Art, Memory, and the Cultivation of Virtue: The Ethical Function of Images in Antoninus’s Opera a ben vivere

This article examines the relationship between visual images, visual imagination, and memory in fifteenth-century Florentine devotional practice as described in Opera a ben vivere, written about 1454 by the archbishop of Florence and Observant Dominican friar Antonino Pierozzi (later St. Antoninus) as a spiritual guidebook for the Florentine laywomen Dianora and Lucrezia Tornabuoni. A prescription for image meditation in this text provides evidence for how imagery—both real and imagined—functioned to guide the devotee toward the cultivation of virtue as she moved from contemplation of the visible body of the crucified Christ to emotional empathy with Christ and his mother’s suffering and finally to an enhanced intellectual comprehension of the invisible mystery of the Incarnation, necessary for self-reflection. In this process the actual physical object—in this case, a crucifix—was intended to engage the devotee’s external sense of corporeal vision and function as a portal through which, via imagination and memory, she could access the internal senses of emotion and intellect to arrive at spiritual understanding within the mind and a transformation of the soul. Repeated meditation on this imagery functioned to “impress” its significance on the devotee’s soul, making it part of her ethos. Contextualizing this affective process relative to the Renaissance understanding of visual comprehension, imagination, and memory as revealed in the writings of Antoninus sheds greater light on the devotional function and use of visual images, especially those of Antoninus’s contemporary Fra Angelico.