ABSTRACT
Friar Giovanni Dominici's advice regarding domestic devotional art is often cited as evidence for the use of a wide range of religious imagery in Renais sance Florence. In his treatise, Regola del governo di cur a familiar e (1403), Dominici discussed what he considered the only justification for having art in the home: to aid in the education of children. Indeed, he advocated images of
saintly children or young virgins in the home, in which your child, still in swaddling clothes, may take delight and thereby may be gladdened by acts and signs pleasing to childhood. And what I say of pictures applies also to statues. It is well to have the Virgin Mary with the Child in arms, with a little bird or apple in His hand. There should be a good representation of Jesus nursing, sleeping in His Mother's lap or standing courteously before Her while they look at each other. So let the child see himself mirrored in the Holy Baptist, clothed in camel's skin, a little child who enters the desert, plays with the birds, sucks the honeyed flowers and sleeps on the ground ... Thus it is desirable to bring up little girls in the contemplation of the eleven thousand Virgins as they discourse, pray, and suffer. I should like them to see Agnes with her little fat lamb, Cecilia crowned with roses, Elizabeth with roses in her cloak, Catherine and her wheel... For this reason you should know that representations of the angels and saints are permitted and intended for the instruction of the unlearned.1
