Anne Derbes, Ritual, Gender & Narrative in Late Medieval Italy: Fina Buzzacarini and the Baptistery of Padua. Studies in the Visual Cultures of the Middle Ages, 15. Turnhout: Brepols, 2020, 384 pp., 188 colored ill.

Abstract

Abstract: During my repeated visits to Padua, I have always made sure to visit also the amazing Baptistry dedicated to John the Baptist right next to the cathedral. Though small in space, it is a most dazzling and astounding art work with fantastic frescoes by Giusto de’ Menabuoi (d. ca. 1390). Anne Derbes, Prof. Emerita of Hood College in Frederick, MD, here presents perhaps her scholarly masterpiece, after having published widely on Giotto, the Scrovegni chapel, late medieval Italian art, and paintings depicting Christ’s Passion, offering a detailed and in-depth study of this amazing baptistery. If there had been any doubt in the past – and many voices have formulated those doubts – about women’s active role as art patrons, then Derbes’s investigation shatters any questions in that regard. Fina Buzzacarini (d. 1378), wife of the lord of Padua, Francesco da Carrara (d. 1393), beautifully portrayed in one of the registers inside on the baptisterum walls, here reproduced as Fig. 8 (p. 36; see also online at: <uri href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Buzzaccarini#/media/File:Giusto_de'Menabuoi_Petrarca.JPG">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Buzzaccarini#/media/File:Giusto_de'Menabuoi_Petrarca.JPG</uri>), had chosen this location as her and her husband’s mausoleum and commissioned Giusto to create the stunning pictorial program which easily stands the comparison with Giotto’s in the Scrovegni Chapel. However, as Derbes is not getting tired to emphasize, she did not simply pay the money for this monumental art work; she was obviously deeply involved in the visual program and the theological concept, interacting in that process also closely with the poet Petrarch, who seems to have had some artistic skills himself.