I gesuati e la disputa sull’Immacolata Concezione, in «Rivista d’Arte», 2018, a. 53, n. 8, pp. 113-123.

This essay aims to show the stance of the Sienese Jesuati (Apostolic Clerics of Saint Jerome) in the dispute about the Immaculate Conception that, especially from the end of the15th century and the beginning of the next one, inflamed Christianity. On opposite sides were the Dominicans, which could not agree to approve the idea of the preservation from the original sin of the Virgin, and the Franciscans which firmly supported it. The cult of the Immaculate, that was increasingly becoming established among believers, spread with the images too. Many iconographic schemes were produced to represent this aspect of the life of the Virgin. In the Sie- nese church of the gesuati san Girolamo, there is a painting of Lorenzo di Giovanni representing Saint Anne with the Virgin and the Holy Child, dated 1531. This iconographic subject was always used to mean the Immaculate. But this painting refers it explicitly through a note painted with a particular version of the Hail Mary written by pope Alexander VI that includes these words: «sine macula et sine peccato processisti Virgo Maria». Through this artistic commissioning, the gesuates joined the Immaculist party in a new and explicit way at a time when the dispute was still so strong.