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Since the inception of Renaissance scholarship in the late 1800s, the mendicant orders of friars – above all the Franciscans – have been considered pivotal for the artistic and urban renewal underway in Italy from the 1200s onwards. This dissertation provides the first comprehensive study of the ‘third’ mendicant order: the Hermits of St Augustine, long dismissed as pale imitators of the Franciscans and the Dominicans. My major re-evaluation of the Augustinians’ artistic legacy reveals them to be innovative patrons who used art discerningly to promote a distinctive identity, with much wider implications for our prevailing understanding of Franciscan patronage as a normative model for artistic renewal. My thesis systematically considers the use of different media – illuminated manuscripts, panel paintings, wall paintings, and shrines – both as individual pieces, and combined as part of the church interior. By building on extensive field work, my research brings into conversation a wide array of dispersed artefacts, isolated hermitages, and new archival evidence to investigate the complicated mechanisms behind commissioning art. Scholars have questioned whether Augustinian artistic patronage had any distinctive characteristics at all. My research reveals for the first time the existence of overarching iconographic and artistic themes. In contrast to St Francis for the Friars Minor and St Dominic for the Order of the Preachers, the Augustinian friars lacked a charismatic contemporary saintly founder, and were threatened with suppression on account of their recent foundation. In reaction to this, the Hermits forged an origin myth in which they claimed to be founded directly by the late antique church father St Augustine. I argue that the Augustinians employed art as a key platform to develop this fictive past which proved to be crucial to their survival and emphasized eremitical themes often overlooked by the resolutely urban focus of scholarship on late medieval Italy. This dissertation examines the art, sanctity, and unique identity of the Augustinian friars, and, more broadly, provides a new model for how control over the past can be exercised through artistic patronage and how artworks played a crucial role in the institutional consolidation and survival of a religious order.

This doctoral thesis is an in-depth comparison of lay and religious sources produced in Siena (1260-1330) on the topics of criminal justice, conflict and violence. Two main trends have been highlighted in the development of criminal justice in late medieval Italy. Firstly, that the practice of revenge was still popular among members of all social classes. Secondly, that crime was increasingly perceived as a public matter that needed to be dealt with by the government, and not by private citizens. These two aspects are partly contradictory, and the extent to which these models reflect the reality of communal justice is still open to debate. This thesis aims to shed light on this question through the contribution of religious sources. Recent works have highlighted the need to associate the study of political and judicial practices of conflict to that of religious elaborations - something that scholars have started attempting only very recently. The argument underlying this research is that religious people were an effective pressure group with regards to criminal justice, thanks both to the literary works they produced and their direct intervention in political affairs, and their contributions have not received the attention they deserve. The thesis suggests that the dichotomy between theories and practices of 'private justice' (e.g. revenge) and of 'public justice' (trials) should be substituted by a framework in which three models, or discourses, of criminal justice are recognised as present in late medieval Italian communes: in addition to the trends described above, also a specifically religious approach to criminal justice based on penitential spirituality should be recognised as an influence on the policies of the communes. This case study shows that, although the models were competing, they also influenced each other; and none of them managed, in this period, to eliminate the others, but they coexisted.

During the late Middle Ages, a remarkable phenomenon occurred in Italy: the growth of many small, self-governing city-states, which included Siena. At this time the Sienese commune was administered by a succession of elected ruling councils: the Ventiquattro, the Trentasei, and the Nove. Despite being mired in social and political turmoil, these regimes sponsored great works of art. This dissertation argues that the arts were a fundamental component of these administrations' ability to rule because of the way that cultural production helped to create and spread new conceptions of social class. This project examines two areas of the arts either commissioned, or created, by the Trentasei, Ventiquatttro, and the Nove: a set of eighteen painted book covers from the government financial offices of the Biccherna and Gabella, and the Palazzo Pubblico complex (which includes the town's main square). Through the methods of iconology and social closure it demonstrates how each of these arts, over time, acted as fulcrums through which members of Siena's various social groupings attempted to monopolize certain cultural advantages by usurping privileges held by others and/or by excluding (or attempting to exclude) outside groups. Such cultural advantages included: displaying coats of arms and last names, possessing a palace and tower, and accessing the space of the city's piazza. The structural relationships that were made as groups sought to usurp/exclude others from participation in these arts created the city's social classes. This dissertation provides an interdisciplinary bridge between socio-political and art historical analyses on late medieval Siena. It fills an important gap between the detailed social histories of the city, whose methodologies have not allowed the detailed examination of the evidence provided by the arts, and traditional art historical approaches, for which Sienese society tends to be a backdrop to other concerns, such as patronage, technique, and iconography.

This thesis examines the influence of the fourteenth-century Sienese painter Bartolommeo Bulgarini through his depiction of Saint Francis of Assisi exposing his side wound. By tracing the development of this motif from its inception to its dispersal in selected Tuscan panel paintings of the late-1300’s, this paper seeks to prove that Bartolommeo Bulgarini was significant to its formation. In addition this paper will examine the use of punch mark decorations in the works of artists associated with Bulgarini in order to demonstrate that the painter was influential in the dissemination of the motif and the subsequent tradition of its depiction. This research is instrumental in recovering the importance of Bartolommeo Bulgarini in Sienese art history, as well as in establishing further proof of the existence of the hypothesized Sienese “Post-1350” Compagnia, a group of Sienese artists who are thought to have banded together after the bubonic plague of c.1348-50.

Public architecture that frames civic space, enlivens political debate, and embodies democratic ideals is the focus of this thesis. In the United States, civic architecture historically sought to express the purposes and ideals of the new institutions of a representative democracy. Civic architecture further shaped and bounded the civic sphere of public discourse. The decline of the public realm in the nineteenth century has, by extension, resulted in a decline of the civic realm. This thesis investigates how civic architecture can best reflect and embody, represent and nurture, a civil society appropriate to a twenty-first century representative democracy, while seeking to frame a contemporary civic realm. The analysis continues to the symbolic and spatial evocations of civil society ideals within American architecture, and an investigation into the changing concepts of civic architecture. Finally, the design project seeks to express and realize such civil society ideals through an urban design project for the public square of Mansfield, Ohio, and the design of a new county courthouse.