From Giotto to Botticelli: The Artistic Patronage of the Humiliati in Florence by Julia I. Miller and Laurie Taylor-Mitchell (review)

The authors provide a study of the Florentine church of Ognissanti, the leading house of the Humiliati in Tuscany and one of the largest belonging to that religious order. The authors present the artistic decoration of the church as an example of Humiliati patronage in the long Italian Renaissance and offer their analyses of specific works made for the Humiliati by prominent artists from Giotto to Botticelli and beyond.

The authors pursue a dual purpose—to trace the history and development of the Order of the Humiliati from their origins in northern Italy in the late-twelfth century to the suppression of the male branch of the order in the sixteenth century and, at the same time, to show the history and development of the order as it appears in works of art commissioned for the church of Ognissanti in Florence. It is the authors’ thesis that because the Humiliati lacked a charismatic founder or saints from the order with whom the members could identify, they crafted and expressed a spiritual identity in art through the representation of specific virtues or themes but variously over the course of their history. In early works commissioned for the church, artists such as Giotto and Giovanni da Milano expressed Humiliati ideals of humility and charity through composition, color, and certain significant motifs, and included in their works particular saints from other religious orders who might be venerated by the Humiliati for having valued these same ideals. In their later history, the members of the order abandoned their primary devotion to humility and hard labor, and sought to remake themselves as scholars and intellectuals, following the model of their brethren in the Dominican order. The authors place Donatello’s Reliquary Bust of Saint Rossore, Ghirlandaio’s St. Jerome, and Botticelli’s St. Augustine in the context of this later period in Humiliati history, which saw a decline in the number of members in the order, but also saw extensive renovation and new programs of decoration in the church of Ognissanti, itself.

It is perhaps the nature of the study, perhaps the manner in which the authors construct and develop their thesis, that the volume is more successful in its entirety than would be any of its individual parts presented independently. Thus, for example, their study of Giotto’s Ognissanti Madonna is not entirely convincing on its own, relying heavily on suggestion and possibility. Nevertheless, when their observations and analyses are viewed within the greater context of Humiliati patron-age—when they have shown that saints appear in similar places, with similar poses, or in the same color of habit in other works subsequently produced for display in the same church—the authors are able to construct an argument that is ultimately more sure and certain than their conditional language might convey.

To a certain degree, the scope and focus of the volume seem arbitrarily constrained. The church of Ognissanti is important and the works made for its decoration rank among the finest of the Renaissance period. One wonders, however, whether the history of Humiliati patronage might have been told differently if more attention were given to other significant churches and their decoration. As example, the authors devote a portion of chapter 3 to the decorative program of the Humiliati church in Viboldone, but, as they admit, their discussion here “is limited to aspects of Humiliati ideology that also appear in Ognissanti” (p. 75). The story of Humiliati patronage is here told through a single monument and its history of decoration, and although that story is compelling, it is perhaps not as complete as it might otherwise have been.