Cooperation and Conflict: Stained Glass in the Bardi Chapel of Santa Croce

When the Franciscan friars of Santa Croce in Florence began rebuilding their church in the late thirteenth century, they included a program of stained glass windows in the new basilica. The Santa Croce friars were most likely following the model of the mother Franciscan church in Assisi, where narrative stained glass appeared in Italy for the first time in the mid-thirteenth century. While the Santa Croce friars likely planned and paid for the glass that remains in the high altar chapel from the 1320s, the private patrons of Santa Croce financed the windows in the transept chapels of the church (see plan, Fig. 1). In fact, soon after the transept was completed in 1310, private Florentine citizens, spurred on by the promise of papal indulgences, began to purchase entire chapels and finance their decoration with stained glass, fresco and panel paintings. While only about half