Transforming the Church Interior in Renaissance Florence

Screens and Choir Spaces, from the Middle Ages to Tridentine Reform

Joanne Allen

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781108833592
• eBook ISBN:
  9781108988209
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Before the late sixteenth century, the churches of Florence were internally divided by monumental screens that separated the laity in the nave from the clergy in the choir precinct. Enabling both separation and mediation, these screens were impressive artistic structures that controlled social interactions, facilitated liturgical performances, and variably framed or obscured religious ritual and imagery. In the 1560s and 70s, screens were routinely destroyed in a period of religious reforms, irreversibly transforming the function, meaning, and spatial dynamics of the church interior. In this volume, Joanne Allen explores the widespread presence of screens and their role in Florentine social and religious life prior to the Counter-Reformation. She presents unpublished documentation and new reconstructions of screens and the choir precincts which they delimited. Elucidating issues such as gender, patronage, and class, her study makes these vanished structures comprehensible and deepens our understanding of the impact of religious reform on church architecture.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Note to the Reader
• Archive Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Accessing the Italian Church Interior
• Chapter 2 Transforming Churches in Fifteenth-Century Florence
• Chapter 3 Transforming Churches in Sixteenth-Century Florence
• Chapter 4 Community and Access in the Mendicant Church: Santa Maria del Carmine
• Chapter 5 Patronage and Place in Monastic Churches: Santa Trinita and San Pancrazio
• Chapter 6 Gender and Ceremony in the Nuns' Church: San Pier Maggiore
• Chapter 7 Behavior and Reform in the Civic Oratory: Orsanmichele
• Chapter 8 Duke Cosimo I de' Medici, Religious Reform, and the Florentine Church Interior
• Glossary
• Archival Bibliography
• Bibliography
• Index