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Gunzburg, Darrelyn. ‘Looking Back: The Transgression of Social Codes
Explored through the Direct Gaze in Fra Angelico’s San Marco Altarpiece
When Compared with Madonna and Child with Eight Saints ’ St Andrews
Journal of Art History and Museum Studies 14 (2010): 31-44.
ABSTRACT
This paper offers a thematic study of how a contemporary female audience may
have encountered the direct gaze in Italian religious paintings of the mid-
Quattrocento. Specifically it contrasts two works by Fra Angelico (born c.
1387-1400, died 1455) - the publicly viewed San Marco Altarpiece (The Virgin
and Child Enthroned with Angels and Saints c. 1438-40) and the privately
viewed male-only Madonna and Child with Eight Saints (also known as
Madonna delle ombre. c.1450) in the east dormitory corridor of San Marco –
and notes the differences in the exemplars who carry the direct gaze within each
painting.
The paper considers the location and Dominican iconography of these two
paintings and then draws on the evidence of the code and conduct books of the
time written by men, letters and works written by women, the prevailing
literature, the nature of medieval sexuality, and contemporary thinking regarding
the nature of the gaze through the disciplines of gender and visual culture,
psychology and memory.
The thesis of this paper is that, despite the proscriptive texts of the fourteenth
century, when a woman encountered the direct gaze of a man in a religious
painting, another dialectic was occurring, a possible unintentional, or even
intentional, crossing of social codes.
1
Looking Back: The Transgression Of Social Codes Explored Through The
Direct Gaze In Fra Angelico’s San Marco Altarpiece (The Virgin And Child
Enthroned With Angels And Saints C. 1438-40) When Compared With Madonna
And Child With Eight Saints (Also Known As Madonna Delle Ombre. C.1450),
San Marco, East Dormitory
Often depicted in Italian religious paintings of the thirteenth to fifteenth
centuries is the image of the person who looks out of the frame directly at the
viewer. In 1435 Leon Battista Alberti (1404 - 1472) codified this when he
stated:
Then, I like there to be someone in the ‘historia’ who tells the
spectators what is going on, and either beckons them with his hand to
look, or with a ferocious expression and forbidding glance challenges
them not to come near, as if he wished their business to be secret, or
points to some danger or remarkable thing in the picture, or by his
gesture invites you to laugh or weep with them.1
Baxandall notes that in fifteenth century Florence there was a great flowering of
religious drama, stories of which had only previously been seen in religious
paintings. He suggests that the festaiuolo of plays (the choric figure, often in
the character of an angel, who introduced the religious drama and mediated
between audience and stage) is reflected in religious paintings by those figures
who gaze out of the scene to the viewer and point to the central action:
The role is always a minor one, an attendant angel or a lady in waiting;
but it will be standing in a close relationship with other similar figures
… In this way we are invited to participate in the group of figures
assisting at the event. We alternate between our own frontal view of
the action and the personal relationship with the angel group, so that
we have a compound experience of the event: the clarity of one kind
of access is enriched by the intimacy of the other... We become active
accessories to the event.2
However, although minor figures such as angels, young boys and adult
females do gaze out of religious paintings, the direct gaze is not always limited
to a minor person. There are many other exemplars who carry a direct gaze in
Italian religious paintings and these include female saints, male name saints [fig.
1], male titular saints [fig. 2], patron saints [fig. 1], the Virgin Mary [fig. 3], the
Christ Child [fig. 3], Christ in adulthood, and even God.
2
Figure 1: Fra Angelica, The Virgin and Child Enthroned with Angels and Saints, c. 1438-40,
tempera and gold on panel, Florence Museo di San Marco. Photo: Nicolò Orsi Battaglini.
Figure 2. Bonaventura Berlinghieri, The Saint Francis Altarpiece, 1235, tempera on wood,
San Francesco, Pescia, Italy. Photo: D.Gunzburg.
3
They occur across time in the late medieval period - Duecento to
Quattrocento. They occur across genre - in frescoes [fig. 3], altarpieces [figs. 1
and 2], and in funerary chapels. They occur across material - on wood [figs. 1
and 2], canvas, and wall [fig. 3] - and as part of personal travelling triptychs.
They are viewed in villages [fig. 2], towns, and major cities [figs. 1 and 3]
throughout Italy and at various times of the day, depending on the church
service in question, hence under different lighting conditions. They are usually
elevated and thus require the viewer to look up, either at a wall [fig. 3], hung on
a wall [fig. 2] or placed on an altarpiece [fig. 1]. With such diversity and
frequency of the direct gaze in the religious art of the period, and given the
subordinate role of women, an area which will be investigated later in this paper,
what might have been the impact of these major figures who gaze out on the
female lay audience? This question is explored using two paintings.
Figure 3. Lippo Vanni, Virgin and Christ Child with Saints Francis, John the Baptist,
Catherine of Alexandria and Blessed Pietro da Siena, 1360s, fresco, Martinozzi Chapel,
San Francesco, Siena. Photo: D.Gunzburg.
4
THE SAN MARCO ALTARPIECE
The San Marco altarpiece, The Virgin and Child Enthroned with Angels and
Saints [fig. 1] was commissioned by Cosimo de’ Medici when he gained
patronal rights to the main chapel of the church of San Marco, Florence. Fra
Angelico c. 1438-40, took a new approach to this piece.3 Instead of the separate
panels on gold ground, turrets, pinnacles and gables of previous high altarpieces,
the San Marco altarpiece presented a sacra conversazione. Dedicated to the
Virgin and Child with angels and six saints standing either side of her throne
within a single unified space, the iconography of Fra Angelico’s painting was
deeply embedded into Dominican culture. Saint Dominic, Saint Peter Martyr,
and Saint Thomas Aquinas, stand on the Virgin’s left whilst Saint Mark, the
titular saint of the Medici parish church, stands in the place of honour to the
right of the Virgin. He faces Saint John the Evangelist and points to the text in
his Gospel recording Christ’s command to preach, one of the principle roles of
the Dominican Order.4 Saint Lawrence, patron saint of Cosimo’s dead brother,
Lorenzo, stands to the viewer’s far left.
In Florentine society at this time, expenditure on religious institutions was one
of the obligations imposed on the rich.5 Patronage of a family chapel also offered
opportunities for self-promotion, capturing a favourable moment to display wealth
and to mark financial, political and social prestige. Hence dominating the
foreground are Cosimo de’ Medici’s patron saints, Cosmas and Damian, and in a
radical departure from Dominican iconography, their legend was continued in the
predella. Neither Cosmas nor Damian held any special meaning for Dominicans,
and whilst in this altarpiece Damian faces away from the viewer, Fra Angelico
recognised, incorporated, and visually presented Cosimo’s patronage by depicting
Saint Cosmas looking directly out of the painting.
The main panel size is 220 cm x 227cm. Including the predella, and the
suggested ten pilaster panels of the original frame, such an altarpiece, unusual
for its time, would have made an imposing statement. In this altarpiece four
figures gaze out at the viewer: Saint Lawrence, Saint Dominic, the naked Christ
Child seated on the Virgin’s left knee, and Saint Cosmas, kneeling centre left,
gesturing to the Virgin.
5
The altarpiece reflected the devotional needs of the Order. However, by
placing Saint Cosmas to the front of the picture, longitudinally forward of the
titular Saint Mark yet, at the same time, on the same plane, in the place of
honour at the Virgin Mary’s right side, Fra Angelico was consolidating Cosimo
de’ Medici’s role as the most powerful man in the territory. Amongst other
things this was a clear display of power to the San Marco community and a male
lay audience. As well, the inclined head suggests reception, the gesture of the
hand imparts invitation, the kneeling figure conveys adoration, whilst the hand
across the chest and near the heart is akin to the gestural syntax of courtly love.6
When viewed by a male audience, this implies an encouragement of courtly love
for the Virgin. But what of a female audience? In order to understand this
question it is firstly necessary to know how visible this altarpiece would have
been to a lay female audience.
VISIBILITY – LOCATION OF THE SAN MARCO ALTARPIECE IN THE
CHURCH
The San Marco altarpiece was placed on the high altar in the chancel of the
main chapel of the church of San Marco, Florence. Hall states that whilst the
first church of San Marco had a tramezzo in the Trecento, by the time
Michelozzo redesigned it in the Quattrocento there was but a single partition
between nave and sanctuary.7 However, in his book Fra Angelico at San Marco
Hood includes a reconstructed plan of 1450 showing a tri-fold division of the
church with the area between the entrance and the tramezzo denoted as the
“church of the women” [fig. 4].8
As a mendicant church, the area of the high altar and the main chapel was
barred to the laity during Mass. Indeed Hood suggests that the fifteenth century
remodelling of the church of San Marco to fit the Dominican customs of
common worship had little connection with worship by the lay congregation.
Yet there were at least three occasions when the door from the friars’ choir
would have been opened to the public and the altarpiece visible: in the evenings
when the friars sang a hymn to the Virgin at one of her altars in the lower
6
church; when the Host was raised for worship by the entire congregation during
the Mass; and when communion was dispersed.9
Furthermore Randolph notes that, whilst “the spatial imperative of division
was felt with particular urgency by the mendicants”,10 laywomen may have had
a much closer access to and hence visibility of the altarpiece. He cites the fresco
of the Miracle of the Crib at Greccio in the Upper Church of San Francesco in
Assisi [fig. 5] which portrays lay women viewed from the presbytery, looking
on from the doorway of the rood screen which separated presbytery from nave,
whilst a priest enacted the Christmas story.
Figure 4. San Marco, Florence. Reconstructed plan of 1450, ground floor, showing a tri-fold
division of the church. Drawing: Timothy Keohle in Hood, William. (1993) Fra Angelico at
San Marco, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, p.3.
7
Hence laywomen may well have encountered the direct gaze of Saint Cosmas
in the San Marco altarpiece at close quarters, and whilst it may have been a
relative rarity, it could be argued that this rarity made the encounter with the
image all the more powerful.
MADONNA AND CHILD WITH EIGHT SAINTS
In contrast to this publicly viewed altarpiece was the privately worshipped
Madonna and Child with Eight Saints (also known as Madonna delle ombre),
also painted by Fra Angelico but some ten years later c.1450 [fig. 6]. Located in
the east dormitory, this fresco was designed for male viewing only. Friars,
novices and clerics, but not lay brothers, would have gathered together in front
of this fresco in the dormitory corridor for matins of the Blessed Virgin before
going down to the choir for regular matins.11 The strip of night sky at the top of
this sacra conversazione suggests the times of day at which prayers would have
been said - before dawn or late at night. Occupying the entire vertical expanse of
Figure 5. Giotto di Bondone (?) Miracle of the Crib at Greccio, c.1290-1300, fresco, Upper
Church, San Francesco, Assisi. Photo: public domain.
8
the wall separating the doors from Cells 25 and 26 in the east corridor Madonna
delle ombre is painted in the manner of an altarpiece, a special case of tempera
painting combining true fresco with tempera.12
In composition and iconography Madonna delle ombre was a repetition of
the San Marco altarpiece, and whilst Saint Thomas Aquinas replaces Saint
Francis, four saints still stand either side of the seated Virgin and Child
maintaining the same bilateral symmetry by stance and colour. As in the San
Marco altarpiece, the naked Christ Child seated on the Virgin’s left knee gazes
out at the viewer, as does Saint Lawrence, now standing to the left of the Virgin.
However, in this piece Saint Dominic holds the major direct gaze, his intent,
austere look to his friars emphasizing his testament/curse to which his finger
Figure 6. Fra Angelico. Madonna and child with Eight Saints. Also known as Madonna delle ombre
(Madonna of the Shadows). c.1450, fresco and tempera, Florence, San Marco, east dormitory.
Photo: Nicolò Orsi Battaglini.
9
points. Like God, Jesus and the Virgin Mary, such a famous celibate with a
preaching role, his chastity emphasised by his attribute of the lily, was in a
unique category, beyond reproach. Such a gaze, in contrast to that of Saint
Cosmas in the publicly viewed San Marco altarpiece, does not challenge social
convention and does not provide any hint of meaning other than that of
Dominican devotion.
The quality of the gaze held by these two exemplars is immensely different.
Since only one could have been viewed by the public, including women, why
were they so different and what might have been the impact on the women who
viewed the San Marco altarpiece?
THE MOULDING OF WOMEN’S BEHAVIOUR
There were at this time at least two discourses shaping women’s behaviour in
the social community. One was through the use of images for prayer and
penance. The other was concerned with conduct.
A religious painting was considered to be a stimulus to the viewer’s
understanding of the central episodes of the lives of Christ and Mary, and
spiritual training in the fifteenth century required the viewer to develop an
ability to form intense, vivid and memorable mental images. The Dominican
community achieved this through gesture and attitude, learning a visceral
understanding of how to preach and pray, guided by Saint Dominic’s (c.1170-
1221) De modo orandi (The Ways of Prayer).13 A comparable text for the
female laity was the Zardino de Oration (Garden of Prayer) written in 1454 and
printed in Venice. Designed to teach young girls how to visualise, it used
emotional involvement as the key, encouraging them to superimpose the local
environment and people they knew onto biblical events: “shape in your mind
some people, people well-known to you, to represent for you people involved in
the Passion… putting all your imagination into it.”14 Another fourteenth century
text, Meditations on the Life of Christ: An Illustrated Manuscript of the
Fourteenth Century also encouraged the reader to “learn all the things said and
done as though you were present”15 in order to develop the quality of attention
through imagination.
10
At the beginning of the fifteenth century Giovanni Dominici (1356 - 1420),
in his Florentine treatise of 1403, Regola del Governa di cura familiari (The
Rule for the Management of Family Care) laid down the types of images that
were suitable to have in the house as a child was growing up. These images
helped shape the way children saw themselves and demonstrated how they
should act in society. True to the manner of the times, these were different for
male and female children. Suggestions for female children included images of
pious female saints such as saints Agnes, Cecilia, Elizabeth and Catherine who
would instil in them amongst other things “a disgust of vanity”.16
Simons observes that men and women in the Quattrocento lived in “... a
Mediterranean display culture where honour and reputation were vital
commodities and appearance was always under scrutiny”.17 This culture came
from the second social discourse which was concerned with conduct. Women
more so than men inhabited a bounded society framed by correct behaviour
outlined in code and conduct books. Pressure was continuously exerted on
women to be modest and obedient, reflected in the changing role of Mary,
Simeon and Joseph in altarpieces depicting The Presentation in the Temple.18
These depict Mary appearing more humble and subservient as the fifteenth
century advanced, whilst Simeon and Joseph take on roles of greater assertion,
participation and presence.
Through paintings and textual treatises, women’s lives were prescriptively
and proscriptively shaped. Written by men, the code and conduct books
postulated a tradition of ideal conduct for women. Some were written by men to
women; others advised men on how to keep women disciplined. All appeared to
reinforce the inequity of status between men and women by controlling how
women were to act, what they were supposed to look like, how they were
encouraged to view their surroundings, what comprised the confines of their
physical world and, most importantly, rulings regarding what a women could do
with her eyes and thus what constituted the social safety of a woman’s gaze.
Advice differed depending on who was the recipient and with which social
grouping the woman was connected. A wife was legally subordinate to her
husband whilst a widow of noble rank had a degree of independence. Ruling
11
women were more visible and hence were required to express dignity and power
in the way they dressed whilst laywomen were instructed to keep a low profile
and avoid attention.19 Even nuns, already marginalised from first order monastic
communities, were encouraged to behave like a young girl when speaking:
“timidly and bashfully”.20
In his long vernacular poem Reggimento e costume di donna (The Rule
and Customs of a Lady), written between 1314-1316, Florentine lawyer and poet
Francesco da Barberino (1264 - 1348) considered that a woman’s gaze in
company was of vital importance in serving her virtue.21 He called it the
appearance of “vergogna” or “bashfulness and these strictures regarding where
and how a women could look included not out of windows, not out of doors, not
around in company, and most definitely not back at men.
These attitudes were reinforced across the century in the writings of Paolo da
Certaldo in his Libro di buoni costumi (Book of Good Customs) written in
Italian around 1365, Francesco Barbaro (1390 - 1454) in his Latin treatise, On
Wifely Duties, written in 1416, and Florentine bookseller Vespasiano da Bisticci
(1421 –1498), writing in the vernacular in his Vite di uomini illustri del Secolo
XV (Lives of Illustrious Men of the XVth Century), who defined a woman’s
“dowry of virtue” as “infinitely more valuable than one of money, which may be
lost, but virtue is a secure possession which may be retained to the end of their
lives.”22 Barbaro cautioned against “the wandering of the eyes”, urging wives to
take care of their “faces, countenances, and gestures” and pointedly wrote: “By
maintaining an honest gaze in their eyes, they can communicate most
significantly as in painting, which is called silent poetry.”23
In particular, Alberti’s views on the decorum of women and the direction of
their gaze, written up in his vernacular treatise of the 1430s and 1440s, I libri
della famiglia (The Family in Renaissance Florence), crossed into his handbook
for painters. In his De Pictura (On Painting) he wrote: “In young maidens,
movements and deportment should be pleasing and adorned with a delightful
simplicity, more indicative of gentleness and repose than of agitation.”24 This
was echoed by Florentine architect, sculptor and architectural theorist Antonio
di Pietro Averlino (c.1400 - c.1469), known as Filarete, writing c.1465 in his
12
Trattato di architettura (Treatise on Architecture), who wrote: “When you have
to do young women [they should have] honest and moderate actions, with weak
poses rather than bold ones … ”25 Finally, writing at the end of the century in
1491, Florentine Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola (1452 - 1498), in his
Libro della vita viduale (Book on the Widow’s Life), commended widows to
lead a solitary life and avoid all the vices of the senses, listing taste first and
sight second, quoting Ecclesiasticus 26.9: “fornication in a woman can be
known from the way she raise and lifts up her eyes”.26 Across the Quattrocento
women were being given distinct instruction on where to look and what not to
look at, and artists were being given instruction on how to represent them with
attributes of modesty.
In a way quite separate to that of Barberino, Alberti and Bisticci, Simons
describes a dowry of virtue as what women inherit from their mother.27 The
virtue of humility, a religious ethic, became woven into the social fabric and
“turned into a recipe for ‘feminine’ qualities that have a kinship with humility -
modesty, silence, obedience”28 encapsulated in the act of lowered or averted
eyes. A loose woman looked at men in the streets. A direct mutual gaze
between a man and a woman implied a contract of complicity. In his Comento
de’ miei sonetti, Lorenzo de’ Medici’s heart is “made noble” by the eyes of his
Lady.29 Simons cites an Italian ceramic trencher 1525-30 depicting a man and a
woman looking at each other with the inscription reading “All things are done
by money” suggesting an exchange with a prostitute. Yet the direct gaze of the
Virgin Mary implies intercession and the presence of the Christ Child ensured
“the foreclosed possibility of a taboo sexual encounter with the Mother”.30
However, Stanbury’s work on the gaze of the Virgin counterpoints this
assumption. She argues that, whilst women’s gazes were controlled by an
“economy of gender”, in the Crucifixion scene Mary is exempt from the “taboos
against a woman’s gaze, particularly one focused on the male body”.31 Such
exemption may be due to the fact that it is a gaze upon a nearly dead body from
a compassionate mother and therefore hardly erotic. Yet Stanbury goes on to
clarify that the “suffering maternal gaze” has in fact become “so codified and
sanctified … that it has become seeable”. What remains invisible in a tableau
13
such as Giotto’s Lamentation, 1304-1306. Fresco. Capella degli Scrovegni,
Padua, Italy, are “its transgressions, its violations of ordinary boundaries
through gestures that conflate Eros, Thanatos, and maternal power. The male
body is laid out, naked – one might even say nude – limp, surrounded by women
who not only grieve but stare and touch as well.” Stanbury acknowledges
Georges Bataille as the one who has labelled these clouded boundaries existing
between Mary and the grieving women around Christ as “sanctified
transgressions”.
Such sanctified transgressions are seen in the crucifixion scene to the front of
the San Marco altarpiece: Mary gazes unencumbered at her dying son whose
sagging body nailed to the cross in forced passivity is “broken and entered; it is
feminised, becoming the site of a courtly rhetoric of desire”. Along the same
sightline axis, the Virgin on the throne looks down at Saint Damian kneeling
before her. However, Saint Cosmas, kneeling to the front of the altarpiece whose
gesture indicates the Virgin and who looks out at the viewer, both male and
female, does not constitute a figure who is part of the sanctified transgressions.
Whilst there is a visual assertiveness in Saint Cosmas’ gaze and, as previously
noted, it would be incorrect to underestimate the fact that this was the name
saint for Cosimo de’ Medici and hence a display of his power, there is a
symmetry, a mirroring even, of his pose with Saint Damian, one of Alberti’s
themes in his treatise on painting. His gesture to the Virgin directs the viewer to
her, indicating her visual assertiveness. The Virgin, being on the same
longitudinal axis as the Crucifixion, then leads the eye down to the final moment
of “sanctified transgression”. It can be argued therefore that, whilst a
Quattrocento female viewer may have never understood or made these
connections consciously, rather than feel diminished by the direct gaze of Saint
Cosmas, she may, in fact, have felt that she, personally received his gaze and
could return it.
14
MEDIEVAL UNDERSTANDING OF SEXUALITY
The dominant convention of the day which defined female as subordinate to
male was linked to “the systems of binaries - of the many pairs of opposing
qualities used in all discourses to describe and account for the world”.32 As
Karras points out in her work on sexuality in medieval Europe, to be active was
to be masculine and to be passive was to be feminine. It was this understanding
of active and passive partner that was the operative ingredient in how medieval
people thought about sexuality. Sex in medieval times was not something two
people did together but something that one person did to someone else. Thus
“the virgin is a passive partner to whom God does something”.33 Indeed Warner
comments on how humilitas, humility, the greatest of the Christian virtues, was
interpreted as submissiveness and given historical credence firstly by Plato who,
in his Timaeus, wrote that being born a woman was man’s penance for not
leading a good life, and then by Aritsotle, who, in his Politics, wrote that the
male is superior to the female and the ruler of women.34 The subordination of
the female therefore became embroidered into the culture through the idea of
reproduction and upheld by the rules governing ecclesiastical and secular
institutions and their fundamental discourses of power. This subordination was
included in the frequently-printed compendium of canon law written by the
Dominican Archbishop of Florence, Antonino Pierozzi (Saint Antonius)
between 1440 and 1459,35 and the writings of Thomas Aquinas “who systemised
theology and the Christian position on various sexual issues”.36
In contrast to these writings, not only was the topos of the church as a space
for amorous meetings a poetic tradition but it was where the exchange of gazes
was seen as a sign of sexual choice. As Randolph notes, “Sacred space was
figured as apt for the type of non-verbal interchange that characterised the
surveying and judging of women.”37 In the heart of Florence, in a letter dated 24
August, 1447, Alessandra Strozzi wrote to her son Filippo Strozzi in Naples of
her future son-in-law, Marco Parenti, that he was “a young man of the best type,
with every good quality”38 indicating that she had looked at him and made an
assessment. Alessandra Strozzi was a widow and part of an influential family.
As head of the household she was the decision-maker, albeit with the help of
15
relatives, and left with two surviving daughters, it was part of her responsibility
to seek good husbands for them. As a widow she had the advantage of being
able to look at men. It is possible to argue therefore that wives’ or widow’s
ability to look around their world and gaze directly at others, in particular
younger men, was more fluid and less restrictive than unmarried women.
THE DIRECT GAZE
The direct gaze in Italian medieval religious paintings of the Quattrocento
was a visual artefact which was not hidden. It was one way of encouraging a
viewing congregation to understand the divine through the narrative the painting
depicted. Olin defines the gaze as “a long ardent look” the intensity of which
combines both knowledge and pleasure placed “in the service of issues of
power, manipulation and desire”.39 In public and social life the direct gaze was
appropriated by men and directed at women upon whom were imposed “a
specific visual formula ‘downcast eyes and tilted head’.”40 Bogart, in discussing
portraits, asserts that “in times past it was a crime to look directly at a king’s
face, but anyone could look upon his portrait and receive a reciprocal glance.”41
However, when a female had been instructed since childhood to imagine those
in the painting as existing in present time and yet told not to look directly at
men, for a woman to receive a direct gaze from a male in a religious painting
was actually contra to the codified behaviour taught to women and thus
potentially such a direct gaze could be perceived by its female receiver as erotic.
This paper has investigated the direct gaze seen in religious paintings of the
Quattrocento by comparing and contrasting two paintings by the same artist –
Fra Angelico - for the same order - Dominican - and in the same location - the
church and dormitories of the church of San Marco, Florence. Both were
commissioned by Cosmio de’ Medici and painted for the San Marco friars,
clerics, novices and lay brothers. The San Marco altarpiece, sited inside the
church on the altar of the friars’ choir, was also at certain times open to public
scrutiny. The Madonna delle ombre, sited in the east dormitory was only ever
seen by friars, novices and clerics, and never by women.
16
Women had precise social practices which have been explored in this paper
through the Quattrocento literature designed to teach women how to meditate,
the code and conduct books which defined where women could direct their gaze
and at what, the poetic literature which reinforced these codes, and the medieval
understanding of sexuality.
In the Madonna delle ombre, the direct gaze of Saint Dominic appears
uncomplicated. His gesture expresses his rule and the obligation to preach to his
Observant community leaving little in doubt as to his intentions. In contrast the
direct gaze of Saint Cosmas in the more publicly viewed San Marco altarpiece is
complicated. His gestural syntax, body language and direct gaze, when viewed
by a male audience, imply an encouragement of courtly love for the Virgin.
However, when viewed by a female audience, it seems to transgress the rigorous
social codes directed at women in the Quattrocento.
The above investigation has sought to excavate an historical dimension to the
work, rather than impose any post-modern anachronisms and suggests that
further research is required across a broader range of Quattrocento donor
portraits in order to explore sanctified, recognised figures depicted in a manner
which is, potentially a transgression of social codes .
17
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C. Grayson (ed.) Leon Battista Alberti: On Painting (1435) London 1991.
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Century, Baltimore, 1994.
A. Randolph, 'Regarding Women in Sacred Space' in G. A. Johnson and S. F.
Matthews Grieco (ed.) Picturing Women in Renaissance and Baroque Italy,
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M. B. Hall, 'The Ponte in S. Maria Novella: the Problem of the Rood Screen in Italy',
Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 35, 1974, 157-73.
W. Hood, 'Saint Dominic's Manners of Praying: Gestures in Fra Angelico's Cell
Frescoes at San Marco', The Art Bulletin, Vol. 68, 1986, pp.195-206.
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18
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19
ENDNOTES
1 C. Grayson (ed.), Leon Battista Alberti: On Painting (1435) London, 1991, 77-8.
2 M. Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy, Oxford 1988, 75-
6.
3 W. Hood, Fra Angelico at San Marco, New Haven and London 1993, 43.
4 W. Hood, 'Fra Angelico at San Marco: art and the liturgy of cloistered life' in
Verdon and Henderson (ed.) Christianity and the Renaissance: Image and the
Religious Imagination in the Quattrocento, Syracuse, 1990, 112.
5 M. Hollingsworth, Patronage in Renaissance Italy. From 1400 to the Early
Sixteenth Century, Baltimore 1994, 50.
6 A. Randolph, 'Regarding Women in Sacred Space' in Johnson and Matthews Grieco
(ed.) Picturing Women in Renaissance and Baroque Italy, Cambridge, 1997, 26.
7 M. B. Hall, 'The Ponte in S. Maria Novella: the Problem of the Rood Screen in
Italy', Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 35, 1974, 169.
8 Hood, Fra Angelico at San Marco, 2.
9 Hood, Fra Angelico at San Marco, 46.
10 Randolph, 'Regarding Women' in (ed.), 34.
11 Hood, Fra Angelico at San Marco, 321.
12 Hood, Fra Angelico at San Marco, 256.
13 Cited in W. Hood, 'Saint Dominic's Manners of Praying: Gestures in Fra Angelico's
Cell Frescoes at San Marco', The Art Bulletin, Vol. 68, 1986.
14 Cited in Baxandall, Painting and Experience, 46.
15 I. Ragusa and R. B. Green (ed.), Meditations on the Life of Christ: An Illustrated
Manuscript of the Fourteenth Century, Princeton, 1961, 15.
16 C. E. Gilbert, Italian Art 1400-1500, Sources and Documents, Englewood Cliffs
1980, 146.
17 P. Simons, 'Women in Frames: the eye, the gaze, the profile in Renaissance
portraiture' in Broude and Garrard (ed.) The expanding discourse: feminism and art
history, Boulder, 1992, 47.
18 P. H. Jolly, 'Learned reading, Vernacular Seeing: Jacques Daret’s Presentation in
the Temple', Art Bulletin, Vol. 82, 2000, 447.
19 C. King, Renaissance Women Patrons, Manchester 1998, 249.
20 C. King, 'Women as patrons: nuns, widows and rulers' in Norman (ed.) Siena,
Florence and Padua: Art, Society and Religion 1280-1400, Volume 2: Case Studies,
New Haven and London, 1995, 244.
21 F. d. Barberino, Reggimento costumi di donna (1314-1316), Turin 1957.
22 V. da Bisticci, Renaissance Princes, Popes and Prelates, The Vespasiano Memoirs,
Lives of Illustrious Men of the XVth Century, New York 1963, 462.
23 F. d. Barbaro, 'De re uxoria (On Wifely Duties, 1416)' in Witt (ed.) The Earthly
Republics. Italian Humanists on Government and Society, Manchester, 1915, 204.
24 Grayson (ed.), Alberti, On Painting, 80.
25 J. R. Spencer (ed.), Antonio Filarete: Treatise on Architecture, New Haven,
Connecticut, 1965, 306-7.
26 Cited in King, Renaissance Women Patrons, 33.
27 Simons, 'Women in Frames' in (ed.), p.48.
20
28 M. Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary, New
York 1976, 184.
29 A. W. B. Randolph, Engaging Symbols: Gender, Politics, and Public Art in
Fifteenth-Century Florence, New Haven and London 2002, 131.
30 Simons, 'Women in Frames' in (ed.), p.56, n.84.
31 S. Stanbury, 'The Virgin's Gaze: Spectacle and Transgression in Middle English
Lyrics of the Passion', PMLA, Vol. 106, 1991, 1086.
32 King, Renaissance Women Patrons, 41.
33 R. M. Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing unto others, New York and
London 2005, 55.
34 Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, 177-8.
35 King, Renaissance Women Patrons, 28.
36 Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe, 21.
37 Randolph, 'Regarding Women' in (ed.), p.38.
38 A. Crabb, The Strozzi of Florence: Widowhood and Family Solidarity in the
Renaissance, Michigan 2000, 91.
39 M. Olin, 'Gaze' in Nelson and Shiff (ed.) Critical Terms for Art History, Chicago
and London, 2003, 319.
40 P. Berdini, 'Women under the Gaze, a Renaissance genealogy', Art History, Vol.
21, 1998, 586.
41 L. Bogart, 'Reconstructing past social moods from paintings, The eye of the beheld',
International Journal of Public Opinion Research, Vol. 15, 2003, 13.
