(PDF) Architectural Collaboration in the Early Renaissance: Reforming the Florentine Badia

(PDF) Architectural Collaboration in the Early Renaissance: Reforming the Florentine Badia
About
Press
Papers
We're Hiring!
Outline
Title
Abstract
All Topics
Theology
Christian Studies
Architectural Collaboration in the Early Renaissance: Reforming the Florentine Badia
Anne Leader
2005
April 06, 2026
visibility
description
32 pages
Sign up for access to the world's latest research
check
Get notified about relevant papers
check
Save papers to use in your research
check
Join the discussion with peers
check
Track your impact
Abstract
In the late 1420s, Abbot Gomezio di Giovanni initiated a major building campaign to reform the Benedictine monastery of the Badia Fiorentina. Designed to provide its community with an orderly space in which to pursue the Benedictine Observance, the compound rises around the so-called Orange Cloister, long considered to be an early work of Bernardo Rossellino. A reevaluation of the archival record demonstrates that he was one of many who contributed to the project, which was a collaborative effort co-directed by master mason Antonio di Domenico della Parte and master stonecutter Giovanni d’Antonio da Maiano. In addition to issues of authorship, this article investigates why the building looks the way it does, how it was built, and how it served the Abbot’s reform program. Answers to these questions allow us to develop our appreciation of Benedictine life and architectural practice in early Renaissance Florence.
Related papers
"Fiorenza figlia di Roma": New Light on the Baptistery of San Giovanni and the Chronology of Florentine Romanesque Architecture
Elon Danziger
Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 2024
Since the late eighteenth century, studies of the baptistery of San Giovanni in Florence have built their chronologies around one or both of two well-known reference points: a consecration by Pope Nicholas II in 1059 and the transfer of the baptismal font from Santa Reparata to San Giovanni in 1128. Both originate in a 1684 history of Florence by Ferdinando Leopoldo Del Migliore. A close examination of manuscript sources reveals both to be spurious. Freed of these constraints, we find multiple lines of evidence to support dating the origin of the project to the 1070s and the completion of its most important elements by the 1090s. Consequently, it is possible to propose a new perspective on the development of early Romanesque architecture in Florence. Santi Apostoli, San Giovanni, and San Miniato, likely all works of the same architect, seem to represent not an organic development but an extrinsic current introduced into a visual culture for which the antique had been only one of many formal sources. The similarity in plan between San Miniato and the Roman church of Santa Maria in Portico consecrated by Pope Gregory VII and the extraordinary reference San Giovanni makes to the Pantheon, then reserved for papal masses, are among the pieces of evidence adduced for the involvement of Roman church reformers in Florentine architecture. The article furthermore explores the support of the Tuscan margravine and the role of Bishop Ranieri in the conception and realization of the baptistery.
Download free PDF
View PDF
chevron_right
Sacred Space and Architecture in the Patronage of the First Grand Duke of Tuscany, in San Lorenzo. A Florentine Church, a, ed. by R. Gaston, L.A. Waldman, Florence, Cambridge, MA, 2017, pp. 504-524.
Emanuela Ferretti
Download free PDF
View PDF
chevron_right
Transforming the Church Interior in Renaissance Florence
Joanne Allen
Transforming the Church Interior in Renaissance Florence (Cambridge University Press, 2022), 2022
Before the late sixteenth century, the churches of Florence were internally divided by monumental screens that separated the laity in the nave from the clergy in the choir precinct. Enabling both separation and mediation, these screens were impressive artistic structures that controlled social interactions, facilitated liturgical performances, and variably framed or obscured religious ritual and imagery. In the 1560s and 1570s, screens were routinely destroyed in a period of religious reforms, irreversibly transforming the function, meaning, and spatial dynamics of the church interior. In this volume, Joanne Allen explores the widespread presence of screens and their role in Florentine social and religious life prior to the Counter-Reformation. She presents unpublished documentation and new reconstructions of screens and the choir precincts which they delimited. Elucidating issues such as gender, patronage, and class, her study makes these vanished structures comprehensible and deepens our understanding of the impact of religious reform on church architecture.
Download free PDF
View PDF
chevron_right
Architecture and Charity. Paradoxes and Conflicts in the Construction of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco in Venice (1517–1560), in “Confraternitas, Society for Confraternity Studies”, 21, 2, 2010, pp. 17-30. ISSN: 1180-0682
Gianmario Guidarelli
Download free PDF
View PDF
chevron_right
The Monastic Architecture of the Order of the Poor Ladies — Later Called 'Poor Clares' — in Central Italy between 13 th and 14 th Centuries
Valeria Danesi
Actual Problems of Theory and History of Art: Collection of articles. Vol. 7. Ed. S. V. Mal’tseva, E. Iu. Staniukovich-Denisova, A. V. Zakharova. — St. Petersburg: St. Petersburg Univ. Press, 2017, pp. 336-344., 2017
At the dawn of the 13th century the male monasticism was living a new era, marked by the advent of St. Francis and St. Dominic and characterized by a return to the poorest and humble roots of Christianity as well as by greater openness towards the believers, more than the closed dimension of the monastery. A new female religious movement, known as ‘the Poor Ladies’, was born in Central Italy in the same years, under the guidance of St. Clare of Assisi. The movement did not join any of the existing monastic rules at the beginning, even though it was strictly bound to the Franciscan experience and had total poverty as its highest and exclusive aspiration. The Church of Rome saw a possible critical issue in the movement and in its lack of control. It tried to regulate it at the Council of Lateran IV in 1215, especially with the Cardinal Bishop of Ostia Ugolino dei Segni (the future Pope Gregory IX), an essential figure for the history and evolution of the female monasticism who imposed the cloistered life on all female monastic orders. The analysis of the architecture of the so-called ‘PoorLadies’ is, therefore, fundamental in order to understand the consequences of this imposition. New liturgical spaces for females only, in fact, started to be created in both the existing convents and in the newly built ones with the aim of protecting the daily life of the nuns. The arrangement of the preexisting spaces in St. Damianoin Assisi — the cradle of the order of St. Clare — was purely random but led anyway to the creation of proper architectural models, later exported in other convents of the same order. The nuns’ choir in St. Damiano, infact, is located outside the ecclesiastical perimeter in order to preserve the cloistered dimension. However, this peculiar position of the choir made it quite difficult for the nuns to assist to the liturgical functions from the beginning, but the issue was solved only during the 14th century with the ‘migration’ of this liturgical space to a new position, after a series of different solutions.
Download free PDF
View PDF
chevron_right
The Seventeenth-Century Project for the Church of San Nicolò del Lido in Venice: Liturgical Problems and New Architectural Models in the Counter-Reformation
Massimo Bisson
"Architecture, Art and Identity in Venice and its Territories, 1450–1750. Essays in Honour of Deborah Howard", edited by N. Avcioglu and E. Jones, vol. I, pp. 159-170, 2013
When the Cassinese monks of San Nicolò del Lido - during the first decades of the Seventeenth century - had to rebuild their church, they took as a model the sister abbey of San Giorgio Maggiore, whose temple was designed by Andrea Palladio in 1565 and completed, after the architect’s death (1580), with a choir and a chancel that differed from the original idea. Both these parts of the building, in particular, were redesigned taking into consideration the principles of monastic life recently reaffirmed by the Council of Trent: the choir, in fact (contrary to the tradition hitherto observed by the Cassinese congregation), was located behind the main altar, in a deep apsidal space far from the nave and separated from the chancel by a massive architectural screen, upon which the organ was located. The same criteria were observed for the project of the new church of San Nicolò del Lido, probably designed by the venetian architect Francesco Contin: the plan of both the choir and the chancel is indeed almost identical to that of San Giorgio Maggiore. Even the furnishings were similar, those of the organ in particular, whose case was carved by the same craftsman and was located in the same place, between the chancel and the choir; the choir stalls were also crafted with a similar decoration. The contract signed between the monks and the masons (1626) refers specifically to the Palladian church: as a matter of fact, the architectural membering of the new building even had to imitate those of the other venetian abbey and had to be painted in red like they were. Architectural experimentations long elaborated during the construction of San Giorgio Maggiore provided therefore the monks of San Nicolò del Lido an already established working model: they were even able to perfect it with minor modifications, giving way to the completion of the difficult genesis of the post-Tridentine monastic church.
Download free PDF
View PDF
chevron_right
Camaldolese and Vallombrosan: Architecture and Identity in Two Italian Reform Orders
Erik Gustafson
Other Monasticisms: Studies in the History and Architecture of Religious Communities Outside the Canon, 11th-15th Centuries, 2022
In this essay, I introduce the eleventh- and twelfth-century architecture of two Italian monastic reform orders, the Vallombrosans and Camaldolese. Both orders are marginal in the canon of monastic history and architectural history, despite the recent work of historians such as Francesco Salvestrini for the Vallombrosans and Cecile Caby for the Camaldolese. While a few French and Italian scholars have published a handful of articles on Vallombrosan architecture, Camaldolese architecture remains largely unstudied. I will argue that through the course of the twelfth century both the Vallombrosans and Camaldolese orders were intentionally systematic in the construction of their monastic churches, using architecture to visually assert their claims to reviving the apostolic ideal. A survey of the roughly 40 Vallombrosan and Camaldolese churches extant in Tuscany reveals that both orders nearly always built single-naved churches, although both tended to include architectural elaborations specific to each order. I will argue that the single-naved church was associated with the apostolic ideal, although the Vallombrosans and Camaldolese differed in how they interpreted the vita apostolica be lived. Both orders, however, deserve their place in monastic history as influential movements, both for the twelfth-century apostolic movements in northern Europe as well as the later rise of the mendicant orders from the central Italian cradle of reform monasticism.
View PDF
chevron_right
M. Hurx (2009), ‘Bartolomeo Ammannati and the college of San Giovannino in Florence: Adapting architecture to Jesuit needs’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 68, 338-357.
Merlijn Hurx
Download free PDF
View PDF
chevron_right
Nuns as Architects in Renaissance Reggio
Diane Ghirardo
Proceedings of the EAAE/ARCC Conference on Research , 2013
A convent plan dating from approximately 1519 raises a series of question concerning architectural production and the role of women in Renaissance Italy. This paper examines the plan in question, its authorship, the history of the convent depicted, and the relationship of the plan to the convent as built. The paper then addresses the role of women in architectural design in Renaissance Italy, and challenges the longstanding assumption that women did not design buildings then because they were not permitted to do so.
Download free PDF
View PDF
chevron_right
Chapter House Decoration in Florence ,1350-1500: Four Extant Decorative Schemes
Dr. Swapna Sathish
OU Journal, 2001
Download free PDF
View PDF
chevron_right
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.
Anne Leader
University of Virginia, Post-Doc
Anne Leader is Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) at UVA. She received her Ph.D. in the History of Art and Archaeology, with a specialization in Italian Renaissance Art, from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University in 2000. She was Rush H. Kress Fellow at Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence from 2008 to 2009. She has held teaching positions at the University of New Hampshire, Kean University, The City College of New York, and the Savannah College of Art and Design (Atlanta).

Her research and publications explore a range of topics in Italian Renaissance art, architecture, urbanism, and religious tradition, including: Michelangelo’s final project for the Sistine chapel, Benedictine monasticism and artistic patronage, Renaissance workshop practices and artistic authorship, and, most recently, burial practices and tomb monuments including articles on the tomb of Leonardo da Vinci's father. She is especially interested in sacred art and architecture, specifically in how images and buildings were used by individuals and institutions for devotional practice, doctrinal instruction, and propaganda.

She has published articles and reviews in The Burlington Magazine, caa.reviews, Human Evolution, The Journal for the Society of Architectural Historians, The Renaissance Quarterly, Renaissance Studies, Speculum, Studies in Iconography, and the Visual Resources Association Bulletin. Her monograph was published by Indiana University Press in 2012. MQUP and MIP published her edited volumes in 2018. She inaugurated the Italian Art Society's IASblog in 2013 and served as editor until 2016. As an IATH Visiting Fellow, she is preparing her database of Florentine tombs (ca. 1250-1650) for publication online as an interactive website (http://sepoltuario.iath.virginia.edu/).

If you would like PDFs of any publications listed here, please contact Anne Leader via messages or email.
Papers
105
Followers
1,967
View all papers from
Anne Leader
arrow_forward
Related papers
The Florentine Badia: Monastic Reform in Mural and Cloister (dissertation)
Anne Leader
ISBN 978-0-599-91610-4, 2000
This dissertation investigates the Orange Cloister of the Badia Fiorentina -- a Benedictine abbey located in central Florence. Between 1428 and 1441, this cloister was built and decorated with mural paintings depicting the Life of St. Benedict. Despite their position in one of the oldest and richest Florentine ecclesiastical institutions, these murals are not included in general surveys of Italian Renaissance painting for lack of an accepted author. However, they survive as a rare example of progressive Florentine mural decoration painted during the decade following the death of Masaccio. Rather than its authorship, this investigation begins with questions of the mural program’s function and reception, creating a framework where issues of architectural setting, iconography, historical context, patronage, and style are integrated to present a more extensive and satisfying interpretation of the paintings. A review of the literature demonstrates how previous studies of the Orange Cloister focus on issues of authorship, as historians have discussed either the cloister’s construction and responsible architect or its mural program and painter. This dissertation examines the entire complex, remedying the artificial division between architectural and art history. Analyzing the extant building fabric, documentary evidence -- much published here for the first time, and other primary sources, this study aims to reconstruct the cloister’s fifteenth-century appearance and function. A discussion of the patron, Abbot Gomezio di Giovanni, explains how the cloister complex formed an integral part of his reform program initiated at the monastery in 1419. Issues of architectural authorship are also addressed to question the validity of historians’ attempts to identify the cloister’s “architect.” Similarly, art historians have struggled with the authorship of the cloister’s murals. A review of documentary, circumstantial, and stylistic evidence suggests that the Life of St. Benedict cycle was produced by two teams of artists, who included the documented, much-debated, and poorly understood Portuguese painter Giovanni di Consalvo. Stylistic and iconographic analysis clarifies the relationship between the Badia cycle and its textual and pictorial sources to show how the murals served Gomezio’s institutional reforms by expressing themes crucial to the abbot and his monastic community.
Download free PDF
View PDF
chevron_right
Richard Kieckhefer, Review of The Badia of Florence: Art And Observance in a Renaissance Monastery
Anne Leader
Church History, 2013
View PDF
chevron_right
George Bent, Review of The Badia of Florence: Art and Observance in a Renaissance Monastery
Anne Leader
The Medieval Review, 2012
View PDF
chevron_right
The Residence and Loggia della Misericordia (il Bigallo): Art and Architecture of Confraternal Piety, Charity, and Virtue in Late Medieval Florence (Abstract)
Phillip Earenfight
Confraternitas, 1999
This dissertation considers the art and architecture of the residence and loggia of the Compagnia di Santa Maria della Misericordia. The Misericordia was one of the largest charitable confraternities in late medieval Florence. It was located on the Piazza San Giovanni, near the Baptistry, Campanile, and Duomo, in the
Download free PDF
View PDF
chevron_right
The Benedictines in Rome and their influence on the design of the city, in Architecture of the Soul. Diachronic and Multidisciplinary Readings
Maria Grazia Turco
Architecture of the Soul. Diachronic and Multidisciplinary Readings, 2022
The paper recounts the historical courses of two main Roman churches, in Transtiberina area, dedicated to Saint Benedict, or entrusted to the Benedictine Order care, such as: St. Benedetto in Piscinula and St. Cecilia. Moreover, basing on archival sources, many Benedictines monastic complexes and churches, spread in the Roman vicinity, emerge. This heritage is nowadays highly fragmented, and surrounded by a deeply altered environment; nevertheless, some architectural peculiar features – constructions site process, building techniques, and foundation structures – can still be identified. The Benedictine friars had an important role regarding the urban structure, having deeply influenced the development of the areas where they settled, building their monasteries, as the two churches above mentioned demonstrate. Concluding, regarding the analyzed cases, clearly emerges that the urban Benedictine architectural complexes have always played an important role within the city pattern, not only regarding pastoral or evangelization obligations, but as stabilitas factor strengthener, embodying the choice to share the life with brothers, in a dedicated space. This cultural and architectural phenomenon established a ‘system’ between Benedictine complexes, one that influenced the development of the city, the territory and the landscape.
Download free PDF
View PDF
chevron_right
First Principles: Gabriele Stornaloco and Milan Cathedral
Richard SCHOFIELD
Giulia Ceriani Sebregondi
"Architectural History", 2016
The construction from 1386 of Milan Cathedral, the largest Gothic church ever constructed in Italy, was one of the most important episodes in the history of Italian and European architecture. The documentation of the late Trecento and early Quattrocento discussions over how to build the Cathedral is extraordinarily rich and extensive, and permits a consideration of the project from many points of view including the relationship between medieval architectural theory and an actual project. At the same time, any enquiry has to contend with the copious modern literature and the conclusions that have been reached hitherto – often erroneously in our view – about many of the most salient points. We thus re-examine published and unpublished documentation and the existing literature, analysing especially the format of the building's elevation, the proposals by Gabriele Stornaloco and Jean Mignot, and the drawings attributed to Antonio di Vincenzo. We also reconsider the notions of ars and scientia which have previously been misinterpreted in discussions of the cathedral documentation.
Download free PDF
View PDF
chevron_right
2021, November - Early Modern Rome 4 International Conference - paper: Renovating a Tradition. The project for Sant’Adriano in the Roman Forum by Baldassarre Peruzzi (with Andrea Bonavita)
Giulia Ceriani Sebregondi
2021
The paper investigates Early Modern Rome in its very hearth: the Roman Forum. The focus on architectural history is strictly related with other disciplines, such as history, art history, religious studies, diplomacy, cultural studies. It analyzes the project by Baldassarre Peruzzi (1481 - 1536) for the transformation of the churches of Santa Martina and Sant’Adriano, and the space in between, illustrated in the drawing Florence, GDSU 625Ar. The drawing has been indicated in so far as “enigmatic” by the scholars: it was not clear who was the patron, which the function of the building, the date, if it was a survey, an actual commission, or an ideal project. The identification of the patron in cardinal Agostino Trivulzio (1485 - 1548) makes now possible to understand its meaning and purpose. Suddenly, the project appears clearly aimed at reconfiguring the cardinal’s titular church and building the related residence, renovating a century-old tradition of cardinals deacons in Rome. This work has been conducted jointly by Andrea Bonavita and me, discussing every single aspect together.
Download free PDF
View PDF
chevron_right
L’architettura della Compagnia di Gesù in Italia XVI-XVIII sec. Luciano Patteta [et al.]
David Navarro Catalan
VLC arquitectura. Research Journal, 2015
Download free PDF
View PDF
chevron_right
The Origin of the Renaissance Palace: Domestic Architecture during the Florentine Oligarchy, 1378-1432
Lorenzo Vigotti
Art and Experience in Trecento Italy, 2018
This dissertation investigates the origin of the architectural typology of the Renaissance palace as it emerged in Florence between the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth centuries. This was a period characterized by a dramatic shift in domestic architecture, mirroring a parallel transformation of the Florentine society under the political regime of the Albizi oligarchy. This study fills a clear gap in existing scholarship, comprehensively addressing the private palatial architecture built in Florence in the sixty years before the construction of Palazzo Medici in 1446. Three palaces and their family archives have been studied for the first time: Palazzo Alessandri (built in the 1370s), Palazzo da Uzzano-Capponi (built circa 1411), and Palazzo Busini-Bardi (built before 1425). Their patrons, all pairs of brothers, used the size and urban prominence of their new residences to assess their political and social dominance on the city. They eliminated all commercial functions from their palaces and organized the space around a central courtyard with loggias, with a multiplication of dedicated rooms for the different public and private functions of the household. These palaces are representative of a period of transition in domestic architecture that inaugurated a new, successful domestic typology that was subjected to little change in—at least—the following three centuries. Built in a period of rising individuality, these private buildings, together with the ones that followed, helped set the modern concepts of the apartment and family privacy.
Download free PDF
View PDF
chevron_right
Rev of Andrea Galdy, The Art History and Architecture of Florentine Churches
Elizabeth Pilliod
Renaissance & Reformation , 2018
Download free PDF
View PDF
chevron_right
Related topics
Benedictine Monasticism
Explore
Papers
Topics
Features
Mentions
Analytics
PDF Packages
Advanced Search
Search Alerts
Journals
Academia.edu Journals
My submissions
Reviewer Hub
Why publish with us
Testimonials
Company
About
Careers
Press
Content Policy
580 California St., Suite 400
San Francisco, CA, 94104