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

The Roman Confraternita di San Giovanni Decollato, actually founded by and comprised of well-to-do Florentines, conducted execution rituals in much the same manner as the Compagnia dei Neri. They attended to the condemned with tavolette, crucifixes (including a very large replica of the crucified Christ) and prayers, provided a confessor (usually a Jesuit rather than a Dominican) and final communion, helped the prisoner to write his last wishes, letter to family and will, and arranged his burial. (64) Sympathetically, they sang to him penitential psalms, particularly the Miserere, and the Litany of Loreto, while he gazed at a panel from their diverse collection of tavolette. (65) The pictures were often mounted in unusually broad frames, so that the condemned person, when on route to execution, would not be distracted by family and throngs of onlookers, and could focus completely on the image and, through it, on Christ's necessary sacrifice. Presumably for this same reason, the compositions of the pictures tend to be simple, almost schematic, with elements arranged to keep the eye engaged, trained on--or continuously circling back to--the centre of the work. Indeed, the directed path of eye movement together with the prisoner's continual repetition of the Credo or Ave Maria are akin to techniques employed in hypnosis and may have induced a similarly trancelike or, at least, acute mental state. (66)

As has been observed by Jean S. Weisz, Edgerton, and others, the members of the confraternity of San Giovanni Decollato provided their prisoners with a wealth of visual 'comforts' and stimuli; in addition to the array of tavolette, representing, on their reverses, a variety of saints' martyrdoms in order to suit the paziente's specific circumstances or mode of execution, the brotherhood had its oratory, church and chapels grandly decorated with appropriate paintings. (67) The earliest of these works, executed by the Florentine artists Francesco Salviati and Jacopino del Conte, are realized in an extravagantly complex, mannerist style. Yet, despite its artistic flourishes and excesses, Jacopino's Descent from the Cross (c. 1551), on the oratory's altar wall, was earnestly conceived to fulfil the organisation's mission (Fig. 12). Just as the tavolette depict or call particular attention to saved penitents, such as Peter, Mary Magdalene and the Good Thief, Jacopino's work features the remorseful Thief and the Roman centurion, who both experienced spiritual conversion at the Crucifixion--dramatis personae of the Gospel accounts who seldom appear in Italian art, let alone major works, of this period. (68) The centurion grasps Christ's lower legs to help remove him from the cross--a gesture meant to associate the soldier with the penitent Mary Magdalene, who is often depicted passionately embracing the cross at the feet of the crucified Christ. Moreover, Jacopino visually bonds and lends additional prominence to the penitents by placing the Magdalene at centre, vertically aligned with the centurion and Christ. The painter also acknowledges the important service of the confraternity members in representing the striding Magdalene's urgent attempt to comfort the Virgin and the dutiful attention of the centurion to Christ's body. Other artists, notably Giorgio Vasari and Jacopo Zucchi, relinquished their usual, fashionably intricate and opulent manners for the confraternity; as Weisz observed, Vasari's Beheading of St John the Baptist (1552), on the high altar of the Church of San Giovanni Decollato, and Zucchi's Crucifixion (c. 1580-85), possibly intended for the brotherhood's Cappella della Conforteria in the Campidoglio prison (now sacristy of the Oratory of San Giovanni Decollato), closely conform in style to the darkly austere tavolette. (69)