The Supplicationes variae of 1293, which entered the personal library of Cosimo di Giovanni de' Medici (1389-1464) in the early fifteenth century, counts among the rich holdings of medieval and early modern manuscripts in Florence's Laurentian Library (BMLF, Plut. 25.3). By virtue of its status as an unicum, for no comparable illuminated prayer book survives from thirteenth-century Italy, this collection of sacred texts and images is one of the Laurenziana's most prized treasures and typically is withheld from consultation. An exception, however, was repeatedly made for Amy Neff, and this book is the result of a career-long study of the rare codex that began more than forty years ago with the author's dissertation. A Soul's Journey has a very high production value that puts an otherwise unavailable manuscript into the hands of students and scholars of late medieval art, history, and religion, who, no doubt, will appreciate its 245 plates and illustrations, nearly all in color, to say nothing of Neff's meticulous scholarship.
The Supplicationes consists of 388 folios whose illustrated Latin texts were copied from a variety of medieval and late medieval sources by a certain Manuel, who Neff hypothesizes was the young Manuel Fieschi, a prelate and member an elite Genoese family. Three theologically complicated full-page drawings of the Hand of God (Dextera Dei), Man as Microcosm, and the Measure of Christ precede those texts, and they are followed by thirty-three full-page, colored drawings that visually trace the life of Christ from the moment of his incarnation in the Annunciation to the end of time as represented in a two-page Last Judgment. The manuscript's final folios are decorated with twelve additional narrative and iconic images whose subjects range from a Trinity (Mercy Seat), to standing figures of saints, scenes of the martyrdoms of Sts. Stephen and Lawrence, and a miracle of St. Nicholas. The last drawing depicts the multi-tasking St. Michael, who represents the ascent of humankind to God as he vanquishes Satan with one hand and weighs souls with the other.
Via careful analyses of the manuscript's texts, and an equally diligent stylistic, iconographic, and contextual parsing of its many images, Neff walks the reader through the manuscript in ten dense chapters in much the same way its reader would have approached it. This monographic study's title encapsulates one of its primary theses: that the manuscript led its well-to-do and highly educated young owner on a spiritual journey whose purpose was to remedy "humankind's existential distress" (p. 31) and lead to salvation through vocal and contemplative prayer and a cohesive and carefully structured engagement with both text and image. The book’s title is based on The Soul's Journey into God (also known as the Journey of the Mind to God) of 1259 by St. Bonaventure (c. 1217-1274), the theologian who did so much to codify and shape Franciscan thought, devotions, and sacred art during the Order's formative years. It therefore is closely tied to the subtitle, which conveys the book's other primary theme: the Supplicationes's reliance on and relationship with Franciscan textual and visual sources. Neff persistently emphasizes the ways in which Bonaventure's writings resonate throughout the manuscript, whose contents likely were assembled under the guidance of a mentor who was a member of the Order of Friars Minor. One of many examples of the Supplicationes's Franciscan character is its focus on Christ's wounds--the very injuries that marked St. Francis's body when he received the stigmata on the remote, Tuscan mountain at La Verna--and images and texts related to holy persons to whom Francis and his followers were especially devoted, such as the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalen, and the Archangel Michael.
Neff's goal is to arrive at a holistic understanding of the manuscript, rather than to focus on issues related to the style of its illustrations as previous scholars have. Her approach finds a complement in that of other students of Italian late medieval art and mendicant visual traditions who privilege function and meaning over questions of authorship and style, such as Joanna Cannon's investigations into visual traditions associated with saints' cults and the Dominican Order, and Donal Cooper's and Janet Robson's analyses of the Franciscan mother church of San Francesco in Assisi. Neff primarily engages with the Supplicationes's texts in Chapters 3 through 5, but, as noted above, it is the degree to which the manuscript is illustrated that distinguishes it from contemporary Italian manuscripts, and, as an art historian, the author's principal concern is to provide exhaustive--sometimes overly so--stylistic, iconographic, and contextual analyses of the many images that decorate its folios. Some of those images are richly colored and gilded illuminations, and includein particular the small roundels that depict the Labors of the Months and the intricate borders in a twelve-page calendar near the beginning of the manuscript. Others are historiated and inhabited initials that adorn the subsequent devotional texts, which include various Offices and Psalters. Although they are larger in scale, the monochrome and colored drawings at the beginning and end of theSupplicationes are comparatively modest, but better suited for a manuscript whose contents are closely associated with the tenets of a religious order predicated upon a vow of poverty.
All of the Supplicationes's images are reproduced in a section of plates that follow Neff's text, and the text itself is copiously illustrated with images of Italian, English, French, and Germanic manuscripts, sculpture, and metalwork, as well as Byzantine illuminations, icons, and mosaics and Italian frescoes and panel paintings. Through these comparative illustrations, Neff shows that, despite its probable Genoese ownership and use, the manuscript's illuminations are the products of a sophisticated, multicultural fusion of northern Italian, northern European--predominantly Germanic--and Byzantine sources by artists who were grounded in miniature painting traditions associated with Bologna, Venice, and Padua. Indeed, for Neff the codex may have been produced in Genoa by artists who came to that maritime Republic from the Veneto. It should not be ruled out that, as the city in which one of the Franciscan Order's most important saints, the Portuguese-born Anthony, was buried, Padua's visual and sacred culture informed some of the manuscript's many Franciscanisms.
Although she delves into the complicated and multivalent issues related to the images' style and authorship throughout the book, Neff principally tackles them in the penultimate chapter, entitled "The Making of a Manuscript." It is here that she attributes the paintings and drawings to cohorts of anonymous artists she designates as the Life of Christ Atelier, the Joys of the Virgin Master, and the Ornamentalist, respectively. The majority of the illustrations are the work of the Life of Christ Atelier, whose stylistic debt to late Byzantine art--which is fully in keeping with the manuscript's date and provenance--is the most apparent. Taking cues from the seminal scholarship of Hans Belting and Anne Derbes, Neff elucidates the impact that late Byzantine art dating from the Palaiologan period (1261-1453) in particular had on the images, which the Atelier modified to conform to Western needs and tastes. It makes sense that this chapter comes after the systematic introduction and analysis of the manuscript's contents in the order in which they appear in the codex, but its historiographic overview of attribution issues and identification of the groups of artists who created the paintings and drawings in question might have been more helpful at the beginning of the book, where they could have anchored the subsequent contextual discussions of the pictures' appearance and meanings.
The preceding Chapters 6, 7, and 8 concern the full-page narrative and iconic colored drawings that conclude the Supplicationes. Discussion of the thirty-two Byzantinizing scenes of the life of Christ is divided between Chapters 6 and 7. The former concludes with the Raising of Lazarus and the latter launches into a discussion of the Entry into Jerusalem without introduction. The abrupt break between the two chapters coincides with the start of the manuscript's Passion sequence and appears to have been made to avoid having an excessively lengthy chapter on the Life of Christ cycle, but the shift from one to the other is conveyed solely via the chapters' titles ("Preludes to the Passion: Recognition and Belief" and "Through the Passion to Salvation"), and could have been made more transparent in the text. As with the rest of the book, Neff's analyses of the Christological scenes are detailed and multivalent and further highlight the manuscript's Franciscan-infused content, especially the images' relationship to texts such as St. Bonaventure's Tree of Life. Her discussion in Chapter 7 of Mary's swoon in the Way to Calvary, which is related to her important earlier work on images of the fainting Virgin at the base of Christ's cross (Art Bulletin 80, no. 2 [1998]: 254-73), and her fascinating analysis of Satan, who gives bloody, infernal birth to damned souls in the Last Judgment, are particularly rewarding.
An iconic drawing of the Madonna and Child Enthroned discussed in Chapter 6 merits further consideration, for Neff's explanation that it may have been inserted into the early Christ cycle to compensate for an absent scene of the Adoration of the Magi is not entirely satisfactory. She does note that, following Byzantine precedent, the heads of the approaching Magi appear to the left of the cave that Mary and the newborn Christ occupy in the Nativity, and observes that the Madonna and Child Enthroned invites the kind of devotions typically directed at altarpieces. However, she could have taken the latter observation a step further, especially with regard to where it appears in the Christ cycle. To be specific, the Madonna and Child Enthroned provides the same kind of visual break between chronological and/or thematic groupings of scenes that an iconic image, altarpiece, or change in register does in narrative cycles in churches and chapels. In the Supplicationes, the drawing follows the Massacre of the Innocents, which concludes the incarnation and infancy scenes, and precedes the Christ among the Doctors, which often, as it does here, initiates cycles of the adult Christ's life and Passion. Similar transitions occur in the near contemporary Scrovegni Chapel frescoes in Padua, where Giotto's Last Judgment provides a spatial and thematic break between the Massacre andChrist among the Doctors in the middle register of the chapel's right and left walls. Another example is the New Testament cycle in San Gimignano's Collegiata (c. 1350s), where the infancy sequence in the top register of the church's right wall ends with the Flight into Egypt and the narratives resume on the other side of an oversized Crucifixion in the middle register with Christ among the Doctors.
The organizational similarities between the aforementioned fresco cycles and some of the Supplicationes's images suggest that it would have been worthwhile to explore commonalities between how the manuscript's reader progressively navigated its text and images and how the faithful moved through the similarly complex and cohesive narrative cycles and iconic images that decorated late medieval Italian ecclesiastical and conventual spaces. In the final chapter, Neff notes that the Supplicationes's "glimpse into the intersections of Franciscan art, theology, and devotion is unique" (p. 195). While those intersections may be unique to the manuscript tradition, they are amply present in the ritual and decorative traditions of late medieval Franciscan churches. As Holly Flora has shown in Cimabue and the Franciscans (2018), which was forthcoming when this volume went to press but does appear in Neff's bibliography, Cimabue's Marian, Crucifixion, Apocalyptic (including St. Michael), and Petrine scenes in the transept of San Francesco at Assisi (c. 1277-82), likewise testify to Franciscan imagery and theology. In any event, it is more constructive to appreciate what A Soul's Journey does, than to take issue with the few things it does not, and the book stands without question as an important and valuable contribution to medieval manuscript, art, and Franciscan studies.