Imagination all compact: tavolette and confraternity rituals for the condemned in renaissance Italy: Larry J. Feinberg traces the history of the ideas that lay behind tavolette, devotional images held up to the faces of condemned men as they were led to execution

Apollo, May, 2005 by Larry J. Feinberg

As the condemned, arms and legs in chains, were led down the stairs of the confraternity building, the brothers asked them to declare In manus tuas, Domine, commendo spiritum meum, words that they would say again, as Christ did, just before the moment of death. When the pazienti left the quarters of the Black Brotherhood, they were conducted, after a long procession, to the confraternity's chapel at the Pratello della Giustizia (Field of Execution or Justice), where they stopped before an altarpiece representing the Lamentation (1436; now in the Museo di San Marco, Florence), painted by the Dominican master Fra Angelico (Fig. 9). (50) Profiting from close ties with the Dominican order of the Florentine church of Santa Maria Novella, the Compagnia dei Neri had received the work as a gift from a benevolent Dominican friar. As Millard Meiss pointed out long ago, Fra Angelico's unusual composition, in which the Virgin Mary, Apostles, and saints almost all assume humbled, kneeling or seated positions around the dead Christ, derives from a picture created over sixty years earlier by Niccolo di Tommaso (c. 1370; Congregazione della Carita, Parma). (51) The inscription MEUS on the collar of St Catherine of Alexandria in Fra Angelico's work discreetly alludes to verses from Isaiah (53:4-5), also written in Latin on Niccolo's painting: 'Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, and with his stripes we are healed." (52) Fra Angelico's partial and somewhat obscure reference to these verses perhaps suggests that the entire Old Testament passage was recited for or with the condemned men in the picture's presence. Very near the work and on their knees at the altar, as if huddled alongside Christ's mourners in the painting, the pazienti received their last communion, before proceeding to the platform for beheading.

[FIGURE 9 OMITTED]

Certain of these rituals may have been reflected in--or reinforced by--parts of the aforementioned, ben morire sermon of the fiery Dominican Savonarola. There, he advises that someone should recite the Credo continuously for a dying person, which was the customary practice of his fellow friars. (53) As a precaution for unexpected and sudden death, Savonarola, who lived among Fra Angelico's private, devotional paintings in San Marco, recommended that households display three pictures, representing heaven and hell, Death at the door of a than in sickbed (Fig. 11), and a man on his deathbed surrounded by family, friends, a confessor, and demons. (54) Savonarola suggests that such images, with another picture of Death and a portable, small piece of bone (morticina d'osso), would serve as effective mementi mori, and ensure that their owners would always maintain the proper, morbidly-alert state of mind, ever prepared for the incalculable moment of demise. (55)