Small ensembles for private devotion became increasingly popular in 14^th-century Italy among a wide range of social classes. Although much about individual objects remain unknown, their numbers and size indicate many were used in lay homes, while others served clerics and other religious. Even ensembles with standardized subject matter, experienced through daily, physically close, personal contact, were intended to engage owners’ emotions and thus enhance their devotions. Analyzing the specific contents, compositions, and the representation of the Virgin Mary in selected works, this paper argues that the education of lay owners’ feelings reached beyond spiritual matters to condition emotions and emotional behaviors in the secular realm. Comparing the imagery with messages conveyed through other widely known cultural instruments (eg. sermons, religious plays) it will argue that these intimate images played an important role in the gendering of emotional behaviors and expectations for women in accordance with social ideas.

The vita panel—featuring a central iconic saint flanked by scenes from their life—appeared in Italy in 1235 to depict St. Francis, a new saint whom this combination of iconic and narrative imagery acted to authenticate. By 1280, the format was adapted to depict a very different kind of saint, Mary Magdalen. A well-established biblical woman famous for her dissolute life and sincere penance, the first female saint on a vita dossal appears the antithesis of the newly sainted alter Christus Francis.

I examine why Mary Magdalen was depicted using this format in the famous panel at the Accademia. I argue that this combination of narrative scenes with an iconic image presents the Magdalen as the exemplar of penitence, a virtue especially for women, seen as sinful by their nature, and explore the ways in which gender played a role in the Magdalen’s representation and reception as perfect penitent.

This paper will revisit the question of lay female access through the tramezzo screens in mendicant churches. Building from the recent work of Cooper and Heller, I will argue that lay women’s access through dividing screens depending on the kind of friars resident in the church. Rather than representing an intractable barrier to the laity, I suggest the tramezzi connoted a spiritual transition between the nave area and the choir zone beyond. What such a transition might signify for women encountering both the church and the art within depended on the identity of the order. I will argue that as some orders explicitly denied access while others tacitly allowed passage, women’s experience of moving through screens was indelibly colored by the ethos of the order. Such experience, framed by the spatial and spiritual habits of each order, prepared how women might have intellectually approached the art within a church.