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Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 2007, vol. 2 The Dominicans and Cloistered Women: The Convent of Sant’Aurea in Rome 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 Virgin holding the standing Christ Child while two angels hold a cloth of honor behind their heads. At Mary’s right hand is Saint Dominic, head of the Dominican Order, 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 friar 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 Thomas Aquinas. 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 saints, 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, 43 emw final 1.indd 43 8/13/07 7:21:13 AM 44 EMWJ 2007, vol. 2 Anne Dunlop 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. emw final 1.indd 44 8/13/07 7:21:16 AM The Dominicans and Cloistered Women 45 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. emw final 1.indd 45 8/13/07 7:21:18 AM 46 EMWJ 2007, vol. 2 Anne Dunlop 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. emw final 1.indd 46 8/13/07 7:21:20 AM The Dominicans and Cloistered Women 47 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. emw final 1.indd 47 8/13/07 7:21:21 AM 48 EMWJ 2007, vol. 2 Anne Dunlop 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 friars. 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 nuns were transferred to the venerable Dominican house of San Sisto Vecchio all’Appia. In 1575 this combined community moved into the new church 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 Italy has been a uniquely rich field for this work, marked as it was by such extraordinary figures as Catherine of Siena 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 emw final 1.indd 48 8/13/07 7:21:22 AM The Dominicans and Cloistered Women 49 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 emw final 1.indd 49 8/13/07 7:21:22 AM 50 EMWJ 2007, vol. 2 Anne Dunlop 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.