From Introduction: The ideal of femininity which developed in Renaissance painting, was a visual and psychological type which was to become the Western European Christian formula of the feminine. This type has survived until the present day, so a discussion of its origins can be revealing for us in the twentieth century, especially as it has been neglected in traditional art historical works. In this essay, the changes in the image of the feminine, in just under three hundred years of Florentine painting, starting with Giotto1. and ending with Raphael~· will be covered. The images will be taken from the wo rk of artists who were Florentine in training, who worked in the city or who were strongly influenced by the Florentine style of painting. I have divided the paintings I have studied into three sections. In the Religious section the paintings are mainly of Mary. The Mythological images refer to Greek and Roman myths and the humanistic interpretations of them. Finally, the Portrait and Genre images are selected on the following basis: In the genre paintings they are sometimes part of works related to religion or mythology, but, in their handling, the painters treat the figures as real human beings rather than holy or mythological figures. In others they are bona fide portrait representations. 3. I have made the above distinction because I expect that the gap between religio-mythological images and portraits will give some indication of the difference between the ideal and the reality for women of that time. The images will be analysed and changes noted in favoured types, gestures, expressions, movements, placing in the composition, relationships to others, favoured themes, costume, colour and symbols. I will point out as I proceed the effects that these elements had on the mood and tone of each image.

This dissertation examines the practice of embedding devotional objects, such as relics and painted panels, into mural images in Italy between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries. Examples can be found as far south as Amalfi, and as far north as Lombardy, and in a variety of ecclesiastical institutions, ranging from urban cathedrals, remote hermitages, and influential monastic centers. Yet despite its widespread application—found even in the Arena Chapel in Padua—the practice has never been systematically studied. Older studies of the sites taken up in this dissertation generally omit mention of their embedded objects altogether, either because the objects were seen as incidental to the larger image in which they were set, or because their inclusion did not follow certain post-medieval parameters of artistic progress. The works of this study elide traditional divisions within the study of medieval art, traversing the categories of icon and narrative, portable and monumental, and “image” and “art.” This study contends that medieval image-makers engaged the aesthetic and symbolic potential of mixing diverse media. The introduction gives an analysis of the notions of “medium” and “mixture” in the Middle Ages in order to elaborate the heuristic concepts that drive the ensuing chapters. Chapters 1-3 each examine a specific type of embedded object, and consider the various modes of combination exhibited therein. Chapter 1, “Assimilation,” examines relics that were embedded within mural images, and focuses on the apse mosaic of San Clemente in Rome, ca. 1120. Chapter 2, “Fragmentation,” analyzes the insertion of circular wooden panels in murals, and centers on the apse fresco of Santa Restituta in Naples, ca. 1175. Chapter 3, “Mediation,” considers the rectangular panel of God in the Arena Chapel in Padua, produced by Giotto between 1303 and 1305. To recuperate the intermedial practice of embedding objects in mural images, I examine the technical and aesthetic features of mixed media murals in relation to coeval understandings of mixture, media, and mediation. It was a practice that involved an understanding of the mural image not just as a flat surface for pictorial elaboration, but as a physical and spatial entity that could be manipulated and thematized within the image itself. By incorporating relic or panel into a mosaic or frescoed mural, medieval image-makers nested objects traditionally viewed as portable and venerable, into one understood as fixed and site-specific. This maneuver gave the mural a stratified quality of assemblage, producing registers of difference and ambiguity between container and contained, image and object, surface and depth. Throughout the dissertation, I explore these dialectics, demonstrating how and to what ends embedded objects establish difference, only to transcend it. The ambivalent understandings of mixture in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—sometimes a hybrid, at other times, a metamorphosis— inform my analysis of the mixed representational systems of this study. The period may be characterized by a growing intellectual interest in the observation and manipulation of physical substances, the study of which was seen to reveal the connective fabric of God’s cosmic order. The works studied here participate in this broader attention to the processes of the natural world. I therefore consider how medial combinations were seen to signal analogous behavior in the mixtures discussed by theologians, natural philosophers, and artists. Attending to both the constituent parts and the symbolic value of their combination, I show how the act of embedding worked by analogy to figure the theological processes of assimilation, fragmentation, and mediation.