The Franciscans and Art Patronage in Late Medieval Italy by Louise Bourdua (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 193 man East. She opens with a necessary review of intellectual construction of the Turk in the Middle Ages, focusing on crusader propaganda and courtly literature that developed a concept of the Turk as a religious foe, enemy of the true faith, the infidel who needed to be conquered in order to free the Holy Land for Christian rule and prepare the world for the second coming of Christ. Next, Bisaha moves forward chronologically to an analysis of individual writings by a number of sixteenth-century Italian humanists, who, steeped in the philosophy and natural paradigms of the ancients, eventually came to reject the medieval Christian tradition in favor of a view of Muslims (and Turks in particular) as barbarians, “others” utterly different from, and inferior in learning, civilization , and custom from the West. This chapter, which presents the core of Bisaha’s argument and is the most successful chapter, rescues an obscure aspect of humanist scholarship. The texts she discusses reinforce her argument that, although they made a living from their knowledge of the past, Italian humanists were very much aware of and engaged in the pressing political questions of their day. A more narrowly focused chapter follows, examining humanist responses to contemporary Greeks living under Turkish rule and showing that while some humanists portrayed contemporary Greeks as heirs to the learning and culture of the ancient Greeks and thus honorable, most described them as fallen from former greatness into ignorance. This section was the least compelling of the four, because it interrupts the development of the argument, woven into the rest of the work, that the humanists helped created a new idea of the west by writing about the east. Last, Bisaha turns to the problem of religion in the writings of the Italian humanists about the Turks. She examines the language used in a variety of tracts discussing the religious differences between Islam and Christianity . In so doing she reminds the reader that humanism is not synonymous with a completely secular or non-religious worldview; indeed, she does a remarkable job of proving that a sizable number of humanists in fact never divorced themselves from the medieval heritage that saw Islam’s followers as dangerous practitioners of a false religion. The book is not illustrated, but the reader might have benefited from inclusion of some of the pictorial representations of Turks and other Muslims that illustrated some of the later sixteenth and seventeenth-century humanist publications as well as other writings on geography and ethnography, such as world atlases and encyclopedias. Without moving the discussion out of the realm of textual analysis, such depictions would have given the reader a sense of how, literally, Turks were “pictured” by European educated elites, and perhaps how such engraved images in books reinforced or contradicted the humanist texts under discussion. In all, this is a fascinating work, utterly clear in its prose and solidly argued. It brings to light a forgotten aspect of the Italian humanist corpus , one that, as Bisaha convincingly shows, influenced the creation of the idea of “Europe” which would have such enormous impact in the colonial period and into the modern era. LAURA YORK, History, UCLA Louise Bourdua, The Franciscans and Art Patronage in Late Medieval Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2004) 242 pp. REVIEWS 194 In The Franciscans and Art Patronage in Late Medieval Italy, Louise Bourdua investigates Franciscan attitudes and practices regarding art patronage from the mid-thirteenth century to the dawn of the fourteenth. Through detailed and cogent case studies of three important Franciscan churches (San Fermo Maggiore, Verona; San Lorenzo, Vicenza; and Sant’ Antonio, Padua), she examines issues of patronage, spirituality, and production. Bourdua’s central argument is that Franciscan art patronage in the later Middle Ages was governed primarily by local aesthetics and processes of patronage, not the dictates of the mother church at Assisi. This book’s greatest strength lies in its synthesis of Franciscan ideals and life, documentary evidence, and the art and architecture itself. Although the title suggests that the work covers the entirety of the Italian peninsula, the reader should bear in mind that the study focuses almost exclusively on the Veneto. The case studies are...