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  • Art and Piety in the Female Religious Communities of Renaissance Italy: Iconography, Space, and the Religious Woman's Perspective
  • Marilyn Dunn
Anabel Thomas . Art and Piety in the Female Religious Communities of Renaissance Italy: Iconography, Space, and the Religious Woman's Perspective. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. xxxii + 406 pp. + 12 color pls. index. illus. bibl. £75. ISBN: 0–521–81188–0.

Focusing on conventual art in Renaissance Tuscany and Umbria, Anabel Thomas's study makes a significant contribution to the growing body of scholarship that examines female religious communities, gendered identity, and religious imagery in the early modern period. Thomas is concerned primarily with "art produced for female gaze within an enclosed religious space" (xxiii) considered within the context of the character of female religious communities. Based on [End Page 923] archival research and surviving physical evidence, Thomas's book challenges assumptions about the character and place of art in female religious communities and demonstrates the rich and integral role of artistic imagery within conventual spaces. She argues that art produced for the inner spaces of female religious communities differed in content and function from that displayed outside the convent walls or intended for a male audience. Thomas's study is particularly significant for its detailed examination of these inner spaces which because of their lack of accessibility often have been ignored or regarded peripherally in previous scholarship.

To explore the interface between iconography, space, and audience, Thomas organizes her book into five sections which consider these issues from multiple perspectives utilizing examples of religious communities representing a variety of orders. She begins by addressing the limitations of various types of documen-tary and physical evidence, an issue to which she is quite sensitive, establishes a background of the history, organization, and character of individual female religious communities, and introduces her consideration of issues of gender and distinctions between male and female spaces. In interpreting the place of art in female religious communities, Thomas stresses "the function of the space, access to it, the role of the artwork itself, and the conditions under which it was to be viewed" (71). This leads to her discussion of the architectural development and spatial organization of conventual spaces in part 2. Here she notes the hierarchical arrangement of conventual spaces as well as the flexibility of certain spaces. This careful consideration of space provides an essential groundwork for the ensuing discussion of the function of art within these spaces in part 3. In this section Thomas advances her thesis that gender distinctions existed between imagery intended for the inner spaces and that located in more public areas of conventual complexes. She argues that a male emphasis is present in art for the public church, whereas in areas restricted to the female gaze, images emphasizing obedience, humility, purity, or female religious are more common.

Issues of how iconography of imagery relates to its space and audience and to a community's history are examined in depth in case studies of the Franciscan Tertiary communities of Sant'Anna at Foligno and Sant'Onofrio in Florence. For instance, in her discussion of the large refectory at Sant'Anna, Thomas notes that its unusual iconography of scenes of feasts which emphasize the physical work involved in preparing and presenting food is tailored to its specific location and female audience. She differentiates the embellishment of this space from the simpler, instructive decoration intended for a different audience in the refectory of novices. Further, she considers how images would have coordinated with seating arrangements and just how they would have been viewed.

Politics of display are further discussed in the case studies of part 4 in which Thomas argues that internal spaces of female religious communities were embellished with decorations that were specifically linked to conventual rituals and the function of individual spaces. Images served to regulate the responses and behavior of the religious women who viewed them. [End Page 924]

Finally, Thomas considers issues of conventual patronage examining the degree of control women exercised in commissions and in influencing iconography. While acknowledging the role of male advisers as intermediaries in the commissioning and production of conventual art, she rightly asserts the need...

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