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Tabernacle and sacrament in fifteenth-century Tuscany

Context and contribution: Wright’s essay is contained in an edited volume devoted to Renaissance sculpture, based on a conference originally held at the V & A, where it was the only paper dealing with the cultic role of architectural sculpture. The chapter focuses on a number of major Florentine and Tuscan examples of tabernacles, not least works from the collection of the V&.A. As an intervention on the frame it was paired with a rare discussion of the (non-devotional) frame to Ghiberti's famous Baptistery doors, in a volume that otherwise highlights continuing engagements with facture, workshop organisation and artistic careers.

Research imperatives and process: This essay is an intervention in a vital area of scholarship addressing the body of Christ, its role in representation and as a sacred object in the late medieval and early Modern period. Wright argues that the sacrament tabernacle in northern Italy (in the context of very little recent scholarship for S. Europe) as a specialist piece of liturgical furniture, emerged as a site where new representational means and ornamental vocabularies were exploited with enormous ingenuity in relation to the work of the frame and to some extent to compensate for the lack of Christ’s visible Body. She deliberately engages across the institutional divide to relate to the curatorial world and to museology . A principal aim was to reinstate an engagement with historical viewing that, while undermining the museological category of 'Renaissance sculpture' did not re-inscribe its object as another form of 'material culture'.