Fervent devotional practices that included ritual penance, daily prayer, and focused meditation underpinned the public charitable mission of the quattrocento Oblates of Santa Francesca Romana. Images documenting and replicating the miraculous works and ecstatic experiences of Francesca Ponziani played a crucial role in defining and directing these practices. In the last chapter, I examined frescoes from the Tor de’Specchi oratory portraying Francesca Romana's charitable work throughout the city of Rome as models for the ongoing labors of her oblate community. Here, I focus on painted renderings of Francesca's mystical visions that challenged artists to recreate the liminal (between states of consciousness), metaphysical world of ecstatic events. Three gilded panel paintings depicting scenes from Francesca's celestial visions are at the heart of this chapter. Here, I argue that these panels were commissioned by the oblates at Tor de’Specchi shortly after their founder's death, and represent the community's initial contribution to the lasting legacy and image of Santa Francesca Romana (Plates13–15).

As we shall see, the gilded paintings originally formed a series that was likely part of a multi-paneled altarpiece (much of which is now lost), and were the clear inspiration for frescoed representations of Francesca's visions in the community oratory cycle introduced in the previous chapter. Together, the panels formed the pictorial foundation for a type of meditative viewing practice that was carried forward – and refined over time – in the decorative program at the monastery at Tor de’Specchi. As a fledgling religious order, the oblates were obliged to shape and perpetuate their founder's identity. Under their patronage, the richly sensual and material details of Francesca's visions sketched by Mattiotti in his written Trattati were translated into vivid and accessible painted form on the panels, and later in the frescoes, and served to excite both the corporeal and inward senses of the oblates. These “visual visions” were made to epitomize and embody Francesca's Roman-ness as emblematic of a unique spiritual and communal model for her female followers as they established themselves as a viable and visible entity in the papal city.