In room after room, painted in rich, dark colors drawn from the works themselves, Florence surprises. The show’s title is a lure to bring in visitors, since the real focus is the relatively unknown and certainly understudied Pacino di Bonaguida. Sure, there are more works by Giotto than have ever been shown in a North American exhibition, but they are routinely outshone by his contemporary, Pacino. Were his name a household one, as Caravaggio’s is, the show might well have been titled Pacino di Bonaguida and His Legacy.
The real subversion of the show, though, is not of the Giotto/Pacino hierarchy, but of the basic medieval/Renaissance divide. While the show tells us we are “at the Dawn of the Renaissance,” manuscripts are given at least equal play as the larger panels, altars, crucifixes, glass, and other Renaissance staples. These are usually relegated to separate shows — at the Getty, for example, “medieval” manuscripts are usually downstairs in the gallery dedicated to their display, and “Renaissance” panels are housed in the galleries of paintings. Here, the first work we encounter is a remarkable manuscript record of grain sales from Orsanmichele), heavily illuminated and open to the earliest surviving city view of Florence (which plays very nicely against the massive photo of the modern cityscape just outside the show’s entrance). The manuscript illumination is a nice bit of propaganda touting Florence’s generosity toward the indigent, in comparison to that cheapskate Siena. We all saw Orsanmichele in Renaissance courses, and I am willing to bet that few of us saw manuscripts along side it. The manuscripts appeared in our medieval courses, the panels and porticos in our Renaissance courses, and never the twain shall meet.
The show begins with this surprising manuscript, but ends — appropriately — with the real show-stopper. No, not one of the Giottos, nor Pacino’s stunning Chiarito Tabernacle, with its gold-over-gesso relief of Pentecost. No, the final work (or works, depending on your perspective) is twenty-four leaves, reassembled through great effort from 16 collections, from the magnificent Laudario of Sant’Agnese (ca. 1340), illuminated by Pacino and the Master of the Dominican Effigies. I had seen the remarkable image of the martyrdom of St. Lawrence in a smaller manuscripts show at the Getty, depicting the saint being grilled over a gorgeous black and red representation of glowing coals (famously, his Vita claims that he told his torturers “Turn me over. I’m done on that side.”). The image, though, that captivated my companions and I was just beside it: a leaf containing the martyrdom of St. Bartholomew. A medievalist friend and I were in delighted raptures over this illumination for fifteen somewhat giddy minutes. In two main panels and two marginal roundels, the saint is flayed alive, beheaded, returns to preach and is buried by his followers.
In the scene of his flaying, he appears youthful and Christ-like. He towers over his torturers — indeed, he stands as tall as the tower to which he is chained. Bartholomew leans to the left, as if about to take flight, while three men go about the workman-like task of removing his skin. Two use knives as if opening seams on his right arm and leg, while the third yanks down on a flap of skin already loosened from his left hand. I once saw a goat being skinned, and the image seems to reflect closely both the process and the straightforward, serious, calm demeanor of the flayers. We have no screaming, grimacing, mocking tormentors, as Bosch would perhaps have given us. The flaying is gruesome enough, but in the second scene, Bartholomew kneels, his body in a position of prayer but his head already chopped off, fallen in a splash of blood and curiously — as in several other martyrdoms from the Laudario — turned back as if to look at the body from which it was severed. Would that I had known this manuscript when I was writing about severed heads. The head seems to have instantly become a relic, like the (several) severed head(s) of John the Baptist, its halo becoming a golden platter, as if mimicking the immensely creepy relic at Amiens. Here, the body of Bartholomew wears what might be mistakes for a white robe, but for the foot we can see still attached — this is his flayed skin, of course, which he wears like a cape, with the arms knotted at his stump of a neck, the skin of the hands dangling down limply, in sharp contrast to his flayed and — we suddenly realized — bloody hands which, though the body is now headless, nonetheless remain raised in an attitude of reverent prayer.
There are other great flaying images, of course — Michelangelo’s image of Bartholomew, apparently containing a self-portrait on the flayed skin, and Gerard David’s The Judgment of Cambyses come readily to mind. And there are other works that seem to stress skin, less directly (for me, a number of the images in the Tiberius B.v Marvels of the East seem to be about skin, and at some point I’ll write that essay, since I was rather wrong about it the one time I have done so).
Katie Walter has a new collection on Reading Skin in Medieval Literature and Culture coming out in Palgrave’s great New Middle Ages series. Peggy McCracken is working on a book tentatively entitled In the Skin and a collection of essays (co-edited with E. Jane Burns) on Stones, Worms, and Skin: Gender and Embodiment in Medieval Europe. Kat Tracy is tentatively planning a collection of essays on flaying, which will hopefully feature essays on visual images and material culture. You know you all want to read an essay about the scrap of ‘Viking skin’ nailed to the church door at Hadstock. Hopefully, someone will take that up. Skin seems to be having its moment in medieval studies.
This image seems a perfect place to focus such a discussion, since the skin is so very much in evidence, the imagery so striking, and the context — a manuscript, of course, illuminated on vellum — more potent for such a discussion than the same image on a wooden panel or ivory plaque would be. One hardly needs the Old English book riddle to draw the connection between the flayed skin in the image and the flayed skin on which the image is painted.
One of the curiosities of the exhibition is the striking contrast between the excellent state of preservation of many of the manuscript leaves — despite their origins in violence and their modern dismemberment — and the more worn and faded state of many of the panels. In two displays, the exhibition highlights the ravages of time on the panels. In the first of these, two panels by Bernardo Daddi are hung side by side, one worn much more than other. In the better preserved, the coy glances of St. Ursula’s companions are well preserved, and their boat floats in lovely, translucent waters. The martyrdom scene, in comparison, is bleached, sapped of life and, I suppose, of death, with the image’s central violence muted by fading of colors, losses to the surface, retouching, and so on.
The side panels of the Chiarito Tabernacle have also suffered badly over time, subjected to light daily, and in some areas painted with unstable pigments like yellow orpiment, which has fallen off the surface, and blue azurite, which has darkened so much as to appear black. The manuscript leaves, on the other hand, have spent more of their life closed away and thereby protected, and their colors (though in some cases faded) reward us for their long stewardship (at least until the nineteenth century, when some were divided and, in essence, turned into independent panels): they are far more vibrant and vivid than their contemporaries. Beside the Tabernacle, though, we are treated to a digital reconstruction, resulting from a Getty partnership with a scientist from the Rochester Institute of Technology, based in part on examinations of the better-preserved pigments in Pacino’s manuscripts. Turning to the manuscripts allows us to experience the effects of the panels, without reconstruction, especially as one of them — wonderfully and bizarrely — contains an illumination on panel-painting scale, filling nearly the entire folio of a large-format copy of the Carmina Regia, an address from the city of Prato to Robert of Anjou, King of Naples.
All this overlap between manuscripts and panels, panels and glass, glass and manuscripts, all of this potently and implicitly questions the medieval/Renaissance divide, as well as the divide between media. We should follow the model established by this exhibition in our examinations of art. We should be more omnivorous, taking into account not only our medium of specialization (why do my discussions of monsters in manuscripts remain generally confined to manuscripts?) but also our periods of specialization. Go to the show (which will also open in Toronto as Revealing the Early Renaissance: Stories and Secrets in Florentine Art, March 16 – June 16, 2013). You’ll see just what I mean.