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

Renaissance Quarterly, Summer, 1995 by Jeryldene M. Wood

On 29 December 1505 the Abbess Battista Alfani recorded that the convent had ordered a painting of the Assumption of the Virgin, a subject appropriate to their church, for the high altar. The nuns selected the artist Raphael of Urbino based on the advice of citizens and their spiritual fathers, and they paid him thirty gold ducats on account from alms that Suor Illuminata de Perinello had bequeathed "to spend on things of the church."(15) We know from the extant contract that the painting was to resemble Ghirlandaio's Assumption in the Franciscan friars' San Girolamo at Narni, and from a second contract of 1516 that the nuns themselves had approved Raphael's drawing for the work.(16) Still incomplete when Raphael died in 1520, the altarpiece was finished by Giulio Romano and Gian Francesco Penni and finally delivered to Monteluce in 1525.(17) As Abbess Battista noted, the Assumption was ordered specifically for the "altare maggiore de la chiesia de fuore" and its theme was selected for its pertinence to Monteluce: not only was the complex dedicated to Mary, but the feast of her Assumption on 15 August was honored with a special indulgence for visits to the church and marked by a solemn public procession and the singing of High Mass and Vespers.(18) Such specificity was not unusual because the abbesses carefully distinguished between commissions for the public church, the chiesia de fuore, and the inner church or nun's choir, the chiesia nostra dentro, throughout the chronicle. For example, the vaulting of the former occurs in 1470-72, whereas the latter had already been vaulted in 1449-51.(19) The Poor Clares ordered art of high quality for the external church: brass candlesticks crafted in Venice; brocade and silk cloths and marble sculpture imported from Florence; and paintings created by prominent or promising Urnbrian artists.(20) Furnishings for the sisters' church were to the contrary mostly utilitarian and sometimes even second hand, as when a new armadio was made for the outer church in 1504-05 and the old one was moved to the nun's choir.(21)

Reading through the cronaca of Monteluce provides a sense for the day-to-day aspects of artistic patronage in a religious house: the funding, the choice of artists, and the time and planning involved in artistic commissions. With the exception of a legacy whose terms requested the making of a relief of the Madonna and Child for the altar of the infirmary to provide comfort for the sick and dying nuns, the chronicle does not suggest the personal significance of art for the Poor Clares.(22) To understand their private attitudes toward art and devotions during the Quattrocento, we must turn to the writings and paintings created by the abbess at another Franciscan Observant convent, the Corpus Domini at Bologna.

As a paradoxical combination of pragmatic abbess, inspired musician, and devout painter, as well as a passionate mystic and a visionary writer whose works were read by the Clarisse throughout Italy, Saint Catherine Vigri was a principal figure in the renaissance of the Poor Clares during the fifteenth-century reform era. Saint Catherine actually passed most of her life at Ferrara, where her father was employed at the court of Niccolo d'Este and where she served as a lady-in-waiting to Niccolo's daughter Margarita. There is no evidence of her religious vocation until after Margarita's marriage in the late 1420s when the saint entered the Corpus Domini, a Ferrarese convent that was in the process of becoming a house of Observant Poor Clares. In 1456 Saint Catherine was sent to found a convent at Bologna, also called the Corpus Domini, where she served as abbess until her death in 1463.(23)