(Paul Criado / Heights Staff)
Boston College hosted the annual Josephine von Hennenberg Lecture in Italian Art on Tuesday, featuring Holly Flora of Tulane University, who presented Mirror of Eternity: The Croce Dipinta and the Franciscans Between Medieval and Renaissance.
Held in the McMullen Museum of Art, this lecture united students, faculty, and art enthusiasts alike to explore a powerful convergence between faith, art, and history.
This lecture aligns incredibly well with the fall exhibition, Medieval | Renaissance: A Dialogue on Early Italian Painting. The exhibit is currently on view for all students and is a must-see if you’re near the McMullen.
“The exhibition really asks us to think about how we can consider and also resist these words ‘Medieval’ and ‘Renaissance,’ these traditional categories of periodization,” Flora said.
Rejecting these oversimplifications is a central theme of the exhibition and was a key point in Flora’s lecture.
She first introduced Cimabue, an Italian artist who lived during this liminal space between the Medieval and Renaissance periods.
“Cimabue is often celebrated as the evolutionary link between these two eras,” Flora said.
Flora emphasized the importance of painted crosses, or croce dipinta, a format popularised by the Franciscans in the 13th century. She argued that the rise of naturalism in Florentine art cannot be separated from Franciscan spirituality—the Order profoundly influenced both subject matter and form.
While Cimabue is often highlighted for creating a more convincing sense of space, Flora emphasised that male artists like Cimabue, specifically those in Florence, were not the only driving forces of artistic development in this time.
“I wanted to complicate some of the traditional ideas about this so-called transition period between Medieval and Renaissance, including kind of interrogating the idea of the privileged of male genius artists, like Cimabue,” Flora said. “I really began to think about how he was only one of many interrelated agents of change.”
Flora continued to contextualize the rise of painted crosses, explaining that they became increasingly common in Italian churches. To explore their significance deeper, she explained how these crosses functioned not as purely decorative but as instruments of devotion.
“The painted cross became the visual focal point for those gathered to hear mass, helping them to experience what has sometimes been termed ocular communion,” said Flora.
The focus of the lecture then pivoted to explain the significant stylistic shift in the depiction of Christ. Flora contrasted the triumphant, stoic Christ of the 12th century with the later Christus patiens type. This shift, she argued, was deeply tied to Franciscan spirituality. The result allowed viewers to engage empathetically with Christ’s suffering.
Flora then stylistically explored the innovative treatment of form and light in Cimabue’s Santa Croce crucifix.
“While both feature the Christus patiens, the Santa Croce crucifix has much softer painterly brush strokes contouring the musculature of Christ’s body, marked by subtle contrasts of light and shadow,” said Flora. “The nakedness of Christ was equated with his poverty. Christ’s nudity was intimately connected with the idea of the nudity of Francis.”
She emphasised how the near transparency of Christ’s loincloth in this croce dipinta was linked to Franciscan devotion and enhanced contemplative engagement.
Flora then gave particular attention to women’s role in shaping devotional practice. In discussing Clare of Assisi, she highlighted the idea of Christ as a mirror for meditation.
Flora argued that Clare’s vision helped viewers understand that a painted cross prompted the nuns to consider the duality of Christ’s nature as fully human and fully divine.
The lecture concluded with the story of a 2019 discovery: A small Cimabue panel was found in a woman’s kitchen outside Paris and later identified as part of a fragmented narrative diptych commissioned for a Poor Clare convent.
This ‘kitchen Cimabue,’ as Flora described it, highlights the complex circulation of art and devotional practice in medieval Italy, revealing how these narrative sequences shaped the visual experience of Christ’s life and passion.
“As historians, when we look into the past, we are likewise searching for something we can only see dimly,” said Flora. “But even in our imperfect glimpses into the past, hopefully we can shape how we relate to the divine, to the world, and most importantly to ourselves.”
The lecture forced listeners to reconsider the ubiquitous narrative of Medieval and Renaissance art. It was not simply the achievement of male geniuses in Florence—the artistic transformation was both collective and devotional in nature.
In painted crosses, Christ’s humanity and the saints’ devotion converge, creating a mirror through which viewers, both then and now, might get a glimpse of both divinity and humanity.