«Salve mundi salutare». L’affresco di Cristo crocifisso con san Domenico nel convento di San Marco a Firenze
Victor M. Schmidt
This article discusses Fra Angelico’s fresco of Christ on the cross with St Dominic on the first floor of the convent of San Marco in Florence, with special reference to the inscription. The source of the inscription was indicated more than a century ago by Stephan Beissel: the beginning of a prayer in verse once attributed to St Bernard of Clairvaux (but now commonly regarded as the work of the Cistercian abbot Arnulf of Louvain, d. 1250). The inscription must have been added to the fresco in the late 1490s. The vario lectio of the last three words («presta mihi copiam» instead of «da mihi tuam copiam») occurs in two incunabula of minor works (Opuscula) by St Bernard printed in 1495 in Brescia and Venice, respectively. An edition of the Opuscula is recorded in the catalogue of the convent’s library, which was drawn up in 1499-1500. The inscription gives a special focus to the required attitude to Christ, as described in De modo orandi sancti Dominici from the late 13th century. The text of the prayer also helps to understand an iconographic aspect often noted in this fresco as well as in others in the convent representing Christ on the cross: the conspicuous effusion of blood. This feature has been related to specifically Dominican ideas about the salvific nature of Christ’s blood. However, the same attention to Christ’s blood is also expressed in three couplets of the prayer. Finally, Christ’s salvific blood also played a role in Savonarola as prior of the convent. In 1496, he had an elaborate vision of Christ on the cross, from whose wounds came forth a great amount of blood. The vision was described and explained by Savonarola himself in a sermon, and by one of his followers, Dominico Benivieni, in a booklet published in the same year. A woodcut illustration shows how a multitude of persons bathing themselves in the stream of blood coming out of Christ’s wounds. The artist did not “copy” Fra Angelico, but the conspicuous emphasis on blood in the fresco in the corridor (and similar ones in the friars’ cells) may have had an impact on Savonarola’s vision.