The hermits and monks of Camaldoli uphold asceticism or spiritual purification of the soul to be a fundamental tool for aligning the mind, body, and spirit in one’s pilgrimage towards and contemplation of God. The architecture, landscape, and visual imagery of this Order, which was founded a millennium ago, plays a fundamental role in the somaesthetic cultivation of its asceticism. This essay analyzes architectural design of the Order’s cloistered environments, which were built in forests, islands, and in cities, as well as the monks’ daily viewing of art (altarpieces, private devotional paintings, and illuminated manuscripts), whose imagery exemplified composure of the ascetic body. The study pays particular attention to representations of St. Romuald of Ravenna, the founding father and argues that the rules governing and shaping the ascetic body are portrayed more explicitly by monk artists, such as Don Lorenzo Monaco. Many of the terms found in the Regola or Rules of the Camaldolese Order, including ingegnare (to devise) or composizione (to compose), correlate with those found in treatises about art, sparking intriguing questions about the role of vision in the ascetic quest for aligning mind, body, and soul.

In this paper, part of a larger book project on early Renaissance manuscripts of Francis’ legend, I will consider how the issue of poverty is reflected in two illustrated manuscripts of this text, made in Italy about one century apart. The first, illuminated in central Italy in the early fourteenth century (Madrid, Archive, Church of St. Francis) apparently served as a model for a second codex made in the mid-fifteenth century in Brescia (Collegio St. Bonaventure, Rome). In this paper, I will consider where and why the artists diverged from the model and look at the larger issues surrounding the creation of a copy of this manuscript over a century later. I will argue that the second copy may have been made in the context of the Franciscan Observant reform movements of the fifteenth century. In looking back to an earlier manuscript’s images of Francis’ life, the friars in Brescia who likely commissioned the second manuscript sought to return to the more extreme poverty and bodily asceticism of an earlier era. As a result, both manuscripts contain unusual iconographic programs designed to instruct friars in the appropriate use of their bodies in Franciscan devotional practices.

Fra Angelico’s tri-lobed shaped panel of the Last Judgment, painted after 1426 for the Camaldolese monastery of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Florence, is filled with nearly two hundred delicately rendered figures of the saved and the damned organized on either side of a vacant necropolis rendered in dramatic one-point perspective. Christ sits in judgment above, with exquisite golden rays of divine light emanating from his body. Recent scholarship on the panel has centered on the technical aspects of Angelico’s working process and the spiritual message the painting conveyed to the Camaldolese monks who lived at the Angeli. This paper instead examines the painting through the lens of humanistic interest in optics in the early Quattrocento. It situates Angelico and his early career within the context of the intellectual circle of secular humanists that surrounded Ambrogio Traversari at the monastery between the 1420s-1430s and considers the intersections of the painting’s form and function with the scientific and mathematical treatises discussed and developed by key members of the group. Ultimately, the paper offers a sophisticated reading of the Last Judgment that accounts for its radical composition and connects to ancient and contemporary ideas of vision as a form of touch.