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Nicholas A. Eckstein. Painted Glories: The Brancacci Chapel in Renaissance Florence.

2017; Oxford University Press; Volume: 122; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/ahr/122.5.1693

1937-5239

Loren Partridge,

Medieval and Early Modern Justice

For over two decades, Nicholas A. Eckstein has devoted himself to in-depth archival research and stellar publications on Florentine late-medieval and Renaissance popular religion, lay devotion, charitable institutions, civic culture, and neighborhood social interactions. He has primarily focused on the district of the Green Dragon on the south side of the Arno River. Calling on his social historian’s methods and sensibilities, Eckstein has produced an outstanding contribution to our understanding of the celebrated Brancacci Chapel within the Carmelite Church of Santa Maria del Carmine, one of the most prominent features of the Green Dragon district. Eckstein reconstructs to an impressively full extent the Carmine’s building history from its beginnings through the fifteenth century (i.e., before Giorgio Vasari’s 1568 renovations [26, 217 n. 14] and the 1771 fire). Eckstein identifies the early patrons of all the church’s chapels and altars and, in many cases, recovers the nature (and more rarely the remains) of their original decoration and the names of the executing artists. He is thus able to show that the Brancacci Chapel was in no way unique, but conformed throughout its history to the evolving patterns of patronage and painting of the entire church. Eckstein also establishes the fact that the artists employed in the Carmine—including the painters of the Brancacci Chapel, Masolino, Masaccio, and later Filippino Lippi—most often owed their commissions to the professional, family, and social contacts made within the Green Dragon neighborhood and the Carmelite community. To demonstrate how the subject matter of the Brancacci Chapel speaks to both the legitimacy of the friars and the status of the patrons, Eckstein outlines in detail the history (and pseudo-history) of the Carmelite order and the fortunes of the Brancacci family. Most significantly, through a close iconographical reconstruction and reading of the original program, which is based on the life and miracles of St. Peter, the author calls our attention to a series of opposed episodes within the structure of the decoration that emphasize, on the one hand, sin, disbelief, and disobedience leading to damnation, and, on the other, repentance, belief, and charity resulting in forgiveness and salvation. Eckstein also adroitly argues that this conceptual framework would have encouraged an active dialogue with viewers from the community who, through liturgy, sermons, sacred drama, hagiography, and devotional treatises, were educated to experience religion in terms of these standard Christian polarities.