Seit Jahrhunderten Praktizierten Ortsliturgie“ (S. 129) Unterließ, Muss Wohl Offen Bleiben

E.3. Bildkünste 203 genauere Angaben auf Grund der bekannten „hier seit Jahrhunderten praktizierten Ortsliturgie“ (S. 129) unterließ, muss wohl offen bleiben. Die von Beate Braun-Niehr beschriebene außergewöhnlich aufwändige Gestal- tung der Handschrift weist jedoch darauf hin, dass der Gebrauch des Rituale nicht nur für einen begrenzten Zeitraum gedacht war. Die Frage, ob es darüber hinaus Gründe gab, die die Herstellung der Handschrift gerade in diesem Zeitraum erklären könnten, wird vorerst nicht gestellt und muss weiterer Forschung vorbehalten bleiben. Katrin Eichler Hochschule Karlsruhe – Technik und Wirtschaft Benjamin Paul: Nuns and Reform Art in Early Modern Venice: The Archi- tecture of Santi Cosma e Damiano and its Decoration from Tintoretto to Tiepolo; Farnham (GB): Ashgate Publishing Limited 2012; 314 p., 93 b/w + 9 color ills., ISBN 978-1-4094-1186-4, US $ 124,95 The reformed Benedictine nuns of Santi Cosma e Damiano in Venice oversaw a re- markably coherent and consistent decorative program for their convent church over three centuries. From the convent’s establishment in 1481 to its dissolution in 1806, they employed some of the best artists working in Venice and the Veneto: Giovanni Buonconsigio, Palma il Giovane, Jacopo Tintoretto, Alessandro Varotari (il Pado- vanino), Sebastiano Ricci, Giuseppe della Porta, Gerolamo Pellegrini, Antonio Zanchi, Antonio Molinari, Sebastiano Ricci, Angelo Trevisan, Giambattista Pittoni, Giovanni Battista Crosato, Girolamo Brusaferro, Pietro Liberi and Giambattista Tiepolo. The structures of this once prominent convent and its church are now publicly accessible since the 2008 completion of a restoration campaign begun in the 1990s. While the restored structures and affiliated publications offer new clarity about the evolution of this complex, Benjamin Paul’s book does far more to resurrect Santi Cosma e Dami- ano as an important Venetian monument. Most of the church’s decoration is dis- persed, and its structure suffered irreparable damage from use as a military hospital and barracks in the nineteenth century and as a knitwear factory until 1982. Paul’s new book offers a skilled historical, visual and iconographic analysis of every aspect of the church’s structure and decorative program, reinterpreting it for the first time in the context of the nuns’ distinctive Benedictine reform ideology. In addition, the book’s thorough documentation allows Paul to correct misattributions in both past publications and recent ones celebrating the restoration work. Even more significant are Paul’s contributions to the state of research on early modern religious reform identity and to a growing body of literature on nuns in early modern Italy. Paul’s precise historical reconstruction and reinterpretation of this complex in light of Benedictine reform theology is a substantial scholarly achievement. (Indeed, he seems to leave no archive unvisited, no document unconsulted, no map unstudied, and no page unturned.) In its own right, the detailed analysis of the nuns’ intentional 204 Journal für Kunstgeschichte 16, 2012, Heft 4 adherence over generations to a program of building and decoration that both incor- porated and personalized the ideology of the reformed Cassinese Congregation of Benedictines, with which they proactively affiliated themselves, is valuable and important. In addition, this book explicitly connects that reconstruction with the important, larger concerns that this work informs: religious reform identity, the art and architecture connected with it, and the self-realization of nuns in early modern Venice. It informs a larger body of study about monasticism and reform in which religious women and men navigate the complexity of group identity and the way they adhere to it, craft its evolution, posture their individual stances in relation to the group ideology, and represent themselves and their beliefs publicly and privately. His account sheds light on questions of corporate religious identity in art and architecture. For example, the Santi Cosma e Damiano nuns were similar to their contemporary Bene- dictine sisters in cities like Parma and Milan in that their church decorations both adopted and adapted the distinctive Cassinese reform ideology of the larger congregation with which they were connected.1 Paul’s analysis offers new information that will inform future studies of individual and group identity and the representation of it in the early modern era. The book also contributes to a growing body of scholarship on nuns in Italy, to which it offers insights about how these early modern women navigated their envi- ronments. Paul’s research on how the nuns oversaw the business of church building and decoration contributes important information that sheds light on larger questions about the educational, religious, artistic and social networks to which nuns belonged. Like well-educated, socially connected Benedictine nuns across northern Italy, those of Santi Cosma e Damiano exercised considerable autonomy in their patronage, taking full advantage of their education and other resources they brought from outside the convent walls as well as their communications with spiritual advisors, congrega- tional overseers, family and friends. Paul avoids the temptation to cast his nuns in the roles of either cloistered prisoners or empowered enclave, perhaps oversimplified characterizations to be found in past studies of early modern nuns. Instead, he de- scribes a more multi-dimensional existence in which the Santi Cosma e Damiano nuns negotiated changing regulations and relationships over centuries. Paul offers a detailed reconstruction of the nuns’ considerations and decisions about their monastic complex and its decorative program that parallels the equally detailed and valuable reconstruction of its building and decoration in the context of the nuns’ reform ideology. His account will inform further analyses of how both convents and networks of them functioned as patrons of architecture and art. The volume is divided into two main sections of five chapters each. Part I re- constructs the founding and construction of the convent and church, while Part II offers an exceptionally detailed reconstruction and reinterpretation of the church’s 1 Mary-Ann Winkelmes: Taking Part: Benedictine Nuns as Patrons of Art and Architecture. In: Picturing Women in Renaissance and Baroque Italy, ed. by Geraldine Johnson, Sara Matthews Grieco; Cambridge 1997, p. 91–110. E.3. Bildkünste 205 decorative program from its fifteenth-century beginnings through the eighteenth century. The first five chapters explicate the founding of the monastery and the develop- ment of its structures, within the rich historical contexts of monastic foundation stories, female monasticism in Venice, and Cassinese reform-style architecture. The strong personality of Marina Celsi, her wisdom about the successes and failures of contemporary convents in her city, and her clarity about documenting her choices on behalf of the convent allow Paul to demonstrate the strength of the early community’s reformed Benedictine theology that would persist to guide nearly all its decisions about its buildings and decoration in the following centuries. After leaving two convents that were, in her view, failures, Celsi returned to secular life and later decided to found a convent that she explicitly affiliated with the Cassinese Congregation of reformed Benedictines headquartered in nearby Padua. Her lengthy spiritual testa- ment of 1 August, 1508, which Paul transcribes in full in the first of nine appendices, would remain a touchstone for future generations of nuns at Santi Cosma e Damiano. In it, Marina calls for the placement of her tomb where all the sisters would pass by it regularly and remember her. (Appendix 1, p. 270) Marina Celsi and her early sisters may consciously have linked their foundation story, which includes Marina’s own physical labor, to the ora et labora motto of the early Benedictines whom their reformed Cassinese Congregation emulated. In addition, it is worth noting that the nuns pre- sented a proto or builder with their own design for their church, perhaps consciously paralleling the process by which the mother church of the Cassinese Congregation, Santa Giustina in Padua, was designed and constructed.2 Paul’s chronology of the piecemeal acquisition of the site and the construction of its first structures relies on a wealth of plans, sketches, documents of purchase, dia- grams and maps of the convent’s buildings and grounds, many of them published here for the first time. In Appendices 5–8, Paul provides complete transcriptions of the notations on five of these drawings, allowing readers to follow his argument with ease, and also to use these sources for future study. Such notations are often quite dif- ficult to decipher in reproductions, although Ashgate’s reproductions of these plans and maps are of very high quality. The architecture of Santi Cosma e Damiano, as Paul explains, incorporates many characteristics of the Cassinese Congregation’s church buildings shared by reformed Benedictine convent churches in Venice, Santa Croce della Giudecca, and the Ognis- santi, also affiliated with the Congregation, including a tri-lobed apse, simple and visible interior geometry, a dome over the altar, and plenty of natural light through clear glass windows. The distinctive architecture of Cassinese reform-style churches borrowed aspects of the church buildings that Cassinese leaders associated with their

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