The murals of the life of St. Rainerius (1117—1160) in the Camposanto in Pisa, begun by Andrea da Firenze about 1377 and completed by Antonio Veneziano in 1384-86, present a new view of sainthood compared to the murals of Lives of the Hermit Saints painted some fifty years before.  While the latter reflect aspects of Dominican piety shared by the clerical elite in Pisa during the early Trecento, the former promote the urban, secular life of a local saint.  Using unpublished eighteenth century drawings of the murals, I will present a more precise reading of the murals than has been possible.  I also propose that the murals were part of a campaign during the signoria of Pietro Gambacorta (1369-92) to reclaim the Camposanto as a communal space.  Their imagery celebrates Pisa as a locus of sacred and secular activity that promised material and spiritual wealth for all its citizens.

How can a work for a private patron subtly manipulate public values? In about 1503, the Piccolomini family commissioned Pinturicchio to create a fresco in the Sienese cathedral, depicting the papal crowing of Francesco Todeschini Piccolomini, alias Pius III: a private commission (as coats of arm show) for a public place (the cathedral’s nave). Curiously, out of the flat surface of the fresco rises a sculpted element: the pope, created in stucco. Several aspects of the 15^th century Sienese public life help explain such a detail: in a politically difficult time, paintings in the Public Palace and sacre rappresentazioni often portrayed the pope as a defensor civitatis, essential to the survival of the republic. Pinturicchio’s formal choice seems to shrewdly allude to that: since the republican balance prevented them from doing explicitly, the Piccolomini circuitously tried to exploit public values in a public place for the rise of their family.

Post-Trent, public activity in the parlatorio of Venetian convents was regulated by not one, but two bodies of oversight: the religious office of the Venetian patriarch and the state-sponsored Provveditori Sopra Monasteri. Frequent visitations by both have left us with records of the nuns’ activities throughout the 17th-century. Public performances of plays in the convent parlatorio are mentioned not only in visitors’ records, but in prohibitions, licenses, and the dedicatory prefaces to plays published throughout the Veneto. This paper explores the highly contested space of the convent parlor as the perfect, if incongruous, setting for the practice of theatre–an art form in which women were still largely absent as players on Italy’s professional and court stages. In presenting the “cloistered” nun-as-actress before a diverse, public audience, this essay invites a reconceptualization of the space of theatrical production and reception in the early modern period.