AN \" INNUMERABLE COMPANY \" OF ANGEL-MUSICIANS AT S. MARIA NOVELLA, FLORENCE

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AN “INNUMERABLE COMPANY” OF ANGEL-MUSICIANS AT S. MARIA NOVELLA, FLORENCE {Title.} My project relates to my dissertation, “Depicting the Sound of Silence: Angel-Musicians in Trecento Sacred Art,” where “Trecento” refers to the 1300s in Italy. In essence, pictures of angel-musicians were metaphors for the actual angels who were believed to sing hymns in heaven, in concert with human beings in church. This article of faith was called “concelebration.”

{Comparison.} But I noticed that musical angels emerged only around 1100, and only in Western art—they never existed in Byzantium. This struck me as related to other factors, such as the angels’ ritual behaviors and emotional states, with the Byzantine ones looking a little worse for the difference. On top of all this, no one had remarked on a basic problem: that angels were technically both bodiless and silent. Or, relatedly, that angels, sacred images, and sacred music had similar metaphysical qualities and sanctifying functions. For my dissertation, I wanted to produce a synthetic account of the meanings and functions of musician angels, while also addressing the Byzantine question. I chose to focus on Trecento Tuscany as once place where Western and Byzantine artistic modes came together. {Quote.} I started with the idea that the medieval Church—East and West—evolved images and rituals based on the notion that angelic ministry was exemplary for human practice. I took this as license to organize my chapters around four key precepts of angelology, all of them having variable expressions through time and space. These are the angels’ liminality, aesthetics, ideal enactment of the liturgy, and multiplicity. {SMN Window.} I discussed how although angels were supposed to be ineffable, they were also the only created beings who could traverse the divide between heaven and earth. This is why angel-musicians tended to congregate in in-between zones, such as windows. The point of their

Gillette 2 mediating the sensible and suprasensible was to entice people into mystically joining in their liturgy, an act of profound spiritual benefit. Because of this, the pictures were not passive indices of belief, so much as active forces of engagement that shaped people’s mental worlds and ritual behaviors. {SMN} My digital project comes out of my fourth chapter, “Multiplicity.” In this chapter, I interpret the dynamics of angel-musician imagery as they played out in a series of threedimensional, functional spaces in S. Maria Novella, the main church of the Dominican friars in Florence.

{Angel concerts.} No fewer than seven Trecento images with angel concerts survive from S. Maria Novella—public and private, fixed and portable, and in glass, fresco, tempera, and embroidery. My first task for this chapter was to associate each of them with hymns or sermons for their proper ceremonies. I found that all of these were joyous events that invoked concelebration with flocks of angels.

{Strozzi Chapel.} For instance, the Strozzi Chapel was the tomb chapel of this family of bankers, dedicated to the great Dominican theologian St. Thomas Aquinas. A friar would perform a requiem Mass here each day, to conduct the souls of the Strozzi to their celestial niches. The feast of Aquinas was an exception, warranting a high Mass with extra hymns and a

Gillette 3 big audience. In both events, the angels on the altar, who play an organetto and bagpipe, would serve as prompts for singing with “all the hosts and powers of heaven.” In this capacity they were mediators of grace, precipitating the actions and attitudes whose end was the restoration of “the faithful multitude” to Paradise. There, they would “join the crowd of angels” around God’s heavenly throne or altar, endlessly singing a hymn of glory.

{Multiplicity.} Having thus gone through all seven images of angel bands, I explore angelic multitude as a fundamental trait of theirs, providing evidence of their blessedness and hope for humanity’s future bliss. The gist of these quotes is that the angels are multiple, because the more perfect things are, the more God makes of them. Likewise, their circuit is interminable and their song inestimable, as the stained-glass window nicely shows, and the blessed will encounter innumerable angels once they rise to heaven (like the Strozzi). {SMN.} But I wondered, on the whole, whether the angel-musicians distributed in their ritual spaces constituted fragments, or “gestalts” that cooperated to forge holistic inner worlds. A major challenge to this question is that although S. Maria Novella still stands, its interior looks nothing like it would have during the Trecento. Mainly, its frescoes and screening systems were wiped out as a result of Renaissance distaste for medieval art.

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{Plan.} Fortunately, Marcia Hall—a professor of Art History here at Temple—established the boundaries of the rood screen and walled-in choir. I put the angel concerts in place, on top of her plan. The screen separated the friars and laity, generally, though laymen could sometimes pass through, like to visit family chapels. In the choir, the friars performed the Mass and Offices day by day, year by year—singing with the angels all the while. This slide indicates the maps of religious experience that the images proposed, without quite fleshing them out. In the Middle Ages, people used schemata like this to recreate and explore the mansions of heaven in their heads, as another way of getting to the celestial liturgy. But I decided to use Sketchup and do it digitally, instead. {Video.} I used Hall’s plan as the basis for my model, and we are going on a tour to look at the big rose window in the nave, an altarpiece within the rood screen, the high altar in the choir, the Rucellai and Strozzi chapels nearby, and back to the window. Bear in mind that there would have been doors, gates, curtains, candles, flowers, liturgical gear, and all kinds of ephemera, too. Noting this, I faced a multiplicity of choices as to how I would render a standing church. I learned, for example, that adding arches and vaults made it too hard to “walk around” in the program, so I took an impressionistic approach to the elevation. Color, also, was critical. In fact its absence in mosques was the single quality that struck one traveling Florentine, who wrote that these “churches made for sultans…are all white [within], without any painting.” To set foot in an actual structure like mine might cause you fear and trembling, but it does animate the spatial dynamics of the heterotopic medieval church. And just like the human liturgy was a copy of the angelic one, the church was supposed to be a copy of heaven itself, which was not subject to any sublunary laws of gravity. What this model reveals is that angel-musicians abounded, in brief, at sites dedicated to angelic concelebration. Most were quite private, excepting the great rose window. What the model helps to imagine is that the friars’ chant would be audible through the church, lay brotherhoods performed another version of angelic music in public space, and the window projected the future bliss of Paradise to everyone. These conditions reiterate that while images implemented their agendas directly, church architecture was not a straightforward proposition so much as a symbolic and ritual allegory of the Heavenly City. In this line of thought, the friars primarily and their flock secondarily were embodied in the church—and the church in them—asserting themselves through concelebration as the “living stones” of the building that was at once heaven and Christ’s body.

Gillette 5 {Integration.} So the permeability between architecture, image, and imagination meant that the types and settings of angel-musician imagery nuanced but also conspired in the motion from precept to mysticism in people’s soulscapes, amidst the unifying act of singing with the angels on festal and ferial occasions. To concelebrate with them was the integrative goal of angels themselves, the ritual topography of S. Maria Novella, and the hymns and rites with which the pictures of angel concerts were bound, “turning us” (as the Pseudo-Dionysius wrote) “to the oneness of our conducting Father, and to a deifying simplicity.” THANK YOU