Ritual, Gender, and Narrative in Late Medieval Italy: Fina Buzzacarini and the Baptistery of Padua

Ritual, Gender, and Narrative in Late Medieval Italy is the first English-language study of the baptistery of Padua and its extraordinarily rich fresco program, which opens with Genesis and closes with the Apocalypse. Remarkably, when the building was refashioned and frescoed by Giusto de’ Menabuoi in the 1370s, it was a woman, Fina Buzzacarini, who funded the enterprise. In late medieval Italy, baptisteries were potent symbols of civic identity, solidarity, and pride, and towns spent lavishly on them - but no other baptistery was so radically reworked at the behest of a woman. Remarkably, too, though the building continued to function as Padua’s baptismal church, the renovations transformed it into the mausoleum of Fina Buzzacarini and her family. This volume takes an interdisciplinary approach, using close visual analysis to argue that to a surprising degree, Fina exerted control over the images. The author argues too that ritual is equally important in understanding the frescoes: that in multiple ways that have rarely been considered, the images respond to and participate in the ritual enacted in this sacred space. The prayers intoned at the font, the actions of the officiant, the hymns chanted in procession and inside the baptistery, and even details of the rite all find visual echoes on the baptistery’s walls. Ultimately, gender and ritual intersect in the multilayered frescoes of the Padua baptistery.