Revisiting the Umbrian retro-choir

Résumé 0

Recent research has clarified many aspects of the pre-Tridentine mendicant church interior, notably the importance of tramezzo rood screens, the elevated display of large-scale painted panels and – the focus of the present book – the location of choir precincts. It has, however, also revealed the complexity and diversity of liturgical furniture and spatial arrangements. This degree of flexibility cautions against reading Renaissance church interiors in crudely functional terms. The introduction of apsidal choir precincts or so-called “retro-choirs”, once regarded as a fundamental characteristic of Tridentine rearrangements, is now understood as an extended process responding to a number of distinct factors. This paper examines some of the earliest evidence for mendicant retro-choirs associated with Franciscan churches in Umbria, stretching back into the thirteenth century. I first highlighted this anomalous phenomenon in an article published in 2001 in the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes: I can now introduce additional archival material to both consolidate and nuance those findings. The ambiguous case of Sansepolcro – in the modern region of Tuscany but falling within the medieval Franciscan province of Umbria – suggests that the adoption of the retro-choir respected the Order’s provincial boundaries. Despite sharing an identical liturgical framework, friars in the Tuscan and Umbrian provinces developed very different modes for arranging their church interiors. These differences are reflected in both the architecture of the churches and the artworks commissioned for them. This paper reassesses the evidence for provincialism in Franciscan church configuration in central Italy, asks how this was possible, and considers what such distinctions might have signified for a contemporary audience.