Holy Matter by Sara Ritchey

Holy Matter by Sara Ritchey

Author:Sara Ritchey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2014-06-15T00:00:00+00:00


FIGURE 3.1. Pacino di Bonaguida (fl. 1302–after 1340), “Tree of Life (Tree of the Cross).” Tempera on panel, 248 x 151 cm. Ca. 1305–10. Accademia, Florence, Italy. Photo credit: Scala/ Art Resource, NY.

The similarities between the Lignum vitae paintings intended for male and female communities, however, suggest further meanings that this imagery may have communicated in the fourteenth century. All such paintings uniformly depict twelve branches with four fruits per branch, which carry the weight of the crucified body of Christ. They all clearly represent Bonaventure’s treatise, translating his meditation from a textual to a visual medium. They each include a portrait of Francis and Clare of Assisi at the base of the tree. Adjacent to Clare is Bonaventure, always clutching his open book. Like Francis’s presence there, as well as Bonaventure’s, Clare’s appearance apparently lent authority, even in the predominantly male communities for which these later images were created. The question is why—why was Clare affiliated with this tree, this treatise? And what did her image at the base of the tree convey to its viewers?

During her lifetime, the papacy, under Gregory IX and Innocent IV, deliberately sought to institutionalize Clare and her followers, to compel them to accept property and other sources of income, while, at the same time, the majority of friars resisted pastoral responsibilities and deliberately thwarted efforts to incorporate women’s houses into their order.51 After Clare’s death, these same entities struggled to control her sanctified, and thoroughly sanitized, image.52 Furthermore, poverty had ceased to inform the spiritual and practical life of the Franciscan Second Order. The epistolary Clare was replaced with the hagiographical Clare, the docile and submissive virgin. Given the contested status of Clare’s image, why should she, almost of necessity, be portrayed in the presence of the Lignum vitae? Which version of Clare was represented therein, and what was her function?

I would argue that Clare was one of the original creators of a profoundly influential method of Franciscan meditation. The lineage of the meditative devotional practice usually associated with the Lignum vitae runs through Clare and her sisters. In crafting her meditations on Christ’s life through the branches of a tree, Clare surely recalled instructional advice designed to shape enclosed women’s identities as virgins. But Clare interpreted the significance of the life of Christ in a rather different manner. She was particularly receptive to the nascent imaginative theology of the re-creation, but she considered not the incarnation but the crucifixion of Christ as the critical cosmic event that restructured the material world. The crucial devotional task of enclosed women, she believed, was to identify with the impoverished Christ, whose sacrifice offered hope for material redemption, for transformation into the image of divinity. She reinterpreted the role of brides of Christ as one of transformation rather than incarnation, not embodying the divine but sharing an identity with the divine body. Put another way, Clare took a largely Marian image of incarnation and gave it a more firmly sacerdotal meaning by emphasizing the work of the crucifixion.



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