The Program of Giotto's Saint Francis Cycle at Santa Croce in Florence

THE PROGRAM OF GIOTTO'S SAINT FRANCIS CYCLE AT SANTA CROCE IN FLORENCE1 Giotto's fresco cycle of the life of St. Francis, painted in the funerary chapel of Ridolfo de' Bardi at the Franciscan Church of Santa Croce in Florence in the first quarter of the fourteenth century, was a work that was at once thoroughly conventional and completely novel. Cycles of saints' lives were almost as old as Christian painting, and Francis's life had been one of the most popular in Italy since his death in 1226. Decorated family burial chapels were a relatively new phenomenon in Trecento Florence, however, and they served multiple purposes for their donors.2 They were typically located inside a church and encompassed an altar, and their most important function was to provide sanctified sites for burial and offer the opportunity for continuous services that would benefit the deceased's souls in Purgatory.3 They were also charitable donations, reflecting on their patrons' souls, and they served as philanthropic gestures that brought honor to the donors and their families. The family chapel could thus act as a kind of advertisement for its donor, presenting him in the most favorable light in both secular and spiritual terms. The image it created of 1I am grateful to James Beck and David Rosand for their comments and suggestions regarding this material. 2A. Höger, Studien zur Entstehung der TamUienkappelle und zu Familienkappellen und -Altären des Trecento in florentina· Kirchen (Bonn, 1976) 16-20; P. Aries, The Hour ofour Death, trans. H. Weaver (New York, 1981) 29-36; S.T. Strocchia, "Burials in Renaissance Florence, 1350-1500," Dissertation, University of California (Berkeley, 1981) 267, 359-60; D. Pines, "The Tomb Slabs of Santa Croce," Dissertation, Columbia University (New York, 1985) 9-13. The earliest extant document that can be related to a surviving family chapel anywhere in Florence refers to Santa Croce; it is the will of Donato Peruzzi, dated 1292, commissioning a chapel for himself in the new church, which was yet to be built (Hóger, 65-66; LB. Supino, GH albori dell'arteflorentina [Florence, 1906] 138^40; L. Tintori and E. Borsook, Giotto: The Peruzzi Chapel [New York, 1965] 95, appendix A, doc. 1). 3L. Bordua, "Friars, Patrons and Workshops at the Basilica del Santo, Padua," in The Church and the Arts, ed. D. Wood (Oxford, 1992) 135, in her study of the purchase of chapels at the Santo in Padua has found that potential patrons were primarily interested in spiritual issues. Franciscan Studies 52 (1992) 86 JANE C. LONG him was like insurance against the future, securing him an honorable place in both the earthly and celestial realms.4 While the purpose of private chapels in the Trecento seems fairly clear, the genesis and function of their decorations is harder to pin down. Few contemporary remarks about art survive, and scholars have tended to make certain assumptions based on later comments. Since the secular concerns of the donors have been found to affect the ostensibly religious art of various fifteenth- and sixteenth-century artists,5 many historians assume that donors exerted the same sort of impact on commissions in early fourteenthcentury Florence. Thus, they approach these works with expectations that prejudice their interpretations, presuming they will find temporal elements in pious images.6 Although twentiethcentury logic might suggest that anyone who furnished the considerable funding required to produce works of art would inevitably wish to control the finished appearance of those images, there is no proof that this was invariably the case.7 Close study of Giotto's St. 4F. W. Kent, Household and Lineage in Renaissance Italy (Princeton, 1977) 43-48, 5962 ; G. Brucker, Florentine Politics and Society, 1343-78 (Princeton, 1962) 28-40; T. H. Kuehn, "Honor and Conflict in a Fifteenth-century Florentine Family," Richerche storiche 10 (1980): 288-90. In the late fifteenth century Giovanni Rucellai wrote that he built a family chapel to reflect "partly to the honor of God and the honor of the city and the memory of me" (Kent 100; Strocchia 234, 373-75). Secular concerns such as self-aggrandizement seem to have been less in the minds of early fourteenthcentury chapel donors...