14 - Visual Religious Education in Late Medieval Florence: Zanobi Perini, The Leggenda di Santo Tobia, and The Misericordia

Summary

The work of Joanna Cannon has considerably enriched our understanding of the varied functions of religious images in late medieval Italy. My contribution to her Festschrift intersects with her work, as I explore the multi-layered relationship between visual hagiography and lay religious education (something she did masterfully in her inspirational study on Margherita of Cortona). This chapter is about two illustrations in a manuscript of the Leggenda di Santo Tobia (a vernacular version of the Book of Tobit) copied and illustrated in 1408 by a Florentine youth, Zanobi di Pagolo di Agnolo Perini, for his own edification (Plate XXI, Fig. 14.3). The manuscript is bound into a miscellany, Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, Fondo Nazionale MS II.II.445 (hereafter BNCF II.II.445), which contains other texts copied by Zanobi in the years 1407–9, as well as his own illustrations (Figs. 14.1, 14.2, 14.3, Plate XX), in addition to those executed by another illustrator (Plate XXI). This is not the only such example of a miscellany produced by a teenager that has come down to us; Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana MS 1655 was copied and illustrated in 1399 by Romigi d’Ardingo di Corso de’ Ricci when he was sixteen or seventeen years old.

The illustrations in these miscellanies have received virtually no scholarly attention. Yet they are very important testimonies; they formed part of a vast corpus of images, of which very little survives, created by individuals with no artistic training, and shared by the majority of people living in urban centres. In the case of Zanobi’s miscellany, as I shall demonstrate, it bears witness to the attitude of a youth to well-known works of art. More importantly, the illustrations of the Leggenda contribute to our understanding of how visual hagiography was employed in the religious education of the young. The images appear to have been inspired by the Story of Tobit and Tobias, a fresco cycle painted c. 1350–70 in the domus residentiae of the compagnia of Santa Maria della Misericordia. According to documentary evidence, this confraternity took care of abandoned children; I shall propose in this essay that the fresco, like the text of the Leggenda, served to provide the young charges of the Misericordia with religious and moral instruction.