364 Italian Bookshelf - Ibiblio

“Italian Bookshelf” Annali d’ italianistica 24 (2006) 379
Louise Bourdua. The Franciscans and Art Patronage in Late Medieval Italy.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004.
Anyone who has ever visited Assisi sees firsthand the extent to which the Franciscan
movement quickly fell subject to the monumental, memorializing impulse that informs so
much of the Christian tradition. Historically one locates the origin of the Franciscan shift
away from peripatetic mendicancy and toward an institutional model reminiscent of
earlier orders in the split between Spirituals and Conventuals. But we may also ask fairly
whether the rise of the Conventuals was more result than cause, whether indeed the
magnetism of money was finally too strong even for Franciscan piety wholly to resist.
Poverty, after all, precludes two solutions that were already standard in Italian religiosity:
participation in visual culture, necessitated in no small part by limited literacy, and the
establishment of pious spaces beyond those attached directly to Francis, which would
institutionalize Franciscanism elsewhere. Franciscan activity in these areas forms the
subject of Louise Bourdua’s careful, informative book.
To be sure, her title is something of a misnomer. Far from comprehensive, her
history focuses on three churches in the Veneto: San Fermo Maggiore in Verona, San
Lorenzo in Vicenza, and Sant’Antonio (“il Santo”) in Padua. The choices are anything
but serendipitous. Beyond examining the specifics of the churches’ patronage and their
visual and architectural programs, Bourdua undertakes to contest a widely accepted
thesis, advanced principally by the German art historian Dieter Blume, according to
which the mother house in Assisi imposed upon Franciscan churches elsewhere a
standard programmatic model based on its Francis cycles. As Bourdua points out, none of
the drawings that supposedly circulated survives, and this lack of evidence significantly
weakens Blume’s claim. But rather than discard Blume’s thesis entirely, Bourdua argues
that while the mother church may have exercised influence within a discrete range, the
northern cities she studies clearly fell beyond the limits of its rule. Complicating matters,
as she successfully argues, was the enormously popular local figure of St. Anthony,
whom patrons sought to honor alongside Francis.
Bourdua offers a very good and useful overview of Franciscan art and patronage, as
well as the historiography of both. The starting point for the latter is Henri Thode’s
Francis of Assisi and the Beginning of the Art of the Renaissance in Italy (1904). Thode
related the “birth” of the Renaissance specifically to Franciscan art because of what he
argued was a natural disposition to art among Tuscans, favorable economic conditions in
Tuscany, and the advent of this new “subjective and sentimental” religious movement.
Bourdua’s own title suggests her dissent from Thode’s claim about the Franciscan origins
of the Renaissance. Beyond that, Thode’s hypothesis misses a point that Bourdua might
have made more emphatically; namely, that the impulse to patronage often involves,
somewhat paradoxically, both piety and the desire to advertise same. While patrons thus
offer themselves as models of a certain disposition toward the faith, they also disclose a
self-congratulatory desire to show that they have spent their money wisely. In the case of
the Franciscans, for whom wealth is not a neutral category, that dual impulse can be
difficult to negotiate.
Of the three churches studied, Bourdua is particularly successful with Sant’Antonio
in Padua, thanks to the complexity of the site and the multiple projects available for
examination. The other two cases are more limited: San Fermo because much of the
picture cycle she studies is lost, and must therefore be conjectured about; and San
Lorenzo for its study of a single though not unimportant commission, the façade portal by