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Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 2007, vol. 2

The Dominicans and Cloistered Women: The Convent of Sant’Aurea in Anne Dunlop

n 1358, the artist Lippo Vanni of Siena signed and dated a triptych Inow in the buildings of the Roman Dominican community of Santi Domenico e Sisto (fig. 1).1 The center panel shows the holding the standing Christ Child while two angels hold a cloth of honor behind their heads. At Mary’s right hand is Dominic, head of the , labeled “DOMINICUS” at his feet and holding a red book and a lily. To her left is a female saint dressed in red and purple, her only attribute a large vase. An area of loss cuts this figure in half, further straining iden- tification, but she is labeled “SCA AURA” at her feet. Perhaps the oddest feature is a small figure of Eve at the Virgin’s feet. Seated with her back to the viewer, Eve is dressed in fur, and she gestures to a blonde, female- headed serpent with her right hand. Below her is a small zone that func- tions like a predella, where the Man of Sorrows is flanked by bust-length images of a second Dominican at his right and a bearded saint with a book and a large knife at the left. The friar is identified by the words on the open book he holds, “Veritatem meditabitur guttur meum,” the first words of the Summa contra gentiles of . The iconography is found in other Sienese images of Thomas, while the saint with the knife follows Sienese conventions for the apostle Bartholomew. Finally, there are four narrative scenes in the wings (figs. 2–4): two show a blonde saint being tortured and beheaded, and two others show a trio of , a priest, a woman, and a bishop, apparently performing miracles. This triptych is a large work, about 159 x 208 cm, and it must have been an important and expensive commission. In the year it was signed,

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Figure 1. Lippo Vanni. Triptych of the Madonna and Child with Saints Aurea and Dominic. Signed and dated 1358. 159 x 208 cm. Rome, Ss. Domenico e Sisto. Photo courtesy of the Soprintendenza per i beni artis- tici e storici dei Roma, Gabinetto fotografico.

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Figure 2. Lippo Vanni. Triptych of the Madonna and Child with Saints Aurea and Dominic. Detail: Aurea suspended and scourged. Photo courtesy of the Soprintendenza per i beni artistici e storici dei Roma, Gabinetto fotografico.

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Figure 3: Lippo Vanni. Triptych of the Madonna and Child with Saints Aurea and Dominic. Detail: The miracle of the tailor’s son. Photo courte- sy of the Soprintendenza per i beni artistici e storici dei Roma, Gabinetto fotografico.

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Figure 4: Lippo Vanni. Triptych of the Madonna and Child with Saints Aurea and Dominic. Detail: The miracle of the escape from fire. Photo courtesy of the Soprintendenza per i beni artistici e storici dei Roma, Gabinetto fotografico.

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1358, Lippo Vanni was probably the most successful painter in the city of Siena, listed first among the city’s painters in the statutes of the city’s guild two years earlier.2 Yet despite its current location and the presence of Dominic and Thomas Aquinas, the painting was not done for the Dominican . It can be traced to the former convent of Sant’Aurea in Campo Senese, dedicated to a virgin martyr who is the patron saint of the Roman port city of Ostia. First recorded in 1348, Sant’Aurea was located near the Campo dei Fiori at the heart of medieval and early modern Rome. It was suppressed in 1514, when the were transferred to the venerable Dominican house of all’Appia. In 1575 this combined community moved into the new of Santi Domenico e Sisto, and the triptych has remained there, even though the last nuns moved to the house of Santissimo Rosario a Monte Mario in 1931. Only two modern scholars, Alberto Zucchi and Pio Pecchiai, have explored any aspects of its history.3 The painting is one of the few remaining traces of this convent: the church and buildings of Sant’Aurea have not existed since the late Cinquecento, when they were replaced by the church of Spirito Santo dei Napoletani. Its former existence is still recalled by the via S. Aurea across from this church, but beyond the panel, only fourteen short archive documents and a couple of related references record its existence.4 In what follows I want to reconstruct something of the history of this lost female community, using the triptych as a starting point for my discus- sion. Such a goal may seem old-fashioned, and even belated: scholars have been working to rediscover and record women’s history for many years now, and fourteenth-century has been a uniquely rich field for this work, marked as it was by such extraordinary figures as or Queen Bridget of Sweden.5 But I believe the community of Sant’Aurea is worth exploring for at least two reasons. The first is its apparent ordinari- ness—the same ordinariness that allowed it to disappear almost without a trace after existing at the heart of the capital of Christendom for almost two centuries. In 1358, the year recorded on Lippo Vanni’s triptych, the Dominicans drew up a list of convents under their direct jurisdiction. There were 157, of which forty were in Italy and sixteen in the Provincia Romana.6 According to the Dominican historian William Hinnebusch, the average female community might have as many as fifty nuns, which means

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that in 1358 there were perhaps as many as eight thousand Dominican sisters in Europe.7 The lives of cloistered women are now being researched and explored, and yet we still know relatively little about the experience of ordinary nuns.8 There is still no overarching study of female monasticism in medieval and early-Renaissance Rome, and many convents are every bit as poorly documented as Sant’Aurea.9 So a study of Sant’Aurea reveals a partic- ular small world that may suggest something of a much wider experience. Yet Sant’Aurea is also a kind of limit case for this type of recuperative study, and a chance to explore the sources that might be brought to bear and the forms of interpretation they require, beginning with the 1358 triptych.10 Visual sources arguably generate a greater range of interpretation than most archival documents, and while my use of written sources is based in the tradition of an empirical social history, my reading of the painting will be loosely post-structuralist, an approach sometimes seen as fundamentally ahistorical for its insistence on the possibility of transhistorical reading. An underlying question is whether the two approaches are methodologically contradictory, based as they are in two opposing models of the historical sign, though the best post-structural visual analysis always begins from a knowledge of historical habits and possibilities for a given work. I will be arguing that Lippo Vanni’s triptych is structured by a series of tensions and oppositions, and that these can be used to frame the few written sources on the convent. At their root was the impossible model of female religious vocation within the larger Church. For if the mendicant friars imagined the sisters of their orders living in a kind of anchorite isolation, nuns were often intimately tied to the neighborhoods where their convents stood, and the triptych is a unique index of this tension. To make this argument, I will first analyze the painting. I will then turn to what is known about Sant’Aurea and the Dominican vocation for women, and I will conclude with the particular problems of Sant’Aurea within this larger model.

The Triptych

In many ways Lippo Vanni’s painting has an unremarkable iconography, and it might initially be read in a straightforward manner. The Virgin Mary sits enthroned at the center; she was the titular head of the Dominican

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Order, as well as Queen of the Angels, two of whom act as attendants to her. Dominic and Aurea represented the community of Sant’Aurea to her; as the founder and head of the Dominican Order, Dominic stands at her favored right hand, while Aurea as patron saint of the convent stands to the left. Thomas Aquinas below Dominic provides a second instance of Dominican sanctity and learning: both of them clutch books, and Dominic also holds a lily to mark his purity. The Man of Sorrows beside Thomas was a reminder of the Dominican promulgation of the devotion of Corpus Christi or Corpus Domini, which Aquinas had helped to defend.11 It was also an appropriate image over an altar table, where Christ’s sacrifice was recreated in the Mass. Below Aurea, the apostle and martyr Bartholomew wears colors and fabric similar to Aurea’s own dress, a visual link that stresses that the two saints shared their feast day, August 24. Bartholomew was also a neighborhood figure. His were housed at nearby San Bartolomeo ad Isola. Furthermore, he was a patron of the city of Siena, Lippo Vanni’s hometown. Though somewhat more unusual, the juxtaposition of Mary and Eve is found in almost twenty Trecento and early Quattrocento paintings.12 The earliest examples are Sienese, like the painter here, and found in the circle of Ambrogio Lorenzetti. The pairing is based on a fundamental doctrine of Marian . The apostle Paul had called Christ the new Adam, because Christ’s sacrifice on the cross brought the possibility of redemption despite . In early patristic writings, Mary was then called the new or second Eve by analogy, a link reinforced, among other things, by the accident that in the of the Bible the angel’s greeting to Mary, “ave” or hail, is a palindrome of “Eva,” or Eve. So the axis that runs through the center of the painting, from Eve and the serpent (with the Man of Sorrows below them) to Christ and Mary above, is a kind of condensed chain of cause and effect, as well as of transition from death to grace, with Christ alone occupying both conditions in the center panel. It is notable, though, that in no other surviving painting is the figure of Eve so small in relation to Mary. Her position denies eye-contact to the viewer, and in no other surviving image does she address the Virgin and Child so directly, gesturing to the snake as if in explanation or confession. Furthermore, her hair and flesh seem to reiterate those of the Man of

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Sorrows immediately below her, as if he has been rotated 180 degrees and stretched out his arms. But Aurea is also represented in both death and life across the hori- zontal axis of the work. Her image in the center panel is generic, as if the artist had not been quite sure how to represent her: a blonde saint with vaguely antique costume and a vase. He apparently had few precedents. There are only three other images of the saint, all from Dominican con- texts, and two of them Sienese. The oldest is a small triptych by Duccio in the National Gallery in London, done at the beginning of the century, with the Virgin and Child in the center and Dominic and Aurea in the two wings. The second is a reliquary triptych now in the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore and attributed to the circle around Lippo Vanni himself. Besides Dominic and Aurea, this triptych also includes Bartholomew, as well as an unidentified male martyr, , and Saint . The only other identifiable image of Aurea is in the Dominican church of Gubbio.13 There is no consistency among the four images. This is not so surprising. Like many virgin martyrs, Aurea is a con- fused and shadowy figure. As the entry in the Acta Sanctorum makes clear, Aurea’s legend is corrupt and inconsistent, conflating the martyrdoms of several different saints.14 She may have been a Greek pilgrim to Rome, but even her name is a type of fabrication, for in the earliest sources, written in Greek, she is called Chryse, making her Aura or Aurea in Latin. It is pos- sible, however, to reconstruct a version of her legend current in Trecento Rome using surviving liturgical hymns for her feast day, and in this account Aurea was a third-century noblewoman of the city, martyred with several of her converts.15 The four scenes in the wings follow this legend, begin- ning at the top left (fig. 2). Denounced for her faith, Aurea was brought before the emperor Claudius, shown presiding from his palace window while she is suspended and tortured at the left and scourged, Christ-like, at a column on the right. Exiled to a property she owned in Ostia, she then lived with a group of holy companions under the pastoral care of the bishop, called Cyriacus, and a priest named Maximus.16 One of their joint miracles is shown at the bottom left (fig. 3): a tailor mourns as his son lies dead in a bedroom above his shop, while to the left of the building Aurea, Cyriacus, and Maximus resurrect the boy through their prayers.

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When Claudius learned of these events, Aurea and her companions were again arrested. The Romans attempted to burn them to death (fig. 4), but the three saints were unharmed by the flames; this is shown at the top of the right wing, where two soldiers with the Roman motto SPQR on their shields shy away as the fire turns against them. The clerics were finally decapitated, and Aurea was thrown into the sea with a millstone attached to her neck (fig. 5). This is the final scene: beyond the pink city walls Aurea is drowned in a green semi-circle of sea, and her body washes up on the shore at the very bottom of the image, the string of the millstone still vis- ible around her neck. According to tradition she was buried in the basilica of Sant’Aurea at Ostia, and she is the patron saint of the city.17 So the vase Aurea holds as an attribute at the center of the panel might conceivably reference her death by water, but it is otherwise hard to understand, and beyond the long blond hair, there is no real visual link between her figure in the wings and her figure near the Virgin and Child. Aurea is also consistently and oddly framed within the wings. The scenes themselves are loosely based on two of the four panels showing the life of Saint Nicholas done by Ambrogio Lorenzetti for the church of San Procolo in Florence; here again it is clear Lippo Vanni was drawing heav- ily on his city’s visual patterns. But the differences are striking. Nicholas provides charity and calms the seas, alone and active in each case. Yet in each scene except the last, Aurea never appears except flanked by a man on each side—either the torturers who suspend and flog her, or Maximus and Cyriacus. In the top two scenes, she is also watched, from a decorous distance, by her pagan judge. She is consistently boxed in by architecture as well —only her corpse escapes to the great outdoors, or at least her bobbing head and neck. The body being drowned is surrounded by such a group of male figures that it is almost difficult to find it. The scale too is odd, linking the little figures in the wings most closely to the predella figures and small figure of Eve in the central panel. And because she is tor- tured alone, Aurea’s figure is reminiscent of Christ scourged and of male saints suspended. Though her nude torso has lost its sex, she has retained her long skirt in both cases, as if a partial hermaphrodite. This triptych’s very existence is slightly unusual in a Roman context. Panel paintings do not seem to have been common on Roman altars,

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Figure 5: Lippo Vanni. Triptych of the Madonna and Child with Saints Aurea and Dominic. Detail: Aurea drowned.

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though there were notable exceptions, Giotto’s Stefaneschi for ’s and the icon of the Sancta Sanctorum being two of them. Its folding triptych form suggests an object that was intended to be closed when not in use, though it is too large to have been a portable panel for private devotion. Most surviving Trecento triptychs are relatively small images, normally with the Virgin and Child at the center. The wings typi- cally have standing saints, or scenes from the Passion or the life of Mary; often the Annunciation appears in the pinnacles—Gabriel on one side, and Mary on the other. Few have narrative scenes unrelated to the Madonna and Child, as they are here. We might imagine something like an image for a . Closed when not in use, the triptych was painted by a Sienese artist using Sienese visual precedents and mixing a Madonna and Child panel with a kind of abbreviated vita icon of Aurea herself. As such, it represented Sant’Aurea to the local world.

Sant’Aurea in Campo Senese and the Dominican vocation

A legend reported in the seventeenth century convent of Santi Domenico e Sisto claimed the community of Sant’Aurea was created in Aurea’s Roman villa by her followers after her death.18 Despite pious legend, however, it is not certain when Sant’Aurea was founded. It does not seem to have existed at the beginning of the Trecento.19 In a 1368 document it is described as bound on one side by the orchards and possessions of the “Domini de Andreoctinis,” with the Tiber at the foot, “via mediante,” and public roads on the remaining two sides; to the west lay the Campo dei Fiori, and the “via magistralis” or main road ran nearby.20 A glimpse of the exterior is given in a 1593 map of Rome, where despite the label T(emplum) Spiritus Sancti, designating the church that replaced it, Sant’Aurea itself appears to be shown, pitched-roofed and presumably unvaulted, a stipulation of the Dominican legislation for male houses.21 The convent buildings seem to be those along the north side. A walled court or garden runs before it to the Tiber; and its orientation was apparently toward the river.22 Its dedication at least can probably be linked to Dominican politics, for Ostia was the see most often held by Dominican cardinals in the Duecento and Trecento, and the Duccio triptych at least has been linked to a cardinal

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of the order. It was normally designated “Saint Aurea of the Campo (or sometimes Castro) Senese,” an area of Rome named perhaps because a Sienese colony had settled to trade there.23 Other “nations,” including the Florentines, lived and worshipped nearby. It was surrounded by many other monasteries and churches—nearest among them Sant’Austerio, San Nicola de piazza Padella, and San Biagio. It was also small. A 1383 docu- ment listed ten sisters; in 1413 there were eleven, and it was specified they represented at least two-thirds of the community, implying no more than fifteen women.24 Several of them, with names like de Monte, Alessi, and Rufini, seem to have been the daughters of the middling local aristocracy.25 The dowry needed to enter a convent was much more modest than the dowry required for a decent marriage, and we know that many convents were filled with the daughters of notable local families of lesser wealth, or important families fallen on (relatively) hard times.26 Sant’Aurea had a small patrimony of lands near the city to support the nuns. Again, this is very typical.27 Female religious houses sometimes began as groups of devout women living together in a more or less formal way.28 In Rome (and elsewhere), they grew, and were often then regularized, through local factional sup- port. With the papacy in Avignon, the city was especially strongly divided into clear areas of clan influence, and so were its churches and convents. , for instance, was a Colonna creation and institu- tion. It had been taken in the 1280s from a group of Benedictine at the suggestion of two Colonna cardinals, and became a Franciscan house around the saintly Margarita Colonna, under a rule drawn up by Cardinal Giacomo Colonna, and it was filled with the legitimate and illegitimate daughters of the Colonna and their clients, whose continuing bequests ensured its support.29 The first possible reference to Sant’Aurea suggests it, too, was embedded in local factional affairs. It comes on June 12, 1348, in the will of one of the Colonna’s great rivals, the Orsini, who controlled much of the western sector of Rome, as well as huge areas of the sur- rounding countryside. After a long series of pious bequests, and almost as an afterthought, the knight Andrea di Orso Orsini made the following legacy: “Item, for the monastery […] which is in the ‘castro senese’ of the city of Rome, for the fabric of the said monastery, fifty gold florins.” The

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ellipsis here marks damage to the original document, but the convent has been taken as Sant’Aurea because of its designation “in castro senese.”30 Andrea was the head of the Orsini of Campo dei Fiori, a branch of the clan based at the end of the “via magistralis” in which Sant’Aurea stood. He was a major political figure, having been Rector of the Patrimony of Saint Peter in 1333 and joint governor of Rome in 1336.31 His family also had important Dominican ties.32 Andrea’s , Cardinal Matteo Orsini, served as head of the Dominican Province of Rome, and at his death in 1341 was de facto protector of the order at the papal court in Avignon.33 Cardinal Orsini left bequests to local churches including Santa Barbara alla Regola and San Salvatore del Campo, and to Dominican convents in Rome, Bologna, Perugia, Florence, and elsewhere. Since Sant’Aurea is not mentioned in the cardinal’s will, it is possible the convent came into being sometime between 1341 and 1348. Twenty years later, in 1368, a related magnate family appears in Sant’Aurea’s slim archive. Two documents were drawn up on the same day with the same witnesses.34 In the first, the “magnificus vir” Francesco, Count of Anguillara, declared with his mother the Countess Francesca that they had four hundred gold florins to create a chapel and altar in the church of Sant’Aurea.35 The money was to be given on behalf of Agnese, widow and executrix of Pucciarelli Pucii Bovis of the lords of Tolfa Vecchia, accord- ing to her husband’s wishes. The second document recorded that Domina Agnese wished this altar to be constructed for the soul of her deceased husband, and then specified:

The aforementioned lady executrix, with the will of the lady prioress and of all the other sisters of the said monastery, chooses an altar and the place of it within the said church, that is, facing the iron grille of the said monastery beside and near the main altar of Saint Aurea, by which grille the said lady prioress and the nuns are able conveniently to see and watch and hear the mass sung and the singing and celebra- tion of the divine offices and other solemnities as is required to be done at other altars consecrated in other churches.36

While strongly suggesting that Lippo Vanni’s painting was not visible to the nuns, this bequest also places Sant’Aurea firmly in the local world.

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Pucciarello di Puccio had been a vassal of the Counts of Anguillara, a great family of the Roman campagna, closely allied to the Orsini.37 The Anguillara had a palace and tower in Trastevere, not so far from Sant’Aurea and the palace of the Orsini of Campo dei Fiori, and Count Francesco’s father had been mentioned alongside Andrea and Matteo Orsini in the prayers of the 1332 Dominican chapter.38 Yet this very embeddedness at the heart of premodern Rome placed Sant’Aurea at odds with Dominican ideas of the female vocation: though convents were necessarily neighbor- hood institutions, the nuns themselves were to live completely withdrawn from the world. And Rome was a long-standing flashpoint–the main his- torical flashpoint–in the debate about claustration. According to ’s original conception of his Second Order, nuns were subject to a strict rule, based, like that of the friars, on the Rule of St. Augustine.39 The Dominicans were officially the Order of Friars Preacher, but despite the stress on scholarship to enable the friars to carry out this mission, Dominican nuns were not expected to devote much time to study. Their main task was instead to offer continuous prayers for the success of the friars’ work, because the brothers had less time to pray themselves because of their activity among the laity. For the choir nuns it was sufficient to know enough Latin to sing the religious offices; converse or lay sisters did the menial jobs.40 Most importantly, however, Dominican nuns were to live completely withdrawn from the outside world. A “wheel,” a kind of revolving cylinder between the cloister and the public space, allowed communication to be scrutinized and controlled, and most con- vent choirs, including apparently that of Sant’Aurea, were hidden behind walls and iron grilles. Some of these had iron spikes to discourage the curi- ous.41 The friars were to oversee the nuns and to minister to their spiritual needs, and all convent business was to be done through appointed procura- tors. Even the friars were not to enter the cloister unaccompanied.42 In the early thirteenth century, as the Dominicans came into being, this idea of female vocation was conservative, even reactionary. It was also directly linked to the circumstances of the order’s formation. As the mendi- cant orders emerged in the 1210s and 1220s, the papacy was undertaking one of many periodic reforms of female religious houses.43 Nuns in Rome were said to leave their cloisters to roam the streets at will, and Innocent

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III and his successor Honorius III sought to impose a more rigorous clois- ter on female houses. In this climate, the new mendicant orders could not afford the scandal of female followers roaming the streets, begging as the friars did. On the contrary, Dominic instead became the agent of papal change. In 1221, with the blessing of Honorius III, Dominic created the community of San Sisto all’Appia by bringing together almost all the nuns of Rome, regardless of rule or order.44 It is usually considered Dominic’s first real foundation, and in many ways it was an ideal mendicant solution to the “problem” of female vocation: the new house lay at the safe distance of about two and half kilometers beyond the city walls. The need to isolate women seems to have trumped their existing separate rules or modes of religious life. Yet in the same climate even the much more radical seems to have considered a kind of hermitical isolation the only possible vocation for his follower Saint Claire.45 There is a whole literature denouncing the “prison” of convent walls, and several Italian convents had a second life as penitentiaries after their community’s dissolution.46 To support this stress on cloister, especially given their own peripa- tetic beginnings, the friars drew on traditional patristic sources, notably Saint Jerome’s fourth-century letter to the virgin Eustochium. It had long been the fundamental source for writing on female vocation, and circulated widely in both Latin and vernacular versions throughout the Trecento and Quattrocento.47 Jerome argued that virginity was the natural state of human beings, to be valued therefore above all others. Female chastity was more praiseworthy than male chastity, as women by nature were weaker and more bodily than men; nuns were to be the virgin brides of Christ, battling that essential frailty and waiting in their cloisters to be united with Him. This letter also argued that Mary was the special mother and patron- ess of women because she was the special patroness of Eve, a connection made over and over in writings on the female vocation and reiterated in the Sant’Aurea triptych.48 Thus the Dominican Master General Humbert of Romans (1194–1277) began a model sermon to women in cloister by reminding them that they were the chosen handmaidens and spouses of Christ. In their cloister they were emulating the reclusive life of the Virgin and Queen Esther, and reducing their chance of being raped like the Old Testament Dinah.49 In the 1390s, when Fra Giovanni Dominici wrote

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to the Venetian nuns of Corpus Christi, a community he had created, he enjoined them to stay within the cloister, waiting for Christ their bride- groom; wives should not go out alone and Christ was an especially jealous spouse.50 He praised Mary, patroness of virgins and Bride of Christ, as their example, and he addressed the nuns as “reverende madonne,” adding that they were the “brides of the emperor of heaven and earth” while he himself was only Christ’s “creature and useless servant.”51 But despite the papal and mendicant reforms, many female communi- ties remained only loosely affiliated with the male religious orders; one of the most famous houses of Rome, the of Santa Francesca Romana, falls into this category.52 Dominic’s own first attempt to found San Sisto failed, partly because many women left the cloister and the relatives of others seemed to have fetched them out again, unwilling to lose them to an isolation that did not conform to their own ideas of female religious life. The decision to place a girl in a convent was often made when she was only six or seven years old, as it determined the dowry that needed to be set aside for her.53 These families did not necessarily expect their daughters to disappear into isolation; further, some of the most exemplary holy women seem to have viewed clausura as only one aspect of a wider emulation of Christ, a goal they shared with the friars. Claire of Assisi was chastised on several occasions for leaving her convent to beg as Francis had done, and Claire of Montefalco also begged alms in the streets.54 In Dominic’s second attempt at San Sisto, he took no chances, retaining the nuns’ keys as they entered their new home, forbidding them to speak to outsiders, and appointing lay brothers to watch over them. But resistance lingered, and the thirteenth century rang to a close with the 1298 decretal of Boniface III, Pericoloso ac detestabile, denouncing Roman nuns’ movements beyond their convent doors. The Dominican friars, for their part, spent much of the thirteenth century trying to divest themselves of responsibility for female houses, a partial legacy of the San Sisto work.55 In these struggles, the friars’ stress on cloister was reiterated with a kind of rising shrillness. In another model sermon, Humbert of Romans claimed many religious women were under-zealous about maintaining their seclusion, and although not aware of their error, “neither do they remember the frailty of women, and how the devil led Eve astray; and thus… they hurl themselves into sin.”56 In late-Trecento Venice, Giovanni Dominici’s

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letters became more and more hostile as the Corpus Christi nuns strayed from his ideal. In an early rebuke, he said only that their struggles were not onerous: “No combat is less dangerous than yours, nor with a safer out- come, and without this one you would have a much more acute struggle: it would fall to you to fight the ancient serpent who defeated our first mother Eve.” 57 His later letters are filled with references to the nuns’ fragility, and at one point he states baldly that the sisters are themselves Eves for tempt- ing him to rejoice in worldly things.58 The nadir, significantly, came as the nuns resisted his attempts to impose a new, stricter rule, essentially that of San Sisto. Having mentioned their frailty and compared them to spoiled babies, he railed: “I believed I had made a body of Christ, glorious and without sin, and I made it of walls and rotten flesh,” before adding that even Adam and Eve in Paradise had rules to obey.59 So it is clear why the small convent of Sant’Aurea might be caught in these struggles. Located at the very heart of Rome, it was porous to the world. An incident recorded in 1425 suggests just how open it might be. One day a man arrived at the convent door. He introduced himself as Antonio di Paolo from Umbria, and explained that he had learned there was gold hidden in the grounds of the community. To find it, the nuns needed to give him fifty gold pieces. These would be sealed in a jar and buried, and the buried money would then attract the buried treasure like a magnet, because “like attracts like.” Antonio would return a month later, and they would dig up the jar with the lost horde now with it. When he failed to reappear, the nuns dug up the jar. Lead had been buried in it, and their gold was gone. When the Roman senator Carolus de Lapis and three conservatori of the city wrote to the of Norcia, Antonio di Paolo’s putative hometown, they discovered no such man was known there.60 This story suggests the nuns were good Romans, if gullible ones: the belief was widespread in the Middle Ages that “Golden Rome” was built on buried treasure, and Roman leases often had clauses specifying that any treasure discovered belonged to the property owner, not the finder.61 But it is strik- ing also that the sisters seem to have acted independently of any procurator or advisor, making their own decisions throughout. The odd stress on Aurea’s own constant enclosure in Lippo Vanni’s painting, and her constant bracketing by male figures, may seem almost a

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too-literal translation of an idealized female enclosure, but perhaps more interesting is the way flesh seems to transform itself within the image. Aurea’s figure as she is whipped is explicitly like that of Christ; no Trecento eye would have failed to see the scourging scene from the Passion almost at the surface of the little scene, and it has been suggested that the “strappado” or hanging was also a male punishment. If her corpse disappears in death, all lost except for her head, and even that literally at the bottom right of the triptych as if about to move out of it, that, too, is vaguely Christ-like, though typically His feet disappear at the top of an Ascension scene. But from a sense of too much body, doubled in the first scene and exposed to view, she has somehow lost her corporality at the end of the narrative sequence, and the figure beside the Virgin and Child seems like a different woman. Aurea’s Trecento office did cast her as a kind of proto-, stress- ing she had died as a steadfast virgin and example to her followers, but there is little that suggests that here.62 Thus the central axis of the painting becomes even more prominent, with its sense that Christ’s dead body has become Eve’s living and sinning one above it, more than the gigantic baby held by Mary. At the center of this painting seems to be a gap: the spread of Mary’s blue gown. But the whole impossible dream of the female vocation seems to be here, the making of mother Eve’s descendents into a body of Christ rather than rotten flesh. The problem of agency remains, however: how does a given painting come to figure a larger structural problem? We would need to imagine an artist almost preternaturally attuned to nuance, or a series of unrelated visual and patronage decisions that somehow produced this end. It is possible the nuns of Sant’Aurea were involved at least indirectly in the triptych’s commission, shaping it through their own lens, though they would normally have had to work through an intermediary agent, either a layman or a Dominican friar.63 But the oddness remains. The only dedicated study of Sant’Aurea, in the early twentieth centu- ry, suggested that its final suppression was brought about by over-friendly relations with the outside world.64 In the final years before Sant’Aurea’s 1514 suppression, there were repeated warnings to the sisters. In both 1497 and 1499 a nun from San Sisto was imposed as prioress and the reigning prioress excused.65 In 1506 the nuns were warned not to let

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anyone sleep within convent walls nor to leave the cloister themselves.66 In 1512, two years before Sant’Aurea’s dissolution, one sister Nufria was forbidden to re-enter the convent without explicit permission.67 Yet this is to take the friars’ view of things, and it approaches blaming the victim. In the early Cinquecento the area around the convent was being recreated by Pope Julius II as the via Giulia, and lined with impressive churches and palaces.68 The various “nations” of the city created new churches, the most famous being San Giovanni dei Fiorentini; the Sienese created the oratory and later church of Santa Caterina, dedicated to Catherine of Siena. It is possible Sant’Aurea was simply no longer prestigious or powerful enough to keep a place in this new urban space, and had lost the local support and relations that might have sustained it. Certainly the sisters of Sant’Aurea become invisible almost as soon as they entered San Sisto, and almost no sisters took the name Aurea after the move. The nuns of San Sisto had their own artworks, including a Madonna attributed to St. Luke himself, and Lippo Vanni’s triptych could hardly be expected to compete.69 Yet at least one sister of the new house was sufficiently devoted to have it restored and to obtain a of Aurea and an indulgence for her feast.70 Closed now within the buildings of Santi Domenico e Sisto, the panel remains a record of a small world, but it is hard not to see the area of damage dividing Saint Aurea’s painted figure as a sign of a larger loss.

Notes

1. I would like to thank the two anonymous readers for Early Modern Women for their many helpful suggestions. The work was first published by F. Mason Perkins and G. De Nicola, “Alcuni dipinti di Lippo Vanni,” Rassegna d’arte senese 6 (1910): 39–41. See also Sharon Dale, Lippo Vanni: Style and Iconography (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1985), 16–17 and 96–102; Un’antologia di restauri: 50 opere d’arte restaurate dal 1974 al 1981. Catalogo della mostra, , 1982 (Rome: De Luca, 1982, hereafter Restauri), 20–23; and Luisa Mortari, “L’antica Croce dipinta della chiesa romana dei SS. Domenico e Sisto,” in Studi in onore di Giulio Argan (Rome and Florence: Nuova Italia, 1984–1985), 1: 11–27. Santi Domenico e Sisto is now the seat of the Università Pontificia Tommaso d’Aquino. 2. Lippo Vanni (more properly Lippo di Vanni, though I will retain the conven- tional name here) is documented between 1344 and 1375 as a painter and miniaturist. In addition to Dale, Lippo Vanni, see Diana Norman, Siena and the Virgin: Art and Politics

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in a Late Medieval City State (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), 133–155; and Il gotico a Siena: Miniature, pitture, oreficere, oggetti d’arte (Florence: Centro Di, 1982), 26–36. 3. Alberto Zucchi, Roma domenicana: note storiche (Florence: Edizioni “Memorie Domenicane,” 1938), 1: 131–153; Pio Pecchiai, La Chiesa dello Spirito Santo dei Napoletani e l’antica chiesa di S. Aurea in via Giulia (Rome: Ugo Pinnarò, 1953). For medieval church- es in the city, see Mariano Armellini, Le chiese di Roma dal secolo IV al XIX (Rome: Nicola Ruffolo, 1942); Christian Huelsen, Le Chiese di Roma nel medio evo: Catalogo ed appunti (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1927); and Umberto Gnoli, Topografia e topomastica di Roma medioevale e moderna (Rome: Staderini, 1939). For Roman churches still extant, see Walter Buchowiecki, Handbüch der Kirchen Roms, 3 vols. (Vienna: Hollinek, 1967). 4. The fourteen documents are in , Archivium Generalis Ordinis Praedicatorum (hereafter AGOP), XII, 9002, buste 66–81 and 9003, busta 123. There are partial transcriptions in Pecchiai, Spirito Santo, 147–161. 5. For an introduction to the existing bibliography, see Silvia Evangelisti, “Wives, Widows, and Brides of Christ: Marriage and the Convent in the Historiography of Early Modern Italy,” History Journal 43 (2000): 233–247; Daniel Bornstein and Roberto Rusconi, eds., Women and Religion in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, trans. Margery J. Schneider (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Movimento religioso femminile e francescanismo nel secolo XIII: Atti del VII convegno internazionale (Assisi: La Società, 1980); and Roberto Rusconi, ed., Il movimento religioso femminile in Umbria nei secoli XIII–XIV: Atti del convegno internazionale di studio (Florence and Perugia: Nuova Italia and Regione dell’Umbria, 1984). The studies of Caroline Walker Bynum are still fundamental: Holy Feast and Holy Fast: the Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991). 6. Maria Walz, Compendium historiae Ordinis Praedicatorum 2nd ed. (Rome: Herder, 1930), 175–77, citing the codex Barcinonensi, AGOP LII, X, 88s. The Provincia Romana covered central Italy, including Tuscany, Umbria, and the Marches. 7. William A. Hinnebusch, The History of the Dominican Order. Part I: Origins and Growth to 1500 (Staten Island, NY: Alba House, 1966), 383. 8. General studies include: Jo Ann Kay McNamara, Sisters in Arms: Nuns through Two Millennia (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1996); Micheline de Fontette, Les religieuses à l’âge classique du droit canon (Paris: J. Vrin, 1967); Edith Pásztor, “Il monachesimo femminile,” Dall’eremo al cenobio: la civiltà monas- tica in Italia dalle origini all’età di Dante, ed. Giovanni Pugliese Carratelli (Milan: Libri Scheiwiller, 1987), 153–179; and Michel Parisse, Les nonnes au Moyen Age (Le Puy: C. Bonneton, 1983). Two regional studies are Helen Hills, “Cities and Virgins: Female Artistocratic Convents in Ealry Modern Naples and Palermo,” Oxford Art Journal 22 (1999): 31–54; and Mary Laven, Virgins of Venice: Enclosed Lives and Broken Vows in the Renaissance Convent (London: Viking, 2002). For the Dominicans and lay female piety,

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see: Maiji Lehmijoki-Gardner, Worldly Saints: Social Interaction of Dominican Penitent Women in Italy, 1200–1500 (Helsinki: Suomen Historiallinen Seura, 1999). 9. While the medieval period has been relatively poorly studied, there are a num- ber of studies of nuns and images in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Rome. See Carolyn Valone, “Roman Matrons as Patrons: Various Views of the Cloister Wall,” in The Crannied Wall: Women, Religion, and the Arts in Early Modern Europe, ed. Craig A. Monson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 49–72; Marilyn R. Dunn, “Nuns as Art Patrons: The Decoration of S. Marta al Collegio Romano,” Art Bulletin 70 (1988): 451–477; and “Spiritual Philanthropists: Women as Convent Patrons in Seicento Rome,” in Women and Art in Early Modern Europe, ed. Cynthia Lawrence (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 154–188; and Franca Trinchieri Camiz, “’Virgo-non sterilis. . .’: Nuns as Artists in Seventeenth-Century Rome,” in Picturing Women in Renaissance and Italy, ed. G.J. Johnson and S.F. Matthews-Grieco (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 139–164. 10. Studies of images and religious women include: June H. McCash, ed., The Cultural Patronage of Medieval Women (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1996); Anabel Thomas, Art and Piety in the Female Religious Communities of Renaissance Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Gary M. Radke, “Nuns and their Art: the Case of San Zaccaria in Renaissance Venice,” Renaissance Quarterly 54 (2001): 430–459; Julian Gardner, “Nuns and : Agendas for Research,” Römisches Jahrbuch 30 (1995): 27–57; Jeffrey Hamburger, “Art, Enclosure, and the Cura Monialum: Prolegomena in the Guise of a Postscript,” Gesta 31 (1992): 108–134; Nuns as Artists: the Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1997); The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (New York: Zone Books, 1998); Cordelia Joan Warr, “Female Patronage and the Rise of Female Spirituality in Italian Art of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries,” Ph.D. diss., University of Warwick, 1994; Jeryldene M. Wood, Women, Art, and Spirituality: the of Early Modern Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and Paul Vandenbroek, ed., Le Jardin Clos de l’âme: l’Imaginaire des religieuses dans le Pays-Bas du sud depuis le treizième siècle (Brussels: Snoeck–Ducaju and Zoon, 1994). 11. Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 12. On the pairing, see Ernst Guldan, Eva und Maria: Eine Antithese als Bildsmotiv (Graz and Cologne: Böhlaus, 1966); Beth Williamson, “The Virgin Lactans as Second Eve: Image of the Salvatrix,” Studies in Iconography, 19 (1998): 105–138; and my “Flesh and the Feminine: Early-Renaissance Images of the Madonna with Eve at Her Feet,” Oxford Art Journal 25 (2002): 127–147, which briefly discusses the Sant’Aurea painting. 13. See Victor M. Schmidt, “Il trittico di Duccio alla National Gallery di Londra: la datazione, l’iconografia e il committente,” Prospettiva 81 (January, 1996): 19–30, with earlier bibliography; and George Kaftal, Iconography of the Saints in Central and South Italian Schools of Painting (Florence: Sansoni, 1965), 123–124. The Gubbio fresco, show-

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ing the Aurea full-length and with an abbreviated label, is reproduced but not discussed by Enrica Neri Lusanna, “Percorso di Guiduccio Palmerucci,” Paragone-arte 325 (1977): 10–39, figure 8a, as “Pittore eugubino della metà del Trecento.” 14. Acta Sanctorum (Antwerp, 1642-; reprint Brussels: Culture et Civilisation, 1966-), 4: 755–776. Though the saint’s name is given in Trecento and Quattrocento documents as both Aura and Aurea, she is consistently called Aurea in discussions of the convent, and that name will be retained here. 15. Analecta hymnica medii aevi, ed. Guido Maria Dreves and Clemens Blume, 55 vols. (Leipzig: O.R. Reisland, 1886–1922), 19 (1895): 73–74; 37 (1901): 120; 43 (1903): 86; and 45a (1904): 36–37. 16. It is worth noting that these names are given in the Acta Sanctorum, but not in Aurea’s Trecento office. 17. For Aurea and Ostia, see Russell Meiggs, Roman Ostia, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), 518–531; and Christoph Luitpold Frommel, “Kirche und Tempel: Giuliano della Roveres Kathedrale Sant’Aurea in Ostia,” in Festschrift für Nikolaus Himmelmann: Beiträge zur Ikonographie und Hermeneutik, ed. Hans-Ulrich Cain et al (Mainz am Rhein: P. von Zabern, 1989), 491–505. 18. There are three early-modern chronicles by the nuns of the convent, brought together in Joachim-Joseph Berthier, Chroniques du monastère de San Sisto et de San Domenico à Rome, écrites par trois religieuses du même monastère, et traduites per un reli- gieux dominicain, 2 vols. (Levanto: Imprimerie de l’Immaculée, 1919–1920); the legend is recorded at 1: 47–48. The chronicles were written by Pulcheria Carducci (mid-Seicento), Domenica Salomonia (1656–1672), and Anna Vittoria Dolara (died 1827), with addi- tions by Tomasa Angelica Pannilini (ob. c. 1919). Berthier’s work should be used with caution, since it moves from one chronicle to another without always signaling the shift; for this reason, I have not used it as a source for Sant’Aurea, although there is a short discussion of the community. For Santi Domenico e Sisto, see, instead, Christina Morris McOmber, “Recovering Female Agency: Roman Patronage and the Dominican Convent of Ss. Domenico e Sisto,” Ph.D. diss., 2 vols., University of Iowa, 1997; and Virginia Bernardini et al, Ss. Domenico e Sisto (Rome: Istituto Nazionale di Studi Romani, 1991). On convent chronicles, there is an excellent study by K. J. P. Lowe, Nuns’ Chronicles and Convent Culture in Renaissance and Counter- Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); for outside Italy see Anne Winston-Allen, Convent Chronicles (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004). 19. Sant’Aurea does not appear in the list of the known as the Anonimo Torinese, compiled around 1314, and although it is included in a list of Dominican convents of the Roman Province compiled in 1320, the name was inserted by a different hand, probably later in the Trecento. See Giorgio Falco, “Il catalogo di Torino delle chiese, degli ospedali, dei monasteri di Roma nel secolo XIV,” Archivio Storico Romano di Storia Patria 32 (1909): 411–443. According to the first edition of Walz, Compendium historiae, 248, between 1303 and 1358 five convents were added to the Dominican Roman province, but unfortunately he provides no names or references. Both

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Zucchi, Roma domenicana, 137–138, and Pecchiai, Spirito Santo, 10–11, have suggested Sant’Aurea was founded soon after 1320; my own suggestion is offered below. 20. AGOP XII, 9002, busta 69 (Pecchiai, Spirito Santo, 149). 21. For legislation on male houses, see: Richard A. Sundt, “Mediocres domos et humiles habeant fratres nostri: Dominican Legislation on Architecture and Architectural Decoration in the 13th Century,” Journal of the Society of Architecural Historians 46 (1987): 394–407; Gilles Meerssemann, “L’Architecture Dominicaine au XIIIe Siècle: Législation et Pratique,” Archivium Fratrum Praedictatorum 16 (1946): 136–190; and Joanna Louise Cannon, “Dominican Patronage of the Arts in Central Italy: the Provincia Romana, c.1220–c.1320,” Ph.D. diss., University of London, 1980, 52ff. Gesta 31/32 (1992) was a special issue dedicated to female monastic houses. Suggestive work on medieval convent architecture in Britain has been done by Roberta Gilchrist, Gender and Material Culture: The Archeology of Religious Women (London and New York: Routledge, 1994). 22. Stefano Borsi, Roma di Sisto V: La pianta di Antonio Tempesta, 1593 (Rome: Officina, 1986), 138–140 and map section I-2. The identification of the church as Sant’Aurea is accepted in Restauri, 21. 23. Gnoli, Topografia e topomastica, 66–67. Sienese patronage at the later church of Santa Caterina, also considered to be “de nazione Senese,” is discussed by Serenella Rolfi, “Un aromatario senese e la chiesa di Santa Caterina a Via Giulia,” Roma moderna e con- temporanea 5 (1997): 185–207. Ceccarius, Strada Guilia, 18, claims the Sienese may have used San Nicola de Incoronatis (or de Furca) rather than Sant’Aurea as its main church before the creation of Santa Caterina, but he gives no source for this claim. 24. The 1383 list: AGOP XII, 9002, busta 72 (Pecchiai, Spirito Santo, 150); busta 71 is a copy of the same document, but lists only four nuns. The 1413 list: AGOP XII, 9002, busta 77 (Pecchiai, Spirito Santo, 151–152). An imperfect comparison is offered by the 1320 list Catalogue of Torino. According to this source, the Clarissan community at San Silvestro di Capite held 17 nuns; Santa Caterina had 8, Sant’Erasmo had 16, and Santa Bibiana held 18. The two great exceptions were the Dominican San Sisto Vecchio, which held 70 sisters with 16 friars attached to them, and Santa Maria in Julia, which held 40 women. See Falco, “Il catalogo di Torino” for these figures. 25. The sisters were listed as Elena de Potenza, priorissa, Magdalena de transti- berim subpriorissa, Catherina de Pistorio, Benedicta de Benedictinis, Paolotia Cole dello Mastro, Romanella de Monte, Caterinotia Iohannis Vecchi, Ceccha de Rufinis, Lippa ser Stephani, Honufria Lelli Alexii, and Rita Philippi Raputi. 26. For the economic and social conditions of choir nuns, see Richard Trexler, “Le célibat à la fin du Moyen Age: Les religieuses de Florence,” Annales ESC 27 (1972): 1329– 1350; and Gene Adam Brucker, “Monasteries, Friaries, and Nunneries in Quattrocento Florence,” in Christianity and the Renaissance: Images and Religious Imagination in the Quattrocento, ed. Timothy Verdon and John Henderson (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1990), 41–62. 27. Jean-Claude Maire-Vigueur, “Les ‘casali’ des églises romaines à la fin du moyen âge (1348–1428),” Mélanges de l’École Française de Rome: Moyen Âge, Temps Moderne 86

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(1974): 63–136. Maire-Vigueur records a 1396 donation to Sant’Aurea of twenty-five florins by Andrea della Valle: 89–90, nt. 2. 28. Mary Martin McLaughlin, “Creating and Recreating Communities of Women: the Case of Corpus Domini, Ferrara, 1406–1452,” Signs 14, no. 2 (1989): 293–320. Founding a convent was an expensive business, and therefore rare. The Dominican Cardinal Niccolò Albertini of Prato left 11,000 gold florins to create S. Niccolò in his hometown: Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, 1:734–736. 29. Robert Brentano, Rome Before Avignon: A Social History of Thirteenth-Century Rome (London: Longman, 1974), 230–247. 30. “Item per monaster. quod sit in castro senese di urbe, per fabrica dicti monas- terii quinqaginta flor. aur.” “Testamento di Andrea di qd. Orso de Filiis Ursi,” Archivio Storico Capitolino, Archivio Orsini II, A 005, n. 007, 12 giugno 1348. Andrea left a series of legacies for his wife and heirs, monies for a chapel he had founded at S. Pietro del Castello di Burdella, and then bequests to a series of churches. Among the Roman churches mentioned were: S. Pietro, S. Spirito in Sassia, S. Lorenzo in Damaso, S. Marie Grupte Pinte (a local church where the Orsini had jus patronatus), S. Marie de Orto (or de Urbe, as the word is smudged), S. Giovanni in Laterano, S. Paolo, S. Lorenzo fuori le Mura, S. Sabbastiani. Most were left five florins. 31. On the Orsini family, see Franca Allegrezza, Organizzazione del potere e din- amiche familiari: gli Orsini dal Duecento agli inizi del Quattrocento (Rome: Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo, 1998); Sandro Carocci, Baroni di Roma: Dominazioni signorili e lignaggi aristocratici nel Duecento e nel primo Trecento (Rome: École Française de Rome, 1993), 387–403 and tables; Giuseppe Marchetti Longhi, I Boveschi e gli Orsini (Rome: Istituto di Studi Romani, 1960); Pompeo Litta, Famiglie celebri di Italia (Milan: Giulio Ferrari, 1819–1867), 7: np. For Orsini control of the city space, see Enrico Guidoni, “Roma e l’urbanistica del Trecento,” Storia dell’arte italiana, 322–332. 32. Andrea Orsini supported the Chapter of the Dominican Roman Province in both 1332 and 1339, and was remembered in their prayers pro vivis: Acta capitulorum provincialium provinciae romanae (1243–1344), ed. Thomas Kaeppeli with Antonio Dondaine (Rome: Institutum Historicum Fratrum Praedicatorum, 1941), 279 and 316. 33. Stefano L. Forte, “Il Cardinale Matteo Orsini OP e il suo testamento,” Archivium Fratrum Praedicatorum 37 (1967): 181–262. Matteo was named Provincial of the Province of Rome in 1322, and Cardinal of S. Giovanni e Paolo in 1327. In the 1330s he was given the archbishopric of Palermo, which he ceded when named Cardinal Bishop of Sabina in 1336. It is Forte who describes Matteo as de facto protector, although this post did not officially exist until c.1376. Matteo had founded a family chapel in the main Dominican church of Rome, Santa Maria sopra Minerva: Giancarlo Palmerio and Gabriella Villetti, Storia edilizia di S. Maria sopra Minerva in Roma 1275–1870 (Roma: Viella, 1989), 48–53, and 152–156. Andrea, in his will, left ten gold florins for his burial in the chapel, a sum which further underlines the importance of his donation to Sant’Aurea. 34. AGOP XII 9002, buste 68 and 69 (Pecchiai, Spirito Santo, 148–149). One of

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these is the document also noting the location of S. Aurea, mentioned briefly above. 35. In 1368 the minor Francesco and his apparently younger brother Nicola, Counts of Anguillara and Capranica, were subject to their mother’s guardianship, hence her intervention here. For the Anguillara, see Carocci, Baroni di Roma, 299–309; and Vittorino Sora, “I Conti di Anguillara dalla loro origine al 1465,” Archivio della Societá Romana di Storia Patria 29 (1906): 397–442, and 30 (1907): 53–118. 36. AGOP XII, 9002, busta 69 (Pecchiai, Spirito Santo, 149): “domina executrix predicta cum voluntate infrascripte domine priorisse et omnium aliarum monialium dicti monasterii elegit singnanter [sic] altarem et locum altaris intus dictam ecclesiam, videlicet in respectu gratis ferree dicti monasterii iuxta et prope altarem magnum Sancte Auree, per quam gratem dicta domina priorissa et moniales valeant habiliter et ex aspectu oculo- rum videre et aurire canere missam et canere et celebrare divina officia et alia sollempnia que requiruntur facere in aliis altaribus consacratis aliarum ecclesiarum.” The document is rubbed in places but legible. 37. The Anguillara figure prominently in the story of Pucciarello’s bequest. Pucciarello made a will on July 29, 1363, leaving Count Giovanni, Francesco’s father, as his executor and heir to almost all his goods. Giovanni himself died before September of that year, and presumably the inheritance then passed to Giovanni’s own heir, Francesco, with the widowed Countess Francesca as executrix and guardian of their children. Slightly later, the Countess recorded she had four hundred florins in usufruct for Agnese, Pucciarello’s widow, presumably the same four hundred florins marked for the Sant’Aurea bequest, and in July 1364 Francesco stipulated he would give Agnese fifty florins a year for two years, “propter multa servicia et merita per eum recepta a domina Angnete et propter magnum amorem quem ipse et pater eius habuit erga ispa.” For this story, see Sora, “I conti di Anguillara,” 30 (1907): 101–109; and 29 (1906): 437 nt. 3 for Giovanni’s death. 38. For the links of the two families, see C. de Cupis, “Registro degli Orsini e dei Conti di Anguillara,” Bollettino della regia società di storia patria Anton Ludovico Antinori 14 (1902) through 28/29 (1937–38). Count Francesco had Orsini women for a great-aunt, great-grandmother, and great-great-grandmother, and he may also have had an Orsini man as his great-uncle, since his aunt Emilia had received a dispensation to marry Matteo Orsini “de Monte,” one of the Orsini of the great palace complex at Monte Giordano. This branch also had shared property: Carocci, Baroni di Roma, 399–400 and tavola 11. For the 1332 chapter: Acta capitulorum provincialium provinciae romanae, 279. 39. For Dominican nuns in particular, see Hinnebusch, Dominican Order, 377– 415, and de Fontette, Les religieuses, 89–127. 40. For Dominican converse, see de Fontette, Les religieuses, 107; Trexler, “Le céli- bat,” 1336. 41. Adrian Randolph, “Regarding Women in Sacred Space,” in Picturing Women, 17–41; and Caroline A. Bruzelius, “Hearing is Believing: Clarissan Architecture, ca. 1213–1340,” Gesta 31 (1992): 83–91. 42. Hinnebusch, Dominican Order, 393–400, discusses the friars’ responsibilities for the nuns.

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43. On this reforming period: McNamara, Sisters in Arms, especially 289–323; Edith Pásztor, “I Papi del Duecento e Trecento di fronte alla vita religiosa femminile,” Il movimento religioso femminile, 29–65; and Brenda M. Bolton, “Daughters of Rome: All One in Christ Jesus,” in Women in the Church, ed. W. J. Sheils and Diana Wood (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 101–115. 44. The foundation of San Sisto has been much discussed because it was an important step both in medieval convent reform and in the spread of the Dominican Order in Italy. In addition to the studies mentioned above, see Raimondo Spiazzi, ed., La chiesa e il monastero di San Sisto all’Appia: raccolta di studi storici (Bologna: Edizioni Studio Domenicano, 1992), which brings together and reprints relevant earlier studies. In some accounts, the nuns of the legendary first community of Sant’Aurea joined San Sisto when it was founded in 1221, and Sant’Aurea was subsequently refounded by sisters of S. Sisto in the Trecento: Berthier, Chroniques, 1: 48 and 293; and Ottavio Panciroli, Tesori nascosti dell’alma citta di Roma (Rome: Heredi d’Alessando Zannetti, 1625), 758. 45. Rosalind B. and Christopher N. L. Brook, “St. Clare,” in Medieval Women, ed. Derek Baker (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978), 275–287, especially 282–286. Claire’s own rule lays less stress on cloister than that of Gregory IX. 46. For this literature, see Elissa B. Weaver, “The Convent Wall in Tuscan Convent Drama,” in The Crannied Wall, ed. Monson, 73–86. 47. Jerome, “Epistola XXII: Ad Eustochium, Paulae filiam. De Custodia vir- ginitatis,” Patrologiae Cursus Completus: Series Latina, ed. J. P. Migne (Paris: Garnier Frères,1844–1890), 22: 394–425. For an introduction to the dominant themes, see Carla Casagrande, ed., Prediche alle donne del secolo XIII (Milan: Bompiani, 1978). For the popularity of Jerome’s epistle, see Parisse, Les nonnes, 16; and for a contemporary ver- nacular version: Filippo Salmeri, ed., Epistula di sanctu Iheronimu ad Eustochiu (Catania: CUECM, 1980). 48. “Postquam vero Virgo concepit in utero, et peperit nobis puerum…soluta maledictio est. Mors per Evam: vita per Mariam. Ideoque et ditius virginitatis donum fluxit in feminas, quia coepit a femina.” [After a Virgin conceived in her uterus, and bore for us a child. . . the curse was lifted. Death through Eve, life through Maria. Thus the gift of virginity flows most richly in women, as it began from a woman.] Jerome, “Ad Eustochium,” 408. 49. Casagrande, Prediche, 37–42; more generally, see Edward Tracy Brett, “Humbert of Romans and the Dominican Second Order,” Memorie domenicane 12 (1981): 1–25. 50. B. Giovanni Dominici OP, Lettere spirituali, eds. M-T Casella and G. Pozzi (Freiburg [Friburgo]: Edizioni Universitarie, 1969), 60–61. See also Gaudenz Freuler, “Andrea di Bartolo, Fra Tommaso d’Antonio Caffarini, and Sienese Dominicans in Ven ice,” Art Bulletin 69 (1987): 570–586. 51. Dominici, Lettere, 83, and 90–93: “siete spose dello imperador del cielo e della terra e io sono sua creatura e disutile servo.” 52. See the excellent study by Katherine Gill, “Open Monasteries for Women in

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Late Medieval and Early Modern Italy: Two Roman Examples,” in The Crannied Wall, ed. Monson, 15–47, which discusses the Oblates of Santa Francesca Romana and the Pinzochiere of Sant’Agostino. 53. Trexler, “Le célibat,’ 1338–1341,” but confer Anthony Molho, “‘Tamquam vere mortua’: Le professioni religiose femminili nella Firenze del tardo medioevo,” Società e storia 12, no. 43 (1989) : 1–44. 54. Brooke and Brooke, “St. Clare,” 253–273; Pásztor, “I papi,” 60. 55. Elizabeth Makowski, Canon Law and Cloistered Women: “Pericoloso” and Its Commentators, 1298–1545 (Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1997). For the Dominicans’ fight against convent supervision, see Hinnebusch, Dominican Order, 389–393. 56. Casagrande, Prediche, 56: “nec recordantur fragilitatis foemineae, et quomodo diabolus Evam seduxit: et ideo frequenter procurante hoste, istae ruunt in peccata.” 57. Dominici, Lettere, 65: “Niuna battaglia è più sicura e meno pericolosa che questa che avete, e, se questa mancasse, aresti delle più cocenti: converrebbevi combattere col serpente antico dal quale la prima madre nostra Eva si trovò sconfitta.” 58. Dominici, Lettere, 171. 59. Dominici, Lettere, 164–167, here at 166: “io credeva avere fabricato un corpo di Cristo già glorioso e impeccabile e io l’ho fatto pur di mura e di carne fetida.” 60. Pecchiai, Spirito Santo, 18–22, and 152–154 for the text of the letter, which is in the Biblioteca Casanatense, ms. 4501. 61. Brentano, Rome Before Avignon, 74–75. 62. Analecta hymnica medii aevi, 45a (1904): 36–37. 63. Though the first mention of an agent comes almost twenty years after Lippo Vanni’s triptych was signed, both laymen and friars are documented in this role. AGOP XII 9002, busta 73 (Pecchiai, Spirito Santo, 150) records in June 1385 a brother Biagio, of the Domenican friary of San Biagio, as procurator and syndic for the nuns. AGOP XII: 9002, busta 75 (Pecchiai, Spirito Santo, 151) records in November 1399 the notary Paulo di Andrea acting to buy a house for the nuns. 64. Zucchi, Roma domenicana, 141–144. 65. Zucchi, Roma domenicana, 141–142; Pecchiai, Spirito Santo, 24. 66. “Prohibetur . . . monialibus S. Aure de Urbe ne ad pernoctandum quasvis per- sonas introducant, nec non soror aliqua egredi audeat de monasterio. Egressa autem non possit reverti sine licentia. [ It is forbidden . . . that the sisters of Sant’Aurea of Rome allow any person into the convent to spend the night, nor that any sister presume to leave the convent. Having left the convent, she is not allowed to return without licence to do so.] Zucchi, Roma domenicana, 142. 67. Registrum litterarum fr. Thomae de Vio Caietani OP Magistri Ordinis 1508– 1513, ed. Albertus de Meyer (Rome: Institutum Historicum Fratrum Praedicatorum, 1935), 146: “Mandatur sub poena excommunicationis priorissae et sororibus monasterii Sanctae Aurae de Urbe, ne presumant recipere intra monasterium sororem Nufriam sine expressa licentia in scriptis habita a Magistro Reverendissimo.” [The prioress and sisters

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of the convent of Sant’Aurea of Rome are ordered, on pain of excommunication, not to presume to receive sister Nufria into the convent without the expressed written permis- sion of the Reverend Master.] 68. Luigi Salerno et al., Via Giulia: una utopia urbanistica del ‘500 (Rome: A. Staderini, 1973); and Carlo Pietrangelli, ed., Guide Rionali di Roma: Rione VII Regola, 2nd ed., 3 vols. (Rome: Fratelli Palombi, 1973–1979). 69. For the Madonna, see Pietro Amato, De Vera Effigie Mariae: Antiche Icone Romani (Rome: De Luca, 1988); and Francesco Maria Torrigio, Historia della Veneranda Immagine di Maria Vergine posta nella Chiesa del Monastero delle RR. Monache di Santi Sisto e Domenico di Roma (Rome: M. Manelfi, 1641). 70. Berthier, Chroniques, 2:121–122, claims the relic was a part of Aurea’s finger, subsequently lost.

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