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

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.