Before the late sixteenth century, the churches of Florence were internally divided by monumental screens that separated the laity in the nave from the clergy in the choir precinct. Enabling both separation and mediation, these screens were impressive artistic structures that controlled social interactions, facilitated liturgical performances, and variably framed or obscured religious ritual and imagery. In the 1560s and 70s, screens were routinely destroyed in a period of religious reforms, irreversibly transforming the function, meaning, and spatial dynamics of the church interior. In this volume, Joanne Allen explores the widespread presence of screens and their role in Florentine social and religious life prior to the Counter-Reformation. She presents unpublished documentation and new reconstructions of screens and the choir precincts which they delimited. Elucidating issues such as gender, patronage, and class, her study makes these vanished structures comprehensible and deepens our understanding of the impact of religious reform on church architecture.
In 1486 the Padua Cathedral canons requested permission to build a new apsidal choir in “the way and structure of the church of St. Peter in Rome.” The canons were evidently referring to the unfinished Vatican tribuna: a deep vaulted apse at the west end of St. Peter’s. Newly published documents reveal that both Nicholas V and Paul II spent large sums on its construction. The Paduan case shows that the Vatican tribuna was influential in terms of architectural type and function. Although the physical extent of the fifteenth-century work is hard to determine, Bramante’s continuation of the extension in the sixteenth century shows it was considered substantial enough not to abandon completely. In Nicholas V’s Tribuna for Old St. Peter’s in Rome as a Model for the New Apsidal Choir at Padua Cathedral, Joanne Allen suggests that the St. Peter’s project could represent an important episode in the development of extended high altar chapels and retrochoirs, a phenomenon that gained momentum in the decades after work began on the Vatican tribuna.
The majority of choir stalls in Italy lack misericords. Their unusual presence in Piedmont and the Valle d'Aosta most probably reflects their proximity to, and the influence of, northern Europe. This paper reveals that the rare instances of misericords elsewhere in Italy are connected to the Carthusian order. Rather than performing an artistic role, their presence is derived from the specific rubrics of Carthusian liturgy, which legislated in detail on the correct use of misericords. The Cistercians also regulated their use, but a similar correlation cannot be assessed because of the lack of surviving furniture. The Carthusian connection, meanwhile, suggests a purely liturgical function for the carved rests, expanding the study of misericords beyond stylistic and iconographic analyses.
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