Joanna Cannon’s impact on the study of late medieval Italian art has been profound. Her influence is felt as a scholar through the seminal publications in her bibliography and as a teacher who has trained numerous researchers active in the field, both as university academics and museum curators, across Europe and North America. This book is offered by her doctoral students as a celebration of Joanna’s remarkable career and achievements, and in gratitude for her dedication and generosity to her field, her students, her colleagues, and her friends.

Joanna’s scholarship is driven by a historically contextualised approach that, to a great extent, can be seen continued within the work of her students. This is coupled with a determined focus on the visual and material qualities of the objects under her examination. A close attention to the object – whatever that object might be: altarpiece, wall painting, votive panel, portable diptych, manuscript, metalwork, or ivory (Fig. 1.1) – has always been a fundamental tenet of Joanna’s research and teaching. Her concern with materiality is amplified by a commitment to analysing the physical characteristics of works of art by means of technical analysis, and to understanding the creative processes and working practices of artists. A further interest concerns the multifarious and changing ways in which viewers experienced the art of late medieval Italy. This wide range of ways of looking indicates the comprehensive nature of Joanna’s research, and helps to explain why she has been such a keenly sought-out collaborator by colleagues within art history and also in adjacent fields.

Joanna’s interests and approach were shaped by the fertile academic environment of The Courtauld Institute of Art and the wider University of London in the 1970s, where the study of medieval art and architecture flourished under the interdisciplinary aegis of Peter Kidson (the legendary ‘PK’ to Joanna and her contemporaries). Having already spent three years at the Institute as an undergraduate, she took her PhD on ‘Dominican Patronage of the Arts in Central Italy: The Provincia Romana c. 1220–c. 1320’ with Julian Gardner, who continued to supervise Joanna after departing The Courtauld to establish the History of Art department at the University of Warwick in 1974.

The Sienese artist Ambrogio Lorenzetti created two works for the church of San Procolo in Florence. One of them, a triptych of the Virgin and Child flanked by the two bishop saints Nicholas and Proculus, once bore Ambrogio’s signature and the date 1332. The other – the subject of this essay – now consists of two panels, each depicting a pair of scenes from the life and miracles of Saint Nicholas of Bari (Plates X and XI). This quartet is one of the most sophisticated and best-known narrative ensembles from the Trecento, but its context in a modest parish church remains underexplored. By focusing on San Procolo, its institutional links, and its lay patrons, this essay will suggest that Lorenzetti’s narratives responded to their setting and likely audience within the church, spoke to the preoccupations of Florentines in the years around 1330, and expressed the concerns of their patron, who can be identified for the first time.

San Procolo is a small parish church in the ancient heart of Florence, just to the north-east of the Bargello, on the corner of Via de’ Giraldi and Via de’ Pandolfini. Probably already founded by the first millennium, in 1064 it was gifted by the Bishop of Florence to the nearby Benedictine monastery of Santa Maria, commonly known as the Badia Fiorentina. In 1622 the church was totally rebuilt and its orientation reversed, with the high altar being moved to the west end and the main door to the east; its interior was further remodelled in the eighteenth century. Consequently, the interior of the church gives no clues as to the original position or function of Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s panels. San Procolo remained under the control of the Badia until it was suppressed in 1778 and sold to Cardinal Salviati, in whose family’s possession it remains. At the time of writing, the church is deconsecrated and closed to the public. After San Procolo was secularised, the Saint Nicholas panels were transferred to the Badia. When that church, too, was suppressed, they entered the Galleria dell’Accademia before being transferred to the Uffizi in 1919.

On 27 September 1427, San Bernardino delivered one of his thundering sermons on the Piazza del Campo in Siena. As was customary with his preaching style, he dotted the sermon with local Sienese references, which, in this instance, included a colourful metaphor about the relative roles of the city cathedral and of its main charitable institution:

The hospital that San Bernardino evokes in his sermon is Santa Maria della Scala, which, as he implicitly suggests through his eye metaphor, was one of the key civic institutions of medieval and Renaissance Siena. The hospital, as the passage indicates, occupied vast premises in front of the city cathedral and episcopal residence. Founded in the eleventh century, by Bernardino’s times the hospital was equipped with its own church, dedicated to the Virgin Annunciate, and prided itself on a set of precious relics and reliquaries of the Passion of Christ, of the Virgin Mary, and of saints. This holy collection was largely the result of a single acquisition made in Venice in 1359, when Santa Maria della Scala purchased an illustrious group of relics and reliquaries of Byzantine provenance from the merchant Pietro di Giunta Torrigiani. By 1427, when Bernardino delivered his sermon, the Byzantine relics had become the focus of a major and well-established public cult in Siena, contributing to the prestige of Santa Maria della Scala and to its civic status. But how was the integration of the Byzantine treasury into the highly specific Sienese civic cult achieved, what purposes did the Byzantine relics fulfil in Siena, and what correlations existed between their use in the Italian city-state and their original meaning in Byzantium?

A pervasive theme in Joanna Cannon’s many contributions to the study of medieval art is the relationship between form and function, set against both the wider spiritual concerns of the period and networks of patrons at specific sites and over large geographic areas. This focus led her to question deep-rooted assumptions about early Italian art and has transformed our understanding of what images might signify to multiple audiences over time. Inspired by her scholarship, I approach a category of medieval images that has been relatively little studied: painted panels that also claim to be relics or reliquie dipinte. Such a classification relates to a panel’s association with a holy individual or a miraculous event, or even the belief that it was fashioned from a sacred tree. For example, two thirteenth-century images of Saint Francis attributed to the Maestro di San Francesco (c. 1260) and to Cimabue (c. 1280), both today in the Museo della Porziuncola, Assisi, have been linked through their respective inscriptions to the wooden bier upon which the saint’s dead body rested and to the wood-lid of his first tomb. The panels are thus ‘contact’ relics – the boards believed to have once supported and covered Saint Francis’s corpse. Equally important, their sacral value stems also from the images of Saint Francis painted on the ‘holy’ surfaces and, in the case of the former, a lengthy text that has been attributed to the saint himself. Created in the early history of the Franciscan Order, the two panels provide important evidence for the representational strategies used in the promotion of ‘new’ saints (that is, images created within living memory of the holy person depicted), such as Francis – who died in 1226 and was canonized just two years later, in 1228 – as has been discussed by Joanna Cannon, amongst others. Yet in these instances, the depiction of Saint Francis together with the inscription point to the sacral value of the support, which is offered not only as a relic of the saint, but serves to validate his very image. The calibrated interplay between painted surface and material creates a series of mutually reinforcing associations brought about through representation and substantiated by its very matter, wood.

The space around medieval church altars at times involved various audiences – from both clerics and members of the laity – who observed or handled objects in a range of media in the performance of the liturgy. This theme of access to works of art and the relationship between media and use has been a strong undercurrent in the scholarly and pedagogical work of Joanna Cannon, with whom I shared a memorable, indeed careeraltering, conversation about Bernardo Daddi and painters of illuminated manuscripts. That discussion was the catalyst for a journey – of a long bus ride and dizzying hike – to a remote parish church in the hills of Tuscany that is associated with an impressive array of fourteenth-century objects, some of which are still there and some of which can be traced back to it. These objects are the subject of this essay.

The polyptych with The Crucifixion and Saints, presently in The Courtauld Gallery (Plate XIII), was arguably the last great commission undertaken by Bernardo Daddi and his workshop. Beneath the central panel is an inscription indicating the artist’s name and the date 1348, providing a chronological point of reference for the commission and indicating a terminus point for Daddi’s career, as he died on 8 August of that year, likely as a result of causes related to the Black Death. The painting once adorned an altar within the intimate space of the parish church of San Giorgio a Ruballa (Osteria Nuova di Bagno a Ripoli), founded by at least 1273 and renovated around 1337. The glimmer of the Trecento interior is almost completely lost, now overshadowed by the Baroque stucco work of Giovan Martino Portogalli (1707) and the architectural redesign by Niccolo Matas (1863). Yet three early Trecento works are still housed within. The first is a large devotional panel with the Maesta: The Virgin and Child with Angels and Saints Matthias the Apostle and George, dated with a partially abraided inscription to 1336 or 1337 and thought to be the work variously of Maso di Banco, Orcagna, Bernardo Daddi or an artist in his shop, or an anonymous painter conventionally referred to as the Maestro di San Giorgio a Ruballa (Fig. 10.1). Next is a choir book assigned to the workshop of Pacino di Bonaguida and stylistically dated to the 1330s – (Plate XIV).

As the heads of the Greek and Latin Churches sought to unite their respective institutions during the Council of Florence in 1439, they and their entourages were treated to elaborate, public displays of the Florentines’ devotion to two of their most important patron saints: John the Baptist, and the early Christian bishop, Zenobius (d. c. 424). On 26 April the council participants attended the translation of Saint Zenobius’s relics from the crypt of the medieval cathedral of Santa Reparata to a chapel dedicated to him in the east tribune of the new cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore (Fig. 15.1). Slightly less than two months later, the same prestigious cohort witnessed the annual celebration of the Baptist’s feast on 23 and 24 June. The April and June events were celebrated with a great deal of pomp, and the visiting ecclesiastical dignitaries must have departed their host city with the impression that the Florentines accorded a similar amount and kind of attention to both of their saintly protectors.

One would never arrive at the same conclusion today. Since 1975, Saint Zenobius’s traditional feast of 25 May has been observed on 10 May, when its celebration is efficiently, if ahistorically, bundled with that of Florence’s other sainted (arch)bishop, Antoninus Pierozzi (1389–1459). The very modest recognition of Zenobius on that day, which consists of special masses and the display of the saint’s head reliquary (Plate XXII) near the Saint Zenobius Chapel, largely passes unnoticed. The feast of Saint John, in contrast, is celebrated from morning to night each 24 June with a procession, complete with a corps of drummers and the choreographed movements of costumed flag-bearers, Mass in the cathedral, a rousing game of calcio storico, and an impressive display of fireworks over the river Arno. The discrepancies in the degree to which each saint’s feast is presently celebrated in Florence have long found a parallel in the historical and art historical literature, which unequivocally privileges the place the civic patron, John the Baptist, occupied in Florentine devotions over that of the episcopal patron, Zenobius.

The decorative scheme of the Baroncelli chapel in the church of Santa Croce in Florence (Fig. 9.1) – including frescoes on the walls depicting the life of the Virgin, frescoes in the vault with allegorical representations of the virtues, stained glass with images of saints, sculpture at the entrance to the chapel, and Giotto’s altarpiece of the Coronation of the Virgin (Plate XII) – can be said to have at least two registers of meaning. On one level, the iconographical programme reflects the Baroncelli family’s concerns with salvation. Overlaying this relatively straightforward reading, however, is a more complex Franciscan theology that weaves together divine revelation, angelic visitation, and light in reference to salvation. The purpose of this chapter is to revisit these layers of meaning, and to suggest more specifically that the chapel’s iconographic scheme reflects Franciscan views on the Beatific Vision controversy, which reached its peak between 1331 and 1336, with implications for both our reading of the chapel’s imagery and the dating of its decoration.

The controversy was the most prominent theological dispute of the time and centred on whether the saved attained the Beatific Vision – the full and unmediated vision of God in heaven – immediately after death, or whether this would only occur after the resurrection of the body at the Last Judgement. In a series of sermons delivered in 1331–32, Pope John XXII (Jacques Duese, r. 1316–34) proposed that souls could not enjoy the sight of God until Judgement Day. These views met with great resistance among Dominican thinkers and also Spiritual Franciscans, who were already at odds with the Pope over the Poverty Controversy. Other Franciscans, however, agreed with John, or at least took a more nuanced view of the afterlife in which the Beatific Vision was gradually attained and perfected. The iconography of the Baroncelli chapel – which insists on the importance of the resurrected body – reflects the Franciscan idea of the gradual attainment of perfect vision, and of the body perfecting the vision of God, ideas moreover aligned with Bonaventure’s writings about spiritual seeing and the ascent of the soul to God beginning during life.

The Detroit Institute of Arts houses a small wooden panel (13 × 9.2 × 1.6 cm), originally one half of a fourteenth-century Italian reliquary diptych (Plate XV). The gilt wooden frame encloses a rectangular piece of verre églomisé, or gilded glass, which depicts the Virgin Mary, enthroned, and nursing the Christ Child on her knee. Surrounding this central image of the Virgin Lactans are painted decorative leaf forms, in gold, on red or black backgrounds. In between these leaf forms are clear glass windows, through which sections of parchment are visible behind. There are small openings in the parchments themselves, which reveal tiny relic fragments underneath. The relics are accompanied by identifying texts written in red ink on the relevant parchment.

The object entered the DIA collection in 1994, having been purchased at auction in that year, and remains almost completely unpublished, save for the sale catalogue of the dealer from which the Detroit Institute of Art acquired the piece, and a brief notice in the DIA Views magazine in December 1994 following its acquisition. The Detroit reliquary panel is not featured in any of the main published studies on gilded glass reliquaries, nor in studies of gilded glass more widely. It is mentioned in an unpublished 2005 Masters dissertation from The Courtauld Institute by Irene Galandra (and supervised by Joanna Cannon), but otherwise it has received almost no scholarly attention.

The Detroit gilded glass offers a suitable topic for a Festschrift essay for Joanna Cannon, for reasons pertinent both to Joanna’s own interests and to my own development as an academic researcher. First, it presents the opportunity for a close study of an individual object, with particular attention both to its physical and material characteristics, and also to its iconographical particularities: these are both key interests in Joanna’s work. Secondly, many of the surviving examples of gilded glass panels of this period seem to have been produced for use in a Franciscan context. Some of them are still in locations associated with the Franciscan Order, or have a secure Franciscan provenance.

The work of Joanna Cannon has considerably enriched our understanding of the varied functions of religious images in late medieval Italy. My contribution to her Festschrift intersects with her work, as I explore the multi-layered relationship between visual hagiography and lay religious education (something she did masterfully in her inspirational study on Margherita of Cortona). This chapter is about two illustrations in a manuscript of the Leggenda di Santo Tobia (a vernacular version of the Book of Tobit) copied and illustrated in 1408 by a Florentine youth, Zanobi di Pagolo di Agnolo Perini, for his own edification (Plate XXI, Fig. 14.3). The manuscript is bound into a miscellany, Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, Fondo Nazionale MS II.II.445 (hereafter BNCF II.II.445), which contains other texts copied by Zanobi in the years 1407–9, as well as his own illustrations (Figs. 14.1, 14.2, 14.3, Plate XX), in addition to those executed by another illustrator (Plate XXI). This is not the only such example of a miscellany produced by a teenager that has come down to us; Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana MS 1655 was copied and illustrated in 1399 by Romigi d’Ardingo di Corso de’ Ricci when he was sixteen or seventeen years old.

The illustrations in these miscellanies have received virtually no scholarly attention. Yet they are very important testimonies; they formed part of a vast corpus of images, of which very little survives, created by individuals with no artistic training, and shared by the majority of people living in urban centres. In the case of Zanobi’s miscellany, as I shall demonstrate, it bears witness to the attitude of a youth to well-known works of art. More importantly, the illustrations of the Leggenda contribute to our understanding of how visual hagiography was employed in the religious education of the young. The images appear to have been inspired by the Story of Tobit and Tobias, a fresco cycle painted c. 1350–70 in the domus residentiae of the compagnia of Santa Maria della Misericordia. According to documentary evidence, this confraternity took care of abandoned children; I shall propose in this essay that the fresco, like the text of the Leggenda, served to provide the young charges of the Misericordia with religious and moral instruction.

It is now over a third of a century since a fourteenth-century fresco, generally known as the New Fresco (Plate IX), was discovered at the heart of Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico, in the centre of the west wall of the building’s main council-chamber, the Sala del Consiglio, now generally known as the Sala del Mappamondo (Fig. 7.1). This remarkable work was evidently whitewashed not long after it was painted, since it occupies an area of wall covered from 1345 onwards by Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s longlost Mappamondo, the world-map which gave the room its popular name. Before this, however, the fresco had already been deliberately damaged: as the restoration campaign in 1980–81 revealed, at some stage the figures had been pelted with stones and then cancelled out with a thick layer of blue paint, leaving visible only the hill-top town on the right. And one further layer of over-painting – Sodoma’s 1530 fresco of Saint Ansanus on the left-hand side of the wall – means that only part of the image is now recoverable. The New Fresco that we see today is a resurrected fragment, an abused masterpiece that was buried and forgotten by the very government that commissioned it.

The unique, strangely mute composition of the work and its negative treatment by the Sienese themselves make the New Fresco a particularly intriguing object of historical study. It also sits right at the heart of several debates about the iconographic self-representation of the Sienese commune and the development of Sienese art in the early fourteenth century, a field that Joanna Cannon’s work has done so much to illuminate. Unfortunately, however, its interpretation has so far been dogged by controversy. As is well known, the New Fresco has been embroiled in the dispute that surrounds the famous fresco above it, the equestrian portrait known as the Guidoriccio, due to links with the so-called ‘Castle Series’, a documented set of depictions of Sienese territories displayed in the same room. All previous interpretations of the New Fresco, therefore, have been assumed to have a bearing on the so-called ‘Guidoriccio problem’, and there can be no doubt that this has hindered the proper evaluation of the image.

In 1895, the Triestine physician Antonio Lorenzutti gave a precious fourteenth-century painted triptych with foldable wings on permanent loan to his local town museum. The object had been given to him by the Benedictine nuns of San Cipriano in Trieste, as a thank-you for the free medical services he had provided for their community over the years. In 1907, Lorenzutti’s family bequeathed the triptych to the municipality of Trieste; currently displayed in the Civico Museo Sartorio, it still forms part of the city’s art collections (Plate V).

Since its transition from female monastic clausura to museum context, the triptych has played an important part in the historiography of Venetian Trecento panel painting. Its wings, especially, believed to be early works by Paolo Veneziano, have received a considerable amount of attention, and have mostly been discussed in the context of his workshop production and artistic development. Most scholars now date the wings to c. 1328–30, and very plausibly argue that they were added to the slightly older central panel, painted c. 1300–20, in a second stage of development.

In addition, iconographic studies have mainly focused on the images depicted on the wings and linked them to the early history of the Benedictine nuns of San Cipriano in Trieste, from where the triptych emerged at the end of the nineteenth century. Before moving to the premises of the church of San Cipriano in 1458, the community, then operating under the name of Santa Maria della Cella, went through a period of relative institutional fluidity. A ‘Cella dominarum Sancte Marie’, probably a semi-religious group, mentioned in the documents in 1265, was transformed into a monastic house by the Triestine bishop in 1278, and from at least 1282 belonged to the Ordo Sanctae Clarae, the female branch of the Franciscan Order as instituted by Pope Urban IV (r. 1261–64). This institutional shift – the reasons for which are unknown – caused serious differences between the community of Santa Maria della Cella and the Triestine bishop, which were only settled in the years around 1330. Maria Walcher Casotti suggested that the scenes on the triptych’s right wing, in particular the one in the middle register showing how Saint Clare and Saint Agnes present a group of young women to a bishop saint, may be connected to the community’s reconciliation with the Triestine Episcopal See.

The role of the mendicant orders in the development of central Italian painting during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries has been a recurring subject of debate within art history; indeed, Joanna Cannon’s research has shed much light on this area. Her work on issues of poverty, the development and dissemination of new forms, and Sienese altarpiece design has been highly influential. Alongside these art historical debates, liturgical historians have similarly examined the Franciscan Order’s contribution to developments in liturgy during the same period.

It is perhaps strange, then, that rather less attention has been paid to the liturgical vessels produced for mendicant use in general, and the Franciscans in particular. This observation must be tempered by the acknowledgement that one object has provoked much discussion. The extraordinary status of the chalice (Plate IV) created by the Sienese goldsmith Guccio di Mannaia for the Basilica of San Francesco in Assisi on behalf of Pope Nicholas IV has long been acknowledged, and indeed its reputation continues to increase. In 2014, for example, following a campaign of restoration and scientific study of the chalice, a monograph was produced dedicated to this single object, one of the most celebrated pieces of the goldsmith’s art to have been produced in the later Middle Ages. The chalice bears two inscriptions, the first naming Guccio as the chalice’s maker, while the second names the patron, Pope Nicholas IV. Unlike the gifts of liturgical apparatus given by Nicholas to the Basilica at Assisi immediately after his coronation as Pope, which seem to have been objects already in existence, the specifically Franciscan character of the chalice’s iconography as well as the inclusion of an image of Nicholas himself as Pope strongly suggest that it was a commission specifically undertaken for presentation to San Francesco. In this respect, it is similar to the embroidered altar decoration presented by Nicholas to the Basilica in 1289, a gift that was commemorated in its own bull, Excimatur ab intimis. Although undocumented, it is possible that the gift of the chalice might have followed a similar timetable. Guccio’s chalice is the earliest surviving example to present a new type of form, more vertical, more architectural in inspiration and making extensive use of figurative enamels, in a definitive split from the types of chalices in use during the thirteenth century.

Sculpture is not a medium generally associated with early Franciscan art. Joanna Cannon has shown how the Dominicans used sculpted imagery on their founder’s tomb as part of a strategy to promote his cult in the second half of the thirteenth century. The Friars Minor, on the other hand, spread the visual image of their founder almost exclusively through frescoes and panel paintings; and some of the earliest sculpted representations of Saint Francis are not in Franciscan churches but on cathedral facades in France and Spain, among the elect in Last Judgement scenes. Any reader of Franciscan texts, though, must be struck by their vivid and frequent use of sculptural imagery to portray the founder of the Order and his most distinctive attributes, the stigmata. Saint Francis’s body was imagined as having been melted and imprinted like wax, moulded like clay, hammered like metal or chiselled like stone. Saint Francis is described by his most important thirteenth-century biographer, Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, as coming down from the mountain of La Verna, after his transformative vision of the Christ-Seraph, ‘bearing with him the likeness of the Crucified, depicted not on tablets of stone or on panels of wood carved by hand, but engraved on parts of his flesh by the finger of the living God’. In his final years ‘he was squared like a stone to be fitted into the construction of the heavenly Jerusalem, and like a work of malleable metal he was brought to perfection by the hammer of many tribulations’. These are metaphors, to be sure, drawing on a longstanding tradition of comparing saints to ‘living statues’, and freighted with biblical allusions intended to reveal the eschatological significance of Saint Francis’s life. But it was central to the Order’s purpose that they should be understood not just as figures of speech but as describing a corporeal reality. Francis had been physically changed on La Verna: the side wound and the nails had quite literally been carved and modelled in his flesh to transform him into an image of the crucified Christ.