Stitches and Patches: The Franciscan Habit in an Engraving by Lucas Vorsterman

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all those who have contributed to discussions that have resulted in this essay, particularly the anonymous readers, whose comments changed the ways in which I thought about some of the material.

Notes

1 For details of Vorsterman’s life, see Henri Hymans, Lucas Vorsterman: Catologue raisonné de son Oeuvre (Brussels: Bruylant-Christophe, 1983), 13–59.

2 Pamela Askew, ‘The Angelic Consolation of St. Francis of Assisi in Post-Tridentine Italian Painting’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 32 (1969): 304–05.

3 Dorothea Bieneck, Gerard Seghers, 1591–1651: Leben und Werk des Antwerpener Historienmalers (Lingen, Germany: Luca Verlag, 1992), 157–58 (A31).

4 Virginie Frelin and Anne Delvingt, Gérard Seghers, 1591–1651: un peintre flamand entre maniérisme et caravagisme (Valenciennes, France: Musée des beaux-arts de Valenciennes/Librairie des Musées, 2011), 62–63. The drawing, in pen and brown ink, with brown wash, measures 37.5 × 26.5 cm.

5 Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy After Receiving the Stigmata, Held by Two Angels …, 38.5 × 26.6 cm, https://wellcomecollection.org/works/dnhzkw3d.

6 Saint Francis Supported by Angels, 38.6 × 26.6 cm, https://rkd.nl/en/explore/images/259467.

7 Saint Francis Supported by Angels, 38.6 × 26.6 cm, Inv. Nr. HB 61 (Nr. 48). Bieneck, Gerard Seghers, 158–59 (A31a).

8 For an overview of the ‘Iconography’, see Joaneath A. Spicer, ‘Anthony van Dyck’s Iconography: An Overview of Its Preparation’, Studies in the History of Art 46 (1994): 325–64.

9 See Dillian Gordon, ‘A Perugian Provenance for the Franciscan Double-sided Altar-piece by the Maestro di San Francesco’, The Burlington Magazine 124 (1982): 71, note 19.

10 For a brief introduction to these texts, see the ‘Introduction’ to “The Deeds of Blessed Francis and His Companions by Ugolino Boniscambi of Montegiorgio (1328–1337) and The Little Flowers of Saint Francis (A Translation and Re-Editing of The Deeds of Saint Francis and His Companions by an Anonymous) (After 1337)’, in Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, vol. 3, The Prophet, ed. Regis J. Armstrong, J.A. Wayne Hellmann, and William J. Short (New York, London and Manila: New City Press, 1999), 429–34. See also, Askew, ‘The Angelic Consolation’ (299), who notes a similar incident at Rieti, related in Thomas of Celano’s Vita Secunda, chapter 89.

11 ‘The Little Flowers of Saint Francis’, in Saint Francis of Assisi Writings and Early Biographies: English Omnibus of the Sources for the Life of Saint Francis, ed. Marion Habig (London: SPRC, 1979 [1973]), 1443–44.

12 Askew, ‘The Angelic Consolation’, 304.

13 Ibid., 289.

14 Ibid., 281.

15 Ibid., 281–82.

16 Ibid., 304.

17 An exception to this, in relation to the Franciscan habit, is Cordula van Wyhe, ‘The Making and Meaning of the Monastic Habitat Spanish Habsburg Courts’, in Early Modern Habsburg Women: Transnational Contexts, Cultural Conflicts, Dynastic Continuities, ed. Anne J. Cruz and Maria Galli Stampino (Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2013). However, she does not discuss representations of stitched seams or the stitching on patches, as her focus is on courtly monasticism.

18 Elizabeth Birbari, ‘Stitchery in Classical and Renaissance Art’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 34 (1971): 318–20; and Aileen Ribeiro, Clothing Art: The Visual Culture of Fashion, 1600–1914 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2016), 3.

19 For discussion on touch, texture, and the patched habit, see Cordelia Warr, ‘Touch, Sight, and the Patched Franciscan Habit’, in Aesthetic Theology in the Franciscan Tradition: The Senses and the Experience of God in Art, ed. Xavier Seubert and Oleg Bychkov (New York: Routledge, 2019), 209–33.

20 Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata, 48.3 × 33.5 cm, https://wellcomecollection/org/works/gt6n2syk. The print in the Wellcome Collection is not dated, but a print in the Minneapolis Institute of Art (accession no. 2012.92.4) has the date 1593.

21 Spicer, ‘Anthony Van Dyck’s Iconography’, 331.

22 Gerard Seghers, Saint Francis and the Angel, c. 1619, oil on canvas, 122 × 98 cm, Musée des Beaux Arts, Caen, inv. 2017.2.1.

23 Julius S. Held, ‘Rubens and Vorsterman’, in Julius S. Held, Rubens and His Circle, ed. Anne W. Lowenthal, David Rosand, and John Walsh (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), 114. The essay was originally published in The Art Quarterly 22 (1969): 111–29.

24 Peter Paul Rubens, The Stigmatisation of Saint Francis, c. 1616, oil on canvas, 382 × 243 cm, Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne.

25 On Rubens’ painting, see Thomas L. Glen, ‘The Stigmatization of Saint Francis by Peter Paul Rubens’, Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch 42 (1981): 133–41, and Willibald Sauerländer, The Catholic Rubens: Saints and Martyrs, trans. David Dollenmayer (Getty Research Institute: Los Angeles, 2014), 117–24, first published, in 2011, as Der Katholische Rubens: Heilige und Märtyrer.

26 Held, ‘Rubens and Vorsterman’, 114–16.

27 On the mozzetta, see Servus Gieben, ‘Per la storia dell’abito Francescano’, Collectanea Franciscana 66 (1996): 455–56.

28 Tim Ingold, ‘The Textility of Making’, Cambridge Journal of Economics 34 (2010): 91–102.

29 Thomas of Celano, ‘The Life of Saint Francis 9:22’, in Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, vol. 1, The Saint, ed. Regis J. Armstrong, J.A. Wayne Hellmann, and William J. Short (New York, London, and Manila: New City Press, 1999), 202.

30 Sauerländer, The Catholic Rubens, 115.

31 Bartholomew of Pisa, Liber aureus, inscriptus Liber conformitatem vitae beati, ac seraphici Patris Francisci ad vitam Iesu Christi (Bologna: Alessandro Benazzi, 1590).

32 For a brief discussion of these issues, see André Vauchez, Francis of Assisi: The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Saint, trans. Michael F. Cusato (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2012), 228–31, first published, in 2009, as François d’Assise: entre histoire et mémoire.

33 Paul Hanbridge, trans., The Capuchin Constitutions of 1536 (Rome: Collegio San Lorenzo di Brindisi, 2006), 6 (lines 26–28), https://capuchins.org/documents/Constitutions1536.pdf. The Latin text has been published in Costanzo Cargnoni, ed., I frati Cappuccini: Documenti e testimonianze del primo secolo, 5 vols (Perugia: Edizioni Frate Indovino, 1988–93), vol. 1, 249–64.

34 Anne Hollander, The Language of Clothes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993 [1975]), 34–35.

35 Federico Borromeo, Sacred Painting: Museum, ed. and trans. Kenneth S. Rothwell, Jr (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2010), 130–31 (bk 2, ch. 11, par. 9).

36 For an English translation of the Regula Bullata, see Armstrong, Hellmann, and Short, eds, Francis of Assisi, vol. 1, 99–106 (101). The Latin text is available in Kajetan Esser, Die Opuscula des Hl. Franziskus von Assisi, (Rome: Editiones Collegii S. Bonaventurae ad Claras Aquas, 1976), 363–72 (367), ‘Et fratres omnes vestimentis vilibus induantur et possint ea repeciare de saccis et aliis peciis cum benedictione Dei’.

37 David Flood, ed., Early Commentaries on the Rule of the Friars Minor, vol. 2, Peter of John Olivi, John Pecham (Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute Publications, 2017), 28–29.

38 Neslihan Şenocak, The Poor and the Perfect: The Rise of Learning in the Franciscan Order, 1209–1310 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2012), 49; David Burr, The Spiritual Franciscans: From Protest to Persecution in the Century after Saint Francis (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), 2.

39 Elizabeth Currie, Fashion and Masculinity in Renaissance Florence (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 74.

40 Carole Collier Frick, Dressing Renaissance Florence: Families, Fortunes, and Fine Clothing (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 257, note 84.

41 David Herlihy, Opera Muliebra: Women and Work in Medieval Europe (New York: McGraw Hill Publishing Company, 1990), 77, trans. from Philippe de Navarre, Les quatre âges de l’homme, ed. M. de Fréville (Paris: Société des Anciens Textes Français, 1888), 16; Paolo da Certaldo, Libro di buoni costumi, ed. Alfredo Schiaffini (Florence: F. Le Monnier, 1945), 126–28; Juan Luis Vives, The Education of a Christian Woman: A Sixteenth-Century Manual, ed. and trans. Charles Fantazzi (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 61 and 262.

42 The Capuchin Constitutions of 1536, 6 (lines 31–34).

43 Noted by John Moorman, A History of the Franciscan Order from Its Origins to the Year 1517 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 358–59. The text was published as Michael Bihl, ‘Ordinationes a Benedicto XII pro fratribus minoribus promulgatae per bullam 28 novembris 1336’, Archivum Franciscanum Historicum 30 (1937): 340–42.

44 Zacharias Boverius, Annalium seu Sacrarum historiarum ordinis Minorum S. Francisci qui Capucini nuncupantur, 2 vols (Lyons: Claudius Landry, 1632), vol. 1, 37: ‘Tunica[m] mox laceram, obsoletam, & quàm in Conventu viliorem, atque austeriorem reperire potuit, sibi comparat; cui quadratum Caputiam, illius instar, quod ei in Tabula delineatum fuerat, antea sibi pparatum assuit; eáque indutus, ac fune rudiori praecinctus, cùm manu ligneam Crucifixi Imaginem arripuisset, intempesta nocte è Conventu egreditur …’; Gieben, ‘Per la storia dell’abito Francescano’, 464. See also, Martin Elbel, ‘The Making of a Perfect Friar: Habit and Reform in the Franciscan Tradition’, in Friars, Nobles and Burghers: Sermons, Images and Prints, ed. Jaroslav Miller and László Kontler (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2010), 153.

45 Niccolò Catalano, Fiume del Terrestre Paradiso diviso in Quattro capi, o discorsi, trattato difensivo ove si ragguagli il Mondo della verità dell’antica forma d’Habito da S. Francesco (Florence: Amadore Massi, 1652), 494. For more information on seventeenth-century publications that discussed the form of Francis’s habit, see Alejandra Concha-Sahli, ‘The True Habit of St Francis: The Capuchins and the Construction of a New Franciscan Identity’, Collectanea Franciscana 87, fasc. 34 (2017), 513–52.

46 Mechthild Flury-Lemberg, Textile Conservation and Research: A Documentation of the Textile Department on the Occasion of the Twentieth Anniversary of the Abegg Foundation (Bern: Schriften der Abegg-Stiftung, 1988), 314–17; Elizabeth Coatesworth and Gale Owen-Crocker, Clothing the Past: Surviving Garments from Early Medieval to Early Modern Western Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 171–74.

47 Flury-Lemberg, Textile Conservation and Research, 314.

48 Ibid., 314–15.

49 Francis of Assisi, ‘The First Letter to the Custodians’, in Francis of Assisi, vol. 1, Armstrong, Hellmann, and Short, eds, 56–57. On medieval genuflection, see Przemysław Mrozowski, ‘Genuflection in Medieval Western Culture: The Gesture of Expiation – the Praying Posture’, Acta Poloniaw Historica 68 (1993): 5–26.

50 See, for example, the fifteenth-century Italian text translated by Daniel Bornstein, ‘How to Behave in Church and How to Become a Priest’, in Medieval Christianity in Practice, Miri Rubin, ed. (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009), 109–16 (110–11).

51 Cynthia Lawrence, ‘Confronting Heresy in Post-Tridentine Antwerp: Coercion and Reconciliation as Opposing Strategies in Rubens’ Real Presence in the Holy Sacrament’, Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art/Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 55, no. 1 (2004): 86–115.