ICMA at the Andrew Ladis Memorial Trecento Conference
‘Notice every detail’: A Visual Narrative of the Passion and its Clarissan Audience
Keynote by Anne Derbes and Amy Neff
Sponsored by the ICMA

Thursday 23 October 2025 at 5:30pm
Register to attend online HERE
Instructions below to attend in person (Athens, GA)

ICMA members are invited to attend the keynote lecture for the Andrew Ladis Memorial Trecento Conference to be held in Athens, GA. The conference will be hybrid and ICMA members are welcome to attend online or in person.

‘Notice every detail’: A Visual Narrative of the Passion and its Clarissan Audience will be presented Thursday 23 October 2025 at 5:30 pm – 6:30 pm (EDT) by Anne Derbes (Hood College, Maryland) and Amy Neff (University of Tennessee, Knoxville).

Abstract:
The author of the Meditations on the Life of Christ, addressing a Clarissan nun, opens the meditation at Matins with this instruction: “Follow … from the beginning of the passion to the end…. Notice every detail as if you were present.” In our talk, we take that directive to heart. Our focus is a monumental, early-fourteenth-century, multi-scene panel painting of the passion from the convent of Santa Clara, Palma de Mallorca. The panel was probably intended for the nuns’ choir, the liturgical and devotional center of Clarissan life. While it has been widely and probably correctly ascribed to an itinerant Italian painter, close examination of the panel shows, first, that he collaborated with a Catalan artisan and, second, that the painter had spent considerable time in the Kingdom of Serbia before making his way to Mallorca. However, despite his careful emulation of Serbian wall paintings, at times he disregarded Palaeologan types and instead chose compositions that were popular in Italy and particularly relevant for the Poor Clares’ identity and devotional lives. The panel also would have spoken to the Palma Clares more specifically, for its narrative choices and certain details reveal an unusually pronounced antisemitism corresponding to local concerns. In the second decade of the century, during the tenure of Abbess Blanca de Vilanova, the nuns waged a systematic campaign to drive Jews from the area. Our talk concludes by considering the agency of the nuns, the panel’s possible patrons, and the role of the Franciscan order in the mobility of people and images in the late medieval Mediterranean.

The Conference and keynote registration links:
The biennial Andrew Ladis Memorial Trecento Conference is based upon the conferences once hosted by our esteemed colleague, Andrew Ladis, at the University of Georgia, Athens. It is designed as a small, workshop-like gathering that offers a unique opportunity for advanced students, emerging and advanced scholars of fourteenth-century Italian art to network, collaborate, and share their research.

The Proceedings (revised conference papers) are published in the Trecento Forum series by Brepols Press.

The 2025 conference will be held at the Georgia Museum of Art in Athens, GA, and will be fully hybrid. All ICMA members are warmly invited to attend the keynote lecture, which is partly sponsored by the ICMA, and the full conference, either online or in person. [Note: online participation is free while in-person attendees are asked to pay a small fee. Although in-person registration may be closed, anyone wishing to attend can email jsteinhoff@uh.edu]

The full conference program and registration links are available at https://georgiamuseum.org/trecento/