Erica Nunn-Kinias

Rhode Island School of Design Museum, co-authored set of publications on the medieval and early modern sculptures in RISD’s collection, with Brown’s Practicum class, 2015-16, in: The Manual: a journal about art and its making

Devotional representations of Saint Barbara, a Christian martyr whose legend extended across both Western and Eastern medieval worlds, flourished in fourteenth-century Europe. An examination of the Providence Saint Barbara reveals a sculptural tradition with complex and colorful practices of medieval devotion to the cult of saints.

The archetypal patrons of monastic art and architecture in the Middle Ages are lay women and men whose donations were in aid of their own spiritual well-being and that of their relatives, and rarely do we consider nuns who themselves commissioned works out of their own private wealth. This paper highlights the less-studied practice of artistic patronage by nuns by examining a remarkable illuminated manuscript, Le Traité de la vanité des choses mondaines, (“Treatise on the vanity of worldly things”), commissioned by Jehanne Girand (d. 1468), abbess of the female Franciscan abbey of Longchamp, located just west of Paris in the Bois de Boulogne. Produced in 1466 for the private use of the abbess, the manuscript features nineteen richly decorated images depicting Jeanne in dialogue with the treatise’s author, the friar Jean Barthélemy, within the architecturally specific spaces of her abbey, accompanied by scenes of the outside world—inaccessible to a cloistered nun—described in the text. I present this work, with its rich layering of images: the patron, who is both subject and intended reader, is depicted in her cloistered space next to the author, her teacher, and the choses mondaines. I argue that these layers of meaning result in a dynamic, multisensory devotional tool in which the abbess plays an active role of both humble nun and supplicant to spiritual instruction and privileged patron.