Introduction

This article argues for an important but neglected interpretation of Donatello’s High Altar at the Santo in Padua of the late 1440s and of the choir screen that once surrounded it. It contends that the Virgin Mary is represented in her immaculate state, according to a doctrine of growing interest in fifteenth-century Italy that she was exempted from original sin prior to the very first moment of her conception.Footnote ¹ This doctrine was vigorously promoted by Francesco della Rovere (1414–84), the future Pope Sixtus IV, first in a sermon delivered in Padua in 1448, while the altar was being erected; then in two bulls he subsequently wrote as pope; and, finally, in two liturgical offices that he commissioned. Francesco had spent almost twenty years in Padua at the Santo convent and was closely tied to it even in his later career.

This reading of the altar is significant for four reasons. The ways in which the Immaculate Conception was visualized before the late sixteenth century were not standardized, leading to a variety of pictorial expressions of the theme. As a result, modern viewers misread their meaning and overlook occurrences of it. Mirella Levi d’Ancona, the author of an early study on the representations of the Immaculate Conception, observed that the theological positions in favor of the doctrine were almost impossible to depict in visual formulas because they dealt with a concept, rather than a narrative scene.Footnote ² This led to a series of pictorial depictions of the elusive theme that were singular or rarely repeated, making them difficult to recognize.Footnote ³ For example, such a major monument as the Sistine Chapel ceiling was only recently reinterpreted in terms of the Immaculate Conception by Kim E. Butler.Footnote ⁴ Some time ago, Regina Stefaniak launched this rethinking about the Immaculate Conception by linking the iconography of Leonardo’s Madonna of the Rocks, which is known to have been commissioned by a confraternity devoted to the Immaculate Conception for the church of San Francesco Grande in Milan, to verses from the book of Proverbs that begin the reading on the feast day of the doctrine.Footnote ⁵ She interpreted Leonardo’s landscape as the not-yet-created world whose genesis the figure described in Proverbs preceded, and as this figure was related to the Immaculate Virgin, she used this to connect the altarpiece to the Immaculate Conception. There the dilemma lay not in linking the doctrine to the painting, but in deciphering how the painting’s iconography represented the Immaculate Conception.

A second reason that rereading Donatello’s High Altar as a visualization of the Immaculate Conception is important is that it is one of the earliest artistic visualizations of the theme in the fifteenth century, when the cult underwent vigorous growth and met with vehement opposition. Its first appearance in the visual arts of the period is usually dated decades later.Footnote ⁶ Third, like many other early depictions of the theme, it utilizes a compositional format that was rarely adopted afterward. Finally, the High Altar is a major landmark of the fifteenth century, if not of the Italian Renaissance. To misunderstand the intentions of its commissioners is unfortunate.

Emergence and Early Development of the Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception

The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception can be construed as an effort to enhance the sanctity of the body of Jesus, received in the Eucharist, by sanctifying the Virgin’s flesh from which he was born.Footnote ⁷ Not until the eleventh century did the doctrine arrive in the West, and then in a limited way, through the adoption of a feast celebrating Mary’s conception.Footnote ⁸ The spread of the feast and the growing popular assumption that it commemorated Mary’s immaculacy led to theological debate. Bernard of Clairvaux openly opposed the feast, even though he was a vigorous promoter of the cult of the Virgin.Footnote ⁹ Most Scholastics sided with him, including the doctrine’s most significant critic, Thomas Aquinas (1225–74).Footnote ¹⁰ His negative stance would lead the Dominican order to become the most vociferous opponent of the doctrine.

The theological basis for the Immaculate Conception only gradually gained adherents. The most important advocate was the Scot John Duns Scotus (ca. 1266–1308).Footnote ¹¹ The focus on the Immaculate Conception in Padua does not derive from the theology of Saint Anthony, who never preached a sermon on the doctrine, although he was sympathetic to the interpretation. A number of sermons by Anthony show his favorable inclinations toward Scotus’s later reading.Footnote ¹² Later Franciscans, including those at the Santo convent, almost uniformly followed Duns Scotus.Footnote ¹³

The dispute led Alfonso V, the king of Aragon (1396–1458), to repeatedly petition the Holy Roman emperor Sigismund (1368–1437) to promote the feast and doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. He entreated him to arrange that the Council of Basel rule on the issues. By 1436, on the eve of the council’s break with Pope Eugenius IV (r. 1431–47), the doctrine was a subject for open debate and written polemic.Footnote ¹⁴ In 1437, when Eugenius IV and his legates withdrew from Basel and left for Ferrara, the council deposed him and elected Amadeus VIII of Savoy (1383–1451) as Felix V. Finally, on 17 September 1438, the council endorsed the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. However, the decision had no legal standing as the council no longer held ecumenical status. As John de Torquemada (1388–1468) argued, the doctrine enunciated at Basel was invalid because it was issued after the break with the pope. According to him, the true council had been transferred to Ferrara.Footnote ¹⁵ The decree of Basel had little impact in Italy where the validity of the council’s rulings was never recognized.Footnote ¹⁶

As a result, the intense controversy over the Immaculate Conception continued unabated. In this heated climate, just ten years later in Padua, the Franciscan Francesco della Rovere took up the cudgels in defense of the doctrine. The crucial event was his oration on the Immaculate Conception, in Padua in 1448, spoken by the bishop of Padua, Fantino Dandolo (1379–1459). The oration was delivered before an imposing group of Padua’s most important citizens.Footnote ¹⁷ At that point, Francesco had lived for at least seventeen years at the Santo convent and had been a professor of theology at the University of Padua for four years.Footnote ¹⁸ He would remain at the convent and university until 1449, when he began his rise in the church hierarchy.Footnote ¹⁹

Francesco della Rovere continued to be closely connected with the Santo even after he left Padua. After being elected to the papacy as Sixtus IV in 1471, he was the first pope ever to visit the Santo convent, in 1475, on the occasion of the jubilee. At that time he conferred privileges on the Santo akin to those of St. Peter’s. In 1483 he paid for the construction of one of the internal cloisters at the Santo. He also donated to the convent a number of liturgical vestments and furnishings.Footnote ²⁰ Bishop Fantino Dandolo was no less devoted to the doctrine. Still preserved in the Biblioteca Capitolare in Padua are five sermons he delivered in the diocese of Padua and in Venice about the Virgin’s immaculacy.Footnote ²¹ As his biographer later revealed, Dandolo’s profound distress that so respected a theologian as Thomas Aquinas had not believed in the immaculacy of Mary led to Aquinas appearing in a vision to comfort him. According to Dandolo’s dream, Thomas renounced the position he had espoused in life about the maculacy of the Virgin and indicated to Dandolo his true belief in Dandolo’s position.Footnote ²²

Another key figure in the fifteenth-century history of the controversial doctrine was Lorenzo Nogarolo (d. 1486), whom Francesco della Rovere, when later elected Pope Sixtus IV, chose to write a liturgical office about the Immaculate Conception. He was then in Padua as one of Francesco’s students.Footnote ²³ Giacomo de’ Zocchi (d. 1457), an eminent legal scholar from Ferrara who taught at Padua for thirty years, was also there. He wrote a treatise that upheld the Scotist viewpoint on the Immaculate Conception, buttressing its legal position.Footnote ²⁴ Zocchi is buried at Santa Giustina in Padua and commemorated in a gisant tomb by Bartolomeo Bellano (1437/38–1496/97).Footnote ²⁵ As the names of some of Francesco della Rovere’s listeners reveal, Francesco’s oration met an enthusiastic audience predisposed to support it. And, in fact, beginning in 1448, the canons of the cathedral of Padua commemorated the day of the oration, 8 December, which Francesco had deliberately chosen because it was the feast of the Virgin’s conception, as the celebration of the Immaculate Conception of Mary.Footnote ²⁶ The design of the High Altar took place within the context of this religious climate in Padua and reflects the religious beliefs of the members of the oversight board of the Santo convent, the Massari, which was made up of friars and Paduan patricians, some of them professors at the university. They supervised the construction and decoration of the church and were closely connected with Francesco della Rovere, Bishop Dandolo, Nogarolo, and Zocchi.

The date 8 December 1448 was just months after the provisional erection of the High Altar of the Santo by Donatello (ca. 1386–1466), which occurred on the feast day of Saint Anthony, 13 June. The date for the unveiling had been set a few months earlier, in April of that year, but it had been anticipated ever since Donatello signed a contract on 23 June 1447 agreeing to complete most of the sculptures for the altar within eight months.Footnote ²⁷ The temporary installation of the altar’s component parts within the already-erected choir screen was planned with the express purpose of allowing the church’s overseers to check how well the altar ensemble was received by pilgrims and visiting friars and laity, or, as they put it, by “forestieri” (“foreigners”).Footnote ²⁸ Workmen began in April to move the components of the altar into place within the choir screen to have it ready in time for the feast day. The installation must have met with a positive reception because after 13 June additional features continued to be executed and added to it.Footnote ²⁹ The sermon written by Francesco della Rovere and read at the Santo on what became the feast of the Immaculate Conception was delivered with the altar and surrounding choir screen on full view nearby. As will be demonstrated, the sermon articulated the doctrinal basis for the future pope’s later campaign to have the Virgin recognized as immaculate. In visual affirmation of this belief, the High Altar and surrounding choir screen were coordinated to express the doctrine. None of the surviving documents concerning the High Altar articulate this relation. No contract survives; most of the documents are records of payment. However, the close connection of Francesco della Rovere with the Santo convent and the provisional erection of the incomplete altar in 1448 for inspection and corrections suggest that the Santo’s oversight board made sure that the artists correlated the iconography of the altar and choir screen with this doctrine articulated by Francesco and enthusiastically supported at the Santo convent.

Francesco della Rovere continued his ardent devotion to the Immaculate Conception even after being elected to the papacy. In so doing, he became the first papal advocate of the doctrine. He was prompted to do so not only by his own beliefs, but by the ongoing, adamant opposition of the Dominicans. His oration of 1448 became the basis for two bulls on the subject, which he enunciated as Pope Sixtus IV: Cum Praecelsa (With the most lofty one) and Grave Nimis (Important beyond measure). The first was issued in 1477 and established special indulgences for all those who attended the rituals of the feast; the second appeared in 1482–83 and threatened excommunication for those who continued to debate the doctrine.Footnote ³⁰ The oration was also the foundation for the two liturgical offices he commissioned. The pope prompted Leonardo Nogarolo, his former student in Padua, to write a liturgical office on the Immaculate Conception (Officium Immaculatae Conceptionis) for the use of the entire church in 1477. Sixtus also encouraged Bernardino de’ Busti (ca. 1450–ca. 1513) to write a second liturgical office on the Immaculate Conception for the Franciscan order in 1480.Footnote ³¹ Sixtus dedicated his own funerary chapel in Old St. Peter’s to the Immaculate Conception and consecrated it on 8 December 1479, the day of Mary’s feast. The diarist Jacopo da Volterra recorded that in 1479 and the four following years, until his death in 1484, the pope celebrated the feast in his chapel and then processed from Old St. Peter’s to Santa Maria del Popolo to pray to the Virgin in that church.Footnote ³²

A leading Dominican, Vincenzo Bandello (1435–1506), the later minister general of the order who was elected in 1500, countered these moves to promote the doctrine with a series of treatises arguing the Thomist position against the Immaculate Conception. Bandello’s first essay had been published anonymously in 1475 in Milan; the second in 1476, just after Sixtus commissioned Nogarolo to write his liturgical office; and the third in 1481, Tractatus de Singulari Puritate et Praerogativa Conceptionis Salvatoris Nostri Iesu Christi (Treatise on the unique purity and privileged conception of our Lord Jesus Christ). It was shortly thereafter republished in an expanded edition.Footnote ³³

In 1477, Sixtus ordered Francesco Sansone (1414–99), who had been appointed minister general of the Franciscan order in 1475, to debate publicly the arguments for the Immaculate Conception against its Dominican detractors. Sixtus was motivated by the anonymously published treatise by Vincenzo Bandello, who stood as Sansone’s opponent in the three-day debate. Legend has it that Sansone was so eloquent in defense of the Immaculate Conception that Sixtus congratulated him effusively and gave him for his debating skills the nickname Sansone, or Samson, by which he was afterward called.Footnote ³⁴ Nevertheless, despite Sansone’s debating triumph, Julius II was forced to deliver another injunction against further debate on the Immaculate Conception in 1503.Footnote ³⁵

Like Sixtus, Sansone was closely connected to the Santo convent: he made several endowments to it for benches and cabinets in the sacristy, and, most important, he underwrote the redecoration of the Chapel of the Arca of Saint Anthony where Anthony’s relics are enshrined. There is a relief effigy of Sansone that functions as a cenotaph on the chapel’s rear wall.Footnote ³⁶ The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception continued to be supported in the Franciscan community and was reiterated at the Council of Trent.Footnote ³⁷

High Altar at the Santo

Surprisingly, even though the Santo was a hotbed of immaculist thinking in the years during which the altar and choir area were planned and executed, the argument that the Virgin honored in a sacra conversazione at the center of its High Altar was planned to represent the Immaculate Conception has been made only once before, in a learned article by Regina Stefaniak.Footnote ³⁸ She contended that Donatello’s Virgin (fig. 1) borrowed her generally classicizing appearance and features, such as the veil cut horizontally across her shoulders, her long waving hair, black color, standing position, and the sphinxes on her throne, from Roman images of the Egyptian goddess Isis that the artist might have seen in Rome (fig. 2). Against this theory is the lack of evidence of such a discovery or even evidence that Donatello would have recognized a figure of Isis. Of these supposed common traits, the one exclusive to Isis is the sphinxes on the Virgin’s throne, as sphinxes had long been associated with the Egyptian goddess.Footnote ³⁹ The other visual links Stefaniak established between the two are more generic. The Virgin’s horizontally cut veil can be found on earlier images of Mary, such as the Presbyter Martinus’s Maiestas from Borgo San Sepolcro (fig. 3).Footnote ⁴⁰ The Virgin’s black color is the same shade as the dark patina of all the bronzes on the High Altar’s sculptures. The classicism of the Virgin’s face and hairstyle are like those employed by Donatello earlier for the Virgin in his Cavalcanti Annunciation from Santa Croce (ca. 1428–33).Footnote ⁴¹ Finally, Mary’s standing position can be explained in another way, as will be argued later in the essay.

Figure 1. Donatello. Virgin and Child, 1446–50. Padua, High Altar, Santo. Fototeca del Messaggero di Sant’Antonio.

Figure 2. Isis, Roman, second century CE. Naples, Museo Archeologico. Alinari / Art Resource, NY.

Figure 3. Presbyter Martinus. Maiestas, 1199. Borgo San Sepolcro, Camaldolese Abbey. Bpk, Berlin / Joerg P. Anders / Art Resource, NY.

Stefaniak contended that the supposed transfer of features between Isis and the Virgin was justified on the basis of the commonalities between them. The Egyptian goddess had been interpreted in De Iside et Osiride, a treatise by Plutarch (46–120) that could have been available to theologians at the Santo, as the Egyptian goddess of wisdom.Footnote ⁴² The Virgin, like Isis, had long been linked to wisdom, and so became associated, according to Stefaniak, with Isis and her characteristics. Apologists for the Immaculate Conception argued that the Virgin had been spiritually conceived in the mind of God from the beginning of time. For example, Francesco della Rovere’s sermon described as follows: “According to Bernard, ‘no one penetrated the abyss of divine Wisdom like the Blessed Virgin; by God and by the grace of the sacred Holy Spirit she was the first enlightened. . . . And just as she is preeminent in martyrdom and learning, so too in virginity that which was conceded to her so abundantly and indescribably as is said in Proverbs 8: “I was already conceived before there were abysses,” for she was conceived before the infernal plague could touch her.’”Footnote ⁴³ De’ Busti elaborated on della Rovere’s argument.Footnote ⁴⁴

These concepts were used to relate the Virgin to the “primordial feminine principle,” and so to Isis in another way.Footnote ⁴⁵ While many of the visual links between Roman images of Isis and Donatello’s Virgin seem inconclusive, and there is no proof that Donatello could have seen a Roman statue of Isis, the theory that such a theological connection between the two was made during the Renaissance may well prove true; it is substantiated by the commingling of the cults and imagery of the Virgin and Isis in the church of late antiquity and in the earliest painted representations of the Virgin Mary.Footnote ⁴⁶

Sixtus’s espousal of the Immaculate Conception is most obviously visualized by the Virgin’s projection of the Child before her womb (fig. 1), the organ apostrophized repeatedly as the “Beatus venter” (“blessed womb”) in his public sermon of 1448 and in the liturgical offices in honor of the Virgin that he commissioned. In his sermon, he referred to “Jesus Christ, carried in the virginal womb in order to save humanity.”Footnote ⁴⁷ In his liturgical office Nogarolo took up the theme: “Blessed womb, which carried you. Truly, the blessed womb, which is ignorant of sin, the womb of purity, the womb of innocence, the garden full of all beauty, the holy house of God, the temple made by the hand of God, the ark of salvation, the ark of the covenant between God and man.”Footnote ⁴⁸ So, too, did de’ Busti articulate the idea repeatedly, using the same introduction, “Blessed womb, which carried you.”Footnote ⁴⁹

Mary seems to be in the midst of standing and thrusting the Christ Child toward the viewer; he is positioned over her womb and within her body’s contours, emphasizing that the baby she is offering to worshipers was once contained within her body. One of the Virgin’s legs is already straight while the other is bent as she pushes up, wrapping her foot around the throne base to steady her upward transition. This unusual intermediate position has puzzled historians.Footnote ⁵⁰ It can be interpreted in two ways: that she is either standing up or sitting down. The Virgin’s arm gesture places Christ emphatically within her contours and over her womb, stressing the Incarnation of Christ, the word made flesh within her body. The accent on Christ’s placement visualizes the contention of proponents of the Immaculate Conception that Mary had to have been forever free of original sin in order to have been worthy of bearing Christ. In their view, the words spoken by Gabriel to the Virgin, “Ave Maria, gratia plena” (“Hail Mary, full of grace”), as recorded in Luke 1:28, declare her immaculacy by stressing her state of grace.Footnote ⁵¹ For this reason, a number of fifteenth-century visualizations of the Immaculate Conception include a scene of the Annunciation.Footnote ⁵²

Furthermore, the Virgin’s semi-standing position serves as a metaphor for Sixtus’s argument, articulated in his first bull on the doctrine, that she is the necessary intercessory agent in mankind’s salvation through the authority vested in her as the immaculate human source of Christ.Footnote ⁵³ He elaborated in the bull a theme from his sermon of 1448: “For Eve means life; as the mother of the living, the holy glorious lady Mary is truly the life of sinners, and pious succoring mother of all who hope in her, in whom if anyone will come to her in devotion he will certainly find life and will through her find salvation in the Lord.”Footnote ⁵⁴ The High Altar Madonna is given pronounced agency: she rises up, leans forward, and holds the Child out to the worshiper below because she is the necessary intercessory agent in human salvation. Her foot is wrapped around the throne’s leg to stress furthermore that she is the throne on which Christ is seated.Footnote ⁵⁵

Sixtus went further: he proclaimed that through the Immaculate Virgin’s intercession humankind could possibly regain the state of grace lost through the sin of Adam and Eve. They are depicted by Donatello on the back of her throne (figs. 4 and 5). The tails of the two sphinxes that support the front of it swirl into Adam and Eve’s space, insisting on the Virgin’s connection to them. Although Adam and Eve brought on original sin, the apologists for the Immaculate Conception considered them the only other persons besides Christ and the Virgin to have been born free of original sin. As de’ Busti wrote in his liturgical office commissioned by Sixtus IV, Adam and Eve’s pure flesh and creation in grace were the precedents for Christ and the Virgin.Footnote ⁵⁶ He specified, “In the beginning God created heaven and earth incorruptible, and so it is believed God created the Virgin free from every sin.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Adam’s and Eve’s sinlessness — before they ate the fruit — is represented in their ideally beautiful human bodies. Furthermore, Eve’s agency in the sinful act of being tempted by the serpent is reduced: she seems to be interacting with the serpent as Adam bites into the fruit.

Figure 4. Donatello. Adam in the Garden of Eden (the back of the Virgin’s throne), 1446–50. Padua, High Altar, Santo. Fototeca del Messaggero di Sant’Antonio.

Figure 5. Donatello. Eve in the Garden of Eden (the back of the Virgin’s throne), 1446–50. Padua, High Altar, Santo. Fototeca del Messaggero di Sant’Antonio.

The Immaculate Virgin is also equated by de’ Busti with the tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden, which is the third form prominent on the back of the Virgin’s throne. As he wrote in his liturgical office, “O therefore, most blessed Virgin, you are truly that heavenly tree, the wood of life, which God placed in the middle of Paradise (Gen. 2:9); you are that tree of which it is said: here is that tree in the middle of the earth.”Footnote ⁵⁸ By definition of the tree’s location in the Garden, it was in a state of grace. The faithful who read or heard de’ Busti’s pronouncements linking Adam and Eve with the Virgin would have understood these more rarefied connections that go beyond the standard Mary as the new Eve and Christ as the new Adam.

Thus far, the discussion has involved features of Donatello’s High Altar that are still visible in its reconstructed state. It is important to consider other aspects that are now transformed or lost that were part of the original conception. Most historians who have attempted to reconstruct the altar’s appearance in the fifteenth and early sixteenth century, before a series of modifications changed its appearance, agree that Donatello intended it to be a sacra conversazione in which six saints all at the same level stood under a stone canopy supported on columns. Three saints flanked the Virgin and Child on each side. Francis and Anthony, the two saints most venerated at the Santo, were closest to the Virgin and Child; next to them were Giustina and Daniel, the civic patrons of Padua. Finally, at the ends of each triad stood the bishop saints, Louis of Toulouse, a venerated Franciscan, and Prosdocimus, a former bishop of Padua.Footnote ⁵⁹

A stone canopy, which is now lost, supported on columns and pilasters, once stood over the heads of the Virgin and Child and six flanking saints. In its center was a roundel of God the Father; this emblematic decoration suggests that the canopy played the role of an architectural equivalent to the metaphor of God’s protection of the Virgin from sin.Footnote ⁶⁰ It is not a typical feature of sacra conversazione compositions. That description of God’s shielding the Virgin, contained in both de’ Busti’s and Nogarolo’s liturgical offices, later found visual expression in parallel terms: painters represented it by God’s flying overhead and shielding the Virgin with his extended mantle.Footnote ⁶¹ The roundel with God the Father directly above the head of the Virgin in the original canopy can be seen as a schematic version of that formula for God’s sheltering her from sin. It was of paramount importance to express God’s active role in the creation of the Immaculate Virgin and preserving her free from sin.

The six saints who flank the Madonna and Child, three on each side, have little to do with the interpretation of the Immaculate Virgin that Sixtus was promoting. Their inclusion advances other arguments important to the Franciscan friars at the Santo and to the city of Padua, for which the Santo serves as a state church. Francis and Anthony, as well as Louis of Toulouse, represent major saints of the Franciscan order, and Giustina, Prosdocimus, and Daniel are patron saints of the city. So, too, the reliefs of the miracles of Saint Anthony on the altar’s base honor the saint whose relics are enshrined at a nearby altar.Footnote ⁶² However, it should be noted that both Anthony and Francis were repeatedly linked to the Immaculate Virgin, perhaps because of Sixtus IV’s special devotion to them. They were depicted in the pope’s private funerary chapel in Old St. Peter’s and also in an altar he had erected to the Immaculate Virgin at Assisi.Footnote ⁶³

The Choir Screen Surrounding the High Altar and the Bronze Reliefs by Bellano and Riccio

The theme of the immaculately conceived Virgin was expanded instead on the choir screen that originally framed the front and sides of the High Altar. Today the worshiper looks over a low balustrade and directly confronts the High Altar, which is toward the front of the choir area (fig. 6). That open access is radically different from the initial conception. It represents an attempt made at the end of the nineteenth century by Camillo Boito (1836–1914) to recover the High Altar’s original configuration. The arrangement of Donatello’s altar had already begun to be changed in the sixteenth century. The first of several reconstructions of the High Altar area began in 1579, under the aegis of Girolamo Campagna (1549–1625).Footnote ⁶⁴ Boito intended to return the altar to its configuration in the fifteenth century but most historians judge as inaccurate his rearrangement of the Virgin and Child flanked by Francis, Anthony, Giustina, and Daniel on the same level, but separated from the bishop saints that stand on separate projecting, lower plinths.Footnote ⁶⁵

Figure 6. Donatello. High Altar, 1446–50. Padua, Santo. Fototeca del Messaggero di Sant’Antonio.

Not only the High Altar was modified after Donatello’s departure from Padua. After decades of debate in the sixteenth century about adapting the altar area to the dictates of the Council of Trent so as to make the celebration of the Mass more visible to the laity, the components of the screen were moved from in front to behind the High Altar in 1651.Footnote ⁶⁶ They remain in that position today. At that time the orientation of the screen was changed so that the outside walls faced the interior of the choir. This meant that the bronze reliefs by Andrea Riccio (ca. 1470–1532) on the outside of the inner front wall of the choir screen and Bellano’s on the outside of the side walls, which once faced outward toward the laity and pilgrims in the ambulatory, became visible only to the friars within the choir area and the laity who entered it when Mass was not being held there.Footnote ⁶⁷

Fortunately, an eyewitness description of the choir screen’s original appearance survives, written in 1590 by a friar at the Santo, Valerio Polidoro (sixteenth–seventeenth century).Footnote ⁶⁸ It provides the basis for all attempts to reconstruct the screen as it was in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Polidoro revealed that there was originally a choir screen arranged as a square u shape before the High Altar, in general terms akin in shape and materials to the High Altar at the Frari in Venice, which it may have influenced.Footnote ⁶⁹ According to Polidoro, “The church of the glorious Santo is divided by a choir screen composed of an ancient colonnade positioned atop a continuous pedestal, like a wall, which has at its center a grand entrance.”Footnote ⁷⁰ In a later chapter, he describes how it was composed “of three parts, that is, of that which confronted the high altar, of a right and left [part] which was closed for more than half with a square shape on the outside.”Footnote ⁷¹ In other words, Polidoro was recording a three-sided, square-shaped choir screen with solid walls that enclosed one-half of the High Altar’s sides. The choir screen that Polidoro described had been constructed between ca. 1438 and 1444–45, chronologically just prior to the High Altar, which was begun in 1447.Footnote ⁷²

The front side of the screen was conceived as a loggia; the arched central entrance led into an intermediate space and then, through an opening in a solid wall, into the choir.Footnote ⁷³ The loggia emphasized the transition between the nave of the church and the choir, the world of the laity and the world of the religious. As indicated in this line-drawing elevation of the choir screen (fig. 7), modified from drawings in Bernardo Gonzati’s still-fundamental volumes (1852–53) on the Santo, the side facing the congregation consisted of a round-arched arcade atop a continuous base that terminated in pilasters at the corners and sides. The rear wall of the front side, like the side walls, was comprised of solid marble panels flanked by pilasters atop a continuous base. It, like them, had bronze narrative reliefs at the tops of the panels (fig. 8).Footnote ⁷⁴

Figure 7. Line drawing of the destroyed front wall of front side of choir screen, ca. 1438–1444/45. Padua, Santo. Original reconstructions by Bernardo Gonzati, supplemented by Grace Chi.

Figure 8. Line drawing of the destroyed rear wall of front side of choir screen, ca. 1438–1444/45. Padua, Santo. Original reconstructions by Bernardo Gonzati, supplemented by Grace Chi.

Ten Old Testament reliefs by Bellano originally fit into the upper part of panels on the exteriors of the side walls (figs. 9 and 10).Footnote ⁷⁵ The reliefs by Bellano, which were commissioned and executed between 1484 and 1490, were added to the choir screen before the two reliefs by Riccio.Footnote ⁷⁶ In 1506–07, Riccio was commissioned to provide two additional bronze reliefs that matched the earlier group in size and in their relative positions on the choir screen.Footnote ⁷⁷ Marcantonio Michiel (1484–1552), the Venetian nobleman who made inventories of notable monuments in Northern Italy, described two Old Testament reliefs by Riccio flanking the choir-screen entrance when he recorded his notes about the Santo in ca. 1537.Footnote ⁷⁸ An expanded account was provided by Polidoro in 1590, who recorded the entire sequence of sculptures for the first time. According to his testimony, the reliefs, which measured 65 x 85 cm, ran along the choir-screen walls in the order depicted in figures 9 and 10.Footnote ⁷⁹ The position of the Judith and Holofernes and David before the Ark with the Death of Uzzah in the middle of the sequence established by Polidoro suggests that he listed the reliefs in their order on the choir screen, starting at the north side entrance of the choir screen, where the first five reliefs by Bellano were installed, moving forward to the front side, where the Judith and Holofernes and David before the Ark with the Death of Uzzah were positioned, and then from the front to the side entrance on the south side, where the final five reliefs by Bellano were placed.Footnote ⁸⁰

Figure 9. Line drawing of the original placement of the Old Testament reliefs, 1484–90. North side wall of choir screen. Padua, Santo. Original reconstructions by Bernardo Gonzati, supplemented by Grace Chi.

Figure 10. Line drawing of the original placement of the choir-screen reliefs, 1484–90. South side wall of choir screen. Padua, Santo. Original reconstructions by Bernardo Gonzati, supplemented by Grace Chi.

The key reliefs are by Riccio. His Judith and Holofernes (fig. 11) and David before the Ark with the Death of Uzzah (fig. 12) were installed out of chronological order and in a special position of prominence, on the inner wall of the front side of the choir screen. There they were visible through the loggia of the front side of the front wall of the screen. Furthermore, they flanked the arched main entrance into the choir area and framed the view of the High Altar. They were meant to be seen in conjunction with it and seem a clear Franciscan response, in terms championed by Sixtus IV earlier in his sermon in Padua, to the decades-long, inflamed dispute first engaged at the Council of Basel.

Figure 11. Riccio. Judith and Holofernes, 1506–07. Originally flanking front entrance of choir screen. Padua, Santo. Fototeca del Messaggero di Sant’Antonio.

Figure 12. Riccio. David before the Ark with the Death of Uzzah, 1506–07. Originally flanking front entrance of choir screen. Padua, Santo. Fototeca del Messaggero di Sant’Antonio.

Riccio’s sculptures provide a significant gloss on the Immaculate Conception theme of the altar. Judith had been traditionally linked typologically to the Virgin. Francesco della Rovere extolled this connection and dwelt on it in his sermon on the Immaculate Conception delivered at the Santo in 1448. He quoted Proverbs 31:10–11, “Who will find a strong woman?” as the introduction to the pairing of Judith and David, as had been done frequently in the past.Footnote ⁸¹ The bronze relief of Judith and Holofernes depicts Judith outside Holofernes’s tent at the left of the composition, handing Holofernes’s head to her maid after she has decapitated it. In the center of the relief is an unusual intermediate scene of a raging battle, not described in the book of Judith, through which Judith seems to have passed on her way to present Holofernes’s head to the elders of Bethulia outside the city walls, on the right of the relief. The battle scene may allude to the warfare that took place afterward, once Judith had commanded the people of Bethulia to hang Holfernes’s head on the city’s walls, and they became emboldened to attack his scattering army, as is recorded in Judith 15:1–6. It certainly suggests the harrows through which Judith passed safely as she made her way through the enemy camp. Francesco insisted on the perils of her journey, which she could have only conducted safely because of God’s grace. Drawing on the book of Judith, he described how the elders of Bethulia lighted torches and poured out of the city’s gates when they saw Judith approaching, just as Riccio sculpted it. He quoted Judith’s address to them: “‘God lives who protects me both on my coming and going and has prevented His handmaiden from being defiled. God has allowed me to enjoy His victory without the pollution of sin.’ All the people cried as though with one voice, ‘Daughter, you are blessed by the Lord God in Heaven before all the women on earth, because through your merit all the seed of Israel has been liberated from the King Holofernes.’”Footnote ⁸²

Francesco continued, berating those who denied the Virgin’s immaculacy: “Oh human ignorance! Oh the intellects of men too caught up in their own opinions! If all the other sayings of divine scripture also do not press us to affirm this Sacred Conception, the sole figure, this sole mystery, ought to force us to confess the purity of the Virgin from all the sordidness of sin.”Footnote ⁸³ He further admonished in his continued analogy between the Virgin and Judith: “Perhaps that glorious Virgin who when she avowed and glorified the omnipotence of God saying ‘Behold the handmaiden of the Lord’ did not merit cutting off the head of Holofernes, that is, the head of our infirmity and distancing from divine commandments? Therefore she was blessed among women, and coming into the world, and going out of it, the Lord kept her from every stain of sin.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Nogarolo, who wrote the liturgical office of the Immaculate Conception for the entire Latin church at Sixtus’s behest, in an antiphon drew on Judith’s safe journey through the enemy camp as a metaphor for how God had protected the Virgin Mary from every evil and guarded her soul throughout the ages: “The Lord protected you from every evil, Maria, protected your soul, your entry and your exit through the ages.”Footnote ⁸⁵

The companion scene to that of Judith, the narrative of David before the Ark and the Death of Uzzah, was singled out to be placed on the other side of the choir screen’s entrance because the Virgin descended from the house of David. Francesco della Rovere, after being elected to the papacy, wrote a prayer to the Virgin entitled “Stella Maris,” which put this notion succinctly: he called Mary “born according to divine plan from the royal house of David.”Footnote ⁸⁶ De’ Busti emphasized in his liturgical office that another proof of Mary’s immaculate status was that she was unique among women because her genealogy could be traced back through the generations of the Old Testament to David. He explained that other women had no family histories for several reasons. Basing his pronouncements on Albertus Magnus, he argued that Eve had been born from the rib of Adam, that women were an inferior sex, that Eve had sinned first in the Garden of Eden, and that women were weak and corruptible: “Descending from the tribe of David, the Virgin would not have been betrothed unless she were from the Jewish tribe and the house of David. . . . The blessed Virgin was, however, exempt from every defect and bad womanly quality . . . and through her husband her genealogy was described.”Footnote ⁸⁷

Francesco della Rovere had stressed in his sermon of 1448 the agency of the Immaculate Virgin in human salvation and that its effects would be felt throughout all the generations of the Virgin: “Indeed to her was conceded the grace of mercy to all the human race. For which grace all those who are predestined will be saved in eternal glory. . . . ‘Her mercy is felt by those who hold her in awe and by their progeny.’ And in the sermon ‘Missus est,’ St. Bernard said that, when the glorious Virgin uttered her words in divine response to the angel in the angelic salutation, she saw in spirit all the generations who were going to be saved in the future through her son, Jesus Christ.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Furthermore, the ark of the covenant was associated with the Immaculate Virgin by the doctrine’s promoters. In his liturgical office, Nogarolo wrote, “The womb of the Immaculate Virgin is the ark of salvation and the ark representing the covenant between God and man, the most ornate tabernacle in which was hidden the sweetest manna.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Similarly, de’ Busti called the Virgin the ark of the testaments,Footnote ⁹⁰ and the ark of the treasury of God and the ark of the tabernacle.Footnote ⁹¹

The decoration of the ark in Riccio’s relief links it tightly to the Immaculate Virgin by depicting the Creation of Eve and the Temptation. The scene of the Temptation recalls closely the one depicted in larger scale on the back of the Virgin’s throne. As noted earlier, Eve and Adam were singled out as being uniquely similar to the Virgin because of their immaculate state before they ate the fruit. The ark’s architecture recalls on a miniature scale the canopy with a round arch lunette adorned with a roundel of God the Father that once surmounted the High Altar by Donatello. This quotation of the altar’s architecture and its decoration further connects the small-scale tabernacle to the monumental architecture of the altar and to the Virgin it honors. This is not a unique instance of scenes of David and the ark and Judith and Holofernes glossing the Immaculate Virgin, although it is not common. For example, nearly two centuries later, shortly after 1629, Domenichino (1581–1641) depicted David Dancing before the Ark, Judith Triumphant over Holofernes, Esther before Ahasuerus, and Solomon and His Mother in the pendentives of the Bandini Chapel at San Silvestro al Quirinale, Rome.Footnote ⁹² There they framed an altarpiece of the Assumption of the Virgin, which had become by then a standard iconographic formula for the Immaculate Conception.Footnote ⁹³ The painting was signed and dated 1585 by Scipione Pulzone (ca. 1542–98).Footnote ⁹⁴

Bellano’s Old Testament reliefs are also tied to the High Altar. They continue the sequence of scenes begun on the back of the Virgin’s throne with the Temptation. In the fifteenth century, the High Altar was located originally at the far end of the choir, close to the arcade of the ambulatory, as indicated in a small sketch of its ground plan, probably from the mid-sixteenth century, preserved today in the Uffizi.Footnote ⁹⁵ This means that the faithful at the Santo standing in the ambulatory were close to the back of the altar and could have easily seen the Temptation on the back of the Virgin’s throne through the openings in the decoration of the metal screen that linked the ambulatory piers behind the High Altar.Footnote ⁹⁶ They would have naturally linked the Temptation to the series of Bellano’s Old Testament cycle, which were once on the exterior of the choir-screen side walls, because of their similar size and bronze material. Furthermore, the High Altar’s Temptation would have provided the Creation scene beginning that the cycle otherwise lacks.Footnote ⁹⁷

Visitors to the Santo were encouraged to move along the choir screen’s side walls and through the ambulatory and observe its decoration. The church is a major site of pilgrimage to which hordes came to venerate the relics of Saint Anthony in the left transept chapel, from which they exited along the north side of the choir-screen wall, and from there into the ambulatory.Footnote ⁹⁸ Partial relics of Anthony were preserved in the sacristy on the other side of the ambulatory so they were induced to continue their circuit around the back of the choir past the back of the Virgin’s throne, and then along the south side of the choir screen.Footnote ⁹⁹

A number of Bellano’s sculpted narratives can be read in connection with the theme of the Immaculate Conception, although most cannot. Francesco della Rovere had linked Moses’s rod, which he received from God and which allowed him to lead the Israelites across the Red Sea, to the Virgin, thus connecting the Immaculate Virgin to the relief of the Crossing of the Red Sea: “Moses, Exodus 14, he freed the children of Israel from the hand of the Pharaoh, having them walk through the middle of the dry sea. . . . And all these things, and every one of them, were done by the touch of a rod received from God for who will be this rod that allows us to cross the surging waters of this world securely, other than the blessed Virgin alone?”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ De’ Busti repeated a shorter version of the theme in his office.Footnote ¹⁰¹

The scene of Moses and the Brazen Serpent has at its heart Moses’s rod, already linked directly to the Virgin. It also suggests one of the most common symbols of her immaculate status: because she is protected from the serpent’s bite, or sin, she can crush the serpent with impunity. As Della Rovere put it in his sermon: “Perhaps this is not that woman of whom in Genesis, chapter 3, it is said that she will tread on the head of the serpent? This is that Virgin who by herself destroys diabolical astuteness and dangerous temptation and emphatically makes her servants vigilant and resistant against the evil maneuvers of the devil.”Footnote ¹⁰² De’ Busti, in one of his sermons dedicated to the Virgin, picked up the theme.Footnote ¹⁰³ He also linked her to David in terms of the boy’s battle with Goliath, as he had earlier in terms of lineage. The connection to David and Goliath was made by de’ Busti according to the following parallel: “You are called the door to heaven. . . . You were not even wounded by the weapon of Goliath.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴

The Virgin is often named the Temple of Solomon, which helps to explain the dominance of the building in the scene of the Judgment of Solomon: “Solomon, in book 3, chapter 5, of Kings, that great and wise king, built a grand and very beautiful temple, of carved and perfect stones . . . and when it was built no hammers and axes and other metal tools were heard. Who doubts that the true temple of the Lord is the glorious Virgin alone? In whose very holy flesh, both the purest vessel of the Lord and the prepared dwelling place of the Lord, one must firmly believe that there was no need of hammers, that is, of contact with sinners.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ De’ Busti repeated the essence of Francesco della Rovere’s comparisons between the Immaculate Virgin and the Temple of Solomon in his liturgical office, calling her a true temple of Solomon.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

The Immaculate Virgin was also linked to Jonah, making the inclusion of the narrative of his being swallowed by the whale relevant to this doctrine. In one of his sermons, de’ Busti wrote: “As Jonah endured in the belly of the whale and was kept safe . . . so God could protect his mother from the fire, from the bite of the devil, and from every sin. . . . Thus Christ chose his blessed virgin mother from eternity.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Nogarolo provided patristic backing for the theme: “Listen, as Augustine says, because it was fitting that the Holy Spirit kept Jonah safe in the belly of the whale, against natural use, yet wanting to keep him safe only through mercy, would not Mary be preserved immaculate through grace and outside of nature?”Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Conclusion

Sixtus IV, the former Francesco della Rovere, was the foremost advocate of the Immaculate Conception in the fifteenth century. He was tireless in its support: he wrote a major sermon focused on it while at the Santo convent in Padua, composed two bulls, and commissioned two liturgical offices, all in honor of the controversial doctrine. It should come as no surprise that the High Altar of the Santo, the major liturgical focus of the church with which he was intimately associated for over four decades, should be the first major visual depiction of the interpretation in fifteenth-century Italian art. Sixtus delivered the sermon propounding the doctrine in Padua as the altar was being constructed. Many of his descriptions articulating the Virgin as immaculate are given visual form in the altar and the choir screen that frames it — the veneration of her womb, the insistence of the Virgin’s agency in humankind’s salvation, and the parallelism of Adam, Eve, and even the tree of knowledge with her as free from sin. Furthermore, he closely associated the Immaculate Virgin with the Old Testament figures of Judith and David, whose narratives are represented in the bronze reliefs on the choir screen, out of order with the rest of the Old Testament cycle and separately commissioned. These scenes flanked the front entrance to the choir screen, and so pilgrims and congregants looked between them to see the Virgin on the High Altar, reading the three representations together. Other Old Testament narratives positioned along the sides of the choir screen visualize key components of Immaculate Conception iconography.

The ensemble of High Altar and choir screen, which was being executed and erected in the period that Francesco della Rovere wrote the sermon, and the choir-screen reliefs, which were commissioned in the later fifteenth century, when Francesco, elected Pope Sixtus IV, pronounced bulls and sponsored liturgies in honor of the Immaculate Conception, announce in powerful visual terms the Virgin’s immaculacy, the doctrine to which Sixtus was so ardently devoted throughout his whole life.