Late sixteenth-century Florentine art, especially works commissioned by confraternities, has begun to emerge from scholarly limbo. Among these reassessments, this book by Douglas N. Dow considers three little-known confraternal decorative programs executed during the 1580s and 1590s. Each of these three sodalities chose to depict the twelve apostles, despite their dedications to Gesù Pellegrino, San Giovanni Battista, and Santissima Annunziata. Although a long tradition existed for brotherhoods to model themselves on the apostolic twelve — e.g., twelve supposed founders, twelve chief officials — Dow explains this iconographic choice as an expression of confraternal charity and devotion as well as a means to demonstrate the sodalities’ significance to contemporary Catholic reformers.
The book is comprised of an introduction, four chapters, a conclusion, and an appendix. The introduction outlines Dow’s goals: to examine “form, iconography, context, and ritual to explore how the works of art spoke to their intended audience and reflected the concerns of their patrons . . . [and to contribute] to an overall understanding of art patronage by those who were not members of Florence’s economic, political, and ecclesiastical elite” (2). Such concerns are not new to art history nor, for that matter, to confraternal studies. Nevertheless, the volume serves to highlight and document inaccessible and/or lost decorative programs that deserve serious consideration by scholars.
Chapter 1 focuses on the patronage of Alessandro de’ Medici. Appointed archbishop of Florence in 1574 and elevated to cardinal in 1583, he took up residency in his archdiocese only in 1584. A learned ecclesiastic who counted the charismatic Oratorian Filippo Neri among his close friends, Alessandro was also deeply engaged with reform. He firmly exercised his Tridentine mandate to oversee confraternities. Soon after his return to Florence, Alessandro commissioned Giovanni Antonio Dosio to renovate the church of Gesù Pellegrino, which housed a sodality of priests. This small church, decorated with frescoes and altarpieces by Giovanni Balducci, is the subject of chapter 2. It seems likely that Alessandro ideated the iconographic program portraying apparitions of Jesus flanked by the apostles. Dow points out how revelation is a dominant theme and that sensuous color is essential to its visualization. Chapter 3 focuses on the main chapel of San Giovanni Battista detto dello Scalzo, once decorated with terracotta sculptures of the apostles, but now destroyed. The discussion, therefore, depends on documentary evidence to re-create the Scalzo’s program and patronage of its own artist-artisan members, which, in turn, augmented the collective meaning of the apostolic exemplars. The entire confraternal complex is reconstructed in the appendix.
The fresco cycle depicting the martyrdoms of the twelve apostles in the atrium of the oratory of Santissima Annunziata is the theme of the final chapter. Dow convincingly argues that the violent scenes offered a precedent for the flagellants’ own penitential rituals. He explains how the distance between the apostles and the lay brothers was collapsed, “an effect encouraged by formal devices that erode the spatial — and, ultimately, temporal — separation” (152). Although each decorative program was inflected to accentuate the confraternity’s particular focus, Dow recapitulates in the conclusion how apostolic iconography was employed by all three confraternities to legitimize their origins and underscore their import for reformed Catholicism.
The usefulness of this volume is sorely diminished by the poor quality of its illustrations, for there are only five color illustrations and several muddy black-and-white photographs. They provide little idea of the chromatic effects and compositional richness of the extensive decorative programs that the author goes to great (even repetitious) lengths to describe. It is difficult for the reader to appreciate, let alone reassess, late Cinquecento Florentine religious painting without being able to see these images properly. Moreover, since measurements of the confraternal spaces and works of art are also lacking, a sense of scale is lost. Dow notes that his book went to press before he could consult the new archival discoveries on the Scalzo apostles published by Alana O’Brien. This is unfortunate, since her findings provide crucial evidence for dating and patronage. Nonetheless, Dow focuses new attention on Florentine confraternal identification with the apostles at a time when the Church was asserting its own claims as a purified paleo-Christian institution. This exemplifies yet another dynamic way in which sodalities responded to and shaped the prevailing religious culture.
