Immagini dei predicatori e della predicazione in Italia alla fine del Medioevo by Roberto Rusconi (review)

Roberto Rusconi's Immagini dei predicatori e della predicazione in Italia alla fine del Medioevo addresses the representations of preaching in late medieval Italy. The book begins with "Retractatio," the piece which could to be translated as "Reflections." In the "Retractatio," Rusconi briefly introduces the idea of the volume: to collect his previous articles on the representations of sermons and preachers in both literary and iconographical material. According to him, studying the representations of medieval preaching is closely connected to hagiographical studies, and it allows us to take a closer look to the margins of the medieval society. The essays are collected from the author's vast production from the years 1985–2008. Covering more than twenty years of Rusconi's active academic life, they also reveal interesting changes in his thinking and in the ways that he addresses phenomena connected to medieval preaching. The idea of personal growth is sustained by the "Retractatio," the reflections, which include mostly the author's short biography in relation to the texts of the book. The approach is admittedly interesting, yet a deeper introduction discussing the principles for choosing the included articles would have facilitated the reader's task with such a large and comprehensive collection. This is especially true for several essays with considerable overlap in both descriptions and analysis, in which cases the common material would have called for the author's justification for why they all are included inside the covers of one book.

The first section includes three papers published between 1985 and 1995. This section is suitably entitled "In Principio": the articles address mainly the beginning of the history of two mendicant orders, the Dominicans and Franciscans, and the representation of their main figures, Saints Dominic, Francis, Peter Martyr, and Anthony. Interestingly, it seems that already the first section provides a picture of Rusconi's personal scholarly evolution: the first two articles, "'Forma apostolorum': l'immagine del predicatore nei movimenti religiosi francesi ed italiani dei secoli XII e XIII," written in 1985, and "Reportatio," written in 1989 are based on a great variety of textual sources, mostly hagiographical, whereas the third one, "'Trasse la storia per farne la tavola' immagini di predicatori degli ordini mendicanti nei secoli XIII e XIV" written in 1995 makes use of iconographical sources as well. The iconographical material becomes more central to the author's analyses together with the written evidence in the following sections.

The second section, "La rappresentazione delle prediche," contains three articles from the years 1989–2001. Here, the focus is moved from the beginning of mendicant orders, their founders, and the first preachers, to the preachers of the fifteenth century. Also, the author's focus seems to switch permanently from the texts to the images. The first article, "'Predico' in piazza': politica e predicazione nell'Umbria del '400," contextualizes preachers in the local political context of Umbria. Preachers received sympathy especially with their sermons for peace and reform in lay communities. The next article, "Le pouvoir de la parole. Représentation des prédicateurs dans l'art de la renaissance en Italie," discusses the image of the preacher and the image of the saint and their conflation. The article argues for the increasing focus on the representations of preachers in the art of Renaissance Italy. One key element of this development seems to have been that the preachers gained the fame of sanctity more often than before and that many were eventually canonized. Two images, that of the preacher and that of the saint, became one, the preacher-saint. The section "Immagini di predicatori e scene di predicazione nell'arte italiana all'epoca di fra' Girolamo da Ferrara" focuses on Girolamo da Ferrara (Savonarola) whose activity is analyzed in a wide context of mendicant culture. In this article, Rusconi discusses Savonarola's role in the sponsorship of art and commitment to support art in medieval Italy. The question...