Books by Loretta Vandi
Eufrasia Burlamacchi
The first monograph entirely devoted to the illumination of Sister Eufrasia Burlamacchi The first... more The first monograph entirely devoted to the illumination of Sister Eufrasia Burlamacchi The first monograph entirely devoted to the illuminated manuscripts of Sister Eufrasia Burlamacchi (1478-1548), this book demonstrates that her artistry should not be confined to painting or sculpture alone. Within the convent walls of San Domenico in Lucca where she lived and worked, Burlamacchi attained high levels of artistic proficiency through her knowledge of drawing and colour technique, composition, treatment of space and proportions. This book highlights that Sister Eufrasia was aware of the progress illumination underwent in contact with the artists we now include in the High Renaissance. She quickly established a style which she then passed on to younger sisters in faith to establish a convent workshop where mutual exchange was the norm. Here, for the first time, Eufrasia Burlamacchi is recognized and discussed as an influential and gifted artist in her own right.
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Margherita de' Soderini nella storia religiosa del Quattrocento, 2023
Il tema delle reportationes di prediche del tardo Medioevo e della prima età moderna è entrato a ... more Il tema delle reportationes di prediche del tardo Medioevo e della prima età moderna è entrato a far parte a pieno diritto della storia della religiosità europea. Il manoscritto Magliabechiano XXXV 98 (FIRENZE, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale) – qui trascritto e commentato per la prima volta nella sua interezza – si colloca all’interno di questo contesto. Il codice, scritto da Margherita di Tommaso Soderini, appartenente a una delle più importanti famiglie fiorentine del XV secolo, è la testimonianza più completa del contenuto della predicazione tenuta a Firenze negli anni Ottanta del Quattrocento dal frate agostiniano Mariano Pomicelli da Genazzano. Gli excerpta e i ‘richordi’ di prediche quaresimali e avventuali – raccolti dalla Soderini in Santa Maria del Fiore, San Lorenzo, Santa Croce, San Gallo e nelle chiese dei monasteri delle Murate e di San Gaggio – gettano luce sugli interessi religiosi, l’appropriazione dei contenuti, le attitudini verso il linguaggio e le considerazioni sociali di una donna che compose per sé e le figlie un’opera di edificazione morale e spirituale.
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Journal of Design History, 2020
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These in-depth, historical, and critical essays study the meaning of ornament, the role it played... more These in-depth, historical, and critical essays study the meaning of ornament, the role it played in the formation of modernism, and its theoretical importance between the mid-nineteenth century and the late twentieth century in England and Germany. Ranging from Owen Jones to Ernst Gombrich through Gottfried Semper, Alois Riegl, August Schmarsow, Wilhelm Worringer, Adolf Loos, Henry van de Velde, and Hermann Muthesius, the contributors show how artistic theories are deeply related to the art practice of their own times, and how ornament is imbued with historical and social meaning.
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Journal of Art Historiography, 2019
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If one defines 'Modernism' as 'High Modernism' (approximatively 1910-1940), which in the European... more If one defines 'Modernism' as 'High Modernism' (approximatively 1910-1940), which in the European scope of this book certainly makes sense (the target of Ornament and European Modernism is England and Germany, not Europe), then this volume is as much about pre-Modernism and after-Modernism or late Modernism than about Modernism itself. It covers a period ranging from Owen Jones's The Grammar of Ornament (1856) till Ernst H. Gombrich's The Sense of an Order (1959), a book written at the acme of abstract expressionism, with two of the five chapters of the book focusing on the pre-Modern starting point the (provisional) after-Modern endpoint of Western art's involvement with ornament and decoration. This emphasis on the chronological margins of Modernism should not come as a surprise either, since Modernism and ornament are two notions that are often positioned in diametrically opposed way. The famous, but not always well read or contextualized slogan of Alfred Loos, 'Ornament is crime', is the best-known symptom of this antagonism, which the interesting collection edited by art historian Loretta Vandi aims to question. And it does so very successfully, thanks to the rich and sophisticated historical reconstruction and close-reading of many debates, publications, and realizations having to do with ornaments. If contextualization and close-reading are the key words of the book's art-historical methodologies (it would be a mistake not to put this word in the plural), the most important stance it takes is the rejection of any radical dichotomy in the study of the ornament. In this regard, it certainly obeys the main inspiration of all those, theoreticians as well as practitioners who make a plea for decoration and ornament, but it no less certainly differs from the general view which strongly opposes ornament to things such as structure (in the case of architecture, for instance) or form and function (as far as the visual arts and work in design are concerned). That ornament is not just decoration, that is a superficial element that can be taken away or ignored without harming the essence of a work, and that there is no distinction to be made between decoration and functionality are basic tenets of all contributions that enable them to frame the ornament in less simplified ways. More
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The Eternal Flame & Eufrasia Burlamacchi
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Loretta Vandi, La trasformazione del motivo dell'acanto dall'antichità al XV secolo, Bern 2002 In... more Loretta Vandi, La trasformazione del motivo dell'acanto dall'antichità al XV secolo, Bern 2002 Introduzione-Parte prima "I presupposti teorici" Capitolo primo Alois Riegl
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English summary
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Four Essay, 2007
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Four Essays, 2007
The Struggle for Relics. Urban Space and Ritual in Eleventh-century Lucca
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Partendo da tematiche specificamente teoriche riguardanti l’ornamento, in quest’opera viene svilu... more Partendo da tematiche specificamente teoriche riguardanti l’ornamento, in quest’opera viene sviluppata un’indagine storica sui caratteri formali, sui valori simbolici e sulle funzioni del motivo dell’acanto – una delle forme decorative più presenti nei repertori dell’arte e quindi indice di preferenza estetica – nei contesti artistici più rappresentativi che vanno dal VI secolo a. C. fino al Rinascimento.
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Four Essays, 2007
Suppose there were a man on the top of a high mountain looking at a huge city down in the plain. ... more Suppose there were a man on the top of a high mountain looking at a huge city down in the plain. Meanwhile he is attempting to encompass with just one glance the city’s boundless and craggy extension, his imagination eyes start to scan it as a multilayered whole, being at once hospital, brothel, purgatory, hell, and penal colony. But the devil came and said unto this man: “What are thou watching my city for? It is mine and I shall give it thee if only thou worship me”. And the man answered: “I cannot, because I love it such as it is and instead of worshiping thee I shall worship thy city and it will become mine!” The man is Charles Baudelaire and his city is Paris of the 1850s, the place where every abnormity bloomed like a flower.
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Il Manoscritto Oliveriano 1. Storia di un codice boemo del XV secolo, 2004
It deals with a rather rare manuscript (a psalter-hymnal) decorated by Valentin Noh and made in P... more It deals with a rather rare manuscript (a psalter-hymnal) decorated by Valentin Noh and made in Prague during the reign of King Ladislaw II Jagello, which I reasoned to be a splendid example of the revival of late Gothic art in Bohemia after the Hussite revolution
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Che dipinti raffiguranti nature morte necessitino di sguardi attenti e prolungati, non è una novi... more Che dipinti raffiguranti nature morte necessitino di sguardi attenti e prolungati, non è una novità. Mancando di un soggetto narrativo, lo sforzo maggiore dell'osservatore, di fronte a questo genere di opere, dovrà essere almeno duplice: da una parte interpretare i 'supposti' simboli nascosti all'interno della più prosaica apparenza, dall'altra leggere i valori formali, cercando di penetrare nelle più sottili differenze di composizione, inquadratura, scelta di forme e colori. Tuttavia, a differenza di un dipinto raffigurante un paesaggio o una scena di genere, la natura morta ha una presenza 'perentoria', che ci può seguire alla stessa stregua di uno sguardo che supera i limiti di una tela nella quale è racchiuso. L'emancipazione del soggetto senza uno specifico contenuto storico o religioso è avvenuta molto gradualmente all'interno della pittura occidentale. Certo, già presso i romani nature morte di vario tipo erano state inserite nella pittura detta del 'terzo stile' oppure come 'emblemi' al centro di tappeti musivi. Nel corso del medio evo qualche brano di natura morta si poteva cogliere all'interno di dipinti sacri su tavola o ad affresco, o nei 'marginalia' dei codici miniati, soprattutto nel corso del XIII e XIV secolo. Con il XV secolo vasi con fiori, frutti e oggetti vari cominciano ad assumere gradatamente un valore visivo autonomo prima sconosciuto, soprattutto nei dipinti dedicati a Maria (tra i tanti, quelli dello Squarcione e di Carlo Crivelli), oppure nelle tarsie lignee nei cori delle chiese, nelle porte interne di palazzi o sulle pareti degli studioli, come nel Palazzo Ducale di Urbino. Si possono apprezzare poi anche brani naturalistici all'interno delle grottesche (come negli affreschi delle Logge Vaticane realizzate da Raffaello e aiuti), ma ciò che accomuna tutti questi casi
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Conference Presentations by Loretta Vandi
Mysticism has made contemplation the fundamental tool for spiritually understanding the truths of... more Mysticism has made contemplation the fundamental tool for spiritually understanding the truths of faith. Both approaching and becoming one with these truths, the mystic enters a dimension of purity, both of thought and of emotions. My contribution would like to add a piece to the reconstruction of the ways of mysticism, much more varied than those considered so far. Analyzing the artistic production of Sister Caterina Angelica della Vacchia (1608-1663), a Florentine Poor Clare who, from 1634 to 1660, wrote poems illustrated by drawings, I was able to detect a convergence between the naturalism present in her writing and that characterizing her drawings. It is a mystical naturalism in the sense that verses, in the same way as drawings, lead to contemplation, which opens the way to a dimension beyond reality. The drawings, depicting plants, flowers and animals, from a technical point of view, do not differ from the objectively accurate rendering of the subjects typical of the ‘scientific drawings’ of the time when Sister Caterina Angelica lived. The subjects of the drawings, on the other hand, belong to a Franciscan way of seeing, feeling and contemplating nature. Being a Poor Clare led her to enhance the simpler, less flashy species, isolating them on the sheet, enlarging them and never adding color. This black and white nature, like the black of writing on the white of the sheet, indicates that the truest meaning is never on the surface. Only in one case, however, a flower that is certainly not simple – the passionflower – is designed with great wealth of detail. A more than justified choice, since these details are the arma Christi, clear symbols to meditate on the Savior’s passion. The work of Sister Caterina Angelica shows that naturalism, simplicity and beauty can collaborate to overcome sensible reality.
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Books by Loretta Vandi
Conference Presentations by Loretta Vandi
My discussion of the manuscripts aims to challenge the prevalent opinion that the early eleventh century was a slow and uneven period of incubation in Apulia, preceding the full bloom of Romanesque art after the Norman conquest of the region. Traditionally, accounts of the impact of the conquest include the introduction of classical sources for the visual ornamentation of classical texts. Instead, I argue that the early illuminated manuscripts of the Metamorphoses partake of the figural and ornamental motifs found in predominantly local Latin, Byzantine, and Islamic productions of luxury goods, such as textiles, ivory, ceramics, stone, and metalwork. Moving across various media into the context of an illuminated codex, these motifs and patterns were subject to a process of adaptation evident in their treatment on the manuscript page. Drawn as they are from such diverse contexts, the marginal illustrations of the Naples and Cesena manuscripts may best be described as visual expressions of a “multilingual” historical context. Although no proof of a direct correspondence between visual and spoken language exists for this period, I propose to discuss these illustrations as if they represented the visual counterpart of a southern Italian compound language, characteristic of a society in which various constituencies were economically and spatially interdependent. Adopting a linguistic metaphor facilitates a consideration of the artistic choices that were essential to the production of the illuminated Ovid.
Loretta Vandi
If the printed image in Europe sprang out of the three Ps–paper, piety (in the form of printed religious images), and playing cards–then their role within the cultural dynamics of the fifteenth-century society could hardly be ignored. Scholars of popular playing cards, like Michael Dummett, Timothy Husband, Andrea Vitali, and Giordano Berti have all remarked that they are now extremely rare even though cards produced from woodblocks were by far the most common, designed for a mass market and printed on paper according to mechanical production.
Simple in both design and production, the decks were printed on large woodblocks, typically two blocks with twenty-four cards each, then cut apart from the printed sheet into individual cards. They were glued to several layers of paper to make a stiff pasteboard and then trimmed. Generally, they were not colored, but those that were had a very limited gamut of hues (usually two colors), applied with the aid of stencils. The earlier cards were probably crude with little artistic pretension but designed in such a way that the figures and the suit symbols were easily recognizable and the value of pip cards readily determined.
Chance had it that while a 1532 book with notary records belonging to the Urbino Curia was under restoration, two fifteenth-century uncut series of popular woodcut cards re-appeared from the leather cover of the document, used to reinforce it. On the ground of this discovery, my contribution will deal with still unanswered questions concerning the cards themselves:
1. the exact composition of the original packs
2. the games that were played
3. the composition of the several copy-packs
4. the impact they had on the organization of social life.
Loretta Vandi, Choir-Books, Inspirational Ornament, and Chant Performance in the Convent of St. Domenico in Lucca
My work on Italian nuns’ manuscripts has demonstrated that the ornamental decoration flanking musical notation in liturgical books can be linked to the nuns’ performance of the chant. For example, the ornamental apparatus in twelfth-century manuscripts produced by and for the female Benedictine community of Santa Maria at Pontetetto (Lucca) provided a ‘narrative support’ for the singers, which encouraged them to remain mindful of the communal nature of their song. Twelfth choir-books written and decorated from 1505 to 1545 in the newly founded reformed Dominican convent of St. Domenico at Lucca, similarly demonstrate this relationship between ornament and performance. In the nuns’ manuscripts there are two kinds of ornament, figural (flowers, leaves, fruits, masks) and abstract (dots, lines, and geometrical shapes), the former mainly employed as a frame for images of saints, the latter as a filling for large pen-drawn initials. It is the initials filled with abstract ornament–a real tour de force–that seem conceived so as to create a tension, a sense of competition, between their own and the chant’s development. In this view, the effect on the chant’s performance should have been a continuous enhancement of the individual dimension through the empathic perception of that tension.
The main argument of my article is based on the premise that long acquaintance with a form of art (chant) should, under certain conditions, eventually have a bearing on the creation of another form of art (ornament), especially in a place where relationships with outer stimuli were either very few or lacking altogether. But the affective responses both ornament and chant would arouse and coordinate in those secluded groups were always present either aiding them in or preparing them for communal actions, whose main feature was repetition. Taking this practice in its positive meaning—which then as now includes good memory, high degree of controlled expectation, and valuation of the results through comparison—it will be further argued that the Dominican nuns who wrote, notated, and illuminated their choir-books, were able to translate the contents of the cyclic musical unfolding of the liturgical year into a synthetic decorative scripture that took the form of pen-drawn initials filled with abstract ornament. These pure decorative productions, with their variety and complexity, were as much parallel to as in competition with chant.
During the eleventh and twelfth centuries a common Christian culture, born in the Mediterranean, which included among other practices journeys to sacred sites and the tombs of the venerated dead had taken route in northern and western Europe and produced local offshoots. To this great stream of people only the Reformation seemed to have put an end. But the story of the European pilgrimage does not end of course with the sixteenth century. If it suffered a dramatic and prolonged interruption in Protestant Europe, it flourished, with some regional and local variation, where Catholicism proved both resistant and resurgent, and where it was effectively undisturbed. In Western Middle Ages there was no question as to the holiest place in the world, that ultimate and ideal city which every pilgrim had to be directed to. There was however an accumulation of belief and superstition about the nature and value of the Jerusalem pilgrimage and also the growth of a strain of piety centered on Christ's passion which would have a large part to play in the future. On the other hand a realistic outlook had already caught on during Carolingian times; in the Council of Chalons of 813 it was put forward: " Among pilgrims there were those who, wandering around falsely, claim that they are on pilgrimage or who are so stupid that they think that they are purged of their sins simply by the sight of holy places, paying no attention to the saying of blessed Jerome 'it is not having seen Jerusalem, but having lived well at Jerusalem, that is worthy of praise' ". Realism apart, Jerusalem uniqueness stood unquestioned in the pilgrims' imagery till the 12th century and no competitive town was required to establish a hierarchy of values. Unless that unquestioned place had to suffer the worse of all destinies: to be physically destroyed. Christian history would have asked therefore for a new Jerusalem and the city which happened to possess if not the sepulcher, at least an image, the true image of Christ, might be entitled to substitute the former. In the early crusades period, an Italian city-Lucca-sought to present herself as that " new Jerusalem " , declaring to be the abode of the " true image of Christ " , the Volto Santo, carved by Nicodemus, a bystander at the crucifixion and deposition of the Savior. A whole legend, written by a cleric named Leboinus, who lived at St Martino cathedral, was the necessary support which, along with material (the presence of relics), narrative (the lives of other saints) and visual-kinetic (attending to processions) features yielded an astonishing result which had to transform the relationships between Lucchese clergy, commune and people, on the one hand, and the flock of pilgrims who chose Lucca as their final sacred place, on the other. This approach can be regarded as a new phase in the history of Western pilgrimage. The ancient belief that pilgrimage carried with it the promise of forgiveness of sin took on greater precision in the form of the indulgence accorded to the believer if his way of life was made attuned to what was suggested by the religious orchestrators. The history of 'peregrinatio' down to the sixteenth century is deeply coloured by this development. Nevertheless, when Bede-one of the first major interpreters of pilgrimages-started his commentary on sacred travels in the 9th century, Lucca, notwithstanding the flurry of hospital foundations for pilgrims by lay and ecclesiastical notables since the 8th century, was just a " submansio " , a stop among many along the via Francigena (by the way, the early description of Francigena dates from 990, when archbishop Sigeric of Canterbury returned from a visit to Rome; one of his overnight stops was Lucca). No wonder, then, if Bede in his " History of the English
LORETTA VANDI-"Cosa disse San Giovanni Evangelista a Malatesta da Verucchio? Il messaggio politico di Dio negli affreschi di Sant'Agostino a Rimini"
architect who lived and worked in Urbino, Lucca, andMilan. Less known is his
activity as an artistic counselor. The present paper is about a letter (October
31, 1623) by Oddi to Matteo Bernardini, “Operaio” at San Martino Cathedral
in Lucca, that scholars have never analyzed in depth, in which he offered
suggestions to transform the old medieval cathedral into a building “alla moderna”.
Oddi aimed at giving more light and decorum to the interior; at the
same time he proposed, for the exterior, to demolish the porch in order to create
a facade with correct proportions. The letter is an interesting document testifying
to the architectural and ornamental preferences of an intellectual who wished
to express judgments on the arts of his own time as well as of the past.
Taking into account the relationships between the interior and the exterior of
the building and stressing the importance of the environment, Oddi deals also
with issues of perception (close and from afar viewing), along with the quality
and preservation of the diverse architectural materials.