St Clare with Kneeling Female Donor

Entry

This standing female figure is attired in the vestments of the Franciscan Order of St Clare and can therefore be identified as the order’s founder, Clare of Assisi (1194-1253).¹ Clare wears a reddish-brown habit with a dark-brown cord, a grey scapular and cloak, a white wimple and a black veil with a white border. She stands barefooted on a sloping mound while gazing down at the pages of an open book supported in her right hand. With her left hand, Clare gestures in the direction of the donor kneeling in prayer at her feet, whom she formally presents to a now lost holy figure. If observing the Latin inscription PVER (boy) painted at the saint’s feet, the missing figure in this particular group is likely the Christ Child, perhaps accompanied by the Virgin Mary. As is fairly common in works of late medieval sculpture, the scale of the donor, also dressed in the habit of the Order of St Clare, is significantly smaller than that of her accompanying patron saint. The painted inscription on the pages of Clare’s open book has only partly been preserved and is therefore too fragmentary for interpretation. On the basis of style and wood type – oak – this small group can be situated in the Southern Netherlands and dated to the early sixteenth century.

The Order of St Clare was founded in the early thirteenth century in Italy (San Damiano) as the so-called ‘Second Order of St Francis of Assisi’, i.e. the female branch of the Franciscans. With the founding of the first monastic community in Bruges by the nun Ermentrude in that same century, the Order of St Clare gained a foothold in the Low Countries. With Bruges as its base, new communities were formed in Flemish cities such as Ypres, Gentbrugge, Petegem and Saint Omer, followed by convents in Brussels (1345), Antwerp (1455), Hoogstraten (1494), Mechelen (1501) and Leuven (1513). The popularity of the saint and her followers in the Low Countries is affirmed by the Middle-Netherlandish translation of Clare’s vita, published under the title Die legende ende dat leven der heiliger maget Sinte Claren (Antwerp, 1491) by Gheraert Leeu, a printer active in Gouda and Antwerp. Moreover, Jacob of Maerlant is known to have produced a Middle-Netherlandish translation of Thomas of Celano’s Latin vita of St Clara, entitled Legenda Sanctae Clarae Virginis, by as early as 1273. No copy of this translation has survived.²

In all probability, the group comes from a small altar for private devotion kept by a nun of the Order of St Clare in her own cell. The possession of such an altar implies this individual would have lived by the so-called ‘Second Order’ and was therefore a member of the ‘Rich Clares’, also known as Urbanists (after Pope Urban IV, who wrote this rule). This branch of the order is to be distinguished from the ‘Poor Clares’: nuns who lived according to the strict rule imposed by St Coleta of Corbië (1381-1447). Around 1410, Coleta had argued for a return to the purest rule of poverty originally propagated by St Clare. In doing so, she managed to draw a substantial following. Coleta died in Ghent. After the order was reformed, the majority of the Flemish monasteries were affiliated with the ‘poor’ rule. In Flanders, only the orders of Leuven and Hoogstraten remained loyal to the rule of Urban. One may therefore presume the present sculpture belonged to a nun residing at one of these two convents.

Frits Scholten, 2024