Politics on the Cloister Wall: Fra Angelico and His Humanist Observers at San Marco

This dissertation reevaluates the Medici patronage of Fra Angelico at the convent of San Marco in order to examine the emergence of an innovative lay viewing practice in the Quattrocento. By considering the site's elite lay-humanist audience, virtually overlooked in art-historical scholarship, the project traces how the burgeoning interest in Greek and Latin studies in fifteenth-century Florence ultimately accounts for the Medici decision to finance the rebuilding and decoration of San Marco in the late 1430s and 1440s. Further, it contends that entire sections of Fra Angelico's decorative program at the convent were created with this secular audience in mind. Thus challenging the dominant notion that San Marco was a strictly cloistered Observant Dominican institution, it takes into account the coexistence of religious and secular viewers at the site and provides a new conceptual model for the social use of religious environments by the laity during the early Renaissance in Florence. The confluence of Greek and Latin thought in the intellectual and social arenas of Florence in the first half of the fifteenth century provides the most cogent context for reevaluating the San Marco complex. The first part of the dissertation argues that Cosimo de' Medici's efforts to foster humanistic studies and to support the presence of Byzantine thinkers in Florence had a decisive impact on his decision to finance the restoration and decoration of San Marco-a decision that scholars until now have largely attributed to reasons of devotion as opposed to reasons of scholarship. The second part of the manuscript analyzes the humanist reception of Angelico's imagery at the convent within an interdisciplinary framework and promotes a performative reading of the decorative program. It draws on the contemporary fifteenth-century philosophical discourses produced by the lay-humanists and their Byzantine counterparts, and on the political and ritual contexts with which they were concerned, to advocate a new approach to Renaissance imagery based on an acculturated vision of the laity.