Flesh made word: sacramental visibility in the Bardi Panel of Santa Croce, Florence

Abstract

Discussions of early Franciscan visual archives frequently center on questions of dates and source texts, historical considerations of conflicts within the Order, and an authorial eagerness to narrate stylistic development in the direction of representational realism. This article offers an analysis of an exemplary thirteenth-century vita panel—the Bardi Panel of Santa Croce, Florence—that resists the pull of textual hermeneutics and social context as explanatory foundations. It argues, instead, that the visual rhetoric of the painting works to install a specific style of theological seeing. The Bardi Panel does this by constructing the body—the glorified body of the saint and the social body of the Order—as sacramental objects. The Franciscan body, figured through the lens of sacramental visibility, is doubled, at once an image of itself and a medium for the presence of another; it is acipher, a visible surface that renders legible sanctified interiority and divine confirmation. This textualized body, it is suggested here, comes complete with protocols for reading that aim to capture the desire of an imagined audience and train their seeing to a form of seeing beyond. This approach frames sacramental visibility in the Bardi Panel as both a way of seeing and a way of representing what is seen.