Preface

Claudia Jentzsch; Katharine Stahlbuhk

doi:10.11588/riha.2026.2.113750

Authors

Claudia Jentzsch

Claudia Jentzsch is director of the August Bebel Institute in Berlin, which is dedicated to political education. She studied art history as well as communication and media studies in Leipzig and Florence, specializing in Early Modern Italian art history. She worked in the communications department of documenta 12 (Kassel) and the Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art. Her Ph.D. project, Order and Community: The Aesthetics of the Florentine Augustinian Hermit Church of Santo Spirito, is being undertaken at the Berlin University of the Arts and has been supported by a Berlin State Scholarship (Nafög), as well as by grants from the DAAD and the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut. Her research focuses on pre-modern visual, material, and memorial culture; the art and architecture of the mendicant orders – particularly the Augustinian Hermits; and the cultures of learning in Italian Humanism. In her teaching, she has focused on methods of cultural mediation and on approaches to integrating cultural and political education. Her research presented in this volume was supported by the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History, Rome, and by the DFG Research Group "Imaginarien der Kraft" at the University of Hamburg.
Katharine Stahlbuhk

Katharine Stahlbuhk is an art historian and specialist in 14th- and 15th-century Italian art. Her research explores the materiality and technical execution of artworks, as well as the ethical implications of humanist aesthetics. She is particularly interested in the intersections of visual art and literature, with a focus on the mendicant orders and their contributions to humanism. She has held fellowships at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, Bibliotheca Hertziana, Villa I Tatti, University of Padua and at the Italian Academy, Columbia University, New York. Her first book, Oltre il colore. Die farbreduzierte Wandmalerei zwischen Humilitas und Observanzreformen, was published in 2021 with Deutscher Kunstverlag. She is the co-editor of the first German translation and annotated edition of Leon Battista Alberti's Profugiorum ab aerumna (Über die Seelenruhe, Berlin: Wagenbach 2022, 2nd ed. 2023). Since 2026, she has been a researcher in the project A Minor Model? Structures, Iconographies and Materials for the Milanese Franciscan Observance between Invention, Disruption and Anachronisms (1420–1550) based at the Scuola universitaria professionale della Svizzera italiana (SUPSI) and financed by the Swiss National Fund.

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Abstract

The title of this special issue invokes the concept of civitas, understood as the collective body of a town’s inhabitants bound together by a shared commitment to the common good. In contrast to the monastic orders, who typically lived apart from urban centers, the mendicant orders deliberately embedded themselves in the fabric of the city. Consequently, mendicant friars engaged in dynamic exchanges with the lay world, participated in humanist discourses revolving around the valori civici, and exerted both direct and indirect influence on conceptions of the "body of the city" – in its immaterial, imagined dimension as well as in its material, built form. Bringing together six case studies by scholars of art history, history, and the history of philosophy, this special issue explores how mendicant involvement shaped art, architecture, and urban space in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy.

Published in Vol. 17 No. 2 (2026): RIHA Journal

Date

2026-05-30

DOI

https://doi.org/10.11588/riha.2026.2.113750

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