VECCHIETTA’S RELIQUARY CUPBOARD: FRAME AND FRAMED AT SANTA MARIA DELLA SCALA, SIENA Jordan Famularo The national museum in Siena houses the remains of a painted reliquary cupboard made in the fifteenth century by Lorenzo di Pietro, known as Vecchietta (fig. 1). Two doors and part of their attached framework are all that survive from the original container. Vecchietta began work on the cupboard in 1445 and probably completed it late that year or in 1446.1 The cupboard doors and frame were installed over a cavity in the south wall of a newly constructed sacristy in Santa Maria della Scala,2 the church and hospital complex located on the south side of Siena’s Piazza del Duomo. The sacristy soon underwent more construction, during which the cupboard doors and frame were removed. The art- historical literature provides no indication that Vecchietta’s cupboard was reinstalled elsewhere in the church in the wake of renovations made to it in the second half of the fifteenth century. During the cupboard’s removal, its sides were damaged, but otherwise the surviving parts are in a good state of preservation.3 The cupboard was commissioned in the midst of a campaign led by Giovanni Buzzichelli, the rector of Santa Maria della Scala, to strengthen the hospital’s finances by attracting increased flows of pilgrims and pious donations. From its earliest documented history, Santa Maria della Scala served travelers and pilgrims. Siena was on the main route between Rome and places northward, whether northern Italy or transalpine locales.4 Two pilgrimage halls were added to the building in 1325 and enlarged periodically; by 1399 there were beds enough to accommodate 130 adults. 5 By the time of Buzzichelli’s rectorship, 1433 to 1444, the hospital authorities decided to decorate the building with painted illustrations of past and present performances of good works at the hospital, which cared not only for pilgrims but for foundlings, the elderly, and the sick.6 In the wake of these commissions for wall and ceiling paintings, Vecchietta received the commission for the reliquary cupboard. From the start, the hospital’s sacred relics were designated as the contents to be stored in the cupboard. In 1443, Pope Eugenius IV had bestowed enormous prestige on the relics by granting an indulgence for pilgrims who visited them. 7 The relic collection included a celebrated treasure of Byzantine objects purchased by the hospital in 1359; this Byzantine assemblage included a lectionary with precious-metal binding, reliquaries, and relics. Figure 1. Vecchietta, reliquary cupboard’s exterior panels made for Santa Maria della Scala, Siena, 1445-46. Tempera on panel, 273 x 187 cm. Siena, Pinacoteca Nazionale n. 204. The Byzantine objects were part of a larger westward movement of artifacts and people from the Eastern Mediterranean, flows that increased during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries due to the Ottoman Turks’ advances into the Byzantine Empire. These last centuries of the Byzantine Empire’s existence, before the final Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, are described as times of political fragility and economic scarcity for Byzantium. Such characterizations, whether deduced by modern scholars or recorded by historical witnesses themselves, imply a sense of diminished Byzantine power and efficacy in cross-cultural networks. Rather than a general notion of Byzantine decline, though, a more nuanced situation can be deciphered from the study of material objects, especially those that moved from Byzantium to other places, as Cecily Hilsdale demonstrates in her work on diplomacy-oriented art.8 For the people who fled and the objects that traveled, one of the important landing points was the Italian peninsula. Italy received merchants, diplomats, scholars, and refugees bringing objects of various types. This article investigates the role of such objects in networks connecting Byzantium and Siena at two specific points in time: 1359, when the hospital received its Byzantine treasure; and the mid-1440s, when the reliquary cupboard was produced. For this objective, Actor-Network-Theory is a useful heuristic approach. Denying a hard division between the world of material things and the world of human associations, the approach highlights the interplay among people and objects inherent in the life cycles of cross-cultural networks.9 Because the reliquary cupboard’s function was to house the hospital’s precious objects, its role as a mediator between its contents and its audience requires Shift 9 | Famularo | Vecchietta’s Reliquary Cupboard | 2 special attention. The Byzantine reliquaries, relics, and lectionary were matched with Vecchietta’s cupboard for their storage in the hospital sacristy, which was itself decorated with paintings on the walls and vault. Because the cupboard and sacristy space are framing elements, they reveal how a network gains coherence, and they deserve art-historical examination as much as the imported objects themselves. Meriting consideration, therefore, is the cupboard’s role as a framing device for objects imported from Byzantium, a conceptual lens for understanding how Sienese patrons, artists, and beholders appreciated such imports within a cross- Mediterranean network. At the same time, the cupboard itself was framed by both the frescoes in the room surrounding it and by the historical context in which the relationships between fifteenth-century Byzantium and Italian cities came to the fore in matters of diplomacy, hierarchies and doctrine within the church, and cultural exchange. Of special importance is the religio-historical context involving the debates between the Latin and Greek churches that came to a head at the Council of Florence. The council began in 1439 and continued beyond the time of the cupboard’s manufacture. This article calls attention to a tension underlying the choices made concerning the design and placement of the cupboard: a tension deriving from a conflict between the desire to promote the aura of the cupboard’s precious contents from the East, on the one hand, and, on the other, the motivation to assert the superiority of Latin church doctrine over that of the Eastern church. The Journey from Byzantium to Siena The assemblage of objects purchased by the hospital was incredible in its time— the buyers committed to pay the huge sum of 3000 gold florins—and is unparalleled in its historical traceability. Its transfer from Byzantium to Italy is shown by textual evidence from 1357 and 1359. Documents establish it as the largest group of Byzantine objects to be imported into Italy with an intact provenance. The documents are copies made in 1680 from the originals, and they carry notarized affidavits attesting to their authenticity.10 These documents locate the objects in Constantinople in 1357 and pinpoint their sale in 1359 in Venice to a syndic from Santa Maria della Scala. A 1357 statement was drawn up to identify the assemblage’s contents and to record that a Florentine merchant living in Constantinople had acquired them there. The document also certifies that the objects came from the Byzantine imperial palace, a certification also attested to by two of the document’s witnesses, both bishops who visited a member of the imperial family for her account of the objects’ provenance. The bishops relayed that the empress solemnly swore that the imperial family sold the objects out of necessity, and that the emperor had nothing more valuable. By May 28, 1359, the merchant had reached Venice with the objects, for on that date in Venice he entered into contract with the hospital syndic, Andrea Gratia. The price was to be paid at the rate of 100 gold florins every six months. Paul Hetherington’s analysis of the object lists in the 1357 and 1359 documents yields several macro-level conclusions: (1) not all the objects can be identified in repositories (museums, libraries) today, (2) the documents show a misunderstanding of Greek inscriptions on the artifacts, and (3) the assemblage expanded between 1357 and 1359, effectively giving some objects a spurious imperial provenance. 11 Based on her review of other original records in the Shift 9 | Famularo | Vecchietta’s Reliquary Cupboard | 3 Sienese state archives, Giovanna Derenzini establishes September 24, 1359 as the terminus ad quem for the treasure’s arrival in Siena.12 The arrival, in other words, was more than 80 years before Vecchietta’s commission for the cupboard. The main query of this article asks why and how the cupboard re- framed the Byzantine objects in the 1440s. The Reliquary Cupboard as Framing Device The cupboard consists of a pair of rectangular doors hinged laterally and surmounted by a lunette. In the lunette, which remains in view whether the doors are open or closed, are six panels (see fig. 1). The pair of panels at the center— scenes of the Crucifixion and Resurrection—is flanked by a panel with the Annunciate Virgin on the right and the angel Gabriel on the left. At the extremes of the lunette are small seraph faces with wings. When the cupboard doors are in closed position, holy figures are compartmentalized into two horizontal registers of six panels each. The arrangement constitutes what Hendrik van Os calls “a kind of anthology from the local hagiography.”13 Figure 2. Vecchietta, reliquary cupboard’s interior panels made for Santa Maria della Scala, Siena, 1445-46. Tempera on panel, 273 x 187 cm. Siena, Pinacoteca Nazionale n. 204. The interior panels (fig. 2) show eight scenes from the narrative of Christ’s Passion. From top to bottom and left to right on each door, these scenes are the Last Supper, Christ Washing the Apostles’ Feet, Kiss of Judas, Christ before Caiaphas, Christ before Pilate, Flagellation, Mocking of Christ, and Way to Calvary. 14 The Passion scenes on the interior side of the doors and the Crucifixion and Resurrection scenes in the lunette may refer to the relics that Shift 9 | Famularo | Vecchietta’s Reliquary Cupboard | 4 were parts of the “Arma Christi” (the attributes of Christ’s victory on the Cross).