Thus is the Blessed Julia, to whom Certaldo has always expressed great devotion, defined. The blessed woman rests in the Church of Santi Jacopo e Filippo, in front of a bust of Certaldo’s most famous son, Giovanni Boccaccio, allowing us to become acquainted with the spirituality of this center in the Valdelsa. The Blessed Julia was part of a group of hermit saints in the Valdelsa, similar to Fina of San Gimignano and Veridiana of Castelfiorentino. There are many similarities, especially to the latter, from their modest origins and their extremely humble work, one worked for the Attavanti family, and Julia worked for the Tinolfi family of Certaldo where she was a maidservant. Following the Tinolfis, who moved to the city in the 1340’s, Julia also went to Florence where – unlike Veridiana who was never part of any order – she joined the Augustinians, who later, together with the Tinolfis, promoted her cult.
The Parish Church of San Lazzaro a Lucardo was the mother church for the churches of Certaldo, the Church of Santi Tommaso e Prospero and the Church of Santi Jacopo e Filippo, at one time of Santi Michele e Jacopo. Set a little outside the town along the Via Francigena, it had very ancient origins, since it was already mentioned in the10th century. Its period of major splendor was during the 13th century when it was guided by prominent priests and rectors. At that time, there were six suffragans that became sixteen in the following century. Its architecture is an interesting example of the importation of Lombard Romanesque to Tuscany, as exemplified especially by the three apses articulated by subtle pilasters that come together in hanging arches, creating an airy gallery with a clear Lombard imprint. It is the most authentic and untouched part of the building, while the façade, which preserves the antique tri-partition of the Romanesque era, was remodeled with the addition of a central window.
The interior basilican plan with three aisles that rest on rectangular pillars, later adorned by Cenni di Francesco’s frescoes, had a crypt under the central nave and a raised presbytery with the main altar. From 1363 onward, the parish church was under the patronage of the Gianfigliazzi owners, having been endowed to Filippo Gianfigliazzi. The Gianfigliazzis, proprietors of the Castle of Santa Maria Novella, were munificent patrons, commissioning important works of art that are still kept in the church, such as the baptismal font and the holy water stoup, as well as furnishing it with precious silver works, the majority of which are currently displayed in the Museum.
It was this very Gianfigliazzi family that had a dispute with the powerful Augustinians who, certainly since 1422 – probably in 1372, the time of Brother Giovanni Benci’s election to the position of canon – established themselves in the Church of Santi Jacopo e Filippo. Evidence of the dispute is, next to the church’s entry door, a large holy water stoup dated 1572, formerly used as a baptismal font, reduced to this function at the will of the bishop with a decree in 1632-33 that denied the baptismal right to the Church of Santi Jacopo e Filippo, as the inscription indicates. The Augustinians, in fact, exercised real control over the territory, especially in the areas neighboring the church, often laying claim to privileges of immunity and exemptions from the bishop’s vicar, thus as the conventions established between the parish priest Gino Gianfigliazzi and the convent’s prior Michelangiolo Bevilacqua demonstrate. The Augustinians codified the cult of the Blessed Julia and in 1672 charged Father Andrea Arrighi, known as Capranica from the name of his birthplace, with drawing up the history of the church. Capranica, who later became the prior of Santo Spirito, was devoted to the celestial patroness of Certaldo all his life, until 1702 the year of his death. The Augustinians remained at Certaldo until the convent’s suppression in 1783.
by Rosanna Caterina Proto Pisani
in, Museo d’arte sacra di Certaldo. Guida alla visita del museo e alla scoperta del territorio, a cura di Rosanna Caterina Proto Pisani, Polistampa 2006
Administratively divided between the provinces of Florence and Siena, Valdelsa is a borderland. The town of Certaldo is set at the end of the Florentine Valdelsa almost equidistant from the two cities, which are among the most culturally active in Tuscany, which have performed a leading role in the field of the figurative arts at certain periods. Thus, Florence and Siena are the centres of a figurative patrimony that we recognize in many of the works present in the Certaldo Museum. If the two 13th century Madonnas have been carried out by Florentine masters, the Master of the Bigallo and Meliore, early evidence of Sienese painting was already visible in the 14th century. Thus the Bagnano Triptych, assigned to Ugolino di Nerio, documented in Florence where he worked in the Churches of Santa Maria Novella and of Santa Croce, and possibly Duccio’s most refined disciple, seems to have drawn on Giotto’s Madonna in the Badia Polyptych for the Madonna on the central panel.
Among the collections in the Fucecchio Museum of Sacred Art, the textile sector is distinguished by its variety and richness, permitting an interesting excursus in the textile manufacturing styles and techniques of the 17th and 18th centuries. Florentine production is represented by various examples. The chasuble in chiseled velvet on a fine cloth interwoven with silver from the Collegiate Church of San Giovanni Battista, again proposes – although with a variant that substitutes a blackberry for a pine cone – the classical 15th century motif of a thistle flower within an ogival stitch-frame, that spread throughout Tuscany with great success during the 16th century. The fortune of such a motif, carried out with different techniques also in the following century, was even taken up again in a 19th century revival.
Recovered identity: Giovanni di Ser Giovanni known as Lo Scheggia, Giovanni Larciani and Bartolomeo Ghetti
In art history studies, often unknown artists are baptized using the name of a principal work, the so-called namepiece used in the Anglo-Saxon historiography, around which revolves the corpus of other works grouped on the basis of stylistic elements. In the last thirtyfive years, art history scholars have been able to identify some of the artists present in Fucecchio, that were still without a biographical identity in the Museum’s 1969 catalog. Thus, the Master of Fucecchio, who takes his name from the Museum’s mid-15th century panel depicting the Madonna with Child In Glory Of Cherubs With Saints Sebastian and Lazarus, Mary Magdalene and Martha, also known as the Master of the Cassone Adimari from the front of a chest in the Florence Academy, was identified by Luciano Bellosi (San Miniato exhibition catalog, 1969), as Giovanni di Ser Giovanni, also known as Scheggia or Scheggione, as he signed the fragmentary fresco depicting the Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian in the Oratory of San Lorenzo in San Giovanni Valdarno.
Among the oldest works kept in the Museum is a small painting representing a Holy Deacon and a Saint, may be Saint Barbara, owned by the Florentine Galleries, which bought it in 1829. In storage with the label saying “Russian-Byzantine School”, it was first given on loan to the Accademia Etrusca in Cortona and then to the Museum of Fucecchio when it was inaugurated, as it is part of a cross painted for the Church of San Salvatore in Fucecchio where it had been until 1780. Important evidence of the cross’ successive peregrinations (Pisa Cathedral and then the Dal Pozzo Chapel in the town’s Monumental Cemetery) and of its dismemberment are some 19th century engravings that have allowed art historians to trace its history.
Gaetano Maria Rosati, a leading figure of 19th century Fucecchio culture, stated in one of his essays: “The Fucecchio church boasts an uncommon celebrity among the famous churches of Tuscany and, if it does not rival with the main ones, perhaps it surpasses them for the singularity of the events regarding it that have so much to do with ecclesiastical history… it is the last of its merits to be and to have been a privileged territory independent from time immemorial” (in «Bullettino Storico Empolese», X, 1966). The pride with which Rosati emphasized the peculiarity of the Fucecchio church was the same that, at the end of
the 18th century, had spurred Canon Giulio Taviani, after the discovery of ancient documents, to ask the parish of San Giovanni Battista in Fucecchio, the town’s religious fulcrum, be elevated to a co-cathedral of the diocese.
An entire hall of the Museum of the Collegiate Church of Sant’Andrea gathers, both in quantity and quality, the best of an important Florentine workshop of the second half of the 15th century, the Botticini family of painters active for about 40 years, as documents from Empoli, Valdelsa and Valdarno can testify. Francesco Botticini, the leading painter born in 1466, was a “son of an artist”, since his father Giovanni di Domenico was – as documents record – a painter of «naibi», that is, playing cards. His training, after the early rudiments learned from his father, took place at first in the extremely prolific workshop of Neri di Bicci then passing rapidly to a more up-todate and stimulating workshop, that of Verrocchio, where many personalities, who marked Florentine painting in the second half of the 15th century, were trained.
The picture gallery’s first hall, on the upper floor, has gathered interesting works from the Florentine workshops that were in great favor between the 14th and 15th centuries, with a display of works by masters of a certain importance: Agnolo Gaddi, Niccolò di Lorenzo, Mariotto di Nardo and Lorenzo di Bicci. Lorenzo di Bicci, active in the second half of the 14th century, was the founder of a workshop that
continued to work with great technical skill and decorative knowledge throughout the entire 15th century, inherited first by his son Bicci and later by his grandson, Neri. In the Museum of the Collegiate Church of Empoli, there are works representative of all the dynasty’s members, allowing us to observe the traditional organization of workshops and the work that was carried out in them: portable altars, acroteria, chests, puerpera’s trays, banners but also the coloring of statues.
«Therefore, Empoli can boast the possession of two of Masolino’s paintings»: thus in 1902 did the famous American critic, Bernard Berenson, attribute to Masolino the two masterpieces present in this Tuscan city: the Madonna with Child in the Church of Santo Stefano degli Agostiniani («the most charming») and the Christ in Pietà in the Collegiate Church («the most noble»), at one time attributed to
Masaccio. A few years later, in 1905, documents related to the 1424 payment for the frescoes of the Company of the Cross to Masolino were discovered: «Said chapel named above for which the Company commissioned its painting have paid to Maso di Cristofano, a painter from Florence, seventy-four gold florins on the day of 2 November 1424, as appears in our ancient books» (O.H. Giglioli 1905).
The Museum of the Collegiate Church of Empoli arose on a background of Risorgimento uprisings aimed at creating the Unification of Italy. Its origin dates back to 29 June 1859, when the provisional government of Tuscany awarded the Opera di Sant’Andrea a first grant of 5,040 liras as a subsidy for the restoration and enlargement of the church. The contribution, assigned in a timely manner, was to be used also to restore some ancient works kept in the church: on 13 February 1860, the Ministry was notified that the Company of Saint Lawrence, inside the Collegiate Church, was the seat designated for the establishment of the picture gallery. In order to understand the speed with which the contribution was granted, certainly not at a time suited to setting up a museum in a small provincial town, it must be remembered that the Minister of Foreign Affairs for the provisional government was the lawyer Vincenzo Salvagnoli, member of an old Empoli family that could boast its own chapel in the Collegiate Church: in all respects, he can be considered the father of the Museum of the Collegiate Church.
The sacred paraments displayed in the museum are only a limited part – as it comes out from the ancient inventories – of the basilica’s textile sets, increased over the centuries by precious gifts to the Virgin, especially on the occasion of the famous processions of 1633 and 1711. In the limited number of objects – all of the highest quality – it is necessary to emphasize the presence of a large group of “capes”, specific objects, specially made for the Madonna of Impruneta. The capes are rectangular cloths, used to cover devotional images, as for example, the Santissima Annunziata in Florence, increasing their aura of sacredness. In the specific case of the Madonna of Impruneta, the cape was not just used to cover the image on the altar but it also accompanied the Madonna in her processions.
With the end of the Medici dynasty and the accession of the Lorraines, in the 18th century, the cult of the Virgin was somehow restrained. The Enlightenment policy tended to promote a lay state and was adverse to certain exterior displays, such as the cult of the images, the processions, and the relics. Inside the Church itself there were trends tinged with Jansenism that considered these manifestations to be forms of superstitions.
The cult of the Madonna of Impruneta reached its climax with the Medici dynasty that came to define her as the Family Madonna”. If, during the grand duchy of Cosimo I, rather averse to exterior manifestations, there were only two processions, it was especially during the regency of Cristina of Lorraine and of Maria Maddalena of Austria, and so under Cosimo III, that the cult of the Madonna of Impruneta was in great favor.
Monsignor Antonio di Bellincione from the ancient and powerful degli Agli family, “extremely learned in Greek and in Latin and a man of great honesty”, according to the characterization by his biographer Vespasiano da Bisticci, from 1439 he was the parish priest of the church of Santa Maria which he endowed with numerous architectural interventions and where he died in 1477.
“A peste, fame et bello libera nos Domine”(i.e., From plague, famine and war, o Lord, deliver us). This was the invocation that accompanied the Virgin of Impruneta during her transfers to Florence. The first procession that brought the Madonna of Impruneta to Florence, giving birth to the very close relation that sprang up between the city and the Impruneta icon, took place in 1354, a few years after the black death of 1348.
The monumental sculpture group representing The Mourning over the Dead Christ, that dominates the altar of the oratory of San Francesco has recovered, after a recent and skillful restoration, the refined tones and the compositional harmony that permit reconciliating the subject’s intense dramatic spirit with the solemnity of the forms typical of the best Florentine plastic art tradition. That is because this important work, datable to the second decade of the 16th century, is the epitome of a long and experienced culture that found unparalleled applications in the Florentine Renaissance, which were widely studied by Giancarlo Gentilini, a specialist in this sector. From the beginning of the 15th century, terracotta sculpture experienced in Florence a true rebirth characterized by the recovery of classical artistic experiences; in this context, around 1440, Luca della Robbia (1399/1440-1482) developed, with technical intelligence and artistic mastery, the potentialities of clay reliefs by covering their surfaces with a ceramic enamel thus giving them new expressive values as well as making them more resistant to atmospheric agents.
Among the early artistic representations created in order to show and affirm Christ’s humanity, those of the Crucified, alone or surrounded either by mourners or by scenes of the Passion, had experienced a progressive diffusion beginning from the 5th century, using artistic means of various types and materials: painting on panels, sculpture, fresco, mosaic, ivory, enamel and so on. From the 13th century onwards this “humanization” of Christ further progressed in a dramatic sense, supported by formal and technical innovations that permitted a more decided naturalism and, occasionally, a strong pathos. Even the witnesses to Christ’s agony participate in this
dramatization, assuming emotional attitudes that range from a contained sorrow to meditation and despair in scenes which are differently crowded and complex.
The hospice of San Francesco in Greve was, for centuries, a significant Franciscan settlement in the Greve area, subordinate to the larger Croce convent in San Casciano that, together with the important settlements of San Vivaldo (Montaione) and of Vivaio (Incisa), was among the principal Franciscan centers of the Strict Observance in the area south of Florence. Everything in the small complex in Greve evokes a Franciscan spirituality: from the simplicity of the structure to the iconographic repertory of the sacred images housed in the oratory, both in those carried out for the hospice itself but also in those that arrived here from other churches in the area.
The core of the ecclesiastical furnishings displayed in the Museum of Sacred Art in Tavarnelle – apart from two exceptional 13th century crosses and some 14th-15th century exemplars – is made up for the most part by works in silver from the 18th and 19th centuries. The majority of these objects were crafted in Florentine workshops, as is demonstrated by the stamping: next to the city stamp (a walking lion turned to the left) could also appear the stamp of the assayer, who tested the alloy quality of the silver, and that of the maker, namely the silversmith who created the object.
The consistent collection of paintings by Neri di Bicci as well as one by his grandfather, Lorenzo di Bicci, housed in the Museum of Sacred Art, invites us to talk about one of the main Florentine workshops. Often a family-run business consisting of different generations of artists linked by kinship, the workshop guaranteed the continuity of the craft and offered advantages to its numerous members.
Not only were the sons of artists exempted from paying the membership fee to the Guild of Physicians and Apothecaries, but they also had the possibility of an early apprenticeship. The handing down of management also took place gradually, as in the case of Bicci who inherited the management from his father Lorenzo, and of Neri who received it from Bicci.