Mendicant Orders and Late Medieval Art Patronage in Italy

First emerging in the early thirteenth century, the mendicant orders rapidly rose to prominence in the religious landscape of the late medieval period. While initially quite diversified in their aims, mendicant orders are characterized by communal poverty and a consequent need for mendicancy. Their emphasis on an apostolic lifestyle involving preaching, teaching, and living among the people whom they served, contrasted with long-established monastic orders, such as the Benedictines, who isolated themselves away in the cloister. It also led them to very quickly becoming major commissioners of art and architecture, often argued to be seminal in the development of the emerging naturalism of the Duecento. Each order came to be composed of three branches: the friars, the nuns, and the tertiaries, or lay affiliates, both men and women. Which religious orders should be considered mendicant was first codified at the Council of Lyon in 1274: Franciscans, Dominicans, Carmelites, and Augustinians. While these four formed the core of the mendicant orders, others were added over the subsequent centuries, including the Trinitarians, Mercedarians, Jesuati (originally a lay congregation, not an order), Minims, etc. The mendicant identity of the Servites is more problematic and complex than that of the original four, but was definitively established by 1418. In this article, we provide a guide to the scholarship on the artistic patronage of the four original mendicant orders, as well as the Servites, in the period from c. 1200 to 1400. After a general overview of the problematics connected to mendicant patronage, the article is organized primarily by order. Each section first presents a brief selection of the most important historical references for the order to orient the reader, and then continues on to consider general studies on the order’s art patronage, on patronage by nuns (when possible), and on key monuments and works of art of the order. As a preliminary warning, scholarship on the singular mendicant orders’ patronage is fragmented and unbalanced. Franciscans occupy the leading position, with Dominicans a distant second. Only recently a book was devoted to Augustinians (Art and the Augustinian Order in Early Renaissance Italy, edited by Louise Bourdua and Anne Dunlop [Aldershot, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007]), while Carmelites and Servites are the most lacking. Due to a lack of prestigious (and therefore visible) settlements or works of art, nuns’ patronage tends to be understudied and it could not be included in the Carmelites entry, since the order did not accept women until after 1452.