Female Piety and Food in the Italian Renaissance

Home , Andrea del Castagno, Crucifixion (Mantegna), Crucifixion (Vouet), Fresco, Last Supper (Cranach), Last Supper (Fernandes)

Caitlin Hoerr

2015

For my grandfather, Michael J. Mussomeli, whose trips to Sicily, Rome, and Florence inspired my passionate relationship to Italian food.

“THE WORD GAVE HIMSELF AS FOOD:” FEMALE PIETY AND FOOD IN THE ITALIAN

RENAISSANCE

Caitlin Hoerr

ABSTRACT

This project considers the particularly passionate relationship between women and food, in the context of select artworks created for female convents and nunneries. The depiction of food and the act of eating in Renaissance artworks created for female religious institutions takes on powerful symbolic meaning for the viewers, acting as a didactic message about the relationship of the female viewer to Christ’s spiritual and corporeal body. Furthermore, the use of food as a crucial tool for female spirituality offers insight into the ways that women constructed agency within a patriarchal society.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This project would not have been possible without the incredible support I received throughout the past few years. First, I would like to thank Kim Butler Wingfield, who has guided me as this project has grown and shifted, given me support and assistance for the past two years, and taught me the joys of being an art historian. I am also grateful to Joanne Allen, Andrea

Pearson and Juliet Bellow, who have been instrumental in pushing me to be a better writer and researcher. Kathleen Nolan has provided me with endless opportunities for growth and gave me the courage to pursue art history beyond the safety of Hollins University. I owe an enormous thank you to my parents, for providing me with endless love and support. I am indebted to

Brittney Bailey and Danielle Sensabaugh, who have been my partners in crime and emotional support system for the past two years, and have listened to iterations of this paper so often they can probably recite it themselves. And to Maran, who continues to be the best and most supportive person I know.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ...... ii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... iii

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ...... v

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

CHAPTER 1 FOR HER TO EAT: FEMALE SPIRITUALITY AND FOOD IN ANDREA DEL CASTAGNO’S LAST SUPPER...... 6

CHAPTER 2 FROM SINFUL TO SAINTED: REPENTENCE AND REGULATION IN SANDRO BOTTICELLI’S PALA DELLE CONVERTITE ...... 26

CHAPTER 3 “RETURN TO THE EXAMPLE OF SAINTS:” SAVONAROLA’S CORPOREAL AND SAINTLY BODIES IN PLAUTILLA NELLI’S LAST SUPPER ...... 45

CONCLUSION ...... 61

ILLUSTRATIONS ...... 62

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 64

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1. Taddeo Gaddi, Last Supper, Tree of Life, and Four Miracle Scenes, 1360, fresco, Florence, Italy: Santa Croce...... 62

Figure 2. Andrea del Castagno, Last Supper, 1447, fresco, Florence, Italy: Sant’ Apollonia ...... 62

Figure 3. Andrea del Castagno, Last Supper, Crucifixion, Resurrection and Entombment, 1447, fresco, Florence, Italy: Sant’ Apollonia...... 62

Figure 4. Duccio di Buoninsinga, Last Supper: detail of Maesta Altarpiece, 1308-11, tempera on panel, Siena, Italy: Siena Cathedral...... 62

Figure 5. Andrea del Castagno, The Resurrection, Crucifixion, and Burial of Christ, 1447, fresco, Florence, Italy: Sant Apollonia...... 62

Figure 6. Paolo Schiavo, Crucifixion, 1438-47, fresco, Florence, Italy: Sant Apollonia...... 62

Figure 7. Andrea del Castagno, detail of Last Supper, 1447, fresco, Florence, Italy: Sant’ Apollonia...... 62

Figure 8. Andrea del Castagno, Saint James the Greater: detail of Last Supper, 1447, fresco, Florence, Italy: Sant’ Apollonia...... 62

Figure 9. Andrea del Castagno, detail of Last Supper, 1447, fresco, Florence, Italy: Sant’ Apollonia...... 62

Figure 10. Andrea del Castagno, The Crucifixion, 1447, fresco, Florence, Italy: Sant’ Apollonia...... 62

Figure 11. Andrea del Castagno, The Entombment, 1447, fresco, Florence, Italy: Sant’ Apollonia...... 62

Figure 12. Andrea del Castagno, Entombment, 1447, sinopia underdrawing, Florence Italy: Sant’ Apollonia...... 62

Figure 13. Andrea del Castagno, Saints Matthew, Phillip, Thomas: detail of Last Supper, 1447, fresco, Florence, Italy: Sant’ Apollonia...... 62

Figure14. Andrea del Castagno, Judas and Christ: detail of Last Supper, 1447, fresco, Florence, Italy: Sant’ Apollonia...... 62

Figure 15. Sandro Botticelli, Pala delle Convertite Reconstruction, originally for Santa Elisabetta delle Convertite, 1490-4, tempera and oil on panel, Florence, Italy...... 62

Figure 16. Sandro Botticelli, Feast in the House of Simon, originally for Santa Elisabetta delle Convertite, 1490-4, tempera and oil on panel, 20 x 43.8 cm, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Philadelphia Museum of Art...... 63

Figure 17. Sandro Botticelli, The Last Moment of the Magdalene, originally for Santa Elisabetta delle Convertite, 1490-4, tempera and oil on panel, 20 x 43.8 cm, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Philadelphia Museum of Art...... 63

Figure 18. Sandro Botticelli, The Trinity with Saints, originally for Santa Elisabetta delle Convertite, 1490-4, tempera and oil on panel, 215 × 192 cm, London, England: Courtauld Institute of Art...... 63

Figure 19. Sandro Botticelli, Predella Panel Reconstruction from the Pala delle Convertite, originally for Santa Elisabetta delle Convertite, 1490-4, tempera and oil on panel, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Philadelphia Museum of Art...... 63

Figure 20. Sandro Botticelli, Conversion of the Magdalene, originally for Santa Elisabetta delle Convertite, 1490-4, tempera and oil on panel, 20 x 43.8 cm, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Philadelphia Museum of Art...... 63

Figure 21. Sandro Botticelli, “Noli me Tangere,” originally for Santa Elisabetta delle Convertite, 1490-4, tempera and oil on panel, 20 x 43.8 cm, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Philadelphia Museum of Art...... 63

Figure 22. Donatello, The Penitent Magdalene, 1453-5, wood, Florence, Italy: Museo dell’Opera del Duomo...... 63

Figure 23. Sandro Botticelli, Mystic Crucifixion, 1500, tempera and oil on canvas (transferred from panel), 72.4 x 51.4 cm, Boston, Massachusetts: Harvard Art Museums Fogg Museum...... 63

Fig 24. Sandro Botticelli, Tobias and Raphael, detail of Holy Trinity with Saints, originally for Santa Elisabetta delle Convertite, 1490-4, tempera and oil on panel, London, England: Courtauld Institute of Art...... 63

Figure 25. Plautilla Nelli, Last Supper, originally for Santa Caterina da Siena, sixteenth century, fresco, Florence, Italy: Santa Maria Novella...... 63

Figure 26. Leonardo da Vinci, Last Supper, 1494-8, tempera on gesso, Milan, Italy: Santa Maria delle Grazie...... 63

Figure 27. Domenico Ghirlandaio, Last Supper, 1486, fresco, Florence, Italy: San Marco...... 63

Figure 28. Domenico Ghirlandaio, Scattered Cherries, detail of Last Supper, 1486, fresco, Florence, Italy: San Marco...... 63

Figure 29. Plautilla Nelli, Lamentation, sixteenth century, oil on panel, 288 x 192 cm, Florence, Italy: Museo de San Marco...... 63

Figure 30. Plautilla Nelli, Crying Women, detail of Lamentation, sixteenth century, oil on panel, Florence, Italy: Museo de San Marco...... 63

Figure 31. Andrea del Sarto, Lamentation Over the Dead Christ, 1524, oil on panel, 203 x 239 cm, Florence, Italy: Palazzo Pitti...... 63

Figure 32. Fra Bartolomeo, Lamentation, 1511, oil on panel, 158 x 199 cm, Florence, Italy: Palazzo Pitti...... 63

Figure 33. Plautilla Nelli, Food and Drink, detail of Last Supper, originally for Santa Caterina da Siena, sixteenth century, fresco, Florence, Italy: Santa Maria Novella...... 63

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INTRODUCTION

The conception of the female spiritual body in the Italian Renaissance is one that is exemplified by the cultural and religious relationship of women and food, seen through rites of fasting and the Eucharist. While male spirituality was cerebral, the female religious persona was constructed through the material and tangible experience. This thesis will examine the way in which religious women aspired to a relationship with Christ through different facets of their corporeality. In so doing, I aim to establish a framework for thinking about the alignment of cultural ideas of food with Renaissance spirituality, especially in Florentine women’s institutions.

Art historical scholarship on these subjects remains focused on the medieval religious woman; however, the period of 1400 to 1600 was a time of great religious and cultural change, with the population of nuns in the city of Florence increasing dramatically. This project considers food as a vehicle through which women express their passion for Christ, while focusing on artworks created for female convents and nunneries. The representation of food and the act of eating in Renaissance artworks created for female religious institutions take on powerful symbolic meaning for the viewers, acting as a didactic message about the relationship of the female viewer to Christ’s spiritual and corporeal body. Furthermore, the use of food as a crucial tool for female spirituality offers insight into the ways in which women constructed agency and access within a patriarchal society. Rather than examining this relationship between women and food through a theological reading of each convent’s rites and rituals, this project will instead look to the influences of patrons and the daily experiences of the community.

The vehemence with which Medieval and Renaissance women approached food has not gone undocumented or unstudied. The use of food as a means of bodily regulation and as a vehicle for the expression of passion for Christ and the sacraments have been used by scholars to situate the culture of female spirituality.

Rudolph Bell’s seminal book Holy Anorexia (1985) studies the suppression of physical urges and corporeal needs in medieval female spirituality in relation to an anachronistic medical diagnosis of disordered eating.1 Bell proposes that this suppression was a tool through which women freed their spirits from the cultural belief in female unworthiness. Starvation, fasting, and food rituals were a means of communicating with God, and could bring the nun or woman a heroic or sainted status. Caroline Walker Bynum’s subsequent work Holy Feast and Holy Fast:

The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women provides nuance to this relationship of women and food, especially the devoted attention that early medieval nuns and saints paid to the sacraments of the Eucharist.2 Bynum’s scholarship sought to historicize the culture of food- related female piety, exemplified by scores of women across Europe who claimed sanctity and a relationship to Christ through extended fasting, food multiplication miracles, and Eucharistic visions.3 Both scholars point to the way that women used fasting and eating as a means of access to a Catholic church that was increasingly closed off to female sanctity, and create frameworks that use rituals of eating and fasting to examine gendered relationships to the Christian faith.

Both works focus on medieval religious culture; their methodologies have not been fully extended into the Renaissance. Art historians who employ their methodologies, such as Diana

1 Rudolph Bell, Holy Anorexia (Chicago, University of Chicago Press: 1985).

2 Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkley: University of California Press, 1987).

3 Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, 74.

Hiller in her book Gendered Perceptions of Florentine Last Supper Frescoes, c. 1350-1490

(2014) do so only when discussing works that date before the sixteenth century, and use their frameworks to situate a social-historical basis for examination of food-related piety and artwork.4

The aim of this thesis is to further establish that religious rituals of feasting and fasting were used by religious orders to attain different aims, and allowed new spheres of access within the church to religious women. By applying the framework and methodologies of Bynum and Bell to artworks created between 1450 and 1600, artwork created for different religious orders are examined in terms of their political and religious history, and the relationship of women to both food and their corporeal body as a means to attain spiritual grace.

My project will present three case studies, each focusing on a single work of art housed in a Florentine convent. The first chapter, which examines Andrea del Castagno’s Last Supper for the convent of Sant’ Apollonia, lays the groundwork for my treatment of female food-related piety. The Benedictine rituals of fasting and punishment within the refectory, or dining space, offer insight into the larger relationship of nuns and food, including the traditions of fasting and the treatment of food within the convent. The fresco of Christ’s Last Supper, as well as those that accompany it (Christ’s Crucifixion, Burial, and Resurrection) offer didactic guidance to the nuns who would view them as they ate. The painted female saints simultaneously present illustrations of the controlled religious relationship to Christ’s corporeal body in the larger context of regulation and identity. The relationship of women to Christ is examined alongside the male

Apostles pictured, whose authoritative gestures speak to the new relationships to sacerdotal authority and papal power facing the convent.

4 Diana Hiller, Gendered Perceptions of Florentine Last Supper Frescoes (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing, 2014).

The second chapter addresses Sandro Botticelli’s Pala delle Convertite, painted as a high altarpiece in 1490-4 for the church of the Augustinian convent, Santa Elisabetta delle Convertite.

The central panel and its accompanying predella panels represent episodes from the life of Saint

Mary Magdalene, whose holiness was expressed through the physical changes to her corporeal body and whose life was an exemplary tale of overindulgence and subsequent renunciation.

Commissioned to hang in the public church of a convent known as a haven for repentant prostitutes, the artwork dramatized the evolution from sin to sainthood of Mary Magdalene.

Through themes of repentance and regulation expressed through her corporeal needs and desires, the story of Mary Magdalene emerges as one that emphasizes the aims of the convent and its patrons, as demonstrated by the convent’s history and the penitential rules in place for its nuns.

The depictions of this saint turning away from earthly food and towards a holier experience not only functions didactically, but creates an emphasis on the necessity of male sacerdotal authority for repentance.

The final case study will examine the Last Supper painted in 1550 for the Dominican convent of Santa Caterina by its prioress, Suor Plautilla Nelli. A well-known work that was lauded by Giorgio Vasari in 1568, this fresco presents a rare moment to witness this theme represented by a female artist for her fellow nuns. This chapter will examine Nelli’s Last Supper in relation to Savonarola’s own conception and metaphorical use of the spiritual female body. A textual analysis of his writings and sermons, alongside an iconographical examination of Nelli’s works, will demonstrate that her unique focus on the physical reactions and emotions of the corporeal body is not a result of poor artistic training. Instead, one can read strains of

Savonarolan teachings inscribed on the painted figures. The work both conforms to Dominican

Last Supper traditions, and departs from them; the depictions of both the feminized apostles and

the overly rich array of foods on the table come together to express the Dominican female relationship to food and the body as a means of access to spiritual grace.

These three case studies together emphasize the different ways that three different religious orders —Benedictine, Augustinian, and Dominican— used familiar symbols of food, feasts, and ascetic saintly bodies in order to further their own aims. Each chapter outlines the contexts in which religious and political motivations spurred the creation of artwork for female religious, who would have faced images that were not merely didactic in the sense of gendered corporeal regulation, but could also display the singular potential of female corporeality and spirituality.

CHAPTER 1

FOR HER TO EAT: FEMALE SPIRITUALITY AND FOOD IN ANDREA DEL

CASTAGNO’S LAST SUPPER.

Prompted by the creation of Taddeo Gaddi’s Last Supper for Santa Croce, monasteries and nunneries in Florence after 1350 increasingly commissioned frescoed Last Suppers in their refectories, or dining spaces (fig 1).5 Ten known versions were created by 1500; the frequent repetition of this scene prompted Florence’s nickname of “the city of refectory Last Suppers.”6

Despite substantial competition, art historians agree that Andrea del Castagno’s Last Supper (fig

2), painted in the Benedictine nunnery at Sant’ Apollonia in 1447, is the first truly Renaissance

Florentine refectory painting, due to its classicizing figural style and its innovative perspectival planes.7

I will argue that the depiction of food in Castagno’s Last Supper and its accompanying

Passion scenes reinforce pious relationships of Benedictine nuns with the Eucharist and their vocational community. The actions of the male apostles in the Last Supper relate in complex ways to a female religious space and the consumption of food within the observant Benedictine order. The Passion frescos above, featuring female saints, simultaneously present illustrations of the controlled religious relationship to Christ’s corporeal body in the context of regulation and identity, as well as effective and bodily power. The religious significance of food is placed

5 Creighton Gilbert, "Last Suppers and Their Refectories," in The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion: Papers from the University of Michigan Conference, ed. Charles Tinkaus (Leiden: E.J. Brill , 1974), 371.

6 Hiller, Gendered Perceptions of Florentine Last Supper Frescoes,12.

7 Eve Borsook, The Mural Painters of Tuscany: From Cimabue to Andrea del Sarto (London: Phaidon Press, 1960).

within a particularly female cultural relationship to gendered ideas regarding ingesting and eating.

The convent of Sant’ Apollonia, known for their “rigorous piety,” was a Benedictine institution located in a northern region of the city, founded in 1339.8 By the fifteenth century, the community had become Observant, and were gaining accolades from their contemporaries, including the papacy and other Florentine authorities.9 Today consisting of a small art museum and administrative spaces, the refectory has been restored to display Castagno’s restored fresco, as well as sinopia under-drawings and sketches.

The refectory wall of Sant’ Apollonia features a nearly life-size Last Supper, depicted with Castagno’s complicated construction of linear perspective in order to accommodate multiple viewers seated at various positions in the dining room. Christ and his apostles are seated at a single long table, with Judas positioned across the table from Christ (fig 3).10 This is a departure from scenes such as Duccio’s Last Supper (1308), painted for the rear of the Maesta altarpiece created for the Cathedral of Siena (fig 4). In this earlier work, Judas is not differentiated from the other apostles but blends into the crowd of men who inhabit either side of the table. Gaddi, followed by Castagno and numerous Florentine artists, painted Judas seated apart from the group, a change that continued in the work of artists such as Domenico

Ghirlandaio, as a means of showing the “otherness” and inherent sinfulness of Judas.11 As we

8 Andree Hayum, "A Renaissance Audience Considered: The Nuns at S. Apollonia and Castagno's 'Last Supper'." The Art Bulletin 88 (June 2006); Hiller, Gendered Perceptions of Florentine Last Supper Frescoes, 147.

9 Hiller, Gendered Perceptions of Florentine Last Supper Frescoes, 16.

10 Gilbert, “Last Suppers and Their Refectories,” 375.

11 This convention of showing Judas alone on the side of the table is not changed until Leonardo’s more well-known Milanese Last Supper.

shall see, the placement of apostles, their facial morphologies, color of garments, even the structure of the architectural space, separate Judas from his fellows.

A series of three paintings, separated from the Last Supper by a field of simulated marble and by the painted rooftop of the constructed dwelling, rises even higher above the audience of women. The images of Christ’s Crucifixion, his Entombment, and his Resurrection are accompanied by a host of angels and sainted women. Recognizable by their garb and actions, the

Virgin, Magdalene, and their comrades feature a common type of didactic imagery for nuns and therefore directly address their female counterparts in the audience (fig 5). Although frequently the case in previous scholarship, these upper frescoes ought not be separated from their more famous companion piece. Rather, they work together with the painted men and their meal to reinforce messages about the relationship of the spiritual body, male and female, to the church and the institutions of both day-to-day convent life and the Eucharist.

The craggy landscapes of these upper paintings are partially damaged and reflect both their age and the fragility of fresco.12 The room’s use in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for mundane tasks such as storage areas and conference rooms, and their later whitewashing, has resulted in their disappearance from art historical texts. Another reason for this lack of scholarly interest is their departure from Castagno’s usual style. These atmospheric paintings set in nature are not consonant with the descriptors that adhered to Castagno since his biography in Vasari’s

Vitae, published in 1550. “That miserable Andrea del Castagno,” suffered from a lack of talent.13

12 Hayum, "A Renaissance Audience Considered,” 243. The fresco is not mentioned in Vasari, and does not appear in art historical or historical literature until the 1870s. Castagno was not immediately identified at the painter. The convent was suppressed in 1866, after which it was used as a storage warehouse and barrack for the military. The building became the Castagno Museum in 1911. Many details of these upper paintings, now hard to decipher due to destruction, can be studied in the sinopia, which was found in 1953, and is displayed today alongside the fresco.

13 Vasari, Lives of the Artists trans. Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 201. 8

An adept draughtsman, Castagno was nonetheless an unskilled colorist, which resulted in paintings that Vasari deemed “crude and harsh.”14 Despite accolades for his geometries, his inventive foreshortening and bold figures, the artist was said to be savagely jealous of his contemporary, Domenico Veneziano; after a competition between the two artists to decorate the chapel of S Maria Nuova, Vasari writes that Castagno beat the other artist to death, only confessing to the deed on his deathbed.15 Castagno’s alleged crime has since been proven to be a falsehood on the part of the author, since in actuality Veneziano is known to have passed away in

1461, four years after Castagno had died from the plague.16 Nonetheless, the characteristics of

Vasari’s depiction of Castagno--harsh, bold, and vehement--have colored discussion of both the artist and the artwork itself.

Art history remained married to Vasari’s interpretation of Castagno’s work. Though

Vasari does not specifically mention Sant’ Apollonia’s Last Supper, it features prominently in art historical accounts of the painter’s ouevre.17 In particular, Vasari’s praise of the artist’s bold innovations as a draughtsman, particularly his experimentation with linear perspective, has shaped discussions of this particular artwork. Leo Steinberg cites the Castagno image as influential upon the schemes of perspective and geometry in Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper painted in 1495 for the Milanese refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie.18 Creighton Gilbert

14 Vasari, Lives of the Artists, 203.

15 Ibid. Vasari argues that Castagno’s painting of Judas for this competition is actually a self-portrait, a display and foreshadowing of the crime and death of Veneziano. Vasari says that Castagno resembled Judas in both appearance and deed, and that he identified and painted his own face onto the wicked apostle as a means of confession.

16 Spencer, John R. Spencer, Andrea Del Castagno and His Patrons (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 20.

17 Vasari, Lives of the Artists, 205.

18 Leo Steinberg, Leonardo’s Incessant Last Supper (New York: Zone Books, 2001), 119. Steinberg uses Castagno among many other examples of refectory fresco images that seek to prolong the dimensions of the room 9

likewise uses Castagno’s unique geometric and perspectival innovations as evidence for later choices made by Leonardo da Vinci in the context of the Florentine preference for Last Supper scenes.19 His exploration of the genre, and his exploration of Sant’ Apollonia’s refectory image, rests on an analysis of the shift from Crucifixion imagery, to the Renaissance desire for scenes of the Last Supper. Though Gilbert discusses the differences between images created for refectories and chapels, his analysis centers on those paintings most likely seen by male viewers, with a broad generalization regarding the importance of the Eucharist for all who entered into religious monastic life.

Important scholarship has recently departed from this focus on form, instead exploring the social and economic histories of the convent. Eckart Marchand argues that the fresco demonstrates the contemplative habits of nuns and monks in strict clausura, dedicated as members of an observant order to focus on life as an imitation of Christ. According to this reading, the viewer is meant to consider the apostles as exemplars of different modes of contemplation.20 Marchand neglects the gendered aspects of the work, especially generalizing in relation to the experience of viewership for religious women. Andree Hayum’s article, “A

Renaissance Audience Considered,” explores the records that document the uniquely female aspects of Benedictine life within the convent, such as their daily rites and rituals, in relation to the central painting. Hayum aims to situate the work within a genre of didactic imagery meant for female religious viewers, especially focusing on the similarity of this work to other Castagno itself. The fusion of real and fictional, painted space is at the heart of the (admittedly short) discussion of Castagno’s work. Castagno, and Leonardo, has removed the painting from schemes of simple one-point perspective, with a single intended viewing position. There is no way to make the space “right,” but rather the perspective allows for more than one viewer and vanishing point at a time.

19 Gilbert, “Last Suppers and Their Refectories,” 376.

20 Marchand, "Monastic 'Imitatio Christi': Andrea del Castagno's 'Cenacolo di S. Apollonia'." Artibus et Historiae 24 (2003): 25.

works, such as his frescoes of famous women in at the Villa Carducci. Diana Hiller’s Gendered

Perceptions of Florentine Last Supper Frescoes builds upon Hayum’s work, and presents a broader history of the genre of Last Suppers through the lens of gender. This paper is indebted to their conclusions; Hiller pinpoints the formal differences between the male and female spaces and the poignancy of the theme of the Last Supper in gendered terms, and Hayum explores the choice of the narrative for the convent, especially focusing on the necessity of exemplary figures for the religious education of nuns.21 Both authors delve into the specific resonances of each apostle, and their compelling individualization by Castagno. Yet one might argue that as a result, the significance of Christ’s corporeal and metaphorical body is diminished. Moreover, these scholars do not seek to expand upon existing analysis of the core Eucharistic doctrine in relation to the cultural relationship of religious women and food, which would be supported by

Caroline Walker Bynum’s important work.22 Hiller argues that the refectory acted as a space of penance and punishment for the nuns, and that they would have viewed these images as visual expressions of this atmosphere of denial and regulation.23 Though evidence allows that the refectory was one such space, the act of eating held a stratified place in Italian Renaissance culture; food had moved from a medieval mode of penance and had taken on different cultural and symbolic iterations in the Renaissance, as we shall see—above all in relation to issues of corporeality. As stated above, food was not just a part of the daily experience, but was a tool for

21 Hayum, “A Renaissance Audience Considered,” 243. Hiller, Gendered Perceptions of Florentine Last Suppers, 53.

22 See the project’s introduction for a larger description of the work of Caroline Walker Bynum as it intersects with this specific project. Bynum’s argument of the necessarily female relationship between women and food is the starting point for this paper. However, as the introduction to the larger thesis project will explain, I intend to see what happens to her findings when applied directly to artworks created later than the timeline of her project, Holy Feast and Holy Fast.

23 Hiller, Gendered Perceptions of Florentine Last Suppers, 152.

religious women to conceptualize and understand the spiritual female body. Ideas of food, of fasting, regulation, and renunciation allowed women a means to conceptualize their relationship to Christ and his suffering. Furthermore, the specific foods portrayed in this work are both sacerdotal and cultural, pointing not only to the larger female relationship with the church, but the convent’s place in Florence at the time.

The commission contracts state that the abbess Cecilia di Pazzino Donati commissioned the fresco in 1447 as part of a number of renovations and artistic projects for the community.24

The growing expansion of the Benedictine community at Sant’ Apollonia, burgeoned by the financial support — and daughters — of the Medici family and their allies necessitated and allowed for such projects to occur.25 The refectory itself was almost entirely renovated, the frescos being only one of numerous artistic commissions completed, paid for by income brought in by the nuns, by familial aids, and from growing papal support for the community. Documents dating from 1439 show that Pope Eugenius IV took the nuns of the convent into his protection in his career-long effort to uphold Observant orders.26 In 1438, the year prior, he had ceded control of the hospital of S. Paolo a Pinti to the group he called “the most observant” nuns of Sant’

Apollonia.27 He pointed to a lack of income fettered by a rising population within the convent.

The nuns successfully petitioned the Pope for the construction of a new altar and chapel; they further petitioned for more property holdings to gain wealth, claiming that their increasing numbers were continuing to financially burden their establishment. Eugenius placed the convent

24 Hayum, “A Renaissance Audience Considered,” 25.

25 John R Spender, Andrea del Castagno and His Patrons (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 106- 108.

26 Ibid.,120.

27 Sharon Strocchia, Nuns and Nunneries in Renaissance Florence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 62.

of S. Maria a Mantignano under their jurisdiction, despite the fact that this was a venerable, well- known Benedictine convent, which brought in more annual revenue than Sant’ Apollonia. The

Pope upheld the superior piety of Sant’ Apollonia, in contrast to the newly disbanded group of sisters from S. Maria, whom he claimed had poor leadership and enjoyed “the dishonest way of life.”28 Despite Sant’ Apollonia’s new holdings in the city of Florence, the convent was exempt from paying ecclesiastical taxes; the women housed therein were placed under direct papal supervision, on the condition that they remained Observant.29 Rather than reporting to the

Archbishop of Florence, or being in his jurisdiction, the nuns of Sant’ Apollonia reported directly to the pope, with any suit or litigation raised against the women and institution to be handled by

Rome, not the courts of Florence.30 This papal alliance cemented Sant’ Apollonia as a relatively independent place of means, with substantial income and properties that spread across several different Florentine neighborhoods. The convent was granted political and cultural capital within the city, owing to its newfound fame found through the Pope’s attentions. Most importantly, the

Pope’s decree in 1439 gave them permission to take communion every Sunday they wished, and to have the Host kept in their convent church.31 This alliance propagated Sant’ Apollonia’s spiritual reputation at a moment in Florentine history when female monastic institutions were becoming more numerous. Their identity as a religious community was thus one that increasingly celebrated their connection to the larger ecclesiastical fabric of the Catholic Church, as well as to Eucharistic piety.

28 Strocchia, Nuns and Nunneries, 62. The annexation and transferal of funds of the convent of S. Maria a Mantignano doubled Sant Apollonia’s treasury.

29 Ibid., 63.

30 Spencer, Andrea del Castagno, 102.

31 Ibid.

Eucharistic symbols were not just a celebration of new papal privileges for the convent, however, but evocations of the cultural relationships between the female body and the body of

Christ as precipitated by food. The Eucharist was one of the ways in which religious women traditionally subverted sacerdotal authority and created spiritual relationships to the Christian faith.32

The communion host became the flesh of Christ, and the wine his blood, in the hands of the priest during consecration, not when placed on the tongue of the individual.33 The bread and wine on the altar was not a symbol or earthly object, but was instead Christ’s literal presence.

This is demonstrated in other artworks at Sant’ Apollonia; for example, a Crucifixion fresco by

Paolo Schiavo, painted in the cloister during the expansive convent renovations, and commissioned by Pope Eugenius himself before his death in 1447 (fig 6). It depicts angels moving to catch Christ’s falling blood in chalices. The cross is secured in a pile of rubble to symbolize Golgotha; the earth already bears a momento mori, a skull and bones meant to remind the viewer of their own mortality, and to secure the scene as a place of death. A group of nuns in the convent’s original white habits—they would switch to the more commonly seen black habits when they became Observant— kneel below accompanied by their abbess and two diminutive male donors. The papal seal decorates the side of the image, further aligning the convent with the

32 Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, 190. The language to describe female spiritual relationships with Christ frequently alluded to the need for sustenance. The desire for God was often described in the same terms that one would describe physical hunger or starvation. Men, however, could preach in order to express their spirituality. Nuns had substantially fewer options, and as many scholars have stated, found that the best way to demonstrate their piety was through ascetic practices. The early Christian desire to ignore somatic desires by denying the necessities of food and drink gave way by the extensive medieval practices of female fasting within religious institutions. Bynum argues that the Eucharist was one instance in which rituals of food were one of the most important moments for Christian females. Thirteenth century nuns denied participation in the mass often reported visions of Christ bringing the bread and wine directly to them, despite resistance from their leading church fathers. Food miracles such as bleeding hosts and visions allowed women into the space of the altar, often shut off to them and only allowed entrance by male priests.

33 Ibid., 53.

papacy. The cloister was another area of the convent where the nuns would gather, away from the more public spaces of the chapel where they celebrated mass. This fresco is one of a series of reminders of both the papacy and the relationship of the convent to their special privileges of the Eucharist. However, it is also a display of a direct female interaction with Christ as both a body and a source of sustenance. The women are close to Christ, reaching towards his body with clasped hands. They do not need intercessors, or the two male figures of patrons, in order to be present and a part of the scene. As the women moved from the cloister to the refectory, following the path that led them from the chiostro grande to their habitations and day-to-day rooms, they would have walked past this image, which invited them to contemplate their forthcoming spiritual and physical nourishment.34 The Schiavo painting demonstrates that the responsibility for readying themselves and their souls for this nourishment was contingent upon their own actions and their own relationship to Christ.

After viewing the Schiavo painting and entering the refectory, the nuns would have come face to face with the Castagno, as it was painted in a room they inhabited every day. The refectory itself served as the most communal space for Benedictine women besides the nun’s choir within the church where they celebrated mass. Their swelling numbers coupled with reports of internal tension made the reinforcement of communal Benedictine life even more important.35 Meals in the refectory had a liturgical temporality, featuring mass or church hours before and after. After praying at their seats, facing a religious image, nuns would eat their food

34 Hiller, Gendered Perceptions of Florentine Last Suppers, 148. Hiller posits that this would have been a transition often experienced by the nuns at Sant Apollonia, given their schedules.

35 Strocchia, Nuns and Nunneries , 64. There were reports of friction between the Abbess of Sant’ Apollonia and nuns, especially formerly superiors or abbesses who had been stripped of their rank upon arrival to the new convent. One example was Abbess Bartolomea Biliotti of Mantigano, whose tenure was deemed “negligent” by the Pope. After her resignation, and her convent’s suppression, she refused to reside in Sant Apollonia. She was eventually permitted to live in her ancestral stronghold by a papal accord in 1441. Other nuns reportedly refused to interact with other sisters in the choir and refectory.

to the sound of scripture readings, often accompanied by the narrative of a female saint, or a noted sister.36 The women sat in two long tables, facing the fresco, whose floor would have aligned with their eye as they stood and walked about the room. Much like their own experience, the table of Castagno’s Last Supper is set simply. The viewer is not shown a sumptuous feast.

Rather, the table is tilted up so that the only items visible are the small loaves of bread and wine, as well as four small bowls of figs (fig 7). The sparseness of the food provided is striking, even compared to the simplicity of earlier Last Suppers such as Gaddi’s.37 Humanist dietary literature was swelling in popularity and production, drawing upon pre-existing theological thought that correlated the state of the soul to what was ingested and put into the body.38 Despite Sant’

Apollonia’s wealth, they used fasting and inexpensive foods such as fava beans and greens to attain and maintain a closer relationship to Christ and his suffering.39 The lack of food on the fresco’s table is not only a means to further the Biblical story, but to center the viewer within the experience, and to remind them of the daily emphasis on bodily regulation as a means of furthering their piety and relationship to their religion.

As Hayum found in the convent’s archival materials, the refectory at Sant’ Apollonia functioned as the locus of social interaction for the nuns. Benedictine orders not only ate meals, but also carried out their punishments in the refectory, which included bodily humiliations or

36 Hiller, Gendered Perceptions of Florentine Last Suppers, 160.

37 Hayum, 250. Hayum notes that even later Last Suppers such as those by Leonardo da Vinci feature tables spread with more food. Hiller argues that the sparing amounts of food painted for female convents was a deliberate choice on the part of the convent.

38 Ken Albala, A Cultural History of Food in the Renaissance (London: Berg Books, 2012), 98.

39 Hiller, Gendered Perceptions of Florentine Last Suppers, 162. The nuns of Sant Apollonia ate mostly bread and, following the Pope’s dispensation, cheap cuts of meat, such as mutton. Eggs and vegetables are seen in their inventories only when included in a novice’s dowry upon entrance to the convent. The fact that the Pope did not give them permission to eat meat until 1481 is indicative of the importance of their fasting on their standing within the Catholic church.

enforced fasting.40 Other common punishments included being forced to eat from the refectory floor, or forced meals in the company of nuns lower in rank, or separation from the other women altogether. If a nun passed away, her place would be set at the table and kept as a memorial for thirty days.41 The room not only facilitated alliances between worship and the daily consumption

(or rather, regulation) of food, but also acted as a space where their identities as nuns within the order were upheld. When the sisters of the newly joined convent of Santa Maria a Mantignano fell into the ranks of Sant’ Apollonia, they rebelled against their new Abbess and convent by refusing to take communion with the other women; they further refused to eat in the refectory with them. This evidence points to the refectory and the rituals of communal eating in this space as ones that was deeply important to identity and spiritual wellbeing, and not just for the necessity of physical sustenance.

Unlike most of the women gathered in the refectory, the figures of the Last Supper painting do not eat. Few of the apostles interact with the food set before them at all. The most notable exception is James the Greater, who, Hayum notes, holds his cup in the manner that nuns were instructed to hold wine vessels, as well as the way that priests would hold the sacrament during the mass (fig 8).42 Rising above the heads of the female nuns, this familiar symbol would have recalled the physical act of receiving communion from a priest.43 James’ sacerdotal action

40 Hayum, “A Renaissance Audience Considered,” 246.

41 Ibid.

42 Hayum, “A Renaissance Audience Considered,” 247. It is interesting that James is shown holding the wine, presumably caught in the act of drinking, since he is noted in The Golden Legend as abstaining from food, wine, and bathing.

43 Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, 56. Women had been prohibited since the early church to receive communion in their own hands; instead, the host was placed directly on their tongue by the priest. The cup was likewise only held by the priest, and in some cases beginning in the thirteenth century, the consecrated wine of the Eucharist would be withheld from the public altogether in favor of the officiant drinking the wine as a stand-in for the congregation as a whole.

with the Eucharist is stoic, calm and male, contrasted with the visceral emotions of the women above as they act out their reactions to Christ’s death. The gestures of the men, especially Peter’s raised hand and James’s contemplative gaze into the cup, contain allusions to priesthood, a role that many of the apostles took on after the Ascension of Christ.44 Andrew cups his hand over a loaf of bread; his calm and somber touch a contrast to the bereaved grasp of the Magdalene towards Christ’s body above (fig 9). The lack of meat and rich food, not uncommon for Last

Supper paintings, also demonstrates the renunciation of worldly, bodily nourishment, upheld as desirable and holy for women. The striking difference between the calm men, gathered around a still-living Christ, and the women in the frescoed scenes above, need not be read as strictly contrasting, however. The different scenes of the fresco can be understood to have engaged with two different modes of viewing, one which called upon exemplary women as markers for their own emotive spirituality, and the male apostles as markers of a relationship to Christ and the

Eucharist less readily available.45

Accordingly, the scenes above the Last Supper are decidedly more female-filled, and can be read as an alternative mode of piety than the stoicism and definitive masculinity of the Last

Supper below. The frescoes depict the saints Mary, Martha, and the Magdalene. The Virgin is represented in such a way that highlights the humanity of her son. The Virgin is an exemplar of female emotional restraint here, though she is shown to be limp at the scene of her son’s death in the Crucifixion, held up by two other women. She is caught in a swoon of compassio,

44 Marchand,"Monastic 'Imitatio Christi,'” 39.

45 An important point raised by both Hiller and Hayum is that the painted name-plates for each apostle and relatively simple imagery speaks to an audience that, consisting of women, would have been less classically educated than their male counterparts. The iconography of these frescoes also does not speak directly to the order in which the convent belonged, featuring no heraldic, familial, or papal crest or insignia.

experiencing the pains and suffering of the Passion alongside her son.46 Though her face is solemn and still, exploration into the artistic type of the swooning Virgin have centered on her physicality in this moment; as Amy Neff argues, her pain is that of childbirth, resulting not in the birth of a son, but in his death as a means of securing the life of all of humankind after him.47

The Virgin here has not completely fallen into a swoon, but is held up by her companions, who surround her in a protective stance. The choice to depict Mary as limp and shaken at this moment emphasizes her humanity and the bodily reaction to the emotions of the scene. As noted by Otto von Simson in his examination of similar themes in Northern Renaissance art, the Virgin is not only physically weak, but exhibits the deathly pallor and behavior of Christ, and marks her bodily participation in the sacrifice taking place. She is not only a witness, but a participant, which and could allow a female viewer an opportunity to likewise take part in the action of the scene.48

The Magdalene was another Biblical female whose iconography in the Renaissance aligned her with the corporeal.49 A reformed sinner, transformed from a life of fleshly indulgence through her love of Christ, she is identified here as a courtly beauty, denoted by the long hair that flows over her shoulders and back. She is an emotional and bodily complement to the Virgin in

46 Amy Neff, “The Pain of Compassio: Mary’s Labor at the Foot of the Cross,” The Art Bulletin 80, no2 (1998): 256.

47 Ibid., 257. Compassio is the mode of representing the Virgin’s body as following and copying that of Christ on the cross. As Neff argues, this removes her from the realm of an unfeeling saint, and instead allows for the Virgin to be experiencing this as a physical, overwrought experience. Neff also links this theme to that of childbirth, with Mary as the New Eve who brings about salvation. The idea of Mary as a New Eve has long been accepted and was a popular motif in Medieval and Renaissance art. Theologians agreed that Mary had not undergone the pains of childbirth at the scene of the Nativity. However, the descriptions of her pain at the foot of the cross are a means of connecting this lived experience to her role as a fleshly mother to Christ, with earthly concerns and feelings, not just a spiritual one.

48 Otto von Simson, “Compassio and Co-Redemptio in Roger van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross,” The Art Bulletin 35, no 1 (1953): 9-16.

49 Hiller, Gendered Perceptions of Florentine Last Suppers, 163.

the Crucifixion, literally grasping the base of the cross upon which Christ’s body is fixed (fig

10). Her expressive grief is another mode through which examples of female piety are demonstrated and upheld. The Virgin’s calm grace is that of a woman who is aware and allowing the moments of painful reckoning, while the Magdalene is connected to the grief that encompasses this moment. It is important not to see the two women as contrasts, but rather as two modes of grief felt and expressed by flesh and blood women, much like those who would be viewing the work.50 Christ’s death is the emblem of salvation for humankind; the Magdalene wraps her arms around his cross, reminding viewers of her impulse to reach for Christ when he appeared to her as a resurrected body. The Magdalene is representative of religious women who were encouraged to bodily respond to Christ’s passion, using their corporeal bodies as a means to engage with and express their spirituality. Like the Magdalene, nuns and religious women denied their somatic urges, and used deprivation and indulgences of the body to aspire to aspects of a relationship with Christianity.

The Entombment on the far right side (Christ’s left) of the frescoed wall likewise features the Magdalene and Virgin as especially demonstrative characters (fig 11). Though its current state inhibits formal analysis, the sinopia or fresco under-drawing reveal the figures in clearer detail (fig 12). As Christ’s body is lowered into a tomb, the Magdalene’s mouth is open, caught in a wail. Her hands clutch at her hair. Castagno has chosen to show her awash with grief, rather than placing her in the scene of Christ’s Resurrection, a much more joyous occasion. The Virgin here is calmer, without the expressive facial features of the Magdalene, and without the limpness of her limbs from the Crucifixion. Nonetheless, her hands press against her cheeks, signaling her pain. The two women are allowed a relationship with Christ’s death; they cluster at the foot of

50 Neff, “The Pain of Compassio,” 254.

his crucifixion, and around his grave, expressing their grief through their bodies and actions.

They do not appear in the scene of his resurrection to the far left side of the fresco wall. They are literally shown with his Eucharistic body, the flesh and blood that would become the food and drink of the world, and the holy food of the rite of communion. It is worth noting that the

Apostles are shown with the living Christ as well as with the emblems of his sacrificed body.

The women participate in the scenes of his death and burial, acting as critical intercessors and examples to the female viewer, but are not given access to the Eucharistic elements of Christ’s body.

These female-dominated scenes likewise rose above the heads of the seated sisters; their eyes would move from the hands of Judas and Christ towards the expanse of brightly painted marble blocks, to the Cross and the body of the dying Jesus. Though the Last Supper is closer to their eye-level, and the linear perspective propels this indoor scene forward, the outdoor, passionate moments of Christ’s next three days are shown in larger scale than the stoic, still scene below. Even the gesture of Thomas and the lines of the tiled ceiling above the heads of the apostles draw the eye upwards towards the female saints (fig 13). Though the actions and figures of the Last Supper were meant to be didactic, it is in the pictorial examples of the female saints above that the nuns were to derive their own meditations and behavior. The apostles are after all male, and are examples of stoic, reserved male spirituality and holiness. It is through the bodies and gestures of the apostles that the activity of quiet contemplation is addressed.51 Food here, functions as reminder of the myriad of ways that eating and ingesting was used as a means to deny the somatic and aspire to the spiritual. It is above, in the emotive expressions of the

51 Marchand, "Monastic 'Imitatio Christi,'” 39. The author further argues that the brightly colorful expanses of simulated marble painted above the heads of the apostles would also be used for prescribed meditation and contemplation by the nuns.

women, that the passionate response to the body of Christ is evoked. The female saints also act as markers for the nuns, demonstrations of the avenues through which their own experience can be lived.

The frescoed characters and the painted space come together to form a pointed, gendered message in the figure of Judas (fig 14). He has a torn piece of bread in his right hand, and lifts it to his mouth to be eaten. In John’s Gospel, the source for this particular Last Supper interpretation, Satan entered him at the moment when Judas ate the bread dipped in wine.52

Because of this, Castagno has portrayed Judas as an anti-Semitic caricature, with a curving, hooked nose, pointed beard and curling large ears. These are often used to denote the difference between pious Christians and an “Other” religion, and add to the separation of Judas from the classically idealized apostles in front of him. Dressed in dark clothing similar to the nun’s habits,

Judas is held apart from the apostles, much like a punished nun would be held away from her sisters.

It is not only through his garb and physiognomy, but also through his very position that

Judas is made into an “other.” Judas has his back to the viewer, sitting at a lower plane than the apostles.53 The perspective of the floor tilts him forward, until it appears that the legs of his stool about to fall into the space of the viewer. By contrast, the other men in the fresco are raised by the architecture of the bench, and held apart by the statues on either end. Judas as a separated, yet present, member of the group returns to the lived experience of the penitent female within the room. Space, and separation from the group, was a frequently used punishment within the

52 Jane Webster, Ingesting Jesus: Eating and Drinking in the Gospel of John (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003).

53 Jane Webster, Ingesting Jesus, 160. Webster notes that this side of the table, in traditional evening meals of the early Christians, would have been left bare so that the servants would be able to wash the feet of the guests. In order to pass Judas the bread to reveal him as the unfaithful disciple, Jesus would have to reach over the faithful.

convent and the Benedictine order as a whole. Iconographically, Judas’s separation is an instantly recognizable symbol of his inherent wickedness. Judas is the access point to the narrative of the story, the intercessor between the viewer and the rest of the figures in the fresco.

His action of lifting the bread to be eaten reminds viewers of the exact Biblical moment depicted, when he is revealed as Christ’s betrayer to the group at large. The only other food at the table is a bowl of figs, a familiar fruit that eaten at Lent in monastic institutions as a means of showing their renunciation from more desirable food.54 Used by the Gospel of Luke in one of countless parables of barren trees, Christ curses a fig tree that, though leafy and fragrant, did not provide bodily or spiritual nourishment.55 There is also less practical significance to this choice of fruit, however; Adam and Eve covered themselves with fig leaves to hide their shameful nakedness in the presence of the Lord, and Judas hangs himself from a fig tree after he feels shame for betraying Christ. The fig is called upon in moments where the Biblical characters are overcome with shame, and its presence in these stories of bodies and bodily shame relay to its use here as a symbol of regulation and repentance.56 Diana Hiller has noted that the three refectory frescoes painted for fifteenth-century female convents featured this fruit, whereas the comparable nine frescoes for male institutions do not. This demonstrates that the female space was even more so focused on renunciation; the fig was a cemented symbol meant to evoke shame, and even contrition in the fact of Judas’s betrayal.

Judas also allows the nuns to assimilate themselves within the theme of the Eucharist and the fresco itself. Not only is the female viewer reminded of their own inherent, particularly

54 Hiller, Gendered Perceptions of Florentine Last Suppers, 165.

55 Ibid., 166.

56 Ibid.

female sinfulness, but the equation of eating with indulgence. Judas becomes a cautionary placeholder for the female viewers. They are made into an “other” just as Judas is painted as a narrative “other’. As they, like Judas, also dine, they remain separated from the holier space of

Christ and the apostles. The presence of food in the Last Supper reminds the viewer of the themes of repentance and regulation that were necessary for the conception of a female spiritual body and relationship to Christianity and Christ.

In conclusion, the fresco cycle at Sant’ Apollonia is not merely an instance where an artist wanted to adhere to a popular Florentine trend. The ritualistic relationship to food in the convent culture functioned as a vehicle for women’s spirituality and faith. The scenes of the

Eucharist also reminded the nuns of their own special status afforded by the Pope, and the rituals and expectations they were meant to uphold. The space of the refectory not only invokes liturgical and spiritual resonances with food as a symbol, but also explicitly draws upon the idea of food as a female concern, aligned with concern about the body.

Not only does the image of the dinner shared by Jesus and his followers act as a precursor to the Crucified body above, but it draws on cultural and historical aspects of

Christianity that relied on food imagery to signify piety, and to allow a relationship to Christ. As the only member of the dinner taking part in the sparse food on the table, Judas signals his own fall from grace. He also mimics the actions of the women who would be gathered in the refectory to take their meals. Judas is simultaneously made foreign and othered, but also familiar, a warning of the viewer’s own potential downfall and holiness. He is a dark “other”, held apart from the exemplary apostles and female saints that surround him. Food and eating are both a holy, sacerdotal action by the apostles, and what betrays Judas as an “other.” By depicting these scenes, and these figures, Castagno depicted the array of relationships available for religious

women and Christ. Through the paintings of both male and female figures, the nuns were presented with possibilities: proper behaviors and modes of spirituality are presented through the didactic examples of the Virgin and Magdalene, while the male figures demonstrate their renunciation of somatic needs through their participation in the Biblical story of the Last Supper.

Their separation from Judas, just as a disobedient nun would be set away from the shared dinner table, imposes the proper and accessible relationships to Christ, cast in a scene from Christ’s life.

CHAPTER 2

FROM SINFUL TO SAINTED: REPENTENCE AND REGULATION IN SANDRO

BOTTICELLI’S PALA DELLE CONVERTITE

As demonstrated by analysis of Andrea del Castagno’s Last Supper, the depiction of food and wine in religious artwork not only reminded women of the significance of food and the rites of fasting and eating communal meals, but also exemplified ideas about the female spiritual body. Through the rites of the Eucharist, fasting, and even the shared meals in the refectory, nuns engaged in a relationship with their faith, bolstered by their very corporeality. Similarly, the depiction of meals in Sandro Botticelli’s religious artworks expresses themes of repentance and regulation, in relation to the narrative of Saint Mary Magdalene’s conversion.

Sandro Botticelli’s Pala delle Convertite (fig 15) has been little studied since its separated panels have disappeared and reappeared throughout the history of art. Consequently, the painting, first mentioned by Giorgio Vasari, evaded discovery and identification, which resulted in limited scholarly study.57 Housed in a Augustinian Florentine convent known for rehabilitating prostitutes, Santa Elisabetta delle Convertite, the specific saints portrayed in this artwork offer an illuminating look at the ways in which marginalized groups of women interacted with their wealthier, and sometimes higher-class patrons. In particular, Botticelli’s use of the life of the Magdalene in the predella panels for this altarpiece furthers ideas that this altarpiece was meant for multivalent space, one that encompassed the patron, nuns, and the lay

57 Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists, trans. George Bull (London: Penguin Books, 1965), 225.

audience who was known to worship in the convent.58 The Magdalene and her life are exemplary for women whose spiritual bodies were in even more need of an example and influence of a holy saint; similarly, her life story served as incentive for financiers looking to perform good deeds and lead others towards redemption. This chapter will contextualize the painting’s messages to patron and viewer with an iconographical and a social-historical analysis of the predella panels, in particular the scenes of feasting and communion depicted in The Feast at the House of Simon, and The Last Moments of Mary Magdalene (fig 16, 17). The choices that Botticelli made in depicting both the body of the Magdalene and the men who aided in her conversion explores the complicated figure that the saint held in Florentine society, one which both allowed women access to holiness, while reminding them of their difference. The focus within the predella panels on images of renunciation of food, and explicit renderings of her holy feeding as a demonstration of her holier state reminds the women of the most important and viable means to become holy: through renouncing sins and desires of the body in relation to sacred food, aided by sacerdotal authority and power.

58 Megan Holmes, “Representing Le Suore: Altarpieces for Two Florentine Benedictine Nunnery Churches,” in Fra Filippo Lippi: The Carmelite Painter, ed. Megan Holmes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). The complex theology of the main panel and its function within the convent’s church space is beyond the scope of this study. An alternative framework would follow the scholarship of Megan Holmes, whose exploration of Filippo Lippi’s The Coronation of the Virgin (1439-46) for Sant’ Ambrogio reveals two levels at which the piece can be read. The upper register, featuring the coronation of the Virgin, was meant to be didactic for the nuns who would similarly take the veil in a ritual mystic marriage. The foreground of the painting depicts a number of virginal and exemplary saints, including Theopista, who looks out to the viewer. Theopista, a patrician wife who remained faithful to her husband even when separated, was an exemplar of marriage; Holmes states that, in Theopista, “here was wealth, position, female beauty, and male offspring—all inscribed within a sacred halo.” The saint’s iconography had potency to a secular, patrician audience, such as the one that made up the congregation of Sant’ Ambrogio. Holmes argues that the Virgin and Theopista are placed upon different architectural planes, existing on differentiated levels, to be readily visible to their intended audience. The nuns, seated apart according to clausura, and probably in a raised gallery, would have seen the Virgin, while the congregation, seated lower, would have gazed into the face of Theopista. It is possible that such a reading would be ascribed to Botticelli’s Pala delle Convertite and its predella panels, since the church congregation was made of both secular and religious peoples; such information about the convent’s spatial construction is not available.

The Pala delle Convertite consists of a seven-foot tall Trinity with Saints John the

Baptist, Mary Magdalene, Tobias, and Raphael (fig 18), and four separated predella panels:

Conversion of the Magdalene, The Feast at the House of Simon, “Noli me Tangere,” and The

Last Moments of the Magdalene (fig 19).59 Art historical attention has primarily focused on this upper panel, with the lower predella scenes implicitly deemed insignificant. This is likely due to their separation, as well as the suppression of the church in 1808.60 However, a reading of only the upper panel neglects to see the heavy emphasis on conversion and corporeality found throughout the completed work. The predella panels structure a narrative about Mary’s conversion from a courtly, well-dressed and full-bodied woman to an ascetic, starved saint, beloved by Christ. Though the events would have been familiar, in sources such as Jacobus de

Voragine’s The Golden Legend, as well as contemporary Florentine sermons, the scenes are nevertheless uncommon, and specifically geared towards the space of the Convertite. Distinctive from other Florentine institutions, Santa Elisabetta was founded by a group of women who were so moved by the preaching of Simone de Cascia that they retired to monastic life.61 Under the control of Santo Spirito and bolstered with funds from the Compagnia di Santa Maria delle

Laude detta il Piccione, a lay group, and other patrons, its charitable mission to house penitential women was begun in the twelfth century, and was still active in the fifteenth century. A 1484 change in control to the guild of the Arte de Medici e Speziali, or the guild of doctors and pharmacists, lead to a mass rebuilding of the convent buildings, and the commission of

Botticelli’s artwork for the high altar. The full extent of the rebuilding is unknown; the full range

59 The predella was painted on a single piece of wood, which was cut up and distributed some time after the last recorded sighting of the painting within the convent in 1805.

60 Yashiro, “A Newly Discovered Botticelli.”

61 Ibid.,161. 28

of artworks commissioned and placed in the church and the convent’s public and private spaces would no doubt further elucidate the messages of Botticelli’s altarpiece.

The first three panels feature the Magdalene as she encounters Christ; as she becomes more holy and turns away from her life of sin, her corporeal nature and her body fall away to reveal her ascetic, saintly form. This guise, the Magdalene cloaked in her hair, with a gaunt, starved face and veined hands, features prominently in the last predella panel, as well as the upper altarpiece, which depicts Christ, the Magdalene, St John the Baptist, Tobias and the archangel Raphael. The first panel in the set is The Conversion of the Magdalene (fig 20), which depicts Mary separated from a preaching Christ by stark white architecture and a crowd of people. Shown alone, the Magdalene is at the beginning of her journey to sainthood, a sinner in the midst of realizing her love for Christ.62 The second in the scheme is The Feast at the House of Simon. The Magdalene kneels before Christ while he sups with the apostles, washing his feet in a combination of oil, her tears, and her hair. The third is the Noli Me Tangere (fig 21), a popular scene in Magdalene devotional imagery. Here, Mary seems to be falling towards a newly resurrected Christ, kneeling before him as he turns away. Their hands are barely separated as she reaches for him, a reminder of his emphatic refusal to allow her to touch his newly resurrected form. The fourth and final scene is The Last Moments of Mary Magdalene. Here, dual stories occur. The left hand side of the panel features the Magdalene’s daily mystical levitation, a spiritual feeding assisted by angels and watched by an awe-struck priest. At this moment, she has cast aside all semblance of her former life and lives alone in the desert, dressed only in her hair and needing no earthly nourishment. In the right hand side of the panel, the Magdalene bends to take communion from this same priest and his two aids. According to the Golden Legend, this is

62 Katherine Ludwig Jansen, The Making of the Magdalene: Preaching and Popular Devotion in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 186.

the moment right before she dies, falling lifelessly to the floor after drinking the blood of Christ.

A saint upheld as exemplary for her corporeal spirituality, known dually for the sins and holiness of her body, the focus within the panels on changes to her body and her corporeal nature work to emphasize her ascent into a realm of holiness.

The altarpiece was first mentioned by Vasari in his vita of Botticelli, described as a painting created for “the Convertite convent,” a term used to categorize former prostitutes or fallen women who had turned to monastic life as a means of repentance and salvation.63 Vasari does not delve into the specifics of iconography, or even the formal qualities of the work, but includes it in a section of text detailing commissioned religious works.64 The repeated depiction of the Magdalene at various points of her life is especially forceful given the convent’s mission, which was to house and rehabilitate prostitutes, and provide them with instruction to support their turn away from sin towards religion and morality.65 The Magdalene was a popular figure in sixteenth-century Italian art that drew interest and attention from groups such as the Convertite; their own missions of conversion and rehabilitation were especially in line with the narrative of

63 Vasari, 225. “He also painted a panel picture for the Convertite Convent and another for the nuns of Santa Barnabara.” ; Christopher LCE Witcombe, “The Chapel of the Courtesan and the Quarrel of the Magdalenes,” The Art Bulletin 84 (2002): 274. Institutions to house these marginal groups of women became increasingly popular during this time. The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries bore a revived interest in the moral health of cities, and focused heavily on the conversion of prostitutes through religious institutions. Witcombe describes the increased charitable activity of patrician families and guilds in Tuscany at this time, much of which was aimed at these conversions and monetary needs of these convents. As this interest in charity and conversion rose, so too did interest in the life of the Magdalene prior to her sainthood.

64 Ronald Lightbrown, Sandro Botticelli: Life and Work (New York: Abbeville Press Publishers, 1989), 201. After being removed from the convent’s high altar, and placed in various other locations, it disappeared in 1730.

65 Yukio Yashiro, “A Newly Discovered Botticelli,” The Burlington Magazine 46 (1925): 156. Found in the collection of the Viscount Lee of Fareham, the upper panel’s authorship was confirmed by Yukio Yashiro in 1925. Yashiro connected the Trinity’s special focus on the Magdalene to the convent of Santa Elisabetta delle Convertite, an Augustinian institution for whom she was a patron saint. The predella scenes detailing events of the Magdalene’s life were later matched to this large upper panel by Herbert Horne, and are now acknowledged as pieces of this “great lost altarpiece” despite remaining separated The upper panel is currently at the Courtauld in London. The four predella panels are at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Both museums acknowledge the lack of the other pieces of this artwork.

her conversion from a life of sin to a place as a beloved of Christ. 66 Mary Magdalene had become a figurehead for religious leaders who focused their attentions on the Florentine need for penance.67 The widely successful Golden Legend by Jacobus de Voragine popularized an image of her as a vain, lustful patrician woman who turned away from both vanities and the sins of the body due to her love of Christ and her desire to be made holy. Drawing from the example of public sermons, Florentine art focused especially on her conversion; she was often depicted as a secular beauty, or as an eremitical saint, clothed in her hair, as demonstrated by Donatello’s St

Mary Magdalene,(1453-5), a wooden sculpture likely created for the Baptistery of Florence (fig.

22).68 Botticelli’s altarpiece for the Convertite features both the ascetic hermit, painted prominently in the large upper panel, and the patrician, beautiful Magdalene who slowly undergoes her conversion in the lower scenes. Botticelli uses the aesthetic hallmarks of the saint, such as her long, luxurious hair, and her brightly painted red clothes in order to focus the

66 Jansen, The Making of the Magdalene, 6, 34-8. A sermon by Pope Gregory the Great in 591 ushered in a version of the Magdalene which became prevalent in popular culture, a woman whose identity was created from those of three different females mentioned in the Gospels. The unnamed woman at the feast of Simon, Mary of Bethany, and the Mary out of whom Christ cast demons became one woman. Further retellings of her life collapsed this woman into the life of Saint Mary of Egypt, a prostitute who goes into the desert to repent for her sins and to remove herself from secular life. The Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 and the foundation of the Franciscan and Dominican orders soon after cemented the view of Mary Magdalene as penitent prostitute, and she was quickly lifted into prominence by widespread preaching.

67 Witcombe, “The Chapel of the Courtesan,” 279. Additionally, the fact that the predella features a conversion narrative could speak to the time in which the painting was created. Though the Pala delle Convertite is one of the few religious works by Botticelli that has not been read as influenced by the apocryphal preaching of the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola, it is dated from the same span of time. Botticelli’s somber Mystic Crucifixion (fig 22), which scholars have argued depicts a fallen Florence at the moment of Christ’s sacrifice, features fiery skies lifted from Savonarola’s preaching, much of which focused on the plight of Florence’s collective soul. Despite the fact that the painting was not created for a Dominican church, the conversion of the Magdalene from patrician beauty to eremitical saint would appeal to a Savonarolan audience.

68 Though the scene of her conversion, such as in The Conversion of the Magdalene, was commonly used by preachers to inspire similar conversions and behaviors, Botticelli has removed several key details of the story to focus the viewer on the action of the Magdalene. The Magdalene, according to the Golden Legend, was brought to listen to Christ’s preaching at the urging of her sister Mary, who is often portrayed in such scenes. Here, Botticelli has removed her from the crowd, emphasizing her separation from Christ and the other listeners through distance and the harsh lines of architecture. Her appearance, though created using saturated reds and other warm colors, is not rich or overtly wealthy.

viewer’s attention on scenes of her life that draw emphasis to her corporeal nature, and the nature of her relationship to Christ and the church as personified through her renunciation of somatic needs such as earthly food.69

The emphasis on conversion within the life of the Magdalene has garnered attention from art historians, who use such images as a tool for further discussion of prostitution in

Florentine history, and the phenomena of Convertite, or repentant prostitutes who were housed in convents to take part in a more spiritual and religious life.70 Katherine Ludwig Jansen is one such scholar, whose situates the Pala delle Convertite within a larger timeline of Magdalene imagery, beginning in the early formation of the saint’s vitae, and continuing into the High Renaissance.

Her work, The Making of the Magdalene, uses Florentine mass culture—sermons and religious tracts—to demonstrate the widespread use of the Magdalene as a figurehead for religious orders newly interested in penance. She argues that Botticelli’s painting was didactic, meant to inspire contemplation in the nuns during mass.71 The Magdalene exists in her reading as a figure through which the women inserted themselves into the Biblical story and performed exemplary behaviors. Martha Levine Dunkelman likewise posits this use for Magdalene imagery in her discussion of Donatello’s Mary Magdalene.72 Both art historians see the work as one of a series

69 Jansen, The Making of the Magdalene. Botticelli draws from a tradition, as laid out by Jansen. The Magdalene embodied the traits of an idealized female, yet she was also painted with heralds of her life of sin: the bright red garments that she is commonly depicted with not only remind the viewer of her burning love of Christ, but also the rich indulgences she allowed herself previously.

70 Other art historical analysis remains mired in canonical distaste for Botticelli’s religious paintings. Although historians bemoaned what they termed its shortcomings, such as the lack of graceful figures, the somber hue modeling, and the dour religious themes, positive accounts of its delicacy and subtle coloring spurred debates about its commission and creation. Early discussion of the work was almost entirely fixated on connoisseurial attempts to situate it within Botticelli’s oeuvre and his known Florentine patronage base.

71 Katherine Ludwig Jansen, The Making of the Magdalene, 184.

72 Martha Levine Dunklemann, “Donatello’s Mary Magdalene: A Model of Courage and Survival,” Women’s Art Journal 26 (2006).

of art objects that act as exemplars for the mass group of women known as “convertite.”73

However, the emphasis on scenes of food and corporeality in these works is not addressed.

While the inhabitants of Santa Elisabetta doubtless saw the work, there are more intimate art objects known to be in their private spaces, and more suited to such contemplation and private devotion.74 The emphasis on renunciation of earthly needs and desires in such spaces must be taken into account in a discussion of artwork created for such a space. The placement of this work at the high altar, seen by a larger and more varied audience, also needs to be taken into account. Anabel Thomas reminds us that while the lay audience needs to be taken into account, the large size of the Magdalene and the multiple levels of meaning could provide different levels of viewing, with significations to be read by several different groups of people.75 Given the size of the Trinity and the large space given over to the Magdalene, Thomas states that it would have been seen from both the first level of the church, and the second, where the women would participate in the mass from the choir. The idea of an upper, private space and a lower space where interactions with the laity were possible furthers the point that the altarpiece must be viewed as a work made for both audiences, and that the Magdalene is more than an exemplary penitent.76 Indeed, it is necessary to conceptualize the experience of multiple viewers within the institution, and the different messages to be found within the scenes of conversion in both the main and predella panels of the altarpiece.

73 Dunklemann, “Donatello’s Mary Magdalene,” 10.

74 Dunklemann, “Donatello’s Mary Magdalene,” 12. There was a wooden sculpture based on Donatello’s innovation Mary Magdalene, c. 1430, which likely was aimed at furthering contemplative prayer.

75 Thomas, 85.

76 Ibid.

It is essential to remember Santa Elisabetta delle Convertite not as an independent entity, but an institution created at the behest of wealthy patrons whose longevity was dependent on the charitable acts and donations by elite families and other monastic orders. The convent was first created with funds from a lay group that met in Santo Spirito, the Compagnia di Santa Maria delle Laude detta il Piccione, and remained dependent on the Compagnia and other donors for monetary support and their prestigious status in Florentine society. Prostitution was considered one of the greatest dangers to the Early Modern city, and women who had fallen into a life of prostitution were seen as socially and morally dangerous.77 The emergence of new diseases and the constant threat of the plague, as well as fear of the moral repercussions of prostitutes and the lust they inspired lead to the creation of institutions such as Santa Elisabetta delle Convertite; elite families directly donated to the conversion of prostitutes, sending both women and aid to such convents. It became a premium exercise in charitable giving to donate to such institutions, and as such, the importance of the patron in artworks prominently displayed in the convent cannot be overlooked.78 The fact that the artwork, commissioned not by the nuns, but by a group of patrons, the guild Arte de Medici e Speziali, focuses on the conversion through the renunciation of the somatic needs and the day to day experience of the convent. Though little work has been done on the everyday experience of the women housed there, some records indicate that they lived frugally, ate poorly, and with a heavy focus on contemplative moments to aid in their soul’s conversion.79 The depictions of food, which call to mind the institutional rites of both the Eucharist, and the day-to-day rituals of fasting and communal eating, not only

77 John K. Brackett, “The Florentine Onesta and the Control of Prostitution: 1403-1680” Sixteenth Century Journal 24 (1993): 274

78 Witcombe, “The Chapel of the Courtesan,” 282

79 Jansen, 184. 34

familiarize the painting’s scenes to the female nun, but remind all viewers of the significance of the Magdalene’s corporeality and her spiritual body.

Both patron and converted nun are offered didactic directions or incentives in the predella scenes that are habituated by food, The Feast at the House of Simon and The Last Moments of

Mary Magdalene. In The Feast at the House of Simon, the Magdalene falls nearest to the viewer, held abruptly apart in the foreground from the apostles by the stark white fabric of the tablecloth.

She kneels to kiss and anoint Christ’s feet, who has half-risen, his hand raised in a gesture of benediction. The apostles are likewise raised, a few expressing alarm at the scene before them.

Judas especially, possibly the darkest and tallest apostle directly behind the Magdalene, has revealed his displeasure, a reference to his strongly worded protests to her presence in the Gospel of John.80 This insistence on the lack of the Magdalene’s worth is countered by Christ, and further serves to separate Judas from the wisdom of God. This painted moment is prototypical of the Last Supper, which, as we have seen, was a familiar scene of communal eating often painted in convents and monasteries as a means of furthering and expressing ideas of repentance and bodily regulation. Judas’s rebuke is similarly prototypical of his actions in the Last Supper, which Florentine artists had painted as an expression of his difference and unholiness. The

Magdalene is similarly set apart and is painted, like Judas, in a way that casts her as different and unholy. In this case, the Magdalene is repenting the sins of her body, anointing Christ in the oils with which she purportedly used to vainly perfume herself. Recalling Caroline Walker Bynum’s discussion about the use of food as a cultural symbol and reminder of female penance, the dining

80 Jansen, The Making of the Magdalene, 187. Jansen notes that theologians and historians typically read this scene as the moment of her first confession, which would have allowed her access to the rites of the Eucharist. Much like the women who were housed in the convertite, and other nuns, the Eucharist was not offered unless the recipient had given their confession.

room here is transformed into a space of renunciation of all somatic impulses and temptations.81

Like Judas, who is revealed as Christ’s betrayer at the Last Supper, the Magdalene reveals herself as a shamed sinner within the space. She is even set on the closest side of the table, alone while the apostles sit with their backs to the wall: a common trope used in Last Supper imagery.

However, she acts out of a desire to be forgiven for her sins, and her move away from corporeal needs towards a new spirituality is to be upheld as exemplary, and lauded. The bread and wine spread on the table departs from Last Supper iconography in that it is not a typological symbol of

Christ’s Passion and the Eucharist; instead, the food is a reminder of the Magdalene’s corporeal state, and the somatic desires that she renounces to attain grace. She is at this moment atoning for her past sins while also aspiring to a higher spirituality and raised lifestyle through Christ and his teachings. This moment in her life is ambivalent, which is expressed by the gestures of the apostles, and the way that her body half-emerges from her red cloak to reveal her arms and hands. She is not yet a saint or holy figure, yet she is aware of her sin, and actively gesturing to change. In this depiction of the Magdalene renouncing her bodily sin and desire, she receives benediction and grace from Christ. The fact that Botticelli has painted her, surrounded by the

Apostles and kneeling before a priest-like Christ reinforces the importance of the Church and patron on the acts of conversion that are undertaken in the very convent of Santa Elisabetta.

Similar to The Feast at the House of Simon, the central panel Trinity with Saints offers an analysis of the figures of the altarpiece as it functioned within the space and an audience made up of lay members, donors, and the nuns, though not one that focuses on food to express the

81 One apostle has raised himself up the most, and appears to reach towards the Magdalene. His darker skin, hair, and garments could notify the viewer to his identity. Furthermore, the gospel of John states that when the Magdalene enters the room and pours the oil onto Christ’s feet, Judas complains, stating that she is not fit to be in their presence. Christ, of course, rebukes this, but the story serves as a prototype for the later last supper, when Judas again reveals himself as a betrayer of Christ.

corporeal. Rather, the bodies of Christ, the Magdalene, and the other saints are on display, painted with detailed attention to the veins, bones, and flesh of the figures. Featuring a crucified

Christ held aloft by God the father in the form of a Throne of Grace, surrounded by angels, the painting appears crowded by faces.82 The ascetic Magdalene, cloaked in an abundance of hair, gazes upward into the face of Christ. St. John the Baptist accompanies her on the opposite side of

Christ, wearing his camel hair garments and looking out towards the viewer.83 The two ascetic saints, both of whom cast away their lives of privilege to become hermits, echo each other in their devotion. Diminutive figures of Tobias, perhaps an attribute of the patron, holding his attribute of a healing fish, and the archangel Raphael pick their way through the landscape, leading the eye towards the predella scenes below.

The Magdalene is depicted in the later years of her life. She is boney, with hands and cheekbones that look whittled by hunger. Compare this figure to the Magdalene in Botticelli’s contemporaneous Mystic Crucifixion (1500, fig. 23). Here, the Magdalene grips the base of the cross upon which a bloody Christ hangs. She wears red, typical of Florentine depictions, her hair only loosely covered and flowing abundantly down her back. Though Botticelli does not overtly emphasize her body, and she is a figure mostly constructed of fabric, the curves of her chest and waist are darkly outlined and noticeable. Her cheeks are full and healthy, and she appears closer to a Florentine beauty than an eremetical saint.84 Though present at Christ’s crucifixion, and

82 Sara Jane Pearman, “The Iconographic Development of the Cruciform Throne of Grace from the Twelfth Century to the Sixteenth Century,” (Ph.D dissertation, Case Western Reserve University, 1974), 32.

83 The piece is centered on the male relationships to Christ; God the father has replaced the Virgin in centrality. The cross and Christ’s body rest between his knees, taking the Virgin’s place as the throne of heaven. Christ’s blood drips into God’s palms, as the older man holds the arms of the cross aloft and in place. St John the Baptist’s hand reaches towards both God and Christ, and his hand appears almost to rest on God’s knee.

84 Donald Weinstein, Savonarola and Florence: Prophecy and Patriotism in the Renaissance (Princeton, Princeton University Press: 1970). This figure has been connected to Savonarolan ideals, as the reformed ‘bella donna’ of Medicean love poetry and a response to Savonarola’s reforms.

fulfilling her role as one of Christ’s beloved followers, she is still depicted as vain, with a beautiful face and painted red lips.

The Pala delle Convertite’s Magdalene is by contrast ugly, and shapeless, her cheeks and lips uncolored and plain. The Magdalene’s large shape to the left of Christ in The Pala delle

Convertite and her particularly haggard, starved appearance addresses the convent it was housed in. Though the convent was named for the Hungarian Saint Elizabeth, the Magdalene was a readily available patron of prostitutes and their conversion.85 The care of the convent was first entrusted to the monastic community of Santa Spirito; by 1458, the keeping of their grounds and adornment of their fabric was moved to the guild Arte de Medici e Speziali, or the guild of doctors and pharmacists. This change in patronage inspired a mass rebuilding of the convent, with a new choir being built in 1484 and artworks such as the Pala delle Convertite being commissioned.86 Though the nuns brought in some funding for these renovations, the accounts of

Suora Alexandra, abbess at this time, show that the nuns did not pay Botticelli’s painting.87 The miniature Raphael, the patron of doctors, is believed to represent the funding of the Arte de

Medici e Speziali for this particular artwork, though he is diminutive in stature to the convent’s

Magdalene and John the Baptist, the patron saint of Florence.88

However, to look at this upper panel only as an exemplary image for the nuns, or as a means of conveying the power of the corporate patron, would be reductive. Take, as an example, these figures of Tobias and the archangel Raphael, who meander on a path past the Magdalene’s

85 Thomas, Art and Piety in the Female Religious Communities of Renaissance Florence, 41.

86 Lightbrown, Sandro Botticelli, 204. Unfortunately, the guild soon complained that they were in debt due to the high costs of the convent and its many renovations, which could be evidence of both extensive building projects and several now-forgotten art objects for the spaces.

87 Ibid., 205.

88 Thomas, “Art and Piety in the Female Religious Communities of Renaissance Florence” 122.

feet, called upon as attributes of doctors and indicative of the guild’s sponsorship of the project

(fig. 24). But the small figures would also have been an example of the journey of conversion through church authority and bodily regulation.89 In her discussion of holy spaces, Anabel

Thomas identifies these two as figures who appear in artworks meant for ambivalent spaces, neither public nor private but shared by nun, patron, and lay audience. The Magdalene is likewise a figure known to have several inherent meanings, a saint whose conversion from sin was lauded by writers and theologians, while often still retaining her physicality and bodily presence as an attribute and reminder of the notion of vice embedded in the selfsame story.90 An important facet of Magdalene worship and prominence was this specific focus on the female spiritual body. The Magdalene was considered the most corporeal saint, known for the use of her body in both the Bible and in secular text as a representation of her spiritual journey.

Bonaventure (1221-1274), who led the Franciscans in their formative years after the death of St.

Francis, commended women who followed the Magdalene’s example of a bodily response to

Christ and his passion, urging women to weep as she wept, and to bathe Christ in their hair as she did.91 The emphasis on the physicality of the Magdalene’s worship is at the heart of

Bonaventure’s sentiment, and Botticelli’s portrayal, as well as the Augustinian institution’s use of her as a symbolic figure.92 Though the institution was Augustinian, not Franciscan, the use of

89 In the gospel of Tobias, Raphael casts a devil out of the body of a woman whom Tobias is intended to marry. The woman’s previous suitors had all been killed by this devil as a result of giving in to their sins of lust and attempting to consummate their marriages. But Tobias is able to proceed into the marriage out of duty to God, not with lust or intentions of carnal knowledge.89 This story is one of chaste sex within marriage, but more importantly, is focuses on the regulation of the body in order to attain spiritual grace. Tobias and Raphael walk towards the bottom of the panel, emblems of a Godly marriage and a woman made pure, leading the eye towards the predella scenes.

90 Hiller, Gendered Perceptions of Florentine Last Supper Frescoes, 58.

91 Ibid.

the Magdalene’s body as a vehicle in her life story had been well-spread in popular culture, and was a facet of her spirituality that was widely upheld.93

The larger panel is only one vehicle through which these stories and themes are displayed. The predella panels, though smaller and less prominently seen from the nun’s choir or the nave, are central to a larger understanding of the work. Seen together, the formal elements further the narrative of conversion and a focus on the changing body: the Magdalene changes aesthetically, losing the voluminous, flaming red cloak that swathes her form as she engages more and more with Christ. This is not to say that her body is shown; even in the “Noli me

Tangere” she is made up of the swells of mottled purple fabric rather than limbs. In the final scene, the sainted and ascetic Magdalene looks like she’s become disinterred from her body altogether, her hands and feet emerging from the sheaves of her hair. The architectural and landscape elements in the backgrounds of each scene likewise shift as the story moves from a portrayal of a sinful woman to that of a life converted. The dark squares of imposing classical architecture of The Conversion are continued in the Feast at the House of Simon, though a sliver of shrubby trees can be seen out of an open doorway at the end of a hallway. Both the Noli me

Tangere and The Last Moments of the Virgin feature a stronger emphasis on the natural landscape, with the garden’s grass painted in uneven sprigs in the former. The latter scene is almost half-composed of the grotto where she ensconces herself, and a hazy seascape, a further allusion to stories of her life and miracles.94

92 It is important to remember that in many cases, the Magdalene should not be considered a model of female spirituality in opposition to the Virgin Mary. Rather, both women are discussed by Renaissance theologians as having bodily urges and desires. Whereas the Magdalene acted upon her lust and vanity and repented, the Virgin was able to fully regulate her body, and never gave in to her urges.

93 Hiller, Gendered Perceptions of Florentine Lasy Suppers, 60.

94 Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, trans. Helmut Ripperger and Granger Ryan (New York: Arno Press, 1969): 356. There are several instances in Mary’s story where she is called upon to save people from the sea, 40

It is within the two scenes of feasting and eating that conventions of female spiritual bodies are brought further into the story of the Magdalene’s conversion, with a specific focus on the importance of bodily regulation as a means to attain grace. The two paintings depict the

Magdalene in a space of food, capitalizing on ideas of renunciation as a means of furthering penance and gaining access to God. Both paintings also have a strong emphasis on male authority, and assert her conversion as an experience that could only take place as a result of the male-driven church.

The final scene is an amalgamation of the Magdalene’s life as an ascetic, her final communion, and the moment before her death, to be read left to right. Clad in her hair, the

Magdalene takes part in her mystical levitation, held aloft by two angels. The small glimpses of exposed skin, on her hands and feet, are the same muddy color of the desert that surrounds her.

She has denied all aspects of her former life, casting off her former vanities. Among the craggy rocks, she has even left the beautiful marbles and classical spaces of the architectural schemes of the previous scenes. The trees, green and plentiful in the garden of the “Noli me Tangere” have disappeared as well, to be replaced by the spindly bare bones of a desert tree without leaves or buds. This is a space which will not yield any nourishment or comfort to its inhabitants. She has also renounced somatic needs, such as food and water. Instead, the Golden Legend recounts that she relies on heavenly modes of nourishment:

And every day at every hour canonical she was lifted up in the air of angels, and heard the glorious song of the heavenly companies with her bodily ears. Of which she was fed and filled with right sweet meats, and then was brought again by the

such as travelers journeying from one coast to another in a boat similar to that painted by Botticelli. Jansen makes the analysis that the sea is also a pun on the Latin root of her name, which Voragine states is amarum mare: the bitter sea. The shining white-blue water could also be another pun on this Latin root, which Voragine also translates to “light giver.”

angels unto her proper place, in such wise as she had no need of corporal nourishing.95

In this stage of her life, the metaphysical and heavenly has replaced the earthly, as demonstrated through the visual elements of the panel. Botticelli paints her caught mid- levitation, in a space that is neither heavenly nor earthly. Her feet seem planted on the ground, though angels reach for her. The blue and red robes of these companions are bright shocks of color against the earthy tones of her hair and surroundings.

The right-most tableau of the predella features the Magdalene, almost prostrate before a priest and his two assistants. She is shown in the act of receiving communion, moments before she purportedly drops dead on the steps to the high altar. In this final depiction of the Magdalene, she has lost her body altogether, half bent under her mass of hair as she stoops to receive the host. Botticelli repeats Christ’s pose and gesture from The Feast of Simon in the figure of the priest. Mary’s act of taking communion would have been a final demonstration of her repentance; in order to receive communion, she would have had to confess her sins. It is a final demonstration of her conversion from a life of sin to sainthood and holy renunciation. Together with the mystical levitation, they show a woman transformed, a saint who has cast aside somatic need, and receives heavenly food in the realm of angels.

Her repentance is also shown in both scenes in relation to sacerdotal, institutional power.

If we view The Feast at the House of Simon as an image that makes use of Last Supper imagery, it must also be read with the Eucharistic implications of such similar artworks. Christ’s gesture is

95 Voragine, The Golden Legend, 361.

the same as that of the priest in The Last Moments of the Magdalene. The table is set sparsely with what appears to be chalices of wine and plates of bread, much like Castagno’s Last Supper table. In The Last Moments, Christ’s resurrected body is not painted; instead, his presence is noted through the Eucharistic ritual itself, furthered by the same gesture from the priest. The

Magdalene, though depicted in her guise as an ascetic hermit, sheathed in hair, is no longer in her wilderness grotto, but is instead returned to an architectural setting. The tableau of her communion, accompanied by a priest and two deacons, is firmly ensconced in dark columns and a series of walls. In this moment after Christ’s ascension, the Magdalene still exists in her sainted state through her relationship to the church authority, represented through the priest, the rite of the Eucharist, and the setting of the scene itself. Jansen notes the focus on such scenes in the predella panels for the Convertite; popular anecdotes of the Magdalene’s life are left out, such as her preaching to heathens or arguing with corrupted priests. The fact that she is not shown in these scenes of authoritative power, and that Botticelli instead focuses the viewer towards scenes of her physicality, corporeality, and body furthers the point that her conversion is to be understood through the change in her flesh, not her agency.96 The conversion of the Magdalene can therefore be seen as a demonstration of the promises that await one who turns from a life of sin, especially to a life of institutionalized repentance. The Magdalene becomes a symbol of both the women and the convent itself, who receive absolution at the hands of the higher powers of

God and priest.

The Magdalene in this set of images for the predella is a layered symbol, presented to a varied audience in a space that is not fully private, yet was inhabited to some degree by the women of the convent. On the one hand, the Magdalene and her conversion, mediated through

96 Jansen, The Making of the Magdalen, 189.

the aid of Christ and other clerical authorities, serves as a reminder of the convent’s mission and existence. Never a fully independent space, kept afloat by charitable donations of both wealthy families and monastic institutions, the sacerdotal authorities who take part in the Magdalene’s conversion are emblems of that aid, and the probable control that those patrons must have had on the convent.97 On the other hand, the figure and story of the Magdalene cannot be separated from the female institution, and the repercussions of this female saint on real Florentine women. As a woman who, unlike the Virgin or other female saints, was never known for her chaste life pre-

Christ, the Magdalene has proven to be an alternative exemplary figure for women. Known for her bodily religiosity, and the corporeal nature of her life story, she was a figure that allowed similar women access to holy spaces and attitudes previously out of reach.

The two scenes therefore demonstrate the joys that accompany the neglect of the body and its sinful desires. As the Magdalene becomes less corporeal and turns more towards a life of ascetic piety, her relationship to Christ becomes deeper, giving her access to realms that are outside of the Earth. Instead of relying on food, painted in beautiful detail by Botticelli on the table of Simon, the Magdalene instead turns to Christ. In doing so, she receives a greatness that would be unfathomable for a woman of her station and lifestyle. Botticelli’s Pala delle

Convertite allows for further understanding of the place of convertite and their institutions. This altarpiece not only demonstrates a popular type for these monastic homes for prostitutes, but also unpacks the many different choices made to accommodate and speak to both marginal and normative groups in a shared religious space.

97 Strocchia. I aim to further substantiate the idea of the convent as a way for families and patrons to give alms and charity, and what this might have entailed for the women who were housed there.

CHAPTER 3

“RETURN TO THE EXAMPLE OF SAINTS:” SAVONAROLA’S CORPOREAL AND

SAINTLY BODIES IN PLAUTILLA NELLI’S LAST SUPPER

The Renaissance conception of the female body, as we have seen, was not fixed in ideology or form, but acted as a potent symbol with a variety of meanings to different religious institutions. By these means, spiritual grace was disseminated and achieved. Food and the act of eating can be understood as a means through which women grappled with these ideas, expressed their spirituality and secured access to relationships with Christ and their church Orders. The women of both Sant Apollonia and Santa Elisabetta attained this access through the actions of eating and renouncing food, acts which were further displayed in artworks commissioned for, and seen within, their institutions. The regulation of food and the body took on different meanings for each institution, as the theurgy became galvanized by the political and theological workings of the convents and their patrons. A third group of women likewise operated with changing conceptions of the female spiritual body, furthered by the common mentality that the suppression and control of somatic urges would bring them spiritual grace. The convent of Santa

Caterina da Siena in Florence, closely aligned to the Savonarolan-driven San Marco, and the strain of Savonarolan Dominican thought, was an institution that focused attention on the corporeality of religious women. Named for the famous ascetic saint, whose biography especially highlights her physicality, and her renunciation of flesh and food, the convent serves as a final case study for the relationship between women and food.98 This vested interest and

98 Bell, Holy Anorexia. Bell focuses heavily on the life and legend of Saint Catherine of Siena, who lives in the 1330’s and was a Dominican nun. Her confessor, Raymond of Capua constructed the legend of her life, which lead to her canonization as a saint in 1460. St Catherine’s biography is full of ingestion—she eats the pus of the sick 45

focus on the spirituality and reform of religious and secular women alike is coupled with a growing number of female artists in the sixteenth century. Plautilla Nelli’s Last Supper (c. 1550), painted for Santa Caterina’s refectory, provides a glimpse at new conceptions of the spiritual female body in a Dominican establishment that was established under the control of the

Piagnone, or the “weepers” who were the followers of Savonarola (fig 25). Through an examination of the network of Piagnone artwork at play in the convent, Nelli becomes an artist not merely interested in the day-to-day production and consumption of food, but is rather engaging with the complicated relationship of corporeal need and spiritual grace.

Remarkably, Plautilla Nelli’s artworks are often overshadowed by the issue of her long and prosperous career; as such, art historians have focused more on identifying the reasons for her success, rather than examine her creative output per se. Her paintings feature only in discussions of female “picture-makers,” a class of nun whose artistic productions increased the revenue and legacy of the Dominican San Marco School.99 Though the friar Girolamo

Savonarola, by this time heralded as a saintly martyr by Florentine Dominicans, is remembered as a detriment to art rather than its patron, he urged artists to create “decent” artworks to be used as tools for the religious education of females and children. While Nelli’s familial and institutional connections to Savonarola and his disciples have been acknowledged, art historians have, surprisingly, little considered Piagnone theology within her artworks. This chapter will examine Nelli’s Last Supper, painted for her convent refectory at Santa Caterina, in relation to who come to her for healing, and she experienced Eucharistic visions of drinking Christ’s blood. She thoroughly renounced food, and it was thought by her contemporaries that she had survived for so long without it that she could no longer properly digest. Though both her confessor and sacerdotal authority in her life could not agree whether her resolute refusal to eat was based on the urges of a demon or of God, her legendary persona was lauded after her canonization, and she was upheld as a saintly ascetic.

99 Andrea Muzzi, “The Formation of Plautilla Nelli’s dipinora: Artistic ‘Dilettantismo’ and Savonarola’s Ideas in the Convent,” in Suor Plautilla Nelli (1523-1588). The First Woman Painter of Florence, ed. Johnathan Nelson (Florence, Cadmo, 2000), 31.

Savonarola’s own conception and metaphorical use of the spiritual female body. A textual analysis of his writings and sermons, alongside an examination of her own artistic practice, as well as an iconographical analysis of the work will further demonstrate that this artist’s “weakly painted” bodies are not a symptom of poor artistic training. Instead, they can be read as reflecting

Nelli’s engagement with the strains of Savonarolan teachings, effectively providing a visualization of a sacred Piagnone body.

At first glance, Nelli’s Last Supper is a familiar rendition of a popular artist’s theme, though with notable deviations from other such works being created at the time. Just as in

Castagno’s Last Supper, Christ and his apostles are arrayed alongside a long dining table; Judas is separated, his back turned partially away from the viewer as he interacts with the meal set before him. The familiar apostles gather on either side of Christ, who holds a torn piece of bread in one hand. Judas, across from him, reaches for the bread with one hand, the other holding his bag of silver. Judas’s face is shadowed, and his complexion is darker than the brightly illuminated faces of the men across the table from him. The apostles do not eat, but instead react to Christ’s words and Judas’s action with proclamations and loud gestures. Leonardo da Vinci’s widely known Last Supper (fig 26), painted for the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie in

Milan, had revitalized the genre, and propelled the psychological impact of the scene by moving

Judas to sit among his fellow apostles. While artists drew upon Leonardo’s composition for their own artworks, Nelli’s return to the older composition draws attention to the separation and segregation of Judas. The painting is also notably more detailed than other depictions of the

Biblical story, which typically show a sparse table setting of bread and wine. Nelli’s table, arrayed on a white creased tablecloth, bears a wide array of food and fine dining accoutrements, from delicate white and blue porcelain to a cooked lamb and bowl of greens. Domenico

Ghirlandao’s 1480 Last Supper fresco for San Marco’s foresteria, or guest quarters, likewise features a wide array of food (fig 27). However, his scene features mostly theological devices meant to further the Eucharistic and Christological messages of the scene: for example, the cherries scattered over the table are common reminders of the spilled blood of Christ, and not a common part of a Florentine dining experience (fig 28).100 Nelli’s inclusion of greens, a roast lamb, and fava beans represents the dinner as a meal, not merely typological moment in the life of Christ.101 However, a focus on the familiarity of the scene draws attention away form the iconographical strains of Piagnone theology and thought at play within the convent and the artwork created for it.

Art historians are not unique in their focus on Nelli’s gender and the intimately

“feminine” aspects of her art and career. Nelli, and her artworks, are described more by Vasari’s

Lives of the Artist than any other female artist, and he is surprisingly complimentary; Vasari goes so far to claim that if Nelli had been born a man, she would have been a perfect artist.102

100 Hiller, 50.

101 Ann Roberts, “The Dominican Audience of Plautilla Nelli’s Last Supper,” in Plautilla Nelli (1524- 1588): The Painter-Prioress of Renaissance Florence ed. Johnathan Nelson (Florence: Syracuse University, 2008). Roberts argues that the scene would have been drawn from Biblical and contemporary understanding of a Passover Sedar.

102 Giorgio Vasari, “Plautilla Nelli” Suor Plautilla Nelli (1523-1588). The First Woman Painter of Florence, ed. Johnathan Nelson (Florence, Cadmo, 2000) 132. Vasari states that “Even though she drew very well, other women equaled Properzia not only in drawing but have also done as well in painting as she in sculpture. Of these the foremost is Sister Plautilla, a nun who is now Prioress of the Convent of Santa Caterina in Piazza San Marco, Florence. She began to draw and paint little by little, in imitation of great masters, until finally through much diligence she executed some works that have amazed the artists. There are two panels by her hand in the aforementioned Convent of Santa Caterina; the one that is the most highly praised represents the Magi adoring Jesus. In the choir of the convent of Santa Lucia in Pistoia is a large panel portraying the Madonna and Child, St Thomas, St Augustine, St Mary Magdalene, St Catherine of Siena, St Agnes, St Catherine the Martyr and St Lucy. Another large panel by her was sent out by the Governor o the Hospital of Lemmo. In the refectory of the adorementioned Convent of Santa Caterina, there is a large Last Supper and in the work room there is another panel by her. She made so many paintings for the homes of Florentien gentlemen that it would take too much time to list them all here. The wife of the Spaniard Signor Mondragone owns a large painting of the Annunciation, and Madonna Marietta de’ Fedini owns another like it. There is a small painting of Our Lady in San Giovannino in Florencce and an altar predella in Santa Maria del Fiore, in which there are some very beautifully executed scenes from the life of St Zenobius. Because this revered and virtuous sister studied the art of miniatures before she began 48

Unfortunately, according to Vasari, her gender didn’t allow her to study nature and the human body, and so her drawing and design are left wanting, even if the author does commend her coloring.103 A vividly detailed work by a female artist, art historians consider The Last Supper a window into the life of a nun-painter, a scene of familiarity that would have encouraged the female viewer to see the scene as aligned to her own actions and life.104 This strain of scholarship emerges strongly in work that surrounds the restoration of Nelli’s works and biography to canon, which argues for Nelli’s importance as a female artist who offers glimpses into life on the margins of the art world. Rather than use the work to further understand the everyday life and gestures of the nun, whether painter or viewer, the work should be analyzed in the context of promoting the theological and cultural aims of Santa Caterina da Siena, a convent founded by

Suor Lucia Bartolini Rucellai (1465-1520), a devotee of Savonarola, and kept afloat by the financial and institutional support of the Observant Dominicans who were followers of the martyred friar.105

painting panels and works of importance, she also produced many truly beautiful small paintings, now owned by various people, which need not be listed here.”

103 Ibid. “But the best works by her hand are those she copied from others. In these we see that she would have done marvelous things had she had the opportunity, as men do, to study and devote herself to drawing and portraying living and naturally clear. This is manifestly clear in her painting of the Nativity of Christ, a copy of one Bronzino did for Filippo Salviati. It is also clear in the fact that, in her paintings, the faces and features of women are much better and have much greater verisimilitude than her heads of men, because she was free to study women at her leisure. Some o the women’s faces in her works are portraits of Madonna Costanza de’ Doni, who was in our day an example of incredible beauty and honesty. Despite the fact that the artist, being a woman, lacked practice in painting from life, these are painted so well that no one could ask for more.”

104 Nelli’s Last Supper Restoration is documented and discussed in the exhibition catalogue Italian Women Artists from Renaissance to Baroque, which accompanied the 2007 exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts of the same name. Though careful to align Nelli’s artistic practice with that of other artists working in Florence at the time, the text recounts the scene of the Last Supper as an observed space, complete with objects that would have been familiar to the nuns eating in the refectory.

105 Catherine Turrill, “Compagnie and Discepole: The Presence of Other Women Artists at Santa Caterina da Siena,” in Suor Plautilla Nelli (1523-1588). The First Woman Painter of Florence, ed. Jonathan Nelson (Florence, Cadmo, 2000), 95.

Nelli’s painting both adheres and departs from the framework outlined with respect to

Andrea del Castagno’s Last Supper in the Chapter One. Like the nuns at Sant’Apollonia, the women who inhabited Santa Caterina used their refectory as a communal dining area: a place where their network was strengthened and celebrated. Nelli similarly reinforces the importance of the Eucharist through her inclusion of bread and wine upon the table; Christ and Judas are the only figures who interact with the food, both to signify the moment in the Biblical story and to accentuate Judas’s difference from the other men. The Eucharistic elements not only remind the female viewers of this most important rite within the church, but the Apostle’s resolute disinterest in food, in favor of a relationship to Christ, reinforces the necessity of fasting and somatic renunciation to attain spiritual grace. The renunciation of food and the emphasis on a spiritual, not corporeal, body, works in tandem with the literature known to have been read during meals such as prayers, and recitations of the lives of saints, in the refectory.106 However, unlike Castagno’s fresco, there are no records of female saints in existing works painted to accompany the scene. Instead, the male figures within the Last Supper act as the means through which messages about the corporeal body are reiterated. In this case, Nelli was similar to both

Castagno and to Botticelli in creating her artwork: she was responding to outside religious influences, as well as the mission of the convent, which had been resolutely Piagnone since its inception.

The foundation of convents by the disciples of Savonarola, including Santa Caterina, sought to spread the preaching and theological beliefs of the martyred friar. Savonarola believed that reform was a necessary course of action, especially in light of the state of religious art and theology in Florence. He also believed in the necessity of Florentine women for the reform of the

106 Roberts, “Plautilla Nelli’s Last Supper,” 47.

larger city, and fostered an extensive network of correspondences and elegiac relationships to both secular and religious women. He wrote religious tracts to be sent to convents, and visited the women themselves, where he was often called upon to perform healing miracles, and to expound on the proper way of devoted life. His reform called for a return to religion of old; a

1493 letter written to the abbess of a convent in Ferrara stated a wish to “return to the principles and examples of our saintly predecessors” which included directives to “…build poor convents; to wear a rough and old and patched habit; to eat and drink within the limits of sobriety… to cultivate silence and solitude; to separate oneself from the rest of the world and give oneself to contemplation.”107 This call to return to a medieval conception of the body’s regulation as a means to attain a more contemplative life is furthered by his preaching on the gospels.

Savonarola upheld saints who ignored their corporeal bodies, what he termed their “fleshliness”, in order to give their lives to Christ.108 For example, in a sermon given on Good Friday in 1496,

Savonarola reminded the gathered listeners that the Virgin Mary had corporeal desires before the birth of Christ, but “held it in check” through regulation and contemplative life.109 He urges that

“if fleshliness had wanted to move her against her will, it would not have been able to, and she would have felt no sorrow.”110 The Virgin and other saints are therefore presented as figures with corporeal bodies, with corporeal desires, and regulation of those desires.

107 Herbert Lucas, Fra Girolamo Savonarola: A Biographical Study Based on Contemporary Documents, ( London: Sands and Company, 1906) 86. The letter is date 10 September 1493.

108 Anne Borelli and Maria Pastore Passaro, ed. Selected Writings of Girolamo Savonarola (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005) 18. The sermon is known noted as Sermon XLIV from “The Art of Living Well” (Amos and Zacharias).

109 Ibid.

110 Ibid.

Savonarola further expounds upon the body as a vehicle of regulation; hidden within one of his many treatises on religious art is the line that “children and women respond like plants do, with their bodies, and through physical stimulation.”111 Though here he was speaking on the necessity of creating religious art with good morals and decent stories, it also illustrates the fact that spirituality and religious teaching is imparted through the corporeal body. But the body does not readily allow itself to be regulated; the entire Sermon of Living Well, given in 1496, presents the fraught relationship between “fleshliness” and reason. The flesh does not want to suffer, or want to feel pain, but must continually be controlled by reason in order to claim honor.112 Despite this, his letters to prominent religious and lay women alike remind them to purify themselves of desire “for all worldly things,” and to use fasts, confession, and obedience as ready tools to achieve grace.113 For the nuns of Santa Caterina, their physical bodies and experiences were a means for them to attain spiritual grace. As Sharon Strocchia has outlined in her work on female Savonarolan convents, the dissemination of saint’s and nun’s lives within the Dominican Order used the physical suffering not as a means through which Christ’s Passion was to be imitated, but rather framed the Observant

Dominicans of Santa Caterina and their comrades as martyrs who struggled to achieve spiritual grace and guidance despite both external forces and their own nefarious corporeality.114 One of the most

111 Anne Borelli and Maria Pastore Passaro, ed. Selected Writings of Girolamo Savonarola, 35. Known as Sermon XXVII,

112 Ibid.,21. from “The Art of Living Well,” Sermon XLIV. “Fleshliness says it does not want to suffer, but reason steps in and considers that the honor of the Father must take first place.”

113 Nelson, Allison. "The Florentine Friar and His Female Followers: Savonarola and the Cura Monialium" (PhD diss., University of Nebraska at Omaha, 2009) 51. Nelson’s thesis studies a prayerbook created for an Observant Dominican Order; the author links the stages through which the prayerbooks main character, a nun, achieves a perfect relationship with Christ. The first stage is gifts to her heavenly spouse, Christ, which the author lists as “tears, prayers, studies, fastings, and works of charity.” 62

114 Sharon Strocchia,"Savonarolan Witnesses: The Nuns of San Jacopo and the Piagnone Movement in Sixteenth-Century Florence," Sixteenth Century Journal, 2007, 411. The author here refers to the compilations of obituaries collected by convents and monasteries in Renaissance Italy. Strocchia frames the objects as a means through which the Observant Dominican network is strengthened, while at the same time rendering the female members to a series of physical ailments and deaths, not accomplishments.

important and fiercely loyal centers of female Savonarolan spirituality, the institution’s most communal center, the refectory, presents these foundational ideas.115

As in the refectory of Sant Apollonia, the refectory of Santa Caterina was a crucial space where the network of the convent and its Order was celebrated and strengthened. As demonstrated in previous chapters, the artwork created for these private spaces works speaks not only to the internalized desires of the religious Order, but their position within the larger city of

Florence.116 Much like Castagno, Nelli was responding to demands made by the Order to create an artwork at a time when their relationship to the papacy and the larger city of Florence was shifting

The Last Supper forces the viewer to confront the variety of foods arrayed before both the nuns and the apostles. Art historians such as Ann Roberts have pointed to the femininity of the apostle’s features, recounting a story that a sister of the convent joked that “Nelli painted

Criste instead of Cristo,” which suggests that the sweet, smooth faces of Christ and his followers were understood by her contemporaries as ready exemplars for the women, even taking on feminine characteristics.117 Saint John, the most beloved Apostle,118 is particularly feminized, with a young, unbearded face, emphasized with red cheeks and high cheekbones, perhaps providing a ready example for the female viewers. As the apostles ignore the meal in favor of

115 Ibid. Unlike Santa Caterina, which was created with the impetus to foster Piagnone thought, the other prominent Savonarolan convents of San Jacobo and S Lucia (Annalena) had previously been independent entities. The years following Savonarola’s death featured quarrels between these nuns and the friars of San Marco, with each group fighting for independence and self-governance.

116 Roberts, “The Dominican Audience of Plautilla Nelli’s Last Supper,” 46. Roberts hypothesizes that the refectory which housed this Last Supper may have been a new renovation or construction, given the community’s documented expansion in the mid sixteenth century.

117 Roberts.

118 This is according to John’s Gospel.

looking and speaking towards Christ, the nuns too are reminded of the constant need to ignore their “fleshliness,” which according to Savonarola is an ever-present, loud, complaining force that needed to be pushed aside by the soul’s reason.

Though Savonarola’s career and the religious upheaval that followed are a generation before Nelli’s lifetime, her paintings and the convent’s theological fabric are still deeply impacted by the rivalry for religious control over Florence. A history of Savonarola’s influence on the religious outlook in Florence and Italy is often marred by tumultuous years that followed his death. Though his execution only seemed to spur his followers towards greater calls for reform, the larger culture of Florence was not as receptive. The friars of San Marco,

Savonarola’s convent church, soon found themselves embroiled in internal discord, much of which came to a head in the so-called ‘Quarrel’ of 1506, in which the sanctity of the Observant

Dominicans was fiercely debated.119 In addition to the internal changes, external forces were actively campaigning against the Dominicans. Upon the Medici’s return to Florence in 1512 and their Dukedom in 1532, the religious writings and works of Savonarola were banned.120 The

Medici pushed hard against the control of San Marco, and slowly weaned them of their financial supporters. Despite a surge in interest in Savonarola’s relics, which were purported to have mystical properties, Duke Cosimo I tried to force the Piagnone into obscurity.121 Santa Caterina

119 See Lorenzo Polizzano. "When Saints Fall Out: Women and Savonarolan Reform in Early Sixteenth Century Florence." Renaissance Quarterly (1993). At stake in the discord which lasted from 1506 until 1509 was the vested interest the friars had in controlling the female nuns and tertiaries who lived in Piagnone institutions.

120 Strocchia,"Savonarolan Witnesses,” 412.

121 Ibid.,411. Magnolia Scudieri, “The History, Sources, and Resotration of Plautilla Nelli’s Lamentation,”in Plautilla Nelli (1524-1588): The Painter-Prioress of Renaissance Florence ed. Johnathan Nelson (Florence: Syracuse University, 2008). It is one of two panels noted by Vasari as hanging in her convent. Study of the work and the convent’s archival material has shown that the Lamentation hung above the right-hand altar of the church, and was documented to still be there in 1795, as recorded by Luigi Lanzi. After the convent’s suppression in 1812, the work was exhibited at the Gallery of the Accademia in Florence; it is now shown in the Museum of San Marco.

was a steadfast hub of Savonarolan activity, evidenced both by an attributed (now lost) portrait of the friar by Plautilla Nelli, and the biography of his life written by her older sister, Petronilla, completed in the 1540’s or 1550’s.122 Sharon Stroccia has demonstrated that these actions were part of a network that aimed to fortify Savonarola’s legacy, even in the face of harsh criticism and papal action against his followers. Thus, one can also argue that the artworks painted by

Nelli for the convent, including her Last Supper and the Lamentation, also in her convent’s church by 1568 (fig 29), are also part of the Piagnone network, containing subtle messages that would have been legible to a Pro-Savonarolan audience.123

When one examines Nellli’s paintings as a part of this network, rather than merely trying to fit her into the avant-garde Late Renaissance art that was being produced in Florence, ties to

Savonarola’s teachings can be better seen. The Lamentation and Last Supper have both been studied by art historians such as Andrea Muzzi and Magnolio Scudieri in relation to her possible tutors, be they Fra Bartolomeo, whose drawings she was known to have inherited, or

Michelangelo, whose work she was known to have copied.124 The focus on the emotional psychology of her painted figures, such as the emphasis on the red, weeping eyes of the Virgin and Magdalene in the Lamentation (figure 30) is attributed to her known work as a portraitist, and as a focal point away from the non-linear or technical setting in which she places the characters.125 Instead, the focus on the corporeality and human nature of the bodies speaks to

122 Ibid., 412

123 Andrea Muzzi, “The Artistic Training and Savonarolan Ideas of Plautilla Nelli,” in Plautilla Nelli (1524-1588): The Painter-Prioress of Renaissance Florence ed. Johnathan Nelson (Florence: Syracuse University, 2008). The author has written extensively on the artistic training of Nelli. Her article finds links in patronage of Nelli’s artworks to demonstrate her status as a Piagnone artist. The compositional and figural elements that the author addresses are examples of Nelli’s interaction with other artists, not with Savonarola’s theology.

124 Ibid.,34-6

125 ibid

Savonarola’s insistence on penitent flesh as it pertains to spiritual grace. Originally hanging in above a side-altar in the convent’s church, the Lamentation draws its composition from Andrea del Sarto’s Lamentation Over the Dead Christ, completed in 1524 (fig 31). The prostrate

Magdalene and the figure holding the head of Christ are even lifted from Fra Bartolomeo’s

Lamentation (fig 32).126 As with all of her works, derivations are easily discerned. The bodies, especially Christ, are non-naturalistic and stylized, with an even light casting small shadows. The

Virgin and her accompaniment of women are made up of shrouds of fabric, with fleshy, boneless hands that reach to touch the dead Christ. The result is a painting that steadfastly refuses to be a naturalistic glimpse into the scene. Instead, it decidedly follows Savonarola’s insistence on a new religious art to inspire contemplation. The women clutch at the body of Christ, which is unwrapped and uncovered by any ceremonial cloth or wrapping. Even the tear-filled eyes as a reference to the disciples of Savonarola: his detractors pejoratively called him a friar loved by women and fools, a group termed “the weepers.” The emphasis on the red skin surrounding the weeping eyes of the Virgin and her companions summons Savonarola’s recount of the scene of the Pieta, where the Virgin, though rationally glad for the salvation that would arrive for mankind at the death of her son, felt “in her fleshly part” a deep sadness, “and experienced such a sorrow that her suffering exceeded the suffering of all the martyrs.”127 Though weeping, and shedding tears, she does not carry herself in an undignified manner, but rather retains her modesty, comforting the other women, who, in both the sermon and in the painting, cry harder at the sight of their dead leader.128 In the background, women tend gardens and gather food for the

126 Ibid.,38.

127 Anne Borelli and Maria Pastore Passaro, ed. Selected Writings of Girolamo Savonarola, 19. From Sermon XLIV “The Art of Living Well” noted as the Sermon of Amos and Zacharias,

128 Ibid. “Nor is it true that she was comforted by Mary Magdalene; rather, she comforted the Magdalene. She had no need to be consoled by the other women, she who would encourage them in the faith…” 56

prosperous city atop the hill, subtle reminders of the needs of the human, fleshly body of Christ and his mother, who have managed to overcome these shortcomings to achieve holiness.129

The Lamentation is not the only instance where Nelli’s painting has been stripped of its

Savonarolan context and iconography. The Last Supper has also been studied as a means through which the artistic training (or lack thereof) of Nelli is on display, not as a work engaging with the theological and cultural history of the convent. Nelli’s painting is directly engaging with the network of Piagnone art and literature concerned with disseminating the theology of Savonarola, while still following the iconographical tenants of Florentine Last Suppers. The lavishly detailed painting of the table, as well as the careful consideration of the flesh and bodies of the figures reminds the viewer of Savonarola’s insistence on the presence of “fleshliness.” The elaborately spread table features an array of food, including customary bread and wine, but distinctively painted Venetian glassware, imported porcelain, lettuce, beans, and salt.130 Though plentiful, the food is still inexpensive; green, leafy vegetables such as the fava beans and lettuce would have been a lower-class food, suited for the poor or for an Observant Order who wished to remain simplistic (fig 33).131 The food is not only what could have been recognizable to the nuns, but the green lettuce was a common iconographical symbol of penance and renunciation of rich foods.132

129 Elizabeth Nicolson, Italian Women Artists from Renaissance to Baroque (Milan: Skira, 2007). The author posits that the inclusion of this female labor in the background demonstrates the importance of women in the production and care of food in Italian culture. The leafy gardens could also be a prototype of the scene of the Noli Me Tangere, which would have occurred between Christ and the Magdalene upon his resurrection.

130 Nicolson, Italian Women Artists, 104. The author points out the origins of the dinnerware on the table, and argues that their inclusion would have pointed to the convent’s high social and artistic ranking.

131 Roberts, 52.

132 Hiller, 50.

Christ and Judas are the only figures that interact with the food before them at all, despite its abundance.

The iconography not only emphasizes penance and renunciation, but is enforced by the space in which it is housed. The previous chapters on Botticelli’s Palla delle Convertite and

Castagno’s Last Supper have stressed the use of depicted food and eating as a means of showcasing the importance of bodily regulation and control of corporeal desires, especially in a space such as a convent and its refectory As both paintings suggest, the decision to paint scenes of eating, and to include depictions of food, acts as a clear visual of the corporeal desires and needs of the body. In both instances, interactions of the figures within the scenes introduce didactic messages for the viewer about the rejection of the somatic in order to attain access to a closer relationship to Christ, and a more sanctified soul. Nelli’s Last Supper likewise focuses attention on the somatic. The wide array of food is, indeed, what would be consumed within the refectory, to some extent.133 Wine and bread were commonplace, served even on days that called for light fare or fasting. The lamb, normally seen as a symbol of a sacrificial Christ, is baked and waiting to be eaten in a serving dish. Its browned skin seems more a reminder of the act of ingesting, and a reminder of the fact of flesh, which clothed both Christ, his apostles, and the viewers. For Savonarola, the struggle between the “fleshliness” and the reason of the soul was of the utmost importance, and he hastened to remind his followers that regulation of the body not only kept the desires of the corporeal body at bay, but allowed the soul clarity to continue to make such decisions. The roasted lamb is a pungent reminder of the immediacy and necessity of the body, which the nuns would struggle against in their daily lives. The practice of reading scripture and theology while seated in the refectory would have been a further reminder of their

133 Ibid., 47. The sisters at Santa Caterina were allowed to eat meat three days per week.

task of regulation, as the “feed their souls as well as their bodies.”134 The proliferation of food and carefully detailed emphasis on the dining experience of the apostles would cast focus on what needed to be renounced in order to attain a close relationship to God, and to the perfected state of the martyred Savonarola.

Savonarola’s recommendations for the regulation of the physical body, fostered by confession, fasting, and other rituals, were not unique to his reform. As noted above, almost every Order called for such controls on the body, though there were diverse vehicles of transmission. For instance, though the nuns of both Santa Caterina and Sant Apollonia were both instructed to eat light meals, and give up their own desires to aspire to the calling of Christ,

Savonarola and his followers called for a return to the stories of saints, and their renunciation was seen as just such a return.135 The Last Supper was a departure from Nelli’s Lamentation; whereas the Lamentation showed the physical, bodily form of the Piagnone woman, the Last

Supper is a reminder of the action needed to become and maintain that holiness. The detailed array of food set before the apostles serves to exemplify their sainted states. Rather than indulging in the somatic needs of the body, the figures turn towards Christ, taking part in the events of his life. Nelli paints these figures as corporeal bodies in regulation, able to attain a closer relationship to Christ. The insistence on the issues of corporeality and “fleshliness” aligns this simple Last Supper image with the larger network of Savonarolan imagery that sought to impart the teachings of their martyred leader to the larger Florentine religious community. In so doing, Nelli is not merely a female painter who is painting her everyday existence—a female

134 Roberts, “The Dominican Audience of Plautilla Nelli’s Last Supper,” 48.

135Polizziano, “When Saints Fall Out,” 491. After his death, the sanctity and continuation of his reform movement was fostered and spread by the miracles of Suor Domenica and the country-nun Dorothea, both of whom rose to prominence in the early sixteenth century. Dorothea’s claims of piety especially revived medieval notions of Eucharistic miracles; before her eventually trial, she claimed to have survived for months on the wine and bread of the Eucharist alone.

preoccupation with the production and consumption of food—but rather demonstrates her participation in the framework of Piagnone piety.

CONCLUSION

The paintings presented as the focal points for these three case studies point to the diverse ways in which the Renaissance Florentine conception of the spiritual body was affected by the female relationship to food and eating. Beginning with Castagno’s mid-fifteenth century Last

Supper, and ending with Nelli’s mid-sixteenth century work, each painting is a carefully constructed statement about the importance of the spiritual and corporeal body within the institutions. Through the scenes of both feasting and fasting, the female viewers of the works would have been presented not only with didactic images, but rather with multi-layered reminders of this relationship to food and their corporeality. In each case, analyses of the works are bolstered by the concerns of each institution, such as patronage, religious changes, and unique social and political contexts. Nevertheless, the paintings are coherent in their reminders to female religious viewers of their dependency on the male sacerdotal institution, whether the

Augustinian friars and laymen who controlled the purse of Santa Elisabetta delle Convertite, site of Botticelli’s altarpiece, or the Piagnone friars of San Marco who controlled Santa Caterina,

Nelli’s convent home. The methodologies of Bynum and Bell must be reframed in order to account for the differing ways that religious orders and institutions used the female spiritual and corporeal body, both as a means of access to Christ, and as a method of difference between the female viewer and the church. Through scenes of regulation, eating, and the participation in rituals of the Eucharist, nuns were not only reminded of the sacerdotal authority, but their own ability to create and participate in a relationship with Christ and their faith.

ILLUSTRATIONS

Note: Due to copyright restrictions, the illustrations are not reproduced in the online version of this thesis. They are available in the hard copy version that is on file in the Visual Resources

Center, Art Department, Katzen Art Center, American University, Washington, D.C.

Figure 1. Taddeo Gaddi, Last Supper, Tree of Life, and Four Miracle Scenes, 1360, fresco, Florence, Italy: Santa Croce.

Figure 2. Andrea del Castagno, Last Supper, 1447, fresco, Florence, Italy: Sant’ Apollonia

Figure 3. Andrea del Castagno, Last Supper, Crucifixion, Resurrection and Entombment, 1447, fresco, Florence, Italy: Sant’ Apollonia.

Figure 4. Duccio di Buoninsinga, Last Supper: detail of Maesta Altarpiece, 1308-11, tempera on panel, Siena, Italy: Siena Cathedral.

Figure 5. Andrea del Castagno, The Resurrection, Crucifixion, and Burial of Christ, 1447, fresco, Florence, Italy: Sant Apollonia.

Figure 6. Paolo Schiavo, Crucifixion, 1438-47, fresco, Florence, Italy: Sant Apollonia.

Figure 7. Andrea del Castagno, detail of Last Supper, 1447, fresco, Florence, Italy: Sant’ Apollonia.

Figure 8. Andrea del Castagno, Saint James the Greater: detail of Last Supper, 1447, fresco, Florence, Italy: Sant’ Apollonia.

Figure 9. Andrea del Castagno, detail of Last Supper, 1447, fresco, Florence, Italy: Sant’ Apollonia.

Figure 10. Andrea del Castagno, The Crucifixion, 1447, fresco, Florence, Italy: Sant’ Apollonia.

Figure 11. Andrea del Castagno, The Entombment, 1447, fresco, Florence, Italy: Sant’ Apollonia.

Figure 12. Andrea del Castagno, Entombment, 1447, sinopia underdrawing, Florence Italy: Sant’ Apollonia.

Figure 13. Andrea del Castagno, Saints Matthew, Phillip, Thomas: detail of Last Supper, 1447, fresco, Florence, Italy: Sant’ Apollonia.

Figure14. Andrea del Castagno, Judas and Christ: detail of Last Supper, 1447, fresco, Florence, Italy: Sant’ Apollonia.

Figure 15. Sandro Botticelli, Pala delle Convertite Reconstruction, originally for Santa Elisabetta delle Convertite, 1490-4, tempera and oil on panel, Florence, Italy. 62

Figure 18. Sandro Botticelli, The Trinity with Saints, originally for Santa Elisabetta delle Convertite, 1490-4, tempera and oil on panel, 215 × 192 cm, London, England: Courtauld Institute of Art.

Figure 22. Donatello, The Penitent Magdalene, 1453-5, wood, Florence, Italy: Museo dell’Opera del Duomo.

Figure 23. Sandro Botticelli, Mystic Crucifixion, 1500, tempera and oil on canvas (transferred from panel), 72.4 x 51.4 cm, Boston, Massachusetts: Harvard Art Museums Fogg Museum.

Figure 25. Plautilla Nelli, Last Supper, originally for Santa Caterina da Siena, sixteenth century, fresco, Florence, Italy: Santa Maria Novella.

Figure 26. Leonardo da Vinci, Last Supper, 1494-8, tempera on gesso, Milan, Italy: Santa Maria delle Grazie.

Figure 27. Domenico Ghirlandaio, Last Supper, 1486, fresco, Florence, Italy: San Marco.

Figure 28. Domenico Ghirlandaio, Scattered Cherries, detail of Last Supper, 1486, fresco, Florence, Italy: San Marco.

Figure 29. Plautilla Nelli, Lamentation, sixteenth century, oil on panel, 288 x 192 cm, Florence, Italy: Museo de San Marco.

Figure 30. Plautilla Nelli, Crying Women, detail of Lamentation, sixteenth century, oil on panel, Florence, Italy: Museo de San Marco.

Figure 31. Andrea del Sarto, Lamentation Over the Dead Christ, 1524, oil on panel, 203 x 239 cm, Florence, Italy: Palazzo Pitti.

Figure 32. Fra Bartolomeo, Lamentation, 1511, oil on panel, 158 x 199 cm, Florence, Italy: Palazzo Pitti.

Figure 33. Plautilla Nelli, Food and Drink, detail of Last Supper, originally for Santa Caterina da Siena, sixteenth century, fresco, Florence, Italy: Santa Maria Novella.

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