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Women, Art and Spirituality: The Poor Clares of Early Modern Italy - Review
Art Bulletin, The, March, 1998 by Ann Roberts
What is most puzzling about these choices is that the book opens with a chapter entitled "The Manuscript as Object." This title, however, further challenges our expectations and demonstrates a certain semiotic slippage. It treats the book not as a physical object with specific characteristics, but as the object of social transactions between giver (Jacques Raponde) and recipient (Philip the Bold), or between client (Raponde) and illuminator (unknown, but generally referred to as the "Coronation Master," after a designation by Millard Meiss). These relationships are adroitly and convincingly argued, and this section of Buettner's book offers many insights into the reasons for and mechanisms by which aristocratic collectors surrounded themselves with books, as well as why this text might have appealed to Philip the Bold in particular.
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The Paris manuscript is also the object of a linguistic and cultural transaction: this is the first translation into French of Boccaccio's original Latin. Buettner argues that Raponde, a Parisian merchant of Lucchese descent, was the moving force behind the decision to translate this text into French and that he advised the decorative program. She demonstrates several instances in which the illuminator was clearly working from the French translation and indicates moments when the images deviate from the text to make the stories conform to French rather than Italian custom. She also identifies insertions into the program that reflect Jacques Raponde's interest in silk production.
With this contextual material confined to the first chapter, the bulk of this book is devoted to readings of the images. Faced with the task of interpreting 109 separate images, the author prefers not to use conventional iconographic methods, that is, to trace a "diachronic chain of images that functioned as antecedents" (p. 25) for these illuminations. The author rightly explains that establishing such traditions of representation is difficult for secular images of the Middle Ages, as illuminators had no ready stock of models for newly translated secular texts. As a result, Buettner's book does not examine parallels, predecessors, or other iconographic comparisons to the miniatures; save one, all of the illustrations come from the Paris manuscript. One should not approach Buettner's book expecting to find discussion or illustration of medieval iconographic traditions for representing famous women, as individuals or as types.
Buettner sees the illuminations not as illustrations, but as interpreters of the text. In her reading, the images in the Paris manuscript filter Boccaccio's text through another medieval textual tradition: estate literature. She thus discusses the images of women according to their social status, rather than their order in the text. Queens, empresses, goddesses, priestesses, and warriors are interpreted as linked thematic groupings. A further thematic grouping concerns images of death, dismemberment, and torture, which are distressingly frequent in the stories of these famous women regardless of their estates. This organizational strategy gives the author room to make many insightful comments about the "rift . . . between representation and imagined reality" (p. 43) in the depiction of specific classes. For example, several images depict queens who rule alone even though, according to French custom, queens could not rule by themselves. Buettner concludes that these images represent male power: they are not exemplars for women. Interesting insights into the representations of women warriors, writers, and artists abound in this chapter. What might have made this chapter somewhat more useful to those who haven't memorized Boccaccio's text is a summary of the text and a more detailed discussion of the relationship between text and image. The reader would then be in a better position to accept the rather offhand comment made by the author that the three instances where more than one image illustrates a biography are a function of the layout, rather than a narrative tool or other imperative. Buettner argues that the presentation of women served on one level to reinforce contemporary gender and class expectations; yet because the manuscript placed before the eyes of the Duke of Burgundy numerous images of women in unexpected roles, it may have had some (feminist?) effect on the Duke and his court.
