Late Medieval Italian Art and its Contexts: Essays in Honour of Professor Joanna Cannon, ed. Donal Cooper and Beth Williamson

The Christ child sits in his mother’s arm, his wriggling legs held gently while he reaches to pull at her robe and veil with his right hand. He gazes adoringly up at her with laughter on his lips, as she stares outwards and beyond, to a future that is ahead of him; beyond the space of the tondo frame that encircles them.

It is not always the case that one starts a review with the cover image, but in the case of this beautifully produced festschrift in honour of Professor Joanna Cannon, who retired in 2019, it is highly apt. The volume, edited by Donal Cooper and Beth Williamson, is a stimulating collection of essays written by a range of Cannon’s Ph.D. students whose scholarship and subsequent careers demonstrate the impact of her research and teaching. What the image conveys in both its form and content is the heartfelt gratitude of this closely connected group to an inspirational scholar who has decisively shaped the field of late medieval Italian art and encouraged others to walk a similar path. The visual reference to Giotto’s Circle will not be lost on those who are regular or occasional attendees of Cannon’s informal research forum (in person and online now) at the Courtauld Institute of Art, whose sole condition of participation is that you must present your work in progress. It is that esprit de corps that runs throughout the whole book.

The fourteen essays that comprise the volume take us to different locations across the Italian peninsula—from Siena, Florence and Assisi to Bologna and Trieste—with their case-studies focusing on diverse spaces and media that evidence the visual riches of this period. The majority map on to Cannon’s own long-standing and pioneering concerns with the patronage of the late medieval mendicant orders (male and female, especially Dominican, though in this volume the emphasis is distinctly Franciscan) in regard to wall paintings, altarpieces, metalwork, sculpture and liturgical books produced by the leading artists and workshops of the day; objects and images that bear witness to contemporary theological debates and wide-ranging devotional practices. The key word in the title of the volume is context: how do we situate primarily religious but also political artworks to best interpret their materials, iconographies, designs and functions? And, as the essays make clear, that context is worked out through cross-disciplinary investigation.

Thematic grouping is intentionally avoided in the volume to allow the essays to speak to one another more freely across a chronology of c.1250–1450 and this is effective. It begins appropriately with a unique Dominican table relic, purportedly the very wood upon which St Dominic ate and performed a miracle (Jessica N. Richardson) and finishes with the study of the power of civic saints and relics in Florence (Sally J. Cornelison). In between, we encounter a range of fascinating and interconnected topics: haptic presence in Franciscan sculpture and its situation in the controversy around the observation of the Order’s Rule (John Renner); images as historical record as tested in a Sienese political fresco (Thomas De Wesselow); design innovations in Franciscan chalices (Glyn Davies); artistic networks and workshop practice of painter-illuminators in the environs of Florence (Bryan C. Keene); light-filled revelation in the decorations of a family chapel in the convent of Santa Croce (Virginia Brilliant); and religious education and drawing practices of children and youths, both in Florence (Federico Botana). Combing of the documentary record is exemplified in Cooper’s chapter, where a prosopographic methodology casts new light on individual acts of patronage by friars at provincial level in the early Trecento. Concerns about excessiveness in Franciscan church architecture are counterbalanced by the nurture of their novices through a beautiful glass reliquary diptych, carrying the motif of the Virgin lactans. This diminutive object is contextualised by Williamson within the life of the convent and in doing so she returns to questions of individual patronage.

Michaela Zöschg examines the form and function of the central panel of a Clarissan triptych in Trieste and in doing so lightly pushes the boundary of the volume north of the Alps. Her analysis of the Veronica image on this panel targets the immersive quality of the Franciscan nuns’ spiritual exercises across provinces and how the visual arts helped to shape their experience. Wider cultural exchange is also explored through Byzantine relics and reliquaries in the treasury of the hospital church in Siena (Stefania Gerevini). Janet Robson returns to her doctoral subject of Ambrogio Lorenzetti, focusing on his partial vita dossal of St Nicholas for a modest parish church in Florence through the lens of charity and famine. Her reading of the saint’s legend and miracles alongside the surviving panels and historical context responds to Cannon’s earlier work on audiences and functions for this visual type. A second chapter focusing on Simone Martini (James Alexander Cameron) does so via the panel of the Holy Family in the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. I end here, since the unusual ‘visual quirk’ he identifies serves as a reminder, twelve chapters in, not only of the playfulness conveyed by Christ in the cover image but also of the ethos of the book as a whole; a celebration of pedagogy. That quirk is argued to be an artistic anamorphosis (in the face of the Virgin Mary) set within the context of Trecento science of optics. Figure 12.3—the author’s own photograph—takes us straight into the seminar room to hear the shifting in seats as we test a new angle on the basis of close examination of the object. Who else can hear Joanna say, ‘ah ha’?

The volume is richly illustrated and benefits from a colour plate section in the middle. The select bibliography is followed by a list of Cannon’s publications, which, along with the abundant acknowledgments in the essays and footnotes, takes us full circle from the elegant introduction. The editors and contributing authors are to be congratulated for their collaborative and meticulous work, which all of us who have studied with Joanna Cannon and benefited from her expertise and support over the years would be justified in expecting.