The Badia of Florence. Art and Observance in a Renaissance Monastery by Anne Leader (review)

The Badia of Florence. Art and Observance in a Renaissance Monastery. By Anne Leader. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2012. Pp. xii, 325. $65.00. ISBN 978-0-253-35567-6.)

The Badia of Florence is not on the beaten track of today’s tourist. The second medieval church, consecrated in 1310, was destroyed in an ill-conceived reconstruction of 1628; and gaining access to the so-called Chiostro degli Aranci, the principal surviving structure of the early-fifteenth-century rebuilding, is complicated and requires perseverance. It is well worth the effort, however. The tranquil cloister is architecturally delightful and is graced by a series of important, although underrated, frescoes of scenes from the life of St. Benedict.

In 1418 a group of seventeen Benedictine monks, led by the redoubtable and charismatic Portuguese abbot Gomezio di Giovanni, moved south from Santa Giustina in Padua to reform the Florentine Badia by establishing there the new Benedictine Observance. Awkwardly tucked into an overcrowded area within the ancient Roman city center, the Badia was the wealthiest monastery in Renaissance Florence. Abbot Gomezio’s program of rebuilding and decoration between 1420 and 1440 was crucial to his program of reform and to the “revitalization of its Benedictine community” (p. 3). The author of this excellently researched and enlightening book writes of the Badia as “an important site of competitive self-fashioning” (p. 55) in the light of extensive monastic rebuilding elsewhere in Florence—notably at San Marco—to establish reformed, Observant houses. Interestingly, Anne Leader shows that shortly before his exile to Venice in 1433, Cosimo de’ Medici offered to finance major parts of the Badia reconstruction. A small oratory opening off the cloister shows that progress was made with this plan—this centrally planned structure vaulted with a dome carried on pendentives, a very unusual architectural form at its time, was based on the Old Sacristy of San Lorenzo, built by Brunelleschi in the 1420s for Cosimo’s father, Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici. After his return from exile, however, Cosimo turned his attention instead to reconstructing San Marco for the Dominican Observants, perhaps finding Abbot Gomezio too powerful and unaccommodating a partner.

For the historian of early Renaissance art, two of Leader’s other findings are particularly important. First, the documentary record shows that Bernardo Rossellino, traditionally considered the architect of the Chiostro degli Aranci, was in fact too peripheral a figure to have had any significant part in the design. Second, through astute and discriminating comparisons between details in the frescoes and in their sinopia under-drawings, Leader shows that the designs are considerably more accomplished than the paintings’ execution, and she persuasively attributes them to Fra Angelico, whose “stripped-down narrative style” (p. 251) would have appealed to Abbot Gomezio. Preoccupied with the decoration of the San Marco cloister at this time, Fra Angelico left the fresco work to members of his substantial workshop, whose artistic abilities proved at times to be impoverished.

For readers of this journal, however, perhaps of greater interest will be Leader’s discussion of the Benedictine propaganda value of the cloister and its mural decorations. She describes well the relationship between the functions of spaces within the reconstructed monastery and significant aspects of the Benedictine rule. This she follows up in a lengthy and revealing examination of the choice of scenes from the life of Benedict for the fresco cycle, and how these scenes and their treatment would have been understood by the monks. She shows that Abbot Gomezio’s frescoes were intended both to ensure that the monks “would contemplate and emulate the virtuous, pious and ascetic habits of St Benedict”(p. 133) and to “emphasize obedience to and respect for the abbot’s authority and autonomy” (p. 133). It comes then as no surprise that to be able to demonstrate his support for the Observant movement, Cosimo de’ Medici looked elsewhere.