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Recent discoveries have renewed scholarly focus on the convent of Santa Chiara at San Gimignano as the initial context of the text known today as the Meditationes Vitae Christi (or the Meditations on the Life of Christ) – the most widely disseminated and influential devotional text of the later Middle Ages. Péter Tóth and Dávid Falvay have fixed the text’s composition to around the year 1300 and identified its author as a local Franciscan friar named “Jacobus”. This article extends Tóth’s and Falvay’s findings by examining the refoundation of Santa Chiara at the start of 1300, when the local townsman Pardoccio di Ser Bonifazio endowed the nunnery with substantial tracts of farmland just outside San Gimignano. Pardoccio was heavily invested personally in the project. He committed his wife and young daughter to Santa Chiara as oblates, and the latter would in time takes her vows as a Clarissan nun. He would soon join the Franciscan first order as a friar at the nearby male house of San Francesco. Pardoccio’s story illuminates how family relationships could bleed across the institutional boundaries of the early Franciscan movement. But our particular focus here is on another aspect of Pardoccio’s donation: his requirement that the receipts from the farmstead should fund a permanent community of six male friars based at Santa Chiara and dedicated to the cura monialium. Pardoccio undertook to construct a cloister, well, and cells for these friars, in effect creating a male micro-convent attached to the larger female foundation (even though the town’s principal male friary was only a few hundred metres away). The San Gimignano initiative was not unique: similar provisions were made several decades later by the founder of the Clarissan nunnery of San Paolo at San Miniato. Arianna Pecorini’s research on the Clarissan foundations in Pisa has highlighted the case of San Martino in Kinzica, which incorporated a male ‘conventino’ of four friars, with its own guardian and lector. These examples invite a reappraisal of the Franciscan commitment to the cura monialium of the Clarissan movement at the start of the fourteenth century. Scholarship on Clarissan double monasteries has tended to focus on large royal foundations, like the Angevin house of Santa Chiara in Naples. The evidence gathered here suggests that double communities were more common in the early Franciscan movement than generally assumed, and included the foundation for which the Meditationes was most likely written. Recent discoveries have renewed scholarly focus on the convent of Santa Chiara at San Gimignano as the initial context of the text known today as the Meditationes Vitae Christi (or the Meditations on the Life of Christ) – the most widely disseminated and influential devotional text of the later Middle Ages. Péter Tóth and Dávid Falvay have fixed the text’s composition to around the year 1300 and identified its author as a local Franciscan friar named “Jacobus”. This article extends Tóth’s and Falvay’s findings by examining the refoundation of Santa Chiara at the start of 1300, when the local townsman Pardoccio di Ser Bonifazio endowed the nunnery with substantial tracts of farmland just outside San Gimignano. Pardoccio was heavily invested personally in the project. He committed his wife and young daughter to Santa Chiara as oblates, and the latter would in time takes her vows as a Clarissan nun. He would soon join the Franciscan first order as a friar at the nearby male house of San Francesco. Pardoccio’s story illuminates how family relationships could bleed across the institutional boundaries of the early Franciscan movement. But our particular focus here is on another aspect of Pardoccio’s donation: his requirement that the receipts from the farmstead should fund a permanent community of six male friars based at Santa Chiara and dedicated to the cura monialium. Pardoccio undertook to construct a cloister, well, and cells for these friars, in effect creating a male micro-convent attached to the larger female foundation (even though the town’s principal male friary was only a few hundred metres away). The San Gimignano initiative was not unique: similar provisions were made several decades later by the founder of the Clarissan nunnery of San Paolo at San Miniato. Arianna Pecorini’s research on the Clarissan foundations in Pisa has highlighted the case of San Martino in Kinzica, which incorporated a male ‘conventino’ of four friars, with its own guardian and lector. These examples invite a reappraisal of the Franciscan commitment to the cura monialium of the Clarissan movement at the start of the fourteenth century. Scholarship on Clarissan double monasteries has tended to focus on large royal foundations, like the Angevin house of Santa Chiara in Naples. The evidence gathered here suggests that double communities were more common in the early Franciscan movement than generally assumed, and included the foundation for which the Meditationes was most likely written. Recent discoveries have renewed scholarly focus on the convent of Santa Chiara at San Gimignano as the initial context of the text known today as the Meditationes Vitae Christi (or the Meditations on the Life of Christ) – the most widely disseminated and influential devotional text of the later Middle Ages. Péter Tóth and Dávid Falvay have fixed the text’s composition to around the year 1300 and identified its author as a local Franciscan friar named “Jacobus”. This article extends Tóth’s and Falvay’s findings by examining the refoundation of Santa Chiara at the start of 1300, when the local townsman Pardoccio di Ser Bonifazio endowed the nunnery with substantial tracts of farmland just outside San Gimignano. Pardoccio was heavily invested personally in the project. He committed his wife and young daughter to Santa Chiara as oblates, and the latter would in time takes her vows as a Clarissan nun. He would soon join the Franciscan first order as a friar at the nearby male house of San Francesco. Pardoccio’s story illuminates how family relationships could bleed across the institutional boundaries of the early Franciscan movement. But our particular focus here is on another aspect of Pardoccio’s donation: his requirement that the receipts from the farmstead should fund a permanent community of six male friars based at Santa Chiara and dedicated to the cura monialium. Pardoccio  undertook to construct a cloister, well, and cells for these friars, in effect creating a male micro-convent attached to the larger female foundation (even though the town’s principal male friary was only a few hundred metres away). The San Gimignano initiative was not unique: similar provisions were made several decades later by the founder of the Clarissan nunnery of San Paolo at San Miniato. Arianna Pecorini’s research on the Clarissan foundations in Pisa has highlighted the case of San Martino in Kinzica, which incorporated a male ‘conventino’ of four friars, with its own guardian and lector. These examples invite a reappraisal of the Franciscan commitment to the cura monialium of the Clarissan movement at the start of the fourteenth century. Scholarship on Clarissan double monasteries has tended to focus on large royal foundations, like the Angevin house of Santa Chiara in Naples. The evidence gathered here suggests that double communities were more common in the early Franciscan movement than generally assumed, and included the foundation for which the Meditationes was most likely written. Recent discoveries have renewed scholarly focus on the convent of Santa Chiara at San Gimignano as the initial context of the text known today as the Meditationes Vitae Christi (or the Meditations on the Life of Christ) – the most widely disseminated and influential devotional text of the later Middle Ages. Péter Tóth and Dávid Falvay have fixed the text’s composition to around the year 1300 and identified its author as a local Franciscan friar named “Jacobus”. This article extends Tóth’s and Falvay’s findings by examining the refoundation of Santa Chiara at the start of 1300, when the local townsman Pardoccio di Ser Bonifazio endowed the nunnery with substantial tracts of farmland just outside San Gimignano. Pardoccio was heavily invested personally in the project. He committed his wife and young daughter to Santa Chiara as oblates, and the latter would in time takes her vows as a Clarissan nun. He would soon join the Franciscan first order as a friar at the nearby male house of San Francesco. Pardoccio’s story illuminates how family relationships could bleed across the institutional boundaries of the early Franciscan movement. But our particular focus here is on another aspect of Pardoccio’s donation: his requirement that the receipts from the farmstead should fund a permanent community of six male friars based at Santa Chiara and dedicated to the cura monialium. Pardoccio undertook to construct a cloister, well, and cells for these friars, in effect creating a male micro-convent attached to the larger female foundation (even though the town’s principal male friary was only a few hundred metres away). The San Gimignano initiative was not unique: similar provisions were made several decades later by the founder of the Clarissan nunnery of San Paolo at San Miniato. Arianna Pecorini’s research on the Clarissan foundations in Pisa has highlighted the case of San Martino in Kinzica, which incorporated a male ‘conventino’ of four friars, with its own guardian and lector. These examples invite a reappraisal of the Franciscan commitment to the cura monialium of the Clarissan movement at the start of the fourteenth century. Scholarship on Clarissan double monasteries has tended to focus on large royal foundations, like the Angevin house of Santa Chiara in Naples. The evidence gathered here suggests that double communities were more common in the early Franciscan movement than generally assumed, and included the foundation for whi

Recent discoveries have renewed scholarly focus on the convent of Santa Chiara at San Gimignano as the initial context of the text known today as the Meditationes Vitae Christi (or the Meditations on the Life of Christ) - the most widely disseminated and influential devotional text of the later Middle Ages. Péter Tóth and Dávid Falvay have fixed the text's composition to around the year 1300 and identified its author as a local Franciscan friar named \"Jacobus\". This article extends Tóth\"s and Falvay's findings by examining the refoundation of Santa Chiara at the start of 1300, when the local townsman Pardoccio di Ser Bonifazio endowed the nunnery with substantial tracts of farmland just outside San Gimignano. Pardoccio was heavily invested personally in the project. He committed his wife and young daughter to Santa Chiara as oblates, and the latter would in time takes her vows as a Clarissan nun. He would soon join the Franciscan first order as a friar at the nearby male house of San Francesco. Pardoccio's story illuminates how family relationships could bleed across the institutional boundaries of the early Franciscan movement. But our particular focus here is on another aspect of Pardoccio's donation: his requirement that the receipts from the farmstead should fund a permanent community of six male friars based at Santa Chiara and dedicated to the cura monialium. Pardoccio undertook to construct a cloister, well, and cells for these friars, in effect creating a male micro-convent attached to the larger female foundation (even though the town's principal male friary was only a few hundred metres away). The San Gimignano initiative was not unique: similar provisions were made several decades later by the founder of the Clarissan nunnery of San Paolo at San Miniato. Arianna Pecorini's research on the Clarissan foundations in Pisa has highlighted the case of San Martino in Kinzica, which incorporated a male 'conventino' of four friars, with its own guardian and lector. These examples invite a reappraisal of the Franciscan commitment to the cura monialium of the Clarissan movement at the start of the fourteenth century. Scholarship on Clarissan double monasteries has tended to focus on large royal foundations, like the Angevin house of Santa Chiara in Naples. The evidence gathered here suggests that double communities were more common in the early Franciscan movement than generally assumed, and included the foundation for which the Meditationes was most likely written.

A leading scholar of Italian trecento art, Janet Robson helped to move study of the fresco cycles in the basilica at Assisi away from an exclusive emphasis on issues of attribution towards the richly documented iconographical and theological analysis in which she specialised.

The ambitious Milanese exhibition programme associated with Expo 2015 concluded with \"Giotto, l'Italia,\" at the Palazzo Reale, Milan, with Giotto being chosen alongside DaVinci to showcase Italian Renaissance art to an international public. This exhibition is intelleigent in concept, coherent in narrative and elegant in display, with curators wisely presenting a Giotto undiluted by stories of schools and influence. Their great scoop was securing the loan of the STefaneschi polyptych from the Pinacoteca Vaticana, the first time this work has ever left Rome since it was painted.

While visualizations of various types—such as maps, 3-D models, and animations—have become staples in digital humanities approaches to art and architectural history, how to integrate analog data (artworks and drawings, archival documents, and so on) into born-digital outputs remains a fundamental concern. This article discusses processes developed through ongoing work on the art historical visualization project Florence4D. It proposes an integrated approach where technologies for 3-D models, mapping, and location-aware augmented reality (AR) converge, while the research data is no more than a click away in structured ontology databases. The structure of the underlying data is key to creating a collaborative research space where the three broadly defined spatial technologies of 3-D and augmented reality, GPS, and geoinformation systems (GIS) interact, enabling researchers to move seamlessly between building-, local-, and urban-scale analysis and the interpretation of art, architecture, and urban design history.

Copper reviews Quale Francesco? Il messaggio nascosto negli affreschi della Basilica superiore di Assisi by Chiara Frugoni.

Many scholars have seen the brief pontificate of the first Franciscan pope, Nicholas IV (reigned 1288-92) as the moment when the unparalleled mural decoration of the Upper Church knave that includes the St Francis cycle was initiated at the Basilica of S. Francesco in Assisi. This article examines a passage in a tract written by a group of leading Franciscan theologians in 1312 which defended the decoration of Franciscan churches against the charge of lax observance of poverty in the Order and apparently asserts that the paintings at Assisi were ordered by Nicholas. Argues that the significance, as well as the limitations of the passage as a piece of evidence in the \"Assisi problem\" the dating and attribution of the St Francis cycle can only be properly understood by situating the text within its own historical context, two decades after Nicholas IV's pontificate. (Quotes from original text)

In 1864 the V&A (then the South Kensington Museum) purchased a large marble altar frame from a dealer in Florence. The quality of the frame identifies it as the product of a leading Florentine sculpture workshop, possibly that of Giuliano da Sangallo at the end of the fifteenth century. Its dimensions indicate that it would have housed a large altarpiece in one of the city's churches. The frame's provenance remains obscure, but this article offers the first critical evaluation of the object based on first-hand examination. Comparisons with similar frames in Florentine churches (surviving and documented) suggest that the V&A frame can be identified as an example of a particular category of monumental altar that was popular in the city in the decades around 1500. This type combined painted panel altarpieces with sculpture, integrating both within impressive architectural superstructures comprising lateral columns, elaborate entablatures, and arched lunettes. Identifiable examples housed altarpieces by Perugino, Lorenzo di Credi, Piero di Cosimo, and Ridolfo del Ghirlandaio, each juxtaposed with tin-glazed terracotta reliefs by the Della Robbia shop. The popularity of these arched frames was relatively short-lived, but their brief heyday provides important evidence for the gathering appreciation of aesthetic integration, formal order and spatial symmetry within Italian church interiors in the years around 1500.