Images, piety and women in late medieval devotion: The Hunt Crucifixion with Saint Clare.
by Dr. Catherine Lawless
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Typical of these trends were Florentine women such as Verdiana of Castelfiorentino (d.1242) and Umiliana dei Cerchi (1219-1246). Verdiana was first a shepherdess and then a domestic servant in the house of a rich relative. Affected by the devotional climate of thirteenth-century Italy, she went on pilgrimage to the Galician shrine of Santiago de' Compostela and to Rome. She spent the rest of her life in a cell with a small aperture through which food, and of the utmost importance to a holy woman, the Eucharist, could pass. Individuals spoke of their spiritual problems through this opening to her and received advice, but, according to the hagiography, some, threatened by her power threw in serpents in a bid to either kill her or drive her out of the cell. In a trope common to saints' lives, Verdiana instead tamed the serpents and they became her beloved pets.26 The relics of St Verdiana herself are venerated at Castelfiorentino, and in the nineteenth century at least, the relics of the serpents were kept in the same church: unsurprisingly, the saint is invoked against snake bites.27 She was so popular in the fourteenth century that Boccaccio (1313-1375) was able to use her in the Decameron, where he satirises holy women by talking of how one very unholy woman imitated their religious practices, describing:
[…]an old bawd who to all outward appearances was as innocent as St Verdiana feeding the serpents, for she made a point of attending all the religious services clutching her rosary, and never stopped talking about the lives of the Fathers of the Church and the wounds of St Francis, so that nearly everyone regarded her as a saint.28
Umiliana dei Cerchi was the daughter of a prominent leader of a noble faction in Florence. After her husband's death she defied her family and refused to remarry. In 1234 she married, and according to her hagiographer, the same year saw her conversion to a life of penitence and charity. Upon the death of her husband Umiliana returned to her birth family's home but refused her father's pleas to remarry and instead embarked on a hermit's life in the tower of the Cerchi house. Immediately after her death in 1246 the Franciscan Vito da Cortona wrote her biography in clear attempt to build or respond to a cult.29 The bishop of Florence, Ardingo, saw in Umiliana a useful model with which to control the many irregular groups of pious lay women and to channel their activity into mainstream religious life. The real or perceived risk of heresy was combatted with accounts of Umiliana's devotion to the Eucharist, Confession, and her complete submission to the authority of her confessor, Fra Michele degli Alberti.30
The piety exhibited by women like Verdiana, Umiliana, Angela of Foligno, and the much more famous Catherine of Siena, was often marked by extreme asceticism, flagellation, meditation and what we could now call a type of mysticism which often led to bodily ecstasies. Much of this centred upon devotion to either the Christ Child, which in their visions female mystics would often hold in their arms, or the Passion of Christ. Like St Francis, but unlike many of their male contemporaries, the pains of the Passion were realized in their own bodies. The Dominican tertiary Vanna of Orvieto's (1264-1306) body stiffened into the shape of the cross as she meditated in front of the crucifix in her cell.31 Angela of Foligno felt the pains of the Passion when she looked at it in pictures.32 Another mystic who had a prominent public voice in the fourteenth century, Bridget of Sweden (1303-1373), would drop burning wax upon her hand in memory of the Passion every Friday and if, by the following Friday it did not hurt enough, she would re-open the wound. In 1346 she founded the Brigidine Order whose insignia were the Five Wounds of Christ.33 Clare of Rimini (d.1306) would have herself tied to a column on Fridays and be whipped by her companions.34
So significant was this 'affective piety' that some women internalised the imagery of the Crucifixion, turning their own bodies into living reliquaries. Clare of Montefalco (c.1268-1308), abbess of the convent of Santa Croce in Montefalco, was the subject of an episcopal enquiry in 1308, when after her death her nuns opened up her body and found on her heart the symbols of the passion, and on her gall bladder three globes of equal size and weight which they interpreted to be the symbol of the Holy Trinity. In 1317 an apostolic inquest was opened.35 Having lived a life of piety, intense mortification and subjugation of the flesh through fasting, asceticism and intense prayer in an attempt to relive the Passion of Christ, Clare felt that the burden of the Cross was assimilated within her very body. When dying, she rebuked a nun for making the sign of the cross over her, saying: 'Sister, why do you make this sign over me? I have no need of the cross outside me, for I have my Jesus Christ crucified inside my heart.'36 While dying, Giuliana Falconieri (1270-1341), a Florentine Servite tertiary, was unable to receive any food, including the Eucharist. She pleaded to be carried so that she could at least see the Host. When she did, she was reinvigorated and threw herself on the floor in the shape of the cross. She asked for the Host to be brought to her so that she can kiss it; and after being refused this by the priest she then prayed that a veil be placed on her breast and the Host laid on that. When this was done, the Host sank into her breast and was never found. When her body was washed for burial, the image of the Host, superimposed with an image of the Cross, was found imprinted 'like a seal' on her breast.37 Catherine of Siena received, like St Francis, the stigmata in her own body, although in the fifteenth century the Franciscan pope Sixtus IV forbade representations of her as a stigmatic as it took from the unique position of St Francis himself.38
The depiction of the sufferings of Christ on the Cross were a reminder to the viewer that he was a man, he could suffer pain, and that he had endured suffering and death for the redemption of humanity. His humanity was visible in his body, which was consumed in the Eucharist itself, as part of the ever renewing sacrifice of the Mass. The humanity of Christ is essential to Eucharistic doctrine. The bread of the Eucharist becomes the body of Christ at the moment of consecration through the agency of the priest. The doctrine was promoted by the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 as the greatest miracle that had ever occurred and one which was continuously recurring every time the bread was consecrated.39 Eucharistic miracles abounded throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries: hosts bled in the hands of unworthy priests, hosts were stolen to fertilise fields, sometimes stolen hosts revealed their whearabouts.40 In Florence itself there was the miraculous host of S. Ambrogio. In 1228 in the Benedictine nuns' church of S. Ambrogio, a priest was preparing a chalice for Mass when he saw real flesh and blood.41 The importance of the Eucharist as spiritual food to holy women has been documented by Caroline Bynum Walker, and related to the practice of the imitation of Christ. She cites St Bernard of Clairvaux's definitions of imitatio as 'being in society with', 'experiencing', 'learning', 'taking into oneself', 'consuming'.42
In the Hunt panel, the blood of Christ drips down the cross and flows past the mouth of Saint Clare herself. Late medieval visions are filled with imagery of the blood of Christ, and like the Eucharist, the blood of Christ was seen to work miracles. The following account is of the miraculous blood in the church of Sant' Andrea, Mantua: '1298: On the feast of the Ascension, miracles of the blood of Christ began in the church of Sant'Andrea in Mantua. On that day fra Alberto from Trent was cured: he was arthritic and paralysed such that he could not move without sticks, and walked badly even with them. And in the following days, many paralyzed men and women, lame, blind, mute and hunchbacked were released from their disabilities and pains by virtue of the precious blood of Christ.' St Catherine of Siena frequently referred to herself as 'saturated in the blood of Christ. Every time she received the Eucharist she tasted blood in her mouth.43 She wrote to one of her devotees that the blood of Christ would make her strong on the field of battle as it had done for the virgin martyr, St Lucy.44 In another letter, this time to a Dominican friar, she wrote, in the hope that the pope would listen to her and declare a crusade on the infidel: 'I have written a letter to the Holy Father, pleading with him, for the love of the sweetest Blood, to give us permission to offer our bodies to martyrdom.' 45 Catherine wrote of the importance of the very flesh of Christ in a letter to one of her Dominican tertiary followers: 'You are a bride! You know well that the Son of God in the Circumcision, when his flesh was cut, married us all, giving us his flesh in the form of a ring, in sign of which he wished to marry all humanity.'46
The biographer of the blessed Aldobrandesca of Pisa (d.1309) told of how the holy woman, while meditating intently on the Passion of Christ in front of a crucifix felt a desire to taste the blood. Immediately, a drop of blood appeared on the side of the crucifix and she 'tasted its extraordinary delicacy and sweetness'. She then commissioned a painting which showed the Deposition of Christ, where the Virgin was shown 'with her mouth touching the wound in his side'. The Blessed Aldobrandesca could thus identify herself with the Virgin and, through the use of the image, remember both the Passion and her own taste of Christ's blood.47
Further, the assimilation of St Francis with the Crucified body of Christ is recalled in the canonisation proceedings of St Clare (1255) when a witness spoke of how St Clare revealed a vision to her. In the vision, St Clare saw Francis who revealed a breast to her and told her to come and suck it. She did so 'and that which she tasted seemed so sweet and pleasing that it could not be explained in any way'.48 St Francis's body is gendered female in this vision, as Christ's body was often gendered female in other female mystical visions. As Caroline Bynum Walker has demonstrated, male and female were not necessarily oppositional categories in the middle ages, rather they could be seen as being on a continuum of being.49 Flesh was often gendered as female, with the soul, or spirit, being gendered as male. The corporeal nature of the Eucharist could be seen as giving a female nature to the crucified Christ, and in Clare's vision, this nature is then transposed onto Francis, her spiritual father. Francis' bearing of the breast is reminiscient of the Virgin Mary baring her breast and giving milk, a common image in the Middle Ages, where Mary was elevated to the position of co-redemptrix, and milk and blood were seen as the same substance.50 Many late medieval paintings show Christ revealing his wounds while Mary reveals her breast, both acting as intercessors for humankind. A similar vision was received by the Angela of Foligno, who suckled Christ and saw him place the heads of her 'sons', that is, the Franciscan friars who followed her, into the wound in his side.51 She herself was embraced with the arm of the Crucified Christ and goes into his wound52
Role of Images
In the devotional piety discussed so far, the role of the image should be noted. It is while praying in front of panels, crucifixes and other images that these women experienced their visions, bodily transformations, and ecstasies. The role imagery played in late medieval devotion cannot be over-emphasised. The Franciscan St Bonaventure wrote in the thirteenth century, a picture is that which 'instructs, arouses pious emotions and awakens memories'.53 Bonaventure's Dominican counterpart, St Thomas Aquinas (d.1274) wrote that art was didactic in that it taught the person what to venerate, it helped the person to remember and it inspired devotion.54 Both authors were following in the long established tradition established by Pope Gregory the Great (669-731) who wrote, in response to iconoclasm, that art was the literature of the laity: '[…] it is one thing to worship a picture, another to learn from the story depicted what should be worshipped. For what a book is to those who can read, a picture presents to the uneducated who observe, since in it the unlearned see what they ought to follow, and in it those who know no letters can read. Hence a picture serves as reading specially for the people.' In a manual written for painters, the artist Theophilus wrote: 'But if, perchance, the faithful soul observes the representation of the Lord's Passion, it is stung by compassion. If it sees how many torments the saints endured in their bodies and what rewards of eternal life they have received, it eagerly embraces the observance of a better life. If it beholds how great are the joys of heaven and how great the torments in the eternal flames , it is animated by the hope of its good deeds and is shaken with fear by reflection on its sins'.55
Imagery makes frequent appearances in the lives of the saints. Images of the Crucifixion played an important role in the conversions of St Francis of Assisi and St John Gualberto, the Tuscan founder of the Vallombrosan order. A Crucifix spoke to the Bridget of Sweden in the Roman church of S. Paolo fuori le Mura in 1370.56 Umiliana dei Cerchi, seeing that her little her daughter was close to death prayed in front of an image of the Virgin and Child. As soon as she finished praying her child awoke, and then the Christ Child left the picture, went to the child in the bed, and made a sign over her. The child made the sign of the cross, was cured, and the Christ Child then disappeared.57 Villana dei Botti (d.1361), a Florentine holy woman associated with the Dominican Order, prayed daily in front of a Crucifix in the church of Santa Maria Novella. After Villana's death, the Crucifix was venerated not only for what it represented itself, but, like the Crucifixes associated with Bridget of Sweden, Francis of Assisi and St John Gualberto, because of its association with the holy woman.58 Ludolph of Saxony recounts a similar story of how a nun was so deeply affected by Christ's Passion that whenever she saw an image of Christ crucified she would lose control of herself and fall to the ground.59 Catherine of Siena became partially paralysed when she prayed in front of Giotto's mosaic of the Calling of the Fishermen in St Peters. Indeed, Catherine's mystic marriage with Christ was almost certainly influenced by images that she had seen of the mystic marriage of her name-sake, Catherine of Alexandria.60
What we know from diaries, letters, testaments and sermons about Florentine piety shows that images were used as devotional aids by the faithful of all classes. The Dominican friar Giovanni Dominici gave explicit instructions regarding the type of art that was to be kept in houses:
the Virgin Mary is suitable, with the Child on Her arm and a little bird or pomegranate in its hands. Other good figures are Jesus sucking milk, or Jesus asleep in his Mother's lap…. So let the child look upon his own image in the Holy Baptist, a little boy entering the desert dressed in a gown of camel's hair, playing with the birds, sucking leaves and sleeping on the ground. It would not harm him to see… the Massacre of the Innocents, so that he should fear arms and armed men. And so it would be well to nurture little girls on the sight of the eleven thousand virgins, talking, praying, and fighting.61
The Florentine merchant Giovanni Morelli's (1371-1444) diaries who the importance of images in his devotional life. In language reminiscient of the female mystics, he wrote:
And having calmed my heart and my mind, my eyes turned to the right side of the true Crucified Christ, where, looking, at the foot of the Cross I saw the pure and his holy blessed Mother, who I considered full of the such sorrow and such sadness; and considering that my sins were the reason for such affliction, […] but considering in the mind the sorrow of that pure Virgin, mother of the pure and precious Son, and considering the many dangers that from the day of his birth he had carried to the last in front of her eyes dead and broken by dissolute sinners.
Like the nun addressed in the Meditations on the Life of Christ, Morelli relates the sorrow of the Virgin to his own life, and his sick young son, Alberto:
and remembering the sorrow that I carried for my son, strongly I began to be ashamed and it was no small time before I rose from prayer […] …rendering many thanks to God and to his blessed Saints, with great comfort, it appearing to me that it had to be done, many times, holding in my arms the panel, I kissed the Crucified Christ and the figure of his Mother and of the Evangelist.62
Morelli's son died in 1406 aged ten, but his father noted that he had demanded that the image of the Virgin be brought to him in his bed.63
The image of the Crucifixion with St Clare in the Hunt Museum could have reminded the viewer, possibly a Clarissan nun or group of Clarissan nuns, of a number of different devotional themes. The image of the Crucified body of Christ, with angels catching his blood in chalices, would have brought to mind the sacrament of the Eucharist. The presence of St Clare could have led the viewer to think not only of the devotion of St Clare herself towards Christ and the Eucharist, but also, through her position at the foot of the Cross of the more usually represented saints Mary Magdalen or Francis. The Madonna, fainting in grief and barely supported by St John the Evangelist and St Mary Magdalen, served to demonstrate the intensity of emotion that the viewer should feel in looking at such an image. The gestures and the cases of the crowd around the fcross all direct the viewer upwards, towards the Crucified Christ and aid its audience, who, with St Clare and the friar, were not present at the event depicted, to see it, meditate upon it, and take part in it.
1. The panel was sold in Sotheby's, 24th June, 1965. Its measurements are 33 (h) x 21 (w).
2. On the iconography of the Crucixion, see Gertrud Schiller, The Iconography of Christian Art, vol.1 (London, 1966).
3. Giulia Barone, 'La riforma gregoriana', in Storia dell'Italia Religiosa: 1. L'Antichità e il Medioevo, ed. G. de Rosa, T.Gregory and A. Vauchez (Bari, 1993), pp.243- (pp.267-8).
4. For an analysis of how twelfth and thirteenth-century spirituality influenced Francis and his contemporaries, and the importance of the suffering Christ not only to Francis but to the Beguin movement of northern Europe, see André Vauchez, Ordini mendicanti e società italiana XIII-XV secolo (Milan, 1990), pp.61-3; and Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: studies in the spirituality of the high middle ages (Berkeley, 1982).
5. Vauchez, Ordini, p.36.
61. The Mendicant Orders are generally understood to be the Franciscans, the Dominicans, the Augustinian hermits, the Carmelites and the Servites. Their common characteristic in this period was the refusal to own property. The First Order were the male friars, the Second Order were female nuns, and the Third Order, or tertiaries, were lay penitents who, although they took vows, often lived in their own homes and had greater freedom of movement. For a summary of the evolution of the Mendicant orders, see Giulia Barone, 'Gli Ordini Mendicanti', in Storia dell'Italia Religiosa: 1. L'Antichità e il Medioevo, ed. G. de Rosa, T.Gregory and A. Vauchez (Bari, 1993), pp.347-373, especially pp.347-8.
7. Pseudo-Bonaventura, Meditations on the Life of Christ, ed. by Isa Ragusa and Rosalie Green (Princeton, 1977), p.38.
8. Meditations, p.89.
9. Pseudo-Bonaventura, Meditations, p.73
10. Pseudo-Bonaventura, Meditations, p.333
11. Pseudo-Bonaventura, Meditations, p.339.
12. Henk Van Os, The Art of Devotion in the Late Middle Ages in Europe, 1300-1500 (London and Amsterdam, 1994), p.22. The Edinburgh panel is a side panel of a triptych, the centre of which is occupied by the Virgin and Child.
13. Giorgio Vasari, Le Opere di Giorgio Vasari, ed. by Gaetano Milanesi, 9 vols., (Florence, 1875-85), I, p.402. Henceforth Vasari-Milanesi.
14. On the influence of Franciscan ideals on artistic production, iconography and style, see Louise Bourdua, The Franciscans and Art Patronage in Late Medieval Italy (Cambridge, 2004).
15. See for example, the Augustinian friar, Fra Francesco Mellini's commissions for the female convent of San Gaggio in the 1460s from the painter Neri di Bicci. Neri di Bicci, Le Ricordanze, ed. Bruno Santi (Pisa, 1976), pp. 163, 234. He was their confessor and dedicated his treatise on the Passion of Christ to them. Giuseppe Richa, Notizie Istoriche delle Chiese Fiorentine Divise ne' Suoi Quartieri, 10 vols (Florence, 1754-62), IX, p.61.
16. Vauchez, Ordini, p.53.
17. The feast of St Bartholomew was celebrated August 24th. The saint was reputedly flayed alive.
18. Angela of Foligno, Angela of Foligno: The Complete Works, ed. and trans. by Paul Lachanze (New York, 1993), p.169. The feast of Our Lady in August referred to by Angela was that of the Assumption, which occurs August 15th.
19. Vauchez, Ordini,p. 52.
20. Roberto Rusconi, 'L'Italia senza papa. L'età avignonese e il grande scisma d'occidente', in Storia dell'Italia Religiosa: 1. L'Antichità e il Medioevo, ed. by De Rosa, G., T. Gregory and A. Vauchez, Bari, 993, pp.427-454 (p.442).
21. Caterina da Siena, Le Lettere di Santa Caterina da Siena, ed. P. Giuseppe Di Caccia, 3 vols (Bologna, 1996-1999), I, letter 61, p.78, letter to Agnese, one of Catherine's followers.
22. Jacobus de Voragine (d.1298), The Golden Legend: Readings on the Lives of the Saints, translated by William Granger Ryan, 2 vols (Princeton, 1993), pp.374-383 (p.381).
23. André Vauchez, 'Comparsa e affermazione di una religiosità laica (XII secolo- inizio XIV secolo)', in Storia dell'Italia Religiosa: 1. L'Antichità e il Medioevo, ed. by De Rosa, G., T. Gregory and A. Vauchez, Bari, 1993, pp.397-425 (p.418)
24.The difficulties of defining various groups of penitential men and women, and of separating them from the more traditional monastic groups have been outlined by Duane Osheim, 'Conversion, Conversi, and the Christian Life in Late Medieval Tuscany,' Speculum 58 (1983), pp.368-90.
25. Katherine Gill, 'Open Monasteries for Women in Late Medieval and Early Modern Italy: Two Roman Examples,' in The Crannied Wall: Women, Religion and the Arts in Early Modern Europe, ed. C. A. Monson (Ann Arbor, 1992), 15-47 (p.18).
26. Giuseppe Maria Brocchi, Vite de' Santi Beati Fiorentini (Florence, 1742), pp.170-175.
27. Luigi Santoni, Raccolta di Notizie Storiche riguardanti le chiese dell'arcidiocesi di Firenze (Florence, 1847), p.269.
28. Boccaccio, Decameron, 5th day, 10th story (Harmondsworth, 1973), pp.471-2.
29. Vito Cortonensis, 'De B. Aemiliana,' Acta Sanctorum, Maii IV (Antwerp, 1685), 385-400. (Henceforth AASS). An early Florentine vernacular version is found in Giuseppe De Luca, 'Leggenda della Beata Umiliana de' Cerchi,' Scrittori di Religione del Trecento, Volgarizzamenti, 4 vols (Turin, 1977), III, 365-410.
30. Anna Benvenuti Papi, 'Umiliana dei Cerchi,' Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (Rome, 1960-1983), 692-6 (693).
31. Gaudenz Freuler, 'Andrea di Bartolo, Fra Tommaso d'Antonio Caffarini and Sienese Dominicans in Venice', Art Bulletin lxix (1987), pp.570-86 (p.574).
32. Angela of Foligno, Angela of Foligno: The Complete Works, pp.141, 175.
33. James Hall, Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art (London, 1979), p.53.
34. André Vauchez, La Santità nel Medioevo (Bologna, 1987), p.156.
35. Ernesto Menestò, 'The Apostolic Canonization Proceedings of Clare of Montefalco, 1318-1319', in Women and Religion in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, ed. by Daniel Bornstein and Roberto Rusconi, trans. by Margery J. Schneider (Chicago, 1996), pp.104-129 (p.105). See also Cordelia Warr, 'Representation, Imitation, Rejection: Chiara of Montefalco (†1308) and the Passion of Christ', in Studies on Medieval and Early Modern Women, 4: Victims or Viragos?, ed. Christine Meek and Catherine Lawless (Dublin, 2005), forthcoming.
36. Menestò, 'The Apostolic Canonization Proceedings', p.116.
37. Brocchi, Vite, pp.9-11.
38. Rona Goffen, 'Friar Sixtus IV and the Sistine Chapel', Renaissance Quarterly, vol.39, no.2 (1986), pp.218-262 (p.221).
39. Vauchez, Santità, p.52.
40. Mirri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1991).
41. Marchionne di Coppo Stefani, Cronica Fiorentina, ed.Niccolo Rodolico, Rerum Italicum Scriptores, xxx, 1 (Città di Castello, 1903), pp.32-3.
42. Caroline Bynum Walker, 'Wonder', The American Historical Review, cii, 1 (1997), pp.1-26 (pp.11)
43. Catherine of Siena, The Dialogue, ed. Susanne Noffke (New York, 1980), p.379, quoted in Caroline Walker Bynum, Fast, Feast, and Flesh: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women', Representations, no.11 (1985), pp.1-25 (p.13).
44. Caterina da Siena, Lettere, I, no.283, p.366. 'The Blood animates us and makes us run to the field of battle; as Lucy did, who was so enamoured of God, keeping a constant memory of the blood of the Son of God, that with a strong spirit she ran to offer her body as sacrifice'.
45. Caterina da Siena, Lettere, I, p.397.
46. Caterina da Siena, Lettere, I, no.50, p.82. Walker Bynum has pointed out that St Catherine, who was mystically married to Christ in a vision, clearly believed that the ring used was the foreskin of Christ. Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York, 1992), pp.172-3.
47. Chiara Frugoni, 'Female Mystics, Visions, and Iconography', in Women and Religion in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, ed. by Daniel Bornstein and Roberto Rusconi, trans. by Margery J. Schneider, (Chicago, 1996), pp.130-164 (p.137).
49. Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, pp.108-9.
50. See also Charles Wood, 'The Doctor's Dilemma: Sin, Salvation and the Menstrual Cycle in Medieval Thought', Speculum, lvi (1981), pp.710-27.
51. Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, p.129.
52. Angela of Foligno, The Complete Works, p.175.
53. S. Bonaventure, Liber Sententiorum III, dist.9, art.1, q.2, quoted in Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origins and Character, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA., 1953), p.141.
54. Gregory I, Registrum Epistolarum, quoted in Margaret Aston, Lollards and Reformers: Images and Literature in Late Medieval Religion (London, 1984), p.116.
55. Andrew Martindale 'Patrons and Minders: the Intrusion of the Secular into Sacred Spaces in the late Middle Ages' Studies in Church History – The Church and the Arts, ed. Diana Wood (London, 1992), p.143
56. Vasari-Milanesi, I, p.541 (life of Pietro Cavallini)
57. De Luca, 'Leggenda', pp.396-8.
58. Vincenzo Fineschi, Memorie sopra il cimitero antico della chiesa di S. Maria Novella di Firenze (Florence, 1787), p.58; Joannes Carolus, 'Vita Beatae Villanae', AA.SS. Augusti V (Antwerp, 1741), p.864.
59. Ludolph of Saxony, Vita Iesu Christi (Paris, 1529), Lviii.
60. Millard Meiss, Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death (Princeton, 1955) pp.105-107.
61. Fra Giovanni Dominici, Regola del governo di cura familiare, ed. Donato Salvi (Florence, 1860), pp.131-2, translated in Iris Origo, The Merchant of Prato (Harmondsworth, 1979), p.371.
62. Giovanni Morelli, 'Ricordi', in Mercanti Scrittori: Ricordi nella Firenze tra Medioevo e Rinascimento, ed. by Vittore Branca (Milan, 1986), pp.308-11. Henceforth Branca-Morelli.
63. Branca-Morelli, p.294.
2 Responses to "Images, piety and women in late medieval devotion: The Hunt Crucifixion with Saint Clare."
Great article Catherine and, in keeping with the subject, a meditational piece in itself .
Keep up the good work, and as Clare's brother Francis said:
Preach the Gospel at all times and when necessary use words.
Catherine Lawless says:
Thank you so much for your kind comment. Best, C.