as it appeared during the rule of the duke of Athens, are
unifi ed in an abstract narrative structure to produce an
effect of reality within a timeless image of the triumph
of virtue over tyranny.
Until relatively recently, scholars of art history gen-
erally associated Orcagna with a retrogressive style of
painting that supposedly took hold in Florence after the
black death. In fact, Meiss (1951) considered Orcagna’s
great altarpiece Christ with Saints Thomas and Peter,
made for the Strozzi Chapel in Santa Maria Novella, an
example of this style. Although Meiss’s study remains
a powerfully persuasive piece of eckphrasis, his assess-
ment of Orcagna’s style as the repository of a general
cultural psychology has been challenged by scholars
who have looked less to the history of style and more
to the circumstances of individual commissions to ex-
plain the formal characteristics of Orcagna’s work. In
this process, paintings like the Strozzi altarpiece have
emerged as highly sophisticated visual structures. In his
work for the Strozzi Chapel, Orcagna manipulated space
and form to evoke a sacred vision, which appears in the
midst of a panoramic view of the Last Judgment painted
by his brother Nardo on the surrounding walls.
One of Orcagna’s most important commissions was
the richly decorated marble tabernacle for Or San Mi-
chele, designed and executed between 1352 and 1360.
The site—on the main street leading from the Duomo
to the Palazzo Vecchio—was not only the city’s grain
market but also a nexus of power. Or San Michele
served as the center of devotion for the city’s guilds,
and Orcagna’s tabernacle was commissioned by the
Compagnia della Madonna di Orsanmichele to enshrine
a miracle-working image of the Madonna that had made
the site the center of a popular cult. Actually, the object
enshrined in Andrea’s tabernacle was a newly painted
image commissioned in 1346 by the compagnia from
Bernardo Daddi. The tabernacle itself is a freestanding
marble structure, inlaid with stone and gold glass and
covered with relief sculptures, including scenes from
the Life of the Virgin. The structure is neatly tied, both
thematically and visually, to the surrounding loggia,
with a crowning fi gure of Saint Michael (San Michele),
rising to nearly touch one of the bosses of the vaulting.
As Cassidy (1992) has shown, the tabernacle was also
engineered to meet the needs of the cult, with movable
screens which normally shrouded the image of the Virgin
but which could be raised to reveal the icon on Sundays,
feast days, and other signifi cant occasions. It was in con-
nection with this commission that Orcagna, a painter,
became a member of the guild of masons and stone
workers; and it was presumably through this project, for
which he must have assembled a workshop of skilled
masons and sculptors, that he established his credentials
as an orchestrator of architectural decoration.
See also Daddi, Bernardo; Nardo di CioneFurther Reading
Belting, Hans. “Das Bild als Text: Wandmalerei und Literature im
Zeitalter Dantes.” In Malerei und Stadtkultur in der Dantezeit:
Die Argumentation der Bilder, ed. Hans Belting and Dieter
Blume. Munich: Hirmer, 1989.
Boskovitz, Miklós. “Orcagna in 1357—and in Other Times.”
Burlington Magazine, 113, 1971, pp. 239–251.
Cassidy, Brendan. “The Assumption of the Virgin on the Taber-
nacle of Orsanmichele.” Journal of the Warburg and Cour-
tauld Institutes, 51, 1988a, pp. 174–180.
——. “The Financing of the Tabernacle of Orsanmichele.”
Source, 8, 1988b, pp. 1–6.
——. “Orcagna’s Tabernacle in Florence: Design and Function.”
Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 55, 1992, pp. 180–211.
Cole, Bruce. “Some Thoughts on Orcagna and the Black Death
Style.” Antichità Viva, 22(2), 1983, pp. 27–37.
Giles, Kathleen Alden. “The Strozzi Chapel in Santa Maria
Novella: Florentine Paintings and Patronage, 1340–1355.”
Dissertation, New York University, 1977.
Kreytenberg, Gert. “L’enfer d’Orcagna: La première peinture
monumentale d’après les chants de Dante.” Gazette des Beaux
Arts, 6(114), 1989, pp. 243–262.
——. “Bemerkungen zum Fresko der Vertreibung des Duca
d’Atene aus Florenz.” In Musagetes: Festschrift für Wolfram
Prinz zu seinem 60. Geburtstag am 5. February 1989. Berlin:
Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1991, pp. 151–165.
——. “Image and Frame: Remarks on Orcagna’s Pala Strozzi.”
Burlington Magazine, 134, 1992, pp. 634–638.
——. Orcagna’s Tabernacle in Orsanmichele, Florence. New
York: Abrams, 1994.
——. “Orcagnas Fresken im Hauptchor von Santa Maria No-
vella und deren Fragmente.” Studi di Storia dell’Arte, 5–6,
1994–1995, pp. 9–40.
Meiss, Millard. Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black
Death. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1951.
Padoa Rizzo, Anna. “Per Andrea Orcagna pittore.” Annali della
Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Series 3, 11(3), 1981,
pp. 835–893.
Paoletti, John T. “The Strozzi Altarpiece Reconsidered.” Memorie
Domenicane, 20, 1989, pp. 279–300.
Rash Fabbri, Nancy, and Nina Rutenberg. “The Tabernacle
of Orsanmichele in Context.” Art Bulletin, 63, 1981, pp.
385–405.
Taylor-Mitchell, Laurie. “Images of Saint Matthew Commis-
sioned by the Arte del Cambio for Orsanmichele in Florence:
Some Observations on Conservatism in Form and Patronage.”
Gesta, 31, 1992, pp. 54–72.
C. Jean CampbellORESME, NICOLE
(ca. 1320/25–1382)
A writer known mainly for his mathematical, scientifi c,
and economic treatises and for his vernacular transla-
tions of Aristotle. Educated in arts and theology at the
Collège de Navarre in Paris, Oresme was in 1356 ap-
pointed its grand master. During this period, his long
association with the royal family began; he may haveORCAGNA, ANDREA DI CIONE