dominicans, franciscans, and the art of political rivalry: two drawings and a fresco by giovanni...

Dominicans, Franciscans, and the art of politicalrivalry: two drawings and a fresco by Giovanni

Battista della Rovere

Thomas McGrath

A strong rivalry characterized relations between the Dominicans and Fran-ciscans from their early history through the sixteenth and seventeenth centu-ries. More alike than different, the Dominicans (officially recognized in 1216)and the Franciscans (1223) rejected traditional monasticism, dedicatingthemselves to poverty, preaching, and maintaining an active presence withinthe secular community. Both, moreover, pledged allegiance directly to thepope and often found themselves in direct competition for papal favours. By1255, tension had risen to such a degree that the Dominican and Franciscangenerals felt compelled to draft a letter calling for harmony between the twoorders, demanding that they refrain from denigrating each other in publicand recommending that the buildings of one order be geographically distantfrom those of the other.1 In the realm of the visual arts, Dominicans andFranciscans tried to keep their iconographies clear and distinct, even if doingso sometimes entailed overt political manipulation. In 1472, for example, theFranciscan Pope Sixtus IV outlawed all representations of the DominicanSaint Catherine of Siena that showed her receiving or displaying the stigmata,an attribute that was to be reserved exclusively for St Francis.2 During thesixteenth century, as Catholics responded to the challenges of the ProtestantReformation, relations between the two orders remained tense. Attempts bythe church to root out corruption, purge itself of potentially heretical doc-trine, and clarify its mission forced Dominicans and Franciscans to re-evaluate

Work on this article began while I was a Research Fellow in the Department of Prints, Drawings and Photo-graphs at the Fogg Museum of Art at Harvard University in 2002 and 2003, and I would like to thank mycolleagues at that institution for their help and support. I am also indebted to Simon Tugwell of the DominicanHistorical Institute in Rome, and to Aristide Cabassi, Director of the Biblioteca Francescana at Sant’Angelo inMilan.

1 See David Burr, Olivi and Franciscan Poverty (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 149–50.On Marian devotion as a source of friction and rivalry among the mendicant orders, see André Duval, ‘Ladevotion Mariale dans l’ordre des Freres Precheurs’, in Hubert du Manoir de Juaye (ed.), Maria, etudes sur laSainte Vierge, Vol. 2 (Paris: Beauchesne, 1952), 737–82.

2 See Daniel Antonin Mortier, Histoire des Maitres Generaux de l’ordre des Freres Precheurs, Vol. 5, (Paris: A. Picara,1911), 6. Sixtus IV’s injunction was overturned by Innocent VIII in 1491.

Renaissance Studies Vol. 25 No. 2 DOI: 10.1111/j.1477-4658.2010.00665.x

© 2010 The AuthorJournal compilation © 2010 The Society for Renaissance Studies, Blackwell Publishing Ltd

their roles within the Christian community and to distinguish themselves fromeach other by emphasizing their differences.

Two drawings in the Fogg Museum by the Milanese artist Giovanni Battistadella Rovere from around 1600 call attention to the ways in which the politicalrivalry between Dominicans and Franciscans helped shape the visual imagerythese groups propagated during the Counter-Reformation. The drawingsdepict scenes from the lives of saints Dominic and Francis and allude to pointsof contention that had arisen between the two orders. The first drawingappears to show St Dominic preaching before the Fourth Lateran Council(Fig. 1) – an unusual episode, absent from the historical sources, that assertsDominic’s privileged role as the original recipient of the rosary from theVirgin.3 The second drawing, St Francis Receiving the Perdono at Porziuncola(Fig. 2) reintroduces overlooked narrative elements that accentuate Francis’sallegiance to the Virgin and make reference to an independent Franciscanrosary tradition that challenged that of the Dominicans.4 By resurrectinglegends from their early histories, Dominicans and Franciscans sought tofashion new corporate identities that they hoped would augment their rel-evance in post-Tridentine Europe, and visual images played a vital role in thisprocess. The two drawings in the Fogg Museum are best understood asattempts by these two orders to establish a stronger connection with the laityand assert their centrality to the mission of the Church.

Although the attributions of the Fogg drawings have wavered over theyears, they should both be given to Giovanni Battista della Rovere.5 The StFrancis Receiving the Perdono, whose draughtsmanship is very similar to signedand dated sheets like the Miracle of St Carlo Borromeo in the Castello Sforz-esco, Milan (1606)6 and the Virgin and Child with the Archangel Michael andJohn the Baptist in the Albertina (1609),7 can now be connected with hisfresco of the same subject in the church of Sant’Angelo, Milan, executed inthe early 1590s (Fig. 3); the composition is almost identical, althoughvarious details, such as the design of the steps and the gesture of the Virgin,were changed when the artist executed the final project. The attribution of

3 Inv. no. 1983.116; brown ink, light reddish-purple wash, white gouache, over traces of graphite on off-whiteantique laid paper; squared (underneath, it seems) in black chalk; image surrounded by a thin framing line inbrown ink; 245 ¥ 189 mm. My thanks to Penley Knipe and Anne Driesse of the Strauss Center at HarvardUniversity for their assistance with the technical examination of these drawings.

4 Inv. no. 1972.334; brown ink, grey-brown wash, black chalk on off-white paper, squared in graphite(?);verso, brown ink; 343 ¥ 262 mm.

5 The St Francis Receiving the Perdono was until recently attributed to the Sienese artist Ventura Salimbeni. SeeJames G. Harper, Verso: The Flip Side of Master Drawings, exh. cat. (Cambridge, MA: Fogg Museum of Art, 2001),37–8, cat. 10. The second drawing, which appears to show St Dominic before the Fourth Lateran Council, cameto the Fogg in 1983 with an attribution to Giovanni Battista della Rovere, although it has never been published;notes in the curatorial file indicate the attribution has been questioned.

6 Castello Sforzesco, Milan, inv. no. B coll. 2171. See Giulio Bora in Il Seicento Lombardo, Vol. 3, exh. cat.(Milan: Palazzo Reale and Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, 1973), 32–5, cat. 139.

7 Veronika Birke and Janine Kertész, Die italienischen Zeichnungen der Albertina, Vol. 3, (Vienna: Böhlau,1992–97), 1781, cat. 13171, repr.

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the first Fogg drawing (Fig. 1) to Giovanni Battista della Rovere rests on itsstrong stylistic affinities with drawings like the study for St Dionigi Blessing inthe Accademia, Venice (Fig. 4), which is signed and dated 1597 on theverso.8 The spatial setting is somewhat compressed in both drawings, and

8 Inv. no. 637; brown ink, brown wash, and black chalk on prepared paper; 391 ¥ 281 mm. For more on thisdrawing see Bora in Il Seicento Lombardo, Vol. 3, 33. Giovanni Battista della Rovere’s signature (‘J. B. S.’) wasidentified by Philip Pouncey in his review of Aldo Bertini’s 1958 I disegni italiani della Biblioteca Reale a Torino (TheBurlington Magazine, Vol. 101 (1959), 297) and appears on more than thirty sheets.

Fig. 1 Giovanni Battista della Rovere, St Dominic Preaching Before the Fourth Lateran Council, c. 1600, brown ink,light reddish-purple wash and white gouache over traces of graphite on off-white antique laid paper, squared inblack chalk, 245 ¥ 189 mm, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Art Museums (gift of Ian Woodner,inv. no. 1983.116)

Dominicans, Franciscans, and political rivalry 187

the same shorthand notations are used to describe facial features, lendingall of the characters the same general morphology. The wide, almostdeformed visage of the priest on the left in the Venice drawing, forexample, bears a striking resemblance to that of the child (or dwarf?) in theforeground of the Fogg drawing, and the hollow eyes and dowel-shapednose of the beggar on the right who receives the child’s alms reappearthroughout the St Dionigi.

Both drawings functioned as preparatory studies for commissioned paint-ings or frescoes. The relationship between the St Francis Receiving the Perdono

Fig. 2 Giovanni Battista della Rovere, St Francis Receiving the Perdono at Porziuncola, c. 1591–95, brown ink,grey-brown wash, black chalk on off-white paper, squared in graphite(?), 343 ¥ 262 mm, Cambridge, Massa-chusetts, Harvard University Art Museums (gift of Mr. and Mrs. Sydney J. Freedberg, inv. no. 1972.334, recto)

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drawing and the fresco in the church of Sant’Angelo in Milan has alreadybeen established. Although The St Dominic Preaching Before the Fourth LateranCouncil cannot be connected with a known fresco, it, too, must record aspecific commission. The only plausible explanation for the oddly shapedframe around the image, with its small, rectangular protrusion at the top, isthat it was intended for a unique architectural setting. Executed in ink, wash,and some white gouache over a preliminary drawing in black chalk, the StDominic Preaching is virtually free of pentimenti (a feature common to

Fig. 3 Giovanni Battista della Rovere, St Francis Receiving the Perdono at Porziuncola, c. 1591–95, Milan, church ofSant’Angelo (photo: author)


prospectus drawings); squaring lines are visible beneath the wash andgouache, suggesting the artist carefully transferred this design from an earlier,less finished sketch, probably as a prospectus to be presented to the patron.The church that commissioned the work must have been in or near Milan,where Giovanni Battista della Rovere and his brother (and frequent collabo-rator) Giovanni Mauro (1575–c. 1640) enjoyed considerable success in the

Fig. 4 Giovanni Battista della Rovere, St Dionigi Blessing, 1597, brown ink, brown wash, and black chalk onprepared paper; 391 ¥ 281 mm, Venice, Gallerie dell’Accademia, inv. no. 637 (by permission of the Galleriedell’Accademia, Venice)

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late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.9 It is tempting to speculate thatthe St Dominic Preaching was destined for the large Dominican church of StEustorgio where Giovanni Mauro della Rovere worked at least three timesbetween 1601 and 1636, including once in 1620 when he frescoed the choirvault with The Institution of the Rosary, but there is no documentary evidence tosupport this hypothesis.10

Neither Giovanni Battista della Rovere nor Giovanni Mauro della Roverehas been the subject of a published catalogue raisonné, and our understand-ing of their art and career is far from complete. While they carved out a nichein Milan as painters of religious narratives, executing five of the large canvasesin the Duomo depicting the life of St Carlo Borromeo (1602–04), as well asmuch of the fresco decoration at the Abbey of Chiaravalle (c. 1615), theyfound a wider audience in the provinces, often working as a team.11 Todaythey are regarded chiefly as illustrators of religious and historical subjects whoemployed ‘an easy decorative style’.12 Other Milanese artists from the period,such as Giulio Cesare Procaccini, Cerano, Morazzone, and Danielle Crespi –admittedly more innovative than the della Rovere – have garnered morescholarly attention. The two drawings in the Fogg Museum, however, encour-age a more nuanced interpretation of Giovanni Battista della Rovere’s art,particularly when considered within the context of political rivalries betweenreligious orders in early Seicento Lombardy, and the demands those rivalriesexerted on the artists who worked for them. In both drawings, GiovanniBattista della Rovere reveals a sensitivity to changing religious attitudes in lateRenaissance Italy, as well as an ability to work with patrons to forge newiconographies that responded to Counter-Reformation concerns.

THE ROSARY AND DOMINICAN IDENTITY

The first drawing, which I will argue shows St Dominic Preaching Before the FourthLateran Council (Fig. 1), depicts a bearded figure in monastic garb standing ina pulpit before a large audience. He holds what appears to be a rosary,identifying him, in all likelihood, as St Dominic, who (according to legend)received the rosary from the Virgin as an aid in his fight against the

9 On the art of the della Rovere brothers see Giulio Bora in Il Seicento Lombardo, Vol. 3, 32–5; SimonettaCoppa, ‘Schede per il Fiammenghino’, Arte Lombarda, 17 (1972), 14–21; Mariella Morandi, ‘Aggiunte Cremo-nesi al Fiammenghino’, Arte Lombarda, 124 (1998), 88–9; Paolo Tenchio, L’opera del Fiammenghino: nelle Tre Pievialtolariane (Menaggio: A. Sampietro, c. 2000).

10 Giulio Bora, ‘La pittura dalle fine del Quattrocento all’Ottocento’, in La Basilica di Sant’Eustorgio in Milano(1984), 185, 189, and 191.

11 On the Carlo Borromeo series, see Marco Rossi and Alessandro Rovetta, ‘La vita di san Carlo nei quadronidel Duomo di Milano’, in F. Buzzi and D. Zardin (eds.), Carlo Borromeo e l’opera della ‘grande riforma’ (Milan:Silvana, 1997), 81–104. On the Chiaravalle frescoes see Simonetta Coppa, ‘La pittura del Seicento e Settecento’,in Chiaravalle. Arte e storia di un abbazia cistercense (Milan: Electa, 1992), 404–53.

12 Simonetta Coppa, ‘Rovere, della (ii)’, in The Grove Dictionary of Art, Vol. 27 (New York: Grove’s Dictionaries,1996), 275. Giulio Bora (Il Seicento Lombardo, Vol. 3, 16) similarly described them as ‘Pittori abili e sbrigativi,. . . proponendo un tipo di pittura facile e illustrative’.


Albigensian heretics. Scenes of St Dominic preaching against heresy werecommon in the late sixteenth century and include Bernardino Poccetti’sfresco from the early 1580s in the cloister of Santa Maria Novella, Florence.13

But while the audience in Poccetti’s fresco is made up of the general popu-lace, the audience in Giovanni Battista della Rovere’s drawing includes apope, flanked by at least one crowned head of state and several high-rankingchurch officials (identifiable by their headgear). The standing figure in theleft foreground, moreover, wears the uniform of a papal guard. The onlygathering of such high-ranking religious and secular leaders during Dominic’slifetime was the Fourth Lateran Council, which met at the church of SanGiovanni in Laterano toward the end of 1215. Pope Innocent III presided overthe sessions, which were attended by seventy-one patriarchs and emissariesfrom various countries, as well as 412 bishops and over 800 abbots and priors.14

The subject of Dominic’s sermon must be the rosary and the sacred mys-teries it represents. The long string of beads hanging from Dominic’s righthand, positioned in the empty space near the centre of the upper part of thecomposition, constitutes a primary focus of visual interest. The pope andother members of the audience gaze at it with silent reverence, and the vieweris encouraged to do the same. Popular legend held that the Virgin had giventhe rosary to Dominic sometime between 1208 and 1213.15 The rosary –literally a mechanical device that helped one keep track of a series of prayersand meditations – served to strengthen religious conviction by reminding oneof the basic tenets of the Catholic faith. Its origin as an anti-heretical toolmade it particularly attractive during the Counter-Reformation, as Catholicleaders sought to combat the new heresy of Protestantism.16 As rosary devotionexploded in popularity over the course of the sixteenth century, Dominicansincreasingly asserted their association with the rosary tradition through paint-ings and frescoes.

While the visual evidence strongly suggests that the drawing shows StDominic preaching before the Fourth Lateran Council, there is no evidencethat Dominic ever did so. Dominic’s principal and most reliable biographer,Jordan of Saxony, who assumed the leadership of the order after Dominic’sdeath, devoted only three sentences to Dominic’s petition before Pope

13 See Peter Assmann, Dominikanerheilige und der verbotene Savonarola (Mainz: Chorus-Verlag für Kunst undWissenschaft, 1997), 150–51; and Paul Hamilton, Disegni di Bernardino Pocetti, exh. cat. (Florence: Uffizi, 1980),Pl. 2.

14 For a general overview of the Fourth Lateran Council see Jane Sayers, Innocent III, Leader of Europe11198–1216 (New York: Longman, 1996), 95–101.

15 Herbert Thurston, ‘Genuflections and Aves: A Study in Rosary Origins’, The Month, 127 (1916), 551, fn. 1.On the life of St Dominic see Simon Tugwell, ‘Notes on the Life of St Dominic’, Archivum fratrum praedicatorum,65 (1995), 5–169; 66 (1996), 5–200; 67 (1997), 27–59; and 68 (1998), 5–116.

16 Danilo Zardin, Confraternite e vita di pieta nelle campagne lombarde tra ‘500 e ‘600 (Milan: N. E. D., 1981) 201,calls rosary devotion one of the supporting pillars of the Counter-Reformation church; see also Mario Rosa,Religione e società nel mezzogiorno tra cinque e seicento (Bari: De Donato, 1976), 217–28.

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Innocent III, and said nothing about his preaching on this occasion.17 Thefirst biography of Dominic to mention this episode appeared in 1647; to thebest of my knowledge it had never been represented in paintings or frescoesprior to Giovanni Battista della Rovere’s drawing. It might have its roots,however, in an early fifteenth-century book illustration. Alberto da Castello’svery popular Il Rosario della gloriosa Vergine Maria, published in Venice in 1521and reprinted eighteen more times before 1573, includes a woodcut showinga haloed Dominic distributing rosaries from a low pulpit (Fig. 5). His

17 See the translation of Jordan of Saxony’s text in Dominican Sources: New Editions in English, Vol. 1 (Bath:Downside Abbey and Blackfriars Publications, 1982), 11. Some early sources report that Dominic preachedextensively in Rome during Lent in 1218, although none mentions a papal audience. See Marie-HumbertVicaire, St Dominic and His Times, trans. Kathleen Pond (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1964), 247.

Fig. 5 Woodcut illustration from Alberto da Castello, Il Rosario della gloriosa Vergine Maria, Venice, MarchioSessa e Piero da la Serena, 1524 (by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University)


audience includes a pope, isolated from the rest of the crowd in the lower leftcorner, as well as a bishop and a crowned head of state. The others gatheredaround Dominic, most of whom clutch rosaries, are commoners and at leastone appears to be a woman. This cannot be the Fourth Lateran Council,which was attended only by high-ranking state and religious officials. Thewoodcut’s subject and meaning are most plausibly explained by the text onthe following pages, which describes how people from all classes and profes-sions practiced rosary devotion, from kings and princes to country people andartisans.18 The text, which makes no specific mention of the distribution ofrosaries by Dominic himself, discourages a literal reading of the image, whichis probably meant to illustrate the broad appeal of rosary devotion and thepopularity of rosary confraternities.

If the woodcut in Alberto di Castello’s book supplied a visual source forGiovanni Battista della Rovere’s composition, Hernando de Castillo’s Primeraparte de la historia general de Santo Domingo might well have provided inspirationfor the subject.19 Hernando de Castillo’s book, published first in Madrid in1584 and translated into Italian five years later, reinterpreted Dominic’s inter-action with the Fourth Lateran Council. It was Dominic, the author suggested,who had uncovered and publicized most of the errors and abuses that thecouncil was trying to remedy. Although Hernando de Castillo did not actuallyclaim that Dominic delivered a sermon before the council, he emphasized thereceptiveness of the council to Dominic’s teachings and ideas. Jean de Giffrede Rechac, who wrote his own biography of Dominic in 1647, apparentlyinferred from Hernando de Castillo’s book that Dominic appeared before thecouncil in some official capacity, writing that Dominic was ‘heard’ by thecouncil and that he offered a ‘deposition’ on heresies and abominationswithin the church.20 Such an interpretation must have been encouraged bythe woodcut in Alberto da Castello’s popular Rosario that showed the pope asa member of Dominic’s audience, even if that woodcut was not intended as arepresentation of an actual event.

Why would the Dominicans in the late sixteenth century have turned tosuch an obscure and weakly documented episode as a subject for a painting orfresco? They must have been motivated largely by a desire to reclaim theirstatus as guardians of the rosary tradition, and to assert their authority over theever-growing number of rosary confraternities. In Giovanni Battista della

18 Alberto da Castello, Il Rosario della gloriosa Vergine Maria (Venice: Marchio Sessa e Piero da la Serena, 1524),12.

19 Hernando De Castillo, Prima parte de la historia general de Santo Domingo y de su orden de predicadores (Madrid:Francisco Sanchez, 1584), 35–6; Hernando de Castillo, Dell’historia generale di S. Domenico et dell’ordine suo de’predicatori, trans. Timoteo Bottoni (Venice: Damiano Zenaro, 1589). I am indebted to Simon Tugwell forbringing this text to my attention.

20 Jean de Giffre de Rechac, La vie du glorieux patriarche Saint Dominique (Paris: Sebastien Hure, 1647), 273:‘Etans heureusement arriuez à cette premiere ville du monde, et le Concile étant ouvert, S. Dominique y fut ouyet sa deposition receue touchant les erreurs, heresies, impietez et abominations des Vaudois, Albigeois et autresSectaires de semblable farine’.

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Rovere’s hometown of Milan, this authority had been directly challenged bythe aggressive reforms of Carlo Borromeo. Borromeo, Archbishop of Milanfrom 1560 to his death in 1584, launched a systematic campaign to bring thedisordered array of lay confraternities under the control of a few centralizedorganizations.21 In 1584 Borromeo, acting without Dominican consent, movedthe chapel of the Compagnia della Rosario from St Eustorgio, Milan’s oldestand largest Dominican church, to the Duomo, effectively taking the rosaryconfraternity away from the Dominicans and placing it under the supervisionof the parish. Borromeo anticipated the complaints of the Dominicans, notingin a letter written that same year that additional rosary chapels could still bebuilt in other churches.22 But Dominican authority in this vital matter hadbeen compromised, and over the next several decades the friars at Sant’Eustorgio felt the need to reassert their founder’s role in the origin of therosary with renewed vigour.23 In 1592 they commissioned Paolo CamilloLandriani (Il Duchino) to decorate a chapel in Sant’ Eustorgio with a scene ofSt Dominic battling the Albigensian heretics, as well as its sixteenth-centurycounterpart, the 1571 victory over the Turks at Lepanto, which had beenachieved, the pope declared, through the help of rosary recitations. And in1620 they hired Giovanni Battista’s brother, Giovanni Mauro della Rovere, tofresco the choir vault with St Dominic receiving the rosary from the Virgin.24

While Borromeo’s reforms might have weakened the power of the Domini-cans in Milan, Dominicans were still able, and apparently even more deter-mined, to proclaim the rosary as a fundamental part of their heritage throughcarefully designed paintings and frescoes. Giovanni Battista della Rovere’sdrawing of St Dominic preaching, with its unusual subject and oddly shapedframe, probably records a commission (apparently never executed) thatstemmed from this campaign.

While Dominicans encountered certain checks on their authority in Bor-romeo’s Milan, their control over rosary confraternities throughout Europe,and the papal privileges that came with it, stirred jealousy and resentment inmembers of other religious orders. Many orders had their own long-standingtraditions of using beads as mnemonic devices for prayer and meditation,which they believed warranted the same recognition as the Dominican

21 On Borromeo and confraternities in Milan see Black, Italian Confraternities, 75–76. See also Zardin,‘Relaunching Confraternities’.

22 Maria Louisa Gatti Perer, ‘Per la definizione dell’iconografia della Vergine del Rosario’, in Buzzi andZardin (eds.), Carlo Borromeo e l’opera della ‘grande riforma’, 186–187. On Sant’ Eustorgio see Enrico Cattaneo, ‘Levicende storiche’, in Gian Alberto Dell’Acqua (ed.), La basilica di Sant’ Eustorgio in Milano, (Milan: BancoPopolare, 1984), 17–43.

23 See Cesare Mozzarelli, ‘Sant’Eustorgio, Il domenicano Gaspare Bugati, e la polemica antiborromaica nellaMilano del secondo Cinquecento’, in Paolo Biscottini (ed.), I chiostri di Sant’ Eustorgio in Milano (Milan: Silvana,1998), 78–83.

24 See Bora, ‘La pittura dalle fine del Quattrocento’, 184, 189. Bora connects Giovanni Mauro della Rovere’slost fresco with a drawing in the Frankfurt Städelsches Kunstinstitut (Fig. 217, page 193).


rosary.25 The Servites, for example, had been reciting the Rosary of the SevenSorrows since the thirteenth century; the Carthusians claimed a rosary tradi-tion that originated in the fourteenth century; and the Franciscans had beenpracticing a form of devotion involving a loop of beads known as the Fran-ciscan Crown (or Seraphic Rosary) since the 1420s, if not earlier.26 The papalsanction of the Dominican rosary legend, moreover, implied that the Domini-cans enjoyed a privileged relationship with the Virgin, who had chosen theirfounder to spread the principal form of Marian devotion. But other ordershad equal, if not greater, claims to being most favoured by the Virgin. TheCarmelites had been known as the Order of the Blessed Virgin of MountCarmel since 1220, and the Franciscans actively promoted the doctrine of theImmaculate Conception of the Virgin, which the Dominicans denied.27

This tension was most pronounced between the two largest mendicantorders, the Dominicans and the Franciscans. Franciscans had cause to feelsomewhat disenfranchised under the rule of the Dominican Pope Pius V(1566–72). Pius not only granted Dominicans control over the increasinglypopular rosary confraternities, but also issued two to three times as many bullsthat favoured Dominicans over Franciscans than his predecessors had.28

Dominicans and Franciscans also clashed over the politically charged doctrineof the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin, which virtually all the orders,with the notable exception of the Dominicans, embraced. The ImmaculateConception had gained validity under Pope Sixtus IV, who established a feastin its honour in 1471 and regarded anyone who challenged it as a heretic. Theelevation of the Dominican Saint Thomas Aquinas to the status of doctor ofthe church by Pius in 1567 revitalized this debate, since Aquinas had famouslyrejected the notion that the Virgin had been conceived without original sin.Pius diplomatically chose not to undo the precedent set by Sixtus IV on thismatter, but he also refused to condemn the dissenters. In 1570, debate overthis issue, which sharply divided the Franciscans and Dominicans, hadreached such an intensity that Pius advised anyone who might be inclined toargue too vehemently to ‘either keep silence all together (and this would bebetter and safer) or . . . let him expound his own opinion with due

25 See Winston-Allen, Stories of the Rose, 13–18.26 See Duval, ‘La devotion Mariale’, 772–3, 776. On forms of rosary devotion in the thirteenth and fourteenth

centuries see Herbert Thurston, ‘Chapelet’, in Fernand Cabrol (ed.), Dictionnaire d’archéologie chrétienne et deliturgie, Vol. 3, Part 1, (Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1948), 401–06. On the Franciscan Crown see Raphael Huber, ADocumented History of the Franciscan Order 1182–1517 (Milwaukee: Nowiny, 1944), 917. On the Carthusian rosarysee Herbert Thurston, ‘The Rosary Amongst the Carthusians’, The Month, 96 (1900), 513–27. On frictionbetween Carmelites and Dominicans see Otto Zöckler, ‘Carmelites’, in S. M. Jackson (ed.), The New Schaff-HerzogEncyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, Vol. 2, (New York and London: Funk and Wagnalls, 1908), 418. A broaddefinition of the term ‘rosarium’ included an anthology of texts on Marian themes, and several orders,including the Cistercians, claimed such a tradition; see Gilles Gérard Meersseman, Ordo Fraternitatis Confraternitee Pietà dei Laici nel Medioevo, Vol. 3 (Rome: Herder, 1977), 1147.

27 Wenceslaus Sebastian, ‘The Controversy after Scotus to 1900’, in Edward O’Connor (ed.), The Dogma of theImmaculate Conception, (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1958), 213–70, especially 214 and 242.

28 Nicole Lemaitre, Saint Pie V, (Paris: Fayard, 1994), 166.

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moderation and without attacking the contrary opinion’.29 On both doctrinaland political grounds, then, friction between Dominicans and Franciscansintensified in the late 1500s.

VISUAL RESPONSES TO THE DOMINICAN ROSARY LEGEND

By the middle of the sixteenth century, the legend of Dominic’s role in theinstitution of the rosary had become a crucial part of the Dominicans’ identity,and paintings of Dominic receiving the rosary from the Virgin appeared withgreat frequency. Lorenzo Lotto’s 1539 altarpiece for San Nicolo in Cingoli,showing the Virgin lowering the rosary into Dominic’s hands, provides atypical example, while Oddone Pascale’s 1531 altarpiece for San Giovanni inSaluzzo depicts Dominic’s subsequent victory over the Albigensian heretics.30

Visual images such as these, which helped propagate the Dominican versionof the rosary’s origin, reflected the official recognition granted to the legendby a series of popes, beginning in the 1490s with Alexander VI. Dominicanauthority over rosary confraternities had been generally accepted since 1470,when the Dominican Alanus de Rupe formed the first one in Douai, and wasmade official by Pius V in 1569.31 These confraternities attracted thousandsupon thousands of members, who were motivated by promises of indulgences.The local Dominican churches that sponsored these confraternities, more-over, gained prominence and influence in their communities.32

During the period of renewed tension between the two largest mendicantorders in the years following the Council of Trent, the Franciscans, along withother religious orders, began to challenge the officially sanctioned legend ofDominic’s role in the origin of the rosary through the creation and display oftheir own visual images. Altarpieces showing the Virgin or Child bestowing the

29 Rene Laurentin, ‘The Role of the Papal Magisterium in the Development of the Dogma of the ImmaculateConception’, in O’Connor (ed.), The Dogma, 300.

30 On Lotto’s altarpiece see Peter Humfrey, Lorenzo Lotto (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 129–31and Fig. 131; for Oddone Pascale’s altarpiece, see Cristina Quattrini, ‘Un’ipotesi iconografica per la “Madonnadel Rosario” di Federico Barocci’, in Ranieri Varese (ed.), Studi per Pietro Zampetti, (Ancona: Lavoro Editoriale,1993), 441. For an excellent overview of the rosary in Italian art, see Esperança Camara, Pictures and Prayers:Madonna of the Rosary Imagery in Post-Tridentine Italy (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2002).

31 According to Duval, ‘La devotion Mariale’, 776, a bull issued by Julius III can be interpreted as grantingcontrol over rosary confraternities to Dominicans by 1551. See also Duval, ‘Rosaire’, in Dictionnaire de Spiritualité,Vol. 13, (Paris: G. Beauchesne, 1988), 953. On Leo X’s bull of Oct. 6, 1520 (‘Pastores eterni’) see Mortier,Histoire des Maitres Generaux, Vol. 5, 242.

32 On rosary indulgences, approved as early as 1475, see Daniel Antonin Mortier, Histoire des Maitres Generauxde l’ordre des Freres Precheurs, Vol. 7, (Paris: A. Picara, 1920), 189; and Duval, ‘Rosaire’, 954. Alberto da Castellolisted many rosary indulgences in his Rosario della gloriosa Vergine Maria, first published in Venice, 1521 (see p.24). On the growth of rosary confraternities see Mario Rosa, Religione e società nel mezzogiorno tra cinque e seicento(Bari: De Donato, 1976), 226; Christopher Black, Italian Confraternities in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge:Cambridge University, 1989), passim but especially 56; Anne Winston-Allen, Stories of the Rose. The Making of theRosary in the Middle Ages (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University, 1997), 111–27; Zardin, Confraternitee vita, 201–57; and Danilo Zardin, ‘Relaunching Confraternities in the Tridentine Era: Shaping Consciencesand Christianizing Society in Milan and Lombardy’, in Nicholas Terpstra (ed.), The Politics of Ritual Kinship.Confraternities and Social Order in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2000), 199.


rosary on saints other than Dominic began to appear, to the consternation ofDominicans, in the second half of the sixteenth century. Michele Curia’spanel from circa 1570 in Santa Maria di Montecalvario, Naples, for example,shows the Virgin and Child handing strings of beads to Franciscans.33 Otheraltarpieces featured the Child giving a rosary to Francis, while the Virginpresented one to Dominic. Examples include an altarpiece by Marten de Vos(1531–1603) in Beerse from the end of the sixteenth century;34 one by DenisCalvaert for S. Michele in Mezzolara di Budrio, near Bologna, from 1612;35

and a preparatory drawing by Giovanni Mauro della Rovere in the AccademiaCarrara, Bergamo, from around 1619.36 While Francis appeared most fre-quently in these paintings, Giovenale Ancina (Oratorian), Michele Pini (Cam-aldolese), Bernardino of Siena (Franciscan), Carlo Borromeo (who did notbelong to an order) were also depicted as recipients of the rosary.37

Dominicans clearly regarded these images as an attack on their authorityand history. At their chapter general meeting in 1574, they denounced thedisplay of altarpieces showing saints other than Dominic receiving the rosaryand continued to complain for at least a century.38 Annotations inscribed onan engraving from the early 1600s, now lost but described in detail by thehistorian Daniel Mortier in 1920, expressed the Dominicans’ outrage.39 Theengraving, probably French, depicted the Virgin and Child standing on acrescent moon and handing a rosary to St Francis. Latin annotations, writtenin a seventeenth-century hand, detailed abuses committed by French rosaryconfraternities not supervised by the Dominican order. The author accusedFranciscans, Cappuchins, and Carmelites of displaying altarpieces showingFrancis, Theresa, and others receiving the rosary, and listed several specificexamples. An inscription at the top of the sheet announced, ‘This image [was]presented to the Chapter General in Rome [in] 1629’, presumably as proof ofbrazen attempts to undermine the Dominican legend of the rosary. Thecontroversy still raged thirty years later, when Dominicans in Toulouse

33 See Maria Cali (ed.), La pittura del Cinquecento, Vol. 2, (Turin: UTET, 2000), 489, repr. See also PierluigiLeone de Castris, Pittura del Cinquecento a Napoli (Naples: Electa, 1996), 166, where it is given to Giovanni de Mioand collaborators.

34 The painting is in the church of St Quirinus. See W. H. Savelsberg, Die Darstellung des Hl. Franziskus vonAssisi (Rome: Istituto Storico dei Cappuccini, 1992), 323–4, cat. 168, repr.

35 Vera Fortunati Pietrantonio (ed.), Pittura Bolognese del ‘500, Vol. 2, (Bologna: Grafis, 1986), 708, repr.36 See Francesco Rossi (ed.), I grandi disegni italiani dell’Accademia Carrara in Bergamo (Milan: Silvana, 1985),

cat. 28, repr.37 St Bernardine appears in Pietro Ronzelli’s 1592 altarpiece in Santa Maria Assunta, Curno (Bergamo); see

Gian Alberto dell’Acqua (ed.), I pittori bergamaschi. Il Cinquecento, Vol. 4 (Bergamo: Poligrafiche Bolis, 1975) 446,448, Fig. 5. Carlo Borromeo and Giovenale Ancina (an Oratorian) appear in Giovanni Baglione’s altarpiece forSan Biagio in Macerino (Umbria); see Vittorio Casale et al., Pittura del Seicento e Settecento. Ricerche in Umbria, Vol.1, (Treviso: Canova, 1976) 85, No. 4, repr. Michele of Pisa (that town’s first abbot) appears in Aurelio Lomi’s1619 altarpiece for the Camaldolese church of San Michele in Borgo, Pisa; see Roberto P. Ciardi, Aurelio LomiManiera e Innovazione (Pisa: Pacini, 1989), 260–61, cat. 72, repr.

38 J. D. Miller, Beads and Prayers: the Rosary in History and Devotion (London: Burns and Oates, 2002), 28.39 Mortier, Histoire des Maitres Generaux, Vol. 7, 192–96.

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obtained a decree from Pope Alexander VII (1655–57) prohibiting the displayof an altarpiece showing the Virgin giving the rosary to saints Francis andClaire.40

Giovanni Battista della Rovere’s representation of Dominic preachingbefore the Fourth Lateran Council, suggested although not actually describedby revisionist biographies like that of Hernando de Castillo’s Historia general deSanto Domingo, reinforced at least two themes essential to the identity theDominicans had cultivated. First, it testified to Dominic’s status as the originalrecipient of the rosary by creating an historical context. As paintings of othersaints receiving the rosary appeared with greater frequency, Dominicansresponded by offering a visual image that testified to Dominic’s use of therosary in a specific place and at a specific time. Second, it depicted Dominicholding forth on doctrinal issues before the pope, which alluded to the saint’sprofound understanding of theology and the continuing role of Dominicansas papal advisors. While both Dominicans and Franciscans regarded preach-ing as one of their primary missions, Franciscans were authorized to preachrepentance and penitence, but not doctrine. William Hood has pointed outthat early Franciscans were not all priests, and that Francis did not believe thatpriestly orders were necessary for his vocation. Dominican friars, by contrast,had been enjoined by the pope to preach against heresy, which required themto be well versed in the finer points of Christian theology.41 The office ofMaster of the Sacred Palace, or pope’s theologian, moreover, had been heldexclusively by Dominicans since its inception, beginning, most believed, withDominic himself.42 The rosary further symbolized the Dominicans’ role aswarriors against heresy, which they felt distinguished them from other men-dicant orders, particularly the Franciscans, and helped bolster their status inPost-Tridentine Italy. The Fogg drawing, then, is best understood not as asimple illustration of an event from the life of a saint, but as a propagandisticattempt to reaffirm certain principles and traditions that defined the Domini-can order.

THE FRANCISCANS’ REVIVAL OF THE PERDONO LEGEND

The Dominicans’ ability to gain political traction by reviving narratives andforms of devotion from their early history was not lost on the Franciscans, who

40 Herbert Thurston, ‘The Rosary: The Rebutting Evidence’, The Month, 97 (1901), 180.41 William Hood, ‘Saint Dominic’s Manners of Praying: Gestures in Fra Angelico’s Cell Frescoes at San

Marco’, The Art Bulletin, 68, No. 2 (1986), 197. As preparation for this mission, which took on greaterimportance following the Council of Trent, Dominicans received a rigorous education. In 1585 the Dominicanmaster general Sixtus Fabri instituted a stricter and more comprehensive programme of study, mandatorythroughout the order, that included two years of logic and three years of philosophy; ee Mortier, Histoire desMaitres Generaux, Vol. 5, 619, and Angelus Walz, I Domenicani al Concilio di Trento (Rome: Herder, 1961),especially 414–15.

42 On the Master of the Sacred Palace see R. Creytens, ‘Le “Studium Romanae Curiae” et le Maitre du SacrePalais’, Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum, 12 (1942), 5–83.


also looked to the past for legends and traditions that might clarify theirmission and enhance their popularity. One such legend told the story of howSt Francis had secured an indulgence for anyone making a pilgrimage to thesmall chapel at Porziuncola, which in many ways paralleled the story of theinstitution of the Dominican rosary, another means of earning indulgences.The Porziuncola Indulgence, or Perdono, had rarely been depicted since thelate fourteenth century. Federico Barocci’s painting of this subject for SanFrancesco in Urbino (Fig. 6), commissioned in 1571, provides the firstinstance of its representation in an altarpiece since Ilario da Viterbo’s 1393version for the Porziuncola chapel (Fig. 7).43 Barocci interpreted the Perdonoin a fairly simple manner, with a kneeling Francis centred below a vision ofChrist and the Virgin (along with St Nicholas, added at the behest of thepatron). Giovanni Battista della Rovere’s version, created less than twentyyears later, is preserved in the preparatory drawing at the Fogg Museum andin his fresco in the church of Sant’Angelo, Milan. Both the drawing and thefresco reintroduce at least two important narrative elements that Barocci hadomitted: the official sanction of the indulgence by Pope Honorius III, seen inthe background on the left; and the miraculous roses, prominently displayedby Francis in his outstretched hands. In making these and other modificationsGiovanni Battista della Rovere offered support for the legitimacy of thePerdono legend, called attention to Francis’s devotion to the Virgin, andalluded to a Franciscan rosary tradition that directly competed with that of theDominicans.

The full story of the Porziuncola Indulgence was recounted by the myste-rious Michele di Bernardo around 1284 and elaborated by Bishop Conrad ofAssisi in 1335.44 Bishop Conrad’s sequence of events evidently supplied thebasis for Fra Illario di Viterbo’s altarpiece of 1393 in the small Porziuncolachapel (Fig. 7), now contained within the large basilica of Santa Maria degliAngeli.45 Bishop Conrad begins his narrative with Francis praying at thechapel, where he is tempted by demons to yield to his weariness and go tosleep. Francis instead throws himself into a briar patch but angels intercede,causing the thorns to vanish and roses to bloom, even though it is the middleof winter. In the first scene in Illario di Viterbo’s painting, at lower right,angels appear to Francis, who stands in the thorn bushes. In the next scenethey lead him back to the chapel. At the top of the panel, Francis is shown withroses in his hands, kneeling before an apparition of the Virgin and Christ

43 Elvio Lunghi, Immagini di Assisi nell’arte (Assisi: Minerva, 1998). The subject appeared in frescoes by Tiberiodi Assisi (Montefalco, cloister of San Fortunato, 1512; and Assisi, Capella delle Rose in Santa Maria degli Angeli,1516) and Dono Doni (Assisi, Cloister of Sixtus IV, San Francesco, 1564). On Barocci’s painting see MarilynAronberg Lavin, ‘Images of a Miracle. Federico Barocci and the Porziuncola Indulgence’, Artibus et Historiae,54/27 (2006), 9–50.

44 Raphael Huber, The Portiuncula Indulgence: From Honorius III to Pius XI (New York: J. W. Wagner, 1938), 55,66–7, 86–91.

45 See Francesco d’Assisi. Storia e Arte, exh. cat. (Assisi: Sacro Convento, 1982), 167, cat. 10.7, repr.; and ItaloFaldi, Pittori viterbesi di cinque secoli (Rome: Bozzi, 1970), 12–14 and 115–21, Figs. 33–8.

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surrounded by angels, requesting an indulgence for all who come to worshipat the Porziuncola chapel. At the upper left, Francis kneels before Honorius,asking for official sanction of the indulgence and offering three red and threewhite roses as proof of his vision. And finally, at the lower left, Francisannounces the indulgence at Porziuncola.

The veracity of the Perdono legend was frequently questioned, which mightexplain why it was almost never depicted in paintings before Barocci and his

Fig. 6 Federico Barocci, The Perdono of St Francis, 1574–76, oil on canvas, 427 ¥ 236 cm, Urbino, Church of SanFrancesco (Scala/Art Resource, New York)


patron revived it in the 1570s. No papal documents affirming the PorziuncolaIndulgence survived, and Francis’s early biographers, including Bonaventure,made no mention of it. According to Bishop Teobaldo of Assisi in 1310, PopeHonorius wanted to present Francis with a formal bull, but Francis refused it,arguing that Christ, the Virgin and the angels would serve as his notaries andwitnesses.46 This story clearly did not satisfy the Dominicans, who charged thatthe Perdono legend was a fiction. In a gesture that seems almost mocking,Dominicans contended that Pope Benedict XI in 1304 had offered an iden-tical indulgence to anyone who worshipped at the Dominican church inPerugia.47 Like Francis, they were unable to produce any written proof,

46 Stefano Brufani, ‘Il diploma del vescovo Teobaldo d’Assisi per l’indulgenza della Porziuncola’, Franciscana,2 (2000), 43–136.

47 See Mario Sensi, Il Perdono di Assisi (Assisi: Edizioini Porziuncola, 2002), 73–82. Francesco Bartoli, aFranciscan who wrote his Trattato sull’Indulgenza in the middle of the fourteenth century, recorded Dominicancriticisms from as early as 1308. A miniaturist depicted the granting of the indulgence in Perugia by Pope

Fig. 7 Fra Ilario di Viterbo, Annunciation and the Story of the Perdono, 1493, tempera and gold leaf on panel,Assisi, church of Santa Maria degli Angeli (© Adrian Fletcher, www.paradoxplace.com)

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asserting that the pope had died shortly after making his pronouncement.Critics also noted that popes rarely approved plenary indulgences, whicheliminated the time a soul was required to spend in purgatory, reserving themalmost exclusively for those who participated in the crusades. Protestants,meanwhile, charged that there was no scriptural basis for indulgences of anykind, and harshly criticized the practice of selling them. After the Council ofTrent reaffirmed the legitimacy of indulgences in its dictates of 1564, and asFranciscans began to re-examine and revive the early history of their order,paintings of the Perdono began to appear with greater frequency.

GIOVANNI BATTISTA DELLA ROVERE’S FRESCO AND THE REAPPEARANCE

OF THE ROSES

The miraculous roses played a vital role in the sixteenth-century reinterpre-tation of the Perdono story, as Franciscans sought to question the legitimacyof the Dominican rosary legend. The roses, which had been present in FraIllario da Viterbo’s altarpiece of 1393 but missing from Barocci’s, madeperhaps their earliest sixteenth-century appearance in Giovanni Battista dellaRovere’s fresco in the church of Sant’Angelo (Fig. 3), where they areaccorded a position of privilege. Giovanni Battista della Rovere began deco-rating the St Francis chapel no later than 1591, the date inscribed by the artiston a drawing for one of the frescoes in the chapel’s dome.48 Work must havebeen completed before 1595, the year Paolo Morigia published his guide toMilan in which he praised the St Francis chapel as an exemplary work by thedella Rovere brothers.49 To the best of my knowledge, the only other paintingof the Perdono featuring roses that might predate the Sant’Angelo fresco isFrancesco Vanni’s version for the church of San Francesco in Pisa, painted noearlier than 1592 and perhaps a few years later;50 here, angels carry flowers intheir draperies. In the version by Pietro Faccini for San Domenico in Bolognafrom 1595, Francis holds roses in his outstretched hands. Roses can also befound at the base of the altar in the Perdono engraving from the Life of StFrancis series by Francesco Villamena, printed by Andrea de Putti in Rome in1594, and in the 1595 altarpiece by Francesco da Castello in the Cappuchin

Benedict XI in 1304 in a fourteenth-century manuscript (cod. 975) in the Biblioteca communale Agusta diPerugia; see Francesco Mancini and Aurora Scotti (eds.), La basilica di Santa Maria degli Angeli, 3 vols., (Perugia:Electa, 1989), 48, Fig. 31.

48 Temptation of St Francis, London, Courtauld Institute, Witt Collection, inv. no. 2558; inscribed on the versoin brown ink, ‘GBR 1591’. Laura Giles noted the connection between drawing and fresco in Suzanne FoldsMcCullough and Laura Giles, Italian Drawings Before 1600 in the Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago: Art Institute ofChicago, 1997), 214. No contract for the chapel survives in the Sant’Angelo archives.

49 Paolo Morigia, La Nobilità di Milano (Milan: P. Pontio, 1595), 282.50 See Simonetta Prosperi Valenti Rondinò’s entry on the painting in L’immagine di S. Francesco nella Controri-

forma, exh. cat. (Rome: Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica, 1982), 88, cat. 68, repr. Lingo, The Capuchins, 342,suggests Vanni might have relied on Villamena’s 1594 engraving.


church in Rieti.51 Together these paintings and prints testify to a sudden surgeof interest during the 1590s in the miraculous roses and their significancewithin the Perdono narrative.

The image of Francis holding a basket of roses before an apparition of theVirgin held special significance for Franciscans for several reasons. First, thegeneral composition, including the pose of Francis holding the roses in histwo outstretched hands, recalls the earliest known depiction of the Perdono,Ilario da Viterbo’s 1393 painting in the Porziuncola chapel (Fig. 7), lending itan historical authenticity. The circular arrangement of flowers also alludes toa specific Franciscan form of devotion, the Franciscan Crown, a type of rosarythat had been popular within the order since the 1420s, if not earlier, half acentury before Alanus de Rupe propagated the story that Dominic had beenthe first recipient of the rosary.52 According to legend, the Franciscan crownoriginated with a young novice who routinely placed a wreath of flowers on astatue of the Virgin. The Virgin herself appeared to him on one occasion andrequested that he weave a symbolic wreath out of repeated recitations of theseven joys. In some versions of the story roses spring from the novice’s mouthas he speaks, forming a chain much like a rosary. While Giovanni Battista dellaRovere’s reference to the Franciscan Crown in a depiction of the Perdono issubtle, it is not without precedent. A woodcut illustration in Die Legend desheyligen Vatters francisci, published in Nuremburg in 1512, unmistakably linksthe Franciscan Crown to the Porziuncola Indulgence (Fig. 8).53 Here, Francisgathers flowers in the folds of his robe, and the whole scene is framed by awreath of roses tied together at the bottom with a simple rope, representingthe cincture worn by all Franciscan friars. In the lower left and right cornerskneeling figures hold loops of beads that mirror the large wreath thatencircles the composition. The message is clear: the Franciscan Crown (orrosary) derives from, or at least symbolizes, the roses that bloomed on thenight Francis requested the Porziuncola Indulgence. The woodcut, then,effectively transforms the iconography of the rosary, purging Dominic from itshistory and locating its power and meaning in St Francis and the Perdono.The circle of roses held by Francis in Giovanni Battista della Rovere’s frescocommunicated a similar message to its intended audience of late sixteenth-century Franciscan friars.

The roses also fulfilled the rhetorical function of helping to convinceviewers of the veracity of the Perdono legend. Giovanni Battista della Rovere’s

51 On the Villamena engravings see L’immagine di S. Francesco, 176–8; on Francesco da Castello’s altarpiece,see Enzo Borsellino, ‘Inediti di Francesco da Castello nel reatino’, Prospettiva, Nos. 33–6 (1983–84), 190–93,repr.

52 Herbert Thurston, ‘The So-Called Bridgittine Rosary’, The Month, 100 (1902), 189–203. Thurston noteselsewhere (‘The Rosary: The Rebutting Evidence’, The Month, 97 (1901), 519–20) that legends in which asuccession of Ave Marias is likened to a crown of flowers presented to the Virgin can be found in the thirteenthcentury, if not earlier.

53 Die Legend des heyligen Vatters francisci (Nuremburg: Erben C. Rosentaler, 1512), unpaginated, but thewoodcut faces the first page of the final chapter, ‘Von dem grossen Ablas’.

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inclusion of the small scene of Francis receiving confirmation of the indul-gence from Honorius III, glimpsed through a doorway at the left, adds both anhistorical dimension and a legal underpinning to the Perdono story. Bypresenting the full sequence of events through which Francis obtained thePerdono, Giovanni Battista della Rovere reminded the viewer that the Porzi-uncola Indulgence was not merely promised to Francis during a private vision,but also publicly affirmed during an official ceremony by Christ’s representa-tive on earth, even if no official documentary proof existed. The roses thatFrancis brings to Honorius, moreover, constitute a physical link betweenFrancis’s supernatural experience and his actual petition before the pope.

Fig. 8 Woodcut illustration from St Bonaventure, Die Legend des heyligen Vatters francisci, Nuremburg, Erben C.Rosentaler, 1512 (by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University)


The roses also carry a symbolic meaning, accentuating Francis’s privilegedrelationship with the mother of Christ. Roses, long regarded as one of theVirgin’s primary attributes, play an integral role in Bishop Conrad’s narrative,where their miraculous appearance signalled the arrival of the Virgin at thePorziuncola Chapel. While most other representations of the Perdono fromthese years showed the roses held by angels or scattered at the base of the altar,Giovanni Battista della Rovere placed them in Francis’s outstretched handsand isolated them, like Dominic’s rosary, near the centre of the composition.A sketch on the verso of the sheet in the Fogg shows the artist reworking theVirgin’s gesture of supplication, extending her right hand toward Francis tocreate a stronger link between the two (Fig. 9). Francis’s posture has also beenmodified. He leans forward more dramatically in the fresco than in thedrawing, stretching out his arms as though offering the roses to the Virgin andreinforcing his connection with her. This interaction, missing from bothBarocci’s painting and Villamena’s engraving, calls attention not only toFrancis’s devotion to the Virgin but also the Virgin’s allegiance to Francis,whose cause she pleads before Christ. And importantly, the fresco visuallymimics the institution of the rosary, where Dominic was shown kneelingbefore the Virgin with outstretched hands that grasped beads instead offlowers. Dominic’s status as most favoured by the Virgin, implied by theubiquitous image of the institution of the rosary, finds a challenge in GiovanniBattista della Rovere’s version of the Perdono.

CONCLUSION

Giovanni Battista della Rovere’s St Dominic Preaching and St Francis Receiving thePerdono fulfilled in large measure the Council of Trent’s requirements forreligious images. Both accorded with the Council of Trent’s desire to celebratethe lives of saints and encourage popular forms of devotion, and both exhibitedthe narrative clarity prized by reformist cardinals like Carlo Borromeo andGabriele Paleotti. The Perdono, in particular, transformed Barocci’s symmetri-cal and rather static composition into a dynamic arrangement of forms thatallowed the viewer to understand the interactions among the figures and followthe narrative sequence of events more easily, creating an image that instructedas much as it inspired. But the new goals and priorities established by Trent alsocreated political tensions, which influenced art just as profoundly as its instruc-tions regarding content and presentation. Trent’s mandate for spiritualrenewal and improved relations between the church and the laity conferred aspecial status on Dominicans and Franciscans, who were already committed tooutreach and maintaining an established presence in the secular world. It alsoaltered and intensified the old rivalry between the two groups of friars, whoutilized the power of images to clarify their roles within the Catholic communityand steer public opinion in their favour. This was particularly true in Milan,where Borromeo’s relocation of the chapel of the Confraternity of the Rosary

206 Thomas McGrath

to the Duomo diminished the authority of the Dominicans and encouragedthem to assert their founder’s privileged status as the original recipient of therosary with renewed vigour. As Franciscans responded by commissioningpaintings and frescoes that promoted comparable legends from their ownhistory, the art and rhetoric of one order responded to the art and rhetoric ofthe other in a kind of early modern spin-control in which the spiritual and thepolitical became inextricably bound together.

Suffolk University

Fig. 9 Giovanni Battista della Rovere, Studies for St Francis Receiving the Perdono, c. 1591–95, brown ink, 343 ¥262 mm, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Art Museums (gift of Mr. and Mrs. Sydney J. Freedberg,inv. no. 1972.334, verso)


dominicans, franciscans, and the art of political rivalry: two drawings and a fresco by giovanni...

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