Reviewed by: Gendered Perceptions of Florentine Last Supper Frescoes, c. 1350–1490 by Diana Hiller Natalie Tomas Hiller, Diana, Gendered Perceptions of Florentine Last Supper Frescoes, c. 1350–1490 (Visual Culture in Early Modernity), Farnham, Ashgate, 2013; cloth; pp. xv, 232; 8 colour, 36 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. €60.00; ISBN 9781409462064. This beautifully illustrated study of nine Last Supper frescoes in Florentine refectories, monastic and conventual, from the mid-fourteenth to the late fifteenth centuries examines these art works from the perspective of the viewer and their gendered perceptions of the frescoes. Diana Hiller argues that male and female religious viewed these frescoes very differently based on varying religious, cultural, emotional, and intellectual contexts, which were themselves gendered. In Chapter 1, Hiller introduces the tradition of Last Supper paintings in Italy, discussing the handful of Italian non-refectory images, both inside Florence (in the baptistery vault) and the handful of early refectory images outside Florence, painted in the early decades of the fourteenth century. From 1350 onwards, however, frescoes of the Last Supper in the refectories of religious houses became a particularly Florentine phenomenon. Nine frescoes have survived: beginning with Taddeo Gaddi’s Last Supper painted on the refectory wall of the Franciscan monastery of Santa Croce, to the 1488 Last Supper fresco painted for a group of Franciscan tertiaries in the convent of San Girolamo. Six frescoes were painted for male houses and three for female houses. All of these frescoes preceded Leonardo da Vinci’s famous Last Supper fresco, which was painted in Milan between 1495 and 1498 in the refectory of the Dominican monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie; as the author observes, this fresco marked the ‘apotheosis’ of the ‘visual and iconographic history of Last Supper images’ (p. 7). [End Page 304] The author argues throughout the book that male and female religious perceived the Last Supper images differently and in Chapter 2, she examines the different educational contexts that male and female religious experienced. The male friars, often preaching friars, were schooled in Latin, trained in biblical exegesis and the interpretation of learned texts and glosses written by Church Fathers and later learned theologians. Their monasteries also contained extensive libraries filled with classical, patristic, and theological books and manuscripts, usually in Latin and in the library of San Marco also in Greek. They were taught how to read texts, both written and visual, in a learned way. In contrast, the female religious, even in such aristocratic convents as St Apollonia, were educated rather than learned, and usually could read only in the vernacular, and their libraries held few books. The impact of gender on this experience is only highlighted in this chapter when the convents are examined as a contrast to male experience, implying that gender was an exclusively female phenomenon. Male friars were also gendered and a focus on the impact of gender earlier in the chapter might have led to a more extensive discussion of gender in the monastic learning environment. Having established the differing intellectual contexts of the male and female religious, in Chapter 3, Hiller argues that friars and monks would have viewed the frescoes as mirrors of their own corporate identity and that the frescoes in male houses, as opposed to those found in convents, contained complex, learned messages that necessitated an understanding of Latin. These frescoes emphasised a more affective, individualised piety, with the nuns being encouraged to concentrate their devotion on individual saints, whose names were helpfully written in the vernacular, in contrast to the lack of names in the frescoes of the male houses. The last two chapters of the book discuss the perceptual environment of the refectories in the male and female houses, respectively. The records indicate that refectories in the male houses were public spaces that entertained male guests. The texts read during the refectory meal were learned, and in Latin; the friars observed elaborate rituals and the food, both in the frescoes and at the table, was plentiful and reflected an upper-class diet. The presence of guests, abundant food, and learned readings helped to project the status of the community to the outside world. In contrast, the stricter emphasis on...
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