Displacement and Reconfiguration: The Effects of the Florentine Guasto of 1529 on Devotional Spaces and Networks of Artistic Patronage

Chiara Capulli

What objects do religious communities take with them when leaving their homes in a time of upheaval? What do they choose to save from ruin, and how do these objects perpetuate their collective memory? In 1529, as the formidable Imperial army approached the city of Florence, the Republican government took drastic action and ordered a Guasto (literally, a ‘destruction’), a blanket decree that all buildings within a mile of the city walls be demolished to deny the besiegers any shelter or structures that they could fortify. Included were some of the city's most eminent suburban monasteries: San Benedetto Fuori alla Porta Pinti, San Donato a Scopeto, San Giovanni Evangelista of the Faenza nuns, Monticelli, Montedomini, San Giusto alle Mura, and San Gallo. The forced relocation in different sites within the walls jeopardized the collective institutional memory of the evacuated communities. My research asks how much memory could be reinstated by salvaging or manipulating visual and material heritage. Among the material remains of their crumbling homes and ruined churches, the displaced communities saved the bodies of their founding saints and building materials, of which they retained ownership, and many works of art. Although portable, altarpieces were produced for specific sites and manifested the needs of individuals. Their displacement thus undermined the ritual topography in which they participated. In most cases, their re-arrangement clashed with the setting of the newly assigned houses, thus instigating processes that directly affected the visual agency of the previous and new occupants of the sites. After the upheaval of the Guasto, communities needed to re-negotiate their devotional focus. Their institution’s survival would depend upon successfully meeting their own liturgical needs, respecting their patrons’ requests, and in many cases undertaking the necessary architectural reconfiguration of the new churches. 
Heterogenous sources and substantial unpublished archival material underpin the reconstruction of the communities’ pre-Guasto visual culture and then support the analysis of the changes and the consequences of their displacement. The research draws on both traditional art historical methods and on the tools of Digital Art History, namely quantitative and spatial analysis to investigate patterns of artistic patronage on a city-wide scale, 3D reconstruction for lost buildings whose appearance is known through textual sources in order to understand the scale and appearance of the churches for which altarpieces were produced, and non-invasive archaeological techniques, such as Ground Penetrating Radar, to investigate any sub-surface remains. The results will constitute an addition to Florentine sacred geography and neighborhood identity and will also reconsider the Guasti as pivotal events of disruption in the urban and artistic development of Renaissance cities, challenging the dominant narrative of their increasing expansion during the early modern period.