Isis Rising: The Ancient Theology of Donatello's "Virgin" in the Santo

Abstract

As signaled by the citation of Proverbs 8:24 and Sirach 24:31 in its prologue, the decree of the Council of Basel on the Immaculate Conception represented a triumph of the immaculist Marian teaching of the Franciscan theologian and philosopher John Duns Scotus. The Franciscan Studium Generale at the church of Sant'Antonio in Padova had been a flourishing center of Scottist philosophy and theology since the beginning of the fourteenth century, when the Franciscan companions and allies of the Subtle Doctor and his immediate successors returned from their studies in Paris and Oxford. It seems plausible that after Basel the Franciscans might have wished to celebrate the victory of the Immaculata and their own Scottist theology in a new altarpiece for their church, carried out by Donatello between 1446 and 1450. The interpretation sets the Virgin's sapiential persona into the broader context of the long-standing Christian homology between Genesis and the Timaeus, producing a Platonic reading of the Immaculata as the feminine principle in creation: the mother, receptacle, and womb of all generation. In his treatise De Iside et Osiride Plutarch had identified that primordial feminine principle with Isis, the Egyptian goddess of wisdom. Certain formal resemblances between Donatello's Virgin and ancient figures of Isis are interpreted in terms of this homology. Given that the Council of Basel was schismatic by the time it issued the decree on the Immaculate Conception, the Isis persona provided a well-found confirmation of their predelicted doctrine in the writings of some "ancient theologians".