Franciscan Studies

While preaching in Siena in 1427, the Franciscan preacher, Bernardino of Siena referred to a celebrated painting by Simone Martini. The specific painting was the Annunciation now in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and originally located in Siena’s Cathedral. Bernardino referred to it in connection with schooling young girls in the virtue of modesty:

You see she [the Virgin] does not gaze at the angel, but sits with that almost frightened pose. She knew well it was an angel, so why should she be disturbed? What would she have done if it had been a man? Take her as an example, girls, of what you should do. Never talk to a man unless your father or mother is present.¹

Here Bernardino offered the image of the Virgin as a model of modesty and chastity, but as a humble young maid St. Clare of Assisi could have also served this purpose. At the end of the fourteenth century, the most influential representations of St. Clare in Italian art were other images by Simone Martini’s from the lower church of Assisi that depict her as a mystical virgin wearing a nun’s habit or another example that shows her holding a lily, which is a sign of purity and virginity, typical of female saints, with her head bent and her eyes cast down (Fig. 1). Simone Martini’s famous image was later reproduced in majolica form on plates for domestic use, many of which are preserved in the Capuchin Museum in Rome (Fig. 2). This is the image of St. [End Page 237] Clare that endured for decades, but, interestingly, it was Bernardino who was partially responsible for the new image of St. Clare in Early Modern culture.

St. Clare of Assisi has been the subject of a certain renaissance in recent years and extensive monographs about her life and editions of her works have been published. She also features in many books concerned with mystics and female spirituality in the Middle Ages and in works on her role in the early development of the Franciscan order.² She has been the subject of several excellent biographies of which perhaps the most comprehensive are those by Bartoli, Peterson, and Frugoni. Of these, Frugoni’s work used a wide range of visual sources in order to construct the biography.³ Catherine Mooney offers a close look at her writings and works about her and St. Francis by male commentators. The concept of imitation, she writes, was central to understanding the image of St. Clare: she is the subject of special attention [End Page 238] as an Altera Maria in an attempt to create a female model saint distinct from St. Francis, who is the Alter Christus. Joan Mueller has analyzed the works of St. Clare and undertaken a close reading of her letters to St. Agnes of Prague. In A Companion to Clare of Assisi she provides an excellent introduction to the saint’s life and works. Leslie Knox charts the evolution of the cult of St. Clare in the textual tradition from the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries.⁴

In the field of art history, most of the works dedicated to St. Clare have been studies of the earlier tradition that depict the saint in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Assisi.⁵ Unlike for St. Clare, there is an immense body of [End Page 239] literature on the subject of St. Francis in art.⁶ Much work on the earlier tradition has been done by William Cook and Servus Gieben, who look at St. Clare in connection with the iconography of St. Francis and present their material in a catalogue format, which both facilitated and called for further research.⁷ Depictions of St. Clare beyond medieval Assisi have generally not been subject to much attention [End Page 240] and her images from the Early Modern period, that is, in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and early seventeenth century, and even the many images in Assisi after the fourteenth century have not received much attention.

This paper explores the rebirth of St. Clare of Assisi as a central...