fit. Those depictions have an impersonal authority, like Jacopo da Voragine’s verbal account. Paintings of the fourteenth century introduced perspective. Before the mathematicization of perspective, it was technically easiest for the painter to choose a head-on, perpendicular point of view onto a prismatic space. Trecento painters had empirical methods for designing these virtual spaces.27 The calculations required to generate a convincing, and eventually correct, perspective from an oblique angle were more complex and would not be mastered until the next century. But frontality and symmetry have their own rhetorical power, independent of whether the virtual space is constructed mathematically. Because the ritual in the Temple places the lay supplicants on one side and the officiating priests on the other, the frontal view places the beholder in a position of neutrality. We are not involved, because we are not aligned by the viewing angle either with the laypeople on the left or the clerics on the right. A line of sight perpendicular to the architecture requires no justification. The frontality seems simply to be the most efficient way to present all the facts, to make them all visible at once, and to permit the beholder of the painting to make sense of the historical event. Giotto’s painting is thus suspended between two painting systems. Frontally oriented and laterally symmetrical, it gives the impression that it has been organized for maximum expository clarity, like a much older painting. But as the result of careful measurements generating a nearly correct perspective, it gives the conflicting impression that it is simply an eyewitness report from a particular vantage point. From that eyewitness’s unique vantage point, and at the climactic moment of the story, the figure of Joseph, husband of Mary, a protagonist in the story, was unfortunately obscured by a pier. No earlier, pre-perspectival painter would ever have placed a pier in front of a key character. The eclipsing of Joseph in Giotto’s fresco signals the element of chance and subjectivity involved in allowing a neutral perspectival algorithm to generate the composition. Joseph’s eclipse creates an effect of authority: if a protagonist is screened, then the painter obviously did not alter the eyewitness account. This must be the way it really was — thus the rhetoric of the picture. Giotto could easily have made alterations to his composition to ensure Joseph’s visibility, but he didn’t. If Giotto were to make Joseph visible by moving him to the side, then it would no longer be a faithful rendering of the scene. But if he were to move the viewpoint, the picture would no longer be frontal and would lose some degree of gravity. Thus, Giotto moves toward archaic simplicity and formality but leaves a reminder that he also can paint the other way, generating the effects of reality through random croppings. The

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4.7  Nicola Pisano, Presentation of Christ in the Temple, complete by 1259. Marble, 85 × 113 cm. Pisa, Baptistry, pulpit.

obscured figure of Joseph holds two systems of painting in suspension. This is also a theological joke since Joseph’s role in the story, as father and not-father of the child, is already ambiguous.28 The central bay of the Temple frames the essential three figures as a picture within the picture. Again, accurately constructed perspective permits the painter to create an abstract and diagrammatic quality with natural, motivated elements. The prophetess Anna stands just on the boundary between the central and the right bays; Joseph stands on the same boundary on the left side, though blocked by the pier.29 Only these five figures are marked by haloes. On the sides, there is a proliferation of extras, anonymous but differentiated, multiplying the geometry of sacred and profane. There are thirteen people in all: few earlier depictions of the scene were so populous. The relief by Nicola Pisano on the pulpit of the Baptistry at Pisa, however, completed by 1259, included fifteen, plus the child (ill.  4.7).30 That unique depiction mimicked the chaotic, compressed compositions and random, unfocused psychology of ancient Roman sarcophagi. In Giotto’s more lucid composition, the three figures at the left, lined up immediately behind Joseph and inside the last bay of the side-aisle, are recognizable as the Holy Family’s makeshift entourage: a young man and two women, perhaps the midwives attested in the apocryphal Infancy gospels, the first witnesses to the Virgin Birth. All the figures in the nearer layer of space, in front of the pillars and closer to us, meanwhile, are to

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be understood either as representative members of the local community (on the left) or priests of the Temple (on the right). They witness the attempt of the outsiders to observe the rites. On the left, there is a white-haired man and a male youth standing on a strange ramp-like platform. On the right, there are three men wearing robes bordered with ornamental bands. An additional bearded man or men, beyond the scene’s protagonists, were introduced for the first time, according to Shorr, in the second half of the thirteenth century, perhaps by Nicola Pisano’s pulpit.31 The supplementary male figures at the right are another field for the geometry of recognition. The question of the community’s recognition of the true significance of the event is mentioned only indirectly in Luke’s text (verse 38): Anna “continued to speak about Him to all those who were looking forward to the redemption of Jerusalem,” implying that some were not anticipating that redemption. The verse points to a divide in the community, which will yawn open and break history in two. On the whole, Giotto’s witnesses are inexpressive. The entire cast seems spellbound. This creates the formal, balanced quality. Giotto does not allow the somatic traces of psychology, which activate rhetoric, to interfere with form, the image of a “mythic whole.” The ancient concept of ritual did not expect from participants any emotional or even cognitive involvement. The principals submitted themselves to a procedure; the onlookers were witnesses, a legal not a psychological category. Witnessing was a matter of being present, of being placed in a scene. But at Assisi, one figure does break with the overall formalized and hieratic mood: the beardless figure in a pale red robe on the right, kneeling with outstretched arms (detail, p. 112). The priest’s expressive gesture stands out. The Meditations on the Life of Christ describes a joyful procession on the occasion of the Presentation in the Temple.32 But no texts suggest that anyone present in the Temple apart from Simeon and Anna, and the members of Mary’s immediate entourage, recognized the meaning of the event. No prior depiction of the event includes a figure stretching out his arms toward Simeon and the Child. Yet he is virtually never discussed in the scholarly literature on Giotto. Who is he? The prima facie identification would be a member of the Temple community who, inspired by Simeon’s song, recognizes the Messiah. The biblical text mentions no such figure, however, unless it is one of those “looking forward to the redemption of Jerusalem” (redemptio saeculi, in the Pseudo-Matthew). The gesture resembles an ancient attitude of prayer, a gesture of acclamation more urgent and emotional than the more common modern gesture of hands pressed together.33 Just below and to the left of the Presentation in the vaults of the north transept is Giotto’s Crucifixion with St. Francis making a similar gesture at the base of the Cross (ill. 1.5). The hands of the kneeling priest in the Presentation, however, are a little closer together than this, as if he were reaching out to grasp the Christ Child Himself.34 The cleric’s apparently impassioned gesture makes an effect of spontaneity and authenticity, the self-surrender of a devout suddenly released from

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the injunctions of established ritual. Such a gesture would be anomalous at the real performance of a Purification or Presentation ceremony. It must signify that the sacrificial machinery has been broken. Up to this point, the altar of the Temple had served as the “switchboard” connecting God and humans. From now on, both the story and the painting seem to say, Christ himself will fulfill that function. Up until Simeon’s intervention, this could be the story of any ordinary Jewish family. The law predisposes the family as profane: the postpartum mother is in need of purification, and both parents need to settle an account with the priesthood. But this child reverses the topology: his advent reveals the false or insufficient sacrality of the Temple. Not the priests but two unordained holy people, Simeon and Anna, a kind of natural rather than established clergy, recognize him. Christ reverses the values in the sense that the priest is demoted by his presence into a representative of profanity. We see not the induction of the profane into the sphere of the sacred, but the reverse. Depicted is the induction of the sacred — the incarnated God — into his own profanated precinct. The immeasurable is suddenly among us. For those who understand well, the body of the Child opens up an abyss in the middle of the picture. The kneeling figure’s slightly oblique placement suggests that he is no longer in unanimity with the Temple establishment, as if he were the first of the cohort of priests to recognize the nullification of the law and so break ranks. Unlike the Jewish elders behind him, the kneeling figure lacks a beard, which may be another way the painter indicates the modernity, or anticipatory quality, of his recognition of Christ. The beardlessness, and a certain particularity of his physiognomy, force us at least to ask the further question: could this be the portrait of a modern cleric, the person who sponsored or paid for the mural cycle — and whose emotional reaching, mirroring Mary’s, indicates his piety? It is not known who commissioned the cycle, but it is thought that the project may have been planned or launched by Cardinal Napoleone Orsini around 1300, together with the Chapel of St. Nicholas.35 Some chord of sympathy seems to connect the emotional cleric with the modern world. But does the image refer to a specific individual? The physiognomy is little help: the rhetoric of individuation, achieved usually through some irregularity or idiosyncrasy of facial features, is too weak. The costume is no help: this is the timeless clerical garb. A historical figure in a painting could wear modern-seeming vestments because those vestments were considered to have an ancient pedigree. The similarity of the costume to those of the two standing priests would suggest that this is not an embedded portrait, like the kneeling figures at the base of the Munich Crucifixion, but at best a crypto-portrait, that is, a reference to a modern person hiding behind a historical personage. But then it is not very successful, for we cannot even say for certain that it is a portrait, let alone identify the subject. Do the nearby portraits of Teobaldo Pontano, Gentile da Montefiore, and the Orsini brothers speak in favor of the portrait hypothesis? In the Lower

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Church at Assisi, in the lunette above the entrance to the St. Nicholas Chapel, there is a mural depicting the chapel’s two patrons, Napoleone and Giangaetano Orsini, who some think are portrayed as the kneeling acolytes in the Obedience mural. Here the brothers are presented directly to Christ by St. Francis and St. Nicholas of Bari. Arranged behind them are further kneeling cardinals, three on each side. The chapel was complete by 1306, and Giotto may have been involved. The Orsini brothers are also depicted in a stained glass window. In the south transept there is a fictive altarpiece by Pietro Lorenzetti with two modern patrons (only one survives) in the predella, depicted as busts, in profile, praying. In the Chapel of St. Martin, another space directly off the nave of the Lower Church, there are two portraits of the patron, Cardinal Gentile da Montefiore: one in the stained glass, kneeling before St. Martin in the guise of Pope Martin I, and a second on the wall, kneeling before St. Martin, who appears this time in bishop’s robes. These were painted by Simone Martini probably around 1315.36 The two portraits of Teobaldo Pontano, bishop of Assisi, were discussed in chapter 1 (ill. 1.3). All four men are beardless, but none of them much resembles the kneeling cleric in the Presentation. Speaking against the hypothesis that the figure in the Presentation of Christ is a portrait are several heavy objections: first, a patron is always portrayed in a grave, composed attitude, not gesturing emotionally; second, he is usually relegated to a marginal zone, not embedded in a historical scene and dressed like the other characters; third, modern supplicant figures are rarely associated with depictions of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple. An exception is the central scene of a polyptych from the church of Santa Maria Nuova in Bologna and attributed to a certain Pseudo-­ Jacopino, datable perhaps to the 1330s (ill. 4.8).37 The scene shows Mary and Joseph accompanied by three women. On the right-hand side and separated from the biblical event by a wall, but with a door ajar, is a nun with rosary beads, kneeling and wrists crossed on her breast.

Witnessing and recognition The priest who recognizes the fulfilment of Simeon’s prophecy is a pure invention of the painter. No later painter, it seems, accepted Giotto’s emendation of the iconography: the clear-sighted priest will not be seen again. A more famous convert is the soldier at the Crucifixion who pierces Christ’s side. His revelation is recounted in John 19:34–35: “Yet one of the soldiers pierced His side with a spear, and immediately blood and water came out. And he who has seen has testified, and his testimony is true; and he knows that he is telling the truth, so that you also may believe.” The soldier is often depicted in paintings. In the apocryphal Acts of Pilate, he is given a name, Longinus.38 Longinus and Giotto’s priest represent all the witnesses to come, clerical or lay, who experience a moment of recognition. Such historical witness figures, whether named or unnamed, may be understood as placeholders for

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4.8  Pseudo-Jacopino, polyptych with Pietà and Presentation of Christ in the Temple, 1330s. Panel, 114 × 197.5 cm. Bologna, Pinacoteca Nazionale.

all those who will be asked to decide. They stake out a place for a real, named modern devout. They differentiate themselves with their decisive gestures from those who hesitate. Other placeholders anticipate the ones who do hesitate or reflect. Several key episodes in the lives of Mary and Jesus involved laity or outsiders brought face to face with a choice. At one end of Christ’s life, there was the Nativity and the Adoration of the Magi. Both of these scenes involve distinctions drawn between those who recognize and those who do not. At the time of Christ’s birth, the world was unaware that the Messiah had been born. Only some shepherds, the Wise Men from the East, and (mentioned in some but not all accounts) the midwife from the hills see clearly — outsiders, all of them. At the Adoration of the Magi, members of the entourage of the Magi (not the Magi themselves) are sometimes shown conferring, comparing notes — at Assisi in the same cycle, for example. At the other end of Christ’s life, there is the Carrying of the Cross, the Crucifixion, and the Deposition, Lamentation, and Entombment.39 At the moment of Christ’s death, the local Jewish community starts to split. Among the crowd accompanying Christ on his route to Golgotha were many who discussed and debated. Some may have chosen then to side with Christ’s family and faithful inner circle: perhaps the “passerby” or out-of-towner Simon of Cyrene (the evidence is ambiguous — the man was

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compelled by the soldiers to carry the cross for Jesus, but the experience may have drawn him close to Christ). The Crucifixion is the principal iconographic theater for the theme of public discussion of Christ’s identity and meaning. The fracture of the community into believers and doubters is already narrated in the Gospel. But painters took the liberty of introducing conferring or brooding figures, especially at the inclusive multitudinous Crucifixions — the version by Ambrogio Lorenzetti at Assisi is exemplary — but also in the more sparsely populated, diagrammatic Crucifixions. We saw the trace of doubt or dissent, reduced to a concise formula, at the right edge of Giotto’s Munich Crucifixion (ill. 1.1). Many depictions of the Crucifixion perform a triage: there is the inner circle of mourners; there is the uncomprehending world, vindictive or merely curious; and finally, there are those who hesitate on the threshold.

Witnessing and the portrait Such episodes involving looking and assessing, the “trying out” of points of view, were the very scenes where one was likely to find the portrait of a modern devout.40 To be sure, a portrayed patron displayed no doubts or hesitation whatsoever, nor did patrons typically mimic the demonstrative grief of Mary Magdalene, prostrate at the base of the Cross. Rather, they were expected to maintain a poised attentive attitude of single-minded prayer, an attitude that few at the historical scenes adopted. In the scene of the Carrying of the Cross, no modern patron would wish to be portrayed in the guise of the dragooned Simon of Cyrene. The small Sienese panel in the Frick Collection in New York, sometimes attributed to Barna da Siena, a painter mentioned by Ghiberti and Vasari, reduces the entire scene to a pair of figures (ill. 4.9).41 The Dominican friar who inclines fervently toward Christ makes his appearance only as a miniature, however: he is not playing the role of Simon. He seizes his moment, the moment when Christ himself hesitates, turning to seek his mother. The Dominican shares the pictorial field with Christ: Christ’s robe and foot overlap his small body. Recall Matthew 10:38: “And the one who does not take his cross and follow after Me is not worthy of Me” (cf. Matthew 16:24).42 The painting tradition was drawn to such stories because of the hints of strife and misunderstanding, the “folds” in the stories promising a glimpse into psychic depths. In these textual folds, they found modality: the grammar of possibility and obligation, the might have, could have, and should have. They lodge such alternative states of being in anecdotal pockets of the narrative. The pictorial tradition absorbed innovations only cautiously. But some innovations, even without scriptural authority, persisted. The presence and the significance of the ox and the ass, for example, are attested only in the apocryphal gospel Pseudo-Matthew.43 The Presentation of Christ and the Presentation of the Virgin were often treated as a complementary pair in the fourteenth century. Yet one episode is attested in Luke, and the other only in the apocryphal Gospels.

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4.9  Barna da Siena, Christ Carrying the Cross, 1330–50. Panel, 30.5 × 21.6 cm. New York, Frick Collection.

A historical episode that does not involve onlookers, by contrast, does not invite a portrait. Rarely in the Trecento is the Annunciation associated with the portrait of a patron or supplicant,44 more rarely still is the Resurrection. The reason is that these scenes of Jesus’s supernatural entry into and exit from the human sphere were precisely not witnessed; that is the key to their significance and why these events pose the most fundamental tests of faith. For they

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propose happenings that strain credulity. These are the “crossing downs,” the avatars, which mark the thresholds of life itself: on one end, an inseminating rape (the Incarnation) and on the other, the Resurrection (a disincarnation). At the latter, the only potential witnesses, the soldiers guarding the tomb, are asleep, like the apostles at Christ’s vigil at Gethsemane, or Brother Leo at the Stigmatization of St. Francis. Historically, incredulity in the face of the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection was the pagan’s first response to the Christian movement. Even in the folkloric apocryphal literature, Mary’s story of a visitation by an impregnating angel is doubted, in the first instance by her husband.45 A portrait, when it is not simply juxtaposed to a standing or an enthroned figure, was most likely to be found near one of the historical scenes involving witnessing. One should note that even the most basic formula of worship — a submissive figure kneeling before a standing or sitting figure — had its corresponding templates in the iconographic tradition. St. Catherine submits as the bride of Christ. The Virgin Mary submits before her son at her Coronation. Another is St. Helena adoring the Cross: see the large painting on canvas in Bologna by Simone de’ Crocefissi (ca. 1370) with a praying nun.46 This transposition of the drama of spiritual decision from the birth moment of Christianity to the present would seem to be hollow because few Europeans around 1300 ever “decided” to follow Christ. But there were degrees of lay investment. One could decide to intensify one’s involvement in Christ. The life of St. Francis encouraged the laity to give more, to sacrifice more. New zones of participation were created: lay clergy, confraternities, holy men and women, widows, secular nuns; private and semiprivate mortuary chapels. Commitment was spoken about with the language of court (vassalage to Christ) but also the language of sacrifice (you are asked to give yourself ). The figures at the margins of these scenes of witnessing, who in these years emerge in painting for the first time, are outposts of lay devotion. The historical witnesses —  Longinus, Simon of Cyrene, Nicodemus — were tested. The modern holy men and women — St. Francis, St. Claire, Angela da Foligno — were summoned to re-witness, to witness the witnessing, and they too were tested. Finally, the modern lay devout, the portrayed, assure everyone with their composure that they, too, have passed the test.

The midwives One of the most dramatic recognitions in the narrative of Christ’s early life is the legend of the woman Salome, who doubted that the child’s mother could have given birth and yet retain her virginity. The story of Salome’s doubt is unattested in the Gospel and so was not accepted into the pictorial tradition without resistance. The anecdote of the midwife, or two midwives, introduced a new layer of witnessing that struck right at the heart of the implausibility of the Christian myth.

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The story of the midwives is first recounted in the so-called Proto-Evangelium of James, a text purportedly written by James, brother of Christ, but evidently composed in the mid-second century. For many reasons, not least some clashes with the Gospels — for example, Simeon, the one who receives the prophecy of the coming of the Messiah, is described here as the head Rabbi of the Temple — many theologians condemned the text as an invention. St. Jerome dismissed the midwives as deliramenta (delusions, nonsense) of the Apocrypha, and Thomas Aquinas followed him.47 The Proto-Evangelium directly acknowledges the historical disputes about the Virgin Birth. One of the midwives says to Mary: “Make yourself ready, for there is no small contention concerning you.”48 The phrase suggests that Salome represents a more general skepticism in the community. The Proto-Evangelium, a Greek text, was read mainly in the East. Much better known in the West was the simplified Latin version known as the gospel of Pseudo-Matthew. We have seen that the Pseudo-Matthew was a major source for Giotto. According to that text, Mary gives birth in the cave all on her own, surrounded by angels. Joseph returns accompanied by the midwife Zahel. He asks Mary to permit Zahel to examine her, in case she requires attention. The midwife examines Mary and cries out in a loud voice: “Lord Almighty, have pity on us! . . . A virgin has given birth, and after the birth she is still a virgin.” Hearing these words, a second midwife, named Salome, expresses doubt and receives permission to perform her own inspection. Immediately her right hand withers, and she laments and repents. A “resplendent young man” appears and assures her that if she touches and adores the Child, she will be healed.49 The episode is nothing if not suspenseful and for that reason was readily taken up into sermons and the religious plays.50 In some versions, the midwives or obstetrices conduct conversations with the shepherds and the Three Magi. The art of painting is by contrast so hemmed in, so retentive, and so limited in this period in its freedom to invent subplots and add characters. In the religious dramas, the playwrights gave names and personalities to unnamed characters in the Bible, introduced new characters, and invented dialogue. No religious painter could do that. Painting was quite sealed off within its own tradition. The dramatized conversations of the midwives addressed the question of why the shepherds and the Three Magi were not asked to accept the Virgin Birth. (The Meditations on the Life of Christ reports that the Kings “believed everything the Lady related.”)51 We recall that the women who tended the tomb of Christ delivered the news of the Resurrection to the apostles. The testimony of the women, frontline witnesses, precedes that of the men. This is related to their involvement with the body, for it was women who were entrusted with the preparation of the newborn and the newly dead body. The pictorial tradition, in both East and West, is obscure. The earliest depictions give us Salome alone, showing her damaged hand to Mary. The earliest depiction of the virginity test that includes both women dates to the

4.10  Taddeo Gaddi, Nativity of Christ, 1320s? Panel, 41.5 × 41.8 cm. Madrid, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza.

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4.11  Luca di Tommè, Adoration of the Magi, 1360–65. Panel, 41 × 42 cm. Madrid, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza.

later eleventh century. There is also a parallel tradition of depictions of the domestic motif of two women bathing and feeding the Child. They appear in Giotto’s Nativity at Assisi, the scene directly above the Presentation of Christ in the Temple on the vault of the north transept of the Lower Church (ill. 4.2). Even this motif, which may recall but does not depict any skepticism or test, was not common and was not much adopted despite Giotto. According to Émile Mâle, there are no depictions of the midwives at all throughout the thirteenth century.52 All the more surprising, then, is the panel representing the Nativity of Christ attributed to Giotto’s pupil Taddeo Gaddi, a singularity in fourteenth-century Italian painting (ill. 4.10).53 At the right edge there are two women huddling close together; one of them gestures. They are contrasted, within the picture, with the angels in the sky. Angels also talk and gesture, but they presumably model a positive, nondestructive form of conversation. A third angel, meanwhile, announces the event to the shepherds at the left, who have been cut off. For stylistic reasons — the “static” shed and Virgin, parallel to the picture plane — Boskovits dates the Thyssen Nativity to the mid-1320s. On the basis of the handling of the gold haloes and other physical clues, the panel has been connected to a Presentation of Christ in the Temple by the same hand, in a private collection.54 At the left edge of that Presentation there are also two women looking on and commenting; one places her arm around the other, who raises her hand as if to indicate speech.55 There can be little doubt that the women at the right of the Thyssen Nativity, perhaps also the women at the left of the Presentation, are Salome and the midwife. But there are no iconographic hints beyond the conversation itself, and no clear differentiation between a believing and a skeptical woman. The painter

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has de-particularized the iconography in order to represent the commentary of women in general. Salome stands for the pragmatic, common-sense point of view; she has the manifest image of the world, unclouded by doctrine.56 An interesting comparison is the Adoration of the Magi, a work of several decades later, by the Sienese painter Luca di Tommè, also in the Thyssen Collection, which depicts at the right edge two standing angels in attitudes of prayer, one turning to the other as if to speak (ill. 4.11).57 As if angels, too, need to compare notes and exchange views. But then they are only mirroring the two kings or Magi on the left edge, also conversing, as was conventional in this scene. The secret of every birth — the paternity — is the subject of gossip par excellence. The word “gossip” comes from Old English god-sib, meaning “godparent.” By Middle English, the term was extended to cover all the women present at a birth. After the birth, the midwives, the gossips, reintegrate the mother into the community of women. Of course, that is not what is depicted in our picture: the reintegration will have to wait for the ritual Purification in Jerusalem. Here the women at the edge stand erect, distanced. They stand on their own two feet, rhyming with the frame rather than leaning into the overall shape of the scene.

The Lamentation over the Body of Christ Another episode where women confer is the Entombment or Lamentation, the two successive and sometimes blended scenes of the preparation of Christ’s body for the tomb and the grieving over his body. Because women are involved with such intimate solicitudes at both ends of the span of life, the Lamentation can be considered the pendant to the Nativity. The origins of this iconography are multiple and complex. The Deposition and Embalming of the body, with the participation of unnamed women, figures in Ottonian art and is imported to Italy already in the twelfth century. From Byzantium, however, derive the more emotional variants involving expressions of grief and Mary’s intimate embrace of the body, in both murals and manuscripts. The Byzantine Lamentations tend to happen on the tomb itself, while in the Italian versions the body is on the ground.58 The overall strong formal imperative laid down by the Byzantine models was to express the unanimity of the participants’ grief by subjecting their bodies to irresistible downward and centripetal forces. A powerful example of this approach is found on an apron or scenic side panel of a Crucifix in Pistoia, commissioned from the Florentine painter Coppo di Marcovaldo in 1274 (ill. 4.12).59 Such narrative side panels were already archaic at this date — since Giunta Pisano, they had mostly been replaced by imitation cloth. The format of Coppo’s Lamentation is basically Byzantine, but both the tomb (a Byzantine feature) and the Cross (an Italian feature) are absent, so making the wracked bodies of the mourners carry all the emotion. Luciano Bellosi attributes the

4.12  Coppo di Marcovaldo and Salerno di Coppo, Crucifix, after 1274. Panel, 2.80 × 2.45 m. Pistoia, Duomo.

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Lamentation — with its agitated emotionalism generated by a painterly “divisionism” derived from Cimabue, and its faceted, angular, and “irreal” figures — to Coppo’s son Salerno, whose documented release from prison in 1274 in order to work with his father on the Pistoia cross gives us the work’s date.60 This scene measured about thirty-six square centimeters and would not have been easy to see from a vantage point on the ground if the Crucifix were hung or mounted high. I don’t believe that rules out a close analysis of the image. The painters did their best no matter what the future viewing conditions. This composition may be understood as an image of what the scene around the body looked like from the point of view of someone intensely participating in the collective emotions. The picture does not show us the observer observing. There is no distribution of relative emotional involvement across a gamut. In case you have trouble grasping the gravity and meaning of the scene, the imperious artist conjures up a formal symbol, a signature, of that meaning. The form supplements your own feeble visualizing powers. The picture delivers an unequivocal answer to any ontological-theological questions. The Entombment of Coppo di Marcovaldo is homogeneous and dense because the overall form dominates its own contents. Any body or thing represented must submit to the overall gestalt of the picture. An object too insistent on its own objecthood, or an individual person distracted by her own thoughts, would interfere with that effective agitation. The peaked mountain and the draped, garland-like cloth form a closed envelope. There is no setting, no tomb or cross, to interfere with the overall gestalt. The insistent leaning-ins of the shaping pod are relayed throughout the composition, delivering to every figure a formal assignment. On such a small scale, the artist could dial the emotional intensity up to the maximum. Every element, no matter how insignificant, contributes to the total effect of anguished bereavement in the same way. The picture could be said to be formally closed, for it could not accept alien forms without severe loss of effect. The art of Coppo di Marcovaldo was familiar to Giotto and may have represented a prevailing mode against which he defined himself. Coppo designed some of the mosaics in the vault of the Baptistery in Florence.61 Similar effects are produced in the unfortunately half-destroyed fresco of the Lamentation in the Lower Church of Assisi, painted before 1263 by the so-called Master of San Francesco (ill. 4.13). This scene, too, is contained in an envelope formed by a pointed arch, this time the contour of the large vault. The wall was later punctured by a large aperture, and the right half of the Lamentation was lost. We see a group of three women supporting a swooning Mary, profiled against a rocky hill forming another archlike envelope as it leans rightward against the containing arch, the edge of the picture. The entropic waves of grief ripple through the sharp pleats of the women’s robes. The coiled energy of their group is contrasted to the white slab and motionless corpse to the right. We see two figures standing behind the tomb and an angel in the sky. The forms are entirely wrapped up in themselves; the unanimity of grief is expressed by the closed-­

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circuit, convergent, call-and-response quality of the movement. If less decisively than Coppo’s compact picture, this Lamentation too is formally closed. The earliest painting campaigns at Assisi struck grandiose notes. The painters translated to the walls and vaults of the west end of the Upper Church the totalizing approach to form of the Byzantine tradition. At the end of the 1270s Cimabue raised the tone of the sanctuary at Assisi with a series of sublime and cosmic images, essays in apocalyptic and hierarchical form unrestrained by earthly considerations: the Ascension of the Soul of the Virgin, the Enthroned Christ and Virgin, the Vision of the Throne and the Book of the Seven Seals, the Vision of the Angels at the Four Corners of the Earth, the Apocalyptic Christ, the Fall of Babylon; as well as several narrative scenes.62 The art historian Luigi Lanzi said in 1789 that “if Cimabue is the Michelangelo of that period, then Giotto was its Raphael” — his way of saying that Cimabue’s forms were more sublime than Giotto’s.63 Even in his psalmodic mode, Giotto is disciplined and restrained. In 1288, the Franciscan pope Nicholas IV launched a new campaign at Assisi: the mural decoration of the Upper Church, embracing the Old Testa-

4.13  Master of San Francesco, Lamentation over the Dead Christ, before 1263. Fresco. Assisi, Lower Church.

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4.14  Giotto (?), Lamentation over the Dead Christ, c. 1290. Fresco, approx. 300 × 300 cm. Assisi, Upper Church.

ment and New Testament scenes in the upper part of the right side of the nave of the Upper Church, and subsequently the Legend of St. Francis.64 The straightforward storytelling of the Old and New Testament scenes of the third and fourth bays stands out in relief against the relentless, stupefying chorus of Cimabue’s cycles, now badly deteriorated and barely legible. Among the New Testament scenes in the nave of the Upper Church, in the bay nearest the entrance, there is a Lamentation (ill. 4.14). The figures of two women at the rear, standing, detach themselves from the crowd and seem to confer. One gestures with her hand. It would be absurd to claim that the women evince doubt or hesitation. And yet they are not mourning either. The pair seem suspended in an affective in-between zone, neither fully inside the circle of grief nor fully outside.65 This episode is the inauguration of the thirty-six-hour hiatus between the death of Christ and the first news of his resurrection: the period of his absence, a period of acute anguish and doubt for his inner circle, we can be sure. They ponder the future of his teachings. If Jesus was who he said he was, then one was justified in expecting from him a sign from the far side of his own death as a man. In this Lamentation the figures stand for the first

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time at Assisi each on their own two feet. Even the kneeling mourner at the left is upright. The figures seem to have shrugged off any formal assignments from outside. The figures in the core group in contact with Christ’s body are bent but poised. A figure at the far right — Nicodemus? — leans in somewhat unstably. But the collection of five upright postures in the back row creates an overall impression of perpendicular alertness, despite everything. The scene is no longer curved in upon itself but is structured like a grid, as if the painter had learned how to exploit the power of the rectangular format. He allows the perpendiculars of the frame to reverberate throughout the scene. All the overwrought energy is gathered up and assigned to the angels in the sky. In 1288 a distinctive new painter emerged at Assisi: many believe this is Giotto. I do not wish to enter right here into this question of all art historical questions, but simply say that I am impressed by Serena Romano’s argument that the Lamentation was painted directly after the two episodes involving Isaac and Esau (whose author she thinks may be Giotto). The Lamentation, for Romano, is not at the same high level as the Isaac and Esau scenes. The style derives from the Isaac Master but also Jacopo Torriti, and generally bears Roman, even ancient Roman traces, as well as signs of awareness of French cathedral sculpture.66 The Isaac Stories themselves are based even more clearly on the study of ancient Roman mural painting. The Isaac painter was interested in women, domesticity, and interior spaces.67 Romano describes the “doubled” female presence, exceeding the narrative, in the Isaac scenes. The women function, she argues, as witnesses super partes, neutral, like a Greek chorus. This motif is adopted by the master of the Lamentation, where the two women in the center seem to “spring from the rock,” solemn spectators and pivots of action who “elongate” the compact narrative into “scenic and emotionally diversified situations.” She names the “extraordinary” Lamentation “the sole true heir of the narrative temperament of the Isaac Stories.”68 A few years later, Giotto developed this approach to the Lamentation at the Arena Chapel in Padua (ill. 4.15). Here the underlying grid is so powerfully felt that the painter can express all he wants to express — or all he wants the figures to express — simply by introducing refined deviations from the perpendicular. The picture is anchored at the right by the two recently convinced men who aid the family of Christ at the close of the day: Nicodemus, a Pharisee who visited Christ at night to discuss his teachings, and Joseph of Arimathea, a rich man who helped remove the body from the Cross and lay it in the rock-hewn tomb, according to Matthew 27:60 his own tomb. But at the left, a crowd of mourning women, also unhaloed, presses forward: these are the female adherents of the movement, the “many” women “who had come with him from Galilee,” mentioned in Mark 15:41, Matthew 27:55, and Luke 23:55. The group of mourning women at the left provides a vertical anchor. The haloed woman and the woman next to her, hands clasped, can lean inward and downward, not in selfloss but as if tethered to the anchor behind them. The hooded and unhaloed women seated on the ground, slumped, brooding, their broad backs turned to

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4.15 Giotto, Lamentation over the Dead Christ, 1303–5. Fresco, approx. 200 × 185 cm. Padua, Arena Chapel.

us, strike two ponderous notes in the bass register. The slopes of their backs say it all, as do the rhyming backs of John and the woman below him. Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus stand in thoughtful and detached colloquy just as they were in the Assisi mural. Again, all writhing is delegated to the angels. Every human figure, sitting or standing, is placed firmly on the ground. The brilliance of this approach — and this composition has not wanted for admirers — is that every slope and vector appears generated from within, naturally, rather than imposed from without. The Byzantine Lamentations and the thirteenth-century Italian paintings closely dependent on them can be called formally closed because an iron law of form governs the entire picture surface. That law of form sets the pictures apart from everything in our world; it rarefies them. This is true as well about such hierarchical, abstract compositions as Cimabue’s ecstatic visions in the Upper Church at Assisi. In the Lamentations at Assisi (perhaps by Giotto) and Padua (by Giotto) just discussed, by contrast, all patterning is internally explicable. These compositions are formally open. The figures stand squarely on the ground because

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that is how erect bodies stand. If the figures bend this way or that, it is because they are inclined to do so, guided by emotions and thoughts. And so, there is no barrier, in principle, to adding more figures. Realism knows no limits: there is no reason it should stop recording what happened, what was or is. Realism in painting is not necessarily a matter of deceptive illusions that double our perceptions. Realism can also be an effect generated by our assessment, as beholders, of the relative force of several factors potentially governing the disposition of figures in the plane and in the virtual space: the way things would have looked if you had simply come across them, the way people are likely to behave, and the way things look when they are shaped from the outside by a formal principle. Most Lamentations, as just noted, contain one or more unhaloed women who do not express the same intensity of anguish as the inner circle. They function as a benchmark of neutral emotion against which the hysteria of John and all the Marys is measured. In the panel in Berlin by Puccio di Simone, for example, there is such a woman on her own at the feet of Christ.69 There is a parallel development in Siena. In the Lamentation of the Maestà by Duccio, there are three women without haloes. In a panel in Berlin from the predella of the high altar at Santa Croce in Florence by the Sienese painter Ugolino di Nerio (c. 1325–30) there is a single female figure without a halo.70 This is the background for the influential Deposition or Lamentation by Ambrogio Lorenzetti that is thought to have served as the predella of an altarpiece once in the convent of Santa Petronilla in Siena (ill. 4.16).71 Such an altarpiece was noted by the local historian Guglielmo della Valle in 1786. Luigi de Angelis in 1816 provided a more detailed description: a Madonna and Child with “other saints” and a Deposition below.72 None of the attempts to reconstruct the original aspect of this altarpiece is quite satisfactory. Nor is it possible to date the work — various dates in the 1330s and 1340s have been proposed. The Lamentation, 52 by 140 centimeters, and possibly trimmed down on two or all four sides, is large for a predella, and large in relation to the other panels that have been associated with the dismantled Petronilla retable. One might well be inclined to separate the Lamentation from the other panels, supposing it to be not a predella at all but the lower section of a vertical panel with the Crucifixion above, like the little panel by Taddeo Gaddi in the City Art Gallery, Bristol, or the larger picture on canvas by Benedetto di Bindo in Siena.73 All the panels thought to belong to the Santa Petronilla altarpiece were transferred to the Istituto di Belle Arti in Siena before 1842. Among these panels are halflength figures of S. Massimino of Aix and St. Dorothy, who, however, it has recently been suggested, could be St. Martha. For it has also (only recently!) been noted that S. Massimino and St. Martha appear alongside St. Lazarus among the mourners in the Lamentation, identified by inscriptions in their haloes. It has also been hypothesized that the whole altarpiece was originally in the convent church of Santa Marta in Siena, established in 1328, and came to Santa Petronilla only later. These apparent bonds between the Lamentation

4.16  Ambrogio Lorenzetti, predella with Lamentation over the Dead Christ, 1330s or 1340s. Panel, 52 × 140 cm. Siena, Pinacoteca Nazionale.

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and two of the other panels strengthen the identification of the Lamentation as a predella. Let us remember that these were the early days of the predella generally and there was a lot of experimentation. Predella or not, the Lamentation made a lasting impact within the Sienese tradition. There are four surviving copies or adaptations: the Lamentation on canvas attributed to Benedetto di Bindo, just mentioned, the lower segment of a processional banner;74 a panel from the predella of the Coronation altarpiece in San Francesco in Montalcino, dated 1388 and now in Siena, attributed to Bartolo di Fredi;75 another predella attributed to Andrea di Bartolo or to his son Giorgio di Andrea;76 and a square panel in Stockholm also given to Andrea di Bartolo (ill. 4.17).77 All four copies include a group or a pair of women at the far right without haloes whose body language expresses neither grief nor devotion but a more detached, assessing state of mind. These are the onlookers, the “women watching from a distance” mentioned in Mark 15:40 and Matthew 27:55, newly interpreted; a collectivity that included Mary Magdalene and other women of the inner circle but also the women who came from beyond Jerusalem. In Ambrogio’s panel, one woman turns away from the body of Christ, covering her mouth with the corner of her pale red robe, her brows knit in anguish. Her companions farther to the right are more composed. One rests her forearm on her raised knee, with one hand poised on the other wrist; her expression is blank, abstracted. The other, her face showing concern, places her hand beneath her chin. Both gestures, indicating some degree of intellectual and emotional detachment, are unthinkable for holy figures. So too is the costume of the woman in the middle: a robe cut low across the back of the neck and a torus-shaped arrangement of the hair, or hair supplemented by a headdress, with a veil attached. This is a modern, worldly costume. Her headdress is a mazzocchio, a stuffed roll or torus supporting a veil or other headgear. The mazzocchio supplemented or imitated real rolled braids of hair contained by spiral ribbons. Unless the woman had quantities of hair, these braids were themselves supplemented by silk or real hair extensions, known as posticci.78 These headdresses and hair styles became a public issue in the 1330s.79 The posticci were criticized. Braids alone were evidently not coded as excessively profane or worldly, for there are many secular and even holy women with braided hair coiled around their heads in Giotto: at Padua, the women under the arch in the Meeting at the Golden Gate; at least two women in the Birth of the Virgin; Mary herself at the Annunciation, Visitation, and Nativity; and so on. From the middle decades on, there was a tendency to dress painted holy figures in ever more fashionable ways. Robert Brennan discusses the introduction of contemporary fashions into painting beginning in the 1340s, pointing for instance to the stylish women among the saved in the Last Judgment by Nardo di Cione in the Strozzi Chapel at Santa Maria Novella. Brennan notes that Franco Sacchetti criticized the fashion of a tight hood over a rolled, beribboned braid of hair, exactly the hairstyle of the Virgin Mary herself in Giovanni da Milano’s

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4.17  Andrea di Bartolo, Lamentation over the Dead Christ, c. 1400? Panel, 54 × 49 cm. Stockholm, National Museum.

lunette with patrons in the Metropolitan Museum (ill. 5.17).80 The midwife in the Prato predella by Giovanni da Milano, mentioned above, has braided hair. The Virgin in Jacopo di Cione’s Coronation (the San Pier Maggiore altarpiece, London, National Gallery) has a braid wrapped in spiral thread. There are many other examples in Trecento paintings of Mary and other female saints outfitted with splendid robes and rolled braids.81 Pace Sacchetti, “fashion” was evidently not always understood as mere vanity but also as splendor. The woman with the rolled braids, real or imitated, in Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Lamentation is not a portrait but an outpost of a lay beholder. No lay devout person would have herself portrayed in such an ambivalent attitude. The woman in Lorenzetti’s predella stands instead for the profane sphere that always needs to be won over. She is one whose participation in the events is uncertain, contingent, cannot be taken for granted. She, and perhaps as well the woman at the far-right edge with her hand below her chin, are like extras in a film, without speaking parts.82 The processional banner on cloth by Benedetto di Bindo included all three women, not omitting the central figure’s modern headdress and hand resting on wrist. This is the only one of the adaptations of the Petronilla Lamentation that preserves the modern headdress. Two of the three other versions reduce the number of haloless women at the right edge to two. The symbolic form of the emotional disarray at the Lamentation is the relative lack of internal structure. Figures seem to spill out and across randomly. De Angelis, the Sienese commentator of 1816, was struck by the profusion: che

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numero grande di figure!83 This shortfall of formal patterning was reproduced by the later copyists of Lorenzetti’s composition. The format and location of the predella enforce the earthbound point of view, as if we too, like these women, were seated on the ground. Contrast the Lamentations by Giotto at Assisi and Padua, where we have the point of view of someone standing. The evangelists’ account of Christ’s copious female following already contains the image of a limitless proliferation. The general tendency in the Gospels toward a confusion of women named Mary suggests as much. Beyond Mary mother of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, there is Mary the wife of Cleophas ( John 19:25), who may be the sister of the Virgin Mary and may also be the Mary mother of James (and Joseph) mentioned by Matthew 27:56, Mark 15:40, Mark 16:1, and Luke 24:10; Mary Salome (Mark 15:40–41), who may be the wife of Zebedee’s children (Matt. 27:56), in other words, the apostles James and John; and Mary of Bethany, the sibling of Martha and Lazarus (Luke 10:38–42, John 12: 1–3). Matthew 27:61 mentions “the other Mary.” And then there are one or two or more women, some of them called Mary, who on Sunday morning bring the spices to treat the body and discover the empty sepulcher (Matthew 28:1, Mark 16:1, Luke 24:10, John 20:1). According to legend, St. Anne had not one but three daughters all named Mary. The metastasis of names suggests a formal theoria or ritual procession. The profile of the mourning group, who have faced evil, is by contrast amorphous. The lateral dilation involves a loss of gestalt. Composure, or good form, is threatened by realism, or an excess of content over form, resulting in bad form. Christ’s body, even on the Cross, had provided ordering form. Now that body is limp, and the whole picture sags. Formless mourning spills over in the Entombment by Simone Martini in Berlin, a tiny panel once part of a four-winged portable altar or reliquary (ill. 4.18).84 Here there are no less than twenty-three mourning women, most of them without haloes. Such a little picture, and ungoverned by an overall gestalt, lacks the gravitas of the great altarpieces. The psychological realism of the shared anguish is totalizing and boundless; the theological lesson is momentarily engulfed by the world. Psychological realism contaminates the sacred mission of the picture, for mourning is not the same as worship. After all, mere mortals are also lamented. The intensity of the grief is no proof of Christ’s divinity, for sons, lovers, and teachers, and not only gods, are lamented. At least two of the female supernumeraries in Simone Martini’s Berlin Lamentation are wearing black hooded robes with white bands beneath, a marker of modern devout vocation as nuns, tertiaries, or widows. In Trecento painting, historical ancient figures almost never wear black.85 One kneels prayerfully at the foot of the body. Joel Brink has argued that these and other figures in the Orsini polyptych are portraits. The portable altar was painted by Simone in the mid- to late 1330s, in Avignon, for a cardinal of the Orsini family, almost certainly Napoleone Orsini. He is portrayed, diminutive and in a cardinal’s robes, kneeling in the foreground of the Deposition of Christ in Antwerp, another wing of the now dispersed polyptych. An elderly modern monastic

4.18  Simone Martini, Lamentation over the Dead Christ, from Orsini polyptych, 1330s. Panel, 23.7 × 16.7 cm. Berlin, Gemäldegalerie.

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woman appears in the crowd here and in the Carrying of the Cross in the Louvre. Brink reveals the extent of Cardinal Orsini’s involvement with the FranciscanAugustinian monastery of Santa Croce in Montefalco (Umbria), whose first abbess Giovanna di Damiano (d. 1291) had been succeeded by her sister Chiara della Croce (d. 1308), a celebrated holy woman and mystic. Orsini “appears to have known Chiara personally” and played a role in her (unsuccessful) canonization process. Brink argues that the older female nunlike figure in the upper left, profiled against the palm tree, is the portrait of the older sister Giovanna, while the younger praying figure in black and white at the lower left is Chiara herself.86 It seems equally likely, perhaps more likely, that they are not portraits but placeholders for modern devout. Intended as portraits or not, such figures are so weakly anchored in reference that they have become generic images of modern lay or clerical devout (note that Boskovits describes the figure at the left as “nun or widow”). The figures “stood for” the owners or patrons of the work, and at the same time were rendered discreetly enough that they could blend into the crowd. Because they resemble other historical grieving women, they can just “join in.” The historical women have prepared the ground for the near-portraits. The latter are in their own right placeholders, chaperones, pioneers. The near-portraits prepare the ground for the true portraits. They are a bridge between the women in the historical scenes and modern women.

Proto-portraits A Crucifixion fresco of the early 1330s in the refectory of Santo Spirito, attributed to Orcagna, depicts anonymous grieving women at the margins of the scene (ill. 4.19). A group of six women stands to the left of the Cross. One of them looks nunlike; another, with a braid coiled on her head, observes the Holy Family with apparent concern. They play the role of chorus.87 A chorus is a group that represents the community and comments, in a tragedy, on the represented events. The chorus observes, assesses, approves, disapproves, and so bridges the gap between the audience and the fiction. The authority of the chorus is collective. A portrait assimilated to such a chorus cannot be too distinctive. Similar figures are found in some earlier depictions of the mourning women at the Death of the Virgin, or Dormition. The accounts given by the apocryphal early Christian texts known as the Transitus Mariae speak of mourning women. In the tympanum of the west door at Strasbourg (1225–30), those women are represented collectively by a single woman in the foreground, a supplement to the group of the apostles behind the dead. Andrea Worm has argued that the apparitions of unhaloed women in some still earlier medieval depictions of the Death of the Virgin, especially in manuscripts, were proto-portraits. Her starting point was several figures at the margins of that scene and the next, the Burial of the Virgin, in a lavish manuscript of the early twelfth century from the Rhineland, the Paris Pericope Book or Gospel Lectionary. In the miniature depicting the Death of the Virgin, a hooded figure

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4.19  Orcagna (Andrea di Cione), Crucifixion, detail. Fresco, early 1330s. Florence, Santo Spirito, refectory.

in a kneeling or half-kneeling position grasps the feet of the Virgin. In the Burial of the Virgin, three such figures (two hidden by the head of the other) appear at the far-right edge.88 These supplementary figures are distinguished from the others present at the scenes by their gender — female, as denoted by their hooded garments — and by the lack of haloes. They are completely nondescript, without any distinctive features. Worm suggests that when one can identify female patronage of a manuscript — she gives the example of an Evangeliary of the 1070s from Essen — we may ask whether such figures do not represent the books’ owners: portraits without individuation, as it were. In the case of the Paris Pericope Book, she suggests that the single woman at the Dormition might represent the abbess or prioress, and the three women in the Burial members of her convent. Worm acknowledges that these figures may represent the mulieres mentioned in devotional texts on the Dormition, where Mary has conversations with her servant women, even delivering homilies about doubt and selfishness, since some of the women seem to have feared for their own salvation rather than simply feeling grief.89 These figures were reproduced in Byzantine art and, in the West, in the Benedictional of Æthelwold (tenth century). If a female figure at the Dormition recalled the textual tradition that the mourning women had been neglectful and selfish in their worries about salvation, instead of focusing on Mary, then no patron would have wished to be associated with them. Support for the suggestion that supplementary women at the Death of the Virgin stood in for patrons, or more generally represented lay or clerical beholdership, is the Death of the Virgin by the Florentine Puccio di Simone

4.20  Anonymous Bohemian painter, Dormition of the Virgin, c. 1340–45. Panel, 100 × 71.1 cm. Boston, Museum of Fine Arts.

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(c. 1350), where two modern women kneel in the foreground.90 They are small in scale, and they do not belong to the event, or even see it, for they are shown in profile and look straight past the scene. Another example is the Death of the Virgin by the Bolognese painter known as Pseudo-Jacopino, where a whole group of women holding a cloth crouches at the foot of the bed.91 In the Bohemian Dormition in Boston (c. 1340–45), the upper bodies of two women reading books are visible at the lower edge; alongside them and belonging to the same level of reality (they are smaller than the main figures in the painting) is a praying monk, standing for the patron, presumably (ill. 4.20).92 Such figures, known from fourteenth-century French ivories, were “professional mourners.” In his study of the Golden Haggadah, a manuscript created in Catalonia between 1320 and 1330, Marc Michael Epstein advances a hypothesis similar to Worm’s about supplementary figures in narrative scenes.93 He notes a superabundance of female figures in many miniatures, exceeding the requirements of iconography and suggesting the possibility of a resonance with the person of the book’s owner, whom he speculates may have been a woman.94 Assaf Pinkus, finally, in his study of the sculpted tympanon at the church of Thann in Alsace (mid-fourteenth century), proposes a relationship between the patron Johanna von Pfirt and the figure of Eve. Not that Johanna had herself portrayed (nude!) as Eve, but rather that she psychically identified with her. He develops the idea of the “patron as narrator.”95 The analyses by Worm, Epstein, and Pinkus suggest that the incidence of such double-codings and cryptic identifications of patrons with characters, especially in the manuscript tradition, may be quite extensive, and we just need to look for them. Not that it is easy to prove such conjectures.96 In the Entombment at Villa I Tatti, another panel belonging to the series containing the Gardner Presentation and the Munich Crucifixion, there is a single male figure without a halo (ill. 4.21 and detail, p. 155).97 Christ’s familiars form an arc rhyming with the low hill in the background. Left to right, there is collapsing Mary, a woman supporting her, a brooding woman, an older man (Joseph of Arimathea), a younger man, and a figure in red with concealed face, at the feet of Christ, presumably Mary Magdalene. At the right rear there is an expressive younger figure with longish hair, perhaps John. Then finally there is the man lacking a halo, middle-aged and bearded, behind the principal mourners and at the dead center of the square panel. The texts do not speak of a male involved in the Entombment beyond John, Joseph of Arimathea, and Nicodemus ( John 19:39). If the figure in green at the right rear is John and the man kissing Christ’s hand is Nicodemus, then who is the man without a halo? If that figure in green is instead a woman, then the man kissing Christ’s hand is John. And in that case the man at the rear is Nicodemus, who is sometimes depicted without a halo because he is mentioned earlier in the book of John (3:1–2) as a Pharisee who visited Jesus “at night” presumably because he did not wish to draw attention to his interest in the new teacher. But Carl Brandon Strehlke argues that this figure was added later at the request of the patron,

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4.21  Giotto and workshop, Entombment of Christ, 1310– 20? Panel, 45.3 × 43.9 cm. Settignano, Villa I Tatti.

pointing out that the figure does not appear in an X-ray and that he is thinly painted. The figure lacks a halo, according to Strehlke, either because “it was not possible at that point to add a halo” or because Nicodemus didn’t deserve one.98 I would question the view that the figure was added later. I don’t believe that this is a crypto-portrait, that is, a portrait of a patron playing the role of a historical figure (in this case Nicodemus), in part because this convention was not at all well-established in the beginning of the fourteenth century, and in part because we know what the patron of this work looked like — he is kneeling at the base of the Crucifixion in the panel in Munich. I believe the man without a halo was meant to be read both as Nicodemus and as a generic lay witness, an outpost of lay devotion.

Detail of ill. 4.21

v Interlopers

It is a commonplace of modern art history that Florentine art declined after the death of Giotto in 1337, or even after his withdrawal from the Florentine scene, for already in 1328 he went to Naples and after that did not do much more in Florence before his death, apart from the design of the Campanile. His immediate followers did not break new ground, it is argued. On the contrary, according to Robert Oertel, “until the end of the Trecento, Giotto’s style was the inevitable point of departure for his successors, with the result that their work lost its freshness and became formalistic, eclectic, and artificially archaic, or was reduced, for a time, to a premature, undisciplined naturalism.”1 For Pietro Toesca, the Florentine painters were not very curious about the new: “Most of them, although working in the good manner, repeated or varied with little ingenuity the modes of the major, recently dead masters; even the tradition of Giotto’s earliest followers, reduced to formulas and external simplicity, was now distant. And the lesser ones are hardly worth mentioning.”2 This is the consensus, even if there is disagreement about whether the tendencies toward a hieratic style and a recovery of archaic modes can be coordinated with the Black Death, as the American art historian Millard Meiss influentially argued. Meiss began his great book Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death (1951) with the anecdote from Franco Sacchetti about artists conversing about the decline of art after Giotto (see p.  85), and took it literally.3 Meiss went on to speak of the patrons’ preoccupation with death, encouraging a new mode of painting that — departing from Giotto’s more openhearted humanism — suppressed narrative in favor of a ritualistic character and promoted the authority of Church and priesthood. “All sections of the middle class were . . . clearly united in their desire for a more intensely religious art.”4 Meiss linked this shift in mentality especially to the frontal, “bound,” Detail of ill. 5.20

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and joyless figures in the works of Andrea di Cione (Orcagna), which were less responsive and attentive, less individual, than those of Giotto and the first generation of his followers. Axiality and symmetry, hierarchy, uniformity and regimentation, opulence of materials, a reintroduction of the supernatural: all this Meiss describes as a “recovery” of the artistic language of the thirteenth century — a regression, in other words. I would argue, however, that there was no need for Orcagna to “recover” the sense for hierarchy because the psalmodic and hieratic approach to sacred art, discussed in chapter 3, was the main project of fourteenth-century Italian art, all the way through. Orcagna represents an unfolding and realization of that style. Giotto’s contributions to an art of praise were on a small scale, jewellike in their intensity and precision. The midcentury painters magnify Giotto’s art, blow it up to the scale of spectacle. Recent scholarship narrates the development of art in Florence from midcentury on without alluding to decline. Andrea De Marchi describes the growing complexity of the grandi macchine d’altare in Florence in the 1370s and 1380s.5 An exemplary work that is now dispersed and whose original splendor can only be imagined was the Coronation of the Virgin, with rows and rows of saints and angels, at San Pier Maggiore in Florence (1370–71), by Jacopo di Cione and Niccolò di Tommaso. Tracking the evolution of the increasingly unified polyptychs from Orcagna to Lorenzo Monaco, De Marchi invokes the Annunciation polyptych by Giovanni del Biondo for the sacristy of Santa Maria Novella; the high altar of the Basilica dell’Impruneta by Niccolò di Pietro Gerini and Tommaso del Mazza, 1375; the altar by Giovanni del Biondo, 1379, in the Rinuccini chapel, Santa Croce; and Agnolo Gaddi’s polyptych for Santa Maria Novella, 1375, now in Parma (ill. 0.1). Ambitious murals of that generation are the Spanish Chapel by Andrea di Bonaiuto (Andrea da Firenze) in Santa Maria Novella, 1350s; the murals by Giovanni da Milano, 1360s, in the Rinuccini chapel; the murals in the sacristy and chapter house at Santa Croce; and the Last Judgment by Nardo di Cione at Santa Maria Novella. For Luciano Bellosi, Florentine painting was ancora ben viva e capace di accrescimenti grazie all’ attività of Giottino and Giovanni da Milano.6 Among the major works beyond Florence that drew on the Florentine tradition there was the cycle of frescoes at the Camposanto at Pisa, including a destroyed Assumption by Stefano Fiorentino. At Assisi, the Crucifixion in the Chapter House and the St. Stanislaus frescoes are now most often dated to the 1340s and attributed to Puccio Capanna; the apse of the Lower Church was adorned with a Gloria Celeste attributed by Ghiberti to Stefano Fiorentino.7 Stefano painted a Coronation of the Virgin at the abbey of Chiara­ valle near Milan. Giusto de’ Menabuoi painted the vault of the Baptistry at Padua (1375–78), with row upon row of saints and angels; the latter artist was a Florentine possibly trained by Maso di Banco.8 This is a very incomplete list of major works. The old sources, apart from Sacchetti, whose anecdote is not a historical account, do not speak of decline after the death of Giotto. The humanists held

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a basically technical view of the art of painting (see p. 97). In the field of technology, the pioneer is inevitably surpassed. The scholar Benvenuto da Imola wrote (c. 1376) that “Giotto still holds the field because no one subtler than he has yet appeared, even though at times he made great errors in his painting, as I have heard from men of outstanding talent in such matters.”9 Lorenzo Ghiberti said that Giotto had many disciples di grandissima fama, naming Stefano Fiorentino, Taddeo Gaddi, Maso di Banco, and Buonamico Buffalmacco.10

Vasari on the Trecento Nothing in Vasari’s Lives of the Artists supports Meiss’s thesis of a regression to an archaic severe style, or even the simpler thesis that the art of painting declined. On the contrary, Vasari said that five of Giotto’s immediate successors actually exceeded his achievements: his own pupils Taddeo Gaddi and Stefano Fiorentino; Stefano’s son Giotto di Stefano, known as Giottino; and the Sienese Pietro Lorenzetti and Simone Martini. According to Vasari, Giotto was first surpassed not by Masaccio but already in his own century.11 Vasari speaks of the imperfection of Giotto’s art in the Preface to part two of his Lives: Giotto “failed to execute his eyes with that beautiful movement which they have in life, his weeping figures with delicacy,” and so on. But Vasari urges us to consider the historical context: . . . scusilo la difficultà dell’arte ed il non aver visto pittori migliori di lui; e pigli ognuno, in quella povertà dell’arte e dei tempi, la bontà del giudizio nelle sue istorie, l’osservanza dell’arie, e l’obbedienza di un naturale molto facile; perchè pur si vede che le figure obbedivano a quel che elle avevano a fare; e perciò si mostra che egli ebbe un giudizio molto buono, se non perfetto.  . . . the difficulty of the art, the fact that he had not observed better painters than himself, must excuse him. And in that period of artistic poverty, everyone can grasp the soundness of judgment in his scenes, his observation of human expression, and his easy obedience to a natural style, because it is also evident that his figures fulfil their purpose, showing in this way that Giotto’s judgment was very good, if not perfect.

Vasari then says that the excellence of Giotto’s successors also reveals that Giotto’s art was very good, but not perfect: there was room for improvement, in other words: E questo medesimo si vede poi negli altri, come in Taddeo Gaddi, nel colorito; il quale è più dolce ed ha più forza, e dette migliori incarnazioni e colore ne’ panni, e più gagliardezza ne’ moti alle sue figure. In Simon Sanese si vede il decoro nel compor le storie; in Stefano Scimmia ed in Tommaso suo figliuolo; che arrecarono grande utile e perfezzione al disegno ed invenzione alla prospettiva, e lo sfumare ed unire i colori, riservando sempre la maniera di Giotto. And the same thing is evident in the others who followed him, as in Taddeo Gaddi’s colouring, which is sweeter and more forceful, in his better flesh-tones and the colours of his garments, and in the more robust movements of his figures. It is evident in the

160 decorum of the narratives composed by Simone [Martini] of Siena, and in Stefano Scimmia and his son Tommaso, whose work brought great improvement and excellence to drawing as well as great powers of invention to perspective, and to the blending and unifying of colours — all the while keeping to Giotto’s style.12

In his Life of Taddeo Gaddi, he says that the painter was in his coloring più fresco e vivace di Giotto. Vasari also says that Taddeo exceeded Giotto as a portraitist: Nelle figure della quale opera, perché furono ritratti dal naturale, si vede vivezza e grazia infinita, in quella maniera semplice, che fu in alcune cose meglio che quella di Giotto; e massimamente nell’esprimere il raccomandarsi, l’allegrezza, il dolore et altri somiglianti affetti, che, bene espressi, fanno sempre onore grandissimo al pittore. In the figures of that work, because taken [portrayed] from nature, one sees liveliness and infinite grace, in that simple manner which was in some ways better than that of Giotto, and above all in expressing supplication, joy, grief, and other similar emotions, which, well expressed, always bring the greatest honor to the painter.13

In his life of Pietro Laurati (Pietro Lorenzetti), Vasari says that contemporaries believed, on the basis of the Ospedale frescoes, “with great reason,” that that artist was destined to surpass Giotto.14 But we will see that Vasari allots the highest praise of all to Stefano Scimmia, Stefano the “ape of nature” — this is Stefano Fiorentino — and to “Tommaso” — this is Giottino — who surpassed Giotto in drawing, perspective, and in the shading and blending of colors.

Stefano Fiorentino and Giotto di Maestro Stefano One of the most formidable obstacles to understanding fourteenth-century Florentine art is the near-total lack of information and surviving traces of those two most highly praised painters, father and son. The theme of family ties linking artists runs through all the old sources.15 The father–son succession of Nicola and Giovanni Pisano dominated Tuscan sculpture in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. The brothers Andrea, Nardo, and Jacopo di Cione were ascendant in Florence in the middle and the third quarter of the fourteenth century. The painter Gaddo Gaddi was the father of Taddeo Gaddi, who was in turn the father of Agnolo and Giovanni Gaddi. Who was Stefano Fiorentino? In a document involving a planned commission in Pistoia, datable to 1347, “Maestro Stefano” was listed among the six “best painters” in Florence, alongside Taddeo Gaddi, Andrea and Nardo di Cione, Puccio Capanna, and one “Francesco from the workshop of Andrea.”16 Filippo Villani praised Stefano as that simia naturae who depicted bodies with an accuracy worthy of a physician, such that “Giotto himself said [that] his

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pictures seem only to lack breath and respiration” (c. 1381–82).17 Among Giotto’s disciples, Lorenzo Ghiberti named Stefano first, describing his works as molto mirabili e fatte con grandissima dottrina. Yet few works survive that can be attributed to Stefano with any confidence. Ghiberti listed several works in Florence that do not survive, as well as a Gloria Celeste in the apse of the Lower Church at Assisi made con perfetta e grandissima arte but painted over in the seventeenth century.18 Cristoforo Landino, the humanist scholar and commentator of Dante, mentioned both Stefano and Maso in 1481.19 Antonio Billi, in his collection of notes on Florentine painting, said that Stefano painted the Assumption of the Virgin in the Camposanto at Pisa.20 This work, which was destroyed in 1944, is the basis for the attribution to Stefano of the fresco of the Coronation of the Virgin at the abbey of Chiaravalle near Milan.21 In addition, Roberto Longhi attributed a Giottesque Crucifixion at I Tatti to Stefano Fiorentino as well as the frescoes at Assisi now by consensus, and on the basis of documents, given rather to Puccio Capanna, a local painter and disciple of Giotto, much praised by Vasari (namely, the Coronation of the Virgin given by Vasari to his Giottino, the St. Stanislaus scenes, and the Crucifixion in the Chapter House).22 Longhi admired in the Assisi Coronation the corte d’amore, appassionata ceremonia, coltivazione angelica straordinaria, and compared it to the Baroncelli altar — he even said that Stefano’s angels were superior to Giotto’s.23 Although few are now willing to take these works away from Puccio Capanna, who was much praised by Vasari, many believe Stefano was working alongside Giotto at Assisi. At Santa Maria Novella, finally, a wall painting depicting the standing, full-length figure of Thomas Aquinas, discovered in 1857, was attributed convincingly by Gaia Ravalli in 2016 to Stefano.24 This work was mentioned by Ghiberti. About Stefano, Vasari says that: Fu in modo eccellente Stefano, pittore fiorentino e discepolo di Giotto, che non pure superò tutti gl’altri che innanzi a lui si erano affaticati nell’arte, ma avanzò di tanto il suo maestro stesso, che fu, e meritamente, tenuto il miglior di quanti pittori erano stati infino a quel tempo, come chiaramente dimostrano l’opere sue. Stefano, the Florentine painter and disciple of Giotto, was so excellent that he not only surpassed all those before him who had labored in the art, but also advanced so far beyond his own teacher that he was deservedly held to be the best painter up until that time, as his works clearly demonstrate.

In exceeding his teacher, Stefano approached the “modern manner”: Essendo poi condotto, per essere stato discepolo di Giotto, fece a fresco in San Pietro di Roma . . .  alcune storie di Cristo . . . con tanta diligenza, che si vede che tirò forte alla maniera moderna, trapassando d’assai nel disegno e nell’altre cose Giotto suo maestrocon tanta diligenza che si vede che tirò forte alla maniera moderna, trapassando d’assai nel disegno e nell’altre cose Giotto suo maestro.

162 Having then been brought to Rome because he was a disciple of Giotto, he painted some stories of Christ in fresco at St. Peter’s . . . with so much diligence that you can see him stretching toward the modern manner, surpassing considerably in drawing and in other things his master Giotto.

Vasari owned a drawing by Stefano: E, nel vero, aveva Stefano gran facilità nel disegno: come si può vedere nel detto nostro libro, in una carta di sua mano, nella quale è disegnata la Transfigurazione che fece nel chiostro di Santo Spirito; in modo che, per mio giudizio, disegnò molto meglio che Giotto. And truly Stefano had a great facility in drawing, as can be seen in my Libro de’ disegni in a sheet by his hand depicting the Transfiguration that he painted in the cloister of Santo Spirito, such that — in my judgment — he drew much better than Giotto.

And concluded that se gli può attribuire che dopo Giotto ponesse la pittura in grandissimo miglioramento; perchè, oltre all’essere stato più vario nell’invenzioni, fu ancora più unito nei colori e più sfumato che tutti gl’altri, e sopra tutto, non ebbe paragone in essere diligente. if it can be claimed that after Giotto he did the most to improve painting it is because, apart from being more various in invention, he was also more unified in his colors and more “smoky” or blended in coloring than all the others, and above all had no equal in diligence.25

The oldest source that mentions a Florentine painter named Giottino is Francesco Albertini, whose guide to the monuments of Florence was published in 1510. Albertini reports that el tabernaculo in su la piaza [S. Spirito] è di Ioctino.26 A few years later, Antonio Billi says that Giottino was a disciple of Giotto and per fama his son; it does not say that he was the son of Stefano.27 The only surviving work among the half dozen works Billi attributed to Giottino is the work mentioned by Albertini, the fresco depicting the enthroned Madonna and Child surrounded by saints, once mounted in a semi-exposed tabernacle in the Via del Leone, and before that on a tabernacle on a street corner at Piazza Santo Spirito (ill. 5.1). That work, now in the Accademia, had been mentioned by Ghiberti, who attributed it to Maso di Banco. Since Billi took the work away from Maso and gave it to Giottino, he must have had access to a different tradition, perhaps an oral tradition, than Ghiberti, unless he simply decided to trust Albertini’s more recent statement. The manuscript notes on painting by someone we call the Anonimo Magliabechiano (1530s–1540s) attribute the work on one page to Maso and on another to Giottino.28 Several decades later, Vasari published the life of a painter he called “Tommaso di Stefano, detto Giottino.” He reported that some believed that painter to be the son of Giotto, but that in fact he was the son of Stefano Fiorentino, that his name was Tommaso, that he was born in 1324, and that his father taught him the rudiments of painting. The son decided to imitate

5.1 Giottino, Madonna and Child with Saints, 1356? Detached fresco, extant paint surface, 249 × 141 cm; overall 310 × 152 cm. Florence, Galleria dell’ Accademia.

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not his own father but Giotto, Vasari says, and for that reason was known as “little Giotto” or Giottino. In the seventeenth century, the Florentine historian Filippo Baldinucci revived the older story about a family tie to Giotto, asserting that Stefano was the grandson of Giotto on the basis of a document involving a certain painter Ricco di Lapo who married Giotto’s daughter Caterina, and who had a son named Stefano. If all that were true, then Giottino would be the great-grandson of Giotto. But this conjecture has always been doubted and was in fact recently refuted by a pair of documents showing that the father of Stefano, named Ricco, was not Ricco di Lapo, the son-in-law of Giotto.29 In the nineteenth century, two old sources surfaced that name a “Giotto di Maestro Stefano”: a document of 1368 listing him as a member of the painter’s guild in Florence, and a document of 1369 listing him as part of a team of painters working at the papal palace at the Vatican.30 These documents, the only ones we have from the painter’s lifetime, proved that the son’s name was not Tommaso, as Vasari thought, but Giotto, and that Giottino was therefore the diminutive form of his own name.31 This does not rule out the possibility that he was called “little Giotto” because he was such a good painter.32 Dopo l’avere imparato da suo padre i primi principii della pittura, si risolvè, essendo ancor giovanetto, volere, in quanto potesse con assiduo studio, essere imitatore della maniera di Giotto, piuttosto che di quella di Stefano suo padre. La qual cosa gli venne così ben fatta, che ne cavò, oltre alla maniera che fu molto più bella di quella del suo maestro, il soprannome di Giottino, che non gli cascò mai. After having learned from his father the first principles of painting, he resolved, already as a youth, to try, insofar as he could through assiduous study, to be the imitator 33 of the manner of Giotto, rather than that of his father Stefano. Which he did so well that he obtained, beyond that manner which was much more beautiful than that of his master [Stefano], the sobriquet “Giottino,” which never left him.34

In his Life of the so-called Tommaso di Stefano, Vasari resolved the problem of the competing traditions (i.e., the problem of the fresco from Piazza Santo Spirito given by Ghiberti to Maso and by Albertini and Billi to Giottino) by gathering under the single name Tommaso di Stefano works which are today attributed to three different artists: Maso (Tommaso) di Banco, Giottino, and Tommaso, a sculptor who had carved a statue on the Campanile.35 Vasari lists works by his chimerical Tommaso, mostly frescoes, in more than twenty locations in Florence, Rome, and Assisi. Most have perished or can no longer be identified. Vasari simply makes Maso di Banco disappear, even though both Billi and the Magliabechiano manuscript named him (Billi attributing only one work to him) — and even though Ghiberti, we recall, living a century closer to the Trecento than either of these sources, listed Maso among Giotto’s four principal disciples.36 Ghiberti did not mention Giottino; but Schlosser reminds us that Ghiberti’s narrative was highly selective and by

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his own account highly subjective. Moreover, “he unfortunately did not think about the art historians, hungry for dissertation topics, of a distant era . . .”37 The confusion created by Vasari persisted into the twentieth century.38 Eventually, Richard Offner and Roberto Longhi divided up Vasari’s synthetic Tommaso on the basis of style.39 The Constantine and St. Sylvester cycle in the Bardi di Vernio (Bardi di Mangona) chapel in Santa Croce was given back to Maso di Banco, just as Ghiberti had said. The St. Stanislaus and Coronation frescoes in the Lower Church at Assisi, as well as the Crucifixion in the Chapter House, were given by Longhi to Stefano Fiorentino.40 Two pictures described and praised by Vasari, however, were — by Offner and Longhi, and by consensus are still — assigned to Giotto di Maestro Stefano, or Giottino: the detached fresco depicting an enthroned Madonna and Child with saints, once in Piazza Santo Spirito and now in the Accademia (possibly datable to 1356); and the Lamentation, the panel once housed in the church of San Remigio in Florence (after 1363).41 The latter work, one of the summits of fourteenth-century painting, is not mentioned by any source before Vasari. It is the most significant panel painting of the century that introduces portraits of lay patrons directly into a scene, such that they occupy space alongside the historical characters. On the basis of the four beautiful works we do know by the father and the son — five if we include the newly discovered Thomas of Aquinas at Santa Maria Novella — it can be shown, first, that they pursued a small set of formal themes introduced by Giotto and developed especially in the Lower Church at Assisi; and second, that Giottino was a key figure in a group of highly creative painters working together and sharing ideas in the third quarter of the century. This group included the brothers Cione, Agnolo Gaddi, and from 1363 Giovanni da Milano.

The San Remigio Pietà We owe our knowledge of the provenance of the San Remigio Lamentation or Pietà to Vasari. But even this knowledge is not definitive. Vasari saw the work in the church of San Remigio before 1550, the date of the first edition of his Lives of the Artists.42 Records of a pastoral visit to the church in 1575 and several other descriptions over the next two centuries mentioning a picture of the Deposition or a chapel of the Pietà seem to track the work’s displacements from one location in the church to another.43 We will consider the evidence more carefully later in this chapter. The painting was transferred from San Remigio to the Uffizi Galleries in 1851 (ill. 5.2). For a long time, the picture was undervalued or misunderstood. Carl Friedrich von Rumohr assigned it to Pietro Chellini, a fifteenth-century artist. The work figures prominently in the article of 1900 on Giottino by Paul Schubring and the book of 1908 by Osvald Sirén.44 But Bernard Berenson did

5.2 Giottino, Lamentation over the Dead Christ, after 1363. Panel, 195 × 134 cm. Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi.

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not make much of the painting. Longhi was more interested in the father, Stefano. Toesca admired the picture but did not recognize the phantom “Giottino,” preferring to connect it to the Lower Church frescoes — the St. Stanislaus scenes, for example — where he still saw the hand of Maso.45 Julius von Schlosser was poorly disposed to the Uffizi painting. He initially wondered whether the panel might not have been the Deposition over the portal to the cemetery at San Pier Maggiore, which, according to a document of 1392, had been painted by Maso dipintore, grande maestro (Maso di Banco) on commission from Drea (Andrea) degli Albizzi, a Benedictine nun at San Pier Maggiore, presumably before 1348, when Maso disappears from the sources. In 1392, Drea’s relation Benedetto Albizzi had the picture restored by Niccolò di Pietro Gerini. But Schlosser conceded that there was no trace of Maso’s hand in the San Remigio panel, and so suggested that the picture was just a copy of that lost work by Maso, but one that preserved the portrait of Drea degli Albizzi (the nunlike woman in the painting).46 Since he did not believe that the picture was commissioned for the church of San Remigio, he had to identify the presumed St. Remigius in the bishop’s costume as the Florentine protobishop St. Zenobius.47 These reasonings permitted Schlosser to justify Rumohr’s attribution of the San Remigio Pietà to a Quattrocento master.48 Millard Meiss did not mention the picture in his Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death. The first sustained treatment was an article of 1960 by Karl Birkmeyer.49 John White, in his survey of thirteenth- and fourteenth-­ century Italian painting (1977), wrote an eloquent description and interpretation of the painting but attributed it to an “unknown Florentine Painter.”50 White’s caution reminds us that our only basis for attributing this picture to the painter Giottino is Vasari. The safest policy would be to call the artist the Master of the San Remigio Lamentation.51 The turning point in the valuation of the work was Carlo Volpe’s long article of 1983, “Il lungo percorso del ‘dipingere dolcissimo e tanto unito’ ” (“The long career of “the most sweet and unified [harmonious] painting”).52 In Volpe’s new narrative of fourteenth-century Italian art, Stefano and especially Giottino are protagonists. An article of 2001 by Luciano Bellosi builds on Volpe’s theses.53 The San Remigio Lamentation measures 195 centimeters in height and 134 centimeters across.54 Effectively, it is a square with an added segment at the top, in the form of an ogee arch, to accommodate the Cross’s crossbeam and Titulus.55 The scene is not set in a rocky landscape but rather profiled against a smooth expanse of gold leaf. The gold begins about a third of the way up. The lower third of the panel is painted in a dull brown, representing the ground, the earth. This creates the effect of a ground plane measuring about ten feet square; in fact, the ground plane and the standing figures mark out an imaginary or virtual cube of ten feet on a side. The uprights — the cross, the rigidly standing figures — make an architectonic infrastructure. In the midst of the historical scene, the painter has cleared room for four

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interlopers from the future: two standing male saints who lived in the early Middle Ages (their presence is conventional) and two kneeling female devout in modern costume who share the depicted volume with both the biblical mourners and the medieval saints (their presence is new). By absorbing modern persons into a plausibly described historical episode, the painting shows what any sacrifice was meant to do, namely, to make the profane sacred. The kneeling women in black are visitants from the real world that once surrounded the painting (detail, p. ix). One wears a black robe, black hood, and white wimple and appears to us in profile, hands pressed together in prayer. The other, bareheaded, in three-quarter view, hands crossed over her breast, wears a splendid, worldly black and grey embroidered robe, off the shoulders, with a low-slung gilded belt.56 Together they form a doublet: a pairing of sacred and profane that reproduces the hybrid quality of the picture as a whole — its own pairing of visitants from a profane world and a sacred scene. This motif — the pairing of a worldly and a religious patron or supplicant, sometimes a man and a woman, sometimes two women — is so common in fourteenth-century painting that one comes to doubt the motif’s reference to reality. It is a topos, a commonplace.57 In this painting, the blonde supplicant appears younger than her companion, suggesting a mother and daughter. But this may be an effect due to the costumes: perhaps they are sisters.58 The two women must have paid for the painting. The standing saints at the left, who chaperone the two women, are St. Benedict, the sixth-century founder of the Benedictine Order, holding a red book (his Rule) and wearing a white Cistercian habit, and (probably) the fifth- and sixth-century French saint Remigius (Rémy), the patron of the church. All four postbiblical figures stare with grave attention at the body of the Dead Christ. The saints place their hands firmly on the women’s heads, a gesture of protection and patronage familiar from sculpture, including ivories. We have also seen it in Torriti’s portrait of Nicholas IV in the Lateran apse mosaic (ill. 2.1); compare also the image of Bishop Pontano before St. Rufinus in the Magdalene Chapel at Assisi (p. 25). The depiction of the Lamentation has split open to make space for the anachronistic witnesses. The patrons are no longer marginalized as in nearly all earlier paintings: they are neither sequestered in compartments — cut off from the object of their longings by a frame — nor are they excluded from the pictorial world by their extreme miniaturization and strict profile, as if they were puppets. The physically plausible placing of the historical figures on the ground plane and their persuasive postures and gestures create an effect of temporal unity. The two women from the future puncture the smooth surface of that present tense. They kneel on the edge of the cloth on which Jesus lies. And yet they are miniaturized: if they were to stand up, they would reach to about three-quarters of the height of the historical figures and the two medieval saints. It is impossible to hold both impressions in the mind at once: the women are at once real, and too small. If they and their anachronistic patrons,

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Benedict and Remigius, were removed, the composition would have a meaningless hole in it. The careful description of the women, and the rational disposition of the bodies in the fictive space, impose a strong sense of plausibility that is then shaken by the discord in scale. In this picture, the human figures come in three sizes: too small, just right, and too large. For the body of Jesus, lately removed from the Cross that rises up behind, is elongated: if he were to stand up, he would tower over everyone.59 Christ, the incarnated deity, lacks the outlandishness that in other traditions may signal a god’s unapproachability. The only vestige of such monstrosity, in this painting, is his size. The portraits are not supplements; on the contrary, the picture seems to have been built for and around them. And yet no one in the biblical scene pays any attention to the modern women. Nor does the painter worry about whether the modern women enjoy an unobstructed view onto the events. The figure in grey seems to block the women’s view of Christ. The portraits are cut from a different cloth from the rest of the picture: they are transferred directly from life, whereas all the other figures are adaptations of figures from other paintings. The two women in black had very likely never before appeared in a painting.

The Ponce Annunciation The surviving Florentine picture closest to this one in conception is the Annunciation now in Ponce, Puerto Rico, introduced in the opening pages of this book (ill. 5.3). Like the Pietà from San Remigio, this appears to be an independent panel, without side panels or any other supplementary carpentry.60 Mary’s elaborate throne seems to have been truncated at the top. There is a margin of punch marks all around the edges of the picture, but they and the entire gold ground are considered a modern fabrication.61 The picture measures 131.5 centimeters by 132.1 centimeters, and so fits into a square almost identical in size to the main scene of the San Remigio Pietà, below the ogee arch with the crossbar of the Cross and the red titulus. The two pictures are constructed similarly: a neutral ground creating a strip of space, and a solid rear wall of gold ground.62 In tandem, the modern man in blue cloak and tunic and the messenger angel kneel and salute the Virgin. Christ is in the sky, already on his way to earth.63 The man in blue is in tune with the angel, reinforcing the marvelous, emotional vector of the angel’s message. This man, a layman who presumably paid for the painting, though not necessarily, is about two-thirds the size of the holy personages, just about the same ratio we find in the picture from San Remigio (detail, p. 17). The composition accommodates the petitioner’s desire to demonstrate his dedication to the Virgin Mary. This was rare in an Annunciation — a scene, as we noted in the last chapter, that did not invite witnesses. Moreover, Annunciations were often compartmentalized, the narrative space divided symbolically by a door or a column or a vase with flowers in order to

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5.3 Jacopo di Cione, Annunciation, 1370s? Panel, 131.5 × 132.1 cm. Ponce, Museo de Arte.

suggest that the angel and the young woman, although they share a virtual space, do after all belong to different spheres (ills. 5.6, 5.11, 5.12). That was the whole exceptionality of the event! Mary seems to experience Gabriel, but the partition suggests that her perception of him may be incomplete, or less complete than ours. The partition signals that Gabriel after all is uninvited; his presence in the room is questionable; he has penetrated a private chamber. In the Ponce picture, the small figure of the modern man himself serves as the partition: he takes the place of the vase. In each of these two pictures, the San Remigio Pietà and the Ponce Annunciation, the artist has undertaken a completely new way of handling the inward-pressing laity. The artists simply draw the laypersons into the gestalt of the picture. A portrait, merely referential in the sense that its meaning barely exceeds the reference it makes to a real person, troubles the paintings’ allegiances to the formal conventions established by prior paintings. An aspiration to formal completeness may be threatened by an inward-crowding portrait. Silhouettes pasted on to the surface of the painting may interfere with

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an overall formal theme. Such an image was a rebus: it placed painted images of real people in proximity to desired targets or interlocutors, thus indicating publicly the orientation of the patron’s devotional imagination. The readout of the rebus was: these people have a devout imagination, this is the sort of thing that matters to them, that is real to them. In the Lamentation from San Remigio and the Annunciation in Ponce, the modern figures have been territorialized, recruited to the pictures’ own strong will to composure. The will to composure was shared by the elite social beings, in the sense that composure and order mattered in life. This made the women’s intervention, and all the lay portraits, possible. The preference for decorum, intelligible pattern, harmony of parts to whole, and resolution of tensions carried over from social life into art. An image is well-suited to represent this desired wholeness. An image presents completeness. Faith seeks above all completion. This is why the society invested in beautiful images. The artists’ ability to place figures in a represented space creates the opportunities for paradox. The modern women and their medieval sponsors in the San Remigio Lamentation are both inside and outside at once. In the Ponce Annunciation, the blue-cloaked man occupies and indeed shares space. The colors of the garments knit all three figures together. The orange slipper of Gabriel treading on the man’s robe in the Ponce picture is a refined touch: it implies that the mortal supplicant was already there, on his knees, worshipping Mary, even before the angel arrived (detail, p. 17). He is not only spatially but also temporally mixed up with the sacred story. Like the women in the Pietà, and unlike many such figures who seem to stare at nothing, he sees what is before him and yet remains invisible — at least we are given this impression — to the historical characters. (But does he see the angel behind him?) The patrons are placed before the most wrenching or the most bewildering of spectacles, and yet, bound by the customs of elite portraiture, they cannot express any emotions. The women witnessing the event are inside the work of art; they do not see the whole scene that the artwork frames for us, but they have a privileged vantage point on the core of the scene, the upper body of Christ and the cluster of mourners attending to him — unless their view, as noted, is blocked in the name of perspectival realism by the figure in grey. Such pictures, suspended between virtual and real scenes of worship, depict states of mind — attentiveness and witnessing — and are themselves the targets of patterned devotional attention. There are three levels: the historical mourners; the medieval and modern meta-mourners; and finally, us and all the other beholders, meta-meta-mourners, in the real world. Histories of piety cannot be extricated from biographies of artistic form.

The Lamentation on panel The Lamentation is a scene that depicts both outright grief and an empathetic but more detached contemplation of the mysteries — two levels of involvement.

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5.4  Master of the Fogg Pietà (Maestro di Figline), Lamentation over the Dead Christ, c. 1330. Panel, 42.2 × 50 cm. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard Art Museums.

Giotto’s Lamentation at Padua, discussed in the last chapter, became the new standard for Florentine as well as for Sienese painters (ill. 4.15). The composition was adapted many times, often on a small scale and often ingeniously, as for example in the Lamentation, perhaps once the center of a predella, at Harvard, the namepiece of the Master of the Fogg Pietà, also known as the Master of Figline (ill. 5.4).64 Here the body of Christ has been tipped forward almost until it is parallel with the picture plane, as if to give us beholders, in front of the painting, a better view. We also find traces of Giotto’s Lamentation in smallscale works like the panel by Lippo di Benivieni, also at Harvard.65 This picture, datable to the 1320s, representing a Lamentation of roughly the Giottesque type, vertical in format, was not an altarpiece but a private devotional picture.66 But there were not so many opportunities to develop Giotto’s invention on large wall surfaces. A post-Giottesque example of an Entombment, a related but more compact scene, gathering the mourners tight around the tomb, is the painting by Taddeo Gaddi at the tomb of Tessa de’ Bardi in the Bardi di Vernio (Bardi di Mangona) chapel at Santa Croce (ill. 5.5).67 The only known Florentine Lamentation in large format is the overdoor fresco at Santa Croce

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also by Taddeo Gaddi, datable to about 1345.68 Only the upper half of that fresco, now detached and in the museum at Santa Croce, survives, enough to discern both that Giotto’s composition was its model — no surprise — and also that it in turn may have been one of the models for the San Remigio composition.69 St. Francis is just visible kneeling on the left. Evelyn Sandberg-Vavalà lists only one earlier Italian depiction of the Lamentation that places Christ flat on the ground and shows Mary embracing Christ: the painting by Coppo di Marcovaldo on the Cross at Pistoia (ill. 4.12 and detail).70 It seems unlikely, however, that the Cross in Pistoia was Giottino’s main source. There must be a missing link or a missing predecessor that they both drew on. Giottino took a new step: he transferred the Lamentation onto a relatively large panel. Most altarpieces or retables at that time were assemblages of panels held together by an elaborate carpentered frame. The multilobed altarpiece or polyptych was divided into internal partitions — framed fields or niches — that maintained orderliness, including temporal unity: saints and modern devout were parceled into separate fields, avoiding disunities of time and space. The earliest horizontal narrative scene on a large unbroken expanse of panel (nearly two meters wide) was the famous Annunciation in the Uffizi by Simone Martini and Lippo Memmi, signed and dated 1333, the first of four retables for the altars dedicated to the patron saints of Siena in the Duomo

5.5  Taddeo Gaddi, Entombment of Christ, 1335–40. Fresco, 238.5 × 218 cm. Florence, Santa Croce, Bardi di Vernio Chapel.

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5.6  Simone Martini and Lippo Memmi, Annunciation, 1333. Panel, 305 × 265 cm. Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi.

(ill. 5.6).71 Even Simone’s image, however, was flanked as in any other horizontal altarpiece by compartments containing standing saints. In the wake of Simone’s sensational painting, the compartmentalized retable began to break up. The best artists converted the tension between the old, compartmentalized format and the new pressure to tell stories on an altarpiece by concatenating bodies across a horizontal field, into an artistic resource. In Pietro Lorenzetti’s Birth of the Virgin altarpiece (1342, Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Siena), the framing piers that divide the compartments are transformed into a screen through which we view a scene taking place in two rooms. Through the arched frame of the opulent Strozzi altarpiece (1354–57, Cappella Strozzi, Santa Maria Novella) by Andrea di Cione (Orcagna), the dividing and notionally supporting piers removed, we see a series of figures, standing and kneeling on a strip of patterned ground, interacting with each other in slow cadences against a gold backdrop, as if the figures in a compartmentalized polyptych had woken up and begun to move (ill. 5.7). On the left, Mary presents St. Thomas Aquinas to Christ. On the right, Peter kneels to receive the keys. John the Baptist

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5.7  Andrea di Cione (Orcagna), Enthroned Christ and Saints, 1354–57. Panel, 274 × 296 cm. Florence, Santa Maria Novella, Cappella Strozzi.

looks straight out at us. In this painting’s model, Giotto’s Stefaneschi altar, the angels were gathered around Christ’s throne in reasonably lifelike fashion (ill.  3.8). Orcagna has bundled up some of the angels as abstract cherubim, creating an impression of antiquity. In his celebration of the soft, emotional painting manner of Stefano and Giottino, Carlo Volpe used Orcagna as a foil. Volpe considered Orcagna’s painting flat and lifeless, leading to the dogma of the primacy of disegno, or the linear and calculated painting manner, promoted by Cennino Cennini. This is a version of Millard Meiss’s argument about the decline of Florentine painting around midcentury, though Volpe’s explanation for the sterility of the art of Orcagna is entirely internal to the history of painting, not like Meiss’s based on historical context. But Orcagna’s Strozzi altarpiece is anything but lifeless. “Hierarchy prevails,” David Summers concedes in his analysis of the work, but “the virtual space, brilliant with gold and tempered colours, is alive with a new geometry of gestures and gazes.”72 It is not obvious that this painting is discontinuous with the work of Stefano and Giottino. Already in 1885, Henry Thode questioned

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the cliché of the stagnation of Florentine painting after Giotto — “it only seems so.” His surprising way of putting it was to say that Giottino surpassed Giotto in the formation of figures and so prepared Orcagna’s “pursuit of beauty” (Schönheitsstreben).73 The Strozzi altar, Agnolo’s altar for Santa Maria Novella (ill. 0.1), the San Pier Maggiore altar — all these works, created by the very artists with whom Giottino was working closely in the 1350s and 1360s, are constructed with bodies alone: no setting, no architecture except thrones, few props. The bodies respond to each other like magnets. These works draw no distinction between figure and composition: they are monistic, made all of one substance. They present a limited repertoire of gestures, inexpressive, continuous. These works extend the noble art of praise, maintaining high standards of decorum and gravity. Bright, even lighting removes the configurations from human timescales, working against the hints of animation and consciousness. High points of Trecento art, they are homogeneous, magnetically charged, and hard of access, not inviting like the narrative frescoes. The painter of the San Remigio Pietà also built a composition with minimal setting or props, out of bodies alone. The work was complete as we see it now: there were no supplementary but now missing side panels. But in contrast to the works we have just described, and in view of his subject matter — narrative, not presentational — the artist does not submit his figures to a dominant overall gestalt. Liberated from the conventions of compartmentalization still governing the altar-bound retable, he adapts from Giotto the concept of the composition as a grid of perpendicular bodies. This grid-like infrastructure is the formal legacy of the Giottesque tradition of Lamentations, stemming from the Assisi mural (ill.  4.14). Gravity-determined perpendicularity is the symbolic form of the respect for nature, the resistance to received forms, and the resistance to the temptation to generate emotion with form. An overall perpendicularity reads as truth to the simple laws of nature and to the shared lifeworld of familiar sensations and assumptions. These truths emerged when the painters swept aside inherited pictorial formulas and instead just pictured the moment as they felt it must have been. Not every painter in Giottino’s orbit fully grasped this. The figures of Nardo di Cione, for example, are often denatured by an awkward contrapposto. Giottino’s figures stand on their own two feet, solidly planted on the ground, as do the figures of the Ponce Annunciation. Where the decorous retables were formally closed and could admit the persons of earthly supplicants only under strict conditions of compliance, Giottino’s Lamentation is formally open.

Vasari on the three manners of Trecento painting How did the painter integrate this collection of upright and crumpled bodies, these human shrubs and trees grown up around the horizontal corpse? Vasari addressed this question, indirectly, in enigmatic remarks at the beginning of

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his Life of Giottino. Here he lists three distinct manners of painting, offering the first draft of a formalist history or taxonomy of Trecento art:74 Quando fra l’altre arti quelle che procedono dal disegno si pigliano in gara, e gli artefici lavorano a concorrenza, senza dubbio esercitandosi i buoni ingegni con molto studio, trovano ogni giorno nuove cose per sodisfare ai vari gusti degl’ uomini. E, parlando per ora della pittura, alcuni ponendo in opera cose oscure e inusitate, e mostrando in quelle la difficultà del fare, fanno nell’ombre la chiarezza del loro ingegno conoscere. Altri lavorando le dolci e delicate, pensando quelle dover essere più grate agli occhi di chi le mira per avere più rilievo, tirano agevolmente a sè gli animi della maggior parte degli uomini. Altri poi dipingendo unitamente e, con abbagliare i colori, ribattendo a’ suoi luoghi i lumi e l’ombre delle figure, meritano grandissima lode e mostrano con bella destrezza d’animo i discorsi dell’intelletto: come con dolce maniera, mostrò sempre nell’opere sue Tommaso di Stefano detto Giottino.  When those arts that proceed from design enter into competition and the artisans are rivalling one another, the good minds, no doubt, exerting themselves with much study, discover every day new things to satisfy people’s various tastes. Speaking for now about painting: some, carrying out obscure and unusual things and so demonstrating the difficulty of the technique, make known in the shadows the brightness of their own genius. Others, fashioning the sweet and the delicate, thinking these more likely to please the eyes of all who behold them, so conspicuous are these effects, easily attract to themselves the minds of the majority. Still others, painting in a unified fashion and lowering the tones of the colors, and so reducing to their proper places the lights and shades of their figures, deserve very great praise, and reveal the thoughts of the intellect with beautiful dexterity of mind; as they were revealed with a sweet manner in the works of Tommaso di Stefano, called Giottino.75

Vasari begins by saying that rivalry among artists, and the desire to win the approval of the public, spurs innovation. The implication is that under the pressure of competition artists may swerve from their pursuit of visual truth or the best principles of design. The first of the three described manners is bent on producing cose oscure e inusitate, e mostrando in quelle la difficultà del fare —  technical tricks, perhaps difficult foreshortenings or depictions of architecture, perhaps effects of light and shade: difficulty for its own sake. Vasari disapproves of the painters’ tendency to “demonstrate” rather than hide the difficulty of their art. Vasari speaks of shade and light — fanno nell’ombre la chiarezza del loro ingegno conoscere — not only to suggest that the painters’ tricks involve effects of light, but also to say that, paradoxically, their illustriousness rests on their obscurities. The second manner, which is not necessarily a successive phase but possibly runs in parallel with the first, produces effects dolci e delicate, and is also widely pleasing, an ingratiating manner. The comment that these effects have più rilievo is confusing: I believe it may refer not to effects of depth or volume, or to the distribution of light and shade, but to the conspicuous or striking quality of the achieved sweetness and refinement. Roberto Longhi believed that Vasari was referring here to the Sienese

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painters.76 Carlo Volpe thought he was referring to Bernardo Daddi.77 Vasari may have been thinking of the variegated, musical compositions, involving many juxtapositions of bright colors, of Agnolo Gaddi, Giovanni da Milano, or Lorenzo Monaco (ills. 0.1, 3.2).78 The manner listed last, which Vasari very much approves of, is the manner of the painters dipingendo unitamente, e con abbagliare i colori, ribattendo a’ suoi luoghi i lumi e l’ombre delle figure. This last manner enlists the “unification” or “lowering” of tones in the service of a unification of composition. This implies that the painters of the second manner, seeking to seduce the eyes with sweet and delicate effects, were sometimes guilty of an unnatural heightening or brightening of tones. The sensitive handling of paint that Vasari attributes to the third style, by contrast, involving a softening of contours and a blending of colors, reveals the “discourses” or “thoughts of the intellect,” thus contributing to narrative and psychology. This colorism has an intellectual brief and is not merely sweet and pleasing. The modulated and non-sensationalist approach to color allowed the painter’s conceptions of character and emotion to shine through. This is the manner of Giottino. Longhi argues that Vasari’s third manner also embraces Stefano Fiorentino; Vasari in his description of the Gloria Celeste in the Lower Church at Assisi did after all speak of the maniera dolcissima e tanto unita of Stefano Fiorentino.79 That may be, but the passage we are discussing is the preamble to the life of Giottino, not that of Stefano. Checking Vasari’s words against works, we may agree that the painter’s “unifying” manner is created with a modulated treatment of light, colors, and shadows, a blending of colors without disruption by high tones or deep shadows. Vasari in this passage is striving to account for his own overall admiration for Giottino’s manner of painting, even though Giottino’s compositions would seem to lack the dynamic, expressive qualities characteristic of Raphael, Michelangelo, and the Mannerist art of Vasari’s own time.80 Giottino does little work with curves, and there is little movement. His style would seem to have little in common with Mannerism. Why then is his art, for Vasari, so strangely effective? Because the painting manner is “unified.”81 Both works we know by Giottino and the two works by Stefano, as well as some of the smaller pictures attributed to them, do seem to conform to this description. It is true that Vasari folded into his picture of Giottino several works by Maso di Banco. But some of the qualities he praises were also Maso’s — at least as far as we know this intriguing painter, whose standing was high with Ghiberti (he said that he “abbreviated,” abbreviò molto, the art of painting) — but whose works have mostly not survived. In fact, these very qualities are thought by some to have been passed down to Giottino both by Maso and by his coeval, Giottino’s father and teacher, Stefano.82 Longhi suggested that when Villani called Stefano the simia naturae, he was referring to the direct observation from life of colors.83 Some scholars believe that the soft, atmospheric manner originated among the painters working with Giotto in the Lower Church of Assisi.84 Later in his life of Giottino, Vasari mentions the Coronation of the Virgin in the

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arch over the pulpit in the Lower Church at Assisi, con la solita unione de’ colori —  il che era proprio di questo pittore.85 That painting, now attributed to Puccio Capanna, belongs to the same lineage within the body of works descended from Giotto. Note also that Roger Fry spoke of the “enveloping atmosphere” of the Stefaneschi altar.86 One is tempted to read the paragraph as a microhistory of Trecento painting. It seems to me more likely, however, that Vasari was not recounting a sequence of styles but rather enumerating three different modes of painting found among the painters of the first half and middle of the fourteenth century. After his remarks on the three manners, Vasari goes on to explain why Giottino can be said to have surpassed both Giotto and Stefano: Fu, dunque, costui nella pittura sì diligente e di quella tanto amorevole, che sebbene molte opere di lui non si ritrovano, quelle nondimeno che trovate si sono, erano buone e di bella maniera; perciocchè i panni, i capelli, le barbe e ogni suo lavoro furono fatti et uniti con tanta morbidezza e diligenza, che si vede ch’egli aggiunse senza dubbio l’unione a quest’ arte, e l’ebbe molto più perfetta che Giotto suo maestro e Stefano suo padre avuto non aveano. He was so diligent in painting, then, and so much in love with it, that, although many of his works cannot be found, those nevertheless that have been found are good and in a beautiful manner. The draperies, the hair, the beards and all of his work were fashioned and unified with so much softness and diligence, that it is seen that he undoubtedly added unity to this art, much more perfectly than did his teacher Giotto and his father Stefano.87

What is so perfectly unified by Giottino’s painting manner? The three levels of reality represented by the ancient holy personages, the medieval saints, and the modern portraits. The inhabitants of three time frames now occupy the same virtual space, thanks to the breakdown of the compartmentalized polyptych and the unrolling of pictorial narrative across the horizontal panel opened up by Simone Martini. The softness, morbidezza, achieved by diligence, allowed for the transitions — on the level of the paint layer — between modern patrons and historical or legendary characters. All elements are suspended and equalized by the liquid aesthetic, a homogenizing authority that reads as the authority of the artist’s mind. The historical characters — Mary, John, and the rest — register their awareness of the divine movement behind reality in live time, as it were, absorbing with their bodies and emotions the shocks produced by the penetration of the deity into earthly life. This collision is legible on their bodies, which are fused by the artist into a total form. The modern devout, by contrast — the two kneeling women, centuries removed from the age of apostles and martyrs — must seek the divine with their minds, encouraged by ideas, words, and images. The devout patrons cannot participate in the grieving. They do not presume to mimic the gestures seen and cries heard inside the world that hosts them. They are both guests and hosts at once. They

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would seem to be far less susceptible beholders than their sister Angela da Foligno, who was unable even to look at a painting: And when I saw the Passion of Christ depicted, I could hardly bear it, a fever would come over me and I would become sick. For this reason my companion hid from me images of the Passion, so that I wouldn’t see them.88

The two painted women carry gravitas and pattern over from the social world, lending those qualities to the artwork. They absorb what they see with equanimity because the outcome, for them, is not in doubt. The painting manner had to bridge this schism between the positions of the modern and the historical witnesses. From a distant vantage point, however, the modern supplicants and the historical participants may not seem so far removed from one another, but rather more like points on a spectrum. None of them loses hope, because the Christian story is never tragic. The overall shape of the myth, grasped in advance, is affirmative. Here we arrive at the paradox of Erich Auerbach’s thought. Auerbach was interested in the tragedy of ordinary existence but may have overrated Christianity’s ability to absorb this worldview. The center of gravity of Auerbach’s entire project — this, a measure of his audacity — was a Christian poet who precisely entitled his magnum opus Commedia. The tragic mode is not what the supplicant portrait mode explores.89 In his book Michelangelo and the Reform of Art, Alexander Nagel says that ancient tragedy, which places “dramatic emphasis on the irreversibility of the hero’s death,” is not compatible with the Christian axioms of resurrection and redemption.90 This principle was strained in the depiction of more emotional episodes like the Lamentation. Nagel goes on to argue that the thesis of loss overcome was more effectively supported by altarpieces than by scenes in narrative cycles. The altarpiece, he argues, associated with an altar, more readily “connected [the depicted subject matter] to the scheme of redemption celebrated in every mass rite.” “Altarpieces were more likely to stress the ‘figural’ significance of biblical events.”91 Nagel compares Giotto’s Lamentation at Padua to Giottino’s San Remigio Pietà. Giotto places the scene decisively in a landscape and in history — there are no anachronistic visitors. The dramatic and emotional elements are brought out. Giottino, for his part, places the scene before an abstract gold ground. The scene is presented not as an episode in a sequence but as self-contained, the sole object of attention as it is for the modern women inside the scene. The emotions — as we have seen — are concentrated in the facial expressions but not so much in the body language of the figures. The woman at Christ’s feet as well as the modern women model Christian devotion. The picture’s diagrammatic quality — and here Nagel invokes the pioneering article on the painting by Karl Birkmeyer — brings out its “suprahistorical,” symbolic dimension.92 Giottino’s painting was not necessarily associated with an altar, as we will see, but the point still holds. An association with a tomb would have generated similar meanings.

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The soft blending allows the work to achieve the impossible: the delivery of multiple perspectives all at once, all overlaid on top of one another. The embedded portrait of the patron is both inside and outside the painting. The portraits represent the people who caused (paid for) the painting in a state — a posture of worship, a rapt, reverential frame of mind — elicited by an imaginative awareness of sacred history. What their imagination shows them — imagination, no doubt, guided by paintings — is just what this painting depicts: Christ’s body surrounded by his familiars. So, the painting shows us both an image of a Lamentation much like one the patrons might have known, and an expanded double portrait: the patrons themselves plus what they see. The physical panel in the church is all these things at once: it is an image of an event; an image of an imagined event; an image of real people absorbed in such an imagining; and finally an image that may itself inspire or generate further mental and material images . . . All this sounds like a challenge, but it is not, for that is just what paintings do. It is no less than what the elite thirteenth-century illuminated manuscripts were doing, except that the new technologies of the representation of space and of physiognomy multiplied the opportunities for paradox and aesthetic confusion. The artist is asked to make the portraits. The artist has an interest in making those portraits cooperate with the painting’s overall gestalt, which in a traditional painting mode is the imagistic sign or glyph of the historical event, the form of the event’s mythic coherence. It is hard enough to assimilate a portrait to such a form without creating imbalance or discontinuity. On top of it, there is now a new interest in the realistic rendering of the sacred scenes. The narrative realism conflicts with the imagistic sign. But the portrait interferes with the realism. And the realism in turn interferes with the rebus or diagram-like quality of the portrait. The portrait’s direct reference to the individual — non-problematic in a pictorial rebus, which is just a montage of discrete elements — is now profiled against the remaining, non-referential portion of the picture, that is, the conventional interpictorial material (the composition derived from Giotto) now treated in a realistic fashion. The portrait raises the question of the respective apportioning of credit to the tradition and to the artist, a question that in earlier times was not routinely asked. The referential links, not dependent on mutable conventions or codings, override the overall picture of reality presented by the painting. The portraits are like stigmata in the body of the painting, disfiguring traces of an encounter with a more real reality outside the picture. Only an integrative painting manner could heal those wounds. Here is Vasari’s description of the fresco now in the Accademia, attributed by Ghi­ berti to Maso di Banco but by everyone since to Giottino (ill. 5.1): su la piazza di detta chiesa, per ire al Canto a la Cuculia, sul cantone del convento, quel tabernacolo ch’ancora vi si vede con la Nostra Donna et altri Santi dattorno, con alcune teste le quali tirano forte a la maniera moderna. Quivi cercò variare e cangiare le carnagioni e similmente

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mostrò accompagnar[e], nella varietà de’ colori e ne’ panni, e con grazia e con giudicio tutte le sue figure, le quali molto s’ingegnò correggere e fuggì quegli errori che spesse volte all’occhio dànno cagione di biasimo al giudicio di molti. on the piazza of that church [S. Spirito], on the way to the Canto alla Cuculia, on the corner of the convent, that tabernacle that is still seen there, with Our Lady and other Saints around her, with several heads that tend strongly towards the modern manner. In this work he sought to vary and to blend [cangiare] the flesh-colors, and to bring together [accompagnare] all the figures, with all their variety of colors and draperies, and with grace and judgment. He contrived to correct those figures, avoiding the errors which in the judgment of many often give occasions to the eye for blame.93

The maniera moderna, he says: for Vasari, Giottino points forward. The biasimo al giudicio di molti are the negative judgments of the present, Vasari’s own time, of Trecento painting with its facetted, modular manner and too-crisp contours. Giottino avoided all that. Let us check Vasari’s description against the painting, a large work, 310 centimeters in height.94 Such outdoor tabernacles were and are common in Florence.95 Of course Giottino’s brush is not the last to have touched it. Ghiberti, Billi, and Vasari all saw it on Piazza Santo Spirito. Milanesi in the later nineteenth century reported that the work had been repainted and then destroyed, but then he seems only to have been relaying the account of the eighteenth-century editors of Vasari.96 But then in 1909, Alessandro Chiappelli identified a long-overlooked fresco in the Via del Leone as the very one mentioned in the old sources as at Santo Spirito.97 The basis for this identification was purely stylistic. One must assume that the fresco was relocated at some point between Vasari and Milanesi, perhaps in the eighteenth century. It seems to have been moved indoors in 1957; Berenson saw it then and attributed it to the early Nardo di Cione.98 The body of the enthroned Virgin Mary is voluminous and blocklike, and the effect is enhanced by the slightly small size of her head (ill. 5.1 and detail, p. 183). Two angels flanking her gabled throne hold a cloth of honor. Six more angels or saints train their gazes on her and her child, three of them with arms crossed on the breast. At the lower right a tonsured saint in white turns his body toward the Madonna. At the lower left, John the Baptist turns an austere, weary gaze outward and downward, and points to Jesus. John in such compositions often plays the intermediary role. Here his features are sharply drawn, his body, arms, and hands poised and sensitive. On Mary’s face falls, in Boskovits’s phrase, the “shadow of fatigue.” The accompanying saints are expressionless in their “dry and intense concentration.”99 The painter achieves these effects, Vasari tells us, by “varying and blending” the complexions. He is speaking of the soft modelling in the faces of the figures: the blushes of pink in the cheeks, the more somber notes in the faces of the male saints at the lower edges. The smooth transitions in tone and hue across the surface of the skin, the overall balanced variety of colors: this is what Vasari calls the modern manner. And some of the same effects are found in the San Remigio

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Detail of ill. 5.1, Giottino, Madonna and Child with Saints.

Pietà, once one allows for the medium, the tempera paint that is denser and less fugitive than fresco. In sum, Vasari’s chimerical “Giottino” is unwieldy but useful to us because his overall judgment of the artist is mainly based, it would seem, on the San Remigio Pietà and the Santo Spirito tabernacle, and so we can check it.

Giottino and compagnia In 1369, as mentioned above, “Giotto di Maestro Stefano,” our Giottino, was named in a document recording payments to twenty-four painters working on the renovation of the Vatican Palace undertaken by Pope Urban V.100 Three painters were better paid than the others, paid at a monthly rate that amounted to at least fifty percent more and in some cases double the daily rate paid to the others. Those three were Giovanni Gaddi (the son of Taddeo; no known extant works), the archpresbyter Giovanni (possibly a Roman artist),101 and Giotto di Stefano.102 Among the painters paid at the ordinary rate

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were such accomplished artists as Agnolo Gaddi and Giovanni da Milano.103 Giovanni da Milano is today considered a protagonist in this phase of Florentine art history, even if Vasari does not apportion him a vita of his own, mentioning him only as a pupil of Taddeo Gaddi. Longhi credits Rumohr with having first judged Giovanni da Milano properly.104 Giovanni was a Lombard who is recorded working in Florence in 1346. Later, he seems to have spent the better part of a decade in Siena before returning to Florence in 1363. Erling Skaug, tracking the punch marks across a wide range of Sienese and Florentine panels, has argued that Giovanni brought with him to Florence a set of tools and that he created, or perhaps reconsolidated, what has been called a compagnia, a kind of painters’ cooperative involving sharing of tools, workshop space, and presumably artistic ideas.105 Skaug listed six pictures by six different artists with punch marks made with Giovanni’s tools, one of them the San Remigio Pietà.106 This sets the painting’s terminus post quem as 1363. Skaug says that a “majority” of Florentine painters between 1363 and 1375 at one point or another used these punches. He describes a “large joint enterprise” that included the Cione brothers and Giottino as well as Niccolò di Tommaso and Giovanni del Biondo. This hypothesis is supported by stylistic comparisons. Volpe, for example, believed Giottino was working closely with Nardo di Cione. Boskovits compared a Madonna and Saints by Jacopo di Cione (private collection), as well as a Madonna and Child by the Master of the Misericordia in Ponce, to Giottino’s fresco once at Piazza Santo Spirito.107 That same fresco may be compared to the Madonna and Child by Nardo di Cione formerly at the New-York Historical Society and now in the Brooklyn Museum.108 Evidence of a reception of the San Remigio Pietà within this network of painters is not hard to find. The composition is echoed in works by Nardo di Cione and Giovanni Bonsi.109 St. Benedict in a panel in Stockholm by Nardo, holding a red book, resembles Giottino’s Benedict.110 The cross in the Crucifixion in the National Gallery attributed to Jacopo di Cione has a large titulus mounted on a thin supporting stick, gold letters on red, and reading not YNRI but INRY.111 The Lamentation by Giovanni da Milano in the Galleria Corsini, one scene on a panel divided into eight sections, compresses Giottino’s composition into a square (ill. 5.8).112 There are some striking similarities: the Virgin holds Christ in her arms; the woman in the lower right corner with chin in hand resembles the blonde mourner in the lower right corner of the Giottino; the figure of John with clasped hands has been rotated and shifted to the right. The peculiar expression of St. Nicholas in the picture in Rome, not at the Lamentation but in one of the side panels, matches the expression of St. Remigius in the picture in Florence. The painting by Giovanni da Milano is considered by many his earliest known work, however, datable to about 1355. If we accept this and also wish to persist in considering it an adaptation of the San Remigio Pietà and not one of its models, then the picture by Giottino would have to be dated prior to 1355.113

5.8  Giovanni da Milano, panel with eight scenes including Lamentation over the Dead Christ, after 1363. Panel, 87 × 55 cm. Rome, Galleria Corsini.

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5.9  Cenni di Francesco di ser Cenni or Giovanni del Biondo, Lamentation over the Dead Christ, late 1370s. Panel, 45.6 × 85.6 cm. Munich, Alte Pinakothek.

The lunette-formed Lamentation in Munich, attributed to Cenni di Francesco di ser Cenni or Giovanni del Biondo and dated on the basis of style to the later 1370s, is directly dependent on the San Remigio Pietà (ill. 5.9).114 The titulus, though not fully visible, is mounted on the cross on a thin peg. Mary embraces Christ, and Nicodemus holds the nails — both rare motifs, as Vavalà pointed out.115 There are peculiar doublings, as in the San Remigio picture: Joseph of Arimathea, holding the ointment jar — or is it the ciborium in which Joseph collected the blood of Christ? — and standing tall at dead center, resembles Christ himself. Another man, lacking a halo, kisses Christ’s feet — who could this be? Beyond Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea and of course John, no man at this scene customarily displays such fervent devotion. Here there is one woman without a halo, in a dark hooded cloak; apart from her, the company is equally divided, seven men and seven women. The Strozzi funerary chapel at Santa Maria Novella by Agnolo Gaddi (1370–75), finally, is indebted to Giottino: here John and Joseph of Arimathea have proper haloes; another man with a glowing aureole would seem to be Nicodemus; and two men have unmarked heads — perhaps either portraits or placeholders (ill. 5.10).116 Agnolo’s brother Zanobi Gaddi, by the way, married in 1381 a member of the Aldighieri family, major patrons of the church of San Remigio in the fourteenth century.117 I would propose as one of the features of Giottino’s Pietà that struck later artists the wounds left by the crown of thorns on Christ’s forehead (detail, p. 231). Some later pictures that include this motif are the Entombment in San

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5.10  Agnolo Gaddi, Entombment of Christ, 1370–75. Fresco. Florence, Santa Maria Novella, Strozzi funerary chapel.

Carlo dei Lombardi in Florence by Niccolò di Pietro Gerini (1380–85?);118 the Crucifixion by Giotto (?) in Berlin;119 and a Dead Christ with Mary, perhaps by a Neapolitan follower of Giotto, in London.120 The forehead wounds were surely well thought out by Giottino: the relics are one of the picture’s themes. Nicodemus holds the nails, and yet there is no Crown of Thorns depicted. Perhaps the saints’ hands on the heads of the two women are to be understood as a conferral of the crown of thorns onto their heads, sealing their complicity.121

The mourners Vasari made no remark about the presence of the modern women in the picture at San Remigio, perhaps because he knew so many pictures of his own day with embedded patrons. And yet indirectly he does gather them into his description of the painting. It is said, he begins, che Tommaso fu persona maninconica e molto solitaria, ma nell’arte amorevole e studiosissimo, come apertamente si vede in Fiorenza nella chiesa di San Romeo, per una tavola lavorata da lui a tempera con tanta diligenzia et amore che di suo non si è mai visto in legno cosa meglio fatta. Questa tavola è posta nel tramezzo di detta chiesa a man destra, et èvvi dentro un Cristo morto, con le Marie intorno e co’ Niccodemi, accompagnati di altre figure le quali con amaritudine et atti dolcissimi et affettuosi piangono quella morte, torcendosi con diversi gesti di mani e battendosi di maniera che nella aria del viso si dimostra assai chiaramente l’aspro dolore del costar tanto i peccati nostri.

188 that Tommaso was a melancholic and very solitary person, but in his art passionate and studious, as obviously seen from a panel in the Church of S. Remigio in Florence, made by him in tempera with such great diligence and love that there has never been seen a better work on panel by his hand. This panel is placed in the rood screen of that church, on the right-hand side. There is a Dead Christ surrounded by the Marys and the Nicodemuses, accompanied by other figures who lament His death with bitterness and with the most sweet and loving gestures, wringing their hands with diverse gestures, and beating themselves such that the expressions of their faces reveal clearly enough their bitter sorrow at the great cost of our sins.122

In this context, the “diligence” Vasari praises in Giottino (five times!) would seem to refer to the labor-intensive method of blending the colors, or perhaps more generally to the painter’s scrupulously evenhanded approach to his descriptive task, his egalitarian sweeping together of the historical and modern mourners under a single stylistic principle. Vasari’s enumeration of the figures in the painting disregards the difference between the expressive manners of the historical figures and the more composed, alert demeanors of the anachronistic interlopers. For whom does he mean when he speaks of the accompanying altre figure? Do they with their diversi gesti include also the modern women? Note that the little church of San Remigio is only a long stone’s throw from the Palazzo Vecchio; Vasari must have known the picture pretty well.

I Niccodemi In this passage — and only in the first, 1550 edition of his Lives — Vasari uses a strange word: I Niccodemi, the Nicodemuses, in the plural. There was of course only one man named Nicodemus present at the Crucifixion of Christ, a Pharisee and “a ruler of the Jews.” Pharisees were adherents of a school of teachings, quasi-priestly figures. In Christ’s fatal hour, Nicodemus brings to Golgotha “a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about a hundred litras weight” (a considerable amount), to be buried with the body (John 19:39) (detail, p. 189). In pictures, Nicodemus lends a hand to Joseph of Arimathea, another exemplary Jew who joined and aided the family and followers of Christ. In some traditions, however, Nicodemus was not so exemplary, but rather an ambiguous figure on account of his apparent prudence and even hypocrisy in having chosen, earlier, to visit and converse with Jesus only by night (John 3:2). This is why he is sometimes represented without a halo (see p. 153). In the San Remigio Pietà, Nicodemus would seem to be the figure in white at the right rear, holding the jar of myrrh and aloes. This reminder that Christ’s body was prepared for burial, embalmed, also invokes the origins of portraiture as explored by Dominic Olariu (p. 43). Nicodemus also holds, in his extended right hand covered by a fold of his own robe, the extracted nails, and speaks with an older man who must be Joseph of Arimathea.123 Is he showing the nails to Joseph? What

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Detail of ill. 5.2, Giottino, Lamentation over the Dead Christ.

did the nails prove? Is he making a point about their future value as relics? In a predella by Lorenzo Monaco, Nicodemus holds up the nails in the same fashion; on the other side of the picture, Joseph of Arimathea holds up the crown of thorns.124 The two men are clearly showing the relics, and yet no one in the scene is looking at them. Why does Vasari speak of multiple Niccodemi in the San Remigio Pietà? The young man in red and blue at the base of the Cross is John. The figure just below him, kissing Christ’s hand, could be understood as a man but is more likely a woman. Typically, in such scenes, there is a proliferation of women, most of them named Mary, as we noted in the last chapter (p. 148). In describing the Lamentation by Fra Angelico now in San Marco, Antonio Billi spoke of un coro delle Marie, a chorus of Marys, seemingly without worrying too much whether they really were all called Mary or not.125 Vasari seems to have transferred such a usage to the male side of the ledger, speaking of the Nicodemuses the way one spoke of the Marys. His carelessness — since there do not seem to be any extra or unnamed men in the scene — indicates his willingness to gather all the figures in the scene under one heading: the mourners who “lament His death with bitterness and with the most sweet and loving gestures.” For the reserved gestures of the interlopers — the modern women — are still gestures;

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they express awe and reverence in their own muted way. More particularly the elevation of the name Nicodemus to a category suggests Vasari’s awareness that the true theme of this and every other Lamentation is the predicament of the individual suspended among multiple commitments, or between public duty and private conscience — the very predicament of the historical Nicodemus. The phrase le Marie e i Niccodemi invokes a generic witnessing function that can embrace named figures, unnamed historical figures, unnamed modern placeholders for laity, and named modern portraits. In the second edition of Vasari’s book, published in 1568, the word Niccodemi in the life of Giottino was altered to the singular Niccodemo. However, Vasari used the word Niccodemi, in the same way that he used it in the description of the San Remigio Pietà, in two other passages in the Lives, and in both editions.126 A possible context for this usage is the debate among Protestant Reformers about the moral character of the biblical Nicodemus. Already in the late 1520s, Swiss Reformers were speaking of the pusillanimous or clandestine followers of their movement as Nicodemiti. John Calvin publicized the term in his treatise of 1544 harshly condemning those cautious dissemblers as “Nicodemites.” The Reform movement would soon die, Calvin realized, if those drawn to Protestant teachings were unwilling to break openly with the established Church.127 Some German Reformers were more patient, realizing that not every thoughtful layperson was willing to rush headlong into martyrdom. The theologian Johannes Brenz said in 1529 that he would gladly take the name Nicodemus. The distinction between a Nicodemus and the category Nicodemites is important because, according to Carlos Eire, there was no creed or movement called “Nicodemism,” only individuals.128 The debates of the Protestant Reformation extended into elite Italian circles in the 1540s, 1550s, and 1560s, echoing in particular in the orbit of Michelangelo, Vasari’s mentor and lodestar.129 In a far from exhaustive survey of contemporary sermons and statements on this topic, I found only one use of the Latin word Nicodemi, as opposed to Nicodemiti; in other words, a reference not to dissemblers as a category, but to a dissembler as a Nicodemus: in a letter by Zwingli (1539) cited by Carlo Ginzburg — though there are no doubt many more to be found.130 Few patrons took up Vasari’s implicit invitation to project oneself onto Nicodemus. The historical figure Nicodemus does not seem to bear the features of any modern person in a fourteenth-century painting — no crypto-­ portraits inhabiting the figure of this crypto-Christian, in other words. Nicodemus overcame his shadowy reputation by becoming in legend an eyewitness par excellence: he was the alleged author of the Gospel of Nicodemus, where he figures as a vigorous defender of Christ against the other Jews.131 In legend, he was also a sculptor. The large carved image of Christ on the Cross in Lucca, known as the Volto Santo and considered a miracle-­ working image, mentioned even in Dante (Inferno 21.48), was attributed to Nicodemus.132 The statue, which has Christ wearing an ankle-length tunic, probably dates from the ninth century. The Pisan Dominican Giordano da

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Rivalto, in a sermon in the Italian language preached in Florence in 1305, said that Nicodemus “painted on a beautiful panel” (dipinse . . . in una bella tavola) Christ on the Cross as he was (a quella figura e modo che Cristo fu) — for Nicodemus was really there.133 Giordano’s words suggest that Nicodemus was also known as a painter. Artists, especially sculptors, identified with Nicodemus. Corine Schleif invokes the relief by Benedetto Antelami in Parma (twelfth century), where the artist’s name or signature appears above the figure on the ladder removing the nails.134

The original installation of the panels It would be easier to make sense of the interpenetration of the sacred and profane, as explored in these paintings, if we could establish their original locations and functions. This is not so easy to do. The Annunciation now in Ponce does not have an old provenance.135 Nor is the attribution secure. The picture has been attributed to Agnolo Gaddi (van Marle), Spinello Aretino, Giovanni del Biondo (Meiss), Maso di Banco, and Bartolo di Fredi. But Longhi and Berenson (with a question mark) both pointed to Jacopo di Cione, and that is where the attribution rests for now.136 There is a close relation to the panels of the San Pier Maggiore altarpiece, attributable to Jacopo di Cione and Niccolò di Tommaso (who was a pupil of Nardo di Cione and may have been the “Niccolaio” mentioned in Sacchetti’s story about the conversation among the painters at San Miniato). Jacopo di Cione was of course the brother of Andrea di Cione, known as Orcagna. Yet as far as I can see no one has thought to connect the Ponce Annunciation to the intriguing report in Vasari that there was a painting signed by Orcagna in the church of San Remigio, presso alla porta del fianco (near the door on the side wall).137 The local historian Giuseppe Richa in 1754 added the information that the picture by Orcagna was an Annunciation, and that it was to be found in the sacristy at San Remigio together with the Pietà by Giottino.138 The similarities in format and conception of the two paintings embolden us at least to consider identifying the Ponce picture with the picture Vasari said was by Orcagna. “Near the door on the side wall” would place it not too far from the Pietà, which we recall Vasari said was on the right side of the tramezzo (if that tramezzo had extended across the side aisle, then it would have met the church’s right wall near a door).139 But Vasari mentions a signature. If the Annunciation in Ponce is the picture Vasari saw in San Remigio, then either he was mistaken about the signature, or there was a signature on an original frame that is now lost.140 In 1960, a new painting surfaced: a small Annunciation that very curiously reverses the customary left and right positions of the angel and Mary, and that bears Orcagna’s signature and the date 1346 (ill. 5.11). This picture is based on the Annunciation now in the Pinacoteca of Siena by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, and dated 1344, a picture in square format (ill. 5.12).141 In his

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5.11  Andrea di Cione (Orcagna)?, Annunciation, 1346. Panel, approx. 78 × 58 cm. Private collection.

publication of this work in 1961, Umberto Pini said that it had entered the Gerli collection in Milan in 1947.142 There is also a portrait, identified by the inscription as the wool manufacturer Bellozzius Bartoli. Today, almost everyone seems to agree that this was the picture Vasari saw at San Remigio. Andrea De Marchi and Maria Bandini propose that it was mounted on the tramezzo alongside the Pietà by Giottino (Annunciations on altars being unheard of in Florence at this point.)143 But there are many reasons to question Pini’s argument that the Gerli picture is the one described by Vasari. Pini asserts that it went straight from the church of San Remigio into the collection of Horace de Landau (1824– 1903), the banker and book collector, in the nineteenth century. But Milanesi said already in 1846 that he didn’t know where the Orcagna picture from San Remigio was. One would have to determine whether Landau was already buying pictures before 1846; and one would have to accept the unlikely fact that the church sold the picture to Landau in, say, 1845, but did not tell Milanesi. In any case, how could Pini in 1960 possibly know, without anyone else knowing it, that the picture went straight from San Remigio into a nineteenth-century private collection? And given the significance of Vasari’s mention of Orcagna’s signature, it is incredible that no one before 1960 saw this picture and connected it to Vasari. Miklós Boskovits discussed the painting in 1971 and, although he admired the style and was ready to give it to Orcagna, pointed out that there is no proof

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5.12  Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Annunciation, 1344. Panel, 130 × 150 cm. Siena, Pinacoteca Nazionale.

that the section of frame with the signature belongs to the rest of the picture, and that Richard Offner considered it “beyond question a ruin of the early fifteenth century.”144 The photos Pini published from 1947, before restoration, reveal that it was in poor condition. Pini did not give the dimensions of the picture. We can only guess that they are similar to the dimensions of the apparently modern copy in the Louvre.145 Boskovits did not see the picture; to this day, it seems, no one has. Finally, if there had been an Annunciation by Orcagna in San Remigio, with an unusual right-to-left orientation, someone would have copied or adapted the composition. Until someone has inspected the Gerli Annunciation properly, I am ready to set it aside, under suspicion as a modern forgery, perhaps overpainting and inscribing an old panel, perhaps appending to one panel a segment of frame with a signature from another panel. The picture too conveniently fills the

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5.13  Taddeo Gaddi, Annunciation, 1340s. Panel, 123 × 83 cm. Fiesole, Museo Bandini.

gap left by Vasari’s mention.146 Instead, I think it more likely that the Ponce picture was the Annunciation that Vasari saw and attributed to Orcagna, even though it lacks the signature that Vasari said he saw. Neither the Gerli picture nor the Annunciation by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, incidentally, was the model for the composition of the Ponce Annunciation. That model directly or indirectly was the Annunciation by Taddeo Gaddi in the Museo Bandini in Fiesole, a picture datable to the 1340s (ill. 5.13).147 In the Bandini Annunciation, Mary occupies an elaborate throne that stands for the built environment in general, the “world.” The angel kneels, his wrists crossed on his knee. (Admittedly it is Ambrogio’s version, not the Bandini version, that has Mary’s arms crossed on her breast, just as in the Ponce Annunciation.) There are a number of pictures dependent on the Bandini Annunciation: the panel at Harvard by the Master of the Orcagnesque Misericordia, with four scenes including an Annunciation, employing the vertical format and with the angel holding a palm frond (ill. 5.14);148 the Annunciation by the Master of Santa Verdiana, also with palm frond, but also with Mary’s wrists crossed on the breast as well as the white pallium with black crosses worn by the angel,

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5.14  Master of the Orcagnesque Misericordia, Annunciation, 1375–1400. Panel, 82.5 × 54.3 cm. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard Art Museums.

both motifs found also in the Ponce picture;149 the horizontal Annunciation by Bicci di Lorenzo, with Mary’s hands crossed on the breast;150 a fresco at San Marco, set in an interior with two patrons kneeling in a doorway at the left, behind the angel;151 the Annunciation by the Master of the Annunciation of the Accademia — vertical in format, Mary is standing;152 and the Annunciation in two parts, flanking a window, by Niccolò di Pietro Gerini, a detached fresco now in the sacristy of Santa Felicità.153 There are also Annunciations that may ultimately derive from the Taddeo Gaddi picture in the Museo Bandini but may also be dependent in various ways on the Ponce picture, which was very likely in a conspicuous location in Florence even if it was not at San Remigio. Overlooked in this discussion has been the large Annunciation in the Yale University Art Gallery attributed to Niccolò di Pietro Gerini (ill. 5.15).154 The horizontal dimension, 136.8 centimeters, is very close to that of both the San Remigio Pietà and the Ponce Annunciation. With the Ponce Annunciation, this panel shares: its triangular gable; the somewhat heavy-set, blocklike kneeling angel, with its white pallium adorned with black crosses;155 Mary’s architectural throne; and her arms crossed on her breast. The Ponce picture has Christ as a child in the sky, rather than God. But Christ as embryonic child in an Annunciation was unknown in Tuscan painting at this point, and so it has been argued that this is an overpainting.156

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5.15  Niccolò di Pietro Gerini, Annunciation, 1380s. Panel, 116.5 × 136.8 cm. New Haven, Connecticut, Yale University Art Gallery.

Now let us consider what facts we have concerning the original setting of Giottino’s Pietà or Lamentation. Again, we can only be certain that it was at San Remigio by 1550. Still, it is plausible and perhaps probable that the picture was originally made for San Remigio, a modest three-aisled Gothic structure between the Palazzo Vecchio and Santa Croce, a church under the governance of the Augustinian Canons Regular. Vasari reports that the panel was mounted on the right side of the church’s tramezzo, or rood screen. A rood screen is a partition between the nave and the choir. That structure no longer exists at San Remigio: it was destroyed at some point, though it is not clear when.157 In Florence, the mendicant churches Santa Croce and Santa Maria Novella, much larger buildings, also had rood screens. They were demolished in the 1560s by none other than Vasari, and they are difficult to reconstruct.158 The rood screen at San Remigio cannot have been very large, perhaps a wall

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spanning only the width of the nave, perhaps extending into the side aisles (ill. 5.16). The distance between the octagonal pillars, edge to edge — the width of the nave — is 6.2 meters. The side aisles are 2.9 meters in width. The pillars themselves are one meter thick. Discolored stones in the right-hand pillar mark the location of the pulpit, now absent. A triangular or wedge-shaped discolored stone may replace a stone that served as the anchor for the pulpit. The top edge of those stones, marking the level of the pulpit, is 2.75 meters (nine feet) above the ground — a reasonable height for the rood screen.159 It is sometimes asserted that the Lamentation by Giottino was not an altarpiece, because of its placement on or in the rood screen. But rood screens often had recessed chapels with altars and retables. In his Lives of the Artists, Vasari describes a couple of dozen pictures that were mounted on or in a rood screen: nel tramezzo. Several times, he mentions pictures in chapels in the rood screen.160 Joanna Cannon lists sixteen Dominican churches where the presence of altars — sometimes several — on or in rood screens was noted.161 These screens no longer exist. As we said before, few altarpieces depicted single episodes spread across large unbroken surfaces. That is another reason to doubt this was an altarpiece.162 But even if the San Remigio painting stood on a private altar on or before the rood screen, its dissociation from the church’s regular public altars, not to speak of its high altar, granted the painter a certain freedom.

5.16  Church of San Remigio, Florence, interior.

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If the San Remigio panel was not associated with an altar at all but was simply mounted on the rood screen, then it is perhaps best to think of it as a memorial or funerary image. These were pictures placed above or near tombs, providing a measure of spectacle to sustain the memory of the dead. This class of images is still poorly understood. It may have included the mural Lamentation by Taddeo Gaddi at Santa Croce. The range of possible formats and arrangements was vast. Michele Bacci gives the example of a fresco in San Domenico, Arezzo, depicting a Madonna della Misericordia sheltering a crowd under her cloak and facing the Enthroned Christ (c. 1350). An inscription on the lower edge in the vernacular language says that the tomb of Monna Tora di Ventura, the wife of a grocer, is nearby, and that they both hope to rest in peace.163 In the northern European tradition the term “epitaph” has been used to designate a sacred image with a portrait and an inscription and placed not on an altar but near a tomb. Such images emerged around 1350.164 There is reason to believe that the lunette was a preferred format for such images, perhaps because it fits in round-arched wall-niches designed for tombs.165 In the introduction to this book, we glanced at the lunette by Paolo Veneziano for the tomb of Doge Francesco Dandolo (1339) in the Chapter House of the Franciscan church in Venice, the Frari (ill. 0.3). The panel represents Dandolo, in red and ermine garments and his cap of office, kneeling before the Enthroned Virgin and Child, recommended by his name-saint; on the other side, there is the Dogaressa Elisabetta Contarini and St. Elizabeth of Portugal (or Hungary), both dressed as Franciscan tertiaries. The panel was lodged above the tomb and beneath the arched canopy.166 The format was not so new. The lunette-shaped Deposition by Nicola Pisano in Lucca (1260–65) was associated with a tomb.167 At the tomb of Bonagiunta Tignosini at the cloister of San Francesco at Lucca the patron is depicted kneeling before the Madonna and Child, with St. Francis on the other side (1274?).168 Another possible funerary image is the lunette-shaped Lamentation in Munich based on the San Remigio Pietà (ill. 5.9). The lunette-shaped panel in the Metropolitan Museum (c. 1365) by Giovanni da Milano, the collaborator of Giottino, is one of the rare images of this period that depicts actual physical contact between a modern mortal and Christ himself (ill. 5.17).169 Another example of depicted contact is the rectangular panel in the Denver Art Museum attributed to Silvestro dei Gherarducci, depicting Christ as Man of Sorrows rising from the tomb (c. 1365). To the right is John and to the left the Virgin Mary with her hand firmly on the shoulder of the black-robed supplicant (ill.  5.18).170 One may speculate that a funerary context licensed a physical contact indicating that the deceased had already crossed over into Mary’s sphere.171 I am not competent to assess the Byzantine tradition of funerary images but will note that Paul A. Underwood, in his monograph on the Kariye Djami (the Church of the Holy Savoir in Chora) in Constantinople, speaks of early fourteenth-century funerary frescoes in the Parecclesia: tombs in wall niches, with full-length fresco portraits of deceased and family members on rear walls of the niches.172 Katherine Marsengill, meanwhile, discusses a twelfth-century

5.17  Giovanni da Milano, Madonna and Child, c. 1365. Panel, 68.9 × 144.1 cm. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

5.18  Silvestro dei Gherarducci, Christ as Man of Sorrows, c. 1365. Panel, 30 × 64 cm. Denver Art Museum.

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text by Isaak Komnenos, brother of John II “Sebastokrater,” about the transfer of a tomb monument to a new site.173 Isaak’s instructions were to bring the portraits of his parents but to leave his own portrait at the old site, thus most likely a panel. This is evidence of the practice of placing portraits at the tomb site. There are no surviving examples in situ, but Marsengill reproduces two fourteenth-century panels from the eastern sphere, involving portraits together with the Madonna and Child, that seem to have functioned as funerary portraits of this type. Who commissioned the San Remigio Pietà? The emblems in the medallions in the pedestal of the painting, much damaged, are simply dragons, not coats of arms. Similar ornaments appear on other paintings, for example on the socle of Orcagna’s Pentecost polyptych in the Accademia (1365–70).174 The antiquarian Stefano Rosselli in his manuscript on Florentine tombs (1657), however, could still make out the forms of stemmi or coats of arms on the work’s original frame. Rosselli’s descriptions do not quite match the work, but, given the damaged state of the decorations already then, what he saw could be compatible with the stemma of the Bellacci family, who are the work’s most likely patrons. The Bellacci were meat purveyors who rose to considerable wealth in the Trecento. Bellaccio di Puccio was elected prior of the Arte dei Beccai, his guild or corporation, in 1342 and 1346. His sons moved into banking. Rosselli reported that “according to some” the Bellacci paid for the reconstruction of the choir of the church San Remigio as well as the tramezzo, probably between 1360 and 1368.175 The report on a pastoral visit of 1575 mentions a Cappella della Pietà — so-called on account of the painting? — under Bellacci patronage. Whether the tramezzo still existed at that point, and whether the painting had been moved, we do not know. Rosselli in 1657 lists a quadro antichissimo della Deposizione di Croce di Nostro Signore over the door leading to the cloister, in the right-side aisle. He says that this painting came from an altar belonging to the Bellacci family located on the wall of the left-side aisle. A libro dei ricordi of 1658, however, describes a Pietà on the colonna del Pergamo avanti al coro (the column supporting the pulpit), which is more or less what Vasari had said. Possibly the paintings described by Rosselli and by the report of 1658 were not the same. In any case, by the time of Richa (1754), the Pietà now in the Uffizi had been moved to the sacristy of San Remigio. Richa’s description of the church prompted the hypothesis of Schubring, tentatively accepted by Birkmeyer, that the picture was commissioned by the Alberti family, the prominent merchants and forebears of the humanist Leon Battista Alberti.176 Richa wrote of a marble panel, now lost, marking a tomb on the wall near the pulpit — that is, on or near the right side of the rood screen.177 Richa recorded the inscription on that panel commemorating Caroccio di Alberti, known as Caroccino, who died in Palermo in 1371 but was not buried in Florence until 1373. A year later, his father Jacopo di Caroccio Alberti drafted his own will, expressing indignation that the friars at Santa Croce — where the family had had strong ties since the late thirteenth century, the beginning of the church’s construction, and in whose Cappella Maggiore the Alberti had

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paid for frescoes by Giottino’s confrère Agnolo Gaddi, and where the family possessed a crypt chapel — could somehow not find room to bury his son, who therefore had to be buried in San Remigio.178 The Alberti were also major sponsors of the church of San Remigio, although no stemmi remain in the church.179 The father Jacopo died in 1374 and was buried in Santa Maria della Grazie.180 If this painting were related to the tomb of Caroccino, then the two modern women in this picture would be the bereaved mother of Caroccino and now widow of Jacopo, Mattea, a member of the Strozzi family, probably in her mid-forties at that point, and an unidentified sister of Caroccino.181 If true, then the older woman is not necessarily a nun, as has often been asserted on the basis of her costume.182 Devout laywomen might also don a black hood and white wimple or soggólo, particularly widows, who occupied an ambiguous middle position between public and cloistered life.183 Her withdrawal from mating is matched by her approach to the sacred sphere. The change in dress, or vestem mutare, was an obligatory symbol of the widow’s change in status. Dante in Purgatorio 8.74 spoke of the bianche bende, the widow’s “white bands.”184 Above all, the widow is a delegate. It was expected of a widow that she spend her years performing devotions and sponsoring masses in support of the soul of her husband.185 These were votive masses, off the liturgical calendar; just as this painting may have stood outside the liturgical schedule of its church. The widow could also pay for a chapel or a painting.186 The Bellacci hypothesis seems preferable to me, first, because they paid for the construction of the tramezzo at some point between 1360 and 1368 and this matches the probable date of the painting. There is no record of a Bellacci tomb in San Remigio. But there is no need for a tomb. The picture is about death. The family member in question would be Bellaccio di Puccio himself, who might well have died in the 1360s. However, Bellaccio di Puccio is buried in Santa Croce, and this Franciscan connection casts doubt on the Bellacci hypothesis, since the painting suggests a Benedictine allegiance — and also casts doubt on the Alberti hypothesis, for they, too, had Franciscan ties.187 Nevertheless the painting could have been paid for by the Bellacci in anticipation of a possible burial in the parish church. The kneeling man in blue in the Annunciation by Jacopo di Cione now in Ponce could be Bellaccio himself, and the women in the Uffizi picture his wife and daughter.188 Family arrangements for funerary imagery and apparatus could be complex and could change over time: Bacci gives the example of a mural in San Pietro a Ripoli near Florence by the painter Pietro Nelli (c. 1380), with a symbolic image of the Passion — Christ half-risen from the tomb and surrounded by the arma Christi and, above, an Annunciation. In the foreground, in profile, are the portraits, kneeling, of the husband Goccio Lupicini, the wife Monna Mattea, and a daughter. Nearby in the same church there is a panel for the husband paid for by the wife.189 The Annunciation now at Ponce and the Pietà by Giottino would have made an excellent pair mounted on the tramezzo of San Remigio: the dimensions are similar, as are the formats, basically horizontally oriented rectangles

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with shaped gables above. The treatments of the neutral ground plane as well as the gold grounds are similar. Iconographically, the subjects bracket Christ’s life; the two works are attributed to two artists we know to have worked closely together; and both involve embedded portraits of similar proportions. Perhaps they flanked a carved or painted Crucifix. Perhaps they were commissioned by the same family. In that case, the panels together might picture a plea on the part of the women in the Lamentation for intercession on behalf of a deceased family member. The women, whether Bellacci or Alberti, tend to the souls of their husband and father (or brother). If the father was eventually buried in another church, then he appears here in the Annunciation to bring about a virtual family reunion. The hypothetical pairing of the two paintings changes their meanings. The San Remigio Pietà, unlike its models by Giotto, is scenic but noncyclical, not part of a sequence. Pairing it with an Annunciation, however, creates a mini-cycle running from birth to death.

The funerary image The portrayed will die and, as portraits, will persist among the living. But the supplicant portrait, by juxtaposing the image of a living person to images of the dead — the saints — proposes a more permanent afterlife: absorption into the corpus mysticum, the communion of the living and the undamned dead. Already the simple copresence of the living and the saints in a shared representational field expresses this aspiration. It was agreed that the non-saintly dead could do nothing on their own behalf. Dead, they are no longer able to make the case for their own salvation. They must rely on family and descendants to sponsor masses and to ask the saints to plead for their otherworldly preferment. A funerary image was only one component in an elaborate process and apparatus. Sharon T. Strocchia describes the rituals and accoutrements, the pomp of the burial, and the expenditure: the banker Niccolò di Jacopo degli Alberti, for example, was buried in 1377 at Santa Croce in a red and gold silk robe worth three thousand florins (the value of five hundred finely painted, gold-ground triptychs . . . see p.  207).190 Memory was sustained by liturgy, including masses for the dead involving various formulas of commendatio animae, intercessional prayer, anniversary rites, and the naming of donors, gifts, offerings of wax or cloth, inscription into memorial books, and alms and charity in the name of the dead, as well as lamps, candles, biers, sepulchral art, and of course tombs.191 Intercession, as it was pictured and practiced, relied on a conception of the saints, the already-saved, as quite humanlike listeners and messengers, capable of hearing and relaying human petitions. The principle of saintly responsiveness was essential to mainstream devotional practice. The Golden Legend asserted that the saints know the requests of the supplicants.192 Dante was convinced that Christian prayer, in contrast to the petitions of the pagans, does reach the saints. In the Commedia, he asks Virgil why he wrote in the

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Aeneid that the prayers of the living are not heard by the dead. The Roman poet explains that in his own time, before the revelation of Christ, “il priegho da Dio era disgiunto” (Purgatorio 6.42). No one could question Christ’s capacity to hear earthly appeals. But as we have seen, by the fourteenth century people were more likely to address their prayers to mediating figures, the saints or the Virgin Mary. In book 1, chapter 50 of her Revelations, a text written in the 1340s, St. Bridget of Sweden reports a vision of a lengthy intercessional dialogue between Mary and her son: “No petition of yours,” Christ says, will ever come to me without being heard. Any who ask for mercy through you and have the intention of mending their ways will win grace. As heat comes from the sun, so too all mercy will be given through you. You are like a free-flowing spring from which mercy flows to the wretched.193

In pictures, supplicants sometimes address their cases directly to Christ: the brothers Orsini at Assisi, for example (p. 129). Perhaps cardinals could bypass saintly intercession. But not everyone agreed that the saints could hear our pleas. The saints, after all, are mortal. Their decaying bodies remain on earth. What kind of death is this, in which one is able to listen to earthlings and conduct court business, as it were, in the Kingdom of Heaven? The problem of the dead — the problem of communication between the living and the dead — was created when the Kingdom promised by Christ did not arrive immediately upon his death, as expected.194 The Gospels speak only twice of a “church” (ecclesia) but about a hundred times of the Kingdom of God.195 Matthew 19:28 and Revelations 6:9 suggest that the apostles and the martyrs were inducted directly into Heaven. The Gospels knew nothing of the later cult of the saints, of course. Eventually, theologians agreed that the human beings designated by the Church as its saints — its undead heroes — are ushered, like the apostles, immediately into the company of God.196 But do they hear us just as God hears us? This was a difficult theological crux. Pagans, who knew only gods and heroes, but not saints, ridiculed Christians for their pretended intimacy with the dead. St. Augustine, sensitive to pagan mockery, had conceded that, except in exceptional miraculous circumstances, the dead take no interest in the living.197 Both Luke 24:5 (“Why are you seeking the living One among the dead?”) and Matthew 8:22 (“Let the dead bury their own dead”) could be interpreted as discouragements to a cult of the saints. Scripture gave Christians reason to worry about the efficacy of their prayers: Romans 8:26: “Now in the same way the Spirit also helps our weakness; for we do not know what to pray for as we should.” The Gospel made it clear that you cannot invite yourself into the Kingdom of God, but only wait in readiness, like wise virgins or wakeful servants (Matthew 25:13, Luke 12:35–37). The oldest formulations of the doctrine of intercession do not assign a mediating role to the saints. Romans 8:26 continues: “The Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for

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words.” Hebrews 7:25 says Christ will make intercession, as does John 2:1: “We have an Advocate (παράκλητος, paraclete) with the Father.” The appeals to heavenly intermediaries were hard to justify theologically. Heretics and eventually Reformers denied that the living and the dead could do anything for one another.198 Even Thomas Aquinas wondered how the dead, deprived of their bodies, come to know anything at all.199 Franco Sacchetti in his letter to Jacomo di Conte of Perugia mocked the ignorant devout who addressed their prayers not to saints but to images of Pope Urban V. People even light candles to the image of the pope, he says. One can infer that Sacchetti was skeptical of the whole business of intercession.200 What is the role of a mural or panel painting in this system? The San Remigio Pietà seems to diagram an intercessional plea. Certainly, patrons concerned themselves with the protocols of attention in the paintings they paid for. Bacci gives the example of a document involving a panel in Lucca (1373) in which the patron Iacopo Fatinelli delivers precise instructions to the painter about the saints and where they should be looking while they pray for his soul.201 The women in the San Remigio panel would appear to be pleading for the salvation of their own souls or for the preferment of one already dead who was close to them. Does the painting actually make the plea? By no means, for neither the saints nor the deity will be persuaded by a picture. Does the painting carry on submitting that request even when there is no one present, even after the death of the portrayed subject? No — an image does not act, nor does it secure reference. An image has no power, unless it is rhetorical: the power to seduce and persuade. Renate Kroos in her thorough study of late medieval funerary practices describes the images as pictograms of what is supposed to happen. Sculpted tombs and paintings express desires, summon to prayer, furnish texts, and proclaim worldly status. Portraits “intensify” the intercessional plea, and for this reason were placed as close as possible to the clerical zone, the choir.202 According to Otto Gerhard Oexele, the key to the project of memoria was the naming of names, which gave the dead a legal and social status. The presence of the dead constituted by naming, and generally ideas about the status of the dead, were expressed by images. Memoria was impersonal; only after 1800, Oexele argues, did collective memory give way to mere remembrance or recollection.203 Géraldine Johnson presented a document relating to a fifteenth-century portrait apparently indicating that a portrait itself went on delivering the request, on its own.204 The patron of the Pellegrini Chapel in Sant’Anastasia, Verona, says in his testament, dated 1429, that mass shall be said for his soul for a period of three years, and in addition that there will be a sculpted portrait of himself in an attitude of prayer (which still exists) that “must be completed within three years.” This is taken to mean that the portrait will pick up where the masses left off. But I don’t see this as proof that the portrait was credited with magical powers. The patron may only have been able to afford three years of masses and hoped that his portrait would serve from that point on as

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testimony to his piety, in the eyes both of heaven and earth. That seems quite different from the notion of a portrait that is capable of winning, just by being there, whatever benefits and advantages a personalized mass was expected to win. The painting or sculpture itself, with its craft and beauty, attests to its patron’s willingness to make sacrifices, to her devotional good will, and to her awareness of her own salvational neediness. The artwork publishes all this, for the eyes of the living dead, the saints, and for the eyes of the living.205 One may have believed that the saints know the hearts and intentions of the supplicants, that they hear their prayers, and that they hear the names of the dead read at masses commissioned by the living and performed by the clergy. But there is little evidence that anyone believed that a more successful portrait likeness brought additional salvational efficacy.206 Verisimilitude had no function within the intercessional project. One was not admitted to Heaven on the basis of facial recognition. Nor is physical or physiognomic individuality valued as such. A passage in Dante suggests that one surrendered one’s appearance on entering Paradise: you give your image back to God, as it were. The Christian loses her appearance and enters a throng — we have seen them pictured — retaining only a higher, spiritual individuality.207 This is why the relatively generic fourteenth-century portrait, low on particularity, cannot automatically be explained as a shortcoming in technical skill. The generalized appearance also had its own rhetorical power. A generalized appearance, and a symbolic assignment of the two women in the San Remigio Pietà to the paired categories of sacred and profane, was less formally disruptive to the surface of the work. Even the younger woman’s blonde hair may be a generalizing device. For it has been pointed out that nearly all women depicted in Trecento paintings, sacred or profane, when their hair is visible, were blonde.208 We may well question whether we should expect from a painting such as the San Remigio Pietà any theological consistency or resolved theological content. Does it even picture an intercessional request? The saints seem to present and recommend the women — but to whom? Mary is distraught, her face purple and congested with grief (detail, p. 231).209 It is not exactly the moment to address an appeal.210 The protagonists are too preoccupied to attend to a mortal’s request. Intercession is ordinarily pictured in nonnarrative pictures, typically as an appeal made by the supplicant and a saint to a seated, attentive Mary. Nevertheless, hopes for preferment, and the system of social rewards associated with public demonstrations of confidence in the intercessional routines, provide the overall context for both paintings.211 It seems to me unlikely that the historical actors — the patrons, the families, the clerics, the painters — were working from coherent theological scripts. The portraits model and advertise proper devotion, and the paintings were testifying to a fervent desire for salvational preferment.212 That is enough. An artist places the portrait of a devout mortal in physical proximity to a relic-bearing altar and an image of Christ. This proximity may convince people that the petitioner has actually moved a little closer to the divine sphere. Some call this magic, and perhaps it is, if magic is understood as a trick of the

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mind. The San Remigio Pietà places the women advantageously in the church space, just as they were no doubt accustomed to being well-placed in real life, in social space. The dead father, possibly, was nearby, in his tomb (and perhaps by proxy in the painting of the Annunciation now in Ponce). Tombs with or without a carved effigy were also placed as close as possible to an altar with its hidden treasure of potent relics. The rood screen normally marks the limit of a layperson’s approach to a church’s high altar. A passage from the Confucian tradition — far afield! — may yet help us grasp the undetermined quality of the much later European and Christian practices. The text concerns so-called “spirit articles,” or objects buried with the dead, such as clay vessels or musical instruments, for use in the afterlife. Evidently there was some doubt about how dead or how alive the denizens of tombs really were. Sensitive to that hesitation, Confucius is said to have instructed his disciples: In dealing with the dead, if we treat them as if they were entirely dead, that would show a want of affection, and should not be done; or, if we treat them as if they were entirely alive, that would show a want of intelligence, and should not be done. On this account the bamboo artifacts [made for the dead] should not be suited for actual use; those of earthenware should not be able to contain water; those of wood should not be finely carved; the zithers should be strung, but not evenly [etc.]. . . . These objects are called “spirit articles” because they are created to honor the spirit of the dead.213

The spirit articles in their unusable state represent the idea that the dead are living, without committing to that idea. In the same way, the portraits of the dead in the European practices represented the idea that the funerary arrangements made in this world had some bearing on the fate of the soul in the other world. Desire for salvation overlapped with desire for worldly self-aggrandizement. The sardonic Franco Sacchetti in his stories and verses cast a cold eye not only on the idolatrous rabble but also the hypocrisy, dissembling, and vanity of the elite.214 For others, piety complemented, rather than contradicted, wealth and status. One must repress the modern reflex of reading every display of wealth as profanation. Splendid clothes paid homage to the deity, just as they might today, in polite company, pay homage to your host. And this despite the teachings of St. Francis, which were familiar to all. Many were drawn to Francis’s radical embrace of poverty, his imitation of Christ, but few imitated his imitation. The very concept of an affluent Florentine with Franciscan leanings paying for a work of art is paradoxical. Francis preached the relinquishing of all possessions. The fault line between the sacred and profane runs straight through the heart of each of us. One only need read the opening pages of Iris Origo’s Merchant of Prato, her biography of the fourteenth-century cloth merchant Francesco di Marco Datini, to be reminded that sacred images were luxury goods sold side by side with arms and armor, fine leather, wedding rings, jewel cases and coffers, and

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ornamental enamels, not to mention the cloth. To stock his shop in Avignon, Datini ordered paintings from Florence: in 1373, he asked his agents to send a panel of Our Lady on a background of fine gold with two doors, and a pedestal with ornaments and leaves, handsome and the wood well-carved, making a fine show, with good and handsome figures by the best painter, with many figures. Let there be in the center Our Lord on the Cross, or Our Lady, whomsoever you find — I care not, so that the figures be handsome and large, the best and finest you can purvey, and the cost no more than 5 ½ or 6 ½ florins.

In 1386, Datini records the arrival of “four panels of fine gold, with good figures of Our Lord and Our Lady and several Saints, without flowers, by Jacopo di Cione.” More expensive paintings Datini purchased not on spec but only as special orders. Datini also dealt in saffron and wine. An inventory of 1335 of the Avignon shop of Bonaccorso di Vanni, Datini’s friend and associate, a moneylender, lists several expensive works of sacred art as well as silverware, goldware, and gemstones.215 Customers who bought such paintings “off the rack,” as it were, obviously had no involvement in the works’ planning or design. They could conceivably ask another painter to append small portraits of themselves as owners, if not patrons. When he returned to Prato, Francesco di Marco Datini built a fine house and furnished it with sacred images, three in his bedroom, one each in most of the other rooms. His business partner handled the purchases: You say you would have a picture painted for you on one of those panels, of our Lord, but you say not if you would have Him on the Cross, or how you would have Him . . . I have two pairs [of pictures] made for Boninsegna [another partner]. In one, each picture is the size of a folio, and on one Our Lord is portrayed, with Our Lady and St. John beside Him, and the other side shows Our Lady seated with the Child on Her lap — all in fine gold.

Datini’s biographer confides her “strong impression that Francesco distinguished one [luxury] object from another only by its cost.” Nevertheless, he paid for paintings on the walls and altars as well as stained glass in several churches of Prato, employing, among others, Agnolo Gaddi, Niccolò di Pietro Gerini, and Lorenzo di Niccolò.216 A magnificent Trinity survives by Gerini, with portraits of Datini and his wife and daughter (1405–10?).217 The concept of function as it used by art historians is a normative scenario describing historical actors’ engagements with paintings and other artifacts. In reality, we can be sure, paintings were always straying from the scenarios.218 If one wished to preserve a painting, it was easily moved from one church to another, or to a different space. Sacristies in many churches were like art galleries. Functionally disabling or reassigning a painting did not mean devaluing it. Artistic depictions of sacred content were expected to lead diverse lives in people’s imaginations. Artworks participated in but also interfered with devotional ecologies — they, too, were uncanny guests at the ritual. Paintings

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like these, elaborations on the “living” icons of the previous century inviting dialogic devotional interaction, were prompts to the religious imagination. But those original devotional scenarios are engulfed by the paintings: for they make private worship the very subject of art.

Harmony and discord A painting represents the aftermath of torture and an unspeakably violent death. An internal formal coherence — what we have been calling patterning, composure, or gestalt — overcomes disorder, the catastrophe of the Crucifixion. A painting depicting a Lamentation stages a contest between order and chaos that is never resolved but persists as a theme in the imaginations of its beholders. The Passion of Christ has come to an end, the mourners commence the process of healing. Disorder retreats, only to reveal itself on other levels. Vasari, we saw, struggled to articulate his conviction that the San Remigio Pietà held together as an artwork. He found the painting beautiful despite the entropic breakdown entailed by the grieving.219 He describes the lamenting women, whose faces are distorted in sorrow and yet display the “most sweet and loving gestures” (atti dolcissimi et affettuosi). He rescues their sorrow — recruits it to the aesthetic assessment of the painting — by interpreting it theologically: “The expressions of their faces reveal clearly enough their bitter sorrow at the great cost of our sins.”220 It is a higher form of grieving. Vasari relocates the beauty of the artwork in the beauty of the people depicted in it, a beauty, however, that in this one case is barely recognizable behind the facial features crumpled by grief. He is drawing an analogy between a beautiful face distorted by weeping, and a painting convulsed by expressions of grief and yet still beautiful. The implication is that the overall beauty of an artwork is always ultimately derived from beauty in reality, and that therefore a painting that shows the faces of beautiful women distorted by grief squanders one of its chief resources. He pursues this line of thinking as he continues his description of the San Remigio Pietà: Ed è cosa maravigliosa a considerare, non che egli penetrasse con l’ingegno a sì alta imaginazione, ma che la potesse tanto bene esprimere col pennello. Laonde è quest’ opera sommamente degna di lode, non tanto per lo soggetto e per l’invenzione, quanto per avere in essa mostrato l’artefice in alcune teste che piangono, che ancora che il lineamento si storca nelle ciglia, negli occhi, nel naso e nella bocca di chi piagne, non guasta però nè altera una certa bellezza, che suole molto patire nel pianto, quando altri non sa bene valersi dei buon modi nell’arte. And it is a marvelous thing to consider, not just that he penetrated with his ingenuity to such a height of imagination, but that he could express it so well with the brush. Thus the work is consummately worthy of praise, not so much for the subject and the invention, but for having displayed the painter’s artifice in some of the weeping faces, such that although the features are distorted in the eyebrows, eyes, nose, and mouth of those who cry, nevertheless this neither spoils nor alters a certain beauty which usually suffers

int e r l o p er s 209 much from weeping, that is, with those other painters who do not know how to avail themselves of the good manners in art.221

The invenzione or subject is conventional. More praiseworthy is the painter’s ability to express the pain of grief without spoiling the overall appeal of the work. Vasari’s way of putting this is to say that the beauty of the women shines through their distorted expressions.222 But this is also his indirect way of saying that the picture as a whole possesses a certain beauty (una certa bellezza) that mysteriously overcomes the awkward expressive distortions, and moreover does not interfere with the sacred message. One feels Vasari might have advised Angela da Foligno, who found depictions of the Passion too distressing to contemplate, simply to find more beautiful paintings of the Passion. Vasari attributed the coherence of Giottino’s paintings to his soft, lambent, painterly manner. He is noting a historical shift from a fabulous painted world where all is sharply defined with stagey contrasts between light and dark, to a painted world of fine shadings and obscurities, continuities of tone better matching the flow and flicker of emotions. The diminishment of lightdark contrast imparts an overall, homogeneous look. The coloristic unity embraces and resolves all tensions, including the tension introduced by the portraits. Vasari was sensitive to the painter’s predicament, perhaps comparing it silently to his own double allegiance to his powerful patrons and to his idea of good form. Yet discord persists as the picture’s secret code, as an incessant rhythm of inexplicable doublings, pairings, correspondences, and substitutions. The ricocheting doublings never settle. Karl Birkmeyer in his 1960 article on the painting made these doublings a theme. Joseph of Arimathea, the older man with clasped hands, at the right, resembles St. Peter, who, having denied Christ, was absent at the event (detail, p. 189).223 The intercessor saint at the left (Benedict?) is in turn his doppelgänger. Joseph of Arimathea also resembles the conventional image of Joseph, the father of Christ, who was not present at the Crucifixion. Joseph of Arimathea functions in the story as the surrogate of that absent father. The younger man, Nicodemus, shows the nails, which number among the arma Christi or instruments of the Passion, now holy relics, to Joseph of Arimathea, but also notionally to Peter, who was a waverer as was Nicodemus himself. This figure in white is the sosie or look­ alike of Christ, as if there were two Christs in the picture, the sufferer and the resurrected, both present in the same picture. Note that the head of the kneeling blonde woman at the left blocks our view so we don’t know if Giottino’s Benedict is holding his book with his sleeve, as he does in the panel by Nardo di Cione in Stockholm: in that case, he would rhyme with Nicodemus at the right. There are seemingly two figures in the painting who play the conventional role of Mary Magdalene: the kneeling woman on the left in blue tunic and pink robe, and the disconsolate woman in the lower right corner, in blue and red, both with long unbound blonde hair. Mary Magdalene

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and Nicodemus are both associated with the pyx or container for herbs or ointments. In his classic study The Double, Otto Rank argued that in a primitive society the double represents the soul.224 A double is both an assurance of immortality and a harbinger of death. The portrait in a funerary context is just this. One recalls the embalmed corpses that Olariu sees as the matrix of the technique of likeness. The doubling of types and forms inside the painting reproduces the doubling of person and image in the funerary scenario.

Doublings and merisms The modern women in the San Remigio panel conform to a wider pattern of doubling across the spectrum of Trecento art and in a variety of contexts: the pairing of two women, one more and one less holy. We see it in the sacred stories: the midwives came as a pair, one pious, one practical.225 The type in Scripture is the pair of sisters Mary and Martha, one spiritual, one practical (Luke 10:38–42). Recall that one of the women in the Lorenzetti Petronilla Lamentation bears the name Martha on her halo. May we imagine that Martha is one of the characters in the San Remigio Pietà? At the right side of Giovanni da Milano’s Expulsion of Joachim in the Rinuccini Chapel in Santa Croce (1365) there is a row of blonde women, all with hair braided, wrapped with ribbon, and coiled, like the worldly woman in the predella of the Petronilla altarpiece, and a row of women in black and white habits (ill. 5.19).226 All the women are holding lambs. They are women of the community, sacred and profane, come to the Temple to make offerings. They are a multiplication of the San Remigio pair. In Giovanni da Milano’s Birth of the Virgin in the same chapel the second woman from the left, accepting the cloth, wears a robe similar to Giottino’s worldly woman, with embroidered collar and embroidered hems running down the sleeves, but blue, not black, and with no belt. In the Meeting at the Golden Gate in the Rinuccini Chapel, the pair of sacred and profane women appears just behind Anna. The sacred-profane pairs of women are often arriving: the midwives at the door in the Birth of the Virgin, a predella panel, in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford (1360s?), for example, a painting that might be considered an anagram of the San Remigio Pietà (ill. 5.20 and detail, p. 156).227 Structurally, there are only ever five or six elements in a Christian narrative painting. Paintings are always rearranging the contents of older paintings. In this image, the mother of the Virgin, Anne, in bed, occupies the position of the dead Christ. The mourning women pay no attention to her, however, but instead tend to the infant Mary; they are the midwives. That infant anticipates Mary’s own child Christ. And Anne with her ambiguous gesture anticipates her daughter’s encounters first with the angel Gabriel and later with the death of her son. At the door arrives the pair of well-wishers, a blonde woman in a red dress and a woman in black and white nun’s or widow’s garb. They stand for the world at large and anticipate the lay supplicants. They are greeted by a

5.19  Giovanni da Milano, Expulsion of Joachim, c. 1365. Fresco. Florence, Santa Croce, Rinuccini Chapel.

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5.20  Master of the Ashmolean Predella, Birth of the Virgin, 1360s? Panel, 37.4 × 65.2 cm. Oxford, Ashmolean Museum.

woman in an orange robe who is both an attendant and an anticipation of the medieval chaperoning saints. Portraits of patrons or supplicants often make up such sacred-profane pairings, for example the two women in the ingenious panel by Bernardo Daddi known as the Madonna of the Museo dell’ Opera (1335) (ill. 2.5). Two such women kneel in the foreground of the Death of the Virgin by Puccio di Simone (pp. 151, 153). Such pairings are too frequent to be simply realistic renderings of real people who happened to dress this way. The pairing of a more worldly and more religious woman is a topos. The pious woman is the shadow of the profane; she is her soul.228 A version of this topos is the pairing of a worldly man and a devout nunlike woman. We saw this right at the start, in the Munich Crucifixion by Giotto (ill. 1.1). Another example is the pair of portraits below the Madonna and Child at Avignon by the Master of 1310 (ill. 1.8). At the lower level of the mural Paradise by Nardo di Cione in the Strozzi Chapel in Santa Maria Novella (1354–57), a lay couple is ushered into Paradise by an angel: the man is in profane costume, the woman in black with head covered.229 Note that it is never the other way around, clerical man and worldly woman. The constant, as it were, is a woman, either a nun, a lay tertiary, or a widow dressed in nunlike

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clothes, and she is always being paired either with a more worldly woman, often apparently younger, or with a man dressed in a worldly fashion.230 A variation on the hierarchical sacred-profane pairing is the St. Catherine Disputing with the Doctors by Cenni di Francesco di ser Cenni in the Metropolitan Museum, with two female devout in white mirroring the two saints in red (ill. 5.21).231 The sacred-profane pairings are examples of a merism, a rhetorical device that names a contrasting pair in order to indicate a totality. When you search high and low, and over hill and dale, you have searched everywhere. When you have moved heaven and earth, you have done all you can. The merism (< Greek merismós, dividing or partitioning) does not necessarily logically cover everything. There is more in God’s nature than “kindness and severity” (Romans 11:22), but in context the phrase covers all his relations with humans.232 When two women arrive at the door, one sacred and one profane, they stand for all women. The merism or “polar expression” supports the proposition that every woman is either sacred or profane, with no third category. Each woman may contain within herself a sacred-profane division. In the San Remigio Pietà especially, the contrast between the one woman’s sober garb and the expensive allure of the other woman is striking. Yet they do not map onto sacred and profane without remainder. The woman in black may well be a widow, that is, one who has been married and probably has borne children; she is inhabited by bodiliness. By contrast, the other woman with her flowing hair is very likely a virgin and to that extent still holy, in touch with the saints. The figure of St. Catherine in the Prato altar by Giovanni da Milano is dressed not so

5.21  Cenni di Francesco di ser Cenni, St. Catherine Disputing with the Doctors, c. 1380. Panel, 57.8 × 46.4 cm. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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differently from the young woman in the San Remigio painting.233 Clothing and ornamentation generally in the premodern world were understood not merely as supplements but also as continuations or extrusions of the essence of the person. The meristic pairing introduces content that exceeds the portraits’ merely referential indication of real people. The merism recruits the portraits of the patrons into a general reflection on the comprehensiveness of the Christian myth and the rituals that articulate it. The faith, the merism says, covers and accounts for all of reality, the spiritual and the creaturely, the timeless and the everyday, heaven and earth. The doppelgänger or lookalikes within the sacred stories, meanwhile, introduce symmetry and pattern that exceed the scripted content, interfering with — though not derailing — the narrative imperative and the compulsion to realism, or probability. Both merisms and symmetrical doublings legitimate the portraits of the modern patrons by assigning them a role to play within the artwork. Portraits in this period are never very far from typicality. The capacity to render convincing likenesses, despite Giotto’s leap forward, was limited. Faced with this technical blockage, portraits reassumed symbolic functions. We looked in chapter 1 at generic or typified images of supplicants in elite manuscripts that seemed possibly to represent individuals, though without reproducing recognizable facial features, and at the same seemed to represent ideal devotional attitudes.234 The rule that seems to have legislated that all women in Trecento painting have blonde hair (p. 205) may be another symptom of this blockage, the reversion to an archaic, symbolic concept of type in the face of an inability to achieve likeness (in the case of portraits) or an unwillingness to introduce particularity into female physiognomies (in the case of anonymous female figures). Doubling, twinning, rhyming were ways of generating a sense of enigma as such, compensating for painting’s incapacity to suggest mystery — as poems can — through omission and ellipsis. Northrop Frye has written that parallelism, a “unit of two (more rarely three) members, of which the second completes the rhythm, but often adds little if anything to the sense,” was the basic unit of biblical verse.235 Parallelism conveys a sense of a dialogue initiated by God but completed by the reader, through repetition. Frye gives as examples Psalm 91:2–6 and Matthew 7:9–10, as well as the story of Christ riding into Jerusalem on an ass, recounted in all four gospels and based on Zechariah 9:9: He is righteous and endowed with salvation, Humble, and mounted on a donkey, Even on a colt, the foal of a donkey.

Mark, Luke, and John understood correctly that this was poetry and that “only one animal is involved.” But Matthew 21:2 misunderstood: “Go into the village opposite you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied there and a colt with it. Untie them and bring them to Me.”

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5.22  Bernardo Daddi, Annunciation, c. 1335. Panel, 43.5 × 63 cm. Paris, Musée du Louvre.

A curious example of this device in painting is the Annunciation by Bernardo Daddi in the Louvre (c. 1335), where an unexpected second angel kneels behind Gabriel (ill. 5.22).236 The doubling may have been prompted by a picture like the one in the Vatican attributed to the Marchigian painter Allegretto Nuzi or his follower Francescuccio Ghissi, with a Man of Sorrows in the upper part and a Nativity in the lower part. Twin angels with hands pressed together kneel before the Christ Child (ill. 5.23).237 In a panel in a private collection attributed to Francescuccio Ghissi, two angels adore the Madonna of Humility.238 The doubled angel insists upon Mary’s worthiness: not one but two creatures from heaven have come to pay homage. In the Baptism of Christ by Niccolò di Pietro Gerini, the central scene of an altarpiece from Santa Maria degli Angeli (the first known altarpiece to feature this scene), dated 1387, there are two angels kneeling on the riverbank; one holds the robe of Christ and the other prays.239 A famous comparandum from the future is the Annunciation in the Martelli Chapel at San Lorenzo by Filippo Lippi (c. 1440), where Gabriel is backed up by a pair of standing angels. This may help us interpret the Louvre Annunciation with two angels. Patristic texts spoke of a “descent” of angels come to witness the event. The Qur’an speaks of “a number of angels” at the Annunciation. Gabriel arrives with an entourage. The plurality removes any suspicion that Mary had illicit relations with the visitor — the additional angels are chaperones.240 Albertus Magnus considered it highly unlikely that only one angel came. The iconographic authority for a multiplicity of angels is a mosaic at

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5.23  Allegretto Nuzi or Francescuccio Ghissi, Man of Sorrows and Nativity, c. 1360. Panel, 34.7 × 24.5 cm. Vatican, Pinacoteca.

Santa Maria Maggiore (432–40).241 And yet neither the Trecento (Louvre) nor the Quattrocento (San Lorenzo) example seems to have been imitated. Latent patterns may seem to produce order. But a doubling is a malfunction, a metastasis. You don’t need two of everything. In the San Remigio picture, the uncanny logic of the doublets is reinforced by inconspicuous visual rhymes and asymmetries: the chiasmus of the gloved hand of one saint on the bare head of the younger woman, and the bare hand of the other saint on the covered head of the older woman; or the single red jewel on the saint’s glove that matches the single visible stigma on Christ’s hand. Such rhymes hint at unexplored co-involvements (detail, p. ix). Iconographies of abasement and self-loss bring out the hidden circuitry of familial and libidinal energies, the arenas of switching and substitution par excellence.242 In the Lamentation, a younger woman tends to an older swooning woman, Mary, who always either lacked a husband or had too many husbands: an earthbound old man, Joseph; a potent but remote old man, God; and of course the “angel” Gabriel, who according to the pagans was the real father. Mary, whose bridegroom was her own son, at the end of her life

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appears again as a child in Jesus’s arms, in the scene known as the Dormition. The absence of Joseph from the Crucifixion is underscored in paintings by the presence of a surrogate old man, also named Joseph. The unstable pairs are code for the structuring desires. The women’s gazes are steady and inexpressive, and yet we know those gazes were traversed by desires. The familial and libidinal content is encoded in the semantic patterning. The hysteria of the mourners brings us to the margins of experience. But the portrayed women have their own hopes and disappointments, just like the mythic characters, only more so, for they were real. We know a little about the mythic characters — Mary, Mary Magdalene, John — but that little is all there is to know about them, for they have become fictional characters, no longer in contact with their historical types. The patron is real, and yet we know nothing about him or her. The portrait is a condensation of a whole life, all the events and engagements summed up in a packet of features designed for recognition. In the Christian myth, the stories themselves, and not just the characters, come in pairs. The Presentation of Mary in the Temple is paired with the Presentation of Christ in the Temple; the Lamentation with the Dormition; the Birth of the Virgin with the Nativity of Christ; the Sacrifice of Joachim with the Presentation in the Temple; the Annunciation to Anne with the Annunciation to Mary. In each case, one element in the pair is attested in the Gospel, the other in apocryphal sources; one scene diagrams a doctrine, the other is an occasion for narrative and even anecdotal elaboration. Bruno Latour, who detects a hidden affinity between talk about God and talk about love — that is the key to his reckoning with religion (p. 109) — speaks of the apocryphal Infancy Gospels as “a short-circuit between the humble business of human affection and the grandiose scenographies of biblical history.”243 Splitting semantic patterns into two separate bundles, one more formal and one more informal, is a way of avoiding an unnecessary forcing of divergent meanings latent within myth into collision, and instead distributing them across two paired scenes. The Dormition and Assumption of Mary replays the problematic but indispensable event of Christ’s Resurrection. The pregnancies of Anne and Elizabeth, rhyming with Old Testament episodes, are almost as improbable as Mary’s. As in biblical typology — the science of pairing New Testament episodes with Old Testament predecessors — doublings create a sense of history’s inner structure and of a pervasive meaningfulness. There is always a difference, a gradient, within such doublets: Mary’s death is not biblically attested but it is also not tragic: she was aged, and at that point everyone involved was confident about the overall project of Christianity; Christ was in his Heaven, and so forth. There was a margin for folkloric elaboration. In each scene of death, Lamentation and Dormition, two states of mind are in play: on the one hand straightforward grief, as might be felt for the death of anyone near; and on the other, apprehension about what happens next — for how do gods die? Apprehension is portioned out at the margins of the pictures to anonymous figures whose intensity of suffering is less and thus does not interfere

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with thought. In the Lamentation by Simone Martini in the Orsini portable altar, the modern clerical woman at the upper left seems to turn back toward a group of modern devout, as if to exhort and instruct (ill. 4.18). In the San Remigio Pietà, the asymmetry of the paired modern women is reproduced on the level of the overall form. The medieval and modern intruders are all crowded into the left-hand side of the picture. But the division made by the Cross between historical and belated mourners is not strict: the bodies of three historical figures — St. John and two mourning women — as well as Christ’s lower legs, cross that line and enter the left-hand space. There is also the mysterious female mourner at the very left edge who so resembles Mary Magdalene. Is she possibly a modern holy woman and so belongs with the other moderns on the left side of the painting? Mary Magdalene would seem to be the downcast figure in the lower right corner. But in the Lamentation on the panel in the Galleria Corsini by Giovanni da Milano, which is either a model for the San Remigio picture or vice versa, Mary Magdalene is in red and at the center, while the woman in the corner is just one of the pious mourners. At any rate, that seated woman is the cornerstone and the conclusion of Giottino’s picture. The picture is so composed as to convey a strong sense of completeness, an effect reinforced by the square format. The row of heads of the five standing male figures gives the rhythm: a line arcing up and then down, then back up until it flattens out at the right, between the only two figures who communicate with one another, Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea. The heads of the kneeling women, meanwhile, form sloping lines converging on Christ’s head. The clasped hands of the woman on the left, John, and Joseph of Arimathea form another diagonal. The architectonic grid established by the ground plane, the horizontal body of Christ, the upright pillar-like bodies as well as the Cross, is hospitable to such diagrammings of asymmetry. Within a grid, the affects read as deviations. The disorder pressing up from below the surface creates tremors: a disequilibrium or precarity signaling that everything is not quite in balance.

The superimposed chessboards Douglas R. Hofstadter in his classic Gödel, Escher, Bach explores the paradoxes of what he calls tangled hierarchies, or systems designed to convert instructions into actions but that, due to self-reference, loop back upon themselves and go nowhere. A cybernetic hierarchy comprises stacked layers of instructions that, working together, carry out functions. One layer takes orders from — is programmed by — the layer just above, and so on, until you arrive at a top layer whose instructions cannot be modified (God, or the laws of physics). A tangled hierarchy is one in which an operation loops back and interferes with the law-giving order above it, entering into and modifying the program that governs it. A program that rewrites itself violates the cybernetic hierarchy. Such feedback can play an essential role in a system’s self-regulation, as long as it is

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expected.244 A computer program caught unintentionally in such a “strange loop” may be said to have failed or broken down. Highly complex systems such as the human mind (Hofstadter calls these heterarchies) are always caught in strange loops. One of his many metaphors for explaining such phenomena involves a self-modifying game of chess.245 To visualize a situation where the unexpected interference of one level in another creates only chaos and confusion, Hofstadter asks us to imagine we are playing chess on a chessboard according to the well-known rules. On a second chessboard, however — and we can imagine it either alongside or hovering hierarchically above the first — moves have different meanings: they change the rules of the chess game being played on the first board. Instead of playing chess on that second board, we use it to alter the rules of the game played on the first board. So, a pawn moved two squares forward on board two, for example, might change the rules for castling on board one. But above that second board we may imagine a third board which determines the meanings of the rule-changing moves on board two. So, for example, a rook moved two squares diagonally on board three could establish a new rule such that the pawn moved two squares forward on board two now changes the rule for how knights move on the first board. And so on. Hofstadter then asks us to imagine superimposing the boards so that we are not sure, when we make a move, which board we are playing on. You may think you are making a move in a chess game, advancing a bishop to trap your opponent’s rooks in a fork. In fact, you are playing on the second board, and you have just unwittingly changed the rules, allowing (for example) one of your opponent’s rooks to move diagonally and so capture your bishop. This is the tangled hierarchy: the rules and the game are no longer kept separate. It is a self-modifying game. Every move changes the rules of the game. Now there are games, rules, meta-rules, and meta-meta-rules, all mixed up, so that one may no longer speak at all of higher and lower levels. Now let us imagine that the top layer in our game of sacred art is the Christian legend and cosmology, the inviolable content. These instructions cannot be changed. That layer includes the roster of prestigious guides or conductors who model devotion: the Three Magi, Mary and Joseph themselves, Mary Magdalene, also the angels. They set the rules for the design of any additional figures, stationed on lower chessboards, who honor, praise, and beseech: the early medieval saints, the martyrs, and, eventually, the recent religious heroes such as St. Francis. On the layer of the game itself, at the bottom, the artist struggles to accommodate such late-coming worshippers to the demands of effective and decorous artistic form. On that primary board, the gameboard, the composition of the painting is worked out. In art, just as in Hofstadter’s heterarchical model of the human mind, all the “layers” are superimposed. This leads to confusion. Imagine, for example, that a devout layperson, arriving on the scene in the late thirteenth century, wishes to approach the altar, to participate. He seeks to change the parameters

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5.24  Collaborator of Francesco da Rimini (Maestro di Verucchio?), Adoration of the Magi, c. 1330. Panel, 51 × 46.5 cm. Ajaccio, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Palais Fesch.

of public devotion. He asks a painter to introduce his portrait into a sacred image. The patron and his painter intervene in what they think is a rule-­ determining way, as if they were playing on board two. But this reprogramming is carried out in the medium of art. That is, they are playing at the same time on board one. The move determining the rule-change — and not just the rule-change itself — has immediate consequences in the game of art. To anyone on the outside, still respecting the traditional rules and not apprised of the rule-change, the intervention of the portrait of the modern devout is visible on what appears to be the primary gameboard, the artwork, only as an ugly, impossible move — as if someone moved a pawn four squares forward. The rule-change, which was motivated by real-world, not artistic, concerns, is proposed in the language of traditional, sacred art. Now imagine that the artist finds a way to fit the modern portrait into the composition such that the overall beauty of the picture is not impaired, and may even be improved. But, again, the chessboards are superimposed, or merged. Any adjustment to the conventions of the sacred image on aesthetic grounds is also a move on the next board up, the one that sets the rules for the design of supplicant figures. The rules of the game have again been changed. The configurations worked out on the gameboard for artistic reasons feed back into the rules: the portraits are assigned new places; new postures and attitudes are asked of them. This also affects the placement of the sacred

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figures, who may now receive instructions relayed back down to them by the modern portraits. They move to the side to accommodate the intruders. They now increasingly conform to the images of the patrons, in their restraint, their upright postures, but also in their “topical” doubling, unrealistic and conventional. The portraits generate the doublings among the rest of the figures — not just in this picture, but generally. The sphere of the supplicant portraits exerts a magnetic pull on the compositions. Examples of the strange effects of this pull are the panels in Ajaccio (Musée des Beaux-Arts) (ill. 5.24) and Coral Gables (Lowe Art Museum) depicting the Adoration of the Magi. The Coral Gables picture belonged to an altarpiece in Rimini (c. 1330), attributed to Francesco da Rimini, that also included the panel in the National Gallery depicting the Vision of the Blessed Clare of Rimini.246 An altarpiece in Ajaccio, evidently a copy of the first work, includes both these scenes. In the foreground of both Adorations there are small-scale, kneeling, praying figures of Joseph and a deacon saint, perhaps St. Stephen.247 Dillian Gordon suggests that they are name saints of the patrons, so in effect stand-ins for the patrons. They kneel with palms together, like patrons, but lean forward in their emotion, arms outstretched, like historical worshippers. In the Ajaccio panel, they mimic the pose of the foremost of the Three Magi.

Unity of person and unity of picture The San Remigio Pietà shows an entire sequence of nested reactions, of varying intensity, from the intense suffering of the women to the practical-minded semi-detachment of Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea, discussing the burial arrangements and the custodianship of the relics. The range of possible reactions is spread out over a differentiated scale that gives you as beholder multiple options for involvement. The two modern witnesses might be expected to share in this collective distress. But they do not. Those women’s bodies are organized by formulaic gestures of devotion. The arms crossed on the breast had entered pictorial representation in the late thirteenth century.248 This gesture expressing humility and ardor has some ancient pedigree in religious practice. The gesture is mentioned by Dante at Purgatorio 5.126–27: the warrior Bonconte da Montefeltro, dying in battle in the year 1289, “makes a cross of himself” (e sciolse al mio petto la croce ch’ i’ fe’ di me quando ‘l dolor mi vinse). In the analysis of Heather Webb, Bonconte with this gesture abandons his worldly person and establishes a new personhood in dedication to the Virgin.249 In the Little Flowers of St. Francis (chapter 20) a noble youth who had entered the order was taught by Francis “to kneel down with great reverence and . . . cross his arms on his breast [colle braccia cancellate] and prostrate himself whensoever he passed before the altar of the convent.”250 Francis himself makes the gesture in chapter 6: cancellò le braccia a modo di croce. The verb cancellare, a Latinism in Italian, is rare. This episode and Francis’s gesture were described differently in the earliest Lives of Francis, by

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Thomas of Celano.251 It seems possible that the Fioretti, a fourteenth-century compilation, adapted the scene to conform with modern pictures. The gesture also indicated humble submission. In the Carmina regia addressed to Robert d’Anjou, the personification of Italia, distressed, with loose hair and arms crossed on her breast, begs the king to save Rome.252 But the gesture was associated in painting mostly with Mary. The hands of the Virgin in the late thirteenth-century mosaic Coronation of the Virgin in the Duomo at Florence are crossed in this fashion, though ambiguously. Giotto assigned the gesture to Mary in his Presentation of Mary in the Temple and Annunciation at Padua. The motif recurs in the small panel of the Coronation by the Master of the Codex St. George in the Bargello.253 The Virgins in the Coronations by Jacopo di Cione (Accademia and National Gallery, the San Pier Maggiore altar) have crossed hands and resemble the Virgin of the Ponce Annunciation, where of course once again the Virgin crosses her arms over her breast. In the Nativity portion of the Nativity-plus-Adoration (both scenes take place in the same virtual space!) by the Pseudo-Jacopino, in Raleigh, it is Joseph who has “canceled” or crossed arms and Mary who presses her hands together (ill.  5.25).254 It is the opposite in the Nativity in the Vatican, where Mary’s hands are crossed and Joseph’s hands are pressed together like those of the two angels (ill.  5.23). In the Annunciation by Bernardo Daddi in the Louvre, both Mary and the unconventional second angel kneeling behind Gabriel use the hands-crossed gesture (ill. 5.22). The assignation of the gesture to the Annunciate Virgin was reinforced or prompted — depending on the date of the text — by the Meditations on the Life of Christ, which has her acknowledging the angel’s message while kneeling with “joined” hands, cum le mane zonte in the vernacular version, a phrase interpreted by Sarah McNamer to mean hands crossed on the breast.255 The motif migrated from paintings not only to the Fioretti but also to the religious drama: Moshe Barasch points out that the authorial stage directions to the Florentine Rappresentazione della Annunziazione attributed to Feo Belcari (late fifteenth century) have the Virgin facendo sopra il petto delle sue braccia croce.256 In the San Remigio Pietà, the worldly woman mimics Mary’s crossed arms on the breast. The gesture is relatively rare with laypersons.257 The other woman presses her two hands together, a familiar enough attitude of prayer, but not an ancient one, and therefore not often assigned in modern paintings to ancient personages, except Mary.258 (St. Anne in Giotto’s Annunciation to St. Anne at Padua also kneels with hands together.) The oldest represented prayer gestures were an ecstatic elevation of the hands, or hands raised and spread with palms facing forward. Among the oldest embedded portraits, the figures of the early medieval popes, we find those ancient prayer attitudes: arms raised in standing position, or prostration. To sacrifice is to make sacred, but the sacrificed object is also forfeited and accursed. Between the 1220s and the 1250s, these expressive demonstrations gave way in the Roman apses to the modern gesture of hands pressed together while kneeling, which may have had origins

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5.25 Pseudo-Jacopino, Nativity and Adoration, 1325–30. Panel, 52.7 × 80.3 cm. Raleigh, North Carolina Museum of Art.

in the protocols of feudal fealty.259 Already since the twelfth century, the more controlled, static gesture of the hands pressed together was infiltrating the liturgy as well as art, including funerary sculpture. Giotto’s Ascension of Christ at Padua assigns the old raised-hands gestures to the angels and saints in the upper part, while Mary below presses her hands together, as if this were the appropriate terrestrial gesture. In the fourteenth century, only Francis and the mystics fling themselves on the ground. The Little Flowers shows us Francis in ecstatic prayer over Bernard — a layman who would later convert — believing he was sleeping: “He rose from his bed and knelt down to pray; lifting his eyes and hands to heaven he cried with great devotion and fervour, ‘My God, my God!’ And so saying and weeping bitter tears, he prayed until morning, ever repeating, ‘My God, my God!’ and naught else.”260 In the San Remigio picture, the bourgeois women’s capacity for feeling is not shown.261 They sublimate emotions and maintain composure, the very quality that society expects of a work of art; for it is life that is too often discomposed. Their composure is not shaken any more than their attention is clouded by thought. The portrayed individual makes her appearance precisely as undivided. Division as such is represented elsewhere, by the splittings and doublings — division is outsourced to the merisms. Perhaps the women heed

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Romans 12:2: “And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” The flattening in the fourteenth century of the once-steep medieval social hierarchy meant that bourgeois patrons were less likely to feel compelled to represent themselves in groveling submission as vassals and by the same token were less likely to abandon their dignified reserve before God. St. Bridget in her Revelations, book 6, chapter 122, gives us a clue to the modern concept of prayer: The Son of God speaks: “When I placed myself in a human nature, I practiced restraint in my prayers, toils, and fasting, so that nobody who saw me might be scandalized. . . . This lady whom you now see has a strange way of gesturing and conducting herself. . . . She is not without great temptations now, however, without remorse of conscience. It is therefore advisable for her to moderate her movements and gestures and do what she does in private rather than in public. Otherwise her exaggerated efforts and her prayer will be less deserving of reward.”262

A painted portrait, moreover, that identifies itself not by a label, a name, but only by a set of conventions of posture, gesture, and placement, and a fine physiognomic rhetoric supported by an ever-advancing realist technique, must be shielded from such distorting waves of emotion. A portrayal too intense, too heavily filtered through emotion, will not be recognizable as a portrait. But the women’s composure also points backward in time, conferring archaic dignity. The range of states of mind or emotions represented by thirteenth-century artists was narrow, and always composed and saintly.263 It could be said that the undivided person grants the picture its unity. That is perhaps what Vasari was struggling to say in his life of Giottino, which Schlosser called his Giottino “romance” or “novel” (Giottinoroman).264 We recall that Vasari described the painter as melancholic and solitary. The price of the unity of the picture is the artist’s obsessive self-dedication to the point of selfharm. The topos of the self-destructive artist is the intensified summation of the idea of the interlacing of life and works:265 Ma non è gran fatto che Giottino conducesse questa tavola con tanti avvertimenti, essendo stato nelle sue fatiche desideroso sempre più di fama e di gloria, che d’altro premio o ingordigia del guadagno, che fa meno diligenti e buoni i maestri del tempo nostro. E come non procacciò costui d’avere gran richezze, così non andò anche molto dietro ai comodi della vita; anzi, vivendo poveramente, cercò di sodisfar più altri che se stesso: perchè, governandosi male e durando fatica, si morì di tisico d’età d’anni trentadue. But it is no great thing that Giottino should have executed this panel with so much care, since in his labors he was always more desirous of fame and glory than of any other reward, or of that greed for gain that makes masters of our own time less diligent and less good. And even as he did not seek great riches, so he did not much pursue the comforts of life; on the contrary, living poorly, he sought to satisfy others rather than himself: for that reason, tending poorly to himself and enduring toil, he died of consumption at the age of thirty-two.266

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Opacity of the embedded portrait Embedded portraits, with their gathered emotions, their unbroken focus, and their nonsymbolic status, are irreducible and opaque. A portrait’s theme is its sitter. A portrait is not so much a representation as an extrusion of life. The embedded portrait is to a fictional character what a relic is to the life of a saint. Rigidly designating their sitters, these portraits are indeed much like relics. There is a decisive break when we arrive at the modern women, the visitants. They just don’t belong, and their non-belonging is the content of the picture. The topical or meristic treatment, the imposed pattern that grants the pair of portraits a meaning, was designed as a remedy for this non-belonging. For all that, the picture remains a “cradle” for two completely different modes of signification. On the one hand, there are the portraits, which signify not by manipulating conventions but by referring, or pointing to something real in the world. Reference is not a mental association proposed by signs — it is real, you can’t argue about it. On the other hand, there is the rest of the picture, which signifies by extending chains of copied images that lead backwards, picture by picture, to an original authoritative image, a type. The force of the embedded portrait is its assertion of the difference between its strong referential link to reality and the now suddenly weaker-seeming forms of signification of the rest of the picture, merely semiotic content open to interpretation. The portrait lands inside the religious painting, the depicted myth, as a foreign body. The portrait projects life into a depicted world, a world not presented as a fiction or invented world but as historical fact. The portrait is a hard fragment of a real world that, once transported into a depicted world, has the power to demote that second world from fact to fiction, to something less than real. The portraits introduced into a sacred painting may be compared to precious stones or relics embedded or inlaid in small painted panels and triptychs. This blending of the categories of reliquary and panel painting happened for the first time in the fourteenth century in Italy. A small reliquary triptych with depictions of the Annunciation and the Madonna and Child and saints by the Sienese painter Lippo Vanni, also in Baltimore, is dated to the 1350s (ill. 5.26). The now-missing relics once occupied the holes in the gable and predella.267 Plenty of reliquaries before this had been painted with figures and scenes. This is different: now the relic is sheltered in a painted artifact that potentially had other uses, as if the relic were a mere ornament. The diptych or triptych is both an artwork and a container. The relics are opaque and mute, like stones. Like a relic or a stigma, the portrait short-circuits symbolic signification. The portrait is an assignment that appears to take art out of the hands of the artist. The brief of portraiture asks the artist to dial down invention and imagination in favor of fidelity to the given, a fidelity produced by technical means not necessarily coordinated with aesthetic considerations. But, as with the relic, the translation into the new context gives the humble content (the mortal supplicant, the featureless bone of the saint) a meaning.

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5.26  Lippo Vanni, reliquary triptych with Annunciation and Madonna and Child and saints, 1350s. Panel, 49.4 × 45.4 cm. Baltimore, Walters Art Museum.

Relics are real samples of the saint’s body, not signs, and so they manage to summon up the whole real lived life of the saint, and more effectively than the surrounding non-portrait images of people can ever do. The portrait and the relic are semantic dead spots. They signify nothing other than the strength, the rigidity, of the link. But we know in each case that what was being referred to is bottomless: the whole life of an individual, even if neither the portrait nor the relic can actually deliver all that content. The real person embedded in a sacred narrative painting, by all appearances more constrained and less animated than the fictional characters surrounding her, would seem to be opaque and irreducible. Hans Belting noted that in Pietro Lorenzetti’s fictive triptych — that is, a fresco that simulates a carpentered altarpiece — in the Lower Church at Assisi, the profile portraits of the patrons have “the character of artifacts”: they seem less alive than the heavenly figures depicted above.268 This is consistent with the concept of the portrait subjects’ worthiness, their sacrality and virtue. It is only an apparent paradox that Lorenzetti’s saintly figures, the Virgin and Child and saints, are alive and the portraits of the living are flat. We may infer even if we see no evidence of it, on the basis of the advertised fact of the supplicant’s devout intentions, that planted inside that person is a vision, a hope, a consciousness that is nothing other than the mind’s capacity to make a representation of itself; the very opposite of irreducibility. The opacity of the portrait-relic speaks of the plastic and emergent quality of personhood, but also of confusion and ecstasy. Behind the hard surface lies the picture’s sanctuary. The hard, gemlike flame emanating from the portraits hints at a source within. This is the picture’s hearth or focus (< Latin focus = hearth, family).

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The portraits may seem to be blank, unwelcome dead spots in the scene that contribute nothing to our confidence in the reality of the event, and nothing to our understanding of the meaning of the event. From that point of view, the portraits are sub-artistic, in the same way that photography is in some sense sub-artistic. That is why Vasari never lingered over portraits. But one may instead see the portraits as deep shafts opening onto an infinity of experience and consciousness, inexhaustible, deeper by far than anything else offered by the painting.

Open and closed form The web of doublings in the picture obscures the fundamental one: the folding of us outside the work onto the portraits inside the work. The portraits mimic the historical beholders (Mary, Mary Magdalene, et al.), to a degree. But as outposts of all lay beholders, the portraits invite our mimicry. These are paintings whose beholders are already inside the painting, on site, as it were. The pictures are pre-beheld. The old sacred images, by contrast, made evident what must be seen: this was the art of praise. There was no need to provide a user’s guide inside the picture, because the work was meant to compel your response. Or it invited no response. In the old cult images it was not the angels who served this purpose, for they are not our models. Giottino’s Lamentation, descended from Giotto’s at Assisi and Padua, which itself descends from the Byzantine murals, does not only display the body of Christ but also shows people contemplating and mourning that body. Adding a portrait to a picture adds a layer of mediation. Instead of simply showing us the event, the painting shows us beholders who, like ourselves, are on the outside, seeking to enter imaginatively into the event. The question is raised: are we being shown what really happened, or are we being shown what the witnesses saw? To see an event from inside the event is to experience it with the whole body. This is somatic vision, the very opposite of perspectival vision. Under the pressure of emotions there will be foreshortenings and deformations. The historical female mourners in the San Remigio Pietà are not demonstrative, but they are tense; what they see must be confused, reeling, distorted, or so one would think. Do they not recognize with dread and foreboding that they are face-to-face with the promise of negation, whose form is non-form? Were they seeing something like the Entombment of Christ by Taddeo Gaddi at Yale (ill. 5.27), possibly a late work and therefore contemporary with the San Remigio Pietà?269 Taddeo’s Entombment gives us closed form: all the parts interlock; the painting’s overall gestalt conveys the agony of the moment. Such a picture does not admit a portrait. Karl Birkmeyer suggested that the San Remigio picture was in effect a small, isolated, and therefore “pure” Pietà — an expressive isolation of the dead Christ and the mourning Virgin — which the artist had built back up, by adding figures, into a kind of symbolical Lamentation: a “crystallization of wailing” over Christ.270 Taddeo’s picture reverses this

5.27  Taddeo Gaddi, Pietà, 1335–40? Panel, 116 × 76.3 cm. New Haven, Connecticut, Yale University Art Gallery.

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process. A scenic Lamentation has (not literally, but in effect) been cropped; only the scene’s inner core is shown. Like the Lamentation by Coppo di Marcovaldo analyzed in the last chapter (ill.  4.12 and detail), Taddeo’s painting leaves nothing to chance and leaves you no room for choice. In the San Remigio Pietà, the painter has given us instead a cold, distanced view, nothing like the empathetic and holistic images by Coppo di Marcovaldo or the Master of St. Francesco at Assisi in the Lower Church at Assisi (ill. 4.13). Those pictures were inhospitable to lay interlopers, so demanding was their form.271 Perhaps it is the steady gazes of the modern women, the portrayed, that have generated this objective view on things. Perhaps, in their eyes, Christ is not immeasurable, perhaps the women do comprehend, and they are not negated; this is not the vision of Paradise, the “staring at God” any more than it is the incoherent and self-negating ardor of the Franciscans. The women’s self-mastery has no effect on the emotions of the others. The women’s intense but passive receptivity is projected onto the picture as a whole, stabilizing the scene. Their passivity and composure spread like a contagion, “settling” the composition. The tamping down of the overall emotional gestalt of the picture has the effect of opening up space for us, outside the picture. We can now follow the women into the painting. The women are a path leading from the outside to the inside. They appear in the picture just as they would outside the picture, kneeling in the church. The act of looking-on is displaced from reality to art. The passivity of an observer — which is also a kind of freedom — is imported into the picture, as if pumped into the picture, converting participants into observers. Nicodemus and Joseph are detached. The price paid is the loss of that overall gestalt that closed and rounded Coppo’s composition, sealing it off from everything foreign. In Coppo’s Lamentation, consciousness and attentiveness had been shared equally by all the participants. Response, at least as depicted, was collective. Giottino’s painting, by contrast, de-collectivizes consciousness. Each person has his or her own response. There are subtle distinctions from one figure to another. These shadings of emotion were the hallmark of this painter.

At the origin of the work is a transference, a dynamic reorganization of the passions. In the formulation of Shoshana Felman, recalling our discussion of her essay on the intricacies of reading (pp. 103–6): “The story’s origin is not a referent, but the very act of reference: the very act — through love and death — of referring to the Other; the gesture of the transference of a story.”272 Desire is displaced from one object to another. The women gather up all the libidinal force invested in their profane and sacred families (husbands, sons, daughters, parents; Mary, Jesus, Joseph, John, Mary Magdalene) and train them on a single target, the image of Christ’s death that is a non-death. Christ is the addressee of their unconscious. To him is attributed all the knowledge. He is and will remain — because unburied — a ghost. Mourning shades into

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necrophilia. Vasari, who is our predecessor, our advance scout, as interpreter of the painting, was also caught up in a displacement involving the substitution and confusion of sacred and profane desires. He dealt with the enigma of artistic beauty by displacing the question onto the weeping faces. Through the veils of tears, he thought he could discern the youthful, comely women who underwrote the painting’s beauty. In an infinite regress, the patron moves into the slot in the narrative once occupied by a purely pictorial artifact, the anonymous placeholder. The portrait in turn becomes a pictorial placeholder for the secular beholder of the future — Vasari, or you. The portrait settles the dramatic scene, reterritorializing the libidinal agitation, so that the future beholder can grasp it. The Lamentation over the Body of Christ is the essential Christian image for modern times because it shows people pondering the hypothesis of the necessity of Christ’s death. They have not yet experienced or received the news of the Resurrection. Christ’s death was meant to be the first death that amounted to more than a death, so allowing all our deaths to exceed themselves. Many societies had organized themselves around the sacred-profane binary, if only to legitimate the power invested in a ruler-priest, or to justify physical boundaries within the communal space. But now under Christianity the merism of sacred and profane promises to solve the problem of death, of your death. Christianity maps sacred-profane onto life-death. A merism is a doublet that creates rhetorically the impression of a wholeness without remainder. That is all there is: “the quick and the dead” of Tyndale’s Bible. The Christian is asked to embrace life and death, as if one’s life would be fulfilled and ratified only by death. The mutual involvement of the living and the dead cultivated by the tomb-cults and by the intercessional promise sustains the hope that “life plus death” will amount to something, that there is something valuable beyond life that will complete us. A proposition easy to accept from a soteriological or an ecological perspective, but hard to accept when facing the prospect of one’s own death. From a great distance, there are the living and the dead, all the human beings who ever were. But from my point of view, there is only life, which is not completed but only negated by death. Maybe that was all it took to shake Christianity: the realization that the merism life and death is factitious, and deceitful. In reality, there is only life, and nonlife. There is no positive definition of death. This is what the portrait revealed, challenging the sacred image and its meristic thesis. The portrait set up inside the sacred image an individual, inalienable point of view. Consequences of that inalienability are the obsession with one’s own life, the care for one’s own existence, and the recognition of the sheer impossibility of grasping one’s own death.

Detail of ill. 5.2

vi The Classic Art History of the Portrait

The embedded portrait, symbol of the colonization of the sacred field by the real and the human, played a prominent role in the “classic” twentieth-­century historiography of Renaissance art. By the midpoint of that century, the clouds of idealism were thought to have been finally dispersed, first by the positivism of the nineteenth century and then by the catastrophic wars of the twentieth century. Christianity had lost its grip. People needed a new way to describe the sacred art of the Renaissance as already modern art.

Erwin Panofsky, 1953 On the frontispiece of his magnum opus Early Netherlandish Painting, published seventy years ago, Erwin Panofsky reproduced a detail from an altarpiece by the Flemish artist Rogier van der Weyden, the Nativity now in Berlin (ill. 6.1).1 The central panel of this triptych shows the work’s patron kneeling at the Nativity of Christ, alongside Mary and Joseph.2 That patron was probably Pieter Bladelin, a financier and treasurer of the Order of the Golden Fleece. Born into a wealthy but non-noble family, Bladelin had risen in the service of the Duke of Burgundy, Philip the Good.3 The detail chosen by Panofsky as the emblem of his book is a close-up depicting Bladelin’s upper body (ill. 6.2). Bladelin is in effect the protagonist of the entire book. The basis of the identification of this man as Pieter Bladelin is an engraving of 1641 that depicts the castle and town of Middelburg, near Bruges, a town that Bladelin himself founded in 1444 at the age of thirty-four. Van der Weyden’s painting is thought to include a “portrait” of the town as well as a portrait of the man.4 The picture has been dated on stylistic grounds to the late 1440s, by some, and by others to the early 1450s. It is quite plausible Detail of ill. 6.3

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6.1  Rogier van der Weyden, triptych with Nativity, c. 1450. Central panel, 91 × 89 cm. Berlin, Gemäldegalerie.

6.2  Frontispiece and title page, Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting (1953).

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that Pieter Bladelin commissioned a triptych from the outstanding Flemish painter of the day either for his palace in the town of Bruges or for the castle around which the town was built. It may have been a semipublic painting, especially if Panofsky was right that the scene of Augustus and the Tiburtine Sibyl in the triptych’s left wing contains portraits of the noblemen and imperial advisors Pierre de Beffremont and Jean le Fèvre de St.-Remy playing the roles of “dignitaries witnessing the vision.”5 In the end, the modern man’s name is not so important. He is wealthy, he is dressed as himself, and his portrait is introduced in full scale into a religious scene, as is the image or portrait of a modern town not much resembling ancient Jerusalem. The embedding of portraits in sacred historical scenes was not so common in Bladelin’s time. Among all the Netherlandish triptychs painted before 1530 only five percent depicted a donor or patron in the middle panel.6 The earliest Netherlandish example of a portrait introduced into a narrative scene is the Crucifixion altar in Vienna by Rogier van der Weyden, another triptych, dated on the basis of style to the 1440s. Here an unidentified man and woman, portrayed in full scale, kneel in prayer at the foot of the Cross (ill.  6.3 and detail, p. 232).7 They wear black and are unmistakably modern. They occupy the whole space to the right of the Cross, relegating Mary Magdalene — who has already been displaced by the Virgin Mary from her customary position at the foot of the Cross — to the left wing of the triptych. This posed a problem for later artists who wished to borrow Rogier’s elegant composition. In an early, smaller copy of the middle panel of the Vienna triptych, attributed to Rogier’s own workshop, the modern patrons were removed and replaced by the figure of Mary Magdalene from Rogier’s Madrid Deposition.8 In a copy by the Brussels Master of the Legend of St. Catherine, now in the Prado, the patrons are swapped out for three female mourners.9 Gerard David made an adaptation, now in the Barnes Collection, that replaces the patrons with the figure of the Magdalene from the left wing of the Vienna triptych, in reverse.10 Copies and adaptations of Rogier’s other works involving patron portraits called for other solutions.11 The paintings were modular: patrons, saints, and sacred personages were units in a compositional calculation, masses to be balanced and juxtaposed. In the Prado Crucifixion by the Master of the Legend of St. Catherine, one of the mourning women is standing and two are kneeling. The kneeling women, in splendid exoticizing costumes, repeat the gestures of the Vienna patrons, one with hands pressed together and the other with interlaced figures. But they have risen to one knee, as modern lay supplicants never do, and their emotions rise to flood their expressions. This is the moment of the “arrival” of the embedded portrait. With Rogier van der Weyden, you have a new visual idea. In the Berlin picture, the patron —  we may as well call him Bladelin — is fully integrated into the work of art. Without him, there is no composition — the entire work would have to be rethought. This is the realization, in artistic terms, of that quality of the late

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6.3  Rogier van der Weyden, triptych with Crucifixion, 1440s. Central panel, 96 × 69 cm. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum.

thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century “interactive” devotional panels identified by Jens Wollesen: the supplicants were not simply appended to established pictorial formulas; rather, they exerted a push-and-pull pressure on those formulas, generating entirely new configurations.12 Bladelin kneels just outside the crumbling shed. Mary also kneels. Bladelin’s head is bowed. His expensive black clothes mark him straight away as an interloper. He is an apex on a triangle with the parents of Christ — the figures form a tripod, a cooking vessel converted into a sacrificial vessel. Within the triangle is the ritual offering: Christ, an infant whose fate is already known. “The donor,” writes Panofsky, “his fine-boned face expressing deepest piety, but full of sadness, is permitted to participate in Our Lady’s Devotion.”13 Theological propositions are now written on his features. Bladelin’s head turns, and yet toward nothing. Bladelin is not looking at the Christ Child but seems almost to be staring at one of the mysterious holes in the ground, which have been interpreted as apertures opening onto either a well associated with the Three Magi, or the grotto of the Nativity, or, by Al Acres, as the prison of the Devil who has been rebuffed by faith.14 Bladelin’s withdrawal into himself creates the impression that his involvement with the divine is entirely inward and

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is not dependent on stimuli such as paintings. His devotional intellect gives him the privilege of withdrawing from time and from the drama of bodily involvement. All this the modern scholar-aesthete can understand.15 Something has changed: we cannot check the man’s face against a referent in reality, and yet it feels unmistakably like a portrait. The density of data in the head of the worshipper, registering the finest irregularities, reads as the index of a continuity of experience underlying and integrating the flow of existence. This will be called character or personality. Georg Simmel in his book Rembrandt (1916) said that the impression we gain from a painted portrait that an inner life is legible on the face is no different from the many such impressions we have in life itself. When we read people’s expressions, we are not merely “inferring” an inner life, we actually see “that life as immanent in . . .  physiognomy and movement.” The visible world includes the life of others.16 The legibility of the face may be historically conditioned to some extent, but, on the whole, this is just how humans live; reading faces is what we are good at. What is historical is the technical capacity to depict a face that tricks us into reading it as if it were a real face. The painting by Rogier reveals, retrospectively, the generic quality of Trecento portraits. The faces of the two women in the San Remigio Pietà were psychologically empty, or illegible: they exhibited at most a stunned sense of dread. Bladelin’s features, by contrast, imply a ruminative tragic knowledge. In his mind’s eye, the worshipper sees himself contemplating the holy story. He is mindful of his own mindfulness. First-order and second-order perception overlap. The painter has led us inside a house of mirrors. The one who praises is now also one who is praiseworthy, as if we have cycled back to that archaic concept of portraiture whereby only the most exalted, worthy, and virtuous merit portrayal. When he paints a Nativity, a painter begins with readymade figures, formulas established by earlier painters, or by his own prior works, and then works them up, adapts and adjusts them. The portrait, by contrast, is not worked up; it is seized whole, mirror-like. This produces a difference between Bladelin and the historical-mythic figures, Mary and Joseph: the latter still look conventional, even though painted in the new, lifelike technique of oil paint. This makes an uncanny effect. Panofsky’s admiration for Bladelin reverses Hegel’s judgment on the hybrid sacred paintings of the Renaissance (p. 61). Hegel thought the faces of the sacred personages in the old Netherlandish paintings exhibited true piety, a confidence in their purpose that consumed their consciousness without remainder. The modern patrons, by contrast, on the evidence of their portraits, were distracted, merely posing or acting, under the strain of reconciling their penitent and worldly selves. For Hegel, this was a sign that in modernity the art of painting would no longer be the medium of ideality. The divided quality of the modern devout, however, did not trouble Panofsky. He prefers Bladelin’s refined, abstracted, melancholic expression to the single-minded

6.4  Niccolò di Tommaso, triptych with Nativity, 1373–1375. Central panel, 63.5 × 51.9 cm. Phila­delphia Museum of Art.

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fervor of the saints. The question of Bladelin’s sincerity is irrelevant. Panofsky considered the crooked timber of humanity a worthy enough subject matter.

Bridget of Sweden and iconography Bladelin kneels alongside the Virgin, an act of hubris, it would seem. Who gave Bladelin license to attend the Nativity? The Virgin’s white shift provides the clue, for this is how she appeared to the most celebrated witness of her century, the devout noblewoman Bridget of Sweden. Bridget’s vision of the Nativity occurred in Bethlehem in August 1372. She described it in part seven of her Revelations.17 Bridget died in Rome in 1373, and the Revelations were edited in preparation for her canonization hearings in 1377. Almost immediately, there was demand for manuscript copies.18 For many patrons and painters, Bridget’s account possessed enough authority to actually alter the iconography of the scene. Like the women in the San Remigio Pietà, Bridget had been shown how it really was. The first “Brigittine” Nativities were commissioned by patrons who had encountered Bridget in Naples immediately upon her return from the Holy Land in the fall of 1372. Bridget had spent quite a lot of time in Naples over the years and had cultivated ties with the Orsini and other leading families. Documents indicate that already by 1376 there were images illustrating Bridget’s vision of the Nativity in three Neapolitan churches; none of these survives. Documents attest to further aristocratic commissions, also in Rome and Lazio.19 The earliest surviving Brigittine paintings are the three Nativities attributed to the Florentine Niccolò di Tommaso, whom we have already met twice, as the collaborator of Jacopo di Cione on the San Pier Maggiore altarpiece and as a candidate to be the author of the Ponce Annunciation. These panels, in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Yale University Art Gallery, and the Vatican Pinacoteca, depict Bridget herself in the lower right corner, in black, as witness, her kneeling posture mirroring the Virgin’s own.20 Niccolò di Tommaso was working in Naples from early 1373, when he may have met Bridget in person, until some point in 1375.21 In the Philadelphia triptych, the best of the paintings, Bridget kneels on a stone ledge just outside the cave; her eyes appear to be closed (ill. 6.4).22 She has a halo. Behind her is a pilgrim’s staff and flask. Above the cave are God and angels. There are several inscriptions on scrolls. Mary and Christ are encased in gold mandorlas. Mary, having discarded her shoes just as Bridget related it, kneels in a white shift before her child. Mary’s red and blue garments, as well as the linen and woolen cloths and “other small articles” mentioned by Bridget, are also on the ground; on the rear wall of the cave is the candle affixed by Joseph. Mary’s golden hair flows freely. Bridget reports that Mary gave birth instantaneously and without blood or pain, while kneeling and praying, hands raised. When the baby appeared she remained kneeling, pressed her hands together, and bowed her head. In the paintings, she indeed presses her hands together like a modern devout, while Joseph uses the hands-crossed-on-breast gesture usually given to female figures.23 Bridget’s

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“correction” of the conventional iconography based on her vision was perhaps understood (and perhaps even by Bridget herself ) as a counterweight to the painters’ growing emphasis on artistic form as opposed to content. Bridget’s vision does not differ drastically from earlier devotional scripts or from earlier paintings of the Nativity. How could it? Some aspects of her description were present already in the Meditations on the Life of Christ. The older art historical literature (Henry Thode, Émile Mâle) attributed the shift in the iconography of the Nativity around 1400 to the Meditations. Henrik Cornell in 1924 realized that the impact of Bridget’s Revelations was more significant.24 More recent scholars have pointed out that some of the motifs of Bridget’s version — for example Mary kneeling and praying to her own child — may already be found in Trecento painting. Millard Meiss lists three pre-Brigittine pictures that show Mary kneeling at the Nativity.25 To these examples we may add the panel attributed to the Master of the Piani d’Invrea Crucifixion (c. 1340–45) and the triptych by the Master of San Lucchese (c. 1335–40), both in the Alana Collection, Newark.26 But Cornell already noted such examples and was not fazed because already the Meditations on the Life of Christ says that immediately after the birth, Mary knelt and adored (“contemplated” in the Italian text) her child.27 Panofsky and Meiss seem a little too eager to show that in each case Bridget must have been influenced by paintings she saw in Italy, as if to insinuate that her visions did not after all come to her straight from heaven, as claimed. But of course Bridget knew Italian paintings: she spent much time in Italy, over a period of more than twenty years, often among wealthy people who owned private devotional paintings. Her imagination fired by the tradition of sacred imagery, she had a vision that ended up feeding back into that tradition. She is the last witness, one might say. At any rate, such remarks about the dependency of Bridget’s vision on Italian paintings miss the point because Bridget’s key innovation was not Mary’s kneeling and praying per se, but the white shift (absent in all the pre-1373 examples), as well as the discarded shoes and the prepared linens — apparently irrelevant details whose presence in Bridget’s report attested to the reliability of that account. This is the “reality effect” familiar to readers of narrative fiction. Modern comments on the constructed quality of Bridget’s vision reproduce critiques levelled against her in her own time, for her detractors already then felt that she was too cultivated, too well-prepared for her visions. As Barbara Newman has shown, the Church was quick to discredit the sophisticated visions of elite mystics in favor of the more authentic reports of the naive and unlettered.28 Fabian Wolf collects a large quantity of Italian examples of early Brigittine Nativities, in fresco painting and manuscripts as well as panel paintings.29 The new iconography of the Nativity was transferred to northern European painting by the Brothers Limburg.30 The Brigittine motifs figure in one of the direct models for Rogier van der Weyden’s Nativity triptych for Pieter Bladelin, the Nativity by the Master of Flémalle or Robert Campin — possibly Rogier’s

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teacher — now in Dijon, a painting that also refers to the story of the midwives.31 Panofsky notes that in Rogier’s adaptation of that model, “the donor takes the place of the believing midwife.” Indeed, in chapter 4, we described the midwife in Taddeo Gaddi’s Thyssen Nativity as a placeholder for a lay devout. Bridget becomes another Leitfigur or model of devotional behavior, in the sense developed by Frank O. Büttner.32 Like Francis, she mediates between divinity and the modern laity. She updates or refreshes the Franciscan topos. The paintings show us Bridget, and they show us what she sees. This “folded” quality was already present in Giottino’s San Remigio Pietà, which shows us the female patrons and what they saw. Bridget is the lay devout who opened up space for other devout at the Nativity. Or is it the other way around? Did the portraits of modern lay devout in Italian paintings provide the model not only for Bridget herself but also for the kneeling, adoring Mary of Bridget’s vision? The lay donor or patron portrait was in effect routed through Bridget’s vision and back into the sacred iconography — in the form of Mary. Mary now kneels before her child in the attitude of a modern lay worshipper. Mary was a layperson, even if she was given over by her parents to the priests of the Temple at the age of three, according to the apocryphal text.33 She left the Temple to marry Joseph. At the Nativity, she became the first lay worshipper of Jesus. Her genuflection is Christocentric: in focusing on Christ, she diminishes herself. But by imitating a modern lay devout, Mary makes herself the vortex of the painting, for now modern worshippers can more easily enter into her experience. It was as if she had anticipated and prepared their own devotions. This was effective with men, too, as the case of Bladelin shows. The chain of imitations came full circle: the lay supplicant portrait of the fourteenth century, Bridget, Mary, and finally Bladelin.34 Here we may recall Hofstadter’s argument about the superimposed chessboards. On one chessboard, the game is played. On a second, the movements of the pieces determine the rules of the game played on the first board. If the two boards are superimposed — and this is just what we are saying the art of painting does — then a chess move will have double consequences: it will “count” in the game, and at the same time it will alter the rules of that game. The “game” is the effort to create a successful painting. The “rule-change” is the news conveyed by Bridget about the Nativity, and her licensing of the new significance of the image of the patron within the composition. The rulechange lends a new authority to a painter’s iconographical choices, and it generally endorses pious lay involvement in the mysteries. But Bladelin’s virtual presence at the event also completely alters the composition — he is now part of the artwork and not merely a supplement. The chain of imitations has also come to an end: Bladelin himself has no visions. Panofsky, whose view of Christianity was neutral, was impressed not by the content of Bladelin’s pious reflections, but by his capacity to feel and think. Bladelin’s mind is an empty vessel; its contents can be switched out. He is feeling and contemplating, object unspecified. Panofsky’s interest in

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Bladelin’s sensibility is not a complete fantasy, for it was the basis for the institution of the independent portrait. The psychic unity of the person — the gathering up of the various emotional and cognitive themes of the man’s life into a coherently acting social being — is transferred to the portrait, allowing the portrait to stand alone. Pieter Bladelin, subject matter enough, is self-framing. In choosing a close-up of Bladelin for the frontispiece to his book, Panofsky was only recapitulating the process of cropping that eventually reduced the supplicant portrait, normally the whole body, to the bust format. A great innovation of the Trecento was the physically independent bust-length portrait of the non-holy personage. Until then, only saints or other religious heroes could occupy a panel all on their own — we call these icons. Icons are mobile portraits that may circulate and still retain significance. Modern saints — Francis and Dominic — were depicted on their own panels within decades of their death. The oldest surviving independent portraits of lay subjects were the royal or aristocratic portraits of the third quarter of the fourteenth century (Jean II le Bon of France; Rudolf IV, Duke of Austria). Hans Belting asked how the layperson ever presumed to claim the surface of an independent, mobile painted panel for his or her own face, outside a religious context. His answer was that the Netherlandish independent portrait was conceptually continuous with the coat of arms, a painted emblem that originally adorned shields and identified the family of the shield’s bearer. With such a shield you could be present by proxy, in a castle or a church. The painted portrait, which resembles in size, materiality, and mobility the shield, extended this idea. Before the advent of the autonomous, mobile portrait painted on panel, Belting argues, one cannot speak of a portrait truly representing a person.35 Until then, the portrait rendered a mere body — for the modern portrait, you need the psychic unity as well. The votive context provided that. Panofsky could identify with Bladelin because he “knew” him as the subject of an independent portrait. Not literally, because there is no independent portrait of Bladelin, but there could have been one — probably there was one! now long lost. It is easy to imagine how it would have looked. Rogier van der Weyden was one of the pioneers of this institution. Alongside Jan van Eyck and the Master of Flémalle (or Robert Campin), he created the portrait as a work of art. At least three paintings by van der Weyden — the portrait of a woman in Berlin, the portrait of Francesco d’Este in New York, and the portrait of a woman in Washington — appear to have stood alone, unattached to a sacred image (for example in the form of a hinged diptych).36 The emblem of Panofsky’s book, the cropped portrait of Bladelin, reveals the hidden centrality of the lay patron in modern writing on Renaissance art. I have tried in this book to understand fourteenth-century painting without looking forward to the fifteenth century. But when the patrons appear in Christian paintings, we moderns are inevitably drawn to them; they make possible a “transition.” In those moments when our involvements with artworks reproduce, in transfigured form, some of their predicaments — the balancing of

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order and disorder, the pursuit of a life unto death — we arrive at the limits of an objective and historical approach to those works. The idea that the depiction of the real individual — the portrait — represents an inner limit of Christian painting was a cornerstone of modern art history — in Panofsky, and before him in Alois Riegl. The embedded portrait is a basis for modern investment in these pictures completely independent of an investment in the Christian myth. It marks the modern moment when the relation of the profane beholder — the historian — to sacred painting is reset. “Beauty,” for Riegl and Panofsky, can no longer serve as a shorthand for the works’ extra-Christian appeal, as it did for Vasari. The entire project of Christianity has to be translated into more universal terms, repackaged for modernity. Bladelin symbolizes for Panofsky the “occupation” of the sacred ground by the enlightened and self-aware modern subject. Bladelin himself, not to mention the painter, would have been baffled by Panofsky’s view.

Alois Riegl, 1902 Erwin Panofsky in 1953 was saying that we have seen the worst, and, despite everything, we have succeeded in protecting what is most precious: the flame of ideality that is our own conscience. The great Viennese art historian Alois Riegl, writing more than fifty years earlier, his mind at ease, secure, after decades of European peace, could not foresee the trials of the century to come. Riegl, too, built his magnum opus, a monograph on the Dutch group portrait, on or around an embedded portrait of the fifteenth century. The Dutch Group Portrait (1902) is mainly about depictions of civic guard companies, boards of trustees, guild officers and the like, an artistic institution of the Dutch Republic in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.37 These include the great militia company paintings by Frans Hals as well as the anatomy lessons and the portrait The Staalmeesters or the Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild by Rembrandt van Rijn. Riegl began his study with a lengthy reading of an earlier painting, by the Dutch artist Geertgen tot Sint Jans, the Burning of the Bones of John the Baptist, now in Vienna (ill. 6.5).38 This is one of two surviving paintings, front and back of a single wing of the high altarpiece of the church of the Knightly Order of St. John the Baptist, a convent established in Haarlem in 1310. The altarpiece, which intact was one of the largest of the entire century, almost as large as Hugo van der Goes’s Portinari altar, was mostly destroyed in the war with the Spanish in 1573. Dendrochronological analysis indicates that the paintings were painted after 1481. The work may have been commissioned by the Commander Jan Willem Jansz., whose long tenure began in 1484. The painter Geertgen died in 1493 or 1494. The wealthy convent housed both religious and lay brothers. The upper ranks were the Knights proper, nobility or notables, only eight in number. Then came the “brother priests,” and last, the “serving brothers,” but even these latter had taken orders. The painter Geertgen tot Sint Jans lived among

6.5  Geertgen tot Sint Jans, The Burning and Recovery of the Bones of John the Baptist, after 1484. Panel, 172 × 139 cm. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum.

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them — thus his name — as something like a lay brother, evidently, for his biographer Karel van Mander says he took no vows.39 According to the old histories, the apostate emperor Julian tried to destroy the remains of John the Baptist, but some monks of Jerusalem managed to rescue a few bones. At first glance, the group of men in black at the left, behind the empty tomb, are those ancient monks (detail, p. 261). But their costumes are modern, and the painter has given more information about their physiognomies than is necessary to tell the story. It has therefore long been held that these figures are crypto-portraits of the Haarlem Johannites.40 Five have eight-pointed white crosses on their habits, and those five reappear in the middle ground, on the path sloping upward to the gates of Jerusalem — one can just about recognize their faces. It is not clear who the six men to the right of the original five are. They also appear to be portraits. In the Lamentation over the Dead Christ, the other surviving element of the altar, and also now in Vienna, there is a figure in black at the rear with a white cloth draped over his arm — also clearly a portrait. The portrayed Johannites at the Burning of the Bones and the Lamentation are only partly submerged in their roles. The Johannites are physically present at the events, taking up space; they even participate by holding bones or a winding cloth; there is no sense that they might be somehow collectively imagining the whole scene. But they are psychically absent, like Pieter Bladelin. They all turn their heads in identical fashion, no doubt instructed by the artist, when he made the individual preparatory drawings, to adopt the “three-quarter” pose, the most informative. This uniform angling contributes to the artificiality of their aspect. Nevertheless, Riegl saw that painter and patrons had seized on an opportunity, provided by the story, to create a group portrait, an assemblage of individual portraits not just tiled one next to the other, but unified as a group by some external motivation, in this case, their roles as instigators and witnesses in this episode of sacred archaeology. For Riegl, the Burning and Recovery of the Bones of John the Baptist already reveals the basic tension between the subordination of the individual figure to an overall formal theme, as the painting qua artwork demands, and the coordination of that figure with other figures, as psychological realism demands — a tension that would govern the development of the secular group portrait in Holland for the next two centuries. Riegl emphasizes here the artist’s interest in creating the effect of his portrait subjects’ psychic abstraction, their psychic autonomy, even if governed in part by the method of assembling a portfolio of conventional three-quarter views, and at the risk of making them appear to be uninterested in anything at all, including the astonishing events they are witnessing. The clerics, although not reacting visibly to one another, are nevertheless coordinated — the picture, the arrangement of the bodies and heads, conveys this coordination, if not the psychology. The “coordinated attentiveness” of this painting “is an early witness to a decisive evolution toward subjectivity in art that would eventually leave antique and Italian Renaissance concepts far behind.”41

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Riegl’s condescending tone when discussing the sacred art of the fifteenth century suggests that he was not tempted to linger long among these works. He speaks of the patrons’ “comforting certainty about their own immortality and redemption” and of their essentially “egotistical” desires for the heavenly reward, even when portrayed collectively.42 Riegl makes no apology here for his secular perspective. In his view, the sacred legend was destined to wither away leaving only the portraits, the images of human beings as such, suspended, in some of the group portraits of the seventeenth century, in a neutral dark medium, with a minimum of attributes, props, or narrative or symbolic pretexts. Riegl was interested not in the idea of God held by the Haarlem clerics, but rather in showing how Dutch artists, while working through the representational paradoxes of the group portrait, were exploring the riddles of selfhood and collective identity, the conflicting claims on the individual of multiple nested communities (family, guild, militia, nation), and generally the adaptation of will and feeling to modern conditions. Riegl was more interested in society and sociability, the horizontal attentions and compacts that bound human beings together, than was Panofsky. The subtext of Riegl’s book is the fine-tuning of liberal society. This seemed the most pressing political project, perhaps, in 1902: how to balance the claims of the individual and the community now that the mythically sustained hierarchies of the ancien régime had lost their authority. Riegl laid a foundation for Panofsky’s liberal humanism, which was more philosophical and even more protective, if possible, of the freedom of the mind and spirit. In his comments on this very painting by Geertgen in Early Netherlandish Painting, Panofsky does not mention Riegl. But Panofsky, who early in his career had engaged with Riegl as a theorist of art, must have known Riegl’s classic study well. He accepts Riegl’s premise that the sacred paintings of the fifteenth century are the first that implicate the modern, secular, and aestheticizing beholder. The predicaments of the fifteenth-century bourgeois start to resemble those of their nineteenth- and twentieth-century descendants. The achievement of these rich and righteous citizens within a cumulative, progressive history of European civilization is precisely the repression of all inner chaos. Panofsky said that Rogier van der Weyden as portraitist flattens the complexity of the individual into “character” — an abstraction and clarification formed by action in the social sphere, and consistent with social position.43 Pieter Bladelin and the Haarlem worthies project a self-awareness and competence that can easily be reassigned, it would seem, from sacred to worldly tasks. At the same time, their “fine-boned” heads rotate in space but do not point anywhere in particular, indicating a capacity to withdraw, when appropriate, from social and power-based relations. In the paintings analyzed by Panofsky and Riegl, the anarchic energies stirred up by the attempt to approach God were now quelled and quieted, imprisoned like the Devil in his grotto in the Bladelin altar, or finally buried properly, as in Geertgen tot Sint Jans’s painting. The ideal devout patron

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is neither merely pragmatic, nor troubled, but instead indulges in a muted feeling of “sadness.” The Haarlem brotherhood are finely tuned, attentive — to what? There is no need to specify, for they will bring the same thoughtful attentiveness and reasonableness to anything they face. After this moment in art history, Riegl and Panofsky are saying, the patron may withdraw his image, but he is in fact always there. The patron is both the subjectivity that programs the artwork, and the addressee of art. Evidently, the embedded portrait between the fourteenth and fifteenth century has taken on completely new meanings. Between the era of Giotto and Giottino, on the one hand, and the era of Rogier van der Weyden and Geertgen tot Sint Jans on the other, the institution of the independent portrait has intervened. The panel portrait by van Eyck or van der Weyden pictured and possibly even encouraged that fusion of personhood that Panofsky and Riegl saw as civilization’s destination. The embedded portraits of the previous century, especially in the Franciscan context, had been always on the verge, just barely holding it all together. Their subjects were exposed as Pieter Bladelin and the Johannites are not. The portraits in the Nativity and Crucifixion by Rogier, and in Geertgen’s altarpiece, are like independent portraits that have been plugged into a sacred picture.

Erich Auerbach on realism Modern neo-humanist scholars redeem premodern art and poetry — products of a faith-oriented, non-secular, unenlightened age — with the argument that we may after all not be so alienated from those works, because in modernity we have not really dispensed with God, as it may superficially appear. Instead, the divine has migrated inside us. The incommensurability is not between human and God, but potentially — and this is what humanism is meant to overcome — between human and human. We are gods for one another, with all the implications this carries: we compel each other’s love and respect, and yet are unknowable to one another. Twentieth-century humanists took for granted that we inhabit an indifferent universe and the only spirituality is our own, our conscience and intellect. Where is ideality? It used to be the invisible order of the cosmos. In modernity, it is the bottomless interior of the human subject, the innermost (Latin intimus, innermost). Erich Auerbach began his book on Dante — written in 1929, just before history’s tailspin — by speaking of the unity of the person, the human being as an indivisible fusion of body and spirit, as the great theme of Western literature. The individual’s unique fate follows from that unity, “which like a magnet attracts the acts and sufferings appropriate to it.” The unity of the individual is present even before observation begins.44 That is Auerbach’s starting point, his premise. By this logic, myth and superstition must fall away, and realism must in the end emerge. The core of Auerbach’s entire project, however, is his famous reading of Dante as a typological thinker. Auerbach

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argues that medieval typology, the study of the Old Testament’s multiple foreshadowings of the New Dispensation, led Dante to the intuition that everything that ever happened and will happen, in history, in modern life, and in sacred history, is equally concrete and real. The appearance of human souls in the other world “is a fulfillment of their appearance on earth, their appearance on earth a figure of their appearance in the other world.” A typological schema “permits both its poles — the figure and its fulfillment — to retain the characteristics of concrete historical reality. So far from draining earthly existence of its substance, typology actually gives it substance. For Dante, human history is “in constant connection with God’s plan” by virtue of a “multiplicity of vertical links that establish an immediate relation between every earthly phenomenon and the plan of salvation as conceived by Providence.”45 This reading is admired by all those who wish to hold onto the image of Dante as essentially a religious thinker, and not simply a poet who spins fictions in the medium of theology. And yet at the end of the chapter in Mimesis on Dante, entitled “Farinata and Cavalcante,” Auerbach undermines his own theological reading of the Commedia by asserting that in the end the unforgettable characterizations of the passions and anxieties of the denizens of Hell and Purgatory, the “direct experience of life” that Dante offers, “overwhelm everything else.” So impressive and moving are these portraits. For Farinata degli Uberti (the same whose painted portrait by Giotto Vasari had seen in the Job frescoes at Pisa) and Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti were real people. By virtue of this immediate and admiring sympathy with man, the principle, rooted in the divine order, of the indestructibility of the whole historical and individual man turns against that order, makes it subservient to its own purposes, and obscures it. The image of man eclipses the image of God.46

For Dante scholars, this is an awkward crux, because Auerbach’s own typological reading of the poem was so eminent and impressive, whereas his humanistic rescue of Dante is so obviously anachronistic, even “Romantic.” For there is plenty of counterevidence in the poem that would suggest that Dante was absolutely not saying that it was mankind’s destiny to “make the divine order subservient to its own purposes” or to “eclipse the image of God.” To take an almost random example from the Paradiso: in the first canto, the character “Dante” finally lays eyes on Beatrice and in doing so “passes beyond the human.” He finds he cannot express this experience directly, but only indirectly, in a simile: Beatrice tutta ne l’etterne rote

The eyes of Beatrice were all intent

fissa con li occhi stava; e io in lei

on the eternal circles; from the sun,

le luci fissi, di là sù rimote.

I turned aside; I set my eyes on her.

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Nel suo aspetto tal dentro mi fei,

In watching her, within me I was changed

qual si fé Glauco nel gustar de l’erba

as Glaucus changed, tasting the herb that made

che ’l fé consorto in mar de li altri dèi.

him a companion of the other sea gods.

Trasumanar significar per verba

Passing beyond the human cannot be

non si poria; però l’essemplo basti

worded; let Glaucus serve as simile — 

a cui esperïenza grazia serba.

until grace grant you the experience.

(Paradiso 1.64–72)

(Trans. Mandelbaum)

Trasumanar: to pass beyond the human and enter the company of gods. In the interpretation of Heather Webb, trasumanar is to arrive at the real, stable person, not the “aerial, relational, dynamic person” of the Purgatorio.47 We saw earlier that this person who transcends himself and enters into the presence of divinity gives up his face. Poetry, perhaps, or music can convey this, but not painting. Giuseppe Mazzotta rescues Auerbach by contending that the scholar was not really claiming that the text of the Commedia supports his reading. Auerbach knew, Mazzotta suggests, that his assessment of Dante’s significance in the history of European literature rested on an imbalanced reading of the text. At the crucial moment, according to Mazzotta, Auerbach left Dante’s words behind and handed over his own interpretation to the care of Hegel’s “cunning of reason,” the inexorable logic of history that cannot be perceived by any too-literal reading of texts.48 Auerbach himself says that “Dante’s work made man’s Christian-figural being a reality, and destroyed it in the very process of realizing it.” That is, the Commedia proposes a total coordination of the earthly and the divine. But the picture of earthly existence offered by the poem overwhelms the theological construct. “The tremendous pattern was broken by the overwhelming power of the images it had to contain.”49 Realism is an ungovernable force. What Dante shows undermines what he tells. The poetic work had a momentum of its own; Dante is dominated by the poem he wrote.

Aby Warburg, 1902 There is a third classic twentieth-century treatment of fifteenth-century painting that revolves around the portrait of the layperson embedded in a sacred scene. In 1902, Aby Warburg published a short book on the Sassetti Chapel in the church of Santa Trinità in Florence, with its narrative frescoes by Domenico Ghirlandaio (early 1480s) (ill. 6.6).50 This was the very year of Riegl’s Dutch Group Portrait, and like Riegl, Warburg was no Kulturpessimist. He was at that point in his life so confident of the stability and vitality of the society he inhabited, and felt so liberated from religious myths, that he saw no need to protect a uniquely human spiritual inwardness. In 1902, Warburg produced an interpretation of fifteenth-century culture symmetrical to Riegl’s, that is, similarly structured but with the values reversed. He did not prize that balanced

6.6  Domenico Ghirlandaio, Confirmation of the Rule of St. Francis, early 1480s. Fresco. Florence, Santa Trinità, Sassetti Chapel.

attentiveness that Riegl identified as the theme of Flemish and Netherlandish art. Instead, in his text on the Sassetti Chapel, he celebrated the willfulness, dynamism, and physicality of the Florentines. The basic concept of horizontal scenes stacked on the walls of a narrow chapel is Giottesque. Moreover, the very scene Warburg focuses on is a remake of Giotto’s fresco of the Confirmation of the Rule of St. Francis by Pope Honorius III in 1223 in the Bardi Chapel in Santa Croce (ill. 6.7). Ghirlandaio’s version hosts one of the boldest interventions of any patrons ever into a historical scene. Climbing an inexplicable flight of stairs that ushers them into the midst of the historical event are lifelike portraits of the youthful sons of Lorenzo de’ Medici, the Magnificent, together with their elite team of tutors, the poets and scholars Angelo Poliziano, Luigi Pulci, and Matteo Franco. Standing on the marble floor above them, the same floor upon which the Pope’s meeting with Francis is taking place, are the chapel’s patron Francesco Sassetti, a banker, together with his family and his own patron, Lorenzo, all swelling with pride and presence. There had been no portraits at all in Giotto’s version in Santa

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Croce. But we see in retrospect that the four robed and standing men serving as witnesses, two on each side, are placeholders for the figures of Lorenzo and the male members of the Sassetti family. In the background of Ghirlandaio’s scene, visible through the arcade sheltering the papal colloquy, is not Rome but modern Florence. The jamming together of times and places asserts the actuality of the papal confirmation of the Franciscans, the decision to absorb the nonconformists into the Church and so head off a schism. The consequences of that decision were written into daily life in Florence, then and forever. Santa Trinità was not even a Franciscan church. The embedded portraits in the upper register of the Sassetti Chapel derive from the tradition of crypto-portraits. Vasari mentioned a number of supposed portraits of contemporary notables hidden among the crowds and the bystanders already in Giotto’s paintings. The art of the crypto-portrait was cultivated in fifteenth-century Florence precisely in the orbit of the Medici. The figures of the Three Magi in Benozzo Gozzoli’s Epiphany in the Medici Chapel (1459) were traditionally identified as crypto-portraits of Cosimo il Vecchio, Piero, and Lorenzo de’ Medici, though today prudent scholars doubt this.51 Vasari himself identified crypto-portraits of Cosimo the Elder, Giuliano de’ Medici, and Giovanni (son of Cosimo) in Sandro Botticelli’s Adoration of the Magi, painted in the early 1470s for an altar on the counterfacade of Santa Maria Novella, and now in the Uffizi, but this too has been doubted.52 If they are too well disguised — that is, if they resemble too closely the surrounding, anonymous figures — such portraits will not be legible as portraits.

6.7 Giotto, Confirmation of the Rule of St. Francis, 1325–1328. Fresco, approx. 280 × 450 cm. Florence, Santa Croce, Bardi Chapel.

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There is no danger of that with Ghirlandaio’s images of Sassetti, Lorenzo, and the children and tutors. They are so obviously plucked straight from life, still wearing their modern garments, that no one could mistake them even for an instant for random, thirteenth-century witnesses to the papal confirmation of the Rule of St. Francis. Like the modern Florentines depicted in a nearby work, the Deposition from the Cross by Fra Angelico, in the sacristy at Santa Trinità, they are scarcely disguised (ill. 7.1). Italian painters as well as wealthy patrons were impressed by the realism of the Netherlandish painters. Panel paintings by Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden were known in Italy even before Ghirlandaio’s birth in 1448. Still, the arrival in Florence in 1483 of the altarpiece commissioned by Tommaso Portinari from the Flemish master Hugo van der Goes must have been a shock. This immense triptych represented a Nativity with the Shepherds, and on the side panels portraits of the patrons with their sponsor saints, in landscapes. The painting was installed in the church of Sant’Egidio in the Ospedale of Santa Maria Nuova. From that point on, every Florentine painter had to decide whether to follow the path marked out by this tremendous work, as Ghirlandaio did, or to reject it with its realism wholesale, as would Ghirlandaio’s pupil, Michelangelo Buonarroti. In the Sassetti Chapel, Ghirlandaio not only adopted the style of this work, but also adapted its composition, in the altarpiece representing the Nativity with the Shepherds mounted on the altar below the frescoes. Here on the right edge, three shepherds, their physiognomies drawn straight from life, exchange marveling words and glances. The shepherds in Hugo van der Goes’s altarpiece are less decorous and more homely; they can hardly contain their fervent joy. Max J. Friedländer noted of this work that “the donors are admitted as equals into the holy circle.” Of course — and that was not new. But Hugo’s shepherds, now for the first time given real features, were completely new. They have barged in like bourgeois patrons, except for their poor manners. The people, Friedländer wrote, the “third estate,” “press forward to salvation”; a “new kind of piety, drawn from the congregation, is elevated to the altarpiece.”53 The Feast of Bacchus by Velázquez (ill. 0.5) was nothing other than an ironic anagram of this composition. Warburg recognized the superiority of van der Goes’s original to Ghirlandaio’s imitation, remarking that the northern artist’s shepherds, “absorbed in the act of seeing, are the unconscious symbols of that self-forgetful candor of observation in which the Flemings so greatly excelled the classically educated and rhetorically minded Italians.” This was long before such affirmations of the self-referential and therefore proto-modern quality of artworks had become an art historical commonplace. Warburg’s view of Flemish realism, however, was ambivalent. He did not believe that portraiture, no matter how skillful, could ever realize the spiritual possibilities of the art of painting. It puzzled him that the sophisticated Florentines were drawn to the peculiar Flemish hybrid of brilliant realism and naive piety:

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Did an overly refined aesthetic sense perhaps incline them to clothe their own worldly skepticism in the more acceptable style of naive Flemish piety? They may indeed have taken pleasure in some such self-serving image of themselves; but this was not a prime motive for the Florentine donor, who was still “primitive” enough to insist that a donor portrait must be an unmistakable likeness: only thus could it fulfill its primary purpose, that of setting the seal of authenticity on his votive offering.

In invoking “votive offerings,” Warburg was seeking an alternative, local explanation for the vivid presence of the images of the bankers and their families in the Florentine frescoes. He compared those painted portraits to the lifesized votive effigies in wax found in many Florentine churches in these years. Such effigies, rendered in the morbid, fleshlike medium of wax, dressed in real clothes and outfitted with wigs, represented the ne plus ultra of premodern realism.54 In this way, Warburg uncoupled Ghirlandaio’s portraits from any history of Renaissance art and explained the postponement of the inevitable moment when “the Italian ‘eagles’ dared to take wing and soar to the higher world of ideal forms.”55 For like early portrait photographs, wax effigies in their day were not confused with works of art. They were made not by artists but by specialized craftsmen, the fallimagini or wax workers, who according to Vasari were all trained by the sculptor Andrea del Verrocchio.56 The practice of mounting wax effigies in churches is well-attested in the old sources, even if only a single such object from the period survives, and none from Florence.57 Warburg’s analogy between the wax effigies and Ghirlandaio’s painting separates out realism from its artistic applications. He is saying that the realism of the painted portraits was not only a technical achievement that permitted humanist scholars to rank modern painters and compare them to the ancient realists Zeuxis and Apelles, but also a carrying over of the realism of the three-dimensional effigies into the two-dimensional medium of paint.58 That realism, according to Warburg, was believed by Sassetti and his contemporaries to enhance the efficacy of images placed in physical proximity to altars and shrines in hopes of drawing on the healing power of those charged places, or in hopes of attracting the attention and winning the favor of the Virgin Mary or the saints who might then intercede with Christ and gain salvational preferment for the devout mortal: By associating votive offerings with sacred images, the Catholic Church, in its wisdom, had left its formerly pagan flock a legitimate outlet for the inveterate impulse to associate oneself, or one’s own effigy, with the Divine as expressed in the palpable form of a human image. The Florentines, descendants of the superstitious Etruscans, cultivated this magical use of images in the most unblushing form, right down to the seventeenth century.59

Warburg pointed out that only a few years earlier Lorenzo de’ Medici, grateful for having been spared in the Pazzi conspiracy, commissioned three lifesized wax effigies of himself and installed them in three different Florentine churches.

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The unartistic form of the wax effigy may suggest a popular cult. But wax was expensive (the clerics would eventually melt effigies down for candles). This was actually an elite practice. Francesco di Marco Datini’s business partner Domenico di Cambio wrote to Datini in 1389 urging him to flee the plague in Prato. But Datini stayed put. Domenico wrote again, with resignation: “I have commended you to Our Lady of the Assumption, vowing, if she guards you from this pestilence, I will place before Her a waxen man in your likeness.”60 (Although admittedly he does not say full-scale.) Cynical about established religion, Warburg was by no means shocked by the Florentines’ confidence in image-magic. Indifference to both theological and artistic concerns was for Warburg the mark of seriousness — this bodymagic was the real religion. Warburg was perhaps a little too confident in his identification of Sassetti’s motives. The wax effigies belonged to the category of the so-called ex-voto, a gift signaling recognition and gratitude offered to Mary, upon delivery from illness or other misfortune, and in fulfillment of a vow.61 The practice is ancient. Many ex-votos represented body parts corresponding to the malady or affliction, formed in silver or wax or less expensive materials. A whole body, a nude figurine, represented an overall healing, or possibly a spiritual self-­dedication. Such figurines were the origin of the full-scale effigies, which are not attested until the late Middle Ages and which (unlike the traditional small-scale figurines) represent the subjects typically in a kneeling pose and outfitted with real clothes and wigs. The format and form of these effigies were influenced both by tomb sculpture and by painted supplicant portraits. New functions were overlaid on the original function of honoring the vow made in a moment of distress: notably the public advertisement of one’s piety and wealth. When a motive is given, however, it is always the orthodox one. The letter from Datini’s business partner speaks, correctly, of a wax image offered as fulfilment of a vow: it is that act alone that will please the Virgin. Thus, it is difficult to disentangle the motives. In the case of the Medici effigies, people could well have inferred that Lorenzo, wounded, had vowed to the Virgin to make a gift of thanks, in the form of three wax effigies, if he was fortunate enough to survive. But there is no way to know whether he actually made any such vow. Lorenzo could easily have decided — probably did decide — to commission the effigies after the event, in safety and tranquility. On top of all the other motives, in Lorenzo’s case, there were the political: in the immediate wake of the hostile conspiracy, he had to shore up his standing with the public. Motives were always mixed. Even the belief in the power of the shrine was ranked by some contemporaries as a “superstition.” One of the conspirators against the Medici brothers, the condottiere Giambattista Montesecco, “cut-throat as he was, refused to stab Lorenzo before the high altar” of the Duomo, where the deed was to take place. “At the last moment some sense of the religio loci dashed his courage. Two priests were then discovered who had no such silly scruples. In the words of an old chronicle, ‘Another man was

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found, who, being a priest, was more accustomed to the place and therefore less superstitious about its sanctity.’ ”62 Vasari mentions in the Life of Verrocchio three images of Lorenzo, one with a wound in the throat and bandages, one in civil habit (at Santissima Annunziata), and another. The first one at least would seem not to have represented him kneeling in prayer. A 1527 inventory mentioned an image of Giuliano de’ Medici in ginocchioni.63 Some of the votive images at Santissima Annunziata were equestrian figures — surely these were fulfillments of votive promises, perhaps alluding to a military victory, and not representations of prayerful piety.64 There is nothing magical about publicity, nor is there any magic involved in the traditional ex-voto, which is only a public honoring of a promise. For that reason, Warburg was uninterested in ex-votos. He also ignored Ghirlandaio’s more traditional portraits of the patrons Francesco Sassetti and Nera Corsi Sassetti: two registers below the scene of the Confirmation, flanking the altar with its Nativity, are fresco images of the married couple kneeling in trompe l’oeil marble niches. People wanted their image placed as close to an altar or tomb shrine as possible. This advertised the patron’s piety, and it visualized desired results. Practices that may seem to modern historians to involve confusions between images and living beings must be understood as subroutines within public or semipublic, ritualized or semi-ritualized, performances. The funerary effigies, first in wax and later carved in stone, discussed by Dominic Olariu were surrogate bodies. They did not magically reinstate the absent bodies. Instead, they played a role within a public theater of praise for the virtues and worth of the deceased. Supplicant portraits, for their part, emerged within a context of spiritual neediness. They gave visible form to the salvational aspirations of the supplicants. The devout hoped that the watchful undead, the saints, would recognize their good intentions and relay their concerns to the true power. But this was not magic, this was simply faith. The painted portraits of patrons we have been considering, as well as the ex-votos — offerings made in principle in fulfillment of a vow, although in practice often in hopes of reward or even healing — all belong to this votive stream. What does it mean to say that people believed that image placement would affect salvation? It meant nothing stranger than that people hoped that the portraits would improve their odds for preferment, just as they hoped that conspicuous placement of a portrait in a church would enhance their social standing. They did not hope that there was a God, however. They knew there was a God. They only hoped that God was listening. Franco Sacchetti mocked the votive effigies just as he mocked the naive idolatries of the common people, but he did not mock anyone for trusting in God. So, Warburg’s analysis does not oblige us even to enter the question of belief. As Hugo van de Velden justly put it, the boti “gave substance to the fictional truth that he [Lorenzo] would forever abide in the presence of his holy

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patrons and worship them.” Resemblance, meanwhile, “accommodated a demand for differentiation.” The effect of likeness, supplementing costume, insignia, heraldry, and precious materials, pictured a “hierarchy that would mirror the actual social stratification.”65 In fact, we don’t have to pronounce on the patrons’ motives. Warburg was only saying that realism was driven by a desire to place referential images as close to the shrine as possible. Whether this desire was grounded in fetishistic magical belief, or simply in a rational concern with publicity or visualizing results, doesn’t matter. We are left with the problem of realism, however. Realism, generating an effect of likeness, lent support to the referential intention. The effect of realism brings an aesthetic pleasure that is hard to explain, but is real — perhaps related to elementary sensations of wonder, even if only admiration for the artist’s ability to do something well. Following the axiom of sympathetic magic proposed by the anthropologist J. G. Frazer, whereby like operates on like, Warburg asserted that heightened realism was believed by Lorenzo and his contemporaries to heighten the efficacy of an image — not just a picture of a desired result, in other words, but a real “spooky action at a distance.” That is a big assumption. Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz gave the opposite explanation: realism arrived as a compensation for declining belief in sympathetic magic, as if realism were forcing the issue, or insisting.66 This is in tune with the argument of E. H. Gombrich’s classic micro-theory of art, “Meditations on a Hobbyhorse,” which holds that art begins in substitutions (a hobbyhorse for a horse) activated in contexts of action or ritual. Mere likeness to a living horse arrives only later, as a supplement to the more real realism of the hobbyhorse.67 Warburg, by contrast, was suggesting that the painted portraits were trying to extend the magical capacities of the wax boti, which functioned by realism. But Hugo van de Velden argues that the boti became more realistic because contemporary painting was becoming realistic.68 The wax effigies were just keeping up with the latest trends in painting. I would not reject this interesting argument, especially if we believe that the kneeling posture of the boti was influenced by the painted supplicant portraits. Ghirlandaio’s brush heightened the tensions between the real and the fictive, the historical and the modern, that we have seen throughout this study generating all the pleasure. Adapting to by-now irresistible lay pressure, Ghirlandaio completely rethought painting. The Medici forced an entirely new kind of picture, making Rogier’s Berlin Nativity — a more refined painting by a greater artist — look tentative. Ghirlandaio’s portraits seem to coax more life also out of the historical figures, the members of the papal court. They have woken up and seem aware that they are observed. We begin to feel or imagine real human presence below the mythic and conventional carapace. The mythic figures and the modern start to look like equals — this could have been a crisis if the embedded portrait had not been reined in, as it would be in the sixteenth century. The Mannerists dialed up style, recreating the formal closure

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of the thirteenth-century images. It was harder to force a portrait of a patron into a Rosso, a Pontormo, a Bronzino, a Beccafumi, and this is why Vasari was so uninterested in portraits, and so worried about Giottino’s “unity.” Robert Pfaller in his book Die Illusionen der anderen called attention to situations and contexts in modern life where belief and convictions play a significant role in shaping collective moods and even actions, and yet the beliefs do not seem to emerge from any precise source or belong to anyone in particular (see p. 36). He speaks of feelings and convictions that appear to have external, objective existence.69 One can see how this works with the premodern devotional portraits. The passive attentiveness of a devout is displaced onto the artworks. The state of mind of pious submission is made visible. Anyone else looking at the work is affected, through contagion, by this strong sense of the objectivity of such feelings. That person’s participation in the by-now “interpassive” state of mind is in turn displaced onto further paintings. The state of mind is something shared between bodies and images. Slavoj Žižek argues that “direct belief” in truth, subjectively assumed, is a modern expectation.70 Traditionally, beliefs were distanced and mediated, like rituals. Warburg’s protagonists, strange as it may seem, are not the people but the images. The patrons are not really creating the images, they are only taking advantage of them. Warburg extracts himself both from the futile inferences of the historian of states of mind (art history as long-distance psychologizing) and from the prosaic reductionism of the pragmatic, behaviorist explanations. For Warburg does have a theory of human nature: as a barely containable bundle of anxieties, longings, and will-to-power. Images are the externalizations of such emotions, and once shaped, the images have a life of their own. Images do not master or govern the emotions, but are shaped by them. Emotions project the images into the environment and into history. The emotions the images so densely register are contagious. History is a relaying of the strongest emotions beyond their human carriers. Warburg dominates the historical period he studies because his view of images is more magical than the view of fifteenth-century people. In that time, most everyone thought relics had power. There is little evidence, however, that anyone thought images had power, unless the image itself were a contact relic, that is, had come into physical contact with a relic or a holy personage, or was thought to have a miraculous origin (the acheiropoieton, or image “made without hands,” or the Madonna painted by St. Luke). When the sources speak of miracle-working images, they are speaking of images of the Virgin Mary through which or near which the Virgin Mary herself (not her image) has performed a miracle, and might be expected to perform more miracles. Miracle-working images also function as pickups or transducers that relay human requests to divine ears. Warburg’s concept of the power of images, by contrast, required no divine or extra-human source. Human emotions were power enough, provided you agreed with him that those emotions took on a life of their own once crystallized in an image. “Realism,” then, in Warburg’s

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fifteenth century, at least the Italian version of it, was the registration of the image’s dynamic potential. “The form of this world is the figure of eros” — thus Karl Barth, commenting on Paul’s exhortation: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2). Paul is speaking of the aion, “the world of time, and of men, and of things”; the materialist ecosystem sustaining the Medici, the Sassetti, Ghirlandaio. In this world, there is “a general pressure towards concreteness, to light-created light! . . . a pressure towards enjoyment, possession, success, knowledge, power, rightness.” Barth’s evaluation of all this is the antithesis of Warburg’s evaluation and, by antithesis, is revealing. These “triumphant” but “unjustified” actions are the actions of men who have been sacrificed, defeated. “Generation is directly confronted by death.”71 Fame and worldly standing are modalities of eros. Warburg would not deny it. His riposte would simply be: the image that memorializes is effective forever and ever, for there is no natural expiration date on fame. On the other hand, once salvation is attained, the ladder — the “speaking” panel painting serving as meditational prompt, the intercessory portrait — can simply be kicked away, its function exhausted. Missing from Warburg’s 1902 essay is any sense of Sassetti’s possible Christian motivations. In an essay of 1907, “Francesco Sassetti’s Last Injunctions to his Sons,” Warburg quietly emended the ahistoricisms of his earlier study.72 In this later essay, Sassetti appears as deeply pious and desiring nothing more than to commend his own soul to the protection of his namesake, St. Francis. He tried in vain to convince the Dominicans of Santa Maria Novella to allow him to found a chapel and adorn it with the story of Francis, turning to the Vallombrosan church of Santa Trinità only when those negotiations foundered.73 Warburg made no contribution to the lines of thought developed by Riegl and Panofsky, which emerge out of Hegelian idealist and neo-Kantian critical philosophy, respectively. Riegl’s history of art as a movement away from body-based relations with material artifacts toward the purely optical apprehension of form is a version of Hegel’s history as the biography of the unfolding of Spirit. Panofsky’s art history contributed to Ernst Cassirer’s philosophical narrative of humankind’s development out of the practical, everyday sphere of manipulation and toward the free and autonomous realm of the mind, or “culture,” where pragmatism and finitude are overcome through symbolization. From a Warburgian point of view, Riegl and Panofsky, when they allowed for a migration of the infinite from the divine sphere to human subjectivity, were only “rescuing” Christianity. Warburg himself was uninterested in saving the Christian appearances or translating Christianity into other, modern terms. Perhaps Warburg was in part writing against Henry Thode, who had identified Francis of Assisi and his movement as the origin point of Renaissance art. Thode had been a supportive early mentor of Warburg at the University of Bonn. Thode saw Franciscanism as the stimulus

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and sponsor of a “new Christian art” grounded in a feeling for nature and for humanity. He acknowledged that the “humanity” of Francis’s movement was institutionalized on a philosophical level only in the fifteenth century, as “humanism.” But he saw the development of art from Giotto to Raphael as “unified,” continuous.74 Thode, for his part, was writing against Burckhardt, who had downplayed the role of Christianity and sacred art in the renewal of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Neither Thode nor Burckhardt in their accounts of the Renaissance assigned a major role to the philological and antiquarian study of ancient civilization; both stressed instead the spontaneous and forward-looking quality of the Renaissance. Warburg was in tune with the vitalisms of Thode and Burckhardt but, convinced that antiquity had persisted into modernity, was prompted by their projects to find a new assessment of its significance.75 Warburg sought anthropological and, more fancifully, physiological bases for a redescription of religion as an investment in material things in the hope of gaining control over all the unstable forces in the universe, particularly those inside us. He considered archaic animistic and totemistic practices at once remote and near. He seems quite unimpressed by Christian eschatology and its unfulfilled promises, which he must have seen as an ideology imposed by powerful institutions but without any anthropological grounding. And Warburg was by no means convinced that Christianity had fully overcome the pagan attitudes. Riegl and Panofsky, by contrast, understood the modern (post-Renaissance) European beholder’s relation to art as sublimated and intellectualized, and therefore as an advance on the more affective, manipulative relations to art of the preceding eras. Warburg fully “owns” his secularism. Comparing Giotto’s Confirmation of the Rule of St. Francis with Ghirlandaio’s version of the same subject, he writes: Giotto depicts the human body because the soul is able to speak through the lowly physical shell; Ghirlandaio, by contrast, takes the spiritual content as a welcome pretext for reflecting the beauty and splendor of temporal life — just as if he were still apprenticed to his goldsmith father, with the task of displaying the finest merchandise to the avid gaze of customers on the feast of Saint John. Ghirlandaio and his patron extend the donor’s traditional modest prerogative of being devoutly present in some corner of the painting, and coolly assume the privilege of free access to the sacred narrative, as onlookers or even as participants in the action.

Thus the trajectory of the portrait of the patron, in Warburg’s telling: once timid and marginal, now brazenly assertive, if not impious. A comparison between the two frescoes reveals how radically secularized the social life of the Church had become since Giotto’s day. So massive is the change in the official visual language of the Church that even a viewer with a general knowledge of art history, coming unprepared to Domenico Ghirlandaio’s fresco, would at first sight imagine it to be anything but a scene from sacred legend.76

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Warburg is not dismayed by the materialist turn in the Quattrocento. For he sees in the effigy-superstition an authentic religiosity reappearing inside the now-hollow Christian work of art, like a revenant. Perhaps Warburg was saying that secularization never needed to happen: we went straight from archaic magic to modern magic, making Christianity look like an episode. Secularization is the cure for Christianity, not for magic. Warburg prompts us to ask: Did secularization actually happen? Isn’t all the self-deception and wishful thinking that once sustained Christianity all still with us, only differently distributed? Secularization is a modern word referring to a repurposing of ecclesiastical institutions, in particular the seizure of the monasteries by European states in the wake of the Napoleonic wars. Secularization was the stripping away of the Church’s power. It did not necessarily convert everyone into rationalists. Did disenchantment or Enlightenment ever happen? Are we not as neurotic, obstinate, obtuse, credulous, melancholic, anxious, guilt-ridden, and cruel as ever? The modern historian who looks at premodern Christians from a very great distance, confident that they lack some crucial knowledge and self-knowledge that we possess, will understand nothing. That historian will see the dead, the people of the past, as already involved with our predicaments, whereas in truth we have not even begun to extricate ourselves from their predicaments. Warburg does not say, as Riegl or Panofsky do, that some fourteenth- and fifteenth-century people were already balanced, like us. Rather, he says that like them we are all still psychically vulnerable, confused, and thwarted.

Detail of ill. 6.5

vii Fra Angelico and the Portrait

When a Trecento painter breaks the surface of a representation by inserting an image of a person legible as a portrait, he draws a frame around a figure and exempts it from the overall psychological situation. Giottino differentiated his portraits from the historical figures around them through scale, demeanor, and costume. A portrait interrupting the continuity of an image signaled a provisional but direct recourse to experienced reality as opposed to mere reliance on the handed-down conventions of painting. The embedded portrait, a task not chosen freely but imposed upon the painter, threatened the overall form of the picture, its formal unity. It was after all that very overall gestalt, along with the splendor of materials and the quality of workmanship, a quality of “rightness” and sufficiency, that set an artwork apart from everything else in the environment. Giorgio Vasari, rating pictorial unity highly, saw realism only as a threat. His own art descended from Domenico Ghirlandaio’s, insofar as his mentor Michelangelo Buonarroti had been Ghirlandaio’s pupil. For his Lives of the Artists, Vasari drew on records compiled by Ghirlandaio and shared with him by his son Ridolfo. But Michelangelo and Vasari and all the Mannerists could be said to have tamed the mirror-like realism of Ghirlandaio and the Netherlanders by pressing and molding bodies into an overall configuration signaling indifference to the mere appearance of things. In this respect, Mannerism could be said to have recovered a continuity with the sacred art that preceded Giotto, the powerful formal hieroglyphs of thirteenth-century painting. Mannerism ejected the portrait from sacred painting in favor of total artistic control, the same control that medieval painters, who were not expected to reproduce the look of things, had enjoyed.

Detail of ill. 7.1

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Giottino, too, in his own century and in his own way, had achieved pictorial unity, not by imposing style on bodies, but through an all-over approach to style, grounded at the level of the brushstroke and its connection to the adjacent brushstroke. This knitting together of brushstrokes, not bodies, is the quality in Giottino that Vasari felt was modern, and that would, with time, lay the groundwork for a new art based on interdependency among painted forms. Giottino’s approach, which he developed in a work that may not have stood on an altar and so enjoyed a certain freedom from convention, would encourage a subordination of figures to overall formal themes and ultimately a levelling of the distinction between figure and not-figure. A “modern” painting for Vasari was a painting that was all art, from one edge to the other. (Compare this with Gertrude Stein on the “reason” for the making of Cubism: “The composition, because the way of living had changed the composition of living had extended and each thing was as important as any other thing.”1) Giottino’s accomplishment was to have invited the portraits not only into the sacred episode, but also into his own painting — and then not to have permitted those portraits to destabilize the painting. The portrait made a tear in the homogenous form-envelope. The painter absorbed and domesticated the non-art that is the portrait by treating historical and modern elements in the picture in the same way, with a wall-to-wall, indiscriminate realism.

Giotto, Giottino . . . The subtitle of this book has already revealed where the sequence is headed. Giovanni da Fiesole, a Dominican friar whose secular name was Guido di Pietro but who is known to art history as Fra Angelico, or the Angelic Brother, was born in the Mugello, in Tuscany, around 1395.2 He was a contemporary of Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden. Fra Angelico emerged as a painter in Florence in the 1420s. It will be argued here that Angelico recognized Giottino as the first painter to have yielded to the pressure of lay beholders toward self-representation without abandoning his own idea of a picture. Angelico saw what Vasari would later try to say: that Giottino had written the first draft of modern painting. Around 1423, the cultivated banker Palla Strozzi, rival of the Medici, commissioned from Lorenzo Monaco a large Deposition of Christ from the Cross for the sacristy, or funerary stanza, of Santa Trinità (ill. 7.1).3 Some years after the older artist’s death in 1424, Fra Angelico, still a young painter, took over the commission. Here, Angelico revived the early and mid-Trecento experimentations with the interaction between portrait and sacred image. Such experimentation had not flourished in the last decades of the fourteenth century and the first years of the next. The Santa Trinità Deposition leaps back two generations to comment directly on Giottino’s San Remigio Pietà. Just as Giottino’s work is the earliest Lamentation we know on a panel of that size, so is Angelico’s work possibly the first Italian — and not merely Florentine — depiction

7.1  Fra Angelico, Deposition of Christ from the Cross, 1432–34. Central panel, 176 × 185 cm. Florence, Museo di San Marco.

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of a Deposition in the main field of an altarpiece.4 If Schubring was right about the patronage of that earlier work, then it would be worth recalling that Mattea, the mother of Caroccio di Alberti (Caroccino), was a Strozzi. The scene is spread across a vast rectangle notionally obscured at the top by the spandrels between the three arches, vestiges of the older conception of a retable as a polyptych. There are twenty-one figures in all, plus Christ. The bay formed by the central arch contains the nuclear scene: the body of Christ handed down from the Cross by five men, three of them perched on two parallel ladders. Right away, we may wonder: where did all these men come from? The inner circle of Christ in fourteenth-century paintings was restricted. The only men present besides John were Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus. Here the two extra men lending a hand symbolize the multiplication of demands faced by the painter and originating from beyond the sphere of painting and its conventions. On the left are the women, nine including the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene. This all happens on a carpet of flowers. In the background are the walled city of Jerusalem, prismatic; a stony desert; and several isolated Mediterranean trees. Six angels oversee the event. The robes are brightly colored, alternating red, blue, green, and yellow. The red accents predominate. Marcia Hall has explained how Fra Angelico persisted with the old system of coloring described by Cennino Cennini, whose treatise of circa 1400 gives us our only thorough account of how early Renaissance painters painted. Cennini did not use dark undertones to create shadow. Instead, he laid down pure pigment in the shadows, then gradually brightened the surface by adding white to his pigments.5 The added brightness, however, came with a loss of intensity or saturation: the brightened yellow, creating a sense of volume, was less yellow. To supplement this limited way of modelling, John Shearman argued, the Trecento painters used what he called “color-shifts,” abrupt transitions from one color to another. A yellow robe, for example, was juxtaposed to a blue tunic; blue is inherently darker than yellow. This approach to the modelling of volumes had two effects: first, the sudden transitions from one color to another “impose an accent on the linear qualities of the painting” and, second, the whole of the painting will be many-colored and variegated. Angelico’s brilliant tonalities make for a celebratory effect, “absolute color.”6 In the Deposition, the coloristic melody is continuous, weaving through the company without distinguishing between inner and outer circles. Or so it seems at first, so seduced are we by the flow of form. The women on the left protectively enclose Mary, who sits on the ground. The postures of the men in the central bay are determined by their physical tasks. But on a closer look, the two groups appear internally divided. Among the women, five have haloes, just as in the San Remigio Pietà: Mary, Mary Magdalene, and three more. The haloed woman at the rear of the group, however, presses her hands together in the modern prayer gesture, rarely

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used by historical characters in paintings. She is positionally frontal. Perhaps she is a holy woman of modern times, already beatified. At any rate she both belongs and does not belong, like the kneeling woman on the left of the San Remigio Pietà. At the right edge of the group at the left there is a woman with a black robe and white headdress and without a halo. These two correspond to the patron portraits in the San Remigio Pietà. They are not straightforward embedded portraits, however, but at most hidden portraits — family members, perhaps, their features recognizable to contemporaries but subsumed within the roles they play — or they are simple generic images of lay semi-outsiders, placeholders for a portraiture that will never be. Mary Magdalene kneels at the left, kissing the feet of Christ. She forms a bridge to the group of the central bay. Among the men on and around the Cross, there are three haloes: the two men at the top — Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus — and John, in blue, below. The two unhaloed men at the left side of the Cross, one gesturing, appear to speak to one another. The gesturing man with blue robe and black headdress has distinctive features (detail, p. 262). Black fabric, once again, is usually the signal of an interloper from the future — that is, the modern world. Vasari identified this figure as a hidden portrait of the architect Michelozzo: Il suo ritratto è . . . nella figura d’un Nicodemo vecchio con un cappuccio in capo, che scende Cristo di Croce.7 Vasari’s usage is again strange: “a” Nicodemus! But this was his way of saying that the figure is not the Nicodemus — that personage is the uppermost man with a foreshortened halo, high on the ladder, reaching down to support Christ’s arm — but simply one of the men helping out. Such anonymous helpers are not mentioned in the Gospel, however. This likeness of Michelozzo — if such it is — is therefore not a crypto-portrait (a mapping of a portrait onto a named figure) but a hidden portrait (a mapping of a portrait onto an unnamed figure).8 The curly-haired youth kneeling in the right foreground, his right hand on his breast, his left hand gesturing, stands apart in this painting. His red coat, belted high at the waist, is surely modern. But his contours overlap with figures of John and with the man holding the Crown of Thorns and the nails. He bridges the two groups, the nine women plus five men on the left and the six men on the right — and belongs to neither. This figure is neither a cryptonor a hidden portrait, for he plays no role. He is instead the closest we have here to an embedded portrait of the sort exemplified by Pieter Bladelin. But his gesture is peculiarly demonstrative, and he plays too big a role formally to be the portrait of a contemporary person, a patron, for he serves as the double of Mary Magdalene. He is decked not with a halo but a thin aureole of rays. He is possibly a modern but not contemporary personage, the Blessed Alessio degli Strozzi (d. 1383), a Strozzi forebear and friar at Santa Maria Novella.9 On the right are six men, bystanders, their costumes a medley of modern and ancient (detail, p. 268). The costumes are hard to interpret, for stylish modern-seeming costumes may also be worn by ancient personages associated with the East — the man at the rear of the group with the conical hat may be

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Detail of ill. 7.1, Fra Angelico, Deposition of Christ from the Cross.

understood this way. None of the men in this right-hand group is outfitted with a halo. The forms of their bodies are not contiguous with the figures on the left-hand side of the painting; only the Crown of Thorns overlaps with the hem of the robe of Joseph of Arimathea. The men at the right represent the modern world, including possibly non-Christians, as opposed to the original church represented by all the figures on the left.10 The men stand erect, conversing and pondering. The three bays of the picture correspond to the realms of the heart, the body, and the mind, left to right. All are united by the pulse of the colors. Here, if anywhere, Angelico has planted hidden portraits. But we are unable to identify them. One of the men shows the Crown of Thorns and the nails, insisting to these outsiders, skeptical laymen, that these are henceforth to be treated as sacred relics. The inscription below him reads: “The righteous person perishes, and no one takes it to heart” (Isaiah 57:1). The showing of the nails and the Crown of Thorns, as we have seen, is a task assigned conventionally to Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea, who in this painting are otherwise occupied high on the ladders. The two men without haloes to the left of the Cross, and lower down, are conversing, comparing notes, as Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea often do. There is multiplication of these figures throughout the picture — as Vasari implied with his phrase un Niccodemo. It is extraordinary that someone else would presume to push aside Nico-

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demus and Joseph of Arimathea and take over their relic-showing role. I would not wish to rule out that this is a crypto-portrait of the picture’s patron. Marcia Hall, however, is skeptical that we can make any positive portrait identifications in the picture. She does observe that the inscription on the frame, Zechariah 12:10, supports a connection of the work with the death of Bartolommeo Strozzi in 1426.11 Fra Angelico and his patrons were evidently unwilling to block anyone’s views (be they inside or outside the painting) with outright portraits, embedded portraits of the sort we have seen in Giottino and Rogier van der Weyden. Witnesses or chorus figures who model devout beholding may also block our view. But such overlappings do not read as interferences, or as “strange loops,” because they are fictional characters, occupying a different level of reality from ours. Angelico is aware that too-distinct modern portraits will disrupt his painting. But too-discreet hidden portraits will lead to uncertainty about identity. He finds a balance, the most sophisticated any painter had up to this point: the middle path, and the uncanniness, of the hidden and possibly the crypto-portrait. As mentioned already, the Deposition was still in Santa Trinità when Domenico Ghirlandaio painted his frescoes for Francesco Sassetti half a century later. Let us note that Fra Angelico painted no independent portraits, as far as we know; that is, bust-length images of modern people on mobile panels of the sort pioneered by the Netherlandish painters and adopted by Italian contemporaries of Angelico such as Masaccio and Filippo Lippi. But he knew the difference between a conventional head and a portrayed head. A beautiful drawing at Windsor attributed to Angelico (ill. 7.2) portrays with scrupulous precision the real head of a real man.12 A figure on the verso of the sheet connects it to one of Angelico’s frescoes for the Chapel of Nicholas V in the Vatican (1447–51).13 Although there is no direct match in the frescoes to the Windsor head — unless it is the figure of St. Stephen consecrated as deacon by St. Peter? — this man looks as if he might have served as one of the painter’s models. I would describe this drawing as a quasi-portrait: a study of a model from life that tends toward portraiture insofar as the artist has voluntarily submitted to the model’s being. The model is treated as if he were important enough to be a portrait subject. The artist stops to take an interest in the whole existence of the model, as symbolized by the face. This is an expression, perhaps, of the artist’s new freedom, his freedom to use his time as he pleases. In the Deposition, all the figures are fused, sacred and profane alloyed in an interworld. Angelico gathers portraits and icons together and tranquilizes them, soothes the passions and softens the gestures, restoring the figures to the sleepwalker state of thirteenth-century painting, or at least to the perpendicular, sedate, collected manner of the San Remigio Pietà. Alexander Nagel writes that in Angelico’s Deposition “all action is accomplished with the quiet and efficiency of the movements performed at a Mass ceremony.” It is a “congregation” on the right that is being shown the instruments. Nagel reads

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7.2  Fra Angelico, Head of a Man, c. 1450. Metalpoint on prepared surface, 18.1 × 16.7 cm. Windsor, Royal Library.

Angelico’s altarpiece as a critique of Gentile da Fabriano’s Adoration of the Magi (1423) in the same chapel: an altarpiece, Angelico teaches, must “focus and reinforce attention, not disperse it.”14 Angelico follows Giottino by establishing as the matrix of his work a more or less naturalistic scene — figures arrayed in a space, on a ground — and then endeavoring to accommodate the portraits. Here he breaks not only with the copiousness of Gentile da Fabriano’s Adoration but also the mode of the great polyptychs of the first years of the century — the Coronation of the Virgin by Lorenzo Monaco from Santa Maria degli Angeli (Accademia, 1414) is exemplary — constructed entirely out of bodies, planted on no ground at all, and inhospitable to portraits. Angelico picks up where Giottino left off. Thus Vasari’s embarrassment in his Life of Fra Angelico: he is only able to describe a steady, progressive development and has no language for archaisms and recuperations. Angelico’s modern painting must generate by its own means — mere form — that sensation of elevation above the ordinary that the topic itself in its compulsory way used to achieve all on its own. We are very far removed from the epoch of what Hegel called the “severe style,” the style of that art of the archaic periods that “grants domination to the topic alone,” and is not concerned with its mode of reception. Modern or Romantic art (for example, Fra Angelico) is ingratiating, pleasing, such that the public “is brought by the work only into conversation with the artist.”15 The painting is now neither a supplement to an experience of the sacred, nor a prompt, nor a catalyst. It now has to be the experience.

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The present discussion of Fra Angelico and the portrait is too condensed; we are not dealing thoroughly with the many mysterious images of the Dominican holy men and women and others throughout the painter’s oeuvre. Among the many figures in the predella of the altarpiece for the high altar of San Domenico at Fiesole (c. 1423–24), for example, in the far left and far right panels, Angelico portrayed thirty-five Dominican Blessed, men and women, all with black and white habits and aureoles, as well as two apparently modern figures without aureoles.16 All but those last two figures are labeled and have in some cases gently individualized features. Since many of them lived in prior centuries, Angelico cannot have known what they looked like. He achieves an effect of resemblance. Such invented portraits may be described as retrospective portraits.17 In the high altarpiece of San Marco (c. 1440), now in the San Marco Museum, the figure of St. Cosmas, the patron saint of the work’s patron, Cosimo de’ Medici the Elder, kneeling in the left foreground and turning outwards toward us, would seem to be a quasi-portrait: the too-distinctive features are not those of the patron but rather of an interesting-looking model. On the wall of the Chapter Room at San Marco, Fra Angelico painted a Crucifixion (1441–42) witnessed by nine figures on the left — the four historical personages who were actually present at the event plus Sts. Cosmas and Damian, St. Lawrence, St. Mark, and John the Baptist — and on the right by eleven more modern holy men, in Vasari’s phrase the capi e fondatori de religioni, beginning with St. Dominic below the Cross and including St. Francis and St. Thomas Aquinas. Vasari identified the St. Cosmas as a portrait of the sculptor Nanni di Banco.18 The motif of the swooning Virgin Mary supported by Mary Cleophas and John echoes the group on the left of Giotto’s Munich Crucifixion (ill. 1.1).19 In the cloister of San Marco, and in the famous decorated cells, there are many interpolated portraits of the order’s founder, St. Dominic, witnessing the biblical events. Angelico often gives Dominic individualized features, and yet he is careless about reference, disorienting the viewer by showing us Dominic sometimes with a beard, and sometimes without. Some cells portray St. Peter Martyr, for example the Presentation of Christ in the Temple in cell ten, which also portrays the Beata Villana delle Botti (detail, p. 273).20 The kneeling, haloed friar in the Resurrection in cell eight (ill. 3.10) wears, exceptionally, a hooded habit. The two figures in a lunette in the cloister who greet the Resurrected Christ as Pilgrim (Luke 24) bear no haloes and seem to represent the Dominican friars generally. But this book is already long enough. For now, let us note that after his work on the Strozzi Deposition Fra Angelico extended his research into the tension between narration and portraiture in the Lamentation over the Body of Christ. This panel, now in the museum at San Marco, was commissioned in 1436 by the Benedictine Fra’ Sebastiano Benintendi for the Confraternity of San Marco in the Oratory of the Croce al Tempio (ill. 7.3).21 The date of completion, 1441, is inscribed in the hem of the robe of the Virgin (detail, p. 293). The

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patron numbered among his ancestors the modern holy woman mentioned in the previous paragraph, Beata Villana delle Botti (1332–61), a Dominican tertiary. The Confraternity of the Oratory of the Croce al Tempio had proprietary rights over her relics preserved in S. Maria Novella.22 She is the kneeling figure at the right of the painting, with arms crossed on her breast and labeled with an inscribed scroll (detail, p. 273). On her head glows a coronal aureole. She is a fragment of the fourteenth century embedded in the modern painting, standing in for that rapidly receding century and its pious ways. The fourteenth-century usages do not just persist on their own — they had to be recovered, retested. Next to her is the third- and fourth-century St. Catherine of Alexandria, crowned and haloed. Catherine’s stylized pose, her hands and the martyr’s palm frond, make her look like a citation from another painting. The two women are set just slightly apart from the main group. At the far left is St. Dominic, the only standing figure. The high art of Fra Angelico is on display in the figure of the woman in red at the rear (between Mary and John) with an aureole (detail, p. 293). The painter psychologizes and so naturalizes her prayer gesture: instead of assigning her the conventional hands-crossed-on-breast gesture, he has her hands flop just a little, as if this were not a conventional but an authentic, emotion-driven gesture. The woman in blue to her left clutches a corner of her robe and puts her hand to her face in a natural way. Angelico gives us the anthropological roots of the conventional gestures. Still, his anthropological-psychological realism is offset by the unreal colors and the overall tone of ardent spirituality. He extends that thread of natural, offhand gesture that one can trace from Giotto to Maso di Banco to Giottino (see p. 40). This is the painting in which Antonio Billi in the sixteenth century saw un coro delle Marie (see p. 189). The bloody wounds on Christ’s forehead are derived, I would propose, directly from Giottino’s San Remigio Pietà (detail, p. 231); so too is Christ’s stature, just a little too tall. It is realism all across the painting. But it is also style all across the painting, unrelenting. The emotion travels left to right in a soft wave, stirring the dense company. The trails of blood dripping from the nails not straight downwards but somehow inwards reinforce the sense of a hidden formal imperative. The undulating cluster of mourners is contrasted to the massive block of the walled city, symbol of the uncomprehending world. Subtracting the standing figure of Dominic, you have a repetition of the Last Supper, Mary presiding over the body and the blood, with twelve “apostles.” As in the Strozzi Deposition, the figures have been hypnotized by the magic realism.

Fra Angelico and Rogier van der Weyden The congruities between the overall projects of van der Weyden and Angelico have often been noted. We know that Rogier was impressed by one of Angel­ ico’s innovative compositions: his Entombment of Christ in the Uffizi is based

7.3  Fra Angelico, Lamentation over the Dead Christ, 1441. Panel, 105 × 164 cm. Florence, Museo di San Marco.

7.4  Fra Angelico, Entombment of Christ, c. 1440. Panel , 37.9 × 46.6 cm. Munich, Alte Pinakothek. 7.5  Rogier van der Weyden, Entombment of Christ, 1450? Panel, 110 × 96 cm. Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi.

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directly on Angelico’s picture of the same subject, the central panel, now in Munich, from the predella of the high altarpiece of the church of San Marco that he completed for Cosimo il Vecchio in 1443 (ills. 7.4, 7.5).23 According to the humanist scholar Bartolommeo Fazio, writing circa 1456, van der Weyden was in Rome in 1450.24 He would very likely have stopped in Florence en route. During his Italian sojourn, or at some later point, upon his return to Flanders, it is believed (but cannot be proven) that he was asked by the Medici to paint the Entombment now in the Uffizi as well as the Madonna and Child with standing saints now in Frankfurt. In Florence, Rogier would have seen Angelico’s Deposition and Lamentation with their embedded portraits. The analogies with the portraits in his own Vienna Crucifixion and in the Nativity for Pieter Bladelin must have struck him. One cannot but wonder whether Rogier could have seen Angelico’s works before he painted those two altarpieces. There is no barrier to dating the Bladelin altarpiece to the 1450s, after Rogier’s Italian trip. There is more agreement, however, even if only on stylistic grounds, that the Vienna triptych, also undocumented, was painted in the 1440s, before the trip. It cannot be ruled out that Rogier’s 1450 journey was his second journey to Italy.25 Rogier’s reputation in Italy did precede the 1450 visit at least by a few years: Ciriaco d’Ancona was shown a painting by Rogier in Ferrara already in 1449, and the Miraflores altar now in Berlin was presented to the Spanish abbey in 1445.26 There is no reason to assume that an earlier journey by a not-yet-famous painter would have been mentioned by contemporaries. After all, there is no documentation at all of Albrecht Dürer’s presumed first trip to Italy in 1494–95. If Rogier had been in Florence, say, in the late 1430s, he would have seen Angelico’s solutions, not to mention Giotto’s and Giottino’s solutions. The literature speaks of Rogier’s embedded portraits as if they were standard fare in the northern tradition. But the Vienna Crucifixion and Berlin Nativity were experiments, outliers, virtually without precedents in the Flemish tradition. And few Flemish painters would follow Rogier’s lead: in the future, most portraits of patrons would be relegated to the wings, as in the Portinari altar.27 Jan van Eyck’s Madonna of Canon Joris van der Paele and his Madonna of Chancellor Rolin were conspicuous prompts, though these were not narratives with embedded portraits so much as luxury versions of the old votive paintings involving enthroned Madonnas with appended kneeling supplicants. Thus, it is not inconceivable that the impetus for Rogier’s more complex works with embedded portraiture came from Florence. An earlier trip would almost permit us to explain Rogier’s Madrid Deposition (c. 1435) as his response to Fra Angelico’s San Marco Deposition. This hypothesis would, in addition, support the theory that the Nicodemus in Rogier’s Uffizi Entombment is a crypto-portrait of Cosimo de’ Medici — in fact, John Pope-Hennessy says that Rogier was the first painter ever to overlay a portrait likeness on a Nicodemus.28 Nicodemus’s status as exemplary lay devout was a fourteenth-century Italian, not a Flemish, preoccupation. In the

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Medici Madonna now in Frankfurt (c. 1460–64), a sacra conversazione seemingly influenced by Angelico’s San Marco altar, some have seen a crypto-portrait of Cosimo de’ Medici, but this cannot be proven.29 Some scholars have doubted even the 1450 trip.30 That is going too far, for it would be hard to explain Rogier’s Medici Madonna without firsthand knowledge of Angelico.31 The stepped stone platform in a flowery field seems to derive from Angelico’s Sts. Cosmas and Damian before Lysias, also in Munich, and the Sacra Conversazione of the Annalena altar. A figure with a thumb hooked in the belt appears both in Angelico’s Munich Cosmas and Damian panel and in the wing with Augustus and the Sibyl in Rogier’s Bladelin altar. This detail suggests to me that Rogier, at the very least, saw Angelico’s works in Florence before he painted the Nativity for Pieter Bladelin, whether we wish to explain this by an earlier trip to Italy or (more likely) by a post-1450 dating of the work in Berlin. Both painters were occupied with the problem of reconciling portrait to composition. But the differences in style, in particular handling of color, between Angelico and Rogier are more important than their similarities. Vasari in his Life of Antonello da Messina spoke of la vivacità de’ colori e la bellezza ed unione of a painting by Jan van Eyck.32 If unione means here what it usually meant in Vasari, then he was crediting van Eyck (and by extension van der Weyden as well) with a successful integration of the picture surface through a soft blending of colors at the edges of forms. But our eyes do not confirm this. The effect created by the two approaches, Rogier’s and Angelico’s, is similar: both painting manners achieve a brightened, surreal, and celebratory paint surface, with too much focus, within which the gradient between the intensely real sacred stuff and the slightly more real heads based on study of live models is barely discernible, but all the more eloquent for that. However, van Eyck and van der Weyden inaugurated an entirely new technique involving translucent glazes.33 The Flemish artists thematized viewing itself — the technique achieves this almost automatically. There are mirrors, panes of glass, eyeglasses, reverse angles. None of this is found in Fra Angelico, for he only heightened the Trecento manner. In the thirteenth century, when the portraits of elite lay devout encountered sacred persons on the pages of illuminated manuscripts, there was no real and more real. There was just artistry and beautiful form across the picture field. This world and the other world were fused by art. Faced with such works, queries about what we are really seeing seem misplaced. In the fifteenth century, by contrast, the realistic technique is meant to raise such questions. Is Joris van der Paele in the presence of the Virgin, in her throne room in the Heavenly Jerusalem? Is he at home imagining her? Has a painted or sculpted image of the Virgin provoked the worshipper’s mental image? The realism invites such questions but offers no answers, so generating chaos and pleasure; the ambiguity is now part of the work’s value; sensations are built on the

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theological infrastructure of the image but soon meander away from it. In van Eyck’s Madonna of Canon van der Paele, there is a triple classification of realism: Mary is a mere formula; St. George on the right appears to be an invented physiognomy, even if it displays some particularity (male figures, sainted or modern, are generally given more particularity than female figures); van der Paele himself has been drawn directly from life. But then there is the saint at the left, Donatus — he looks as real as van der Paele. The painter must have used a live model. The likeness, once it is at large inside the artwork, provides endless opportunities for role-play, substitutions, identifications; appearances and disappearances of the self; projections and transferences running between figures and beholders; and generally a confusion of spheres. Giovanni Bellini, later, carried such confusion to an aesthetic limit. His horizontal panel in the Accademia in Venice represents the Virgin and Child against a dark neutral background and attended by two female saints (ill. 7.6).34 Are they saints? They have few attributes if any. The woman on the left is a wealthy devout with strings of pearl in her hair, a style recalling late antique models. Her palms are pressed together in the manner associated with the laity. Her counterpart on the right has loose blonde hair and hands crossed on the breast in the holy manner. Is she Mary Magdalene? The paucity of attributes and the singular, affecting features of the two women permit us to imagine that these were real, modern women, not saints. Were they patrons disguised as saints? I think more likely they were quasi-portraits: studio models hired or persuaded by Giovanni Bellini to impersonate saints, and in whose faces and beings the painter chose to invest his time. Studying and transcribing their features, he planted powerful hints of emotions below the surface. He treated the women as if they were patrons paying him, and not the other

7.6  Giovanni Bellini, Madonna and Child and Saints, 1490s. Panel, 58 × 107 cm. Venice, Galleria dell’ Accademia.

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way around. The studio model as individual is supposed to disappear, but sometimes she doesn’t quite. The physiognomy presses upwards from below the armature of iconography and into the sacra conversazione.

Vasari’s “Giottino romance” Vasari had difficulty assigning Fra Angelico a part in the main story he was telling, namely, the history of the sublimation of realism — a merely technical achievement — in the aesthetic of disegno; or, put another way, the bringing forth in artistic form of the ideal infrastructure of reality. And yet Vasari himself had provided all the materials for an alternative history of art driven by a dialectic between the insistent claims of the portrait and the formal desideratum of a unified picture surface. He left us an important clue about the transition from the fourteenth to the fifteenth centuries, which he otherwise describes as a sudden leap forward, to Masaccio. This clue has been overlooked in the scholarly literature. It is concealed nowhere else than in his Life of Giottino (whom he calls, we remember, Tommaso di Stefano, and to whom he attributes several works we now consider to be by Maso di Banco). At the end of that biography, Vasari said that the painter “left more fame than wealth” (il quale lasciò più fama che facultà) and listed several of his disciples: Giovanni Toscani d’Arezzo, Michelino, Giovanni dal Ponte, e Lippo, i quali furono assai ragionevoli maestri di quest’arte: ma più di tutti Giovanni Toscani, il quale fece dopo Tommaso, di quella stessa maniera di lui, molte opere per tutta Toscana. Giovanni Toscani d’Arezzo, Michelino, Giovanni dal Ponte and Lippo, all quite good masters of the art; but most of all Giovanni Toscani, who made many works all over Tuscany after Tommaso [Giottino], in his same manner.

We do not know who he meant by Michelino. Giovanni dal Ponte was a Florentine painter of the early Quattrocento whose biography Vasari gives elsewhere.35 Lippo, too, gets his own biography.36 But we are invited to pay close attention to Giovanni Toscani (or Tossicani) d’Arezzo because he painted in the “same manner” as his teacher Giottino. Vasari lists several works, in Arezzo, Empoli, and Pisa, none of which survive: nella Pieve d’Arezzo, la cappella di S. Maria Madalena de’ Tuccerelli: e nella Pieve del castel d’Empoli, in un pilastro, un Sant’ Iacopo. Nel Duomo di Pisa ancora lavorò alcune tavole, che poi sono state levate per dar luogo alle moderne. in the chapel of Mary Magdalene of the Tuccerelli in the parish church of Arezzo; a St. James on a pilaster in the parish church of Empoli; and also in the Duomo of Pisa he made some panels which were removed to make room for the modern.37

The most important work for Vasari, however, is Giovanni’s last:

f r a ang e l i c o a n d t h e p ort r a i t 279 L’ultima opera che costui fece, fu, in una cappella del vescovado d’Arezzo, per la contessa Giovanna moglie di Tarlato da Pietramala, una Nunziata bellissima, e San Iacopo e San Filippo. La quale opera, per essere la parte di dietro del muro volta a tramontana, era poco meno che guasta affatto dall’umidità, quando rifece la Nunziata maestro Agnolo di Lorenzo d’Arezzo, e poco poi Giorgio Vasari, ancora giovanetto, i Santi Iacopo e Filippo, con suo grand’utile; avendo molto imparato allora, che non aveva commodo d’altri maestri, in considerare il modo di fare di Giovanni, e l’ombre e i colori di quell’opera, così guasta com’era. In questa cappella si leggono ancora, in memoria della contessa che la fece fare e dipingere, in un epitaffio di marmo, queste parole: a n n o d o m i n i m ccc x x x v d e m e n s e au g u st i ha n c c a p e l l a m co n st ru i f e c i t n o b i l i s d o m i na co m i t i s sa i oa n na d e sa n c ta f l o r a u xo r n o b i l i s m i l i t i s d o m i n i ta r l at i d e p e t r a m a l a a d h o n o r e m b e ata e m a r ia e v i rg i n i s .

The last work that he made was in the chapel of the Duomo of Arezzo for the Countess Giovanna, the wife of Tarlato da Pietramala, a most beautiful Annunciation with St. James and St. Philip. That work, because it was on the back side of the wall facing north, had been virtually ruined by humidity when the master Agnolo di Lorenzo of Arezzo restored the Annunciation. And shortly afterward Giorgio Vasari, still a youth, restored the figures of St. James and St. Philip. This was very advantageous for him, for he learned much — at that time he [Vasari himself ] did not have the benefit of other masters — by reflecting on Giovanni’s manner of painting both the shadows and the colors of that work, ruined as it was. In that chapel one may still read, in memory of the countess who had had the chapel constructed and painted, in an epitaph of marble, these words: in the year of our lord

1335

i n t h e m o n t h o f au g u st t h e n o b l e l a dy co u n t e s s

j oa n na d e sa n c ta f l o r a , w i f e o f t h e n o b l e k n i g h t ta r l at o d e p e t r a m a l a , ha d t h i s c ha p e l co n st ru c t e d t o t h e h o n o r o f t h e b l e s s e d v i rg i n m a ry . 38

Here Vasari discloses what he believes to be his own autobiographical entanglement in the life and work of Giottino. We recall that Julius von Schlosser called Vasari’s Life of Giottino his Giottino “romance” or “novel” (Giottino­ roman) (p. 224). Here Vasari not only identified Giottino’s pupil Giovanni Tossicani as a fellow Aretine, but also declared himself — who otherwise, he confesses, had no proper master — a pupil, one degree removed, of Giottino. An Annunciation by Giovanni in a chapel in the Duomo in Arezzo, he tells us, damaged by dampness, was restored by the local painter Agnolo di Lorenzo (Angelo di Lorentino, c. 1465–1527). This painter assigned the restoration of two further frescoes in that chapel, a St. James and a St. Philip, to none other than the youthful Giorgio Vasari (b. 1511). This apprenticeship taught Vasari how to paint shadows and colors in the manner of Giovanni Tossicani, which was the very manner of his own gifted teacher Giottino.39 Even before he had studied the old masters in Florence, Vasari got a glimpse of the integrated, unified painting manner, the manipulation of colors and shadows, as it had been developed by Stefano Fiorentino and his son Giottino. It may be worth noting that Vasari’s praise for Spinello Aretino is similar to his view

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of Giotto, stressing invenzione and vivacità.40 This may imply that Vasari saw Spinello Aretino as the representative of the mainstream Aretine tradition, and that Giovanni Toscani was offering something different, carrying forward not Giotto’s manner but the manner of his most gifted followers, Stefano and Giottino. Vasari is contributing to a case for a continuity between the old century and the new, a case that would conflict with his own customary “saccadic” approach to historiography.41 Ordinarily, he looks for the sudden leap forward (Giotto, Masaccio, Leonardo); here, Vasari detects a smoother, subterranean flow running from Giottino to Giovanni Tossicani to himself. There is every reason to believe that Vasari had good information about the painter of the frescoes in the Duomo, which he called the Vescovado. The name Giovanni Tossicani could not have come out of nowhere; there must have been an old tradition to which he had access. Vasari’s grandfather was Giorgio Taldi, a potter, thus the name Vasari; he imitated ancient Aretine (Etruscan) vases. His great-grandfather Lazzaro Taldi (1396–1468) was a leatherworker and painter in Arezzo, a contemporary of Fra Angelico; he studied with Piero della Francesca and later painted harnesses and cassoni.42 Vasari’s Giovanni Tossicani is almost certainly the Florentine painter Giovanni di Francesco Toscani, who is believed to have been born around 1372 (because a document of 1427 gives his age as 55), and to have entered the Compagnia di San Luca in Florence in 1424 and, in the same year, the Arte dei Legnaioli as a painter of cassoni.43 Giovanni di Francesco Toscani — like Giovanni dal Ponte, also mentioned by Vasari — was far too young to have trained with Giottino. But, because he believed his Giovanni Tossicani to be Giottino’s pupil, Vasari was unable to see him for what he was, namely, a contemporary of Fra Angelico working in a similar manner. It is also possible that the paintings in Arezzo that Vasari retouched had nothing to do with the historical Giovanni Toscani. Vasari, however, not yet as a youth in Arezzo but later, was familiar with real works by Giovanni Toscani in Florence, and he believed that whatever paintings he restored in the Tarlati chapel were by that same painter, and that through that painter he was channeling the Trecento artist Giottino. The basis of the corpus of Giovanni di Francesco Toscani are the surviving fresco fragments in the Cappella di S. Niccolò in Santa Trinità, commissioned by the Ardinghelli family in 1423–24. This was a funerary chapel outfitted with a lunette-shaped fresco of the Man of Sorrows in a low, recessed, arched niche.44 In the lunette, a half-length Christ rises from the tomb, arms outstretched, and flanked by a mourning Mary and John (ill.  7.7). The soft, smudged modelling of skin and drapery would seem to match the descriptive terms employed by Vasari in his essay on Giottino. That chapel is directly across from the Sassetti Chapel later painted by Ghirlandaio. Perhaps the conspicuous Santa Trinità fresco helped Vasari recall the qualities he had admired as a youth in the frescoes of the Duomo of Arezzo. Luciano Bellosi in 1966 connected these paintings to the Master of the Griggs Crucifixion, a

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7.7  Giovanni Toscani, Pietà, 1423–24. Fresco. Florence, Santa Trinità, Ardinghelli Chapel.

personality gathered by Richard Offner around a Crucifixion in the Metro­ politan Museum of Art (ill. 7.11).45 Offner had characterized this artist as an early convert to the styles of Gentile da Fabriano and Masaccio. Several other commissions from Florentine families are documented. A number of panels from no-longer-intact altarpieces, as well as other small-scale works, have been attributed to Giovanni Toscani. The most revealing of the panels associated with the altarpiece of the Ardinghelli chapel (dismantled in the eighteenth century) is the St. John the Baptist and St. James in Baltimore (ill. 7.8), whose grave, muted expressions recall Giottino but even more particularly his father Stefano, for example in the St. Thomas Aquinas of Santa Maria Novella.46 Giovanni Toscani is also known today for several painted cassone panels in a bright, variegated style. He died in Florence in 1430 and was buried in the Duomo. No document has been found that links Giovanni Toscani to Arezzo. But it is quite plausible that he worked there: we know he traveled because a document of a commission of 1427 connects him to the Marche.47 Giovanni’s ties to the Trecento are not hard to discern. The Maglia­ bechiano manuscript listed Giovanni Toscani as a pupil of Agnolo Gaddi. Bellosi saw him as a “neo-Giottesque” painter and noted in his work references to Jacopo di Cione and Niccolò di Tommaso, both artists connected to Giottino.48 He is seen as a “transitional” painter. There is a consensus that Giovanni Toscani was receptive to the styles of Gentile da Fabriano and of Masaccio and Masolino. It is also possible that he influenced them.49 Lorenzo Sbaraglio says that Giovanni’s contribution in the 1420s was la ricerca di naturalezza nell’ analisi degli incarnati (flesh-tones), and that both Masaccio and Angelico may have been receptive and considered him innovative.50 Vasari wanted to see Giovanni Toscani as more than a transitional figure. His painter carries forward something precious from the Trecento. Vasari says about Giovanni Toscani what he should have said about Fra Angelico.

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7.8  Giovanni Toscani, St. John the Baptist and St. James, 1423–24. Panel, 102 × 76 cm. Baltimore, Walters Art Museum.

Vasari was unable to process Angelico’s reputation for piety, perhaps because it seemed to signal that he still belonged to the older age and not to the generation of the great innovators (Masaccio, Domenico Veneziano, Filippo Lippi, Piero della Francesca). The coordination between personal piety and prowess as a painter is a riddle for Vasari. In his Life of Fra Angelico, he struggles to find a middle path, insisting that Angelico’s paintings were far from homely and simple as one might expect the works of a cleric to be, but nor were they so sensual as to earn suspicion.51 Vasari could not say how a devout painter could also be modern. Angelico is already a painter of the second era (in other words, his style possesses grace, naturalness, order, design, and proportion), and yet he is still working on projects initiated in the first era (his holy figures possess più aria e somiglianza di santi than those of any other painter of his time).52 Vasari admires but cannot grasp Angelico, because the older painter’s eminence as an artist cannot be situated within Vasari’s own overall narrative. Angelico’s qualities are in fact Giottino’s qualities. But Vasari cannot quite complete the calculation and arrive at the sum. This short-circuit led him away from Angelico’s biography and into his own, where he discovered his own involvement with the Trecento, which he could not otherwise spell out. Vasari reveals in other ways that he is protective of Fra Angelico: in the proem to part 3, he listed fourteen painters of the previous century whose style was too “dry” due to excessive study of antique sculptures. He exempted Angelico from that critique. Of course — because in the works of the antiquarians “one never sees a unified softness in the colors” (una dolcezza ne’ colori unita) as one

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would eventually see in the works of Francesco Francia and Pietro Perugino.53 In his own close reading of Vasari’s Life of Giottino, Robert Brennan has also shown how Vasari indirectly contributes to a narrative about modern art that is in tension with the main story line of the Lives of the Artists.54 Brennan’s stakes are completely different from mine: he is interested in showing that Cennino Cennini’s technical account of the rise of the new painting provided a stable criterion for artistic modernity, whereas Vasari’s, style-based, does not. But our readings coincide to the extent that both are convinced that the biography of Giottino reveals a fault line in Vasari’s thinking. Brennan argues that Cennini, by establishing science or knowledge as the basis of modern art, allowed for a continuous development, a sequence of incremental adjustments that over the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries bring out all the unrealized possibilities in Giotto, without ultimately toppling Giotto’s standing as the one who “made art modern.” By contrast, Vasari’s model of sudden leaps forward, from one “age” to the next, sees achievement in art as not merely technical but as the attainment of “a grace that exceeds measure.”55 Vasari’s model must ultimately relativize Giotto, granting him the prestigious position of a pioneer but providing no theoretical basis for his absolute standing as an artist. In his Life of Giottino, however, Vasari is more like Cennini. For Brennan, Vasari shows how Giottino improved on Giotto by developing a new way of constructing the face, so as to uncouple and liberate the modelling effects from the description of the underlying structure of the head. He argues that Vasari’s account of Giottino’s painting manner therefore does actually “fit into the space” opened up by Cennini’s account, just as I am claiming that Vasari’s account of the painting manners of Giottino and his “pupil” Giovanni Toscani fits into a narrative running from Giotto to Stefano to Giottino to Angelico that would knit the first age of painting together with the second. We have to listen to Vasari carefully to hear this contrapuntal theme weaving through his narrative. The conventional story, supported by passages in Vasari, is that Fra Angel­ ico’s unreal colors were a holdover from the Trecento, destined to be swept away by Masaccio. Marcia Hall speaks of Angelico’s “determination to achieve a fusion of his color system and the new perspective.” But she also says that his colors, in that they pull everything forward out of the shadows, “counteract” perspective.56 William Hood says much the same thing about modelling in Angelico’s early works: his “Gothic” rendering of reality was incompatible with Masaccio’s chiaroscuro.57 And one might well infer from his account of the three manners of Trecento painting, at the beginning of his Life of Giottino, that Vasari saw a path forward from Giottino to Masaccio, who more than any other painter of his generation broke with the approach to color prescribed by Cennini. Masaccio early on abandoned the method of modelling through abrupt shifts from one color to another, and he did not use at all the technique of “changing” or cangiante color, the gradual transition of one color to another creating an unreal silken effect, a technique introduced by

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Giotto and mentioned by Cennini as a suitable approach to the depiction of an angel.58 It was surely Masaccio’s “modulated” painting manner, not Angel­ ico’s bolder color-symphonies, that Marvin Trachtenberg had in mind when he remarked that the rationalized perspective of the Quattrocento was the “perfect spatial matrix” for the “organic, articulate softness, [the] suppleness of line and subtle modulation of light and color” of the new painting.59 But it seems to me that Giottino’s manner is also modulated and that perspectival construction would suit it perfectly. It also seems to me that Angelico’s own modulating and unifying manner allowed him to elevate the color values without lapsing back into the Trecento manner. And the desired fusion with perspective is achieved. Vasari’s “blocked” admiration for Fra Angelico, and his professed personal indebtedness to Giottino, as his style was mediated through the supposed Giovanni Tossicani, obliges us to revise the simple story of a Trecento painter, Giottino, who by modulating and blending his colors pointed forward to the psychologically eloquent manner of Masaccio. Vasari did not consider the muted, naturalistic colors of Masaccio and his fifteenth-century heirs (Domenico Veneziano, Filippo Lippi, Piero della Francesca, Domenico Ghirlandaio, ultimately the somber chiaroscuro of Leonardo) to be the last word. He does not explicitly say that he favors the muted, realistic colors of Masaccio over the bright and unreal colors of Angelico. The painting Vasari ultimately admired most, of course, was that of Michelangelo and his followers, whom we call Mannerists, among them Vasari himself. Michelangelo, who we know admired Giotto’s Ognissanti Dormition (ill.  3.6), reintroduced the cangiante drapery of Giotto and generally achieved an otherworldly, one may say angelic heightening of tone that became the basis for the ecstatic and even delirious styles of Jacopo Pontormo, Rosso Fiorentino, Parmigianino, Domenico Beccafumi, and ultimately Vasari himself. And the high notes these painters struck were echoes of Fra Angelico, who had retained the dazzling color-mosaics of the Trecento painters even while introducing the subtle, fused approach to skin that permitted the convincing renderings of emotion, and the discorsi dell’ intelletto, so admired by Vasari in the art of Giottino. The modern manner of Michelangelo was the manner admired by those artists Vasari describes, in his Life of Perino del Vaga, in the year 1522, strolling about Florence, poking into churches and talking shop: ragionando insieme d’una cosa in altra, pervennero, guardando l’opere e vecchie e moderne per le chiese, in quella del Carmine per veder la cappella di Masaccio; dove guardando ognuno fisamente e moltiplicando in vari ragionamenti in lode di quel maestro, tutti affermarono maravigliarsi che egli avesse avuto tanto di giudizio, che egli in quel tempo non vedendo altro che l’opere di Giotto avesse lavorato con una maniera sì moderna nel disegno, nella imitazione e nel colorito, che egli avesse avuto forza di mostrare nella facilità di quella maniera, la difficultà di quest’arte; oltre che nel rilievo e nella resoluzione e nella pratica non ci era stato nessuno di quegli che avevano operato che ancora lo avesse raggiunto.

f r a ang e l i c o a n d t h e p ort r a i t 285 reasoning together about one thing and another, and looking at works both old and modern, they arrived at the Carmine to see the chapel of Masaccio; where each of them examining fixedly and multiplying with various reasonings the praise for this master, all affirmed that they marvelled that he had such judgment to have worked, already in that time, seeing nothing but the works of Giotto, in a manner so modern in disegno, imitation, and color; that he had had the power to show, in the facility of his manner, the difficulty of this art; and moreover that in relief and resolution and in execution no one working at that time had reached that level.

Here Vasari simply says that Masaccio possessed una maniera sì moderna nel disegno, nella imitazione e nel colorito. But in his Life of Masaccio, Vasari had said that the painter dipinse le cose sue con buona unione e morbidezza — the very terms he used to characterize the painting of Giottino.60 The painting manner that Vasari did not very much admire was the celebratory coloristic rhetoric, low on psychology, of Agnolo Gaddi, Jacopo di Cione, Niccolò di Pietro Gerini, and Lorenzo Monaco. Giottino was quite capable of sensational color effects: the loop of green-orange cangiante drapery on the arm of John the Baptist in the Santo Spirito fresco (ill. 5.1 and detail, p. 183); the several figures (the holiest) in the San Remigio Pietà with two-toned garments, as well as the yellow-green cangiante effect in the robe of St. Remigius (ill. 5.2 and detail, p. ix). Giottino toned down without abandoning the heightened color-contrasts of Giotto, elevated to a high pitch by some of his contemporaries. And so, by giving his figures thoughtful, anxious, or grieving expressions, he combined — in Vasari’s eyes — the virtues of Angelico and Masaccio. These are the qualities of the fresco fragments attributed to Giottino and now in the Museo degli Innocenti in Brunelleschi’s Ospedale in Florence (ills. 7.9, 7.10) (see p. 336, n. 41). On the basis of an old inscription on the back, the fragments are connected to the church of San Pancrazio, where, according to Vasari, Giottino painted a Christ Carrying the Cross, with various saints, figures that “have expressly the manner of Giotto.”61 The bearded, leonine saint has an astute look; the woman in red is also grave and discerning. It is not so difficult to see what Vasari admired in the art of Giovanni Toscani. This artist was capable of heightened colorism. But he was also capable of lowering the rhetorical temperature and, instead of asking great folios of colored drapery to carry all the emotion, allowing the emotions to emerge from within. The lunette fresco in the Ardinghelli Chapel is a good example (ill. 7.7). The figure of John sways with muted, contained emotion.62 As if confirming Vasari’s intuition, some of Giovanni Toscani’s oeuvre is now being peeled off and given to Fra Angelico. Already in 1966, Bellosi had spoken of a “rhyme” with Angelico. He noted particularly in the Griggs Crucifixion, supposedly Giovanni’s last work, an analogy with Angelico (ill. 7.11).63 The New York picture is a remarkable composition involving thirteen onlookers, mounted and standing, forming a perfect semicircle around the Cross. Their conversations, their minds, glow as brightly as their costumes. In 1988,

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7.9 Giottino, Head of Saint, c. 1360? Detached fresco, 24 × 23.5 cm. Florence, Museo degli Innocenti. 7.10 Giottino, Head of Saint, c. 1360? Detached fresco, 39.5 × 21 cm. Florence, Museo degli Innocenti.

Bellosi concluded that the Griggs Crucifixion was too innovative to attribute to Giovanni Toscani and belonged instead nell’ ambito dei problemi posti dall’ attività giovanile dell’ Angelico, which is very close to saying that Angelico painted it.64 Laurence Kanter, following suggestions by Bellosi and others, has said it outright: the Griggs Crucifixion is by the young Fra Angelico.65 For Miklós Boskovits, the new attribution proves the close ties between Giovanni Toscani and Angelico.66 Encouraged by Vasari’s remarks on unity, and by these reattributions, we easily discern more ties between Fra Angelico and the Trecento. Angelico’s other Crucifixion panel in the Metropolitan Museum of Art is conceived as a sacra conversazione, an innovation of his own time.67 But the painter restores the gold ground and spaces the figures as if they were encased in distinct niches, like a compartmentalized polyptych of the previous century. Carl Strehl­­ke relates the horizontal format of Angelico’s San Domenico Annunciation to Brunelleschi — but couldn’t the painter simply have been looking at Trecento models? Roberto Longhi says that Angelico at San Marco “recalled” the Crucifixion in the Chapter House at Assisi and compares the Annunciation on the back of the Santa Reparata altar (Accademia), which he associated with Stefano Fiorentino, to Angelico: una pittura fusa ad “unità.”68 Angelico’s awareness of the Trecento encompassed Giottino, as Alexis-­ François Rio recognized already in 1861. In his ecstatic description of the San Remigio Pietà, Rio wrote: Quelle éloquence muette dans ces clous sanglants montrés par un des assistants, et imités depuis par Fra Angelico.69 In Angelico’s Louvre

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7.11  Fra Angelico, Crucifixion, c. 1420–23. Panel, 64 × 49 cm. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Crucifixion, John clasps his hands together, fingers interlaced, as do three figures in the San Remigio Pietà, one on the left, one in the center, and one on the right. This is a gesture expressing grief, not a prayer gesture, and is relatively uncommon in the older paintings. It does not appear in Giotto’s Lamentations at Assisi or Padua (the figure in each scene who holds clasped hands at waist level expresses another emotion, perhaps resignation or a containment of grief ).70 Volpe considered the Madonna of Humility in Pisa to be Angelico’s response to the figure of the Virgin in Giottino’s detached fresco from Santo

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Spirito now in the Accademia (ill.  5.1).71 Giovanna Ragionieri believes that both Angelico and Masolino studied Giottino’s works.72 Boskovits remarked how surprising it was that no one mentioned the San Remigio picture before Vasari, given that the generation of Masolino and Angelico must have studied it closely.73 Distorted recognitions of the link between Giottino and Angelico were the early misdatings, now scarcely comprehensible, of the San Remigio Pietà. Schlosser conceded that Rumohr was wrong to attribute the Uffizi picture to the early Quattrocento painter Pietro Chellini but insisted that he had been on the right trail. Schlosser judged the costume of the woman in black to be late Trecento, and compared the treatment of space to Angelico’s. Fra Angelico understood Giottino’s main achievement to be the overcoming of the discord of sacred and profane through his harmonizing style, a style that acts like a tuning fork, tuning sacred and profane to the same note. The authority of style cast a spell over all the picture’s contents.

Last remarks on the modern sacred art Three last things remain to be noted about Fra Angelico’s embedded portraits. First, there is no continuous development from the Trecento: Angelico reanimated the institution.74 He was responding to lay pressure toward self-representation, no doubt, particularly after patrons saw what the young painter was capable of. But not only that: Angelico must have felt that the dream-like intensity of a plausible human face, arousing confusion about its anchorage in reality, added something to the sacred pictures. Thus, the spectrum of crypto-portraits, hidden portraits, quasi-portraits, and merely conventional faces in this artist’s paintings. Angelico reinstated but immediately domesticated the embedded portrait. He did not relegate the lay patrons to a marginal zone, waiting in the wings, as Masaccio did in his Trinity in Santa Maria Novella (1426–28), so perpetuating the standard Trecento approach. Second, Angelico’s experiments staved off the encroachments upon art of power as such, the ardent and brutal invasions of the elite of the generation of Cosimo il Vecchio and the next generation, which so impressed Jacob Burckhardt and Aby Warburg. Angelico put the patrons in a trance, neutralizing their force and not permitting their willfulness to break the mood. Individual figures in Angelico’s painting, both the conventional and the described, display only muted emotions; but collectively like a choir they produce a supra-psychological, one could say angelic, emotionality. Third, Fra Angelico heightened sacred art not only by offering hallucinatory realism as a cipher for the divine, but also in his embrace of linear perspective. In this respect, too, he works in parallel to Rogier van der Weyden, recruiting realism to the modern sacred art. Roberto Longhi in his book of 1927 on Piero della Francesca, in a discussion of the ways that Angelico served as an example to Piero, noted that Angelico had no wish to be “ignorant” (or even

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“abstinent”: digiuno) of this new and mysterious art.75 In his early Deposition and Lamentation, worries Longhi, the artist would appear to be succumbing to a “heretical” passion for perspective. But he knows how to conceal this passion — the proof is that, in our own discussion of the two pictures just above, we barely mentioned perspective. Longhi’s example is the great Coronation of the Virgin from San Domenico in Fiesole now in the Louvre (ill.  7.12).76 Here, it would seem, Angelico achieves the very equilibrium of hierarchy and distraction we know from the Trecento paintings with their throngs of angels. He appears to extend the research of Lorenzo Monaco in his Santa Maria degli Angeli Coronation of the Virgin (1414),77 or the Coronation by Rossello di Jacopo Franchi (c. 1424– 25).78 Angelico’s Louvre Coronation is continuous with the immemorial art of praise: the “objective” approach to the other world; emotion everywhere and nowhere; the saints psychologically detached from the scene they witness; color and detail evenly distributed across the surface; the whole presented as if seen from a non-place, an “angelic” perspective. But Longhi shows how misleading this impression is. The Louvre Coronation is governed by linear perspective.79 In this picture, to be sure, la scatola del mondo è qui ben chiusa e sospesa, probabilmente, nelle sfere più alte del cielo: “the box of the world is here well closed and suspended, very likely, in the highest spheres of heaven.” Perspective is artificial: it makes a box, a scatola, of the world. The painter alleviates the mundanity of perspective by “closing” his perspectival box, cutting it off from the world and suspending it in heaven, so that the parallels he has constructed do not go rushing off to their vanishing points and so connecting the sacred to the profane. The ceremony of the Coronation, the assemblage of bodies on a marble platform, is a completely artificial construct that does not connect with anything we know. But the relations of body to body within the construct are all carefully calculated. This is no longer the objective, angelic vision of the Trecento paintings. It is instead the desired fusion of the heightened colorism of the last century with the perspectival probity of the new. Longhi’s way of putting it is to say that everything in the Louvre Coronation is as if cut from a large rock crystal: Quel che v’è dentro, si svolge con una perspicuità spaziale davvero inaudita, come se tutto fosse tagliato in un gran cristallo di rocca (“everything in [that world] is carried out with a spatial perspicuity [transparency, lucidity] truly unheard of, as if everything were cut into a large rock crystal”). In this way, Longhi indicates that the perspective hides itself. Angelico does not construct a space and then fill it with bodies. He creates a space with the bodies, with the lucid, crystalline cluster of bodies. The picture and the heavenly court it depicts cohere because they are constructed according to the rules of perspective. Pablo Maurette connects Longhi’s word perspicuità to perspective. But by using the metaphor of the crystal, Longhi also captures the sense unique to Angelico’s art that the mass of spiritual bodies is at once immediately apprehensible and at the same time impenetrable. For Longhi, it was crucial, assuming that one is at all interested in showing what is artistic about an artist, that one show how mere naturalism

7.12  Fra Angelico, Coronation of the Virgin, before 1435. Panel, 209 × 206 cm. Paris, Musée du Louvre.

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is overcome, sublimated. The painting of Piero della Francesca was for Longhi a paradigm of a style that (in Maurette’s words) “inaugurates a world and presents it as real, more real than the three-dimensional world . . . all without dissimulating its total artificiality.” Both Angelico and Piero achieve this simulation, by means of realism, of a more real reality through mastery of perspective, un meccanismo fondato sull’illusione ottica che si auto-cancella nel suo stesso dispiegarsi (“a mechanism founded on optical illusion that cancels itself in its own deployment”). Longhi’s aesthetic idealism, built on the base of historical fact, reproduces the transactions and tactics, the new pact between ideality and pictorial form, of Angelico himself.80 The sacred painting of Fra Angelico and Piero della Francesca is threatened by the transitivity implied by calculated one-point perspective. Where do the exchanges of point of view stop? The Brigittine intervention into iconography, because it involved witnessing, a theme first developed in the elite thirteenth-­century manuscripts, was already “perspectival” in the sense that the subjective view on things was permitted to govern the sacred art. In the high art of the ancient civilizations, the merely human witness counted for nothing. Art presented the divine real as it was, not how it appeared from a point of view. The Christian myth introduced the element of skepticism — was Christ a god at all? — and the answering protest of eyewitnessing and testimony. The traditional, interpassive rituals, which did not expect the participant to have a point of view or an opinion, were replaced by scenes and spectacles. To praise is not to observe. Christian art in turn developed the theme of vision, on the levels of both content and form. The pictorial art is perfectly suited to the themes of witnessing and inspecting and the comparing of all the competing points of view. But witnessing and inspecting diminish their object. As soon as there is an angle of address, there is a problem. This is the driving ironic force of the history of the pictorial art. Once sacred art thematizes viewing, there would be unending cycles of importation of the results of lay viewing into sacred art, a self-replenishing lay occupation of the holy sightlines. Bridget of Sweden’s correction of the Marian iconography opened the prospect of an infinite regress of transitivity. St. Paul might have said that a sacred art that seeks to translate the real into human dimensions will recede into irrelevance. For according to Paul “we do not know what to pray for as we should” (Romans 8:26). The Spirit’s Intercession, its “songs of praise,” are “beyond our competence”81 and for that reason sound in our ears as mere groanings, just as a true image of God would never, to our eyes, cohere, and would never merely please. Fra Angelico postponed as long as he could the translation of the real into mere perceptual experience, and as noted earlier, he did not indulge as did his Flemish contemporaries in optical tricks, mirrors and reflections, the iconography of beholding. This is still the art of praise. The old devices of doubling and patterning, the merisms and the resemblances, tamp down all distracting differences. And yet there is a force of individuation at work inside

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Angelico’s paintings. On zooming in upon the Coronation (detail, p. 294), one discovers a whole array of distinctive heads, angled in every direction, especially among the male saints at the left and right edges, heads both bearded and smooth; singular enough, some of them, to hint at the experience of a live model — one thinks of the drawing at Windsor.82 The realism and the hier­ archy are held in equilibrium. But heaven is teeming with life. Pablo Maurette says that the scene produces “an almost hypnotic effect of movement; an elastic movement, hot and soft, a movement of opening, of arms that prepare to embrace, of flowers that open.”83 The idea of a picture made of bodies recalls Longhi’s words on Stefano Fiorentino’s Chiaravalle Coronation: “It is all human material, all too human, and of a sensual fervor.”84 We notice that some saints on the left are writing in books, recording the event (is it a historical event?), accommodating it to theology. Their writing individuates them. We notice what we perhaps shouldn’t notice: that some angels in the upper part seem to have a blocked view of the Coronation. We notice that some saints kneeling in the foreground have a privileged view — who are they? A bald male saint with a quill in his hand; Mary Magdalene with her hair and her jar? We notice that the place at the very center, with the perfect view, is unoccupied —  except by us. The individuating drive, set in motion by the pressure toward portraiture, seems to carry on independent of the artist, a momentum not so much angelic as diabolical. Fra Angelico persists all the same, insisting with his bright proclamations of the really real. One might have wondered: would painting only ever be capable of picturing the interactions between our reality and the real reality? Angelico’s answer was: not yet; for now, the transitivity of viewing, the sharing of lay sightlines, the analogies proposed by painting between seeing and knowing, all that is, in his art, one more time postponed. In the Coronation in the Louvre, there is no question of “response,” either inside the picture, or with it. The portrait-like heads of its male saints are carved from rock crystal but at the same time suspended in the liquid medium of the artist’s style. Angelico’s blending of the real and the surreal in the Coronation, and his Deposition and Lamentation at San Marco interleaved with witnesses, portraits, and crypto-portraits, are the extensions of Giottino’s project: a reoccupation of the entire picture surface under the sign of a style, such that the laity can finally make their appearance and, at that same moment, metabolized by the style, disappear inside the painting.

Detail of ill. 7.3

Excursus: Reference and Likeness

A portrait is an image of a person that points to a real, existing person. I call that referring to a person. The main purpose of the portrait is to bring that real person to mind. Further things can be done with a portrait — it can stand in for an absent referent, it can publish and acclaim a person, it can interpret a person’s character. But how can an image refer at all? Reference is ordinarily understood as the capacity, within a context of communication, to point directly to features of the real environment. Pointing directly is a way of making something present for someone else even in the absence of shared linguistic resources. So, for example, when you and a waiter in a restaurant do not share a language, you order food by pointing to dishes on other peoples’ tables or to pictures on a menu. Direct indication leaves little room for ambiguity or interpretation. Language, too, can point, anchoring discourse in reality. A spoken sentence may refer to the real context of its utterance by using such deictic (pointing) or indexical words as here and now, she and we, tomorrow and next year: words that point to places or persons or time frames. The target of their pointing will shift depending on who is speaking, when, and where. Temporal gaps between the scene of speaking and the desired referents pose problems. Writing always has this problem: the scene of reading is alienated from the scene of writing. Out of context, deictic pronouns or other “shifters” won’t work — but proper nouns, or names, will. The person or the year is given a name (Giotto, 1337) such that the reference is consistent across any number of contexts of reading or listening. An image of a person outfitted with a label bearing that person’s name obviously can refer in this way. But does an unlabeled painted likeness of a

Detail of ill. 7.12

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person refer to that person? Not in any rigorous sense. Pictorial reference is no more than a metaphor. If, however, a painted likeness is so accurate that the person portrayed is recognized by beholders, then something like reference has been achieved. Reference by resemblance works when the image so closely resembles a person that people who already know that person (or know other images of that person) can recognize her or him. The success of the reference depends on recipients’ prior knowledge. Pictorial resemblance can never be secured, however, or verified beyond dispute, because it is only an assessment made by a mind and a memory, an empirical result. True reference, established by fiat, is unambiguous and does not await ratification by anyone. True reference, an intentional direct pointing, cannot be misunderstood, and can be understood by anyone. Despite the dependency of the unlabeled portrait’s referential aspirations on contexts of reception, surprisingly few European portraits actually bear anywhere on their surface the names of their subjects. The sitters of historical portraits are identified by modern scholars mainly on the basis of guesses based on knowledge about the picture’s provenance, by comparison with other, validated portraits, or by deciphering of heraldic or other signs. This fact is seldom noted. It seems to hamper the supposed principal function of portraits, the perpetuation of the memory of the sitter. Medallic portraits, for example, always bore the name. The same was true of the printed portrait. But portraits painted on panel or canvas were also mobile. Unlabeled, they venture a reference that is highly vulnerable to oblivion. There must have been an assumption that mobile painted or sculpted portraits were not likely to stray far out of contexts where their sitters would be recognized. When a beholder recognizes a likeness as a portrait, she infers an intention to refer. A portrait is always intentional. But not all intentional likenesses are referential. You might recognize an actor in a movie, but the point of the film was not simply to mention that actor, but rather to use the actor’s person as a scaffold for a fictional character (though there may also be an expectation on the part of the filmmaker that many viewers will recognize the actor). Even a likeness meant to refer is not necessarily a portrait. Your photo on your driver’s license refers to you, but one would hesitate to call it a portrait. Why? It seems to meet the definition offered above (that is, an image of a person that points to a real person). Evidently some usages of the word exceed that definition. Perhaps we expect a portrait to tell us more about someone than simply how they look. This is revealed by modern usage in English: we sometimes say “portray” when we mean “depict in a convincing way, conscientiously, revealing something essential,” and without any imputation of reference. A portrait, then, is an image used in a context of communication — the image used as a message — which refers, usually but not always by a physiognomic resemblance, to a real person, whereby the individuality or absolute distinctiveness of that person is the main content of the message. In the contexts

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of art history or art criticism, the imputed distinctiveness of the depicted person may be used as a platform for artistic meaning. In such cases we speak of portraits as works of art. In thinking about artistic and nonartistic portraits we will want to work with all three concepts: likeness, reference, and art-quality.

Likeness is not an intrinsic property of anything. Likeness is a similarity, perceived by someone, between the appearances of two things. Analogies, metaphors, and icons all rely on such subjective perceptions of similarity. Likeness is not absolute but relative: a child may resemble a parent to varying degrees. An effect of likeness can be achieved even by quite unlifelike images, for example caricatures. The caricature may grotesquely distort someone’s features and yet be instantly recognizable. Although a relation of likeness requires two elements, some images appear “resemblant” all on their own. They appear dependent on a real model in the world. Our prior experience of pictorial likenesses conditions us, faced with certain images, to suppose that there must have been a model. This is because an image can signal an intention to refer through its format as well as through conventional poses and costumes. An image can also signal that intention by activating a rhetoric of resemblance generated by an excess of physiognomic information — details, irregularities — beyond the degree of differentiation required for ordinary, practical non-referential kinds of signification. A painted image might look quite lifelike to us, but not necessarily to someone who knew the portrayed personally. We know what it means to say that a portrait just doesn’t quite capture the essence of the person. A less lifelike image, such as a caricature, might do a better job. Or even an object: in Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez, the widow of the distinguished physician Juvenal Urbino, sifting through his clothes, comes across his “hats that resembled him more than his portraits.”1 True resemblance is highly subjective. The paradoxical likenesses without reference complicate our attempts to grasp the meanings of portraiture in art because it is often hard to tell, without additional evidence, whether we are looking at a portrait or a fictional image with no referent. If we don’t know whether an image has its origin in a real face, then we don’t know how much freedom the artist had. Wendy Steiner argues that the portrait’s referential brief, because its fulfillment depends on the beholder’s prior knowledge, intrinsically interferes with any aesthetic aspirations: “It is in this special functioning of the index — as a necessary component of any reference to reality, but one dependent upon prior knowledge of that reality — that a gulf in portraiture arises between artistic intention and audience response. All art with a denotatum [or referent] involves this difficulty.”2 Faced with early portraits, one often has the sense that there was an

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intent to refer, even when one does not know the name of the person portrayed (let alone know that person). This was as true for contemporaries as it is for us, centuries later. The portrait is a message whose content properly should be: “this is a portrait of so-and-so,” but in practice its content is often simply “this is a portrait.”3 Once painters are capable of lifelike depictions, beholders will expect even the face of a fictional personage to contain a certain amount of information. Unlike a poet, a painter cannot just omit to describe a face. And a featureless, doll-like face will be unsatisfactory. An artist can create spurious effects of reference by modulating the irregularity or idiosyncrasy of facial features, exaggerating deviations from imagined norms. Such tricks give the impression that a face was directly copied from life. A quantity of unmotivated information about a face will contribute to the overall “sense of life” of the scene it inhabits. Some of the supposed portraits by Giotto mentioned by Giorgio Vasari were no doubt just the distinctive-looking faces of bystanders, onlookers, and unnamed extras in narrative scenes. Such figures seemed to stand apart from their surroundings, perhaps by an excess of descriptive detail, perhaps by a perceived quality of psychic disengagement. Vasari must have then made an educated guess about who was portrayed, perhaps relying on a local tradition. He inferred intentions to refer to famous but non-­legendary individuals even when biographical facts begged the question of how Giotto possibly knew what the sitter looked like. For example, Vasari says that Giotto painted in the chapel of the Bargello the portrait of Brunetto Latini, Dante’s teacher.4 But Brunetto Latini died in 1294, and the Bargello Chapel, if Giotto painted it at all, was his last work. Was the painter recalling features he saw almost four decades earlier? Perhaps Vasari wasn’t sure about the dates, or perhaps he supposed that Giotto had access to an accurate older depiction of Brunetto’s features. This must have been his thinking when he said that Giotto painted a St. Francis (d. 1226) and a St. Dominic (d. 1221) ritratti di naturale, on a round pillar in the church of San Francesco in Arezzo.5 In the first edition of his Lives of the Artists (1550), Vasari listed about a dozen portraits by Giotto; in the second edition (1568), he listed around fifty.6 It is likely that Vasari was right about the portraits in crowd scenes by Giotto and others at least part of the time. It seems that artists did introduce their own features into these parts of the work, as a kind of iconic signature, or as a secret signal to other artists. Filippo Villani said that Giotto painted a self-portrait together with a portrait of Dante.7 Vasari reports that Giotto’s disciple Puccio Capanna painted himself among a group of shipwrecked sailors, in an ex-voto in Rimini: I discepoli suoi furono Taddeo Gaddi, stato tenuto da lui a battesimo come s’è detto, e Puccio Capanna fiorentino, che in Rimini, nella chiesa di San Cataldo dei Frati Predicatori, dipinse perfettamente in fresco un voto d’una nave che pare che affoghi nel mare, con uomini che gettano robe nell’acqua, de’ quali è uno esso Puccio ritratto di naturale fra un buon numero di marinari.8

excu r su s : r e f e r en c e a n d l i k en es s 299 His disciples were Taddeo Gaddi, for whom he served as a witness at a baptism, as we said, and the Florentine Puccio Capanna who in Rimini, in the church of S. Cataldo de’ Frati Predicatori, painted perfectly in fresco a votive image of a ship which appears to be sinking in the sea with men throwing things into the water, one of whom is Puccio portrayed in a lifelike way [di naturale] among a crowd of sailors.

And not all such portraits were portraits of artists, according to Vasari. In the Job stories painted by Giotto at the Camposanto in Pisa, Vasari saw a portrait of Farinata degli Uberti, the aristocratic leader of the Ghibelline faction.9 But Farinata had died in 1264 — how did Giotto possibly assign him a physiognomy? Ernst Gombrich considered Vasari “reckless” in his identifications of such portraits: the “Cimabue” he saw in the Spanish Chapel, for example, standing alongside a self-portrait in profile (made with a mirror, he says, echoing Villani on Giotto) of Simone Martini, who Vasari thought had painted the fresco.10 We may describe those portraits of notable contemporaries, or artists’ self-portraits, mixed in among a crowd as hidden portraits. The hidden portrait is double-coded: some beholders will read it as the image of an anonymous but distinctive-looking character; some beholders will recognize the features of Giotto, Dante, or Farinata.11 A portrait legible as either of two named individuals — a real modern person, or a named character in a historical scene — is a crypto-portrait. The crypto-­ portrait is the portrait of a modern individual insinuated into a historical scene not in the person of an anonymous bystander, and also not as himself, but rather as himself playing the role of a character in the episode.12 So, for example, the features of Emperor Charles IV are projected onto one of the Magi in an Epiphany in a small Bohemian panel (c. 1355–60) in the Morgan Library.13 The individual who impersonates one of the Magi must be quite an important person. He floods the historical character with his existence (his age and bearing) and to some extent his physiognomy, creating a double reference. A self-portrait by Orcagna described by Vasari was a crypto-portrait: In uno de’ quali Apostoli ritrasse di marmo se stesso vecchio, com’era, con la barba rasa, col cappuccio avvolto al capo, e col viso piatto e tondo; come di sopra nel suo ritratto, cavato da quello, si vede.14 Orcagna was playing the role of one of the apostles. A phrase of Vasari suggests another way of thinking about the crypto-portrait. Describing Raphael’s fresco of the Battle of Ostia in the Stanza dell’Incendio di Borgo in the Vatican Palace, Vasari says: “St. Leo is figured and portrayed by Pope Leo X” (S. Leone è figurato e ritratto per papa Leone X ).15 Leo X, Raphael’s patron, has served as the model for the figure of the ninth-century saint and pope Leo IV. But Vasari’s words identify the modern pope also as the author of the portrait. Leo X, in effect, paints the portrait of St. Leo with his own features, rendering the depiction more lifelike. There is a confusion about who is the author of the portrait, the painter or the sitter. Leon Battista Alberti will mention the institution of the crypto-portrait twice in book 3 of his treatise on painting:

300 . . . poi che in una storia sarà uno viso di qualche conosciuto e degno uomo, bene che ivi sieno altre figure di arte molto più che questa perfette e grate, pure quel viso conosciuto a sé in prima trarrà tutti li occhi di chi la storia raguardi: tanto si vede in sé tiene forza ciò che sia ritratto dalla natura. Per questo sempre ciò che vorremo dipignere piglieremo dalla natura, e sempre torremo le cose più belle.16 . . . when a scene contains a face of some well-known and worthy man, since even though it may have other made-up faces that are much more perfect and attractive, yet that wellknown face will draw all the eyes of the observers first, such is the power, we see, of what is drawn from nature. Hence we will always take what we want to paint from nature, and we will always pick the most beautiful things.17

This is a complicated and interesting point. Alberti concedes that a truthful-­ seeming image of a famous face has an intrinsic appeal. Eyes will be drawn to it. But he does not consider this an artistic quality. An artist should not be beguiling beholders with striking likenesses of important people, any more than he should be seducing them with gold leaf (as Alberti says elsewhere). But he sees that nature is now the artist’s indispensable resource. The raw likeness is more attractive than the beautiful, artificial faces surrounding it. So, he advises the painter to draw his material from nature, thus exploiting the elemental appeal of reproduced nature, but choosing as his models not the visages of famous men, but only the most beautiful faces. In this way, the painter avails himself of natural beauty, converting it into artistic currency. His paintings will be both realistic and beautiful. Then near the end of his treatise, he writes: Ebbi da dire queste cose della pittura, quali, se sono commode e utili a’ pittori, solo questo domando in premio delle mie fatiche, che nelle sue istorie dipingano il viso mio, acciò dimostrino sé essere grati e me essere stato studioso dell’arte.18 These were the things I have had to say about painting, and if they are convenient and useful to painters, I ask as a reward of my labors only that they paint my face in their stories, and thus show that they are grateful and that I was studious of the art.19

This too is interesting: Alberti gives us a sense of how a hidden or crypto-­ portrait could come about. The portrait may be a gift or tribute bestowed by the artist. Alberti suggests that such a portrait would associate him, Alberti, favorably with the artist and the art of painting, an association that is evidently more important to him than the association with whatever sacred or legendary story he will have been added to. Finally, he implies that a painter also has the power to insult a sitter by portraying him in a less than flattering way, if he wished to. One would like to know if any painter took Alberti’s hint and planted a portrait of him in a fresco or a panel — perhaps it is somewhere in plain sight. Rhetorics of resemblance were mastered already by medieval sculptors. The life-sized statues of the founders portrayed at the Cathedral of Naumburg in Saxony (mid-thirteenth century), identified by inscription, look as if they

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were copied straight from life. But the portrayed persons had lived and died two centuries earlier, or more. The physiognomies are completely invented. Reference and resemblance are sometimes disengaged, and this was still the case in Giotto’s time, less than a century after Naumburg. Dominic Olariu, developing elements in Hans Belting’s speculative anthropology of art, derives the late medieval tomb effigy from ancient traditions of embalming — he uses the term thanatopraxis — sustained in Byzantium and revived for an elite clientele in western Europe around 1200. Olariu argues that the sculpted effigy is to be understood as a making permanent of the embalmed body.20 For a superelite, appearance now figures alongside coats of arms, insignia, and gestures as a way of denoting the individual. Olariu begins by speaking of tomb effigies, but his deep archive of references to portraiture in French poetry encourages him to extend his interpretation to portraits that were not strictly substitutive. In the ancient world, Olariu contends, and in the thirteenth-century West, resemblance was an exclusive privilege; only the worthiest, possessed of sacrality and vertu, merited it. This had nothing to do with what we would today call the sitter’s personality. By the fifteenth century, however, the sitter’s virtue will begin to depend less on God and will instead be understood as “arbitrary forces and energies,” more like what we call temperament or character.21 In chapter 1, we presented Laura Jacobus’s convincing hypothesis that facial casting played a role in the fabrication of sculpted likenesses of Enrico Scrovegni and others. Both Jacobus and Olariu challenge the mainstream historiography of late medieval European portraiture.22 The main tradition, descending from a seminal article by Harald Keller, is skeptical that lifelikeness meant anything at all to late medieval patrons.23 Keller argued that conventions and types governed sculpted physiognomies. For John White, the apparent lifelikeness of late thirteenth-century tomb sculpture is a product of “studio patterns” or templates developed for other purposes, for example the face of the Crucified Christ.24 The literature on Giotto as portraitist has also mostly followed this line of thinking.25 A classic demonstration of the conventionality of apparently lifelike portraits was an essay of 1975 by Sheldon Nodelman on the so-called “veristic” Roman portrait bust of the first century bce. Nodelman noted “such an insistent pattern of recurrence in the selection and handling of particular physical and characterological traits [signifying pragmatism, self-discipline, worldly experience, etc.] that all these apparently so individualized portraits finally look very much alike, and it becomes clear that we are dealing with a conventional type, whose properties are dictated by ideological motives.”26 Such views are consistent with the modern strong conventionalist views of E. H. Gombrich, Nelson Goodman, and Umberto Eco, who have argued that even photographs draw on convention and do not signify straight­forwardly.27 The discipline of art history is invested in the propositions that artistic form is not necessarily constantly being mined from reality, and that form is also

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not just invented by the artist but rather is more likely to have been transferred horizontally, from picture to picture. Art history’s classic move is to demonstrate the conventionality of even true-seeming representations, so correcting unthinking “vernacular” confidence in pictorial realism. Much recent scholarship on portraiture in the European fourteenth century also stresses the constructed quality of likeness. The main themes are compliance with physiognomic theory; the relational or diacritical production of effects of verisimilitude; and the intertwining of likeness with memory and devotion. Combinations of conventional signs produce effects of individuation. Peter Seiler compares the Scrovegni profile portrait to other profiles by Giotto and finds no particular distinctiveness; he agrees with Keller that likeness did not matter to Giotto or to his patrons (detail, p. 41).28 Stephen Perkinson says portraiture was a social practice, not a stable form of representation. He says that art history tends to underrate the “iconography” involved in portraiture. In his book, he stresses not the singularity of the panel portrait of the king of France, Jean II le Bon (c. 1350), the oldest surviving physically independent painted portrait, but rather embeds the artifact in a context of portraits in elite manuscripts of the sort analyzed by Alexa Sand in her monograph on thirteenth-century French devotional manuscripts.29 In an essay of 2012, Perkinson modifies his views somewhat. He maintains that reference in the Middle Ages was secured mainly through textual and symbolic channels: inscriptions, costumes, regalia, heraldry.30 But he concedes that physiognomic resemblance was gradually added to the system; the images of Pope Boniface VIII, by Giotto and others, were a “conflation of the physical and the institutional Pope.” He insists that earlier in the Middle Ages, resemblance was actually mistrusted and avoided; mimesis was considered an insecure form of representation because future audiences would be unable to recognize the portrait subjects. This is where Olariu would disagree. I would hold that conventions have their power but that the conventionalist view has been taken too far. Such extreme views as those of Goodman or Eco are hard to sustain in real discursive situations. They don’t match experience. In the same way, the historian Otto Gerhard Oexele is skeptical of the art historian Keller’s thesis that medieval portraiture, not taking human beholders into account, dealt with types rather than individuals, and the exemplary rather than the singular. If Keller were right, Oexele counters, then the advent of the portrait likeness in the early Renaissance would have represented an emancipation from what he calls the dominant “memorial” culture of the Middle Ages. For Oexele, the medieval obsession with memorialization was precisely concerned with the individual, even if not always with portrait resemblance. But portrait resemblance by no means clashed with the memorial function.31 A painted portrait by Jan van Eyck or Hans Holbein the Younger gives you a strong impression that the painter studied the sitter’s face at length and carefully transcribed his or her features onto a sheet of parchment or paper,

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and then ultimately onto a prepared panel, with paint. To generate such likenesses in paint, an artist does have to simplify or in some cases abandon the enabling codes, the rules by which artists worked. A likeness cannot be based entirely on received formulas but must, to some degree, draw on the image-maker’s direct experience of the person. This unmediated encounter between artist’s eye and object to be depicted, and the simultaneous transcription of the perceived data into the artistic medium, is the referential “pointing.” Observation and transcription function the way literal pointing does in a communicational situation. Likeness is empirical: it is tested by the fact of recognition. The fidelity to the natural datum yields a simulation of a real-life recognition. Neither Giotto nor any other painter of the fourteenth century achieved these high degrees of verisimilitude. Nevertheless, the effective realism of the fifteenth century had a prehistory. Scholars, clearing out space for the commonsensical, naturalist view that portrait likeness is not an overly complicated “iconographical” matter but was readily admired and coveted, will sometimes hedge their commitment to conventionalism. Julian Gardner, for example, at one point contends that funerary art and liturgical ceremonial art were unlikely contexts to encourage the cultivation of realistic likeness — one could not formulate a position more directly opposed to Olariu’s.32 But elsewhere, seeking to date Giotto’s Stefaneschi altar on the basis of the apparent age of the Cardinal in his portraits on that work, Gardner adopts a more commonsensical attitude.33 Noa Turel also adopts a compromise position between conventionalism and naturalism. She argues that the phrase au vif, often encountered in the texts and associated with Jan van Eyck and other realists, did not necessarily mean adequacy to a live model but rather invoked the effect of vividness or animation that this mode of painting produced.34 This was a quality that a portrait could have, but not only portraits. Turel suggests that we adjust our readings of the phrase au vif, at least before 1550, recognizing that the term referred not to the process of picture-making — the transfer of natural data to the panel — but to the product: not the imitation of a model, but to the generation of a sensation of lifelikeness; immersion, not indexicality. In this way, Turel explains why some portraits are described as au vif even when the sitter is not known — this is what I have been calling the rhetoric of realism. Turel argues that the topos of “drawing from life” must be seen within the tradition of legendary origins ascribed to sacred paintings; that there is a discourse since antiquity on the animation of sculpture by color; that medical alchemy and revivication provide overlooked contexts for van Eyck’s Ghent altar; and that painting in that period must be understood as a “spatial” practice, contributing to spectacles of animation in time and space. I find this convincing and would only suggest that Turel has no need to complement her revelation of the discursive contexts sustaining the rhetoric of likeness with an endorsement of the constructionist position on the technical achievement of likeness. Her thesis about the

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meaning of the phrase au vif is quite compatible with a naturalist conception of likeness. If the value and appeal of a lifelike representation are self-evident, as Olariu suggests, then it is only a matter of access to the technology. This view supports the story of the democratization of portraiture, the tracking of a will to self-portrayal that requires no elaborate explanation, a story to which the present book seeks to contribute. The text quoted by Pietro d’Abano near the beginning of this book (p. 22) suggests the eagerness of society for likeness, and the immediate intelligibility of the concept.35

The unmediated encounter between artist and portrait subject (“sitter”) is implied by the word for portrait used by Vasari and other early commentators: ritratto, based on the verb ritrarre (< Latin retrahere, to drag). The artist drags, pulls, or draws the stylus across the surface, matching line by line what she sees before her. The scene of drawing is imagined as a back-and-forth between looking and drawing, a matching of mark to percept. Drawing from life is a coordination of eye and hand, tracked mechanically by the line, in real time. In a discussion of the Latin word protrahere (to draw forward, bring to light), Gottfried Boehm speaks of its geometrical meaning, a “generating” of lines out of points. He stresses the process of the image’s emergence that a beholder can follow virtually, setting even the finished picture into a relation with time. Not until around 1400 did a cognate noun corresponding to that finished product appear. An inscription on a lost portrait by Jan van Eyck, for example, used the word portraiture.36 The processual theme in the histories of protrahere, portraiture, portrait, ritrarre, ritratto is also present in the English word drawing. The referential ambitions of drawing, by contrast, are more clearly marked in the etymology of German zeichnen (< pie *deik- = to point out), cognate with English deictic, index, and token. A painted likeness based on direct observation is an early, low-tech version of the mechanically made image of modernity, the photograph. Just as photography changed the meaning of handmade images, so did painted images that referred by likeness change the meaning of non-referential images. Not all photographs show us people. But portraits played a dominant role in the early history of photography, and they still do — it was what people mostly want photography to do. This immediacy based on the mechanical or quasi-mechanical transfer of data from reality to plane surface is the basis for the distinction between portraits and icons. Icons, too, are images that refer to individuals. Icons deliver images of religious heroes (persons historical but wrapped in legend) by copying earlier images that are recognizable on the basis of convention. St. Peter looks more or less this way, Mary Magdalene more or less that way. We know the painter did not see Peter or Mary with his own eyes. Icons are portraits

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of historical persons who have already been represented countless times by images that mostly resemble one another. The icon, far removed from its source in life yet still recognizable, betokens fame itself. A picture of Abraham Lincoln painted yesterday is more like an icon than a portrait. The self-­ resemblance of the corpus of existing images ensures recognizability. On that basis, the person becomes a character of legend or myth, and the real person is buried below. The holy personages, Mary, John, and Mary Magdalene, like Lincoln, were real people who lived and died. Their images, whether standing alone or embedded in narratives, also refer to them. There were traditions of images — chains of images, one copied from another — that purported to tell us what they once looked like. But such traditions cannot be trusted. Mary’s and Joseph’s faces are too generic, too generalized. They have to be, because the images of Mary and Joseph are symbolizing religious ideals. Those faces stand for entire categories of idealized existence, idealized behavior. By contrast, the image of the ordinary, non-heroic person does nothing but refer to that person and her existence. The portrait, unlike an icon, is often an occasional image in the sense that the scene of its literal origin — the “occasion” of the encounter between artist and sitter — persists as an essential element of its meaning. A physical encounter between a painter and a portrait subject may be inscribed into the work. The portrait in modernity documents a coming together of two people, whereas an icon, also created in a painter’s workshop, is supposed to make you forget that workshop (unless the icon is one of those few portraits of the Virgin Mary alleged by legend to have been painted by St. Luke). Another aspect, almost a criterion, of the portrait — but also of the icon —  is “framedness”: the isolation or extraction of the image of the person from relational or interactive contexts. Portraits and icons are depictions of individuals alone against a neutral or nonnarrative background and sealed off from the world by a frame. A depiction of a person engaged in action is not ordinarily called a portrait. In the Upper Church at Assisi there are many images of St. Francis in the mural cycle narrating his life. Francis looks more or less the same in every scene. Are these portraits? No: the portrait is an isolating image. The portrait, “ruling out” accident, extracts a person artificially from life and action in order to convey some stable aspect of their being.37 In a portrait, the individual is on his own. Just as a witness who is brought before a court, to appear in person, is essentially alone.38 We noted that Vasari identified many portraits by Giotto and others hidden in crowd scenes. Now we can see the apparent lifelikeness he detected in those faces as a framing device: the physiognomy set the person off from his neighbors, an effect perhaps reinforced by a certain abstracted or disengaged facial expression. There is a reason why carved or cast statues and busts were the original and least ambiguous formats for portraiture: the isolating frame is the work’s own outer surface.

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Today, when people use the word portrait, they most often mean an image not only denoting and describing an individual, and whose content is that person’s individuality, but also transcending the referential function and inviting admiration as a work of art. The concept of the portrait-as-artwork begs an enormous question: what is an artwork? “Artwork” is hardly a simple or a timeless category. But we can identify times and places when images of individuals have been valued for qualities not dependent on any interest or stake in the real existence of the depicted person, including or perhaps especially in cases when one had no idea at all who was depicted. The assignation of value to painted or sculpted portraits of unknown people is a marker of a society that values art. We take it for granted today, but in most times and places it would have made no sense to own a portrait of a person whose name one did not know. Pliny in the first-century ce deplored the decadent tastes of Roman aristocrats of his day who purchased and displayed portrait busts of unknown people who were not even their own ancestors (Natural History, book 35.2). He would have judged the Medici of the fifteenth century to be decadent: a 1492 inventory of their collections mentions una tavoletta dipintovi di una testa di dama franzese cholorito a olio, opera di Pietro Cresti da Bruggia.39 The Florentines were interested in this painting and the artist who painted it, not the woman depicted. One must conclude that some people in some times find a portrait’s interpretation of appearance and personhood, even when the person is long gone and her name forgotten, intrinsically beautiful, thought-provoking, or affecting. The aesthetic potential of the portrait is easiest to perceive, paradoxically, in eras when the techniques of realism are little developed. The least lifelike pre-1300 portraits in Europe, mostly tomb effigies and other sculpted portraits, are often those possessing the most eminent aesthetic qualities.40 The increasingly lifelike technique of the painted portraits of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries discouraged the display of any artistic will, or style, that might interfere with effective reference to the portrait subject. The portrait was inimical to art in proportion to its lifelikeness — so it must have seemed, and the management of this tension by fourteenth-century Italian painters has been the topic of this book. The tension was relaxed the moment the portrait was given its own independent physical platform, typically a rectangular panel, small enough to hold in the hands, depicting the upper body and head of the sitter against a neutral background. Now the isolated or framed-off quality that distinguishes every portrait was reinforced by the physical mobility and notional context-­independence of the panels. Now the whole content of the work was the depicted person. This was the format of many icons, or portraits of divine personages or religious heroes. The earliest surviving portraits of nonholy modern people since antiquity — that is, not icons — painted on their own independent supports, and small enough to be mobile, were the royal

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portraits of the mid- and late fourteenth century, in northern Europe.41 Vasari said Giotto brought a portrait of Clement V back from Avignon and gave it to Taddeo Gaddi, and although this report is mistrusted, there could very well have been such a portrait of the pope.42 Such images, whose function and meaning are seemingly exhausted by their dedication to the physiognomies and expressions of their self-­advertising sitters, are unlikely magnets for aesthetic evaluation. And yet within decades, exactly this sort of portrait was considered a collector’s item. The earliest basis for such an attribution of aesthetic quality — unless the reputation and prowess of the artist were a factor in its own right — was tied to the person. A paradigm of the early portrait as an object of desire was the portrait of the beloved, a category that existed at least since the fourteenth century. Petrarch in his Sonnets 77 and 78 speaks of a portrait of his beloved, Laura, by Simone Martini: 43 Ma certo il mio Simon fu in paradiso

But certainly my Simon was in Paradise,

(onde questa gentil donna si parte),

whence comes this noble lady;

ivi la vide, et la ritrasse in carte

there he saw her and portrayed her on paper,

per far fede qua giú del suo bel viso.

to attest down here of her lovely face.

L’opra fu ben di quelle che nel Cielo

The work is one of those which can be

si ponno imaginar, non qui tra noi,

imagined only in Heaven, not here among us,

ove le membra fanno a l’alma velo.

where the body is a veil to the soul.44

(Canzone 77, lines 5–11)

Such a portrait, painted on a sheet of parchment or on a panel, could have existed.45 It is unlikely that Laura herself existed, however, so we may read this poem as Petrarch’s abstract reflection on, first, the miracle of the great painter’s gift that delivers an image not of a mortal woman but of a sublimated being, rendering her as the lover sees her in his mind’s eye, or as one would apprehend her in heaven; and second, the relative merits of painting and poetry. By introducing Simone’s portrait into his sequence of poems about Laura, Petrarch implies that the painting achieved a plenitude that his own poetry could not match. The poet concedes the fragmentary, incomplete, even unsatisfying nature of his own verbal descriptions. This is just a conceit, not to be taken literally, but it formulates clearly enough the aesthetic potential of a painted portrait. To speak of a portrait as a rival to poetry is to concede its ability to draw directly upon the beauty of the depicted person. Eventually, the whole person and not just their beauty will serve as the scaffold for the portrait conceived and received as artwork. The existence, personhood, personality, or character of the sitter is taken up as a theme, that is, not just as a content or subject matter but as a whole idea that permits association with moral, religious, or societal ideals, or concepts of will and agency. The perception of the wholeness of the individual is borrowed to sustain a certain quality of wholeness

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that someone feels that artworks ought to possess. This is the theme sustaining the great period of the artistic portrait in Europe, from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. After the invention of photography in the nineteenth century, many artists felt liberated from the requirement of producing likeness. Nevertheless, portraiture flourished at the end of the nineteenth century and in the first half of the twentieth, precisely when painting styles were untethering themselves from nature. Portraits in this period became less lifelike and more artlike. Once again, as was sometimes the case in the European Middle Ages, the aesthetic possibilities of the portrait were most readily elicited when the imperative of realism receded. The culmination of this process were such near-abstract portraits as Picasso’s Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (1910, Art Institute of Chicago), or the emblematic or symbolic “poster portraits” of Charles Demuth, such as Dove (Arthur G. Dove) (1924, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University).46 The inverse of the abstract portrait, in modernity, is the photographic portrait presented as an artwork. It may seem dubious, to some, to elevate an objective, mechanically produced photograph of a face to the level of an artwork. But, of course, there are plenty of examples: likenesses with some ineffable supplement of insight-­ yielding style. They are greatly outnumbered, however, by all the nonartistic portrait photos. The idea that an image of a person’s face could sum up that person, revealing his or her essential coherence, was extended in modern times beyond the face to the time-based media (the novels The Portrait of a Lady or A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Portrait, the title of many popular music albums; and the biopic, which may be thought of as an animated portrait). The hypothesis of the art-like achievements of the portrait counter­ balances the assumption that the artist who submits to the task of portraiture limits her options. For the implications of the project of reference for art, whether verbal or pictorial, are unclear. Art involves fiction, or the crafting of virtual possible realities. Reference is precisely nonfictional. This distinction is underscored by a remark of Cicero’s, cited by Augustine. Cicero in De republica said that in early Greek times it was made a law “that whatever comedy wished to say of anyone, it must say it of him by name.” Some characters in plays, in other words, resembled public figures. The likeness was amusing for the audience, but offensive to the target of the joke. The reference was hidden behind a fictional character. The law requiring playwrights instead to name their targets converted satire into libel, thus discouraging playwrights from engaging at all in satire, which neither Cicero nor Augustine considered a feature of a morally sound society.47 Direct reference by name rescinded poetic license: now the play’s “portrait” can be judged, in a court of law, according to its likeness to its model. Whereas a fictional character in a play can only be judged, if at all, by her likeness to human nature in general. Naming or reference, then, forces the artist or author into a position of responsibility.

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The author of a fiction, by definition, knows more about her characters than they know about themselves. Can one say that, when the artwork is structured around reference? Does a photographer know more about the people in front of his lens than they know about themselves? Does a portrait painter know his sitters better than they know themselves? Reference puts pressure on fiction. But the tension between fiction and reality, which animates the genre of satire, should not arise at all in sacred art. For everything in a sacred image is supposed to be real and true. And yet a portrait embedded in a sacred image creates a strong impression that it is more real than everything surrounding it. That is because the artist made it by direct transcription of observed data. The invented quality of the n­on-­ referential parts of the painting allowed for general, “poetical” commentary. The portrait is a limitation, an obstacle, and an end to that commentary. There is one great example of a poetic work that is constructed around reference: Dante’s Commedia. The imaginative construct is studded, especially in the Inferno and the Purgatorio, with portraits from life, and proper names. This creates an uncanny tension. The basis of the break with medieval painting, noted as it was happening by the fourteenth-century writers, was the painter’s new fidelity to the natural data — his diminished dependency on handed-down formulas. Those writers did not seem overly concerned, as we noted, that the mechanical operation of transcription might also diminish the painter’s opportunities for adding the surplus of beauty, style, or patterning which made some paintings more artistic than others. The artist was an artisan who was capable of creating something new and beautiful. The artist who is contracted merely to reproduce the look of things has signed away some of his freedom. When art was just a matter of manipulating conventions, it was easy to add that surplus. The conventions were flexible and allowed for adaptation. The medieval conventions were not as binding as the observed natural datum. This seems paradoxical because the Renaissance is also often understood as an emancipation and empowering of the artist. Rudolf Berliner seized upon this paradox and argued in a famous article that the medieval artist was in fact already free.48 Theologians, he contended, recognized by the thirteenth century at the latest that images, although dubious as reports on the divine reality, nevertheless had valuable rhetorical and expressive powers. The very source of those powers was the unstable and merely relative relation of the image to real reality. Once theologians ceased asking artists to channel the divine, thereby protecting themselves against any charge of idolatry, art was effectively free. Theologians may have asserted the necessity of a legitimating similitudo, but in practice they left things entirely to the artists. Theologians who blamed artists for incorrect representations were implicitly acknowledging their freedom. The task of portraiture decreased the artist’s freedom. Artists may not have been expected any longer to deliver true images of God. But they were

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now increasingly expected to reproduce the look of things generally, and at times were held responsible for reproducing the appearance of a particular individual. In this period nearly all portraits were caused by their sitters: the sitter desired to be portrayed and hired an artist to do it. The commissioned portrait is a form of self-portrait. The patron is simply using the painter as an instrument, the way we use the cameras on our phones today to make portraits of ourselves. The painter was an image-making device that anyone with a bit of money could operate. It is understandable why Giotto did not invest so much in perfecting his portrait technique. Enrico Castelnuovo, noting that the painted portrait of Enrico Scrovegni in the Arena Chapel is less distinctive than the carved portrait of Clement IV on his tomb in San Francesco in Viterbo (1271–74), asked why the painted portrait in Giotto’s time lagged behind the sculpted portrait.49 The answer is that Giotto’s priority was not precise description but the creation of a completely new relation among figures and things in space. What is innovative about the Scrovegni portrait in the Last Judgment — and this is a function of the painter’s overall pictorial aim — is that it is in full scale (detail, p. 41). One can imagine — though not prove — that Giotto resented his own reputation as a pure naturalist. It is instructive to look at Giotto’s depictions of real architecture. For one may make a portrait not just of a human being but of any entity insofar as it is considered in its singularity, and not merely as a token of a type, and whose accurate description can be recognized by someone. There can be portraits of cities, buildings, ships, household pets. Of course, everything is singular, every blade of grass, but that singularity may not matter much to anyone. A portrait refers to something whose very individuality is a matter of interest to someone, and that in life contexts cannot readily be swapped out for something else. Vasari himself used the word in this way: in his Life of Arnolfo di Cambio, he says that Simone Martini (in fact, it was Andrea da Firenze) in the Spanish Chapel at Santa Maria Novella (1365–68) painted the portrait (ritratto) of the Duomo of Florence.50 At Assisi, in the Upper Church, Giotto painted a portrait of the Temple of Minerva in Assisi, an ancient building that still exists. It is the backdrop for one of the miracles of St. Francis. Giotto paints it with five instead of six columns. Why? Anyone could check and see that he had made a mistake — the temple is only a few hundred yards from the basilica. This mysterious decision is a clue to Giotto’s art generally. By subtracting a column from the building, he asserts his liberty to stray from truth for his own purposes.51 The portrait was institutionalized as a subject of discourse at the latest by 1435, the date of Leon Battista Alberti’s treatise On Painting. At the beginning of book 2, Alberti named portraiture as one of the essential powers of the art of painting: Tiene in sé la pittura forza divina: non solo quanto si dice dell’amicizia, quale fa li uomini assenti essere presenti, ma più i morti dopo molti secoli essere quasi vivi; tale che con molta ammirazione de l’artefice e con molta voluttà si riconoscono.52

excu r su s : r e f e r en c e a n d l i k en es s 311 Painting has a divine power, not just because, as is said of friendship, it makes absent ones present, but it makes the dead seem to live, after centuries, so that they are recognized with pleasure and the artist is admired.53

Alberti then gives two examples from antiquity. Several different capacities of the portrait are packed into these two sentences: the image keeps the distant friend or loved one in view; seems miraculously to reverse death; provides an antiquarian pleasure in seeing what long-dead illustrious people looked like; and is a measuring stick to hold up to the artists of the past. One century after Giotto, the portrait is inscribed into a general theory of art. Soon there will be collections of painted portraits, albums of printed portraits, collections of self-portraits of artists. A portrait could be prized as a work of art, as an eloquent or affecting image, even if tethered tightly to real data. A modern portrait is expected to reveal an array of significant aspects of a person’s existence and being, perhaps their very essence. A modern portrait is expected to convey what we really need to know about a person. That is what we feel about Diego Velázquez’s Pope Innocent X, or J. A. D. Ingres’s Monsieur Bertin. But if the portrait is really successful as a work of art, paradoxically, we may also feel that the painting’s true subject is not the sitter but the artist.54 Most of the portraits we are dealing with in this study had to meet no such lofty expectations. Like the photo on a modern ID card, the early donor or patron portrait tells us all we need to know about that person in a given context, and is none too concerned with rivaling works of art. The fourteenth-­ century supplicant portrait involved a reduction to what counted in a devotional or commemorative context. The embedding of the portrait in a sacred artwork forced the issue, submitting the portrait to an artistic will.

acknowledgments

Much of the reading and research for this book was carried out at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and at Villa I Tatti, Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Florence. I am grateful for the support I received from both institutions as well as from Yve-Alain Bois and Alina Payne. At Princeton University Press I wish to thank Michelle Komie for her trust, conviction, and good judgment, as well as Jessica Massabrook, Annie Miller, Terri O’Prey, and Steve Sears. Thanks also are due to Lachlan Brooks, Dave Luljak, and Michael Sandlin. With admiration and gratitude I salute once again Julie Fry, the peerless book designer. I wish to thank the three anonymous readers for Princeton University Press, whose admonitions I have done my best to heed. And a fourth reader, anything but anonymous: I hardly need say how valuable and meaningful Alexander Nagel’s response to the manuscript has been. Romy Golan, meanwhile, has no need to read the book because over time we have talked the whole thing through. Among the book’s more distant origin points I would name three of my teachers at Harvard: Henri Zerner, whose remarkable lecture course in 1987 on the history and theory of the portrait opened the topic for me, proposing the portrait as the most demanding test of the thesis of the conventionality of the image. Wolfgang Kemp, who taught at Harvard in 1986, and whose Die Räume der Maler: Zur Bilderzählung seit Giotto remains one of the best books ever written in art history, so refined and economical. Kemp showed us the virtual spaces — literally, the rooms — of the Tuscan and the Netherlandish painters as narrativized fields structured by familial topologies and public/private distinctions. Finally, Hans Belting (1935–2023), whose seminar in 1984 on the

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“functional aspects” of Trecento panel painting looked back to his book The Image and Its Public and forward to Likeness and Presence. Over the years, from near and far, as the wheel of the generations slowly rotated, I followed Belting’s singular intellectual trajectory, allowing his writings to shape what I perceived as my own counter-project. The end is the beginning, a response to the teacher as deferred action; an untimely book in the good sense, I hope (that is, counter-cyclical in disciplinary terms); but in another sense, unfortunately not in time. My copy of Gaetano Milanesi’s edition of Vasari’s Lives of the Artists was a much-valued gift from the art historian Jean Weisz (who died in 2022), the lifelong friend of my mother. I wish to thank Louise and Gordon Wood, my parents — for everything.

notes

in t ro du ct io n 1. Galleria Nazionale di Parma, inv. no. gn435, 159 × 198 cm. Angelo Tartuferi, ed., L’eredità di Giotto: Arte a Firenze, 1340–1375, exhibition catalogue, Uffizi (Florence: Giunti, 2008), no. 45, pp. 188–89 (Alberto Lenza). 2. Giovanna Damiana, “Fiorentini fuori sede: La tavola di Agnolo Gaddi nella Galleria Nazionale di Parma,” in Governare l’arte, ed. Claudio di Benedetti and Serena Padovani, Festschrift Antonio Paolucci (Florence: Giunti, 2008), pp. 37–45: there is no physical evidence that there was ever a pendant figure on the right. 3. Harold Acton, Memoirs of an Aesthete (London: Methuen, 1948), p. 20. 4. Museo de Arte de Ponce, inv. no. 62.0268, 131.5 × 132.1 cm. See the more complete discussion below, pp. 169–71. 5. Fern Rusk Shapley, Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: Italian Schools, vol. 1 (London: Phaidon, 1966), p. 32. 6. “Donor portrait” used to be the catchall term for the portraits of modern figures associated with sacred images, but the word “donor” properly refers to a person who gives or donates an artwork or a building, or who founds or funds an institution. In the cases we are dealing with it is not always clear that the portrayed person on or in the artwork was in any sense “giving” the work. Some of the works were not gifts but for private consumption. Others were paid for by someone else, perhaps a family member, and simply honored or remembered the portrayed individual. 7. Thomas Puttfarken, The Discovery of Pictorial Composition: Theories of Visual Order in Painting 1400–1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), ch. 12, here pp. 280, 290. 8. Museo Nacional del Prado, inv. no. 1170. 9. See his own early Adoration of the Magi (1619), Museo

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Nacional del Prado, inv. no. 1166, mysteriously inhabited, it would seem, by portraits.

c ha p t er on e: f r a n c i s c a n i s m, t he l a i t y, a n d port r a i t s 1. On the similarities between the Franciscans and the heretics, from both sociological and ideological points of view, see Herbert Grundmann, Religious Movements in the Middle Ages [1929] (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995). Strictly speaking, the Roman conquerors did not award blanket citizenship until Caracalla’s edict of 212–213: Myles Lavan, “The Spread of Roman Citizenship, 14–212 ce: Quantification in the Face of High Uncertainty,” Past and Present 230 (2016): pp. 3–46. 2. Munich, Alte Pinakothek, inv. no. 667, 45 × 43.7 cm. Rolf Kultzen, Alte Pinakothek München, Katalog V, Italienische Malerei (Munich: Bruckmann, 1975), pp. 52–53. 3. There are two further scenes in Munich, a Last Supper and a Harrowing of Hell; a Presentation of Christ in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston; a Pentecost in London, an Entombment at Villa I Tatti; and an Epiphany in the Metropolitan Museum. There have been many interesting theories about the pictures’ original setting; see the review in Carl Brandon Strehlke and Machtelt Brüggen Israëls, The Bernard and Mary Berenson Collection of European Paintings at I Tatti (Florence: Villa I Tatti, 2015), pp. 323–25. Roberto Longhi considered them the predella of an altarpiece (it would have been three meters wide); cited by Dillian Gordon, “A Dossal by Giotto and his Workshop: Some Problems of Attri­ bution, Provenance, and Patronage,” Burlington Magazine 131 (August 1989): pp.  524–31, here p.  529. Giovanni Previtali associated the panels with the four altars by Giotto in Santa

315 Croce mentioned by Lorenzo Ghiberti. Ferdinando Bologna proposed that they belonged to a polyptych by Giotto from Borgo San Sepolcro mentioned by Giorgio Vasari in Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori, ed. Gaetano Milanesi, vol. 1 (Florence: Sansoni, 1878), pp. 395–96; Vasari, Lives of the Artists, trans. Julia Conway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 30 (a widely used English translation of Vasari, though not all the passages I will refer to were included in this one-volume abridgement; the passages I quote that are not in the Oxford translation, I have translated myself ). (Citations of Vasari henceforth will be abbreviated as Milanesi and Oxford.) Gordon’s “A Dossal by Giotto and his Workshop” proposed that the series was a dossal (a low horizontal element mounted on the back of an altar) for a patron in Rimini, where that format was common. Strehlke reviews Gordon’s proposal favorably but points out (p. 323) that the angels in the New York and Villa I Tatti panels are looking or gesturing upwards, which would favor some other configuration. However, in David Bomford, Jill Dunkerton, and Dillian Gordon, Art in the Making: Italian Painting before 1400 (London: National Gallery, 1989), pp. 64–71, Gordon notes that the backs of four of the panels are coated with porphyry-colored paint, suggesting that the series of panels was visible from the rear, and excluding the predella hypothesis; see also Dillian Gordon, Italian Paintings Before 1400 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), p. 233. 4. Giorgio Bonsanti, in Angelo Tartuferi, ed., Giotto: Bilancio critico di sessant’anni di studi e ricerche (Florence: Giunti, 2000), no. 23, pp. 174ff., attributes the series to Giotto with a date of the early 1320s. See also the entry by Tartuferi in Florence at the Dawn of the Renaissance: Painting and Illumination, 1300–1350, ed. Christine Sciacca (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2012), no. 32, pp. 170–77. Strehlke reviews the attributions in Berenson Collection, pp. 325–26. Quite a few scholars accept Giotto’s authorship, following Longhi. Others, including Strehlke, prefer an overall attribution to Giotto but with workshop participation in the execution. An exception is Francesca Flores d’Arcais, Giotto (New York: Abbeville, 2012), pp. 212–18, who sees no involvement by Giotto at all — a hesitation to be taken seriously because she tends to inclusivity. Michael Viktor Schwarz, Giottus Pictor, vol. 2, Giottos Werke (Vienna: Böhlau, 2008), pp. 588–89, attributes the work to a direct pupil of Giotto and dates it to the 1310s. Note that Giotto’s formulas were frequently copied and adapted, perhaps inside his workshop, perhaps beyond, by painters who had been close to him; see for example the panel in Troyes, Musée des Beaux-Arts, inv. no. 08-7-2, 31 × 23 cm., possibly a private devotional panel, which adapts the composition of the Munich Crucifixion, but without the patrons. Giotto e compagni (Paris: Musée du Louvre, 2013), no. 18, pp. 164–65. 5. Strehlke, Berenson Collection, p. 323, described the costume as a green alb with gilt-decorated collar and says he appears to be holding a maniple. He reports that microscopic examination reveals that the man is tonsured. I don’t see the tonsure. Gordon, “A Dossal by Giotto and his Workshop,” pp. 530–31, sees the man as a layman. She says that this is not

ordinary fashionable dress, but neither is it clerical. Gordon believes this is a lay donor who has had himself portrayed in a grand fashion. She cites Robert Oertel, who considered him a “deacon,” a non-ordinated clergyman who also operated in the secular sphere. Gordon asserts that the robe of the woman was originally blue and cannot be a habit. 6. This is the interesting thesis of Katherine Marsengill, Portraits and Icons: Between Reality and Spirituality in Byzantine Art (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), p. 1. 7. Strehlke, warning that the figure bears no currently visible stigmata, is willing only to say that he is “most likely” Francis; Strehlke, Berenson Collection, p. 323. 8. Ruedi Imbach, Laien in der Philosophie des Mittelalters (Amsterdam: Grüner, 1989), pp. 16–22. 9. Coluccio Salutati, On the World and Religious Life, trans. Tina Marshall, I Tatti Renaissance Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), proem to book 2, and again in book 2, section 15, pp. 201–2, 354–57. Salutati is recalling a passage in Jerome; Jerome’s meaning was different, however. 10. André Vauchez, The Laity in the Middle Ages: Religious Beliefs and Devotional Practices (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), esp. ch. 8, shows how Franciscanism and the new forms of lay piety were prepared by the sermons and other catechistic and pastoral campaigns in the Italian towns, often highly responsive to changing social conditions. 11. Vauchez, Laity, p. 113. See also his ch. 5 on lay saints and ch. 9 on confraternities. 12. Already the nonconformist communities that had been labeled heretics, and who in some ways anticipated Francis’s revolution, blurred the boundaries. The Waldensians, for example, held that laypersons could hear confession and perform the Mass; Grundmann, Religious Movements, p. 42. 13. Rico Franses, Donor Portraits in Byzantine Art: The Vicissitudes of Contact between Human and Divine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 17ff., draws a distinction between the “contact portrait,” in which a donor is depicted giving something, and the “ktetor [founder] portrait” depicting the owner or possessor of the picture. He suggests that only images involving the iconography of donation should be called donor portraits. 14. The most comprehensive survey and study of this phenomenon in Italian painting is Dirk Kocks, “Die Stifterdarstellung in der italienischen Malerei des 13.–15. Jahrhunderts” (PhD diss., University of Cologne, 1971). A major study is Frank O. Büttner, Imitatio pietatis: Motive der christlichen Ikonographie als Modelle zur Verähnlichung (Berlin: Mann, 1983). Büttner’s book can be misleading because it is organized thematically, not chronologically. Fourteenth- and fifteenth-­ century examples are often treated together as if belonging to the same pool of time. Most of his examples are, in fact, from the fifteenth century. A significant discussion is Victor M. Schmidt, Painted Piety: Panel Paintings for Personal Devotion in Tuscany, 1250–1400 (Florence: Centro Di, 2005), ch. 4. See, recently, David Ekserdjian, The Italian Renaissance Altarpiece: Between Icon and Narrative (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021), pp. 81–89. Covering (like Büttner) both Italian

316 and northern European material are: Barbara G. Lane, “The Development of the Medieval Devotional Figure” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1970), pp.  125–44; John Pope-­ Hennessy, The Portrait in the Renaissance (New York: Bollingen Foundation and Pantheon, 1966), ch. 6, “Donor and Participant”; and Lorne Campbell, Renaissance Portraits: European Portrait-Painting in the 14th, 15th, and 16th Centuries (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990). A recent and impressive book on the northern European works of the fifteenth century is Johanna Scheel, Das altniederländische Stifterbild: Emotionsstrategien des Sehens und der Selbsterkenntnis (Berlin: Mann, 2013). I became aware only too late of Ingrid Falque, Devotional Portraiture and Spiritual Experience in Early Netherlandish Painting (Leiden: Brill, 2019) (text and catalogue), and have not been able to absorb its findings. She covers the period 1400–1550; her approach is taxonomic, not historical. Most relevant for our purposes is Falque’s chapter 1 on the placement of the portraits in the physical and iconographic spaces, and on the devices that demarcate “degrees of reality.” Marius Rimmele, Das Triptychon als Metapher, Körper, und Ort (Munich: Fink, 2010), pp. 287–94, provides a good résumé of the literature up to that point on fifteenth-century northern European votive portraits and their functions. On earlier Italian material, see Linda Safran, “Deconstructing ‘Donors’ in Medieval Southern Italy,” Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 60/61 (2011/2012): pp. 135–51. On Byzantine art, see the volume of the Wiener Jahrbuch just cited, dedicated to female patronage in the Middle Ages, as well as Franses, Donor Portraits in Byzantine Art. For orientation and literature on portraits in the margins of icons, see Annemarie Weyl Carr, “Donors in the Frames of Icons: Living Beyond the Borders of Byzantine Art,” Gesta 45 (2002): pp. 189–98. 15. Kocks, “Die Stifterdarstellung,” pp. 111–12, ventures to say that this is the first painting that depicts saints and donors in the same scale. 16. Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983). Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak, When Ego Was Imago: Signs of Identity in the Middle Ages (Leiden: Brill, 2011). 17. Translation by Allen Mandelbaum; available at http:// www.worldofdante.org/. 18. J. Thomann, “Pietro d’Abano on Giotto,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 54 (1991): pp. 238–44. Dominic Olariu, La genèse de la représentation ressemblante de l’homme: Reconsidérations du portrait à partir du XIIIe siècle (Bern: Peter Lang, 2014), pp. 286–88. Enrico Castelnuovo, “Les portraits individuels de Giotto,” in Le portrait individuel, ed. Dominic Olariu (Bern: Peter Lang, 2009), pp. 103–20, here pp. 103–4. See also Serena Romano, La O di Giotto (Milan: Electa, 2008), p. 131. 19. Peter Sloterdijk, in Spheres, vol. 1, Bubbles (Los Angeles: Semiotexte, 2011), pp. 145–55, building on a section of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Mille plateaux, writes that with Giotto the face emerges, not isolated but out of a condition of “interfaciality,” or encounters between faces, in narrative or dramatic scenes. The Urbild gives way to the Urszene: Sloterdijk

writes against the privileging of the icon, and by extension against a concept of personhood independent of its social determinants, which he associates with Plato. 20. Giovanni Villani, Nuova Cronica, book 11, ch. 12, as cited by Michael Viktor Schwarz and Pia Theis, Giottus Pictor, vol. 1, Giottos Leben: Mit einer Sammlung der Urkunden und Texte bis Vasari (Vienna: Böhlau, 2004), p. 285. Villani’s word trasse is the past historic of trarre, “to draw,” the root of the verb ritrarre, “to portray.” Villani says dal naturale, which seems to mean also for Vasari “in a lifelike way” and not necessarily literally always from live models. 21. Vasari, Milanesi, vol. 1, p. 372; Oxford, p. 16. Why does he say that Giotto was the first to have done this in two hundred years? It is an obscure remark. 22. Vasari also records several portraits by Giotto in the lives of other artists, for example the portrait of Arnolfo di Cambio in the Bardi Chapel in Santa Croce, mentioned in the Life of Arnolfo, and the portrait of Duke Charles of Calabria kneeling before a Madonna, in the Palazzo Vecchio, mentioned in the life of Michelozzo; Milanesi, vol. 1, p. 291 and Milanesi, vol. 2, p. 436. 23. On Giotto’s portraits, see Kurt Bauch, “Giotto und die Porträtkunst,” in Giotto e il suo tempo (Rome: De Luca, 1971), pp. 299–309; E. H. Gombrich, “Giotto’s Portrait of Dante?,” Burlington Magazine 121 (August 1979): pp.  471–81; Hayden Maginnis, Painting in the Age of Giotto: A Historical Reevaluation (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University, 1997), pp. 8–13; Peter Seiler, “Giotto als Erfinder des Porträts,” in Das Porträt vor der Erfindung des Porträts, ed. Martin Büchsel and Peter Schmidt (Mainz: Zabern, 2003), pp. 153–72; Schwarz, Giottos Werke, pp. 34–38, 261–62, 502–3, 582–86; Romano, La O di Giotto, pp. 131–34; and Carl Brandon Strehlke, “Agnolo Gaddi and Trecento Florentine Portraiture,” in Agnolo Gaddi and the Cappella Maggiore in S. Croce, ed. Cecilia Frosinini (Cinisello Balsamo, Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2014), pp. 155–63. 24. Olariu calls him a “parasite” on the hierarchical system; La genèse de la représentation ressemblante, p. 414. On Scrovegni’s predicaments and his ambition, see Laura Jacobus, Giotto and the Arena Chapel: Art, Architecture and Experience (London: Harvey Miller, 2008), pp. 3–13, and Anne Derbes and Mark Sandona, The Usurer’s Heart: Giotto, Enrico Scrovegni, and the Arena Chapel in Padua (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University, 2008), pp. 24–43. 25. The identity and even gender of these three figures is contested. See Derbes and Sandona, The Usurer’s Heart, p. 4n8; and Schwarz, Giottos Werke, pp. 34–38, also on the identity of the cleric. For the latter, see Jacobus, Giotto and the Arena Chapel, pp. 28–29. 26. On the fidelity of this portrait to Scrovegni’s physiognomy, see the excursus “Reference and Likeness.” 27. Derbes and Sandona, The Usurer’s Heart, pp. 27–30. 28. Laura Jacobus, “A Knight in the Arena: Enrico Scrovegni and ‘his true image,’ ” in Fashioning Identities in Renaissance Art, ed. Mary Rogers (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 17–26. 29. Laura Jacobus, “ ‘Propria Figura’: The Advent of Fac-

no t e s 317 simile Portraiture in Italian Art,” Art Bulletin 99, no. 2 (June 2017): pp. 72–101. See also her article on Bernardino (“Porrina”) degli Albertini (d. 1308/9), whose life-sized and lifelike statue was possibly directly influenced by Scrovegni’s. Jacobus argues for a convergence and compatibility of naturalism with a physiognomic schema generated by a proportional system as well as a rhetoric of lifelikeness supported by the study of ancient Roman veristic portraiture: Laura Jacobus, “ ‘I, Porrina’: A Hyper-Realistic Portrait in the Collegiata of Casole d’ Elsa,” in Art and Experience in Trecento Italy, ed. Holly Flora and Sarah S. Wilkins (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018), pp. 61–77. 30. On the kneeling, diminutive Pontano’s grip on Mary’s hand, which, except for the use of the left hand, resembles the Roman imperial motif of restitutio, see Moshe Barasch, Giotto and the Language of Gesture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 132–33. 31. Alexa Sand, Vision, Devotion, and Self-Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 279. 32. Sand, Vision, Devotion, and Self-Representation, pp. 280–81. 33. Sand, Vision, Devotion, and Self-Representation, p. 279, quoting Meyer Schapiro and invoking Giotto’s portrait of Pontano kneeling before Mary Magdalene. 34. There were also early portraits of Thomas Becket (d. 1170); see Rosalind B. Brooke, The Image of St. Francis: Responses to Sainthood in the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 169. 35. The mural portrait in the Benedictine abbey of Subiaco, marked off by a painted frame, was painted possibly no more than a decade after Francis’s death. The small figure of a cleric kneels at his feet. Many questions about this image are unresolved, however: Klaus Krüger, Der frühe Bildkult des Franziskus in Italien: Gestalt- und Funktionswandel des Tafelbildes im 13. und 14. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Mann, 1992), pp. 56–63, ill. 112. Some early portraits of Francis were flanked by side panels with small narrative scenes. In the Lower Church at Assisi, on the wall of the north transept, there is an enthroned Madonna and Child by Cimabue, with flanking angels; standing next to this group, and facing outward, toward us, is a full-length image of St. Francis against a dark background. Luciano Bellosi, Cimabue (Milan: Motta, 2004), pp. 230–36. Holly Flora, Cimabue and the Franciscans (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018), pp. 131– 51. Cimabue’s fresco was spared when the vaults of the north transept were repainted by Giotto and his team. 36. Edward B. Garrison, Italian Romanesque Panel Painting (Florence: Olschki, 1949), no. 542, associating the work with the Master of Saint Francis. Comprehensive but hard to use because it is organized alphabetically by location is William R. Cook, Images of St. Francis of Assisi in Painting, Stone, and Glass from the Earliest Images to ca. 1320 in Italy: A Catalogue (Florence: Olschki, 1999); on the Santa Chiara Cross, no. 28, pp. 63–64. Note that one of the very earliest Franciscan Crosses portrayed a certain Brother Elias at the foot, not Francis. That usage seems to have faded quickly; from that point on it is mainly Francis himself who has the privilege. Donal Cooper and Janet Robson, The Making of Assisi: The Pope, the Franciscans and the Painting of the Basilica (New Haven, CT: Yale University

Press, 2013), pp. 63–72. See Krüger, Der frühe Bildkult des Fran­ ziskus, p.  159, ill. 296–97. Another good discussion of this group of works is Joanna Cannon, “Giotto and Art for the Friars: Revolutions Spiritual and Artistic,” in Cambridge Companion to Giotto, ed. Anne Derbes and Mark Sandona (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 103–34, here pp. 108–24. 37. Susie Nash, “Claus Sluter’s ‘Well of Moses’ for the Chartreuse de Champmol reconsidered; Part III,” Burlington Magazine 150 (November 2008): pp. 721–41, traces the forms and meanings of the Magdalene prostrate at the base of the Cross. On Mary Magdalene at the cross and her role as a model for portraits of modern patrons, see Büttner, Imitatio pietatis, pp. 143ff. 38. Schlosser, “Eine Fulder Miniaturhandschrift der k. k. Hofbibliothek,” Jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen Sammlungen 13 (1892): pp. 1–36, here pp. 21–23. 39. Worcester Art Museum, inv. no. 1922.207. Garrison, Italian Romanesque Panel Painting, no. 497. Kocks, “Die Stifter­ darstellung,” pp. 88ff., 391 (no. 251). Büttner, Imitatio pietatis, p. 145 and ill. 159. The Cross is missing its terminal panels on the side arms and top. 40. Galleria dell’ Accademia, inv. no. 1890 n. 436 (hanging as of February 2022 in the Uffizi). Miklós Boskovits and Angelo Tartuferi, Cataloghi della Galleria dell’ Accademia di Firenze, Dipinti, vol. 1, Dal Duecento a Giovanni da Milano (Florence: Giunti, 2003), no. 25, pp. 140–44. The work was probably made for San Pier Scheraggio, the church mostly destroyed to make room for the Uffizi. 41. Bellosi, Cimabue, pp. 183–93. 42. The Little Flowers of St. Francis, The Mirror of Perfection, The Life of St. Francis, Everyman’s Library (London: Dent, 1910), ch. 44, pp. 78–79. Luigina Morini, ed., I fioretti di San Francesco (Milan: Rizzoli, 1979), pp. 187–89. The Fioretti is a collection of stories composed in Latin in the second quarter of the fourteenth century, probably by Ugolino da Montegiorgio, and translated into the vernacular in the last quarter of the century. 43. Art Institute of Chicago, inv. no. 1933.1032. Laurence B. Kanter, Painting and Illumination in Early Renaissance Florence, 1300–1450 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994), no. 28, p. 299. 44. See the analysis by Erich Auerbach of Francis’s breathless, uncalculated prose style; Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953), pp. 166–69. 45. The debate about the date and authorship of the Meditations on the Life of Christ remains unresolved. This extremely important question does not deserve to be crammed into a footnote. But to summarize: The Latin text survives in at least 110 manuscripts, few if any of which seem to date earlier than the mid-fourteenth century. Some are illustrated, including the Paris manuscript (BnF, Ms. Ital. 115), one of the apparent Italian translations of the text and the basis for the (by art historians) widely used translation by Isa Ragusa and Rosalie B. Green (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,

318 1961). This manuscript is now the subject of an extensive art historical analysis by Holly Flora, The Devout Belief of the Imagination: The Paris Meditationes vitae Christi and Female Franciscan Spirituality in Trecento Italy (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009). Until the eighteenth century, the text was attributed to St. Bonaventure. Even after the author came to be known only as Pseudo-Bonaventure, the date of composition was believed to be the late thirteenth century. The modern editor of the text dates it much later, accepting the testimony of a contemporary who reported in 1385 that the author was the Franciscan Johannes de Caulibus: C. Mary Stallings-Taney, ed., Iohannis de Caulibus Meditaciones vite Christi (Turnhout: Brepols, 1997), pp. ix–xi, a remarkably brief discussion of the authorship and date; see also her translation, John of Caulibus, Meditations on the Life of Christ, ed. and trans. Francis X. Taney, Anne Miller, and C. Mary Stallings-Taney (Asheville, NC: Pegasus, 2000), pp. xiii–xxiv. Sarah McNamer, in two articles (“Further Evidence for the Date of the Pseudo-Bonaventuran Meditationes vitae Christi,” Franciscan Studies 50 [1990]: pp. 235–61; “The Origins of the Meditationes vitae Christi,” Speculum 84 [2009]: pp. 905–55) agrees with Stallings-Taney that the Latin text is almost certainly to be dated later than 1336, and perhaps several decades later (both follow the findings of Alexandra Barratt, who showed that the text cites the Revelations of Elisabeth of Töss, who died in 1336), but argues that an earlier and shorter text, written in Italian and the model for the Latin text, is preserved in a Bodleian manuscript, and may date from the beginning of the fourteenth century — no earlier, anyway, than 1298–99, the year of the death of Mechthild of Hackeborn, whose Revelations are quoted in both the Latin and Italian texts. McNamer has now published that Italian text with an English translation: Meditations on the Life of Christ: The Short Italian Text (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2018). Péter Tóth and Dávid Falvay, however, in “New Light on the Date and Authorship of the Meditationes vitae Christi,” in Devotional Culture in Late Medieval England and Europe, ed. Steven Kelly and Ryan Perry (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), pp. 17–105, have argued: 1) that the basis for the late dating of the Latin text has now collapsed (because the attribution of that Middle German Revelations, whose Latin translation was extensively quoted in the Latin Meditations to Elisabeth of Töss, cannot in the end be established); 2) that a Latin Meditations was already mentioned in a pair of sermons probably dating from the 1320s; and 3) that a possible author of that Latin text was one Jacobus da San Gimignano, a Franciscan friar, who may have composed it as early as 1300. McNamer responds to Tóth and Falvay in the introduction to her edition as well as in a further article, “The Debate on the Origins of the Meditationes vitae Christi: Recent Arguments and Prospects for Future Research,” Archivum Franciscanum Historicum 111 (2018): pp. 65–112. Art historians have frequently assumed that the text dates from around 1300, as if unaware of the ongoing philological debates. This allows them to derive various iconographical motifs in Giotto and other early fourteenth-century painters from the Meditations. I do not presume to adjudicate these debates, but if one is interested in the

possible influence of the Meditations on Giotto, one might note that the hypothesis of Tóth and Falvay encourages (though does not prove) an early fourteenth-century dating of the Latin text, whereas McNamer hesitates to assign an early date to the Italian text at Oxford, saying only “1300–1325” (p. cxx), and generally urges caution in the question of possible influence running from the text to the paintings; see her “Origins of the Meditationes vitae Christi” (the 2009 article), p. 946, and pp. cxxx–cxxxiii in her edition. Holly Flora’s discussion of the question in her monograph, The Devout Belief of the Imagination, pp. 33–40, is excellent. See now Holly Flora and Péter Tóth, eds., The Meditationes vitae Christi Reconsidered: New Perspectives on Text and Image (Turnhout: Brepols, 2021), pp. 8–11, summarizing a debate on date and authorship that they consider “still open to discussion”; the editors and contributors to this volume, however, lean generally towards an earlier dating and the primacy of the Latin text. See as well the recent critical edition of the earliest Italian text: Diego Dotto, Dávid Falvay, and Antonio Montefusco, eds., Le Meditationes vitae Christi in volgare secondo il codice Paris, BnF, it. 115 (Venice: Edizioni Ca’ Foscari, 2021). 46. John of Caulibus, Meditations on the Life of Christ, p. 259 (ch. 79, “Meditation on the Passion at Vespers”). Isa Ragusa and Rosalie B. Green, eds., Meditations on the Life of Christ (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), pp. 340–41. 47. John of Caulibus, Meditations on the Life of Christ, pp. 275–76 (ch. 81, “Canticles of the Saints in Limbo”). Ragusa and Green, eds., Meditations on the Life of Christ, p. 355. The author cites Bernard, but the passage cannot be identified. On Bernard and other textual sources drawn upon by the author of the Meditations, see the introduction to the translation by Stallings-Taney et al., pp. xxvi–xxvii. 48. Siena, Pinacoteca Nazionale, inv. no. 20, 23.5 × 16 cm. Piero Torriti, ed., La Pinacoteca nazionale di Siena: I dipinti (Genoa: Sagep, 1990), pp.  22–25. The work may have been the center of a triptych: holes on each side could have held hinges. John White, Duccio: Tuscan Art and the Medieval Workshop (London: Thames and Hudson, 1979), pp. 46–60. Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 397, notes that Duccio’s Rucellai Madonna also offers her foot. On this motif, see Joanna Cannon, “Kissing the Virgin’s Foot: Adoration before the Madonna and Child Enacted, Depicted, Imagined,” Studies in Iconography 31 (2010): pp. 1–50. Victor M. Schmidt, “La ‘Madonna dei francescani’ di Duccio: Forma, contenuti, funzione,” Prospettiva 97 (2000): pp. 30–44, here p. 38, relates the work to the Maestà by Cimabue in the Lower Church at Assisi. Jens T. Wollesen, “Hasten to My Aid and Counsel”: The Answers of the Pictures: Private Devotional Panel Paintings in Italy around 1300 (New York: Legas, 2005), cat. no. 3, and pp. 105–15, connects the panel to Franciscans in Cyprus who had contacts in France. 49. Jacopone da Todi, Laude, ed. Franco Mancini (Bari: Laterza, 1980), no. 69, p. 199; Jacopone da Todi, The Lauds, trans. Serge Hughes and Elizabeth Hughes (New York: Paulist Press, 1982), no. 83, p. 241. On the dramatic quality of Jaco-

no t e s 319 pone’s poetry, its abandonment to feeling, as an extension of Francis’s capacity to “act out one’s own being,” see Auerbach, Mimesis, pp. 170–73. 50. Angela da Foligno, Memoriale, ed. Enrico Menestò, trans. Emore Paoli (Spoleto: Fondazione Centro italiano di studi sull’ alto medioevo, 2015), ch. 1, pp. 8–9 (Latin text with modern Italian translation). The translation is from Angela of Foligno, Memorial, ed. Cristina Mazzoni, trans. John Cirignano (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1999), p.  26. An early fourteenth-­century panel from an altarpiece in the National Museum of Catalan Art, Barcelona (inv. no. 35700) depicts a supplicant — not a portrait but a generic petitioner — to St. Peter completely naked. He is already at the Gate of Heaven. But Angela would say that we are always already in extremis. Why were there no naked supplicant portraits? 51. Quoted by Carlo Carrà, Giotto [1924] (London: Zwemmer, 1925), p. 18. 52. Erich Auerbach, “St. Francis of Assisi in Dante’s Commedia” [1945], Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 79–98, here p. 79. 53. On the penitential movement, see Vauchez, Laity, ch. 10. On the flagellants, see John Henderson, “The Flagellant Movement and Flagellant Confraternities in Central Italy, 1260– 1400,” Studies in Church History 15 (1962): pp. 147–60; Niklaus Largier, In Praise of the Whip: A Cultural History of Arousal (New York: Zone Books, 2007), pp. 101–74; and Andrew H. Chen, Flagellant Confraternities and Italian Art, 1260–1610: Ritual and Experience (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018). 54. Here and throughout I cite the New American Standard Bible, generally considered the most literal English translation. I have also relied on the extensive philological footnotes in the New English Translation (NET Bible). 55. Vat. Cod. Chigi L. VIII. 296, fol. 152r. The manuscript may be dated to 1348 or a few years earlier. Germaid Ruck, “Brutus als Modell des guten Richters: Bild und Rhetorik in einem Florentiner Zunftgebäude,” in Malerei und Stadtkultur in der Dantezeit: Die Argumentation der Bilder, ed. Dieter Blume and Hans Belting (Munich: Hirmer, 1989), pp. 115–31, here p. 126, ill. 31. Susanna Partsch, Profane Buchmalerei der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft im spätmittelalterlichen Florenz: Der Specchio umano des Getreidehändlers Domenico Lenzi (Worms: Werner, 1981), p. 95. Gert Kreytenberg, Orcagna, Andrea di Cione: Ein universeller Künstler der Gotik in Florenz (Mainz: Zabern, 2000), p. 101, fig. 224. Sciacca, ed., Dawn of the Renaissance, p. 153. Chiara Frugoni, ed., Il Villani illustrato: Firenze e l’Italia medievale nelle 253 immagini del ms. Chigiano L VIII 296 della Biblioteca Vaticana (Florence: Le lettere, 2005), p. 71, fig. 12; p. 184. 56. Avignon, Musée du Petit Palais, inv. no. 20439, 215 × 132 cm. Michel Laclotte, Peinture italienne, Museé du Petit Palais (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2005), no. 135, pp. 127– 28. Wollesen, “Hasten to My Aid,” p. 47. The inscription, dated February 1310, expresses the hope that the souls of the patrons Filippo di Pace and his wife Jacoba, by the mercy of God, will rest in peace.

57. In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass (1871), Alice meets the nursery rhyme character Humpty Dumpty. In Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon (1947), the book Goodnight Moon appears on the chest of drawers next to the rabbit’s bed. In Crockett Johnson’s Harold and the Purple Crayon (1955), the child Harold creates with his crayon a series of drawings resembling book illustrations into which he enters and moves about. 58. Annemarie Weyl Carr, “Donors in the Frames of Icons: Living Beyond the Borders of Byzantine Art,” Gesta 45 (2002): pp. 189–98. 59. Robert Pfaller, Die Illusionen der anderen: Über das Lustprinzip in der Kultur (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2002), and see below, p. 257. 60. Little Flowers of St. Francis, ch. 2, p. 2. Morini, ed., I fioretti di San Francesco, p. 62. 61. Mirror of Perfection, ch. 15, p. 197. 62. Little Flowers of St. Francis, ch. 11, p. 20. Morini, ed., I fioretti di San Francesco, pp. 92–93. 63. Little Flowers of St. Francis, ch. 30, p. 58. Morini, ed., I fioretti di San Francesco, p. 155. 64. Little Flowers of St. Francis, ch. 32, p. 61. Morini, ed., I fioretti di San Francesco, p. 160. 65. “Life of Friar Juniper,” Little Flowers of St. Francis, chs. 8–9, pp. 143–44. Morini, ed., I fioretti di San Francesco, pp. 301–3. 66. Thomas of Celano, First Life of St. Francis of Assisi, ch. 17, section 45, p. 48. 67. The Mirror of Perfection, ch. 19, p. 199. Cf. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 57: Francis’s “peculiar world outlook” can be defined as “a carnivalized Catholicism.” 68. See Giuseppe Mazzotta, Dante, Poet of the Desert: History and Allegory in the Divine Comedy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 237–38. 69. Christian Duquoc, “À propos Francis: The Theological Value of the Legend,” in Francis of Assisi Today, ed. Christian Duquoc and Casiano Florstan (Edinburgh: Clark, 1981), pp. 81–85. 70. Cf. the Crucifixion by Bernardo Daddi in the National Gallery of Art, inv. no. 1961.9.2, with a similar group of women plus John at the left; here, however, the men at right are all acclaiming Christ. Cf. the panel in Troyes mentioned above, p. 315, n. 4. The group around Mary at the left of Giotto’s panel had a long reach: it was cited in a Crucifixion triptych attributed to Niccolò di Pietro Gerini and the shop of Jacopo di Cione in the Accademia in Florence (1380–85), inv. no. 1890 n. 3152; Miklós Boskovits and Daniela Parenti, Cataloghi della Galleria dell’ Accademia di Firenze, Dipinti, vol. 2, Il tardo Trecento (Florence: Giunti, 2010), no. 28, pp. 143–48; and by Fra Angelico in the Crucifixion of the Chapter Room at San Marco (p. 271). The Munich panel was probably itself echoing a more conspicuous but no longer extant work by Giotto. 71. Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1979), but see below, pp. 218–21. 72. Cf. the man in yellow at the lower right of the large Giottesque Crucifixion from Naples in the Louvre (inv. no.

320 r.f. 1999–11) who makes a gesture similar to that of the man at the right of the Munich panel. Giotto e compagni, no. 22, pp. 176–83. 73. See the small triptych by Maso di Banco in the Brooklyn Museum (inv. no. 34.838): in the Nativity on the left wing, Mary, as if exhausted by childbirth, leans back on one elbow, with one knee raised. Such eloquent and efficient gestures make a through line from Giotto to Giottino. Luciano Bellosi, “Giottino e la pittura di filiazione giottesca intorno alla metà del Trecento,” Prospettiva 101 (2001): pp. 19–40, here p. 24, writes of John the Baptist and St. Benedict almost turning their backs on us in Giottino’s Santo Spirito fresco, an innovation (ill. 5.1). 74. Exemplary is the thirteenth-century French ivory of a cavalier kneeling before a lady, in the Victoria and Albert Museum, inv. no. 217–1867, adduced by Sand, Vision, Devotion, and Self-­Representation, pp. 62–63.

c h ap t e r t wo : t h e dem oc r at i z at i on of t he p o rt r ai t, 1 2 7 0 – 13 2 0 1. Dominic Olariu, La genèse de la représentation ressemblante de l’homme: Reconsidérations du portrait à partir du XIIIe siècle (Bern: Peter Lang, 2014). 2. Willibald Sauerländer, La sculpture gothique en France, 1140–1270 (Paris: Flammarion, 1972), p. 168, pl. 271. 3. For example, the Bishop Saint with two kneeling lay patrons, northern France (Amiens?), c. 1250, Victoria and Albert Museum, inv. no. 276–1867, or the Madonna and Child with kneeling male patron, Paris, 1300–1330, Victoria and Albert Museum, inv. no. 4–1872. Paul Williamson and Glyn Davies, Medieval Ivory Carvings: 1200–1550, vol. 1 (London: V&A Publishing, 2014), no. 50, pp. 164–65, and no. 81, pp. 256–57. Only the first of these appears in Raymond Koechlin, Les ivoires gothiques français (Paris: Picard, 1924), no. 30. On a diptych in the Courtauld Gallery, inv. no. o.1966.g8.4, the Virgin places her hand on the head of a kneeling woman while Christ places a crown on a kneeling king (Saint Louis?) (Paris, c.  1325–50); John Lowden, Medieval and Later Ivories in the Courtauld Gallery (London: Courtauld Gallery, 2013), no. 9. See also the plaquette in the Louvre with Madonna and Child with two lay donors, Paris, 1340–60; Danielle Gaborit-­ Chopin, Ivoires médiévaux, V e–XV e siècles (Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 2003), no. 169, with references to similar objects; Koechlin, Ivoires gothiques, no. 547. A diptych in the Louvre (Paris, c. 1300) depicts Mary and John kneeling as intercessors before Christ — placeholders for the lay donors: Gaborit-­Chopin, Ivoires médiévaux, no. 125; Koechlin, Ivoires gothiques, no. 775. Confidence in the scientific value of art historical generalizations is not reinforced by the V&A and Louvre catalogues, which assert, respectively, that lay donors in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century ivories were “not unusual” (p. 256) and “rare” (p. 412). 4. André Vauchez, Francis of Assisi: The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Saint [2009] (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), p. 8. According to Vauchez, there is no proof that Fran-

cis’s mother was French, as was believed at the time and is still sometimes asserted. 5. Thomas of Celano, First Life of St. Francis of Assisi, trans. Christopher Stace (London: Triangle, 2000), ch. 7, section 16, p. 21. 6. Perhaps because, as Enrico Castelnuovo said, speaking of the fourteenth century, the royal and near-royal courts were a more congenial context for the development of portraiture than the bourgeois urban sphere; Enrico Castelnuovo, “Il significato del ritratto pittorico nella società,” Storia d’Italia, part 5, I documenti, vol. 2 (Torino: Einaudi, 1973), p. 1040. 7. Morgan Library, MS M. 729, fol. 232v. Alexa Sand, Vision, Devotion, and Self-Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) argues that these books, and the images of their owners inside the books, were self-duplications: images of one’s own piety. On a mid-fourteenth-century English manuscript depicting patrons kneeling at the Crucifixion, see Kathryn A. Smith, “The Neville of Hornby Hours and the Design of Literate Devotion,” Art Bulletin 81 (1999): pp. 72–92. See also Nigel Morgan, “Patrons and Devotional Images in English Art of the International Gothic, c. 1350–1450,” in Reading Texts and Images: Essays on Medieval and Renaissance Art and Patronage, ed. Bernard James Muir (Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 2002), pp. 93–121, with many examples, though he reports that donors were only rarely placed inside narrative scenes. Jens T. Wollesen, “Hasten to My Aid and Counsel”: The Answers of the Pictures: Private Devotional Panel Paintings in Italy around 1300 (New York: Legas, 2005), pp. 144–47, draws a parallel between the Italian interactive panel and the northern European Books of Hours and prayer books. 8. Amy Neff, A Soul’s Journey: Franciscan Art, Theology, and Devotion in the Supplicationes variae (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2019), pp. 51–52, fig. 30 and pls. 22 and 47. Neff locates the production of the manuscript to Padua or the Veneto generally. She also reproduces a page from a Bolognese manuscript depicting a youth in a floral roundel praying to a Madonna and Child in an initial; fig. 29. 9. Pia Palladino, ed., Treasures of a Lost Art: Italian Manuscript Painting of the Middle Ages and Renaissance (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003), no. 4, pp. 13–15. Alexa Sand, however, states that “the owner portrait never became as central to the visual repertoire of Italian books for personal devotional use as it did in the north”; Sand, Vision, Devotion, and Self-Representation, p. 10. 10. Nigel Morgan, “Patrons and their Devotions in the Historiated Initials and Full-Page Miniatures of ThirteenthCentury English Psalters,” in The Illuminated Psalter, ed. Frank O. Büttner (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), pp. 309–22, here pp. 313–15. 11. John Pope-Hennessy, Italian Gothic Sculpture (London: Phaidon, 1972), pp. 59–61, 240. 12. Francesca Baldelli, Tino da Camaino (Morbio Inferiore, Switzerland: Selective Art, 2007), pp. 64–74. Lily Richards, “San Ranieri of Pisa: A Local Cult and its Expression in Text and Image,” in Art, Politics, and Civic Religion in Central Italy, 1261–1352, ed. Joanna Cannon and Beth Williamson (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 179–236, esp. pp. 186–91.

no t e s 321 13. An overview is Francesco Gandolfo, “Il ritratto de committenza,” in Maria Andoloro and Serena Romano, Arte e iconografia a Roma: Dal tardoantico alla fine del medioevo (Milan: Palombi, 2002), pp. 139–49. 14. Walter Oakeshott, The Mosaics of Rome, from the Third to the Fourteenth Centuries (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1967), pp. 312–13, ills. 195–96. Gerhart B. Ladner, Die Papstbildnisse des Altertums und des Mittelalters, vol. 2 (Città del Vaticano: Pontificio Istituto di Archeologia Cristiana, 1970), pp. 235–40, pl. L, LI. Gandolfo, “Il ritratto,” p. 148, ill. 132. Donal Cooper and Janet Robson, The Making of Assisi: The Pope, the Franciscans and the Painting of the Basilica (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), pp. 22–27. Serena Romano, La pittura medievale a Roma, 312–1431: Corpus e atlante, vol. 6, Apogeo e fine del medioevo, 1288–1431 (Milan: Jaca, 2017), no. 7a, pp. 49–57 (Valentine Giesser). On the appearance of Francis on the apse of the Archbasilica, the oldest and highest ranking of the papal basilicas, see Julian Gardner, “Giotto in America (and Elsewhere),” in Italian Panel Painting of the Duecento and Trecento, ed. Victor M. Schmidt, Studies in the History of Art 61 (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2002), p. 171. 15. Oakeshott, Mosaics of Rome, pp. 244–47, ills. 139–42. 16. Oakeshott, Mosaics of Rome, p. 318, pl. 30, ill. 234. Michele Bacci, Investimenti per l’aldilà: Arte e raccomandazione dell’anima nel Medioevo (Rome: GLF Editori Laterza, 2003), pl. 23. 17. Innocent II at Santa Maria in Trastevere (1140s), standing and holding a church model — the last example of this format in a Roman apse; Oakeshott, Mosaics of Rome, pp. 250– 55, pl. 26. Honorius III at San Paolo fuori le Mura (1220s), a tiny figure worshipping the foot of the Enthroned Christ; Oakeshott, Mosaics of Rome, pp. 295–97, ill. 183; Herbert L. Kessler, Rome 1300: On the Path of the Pilgrim (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 178. At Santa Maria Aracoeli, in the left transept, the tomb monument of Cardinal Matteo d’Acqua­sparta (ca. 1300), including a fresco by Cavallini, in an aedicule, depicting a Madonna and Child enthroned with saints and a portrait; Michele Bacci, Investimenti per l’aldilà, pl. 10; Cooper and Robson, Making of Assisi, pp. 45–48. At Santa Maria Maggiore, Torriti depicted Nicholas IV, small in scale and kneeling before the Enthroned Christ and Virgin, and on the other side the mosaic’s true patron, Cardinal Giacomo Colonna (1295). Oakeshott, Mosaics of Rome, p. 314, ill. 197–99; Cooper and Robson, Making of Assisi, pp. 27–33. At Santa Maria Maggiore, a mosaic by Torriti in the apse at the window level depicts the Dormition of the Virgin with three kneeling figures, small, in the front plane — a layman and two clerics: Bertoldo Stefaneschi and two Franciscans, possibly Torriti and an assistant (c. 1296/c. 1305?). Oakeshott, Mosaics of Rome, p. 322; Richard Krautheimer, Rome: Profile of a City (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 218. 18. See the brief, cogent discussion by Francesca Flores d’Arcais, Giotto (New York: Abbeville, 2012), p.  13. Michael Viktor Schwarz, Giottus Pictor, vol. 2, Giottos Werke (Vienna: Böhlau, 2008), pp. 261–62, 582–84, stresses the significance of the Roman examples for Giotto’s portraits. 19. Ladner, Die Papstbildnisse, pp. 288–96, pl. 66, 67, accept-

ing Giotto’s authorship; Flores d’Arcais, Giotto, pp. 110–12; Georgia Sommers Wright, “The Reinvention of the Portrait Likeness in the Fourteenth Century,” Gesta 39 (2000): pp. 117– 34, here pp. 119–23. 20. Ladner, Die Papstbildnisse, pp. 219–21, fig. 97, pl. 46, 47. 21. Schwarz, Giottos Werke, pp.  255–62. Flores d’Arcais, Giotto, pp. 244–47. 22. Miklós Boskovits, Mosaics of the Baptistery of Florence (Florence: Giunti, 2007), pp. 603–7, pl. clxxix; this is volume two of Richard Offner et al., A Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting (1930–). Boskovits attributes the mosaic to the Master of St. Agatha, c. 1270, and suggests that the portrait may represent the nobleman Corso Donati or the head of the Opera of San Miniato. See also Schwarz, Giottos Werke, pp. 582–83. 23. Gerhard Wolf, “Nichtzyklische narrative Bilder im italienischen Kirchenraum des Mittelalters: Überlegungen zu Zeit- und Bildstruktur der Fresken in der Unterkirche von S. Clemente (Rom) aus dem späten 11. Jahrhundert,” in Hagio­ graphie und Kunst: Der Heiligenkult in Schrift, Bild und Architektur, ed. Gottfried Kerscher (Berlin: Reimer, 1993), pp. 319–39. 24. The mosaic panel measures 164.5 × 75.5 cm. Serena Romano, La pittura medievale a Roma, 312–1431: Corpus e atlante, vol. 5, Duecento e la cultura gotica, 1198–1287 ca. (Milan: Jaca, 2012), no. 42, pp. 262–64. Julian Gardner, “The Capocci Tabernacle in S. Maria Maggiore,” Papers of the British School at Rome 38 (1970): pp. 220–30. 25. Romano, Apogeo e fine del medioevo, no. 40, pp. 217–18. 125 × 104 cm. (above) and 109 cm. (below). 26. This identification was proposed by Livario Oliger, “Due musaici con S. Francesco della Chiesa di Ara­coeli in Roma,” in Archivum Franciscanum Historicum 4 (1911): pp. 213–51. 27. Alessandro Tomei, Iacobus Torriti pictor: Una vicenda figurativa del tardo Duecento romano (Rome: Argos, 1990), pp. 143–44, fig. 161. 28. See also the mosaic panel with the senator Giovanni Colonna presented by St. Francis, from Santa Maria Aracoeli, now Palazzo Colonna. Romano, Apogeo e fine del medioevo, no. 17, pp. 152–54, dated to the 1290s. 29. Grenoble, Musée de Grenoble, mg 1302, 170 × 64 cm. Inscribed names of patrons are rare on painted panels; another exception is the Madonna in Maestà attributed to Segna di Bonaventura at the Collegiata di San Giuliano, Castiglion Fiorentino (four kneeling figures). Victor M. Schmidt, Painted Piety: Panel Paintings for Personal Devotion in Tuscany, 1250–1400 (Florence: Centro Di, 2005), p. 116. Fondazione Zeri, Fototeca, no. 4177. (The online catalogue of the photo collection of the Fondazione Federico Zeri, University of Bologna, is an invaluable resource: http://catalogo.fondazionezeri .unibo.it; henceforth cited as: Fondazione Zeri, Fototeca.) 30. Tomei, Iacobus Torriti Pictor, p. 139, fig. 151. He says the panel has nothing to do with Jacopo Torriti; by contrast, Luciano Bellosi, La pecora di Giotto (Torino: Einaudi, 1985), pp. 113–14, placed it close to Torriti. Serena Romano assigns it to the 1290s and the ambito Torritiana; Apogeo e fine del medioevo, no. 1, pp. 37–38. See also Gertrude Coor-Aschenbach, “Notes

322 on two unknown early Italian panel paintings,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 42 (1953): pp. 247–57. An article on the panel by Paul Hetherington published in 1985 in the same journal is bizarrely unaware of Coor-Aschenbach’s article and adds nothing. 31. Bacci, Investimenti per l’aldilà: Ascoli Piceno, San Vittore, Cross with “Iacobus,” p. 173, fig. 17, and Lamentation, pp. 192–93, pl. 17; Monaldo Forteguerra in Santa Maria Nuova, Viterbo, p. 195, pl. 22. 32. Bacci, Investimenti per l’aldilà, pp. 68–69. See also the example from Arezzo, below, p. 198. 33. Joanna Cannon makes this point in Religious Poverty, Visual Riches: Art in the Dominican Churches of Central Italy in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), pp. 15–16. 34. Bacci, Investimenti per l’aldilà, pp. 98–101, fig. 10. 35. It has been suggested, however, that the figure emerging from his tomb in Maso di Banco’s so-called “particular judgment” fresco in the Bardi di Vernio Chapel in Santa Croce represents not one person but all the male members of his family. Bacci, Investimenti per l’aldilà, p. 175. The same may hold for Taddeo Gaddi’s adjoining fresco with a female figure who may represent Tessa de’ Bardi or all the women in her family (ill. 5.5); see Andrew Ladis, Taddeo Gaddi: Critical Reappraisal and Catalogue Raisonné (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982), no. 11, pp. 136–41. 36. Fame, too, was conceived as oral transmission: cf. Dante, Inferno 4:76–78, Virgil’s response to Dante’s question about the ancient poets confined in the underworld: L’onrata nominanza / che di lor suona sù ne la tua vita, / grazïa acquista in ciel che sì li avanza (“The honor of their name / which echoes up above within your life, / gains Heaven’s grace, and that advances them”; trans. Mandelbaum). 37. On the transition from mostly oral-liturgical commemorations of patrons (eleventh to thirteenth centuries) to physical-visible (tombs, altarpieces) (fourteenth to sixteenth centuries), see Andrew Martindale, “Patrons and Minders: The Intrusion of the Secular into Sacred Spaces in the Late Middle Ages,” Studies in Church History 28 (1992), pp. 143–78. 38. André Vauchez, Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 460. 39. Bacci, “Pro remedio animae,” pp. 149–55: the idea of self-commendation (dedicatio sui) derives from the homage offered by a vassal to a lord. By the late Middle Ages, with the exception of the taking of orders or entry into a monastery, the dedication of the entire self remained an ideal but was mostly acted out in ritual and iconography. 40. This is the thesis of Frank O. Büttner, Imitatio pietatis: Motive der christlichen Ikonographie als Modelle zur Verähnlichung (Berlin: Mann, 1983), pp.  4–5: the portrait subject aspired to conformitas, a symbolic analogy, not a machinelike functioning. 41. Schmidt, Painted Piety, ch. 4, makes this point. He says that the meaning of supplicants on or near tombs is relatively clear — pro redemptione animae — but that otherwise it is not so

clear. He also points out that sometimes the portrayed supplicant is already dead, and that person is not always the patron (i.e., the one who paid the painter). 42. Paris, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, inv. no. 70, 93 × 133 cm. Mostra Giottesca, exhibition catalogue, Palazzo degli Uffizi (Bergamo: Istituto italiano d’arti grafiche, 1937), pl. 36. Edward B. Garrison, Italian Romanesque Panel Painting (Florence: Olschki, 1949), no. 368, p. 142. Wollesen, “Hasten to My Aid,” ill. 14 and pp. 42–43. 43. Wollesen, “Hasten to My Aid.” 44 Hans Belting, Das Bild und sein Publikum: Form und Funktion früher Bildtafeln der Passion (Berlin: Mann, 1981), p. 351, and ch. 13; p. 410. See also Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art [1990] (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), ch. 17. 45. The central panel measures 37 × 25.3 cm. The picture is missing a fold-down panel at the top. Wollesen, “Hasten to My Aid,” cat. no. 5, and pp. 132–34. Garrison, Italian Romanesque Panel Painting, no. 356. Edward B. Garrison, “A Ducciesque Tabernacle at Oxford,” Burlington Magazine 88 (1946): pp. 214– 33. James Byam Shaw, Paintings by Old Masters at Christ Church, Oxford (London: Phaidon, 1967), no. 3, p. 30. Fondazione Zeri, Fototeca, no. 5873. 46. New York, Metropolitan Museum, inv. no. 1975.1.24, 52.7 × 29.8 cm. 47. See Dirk Kocks, “Die Stifterdarstellung in der italienischen Malerei des 13.–15. Jahrhunderts” (PhD diss., University of Cologne, 1971), pp. 129–31, for more Tuscan examples. 48. Florence, Museo dell’ Opera del Duomo, inv. no. 89, 131 × 116 cm. Mostra Giottesca, no. 169, p. 529. Lars Jones, “Visio divina? Donor Figures and Representations of Imagistic Devotion: The Copy of the ‘Virgin of Bagnolo’ in the Museo dell’ Opera del Duomo, Florence,” in Italian Panel Painting of the Duecento and Trecento, ed. Victor M. Schmidt, Studies in the History of Art 61 (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2002), pp. 31–55. Wollesen, “Hasten to My Aid,” esp. pp. 23–51, figs. 2–3. Wollesen’s entire book is prompted by this one painting. Note also the version in the Getty Museum, inv. no. 93.pb.16: Christine Sciacca, ed., Florence at the Dawn of the Renaissance: Painting and Illumination, 1300–1350 (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2012), cat. no. 6, pp. 42–45, with a different text on Mary’s book. There is a copy of the central panel in the Vatican Pinacoteca. 49. Examples painted on the walls of churches have mostly disappeared but must have been abundant. Again, it is Michele Bacci in Investimenti per l’aldilà who assembles examples, supplementing the corpus of thirteenth-century lay portraiture discussed above, pp. 47–48: in a fresco by Pietro Lorenzetti, John the Baptist presents a knight to Madonna and Child, Siena, San Domenico in Camporegio, c. 1330 (the supplicant is represented full-scale) (p. 198, pl. 24); Lucca, Santa Maria Forisportam, a fresco near the floor (related to a tomb?); again, a knight in full-scale is presented by the Baptist (?) to the Madonna (p. 161, pl. 9); and dated 1369, in the cloister of the Ognissanti in Florence, a deceased youth

no t e s 323 Gaspare Mazzi, kneeling and in profile, on a ledge in front of an Annunciation, a replica of the venerated cult image at Santissima Annunziata (p. 171, pl. 11). 50. Museum of Fine Arts, inv. no. 23.211, 40.3 × 32.1 cm. Laurence B. Kanter, Italian Paintings in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1994), no. 1, pp. 52–54. Richard Offner et al., Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting, section 3, vol. 4, Bernardo Daddi, His Shop and Followers, new edition by Miklós Boskovits (Florence: Giunti, 1991), p. 226, pl. 27, with speculation about the identity of the modern holy woman (Blessed Joan of Signa? St. Fina?). Cf. the Crucifixion by Daddi, the right wing of a small or even portable tabernacle, in the Accademia, with a kneeling lay donor directly under the Cross; inv. no. 1890 n. 8563. Miklós Boskovits and Angelo Tartuferi, Cataloghi della Galleria dell’ Accademia di Firenze, Dipinti, vol. 1, Dal Duecento a Giovanni da Milano (Florence: Giunti, 2003), no. 8, pp. 66–67. Mostra giottesca, pp. 524–25, fig. 168. 51. Fondazione Giorgio Cini, inv. no. 40062, c. 1330–35. La Galleria di Palazzo Cini (Venice: Marsilio, 2016), no. 13. Alessandro Tomei, ed., Giotto e il Trecento: “Il più sovrano maestro stato in dipintura,” 2 vols. (Milan: Skira, 2009), cat. no. 51, as the Umbrian Maestro del Dittico Poldi Pezzoli. 52. There is a diminutive, haloed woman supplicant in the Crucifixion by Lippo di Benivieni in Memphis, possibly a layperson, with the nimbus added later. Trinita Kennedy, ed., Sanctity Pictured: The Art of the Dominican and Franciscan Orders in Renaissance Italy (Nashville: Frist Center for the Visual Arts, 2014), pp. 127–29. Cf. the painting with a kneeling woman with nimbus in foreground by Paolo di Giovanni Fei: Miklós Boskovits, The Martello Collection: Paintings, Drawings, and Miniatures from the XIVth to the XVIIIth Centuries (Florence: Centro Di, 1985), pp. 128–29: early 1380s (?); Boskovits says the “nun” was added later, but does not say why, and does not mention the nimbus. 53. Tucson, University of Arizona Museum of Art, inv. no. 61.118, overall 44.7 × 63.5 cm. Kress Collection, no. k 1717. Fern Rusk Shapley, Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: Italian Schools, vol. 1 (London: Phaidon, 1966), p. 23, fig. 50. Sciacca, ed., Florence at the Dawn of the Renaissance, no. 37, pp. 193–95. 54. Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, inv. no. 61.2, 26.4 × 42.5 cm. Kress Collection, no. k 1289. Fern Rusk Shapley, Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: Italian Schools, vol. 1 (London: Phaidon, 1966), p. 15, fig. 25. 55. Boston, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, inv. no. p27e46, 164 × 300 cm. Alessandro Volpe, Giotto e i riminesi: Il gotico e l’antico nella pittura di primo Trecento (Milan: Motta, 2002), pp. 82–85. Volpe suggests that the picture was destined for a Franciscan confraternity or consorority, in the chapel of their establishment or in the main Franciscan church. 56. Siena, Pinacoteca Nazionale, Deposito dall Parrocchiale di Vertine in Chianti, early fourteenth century, 154 × 88 cm. Possibly by Niccolò di Segna. Piero Torriti, ed., La Pinacoteca nazionale di Siena: I dipinti (Genoa: Sagep, 1990), pp. 46–48. 57. National Gallery of Art, inv. no. 1937.1.3, 1333, 233.5 × 88.8 cm. Miklós Boskovits, Italian Paintings of the Thirteenth and

Fourteenth Centuries (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2016), no. 9. 58. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts, trans. T. M. Knox, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p.  92. G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, vol. 1 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), p. 128. 59. Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. 1, p. 102. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, vol. 1, p. 141. 60. Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. 1, p. 155. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, vol. 1, p. 206. 61. Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. 1, p. 172. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, vol. 1, p. 227. 62. Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. 1, pp. 173–74. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, vol. 1, p. 228. 63. Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. 1, p. 174 (translation slightly modified). Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, vol. 1, pp. 228–29. 64. Munich, Alte Pinakothek, inv. no. waf 245, 114.8 × 124.9 cm. Max J. Friedländer, Early Netherlandish Painting, vol. 10, Lucas van Leyden and other Dutch Masters of his Time (Leiden: Sijthoff, 1973), no. 98. Ingrid Falque, Devotional Portraiture and Spiritual Experience in Early Netherlandish Painting (Leiden: Brill, 2019), cat. no. 350. The picture was attributed by Walter Gibson in his 1969 dissertation (The Paintings of Cornelis Engebrechtsz [New York: Garland, 1977], no. 87) to the master’s son Pieter Cornelisz, but a recent publication (of which Gibson is one of the coauthors) assigns the painting to an unknown hand or hands in the master’s shop, perhaps after his death in 1527. Jan Piet Filedt Kok, Walter Gibson, and Yvette Bruijnen, Cornelis Engebrechtsz: A Sixteenth-Century Leiden Artist and His Workshop (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), cat. no. 35, pp. 106–108, 206. 65. Filedt Kok et al., Cornelis Engebrechtsz, p. 106, consider the picture an epitaph or memorial image, perhaps associated with a tomb. They also believe for not completely convincing reasons that the painting was the central panel of a triptych. Furthermore, they believe that the donors were likely depicted on the lost wings and that the kneeling people in this picture were the ancestors of the donors. This seems improbable to me. This would have entailed a second set of sponsoring saints in the wings. They adduce as a comparandum a triptych in Bonn by Jan Mostaert, but in that picture the sponsoring saints are in the wings and the kneeling moderns in the center are unaccompanied. 66. It is interesting to compare the complaint of a sixteenth-­century priest about the portrait of a patron crouching behind a pilaster in an Annunciation (1520) by Titian in Treviso. The modern man appears, on the picture surface if not in the virtual space, between Mary and the angel. The priest felt that his devotions were “contaminated” by the presence of the secular patron. Charles Hope, “Altarpieces and the Requirements of Patrons,” in Christianity and the Renaissance, ed. Timothy Verdon and J. Henderson (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990), pp. 535–71, here pp. 553–54. 67. Sand, Vision, Devotion, and Self-Representation, p. 138, with references to the literature.

324 68. It is not known exactly when the Crucifixion entered the Munich collection; the picture is first mentioned in an inventory dating between 1812 and 1815: Carl Brandon Strehlke and Machtelt Brüggen Israëls, The Bernard and Mary Berenson Collection of European Paintings at I Tatti (Florence: Villa I Tatti, 2015), p. 322. 69. Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. 2, p. 877 (translation adjusted); Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, vol. 3, p. 117. He quotes Carl Friedrich von Rumohr, Italienische Forschungen, vol. 2 (Berlin and Stettin, 1827), p. 73.

c h ap t e r t h r e e: hi s to r ig r ap h y a n d m e t h od 1. Carl Friedrich von Rumohr, Italienische Forschungen, 3 vols. (Berlin and Stettin, 1827–31). Julius von Schlosser published all three parts in one volume (Frankfurt: Frankfurter Verlags-Anstalt, 1920). 2. Rumohr, Italienische Forschungen, vol. 2, p. 44. Rumohr’s chapter on Giotto, lightly abridged, is translated in Gert Schiff, ed., German Essays on Art History (New York: Continuum, 1988), pp.  73–94. Martin Gosebruch, Giotto und die Entwicklung des neuzeitlichen Kunstbewußtseins (Cologne: DuMont, 1962), p.  39, connects Rumohr’s vehement and unprecedented views to his irritation at the artist and writer J. D. Passavant’s assimilation of Giotto to the overly pious picture of medieval art painted by the Nazarenes, so rendering Giotto innocuous. Passavant, however — insofar as he hailed Giotto as the source of the “great sublime style in painting” and a painter of austerity, gravity, and “strength and depth of thought” — in fact anticipates a twentieth-century valuation of the artist. See Corina Meyer, “Working on ‘Depth of Thought’ and ‘Serious Gravity’: Johann David Passavant and Early Italian Painting,” Predella: Journal of Visual Arts 41–42 (2017): pp. 45–60, here p. 48. 3. Rumohr, Italienische Forschungen, vol. 2, pp. 43–44. 4. Rumohr, Italienische Forschungen, vol. 2, p. 73. 5. Rumohr, Italienische Forschungen, vol. 2, pp. 54–57. 6. Rumohr, Italienische Forschungen, vol. 2, pp. 58–60. 7. Jacob Burckhardt, Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. 3 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2000–), p. 349. 8. Burckhardt, Werke, vol. 3, pp. 40–41. 9. Burckhardt, Werke, vol. 16, p. 208. 10. Burckhardt, Werke, vol. 16, p. 212. 11. Burckhardt, Werke, vol. 3, p. 349. 12. In his book Konrad von Hochstaden: Erzbischof von Köln, 1238–1261 (Bonn, 1843); excerpted in Burckhardt, Kunst der Betrachtung: Aufsätze und Vorträge zur bildenden Kunst (Cologne: DuMont, 1984), pp. 52–53; Burckhardt, Werke, vol. 1, pp. 216–22, 226–32. He ranked the sculptures at Trier and Mainz higher than those of Nicola Pisano. 13. Burckhardt, Cicerone, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 36. 14. The painting is from the Monastery of Santa Maria degli Angeli; it hung in the Uffizi galleries from 1814 to 1919 and is now in the Accademia, inv. no. 1890 n. 438, 222 × 109 cm. The picture is considered an early work by Lorenzo, late

fourteenth century or ca. 1400. Cecilie Hollberg et al., eds., Cataloghi della Galleria dell’ Accademia di Firenze, vol. 3, Dipinti (Florence: Giunti, 2020), no. 33, pp. 152–56. Angelo Tartuferi and Daniela Parenti, eds., Lorenzo Monaco, exhibition catalogue (Florence: Giunti, 2008), no. 10, pp. 131–35. Marvin Eisenberg, Lorenzo Monaco (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 9–12, with perceptive analysis of the formal sources, and catalogue entry, pp. 98–99. Marvin Eisenberg, “Some Monastic and Liturgical Allusions in an Early Work by Lorenzo Monaco,” in Monasticism and the Arts, ed. Timothy Verdon (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1984), pp. 271–89, points out that this is the earliest known work that takes this subject matter as its main theme, and suggests a link to the evening devotions of Compline. 15. Burckhardt actually devoted a paragraph to Lorenzo Monaco in the Cicerone, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 63. 16. John Ruskin, Mornings in Florence (Boston, 1875–76), pp. 39–42. 17. Burckhardt, Werke, vol. 3, p. 36. 18. Burckhardt, Werke, vol. 3, p. 29. 19. Bernard Berenson, The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance (New York: Putnam, 1896), pp. 5–6, 9. Giotto and the Modernists make a vast subject: for guidance, see Gosebruch, Giotto und die Entwicklung, pp. 52–66; Hayden Maginnis, Painting in the Age of Giotto: A Historical Reevaluation (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University, 1997), pp. 80–87; and Michael Viktor Schwarz, Giottus Pictor, vol. 3, Giottos Nachleben (Vienna: Böhlau, 2020), pp. 34–36. 20. Friedrich Rintelen, Giotto und die Giotto-Apokryphen (Munich: Müller, 1912), p. 143. 21. Clive Bell, Art (New York: Stokes, 1914), p. 147, in the chapter “Greatness and Decline.” 22. Carlo Carrà, Giotto [1924] (London: Zwemmer, 1925), p. 7. Carrà contradicts Ruskin, who had compared Giotto to Millais. Carrà says the Nazarenes and the Pre-Raphaelites were seeking religiosity in the Primitives, not artistic excellence (p. 15). On the critical debates, in a nationalist context, surrounding Giotto in early twentieth-century Italy, see Alessio Monciatti, Alle origini dell’ arte nostra: La Mostra giottesca del 1937 a Firenze (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 2010). 23. Roger Fry, Cézanne: A Study of His Development [1927] (New York: Noonday, 1958), p. 72. On Fry and the linking of the Primitives and Cézanne in his teaching at the Slade School, 1909–13, see Caroline Elam, Roger Fry and Italian Art (London: Ad Ilissum and Burlington Magazine, 2019), pp. 72–73. 24. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 74 (in book one, “The Analytic of Pure Practical Reason,” ch. 3 “On the Incentives of Pure Practical Reason”). 25. Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 72. 26. Millard Meiss, Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death, The Arts, Religion, and Society in the Mid-Fourteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951), p. 6. 27. T. J. Clark, Heaven on Earth: Painting and the Life to Come (London: Thames & Hudson, 2018), p. 39.

no t e s 325 28. Jan Gijsel, ed., Libri de nativitate Mariae, vol. 1, Pseudo-­ Matthaei Evangelium, ed. Jan Gijsel and Rita Beyers, Corpus Christianorum, Series Apocryphorum (Turnhout: Brepols, 1997), ch. 3, section 4, pp. 314–15. 29. Clark, Heaven on Earth, p. 59. The phrase “period eye” invokes the work of Michael Baxandall, whose book Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972) tried to recover habits of mind and body that structured people’s perceptions of artworks in early Renaissance Florence. Clark’s appeal to Walter Benjamin is perhaps a little misleading: in the cited passage in the Arcades papers, Benjamin is saying that anecdotes have the power to usher the past directly into our present, and so dispel the mystique of abstract notions of historical context and other “mediating constructions” that generate a false “empathy.” The idea is that the anecdote is “uninvited” and so discourages any facile idea of the intelligibility of the past; Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 846, First Sketches, I, 2. Whereas Clark is presenting an eminently intelligible Giotto. 30. Clark, Heaven on Earth, p. 50. 31. Richard C. Trexler, “Florentine Religious Experience: The Sacred Image,” Studies in the Renaissance 19 (1972): pp. 7–41, esp. p. 35. 32. Christopher Brooke and Rosalind Brooke, Popular Religion in the Middle Ages: Western Europe 1000–1300 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1984). 33. Hans Belting, Das Bild und sein Publikum: Form und Funktion früher Bildtafeln der Passion (Berlin: Mann, 1981). Translated as The Image and Its Public in the Middle Ages: Form and Function of Early Paintings of the Passion, trans. Mark Bartusis and Raymond Meyer (New Rochelle, NY: A. D. Caratzas, 1990). 34. Erwin Panofsky, “Imago Pietatis,” in Festschrift für Max J. Friedländer (Leipzig: E. A. Seemann, 1927), pp. 261–308. 35. Accademia, inv. no. 1890 n. 8467, 121 × 63 cm. Miklós Boskovits and Angelo Tartuferi, Cataloghi della Galleria dell’ Accademia di Firenze, Dipinti, vol. 1, Dal Duecento a Giovanni da Milano (Florence: Giunti, 2003), no. 14, pp. 89–93. 36. Belting, Das Bild und sein Publikum, pp. 13–14, 30–31. 37. Belting, Das Bild und sein Publikum, pp. 50–52. 38. Belting, Das Bild und sein Publikum, p. 22. Hans Belting, Giovanni Bellini, Pietà: Ikone und Bilderzählung in der venezianischen Malerei (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1985). 39. For example, in discussing the elegance and refinement of Duccio’s style, derived from the Byzantine icon painters, Belting says that although “the veneration of images did not take place within the categories of art proper,” nevertheless the artistic exchange between Duccio and the icon painters is a historical fact; Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 376. On p. 397 he apologizes for not talking about Duccio’s Madonna of the Franciscans as art. 40. Susan Sontag, “One Culture and the New Sensibility,” Against Interpretation, and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966), p. 296; and “One Culture and the New

Sensibility,” Essays of the 1960s and 70s (New York: Library of America, 2013), p. 277. 41. Byung-Chul Han, Gute Unterhaltung: Eine Dekonstruktion der abendländischen Passionsgeschichte (Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2007), p. 25, identifies a strain of kitsch even in the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, brought out inadvertently by Bach’s own practice of parody, or the introduction of profane motifs into sacred music. 42. Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, vol. 2, Studies in Theological Styles. Clerical Styles [1984] (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006), p. 355, cited by Gregory LaNave, Through Holiness to Wisdom: The Nature of Theology According to St. Bonaventure (Rome: Istituto storico dei Cappuccini, 2005), p. 216. 43. Hans Urs von Balthasar, “Theology and Sanctity,” in Balthasar, Explorations in Theology, vol. 1, The Word Made Flesh [1960] (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), pp. 181–209, here p. 206. 44. Alain de Libera, Penser au moyen âge (Paris: Seuil, 1991). 45. Bonaventure, The Journey of the Mind to God, ed. Stephen F. Brown, trans. Philotheus Boehner (Cambridge, MA: Hackett, 1993), ch. 7, section 6, p. 39. 46. Amy Neff, A Soul’s Journey: Franciscan Art, Theology, and Devotion in the Supplicationes variae (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2019), p. 198. 47. Angela da Foligno, Memoriale, ed. Enrico Menestò, trans. Emore Paoli (Spoleto: Fondazione Centro italiano di studi sull’ alto medioevo, 2015), ch. 9, Seventh Supplementary step, pp. 153–54 (Latin text with modern Italian translation). The translation is from Angela of Foligno, Memorial, ed. Cristina Mazzoni, trans. John Cirignano (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1999), p. 67–68. 48. Bonaventure, Journey of the Mind to God, ch. 1, section 7, p. 7. 49. Bonaventure, Journey of the Mind to God, ch. 7, section 5, pp. 38–39. 50. Franco Sacchetti, Le trecento novelle, ed. Michelangelo Zaccarello (Florence: Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2014), no. 136, pp. 308–11. Meiss, Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death, pp. 3–5. Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators, pp. 77–78. Brennan, Painting as a Modern Art, pp. 93–100 (his initial discussion of the text), and pp. 301–2 (the text itself ). 51. Note that the story is a fragment. Note also that Cimabue is among the names proposed; evidently the painters are not asking: who is the best painter since the death of Giotto? They are not writing the history of Trecento painting. An undertone is the rivalry between Orcagna and Taddeo — both are present, yet they are not named. No wonder Taddeo is so dour. Andrew Ladis, Taddeo Gaddi: Critical Reappraisal and Catalogue Raisonné (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982), p. 51, seems to be saying as much. I would add that Sacchetti is generally pessimistic and critical of his own times, so the comment about the decline of painting since Giotto has to be taken with a grain of salt. Anyway, the history of art is not the main concern, it is all just a foil for the joke. Brennan argues that Alberto’s point was that women

326 using cosmetics surpass nature in the same way that Giotto surpassed the Greeks. I am not sure I agree. I think Alberto was saying, rather, that aesthetic beauty is the improvement of the natural given. Progress in painting, in other words, is not a matter of adjusting the older, inherited painting manners, but rather a matter of directly correcting nature’s defects, in the direction of beauty — whatever that might be, and not excluding the sort of beauty that arouses sexual desire. 52. Cf. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), pp. 293–94, on “a type of religious poetry marked by a concentration of sound and ambiguity of sense. . . . In religious poetry with elaborate stanzaic patterns, such as the Pearl and many poems of Herbert, we realize that the discipline of finding rhymes and arranging words in intricate patterns is appropriate to the sense of chastened wit, a type of sacrificium intellectus, that goes with the form. Such intricate verbal patterns go back . . . to the Hebrew psalms themselves.” 53. John White, Duccio: Tuscan Art and the Medieval Workshop (London: Thames & Hudson, 1979), pp. 137–40, says it is by Cimabue, while Luciano Bellosi, Cimabue (Milan: Motta, 2004), p. 143, says it is by Duccio. 54. See Klaus Krüger, Bildpräsenz — Heilspräsenz: Ästhetik der Liminalität (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2018), pp. 9–11, and Thomas Ruster, “Gott und der Himmel: Warum ihre Unterscheidung im Christentum notwendig ist,” in Parallelwelten: Christliche Religion und die Vervielfachung von Wirklichkeit, ed. Johann Evangelist Hafner and Joachim Valentin (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2009), pp. 162–80. 55. See Carlo Ginzburg, The Enigma of Piero (London: Verso, 2000), pp. 68–70, with references. 56. See Neff, A Soul’s Journey, p. 197, on the reckonings of the measure of Christ’s body. 57. Coluccio Salutati, On the World and Religious Life, trans. Tina Marshall, I Tatti Renaissance Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), pp. 202–203 (proem to book 2). This isn’t actually quite what Cicero said in De natura deorum 1.60. 58. “Praise” is not the best modern word to capture this sense, deriving as it does from the Latin pretium, reward, prize, cognate with price and appreciate. It would be better to say glorify, salute, extol (lift up) — or laud, which is cognate with German Lied, song. Calvert Watkins, How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 333, notes that the opposite of “praise” in this context is “renounce.” 59. Gertrude Stein, “Portraits and Repetition” (1935), Lectures in America (Boston: Beacon, 1985), p. 168. 60. C. M. Bowra, Pindar (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), pp. 34–36. 61. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, p. 294. 62. Cesare Gnudi, “Su gli inizi di Giotto e il suoi rapporti col mondo gotico,” in Giotto e il suo tempo (Rome: De Luca, 1971), pp. 3–23. Carlo Volpe invokes Focillon as well as Gnudi in pointing to Île-de-France proto-humanism as a matrix. See also the discussions of Giotto’s awareness of ancient Roman

and French Gothic sculpture in Serena Romano, L’O di Giotto (Milan: Electa, 2008), pp. 42–52, 81, 84–89. 63. Alexis-François Rio, De l’art chrétien, vol. 1, Toscane et Ombrie (Paris, 1861), p. 202. Rio was writing about the quatre­ foil panels painted for the Sacristy at Santa Croce, housed since the nineteenth century in the Accademia, attributed by the Anonimo Magliabechiano to Giotto but today attributed to Taddeo Gaddi. 64. Vasari, Milanesi, vol. 2, p. 510; Vasari, Oxford, p. 171. The predella is in the National Gallery, London. 65. Vasari, Milanesi, vol. 1, p. 397: La proprietà di questa istoria dipinta non potere essere più simile al vero di quello ch’ell’era; Vasari, Oxford, p. 31. The painting is now in Berlin, Gemäldegalerie, inv. no. 1884. 66. Rio, De l’art chrétien, vol. 1, pp. 187–88. 67. Roger Fry, “Giotto” [1901], Vision and Design (New York: P. Smith, 1947), p. 106. 68. Giacomo Grimaldi in 1620 saw the date, now illegible, 1320; and the work is in accord with Giotto’s mature, “achieved” style: more structured, more classical, less expressive. 69. Julian Gardner, “The Stefaneschi Altarpiece: A Reconsideration,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 37 (1974): pp. 57–103, esp. pp. 79–82. 70. Jonathan Z. Smith, To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 56–57. 71. Van Gogh to Émile Bernard, Arles, on or about August 5, 1888, https://vangoghletters.org/, no. 655. 72. Robert Oertel, Early Italian Painting to 1400 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1968), p. 98, on the Stefaneschi altarpiece: “Giotto’s monumental style could not be reproduced in a small-scale work.” Giovanni Previtali, Giotto e la sua bottega (Milan: Fabbri, 1967), p. 128, is quite critical of the Baroncelli polyptych, and sees Taddeo Gaddi’s hand in it. Scholars disagree about the significance of Giotto’s signatures. White, Duccio, does not consider the Baroncelli polyptych to be by Giotto. In his Pelican volume (Art and Architecture in Italy, 1250–1400 [Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1987], p. 341), White argues that great and original works did not need the protection of a signature: the brushwork was its own endorsement! Serena Romano, La O di Giotto, p. 115n24, doubts Giotto’s authorship of the Pisa Stigmatization of Francis (Louvre) but believes that the signature connects the work to the Legend of St. Francis: the Pisan Franciscans wanted a work that “reprised” the iconography of Assisi and bore Giotto’s name. Andrea De Marchi in Giotto e compagni (Paris: Musée du Louvre, 2013), p. 54, says it may be true that the late works (Baroncelli, Bologna) were signed not as proof of authorship but as proof of paternity, a kind of copyright. My own position is that the signatures don’t help with attributions either way, but that the signature on the Louvre panel undeniably supports the attribution of the Legend cycle at Assisi to Giotto. 73. All three of these manuscripts were in Christine Sciacca, ed., Florence at the Dawn of the Renaissance: Painting and Illumination, 1300–1350 (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2012), nos. 5 (British Library, Royal Ms. 6 E IX), 30 (Biblioteca

no t e s 327 Trivulziana, Cod. 2139), and 45 (National Gallery of Art, inv. no. 1952.8.277). 74. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Conversations with Eckermann, in Sämtliche Werke, section 2, vol. 12 (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1999), pp. 114–15 (May 2, 1824). 75. Hans Küng, The Church (London: Burns & Oates, 1967), pp. 241–45. 76. Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators, p. 71, and see the comments by Brennan, Painting as a Modern Art, p. 102. 77. Brennan, Painting as a Modern Art, pp. 164–67. 78. Silvia Brunetti, La moda nella Toscana del ’300 (Siena: Pascal, 2011), tracks the appearance of worldly costumes in paintings from the 1350s. 79. Leon Battista Alberti, De Pictura (Redazione volgare), ed. Lucia Bertolini (Florence: Polistampa, 2011), Book Three, pp. 307–308. 80. Alberti, On Painting, Book Three, in Italian Art, 1400– 1500: Sources and Documents, ed. and trans. Creighton E. Gilbert (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press), p. 71–72. 81. Vasari, Milanesi, vol. 1, p. 572. Today they are attributed to Giovanni da Milano, whom Vasari recognizes only as a pupil of Taddeo. 82. White, Duccio, pp. 35, 185–87. Belting, Likeness and Presence, p. 396. 83. Michael Viktor Schwarz and Pia Theis, Giottus pictor, vol. 1, Giottos Leben (Vienna: Böhlau, 2004), pp. 248–54. 84. Franco Moretti, Distant Reading (London: Verso, 2013), p. 67. 85. Rio, De l’art chrétien, vol. 1, p. 189, 194. These are half-­ figure abbreviations of the Assisi allegories; see Martindale, Complete Paintings of Giotto, no. 147. 86. The gabled structure with the disk is ambiguous. 87. Martin Gosebruch, “Gli affreschi di Giotto nel braccio destro del transetto e nelle ‘Vele’ centrali della chiesa inferiore di S. Francesco,” in Giotto e i Giotteschi in Assisi (Rome: Canesi, 1969), pp. 129–98, here pp. 162–78. 88. Kugler appreciated allegory (Maginnis, Painting in the Age of Giotto, p. 85), but his pupil Burckhardt, Cicerone, in Werke, vol. 3, pp. 44–45, was in general unimpressed by the allegories of the fourteenth century. Robert Oertel: the Franciscan Virtues is “an instructive and illustrative rather than a monumental work,” and therefore not by Giotto; Oertel, Early Italian Painting, p. 100. 89. Robert Williams pointed out that Vasari credited Giotto with having invented the art of pictorial allegory, which reached perfection in his own time; Williams, Raphael and the Redefinition of Art in Renaissance Italy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 3. On the Gloria Celeste by Stefano, see Vasari, Milanesi, vol. 1, p. 450. See Schwarz, Giottos Nachleben, vol. 3, pp. 63–84, on allegories in general, and the lost Gloria in particular. He attributes the transept allegories to Stefano. Boccaccio in his early poem Amorosa visione (1341–42), canto 4, describes an imaginary allegorical mural that he says no human hand could have painted unless it were Giotto’s. Giovanni Boccaccio, Tutte le opere, ed. Vittorio Branca, vol. 3 (Milan: Mondadori, 1974), p. 34. Schwarz and

Theis, Giottos Leben, p. 347. See the remarks by Creighton Gilbert in “The Fresco by Giotto in Milan,” Arte Lombarda, 47/48 (1977): pp. 63–64. 90. Erich Auerbach, “St. Francis of Assisi in Dante’s Commedia” [1945], Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 79–98, here pp. 82, 84. 91. Lothario dei Segni, On the Misery of the Human Condition, ed. Donald R. Howard, trans. Margaret Mary Dietz (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), the first English translation since the sixteenth century. The treatise was widely read: nearly 500 manuscripts survive; “Introduction,” p. xiii. 92. Quoted by Brian Copenhaver in his introduction to Giannozzo Manetti, On Human Worth and Excellence, I Tatti Renaissance Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), p. xiii. 93. John of Caulibus, Meditations on the Life of Christ, p. 278 (“Canticles of the Saints in Limbo”). Isa Ragusa and Rosalie B. Green, eds., Meditations on the Life of Christ (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 358. 94. Andrew Ladis, Giotto’s O: Narrative, Figuration, and Pictorial Ingenuity in the Arena Chapel (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008), pp. 3–4. Ladis rightly stresses the theological, rather than merely religious, context for the cycle. The theme of the cycle is the soul’s journey to the creator-spirit; a “hearkened ‘where’ of rest and respose — a passage to the center.” There is no other “where” than in the mind of God (Paradiso 27); p. 167. 95. André Vauchez, Francis of Assisi: The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Saint (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), p. 187. On the genre of the legend, see Hippolyte Delehaye, The Legends of the Saints [1905] (New York: Fordham University Press, 1962). 96. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, p. 296. 97. Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition, 1350–1450 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), says that even the fifteenth-century commentators failed to exploit the critical potential of humanism (pp. 11–20, 111). The humanists’ descriptive lexicon was limited, their comments on artworks disappointing. Petrarch, who seems to have cared about painting to some degree, employs mostly commonplaces and conventional formulas, even in his two dialogues in the De remediis utriusque fortunae (1360–66), the lengthiest passage about art from the period (pp. 51–66). The scholars often echoed ancient sources on art without always fully understanding what they were saying. Martin McLaughlin, in a passage quoted by Robert Williams (Raphael and the Redefinition of Art, p. 55n143), observes that Pier Paolo Vergerio was praising Cicero’s style but, in practice, was still writing Latin like the fourteenth-century writer he was; Martin McLaughlin, Literary Imitation in the Italian Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 99–102. 98. Charles Trinkaus, In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought, 2 vols. (London: Constable, 1970), p. xix; see also pp. 761–63.

328 99. Although note that David Summers, The Judgment of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthestics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 260, says that Bonaventure’s metaphysical justification of the mechanical arts may echo in a comment by Cennini. 100. Rosario Assunto, Die Theorie des Schönen im Mittelalter (Cologne: DuMont, 1982), p. 118. 101. Vasari, Milanesi, vol. 2, p. 288; Vasari, Oxford, p. 101. 102. Cennino Cennini, The Craftsman’s Handbook: The Italian “ Il libro d’arte,” trans. Daniel V. Thompson (New York: Dover, 1960), p. 1. Brennan, Painting as a Modern Art, p. 34. 103. Horst Bredekamp, Theorie des Bildakts (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2010), pp. 171–230 (ch. 4, “Der substitutive Bildakt: Austausch von Körper und Bild”). 104. Dominic Olariu, La genèse de la représentation ressemblante de l’homme: Reconsidérations du portrait à partir du XIIIe siècle (Bern: Peter Lang, 2014), p. 78. 105. Bowra, Pindar, p. 97. 106. Watkins, How to Kill a Dragon, pp. 350–53. 107. If the unit measure of the horizontal span is dilated any further, the individual recedes again: “La foi compte par siècles”; the 1848 preface to George Sand, La petite Fadette (Paris: Gallimard, 2011), p. 247. 108. The Little Flowers of St. Francis, The Mirror of Perfection, The Life of St. Francis, Everyman’s Library (London: Dent, 1910), ch. 11, p. 20. Luigina Morini, ed., I fioretti di San Francesco (Milan: Rizzoli, 1979), p. 93. 109. Gijsel, ed., Pseudo-Matthaei Evangelium, ch. 15, section 3, pp. 436–37. 110. Thomas E. Crow, No Idols: The Missing Theology of Art (Sydney, Australia: Power Publications, 2017). 111. Bouyer, Liturgical Piety (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1955), pp. 243–44. 112. Barth, Epistle to the Romans, p. 230, 233–34. His exclamation point. 113. Roberto Calasso, Ardor (New York: Allen Lane, 2014), p. 15. 114. David Summers, Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (London: Phaidon, 2003), p. 45, 254. 115. Lucien Fevre, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais [1942] (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). Denis J. J. Robichaud, “Renaissance and Reformation,” in The Oxford Handbook of Atheism, ed. Stephen Bullivant and Michael Ruse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 179–94. 116. Shoshana Felman, “Turning the Screw of Interpretation,” in Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise, ed. Shoshana Felman (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), pp. 94–207 (originally published in Yale French Studies 55/56 [1977]). 117. Barbara Newman, “What Did It Mean to Say ‘I Saw’? The Clash between Theory and Practice in Medieval Visionary Culture,” Speculum 80 (2005): pp. 1–43, here p. 4, remarks that “nontheists” today tend to “pathologize vision experience (as did medieval critiques of it).”

118. Felman, “Turning the Screw of Interpretation,” p. 125, quoting James’s preface to “The Altar of the Dead.” 119. Felman, “Turning the Screw of Interpretation,” p. 135. 120. Bruno Latour, Rejoicing, Or the Torments of Religious Speech [2002] (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), p. 105. 121. Latour, Rejoicing, p. 105. 122. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, p. 125. 123. Latour, Rejoicing, p. 118. 124. Latour, Rejoicing, p. 108. 125. Latour, Rejoicing, p. 118. 126. Latour, Rejoicing, p. 109.

c ha p t er fou r : w i t n es s es 1. Iris Origo imagines Francesco di Marco Datini glimpsing his own portrait in that painted crowd; Iris Origo, Merchant of Prato (London: J. Cape, 1957), p. 353. 2. Joseph Gantner, ed., Jacob Burckhardt und Heinrich Wölfflin: Briefwechsel und andere Dokumente ihrer Begegnung, 1882–1897 (Basel: Schwabe, 1948), p. 88. 3. Martin Gosebruch suggested that one of them might be Giacomo Gaetano Stefaneschi, in “Gli affreschi di Giotto nel braccio destro del transetto e nelle ‘Vele’ centrali della chiesa inferiore di S. Francesco,” in Giotto e i Giotteschi in Assisi (Rome: Canesi, 1969), pp. 129–98, here p. 174. Julian Gardner, Giotto and His Publics: Three Paradigms of Patronage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), pp. 99–100, doubted this conjecture because Stefaneschi was in his late forties when the vault was painted. The youth in blue, Gardner says, wears a bonnet over blond hair but the other may be tonsured. He proposes the brothers Napoleone and Giangaetano Orsini; this is accepted by Elvio Lunghi, Giotto e i pittori giotteschi ad Assisi (Marsciano: La Rocca, 2012), p. 222. 4. John Ruskin, Giotto and His Works in Padua [1854] (New York: David Zwirner, 2018), p. 97; Ruskin, Giotto and His Works in Padua (London, 1900), p. 107. 5. Guglielmo della Valle, Lettere senesi sopra le belle arti, quoted by Andrew Martindale, Complete Paintings of Giotto (New York: Abrams, 1966), p. 10. 6. Vasari, Milanesi, vol. 1, p. 374. Vasari, Oxford, p. 17. 7. Vasari, Milanesi, vol. 1, pp.  377–79; Vasari, Oxford, pp. 19–20, said that Giotto, after completing the Legend of St. Francis in the Upper Church, moved to the Lower Church, where he “painted the upper section of the walls around the high altar, where the body of St. Francis lies, and all four angles of the vault above it, displaying in all of the work there charming and original inventions. . . . Beside the four vault angles I have mentioned [the Franciscan allegories], there are likewise some extremely beautiful paintings on the side walls which should be held in great esteem both for their obvious perfection and for the great care taken in their execution.” It is likely that he was referring here to the Early Childhood cycle. Ghiberti said that Giotto painted quasi tutta la parte di sotto at Assisi, which would seem to mean the Lower Church. But some interpret this to mean the lower part of the nave in the Upper

no t e s 329 Church; Julius von Schlosser, ed., Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Denkwürdigkeiten (I Commentarii), vol. 1 (Berlin: Bard, 1912), p. 36. 8. John of Caulibus, Meditations on the Life of Christ, p. 39 (ch. 11, “The Virgin’s Purification”). Isa Ragusa and Rosalie B. Green, eds., Meditations on the Life of Christ (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 57. Sarah McNamer, ed., Meditations on the Life of Christ: The Short Italian Text (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018), pp. 40–41. 9. Robert Oertel thought that the Early Childhood frescoes were painted by a follower with “considerable, though purely eclectic skill”; Robert Oertel, Early Italian Painting to 1400 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1968), p. 100. Giovanni Previtali, Giotto e la sua bottega (Milan: Rizzoli, 2000), pp. 100–111, distinguishes among the Lower Church hands a Master of the Vele (vaults; the Franciscan allegories) and a mysterious and gifted “Parente di Giotto” (relative of Giotto), someone closer than a mere pupil or assistant; a “deuteragonist” and “counter-reformer” in the heart of the workshop who subtly undermined Giotto’s achievements by limiting the expressive and realist tendencies and instead initiating a retour à l’ordre. Previtali finds in the Childhood frescoes, which he dates to 1305–10, a master of extended, “classical” space, and a sumptuous, even aristocratic tendency to the harmonious fusion of colors. He attributes them to the Master of the Vele and the “Parente” working together. Flores d’Arcais, Giotto (New York: Abbeville, 2012), pp. 212–18, connects the seven “dossal” panels to Previtali’s Parente. Martin Gosebruch argues by contrast for Giotto’s authorship in “Gli affreschi di Giotto nel braccio destro del transetto e nelle ‘Vele’,” pp. 140–62. He dates them late (c. 1320) and sees a more focused and settled spirituality. Filippo Todini, “Pittura del Duecento e del Trecento in Umbria e il cantiere di Assisi,” in La Pittura in Italia: Il Duecento e il Trecento, ed. Enrico Castelnuovo, vol. 2 (Milan: Electa, 1985), pp. 395–98, attributes them to a Master of the Childhood of Christ who worked alongside Giotto, also in the Magdalene Chapel and on the Stefaneschi altar, in a manner close to that of Stefano Fiorentino, unless he was Stefano. Michael Viktor Schwarz, Giottos Werke (Vienna: Böhlau, 2008), p. 356, gives them to Stefano. Carlo Volpe, “Il lungo percorso del ‘dipingere dolcissimo e tanto unito,’ ” in Storia dell’arte italiana, vol. 5, Dal Medioevo al Quattrocento (Turin: Einaudi, 1983), pp. 232–304, here pp. 236–37, gives them to Giotto and says they represent the proto-humanist values of Île-de-France Gothic. In the exhibition catalogue Giotto: Bilancio critico di sessant’anni di studi e ricerche (Florence: Giunti, 2000), Bonsanti and Boskovits assess all these assessments. Boskovits in that volume, pp. 88–94, 124–29, attributes the works by Previtali’s “Parente,” the artist of the Vele, some of the works assigned to Stefano, the Stefaneschi polyptych, and the seven panels of the “dossal” (early 1320s) — to Giotto. Bonsanti is more cautious (pp. 135–37, 150, 154–56) but agrees that the “dossal” is by Giotto, pp. 174–77. They give the Stefaneschi altar to Giotto and the Parente, 1320–25; Giotto: Bilancio critico, cat. no. 17, pp. 151ff. On the seven panels of the presumed dossal, see Giotto: Bilancio critico, cat. no. 23, pp. 174ff. Since I find it

hard to imagine — pace Previtali and his dramatic account of the rivalry between the master and his “relative” — that artists working under Giotto were charging off on their own, I too am inclined to think of all these works as “by Giotto” even if his brush didn’t paint every stroke and even if he was working with a precocious partner, whether named Stefano or not. 10. An illuminated manuscript dated 1321 quotes the frescoes, providing a terminus ante quem; Elvio Lunghi, The Basilica of St. Francis in Assisi (Florence: Scala, 1996), p. 114. 11. Lunghi, Basilica of St. Francis, pp. 114–16, and Lunghi, Giotto e i pittori giotteschi, p. 188, says 1309–11. Francesca Flores d’Arcais, Giotto, p. 222: planned around 1309, a date we know Giotto was in Assisi. Schwarz, Giottos Werke, pp. 356–58, sees a relation in the architectural scenes to Duccio’s Maestà, providing a terminus post quem of 1311; and later, pp. 388–90, dates the north transept to c. 1315–17, possibly under the leadership of Stefano Fiorentino. Gardner, Giotto and his Publics, pp. 84–85, produces what he calls a definitive internal chronology of the Lower Church murals, based on the overlapping of the giornate, but says that establishing an absolute chronology is more difficult. He says the Nicholas Chapel, however, was complete by 1306, and that the next to be painted was the Early Childhood of Christ. But the next cycle after that was the Franciscan Allegories or Vele, which he dates to 1317–19, leaving more than a decade empty for the Early Childhood cycle. 12. Jacopo da Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan, vol. 1 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 146. 13. See also Exodus 13:11–15: Moses explains this to the people. 14. Note that Luke does not mention the five shekels. Is this because Luke was ignorant, or because they didn’t pay and therefore Jesus remained the family’s “priest”? A. E. Harvey, A Companion to the New Testament (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 223. 15. Hellmut Hager, Die Anfänge des italienischen Altarbildes (Munich: Schroll, 1962), pp. 102–3. Joachim Poeschke, Die Kirche San Francesco in Assisi und ihre Wandmalereien (Munich: Hirmer, 1985), p. 102, points out that the rings comply with the description in Exodus 25:10–12. 16. “Temple” translates Greek ιερον, meaning “the outer courts of the temple,” for women or for gentiles; that is, not the sanctuary, νᾱός. This was a place where Simeon might meet a woman. Again, this may indicate that Simeon was not a priest. 17. This is made explicit by the panel by Taddeo Gaddi in the Accademia, inv. no. 1890 n. 8585, from the sacristy cupboard at Santa Croce, 1335–40: the chief rabbi, wearing a tiaralike headdress, stands behind the flaming altar observing the transaction between Simeon and Mary. Miklós Boskovits and Angelo Tartuferi, Cataloghi della Galleria dell’ Accademia di Firenze, Dipinti, vol. 1, Dal Duecento a Giovanni da Milano (Florence: Giunti, 2003), no. 48, fig. 128. 18. Jacopo da Voragine explains why Mary did not require Purification in Golden Legend, vol. 1, pp. 144, 148.

330 19. It is not clear whether the Presentation on the lintel of the Porta maggiore of the Duomo of Ferrara contains three or four figures; Joseph may be hidden behind Mary. The three-figure Presentation on the triumphal arch of the Cappella Palatina in Palermo (twelfth century) occupies a space sometimes reserved for the Annunciation; and indeed, the scene is like a reversal of the Annunciation: she now presents to the Lord what she was entrusted to create, and the cycle is complete. (Note also that the scene is the antitype of the Sacrifice of Isaac.) 20. A rendering of the Mongolian Phags-pa, it would seem, a script devised for Kublai Khan that flourished during the Yuan dynasty. See Hidemichi Tanaka, “Oriental Scripts in the Paintings of Giotto’s Period,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 113 (1989): pp. 214–26, here pp. 220–22. In the Arena Chapel, Anna’s scroll bears legible Latin words, a passage from her speech as it was reported not by Luke but by the Pseudo-Matthew; the very phrase redemptio saeculi discussed above (p. 100). 21. See also the twelfth-century fresco from the Grotta degli Angeli at Magliano Romano, now Palazzo Venezia; and the relief on the pulpit in San Leonardo in Arcetri: Fondazione Zeri, Fototeca, nos. 182 and 78649. See also possibly a badly restored scene in the Upper Church at Assisi; Holly Flora, Cimabue and the Franciscans (London: Harvey Miller, 2018), pp. 103–5, fig. 3.5, argues, however, that the scene is Mary’s Suitors Before the High Priest. 22. Boston, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, inv. no. p30w9, 45.2 × 43.6 cm. 23. Dorothy C. Shorr, “The Iconographic Development of the Presentation in the Temple,” Art Bulletin 28 (1946): pp. 17–32, here fig. 4. 24. Decio Gioseffi, Giotto architetto (Milan: Edizioni di Comunità, 1963), p. 58. Yet he considers them works of the late 1320s, not by Giotto. John White, The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space (London: Faber and Faber, 1957), p. 75n8, concedes that the perspective in these paintings is more or less correct but treats them scantly because he does not attribute them to Giotto. 25. Francesco Benelli, The Architecture in Giotto’s Paintings (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 157–59. 26. Michael Kubovy, The Psychology of Perception and Renaissance Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 52–64. 27. On Trecento perspective, see Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, pp. 54–59; White, Birth and Rebirth, pp. 23–112; and David Summers, Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (London: Phaidon, 2003), pp. 500–507. 28. Lunghi, Giotto e i pittori giotteschi, p. 208, argues that the obscuring of Joseph invokes an early Christian sense of hierarchy. 29. It is unclear why Anna — not in this scene but in others, like Duccio’s in the Maestà and Giotto at Padua and in the Gardner panel — lacks a halo: is she, like Joseph, somehow a bridge figure between inside and outside? She is not a Jerusalemite. She revives the art of prophecy.

30. John Pope-Hennessy, Italian Gothic Sculpture (London: Phaidon, 1972), pl. 15 (85 × 113 cm). 31. Shorr, “The Iconographic Development of the Presentation in the Temple,” p. 27. 32. John of Caulibus, Meditations on the Life of Christ, pp. 39–40 (ch. 11, “The Virgin’s Purification”). Ragusa and Green, eds., Meditations on the Life of Christ, pp.  58–60. McNamer, ed., Meditations on the Life of Christ, p. 41. 33. Moshe Barasch, Giotto and the Language of Gesture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 57. 34. See also the figure at the lower left reaching toward Francis in the Allegory of Chastity in the vaults of the Lower Church. 35. Lunghi, Basilica of St. Francis, p. 114. 36. Pierluigi Leone de Castris, Simone Martini (Milan: Motta, 2003), pp. 74, 84, and cat. no. 8. 37. Bologna, Pinacoteca Nazionale, inv. no. 217. Andrea Emiliani, La Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna (Milan: Electa, 1997), no. 17, pp. 28–29. Cf. the Presentation with the figures of St. Peter Martyr (thirteenth century) and the Beata Villana delle Botti (fourteenth century) painted by Fra Angelico in cell 10 at San Marco in Florence. 38. Acts of Pilate, ch. 16, section 7, in J. K. Elliott, The Apocryphal New Testament: A Collection of Apocryphal Christian Literature in an English Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) (revised reprint, 2005), p. 184. Elliott is basically an updating of M. R. James’s classic Apocryphal New Testament (1926). 39. Another was the Sermon of John the Baptist, still another the Pentecost, which sometimes involved amazed and perplexed, perhaps skeptical, eavesdroppers, in accord with Acts 2:5–12. Cf. the Pentecosts in London by Giotto (the panel in London belonging to the seven-panel dossal) and Jacopo di Cione (from the San Pier Maggiore altar) (National Gallery, inv. nos. 5360 and 578), as well as the initial by Lorenzo Monaco: Laurence B. Kanter, Painting and Illumination in Early Renaissance Florence, 1300–1450 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994), no. 29d, pp. 241–42. 40. See the Florentine relief of the Epiphany with a halfsized patron (Baldassare degli Ubriachi?) next to the middle Magus (c. 1340, Cappella degli Ubriachi, Santa Maria Novella). Silvia Colucci, “ ‘Ymagines sculptas,’ nonostante tutto: Capitelli, arredi, tombe,” in Santa Maria Novella: La basilica e il convento, ed. Andrea De Marchi, vol. 1 (Florence: Mandragola, 2015), pp. 103–4. 41. New York, Frick Collection, inv. no. 27.1.1, 30.5 × 21.6 cm. The Frick Collection: An Illustrated Catalogue, vol. 2 (New York: Frick Collection, 1968), pp. 189–92. Joanna Cannon, Religious Poverty, Visual Riches: Art in the Dominican Churches of Central Italy in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), pp. 201, 207, says that the lack of hinges makes the panel a “good candidate” for the walls of a friar’s cell; she assigns the work to the circle of Simone Martini, 1330s or 1340s. 42. On the significance of the Way to Calvary in the Franciscan context, see Anne Derbes, Picturing the Passion: Narrative

no t e s 331 Painting, Franciscan Ideologies, and the Levant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 128–37. 43. Jan Gijsel, ed., Libri de nativitate Mariae, vol. 1, Pseudo-Matthaei Evangelium, ed. Jan Gijsel and Rita Beyers, Corpus Christianorum, Series Apocryphorum (Turnhout: Brepols, 1997), ch. 14, section 1, pp. 430–31, echoing Isaiah 1:3. 44. In the fresco by Ambrogio Lorenzetti at Montesiepi in the province of Siena, a patron — perhaps the original patron (who may be Vanni Salimbeni), perhaps a later addition —  kneels behind the angel, on the left-hand side of the composition. This figure was later overpainted and is today barely visible. Eve Borsook, Gli affreschi di Montesiepi (Florence: EDAM, 1969). On the identity of the patron, see Anne Dunlop, “Once More on the Patronage of Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Frescoes at S. Galgano, Montesiepi,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 63 (2000): pp. 387–403. In an Annunciation on the facade of San Francesco in Bassano del Grappa (Veneto), attributed to Guariento or Battista da Vicenza, a patron kneels between the two figures; Fondazione Zeri, Fototeca, no. 4303. A Sienese Annunciation now in Berlin depicts a tiny cleric in black and white habit kneeling below and between the protagonists. Berlin, Gemäldegalerie, inv. no. 1142. Miklós Boskovits, Frühe italienische Malerei: Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Gemäldegalerie Berlin, Katalog der Gemälde (Berlin: Mann, 1988), no. 32 (Lippo Memmi or Bartolo de’ Fredi); Fondazione Zeri, Fototeca, no. 6273. Besides this panel and the Ponce Annunciation, Dirk Kocks, “Die Stifterdarstellung in der italienischen Malerei des 13.–15. Jahrhunderts” (PhD diss., University of Cologne, 1971), nos. 835–837, lists only a late fourteenth-­ century fresco in Orvieto, San Giovenale (Fondazione Zeri, Fototeca, no. 9524, but the work is in poor condition and the modern patron is barely visible in the photo). Gail Geiger, “Lippi’s Carafa Annunciation: Theology, Artistic Conventions, and Patronage,” Art Bulletin 63 (1981): pp. 62–75, affirms that Annunciations with portraits of modern devout are rare; she gives one late Trecento example, from a Dominican Psalter (p. 65). Recall the priest in Treviso who complained about the portrait in a painting by Titian; p. 323, n. 66. 45. Gijsel, ed., Pseudo-Matthaei Evangelium, ch. 10, sect. 1–2, pp. 380–87. Joseph was sure that the women — Mary’s companions — knew the truth! In the Annunciation by Lorenzetti at Montesiepi, there is a figure in the doorway, behind both the patron and the angel — this is an early medieval motif otherwise rare in the Trecento: a witness, perhaps a maidservant, to the Annunciation. Note the half-open door in the Annunciation by the Straus Madonna in the Accademia, inv. 1890 no. 3146; Cecilie Hollberg, Angelo Tartuferi, and Daniela Parenti, Cataloghi della Galleria dell’ Accademia di Firenze, Dipinti, vol. 3, Il Tardogotico (Florence: Giunti, 2020), no. 25, pp. 124–27. On the textual and iconographic tradition that Mary lived with companions, or kept a servant, see Julia Liebrich, Die Verkündigung an Maria: Die Ikonographie der italienischen Darstellungen von den Anfängen bis 1500 (Cologne: Böhlau, 1997), p. 66. See also Wolfgang Kemp, Die Räume der Maler: Zur Bilderzählung seit Giotto (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1996), pp. 33–35, 75–78, and fig.

8: Lippo Memmi (?), Annunciation with a maid in an adjacent chamber, San Gimignano, Collegiata, 1333–50. 46. Jessica N. Richardson, “Visibile Parlare: Inscribed Prayers, Apotropaic Aphorisms and Monumental Mobile Images in Fourteenth-Century Bologna,” in Sacred Scripture / Sacred Space: The Interlacing of Real Places and Conceptual Spaces in Medieval Art and Architecture, ed. Tobias Frese, Wilfried E. Keil, and Kristina Krüger (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019), pp. 351– 86, here pp. 355–68, with color reproduction. 47. Jerome, in Patrologia Latina 23.192, cited by Hélène Toubert, “La vierge et les sages-femmes: Un jeu iconographique entre les Évangiles apocryphes et le drame liturgique,” in Marie: Le culte de la Vierge dans la société médiévale, ed. Dominique Iogna-Prat et al. (Paris: Beauchesne, 1996), pp. 327–60, here pp. 327–29. 48. Elliott, The Apocryphal New Testament, ch. 20, section 1, p. 65. 49. Gijsel, ed., Pseudo-Matthaei Evangelium, ch. 13, sections 2–5, pp. 414–27. See p. 346, n. 225, below, on the variants of the name of the first midwife. 50. According to Toubert, “La vierge et les sages-femmes,” p.  350, the iconography of Salome’s refutation was not addressed to Jews but to modern Christian skeptics, like the nobleman Jean de Soissons, who doubted the Virgin Birth. 51. John of Caulibus, Meditations on the Life of Christ, p. 34 (ch. 9, “The Epiphany”). Ragusa and Green, eds., Meditations on the Life of Christ, p. 51. McNamer, Meditations on the Life of Christ, pp. 34–35, where they ask specifically about the modo della conceptione. 52. Frank O. Büttner, however, in Imitatio pietatis: Motive der christlichen Ikonographie als Modelle zur Verähnlichung (Berlin: Mann, 1983), p. 80, cites a manuscript illumination, c. 1200. 53. Madrid, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, inv. no. 152 (1979.14), 41.5 × 41.8 cm. Miklós Boskovits in The Thyssen-­ Bornemisza Collection: Early Italian Painting, 1290–1470 (London: Sotheby’s Publications, 1990), no. 14, pp. 92–95, says that this is the only Trecento painting representing the midwives other than occupied with Christ’s bath. Andrew Ladis, Taddeo Gaddi: Critical Reappraisal and Catalogue Raisonné (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982), no. 35, gives the picture to the Gaddi shop. 54. Though it is unclear what sort of structure — an altarpiece? a dossal? — supported the two panels. Zeri (Fondazione Zeri, Fototeca, nos. 2312–2313) accepts the association with the Presentation but attributes both pictures to Jacopo del Casentino. 55. Karl M. Swoboda, “Der romanische Epiphaniezyklus in Lambach und das lateinische Magierspiel,” in Festschrift für Julius von Schlosser, ed. Árpád Weixlgärtner und Leo Planiscig (Zurich: Amalthea, 1927), pp. 82–87, discusses the twelfth-­ century frescoes (now dated to the eleventh century) in the monastery of Lambach depicting an Epiphany with three women near the Madonna and Child. They seem not to be angels. Two of the women stand behind the Virgin’s chair; a third off to the side raises her hand as if to speak, like the

332 woman in the Taddeo Gaddi panel. Swoboda relates this to an eleventh-­century church drama representing the Epiphany. 56. The scene remained rare in Italian art. But see the predella of the Prato altarpiece by Giovanni da Milano, 1355–60, a Nativity where a haloed midwife holds the Child. Prato, Museo Civico, inv. no. 1308. Daniela Parenti, ed., Giovanni da Milano: Capolavori del gotico fra Lombardia e Toscana, exhibition catalogue, Galleria dell’Accademia (Florence: Giunti, 2008), no. 12, pp. 182–89. 57. Madrid, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, inv. no. 231 (1978.46). This panel was part of a predella. 58. Still fundamental treatments of this iconography are Gabriel Millet, Recherches sur l’iconographie de l’évangile aux XIVe, XVe et XVIe siècles (Paris: Fontemoing, 1916), figs. 527–35, and Evelyn Sandberg-Vavalà, La croce dipinta italiana e l’iconografia della Passione (Verona: Apollo, 1929), pp. 297–308, and her analytic tables, pp. 456–67, covering not just painted crosses but the whole thirteenth- and fourteenth-century iconography of the Deposition and its succeeding scenes. Hans Belting, Das Bild und sein Publikum: Form und Funktion früher Bildtafeln der Passion (Berlin: Mann, 1981), p. 150: the Entombment appears only in the eleventh century and is immediately transformed into the threnos or Lamentation. It did not become an independent icon, remaining only on wall paintings and in decorative arts. See the discussion in Amy Neff, A Soul’s Journey: Franciscan Art, Theology, and Devotion in the Supplicationes variae (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2019), pp. 133–34, noting that Mary Magdalene at the feet of Christ departs from the Byzantine tradition, as do grieving angels. 59. Pistoia, Duomo, 2.80 × 2.45 m (overall measurements). Mostra Giottesca (Bergamo, Istituto italiano d’arti grafiche, 1937), no. 57, compares the composition of the Pietà to a fresco in the convent of Nerez in Macedonia. Sandberg-Vavalà, La croce dipinta, pp. 747–54, fig. 264. Caterina Caneva and Lia Brunori, eds., La croce dipinta di Coppo di Marcovaldo e Salerno di Coppo a Pistoia (Pistoia: Gli Ori, 2009) (on the traveller’s graffiti, dated 1726, see p. 62). On the emotionally saturated Passion narratives of the mid- and late thirteenth centuries, often on the side panels of painted crosses, and sometimes in Franciscan conventual contexts, and deriving from Byzantine sources, see Anne Derbes, Picturing the Passion: Narrative Painting, Franciscan Ideologies, and the Levant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); see pp. 145–49 for analysis of a scene from Coppo’s San Gimignano cross, which originally belonged to a Clarissan convent. 60. Luciano Bellosi, “Coppo di Marcovaldo e sopratutto Salerno di Coppo,” in La croce dipinta di Coppo di Marcovaldo e Salerno di Coppo a Pistoia, pp. 41–56, esp. pp. 53–54, with details of the Lamentation. Miklós Boskovits, The Origins of Florentine Painting, 1100–1270, which is vol. 1 of Richard Offner’s A Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting (Florence: Giunti, 1993), pl. LI 7, attributes the Cross to Salerno but believes that the collaboration of Coppo is likely in the Entombment; pp. 596–610, here p. 596. A similar Cross at San Gimignano is undocumented but must be by Coppo. 61. Miklós Boskovits, “Florentine Mosaics and Panel

Paintings: Some Problems of Chronology,” in Italian Panel Painting of the Duecento and Trecento, ed. Victor M. Schmidt, Studies in the History of Art 61 (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2002), pp. 487–97. 62. See the new accounts of these cycles in Flora, Cimabue and the Franciscans, pp. 25–129. 63. Luigi Lanzi, Storia pittorica della Italia, quoted by Andrew Martindale, Complete Paintings of Giotto (New York: Abrams, 1966), p. 11. 64. Donal Cooper and Janet Robson, The Making of Assisi: The Pope, the Franciscans and the Painting of the Basilica (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), argue that the two papal bulls of 1288 known as the Reducentes establish the startdate of the painting project. For most scholars, this settles the question of the dating of the Upper Church cycles; see Serena Romano, La O di Giotto (Milan: Electa, 2008), p. 60. 65. Romano, La O di Giotto, pp. 84–88. 66. Romano, La O di Giotto, pp. 60, 79–82, 85, 101–3. 67. Here she invokes the brilliant (and still untranslated) study by Kemp, Die Räume der Maler, esp. pp. 31–35 on the “chronotopos” of the house in Giotto and the role of servants. 68. Romano, La O di Giotto, pp. 101, 103. This is a more modulated account than Previtali, Giotto e la sua bottega, pp. 38–40, 290, who attributes the Lamentation to Giotto, notes the “stylistic unity” of the New Testament scenes, and sees them mediating between the Isaac scenes and the Legend of St. Francis. Hans Belting, Die Oberkirche von San Francesco in Assisi (Berlin: Mann, 1977), pp. 148–50, 231–32, attributes the New Testament scenes to Mitarbeiter; in the Lamentation they took up the drapery style of the Isaac Master. Whatever Giotto’s involvement in these scenes may have been, the Lamentation and Ascension at Padua are “unthinkable” without knowledge of the corresponding scenes at Assisi. And if Giotto is not himself the Isaac Master, he knew these works well and developed their “formal ideas.” Belting was also open to the idea that Giotto painted the Legend, once you correct for the different kinds of workshop he had (pp. 234–42). Luciano Bellosi, La pecora di Giotto (Torino: Einaudi, 1985), pp. 67–79, discusses the relation of the Isaac scenes to the Legend but has little to say about the Lamentation. He points out that Pietro Cavallini at Santa Maria Donnaregina in Naples cites the Assisi Lamentation directly; p. 129. Bellosi’s book is mainly an attack on the separatisti, the scholars who date the Legend of St. Francis after Padua and dissociate it as much as possible from Giotto. He made a good case for a dating in the 1290s. But now that 1288 is established as the start date, Bellosi’s arguments are superfluous. Romano’s careful analysis of the sequence of events between the Isaac scenes and the Legend of St. Francis, based on evidence of the evolving workshop practices, now seems more important. 69. Berlin, Gemäldegalerie, inv. no. 1059. Boskovits, Frühe italienische Malerei, no. 60, pl. 234, pp. 148–52. Karl Birkmeyer, “The Pietà from San Remigio,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 60 (1962): pp. 459–80, here p. 473, fig. 12. 70. Berlin, Gemäldegalerie, inv. no. 1635b. Boskovits, Frühe italienische Malerei, no. 67, pl. 266.

no t e s 333 71. Siena, Pinacoteca Nazionale, inv. no. 77. Pietro Torriti, ed., La Pinacoteca nazionale di Siena: I dipinti (Genoa: Sagep, 1990), pp.  70–73. Cesare Brandi, Regia Pinacoteca di Siena (Rome: La Libreria dello stato, 1933), p. 130. Ambrogio Lorenzetti, exhibition catalogue, Santa Maria della Scala, Siena (Cinisello Balsamo, Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2017), pp. 322–27 (Marco M. Mascolo), with a dating of 1342–44 and an endorsement of the recent reconstruction by Emanuele Zappasodi, “Ambrogio Lorenzetti ‘Uomo di grande ingegno’: Un polittico fuori canone e due tavole dimenticate,” Nuovi Studi 19 (2013): pp. 5–22. 72. Ambrogio Lorenzetti, exhibition catalogue, p. 322. 73. This was the opinion of George Rowley, rejected with vehemence by most other scholars; Ambrogio Lorenzetti, vol. 1 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1958), pp. 40–42. For the Benedetto di Bindo, see below, note 74; for the Bristol picture (inv. no. k2771 ), see the exhibition catalogue The Art of Painting in Florence and Siena from 1250 to 1500 (London: Wildenstein, 1965), pp. 7–8. Arno Preiser’s excursus on the panel is instructive: he considers Rowley’s hypothesis the most probable but also points to contemporary Sienese polyptychs with long and narrow predellas, such that the polyptych hypothesis cannot be ruled out on that basis; Arno Preiser, Das Entstehen und die Entwicklung der Predella in der italienischen Malerei (Hildesheim: Olms, 1973), pp.  303–309. Note that Hayden Maginnis, Painting in the Age of Giotto: A Historical Reevaluation (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University, 1997), p. 139, considers Ambrogio’s Allegory of Sin and Redemption in Siena, similar in size to the Petronilla panel (59.5 × 120 cm), the center of a predella. 74. Siena, Pinacoteca Nazionale, inv. no. 111, tempera on cloth, 75 × 50 cm. Torriti, ed., Pinacoteca nazionale di Siena, pp. 150–51, assigning it to an unknown Sienese painter of the early fifteenth century. Anna Maria Guiducci and Dominique Vingtain, eds., L’héritage artistique de Simone Martini: Avignon-­ Sienne, exhibition catalogue (Avignon: Musée du Petit Palais, 2009), p. 70. 75. Siena, Pinacoteca Nazionale, inv. no. 99, 30 × 61.5 cm. Torriti, ed., Pinacoteca nazionale di Siena, p. 117, 120. Gaudenz Freuler, Bartolo di Fredi Cini: Ein Beitrag zur sienesischen Malerei des 14. Jahrhunderts (Disentis: Desertina, 1994), no. 52. 76. Siena, Pinacoteca Nazionale, inv. no. 57. Torriti, ed., Pinacoteca nazionale di Siena, no. 57. Freuler, Bartolo di Fredi Cini, no. 38. 77. Stockholm, National Museum, inv. no. nm 4463, 54 × 49 cm. 78. On such headdresses, see Egidia Polidoro Calamandri, Le vesti delle donne fiorentine nel Quattrocento (Florence: La Voce, 1924), pp. 86, 90; Rosita Levi Pisetzky, Storia del costume in Italia, vol. 2, Il Trecento – il Quattrocento (Milan: Istituto editoriale italiano, 1964), pp. 122–33, 288–99; Jacqueline Herald, Renaissance Dress in Italy 1400–1500 (London: Bell and Hyman, 1981), pp. 210, 213; Carole Collier Frick, Dressing Renaissance Florence (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), p. 46; Roberta Orsi Landini, Moda a Firenze e in Toscana nel Trecento (Florence: Polistampa, 2019), pp. 33–37.

79. On sumptuary laws generally in Florence and Siena, see Silvia Brunetti, La moda nella Toscana del ’300 (Siena: Pascal, 2011), pp. 25–35, and Joël F. Vaucher-de-la-Croix, “Le parole nell’ armadio: lessico della moda nella ‘Prammatica sulle vesti delle donne fiorentine’,” in Franck Sznura et al., Draghi rossi e querce azzurre: Elenchi descrittivi di abiti di lusso, Florence, 1343–45 (Florence: Sismel Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2013), pp.  cii–cli, cxii–cxiii. 80. Robert Brennan, Painting as a Modern Art in Early Renaissance Italy (London: Harvey Miller, 2019), pp. 162–77. 81. See Brunetti, La moda nella Toscana del ’300, pp. 13–15, on sacred personages as well as bystanders in Trecento paintings wearing contemporary clothes. Pisetzky, Storia del costume in Italia, figs. 6, 35, 36, 42, 56. Landini, Moda a Firenze, ills. b 31, b 37. Laura Jacobus, Giotto and the Arena Chapel: Art, Architecture and Experience (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), discusses the importance of neatly arranged hair to an haute bourgeoisie steeped in conduct literature, pp. 222–23, and generally on the norms of a newly moneyed upper class, pp. 203–39. 82. Birkmeyer used the term “extras” in “The Pietà from San Remigio,” p. 469. He ventures — mistakenly, I believe — to describe the three women at the right edge of the Petronilla Lamentation as “three female donors (?),” p. 480n3. 83. Ambrogio Lorenzetti, exhibition catalogue, p. 322. 84. Berlin, Gemäldegalerie, inv. no. 1070a, 23.7 × 16.7 cm. Boskovits, Frühe italienische Malerei, no. 64, pp. 155–59. Pierluigi Leone de Castris, Simone Martini (Milan: Motta, 2003), pp. 300–310, and cat. no. 33. 85. This principle sometimes generates puzzlement, as in the famous case of the woman in black at the Golden Gate in the scene by Giotto at Padua. On this question, see Andrew Ladis, Giotto’s O: Narrative, Figuration, and Pictorial Ingenuity in the Arena Chapel (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008), pp. 111–26. Barasch, Giotto and the Language of Gesture, p. 110, says she is Anne’s “nurse and counsellor.” Jacobus, Giotto and the Arena Chapel, pp. 182–85, rejects the thesis that she is Synagoga and says she is more likely a widow, and a beggar, demonstrating the charity of Joachim and Anna — as if a modern type, the widow in black, were transported back to biblical times. Victor I. Stoichita, “Giotto — the Eye and the Gaze,” in The Right Moment, Essays Offered to Barbara Baert (Leeuwen: Peeters, 2021), pp. 147–80, identifies the woman as the “textual phantasm” of a jealous onlooker, perhaps a widow. 86. Joel Brink, “Cardinal Napoleone Orsini and Chiara della Croce: A Note on the ‘Monache’ in Simone Martini’s Passion Altarpiece,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 46 (1983): pp. 419–24. 87. Richard Offner, A Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting, section 4, vol. 1, Andrea di Cione (Florence: Giunti, 1962), pl. 5, as Master of the Santo Spirito Refectory. Gert Kreytenberg, Orcagna, Andrea di Cione: Ein universeller Künstler der Gotik in Florenz (Mainz: Zabern, 2000), pp. 151–58: Ambrogio Lorenzetti shop. Sirén gave this fresco to Giottino. Cf. the Crucifixion in the Metropolitan Museum (inv. no. 1975.1.65) attributed to Orcagna (c. 1365), where a woman without a halo — one of five — turns away from the Cross as if about to

334 address one of the haloed women tending to the Virgin Mary. 88. Paris, Bibliothèque de France, Cod. lat. 17325, fol. 51v– 52r. Andrea Worm, Das Pariser Perikopenbuch und die Anfänge der romanischen Buchmalerei an Rhein und Weser (Berlin: Deutscher Verlag für Kunstwissenschaft, 2008), pp. 149–59, pl. 29–30. 89. Antoine Wenger, L’Assomption de la t. s. Vierge dans la tradition byzantine du VIe au Xe siècle (Paris: Institut français d’études byzantines, 1955), p. 247, on the conversations recorded in the Latin Transitus manuscripts. See also Robert Deshman, The Benedictional of Æthelwold (Princeton, NJ: Prince­ ton University Press, 1995), pp. 124–38. 90. Location unknown, 28 × 53 cm. The attribution was made by Longhi. Previtali, Giotto e la sua bottega (Milan: Rizzoli, 2000), fig. 173. Miklós Boskovits, A Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting, section 3, vol. 9, The Fourteenth Century: The Painters of the Miniaturist Tendency (Florence: Giunti, 1984), p. 368, pl. cxcvic. Fondazione Zeri, Fototeca, no. 2775. This painter is also called the Master of the Fabriano Altarpiece. 91. Emiliani, La Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna, no. 16. 92. Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, inv. no. 50.2716, 100 × 71.1 cm. Barbara Drake Boehm and Jiri Fajt, eds., Prague: The Crown of Bohemia, 1347–1437 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2005), no. 26, pp. 154–56. At least 10 centimeters were cut off at the lower edge. See the panel in the Morgan Library in the same publication, no. 25. 93. London, British Library, Add. Ms. 27210: https://www .bl.uk/collection-items/golden-haggadah. 94. Marc Michael Epstein, The Medieval Haggadah: Art, Narrative, and Religious Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), pp. 178–200. 95. Assaf Pinkus, “The Patron Hidden in the Narrative: Eve and Johanna at St. Theobald in Thann,” Zeitschrift für Kunst­geschichte 70 (2007): pp. 23–54, with a good general discussion of fourteenth-century lay patronage, pp. 49–54. 96. Recall the Bolognese initial from the Lehman collection (c. 1290–1300) with the female supplicant (patron?) receiving candles from Mary’s own hands; p. 44. 97. Carl Brandon Strehlke and Machtelt Brüggen Israëls, The Bernard and Mary Berenson Collection of European Paintings at I Tatti (Florence: Villa I Tatti, 2015), pp. 319–29, pl. 44, here dated c. 1320. 98. Strehlke, Berenson Collection, pp. 320, 322.

c h ap t e r f i v e : i n t e r l op er s 1. Robert Oertel, Early Italian Painting to 1400 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1968), p 185. 2. Pietro Toesca, Il Trecento (Torino: Unione Tipografico-­ Editrice Torinese, 1951), p. 644. 3. Millard Meiss, Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death: The Arts, Religion, and Society in the Mid-Fourteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951), p. 3. 4. Meiss, Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death, ch. 1 and ch. 2, pp. 9–73, here p. 73. 5. Andrea De Marchi, La pala d’altare: Dal polittico alla pala quadra (Florence: Art & Libri, 2012), pp. 28–31, 46–48.

6. Luciano Bellosi, “Giottino e la pittura di filiazione giottesca intorno alla metà del Trecento,” Prospettiva 101 (2001): pp. 19–40, here p. 21. For another defense of post-1348 Florentine painting and the Strozzi altar, see Hayden Maginnis, Painting in the Age of Giotto: A Historical Reevaluation (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University, 1997), pp. 166, 178. 7. Carlo Volpe, “Il lungo percorso del ‘dipingere dolcissimo e tanto unito,’ ” in Storia dell’arte italiana, vol. 5, Dal Medioevo al Quattrocento (Turin: Einaudi, 1983), pp. 232–304, here pp. 239–44. 8. Anne Derbes, Ritual, Gender, and Narrative in Late Medieval Italy: Fina Buzzacarini and the Baptistery of Padua (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020), counts, excluding the angelic choirs, 108 holy personages in the dome. The portrait of the patron Fina Buzzacarini appears kneeling at left before the Madonna and Child on the west wall, in a lunette-shaped tomb canopy (pp. 45–57). 9. Andrew Martindale, Complete Paintings of Giotto (New York: Abrams, 1966), p. 9, quoting Meiss. 10. Julius von Schlosser, ed., Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Denkwürdigkeiten (I Commentarii), vol. 1, (Berlin: Bard, 1912), p. 37. A good translation of Ghiberti’s Second Commentary is Creighton Gilbert, ed., Italian Art, 1400–1500: Sources and Documents (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1980), pp. 76–88. Angelo Tartuferi, I Giotteschi (Florence: Giunti, 2011) is a good modern overview of the Giotto succession. 11. Maginnis makes this point in his illuminating discussion of Vasari’s comments on the Trecento, Painting in the Age of Giotto, p. 35, also p. 28. Since some of the paintings attributed by Vasari to “Tommaso di Stefano” were in fact painted by Maso di Banco, we may add Maso to the list of Trecento painters who surpassed Giotto. 12. Vasari, Milanesi, vol. 2, p. 102; Vasari, Oxford, p. 53. 13. Vasari, Milanesi, vol. 1, pp. 576, 585. 14. Vasari, Milanesi, vol. 1, pp. 471–72. Maginnis, Painting in the Age of Giotto, p. 25n22, doubts that Vasari ever saw the frescoes, for they bore until the eighteenth century an inscription assigning them to Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Yet Vasari did not know that the two painters were brothers. 15. See Paul Barolsky, Giotto’s Father and the Family of Vasari’s Lives (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University, 1992), pp. 22–24. Wolf-Dietrich Löhr und Stefan Weppelmann, “Fantasie und Handwerk”: Cennino Cennini und die Tradition der toskanischen Malerei von Giotto bis Lorenzo Monaco, exhibition catalogue (Munich: Hirmer, 2008), criticized the genealogical topos as a chauvinistic myth and an obstacle to a critical understanding of Trecento art. 16. J. A. Crowe and G. B. Cavalcaselle, A History of Painting in Italy: Umbria, Florence, and Siena, from the Second to the Sixteenth Century, ed. R. Langton Douglas, vol. 2 (London: Murray, 1903), p. 126. 17. Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition, 1350–1450 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 71. 18. On this work, whose subject matter remains unclear, see Michael Viktor Schwarz, Giottus Pictor, vol. 3, Giottos Nach­

no t e s 335 leben (Vienna: Böhlau, 2020), pp. 63–84. The head in Budapest is thought by many to come from this work; Gaia Ravalli, “Rileggere Ghiberti: Stefano fiorentino, Orcagna e altri fatti pittorici a Santa Maria Novella,” in Ricerche a Santa Maria Novella: Gli affreschi ritrovati di Bruno, Stefano e gli altri, ed. Anna Bisceglia (Florence: Mandragora, 2016), p. 149; Miklós Boskovits, however, in Giotto: Bilancio critico di sessant’anni di studi e ricerche (Florence: Giunti, 2000), p. 126, gives the fragment to Giotto. 19. Cristoforo Landino, in Michael Viktor Schwarz and Pia Theis, Giottus Pictor, vol. 1, Giottos Leben (Vienna: Böhlau, 2004), p.  368: “Della disciplina di Giotto come dal caval troiano usciron mirabili pittori, tra quali molto è lodato la venustà in Maso. Stefano da tutti è nominato scimia della natura tanto espresse qualunque cosa volle. Grandissima arte appare in Taddeo Gaddi.” 20. Antonio Billi, Il libro di Antonio Billi [ca. 1515], ed. Karl Frey (Berlin, 1892), pp. 10–11. 21. A good recent discussion affirming the attribution of the Chiaravalle fresco is Carla Travi, “Per Stefano Fiorentino: Problemi di pittura tra Lombardia e Toscana alla metà del Trecento,” Arte cristiana 91 (2003): pp. 157–72. On the lost Assumption at Pisa, see Antonino Caleca et al., Pisa — Museo delle Sinopie del Camposanto Monumentale (Pisa: Opera della Primaziale Pisana, 1979), pp. 68–69. Bellosi, “Giottino e la pittura di filiazione giottesca,” p. 31, said that Volpe considered the Chiaravalle Coronation and the Pisa Assumption to have been painted by two different artists. 22. Carl Brandon Strehlke and Machtelt Brüggen Israëls, The Bernard and Mary Berenson Collection of European Paintings at I Tatti (Florence: Villa I Tatti, 2015), pp. 420–25, pl. 64, entry by Luciano Bellosi. 23. Roberto Longhi, “Stefano Fiorentino,” in Opere complete, vol. 7 (Florence: Sansoni, 1974), p. 75. 24. Ravalli, “Rileggere Ghiberti,” pp. 145–71. Schwarz, Giottos Nachleben, p. 82. To me, the Santa Maria Novella Aquinas possesses some of the dignity and serenity of Cavallini’s apse fresco in San Giorgio Velabro, with more complex drapery and psychology. The older literature — an example is Alexis-­ François Rio, De l’art chrétien, vol. 1, Toscane et Ombrie (Paris, 1861), p. 188 — gave that fresco to Giotto. 25. Vasari, Milanesi, vol. 1, pp. 447, 450, 453. 26. Francesco Albertini, Memoriale di molte statue e pitture della città di Firenze [1510], ed. Luigi Mussini and Luisa Piaggio (Florence, 1863), p. 16. 27. Billi, Il libro di Antonio Billi, pp. 8–9. The Magliabechi­ ano manuscript (1530s–1540s), which relies in part on Billi, says he was the son of Stefano and the disciple of Giotto, but per fama the son of Giotto; Karl Frey, ed., Il Codice Maglia­ bechiano cl. XVII. 17: Contenente notizie sopra l’arte degli antichi e quella de’ fiorentini da Cimabue a Michelangelo Buonarroti, scritte da anonimo fiorentino (Berlin, 1892), p. 59. 28. Frey, ed., Il Codice Magliabechiano, pp. 56, 59. 29. Filippo Baldinucci, Notizie dei professori del disegno da Cimabue in qua, vol. 1 (Florence: S.P.E.S., 1974–75) (a reprint of the Florentine edition of 1845–47), pp. 122–23. Alberto Lenz,

“Stefano di Ricco: Una precisizione documentaria,” Arte cristiana 96 (2008): pp. 469–73. Already Eugenia Lucignani, “Il problema di Giottino nelle fonti,” Rivista d’arte 24 (1942): p. 123, had pointed out the unlikelihood of Stefano’s descent from Giotto. 30. M. Gualandi, Memorie originale italiane risguardanti le belle arti, vol. 4 (Bologna, 1845), p. 182. Crowe and Cavalcaselle, History of Painting in Italy, pp. 188–89. On Giottino, see generally the entries in the Dizionario biografico degli italiani (Ada Labriola), the Enciclopedia dell’arte medievale (C. De Benedictis), the Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon (F. Mori), and the Dictionary of Art (Brendan Cassidy). 31. Was he named Giotto by his father in honor of the great painter? Not necessarily. The name Giotto, although not common, is not unique: it is a Tuscan diminutive of Angelo or Angiolo (> Angiolotto > Giotto) (Baldinucci, Notizie, vol. 1, pp. 124–25) or Ambrogio (Colnaghi’s Dictionary of Florentine Painters from the 13th to the 17th Centuries [1928] [Florence: Archivi Colnaghi, 1986]). Note also that since the name Giottino is not attested before Albertini and Billi, it is possible that he was never actually called this but was only given the cognomen by later compilers and historians. 32. A curious loose thread that reopens the question of Vasari’s “Tommaso” is the notice by Baldinucci, Notizie, vol. 1, pp. 281–82, of an allegorical altarpiece for the Gucci Tolomei chapel in Santo Stefano al Ponte bearing the signature “Tommaso di Stefano Fortunatino,” a name not otherwise attested. Baldinucci decided, probably correctly, that this painter was not Giottino. But Vasari had said that Giottino had painted “in his youth” a chapel allato alla porta del fianco in that very church (Vasari, Milanesi, vol. 1, p. 623). Walter Paatz, Die Kirchen von Florenz, vol. 5 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1953), p. 223 and n. 101, says that the Gucci Tolomei chapel was the fourth on the church’s left wall. Perhaps someone who had read Vasari inscribed the name Tommaso di Stefano on the allegorical altarpiece after it had left the church and entered into circulation. David Ekserdjian, The Italian Renaissance Altarpiece: Between Icon and Narrative (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021), p. 58, points to a picture in a private collection matching Baldinucci’s description, but without an inscription, and attributed to Jacopo di Cione. 33. In the 1550 edition, he is the prontissimo imitatore di Giotto. 34. Vasari, Milanesi, vol. 1, pp. 621–22. 35. The discussion by Crowe and Cavalcaselle, History of Painting in Italy, pp. 190–95, is still useful. 36. Vasari may have been encouraged in this error by the scholar Giambattista Gelli, who included Maso among the twenty artists’ biographies he composed possibly before 1550, and said of that painter that he was nicknamed Giottino because he was Giotto’s adopted son; David Wilkins, “Maso di Banco: A Florentine Artist of the Early Trecento” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1969), pp. 9–10. Note that Vasari does not seem to have used the Magliabechiano manuscript, though he may have used the same version of Ghiberti that that manuscript used. However, see Charles Hope, “The Lives

336 of the Trecento Artists in Vasari’s First Edition,” in Katja Burzer et al., Le Vite del Vasari: Genesi, topoi, ricezione (Florence: Kunsthistorisches Institut, 2010), pp. 34–35, on the possibility that Vasari was relying on a manuscript containing material from Ghiberti and the Anonimo Magliabechiano and compiled by Domenico Ghirlandaio. In his Life of Stefano, Milanesi, vol. 1, pp. 452–53, Vasari says he knows that Giottino was the son of Stefano from Ghiberti and Ghirlandaio, even though in his Commentaries Ghiberti does not mention Giottino at all. This suggests that he learned this fact from the Ghirlandaio manuscript (which does not survive) and assumed that it had derived from Ghiberti. On this topic, see also Barbara Agosti, Giorgio Vasari: Luoghi e tempi delle Vite (Milan: Officina, 2013), p. 35. 37. Schlosser, ed., Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Denkwürdigkeiten (I Commentarii), vol. 2, pp. 20–21. The question of who knew what, and how, is complex. Neither Villani, Ghiberti, nor Billi mentioned Bernardo Daddi or Jacopo del Casentino, but the Codex Magliabechiano did; Osvald Sirén points this out, Giottino und seine Stellung in der gleichzeitigen florentinischen Malerei (Leipzig: Klinkhardt und Biermann, 1908), p. 5. 38. See the overview of the “Giottino problem” by Julius von Schlosser, “Lorenzo Ghibertis Denkwürdigkeiten,” Kunst­ geschichtliches Jahrbuch der K. K. Zentral-Kommission 4 (1910): pp. 105–211, here pp. 192–202. 39. Richard Offner, “Four Panels, a Fresco and a Problem,” Burlington Magazine 54 (1929): pp. 224–45. Longhi, “Stefano Fiorentino,” pp. 64–82. This was a lecture of 1943 first published in Paragone 13 (1951): pp. 18–40. 40. Longhi, “Stefano Fiorentino,” p. 69. Again, the works at Assisi just mentioned are now assigned to Puccio Capanna. The most inclusive corpus of works given to Puccio Capanna is Piero Scarpellini, “Di alcuni pittori giotteschi nella città e nel territorio di Assisi,” in Giotto e i giotteschi in Assisi (Rome: Canesi, 1969), pp. 211–70, here pp. 242–62. See the discussions by Giovanna Ragionieri, “Pittura del Trecento a Firenze,” in La Pittura in Italia: Il Duecento e il Trecento, ed. Enrico Castelnuovo, vol. 1 (Milan: Electa, 1985), pp. 300–301, and Angelo Tartuferi, “La nuova visione pittorica di Giotto a Firenze e in Toscana: Giotteschi, non-giotteschi,” in Giotto e il Trecento: “ Il più sovrano maestro stato in dipintura,” ed. Alessandro Tomei, vol. 1 (Milan: Skira, 2009), pp. 73–83; both largely following the narrative of Carlo Volpe, “Il lungo percorso.” 41. Giottino evolves: there are a few candidates for absorption into the catalogue of his works, all small pictures or fragments, even if there is no consensus yet about their authorship. See Daniela Parenti, “Aspetti della pittura fiorentina alla metà del Trecento,” in Da Puccio di Simone a Giottino: Restauri e conferme, ed. Angelo Tartuferi and Daniela Parenti, (Florence: Giunti, 2005), pp. 25–32; the most convincing is the tabernacle from the Convento delle Oblate di Careggi with a Madonna and Child and Saints and a Crucifixion: cat. no. 5, pp. 54–57 (Mirella Branca). See also the catalogue entries by Tartuferi in Alessandro Tomei, ed., Giotto e il Trecento: “ Il più sovrano maestro stato in dipintura,” vol. 2 (Milan: Skira, 2009), nos. 42–43, pp. 198–99, on the very refined fresco fragments

from the church of San Pancrazio now at the Museo degli Innocenti, apparently from a lost work attributed by Vasari to Giottino (see p. 285 and ills. 7.9, 7.10). Bellosi and others had attributed the fragments to Nardo di Cione; but Bellosi changed his mind in “Giottino e la pittura di filiazione giottesca,” p. 19, noting that Volpe was the first to see Giottino’s hand. With regard to further possible overlooked works by Giottino, I would continue looking in the direction of the elusive Master of San Lucchese, for example the Madonna and Child with Eight Saints in Berlin, inv. no. 1141a; Miklós Boskovits, Frühe italienische Malerei: Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Gemäldegalerie Berlin, Katalog der Gemälde (Berlin: Mann, 1988), no. 49, pp. 124–27. Note that already Alessandro Chiappelli, “ ‘Giottino’ e un tabernacolo testè riaperto in Firenze,” Rassegna d’arte 9 (1909): pp. 71–73, here p. 72, connected the Berlin panel to Giottino. The tentative corpus of the Master of San Lucchese is mostly small-scale works characterized by a refined handling of color and modelling and a certain grave intensity of mood. See the list of pictures in Richard Offner, Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting, section 4, supplement, A Legacy of Attributions, ed. Hayden B. J. Maginnis (New York: College of Fine Arts, New York University, 1981), pp. 21–23, and the assessments by Miklós Boskovits in his Pittura fiorentina alla vigilia del Rinascimento, 1370–1400 (Florence: Edam, 1975), p. 199n87, and in his catalogue of the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, Frühe italienische Malerei, p. 124; as well as Erling Skaug, Punch Marks from Giotto to Fra Angelico: Attribution, Chronology, and Workshop Relationships in Tuscan Panel Painting: with particular consideration to Florence, c. 1330–1430, vol. 1 (Oslo: IIC, Nordic Group, 1994), pp.  155–57, and Volpe, “Il lungo percorso,” pp.  239– 40. Bellosi, “Giottino e la pittura di filiazione giottesca,” pp. 34–35, places the Maestro di San Lucchese among the painters like Maso who developed some clues in late Giotto, a softer more blended approach to modelling, even sfumato. See also the exquisite triptych attributed to Maso at the Brooklyn Museum, inv. no. 34.838 — this, too, is close to Giottino. 42. Charles Hope, who holds a minimalist view about which descriptions by Vasari are based on actual experience and which are drawn from older sources, and even about which passages were written by Vasari, believes that he did write the description of the San Remigio Pietà; Hope, “The Lives of the Trecento Artists,” p. 36. 43. On the church and its decorations, see the two articles by Maria Bandini, “La chiesa di San Remigio a Firenze e la sua decorazione pittorica tra XIV e XV secolo,” Arte cristiana 98 (2010): pp. 173–82; and “Vestigia dell’ antico tramezzo nella chiesa di S. Remigio a Firenze,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Instituts in Florenz 54 (2010/12): pp. 211–30. The discussion by Ada Labriola in her entry on Giottino in the Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 55 (Rome: Istituto dell’ Enciclopedia Italiana, 2001), pp. 423–27, here pp. 425–26, is especially lucid. See also Alberto Busignani and Raffaello Bencini, Le chiese di Firenze: Quartiere di Santa Croce (Florence: Sansoni, 1982), pp. 101–12, and recently Giampaolo Trotta and Licia Bertani,

no t e s 337 San Remigio a Firenze: La chiesa e il suo popolo, vol. 1 (Florence: Tassinari, 2020), pp. 263–64, 310–11, 319–20, 626–30; and vol. 2, p. 710. 44. Paul Schubring, “Giottino,” Jahrbuch der Königlich Preussischen Kunstsammlungen 21 (1900): pp. 161–77. Sirén, Giottino und seine Stellung. This book was absorbed into Sirén’s two-volume English-language publication, Giotto and Some of his Followers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1917), pp. 209ff. on the Pietà. 45. Toesca, Il Trecento, pp. 629–32. 46. Schlosser, “Lorenzo Ghibertis Denkwürdigkeiten,” pp. 183, 198–99. For the document, see Vasari, Milanesi, vol. 1, p. 628n2. 47. Crowe and Cavalcaselle also thought he was St. Zenobius; History of Painting in Italy, p. 195. 48. Schlosser, “Lorenzo Ghibertis Denkwürdigkeiten,” pp. 188, 198. Schlosser mistakenly stated that Vasari did not mention the San Remigio picture in the 1550 edition of the Lives — a symptom of his peculiar resentment of the painting. Nevertheless W. Valentiner, “Orcagna and the Black Death,” Art Quarterly 12 (1949): pp. 48–73, here pp. 52–53, largely follows Schlosser. 49. Karl Birkmeyer, “The Pietà from San Remigio,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 60 (1962): pp. 459–80. 50. White notes that although the modern women “are there,” the painter transforms the scene into “a mystery and a symbol,” “eternally actual and eternally remote”; John White, Art and Architecture in Italy, 1250–1400 (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1987), p. 422. 51. This is the view of Brendan Cassidy in his entry on Giottino in the Dictionary of Art, vol. 12 (New York: Grove, 1996), p. 681. 52. Volpe, “Il lungo percorso,” pp. 232–304. 53. Bellosi, “Giottino e la pittura di filiazione giottesca,” pp. 19–40, stresses the radicality of the mixing of modern patrons into the scene, a license offered by the medium of panel — he says Giottino would not have done this in the (now mostly lost) San Pancrazio Pietà in fresco. I am not so sure of this: Michele Bacci’s many examples of unorthodox frescoes involving supplicant portraits suggest otherwise. Judging Giottino to be possibly the greatest Florentine painter of the century after Giotto (p. 19), Bellosi invokes the picture’s gravitas and calm, far from the mechanized symmetries of Orcagna, and wonders at the continual rotation of viewpoints, recalling the Dream of St. Ambrogio by Simone Martini in the chapel of San Martino at Assisi. 54. Uffizi, inv. no. 454. Mostra Giottesca (Bergamo: Istituto italiano d’arti grafiche, 1937), no. 153, pp. 484–89. Angelo Tartu­ feri, ed., L’eredità di Giotto: Arte a Firenze, 1340–1375 (Florence: Giunti, 2008), no. 38, pp. 172–74 (Federica Baldini). Boskovits, Pittura fiorentina alla vigilia del Rinascimento, pp. 41–42. Luisa Marcucci, Gallerie Nazionali di Firenze: i dipinti toscani del secolo XIV (Rome: Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato, 1965), no. 50, pp. 88–90, with a sensitive account of the painter’s affinities with Giovanni da Milano and Maso di Banco, and generally his style and “poetics.”

55. Marcucci, however, says the frame is not original. Andrea De Marchi (quoted by Baldini in L’eredità di Giotto, p. 172) says that an original frame with side pilasters and predella would have given the picture a more traditional appearance. Skaug, Punch Marks from Giotto to Fra Angelico, p. 191n39, disagrees, asserting that the frame is intact with its original punch marks. 56. Judith B. Steinhoff, “Gendering Prayer in Trecento Florence: Tomb Paintings in Santa Croce and San Remigio,” in Picturing Death, 1200–1600, ed. Stephen Perkinson and Noa Turel (Leiden: Brill, 2021), pp. 64–78, here p. 76, asks whether the fabric might be dyed a luxurious perso or deep purple. She cites Pierre Antonetti, La vie quotidienne à Florence au temps de Dante (Paris: Hachette, 1979), p. 59, who says that robes of this color — a mixture of purple and black, according to Dante, Convivio, book 4, ch. 20 — were suitable for the mourning clothes of the close relatives of the deceased. 57. Cf. the Lamentation in the Upper Church at Assisi (Giotto?) (ill. 4.14) with the pair of female onlookers, one in a dark hooded robe and the other in a thinner veil that reveals the hair; and recall the comments on these women by Serena Romano, p. 142. 58. Dirk Kocks, “Die Stifterdarstellung in der italienischen Malerei des 13.–15. Jahrhunderts” (PhD diss., University of Cologne, 1971), pp. 147–48, says the faces of the women are less particularized than their costumes. 59. Birkmeyer, “The Pietà from San Remigio,” p. 468, notes this, following Sirén, Giottino und seine Stellung, p. 46. The front of Giotto’s Stefaneschi polyptych observes the same canon of hierarchical proportions: St. Peter is a giant, the donors Stefaneschi and Pope Celestine V are a little too small, and the patron saints George and Celestine are just right. 60. Ponce, Puerto Rico, Museo de Arte de Ponce, 62.0268, 131.5 × 132.1 cm. Fern Rusk Shapley, Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: Italian Schools, vol. 1 (London: Phaidon, 1966), p. 32 and fig. 77, as “Studio of Orcagna.” Boskovits, Pittura fiorentina alla vigilia del Rinascimento, p. 328. Frank O. Büttner, Imitatio pietatis: Motive der christlichen Ikonographie als Modelle zur Verähnlichung (Berlin: Mann, 1983), p. 73, as school of Orcagna. Although it is difficult to say anything about the frames with any certainty, Judith Steinhoff, when speaking of the rarity of oddly shaped frames such as that of the San Remigio Pietà, rightly compares it to the Ponce Annunciation; “Gendering Prayer in Trecento Florence,” p. 75. 61. Shapley said that the gold ground is “completely new.” I am grateful to Helena Gómez de Córdoba, curator at the Museo de Arte de Ponce, for her comments and for a set of high-resolution photographs that she took herself. The photos reveal quite artful punch tooling, but Laurence Kanter on seeing the new photos confirms that the gold ground is entirely modern; email of May 21, 2021. 62. It would be instructive to compare the backs of both panels. The Museo de Arte de Ponce has been closed for longterm renovations. 63. The figure of the Christ Child arriving from the upper left is thought by some to be an addition, perhaps concealing a figure of God the Father. But there is no proof of that.

338 64. Harvard Art Museums, inv. no. 1927.306, 42.2 × 50 cm. Hans Belting, Das Bild und sein Publikum: Form und Funktion früher Bildtafeln der Passion (Berlin: Mann 1981), pp. 88–89. 65. Harvard Art Museums, inv. no. 1917.195 a, 49.4 × 33.8  cm. Birkmeyer, “The Pietà from San Remigio,” p. 472, fig. 11. 66. See also the Lamentation by the Master of the St. George Codex at the Cloisters Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. no. 61.200.2. 67. Andrew Ladis, Taddeo Gaddi: Critical Reappraisal and Catalogue Raisonné (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982), no. 11. 68. 132 × 417 cm. Ladis, Taddeo Gaddi, no. 15, pp. 152–54. Fondazione Zeri, Fototeca, no. 1650. 69. Ladis, Taddeo Gaddi, p. 153, describes the San Remigio Pietà as a “not altogether successful adaptation of Taddeo.” 70. Evelyn Sandberg-Vavalà, La croce dipinta italiana e l’iconografia della Passione (Verona: Apollo, 1929), pp.  301–2, 456–67. 71. Marcucci, Gallerie Nazionali di Firenze, no. 108, pp. 149– 52. Pierluigi Leone de Castris, Simone Martini (Milan: Motta, 2003), pp. 274–86 and cat. no. 32. 72. David Summers, Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (London: Phaidon, 2003), p. 505. 73. Henry Thode, Franz von Assisi und die Anfänge der Kunst der Renaissance in Italien [1885] (Vienna: Phaidon, 1934), p. 552. But Thode may only be echoing Burckhardt, who in the Cicerone said that Orcagna had brought the element of “beauty” into the Florentine school; Jacob Burckhardt, Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. 3 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2003), p. 59. 74. Paola Barocchi quotes the eighteenth-century scholar Giovanni Gaetano Bottari, who praised these opening lines in the following way: “Queste Vite del Vasari sono stimabili non tanto per l’istoria delle tre belle arti, quanto per essere in qua e in là seminate d’ottimi lumi per accrescimento e studio delle medesime, come si può vedere nel principio di questa Vita; i quali lumi, se fossero tutti raccolti insieme, farebbero un trattato compito, che sarebbe utilissimo agli studiosi delle medesime.” Paola Barocchi and Rosanna Bettarini, eds., Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori scultori e architettori, vol. 2, part 2, Commento (Florence: Sansoni, 1969), p. 610. 75. Vasari, Milanesi, vol. 1, p. 621. 76. Longhi, “Stefano Fiorentino,” p. 66. 77. Volpe, “Il lungo percorso,” p. 253. 78. Vasari uses the phrase con arie delicate e dolci when describing the saints in Fra Angelico’s Coronation altar from Fiesole (Louvre); Vasari, Milanesi, vol. 2, p. 511. 79. Vasari, Milanesi, vol. 1, p. 451. 80. Mario Pozzi and Enrico Mattioda, Giorgio Vasari: storico e critico (Florence: Olschki, 2006), pp. 126–29, in an interesting discussion of this passage, argue that the first manner, involving “obscure” tones and demonstrating chiarezza d’ingegno, maps onto Leonardo da Vinci. This first manner leads to the maniera moderna; Giorgione adds dolcezza and unione del colore. Pozzi and Mattioda go on to map the second manner onto Raphael and the third onto Michelangelo, not in the Doni Tondo, not on the ceiling, and not in the Leda, but in the Last

Judgment. Here he achieved the ultimate unione del colorito, a new chromatic harmony. Cf. the somewhat different schema of Marcia B. Hall, Color and Meaning: Practice and Theory in Renaissance Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 67, 93–95, where she distinguishes four modes of coloring in the High Renaissance: sfumato (Leonardo), chiaroscuro (late Raphael and Sebastiano del Piombo), unione (Raphael), and cangiantismo (Michelangelo). Unione is a balance between color intensity and the obscurity of the shadows; the shadows are not so dark that chromatic identity is sacrificed. Cangiantismo revives the manner of Cennini. 81. Longhi, “Stefano Fiorentino,” p. 66, points out that Vasari uses the word unione in his technical introduction (“Introduction to the Three Arts”): “L’unione nella pittura è una discordanza di colori diversi accordati insieme . . .”; “. . . e nella sommità, dove si fatto lume percuote, sempre vi sarà dolcezza et unione”; “. . . il colorito più morbido, più dolce e dilicato e di unione e sfumata maniera . . .” (Vasari, Milanesi, vol. 1, pp. 179, 181, 185) as well as in the lives of Masolino (“grandezza nella maniera, morbidezza et unione nel colorito”; Vasari, Milanesi, vol. 2, p. 267), Andrea del Sarto, Fra’ Bartolommeo, and Giorgione. One may add to this list Masaccio, Raphael, and Rosso Fiorentino (on the latter: “nell’unione de’ colori non è possibile far più, essendo che i chiari, che sono sopra dove batte il maggior lume, con i men chiari vanno a poco a poco con tanta dolcezza et unione a trovar gli scuri con artifizio di sbattimenti d’ombre, che le figure fanno addosso l’una all’altra figura, perché vanno per via di chiari scuri facendo rilievo l’una all’altra”; Vasari, Milanesi, vol. 5, pp.  158–59). Uccello, by contrast, “non osservò molto l’unione di fare d’un solo colore, come si deono, le storie”; Vasari, Milanesi, vol. 2, p. 207; Vasari, Oxford, p. 70. Martindale, Complete Paintings, quotes Lanzi (1789), on the “unity” of Giotto’s painting: again, he was Raphael and Cimabue was Michelangelo. Cf. Barocchi in Giorgio Vasari, La vita di Michelangelo nelle redazioni del 1550 e del 1568, ed. Paola Barocchi, vol. 3, Commento, pp. 1370–77, esp. pp. 1373–74, a long note on Vasari’s phrase sì unitamente dipinta, from his description of the Last Judgment. Barocchi lists many usages of this term with respect to various painters. 82. On the influence of Maso on Stefano, Giottino, Nardo, and the Master of San Lucchese, see Angelo Tartuferi in L’eredità di Giotto, pp. 28–29. 83. Longhi, “Stefano Fiorentino,” pp. 65, 67. But note that Longhi does not consider Maso to have treated his colors in the “unified” manner, p. 70. 84. See the discussions above on the attribution of the Early Childhood frescoes (p. 119) and on the corpus of Stefano Fiorentino (p. 161). Volpe says that Stefano worked alongside Giotto on the Crucifixion in the Lower Church (ill. 1.5). Filippo Todini, “Pittura del Duecento e del Trecento in Umbria,” in La Pittura in Italia: Il Duecento e il Trecento, ed. Enrico Castelnuovo, vol. 2 (Electa, 1985), pp. 395–98, says that whoever painted the Early Childhood frescoes was painting in that very maniera dolcissima e tanto unita that Vasari ascribed to Stefano in his description of the Gloria Celeste. Tartuferi, “La nuova visione pittorica di Giotto a Firenze e in Toscana,”

no t e s 339 pp. 78–81, attributes the Early Childhood cycle, the Vele, and the Budapest fragment to Stefano. Bellosi, “Giottino e la pittura di filiazione giottesca,” pp. 33–34, said that this blended manner was the essential contribution of the generation of Stefano and Puccio; unlike the first generation (Taddeo, Daddi, Maso), they did not indicate light sources. Bellosi proposes that Lorenzo Ghiberti, when he said that Maso “abbreviò [abbreviated] molto l’arte della pittura” (Schlosser, ed., Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Denkwürdigkeiten [I Commentarii], vol. 1, p. 38), must have meant that Maso used wider brushes, not just the tip, like Cimabue, and that this technique was both quicker and the source of the painterly unity. If so, Bellosi continues, Giotto himself may have already arrived at this method, for example in the sfumato of the Stuttgart Apocalypse or in the Louvre Crucifix. 85. Vasari, Milanesi, vol. 1, p. 627. 86. Roger Fry, Vision and Design (New York: P. Smith, 1947), p. 105. 87. Vasari, Milanesi, vol. 1, p. 623. 88. Angela da Foligno, Memoriale, ed. Enrico Menestò, trans. Emore Paoli (Spoleto: Fondazione Centro italiano di studi sull’ alto medioevo, 2015), ch. 1, pp. 18–19 (Latin text with modern Italian translation). Translation here my own. See also Angela of Foligno, Memorial, ed. Cristina Mazzoni, trans. John Cirignano (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1999), p. 32. 89. Erich Auerbach, Dante, Poet of the Secular World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961). Cf. Luciano Bellosi, quoted by Serena Romano, La O di Giotto (Milan: Electa, 2008), p. 56n64: at Assisi, the Old Testament scenes use the tragic tone, the Francis scenes the comic. 90. Alexander Nagel, Michelangelo and the Reform of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 33–45, here p. 35. 91. Nagel, Michelangelo and the Reform of Art, p. 38. 92. Bellosi, “Giottino e la pittura di filiazione giottesca,” p. 19, uses the term impaginazione (“layout”) to suggest a tension with experiential logic. 93. Here I quote the 1550 edition; Barocchi and Bettarini, eds., Le vite, vol. 2, part 1, Testo, p. 231. Vasari, Milanesi, vol. 1, p. 624. 94. Galleria dell’ Accademia, extant paint surface, 249 × 141 cm; overall 310 × 152 cm. Boskovits, Pittura fiorentina alla vigilia del Rinascimento, pp. 40–41 and, on the date, p. 206n138. In 1928, Francesco Lumachi saw an inscription near the original site at Piazza Santo Spirito referring to a chapel founded in 1356; by 1962, Ugo Procacci could only read MCCCL. Tartuferi, ed., L’eredità di Giotto, no. 35, pp. 166–67 (Federica Baldini). Tomei, ed., Giotto e il Trecento, cat. no. 41 (Alberto Lenza): the fresco was said to be in a pessimo state of conservation in 1863 and 1873. It was detached and reintegrated in the 1930s, then again reintegrated in 1981–82. The picture only entered the Accademia in 1981. 95. George R. Bent, Public Painting and Visual Culture in Early Republican Florence (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 17–18, and see his entire chapter on outdoor tabernacles and their role in the community. He points out

that the painting was mounted in a poor district of Florence. He says that Augustine, Romuald, and Bernard are all candidates to be the saint in white at the lower right. 96. Vasari, Milanesi, vol. 1, p. 624n2. This was the report of the edition by Gentili, De’ Giudici, and Hugford, vol. 1 (1767), p. 445n1, cited by Barocchi, ed., Le Vite, vol. 2, part 2, Commento, p. 612. 97. Alessandro Chiappelli, “ ‘Giottino’ e un tabernacolo testè riaperto in Firenze.” He says it was sheltered from the elements by an iron grill and a glass door. 98. Bernard Berenson, Italian Pictures of the Renaissance: Florentine School (London: Phaidon, 1963), vol. 1, p. 151, with a question mark. Presumably Berenson saw the picture in the exhibition of detached frescoes in Florence in 1957; Mostra affreschi staccati, exhibition catalogue (Florence: Forte di Belvedere, 1957), no. 40, p. 49. 99. Boskovits, Pittura fiorentina alla vigilia del Rinascimento, p. 41. 100. On those renovations, see Alessio Monciatti, Il Palazzo Vaticano nel Medioevo (Florence: Olschki, 2005), pp. 239–43. 101. Colnaghi’s Dictionary of Florentine Painters, p. 128. 102. Crowe and Cavalcaselle, History of Painting in Italy: Umbria, Florence, and Siena, vol. 2, pp. 190–91, following Müntz. Vasari, Milanesi, vol. 1, p. 626, says Giottino painted frescoes at the Lateran. Crowe and Cavalcaselle also publish documentation of a substantial payment to a Giotto pictore in Pisa in 1369, a private and profane commission. This is no longer considered to refer to Giottino (see Labriola, “Giottino,” as well as the entry by De Benedictis in the Enciclopedia dell’arte medievale, for example), but I am not sure how it can be ruled out. 103. It may seem puzzling that documents of 1366 and 1367 listing painters brought in as consultants by the Opera del Duomo of Florence name Taddeo Gaddi, Andrea di Cione, Niccolò di Tommaso, Giovanni di Bonsi, and several others, but not Giottino, Giovanni da Milano, or Agnolo Gaddi. Richard Offner, Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting, section 4, vol. 1, Andrea di Cione (New York: College of Fine Arts, New York University, 1962), pp. 21–22. But one should not overinterpret this fact. Giottino and the others may have been out of town or simply not interested in serving as consultants. Many painters named in this list are completely unknown to us today. 104. Longhi, “Stefano Fiorentino,” p. 68. 105. The concept of the painters’ compagnia or cooperative was first developed by Ugo Procacci, “Di Jacopo di Antonio e delle compagnie di pittori del Corso degli Adimari nel XV secolo,” Rivista d’arte, ser. 3, 10 (1961): pp. 3–70. Judith B. Steinhoff, Sienese Painting After the Black Death (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), ch. 6, builds on the idea, presenting evidence for a Sienese compagnia flourishing between 1348 and 1363, a sharing of tools and patterns, documented across a corpus of 75 works, as a way of adapting to new economic conditions. See Skaug, Punch Marks from Giotto to Fra Angelico, pp. 191–93, 214–15 on the “post-1363 collaboration.” Giovanni da Milano’s whereabouts between 1348 and 1363 are unknown; it is the punch marks that place him in Siena in the 1350s.

340 106. Skaug, Punch Marks from Giotto to Fra Angelico. Some Italian scholars seem to have decided silently to reject Skaug’s evidence: Federica Baldini, for example, in the exhibition catalogue L’eredità di Giotto still dates the San Remigio Pietà to 1357–59. See Steinhoff ’s discussion and defense of the punch mark evidence in Sienese Painting After the Black Death, pp. 229–30n6. 107. Boskovits, Pittura fiorentina alla vigilia del Rinascimento, p. 206n145; p. 371, fig. 219. For the Ponce picture (Museo De Arte, inv. no. 62.0256; Kress Collection, no. 1119), see Shapley, Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection, p. 43, fig. 107, with attribution to a follower of Niccolò di Pietro Gerini. Fondazione Zeri, Fototeca, no. 2971. 108. Brooklyn Museum, inv. no. 1995.2. Note that Ragionieri, “Pittura del Trecento a Firenze,” p. 301, sees echoes of the San Remigio panel in Nardo di Cione and Giovanni Bonsi as well. 109. Ragionieri, “Pittura del Trecento a Firenze,” p. 301. 110. Stockholm, National Museum, inv. no. 2259. 111. London, National Gallery, inv. no. 1468, c. 1369–70, 154 × 138 cm. Dillian Gordon, The Italian Paintings Before 1400 (London: National Gallery, 2011), pp. 42–51, points out that Crucifixions with crowds — the Spanish Chapel may have been a source — were rare in the main fields of altarpieces. The decision to transfer this scene better known from frescoes to a panel may have been prompted by the San Remigio panel. That picture’s large red titulus, its supporting peg, and the letter Y have been thought by some to register the painter’s contact with Sienese or even northern Italian art. Schubring, “Giottino,” p.  171n2, says the YNRI is northern, Venice or Verona. But I have not seen convincing comparanda. See the Crucifix by Cavallini, the fresco in Naples, San Domenico Maggiore: tablet mounted on a small peg. Giotto’s Padua and Assisi Crucifixions also have the tablet mounted on a thin peg. 112. Rome, Galleria Corsini, inv. no. 558, 87 × 55 cm. Daniela Parenti, ed., Giovanni da Milano: capolavori del gotico fra Lombardia e Toscana, exhibition catalogue, Galleria dell’Accademia (Florence: Giunti, 2008), no. 15, pp. 198–200. Fondazione Zeri, Fototeca, no. 2899. 113. On the relations between Giottino and Giovanni da Milano, see Daniela Parenti in the exhibition catalogue Giovanni da Milano, pp. 65–66. She notes the similarity between the “worldly” female portrait in the San Remigio painting and the figure of St. Catherine in Giovanni’s Prato altar as well as figures in the Rinuccini frescoes. She relates the solemn, “aulic” language of Giottino’s composition to such mature works of Giovanni as the St. Anthony in Williamstown (cat. no. 13; cf. the bishop saint in the Uffizi picture). But she prefers to reverse the direction of influence, dating the San Remigio panel to the 1360s, with Giottino taking Giovanni’s Corsini panel as a model and elevating Giovanni’s naturalism. In her view, the punch marks brought to Florence by Giovanni in 1363 would confirm this. 114. Munich, Alte Pinakothek, inv. no. waf 304, 45.6 × 85.6 cm. The panel may have been mounted above a retable or a

door. See most recently the catalogue of the Alte Pinakothek: Andreas Schumacher, ed., Florentiner Malerei: Die Gemälde des 14. bis 16. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2017), pp. 185–89. Fondazione Zeri, Fototeca, no. 2989. 115. Vavalà, La croce dipinta, pp. 301–14 and the analytic tables, pp. 456–67. An earlier example with both motifs is the Entombment by Taddeo Gaddi at Santa Croce, Bardi di Vernio Chapel (ill. 5.5). For the nails, see the panel in the Harvard Art Museums with the Entombment and other scenes attributed to the Master of the Orcagnesque Misericordia (inv. no. 1917.213) (ill. 5.14). 116. Andrea De Marchi, ed., Santa Maria Novella: La Basilica e il convento, vol. 1 (Florence: Mandragola, 2015), p. 104; also p. 239 in same volume. 117. Trotta and Bertani, San Remigio a Firenze, vol. 1, p. 263. 118. Raimond van Marle, The Development of the Italian Schools of Painting, vol. 3 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1924), pp. 614, 616, fig. 345. Maria Sframeli, ed., Il restauro dei dipinti di Niccolò di Pietro Gerini: Deposizione e Resurrezione di Gesù Cristo (Florence: Polistampa, 2015). This picture, dependent on Taddeo Gaddi’s Entombment in the Bardi di Vernio chapel, also has Nicodemus with the nails. 119. Berlin, Gemäldegalerie, inv. no. 1074a. Boskovits, Frühe italienische Malerei, no. 25. Note the titulus on a peg. D’Arcais, Giotto, pp.  316–17. Boskovits says it is the same hand that painted the Stefaneschi altar. Others attribute the panel to the “Parente” of Giotto, or the Master of the Vaults. 120. National Gallery, inv. no. 3895. Gordon, Italian Paintings before 1400, pp. 372–79. On the verso, there is a Cross with nails and hammer; Martin Davies (cited by Gordon, p. 377) argued that the pendant (Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. no. 1975.1.102) would originally have also had a painted verso, in this case depicting the Crown of Thorns. 121. Further support for the claim that the Crown of Thorns is a hidden theme is Birkmeyer’s argument that the cross in this picture is only symbolic, itself one of the Arma Christi: Birkmeyer, “The Pietà from San Remigio,” p. 464, also pointing out that the lunette in Munich has vertical poles leaning against the Cross (ill. 5.9). 122. Here I quote the 1550 edition, Barocchi and Bettarini, eds. Le vite, vol. 2, part 1, Testo, p. 234. 123. On the grasping of sacred objects with the hands covered by a cloth or a corner of a cloak, see Rab Hatfield, Botticelli’s Uffizi ‘Adoration’: A Study in Pictorial Content (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), pp. 35–48, on veils and cloths and the theme of offering: the laity were expected to cover their hands with cloth when making an offering; and Moshe Barasch, Giotto and the Language of Gesture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 97–115. See the Lamentation / Entombment discussed in Amy Neff, A Soul’s Journey: Franciscan Art, Theology, and Devotion in the Supplicationes variae (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2019), pp. 132–36, pl. 73 (fol. 377v in the manuscript): the male figure at right (Joseph of Arimathea) has a cloth draped over his shoulder and arms; Neff adduces Byzantine

no t e s 341 models. Simeon holds the Christ Child in this fashion in Giotto’s Assisi and Padua Presentations. The older man at the right of Giotto’s Lamentation at Padua — Joseph of Arimathea? — drapes the end of his white, shawl-like garment over his hand, but holds nothing. Cardinal Stefaneschi in his altarpiece by Giotto holds the ancona with a cloth. The St. Benedict by Nardo di Cione in Stockholm (National Museum, inv. no. 2259) holds his red book with a sleeve-covered hand. 124. Laurence B. Kanter, Painting and Illumination in Early Renaissance Florence, 1300–1450 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994), no. 31a. Private collection. 125. Billi, Libro di Antonio Billi, p. 18–19. 126. Vasari, Milanesi, vol. 3, “Life of Perugino,” p. 586: speaking of an altar started by Filippino Lippi, the Deposition now in the Accademia: i Niccodemi che lo depongono (there are three men on two ladders). Vasari, Milanesi, vol. 5, “Life of Perino del Vaga,” p. 600: the Deposition for Santa Maria sopra Minerva (mostly destroyed by a flood in 1530). Here in a footnote Milanesi says that Bottari already remarked upon the usages of the plural Niccodemi in Vasari. 127. John Martin, Venice’s Hidden Enemies: Italian Heretics in a Renaissance City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 126–46, gives a good summary of the debates. 128. Carlos Eire, War Against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 234–75, on the Nicodemites and Calvin; p. 243n38 for the passage by Brenz. 129. Jane Kristof, “Michelangelo as Nicodemus: The Florence Pietà,” Sixteenth Century Journal 20 (1989): pp. 163–82, points out that Calvin’s attacks on Nicodemites targeted inter alia the Spirituali, a community of liberal or reform-minded Catholics loosely organized around Cardinal Reginald Pole and including Michelangelo’s friend Vittoria Colonna. On the evangelical or reform movements in sixteenth-century Italy, see Delio Cantimori, Eretici italiani del Cinquecento (Florence: Sansoni, 1967); Carlo Ginzburg, Il nicodemismo: simulazione e dissimulazione religiosa nell’ Europa del ’500 (Torino: Einaudi, 1970); and Paolo Simoncelli, Evangelismo italiano del Cinquecento: questione religiosa e nicodemismo politico (Rome: Istituto storico italiano per l’età moderna e contemporanea, 1979). See Alexander Nagel, The Controversy of Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), pp. 3–7, on the overall relation between Reform impulses and Renaissance art, and throughout, for example, pp. 197–220 on “forms of iconophobia”; as well as Corine Schleif, “Nicodemus and Sculptors: Self-Reflexivity in Works by Adam Kraft and Tilman Riemenschneider,” Art Bulletin 75 (1993): pp. 599–626, esp. p. 612. 130. Ginzburg, Il nicodemismo, p.  97, citing Huldrych Zwingli, In evangelicam historiam . . . (Zurich, 1539), p. 292; cited also by Kristof, “Michelangelo as Nicodemus,” p. 172. The Grande Dizionario della lingua italiana defines un Nicodemo in this sense, i.e., as a dissembler, but the example is drawn from a nineteenth-century author. 131. The Gospel of Nicodemus is also known as the Acts

of Pilate (see p. 129). The text we have dates from the fifth or sixth centuries, but according to Elliott there was an older tradition. J. K. Elliott, The Apocryphal New Testament: A Collection of Apocryphal Christian Literature in an English Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 164–85. 132. Sacchetti in his letter to Jacomo di Conte mocks the image; Franco Sacchetti, La battaglia delle belle donne: Le lettere, le sposizioni di vangeli, ed. Alberto Chiari (Bari: Laterza, 1938), p. 102. 133. Giordano da Rivalto, Prediche inedite (Bologna, 1867), p.  170, quoted by Ivan Nagel, Gemälde und Drama: Giotto, Masaccio, Leonardo (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2009), p. 71. 134. Schleif, “Nicodemus and Sculptors,” p. 612. 135. It was in the collection of Achillito Chiesa in the early twentieth century, then Contini Bonacossi’s collection, and then acquired by Kress in 1931. However, it is not in any of the five sales catalogues of the Chiesa collection ( 1925–1930). 136. For these opinions, some of which were unpublished communications, see Shapley, Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection, p. 32. Bernard Berenson, Italian Pictures of the Renaissance: Florentine School, vol. 1, p. 105. 137. Vasari, Milanesi, vol. 1, p. 595 (just says a tavola); p. 607 (says it was signed). 138. Giuseppe Richa, Notizie istoriche delle chiese fiorentine, vol. 1 (Florence, 1754), p. 258. 139. There is no physical evidence that decides whether the rood screen extended across the side aisles as well. It is not aligned with the existing door, so that would not have been a problem. But there are no traces on the wall indicating a join with the tramezzo. Bandini, “Vestigia dell’ antico tramezzo nella chiesa di S. Remigio a Firenze.” See also her article “La chiesa di San Remigio a Firenze e la sua decorazione pittorica tra XIV e XV secolo.” 140. Richa does not mention a signature. There are other complicating facts. In 1842, the parish sold an Annunciation to the Accademia. That picture is now believed to be the Annunciation attributed to Mariotto di Nardo. Sonia Chiodo says this picture may not have arrived at San Remigio until the late eighteenth century, but that is just a conjecture. The Annunciation by Mariotto di Nardo may have been at San Remigio ever since it was painted c. 1405–10, and if so, then it may have been the picture Vasari attributed to Orcagna. Perhaps it bore a signature or a notice indicating it was by Mariotto di Nardo, whom Vasari believed (possibly correctly) to be the son of Nardo di Cione and therefore the nephew of Orcagna. Accademia, inv. no. 1890 n. 463, 165.5 × 155 cm. Miklós Boskovits and Daniela Parenti, Cataloghi della Galleria dell’ Accademia di Firenze, Dipinti, vol. 2, Il tardo Trecento (Florence: Giunti, 2010), no. 19, pp. 104–7. 141. Siena, Pinacoteca Nazionale, inv no. 88, 130 × 150 cm. Piero Torriti, ed., La Pinacoteca nazionale di Siena: I dipinti (Genoa: Sagep, 1990), pp. 78–79. 142. Umberto Pini, “L’Annunciazione di Andrea Orcagna retrovata,” Acropoli 1 (1960/61): pp. 7–37. Gert Kreytenberg, Orcagna, Andrea di Cione: ein universeller Künstler der Gotik in

342 Florenz (Mainz: P. von Zabern, 2000), pp. 63–66, pl. 14a and figs. 64–67 (photos of 1947 and 1960 and the Louvre copy). 143. Andrea De Marchi, “ ‘Cum dictum opus sit magnum’: il documento pistoiese del 1274 e l’allestimento trionfale dei tramezzi in Umbria e Toscana fra Due e Trecento,” in Medioevo: Memoria e immagine, ed. Arturo Carlo Quintavalle (Milan: Electa, 2009), pp. 603–21, a theory about triadic mounting of pictures (often two panels flanking a Crucifix), a convention mostly exhausted by the 1320s. Bandini, “Vestigia dell’ antico tramezzo nella chiesa di S. Remigio a Firenze,” pp. 223–26. Both scholars describe the traces on the second pilaster on the right of the stone once supporting the pulpit as well as traces of the joins of the rood screen to the tramezzo, and present a scale drawing of a reconstruction of the tramezzo showing that while the church feels small when you are in it, there was plenty of room on a rood-screen for two works the size of the Pietà. The ceiling of the nave is indeed higher than it looks. 144. Miklós Boskovits, “Orcagna in 1357 — and in Other Times,” Burlington Magazine 113, no. 818 (May 1971), p. 240. 145. Musée du Louvre, inv. no. 201641, 78 × 58 cm. 146. Note also the patron’s blue and orange garment — as if the forger copied the figure in the Ponce Annunciation! 147. 123 × 83 cm. Ladis, Taddeo Gaddi, no. 16, questions the attribution. Tartuferi in L’eredità di Giotto, pp. 120–22. 148. Harvard Art Museums, inv. no. 1917.213, third quarter of the fourteenth century, 82.5 × 54.3 cm. Sirén, Giottino, p. 217, attributed it to Jacopo di Cione. 149. Courtauld Galleries, inv. no. 1966.gp.223, 62.5 × 38.8 cm. Fondazione Zeri, Fototeca, no. 4634. The panel has also been attributed to Lorenzo di Niccolò and the Master of the Orcagnesque Misericordia. 150. Carl Brandon Strehlke, Italian Paintings, 1250–1450, in the John G. Johnson Collection and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, in association with the Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), p. 14, attributed to a follower of Agnolo Gaddi. Fondazione Zeri, Fototeca, no. 104645. The picture has also been attributed to Agnolo Gaddi and Andrea Bonaiuti. 151. Fondazione Zeri, Fototeca, no. 4788. 152. Accademia, inv. no. 1890 n. 455, 179 × 117 cm. Fondazione Zeri, Fototeca, no. 4087. 153. Louis Alexander Waldman, “Pontormo, Niccolò di Pietro Gerini, and the Capponi Chapel,” in Renaissance Studies in Honor of Joseph Connors, ed. Louis A. Waldman and Machtelt Isräels, vol. 1 (Florence: Villa I Tatti, 2013), pp. 15–18. Henk van Os, Sienese Altarpieces, 1215–1460: Form, Content, Function, vol. 2 (Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1990), pp. 102–3, mentions the heavy, blocklike kneeling angels in works by Andrea di Bartolo and Taddeo di Bartolo. 154. Yale University Art Gallery, inv. no. 1871.21, 116.5 × 136.8 cm. Fondazione Zeri, Fototeca, no. 3488. Bandini, “La chiesa di San Remigio a Firenze e la sua decorazione pittorica,” p. 178 and fig. 20, invokes this painting as a possible model for the Annunciation fresco in the refectory at San Remigio, of which traces survive. But, of course, the Ponce Annunciation would equally have served as a model.

155. A pallium is a white woolen sash, an ecclesiastical garment of great antiquity, usually adorned with crosses and worn only by prelates of distinction. Its origins are obscure. The Feast of the Annunciation was added to the list of liturgical celebrations meriting the donning of the pallium already in the tenth century. Steven A. Schoenig, Bonds of Wool: The Pallium and Papal Power in the Middle Ages (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2016), pp. 2–5, 256–57. The angels in these paintings seem to be wearing free-form, ribbon-like versions of the pallium — perhaps their introduction to the iconography represents a theory about the origins of the garment? 156. Perri Lee Roberts, Corpus of Early Italian Paintings in North American Collections, vol. 3, The South (Athens, GA: Georgia Museum of Art, 2009), pp. 590–91. 157. Labriola, “Giottino” says it was destroyed around 1570, but I am not sure what the evidence for this is. 158. Marcia Hall, “The Ponte in S. Maria Novella: The Problem of the Rood Screen in Italy,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 37 (1974): pp. 157–73; and Marcia Hall, “The Tramezzo in S. Croce, Florence, Reconstructed,” Art Bulletin 56 (1974): pp. 325–41. See her recent summary of the work on Italian rood screens, “The Tramezzo in the Italian Renaissance, Revisited,” in Thresholds of the Sacred: Architectural, Art Historical, Liturgical, and Theological Perspectives on Religious Screens, East and West, ed. Sharon Gerstel (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library, 2006), pp. 215–25. 159. These are my own measurements. See also Bandini, “Vestigia dell’ antico tramezzo nella chiesa di S. Remigio a Firenze.” 160. Giotto’s Dormition (Berlin) from the Ognissanti, for example, was in an altar in the rood screen. See Schwarz, Giottos Werke, p. 93, on the altars at Santa Maria Novella. 161. Joanna Cannon, Religious Poverty, Visual Riches: Art in the Dominican Churches of Central Italy in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), p. 38. Donal Cooper, “Experiencing Dominican and Franciscan churches in Renaissance Italy,” in Sanctity Pictured: The Art of the Dominican and Franciscan Orders in Renaissance Italy, ed. Trinita Kennedy (Nashville: Frist Center for the Visual Arts, 2014), pp.  47–61, summarizes our knowledge on tramezzi, stressing the interpenetration of lay and clerical zones, and the flexibility, which is what makes it so hard for us to hypothesize about locations. The Presentation by Fra Carnevale in Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, inv. no. 37.108, depicting a rood screen with altars, is much too late for our purposes — circa 1467 — and anyway dubious as evidence, but it is almost all we have; Cannon invokes it, Religious Poverty, p. 40. 162. Note that De Marchi in his published lecture course La pala d’altare did not include the San Remigio Pietà. David Ekserdjian, however, includes the work in his recent magisterial book The Italian Renaissance Altarpiece, pp. 18–19, as did Jacob Burckhardt in his manuscript on the altarpiece (1893–94), The Altarpiece in Renaissance Italy, ed. and trans. Peter Humfrey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 55 (Burckhardt did not consider the frame original).

no t e s 343 163. Michele Bacci, Investimenti per l’aldilà: Arte e raccomandazione dell’anima nel Medioevo (Rome: GLF Editori Laterza, 2003), p. 159, pl. 8. Luciano Bellosi, “La mostra di affreschi staccati, al Forte Belvedere,” Paragone, n.s., 21, no. 201 (1966): pp. 78–79. 164. Paul Schoenen, “Epitaph,” Reallexikon zur deutschen Kunstgeschichte, vol. 5 (Stuttgart: Druckenmüller, 1967), col. 872–921: the Greek word, meaning “belonging to the grave,” originally referred to a funeral oration or eulogy, later to an inscription on a tomb, and in the fifteenth century was transferred to entire monuments, typically wall monuments with inscriptions and sometimes images, and not associated with a tomb. Dagmar Thauer, Der Epitaphaltar (Munich: Mäander, 1984), is about epitaph-altar hybrids. 165. Victor M. Schmidt, “The Lunette-Shaped Panel and Some Characteristics of Panel Painting,” in Italian Panel Painting of the Duecento and Trecento, ed. Victor M. Schmidt, Studies in the History of Art 61 (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2002), pp. 82–101, here p. 86. 166. See the reconstruction by Debra Pincus, The Tombs of the Doges of Venice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 108–20, figs. 81–86. There is no documentation of the commission, but Dandolo expressed shortly before his death the desire to be buried in the Frari. This implies that the whole structure, tomb and painting, was undertaken post mortem. The painting is in poor condition. Michelangelo Muraro, Paolo da Venezia (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1970), pp. 33–35, 126–27. 167. John Pope-Hennessy, Italian Gothic Sculpture (London: Phaidon, 1972), p. 228. 168. Bacci, Investimenti per l’aldilà, pp. 68–69, pl. 4. See the discussion above, p. 48. 169. Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. no. 07.200. Acquired by 1907 by Roger Fry, this was one of the very first pre-1400 paintings to enter the museum; Caroline Elam, Roger Fry and Italian Art (London: Ad Ilissum, in association with The Burlington Magazine, 2019), pp. 40–41. 170. Denver Art Museum, inv. no. 1961.154, 30 × 64 cm. Shapley, Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection, pp. 33–34, fig. 78. It has been proposed that the panel was the center of the predella of a polyptych attributed to Jacopo di Cione (c. 1368–70?) and perhaps from Santa Maria degli Angeli: Gordon, Italian Paintings Before 1400, pp. 95–102, attributing the Denver picture tentatively to Andrea and Jacopo di Cione and suggesting that the portrayed is Franceschino di Ser Berto degli Albizzi, a notary. Cf. the predella in Prague by Nardo di Cione; Richard Offner, Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting, section 4, vol. 2, Nardo di Cione (New York: College of Fine Arts, New York University, 1960), pp. 33–35, pl. 5ff. 171. Monaldo Forteguerra, whose wrists are held by the Virgin in the fresco in Santa Maria Nuova in Viterbo (p. 48), was buried below that image. 172. Paul A. Underwood, The Kariye Djami, vol. 1 (New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1966), pp. 269–99, and vol. 3, pl. 533–53. He says that aristocrats sometimes took orders late in life to ensure a church burial; cf. Enrico Scrovegni.

173. Katherine Marsengill, Portraits and Icons: Between Reality and Spirituality in Byzantine Art (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), pp. 232–45, figs. 86–87. 174. Accademia, inv. no. 1890 Dep. n.65. Miklós Boskovits and Angelo Tartuferi, Cataloghi della Galleria dell’ Accademia di Firenze, Dipinti, vol. 1, Dal Duecento a Giovanni da Milano (Florence: Giunti, 2003), no. 3, pp. 43–47. 175. On the Bellacci and their involvement with the church, see Bandini, “Vestigia dell’ antico tramezzo nella chiesa di S. Remigio a Firenze,” p. 223; Labriola, “Giottino”; and Trotta and Bertani, San Remigio a Firenze, vol. 1, pp. 263–64. 176. Schubring, “Giottino,” p. 172; Birkmeyer, “Pietà from San Remigio,” pp. 477–78. 177. Richa, Notizie istoriche delle chiese fiorentine, p. 260: sotto al pulpito vedesi lapida di marmo ritta al muro. 178. Thomas Loughman, “Commissioning Familial Remembrance in Fourteenth-Century Florence: Signaling Alberti Patronage at the Church of S. Croce,” in The Patron’s Payoff: Conspicuous Commissions in Italian Renaissance Art, ed. Jonathan K. Nelson and Richard Zeckhauser (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), pp. 133–48, here p. 141. 179. Maria Bandini, “La chiesa di San Remigio a Firenze e la sua decorazione pittorica,” p. 173n15. 180. On Alberti’s quarrel with the Franciscans, see Bruce Cole, Agnolo Gaddi (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), p. 80. 181. Mattea di messer Francesco Strozzi married Jacopo in 1345; their son was therefore no older than twenty-­six when he died. Jacopo’s brother Bartolommeo Carocci also died in 1374. He and his wife had ten children including a daughter who was a Clarissan nun and three daughters who married in 1367, 1375, and 1377. See the family tree provided in Richard A. Goldthwaite, Enzo Settesoldi, and Marco Spallanzani, Due libri mastri degli Alberti: Una grande compagnia di Calimala, 1348–1358, vol. 1 (Florence: Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze, 1995), p. xiv. According to the tree, Caroccino was the only child of Jacopo and Mattea, weakening the Alberti patronage hypothesis. 182. Baldini in L’eredità di Giotto, p. 172, for example, says she is a Benedictine nun. Labriola, “Giottino,” agrees, suggesting that this is the meaning of St. Benedict’s hand on her head. 183. Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 120, calculates that in 1427, eighteen percent of Florentine women aged forty were widows; forty-five percent of those aged fifty. 184. Rosita Levi Pisetzky, Storia del costume in Italia, vol. 2, Il Trecento – il Quattrocento (Milan: Istituto editoriale italiano, 1964), pp. 121–22. Jacqueline Musacchio, Art, Marriage and Family in the Florentine Renaissance Palace (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 247–48. See Bernhard Jussen, Der Name der Witwe: Erkundungen zur Semantik der mittelalterlichen Busskultur (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000), pp. 176–82. 185. Jussen, Der Name der Witwe, pp. 202–3. Samuel Kline Cohn, Jr., The Cult of Remembrance and the Black Death (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), pp. 116–17, on widows’ commemoration of their husbands.

344 186. For some examples of widows as patrons in this period, see Catherine King, Renaissance Women Patrons: Wives and Widows in Italy, c. 1300 – c. 1550 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1998), pp. 100–103, 221–23. Instructive, even if drawing on documents not from Italy but from Liège, is Michel Lauwers, La mémoire des ancêtres, le souci des morts (Paris: Beauchesne, 1997), pp. 425–59 on the role of semireligious widows (mulieres religiosae) in care for the dead, and pp. 437, 441, and 451 on Mary Magdalene as a model, and on women as “agents” of the Christianization of funerary practices in the late Middle Ages. 187. See “Bellacci, Bellaccio di Puccio,” Digital Sepoltuario, University of Virginia: sepoltuario.iath.virginia.edu/tombs /people/PEO00000880. 188. Steinhoff, “Gendering Prayer in Trecento Florence,” p. 77; observing that the younger woman is treated in a special fashion — she crosses her arms like a holy figure, she is dressed in highest luxury, she is presented almost frontally — Steinhoff asks whether she might in fact be the dead person. I would not wish to rule out this intriguing suggestion. 189. Bacci, Investimenti per l’aldilà, pp. 180–81, fig. 19, pl. 18. 190. Sharon T. Strocchia, Death and Ritual in Renaissance Florence (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), pp. 55–104. 191. Arnold Angenendt, “Theologie und Liturgie der mittelalterlichen Toten-Memoria,” in Memoria: Der geschichtliche Zeugniswert des liturgischen Gedenkens im Mittelalter, ed. Karl Schmidt and Joachim Wollasch (Munich: Fink, 1984), pp. 79–199, esp. pp. 164–99, and Renate Kroos, “Grabbräuche und Grabbilde,” in Schmidt and Wollasch, eds., Memoria: Der geschichtliche Zeugniswert des liturgischen Gedenkens im Mittelalter, pp. 285–353, presenting an impressive quantity of material especially from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. 192. Jacopo da Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan, vol. 1 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), ch. 76, “De letania maiori et minori.” 193. Saint Bridget of Sweden, Revelations, ed. Bridget Morris, trans. Denis Searby, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 140–42. 194. The article by Arnold Angenendt, “Fear, Hope, Death, and Salvation,” in the Oxford Handbook of Medieval Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 289–304, is useful on the question of intercession. 195. Hans Küng, The Church (London: Burns & Oates, 1967), p. 43. 196. As for the rest of us, confusion reigned about whether or not we remain in an intermediate state until the final collective judgment. There was a basis in the Gospel for a belief in an immediate passage to Heaven: Luke 16:19–31, for example —  the rich man and Lazarus. Pope Benedict XII clarified the question with the bull Benedictus Deus in 1337 asserting that the souls of the saved were introduced immediately upon death into the presence and direct apprehension (visio beatifica) of God. The fresco by Maso di Banco in the Bardi di Vernio (Bardi di Mangona) Chapel in Santa Croce, with a man rising

from his tomb toward Christ, may depict such a personalized or “particular” judgment. (see p. 332, n. 35). Wilkins, “Maso di Banco,” p. 23 and appendix 6, pp. 164–65, suggests that the concept might have been common, not unique to this picture. 197. Robert Bartlett, Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the Reformation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), p. 104; see also pp. 589, 592f., 609f., 621–26. 198. Note that the Waldensians doubted the effectiveness of prayers for the dead; Herbert Grundmann, Religious Movements in the Middle Ages [1929] (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), p. 42. 199. Patrick Quinn, “Aquinas’s Dilemma about Knowledge after Death,” in Death and Dying in the Middle Ages, ed. Edelgard E. DuBruck and Barbara I. Gusick (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), pp. 143–54. 200. Sacchetti, La battaglia delle belle donne, pp. 100–101 (letter 11). It sounds at first as if Sacchetti were exaggerating: were people really so simple? But see the two lost portraits of Urban V in San Salvatore della Corte (now Santa Maria della Luce in Trastevere), destroyed but preserved in water­ colors by Antonio Eclisse; Serena Romano, La pittura medievale a Roma, 312–1431: Corpus e atlante, vol. 6, Apogeo e fine del medioevo, 1288–1431 (Milan: Jaca, 2017), no. 88, pp. 344–45 (Valentine Giesser), with references to other such images in Roman churches. In both paintings, the pope is holding small images of Sts. Peter and Paul. And in each painting, there is a small marginal figure in an attitude of prayer — presumably prayer directed to Peter and Paul, not to the pope, but one can see how Sacchetti would seize upon the ambiguity. Sacchetti was referring to an image in the Baptistery in Florence. Sacchetti was also scornful of the Florentine Marian image-cults of la gente grossa e nuova, not excepting the miracle-working images at Orsanmichele and Impruneta; p. 103. 201. Bacci, Investimenti per l’aldilà, pp. 159–60. 202. Kroos, “Grabbräuche und Grabbilde,” pp. 346–53. 203. Otto Gerhard Oexele, “Memoria und Memorialbild,” in Schmidt and Wollasch, eds., Memoria: Der geschichtliche Zeugniswert des liturgischen Gedenkens im Mittelalter, pp. 384–440, here p. 385, 387, 439–40. 204. Géraldine Johnson, “Activating the Effigy: Donatello’s Pecci Tomb in the Siena Duomo,” Art Bulletin 77 (1995): pp. 445–59, here pp. 458–59. Leo Bruhns, “Das Motiv der ewigen Anbetung in der römischen Grabplastik des. 16., 17. und 18. Jhs.,” Römisches Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 4 (1940): pp. 255–432, here p. 264, ill. 183, mentions the Pellegrini statue but not the document. 205. Corinne Schleif, “Hands that Appoint, Anoint, and Ally: Late Medieval Donor Strategies for Appropriating Approbation through Painting,” Art History 16 (1993): pp. 1–32, is sometimes cited in support of the “power of images” thesis. But in this article, Schleif actually says that donors had all kinds of motives, including political. They manipulated conventions in order to present themselves in the best light. No magic here except propaganda. More open to the magical hypothesis is Marius Rimmele, Das Triptychon als Metapher,

no t e s 345 Körper, und Ort (Munich: Fink, 2010), pp. 287–94. Noa Turel, Living Pictures: Jan van Eyck and Painting’s First Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020), pp. 64–67, coins the phrase “pictorial cryogenics” and makes the leap from “vivification by color” to “perpetual prayer machines.” Laura D. Gelfand and Walter S. Gibson, “Surrogate Selves: The ‘Rolin Madonna’ and the Late-Medieval Devotional Portrait,” Simiolus 29 (2002): pp. 119–38, make perhaps the strongest case for the portrait as an active, efficacious stand-in, assembling examples from Books of Hours as well as panel painting and sculpture including effigies, and pointing to documentation of surrogate pilgrimages, penance, and prayer. In the end, however, they present no evidence that a portrait “continued to pray” even in the absence of the portrayed individual. The argument is sustained by suppositions: “In view of the importance attached to the repetition of prayers and other religious texts, we must consider the possibility that Margaret’s portrait, and by extension other devotional portraits in Books of Hours, were understood to engage in endless prayer, even when the people they represented were unable to do so” (p. 131). I would say that such images only represented the idea that the subject would pray perpetually if they could. 206. A maximum indifference to likeness is professed by members of the Compagnia di Disciplinati, a penitential confraternity: in the pinnacle of a painting by Niccolò di Pietro Gerini (c. 1405) of the Man of Sorrows are portrayed two kneeling penitentials presented to Christ by apostles; they are fully hooded, their faces hidden. Accademia, inv. no. 1890 n. 5066. Boskovits and Parenti, Cataloghi della Galleria dell’ Accademia di Firenze, Dipinti, vol. 2, Il Tardo Trecento, no. 23, pp. 123–28. 207. See the commentary by Gerhard Wolf on Paradiso 31.103–111 in Rudolf Preimesberger et al., eds., Porträt (Berlin: Reimer, 1999), pp. 168–75. 208. Roberta Orsi Landini, Moda a Firenze e in Toscana nel Trecento (Florence: Polistampa, 2019), pp. 31–32. The trendsetting work may have been Simone Martini’s Maestà (1315): Charles Dempsey, The Early Renaissance and Vernacular Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), pp. 43–55, 61, 95, 97–98. 209. A phrase of Bellosi, “Giottino e la pittura di filiazione,” p. 21. 210. Kocks, “Die Stifterdarstellung,” does not give any examples of requests for Intercession before the dead Christ. 211. Michele Bacci in two invaluable books has compiled an abundance of evidence, material and textual, much of it little known, relating to the salvational ambitions of the devout and the involvement of paintings and other artifacts in these projects. Michele Bacci,“Pro remedio animae”: Immagini sacre e pratiche devozionali in Italia centrale (secoli XIII e XIV) (Pisa: ETS, 2000): so-called “miraculous” images, collective and private cults, the involvement of images with liturgy; ex-votos (ch. 3); images, testaments, and hopes for salvation (ch. 4, pp. 227–328); legal aspects, inscriptions, iconography, and the portrait as an “expression” of the recommendation of the soul (ch. 5, pp. 329–430). Bacci, Investimenti per l’aldilà, covers similar ground but from different angles and introducing additional

material: prayer and other forms of “suffrage,” caritative practices associated with salvational hopes, and again the role of portraits. Bacci’s findings have not yet been absorbed by art historical scholarship. One of the many merits of his studies is that he distinguishes carefully between practices of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. 212. Arnold Angenendt says that even the early medieval idea of the afterlife was less theological and more a matter of thinking in religious-mystical images; he uses the word Ausmalungen, or picturing, envisioning; Angenendt, “Theologie und Liturgie der mittelalterlichen Toten-Memoria,” p. 198. 213. Wu Hung, “The Art of ‘Ritual Artifacts’ (Liqi): Discourse and Practice,” in A Companion to Chinese Art, ed. Martin J. Powers and Katherine R. Tsiang (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2016), pp. 233–53, here p. 240. 214. Robert Brennan, Painting as a Modern Art in Early Renaissance Italy (London: Harvey Miller, 2019), p. 160, quotes the Libro delle Rime, no. 248. 215. Iris Origo, The Merchant of Prato (New York: Knopf, 1957), pp. 11–20. 216. Origo, The Merchant of Prato, pp. 257–63. 217. Rome, Musei Capitolini, inv. no. pc 102, 217 × 89 cm. 218. Douglas Brine, “Evidence for the Forms and Usage of Early Netherlandish Memorial Paintings,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 71 (2008): pp. 139–68, deals with more than 200 examples of memorial tablets or epitaphs mounted near tombs. Although this material dates from a later period, the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the picture Brine presents might be instructive for us. He describes funerary, votive, commemorative, and expiatory functions that seem to overlap and combine. The epitaphs did all these things, or none of them. Probably no one had it straight in their minds. 219. See the discussions of the San Remigio Pietà and its modelling of forms of public grieving, especially as governed by sumptuary laws, in Judith B. Steinhoff, “Weeping Women: Social Roles and Images in Fourteenth-Century Tuscany,” in Crying in the Middle Ages: Tears of History, ed. Elina Gertsman (New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 35–52, esp. 41–46; and Judith B. Steinhoff, “Mandates for Women’s Mourning in the Early Renaissance: Paintings and the Law in Trecento Florence,” in Idealizing Women in the Italian Renaissance, eds. Elena Brizio and Marco Piana (Toronto: Center for Renaissance and Reformation Studies, 2022), pp. 25–53, esp. pp. 31–39. In the more recent article, Steinhoff interprets the mourning women at the right of Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Petronilla predella (ill. 4.16) as exemplars of proper public control of the emotions; p. 39. 220. Note the comment by George Bent, Public Painting and Visual Culture, pp. 5–6: the medieval sponsor saints convey ideas; the grieving women show the laity another register of devotional intensity. 221. Vasari, Milanesi, vol. 1, p. 628. 222. For Pozzi and Mattioda, Giorgio Vasari, p. 223, this passage shows Vasari reaffirming his sense of the limits of physiognomic realism: expression must not interfere with overall harmony.

346 223. Sirén, Giottino, p. 46. One of the surviving fragments of the Deposition by Giotto in Santa Chiara, Naples, depicts a bearded man clasping his hands together in similar fashion to the figure at the far right in the San Remigio Pietà. D’Arcais, Giotto, p. 349. John White, Art and Architecture in Italy, 1250–1400, p. 422, says that Joseph of Arimathea holds the nails and is facing St. Peter: no Nicodemus at all in the San Remigio Pietà, in other words. 224. Otto Rank, The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study [1925] (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971). 225. The binarism is stressed by the gospel of Pseudo-­ Matthew, where the doubting midwife is called Salome, just as she was in the Proto-Evangelium of James, and the believing midwife is now given a name, and at least in some manuscripts a strangely similar name: Zelomi (otherwise Zelemi or Zahel).Jan Gijsel, ed., Libri de nativitate Mariae, vol. 1, Pseudo-­ Matthaei Evangelium ed. Jan Gijsel and Rita Beyers, Corpus Christianorum, Series Apocryphorum (Turnhout: Brepols, 1997), ch. 13, sect. 3, pp. 416–17 and 416n4. The pious-practical binarism is brought out by the bestowal of a similar name on the doubting midwife. The twinned names suggest that we are dealing here with a single woman, divided in nature. 226. Bellosi, “Giottino e la pittura di filiazione,” p. 24, on Giottino’s Santo Spirito fresco, spoke of the hair of the angels twisted into buns, so femininizing them, as an innovation. 227. Oxford, Ashmolean Museum, inv. no. wa 1850.6, 37.4 × 65.2 cm. The artist has been thought to be Orcagna or his brother Jacopo but is now simply known as the Master of the Ashmolean Predella. 228. See Otto Rank on the doppelgänger: the ego projects the conscience outwards as something foreign to itself. 229. See Joanna Cannon, Religious Poverty, p. 332, on these portraits, which she considers “more powerfully animated” than typical kneeling supplicants, so pushing them away from generic status and toward portraiture. 230. On the non-worldly costumes of tertiaries and penitents, see Bacci, Investimenti per l’aldilà, pp. 180–81. 231. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. no. 1982.35.1, c. 1380, 57.8 × 46.4 cm. Cf. the triptych by Jacopo di Cione in the Accademia with two supplicants in fashionable red clothes; Accademia, inv. no. 1890 n. 8465. Boskovits and Tartuferi, Cataloghi della Galleria dell’ Accademia di Firenze, Dipinti, vol. 1, no. 20, pp. 116–21. There are similarly dressed figures at the lower right of the Allegory of the Church in the Spanish Chapel; Richard Offner, Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting, section 4, vol. 6, The Fourteenth Century: Andrea Bonaiuti (New York: New York University, 1979), pl. II 9. 232. There are many merisms in the Bible: see Ecclesiastes 3 or Romans 8:38–39. Related are so-called legal doublets such as cease and desist, ways and means, and other redundancies, as well as irreversible binomials (wear and tear, short and sweet). Calvert Watkins, How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 9–10, 44–46, defines merisms as two-part figures that refer to the totality of a single higher concept. Such “characteristic formulas” involve culturally significant features and have great staying

power, surviving lexical renewals. See also Jože Krašovec, “Merism — Polar Expression in Biblical Hebrew,” Biblica 64 (1983): pp. 231–39. 233. On the often-luxurious clothing of portrayed patrons, see Silvia Brunetti, La moda nella Toscana del ’300 (Siena: Pascal, 2011), pp. 15–20; on the relaxing of sumptuary laws regarding exposed shoulders, beginning in the 1340s, pp. 126–27; and on the depiction in religious paintings, beginning in the 1360s, of young women wearing tight-fitting shifts rather than overgowns, pp. 129–30. Brennan, Painting as a Modern Art, pp. 174– 76, fig. 72. 234. These are the “wider visual associations” invoked by Joanna Cannon, Religious Poverty. 235. Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), pp. 209–11. 236. Paris, Musée du Louvre, inv. no. mi 393 / Campana 135, 43.5 × 63 cm. 237. Pinacoteca Vaticana, inv. no. 40244, 34.7 × 24.5 cm. Francesco Rossi, Catalogo della Pinacoteca Vaticana, vol. 3, Il Trecento: Umbria — Marche — Italia del Nord (Vatican City: Tipografia Vaticana, 1994), no. 15, pp. 60–62: c. 1360; the only unusual feature, Rossi says, is that Mary and Joseph are kneeling on the same cloth that the child lies upon. Fondazione Zeri, Fototeca, no. 7963. Raimond van Marle, The Development of the Italian Schools of Painting, vol. 5 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1923–38), p. 178, fig. 113. Georg Weise and Gertrud Otto, Die religiösen Ausdrucksgebärden des Barock und ihre Vorbereitung durch die italienische Kunst der Renaissance, Schriften und Vorträge der Württembergischen Gesellschaft der Wissen­schaften, Geisteswissenschaftliche Abteilung, Heft 5 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1938), fig. 32. Barasch, Giotto and the Language of Gesture, p. 80, fig. 41 (as the work of a German artist). 238. This and a similar panel by Allegretto Nuzi in Ascoli Piceno (Fondazione Zeri, Fototeca, no. 7952) are reproduced by van Marle, Development of the Italian Schools of Painting, vol. 5, pp. 170–71, 174, figs. 108 and 110. 239. London, National Gallery, inv. no. 579. Gordon, Italian Paintings Before 1400, pp. 395, 402–3, fig. 19. says the composition was borrowed from an earlier altarpiece by Giovanni del Biondo in San Lorenzo, now in the Uffizi, Contini Bonacossi Collection. 240. Muna Tatari and Klaus von Stosch, Mary in the Qur’an: Friend of God, Virgin, Mother (London: Gingko, 2021), pp. 173–74. 241. Jeffrey Ruda, Fra Filippo Lippi: Life and Work (London: Phaidon, 1993), pp. 117, 121–23. Julia Liebrich, Die Verkündigung an Maria: Die Ikonographie der italienischen Darstellungen von den Anfängen bis 1500 (Cologne: Böhlau, 1997), pp. 65–66. 242. Albrecht Koschorke, The Holy Family and Its Legacy: Religious Imagination from the Gospels to Star Wars (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003) is a book-length analysis of the relational geometries of the Holy Family. 243. Bruno Latour, Rejoicing, or the Torments of Religious Speech [2002] (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), p. 157. 244. Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1979), p. 691. 245. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, pp. 687–88.

no t e s 347 246. Gordon, Italian Paintings Before 1400, pp. 209–16, figs. 15–16. 247. Ajaccio, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Palais Fesch, inv. no. 852.1.730, c. 1330, 51 × 46.5 cm. Gordon attributes the work to a Riminese collaborator of Francesco da Rimini (Maestro di Verucchio?). 248. Barasch, Giotto and the Language of Gesture, pp. 72–87. 249. Heather Webb, Dante’s Persons: An Ethics of the Trans­ human (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 63–76. 250. The Little Flowers of St. Francis, The Mirror of Perfection, The Life of St. Francis, Everyman’s Library (London: Dent, 1910), p. 37. Luigina Morini, ed., I fioretti di San Francesco (Milan: Rizzoli, 1979), p. 121. 251. Little Flowers of St. Francis, p. 12. Morini, ed., I fioretti di San Francesco, pp. 79–80 and n. 3. 252. British Library, Royal MS 6 E IX, fol. 10v–11r. Christine Sciacca, ed., Florence at the Dawn of the Renaissance: Painting and Illumination, 1300–1350 (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2012), cat. no. 5. Dieter Blume and Hans Belting, Malerei und Stadtkultur in der Dantezeit: Die Argumentation der Bilder (Munich: Hirmer, 1989), p. 41, ills. 8, 9. 253. Weise and Otto, Die religiösen Ausdrucksgebärden, pp. 28–47, with a list of examples illustrated by van Marle. 254. Raleigh, North Carolina Museum of Art, inv. no. gl.60.17.11, Kress 1170, c. 1325–30. Also attributed to the Pseudo Pier Francesco Fiorentino. Castelnuovo, ed., La pittura in Italia, vol. 1, p. 214. 255. John of Caulibus, Meditations on the Life of Christ, p. 15 (ch. 4, “The Incarnation”). Isa Ragusa and Rosalie B. Green, eds., Meditations on the Life of Christ (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 19. Sarah McNamer, Meditations on the Life of Christ: The Short Italian Text (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018), pp. 10–11, 202n12. 256. One would like to envision a religious drama in dialogue with the paintings already in the fourteenth century. However, Alessandro d’Ancona, Origini del teatro italiano, vol. 1 (Torino, 1891), pp. 207–16, found little evidence of Sacre­ rappresentazioni in the fourteenth century of the sort known from fifteenth-­century Florence. 257. Victor M. Schmidt, Painted Piety: Panel Paintings for Personal Devotion in Tuscany, 1250–1400 (Florence: Centro Di, 2005), pp. 129–30, lists several examples, including the panel depicting John the Baptist with a kneeling supplicant in La Spezia, Museo Civico, attributed to the Giotto shop (fig. 66); and Giovanni dal Ponte, Mystic Marriage, in the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest (fig. 83), husband with crossed arms and wife with hands pressed together. 258. Barasch, Giotto and the Language of Gesture, pp. 56–71. 259. Gerhart B. Ladner, “The Gesture of Prayer in Papal Iconography of the 13th and Early 14th Centuries,” in Didascaliae, ed. Sesto Prete, Festschrift Anselm M. Albareda (New York: Rosenthal, 1961), pp. 247–75. 260. Little Flowers of St. Francis, pp. 2–3. Morini, ed., I fioretti di San Francesco, p. 9. 261. On the contrast between the calm modern women and the expressive historical mourners, see Steinhoff, “Gendering

Prayer in Trecento Florence,” pp. 76–77, as well as her “Weeping Women: Social Roles and Images in Fourteenth-­Century Tuscany.” 262. Saint Bridget of Sweden, Revelations, ed. Bridget Morris, trans. Denis Searby, vol. 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 183. 263. Émile Mâle, The Gothic Image: Religious Art in France of the Thirteenth Century [1898] (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 283. 264. Schlosser, ed., Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Denkwürdigkeiten (I Commentarii), vol. 2, p. 130. 265. See Gabriele Guercio, Art as Existence: The Artist’s Monograph and its Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). 266. Vasari, Milanesi, vol. 1, pp. 628–29. 267. Baltimore, Walters Art Museum, inv. no. 37.750, 49.4 × 45.4 cm. See as well the wing of a diptych, also in the Walters (inv. no. 37.1686), containing, in small, labeled cavities surrounding the central Crucifixion on verre églomisé, relics of the True Cross, the Holy Sepulchre, the eleven thousand martyrs, and several apostles. The object makes Franciscan references and is dated c. 1355–70 to the mid-fourteenth century; the painted parts are attributed to Tommaso da Modena. Martina Bagnoli, Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics, and Devotion in Medieval Europe, exhibition catalogue, Cleveland Museum of Art and Walters Art Museum (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), nos. 118–19. See also the triptych by Simone dei Crocefissi in the Louvre, inv. no. dl 1973 15. Jens T. Wollesen, “Hasten to My Aid and Counsel”: The Answers of the Pictures: Private Devotional Panel Paintings in Italy around 1300 (New York: Legas, 2005), p. 61n34 and figs. 35–36, discusses several other such panels. In the Byzantine sphere, icons “were rarely used to house relics”: see Annemarie Weyl Carr, “Donors in the Frames of Icons: Living Beyond the Borders of Byzantine Art,” Gesta 45 (2002): pp. 189–98, here p. 189, discussing the diptych of Maria Palaiologina (1376–84) in Cuenca. 268. Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 417–18. 269. Yale University Art Gallery, inv. no. 1871.8, dated by the Gallery to 1335–40; by Ladis, Taddeo Gaddi, no. 62, to 1360– 66. Ladis says it was cut down but not too drastically: originally the corners of the tomb must have been visible. 270. Birkmeyer, “The Pietà from San Remigio,” pp. 461–62, 464. 271. So it would seem — but note the modern figure, probably Jean de Berry, at the left of the c. 1400 French Entombment in the Louvre (inv. no. m. i. 770). That figure holds an ointment jar, however, legitimating his otherwise somewhat intrusive presence. Victor M. Schmidt, “Portable Polyptychs with Narrative Scenes: Fourteenth-Century De luxe Objects between Italian Panel Painting and French Arts somptuaires,” in Italian Panel Painting of the Duecento and Trecento, ed. Victor M. Schmidt, Studies in the History of Art 61 (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2002), pp. 395–425, here pp. 417–18, ill. 35. 272. Shoshana Felman, “Turning the Screw of Interpretation,” in Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading:

348 Otherwise, ed. Shoshana Felman (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), pp. 94–207, here pp. 129–30.

c h ap t e r si x: t h e c la s s i c art h is to ry o f t h e p ort r a i t 1. Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting : Its Origins and Character (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953), p. ii. 2. Berlin, Gemäldegalerie, inv. no. 535, central panel, 91 × 89 cm. 3. Wim De Clercq, Jan Dumolyn, and Jelle Haemers, “ ‘Vivre Noblement’: Material Culture and Elite Identity in Late Medieval Flanders,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 38 (2007): pp. 1–31, here pp. 4–6. 4. The castle in the engraving is not an exact match of the castle in the painting, and this has sown doubts about the identification of the man as Bladelin. Max J. Friedländer, Early Netherlandish Painting, vol. 2, Rogier van der Weyden and the Master of Flémalle (Leiden: Sijthoff, 1967), no. 38; at no. 49, he notes that the castle in the Berlin picture closely resembles the castle in the background of Rogier van der Weyden’s so-called Columba altar, now in Munich (c. 1450–55). In any case, the castle may have been destroyed by 1641, suggesting that the engraver may in fact have copied the painting. Further evidence for Bladelin’s patronage is a late copy of the painting in the church at Middelburg, and a document revealing that the Berlin painting was in the Bruges home of the Countess of Middelburg in 1630. See Shirley Neilsen Blum, Early Netherlandish Triptychs: A Study in Patronage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), pp. 17–28; Martin Davies, Rogier van der Weyden (London: Phaidon, 1972), pp. 201–3; Lorne Campbell, Van der Weyden (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), p. 51; Dirk de Vos, Rogier van der Weyden (New York: Abrams, 1999), pp. 134, 242–48; and the Frankfurt and Berlin exhibition catalogue: Stephan Kemperdick and Jochen Sander, The Master of Flémalle and Rogier van der Weyden (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2009), pp. 337–40. Everyone has the same information, and no one can either prove or refute the identification. 5. Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting, p. 278; on p. 274, he says that they appear in van der Weyden’s Uffizi Entombment as well (ill.  7.5). No one else seems to accept these identifications. 6. Johanna Scheel, Das altniederländische Stifterbild: Emotionsstrategien des Sehens und der Selbsterkenntnis (Berlin: Mann, 2013), pp. 27–28, based on a survey of 328 triptychs by Suzanne Laemers; about a third contained portraits either on the wings or the central panel. The oldest work in this survey is the Maelbeke Madonna, a copy of the central (nonnarrative) panel of a lost triptych by van Eyck; the second oldest is van der Weyden’s Vienna Crucifixion. Ingrid Falque, Devotional Portraiture and Spiritual Experience in Early Netherlandish Painting (Leiden: Brill, 2019), lists 754 paintings, 30.4 percent of which place portraits of patrons on the same panel with the main sacred figures; in 28 cases, or 3.7 percent, these are triptychs. 7. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, inv. no. 901, central panel, 96 × 69 cm.

8. Dresden, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Gal.-Nr. 800. Friedländer, Early Netherlandish Painting, vol. 2, no. 90, pl. 180. 9. Madrid, Prado, inv. no. 2663. Max J. Friedländer, Early Netherlandish Painting, vol. 4, Hugo van der Goes (Leiden: Sijthoff, 1969), no. 50, pl. 54. Cf. the version in Brussels by Ambrosius Benson with a kneeling woman and two standing men —  mourners or onlookers? — replacing the patrons; Friedländer, Early Netherlandish Painting, vol. 11, Antwerp Mannerists and Adriaen Ysenbrant (Leiden: Sijthoff, 1974), no. 248. 10. Philadelphia, Barnes Collection, inv. no. bf 123. Max J. Friedländer, Early Netherlandish Painting, vol. 6, Gerard David, part 2 (Leiden: Sijthoff, 1971), no. 187, p. 84, pl. 198. 11. See Friedländer, Early Netherlandish Painting, vol. 2, nos. 20a–d (variations on the London Pietà with St. Jerome and patron) and 38a–b (copies of the Bladelin altar with adoring shepherds replacing the patron). See also no. 40a, the Holy Family with St. Paul and Patron, Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. no. 32.100.44, and no. 49, the Columba altar in Munich, inv. no. waf 1189, with a patron at the far left. 12. Jens T. Wollesen, “Hasten to My Aid and Counsel”: The Answers of the Pictures: Private Devotional Panel Paintings in Italy around 1300 (New York: Legas, 2005), p. 41. 13. Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting, pp. 277–78. 14. Al Acres, Renaissance Invention and the Haunted Infancy (London: Harvey Miller, 2013), pp.  200–208. The textual sources for these three readings are the Speculum Humanae Salvationis, the Meditations on the Life of Christ, and The Golden Legend, respectively. 15. Marika Takanishi Knowles, Realism and Role-Play: The Human Figure in French Art from Callot to the Le Nain Brothers (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2020), p. 192, argues that the condition of the independent portrait in early modern Europe is the absence of internal psychic drama. 16. Quoted by Michael Podro, “The Portrait: Performance, Role and Subject,” in Individualität, ed. Manfred Frank and Anselm Haverkamp, Poetik und Hermeneutik 13 (Munich: Fink, 1988), pp. 577–86, here p. 579; the phrase “life of others” is Podro’s. 17. Saint Bridget of Sweden, Revelations, ed. Bridget Morris, trans. Denis Searby, vol. 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), book 7, ch. 21, pp. 250–52. 18. Fabian Wolf, Die Weihnachtsvision der Birgitta von Schweden: Bildkunst und Imagination im Wechselspiel (Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 2018), pp. 199–203. See also Hans Aili and Jan Svanberg, Imagines Sanctae Brigittae: The Earliest Illuminated Manuscripts and Panel Paintings related to the Revelations of St. Birgitta of Sweden, 2 vols. (Stockholm: Royal Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities, 2003). 19. Wolf, Weihnachtsvision, pp. 205–9. 20. Wolf, Weihnachtsvision, pp. 209–20. 21. Wolf, Weihnachtsvision, pp. 210–11. 22. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Johnson Collection, no. 120, central panel, 63.5 × 51.9 cm. Carl Brandon Strehlke, Italian Paintings, 1250–1450, in the John G. Johnson Collection and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum

no t e s 349 of Art, in association with the Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), pp. 342–44, pl. 62. 23. In the Carmina regia addressed to Robert d’Anjou, British Library, Royal MS 6 E IX, fol. 4v–5r, across a pair of full-page miniatures, Mary kneels before the giant figure of Christ, hands pressed together in prayer; Christine Sciacca, ed., Florence at the Dawn of the Renaissance: Painting and Illumination, 1300–1350 (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2012), cat. no. 5. The panel in the Vatican Pinacoteca attributed to Allegretto Nuzi or Francescuccio Ghissi shows Mary in a blue robe kneeling before her illuminated child, with arms crossed on the breast; Joseph is behind her praying with hands pressed together (ill. 5.23). It is not clear whether this reflects Bridget’s account or not. Panofsky mentions several motifs of the Revelations in Netherlandish paintings, such as the cave, the candle, and the Flagellation column; Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting, p.  277n3; see also pp.  46, 94, 125–26. 24. Henrik Cornell, The Iconography of the Nativity of Christ (Uppsala: Lundequistska Bokhandeln, 1924), pp. 1–44. Cornell did not even know the three panels by Niccolò di Tommaso; the earliest picture he adduces is the fresco at Santa Maria Novella. 25. Millard Meiss, Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death: The Arts, Religion, and Society in the Mid-Fourteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951), p. 149 and n. 73. In one of the pictures, Mary is merely tending the infant, not praying to him. 26. Wolf, Weihnachtsvision, pp. 170–76, ills. 66, 68. The picture by the Master of San Lucchese: Miklós Boskovits, ed., The Alana Collection, Newark, Delaware, USA, vol. 1 (Florence: Polistampa, 2009), pp. 110–16 (Ada Labriola). The picture by the Master of the Piani d’Invrea Crucifixion, formerly in the Richard Feigen collection, has not yet been catalogued by the Alana Collection. 27. John of Caulibus, Meditations on the Life of Christ, p. 25 (ch. 7, “The Nativity”). Isa Ragusa and Rosalie B. Green, eds., Meditations on the Life of Christ (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 34. Sarah McNamer, Meditations on the Life of Christ: The Short Italian Text (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018), p. 25. The early depictions of a kneeling Mary, as Wolf points out (Weihnachtsvision, pp. 84–88), reinforce the hypothesis of an early dating of the Italian text of the Meditations. Wolf believes that the text dates most likely to 1299–1305. 28. Barbara Newman, “What Did It Mean to Say ‘I Saw’? The Clash between Theory and Practice in Medieval Visionary Culture,” Speculum 80 (2005): pp. 1–43, here pp. 37–41. 29. Wolf, Weihnachtsvision, pp. 231–305. 30. Wolf, Weihnachtsvision, pp. 323–35. 31. Dijon, Musée des Beaux-Arts, inv. no. ca 150. 32. Frank O. Büttner, Imitatio pietatis: Motive der christlichen Ikonographie als Modelle zur Verähnlichung (Berlin: Mann, 1983), pp. 81–83. 33. Jan Gijsel, ed., Libri de nativitate Mariae, vol. 1, Pseudo-­ Matthaei Evangelium, ed. Jan Gijsel and Rita Beyers, Corpus

Christianorum, Series Apocryphorum (Turnhout: Brepols, 1997), ch. 4, section 1, pp. 322–23. 34. Craig Harbison, “Visions and Meditations in Early Flemish Paintings,” Simiolus 15 (1985): pp.  87–118, here pp.  94–95, says that Bladelin “reenacts” Bridget’s vision. Generally, Harbison argues that lay patrons in the fifteenth century registered in the paintings they commissioned their desire to emulate the visionaries. No doubt they admired the visionaries. It is not clear, however, that they presumed either to “reenact” the prestigious visions, or to have and record their own personal visions, as he claims. Johanna Scheel, Das altniederländische Stifterbild, develops this hypothesis at greater length and perhaps more cautiously. As noted above, Bladelin’s psychic abstraction prevents us from too readily equating him or any other lay patron with Bridget, who really did witness the Nativity. 35. Hans Belting, Spiegel der Welt: Die Erfindung des Gemäldes in den Niederländen (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2010), pp. 55–64. This was the independently published textual component of the book Erfindung des Gemäldes: Das erste Jahrhundert der niederländischen Malerei (Munich: Hirmer, 1994), written with Christiane Kruse. See also Hans Belting, “Wappen und Porträt: Zwei Medien des Körpers,” in Das Porträt vor der Erfindung des Porträts, ed. Martin Büchsel and Peter Schmidt (Mainz: Zabern, 2003), pp. 89–100. 36. See Martin Davies, Rogier van der Weyden, pp. 200–201, 229, 241. 37. Alois Riegl, “Das holländische Gruppenporträt,” Jahrbuch des Allerhöchsten Kaiserhauses 22 (1902): pp.  71–278, reprinted in 1931 as Alois Riegl, Das holländische Gruppenporträt, 2 vols. (Vienna: Österreichische Staatsdruckerei, 1931). Translated by Evelyn M. Kain and David Britt as The Group Portraiture of Holland (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 1999). 38. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, inv. no. 993, 172 × 139 cm. 39. John R. Decker, The Technology of Salvation and the Art of Geertgen tot Sint Jans (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 22–26. 40. On the portraits, see Truus van Bueren and Molly Faries, “The ‘Portraits’ in Geertgen tot Sint Jans’ Vienna Panels,” in Le dessin sous-jacent dans la peinture, ed. Hélène Verougstraete-­Marcq and Roger van Schoute (Louvain: Université Catholique de Louvain, 1991), pp. 141–50; Josua Bruyn, “Een gedachtenisvenster voor Claes van Ruyven en Geertgen tot Sint Jans ’Johannespaneel’ te Wenen,” Oud-Holland 122 (2009): pp. 81–120; Nanette Salomon, “Geertgen tot Sint Jans and the Paradigmatic Personal, or the Moment before the Moment of Self-Portraiture,” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaar­ boek 59 (2010): pp. 44–69; Molly Faries, “The Vienna Wing Panels by Geertgen tot Sint Jans and His Drawing and Painting Technique,” Oud-Holland 123 (2010): pp. 187–219. 41. Riegl, Group Portraiture of Holland, p. 79; Riegl, Das holländische Gruppenporträt, vol. 1, p. 19. 42. Riegl, Group Portraiture of Holland, p. 67; Riegl, Das holländische Gruppenporträt, vol. 1, p. 7–8. 43. Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting, pp. 289–91. 44. Erich Auerbach, Dante, Poet of the Secular World (Chicago:

350 University of Chicago Press, 1961), pp. 1–2; Erich Auerbach, Dante als Dichter der irdischen Welt (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1929), pp. 5–6. 45. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953), p. 194; see also Erich Auerbach, “Figura,” Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 11–76. 46. Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 202. 47. Heather Webb, Dante’s Persons: An Ethics of the Trans­ human (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 186ff. 48. Giuseppe Mazzotta, Poet of the Desert: History and Allegory in the Divine Comedy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 231–32, 270. 49. Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 202. 50. Aby Warburg, Bildniskunst und florentinisches Bürgertum (Leipzig: Seemann, 1902). Reprinted in Aby Warburg, Die Erneuerung der heidnischen Antike, Gesammelte Schriften, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Teubner, 1932), vol. 1, pp. 89–126. Translated as “The Art of Portraiture and the Florentine Bourgeoisie,” in Aby Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 1999), pp. 185–221. 51. Dale Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici and the Florentine Renaissance: The Patron’s Oeuvre (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 315–20, because she cannot match the faces to verified likenesses, says that the Magi are at best ideal portraits of the Medici patriarchs. Vasari said nothing about portraits. Kent concedes, however, that the populous cortege is well-stocked with true portraits, many of them identifiable. But the intent to refer is enough: if Benozzo expected beholders to grasp the overlap between patrons and Magi, then there is no reason not to call them portraits, whether there is likeness or not. Rab Hatfield, Botticelli’s Uffizi ‘Adoration’: A Study in Pictorial Content (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), p. 73, allows that the young Magus in the Medici Chapel could be an ideal typification of Lorenzo. 52. Vasari, Milanesi, vol. 3, p. 315; Vasari, Oxford, pp. 226–27. The Anonimo Magliabechiano mentions portraits but doesn’t identify them; Karl Frey, ed., Il Codice Magliabechiano cl. XVII. 17: Contenente notizie sopra l’arte degli antichi e quella de’ fiorentini da Cimabue a Michelangelo Buonarroti, scritte da anonimo fiorentino (Berlin, 1892), pp. 104–5. Hatfield, Botticelli’s Uffizi ‘Adoration’, pp. 68–83, concludes that the profile and near-profile formats of the first two Magi indicate that they are portraits, and that the first is most likely old Cosimo. The second is a problem but is most likely Piero. The third Magus, who recurs in Botticelli’s Washington Adoration, must be a type. The youth with sword at the front left is probably Giuliano, and the youth behind the young Magus Lorenzo. 53. Max J. Friedländer, From Van Eyck to Bruegel: Early Netherlandish Painting (New York: Phaidon, 1956), p. 34. 54. See Julius von Schlosser, “Geschichte der Porträtbildnerei in Wachs,” Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen 29 (1910–1911): pp. 171–258, here pp. 212–15. Translated as “History of Portraiture in Wax” in Ephemeral Bodies: Wax Sculpture and the Human Figure, ed. Roberta Panzanelli (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2008), pp. 171–303, here pp. 230–31.

55. Aby Warburg, “Flemish Art and the Florentine Early Renaissance,” The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 1999), pp. 281–303, here pp. 297–98. The word “eagles” (aguias) is used by Francisco da Holanda, in his dialogues with Michelangelo, to refer to the ambition and idealism of the Italian painters; Joaqim de Vasconcellos, ed., Vier Gespräche über die Malerei (Vienna: Graeser, 1899), pp. 34–35. 56. Vasari, Milanesi, vol. 3, pp.  373–74; Vasari, Oxford, p. 240. 57. Warburg, “The Art of Portraiture and the Florentine Bourgeoisie,” n. 49: voto in figura. See his appendix. Michele Bacci, “Pro remedio animae”: Immagini sacre e pratiche devozionali in Italia centrale (secoli XIII e XIV) (Pisa: ETS, 2000), pp. 192–99. Martin Wackernagel, The World of the Florentine Artist [1938] (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), pp. 78–79. The only surviving example is the life-sized, kneeling figure of Count Leonhard of Gorizia (Görz), who died in 1500; the effigy is dated c. 1470. Tiroler Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum, inv. no. p46. The effigy has a wooden core, but the hair and fur coat were molded from beeswax. Schlosser, “History of Portraiture in Wax,” p. 228. Circa 1500, exhibition catalogue (Innsbruck: Tiroler Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum, 2000), no. 1-19-4. 58. Noa Turel, Living Pictures: Jan van Eyck and Painting’s First Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020), p. 95, makes a similar argument, pointing out that the oil-­ glazing technique was in common use in polychromy of sculpture before van Eyck. Guided by the research of Ann-­Sophie Lehmann, Turel argues that van Eyck translated from three dimensions to two the effect of the “suppleness, elasticity, and vivacity of human skin” achieved by the polychromy. 59. Warburg, “The Art of Portraiture and the Florentine Bourgeoisie,” p. 189. 60. Iris Origo, Merchant of Prato (New York: Knopf, 1957), p. 351. 61. The literature is extensive; a good place to start is the exhibition catalogue: Ittai Weinryb, ed., Agents of Faith: Votive Objects in Time and Place (New York: Bard Graduate Center, 2018). 62. John Addington Symonds, Renaissance in Italy, vol. 1, The Age of the Despots (New York: Holt, 1888), p. 398. 63. Hugo van de Velden, “Medici Votive Images and the Scope and Limits of Likeness,” in The Image of the Individual: Portraits in the Renaissance, ed. Nicholas Mann and Luke Syson (London: British Museum, 1998), pp. 126–37, here p. 130. 64. Hans Teubner, “Das Langhaus der SS. Annunziata in Florenz: Studien zu Michelozzo und Giuliano da Sangallo,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Instituts in Florenz 22 (1978): p. 36. 65. Van de Velden, “Medici Votive Images,” pp. 133, 136. 66. Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz, Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 76–78. 67. E. H. Gombrich, “Meditations on a Hobby Horse” [1951], Meditations on a Hobby Horse: And Other Essays on the Theory of Art (London: Phaidon, 1963), pp. 1–11. 68. Van de Velden, “Medici Votive Images,” p. 131.

no t e s 351 69. Robert Pfaller, Die Illusionen der anderen: Über das Lustprinzip in der Kultur (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2002), pp. 26–27. 70. Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), pp. 6ff. 71. Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), pp. 433–34. 72. E. H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (London: Warburg Institute, 1970), pp. 111, 114–20, 168–77, has a different interpretation of Warburg’s texts on Sassetti, based in part on the scholar’s unpublished research notes. Gombrich argues that Warburg, by associating the Santa Trinità frescoes as well as the cycle by Ghirlandaio in the Tornabuoni Chapel in Santa Maria Novella with ancient votive practices, was trying to “rescue” the dangerously worldly and neo-pagan paintings for religion. 73. Aby Warburg, “Francesco Sacchetti’s Last Injunctions to his Sons,” The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, pp. 223–62, esp. pp. 230–32. Patricia Simons, “Patronage in the Tornaquinci Chapel, Santa Maria Novella,” in Patronage, Art, and Society in Renaissance Italy, ed. F. W. Kent and Patricia Simons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 221–50, here pp. 225–30, tells a more complicated story about Sassetti’s negotiations with the Dominicans. On Sassetti’s patronage generally, see Martin Wackernagel, The World of the Florentine Renaissance Artist (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 265–68. 74. Henry Thode, Franz von Assisi und die Anfänge der Kunst der Renaissance in Italien [1885] (Vienna: Phaidon, 1934), p. 80, see also p. 552. 75. Gombrich, Aby Warburg, pp.  26–27, 52–53, 139. See Charles Dempsey’s interesting discussion of Warburg and Thode as the pioneers of a vision of the early Italian Renaissance in which vernacular culture plays a central role, in his Early Renaissance and Vernacular Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), pp. 22–28. 76. Warburg, “The Art of Portraiture and the Florentine Bourgeoisie,” p. 75.

c h ap t e r s e v en : f r a a n gel i c o and t h e p ort r a i t 1. Gertrude Stein, Picasso [1938] (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), p. 12. 2. Cristoforo Landino in 1481 named him “Fra Giovanni angelico.” Vasari called him “Fra Giovanni Angelico da Fiesole.” But over time the name Giovanni dropped away, and he became Fra Angelico or simply Angelico. In the nineteenth century, he came also to be called Beato Angelico. Cyril Gerbron, “The Story of Fra Angelico: Reflections in Mirrors,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Instituts in Florenz 57 (2015): pp.  292–319, here p.  293; Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 118. 3. Museo di San Marco, central panel, c. 1432–34, 176 × 185 cm. Giorgio Bonsanti, Beato Angelico: Catalogo completo (Florence: Octavo, 1998), cat. no. 39.

4. That is, not just the first Florentine depiction of the subject; Carl Brandon Strehlke, Angelico (Milano: Jaca, 1998), p. 25. 5. Marcia Hall, Color and Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 42–46 6. John Shearman, “Leonardo’s Colour and Chiaroscuro,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 25 (1962): pp. 13–47, here pp. 14, 16. 7. Vasari, at the end of the life of Michelozzo: Milanesi, vol. 2, p. 450. Vasari’s identification may be related to the fact that Michelozzo was not only an architect but also a sculptor —  like Nicodemus, according to legend. 8. L. M. Sleptzoff, Men or Supermen? The Italian Portrait in the Fifteenth Century (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, Hebrew University, 1978), p. 112, rejects this identification (and many others) by Vasari. He concedes that the figure in blue looks different from his neighbors but calls him a “figure-type” borrowed from Rogier van der Weyden or some other Netherlandish painter. There is a reflexive assumption that innovation in the realm of portraiture must all be ascribed to northerners. How does Sleptzoff imagine that Angelico knew Rogier’s paintings at this point? 9. This was the suggestion of Ulrich Middeldorf. See Diane Cole Ahl, Fra Angelico (London: Phaidon, 2008), p. 86. Strehlke, Angelico, p. 70n28, denies it, pointing out that the figure in that case should wear a Dominican habit. Timothy Verdon, Fra Angelico (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020), p. 143, has an answer for this: he entered the Order as a teenager against the wishes of his mother, and it is this youthful layman who is portrayed. John Pope-Hennessy, Fra Angelico (New York: Phaidon, 1952), p. 16, thought the kneeling young man in red might be San Giovanni Gualberto, the eleventh-century founder of the Vallombrosan Order. 10. This is a point made by Verdon, Fra Angelico, p. 142. 11. Hall, Color and Meaning, p. 43 and n. 1. 12. Royal Library, inv no. 12812, 18.1 × 16.7 cm. Metalpoint on prepared surface. Keith Christiansen and Stefan Weppelmann, eds., The Renaissance Portrait: From Donatello to Bellini, exhibition catalogue, Metropolitan Museum of Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), no. 5, pp.  94–96. Berenson was the first to attribute the drawing to Angelico. 13. Gerardo de Simone, Il Beato Angelico a Roma, 1445–1455: Rinascita delle arti e Umanesimo cristiano nell’ Urbe di Niccolò V e Leon Battista Alberti (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2017), p. 172. 14. Alexander Nagel, Michelangelo and the Reform of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 63–64. 15. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts, trans. T. M. Knox, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), pp. 616, 619; G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, vol. 3 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), pp. 249, 253. See the discussion in Gillian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology (London: Verso, 2009), pp. 152–54. 16. London, National Gallery, inv. nos. 663.4, 663.5, 31.8 × 21.9 cm. and 31.6 × 21.9 cm. 17. On this concept, see Christopher S. Wood, Forgery, Replica, Fiction: Temporalities of German Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), pp. 111–13. 18. Vasari, Milanesi, vol. 2, p. 507.

352 19. Michaela J. Marek, “Ordenspolitik und Andacht: Fra Angelicos Kreuzigungsfresko im Kapitelsaal von San Marco zu Florenz,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, vol. 48 (1985): pp. 451– 75, here p. 461. See also p. 319, n. 70. 20. William Hood, Fra Angelico at San Marco (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 218 and n. 9. 21. Museo di San Marco, 105 × 164 cm. Bonsanti, Beato Angelico, cat. no. 62. Pope-Hennessy, Fra Angelico, p. 176, says the picture is much damaged. 22. Vasari, Milanesi, vol. 2, p. 514. 23. Uffizi, inv. no. 1890, 1114. Munich, Alte Pinakothek, inv. no. waf38a. Martin Davies, Rogier van der Weyden (London: Phaidon, 1972), pp. 212–13. 24. In his biographical remarks on Gentile da Fabriano, apropos his frescoes (now lost) in the Lateran Basilica, admired by Rogier; Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition, 1350–1450 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), pp. 105–6. 25. Nor can it be ruled out that Bartolommeo Fazio was confused about the date of Rogier’s visit — though that seems unlikely. Dirk de Vos, Rogier van der Weyden (New York: Abrams, 1999), p. 60, believes that Rogier came as an honored visitor, like Albrecht Dürer in the Netherlands in 1520–21. But Fazio could have heard scraps of information about an earlier and a later trip and conflated them into one. 26. De Vos, Rogier van der Weyden, pp. 60–61. 27. The Vienna Crucifixion is innovative in another sense: the Virgin Mary, embracing the Cross, plays Mary Magdalene’s role. Other works by Rogier with portraits are the Abegg Triptych (a patron in the left wing); the Seven Sacra­ ments triptych (possible hidden portraits of the patrons Jean Chevrot and Philippe Courault); the Epiphany of the Columba altar in Munich (a kneeling patron at the left edge, and some see crypto-portraits in the Magi); and the Pietà in London (with a full-scale patron chaperoned by St. Jerome, who touches both patron and Christ). 28. John Pope-Hennessy, The Portrait in the Renaissance (New York: Bollingen Foundation and Pantheon, 1966), p. 289. In the same book, however (p. 258), he says that the conventionalized portrait of Cardinal Torquemada in the Crucifixion at Harvard (inv. no. 1921.34) is the only certain donor portrait by Angelico. Michael Rohlmann, Auftragskunst und Sammlerbild: Altniederländische Tafelmalerei im Florenz des Quattrocento (Alfter: Verlag und Datenbank für Geisteswissenschaften, 1994), p. 35: Nicodemus is not a self-portrait, as some have conjectured, and the Cosimo theory cannot be proven. Paula Nuttall, From Flanders to Florence: The Impact of Netherlandish Painting, 1400–1500 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), also rejects the identification of Cosimo. De Vos, Rogier van der Weyden, no. 35, p. 330, notes that a 1482 inventory described the picture as a tavola d’altare quando San Cosimo medica Christo colla pictura della resurrectione quando Christo risuscita: that is, St. Cosmas, a physician, is actually represented tending to the body of Christ. In that case, Cosimo de’ Medici has hidden his portrait in the figure of St. Cosmas, who then occupies the historical figure of Nicodemus!

29. De Vos, Rogier van der Weyden, no. 31, p. 318. 30. Ernst Kantorowicz, “The Este Portrait by Rogier van der Weyden,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 3 (1940): pp.  165–80, here pp.  179–80, documents Rogier’s presence in the Low Countries from June 1450, and argues that there is anyway little evidence for the 1450 trip. But no one seems persuaded by this. Rohlmann, Auftragskunst und Sammlerbild, pp. 32–33, says that Italians were sending drawings of compositions to Flanders, so that there was no need for Rogier to come to Italy at all. Christopher Lloyd, Fra Angelico (London: Phaidon, 1992), p. 12, wonders if Angelico may have known Rogier’s work, perhaps through an engraving. Yes, there are engravings, but later. 31. Penny Howell Jolly, “Rogier van der Weyden’s Escorial and Philadelphia Crucifixions and their relation to Fra Angelico at San Marco,” Oud-Holland 95 (1981): pp. 113–26, says that Rogier saw Angelico’s grisaille frescoes at S. Marco and that the central panel of the S. Marco altar (1443) was the model for the Medici Madonna. 32. Vasari, Milanesi, vol. 2, p. 568; Vasari, Oxford, p. 188. This was very likely the Lomellini triptych mentioned by Bartolommeo Fazio and belonging at one point to King Alfonso of Naples. The picture no longer survives; see Elisabeth Dhanens, Hubert et Jan van Eyck (Antwerp: Fonds Mercator, 1980), pp. 252–53. 33. E. H. Gombrich, “Light, Form and Texture in Fifteenth-­ Century Painting” [1964], The Heritage of Apelles (London: Phaidon, 1976), pp. 19–35. 34. Venice, Accademia, inv. no. 613, c. 1480–85, 58 × 107 cm. Mauro Lucco and Giovanni Carlo Federico Villa, eds., Giovanni Bellini, exhibition catalogue, Rome, Scuderie del Quirinale (Milan: Silvana, 2008), no. 26 (Peter Humfrey). 35. Vasari, Milanesi, vol. 1, pp. 631–34, where he is said to be a pupil of Buonamico Buffalmacco. 36. Vasari, Milanesi, vol. 2, pp.  11–15. Unmentioned by Vasari, however, are the two pupils of Giottino listed in the 1369 document concerning the work at the Vatican Palace (pp. 164, 183): Iohannis Auri de Florentia and Iohannis de Montepulciano. Their names appear nowhere else. 37. Vasari, Milanesi, vol. 1, pp. 629–30. Vasari spelled the name Tossicani in his 1568 edition. Milanesi unnecessarily corrected it (see below, p. 353, n. 43). 38. Vasari, Milanesi, vol. 1, p. 630. 39. Milanesi (vol. 1, p. 630n2) says, apparently mistakenly, that the figures of Jacopo and Filippo repainted or restored by Vasari were still extant. The chapel of Giovanna Tarlati was destroyed probably in the late sixteenth century: Roberto Bartalini, “Da Gregorio e Donato ad Andrea di Nerio: Vicende della pittura aretina del Trecento,” in Arte in terra d’Arezzo: Il Trecento, ed. Aldo Galli and Paola Refice (Florence: Edfir, 2005), pp. 11–40, here pp. 22–24; Franco Paturzo, Il Duomo di Arezzo (Arezzo: Letizia, 2011), pp. 89, 98; Barbara Agosti, Giorgio Vasari: Luoghi e tempi delle Vite (Milan: Officina, 2013), p. 31 and n. 92. 40. Stefan Weppelmann, “Giorgio Vasari, ‘Pittore Aretino,’ e la tradizione della pittura aretina,” in Percorsi Vasariani tra

no t e s 353 le arti e le lettere, ed. Maddalena Spagnolo and Paolo Torriti (Montepulcianio: Le Balze, 2004), pp. 131–52. 41. Robert Brennan uses this term in Painting as a Modern Art in Early Renaissance Italy (London: Harvey Miller, 2019), pp. 276–79. 42. Vasari, Milanesi, vol. 2, pp.  553–59. The only work attributed to Lazzaro with any certainty is a fresco of St. Vincent in San Domenico in Arezzo. 43. See the entries by Luciano Bellosi in the Dictionary of Art, vol. 31 (New York: Grove, 1996), p. 201, and F. Boggi in the Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon, vol. 110 (Munich: Saur, 2021), pp. 48–50. The artist was mentioned by the Anonimo Maglia­ bechiano — Karl Frey, ed., Il Codice Magliabechiano cl. XVII. 17: Contenente notizie sopra l’arte degli antichi e quella de’ fiorentini da Cimabue a Michelangelo Buonarroti, scritte da anonimo fiorentino (Berlin, 1892), p. 6 — among the disciples of Agnolo Gaddi, and on p. 91 right after the notes on Stefano Fiorentino, with no further information; and with the spelling “Tossichanj,” disproving Milanesi’s conjecture that “Tossicani” had been a printing error in Vasari; see Frey’s notes, pp. 246, 258. 44. Carl Brandon Strehlke, Italian Paintings, 1250–1450, in the John G. Johnson Collection and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2004), p.  154, fig. 82.7, reproduces the work as one of the few surviving examples of such a funerary chapel or avello. The other surviving bit is the St. Nicholas of Bari in Glory above the arch on the outside wall. This work is hard to see; its relation to Giovanni is also complicated by the recent discovery that the intonaco or layer of plaster high on the wall outside the Ardinghelli chapel, which lies above the intonaco of the adjacent Bartolini-­ Salimbeni chapel painted by Lorenzo Monaco, may actually date from the nineteenth century; Lorenzo Sbaraglio, “Alcune osservazioni su Giovanni di Francesco Toscani: Il Polittico Nevin e la tarda attività,” in Intorno a Lorenzo Monaco: Nuovi studi sulla pittura tardogotica, ed. Daniela Parenti and Angelo Tartuferi (Livorno: Sillabe, 2007), pp. 146–55, here p. 154n3. 45. Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. no. 43.98.5, 64 × 49 cm. Laurence B. Kanter, Fra Angelico, exhibition catalogue (New York: Metropolitan Museum, 2005), no. 8. Luciano Bellosi, “Il maestro della crocifissione Griggs: Giovanni Toscani,” Paragone 17, no. 193/13 (1966): pp. 44–58. 46. Walters Art Museum, inv. no. 37.632, 102 × 76 cm. Federico Zeri, Italian Paintings in the Walters Art Gallery (Baltimore, MD: Walters Art Gallery, 1976), no. 18, pl. 16. 47. Sbaraglio, “Alcune osservazioni su Giovanni di Francesco Toscani,” p. 146. 48. Bellosi, “Il maestro della crocifissione Griggs,” pp. 45, 47–48, 54. 49. Miklós Boskovits, “Appunti sugli inizi di Masaccio e sulla pittura fiorentina del suo tempo,” in Masaccio e le origini del Rinascimento, ed. Luciano Bellosi et al. (Milan: Skira, 2002), pp. 53–75, on the possibility that Masaccio was learning from well-defined transitional figures like Giovanni Toscani. Boskovits also raises the possibility that Giovanni worked in Rome. 50. Sbaraglio, “Alcune osservazioni su Giovanni di Francesco Toscani,” p. 153.

51. Vasari, Milanesi, vol. 2, p. 518. 52. Vasari, Milanesi, vol. 2, pp. 105, 520; Vasari, Oxford, pp. 56, 177. 53. Vasari, Milanesi, vol. 4, pp. 10–11: lo studio insecchisce la maniera; Vasari, Oxford, pp. 279–80. 54. Brennan, Painting as a Modern Art, pp. 276–79. 55. Brennan, Painting as a Modern Art, p. 292. Vasari, Milanesi, vol. 4, p. 9. 56. Hall, Color and Meaning, p. 45. 57. William Hood, Fra Angelico at San Marco (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 82–90. 58. Hall, Color and Meaning, pp. 20–21. Cennino Cennini, The Craftsman’s Handbook: The Italian “ Il libro d’arte,” trans. Daniel V. Thompson (New York: Dover, 1960), ch. 77, p. 53. 59. Marvin Trachtenberg, Dominion of the Eye: Urbanism, Art, and Power in Early Modern Florence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 172. 60. Vasari, Milanesi, vol. 5, p. 604; vol. 2, p. 288. Shearman, “Leonardo’s Colour and Chiaroscuro,” p. 40. We noted earlier that Vasari considered some Trecento painters to have surpassed Giotto; here, he says that Masaccio had nothing better to look at than Giotto. Unless “Giotto” here is just shorthand for “Florentine painting of the fourteenth century,” we are seeing here the stratification of Vasari’s text. Different sections were written at different times, and — according to some — by different hands. 61. Vasari, Milanesi, vol. 1, p. 624. 62. Cf. also the beautiful triptych by Giovanni Toscani in the Museo degli Innocenti, L’età di Masaccio (Milan: Electa, 1990), no. 18, pp. 96–97. 63. Bellosi, “Il maestro della crocifissione Griggs,” pp.  54, 57. 64. Luciano Bellosi in Arte in Lombardia tra Gotico e Rinascimento (Milano: Fabbri, 1988), pp. 196–97, no. 51, comparing the work to the Mather St. Jerome at Princeton (inv. no. 63.1; Kanter, Fra Angelico, no. 9, pp. 55–57), which Longhi and others had given to Angelico. Cf., however, Marvin Eisenberg, “The ‘Penitent St Jerome’ by Giovanni Toscani,” Burlington Magazine 118 (May 1976): pp. 275–83. See the recent discussion by Daniela Parenti in the catalogue of the Accademia, Dipinti, vol. 3, Il Tardogotico (Florence: Giunti, 2020), pp. 58–72. 65. Kanter, Fra Angelico, no. 8, pp. 52–54, and see, as well, pp. 19–21, 24, 50–51, 56. Kanter reads the letters on the bridle of the horse at right as “Fr[ater] Ihones” — and thus suggests that this is the only signed work by Fra Angelico. Strehlke, in the exhibition catalogue Fra Angelico: Heaven on Earth, ed. Nathaniel E. Silver (Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2018), p. 73n27, believes the letters are just nonsense writing; and if they did read as Kanter reads them, then the referent would more likely be the Dominican Cardinal Giovanni Dominici. 66. Boskovits, “Appunti sugli inizi di Masaccio,” p. 70. 67. Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. no. 14.40.628. Gombrich describes Angelico’s San Marco altar as “the first real sacra conversazione”; E. H. Gombrich, “The Early Medici as Patrons of Art” [1960], Norm and Form (London: Phaidon, 1966), pp. 35–57, here p. 47.

354 68. Roberto Longhi, “Stefano Fiorentino,” Opere complete, vol. 7 (Florence: Sansoni, 1974), pp. 64–82, here pp. 71, 73. 69. Alexis-François Rio, De l’art chrétien, vol. 1, Toscane et Ombrie (Paris, 1861), p. 235. Strehlke, Angelico, p. 29, also compares the showing of the nails in the upper right of the San Remigio Pietà. Recall also the predella by Lorenzo Monaco mentioned in chapter 5, p. 189. See the remarks of Corine Schleif, “Nicodemus and Sculptors: Self-Reflexivity in Works by Adam Kraft and Tilman Riemenschneider,” Art Bulletin 75 (1993): pp. 622–23, by way of comparison with Adam Kraft’s Schreyer-Landauer Epitaph (1492); she, too, refers to the showing of the nails in the San Remigio Pietà. 70. However, Moshe Barasch, Giotto and the Language of Gesture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 68, points to a figure in the Death of the Youth from Sessa, in the cycle of the post-mortem miracles of St. Francis in the Lower Church at Assisi, with clasped hands at chest level. 71. Carlo Volpe, “Il lungo percorso del ‘dipingere dolcissimo e tanto unito,’ ” in Storia dell’arte italiana, vol. 5 [part 2, volume 1, Dal Medioevo al Quattrocento] (Turin: Einaudi, 1983), pp. 232–304, here p. 260. 72. Giovanna Ragionieri, “Pittura del Trecento a Firenze,” in La Pittura in Italia: Il Duecento e il Trecento, ed. Enrico Castelnuovo, vol. 1 (Milan: Electa, 1985), p. 301. 73. Miklós Boskovits, Pittura fiorentina alla vigilia del Rinascimento, 1370–1400 (Florence: Edam, 1975), p. 206n146. Another reweaving of past and present: Luisa Marcucci, Gallerie Nazionali di Firenze: i dipinti toscani del secolo XIV (Rome: Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato, 1965), p. 89, says that Giottino, with his “universal” spirituality and his power of emotional penetration, is like a thirteenth-century French artist, but endowed with an earthly and humanistic power of individuation — a kind of Domenico Veneziano avant la lettre. 74. Pope-Hennessy, Portrait in the Renaissance, p. 258, notes the scarcity of donor or patron portraits in the early and even mid- fifteenth century. 75. Roberto Longhi, Opere complete, vol. 3, Piero della Francesca (Florence: Sansoni, 1963), p. 15. 76. Louvre, inv. no. 314, mr 220, 209 × 206 cm. Complete by 1435. 77. Uffizi, inv. no. 885. Pope-Hennessy, Fra Angelico, p. 10, compares the Louvre Coronation with its “rational space and inorganic grouping” to Lorenzo’s Coronation. 78. Accademia, inv. no. 1890 n. 8460. Michela Palmeri in the catalogue of the Accademia, Dipinti, vol. 3, no. 46, pp. 207–13. 79. On the perspective with its bravura progressive angling, see Verdon, Fra Angelico, pp. 156–57. 80. Pablo Maurette, “La macchia di Longhi,” Lettere Italiane 73.2 (2021): pp. 269–80, here p. 277–78; on pp. 278–80, he draws an analogy between the qualities Longhi perceives in Fra Angelico and the great art historian’s own crystalline yet impenetrable prose. 81. Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), p. 317. 82. Recall that Vasari in his Life of Fra Angelico described these very saints with the phrase con arie delicate e dolci

(Milanesi, vol. 2, p. 511; Oxford, p. 172), words associated with his second, ingratiating Trecento manner (p. 177). 83. Maurette, “La macchia di Longhi,” p. 274. 84. Longhi, “Stefano Fiorentino,” pp. 76.

exc u r s u s : r ef er en c e a n d l i k en es s 1. Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera, trans. Edith Grossman (New York: Vintage, 1988), p. 281. 2. Wendy Steiner, “Semiotics of a Genre: Portraiture in Literature and Painting,” Semiotica 21 (1977): pp. 111–19, here pp. 113, 117–18. 3. Gottfried Boehm, Bildnis und Individuum: Über den Ursprung der Porträtmalerei in der italienischen Renaissance (Munich: Prestel, 1985), p. 24, says that the key to the portrait of the Renaissance, distinguishing it from the conventionalized masks (personae) of medieval portraits, was a certain “self-­reference” (the sitter presents herself) achieved by an “accidental” and “unredeemable” physiognomic feature interfering with the assimilation of the face to an established schema. 4. Vasari, Milanesi, vol. 1, p. 372; Vasari, Oxford, p. 16. 5. Vasari, Milanesi, vol. 1, p. 377; Vasari, Oxford, p. 18. Milanesi in a note suggests we take the phrase ritratti di naturale in a “broad” sense. Somewhat more justifiable are Vasari’s mentions of a St. Francis ritratto di naturale by Margaritone d’Arezzo (c. 1240–90) (on a panel, and signed), Milanesi, vol. 1, p. 361, and a St. Francis portrayed di naturale by Cimabue (il che fu cosa nuova in quei tempi), Milanesi, vol. 1, p. 249; Oxford, p. 8. 6. Peter Seiler, “Giotto als Erfinder des Porträts,” in Das Porträt vor der Erfindung des Porträts, ed. Martin Büchsel and Peter Schmidt (Mainz: Zabern, 2003), pp. 153–72, here p. 155. 7. Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition, 1350–1450 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 71. 8. Vasari, Milanesi, vol. 1, p. 402. 9. Vasari, Milanesi, vol. 1, p. 382; Vasari, Oxford, p. 21. In the 1550 edition, Vasari gave these frescoes to Taddeo Gaddi. 10. Vasari, Milanesi, vol. 1, p. 258. Milanesi himself rejects the identification. E. H. Gombrich, “Giotto’s Portrait of Dante?” Burlington Magazine 121 (August 1979): pp. 471–81, doubts that the face in the Bargello is in any way a portrait of Dante. He chalks it up to the growing desire throughout the Trecento to identify and agree upon Dante’s true appearance. 11. Jacob Burckhardt assigned the hidden portraits by Giotto and others great importance in his narrative of the origins of portraiture, “Das Porträt in der italienischen Malerei,” Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. 6 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2000), pp. 147–281, here pp. 152–54; this is a manuscript he wrote in the 1890s and left unfinished at his death. 12. On the origins of the crypto-portrait, see Gerhart B. Ladner, “Die Anfänge des Kryptoporträts,” in Von Angesicht zu Angesicht: Porträtstudien, ed. Florens Deuchler, Festschrift Michael Stettler (Bern: Stämpfli, 1983), pp. 78–97. See the fine article by Assaf Pinkus, “The Patron Hidden in the Narrative: Eve and Johanna at St. Theobald in Thann,” Zeitschrift

no t e s 355 für Kunstgeschichte 70 (2007): pp. 23–54. A fundamental study is Friedrich B. Polleross, Das sakrale Identifikationsporträt: Ein höfischer Bildtypus vom 13. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert, 2 vols. ( Worms: Wernersche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1988). Polleross’s title-concept is meant to embrace two “poles” of the phenomenon: the crypto-portrait proper, and the disguised portrait. The crypto-portrait overlays a real person’s features on a historical or mythical character. The disguised portrait overlays attributes of a historical or mythical character on the features of a real person. There are no fourteenth-century examples. Polleross is dealing with a kind of role-play; he introduces the psychology of the sitter. Volker Manuth, Rudie van Leeuwen, and Jos Koldeweij, eds., Example or Alter Ego? (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016) is an anthology of essays on the portrait historié, which they define as a “portrait in the guise of a historical or fictional figure,” but specifically in a narrative. Adam Jasienski, “Converting Portraits: Repainting as Art Making in the Early Modern Hispanic World,” Art Bulletin 102 (2020): pp. 7–30, introduces the concept of “sanctified portraits.” For a general discussion of the confusions between sitters, models, and iconographic types in Renaissance art, see Alexander Nagel, The Controversy of Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), pp. 13–29. 13. New York, Morgan Library, inv no. az022.1. Robert Suckale, “Die Porträts Kaiser Karl IV. als Bedeutungsträger,” in Das Porträt vor der Erfindung des Porträts, ed. Martin Büchsel and Peter Schmidt (Mainz: Zabern, 2003), pp. 191–204, esp. pp. 193, 200–204. Polleross, Das sakrale Identifikationsporträt, vol. 1, pp. 27–28; at vol. 2, pp. 367–69, he lists examples involving Frederick I, Frederick II, and Boniface VIII, as well as emperor Charles IV and King Charles V of France. At the start, only the most dominating personalities among rulers asserted themselves in crypto-portraits, an institution established already in antiquity. 14. Vasari, Milanesi, vol. 1, p. 606. 15. Vasari, Milanesi, vol. 4, p. 360. Vasari, Oxford, p. 326. 16. Leon Battista Alberti, De Pictura (Redazione volgare), ed. Lucia Bertolini (Florence: Polistampa, 2011), book 3, pp. 309–10. 17. Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, book 3, in Italian Art, 1400–1500: Sources and Documents, ed. and trans. Creighton E. Gilbert (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press), p. 72. 18. Alberti, De Pictura (Redazione volgare), p. 322. 19. Alberti, On Painting, book 3, p. 75. 20. Dominic Olariu, La genèse de la représentation ressemblante de l’homme: Reconsidérations du portrait à partir du XIIIe siècle (Bern: Peter Lang, 2014), pp. 15–33, 83–210; on late medieval sculpted portraiture, pp.  357–404. Hans Belting, Bild-­ Anthropologie: Entwürfe für eine Bildwissenschaft (Munich: Fink, 2001), ch. 4. 21. Olariu, La genèse de la représentation ressemblante, p. 413. 22. Olariu, La genèse de la représentation ressemblante, pp.  239–43, says that the embalming tradition has been a blind spot for scholarship so far; Laura Jacobus, “ ‘Propria Figura’: The Advent of Facsimile Portraiture in Italian Art,” Art Bulletin 99, no. 2 (June 2017): pp. 72–101, here p. 73, says that the constructionist view of likeness is the new orthodoxy but

that her own research leads in a different direction. Another study open to the idea that fourteenth-century viewers valued naturalistic likeness is Assaf Pinkus, “The Founder Figures at Vienna Cathedral: Between Imago and Symulachrum,” Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 40 (2013): pp. 63–92. 23. Harald Keller, “Die Entstehung des Bildnisses am Ende des Hochmittelalters,” Römisches Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 3 (1939): pp. 227–356, an authoritative treatment of the forms and functions of medieval donor portraits, tomb effigies, and memorial images. Other significant discussions are: Erwin Panofsky, Tomb Sculpture: Four Lectures on its Changing Aspects from Ancient Egypt to Bernini (New York: Abrams, 1964); Kurt Bauch, Das mittelalterliche Grabbild: Figürliche Grabmäler des 11. bis 15. Jahrhunderts in Europa (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1976); Adolf Reinle, Das stellvertretende Bildnis (Zurich: Artemis, 1984), ch. 2, “Devotions-, Dedikations- und Stifterbilder.” Cf. Christine Sauer, Fundatio et Memoria: Stifter und Klostergründer im Bild 1100 bis 1350 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck u. Ruprecht, 1993) on the images that “published” traditions. 24. John White, Art and Architecture in Italy, 1250–1400 (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1987), pp. 98–99. 25. On Giotto’s portraits, see above, pp. 22–26. Kurt Bauch, “Giotto und die Porträtkunst,” in Giotto e il suo tempo (Rome: De Luca, 1971), pp. 299–309, following Keller, considers medieval images of patrons and donors as well as tomb effigies as not quite truly portraits, in that the facial features are not personalized; cf. Keller, “Die Entstehung des Bildnisses,” pp. 298–301. Bauch sees Scrovegni and the unnamed cleric, however, as notably unidealized and noncompliant with Giotto’s usual way of depicting bodies, and thus representing a break with the medieval tradition. For Bauch, Giotto as portraitist learned most from the sculptors, in particular Arnolfo di Cambio. Michael Viktor Schwarz, Giottus Pictor, vol. 2, Giottos Werke (Vienna: Böhlau, 2008) pp. 34–38, 582–86, argues interestingly that even the images of Scrovegni and the cleric in the Last Judgment at Padua are not really portraits but essays in individualization — a “staging” of physiognomic difference — designed to assist beholders in “experiencing two people.” 26. Sheldon Nodelman, “How to Read a Roman Portrait,” Art in America 63 (January/February 1975), pp. 27–33, here p. 27. 27. E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (New York: Pantheon, 1960), pp. 34–36; Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1976), pp. 15–16; Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 1976), pp. 204–5, not on photographs per se but generally on “iconism and convention”: “ ‘Similarity’ concerns a relation between the image and a previously culturized content.” 28. Seiler, “Giotto als Erfinder des Porträts.” 29. Stephen Perkinson, The Likeness of the King: A Prehistory of Portraiture in Late Medieval France (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2009), pp. 9, 148–53, 189–277. Alexa Sand, Vision, Devotion, and Self-Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). See also Georgia Sommers Wright, “The Reinvention of the Portrait Likeness in the Fourteenth Century,” Gesta 39 (2000): pp. 117–34.

356 30. Stephen Perkinson, “Likeness,” in “Medieval Art History Today — Critical Terms,” ed. Nina Rowe, special issue, Studies in Iconography 33 (2012): pp. 15–28. 31. Otto Gerhard Oexele, “Memoria und Memorialbild,” in Memoria: Der geschichtliche Zeugniswert des liturgischen Gedenkens im Mittelalter, ed. Karl Schmidt and Joachim Wollasch (Munich: Fink, 1984), pp. 436–39. 32. Julian Gardner, “Likeness and/or Representation in English and French Royal Portraits c. 1250 – c. 1300,” in Das Porträt vor der Erfindung des Porträts, ed. Martin Büchsel and Peter Schmidt (Mainz: Zabern, 2003), pp. 141–51. 33. Julian Gardner, “The Stefaneschi Altarpiece: A Reconsideration,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 37 (1974): pp. 57–103, here p. 69. 34. Noa Turel, Living Pictures: Jan van Eyck and Painting’s First Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020), with new interpretations of some important usages of the term, pp. 28–30; see also her article “Living Pictures: Rereading ‘au vif,’ 1350–1550,” Gesta 50 (2011): pp. 163–82. 35. So too does a text adduced by Franz J. Ronig, “Die Bildnisse Kunos von Falkenstein: Typ oder Porträt?” in Die Parler und der schöne Stil, 1350–1400: Europäische Kunst unter den Luxemburgern, exhibition catalogue, vol. 3 (Cologne: Museen der Stadt Köln, 1978–80), pp. 211–14, a passage from the Limburg Chronicle (1380s) describing in detail the “Phyzo­nomien unde gestalt” of an archbishop and Kurfürst. 36. Boehm, Bildnis und Individuum, pp. 45–46, 50, 266n7, 268n30. Olariu, La genèse de la représentation ressemblante, pp. 37–75, drawing on his archive of poetic references, agrees with Boehm: protrahere, pourrtaire, traire, tirer refer to lines pulled from one point to another. 37. Steiner, “Semiotics of a Genre,” p. 115. 38. There are many exceptions that would have to be dealt with one by one: group portraits, family portraits, conversation pieces, equestrian portraits, portraits of people playing games or instruments, self-portraits of artists at the easel. Generally, the permitted activities are quiet and absorptive, and do not decenter or distract the portrayed individual. 39. This is possibly the Portrait of a Woman in Berlin attributed to Petrus Christus. Petrus Christus: Renaissance Master of Bruges, exhibition catalogue (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994), no., 19, p. 169; App. 1, doc. 28, p. 210. Paula Nuttall, From Flanders to Florence: The Impact of Netherlandish Painting, 1400–1500 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,

2004), pp. 107, 254 (appendix). There is no evidence that this picture was ever in Italy, however. 40. See Panofsky, Tomb Sculpture, figs. 199–204, 224, 237. 41. Michael Victor Schwarz, Giottus Pictor, vol. 3, Giottos Nachleben (Vienna: Böhlau, 2020), pp. 117ff., on the portrait of the Habsburg Duke Rudolf IV, which he thinks derives from the Giottesque tradition and is more important for the later independent portrait than the portrait of the French king Jean le Bon. 42. Vasari, Milanesi, vol. 1, p. 387; Vasari, Oxford, p. 25. 43. See Perkinson, Likeness of the King, pp. 159–80 on images of the beloved. 44. Robert M. Durling, trans., Petrarch’s Lyric Poems (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976). 45. Vasari knows the poems and speaks of the portrait as if it had existed; Milanesi, vol. 1, pp. 545–46. Pierluigi Leone de Castris, Simone Martini (Florence: Cantini, 1989), p. 322, also seems to accept the reality of the portrait. 46. Robin Jaffee Frank, Charles Demuth Poster Portraits, 1923– 1929 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 32–41, fig. 32. 47. Cicero, De republica, cited by Augustine, City of God, 2.9. 48. Rudolf Berliner, “The Freedom of Medieval Art,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 28 (1945): pp. 263–88; reprinted in Rudolf Berliner, “The Freedom of Medieval Art” und andere Studien zum christlichen Bild, ed. Robert Suckale (Berlin: Lukas, 2003), pp. 60–76. 49. Enrico Castelnuovo, “Il significato del ritratto pittorico nella società,” Storia d’Italia, part 5, I documenti, vol. 2 (Torino: Einaudi, 1973), pp. 1038–39. 50. Vasari, Milanesi, vol. 1, p. 292. 51. See Francesco Benelli, The Architecture in Giotto’s Painting (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 40–50. Donal Cooper and Janet Robson, The Making of Assisi: The Pope, the Franciscans and the Painting of the Basilica (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), pp. 161–64, relate Giotto’s modifications to the Temple’s form to a typological link proposed by the painting to the Temple in Jerusalem, a prefiguration of the Church; the rose window, they suggest, may refer to Arnolfo di Cambio’s ciborium at San Paolo fuori le mura. 52. Alberti, De Pictura (Redazione volgare), p. 247. 53. Alberti, On Painting, book 2, p. 59. 54. Wendy Steiner, “Postmodernist Portraits,” Art Journal 46, no. 3 (Autumn 1987): pp. 173–77, here p. 173: “We might argue that the self-portrait is not a special case but the generic norm.”

index

Page numbers in italic type indicate illustrations. Acton, Harold, 3 Adoration of the Magi, 130 Agnolo di Lorenzo, 279 Alberti, Caroccio (Caroccino) di, 200–201, 266 Alberti, Jacopo di Caroccio, 200–201 Alberti, Leon Battista, 93–94, 200, 299–300, 310 Alberti, Niccolò di Jacopo degli, 202 Alberti family, 200–202 Albertini, Francesco, 162, 164 Albertus Magnus, 215 Aldighieri family, 186 allegory, 94–97 altarpieces, iconography of, 180 Andrea da Firenze (Andrea di Bonaiuto), 158, 310 Andrea di Bartolo, 146; Lamentation over the Dead Christ, 146, 147 Andrea di Bonaiuto (Andrea da Firenze), 158, 310 Andrea di Cione. See Orcagna Angela da Foligno, 84, 179–80, 209; Memorial, 32, 147, 180 Angelico, Fra, 6, 16; Burckhardt on, 71; and color, 16, 266, 272, 283–84; and Giottino, 264, 270, 287–88, 292; influences on, 281; life of, 264; and modern art, 109, 266–71, 282; name of, 264, 351n2; and perspective, 289, 291; and portraits/embedded portraits, 267, 269, 271, 275, 288, 292; and realism, 291–92; and sacred art, 288–89, 291–92; and Trecento art, 276, 281–84,

286–87, 289; van der Weyden and, 275–76; Vasari on, 267, 269–71, 278, 281–84 Angelico, Fra, works: Coronation of the Virgin, 289, 290, 292, 294 (detail); Crucifixion (New York), 281, 285, 287; Crucifixion (San Marco), 271; Deposition of Christ from the Cross, 252, 262 (detail), 264, 265, 266–70, 268 (detail), 289, 292; Entombment of Christ, 274, 275; Head of a Man, 269, 270; high altarpiece, San Domenico, Fiesole, 90; Lamentation over the Dead Christ, 189, 272, 273, 273 (detail), 289, 292, 293 (detail); Resurrection and the Three Marys at the Tomb, 107–8, 107 Angelis, Luigi de, 144, 147–48 Anna (prophetess), 100, 116, 120, 122–23, 126–28 Anne/Anna (mother of Mary), 74, 148, 210, 222 Annunciation to Mary, 3, 5, 133, 169–70, 215 Anonimo Magliabechiano. See Maglia­ bechiano manuscript Anonymous Bohemian painter, Dormition of the Virgin, 152, 153 Anonymous Florentine painters: Madonna and Child with Angels, 52, 52; Miraculous Madonna of Orsanmichele and Worshippers, 33–34, 34 Anonymous Roman mosaicist, Madonna and Child with St. Francis, 47, 48 Anonymous Roman painter, St. Lucy, 42 (detail), 47–48, 49 Anselm of Canterbury (saint), 96 Antelami, Benedetto, 191 Anthony of Padua (saint), 28, 45

Aquinas, Thomas (saint), 1, 97, 134, 161, 165, 174, 204 Arena Chapel, Padua, 19, 23, 72, 96, 116 Arnolfo di Cambio, 89; tomb of Cardinal de Braye, 44 art: beauty as goal and ideal of, 8, 12, 40, 93–94; Christianity and, 60–61, 67–68, 80–81, 86, 102–4, 291; conventions regulating, 68, 170, 219–20, 225; engagement with notion of hierarchy in, 1, 10, 11–12; Franciscan influence on, 12, 13, 32, 68, 102, 258; and freedom, 109, 134, 269, 297, 309–10; Hegel on, 60–64; Hofstadter’s chessboard metaphor applied to, 218–19, 241; humanist conception of, 73; individuality and, 109; inside and outside of, 19, 35, 39; Latour on effects of, 106–9; as luxury, 206–7; order imposed by, on disorderly reality, 38–40, 87, 92–93, 171, 208, 263; poetry compared to, 60, 69, 87–88, 249, 298, 307–8; portraits as, 296–97, 306–8, 311; praise as function of, 86–88, 92–93, 96–100, 102, 176, 227, 255, 289, 292, 326n58; realism as goal of, 98; religion in relation to, 106–7; skeptical views of, 73, 75. See also artists; embedded portraits; formal/ compositional features of art; portraits; sacred art; unity art history and historiography: behaviorist approach to, 81–82, 104, 110; embedded portraits in, 233–59; functionalist approach to, 80–84, 104, 110; genealog­ ical approaches in, 78, 80; Giotto’s place in, 13–14, 67–75; as history of form, 8;

357

358 art history and historiography (cont’d ): role of the concept of convention in, 302; skeptical strains of, 73, 75, 110; sociological and anthropological approaches to, 76–85, 87, 109–10; and understanding sacred art, 103–9; Vasari and, 14, 16, 23, 68, 77, 98, 159–60, 176–79, 182, 263–64, 278–85 artists: and conventions, 309; desires of, in relation to those of patrons, 10, 12, 38–39, 310; freedom of, 269, 297, 309–10; modern, 10, 264; public’s ignorance of, 86. See also art Assunto, Rosario, 97–98 Auerbach, Erich, 32, 96, 180, 247–49 Augustine (saint), 99–100, 102, 203, 308 Bacon, Francis, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 33 Baldinucci, Filippo, 164 Balthasar, Hans Urs von, 83 Barasch, Moshe, 222 Barna da Siena, Christ Carrying the Cross, 131, 132 Barth, Karl, 83, 101, 258 Bartoli, Bellozzius, 192 Bartolo di Fredi, 146, 191 Basilica of St. Francis, Assisi. See Lower Church, Assisi; Upper Church, Assisi Baxandall, Michael, 325n29 beauty: as artistic goal and ideal, 8, 12, 40, 93–94; Christianity in relation to, in the modern period, 12–13; classic art history and, 243; defined, 93; Giottino’s Lamentation and, 208–9; Giotto and, 69; Hegel on, 60; as means of reconciling sacred and profane, 10, 276, 288; modern art and, 12–13; public’s and patron’s appreciation of, 86; purpose of, 8; reality and, 93–94, 208; Vasari on, 94, 208–9, 230 Beccafumi, Domenico, 257, 284 Beffremont, Pierre de, 235 behaviorism, 81–82, 104, 110 Belcari, Feo, 222 belief. See doubt and belief Bell, Clive, 72 Bellacci family, 200–202 Bellaccio di Puccio, 200, 201 Bellini, Giovanni, 78, 80; Madonna and Child and Saints, 277–78, 277 Bellosi, Luciano, 137, 158, 167, 281, 286 Belting, Hans, 51–53, 77, 78, 80–81, 98–99, 226, 242, 301 Benedetto di Bindo, 144, 146, 147 Benedict (saint), 169, 209 Benedicta (abbess), 26 Benedictine Order, 168, 201 Benedictional of Æthelwold, 151 Benintendi, Sebastiano, 272 Benjamin, Walter, 75, 325n29

Beno de Rapiza, 47 Benvenuto da Imola, 159 Berenson, Bernard, 72, 165, 182, 191 Berliner, Rudolf, 309 Bernard, Émile, 92 Bernard of Clairvaux (saint), 30, 96 Bicci di Lorenzo, 195 Billi, Antonio, 161, 162, 164, 182, 189, 272 Birkmeyer, Karl, 167, 180, 200, 209, 227 Black Death, 157 Bladelin, Pieter, 15, 233, 235–37, 239–43, 245–47, 267, 275–76 body: Angelico and, 289, 292; as disruption of unity of art works, 10–11; ex-votos and, 254; in patrons’ intercessory images, 51; viewers’ attention to, 10–11; women associated with, 134, 137 Boehm, Gottfried, 304 Boldrone, 29 Bonaccorso di Vanni, 207 Bonaventure (saint), 83–85, 97 Bonconte da Montefeltro, 221 Boniface VIII (pope), 23, 45, 302 Bonsi, Giovanni, 184 Boskovits, Miklós, 136, 150, 182, 184, 192–93, 286, 288 Botti, Beata Villana delle, 271, 272 Botticelli, Sandro, 251 Bouyer, Louis, 101 Braye, Cardinal de, 44 Brenz, Johannes, 190 Bridget of Sweden (saint), Revelations, 203, 224, 239–41, 291 Bronzino, Agnolo, 257 Brunelleschi, Filippo, 286 Buffalmacco, Buonamico, 85, 113, 159 Burckhardt, Jacob, 69, 71, 73, 81, 114, 259, 288 Burial of the Virgin, 150–51 Byzantine art, 68, 137, 139, 143, 198 Byzantine icons, 35 Calasso, Roberto, 101, 106 Calvin, John, 190 Cambio, Domenico di, 254 Campin, Robert (Master of Flémalle), 240, 242 Cappella di Santa Rosa, Santa Maria Aracoeli, Rome, 47 Carmina regia, 222 Carrà, Carlo, 72, 324n22 Carrying of the Cross, 131 Cassirer, Ernst, 73, 257–58 Castelnuovo, Enrico, 310, 320n6 Caterina (daughter of Giotto), 164 Cathars, 83, 102 Catherine of Alexandria (saint), 272 Cavalcanti, Cavalcante de’, 248 Cavallini, Pietro, 45, 47; Presentation of Christ in the Temple, 122, 122

Cenni di Francesco di ser Cenni: Lamentation over the Dead Christ, 186, 186; St. Catherine Disputing with the Doctors, 213, 213 Cennini, Cennino, 6, 98, 175, 266, 283 Cézanne, Paul, 72 Charles of Anjou, 44 Chellini, Pietro, 165, 288 Chiappelli, Alessandro, 182 Chiara (Clare) [saint], 26 Chiara della Croce (abbess), 150 Christianity: and art, 60–61, 67–68, 80–81, 86, 102–4, 291; Giotto and, 68, 71; and modern art, 12–13; status of, at its origin, 35; and subjectivity, 60, 291 Cicero, 308 Cimabue, 68, 85, 124, 139, 140, 143, 299; Crucifixion, Upper Church, Assisi, 28; Madonna of the Angels, 28; Maestà (Louvre), 88; Maestà (Uffizi), 88 Ciriaco d’Ancona, 275 Clark, T. J., 73–76, 82, 325n29 Clement (saint), 47 Clement IV (pope), 310 Clement V (pope), 307 clergy: clothing of, 19; laity in relation to, 20, 21; portraits of, 12; regular vs. secular, 21 clothing: in Angelico’s Deposition, 266–69; black, 27, 28, 47, 50, 62, 148, 150, 168–69, 198, 201, 210, 212, 213, 235–36, 239, 245, 267, 271, 288; in fourteenth-century paintings, 146–47; Francis and, 37; in Giottino’s Lamentation, 168, 201; of laypersons, 28; of men, 19–20; of patrons, 28–29; spiritual meaning of, 214; of widows, 20; of women, 146–47 Collaborator of Francesco da Rimini (Maestro di Veruccio?), Adoration of the Magi, 220, 221 color: Angelico and, 16, 266, 272, 282–84; Cennini and, 266, 284; Giottino and, 14, 160, 162, 182–83, 188, 209, 279–80, 284–85; unity achieved by means of, 8, 14, 177– 78, 182–83, 209, 280; Vasari on, 177–78, 182–83, 279–80, 284–85 compagnia (cooperative), 184 composition. See formal/compositional features of art Confraternity of the Oratory of the Croce al Tempio, 271 Confucius, 206 connoisseurship, 77 Contarini, Elisabetta, 7, 20, 198 conventions and conventionalism, 34, 54, 68, 87, 181, 209, 221, 245, 256, 269, 272, 297, 301–3, 309 Coppo di Marcovaldo and Salerno di Coppo, Crucifix, 137, 138, 138 (detail), 139, 173, 229 Cornell, Henrik, 240

ind ex 359 corpus mysticum, 202 Cosmas (saint), 271 Crown of Thorns, 186–87, 189, 267–68 Crucifixion, 26–29, 30, 129, 131 Crucifixion (Munich Crucifixion) [Giotto and workshop], 12, 18 (detail), 20, 51, 271; attributions of, 315n4; the Cross in, 34; doubling in, 212; emotions in, 28–33, 40, 131; Francis in, 21, 29; identity of patrons in, 19–22; order and pattern underlying, 39; original context for, 19, 314n3 (ch1); representational conventions in, 25, 62; status of embedded portraits in, 35–36, 38; viewers’ intended experienced shaped by, 36 crypto-portraits, 251, 267, 269, 275, 288, 299–300, 354n12 Cubism, 264 Daddi, Bernardo, 33, 85, 178; Annunciation, 215, 215, 222; Crucifixion, 54, 55; Madonna dell’Opera, 53–54, 53, 212; St. Paul, 55, 59, 59 Dandolo, Francesco, 7, 198 Dante Alighieri, 96, 98, 190, 201, 205, 221, 247–49, 298; Commedia, 22, 32, 37–38, 180, 202–3, 248–49, 309 Datini, Francesco di Marco, 5, 206–7, 254 David, Gerard, 235 death, Christian meaning of, 230 Death of the Virgin, 150–53 Demuth, Charles, Dove, 308 Deposition of the Body of Christ, 266 devotion: images associated with, 47, 53, 76, 78, 102, 171, 205, 207–8, 220; intercessory hopes linked to, 51, 202; of the laity, 5, 21, 33, 36–37, 133, 154; models of, 180, 205, 219, 241; personalization of, 37, 77; temporality of, 36–37. See also piety dialogic panels. See interactive/dialogic panels disegno, 80, 175, 278 divinity. See God/the divine Domenico Veneziano, 282, 284 Dominic (saint), 1, 271, 272 Dominican Order, 1, 3, 6, 16, 108 donors, 314n6. See also patrons doublings/pairings: in Christian myth, 217; of figures in paintings, 28–29, 168, 212– 14, 221; gender in, 210, 212–13; in Giottino’s Lamentation, 14–15, 168, 186, 209–17, 223; of life and death, 230; as representation of the soul, 210, 212; of sacred and profane, 15, 28–29, 168, 210, 212–13, 230; theological and ontological significance of, 213–14 doubt and belief: and God, 74–76, 102–3, 255; Lamentation over the Body of Christ and, 230; modern psychology of,

73–76; witness figures and, 39, 129–31, 133–37, 141, 147 Drea (Andrea) degli Albizzi, 167 Duccio di Buoninsegna, 68, 86, 144; Madonna of the Franciscans, 30, 31, 51, 88; Madonna Rucellai, 52, 88, 89, 94; Maestà (Siena Cathedral), 88, 122 Dürer, Albrecht, 275 Eco, Umberto, 301, 302 effigies, 24, 44–45, 98, 206, 253–56, 259, 301. See also tombs elites: among laity, 47–48; gender as factor in portraits of, 26; portraits of, 12, 43–45; roles of, in hierarchies, 40 Elizabeth of Portugal (or Hungary) [saint], 7, 198 embedded portraits: Angelico and, 267, 269, 275, 288; as anomalous elements in a work, 8, 12, 19, 35–36, 38, 40, 60–64, 84, 168–71, 181, 220–21, 225, 263; and the art of praise, 99; classic art history of, 233– 59; depicted contact of, 198; doublings/ pairings of, 168, 214; in early Netherlandish painting, 235, 275; emotions of, 28–33, 59, 62–63; in Ghirlandaio’s Confirmation of the Rule of St. Francis, 251, 253, 255; in Giottino’s Lamentation, 167–69, 171, 179–81, 187–88, 201, 204–6, 210, 221– 24, 227, 237, 241, 263, 264; Hegel on, 12, 60–64, 237; and human-divine relationship, 1, 3, 5, 8, 10; intercessional character of, 204–5, 344n205; meaning of, 225–27, 229; of patrons, 5, 6, 7, 12, 14, 314n6; in Ponce Annunciation, 3, 5, 169– 71; and realism, 181; and reality, 10, 62, 64, 225; in Renaissance art, 15; representational conventions for, 33, 62–63, 129, 131, 171, 179–80, 221, 224; and the sacred and profane in art, 10, 168, 212; salvation as goal of, 5, 19, 40, 50, 204–5, 253, 255, 345n211; scale of, 1, 3, 10, 12, 23, 34, 36, 43, 45; and subjectivity, 15, 40, 60, 64, 226, 230, 237, 242–43; van der Weyden and, 233, 235, 237, 242, 247, 269, 275–76, 352n27; varieties of, 51–59; Vasari on, 251; viewers in relation to, 108, 227, 229–30, 243; witness figures as precursors of, 131–33, 150– 54. See also patrons emotion: art’s goal of eliciting, 8; associated with the Crucifixion, 30; of embedded portraits, 28–33, 59; Giotto and, 72, 116– 17; in Munich Crucifixion, 28–33; preparation of the soul through, 30; ritual/ representational conventions for expression of, 33, 36, 127–28, 171, 179–80, 219–21, 224. See also subjectivity Engebrechtsz, Cornelis, Lamentation over the Dead Christ, 62–63, 63 Entombment of Christ, 153–54

Este, Francesco d’, 240 ex-votos, 76, 254–55, 298 Eyck, Jan van, 242, 247, 252, 264, 275, 276, 302; Madonna of Canon Joris van der Paele, 275, 276 Fatinelli, Iacopo, 204 Fazio, Bartolommeo, 275 Felman, Shoshana, 13, 103–6, 108, 229 Fioretti di San Francesco, 100 Florentine art after Giotto, 5–7, 71, 157–60, 175–76. See also Trecento art Follower of Duccio, triptych with Madonna and Child, 54, 58 formal/compositional features of art: Angelico’s Deposition, 266–67; asymmetry, 39, 89, 216, 218; beauty as goal of, 8, 12, 40; of Byzantine art, 68; Christian art and, 12, 13, 60–61; closed compositions, 30, 71, 139–40, 143, 227, 229, 256–57; compartmentalization, 3, 5, 54, 62, 90, 94, 168, 169, 173–74; conventional, 34, 219–21; frontality, 39, 47–48, 116, 122–25, 157, 267; Giottino’s Lamentation, 176, 229; of modern art, 10; open compositions, 143–44, 176, 229; order and pattern, 3, 39–40, 51, 71, 87–91, 171, 208, 216, 263; of premodern art, 8; symmetry, 15, 39, 87–88, 92, 119, 122, 124–25, 158, 214. See also pattern Forteguerra, Monaldo, 48 Francesco da Rimini, 221 Franchi, Rossello di Jacopo, 289 Francia, Francesco, 283 Franciscan Order: and human nature, 8, 13, 38–39, 96, 101; influence of, on art, 8, 12, 13, 32, 68, 102, 258; organization of, 21; and paganism, 101; papal confirmation of, 250–51 Francis of Assisi (saint): on human-divine relationship, 12, 13, 21; images of, 6, 7, 21, 26, 28–29, 45, 47, 95, 96–97, 173, 198, 305, 317n35; and imitation of Christ, 21, 29, 77; and lay associations, 21; life story and teachings of, 21, 37–38, 43–44, 96–97, 133, 206, 221–23; and portraiture, 12, 32; stigmatization of, 29; subjectivity and human nature in the thought of, 38–39; teachings of, 12, 21 Franco, Matteo, 250 Frazer, J. G., 256 freedom: art and, 109, 134, 269, 297, 309–10; of individuals, 64, 73, 109, 246; religion and, 6, 93, 134; secularism and, 99–100 Friedländer, Max J., 252 Fry, Roger, 72, 91, 179 Frye, Northrop, 87–88, 106, 214 functionalism, in art history, 78, 80–84, 104, 110

360 funerary images, 198, 200, 202, 204–6, 210, 303 Gabriel (angel), 3, 170, 171, 210, 215 Gaddi, Agnolo, 5–6, 160, 165, 178, 184, 191, 201, 207, 281, 285; Entombment, of Christ, 186, 187; Madonna and Child with Saints, 1, 2, 3, 5, 11, 158 Gaddi, Gaddo, 160 Gaddi, Giovanni, 160, 183 Gaddi, Taddeo, 6, 68, 85, 94, 144, 159, 160, 172–73, 183, 184, 198, 299, 307; Annunciation, 194–95, 194; Entombment of Christ, 172, 173; Nativity of Christ, 135, 136, 241; Pietà, 227, 228, 229 Gaddi, Zanobi, 186 García Márquez, Gabriel, Love in the Time of Cholera, 297 Garin, Eugenio, 73 Garrison, Edward, 80 Geertgen tot Sint Jans, 15, 243, 245–47; The Burning and Recovery of the Bones of John the Baptist, 243, 244, 245–47 Gentile da Fabriano, 281; Adoration of the Magi, 270 Gentile da Montefiore, 128–29 gestures, 3, 78, 95, 136; Angelico’s use of, 269, 272, 288; compositional role of, 175–76; conventions for, 62, 221, 272; crossed-hands, 221, 239; Giottino’s use of, 189–90, 208, 222; Giotto’s use of, 40, 116, 117, 119, 127–28, 141; in inter­ active/dialogic panels, 52; intercessory, 1, 168; of modern figures in sacred art, 62, 127–28, 130, 146, 179, 189–90, 221; natural, 272; of prayer, 127, 222–23, 266–67, 272 Ghiberti, Lorenzo, 77, 131, 158, 159, 161, 162, 164, 178, 182 Ghirlandaio, Domenico, 15, 256, 263, 269, 280, 284; Confirmation of the Rule of St. Francis, 249–53, 250, 255, 258–60 Ghirlandaio, Ridolfo, 263 Ghissi, Francescuccio, Man of Sorrows and Nativity, 215, 216 ghosts, 13, 103–6 Giacomo di Giovanni Capocci, 47 Giordano da Rivalto, 190–91 Giorgio di Andrea, 146 Gioseffi, Decio, 123 Giottino (Giotto di Stefano), 6; Angelico and, 264, 270, 287–88, 292; and color, 14, 160, 162, 182–83, 188, 209, 279–80, 284–85; emotional expression in the works of, 285–86; historical sources on, 162, 164, 183; influence of, 272; and modern painting, 264; name of, 162, 164, 335n31; payment of, 183; reputation of, 68; unity in the paintings of, 178–79, 264; Vasari on,

8, 14, 159, 160, 162, 164–65, 167, 176–79, 181–82, 187–90, 208–9, 224, 264, 278–80, 283–85 Giottino (Giotto di Stefano), works: attributions of, 336n41; Head of Saint, 285, 286; Madonna and Child with Saints, 162, 163, 181–82, 184. See also Lamentation over the Dead Christ (San Remigio Pietà) Giotto: allegories painted by, 94–97; and Christianity, 68, 71; daughter of, 164; emotional expression in the works of, 116–19; figures in the art of, 22–23; France as source for the art of, 43–44, 89; Hegel on, 63–64; and humanism, 13, 73–75, 97, 157; influence of, 6, 55, 157–65, 171–72, 176, 178–79, 272, 283; Legend of St. Francis cycle, 118; modern interpretations of, 13, 63–64, 67–76, 78, 82, 92, 96, 98, 116, 324n2, 324n22 (see also premodern reputation of ); narrative quality of works by, 13, 23, 68–69, 72; portraits by, 23–24, 128–29, 298–99, 301, 302, 310; premodern reputation of, 22, 67–69, 94, 97, 98, 159–60 (see also modern interpretations of ); Rome as source for the art of, 45; and secular sphere, 71–75; and subjectivity, 72–73; at transition between systems of painting, 125–26; Tuscany as source for the art of, 44–45; Vasari on, 23, 67, 68, 69, 89, 90, 96, 117, 123, 159–60, 298–99 Giotto, works: Allegory of Obedience, 94–95, 95, 114, 114 (detail); Altarpiece of Cardinal Stefaneschi, 91–92, 91, 175, 179; Annunciation, 222; Ascension of Christ, 223; Baroncelli Polyptych, 68, 69, 90, 92; Christ Among the Doctors, 123–24; Confirmation of the Rule of St. Francis, 250–51, 251, 258–60; Crucifix, Rimini, 90; Crucifix, Santa Maria Novella, 27, 90; Cruci­ fixion, 187; Crucifixion with St. Francis, 127; Dormition of the Virgin, 90, 90, 111 (detail), 284; Dream of Joachim, 73–74, 74; Early Childhood of Christ cycle, 115–19, 115, 328n7, 329n9; Entombment of Christ, 153– 54, 154, 155 (detail); Lamentation over the Dead Christ (Assisi), 141–42, 141, 148, 176; Lamentation over the Dead Christ (Padua), 142–44, 143, 148, 171–73, 180; Last Judgment, 23, 24, 41 (detail), 87, 90, 310; Nativity, 136; Ognissanti Madonna, 34, 89, 89; Presentation of Christ in the Temple (Assisi), 14, 112 (detail), 116–29, 117; Presentation of Christ in the Temple (Padua), 116, 118, 123, 222. See also Giotto and workshop Giotto and workshop: Crucifixion with St. Francis, 28, 29; Presentation of Christ in the Temple, 122–23, 123; Teobaldo Pontano and Mary Magdalene, 25, 25, 168. See also Crucifixion (Munich Crucifixion)

Giotto di Stefano. See Giottino Giovanna di Damiano, 150 Giovanni (archpresbyter), 183 Giovanni dal Ponte, 278, 280 Giovanni da Milano, 8, 68, 147, 158, 165, 178, 184, 213; Expulsion of Joachim, 210, 211, 211 (detail); Madonna and Child, 146–47, 198, 199; panel with eight scenes including Lamentation over the dead Christ, 184, 185, 185 (detail), 218; Pietà, 78, 79, 80 Giovanni del Biondo, 158, 184; Lamentation over the Dead Christ, 186 Giuliano da Rimini, Madonna and Child with Saints, 54–55, 58, 65 (detail) Giunta Pisano, 137 Giusto de’ Menabuoi, 87, 158 Gnudi, Cesare, 89 God/the divine: belief in, 74–76, 102–3, 255; functionalist approach to, 81; humans’ relationship to, 1, 3, 5, 8, 12, 13, 21, 31, 40, 80–87, 92, 97, 102, 247–49; psychological conception of, 82; reality of, 75, 82, 86, 104 Goes, Hugo van der, 243; Portinari Altarpiece with Nativity with the Shepherds, 252 Goethe, J. W. von, 77, 93 Gogh, Vincent van, 92 Golden Haggadah, 153 Gombrich, E. H., 256, 299, 301 Goodhart Master, Madonna and Child, 52 Goodman, Nelson, 301, 302 Gospel of Nicodemus, 190 Gospels, stories in, 131, 133–34, 134, 148, 203, 217 Gozzoli, Benozzo, 251 Greek culture, 101–2 hairstyles, 146–47, 205, 214 Hals, Frans, 243 Hegel, G. W. F., 12–13, 15, 60–64, 67, 237, 249, 258, 270 hidden portraits, 267–69, 288, 299, 354n12 hierarchy: Christianity and, 40; compositional, 1, 10, 11, 92; cosmic, 5, 10, 40, 92–93, 100; in fourteenth-century art, 158; and the sacred and profane, 92; tangled vs. cybernetic, 218–19 historiography. See art history and historiography Hofstadter, Douglas R., 218–19, 241 Holbein, Hans, the Younger, 302 Honorius III (pope), 250 humanism: art criticism in fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, 158–59, 253, 327n97; and art of praise, 93, 97; Francis’s teachings and, 258; Giotto and, 13, 73–75, 97, 157; and history, 100; and human nature, 101, 247; and literature, 94, 97; Panofsky and, 246; religious foundation of, 97;

ind ex 361 separation of thought and action in, 76, 83. See also neo-humanism human nature: conservative religious view of, 101; divine nature in relation to, 1, 3, 5, 8, 12, 13, 21, 31, 40, 80–87, 92, 97, 102, 247–49; Franciscan conception of, 13, 38–39, 96, 101 Hus, Jan, 83 icons, 21, 242, 304–5. See also Byzantine icons ideality/the ideal: art and, 1, 60–62; art history/historiography and, 82; Burckhardt and, 69, 71; Hegel and, 12, 60–62 individuality: of aesthetic response, 109; artistic unity vs., 139, 158, 245; convention/tradition vs., 181; existential questions linked to, 230, 247; Franciscan teachings and, 12, 32; freedom associated with, 64, 73, 109, 246; icons and, 21; modern, 243, 246, 248; portraits as vehicles for portraying, 22–23, 50–51, 64, 181, 226, 243, 306, 308, 310; portrayed in fourteenth-­century art, 50, 72, 81, 223; and public-private dilemma, 190, 246; quasi-, 23, 214; and relationship to the divine, 205. See also human nature; subjectivity Infancy Gospels, 126, 217 Ingres, J. A. D., Monsieur Bertin, 311 Innocent III (pope), 96 interactive/dialogic panels, 51–54, 80, 235–36 intercession, 50–51, 102, 202–6, 230, 253 interpassivity, 36, 257, 291 Isaac Master, 142 Jacopo da Voragine, The Golden Legend, 120, 125, 202 Jacopo di Cione, 5–6, 8, 160, 165, 184, 207, 281, 285; Annunciation (Ponce Annunciation), 3, 4, 5, 8, 14, 17 (detail), 169–71, 170, 176, 191, 194–95, 201–2, 222, 239; Coronation of the Virgin, 147, 158, 222, 239 Jacopone da Todi, Lauds, 31–32 James, Henry, The Turn of the Screw, 103–5 Jansz., Jan Willem, 243 Jean II le Bon (king), 302 Jerome (saint), 134 Jesus Christ: birth of, 130, 133–37, 233–40; carrying the Cross, 131; crucifixion of, 129, 131; death of, 230; deposition of the body of, 266; entombment of, 153–54; God’s incarnation as, 82, 86–87; imitation of, 21, 29, 77, 206; intercession of, 203–4; lamentation over body of, 137–50, 169, 171–74, 180–81, 184, 186–89, 209, 216, 218, 229, 272; presentation in the Temple, 116–17, 119–29 John (saint), 1, 28, 30, 39–40, 143, 144, 153, 186, 189, 217, 218, 267, 285

John, gospel of, 6, 26, 129, 148, 153, 188, 204, 214 John II “Sebastokrater,” 200 John the Baptist, 1, 47, 174, 182, 245 Joseph (husband of Mary), 121, 123, 125–26, 134, 209, 216–17, 239 Joseph of Arimathea, 14, 30, 142–43, 186, 188–89, 209, 217, 218, 221, 229, 266–69 Julian (emperor), 245 Kant, Immanuel, 72–73, 257 Keller, Harald, 301, 302 kitsch, 82–83 Knightly Order of St. John the Baptist, 243 Komnenos, Isaak, 200 Kris, Ernst, 256 Kristeller, Paul Oskar, 73 Kroos, Renate, 204 Kugler, Franz, 71 Kurz, Otto, 256 Lamentation over the Body of Christ: Angelico’s version of, 272; Byzantine versions of, 137, 139, 143; comparisons of paintings of, 137–50, 172–73; Giotto’s versions of, 141–44; meaning of, 230; women as witnesses to, 137, 139, 141–44, 146–48 Lamentation over the Dead Christ (San Remigio Pietà) [Giottino], 9, 166, 231 (detail); anomalous elements of, 168–69, 171, 181, 209–18; clothing in, 168, 201; commissioning of, 200–201; comparisons of other works to, 184–87; dating of, 184; doublings in, 209–17, 223; embedded portraits in, 167–69, 171, 179–81, 187–88, 201, 204–6, 210, 221–24, 227, 237, 241, 263, 264; formal/compositional features of, 176, 229; history and original installation of, 165, 167, 191–202; influence of, 184, 218, 272, 288; intercessional character of, 204–5; meaning of, 14–15, 180–81, 205, 208; models for, 173, 176; Nicodemus in, 188–90; overview of, 14–15, 165, 167–69, 171–76; Ponce Annunciation as pendant to, 8, 14, 169–71, 191, 194, 201–2; and realism, 181, 264; sacred and profane in, 14–15, 168, 179, 205; size of, 167, 173; unity of, 8, 14, 168, 178–81, 188, 209, 224; witness figures in, 168, 190 Landau, Horace de, 192 Landino, Cristoforo, 161 Lanzi, Luigi, 140 Lateran Basilica, Rome, 45 Latini, Brunetto, 298 Latour, Bruno, 13, 103, 106–10, 217 Lawrence (saint), 1, 50 laypersons: associations formed by, 21; Biblical counterparts of, 14; burials of, 48; clergy in relation to, 20, 21; clothing of,

28; devotion to the Cross, 26–27; elites among, 47–48; incorporation of, into the gestalt of paintings, 170; piety of, 5, 7, 21, 28, 33, 36–37, 76; portraits of, 26, 242; religious/ethical choices facing, 113, 129–33; witness figures as placeholders for, 113, 129–30, 241. See also patrons; secular sphere Le Fèvre de St.-Remy, Jean, 235 Leo IV (pope/saint), 299 Leo X (pope), 299 Leonardo da Vinci, 284 liberal arts, 99–100 lifelikeness, 6, 23, 89, 99, 237, 250, 297–99, 301, 303–4, 306. See also likeness likeness: concept of, 297; funerary images and, 43; mechanical means of producing, 24, 304, 308; psychological attraction of, 300; realism in art and the issue of, 298, 308; reference in relation to, 296–97; typicality vs., in portraits, 5, 15, 22–24, 26, 43–44, 114, 150, 205, 214, 237, 301–3. See also lifelikeness; portraits Limburg brothers, 240 Lippi, Filippo, 215, 282, 284 Lippo, 278 Lippo di Benivieni, 172 Lippo Memmi, Annunciation, 173, 174 Lippo Vanni, reliquary triptych with Annunciation and Madonna and Child with saints, 225, 226 Little Flowers of St. Francis, 28, 221–23 liturgy: abstraction from the personal and everyday as feature of, 36–37, 87; meaning of early Christian, 101; memory of the dead sustained by, 202 Longhi, Roberto, 165, 177, 178, 184, 191, 286, 288, 289 Longinus, 129 Lorenzetti, Ambrogio, 14, 131; Annunciation, 191, 193, 194; predella with Lamentation over the Dead Christ, 144, 145, 145 (detail), 146, 146–48, 210 Lorenzetti, Pietro, 129, 159, 160, 226; Birth of the Virgin, 174 Lorenzo di Niccolò, 207 Lorenzo Monaco, 178, 189, 264, 270, 285, 289; Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, 66 (detail), 70, 71; Processional Cross, 29 Lotario dei Segni. See Innocent III Louis (saint), 43 Lower Church, Assisi, 14, 25, 28, 92, 94–96, 114–16, 115, 165 Luca di Tommè, Adoration of the Magi, 136, 137 Lucy (saint), 47 Ludovico da Pietralunga, 96 Luke, gospel of, 71, 100, 116, 119–21, 127, 142, 148, 203, 210, 214

362 Lupicini, Goccio, 201 Luther, Martin, 102 Maestro della Croce di Trevi, or Maestro del Dittico Poldi Pezzoli, diptych with Crowning with Thorns, Flagellation, and Crucifixion, 54, 56 Magdalene Master. See Master of the Magdalen magic, 15, 82, 204–6, 253–56, 259 Magliabechiano manuscript, 162, 164, 281 Mâle, Émile, 136, 240 Mander, Karel van, 245 Mannerism, 10, 187, 256–57, 263 Man of Sorrows iconography, 78 Mantegna, Andrea, 78, 80 Marguerite de Provence, 43 Maria de Rapiza, 47 Mark, gospel of, 142, 146, 148, 214 Marle, Raimond van, 5, 191 Mary, Virgin: annunciation to, 3, 5, 133, 169– 70, 215; birth of, 210; birth of Jesus, 133– 37, 239–41; clothing and hair styles of, 146–47; Crucifixion, 39; death and burial of, 150–53, 217; gestures of, 222; husbands of, 216; at lamentation over Jesus, 139, 144, 186, 227; Last Judgment, 23; Madonna and Child, 1, 7, 30, 80, 182; patrons depicted before, 1, 3, 5, 7, 43–45, 48, 50–51, 53, 169; presentation of Jesus in the temple by, 116, 119–21, 125, 128, 129; purification of, 116, 119–21 Mary Magdalene, 25–29, 54, 94, 113, 131, 146, 209–10, 217, 218, 235, 267 Marys, in the Gospels, 148 Masaccio, 98, 278, 281–85, 288 Maso di Banco, 40, 93, 158, 159, 162, 164–65, 167, 178, 181, 191, 272, 278 Masolino, 281, 288 Master of 1310, Madonna and Child, 34, 35, 36, 51, 212 Master of Flémalle (Robert Campin), 240, 242 Master of San Francesco, Lamentation over the Dead Christ, 139–40, 140, 229 Master of San Lucchese, 240 Master of Santa Verdiana, 195 Master of the Annunciation of the Accademia, 195 Master of the Ashmolean Predella, Birth of the Virgin, 156 (detail), 210, 212, 212 Master of the Codex St. George, 222 Master of the Corsi Crucifixion, 27 Master of the Dominican Effigies, All Saints, Laudario of St. Agnese, 93 Master of the Fogg Pietà (Maestro di Figline), Lamentation over the Dead Christ, 172, 172

Master of the Griggs Crucifixion, 280 Master of the Legend of St. Catherine, 235 Master of the Magdalen, 51; Crucifix, 27, 27 Master of the Misericordia, 184 Master of the Orcagnesque Misericordia, Annunciation, 194, 195 Master of the Piani d’Invrea Crucifixion, 240 Matthew, gospel of, 33, 37, 131, 142, 146, 148, 203, 214 Maximilian of Bavaria (king), 63 Medici, Cosimo de’, il Vecchio, 251, 271, 275, 276, 288 Medici, Giovanni de’, 251 Medici, Giuliano de’, 251, 255 Medici, Lorenzo de’, 250–56 Medici, Piero de’, 251 Medici family, 15, 251, 306 Meditations on the Life of Christ, 30, 96, 117, 127, 134, 222, 240, 317n45 Meiss, Millard, 73, 157–59, 167, 175, 191, 240 memorial portraits, 54, 98–99, 302 Menologium of Basil II, 122 merism, 213–14, 223, 230, 292 Michelangelo Buonarroti, 71, 90, 190, 252, 263, 284 Michelozzo, 267 midwives, 14, 133–37, 210, 241 Milanesi, Gaetano, 182, 192 modern art: altarpieces and, 88; Angelico and, 109, 266–70, 282; artists’ role and status in, 10, 264; and beauty, 12–13; Christianity and, 12–13; critiques of, 81; Giottino and, 264; Giotto and, 71–72, 76, 283; Hegel on, 12–13, 60; interpretation of, 100–101; kitsch in relation to, 82; negative/paradoxical/critical character of, 13, 106, 109; portraits in, 311; and reality, 16, 60–61; Renaissance art as, 233; and subjectivity, 15, 243; Vasari and, 264, 283 Montesecco, Giambattista, 254 Moretti, Franco, 94 Munich Crucifixion. See Crucifixion (Munich Crucifixion) [Giotto and workshop] nails, from the Cross, 186–89, 191, 209, 267–68, 272 Nanni di Banco, 271 Nardo di Cione, 158, 160, 165, 176, 182, 184, 191, 209; Last Judgment, 146; Paradise, 87, 212 Nativity of Christ, 130, 133–37, 233–41 Naumburg Cathedral, Saxony, 300 Navicella, St. Peter’s, Rome, 45 Nazarenes, 324n2, 324n22 Nelli, Pietro, 201 neo-avant-garde, 81

neo-humanism, 73, 75–76, 82–84, 110, 247–48 neo-paganism, 71 Netherlandish art, portraits in, 15, 61, 235, 237, 242, 252–53, 269, 276–77 Niccolò di Pietro Gerini, 158, 187, 207, 215, 285; Annunciation (Ponce Annunciation), 195, 196 Niccolò di Tommaso, 191, 239, 281; Coronation of the Virgin, 158, 239; triptych with Nativity, 238, 239 Nicholas III (pope), 45 Nicholas IV (pope), 45, 50, 140, 168 Nicodemus, 14, 30, 142–43, 153–54, 186–91, 209–10, 218, 221, 229, 266–69, 276 nobility. See elites Nodelman, Sheldon, 301 Nuzi, Allegretto, Man of Sorrows and Nativity, 215, 216 Oertel, Robert, 157 Oexele, Otto Gerhard, 204, 302 Offner, Richard, 165, 193, 281 Orcagna (Andrea di Cione), 5–6, 8, 34, 68, 85, 158, 160, 165, 174–76, 184, 191, 200, 299; Annunciation, 191–94, 192; Crucifixion, 150, 151 (detail); Enthroned Christ and Saints (Strozzi altarpiece), 3, 174–75, 175 Order of St. John, 15 Origo, Iris, Merchant of Prato, 206 Orsini, Giangaetano, 128–29, 203 Orsini, Napoleone, 128–29, 148, 150, 203 Orsini family, 239 otherness, 75, 105 Pacino di Bonaguida: tabernacle with Crucifixion and scenes from the Life of Christ, 54, 57; Carmina regia, 92; Tree of Life, 92–93 paganism, 101. See also neo-paganism pairings. See doublings/pairings Panofsky, Erwin, 73, 78, 80, 82, 110, 233–43, 246–47, 258; Early Netherlandish Painting, 15, 233, 234, 242, 246 Paolo Veneziano, Madonna and Child with Saints, 7, 7, 20, 198 parallelism, 214 Paris Pericope Book, 150–51 Parmigianino, 284 Passavant, J. D., 324n2 patrons: and the art of praise, 99; bodies of, 51; as candidates for sainthood, 21; clothing of, 28–29; desires of, for painted commissions, 10, 12, 38–39, 50–51, 59, 99, 288, 310; of Giottino’s Lamentation over the Dead Christ, 168; piety of, 7; portraits of, 5, 6, 7, 12, 14, 314n6; proto-portraits of, 150–54; salvation as goal of, 5, 19, 40, 50, 204–5, 253, 255, 345n211; and subjectivity, 247;

ind ex 363 women as, 151, 153. See also embedded portraits; laypersons pattern, 3, 10, 39–40, 71, 87, 89, 91–92, 171, 208, 214, 216–17, 225, 292, 309. See also formal/compositional features of art; repetition Paul (saint), 45, 55, 258, 291 perspective, 124–26, 284, 289, 291 Perugino, Pietro, 283 Peter (saint), 45, 174, 209 Peter Martyr (saint), 1 Petrarch, 96, 98, 307, 327n97 Pfaller, Robert, 257 Pfirt, Johanna von, 153 photography, 304, 308 Picasso, Pablo, Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, 308 Piero della Francesca, 280, 282, 284, 289, 291 Pietà. See Lamentation over the Body of Christ Pietro d’Abano, 22, 304 piety: Hegel on artistic expressions of, 61–64; lay, 5, 7, 21, 28, 33, 36–37, 76; non-intellectualized, 83; psychological/ behavioral study of, 13, 15, 81–83. See also devotion Piles, Roger de, 10 Pindar, 87, 99 Pini, Umberto, 192–93 Pisano, Giovanni, 86, 89, 160 Pisano, Nicola, 160, 198; Presentation of Christ in the Temple, 126, 126 Pliny, 23, 306 poetry, 60, 69, 87–88, 249, 298, 307–8 Poliziano, Angelo, 250 Ponce Annunciation. See Jacopo di Cione: Annunciation Pontano, Teobaldo, 23, 25, 128–29, 168 Pontormo, Jacopo, 257, 284 Pope-Hennessy, John, 275 Porte Rouge tympanum, Notre-Dame, Paris, 43 Portinari, Tommaso, 252 portraits: Alberti on, 311; Angelico and, 269, 271, 288, 292; artistic quality of, 296–97, 306–8, 311; artist-sitter relationship in, 304; and the art of praise, 98–99; crypto-, 251, 267, 269, 275, 288, 299–300, 354n12; in Dante’s Commedia, 309; defining, 296–97; democratization of, 6, 12, 48, 50–64, 304; of elites, 12, 43–45; framing of, 305–7; funerary images as, 204–5; gender and, 26; Giotto and, 23–24, 298– 99, 301, 302, 310; Giotto’s Presentation of Christ in the Temple (Assisi) and, 128–29; Hegel on, 60–61; hidden, 267–69, 288, 299, 354n12; icons compared to, 304–5; in illuminated prayer books, 44; individuality signaled by, 22–23, 50–51, 64, 181,

226, 243, 306, 308, 310; in late medieval period, 43–44; likeness vs. typicality in, 5, 15, 22–24, 26, 43–44, 114, 150, 205, 214, 237, 301–3; memorial vs. votive, 98–99; modern, 311; in Netherlandish art, 15, 61, 235, 237, 242, 252–53, 270, 276–77; in panel paintings, 47; photography and, 304; in profile, 25–26; proto-, 150– 54; quasi-, 269, 271, 277, 288; reference in, 170, 295, 303; in relation to Francis’s teachings, 12, 32; retrospective, 271; and subjectivity, 15, 237, 242, 247; terminology related to, 304, 310; in three-­ quarter view, 25–26; unique qualities of, compared to typical sacred art, 237. See also embedded portraits; likeness; memorial portraits; votive portraits Postmodernism, 81 praise, as function of art, 86–88, 92–93, 96–100, 102, 176, 227, 255, 289, 292, 326n58 prayer, 202–4, 222–24 Pre-Raphaelites, 324n2 Presentation of the child, 116–17, 119–29, 131 profane. See sacred and profane Protestantism, 102, 190 Proto-Evangelium of James, 134 Psalter-Hours of Yolande de Soissons, 44 Pseudo-Jacopino: Death of the Virgin, 153; Nativity and Adoration, 222, 223; Polyptych with Pietà and Presentation of Christ in the Temple, 129, 130 Pseudo-Matthew (apocryphal gospel), 73, 100, 131, 134 psychological realism, 64, 72, 148, 245, 272 Puccio Capanna, 158, 160, 161, 298–99; Coronation of the Virgin, 178–79 Puccio di Simone, 144; Death of the Virgin, 151, 153, 212 Pulci, Luigi, 250 Purification of the mother, 116, 119–21, 128, 131, 137 quasi-portraits, 269, 271, 277, 288 Qur’an, 215 Ranieri (saint), 45 Rank, Otto, 210 Raphael, 71, 299 rationalism, 106, 110 realism: aesthetic pleasure evoked by, 256; Angelico and, 291–92; art associated with, 98; Dante and, 249; embedded portraits and, 181; Giottino’s Lamentation and, 181, 264; Giotto and, 13, 72, 75, 97; modern art and, 64; in Netherlandish art, 252–53, 276–77; and open compositions, 144; as philosophical/scholarly approach, 81–82; Piero della Francesca and, 291; premodern, 76; psychological,

64, 72, 148, 245, 272; and sacred art, 289; salvational preferment in relation to, 205, 253, 256; in Simone Martini’s Lamentation, 148; theories of, 256; Vasari and, 263, 278; votive effigies and, 253. See also reality reality: beauty in, 93–94, 208; divine/true, 8, 10, 38–40, 75, 82, 102, 291–92; embedded portraits and, 10, 62, 64, 225; Giotto and, 13, 22, 35, 38, 72, 75; of God, 75, 82, 86, 104; modern art and, 16, 60–61; perpendicularity in composition associated with, 176; perspective and, 291; reference to, 225, 295, 297; representation of conflicting concepts of, 10–11, 26, 38, 62; spatial representation and, 3, 5, 10, 22. See also lifelikeness; likeness; realism reference: fiction in relation to, 309; likeness in relation to, 296–97; mechanism of, 295–96; pictorial, 295–96; in portraiture, 170, 295, 303; reality as object of, 225, 295, 297 relics, 187, 189, 205–6, 209, 221, 225–26, 269, 272 reliquaries, 225 Rembrandt van Rijn, 243 Remigius (Rémy) [saint], 169 Renan, Ernst, 32 repetition, 68, 71, 83, 87, 87–90, 98, 104, 214. See also pattern retrospective portraits, 271 Ricco di Lapo, 164 Richa, Giuseppe, 191, 200 Ricuccio di Puccio, 94 Riegl, Alois, 15, 243–47, 249–50, 258; The Dutch Group Portrait, 243, 249 Rintelen, Friedrich, 72 Rio, Alexis-François, 89–91, 94, 287 ritual: abstraction from subjectivity as feature of, 33, 36, 119; conventions regulating emotional expression in, 33, 36, 127–28; funerary images and, 255; Giotto’s Presentation of Christ in the Temple (Assisi) and, 116, 118, 119; lay interest in, 21; as means of commu­nication between human and divine worlds, 6, 121; truth and, 257 Robert d’Anjou, 222 rood screens, 196–98 Rosselli, Stefano, 200 Rosso Fiorentino, 257, 284 Rufinus (saint), 25, 168 Rumohr, Carl Friedrich von, 63–64, 67–68, 71, 73, 85, 86, 90, 91, 117, 165, 167, 184, 288, 324n2 Ruskin, John, 116, 117 Sacchetti, Franco, 85, 93, 146–47, 157, 158, 191, 204, 206, 255, 325n51

364 sacred and profane: in Angelico’s Deposition, 269; beauty as means of reconciling, 10, 276, 288; in Christian response to the problem of death, 230; devotional perspective on, 37; embedded portraits and, 10; in Giottino’s Lamentation, 14–15, 168, 179, 205; Giotto’s art and, 67; in Giotto’s Presentation of Christ in the Temple, 121, 128; hierarchy and, 92; pairing of, 15, 28–29, 168, 210, 212–13, 230; topological conception of, 114–15; Trecento art and, 71; unity of, 10. See also secular sphere sacred art: Angelico and, 288–89, 291–92; beauty as goal and ideal of, 8; humanist approaches to, 97; laity in relation to, 19, 60, 64; Mannerism and, 263; modern attitudes toward, 13, 67, 77–78, 83–84, 99–110, 219–20, 233; patrons’ desires in conflict with conventions of, 219–20; purpose of, 8, 40, 98–99; realism and, 289; reality and truth in, 309; subjectivity and, 291; viewer’s implication in, 75, 103–5, 108, 171, 242–43. See also praise, as function of art saints, intercession of, 5, 50–51, 202–5, 253, 255. See also relics Salome (midwife), 133–34, 136–37 Salutati, Coluccio, 21, 87 salvation: artistic realism in relation to, 205, 253, 256; embedded portraits as means of achieving, 5, 19, 40, 50, 204–5, 253, 255, 345n211; preparation of the soul for, 30; saints (or Mary or Christ) as intermediaries in securing, 5, 202, 253; as theme of Arena Chapel’s narrative cycle, 96–97 Sandberg-Vavalà, Evelyn, 173, 186 San Miniato al Monte, Florence, 45 San Remigio, Florence, 14, 165, 167, 186, 196– 98, 197, 200–201, 206 San Remigio Pietà. See Lamentation over the Dead Christ (San Remigio Pietà) [Giottino] Sassetti, Francesco, 250, 252–55, 258, 269 Sassetti, Nera Corsi, 255 Sassetti family, 15, 250–51 satire, 308–9 Schlosser, Julius von, 26, 164, 167, 224, 279, 288 Schubring, Paul, 165, 200, 266 Scrovegni, Enrico, 23–24, 45, 301, 302, 310 secular sphere: conceptions of, 99–100, 259; epistemological significance of, 99–100; Francis/Franciscans and, 21; Giotto and, 71–75; neo-humanism and, 73; Warburg and, 258–60; Western culture as, 101. See also laypersons; sacred and profane Seiler, Peter, 302 self. See individuality; subjectivity

self-denial/self-loss, 30–32 Seneca, 102 Shearman, John, 266 Shorr, Dorothy C., 122, 127 Sienese art, 146, 172, 177 Silvestro dei Gherarducci, Christ as Man of Sorrows, 198, 199 Simeon, 116–17, 119–23, 127–28 Simmel, Georg, 237 Simone de’ Crocefissi, 133 Simone Martini, 98, 116, 129, 159, 160, 179, 299, 307, 310; Annunciation, 173, 174; Lamentation over the Dead Christ, 148, 149, 218 Sirén, Osvald, 165 Skaug, Erling, 184 Sloterdijk, Peter, 316n19 Sontag, Susan, 82 soul, doubling of figures as representation of, 210, 212 space: in Munich Crucifixion, 34–35, 39; realistic representation of, 3, 5, 10, 22; virtual, 1, 5, 22, 34–35 Spinello Aretino, 191, 279 Stefaneschi, Bertoldo, 45 Stefaneschi, Giacomo Gaetani, 99 Stefaneschi, Jacopo, 23, 45 Stefano Fiorentino, 85, 96, 158–62, 164–65, 167, 178, 279, 281, 286 Stein, Gertrude, 87, 264 Steiner, Wendy, 297 St. Nicholas Chapel, Lower Church, Assisi, 128–29 Strozzi, Alessio degli, 267 Strozzi, Bartolommeo, 269 Strozzi, Palla, 264 subjectivity: art as ordering of, 38–39; Christianity and, 60, 291; devotion and, 36–37; Dutch group portraits and, 245–46; embedded portraits and, 15, 40, 60, 64, 226, 230, 237, 242–43; emotion and, 59; Franciscan conception of, 38; Giotto and, 72–73; Kant and, 72–73; modern, 15; patrons and, 247; pictorial perspective and, 124–25, 291; portraits and, 15, 237, 242, 247; and the question of life and death, 230; ritual as abstraction from, 33, 36, 119; and self-denial, 30–32; truth and, 257; unity of person and, 221–24, 247; of viewers, 229. See also emotion; individuality; psychological realism Taldi, Giorgio, 280 Taldi, Lazzaro, 280 Tessa de’ Bardi, 172 thanatopraxis, 301 Third Order, 21 Thode, Henry, 175, 240, 258–59 Thomas of Celano, 37, 43, 222 Tignosini, Bonagiunta, 48, 198

Tino da Camaino, 45 Toesca, Pietro, 157, 165, 167 tombs: paintings associated with, 3, 7, 20, 44–45, 48, 50, 99, 198, 200–201, 255; sculptures/effigies associated with, 6, 24, 43–45, 98–99, 206, 254–55, 301 Tommaso (sculptor), 164 Tommaso del Mazza, 158 Tommaso di Stefano Fortunatino, 335n32 Torriti, Jacopo, 45, 47, 50, 122, 142; Worship of the Cross, 46, 51, 168 Toscani, Giovanni di Francesco (also called Giovanni Tossicani), 278–84, 285; Pietà, 279–81, 281; St. John the Baptist and St. James, 281, 282 Tosinghi-Spinelli Chapel, Santa Croce, 117 Tossicani, Giovanni. See Toscani, Giovanni di Francesco tragedy, 180 Traini, Francesco, 113 transference, 105, 229 Transitus Mariae, 150 Trecento art: ambiguous character of, 71; Angelico and, 276, 281–84, 286–87, 289; beauty in, 93; formal qualities of, 3; perspective in, 124–25; portraits in, 242; Vasari on, 14, 159–60, 176–79, 181–83; women’s clothing and hairstyles in, 146–48, 205, 214. See also Florentine art after Giotto Trexler, Richard C., 76 Uberti, Farinata degli, 248, 299 Ugolino di Nerio, 144 unity: achieved by color and contour, 8, 14, 177–78, 182–83, 209, 280; embedded portraits as threat to, 263; in Giottino’s Lamentation, 8, 14, 168, 178–81, 188, 209, 224, 264; of person, 221–24, 247; of sacred and profane realms, 10; temporal, 168, 173, 179; Vasari on, 8, 10, 178–79, 182–83, 188, 209, 224, 257, 263, 280 Upper Church, Assisi, 28, 140–41 Urban V (pope), 183, 204 Valle, Guglielmo della, 116, 144 Varro, 99 Vasari, Giorgio: on Angelico, 267, 269–71, 278, 281–84; and Annunciations related to Giottino’s Lamentation, 191–94; art historical project of, 77; on Barna da Siena, 131; on beauty, 94, 208–9, 230; on color, 177–78, 182–83, 279–80, 284–85; on embedded portraits, 251; on Fra Angelico, 16; on Giottino, 8, 14, 159, 160, 162, 164–65, 167, 176–79, 181–82, 187–90, 196, 208–9, 224, 264, 278–80, 283–85; on Giotto, 23, 67, 68, 69, 89, 90, 96, 117, 123, 159–60, 298–99; on history and theory of

ind ex 365 art, 14, 16, 23, 68, 77, 80, 98, 159–60, 176–79, 182, 208–9, 263–64, 278–85; on Lorenzo de’ Medici, 255; on Masaccio, 98; and modern painting, 264, 282; as painter, 279–80; on Puccio Capanna, 158; and realism, 263, 278; on rood screens, 197; sources used by, 335n36; on Stefano Fiorentino, 161–62; and Toscani, 278–82; on Trecento painters, 14, 159–60, 176–79, 181–83; on unity in art, 8, 10, 178–79, 182–83, 188, 209, 224, 257, 263, 280; on van Eyck, 276 Vauchez, André, 51, 76, 77, 320n4 Vavalà, Evelyn. See Sandberg-Vavalà, Evelyn Velázquez, Diego: Feast of Bacchus (The Drunkards), 11, 11, 16, 252; Pope Innocent X, 311 Ventura, Monna Tora di, 198 Verrocchio, Andrea del, 253, 255 viewers: embedded portraits in relation to, 108, 227, 229–30, 243; human body as focus of attention of, 10–11; implication of, in sacred art, 75, 103–5, 108, 171, 242– 43; paintings’ shaping of the experience of, 36, 125, 227; pictorial perspective and, 124–25; subjectivity of, 229; transference performed by, 105, 229 Villani, Filippo, 93, 160, 298, 299 Villani, Giovanni, 22, 93, 98, 178; Nuova cronica, 33 Vinia di Giovanni Capocci, 47 Volpe, Carlo, 167, 175, 178, 184, 287 Volto Santo, Lucca, 190 votive portraits, 26, 36, 47, 51, 59, 86, 98–99, 242, 253, 255, 275 Waldensians, 83 Warburg, Aby, 15, 249–60, 288 wax effigies, 98, 253–56

Weyden, Rogier van der, 16, 242, 246–47, 252, 264, 275–76, 288; Deposition, 275; Entombment of Christ, 274, 272, 276; Medici Madonna, 276; triptych with Crucifixion, 15, 232 (detail), 235, 236, 247, 275; triptych with Nativity, 233, 234, 234 (detail), 235–37, 240–41, 247, 256, 275 White, John, 167, 301 widows, 20 Wilson, Edmund, 103–4 witness figures, 14, 113–54; absence of, from certain Christological episodes, 132–33; as a chorus, 142, 150; doubt and belief explored through depictions of, 39, 129– 31, 133–37, 141, 147; embedded portraits foreshadowed by, 131–33; in Giottino’s Lamentation, 168, 190; in Giotto’s Allegory of Obedience, 114; in Giotto’s Presentation of Christ in the Temple, 126–29; legal vs. psychological conceptions of, 127; midwives as, 133–37; Nicodemus as, 190; as placeholders for lay beholders/portraits, 113, 129–30, 150, 154, 241; as proto-­ portraits, 150–54; recognition experienced by, 121, 127–30; women as, 134, 136–37, 139, 141–44, 146–48, 150–51, 153 Wölfflin, Heinrich, 114 women: associated with the body, 134, 137; clothing and hairstyles of, 146–47, 205, 214; at Death of the Virgin, 150–52; at Lamentation over the Body of Christ, 137, 139, 141–44, 146–48; pairing of, 210, 212–13; as patrons, 151, 153; as proto-­ portraits, 150–53; as witnesses, 134, 136–37, 139, 141–44, 146–48, 150–51, 153 Wycliffe, John, 83 Žižek, Slavoj, 257 Zwingli, Ulrich, 190

credits

Alamy: 1.3, 4.10, 5.10 Alfredo Dagli Orti / Art Resource, NY: 3.3, 3.5, 3.6, 3.10, 4.4, detail on p. 262, 7.1 Alinari Archives / Art Resource, NY: 5.5, 6.7 Alinari Archives / George Tatge / Art Resource, NY: 3.4 Alte Pinakothek, Munich: 1.1 ART Collection / Art Resource, NY: 5.23 Ashmolean Museum, Oxford: 5.20 Author: 3.2 and detail, 4.2, 5.8, 5.11, 6.2, 7.9, 7.10 Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana: 1.7 Biblioteca Berenson, Fototeca, I Tatti — Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies: 4.20 bpk-Bildagentur / Alte Pinakothek, Munich / Art Resource, NY: 2.12, 5.9, 7.4 bpk-Bildagentur / Gemäldegalerie, Berlin / Jörg P. Anders /  Art Resource, NY: 4.18 Bridgeman Images: 1.4, 6.3 Cameraphoto Arte, Venice / Art Resource, NY: 0.3 Denver Art Museum, Gift of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation: 5.18 Domenico Ventura: 2.2 Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY: 5.6, 5.24, detail on p. 268 Fondazione Giorgio Cini: 2.7 Frick Collection: 4.9 Gallerix: 5.22 Google Art Project: 3.7, 6.5 Governing Body of Christ Church, Oxford: 2.4 Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Mass.: 5.14

366

HIP / Art Resource, NY: 3.8 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston: 2.10, 4.6 Kress Collection: 0.2, 2.8, 5.3 Luisa Ricciarini / Bridgeman Images: 4.3 Memphis Brooks Museum of Art; Gift of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation: 2.9 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: 5.17, 5.21, 7.11 Ministero della Cultura — Complesso Monumentale della Pilotta — Galleria Nazionale, Parma: 0.1 Mondadori Portfolio / Art Resource, NY: 5.16 Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid: 4.11 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: 4.20 National Gallery of Art, Washington: 2.11 Nicolò Orsi Battaglini / Bridgeman Images: 7.3 North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh: 5.25 Peter Barritt / Alamy Stock Photo: 5.10 Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia: 6.4 Picture Art Collection / Alamy Stock Photo: 3.9, 4.17 RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY: 1.8, 7.12 Royal Collection Trust / Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2022: 7.2 Scala / Art Resource, NY: 0.4, detail of 1.2, 1.5, 1.6, 2.1, 2.5, 4.7, 4.12, 4.13, 4.14, 4.15, 4.16, 5.2, 5.4, 5.7, 5.13, 5.19, 6.6, 7.5, 7.7 Ville de Grenoble / Musée de Grenoble — J. L. Lacroix: 2.3 VTR / Alamy Stock Photo: 4.1 Walters Art Museum, Baltimore: 5.26, 7.8 Wikimedia Commons: 0.5, 1.2, 3.1, 4.5, 4.8, detail of 4.12, 4.19, 5.12, 6.1, 7.6 Yale University Art Gallery: 5.15, 5.27