Transforming the Church Interior in Renaissance Florence
Screens and Choir Spaces, from the Middle Ages to Tridentine Reform

Investigates the screens which divided church interiors in Renaissance Florence, and the religious and aesthetic motivations behind their elimination in the Counter-Reformation.

Joanne Allen (Author)

9781108833592, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 5 May 2022

366 pages
28.2 x 22.1 x 2 cm, 1.21 kg

'Joanne Allen's book is a key contribution to a burgeoning field: study of the crucial role played by screens and choir enclosures - now almost entirely lost - in articulating the space, functioning, and furnishing of medieval and early modern churches. Allen meets the challenge of reconstructing stories of installation, relocation, and removal across several centuries. The result is a meticulous and richly illustrated study that transforms our understanding of the evolution of the Florentine church interior.' Joanna Cannon, Courtauld Institute of Art

Before the late sixteenth century, the churches of Florence were internally divided by monumental screens that separated the laity in the nave from the clergy in the choir precinct. Enabling both separation and mediation, these screens were impressive artistic structures that controlled social interactions, facilitated liturgical performances, and variably framed or obscured religious ritual and imagery. In the 1560s and 70s, screens were routinely destroyed in a period of religious reforms, irreversibly transforming the function, meaning, and spatial dynamics of the church interior. In this volume, Joanne Allen explores the widespread presence of screens and their role in Florentine social and religious life prior to the Counter-Reformation. She presents unpublished documentation and new reconstructions of screens and the choir precincts which they delimited. Elucidating issues such as gender, patronage, and class, her study makes these vanished structures comprehensible and deepens our understanding of the impact of religious reform on church architecture.

Introduction
1. Accessing the Italian church interior
2. Transforming churches in fifteenth-century Florence
3. Transforming churches in sixteenth-century Florence
4. Community and access in the Mendicant church: Santa Maria del Carmine
5. Patronage and place in monastic churches: Santa Trinita and San Pancrazio
6. Gender and Ceremony in The Nuns' church: San Pier Maggiore
7. Behavior and reform in the civic oratory: Orsanmichele
8. Duke Cosimo I de' Medici, religious reform, and the Florentine church interior.

Subject Areas: Church history [HRCC2], Religious buildings [AMN], Renaissance art [ACND], History of art: Byzantine & Medieval art c 500 CE to c 1400 [ACK]