The contours of tolerance: Jews and the Corpus Domini Altarpiece in Urbino

Dana E. Katz

In the third quarter of the fifteenth century, the Confraternity of Corpus Domini, a brotherhood of laymen dedicated to honoring the body and blood of Christ, commissioned a monumental altarpiece for the high altar of its church in Urbino. Joos van Ghent finished the main panel of the altar-piece with the Communion of the Apostles in 1474 (Fig. 1). (1) Paolo Uccello completed the altarpiece's predella, the Miracle of the Profaned Host, most likely by 1468 (Fig. 2). (2) Uccello's depiction, with its scene of Jews burning at the stake, is striking for more than its elaborately painted presentation of the host desecration legend or its stereotypical invective against the local Jews of Urbino. Uccello's predella is particularly unusual because it represents the story of Jewish host desecration in a country in which such accusations historically are not documented. (3) Depicted above the scene of burning Jews, Duke Federigo da Montefeltro and his entourage appear in the background of the altarpiece's upper panel, Joos van Ghent's Communion of the Apostles. It is my contention that the Corpus Domini Altarpiece represents Duke Federigo's policy on Jews. The altarpiece worked to mollify the Christian community's fear of external threats, specifically, the threatened invasion of Ottoman Turks, by turning attention to its internal adversary, the local Jews. The altarpiece's message served the duke's political interests by portraying the city purged of those elements overtly hostile to the Christian faith, thus reassuring the populace of their security, while simultaneously reinforcing Christian unity through the vilification of Jews. This pictorialized purgation did not advocate the total eradication of Jews, however. The predella symbolically avenges the blasphemous act of only those Jews complicit in host desecration, leaving the larger Jewish community safe within Urbino's city walls.

According to modern historical literature, Federigo da Montefeltro protected his Jewish subjects during his illustrious reign in Urbino from 1444 to 1482. He maintained amicable relations with Jewish moneylenders, merchants, and scholars and also collected Hebrew manuscripts for his personal library. The fifteenth-century bookseller and biographer Vespasiano da Bisticci writes that Federigo collected "whatever books which were to be had in Hebrew, beginning with the Bible and all those dealt with by the Rabbi Moses [Maimonides] and other commentators. And besides the Holy Scriptures, there are books in Hebrew [in Federigo's library] on medicine, philosophy and the other faculties." (4) The scholarship surrounding the house of Montefeltro asserts that both Federigo and his heir, Guidobaldo, tolerated Jewish religious and economic activity in Urbino, and that anti-Jewish attitudes do not appear in Urbino's history until the duchy was passed to the della Rovere family in 1508. (5)

This essay examines the politics of tolerance in fifteenth-century Urbino under Duke Federigo da Montefeltro. Tolerance, as applied during the Middle Ages in the works of canon law and scholasticism, referred to privileges given to Jews as well as other social out-groups to dwell among the communities in Latin Christendom, provided such dissenters served a beneficial role to the society as a whole and proved no threat to Christianity. Tolerance as a political concept offered Jews only limited social forbearance but forestalled expulsion and extermination. (6) Although the Jews of Urbino did not suffer the expulsions and pogroms endemic else-where in Europe, they endured symbolic forms of violence as a result of their vulnerability, inability to retaliate, and lack of communal allies. I explore how violence against Jews functioned in Duke Federigo's campaign of toleration and how the dynamics of tolerance inevitably are linked to civic identity, particularly the identity created by and for the prince. Painting served to represent to the Christian society of Urbino the form and content of the duke's policy toward Jews and, perhaps more importantly, to define the limits of tolerable behavior for non-Christians dwelling in the community. That is, Jews, given that their activities were beneficial to Urbino's civic and spiritual economy, were welcome in Urbino as contributors to a Christian body politic. Nevertheless, serious offenses against the Christian faith would not be left unpunished.

Marilyn Aronberg Lavin was the first to study the anti-Jewish implications of the Corpus Domini Altarpiece, before the subject of social marginalization and "otherness" was topical in academic studies. (7) In her seminal Art Bulletin article of 1967, she argues that the identification of a bearded Easterner depicted beside Duke Federigo in the background of Joos van Ghent's panel is the key to interpreting the altarpiece. Lavin identifies the bearded foreigner as a Jewish doctor serving as Persia's ambassador, who converted to Christianity on visiting Rome in 1472. The Jewish convert's pictorial presence connects the subject matter of the two parts of the altarpiece and suggests that while unrepentant Jews will face damnation, the conversion of non-Christians--both Jews and Muslims--offers an ideal vision of worldwide harmony. Whereas Lavin examines the Corpus Domini Altar-piece's project of conversion as an attempt to create an ecumenical Christian community, the Urbino altarpiece can also be understood locally, as influenced by local politics and reflecting local attitudes and art. Although the altarpiece indeed projects an idealized Christian community predicated on Jewish exclusion, a limited Jewish participation in that community is implied in the predella's demonization of only those Jews overtly hostile to Christianity. Federigo's position was essentially pragmatic: he was willing to tolerate non-Christians in Urbino in the interest of constructing a unified Christian polity.

Federigo embraced Jews not as full members of the community but as practitioners of the money trade whose credit served to induce economic equalization and prosperity in the monetized society of fifteenth-century Urbino. (8) Jews thus were tolerated for their utilitas; as usurers, writes Jacques Le Goff, they helped "to propel the economy and society ... ahead toward capitalism." (9) Yet as Jewish lending impacted the private credit markets and public finances in Urbino, antipathy toward Jews mounted, particularly among the itinerant Observant Franciscans, whose anti-Jewish preaching throughout Italy proclaimed Jewish lenders as enemies of the poor. (10) Franciscan leaders such as Bernardino da Siena, Giacomo della Marca, Giovanni da Capistrano, and Bernardino da Feltre sought to keep Christians in need of loans away from Jewish moneylenders because lending at interest was a mortal sin, as well as an affront to charity, universal brother-hood, and economic justice. (11) Bernardino da Siena preached in his sermon 43 on usury:

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   ... if this concentration of wealth in the hands of the few is
   dangerous to the health of the city, it is even more dangerous when
   this wealth and money is concentrated and gathered into the hands of
   the Jews. For in that case, the natural warmth of the city--for that
   is what its wealth represents--is not flowing back to the heart to
   give it assistance but instead rushes to an abscess in a deadly
   hemorrhage, since all Jews, especially those who are moneylenders,
   are the chief enemies of all Christiants. (12)

Seeking to eliminate Jewish lending, Franciscans advocated the establishment of monti di pieta, charitable credit institutions that issued small loans against pledges of modest value (such as a bedsheet, a belt, or napkins) to the impecunious at a low rate of interest. In her study on the Florentine monte, Carol Bresnahan Menning explains, "As brokers of small loans against pawns, Italian monti di pieta were expected not only to replace Jewish moneylenders but also to set up the conditions in which all Jews could be expelled." (13) Dependent on the largesse of wealthy Christians and fueled by the anti-Jewish sermons of Observant Franciscans, the monti flourished in the Marches, Umbria, the Veneto, Lombardy, Emilia, Tuscany, and beyond. Though the monte occupied a significant space in the monetary economy of Renaissance Italy, it had many inherent problems and did not detract considerably from Jewish moneylending during the fifteenth century. (14) If not economically punitive, the monte represented a symbolic attack against the protections promised to the Jews. Such anti-Jewish legislation illustrates how malleable a political tool the prince's tolerance policy was, fluctuations in Jewish privileges and prohibitions reflecting strategic acts of statecraft.

Urbino was not immune to anti-Jewish seignorial directives. On April 6, 1468, the court, specifically Federigo's consort Battista Sforza, signed the foundation charter for the Urbino monte di pieta, and in 1472, on the birth of his son Guidobaldo, the duke contributed 350 florins to its management. (15) The establishment of the Urbino monte was contemporaneous with Uccello's completion of the Corpus Domini predella. Both the predella and the monte, as manifestations of anti-Jewish sentiment, reinforce the stereotype of the Jewish moneylender as capable of evil and unnatural acts against Christianity. It appears that by 1468 Duke Federigo's policy toward the Jews emerged as an important rubric for social commentary, particularly after Fra Domenico da Leonessa's 1468 visit to Urbino, in which he preached avidly in favor of establishing a local monte. (16) It could be for this reason that the Confraternity of Corpus Domini commissioned the pre-della with its anti-Jewish narrative prior to the altarpiece's main panel, an atypical artistic practice in Renaissance Italy. (17) The predella served to instruct Christians how Urbino's secular authorities would avenge the heinousness of Jewish blasphemies.

Sacrifice and Salvation

After the Fourth Lateran Council's establishment of the doctrine of transubstantiation in 1215, Christians throughout Europe feared for the safety of the sacred host in the presence of Jews. (18) As a consequence, the Council of Vienna in 1267 prohibited Jews from occupying the streets during Eucharistic processions and ordered them to stay behind closed doors and windows when the consecrated host passed in the vicinity of their homes. The fear of Jewish proximity to the Eucharist greatly multiplied when the Feast of Corpus Domini officially entered the Church calendar in 1264. During this period, a series of miracles allegedly took place in numerous European cities in which a sacred host survived desecration or bled to show the real presence of Christ. Among the stories that circulated, Jewish profanations of the sacrament became the most widespread, as Jews throughout Europe were accused of insulting, abusing, and blaspheming the Eucharist. While Jewish host desecration lore began in Europe in the late Middle Ages, stories of Jewish injury to the host continued for centuries and abound in European manuscript illuminations, woodcuts, stained-glass windows, and altarpieces, particularly in the Germanic regions, with their high concentrations of Jewish inhabitants. (19) One of the most complex representations of Jewish host desecration is the Corpus Domini predella in the small Italian city-state of Urbino.

The medieval legend of the profaned host, particularly the story that allegedly occurred in Paris during Holy Week of 1290, inspired the iconography of Uccello's Corpus Domini predella. (20) According to the Parisian legend, a Jew successfully tempts an indebted Christian woman by promising to return her pawned clothing if she procures for him a host obtained at mass. The Jew then injures the host with knives, fire, and boiling water, but the host remains intact and bleeds to show the true presence of Christ. On witnessing the miracle, the Jew's family converts to Christianity, while the Jewish man in many accounts remains hostile to the Christian faith. It is significant that the story takes place during the time commemorating Christ's crucifixion and resurrection, since the legend symbolically re-creates these biblical events. In this tale, the host--the body of Christ--is pierced and tormented in a manner similar to Christ's Passion yet remains indestructible and merely bleeds to show its humanity.

The Urbino predella articulates this story in six episodes, reading from left to right with a series of painted balusters framing each scene. At the left, a Christian woman stands before the Jewish keeper of a pawnshop with a host in her right hand (Fig. 3). The emblematic symbol of the scorpion appears on a yellow stemma (coat of arms) on the hood of the shopkeeper's fireplace and identifies the house as belonging to a Jew. The image of the scorpion was traditionally used in Europe, as well as those of the golden calf, owl, and sow, as early as the thirteenth century to signify the treachery and perfidy of the Jew. (21) The second scene of the predella is set in the pawnbroker's home, as blood in the background emanates from the host, which the Jewish moneylender has attempted to cook (Fig. 4). The Jew's wife and children look on in terror as the blood seeps into the street; outside, soldiers try to break through the shopkeeper's door. The third scene depicts a procession with figures moving toward an altar (Fig. 5). The pope in his distinguishing robe and tiara carries a monstrance containing the holy Eucharist, as clerics process before him and the laity behind. The next episode represents the hanging of the Christian woman who appeared in the first scene (Fig. 6). The Christian woman looks up to find an angel authorizing her redemption. No angel appears to save the Jewish shopkeeper and his family, for the soldiers burn them at the stake in the fifth scene (Fig. 7). In the final episode, the Christian woman lies on a litter atop a catafalque. Two angels surround the woman's head, one holding a pyx, who administers the Last Communion, while two devils pull at her feet (Fig. 8).

Uccello's host desecration story draws on the written redactions of the Parisian legend found, for example, in the Chronicles of Saint-Denis, the French police report Actes de Paris, the Grandes Chroniques, Fra Jean de Thilrode of St- Bavon's account of about 1294, Giovanni Villani's trecento Chronicles, Saint Antoninus's fifteenth-century Florentine redaction, and the quattrocento Italian mystery play Un miracolo del Corpo di Cristo. The Urbino predella, however, corresponds most directly with the Italian examples, which all characterize the Jew as a professional usurer. The Jew's role as moneylender, although reported in some French accounts, was not the only identity given to the Jew. Jean de Thilrode, a monk at the convent of St-Bavon in Ghent, wrote that the Parisian Jew was an employer of a Christian maidservant and not necessarily a usurer. Accounts in the German-speaking regions also did not specify the Jew's position as lender. I stress this point to underscore the manner in which the Italian tales, both pictorial and textual, attach a local identity to the narrative by drawing from an index of commonly known cultural symbols. Certainly the portrayal of the Jew as moneylender had particular social currency for the viewers of the Urbino predella, as Jewish moneylending was an important part of the socioeconomic infrastructure of quattrocento Italy.

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Whereas Lavin compared Uccello's panel with the literary sources of the host desecration legend, an analysis of the pictorial traditions provides further insight into the predella. When juxtaposed with other visual representations of the legend, it becomes strikingly evident that Uccello's painting is unique. Among the most obvious differences is Uccello's use of a detailed narrative cycle, which visually recounts the full story of Jewish profanation in six dramatic episodes. Images depicting the theme of Jewish host desecration most often render the story in one or two concentrated scenes. For instance, the trecento manuscript illumination from Giovanni Villani's Chronicles, the late-fifteenth-century woodcut from the Italian mystery play Un miracolo del Corpo di Cristo, and the Italian host profanation scene from the late fifteenth century in the Hermitage, as well as the woodcut of the Sternberg Jews from 1492 and the Pulkau altarpiece of about 1520, all represent variations of the host desecration narrative in a limited number of scenes that focus on and directly implicate the Jew(s). (22)

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The manuscript version of Villani's Jewish profanation account, "D'un grande miracolo ch' avvenne in Parigi del Corpo di Cristo," illustrates the complex story in a simple scene showing the Christian woman exchanging the host for the garment held by the Jew (Fig. 9). Here, the illuminator selected the scene in which the Jew has tempted the Christian in order to procure the host. The woodcut from the late-fifteenth-century Italian sacra rappresentazione renders this moment of exchange as well, along with an additional episode (Fig. 10). At the left, three usurers, identified as Jews by their round badges, face a robed figure who has entered the shop to pawn an article of clothing. At the right, the three Jews stab and cook the consecrated host, which springs into the air. The mystery play inspired the iconography of the late-fifteenth-century Italian host profanation panel now in the Hermitage, which includes only three scenes from the play (divided into two sections): on the left, the Christians gambling, and on the right, the Christian wife retrieving the cloak her husband pawned on losing at dice, as well as the Jewish pawnbroker, with an accomplice, desecrating the host. (23) The news of host desecration spread to the German-speaking regions, where a contemporary woodcut documents the 1492 profanation accusations against the Sternberg Jews, and the 1338 desecration allegations against the Pulkau Jews of Lower Austria became the subject of the Pulkau altarpiece of about 1520. (24)

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Despite their subtle variations in narrating the legend, all of these images offer the viewer insight into the Jew's culpability and duplicity. An elaborate cycle is not necessary in these pictures, for the protagonist of the stories is solely the perfidious Jew. Uccello's rendition, on the contrary, presents the entire host profanation legend in six acts, emphasizing the theatricality of the tale with actors occupying the foreground and the Jew's home and landscape backdrop serving as the drama's stage set. Uccello's version focuses on the Jew whose blasphemous act unfolds in several scenes and concludes with the horrific group execution in the center of the composition. It also relays the story of salvation of the disobedient Christian woman, who receives God's forgiveness via the angel after defiling the blessed host and, before expiring, accepts the holy sacrament and the true faith. In this sense, Uccello's tale underscores the treachery and brutal fate of the Jews at the hands of the Christians, who compassionately protect their own. Uccello's predella, unlike the other host desecration images, offers a detailed episodic telling of the narrative that reveals not only an anti-Jewish animus but also works to alleviate potential Christian doubt regarding Eucharistic efficacy. As in the other renditions of the tale, the Christian woman sins by selling the host to the Jew. Uccello, however, illustrates her triumph over Eucharistic doubt and her redemption despite it. Although both Christian and Jew are implicated in the profane crime against the sacred host, the Jew perishes with his wife and children, while the Christian is saved. The inclusion of Christian salvation is an important element of the Corpus Domini Altarpiece, since it teaches Urbinate viewers the power and compassion of the Christian faith while also revealing the central role the Eucharist plays in the formation of a Christian identity. The Jews are set in opposition to this belief and as a result are placed outside the community.

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The blasphemous and redemptive qualities represented in the predella are underscored by Uccello's rendering of the host desecration story as a nocturnal scene. According to Jean Verdon, night in the Middle Ages possessed an element of the horrific and the sublime; that is, the darkness of the night induced both demonic acts of violence and spiritual visions. (25) The nocturnal vignettes of Uccello's predella incorporate both aspects of night. The artist situates the Jew's bloody attempt to destroy the host in clandestine darkness, yet his blasphemous act of violence merely causes the Jew's bloodshed. This Jewish violence is offset by the tranquillity of the scenes dedicated to the story's Christian protagonists: the host and the irreverent woman. Uccello portrays the Eucharistic procession led by the pope within a vast nightscape, replete with a crescent moon above. The host's safe passage to the altar is compositionally mirrored in the final scene with the Christian woman's spiritual passage. Here, darkness is made to reaffirm Eucharistic truth and fortify Christian faith, while simultaneously perpetuating the notion of the Jew as demonic. Suspicions of Jewish nocturnal violence were not unusual in Renaissance Italy. According to the Trent 1475 ritual murder case, a guard testified that he heard a child (said to be the young Christian boy Simon Unferdorben) screaming from Samuel Ebreo's house at night. Christian fear of Jewish nocturnal violence provided justification for the ghettoization of the Jews in Italy beginning in the sixteenth century. On March 29, 1516, all Jews residing in Venice were moved to the ghetto and a curfew mandated "to prevent the Jews from going about all night, provoking the greatest discontent and the deepest displeasure on the part of Jesus Christ." (26)

Images of host desecration from the Italian peninsula are few. Although some medieval and Renaissance images of the story may no longer be extant, it seems that the story's pictorial rarity in Italy is due to the fact that historically no accusations of host desecration are recorded in Italy, including Urbino. Christians in north Italy nonetheless implicated Jews in ritual murder, and the historical immediacy of that story fostered its local visual reproduction. The most notorious case of ritual murder took place in 1475, when Christian authorities in Trent accused local Jews of killing the two-and-a-half-year-old Simon in order to use the boy's blood in making Passover matzo and in other religious rituals. (27) The allegations of ritual murder in Italy soon brought repercussions, particularly in the north, where only a few years after the trials in Trent a string of similar accusations was lodged against the Jews of Reggio, Mantua, Arena Po (near Milan), Portobuffole (near Treviso), and Verona. The case of ritual murder in Trent had another significant outcome: images of Simon's murder at the hands of Jews proliferated throughout the Tridentine and Valcamonica regions. (28) The late quattrocento depiction of Simon's ritual murder in the Parrocchia S. Martino in Cerveno (Brescia) exemplifies the type of imagery that decorates the local churches in this area (Fig. 11).

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Without a chronicled event in Italy to inspire images of host profanation, Uccello placed the French desecration story within an Italian context by portraying his Miracle of the Profaned Host in an Italian setting using an Italian visual language. Such pictorial techniques; working to recast Italian history to include an invented tale of Jewish violence, are powerfully suggestive. For example, Uccello took pains to give a faithful rendering of a fifteenth-century Jewish pawnshop in Italy, of which Robert Bonfil surmised that he likely had firsthand knowledge because his visual depiction accurately corresponds to the textual description of the pawnshop in the Book of the Moneylender and the Borrower. (29) According to the text, a pawnshop must be solidly built to prevent theft; the counter should stretch across the room, separating the shopkeeper from his customers; and sufficient light is essential so that the moneylender can determine a good from a bad borrower. Uccello's descriptive detailing, such as the wood-beamed ceiling and tile floor represented in perspective, as well as the quattrocento dress of his painted figures also help to naturalize the host desecration legend in Italy.

Uccello provided additional references that give his story an illusory local realism. (30) In the last four scenes of the predella, the artist painted rolling hills, superfluous to the narrative, that resemble Urbino's landscape vistas. By evoking the Urbinate countryside, Uccello gave the painting local meaning and facilitated the Urbinate viewer's identification with the host profanation legend. The predella's local significance also can be understood in terms of its iconographic relationship to Lorenzo and Jacopo Salimbeni's Crucifixion of 1416, which adorns the east wall of the Urbino Oratorio di S. Giovanni (Fig. 12). Uccello probably modeled the scorpion in his scene of the Jew's pawnshop after the one in the Urbino Crucifixion (on the standard at center left), producing a creature of similar form to that depicted by the Salimbeni brothers. Uccello, moreover, may also recall the Salimbeni Crucifixion, or at least crucifixion iconography in general, with his inclusion of the red shield and standards bearing the Roman inscription S.P.Q.R. (Figs. 6, 7). This unusual detail has meaningful iconographic implications for the Corpus Domini predella. By incorporating traditional crucifixion iconography, Uccello pictorially linked the crucifixion of Christ with the Miracle of the Profaned Host, the legend that symbolically reenacts Christ's Passion. In addition, the artist presented the flag-bearing, mounted soldiers in the fourth and fifth scenes of the predella, flanking the story's two death scenes, to associate Christ's crucifixion on the cross with the execution scenes of the host desecration's Christian and Jewish protagonists. Although all three depict scenes of impending death, faith in Christ and his resurrection helped save the irreverent Christian woman in Uccello's predella, while the irredeemable Jews burn at the stake.

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Thus, by adding local details and iconographically acknowledging the pictorial language of the Salimbeni Crucifixion, Uccello conferred on the host desecration legend meaningful local resonance and legitimacy in a city-state in which Jews had heretofore not been embroiled in host profanation accusations. In this way, Uccello paints host desecration into the Italian context, giving the tale of Jewish abuse a convincing--though fictive--local reality. The localizing details of the predella's stage set, costumes, and props dramatically contrast with Uccello's generic portrayals of the painting's actors. The figures, Jew and Christian alike, are generic types, lacking specific physiognomic characteristics. Although generic facial types are typical of Uccello's oeuvre, nondescript representations of the Jew were unusual in Renaissance Italy, and in northern Europe as well, since they avoid the stereotypical caricature of the Jew common, for example, in images of young Simon's ritual murder. (31) Yet by disallowing the Jew a specific identity through his generic portrayal, Uccello made it easier for the audience to identify local Jews with those shown in the picture. The usurious Jew who stands behind the counter of his pawnshop could stand for any Jewish moneylender in Italy. Uccello nonetheless does not inculpate the larger Jewish community in the blasphemous act. This tale of host desecration is not a corporate attack against the Eucharist by an organized community of Jews, as seen in contemporary examples, including the woodcut from the Italian sacred drama and the Hermitage panel. Rather, Uccello encapsulates the guilt within one Jewish family. His predella serves only as a cautionary tale for those Jews capable of such sacrilege. The story Uccello painted thus naturalizes the host profanation tale locally and universalizes it for those who fit the description.

Picturing Jewish tales of abuse not indigenous to the peninsula is not unusual, as exemplified by Ugolino di Prete Ilario's mid-fourteenth-century fresco in Orvieto Cathedral's Cappella del Corporale of a Jewish father who throws his son into an oven as punishment for having received Communion (Fig. 13). (32) The boy's mother attempts to save her child, but the flames are relentless. The Jewish boy ultimately emerges from the fire unharmed, explaining that the Virgin Mary protected him with her mantle. Having witnessed a miracle, the Jewish boy and his mother convert. The Jewish father, however, is thrown into the oven and consumed by its flames. The depiction of the legend of the Jewish boy in Orvieto Cathedral is similar to Uccello's protrayal of host desecration in several ways. In both, the act of violence is contained within one Jewish family and does not implicate an entire Jewish community, as in the case of ritual murder. Both portray the Jewish male as wicked and obstinate, the Jewish woman as subordinate to her husband and terrorized by his violent transgression, and the Eucharist and Christian faith as authentic and triumphant.

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Uccello's predella also shares a detail common to both the Jewish boy and ritual murder legends: all three include children in their narrative. Although the child, either Jewish or Christian, was an integral part of the Jewish boy and ritual murder stories, children were not a necessary element in the host desecration legend. Their inclusion was a rhetorical narrative device on Uccello's part, which served to maximize the dramatic intensity by playing on the viewer's compassion. (33) Uccello added a detail unprecedented in all renditions of host desecration by including an unborn child in the scene as well. As seen in the predella's second episode, the Jewish woman appears to be pregnant; her hand and the hand of her young child accentuate her swollen belly. The innocent and vulnerable nature of children, in utero as well as crying and grabbing onto their mother in fear, serves to underscore the nefarious and obstinate character of the Jewish male. Narratives of Jewish abuse often centered on such binary oppositions, innocence/wickedness, good/evil, pure/corrupt; nevertheless, these tensions find resolution at the end of the stories with the death of the Jewish perpetrator(s) and the conversion of the Jews who witnessed the miracle. Uccello's telling of the host desecration tale significantly differs from all other renditions of the story in that the entire Jewish family burns to death in the fifth scene. Unlike the Jewish boy of Orvieto, who is saved from the deadly flames by the Virgin Mary and remains unscathed, the Jews in Uccello's rendition of the host profanation story, including the pregnant wife and two young children, all expire.

Implicated in the crime by association, the Jew's entire family is killed as spectators to host desecration, an addition to the narrative that is not documented in other literary or pictorial sources. In Uccello's story the witnesses to the blasphemy are punishable for the perpetrator's crime since they all belong to the same Jewish household. The ties that bind them as a family also secure their collective demise. Uccello's tale also differs from other renditions because of his treatment of the Christian woman's fate. Although the details vary, the Christian woman in both Uccello's predella and the Italian sacred drama is granted divine salvation. Yet Uccello uniquely depicts a scene that tests the strength of her faith once again. Drawn to evil by an insidious Jew in the first scene, the Christian woman fights off the devils that tug at her feet and accepts the offering of the Last Communion by the angels in the last scene. In this way, she embraces God's mercy and triumphs over temptation before leaving the temporal world. Her final acceptance of the consecrated host helps ensure her eternal salvation, whereas the Jews' desecration of the host assures their ultimate damnation. The Jewish family is burnt at the stake as a communal act of cleansing, avenging the Jews' sacrilege and preventing their act of defilement from spreading to other parts of the community. To have spared the Jewish family would have called into question the powers of the Eucharist and its centrality to the Christian faith. To have hanged the Christian woman would have challenged the role redemption and mercy play in Christianity and in Urbino.

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Communion with Christ and the State

Following the completion of the predella, the Confraternity of Corpus Domini commissioned Joos van Ghent to paint in oils the monumental central panel for the high altarpiece. (34) The scene selected by the brothers, the Communion of the Apostles, is an unusual subject in Western painting. (35) Typically, Western programs celebrating the institution of the Eucharist represent the Last Supper with Christ and his Apostles seated in a dining room around a table adorned with wine and bread. Though the Communion of the Apostles iconography is rare in Italian painting, artists such as Fra Angelico and Luca Signorelli painted examples of this imagery. Fra Angelico's version for Cell 35 of the Florentine monastery of S. Marco, executed between 1438 and 1445, depicts Christ giving Communion to the Apostles, seated around a table in an interior setting. Signorelli's Communion of the Apostles of 1512 (in Cortona's Museo Diocesano) situates the figures within an open loggia (Fig. 14). Christ stands under a Renaissance arcade with all'antica design and offers the host to his Apostles. At the lower right, Judas places what appears to be the Eucharist into his moneybag. Judas, who is portrayed in Christian literature as the quintessential perfidious Jew, is pictured in the context of Communion as attempting to profane the host by hiding the wafer among his sullied silver coins. According to medieval accounts, mixing coins and hosts created a volatile environment that often-times provoked powerful reactions. As Sara Lipton writes, "money was considered to be the diametric opposite of, and thus incompatible with, the Body of Christ," as exemplified by a story from 1213 in which "a certain French Jew placed a stolen Host in a box of coins; the coins were miraculously turned into wafers." (36)

Joos van Ghent's portrayal of the Communion greatly differs from other Renaissance renderings in that the iconographic program selected by the Confraternity of Corpus Domini combines veneration of the host with the glorification of Urbino. Set within the crossing of a church transept, Christ stands centered in the foreground, flanked by his Apostles, and administers the host (Fig. 1). Judas, as outcast, stands apart from the other Apostles, his body cropped by the edge of the panel. He emerges wearing a tallit, a Jewish prayer shawl, and clutching his purse filled with coins, which associates him with money and betrayal. Unlike Signorelli, who perhaps alludes to Judas's connection to host desecration, Joos van Ghent avoids such references, since Uccello's predella relayed that story with meticulous detail.

Joos van Ghent's placement of the Communion scene in an ecclesiastical interior is significant within the Urbinate context. Given the prominent status of the Confraternity of Corpus Domini in Urbino and the importance of its high altarpiece, the anomalous placement of the scene was an apposite reflection of the local conditions in which it was produced. (37) Joos van Ghent's Communion of the Apostles is a devotional image meant to inspire piety and reinforce belief in Eucharistic efficacy. Here, Christ, representing the Eternal Priest, stands before his Apostles in the apse of a church that recalls the late Gothic architecture of the Corpus Domini Church, while Christ's pictorial presence recalls the presence of the Corpus Domini priest. (38) Joos van Ghent's painted Communion scene, resting on the high altar of the Corpus Domini Church, thus serves as the quintessential exemplar for the sacramental ritual of Communion. The Corpus Domini priest stands before the iconic depiction of Joos van Ghent's Christ and performs the sacramental act of Communion set forth by Christ himself. This reiteration of Communion, painted and real, underscores the importance of the sacramental ritual to the Urbinate community, while linking that community to Christ.

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The sacramental ritual performed by the Corpus Domini priest differs subtly from that delivered by Christ in the Corpus Domini Altarpiece. According to the ritual of Communion established during the late twelfth century, it is the gesture of elevation that marks the moment of the Eucharist's transubstantiation. (39) Medieval liturgical manuscripts of the Corpus Domini mass accentuate the importance of this gesture by including rich illuminations of the host's elevation. The emphatic sign of consecration has a didactic as well as a liturgical function: elevation makes manifest for the entire congregation the moment in which the wheaten disk transforms into the body of Christ. All onlookers thus are able to participate visually in transubstantiation and witness the miraculous event. During the late Middle Ages, when transubstantiation entered Church doctrine, elevation helped alleviate suspicions regarding the veracity of the Eucharist. In spite of the fact that churchgoers could not see any physical change to the wafer after consecration, by elevating the host, ringing bells, burning incense, and lighting candles, the priest elicited the congregation's sensual involvement in the ritual. Joos van Ghent, however, does not depict the moment of elevation found in images of the Corpus Domini mass because elevation in the case of the Communion of the Apostles was not necessary. Christ himself offers his body in the form of the host to his congregation, his divine presence thereby inviting the viewer's participation in the ritual. Seeing Joos van Ghent's Communion of the Apostles on the main altar of the Corpus Domini Church, the churchgoers of Urbino not only witnessed the miraculous elevation of the host by the Corpus Domini priest but were also reminded of the divine symbolism behind the gesture.

The inclusion of contemporary figures in the far right background, distinguished from the foreground scene by their luxurious dress of gold and cut velvet, also differentiates Joos van Ghent's Communion of the Apostles from other Renaissance depictions (Fig. 15). The most recognizable figure is Duke Federigo da Montefeltro, shown in profile, with his prominent nose. Federigo's courtiers gather behind him, as does a woman, believed to be a nurse or the duke's deceased consort Battista Sforza, with his son and heir, Guidobaldo. The duke touches the arm of a bearded man in Eastern headdress and brocade robe. While Lavin focuses her analysis on the identity of this enticing Easterner, shifting the focus to Duke Federigo's presence offers an additional reading. Traditionally, contemporary figures within a religious program are the donors of the work of art. In the altarpiece of Corpus Domini, Federigo and his court are presented neither as donors praying for divine grace nor as witnesses of the sacred scene. Rather, the presence of the Urbino court interrupts the timeless ritual of Communion with its narrative scene of local courtly life inserted within an iconic devotional image. (40)

From the courtly figures' distinctive gestures, the duke and his entourage appear to be immersed in discussion. Joos van Ghent presents Federigo as a ruler and diplomat welcoming the foreign emissary to his court. Federigo and his visitor here perhaps discuss philosophical matters or, more convincingly, engage in a theological disputation, as each argues the merits of his position. Though it is impossible to discern the topic of the courtly conversation, it is clear from the painting that Federigo and his Eastern guest participate in an amicable exchange of words. Federigo delicately touches the arm of the bearded man, who raises his hand emphatically to decorate his words, while the courtier standing beside them marks with his fingers the number of points made during the discourse. Finger counting, which derives from the scholastic tradition of argumentation founded in early Italian universities and from the enumerated predications of leading trecento and quattrocento Italian friars in their sermons, developed as a visual mnemonic in Italian and northern painting from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries and can be found in Urbinate paintings prior to Joos van Ghent's depiction. (41) The Salimbeni Crucifixion in the Oratorio di S. Giovanni, for example, features an equestrian figure engaged in conversation with a man in black dress who, like Federigo's courtier, counts on his fingers (Fig. 16).

Although the tone of the courtly figures' gestures is easily determined, the unusual portrayal of the duke, his court, and a foreign ambassador in a scene depicting the institution of the Eucharist remains enigmatic. It can be ascertained from the confraternity's documents that Federigo and his court were not the patrons of the altarpiece. While Federigo contributed a relatively small sum of money, 15 gold florins, to the commission in 1474, it was the Confraternity of Corpus Domini that hired and paid both artists. (42) Nevertheless, the visual evidence and written documentation suggest ducal involvement.

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According to Bernardino Baldi, the sixteenth-century court historian under Duke Francesco Maria II:

   ... Uzun Hasan, the very powerful King of Persia, who
   sent ambassadors to the Christian rulers, gave them special
   orders that on his behalf they visit him [Federigo] and
   present him with very rich gifts, which they did diligently.
   In order to keep alive the memory of that fact [Federigo]
   had life-size portraits of himself and the ambassadors
   painted in the high altarpiece of the Confraternity of
   Corpus Domini in Urbino by Joos Tedesco. ... (43)

It appears from this statement that it was on Federigo's request that the confraternity included the portraits of the Urbino ruler and his Persian delegate. Certainly the duke would not have permitted the confraternity to render an image of his likeness within its main altarpiece without his consent. The altarpiece of Corpus Domini must be understood as a project commissioned by the confraternity that successfully pleased Duke Federigo. Federigo's small monetary contribution to the commission in 1474 and the insertion of his portrait suggest that he approved (or perhaps authorized) the altarpiece's imagery.

The question remains as to why the duke supported a project that documented his political affairs within a religious painting commissioned by a confraternity. The answer perhaps lies in the political and religious climate of mid-fifteenth-century Italy. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 raised fears of a Turkish invasion penetrating the Italian borders. During the 1460s and 1470s, Popes Pius II, Paul II, and Sixtus IV attempted to unify the Italian princes in an alliance with the Persians in order to defend Christendom from the Turks. Yet for decades the Italian Renaissance princes had declined to support the popes' proposed alliance. By 1471, during Sixtus's pontificate, the threat brought on by the Turks increased, and the pope dispatched a crusade to encourage the European powers to organize against the attacks of the Turks.

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In 1472 Federigo demonstrated his support of Sixtus's mission when he welcomed the pope's crusading Cardinal Bessarion to Urbino. (44) In the same year the duke wrote a letter to the Persian ruler Uzun Hasan describing his loyalty to the sultan and expressing gratitude for the Persian ambassador's visit to Urbino. (45) Urbinate viewers may well have read the inclusion of the duke with his court and Persian guest in the altarpiece as an indication of Federigo's commitment to unite his state with Persia in order to protect against a Turkish invasion. As gonfaloniere (captain) of the Holy Roman Church, Federigo was responsible for defending Christianity from outside threats. Seen in this political context, the Corpus Domini Altarpiece, with its depiction of the duke gently touching the Persian delegate's arm, visually reassured his Christian subjects that the Turks posed no threat to Urbino.

On the basis of her identification of the Eastern delegate as Ambassador Isaac, a Spanish Jew serving as ambassador from Persia who converted to Christianity during his mission in Italy, Lavin interpreted the altarpiece as a call for the defeat and conversion of all enemies of Christendom. (46) I suggest instead that the two parts of the altarpiece worked together to reinforce the duke's policy on tolerance during a period of intense fear of the non-Christian. That is, the central panel, by showing the duke affectionately receiving the Persian ambassador, whose inclusion in the altarpiece records an alliance between Urbino and the Islamic Aqquyunlu Empire led by Uzun Hasan, represents the relative openness of the community to religious diversity. (47) The portrayal of the Persian ambassador, functioning as proxy for the sultan, in the central panel and the Jews in the predella illustrates Federigo's willingness to allow certain social out-groups in Urbino, provided they served both Christians and Christianity. The predella, nevertheless, clarifies the fate of the non-Christian who crosses the line and threatens the religious and civic community of Urbino. The altarpiece thus performs a symbolic act of cleansing, purging Urbino of all hostile religious dissenters in preparation for the crusade against the Turks.

The presence of contemporary figures in the altarpiece juxtaposed with the predella's anti-Jewish invective may also signify an attempt to assuage popular fears. Both panels contain images of social outsiders whose presence in Urbino does not hinder the unification of the Christian body celebrated by Communion. The bearded Easterner who engages the duke in a warm exchange of words is represented as welcoming the duke's Christian views. In contrast, the Jews who are depicted as overtly hostile to the Christian faith are summarily executed so as to remove them as a threat. The Corpus Domini Altarpiece not only displays within its painted field a devotional image dedicated to Christ and to Christ's body through the Eucharist, it also embodies Federigo's devotion to protecting his Christian subjects and the future of Christianity. The Eucharist serves as a pictorial trope through which the Christian citizens of Urbino constructed a civic identity. As a potent symbol of unification, the Eucharist defined within Urbino a spiritual community dedicated to transubstantiation as well as a secular community dedicated to Urbino's illustrious ruler, Federigo da Montefeltro. That is, the Christian community that formed through the partaking of Christ's body also generated a local body politic centered on the duke. In this sense, the altarpiece not only created a universal Christian community based on the collective sharing of the Eucharist but also delineated the form and content of the civic community of Urbino. If consuming the sacred host, the body of Christ, constructed a Christian and civic identity, then desecrating the host defined the limits of that community. While the main panel of the altarpiece portrays a story of communal inclusion, the predella bears a story of social exclusion.

As Christ offers the sacrifice of his body for the redemption of the universal Christian community, so Federigo offers the sacrifice of the blasphemous Jews for the religious and civic harmony of the Urbino political body. Placed above the Jews at the stake and beside the Persian ambassador at court, Federigo da Montefeltro is presented as the absolute protector of his Christian subjects and their faith. By eclipsing the imminent Turkish threat while simultaneously sacrificing blasphemous Jews, the Corpus Domini Altarpiece combines Eucharistic ritual and myth for the salvation of the Urbino social order.

Notes

I would like to thank the University of Chicago, the Mellon Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the Renaissance Society of America, and the Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism for their support during the course of researching and writing this article. Portions of this essay were first presented at the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan, May 1998, and later revised in a paper given at the Renaissance Society of America conference in Scottsdale, Arizona, April 2002. I am grateful to the participants at both conferences for their helpful comments. I am especially grateful to Charles E. Cohen, Stephen J. Campbell, Paul Mendes-Flohr, Maria Luisa Moscati Benigni, Mark Jurdjevic, and E. J. Carter, as well as Leonardo Moretti and Giuseppina Paolucci of the Sezione Archivio di Stato Urbino, for their many insights. I also would very much like to thank Sara Lipton, Perry Chapman, and the anonymous reader of my manuscript for their invaluable suggestions. Unless otherwise indicated, translations are mine.

(1.) The first entry regarding Joos van Ghent's work for the Confraternity of Corpus Domini is documented in the brotherhood's records in Libro B, carta 69v: "E in sino a di ditto [12 de febraro 1473] bolognini quarantadoi e mezo quali li ha fatti boni mastro Giusto [Giusto da Gand] depintore per contante in pagamento de la taula. ..."; quoted in Moranti, 216. See also Ercole Scatassa, "Chiesa del Corpus Domini in Urbino," Repertorium fur Kunstwissenschaft 25 (1902): 440.

(2.) Uccello's wages can be traced from August 10, 1467, to October 31, 1468. After the October 1468 payment, the artist is no longer mentioned in the Confraternity of Corpus Domini records. For this reason it is assumed that the artist completed the predella in 1468. For transcriptions of confraternal expenditure records, see Moranti, esp. 206-34.

(3.) See Rubin, 169-70.

(4.) Vespasiano da Bisticci, Renaissance Princes, Popes and Prelates: The Vespasiano Memoirs, Lives of Illustrious Men of the XVth Century, trans. William George and Emily Waters (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1963), 104. In addition, Baldassare Castiglione writes in The Book of the Courtier that Federigo "collected many very excellent and rare books in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, all of which he adorned with gold and silver, deeming these to be the supreme excellence of his great palace." Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Charles S. Singleton (New York: Doubleday, 1959), 14.

(5.) On Jews and the house of Montefeltro, see Gino Luzzatto, I banchieri ebrei in Urbino nell'eta ducale (Padua: Arnaldo Forni, 1902); Cecil Roth, The History of the Jews of Italy (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1946), 119; Encyclopaedia Judaica (New York: MacMillan, 1971), s.v. "Urbino," 381; and Alessandra Veronese, "La presenza ebraica nel ducato di Urbino nel quattrocento," in Italia Judaica: Gli ebrei nello Stato pontifico fino al ghetto, 1555 (Rome: Ministero per i Beni Culturali e Ambientali, 1998), 251-83. Under Francesco Maria della Rovere (1508-1538), Hebrew books were burned; the Jews lost their power to acquire real estate and act as bankers; they were forced permanently to wear a distinguishing badge; and they were not permitted to purchase provisions during the day.

(6.) On medieval tolerance, see Istvan Bejczy, "Tolerantia: A Medieval Concept," Journal of the History of Ideas 58 (July 1997): 365-84; Cary J. Nederman, Worlds of Difference: European Discourses of Toleration, c. 1100-c. 1550 (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000); John Christian Laursen and Cary J. Nederman, eds., Beyond the Persecuting Society: Religious Toleration before the Enlightenment (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998); and Ole Peter Grell and Bob Scribner, eds., Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

(7.) Lavin, 1-24. For other studies of the Corpus Domini Altarpiece, see Gianfranco Fioravanti, "Giannozzo Manetti, l'Adversus Judaeos et Gentes e l'Altare del Corpus Domini a Urbino," in Federico di Montefeltro: Lo stato, ed. Giorgio Cerboni Baiardi et al. (Rome: Bulzoni, 1986), 177-87; J. Van Waadenoijen, "The Altarpiece of Corpus Domini in Urbino Reinterpreted," Arte Cristiana 79, no. 743 (1991): 90-98; Dante Piermattei, L'ostia profanata: Gli ebrei e la nascita dei monti di pieta nel ducato di Urbino (Fano: Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Pesaro, 1997); and Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 75-109.

(8.) During an era of ceaseless warring and bad harvests, Renaissance principi sought Jewish capital and expertise in the credit market to maintain economic equilibrium. For this reason, princes permitted their Jewish subjects to lend money to the poor at a rate of interest at times greater than that offered by Christian lenders but would reclaim that money in the form of exorbitant taxes. In this way, the Jews were made to serve as tax collectors for these states; the money they amassed would be transferred to the prince, while the Jews would suffer the Christian community's condemnation for their excessive charges. See Maristella Botticini, "A Tale of 'Benevolent' Governments: Private Credit Markets, Public Finance, and the Role of Jewish Lenders in Medieval and Renaissance Italy," Journal of Economic History 60 (Mar. 2000): 164-89.

(9.) Jacques Le Goff, Your Money or Your Life: Economy and Religion in the Middle Ages (New York: Zone Books, 1988), 93. Regarding usury, see Benjamin Nelson, Idea of Usury: From Tribal Brotherhood to Universal Otherhood (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949); John Noonan, The Scholastic Analysis of Usury (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957); Bonfil, 79-98; R. Po-Chia Hsia, "The Usurious Jew: Economic Structure and Religious Representations in an Anti-Semitic Discourse," in In and Out of the Ghetto: Jewish-Gentile Relations in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany, ed. R. Po-Chia Hsia and Hartmut Lehmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 161-76; and Joel Kaye, Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century: Money, Market Exchange, and the Emergence of Scientific Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), esp. 79-115.

(10.) Jewish moneylending became a significant part of Urbino's credit market around the 1430s, crossing gender, class, and religious boundaries. For example, an inventory dated November 1436 established on the death of the Jewish lender Genatano di Ventura di Isaia di maestro Daniele da Urbino shows a list of nearly one thousand debtors who owed money to the deceased Genatano and his family. The list of debtors named in this notarial registry consists primarily of Christian men; however, Christian women, as well as Jewish men, also borrowed money from Genatano. One of the last names to appear on the 1436 inventory is the name of the illustrious ruler of Urbino, Count Guidantonio da Montefeltro, Federigo's father, who owed Genatano 21 ducati and 30 bolognini. See Sezione Archivio di Stato Urbino, Quadra di Pusterla, n. 28 (1436), cc. 132r-137r.

(11.) On Franciscan anti-Jewish sermons and their impact on Jews in Renaissance Italy, see Diane Owen Hughes, "Distinguishing Signs: Ear-rings, Jews and Franciscan Rhetoric in the Italian Renaissance City," Past and Present 112 (Aug. 1986): 3-59; and Ariel Toaff, "Conversioni al Cristianesimo in Italia nel quattrocento, movimenti e tendenze: Il caso dell'Umbria," in Ebrei e cristiani nell'Italia medievale e moderna: Conversioni, scambi, contrasti, ed. Michele Luzzati et al. (Rome: Carucci, 1988), 105-12. Regarding the impact of the anti-Jewish polemic on the visual arts in Renaissance Ferrara, see Stephen J. Campbell, Cosme Tura of Ferrara: Style, Politics and the Renaissance City, 1450-1495 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 99-129; and idem, Cosme Tura: Painting and Design in Renaissance Ferrara (Milan: Electa, 2002), esp. 219-28.

(12.) Bernardino da Siena, trans. Franco Mormando, The Preacher's Demons: Bernardino of Siena and the Social Underworld of Early Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 189. See also Leon Poliakov, Jewish Bankers and the Holy See from the Thirteenth to the Seventeenth Century, trans. Miriam Kochan (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977), 142. According to Franciscan sermons, it was a mortal sin for Christians to eat or drink with Jews, visit a Jewish doctor, bathe in the company of a Jew, socialize with Jews in their homes, help raise Jewish children, eat a Jew's unleavened bread, or rent a house to a Jew. Moreover, the friars called for prohibitions on the construction or renovation of Jewish synagogues, as well as demanded that Jews wear compulsory badges and follow a strict curfew during Holy Week. Such sermons created severe social tensions, which often fostered hostile rioting in the streets of Italy.

(13.) Carol Bresnahan Menning, Charity and State in Late Renaissance Italy: The Monte di Pieta of Florence (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), 2.

(14.) Those who came to the monte to borrow money had to swear under oath and under pain of imprisonment that they would use the loan strictly for their household needs and not for their businesses and, more importantly, not to satiate their greed. The monte loaned only small amounts of money, approximately 4 florins every six months, to only the poorest of the region. It is as a result of these severe restrictions that the Jewish lending institutions maintained their economic influence until the early 16th century, when the Jewish moneylenders' privileges in many cases were annulled. Bonfil, 34-36.

(15.) On the establishment and management of Urbino's monte di pieta, see Liber Sextus, "Capitoli del monte della pieta d'Urbino," fols. 150v-158v, in Statuta civitatis Urbini (Pesaro: Bartholomaeum Casanum, 1559). For specifics on the pawns and loans transacted at the Urbino monte, see Sezione Archivio di Stato Urbino, Monte di Pieta, Libri dei Pegni-Cassa e Spese. On Federigo's contribution to the Urbino monte di pieta, see Lavin, 18.

(16.) On Fra Domenico da Leonessa, see Luzzatto (as in n. 5), 41.

(17.) See Hannelore Glasser, Artists' Contracts of the Early Renaissance (New York: Garland, 1977), esp. 150-58.

(18.) According to Michael Camille, "the Host can be described as the single most important image to Christians from the middle of the thirteenth century onward, perhaps even overtaking veneration of the cross." Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 215.

(19.) In general, host desecration accusations provoked greater violence in areas with denser Jewish populations, such as the Germanic regions, resulting in the annihilation of entire Jewish communities. See Rubin.

(20.) See Pierre Francastel, "Un mystere parisien illustre par Uccello: Le miracle de l'hostie d'Urbino," Revue Archeologique 39 (1952): 180-91. For an interpretation of the predella that combines a study of gender and anti-Semitism, see Kathleen Biddick, "Genders, Bodies, Borders: Technologies of the Visible," Speculum 68 (1993): 389-418.

(21.) On the scorpion as a Jewish reference, see Marcel Bulard, Le scorpion: Symbole du peuple juif dans l'art religieux des XIVe, XVe, XVIe siecles (Paris: E. de Boccard, 1935), 39; and Ruth Mellinkoff, Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages, vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 46. The central shield attached to the hood of the fireplace represents the profile of a Moor. Both the scorpion and the Moor head figure prominently in Crucifixion scenes as metaphors for the non-Christian. See, for example, Giacomo Borlone's 1471 Crucifixion in the Oratorio dei Disciplini in Clusone. Jacques Lavalleye suggests that the final motif, the star, is also a Jewish emblem. Lavalleye, Juste de Gand: Peintre de Frederic de Montefeltre (Louvain: Bibliotheque de l'Universite, 1936), 44.

(22.) The stained-glass medallions in the church of St-Die (Vosges) in Lorraine, dating to the 1280s, also conflate the host desecration legend. See Meredith Parsons Lillich, Rainbow like an Emerald: Stained Glass in Lorraine in the Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Centuries (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), 112-13.

(23.) For a reproduction and discussion of the Hermitage panel, see M. A. Goukovskj, "A Representation of the Profanation of the Host: A Puzzling Painting in the Hermitage and Its Possible Author," Art Bulletin 51 (1969): 170-73.

(24.) For illustrations of the German images, see Joshua Trachtenberg. The Devil and the Jews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1943), 112; and Rubin, 150.

(25.) Jean Verdon, La nuit au Moyen Age (Paris: Perrin, 1994); and idem, "Recherches sur la societe religieuse et la nuit au Moyen Age," in Les prelats, l'Eglise et la societe, XIe-XVe siecles, ed. Francoise Beriac (Bordeaux: Universite Michel de Montaigne, 1994), 327-36. See also Elisabeth Pavan, "Recherches sur la nuit venitienne a la fin du Moyen Age," Journal of Medieval History 7 (Dec. 1981): 339-56. I would like to thank Craig Koslofsky for introducing me to the medieval history of night.

(26.) For the complete senatorial decree establishing the Venetian ghetto, see David Chambers and Brian Pullan, eds., Venice: A Documentary History 1450-1630 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 338-39. On Jewish ghettos in Italy, see also Kenneth Stow, Theater of Acculturation: The Roman Ghetto in the Sixteenth Century (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001).

(27.) The cult of Simon of Trent was abolished in 1965, when Simon's body was taken from his dedicatory chapel in the church of Saint Peter in Trent and buried. On the Trent 1475 ritual murder legend, see R. Po-Chia Hsia, Trent 1475: Stories of a Ritual Murder Trial (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Anna Esposito and D. Quaglioni, Processi contro gli ebrei di Trento (1475-1478): I processi del 1475 (Padua: CEDAM, 1990); Iginio Rogger and Marco Bellabarba, eds., Il Principe Vescovo Johannes Hinderbach (1465-1486) fra tardo medioevo e umanesimo (Bologna: Dehoniane Bologna, 1992); and Wolfgang Treue, Der Trienter Judenprozess: Voraussetzungen, Ablaufe, Auswirkungen, 1475-1588 (Hannover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 1996). On ritual murder in general, see R. Po-Chia Hsia, The Myth of Ritual Murder: Jews and Magic in Reformation Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988); Alan Dundes, ed., The Blood Libel Legend: A Casebook in Anti-Semitic Folklore (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991); Gavin Langmuir, "Historiographic Crucifixion," in Toward a Definition of Antisemitism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 282-98; idem, "The Tortures of the Body of Christ," in Christendom and Its Discontents: Exclusion, Persecution, and Rebellion, 1000-1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 287-309; and Robert C. Stacey, "From Ritual Crucifixion to Host Desecration: Jews and the Body of Christ," Jewish History 12 (spring 1998): 11-28.

(28.) For images of Simon of Trent, see Gabriella Ferri Piccaluga, "Economia, devozione e politica: Immagini di Francescani Amadeiti ed ebrei nel secolo XV," in Il Francescanesimo in Lombardia: Storia e arte, ed. Maria Pia Alberzoni (Milan: Silvana, 1983), 107-22; and idem, "Ebrei nell'iconografia lombarda del '400," La Rassegna Mensile di Israel 52 (1987): 357-95. Both essays are reprinted in Piccaluga, Il confine del nord: Microstoria in Vallecamonica per una storia d'Europa (Vallecamonica: BIM, 1989). See also Lamberto Donati, L'inizio della stampa a Trento ed il beato Simone (Trent: Tipografia M. Dossi and C. Trento, 1968); Mark J. Zucker, "Anti-Semitic Imagery in Two Fifteenth-Century Italian Engravings," Source: Notes in the History of Art 8-9 (summer-fall 1989): 5-12; and Dana E. Katz, "Painting and the Politics of Persecution: Representing the Jew in Fifteenth-Century Mantua," Art History 23 (Nov. 2000): 475-95.

(29.) See Bonfil, 90-91.

(30.) Rubin, 153, writes, "The host desecration accusation could thus be 'localised' even if it happened elsewhere; the effect was achieved through details of representation of gesture and space, and the familiarisation which these achieved."

(31.) For stereotypical images of Jews in Italy and elsewhere, see Zucker (as in n. 28); Mellinkoff (as in n. 21); Eric Zafran, "The Iconography of Antisemitism: A Study of the Representation of the Jews in the Visual Arts of Europe 1400-1600," Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1973; Heinz Schreckenberg, The Jews in Christian Art: An Illustrated History (New York: Continuum, 1996); and Debra Hassig, "The Iconography of Rejection: Jews and Other Monstrous Races," in Image and Belief: Studies in Celebration of the Eightieth Anniversary of the Index of Christian Art, ed. Colum Hourihane (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 25-37. On stereotyping, see Sander L. Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985).

(32.) On Ugolino di Prete Ilario's frescoes in Orvieto Cathedral, see Rubin, 155; Luigi Fumi, Il Duomo di Orvieto e i suoi restauri (Rome: Societa Laziale Tipografico-Editrice, 1891), esp. 385-89; and Giusi Testa, ed., La cattedrale di Orvieto: Santa Maria Assunta in Cielo (Rome: Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca Dello Stato, 1990), 196-98.

(33.) Rubin, 77-78.

(34.) According to Vespasiano da Bisticci (as in n. 4), 101, Federigo sent for Joos van Ghent from Flanders because the duke preferred oil painting to the Italian tempera technique: "He [Federigo da Montefeltro] was much interested in painting, and because he could not find in Italy painters in oil to suit his taste he sent to Flanders and brought thence a master [Joos van Ghent] who did at Urbino many very stately pictures. ..."

(35.) On the Communion of the Apostles iconography, see Gertrud Schiller, Iconography of Christian Art, trans. Janet Seligman, vol. 2 (London: Lund Humphries, 1972), 24-41.

(36.) Sara Lipton, Images of Intolerance: The Representation of Jews and Judaism in the "Bible moralisee" (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 37.

(37.) The important role the Corpus Domini Church played in Urbino can be attributed to the city's communal association with the Eucharist. For example, during the second half of the 15th century the Feast of Corpus Domini, with its lavish Eucharistic procession, became the most important religious event in Urbino. According to Lavin's research on the Statuta civitatis Urbini, no other feast is given such prominence in Urbino, including Christmas, the Feast of the Virgin, and the feast day of the city's patron saint, Crescentino (Lavin, 10 n. 55). On the civic significance of Eucharistic celebrations outside Italy, see Carolyn Dean, Inka Bodies and the Body of Christ: Corpus Christi in Colonial Cuzco, Peru (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999).

(38.) The church of Corpus Domini in the Piazza di Pian di Mercato (now the Piazza della Repubblica) was demolished in 1705. The precise date of its construction is unknown. Based on confraternal records, Moranti, 16-23, suggests a construction date between 1395 and 1403. The Gothic architecture and interior decoration of the church are described briefly in a document dated 1647 in the Biblioteca Centrale, Fondo del Comune, busta 93, fol. 226r-v.

(39.) On the elevation of the host, see Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 49-82.

(40.) See Gallagher and Greenblatt (as in n. 7), esp. 80-81.

(41.) O. Chomentovskaja, "Le comput digital: Histoire d'un geste dans l'art de la Renaissance italienne," Gazette des Beaux-Arts 20 (1938): 172. Joos van Ghent also used the finger-counting gesture in his portrayals of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Boethius, and Duns Scotus in Duke Federigo's studiolo.

(42.) See the Confraternity of Corpus Domini records, Libro B, carta 75r: "Eadem 7 de marzo 1474 florini quindece doro contanti da nostro Illustre Signore [Federico da Montefeltro] a Guido de Menghaccio per detta fraternita per aiutorio de la spesa de la tavola. ..."; quoted in Moranti, 217.

(43.) Bernardino Baldi, Vita e fatti di Federigo di Montefeltro, duca di Urbino, 1604, ed. Francesco Zuccardi, 3 vols. (Rome: Perego Salvioni, 1824), vol. 3, 241-42: "... Usuncassano potentissimo Re di Persia nel mandar, che fece Ambasciatori a' Potentati Cristiani, ordino loro particolarmente, che da sua parte lo visitassero, e gli presentassero ricchissimi doni: il che fecero essi diligentemente, onde egli per lasciar viva la memoria di quel fatto, fece ritrarre se, e gli Ambasciadori dal naturale nella tavola dell'Altar maggiore della Confraternita del Corpo di Cristo in Urbino da Giusto Tedesco. ..." On Baldi's discussion of the Persian ambassador and the Corpus Domini Altarpiece, see Lavin, 13-14; and J. Van Waadenoijen (as in n. 7), 90. Scholars believe that Baldi made a simple error in transcription when he pluralized "ambassadors." In a letter Federigo sent Uzun Hasan in 1472, the duke discusses the visit to Urbino of only one Persian ambassador. Unfortunately, Baldi's claims regarding the delegate's visit cannot be verified because the archival records Baldi used no longer survive.

(44.) Concerning Bessarion's travels to the Montefeltro territories of Gubbio, Castel Durante, and Urbino, see Cecil Clough, "Cardinal Bessarion and Greek at the Court of Urbino," in The Duchy of Urbino in the Renaissance (London: Variorum Reprints, 1981), 160-71; and Charles Rosenberg, "The Double Portrait of Federico and Guidobaldo da Montefeltro: Power, Wisdom and Dynasty," in Federico di Montefeltro: Le arti, ed. Giorgio Cerboni Baiardi et al. (Rome: Bulzoni, 1986), 221.

(45.) For a copy of the duke's letter to the Persian ruler Uzun Hasan, see Paolo Alatri, Lettere di stato e di arte (1470-1480), Federico da Montefeltro (Rome: Edizioni de "Storia e Letteratura," 1949), 78-79.

(46.) Lavin, 14, writes, "There is still no absolute proof [as to the figure's identity]; but we shall see that acceptance of [t]his idea makes the elements of the ensemble fall into a harmony that is otherwise missing." In 1839 Johann David Passavant wrote that the bearded Easterner in Joos van Ghent's panel was a Venetian nobleman named Caterino Zeno, who served as the ambassador to the court of Persia. This hypothesis was supported until 1949 when Paolo Alatri noted that, according to Baldi, the bearded Easterner in Joos van Ghent's painting was the ambassador from Persia--not the ambassador to Persia. Alatri believed the Eastern figure to be "Ambassador Isaac," who according to archival records traveled from Persia to Italy in 1472-73. In 1964 Jacques Lavalleye rejected Alatri's suggestion for lack of substantial documentation and wrote that the name of the Persian ambassador could not be determined. In 1967 Lavin retraced and extrapolated on Alatri's analysis regarding Ambassador Isaac. See Johann David Passavant, Rafael von Urbino und sein Vater Giovanni Santi (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1839), 430; Alatri (as in n. 45), 79; and Jacques Lavalleye, Le palais ducal d'Urbin, pt. 1, vol. 7 of Les primitifs flamands (Brussels: Centre National de Recherches "Primitifs Flamands," 1964), 7-9.

(47.) On Uzun Hasan and Aqquyunlu history, see John E. Woods, The Aqquyunlu: Clan, Confederation, Empire (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1999).

Frequently Cited Sources

Bonfil, Robert, Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy, trans. Anthony Oldcorn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

Lavin, Marilyn Aronberg, "The Altar of Corpus Domini in Urbino: Paolo Uccello, Joos Van Ghent, Piero della Francesca," Art Bulletin 49 (1967): 1-24.

Moranti, Luigi, La Confraternita del Corpus Domini di Urbino (Bologna: Il Lavoro, 1990).

Rubin, Miri, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).

Dana E. Katz is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Washington University, where she is completing a book on the representation of Jews in the Italian Renaissance courts. She is the author of "Painting and the Politics of Persecution: Representing the Jew in Fifteenth-Century Mantua," Art History 23 (November 2000) [Arts and Sciences, Washington University, St. Louis, Mo. 63130].

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