Margherita of Cortona and the Lorenzetti: Sienese Art and the Cult of a Holy Woman in Medieval Tuscany (review)

Margherita of Cortona and the Lorenzetti: Sienese Art and the Cult of a Holy Woman in Medieval Tuscany. By Joanna Cannon and André Vauchez. (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press. 1999. Pp. xviii, 275; color plates, 26; black and white photographs and figures, 204. $80.00.)

In publishing this joint work of two powerfully professional and knowledgeable scholars, the Pennsylvania State University Press has produced a beautifully sumptuous book with a rich display of plates. The two scholars, Vauchez and Cannon, have appropriately assigned roles, but sometimes their voices merge as they argue unexceptionably the complementary value of verbal and visual saints' lives. This thesis can hardly seem surprising, at least to Italian and American historians of text and image, but it has seldom, if ever, been argued at such carefully detailed length, or about a saint wrapped in such problematic evidence.

Margherita, already a potent local spiritual force, died in Cortona in 1297. She was not actually canonized until 1728, but during the long approach to that canonization water color representations of frescoes in the church of Margherita's entombment were prepared, with which representations visitors in 1634 compared the now no longer but then existing (although damaged) frescoes on the walls. These destroyed but drawn frescoes, with remaining sepulchral sculpture, are the central component of the pictorial, sculptural, and architectural evidence with which Vauchez and Cannon extend the information provided by Margherita's legenda with its attached miracles, which verbal material is in itself a complex document. The greatest value of this valuable book is its exposition of the two experts' methods as they have disassembled and reassembled their evidence over their twenty years of co-operation.

Readers are warned (p. 8) that if they are not art historians they may want to skip over the details of Cannon's examination of her materials and their relation with contemporary work. This would be a mistake; the non-art historian particularly should watch her work, and watch emerging the cautious case for the involvement of the two Lorenzetti brothers in the Cortona paintings and the questioned effect of the "artistic language of Siena." He or she should be forced to realize the richness of early fourteenth-century painted evidence in central Italy.

Vauchez's initial chapters are magisterial. His authority in dealing with saints' lives is to be expected, but the mastery he shows in quickly establishing the skeletal history of a city is also impressive. Margherita herself, in so far as she appears, is stripped of distracting romantic color; and if there is some danger in segregating female saints in recent work, it is not encouraged here. Here, in these chapters, Vauchez offers a kind of model, not a model to be followed but one that will help other historians form and gauge their own work.

Legenda, miracles, and visual-tactile evidence together are used in the book to show the local manipulation of the cult of this penitential nova Magdalena by various Franciscan and clerical interests and more successfully by communal forces. But the Vauchez-Cannon project is so vast and imposing that what it actually concludes in generalization, beyond its magnificent display of method, may seem a little anticlimactic. Perhaps the rather unsatisfactory figure of Margherita herself or the sketchy sources for her city are inhibiting--although Daniel Bornstein's archival studies seem to suggest a denser city.

Vauchez and Cannon are certainly aware of preceding work, like Bornstein's; Anna Benvenuti Papi is gratefully presented. But sometimes there seems a difficulty in being magisterial; it permits a rather dismissive tone in dealing with earlier work of different purpose, and that, reading one's colleagues scolded or ignored, can provoke an unattractive pettiness in a reader's mind, of the sort that makes him ask, "Would the authors reconsider the meaning...