Monumental Sounds   Art and Listening before Dante 9004415009, 9789004415003

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Monumental Sounds

Brill’s Studies on Art, Art History, and Intellectual History General Editor Walter S. Melion (Emory University)

volume 55

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/bsai

Monumental Sounds Art and Listening before Dante By

Matthew G. Shoaf

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustrations: Author. Diotisalvi, Baptistery of San Giovanni (cathedral in foreground), begun 1152, Pisa. Author. Detail of The Last Judgment, marble, 1310–30, Orvieto. Scala, Florence. Detail of The Deception of Isaac, fresco, 1290s, Assisi. Author. Nicola Pisano, detail of The Temptation, marble, 1278, Perugia. Wikimedia Commons/public domain. Detail from Giovanni Morelli’s Italian Painters (1892). This book has received the Weiss-Brown Publication Subvention Award from the Newberry Library. The award supports the publication of outstanding works of scholarship that cover European civilization before 1700 in the areas of music, theater, French or Italian literature, or cultural studies. It is made to commemorate the career of Howard Mayer Brown. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Shoaf, Matthew G., author. Title: Monumental sounds : art and listening before Dante / Matthew G. Shoaf. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2021] | Series: Brill’s studies on  art, art history, and intellectual history, 1878–9048 ; volume 55 |  Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021016913 (print) | LCCN 2021016914 (ebook) | ISBN  9789004415003 (hardback) | ISBN 9789004460812 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Senses and sensation in art. | Christian art and  symbolism—Italy—Medieval, 500–1500. | Art, Gothic—Italy—Themes,  motives. | Narrative art, Italian—Themes, motives. | Senses and  sensation—Religious aspects—Christianity. Classification: LCC N8241.3 .S56 2021 (print) | LCC N8241.3 .S56 2021  (ebook) | DDC 704.9/482—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021016913 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021016914 Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 1878-9048 ISBN 978-90-04-41500-3 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-46081-2 (e-book) Copyright 2021 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau Verlag and V&R Unipress. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Acknowledgments vii List of Illustrations ix Introduction: An Unheard Art 1 1 Knowing Hearing 3 2 Hearing Eclipsed 10 3 Shapers of Ears 18 4 Monumental Sounds 25 1 Listening Up 34 1 Aural Sensitivities 35 2 Lost Hearing 51 3 Great Listeners 60 2 The Ear, Estranged 65 1 Seeing Listening 65 2 Ear Blindness 71 3 Stasis and Significance 84 3 A Feast for the Ears 96 1 Giotto’s The Wedding Feast at Cana 96 2 Scale of Listening 100 3 Rebirth through the Ear 114 4 Aural Ambitions 128 4 Sound Restoration 132 1 Nicola Pisano’s Pulpit in Pisa 132 2 Raising Voices 138 3 Silenced Skeptic 150 4 Antique Resonance 173 5 Muted Clergy 183 6 Sculptural Ephpheta! 192 5 Higher Fidelity 200 1 The Isaac Frescoes in Assisi 200 2 Return of the Repressed Sense 207

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3 Aural Ancestry 220 4 Hidden by Sight 236 5 Auditory Interests 248 Conclusion: Humbling Sight 253 Bibliography 261 Index of Modern Authors 286 Index of Early Sources 288 Index of Subjects 290

Acknowledgments I am very grateful for help I received along the journey of this project’s life. When I began writing in Chicago, in 2017, some groundwork had been laid years earlier with support from Ursinus College in the forms of a pre-tenure paid leave, a post-tenure sabbatical, and funds for research and conference travel. Dominique de Saint Etienne, in Myrin Library’s Interlibrary Loans, put many hard-to-find books into my hands. I appreciate the interest and comments of my former colleagues, especially Deborah Barkun, Lynn Edwards, Sheryl Goodman, Sarah Kaufman, April Kontostathis, Judy Levy, Jay Miller, Tony Nadler, Jennifer Pfleeger, Paul Stern, and Colette Trout. Beyond Ursinus I had fruitful exchanges with Andrew Albin, Caitlín Barrett, Susan Boynton, Ghislain Casas, Peter Dent, Anne Derbes, Jim English, Marisa Galvez, Cédric Giraud, Babette Hellemans, Erik Inglis, Laura Jacobus, Sarah Kay, Irit Kleiman, Lia Markey, Laura K. Morreale, Robert Ousterhout, Diane Reilly, Donna Sadler, Mimi Sheller, and Nino Zchomelidse. Some of these conversations happened at multidisciplinary gatherings: a regional faculty fellowship in 2010–11 at the Penn Humanities Forum (University of Pennsylvania); the Resounding Images: Medieval Intersections of Art, Music, and Sound conference (Columbia University) and the Voice and Voicelessness in Medieval Europe and Beyond conference (Boston University), both in 2013; and a meeting of the Delaware Valley Medieval Association about “Communities of Italy,” in 2014 (Drew University). I benefitted from holdings at the Library of Congress, the Newberry Library, Chicago Public Library, and libraries at the University of Pennsylvania, University of Minnesota, University of Chicago, Northwestern University, Loyola University Chicago, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Free online services such as Google Books, Internet Archive, and academia.edu gave me invaluable access to rare texts and current scholarship. The Photothek des Kunsthistorischen Instituts in Florenz—Max-Planck-Institut kindly provided me photographic help. My eyes were opened to patterns and possibilities by art collections and exhibitions in Bologna (Museo Civico Medioevale, Pinacoteca Nazionale), Chicago (Art Institute of Chicago), Florence (Accademia, Galleria degli Uffizi, Museo dell’Opera del Duomo), New York (Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters, Museum of Modern Art), Pisa (Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Museo Nazionale di San Matteo), Washington, D.C. (National Gallery of Art, National Portrait Gallery), and elsewhere. Several people had vital roles in the book’s advanced stages. I am indebted to Tim McCall for his careful and honest reading of an early draft and for his encouraging spirit. Anne Derbes and Niall Atkinson kindly gave me incisive

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suggestions for revising the proposal. Lia Markey has my thanks for helping me settle on a title and introducing me to Walter Melion, who graciously accepted the book for Brill’s series, Studies on Art, Art History, and Intellectual History. Ivo Romein guided me in the editorial process with good cheer and kind words, and Wilma de Weert’s flexibility and understanding lightened the load of final steps. I received the gift of close and constructive reading from Brill’s two anonymous readers, to whom I am likewise thankful. Their comments made this a better book. I want to recognize others in the deeper background. Stephen Eisenman, Eric Frank, Louise Yuhas, and Esther Yau introduced me to art history and visual studies at Occidental College. Linda Seidel, Michael Camille, Rob Nelson, Tom Cummins, Elissa Weaver, Charles Cohen, Ingrid Rowland, Arnold Davidson, and my fellow graduate students opened artistic and intellectual worlds for me at the University of Chicago. Linda’s inspiration and mentorship in looking, researching, thinking, and writing continue to have special reverberance for me. I cannot separate the book’s beginnings and progress from voices of family and friends: Ken Allan, Nell Andrew, Jean-Noël Anslijn, Jim and Polly Baur, Leah Bowe, Kathryn Cates, Bonnie Cheng, Heather Connor, Erik Davis, Lynn Davy, Brian Duggan, Stefan Fritsch, Brad Hameister, Chriscinda Henry, Cecily Hilsdale, Adrian Jones, Matt Kozusko, Gail Luarca, Jennifer Luarca, Bryson Meunier, Allison Muscolino, Jeff Nigro, Jill Pederson, Meredith Ray, Claire and Pete Roccaforte, Pamela Santini, Jean Scheidnes, Robin Schnur, Nate Shoaf, Rob Spalding, Jamie Taylor, Allie Terry-Fritsch, Galina Tirnanic, Scott Thompson, John Ventura-DeWolfe, Andres Villalta, Steven Ward, and Eric Werner. Nichelle Luarca gave me Das Buch von Hören that helped me start to see hearing differently. I have been very fortunate also for the ears and hearts of my parents, Lorraine and Richard Anderson, and Claire Harrison and Gerry Shoaf. Most of all I am grateful to Nenette Luarca-Shoaf for her love, her encouragement, her wisdom, her example, and so much more. Her patience and generosity humble me so deeply. This book is as much hers as it is mine. I sound a final note of gratitude for Clementine Luarca-Shoaf, who put up with her dad’s frequent yielding to the call of his computer screen. She has inspired me with her imagination, sensibility, empathy, humor, and love. Her voice has filled my heart from the moment she first drew breath. I am still learning to listen. This book has received the Weiss-Brown Publication Subvention Award from the Newberry Library. The award supports the publication of outstanding works of scholarship that cover European civilization before 1700 in the areas of music, theater, French or Italian literature, or cultural studies. It is made to commemorate the career of Howard Mayer Brown.

Illustrations 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

Detail of The Last Judgment, marble, cathedral, Orvieto (photo: author) 1 Detail of The Last Judgment, marble, cathedral, Orvieto (photo: author) 2 Giotto (?), Obedience, Church of Santa Croce, Florence (photo: Scala/ Art Resource, NY) 16 Nicola Pisano, Fontana Maggiore, Perugia (photo: author) 35 Nicola Pisano, detail of Fontana Maggiore, Perugia (photo: author) 36 Nicola Pisano, detail of Fontana Maggiore, Perugia (photo: author) 37 Nicola Pisano, detail of Fontana Maggiore, Perugia (photo: author) 39 Giovanni Pisano (?), detail of Fontana Maggiore, Perugia (photo: Paolo Emilio/ Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license) 40 Nicola Pisano, detail of Fontana Maggiore, Perugia (photo: author) 41 Nicola Pisano, detail of Fontana Maggiore, Perugia (photo: author) 42 Giotto, The Visions of Fra Agostino and the Bishop of Assisi, Church of Santa Croce, Florence (photo: Raffaello Bencini/Archivi Alinari, Firenze) 66 Giotto, detail of The Vision of Fra Agostino, Church of Santa Croce, Florence (photo: Bridgeman Images) 68 Giotto (?), detail of The Vision of Fra Agostino, Church of Santa Croce, Florence (photo: Raffaello Bencini/Archivi Alinari, Firenze) 69 Thomas William Wood, Head of Snarling Dog, 1872 (photo: Wikimedia Commons, public domain) 73 Characteristic ears, from Giovanni Morelli’s Italian Painters, 1892 (photo: Wikimedia Commons, public domain) 76 Giotto, The Lamentation of Christ, Arena Chapel, Padua (photo: Raffaello Bencini/Archivi Alinari, Firenze) 82 Nicola Pisano, The Annunciation to the Virgin, Baptistery of San Giovanni, Pisa (photo: Luisa Ricciarini/Bridgeman Images) 85 Arena Chapel interior, Padua (photo: Archivi Alinari, Firenze) 86 Giotto, detail of The Betrayal of Christ, Arena Chapel, Padua (photo: Archivi Alinari, Firenze) 87 Giotto, detail of The Meeting at the Golden Gate, Arena Chapel, Padua (photo: Cameraphoto Arte Venezia/Bridgeman Images) 88 Giotto, Envy, Arena Chapel, Padua (photo: Raffaello Bencini/Archivi Alinari, Firenze) 89 Giotto, The Wedding Feast at Cana, Arena Chapel, Padua (photo: Raffaello Bencini/Archivi Alinari, Firenze) 98

x 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

41 42

Illustrations Giotto, detail of The Wedding Feast at Cana, Arena Chapel, Padua (photo: Mondadori Portfolio/Electa/Sergio Anelli/Bridgeman) 101 Giotto, detail of The Wedding Feast at Cana, Arena Chapel, Padua (photo: Mondadori Portfolio/Electa/Sergio Anelli/Bridgeman) 102 Giotto, detail of The Wedding Feast at Cana, Arena Chapel, Padua (photo: Mondadori Portfolio/Electa/Sergio Anelli/Bridgeman) 104 Giotto, detail of The Wedding Feast at Cana, Arena Chapel, Padua (photo: Archivi Alinari, Firenze) 105 Giotto, detail of The Wedding Feast at Cana, Arena Chapel, Padua (photo: Raffaello Bencini/Archivi Alinari, Firenze) 109 Giotto, detail of The Wedding Feast at Cana, Arena Chapel, Padua (photo: Cameraphoto Arte Venezia/Bridgeman Images) 111 Giotto, detail of The Wedding Feast at Cana, Arena Chapel, Padua (photo: Cameraphoto Arte Venezia/Bridgeman Images) 113 Giotto, detail of The Wedding Feast at Cana, Arena Chapel, Padua (photo: Cameraphoto Arte Venezia/Bridgeman Images) 115 Giotto, detail of The Wedding Feast at Cana, Arena Chapel, Padua (photo: Raffaello Bencini/Archivi Alinari, Firenze) 117 Giotto, detail of The Wedding Feast at Cana, Arena Chapel, Padua (photo: Raffaello Bencini/Archivi Alinari, Firenze) 118 Giotto, detail of The Wedding Feast at Cana, Arena Chapel, Padua (photo: Archivi Alinari, Firenze) 123 Giotto, The Raising of Lazarus, Arena Chapel, Padua (photo: Raffaello Bencini/ Archivi Alinari, Firenze) 124 Giotto, north wall, Arena Chapel, Padua (photo: Archivi Alinari, Firenze) 125 Nicola Pisano, pulpit, Baptistery of San Giovanni, Pisa (photo: Archivi Alinari, Firenze) 133 Diotisalvi, Baptistery of San Giovanni, begun 1152, Pisa (photo: Scala, Florence) 135 Pulpit, baptismal font and choir with altar, Baptistery of San Giovanni, Pisa (photo: Mark E. Smith/Scala, Florence) 138 Nicola Pisano, lectern, detail of pulpit, Baptistery of San Giovanni, Pisa (photo: De Agostini Picture Library/G. Nimatallah/Bridgeman Images) 140 Nicola Pisano, The Annunciation to the Virgin, The Nativity of Christ, The Annunciation to the Shepherds, The Bathing of Christ, Baptistery of San Giovanni, Pisa (photo: Luisa Ricciarini/Bridgeman Images) 141 Nicola Pisano, The Adoration of the Magi, Baptistery of San Giovanni, Pisa (photo: Bridgeman Images) 141 Nicola Pisano, The Presentation of Christ in the Temple, Baptistery of San Giovanni, Pisa (photo: Luisa Ricciarini/Bridgeman Images) 142

Illustrations 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

55

56

57 58 59 60 61

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Nicola Pisano, The Crucifixion, Baptistery of San Giovanni, Pisa (photo: De Agostini Picture Library/G. Nimatallah/Bridgeman Images) 143 Nicola Pisano, The Last Judgment, Baptistery of San Giovanni, Pisa (photo: Scala, Florence) 144 Bonanno of Pisa, doors (replica), cathedral, Pisa (photo: author) 146 Guglielmo, pulpit, cathedral, Cagliari (photo: Archivio Seat/Archivi Alinari) 147 Bonanno of Pisa, The Presentation of Christ in the Temple, cathedral, Pisa (photo: De Agostini Picture Library/G. Nimatallah/Bridgeman Images) 148 Guglielmo, The Presentation of Christ in the Temple, cathedral, Cagliari (photo: Archivio Seat/Archivi Alinari) 149 Nicola Pisano, detail of The Presentation of Christ, Baptistery of San Giovanni, Pisa (photo: Luisa Ricciarini/Bridgeman Images) 151 Nicola Pisano, detail of The Presentation of Christ, Baptistery of San Giovanni, Pisa (photo: Luisa Ricciarini/Bridgeman Images) 152 Andrea Pisano, Zechariah Mute before the People, baptistery, Florence (photo: Raffaello Bencini/Archivi Alinari, Firenze) 158 North portal frieze, Baptistery of San Giovanni, Pisa (photo: Archivi Alinari-archivio Brogi, Firenze) 159 Nicola Pisano, detail of The Nativity of Christ, Baptistery of San Giovanni, Pisa (photo: Luisa Ricciarini/Bridgeman Images) 160 Nicola Pisano, detail of The Presentation of Christ, Baptistery of San Giovanni, Pisa (photo: De Agostini Picture Library/G. Nimatallah/Bridgeman Images) 161 Nicola Pisano, detail of The Presentation of Christ, Baptistery of San Giovanni, Pisa (photo: De Agostini Picture Library/G. Nimatallah/Bridgeman Images) 163 Nicola Pisano, detail of The Presentation of Christ, Baptistery of San Giovanni, Pisa (photo: De Agostini Picture Library/G. Nimatallah/Bridgeman Images) 164 Nicola Pisano, detail of The Presentation of Christ in the Temple, Baptistery of San Giovanni, Pisa (photo: Luisa Ricciarini/Bridgeman Images) 166 Bonanno of Pisa, The Visitation, cathedral, Pisa (photo: De Agostini Picture Library/G. Nimatallah/Bridgeman Images) 168 Zechariah and Elizabeth, baptistery, Venice (photo: Cameraphoto Arte Venezia/ Bridgeman Images) 171 Sarcophagus of Hippolytus and Phaedra, Camposanto, Pisa (photo: De Agostini Picture Library/S. Vannini/Bridgeman Images) 174 Neo-Attic krater, Camposanto, Pisa (photo: Archivi Alinari-archivio Alinari, Firenze) 175

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62

Detail of Sarcophagus of Hippolytus and Phaedra, Camposanto, Pisa (photo: De Agostini Picture Library/S. Vannini/Bridgeman Images) 177 Detail of Sarcophagus of Hippolytus and Phaedra, Camposanto, Pisa (photo: De Agostini Picture Library/S. Vannini/Bridgeman Images) 179 Detail of The Last Judgment, Baptistery of San Giovanni, Pisa (photo: Scala, Florence) 197 Nicola Pisano, detail of The Presentation of Christ, Baptistery of San Giovanni, Pisa (photo: Luisa Ricciarini/Bridgeman Images) 198 The Deception of Isaac (1), Upper Church of San Francesco, Assisi (photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY) 202 The Deception of Isaac (2), Upper Church of San Francesco, Assisi (photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY) 203 Nave, Upper Church of San Francesco, Assisi (photo: Archivi Alinari, Firenze) 204 Detail of The Deception of Isaac (1), Upper Church of San Francesco, Assisi (photo: Scala, Florence) 209 Detail of The Deception of Isaac (2), Upper Church of San Francesco, Assisi (photo: Scala, Florence) 210 Detail of The Deception of Isaac (2), Upper Church of San Francesco, Assisi (photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY) 212 Detail of The Deception of Isaac (2), Upper Church of San Francesco, Assisi (photo: Scala, Florence) 214 Third bay of north wall, Upper Church of San Francesco, Assisi (photo: Bridgeman Images) 222 The Building of the Ark, Upper Church of San Francesco, Assisi (photo: Alinari/ Art Resource, NY) 223 Abraham and the Three Angels, Upper Church of San Francesco, Assisi (photo: Bridgeman Images) 224 Saint Francis before the Crucifix of San Damiano, Upper Church of San Francesco, Assisi (photo: Raffaello Bencini/Archivi Alinari, Firenze) 226 Detail of The Deception of Isaac (1), Upper Church of San Francesco, Assisi (photo: Scala, Florence) 235 Detail of The Deception of Isaac (1), Upper Church of San Francesco, Assisi (photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY) 237 Detail of The Deception of Isaac (2), Upper Church of San Francesco, Assisi (photo: Scala, Florence) 238 Detail of The Deception of Isaac (1), Upper Church of San Francesco, Assisi (photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY) 241

63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80

Illustrations 81 82 83 84 85 86 87

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Detail of The Deception of Isaac (1), Upper Church of San Francesco, Assisi (photo: Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz—Max-Planck-Institut) 244 Masaccio, Pisa Altarpiece, London, National Gallery of Art (photo: Bridgeman Images) 254 Paolo Veronese, The Wedding Feast at Cana, Paris, Louvre (photo: Leonard de Selva/Bridgeman Images) 255 Masaccio, detail of Pisa Altarpiece, London, National Gallery of Art (photo: Bridgeman Images) 256 Veronese, detail of The Wedding Feast at Cana, Paris, Louvre (photo: Josse/ Scala, Florence) 257 Jan Brueghel the Elder (and Peter Paul Rubens), Hearing, Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado (photo: Museo Nacional del Prado/Art Resource, NY) 258 Jan Brueghel the Elder (and Peter Paul Rubens), detail of Hearing, Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado (photo: Josse/Bridgeman Images) 259

Introduction

An Unheard Art Medieval art is vividly sonorous, with its speaking and singing, whispering and screaming, speech scrolls and gestures, open mouths and inscriptions (Figs. 1, 2). Medieval life too abounded in sound, voices filling the air with shouts, cries, curses, murmurs, prayers, songs, proclamations, sermons, readings from sacred texts, and other pronouncements presented as higher truths. Yet amid the rich historical soundscapes that scholarship has made almost audible, a recurrent medieval worry has been too quiet: Not everyone heard what they were supposed to hear. The unease is discernible in churches of late medieval Italy, where sacred speech could fail to have intended impact despite the vast powers claimed for it. At stake for clergy were communication and service of the divine as well as the fate of others’ souls. At risk for congregants and clergy alike were spiritual progress and the ability to hear the sounds of their

Figure 1

Whispers of the Elect, detail of The Last Judgment, marble, 1310–30, cathedral, Orvieto Photo: author

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004460812_002

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Figure 2

Introduction

Scream of the Damned, detail of The Last Judgment, marble, 1310–30, cathedral, Orvieto Photo: author

own salvation. The issue was not only whether and what worshipers heard but also how they listened. Impediments facing them ranged from inattention and forgetfulness to larger factors of social frictions, sexual habits, and multisensorial environments. Visibility itself could have deafening effects, obscuring the otherwise audible. These tensions are in evidence on painted walls and sculpted surfaces that have defined the age’s aesthetics in modern eyes. Monumental Sounds opens new intersections of art history and the history of the senses as we investigate interactions of sight and hearing in works by Giotto di Bondone (d. 1337) and leading artists of the later thirteenth century. That time is known to art historians more for its visual priorities and achievements than for its auditory values and preoccupations. The major contribution of this study’s approach to pictures, however, is to reimagine how they were understood, how they were engaged with, and how they extended and adapted to local needs a cultural system that made listening a meaningful practice. Part of this book’s claim is that art served auditory interests of those commissioning it, interests which included the reinforcement of vocal authority. But the service itself is the heart of the matter for us. Close analyses will reveal how pictures worked to stimulate and ultimately to bypass phenomenal sensory

An Unheard Art

3

experiences, enabling spiritually formative modes of auditory receptivity. To that end, artists drew on emergent naturalistic styles and a revival of monumental narrative, reconfiguring sacred stories in ways that scholarship has overlooked. Their ‘auralizations’ of pictures put late medieval vision in a new light while also allowing us to reconstruct auditory anxieties and visual strategies developed to address them. Beyond clergymen’s fleeting calls for congregants to open their ears, narrative art’s auditory guidance would ideally equip ritual spaces to activate spiritual listening continuously. 1

Knowing Hearing

Noting the transience of sound, Augustine of Hippo (d. 430) observed that writing keeps human speech from fading into oblivion.1 Indeed, scholars have used texts and an array of other surviving materials to access past representations of sounds and other auditory practices.2 For the multidisciplinary field of sound studies, pictures have been a multifaceted resource in this regard—early modern art, instructional visualizations of speech for the deaf, advertisements, cartoons, and much more.3 Investigations into the senses, into hearing more

1 Augustine, On Christine Doctrine 2.4.5; Brian Sullivan, “The Unwritable Sound of Music: The Origins and Implications of Isidore’s Memorial Metaphor,” Viator 30 (1999), 11. 2 Among the growing literature: D. R. Woolf, “Hearing Renaissance England,” in Hearing History: A Reader, ed. Mark M. Smith (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1994), 112– 35; Bruce W. Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001); Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); Deborah Howard and Laura Moretti, Sound and Space in Renaissance Venice: Architecture, Music, Acoustics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); Jean-Marie Fritz, La cloche et la lyre: Pour une poétique médiévale du paysage sonore (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2011); Voice and Voicelessness in Medieval Europe, ed. Irit Ruth Kleiman (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Carol Harrison, The Art of Listening in the Early Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Niall Atkinson, The Noisy Renaissance: Sound, Architecture, and Florentine Urban Life (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016); Bissera V. Pentcheva, Hagia Sophia: Sound, Space, and Spirit in Byzantium (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017). 3 Richard Leppert, The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation, and the History of the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Jonathan Rée, I See a Voice: Deafness, Language, and the Senses—A Philosophical History (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1999); Sterne, Audible Past. A precursor to sound studies, Jacques Attali’s widely-cited Noise: The Political Economy of Music (1977), launches its argument with an analysis of representations of noise, music, and silence in Carnival’s Quarrel with Lent, painted by Pieter Brueghel the Elder in 1559. Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 21–24.

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Introduction

specifically, have found a veritable feast in pictorial arts of the Middle Ages and Renaissance.4 Historical sounds have come to light in landmark works such as the eleventh-century Bayeux Tapestry, sculptures in the monastery of Santo Domingo de Silos, and painted illuminations in the Hours of Jeanne d’Evreux (fourteenth century).5 Research has uncovered art’s sonic dimensions in late medieval Italy too. Works of the early fourteenth century such as frescoes painted by Giotto in the Arena (Scrovegni) Chapel and relief sculptures on the façade of the cathedral of Orvieto have stood out in this regard.6 All of these studies investigate visual signs, representations, and evocations of sound and sound-making. Looking at medieval art has become instrumental for scholars listening for the medieval past. How medieval art enabled medieval listening and hearing has been less examined. A noteworthy exception is Elizabeth Sears’s study of painted audiences in the Utrecht and Stuttgart Psalters (ninth century), which argues that depictions of people hearing God taught novice monks to receive God’s word willfully with the “ears of the heart,” that is, with whole-hearted attention, during their daily communal listening to Scripture.7 The present book answers the need for a comparable approach 4 The literature is large. I mention only a few studies here: Sylvia Ferino-Pagden, Immagini del sentire: I cinque sensi nell’arte (Milan: Leonardo Arte, 1996); François Quiviger, The Sensory World of Italian Renaissance Art (London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2010); Emma Dillon, The Sense of Sound: Musical Meaning in France, 1260–1330 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Resounding Images: Medieval Intersections of Art, Music, and Sound, ed. Susan Boynton and Diane J. Reilly (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2015); A Feast for the Senses: Art and Experience in Medieval Europe, ed. Martina Bagnoli (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017); Donna L. Sadler, Touching the Passion: Seeing Late Medieval Altarpieces through the Eyes of Faith (Leiden: Brill, 2018). 5 Richard Brilliant, “Making Sounds Visible in the Bayeux Tapestry,” in The Bayeux Tapestry: New Interpretations, ed. Martin K. Foys, Karen Eileen Overbey, and Dan Terkla (Rochester: Boydell Press, 2009), 71–84; Elizabeth Valdez del Álamo, “Hearing the Image at Santo Domingo de Silos,” in Boynton and Reilly, Resounding Images, 71–90; Dillon, “Praying with Sound: The Hours of Jeanne d’Evreux and Walters Art Museum W 102,” chap. 7 in Sense of Sound. 6 Francesco Facchin, “L’udito e la voce nella figurazione padovana tra Tre e Quattrocento: Alcune osservazioni,” Musica disciplina 50 (1996): 167–89, 191, 202; Eleonora M. Beck, Giotto’s Harmony: Music and Art in Padua at the Crossroads of the Renaissance (Florence: European Press Academic Publishing, 2005); Matthew G. Shoaf, “Painted for the Ear: Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s ‘Fraud’ and Political Oratory,” Word & Image 27, no. 2 (June, 2011): 159–74; Shoaf, “The Voice in Relief: Sculpture and Surplus Vocality at the Rise of Naturalism,” in Boynton and Reilly, Resounding Images, 31–45; Shoaf, “Voice and Wisdom in Early Italian Art,” in Kleiman, Voice and Voicelessness, 213–34. 7 Elizabeth Sears, “The Iconography of Auditory Perception in the Early Middle Ages: On Psalm Illustration and Psalm Exegesis,” in The Second Sense: Studies in Hearing and Musical Judgement from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century, ed. Charles Burnett, Michael Fend, and Penelope Gouk (London: Warburg Institute and University of London, 1991), 19–42. Dillon’s

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for the art of late medieval Italy, where paintings and sculptures had a similar potential to enhance receptivity to sacred speech but in a much wider and public world, under varied conditions, in relation to different artistic conventions and developments, and with pictorial complexity and experiential complications unheard until now. This study crosses apparent sensory boundaries while emphasizing that the senses were never imagined to be entirely independent of one another. We should acknowledge, of course, that medieval thinkers did tend to categorize sensory perceptions, at least on some levels. Theologians in the thirteenth century deemed sight—specifically, seeing pictures in churches—more successful than hearing in aiding memory of sacred things and arousing devotion.8 Gregory the Great’s (d. 604) influential commentary on the Book of Job states that God assigned each sense its own domain: The eye cannot hear, the ear cannot see.9 It follows that each sense had its own area of fallibility. What deceived the eye did not fool the ear.10 Sensory specialization was not only perceptual, limited to objects within a given sense’s range of apprehension; it was also functional. Sight was credited with the potential for superior objectivity and certification, for instance, while hearing was understood to be primary in religious instruction and obedience to the divine.11 But we can infer a less constrictive conceptualization of the two senses here, one that moves toward  Sense of Sound deserves mention too for its study of imagery in medieval books operating with words and music to shape listening in late medieval France—musical listening, specifically. 8 Thomas Aquinas, In III Sententiarum 9.1.2b, and Bonaventure, Commentaria in liber III Sententiarum 9.1.2, cited in David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 162–63; Bonaventure, S. Bonaventurae Opera Omnia (Florence: Ad Claras Aquas [Quaracchi], 1887), 3:203. This view of sight’s advantages traces back to Horace’s Ars poetica (vv. 180–82), as Freedberg notes (p. 163). The literature historian Mary Carruthers writes that pre-modern memory advice “stresses the empirical observation that remembering what is aurally received is more difficult for most people than remembering what is visual, and the consequent need to ‘fix’ the one by association with the other.” In Cicero (De oratore), for instance, Carruthers finds the conviction that “visual images are the keenest of all and best retained by the memory; auditory or other perceptions are retained when attached to visual ones.” Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (1990; repr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 27, 73. 9 Gregory the Great, Moralia in Job 11.8. This echoes Proverbs 20.12 (NSRV): “The hearing ear and the seeing eye, the Lord has made both of them.” 10 Two or more senses could err in combination, however, each on its own terms, about something such as a person’s identity. Chapter five centers on a story of multisensory misperception. 11 Robert Jütte, A History of the Senses: From Antiquity to Cyberspace, trans. James Lynn (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 64–67.

6

Introduction

a notion of images as multisensory: In seeing hearing in a picture, worshipers may have been able to ponder auditory perception more effectively, perhaps even differently, from what was possible with their ears alone.12 Medieval culture certainly put value on learning about hearing and the other senses. Philosophical texts in the tradition of Aristotle (d. 322 BCE) construed auditory perception as an object of physiological knowledge. This standpoint illuminated questions of sound’s nature and conveyance, how the ear works, how sound becomes intelligible to the mind, and how it affected the human body and soul.13 We also find reflection on what learning about the senses involves. Consider the research statement at the beginning of De institutione musica, a treatise attributed to Boethius (d. 524) and taught in universities in the thirteenth century: An ability to perceive through the senses is so spontaneously and naturally present in certain living creatures that an animal without senses cannot be imagined. But a knowledge and clear perception of these senses themselves is not so easily acquired, even with an investigation of the mind. It is obvious that we use our senses in perceiving sensible objects. But what is the exact nature of these senses in connection with which we carry out our actions? And what is the actual property of these objects sensed? The answers to these questions are not so obvious; and they cannot become clear to anyone unless the contemplation of these things is guided by a comprehensive investigation of reality.14 While sensing is familiar and easy, the passage says, knowing the senses and things sensed is difficult and demands thorough inquiry. Materials examined in this book similarly take for granted that to know hearing entails work. Hearing speech attributed to God was obligatory for medieval Christians, in the normative discourse of theologians—to the great spiritual disadvantage of the congenitally deaf.15 There was therefore an abiding institutional interest in 12

For recent approaches to past pictorial engagements with the broader sensorium, see The Multi-Sensory Image from Antiquity to the Renaissance, ed. Heather Hunter-Crawley and Erica O’Brien (London: Routledge, 2019). 13 Charles Burnett, “Sound and Its Perception,” in Burnett, Fend, and Gouk, Second Sense, 43–69. 14 Boethius (attributed), De institutione musica 1.1, cited in Emma Dillon, “Sensing Sound,” in Feast for the Senses, 97. The translation belongs to Calvin Martin Bower. Boethius, Fundamentals of Music, trans. Calvin Martin Bower (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 1. 15 Irina Metzler, “Speechless: Speech and Hearing Impairments as Problems of Medieval Normative Texts—Theological, Natural-Philosophical, Legal,” in Social Dimensions

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making hearing an object to be learned about and contemplated. In contexts of worship, knowing hearing called for a lens both narrower and wider than what physiology offered. Giovanni da San Gimignano (d. after 1333) taught sense perception among the many topics of his Summa de exemplis et rerum similitudinibus, for centuries a widely-used resource for sermon content.16 Conversant in Aristotelian and Galenic perceptual theories, the Dominican preacher laid out a kind of hearing that exceeds their explanatory scopes while concerning an auditory object of supreme importance to his religious culture: Inner hearing and perception of God’s word must be similar to the body’s external hearing. For five things are required for the perfection of bodily hearing that are also necessary for inner hearing in its own way. The first is sensory power, in other words, the animal power of hearing. Thus, it is necessary that in the soul there is the power of spiritual grace, which makes that soul sense spiritually and avidly perceive what is said, according to Gregory [the Great]. He says that unless the holy spirit fills listeners’ hearts, the teacher’s voice sounds in vain to the body’s ears; they can form the master’s voice externally; but they are not able to impress the interior.17

of Medieval Disease and Disability, ed. Sally Crawford and Christina Lee (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2014), 59, 65–66. 16 Heather Webb, The Medieval Heart (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 54–58, introduces the place of the Summa de exemplis in late medieval thought on sensory processes and demonstrates the “melding” of physiology and theology in Giovanni’s approach to other senses (taste, touch). Webb extrapolates Giovanni’s assumption that worshipers could comprehend the soul more fully with “a more complete understanding of the mechanisms of bodily function” (p. 56). We will come to Giovanni’s attention to the outer ear later, in chapters two and three. In the excerpt we are about to read, hearing’s main mechanism is the heart, which a current of late medieval thought designated “the point of origin and return for the trajectories of sensory processes,” while the brain mediated sensory function (p. 54). For an overview of Giovanni’s life and work, see Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, s.v. “Giovanni da San Gimignano,” by Silvana Vecchio, http://www .treccani.it/enciclopedia/giovanni-da-san-gimignano_%28Dizionario-Biografico%29/. 17 Joannes a S. Geminiano, Summa de exemplis et rerum similitudinibus 6.11: “Auditus interior, & perceptio verbi Dei, similis debet esse auditui corporis exterior. Nam ad perfectionem auditus corporis, quinque sunt necessaria, quae suo modo requiruntur ad auditum interiorem. Primum est potentia sentiens, s[cilicet] virtus animalis auditiua. Sic oportet, quod sit interius in anima virtus spiritualis gratiae, quae faciat ipsam anima[m] spiritualiter sentire, & auide percipere que dicu[n]tur, vnde Greg. Dicit, quod nisi spiritus sanctus auditorium corda impleat, ad aures corporum vox docentiu[m] incassum sonat formare enim vocem magistri exterius possunt; sed ha[n]c imprimere interius non valent.”

8

Introduction

Distinguishing between bodily hearing and spiritual hearing is paramount for the understanding of art proposed in this book, so let us listen more closely to what Giovanni is saying. His “inner” sensation should not be mistaken for the notion of hearing “as manifesting a kind of pure interiority,” as Jonathan Sterne has put it in The Audible Past, referring critically to an aspect of the Western intellectual inheritance of “a two-thousand-year-old Christian theology of listening.”18 Giovanni is steeped in theology, it is true, but his model of inner hearing is not purely internal, as we will see shortly. Moreover, he assumes its interior aspects may be lacking. Inner hearing in the Summa de exemplis is also different from the inner senses posited by medieval models of perception derived from ancient Greek thought. Those senses—the common sense, the imagination, judgment, memory—participated in a system located in the head, where they combined, processed, and stored information from hearing, sight, smell, taste, and touch.19 By contrast, the hearing discussed by Giovanni (on the authority of Gregory the Great and of physiology, the latter providing an instructive analogy) operates from the heart and with spiritual grace.20 That divine power source fills the heart and activates an “avid perceiving” that prepares the hearer’s soul to receive to God’s word and to be “impressed” by it. Another point Giovanni makes, only hinted at in our excerpt, is that the soulaltering effect of inner listening depended to some extent on audible sound, the material world, and the body. Although God’s word and the soul’s reception of it are irreducible to physiology and the physical in general, Giovanni will go on to say that a “medium delivering the sensed thing” is necessary for inner hearing. He has in mind several mediums, in fact: air, the hearer’s bone, nerve, and brain, and a teacher or preacher.21 Also necessary is a “suitable

18 Sterne, Audible Past, 14, 15. 19 Jütte, History of the Senses, 48. 20 Gregory the Great, Expositio super primam epistolam B. Pauli Apostoli ad Corinthios (Migne, PL 79.1312). The same formulation occurs in Gregory’s Moralia in Job (27.64). 21 Joannes a S. Geminiano, Summa de exemplis 6.11: “Tertium est necessariu[m] medium ordinate sensatum deferens. Defertur enim sonus ad aurem (secundum Constantinum [Africanus]) hoc modo, quod duo nerui ab anteriori parte cerebri procendetes in offibus aurium infiguntur, per quos spiritus audibilis ad praedicta ossa defertur, quibus exterior aer formam soni refere[n]s immediate coniungitur. Unde aer percussus illa ossa collidit, & spiritus in eis existens secundum proprietatem existentis ibi aeris, & neruos allidentis immutatur, qui sic immutatus, recurrens ad suam cellulani fantasticam immutationem representat, & sic auditum causat. Sicut igitur sonus rei corporalis defertur ad aurem medi ante exteriori aere. Ita, & sonus doctrinae spiritualis tra[ns]funditur ad audientis intellectum, mediante exteriori doctore, vel praedicatore. Unde Apost. dicit, quod fides est ex auditu, & auditus per verbum Dei.”

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instrument,” a term Giovanni uses for the outer ear.22 Hypothetically speaking, the necessity of external elements opens the possibility of pictorial art contributing to inner hearing too. We have touched on spiritual grace, physical medium, and the body’s ear. The Summa de exemplis lists two other requirements for inner hearing. One is “moderation and appropriateness in sensation.” What Giovanni means is that sound is heard best when it is not too loud or extreme in some other respect and when it is “shaped” in accordance with what listeners can agreeably accept.23 His use of sonus (sound) rather than verba (words) gives further weight to externals. Sonus draws notice to a pre-verbal level of the sonic experience of God’s word, where speaking and listening initially connect. Thus, beyond words and their meanings, the audible human voice, sounding in the listener’s bodily ears, has its own bearing on spiritual understanding. That influence had to be discrete, as we will see presently with the other requirement stipulated by Giovanni: an “intending” or “concentrating soul.” To be spiritually impressed by words of God, worshipers need to give attention to them, especially to their spiritual sense, and that giving-of-attention means listening “avidly” past different things: past their audible sounds, past the manner of their vocal delivery, and past other distractions from their meaning.24 Worshipers thus had responsibility for their own inner hearing despite their passivity in receiving grace and internal impressions. An additional human responsibility, unstated in the Summa, went beyond speakers and audiences. It belonged to intermediaries, like Giovanni’s instruction, conceived to support and sustain inner hearing’s practice. We will add works of art to that category.

22 Ibid., 6.11: “Secundum instrumentum conuenie[n]s (secundum Constantinum) est quodda[m] os porosum, siue cartilaginosum, quod est concauum, siccum, & durum.” 23 Ibid., 6.11: “Quintum est obiectum te[m]peratum, & proportionatum, quia auditus & vniuersaliter omnis sensus, in extremis contristatur, & in mediis delectatur. Vnde nimis fortis sonus corrumpit, & tollit auditum…. Sic doctrina spiritualis debet esse p[ro]portionata auditorum capacitati, ut s[cilicet] secundum qualitatem, & capacitatem auditorum formetur sermo doctorum.” 24 Ibid., 6.11: “Quartum est anima intendens, quia cum anima intenta est circa vnum, non bene intendit ad aliud. Vnde homo s[a]epe intendens aliis, campana[m] pulsantem non audit. Sic etiam verba Dei homo interiori auditu no[n] percipit, nisi circa ea intentionem apponat. Unde du[m] est in praedicatione, non debet cogitare de aliis, neque debet intendere ad sonu[m] verborum tantum, vel ad ornatum, sed magis ad spiritualem sensum, cuius contrarium multi faciunt.”

10 2

Introduction

Hearing Eclipsed

The object of the hearing for Giovanni, God’s word, filled church spaces across Western Europe every day through the voices of priests, deacons, and other clerical personnel in the course of liturgy and sermons. Artistic production of the era was concentrated in those same places. Religious instruction had been a recognized purpose of pictures in churches since at least as far back as Gregory the Great (around 600 CE), and it continued to be their function with educated audiences in late medieval Italy, notwithstanding the commonplace (traceable back to Gregory) about medieval religious pictures serving the illiterate.25 Beholding pictures was an especially effective means for exciting devotion, in the judgement of theologians in the thirteenth century, as already stated. It should not surprise us to find pictorial art giving worshipers auditory guidance in some form, even in many forms. An early fourteenth-century defense of church ornament in Assisi, one of the great sites of late medieval art, asserted that such beautification drew in laypeople precisely to hear the divine office (“ad audiendum divina offitia”).26 Pictorial art could evidently prepare congregants’ ears for piety even before their feet crossed church thresholds. Auditory perception has been overshadowed in scholarly thinking about late medieval art, however. Apart from recent turns toward sound, the senses, and multisensory images in the Middle Ages, studies of medieval culture have often presented art from the thirteenth century onward as evidence of a rise to cultural prominence of the sense of sight. We read of the “importance of visual participation in worship” and a “marked increase in interest in vision”;27 of “new emphasis upon visual experience”;28 of “increased visual engagement with the natural and social world”;29 and of “expectations of the possibilities

25 Freedberg, Power of Images, 163, 398. For a recent discussion of Gregory’s well-known doctrine of art as pertaining to narrative art in early fourteenth-century Italy, see Jules Lubbock, Storytelling in Christian Art from Giotto to Donatello (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), esp. 6–7, 9–13, 80–81, 288. Lubbock addresses the literacy of late medieval art’s audiences (see especially pp. 7, 10, 12–13, 273). 26 Franz Ehrle, “Zur Vorgeschichte des Concils von Vienne,” Archiv für Literatur- und Kirchengeschichte des Mittelalters 2 (1886–87), 147. The assertion must have encompassed pictorial art. We will return to it at the end of chapter five. 27 Margaret R. Miles, Image as Insight: Visual Understanding in Western Christianity and Secular Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), 65, 73. 28 Michael Camille, Gothic Art, Glorious Visions (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1996), 20. 29 Suzannah Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 6.

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of vision [reaching] a high water-mark for the Middle Ages.”30 We hear of religious devotion being shaped by “constant demand for mental visualization,” by a “need to see,” by a “hegemony of the visible.”31 These perspectives rest firmly on a gamut of materials ranging from theology and devotional literature to science and poetry.32 One of the ways in which pictures have lent substance of their own to visualist arguments has to do with art’s visibility per se. As the scholar of visual culture Suzannah Biernoff has written with regard to the late Middle Ages, “If vision has a history, then it must be sought in the realm of the visible, or so the reasoning goes.”33 To this point, the art historian Michael Camille described people born around 1200 living through a change in the very forces of image production. The great edifices of the cathedrals, for example, rising over the cities—the new centers of power in Western Europe—were filled with a vastly expanded number of representations.34 The religious subject matter of those proliferating representations—in other words, what they gave viewers to see, think about, and respond to—has in turn served scholarly characterization of late medieval worship in terms that

30 Cynthia Hahn, “Vision,” in A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, ed. Conrad Rudolph (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 59. 31 Miles, Image as Insight, 75; Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment, 2–3, 153, 211n1; Jean Wirth, L’image à l’époque gothique (1140–1280) (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 2008), 23–33. Scholarship on late medieval vision and visuality revises previous thinking about the Middle Ages as predominantly oral/aural, a historiographic attitude discussed by Woolf, “Hearing Renaissance England,” 113–14, 128; Mark M. Smith, “Introduction: Of Sense and Non-sense,” in Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in History, ed. Mark M. Smith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 8–11; Sophia Rosenfeld, “On Being Heard: A Case for Paying Attention to the Historical Ear,” The American Historical Review 116, no. 1 (Apr., 2011), 319–26. 32 Recent studies include Gerhard Wolf, “Dante’s Eyes and the Abysses of Seeing: Poetical Optics and Concepts of Images in the Divine Comedy,” in Vision and Its Instruments: Art, Science, and Technology in Early Modern Europe, ed. Alina Payne (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015), 122–37; Optics, Ethics, and Art in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries: Looking into Peter of Limoges’s Moral Treatise of the Eye, ed. Herbert L. Kessler and Richard G. Newhauser (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2018). 33 Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment, 2. 34 Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), xxviii.

12

Introduction

are often exclusively visual. According to another art historian, Cynthia Hahn, attention in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries shifted decisively from the Imago Dei [Image of God] to the Visio Dei [Vision of God]—from the nature of the image to the nature and possibility of sight itself, and ‘gazing upon the divine face’ became an all-consuming goal for the devout. As never before, knowing God was seeing God.”35 Not only the divine face. This is a period of art history known for re-envisioning Christ, the Virgin Mary, and other holy personages, making them more human and accessible than in art of earlier centuries. A third pillar of art’s support for the idea of the eye’s late medieval “dominion” is the matter of style.36 Artists pursued the visualization of space, light, objects, bodies, faces, and gestures in new naturalistic modes, while also taking into consideration pictures’ beholders and how to involve them intellectually, emotionally, sensorially, even spatially in what they saw. Narrative or story-telling art from this period has been understood to ‘speak’ in a visual language that held the persuasive authority of an eyewitness or a sacred text.37 Beholding pictures, it would appear, became a form of hearing, with eyes acting as surrogates for ears. Artists in late medieval Italy have been studied as pioneers of that “age of vision.”38 Already in the Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio (d. 1375) Giotto was remembered for his exceptional skill in visual observation and mimetic representation, elements of what we now refer to as naturalistic style: whatever he depicted had the appearance not of a representation but of the thing itself, so that we very often find, with Giotto’s works, that people’s eyes are deceived, and they mistake the picture for the real thing.39

35 36

Hahn, “Vision,” 59 (author’s emphasis). I borrow from the title of Marvin Trachtenberg, Dominion of the Eye: Urbanism, Art, and Power in Early Modern Florence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 37 For instance, Lubbock, Storytelling in Christian Art, 7–13. 38 The phrase comes from Hayden B. J. Maginnis, The World of the Early Sienese Painter (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), 174–84. See also Trachtenberg, Dominion of the Eye, 233–35; Paul Hills, The Light of Early Italian Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987); Frank Büttner, Giotto und die Ursprünge der neuzeitlichen Bildauffassung: die Malerei und die Wissenschaft vom Sehen in Italien um 1300 (Darmstadt: WBG, 2013); and Christopher R. Lakey, Sculptural Seeing: Relief, Optics, and the Rise of Perspective in Medieval Italy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018). Lakey argues for earlier correspondences between optics and pictorial art. 39 Boccaccio, Decameron 6.5. My translation.

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The art historian Jules Lubbock has stressed another aspect of the visual power that narrative painting gained around this time. Giotto’s frescoes worked to “capture and hold” attention, and in holding it they made “considerable demands” on minds and time as viewers took in and made sense of “complex thoughts, feelings, speech and ideas  … represented by means of visual signs.”40 Lubbock’s idea of depicted speech includes signs of sound in Giotto’s art. We hear this also from Filippo Villani, the Florentine chronicler, writing in the early 1380s. Villani credited Giotto with renewing the art of painting. He cited the artist’s having followed nature’s outlines so closely that [his figures] seem to beholders to live and breathe and even to act and make gestures so well that they appear to speak, cry, rejoice and do other things.41 Again, looking at pictures verges on hearing. This notion helps frame the chapters ahead, though it hardly exhausts the auditory dimensions of art of late medieval Italy, many of which are not directly visible. Take fame. Giotto appears to have surpassed all medieval artists in the scope of his renown, to go by literary mentions such as Boccaccio’s and Villani’s along with those of earlier admirers Pietro d’Abano (d. 1315), Riccobaldo of Ferrara (d. 1318), and Francesco da Barberino (d. 1348).42 The circulation of the painter’s name in elevated tones must have attracted worshipers to churches he decorated and presumably helped him get commissions far and wide. His celebrity in his own lifetime is hardly news to scholars of late medieval art. But utterances of “Giotto” were a miniscule part of the auditory background of artistic production in this period. We can reasonably suppose the importance of hearing in the negotiation and notarization of artists’ contracts, in their planning and procurement of materials, also in their heeding patrons, advisors, and teachers about what to depict and in what manner. Obedience and respect for

40 Lubbock, Storytelling in Christian Art, 269, 272. 41 Filippo Villani, De origine civitatis Florentiae et eiusdem famosis civibus, in Quellenbuch zur Kunstgeschichte des abendländischen Mittelalters, ed. Julius von Schlosser (Vienna, 1896), 370–71. 42 Peter Murray, “Notes on Some Early Giotto Sources,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 16 (1953), 58–62; A. T. Hankey, “Riccobaldo of Ferrara and Giotto: An Update,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 54 (1991), 244; J. Thomann, “Pietro d’Abano on Giotto,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 54 (1991): 238–44.

14

Introduction

a master’s authority were essential for anyone aspiring to be an artist, according to Cennino Cennini’s fifteenth-century handbook for craftsmen.43 Hearing made possible not only artistic training, commissions, and careers in the late medieval “age of vision.” It also supported the prosperity that underpinned demand for art. Without hearing, the operations of international commerce, long-distance trade, local industry, banking and finance, currency exchanges, taking of money in deposit, and advances of credit would be inconceivable. This holds also for non-written communication within offices, between offices and branches, within partnerships and in their formation, in the establishment and operation of banks, in business discussions, in the work of the factors who managed and conducted business for partnerships and of agents who attended to business transactions, in the routine discussions in which wealth and livelihoods hung in the balance: loans, contracts, divisions of labor, trading rights, diplomacy, and risks. Invested parties must have had their ears to the ground for reports and news of developments such as war, which could affect trade routes, markets, investments, and opportunities. Elementary education’s provision of literacy to commercial affairs depended, of course, on students hearing their teachers. Vocational wisdom assumed its own audiences and could bear on listening explicitly. At the end of the thirteenth century, an unknown Genoese writer advised merchants to “beware … of men who are too flattering. These, for [all] their sweet tongue, usually have a stinging tail.”44 Around a century later, Florentine merchant Giovanni Morelli similarly warned apprentices: “Do not be gullible, and the more one shows himself loyal to you and wise in words, the less trust him…. Enjoy listening to tall talkers, braggers, and men of lavish compliments, … but do not give any credit that may bring harm to you, and do not rely upon them at all.”45 We glimpse here a kind of auditory conditioning for commercial (and general) survival. It is no exaggeration to say that the art of late medieval Italy rests invisibly on countless judgments in listening upon which all manner of professional and artistic relationships relied. As for art’s exposed surfaces, how might auditory conditioning have looked? A couple of possibilities are plain. An image could address viewers by means of an inscription urging them to listen to a religious superior, for instance.46 Such 43

Cennino d’Andrea Cennini, The Craftsman’s Handbook: The Italian ‘Il libro dell’arte’, trans. Daniel V. Thompson, Jr. (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1954), 2–3. 44 Robert Lopez and Irving W. Raymond, Medieval Trade in the Mediterranean World: Illustrative Documents (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955), 425. 45 Lopez and Raymond, Medieval Trade, 422–23. 46 In an altarpiece of Saint Dominic, painted in Pisa by Francesco Traini around 1345 for the Church of Santa Caterina (now in the Museo Nazionale di San Matteo, Pisa), the

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an exhortation reminds us of the importance Giovanni da San Gimignano put on auditory concentration and external mediums for hearing God’s word internally. The idea of listening to a superior raises the question of obedience too, the behavior both insisted upon in artists’ workshops and associated with the sense of hearing in religion. The word ‘obedience’ has an ancient etymological connection with hearing. It comes from the Latin oboedire, which has audire (to hear) at its root.47 Obedience gained visibility in the Middle Ages through being depicted as a Christian virtue in manuscript illumination, enamel, glass, metalwork, painting, and sculpture.48 One Obedience, painted on a chapel vault in Florence by Giotto (or an assistant) in the early fourteenth century, takes the form a friar with one hand placed on a holy book and the other holding a finger to his closed lips (Fig. 3), a gesture seen over the millennia in art from ancient Rome to nineteenth-century Romanticism (and in life today).49 Our shushing friar continuously reminded late medieval Florentines gazing up from the chapel floor below to keep silent and heed what they heard from on high. “Nature has given man one mouth but two ears, that he should hear more than speak,” Giovanni da San Gimignano’s Summa de exemplis says.50 But if hearing was a moral priority by divine anatomical design, in order to amount to obedience, it needed to be more than listening or understanding. Disobedience, after all, can imply these very things in its meaning as a refusal

saint holds open toward the viewer a book inscribed with the words (in Latin), “Come, o children, listen to me; I will teach you the fear of the Lord” (from Psalm 34). See Shoaf, “Voice and Wisdom,” 214, 227, and fig. 12.1. Holy figures in art also told viewers to hear other people—again, via inscription. Samuel Edgerton, Jr. Pictures and Punishment: Art and Criminal Prosecution during the Florentine Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 52n38, points to religious images verbally calling for listening in civic settings: “Italian communal buildings  … often displayed images of the Virgin Mary with the inscription ‘Odi l’altra parte!’ (Hear the other side!). This sentiment was directed at the local magistrates so that they might temper their own justice with a reminder of the Madonna’s compassion.” 47 Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 75–76. 48 Forty examples from countries ranging from France and Spain to Poland, dating from the eleventh to fourteenth centuries, are listed in Virtue and Vice: The Personifications in The Index of Christian Art, ed. Colum Hourihane (Princeton, NJ: Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, in association with Princeton University Press, 2000), 258–61. 49 André Chastel, “Signum harpocraticum,” in André Chastel, Le geste dans l’art (Paris: Liana Levi, 2001), 65–90. 50 Joannes a S. Geminiano, Summa de exemplis 10.6: “Vnum os, duasq[ue] aures homini a natura datas esse, ut plus audiat quam loquatur.”

16

Figure 3

Introduction

Giotto(?), Obedience, medallion, fresco, around 1320, Church of Santa Croce, Florence Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY

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to comply with what one has been told to do.51 At the same time, to equate hearing with obedience when the former yields to authority may be correct on its face, but it would also elide certain qualities or inclinations of yielding that had great significance in late medieval piety. In order to be spiritually consequential, listening needed to be motivated and directed in certain ways. Giovanni writes that one must hear God’s word “with reverence and eagerness” like the “great reverence and desire” of those who go to saints’ relics convinced of their healing power.52 Attitudes of spiritually effective listening were not always so explicitly stipulated by churchmen, not even by Giovanni, as the example of faith shows. A phrase in Paul’s Letter to the Romans, restated countlessly by medieval churchmen (including Giovanni), instructs that “faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes through the word of God” (Rom. 10.17).53 Paul does not say inversely that hearing comes from faith, but he did not need to. Medieval Christians had learned to assume it. Their faith had been confirmed after their indoctrination through catechesis, about which chapter one will have more to say. But that faith needed to be rekindled, maintained, increased, reinforced. In a circular fashion, worshipers’ faith came from hearing God’s word while simultaneously being a posture they needed for hearing God’s word effectively. Setting this seemingly autogenic reciprocity in motion was part of the work of pictures examined in this book. Further auditory possibilities now open in medieval art. Any picture referring to such an attitude or arousing it in worshipers could hypothetically qualify as auditory conditioning. Art may therefore have aided ears on a vast scale. Personifications of Faith alone are plentiful across various media—237, by one count, including twenty-four in fresco and forty-one in sculpture.54 This is not to claim that each instance stemmed from a concerted auditory intent on the part of an artist’s patron or advisor. They may well have been made to satisfy other desires. But, I contend, discerning specific auditory intent is possible. The circumstances in which works of art in this book were made and seen are clear enough to argue that discipline in viewers’ listening was among their 51 This position differs somewhat from that of Dolar, who reasons that “the moment one listens one has already started to obey, in an embryonic way one always listens to one’s master’s voice, no matter how much one opposes it afterward.” Dolar, Voice and Nothing More, 76. 52 Joannes a S. Geminiano, Summa de exemplis 10.6: “Item audire debet homo verba Dei cu[m] reuerentia, & auiditate. Nam cu[m] magna reuerentia, & desiderio iret infirmus ad reliquias Sanctorum per quas crederet sanari.” 53 Joannes a S. Geminiano, Summa de exemplis 6.11. He quotes the biblical verse in question (“Fides ex auditu, et auditus per verbum Dei.”) in the course of explaining the third requirement of internal hearing, namely, an external teacher or preacher to convey the word of God to the listener. 54 Virtue and Vice, 191–204.

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Introduction

aims. While the available information about them is quite specific and local, there is an overarching layer of interpretive context to consider as well. With sight’s increasing cultural prominence, pictorial art correspondingly intensified and refined its appeal to visual perception, as scholarship has shown. At the same time, sight’s rise could aggravate auditory insecurities. Unexpectedly, at least for us, naturalistic styles and optical devices in art could promote hearing’s primacy over sight. To make soul-altering speech resound in the face of challenges to the spiritual force of clerical voices, artists redesigned listening to become a visually augmented discipline and looking to become a practice of auditory enhancement. 3

Shapers of Ears

Before saying more about the approach we will take to that auditory work, I pause to acknowledge that the notion of medieval people not always hearing what they were ‘supposed to’ hear may sound commonsensical and intractable, a premise with too nebulous a promise to make seeking it worthwhile. Hearing, it is often remarked, is constant and involuntary, the ears having no lids to interrupt perceptual activity. Still, it would hardly be controversial to suppose that at least some members of any given audience may be inattentive, psychologically less receptive, or interpretively at variance on some level with a speaker’s intended messages.55 Listening is a common enough concern today, to judge by the plethora of publications and online resources for improving it in higher education, business, law, medicine, interpersonal relationships, and 55

Congenital deafness itself is addressed in this book only briefly, in chapters two and three. As regards the hearing-abled, the philosopher Peter Szendy discusses difficulty in knowing others’ listening and questions whether each of us hears the same thing when listening to the same music. He posits a plurality of “regimes of listening.” Peter Szendy, Listen: A History of Our Ears, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). Drawing on Szendy, Sophia Rosenfeld writes insightfully of sounds in a soundscape being “perceived, hierarchized, regulated, manipulated, and endowed with meaning differently in different places and at different times. This results in varied ‘regime[s] of listening’, which is to say different forms of auditory experience or modes of auditory attention dependent not only on the sounds themselves but also on the specific interpreters and their settings.” Rosenfeld, “On Being Heard,” 318. “Regime” does not necessarily capture the dynamics of listening, however. Sonic distraction, for instance, implies a weakness or interruption of a mode of auditory attention that is normative in some way. This idea pervades chapter one of this book. See also the discussion of curiositas—mental or sensual distraction through sound and other sensory modes—in Dillon, “Sound in Prayer Books,” chapter 6 in Sense of Sound.

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other areas.56 Inability and failures to listen have risen to a level of collective urgency. American democracy itself has been weakened by them, some have recently argued.57 As for listening centuries ago, conceptual frameworks available to us are inadequately receptive to the likelihood of inattention. I have already invoked the idea of “soundscape.” According to R. Murray Schafer, who coined the term, a soundscape “consists of events heard” (Schafer’s emphasis) and “sounds that matter” to a given community or to an entire realm such as medieval Christendom.58 In that world, however, certain things could be difficult to hear as a speaker intended—even without the kinds of interference to be detailed below—and yet still matter. Indeed, their importance was inseparable from difficulty in fully hearing them. This principle is illustrated by a gospel story in which Jesus, seated in a boat, addresses a crowd as his disciples look on. The topic of his oration is, precisely, hearing. “Listen!” he exclaims, then going on to talk about a sower’s seeds falling on different kinds of ground, many of them failing to take root, only some of them flourishing.59 His disciples are astounded. Why did he speak in such a round about manner, they later ask. He answers that only those who know “the secret” receive his message, while the rest hear only his voice, their hearts being dull, their ears hard of hearing, their commitment weak, or their 56 One vein of evidence is web-based tutorials in American universities. See, for instance: “6 Tips for Better Active Listening,” https://drexel.edu/goodwin/professional-studies -blog/overview/2019/August/tips-for-better-active-listening/; “The Value of Listening: Cultivating the Skill and Orientation to Listen to Your Students—and Help Them Hear Each Other,” https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/uk/17/09/value-listening. A sampling of the literature: Steven Golen, “A Factor Analysis of Barriers to Effective Listening,” International Journal of Business Communication 27, no. 1 (Jan., 1990): 25–36; Michael P. Nichols, The Lost Art of Listening: How Learning to Listen Can Improve Relationships (New York: Guilford Press, 1995); Helen Meldrum, “The Listening Practices of Exemplary Physicians,” International Journal of Listening 25, no. 3 (2011): 145–60; Claire Stamler-Goody, “Listening Across Difference: How a New University of Chicago Workshop Pushes Law Students to Practice ‘Hearing One Another’,” April 28, 2020, https://www.law. uchicago.edu/news/listening-across-differences. 57 Margaret Hoover, “America Is Polarized. It’s Why We Have to Start Listening to Each Other,” Time, Oct. 25, 2018, https://time.com/5434390/margaret-hoover-polarized-america/; Pearce Goodwin and Graham Bodie, “Let’s Fight for America by Learning to Listen First,” USA Today, Dec. 9, 2019, https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/12/09/national -conversation-project-bridge-political-divide-by-first-listening-column/4307353002/; Astra Taylor, “The Right to Listen: As Citizens of a Democracy, We Need to Hear One Another. Why Can’t We?” The New Yorker, Jan. 27, 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/ news/the-future-of-democracy/the-right-to-listen. 58 R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (1977; repr. Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1994). 59 Matt. 13.1–23; Mark 4.1–20; Luke 8.4–15.

20

Introduction

worldly cares and pleasures strong. “But as for what was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands it, who indeed bears fruit” (Matt. 13.23, NSRV). Christ must reveal the parable’s message in plain terms for his students because, despite their being privy to the secret, they did not understand that “seed” meant God’s word. Evidently, he intended his parable for them. Insiders struggling to hear fruitfully was expected of sacred speech from Christianity’s beginning. “The teacher’s voice sounds in vain to the body’s ears,” Giovanni da San Gimignano warned in the excerpt we read above from his Summa de exemplis. For the purposes of worship at the turn of the fourteenth century, hearing still had to be learned. The parable of the sower continued to have auditory relevance, and we will come across it again. Basic to Christian hearing throughout the Middle Ages was the ‘uncovering’ of words’ meaning.60 Worshipers were obliged to think beyond the literalness of things said in order to grasp their spiritual sense. Just as a seed could refer to God’s word, a stone jar could mean obedience, and a biblical patriarch could symbolize God or the Law or prophecy—to cite a few of the hidden meanings mentioned in passing in this book. The transcending of the literal in speech had a socially discriminatory dimension, which our materials will echo in different ways. Paul had helped establish it at Christianity’s inception in an often-quoted passage of his Second Letter to the Corinthians, writing, “Our competence is from God, who made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not of letter but of spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” (2 Cor. 3.5–6, NSRV). In this ideological perspective, the old and no longer valid covenant was between God and Jews, whose presumed inclination toward the letter and the corporeal rather than toward the Spirit allegedly resulted in collective senselessness, hostility to God, inability to please God, and spiritual death.61 The immediate issue for Giovanni da San Gimignano in teachers’ voices sounding vainly to the body’s ears was none of those things. It was quite practical: worshipers not hearing spiritually. This problem had various facets, as discussed earlier. Among them was the requirement of divine grace and of the soul’s avid concentration. Grace might come unsummoned, but it also needed to be prayed for. Its elusiveness had to do with another, tacit difficulty: If spiritual meaning could not be heard externally, neither could the voice of God. As we will see, Christian theology characterized that voice as purposefully 60 D. W. Robertson, Jr., “Christian Allegory,” chap. 4.1 in A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962). Sources cited by Robertson include Paul’s Epistles and Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine. 61 Rom. 8.5–8.

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distant from human ears and too great for them to withstand direct exposure to. Formerly humanized and available to the public (prophets, saints, and mystics were another matter) through Christ in his lifetime, God’s voice was now mediated by the clergy. As for the quality of worshipers’ auditory attention to those institutionally sanctioned intermediaries, we have already touched on attitudes of eagerness, reverence, obedience and faith. Others will need our consideration as well. The point to underscore here, however, is that the importance of divine speech in lay worship was defined partly by the efforts listeners had to make in order to hear it effectively. If the “soundscape” concept accommodates these dynamics only partly, other ideas may seem more fitting. The notion of historically specific, skillful modes of hearing brings up the “period ear.” Whereas “soundscape” refers to things heard, the “period ear” is about the manner in which they were received, that is, past perceivers’ mental experiences of given sounds, independent of verbal meaning.62 Individuals are not in question. It is a matter instead of groups or communities whose cognitive processing of sensations was influenced, consciously or unconsciously, by the culture in which they participated.63 Conceptually, a “period ear” must be a way of listening that is shared. It must also be habitual.64 It need not be monolithic. The historian of early music Shai Burstyn theorized a mix of “smaller scale ‘period ears’,” with some more open than others on account of “the multiplicity—at times 62

Shai Burstyn, “In Quest of the Period Ear,” in “Listening Practice,” special issue, Early Music 25, no. 4 (Nov., 1997): 692–97, 699–701. Burstyn adapts Michael Baxandall’s well-known “period eye” concept from his Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (1972) and Patterns of Intention (1985). The latter summarizes the concept: “Cultures also facilitate certain kinds of cognitive development in large classes of their members. Living in a culture, growing up and learning to survive in it, involves us in a special perceptual training. It endows us with habits and skills of discrimination that affect the way we deal with the new data that sensation offers the mind.” Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 107. Partially quoted in Burstyn, “In Quest of the Period Ear,” 695. 63 Defining “the period ear” in relation to medieval contexts, Susan Boynton and Diane Reilly hold that “each medieval community possessed culturally informed ears shaped by common experiences and environments, which recognized familiar acoustic events— ambient noise, speech, or melody—according to a set of learned standards specific to their time and place. Among trained practitioners, this aural repertoire was finely honed and included a large body of shared spoken and, sometimes, melodic passages, the memory of which could be prompted by auditory or visual cues.” Susan Boynton and Diane Reilly, “Sound and Image in the Middle Ages: Reflections on a Conjunction,” in Boynton and Reilly, Resounding Images, 19. 64 Schafer, too, writes of the perception of sound having to do with habits—“trained habits” and “cultural and perceptual habits.” Schafer, Soundscape, 152.

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Introduction

bewildering and conflicting—of trends, currents and influences at any particular historical point.”65 This view points to a late medieval ‘attention economy’, the concurrence of stimuli competing for notice in complex sensory environments. It was in such environments that worshipers engaged with the artworks that concern us, and those pictures made riveting claims of their own on the senses. Our materials also share an implicit expectation that spiritually necessary habits and skills of auditory attention were inconstant, chronically lacking, or challenging to maintain. Such an expectation does not negate the idea of people in the Middle Ages hearing in period-specific ways, but it does raise questions of auditory interests, values, and disciplinary strategies. Who wanted to influence hearing? What were their motivations? What were the targeted effects of hearing, and how were they achieved? Those issues underlie the “edification of the senses,” a framework closer to this book’s thinking. Whereas the “period ear” is about the skillful and habitual hearing characteristic of a given time and place, the “edification of the senses” brings to the fore processes and materials by means of which perception was intently trained and assigned meaning.66 The “period ear” posits cultural influence on cognition in perception. “Edification” draws out more sharply the senses’ mutability and cultural constructed-ness. It pertains to perception’s formation, direction, and discipline. Edification implies preconceived ideals of progress. Moral codes and imperatives come into play that belong to the area of culture doing the edifying. Think of Cennini’s instruction to artist apprentices to obey their masters or, in the world of commerce, Morelli’s advice to merchants-in-training to listen mistrustfully to strangers. Edifications of hearing are how sounds that mattered to a community came to matter. Especially relevant for us are the edifying practices of medieval churchmen such as Giovanni da San Gimignano, the teaching of Christians to apprehend and be affected by spiritual things in ways that both extended and exceeded the body’s perceptual faculties. Giovanni’s text indicates the necessity of external mediums and instruments in the practice of inner hearing, as we heard earlier. That need affirms the importance of our looking to pictorial art to understand how people “shaped their material and immaterial worlds to encourage or discourage certain kinds or patterns of sensory experience,” as the scholar of religion

65 Burstyn, “In Quest of the Period Ear,” 697. 66 Richard G. Newhauser, “Introduction: The Sensual Middle Ages,” in A Cultural History of the Senses, vol. 2: In the Middle Ages, ed. Richard G. Newhauser (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 12–17.

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and visual culture Sally M. Promey puts it in a broader study of multisensory engagement in religions’ material practices.67 The spiritual senses in medieval Christianity, and their relationships to bodily senses, embodied practices, and physical environments, have been active topics of scholarly investigation.68 Less considered in the literature are perceptual barriers, an issue at the core of this book’s subject of inquiry. In his unpacking of the parable of the sower for his disciples, Christ mentions certain obstacles which, in being named by him there, in the Gospels, Christianity’s foundational texts, probably came to be expected of audiences throughout the centuries: wavering commitment, and worldly concerns and desires. We should add Christ’s deliberate opacity in speaking, the interpretive problem of literalism, as another generally anticipated barrier. Further hindrances presented themselves in our earlier discussion of inner hearing in the Summa de exemplis: the sounds of words, of voices, of manners of speaking. In her study of listening in early Christianity, the theology historian Carol Harrison finds still other potential auditory impediments in Augustine’s De catechizandis rudibus (Instructing Beginners in the Faith; around 400 CE), including an audience’s size, social background, level of education and belief, gender, age, attention span, and physical discomfort in standing during an oration.69 Sacred communication could also be frustrated by listeners’ self-interest, envy, pride, laziness and, in Harrison’s paraphrase, “a multitude of distractions, temptations, and competing goals which assail the human will.”70 To overcome expected auditory obstructions, early Christianity developed a discursive system of teaching, preaching, and prayer, which Harrison outlines and details from theological texts. That system is a deep cultural background of late medieval verbal practices of opening the heart’s ears, an issue discussed in the present book’s first chapter. My interest in listening attitudes came into sharper focus thanks to Harrison’s discussion of “motivations” such as love of God (caritas) enabling early Christian speakers and listeners to succeed in spiritually beneficial communication. But Monumental Sounds is not a theological history of listening. It does not study an ideal process preserved 67 Sally M. Promey, “Religion, Sensation, and Materiality: An Introduction,” in Sensational Religion: Sensory Cultures in Material Practice, ed. Sally M. Promey (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 2. 68 The Spiritual Senses, ed. Paul L. Gavrilyuk and Sarah Coakley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Éric Palazzo, L’invention chrétienne des cinq sens dans la liturgie et l’art au Moyen Âge (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 2014); Harrison, Art of Listening, 93–94, 106–7. 69 Harrison, Art of Listening, 125. 70 Ibid., 124, 126.

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Introduction

in the writing of influential Christian thinkers. Instead, in exploring how art aided listening for theological ends, this book examines late medieval regimes of listening at local levels. The grounds there are uneven, contested, subject to late thirteenth-century energies and tensions. Economic prosperity, social climbing, and assertions of spiritual authority rub against repugnance of moral corruption, material extravagance, and personal excesses. We will see certain auditory impediments and counteractive listening attitudes become more pressing with specific stakes and stakeholders coming into view. What ‘worldly cares and desires’ could mean varied, depending on the situation, and a given situation could involve more than one: social dynamics, sex, reason, display, decoration, other senses, other sounds. An effective medium of auditory edification needed, among other things, elasticity, multivalence, and strong claims on sensorial reality, qualities available through mastery of pictorial narrative and naturalism, art historical developments with little presence in the medieval soundscapes we have imagined up to now. Those developments will open for us a fine-grained and situated interpretation of Karl Marx’s proposition (1844) that “the forming of the five senses is a labor of the entire history of the world down to the present.”71 This sweeping statement, familiar to cultural historians of sensation, holds that the senses have a history, that historical conditions have shaped them, that it has been continuous work.72 These notions generally harmonize with the scholarly concepts touched on above concerning hearing’s past malleability in terms of certain sounds’ particular importance (“soundscape”), inculcated skills and habits (“period ear”), and moral training (“edification of the senses”). Marx’s characterization of sensory formation as labor also resonates with hearing’s being made into an object of knowledge (physiological, religious) and with its operation in religious communication. In Giovanni da San Gimignano’s Summa de exemplis, sensing God’s word required not only divine grace; it took material supports, human effort, verbal instruction, moderation in speech, and, on the perceiver’s part, preparedness to listen past audible sounds to spiritually impressive sense. Hearing was a collaborative process.

71 Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan (New York: International, 1968), 140–41. Cited in Sterne, Audible Past, 5; Jütte, History of the Senses, 9–10. 72 Sterne comments: “Marx’s passage signals that the very capacity to relate to the world through one’s senses is organized and learned differently in different social settings…. Before the senses are real, palpable, concrete or available for contemplation, they are already affected and effected through the particular historical conditions that also give rise to the subject who possesses them.” Sterne, Audible Past, 5.

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Additional co-workers come recommended by the modern sciences of psychoacoustics and multisensory integration. One of them is the eye. What we see can influence and even override what we hear others saying.73 Another is our central auditory nervous system, which tunes out most of what we hear around us so that we are not overwhelmed by it. (The system does not, however, tell us what we should listen to and in what manner we should listen to it.)74 Situations in late medieval Italy are roughly analogous. Somewhat like the central auditory nervous system, and by means of the eyes, pictorial art could carry out the narrowing, motivating, and directing of auditory attention. On a basic level, it brought viewers’ awareness to listening and guided them toward particular attitudes, emotions, and expectations in their reception of voices.75 It follows that artists themselves collaborated in this process of auditory discipline. Schafer’s historical explication of the soundscape refers to premodern architects as “early sound engineers” seeking to bring “special acoustic properties” like the awe-inspiring resonance of Neolithic caves “into the ziggurats of Babylon and the cathedrals and crypts of Christendom.”76 This book’s artists were sound engineers too. With the available technologies of pictorial narrative and naturalism, they worked to aggrandize desired effects of sacred utterances on audiences. Their art gives us unique access to auditory labors, collaborations, and frictions of their time. 4

Monumental Sounds

Our look at the shaping of listening through pictorial art will be loosely guided by the example of Dante Alighieri. In an often-cited passage in his Divine 73 A famous example of this relationship is the McGurk effect, a phenomenon in which the sight of speaking lips alters our perception of vocal sounds. For a demonstration by the psychologist Lawrence Rosenblum, see “Try this bizarre audio illusion!” YouTube video, 3:25, “BBC,” Nov. 10, 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-lN8vWm3m0. Several contributors to The Handbook of Multisensory Processing discuss the McGurk effect and other evidence of sight’s influence on auditory perception, above all in the context of speech. See especially Dominic W. Massaro, “From Multisensory Integration to Talking Heads and Language Learning,” in The Handbook of Multisensory Processing, ed. Gemma A. Calvert, Charles Spence, and Barry E. Stein (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 153–76. 74 Diana C. Emanuel and Tomasz Letowski, Hearing Science (Philadelphia: Wolters Kluwer/ Lippincott Williams and Wilkins, 2009), 212. 75 To follow Palazzo in thinking of church art (albeit of earlier medieval centuries) as activating hearing would not go far enough. Palazzo, Invention chrétienne des cinq sens, 26–27. 76 Schafer, Soundscape, 217–18.

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Introduction

Comedy (after 1307), a spiritually wayward narrator/pilgrim encounters narrative scenes carved in marble so naturalistically that his eyes seem to smell pictured incense and to hear stone figures speaking and singing. More moving for him than the verisimilitude are depicted persons whose manner of listening activates his own internal hearing and boosts it by inspiring his humility, an attitude of spiritual listening akin to obedience and faith. The poetic experience will help open our investigation, which develops across several wellknown extant pictures, all of which participate in larger pictorial programs and all but one of which pre-date the Comedy: The Presentation of Christ in the Temple (around 1260, Pisa) and The Temptation and The Lord’s Reprimand (1278, Perugia) made by Nicola Pisano (d. between 1278–84); the so-called Isaac Master’s The Deception of Isaac (1290s, Assisi); Giotto’s The Wedding Feast at Cana (around 1305, Padua) and The Visions of Fra Agostino and the Bishop of Assisi (around 1320, Florence). In their original textual versions, these subjects concern turning points in collective spiritual histories. The Temptation and The Lord’s Reprimand, in the Book of Genesis, narrate humankind’s catastrophic separation from God at the beginning of time. The Deception of Isaac, later in Genesis, takes place at the passing down of divine favor from one generation to the next. The Presentation of Christ in the Temple, in the Gospels (Book of Luke), tells of the initial public reception of Christ as humankind’s long-awaited savior. The Wedding Feast at Cana, in the Book of John, marks the start of Christ’s public ministry and of his followers’ belief in his divine power. The only non-biblical story under discussion, The Visions of Fra Agostino and the Bishop of Assisi, first appeared in thirteenth-century written biographies of Saint Francis of Assisi. It relates how the saint’s followers began to believe in his own divine power moments after his death. Speech and hearing are significant components in the textual representation of each story, and the corresponding pictures are sensitive to these elements. But the artists also departed from the texts (and from earlier depictions of the same subjects) in adding to the fulcrum of action unsettled hearers and hindrances of hearing. Collective turning points in spiritual history were thereby ‘auralized’ and individualized, and individual hearers gained in historic stature. These revisions are at the heart of the perceptual engineering delineated in this book, though they are not the whole story. In order best to serve the book’s main issues, we will not approach materials chronologically by completion date, nor will we give equal time to each picture. Certain things will satisfy introductory needs, while others will support deep analyses. In chapter one, Nicola Pisano’s Genesis sculptures introduce a culturally foundational story of humanity’s loss of spiritual hearing. They also anchor

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a survey of acute sensitivities to sounds in late medieval Italy and of diffuse concern about ears being too open in some ways. Dante’s episode of sculptural hearing serves here as a bridge from cultural contexts to pictorial art. Chapter two addresses modern difficulty in recognizing art’s auditory work. Our point of departure, Giotto’s The Visions of Fra Agostino and the Bishop of Assisi, has been called a work of genius for its representations of sound and auditory perception. But a fresh look at the fresco raises unasked questions about how pictures defined listening and differentiated among auditory modes. Perceiving art’s ear-edifying potential demands closer attention on our part as well as awareness of our tendency to overlook things of auditory significance to medieval audiences. Visions leads us to consider art historiography’s blind spot in that area, not only for the sake of remedying it but also to recover insights into pictures’ auditory usefulness. Subsequent chapters will open our eyes to different forms and applications of that utility. Chapter three probes ways in which Giotto’s The Wedding Feast at Cana invites the viewer to compare nuances of hearing, observe the attitude of love (caritas) in listening, and associate spiritual deafness with worldly appetites and impulses. In chapter four, Nicola’s The Presentation of Christ in the Temple fosters listening attitudes of faith and chastity by bringing incredulity into conflict with hearing-based belief and by layering that opposition with a pull between sexual pollution and purity. Chapter five, focused on The Deception of Isaac, brings to light a different kind of training in faithful hearing. There, the challenge is to listen past the persuasiveness of the body’s other senses. Experiences of touch, taste, and smell are part of the listening lessons in previous chapters too. That visual arts from centuries ago appealed to senses beyond sight and hearing is not surprising, given the multisensory orientations of a range of renowned works, from mosaic decoration of the Church of Hagia Sophia (sixth century) to early illuminated manuscripts such as the Drogo Sacramentary (ninth century) to relief sculptures in twelfth-century Souillac, late medieval altarpieces to the printed art of Albrecht Dürer (late fifteenth century), The Lady with the Unicorn tapestries (around 1500), and other allegories of the five senses in French, Italian, Netherlandish, and Spanish painting—and beyond.77 What distinguishes the multisensory engagements of our own materials is their service of 77

Liz James, “Senses and Sensibility in Byzantium,” Art History 27, no. 4 (Sept., 2004): 522–37; Palazzo, “Entrer dans l’église avec les sens,” chap. 4, and “Les cinq sens dans l’euchologie de la messe et dans l’illustration des prières du canon,” chap. 9 in Invention chrétienne des cinq sens; Sadler, Touching the Passion; Carl Nordenfalk, “The Five Senses in Late Medieval and Renaissance Art,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 48 (1985), 7–10, 16. See also Ferino-Pagden, Immagini del sentire; Quiviger, Sensory World; Christina Normore,

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Introduction

hearing and their extensions of pictorial naturalism toward the realization of auditory priorities. Naturalism is an important spiritual resource in Dante’s literary description of the pilgrim’s multisensory and especially sonorous engagement with narrative sculptures. Artists in central and northern Italy had been energetically forging naturalistic styles since the mid-thirteenth century, around the time of Nicola Pisano’s famed adaptations of ancient narrative sculptures in Pisa. Our look at the Comedy in chapter one will prepare us to observe the dependence of narrative art’s auditory engagements on naturalism. Pictorial details not usually associated with sound contributed to making viewers better listeners: the shape of a vase, a building’s form, the thickness of garments, a glove’s tightness, the craftsmanship of wood furniture. Naturalistic innovations for which the period’s art has been celebrated, among them hallmarks of the “age of vision,” have spiritually ear-opening functions as well: material emulations, illusions of spatial depth, reuses of ancient art, liveliness of gestures and actions, heightened drama, and visualization of psychological states. Such elements collaborated in steering early viewers to study distinctions and spiritual progressions in listening. A counter-intuitive function of naturalism (as least for us) was to make viewers aware of limits and spiritually deafening effects of other senses, especially sight. Naturalism in art not only nurtured spiritual hearing. It could also set it in motion, in part by merging acts of looking and listening. We will see that while the outer ears of Dante’s pilgrim deny that the marble figures before his bodily eyes actually speak, he does hear their speech. When he sees a sculpture of The Annunciation, for instance, the event is carved so vividly that the pilgrim could swear the angel actually says “Ave” to the Virgin Mary. But it is he, the viewer, who performs the utterance, internally. We might think of Fra Angelico’s wellknown depiction of the story. The fresco, painted in the Convent of San Marco (Florence, 1440s), contains an inscribed phrase prompting viewers to say “Ave” as they come before the image.78 The pictures in this book do not contain inscriptions. But their lifelikeness is narratively precise to the point of evoking specific phrases for viewers already familiar with the stories —and their figures model the inner sounding of those words. Scholars of medieval and Renaissance art are well acquainted with the idea of early viewers imagining voices and speech in pictures they saw, as

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A Feast for the Eyes: Art, Performance, and the Late Medieval Banquet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Bagnoli, Feast for the Senses. William Hood, Fra Angelico at San Marco (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 18–19. Studies have related words within pictures to Dante’s ‘speaking’ sculptures, as in Roger Tarr, “‘Visibile Parlare’: The Spoken Word in Fourteenth-Century Central Italian Painting,” Word and Image 13, no. 3 (July-Sept., 1997): 223–44.

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mentioned earlier.79 What has not been explored, however, is how such internal sounding could constitute a form of listening and yielding that could lead to spiritual hearing. Viewers had to concentrate on depicted discourse. They had to recollect phrases previously stored in memory. These activities entailed a kind of compliance, but needed disciplined commitment to be spiritually consequential for the viewer. The yielding of one’s voice in making pictures internally audible, I argue, could move the viewer toward humility and other attitudes of devout listening which the words’ sacred status and content could generate further, in concert with other pictorial elements. If ‘speaking’ images lacked audibility without the viewer’s contribution, worshipers could lack disciplined listening, which pictured speech could help stimulate. The word “monumental” in this book’s title speaks to the difficulty of the hearing that is generally at issue. When applied to sound in other contexts, the term has connoted acoustic qualities as well as audience repercussions. Music scholars speak of “musical monumentality,” referring to effects that are grand, overpowering, triumphant, glorious, uplifting, goosebump-raising, sublime.80 A drum tower and bell tower in Beijing have a sound the art historian Wu Hung has called “monumental” for the scale and endurance of their human impact—“a sound that dictated millions of people’s lives for several hundred years.”81 Schafer’s Soundscape imagines the reverberation of a Gothic church slowing down speech, “turning it into monumental rhetoric.”82 The “monumental” in Monumental Sounds similarly alludes to powerful listening experiences.

79 The idea of the viewer’s imagination completing a picture by giving it voice had early modern formulation in the aesthetics of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Laokoon (1766). Arguing that pictorial art inherently appeals to sight and not hearing (a view rejected by the present book, on the grounds that ‘hearing’ can mean more than external audibility), Lessing pointed to the famous ancient sculpture of Laocoon, a Trojan priest suffering an attack of giant serpents and yet opening his mouth only a little. “If Laocoon sighs,” Lessing wrote, “the imagination can hear him cry out” (Wenn Laokoon also seufzet, so kann ihn die Einbildungskraft shreien hören). Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Lessings Laokoon, ed. Hugo Blümner (Berlin, 1876), 40. I use McCormick’s translation. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. Edward Allen McCormick (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 20. See Shoaf, “Voice in Relief,” 35. 80 Alexander Rehding, Music and Monumentality: Commemoration and Wonderment in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 3. 81 Wu Hung, “Monumentality of Time: Giant Clocks, the Drum Tower, the Clock Tower,” in Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade, ed. Robert S. Nelson and Margaret Olin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 122. 82 Schafer, Soundscape, 219.

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But this book also differs from those interpretations in significant ways. Firstly, the effects in question had little to do with sonic qualities audible to the body’s ears.83 Late medieval worshipers were not necessarily moved deeply by what may strike us as “monumental rhetoric” for the slowness of its delivery and its booming reverberation in church space. Indeed, acoustic qualities of speech appear to have made little difference to perceptions of its spiritual significance. The sounds that will matter to us—in sermons, phrases, liturgical speech generally—could well lack in vocal inflection or be otherwise moderate and unremarkable, as Giovanni da San Gimignano advised. Yet the experience of hearing them was meant to be one of humility, awe, and other internally impressive and spiritually progressive states. We are confronting something adjacent to, though not identical to, sound as “affect,” the theorization of sound’s powers beyond representation and signification, its capacity to mobilize behavior, give rise to feelings, moods, emotions, religious attachments.84 This topic likewise extends beyond “the power of speech” in the sense of spoken words and effects normatively ascribed to them being the principle objects of inquiry.85 The scholar of medieval sound and literature Jean-Marie Fritz has remarked that clergymen set great store by sound’s efficacity.86 We will not push speech-powers aside, but we will not give them the last word either. Instability in listening is our premise and field of inquiry, not our problem to resolve. Secondly, “monumental” recognizes art’s material and functional collaboration in producing spiritually formative effects from merely agreeable sounds. Art historians have referred to late medieval pictures as monumental with reference to their size (distinguishing them from ‘miniature’ painting in manuscripts, for instance), material permanence, and aesthetic impressiveness. Possibly the very elaborateness of auditory engineering in the art of Nicola Pisano, the Isaac frescoes’ painter, and Giotto made it seem all the more 83 This point also diverges from the physiological tradition of Aristotle, as traced through the Middle Ages (including late medieval Italy, with Pietro d’Abano) in Burnett, “Sound and Its Perception.” 84 Marie Thompson and Ian Biddle, “Introduction: Somewhere between the Signifying and the Sublime,” in Sound, Music, Affect: Theorizing Sonic Experience, ed. Marie Thompson and Ian Biddle (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 1–24. 85 See, for instance, Le pourvoir des mots au Moyen Âge, ed. Nicole Bériou, Jean-Patrice Boudet, and Irène Rosier-Catach (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014). There is some acknowledgment here of the contribution of listeners and their particular dispositions in the efficacity of speech. Irène Rosier-Catach, “Regards croisés sur le pouvoir des mots au Moyen Âge,” in Bériou, Boudet, and Rosier-Catach, Le pouvoir des mots, 542, 584–85. 86 Fritz, La cloche et la lyre, 415.

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important to audiences.87 Medieval art may be considered monumental in another sense too. Monere, the term’s Latin root, means to remind, teach, or warn. Along with the arousal of devotion, these were standard operations of narrative art in churches. Sounds amplified internally, in worshipers’ minds, could be monumental by virtue of their material support by paintings and sculptures that reminded, instructed, and admonished. That art’s auditory intervention was necessary at all brings us to a fourth sense of the “monumental” for this book. The term evokes the great significance that sounds could visibly gain, through art, in conditions where audiences were not hearing as authorities wished. Art allows us to widen inquiry into the constructed-ness of listening practices such that we also consider the fact of, and cultural value in, challenges to the forming and maintenance of those practices. The philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy writes that “if ‘to hear’ is to understand  … to listen is to be straining toward a possible meaning, and consequently one that is not immediately accessible” (my italics).88 Narrative pictures in this book guided the early viewer toward spiritually-impactful hearing, but what they mobilized more immediately was listening that stretched toward the hard-to-access.89 Insufficient exertion in that direction meant a lack not only in spiritual hearing but also in attitudes worshipers needed for beginning to bridge their distance from their god, such as faith and humility. Sound’s spiritually formative effect for church audiences depended on the quality of their internal reception of what their external ears heard. Central to our inquiry, then, is less the question of what sound did to listeners than of what, with narrative art’s help, listening could do to sound and to listeners. Art’s inclusion in that question brings the theoretical into interaction with local and historical conditions. Narrative pictures ahead raise issues of the auditory motivations of powerful individuals and institutions. Giotto’s Cana arguably prepared viewers for listening with love in the interest of his publicly ambitious patron, to close people’s ears to unflattering statements about 87

Susan Stewart, in her discussion of “the gigantic,” observes that “the more complicated the object, the more intricate, and the more these complications and intricacies are attended to, the ‘larger’ the object is in significance.” Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 89. 88 Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 6. 89 Nancy defines listening further as “tendre l’oreille—literally, to stretch the ear—an expression that evokes a singular mobility, among the sensory apparatuses, of the pinna of the ear—it is an intensification and a concern, a curiosity or an anxiety.” Nancy, Listening, 5.

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him (chapter three). Nicola Pisano designed The Presentation demonstrably to strike a chord with Pisa’s clergy, whose sexual activities vexed their archbishop with concerns about their faith (chapter four). At Assisi, under the aegis of a powerful religious organization, The Deception of Isaac betrays anxiety over the manner of sensing a divine presence (chapter five). Our close looking, augmented by consultation of sermons and other texts, will reveal cracks and slips in clerical command of ears. Such gaps will begin to gain palpability in chapter one, where we will discuss oratorical practices of preparing congregants to hear spiritually. Throughout the book, we will hear from medieval philosophers and theologians whose writings let us to see nuanced play and frustration between hearing with the body’s ears and with the soul. We will make further use of Giovanni da San Gimignano’s Summa de exemplis, though it will not strictly dictate our thinking. That text takes us only so far in contemplating the outerinner auditory dynamic and how pictures engaged viewers in that relationship. Just as auditory issues reveal sides of pictorial narrative and naturalism we have not heard about in studies of the art of late medieval Italy, pictorial narrative and naturalism show art’s cultivation of auditory discipline that has gone unseen until now. Historical developments in looking and artmaking are part of the ‘big picture’ in Monumental Sounds. As the sense of sight gained cultural prowess and as new powers of pictorial art became apparent, Giotto and his predecessors bent their mediums toward auditory ends. Their work allows us to historicize auditory perception from the perspective of needs to satisfy, obstacles to overcome, and tools to do both. In the process, we come to see that listening was both primary and collaborative, transcendent and inconstant, humble and ambitious. Pictorial art too will look both humbler and more ambitious than it has, as our sense of its auditory potential expands. Art historical understanding of the sense of sight will change too. This book both affirms and qualifies the idea of an “age of vision.” With art’s auditory outreach we are not talking simply about another visual conquest to add to those that scholars have already posited. The sense of sight was humbled here, with art exposing viewers to the eyes’ limits in worship. That these lessons occurred in artistic commissions unparalleled in their time in splendor, elaborateness, appeal (emotional, intellectual, psychological), and capacity to make the sacred past a sensorially immersive experience can hardly be incidental. It is as if the spiritual validity of such art depended on visibly giving the ear its due.

…

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This book’s choice to study works by different artists, in varied localities, with diverse subject matter, is a step toward my larger aim of opening up sensory worlds and listening in-the-making. To concentrate on a single artist or program or city, as excellent books on late medieval art have done, would not have sufficed for our topic. That being said, to allot the bulk of analysis and discussion to three pictures risks the impression that we are dealing with outliers. But relationships across our materials as well as between them and the larger pictorial programs to which they belong will emerge. We will also link the pictures to other artworks, not only to underline novel departures but also to suggest continuities. The conclusion draws connections with paintings from the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. In different parts of the book, one of the most in-demand subjects for narrative art in the late Middle Ages, The Annunciation to the Virgin Mary, gains auditory significance collaterally. Another frequent subject, faith, occurs in personified forms more than two hundred times in medieval art, as already noted. Likewise surviving in large numbers are personifications of other virtues related to listening attitudes initiated by the pictures we will examine—charity and chastity.90 Although the quantity of narrative pictures to which worshipers may have given their voices (externally and/or internally) is beyond reckoning, we can now ask whether spiritual hearing might have been a fruit of such acts. In sum, the concepts I develop through singular examples—the auditory work of which cannot be seen at a glance—can expand to other and larger contexts. The pictorial narratives within our scope appear less as outliers than as outgrowths when seen through frameworks beyond art. Already chapter one will begin to make this clear in its use of medieval literature, rhetoric, sermons, and theology. Sermons are especially important in much of the book. They will help us situate pictures in relation to ideas, interests, and practices of their time and milieux. Giotto, for example, turns out to have been more of an auditory innovator than has been thought, but also one who was in substantial dialogue with his contemporaries, when we see parallels between his painting and Giovanni da San Gimignano’s Summa de exemplis. My arguments are outgrowths themselves, drawing as they do on thinking in anthropology, disability studies, history, literature, philosophy, and religious studies, in addition to art history and historiography. Scholars of Nicola Pisano, Giotto, the Assisi frescoes, and late medieval art more generally will hear many notes of harmony and dissonance with recent literature. Ideally, undergraduate and graduate students will feel invited to hear out this book as well. 90

182 occurrences of Humility, 189 of Charity, and 131 of Chastity are listed in Virtue and Vice (pp. 160–77, 230–39).

Chapter 1

Listening Up In medieval Christendom, auditory inattention was a serious concern in the here-and-now of worship. It was also a conflict of mythic proportions. It helped explain the world and the human condition. At the root of history itself was a failure to obey a divine voice, and that lapse—or refusal, depending on how we look at it—provided a compelling reason for telling and retelling the primeval past and for it to be heard again and again. You yourself may be familiar with the story. The world’s first woman, persuaded by the serpent’s saying that her eyes would be opened and that she would become god-like by eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, an act forbidden by her divine creator, suddenly found that tree appealing and desired its fruit. Then she took, ate, and gave to her trusting mate (Gen. 3). The consequence of this transgression was their expulsion from Paradise into a life of hunger, toil, pain, and mortality. The fall would stain their descendants. Humanity as a whole would live in spiritual exile. What of listening, that accessory of Eve’s primordial crime? Medieval Christians were taught to believe that it could prolong or reverse an individual’s lowly state, ultimately leading to damnation or eternal life with the divine. But people might well forget or ignore those spiritual implications, and they did not always hear what religion demanded of them. These problems, which motivated the auditory engineering detailed in this book, had various explanations. We will hear about many of them in this chapter and beyond. Among them, sensory environments hold particular interest. A later chapter will explicitly address visually ‘deafening’ elements. For now, we start categorically with the auditory. A wide array of voices and other sounds competed for people’s ears in late medieval Italy. Tensions between that culture’s remarkable sensitivity to sounds in the world and authorities’ struggles to inspire modes of higher listening are the present chapter’s main subject. Toward the chapter’s end, Dante’s vision of contemplating narrative sculptures in Purgatory will introduce a model of how looking at pictorial narrative may be understood to shape and elevate listening. Most of the evidence in this chapter comes from texts: a poem, a chronicle, civic law, a liturgical manual, and more. But because narrative art’s auditory work in that richly auditory age is ultimately what we are after, we begin with a pictorial reminder of humanity’s mythic corruption through listening—a reminder presented within an explicitly and emphatically visual experience.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004460812_003

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Aural Sensitivities

Eve’s temptation is among the “marvelous things” passers-by will see if they “look carefully” at the Fontana Maggiore (1278), the main public fountain in medieval Perugia (Figs. 4, 5).1 The scene is part of an encyclopedic program of sculptures carved in marble by Nicola Pisano with help from his son, Giovanni, renowned artists in those years. In the relief, a long-haired Eve gives the fruit to Adam as the serpent, spiraling up the leafy tree of knowledge, speaks to her. Its mouth points toward her exposed ear. An adjacent scene shows the pair unhappily driven away by the Lord’s wrath at their disobedience (Fig. 6).

Figure 4

Nicola Pisano, Fontana Maggiore, marble, 1278, Perugia Photo: author

1 “ASPICE Q(UI) TRANSIS IOCU(N)DO MU(R)MU(R)E FONTES | SI BENE P(RO) SPICIAS MI(R)A UID(ER)E POTES.” These phrases begin an inscription on the fountain’s second basin. See Attilio Bartoli Langeli and Nicoletta Giovè Marchioli, “Le scritte incise della Fontana Maggiore,” in Il linguaggio figurativo della Fontana Maggiore di Perugia, ed. Carlo Santini (Perugia: Calzetti—Mariucci, 1996), 181.

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Figure 5

Chapter 1

Nicola Pisano, The Temptation, marble, 1278, Fontana Maggiore, Perugia Photo: author

Both pictures are spare. Eden is denoted by the tree and a bit of ground. The humans fill much of the marble surface. Similarities, differences, and nuances come forward. Initially the couple is at ease. They stand nude, in contrapposto, like idealized figures of ancient Greek art as they flout God’s rule. Her hands

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Figure 6

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Nicola Pisano, The Temptation, The Lord’s Reprimand, marble, 1278, Fontana Maggiore, Perugia Photo: Author

confidently give, his fingers readily accept. Then they stagger away disgraced, their legs moving in reluctant unison, their left hands concealing their groins. The already-distant Lord, his voice receding indefinitely, points an angry finger at them from the sky. Adam looks back at it while blaming Eve with his right hand. As if to designate this move as a return gesture, the bend of his accusatory arm echoes her offer of the fruit moments earlier.2 Eve looks back too, but she does not match her mate in this respect. Her sight is lower, directed toward the tree-winding seducer in the previous panel. This gaze seems to allude to an account Eve has just given of what happened. After Adam blamed her, she reported to the Lord, “The serpent tricked me, and I ate” (Gen. 3.13). The two scenes form a kind of diptych, beginning with her hearing persuasive speech 2 Inscriptions above the reliefs emphasize her culpability. Above The Temptation we read, “Eva decepit Adam” (Eve deceives Adam). In Genesis 3.17 (NSRV), Adam too receives blame for listening: “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten of the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it’.” The inscription above the relief of The Lord’s Reprimand says simply, “Eva me fecit peccare” (Eve made me sin.). For discussion of Eve’s representation here (without attention to auditory issues), see Franca Ela Consolino, “Tre mulieres perniciosae: Eva, Dalilia e Salomè. Considerazioni sul programma iconografico della Fontana Maggiore di Perugia,” in Santini, Il linguaggio figurativo, 221–22.

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and ending with her hearing it again, this time in hindsight, perhaps with confusion and regret. References to listening are visible elsewhere in the fountain’s sculptures. Three of the statuettes around the upper basin allude to it. Moses holds the Law and a rod, the token of his authority as one whom people should hear and believe because he has heard God directly (Exod. 4.1–5).3 King David appears with a psaltery (Fig. 7), the instrument he played while singing to the Lord, giving voice to divine words he was privileged to hear (2 Sam. 23.1–3), and soothing the troubled spirit of Saul (1 Kings 16.23). Saint Benedict of Nursia, founder of monasticism in Europe, tilts his head while listening to an angel, his ear well-articulated (Fig. 8). The saint speaks with an inscription, words directed to a kneeling disciple: “AUDI FR[ATE] MAURE” (Listen, Brother Maurus).4 Among the fifty low reliefs around the fountain’s lower basin, where The Temptation is located, are personifications of the liberal arts. Two of them have pronounced auditory dimensions. Music (Musica) tunes a psaltery in her lap by listening to bells she strikes with a hammer (Fig. 9). Her action endorses the ear’s truth in judgment and in the pursuit of wisdom. Rhetoric (Rectorica), in the form of a seated professor, opens his mouth in speech while a student concentrates on his voice (Fig. 10). This image is a reversal of The Temptation: Vocal persuasion is redeemed. For Perugians and others coming for the fountain’s water or pausing on their way across the public square where the town’s cathedral and civic hall also stood, listening was to be associated not only with humankind’s corruption through Eve but also with religious and intellectual efforts to improve their collective condition. The fountain’s sculptures are hardly the only register of auditory values in the thirteenth-century Italy. Surviving texts point to a much broader context of aural sensitivity. Eve’s temptation, for example, was a touchstone for Boncompagno da Signa (d. after 1240), a professor of rhetoric in Bologna,

3 Moses’ staff, in serving to part the Nile and draw water from rock (Exod. 14.16, 17.6), also had associations with obedient and faithful listening. Moses follows God’s verbal directions in effecting these wonders, though in another telling of the latter he deviates by not drawing the water with his voice as the Lord commanded. Accusing Moses of distrust, God bars him from the promised land (Num. 20.7–12, 24). 4 The phrase recalls the opening words of the prologue of the Rule of St. Benedict: “Obsculta, o fili, praecepta magistri et inclina aurem cordis tui” (Listen carefully, my son, to the master’s instructions, and attend to them with the ear of your heart). The Rule of Saint Benedict, ed. and trans. Bruce L. Venarde (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 2–3. The fountain’s sculpture may allude to the legend of Maurus, whose obedience to Benedict enabled his miraculous rescue of a monk who had fallen into a stream while drawing water from it. Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 1:188.

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Figure 7

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Nicola Pisano, King David, marble, 1278, Fontana Maggiore, Perugia Photo: author

who considered the serpent’s cunning deception an origin of the discipline he taught.5 But when Boncompagno turns to the practice of oratory or to life 5 Boncompagno da Signa, Boncompagni Rhetorica novissima 2.4.5 (Gaudentio, Scripta Anecdota Antiquissorum Glossatorum 2:255): “Secunda persuasionis origio fuit in paradiso

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Figure 8

Chapter 1

Giovanni Pisano (?), Saint Benedict of Nursia, marble, 1278, Fontana Maggiore, Perugia Photo: Paolo Emilio/Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Listening Up

Figure 9

Nicola Pisano, Music, marble, 1278, Fontana Maggiore, Perugia Photo: author

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Figure 10 Nicola Pisano, Rhetoric, marble, 1278, Fontana Maggiore, Perugia Photo: author

Chapter 1

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around him, he hears a range of vocal sounds, from modulation and quivering in orators’ speech, to fluctuations and “dolorous sounds” in the laments of professional mourners, to arguments between Italian students and those from northern lands over excesses in each others’ singing.6 Even more sonorous is the Cronica written by Salimbene de Adam (d. 1287), a Franciscan friar from Parma. He too speaks of Eve’s seduction, but other voices fill his ears. His chronicle touches on memorable acoustic qualities of singers and preachers; the shouting of boys running in the street; gamblers blaspheming God and the Virgin while throwing dice under an arcade; the impeded speech of a toothy and prophetic cobbler; entrancing music being played by youths in a courtyard in Pisa; the pleasant sound of bells filling the valley of Assisi; sounds of young children castigating sinners; sounds of fear, grief, and devotion; sounds of languages and dialects and manners of speaking that were foreign to him. Barbara Garofani, in her survey of sound in the Cronica, aptly labeled Salimbene a “hedonist of orality” for the pleasure he took in listening and a “linguistic sociologist” for his study of local tendencies of speech.7 An obvious comparison is with Dante. Whereas Salimbene heard differences between cities, some years later Dante’s De vulgare eloquentia (begun 1304), which would elevate ‘everyday’ language to a level of respect traditionally commanded by Latin, detected audible variance between neighborhoods in the same city, even between families. More than a thousand dialects are spoken “in this little corner of the world,” he reports.8 The gift of speech, originally given by God to Adam and Eve, had splintered after their fall.9 Such notices, considered side by side, seem to indicate an increased sensitivity to—and inclination to write about—voices far below Paradise. In his classic study of Dante’s poetry, Erich Auerbach spoke of a “general rebirth of sensibility” in the thirteenth century that “gave concreteness and individuality to the writings of the chroniclers and storytellers as well as to works of art.”10 deliciarum, videlicet quando serpens vetitum pomum exhibuit protoplaustis, dolosius persuadens ut ipsum continue degustarent, quia fierent sicut dii, et boni et mali scientiam obtinerent.” 6 Boncompagno da Signa, Rhetorica antiqua 1.19.3, cited in Joseph Dyer, “The Voice in the Middle Ages,” in The Cambridge Companion to Singing, ed. John Potter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 172–73, and 257n36. Boncompagno, Rhetorica antiqua 1.26.3, cited in Carol Lansing, Passion and Order: Restraint of Grief in the Medieval Italian Commune (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), 63–64. 7 Barbara Garofani, “Salimbene sonoro,” Nuova Rivista Storica 82 (1988): 85–104. 8 Dante Alighieri, De vulgari eloquentia 1.10. 9 Ibid., 1.4. 10 Erich Auerbach, Dante, Poet of the Secular World, trans. Ralph Manheim (1929; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 26.

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Concurrent developments in urban centers are pertinent too—the growth of cities and attendant pursuits of state power and public order. City-state governments employed growing numbers of trumpeters and other musicians for communication and glory.11 At the same time, law makers in many cities, including Perugia, sought to quiet publicly disruptive weddings and outbursts of grief.12 Some forms of speech were banned, such as blasphemy and injurious words.13 Perugia’s government outlawed certain political songs in 1269, a law it proclaimed monthly.14 Alongside city statutes, rhetoric instruction put importance on disciplined verbal communication for the sake of societal cohesion.15 Part of that discipline was the moderation of one’s speaking, a value similar to what Giovanni da San Gimignano espoused for the sake of sacred speech being heard effectively but one likely absorbed from the ancient stoic philosophy that informed how intellectuals in late medieval Italy thought about civil life.16 Vocal behavior was also addressed through didactic literature, which offered voice-tempering codes of conduct, from advice on how women should respond when men address them to guidelines for speaking and silence at the dinner table.17 Giordano da Pisa, a Dominican preacher in early fourteenthcentury Florence, talked about Christ and the Virgin Mary as models of virtuous taciturnity.18 11 Frank A. D’Accone, The Civic Muse: Music and Musicians in Siena during the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Stephen J. Milner, “ ‘Fanno bandire, notificare, et expressamente comandare’: Town Criers and the Information Economy of Renaissance Florence,” I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 16, no. 1/2 (Fall 2013): 107–51. 12 Catherine Kovesi Killerby, Sumptuary Law in Italy, 1200–1500 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002); Lansing, Passion and Order. 13 In the case of Pisa, for instance, see I brevi del comune e del popolo di Pisa dell’anno 1287, ed. Antonella Ghignoli (Rome: Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo, 1998), 326–27, 333. For further discussion, see Philip Jones, The Italian City-State: From Commune to Signoria (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 375, 378, 402–3, 512, 516, 574, 608. 14 Jones, Italian City-State, 402. See also William Heywood, A History of Perugia, ed. R. Langton Douglas (London: Methuen and Co., 1910), 78. 15 J. K. Hyde, Society and Politics in Medieval Italy: The Evolution of the Civil Life, 1000– 1350 (1973; repr., London: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1983), 83; Lauro Martines, Power and Imagination: City-States in Renaissance Italy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 116. 16 The stoic influence is a major point in Lansing’s Passion and Order. 17 Daniela Romagnoli, “Cortesia nella città: Un modello complesso. Note sull’etica medievale delle buone maniere,” in La città e la corte: Buone e cattive maniere tra Medioevo ed Eta Moderna, ed. Daniela Romagnoli (Milan: Guerini, 1991), 55–62; Laura Jacobus, Giotto and the Arena Chapel: Art, Architecture and Experience (London: Harvey Miller Publishers, 2008), 203–7. 18 Giordano da Pisa, Avventuale fiorentino 1304, ed. Silvia Serventi (Bologna: Società Editrice Il Mulino, 2006), 396–99, 408, 480–83.

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Sensitivities to sound are manifest too in specialized vocabularies of disparate texts and disciplines. Discernment of vocal qualities such as alta (high) and mollis (soft) and dozens of others was taught by rhetorical manuals and physiognomy tracts.19 Verbal portrayals of holy persons made the voice a telling personal trait. In his hagiography of Francis of Assisi, Thomas of Celano (d. around 1260) conveyed the saint’s exemplarity in part by noting that his voice was “vehemens, dulcis, clara atque sonora” (strong, sweet, clear, and sonorous).20 We have already noted the importance Giovanni da San Gimignano’s Summa de exemplis attaches to moderation and agreeable modulation in clergymen’s voices. A late thirteenth-century liturgical manual is more specific in its prescription of specific qualities of voice in the enunciation of sacred speech. The Rationale divinorum officiorum, by Guillaume Durand, bishop of Mende (d. 1296), holds that cantors should sing in harmonious voices, resounding with smooth modulation, to excite listening souls to devotion toward God.21 Lectors should read so strongly and distinctly that their voices filled the ears of everyone, even those who stood further back.22 Readers’ voices needed to be higher or lower at times to underscore the hierarchical rank of the text (Gospels above Epistles, for example), to emphasize aspects of a biblical event being ritually commemorated, or to recall the low spiritual status of the audience.23 During a certain benediction, prior to reading, the clerical reader was to address the listener directly in an “imperfect” and “halting” voice because the latter was “an imperfect being, namely, man.”24 Aside from official and ritual perceptions of voices such as those just mentioned, aural sensitivities were also contingent upon individuals’ informal experiences, interests, and situations. For the preacher Giordano da Pisa 19 In rhetoric, Bono Giamboni (d. around 1292) named more than twenty vocal qualities, including agra, allegra, alta, bassa, bassetta, benigna, consolata, ferma, grande, mezolana, molle, noioso, piana, sottile, tremante, and trista. See Bono Giamboni, Fiore di rettorica, ed. Giambattista Speroni (Pavia: Tipografia Commerciale Pavese, 1994). Ancient Roman manuals circulating in medieval Italy, Cicero’s De oratore and Rhetorica ad Herennium (the latter is the basis for Giamboni’s Fiore), contain even more such terms. In physiognomy, the richest source of vocal terminology is the anonymously written Liber de physiognomia, dating to the fourth century C.E. and available in late medieval Italy. See Richard Foerster, Scriptores physiognomici graeci et latini (Leipzig, 1893), 2:3–145. Pietro d’Abano’s Liber compilationis phisonomie (1295) abounds in words for vocal traits as well. 20 Thomas of Celano, Vita prima S. Francisci Assisiensis et eiusdem legenda ad usum chori (Florence: Ad Claras Aquas [Quaracchi], 1926), 91. 21 Guillaume Durand, Rationale divinorum officiorum 2.2. 22 Ibid., 2.5.1. 23 Ibid., 4.16.11. 24 Ibid., 5.2.44: “Rursus, ideo in principio imperfecto et syncopato vocabulo pronunciat, quia tunc ad imperfectum, videlicet ad hominem sermonem dirigit.”

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(d. 1311), sounds of Florentine speech were something to study and emulate in an effort to make himself better heard by lay audiences.25 The acuteness of Dante’s ear may have been sharpened by wanderings during his early years of political exile from Florence (early 1300s), as the historian Kenneth Hyde once speculated.26 Salimbene himself had moved around Italy and France for decades before writing his voice-rich chronicle.27 Human mobility must have exposed inhabitants of Italian cities to speech dissimilar to their own. Some class-conscious writers distanced themselves from “rustic” speech or “crude” pronunciations of the countryside.28 But a broader array of endeavors and identities is in question: the internal and long-distance travel related to banking and commerce (northern Europe, northern Africa, eastern Mediterranean, Asia); trans-European pilgrimage to Rome; movements of students and teachers to and from large towns with recently founded universities (Arezzo, Bologna, Naples, Padua, Piacenza, Reggio, Rome, Salerno, Siena, Vercelli, Vicenza); and arrivals and passages of professional soldiers (native speakers of Catalan, French, German, Provençal, Spanish) in the employ of communes, kings, and popes.29 In the domestic sphere, further diversity in speech came 25 Carlo Delcorno, “Il ‘parlato’ dei predicatori,” in “Quasi quidam cantus”: Studi sulla predicazione medievale, ed. Giovanni Baffetti, Giorgio Forni, Silvia Serventi, Oriana Visani (Florence: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 2009), 43–84. Delcorno has argued elsewhere that preaching in the vernacular was a kind of defense against beliefs condemned as heretical and preached in the vernacular by preachers not authorized by the Church. Carlo Delcorno, Giordano da Pisa e l’antica predicazione volgare (Florence: Olschki, 1975), 38n26. 26 J. K. Hyde, “Some Uses of Literacy in Venice and Florence in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries,” in Literacy and Its Uses: Studies on Late Medieval Italy, ed. Daniel Waley (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 114. 27 For a chronology that includes his movements, see Edward Peters, “ ‘Un livre de bonne foy’: The Chronicle of Salimbene and Its Translator,” in G. G. Coulton, From St. Francis to Dante: Translations from the Chronicle of the Franciscan Salimbene (1221–1288), 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972), vii–xxxiv. 28 Salimbene and Dante were among them. Hyde, “Some Uses of Literacy,” 110; Garofani, “Salimbene sonoro,” 92. 29 Much of this circulation is discernable in Jones, Italian City-State. See also Helen Wieruszowski, “Arezzo as a Center of Learning and Letters in the Thirteenth Century,” Traditio 9 (1953), 330–34, 337, 342, 345, 374–75; D. P. Waley, “Papal Armies in the Thirteenth Century,” The English Historical Review 72, no. 282 (Jan., 1957), 15–20; Hyde, Society and Politics, 183–85; Waley, Italian City-Republics, 98–99; Paolo Malanima, “Pisa and the Trade Routes to the East in the Late Middle Ages,” The Journal of European Economic History 16 (1987): 335–56; Forestieri e stranieri nelle città basso-medievali, Atti del Seminario Internazionale di Studio, Bagno a Ripoli (Florence), 4–8 June 1984 (Florence: Libreria Salimbeni, 1988); Debra J. Birch, Pilgrimage to Rome in the Middle Ages: Continuity and Change (Woodridge: Boydell Press, 2000); Pisa crocevia di uomini, lingue e culture: L’età

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with enslaved persons whom merchants had taken from eastern Europe and central Asia and sold to Italian households.30 Others traversing the peninsula included papal and political representatives, ambassadors, colonizers, missionaries, and entertainers.31 Artists were among the many itinerants of the time, and works of art speak to that mobility in their adaptations of styles developed in northern Europe, southern Italy, and Byzantium as well as in the Arabic-like forms and pseudo-Mongolian script that appear in pictured textiles.32 A team of craftsmen making a new cathedral in Orvieto during the 1290s must have sounded geographically plurivocal, including as it did people from France and England, even someone possibly from Poland, along with workers and masters from Arezzo, Camerino, Foligno, Parma, Pisa, and Viterbo.33 Perugia’s Fontana Maggiore itself was a proudly cosmopolitan production that had brought in sculptors from Pisa and an engineer from Venice. Each of them is honored by rhyming Latin phrases in the fountain’s long inscription, which names their hometowns.34 medievale, Atti del convegno, Pisa, 25–27 October 2007, ed. Lucia Battaglia Ricci and Roberta Cella (Rome: Aracne, 2009). 30 Iris Origo, “The Domestic Enemy: The Eastern Slaves in Tuscany in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,” Speculum 30, no. 3 (July, 1955): 321–66 (esp. 338–39). See also Sally McKee, “Domestic Slavery in Renaissance Italy,” Slavery and Abolition 29, no. 3 (Sept., 2008), 308–9. 31 See for instance Julian Gardner, “The French Connection: Thoughts about French Patrons and Italian Art, c. 1250–1300,” in Art and Politics in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Italy, 1250–1500, ed. Charles M. Rosenberg (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 81, 82, 87, 91, 94; Anne Derbes and Amy Neff, “Italy, the Mendicant Orders, and the Byzantine Sphere,” in Byzantium: Faith and Power (1261–1557), ed. Helen C. Evans (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 449, 450, 452, 454. 32 Alexander Nagel, “Twenty-Five Notes on Pseudoscript in Italian Art,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, no. 59/60 (Spring/Autumn 2011), 229–30. For artists’ movements, see R. Tarr, “Journeys of Major Italian Artists between c. 1250 and c. 1400,” in Atlas of Medieval Europe, ed. Angus Mackay and David Ditchburn (London: Routledge, 1997), 238; Brendan Cassidy, “Artists and Diplomacy in Late Medieval Tuscany: The Case of Giotto, Simone Martini, Andrea Pisano, and Others,” Gesta 51, no. 2 (2012): 91–110. 33 Lucio Riccetti, Opera piazza cantiere: Quattro saggi sul duomo di Orvieto (Foligno: Dedicit, 2007), 67–68. 34 “NOMINA SCULPTOR(UM) FO(N)TIS SU(N)T ISTA BONOR(UM) | [… … …] AT(US) NICOLA(US) AD O [… … …] RAT(US) | EST FLOS SCULPTOR(UM) GRATISSIM(US) ISQ(UE) P(RO)BOR(UM) CUI SI N(ON) DA(M)PNES NOM(EN) DIC E(SS)E IOH(ANN)ES | EST GENITO(R) PRIM(US) GENIT(US) CARISSIM(US) IMUS | NATU PISANI SI(N)T MULTO TE(M)PORE SANI | INGENIO CLAR(UM) DUCTORE SCIM(US) AQ(UA)R(UM) | Q(UI) BONE(N)SINGNA UULGAT(UR) M(EN)TE BENI(N)GNA |H(IC) OP(US) EXEGIT S(IC) DUCTILE QUODQ(UE) P(ER)EGIT | [U]ENETII(S) NAT(US) P(ER)USINIS H(IC) P(ER)IMATUS.” Langeli and Marchioli, “Le scritte incise,” 182–83.

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So, ears’ sensitivities in this period had to do with interconnected conditions above the level of the individual. We have just alluded to the rise of the cities, commercial and financial activities, civil and regional conflicts, social attitudes, institutional codes, and geographic mobility. The urban environment, with its surging population, deserves a further word. Its “narrow streets, lying between high stone constructs, amplified noises and smells, quarrels and conversations,” as the historian Lauro Martines writes. The tightness of Italian cities around 1300 was more than physical: “Gossip and rumor rippled back and forth across the warp and woof of close family ties, inherited family relationships and animosities, numerous street acquaintances, and peripheral contacts that were endlessly being renewed.”35 It was in such a world that Italy’s economic prosperity gave rise to a middle class (the popolo) and an upper bourgeoisie (popolo grasso), the latter emulating courtly values of a displaced nobility in speaking ‘properly’ and restraining the voice. It was in such a world too that members of the ascendent classes gained a say in public life. Training in rhetoric became indispensable for them, not only to communicate effectively but also to alleviate, through eloquence, anxieties about strife and disorder. Perugia’s great fountain itself, by means of an inscription composed by rhetoricians, addressed passers-by in the aspirational tone of bourgeois civility while the “murmuring” sound of its falling water (as one of its inscriptions refers to it) announced the availability of a long-sought public good made possible by hydraulic engineering and communal coordination.36 More broadly, it was in such a world that a “new speech” emerged. The historians Jacques Le Goff and Jean-Claude Schmitt coined this term to point out that the laity in thirteenth-century Western Europe began to speak in ways that circumvented or cut against the traditional hierarchy of the Church, which recognized only the word of God and its exclusive possession by ordained clergy.37 Among the manifestations of this shift toward relative horizontality in vocal communication were the rise of preaching, university lectures, professional speakers, and vernacular or everyday tongues that had not enjoyed the cultural respect long commanded by Latin.38 Pulpits and public squares were

35 Martines, Power and Imagination, 74–75. 36 The lower inscription of the second basin begins: “ASPICE Q(UI) TRANSIS IOCU(N) DO MU(R)MU(R)E FONTES” (Behold, passer-by, the waters with their delightful murmur.). Langeli and Marchioli, “Le scritte incise,” 181. 37 Jacques Le Goff and Jean-Claude Schmitt, “Au XIIIe siècle: Une parole nouvelle,” in Histoire vécue du peuple chrétien, ed. Jean Delumeau (Toulouse: Éditions Privat, 1979), 1:257–79. 38 Ibid., 1:261–67.

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instruments of the new speech, though it was not limited to those sites.39 The voices of women, children, peasants, and laborers could now be heard, as Salimbene’s Cronica attests.40 Then, in the later thirteenth century, the new speech met with a “crisis of speech,” a “repression” of speech, a “new authoritarian speech,” Le Goff and Schmitt argue. In response to voices that disturbed religious and civic authorities, such as lay preaching and women speaking, new controls were imposed from above, and official speech retired to the enclosed institutional spaces of churches and civic palaces, where it solidified in books and writing.41 Did the sense of hearing follow a similar trajectory? Did it too contribute to the restraint and exclusion of voices after their efflorescence? Laws made to quiet public lament in Italian cities seem to affirm a repressive function for listening. Their enforcement depended on auditory detection, after all. Yet the efficacy of such legislation is doubtful, scholarship suggests, so repression is less clear.42 There is also reason to ask whether listening itself could be entirely controlled, even at the heart of civic government, where notions of the city, of human company, and of the establishment of justice presupposed speech and audience.43 We cannot know whether civic leaders in crowded assembly halls (or, as they were at times known, parlatorio, arengo, arengaria—referencing public speech etymologically) could actually hear every spoken word upon which their decisions might turn. Even if every word were perfectly audible, listeners’ attitudes in listening were not taken for granted. A speaker had to prepare his audience to hear as he wanted to be heard, anticipating that listeners might not be receptive if the topic held little interest for them, or if the subject matter initially seemed too obscure, insignificant, or unworthy, or if they were bothered or troubled by what a previous speaker had said. Techniques enabling orators subtly to make the listener want to hear and know what they were going to say were taught by manuals such as the Livres dou tresor, a guide to good speaking in government 39 40 41

Ibid., 1:267–68. Ibid., 1:272–75. Ibid., 1:275–77. As for speech beyond those areas, preachers of the time urged the laity to monitor themselves and did so through the moralizing discourse of “sins of the tongue,” which targeted and assigned spiritual consequences to many kinds of talk. See Carla Casagrande and Silvana Vecchio, I peccati della lingua: Disciplina ed etica della parola nella cultura medievale (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1987). 42 Lansing, Passion and Order, 2, 16, 57, 61–62, points out that communal statutes aiming to curb public displays of grief did not always work. Milner, “Fanno bandire,” 133–34, draws insight from town criers in Florence into the limits of government power over the city’s inhabitants. 43 Brunetto Latini, Li livres dou tresor 3.1.2.

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written by Brunetto Latini a little over a decade before Nicola Pisano carved Rectorica on Perugia’s fountain (Fig. 10).44 Model speeches were available for emulation and adaptation. In a pocket-size book containing numerous examples, from fourteenth-century Tuscany, we read how an official might implore a city council directly to “open the ears of your head and those of your heart so that you might understand and advise and take my solution as your own.”45 No verbal tactic guaranteed audience members’ receptivity, of course. Listeners were supposed to resist the lure of eloquence when it led them to disregard wisdom and reason, for instance.46 The legendary consequences of Eve’s persuasion by the serpent taught that lesson too. Civic listening called for guidance to ensure the moral soundness of its receptivity. Although receptive listening could be an instrument of social control during the institutional reaction to the new speech highlighted by Le Goff and Schmitt, more productive for us will be to think of it as an object of social control, essential for shaping and directing thoughts, feelings, and actions toward larger aims. Its absence exposed gaps and insecurities of authority in that vibrantly and at times distressingly vocal age. When Salimbene referred to Eve, he did so to scold women for “dishonorably” speaking too much in church.47 What occasioned his invocation of the Genesis story, in other words, was a disruption of listening (theirs as well as his own) in the house of God, that fortress of hierarchical speech par excellence. Saint Benedict’s urging of Brother Maurus to listen, as displayed in the sculptural decoration of the fountain in Perugia, intimates a lapse of aural discipline even in a devoutly kneeling monk (Fig. 8). Auditory inattention could also be imagined in sweeping programmatic terms that speak eloquently to tensions between sensitivity to sounds in the world and spiritual hearing. In the next section, we examine literature and sermons as facets of a larger system of making listening a culturally meaningful practice, a system to which narrative art would contribute.

44 Ibid., 3.17, 3.20, 3.21, 3.23, 3.25–28. 45 Formulario d’allocuzioni, Vault Ms. 27.1, Newberry Library, Chicago, (no folio number): “PErcio che auoi tocta quello chio pensato di dire intrauoi conuiensi cheuoi appriate li uostri orecchi del capo [et] quelli del cuore Siche uoi possiate intendere [et] consilliare [et] prendere quello partito chessia inmellio p[er]uoi.” 46 See Shoaf, “Painted for the Ear,” 159–74. 47 Salimbene de Adam, Cronica Fratris Salimbene de Adam Ordinis Minorum, ed. Oswaldus Holder-Egger (Hannover: Hahn, 1963), 79–82.

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Lost Hearing

Among late medieval works that ascribed significance to acts of auditory perception, Dante’s Comedy comes across as especially wide-ranging and enthrallingly granular. Obstructed hearing is a recurrent theme. One passage has the spiritually-lost pilgrim covering his ears with his hands to shut out unbearable cries near the bottom of Hell.48 In Purgatory, he speaks of the imagination making us oblivious to outward things “though a thousand trumpets [sound] around us.”49 Other kinds of interference present themselves. He dreams of being spellbound by a siren’s song and failing to hear his guide calling.50 He has trouble hearing what a spirit is saying because it recedes from him.51 He stops listening to another guide, Matelda, when he beholds his beloved Beatrice.52 Disrupted listening in the poem is more than a matter of isolated incidents; it defines the pilgrim’s condition as a human. Upon his arrival in Eden, where intense light and a “sweet melody” fill the air, Dante is struck by the realization that he has been denied those pleasures his whole life on account of Eve’s disobedience. Later, in his ascent toward God, he hears songs so unusual for him that he cannot recall them to the reader.53 Further up, the music of Paradise goes quiet, and he learns that his mortal hearing (“l’udir mortal”) is the reason.54 The sonorous human condition turns out to be a state of auditory deprivation owing to humanity’s distance from the divine, to limits of the body’s senses, and to a perceiver’s own behavior. For Dante, that conduct includes listening. The poem’s protagonist has a surpassingly sensitive ear. We read of him hearing in that other world—and remembering hearing in this world—all manner of things before reaching the heavenly realm: the rustle of leafy branches; the growing din of a cascading river as he approaches it; thunderclaps, and thunder rolling away; the loud groan of a massive metal gate opening and closing; a dog’s snarl; the sounding of a drum; a clock’s chime; and so many voices. He refers to the laments of women in labor, to infants’ cries, to “that speech which first delights fathers and mothers,” to the reassuring tone of a maternal voice.55 He notices refined styles of speaking (“parlare onesto, parlare ornato”). Local dialects catch his ear. 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

Dante, Inferno 29.43–45. Dante, Purgatorio 17.13–16. Ibid., 19.19–36. Ibid., 18.127–29. Ibid., 32.91–93. Dante, Paradiso 20.13–15. Ibid., 21.58–63. Ibid., 15.121–23.

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Souls with whom he converses speak with varying degrees of sharpness, gentleness, sweetness, speed, volume, force, and difficulty. The physical production of speech is labored and audibly hampered at times. Many of the damned struggle to enunciate, hindered by infernal obstacles.56 Wailing, shrieks, laments, and other disturbing sounds pervade and punctuate his passage through Hell. Sighs occur throughout the journey, some of them deep, others devout, pitying, or bitter. Early in Hell, the sad sighs of masses of unbaptized men, women, and children make “the eternal air tremble.”57 There are supernatural sounds: angel wings cleaving air, tombs seeming to sigh and speak, and various unbodied voices. Everything he hears seems to participate in the wondrous to some degree. Even mundane noises have extraordinary gravity. When he hears tell that Giotto “now holds the cry,” having become more famous than the painter Cimabue, the clamor is the sound also of the fleeting glory that is sinful for mortal to seek.58 This partial inventory of sounds in the Comedy suffices to illustrate the richness of listening that, for all its particularities, ultimately hinders awareness of something important missing: higher sounds. The pilgrim’s listening turns out to be a kind of spiritual deafness. Yet it also moves him gradually upward, toward deliverance. Sound aids him in sensing his way through dark and disorienting circumstances.59 The voices of his guides motivate and direct him. Virgil’s counsels draw him up the mountain “which makes you straight whom the world made crooked.”60 He is edified in listening. Through it he learns about sin, virtue, righteousness, and divine justice. It does lead him astray on occasion. In Hell, for instance, he lingers to listen to a quarrel between falsifiers.61 En route to Purgatory from Hell, he is caught by the sound of souls whispering in astonishment at his shadow-casting body.62 Virgil must correct him both times. Yet when the pilgrim reaches Purgatory’s exit, shortly before entering Eden, he proves his completion of spiritual rehabilitation by walking through purifying flames. It is a kind of spiritual hearing test. To overcome his paralyzing fear of the fire and to endure the sensation of burning alive, he heeds

56 Joan Ferrante, “The Relation of Speech to Sin in the Inferno,” Dante Studies 87 (1969): 33–46. 57 Dante, Inferno 4.27. 58 Dante, Purgatorio 11.95–96. 59 Ibid., 7.28–30, 12.109–14. 60 Ibid., 23.124–26. 61 Dante, Inferno 30.106–135. 62 Dante, Purgatorio 5.1–18.

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Virgil’s verbal encouragement and remains “ever attentive” to a voice singing on the other side of the flames.63 As ideas, spiritual deafness and its reversibility through listening were a premise of the preaching of God’s word. I want to linger on this thought before coming to the question of pictorial art, because doing so will help us see how art’s auditory work both fit a culture of aural edification and cannot be entirely explained by cultural factors. The Comedy itself has something to say about preaching. Beatrice, Dante’s guide in Heaven, inveighs against preachers in Florence for distorting or straying from Scripture and for shouting lies to entertain audiences.64 She likens their listeners to “poor sheep” who know nothing and return from the pasture “fed with wind.”65 That ignorance does not excuse them, she warns, seeming to justify Dante’s need for unconventional spiritual mentoring. Whether and how much Florentine preachers were actually puffed up by vainglory, we cannot know. There may have been other reasons for pulpit showmanship, such as rivalry among churches for lay attendance or, as evidenced by Giordano da Pisa’s effort to sound like his audiences, difficulty in connecting with listeners. But, as Beatrice suggests, audiences should be able to recognize hot air for what it was. “Blessed are those who hear the word of God and obey it,” Christ told his disciples (Luke 11.28, NSRV). We find this declaration quoted in Giovanni da San Gimignano’s instruction on inner hearing and perception of God’s word in the Summa de exemplis, compiled between 1298 and 1314, around the time Dante began writing the Comedy. Giovanni too worried that audiences would be empty after sermons, having forgotten what they heard or neglecting to put God’s word to use in their lives.66 The problem he saw was distraction: the obscuring of the spiritual sense of words by the sounds of those words, by a preacher’s manner of speaking, by stories he told, by pleasures of the ears’ delights, or by unrelated thoughts. When the soul is attentive to one thing, Giovanni observed, it does not attend well to another. Church bells go unheard when the mind is elsewhere.67 63 64 65 66

Ibid., 27.10–57. Dante, Paradiso 29.82–124. Ibid., 29.106–8. Joannes a S. Geminiano, Summa de exemplis 6.11: “Lucae: ‘Beati, qui audiunt verbum Dei, & custodiu[n]t illud’…. Multi vocem praedicationis audiunt, sed post uocem vacui recedunt. Quorum si uenter comedit, viscera non replentur. Quia, & si mente intellectum sacri verbi recipiunt, obliuiscendo, & non seruando, quae audierunt, hoc in cordis visceribus non reponunt.” 67 Ibid.: “Cum anima intenta est circa vnum, non bene intendit ad aliud. Vnde homo s[a]epe homo intendens aliis, campana[m] pulsantem non audit. Sic etiam verba Dei homo interiori auditu no[n] percipit, nisi circa ea intentionem apponat. Vnde du[m] est

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All of this presupposes that minds should be intent on hearing the word of God and that they should be able to receive it internally, to soul-altering effect. This expectation ought to have been familiar to every worshiper. They had undergone religious initiation in which listening had reformative roles. In catechesis, the instruction in the faith required for becoming Christian, belief was instilled through effective hearing of the Apostles’ Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, Scriptural readings, and sermons.68 Listening to teaching and preaching was supposed to impress God’s words onto the catechumen’s mind and will. Baptism was a decisive moment in this spiritually developmental process. It purged catechumens of sin, made them one of the faithful, and gave them grace from the Holy Spirit. That grace would empower them to understand and be shaped by mysteries of faith they had learned about in the formal instruction of catechism but were still unable to grasp. From then on, ideally, sermons and Scriptural readings they heard would have spiritually consequential resonance. Their outer hearing would become inner hearing.69 One physical aspect of the baptismal rite accentuated this crucial shift in auditory perception: a priest inserting his saliva-moistened finger into the ear of each catechumen while uttering the Aramaic word, “Ephpheta!” (Be opened!).70 The intrusive rite, a reenactment of Christ’s healing of a deaf man (Mark 7.31–7), was intended to ready the proto-faithfull to hear God’s word preached, to receive gifts of the Holy Spirit, divine wisdom, and sacred in praedicatione, non debet cogitare de aliis, neque debet intendere ad sonu[m] verborum tantum, vel ad ornatum, sed magis ad spiritualem sensum, cuius contrarium multi faciunt. Vnde Sene[ca][Ep. 108]: ‘Quidam veniunt ad audiant, & non addiscant [sic]. Sicut in theatris uoluptatis causa ad delectandas aures oratione, vel voce, uel fabulis ducu[n]tur’.” 68 I borrow the term and the overview of catechesis from Harrison, Art of Listening, 87–91, who explains that catechumens’ “effective hearing” lay “not so much in the acquisition of knowledge as in a right orientation of the will; in opening the ‘ears of the heart’; in a willingness to receive what is heard and to allow it to impress itself upon the mind in such a way that it forms or transforms it—a process which could describe equally well how we come to believe” (p. 90). The word “catechumen,” Harrison points out, was used by early church writers to refer to one who hears (p. 95) and can be understood as “one in whom the faith was made to resonate in their reception of it through their ears” (p. 87). 69 Harrison, Art of Listening, 94. 70 For a sense of the ritual process in which the spiritual ear-opening took place, in medieval Italian contexts, see Augustine Thompson, Cities of God: The Religion of the Italian Communes, 1125–1325 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), 314–16; Amy R. Bloch, “The Two Fonts of the Florentine Baptistery and the Evolution of the Baptismal Rite in Florence, ca. 1200–1500,” in The Visual Culture of Baptism in the Middle Ages: Essays on Medieval Fonts, Settings, and Beliefs, ed. Harriet M. Sonne de Torrens and Miguel A. Torrens (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), 81.

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doctrine while at the same time shielding them from “vain and useless tales.”71 The ephpheta ritual took place outside church or baptistery doors prior to catechumens being admitted within for the first time. At the beginning of a person’s Christian life, then, there was thus a charged parallel between entering a church and moving from bodily hearing to spiritual hearing. Correspondingly, church thresholds could have aural associations. Durand, the liturgist, likened the ear hearing preaching to a church door being knocked on by a bishop’s staff in ritual church dedications, and spoke of ears as “doors through which we introduce the word of sacred preaching to listeners’ hearts.”72 Federico Visconti (d. 1277), an archbishop in Pisa (and a key voice for us in chapter four), put it a little differently: “Man’s door is his ear,” and the Lord “knocks on that door when the word of God is preached by a prelate or preacher.”73 Baptism did not alter hearing permanently. Like a church door, the ears of Christian hearts could shut. “Many things close the ears of the heart [to God],” Giovanni’s text warns, visualizing the idea by giving the example of an asp plugging its ear so as not to hear an enchanter’s voice.74 The image implies the perceiver’s agency in spiritual imperception. Elsewhere, the Summa de 71 Durand, Rationale 6.83.10: “De baptismo … Secundum est aurium et narium cum sputo linitio, quod fit primo exemplo Christi, qui lutum cum sputo faciens, mutum et surdum sanavit, et oculos caeci nati linivit, et expuens linguam ejus tetigit, et digitos in ejus auribus imponens dixit: ‘Epheta’, quod est aperire…. [U]t aperiantur ei aures ad audiendum mandata Dei; ut aperiantur ei sensus in intime corde, ad respondendum sacerdoti de articulis fidei interroganti. Digiti ergo qui in aures mittuntur, sunt verba, sive dona Spiritus sancti. Tertio, per hoc quod aures saliva tanguntur, significatur, et petitur quod doctrina, quae de ore Altissimi fluxit, per aures ejus intret, eique sua redoleat; saliva nempe Christi, idest dulcedo verborum ex ore ejus defluentium, et ipsa Christi divnitas non sanat…. Quinto, ad notandum quod quamdiu sputum naribus trahet, in fide praecepta manere debet, et ut per aures verbis evangelicis pateant, et vanas, et inutiles fabulas a se repellant.” 72 Ibid., 1.6.14: “Virga igitur januas percutere est aures audientium praedicationis voce pulsare. Aures enim portae sunt, per quas ad corda audientium sanctae praedicationis verba introducimus.” 73 Federico Visconti, Les sermons de la visite pastorale de Federico Visconti archevêque de Pise (1253–1277), ed. Nicole Bériou and Isabelle le Masne de Chermont (Rome: École Française de Rome, 2001), 582 (Sermon 32, unknown year): “Hostium hominis est auris eius. Tunc Dominus ad istud hostium pulsat quando per prelatum sive predicatorem verbum Dei predicatur.” 74 Joannes a S. Geminiano, Summa de exemplis 10.17: “Item cor aperiendu[m] est Deo, sicut schola aperietur magistro ad audiendum. Iob: Adaperit aures virorum, & erudiens eos instruit disciplina. Sed multi claudunt ei aures cordis, vt non audia[n]t more aspidis surdae, & obturantis aures suas, ne audiat vocem incantantis.” The biblical source is Psalm 58.4–5 (NSRV): “[The wicked] have venom like the venom of a serpent, like the deaf adder that stops its ear, so that it does not hear the voice of charmers or of the cunning enchanter.”

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exemplis likens the same “deaf asp” to people who, due to sinning in pride, do not hear God’s voice and who despise obeying his command.75 Alternatively, Christian ears could be open to the wrong things, reverting to being a gateway to sin through carnality, malevolence, vainglory, credulity, and other vices.76 Theologians also pointed to far larger causes of spiritual deafness. Gregory the Great said the voice of God was deliberately difficult to hear, “almost a gentle breath” (quasi aurae lenis), nearly hidden from mortal ears to spare them its overwhelming greatness.77 The imputed difficulty of hearing God’s voice is a crucial element of the context we are assembling for appreciating art’s auditory work, and we need to tease it apart from clerical voices sounding God’s word in church spaces. The basic idea was that a rapprochement in divine-human relations had come about through Christ, the word of God “become flesh” and living among humans (John 1.14). As the embodiment of God’s word, Christ declared that he channeled God’s speech authentically with his own audible voice, and insisted that his disciples did the same with their own audible voices—a power later claimed by medieval clergy.78 Yet even at the height of spiritual contemplation the most a devout Christian could hear of God’s own voice was a “slight hissing air” (sibilus aurae tenuis), in Gregory’s phrase.79 The divine voice, entering 75 Ibid., 5.93: “Item peccatum assimilatur aspidi. Nam aspis aurem obturat, vt vocem hominis incantantis non audiat nec ei obediat: & hoc pertinet ad peccatum superbiae, q[ui]a superbus vocem Dei non audit, & eius mandatis obedire contemnit. Psal. Sicut aspidis surdae, & obturantis aures suas, quae non exaudiet voces incantantium.” 76 Carla Casagrande, “Sistema dei sensi e classificazione dei peccati (secoli XII–XIII),” in “I cinque sensi/The Five Senses,” special issue, Micrologus 10 (2002), 39–40. 77 Gregory the Great, Moralia in Job 5.3 (Migne, PL 75.715b–c): “Vox ergo Dei quasi aurae lenis auditur, quia in hac adhuc vita positis contemplatoribus suis, nequaquam se Divinitas sicut est insinuat, sed lippientibus mentis nostrae oculis claritatem suam tenuiter demonstrat.” 78 John 7.16–18 (NSRV): [Christ speaking to Jews in a temple] “My teaching is not mine but his who sent me. Anyone who resolves to do the will of God will know whether the teaching is from God or whether I am speaking on my own. Those who speak on their own seek their own glory; but the one who seeks the glory of him who sent him is true, and there is nothing false in him”; Matt. 10.19–20 (NSRV): [Christ speaking to his disciples] “Do not worry about how you are to speak or what you are to say; for what you are to say will be given to you at that time; for it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you.” 79 Gregory the Great, Moralia in Job 5.3 (Migne, PL 75.716a): “Spiritus quippe ante Dominum evertit montes, et petras conterit; quia pavor, qui ex adventu ejus irruit, et altitudinem cordis nostri dejicit, et duritiam liquefacit. Sed spiritui commotionis et igni non inesse Dominus dicitur, esse vero in sibilo aurae tenuis non negatur; quia nimirum mens cum in contemplationis sublimitate suspenditur, quidquid perfecte conspicere praevalet, Deus non est: cum vero subtile aliquid conspicit, hoc est quod de incomprehensibili substantia

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and leaving a person without betraying its source or reason, “sounds silently in the ear of the heart,” yet becomes louder as it “deadens the ear of our heart to every outward sound.”80 Hearing it stirred love, obedience, and other inclinations demanded by worship—attitudes which, in turn, could boost spiritual listening, as we will see. Conversely, the world’s prosperity and outward desires caused ears of the heart to close. The deafening effect of desires traced back to Eve’s temptation. In the view of the theologian Bonaventure (d. 1274), the ancient serpent in Eden, in complicity with humans’ negligence and “corrupt nature,” deafened spiritual hearing and made all spiritual senses weaken and waste away.81 The Temptation brings our minds back to Nicola Pisano’s Genesis reliefs on Perugia’s fountain (Fig. 6). Viewers’ understanding of pictures of sacred history must have been informed by this larger narrative framework and the beliefs and assumptions underpinning it. Shortly we will come to a poetic view of this relationship in the Comedy. But while we are still in the realm of authoritative voices in church, we must acknowledge the role of clerical speech in restorations of lost spiritual hearing—practices the limits of which opened a need or opportunity for art to shape listening. One of these efforts was the control and deadening of worshipers’ external hearing, which they were thought to have difficulty managing on their own. According to Durand, clergy could prepare ears to hear God during liturgy by demanding worshipers’ humility, as when deacons were to tell them, “Lower your head before God.”82 From the perspective of theologians and preachers, spiritual hearing also needed divine assistance, as at baptism.83 “Unless the Holy Spirit fills listeners’ hearts, the body’s teaching voice sounds in vain to the body’s ears,” Giovanni wrote (citing aeternitatis audit. Quasi enim sibilum tenuis aurae percipimus, cum saporem incircumscriptae veritatis contemplatione subita subtiliter degustamus.” Gregory took the phrase “sibilus aurae tenuis” from 1 Kings 19.12, the story of Elijah meeting God at Horeb. 80 Ibid., 5.28 (Migne, PL 75.706b): “Cum igitur divina aspiratio sine strepitu mentem sublevat, verbum absonditum auditur, quia sermo Spiritus in aure cordis silenter sonat”; ibid., 27.22 (Migne, PL 76.423b): “Voce sua Deus mirabiliter tonat, quia occulta vi corda nostra incomprehensibiliter penetrat. Quae dum latentibus motibus premit in timore, et format in amore, quanto ardore sequendus sit aliquo modo silenter clamat, et fit cujusdam impulsionis nimietas in mente, cum nihil sonet in voce. Quae tanto apud nos valentius perstrepit, quanto et ab omni exteriori strepitu aurem nostri surdescere cordis facit.” See also George E. Demacopoulos, “Gregory the Great,” in Gavrilyuk and Coakley, Spiritual Senses, 71–85 (esp. 77–78, 81–82). 81 Bonaventure, De septem itineribus aeternitatis 6.2. 82 Durand, Rationale 2.9.11. 83 Bonaventure wrote that one’s spirit is deaf unless Christ rouses and opens the inner sense of hearing: “Nisi enim sensus auditus interior excitetur, et a Jesu aperiatur, spiritus noster surdus et mutus ad audiendum efficitur, ut de talibus dicatur illud Psalmi [113.6]: ‘Aures

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Gregory).84 Sermons issued this message directly. Preaching publicly in Pisa’s cathedral on the Feast of the Purification of the Virgin Mary, Visconti reminded listeners that they could not hear salvifically (“salubriter audire”) without “the grace of him, namely Jesus Christ, who had said, ‘Apart from me’, meaning without my grace, ‘you can do nothing’ [John 15.5], meaning preaching or hearing [sermons].”85 At times the archbishop explicitly directed listeners to pray for that grace before he continued with a sermon.86 A few points along those lines need mentioning. For one, spiritually effective listening demanded more than grace, Visconti told audiences. They needed also to be pure and silent.87 And they had to listen attentively (“diligenter”), devoutly (“devote”), usefully (“utiliter”), with the ear of the head and with the ear of the heart or mind.88 We can add another prerequisite: listeners’ mindfulness of the divine nature of sermons, an awareness which the archbishop cultivated. Beyond representing preaching as something enabled by grace, Visconti equated it with the voice of God. “The Holy Spirit speaks in the preacher,” he claimed in a sermon delivered in the cathedral on the feast of Pentecost, for example, adding that “since today is the feast of the Holy Spirit, it is fitting that we should speak of it; but it is not we who speak, but [the Holy Spirit] which speaks in us.”89 He addressed the Pisan public on this occasion. But the archbishop’s audiences also included clergymen, and he assumed they themselves needed reminding of the divine status of preaching. In one synodal sermon, he summoned clerical listeners to join him in asking God “to see fit to put His word into my mouth today.”90 That same year (1258), in another synodal sermon, Visconti used a musical analogy to explain how it is that the Holy Spirit speaks through human mouths: “The Lord uses man like a musical instrument which, if out of tune, utters a noisy and bad sounding or dissonant voice, but if tuned by the master, gives forth sonorously, sweetly, and harmoniously. It is thus with the preacher, who is tuned by the Holy Spirit. His voice is sweet in listeners’ ears.”91 Biblical citations were among the devices on which Visconti relied to coax open inner ears through outer hearing. Addressing the public in Pisa’s cathedral habent, et non audient’ Deum intus loquentem.” Bonaventure, De septem itineribus aeternitatis 3.3. 84 Joannes a S. Geminiano, Summa de exemplis, 227, noted also in chapter one. 85 Visconti, Les sermons, 663 (Sermon 22, year unknown). 86 Ibid., 564 (Sermon 29, year unknown). 87 Ibid., 852–54 (Sermon 66, addressed to clergy perhaps in 1269). 88 Ibid., 495 (Sermon 19, year unknown), 529 and 531 (Sermon 24, year unknown), 563 (Sermon 29, year unknown), 691 (Sermon 46, year unknown). 89 Ibid., 608 (Sermon 37, year unknown). The phrase echoes Matthew 10.19–20. 90 Ibid., 329 (Sermon 1, given in 1258). 91 Ibid., 348 (Sermon 2).

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on the feast day of The Annunciation, he urged listening “with the ear of the head and heart, as Matthew 13 [13.9] says: ‘Let anyone with ears’, meaning of the head, for external hearing, ‘listen!’, meaning inwardly with the ears of the heart.”92 Comparable gospel verses occur in a sermon the archbishop preached to clergy. God should be asked that the word of God should be attentively heard, which is noted here: ‘So that the word of the Lord may spread rapidly’ [2 Thess. 3.1]. Listeners must listen attentively, not obstructing that flow in two ways. The first is the tongue, which hinders when another speaks, as Ecclesiasticus 32 says: ‘Hear in silence, and for thy reverence grace will come to you’ [Sir. 32.9], meaning understanding. The second is the heart, thinking of other things at that moment.93 Visconti paused here to caution against letting one’s mind wander in the marketplace while a preacher’s voice is in the ear—a reference perhaps to the then-growing presence of commerce and goods in urban life.94 He then resumed, adding further Bible verses: And because of this, the Master of masters, the Lord Jesus Christ, said in Matthew 11 [11.15] and Luke 8 [8.8] and Mark 4 [4.9]: ‘Let anyone with ears’, meaning ears of the head, ‘listen!’, meaning with the ear of the heart, as in Job 13: ‘Listen carefully to my words, and let my declarations be in your ears’ [Job 13.17]. And it is philosophic doctrine that man, if he wants to conduct himself perfectly, should show himself whole and not divided in any action, as in Proverbs 2: ‘My son, that your ear may hear wisdom, incline your heart to know prudence’ [Prov. 2.1–2], and 22: ‘Incline your ear and hear words of wisdom, and apply your heart to my teaching’ [Prov. 22.17].95 92 93 94

Ibid., 563 (Sermon 29). Ibid., 852 (Sermon 66, given in 1269). Ibid., 852 (Sermon 66): “Nam ‘vox,’ scilicet predicatorum, ‘in choro’, scilicet audientium, ‘et mens’, scilicet auditorum, ‘in foro’ negotiantium, tunc audiens ‘male dividitur homo’.” Similar references to the marketplace as a spiritually deafening distraction occur in Sermons 29 (p. 563) and 46 (p. 691). Visconti appears to have adapted a rhyme, current in Paris, where he had studied, that portrayed university students as intolerant of sermons and long lectures, letting their minds wander to street life, food, and bed, while singing in choir: “Vox in choro, mens in foro / Vel in mensa vel in thoro.” See Charles Homer Haskins, “The University of Paris in the Sermons of the Thirteenth Century,” American Historical Review 10 (1905), 17. 95 Visconti, Les sermons, 852–53 (Sermon 66).

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With this amassing of scriptural phrases, the Lord appears to have been knocking insistently on the ears of Visconti’s clerical audience. Each sentence, separated from its biblical context, combines with the others to conjure the sense of a larger imperative, one unbound by time and place, something like the voice of God itself commanding listening. On another occasion, after using Scripture to persuade his audience to listen “with the ear of the head and heart,” Visconti exclaimed that he would stop preaching only when men stopped sinning.96 He urged them to attend sermons constantly.97 3

Great Listeners

Yet the heart’s ears could also be opened outside of sermons and liturgy. Dante’s Comedy offers an idea of how, in theory, narrative art might help. We now narrow our purview to a well-known passage in the tenth canto of Purgatorio where the narrator describes pictures ekphrastically, the ancient technique of bringing images rivetingly to life in words while also giving attention to their artifice and praiseworthiness.98 Shortly after Dante’s pilgrim enters Purgatory’s lowest terrace—the mountainous path by which sinners begin to restore their spiritual purity—he comes upon a white marble embankment in which three pictures are carved. The first depicts The Annunciation, the Virgin Mary being greeted by the angel Gabriel. It is followed by a scene of King David dancing among common people in the street before the Ark of the Covenant. In the third picture, Trajan, the Roman emperor, speaks from his horse with a poor widow who has lost a son. That the pilgrim can concentrate on anything at this point in his journey is surprising. He comes to the reliefs in a state of exhaustion and disorientation from a lengthy and arduous climb.99 Nevertheless, he finds them absorbing. Their material aspects catch his eye.100 Their extreme lifelikeness induces in him the sensation of witnessing first-hand events with which he is already familiar from his more pious past. He studies them silently and attentively, reminding us of an attitude that preachers tried to get their own audiences to adopt. Unlike the fleeting words of sermons, however, the reliefs have material permanence which allows the viewer to marvel at them, contemplate them at length, and think of already-learned stories. The pictures’ 96 Ibid., 782 (Sermon 58, given in 1264). 97 Ibid., 782 (Sermon 58). 98 Norman E. Land, The Viewer as Poet: The Renaissance Response to Art (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), xvi–xvii. 99 Dante, Purgatorio 10.1–21. 100 Ibid., 10.31, 10.52, 10.55, 10.72.

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manifold appeal, which includes their outshining the work of ancient master Polykleitos and of Nature herself, almost works against itself. Virgil has to nudge the pilgrim along: “Do not keep your mind on one part only.”101 Most arresting about the sculptures, the pilgrim finds, is their “visibile parlare” (visible speech).102 With regard to the relief of The Annunciation, he says, The angel who came to earth with the decree of peace, wept for since many a year, which opened Heaven from its long ban, before us there appeared so vividly graven in gentle mien that it seemed not a silent image: one would have sworn that he was saying, ‘Ave’ [Greetings], for there [Mary] was imaged who turned the key to open the supreme love, and these words were imprinted in her attitude: ‘Ecce ancilla Dei’ [Here I am, the servant of the Lord] as expressly as a figure is stamped in wax.103 The lifelikeness and composure of the angel and Mary cause the pilgrim to remember specific words from the event’s narration in Luke’s Gospel (Luke 1.28, 1.38). He hears their sound inwardly not as his own memories but as voices belonging to the figures before his eyes. The conflation of visibility with audibility intensifies in the narrator’s account of the next scene, in which choirs gathered near King David and the ark appear so convincingly to sing that the onlooker’s eyes and ears disagree on what is happening: There, carved in the same marble, were the cart and the oxen drawing the holy ark, … In front appeared people, and all the company, divided into seven choirs, made two of my senses say, the one ‘No’, the other, ‘Yes, they are singing’.104 A depiction of incense smoke leads the pilgrim’s nose similarly to contest the reality of what his eyes see.105 His looking at the relief simultaneously exposes sight’s fallibility and its capacity to lay claim to other sensory domains. In the narrator’s recollection of the third picture, an extended dialogue ensues. Dante imagines the widow imploring Trajan to avenge her son’s murder before leaving for battle. 101 Ibid., 10.46. Here and in what follows, I use Charles S. Singleton’s translation. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. Charles S. Singleton, 3 vols., Bollingen Series 80 (1970– 75; repr., Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). 102 Ibid., 10.94–96. 103 Ibid., 10.34–45. 104 Ibid., 10.55–60. The biblical basis of the David scene is 2 Samuel 6. 105 Ibid., 10.61–63.

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The poor woman seemed to say, ‘My lord, do me vengeance for my son who is slain, wherefore my heart is pierced’. And he seemed to answer her, ‘Wait now till I return’. And she, ‘My lord’, like one whose grief is urgent, ‘and if you do not return?’ And he, ‘He who shall be in my place will do it for you’. And she, ‘What shall another’s well-doing avail you, if you forget your own?’ He then, ‘Now take comfort, for I must discharge my duty before I go: justice requires it, and pity bids me stay’.106 The “visible speech” in these passages amazes the pilgrim for its verisimilitude. The marble figures seem to him truly to talk and sing, hallmarks of naturalistic art in what scholarship considers an age of vision. But Dante’s viewer is moved even more by “l’immagini di tante umilitadi” (the images of humilities so great):107 Mary submitting herself to God’s will; David, the “l’umile salmista” (the humble Psalmist), abasing himself publicly in honor of God; Emperor Trajan giving in to a lowly mother’s plea for justice. These figures participate in speech as respondents. Each one listens with an attitude of humility, yielding to the supreme principles of divine will, justice, and humility itself. To be clear, the verses in question do not discuss listening as such. It is implied by Mary’s pose, by David’s movement to music, by Trajan’s words. Mary’s case is particular. Her verbal reply to the angel’s greeting was, in the narrator’s words, “in atto impressa” (imprinted in her attitude) as expressly as a figure is stamped on wax. Looking at the Virgin’s physical appearance affects the pilgrim, inducing him to wonder and contemplate and imagine what she hears and says. This is the moment when Virgil prods him to move his eyes to other parts of the sculptural stories. At the same time, his study of Mary’s physical attitude imparts content: an idea of the humility that, to Dante’s mind, altered history and humans’ prospects beyond death. In talking about The Annunciation scene, he twice makes reference to the ancient closure of Heaven, the penalty for the first humans’ disobedience of God, when Eve aspired to be god-like and she and Adam ate of the forbidden fruit.108 Mary’s listening to the angel begins to reverse the disastrous consequences of Eve’s listening to the persuasive serpent. And there it is, the same humility that reopened Paradise, taking place right before the pilgrim’s eyes!

106 Ibid., 10.82–93. The story of Trajan and the widow comes from medieval accounts of the life of Gregory the Great. See Nancy J. Vickers, “Seeing Is Believing: Gregory, Trajan, and Dante’s Art,” Dante Studies 101 (1983), 70. 107 Ibid., 10.98. 108 Ibid., 10.35–36, 10.42.

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The passage’s allusions to the fall of humankind (Heaven’s “long ban,” the closure of “the supreme love”) say something about the intended audience of these pictured humilities. The poem soon reveals them to be souls stained by pride, the putting of oneself above God. In Dante’s Purgatory, the proud are now doubled over with heavy stones on their backs to counteract their soaring thoughts of themselves.109 The reliefs serve to impress them inwardly with edifying models of humility prior to the downward bending of their bodies.110 The images also have a larger purpose. It is here that Purgatory’s entire system of moral education and spiritual purification begins. Later in the poem, upon exiting the terrace of the proud, Dante’s pilgrim finds his own pride has been washed away.111 The carved stories initiate that rehabilitation, as we discover when, after describing his experience of the sculptures, he humbly honors their content and divine author: “While I was taking delight in gazing on the images of humilities so great, and for their Craftsman’s sake precious to behold …”112 “Gazing on the images … precious to behold”—these phrases valorize the sense of sight. But the pilgrim’s spiritually formative beholding of the reliefs has auditory dimensions too. Looking at them makes of him a listener and a hearer who is not dependent on the body’s ears. This independence is pronounced where he remarks that the angel in The Annunciation “seemed not a silent image” and even more so when his eyes and ears conflict over whether the choirs near King David in the second relief actually sing. In his experience of voices through these first two relief panels, near-audibility is the object of his attention. The virtuality of sounds prevails over verbal meaning. The pilgrim’s looking is still dominant. As he stands before the third scene, however, he becomes an inner listener. The language of the passage at first registers visual details, hinting that Trajan sits on a horse and describing the widow as sorrowful.113 But after noting that “the poor woman seemed to say” her request for vengeance, the poem maintains the conversation, verbal reply upon verbal reply, without visual warrant more than “And he seemed to answer her” (my emphasis). 109 Ibid., 10.115–39. 110 The sharpness of the narrator’s memory of the sculptures suggests that the wax stamp analogy he uses to characterize the Virgin’s response to the angel applies to how he himself internalized the images. For seal-in-wax as a model for memory and moral education, see Carruthers, Book of Memory, 55–57, 71. 111 Dante, Purgatorio 12.115–36. Dante’s self-regard as a poet may be implicated. See Theodolinda Barolini, “Re-Presenting What God Presented: The Arachnean Art of Dante’s Terrace of Pride,” Dante Studies 105 (1987), 53–54. 112 Dante, Purgatorio 10.97–99. 113 Ibid., 10.77–78: “And a poor widow was at [Trajan’s] bridle in attitude of weeping and of grief.”

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The overtaking of bodily sight by inner hearing here adds to the extraordinary lifelikeness of the divinely wrought sculptures, effacing their material artifice. It also connects the pilgrim with Trajan: Each is humbled through listening. The mounted emperor, for his part, merely gives ear to the widow’s plea until she reminds him that justice is his duty. Then he verbally bows to her wish.114 The pilgrim absorbs the lesson and ponders it in relation to the previous scenes. He seems to sense the opening of the emperor’s inner ears, and his sensitivity in this regard intimates the opening of his own. The great listeners have aided his understanding of humility, the spiritual sense imparted by the reliefs. He is humbled in the process, and that attitude enhances his spiritual listening, in turn. Looking and marveling alone do not inspire this inclination. Giving voice to the sculpted figures is an act of self-yielding through which he absorbs the messages of self-yielding before the divine. He begins perceiving great humility with his own germinal humility. Visible speech, in sum, divinely crafted and internally audible through avid and prolonged looking, prepares the pilgrim for spiritual ascent by rousing and shaping his inner listening. Such art was well suited for the first level of Purgatory, where souls were morally challenged and spiritually impure, their capacity to obey God questionable. The sin of pride had auditory implications, the proud being deaf to God’s voice and despising obedience to it, as noted earlier.115 In that light, the reliefs’ auditory effects on the pilgrim seem all the more appropriate. Conditions were not so different among the living in cities of Italy, from the perspective of churchmen such as Federico Visconti and Giovanni da San Gimignano, whose words underscore the continual work of making God’s word heard. In art within churches, spiritual beginners and backsliders had ample opportunity to see listening in sacred history. Depictions of The Annunciation abounded. Impressive listening also appears in places we may not expect, where figures are not great listeners in any moral or spiritual sense, but instead are only on the verge of spiritual progress, rather like Dante’s pilgrim and Trajan, prior to their changes of heart. Pictorial artists got at the same issue of inner sensation as Dante’s literary descriptions, albeit in a different ‘language’, appealing to and stimulating sensorial connections and overlaps such as those that animate Purgatorio 10. Their own naturalistic styles served, among their other functions, to instill attitudes of listening that would enhance hearing beyond churchmen’s efforts to open ears with their voices. In order to see that auditory engineering, however, we first need to address certain blind spots we have inherited. 114 Ibid., 10.89–90. 115 Joannes a S. Geminiano, Summa de exemplis 5.93, quoted above, concerning the deaf asp.

Chapter 2

The Ear, Estranged 1

Seeing Listening

Listening can be obvious in late medieval Italian art, as where the Virgin Mary responds deferentially to the angel’s salutation. In other pictures, listening can be easily inferred. In the Perugia reliefs Eve’s listening is implied by her handing the fruit to Adam (following the serpent’s advice), her reaction to the Lord’s reprimand, and her looking back toward the voice that has ruined her (Figs. 5, 6). Acquaintance with the story and with the notoriety of Eve’s seduction plays a role in our identification of listening here. But such foreknowledge is not always necessary for us to discern listeners. On the same fountain, the monk Maurus kneels before Benedict and the words the holy man shows him: “Listen, Brother Maurus” (Fig. 8). In the representation of Rhetoric, the student stands motionless and attentive before his open-mouthed teacher (Fig. 10). Elsewhere, in depictions of university lectures, students lean toward professors, turning their heads.1 Comparable stances appear in pictures of Pentecost, an event marking the beginning of the early Church, following Christ’s death and prior to his apostles’ first conversions of others to their faith through speaking God’s word (Acts 2). As the group sits in a small house, suddenly filled with the Holy Spirit and speaking in different languages, a cosmopolitan crowd outside is amazed and bewildered by the sound of God’s deeds of power being spoken in their own tongues. Artists at times placed individual listeners near the house’s door, leaning in and turning an ear toward it.2 1 For sculptural depictions of university students listening to esteemed professors, see David J. Drogin, “Art, Patronage, and Civic Identities in Renaissance Bologna,” in The Court Cities of Northern Italy: Milan, Parma, Piacenza, Mantua, Ferrara, Bologna, Urbino, Pesaro, and Rimini, ed. Charles M. Rosenberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 250–52. Members of these carved audiences are not uniformly attentive. Drogin notes an instance where one student rests on a book, napping, in a relief on the tomb of Professor Giovanni d’Andrea (d. 1348) (p. 250, fig. 164). Uneven listening is also visible among students attending a lecture of the jurist Giovanni da Legnagno (d. 1383), carved by Jacobello and Pierpaolo dalle Masegne. See Anita Fiderer Moskowitz, Italian Gothic Sculpture, c. 1250–c. 1400 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 261, fig. 337. These works and several others from the fourteenth century are now in the Museo Civico Medioevale, in Bologna. 2 Two such listeners occupy foreground positions in Pentecost, painted on wood panel by Giotto and his workshop probably in the years after 1310 (now in London, National Gallery, inv. NG5360).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004460812_004

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Figure 11 Giotto, The Visions of Fra Agostino and the Bishop of Assisi, fresco, around 1320, Church of Santa Croce, Florence Photo: Raffaello Bencini/Archivi Alinari, Firenze

Body positions indicative of listening can mislead modern eyes as to the scope and nature of a given picture’s auditory work, however. An instructive example, familiar to historians of early Italian art for its innovative portrayal of listening, is The Visions of Fra Agostino and the Bishop of Assisi, painted in fresco by Giotto and assistants around 1320 for the funerary chapel of the Bardi family in the Franciscan Church of Santa Croce, in Florence (Fig. 11), the same space where Obedience shushes worshipers from above (Fig. 3). The double scene shows religious authorities remotely witnessing Francis’s ascent to Heaven at his moment of death, in 1226. At left, a Franciscan minister named Agostino (now all but lost) sits up on his own deathbed in the presence of several friars. The brief verbal account in Bonaventure’s earlier Legenda maior (1260–63) helps us see what is happening. Agostino, “a holy and upright man” who has long been mute, sees the saint in a vision and suddenly cries out “in the hearing of those who were standing about,” imploring Francis: “Wait for me, Father, wait for me. Wait, I am coming with you!”3 The voice stuns his subordinates, 3 Bonaventure, Legendae duae de vita S. Francisci Seraphici (Ad Claras Aquas [Quaracchi], 1898), 153–54: “Minister quoque Fratrum in Terra Laboris tunc erat Frater Augustinus, vir utique sanctus et iustus, qui in hora ultima positus, cum diu iam pridem amisisset loquelam,

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and when they ask with whom he was speaking so boldly, he responds, “Don’t you see our father Francis on his way to Heaven?”4 The fresco transposes the event’s auditory dimensions into visual terms. A friar at the far side of the bed pulls aside a curtain and leans in to investigate, craning his neck and turning his head, mouth agape. One scholar has judged this to be a perfect description of the act of listening (Fig. 12).5 In the accompanying scene, at right, a sleeping Bishop of Assisi holds his ear with his hand during his own vision, in which Francis reports to him his death and apotheosis. The art historian Barbara Buhler Walsh offered that “the cupped hand under the prelate’s carefully drawn ear … may signify that he hears and understands what Francis is saying.”6 These details, not seen in an earlier fresco of the same subject, led Walsh to hail Giotto’s genius as a narrative artist who dramatized action through sound and who widened the capacity of painting to “image sound through gesture.”7 Indeed, the friar’s pull of the curtain, turned head, and open mouth seem designed to prompt viewers familiar with the story to imagine Agostino’s cry of “Wait for me,” as when Dante’s pilgrim inwardly hears the carved figures in Purgatory speak. Yet gesture is only one device by which the Bardi fresco images sound and hearing. Other figures stand directly before Agostino. Scholarship has seen them as observers and “impassive onlookers.”8 But sight was surely not intended to be the primary mode of perception here. Bonaventure’s text says nothing about the friars beholding their dying elder sitting up when he cried out. The only seeing that matters there is Agostino’s—his inner sight. He alone perceives Francis’s ascension and attests to the saint’s intercessory power. For Bonaventure, the friars around Agostino had two roles, both of them auditory: bearing witness to his revelation and certifying the miraculous nature of his speech.

4 5 6 7 8

audientibus qui astabant, subito clamavit et dixit: ‘Exspecta me, Pater, exspecta, ecce, iam venio tecum’.” Ibid., 154: “Quaerentibus Fratribus et admirantibus multum, cui sic loqueretur audacter, respondit: ‘Nonne videtis Patrem nostrum Franciscum, qui vadit ad caelum?’ ” Jane C. Long, “The Program of Giotto’s Saint Francis Cycle at Santa Croce in Florence,” Franciscan Studies 52 (1992), 109. Barbara Buhler Walsh, “A Note on Giotto’s ‘Visions’ of Brother Agostino and the Bishop of Assisi, Bardi Chapel,” The Art Bulletin 62, no. 1 (Mar., 1980), 23. Ibid., 20–23. A key point of comparison for Walsh is The Visions of Fra Agostino and the Bishop of Assisi in the Upper Church of San Francesco, in Assisi, a fresco painted in the 1290s (Ibid., 21–22, fig. 4). William R. Cook, “Giotto and the Figure of St. Francis,” in Cambridge Companion to Giotto, ed. Anne Derbes and Mark Sandona (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 151; Long, “Giotto’s Saint Francis Cycle,” 108. Walsh does not comment on their activity.

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Figure 12 Giotto, listening friar, detail of The Vision of Fra Agostino, fresco, around 1320, Church of Santa Croce, Florence Photo: Bridgeman Images

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Figure 13 Giotto (and assistant?), listening friars, detail of The Vision of Fra Agostino, fresco, around 1320, Church of Santa Croce, Florence Photo: Raffaello Bencini/Archivi Alinari, Firenze

Recognizant of that difference, Giotto divided the task between figures at the picture’s center and those further out. He visualized the certification with the latter, posing two of the men at the near and far sides of the minister’s bed and dramatizing their responses. As the one pulls aside a curtain, the other recoils and raises a hand in fright. The pair performs wonder and disturbance at the sound of Agostino’s speech. By contrast, the friars clustered at the foot of the bed stand motionless and expressionless, somewhat like the student before the rhetoric instructor on Perugia’s great fountain (Figs. 10, 11, 13). They do look at Agostino, but their eyes more importantly indicate direction and concentration in listening. Through the group, Giotto shows the startling outburst being understood as a revelation—in parallel with the bishop in the adjacent scene. Agostino’s voice, while not directly visible, can be inferred both as a medium of spiritual truth and as a sensorial force. The distinction depends on the manner of listening’s depiction as a physical act and its qualification by other visual elements. The centrality and larger number of the spiritual hearers asserts their greater importance in the picture, for example. In this connection, it cannot be incidental that at the height of the chapel space in which we find the fresco, Obedience urges silence and compliant attention to sacred speech (Fig. 3). The

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immobile and attentive group at the foot of Agostino’s bed conform to and thereby demonstrate that attitude. The Vision of Fra Agostino offers an example of how an artist could distinguish pictorially between inner hearing and external sensation. Also interesting for us is the fresco’s remarkable appeal to viewers standing in the chapel as hearers themselves. Its narrative precision enables us to imagine Agostino’s cries, as we have noticed, but there is more. Julian Gardner, the Giotto scholar, points out the conflation of the pictured scene with the viewer’s own world by means of the friar at the rear of the room, the one pulling aside the curtain to investigate the voice: “Real and fictive spectators lock glances across the deathbed from which Fra Agostino rises to bid Francis to wait for him.”9 The illusion of spatial continuity is sharpened by the frightened friar. His position in the extreme foreground further blurs the boundary between real and fictive space. If Giotto’s Agostino calls out to the saint “in the hearing of those who were standing about,” as Bonaventure wrote, the fresco gave its viewers to imagine themselves “standing about” and “hearing” as if immersed in the moment Francis’s otherworldly power was first heard about and believed. An aim of revisiting this memorable event through picture-viewing and picture-hearing may have been to reinforce devotion to him by revisiting the discovery of his intercessory power. Presumably the fresco also buoyed devotees’ own hopes for his supernatural mediation. To overlook the listeners at its center would miss a motive for the scene’s engulfing, naturalistic devices: making viewers feel present at the beginning of Francis’s cult, with spiritually open ears. In sum, gestures and movements do not necessarily show us the full range of listening in a picture. In Vision, figures’ motionlessness and absence of facial expression, in tandem with larger compositional choices such as spatial positioning, could also have implications that were at once spiritual and auditory. At the same time, we have ignored something that argues even more clearly for spiritual hearing, not bodily sensation, as the scene’s priority. Look again at the friar group (Fig. 13). Amid the cowls and overlapping heads, evenly spaced in a row from the group’s front to its rear, several well-modeled ears are visible.10 They are actively engaged in disciplined listening. Until now they have gone unnoticed. Even in Walsh’s study of how the fresco “images sound,” the only ear of any significance belongs to the sleeping bishop. Arguably, this is not an .

9 Julian Gardner, Giotto and His Publics: Three Paradigms of Patronage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 68. 10 Gardner’s judgment that the group of friars was painted by a “less gifted” member of Giotto’s team of assistants has no bearing on my argument, in part because the art historian maintains that the qualitative level of painting in the Bardi Chapel is “never less than high” and that Giotto directed the project. Ibid., 75.

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incidental oversight but rather a deeper perceptual limitation on our part, a collective tendency not to see the bodily instrument of listening. Indeed, the modern invisibility of the friars’ ears in Vision is a logical extension of perceptual indifference, even aversion, to ears in art historical study over the past century. We have been partially blind to late medieval preoccupations with putting listening before audience’s eyes and minds. To remedy our vision accordingly, we begin by shining a light on a basic component of that concern. 2

Ear Blindness

With its curves, creases, furrows, and concavities, the outer ear is uniquely complex among the human body’s external parts. For that reason, it would seem to have little trouble being seen. It has certainly enjoyed appreciation from time to time. Galen, the ancient anatomist, judged that Nature “has provided for the beauty of the ears, leaving no part rough, unfinished, or ill-proportioned.”11 The philosopher Jacques Derrida wrote of the ear evocatively as “invaginated folds,” “involuted orificiality,” and “the most tendered and the most open organ.”12 Works by contemporary artists Tomio Miki and Isa Genzken bring a variety aural forms to the fore.13 In “The Cardboard Box” (1892), Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes, declares that “there is no part of the human body which varies so much as the human ear. Each ear is as a rule quite distinctive and differs from all the other ones.”14 Yet the ear’s relationship with visibility can be slippery. Bernard Berenson, the connoisseur of Italian Renaissance painting, thought that so little notice is given to ears “not one person probably in a thousand knows the shapes either of his own, or of his

11 Galen, Galen on the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body (De usu partium), trans. Margaret Tallmadge May (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968), 2:529. 12 Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation. Texts and Discussion with Jacques Derrida, ed. Christie McDonald, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), 20, 36. 13 Genzken photographed women’s ears and her own in 1979–80. One of these portraits, Untitled, now belongs to the Art Institute of Chicago (1992.570). That museum also possesses Miki’s 50 Fragments of Ear (2015.88), from 1964, which consists of enlarged ear parts cast in aluminum. 14 Quoted in Carlo Ginzburg, “Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method,” trans. Anna Davin, History Workshop: A Journal of Socialist Historians 9 (Spring, 1980), 8.

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dearest friend’s.” The same applied to art. Berenson thought of the ear as a detail “apt to be neglected in our general impression of a picture.”15 Assuming that there is something to this opinion and that we are not dealing with suppression akin to centuries of Christ’s genitalia in Renaissance art being “tactfully overlooked,” as Leo Steinberg famously argued, what explains modern indifference to ears?16 Visual appearance may have something to do with it. When, in Dante’s Inferno, the narrator describes how the damned in Hell responded to a rant against social upstarts and sudden wealth, he can say simply that the listeners “guarder l’un l’altro com’ al ver si guata” (looked at each other as men look on hearing the truth).17 No ear is observed here, in the very act of listening. Movements of the listeners’ eyes and bodies provide the desired data, plausibly enough. But inertia is not the only curb on ears’ visual interest. Pressures beyond our awareness may keep us from seeing them. According to psychologists, by adolescence we start to recognize others visually by the internal rather than external features of the face.18 There is also the blinding effect of the near silence about ears in learned discussions of the face. Research on emotional expression by Charles Darwin, the nineteenth-century naturalist, all but disregarded human ears because they lack movement, unlike those of dogs, cats, and other animals shown in illustrations pricking up their ears or drawing them back in aggression and other frames of mind (Fig. 14).19 Contemporary philosophers and historians have left unresolved whether ears should be regarded as part of the human face and as participant in productions of meaning that operate through its more central and mutable components.20 Art historical studies of the face in medieval

15 Bernard Berenson, Lorenzo Lotto: An Essay in Constructive Art Criticism (New York, 1895), XIV–XVI. 16 Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and Modern Oblivion, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 17 Dante, Inferno 16.73–78. 18 Hadyn D. Ellis, John W. Shepherd, and Graham M. Davies, “Identification of Familiar and Unfamiliar Faces from Internal and External Features: Some Implications for Theories of Face Recognition,” Perception 8, no. 4 (1979): 431–39; Charlie Frowd, Vicki Bruce, Alex McIntyre, and Peter Hancock, “The Relative Importance of External and Internal Features of Face Composites,” British Journal of Psychology 98 (2007), 62. 19 Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (London, 1872), 111, 365. Darwin did not categorically deny expressivity to human ears, however, noting that they have a share in blushing, “the most peculiar and the most human of all expressions” (pp. 310, 312). 20 Jean-Claude Schmitt, “For a History of the Face: Physiognomy, Pathognomy, Theory of Expression,” Kritische Berichte: Mitteilungsorgan des Ulmer Vereins Verband für Kunst- und Kulturwissenschaften 40, no. 1 (2012), 11; Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Continuum,

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Figure 14 Thomas William Wood, Head of Snarling Dog (ears drawn back), from Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) Photo: Wikimedia Commons, public domain

and Renaissance art have mentioned ears only rarely and in passing.21 The sole remark about ears in John Pope-Hennessy’s widely-read study of portraiture shows that aesthetic preferences excluded pictured ears from contemplation too. Ears in Renaissance art “cease to be repulsive Gothic polypi emerging 2004), 186–211; Hans Belting, Faces: Eine Geschichte des Gesichts (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2013). 21 “Contemporary Encounters with the Medieval Face,” ed. Clark Maines, special issue, Gesta 46, no. 2 (2007); Lorne Campbell, Renaissance Portraits: European Portrait-Painting in the 14th, 15th and 16th Centuries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); Maria H. Loh, “Renaissance Faciality,” Oxford Art Journal 32, no. 3 (2009): 342–63. Exceptions are Bruno Kollwitz, “Im Anfang was das Ohr,” in Das Buch vom Hören, ed. Robert Kuhn and Bernd Kreutz (Freiburg: Verlag Herder, 1991), 29–37; Peter Dent, “Chellini’s Ears and the Diagnosis of Technique,” in “Una insalata di più erbe”: A Festschrift for Patricia Lee Rubin, ed. J. Harris, S. Nethersole, and P. Rumberg (London: Courtauld Institute of Art, 2011), 138–50.

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from the head, and become instead a kind of in-built receiving set whose divine functions compensate for its rather unattractive form.”22 With barely concealed distaste, this sentence dismisses centuries’ worth of ears as alien to heads, to beauty, to Art itself. The pages of art history are a place we might expect ears to be welcomed into view, given the discipline’s tradition of examining human figures as well as artists’ very long history of making them. Indeed, in his mid-eighteenth-century Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums, the earliest modern study of art of ancient Greece and Rome, Johann Joachim Winckelmann offered what is probably the deepest appreciation of ears in the history of art history.23 Winckelmann had an opinion of how ears should ideally look: “flattened and swollen at the cartilaginous wings,” with a small ear-hole.24 That aesthetic preference did not impede his esteem of other forms, however. He was impressed by the beauty and manual execution of sculpted ears, and saw them as artistic displays of skill in bronze and marble.25 Ears’ forms on heads modelled from life are infinite, he wrote, more than a century before “Sherlock Holmes.”26 Their individuality is such that the identity of a severely damaged head might be correctly surmised from the shape of its ears, as in the portraits of the emperor Marcus Aurelius, the ears of which characteristically have “an unusually large inner opening.”27 Artists were so alert to ears that “sie auch das Unförmliche angedeutet haben” (they even copied their deformities).28 Ears not only individualized figural representations; they also socialized them. A battered and swollen ear signaled a type of wrestler (pancratiast), for example.29 This high artistic regard for ears 22 John Pope-Hennessy, The Portrait in the Renaissance (New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1966), 3. 23 Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (Vienna, 1776), 1:364–70. 24 Ibid., 1:365. 25 Even before Winckelmann, art critics had considered the ear very difficult to depict. Seventeenth-century discussions about Agostino Carracci (d. 1602) told of the painter taking on the challenge by making for himself a life-size model—“l’orecchione di Agostino” (Agostino’s big ear). No one topped Carracci in drawing ears and properly grasping their form and placement, according to Malvasia. Carlo Cesare Malvasia, Felsina pittrice: Vite de’ pittori bolognesi (Bologna, 1678), 1:485. Malvasia’s comments were reiterated in André Félibien, Entretiens sur les vies et les ouvrages des plus excellens peintres anciens et modernes, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1696), 2:232. Drawing books were another resource for mastering ears. Odoardo Fialetti’s Tutte le parti del corpo hvmano diuiso in piu pezzi (Venice, 1608) contains eighteen models of ears presented from different points of view (pp. 3–4). 26 Winckelmann, Geschichte, 1:365. 27 Ibid, 1:365. 28 Ibid., 1:365. 29 Ibid., 1:368.

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distinguishes original ancient work from modern additions and restorations, Winkelmann held. If an ear in an ancient engraved gem is “wie angeleget” (put on, as it were) rather than “nicht mit aller Sorgfalt ausgearbeitet ist” (elaborated with utmost care), we should doubt its antiquity.30 Later writers reaffirmed Winckelmann’s view of ears’ post-classical decline. For evidence of artistic decadence after Rome’s fall, Adolfo Venturi, Italy’s first chair of art history, cited figures’ ears in church decoration made between 1000 and 1100, which looked to him “appiccicate agli zigomi come manichi d’anfore” (stuck onto the cheek bones like amphora handles).31 When Venturi wrote this description, around 1900, ears in art were being seen anew. No longer looked upon as traces of an artistic golden age, they seemed to some to promise what art historians needed as their discipline professionalized and sought academic respect: categorical answers to the often-murky question of an artwork’s authorship. The focus was now on Italian Renaissance painting. Enter Giovanni Morelli, the late nineteenth-century politician and self-styled art connoisseur (not to be confused with the late medieval Florentine merchant).32 Under the pseudonym Ivan (or Iwan) Lermolieff, Morelli published a series of studies between 1874 and 1890 in which he used the forms of ears, hands, and other pictorial details to establish the authorship of paintings more accurately—so he claimed—than sources on which art experts usually relied, such as written documents and general impressions of pictures.33 Ears could be useful in 30 31

Ibid., 1:364–65. Adolfo Venturi, Storia dell’arte italiana (Milan: Ulrico Hoepli, 1901), 1:64. Venturi thought it necessary to locate the genesis of such “forme popolari, povere, rozze” (popular, poor, coarse forms) not merely in what he implied to be artistic incompetence but, more deeply, in the centuries-earlier art of provincial and colonial Rome and its “quasi selvaggi” (almost wild) heirs, which Nicola and Giovanni Pisano and Giotto would redeem in the later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries (p. 64). A tacit assumption of Venturi’s, that ears are of interest mainly for determining artistic origins, was widely shared at the time, as we are about to see. 32 Morelli’s thinking re-emerged in later twentieth-century scholarship as an object of methodological curiosity. Before Ginzburg’s “Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes” (cited above), there was Edgar Wind, Art and Anarchy (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), which offers a critique of connoisseurship in which Morelli figures prominently. 33 Pertinent to our purposes are Ivan Lermolieff, “Die Galerieren Roms. Ein kritischer Versuch. 1. Die Galerie Borghese,” Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst 9 (1874): 1–11; Lermolieff, Die Werke italienischer Meister in den Galerien von München, Dresden und Berlin. Ein kritischer Versuch (Leipzig, 1880); and Lermolieff, Kunstkritische Studien über italienische Malerei. Die Galerien Borghese und Doria Panfili in Rom (Leipzig, 1890). The latter is available in English as Giovanni Morelli, Italian Painters: Critical Studies of their Works: The Borghese and Doria-Pamfili Galleries in Rome, trans. Constance Jocelyn Ffoulkes (London, 1892).

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Figure 15 Characteristic ears, from Giovanni Morelli’s Italian Painters, 1892 Photo: Wikimedia Commons, public domain

making attributions, Morelli argued, because every great painter in fifteenthand sixteenth-century Italy had a way of painting them that copyists and students could not imitate. The ear in Titian’s art, Morelli wrote, in a typical formulation, “is round in form and characteristic, very different from the long ear peculiar to Pordenone.”34 Accompanying illustrations paired artists’ names with drawings of differently shaped ears, each one presumably (and perhaps without irony) made from an authenticated painting (Fig. 15). Morelli’s approach to art sparked opposition from scholars, art collection catalog writers, and museum directors, whose views, methods, and authority

34 Morelli, Italian Painters, 307.

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it provocatively questioned.35 His examination of ears was a recurrent point of criticism. Some derided his method as “the ear and toenail school” and “the ear and nose system of identifying pictures.”36 These insults were aimed at what critics alleged to be Morelli’s excessively superficial, mechanistic, and materialistic view of art. Others challenged his assertions about ears painted by certain masters and went about making their own direct observations of art, generating descriptions of ears with more detail than he had presented.37 Naturally, the controversy had the effect of drawing more eyes to pictured ears. And while Morelli’s ideas met with skepticism, they were also adopted, refined, and codified, perhaps nowhere more clearly than in Bernard Berenson’s “Rudiments of Connoisseurship” (written around 1890; published in 1902).38 The general idea was Morelli’s: Italian masters painted ears in their own manner and always the same, and so ears were excellent tests of authorship.39 But Berenson modified that position, saying ears were the most characteristic of all the details of given master’s human figures and specifying that ears’ parts were more characteristic than the whole: “In Botticelli, for example, it is the bulb-shaped upper curve; in Perugino, the bony lobe; in the Bellini, the cavity; in Lotto, the distinct notching in the line joining the ear to the cheek; in Moroni, the chiaroscuro.”40 A premise of this vein of connoisseurship sheds light on the modern estrangement of pictured ears: the idea of their invisibility to artists and

35

36 37 38 39 40

Among the more vociferous critics was Wilhelm Bode, director of the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, who called Lermolieff a “quack doctor” and lamented that his “catalogue of the ears, noses, and fingers” gave museum visitors a dangerous sense of authority in matters of authorship. See Wilhelm Bode, “The Berlin Renaissance Museum,” The Fortnightly Review, n.s., 50 (July–Dec., 1891), 509. Charles Eliot Norton, review of Lorenzo Lotto: An Essay in Constructive Art Criticism, by Bernhard [sic] Berenson, The Athenaeum, no. 3520 (Apr. 13, 1895), 481. Earlier, Morelli defended himself against comparable disparagement. Morelli, Italian Painters, 44. For instance, W. Koopman, “Iwan Lermolieff’s Experimentalmethode, ein unfehlbares Mittel zur Bestimmung von Kunstwerken,” Preussische Jahrbücher 65 (1890): 467–74. Berenson, Study and Criticism of Italian Art, 111–48. Berenson, Study and Criticism of Italian Art, 129–31, 144–45. In 1895, Berenson reiterated Morelli’s view of ears’ usefulness for making attributions, while adding that they betrayed the source of a painter’s training. Berenson, Lorenzo Lotto, xiii–xvii. Berenson, Study and Criticism of Italian Art, 130. This system is not as tight as such language suggests. While Berenson says that a given Italian master “kept on through a lifetime painting the same ear” (p. 129), he also allows that the master’s ears could shift slightly over time as his “habits of visualisation and execution” changed as little as a tree’s leaves or, in the case of Titian’s early and late work, they could vary a great deal (p. 145). The connoisseur positioned himself as singularly qualified to examine ears by virtue of his expertise in painters’ entire oeuvres.

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viewers alike. According to Morelli, painters made the most effort in certain parts of pictures, such as faces, but they let themselves go in “material trifles,” such as ears.41 Like verbal habits and calligraphic flourishes made by the hand, ear forms surfaced involuntarily from “internal conditions,” and therefore could disclose the painter’s “soul,” his “way of thinking.”42 Few other aspects of a Renaissance painting could do this. For Berenson, ears revealed instead tendencies from a master’s artistic training, but he agreed with Morelli in grouping ears with details like hands, folds, and landscape “whose triviality evidently escaped the special attention of the painter and which, for that that reason— being executed by rote and, as it were, almost unconsciously—enable us to get a closer acquaintance with his habits.”43 The execution of ‘non-trivial’ aspects of Renaissance pictures, such as eyes, was subject to the external pressure of being considered by viewers. No such expectation obtained for ears on account of their stasis. “Of all the exposed parts of the human figure, the ears are least capable of a sudden change of character,” Berenson wrote. They “therefore get the least attention.”44 Berenson went further. He generalized that ears were never noticed by anyone in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries because “European man was  … as good as blind to minute peculiarities that neither touched his feelings for beauty, nor concerned his interests.”45 Looking at an ear would not have given viewers what they sought in pictures, namely, in Berenson’s view, guidance in how they should behave in order to get what they want in life. Those desires were satisfied by pictorial elements that described the expressions and character of portrayed persons. What Renaissance poet, Berenson asked rhetorically, ever composed a sonnet “to his mistress’s ear?”46 Absence of beauty now added to absence of expression in the connoisseur’s view of the ear as significantly insignificant. Lacking not only in beauty but also in effort and skill, ears thus amounted to no more than wrinkles in the fabric of artistic achievement, as Pope-Hennessy would judge decades later. A side-effect of Morellian connoisseurship may have been the opening of scholars’ eyes to ears in other periods’ art. In 1914, Wilhelm Vöge was astonished by an early thirteenth-century sculpture of Saint Paul on the cathedral 41 42 43 44

Morelli, Italian Painters, 75. Lermolieff, “Die Galerien Roms,” 8; Morelli, Italian Painters, 23. Berenson, Study and Criticism of Italian Art, 10. Berenson, Lorenzo Lotto, xv–xvi. This presents an explanation as to why ears in pictures made by a master’s students and copyists betray their own authorship. The ability to emulate could not extend to what emulators were not inclined to notice. 45 Berenson, Study and Criticism of Italian Art, 129. 46 Ibid., 129.

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of Reims, whose ears he considered artistically ambitious, exceedingly beautiful, and favorably comparable to those of great Renaissance portraits.47 Meyer Schapiro, in 1931, found the ears of certain apostles carved on monastery cloister piers in Moissac (around 1100) more naturalistic than others—more naturalistic even than the rest of the bodies to which they belonged.48 The scholars’ observations were un-Morellian in their documentation of stylistic change occurring within a given project, the presence of beauty (for Vöge), and the advent of naturalism. This last point departs from the idea that “internal conditions” or ingrained “habits” determined the form an artist gave to ears. Those glimmers of stylistic naturalism in art of twelfth- and early thirteenth-century France came about instead through the sculptors’ careful looking at aural forms, presumably in ancient Roman sculptures. Here we have precedents for artists’ attentive rendering of ears later in Italy, not only for Giotto’s The Visions of Fra Agostino and the Bishop of Assisi, but for the other commissions to be discussed in this book. But if Morelli’s methodology gave pictured ears new visibility, it also became a reason to ignore them again. Richard Offner, a third-generation Morellian with expertise in late medieval Italian painting, frequently surpassed Morelli and Berenson in the length and acuity of his descriptions of ears, particularly where the authorship of then-obscure artists was in question.49 Writing about a figure painted by Jacopo del Casentino, for example, he observed: “His ear—the large ear typical for Jacopo, whose contours sweep upward in a wide curve that turns inward abruptly at the top, dropping in a straight diagonal to the cheek.”50 But such examination nearly vanishes in Offner’s multiplyreproduced “Giotto, Non-Giotto” (1939; reprinted 1969, 1974, 1976, 1995, and twice in 1998), an essay that controversially rejected the traditional opinion that gave to Giotto the frescoes of the Life of Saint Francis of Assisi, in the Church of San Francesco, Assisi.51 Ears barely figure in the argument. Offner reported 47 48

49 50 51

Wilhelm Vöge, “Die Bahnbrecher des Naturstudiums um 1200” (1914), in Wilhelm Vöge, Francis Wormald, and Erwin Panofsky, Bildhauer des Mittelalters: Gesammelte Studien von Wilhelm Vöge (Berlin: Verlag Gebr. Mann, 1958), 93. Meyer Schapiro, “The Romanesque Sculpture of Moissac, I” (1931), in Romanesque Art: Selected Papers (New York: George Braziller, 1993), 147. The least developed ears in the Moissac relief were “small and set too high,” while the most advanced was “well observed” in shape, proportion and position, its parts “more clearly differentiated.” The studies are reprinted in Richard Offner, A Discerning Eye: Essays on Early Italian Painting, ed. Andrew Ladis (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998). Offner, A Discerning Eye, 131. Richard Offner, “Giotto, Non-Giotto” (1939), in Giotto: The Arena Chapel Frescoes, ed. James Stubblebine (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1995), 135–55.

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only that in Assisi they are “generally small” and have “a deep, clean-edged hollow like a snail shell.”52 The remark touches on a pervasive concern with hard external traits which he detected in the San Francesco frescoes, an interest he found incompatible with the “spiritually evolved” character of Giotto’s paintings in the Arena Chapel, where bodies and their parts were less defined in order to express themes of human dignity, brotherly love, and humility of spirit.53 Ears in Assisi disclosed to Offner a distinctive artistic “personality.” But Morellian analysis, with its concrete language, was unsuited for the idealizing style he saw in Padua and elsewhere in Giotto’s undisputed oeuvre.54 Art historians had previously cited that style as evidence of the painter’s genius and artistic supremacy, and Offner agreed wholeheartedly.55 To attend to ear forms would have been to blind oneself to the greatness of that art, so Offner chose not to say nothing about them. Even when speaking of ears in the Assisi frescoes, the consummate describer was uncharacteristically terse: “a deep, clean-edged hollow like a snail shell.” Another kind of ear-minimizing pressure may have been at work: shifting standards of connoisseurial credibility. The value of pictured ears to connoisseurship’s investigations of artistic authorship had already fallen by the time Offner 52 Offner, “Giotto, Non-Giotto,” in Stubblebine, Giotto, 151. A little earlier in his discussion, the connoisseur laid ground for this emphasis on virtual physicality by likening the painter in Assisi to a sculptor who conceives form “in terms of stone and its properties. And indeed he deals with it as if stone were the material of the mental image, so that … the cavity of the ear [seems] hollowed out” (p. 147). 53 Offner, “Giotto, Non-Giotto,” in Stubblebine, Giotto, 138–40. 54 For Offner’s own philosophical and stylistic sources (Immanuel Kant, Walter Pater) as well as his concern about how to write about Giotto’s art, see Andrew Ladis, “Richard Offner: The Unmaking of a Connoisseur,” in Discerning Eye, 4, 11, 14–17, and Hayden B. J. Maginnis, “Richard Offner and the Ineffable: A Problem in Connoisseurship,” in Discerning Eye, 22–26, 28, 30–31. 55 Offner’s idealist view of Giotto’s art had antecedents not mentioned by Ladis or Maginnis: Jacob Burckhardt, The Cicerone: or, Art Guide to Painting in Italy, ed. A. von Zahn, trans. A. H. Clough (London, 1873), 32, 34; Friedrich Rintelen, Giotto und die Giotto-Apokryphen (Munich: Georg Müller, 1912), 93–94; and studies by Offner’s dissertation advisor, Max Dvořák, Geschichte der italienischen Kunst im Zeitalter der Renaissance (1926; repr., Vienna: Facultas Verlages- und Buchhandels AG, 2004), 1:32, 47, and Idealism and Naturalism in Gothic Art (1918), trans. Randolph J. Klawiter (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1967), 120, 124. Rintelen, upon whose denial of the Assisi frescoes to Giotto Offner built, also anticipated Offner’s omission of Giotto’s ears in arguing that one does not find in Giotto’s work the identifying traits that many people “all too enthusiastically” look for in pictures (p. 94). The more general point to underline is that Offner’s partial ear-blindness owed to prior estimations of Giotto that had put the painter’s art above mimetic fidelity to the material world and had construed the artist himself to be intellectually independent (Dvořák) and above his contemporaries in genius (Burckhardt).

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published “Giotto, Non-Giotto.” An openly critical adapter of the Morellian method, Max Friedländer, wrote repeatedly (1920, 1929, 1942) that ear forms could be of only limited use to responsible connoisseurship.56 The conclusion to the pictured ear’s afterlife in art historiography seems inevitable: Ears faded from view, eclipsed by critical attitudes toward Morelli’s method and by connoisseurs taking a greater variety of pictorial elements into account.57 Clouding ears further was the emergence of other art-historical interests and methodologies that did not share connoisseurship’s formalist priorities. Still, at least one new direction of study would seem likely to find ears worthy of inspection. With rising study of pictorial content or meaning (iconography) came investigations of auditory themes and elements in medieval and Renaissance art. The influential Erwin Panofsky saw in certain paintings by Titian “a slight but unmistakable shift from a total to a partial victory of the visual over the aural experience of beauty.”58 Research into the five senses in medieval and Renaissance art surveyed artists’ use of musical instruments, gestures, postures, and gazes to represent hearing and sound.59 At the same time, a single picture might strike several observers as uncommonly sonorous. Pictured cries and the beating of angel wings in Giotto’s painting of The Lamentation of Christ in the Arena Chapel (Fig. 16) were touches of “a very auditory painter,” in the words of one art historian.60 Panofsky himself had already described the painter’s use of landscape in the fresco as

56 Max J. Friedländer, Der Kunstkenner (Berlin: Verlag Bruno Cassirer, 1920), 25–29; Friedländer, Echt und Unecht: Aus den Erfahrungen des Kunstkenners (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1929), 65–66; Friedländer, On Art and Connoisseurship, trans. Tancred Borenius (1942; repr., Boston: Beacon Hill Press, 1960), 166–67, 168, 170. 57 Symptomatic is the care taken by Luciano Bellosi to distance himself from Morelli when writing about ears belonging to a painted figure of Saint Peter in the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore, in Rome: “Lo faccio notare non perché creda in questo tipo di confronti ‘morelliani’, ma perché in questo caso gli orecchi sono di una fattura veramente singolare” (I note it not because I believe in this kind of ‘Morellian’ comparison, but because in this case the ears are of a truly singular making). Luciano Bellosi, La pecora di Giotto (Turin: Giulio Einaudi editore, 1985), 121–22. 58 Erwin Panofsky, Problems in Titian, Mostly Iconographic (New York: New York University Press, 1969), 124. 59 Nordenfalk, “Five Senses in Late Medieval and Renaissance Art,” 1–22; Martine Clouzot, “L’ouïe au Moyen Âge,” in Une histoire des sens au Moyen Âge au Siècle des Lumières (N.p.: Patrimoine en Isére/Musée de Saint-Antoine-l’Abbaye, 2008), 40; Florence Alazard, “L’ouïe de la Renaissance au Siècle des Lumières,” in Une histoire des sens, 50–51; Quiviger, Sensory World, 137–51. 60 Bruce Cole, Studies in the History of Italian Art, 1250–1550 (London: Pindar Press, 1996), 345.

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Figure 16 Giotto, The Lamentation of Christ, fresco, 1303–5, Arena Chapel, Padua Photo: Raffaello Bencini/Archivi Alinari, Firenze

“a sounding board amplifying and diversifying the voices of human figures.”61 Earlier, Max Dvořák saw in The Lamentation a “silent harmony” in the arrangement of figures and a “scale” (Skala) of bodies bent in pain.62 Even further back in time, Friederich Rintelen likened the mood of Giotto’s The Lamentation to laments around Hector’s corpse at the end of The Iliad.63 Attuned though

61

Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origins and Character (1953; repr., New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1971), 1:25. 62 Dvořák, Geschichte der italienischen Kunst, 1:44. 63 Rintelen, Giotto und die Giotto-Apokryphen, 42–43.

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these discussions were to the picturing of sound, none of them pointed to a pictured ear.64 While ears are not entirely absent from later studies, their perceived relationship to meaning has been governed by a tacit assumption, reminiscent of Berenson’s thinking: Inertia = insignificance. This preconception underlies the narrow criteria to which noticed ears tend to conform. One is unusual size. Take the Panotii, for example, a fabled ‘monstrous’ race whose elephantine ears are interpreted as references to hearing evil or listening to the word of God.65 There are also the long-eared asses holding lyres in church sculptures and painted books, an image that has been linked to medieval ideas of failure to hear or understand spiritual things.66 Another criterion for ears to stand out to observers is being acted-upon, as where Giotto’s sleeping bishop of Assisi holds a hand to his ear as he dreams of Francis speaking to him (Fig. 11). Additionally, there is conventional narrative utility and theologically assigned meaning. The bishop of Assisi exemplifies the former. His hearing what Francis says in the vision makes him a witness to the saint’s divine standing and power. As for meaning, consider the frequently depicted Betrayal of Christ (also called The Kiss of Judas or The Arrest of Christ). While Judas gives the sign for Jesus’s arrest, an intemperate Peter cuts off the ear of Malchus, the servant of the Jewish high priest.67 Medieval theology supplies the accepted interpretation: The ear’s amputation signifies the severing of the old (Jewish) mode of hearing, which had lost knowledge of divine things, in preparation for restoring that understanding through Christ.68 In art, that message is activated by Peter’s weapon or by Christ’s healing touch. 64 Shortly after the 1902 publication of Berenson’s “Rudiments of Connoisseurship,” in an attempt to differentiate the contributions of painters Jan and Hubert Van Eyck to the Ghent Altarpiece, Dvořák himself conducted a Morellian analysis of ears with rigor unmatched even by Offner in the 1920s (though Offner presumably learned from it). See Max Dvořák, Das Rätsel der Kunst der Brüder van Eyck (Vienna: F. Tempsky, 1904), 214–15. This passage may well have been the zenith of connoisseurial regard for pictured ears. 65 Debra Higgs Strickland, Saracens, Demons, and Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 52, 57, fig. 14. 66 Helen Adolf, “The Ass and the Harp,” Speculum 25, no. 1 (Jan., 1950), 49, 52–53; Walter S. Gibson, “Asinus Ad Lyram: From Boethius to Bruegel and Beyond,” in “Nine Offerings for Jan Piet Filedt Kok,” special issue, Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 33, no. 1/2 (2007/2008), 37–39. A basic point of reference is Boethius, De consolatione philosophiae 1.4. Ass ears were an attribute also of the mythic King Midas, who received them from Apollo as punishment for foolishly judging the god’s lyre-playing inferior to Pan’s piping. Ovid, Metamorphoses 11.172–93. 67 Matt. 26.51–54; Mark 14.47; Luke 22.50–51; John 18.10–11. 68 Peter Burkhart, Franziskus und die Vollendung der Kirche im siebten Zeitalter. Zum Programm der Langhausfresken in der Oberkirche von San Francesco in Assisi (Frankfurt

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Another familiar acted-upon ear occurs in certain images of The Annunciation. While the angel verbally greets the Virgin Mary, a beam-like emanation transmits a dove (the Holy Ghost) or child from God to the Virgin’s head. Medieval theology again dictates the presently agreed-upon sense: “conceptio per aurem” (conception through the ear).69 Zeno of Verona (d. 372), among the earliest proponents of this belief, saw an opposition between the devil creeping into Eve’s ear (“per aurem irrepens”) through persuasive speech and Christ entering Mary through the ear (“per aurem intrans”).70 In thirteenth-century Italy, the idea of the Virgin conceiving through the ear was diffuse. We find it in a sermon of Anthony of Padua (“ipsa enim Virgo concepit per aurem”) as well as in the writing of notary and legal advisor Albertano da Brescia (“Maria, odendo coll’orecchie l’anunziazione dell’angelo, concepette lo figliuolo di Dio”).71 Conception through the ear is not exactly what we see in pictures of The Annunciation (Fig. 17). Mary’s ears are usually hidden beneath a hood, a veiling which may purposefully maintain the mystery of Christ’s incarnation and preserve Mary’s association with chastity.72 The take-away for us here, however, is the assumed passivity of ears under the lens of iconographic research, with its specific requirements for finding them meaningful—indeed, for seeing them at all. 3

Stasis and Significance

The acted-upon ear, the unusually large ear, and the theologically preinterpreted ear were in use for many centuries in Italian art. They figure in Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia, a late sixteenth-century artists’ handbook for

am Main: Peter Lang, 1992), 75, citing Augustine. The key phrase is found in Augustine, In Joanis Evangelium tractatus 112.18.5 (Migne, PL 35.1931): “Quid ergo auris pro Domino amputata et a Domino sanata significat, nisi auditum amputata vetustate renovatum, ut sit in novitate spiritus, et non in vetustate litterae?” 69 Yriö Hirn, The Sacred Shrine: A Study of the Poetry and Art of the Catholic Church (1909; repr., Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), 294, 296–98, 312–16; Leo Steinberg, “ ‘How Shall This Be?’ Reflections on Filippo Lippi’s ‘Annunciation’ in London, Part 1,” Artibus et Historiae 8, no. 16 (1987): 25–44; Nicholas Constas, Proclus of Constantinople and the Cult of the Virgin in Late Antiquity: Homilies 1–5, texts and translations (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 274–75. 70 Zeno of Verona, Tractatus 1.13.10. 71 Anthony of Padua, Expositio in Psalmos, Sermo 122; Albertano da Brescia, Dei tratti morali di Albertano da Brescia, volgarizzamento inedito fatto del 1268 da Andrea da Grosseto (Bologna, 1873), 187. 72 For other possible reasons, see Steinberg, “ ‘How Shall This Be?’,” 32.

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Figure 17 Nicola Pisano, The Annunciation to the Virgin, marble, 1260, pulpit, Baptistery of San Giovanni, Pisa Photo: Luisa Ricciarini/Bridgeman Images

depicting allegories. A personification of Impiety, for example, has ass ears to signify impiety’s source in ignorance, while a personification of Christian Faith is a virgin who holds a finger to her ear, a reference to the dictum, “Faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes through the word of Christ” (Rom. 10.17).73 All three types occur in the early decades of Italian art. We find them in that most celebrated of late medieval monuments, the fresco decoration of the Arena Chapel by Giotto, around 1303–5 (Fig. 18). The Betrayal of Christ is there, with Malchus’s ear falling from Peter’s blade (Fig. 19). The painter also portrayed Gregory the Great writing while a white bird flutters at his ear, a traditional symbol of divine dictation in medieval 73

Cesare Ripa, Iconologia, ampliata (Siena, 1613), 231, 367. Ripa also made symbols of ears through multiplicity. The head of a personification of Human Wisdom has four ears, while garments worn by Vicious Blame, Curiosity, Fame, Jealousy, Appulian Silence, and Espionage are festooned with ears.

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Figure 18 Arena Chapel interior, 1303–5, Padua Photo: Archivi Alinari, Firenze

depictions of the pope-saint-exegete.74 Enlarged ears occur in the Arena frescoes too. In The Last Judgment the dead rising from the ground have

74 This seldom reproduced detail appears in Giuseppe Basile, Giotto: The Arena Chapel Frescoes (London: Thames and Hudson Ltd., 1993), 365.

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Figure 19 Giotto, Saint Peter severs Malchus’s ear, detail of The Betrayal of Christ, fresco, 1303–5, Arena Chapel, Padua Photo: Archivi Alinari, Firenze

exaggerated ears, perhaps to emphasize their reanimation by a blast of otherworldly horns.75 Ears in the chapel’s fresco program do not always neatly fit pictorial conventions or modern expectations. Anna, the mother of the Virgin Mary, nestles her fingers into the ear of her husband Joachim during their kiss in The Meeting at the Golden Gate (Fig. 20), an unnoticed detail of one of art history’s most famous embraces.76 Elsewhere in the chapel’s fresco program, a personification of Envy (Invidia) has an unusually elongated ear (Fig. 21). This aural distension recalls ass ears and the bestial inability to hear higher things. More likely, it served to indicate receptivity to evil words and a perverse sensitivity to hearing good things about other people. Here, Giotto adapted enlarged-ear 75 For an exceptional reproduction of this detail of The Last Judgment, see Basile, Giotto, 304–5. Further up in The Last Judgment mural, angels blow the horns from the mandorla surrounding Christ. 76 I return to this image in chapter three.

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Figure 20 Giotto, Anna and Joachim, detail of The Meeting at the Golden Gate, fresco, 1303–5, Arena Chapel, Padua Photo: Cameraphoto Arte Venezia/Bridgeman Images

conventions to a new context. In the writings of medieval moralists, the envious person rejoices at others’ misfortune and is tormented by their success, wealth, honor, good works, virtues, and spiritual grace, which they mistake for their own diminishment, deaf to the limitless availability of supreme goods from above.77 Giotto made Envy a spectacle of suffering from within—swelling, withering, self-blinding, self-poisoning, self-piercing, and self-incinerating— all fueled by an excess of listening that seizes on, aggrandizes, and darkens perceived disparity. The multi-pronged assault brings to mind an ancient Mediterranean tradition of apotropaic imagery showing the “evil eye” under

77

For envy in medieval moralist discourse, see Carla Casagrande and Silvana Vecchio, I sette vizi capitali: Storia dei peccati nel Medioevo (Turin: Giulio Einaudi editore, 2000), 36–53.

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Figure 21 Giotto, Envy (Invidia), fresco, 1303–5, Arena Chapel, Padua Photo: Raffaello Bencini/Archivi Alinari, Firenze

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external attack from various things simultaneously.78 But the aural emphasis in Giotto’s figure was unprecedented in artistic personifications of envy, though Christian moralists had warned for centuries against envious hearing. In one biblical verse cited time and again as an exemplum of envy, for instance, King Saul is upset at hearing celebratory music and a song which compares him unfavorably to a newcomer in his military: “Saul has killed his thousands, and David his ten thousands.”79 The ear of Giotto’s Envy has elicited varied characterizations and interpretations.80 At the same time, the numerous average-size ears in the chapel’s narrative scenes have been practically invisible. Offner’s view of Giotto’s ears as too idealized for words does not hold up when we note their detailed depiction. As with the earlier sculptures noticed by Vöge and Schapiro, the work of Giotto and his team carefully describes ears, consistently combining highlights and darker tones to approximate their anatomic parts: Helix, antihelix, triangular fossa, crus, concha and lobule become visible, even when covered tufts of hair or thin veils. The darkest mark was reserved for the opening of the auditory canal. Where opaque headwear is worn, such as the white bonnets (cuffie) worn by laymen, the tragus and intertragic notch peek out at the fabric’s edge. These particulars are evident on heads appearing in profile. Giotto also considered how ears should conform with oblique perspectives, adjusting them on heads in three-quarter view or seen frontally or from behind. Each of these observations finds support in The Wedding Feast at Cana, a veritable showcase of ear study which the next chapter examines. In some instances, there and in other of the chapel’s frescoes, only a few brushstrokes were required. Efficiency mattered in the fresco medium, where most of the painting happened while the wall plaster was wet. But rapidity did not come at the expense of acuity. Small wrinkles appear just in front of the ears of mature figures in The Annunciation to Anna, The Meeting at the Golden Gate (Fig. 20), The Presentation of the Virgin, and The Visitation.81 This kind of detail, 78 Katherine M. D. Dunbabin and M. W. Dickie, “Invidia Rumpantur Pectora: The Iconography of Phthonos/Invidia in Graeo-Roman Art,” Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum 26 (1983), 32 and pl. 8a. 79 1 Sam. 18.10–11 (NSRV). Among references to the story as an example of envy is Peter Cantor, Verbum abbreviatum 11 (Contra invidiam) (Migne, PL 205.53a–b). For more on Giotto’s Envy, see Matthew G. Shoaf, “Eyeing Envy in the Arena Chapel,” Studies in Iconography 30 (2009), 129–32. 80 For in-depth consideration, see Selma Pfeiffenberger, “The Iconology of Giotto’s Virtues and Vices at Padua” (Ph.D. diss., Bryn Mawr College, 1966), V:46–49, which cites literary sources for animal-like ears on human figures, though arguing that with Envy Giotto intended to connote not envy but rather greed and usury. 81 See Basile, Giotto, 41, 54, 67, 92.

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a measure of the heightened stylistic naturalism of Hellenistic and ancient Roman sculptures, lends support to Giotto’s legendary status as a patriarch of Renaissance artists thanks to whom the distant achievements of classical art were revived.82 To declare the pictured ear reborn through Giotto’s brush would be shortsighted, however. He was neither the first artist in late medieval Italy to study ears in ancient art nor the first to depict ears from various points of view. Moreover, his aural depictions owe to discourses current in his time. One possible source of thought is physiognomy, a framework which scholarship has already applied to Giotto’s painting.83 In that theory, an ear’s size and shape were among the external signs of a person’s character or moral identity. The Liber phisionomiae, written by Michael Scot in the early thirteenth century, associates large and fleshy ears with men who were simple, dull, or lazy, while seeing very small and delicate ears as markers of ingenuity, intelligence and wisdom.84 (The ears of Francis of Assisi were small and erect, according to Celano).85 In the much older Liber de physiognomia, written by an unknown author in the fourth century C.E. and still circulating in the early fourteenth century, large ears denote foolishness and impudence, short ears also betray foolishness, excessively round ears signify ignorance, and oblong, narrow ears indicate envy.86 Oblong and narrow, qualities likewise flagged in a physiognomic treatise by Pietro d’Abano, a contemporary of Giotto’s in Padua, bring to mind the ears of Envy in the Arena Chapel (Fig. 21).87 The same d’Abano personally admired Giotto’s ability to paint an exact likeness of a person’s face.88 Yet the physiognomic tradition offers an inadequate lens for ears in the Arena frescoes, firstly because most of Giotto’s ears are fairly uniform in size and shape. In addition, his paintings contain a broader and more nuanced range of emotions and character types than what physiognomic discussions of ears 82 Some of the many ears are poorly executed, we should note. For workshop practices, including free-hand painting, translation of preparatory drawings into fresco, drawing from life, and the scope of Giotto’s control over the training and work of other artists in the Arena Chapel, see Jacobus, Giotto and the Arena Chapel, 133–52. 83 Hubert Steinke, “Giotto und die Physiognomik,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 59, no. 4 (1996): 523–47. Dunbabin and Dickie, “ ‘Invidia Rumpantur Pectora’,” 18, notes that in ancient physiognomic discourse large, oblong ears could show a person’s disposition to envy. 84 Michael Scot, Liber phisionomiae 3.76. 85 Thomas of Celano, Vita prima S. Francisci Assisiensis 1.29: “aures erectae sed parvae.” 86 Liber de physiognomia, in Foerster, Scriptores physiognomici, 2:65–66. 87 Steinke, “Giotto und die Physiognomik,” 538–39. 88 Thomann, “Pietro d’Abano on Giotto,” 238–44. See also Eva Frojmovič, “Giotto’s Circumspection,” The Art Bulletin 89, no. 2 (June, 2007), 204.

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encompass. What is more, the physiognomic view of ears takes no account of the sense of hearing, the importance of which Envy and other figures mentioned above make clear. Encyclopedic writings are more useful to us for preconceptions about ears in Giotto’s time. From their perspective, the ear’s external form participates in the operation of auditory perception.89 Thirteenth-century compilers of knowledge such as Albert the Great, Bartholomew the Englishman, and Vincent de Beauvais wrote of the ear as an instrument of bodily hearing, and describe it in physical terms of cartilaginous composition and perforation.90 Especially pertinent is that encyclopedic resource for preachers, Giovanni da San Gimignano’s Summa de exemplis. “Man has erect ears,” Giovanni wrote, “that is, stretching toward heavenly things and the word of God, not hanging toward earth, as animals’ do.”91 In this statement, aural form signals spiritual potential. When Giovanni comes to “inner hearing and perception of the words of God,” he looks at the ear more closely. The Summa brings us to a different cultural practice of making listening meaningful, one beyond baptism and preachers’ appeals for audiences to open their heart’s ears and pray for divinely empowered hearing. Giovanni’s instruction makes a discipline of spiritual listening.92 It teaches what is necessary for inner hearing—we saw his approach to this topic above, in the introduction— and shows what hearing God’s word requires of the worshiper. In both parts, the physical ear’s qualities and forms serve Giovanni to demonstrate principles to remember and practice. The ear, he says, is permanently open because the worshiper must be ever-ready to hear God’s words, the word ‘ears’ (aures) referring to the drinking-in (hauriendis) of speech.93 The ear’s cartilage, which 89 The role of the outer ear in hearing does not come up in the philosophical discussions surveyed in Burnett, “Sound and Its Perception,” 43–69. 90 Albertus Magnus, De animalibus 12.3.2; Bartholomeus Anglicus, De genuinis rerum coelestium, terrestrium et inferarum proprietatibus 5.12 (De auribus); Vincent de Beauvais, Speculum naturale 21.10 (De auribus). 91 Joannes a S. Geminiano, Summa de exemplis 10.6: “Aures habet homo erectas, idest tendentes ad coelestia & Dei verba, non pendentes ad terram, vt animalia.” 92 Ibid., 6.11. 93 Ibid., 6.11: “Item auditus verborum Dei qualis esse debeat, ostenditur ex ipsis auribus. Primo quia ipsae aures s[em]p[er] sunt apertae. No[n] [e]n[im] aliquando claudunt sicut ipsi oculi, vel os: ex quo ostenditur q[ue] homo ad audiendum verba Dei debet esse semper paratus. Iacob[us]. ‘Sic homo velox ad audiendum. Vnde aures (secu[n]dum Isid[orum]) dicuntur ab hauriendis vocibus’.” Giovanni draws on Virgil’s Aeneid via the Etymologies, by Isidore of Seville, the early medieval encyclopedist, in making an etymological connection between ears and drinking-in spoken words. Isidore, Etymologiae 11.1.46 (Migne, PL 82.403.a–b): “ ‘Aurium’ inditum nomen a vocibus hauriendis, unde et Virg.: ‘Vocemque his auribus hausi’ [Aeneid 4.359].”

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protects hearing and enhances sound perception, signifies that what is heard should be written down lest it be forgotten.94 The ear’s tortuous form corresponds to the necessity of rumination, of slowing down for prolonged and frequent reflection on the received word, which is food for the mind.95 Ear holes mean that one must frequently use meditation, recitation, and action to return to the heard words of God.96 Ears’ immobility recalls that, like Mary Magdalen at Christ’s feet in the house of Martha (Luke 10.38–42), one must be undistracted and calm when listening to sacred speech.97 The relative smallness of ears, combined with their immobility, maximizes their effectiveness for hearing, and also cues the notion that listeners should draw much from short sermons and readings.98 Giovanni had in mind a generic ear for committing these points to memory. He also imagined a congenitally malformed ear. A defect of the orifice can prevent hearing, he wrote, just as when nature neglects to perforate the instrument of hearing in an infant. This is like a person who lacks

94 Ibid., 6.11: “Aures sunt cartilaginosae, quod duabus de causis fuit necessatium. Primo proter defensionem. Defendit enim ne quid nocutum decidat in auditum. Secu[n]do, propter iuuamen, quia s[cilicet] vox percussi aeris cum ad cartilaginem venerit, ibi fortis adunatur intra foramina auditus; & sic vnitus melius percipitur sonus. Quod ergo aures sunt cartilaginosae, signat, quod id quod homo audit ne postea per obliuionem perdatur, debet in carta scribere. Stultum enim est propter confidentiam memoriae nihil scripturae commendare.” 95 Ibid., 6.11: “Item oportet, quod sit tortuosus per ruminationem, scilicet vt verbum receptum, quod cibus mentis est, non subito transeat, sed diutius, siue frequentius ruminet, vel reuoluerat.” 96 Ibid., 6.11: “Aures sunt perforatae, sed sunt haec foramina sicut torcular transuersa, ne frigidus aer nimis cito intrans interiores panniculos laedat, & ne nociuum aliquod accidet, quod auditum impediat, … In quo signatur, quod qui verba Dei audiunt, debent ea transuertere meditando, & recitando frequenter, vel verba audita tranuertunt, qui ea corde perferutando discernunt, & in effectu operis vlterius conuertunt.” 97 Ibid., 6.11: “Homo inter omnia animalia habet aures immobiles, & breuiores, sed ad audiendum maxime efficaces. [Et] hoc est propter bonitatem complexionis. In quo quidem signatur, quod homo debet esse audiendo firmus, & quietus, sicut Maria Magdalena, qua sedebat secus pedes Domini, & audiebat verbum illius. Et hoc signat aurium immobilitas. Sed Martha econuerso mouebatur in ministrando.” 98 Ibid., 6.11: “Aures hominis sunt paruae. Nam (sicut dicit philosophus) homo inter omnia animalia habet aures immobiles, & breuiores, sed ad audiendum maxime efficaces…. Item significatur in breuitate aurium, quod homini delectabilis & competens est non prolixata, sed breuis doctrina vnde praedicationes, & lectiones no[n] debent esse longae, sed breues, & succinctae quae auditum delectent, & animum non grauent…. Homo habet aures breues, sed efficaces, signatur, quod ex paucis auditus debet multa coniicere, quia sicut terra bona ex paucis semibus plurima gramina producit, sic sapiens ex paucis verbis auditis plurimas sententias colligit.”

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the word of God, since what he hears does not penetrate to his heart, either because he does not understand what he hears or because he refuses to obey it.99 The Summa’s view of the ear is foreign to medieval physiognomy just as it is to Morellian connoisseurship and iconographic study. It does not lead us to see ears as unwitting signatures or as essentially meaningless. Mentally picturing the ear, for Giovanni, was a practice of auditory edification. If description of aural forms offers us a clue to something in this context, it is an engrained institutional worry about the estrangement of worshipers’ inner ears. The generic outer ear visualized by Giovanni addressed this concern by serving to counteract distraction from and negligence of sacred speech. The ear’s parts became devices for worshipers to adopt for remembering and implementing ideas they learned about what spiritually effective listening demanded. Together, those parts arguably hint at something further, too. Their utility for Giovanni was predicated both on the ear’s physicality and on its physical inexpressiveness of the soul’s engagement with external conditions and stimuli—the quality Berenson equated with invisibility. The ear thus seems to have lent itself to representing for worshipers a hinge or threshold, like a church door (to recall the analogy used by Visconti and Durand, in chapter one) between different orders of reality: the temporal and the eternal, the sensorial and the spiritual, the human and divine.100 This ambivalence may remind us of Giotto’s The Vision of Fra Agostino (Figs. 11–13). The fresco’s most visible ears belong not to those who react physically to the sound of Agostino’s voice but to the unmoving friars at the picture’s center who register the voice’s otherworldly message. Physical stasis and ear-visibility define the picture’s center, where higher hearing occurs, while the kinetic responses of amazement at the mute minister’s sudden speech happen at the periphery. The friar group, standing as inert as their own ears, 99

Ibid., 6.11: “Aliquando vero auditus non habetur ex defectu foraminis, sicut cum in puero procreato natura instrumentum auditus perforare neglexit, quod utique esse potuit, vel propter naturae defectionem, vel propter inobedientiam materiae. Sic etiam aliquando deficit aliquis circa verbum Dei: quia illud, quod audit, non penetrat ad cor eius. Quod est, vel ex defectu naturali intellectus, scilicet, quia non intelligit, quod audit. Sicut Dominus dixit discipulis adhuc rubidus: Adhuc & vos sine intellectu estis [Matt. 15.16]. Vel quia non recipitur ab affectu, & voluntate obediendi, vel faciendi.” Both Bartholomeus Anglicus and Vincent of Beauvais mention congenital hearing impairment in language similar to Giovanni’s. See Bartholomeus Anglicus, De genuinis rerum 5.12 (De auribus); Vincent de Beauvais, Bibliotheca mundi seu Speculi maioris 14.73 (De gravitate auditus, et surditate). 100 Apart from his tone of abhorrence, Pope-Hennessy may not have been far from this idea in referring to pictured ears as alien (“in-built receiving set”) to their immediate surroundings while also carrying out “divine functions.”

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epitomizes not only obedience, as suggested earlier, but also the Summa’s ideal of auditory attention to divine things. We should not mistake their listening for a passive and negligible mode of perception. Instead, it should be seen as a height of auditory discipline and receptivity. But to start understanding how artists attempted not only to depict but also to cultivate spiritual listening, as Giovanni tried to do in his Summa, and to begin realizing how much of pictures’ work to that end we have overlooked, an earlier fresco by Giotto is far more fruitful for us. With eyes open to pictured ears and their potential significance for spiritually hard-of-hearing worshipers, we turn to an extraordinary auditory remedy from the earliest fourteenth century: The Wedding Feast at Cana, in the Arena Chapel.

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A Feast for the Ears 1

Giotto’s The Wedding Feast at Cana

Wondrous aural healings came about at Christianity’s beginning, in the Gospels’ telling of it. Christ cured a deaf man with a command (“Ephpheta!”) and a moistened finger. With a touch, he reattached the sword-severed ear of Malchus, the Jewish servant. For medieval theologians and churchmen, these tales were not only testaments of Christ’s thaumaturgical power but also signs of recovery of the hearing lost in humans’ expulsion from Paradise, as noted earlier. The present chapter brings to light a scene that is comparatively inconspicuous but no less mythically momentous in its depiction of regained hearing. We come to it by way of another marvel, the canonical written account of which, in the Book of John, does not actually refer to ears and entails no interpretive tradition associating it explicitly with auditory change. The setting is a wedding reception which has run dry, in Cana, Galilee. There, Christ publicly reveals his divine nature for the first time when he transforms water into wine, a miracle which makes believers of his closest followers (John 2.1– 11). Further inaugural implications accrued to medieval remembrance of the event. Most important for our purposes is the distinction it had acquired by the early thirteenth century, well before Giotto, of being the world’s introduction to caritas.1 Caritas was spiritually fundamental from different standpoints. In the Gospels, Christ calls it the greatest commandment (Matt. 22.34–40; Mark. 12.28– 34; Luke 10.25–28). A “motion of the soul” (motum animi) toward delight in God as well as in oneself and one’s neighbor for God’s sake, caritas was the overarching lesson of Scripture and the reason for Christ’s birth and death, according to Augustine.2 Thinkers from Jerome (d. 420) to Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274) deemed it “the mother of all virtues.”3 The stakes for worshipers could not have been higher: Caritas enabled Christians to connect with their god and to attain eternal life.4 Auditory perception was basic to all of this. Reaching those 1 Innocent III, Sermo 8: Dominica prima post Epiphaniam (Migne, PL 217.346c). 2 Augustine, De doctrina christiana 3.10.15–16 (Migne, PL 34.71–72); Augustine, De catechizandis rubidus 4.7, 4.8 (Migne, PL 40.314–15). 3 R. Freyhan, “The Evolution of the Caritas Figure in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 11 (1948), 68n2. 4 Ibid., 68n3; Luke 10.25–8.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004460812_005

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distant aims demanded, in addition to caritas and other things, a lot of listening. Indeed, listening and caritas could be mutually nourishing, each increasing the spiritual efficacy of the other. The notion of a caritas-listening feedback loop goes back to religious training in early Christian contexts. It informs Augustine’s Instructing Beginners in the Faith (around 400 C.E.), specifically in that text’s assumption that Christians-in-training should listen with love when hearing an instructor speak words of divine love (i.e., God’s word).5 Listening with love meant being moved by love to listen to love attentively and patiently.6 Listening with love also meant thwarting grave impediments to love, including pride and envy, dangerous sins which medieval moralists traced back to Eve’s temptation.7 Caritas was thus another listening “attitude,” as we have labeled inclinations of obedience, faith, and humility in auditory attention. If the miracle of the wine at Cana could signify the advent of caritas in the world, by the same token it offered a narrative matrix for envisioning how the love that ultimately led to reunion with God started with the ear. The Arena Chapel was fertile ground for such a story to germinate in pictorial form. We have already observed Giotto’s keen attention to ears and auditory moments in the sacred past he painted on the chapel’s walls. Caritas itself enjoyed special reverence at the site, most publicly so in the building’s dedication to Saint Mary of Charity by its owner and Giotto’s patron, Enrico Scrovegni. As Anne Derbes and Mark Sandona have shown, esteem for the Virgin’s charity permeates several of the numerous scenes that make up the chapel’s pictorial narrative, which encompasses the lives of Mary and her parents, Joachim and Anna, and the life of Christ, and concludes with Pentecost and The Last Judgment. The Wedding Feast at Cana (Fig. 22) is one of the manifestations highlighted by the scholars.8 The Cana fresco, we will see, engages with caritas more extensively than has been understood up to now, and does so by means of its naturalistic depiction of space, architecture, objects, including ears and ear-like forms, and 5 Harrison, Art of Listening, 124–32. 6 For Augustine, the importance of setting this reciprocity in motion was such that he considered listeners’ retention of specifics of verbal instruction less pressing than the affection they felt in hearing them. Augustine, De catechizandis rudibus 3.5 (Migne, PL 40.313); Harrison, Art of Listening, 127–28. 7 Augustine, De catechizandis rudibus 4.8 (Migne, PL 40.315–16); Harrison, Art of Listening, 126. 8 Anne Derbes and Mark Sandona, “ ‘Ave charitate plena’: Variations on the Theme of Charity in the Arena Chapel,” Speculum 76, no. 3 (July, 2001): 599–637. The argument is reiterated and expanded in Anne Derbes and Mark Sandona, The Usurer’s Heart: Giotto, Enrico Scrovegni, and the Arena Chapel in Padua (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008).

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Figure 22 Giotto, The Wedding Feast at Cana, fresco, 1303–5, Arena Chapel, Padua Photo: Raffaello Bencini/Archivi Alinari, Firenze

secondary characters that lend the occasion an air of spontaneity and anecdotal enlivenment. The painter demonstrably shaped these elements around acts of perception, especially hearing, a dimension largely unremarked in Giotto studies.9 A sensory revolution unfolds as we examine the picture anew: It is the birth of caritas, articulated pictorially as a gradual shift from deafness to receptiveness to spoken words of divine love. Giotto, I argue, has reconfigured the 9 An exception is Andrew Ladis, Giotto’s O: Narrative, Figuration, and Pictorial Ingenuity in the Arena Chapel (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008), 121, which describes the scene in multisensory terms.

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biblical feast to open viewers’ inner ears for spiritually regenerative listening.10 Toward the chapter’s end I will suggest that at the root of this perceptual remediation were invidious circumstances motivating Scrovegni to promote an auditory attitude which, in addition to stirring souls and taking them closer to God and salvation, could also inspire fellow citizens’ good will. Cana is a good place to begin probing narrative art’s auditory work more deeply, not only because the picture concerns itself with one of the starting points of Christian listening, like faith or humility, but also because Giotto’s reworking of the traditional story is in some ways more concrete in its aural didactics and therefore easier for us to see. This is not to say that the artist disregarded the biblical account of Christ’s inaugural miracle. The fresco in fact suggests scrupulous adherence to its biblical source, the Gospel of John: On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. When the wine gave out, the mother of Jesus said to him, ‘They have no wine’. And Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come’. His mother said to the servants, ‘Do whatever he tells you’. Now standing there were six stone water jars for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons. Jesus said to them, ‘Fill the jars with water’. And they filled them up to the brim. He said to them, ‘Now draw some out, and take it to the chief steward’. So, they took it. When the steward tasted the water that had become wine, and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), the steward called the bridegroom and said to him, ‘Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the interior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now’. Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.11 The main actors here are Mary, Christ, and the steward. The servants are secondary, along with unnamed disciples, and a bridegroom. Giotto retained all these figures and made them perform actions related by the text. Giotto’s Mary and Christ address servants; the steward tastes; a servant fills a stone jar with water. Collectively they do not simply illustrate the text, however. There is a 10

The fresco anticipates depictions of banquets that would shape courtly viewers’ awareness of their own perceptual processes in the later fourteenth and fifteenth century. See Normore, Feast for the Eyes; Quiviger, “Banquets,” chap. 10 in Sensory World. 11 John 2.1–11, NSRV.

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simultaneity in the fresco that does not correspond to the sequence of actions we read in John. Mary speaks to the servants well before the steward tastes the wine, for instance: “Do whatever he tells you.” There are also gaps. Some of Giotto’s figures respond to things that have occurred but are not shown. Mary has already said to Christ, “They have no wine,” and he visibly acts on the statement rather than to question its propriety, as he first does in John. The servants have already drawn some of the new wine and taken it to the steward, who has just entered the room. We do not see him confirm that the water has become wine; the fresco stops with his sipping. This editorial choice on the part of Giotto, likely with advice, perhaps from more than one intellectual collaborator, inflects the gospel story in certain ways.12 Christ is depicted here as a newcomer. His divine nature and abilities are still unknown to the world. His disciples do not yet believe in him. Pausing the story in this way enabled Giotto to bring something else to attention: figures’ responses to the utterances that brought about the miracle. This emphasis would have helped viewers already familiar with the story to imagine those sacred statements and give them internal voice while becoming absorbed in its visible effects, like Dante’s pilgrim getting drawn into the purgatorial reliefs’ message of spiritual humility through virtually hearing the Virgin, the singers, and Trajan’s dialogue with the widow. Illuminating auditory distinctions come to notice through Cana’s hearers, and the differences would have moved early viewers to reflect on what listening with love meant while simultaneously reconditioning them to practice it themselves. 2

Scale of Listening

Hearing may be less obvious than other senses in Giotto’s Cana at first. Sight appears to prevail among the seated guests. One of Christ’s disciples stares at him, his brow creased in uncertainty about his mentor’s sudden intervention 12 Scholars disagree about the intellectual authorship of the Arena Chapel frescoes. Frojmovič has traced the program’s iconography to social, artistic, and intellectual relations, with Francesco da Barberino and Pietro d’Abano as contributors. See Frojmovič, “Giotto’s Circumspection,” esp. 206. Derbes and Sandona, Usurer’s Heart, propose instead a collaboration involving “the patron, his advisors, Giotto himself, and the artist’s senior assistants” (p. 152) and follow Claudio Bellinati in naming as the chapel’s overall “concepteur” Altegrado Cattaneo di Lendinara, a canon or high priest of Padua’s cathedral and a former jurist renowned for his learning and wisdom (pp. 24–25). Frojmovič, we should note, doubts Altegrado’s authorship (pp. 195, 208n1). Resolving the issue is beyond the scope of the present study. For the sake of simplicity, I refer to the frescoes reductively as Giotto’s while also allowing for others’ involvement and claims to the work.

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Figure 23 Giotto, steward, detail of The Wedding Feast at Cana, fresco, 1303–5, Arena Chapel, Padua Photo: Mondadori Portfolio/Electa/Sergio Anelli/Bridgeman

in the wine shortage.13 Christ, the bridegroom (next to Christ), the Virgin Mary, and another woman watch the steward. The servants, for their part, make little eye-contact with anyone. Non-visual sensations occur among them. The steward’s sipping alludes to taste, perhaps also smell (Fig. 23). Touch is manifest by the gripping of a sleeve, a carafe, a knife. Hearing comes into view more gradually, in concert with the viewer’s inner voicing of phrases from the gospel story. 13

Derbes and Sandona identify the figure as Andrew. Derbes and Sandona, Usurer’s Heart, 203–204n94.

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Figure 24 Giotto, pouring servant, detail of The Wedding Feast at Cana, fresco, 1303–5, Arena Chapel, Padua Photo: Mondadori Portfolio/Electa/Sergio Anelli/Bridgeman

Visibly obedient behavior prompts such auditory recollection, for instance. One servant concentrates on the stone jar into which she pours liquid (Fig. 24), bringing to mind Christ’s saying, “Fill the jars with water.” Two other servants have complied with Christ’s order to “draw some [of the jar’s contents] out and take it to the chief steward” and with Mary’s reinforcement in saying,

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“Do whatever he tells you.” One of them enters the banquet space through a side door, having retrieved the steward from an unseen kitchen or pantry (Fig. 25). The other, the furthest to the left, now stands near Christ, listening to him without facing him directly (Fig. 26).14 The emerging variance between sensory modalities of the servants, on the one hand, and the guests, on the other, suggests that Giotto assumed viewers would notice and find meaning in relationships between and among figures, including broad contrasts in behavior.15 Recent studies have construed the servants in Cana as models of social decorum and moral contraries that have nothing notably auditory about them.16 But it is precisely from the perspective of hearing that those figures gain greater coherence and narrative purpose. Ears are a logical place to resume our looking. The left ear of the water-pourer, which is highlighted and bends slightly from the weight of a thick braid of hair just above it, puns on the expression “inchinare l’orecchio” (inclining the ear), that is, to listen attentively (Fig. 24).17 The two other listening servants appear in profile position, their 14 Some scholars have understood him to be addressed or blessed by Christ, as Rintelen once suggested. Rintelen, Giotto und die Giotto-Apokryphen, 28–9. But on closer inspection the servant appears to stand at the end of the table, which his body overlaps, a position spatially incommensurate with standing exactly in front of Christ. Furthermore, the servant’s feet point not toward Christ but to Christ’s right. These details lead us to see his face not engaging Christ directly so much as partly turned toward him. Yet the impression of face-to-face interaction is hard to deny, an ambiguity I address below. Another ambiguity warrants comment here: While a majority of scholars identify the servant as a young woman, Renate Schumaher-Wolfgarten observes that, in the context of Giotto’s work, the figure’s short hair, ankle-high garment, and garland argue for a young man. Renate Schumacher-Wolfgarten, “Wein- und Speisewunder Jesu aus Oberitalien in Spätantike und Mittelalter: Giotto und das Silberkästchen von S. Nazaro,” in “Vivarium. Festschrift Theodor Klauser zum 90. Geburtstag,” special issue, Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum 11 (1984), 296–97n11. I take Schumacher-Wolfgarten’s point, and provisionally refer to the figure as he/him while hoping that future research will explore the issue. 15 Construction of meaning through antithesis and opposition is a more broadly operative strategy in the Arena frescoes. See Derbes and Sandona, Usurer’s Heart, 11–12. 16 Andrew Ladis, “The Legend of Giotto’s Wit and the Arena Chapel,” The Art Bulletin 68, no. 4 (Dec., 1986), 585, sees the fresco contrasting worthy servants with a foolish steward. Jacobus, Giotto and the Arena Chapel, 214, discusses the figures’ appearance and behavior in terms of decorum. 17 Chiara Frugoni, L’affare migliore di Enrico: Giotto e la cappella Scrovegni (Turin: Giulio Einaudi editore, 2008), 176, found the ear’s slight protrusion from the pressure of the braid a “delicious detail observed with affectionate bonhomie.” As regards idiomatic resonance, in Isaiah (55.3) we read, “Inclinate aurem vestram.” Beyond ‘inchinare l’orecchio’, other ear-bending expressions for listening current in late medieval Italy are ‘abbassare l’orecchio’ (to lower one’s ear) and ‘tenere l’orecchio a qualcosa’ (to hold one’s ear to

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Figure 25 Giotto, entering servant, detail of The Wedding Feast at Cana, fresco, 1303–5, Arena Chapel, Padua Photo: Mondadori Portfolio/Electa/Sergio Anelli/Bridgeman

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Figure 26 Giotto, inactive servant, detail of The Wedding Feast at Cana, fresco, 1303–5, Arena Chapel, Padua Photo: Archivi Alinari, Firenze

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ears articulated and highlighted. These particulars bring to mind connections made in Giovanni da San Gimignano’s Summa de exemplis between the ear and principles of disciplined spiritual listening. The very visibility of ears has significance in the Summa that applies to Cana. Just as the Summa turns the ear’s structural openness into a device for worshipers to remember to be ever prepared to hear divine speech, the servants in question show their readiness to hear Christ. Indeed, the young man behind the steward holds him firmly by the upper arm, his finger slightly creasing the sleeve, to steady him and ensure his compliance with Christ’s instructions, as urged by Mary (Fig. 25). The other young man in profile position, at left, rests still with arms held against his body. He enacts the calm, undistracted listening the Summa says the ear’s immobility should bring to mind in the practice of internal hearing (Fig. 26). A wide space separates this servant from his pouring and entering counterparts. There is imbalance from one side to the other. The labor at the right occurs in pictorial congestion. Each figure is only partly visible to us owing to intervening objects, the doorway, and the picture’s edge. There is also a discrepancy of scale, with servants at the right appearing slightly smaller than those at the left. Along with his larger size, the inactive servant stands in an area free of objects and holds nothing himself. Giotto set him apart from the others. Readiness to hear the Lord evidently has connotations of differing valuein the painting. Inaction may seem odd for a servant amid the dutiful carrying out of Christ’s first miracle, though there is a pictorial precedent for it.18 To see only that he waits for or listens to orders would not account for the pictorial privilege he enjoys. He may be in a state of wonder, knowing as he does that the wine came from water.19 At the same time, in his stillness and concentration on Christ’s speech he is like Mary Magdalen, a paragon of auditory attention.20 The Summa’s discussion of undistracted listening gives the example of Christ’s visit to Martha’s home: Mary Magdalen sits at Christ’s feet listening to his something). ‘Scoprirsi l’orecchio’ (to uncover one’s ear), meaning ‘to listen alertly’, readily applies to the three listening servants under discussion. 18 Schumacher-Wolfgarten, “Wein- und Speisewunder Jesu,” 296, and Pl. 35b. See also Amy Neff, “The Humble Man’s Wedding: Two Late Thirteenth-Century Images of The Miracle at Cana,” in Hourihane, Gothic Art and Thought, 293–323, and fig. 3. The figure in question, appearing in a manuscript dating to 1293, a Supplicationes variae (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Plut. 25.3, fol. 370v), folds his arms, right over left, as he looks at Christ. Giotto modified the pose, such that the right hand holds the left elbow. The change meaningfully shapes the figure’s upper body, as discussed below. 19 John 2.9. 20 Schumacher-Wolfgarten, “Wein- und Speisewunder Jesu,” 296.

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words while Martha is busy hosting him.21 When Martha protests her sister’s unhelpfulness, Christ responds that it is Mary who has made the better choice (Luke 10.38–42). Medieval thinkers associated the sisters with action and contemplation, two spiritual ways of life.22 Action meant giving doctrine to the ignorant and laboring. It also meant being joined to one’s neighbor in love (caritas) through work.23 Contemplation signified detachment from external cares, with mental concentration on the word of God. Love (caritas) of God and neighbor was a further valence of contemplation.24 Of the two modes, it was considered superior. Accordingly, the inactive servant stands apart, nearer Christ, like Mary sitting at Christ’s feet.25 He has moved toward love of God, and Christ appears almost to bless him in response.26 This distinction is crucial for the entire scene, because it makes the servant a singular witness to Christ’s extraordinary but still hidden nature.27 At the same time, the overall event gains meaning through the servant. Medieval commentators saw in Mary and Martha a contrast between feeding the Lord bodily and being fed by him spiritually.28 21 22

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24 25 26 27 28

Joannes a S. Geminiano, Summa de exemplis 6.11. Giovanni describes Martha as moving in serving: “Sed Martha econuerso mouebatur in ministrando.” The Glossa ordinaria, a medieval compilation of glosses on words and verses of the Bible, formerly misattributed to the Carolingian scholar Walafrid Strabo, comments on Luke 10.38–39 by saying that the two sisters “significantur vitae spirituales” (signify spiritual lives): active and contemplative. Walafrid Strabo [pseud.], Glossa ordinaria (Migne, PL 114.287b–c). For medieval perceptions of Mary and Martha, including their association with the active and contemplative life, see Giles Constable, Three Studies in Medieval Religion and Social Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 3–144. “Per Martha, operibus actuosa devotio, qua proximo in charitate sociamur…. Activa panem vel corporalem esurienti, vel doctrinae ignoranti tribuit, errantem corrigit, superbum ad humilitatem revocat, quae singulis expediant dispensat.” Strabo [pseud.], Glossa ordinaria (Migne, PL 114.287b). According to the Glossa, “Per Mariam [sociamur] religiosa mentis intentio in Dei verbo, qua in Dei amore suspiramus…. [C]ontemplativa, charitatem Dei et proximi retinet, sed ab exteriori actione quiescit.” Strabo [pseud.], Glossa ordinaria (Migne, PL 114.287b). Schumacher-Wolfgarten, “Wein- und Speisewunder Jesu,” 307n84, first suggested that the inactive servant referred to the contemplative life. Earlier we saw that the servant does not stand directly in front of Christ, though Giotto made it possible to see the two figures as facing each other. We recall that this is the very beginning of Christ’s public ministry. His divine nature is still largely unknown to others. Augustine, Sermo 104.1.1 (Migne PL 38.616): “Intenta erat Martha quomodo pasceret Dominum…. Maria suaviter audiret verbum dulcissimum, et corde intentissimo pasceretur.” The Glossa offers a similar formulation: “Intenta erat Maria quomodo pasceretur a Domino, intenta erat Martha: quomodo pasceret Dominum.” Strabo [pseud.], Glossa ordinaria (Migne, PL 114.287c). The words repeat almost verbatim in Guillaume Perrault’s thirteenth-century handbook for preachers, Summas of the Virtues and Vices: “Intenta erat

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What words the unmoving Mary hears from Christ, Luke does not say. Her listening to him is all that matters.29 Not only does Giotto’s servant recall Mary Magdalen being fed spiritually; the very act of listening could be conceived as an alimentary process. As the Summa explains, the ear’s tortuous form is necessary so that the received word, “which is food for the mind,” does not pass through quickly and can be “ruminated.”30 What began as a wedding banquet has become a spiritual feast for the ears, with its visually distinguished servant slowly ‘digesting’ Christ’s speech. The water-pourer and the entering servant are not the only figures to whom Giotto opposed the inactive servant, nor is he the only one who contrasts with them. Further antitheses are in evidence through the fresco’s two other servants, the steward and the young man positioned before the bride. The latter stands back-to-back with the contemplative servant, almost a reverse image of him, each of them wearing an ornate ankle-length gown and a garland wreath in his short hair (Fig. 22). The servant before the bride is also paired with the water-pourer, both figures handling a service implement, leaning over their tasks, and having their backs turned toward us, their faces visible only obliquely. The steward, for his part, is coupled with the young man who has brought him into the room. They almost mirror each other in facial profile and paunch. But the steward surpasses his handler in girth and has no visible ear. A cap conceals it. The steward and the servant before Christ bear comparison as well, beyond the active-inactive aspect. The two are equidistant from the picture’s center at opposite sides of the service area, a pendant-like arrangement. The body of each resembles an inanimate object. Scholars have noted how the steward’s rotund torso and creased shirt mimic the bulbous, fluted jars next to him as he tips their new contents into his mouth (Fig. 27).31 Undetected until now is Maria quomodo pasceretur a Deo, intenta erat Martha quomodo pasceret Dominum.” Guilielmus Peraldus, Summae virtutum ac vitiorum 1.4.8 (De praeeminentia vitae contemplatiuae respectu actiuae). Perrault also associates Mary Magdalen with divine love (caritas) when she listens to Christ: “Quartum est, quum quis libenter Deum audit, & audita ab eo retinet memoriter. Lucae 2. Maria conseruabat omnia verba haec, conferens in corde eo. Eiusdem: Magdalena sedens secus pedes Domini audiebat verbum illius. Ioan. 14. Qui habet mandata mea, & seruat ea, ille est qui diligit me.” Peraldus, Summae virtutum ac vitiorum 1.2.4.7 (De signis diuini amoris). 29 In the next scene on the chapel wall, The Raising of Lazarus (Fig. 34), Martha joins Mary in kneeling at Christ’s feet as he commands Martha’s dead brother, Lazarus, to return to life. 30 Joannes a S. Geminiano, Summa de exemplis 6.11: “Item oportet, quod sit tortuosus per ruminationem, scilicet vt verbum receptum, quod cibus mentis est, non subito transeat, sed diutius, siue frequentius ruminet, vel reuoluerat.” 31 Ladis, “Legend of Giotto’s Wit,” 585.

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Figure 27 Giotto, steward and stone jars, detail of The Wedding Feast at Cana, fresco, 1303–5, Arena Chapel, Padua Photo: Raffaello Bencini/Archivi Alinari, Firenze

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how the form of the inactive servant’s upper body echoes his own exposed ear (Fig. 26). If his physical stasis already makes him ear-like, as the Summa would have it, Giotto pushed the auricular similitude further. The enclosed, ovoid contour of his shoulders and sleeves forms an ear shape. The darkened space between the arms and torso corresponds to the shaded recession of a concha. The depression of fabric on his upper right arm bends, a tragus-like curve. The dark crease just below it is similar to an intertragic notch. This ear-likeness, coupled with the steward’s jar-likeness, adds to the contrast between wedding banquet and spiritual feast. Tipsy sipping is in tension with the imbibing of Christ’s speech. While the contemplative servant and the other listening servants divide into elevated but unequal states of auditory perception, the remaining two bring to life lower grades hearing. The ‘earless’ steward, who was not present when Christ ordered the stone jars refilled with water, knows only that the wedding wine is finished: “When the steward tasted the water that had become wine, and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew).”32 In the gospel account, he subsequently expresses to the bridegroom his surprise at the wine’s good quality. We have noted that Giotto’s fresco stops the action before the steward says anything. The bridegroom and the woman to the bride’s left listen for his finding, their own ears well-articulated. Their waiting, a reminder that Christ’s divinity has yet to be revealed, brings a further auditory dimension to the event—they are not as mono-sensory as it first appeared. For the steward, however, the sense of taste is everything. It absorbs him. His not having heard Christ and his ignorance of what the other servants have heard and know add to the credibility of testimony he will unknowingly give of the miracle a moment from now.33 The other unhearing servant has been entirely invented by Giotto. He alone has his back to Christ and involves himself with something other than what Christ commands. He is about to carve food in response to a hand signal from the bride (Figs. 22, 28). The servant pauses but shows no awareness of what is happening around him. We might construe his oblivion as a comment on the unusualness of the turn of events: A wedding guest has unexpectedly taken charge who has no high place at the table and whose authority has yet to be fully recognized. But an extraordinary anatomic detail, overlooked until now, 32 John 2.9 (NSRV). John does not specify that the steward was elsewhere. In representing him as having been absent until just now, Giotto put him out of hearing range at the moment of Christ’s wonder-working command. 33 I disagree with Ladis’s view of the steward as foolish in failing to recognize the good wine. But the late scholar’s interpretation of the steward as a figure of ignorance helps us see him as a guileless witness. Ladis, “Legend of Giotto’s Wit,” 585.

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Figure 28 Giotto, deaf servant, detail of The Wedding Feast at Cana, fresco, 1303–5, Arena Chapel, Padua Photo: Cameraphoto Arte Venezia/Bridgeman Images

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compels a different interpretation: The servant’s visible ear lacks an auditory canal (Fig. 29). Giotto has painted the equivalent of “nature neglected to perforate the instrument of hearing,” the phrase found in the Summa de exemplis and other encyclopedic works of the time, as noted in the previous chapter. Giovanni da San Gimignano linked such an ear to the idea of willful disobedience or a lack of understanding that prevents God’s word from reaching the heart. The servant boy in the fresco appears less unwilling than unable to hear Christ’s words.34 More than an aural hierarchy among the servants, Cana presents a progression in their appetite for the spiritual ‘food’ or ‘drink’ that is Christ’s speech. If, as Dvořák wrote long ago, Giotto’s The Lamentation (Fig. 16) shows a “scale” of aggrieved utterance, Cana offsets that emotional low with a scale of hearing, from external to spiritual. Its revelation to the viewer seems to be purposefully gradual, as we might expect of an exercise, especially one intent on avid perception of something meaningfully hard to perceive. The sequence develops around the service space, from one figure to the next, beginning with the physically deaf servant, followed by the steward, who has heard Christ only second-hand. The active servants personify the next grade up. Here too Giotto subdivided, making the entering servant slightly inferior to the water-pourer by having the Virgin direct at him the order she gave before Christ began to speak: “Do whatever he tells you” (John 2.5). The servant’s obedience is not assumed. He, along with the steward and the impaired servant, is as far back in pictorial space as the banquet table allows. The water-pourer and the inactive servant stand out against this background. The former is second highest spiritually, but her physical distance from Christ and the inactive servant suggests that she is far from the top. Her resemblance in pose to the physically deaf servant prompts comparison both in kind and in degree. While she performs work for Christ and he does not, they each figure a degree of less-than-contemplative listening. This puts the inactive servant in a category of his own both as an ear-witness to Christ’s divinity and as an incipient form of love of God—caritas Dei. He alone listens contemplatively. Of the servants now obeying Christ, only he enacts the attitude of caritas completely and thus most fully partakes of the spiritual feast. 34

For other medieval depictions of hearing impairment, see Aude de Saint-Loup, “Images of the Deaf in Medieval Western Europe,” in Looking Back: A Reader on the History of Deaf Communities and Their Sign Languages, ed. Renate Fischer and Harlan L. Lane (Hamburg: Signum, 1993), 379–402. According to Metzler, medieval thought could be contradictory as to whether congenitally deaf people could acquire Christian faith without hearing Christ’s teachings. Metzler, “Speechless,” 65–66.

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Figure 29 Giotto, deaf servant, detail of The Wedding Feast at Cana, fresco, 1303–5, Arena Chapel, Padua Photo: Cameraphoto Arte Venezia/Bridgeman Images

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Another important listener in Cana, arguably the most interesting one in terms of the outer-inner distinction in hearing, sits somewhat outside the servants’ hierarchical scale. This brings us to the bride. 3

Rebirth through the Ear

The woman at the center of Giotto’s Cana commands a curiously high level of importance, even for a bride (Fig. 30). She wears a crown. Her ornate gown falls to the floor in sumptuous folds. The only frontally positioned figure in the scene, she sits against a decoratively patterned wall which, with adjoining walls in angled projection toward us, resembles the middle panel of an altarpiece with wings opened in feast-day revelation. We might mistake her for the main subject of a medieval triptych. “Like an enthroned Madonna,” Osvald Sirén said of her more than a century ago.35 This majestic treatment is intriguing in that Christ’s mother, the central figure par excellence of early Italian triptych painting, sits next to her almost as a secondary figure. Giotto made the two women a momentary pair. Framed by the unhearing servants, the bride and the Virgin raise their right hands in communicative gestures. But only the Virgin wears a hooded mantel and has a nimbus, emblem of holiness. And only the bride has unconcealed ears, their antihelices brightly colored. Despite her physical proximity to others, Giotto’s bride appears isolated amid the room’s commotion. She pauses, as the deaf servant seems to detect and accentuate in pausing himself. Like the steward, she is absorbed by something. Her outward gaze is incongruous with her request for a morsel of food. Some scholars have seen in this figure an anticipatory feeling of abandonment, their assumption being that the bridegroom will soon leave her to follow Christ.36 The potential of that scenario to provoke her envy bears noting. Another scholarly view holds that the bride typifies the decorum prescribed for haut-bourgeois brides in late medieval Italy, a code of conduct which demanded avoidance of eye contact and a restraint of appetite for purposes of chastity.37 Brides’ behavior was under intense scrutiny. This social fact suggests that Giotto fashioned and positioned his bride to invite such inspection. But 35 Osvald Sirén, Giotto and Some of His Followers, trans. Frederic Schenck (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1917), 1:37. 36 Robert H. Rough, “Enrico Scrovegni, the Cavalieri Gaudenti, and the Arena Chapel in Padua,” The Art Bulletin 62, no. 1 (Mar., 1980), 34; Frugoni, L’affare migliore di Enrico, 175. 37 Jacobus, Giotto and the Arena Chapel, 233.

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Figure 30 Giotto, bride, detail of The Wedding Feast at Cana, fresco, 1303–5, Arena Chapel, Padua Photo: Cameraphoto Arte Venezia/Bridgeman Images

something other than troubled foresight and social conformity has arrested her. Sirén, who was struck a century ago by Giotto’s “psychological power of characterization” in the bride, saw her as “bewildered in the presence of the supernatural.”38 More to the point for us, she has just heard something out of the ordinary, and her response would have moved early viewers of the fresco to make its verbal form inwardly audible: “Vinum non habent” (They have no wine).39 38 Sirén, Giotto, 1:37. 39 In the fresco, we recall, the disciple and three of the servants respond themselves to things already said.

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That short phrase had transformative potential, according to moralists in medieval Italy. In Florence in 1304, preacher Giordano of Pisa told listeners that the Virgin Mary saying “They have no wine” showed her great wisdom and her skill in concise speech. The rarity of the Virgin speaking in the Gospels added gravity to her few utterances. Giordano also found in those words Mary’s many virtues, chiefly her fervent embrace of caritas. In saying the phrase, she shared with the world for the first time her son—a divine being, her treasure and joy.40 For other commentators, “They have no wine” mattered not only as something spoken but also as something heard. In the early thirteenth century, Pope Innocent III explained the phrase to mean divine speech that ignites charity in others through instruction and exhortation. Referring explicitly to the miracle at Cana, Innocent likened the abundance of wine at the beginning of the feast to charity’s glow at the beginning of conversion to Christianity; then the wine runs out, since charity cools, in accordance with divine dispensation. The change of spirit (vicissitudo spiritus) comes and goes mysteriously, as described in the Book of John: “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes” (John 3.8, NSRV).41 This sonorous image emerges recast in the early fourteenth century, in canto 13 of Dante’s Purgatorio. As the pilgrim draws near the envious, whose excitable eyes are sewn tightly shut with wire, an invisible spirit flies past him repeatedly calling out “They have no wine” until it fades in the distance. The voice is an “invitation to the table of love.”42 It works like the cord of a whip, drawn from love, to goad the envious toward charity.43 Giotto’s bride has visibly been pricked by such a sound. She exhibits neither the stirring of envy nor unsteadying inebriation from the banquet’s wine. The artist, I believe, visualized here the sudden change of spirit that precedes charity’s warm glow. The bride’s comportment attests to the spirit of Christ’s first miracle.44 40 Giordano da Pisa, Avventuale fiorentino 1304, 477–89. 41 Innocent III, Sermo 8: Dominica prima post epiphaniam (Migne, PL 217.347b–c): “ ‘Cum autem vinum in hoc convivio defecisset, mater Jesu dixit ad illum: “Vinum non habent”.’ … Vinum in hoc loco propter fervorem signat charitatem, de qua sponsa dicit in Canticis: ‘Introduxit me in cellam vinariam, et ordinavit in me charitatem’ [Song of Sol. 2.4]. Vinum illud abundat in principio nuptiarum, quia charitas in initio conversionis fervescit. Sed interdum deficit istud vinum, quia charitas aliquando frigescit, quod nonnumquam contingit ex dispensatione divina, ut vicissitudo venientis et recedentis spiritus ostendatur, qui, ‘ubi vult spirat, et vocem ejus audis, et nescis unde venit, aut quo vadit’ [John 3.9].” 42 Dante, Purgatorio 13.27: “a la mensa d’amor cortesi inviti.” 43 Ibid., 13.25–40. 44 The composition of the adjacent fresco, The Raising of Lazarus (Figs. 34, 35), is similar to that of Cana: Christ speaks at left, with onlookers at right and figures in the middle who are on the verge of belief in Christ’s divine power. The steward and Lazarus occupy

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Figure 31 Giotto, stone jar necks (with and without ‘ears’), detail of The Wedding Feast at Cana, fresco, 1303–5, Arena Chapel, Padua Photo: Raffaello Bencini/Archivi Alinari, Firenze

Objects collaborate in articulating the bride’s state. Ear-like forms proliferate at the right, near the servant who pours water from one sort of container to another: the handle of the pitcher she raises, also the ‘ears’ of amphorae standing on the low table between her and the steward.45 At least one of the stone jars lacks handles, a discrepancy which corresponds to the invisibility of the steward’s ear (Fig. 31). The three jars with ears, each positioned with only one handle fully visible, correlate with the three obedient servants whom we see from the side (Fig. 22). This relationship is not far from a twelfth-century explication of one of wedding jars at Cana as a symbol of obedience to teachers of Christ’s word, a view which connects the stone receptacles of the new

45

roughly the same position and have comparable narrative functions: The listened-for speech of each will make believers of onlookers. As in Cana, in Lazarus the miracle and its conversional effect on bystanders are incomplete. A man at the center of Lazarus, as Jules Lubbock has observed, “is caught at the turning point when his expression changes from scepticism to belief.” Lubbock, Storytelling in Christian Art, 58. For further discussion of vocal power in Giotto’s Lazarus, See Shoaf, “Voice and Wisdom,” 215, 220–21. Isidore of Seville noted that the term “amphora” derived from the vessel’s shape, with its twin handles resembling ears. Isidore, Etymologiae 16.26.13 (Migne, PL 82.595c): “Amphoro vocata, quod hinc et inde levetur. Haec Graece a figura sui dicta dicitur, quod ejus ansae geminatae videantur aures imitari.” The jars in Giotto’s fresco look something like those in the foreground of an earlier depiction of the wedding feast, in the Upper Church of San Francesco, in Assisi. But the latter have no handles, which suggests Giotto’s deliberateness in adding ‘ears’ to his. Schumacher-Wolfgarten, “Wein- und Speisewunder Jesu,” pl. 37a.

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Figure 32 Giotto, vase, detail of The Wedding Feast at Cana, fresco, 1303–5, Arena Chapel, Padua Photo: Raffaello Bencini/Archivi Alinari, Firenze

wine to compliance in listening to Christian speech.46 But Giotto went beyond reiterating a traditional symbolic reading of the jars. He used the forms to create relationships among elements in the picture to reinforce gradations of listening attitudes. Perched on the gallery in the center of the picture, high above the action, an elegant vase is perched. Originally finished in silver, it is the sole decorative interruption of the feast room’s strong horizontals, from the colorfully striped wall below to the arrangement of finials with which the vase shares the gallery’s airy top (Fig. 32).47

46 Bernard of Clairvaux, Dominica prima post octavam epiphaniae, Sermo 1.4 (Migne, PL 183:156d). 47 Ladis, “Legend of Giotto’s Wit,” 585, mentions the former silver finish of the vase. Jacobus, Giotto and the Arena Chapel, 315n33, suggests that the embroidered panels and borders of the bride’s dress, now black, were “probably silver originally.”

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The vase’s alignment with the bride is exact (Fig. 22). Its contours vaguely match what we see of her from the table up, each with a slender neck widening into a body. Both of its ears are visible, like hers, though they are more pronounced. Its differences from, and placement far above, the stout stone jars have elicited symbolic interpretation.48 But the contrast speaks to the dissimilarity between the servants’ responses to Christ’s command and the bride’s receptivity to the Virgin’s phrase. The bride-vase relationship also gestures at larger significance as it draws the viewer’s eyes upward, from the walls surrounding the horizontal action, past the gallery to the sky. The intricate coordination of objects, bodies, space, and relationships around the bride raises questions that lead to further insights into Giotto’s auralization of the Cana story. Why should the bride serve as witness to Mary’s charity? What made her ears receptive to “They have no wine”? Physical proximity to the Virgin is an insufficient answer. Christ was Mary’s intended audience, after all, and because he sits across the room from the Virgin, everyone else has heard her too. Social class cannot therefore be the answer either, though it does play a role. The Gospel itself says nothing about the bride, but some other accounts of the miracle at Cana do mention her. In a legend current in thirteenth-century Italy, the bridegroom is John the Evangelist, who, after the wedding feast, he leaves his bride to follow Christ. The bride meanwhile perseveres in her virginity and later joins the Virgin.49 Giotto appears to have had in mind such a narrative. It is an occasion of close family, with John sitting next to his cousin (Jesus) while his bride is flanked by his mother (Mary Salome) and aunt (the Virgin Mary).50 The bride’s socially unsecured place here (despite her marital union with the groom), along with her foreseeable departure, deepens her witness-function. Like the steward, she is an impartial outsider who brings an additional qualification to the role. His is gustatory 48

Ladis, “Legend of Giotto’s Wit,” 585, saw a hierarchical parallel between the bride’s alignment with the vase above her and the steward’s jar shape. In his view, the bride-vase relationship had “sacramental connotations” and symbolically offset the steward’s association with folly. 49 Voragine, Golden Legend, 1:382. Voragine mentions a version of the story then in circulation that named Mary Magdalen as John the Evangelist’s bride. That Giotto intended the bride in the fresco to be the Magdalene is a possibility raised by Derbes and Sandona, Usurer’s Heart, citing other late medieval texts (p. 202n70). The authors also discuss a late medieval view of Mary Magdalen as an exemplar of charity, beginning with her wiping Christ’s feet at the house of Simon, in the Book of Luke (Luke 7.38), and culminating in her doing the same again later, in the Arena fresco of The Crucifixion. If the bride in Giotto’s Cana is indeed Mary Magdalen, then—to return to my argument—hearing “They have no wine” introduces her to charity. Derbes and Sandona, Usurer’s Heart, 75. 50 Rough, “Enrico Scrovegni,” 33–34, understood Cana in these terms. A visually unifying aspect of this family, one not noticed by Rough, is that each member watches the steward.

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judgment, as we have seen. Hers is chastity. Giotto insinuated this point both through the physical separation of the married couple and through the juxtaposition of the steward’s large belly and the bride’s lack of appetite.51 This duality is consistent with a patriarchal social code, found in late medieval courtesy literature, which associated a bride’s craving for food with unchastity.52 More germane for us, however, is bodily desires’ dissociation from spiritualized perception in the bride. There is nothing unusual about this, from the perspective of medieval Christian doctrine. “Live by the Spirit, I say, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh,” Paul wrote in his Letter to the Galatians. “For what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh” (Gal. 5.16–17, NSRV). In his First Letter to the Corinthians, Paul spoke more of unmarried women and virgins being “anxious about the affairs of the Lord, so that they may be holy in body and spirit,” as opposed to the married woman, who “is anxious about the affairs of the world, how to please her husband” (1 Cor. 7.34, NSRV). As to the relationship between sexual purity and receptivity to divine speech, thirteenth-century theology saw a direct connection. Bonaventure held that virgins and the continent were the best examples of the good soil necessary for God’s “seeds” (words) to take hold, grow, and bear spiritual fruit.53 Variants of these ideas, bearing specifically on chastity, inform the Arena frescoes.54 The narrative program touches on chastity earlier. Sexless, divinely-willed fertility occurs for the Virgin Mary as well as for her senescent mother (Anna) and cousin (Elizabeth).55 Giotto also emphasized men 51 52 53

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Just as the steward’s ears are hidden by his cap, the bride’s belly is discreetly concealed by the table. Jacobus, Giotto and the Arena Chapel, 233. Bonaventure, Dominica in sexagesima, sermo (S. Bonaventurae Opera Omnia, 9:200): “ ‘In terram bonam’ verbum seminatur, quando quod intellegitur opere completur: et tunc verbum ‘facit fructum trigesimum’ in coniugatis, ‘sexagesimum’ in continentibus, sed ‘centesimum’ in virginibus.” Bonaventure comments here on Christ’s parable of the sower. For connections between chastity and spiritual hearing, with particular regard for music and another of the chapel’s frescoes (The Wedding Procession), see Beck, “Marchetto da Padova,” 15–17. At the same time, Giotto vilified carnal desires in the chapel’s The Last Judgment. See Anne Derbes and Mark Sandona, “Triplex Periculum: The Moral Topography of Giotto’s Hell in the Arena Chapel, Padua,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 78 (2015): 41–70. The fresco cycle has an Annunciation to Mary as well as an Annunciation to Anna and two adjacent Annunciations to Joachim, where God’s plans for the pregnancies are disclosed. A pregnant Elizabeth appears in a Visitation scene. In this instance, it was her husband, Zechariah, who learned of the pregnancy from an angel. Though Giotto did not depict him in the Arena Chapel, Zechariah was a prominent figure in the art of late medieval Italy, as chapter four will discuss.

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who were “symbolic of conjugal chastity.”56 They include the Virgin’s father (Joachim), her husband (Joseph), and her nephew (the evangelist John).57 Three of the spouses in those pre-Cana stories (Anna, Joachim, and Mary) are shown hearing angelic announcements of their divinely-endowed offspring.58 The bride in Cana somewhat fits the pattern connecting chastity with hearing divine messages of generosity. But her case is also dissimilar. No angel speaks to her. No blood relationship exists between her and the Virgin. No pregnancy is at issue. At the same time, the bride’s chastity and outsider status cannot be enough to account for Giotto’s depiction of her heightened receptivity to “They have no wine” because, traditionally speaking, she is a ‘nobody’. The Cana legend variant mentioned above does not really concern her. Some versions of the story omit her altogether.59 A Wedding Feast at Cana, painted around 1308–11 by Duccio and assistants on the Maestà, the great altarpiece for the cathedral of Siena (now in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Siena), has no bride. The Gospel does not mention one, as already noted. In sum, no person could seem less relevant to the miracle of the wine than the bride. According to the Book of John, the importance of the wonder, perceptually and spiritually, centered on Christ. It was an early revelation. Christ did “the first of his signs” and “revealed his glory” and “his disciples believed in him” for the first time (John 2.11, NSRV). Medieval commentators adduced other consequences in this revelatory moment, all of them assuming that humanity’s spiritual redemption and salvation were ultimately at stake. For Pope Innocent III, with 56 The words are Rough’s. Rough, “Enrico Scrovegni,” 33. 57 Ibid., 29–34. On John, see also Derbes and Sandona, “Triplex Periculum,” 69–70. 58 Joachim, for his part, is at first reluctant to listen fully to the divine messenger, a point seemingly implied in Giotto’s consecutive inclusion of two scenes of an angel communicating with him just prior to The Meeting at the Golden Gate. In his first annunciation ( Joachim’s Sacrifice), the angel fails to persuade him to return to Anna. His shame at having been cast out of the temple for his infertility (the fresco cycle’s very first scene) may obstruct his listening too. After his second annunciation ( Joachim’s Dream), seeing Anna at the Golden Gate confirms what he heard the angel say. When Giotto’s Anna touches his ear so intimately in The Meeting at the Golden Gate (Fig. 20), the gesture arguably celebrates the role of hearing in advancing God’s plan and in spiritual fertility. If Anna and Joachim’s famous kiss in Giotto’s fresco alludes to or somehow explains Anna’s miraculous conception of Mary, as many scholars have thought, the insertion of Anna’s fingers into Joachim’s ear cannot be incidental. 59 Federico Visconti, the Pisan archbishop, referred to the Cana story as one of three instances of the glory of the Lord being revealed to all people, summarizing it succinctly: “Tertia fuit in nuptiis Iohannis evangeliste in Cana Galilee, ubi mutavit aquam in vinum” (The third [manifestation] was at the wedding of John the Evangelist in Cana, Galilee, where he changed water into wine). Visconti, Les sermons, 492.

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the miracle of the wine man was converted and transmigrated from error to charity, from vices to virtues, from the Law of Scripture to the Law of Grace.60 Other Christian authorities recognized the event as the beginning of a new age of the world, a changing of the water of the Old Testament into the wine of the New Testament.61 Giotto stressed that typological relationship by juxtaposing his Cana with a quatrefoil in which Moses miraculously (and perhaps with distrust toward God) draws water from rock.62 The painter also went further in enlarging the wedding feast miracle. In the bride, a figure barely defined by tradition, he saw an opportunity to magnify the event’s spiritual incipience while maintaining the specificity of action, locale, materiality that seem to root the moral and metaphysical revolution solidly in worldly experience. Indeed, many of those details gesture toward the spiritual. Cana is replete with motifs of passage (Fig. 22). Water pours. Wine tips. A threshold is crossed. These physical particulars of the miracle’s production cluster at the right, among the active servants. The transformation of water into wine is not actually shown; we infer it from the juxtaposition of the pouring and the sipping. Other passages have more abstractly to do with changes in attitude or disposition, such as the staggered progression among the servants in the quality of their attention to (or ‘drinking-in’ of) Christ’s speech. The contemplative servant, having crossed the service space after drawing out wine for the steward, passes from an active state. Christ himself has changed. He is an altered listener, initially resistant to his mother’s expression of love, then receptive to it. The darkened concha of his ear is the largest in the scene (Fig. 33).63 Vessels change in Cana, from the illusionistic girth and tactility of the jars on the platform in the foreground to the slender, diminutive form of the formerly gleaming vase above the bride. Even the picture’s architecture has unfixed qualities evocative of movement and change. The structure’s side door is open. The decoration spanning its lower wall interposes thin grey-blue stripes and wide red stripes, a pattern oscillating between the colors of water and wine.64 The enclosure loses solidity further up, where sparsely ornamented plaster half-dissolves in shadows, the wall yielding to an openwork gallery (with visible wood grain) crowned by finials connecting gallery with sky. The gradual opening precedes a structural 60 Innocent III, Sermo 8: Dominica prima post Epiphaniam (Migne, PL 217.345c–350d). 61 Laurine Mack Bongiorno, “The Theme of the Old and the New Law in the Arena Chapel,” The Art Bulletin 50, no. 1 (Mar., 1968), 16. 62 Located in the vertical decorative strip just to the left of Cana (Fig. 35). 63 Aurally, he is a late medieval Marcus Aurelius, to recall Winckelmann’s observation about the size of ears’ inner openings in the ancient emperor’s sculpted portraits (chapter two). 64 The grey-blue stripes were originally flanked by a darker color or silver, traces of which are still visible behind the seated men as well as behind the Virgin.

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Figure 33 Giotto, Christ, detail of The Wedding Feast at Cana, fresco, 1303–5, Arena Chapel, Padua Photo: Archivi Alinari, Firenze

shift from horizontally to vertically oriented compositions later in the narrative, where the dead Christ will return to life and ascend toward Heaven. Derbes and Sandona, who first noted this modification in directional emphasis, thought its purpose was to aggrandize “the movement from death to life, from enclosure to release,” an emphasis they found in other Arena frescoes, one of which is located just below Cana (The Lamentation), the other just to its right (The Raising of Lazarus) (Figs. 16, 34, 35).65 Considered in this context, Giotto’s rendering of the physical setting of the wedding feast elaborates the metaphor of spiritual birth, though the prevalence of horizontality keeps the scene earthbound, pre-natal, inceptive—unlike the rises of adjacent scenes.66 Giotto placed the bride amid the fresco’s proliferation of passages. She occupies an intermediate position between Christ and steward, between active and inactive servants, between the Virgin and Christ, and between the miracle’s cause and its impending manifestation. She is complexly transitional herself. On one level, she has entered a “liminal” state—to borrow a familiar term from the folklorist Arnold Van Gennep for a phase of rites of passage—having just been separated from her position in society through marriage and yet far from reaching her new, stable identity in joining the Virgin.67 More immediately, she has been transported by the utterance of “They have no wine.” The fresco pauses on this response just as sharply as it stops water in mid-pour. Unlike the contemplative servant, the bride remains incompletely detached from

65 66 67

Anne Derbes and Mark Sandona, “Barren Metal and the Fruitful Womb: The Program of Giotto’s Arena Chapel in Padua,” The Art Bulletin 80, no. 2 (June, 1998), 286. The chapel’s fresco decoration as a whole embraces this dynamic as an organizing principle, with its colorfully decorated walls enclosing the viewer and its blue, starry vault opening the way upward. Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, trans. Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee (1908; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 11.

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Figure 34 Giotto, The Raising of Lazarus, fresco, 1303–5, Arena Chapel, Padua Photo: Raffaello Bencini/Archivi Alinari, Firenze

the repast. She still listens to the short phrase she has heard, now doing so inwardly. Her condition recalls the necessity of rumination, of slowing down for prolonged reflection on divine speech’s “food for the mind,” which the discipline of inner hearing taught by the Summa de exemplis pegs mnemonically to the ear’s tortuous form.68 Giotto magnified this turn by putting the bride in the picture’s exact center. A side effect of the main event, her listening is also its spiritual crux.

68 Joannes a S. Geminiano, Summa de exemplis 6.11: “Item oportet, quod sit tortuosus per ruminationem, scilicet vt verbum receptum, quod cibus mentis est, non subito transeat, sed diutius, siue frequentius ruminet, vel reuoluerat.”

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Figure 35 Giotto, The Wedding Feast at Cana, The Raising of Lazarus, The Lamentation of Christ, fresco, 1303–5, north wall, Arena Chapel, Padua Photo: Archivi Alinari, Firenze

Anthropologists observe that in different cultures acts of listening to songs, sounds, and noises have served as ways of moving between worlds.69 This 69

Thomas Porcello, Louise Meintjes, Ana Maria Ochoa and David W. Samuels, “The Reorganization of the Sensory World,” Annual Review of Anthropology 39 (2010), 56. See also Anthony Jackson, “Sound and Ritual,” Man, new ser. 3, no. 1 (June, 1960): 293–99.

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applies to representations of spiritual passage as well. The Christian Bible contains transitional moments which are accompanied by unusual voices or other disconcerting sounds. For instance, just prior to conceiving Christ, the beginning of God’s effort to redeem a fallen humanity, Mary is frightened by the angel’s greeting (Luke 1.29). After Christ’s death, at Pentecost, the gathering of apostles that heralds Christianity’s spread throughout the world, there is the amazing speaking in togues and, just prior to that: “Suddenly from Heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind” (Acts 2.2, NSRV).70 Spiritual passage is accompanied by extraordinary auditory experiences also in the poetry of Giotto’s time. At the entry into Hell, in Dante’s Comedy, the air is heavy with sighs, laments, and other grievous sounds.71 The opening of a metal door at Purgatory’s physical threshold produces an unearthly roar, followed by music mingling with a semi-intelligible voice.72 Dante’s spiritual restoration in Purgatory occurs between the “visible speech” of marble sculptures and the hearing-test of walking through flames to the sound of song, mentioned in chapter one. Other sounds arise at transitions within that span. It is upon entering the circle of the envious that the narrator hears the unbodied voice loudly repeating, “They have no wine.” Giotto’s Cana itself is a beginning in the context of the broader fresco program. In the two scenes immediately following it—The Raising of Lazarus (Fig. 34) and The Entry into Jerusalem— disciples, converts, and crowds are drawn to Christ in growing numbers. The spiritual movement begins with the bride’s pause at hearing “They have no wine.” One might object that in the eyes of medieval audiences Christ’s miracle of the wine would have been enough to signify the epochal change, given the ideas already attached to the feast as a turning point toward Christianity. In Giotto’s fresco, however, that turn is auditory also in substance. Listening has become a condition of the movement toward charity, that virtue which, according to Innocent III, replaced human error at Cana. Theologians defined charity not only as love of neighbor and of God but also, following Paul’s Letter to the Colossians, as a bond that unified the community of the faithful among themselves and with the divine.73 Something approaching love of neighbor 70

The Arena Chapel fresco cycle includes an Annunciation to the Virgin(mentioned earlier) and a Pentecost. 71 Dante, Inferno 3.22–33. Later in that canticle, as the poem moves from one major part of Hell to another, the noise level of the cascading Phlegethon, a river of blood, rises from a hum to a blast (Inf. 16.92–105). 72 Dante, Purgatorio 9.133–45. Upon entering Paradise, a passage “beyond humanity,” the narrator hears a new and mysterious sound. 73 Col. 3.14: “Super omnia autem haec, caritatem habete, quod est vinculum est.” Cited in Derbes and Sandona, “ ‘Ave charitate plena’,” 620.

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and love of God occurs among the active and contemplative servants who listen to Christ in Giotto’s fresco. Christ is not the sole or even primary author of these stirrings of new community, his commanding presence in the scene notwithstanding. It is the Virgin who has brought it all into being with fruitful words which seem to abide in the banquet’s actions and details and almost to hang in its air, waiting for the viewer to give them voice.74 Her speech supersedes divine fertilization and blood relations here as a means of spiritual propagation. The chaste bride offers a glimpse of charity’s conception: the moment when divine love is first heard receptively enough to bring about the departure from self that spiritual communitas requires. Her ears become organs of spiritual reproduction.75 A new kind of conceptio per aurem is in progress, and it sets everything in motion.76 As if to impress the lesson gently, the curious exedra-like building, a womb of charity, has the whispered appearance not only of an altarpiece, as suggested earlier, but also of a massive ear, immobile, permanently open, facing up.77 Around the time Giotto painted the Arena frescoes, Giovanni da San Gimignano compiled his Summa, which included the idea that humans have erect ears, “that is, stretching toward heavenly things and God’s word,” as quoted in chapter two.78 If we apply the Summa’s teaching on inner hearing further, Cana’s great ear looks increasingly functional. Its tortuous form is filled with divine speech for viewers to ‘chew over’ in undistracted calm. 74 My thinking here is inspired both by Nancy Ševčenko’s discussion of “fruitful words” in Byzantine art and by Derbes and Sandona’s multivalent conception of fertility and rebirth in relation to the Arena frescoes. Nancy Ševčenko, “Written Voices: The Spoken Word in Middle Byzantine Monumental Painting,” in Boynton and Reilly, Resounding Images, 160; Derbes and Sandona, “Barren Metal and the Fruitful Womb,” 278–79, 282, 285–86—to cite only a few pages. 75 For other connections between the ear, conception, and birth in medieval art, see Jütte, History of the Senses, 92–93; Kollwitz, “Im Anfang was das Ohr,” 31–36. 76 The new listening we see in the bride is a basis not only for the spiritual community that emerges in Lazarus and other scenes following Cana. It also puts into further relief previously mentioned ears in the fresco program that look spiritually receptive in more conventional ways (Gregory the Great’s, also those of the dead rising at the trumpets’ sounding in The Last Judgment), spiritually deaf (Envy’s), and spiritually deaf-but-redeemable (Malchus’s). Cana is the genesis of this dynamic. As an auditory milestone, the fresco also introduces a background that adds narrative depth to subsequent scenes of pious and impious responses to Christ’s utterances, building conflict between the nascent Christian community and its adversaries, between movement toward eternal salvation and descent into Hell. 77 The curved projecting gallery would be the helix; the parallel arcs of wall and table, the antihelix; the curved floor area, the concha; the dark and rounded doorway, the hole. The low table covered with jars occupy a position analogous to the tragus. 78 Joannes a S. Geminiano, Summa de exemplis 10.6.

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Its heavenward opening may have reminded them to be ever ready to receive love’s spirit, its portal recalling their duty to return to that sound in attention and in action. 4

Aural Ambitions

Up to now we have examined the servants and bride of Cana, with a look also at the Virgin, Christ and other figures. Some important guests are not shown: early viewers themselves, pausing before the fresco in the Arena Chapel. By means of various pictorial devices Cana invited them to imagine themselves at the feast being nourished spiritually through the ears. A subtle shift in scale makes the seated figures appear larger than those standing and therefore close to us despite sitting further back. The disappearance of the water-pourer’s body behind the picture’s right border creates an illusion of continuity between pictorial and real space, an impression strengthened by the highly modeled jars’ placement in the extreme foreground. The scene’s foreground opens onto an unseen courtyard which viewers are implied to occupy, making them both beneficiaries of the new wine and witnesses to the advent of caritas. ‘Invitation’ here begins with visual inclusion but opens to the auditory, to inward hearing of “They have no wine” with the help of many pictorial elements. The fresco’s generosity in that regard, its bounty of pertinent details, interrelationships, nuanced differences, and intersecting storylines, intimates an expectation of absorbing and holding viewers’ attention. The picture’s demands on them are considerable. We may find it hard to imagine viewers hearing the world around them while they explored the story, reflected on its intricacies, and ruminated on “They have no wine.” Giotto’s lesson in listening works hard to make itself an object of contemplation. Viewers could be expected to welcome the overture. Through baptism, every person to enter the chapel—its owner, Enrico Scrovegni, and his family, associates, guests, as well as members of the public—had had their ears spiritually opened.79 Given inner hearing’s need for reactivation and discipline, Cana offered a novel way to reset receptivity to God’s word and its ethos of love. These were desired outcomes for any Christian ritual context, just as they were for an individual such as Scrovegni, whose financial fortune must have 79 A thirteenth-century Paduan Liber ordinarius mentions the ephpheta (called “Aperituri”) being performed on infants and children during baptismal rites at Lent and Pentecost. Il ‘Liber ordinarius’ della chiesa padovana, ed. Giulio Cattin and Anna Vildera (Padua: Istituto per la Storia Ecclesiastica Padovana, 2002), 103, 148. I am grateful to Anne Derbes for this reference.

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made spiritual redemption an urgent issue.80 Cana’s auditory feast was likely prepared with other motivations as well. Concerns about lust and carnality are a plausible basis, given the frescoes’ emphasis of chastity and sins of the flesh. An air of illicit sex may have surrounded the property, wealth, and reputation of the Scrovegni.81 But in view of the importance Cana gives to the virtue of charity above all, let us consider instead envy, the vice that Giotto made conspicuously aural (as well as oral) and opposed directly to Charity in the dado-level array of virtue and vice personifications on either side of the chapel space.82 There is even an intriguing relationship between Envy and the servant in Cana who stands before the bride. Similarly clad in plain garments (by comparison with their respective, higher ranking peers), they are unable to hear anything spiritually good. If we interpret that relationship in class terms, social attitudes suggest its importance to the Scrovegni family, who must have employed many servants in their palace. Envious servants could be dangerous, their poisonous tongues corroding domestic tranquility and leaking private issues to public ears, Francis Petrarch warned in his mid-fourteenth-century De remediis utriusque fortunae.83 In Giotto’s Envy, a snake bursts through the suffering woman’s lips, figuring not only a poisonous tongue but also an inability to constrain it as her ear distends to gulp painful disparities and others’ misfortunes. Controlling what servants heard and said would be too narrow a social function for Cana and Envy, however. Petrarch spoke further of the peril of making public show of one’s intellect, virtue, magnificence, and wealth, warning that “envy is inflamed by pretentious display.” He recommended keeping “out of the eyes of wicked enviers as much as possible, lest by your look, words, or guise you invite them to point to you with their finger.”84 Enrico Scrovegni must have courted that risk with open eyes. A proto-capitalist entrepreneur enriched through inheritance, money-lending, and international trade, he aspired to be part of Padua’s ruling aristocracy.85 The chapel was the centerpiece and vehicle of his ambition.86 In that time of unprecedented prosperity in medieval Italy, the popolo grasso was emerging. These were Scrovegni’s people. Their activities revolved around business, from selling and financing

80 81 82 83 84 85 86

Scrovegni’s redemption is a central issue in Derbes and Sandona’s Usurer’s Heart. Derbes and Sandona, Usurer’s Heart, 65, 67–69. Shoaf, “Eyeing Envy,” 132–34. Francis Petrarch, On Remedies for Fortunes Fair and Foul 1.33 (Rawski 1:101–103). Petrarch, Remedies 2.35 (Rawski 3:2:93–94). Jacobus, Giotto and the Arena Chapel, 7–9, details Enrico’s financial success and issues it has raised for the question of what motivated the chapel’s construction and decoration. Jacobus argues this point extensively (see esp. pp. 191–92, 202).

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to administration, and they espoused a view of wealth as a social good. But, as Jacobus notes, few members of this new socio-economic class lived in Padua itself.87 And prevailing social and religious attitudes did not tolerate elites spending money, and likely curbed it.88 Rapid social ascent could stir resentment of the old nobility in Italy’s cities.89 In that “age of vision,” standing out risked detraction, corrosive remarks which could harm the pious ‘image’ of himself that Scrovegni sought to impress upon the public. Fingers did point, and neighbors did complain. Toward the end of the chapel’s construction and decoration, in 1305, Augustinian monks of the nearby Eremitani Church accused Scrovegni of flagrantly exceeding the terms of permission Padua’s bishop had given him for building a small family church. Upset by the chapel’s size, by the disturbance caused by the ringing of its “huge bells,” and probably also by its potential to dim their spiritual authority and lure away their congregation (including donors), the monks alleged that Scrovegni had done everything there “for pomp, vainglory and financial advantage rather than the greater glory and honor of God.”90 Such language raised the allegations above the level of neighborhood affront by appealing to general religious and communal aversion to personal gain, glory, and ostentation.91 Scrovegni, far from oblivious to the possibility of provoking such feelings, seems to have anticipated and tried to preempt them. He welcomed to his property the entire city to continue the public celebration of the feast day of The Annunciation, which had formerly taken place there under the auspices of an established aristocratic family.92 Visits to the chapel were part of that generosity. By papal decree (1304) from Benedict XI, an acquaintance of Scrovegni’s, going there even earned visitors spiritual credit toward admittance to Heaven.93 Giotto, presumably in consultation with a theological advisor,

87 Ibid., 197. 88 Richard A. Goldthwaite, Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy, 1300–1600 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 204–5. 89 Hyde, Literacy and Its Uses, 60. 90 The Eremitani protest is well known in Giotto scholarship, where it has served mainly to address issues of chronology in the chapel’s planning, construction, and decoration. Shoaf, “Eyeing Envy,” 155, 166n107, gives an earlier iteration of the view I present here. For a recent transcription and translation of the document, see Jacobus, Giotto and the Arena Chapel, 356–58. 91 Cassidy, “Artists and Diplomacy,” 96, notes this general attitude. 92 This may have already been Scrovegni’s intent already by 1300, when he purchased the arena property from a member of the Dalesmanini, the noble family in question and the previous host of the public cult event. Jacobus, Giotto and the Arena Chapel, 3, 33. 93 Jacobus, Giotto and the Arena Chapel, 30–31, 355.

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may have designed Cana (and Envy) with the intention of shaping how people listened to others talk about his patron and opening their hearts’ ears to the beneficence Scrovegni so visibly offered. To remember Cana through Giotto’s fresco was ideally, among other things, to practice listening with an attitude of love of neighbor and God—and to be spiritually altered by and in that effort. Cana cannot be explained solely in terms of the patron’s interests. Artistic ambition was evidently at work here too. The striving to image sound and spiritual listening in Cana, amply delineated in this chapter, makes The Visions of Fra Agostino and the Bishop of Assisi (Fig.11) look fairly spare by comparison. We conclude by raising a less visible issue behind that ingenuity. It is the larger problem underlying the instruction on inner hearing that Giovanni da San Gimignano put at the disposal of any preacher using the Summa de exemplis: religious officials’ weak or wavering command of worshipers’ ears. Giotto was not the first artist in Italy to take up this challenge. Nor was Cana the first pictorial inducement of spiritual listening. With its composition-within-acomposition, its use of juxtapositions to draw out distinctions in listening, its contrast between visual materiality and the auditory, and, not least, its emphasis on a worldly figure’s reception of sacred speech, the fresco had forebears among works which scholars have long considered important antecedents of Giotto’s art. The remainder of this book curves back and inward, ear-like, to look at earlier listening lessons. Pictured ears will continue to have significance for us, but we will be more concerned with other measures for activating viewers’ inner hearing, including naturalistic aspects of the period’s narrative art that have been examined many times without recognition of their auditory potential. One of these is the repurposing of styles of ancient Greek and Roman art. As we will see in chapter four, lively sculptural antiquities became another artist’s vital resource for mobilizing listening that clergy needed in order to make themselves heard.

Chapter 4

Sound Restoration 1

Nicola Pisano’s Pulpit in Pisa

No works of art in medieval Italy had so visible an auditory function as pulpits, the platforms on which churchmen stood to speak, read, and sing God’s word to congregants. There was more to the structures than the raw hierarchy of height and boost of vocal volume, though those elements were important given the acoustic moderation of sacred speech. According to Durand, the thirteenthcentury liturgist, to mount a pulpit was to echo great biblical predecessors: Christ, teaching the multitudes from a mountain (Matt. 5.1–2); Ezra, reading the law of Moses to a crowd from a wooden platform (Neh. 8.1–6); Solomon, using a bronze platform to address an assembly of God’s people (2 Chron. 6.13).1 When mouths opened atop a pulpit, their sound was to carry the weight of the prophet Isaiah: “Get you up to a high mountain, O Zion, herald of good tidings; lift up your voice with strength” (Isa. 40.9, NSRV).2 A command from Christ to his disciples gave further lift to the utterances of readers, speakers, and singers on pulpits: “What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light; and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops” (Matt. 10.27, NSRV).3 Durand placed the pulpit at the center of Christianity’s aspiration to global spiritual conquest: “The law was given on a mountain, so the Gospel is therefore read in a high and eminent place, since the evangelical doctrine was spread throughout the earth, as the Psalmist says: ‘their words to the end of the world’ [Ps. 19.4].”4 Seen through the framework of Scripture, pulpits were descendants of the material instruments by which God’s word had been relayed to humankind. They brought biblical mountain tops into church spaces and situated audiences at the foot of verbal majesty.5 1 Durand, Rationale 1.1.33, 4.24.34, 4.26.3. 2 Ibid., 4.24.18. Also cited by Federico Visconti in a sermon he gave in Lyon prior to 1253 and in another delivered in the presence of Pisa’s clergy some time before 1254 (prior to becoming Pisa’s archbishop). Visconti, Les sermons, 376, 706. 3 Ibid., 4.24.18. Visconti used this citation as well, at an unknown date. Visconti, Les sermons, 792. 4 Ibid., 4.24.18. 5 For medieval pulpits in Italy as images of a holy mountain, see Laurence Aventin, “L’ambon, lieu liturgique de la proclamation de la parole dans l’Italie du XIIe et XIIIe siècle,” in Prédication et liturgie au Moyen Âge, ed. Nicole Bériou and Franco Morenzoni (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), 141–42.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004460812_006

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Figure 36 Nicola Pisano, pulpit, marble, 1260, Baptistery of San Giovanni, Pisa Photo: Archivi Alinari, Firenze

The pulpit most familiar to historians of European art still towers in Pisa, roughly thirteen feet high, all marble and crowned with five carved panels filled with narrative action (Fig. 36). It was completed by Nicola Pisano early in his career, in 1260, nearly twenty years before he worked on the fountain in Perugia. The pulpit’s stature in art historiography rests on a genealogy different

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from what Durand invoked. Giorgio Vasari, the sixteenth-century patriarch of modern art history, mentions it having been famous and broadly appealing in his biography of Nicola, whom he celebrated as an artistic pioneer with an uncommonly keen appreciation for ancient splendors.6 By the later nineteenth century, in the origins-obsessed age of Morelli, debate raged internationally over whether classicizing styles in the pulpit’s decoration proved Nicola to have been a native Pisan or a southern Italian immigrant. The geographic birthplace of Renaissance art was at stake in the dispute. Over the past century, the pulpit has made numerous appearances in scholarly articles, monographs, and encyclopedias, as well as in surveys of medieval art, of medieval pulpits, and of Gothic sculpture. It has long been among the first things students see in introductions to Italian Renaissance art. Its narrative reliefs have had their praises sung for humanizing story-telling and sacred history—well before Giotto—and for engaging onlookers through the alignment of depicted elements with their own movements and viewing positions.7 Indeed, the reliefs have been cited as proof of optical thinking about picture-viewer relationships far in advance of linear perspective.8 The pulpit’s sculptures, in other words, have come to be seen as early monuments of the late medieval “age of vision.” Recent research on the Pisa pulpit has looked at its authority not in terms of historical preeminence but rather as a desired effect of planning and execution.9 Caroline Bruzelius has argued, for instance, that the monumentality, materiality, and classical style of Nicola’s sculptures, combined with their capacity to illustrate sermons, would have strengthened the voice of Pisa’s secular clergy at a time when people outside the Church claimed for themselves the right to preach and administer sacraments.10 Clerical voice was indeed a major issue. Its importance was connected with the pulpit’s site, the Church

6

Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori e archittori nelle redazioni del 1550 e 1568, ed. Rosanna Bettarini and Paola Barocchi (Florence: Sansoni Editore, 1966), 2:60–64. 7 Moskowitz, Italian Gothic Sculpture, 26–31. 8 Trachtenberg, Dominion of the Eye, 185–86, 189; Francis Ames-Lewis, Tuscan Marble Carving, 1250–1350: Sculpture and Civic Pride (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997), 61; Lakey, Sculptural Seeing, 115–19. 9 Caroline Bruzelius, “From Empire to Commune to Kingdom: Notes on the Revival of Monumental Sculpture in Italy,” in Gothic Art and Thought in the Later Medieval Period: Essays in Honor of Willibald Sauerländer, ed. Colum Hourihane (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011), 144, 146–48; Herbert Kessler, “The Authority of Antiquity on Nicola Pisano’s Pisa Baptistery Pulpit,” in Le plaisir de l’art du Moyen Âge: Commande, production, réception de l’oeuvre d’art (Paris: Picard, 2012), 122–31. Evidence cited in these studies ranges from the pulpit’s marble to its iconography and the resemblance of its figural displays to ancient art. 10 Bruzelius, “From Empire to Commune to Kingdom,” 146–48.

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Figure 37 Diotisalvi, Baptistery of San Giovanni, begun 1152, Pisa Photo: Scala, Florence

of San Giovanni Battista (Saint John the Baptist), better known today as Pisa’s baptistery, in reference to the building’s intended function at certain times of year (Fig. 37).11

11 While thirteenth-century texts refer to the building as a church, “la chiesa di San Giovanni,” art historians usually speak of it as a baptistery. Eloise M. Angiola, “Nicola

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We see the pulpit’s relevance for baptism in sculpted symbols and evocations of death and spiritual rebirth, scholarship points out.12 But there was an overarching auditory dimension too. Just outside baptisteries, we remember, the ears of late medieval Christians underwent the ephpheta ritual, their official aural preparation to receive God’s word and to bear responsibility for hearing it. Nicola’s pulpit, rising up near the center of the Pisan baptistery’s interior, would have been among the first things seen by baptismal candidates (catechumens) and their godparents upon admittance into the building.13 When San Giovanni operated as a church, the pulpit presumably held gospel readers during the Mass as well as preachers.14 Yet the mid-twelfth-century building had never had a pulpit, as far as we know. Why did it need one now, in the midthirteenth century? Pisa’s economy was growing in those years, its population expanding. The city’s then archbishop, Federigo Visconti (r. 1253–77), the same Visconti we heard opening the ears of worshipers’ hearts through preaching, in chapter one, professed in 1254 to have confirmed 10,000 Pisan youths—about half the overall number of adult inhabitants!15 Accurate or not, this number boasts seemingly countless performances of the ephpheta ritual and, more generally, the religious and civic importance of the baptistery in Visconti’s time. At the same time, the archbishop was an energetic reformer of Pisa’s clergy. His published sermons show that their moral fitness for office was a matter thattroubled him. Clerical immorality must have been an especially serious issue for a baptismal setting, where public ritual revolved around notions of purity in the name of Pisan citizenship, Christian membership, and ultimate reunion Pisano, Federigo Visconti, and the Classical Style in Pisa,” The Art Bulletin 59, no. 1 (Mar., 1977), 5–7, discusses the building’s varied uses. 12 Angiola, “Nicola Pisano,” 7–10, 13–15, 19; Kessler, “Authority of Antiquity,” 122, 128. 13 As Aventin discusses, the Church never strictly defined or limited the use of pulpits in the Middle Ages. Their necessity and use during baptism in medieval Italy is unclear. Holy Saturday was traditionally an occasion of baptism, and Aventin has found connections between the liturgy of that day and pulpits in twelfth-century southern Italy. See Aventin, “L’ambon,” 128–29, 152–53, 157, 160. While no documents are known concerning the baptismal liturgy in Pisa’s baptistery in the thirteenth century, we do know that such a large crowd was expected to fill the building on Holy Saturdays that in 1275 the Commune of Pisa posted guards there to protect the pulpit and other furnishings. Nicole Bériou, “Federico Visconti, prédicateur,” in Les sermons, 256. 14 In a contrary view, Bériou asserts that Pisa’s baptistery pulpit “seems to have been empty most of the time,” existing generally to be admired, to honor Pisa, and to recall the message of redemption that recurred in the archbishop’s sermons to Pisans. Nicole Bériou, “Federico Visconti, prédicateur,” 256. 15 David Herlihy, Pisa in the Early Renaissance: A Study in Urban Growth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), 39.

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with God—and no less grave in gospel readings and sermons, performances which worked toward that reunion.16 The problem regarded not only voice but also hearing, which spiritually effective speech required not only of audiences but of speakers too. This chapter will show that the alleged spiritual deafness of Pisa’s men of God offers a compelling, if only partial, explanation for the pulpit’s commission and for why Nicola’s patron and advisor on the project was probably the archbishop himself, as others have held. The purported deficiency also cautions us against the modern tendency to refer blanketly to medieval viewers of religious art as “the faithful.” Perceived weakness or absence of faith could be a strong stimulus of artistic invention and production. What Nicola made for Visconti was a complex, well thought-out, sitespecific, audio-visual intervention. The pulpit’s hexagonal shape, its appropriations of ancient forms, and its narrative imagery departed from the century-old tradition of Tuscan marble pulpits while conforming with the aesthetics of the baptistery’s interior and furnishings, including its baptismal font (completed in 1246) (Fig. 38).17 In what follows we will consider how Nicola addressed narrative innovations to a certain psychoacoustic environment marked by the problem of restoring authority to clerical voices. Our discussion will again center on a scene with an unsettled listener on the brink of spiritual transition. The figures of interest to us will be ones that have been most often discussed regarding the sculptor’s reuses of ancient art, a source (along with northern Gothic art) of its regionally groundbreaking naturalism. But until now scholarship has not seen significance in the patent carnality and intoxication of Nicola’s antique models. Giotto’s Cana points toward spiritual hearing’s dependence not only on caritas but also on chastity, as we have seen. The present chapter shows that Nicola ‘reformed’ ancient figures and rearranged sacred stories to remind clergymen that effective voicing of God’s word hinged on their own listening in continence and in faith. Clergymen’s belief in and commitment to what they themselves said and heard in church had evidently come into question. Nicola made the physical platform of sacred utterance a remedial platform for their listening. Auditory engineering should be added to his list of achievements.

16 Aventin, “L’ambon,” 140. 17 For the baptistery and its font, see Christine Smith, “The Baptistery of Pisa” (Ph.D. diss, New York University, 1975). On the pulpit tradition in medieval Tuscany, from perspectives of style and form, see Martin Weinberger, “Nicola Pisano and the Tradition of Tuscan Pulpits,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 55 (1960): 129–46; Moskowitz, Italian Gothic Sculpture, 286–94.

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Figure 38 Pulpit (Nicola Pisano, 1260), baptismal font (Guido da Como, 1246), choir with altar (thirteenth century), Baptistery of San Giovanni, Pisa Photo: Mark E. Smith/Scala, Florence

2

Raising Voices

To appreciate the authorizing function of any aspect of the pulpit in Pisa’s baptistery, we need to recognize how extensively it highlights its own purpose of elevating speech, though that emphasis alone was insufficient. The raising of the audible voice here is not only a physical, acoustic fact. It is a conspicuously thematized operation (Fig. 36). The polished marble columns lifting the pulpit’s platform are themselves lifted. Varied in color and length, they spring up from pedestals of varying height which alternate between resting on the floor and on prey-straddling lions. The vertical thrusts change form as they rise, becoming leafy capitals, then standing figures, and finally bundles of colonnettes identical in color and size. Thus, material and physical variety in the physical supports below yields to a static and uniform semblance of support. Above the colonnettes there is only a thin ledge. Ultimately, what the pulpit raised up was not physical. These vertical changes conform to the pulpit’s four-level design. In the lowest level, three men sit among beasts in the shadow of the pulpit’s platform. The column-bearing lions surround them, a reminder that “like a roaring lion your adversary the Devil prowls around looking for someone to devour” (1 Pet. 5.8, NSRV). In sermons given in mid-thirteenth-century Pisa, this predatory idea

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was associated with bodily senses making worshipers spiritually vulnerable.18 In the next level up, where solitary figures pose, spandrels are occupied by prophets with unfurled speech scrolls and evangelists with gospel books. These are God’s surrogate speakers who foretold or described the earthly arrival of Christ, divinely sent liberator of humanity. Higher still, the third level is constituted by the parapet displaying five panels of relief sculpture presenting a narrative of Christ’s entry into the world, his death, and his reign as every soul’s judge after death. At the pulpit’s top is what the art historian Charles Seymour aptly called a “fourth and supernal zone, not of material transformed by the art of sculpture, but of the immaterial, invisible but audible, form of words and a kind of music.”19 There is, however, a material protrusion into this “supernal zone” (Fig. 39). Attached to the ledge is a lectern in the form of an eagle, the emblem traditionally associated with John the Evangelist, author of the Gospel that begins by equating the person of Christ with divine speech: “And the Word became flesh and lived among us” (John 1.14, NSRV). The pulpit’s eagle spreads its wings triumphantly. The sound of reading thus merged with the sculptural glorification of the gospel book’s physical elevation. Eagle lecterns were common on medieval pulpits. They directed audiences’ ears and eyes toward the book as they stood listening in silence.20 Eagle forms were also thought to attract the Holy Spirit while a speaker made a cross sign to keep the devil from removing devotion from the heart and speech from the mouth.21 If the sound of gospelreading signaled a momentary triumph over evil, ideally it also expressed victory over doubt. Having mounted a pulpit, readers were supposed to assure themselves of their belief in the divine words to which they gave voice.22 To an audience looking from below, any occupant of the Pisa pulpit could be only partially visible owing to the roughly three-foot high parapet behind 18 Visconti, Les sermons, 713 (Sermon 48, dated 1254). 19 Charles Seymour, Jr., “Invention and Revival in Nicola Pisano’s ‘Heroic Style’,” in Romanesque and Gothic Art: Studies in Western Art, Acts of the Twentieth Congress of the History of Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963), 1:213–214. 20 Durand, Rationale 4.24.34: “Quod diaconus pulpitum ascendit; quod aperto libro populum salutat, et omnes respondent; quod titulum Evangelii praemittit; quod alta voce et distincte, et contra aquilonem legit; quod omnis populus aures et oculos ad librum dirigit, et in silentio abstando audit.” 21 Innocent III, De sacro altaris mysterio 2.43 (Migne, PL 217.824b): “Adversus ergo aquilonem legitur Evangelium, ut aquilo surgat et auster veniat, id est ut diabolus fugiat, et Spiritus sanctus accedat. Unde diaconus munit se signaculo crucis, ne diabolus, qui insidiatur operibus, tollat ei devotionem de corde, vel sermonem de ore.” 22 Ibid., 2.43 (Migne, PL 217.824b): “Sacerdos itaque vel diaconus cum lecturus est Evangelium, signare se debet in fronte, signare se debet in ore, signare se debet in pectore, ac si dicat: Ego crucem Christi non erubesco, sed corde credo, quod ore praedico.”

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Figure 39 Nicola Pisano, lectern, marble, 1260, pulpit, Baptistery of San Giovanni, Pisa Photo: De Agostini Picture Library/G. Nimatallah/Bridgeman Images

which he stood. There, on its outward-facing surface, in detailed and deeply carved scenes, the theme of elevation continues to develop. Christ, God’s word “become flesh,” appears several times as a borne or raised object. He is held by a manger, by his seated mother, by Simeon in the temple (Figs. 40–42). He is

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Figure 40 Nicola Pisano, The Annunciation to the Virgin, The Nativity of Christ, The Annunciation to the Shepherds, The Bathing of Christ, marble, 1260, pulpit, Baptistery of San Giovanni, Pisa Photo: Luisa Ricciarini/Bridgeman Images

Figure 41 Nicola Pisano, The Adoration of the Magi, marble, 1260, pulpit, Baptistery of San Giovanni, Pisa Photo: Bridgeman Images

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Figure 42 Nicola Pisano, The Presentation of Christ in the Temple, marble, 1260, pulpit, Baptistery of San Giovanni, Pisa Photo: Luisa Ricciarini/Bridgeman Images

lifted on the edge of a wash basin, nailed up on a cross, and seated on an otherworldly throne (Figs. 40, 43, 44). Christ also appears as an object of others’ perceptions. An ox and an ass watch him sleep in the manger, and servants attend to him at a bath (Fig. 40). Kings kneel before him, looking (Fig. 41). Simeon beholds him reverently (the upper half of Christ’s body has not survived) (Fig. 42). People below the cross react to him, as do masses gathered beneath him as he decides souls’ worthiness to enter Heaven (Figs. 43, 44). In the infancy scenes, which occupy three of the cycle’s five panels, Christ’s pictured perceivers are outsiders for the most part, external to his immediate family (Figs. 40–42). These early scenes show Christ being welcomed, his legitimacy recognized, as he is moved into the world, from birthplace to public edifice. The carved narrative integrates other points of view as well. At the bottomright of the first panel, orderly sheep confront disorderly goats, an allusion to an end-of-the-world vision in the Book of Matthew, which says the righteous will be separated from the accursed and the latter will be condemned for eternity for failing to submit themselves to Christ (Matt. 25.31–46) (Fig. 40). In the

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Figure 43 Nicola Pisano, The Crucifixion, marble, 1260, pulpit, Baptistery of San Giovanni, Pisa Photo: De Agostini Picture Library/G. Nimatallah/Bridgeman Images

third panel, Simeon speaks a prophecy that ends by foretelling the opposition of many people to Christ (Fig. 42). His words materialize in the form of adversaries in the next panel, The Crucifixion (Fig. 43). Beneath the crucified Christ we see the skull of Adam, the first human, whose disobedience of God was at the root of all Christ was supposed to redeem. In the final panel, the sheep and the goats have become humans awaiting everlasting life and eternal punishment respectively (Fig. 44). With this narrative conclusion, the principle around which the sculpted story coheres comes forward. It a system of divine justice, with Christ as humanity’s judge. The story’s narration, inseparable in form from the position of moral righteousness and spiritual dominion it depicts in the judging Christ, thereby claims a share of his authority. The Last Judgment being a vision of humanity’s future, that authority governs everything about the pulpit, including its occupant, whose voice may have constituted the “fourth and supernal zone” but whose body did not. To audiences looking up from the baptistery floor, that body may have appeared almost to wear the parapet, like a great stone girdle. Indeed, Durand referred to pulpits almost as belts surrounding

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Figure 44 Nicola Pisano, The Last Judgment, marble, 1260, pulpit, Baptistery of San Giovanni, Pisa Photo: Scala, Florence

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those who mounted them, a sign that Christ surrounds all who keep God’s word.23 To adorn such protection with Christ’s divine authority, in story form, was to confer a loftiness which no measurable height or quantity of marble columns could equal. Pisans had been accustomed to seeing Christ’s life told monumentally in sculpture, though not like this. Two great sets of bronze doors, completed by Bonanno in 1180 and 1186, led into the city’s cathedral. Each was embellished with extensive Christological narratives. The earlier doors, of the cathedral’s Porta di San Ranieri, present the story in a tall grid of twenty frames which rise in five horizontal ‘chapters’ (Fig. 45).24 The cathedral’s massive marble pulpit, completed in 1162 by Guglielmo, displays Christ’s life in sixteen scenes (Fig. 46).25 Several of the subjects depicted on these earlier monuments recur in the baptistery pulpit, which may have gained further authority from this rapport with local tradition.26 Yet this was not only a relationship of dependence and derivation, but also one of independence and renovation. Nicola’s figures depart from their predecessors in many respects, most obviously perhaps in the naturalism of bodies, hair, garments, and overall volume and physicality. Textures, modulations, folds, and particularizing qualities and details give the visible surfaces of the baptistery pulpit’s reliefs new weight in bringing the sacred past to the viewer’s attention and holding it there for contemplation. We observe too that while in the baptistery pulpit the number of scenes has been drastically reduced, each is larger with respect to its predecessors as well as to the general object of which it is part. Carved figures, too, have grown in relation to the compositions they inhabit. This is plain when we look at the handling of a given scene by Bonanno or Guglielmo (Figs. 46–48). With

23 Durand, Rationale 1.1.34: “Quod dicitur [pulpitum] etiam ‘ambo’, ab ‘ambiendo’, quia intrantem ambiet et cingit”; and 4.24.17: “Ascendit [diaconus] ergo super ambonem, ad notandum quod Christus ambit omnes qui custodiunt verbum Evangelii.” For discussion of pulpit etymology, see Aventin, “L’ambon,” 134–5. 24 John White, “The Bronze Doors of Bonanus and the Development of Dramatic Narrative,” Art History 11, no. 2 (June, 1988): 158–94. The later doors, at the cathedral’s main entrance (and destroyed by fire in 1595), featured the “whole life of Jesus Christ,” according to the sixteenth-century historian Raffaello Roncioni, whom White cites (p. 159). 25 Anna Rosa Calderoni Masetti, Il pergamo di Guglielmo per il duomo di Pisa, oggi a Cagliari (n.p.: Bandecchi and Vivaldi, 2000). Only one side of half of the pulpit, which has been divided in two, appears in our illustration. 26 Scenes on four of the pulpit’s five relief panels have precedents on Bonanno’s bronze doors and Guglielmo’s pulpit: The Annunciation to Mary, The Annunciation to the Shepherds (doors only), The Nativity of Christ, The Adoration of the Magi (pulpit only), The Visitation, The Presentation of Christ, and The Crucifixion.

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Figure 45 Bonanno of Pisa, doors (replica) of Porta di San Ranieri, bronze, 1180, cathedral, Pisa Photo: author

the parapet’s hexagonal shape, the visual command of each panel (and figures within it) is even greater in that no more than two of them are fully visible from a given position. The programmatic elevation of Christ in the pulpit’s reliefs is not found in the earlier cycles, several panels of which show no Christ at all.

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Figure 46 Guglielmo, pulpit (half), marble, 1162, originally in Pisa’s cathedral, now in Cagliari’s cathedral Photo: Archivio Seat/Archivi Alinari

Nor do the twelfth-century narratives treat adversarial points of view in the same overarching way. No goats appear in their depictions of Christ’s infancy, for instance. And both cycles conclude on Christ’s heavenly ascent, not on his subsequent judgment of humanity. Part of what was new to Pisans about Nicola’s pulpit, then, was the assertion of its own moral standing within, and by means of, a newly monumentalized narrative and the choice of subjects for it. That assertion deepens through changes to an otherwise customary scene of Christ’s life, which we will come to in a moment. Another aspect of the pulpit’s reliefs needs discussion first, because it relates to the theme of elevation and adds significance to the changes to be examined shortly: divine communication with human audiences. The sculptural narrative begins in this manner, with a pair of angelic announcements of Christ’s arrival: The Annunciation to the Virgin and The Annunciation to the Shepherds, in the upper left and right portions of the first panel (Figs. 17, 40). Here, Christ is elevated in speech through the divine nature of the messengers and the content of the messages. The angel will tell Mary that she will conceive a son who “will be great, and

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Figure 47 Bonanno of Pisa, The Presentation of Christ in the Temple, bronze, 1180, doors of Porta di San Ranieri, cathedral, Pisa Photo: De Agostini Picture Library/G. Nimatallah/Bridgeman Images

will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end” (Luke 1.32–33, NSRV). Nine months later, the shepherds will hear angels say that “a Savior, … the Messiah, the Lord” has just been born (Luke 2.11, NSRV). The wondrous news from on high,

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Figure 48 Guglielmo, The Presentation of Christ in the Temple, marble, 1162, detail of pulpit, originally in Pisa’s cathedral, now in Cagliari’s cathedral Photo: Archivio Seat/Archivi Alinari

already confirmed for the viewer by the child’s visible presence in the manger, is accepted by Mary and the shepherds without hesitation.27 Clergy speaking atop pulpits were supposed to be regarded as messengers of the divine themselves. Preachers could be likened to musical instruments used by God and were said to be filled with the Holy Spirit, as we heard Archbishop Visconti preach in chapter one. In gospel readings, deacons were not only to “announce” the supreme nature of what they read by raising the voice.28 They were also to be heard not as individuals or proxies but as something transcending the human. The deacon reciting the Gospel, Durand states, “is the angel announcing to the Virgin her conception” (my emphasis).29 As 27 Mary will respond, “ ‘Here I am, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word’ ” (Luke 1.38, NSRV). The shepherds will say to each other, “ ‘Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us’ ” (Luke 2.15, NSRV). 28 Durand, Rationale 4.16.11, 4.24.18, 4.24.29, 4.24.34. 29 Ibid., 6.8.3: “Diacobus Evangelium pronuntians est Angelus annuncians Virgini, quod conciperet.”

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for audience, the liturgist is equally plain: When the deacon reads the Gospel aloud, against the eagle lectern, “all the people turn their ears and their eyes toward the book and listen in silence, standing.”30 But such absolute receptivity was hardly a given in Pisa, as we will find later. The elevation of authority in the pulpit reliefs themselves is not represented as unqualified either. They include a remarkable reference to hesitance in faith, an unusual admission of the possibility of doubt about God’s power. This, I will argue, is the core of the pulpit’s lesson in spiritually restorative listening—listening without which the clergymen speaking from its height risked sounding all too human. 3

Silenced Skeptic

Discerning doubt in the reliefs requires taking a fresh look at several revisions Nicola Pisano made to the picturing of Christ’s life. Unlike the earlier Pisan representations of that subject, the bulk of the pulpit’s narrative consists of infancy scenes. Christ’s arrival in the world is drawn out, with much of the action occurring as series of auditory events. In the first panel, angelic messengers announce Christ’s arrival to Mary and to the shepherds (Fig. 40). Humans do the announcing in the third panel (Fig. 42), which follows The Adoration of the Magi (Fig. 41) and is the cycle’s middle panel—and therefore, in art historians’ estimation, one that must have had special importance.31 Two of the speakers here are readily identifiable. One is Simeon, who holds Christ in a setting of round arches reminiscent of the architecture of Pisa’s baptistery. The other speaker is Anna, positioned just behind Simeon and beside an arch or curved wall.32 The two are principle actors in the gospel story known as The Presentation of Christ in the Temple, which scholars have understood the panel relief to represent. Other figures, at the picture’s peripheries, complicate that understanding, however. They do not appear in earlier depictions of the event. If the openmouthed woman at the upper left, between the towers of a pedimented façade, is another Anna (Fig. 49), as some have suggested, why does she appear twice when she makes only one brief appearance in the traditional story? The bearded man at the far right, with another pedimented and twin-towered 30 Ibid., 4.24.34, cited above. 31 Seymour, “Invention and Revival,” 219; Creighton E. Gilbert, “The Pisa Baptistery Pulpit Addresses Its Public,” Artibus et Historiae 41 (2000), 23, describes The Presentation as the “focal center” of the pulpit’s five narrative panels, and argues for its significance in relation to Pisa’s baptistery and congregants there. I return to this point below. 32 Not the mother of the Virgin Mary, a different Anna.

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Figure 49 Nicola Pisano, senescent woman, detail of The Presentation of Christ, marble, 1260, pulpit, Baptistery of San Giovanni, Pisa photo: Luisa Ricciarini/Bridgeman Images

façade behind him, is enigmatic too (Fig. 50). He has been alternately labeled Moses, Herod, Simeon (appearing a second time). Scholarship has also gone beyond identifying him as a person at all. In one view, he functions merely to fill empty space. The prevailing opinion in recent decades has been that he symbolizes a certain liturgical phrase.33 Each of these proposals is a curiosity for a Presentation scene. According to the story told in the Book of Luke, the only Gospel where we find it, Joseph and Mary take the infant Jesus to the temple in Jerusalem “for their purification according to the law of Moses” and to present the baby to the Lord (Luke 2.22, NSRV). Joseph has brought two doves or pigeons as offerings for sacrifice (Luke 2:24). Things do not go as planned once the family enters the temple. Simeon, a local righteous man (not a religious official) enters the temple under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, takes the child in his arms, and utters 33 Max Seidel, Father and Son: Nicola and Giovanni Pisano (Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2012), 1:49–53, summarizes the interpretive history and reiterates his widely accepted view of the figure as a liturgical symbol. The key to its meaning, Seidel contends, lies in a short verse pronounced in the liturgy of the day commemorating The Presentation of Christ in the Temple (February 2): “Senex puerum portabat, puer autem senem regebat.” In Seidel’s interpretation of these words, there is a reciprocity that is reappears in the pulpit’s image of the infant being held by Simeon and the man at the right being held up by a youth: The old man “carries” the child, while at the same time the child “carries” or “supports” the old man. Let us note that the word for the child’s action, regebat, can also mean guided or restored, set right, corrected, connotations that are compatible with the interpretation I advance below. Seidel’s argument originally appeared in Max Seidel, “Studien zur Antikenrezeption Nicola Pisanos,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 19, no. 3 (1975): 307–92.

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Figure 50 Nicola Pisano, senescent man, detail of The Presentation of Christ, marble, 1260, pulpit, Baptistery of San Giovanni, Pisa Photo: Luisa Ricciarini/Bridgeman Images

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praise, blessing, and prophecy (Luke 2.25–35). His oration, known as the Nunc Dimittis (“Now you are dismissing”) in liturgy, recognizes Christ as the savior of humanity he had personally foreseen. Anna, an elderly widow who worships in the temple, arrives at that moment and begins “to praise God and to speak about the child to all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem” (Luke 2.38, NSRV). Abbreviated renderings of the event could be seen in the pictorialized lives of Christ on the doors and pulpit of Pisa’s cathedral since the twelfth century, with the Christ child flanked by Mary and Joseph on one side and by Simeon and Anna on the other (Figs. 47, 48).34 Nicola’s version of the event was unheralded in its visual and narrative extravagance. It bursts with added details, not all of them stemming from Luke’s account (Fig. 42). Numerous figures pack tightly together before the different architectural settings. The “all who” to whom Anna speaks materializes in three figures at her side. Further left, others around the Christ child appear to have assembled more for a public ritual than for the intimate affair described in Luke and in previous artistic representations. Simeon wears a great cape. The youths swing censors as they look on. Nicola defined the event as a multisensory experience decades before Dante imagined almost-smelling and almost-hearing stories carved by God in Purgatory’s marble embankment. In the Pisan relief, beyond scent and sight, touch is evident with the infant squirming in Simeon’s arms and with Joseph, Mary, and Simeon clutching their garments with their flesh-and-bone hands so as not to stumble in their slow convergence. Sense-wise, hearing is the main event, however, though apprehending its spiritual proportions can be a gradual process. For the moment, we note only that the majority of the relief’s figures belong to an audience, either Simeon’s or Anna’s. Formal and compositional relationships among figures is another level on which Nicola exceeded traditional accounts—pictorial as well as textual. Beyond Mary’s pairing with Joseph, her husband, she also forms a pair with Simeon. Each figure appears in three-quarter view in the extreme foreground, with similarly folding gowns. They look at the child whose wriggling body they loosely frame. Behind Mary and Simeon respectively, Joseph and Anna are a secondary pair. Each exposes one foot and holds something. For Joseph, it is the birds, for Anna, a partly unfurled scroll, sign of prophetic speech. Joseph also stands in symmetry with Simeon. Both bearded men pose in three-quarter view and hold an offering to the Lord. Simeon appears simultaneously to be

34

White, “Bronze Doors of Bonanus,” 163, 175–76; William Melczer, La porta di Bonanno nel duomo di Pisa: Teologia ed immagine (Pisa: Pacini Editore, 1988), 125–37.

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connected with each of the other four main figures: not only Mary and Joseph but also Anna, with whom he stands as a ‘pendant’ couple to Christ’s parents, and with the large bearded man at the right, with whom he shares similarities in face and dress. Anna too has multiple counterparts, not only Simeon and Joseph but also the woman behind Joseph. Both veiled figures are entirely novel with their open mouths, raised chins, physiological senescence, and large, deeply carved ears. Lastly Anna and the bearded man behind her form a ‘pendant’ couple to Joseph and the woman behind him. This complicated interconnecting of persons and couples has more in common with Giotto’s Cana than with Luke’s account. The language of the Gospel gives us to imagine a small, insular family. We read that “they” (Mary and Joseph) brought the child to present to the Lord and that “the parents” (again, Mary and Joseph) entered the temple with him (Luke 2.22, 2.27, NSRV). Nicola has expanded the sense of family by elaborating a group of interchangeable surrogates—a just-formed network of spiritual kin. In what other sense might the ‘mystery’ figures belong to this scene? A chronological reading of Luke warrants neither one. The veiled person, with skin naturalistically loosened by age, has been variously identified as a second Anna, as a type (“the other old woman,” a “man”), even as the sculptor’s self-portrait.35 But Nicola must have intended viewers to see Elizabeth here.36 She is the only female elder in Luke prior to the appearance of Anna when Mary and Joseph bring Jesus to the temple. Her “getting on in years” sets the stage for her miraculous conception of John the Baptist after a long, righteous, and infertile life. During her pregnancy, she becomes the first outsider to sense Christ’s incarnation. This happens when, in The Visitation (Luke 1.39–55), she is visited from afar by Mary, her relative, whose own pregnancy Elizabeth has known nothing about. Her perception of Christ in that encounter occurs when she hears Mary’s greeting, which causes the baby in Elizabeth’s womb to move energetically and Elizabeth herself to be filled with the Holy Spirit and to exclaim, 35

36

Ernst Polaczek, “Zwei Selbstbildnisses des Niccola Pisano,” Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst 14 (1903), 143–46 (self-portrait); G. H. Crichton and E. R. Crichton, Nicola Pisano and the Revival of Sculpture (Cambridge: University Press, 1938), 49 (a man); Stefano Bottari, Saggi su Nicola Pisano (Bologna: Casa Editrice Pàtron, 1969), 20 (a second Anna); Salvatore Settis, “The Iconography of Italian Art 1100–1500: An Approach,” in History of Italian Art, trans. Claire Dorey (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1994), 2:198 (another mature woman). Max Seidel first identified her as Elizabeth, on the basis of her resemblance to an analogous figure on Nicola’s later pulpit in the cathedral of Siena, which in turn looks like Elizabeth in The Visitation relief on that pulpit. The scholar did not account for Nicola’s inclusions of Elizabeth in either of the Presentation scenes, however. Seidel, “Studien zur Antikenrezeption,” 330.

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Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.37 The head of Nicola’s Elizabeth protrudes behind Mary, perhaps to make the viewer recall The Visitation blessing while beholding Mary in the later moment, in the temple. Elizabeth’s well-articulated ear and open mouth would have prompted memory of those words, so that viewers might internally voice her humble and joyful reception of a savior she cannot see and her verbal elevation of Mary for believing the angel in The Annunciation (Luke 1.31–33).38 Faith from hearing and touch would have resounded in the recitation. Elizabeth’s ear and mouth further connect her with Simeon and Anna. Luke similarly describes Simeon as filled with the Holy Spirit when he speaks of Christ (Luke 2.25), an oration we will come to in a moment. Like Anna, Elizabeth is mature and confined (Luke 1.7, 2.36). Like both Simeon and Anna, she certifies progress in Christ’s earthly arrival through her inspired utterance. The relationships go further. In medieval thought, Elizabeth, Simeon and Anna were among the last prophets active at the time of Christ’s birth. Elizabeth’s husband, Zechariah (or Zacharias), was associated with this small fellowship too. He is the principle figure at the beginning of Luke’s Gospel before Mary and Joseph enter the story. No other male elder is mentioned until Simeon, and the two men are linked: Zechariah utters a prophecy that Simeon will later reiterate and expand (Luke 1.68–79). Some scholars have identified the bearded man at the right in Nicola’s panel as a Jewish priest, though not one of any importance in the story of The Presentation or in medieval Christian thought. Luke writes that Zechariah was a priest himself. His name has not come up in two centuries of scholarly interest in the relief. We restore it now. To place Elizabeth and Zechariah adjacent to The Presentation of Christ in the Temple was to take liberties with chronology and mingle biblical events from disparate times and places. Such a compositional strategy occurs in earlier Tuscan art.39 The addition of Zechariah in the pulpit panel was especially significant, however. Like Elizabeth, Simeon and Anna, he attests to Christ’s 37 Luke 1.42–45, NSRV. 38 Derbes and Sandona, Usurer’s Heart, 146, report that by the fourteenth century Elizabeth’s address had come to be used widely in prayers to the Virgin that were both routine in devotion and considered extraordinarily powerful for securing her intercession. 39 A historiated capital on the mid-twelfth-century Church of Sant’Andrea, in Pistoia (Tuscany), juxtaposes The Annunciation to Zechariah with The Annunciation to the Virgin

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arrival. His testimony takes the form of the prophecy just mentioned above, which he utters at his house shortly after the birth of his son (John the Baptist) and months before Christ’s birth. Filled with the Holy Spirit, he speaks of the Lord having “raised up a mighty savior for us in the house of his servant David, as he spoke through the mouth of his holy prophets from of old” (Luke 1.69– 70, NSRV).40 The path toward this declaration begins months earlier, far from home, when Zechariah experiences an annunciation of his own. In the gospel report of the event (Luke 1.8–20), the priest enters a temple in Judean hill country to make an offering of incense while worshipers assemble outside to pray. He is terrified and overcome by fear upon finding the angel Gabriel waiting for him beside the altar. A very different kind of response arises when the messenger tells him that Elizabeth will conceive a son who will precede and make people ready for Christ: skepticism. “How will I know that this is so?” Zechariah asks the angel. “For I am an old man, and my wife is getting on in years” (Luke 1.18, NSRV).41 These words provoke a swift and astonishing rebuke: I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God, and I have been sent to speak to you and to bring you this good news. But now, because you did not and The Visitation. See Dorothy F. Glass, Portals, Pilgrimage, and Crusade in Western Tuscany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 11–13, 61, figs. 4, 6, and 7. 40 This genealogical knowledge comes to him either from the Holy Spirit or at home, when the pregnant Mary stays with Elizabeth during the latter’s own pregnancy. Zechariah was there, having completed his priestly service, according to Luke (1.23). While Luke reports no direct interaction between the expectant Mary and Zechariah, an elaborate account of such a meeting and the manner in which Zechariah first learns that she carries humanity’s savior was told in Italy as early as the late thirteenth century. See Domenico Cavalca, Volgarizzamento delle vite dei santi padri, 2nd ed. (Milan, 1854), 4:218–19, cited (in a different edition, of 1830) by Penelope A. Dunford, “The Iconography of the Frescoes in the Oratorio di S. Giovanni at Urbino,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 36 (1973), 367–68. Dunford discusses a scene of Mary greeting Zechariah, painted in early fifteenth-century Urbino by Lorenzo and Jacopo Salimbeni (p. 369 and pl. 52b). A depiction of Mary conversing with Zechariah also appears in a twelfth-century Byzantine manuscript of Marian homilies (Vaticanus graecus 1162, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, fol. 159r). See Maria Evangelatou, “Threads of Power: Clothing Symbolism, Human Salvation, and Female Identity in the Illustrated Homilies by Iackobos of Kokkinobaphos,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 68 (2014), 265, fig. 30. 41 Zechariah evidently forgets Moses’s being punished for distrusting God’s pledge of supernatural empowerment (Num. 20.12) and is heedless of, scriptural stories of divinely enabled pregnancy of infertile women such as Sarah, whose advanced age leads her to laugh inappropriately at hearing the man-angel announce that she will have a son (Gen. 18.11–15).

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believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their time, you will become mute, unable to speak, until the day these things occur.42 When Zechariah exits the temple, worshipers who have been waiting for him outside are confused by his delay. They deduce from his inability to speak that he has had a vision (Luke 1.21–22). He will regain his voice only after the child is born, when he compliantly confirms the truth of the divine announcement by naming the child, in writing, as the angel said he should be called (Luke 1.63–4). Zechariah makes several appearances in the art of late medieval Tuscany. His voice-restoring act of obedience and belief, known as The Naming of the Baptist, would later appear on the pulpit carved that Nicola’s son Giovanni completed for the cathedral of Pisa in 1311, as well as in a fresco cycle painted by Giotto a few years later in the Peruzzi Chapel, and on the bronze doors made by Andrea Pisano (unrelated to Nicola) around 1330 for the south entry of Florence’s baptistery.43 Giotto’s program includes The Annunciation to Zechariah. Andrea’s features The Annunciation to Zechariah and Zechariah Mute before the People. In the latter we see the medieval convention of showing the priest indicating his aphonia by pointing to his mouth (Fig. 51).44 The exterior of Pisa’s own baptistery displays The Annunciation to Zechariah. In a late twelfth-century frieze, located above the building’s north portal, the priest raises a hand fearfully as he comes upon the angel (Fig. 52).45 Within the baptistery, Nicola’s relief depicts a different moment: Zechariah leaving behind his temple, his priesthood, and his congregation. Not only is he mute, he is perturbed to the point of needing help keeping steady. This unstable, lumbering, and introverted Zechariah has no known antecedent or equivalent in pictorial tradition. To account for him, we begin by looking at how the artist has integrated him into the pulpit’s larger sculptural narrative. Zechariah’s large body ‘bookends’ the three-panel infancy cycle while also moving back against the panels’ rightward direction, thereby obstructing further telling of the Christ child’s arrival and recognition by others, which begins two panels earlier with The Annunciation to the Virgin—the other bookend, as it were.46 The reliefs’ constant stress on Christ’s authority up to this point—the 42 Luke 1.19–20, NSRV. 43 Andrea’s relief is notable for its portrayal of listeners choosing silent speech over an audible voice. See Shoaf, “Voice and Wisdom,” 225–26, fig. 12.7. 44 Ilse Falk and Jenö Láni, “The Genesis of Andrea Pisano’s Bronze Doors,” The Art Bulletin 25, no. 2 (June, 1943), 137–38. 45 Ilse Falk, Studien zu Andrea Pisano (Hamburg: Niemann und Moschinski, 1940), 139–41; Smith, “The Baptistery of Pisa,” 194–95. 46 In the next panel, just inches beyond him, the narrative leaps ahead to The Crucifixion.

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Figure 51 Andrea Pisano, Zechariah Mute before the People, bronze, around 1330, south doors, baptistery, Florence Photo: Raffaello Bencini/Archivi Alinari, Firenze

heavenly announcements, the multiple elevations of his body—suddenly halts. A choice has been made, with the doubt-ridden figure, to punctuate the savior’s coming with a question mark. This resounding note of skepticism may seem puzzling. But in certain respects it was actually quite traditional. Medieval theologians and moralists

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Figure 52 The Annunciation to Zechariah, Elizabeth in Prayer, marble, 1180–1200, frieze above north portal, Baptistery of San Giovanni, Pisa Photo: Archivi Alinari-archivio Brogi, Firenze

had long set Zechariah’s incredulity in opposition to Mary’s belief.47 “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” she asks, when the angel Gabriel says that she will now conceive the son of God (Luke 1.34, NSRV). The angel, apparently taking this to be no more than a procedural question, explains vaguely that it will work with the Holy Spirit “overshadowing” the Virgin. Mary promptly and humbly submits herself with the words Dante’s admiring pilgrim remembered on seeing The Annunciation sculpture in Purgatory: “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word” (Luke 1.38, NSRV). The Zechariah-Mary antithesis had appeared in art before Nicola’s time, not only in twelfth-century church sculptures in western Tuscany but also 47

As already remarked by Glass (Portals, Pilgrimage, and Crusade, 12–13), who cites Ambrose (Expositio evangelii secundam Lucan). See also Augustine, Sermo 291.5 (Migne, PL 38.1318). For the thirteenth century, Peraldus, Summae virtutum ac vitiorum 1.2.1: “Similiter beata Virgo beatificatur, Lucae primo, quae credidit angelo in illa sublimi promissione: ‘Beata’, inquit, ‘quae credidisti’ &c. Econtrario vero…. Et Zacharias similiter punitur. Lucae 1. ‘Ecce’, inquit angelus, ‘eris tacens, & non poteris loqui vsque in diem quo haec fiant, pro eo quod non credidisti verbis meis’.”

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Figure 53 Nicola Pisano, Virgin Mary, detail of The Nativity of Christ, marble, 1260, Baptistery of San Giovanni, Pisa Photo: Luisa Ricciarini/Bridgeman Images

in southern Italy as far back as the ninth century.48 In order to bring the two stories into instructive relation, artists presented them symmetrically. Nicola took a subtler approach: A poignant gesture joins Zechariah with the Mary we see in the pulpit’s The Nativity, two panels earlier (Figs. 53, 54). Both figures feel their bellies through wide-open flaps of fabric, the angular folds of which frame their sensing hands. While Mary lifts her face, Zechariah lowers his. The variance invites the viewer to compare and interpret. For her part, the 48 Glass, Portals, Pilgrimage, and Crusade, 12–13. The ninth-century fresco program in Santa Sofia, Benevento, divides into two apses, with The Annunciation to Zechariah and Zechariah Mute before the People in one, and The Annunciation to the Virgin and The Visitation in the other. C. R. Dodwell, The Pictorial Arts of the West, 800–1200 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 162. Nicola may have been personally familiar with the frescoes at Santa Sofia, given the possibility that he worked in Campania (including in Naples and Casertavecchia), traveled between that region and sites to the east, in Apulia, and could have passed through Benevento on the way. For recent discussion of the south Italian geography of the sculptor’s putative early projects, see Bruzelius, “From Empire to Commune to Kingdom,” 142–43.

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Figure 54 Nicola Pisano, Zechariah, detail of The Presentation of Christ, marble, 1260, pulpit, Baptistery of San Giovanni, Pisa Photo: De Agostini Picture Library/G. Nimatallah/Bridgeman Images

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new mother contemplates the coming-to-pass of the mystery introduced by the angel at her annunciation. The event appears behind her head, as if in a memory, albeit from a perspective different from The Annunciation in Dante’s Purgatory reliefs (Figs. 17, 40). Nicola’s Mary Annunciate has not yet pledged her subservience. Instead, she recoils at the angel’s greeting, startled and baffled.49 Mute Zechariah too grapples with what he has just heard and what has just happened. But unlike Mary, he is overburdened by worldly presuppositions. His belly-touching alludes to biological knowledge that deafens him to the divine omnipotence that would make Elizabeth’s pregnancy conceivable. His unexpected touching also would have reminded viewers of Mary in her appearance on the pulpit’s first panel as a paragon of faith, a point accentuated by the reference Elizabeth’s speech makes, in the Presentation panel, to Mary’s believing the announcing angel. The enlargement of Zechariah and the parturient Mary in relation to others around them further secures their comparability while underlining the importance of the viewer pondering the distance between them in faith and receptivity to divine speech. To take the troubled Zechariah for an example of impious unbelief or an antithesis of the faithful Mary would not fully clarify his relationship to The Presentation and its figures, however. Nor would it explain why his disquiet looms so large in the relief panel. Another relationship begins to resolve the matter. Next to Zechariah stands Anna, who does not look at the infant. Sound, not sight, is her primary mode of perception, as she raises her face and parts her lips with praise of God and speech about Christ as a redeemer (Fig. 55). Her speech and his silence are starkly juxtaposed. Anna is the panel’s most overtly vocal figure. Frenzied, she does not control her utterance. Zechariah’s speech is not within his possession either. The voice of each is subject to divine authorization, and that is a big point. But there is another decisive factor. The pronounced connection between Anna’s ear and her open mouth by a means of a strong jawline suggests an alignment of voice and hearing that is fitting for the depiction of a person whose speech was reportedly enabled by her faith, faith which took the form of prophetic listening (Fig. 56). Her comparison with the mute and troubled Zechariah magnifies that precondition. It also indicates the magnitude of the mystery he must accept in order to become faithful. A larger contrast needs our attention as well. Anna’s back forms a boundary between the scene of Zechariah’s departure and The Presentation proper. 49 In Luke, when the angel first appears and speaks to Mary, she is taken aback, but only momentarily: “And he came to her and said, ‘Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you’. But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be” (Luke 1.28–29, NSRV).

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Figure 55 Nicola Pisano, Anna, detail of The Presentation of Christ, marble, 1260, pulpit, Baptistery of San Giovanni, Pisa Photo: De Agostini Picture Library/G. Nimatallah/Bridgeman Images

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Figure 56 Nicola Pisano, Anna, detail of The Presentation of Christ, marble, 1260, pulpit, Baptistery of San Giovanni, Pisa Photo: De Agostini Picture Library/G. Nimatallah/Bridgeman Images

At left and center, Christ has entered the temple as an offering to the Lord. The vocal recognition he receives from Anna and Simeon is possible by virtue not of institutional authority—neither one holds office in the temple—but of their faith. Luke does not report Anna’s specific words in praising God and speaking about Christ being the widely sought redeemer (Luke 2.38). He does quote Simeon, however. Taking the child in his arms and filled with the Holy Spirit, the righteous and devout man addresses him in humility, saying, Master, now you are dismissing [nunc dimittis] your servant in peace, according to your word; for my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel.50 50 Luke 2.29–32, NSRV. Simeon then continues prophesying. Turning to Mary and Joseph and blessing them, he says, “This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be

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Simeon refers to an earlier revelation in which the Holy Spirit indicated that before dying he would “see” the savior (Luke 2.26). That time has now come, and he alone perceives its meaning for humankind. His language is personal and visual: “for my eyes have seen … a light for revelation …” Mary and Joseph, who cannot see this for themselves, are amazed in hearing him say it (Luke 2.33).51 In the pulpit relief, Simeon’s solemn head inclines slightly and his hips shifting forward to help support the restless infant. His lips part a little. His brow creases in wonder, intensifying the gravity of his gaze (Fig. 57). These nuances summon the viewer to give the Simeon figure what it audibly lacks: a voice recognizing the greatness hoped for and previously believed, though only glimpsed in a vision. Meanwhile, at far right, Zechariah has just been stripped of his voice and religious authority by the angel. It will be months before he speaks his own prophecy, which Simeon’s will echo its references to salvation and light (Luke 1.68–79). For now, the temple he has exited is empty. Its congregants are speechless and awe-struck, recognizant of a great and unseen force at work. The carved scene implicates its viewers in the disparity before their eyes. While the temple at right falls silent, the other fills with faithful voices greeting a new age. In giving voice to Simeon’s speech, viewers were sounding the latter temple themselves. The act of hearing Simeon’s speech in saying or imagining it would have complemented the viewer’s voicing of Elizabeth’s blessings for Mary. In Luke, both orations are humble recognitions of Christ’s arrival. In the relief, the figure of Mary connects them as she stands in the temple hearing Simeon while appearing to remember hearing Elizabeth. The value Elizabeth’s words put on faith from hearing and touch is corroborated by Simeon’s handling and sight of Christ. There is also a progression in the scope of their respective words. Elizabeth speaks on an intimate level of herself, Mary, their wombs, and their children. Simeon’s words have a public, universalizing scale. To voice them was to affirm the beginning of humankind’s salvation—and to perform belief in it.52 We are not about to leave Elizabeth stranded, as the relief might seem to do if we did not understand her place and roles here. There was much more to her and Nicola’s pairing of her and Zechariah than has met our eye so far. revealed—and a sword will pierce your own soul too” (Luke 2.34–35, NSRV). The vision of falling and rising and opposition resonates with the two views of humanity shown in The Last Judgment relief, the saved and the damned (Fig. 44). 51 We are reminded of Fra Agostino’s deathbed vision and cry, in chapter two. 52 Elizabeth speaks obliquely of “a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord” (Luke 1.45, NSRV), whereas Simeon is more specific in proclaiming that salvation, revelation, and glory are coming, and that “all peoples” stand to benefit.

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Figure 57 Nicola Pisano, Simeon, detail of The Presentation of Christ in the Temple, marble, 1260, pulpit, Baptistery of San Giovanni, Pisa Photo: Luisa Ricciarini/Bridgeman Images

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Already for a century pilgrims and others circulating in Tuscany had seen The Annunciation to Zechariah coupled in sculpture with The Visitation as well as with The Annunciation to the Virgin at the entry of the Church of Sant’Andrea, in Pistoia.53 The public recognition enjoyed by Elizabeth and Zechariah in mid-thirteenth-century Pisa itself is attested by the visible presence of images of each in the cathedral vicinity. The Visitation had been visible on one of Bonanno’s bronze doors and on Guglielmo’s pulpit since the previous century (Figs. 46, 58).54 Another image of Elizabeth appears in the twelfth-century frieze above the north portal of the baptistery, next to The Annunciation to Zechariah. In Byzantine fashion, the mantle-draped figure lifts her hands in prayer as she faces outward to invite and engage directly with Pisans’ veneration (Fig. 52).55 Her son, John the Baptist, had been the baptistery’s titular saint since its twelfth-century dedication.56 The lighting of fires for the Baptist’s feast day, Visconti told worshipers, was prefigured by Zechariah’s entry into the temple to light the incense.57 We notice that in the portal relief, a censer swings from the priest’s hand. That detail must have gained local importance through association with the annual commemoration of the Baptist’s birth and the multisensory experience the ritual entailed. But Zechariah and Elizabeth do not appear in the baptistery frieze only in the capacity of John’s parentsto-be. Her pose of faith presents a clear contrast with her husband’s test of

53 Glass, Portals, Pilgrimage, and Crusade, 11–12. 54 On that half Guglielmo’s pulpit seen in the photograph(Fig. 46), The Visitation is in the upper left register, where two figures clasp hands (to the right of The Annunciation). 55 Smith, “The Baptistery of Pisa,” 194–95, fig. 213. Smith dates the relief to between 1180 and 1200. In drapery and frontal pose, the figure strongly resembles a cult image in Byzantium (and in Italy, for instance on the Basilica of San Marco, in Venice) known as Our Lady of Mercy, a frontally positioned Virgin Orans (Praying). The north portal Elizabeth recalls other “icons of invocation” showing the Virgin in prayer, as well. For those images and the treatment of images as persons in Byzantium, medieval Italy and beyond, see Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 186, 196, 200, figs. 108, 114, 120, 215. Belting reports too many adaptations of interactive Byzantine icons in medieval Pisa to discuss here, including in a frieze above the east portal of Pisa’s baptistery, made around 1200 (pp. 238, 249, fig. 145). But one observation provides a closer context for appreciating the relationship between Mary, the baptistery portal’s Elizabeth, and local image veneration: “In Pisa, the marble image of the Virgin Orans was seen everywhere on the façades of churches” (p. 357). 56 In hair, nose, brow, and deep-set eyes, Nicola’s Zechariah is the unmistakable ‘father’ of a statuette of John posed atop a column in the zone beneath the pulpit’s parapet. See Angiola, “Nicola Pisano,” 14, fig. 9. 57 Visconti, Les sermons, 655 (Sermon 40).

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Figure 58 Bonanno of Pisa, The Visitation, bronze, 1180, doors of Porta di San Ranieri, cathedral, Pisa Photo: De Agostini Picture Library/G. Nimatallah/Bridgeman Images

faith before the angel. The pulpit reliefs’ own juxtapositions of incredulity and belief—Zechariah in contrast with Elizabeth, Mary, Simeon, and Anna—thus had a predecessor already familiar to Pisans, just outside their baptistery’s doors. Nicola and his patron/advisor built on that familiarity, using the north portal reliefs as an interpretive context for revisiting and revising the theme.

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The ‘prototype’ Elizabeth in the twelfth-century baptistery portal frieze (Fig. 52) augments our understanding of the pulpit’s own Elizabeth and her relation to its own Zechariah (Figs. 42, 49, 50) in ways that bear pointedly on spiritual hearing. Preaching in the cathedral on the feast day of the Virgin’s Annunciation (year unknown), Visconti urged a public audience, “You all must, after the visitation of Mary [i.e., greeting her via the cathedral, which was dedicated to her], visit and honor her own cousin Elizabeth, in other words, the Church of Saint John the Baptist [i.e., the baptistery].”58 Although we cannot be sure, these words seem to have been directing worshipers to approach visiting the baptistery as a reenactment of The Visitation. Possibly the archbishop was imagining them approaching the image of faithful Elizabeth in prayer, on the baptistery’s exterior, and greeting it vocally, as Mary had greeted her cousin with speech, the sound of which made John leap in her womb, filled her with the Holy Spirit, and inspired her utterance of blessings.59 Perhaps Visconti was also thinking of the Elizabeth in the pulpit’s relief, inside the building (Fig. 49). In the same sermon, he had already encouraged listeners to appeal directly to Mary by saying Elizabeth’s very words: “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.”60 This parallel between archbishop and the pulpit relief in prompting worshipers to give voice to the Visitation blessings—while seeing Elizabeth say them just behind the figure of Mary in The Presentation—is all the more interesting when we grasp Visconti’s larger meaning in calling for the performance. The issue was auditory: One cannot effectively preach or hear sermons without divine grace. And for that grace, one should ask Mary, whom, as the angel who greeted her said, is full of grace. In making that supplication, worshipers were supposed to repeat Elizabeth’s words of blessing and remember Mary’s faith at her annunciation, which Elizabeth mentions.61 Our broadening sense of the pulpit

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60 61

Ibid., 568 (Sermon 29): “Vos omnes debetis, post visitationem beate Marie, visitare et honorare consobrinam suam Elisabeth, idest ecclesiam beati Ioannis Baptiste …” In another sermon, Visconti spoke publicly of Elizabeth being filled with the Holy Spirit while uttering prophecy to Mary and saying “as soon as I heard the voice of your greeting in my ears, the child in my womb leaped for joy.” Visconti, Les sermons, 651 (Sermon 40, year unknown). Ibid., 564 (Sermon 29, year unknown). Ibid., 564: “Sed quia de ipsa non potest utiliter predicari et audiri de ea sine Dei et sui Filii gratia, unde ipse dicit, Ioh. XV (15, 5): ‘Sine me’, idest sine gratia mea, ‘nihil potestis facere’, rogemus ipsam, que est plena gratia, ut dixit angelus quando salutavit eam: ‘Ave gratia plena’, Lc. III, ut impetret a Filio nobis gratiam quod nos aliqua de ipsa sic predicemus et vos sic audiatis quod spectet ad honorem suum et ad salutem animarum nostrarum. Et salutemus eam omnes simul dicentes: ‘Ave Maria gratia plena, Dominus tecum’, tu sis

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sculptures’ potential for spiritualizing voices and ears is thus supported by local preaching and piety along with a mode of interaction with pictures that had become part of Pisan culture thanks to an earlier generation of artists carving the baptistery’s portal figures. To reiterate our investigation’s most recent turn: The pulpit’s Elizabeth may have given more than we first thought to the new sonority of The Presentation (Fig. 42) and to worshipers’ vocal participation in that sound. In giving voice to her faith, viewers could simultaneously ask the Virgin to empower their hearing and speaking. The resulting sonority, we should add, may have had even greater resonance for them in light of a medieval Christian interpretation of Zechariah’s silence as a figure of Judaism yielding to Christianity. Ambrose of Milan (d. 397), for instance, had likened the mute Zechariah to the Jewish people who, as he saw it, had nothing to say because they did not understand the new faith.62 At the top of the pulpit’s next panel, The Crucifixion, a personification of Judaism, Synagoga (at right), is replaced by Ecclesia (at left) unambiguously (Fig. 43). In re-sounding The Presentation relief, viewers may have felt themselves to be vocally reenacting an ancient spiritual revolution that affirmed their religious identity as keepers of the final word. Be that as it may, on closer inspection Nicola’s Zechariah merges a little with Christ’s entourage in The Presentation. He does not look ready to join it, but neither does he stand firm in his usual religious station. He moves onward, slow and unsteady. This Zechariah does not neatly fit so categorical a distinction as Ambrose’s. He cannot be lumped in with the opponents to Christ’s authority pictured in the pulpit’s other reliefs: goats, Jews, the damned. The destination of Nicola’s straying figure is no mystery. Luke simply reports that Zechariah went home when he completed his time of service (Luke 1.23). What happened next is worded in the Gospel only obliquely: “After those days his wife Elizabeth conceived” (Luke 1.24, NSRV). Archbishop Visconti gave a more specific account. After largely repeating Luke’s story of Elizabeth and Zechariah, including the priest’s annunciation, his silencing, his being perceived to have had a vision, and his returning home, the preacher added that after his return, Zechariah “knew” Elizabeth, she became pregnant, and he rejoiced greatly.63 On the right side of a fourteenth-century mosaic, in the baptistery of Venice, Zechariah and Elizabeth embrace, reunited after his annunciation and his mute appearance before worshipers at his temple (Fig. 59). nobiscum, ‘benedicta tu in mulieribus et benedictus fructus ventris tui’, fac nos habere dulcissimi Filii tui suum amorem, gratiam et benedictionem.” 62 Ambrose, Expositio evangelii secundam Lucan 1.40. 63 Ibid., 650 (Sermon 40): “Completa septimana sua, quia in fine septimane sue ei apparuit visio, reversus est ‘in domum suam’, cognovit uxorem suam Elisabeth et inpregnata est, de quo multum cepit in corde suo exultare.”

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Figure 59 The Annunciation to Zechariah, Zechariah Mute before the People, Zechariah and Elizabeth, mosaic, fourteenth century, baptistery, Venice Photo: Cameraphoto Arte Venezia/Bridgeman Images

For Nicola’s dumbstruck Zechariah, by contrast, fruitful coupling is still down the road. The relief panel we have been conveniently calling The Presentation of Christ in the Temple, following art-historical convention, needs a modified title. It is more aptly described as a fluid triptych with The Visitation fragment and perhaps Zechariah Abandons the Temple in its lateral ‘wings’.64 The priest’s 64

The verse in Luke to which it most closely corresponds is: “When his time of service ended, he went to his home” (Luke 1.23, NSRV). Depictions of The Annunciation to Zechariah, in Italy, date to as early as the sixth century, in the Saint Augustine Gospels; also, in ninthcentury in frescoes in the Church of Santa Sofia, in Benevento (Campania); and again in the aforementioned capital at the Church of Sant’Andrea, in Pistoia (mid-twelfth century). The subject recurs in later thirteenth-century Tuscan painting and mosaic, including in the baptistery of Florence. Zechariah Mute before the People appears at the Church of Santa Sofia as well. The scene is identifiable for its proximity to the verse, “[Zechariah] kept motioning to them and remained unable to speak” (Luke 1.22, NSRV). Among the place we find it are the mosaic decoration of the cathedral of Monreale (twelfth century) and the baptistery of Venice (mid-fourteenth century). The thirteenth-century fresco program in Parma’s baptistery includes Zechariah Struck Dumb by the Angel. On the other hand, Zechariah’s return home had no pictorial tradition, though the completion of his journey did have one. The latter, which has no basis in the Book of Luke or the Protoevanglium of James, has gone by several titles in modern scholarship: Zechariah and Elizabeth, The Meeting of Zechariah and Elizabeth, Zechariah and Elizabeth Rejoice. The earliest known occurrence in Italy is in Venice’s baptistery (Fig. 59). See George Kaftal, Iconography of the Saints in Tuscan Painting (Florence: Sansoni, 1952), 549, 552; Kaftal,

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departure will culminate months later, after John’s birth, when, obedient and faithful and filled with the Holy Spirit, he speaks once again. His utterance is abrupt and unsettling: “Immediately his mouth was opened and his tongue freed, and he began to speak, praising God. Fear came over all their neighbors” (Luke 1.64–65, NSRV). Nicola’s Zechariah alludes to resolution of the pulpit panel’s faith-unfaith antithesis, raising the possibility of adding a voice to the new sonority. At the same time, in leaving the matter unresolved, the figure compels the viewer to dwell on his disturbance, his diminished authority, his spiritual deafness, his grappling, the angel’s speech re-sounding within.65 A more fitting title for this side of the panel would be Zechariah’s Passage to Faith. Visconti preached (again repeating Luke) that when Zechariah finally spoke, his astounding prophecy introduced the public to John as one who would go on to present Christ to the world and who would have God’s help in doing it.66 We are reminded that speaking for Christ took more than a human voice. Indeed, given the Baptist’s exalted status in medieval Pisa, he must have been a towering model of the divine empowerment of clerical speech. The stories of Zechariah and Elizabeth, as Visconti told them, have shown us other requirements too, including obedience and especially faith. Others come up when the archbishop cites Zechariah and Elizabeth as models of virtuous living. They had prayed to have children, he told worshipers, but the couple served the Lord Iconography of the Saints in the Painting of North East Italy (Florence: Sansoni, 1978), 512; Dodwell, Pictorial Arts of the West, 162; Glass, Portals, Pilgrimage, and Crusade, 11–15, 18, 61; Miklós Boskovits, The Mosaics of the Baptistery of Florence (Florence: Giunti, 2007), 289–90, 291n196 and n197. Often the scene immediately following Zechariah Mute before the People (when not the reunion of Zechariah and Elizabeth) is The Visitation (in which Elizabeth is of course pregnant) or The Naming of the Baptist (at the baby’s birth). And a glimpse of The Visitation is what Nicola’s Zechariah moves toward in the Pisa pulpit relief. For a survey of medieval traditions of picturing Zechariah in cycles of the life of Saint John the Baptist, see Falk, Studien zu Andrea Pisano, 104–156. 65 It may not be coincidental that much of the pulpit’s imagery has analogues in that utterance—the Benedictus, as it is referred to in its liturgical usage. Mention of “those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death” (Luke 1.79, NSRV) could describe the men seated abjectly around the pulpit’s base, surrounded by lions. A reference to “holy prophets of old” (Luke 1.70, NSRV) could relate to prophets occupying the pulpit’s spandrels, below the narrative panels. Emphasis on the problem of enemies and on the divine promise of salvation anticipates The Crucifixion and The Last Judgment (Luke 1.71, 1.74). Talk of the Lord raising up “a mighty savior for us in the house of his servant David” (Luke 1.69, NSRV) connects with Christ’s infancy and the genealogy of his legal father, Joseph. It is as if the pulpit’s sculptural decoration had been co-authored by, and conceived to evoke, Zechariah’s divinely inspired declaration of faith. 66 Visconti, Les sermons, 651–52 (Sermon 40).

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without lamenting their infertility or envying parents who were less worthy of divine favor.67 Envy was widely understood to be spiritually deafening, as we saw in the introduction and chapters two and three. The virtue that interests us presently, however, may be surprising after hearing Visconti say that Zechariah “knew” Elizabeth upon his return home. The couple exemplified chastity.68 Once she became pregnant, Visconti narrates, Zechariah hid her from neighbors and relatives, lest they suspect her of giving herself over to “works of the flesh.”69 In Luke, the couple shares chastity with Mary, Joseph, Simeon, and Anna—the other principle figures at Christ’s public introduction and reception. In Nicola’s The Presentation, chastity thus combines with faith to confer authority on hearing and speech about Christ. How chastity translated into authority in the Pisan context will concern us later. We need first to appreciate the commitment of Nicola’s art to sexual purity and its auditory implications, beyond the references to chaste figures of sacred history. That pledge is visible in the sculptor’s reuses of ancient art. 4

Antique Resonance

In Pisa, the artistic prototypes of Anna and the figures I have identified as Elizabeth and Zechariah were public figures themselves. One of them belongs to a sculpted Roman sarcophagus which by Nicola’s time had been embedded in the exterior of Pisa’s cathedral for nearly two centuries, where it entombed Beatrice of Lorraine (d.1076), mother of Countess Mathilda of Tuscany, the latter a great benefactor of the cathedral (Fig. 60). Another appears in the relief decoration of a Neo-Attic krater (Fig. 61). In the early fourteenth century, some sixty years after the completion of the baptistery pulpit, the large vase was erected on columns near the cathedral and labeled a gift from a Roman emperor, a “measure” in recognition of the city’s ancient role in weighing imperial tribute.70 How much earlier the krater arrived in Pisa is unknown, though scholars have not doubted its presence there in the mid-thirteenth century. Since the twelfth century, the height of Pisa’s military, communal, and ecclesiastical powers the cathedral had been an exhibition site of spolia trumpeting

67 68 69 70

Ibid., 649–50 (Sermon 40). Below we will see that Visconti was thinking specifically of Zechariah’s continence while on priestly duty, before returning home. Ibid., 650 (Sermon 40). Seidel, “Studien zur Antikenrezeption,” 321–24.

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Figure 60 Sarcophagus of Hippolytus and Phaedra, second century CE, Camposanto, Pisa Photo: De Agostini Picture Library/S. Vannini/Bridgeman Images

naval triumphs. Inscriptions in its stone surface compared the city and its artists favorably with mythic glories of the ancient past.71 Local classicisms extended further. Some Pisan nobles made use of ancient sarcophagi that had been altered and Christianized for their burials.72 Sculptural decoration of portals of the baptistery itself emulated a classical style and incorporated classical motifs.73 This wealth of antique appropriations provided a context in which Nicola’s reuses of already-reused art gained significance, though it made his choices no more inevitable than did his presumed training in southern Italy, another milieu in which antique sculpture had become a desirable artistic resource. Prior to the pulpit’s completion, Pisans had never seen anything like the semblances of the ancient figures in the panel of The Presentation. Auditory interests arguably informed Nicola’s choice of models for Elizabeth, Zechariah, and Anna—choices which scholarship has left largely unexplained. At left in the sarcophagus relief, a woman with a large ear and an open mouth speaks to a disconcerted young man (Fig. 63). Antiquarians in the early nineteenth century established the subject: Phaedra’s failed seduction of her stepson, the chaste Hippolytus, with the aid of her nurse.74 Euripides’s version of the legend has the nurse telling Hippolytus something shocking about 71

Chiara Frugoni, “L’autocoscienza dell’artista nelle epigrafi del duomo di Pisa,” in L’Europa dei secoli XI e XII fra novità e tradizione: Sviluppi di una cultura, Atti della decima settimana internazionale di studio, Mendola (25–29 Aug., 1986) (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1989): 277–304. 72 Angiola, “Nicola Pisano,” 24. 73 Carl D. Sheppard, “Classicism in Romanesque Sculpture in Tuscany,” Gesta 15, no. 1/2 (1976), 185, 187. 74 Alessandro da Morrona, Pisa illustrata nelle arti del disegno, 2nd ed. (Livorno, 1812), 286– 88; Sebastiano Ciampi, Due urne sepolcrali (Pisa, 1813), 7.

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Figure 61 Neo-Attic krater, Camposanto, Pisa Photo: Archivi Alinari-archivio Alinari, Firenze

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Phaedra, while Seneca’s nurse tries verbal persuasion instead.75 Whatever the case may be in the sarcophagus sculpture in Pisa, she speaks animatedly—one of the many naturalistic elements Nicola would take from ancient art.76 And Hippolytus recoils at what he hears (Fig. 60). Listening looks different in the krater relief (Fig. 61). Zechariah’s sculptural forbear follows immediately behind a half-naked flute player and pauses as one small figure takes off his shoe while another keeps him upright—Nicola adapted the latter for his unsteady Zechariah. The krater relief combines a Bacchic procession with the drunken god’s stop at a private dwelling, the occasion perhaps of the first human recognition of Bacchus/Dionysos as a god or of the god’s introduction of wine to humans while visiting the farmer Ikarios.77 The scantily dressed revelers behind him move their limbs to the flute’s song, but Bacchus does not respond to the music. Instead, the inebriated god teeters as he concentrates on raising his foot and pulling his garment above it for the shoe’s removal. While Phaedra’s nurse became a prototype for the aural and vocal figures of Elizabeth and Anna (Figs. 49, 55), Bacchus offered Nicola an idea for the juxtaposition of listening and not hearing. Nicola’s reuse of ancient art here goes beyond the depiction of speech and listening per se. His figures bear such a close resemblance to their predecessors that a conscious invitation to compare the new forms with the old is undeniable. What makes the comparisons even more striking is how far the antique reliefs are from ideals of chastity and continence that were associated with Elizabeth, Zechariah, and Anna. Possibly his Pisan contemporaries would not have recognized the Hippolytus story in the sarcophagus relief, though Phaedra was a recurrent character in medieval recitations of classical incest stories.78 If illicit desire in the relief was not obvious to viewers, the sexual overtone must have been plain. Phaedra’s diaphanous gown falls from her bare shoulder (Fig. 62). She exposes a leg and extends her foot to touch the toes of the nude young man (Fig. 60). The biblical seduction of Joseph of Egypt by Potiphar’s wife (Gen. 39) may have come to mind. 75 Euripides, Hippolytus 603, 616–55; Seneca, Phaedra 432–82. 76 Seidel, “Studien zur Antikenrezeption,” 327–28, argues that this quality of speech is precisely what interested Nicola, who, in the scholar’s view, sought such forms in ancient Roman art for the purpose of dramatic expression. 77 A relief dating to around 40–30 BCE, now in the Museo Nazionale in Naples (inv. 6713), has a similar composition and includes flute playing. See Paul Zanker, The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus, trans. Alan Shapiro (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), 62, fig. 49. For possible sources of the krater relief, see Dorothy C. Shorr, “The Iconographic Development of The Presentation in the Temple,” The Art Bulletin 28, no. 1 (Mar., 1946), 27; Seidel, “Studien zur Antikenrezeption,” 319n51. 78 Elizabeth Archibald, Incest and the Medieval Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 68, 78, 102.

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Figure 62 Phaedra, detail of Sarcophagus of Hippolytus and Phaedra, Camposanto, Pisa Photo: De Agostini Picture Library/S. Vannini/Bridgeman Images

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Phaedra’s intermediary, the nurse, brings out the theme of carnal temptation further by mirroring her mistress, exposing a bare shoulder with the fall of a strap (Fig. 63). Go-betweens were a common feature of medieval tales of sexual conquest.79 By Nicola’s time literary authors had often cast the vetula (“old woman”) in the role of procuress.80 In sermons, the vetula became a figure of lust’s dangers. Her venomous tongue, poisonous like the devil’s own, gave immoral advice, stoked lechery in men’s hearts, and corrupted virtuous people.81 Something of this stereotypical image came up in the preaching of Archbishop Visconti when he spoke publicly of the pregnant Elizabeth going into hiding lest neighbors and relatives suspect her pregnancy resulted from “works of the flesh” procured through a vetula.82 In the light of such discourse, the go-between in the ancient relief represented at the very least the antithesis of the chaste Elizabeth and of Anna, the continent widow par excellence. Whether Pisans would have more readily recognized Bacchus and his mythic entourage in the krater relief we cannot know. But precise identifications were unnecessary for seeing inebriation and carnality there. This vein of observation is unspoken in the literature on Nicola Pisano. Some early scholars considered the sculptor a pagan or even “deeply heathen” artist, but antique sensuality registers nowhere in such assessments. Zechariah, in the relief of The Presentation, has often been labeled Bacchus- or Dionysos-like without any question of incongruence. Recognition of the Phaedra story as Nicola’s model usually raises no eyebrows, even when the Phaedra figure is taken to have been the model for the Virgin Mary, that highest standard of purity, in the pulpit’s first two narrative panels (Figs. 40, 42, 53). The notion of the pulpit sculptures’ relationship to those antiquities being problematic at all has rarely arisen. Nicola Pisano: ever the would-be Polykleitos? In a controversial downgrade of Nicola’s art (1864), Joseph Crowe and Giovanni Cavalcaselle judged the sculptor to have rejected “the religious sentiment which had marked his predecessors and contemporaries,” though they 79

Gretchen Mieszkowsi, Medieval Go-Betweens and Chaucer’s Pandarus (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 9–78. 80 Jole Agrimi and Chiara Crisciani, “Savoir medical et anthropologie religieuse: Les représentations et les fonctions de la vetula (XIIIe–XVe siècle),” Annales E. S. C. 5 (Sept.– Oct., 1993), 1299–1302; Mieszkowsi, Medieval Go-Betweens, 58–78. 81 Peraldus, Summae virtutum ac vitiorum 2.3.3.2 (De peccato vetularum turpitudinem consulentium). 82 Visconti, Les sermons, 650 (Sermon 40): “Completa septimana sua, quia in fine septimane sue ei apparuit visio, reversus est [Zechariah] in domum suam, cognovit uxorem suam Elisabeth et inpregnata est, de quo multum cepit in corde suo exultare, sed, propter gentes sive vicinos et cognatos, multum verecundari quod vetula daret opera carni; unde occultabat nec volebat aliquem sciere quousque in sexto mense.”

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Figure 63 Nurse, detail of Sarcophagus of Hippolytus and Phaedra, Camposanto, Pisa Photo: De Agostini Picture Library/S. Vannini/Bridgeman Images

also found that in his art pagan models had become subservient to “Christian subjects and thought.”83 What dismayed the writers was their perception that Nicola had merely imitated the external appearance of ancient art without giving those forms Christian meaning. Since then, however, art historians have considered how classicism in medieval art may have manifested and

83 Joseph Archer Crowe and Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle, A History of Painting in Italy (London, 1864), 1:123–25.

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acted upon deep ambivalence toward the Antique.84 Yet only more recently have scholars begun to admit a cultural dissonance in the Pisan pulpit reliefs. Brendan Cassidy, for one, noted that antique “quotations” such as the likeness of the drunken Bacchus in The Presentation, while they glorified Pisa’s past connections with Rome, were inscrutable to scholars on another level: “It is difficult to determine precisely what Nicola and his patrons intended with these pagan quotations or how thirteenth-century Pisans might have understood them in the context of the Christian stories.”85 The view of Nicola as an imitator of antiquities has persisted in various iterations from Vasari to the twenty-first century, not always with negative connotations for the artist.86 At the same time, scholars since the early nineteenth century have portrayed his relationship to ancient art alternately as one of assimilation, adaptation, translation, independence, transformation, and spiritualization. The last two are the most useful terms for our purposes, albeit with modification. For Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl (1933), spiritualization meant Nicola’s transformation of ancient forms into suitable vehicles for “current religious and moral ideas,” achieved by tempering Antiquity’s prioritizing the physical body and its movements.87 Following this view, Max Seidel influentially proposed that, clothed with garments that spiritualized the body by largely concealing it, the Bacchus-like figure in The Presentation (Fig. 50) embodied an idea from Christian liturgy, as noted above.88 Panofsky and Saxl’s spiritualization argument had another aspect that shaped subsequent understanding of classicism in the pulpit reliefs. If Phaedra could become the Virgin Mary in Nicola’s art, they reasoned, it was because classical form was separate from classical content in the medieval mind.89 In the wake of this “principle of disjunction,” as Panofsky would later term it, scholars construed ancient style

84 Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art, 2nd ed. (1960; repr., New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1972), 109–113; Camille, Gothic Idol, 73–114, 341–43; Jane C. Long, “The Survival and Reception of the Classical Nude: Venus in the Middle Ages,” in The Meanings of Nudity in Medieval Art, ed. Sherry C. Lindquist (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2012), 56–57. 85 Brendan Cassidy, Politics, Civic Ideals, and Sculpture in Italy, c. 1240–1400 (London: Harvey Miller Publishers, 2007), 97–99. Paul Williamson, Gothic Sculpture, 1140–1300 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 244, expresses comparable perplexity. 86 See Seidel, Father and Son, 1:13–39, for a history of scholarly attitudes toward Nicola’s reuses of antiquities. 87 Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, “Classical Mythology in Mediaeval Art,” Metropolitan Museum Studies 4, no. 2 (Mar., 1933), 270–71. 88 Seidel, “Studien zur Antikenrezeption,” 319. 89 Panofsky and Saxl, “Classical Mythology,” 264.

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in Nicola’s art in various ways, all independent of ancient significance.90 With the opening of classical form to non-classical interpretations, the question of its meaning to medieval Pisan audiences has led to spiritual, liturgical, political, civic, and social interpretations grounded in medieval sources.91 The principle of disjunction does not assign value to the act of detachment itself, the leaving behind of old meanings for new ones. But period-specific perspectives give us to think that it must have mattered to Nicola’s contemporaries. For one thing, old connotations could endure while gaining new uses. Take Bacchus, whose name appears in medieval Christian promotions of chastity through an ancient phrase connecting lust with wine drinking: “Venus grows cold without Ceres and Bacchus.”92 Further, ancient meanings could have importance for Christian messages of spiritual progress. A public discussion of The Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary (another name for The Presentation of Christ in the Temple), a major annual celebration in medieval Pisa (Feb. 2), shows Christian identity to have been heavily dependent on awareness of a former, pagan one.93 In a sermon given by Visconti in the cathedral in the presence of the city’s civil leader (podestà), the archbishop offered what was then a common explanation for another of the occasion’s designations, Candelaria (Candlemas). The story’s premise, it is worth pointing out, is an ancient lustful abduction. It should be known that after Persephone had been seized by Pluto, her mother searched for her with torches and candles through the mountains of Sicily. Thus, the custom of the Gentiles came into being, so that in Rome itself … they illuminated the city all around…. Since the Holy 90 91

For this concept, see Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences, 84–100. As shown by the arguments of Seymour, “Invention and Revival”; Angiola, “Nicola Pisano”; Settis, “Iconography”; and Cassidy, Politics. 92 “Sine Cercere et Baccho [or Libero] friget Venus.” Jerome, Adversus Jovinianum 2.7 (Migne, PL 23.310b); Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae 2.2.Q147: “per ieiunia castitas conservatur. Ut enim Hieronymus dicit, ‘sine Cerere et Baccho friget Venus’, idest, per abstinentiam cibi et potus tepescit luxuria.” The phrase comes originally from the poetry of Terrence (The Eunuch, second century BCE). 93 According to the Book of Luke (2.22–23), the bringing of Christ to the Temple began as an act of legal compliance, the consecration of first-born children, whom the Lord claimed as his own (Exod. 13.2). The ritual involved purification, and Luke speaks of it in the plural: “their purification.” For Visconti, the presentation of Christ in the Temple was also the occasion of maternal purification from the “pollution” of childbearing. Neither Christ nor Mary were thought to have actually needed purification, however, Christ being divine in nature and Mary having been free of sexual contact. Visconti, Les sermons, 512 (Sermon 21).

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Fathers could not easily banish this custom, they established a new feast in honor of blessed Mary which was to replace the feast in honor of Persephone.94 Visconti widened the significance of Candelaria by pointing out that the celebration of The Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary also replaced a Roman custom of honoring idols on the Kalends of February. Engagement with material images was thus implicated. The Purification in fact had importance in the thirteenth century as a manifold spiritualization—and not only of pagan beliefs and practices. It ushered in the historical end of Jewish purification and the beginning of Christian purification. Mary and Christ, though already pure, had followed Jewish custom in presenting themselves at the temple after Christ’s birth. Their reasons for doing this, according to churchmen in Nicola’s time, included humility and intent to replace the custom. There was a third reason: the modeling of self-purification for Christians.95 With that modeling in mind, Visconti used the purification theme to urge Pisans to purge themselves of lust, and to do so by praying to the Virgin, “the most chaste one,” for help.96 In Nicola’s The Presentation, Mary is part of a broader discourse of purification that comes through Elizabeth, Anna, and Zechariah referring to the ancient figures of the procuress and the drunken deity. We have already seen that the sculptor used Zechariah and his temple to visualize a priest’s difficult passage from incredulity to faith. The antique references, I suggest, would have evoked a moral bond of the extended ‘family’ of Christ’s witnesses whose members are coupled and visually homogeneous. The sculpted scene is almost a vision of baptism: an assembly of godparent-like figures, spiritual kin who will replace the child’s flesh relations as he enters society.97 The isolation of Elizabeth and Anna further hints 94 I borrow the translation from Angiola, “Nicola Pisano,” 11. For the Latin, see Visconti, Les sermons, 517 (Sermon 22, year unknown). Durand offers a comparable explanation. Durand, Rationale, 673–74. 95 Voragine, Golden Legend, 1:44; Visconti, Les sermons, 513 (Sermon 21). 96 Visconti, Les sermons, 513–14 (Sermon 21), 518–19, 521 (Sermon 22). 97 The Presentation of Christ in the Temple was at times considered a proto-baptism. Durand, discussing the feast of the Virgin’s Purification, refers to baptism as a successor of the ancient rite of presenting infants at the Jewish temple. Durand, Rationale 7.7.17: “sicut praesentatio puerorum ad templum, secundum veterem ritum, defecit, quia hodie fit in baptismo.” Other relationships between the Purification/Presentation and baptism in the thirteenth century are identified in Thierry Maertens, Histoire et pastorale du rituel du catéchuménat et du baptême (Bruges: Biblica, 1962), 218–19; Dorothy F. Glass, “The Sculpture of the Baptistery of Parma: Context and Meaning,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 57, no. 3 (2015), 284. For the medieval Christian concept of spiritual

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at their continence. They interact with no one directly. The source of what each hears is not depicted, and their speech has no direct addressee. Nicola’s Anna is more prominent in this respect. Her audience, one of the novel elements of the pulpit’s The Presentation of Christ, has gathered receptively to her side. They diverge not only from the scandalized Hippolytus but also from the fragmented congregation of Zechariah, the two visible members of which are stranded as they look on, mystified and hearing nothing from the priest. Nicola juxtaposed them with an image of a society reborn through hearing Anna’s faithful and chaste voice—the new sonority in which the relief panel encouraged early viewers to participate, as discussed earlier. What need did this interactive spectacle of sound and moral character satisfy? How does it bear on the authority of churchmen speaking God’s word from the pulpit? Inclining our ears again to Archbishop Visconti will clarify these questions. 5

Muted Clergy

Federico Visconti, Pisa’s archbishop for 24 years beginning in 1253, has rightly been regarded by scholars as an energetic reformer of Pisa’s clergy. That agenda is already palpable in advice about preaching, which he offered in a sermon delivered before clergymen earlier, while serving as a canon in Pisa’s cathedral. He advised those who preached to put themselves “in a high place, not in a valley where the filth of wretched knowledge and carnal pleasure swarms.”98 He said they should contemplate Scripture, in accordance with the Lord’s command to “Get you to a high mountain, O Zion, herald of good tidings,” (Isa. 40.9, NSRV). He maintained that they should live the highest life, so they can speak from the mount, not from the valley. He continued: They should be filled with “illumination of the spiritual” and with “all knowledge, and able to instruct one another” (Rom. 15.14, NSRV). And they should be capable of preaching, so that they may pour out preaching and doctrine like rain on the earth of listeners’ free will. Oratory in Pisan churches appears to have needed lifting in more than one sense. Whether Visconti’s thinking here extended to physical elevation is unclear. But it is worth noting the kinship between his biblical kinship and the importance of baptism to it, see Anita Guerreau-Jalabert, “La parenté dans l’Europe médiévale et moderne: À propos d’une synthèse récente,” L’homme 29, no. 110 (Apr.–June, 1989), 79; Guerreau-Jalabert, “Spiritus et caritas. Le baptême dans la société médiévale,” in La parenté spirituelle, ed. Françoise Héritier-Augé and Elizabeth Copet-Rougier (Paris: Archives Contemporaines, 1996), 162–71; Jérôme Baschet, Le sein du père: Abraham et la paternité dans l’Occident médiéval (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), 29–47. 98 Visconti, Les sermons, 706 (Sermon 48, given before 1254).

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evocations of a “high mountain” and medieval ideas cited at the beginning of this chapter that liken pulpits to mountains on which voices of doctrine should be lifted.99 Art historians have generally agreed that Visconti commissioned the baptistery pulpit himself, though no contract survives.100 The case for his intellectual direction of the pulpit’s sculptural decoration has rested largely on parallels between its imagery and his sermons. His reforms have been cited as additional motivation—a key point for us in this section.101 Eloise Angiola, one of the first scholars to argue for Visconti as the pulpit’s commissioner, showed that his larger aims were to bring order to the archbishopric by regulating the Pisan clergy and to establish “the preeminent authority” of the archbishop and the cathedral church of Pisa.102 The pulpit suited his campaign on several counts, Angiola noted. One was its location in a baptistery, a building at the center of religious and civic life in Pisa. Another was the archbishop’s role in the sacrament of baptism. Angiola’s main point was that Visconti enlisted stylistic classicism to 99 Ibid., 376 (Sermon 6, no later than 1253). 100 Visconti himself has not been unanimously recognized as the pulpit’s commissioner. A document of 1258–59 which registers cathedral expenses, including columns for the pulpit, would seem to indicate its ‘patron’ to have been cathedral’s chapter of canons, a self-governing group headed by an archpriest and independent of the archbishop. For the document, see Antonino Caleca, La dotta mano: Il battistero di Pisa (Bergamo: Edizioni Bolis, 1991), 123. A. Middledorf Kosegarten, “ ‘Davide come Ercole’: Un messagio filo-imperiale dal pulpito del battistero pisano,” in Arte d’Occidente: temi e metodi. Studi in onore di Angiola Maria Romanini, ed. Angiola Maria Romanini and Antonio Cadei (Rome: Sintesi informazione, 1999), 2:885, argues for the cathedral chapter as the pulpit’s patron. Caleca himself thought Visconti was probably the patron and wrote that works at San Giovanni depended strictly on both the archbishop and the cathedral chapter (p. 124). Further evidence of cooperation between the archbishop and the cathedral chapter with regard to Pisa’s baptistery comes in a sermon in which Visconti called on his audience to donate to work happening there. See Visconti, Les sermons, 568–69 (Sermon 29, undated). While others have taken the position that he commissioned the pulpit jointly with the canons, no evidence has emerged to suggest anything beyond an administrative role for the latter, whereas the archbishop’s intellect (legible in his numerous surviving sermons), his civico-pastoral mission, his history of artistic patronage and interest in building, and his desire to contribute to work on the baptistery make him the probable lead in the pulpit’s commission and ideation, as argued by Angiola, “Nicola Pisano,” 1–27; Moskowitz, Italian Gothic Sculpture, 31; Bériou, “Federico Visconti, prédicateur,” 251. 101 Maria Laura Testi Cristiani, “Nicola Pisano e la committenza dell’arcivescovo Federico Visconti,” Critica d’arte 149 (1975), 17; Angiola, “Nicola Pisano,” 1–2, 4. Studies addressing Visconti’s clerical reforms include D. Lucciardi, “Federico Visconti arcivescovo, parte 1,” Bollettino storico pisano 1, no. 2 (1932): 7–48; Luccardi, “Federico Visconti arcivescovo di Pisa, parte 2: Il Vescovo,” Bollettino storico pisano 2, no. 1 (1933): 7–28; Bériou, “Federico Visconti, prédicateur,” 230, 238–40. 102 Angiola, “Nicola Pisano,” 2.

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prop up archiepiscopal and cathedral authority. To emulate ancient sculptures was to appeal to the prestige of the aristocracy to which the archbishop and the cathedral’s clergy belonged, a class with a taste for antique styles. The echelon’s traditional dominance in the commune had waned in the rise of popular political movements. The notion of Visconti being inflexibly allied with Pisa’s aristocracy in the years of the pulpit commission has more recently come into question, however.103 At the same time, Caroline Bruzelius has argued for seeing the pulpit’s authority function and classicism through the lens of another kind of competition. Many people in thirteenth-century Italy’s flourishing of “new speech” felt entitled to preach and to perform sacraments: participants in religious reform movements, “heretics,” charismatic itinerant preachers, and groups authorized by the Church, namely, canons regular, secular clergy, Benedictine monks, Dominican friars, Franciscan friars.104 In this jostling environment, Visconti saw the oratorical skills of Pisa’s clergy needing improvement.105 The classical “language” and “eloquence” of Nicola’s sculpture, carved in the prestigious material of marble, conceivably compensated for their rhetorical shortcomings, Bruzelius maintains.106 But more was needed against the diffuse clamor for the right to sacred speech. And competition from unlicensed voices may have been only background noise in comparison with other issues which preoccupied Visconti. We glimpsed this in chapter one, where he turned audiences’ thoughts to speech and listening explicitly by reminding them that preachers spoke for God and that effective preaching and listening depended on divine grace.107 Prayer alone was not enough to gain such assistance. The archbishop had in mind 103 Alma Poloni has shown Visconti’s support for the anti-aristocratic popolo, which had risen to power only a couple of years before the pulpit’s commission. The relationship endured. See Alma Poloni, Trasformazioni della società e mutamenti delle forme politiche in un comune italiano: Il popolo a Pisa, 1220–1330 (Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2006), 86–93. 104 Bruzelius, “From Empire to Commune to Kingdom,” 146–7; Moskowitz, Italian Gothic Sculpture, 26. Also relevant here is that cathedrals in twelfth- and thirteenth-century central and northern Italy were losing their roles as symbolic centers of civic space, a point made by Stephen J. Milner, “Citing the Rinchiera: The Politics and Place of Address in Trecento Florence,” Italian Studies 55, no. 1 (2000), 54. 105 Bruzelius, “From Empire to Commune to Kingdom,” 148. 106 Ibid., 148. 107 For broader verbal efforts to boost preachers’ spiritual authority in the thirteenth century, see Carla Casagrande, “Le calame du Saint-Esprit: Grâce et rhétorique dans la prédication au XIIIe siècle,” in La parole du prédicateur, V e–XV e siècle, ed. Rosa Maria Dessì and Michel Lauwers (Nice: Centre d’études médiévales, 1997), 235–54; Silvana Vecchio, “Les langues de feu: Pentecôte et rhétorique sacrée dans les sermons des XIIe et XIIIe siècles,” in Dessì and Lauwers, La parole du prédicateur, 255–69.

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something more fundamental during a sermon he gave in the cathedral on the feast of The Purification of the Virgin Mary: “We cannot appear in the presence of God unless we are purified and purged of vices.” To illustrate such purity, the archbishop recalled to listeners’ minds Simeon holding the infant Christ in the temple—a central element of Nicola’s The Presentation relief.108 It is not hard to imagine Visconti fixing a sober eye on members of Pisa’s clergy while speaking those words. In the sermons he delivered at a provincial synod, which he convened in 1258 to promote clerical reforms, he came to the issue of sex. Standing before bishops and archbishops, presbyters and archpresbyters, all canons, abbots, priors, plebans, mendicant friars, and the chaplain of Pisa and its diocese, Visconti declared that many clergymen were fornicators, adulterers, incestuous, and “sodomitas.”109 Few are the priests who do not have a concubine, he lamented. Even worse, few bother to hide them.110 Extremely abhorrent to him was clerical sex occurring “against nature” and on church grounds.111 Armed with biblical citations, the archbishop defended to his fellow churchmen Scripture’s strict ban on such behaviors and stressed their ultimate consequences: divine judgment and disinheritance of God’s kingdom. One of the quotations put this in the direst terms: “ ‘Fornicators’, and the like, ‘their place will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death’ ” (Rev. 21.8).112 Lechery had consequences for how clergy were perceived not only by God but by the public, Visconti realized. He must have feared the communal repercussions of scandal and derision ensuing from disgrace in office.113 In the eyes of the faithful, carnal pursuits could only diminish 108 Visconti, Les sermons, 513 (Sermon 21): “Moraliter, per istam purificationem significatur quod nos non nisi purificati et purgati a vitiis debemus coram Domino comparere…. Et tunc meremur Christum portare sicut Simeon.” 109 Ibid., 358 (Sermon 2, given February 15, 1258): “Ecce quod portitores vasorum iubentur mundari, multo ergo fortius sacerdotes mundi esse debent, qui sunt vasa corporis et sanguinis domini nostri Iesu Christi, quod est contra multos sacerdotes fornicatores, adulteros, incestuosos et sodomitas.” 110 Visconti, Les sermons, 336 (Sermon 1, given February 15, 1258): “Pauci enim sunt sacerdotes, ut intelleximus in nostra diocesi, qui non teneant concubinam et, quod deterius est, eas publice tenent.” Priests were given eight days to separate from their concubines or face a fine. Lucciardi, “Il Vescovo,” 19. Clergy faced severe canonical sanctions if they did not renounce concubinage and homosexual practices. Bériou, “Federico Visconti, prédicateur,” 230. 111 Ibid., 337–38 (Sermon 1); 358, 360 (Sermon 2); 428 (Sermon 11, no year); 698 (Sermon 46, no year). 112 Ibid., 337 (Sermon 1). 113 A discourse against lechery in Perrault’s Summas of the Virtues and Vices warns that lust is especially serious in the case of clergy because it gives rise to public scandal and derision. He adds that fornication in churches is a greater sin than in houses and that the

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the clergy’s superiority in the spiritual kinship they shared.114 The word of God, spoken by preachers, was supposed to cleanse the souls of listeners, he pointed out to Pisa’s clergy.115 Evidently that was not happening. Clerical authority stood in question on a deeper and related count. The effectiveness of their speech demanded, among other things, a “firm faith.”116 Faith was in fact the overarching theme of the synodal oration in which Visconti brought up the issue of clergymen’s sexual transgressions. Throughout the sermon, he presumed his audience’s negligence or ignorance of principles which pertained to their office. He felt compelled to remind them that serving the Lord was a privilege they must earn by acting in faith.117 He was obliged to admonish them that pleasing God was impossible without faith.118 He spoke at great length of faith overcoming the corrupting temptations of the devil and the world.119 He made sure to note that faith was essential to believing that divine judgment would come.120 Visconti wanted clergy to see faith as a path above reproach which they must take. “Let us walk, dearest brothers, the way dignity of office is at stake. Peraldus, Summae virtutum ac vitiorum 2.7: “Quae aggravant peccatum carnis in clericis. Septem aute[m] sunt quae aggrauant peccatu[m] carnis in clericis in sacris ordinibus co[n]stitutis…. Secundu[m] est scandalu[m] & derisio populi…. Quartu[m] est hoc, q[uo]d ad seruitiu[m] Dei assumpti sunt. Sicut enim q[uis] fornicat in ecclesia, magis peccat, qua[m] q[uis] fornicatur in domo co[m]muni, eo q[uo] ecclesia sit Dei seruitio deputata. Sic maius est peccatu[m] luxuriae in clericis qui sunt Dei seruitio deputati, qua[m] in laicis…. Septimu[m] est, dignitas officij ad quod ordinati sunt, quod specialiter pertinet ad sacerdotes.” Visconti knew Perrault’s tract against lechery. He cited it in one of the sermons he delivered at the 1258 synod: “Et nota quod octo sunt rationes quare simplex fuit fornicatio prohibenda, sicut habetur in Summa de vitiis, et in tractatu de luxuria continetur” [i.e., Peraldus, Summae virtutum ac vitiorum 3.5.2]. Visconti, Les sermons, 337 (Sermon 1). 114 Casagrande and Vecchio, I sette vizi capitali, 171–72. 115 Visconti, Les sermons, 328 (Sermon 1): “Sed quia Verbum Dei est apud Deum [John 1.1]: ‘In principio erat Verbum et Verbum erat apud Deum’, necesse habemus recurrere ad ipsum Deum, ut ipse dignetur ad salutem audientium in os nostrum mittere verbum suum. Sic enim scriptum est in Psalmo CVI [v. 20]: ‘Misit verbum suum et sanavit eos’. ‘Misit’, scilicet Deus, ‘verbum suum’, scilicet in os predicatorum, ‘et sanavit eos’, scilicet animos auditorum.” 116 Ibid., 347 (Sermon 2): “Et secundum duplicem litteram nota duos magnos effectus, scilicet, passive, quia … dat verbum predicationis, ut proponens loquatur cum magna ‘constantia fidei’, unde Act. IIII [Acts 4.29]: ‘Da servis tuis cum’ magna ‘fiducia loqui’, et XIX a [Acts 19.8]: Ingressus Paulus ‘sinagogam cum fiducia loquebatur’.” 117 Ibid., 331–32 (Sermon 1). 118 Ibid., 330 (Sermon 1). Here he quotes the Letter to the Hebrews (11.6): “And without faith it is impossible to please God.” 119 Ibid., 331 (Sermon 1). 120 Ibid., 344 (Sermon 1).

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of the blameless,” he implored them, specifying that by this he meant their service “in faith working through love.”121 Walking the way of blamelessness, as far as pulpits went, was an issue not only of God’s pleasure but also of congregants’ perceptions.122 Durand, the thirteenth-century liturgist, wrote of pulpits publicly exposing the life of “perfect men” (i.e., the clergy), and he directed liturgy to demonstrate that perfection.123 Deacons were required to ask for the blessing of a bishop or priest on their way to the pulpit for a gospel reading.124 In moving toward the pulpit, they needed to walk silently, their eyes fixed on the ground. There is an element of exhibition here, a self-conscious attitude about that movement, which Nicola’s mobile and downward-looking Zechariah seems conceived to enter into dialogue with. For deacons, the display had a point: They had to strive to show (“studeat exhibere”) themselves to be “pure in heart, clean in words, chaste in deed,” so that they could “worthily present the Gospel.” As the “fountain of living waters,” the Gospel flows freely only “from a chaste heart and a pure mouth. For praise has no beauty in the mouth of a sinner,” Durand cautioned.125 And if the desired impression of perfection failed? The philosopher Pierre Bourdieu has argued that the authority of spokespersons does not inhere in their speech but rather is delegated to them, granted by their addressees.126 Such a vesting of power, in Visconti’s Pisa, arguably took the form of attentive 121 Ibid., 331 (Sermon 1): “Ambulemus igitur, fratres karissimi, ‘in via immaculata’, idest operemur in fide operante per dilectionem de Gal. V b [Gal. 5.6], ut sic mereamur Domino ministrare.” 122 Aventin, “L’ambon,” 144, discusses how, already in twelfth-century Italy, the moral quality of the lives and actions of deacons entered the spotlight when they mounted pulpits. Among the evidence he cites is a Latin inscription on a pulpit in the abbey church of Casauria (Abruzzi, around 1180), which translates as: “You who sing here, see that your speech be not empty. He errs much who does wrong and sings it well. It is with acts that a good doctrine is worthy of the crown. The proclaimed word is seconded by the merit of actions.” 123 Durand, Rationale 1.1.33: “Pulpitum in Ecclesia est vita perfectorum, et dicitur quasi publicum, sive in loco publico constitutum.” 124 Ibid., 4.24.1. 125 Ibid., 4.24.9: “Diaconus autem ea quae sibi in benedictione dicuntur considerans, se corde purum, ore mundum, et opere castum studeat exhibere, quatenus sacrosanctum Evangelium possit digne proferre, quia ‘puteus aquarum’ viventium, idest evangelica praedicatio, ‘non fluit impetu’, idest libere, nisi ‘de Libano’, idest corde casto, et ore candido…. Deinde licentia et benedictione obtentis, et insuper cruce impressa, ut securus incedat, procedit ad pulpitum cum silentio, inclinato capite, nihil in quibusdam Ecclesiis ferens.” 126 Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 106–16.

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listening to readings and sermons spoken from pulpits. Where speakers of God’s word did not practice what they preached, where they were manifestly unclean and unbelieving, an evidently institution-wide problem, they risked audiences withholding their ears from speech that was supposed to purify all.127 This could be a reason for concern on the archbishop’s part over low or infrequent church attendance.128 The Baptistery of San Giovanni Battista itself had “almost fallen into oblivion,” he lamented during a public sermon (date unknown), urging his audience to visit and honor it.129 The hopeful archbishop took remedial action against these grave clerical shortcomings, partly through speech: admonitions and lessons, practical guidance and edifying examples. In his first synodal sermon, he recommended that clergy pray to God, say their hourly prayers devoutly, protect themselves from demonic distraction, practice sobriety and vigilance.130 In sermons on the feast day of The Purification of the Virgin, before public audiences in Pisa’s cathedral, the archbishop used the occasion’s theme as a frame for mentally girding listeners against lechery.131 Candles held in the related Candelaria procession became symbols of chastity against lust.132 Mary, “the most chaste,” he designated a helper in the struggle for chastity, as previously noted. Memory of Mary and Christ’s entry in the temple and greeting by Simeon and Anna illustrated a qualification for clergy’s service: “We cannot appear in the presence of God unless we are purified and purged of vices.”133 Among the exemplars of chastity whose virtue contributed to the struggle against desires of the flesh, Zechariah was the model Visconti presented for men of the Church in Pisa. When introducing Zechariah as a priest and the husband of Elizabeth, the archbishop added that “priests had wives in those 127 Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine had long taught churchmen to see a decisive connection between audience receptivity to speech and the morality of the speaker’s way of life. Worshipers would condemn God’s word along with the man preaching it if, sensing corrupt hypocrisy, they thought he did not hear himself. Augustine, De doctrina christiana 4.27.59–60 (Migne, PL 34.118–19). 128 Statutes written under his direction called on priests to use the threat of excommunication to compel people to attend church and “hear” the Mass (missam audire) at least once a week. Visconti, Les sermons, 1080 (Synodal Statutes of 1258). 129 Ibid., 568–69 (Sermon 29, year unknown): “Similiter et vos omnes debetis … visitare et honorare  … ecclesiam beati Ioannis Baptiste, quia eam quasi videmini oblivioni tradidisse …” This is the basis of Bériou’s view of the pulpit as having stood empty most of the time. 130 Ibid., 339–41 (Sermon 1). 131 Ibid., 513–14 (Sermon 21, year unknown), 518–19 (Sermon 22, year unknown). 132 Ibid., 513 (Sermon 21), 518 (Sermon 22). 133 Ibid., 512 (Sermon 21), as cited above.

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times.”134 Later in his telling of their story, Visconti drew a pointed analogy, saying that Zechariah remained in the temple during his priestly service “and not with his wife and family, just as clergymen and priests, especially when they are engaged in service, must live in continence and abstain from forbidden things.”135 Especially remarkable for us is the archbishop’s accentuation of Zechariah’s conversion from unfaith. He did this by altering Luke’s narration of the angel silencing the skeptical priest: Zechariah responded, ‘How will I know that this is so?’ That is: What sign do you give me that I should believe this, ‘for I am an old man, and my wife is getting on in years’? Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom. The angel replied, ‘This will be the sign, you will become mute, unable to speak’.136 The silence had been a punishment in Luke. In Visconti’s interpretation, it became a basis of, and an attitude enabling, faith. The phrase he inserted comes from Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians—“Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom” (1 Cor. 1.22)—and refers to the idea that Christian belief in God greatly exceeds earlier modes of knowing. In barring Zechariah’s ability to give voice to questions, the angelic “sign” negated his need for proof of Elizabeth’s fertility and foreclosed the possibility of his understanding it. More than that, the angel’s sign changed the very nature of knowledge. The priest’s belief would no longer require worldly evidence and human wisdom. Instead, it would rest on wonder and absence of inquiry. We recall the belly touching of Nicola’s Zechariah. Still intellectually hung up on flesh-based knowledge, but inwardly sounding the angel’s words in silence, his graduation to faith is just beginning (Figs. 50, 54). Nicola’s pulpit sculptures correlate with Visconti’s response to the fallen state of God’s servants. That audience illuminates not only the reconfiguration of The Presentation of Christ in the Temple but also the pulpit commission itself. The Presentation took on issues of purity, chastity, and faith, which 134 Ibid., 649 (Sermon 40, year unknown): “Narra ego ystoriam sicut habetur in principio Luce, quomodo ante incarnationem Iesu Christi per sex menses erant due iuste persone, vir et uxor, scilicet ‘Zacharias’ qui erat ‘sacerdos’, unus de viginti quatuor principalibus sacerdotibus, et ‘Elisabeth, uxor’ eius, quia tunc temporis sacerdotes habebant uxores.” 135 Ibid., 654 (Sermon 40): “Preterea, sicut Zacharias in sua septimana morabatur in domo ecclesie et non in propria cum uxore et familia, sic clerici et sacerdotes, quando faciunt septimanas suas precipue, debent vivere in continentia et ab illicitis abstinere.” 136 Ibid., 650 (Sermon 40): “Et, cum hec dixisset, respondit Zacharias: ‘Unde hoc sciam?’ idest: Quod signum das mihi ut hoc credam, cum ‘ego et uxor mea sumus’ iam ‘senes’? ‘Iudei enim signa petunt et Greci querunt sapientiam’ [1 Cor. 1.22]. ‘Respondit angelus: “Hoc erit signum, quia ‘eris’ mutus ‘et non poteris loqui quousque hec’ que dixi fiant”’.”

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Visconti wove into his verbal confrontations with an unfit clergy (Fig. 42). The figure of mute Zechariah, shaken and leaving the temple for home, was a lasting reminder that while no one who strayed from the blameless path could truly be heard, lost voices could be restored. Indeed, his voice would become more powerful, frightening his neighbors when he breaks his silence and begins praising God (Luke 1.64–65). The pulpit’s ritual context must have added resonance to that idea. In a public sermon he delivered in the cathedral (year unknown), Visconti spoke of the Baptistery of San Giovanni Battista as “the mirror of this city” and the “portal of paradise,” which only the baptized could enter.137 It was here that Pisans became Christians, where they united in spiritual kinship. Visconti surely intended the pulpit to anchor and catalyze a new start for the clergy themselves in this primal place of collective spiritual generation, social bonding, and hierarchy-perpetuating. The pulpit’s similarity to a sculpted sarcophagus and to the nearby baptismal font would have extended the idea of death and rebirth—re-baptism, effectively—to the spectacle of men speaking from the pulpit’s platform.138 Public perception of a newly qualified clergy must have been a facet of Visconti’s aspiration for the pulpit. But the clergy themselves were among the viewers he intended for its complex, memory-prompting, voice-soliciting sculptural narrative. They were supposed to follow the transformative example of their chaste and rebuked forebear, Zechariah. They were supposed to make their way toward the deep faith they would need to please God and to be heard by all as voices of divine wisdom, not as men of flesh and of the world. They were supposed to give inner voice to the humble and faithful words of Elizabeth and Simeon to correct their own spiritual trajectory, redirecting themselves toward attitudes of listening demanded by their office while also entreating the Virgin for auditory, oratorical, and behavioral help. In transposing the issue of moral

137 Ibid., 568 (Sermon 29): “Similiter et vos omnes debetis, post visitationem beate Marie, visitare et honorare consobrinam suam Elisabeth, idest ecclesiam beati Ioannis Baptiste, quia eam quasi videmini oblivioni tradidisse, cum sit speculum civitatis istius et sit porta [paradisis; quia nullus intrat] paradisum nisi baptizatus in baptismo beati Iohannis qui baptizavit Christum.” It is here that Visconti also refers to the church as Elizabeth and regrets its neglect. 138 Gilbert, “Pisa Baptistery Pulpit,” 28, indicates that the polygonal temple in Nicola’s The Presentation resembles the very building in which the pulpit stands. We may add that in place of an altar, the furniture usually visible between Mary and Simeon in medieval depictions of The Presentation, Nicola made the protruding angle of what may represent a polygonal baptismal font. Earlier in this chapter, I likened the scene to a baptism with attendant godparents. The Presentation relief, in sum, appears generally conceived to appeal to Pisans (including and perhaps especially clergy) as prototypical of spiritual kinship formation in their own baptistery—indeed, as their spiritual forebears.

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fitness to the auditory realm, the pulpit’s sculptures joined to the public speaking of God’s word and to baptism (that ritual start of Pisans’ own inner hearing) the restoration of spirit to the sound of clerical voices. 6

Sculptural Ephpheta!

The restoration of spiritual authority to voices atop the pulpit called not only for the examples of Zechariah, Elizabeth, and Simeon. It demanded material action. Clergymen’s sexual activities had put at risk all by which the sacred was contained and conducted. Priests polluted the sanctuaries and vessels of God, Visconti warned. Their impurity impaired their ability to maintain the integrity of sacred substances. The “filthy works of Venus” had made them indifferent to the “pure sacrifice of the Son of the Virgin.”139 The very body and blood of Christ were compromised by unclean hands. The archbishop quoted Ezekiel, speaking for God, to make plain to his synodal audience the reasons for divine displeasure: “Priests have done violence to my teaching and have profaned my holy things; they have made no distinction between the holy and the common, neither have they taught the difference between the unclean and the clean” (Ezek. 22.26, NSRV).140 It could not have helped that sanctuaries of God were among the places in Pisa where sex workers were known to ply their trade. A communal statute of 1286 named more than twenty churches as sites of solicitation.141 139 Visconti, Les sermons, 360 (Sermon 2): “Et sic suspensi et polluti, quantum in se est ‘polluunt sanctuaria’ Dei, ‘inter sanctum et prophanum non habentes distantiam’, quia excommunicati celebrant, ‘inter mundum et pollutum non intellexerunt’, Ez. [Ezek. 22.26], quia exeuntes ab opere pollute Veneris attendunt indifferenter ad sacrificandum mundum Filium Virginis.” 140 Ibid., 358 (Sermon 2): “Ecce quod portitores vasorum iubentur mundari, multo ergo fortius sacerdotes mundi esse debent, qui sunt vasa corporis et sanguinis domini nostri Iesu Christi, quod est contra multos sacerdotes fornicatores, adulteros, incestuosos et sodomitas, de quibus Dominums conqueritur per Ezechielem, XIII [Ezek. 22.26]: ‘Sacerdotes eius contempxerunt legem meam; polluerunt sanctuaria mea, inter sanctum et prophanum non habuerunt distantiam, inter mundum et pollutum non intellexerunt’.” 141 Francesco Bonaini, Statuti inediti della città di Pisa dal XII al XIV secolo (Florence, 1854), 1:395–96: “Meretricem aliquam publicam, sive rofianam, aut receptatorem vel receptatricem meretricum, et rofianarum et rofianorum, infra muros pisane civitatis … in locis publicis et bonis, de quibus eas expelli faciemus ad voluntatem vicinorum, vel ad minus trium ex eis, qui sint bone fame; nec prope muros civitatis pisane, intus vel extra; nec ab ecclesia sancti Francisci usque ad portam Leonis, et etiam in cappellis sanctorum Ylarii et Martini, Ambrosii et Sebastiani de Fabricis maioribus, et sancti Laurentii de Rivolta, et sancte Margarite, et sancti Frediani, et sancti Xisti, et sancti Georgii de ponte, et sancti

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Objects, like people, could be purified for spiritual purposes. New church buildings required consecration, for instance. Durand writes of the procedure as a kind of baptism without which they remained “cursed” and “corrupt and stained by sin” like all things of this world.142 Clerical utterances and actions occurred. Consecrated water was sprinkled. The same applied to the blessing of bells, baptisteries, stones of baptismal fonts, sacred instruments, and painted or sculpted images of the Virgin Mary, of The Crucifixion, of saints.143 Such practice was widespread. “All altarpieces,” the art historian David Freedberg has written, “must receive a blessing before they can officially become the object of devotion and veneration.”144 Now, the carving of marble may seem to be incompatible with the object consecrations performed by clergy. Presumably the pulpit in the Baptistery of San Giovanni received a blessing after its completion. Yet the overt ‘rebirth’ of figures of Nicola’s The Presentation suggests that reversing the pervasive pollution of spiritual things in Pisa must have demanded a purifying agent outside the spiritually compromised clergy. Enter the artist. Notions of rebirth run deep in the literature on Nicola Pisano, well beyond comments on the baptismal relevance of the forms and iconography of the baptistery pulpit. The classicism of its sculptures gave “new life” to an art that had been “extinct” in Pisa, Crowe and Cavalcaselle wrote in the nineteenth century’s most consequential discussion of Nicola and his work.145 Other senses of rebirth emerge in the modern reconceptualization of the sculptor as

Blasii de ponte, et sancti Georgii porte Maris, et sancte Lucie de Ricuccho, et sancti Felicis, et santi Christofori de Kinthica, et Sancti Sepulcri, et sancti Simonis de Parlascio, et sancti Nicolai et sancte Lucie de Cappellariis, sancti Ysidori, sancti Blasii de Catenis, sancti Viti, et in Torcicoda, et sancti Petri de Yschia, in quibus cappellis nullo modo possint stare; et eas de ipsis cappellis expellemus et expelli facere teneamur, sine aliqua denuntiatione nobis facta vel facienda: et a porta de Plagiis usque ad portam Calcisanam, nec in classis qui sunt infra ortos monasterii sancti Zenonis, nec a degathia usque ad portam Leonis secus muros de intus, et a via Nova sicut trahit versus muros civitatis; in aliqua via vel loco esse vel stare aut habitare possint, nec aliqua ipsarum possit.” 142 Durand, Rationale 1.6.11: “Trina autem interius, et exterius cum hyssopo, et aqua benedicta aspersio trinam baptizandi immersionem significat. Et fit propter tria…. Secondo, propter ipsius Ecclesiae purgationem, et expiationem, omnia namque terrena propter peccatum corrupta sunt, et foedata; hinc etiam, quod in lege omnia pene mundabantur per aquam.” 143 Guillaume Durand, Pontifical, Ms. 143, Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, Paris, contains episcopal blessings of, among other things, “ymagis beatea maria” (fol. 333–37), “ymagini sanctorum” (fol. 338), also of sacred vessels (fol. 339), bells (fol. 346), stone fonts, and baptisteries (fol. 345). 144 Freedberg, Power of Images, 89. 145 Crowe and Cavalcaselle, History of Painting in Italy, 1:126–27.

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an immigrant. Tracing them leads to insight into his art’s potential to sanctify in a pointedly aural way. As we step back momentarily to find the trail, we skirt a veritable scholarly battleground. For centuries, following Vasari, Nicola was believed to have been a native Pisan.146 He gained a seemingly firmer identity in the early nineteenth century, when he came to be seen as the son of a certain Pietro “of Siena” and grandson of a “Ser Blasius of Pisa”—a noble lineage, no less.147 Then, an archival discovery threatened to uproot this venerable family tree. First published by Friedrich von Rumohr, the notarial document of 1266 refers to a “magistrum Nicholam Petri de Apulia” (master Nicola of Pietro of Apulia).148 The word Apulia later became explosive when Crowe and Cavalcaselle used it to argue that Nicola was not Tuscan by birth but had instead come from the classicizing culture of Emperor Frederick II in southern Italy—the now generally accepted idea.149 With Pisa’s traditional artistic primacy abruptly undercut, for the rest of the nineteenth century a lively and at times acrimonious dispute ensued over Nicola’s geo-artistic patria.150 In the early twentieth century, a consensus around the southern-Italy thesis began to take hold, encouraged in part by the discovery of another notarial record (1266), this one linking Nicola to Apulia 146 Vasari, Le vite, 2:63. The idea is clearest where Vasari asserts that Nicola made the Pisa baptistery pulpit in order to leave a memorial of himself to his native land: “a Pisa fece il pergamo di S. Giovanni di marmo, ponendovi ogni diligenza per lasciare di sé memoria alla patria” (my emphasis). 147 This identity was established by the antiquarian Sebastiano Ciampi on the basis of records dating to 1272 and 1273. Sebastiano Ciampi, Notizie inedite della sacrestia pistoiese de’ belli arredi del Campo Santo Pisano ed di altre opere di disegno (Florence, 1810), 35–36. But Ciampi had erred in reading the medieval documents, mistaking the name of a Pisan parish (San Biagio) for a name of Nicola’s grandfather (“Ser Blasius”), as Gaetano Milanesi would reveal in Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori scultori ed architettori scritte da Giorgio Vasari, con nuove annotazioni e commenti, ed. Gaetano Milanesi, 2nd. ed. (Florence, 1878), 1:294, 324n1. With that correction, the grandfather ceased to exist. 148 Carl Friedrich von Rumohr, Italienische Forschungen (Berlin, 1827), 2:152, 155–56. Rumohr took this name to mean that Pietro had come to Pisa from Apulia before Nicola was born. 149 Crowe and Cavalcaselle, History of Painting in Italy, 1:127–28, 130. “Apulia” has been variously interpreted as referring to a specific place in Apulia or Campania (e.g., Bari, Castel del Monte, Foggia, Naples, Ravello, Ruvo) or to territories associated with Frederick II. In recent literature, Bruzelius, “From Empire to Commune to Kingdom,” 142–44, presents an expansive geographic sense of Nicola’s youth in the south. 150 Among the many who weighed in were prominent figures of later nineteenth-century art historiography like Gaetano Milanesi (pro-Tuscan birth and training), Anton Springer (Apulia), Karl Schnaase (Tuscany), Carl Frey (Apulia), August Schmarsow (Tuscany), and Wilhelm Bode (Tuscany).

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without the interposition of Pietro’s name: “Magistro Nichola de Apulia.”151 Scholarship quietly dismissed the father, and from that point onward he ceased to matter.152 As opinion gradually solidified in favor of a Nicola who was a southerner, his achievements detached from questions of biological descent.153 The sculptor was effectively ‘reborn’, with a new origin story. Adolfo Venturi, who published the document, began referring to him only as Nicola d’Apulia.154 That went too far even for adherents of the pro-Apulia position— and here the vocabulary is interesting. As one scholar put it, the artist should always be known as Nicola Pisano, “for if he wanted to call himself the Pisan, we should certainly not rebaptize him anew” (my emphasis).155 Why “Pisano”—or “de Pisis” (or “de Pissis”), as most documents from his lifetime designated him?156 What might that surname have meant? For Émile 151 Adolfo Venturi, “Un secundo documento relativo a Niccolò d’Apulia,” L’arte 9, no. 2 (1906), 127. 152 Pietro, known only from Nicola’s name in a handful of documents from the later 1260s (see below), had been a vague and malleable figment of scholarly discussions. Rumohr, Italienische Forschungen, 155–56, discovered him and speculated that he may have been an artist himself, perhaps even the source of Nicola’s art. Adolfo Venturi, “Il genio di Nicola Pisano,” Rivista d’Italia 1, no. 1 (1898): 5–18, a much-cited study at the time, was one of the first to omit mention of Pietro entirely. 153 The last effort to argue Nicola’s Tuscan origins was I. B. Supino, “La patria di Nicola Pisano,” Memorie della R. Accademia delle sienze dell’Istituto di Bologna, Classe di scienze morali 1, 2nd series (1916–17): 3–11. 154 Adolfo Venturi, Storia dell’arte italiana (Milan: Ulrico Hoepli, 1904), 3:1002, 1004. 155 Giusta Nicco Fasola, Nicola Pisano: Orientamenti sulla formazione del gusto italiano (Rome: Fratelli Palombi Editori, 1941), 228. This comment revives an early criticism of Venturi’s book. Georg Swarzenski, review of Storia dell’arte italiana, vol. 4, by Adolfo Venturi, in Kunstgeschichtliche Anzeigen: Beiblatt der Mitteilungen des Instituts für österreichische Geschichtsforschung 1 (1904), 12: “Aber auch wenn ich der Meinung V’s. wäre, würde ich es für Unfug halten, einen Künstler, der immer Niccolo Pisano gennant wurde, auf den Namen Nicolo d’Apulia umzutaufen” (my emphasis). 156 The word “Apulia” is anomalous in the archival materials naming Nicola. It appears only twice, in documents drafted by a single notary (Hugo quondam Ciani) on a single day in Siena (11 May 1266). Seidel, Father and Son, 1:361, 363, asserts that Nicola decided to refer to himself as “de Apulia” to enhance his status in Siena at a time when the city had a political relationship with the Hohenstaufen kingdom, in southern Italy. Why this is not the case in other Sienese documents naming Nicola goes unexplained, however. Other documents—drawn up by other notaries between 1258 and 1273 in Lucca, Bologna, Pisa, Siena, and Pistoia—refer to him as “de Pisis” or “de Pissis,” usually adding the Pisan parish of San Biagio as his place of residence: (i) “magistro Nicolao de Pisis” (Lucca, 1258); (ii) “magistri Nichole de Pisis” (Bologna, 1264/5–1267); (iii) “magister Nicholus olim Petri lapidum de Pissis populi Sanctii Blasii” (Siena, 1267–8); (iv) “magister Nichola Pisanus, filius condam Petri” (Pistoia, 1273). There are also instances in which Nicola’s name appears with reference only to his parish of residence (in Pisa) or without any toponymic suggestion at all: (i) “Nicholus, magister lapidum, de parocchia ecclesie Sancti Blasii de

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Bertaux, whose study of medieval art in southern Italy promoted the image of the immigrant Nicola, it was a “nom de baptême” (Christian name), gained through acquired citizenship.157 This idea, now the broadly held view, brings us back to the baptistery pulpit.158 That project was what earned Pisan status for Nicola, in the opinion of Gaetano Milanesi, who thought the sculptor had come from elsewhere in Tuscany.159 But Nicola must have already had the designation. A subsequently published document from Lucca, dated 1258 (thus prior to the pulpit’s completion), calls him “Magistro Nicolao de Pisis.”160 If citizenship was not a reward for his work on the pulpit, then it may have helped qualify him for the commission at the outset.161 An inscription on the pulpit (Fig. 64) contains another early occurrence of Nicola’s nom de baptême: “ANNO MILLENO BIS CENTUM BISQUE TRICENTO / HOC OPUS INSINGNE SCULPSIT NICOLA PISANUS / LAUDETUR DIGNE TAM BENE DOCTA MANUS” (In the year 1260 Nicola Pisano carved this eminent work. May his learned hand deservedly be so exaltedly praised).162 In the nineteenth century, both sides of the Apulia-Tuscany debate cited the inscription of “Pisanus” as evidence favoring their respective positions. Eventually, it came to be read as a reference to Nicola’s acquired

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Ponte, quondam Petri” (Pisa, 1265); (ii) “magistro Niccholo quondam Petri” (Siena, 1268). Fasola, Nicola Pisano, 207–20, lists these occurrences in more detail. Émile Bertaux, L’art dans l’Italie meridionale: De la fin de l’empire romain à la conquête de Charles d’Anjou (Paris: A. Fontemoing, 1904), 1:790–91. Introducing a novel view late in the debate, Robert Davidsohn, Forschungen zur Geschichte von Florenz (Berlin: Ernst Siegfried Mittler und Sohn, 1908), 4:534, asked how a Pisan native in Pisa would come by the name ‘Pisan’, and argued that Pisanus was already Nicola’s family name prior to immigration. That Nicola became a citizen after immigrating to Pisa was first proposed in Crowe and Cavalcaselle, History of Painting in Italy, 1:127. Milanesi (ed.), Le vite, 1:324. Supino, “La patria,” 9. See also Fasola, Nicola Pisano, 207. Pisan citizenship was usually based on birth and residency qualifications. Daniel Waley, The Italian City-Republics, 3rd ed. (London: Longman, 1988), 65. Located below The Last Judgment panel. Whether Nicola himself composed and inscribed these words, in 1260, a question raised only in the early literature, is unknown. Bertaux thought Nicola carved the words (L’art, p. 791). Davidsohn, Forschungen, 4: 534, suggested that others probably wrote the inscription. Giovanni Poggi, in agreement with Davidsohn, speculated that the words had been added some time after 1260. Giovanni Poggi, “La patria di Niccolo Pisano,” Rivista d’arte, nos. 9–12 (1907), 154. Karl Frey, noting a poetic dimension to the inscription (which he attributed to the sculptor), pointed out that “Pisanus” rhymes with “manus” and believed the former to have been chosen to echo the latter. Karl Frey (ed.), Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori scultori e architettori, by Giorgio Vasari (Munich: Georg Müller, 1910), 1:1:757.

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Figure 64 Inscription beneath The Last Judgment, pulpit, Baptistery of San Giovanni, Pisa Photo: Scala, Florence

citizenship.163 But to a medieval Pisan audience within the baptistery, where they had become Pisan and Christian at the same time, “Pisanus” would have connoted something personal and compelling: Nicola’s kinship with them. More than that, the inscription construes the sculptor as a medium of higher knowledge. The phrase “docta manus” (learned hand) and the solicitation of praise were not novel; we find such formulas inscribed on earlier artworks.164 But that rhetoric must have ‘sung’ in the context of Visconti’s campaign for spiritual cleansing. It sought viewers’ delegation of authority to Nicola while also warming their reception of the pulpit, with its unusually intense and referential naturalism, its untraditional visualizations of locally familiar subjects, and its novel auditory work. Striking in this regard is the inscription’s placement beneath The Last Judgment panel, a source of the moral authority of the pulpit’s overall program of elevation, as discussed earlier (Fig. 64). The implication is that Nicola’s work is worthy of God, which was also to say indirectly that Visconti’s project of reform was advancing; that the clergy had a new moral footing; and that worshipers now had, in this marble monument, a promise of the fruitful listening and cleansing speech that everyone needed to pass divine judgment. If the pulpit represented a rebirth, it was a collective and multifaceted one, dependent on but also extending beyond its maker. My argument nearly ascribes to Nicola a para-baptismal power to consecrate through carving. The figures of The Presentation push the point further. Our earlier discussion of Nicola’s reuse of the Phaedra sarcophagus and Bacchic krater touched on the spectacle of pagan figures being transformed 163 For instance, M. Wundram, “Nicola Pisano,” in Enciclopedia dell’arte medievale (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1997), 8:687. 164 Frugoni, “L’autocoscienza dell’artista”; Albert Dietl, “In arte peritus. Zur Topik mittelalterlicher Künstlerinscriften in Italien bis zur Zeit Giovanni Pisanos,” Römische Historische Mitteilungen 29 (1987), 97–98.

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Figure 65 Nicola Pisano, Elizabeth, detail of The Presentation of Christ, marble, 1260, pulpit, Baptistery of San Giovanni, Pisa Photo: Luisa Ricciarini/Bridgeman Images

by a Christian narrative context, by suppressing the body, by chaste isolations, by reconfiguration as spiritual kin. The spiritualization of sculpture did not stop there. Nicola clothed his figures more heavily than their antique predecessors. Even the diminutive youth propping up Zechariah is draped, unlike his ancient counterpart. These concealments of the body are consistent with the idea of chastity but have a Pauline valence as well. To be “baptized into Christ” was to be “clothed with Christ” and to yield one’s personal identity to a common membership as “child of God through faith” and as “Abraham’s offspring” (Gal. 3.23–9, NSRV). To clothe oneself in Christ was to “live honorably as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness.” (Rom. 13.13–14, NSRV).165 Nicola’s sculpting of thick folds and deep creases appears to be a baptismal re-clothing of the ancient figures “with Christ.” Another element of baptism comes through the ears of Elizabeth and Anna (Figs. 56, 65). Anna’s is more curious for its odd angle in relation to her face. Its cavity is deeper than that of its model, the ear of Phaedra’s nurse. Would we go too far in proposing that when Nicola ‘reformed’ the libidinous go-between into an ecstatic medium of divine speech, an analogy between the bore of his drill and the insertion of priests’ fingers was at play? Here, in the pulpit’s most overtly vocal figure, whose speech brings into being a public audience for Christ—like the speech of the pulpit’s occupants themselves—the sculptor’s “learned hand” performed the initiatory endowment of spiritual hearing: a sculptural Ephpheta! Giving new life to the art of sculpture meant, among

165 These ideas are cited in Maria Evangelatou’s study of Byzantine images of The Annunciation in which the Virgin spins thread. Maria Evangelatou, “The Purple Thread of the Flesh: The Theological Connotations of a Narrative Iconographic Element in Byzantine Images of The Annunciation,” in Icon and Word: The Power of Images in Byzantium. Studies presented to Robin Cormack, ed. Anthony Eastmond and Liz James (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 262–66. Nicola’s own Virgin Annunciate holds a spindle (now damaged) (Fig. 17). A clothed Eve, one of the pulpit’s corner figures, may once have held a spindle too. The dynamic pairing of spinners may have prompted viewers to associate cloth in the pulpit’s The Presentation with theological discourse of redemptive purity. For the Mary-Eve relationship in the pulpit, see Angiola, “Nicola Pisano,” 13, 15, fig. 10.

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other things, a re-elevation of listening. The authority of the physical pulpit, of the clergy, of the archbishop, and ultimately of Christ and God depended on it. Anna’s ear is an especially rich example of the auditory utility of naturalistic style. It looks receptive, anatomically verisimilar, and age-appropriate for the prophetess in its large size and fleshiness, while at the same time gaining in significance through its resemblance to a locally familiar antiquity. When we turn from Nicola’s painstaking evocations of ancient figures to pictures painted by Giotto in the early the fourteenth century, we find similar areas of concentration, from poses, clothes, faces and ears to multisensory experiences and narrative actions depicted finely enough to elicit specific phrases from the Bible, as seen in chapters two and three. At the same time, Giotto’s The Wedding Feast at Cana and The Vision of Fra Agostino pushed naturalism in a different direction, guiding viewers to discern distinctions in listening attitudes by means of pictorial elements such as naturalistically rendered objects and spaces. Our final chapter will bring us to a slightly earlier art historical moment, the 1290s, and to a famous lurch toward embracing naturalism in painting. There, in a fresco on a church wall, narrative art again attempts to enhance the reception of clerical voices in worship. The pictorial instruments deployed by Giotto to that end are already there. Reuse of ancient art is there too. Something else comes to bear as well, a basic aspect of naturalistic styles and external sensory experience that Nicola’s heavy clothing of figures shows prior sensitivity to: the outward appearance of material things. Chapter five studies a pictorial meditation on visible surfaces and, looking behind them, uncovers institutional anxiety about a singular moment of truth for ears.

Chapter 5

Higher Fidelity 1

The Isaac Frescoes in Assisi

We begin with the problem, at once small and staggeringly large. While the spiritual authority of clerical speech was broadly at stake in the previous chapter, the utterance of a certain phrase could test it as no other: “This is my body.” Said daily by a priest during every Mass in every church, this ritual voicing of Christ’s words (Matt. 26.26; Mark 14.22; Luke 22.19) was supposed to bring about a marvel: the presence of Christ in a piece of bread, the Eucharist (or, consecrated host). It is well known that from the early thirteenth century onward, priests would raise the host after consecrating it with that pronouncement, for congregants to behold. The gesture of display has become scholarly evidence of a devotional ‘desire to see’, even an apotheosis of visual experience in late medieval piety. Meanwhile, auditory dimensions of the Eucharist have gone largely unspoken. The ringing of church bells marked and publicized Christ’s arrival in the bread while prompting worship—that much has been acknowledged.1 But the act itself of hearing “This is my body” has practically met with silence. It was a defining moment for clerical voices and for worshipers’ spiritual identity and faith. Hearing was believing.2 And an ideal response at that moment, on the believer’s part, could be an affective state, like quaking in awe. But listening with an attitude of faith, at that instant, presented an unusual challenge. Apprehending Christ in the Eucharist necessarily drew the senses into conflict, with the ears straining to outweigh the eyes and, in the ritual consumption of the host, the other senses as well. Conceivably, artists could prop up hearing with a basic image. Seeing the image of a mute Zechariah or a spiritually-deaf ass may have prodded priests to believe the words of

1 Gary Macy, The Theologies of the Eucharist in the Early Scholastic Period: A Study of the Salvific Function of the Sacrament According to the Theologians, c. 1080-c. 1220 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 89; Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 59. Archbishop Visconti spoke of this use of bells. Visconti, Les sermons, 866 (Sermon 67). 2 I borrow from the title of a study of late medieval Italian architecture and auditory veneration of the Eucharist: Caroline A. Bruzelius, “Hearing is Believing: Clarissan Architecture, ca. 1213–1340,” in “Monastic Architecture for Women,” special issue, Gesta 31, no. 2 (1992): 83–91.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004460812_007

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consecration they themselves spoke, for example.3 A more surprising intervention reveals itself in this last chapter, where the pictorial engineering of spiritual hearing reaches a crescendo. An art historical complication of the problem holds special interest for us. The auditory challenge posed by the Eucharist in late thirteenth-century Italy was both aided and compounded by what art historians have characterized as a culture-wide sensory change, a shift detectable not only in the raising of the Eucharist but also in the decoration of church interiors. Between the completion of Nicola Pisano’s pulpit in 1260 and Giotto’s decoration of the Arena Chapel around 1303–5, artistic production in central Italy surged. Sculptural programs continued to adorn pulpits while also spreading across other church furnishings and exteriors. Large-scale panel paintings multiplied. New and newly restored pictorial cycles covered the interior walls and vaults of churches and town halls in mosaic or fresco. Much of this artistic proliferation was narrative, a testament to a widespread desire for storytelling. As Nicola’s mid-century work already shows, artists also met demand for narrative action with new emphasis on visual qualities describing bodies, faces, materials, surfaces, objects, and stimuli of sensory experiences. The expansion of immersive pictorial spectacles, what we might call a spectacularization of religion, reinforces the idea of the late Middle Ages as an “age of vision,” a time of the sense of sight’s cultural ascent, as discussed in this book’s introduction and detailed further below. Yet church art did not simply reflect the rise of the eye. Not only could a picture elevate the ear by reinforcing what viewers heard in sermons, scriptural readings, and elsewhere; by soliciting their concentration on auditory moments in sacred history; by stimulating their voicing of biblical phrases; and by aiding viewers in reforming and practicing the inner hearing of God’s word. This chapter immerses us in a pair of frescoes in the Upper Church of San Francesco, in Assisi, which stirred ambivalence about sight precisely in the name of hearing. The precedence of the auditory in the frescoes, a depiction of The Deception of Isaac, can be hard to discern at first (Figs. 66, 67). Their visual qualities and the splendor of the pictorial program surrounding them are extraordinary. The mural decoration of the Upper Church of San Francesco, which includes numerous stories from the Bible and a Life of Saint Francis of Assisi (d. 1226), 3 To say the words consecrating the Eucharist and not believe them, according to liturgists Rupert of Deutz (d. around 1129) and Sicard of Cremona (d. 1215), is “like an ass lifting up his ears to the lyre, but not understanding the melody of the song.” Gary Macy, Treasures from the Storeroom: Medieval Religion and the Eucharist (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1999), 153; Rupert of Deutz, De divinis officiis 2.9 (Migne, PL 170.40d–41a); Sicardus of Cremona, Mitrale, sive De officiis ecclesiasticis summa 3.6 (Migne, PL 213.118b).

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Figure 66 The Deception of Isaac (1), fresco, 1290s, Upper Church of San Francesco, Assisi Photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY

was one of the great artistic undertakings of the age, ordered by Pope Nicholas IV and seen by friars and lay audiences from near and far (Fig. 68). No absolute sensory hierarchy is in question in our two frescoes, which represent a singular event in early biblical history. Yet the sensory implications of what transpires were far-reaching for Christians in thirteenth-century Italy. At the center of discussion is an individual whose hearing marked a critical turn for spirituality. For worshipers, he was a spiritual forebear whose story taught a perceptual

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Figure 67 The Deception of Isaac (2), fresco, 1290s, Upper Church of San Francesco, Assisi Photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY

lesson. These points harmonize with what we have seen in previous chapters. But in prodding viewers over the breach between hearing a short phrase with their bodily ears and receiving it in the heart, the Isaac frescoes stand apart on an affective level. Their auditory work expanded the pictorial medium through naturalism with audacity undetected until now.

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Figure 68 Nave, thirteenth century, Upper Church of San Francesco, Assisi Photo: Archivi Alinari, Firenze

Like The Wedding Feast at Cana and The Presentation of Christ in the Temple, The Deception of Isaac appears in earlier narrative programs. We find it as far back as the fifth century C.E., in Rome.4 In the 1290s, painters restored early Christian representations of the story in some Roman churches and added it in 4 In the mosaic program in the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore.

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others.5 The contemporaneous version in Assisi, however, features an unusually three-dimensional pictorial space and psychological aspects of storytelling which had nothing comparable either in medieval art generally or in narrative art in Assisi itself, most of which was executed by other painters. Scholars have hailed Assisi’s Isaac frescoes a revolution in naturalistic style.6 A great painter must have been responsible, they have said, perhaps a young Giotto, as Henry Thode first proposed in the late nineteenth century, when the accepted authorship of many Renaissance paintings was coming into question.7 Thode’s attribution, a rejection of the traditional Vasarian view, which had ascribed the frescoes to Cimabue, sparked a contentious debate in which the authorship of various artists has been argued over the past century. The issue remains unresolved. Whoever made the frescoes—a Roman painter or a Florentine, Gaddo Gaddi, Pietro Cavallini, “the Isaac Master,” or Giotto himself—would have claim to the title of “founder of modern painting,” Millard Meiss declared at the end of a ground-breaking analysis decades ago.8 The painter’s air of prodigy has only increased with the discovery that he revived the ancient giornata technique of sequencing the execution within each picture (as Giotto would do in Padua), in place of the traditional medieval pontata technique, and that he took only two weeks to paint both pictures.9 The Isaac frescoes’ present-day renown rests partly on their engagement with sensory perception. For Meiss, modern painting’s founding in them came down mostly to their depiction of acts of seeing. He judged one of the frescoes to be “the first post-antique painting in which sight is focused to this degree and given so fundamental a role in the structure and content of a painting.”10 His assessment went still further: 5 Millard Meiss, Giotto and Assisi (N.p.: New York University Press, 1960), 12–15, 19, figs. 34–43, 45; Serena Romano, La O di Giotto (Milan: Mondadori Electa, 2008), figs. 36, 38–42, 51. 6 The literature on the frescoes is too large to list here. Meiss, Giotto and Assisi, and Romano, La O di Giotto, offer the fullest examinations and appraisals to date. I refer to them repeatedly below, citing others as needed. 7 Thode fortified his attribution with a Morellian observation of ear form: “spitz verlaufend angewachsene Ohren” (pointed, closely attached ears). Henry Thode, Franz von Assisi und die Anfänge der Kunst der Renaissance in Italien, 4th ed. (Vienna: Phaidon Verlag, 1934), 258. 8 Meiss, Giotto and Assisi, 25. 9 Romano, La O di Giotto, 100, referring to technical comments in Bruno Zanardi, Il cantiere di Giotto: Le storie di San Francesco ad Assisi (Milan: Skira editore, 1996), 366, 374. The change in fresco technique was documented earlier in Leonetto Tintori and Millard Meiss, The Painting of the Life of St. Francis of Assisi (1962; repr., New York: W. W. Norton and Co., Inc., 1967), 11. 10 Meiss, Giotto and Assisi, 16.

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It is interesting that this great conquest should appear, among surviving works, in the representation of events occasioned by blindness. Only after the vivid realization of sight could sightlessness become fully meaningful. It is the passion with which the painter of the Isaac scenes sought and achieved mastery of the glance that gives these frescoes their exceptional and altogether unforgettable poignancy.11 The point of the “great conquest” of sight and the “mastery of the glance” was to dramatize Isaac’s blindness, Meiss says here. That motivation mattered to him in part because it suggested momentous connections to Giotto’s decoration of the Arena Chapel only a few years later. In each case Meiss saw an uncommonly reflective and feeling painter using controlled and intense glances to humanize stories in ways foreign to medieval art.12 The similarity increased his sense of the likelihood that Giotto indeed authored the Isaac frescoes. On another level, Meiss caught in the poignancy of Isaac’s visual impairment what he took to be a glimpse of artistic freedom after centuries of art’s servility to church dogma.13 But vital questions remain unasked. Why were the blindness and humanity of Isaac—of all the biblical figures depicted by medieval artists—so compelling as to occasion a momentous break with pictorial tradition? Why would an artist have been permitted (or chosen to) make such a departure from the authority of the past? The scholar did not speculate. The centrality of blindness in the Isaac frescoes has faded from the literature. Recent discussions have brought to the fore institutional values which Jacob, the recipient of Isaac’s blessing, could have in Franciscan eyes.14 But we 11 Ibid., 16–17. 12 Ibid., 16, 20, 21, 22. With similar wording, Meiss later escalated the frescoes’ art historical implications: “This is the first painting since antiquity in which glances are focused to this degree and given so fundamental a role in the structure and content of a narrative. In these and other respects the fresco marks a great turn in Western painting and leads directly into the art we call Renaissance.” Millard Meiss, The Great Age of Fresco: Discoveries, Recoveries and Survivals (New York: George Braziller, 1970), 38. 13 In Giotto and Assisi, Meiss insinuated this freedom in various phrases: “The painting dwells on the human situation as much as on the theological allegory, on the biblical narrative rather than its medieval exegesis” (pp. 14–15); the painter “cares most” about the “literal, human content of the story” (p. 17); “The depth and subtlety of this novel content can have been achieved only by a great artist” (p. 17). A more blunt formulation would follow: “[The artist] cares far more about the quality of human thought and feeling than about ecclesiastical dogma.” Meiss, The Great Age of Fresco, 38. 14 Amy Neff, “Lesser Brothers: Franciscan Mission and Identity at Assisi,” The Art Bulletin 88, no. 4 (Dec., 2006): 676–706; Donal Cooper and Janet Robson, The Making of Assisi: The Pope, the Franciscans and the Painting of the Basilica (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 206; Chiara Frugoni, Quale Francesco? Il messaggio nascosto negli affreschi

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reach a very different understanding of Isaac when we hear of his aural significance in sermons of the later thirteenth century. Seen in that context, the freeing of human thought and feeling from religious tradition becomes precisely opposite the frescoes’ intent. What may strike us as revolutionary storytelling and picture-making, I will argue, functioned instead to give viewers distance from human experience—from the body’s senses, from inquiry, from reason— upon hearing the pronouncement, “This is my body.” The frescoes are the most provocative and subtlest evidence this book offers of the artistic engineering of the reception of clerical voices. We even find in the paintings tenets of the contemporaneous science of optics, a hallmark of the “age of vision,” only here that knowledge serves to qualify the eye’s credibility and to underscore the ear’s higher fidelity to truth. To perceive the listening lesson in The Deception of Isaac, our first step is to re-examine the pictorial re-telling of the deception story, looking at the picturing of all the external senses, not only sight. From that standpoint too, the bigger ‘picture’ that emerges is different from what we uncovered in Nicola’s The Presentation and Giotto’s Cana, where, if senses other than hearing obstruct truth’s perception, they do so less completely. 2

Return of the Repressed Sense

The Isaac frescoes come near the end of a series of sixteen Genesis scenes arranged roughly chronologically in two rows along the top of the north nave wall in San Francesco.15 The narrative spans from The Creation of the World to Joseph of Egypt and his Brothers. Many of the pictures are organized in pairs and spotlight pairs of figures.16 Adam and Eve are the principals of the top row, followed by Cain and Abel. The second row begins with two scenes about Noah, then moves on to Abraham, Isaac, and Joseph. The Isaac scenes are distinguished in the sophistication of their pairing. For one thing, the pictures are twin-like, a kind of diptych with virtually identical settings. In terms of narrative time, the second one follows ‘on the heels’ of the first, an immediacy

15 16

della basilica superiore ad Assisi (Turin: Giulio Einaudi editore, 2015), 203. This interpretive perspective rests on a Franciscan text dating to the early 1280s, the Meditatio pauperis in solitudine, attributed to John of Wales. Two scenes just prior to the Isaac frescoes, Abraham and the Three Angels and The Sacrifice of Isaac appear in reverse order. Further below I suggest that this reversal had significance for the Isaac frescoes. Two scenes in the top row, likely The Labor of Adam and Eve and The Sacrifices of Cain and Abel, have not survived.

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out of step with the other fresco pairs but reminiscent of the birth of Esau and Jacob, Isaac’s twin sons whose rivalry animates the scenes.17 In the first, Jacob tricks his bedridden father into giving him a blessing Isaac had intended for his firstborn and favorite son, Esau, whom Jacob impersonates. In the second scene, Esau arrives for the blessing a moment too late—Jacob flees, exiting the house. The text of Genesis conveys the blessing’s great importance to them. It is God’s promise to Isaac’s father, Abraham, of wealth, power, regeneration, and divine favor for him and his descendants.18 And the time for the blessing has come, because Isaac thinks he is dying—as with Fra Agostino and Simeon, death’s imminence attends a perceptual breakthrough.19 As Isaac prepares to pass down this great inheritance, he does so in a state not only of physical weakness but also of ignorance. He does not know that God wants everything to go to Jacob.20 He has not learned that Esau already gave his birthright to his twin brother in exchange for a meal.21 Age has impaired his eyes, making it difficult for him to be certain of whom he blesses.22 Much of the action in the Isaac frescoes does turn on the sense of sight, as Meiss argued. Isaac’s blindness, a precondition for the ruse, is denoted by his barely open eyelids. Jacob and Rebekah, his mother and accomplice, coolly surveil the patriarch (Fig. 69). Rebekah pushes aside a curtain to spy as she hovers at the perimeter of her husband’s curtained enclosure. Jacob, standing near the foot of the bed, keeps a cautious distance from his father before stepping forward to offer the meal. The eyes of mother and son lock on Isaac’s face to scrutinize his responses. They are keenly aware of the risk of bringing a curse on themselves should their fraud be detected.23 Acts of looking continue to elaborate the story in the next fresco, where an eager Esau hurries to Isaac’s 17 In the Genesis account, Jacob is born holding on to Esau’s heel (Gen. 25.26). 18 Gen. 27.28–29 (NSRV): “ ‘May God give you of the dew of heaven, and of the fatness of the earth, and plenty of grain and wine. Let peoples serve you, and nations bow down to you. Be lord over your brothers, and may your mother’s sons bow down to you. Cursed be everyone who curses you, and blessed be everyone who blesses you!’ ” 19 Gen. 27.2–4 (NSRV): “ ‘See, I am old; I do not know the day of my death. Now then, take your weapons, your quiver and your bow, and go out to the field, and hunt game for me. Then prepare for me savory food, such as I like, and bring it to me to eat, so that I may bless you before I die’.” 20 While pregnant, Rebekah learns from the Lord that “two nations [i.e., Esau and Jacob] are in your womb, and two peoples born of you shall be divided; the one shall be stronger than the other, the elder shall serve the younger” (Gen. 25.23, NSRV). She does not share this information with Isaac. 21 Gen. 25.29–34. 22 Gen. 27.1 (NSRV): “When Isaac was old and his eyes were dim so that he could not see.” 23 Gen. 27.11–13 (NSRV): “But Jacob said to his mother Rebekah [as they planned the ruse], ‘Look, my brother Esau is a hairy man, and I am a man of smooth skin. Perhaps my father

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Figure 69 Jacob and Rebekah, detail of The Deception of Isaac (1), fresco, 1290s, Upper Church of San Francesco, Assisi Photo: Scala, Florence

bedside and glances up from his father’s face, distracted (Fig. 70). The widened eyes of the young woman accompanying him—a servant or one of his wives— suggest her alarm at something unexpected.24 will feel me, and I shall seem to be mocking him, and bring a curse on myself and not a blessing’. His mother said to him, ‘Let your curse be on me, my son; only obey my word’.” 24 No one accompanies Esau when he approaches Isaac with the meal, in the Genesis account. Some scholars have mistaken the figure for Rebekah without explaining the sudden change of age and garment or recognizing that Rebekah is partly visible behind her, escaping (Fig. 71). Earlier in the biblical account, we learn of Esau’s marriage to two Hittite women, Judith and Basemath, along with the remark that “they made life bitter for Isaac and Rebekah” (Gen. 26.35, NSRV). The inclusion of one of the women here, where Esau

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Figure 70 Esau and companion, detail of The Deception of Isaac (2), fresco, 1290s, Upper Church of San Francesco, Assisi Photo: Scala, Florence

The sense of touch is noticeable as well, particularly in the first scene. Jacob’s smooth hands and neck are covered with tufted goat skins to simulate Esau’s characteristic hairiness, so that physical contact with his father will not give him away. And Isaac does feel him. He hesitates to accept the identity asserted by the person who has just entered his bedroom seeking his blessing. [Jacob] went in to his father, and said, ‘My father’; and he said, ‘Here I am; who are you, my son?’ Jacob said to his father, ‘I am Esau your firstborn. I have done as you told me; now sit up and eat of my game, so that you may bless me’. But Isaac said to his son, ‘How is it that you have found it so quickly my son?’ He answered, ‘Because the Lord your God granted me success’. Then Isaac said to Jacob, ‘Come near, that I may feel you, my son, to know whether you are really my son Esau or not’. So, Jacob went strives to please his father, may speak to an intended reference to the older son’s poor judgement in family matters—a point which may help to justify the theft of the blessing while also adding to the scene’s drama. The figure’s evident surprise is in contrast with Rebekah’s composure and control in the first scene.

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up to his father Isaac, who felt him and said, ‘The voice is Jacob’s voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau’. He did not recognize him, because his hands were hairy like his brother Esau’s hands; so, he blessed him. He said, ‘Are you really my son Esau?’25 The blessing mentioned here is minor. It is not the one Jacob has come to steal. Isaac still harbors doubt raised by the quickness of the meal’s capture and preparation. Hearing Jacob’s voice gives him another pause, and he begins to lean on other senses for further investigation. He asks for the food, “that I may eat of my son’s game and bless you” (Gen. 27.25, NSRV). Eating does not convince him entirely. He then asks his son to come near. Kissing him, Isaac take the opportunity to smell his garments (Gen. 27.26). Finally satisfied that Esau is the one who stands before him, he delivers the longed-for blessing, which begins, “Ah, the smell of my son is like the smell of a field that the Lord has blessed” (Gen. 27.27, NSRV). The fresco does not get this far into the transaction. A small leg bone protrudes from the bowl Jacob holds. The meat is ready for Isaac’s judgment. The loose fit of the finery he wears tells us that they belong to Esau, the larger of the two brothers and, as first-born son, a priest.26 These elements anticipate the examination continuing with taste and smell. Isaac’s process of verification, in sum, is just beginning. “The voice is Jacob’s voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau”—the picture solicits memory of the perplexed remark as Isaac’s clasp of his son’s hand brings us into the moment where the sibling rivalry fragments into rivalries between senses and between perceived identities. Hearing is the least reliable among the senses, from Isaac’s perspective. He quickly dismisses it. This does not hold for other people present, however. The first fresco shows Jacob and Rebekah not only looking but also listening. Jacob obeys his father in approaching and offering his hand to feel. The son and mother listen for trouble and for the desired blessing. In the second fresco, the two deceivers slip out of the room. Rebekah’s passing around a curtain behind Esau catches his ear, causing him to look up from what he is doing (Figs. 70, 71). His companion is more aural than visual in her action. She does not have a clear view of Isaac and is startled by his disconcerting response to Esau or by not hearing the expected words welcoming his favorite meal from his favored son.27 These figures exhibit a range of hearing, as the servants of Giotto’s Cana 25 Gen. 27.18–24, NSRV. 26 Strabo [pseud.], Glossa ordinaria (Migne, PL 113.150c). 27 Meiss, the first to suggest that the woman might be one of Esau’s wives, described her (contrary to the interpretation proposed here) as “knowing full well what has happened

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Figure 71 Rebekah, detail of The Deception of Isaac (2), fresco, 1290s, Upper Church of San Francesco, Assisi Photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY

would later do. Highlighted curves of wavy hair echo the shape of Isaac’s and Esau’s ears. An ear of Esau’s companion is exposed despite her head being covered by a scarf. She grips a wine pitcher by its ‘ear’. These details should not be assumed to be trivial.28 Rather than a progression toward auditory contemplation of the divine like in Cana, we find a scale of surprise.29 Isaac, the fresco’s main hearer, almost falls out of bed. His instability may remind us of the pulpit relief of Zechariah teetering as he processes the contradiction of his senses by the angel’s words (Fig. 50). But suddenness is not an apt word for Nicola’s relief. Isaac’s state changes rapidly in the corresponding Genesis account:

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and what is likely to happen next.” This view was a pivotal point in the scholar’s argument for the Giotto-like greatness of the artist’s ability to leave behind theology in pursuit of drama, exemplified by the depiction of figures showing “different degrees of awareness of the larger situation” in the second scene. Yet the pictorial basis of Meiss’s interpretation— namely, that the woman “gazes with a feline fixedness at the old man”—rests on a questionable assessment of her looking and does not recognize Esau’s partial obstruction of her view of Isaac. Meiss, Giotto and Assisi, 16. No ears are visible in comparable figures in Pietro Cavallini’s The Birth of the Virgin in the Roman Church of Santa Maria in Trastevere, a mosaic of the early 1290s sharing so many formal similarities with the Isaac frescoes that scholars have considered it to have been a model or adaptation of it. Whichever picture came first—a long debated question—the relationship tells us that exposure of ears was a choice, not a given. Meiss, seeing instead a progression of awareness of the ruse, found Esau to be the least aware while his companion is, by contrast, omniscient. Ibid., 17.

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As soon as Isaac had finished blessing Jacob, when Jacob had scarcely gone out from the presence of his father Isaac, his brother Esau came in from his hunting. He also prepared savory food and brought it to his father. And he said to his father, ‘Let my father sit up and eat of his son’s game, so that you may bless me’. His father Isaac said to him, ‘Who are you?’ He answered, ‘I am your firstborn son, Esau’. Then Isaac trembled violently, and said, ‘Who was it then that hunted game and brought it to me, and I ate it all before you came, and I have blessed him?—yes, and blessed he shall be!’ When Esau heard his father’s words, he cried out with an exceedingly great and bitter cry, and said to his father, ‘Bless me, me also, father!’ But he said, ‘Your brother came deceitfully, and he has taken away your blessing’.30 What light does this passage shed on the second painted Isaac? Is he aware of the deceit, as some scholars suggest?31 Is this a rejection of Esau?32 Is there an exact biblical phrase the painting wants the viewer to voice internally? Is it the violent “trembling”?33 There has been no consensus. Resolving the issue of Isaac’s pictured state is a matter not only of clarifying what has recently been declared the “first psychological drama in the history of medieval painting.”34 It is also a key to the fresco’s auditory significance and all that comes with it. The simultaneity of Jacob and Rebekah’s flight and Esau’s offering of game to his father suggests an early instant, prior to Isaac asking who brought him hunted game—a question which shows his confusion.35 His forehead creases,

30 Gen. 27.30–35, NSRV. 31 There has been disagreement over Isaac’s cognitive state here. Some scholars think the painting shows him bewildered and only beginning to realize the deceit, for instance Meiss, Giotto and Assisi, 17; Hans Belting, Die Oberkirche von San Francesco in Assisi: Ihre Dekoration als Aufgabe und die Genese einer neuen Wandmalerei (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1977), 146; Frugoni, Quale Francesco?, 203. Others have maintained that Isaac now realizes he has been deceived and responds accordingly. See Joachim Poeschke, Italian Frescoes: The Age of Giotto, 1280–1400 (New York: Abbeville Press Publishers, 2005), 61; Romano, La O di Giotto, 71. 32 The fresco has at times been referred to as The Rejection of Esau or Isaac Rejecting Esau. Other titles have been used as well: Esau Seeking Isaac’s Blessing, Isaac and Esau, and Esau before Isaac. 33 Squarely in the “trembling” camp are Meiss (Giotto and Assisi, 17) and Angiola Maria Romanini, “Gli occhi di Isacco: Classicismo e curiosità scientifica tra Arnolfo di Cambio e Giotto,” Arte medievale 2, no. 1–2 (1987), 54. 34 Romano, La O di Giotto, 77. 35 Jacob brings him not the wild game he craves but a goat from the family’s flock, as directed by Rebekah, to expedite the blessing’s transaction (Gen. 27.5–10).

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Figure 72 Isaac, detail of The Deception of Isaac (2), fresco, 1290s, Upper Church of San Francesco, Assisi Photo: Scala, Florence

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and his face seems to redden.36 His large body twists as it jerks away from Esau, right hand recoiling from the sound and moving toward us, left arm beginning to swing across the body as left leg crosses over right. His feet are caught up in the bed sheets that covered him comfortably a moment ago and have now slipped off his thighs. If what we see is indeed the trembling—and I will argue that it does—that response needs to be interrogated, not least because the “trembling” formerly entailed more than modern readers have imagined.37 “Then Isaac trembled violently.” Such wording, frequent in English translations of Genesis, greatly simplifies the formulation found in medieval bibles. The same sentence in the Vulgate text reads, “Expavit Isaac stupore vehementi ultra quam credi potest admirans.” Roughly translated: Isaac became greatly frightened (expavit) in overpowering astonishment (stupore vehementi), awestruck beyond what can be believed (ultra quam credi potest admirans). We immediately hear the restraint imposed in its modern English rendering. Expavit implies trembling or shuddering. But the full Latin phrase stresses a condition that is at once sensory, mental, and emotional, not only an involuntary muscle response. Expavit itself already moves in that direction in its connotation of intense fear. The word occurs elsewhere in the Vulgate Bible, often in contexts where persons experiencing it are confronted visually or aurally with a threat much greater than themselves, such as crowds or enemy armies.38 It could also mean a response to hearing God’s thunderous voice.39 The subsequent words about Isaac’s state—“stupore vehementi ultra quam credi potest admirans”—appear later in the Vulgate as well, though never again all together. Stupor describes horror at destroyed cities and lands,40 amazement at miracles,41 a mysterious trance.42 Vehemens connotes violent intensity of emotion, suffering, battles, beating rain, destructive and divinely-summoned winds, and the violent sound of wind from Heaven heard by Christ’s 36

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The lowlights of Isaac’s face in the second fresco are red, which we do not see in the faces of other figures there, as observed in Zanardi, Cantiere di Giotto, 374. We cannot know whether the redness is sudden, intended as a sign of emotion, owing to losses to his face in the first fresco. Still, it is worth noting that blushing could be interpreted as a sign of fear. See Robert Miner, Thomas Aquinas on the Passions: A Study of Summa Theologiae Ia2ae 22–48 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 235. Although scholars have not always specified which of Esau’s two utterances upsets Isaac in the fresco, there seems to be a consensus around the second: “I am your firstborn son, Esau.” 1 Sam. 28.5; 2 Kings 1.19; Job 31.34; 1 Mac. 6.8. Job 37.1. Jer. 44.22. Mark 5.42; Luke 5.9, 5.26; Acts 3.10. Acts 22.17.

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disciples the day of Pentecost.43 Admiror—astonishment, wonder, awe— conveys responses to a variety of persons and things seen and heard.44 Among them were Christ’s teachings and miracles.45 When he opens the ears of the deaf man (“Ephpheta!”), people nearby were astonished beyond measure (“amplius admirabantur”).46 In the Vulgate’s terms, then, Isaac’s condition is a historical first, unique in its amplification but also verbally consistent with descriptions of responses to later phenomena and events. Medieval interpreters found in the extended phrasing of Isaac’s response to Esau insights into aspects of the deception story that puzzled them. Augustine wrote that Isaac’s movement (“commotio”) in great fear was such that his mind underwent a “certain separation” (mentis alienatio) from his body, in other words, “ecstasy” (ecstasis).47 This view clarified certain questions, like why the deception did not anger Isaac, why he subsequently and humbly confirmed his blessing of Jacob (Gen. 27.33, 28.3–4), and what moral justification its fraudulent interception could have.48 Augustine offered an explanation which the thirteenth century accepted: Ecstasy enabled Isaac to learn that Jacob was the one he had blessed, as God had wanted.49 Only in leaving his bodily senses could Isaac gain access to truths that were otherwise imperceptible to him. To magnify Isaac’s disturbance, then, as the fresco in Assisi does, is to enlarge the onset of the revelation. Medieval thought linked awe and ecstasy with contemplation and knowledge of the divine. No trance was necessary when previously Isaac learned directly from God where to settle or how blessed he would be (Gen. 26.2–5, 26.24), it is true. His fright after the ruse may have closed his ears to God. Maybe too the deception was something of a greater magnitude, one 43 44 45 46 47

Gen. 50.10; Exod. 10.19; Prov. 28.3; 2 Mac. 10.29; Acts 2.2. 1 Kings 16.4; Eccl. 9.11, 24.3, 27.26, 43.20, 43.24; and elsewhere. Matt. 7.8; Mark 6.2, 10.26, 11.18; Luke 2.48, 11.14. Mark 7.37. Augustine, Quaestionum in Heptateuchem 1.74 (Migne, PL 34.569). On “alienatio mentis” and other medieval phrases for altered states of consciousness, see Barbara Newman, “What Did It Mean to Say ‘I Saw’? The Clash between Theory and Practice in Medieval Visionary Culture,” Speculum 80, no. 1 (Jan., 2005), 8–10. 48 Some recent comments on the Isaac frescoes have explained the justification of Jacob’s theft by citing Esau’s moral unworthiness of the blessing. See Neff, “Lesser Brothers,” 685–6; Cooper and Robson, Making of Assisi, 207. But Esau’s perceived immorality did not resolve medieval writers’ perplexity about Isaac’s rapid confirmation of the blessing despite his preference for Esau. 49 Augustine, Quaestionum in Heptateuchum 1.74 (Migne, PL 34.569), reiterated in Isidore of Seville’s Ad Mysticorum Expositiones Sacramentorum, the Venerable Bede’s In Pentateuchum Commentarii, the Glossa ordinaria, and Thomas Aquinas’s Expositio in Genesim. This tradition does not address the persistence of Isaac’s confusion when, after the overwhelming disturbance, he asks who brought him the hunted game (Gen. 27.33).

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calling for a higher mode of perception to address. Those previous occasions did not raise for theologians a contradiction to address.50 Let us for now agree that Isaac’s fear was understood in the Middle Ages to be pivotal for him. It transports him to a state of receptivity to spiritual enlightenment. But that end does not fully explain the choice to objectify the fear in fresco. Etymology points us toward other reasons. Expavit is an intensified form of the verb paveo (to tremble, to shudder). Mary Carruthers has shown that such trembling accompanies two experiences which medieval culture held distinct, horror and terror. Horror gives rise to dread and awe but is “revealed to be reassuringly within the natural cosmos.”51 It is “an emotion born within a person,” and “can describe sensations within our normal, human range,” such as a physical response to a strong taste sensation. Terror is “an experience of what is utterly alien, wholly outside nature.” It “comes from something uncontrollable and external,” and can suspend one’s reason and sensations.52 Art historians have sometimes seen horror in Isaac’s response in the Assisi fresco, an interpretation that accords with Augustine’s idea of the patriarch’s awe and reassurance but which cannot allow for the loss of sensation, an effect of terror. Isaac’s fear simultaneously meets and exceeds both categories. If horror and terror have to do with the perceived nature of that which causes the response, what is so intensely fearful to Isaac about hearing, “I am your firstborn son, Esau”? It presents no acoustic intimidation or semantic malice or threat. Augustine writes that Isaac became afraid “when the older son again sought the blessing” (my emphasis) and that Isaac was dumbfounded that he had given his blessing to the wrong person.53 Perhaps something frightens Isaac about the repetition and confusion of identities. The mirroring of the brothers’ respective demands in Genesis is striking. (Jacob: “I am Esau your firstborn. I have done as you told me; now sit up and eat of my game, so that you may bless me.” Then, Esau: “Let my father sit up and eat of his son’s game, so that you may bless me.”) The painter in Assisi had this repetition in mind. Within the second fresco, a near-twin of the first, Esau already extends to 50 Augustine himself, as noted above, says that revelations of great things tend to happen in states such as Isaac’s ecstasy. Augustine, Quaestionum in Heptateuchem 1.74 (Migne, PL 34.569). See also Valentina Atturo and Alice Bourke, “Contemplating Wonder: ‘Ad-miratio’ in Richard of St. Victor and Dante,” Dante Studies 129 (2011): 99–124. 51 Mary Carruthers, “Terror, Horror and the Fear of God, or, Why There Is No Medieval Sublime,” in ‘Truthe is the beste’: A Festschrift in Honour of A. V. C. Schmidt, ed. Nicolas Jacobs and Gerald Morgan (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2014), 22. 52 Ibid., 21, 28–29. 53 “Ecce benedictionem promissam repetente majore, expavescit Isaac, et alium pro alio se benedixisse cognoscens miratur.” Augustine, De civitate Dei 16.37 (Migne, PL 41.516).

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his father a spoonful of game, an indication that he has already said, “Let my father sit up and eat of his son’s game, so that you may bless me.” In Genesis, blind Isaac cannot recognize Esau by voice at first. He has severed that voice from what he convinced himself to be Esau’s person. Yet the voice cannot be entirely alien to him, a cause of pure terror. He can generally tell his sons apart by sound (“The voice is Jacob’s voice.”). We appear to be dealing with a horrorterror composite, an ambiguity that could unsettle medieval audiences by confusing the very categories that made fear intelligible to them. Modern intellectual frameworks seem to accommodate Isaac’s fear. His response to Esau’s voice bears a resemblance to the Freudian uncanny, “that species of frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar.”54 Freud argued (1919) that in the uncanny the familiar returns as an object of repulsion and distress in certain kinds of experiences. Each of these experiences has something in common with Isaac’s circumstance: being confronted with a ‘double’, with an unexpected repetition, with severed limbs (if we allow disembodied voices to count), with the reality of what has been considered only imaginary (Jacob’s voice).55 For Freud, the repressed thing is ultimately, of course, the fear of castration. Correspondingly, hearing Esau’s voice may make Isaac afraid of God’s wrath over botching the divine blessing’s transmission—and just when Isaac realizes the vulnerability of his will and powers. One of those powers is Isaac’s paternal ability to bequeath to his descendants God’s promise to Abraham. Another concerns the voice per se— and this takes us beyond Freud. Esau’s voice in Genesis momentarily has a life of its own. It is unsecured to a body. It makes demands and refuses to stay in the oblivion to which Isaac banished it. It belongs neither in the present nor to the already-claimed words it speaks. What Isaac hears when Esau speaks comes near a Lacanian concept of the voice as something exceeding language, meaning, and the body, and as something disruptive of hearers’ experiences of—and illusions of control over—reality.56 Late medieval imaginings ascribed certain voices comparable qualities of bodiless, unnerving force. In chapter three we touched on the transformative effect ascribed by a pope, a poet, and a painter to the Virgin Mary saying “They have no wine.” But from a certain standpoint, voice does not entirely account for Isaac’s fear. The potential of hearing to upset needs to be examined. In a twelfth-century sermon by Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153) on The Song of Songs, 54 Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock (London: Penguin Books, 2013), 124. 55 Ibid., 150–51. 56 Dolar, Voice and Nothing More.

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the theologian refers to sight as the noblest sense but argues that hearing comes first in matters of faith. He speaks of hearing as sight’s enabler in worship, saying for instance that Christ must be heard, and heard about, before he can be seen.57 Hearing succeeds where sight fails to encompass Christ’s immense glory, Bernard says. Hearing can even restore sight.58 He cites Peter having to sever the ear of Malchus, the Jewish priest’s servant, in order to open the way for truth and to liberate him.59 He refers to another side-story from the Bible in which a Roman centurion at The Crucifixion declared Christ to be the Son of God and was inspired to believe not by the sight of his face but by the sound of his voice crying out from the cross (Mark 15.39).60 The abruptness and violence of these examples may be telling. Spiritual truth, in this discourse, seems to be separated from sensible reality by a boundary that is opaque and resistant but also thin and permeable through hearing. To make additional points about hearing, Bernard turns to Isaac’s deception. The story illustrates for him the ear’s singular dependability for truth and wisdom, since Isaac’s hearing remained the strongest sense despite his advanced age and did not fail him as the other senses did.61 The deception also demonstrates hearing’s primacy in faith differently: What wonder if the ear perceives truth, since faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes by the word of God, and the word of God is truth? [Rom. 10.17] ‘The voice is the voice of Jacob’. Nothing could be truer! ‘But the hands are the hands of Esau’. Nothing could be more false! You are tricked. The hand’s disguise deceived you.62 For Bernard, Isaac’s lesson shows hearing being overshadowed by the persuasiveness of other senses. The disparity, when exposed, shocks perceivers whose trust in dominant senses has separated them from spiritual truth. Hearing 57 58 59 60 61

Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermones in Cantica Canticorum 28.7 (Migne, PL 183:924c). Ibid., 28.7 (Migne, PL 183:924c). Ibid., 28.5 (Migne, PL 183:923b). Ibid., 28.4 (Migne, PL 183:923a–b). “Adverte adhuc in sancto Isaac quomodo prae caeteris sensibus auditus in jam sene viguerit. Caligant oculi patriarchae, palatum seducitur, fallitur manus, non fallitur auris. Quid mirum, si auris percipit veritatem, cum ‘fides ex auditu, auditus per verbum Dei’ [Rom. 10.17], verbum Dei veritas sit? … Non est veritas in oculo, non sapientia.” Ibid., 28.7 (Migne, PL 183:924d–925a). 62 “Quid mirum si auris percipit veritatem, cum ‘fides ex auditu, auditus per verbum Dei’ [Rom. 10.17], verbum Dei veritas sit? ‘Vox’, inquit, ‘vox Jacob est’ [Gen. 27.22]. Nihil verius. ‘Manus autem manus sunt Esau’ [Gen. 27.22]. Nihil falsius. Falleris: manus similitudo decepit te.” Ibid., 28.7 (Migne, PL 183:924d).

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upsets because it undermines that trust and everything supported by it—and hearing does this unobtrusively, a further blow to sensation-based belief. Bernard’s use of the Isaac story dramatizes the acoustic moderation of sacred speech that we have touched on throughout this book. A comparable vindication of hearing’s sensorially faint claim to truth is visualized and intensified further in the Assisi fresco by the image of fear-stricken Isaac. His feeling hand has drawn him into a veneer of truth and agency that has suddenly cracked. The picture makes that toppling of false reality into an enduring object of contemplation. The patriarch’s twisting, tipping body permanently attests to hearing’s power not only to report a seemingly impossible voice but to upset apparent certainties. In an instant, touch, smell, and taste yield all credibility to what, moments earlier, was the unaccountably contrarian sense. The spectacle of sensory upheaval does not stop there. It pervades both frescoes. Before further pursuing the pictorial ramifications of this auditory agenda, however, we need to consider three contexts that would have given Isaac’s hearing resonance at Assisi: the broader fresco program; writings by and about the founder of the Franciscan order; and Church efforts to shape perceptions of the sacred. These areas will help us see the Isaac frescoes’ work of making worshipers hear “This is my body” to full, quaking effect. 3

Aural Ancestry

Isaac’s deception was about much more than hearing, from medieval points of view. Persons in the story symbolized things greater than themselves—and not always the same things. Jacob was alternately a figure of the gentiles, of spiritual people, the Church, Christians, as well as Christ.63 Esau represented Jews, the devil, and carnal people.64 Rebekah signified the Church, Grace, and

63 Augustine, De civitate Dei 16.37 (Migne, PL 41.515): “Benedictio igitur Jacob, praedicatio Christi est in omnibus gentibus”; Augustine, Sermo 4: De Esau et Iacob (Migne, PL 38.34): “Jacob spirituales figurat”; Strabo [pseud.], Glossa ordinaria (Migne, PL 113.149b): “Jacob Ecclesiae et Christi”; [Pseudo-] Hugh of St. Victor, Allegoriae in Vetus Testamentum 2.11 (Migne, PL 175.649c): “Jacob, gentilis; … Odivit Esau Jacob; odio habent populum Christianum ex gentibus collectum Judaei.” 64 Augustine, Sermo 4: De Esau et Iacob (Migne, PL 38.34): “Esau carnales … figurat”; Strabo [pseud.], Glossa ordinaria (Migne, PL 113.149b): “Esau populi prioris et zabuli”; [Pseudo-] Hugh of St. Victor, Allegoriae in Vetus Testamentum 2.11 (Migne, PL 175.649c): “Esau, Judaicus populus.”

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the Holy Spirit.65 Isaac stood for God, the Law, the Old Testament, Prophecy.66 These valences point beyond the story’s timeframe to the advent of Christianity and its desired distance from Judaism. They also reinterpret the blessing of Jacob, making it Christian history’s earliest turn toward, or prefiguration of, faith. Here, in the Bible’s first book, one generation after Abraham received the divine promise of favor and fecundity, a proto-Christian spirituality already supersedes a ‘carnal’ Judaism through the agency of the Holy Spirit. Isaac has a transitional role in this broader narrative. It is through him that God’s promise to Abraham passes to Jacob and his own progeny on down to Christians, the spiritual heirs of God’s promise to Abraham. Additionally, Isaac denotes a transition between the waning age and the spiritual faith to come. The Glossa ordinaria holds that “Old Isaac [represents] the end of the world; his dim eyes signify that faith has perished from the world and that the light of religion has been neglected.”67 Augustine equated Isaac’s ocular blindness with “blindness of the minds of the Jews.”68 Isaac’s ecstasy leaves him changed, however. “But the eyes of his heart saw the height of the mystery,” Augustine continued.69 He becomes spiritually perceptive, a proto-prophet. The shift comes about through hearing the older son seek his blessing “again.” The Genesis frescoes in the Upper Church of San Francesco bring into the foreground other spiritually consequential acts of hearing prior to the Isaac story. Eve (now partly effaced) listens to the serpent’s calamitous persuasion (Fig. 73). Obedient Noah hears plans for the ark that will save a few humans from the great flood (Fig. 74). Abraham, raising a sword to sacrifice his son 65 Augustine, Sermo 4: De Esau et Iacob (Migne, PL 38.39): “Haec Ecclesia significtur in Rebecca uxore Isaac”; Strabo [pseud.], Glossa ordinaria (Migne, PL 113.149c): “Rebecca Spiritus sancti; … Rebecca plena Spiritu sancto, sciens quod audisset antequam pareret, quia ‘major serviet minori’: haec formam gerit Spiritus sancti, quae quod futurum esse noverat in Christo, ante meditabatur in Jacob, loquitur ad filium minorem”; [Pseudo-] Hugh of St. Victor, Allegoriae in Vetus Testamentum 2.11 (Migne, PL 175.649c): “Rebecca, gratia.” 66 Augustine, De civitate Dei 16.37 (Migne, PL 41.515): “Lex et Prophetia est Isaac”; Augustine, Sermo de Esau et Iacob (Migne, PL 38.39): “Senectus Isaac, vetustatem significat Veteris Testamenti”; [Pseudo-] Hugh of St. Victor, Allegoriae in Vetus Testamentum 2.11 (Migne, PL 175.649b): “Isaac igitur Deus.” 67 “Senectus Isaac, consummationem mundi; oculi caligantes periisse fidem de mundo, et religionis lumen neglectum esse, significant.” Strabo [pseud.], Glossa ordinaria (Migne, PL 113.149b). 68 Augustine, Sermo de Esau et Iacob (Migne, PL 38.39): “Caligo oculorum corporis Isaac, caliginem significat mentium Judaeorum.” 69 Ibid. (Migne, PL 38.44): “Sed noverat mysterium, et caligo oculorum ejus corporeorum significabat caliginem mentis Judaeorum: oculi autem cordis ejus videbant altitudinem mysteriorum.”

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Figure 73 The Temptation, The Sacrifice of Isaac, Abraham and the Three Angels, fresco, 1290s, third bay of north wall, Upper Church of San Francesco, Assisi Photo: Bridgeman Images

Isaac in compliance with the divine command, looks up as the Lord’s ‘speaking’ hand now orders him to stop (Fig. 73). Humanity’s future and relationship with its god had hinged on each of these moments. In the case of Abraham, because he unquestioningly heeded the Lord’s voice in almost killing Isaac, he

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Figure 74 Noah Listens to God, The Building of the Ark, fresco, 1290s, Upper Church of San Francesco, Assisi Photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY

and his descendants received divine favor—favor which Isaac would unwittingly pass to Jacob and which Christians would later claim to inherit. Another sensory theme is introduced in the second Abraham fresco, located just prior to the Isaac stories (Fig. 75). The patriarch (now partly missing also) kneels before the three angels, the “men” in whom the Lord took form when he appeared to Abraham at Mamre to announce that his wife will become pregnant (with Isaac). Theologians had long maintained that although Abraham saw three men, he venerated only one God through them. Augustine explained that the Abraham “truly saw God, not with the eyes of his body, but rather with those of his heart.”70 While Abraham disregards the eyes of his body, he readily 70 Augustine, Contra Maximinum haereticum arianorum episcopum 2.26.8 (Migne, PL 42.809): “Quod visus fuerat Deus Abrahae ad quercum Mambre, sub cujus umbra arboris tres viros pavit, quod oculis corporis vidit: in eis vero Deum, non corporis, sed cordis oculis vidit, id est, intellexit atque cognovit.” The fresco endorses this imputed limit of bodily sight. Abraham is seen communicating only with the middle angel, who stands in front of the other two and is further distinguished by his staff and cruciform nimbus.

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Figure 75 Abraham and the Three Angels, fresco, 1290s, Upper Church of San Francesco, Assisi Photo: Bridgeman Images

accepts what he hears with his bodily ears: an announcement from one of the men that his infertile wife Sarah will soon bear a son.71 Paul comments, in his Letter to the Romans: “[Abraham] did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was already as good as dead (for he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb” (Rom. 4.19, NSRV). 71

In Genesis (18.10–15), Sarah listens to this news from a tent and laughs to herself in doubt. The Lord overhears her and questions her skepticism in his omnipotence. She becomes afraid. (Zechariah will not have adequately heard this story when his own annunciation comes, as discussed in the previous chapter.)

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A pattern of trust thus in hearing emerges across the painted Genesis scenes, interrupted only temporarily by Isaac. It continues into the larger fresco program in the nave of the Upper Church of San Francesco. Auditory events occur in many of the eighteen New Testament scenes and twenty-eight frescoes of the Life of Saint Francis. The New Testament cycle begins with The Annunciation to the Virgin and ends with Pentecost, stories in which Christ’s mother and followers advance sacred history in hearing divine things. Around the middle of the cycle, in The Betrayal of Christ, Peter severs Malchus’s ear, that brutal ‘correction’ of spiritual deafness. The Life too is punctuated and propelled by auditory events with spiritual overtones. A captivated pope listens to the Holy Spirit speak through Francis (Saint Francis Preaches before Honorius III).72 Friars learn of Francis’s death and heavenly ascent from the startling outburst of their long mute minister, Fra Agostino (The Visions of Fra Agostino and the Bishop of Assisi). In The Miracle at Greccio, friars sing with open mouths as Francis has a vision of the Christ child. An early scene shows Francis, his ear partly visible beneath his cuffia, being altered by hearing a voice (Fig. 76). While still a layman, son of a merchant, he kneels in the dilapidated Church of San Damiano and responds with raised hands to a painted wood crucifix commanding him audibly three times, “Francis, go and repair my house.” Thereupon he trembled (“tremefactus”), was astonished at hearing such a marvelous voice (“stupet ad tam mirandae vocis auditum”), and passed into ecstasy (“mentis alienatur excessu”), in the words of Bonaventure’s hagiography (1260–63).73 The remaining twenty-four scenes on the nave walls of San Francesco narrate Francis’s spiritual career to reform the Church, from his rejection of family and other worldly connections to his founding of a spiritual community, his becoming radically Christ-like, his working of miracles, and the growth of his renown. Hearing a voice coming from a material image initiates this holy life. Francis’s response to the crucifix does not resemble Isaac’s response to Esau visually, aside from reactive hands. Nonetheless, each is astonished at a sudden and unexpected sound, a voice without an immediately intelligible context. Studies of the frescoes of the upper church have argued for Francis’s programmatic portrayal as a distinguished descendant of the Genesis patriarchs.74 While Jacob has been considered one of the saint’s spiritual prototypes, Isaac 72 Shoaf, “Voice and Wisdom,” 226–27, fig. 12.8. 73 Bonaventure, Legendae duae de vita S. Francisci, 14: “Tremefactus Franciscus, cum esset in ecclesia solus, stupet ad tam mirandae vocis auditum, cordeque percipiens divini virtutem eloquii, mentis alienatur excessu.” 74 For instance, Burkhart, Franziskus, 46–48; Serena Romano, La basilica di San Francesco ad Assisi: Pittori, botteghe, strategie narrative (Rome: Viella, 2001), 147–50; Neff, “Lesser Brothers.” More recently, see Cooper and Robson, Making of Assisi, 153–81.

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Figure 76 Saint Francis before the Crucifix of San Damiano, fresco, 1290s, Upper Church of San Francesco, Assisi Photo: Raffaello Bencini/Archivi Alinari, Firenze

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has not. And with good reason.75 For unlike the frescoes’ portrayals of Noah, Abraham, Jacob, and Joseph, Isaac is bedridden and does little more than to pass along God’s blessing to the next generation.76 Moreover, in contrast with the divine nature of what Noah, Abraham, and Jacob listen to, the voice Isaac hears is human. And his disregard of it betrays his faulty judgment. This is a noteworthy point of contrast with the Francis we find in posthumous representations of him and in his own writings. In his earliest textual portrayals, Francis constantly listens to the pronouncement of holy words. Never inattentive to the Gospels, he tried to remember everything he heard from them and tried his best to follow it to the letter, Thomas of Celano wrote.77 Bonaventure’s later Legenda maior retains this idea, noting that Francis listened to sacred Scripture with an attentive mind and continuously, with intense devotion, ruminated on what he heard.78 The Legenda describes further how Francis was visibly affected simply by hearing the name Jesus “as if some honey-sweet flavor had altered his taste or some harmonious sound had transformed his hearing.”79 His own writings stress listening. “Listen, sons of the Lord and my brothers,” says a letter addressed to his entire Order, “ ‘and listen to what I say’. ‘Incline the ear’ of your heart and obey the voice of the son of God.”80 The same letter reminds Franciscans to recognize their duty to listen to and act on divine speech: “And since he who is from God hears the words of God, accordingly we who have been deputized specifically for the divine functions must … listen to and do what God says.”81 Elsewhere, Francis expressed concern that friars’ ears were ill-prepared to 75 76

Neff, “Lesser Brothers,” 676 and 702n10. This corresponds to Isaac’s portrayal in Genesis. See Elizabeth Boase, “Life in the Shadows: The Role and Function of Isaac in Genesis: Synchronic and Diachronic Readings,” Vetus Testamentum 51, fasc. 3 (July, 2001): 312–35. 77 Thomas of Celano, Vita prima S. Francisci Assisiensis 1.9: “Non enim fuerat Evangelii surdus auditor, sed laudabili memoriae quae audierat cuncta commendans, ad litteram diligenter implere curabat.” 78 Bonaventure, Legendae duae de vita S. Francisci, 112–13: “Legebat quandoque in libris sacris, et quo animo semel iniecerat tenaciter imprimebat memoriae, quia non frustra mentalis attentionis percipiebat auditu quod continuae devotionis ruminabat affectu.” 79 Ibid., 110–11: “Nomen autem Iesu cum exprimeret vel audiret, iubilo quodam repletus interius, totus videbatur exterius alterari, ac si mellifluus sapor gustum, vel harmonicus sonus ipsius immutasset auditum.” 80 Francis of Assisi, “Letter to the Entire Order,” in Die Opuscula des Hl. Franziskus von Assisi: Neue textkritische Edition, ed. Kajetan Esser (Grottaferrata: Collegi S. Bonaventurae Ad Claras Aquas, 1976), 259: “Audite, domini filii et fratres mei, ‘et auribus percipite verba mea’ [Acts 2.14]. ‘Inclinate aurem’ [Isa. 55.3] cordis vestri et obedite voci Filii Dei.” 81 Ibid., 261–2: “Et, quia ‘qui ex Deo verba Dei audit’ [John 8.47], debemus proinde nos, qui specialius divinus sumus officiis deputati, non solum audire et facere …”

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receive God’s word, citing Christ’s parable of the sower whose seeds do not all reach the good soil to bear fruit—an allusion to the deafening effects of weak faith, worldly concerns, and worldly desires.82 Among the words of God to be heard, Francis evidently had the highest reverence for “This is my body,” the beginning of the phrase spoken by Christ at the Last Supper (Luke 22.19) and repeated by priests during the Eucharist rite to consecrate bread and wine, which the faithful were then supposed to apprehend as Christ himself. Francis sternly reprimanded those who did not see and believe that the body and blood of Christ were truly present after the consecration—”They are condemned.”83 He had to remind all clergy that the body of Christ could not be present “without first being consecrated by [Christ’s] word.”84 He informed all members of his Order that belief in that presence should have a strongly affective register: “Let the whole of mankind tremble, the whole world shake” upon recognizing the overwhelming nature of what was hidden by the “small sight of bread,” with appreciation of the apparent paradox.85 Hagiography portrayed him having this same response to the Eucharist. He experienced in it “stupor beyond measure” (stupori permaximo), according to Celano, and was “astonished in stupor beyond measure” (stupore admirans permaximo), in Bonaventure’s scripture-like reiteration of Celano’s 82 Francis of Assisi, “Admonition to the Brothers,” chapter 22 of the Regula Non Bullata (1221), in Opuscula des Hl. Franziskus von Assisi, 395–6. Bonaventure later elaborated these ideas and turned them into an auditory discipline. ln a sermon, he stressed that the first step to ensuring that the “seeds” find “good soil” was a tranquil and undistracted mind, as exemplified by Mary Magdalen when she listened at Christ’s feet in the house of Martha. Firm belief was then required to retain the word, followed by diligent understanding and practice. Bonaventure, Dominica in sexagesima, sermo (S. Bonaventurae Opera Omnia, 9:199–200). Giovanni da San Gimignano’s discipline of inner listening, laid out in his Summa de exemplis (discussed in earlier chapters), has an ancestor of its own here. 83 Francis of Assisi, Opuscula des Hl. Franziskus von Assisi, 106: “Ita et modo omnes qui vident sacramentum [corporis Christi], quo sanctificatur per verba Domini super altare per manum sacerdotis in forma panis et vini, et non vident et credunt secundum spiritum et divinitatem, quod sit veraciter sanctissimum corpus et sanguis Domini nostri Jesu Christi, damnati sunt.” 84 Francis of Assisi, “Letter to the Clergy,” in Opuscula des Hl. Franziskus von Assisi, 163: “Attendamus, omnes clerici, magnum peccatum et ignorantiam, quam quidam habent super sanctissimum corpus et sanguinem Domini nostri Jesu Christi et sacratissima nomina et verba eius scripta, quae sanctificant corpus.” 85 Francis of Assisi, “Letter to the Entire Order,” 261: “Totus homo paveat, totus mundus contremiscat, et caelum exultet, quando super altare in manu sacerdotis est ‘Christus, Filius Dei vivi’ [John 11.27]! O admiranda altitudo et stupenda dignatio! O humilitas sublimis! O sublimitas humilis, quod Dominus universitatis, Deus et Dei Filius, sic se humiliat, ut pro nostra salute sub modica panis formula se abscondat!”

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phrase.86 These descriptions of hearing “This is my body” recall the language in Genesis for Isaac’s unsettled state. Indeed, they may have echoed it deliberately. By the mid-thirteenth century, in fact, Isaac had become an exemplar of eucharistic perception, as we discover in sermons on The Last Supper and the body of Christ. Federico Visconti took further Bernard of Clairvaux’s use of Isaac’s deception to argue the spiritual primacy of hearing. The Pisan archbishop preached that Jacob’s father was deceived by all his senses except hearing. Sight deceived him, since ‘his eyes were dim so that he could not see’. Similarly taste, since he believed he ate Esau’s venison. Similarly smell, since he smelled the odor of Esau’s vestments. Similarly touch, since he believed he felt Esau when he felt Jacob. But as for hearing, he was not deceived, as is written: ‘The voice is Jacob’s voice’, etc. Similarly, in this sacrament [i.e., the Eucharist] only hearing is true for faith. All the other senses fail. Only hearing is true, by which we hear, ‘This is my body, this is my blood’. All the other senses say that it is bread and wine, but they lie.87 Jacobus de Voragine, archbishop of Genoa, preached in a sermon on The Last Supper that hearing was the only sense not deceived in the sacrament of the Eucharist, as “is shown in Isaac’s blessing of Jacob.” After going through the deception of each of the patriarch’s other senses, Voragine declared that “all faithful persons, when they hear ‘This is my body’, must firmly and truly believe it to be.”88 We hear the same idea promoted by Bonaventure himself, 86 Thomas of Celano, Vita secunda S. Francisci Assisiensis 2.152: “De devotione ad Corpus Domini. Flagrabat erga sacramentum Dominici Corporis fervore omnium medullarum, stupori permaximo habens caram illam dignationem et dignantissimam caritatem”; Bonaventure, Legendae duae de vita S. Francisci, 94: “Flagrabat erga Sacramentum dominici corporis fervore omnium medullarum, stupore admirans permaximo illam carissimam dignationem et dignantissimam caritatem.” 87 Federico Visconti, Les sermons, 634 (Sermon 39, year unknown): “Unde Ysaac, quando Iacob obtulit ei edum, per omnes sensus fuit deceptus preter quam solum auditum. Visus enim defecit ei, quia ‘caligaverunt oculi eius et videre non poterat’. Similiter gustum, quia credidit commedere escam de venatione Esau. Item olfatus, quia sentiebat odorem vestimentorum Esau. Item per tactum, quia credebat palpare Esau, cum palparet Iacob. Sed quantum ad auditum non fuit deceptus, unde dixit: ‘Vox quidem, vox Iacobi est’ etc. Item in hoc sacramento solus auditus verus est per fidem; omnes alii sensus falluntur, solus auditus verus est, quo audimus: ‘Hoc est corpus meum, hic est sanguis meus’. Omnes alii sensus dicunt quod sit panis et vinum, sed mentiuntur, unde per Ysaac sensus humanus figurat.” 88 Jacobus de Voragine, In coena Domini, sermo 2: “Non igitur debet aliquis attendere ad uisum suum, quia uisus putaret se uidere colorem panis, et tamen non est ibi panis; nec

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the Franciscan Order’s great theologian, minister general, and author of the hagiography that described Francis’s response to the Eucharist in Isaac-like terms as astonishment in stupor beyond measure. In an undated sermon on The Last Supper, Bonaventure preached, But [Isaac’s] hearing was not deceived. Whence he said, ‘But the voice is Jacob is Jacob’s voice’, etc. Thus, all the senses are deceived in this sacrament except hearing alone, which hears these words, ‘This is my body’, and immediately one assents through faith, in accordance with what the Apostle [Paul] said: ‘Faith comes from hearing’ [Rom. 10.17].89 The importance of these sermon excerpts for understanding the Isaac frescoes’ auditory work cannot be overstated. They show us that the patriarch’s deception had come to be associated with eucharistic devotion such that the phrase “The voice is Jacob’s voice” could enable hearing “This is my body” with an attitude of faith. At the same time, the sermons reveal something of the large scale of the perceived need to offer such assistance. As eucharistic devotion increased in thirteenth-century Europe, worshipers might not have been hearing “This is my body” faithfully enough, perhaps not at all. The preachers blamed the deceptions of bodily sensation. There were other obstacles and complications, to be sure. Historians of religion point to the ad gustum suum, quia putaret se sentire gustum panis, et tamen non est ibi panis; nec ad tactum suum, quia putaret se tangere substantiam panis, et tamen non est ibi panis; nec ad olfactum suum, quia putaret se sentire odorem panis et uini, et tamen non est ibi panis nec uinum; sed debet attendere ad auditum suum quia, cum audit ‘Hoc est corpus meum’, ita est per omnia sicut audit. Hoc significatum est Gen. XXVII in Isaac, quando benedixit Iacob. Fuit enim deceptus uisus suus, quia oculi eius caligauerant et ipsum non cognouit. Fuit deceptus olfactus suus, quia credidit se sentire odorem uestimentotum Esau, et erat odor uestimentorum que induerat Iacob. Fuit deceptus gustus eius, quia credebat se comedere de uenatione Esau, et comedebat de uenatione Iacob. Fuit deceptus tactus suus, quia putabat se tangere manus Esau, et tangebat manus Iacob. Sed tamen auditus quo uocem Iacob audiuit non fuit deceptus, immo dixit: ‘Vox quidem uox Iacob est’. Sic etiam in isto sacramento omnes alii sensus preter auditum decipiuntur; et ideo omnes fideles quando audiunt ‘Hoc est corpus meum’, ita firmiter et ueraciter credere debent.” 89 Bonaventure, Feria quinta in coena Domini, sermo 1 (S. Bonaventurae Opera Omnia, 9:248– 49): “Sed auditus non decipiebatur. Unde dixit: ‘Vox quidem, vox Iacob’ etc. Sic omnes sensus decipiuntur in hoc Sacramento, excepto solo auditu, qui audit haec verba: ‘Hoc est corpus meum’; et statim homo assentit per fidem, secundum quod dicit Apostolus: ‘Fides ex auditu’ [Rom. 10.17] est.” Preachers in fourteenth-century England took up the theme of intersensory conflict in eucharist veneration. See Rubin, Corpus Christi, 228; Metzler, “Speechless,” 66. The same idea occurs in the “Adoro Te,” a hymn attributed to Thomas Aquinas. Bruzelius, “Hearing is Believing,” 83, 90n1.

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rise of Aristotelian thought “heretical” attitudes, misunderstandings, disenchantment, and indifference as factors eroding doctrinaire perceptions of the sacrament.90 Another difficulty was that, regardless of the manner in which “This is my body” was spoken, no matter the quality of a priest’s voice or its performance, consecration could not work without the consecrating priest’s own belief, according to Aquinas and other theologians.91 Bodily sensation was a major issue nevertheless. We recall that Francis dwelled on the susceptibility of clergy, members of his Order, and the whole of humankind to negligence or faulty perceptions of Christ’s presence despite what their ears told them. Sight could be a barrier, for the host looked the same after consecration as before.92 And this is what the sermon excerpts we just read were getting at. Abraham may well have been known as the father of faith. Isaac too similarly represented faith to medieval Christians, that assurance of things hoped for and conviction of things unseen.93 But Isaac gained ancestral significance in this regard with his story being widely retold to remedy deafness to the Eucharist. The spiritual stakes were high. Worshipers risked idolatry if they adored the bread before hearing its consecration.94 Moreover, it was a problem of spiritual progress and community, for it meant missing the sacrament with which the Mass culminated, the opportunity to join oneself to God and Christ in this world, the

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David Burr, “Eucharistic Presence and Conversion in Late Thirteenth-Century Franciscan Thought,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 74, no. 3 (1984), 5–6, 104; Miri Rubin, “Popular Attitudes to the Eucharist,” in A Companion to the Eucharist in the Middle Ages, ed. Ian Christopher Levy, Gary Macy, and Kristen Van Ausdall (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 465. 91 Fritz, La cloche et la lyre, 415–16. 92 Scholars have often argued or reiterated the primacy of the sense of sight in late medieval eucharistic devotion, beginning with Édouard Dumoutet, Le désir de voir l’hostie et les origins de la devotion au Saint-Sacrement (Paris: Gabriel Beauchesne, 1926). See the recent Aden Kumler, “Translating the Eucharist,” chap. 3 in Translating Truth: Ambitious Images and Religious Knowledge in Late Medieval England and France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011). Attention to the practice of elevating the consecrated host for all to see and discussions of “ocular communion” have reinforced this position. For a persuasive critical perspective, see Carolyn Walker Bynum, “Seeing and Seeing Beyond: The Mass of St. Gregory in the Fifteenth Century,” in The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Anne-Marie Bouché (Princeton, NJ: Department of Art and Archaeology, 2006), 208–40. 93 Heb. 11.20, NSRV: “By faith Isaac invoked blessings for the future on Jacob and Esau.” 94 Camille, Gothic Idol, 215–17; Donal Cooper, “Franciscan Choir Enclosures and the Function of Double-Sided Altarpieces in Pre-Tridentine Umbria,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 63 (2001), 38 and n101.

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realization of spiritual community.95 Fundamentally it was a question of faith. Belief without seeing was taught and assessed through the Eucharist rite.96 And as we now see, perceptual remediation could be necessary for worshipers to pass the test. But more was required perceptually of worshipers if they were to tremble upon hearing “This is my body.” They were supposed to understand the Eucharist to be a veil contrived to hide Christ’s presence from the senses. Among the concealment’s purposes were the cultivation of faith through hearing, the exclusion of unbelievers, and the sparing of the faithful what their senses and sensibilities could not bear: the horror of living flesh being consumed, on the one hand, and exposure to something too great for the senses and imagination to apprehend, on the other.97 The story of Isaac’s deception had relevance here too. We return briefly to Archbishop Visconti, who preached that the body of Christ was veiled in the Eucharist to teach faith to good people and thereby to counteract false belief resulting from Adam and Eve listening to the devil.98 The lesson went beyond the recognition that hearing alone is undeceived at the host’s consecration. There should also be awe (as Francis himself believed). Visconti cited Isaac as the example. The faithful are “astonished beyond what can be believed,” as he was in Genesis 27, when Esau offered him the meal. Like the marveling Isaac, the faithful should marvel when considering the concealment of Christ’s overwhelming presence from their senses.99 Visconti is not 95 The ideal community into which Christians entered through baptism was supposed to become real for them again through participation in the sacrament of the Eucharist. Baschet, Le sein du père, 47. 96 Bynum, “Seeing and Seeing Beyond,” 212 and n29; Rubin, “Popular Attitudes,” 447–48. 97 Bynum, “Seeing and Seeing Beyond,” 212. Roger Bacon, cited by Bynum, is an important thirteenth-century proponent of this view. See Roger Bacon, The ‘Opus majus’ of Roger Bacon, ed. John Henry Bridges (Oxford, 1897), 2:402–3. Bonaventure, Sermo 3: De sanctissimo corpore Christi 3.33–34, explains the veiling of Christ in the Eucharist in similar terms. 98 Visconti, Les sermons, 633–34 (Sermon 39): “Ratio sapientie exegit quod non debuit dari nisi velatum propter tria; hoc enim exigebat fides bonorum, indignitas malorum et fragilitas omnium. Fides bonorum exegit velatum dari, quia aliter non haberet meritum, et in hoc fuit ratio sapientie mirabilis. Item alia ratio: omne demeritum cepit ab ipsa falsa credulitate, cum primi parentes crediderunt esse ut dii in gustu scientie boni et mali, Gn. III (3, 5–7), credendo falso dyaboli testimonio, unde e contrario dignum est ut credant testimonio Dei solius, qui dicit Ioh. VI [John 6.55]. In hiis que videmus, nos ipsi testes sumus, sed in hiis que non videmus, testimonio credimus aliorum. Fides ergo exigit velationem, ut sicut illi prius audierunt vocem diaboli et credentes decepti sunt, ita nunc audiunt testimonium Dei et credentes salvatur. Unde Ysaac, quando Iacob obtulit ei edum, per omnes sensus fuit deceptus preter quam solum auditum …” 99 Ibid., 634: “Ecce ergo mirabilis ratio sapientie, que dat velatum propter fidem bonorum, que ex auditu est; sed notandum quod miratur Ysaac, idest sensus humanus post

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talking about the bread alone. Contributing to believers’ Isaac-like wonder are other aspects: the divine intent, the mystery of its material realization, and the idea of the sheer magnitude of what that manifestation hides from the senses. The worshiper’s deceit by the bread is prefigured not only by Isaac’s deceit but also in the seamless execution and holy purpose of his deception. A faithful person should be aware of the senses’ errors, not to then ignore them but rather to turn their persuasiveness, so difficult to dismiss, toward enhancing astonishment at the concealment’s success. Visconti used preaching to generate reflection and action on this point. Francis, as we have seen, used letterwriting, as where he states plainly that all should tremble with astonishment at Christ being hidden by the “small sight of bread.” Pictures too could equip worshipers to respond to the Eucharist in this manner. Certainly, scholars have understood many works of medieval art to have had eucharistic significance.100 Most germane for the Isaac frescoes is the perspective offered by Kristen Van Ausdall in a recent expansive survey on the topic. Van Ausdall argues that, beginning in the thirteenth century, artists designed images to reveal Christ’s presence beneath the veil of the Eucharist.101 One approach was to represent the consecrated host being held up by a priest. Another was to make the body of Christ into an object of visual contemplation, so viewers would know what their eyes were not seeing in the Eucharist. Mural painting in the Church of San Francesco in Assisi has a prominent place in Van Ausdall’s study. She highlights connections the frescoes make between Francis and Christ’s body, the expression of the saint’s “devotional interaction with the Eucharist” and “desire for affective interaction with the incarnate Christ.”102 But to desire affective interaction with Christ is not the same as to shudder upon hearing “This is my body.” Moreover, having visible substitutes for an invisible presence is one thing. Learning to listen for the arrival of that refectionem, quando Esau, idest species sensibilis, offert ei suam refectionem corporaliter et stupet ultra quam possit cogitari, sicut cum fidelis considerat, miratur.” 100 See for example Ursula Nilgen and Renate Franciscono, “The Epiphany and the Eucharist: On the Interpretation of Eucharistic Motifs in Mediaeval Epiphany Scenes,” The Art Bulletin 49, no. 4 (Dec., 1967): 311–16; Gertrud Schiller, Iconography of Christian Art (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society Ltd., 1971), 2:70, 72–75. Bruzelius, “Hearing is Believing,” 86–87, suggests that looking at mural art played a role in Clarissan nuns’ auditory participation in the Mass, which convent architecture in Assisi and elsewhere prevented them from seeing. For a critical assessment of scholars’ interpretations of medieval art in relation to the Eucharist, see Beth Williamson, “Altarpieces, Liturgy, and Devotion,” Speculum 79, no. 2 (Apr., 2004): 341–406. 101 Kristen Van Ausdall, “Art and Eucharist in the Late Middle Ages,” in Levy, Macy, and Van Ausdall, Companion to the Eucharist, 541–49. 102 Ibid., 542, 549, 551, 568–73.

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presence is quite another. Additionally, we must ask: Was beholding Christ in an image enough to spark amazement at the divine craft at work in the eucharistic disguise? Each of these points is addressed by the Isaac frescoes, which until now have fallen outside the scholarly purview of art-Eucharist relationships. The patriarch’s hearing-induced jolt models what Francis insisted should happen to worshipers at the sound of “This is my body.” In depicting the father’s test of his son’s identity in the previous scene—to the point of cuing the viewer to hear internally “The voice is Jacob’s voice,” that phrase repeated in sermons— the painter described the care with which the holy fraud is undertaken. Jacob takes guidance from Rebekah, patiently restraining himself as his suspicious father verifies his identity (Figs. 66, 69). Her left hand, kept close to her body, has not yet given him the silent signal to extend the meal he holds in his similarly angled left hand. The tight wrapping of cloth over her hand helps us see that her son’s actions are directed by her. His own hands are covered with kidskin gloves, a crucial detail (Fig. 77). Their tightness and precise fit are at odds with the preponderance of loose and heavy fabric in the bed sheets, garments, and curtains that fill the picture. Some churchmen likened the eucharistic veiling of the body of Christ to the swaddling clothes wrapping the Christ child in the manger or to a hand being covered by a coat.103 A prayer uttered at the consecration of bishops invoked the wrapping of Jacob’s hands as a proleptic symbol (as Meiss called it) of the gloves bishops used for handling the Eucharist and earning grace.104 And, again, the covered Jacob could signify Christ veiled by bread in the Eucharist, while his garments were traditionally understood to be those of a religious official.105 103 A sermon given by Aelred of Rievaulx (d. 1167) equates the wrapping of Jesus in swaddling clothes with the veiling of Christ by bread and wine: “In hoc praesepio est Jesus pannis involutus. Involutio pannorum est tegumentum sacramentorum. In hoc praesepio in specie panis et vini est verum corpus et sanguis Christi. Ibi ipse Christus esse creditur; sed involutus pannis, hoc est invisibiliter in ipsis sacramentis. Nullum tam magnum et evidens signum habemus nativitatis Christi, quam quod in sancto altari sumimus quotidie corpus et sanguinem ejus.” Aelred of Rievaulx, Sermo 2: In natali Domini (Migne, PL 195.227b–c). Cited in Leah Sinanoglou, “The Christ Child as Sacrifice: A Medieval Tradition and the Corpus Christi Plays,” Speculum 48, no. 3 (July, 1973), 495n18. Peter of Poitiers (d. 1216) likened the unseen body of Christ in the Eucharist to a coat-covered hand: “Non videtur corpus Christi sicut nec manus sub cappa.” Peter of Poitiers, Sententiarum libri quinque 5.10 (Migne, PL 211.1242d). Cited in Rubin, Corpus Christi, 24. 104 Meiss, Giotto and Assisi, 13. This is the only instance known to me of a scholar connecting the Isaac frescoes and the Eucharist. 105 Strabo [pseud.], Glossa ordinaria (Migne, PL 113.150c): “ ‘Et vestibus Esau’, etc. (HIER.) In hoc loco tradunt Hebraei primogenitos functos officio sacerdotum, et habuisse

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Figure 77 Jacob’s hand, detail of The Deception of Isaac (1), fresco, 1290s, Upper Church of San Francesco, Assisi Photo: Scala, Florence

It would not be a stretch to see in the painting of Jacob an allusion to the hidden Christ, or to recognize in the craft of deceit a reference to Christ’s concealment, or to find in Isaac’s disquiet a response commensurate with that purposefully mystifying misrepresentation (Figs. 67, 72). In the Upper Church of San Francesco, priests would have raised the just-consecrated host for congregants to view.106 As no other picture in the church could, the Isaac frescoes reminded all of their own blindness as they listened for “This is my body,” signal of the arrival of the immaterial object of awe. The need for that object’s disguise to be perceived as such explains a lot about the frescoes’ work to draw attention to capacities and limitations of bodily sight. The next section pushes our own looking to perceive the artistically radical production of that revelation.

vestimentum sacerdotale, quo induti victimas offerebant, antequam Aaron in sacerdotiam eligeretur.” 106 Cooper, “Franciscan Choir Enclosures,” 36–39.

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Hidden by Sight

To have postponed up to now discussion of the Isaac frescoes’ engagements with sight may appear to resist the obvious. Decades of scholarship have cemented the view of the painter’s achievement as a conquest of visible reality.107 Signatures of the triumph are the clarity, coherence, unity, volume, measurability, stability, and near tangibility of the pictorial space. This vein of vocabulary extends to the pictured bodies, which have been likened to sculptures for their concreteness and fixedness. The words ‘realistic’ and ‘naturalistic’ would not fully encompass what is presented, however. Pietro Toesca suggested that in the second fresco Isaac’s right hand “seems to explore the depth of the painting up to its [painted] surface” (Fig. 72).108 Others have agreed, one scholar adding that Isaac stretches out his hand to the picture plane, which coincides with the painted wall, “as if to measure the depth of the space and to give the perspective direction.”109 The statement gives the impression that the patriarch’s fearful pose was contrived to showcase the artist’s visual audacity and skill. Skill and contrivance are indeed on display. Ultimately, however, the artist of interest was not a human one. There is no denying the painter’s powers of observation. The precision of the curtain rods extending the width of each scene are among the many proofs (Fig. 78). One is brighter and slightly larger than the other, differences that describe the relative proximity of each to us and to an unseen light source. Painted mere inches apart on the church wall’s surface, the rods strengthen the illusion of depth. They convince us that Isaac’s curtained inner chamber can accommodate his bed and the actions near it. For this and other reasons, the frescoes have been deemed a precocious experiment in late medieval optics.110 At the same time, the artist had the diagnostic vision of a physician. Isaac’s eyes exhibit symptoms of disease, their lids drooping and a third ‘lid’ behind them covering the patriarch’s pupils (Fig. 79). The specificity of this ocular 107 For instance: Kurt Bauch, “Die geschichtliche Bedeutung von Giottos Frühstil,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 7, no. 1 (Oct., 1953), 50; Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences, 136; Romanini, “Gli occhi di Isacco,” 45–6; Emma Simi Varanelli, “Dal Maestro d’Isacco a Giotto: Contributo alla storia della ‘perspectiva communis’ medievale,” Arte medievale 3, no. 2 (1989), 115, 117, 118, 138n12. 108 Pietro Toesca, Storia dell’arte italiana (Turin: Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese, 1951), 2:448. 109 Cesare Gnudi, “Sugli inizi di Giotto e i suoi rapporti col mondo gotico,” in Giotto e il suo tempo, Atti del congresso internazionale per la celebrazione del VII centenario della nascita di Giotto, 24 Sept.–1 Oct. 1967 (Assisi, Padua, Florence) (Rome: De Luca Editore, 1971), 20. Varanelli, “Dal Maestro d’Isacco a Giotto,” 115, echoes Toesca’s comment. 110 Varanelli, “Dal Maestro d’Isacco a Giotto,” 115, 127, 131, 133.

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Figure 78 Curtain rods and curtain tops, detail of The Deception of Isaac (1), fresco, 1290s, Upper Church of San Francesco, Assisi Photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY

condition has been cited as evidence of the painter’s scientific curiosity.111 But optical aspects of the Isaac frescoes say more about blindness than scientific frameworks do. We will see how The Deception of Isaac offered early viewers a unique exercise in listening for the Eucharist, a lesson which taught them to recognize concealment in visible appearances and blindness in looking. To be clear, I do affirm sight’s importance here. It would take willful blindness to ignore both it and a related fact of its cultural context, namely, welldocumented interest in the sense of sight in late thirteenth-century Italy. We find it in such a variety of areas—poetry, devotional literature, hagiography, preaching, encyclopedias, civic legislation—that to speak of an “age of vision” (Maginnis) or even a “hegemony of the visible” (Wirth) would be apt were it not for the phrases’ sensory exclusivity.112 A flourishing of studies of optics (perspectiva) was among these eye-centered pursuits. Building on traditions of thinking about optics tracing as far back as antiquity, including that of the great Muslim scholar Ibn al-Haytham (called Alhazen in Latin) (d. around 1039), Roger Bacon (d. around 1292), John Pecham (d. 1292), and Witelo (d. before 1314) used geometry to establish truthfulness in the optical relationship between the viewer and objects viewed.113 Pictured things could be among those objects. Part four of Bacon’s Opus maius shows this in promoting the study of optics for the accurate depiction and understanding of “opera artificialia” (man-made works) in the Bible, such as the ark of Noah and the Temple of Solomon. Making physical forms known 111 Romanini, “Gli occhi di Isacco,” 52–53; Romano, O di Giotto, 124. 112 Maginnis, World of the Early Sienese Painter, 174–84; Wirth, L’image à l’époque gothique, 23–33; See also Michael Viktor Schwarz, Giottus Pictor (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2008), 2:569–97; Simon A. Gilson, Medieval Optics and Theories of Light in the Works of Dante (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2000); Büttner, Giotto und die Ursprünge; Kessler and Newhauser, Optics, Ethics, and Art. 113 David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), provides a widely cited account of the study of optics in the Middle Ages. See also F. Cecchini, “Ottica,” in Enciclopedia dell’arte medievale (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1998), 9:12–14.

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Figure 79 Isaac, detail of The Deception of Isaac (2), fresco, 1290s, Upper Church of San Francesco, Assisi Photo: Scala, Florence

by means of pictures, in other words, making the literal truth of things evident to the eyes through geometry, was imperative for studying God’s wisdom and for attaining what Bacon thought of as the literal and spiritual sense of Scripture.114 Theoretically, then, the viewing of scientifically systematized pictures was to become primary to worship, indeed, to faith itself. When Bacon closes his argument with a declaration that “We can understand nothing fully unless its form is presented to our eyes,” he is talking about a correct seeing of objects that would be made possible by fundamental corrections to art.115 114 Roger Bacon, Mathematicae in divinis utilitas. See Bridges, ‘Opus majus’ of Roger Bacon, 1:210–11. For an English translation of the passage in question, see Samuel Y. Edgerton, Jr., The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1975), 17–18; or, Maginnis, World of the Early Sienese Painter, 181. 115 Bacon, Mathematicae in divinis utilitas (Bridges, 1:212): “Nihil est nobis ad plenum intelligibile, nisi figuraliter ante oculos nostros disponatur.”

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Pictures, like vision itself, had hitherto been faulty and thus spiritually obstructive, Bacon implies. Whether artists in the later thirteenth-century in fact shared Bacon’s suspicion of conventional visual perception and representation is not altogether certain, though art historians have identified parallels between the medieval science of vision and novel formal qualities of Nicola Pisano’s pulpit in Pisa, Giotto’s decoration of the Arena Chapel, and several other early Italian works.116 If the Isaac frescoes’ painter drew upon the science of vision himself, he would have been one of the earliest. And we have reason to suspect that he did have it in mind. The production of knowledge of optics, much of it by English Franciscans, was centered in the papal court in Viterbo and taught in Rome, and was therefore close to the Franciscans at Assisi geographically, culturally, and institutionally.117 The painter may well have learned his craft in Rome, which bustled with artistic activity in the later thirteenth century. Among the many mural projects underway were campaigns to repaint biblical cycles in the city’s early Christian churches. The decoration of the Upper Church of San Francesco was roughly modeled on such programs. Possibly the painter had informal contact with a student of optics.118 The Isaac frescoes themselves suggest acquaintance on the artist’s part with elements of vision theory. Emma Simi Varanelli saw this in their threedimensionality, the use of diagonal lines to indicate depth, the appearance of volume of bodies and objects, the rotundity of individual balustrade spindles in the foreground, and other subtleties such as Isaac’s trachoma and the thicknesses of the curtain rods.119 Yet Varanelli argued against understanding the frescoes’ visual innovations to have been entirely determined by optics studies. 116 Edgerton, Rediscovery of Linear Perspective, 16–19, 65, 73–76; Hills, Light of Early Italian Painting, 12, 13, 64–71; Varanelli, “Dal Maestro d’Isacco a Giotto,” 126–33; Edgerton, The Heritage of Giotto’s Geometry: Art and Science on the Eve of the Scientific Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 45–49, 75–76; Francesca Cecchini, “Ambiti di diffusione del sapere ottico nel duecento: Tracce per uno studio sulle conoscenze scientifiche degli artisti italiani del XIII secolo,” in L’artiste et l’oeuvre à l’épreuve de la perspective, ed. Marianne Cojannot-Le Blanc, Marisa Dalai Emiliani, and Pascal Dubourg Glatigny (Rome: École Française de Rome, 1998), 12–14; Maginnis, World of the Early Sienese Painter, 176– 84; Lakey, Sculptural Seeing. 117 Varanelli, “Dal Maestro d’Isacco a Giotto,” 126; Hills, Light of Early Italian Painting, 64; Maginnis, World of the Early Sienese Painter, 177–78. 118 Varanelli, “Dal Maestro d’Isacco a Giotto,” 116, 133. For general considerations, see also Cecchini, “Ambiti di diffusione,” 33; Romano, O di Giotto, 124–25; Katherine H. Tachau, “Seeing as Action and Passion in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries,” in Hamburger and Bouché, Mind’s Eye, 354. 119 Varanelli, “Dal Maestro d’Isacco a Giotto,” 126–28, 133.

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Contending that the pictured space was incommensurable with that line of thought in its overall unity, certainty, clarity, and stability, she pointed to a different source: ancient Roman wall painting.120 Vision theory does not explain everything about the Isaac frescoes, it is true. But let us pause at Varanelli’s point about the painter’s reuse of ancient art. In fact, several arts have been integrated. Isaac’s elegant house is decorated with slender columns of veined marble with carved foliate capitals, elements typical of medieval churches. Thin strips of colorful geometric patterns adorn the house in the manner of the Cosmatesque mosaic decoration of churches and cloisters in central Italy—and emulated elsewhere in pictured architecture.121 Fabrics of varied colors, weights, and cuts fill the center of the scenes: the shiny sheets of Isaac’s bed, the heavier blanket covering his legs, the priestly garment heaped on Jacob, the light cape worn by Esau, and the sumptuous red, quatrefoil-adorned curtains with pseudo-Kufic script running across the top (Fig. 78). Bodies and furniture project from the curtains like relief sculptures set against colorfully patterned ground, as seen in works made by Arnolfo di Cambio for churches in Rome and Orvieto only a few years earlier.122 Rivalling the artistry of the scene’s luxurious fabrics is the woodwork in the foreground.123 Below the hanging edges of Isaac’s covers we glimpse the bed’s carved ornament and fluted legs. Alongside the bed sits a bench decorated with finials, moldings, curled arms, and, at the side, recessed panels containing bas-reliefs (Fig. 80). Its numerous balusters are well modelled and evenly spaced. This is more than a tour-de-force of pictorial carpentry. The tone of each surface varies according to its proximity and orientation to an unseen light source (as with the curtain rods), resulting in an appearance of material consistency which was new to painting.124 We do not see the whole bench. Its bottom is occluded by a marble step. An illusionistic effect results, the sense of an extreme foreground we cannot see and the continuity of the bottom of the bench within it. The painter’s masterful adaptation of ancient Roman trompe l’oeil painting is plain in these details. 120 Varanelli, “Dal Maestro d’Isacco a Giotto,” 123–24. 121 Such architecture is visible in Cavallini’s mosaic cycle of the Life of the Virgin, in the Church of Santa Maria in Trastevere, Rome, from the early 1290s. 122 The decoration of the monument of Guillaume de Bray (d. 1282) in the Church of San Domenico, Orvieto, and the ciborium in San Paolo fuori le mura, Rome (1284), are prominent examples. 123 Metalwork is in evidence in the implements of meal service held by Esau and his assistant. The objects originally had a silvery luster, as the vase in Giotto’s The Wedding Feast at Cana once did (Fig. 32). 124 Giotto took pictured carpentry further in the wood openwork gallery in Cana (Fig. 22).

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Figure 80 Bench, detail of The Deception of Isaac (1), fresco, 1290s, Upper Church of San Francesco, Assisi Photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY

What might the point have been? Serena Romano has likened the bench’s illusionism to a literary description which opens a chapter by detaining readers and preparing them for the narrative to come.125 The bench does lead fittingly into themes of concealment, sensory manipulation, and perspicacity in the frescoes. Its surfaces and balustrade create tension between opacity and permeability. Placed low in the foreground, the bench is something to see as well as to see through and past. It is also a place from which Isaac’s nurse has monitored him, an anecdotal element that leads us to imagine closer looking at the patriarch’s state.126 Distance becomes another valence of seeing, thickening the act of visual perception, so to speak, and bringing it to the viewer’s embodied awareness. The incorporation of opacity and permeability in the bench encapsulates a principle operative in the pictures more generally: Sight is both invited and hindered. It is the one bodily sense that does not actually lead Isaac astray in Genesis, in that he is already blind, as the frescoes reiterate by ‘veiling’ his eyes (Fig. 79). But preachers using the story did not draw this distinction; they spoke of his sight being deceived by Jacob too. And the frescoes go to great lengths to make the viewer aware of sight’s limitations. Much in the scenes covers or is covered. Goat skins partly disguise Jacob’s skin. Naturalistic creases and folds give palpability to garments’ work of covering bodies. Bedsheets drape over Isaac’s legs and then entangle them while falling half off. Richly patterned 125 Romano identifies the bench as part of the bed, a common misperception in the literature. Romano, O di Giotto, 82. None of the other Genesis frescoes in the church has a comparable pictorial/narrative device. 126 The picture implies that the bench was occupied by the servant waiting on Isaac before she was summoned to prop him up for the blessing. “Now sit up and eat of my game, so that you may bless me,” the disguised Jacob has said (Gen. 27.19). Genesis mentions neither a servant nor a bench.

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curtains obscure parts of the room. Bodies impede vision. The servant who props up Isaac in the first scene is sharply eclipsed by the patriarch’s halo, for example (Fig. 66). Only one of her eyes is visible as she turns away from the action, which Isaac visually obstructs from her. In the second scene, Esau inadvertently blocks his counterpart’s view of Isaac (Figs. 67, 70). Rebekah is partly hidden behind a curtain around which she pivots to escape (Fig. 71). Only her twisting mantle and the contour of her left shoulder and elbow are visible. Whomever we think we see in this form— art historians have not been unanimous in interpreting it as Rebekah—it supports neither the idea that visual certainty was the painter’s goal nor the assumption of his confidence in the sense of sight. Rebekah’s identity is no clearer to us than Jacob’s is to blind Isaac in the previous fresco. The viewer’s vision is restricted not only by a contingent viewing position but also by general design. The painter used incidental concealments to make intentional ones more noticeable and kept the extremes apart. Thus, the most pronounced impediments of our own view of figures occur at the left of the first scene (servant, incidental) and on the right side of the second (Rebekah, deliberately stealthy)—‘bookends’ of the deception, as it were. The frescoes make a spectacle not only of concealment but also of their display of actors, actions, and objects. We are not only allowed to see into the house by the absence of a wall. Embellished with Cosmatesque patterns and veined marble columns, the aperture presents itself as a material frame through which we look. Further in, the tied-back curtains are additional frames. A curtain can function to limit visibility, of course. The rear curtains in the frescoes put Isaac’s bed out of view from the rest of the house. When drawn aside, curtains can make a show of visibility, of sight being granted. Medieval artists used tied-back curtains to make an image of a holy persons into a revelation to the viewer.127 The Isaac frescoes’ painter adopted this device for the scenes’ foreground to make the deception of Isaac’s senses into a sacred event uncovered for the viewer’s spiritual benefit. Within that revelation another display is at work. Curved curtain edges snuggly frame the two deceivers, Rebekah and Jacob, putting their cooperation in the spotlight while also pointing up the furtive nature of their actions. Intentional concealment in the scenes is centered here as the words “The voice is Jacob’s voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau” sound in the viewer’s imagination. Rebekah, her left hand covered in cloth, deftly guides her son’s 127 Johann Konrad Eberlein, Apparitio regis, revelatio veritatis: Studien zur Darstellung des Vorhangs in der bildenden Kunst von der Spätantik bis zum Ende des Mittelalters (Wiesbaden: L. Reichert, 1982).

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hide-covered hands toward the completion of his illusory performance. Let us step back a little to appreciate the importance of this covert coordination: In beholding the story we look past layers of material artistry and see materials being artfully manipulated for divinely willed dissimulation. For theologically informed viewers, beholding the story also meant seeing a prefiguration of the Holy Spirit collaborating in Christ’s eucharistic disguise. We now grasp more firmly how the Isaac frescoes could heighten wonder at the craft of Christ’s presence in a piece of bread the moment worshipers heard the priest say, “This is my body.” The interplay of concealment and revelation does not exhaust the frescoes’ exposition of boundaries of visual perception, however. Details in recessed panels on the side of Isaac’s bedside bench, recently discovered in the first fresco, take the viewer’s looking further.128 They are centaurs, hybrids of horse and man (Fig. 81). The centaur in the lower panel, the better preserved of the two, rears up on crouched hind legs and reaches back for an arrow in its quiver. Parts of its body are shaded to look like low-relief sculpture. The tonal gradations are nuanced such that within the penumbra engulfing this side of the bench the indirect illumination of the centaur conforms to the direction of pictured light coming from above. But why centaurs? Romano’s answer is the painter’s classicizing culture.129 For Amy Neff, it is a reference to the semi-bestial nature of Esau.130 Though these interpretations do not connect with the deception theme, they may lead in that direction. The mythic creatures may figure Isaac’s misperception of his sons, the smooth-skinned Jacob conflated with the hairy Esau.131 Additionally, the archery corresponds to the fantasy accepted (or suppressed) by Isaac about the meal offered by the false-Esau, namely, that a hunt

128 Carla D’Angelo, Sergio Fusetti, and Carlo Giantomassi, “Rilevamento dei dati tecnici della decorazione murale della basilica superiore,” in Il cantiere pittorico della basilica superiore di San Francesco in Assisi, ed. Giuseppe Basile and P. Pasquale Magro (Assisi: Casa Editrice Francescana, 2001), 21, fig. 23. No trace of the relief remains on the bench in the second fresco. 129 Romano, O di Giotto, 95n80. 130 Neff, “Lesser Brothers,” 686. There are two centaurs, however, not one, as the latter interpretation implies. 131 Vision theorists repeatedly cited the examples of man and horse as forms that cannot be visually mistaken for one another. For instance: Alhazen, Perspectiva 2.4.24, and Witelo, Perspectiva 3.78. The Optics of Ibn Al-Haytham, Books I–III, trans. A. I. Sabra (London: Warburg Institute, 1989), 218–19; Clements Baeumker, Witelo, ein Philosoph und Naturforscher des XIII. Jahrhunderts (Munster: Aschendorffschen Buchhandlung, 1908), 154. Dante spoke of centaurs as fantasy, calling them “nei nuvoli formati” (formed in the clouds) (Purgatorio 24.122).

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Figure 81 Centaurs, bench ornament, detail of The Deception of Isaac (1), fresco, 1290s, Upper Church of San Francesco, Assisi Photo: Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz—Max-Planck-Institut

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took place and ended so quickly.132 On top of the centaurs’ unreality as beings, their depiction as monochromatic relief sculptures is a third layer fictionality. This artful commentary on the unreliability of Isaac’s senses might have been obvious to worshipers, but the centaurs are difficult to see without binoculars or close-up photography.133 Practically invisible to anyone who does not know to look for them, they are among the pictures’ intentiones subtiles, the fine details of visible objects that medieval vision theory held to be invisible to the glance and perceptible only through scrutiny. For Alhazen and later theorists, perceiving the true form of any visible object demanded a process of certification involving careful contemplation of all of its features: Now some of the particular properties of which the forms of visible objects are composed appear at the moment when sight glances at the object, while others appear only after scrutiny and contemplation. Examples of the latter are minute designs, letters of a script, tattoo marks, wrinkles and the difference between closely similar colors. Indeed, all fine features appear only after they have been scrutinized and contemplated, and not at the moment of noticing the visible object. Now the true form of a visible object which is perceived by the sense of sight is that constituted of all the particular properties that sight can perceive in the form.134 Apprehension of the true form of a visible object through contemplation is hindered, Alhazen says, if its fine features appear at too oblique an angle in relation to the percipient or in too faint a light or at too great a distance.135 The Isaac scenes’ painter seems to have been mindful of this dynamic in placing diminutive and monochromatic centaurs on a shaded, obliquely presented side of the bench—furniture that, as the place from which the nurse has kept an eye on the dying patriarch, already brings into play our sense of ourselves 132 Genesis 27.3–4 (NSRV): “Now then, take your weapons, your quiver and your bow, and go out to the field, and hunt game for me. Then prepare for me savory food, such as I like, and bring it to me to eat, so that I may bless you before I die.” Immediately after Jacob first speaks as Esau (“I am Esau …”) Isaac expresses his wonder at how little time the hunt took. Jacob’s response is that “Because the Lord your God granted me success.” (Gen. 27.20, NSRV). It is at this point that Isaac tells Jacob to approach and begins to verify his identity through touch. 133 Péter Bokody, Images-within-Images in Italian Painting (1250–1350): Reality and Reflexivity (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), 152. 134 Alhazen, Perspectiva 2.4.2. I use Sabra’s translation (Optics of Ibn Al-Haytha, p. 208). See also Alhazen, Perspectiva 2.4.3–5. 2.4.28. Thirteenth-century reiterations of the concept appear, for example, in Witelo, Perspectiva 3.51, 3.57–58. 135 Alhazen, Perspectiva 1.2.22, 1.5.18 (Sabra, Optics 11–12, 54) .

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as onlookers, as noted above. The man-beasts stand at the limit of what diligent contemplation might be expected to see. Their near-invisibility suggests a comparison between worshipers’ scrutiny and Isaac’s. Whereas Isaac was unable to perceive the fiction before him as such, worshipers were supposed to know better. To discern the centaurs may have been, ideally, to certify not only the form of the bench but also something much subtler: an intended intersection of Isaac’s perception of the sensorial ‘reality’ offered by Jacob, on the one hand, and the viewer’s perception of the sensorial ‘reality’ offered by the frescoes, on the other. This section has shown how many aspects of the Isaac frescoes made the deception story into a lesson in correctly sensing the Eucharist. Sight comes out looking both strong and problematic. In the eucharistic interpretation of the Isaac story, heard in sermons by Bonaventure and others, sight is no more reliable than touch. It follows that the depiction of reality in the scenes is akin to the tufted goat skin worn by Jacob. Like that disguise, visibility as such could cover up and distract from truth in hearing. The Isaac frescoes’ painter did not assume such an equation to be self-evident. He insinuated that visibility can show and conceal simultaneously—its use as a disguise, in other words. To that end, he demonstrated a pictorial mastery of concealment and of other arts and did so with a boldness that his contemporaries were not used to seeing in paint. The interior’s three-dimensionality no less than Isaac’s recoiling right hand must have looked strangely realistic and conspicuously enhanced to early viewers. The heightened illusionism, I suggest, helped assert the ear’s higher fidelity in sensing Christ’s presence in the Eucharist. In this logic, the three-dimensionality of Isaac’s projecting right hand (Fig. 72) activates pictorial space for the sake neither of realism per se nor of artistic skill. More than that, it would have intensified early viewers’ awareness of pictorial artifice and of their own looking at the narrative moment of hearing’s vindication.136 Medieval tenets of vision science had at most a collaborative role in this pictorial experiment. The truth in question did not lend itself to principles of optics, in part because the body’s eyes were considered fallible.137 A larger 136 A comparable effect has been suggested by Laura Jacobus for frescoes in the Arena Chapel, albeit in a manner which, in her assessment, implicates only the sense of sight. Jacobus, Giotto and the Arena Chapel, 336: “So profound is the link between perspective and spiritual vision in Giotto’s work that trompe l’oeil or outright deceit of the eye can be equated with pictorial falsehood and spiritual fraud.” Perspectival ambiguities in the Arena frescoes, on the other hand, make the painted walls seem “permeable, a potential threshold of enlightenment, penetrable by the spiritual eye” (p. 336). 137 Hills, Light of Early Italian Painting, 12–14. See also Gilson, “Aspects of Vision in the Comedy: Blinding, Optical Illusions, and Visual Error,” chapter 3 in Medieval Optics.

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reason was the eye’s lower place in a hierarchy of truths. Bonaventure, in the same sermon where he connected Jacob’s deception of Isaac with the Eucharist’s deception of the senses, distinguished between the “truth of faith,” which comes from hearing, and the truths of sense, experience, inquiry, and human reason.138 We find similar thinking in Roger Bacon, the Franciscan philosopher whose recommendation of geometry for accuracy in depicting of biblical objects, mentioned above, has become a standard reference in art historical discussions of optics theory in the late Middle Ages. The seventh part of Bacon’s Opus maius has not come up. It concerns moral philosophy, which Bacon considered a better and nobler science than all others presented in the Opus (including perspectiva). Moral philosophy is superior, he says, because it examines human action, eternal salvation, and one’s conduct in relation to God, neighbors, and oneself.139 Under this heading Bacon mounts a lengthy argument for the importance and truth of the Eucharist. He stresses its miraculous and infinite power. He gives reasons for the veiling of Christ’s presence, including to foster faith and to spare the senses God’s unbearable majesty.140 Among the proofs he adduces for its certainty are the assent of the Church and the agreement of Scripture, “all the sacred writers,” “all Catholic doctors, masters, and readers of God’s law,” and countless miracles found in sacred writings and histories—in sum, the totality of Church-sanctioned verbal authority.141 Part of what Bacon says he struggled against was the inclination of “many Christians, who try with their human sense to make judgments about divine things.”142 The Isaac frescoes’ painter and his unknown advisor(s) must have been cognizant of that difficulty when deciding to reconceptualize The Deception in a way that would guide worshipers to put the truth of faith above the truth of sense.143 “The voice is Jacob’s voice”—early viewers’ internal voicing of these words, prompted by the first fresco, would have reminded them that truth of 138 Bonaventure, Feria quinta in coena Domini, sermo 1 (S. Bonaventurae Opera Omnia 9:248): “Unde hic notatur divina illustratio per veritatem fidei. Est veritas sensus et experientiae, et est veritas investigationis et rationis humanae, et neutra per se sufficit ad esum huius Agni, sed requiritur illustratio, quae fit per veritatem fidei. Unde in isto Sacramento decipiuntur omnes sensus, excepto uno, et hoc est nobis significatum in Genesi, ubi decipiebatur sensus visus Isaac circa Iacob, et sensus olfactus … tactus … gustus.” 139 Roger Bacon, Moralis philosophia 1 (Bridges, Opus majus 2:224–25). 140 Ibid., 4.1 (Bridges, Opus majus 2:398–402). 141 Ibid., 4.1 (Bridges, Opus majus 2:396–97). 142 Ibid., 4.1 (Bridges, Opus majus 2:396). 143 In the Life of Saint Francis, as told by Bonaventure and as pictured on the walls of the Upper Church of San Francesco, the holiness of Francis himself is marked in part by his ability to perceive spiritual truth beyond sensible guises. See Janet Robson, “Bonaventure’s

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faith came through hearing and that they should listen for “This is my body” with faith. Meanwhile, the near-twin pictures invited them to contemplate so much evidence of the truth of sense, including its power to conceal the truth of faith and to deceive those who were not hearing in faith. 5

Auditory Interests

Bacon felt urgency in demonstrating the certainty of Christ’s presence in the consecrated host. Many were ignorant of the sacrament, he worried. Some denied it. Others doubted it. Still others had difficulty understanding or accepting it. Those who sensed it easily were few, though it should be accepted “more devoutly than any other truth in this life.”144 Other churchmen shared Bacon’s worry, as we have seen. That unease certainly formed part of the context in which Bonaventure and others deployed the story of Isaac’s deception. Bodily sight had long been considered inadequate for faith. Paul’s Letter to the Hebrews contains the doctrinal bedrock of this thinking in defining faith as “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Heb. 11.1, NSRV) and in its statement of the hidden nature of sensible reality’s divine making: “By faith we are to understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible” (Heb. 11.3, NSRV). Medieval art could make viewers aware of the spiritual inadequacy of carnal vision, as recent scholarship has demonstrated.145 Still, these considerations do not explain why in late thirteenth-century Assisi a painter was charged with restoring and fortifying trust in hearing, and why he took (or was selected for his capacity to take) such a formally singular approach within the vast pictorial program of the Upper Church of San Francesco. We should not expect a clear answer, but several factors merit a word. Each arises from the presence of painted decoration. ‘Visions of the Cross’ in the Saint Francis Cycle at Assisi,” IKON: Journal of Iconographic Studies 6 (2013): 155–66. 144 Bacon, Moralis philosophia 4.1 (Bridges, Opus majus 2:400). 145 Essays in The Mind’s Eye address this issue in various contexts. In the volume’s conclusion, Herbert L. Kessler remarks that pictures “had to demonstrate God’s essential unseeability by disabling carnal vision,” God’s invisibility being “a central problem of medieval art.” Herbert L. Kessler, “Turning a Blind Eye: Medieval Art and the Dynamics of Contemplation,” in Hamburger and Bouché, Mind’s Eye, 414, 436. See also Jeffrey F. Hamburger, “Seeing and Believing: The Suspicion of Sight and the Authentication of Vision in Late Medieval Art and Devotion,” in Imagination und Wirklichkeit: Zum Verhältnis von mentalen und realen Bildern in der Kunst der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Klaus Krüger and Alessandro Nova (Mainz: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 2000), 47–69 (esp. 49, 52, 60, 61).

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Firstly, there is a question of ambition. The painting of the walls and vaults of the upper church far exceeded norms of Franciscan church decoration (Fig. 68) and had no justification in the writings of the order’s founder, Francis, who had little use for visual art in his spiritual practice.146 The patron of the enterprise, Pope Nicholas IV (r. 1288–92, d. 1292), directed in 1288 that offerings or alms given to the Church of San Francesco (now decades old) be used to have it “maintained, repaired, built, modified, enlarged, finished, and decorated.”147 These activities anticipated the pope visiting and holding court in the church, though in the end he never came. Donal Cooper and Janet Robson have shown Nicholas to have been a “distant” patron in Rome who delegated the implementation of his vaguely worded wishes to administratively and intellectually capable Franciscans in Assisi. Striving to honor the pope, a Franciscan himself, these friars had the nave’s then-bare walls covered with stories from the Old Testament, New Testament, and Life of Saint Francis, and devised and organized the scenes with the elevation of Francis and the Order he founded in mind. Formal and interpretive relationships put scenes around the expansive church walls into dialogue with one another. Congregants had many messages to absorb though prolonged looking at, and among, individual pictures. This is to say nothing of the visual appeal of familiar stories, lively action, vivid color, verisimilitude, and the complexity of painted embellishment between and around the scenes: simulated textile hangings, illusionistic architecture, richly varied patterns covering architectural components (ribs, columns, arches), and bands of portraits of saints. For an ascetic faction within the Franciscan order, the “great sumptuousness of paintings” in the church went against an ideal of poverty that, for them, defined what it meant to be Franciscan.148 Their written criticisms date from 1305 to 1312, a few years after the execution of many (perhaps all) of the nave frescoes, including the Isaac scenes. An institutional defense of the decoration of San Francesco, likely from 1311, argued that the friars did not actually own any of it and that a beautified church was necessary for increasing the quality of lay devotion and for drawing in more laypeople to hear the divine office 146 Elvio Lunghi, “Francis of Assisi in Prayer before the Crucifix in the Accounts of the First Biographers,” in Italian Panel Painting of the Duecento and Trecento, ed. Victor M. Schmidt, Studies in the History of Art 61, Center for the Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Symposium Papers 38 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 342. 147 Cooper and Robson, Making of Assisi, 3. I rely largely on their study in the sentences that follow. 148 Cooper and Robson, The Making of Assisi, 8–9; Cooper and Robson, “ ‘A great sumptuousness of paintings’: Frescoes and Franciscan Poverty,” The Burlington Magazine 151, no. 1279 (Oct., 2009): 656–62.

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(“ad audiendum divina offitia”)—an initial level of sight’s utility for preparing worshipers to listen spiritually.149 The opposition was foreseeable, and not only because of its ascetic motivation. Franciscan regulations drafted under Bonaventure in 1260 (reaffirmed by the Chapter at Assisi in 1279 and again in 1304) had warned against excesses in paint and other media: “Since curiosity and superfluity are directly opposed to poverty, we ordain that any ornamentation in our buildings, whether in paintings, sculptures, windows, columns and the like, … beyond what is appropriate to the needs of the place, be very strictly avoided.”150 Conceivably, the Isaac frescoes were preemptive, intended to defend a liberal interpretation of what was “appropriate to the needs of the place” with regard to painting. Integral to that defense would have been the pictures’ appeal to values traditionally associated with the Order’s founder, namely, Francis’s demand that the Eucharist be recognized as an overwhelming, faith-defining experience. Additionally, the Isaac frescoes would seem to defy the charge of superfluity by reinforcing that aspect of faith if they helped worshipers in a specific and spiritually impactful way to “hear the divine office,” as the 1311 institutional defense puts it. Another possible reason for the Isaac frescoes’ auditory function is the bolstering of the clergy’s vocal authority, an aim of the pulpit in Pisa’s baptisterychurch, as discussed in chapter four. Bacon has shown us difficulties churchmen could have in controlling perceptions of the Eucharist specifically. It may have seemed no longer effective only to speak about Isaac as a figure of true hearing at the pronouncement of “This is my body.” Worshipers’ perceptions of clerical voices themselves were at stake. Bacon pointed out the potent role of those voices in the host’s consecration:

149 Ehrle, “Zur Vorgeschichte des Concils von Vienne,” 146–47. Bonagrazia of Bergamo and Raymond of Fronsac composed the tract (Infrascripta dant). The key sentence regarding lay devotion is: “Preterea habitationes et ecclesie fratrum ut plurimum fiunt per seculares ad laudem dei et cultum divinum ampliandum; quia etiam frequenter devotius celebratur et melius conveniunt seculares ad audiendum divina offitia in ecclesiis pulcris quam in deformibus” (p. 147). Cooper and Robson, “ ‘A great sumptuousness of paintings’,” 659, discuss this document briefly. 150 The phrase in the regulations of 1260, known as the Constitutions of Narbonne (also titled Incipit constitutiones generales), is found in Franz Ehrle, “Die ältesten Redactionen der Generalconstitutionen des Franziskanerordens,” Archiv für Literaturund Kirchengeschichte des Mittelalters 6 (1892), 94: “Cum autem curiositas et superfluitas directe obviet paupertati, ordinamus, quod edificiorum curiositas in picturis, celaturis, fenestris, colunnis et huiusmodi; aut superfluitas in longitudine, latitudine et altitudine secundum loci conditionem arctius evitetur.” Alastair Smart, The Assisi Problem and the Art of Giotto (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 4, indicates the subsequent iterations.

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In conferring on us the power at will through our ministry of causing the Savior to be present in a miraculous manner in this sacrament, God concedes more to us than if he granted any one of us the power to make a universe of himself, nay, more than if he granted him the power to make an infinite number of universes. For the advantage of an infinite number of universes to us is nothing in comparison with that of this sacrament.151 These words are among the most salient statements for the present book. They give us an extreme measure of the chasm between the power claimed for clerical speech and any acoustic quality it could have. Greater human capability is almost unfathomable. Would worshipers have had any inkling, surrounded as they were by vivid painting on every massive wall and overhead surface of San Francesco? Bonaventure and other theologians advanced the idea that seeing images roused piety more effectively than hearing words, as mentioned in the introduction. But with the Eucharist, that distinction may have become a conflict. Would priests’ utterance of “This is my body” have been muted by an environment plastered with visual splendor the likes of which most worshipers had seldom or never seen? A few years later, in the Comedy, Dante imagined a pilgrim being captivated by the pictures of great humilities, “for their Craftsman’s sake precious to behold,” with his guide Virgil having to prod him along: “Do not keep your mind on one part only.” The pilgrim dwells on three narrative scenes. The nave of the Upper Church of San Francesco has sixtytwo! Another perceptual complication merits mention. As Dante’s poem suggests in its allusion to Giotto’s renown overshadowing Cimabue’s (“now Giotto holds the cry”), ‘buzz’ around pictorial art and artists was growing. For decades already, the Pisan pulpit had been telling viewers to praise Nicola Pisano’s “learned hand.” Art may well have attracted congregants, as was desired in Assisi. Whether or not worshipers were then able to concentrate receptively on ritual speech is open to question, however. There are indications that the art of painting was gaining authority tantamount to the Bible in those years.152 In the upper church, frescoes not only revised Christianity’s ancient history to position Francis in relation to Old 151 Bacon, Moralis philosophia 4.1 (Bridges, Opus majus 2:401): “Nam cum confertur nobis, vel cum volumus per nostrum ministerium [quod] mirabiliter existat in hoc Sacramento Salvator, plus nobis conceditur quam si daretur nobis unde posset quilibet mundum novum sibi facere, immo plus quam si faceret infinitos. Nam mundorum infinitorum utilitas nulla nobis est respectu illius Sacramenti.” I use the translation of this passage in Roger Bacon, The Opus majus of Roger Bacon, trans. Robert Belle Burke (New York: Russell and Russell, Inc., 1962), 2:820. 152 Lubbock, Storytelling in Christian Art, 7–11; Shoaf, “Voice and Wisdom,” esp. 214, 229.

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Testament patriarchs, the lives of Christ and the apostles, and the Holy Spirit— an undertaking presumptive of painting’s spiritual veracity on some level. Certain paintings additionally provided the sole medium through which worshipers could witness the famous and controversial stigmata, the Christ-like wounds alleged to have miraculously appeared on Francis’s body.153 Would worshipers’ ears have shared with their eyes credibility in spiritual experience? We have no verbal record of such questions crossing minds and entering conversations in the commission and planning of the upper church’s painted decoration. But we do have the Isaac frescoes, which foresaw hearing’s struggle for authority and which make a spectacle of sight’s illusory claim to truth. That this occurred amid a pictorial program “of outstanding visual ambition” (as Cooper and Robson refer to it) suggests that in this age of vision the need for pictorial lessons in listening may have arisen in part from the prospect of monumental art itself and the effects that its imposing, compelling, and demanding presence could be foreseen to have on worshipers. The same may have applied a few years later for Giotto’s immersive frescoes and overall decorative environment in the Arena Chapel (Fig. 18). Apart from inner ears closing in Padua at the visual pomp of the chapel’s socially-aspirant owner, Cana showed us the visually engrossing potential of the site’s narrative scenes—of which there are thirty-seven, not to mention The Last Judgment, fourteen virtue and vice personifications, and numerous exegetical vignettes and saint portraits (Augustine, Gregory the Great, and the evangelists among them). This is not to enter the debate over whether Giotto authored the Isaac frescoes. It is instead to think of the auditory interests of art’s makers, interests which the very idea of introducing a pictorial program into a given church space could push to the fore and pull into further uncertainty, beyond the many other spiritually deafening factors already troubling churchmen. 153 Cooper and Robson, Making of Assisi, 151.

Conclusion

Humbling Sight Art in the Renaissance would continue to appeal to viewers as listeners. Angels pluck a lute and vocalize at the foot of the Virgin’s throne in an altarpiece panel painted by Masaccio for the Pisan church of Santa Maria del Carmine (1426), a picture in which space, solids, and light are rendered with a naturalism for which Masaccio would become known as a fifteenth-century Giotto (Fig. 82). Music-making is central also to Paolo Veronese’s massive The Wedding Feast at Cana (1563), a sprawling banquet abounding in ears on turned heads (and stone jars) as guests begin to receive the wine Christ has wondrously made (Fig. 83).1 Masaccio and Veronese each placed their musicians on the floor in front of a physically elevated Virgin and Christ. Sound and listening intervene in the viewer’s upward contemplation of the holy pair (Figs. 84, 85). One sixteenth-century viewer, Giorgio Vasari, one of art history’s ‘founding fathers’, was particularly taken with the angel preparing to play on the right in Masaccio’s painting. As the figure vibrates a lute string, he “inclines his ear attentively to the harmony of that sound.”2 Instrument-tuning serves in many Italian Renaissance paintings to prompt the viewer “to apprehend the picture through the imagination of sound,” the art historian François Quiviger has argued. The sensation to be imagined is distinctive and other-worldly, a “permanent note, a continuous sound, an ambient chord,” in contrast with sound’s essential temporality and ephemerality.3 Veronese’s musicians appear more down-to-earth than Masaccio’s. According to a recent interpretation, the former make “noise” and functioned as a spiritual exercise for Cana’s intended viewers (Benedictine monks in Venice), teaching them to “block out the ‘noise’ of the material world” so as to better engage with the quiet figures of Christ and Mary.4 Whatever our interpretation of that music may be, imagining sound is again a way into the picture.

1 21’ 11 ½” x 32’ 5 ¾”. 2 Vasari, Le vite, 3:127: “Nella chiesa del Carmine di Pisa, in una tavola che è dentro a una capella del tramezzo, è una Nostra Donna col Figliuolo, et a’ piedi sono alcuni Angioletti che suonano, uno de’ quali sonando un liuto porge con attenzione l’orecchio all’armonia di quel suono.” 3 Quiviger, Sensory World, 137, 144–51. 4 Kate H. Hanson, “The Language of the Banquet: Reconsidering Paolo Veronese’s Wedding at Cana,” in “Aesthetes and Eaters—Food and the Arts,” special issue, InVisible Culture:

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004460812_008

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Figure 82 Masaccio, Pisa Altarpiece, tempera on panel, 1426, London, National Gallery of Art Photo: Bridgeman Images

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Figure 83 Paolo Veronese, The Wedding Feast at Cana, oil on canvas, 1563, Paris, Louvre Photo: Leonard de Selva/Bridgeman Images

An allegorical painting from the following century takes up this idea and adds a twist. In Hearing, painted by the Flemish artist Jan Brueghel the Elder with Peter Paul Rubens (1618), a palace setting bursts with auditory references: an assortment of musical instruments, music notation, music making and singing, a pair of blowing horns, a stag, arrays of bells, clocks, birds, guns, hunting horns, and bird calls (Fig. 86). Paintings are part of this auditory panoply. One, at right, placed high against an ornate wall, shows Orpheus charming animals with his song. To the left of the balcony hangs a Concert of the Muses and The Annunciation to the Virgin Mary. The Annunciation to the Shepherds decorates the lid of a double-manual harpsichord, partly visible at far left. High on a rear wall is a barely discernible picture of Christ on a boat telling a crowd the parable of the sower. Together, the scenes recall stories of extraordinary sound and listening from ancient and Christian mythology. Artists in Europe had been visualizing some of the narratives for more than a millennium. Brueghel’s twist is this: Imagining pictures is key for apprehending sound, not only the other way around. The painter’s allegory of hearing affirms the

An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture 14 (Winter, 2010), https://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/ the-language-of-the-banquet-reconsidering-paolo-veroneses-wedding-at-cana/.

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Figure 84 Masaccio, angel tuning a lute, detail of Pisa Altarpiece, tempera on panel, 1426, London, National Gallery of Art Photo: Bridgeman Images

tradition of pictorial art—pictorial narratives, especially—giving access to transcendent auditory experiences. Indeed, Hearing flaunts its own auditory potential as a painting, with its amassing of objects, exhibition of pictures, and architectural framing of a deeply receding outdoor view. A red curtain hangs at the upper left, drawn aside by an unseen hand. The trompe l’oeil device echoes the curtains parting behind the Virgin in The Annunciation panel on the wall further back (Fig. 87). The relationship gives us to see Hearing representing itself as a revelation, even as a successor to Mary’s spiritually fruitful, historyaltering experience of the angel’s revelatory voice.

Humbling Sight

Figure 85 Veronese, musicians, detail of The Wedding Feast at Cana, oil on canvas, 1563, Paris, Louvre Photo: Josse/Scala, Florence

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Figure 86 Jan Brueghel the Elder (and Peter Paul Rubens), Hearing, 1618, oil on panel, Madrid, Prado Photo: Museo Nacional del Prado/Art Resource, NY

But to conclude this book by declaring that visual experience had only a partial “victory” over aural experience, as Panofsky did long ago in regard to sixteenth-century painting, would be beside the point.5 In our materials, looking serves listening. A recap of Dante’s poetic encounter with relief sculptures in Purgatory will help us remember how that could conceptually work. Recall that the pilgrim imagines the sound of words and song corresponding to the narrative moments before his eyes. Inner listening gradually becomes his dominant mode of perception. His giving inner voice to what he hears draws to him the stories’ spiritual significance and alters him in accordance with that significance: He is humbled, an attitude he needs for spiritual progress, which includes a great deal more listening. The entire process begins with and is supported by looking: the pilgrim noticing the reliefs, marveling at their craft and vividness, recognizing stories and persons in them, concentrating on the manner in which the figures appear to speak and on qualities of listeners’ responses. From our historical examples we can similarly imagine early viewers of actual narrative art being drawn in by skillful naturalism, recognizing, studying, and comparing depicted objects and persons, noticing similarities, distinctions, contrasts, patterns, and progressions among various 5 Panofsky, Problems in Titian, 124, as noted also above, in chapter two.

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Figure 87 Jan Brueghel the Elder (and Peter Paul Rubens), The Annunciation, detail of Hearing, 1618, oil on panel, Madrid, Prado Photo: Josse/Bridgeman Images

elements—visual activities all contributing to forming attitudes of spiritually impactful and generative inner listening to God’s word in its externally audible forms. This contribution added to a larger apparatus of auditory edification and ear-opening, which included theological and philosophical writings, religious training (catechism), ritual action (ephpheta), and preaching. Narrative art’s lessons in listening served interests of powerful individuals and institutions

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faced with issues the sense of sight could not handle alone and might well have aggravated: people not hearing in ways conducive to reducing social friction (Padua); to upholding authority of church personnel (Pisa, Assisi); to ensuring their own spiritual progress (Padua, Pisa, Assisi); to participating in community (Padua, Pisa, Assisi); to accessing highest levels of attainable truth (Assisi); to experiencing phenomenal reality ‘truly’. In view of how much could ride on looking closely at something like a pictured response to a voice—Giotto’s pausing bride, Nicola’s shaken Zechariah, the fear-stricken Isaac—it is not enough to think of painted or sculpted listeners serving mainly to bring real viewers into pictures, as music-making and other auditory elements in Renaissance art have been thought to do. Still, on some level, the pictorial narratives in this book may indeed have been about art and viewers’ engagement with it, because looking was necessarily always in play. On that note, a last fold in the hearing-sight dynamic bears our consideration, one introduced in our concluding discussion of the Isaac frescoes. In reinforcing the ear’s traditional primacy in matters of faith, narrative art’s makers (artists, advisors, patrons) must have anticipated that putting lively, elaborate, immersive, imposing, and message-rich visual story-telling into churches risked spiritually deafening collateral effects, such as distraction and overestimation of sight’s authority. This perspective takes us beyond any self-authorizing and redemptive effects which pictorial content and style could confer (as with The Last Judgment and the spiritualization of antiquities in Nicola’s pulpit decoration). The very validity of art and of looking stood to be elevated by their being humbled through their visible service to auditory needs and powers.

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Index of Modern Authors Angiola, Eloise M. 184–85 Attali, Jacques 3n.3 Auerbach, Erich 43 Aventin, Laurence 136n.13, 188n.122

Friedländer, Max 81 Fritz, Jean-Marie 30 Frojmovič, Eva 100n Frugoni, Chiara 103n.17

Baxandall, Michael 21n.62 Bellinati, Claudio 100n.12 Bellosi, Luciano 81n.57 Belting, Hans 167n.55 Berenson, Bernard 71–72, 77–78, 94 Bériou, Nicole 136n.14 Bertaux, Émile 195–96, 196n.162 Biernoff, Suzannah 10, 11 Bode, Wilhelm 77n.35 Bourdieu, Pierre 188 Boynton, Susan 21n.63 Bruzelius, Caroline 134, 185, 200n.2, 233n.100 Burckhardt, Jacob 80n.55 Burnett, Charles  92n.89 Burstyn, Shai 21

Gardner, Julian 70 Garofani, Barbara 43 Gilbert, Creighton E. 150n.31, 191n.38

Caleca, Antonino 184n.100 Camille, Michael 10, 11 Carruthers, Mary 5n.8, 217 Cassidy, Brendan 180 Cavalcaselle, Giovanni 178–79, 193 Cooper, Donal 249, 252 Crowe, Joseph 178–79, 193 Darwin, Charles 72 Davidsohn, Robert 196n.157, 196n.162 Derbes, Anne 97, 100n, 119n.49, 127n.74, 155n.38 Derrida, Jacques 71 Dillon, Emma 4–5n.7 Dolar, Mladen 17n.51 Doyle, Arthur Conan 71 Dvořák, Max 80n.55, 82, 83n.64, 112

Hahn, Cynthia 11, 12 Hanson, Kate H. 253 Harrison, Carol 23, 54n.68 Hung, Wu 29  Hyde, J. K. 46 Jacobus, Laura 118n.47, 129n.85, 130, 246n.136 Kessler, Herbert L. 248n.145 Kosegarten, A. Middledorf 184n.100 Ladis, Andrew 98n, 110n.33, 118n.47, 119n.48 Lansing, Carol 49n.42 Le Goff, Jacques 48–49, 50 Lubbock, Jules 13 Maginnis, Hayden B. J. 12n.38, 237 Martines, Lauro 48 Marx, Karl 24 Meiss, Millard 205–6, 208, 211–12n.27, 234n.104 Metzler, Irina 112n.34 Milanesi, Gaetano 194n.147, 196 Miles, Margaret 10, 11 Milner, Stephen J. 49n.42, 185n.104 Morelli, Giovanni (connoisseur) 75–78 Nancy, Jean-Luc 31 Neff, Amy 243

Edgerton, Samuel Y., Jr. 15n.46

Offner, Richard 79–80, 90

Freedberg, David 193 Freud, Sigmund 218 Frey, Karl 196n.162

Palazzo, Éric 25n.75 Panofsky, Erwin 81–82, 180, 258 Pfeiffenberger, Selma 90n.80

287

Index of Modern Authors Poggi, Giovanni 196n.162 Poloni, Alma 185n.103 Pope-Hennessy, John 73–74, 94n.100 Promey, Sally M. 22–23 Quiviger, François 253 Reilly, Diane 21n.63 Rintelen, Friedrich 80n.55, 82, 103n.14 Robson, Janet 247n.143, 249, 252 Romano, Serena 241, 243 Rosenfeld, Sophia 18n Rosier-Catach, Irène 30n.85 Rough, Robert H. 119n.50, 121 Rumohr, Carl Friedrich von 194, 195n.152 Sandona, Mark 97, 100n, 119n.49, 127n.74, 155n.38 Saxl, Fritz 180 Schafer, R. Murray 19, 21n.64, 25, 29 Schapiro, Meyer 79, 90 Schmitt, Jean-Claude 48–49, 50 Schumacher-Wolfgarten, Renate 103n.14, 107n.25 Sears, Elizabeth 4

Seidel, Max 151n, 154n.36, 176n.76, 180 Ševčenko, Nancy 100n, 127n.74 Seymour, Charles, Jr.  139 Sirén, Osvald 114, 115 Smith, Christine 167n.55 Steinberg, Leo 72 Sterne, Jonathan 8, 24n.72 Stewart, Susan 31n.87 Szendy, Peter 18n Thode, Henry 205 Toesca, Pietro 236 Van Ausdall, Kristen 233 Van Gennep, Arnold  123 Varanelli, Emma Simmi 239–40 Venturi, Adolfo 75, 195 Vöge, Wilhelm 78–79, 90 Walsh, Barbara Buhler 67, 70 Webb, Heather 7n.16 Wirth, Jean 11, 237 Zanardi, Bruno 215n.36

Index of Early Sources Aelred of Rievaulx 234n.103 Albertano da Brescia 84 Albert the Great 92 Alhazen 237, 245 Alighieri, Dante 25–26, 28, 43, 51–53, 60–64, 72, 100, 116, 126, 153, 159, 162, 251 Ambrose of Milan 170 Anthony of Padua 84 Aquinas, Thomas 96, 231 Augustine 3, 23, 96, 97, 189n.127, 216, 217, 221, 223 Bacon, Roger 237–38, 247, 248, 250–51 Bartholomew the Englishman 92 Bernard of Clairvaux 218–20, 229 Bible  Genesis 26, 34, 37, 176, 208, 210–11, 215, 217, 218 Exodus 38, 181n.93 Numbers 38n.3 1 Samuel 90 2 Samuel 38 1 Kings 38 2 Chronicles 132 Nehemiah 132 Job 59 Psalms 132 Proverbs 59 Isaiah 132, 183, 227 Ezekiel 192 Ecclesiasticus 59 Matthew 59, 96, 132, 142, 200 Mark 54, 59, 96, 200, 219 Luke 26, 53, 59, 61, 93, 96, 119n.49, 126, 148, 151, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 164, 165, 170, 171n, 172, 173, 181n.93, 190, 191, 200, 228 John 26, 56, 96, 99, 100, 107, 110n.32, 116, 121, 139 Acts 65, 126 Romans 17, 20n.61, 85, 198, 219, 224, 230 1 Corinthians 120 2 Corinthians 20 Galatians 120, 198

Colossians 126 2 Thessalonians 59 Hebrews 231, 248 1 Peter 138 Revelations 186 Boccaccio, Giovanni 12 Boethius 6, 83n.66 Bonagrazia of Bergamo 250 Bonaventure 57n.83, 66–67, 70, 120, 225, 227, 228, 229, 230, 246, 247, 248, 250, 251 Boncompagno da Signa 39, 43 Brunetto Latini 49–50 Cennini, Cennino 13–14, 22 Ciampi, Sebastiano 194 Constitutions of Narbonne 250 Durand, Guillaume 45, 55, 57, 94, 132, 149, 182n.97, 188 Eremitani protest (Padua) 130 Euripides 174–75 Francis of Assisi 227–28 Galen 71 Giamboni, Bono 45n.19 Giordano of Pisa 45–46, 53, 116 Giovanni da San Gimignano 7–9, 15, 20, 24, 30, 32, 33, 53, 57–58, 64, 92–94, 95, 106, 107, 108, 110, 112, 124, 127, 228n.82 Gregory the Great 5, 56 Ibn al-Haytham. See Alhazen Innocent III 116, 121–22, 126 Isidore of Seville 92n.93, 117n.45 Jacobus de Voragine 119n.49, 229–30 Jerome 96 Liber de physiognomia 45n.19, 91 Liber ordinarius 128n Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 29n.79

289

Index of Early Sources Malvasia, Carlo Cesare 74n.25 Ovid 83n.66 Pecham, John 237 Perrault, Guillaume 107–8n.28, 186–87n.113 Peter of Poitiers 234n.103 Petrarch, Francis 129 Pietro d’Abano 91 Pisan statutes 192–93n.141 Raymond of Fronsac 250 Ripa, Cesare 84–85 Rupert of Deutz 201n Salimbene de Adam 43, 50 Scot, Michael 90 Seneca 175

Sicard of Cremona 201n Strabo (pseudo) 107n.22, 221 Terrence 181n.92 Thomas of Celano 45, 91, 227 Vasari, Giorgio 134, 180, 194, 205, 253 Villani, Filippo 13 Vincent de Beauvais 92 Virgil 92n.93 Visconti, Federico 55, 58–60, 64, 94, 121n.59, 132n.2, 167, 169, 170, 173, 178, 181, 182, 229, 232–33 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 74, 122n.64 Witelo 237 Zeno of Verona 84

Index of Subjects Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations Abraham 198, 207, 208, 218, 222–23, 224, 227, 231 Abraham and the Three Angels (Assisi)  207n.16, 222, 224 active, and contemplative, life 107 Adam 34–37, 43, 65, 143, 207, 232 The Adoration of the Magi (Nicola Pisano) 140, 141, 142, 150 Altarpiece of Saint Dominic (Francesco Traini) 14–15n animals 51, 138, 139, 142, 143, 147, 170, 172n.65, 200 (see also under ear[s]) Anna (mother of Virgin Mary) 87, 120, 121 Anna (prophet) 150, 153, 154, 155, 162, 164, 168, 173, 174, 176, 178, 182–83, 189, 198, 199 The Annunciation to Anna (Giotto) 90, 120n.55 The Annunciations to Joachim (Joachim’s Sacrifice, Joachim’s Dream) (Giotto) 120n.55 The Annunciation to the Shepherds (Nicola Pisano) 141, 147, 150 The Annunciation to the Virgin Mary (Assisi) 225 The Annunciation to the Virgin Mary (Fra Angelico) 28 The Annunciation to the Virgin Mary (Nicola Pisano) 85, 141, 147, 150, 157, 162 The Annunciation to Zechariah (Andrea Pisano) 157 The Annunciation to Zechariah (Pisa baptistery) 157, 159, 167 The Annunciation to Zechariah (Venice baptistery) 171 Apulia 160n, 194–95 artistic styles, periods, geographies (beyond late medieval Italy) Byzantine 27, 47, 127n.74, 156n.40, 167, 170, 171n, 198n.65 early Christian 205 early medieval 4, 27, 75, 160n, 171n

early Netherlandish 83n.64 Flemish Baroque 255–56 Greek/Hellenistic 36, 74–75, 90–91, 131, 173, 176 medieval 4, 72–73, 81, 83, 134, 248 northern Gothic 4, 47, 73–74, 79, 134, 137 pseudo-Arabic/Kufic 47, 240  pseudo-Mongolian 47 Renaissance 27, 28, 72–73, 75–78, 81, 134, 206n.12, 253, 255 Roman 74–75, 79, 89–90, 131, 137, 174, 178–81, 184–85, 240 Romanesque 4, 27, 79, 145, 153, 155–56n.39, 167, 171n, 174 southern Italian classical revival 47, 134, 174, 194 artists as auditory engineers 18, 25, 32, 137, 207 hearing patrons, advisors 13, 17, 31, 100n, 130, 131, 137, 168, 180, 190, 247, 252, 260 listening and speaking to other artists 13–14, 22, 47 Assisi 43 Church of San Francesco 68, 201–2, 249–52 frescoes, Upper Church of San Francesco 67n.7, 79–80, 201, 202, 203, 204, 207, 209, 210, 212, 214, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225, 226, 233, 235, 237, 238, 241, 244, 248, 249–52 See also titles of individual works astonishment, awe 30, 52, 165, 200, 216, 217, 225, 228, 230, 232–33, 235, 247 (see also marveling; wonder) attitude(s) of listening 17, 21, 23, 24, 26, 29, 31, 33, 49, 57, 58, 99, 112, 118, 191, 199, 227, 258–59  attention 53, 58, 65, 69, 188–89, 227, 253 avidity, eagerness 8, 9, 17, 112 caritas (charity, love) 33, 97, 99, 112, 126–27, 131 chastity 27, 33, 120, 121, 137, 173

Index of Subjects concentration 9, 69, 106, 253 devotion 45, 58, 227 distrust 14, 38n.3 envy  87, 88, 90, 129 faith 17, 38n.3, 162, 169, 172, 173, 187, 190, 191, 200, 230, 233, 247–48 humility 26, 33, 57, 62, 64, 258 importance of, relative to content retention 97n.6, 108  mindfulness 58 obedience 5, 15, 17, 26, 29, 38n.3, 53, 57, 64, 69–70, 97, 102, 106, 112, 117–18, 172, 211, 221, 222, 227 readiness 92, 106, 227 reverence 17, 59 silence 15, 58, 59, 69–70, 139, 150, 190 stillness 65, 69–70, 93, 94, 106–7, 110, 112, 150 utility 58 See also auditory: distinctions; caritas; chastity; doubt; faith; hearing, inner; humility; obedience audience(s) clerical 58, 59–60, 183, 186–88, 189, 190–91, 192, 228 communal 21–23, 49–50 disruptive 50 expectations regarding 19–20, 23, 49–50, 54, 55–58 like ignorant “sheep” 53 students 38, 42, 65 auditory conditioning (see “edification of the senses”; listening: cultivation of disciplined) distinctions 67, 69–70, 107–8, 110, 112, 118, 119, 211–12 inattention 1, 2, 18–19, 34, 50 underpinnings of artistic production 13–14 See also deafness; ear(s); hearing; listening; sound auditory engineering, some pictorial components of alignment 70, 119, 134 antitheses and contrasts 27, 69, 103, 108, 112, 129, 142–43, 159–60, 162, 165, 170, 172, 178, 209–10n.24

291 ‘book-ending’ (symmetry) 157–58, 160, 162, 242 center-periphery 94, 123–24, 150 diptych- or triptych-like formats 37–38, 114, 127, 171, 207 group composition 153–54, 155, 182 internal framing 114, 153, 160, 242, 256 isolation 114, 182–83, 198 juxtaposition 69, 120, 122, 131, 162, 168, 176, 183 narrative sequence and simultaneity  99–100, 112, 127, 170, 207–8, 213 pairing 37, 69, 108, 110, 112, 153–54, 165, 167, 182, 207, 208, 248 scale (gamut) 82, 106, 112, 198, 212 scale (size) 106, 128, 162 See also naturalism; pictures authority 2, 12, 50, 110, 130, 134, 137, 143, 150, 172, 173, 184, 185, 188–89, 192, 197, 199, 200, 247, 252, 260 (see also under clergy; pictures) Bacchus 176, 178, 180, 181 baptism 54, 55, 128, 136, 182, 184, 191, 192, 198, 232n.95 (see also Ephpheta) The Bathing of Christ (Nicola Pisano) 141, 142 Beijing, drum tower and bell tower in 29 bells 38, 41, 43, 53, 130, 193, 200, 255 Benedict XI 130 Benedict of Nursia 38 Benedict of Nursia, Saint (Giovanni or Nicola Pisano) 38, 40, 50, 65 Benedictus 172n.65 Benevento, frescoes in Church of Santa Sofia 160n, 171n The Betrayal of Christ (Assisi) 225 The Betrayal of Christ (Giotto) 85, 87 blindness. See ear(s): modern invisibility; envy; Isaac: blindness; sight: limits bride 114–16, 119–121, 123–24, 126–27, 260 caritas (charity, love) 96–99, 107, 116, 126–27, 128 (see also under attitude[s] of listening) Casauria, pulpit of abbey church 188n.122  catechesis 17, 54, 259 centaurs 243, 245

292 Charity (Giotto) 129 chastity 114, 120–21, 129, 137, 173, 174, 176, 181, 188, 189–91, 198 (see also attitude[s] of listening: chastity; continence; and under Virgin Mary; Zechariah) Christ 12, 20, 21, 23, 26, 84, 96, 107, 132, 181n.93, 192, 220, 228, 231, 233, 234, 235  body, in art 233–34 elevated, through art 139, 140, 142, 143, 146–49 embodiment of divine speech 56, 139, 140 enabler of inner hearing 57n.83, 58, 83, 85 listener 122 speaking for God 56, 132 taciturnity 44 urging listening 53, 59, 107 voice 56, 219, 227 in The Wedding Feast at Cana 96, 99, 100, 101, 103n.13, 107, 110, 112, 119, 121, 122, 123, 126, 127 See also Eucharist; parable of the sower; and titles of individual works church alleged excesses in building and decoration 130, 249, 250 dedication and purification 193 doors (see thresholds) pollution 192 space 3, 10, 29, 30, 49, 50, 66, 70, 128, 129, 252 clergy authority 50, 131, 134, 137, 138, 150, 184, 185, 187, 200, 247, 250 faith 137, 187–88, 189, 191, 231 moral unfitness 136–37, 186–87 opening worshipers’ ears 54–55, 57–60 (see also catechism; Ephpheta) public perception of 186–87n.113, 188–89, 191 and pulpits 53, 132, 139, 143, 145, 149, 188 reform 136, 184, 186–92, 197 violence toward God 192  voice 10, 18, 45, 48, 56, 134, 137, 138, 149, 150, 172, 200, 207, 231, 250–51 See also audience: clerical; church: pollution; sex

Index of Subjects concealment 20, 37, 56, 84, 107, 108, 120n.51, 180, 198, 235, 237, 241–43, 246, 248 (see also deceit; Eucharist: concealment) consecration 181n.93, 193, 200–201, 228, 231, 232, 233, 234 (see also spiritual purification) continence 137, 176, 182–83, 190 (see also chastity) The Crucifixion (Giotto) 119n.49 The Crucifixion (Nicola Pisano) 142, 143, 170, 172n.65 curtains 67, 69, 70, 208, 211, 234, 236, 240, 241–42, 256 David 38, 60, 61, 62, 63, 90, 148, 156, 172n.65 David (Nicola Pisano) 38, 39 deafness  physiological 3, 6, 18n.55, 93, 94n.99, 96, 112 spiritual 27, 52, 53, 56, 57, 59n.94, 64, 93–94, 98, 112, 127n.76, 129, 136, 137, 162, 170, 173, 200, 225, 228, 231, 252 See also auditory inattention; impediments to inner hearing; Jewish perceptual impairment, in Christian ideology; Malchus deceit 5, 39, 208, 216, 234, 235, 241, 242–43, 246, 247, 248 (see also concealment; Eucharist: concealment; Isaac: figure of sensory deception; naturalism: deceit; naturalism: illusionism) The Deception of Isaac (Assisi) 26, 27, 32, 201, 202, 203, 205–8, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215–18, 220, 225, 227, 234, 235, 236, 237, 238, 239–40, 241, 242–43, 244, 245–48, 249, 250, 252, 260 disturbance 26, 44, 49, 69, 90, 126, 130, 137, 162, 157, 172, 215, 216, 218, 219–20, 229, 234, 235 doors. See thresholds doubt 38n.3, 139, 150, 156, 158–59, 190, 210–11, 224n, 248 (see also Zechariah: incredulity) ear(s) acted upon 54, 67, 83–87 aesthetic problem 73–74, 78

Index of Subjects anatomic parts and physical qualities 71, 90, 92–94, 106, 108, 122, 124, 127n.77 of animals 72, 83, 85, 87, 90n.80, 92, 201n.3 in art historiography 72–84, 205n.7 and artistic achievement 67, 74–75, 78–79, 81n.57 artistic models of 74n.25 of asp 55, 56 attribute of Renaissance personifications 85n blushing 72n.19 carving 154, 155, 198, 199 clues to artistic authorship 75–81, 94 conceptio per aurem 84, 127 in contemporary art 71 conventions in iconographic interpretation 83–84, 94 damaged 74 depicted from various angles 90–91 devil creeping into Eve’s 84 ear hole 93 erectness 91, 92, 127 exposure/visibility 106, 110, 114, 117, 212n.28, 225 expressive limits 78, 94 fingers inserted into 87, 121n.58, 198 (see also Ephpheta) of Francis of Assisi 91 healing 54, 83, 96 “of the heart” 4, 50, 54n.68, 55, 57, 59, 60, 227 idioms 103 instrument of outer and inner hearing 8–9 malformed 74, 93–94, 112 of Marcus Aurelius 74, 122n.64 mental image of 92–94, 106 of Midas 83n.66 mnemonic device 92–94, 124 modern invisibility 70–74, 94 objects’ resemblance to 110, 117, 118–19 (see also ear[s]: and vessel handles) openness 92, 106 L’orecchione di Agostino 74n.25 of Panotii 83 poorly executed 91n.82

293 receptacle of speech 92, 106 shape 76, 77, 79, 87–88, 91, 212 significance of having two 15 size 79, 80, 83, 86–88, 90, 91, 93 social trait 74 stillness 72, 78, 92, 94–95, 106, 110 as threshold 55, 94 tortuous form 93, 108, 124, 127 and vessel handles 75, 117, 119, 212 See also Malchus; pictures: hearing and listening in ecstasy 198, 216, 217n.50, 221, 225 “edification of the senses” 22–23, 24 Elizabeth 120, 154–55, 156, 162, 165, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171n, 172, 173, 174, 176, 178, 182–83, 189–90, 191, 198 Elizabeth in Prayer (Pisa baptistery) 159, 167, 169 emotion 25, 30, 72, 91, 215, 217 (see also individual subject headings) The Entry into Jerusalem (Giotto) 126 envy 23, 87–88, 90, 97, 114, 116, 126, 129, 173 Envy (Giotto) 87–88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 129, 131 Ephpheta 54–55, 96, 128n.79, 136, 216, 259 Esau 208–209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 215, 216n.48, 217, 218, 220, 232, 240, 242 Eucharist 192, 200, 228, 232, 233, 235, 237, 248, 250, 251 concealment 200, 228, 223–33, 234, 235, 243, 246, 247 in moral philosophy 247, 250–51 ocular communion 200, 231n.92 and pictorial art 233–34 See also consecration; Francis of Assisi: and Eucharist; Isaac: and eucharistic perception; listening: and divine presence Eve 34–38, 39, 43, 50, 51, 57, 62, 65, 84, 97, 127n.76, 198n, 207, 221, 232 Eve (Nicola Pisano, in Pisa) 165n eye(s) 5, 12, 25, 26, 28, 32, 34, 61, 63, 69, 72, 78, 88, 101, 116, 150, 200, 209, 236–37, 238, 242, 246 (see also Isaac: blindness; pictures: looking in; sight) Ezra 132 face 12, 72–73, 78, 91, 160, 199, 201, 215n.36, 219

294 faith 137, 139, 150, 155, 159, 164, 165, 167, 172, 190, 191, 198, 200, 224, 232, 238, 247, 248, 250 (see also attitude[s] of listening: faith; clergy: faith; hearing: primary sense in matters of faith; hearing: source of faith) fame 13, 52, 85n, 225, 251 fear 15n.46, 43, 52, 156, 172, 191, 215–18, 224n.71 (see also horror, and terror) Florence 46 frescoes by Giotto (and assistants), Church of Santa Croce 15, 16, 26, 27, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70–71, 157 sculpture by Andrea Pisano, Baptistery of San Giovanni 157, 158 See also titles of individual works Fra Agostino 66–67, 69, 70, 94, 208, 225 Francis of Assisi 66–67, 68–70, 225, 249, 252 and Eucharist 228, 230, 231, 233, 234 and listening 227–29 voice 45 Franciscans 43, 66, 185, 227, 228, 230, 231, 239, 247, 249–50 garments 28, 84, 85n, 108, 110, 114, 129, 145, 153, 167n.55, 176, 180, 198, 199, 211, 234, 240, 241 Genzken, Isa 71 Giotto 2, 4, 12–13, 30–31, 32, 33, 67, 75n.31, 131 and ancient art 90–91, 122n.64 in art historiography 67, 75n.31, 79–80, 81–83, 90, 98 attribution of Isaac frescoes to 205, 206 and Cimabue, in Dante’s Comedy 52, 251 fame, legendary status 12, 91 frescoes, Arena Chapel (see under Padua) frescoes, Church of Santa Croce (see under Florence) See also titles of individual works God 231  as artist 63, 233, 234, 243, 251 disobeyed 34, 35, 37, 62 voice 20–21, 37, 56–57, 215 word of 7–9, 17, 48, 53, 54, 55, 56, 59, 64, 65, 83, 92–94, 97, 107, 112, 120, 127, 128, 132, 136, 137, 140, 145, 183, 187, 189, 201, 227–28, 219, 248, 259 See also Holy Spirit

Index of Subjects grace 7, 8, 9, 20, 54, 58, 59, 88, 122, 169, 185, 220, 234 (see also Holy Spirit) hearing ancient physiological theories 6, 7, 8, 30n.83  certification function 67, 69, 155 collaborative process 24–25, 28, 30–31 dependability 219 detraction 130–31 disruptive of perceived reality 218–20, 234 and emotional response (see attitude[s] of listening; individual subject headings) enabler of sight 219 habitual 21–22, 24 with heart and/or head 7, 8, 58, 59, 60 historical conditions 24, 31–32, 43–50, 230–31, 251, 252 historicization 24, 32 inner or spiritual (see hearing, inner)  limits 21, 51 local conditions of 31–32, 129–30, 185–89, 192, 249–50, 251–52, 260 meaningful difficulty in 19, 21, 112 as object of knowledge, contemplation, practice 6–7, 24, 92–94 outweighed by other senses 200, 211, 219–20, 229–31 primary sense in matters of faith 5, 219, 229, 230, 260 restorative of sight 219 in rhetoric 45, 49–50 source of faith 17, 85, 155, 165, 219, 230, 247–48 surpassing sight in perceiving Christ 219 (see also Eucharist) and travel 46–47 See also attitude(s) of listening; audience; auditory; ear(s); “edification of the senses”; listening; “period ear”; pictures: hearing and listening in hearing, inner 7–9, 31, 54 activation 28–29, 58–59, 60, 92–94, 129, 192, 199, 258 (see also Ephpheta) as chewing, rumination 93, 108, 112, 124, 227 concepts 8

Index of Subjects divine empowerment 7, 8, 54, 57, 58, 139, 169, 185 (see also grace; Holy Spirit) drawing much from brief speech 93 as drinking-in 92, 110, 112, 122 effects on hearer 8, 29–31, 54n.68, 218–20 ever-readiness for 92, 127–28 external supports 8, 9, 24, 26, 30–31 “fruitful” 19–20, 197 impediments (see impediments to inner hearing) internal sounding of pictorially evoked speech 28–29, 61, 63–64, 67, 100, 101–2, 115, 127, 128, 155, 165, 169–70, 190, 201, 234, 242, 247–48, 258 and practices for returning to God’s heard word 93, 128 prayer for 58, 169, 170, 185 and spiritual purification 187 and remembering 93 test of 52, 126, 232 worshipers’ responsibility for 9, 53, 136 See also attitudes of listening; ear(s); pictures: hearing and listening in; pictures: speech and other utterances in Hearing (Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens) 255, 256, 258, 259 heart 7, 19, 55, 94, 112, 139, 178, 188 (see also ear[s]: “of the heart”; hearing: with heart and/or head; sight, inner: “eyes of the heart”) Heaven 53, 61, 62, 63, 66, 67, 123, 126, 130, 215 Hell 51, 52, 72, 126, 127n.76 Hippolytus 174, 176, 183 Holy Spirit 7, 54, 57, 58, 65, 139, 149, 151, 154, 155, 156, 159, 164, 165, 169, 172, 221, 225, 235, 243 horror, and terror 215, 217 (see also fear) humility 57, 62, 63, 64, 155, 159, 164, 165, 182, 191, 216, 260 (see also attitude[s] of listening: humility; personifications: humility) idolatry 182, 231 impediments to inner hearing 2, 9, 23, 24, 27, 31, 49, 53, 56, 57, 59, 94, 207, 228, 231, 248, 260

295 intellectual 162, 172, 190, 191, 231, 247, 248 sensory 28, 229–30, 246, 247, 248 sexual (see lust; sex; unchastity) social 130, 252 sonic 34, 50, 51–52, 53, 251 unpreparedness 227–28 visual 28, 51, 130, 246, 247, 251–52, 260 See also deafness: spiritual; doubt; envy; inebriation; pride incense 61, 153, 156, 167 incredulity. See doubt inebriation 110, 137, 176, 178, 180, 181, 182, 198 inscriptions 1, 14–15, 28, 35n, 37n, 38, 40, 47, 48, 174, 188n.22, 196–97, 251 intentiones subtiles 245–46 Isaac 208, 212–13, 215, 213n.31, 222, 223, 225, 227, 240, 260 blindness 206, 208, 221, 235, 241, 246 and eucharistic perception 229–30, 232–33, 246, 247 figure of sensory deception 219, 229–31, 242, 247 hearing 202–3, 211, 212, 215, 219, 220, 227, 229–30, 232, 235 spiritually transitional 202, 221 symbolic associations 221 “trembling” 213, 215–20, 235, 229 Isaac Master, so-called 205 Jacob 148, 206, 208, 210, 211, 213, 216, 217, 218, 220, 221, 225, 227, 229, 234, 235, 240, 241, 242, 246, 247 Jacopo del Casentino 79 Jesus. See Christ Jewish perceptual impairment, in Christian ideology 20, 83, 170, 190, 221 (see also Malchus) Joachim 87, 97, 120n.55, 121 John the Baptist 135, 154, 156, 167, 172 John the Baptist (Nicola Pisano) 167n.56 John the Evangelist 119, 121, 139 Joseph (husband of Virgin Mary) 121, 151, 153, 154, 165, 172n.65, 173 Joseph of Egypt 176, 207 justice 15n.46, 49, 52, 62, 64, 143 kinship, spiritual 154, 155, 182, 187, 191, 197, 198

296 laments 43, 44, 49, 51, 52, 82, 126, 63n.113 The Lamentation (Giotto) 81, 82, 112, 123, 125 The Last Judgment (Giotto) 86–87, 120n.54, 127n.76, 252 The Last Judgment (Nicola Pisano) 142, 143, 144, 165n.50, 172n.65, 197, 260 listening 32 and activity 106–8, 112 and commerce 14, 59 cultivation of disciplined 14–15, 32, 92–95, 98–99, 137, 189–92, 247, 258–59 cultural constructed-ness 22–23, 31 and divine presence 200, 228, 231, 232, 233, 243, 246 (see also Eucharist) effects on listener 8, 31, 64, 69, 227 (see also individual subject headings) as instrument of social control 50 prophetic 162 and receptivity 2–3, 49–50, 87, 95, 98, 119, 120, 121, 128, 150, 162, 189n.127, 217, 251 “regimes of” 18n, 24 and standing 63, 65, 69, 70, 94–95, 106, 150 ultimate consequences 34 urged by inscribed images 14–15 vocational 14 See also attitudes of listening; audience; auditory; ear(s); hearing; hearing, inner; pictures: hearing and listening in liturgy 10, 45, 57, 136, 151n.33, 153, 188, 200 (see also Eucharist; Mass; Nunc dimittis; speech, in religious contexts) looking blindness in (see sight: limits) close 60–62, 63, 64, 241 (see also intentiones subtiles) at pictures, literary accounts of 12, 13, 60–64 prolonged 60–61, 64, 112, 153, 245–46, 248, 249, 251, 252 self-awareness in 241, 245–46, 248 spiritual validity 260 See also eye(s); pictures: looking in; senses, bodily; sight The Lord’s Reprimand (Nicola Pisano)  26–27, 35–36, 37, 38, 65

Index of Subjects love. See caritas lust 129, 178, 181, 182, 186n.113, 189 (see also seduction; sex; unchastity; Venus) Malchus 83, 85, 127n.76, 219, 225 Martha 93, 106–7, 108n.29, 228n.82 marveling 35, 60, 232, 258 (see also astonishment, awe; wonder) Mary Magdalen 93, 106–7, 108, 119n.49, 228n.82 Mass 136, 189n.128, 200, 220, 228, 231–32, 233, 235, 249–50 Maurus 38, 40, 50, 65 The Meeting at the Golden Gate (Giotto) 87, 88, 90, 121n.58 Miki, Tomio 71 The Miracle at Greccio (Assisi) 225 Moissac, monastery sculpture in 79 “monumental” 29–31 Moses 38, 122, 132, 151, 156n.41 Moses Draws Water from the Rock (Giotto)  122, 125 Muses 255 music 38, 43, 51, 62, 83n.66, 126, 176, 201n.3, 253, 260 (see also singing) Music (Nicola Pisano) 38, 41 musical instruments 38, 39, 41, 51, 58, 81, 127n.76, 149, 253, 255 musicians 38, 39, 43, 44, 176, 253 The Naming of the Baptist (Giotto) 157 The Naming of the Baptist (Giovanni Pisano) 157 The Nativity of Christ (Nicola Pisano) 140, 141, 160 naturalism 3, 12, 13, 18, 24, 25, 26, 28, 32, 61, 62, 64, 67, 79, 97–98, 122, 128, 131, 140, 145, 197, 199, 201, 202, 213, 236, 240, 246, 249, 258 and ancient art 89–90, 131, 176, 197, 199, 240 in Dante’s Comedy (Purg. 10) 60, 61, 62, 64, 258 and deceit 12, 13, 236, 243, 246n.136 ears 67, 70, 79, 199 emulation of materials 118, 122, 131, 240, 241 engagement of viewer 12, 13, 28–29, 32, 60, 62, 64, 70, 134, 258, 260

Index of Subjects illusionism 70, 128, 240–41, 246, 256 psychological aspects 205, 213 spatial aspects 70, 128, 205, 236, 246 tempered 80, 180, 197–98 Neo-Attic krater (Pisa) 173, 175, 176, 178, 182, 197 Nicholas IV 202, 249 Noah 207, 221, 227, 237 Noah Listens to God, The Building of the Ark (Assisi) 223 Nunc dimittis 153, 164–65, 191 nurse(s) 174, 175, 176, 178, 198, 241, 245 (see also servant[s]; vetula) obedience 5, 13–14, 15, 17, 38n.3, 53, 56, 64, 69, 95, 102, 106, 112, 117, 157, 172, 211 (see also under attitude[s] of listening) Obedience (Giotto) 15, 16, 66, 69–70 optics 134, 207, 236, 237–38, 239, 243n.131, 246, 247 (see also intentiones subtiles; pictures: and optics; sight) oratory 39, 43, 48, 49–50, 183, 185 (see also rhetoric; speech, in religious contexts: preaching) Orpheus 255 Orvieto 47 façade sculptures, cathedral 1, 2 tomb by Arnolfo di Cambio, Church of San Domenico 240 Our Lady of Mercy (image type) 167n.55 Padua 46, 130, 131 Arena (Scrovegni) Chapel 86, 97, 128, 129, 130 frescoes by Giotto (and assistants), Arena Chapel 4, 80, 82, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90–91, 97, 98, 99–100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106–8, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119–22, 123, 124, 125, 126–29, 130–31, 201, 206, 239, 246n.136, 252 See also titles of individual works parable of the sower 19–20, 23, 120n.53, 227–28, 255 Parma, frescoes in baptistery 171n Paul 17, 20, 78–79, 120, 126, 198 Pentecost 58, 65, 97, 126, 215–16 Pentecost (Assisi) 225

297 Pentecost (Giotto and workshop) 65n.2 “period ear” 21–22, 24 Persephone 181–82 personifications 252  charity 33, 129 chastity 33 envy 87–88, 89, 90, 91, 129 faith 17 humility 33n, 62, 63, 64, 251 impiety 85 music 38, 41 obedience 15, 16, 66, 69–70 rhetoric 38, 42, 65, 69 See also ear(s): attribute of Renaissance personifications Perugia 38, 44, 47, 48 Fontana Maggiore 35, 38, 47 fountain sculptures by Nicola and Giovanni Pisano 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 47, 48 See also titles of individual works Peter 81n.57, 83, 219, 225 Phaedra 174, 176, 178, 180 physiognomy 45, 91–92 pictures 2–3, 6, 10, 17, 25, 31, 32 authority of 12, 138, 143–44, 197–99, 251–52, 260 blessing of 193 catching and holding attention 13, 60, 128, 145 (see also looking: close; looking: prolonged) in Dante’s Comedy 34, 60–64, 67, 126, 162, 251, 258 demands on viewer 13, 128, 172, 249, 251, 252, 258–59 hearing and listening in 4, 26, 37–38, 62, 64, 65–67, 69–71, 78, 81, 85–86, 88, 90, 95, 98, 101–3, 106–8, 110, 112, 114, 115, 116, 119, 122, 123–124, 126–27, 131, 137, 153, 155, 162, 165, 176, 183, 201, 211–12, 221, 222, 223, 225, 253, 255, 256, 260 looking in 37, 67, 69, 70, 81, 100–101, 114, 142, 153, 165, 205–6, 208–9 materiality 60, 90  multisensory 22, 27, 61, 98, 100–103, 153, 167, 199 and optics 12n.38, 134, 207, 236, 237, 239, 246, 247 (see also intentiones subtiles; optics)

298 pictures (cont.) permanence 3, 30, 60, 191, 220 and religious instruction 10, 31  reminders of sacred stories 31, 60, 61 and scholarly listening for the past 3–4 speech and other utterances evoked by 1, 4, 13, 28–29, 35, 66–67, 81, 99, 100, 102–3, 112, 115, 123, 127, 143, 147–49, 150, 155, 162, 162, 164, 165, 169, 170, 174, 176, 183, 199, 221, 222, 223, 225, 234, 247–48, 255, 256 (see also hearing, inner: and internal sounding; “visible speech”) spiritualized by pictorial means 180, 197–98, 260 spiritual validity 32, 260 ‘visual’ mediums and arts represented in 97, 118, 122, 127–28, 150, 225, 240, 243, 245, 249, 255–56 and worship 5, 10, 31, 238, 249–50, 251 See also artistic styles; auditory engineering, some pictorial components of; impediments to inner hearing: visual; listening; “monumental”; naturalism; skill(s); “vision, age of”; and titles of individual works Pisa 43, 47, 136, 167, 172, 180, 192 antiquities 173–74 (see also Neo-Attic krater; Sarcophagus of Hippolytus and Phaedra) baptistery portal sculpture 159, 169, 170 baptistery pulpit by Nicola Pisano 26, 85, 133, 134, 136–39, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 151, 152, 153, 160, 161, 163, 164, 166, 184, 191, 193, 196, 197, 198, 201, 239, 251 Baptistery of San Giovanni 135, 136, 137, 138, 157, 167, 169, 174, 184, 189, 191, 250 Candelaria (Candlemas) 181–82, 189 cathedral doors by Bonanno of Pisa 145, 146 cathedral, preaching in 58, 169, 181, 183, 186, 189, 191 Church of Santa Maria del Carmine 253 former cathedral pulpit by Guglielmo  145, 147 See also titles of individual works Pisa Altarpiece (Masaccio) 253, 254, 256

Index of Subjects Pisano, Nicola 133, 137, 251 in art historiography 75n.31, 134, 178–81, 193–97 immigration and citizenship 134, 194–97 name(s) in inscriptions and notarial documents 194–97, 251 and notions of rebirth 193–97 para-baptismal power 197, 198 reuses of ancient styles and motifs 131, 134, 136, 174, 176, 178–81, 184–85, 193, 197–98, 199, 260 sculptures, baptistery pulpit (see under Pisa) sculptures, Fontana Maggiore (see under Perugia) See also titles of individual works Pistoia, sculptures on Church of Sant’Andrea 155–56n.39, 167, 171n Pluto 181 Polykleitos 61, 178 portal(s). See thresholds Potiphar’s wife 176 The Presentation of Christ in the Temple (Bonanno of Pisa) 145n.26, 153 The Presentation of Christ in the Temple (Guglielmo) 145n.26, 149, 153 The Presentation of Christ in the Temple (Nicola Pisano) 26, 27, 32, 140, 142, 143, 150, 151, 152, 153–55, 157–58, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 168–72, 173, 174, 176, 178, 180, 182–83, 186, 190–91, 193, 197–98, 207, 260 The Presentation of the Virgin (Giotto) 90 pride 23, 56, 63, 64, 97 “principle of disjunction” 180–81 professors 38, 42, 48, 65 psychoacoustics 25 pulpit(s) 48–49, 53, 132, 136n.13, 201 acoustic function 132, 138 authorizing function 138–39, 143, 145, 147 biblical prototypes 132 and faith 139 lecterns 139, 150 mountain-like 132, 183–84 protection 139, 143, 145 See also under clergy; Pisa Purgatory 51, 52, 60, 63, 64, 126, 258

Index of Subjects The Raising of Lazarus (Giotto) 108n.29, 116–17n.44, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127n.76 Rebekah 208, 209n.24, 211, 213, 220–21, 234, 242 Reims, sculpture on cathedral of 78–79 rhetoric 30, 33, 38, 39, 43, 44, 45, 48, 49–50, 197 Rhetoric (Nicola Pisano) 38, 42, 65, 69 Rome 46, 239, 249 ciborium by Arnolfo di Cambio, Church of San Paolo fuori le mura 240 mosaics by Pietro Cavallini, Church of Santa Maria in Trastevere 212n.28, 240n.121 pictorial decoration, Church of Santa Maria Maggiore 81n.57, 204 The Sacrifice of Isaac (Assisi) 207n.15, 222 Saint Francis before the Crucifix of San Damiano (Assisi) 222, 225, 226 Saint Francis Preaches before Honorius III (Assisi) 225 Sarah 156n.41, 224 Sarcophagus of Hippolytus and Phaedra (Pisa) 173, 174, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 182, 183, 197 Saul (king) 38, 90 Scrovegni, Enrico 97, 99, 128–31 seduction 43, 65, 174, 176, 178 (see also Eve; lust; Phaedra; Potiphar’s wife; sex) unchastity; vetula) senses, bodily arousal of, through looking 61 collaboration among 24–25 conflation 61 contradiction among 61, 200, 211, 219–20 (see also Isaac: figure of sensory deception) cultural constructed-ness 22–23, 31 difficulty of knowing 6 historicization 24 loss of (see ecstasy; horror, and terror) medieval categorization of 5 multisensory integration 25 smell 61, 101, 153, 156, 167, 211, 220, 229, 230 taste 101, 110, 120, 211, 220, 227, 229, 230

299 touch 101, 153, 155, 160, 162, 165, 190, 210, 211, 219, 220, 229, 230, 234 and truth 219, 220, 229–30, 238, 246, 247, 252 See also “edification of the senses”; hearing; listening; sight servants 99, 100–114, 117, 122, 126–27, 128, 129 (see also nurse[s]) sex 186, 192 (see also lust; seduction; unchastity; Venus) sight 32 affecting other senses 61 ambivalence toward 201, 242 certifying function 5, 238, 245–46 cultural ascendance 10–13, 18, 32 (see also “vision, age of”) and devotion 5, 10, 11, 31, 231n.92, 249 fallibility 5, 61, 229, 230, 238, 246 generative of socially consequential talk 130–31 humbled 32 impeded 106, 211, 241, 242, 245 invited 241, 242–43 limits 5, 32, 232, 235, 237, 243, 247, 248 overriding hearing 25, 231, 247, 248 pictorial appeals to 18, 35, 60–61, 134, 249 and understanding 5, 238 See also eye(s); impediments to inner hearing; Isaac: blindness; looking; optics; senses; sight, inner sight, inner inner or spiritual vision 66, 67, 165, 246n.136 “eyes of the heart” 221, 223 Simeon 140, 143, 150, 151, 153–154, 155, 164, 165, 168, 173, 186, 189, 191, 208 singing 1, 26, 38, 43, 45, 53, 59n.94, 61, 90, 132, 188n.122, 255, 258 (see also music; voice[s], human) sins and vices 34, 37n.2, 52, 54, 56, 64, 186–87n.113, 193 (see also individual subject headings; personifications) skepticism. See doubt skill artistic 12, 13, 74, 78, 197, 134, 205, 236, 243, 246, 258

300 skill (cont.) auditory 19n.56, 21–22, 24 (see also attitude[s] of listening; listening: cultivation of disciplined) in deceit 232–33, 234–35, 236, 243 divine 61, 62, 63, 232–33, 234–35, 236, 243 in speech 116, 185 (see also oratory; rhetoric) social class 24, 44, 46, 48, 49, 114, 119, 129, 174, 185 Solomon 132 sound(s) as affect 30 art historical interest in 4 of devotion 43 as distraction 18n, 53 gap between acoustic quality and spiritual effect 30, 251 of languages 43, 44 in late medieval writings 43, 51–52, 126 of speech (as distinct from words) 9, 63, 126 and spiritual transition 66–67, 70, 116, 125–27, 137, 165, 170, 183 (see also Isaac: spiritually transitional; Zechariah: spiritually transitional) transience of 3, 60, 64, 93, 253 of urban life 43, 48, 59 See also impediments to inner hearing: sonic; “monumental”; music; pictures: speech and other utterances evoked by; singing; sonic; speech; voice(s), human “soundscape” 18n.55, 19, 21, 24, 25, 29 sound studies 3 speech acoustic qualities (see under voice[s], human) associated with social class 44, 46, 48, 49 civic (see speech, in civic contexts) codes of conduct 44 dialects 43, 51 dinner table 44 “fruitful” 20, 127n.74 “horizontal” versus “vertical” 48, 50 immigrants’ 46–47

Index of Subjects impeded 43, 56 (see also voice[s], human: aphonia; Zechariah: mute) knocking on ear’s ‘door’ 55 in late medieval writings 43, 46 “new speech” in thirteenth century  48–49, 185 “the power of” 30 preaching outside the Church 49, 134, 185 religious (see speech, in religious contexts) repression of 49 styles 51–52, 53 vernacular 43, 48 See also pictures: speech and other utterances in; “visible speech”; voice(s), human speech, in civic contexts moderation 43 oratory 48 political 44, 48, 49, 50 regulation 43–44, 49 and societal cohesion 44 speech, in religious contexts blessing 193 coming audibly from material image 225 consecration 193, 200 divinely enabled 58, 169, 172, 185 (see also grace; Holy Spirit) gospel reading 45, 132, 136, 137, 139, 149, 150, 188 moderation 9, 132, 220 and moral status of speakers 188–89 prayer for 58, 169, 170, 185 preaching 23, 43, 45–46, 48, 53, 54, 55, 57–60, 92, 136, 149, 169, 170, 183, 185, 187, 189n.127, 229–30, 233, 237, 241, 259 prophetic 143, 153, 155, 156, 164–65, 169n.59, 172 regained (see voice[s], human: regained) sinful 49n.41, 178 (see also envy; lust) See also clergy; God: word of; Virgin Mary: speech; voice(s), human  spiritual hearing. See hearing, inner spiritual purification 63, 99, 151, 181n.93, 182, 186, 187, 188, 189, 193, 197, 198 spiritual reproduction 120–21, 127

Index of Subjects spiritual transition. See under Isaac; sound; Zechariah storytelling, mythical auditory rationale for 34 students 38, 42, 46, 59n.94, 65 Stuttgart Psalter 4 sumptuary laws 44 surprise 211–12 The Temptation (Assisi) 222 The Temptation (Nicola Pisano) 26–27, 35, 36, 37, 57, 65 terror. See horror, and terror thresholds 10, 51, 65, 122, 126, 191, 246n.136 church doors, portals 55, 94 See also under ear(s) Titian 76, 77n.40, 81 Tomb of Giovanni da Legnagno (Jacobello and Pierpaolo dalle Masegne) 65n.1 trade 14, 46, 129 Trajan, Emperor 60, 61, 62, 63, 64 truth(s) 219, 220, 237–38, 246–48, 252 unchastity 120 (see also lust) unfaith. See doubt universities 6, 19, 46, 49, 65 unsteadiness 106, 157, 170, 176, 212, 220 Utrecht Psalter 4 Venice 47, 167n.55, 170, 253 Venus 181, 192 vetula 178 Virgin Mary  The Annunciation to the 28, 33, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 84, 126, 149, 155, 159, 225, 255, 256 caritas 97, 116, 119, 127 chastity 84, 121, 173, 178, 180, 182, 189 and Elizabeth 154–55, 162, 165 and Eve 62, 165n faith 155, 158–60, 162, 169 humility 62, 182 listener 62, 65, 84 prayer to, for speech and inner hearing 169, 170, 191 in The Presentation of Christ in the Temple 151, 153, 154, 165, 168, 173, 181n.93, 182

301 speech 116, 127, 218 taciturnity 44, 116 The Visitation 154–55, 165, 167, 169 in The Wedding Feast at Cana 99, 100, 112, 114, 127 and Zechariah (see under Zechariah) See also ear(s): conceptio per aurem; and titles of individual works Visconti, Federico 136, 137, 183–91, 192, 197 (see also Pisa: cathedral, preaching in) “visible speech” (visibile parlare) 61–64, 67, 126, 153, 159, 258 “vision, age of” 10–11, 28, 32, 130, 134, 207, 237 cultural manifestations 11, 237 late medieval worship 10, 12, 200 medieval study of vision (see optics) pictorial art as evidence of 11–12, 201 See also Eucharist: ocular communion; pictures: authority of; pictures: and optics sight The Visions of Fra Agostino and the Bishop of Assisi (Assisi) 67n.7, 225 The Visions of Fra Agostino and the Bishop of Assisi (Giotto) 26, 27, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70–71, 79, 83, 94–95, 131, 199 The Visitation (Bonanno of Pisa) 145n.26, 167, 168 The Visitation (Giotto) 90, 120n.55 The Visitation (Guglielmo) 145n.26, 147, 167 The Visitation (Nicola Pisano, in Siena)  154n.36 Viterbo. See optics voice(s), human acoustic amplification 132, 138 acoustic qualities 9, 30, 45, 217, 251 aphonia 66, 157, 162 (see also Zechariah: mute) children’s 43, 48, 51 competing for attention 34 disembodied 218 disruptive 44, 50, 66–67, 94, 165n.51, 218 distracting from meaning 9, 53  empty, morally 188n.122 enchanting 55 and fear (see fear) in late medieval writings 43, 51–52 modulation 43

302 voice(s), human (cont.) perceived excesses 43 in physiognomic texts 45 of preacher 43, 58 regained 66–67, 69, 70, 157, 165, 172, 191, 192 restraint 9, 48, 132 in rhetoric 45 of teacher 7, 20 uncanny 218 in urban life 43, 48 women’s 49, 50, 51 See also under artists; clergy water 38, 48, 51, 96, 99, 102, 106, 110, 122, 123, 183, 188, 193, 215, 221 wealth 128–30 The Wedding Feast at Cana (Duccio) 121 The Wedding Feast at Cana (Giotto) 26, 27, 31–32, 90, 97, 98, 99–100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106–8, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119–22, 123, 124, 125, 126–29, 131, 137, 154, 199, 207, 211–12, 240n.123, 240n.124, 252, 260 The Wedding Feast at Cana (Veronese) 253, 255, 257 wind 116, 126, 215 wine 96, 100, 106, 110, 116, 122, 128, 176, 181, 212, 228 witnessing 12, 60, 62, 67, 70, 107, 110, 112, 116, 119–20, 153, 155, 156, 165, 182 womb 127, 154, 155, 169, 224

Index of Subjects wonder 62, 66–67, 69, 106, 165, 190, 216, 233, 243 (see also astonishment, awe; marveling) Zechariah 155, 167, 174, 176, 178, 182, 188, 191, 200, 212, 260 The Annunciation to 120n.55, 156, 170, 224n chastity 189–90, 191 and Elizabeth 155, 168, 169, 170, 172, 173 faith 172, 182, 191 incredulity 156, 159, 170, 182 (see also doubt) model of virtue 172, 173 mute 157, 162, 165, 170, 172, 190, 191 Mute before the People 157, 160n, 170, 171–72n.64 The Naming of the Baptist 157, 172n.64 in pictorial tradition 155n.39, 157, 160n, 167–68, 171–72n.64 powerful speaker 156, 162, 172, 191 and prophecy 155, 156 return home 170–72, 173 spiritually transitional 170, 172, 191 and Virgin Mary 156n.40, 159–60, 162, 168 and The Visitation 167, 172n.64 See also titles of individual works Zechariah and Elizabeth (Venice baptistery) 170, 171 Zechariah Mute before the People (Andrea Pisano) 157, 158 Zechariah Mute before the People (Venice baptistery) 171