Painted Processional Crosses in Late Medieval Italy (1250–1500): Production, Movement, and Mediation

Date of Award

Fall 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

History of Art

First Advisor

Jung, Jacqueline

Abstract

This two-volume dissertation offers the first-ever catalogue of painted processional crosses (Volume II), alongside thematic chapters that investigate the material, spiritual, and ritual significance of these objects for medieval beholders (Volume I). Characterized by their small size, elaborate carpentry, and double-sided painted and gilded surfaces, painted processional crosses were produced in painting workshops in central Italy in the period between 1250 and 1500. Their adaptable iconographic programs made them popular across a range of religious patrons, from lay individuals, to male and female monastics, to confraternities, all of whom used them as visual aids and devotional tools in processions, masses, and in other religious practices. While existing scholarship has almost exclusively treated crosses on an individual basis, often with a focus on style and attribution, this dissertation takes both a holistic and a phenomenological approach. I offer materially-grounded technical analysis alongside historical and ritual contextualization of the objects to illuminate their social life, from their production to their ritual activation. In Chapter 1, I demonstrate how the historiographic treatment of these crosses has been highly fragmentary to date and lay out the stakes involved in creating a catalogue of painted processional crosses. By analyzing the chronological, geographic, formal, and institutional trends across the larger corpus, I offer an unprecedented overview of the object type and set the stage for the next chapters. In Chapter 2, I take a focused approach to reconstruct how painted processional crosses were produced in the workshop of Florentine painter Neri Di Bicci. Using previously overlooked archival evidence from the artist's workshop journal Le Ricordanze alongside two surviving crosses, I demonstrate how artists, responding to patrons' instructions, customized and coordinated multi-part commissions in anticipation of their mediatory role in religious settings. In Chapter 3, I shift the focus towards the function of painted processional crosses and more specifically to devotees' interactions with these mobile emblems in a variety of active, ceremonial uses. The chapter centers on five painted processional crosses produced for male convents and lay confraternities with affiliation to the Franciscan and Dominican Orders. I show how painted processional crosses would have acted as symbolic focal points and visual aids for these civically-minded mendicant institutions, helping them forge internal and external identity through ritual movement. In Chapter 4, I explore painted processional crosses' uses in the liturgical and extra-liturgical devotions of cloistered female monastic communities, specifically Clarissan convents. I ground my analysis of two Clarissan crosses in the hagiographic and textual traditions of the order and in the experiential conditions that enclosure would have created, illustrating how these objects' visual and material programs would have helped facilitate embodied passion piety. Together, the catalogue in Volume II, the overview of the catalogue in Chapter 1, and the case studies in Chapters 2–4 show that painted processional crosses were produced and used on a larger scale than was previously known by a diverse set of actors across central Italy. As multifunctional visual aids that shaped and were shaped by the ritual settings in which participants communed with the divine, painted processional crosses testify to the communicative potential that panel paintings, and specifically painted crosses, could have for late medieval Italian beholders. Through both a holistic and focused approach, this dissertation contributes a new corpus to the study of late medieval Italian art and establishes painted processional crosses’ distinctive mediatory power in an age of religious expansion.

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS