Breaking the silence: the poor Clares and the visual arts in fifteenth-century Italy

Renaissance Quarterly, Summer, 1995 by Jeryldene M. Wood

Dante clearly expected his tale of breached cloister and broken vows to be understood as a failure of will, for the doubts he expressed concerning the justice of punishing those who were forced against their desire usher in his discourse on free will in the next canto. Nonetheless, for modern readers both Dante's exemplum and his choice of language also elucidate the pervasiveness of traditional attitudes that viewed the female gender as weak by nature. Dante locates the inconstant souls on the moon, the lowest of the celestial spheres and a secondary planet visible only by virtue of the reflected light of the sun, and he singles out a monastic woman who has slighted her vows, not because she is intrinsically evil but because she exemplifies inherently passive beings who submit to a stronger force regardless of its sinfulness. While the families actually break the sanctity of the cloister in his poem, it is Suor Constantia, as Piccarda was called in the convent, who pays an eternal price for her frailty of will.(2)

Piccarda's voice is of course Dante's, yet until recently our notions about nuns in early modern Italy were largely formed by such fiction. As contemporary literary and historical studies have revealed, monastic women were in fact not silent. They conversed among themselves and with others - laypersons as well as ecclesiastics - in letters, histories, devotional tracts, prayers, and sonnets. The role of the visual arts as vehicles of communication for nuns has been less explored, however.(3) This article argues for the cogency of the arts to religious women in Renaissance Italy by examining the patronage, production, and response to works of art made for three fifteenth-century convents of Piccarda's order, the female Franciscans.

Bright illuminations on the calendar pages in a breviary decorated by Sano di Pietro in the 1470s for the Poor Clares at Santa Chiara in Siena provide a glimpse of women whose contemplative lives usually included as much labor as prayer.(4) Saint Clare's monastic rule required the nuns to work; indeed, their survival as a community committed to the practice of corporate as well as personal poverty depended on their labor to supplement the alms donated to the convent.(5) As Dante's choice of words to question Piccarda implies, the nuns wove and embroidered ecclesiastical vestments and altar cloths; thus the sister who pauses to watch the falling snow on the right of Sano's illumination for January appropriately holds a distaff [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. Most convents of Clarisse owned land that was cultivated with grains, olives, and grapes and worked by unprofessed lay sisters, tenants, and outside workers who were hired to perform specialized or heavy tasks and labor intensive jobs that needed extra hands, as illustrated on Sano's page for March [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED].(6)

The representation for March reveals that the recipients of the breviary were Observant Poor Clares, for the painted nuns wear the coarse black veils legislated by the reformers in 1460. Their community would have observed the vow of strict communal poverty as it had been outlined by Saints Francis and Clare and then revived in the early Quattrocento by such Observant reformers as Saint Bernardino of Siena, who strove to reinstate the original Franciscan spirit that they believed had been abandoned by the order. Nevertheless, Sano's diminutive Clarisse kneel before a shining gold crucifix placed on an altar covered with expensive red and gold brocade and embroidered silk or linen cloth. The contradiction between belief and practice this illustrates, and for that matter implicit in the very existence of the ornate breviary, makes one wonder whether the Poor Clares were in fact guilty of inconstancy - not to vows of chastity and obedience as in Dante's verse - but to the vow of poverty at the heart of Franciscan spirituality.

A memoriale written by the nuns of Santa Maria di Monteluce at Perugia in order to preserve their history for future sisters, clarifies the system of artistic patronage in fifteenth-century houses of Observant Poor Clares. For in addition to the investitures and deaths of sisters, noteworthy visits from popes and cardinals, and the granting of indulgences, this chronicle records the reception of gifts and legacies, the production of the scriptorium, and the initiation and completion of building projects from the time of the nuns' vote to adopt the Observant rule in 1448 until the eighteenth-century suppression of the convent.(7)

The Perugian nuns worshipped in one of the oldest of the Poor Clares' establishments. Consecrated in 1253, Santa Maria di Monteluce retains the basic plan of most Umbrian medieval churches with an aisleless nave despite several renovations and its current status as a hospital church [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 3 OMITTED].(8) The plain stone facade and the separate nun's choir behind the altar were constructed during an extensive building campaign at mid-fifteenth century, while much of the lavish interior decoration dates to a major remodeling in the late Baroque.(9) According to the memoriale, the fifteenth-century abbesses instigated most of the architectural and decorative projects, chose the builders and artists, and supervised the refurbishing of the premises, which was necessitated in part by the reform itself and in part by the ensuing growth of the community.(10) Benefices such as tithes and rents paid for construction, whereas legacies from individuals were expended on commissions for sculpture, paintings, illuminated manuscripts, and costly liturgical objects. A bequest from the mother of Sisters Eufrasia and Battista Alfani permitted the nuns to order a marble tabernacle by the Florentine Francesco di Simone Ferrucci, who installed it on the Altar of the Sacrament in 1483 [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 4 OMITTED].(11) Lay donors also provided finished works of art that included paintings such as a Madonna and Child with Angels by Bartolommeo Caporali of c. 1465, as well as silk and brocade canopies, altar cloths and clerical vestments (often worked in gold and silver thread), manuscripts, and other expensive ecclesiastical items listed in numerous entries throughout the chronicle.(12) Predictably, the most consistent benefactors were the nuns' families, which were aristocratic or wealthy Perugian clans such as the Alfani, the Oddi, and the Baglioni.(13) Money provided at the investiture of novices - generally not from the giovani or young virgins whose "dowry" supported their lifetime needs, but from entering widows who needed to dispose of property - purchased works of art, as did investiture money that remained after a nun died.(14) In fact, a bequest from one of these widows paid for the most famous endowment at Monteluce [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 5 OMITTED].