Images of the desert, religious renewal and the eremitic life in late-medieval Italy: a thirteenth-century tabernacle in the National Gallery of Scotland
Date
27/11/2019Author
Hope-Jones, Amelia Jennifer
Metadata
Abstract
The image of the desert at the heart of this thesis is contained within a late
thirteenth-century Italian tabernacle, on long-term loan to the National Gallery of
Scotland in Edinburgh. It is a striking and intricate narrative painting, showing
numerous scenes of eremitic life and death in a mountainous desert landscape. The
central panel of the Edinburgh Tabernacle represents the earliest surviving example
of ‘eremitic landscape’ painting in Italy (dated to some fifty years earlier than the
well-known Lives of the Anchorites fresco in the Camposanto of Pisa). It contains a
unique combination of iconography that draws from both East and West. Yet it has
been largely overlooked in the extensive literature on Italian panel painting of the
late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, and its patronage, origins and
intended function are not well understood. This thesis examines the Edinburgh
Tabernacle in some depth, drawing on recent technical analysis prompted by my
research. Seen as part of a wider cultural and religious context, it emerges as an
object of considerable artistic and historical significance. The tabernacle provides
persuasive visual evidence for a profound interest in the desert among the
increasingly urban landscape of late thirteenth-century Italy. In addition, it raises
important questions concerning the legacy of the Desert Fathers in late-medieval
Italy, the spirituality of the recently-formed Mendicant Orders, and the relationship
between Italian religious life and the monastic culture of Byzantium. This study
pursues the impulse that lies behind the making of the Edinburgh Tabernacle. It
explores connections between the tabernacle, the religious context from which it
emerged, and a number of eremitic landscape paintings made in central Italy for
different patrons between c.1330-1500. In doing so, it aims to shed new light on the
function of the object, and the significance of the eremitic life, in late-medieval Italy.