Download PDF | Donal Cooper (editor), Beth Williamson (editor) - Late Medieval Italian Art and its Contexts_ Essays in Honour of Professor Joanna Cannon-Boydell Press, 2022.
414 Pages
CONTRIBUTORS
FEDERICO BOTANA wrote his PhD on the representation of the Works of Mercy in Medieval Italy, which he converted into a book (2012). Since then, he has expanded his research into the fifteenth century, focusing mainly on illuminated manuscripts. His publications include an article on the Benci Aesop in the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, and his recent monograph, Learning through Images in the Italian Renaissance: Illustrated Manuscripts and Education in Quattrocento Florence (2020). He has also lectured extensively on Italian medieval and Renaissance art.
VIRGINIA BRILLIANT is Director of Old Masters at Robilant+ Voena. She obtained her PhD from The Courtauld in 2005 and has held curatorial positions at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Ringling Museum in Sarasota, Florida, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco until 2018. She has published widely on Old Master paintings and the history of collecting in America, including the first comprehensive scholarly catalogue of the Ringling Museums Italian, Spanish, and French paintings, and has organised major exhibitions on Paolo Veronese, Peter Paul Rubens, and various themes in medieval art.
JAMES ALEXANDER CAMERON is a freelance lecturer and researcher of English church architecture, and organised the conference Towards an Art History of the Parish Church at The Courtauld in 2017. He took Joanna Cannon's Masters’ course Artists and Friars in 2010/11, and continued as her doctoral student 2011-15, researching sedilia in the English Church.
DONAL COOPER is Associate Professor in History of Art at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Jesus College. He completed his PhD on Franciscan church interiors at The Courtauld in 2000 and the artistic patronage of the Franciscan Order is a consistent theme in his subsequent research on Italy and the wider Mediterranean. His co-authored book with Janet Robson, The Making of Assisi (2013), won the Art Book prize in 2014. Recent work focuses on digital visualisations to reconstruct the historic aspects of Italian church interiors, and he is Co-Investigator on the Florence 4D mapping and modelling project.
SALLY CORNELISON is Professor of Art History and Director of the Florence Graduate Program in Italian Renaissance Art at Syracuse University. She is the author of Art and the Relic Cult of St Antoninus in Renaissance Florence (2012) and the contributing co-editor of Mendicant Cultures in the Medieval and Early Modern World: Word, Deed, and Image (2016) and Images, Relics, and Devotional Practices in Medieval and Renaissance Italy (2005), in addition to a number of articles and book chapters that concern the visual culture of saints, relics, ritual, and the sacred art of Giorgio Vasari.
GLYN DAVIES is the Head of the Curatorial team at the Museum of London. For many years, he was a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Between 2002 and 2009 he was a member of the Concept Team for the redisplay of the V&A’s Medieval and Renaissance Galleries, and was co-author of the book Medieval and Renaissance Art: People and Possessions (2009). In 2016, he co-curated the exhibition Opus Anglicanum: Masterpieces of English Medieval Embroidery. He has published widely on medieval sculpture, goldsmiths’ work, and textiles. He is currently working on a major project to transfer the Museum of London to a new site at West Smithfield.
THOMAS DE WESSELOW is an independent researcher, having formerly held posts at the National Gallery, London, and at King’s College, Cambridge. He has published a variety of articles relating to Early Italian and Renaissance art and medieval mappaemundi. He is the author of The Sign: The Shroud of Turin and the Secret of the Resurrection (2012).
STEFANIA GEREVINI is Assistant Professor of Medieval Art History at Bocconi University (Milan), and Research Fellow of the British School at Rome. Her research concerns the artistic applications of light and transparency, focusing on the uses and meanings of rock crystal; and the nexus between aesthetics and politics, with emphasis on the artistic interactions between Byzantium and Italian merchant cities. Her research has been published in edited volumes and journals, including Dumbarton Oaks Papers, Gesta, and the Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz. Her current monograph project investigates the relationship between art and crisis through study of the fourteenth-century renovation of the basilica of San Marco, Venice.
BRYAN C. KEENE (he/él/they/elle) is a curator and educator whose work promotes diversity and equity for the study and display of premodern visual arts, as well as the advocacy of LGBTQIA2+ histories and communities.
He is Assistant Professor of Art History at Riverside City College and was formerly Curator of Manuscripts at the Getty Museum. He was a contributing curator and author to the exhibition and catalogue Florence at the Dawn of the Renaissance: Painting and Illumination, 1300-1350 (201213). He is the editor of Toward a Global Middle Ages: Encountering the World through Illuminated Manuscripts (2019), co-editor of New Horizons in Trecento Italian Art (2021), and co-author of The Fantasy of the Middle Ages: An Epic Journey through Imaginary Medieval Worlds (2022).
EOWYN KERR-DI CARLO is an Associate Lecturer in Technical Art History at West Virginia University and is completing her PhD at The Courtauld. Before undertaking doctoral research, Eowyn worked as a paintings conservator and received an MA and CAS in Art Conservation from Buffalo State College. For six years, she was Adjunct Professor at the American University of Rome, lecturing on medieval art history, historical painting techniques, and conservation practices. She held fellowships from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation for the V&A‘s Medieval and Renaissance Galleries and the North Carolina Museum of Art.
JOHN RENNER is an independent scholar and lecturer on Franciscan art and patronage. He received his PhD from The Courtauld in 2016 for a study of the varied functions and meanings of images of Saint Francis displaying his stigmata. Subsequent research and publications have explored the nexus between art and theology in the decoration of Franciscan churches in central Italy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
JESSICA N. RICHARDSON is Lecturer in History of Art at the University of York. She received her PhD at The Courtauld, and has held positions at CASVA, Villa I Tatti, and the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz. Her publications include the co-edited books Remembering the Middle Ages in Early Modern Italy (2015), The Aesthetics of Marble from Late Antiquity to the Present (2021), and the special issue of RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics titled Fashioned from Holy Matter 75/76 (spring/autumn 2021). She is currently completing a monograph on the prehistory and making of miraculous images in Bologna, c. 1100-1650.
JANET ROBSON (+) was a leading scholar of narrative iconography and Franciscan patronage in late medieval Italy. She completed her PhD on images of Judas Iscariot at The Courtauld in 2001; publications drawn from her thesis include her study of Pietro Lorenzetti’s fresco of Judas at Assisi in the Art Bulletin (2004). Her co-authored book with Donal Cooper, The Making of Assisi (2013), won the Art Book prize in 2014. Her chapter here stems from the project on images of Saint Nicholas she developed during her Fellowship at the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Villa I Tatti in 2010-11.
IMOGEN TEDBURY is Curator of Art at the Queen’s House, Greenwich. She is the author of several articles on the reception of Sienese Trecento and Quattrocento painting, the subject of her PhD (2018), and Modern Portraits for Modern Women (2020), a book about portraits of pioneers in women’s higher education. She is currently writing the catalogue of the earlier Italian paintings in the Norton Simon Museum with Sir Nicholas Penny.
BETH WILLIAMSON is Professor of Medieval Culture at the University of Bristol. She completed her PhD on the image of the Virgin Lactans in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italy at The Courtauld in 1996. Central Italian visual culture has remained a strong strand of her subsequent research, and is the subject of her monographs The Madonna of Humility and Reliquary Tabernacles in Fourteenth-Century Italy, as well as the book that she co-edited with Joanna Cannon, Art, Politics, and Civic Religion in Central Italy, 1261-1352. She also researches the intersections of visual and aural culture, with interests in music and sound, and on sensory and bodily experience. She is currently working on an interdisciplinary project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, on late medieval English religious culture, entitled “Describing Devotion.
MICHAELA ZOSCHG is Curator of Medieval Art and Design in the Department of Decorative Art and Sculpture at the V&A in London. Previously, she held the position of Project Curator for Medieval Sculpture and European Textiles at The Burrell Collection in Glasgow and was part of the curatorial team delivering the exhibition Opus Anglicanum: Masterpieces of English Medieval Embroidery at the V&A (2014-16). Alongside her museum work, Michaela is currently completing a PhD project, entitled “in signum viduitatis et humilitatis”: European Queens and the Spaces, Art and Inhabitants of their Clarissan Foundations, c. 12501350’, at The Courtauld.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Many friends and colleagues of Joanna Cannon have helped us to realise this volume in her honour. We are especially grateful to Susie Nash, Laura Jacobus, Dillian Gordon, and Caroline Campbell. The project has been more protracted than any of us could have anticipated, but our editor at Boydell and Brewer, Caroline Palmer, has supported it at every stage with both enthusiasm and perseverance. The book’s visual apparatus has been enhanced by additional funding from the Universities of Bristol and Cambridge, while the text was greatly improved by the thorough and thoughtful comments of the anonymous reader. Our principal thanks go to our contributors for their readiness to contribute and meet our many demands and deadlines with patience and good humour.
INTRODUCTION: CIRCLING GIOTTO
DONAL COOPER AND BETH WILLIAMSON
Joanna Cannon's impact on the study of late medieval Italian art has been profound. Her influence is felt as a scholar through the seminal publications in her bibliography and as a teacher who has trained numerous researchers active in the field, both as university academics and museum curators, across Europe and North America. This book is offered by her doctoral students as a celebration of Joanna’s remarkable career and achievements, and in gratitude for her dedication and generosity to her field, her students, her colleagues, and her friends.
Joanna’s scholarship is driven by a historically contextualised approach that, to a great extent, can be seen continued within the work of her students. This is coupled with a determined focus on the visual and material qualities of the objects under her examination. A close attention to the object - whatever that object might be: altarpiece, wall painting, votive panel, portable diptych, manuscript, metalwork, or ivory (Fig. 1.1) has always been a fundamental tenet of Joanna's research and teaching. Her concern with materiality is amplified by a commitment to analysing the physical characteristics of works of art by means of technical analysis, and to understanding the creative processes and working practices of artists. A further interest concerns the multifarious and changing ways in which viewers experienced the art of late medieval Italy. This wide range of ways of looking indicates the comprehensive nature of Joanna’s research, and helps to explain why she has been such a keenly sought-out collaborator by colleagues within art history and also in adjacent fields.
Joanna’s interests and approach were shaped by the fertile academic environment of The Courtauld Institute of Art and the wider University of London in the 1970s, where the study of medieval art and architecture flourished under the interdisciplinary aegis of Peter Kidson (the legendary PK’ to Joanna and her contemporaries).! Having already spent three years at the Institute as an undergraduate, she took her PhD on ‘Dominican Patronage of the Arts in Central Italy: The Provincia Romana c. 1220-c. 1320° with Julian Gardner, who continued to supervise Joanna after departing The Courtauld to establish the History of Art department at the University of Warwick in 1974. From today’s perspective, surveying a field in great part shaped by Joanna’ research, it takes some effort to remember how unusual it then was to adopt an institution rather than an artist or ‘school as the focus of an art historical project. Julian Gardner’s own thesis, on the patronage of popes and cardinals in and around Rome in the second half of the thirteenth century, led the way.? In terms of mendicant artistic patronage, the closest precedents and parallels at the time were in the German historiography and addressed the better-known Franciscans.? Joannas project was immensely challenging in depth and breadth, cataloguing Dominican houses scattered across three modern provinces and requiring the author to marshal dense documentary evidence alongside panels, frescoes, decorative arts, manuscripts, and architecture. Her fieldwork had a pioneering quality: the material was often poorly published if at all, the monuments sometimes neglected or semi-derelict.
Joanna’s innovative approach attracted the attention of the great French medievalist André Vauchez, who was then completing his own ground-breaking work on Italian sanctity and canonisation.* Vauchez, as director of medieval studies at the Ecole Francaise de Rome, provided a crucial intellectual hub through the ‘Circolo medievistico’ seminar series he chaired. This chimed with Joanna’ choice of Rome as a base, from where she could fan out to explore Central Italy. Joanna’s Italian fieldwork and studies in London paralleled those of her friend and colleague Dillian Gordon, another of Julian Gardner’s Courtauld doctoral students researching Umbrian medieval painting; the two English scholars were frequently mistaken for one another on their Italian travels by custodians, archivists, librarians, and more than one art historian. Gordon would later move to the National Gallery as Curator of Early Italian Paintings, and their partnership would lead to one of Joanna’ most significant scholarly discoveries, the thirteenthcentury devotional diptych uniting the Stoclet Man of Sorrows and a previously unpublished panel of the Virgin and Child, being acquired for the Gallery’s permanent collection in 1999.5
While studying for her PhD, Joanna also worked as assistant to Edward B. Garrison, the independent scholar of early Italian panel painting. The task of working in Garrison's collection cemented her knowledge of thirteenth-century painted panels and sharpened her own connoisseurship, a skill that retained its value in Joanna’s subsequent research and teaching. After Garrison's death in 1981, Joanna curated the invaluable collection of photographs and research materials that he had previously given to The Courtauld. Together with Constance Hill, Conway Librarian, she supervised the updating of Garrison’s seminal work on Italian Romanesque panel painting and its transfer to a searchable CD-ROM format.® The most significant and lasting connection from Joanna's time as a student at The Courtauld was meeting a young scholar of Byzantine manuscripts called John Lowden. Joanna and John married in 1980 and they would teach as colleagues at The Courtauld over four decades. John’s evolving range of interests from Byzantium to medieval Paris has mirrored and complemented Joanna’s own, and their insights and expertise have informed and enriched each other’s research throughout their careers.
By the time Joanna completed her PhD in 1980 she was already teaching at The Courtauld. Her post was part time and would remain so throughout her career, although her selfless contributions to Masters and undergraduate teaching, PhD supervision, and the Institute's administration easily eclipsed those of some of her full-time colleagues. Path-finding articles on Simone Martini and Pietro Lorenzetti established Joanna’s reputation as an international authority on Sienese art and demonstrated the necessity of analysing the artworks concerned through the eyes of their mendicant patrons.’ Her abiding concern with facture and materials led to a deepening interest in technical analysis, and important collaborations in this area followed with her Courtauld colleagues Susie Nash in the Renaissance Section, Caroline Campbell in the Institute’s Gallery, and Caroline Villers and later Aviva Burnstock in the Conservation Department.*
The multiple threads in Joanna’s research came together in her book on the Tuscan holy woman Margherita of Cortona published in 1999 and in Italian translation the following year.’ This project had begun as a collaboration with André Vauchez during Joanna’s time as a student in Rome. Vauchez had introduced her to a set of watercolour copies of medieval frescoes depicting Margherita’s life and miracles preserved in the Vatican, which Joanna would go on to identify as unique records of a lost narrative cycle by the Lorenzetti brothers. The book was published under both their names, but the final text, with the exception of the opening sections, was Joanna’. Here Joanna immersed her reader in the world of a late medieval Tuscan hill-town and showed how artistic commissions and freshly conceived imagery shaped perceptions of a new, as yet uncanonised ‘saint’ through an interlocking set of iconographic choices and patronal negotiations. This richly told study combined contextual readings of tomb sculpture and cult images with a compelling reconstruction of the lost narrative cycle by the Lorenzetti brothers in Margherita’s shrine church, weaving together explorations of function, setting, belief, and identity with extensive analysis of attribution and authorship. Although the material was complex and the argument subtle, Joanna - as ever was concerned to present her narrative in transparent, jargon-free prose, which drew one reviewer impressed by ‘this admirable study’ to note that it ‘has the additional virtue of reading more like a good detective novel than a scholarly monograph.”
The Cortona book completed, Joanna’s thoughts turned to the challenge of publishing her doctoral dissertation. This would be no straightforward ‘book of the thesis’: the original dissertation had already stretched the envelope of a conventional PhD, Joanna’s thinking had advanced significantly in the intervening years, and the scholarly landscape it engaged with had been transformed (in no small part by Joanna herself). With the encouragement of her editor at Yale University Press, Gillian Malpass, Joanna conceived a monograph of unprecedented scope and ambition within the field of mendicant artistic patronage, into which she poured insights and expertise accumulated over her entire career. The project evolved over more than a decade and the end result was the magisterial Religious Poverty, Visual Riches which appeared in late 2013, its publication marked by a memorable launch party at The Courtauld themed in Dominican (or Sienese) black and white."
A volume as rich and multi-faceted as Religious Poverty is hard to summarise, but one of its distinctive qualities is the manner in which its overarching themes emerge from an ensemble of case studies that could easily have been publications in their own right, in particular the chapters on the Dominican houses in Florence and Pisa. These topographically specific sections intersect with thematic treatments of different aspects of the Dominican church interior, notably the division between the church of the friars (the ecclesia fratrum) and the church of the laity (the ecclesia laicorum). The argument embraces and advances recent work on the experience of space and ritual, of liturgy and devotion. Joanna’s canvas captures more fully than any other yet attempted the visual riches and spatial intricacies of the mendicant church interior, from crucifixes to choir stalls, altarpieces to illuminated manuscripts, frescoes to funerary monuments.
The transformation of Joanna’s PhD dissertation into the Religious Poverty volume helps us to measure the ways in which she has advanced the broader study of late medieval Italian art. Thanks to Joanna, our understanding of the mendicant orders as artistic patrons is much deeper and more nuanced than it would otherwise have been. Her thesis was a remarkable gathering of primary material but the book went much further, and the reader may sometimes feel as though they have joined up as a Dominican novice at one of the Order’s Tuscan convents. No longer faceless friars defined by their habits, the Dominican convents emerge as complex communities, combining corporate concerns and sincere piety with local rivalries and individual ambitions - multiple agendas expressed and mediated through their artistic patronage. While Religious Poverty confirmed Joanna’ status as the international authority on the artistic patronage of the Dominican Order, in other publications she has similarly refined our understanding of commissions by the Carmelites, Augustinians, Servites, and Franciscans. Joanna's approach can be situated within the broader disciplinary turn in art history towards patronage studies evident since the 1970s, but it should be recognised that her concept of the ‘patron's share’ is much more ambitious than this characterisation might suggest, encompassing a friar’s daily devotions, ritual practice, liturgical observances, and theological training as formative factors for an artwork’s design and meaning.
Alongside the mendicant orders, the city of Siena and its art has been a recurring theme in Joanna’s teaching and research. Building on earlier work by John White, Andrew Martindale, Christa Gardner von Teuffel, and Henk van Os,” Joanna’s bibliography includes a series of significant publications on Sienese altarpiece design, culminating in her 2010 study of the veneration of the Virgin’s foot, which can be said to have truly uncovered the full resonance of Duccio’s signature prayer at the base of the Maesta for Siena Cathedral. Joanna was one of the first scholars to fully appreciate how the appeal and prestige of Sienese art rivalled Giotto’s in the eyes of contemporaries, even for patrons beyond the Italian peninsula. We look forward with eager anticipation to see how these and other themes coalesce in the major exhibition on medieval Siena that Joanna is now preparing together with Caroline Campbell and Stephan Wolohojian, scheduled to open at the Metropolitan Museum in New York in late 2024 before travelling to the National Gallery in London in spring 2025.
The scholars whose work lies between these covers constitute a narrowly defined group compared to the wide array of researchers taught, guided, or inspired by Joanna: all the authors here were supervised by her in their doctoral studies at The Courtauld, where Joanna taught from her first appointment in 1977 until her retirement in 2019. Most of us were also supervised by Joanna as Masters students, and our approaches had already been shaped by her transformative teaching on the intensive nine-month options she ran for The Courtauld MA, first the tightly focused ‘Early Sienese Painting, and later the more expansive ‘Artists and Friars’ and ‘Seeing Sienese Art. Over 100 Masters dissertations arising from these MA options and supervised by Joanna can be found in The Courtauld Library."* Many of these dissertations are considerable scholarly contributions and it was tempting, when first contemplating a volume celebrating Joanna's career, to propose editing a selection of these for publication. Equally, we were aware of numerous friends and admirers across many different areas of medieval and Renaissance studies who would have jumped at the chance to contribute to a Festschrift in Joannas honour.
This book could very easily have been a multi-volume set. In the interests of a manageable publication, we therefore took the difficult decision to restrict contributions to Joanna’ doctoral students, those who have undoubtedly benefited in the most sustained fashion from her pedagogy and wisdom. A few of her doctoral supervisees were not able to contribute to this volume, and, as Joanna continues in active supervision, there are more who have begun their doctorates since we conceived this project and commissioned the essays, but the contributors gathered together here represent the large majority of her PhD students.
Imogen Tedbury and Eowyn Kerr-Di Carlo, whose doctoral studies with Joanna were at an early stage when the project began, kindly agreed to contribute by compiling the list of Joanna's publications. Imogen now has her PhD and Eowyn is at a much more advanced stage. It is with much sadness that we record one absence, keenly felt by us all, from amongst those who did contribute: Janet Robson died in 2018, shortly after completing the chapter on Ambrogio Lorenzetti published here.!®
Those of us who appear in this volume know that to have studied for our doctorates with Joanna has been one of life’s strokes of good fortune, and a debt that can never be adequately repaid. All of us know well the combination of scholarly rigour, faultless guidance, and great personal kindness that is the hallmark of Joanna’s PhD supervision. Some of us (both editors included) came to The Courtauld from first degrees in other disciplines, and so owe our formation as art historians to Joanna. We began our postgraduate studies at a time when ‘research skills’ were not taught within the MA curriculum, nor, indeed, as part of the PhD. Nonetheless, the training that we received, as part of the holistic experience of studying for the MA and PhD with Joanna, was second to none.
We were shown what it meant to carry out primary research and how to conceive research questions. We were shown how to use the resources at our disposal, how to make the most of London’s opportunities, and how to take our studies into Italian archives, or into American museum conservation departments. We were taught how to understand and how to critically analyse the literature within our field, and also how to access material from other disciplines that might further our studies. A responsible and wide-ranging crossdisciplinarity has always guided Joanna’s own research, and this filters through into the research of those whom she supervised.
Most importantly, we were taught to look, to look hard and look well, and to see beyond the first impressions that a work of art might present and always, of course, to look at the back! (Fig. 1.2) All of us have had the experience of looking at works of art with Joanna first hand in galleries and museum stores in London, and many of us have also had the experience of travelling with Joanna, looking with her at works of art in their original locations, or in galleries or museums abroad. These collaborative processes of looking, and asking questions, have, for all of us, shaped the way that we conduct our research, and the ways that we consider the objects of our study. Even when Joanna is not explicitly teaching, she embodies the pedagogical practices and personal qualities to which we all aspire, and one continues to learn whenever one is in her company. The model of Joanna's teaching is one that all of us have absorbed, providing in turn a benchmark of excellence for those of us who teach or supervise which we endeavour to reproduce, however imperfectly, for our own students.
The title of this introduction - ‘Circling Giotto’ - is a play on Vasari’s famous story of Giotto’s ‘O) where the painter drew a perfect circle freehand as a demonstration of artistic perfection. As one would expect in a collection of essays focused on late medieval Italian art, Giotto’s presence is implicit throughout. But the essays rarely focus on Giotto directly; instead, the volume collectively can be said to circle around him, shedding new light on his contemporaries and rivals, his precursors and followers, and developments in other media and other centres. The title is also a homage to ‘Giotto’ Circle; the research seminar that Joanna established at The Courtauld Institute in 2004 and which she continues to chair today. Many of the essays published here have their origins in talks presented at Giotto’s Circle and have benefited from the seminar’s convivial and constructive criticism. With characteristic generosity, Joanna sought to include researchers working on Italian medieval topics at other British universities, as well as scholars in the field visiting the UK. Now in its eighteenth year, Giotto’s Circle has helped to ensure the continued vitality of what are sometimes called “Irecento studies’ as a distinct research field in Anglophone scholarship. The seminar’s emphasis on introducing new graduate researchers into an expert and supportive network offers powerful testimony of Joanna’s broader sense of responsibility beyond her own research to her field and its future.”
The expansive vision of late medieval Italian art reflected in the essays collected here is manifestly Joanna own. The themes that underpin the volume mirror the major preoccupations of Joanna’ research and publications, as her students have developed her ideas and approaches in their own work, extending her influence further throughout the field. The dominant themes are tightly entangled within the volume and within individual essays, and as editors we found that any configuration of the chapters into sub-groupings impoverished rather than clarified the connections between them. The essays are thus arranged in roughly chronological order, beginning fittingly with Jessica Richardson's study of the earliest images of Saint Dominic. Readers will quickly notice multiple interconnections across the volume. Over half the essays engage with the artistic patronage of the mendicant orders, an area of research that Joanna pioneered in the 1980s and ’90s. Within this group a tighter kernel of contributions grapples with the ramifications of conflicts within the Franciscan movement for that Order’s artistic production, an area which remains one of the most challenging in mendicant studies. Other essays prioritise the civic context for artworks, both secular and sacred, and notably in Siena and Florence. Devotional practice, especially through the close analysis of portable and hand-held imagery, is another recurring theme. Joanna’ interest in workshop organisation, often traversing materials and media, is pursued by several authors. Goldsmiths’ work, enamel, gilded glass, manuscript illumination, and marble sculpture are all represented alongside panel and fresco painting, reflecting the breadth of Joanna’s interests and the range of projects she encouraged and supervised.
No appreciation of Joanna would be complete without mentioning her dedication to her family. Those of us who had MA seminars on Fridays will remember her preparing to go to her mother’s home for the Shabbat meal; everyone knows her devotion to her own family, to her husband John, and to their children, Gregory and Caroline. All of us grieved with her and for her when Caroline died, far too early, in 2015. For some of us Joanna provided a model for how to combine an academic career with raising a family. Knowing now, as we do, how hard this is, we look back in awe at the amount of time that she was able to give to her students, at how she read our written work with such care, how she led evening research seminars and weekend colloquia at The Courtauld, and how she did all of this with an endless energy, positivity, and kindness.
Writing and editing this book, we have often been reminded of the advice proffered by Humbert of Romans - Dominican Minister General and a lead protagonist in Joanna's PhD and second book - to the budding preachers in his Order. “Have a good model to look at; Humbert enjoined his readers: “We see this in painters, who paint better when they follow a good model which they keep before their eyes’* Speaking for all the authors, we have kept Joanna’s scholarship before our eyes and we have undoubtedly ‘painted’ better with its example to guide us. In another artistic analogy, Humbert observed that it ‘is harder to paint a picture which needs a lot of different colours than one which only requires a few.” It is difficult to summarise here Joanna’s substantial and lasting contributions to so many different debates and areas of enquiry. Harder still is to express adequately what she means to us and many others, but we hope that the essays collected together here capture in refracted light something of the varied and vibrant colour she has brought to her field, and to her colleagues, students, and friends.
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