To attend in Florence: The Network of Cassinese Arts in Mediterranean Renaissance Italy

Natalie Arrowsmith Discussion

International Conference

Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut
16–18 March 2017

organized by Alessandro Nova and Giancarla Periti

From the late fifteenth to the mid sixteenth century, an impressive corpus of architecture, sculpture, and painting was created to embellish monastic sites affiliated with the Benedictine Cassinese Congregation of Italy. A religious order of humanistically trained monks whose mobility among the network of Cassinese monasteries was paramount to their spiritual reformed agenda, the Cassinese fruitfully engaged with the most eminent artists and architects of the early modern period, supporting the production of imagery and architecture that was often highly experimental in nature. The Cassinese Congregation constituted a spiritual infrastructure that spread across the northern, central and southern regions of Italy, through which not only monks but also works and models circulated, intersected, and interacted. The mobility and flow of artists, materials, and motifs tied together the reformed religious communities affiliated with the Cassinese Congregation and simultaneously connected an antique with a modern Christian artistic corpus. This system resulted in a virtual continuum linking works of architecture, sculpture, and painting, including the Byzantine church of San Vitale in Ravenna, the Norman cloister of Monreale (Palermo), and Raphael's Sistine Madonna in Piacenza.

Scholarship has presented the Cassinese monks principally as learned patrons of ambitious but locally-inflected works created by credited Renaissance masters. But such an approach has obscured the fact that these modern instances of Cassinese Christian arts existed within a larger cultural network and coexisted with others of differing value, including the management of late antique buildings, the preservation of Byzantine mosaics, and the custody of poorly made votive images in popular shrines. Not only did these lesser-known episodes assure the survival of late antique arts, and artifacts of limited aesthetic appeal, but they also provided occasions for Renaissance masters active in Cassinese communities to confront alternative forms of antiquity in a dialogue among the arts for the reinvention of a modern Christianized art.
  
   
PROGRAM

Thursday, 16 March 2017
Sala Brunelleschi | Ospedale degli Innocenti

14:30
Alessandro Nova and Giancarla Periti
Introduction

Session I: Modelli and Medieval Heritage in the
Architecture of the Cassinese
Chair: Alessandro Nova

15:00
Jörg Stabenow | Dortmund
Architecture and Self-Representation of Religious Orders. A Case Study of the Secular Canons of San Giorgio in Alga

15:40
Guido Beltramini | Vicenza
Fonti antiche e persistenze medievali nella architettura cassinese fra Quattro e Cinquecento

Coffee break
  
   
Session II: Networks, Mobility, and Liturgy
Chair: Hana Gründler

16:40
Tracy E. Cooper | Philadelphia
Image, and Text in the Construction and Circulation of Cassinese Identity

17:20
Claudia Marra | Berlin
Ein idealer Auftraggeber? Mobilität der Architekten im Dienst der Cassinesischen Kongregation

18:00
Gianmario Guidarelli | Padova
Vita spirituale, pratica liturgica e architettura. Monasteri maschili e femminili del Veneto e della Romagna
   
    
Friday, 17 March 2017
Sala Brunelleschi | Ospedale degli Innocenti

Session III: New Research on Santa Giustina and Gregorio Cortese
Chair: Giancarla Periti

09:30
Robert Brennan | Florence
The Art of St. Luke in his Chapel at Santa Giustina

10:10
Alexander Nagel | New York
Raphael, Riccio, and Romanino in a Letter by Gregorio Cortese, Cassinese Monk and Man of Letters

Coffee break
   
   
Session IV: Correggio and Cassinese Theology
Chair: Jessica Richardson

11:10
Andrea Muzzi | Pisa & Livorno
Il Correggio, la cupola di San Giovanni Evangelista e i cassinesi, alla luce di una lettera inedita dell'artista

11:50
Claudia Steinhardt-Hirsch | München
Correggio's Altarpieces and the Cassinese Theological Concept of Grace

Lunch
  
   
Session V: Pictorial Modes, Iconographical Issues, and Legacy
Chair: Fabian Jonietz

14:00
Katharine Stahlbuhk | Firenze
"The Mode of Painting with Green Earth in the Monasteries of the Black Monks". Monochrome Wall Paintings and the Santa Giustina Congregation

14:40
Eliana Carrara | Campobasso
La pala vasariana dell'Assunta nella Badia fiorentina

15:20
Stuart Lingo | Seattle
Federico Barocci and the Legacy of the Renaissance at San Vitale

16:00
Visit to the cloister of the Badia
(with Eliana Carrara; only for participants)
   
   
Saturday, 18 March 2017
Sala Conferenze | Palazzo Grifoni Budini Gattai

Session VI: Artistic Geography and Circulation of Pictorial and Sculptural Models
Chair: Paola d'Agostino

10:00
Anna Bisceglia | Firenze
La Badia di Cava dei Tirreni. Circolazione di modelli e mercato storico artistico

10:40
Michael G. Gromotka | Berlin
Die malerische Dekoration von S. Pietro in Perugia und das Netzwerk der Cassinesischen Kongregation

11:20
Concluding Remarks
   
  
LOCATION
16 –17 March | Sala Brunelleschi
Ospedale degli Innocenti,
Piazza SS. Annunziata, Florenz

18 March | Sala Conferenze
Palazzo Grifoni Budini Gattai,
Via dei Servi 55, Florence


CONTACT
Mandy Richter
richter@khi.fi.it


FURTHER INFORMATION
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