Dominican Women and Renaissance Art. The Convent of San Domenico of Pisa (review)

The Observant reform movements of the mendicant orders transformed the religious life of Italian cities in the fifteenth century and spawned dozens of new male and female religious houses. This book studies the art patronage of one significant Tuscan convent, San Domenico of Pisa, founded at the dawn of the Observant Dominican movement (1385), from its foundation through its suppression in the nineteenth century. San Domenico, under the direction of its foundress and early prioress Beata Chiara Gambacorta, became a model for subsequent reform in other Dominican Observant convents in Tuscany and Venice. Its ways were transmitted both by nuns sent to govern elsewhere and by male superiors who sang its praises, including the ubiquitous Fra Giovanni Dominici. Roberts reconstructs the convent's substantial art holdings, now dispersed, and sets the collection in social and devotional contexts. For this she relies heavily on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century inventories, published here in appendices along with a catalogue raisonnée and related archival documents.

The study confirms a number of well-established conclusions. After Pisa fell to Florence in 1406, this formerly vibrant cultural and economic center declined to a provincial backwater. Artistically, local traditions with Sienese affinities faded and Florentine artists and styles came to dominate. San Domenico's sisters employed Florentine artists such as Benozzo Gozzoli and Fra Angelico; they modeled their work on the Florentine reformed Dominican friary of San Marco, with which the Pisan convent had a fascinating and stormy relationship. Roberts meticulously examines these center-periphery connections of iconography and style. She also finds, unsurprisingly, that the Pisan sisters used their art patronage to reinforce the distinctive spirituality of the Observant Dominicans, as adapted for a female religious audience. Artworks emphasize particularly the Eucharistic cult, the virgin martyrs, and mystical marriage, with images of both Catherine of Siena and Catherine of Alexandria in the latter scene. Finally, she concludes that it is often difficult to determine who made the choices in art patronage: the nuns, the artists, the lay patrons, or male superiors. She notes, for example, that the nuns could not themselves have seen the refectory frescoes in San Marco, on which Gozzoli based their own refectory paintings, so must have relied on an intermediary for the idea. Moreover, she concludes, to the extent that they controlled subject and style, the nuns favored rather backward-looking, static representations of standing saints modeled on pieces they already owned (chapter 7). San Domenico may have been the "mother house of the Dominican reform" in Tuscany (p. 15), but its sisters made no effort to innovate artistically.

Art history specialists will want to review Roberts's painstaking work in identifying San Domenico's holdings, making attributions, and finding influences. Scholars interested in convent studies and female sanctity will be interested in Gambacorta's life and reputation for holiness. The santa viva 's family ruled Pisa prior to Florentine domination; and the faction's subsequent ruin and exile posed challenges for the convent, which are well analyzed in chapter 6. Roberts suggests some useful contexts she does not explore: for example, the convent's reluctant involvement in the Savonarolan upheavals that convulsed the entire Dominican order around 1500 (the literature on Savonarolism is conspicuously absent from the bibliography). But the book argues persuasively that the vibrant visual culture of the high Renaissance was not restricted to the fashionable, the adventurous, or the rich.