Editor’s Note

Bartolomeo Bulgarini’s panel in the Berenson Collection exemplifies what was by the mid-fourteenth century the well-established genre of the Crucifixion: suffering Christ at the center, soldiers and high priests to the right, anguished disciples and mother to the left (fig. 1). St. Francis’s embrace of the foot of the cross soaked in blood is less standard and a marked departure from Bulgarini’s most direct source, a triptych executed in the workshop of his great fellow Sienese painter, Duccio, now in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. But surely one of the most touching aspects of the Duccio has been retained by Bulgarini, virtually intact: the tender gaze directed by the apostle John and a female disciple at Mary, as they delicately support her swooning body. Mary’s own eyes are fixed steadily on her son, who in turn directs his fading sight toward her. Thus the gesture of love—of, I would argue, compassion—takes place without Mary’s acknowledgment. John and this unknown woman, along with a Mary Magdalene in red at the top of the group, are simply reaching out for an exhausted Mary as she is locked in silent, mournful conversation with her son. Bulgarini’s painting resonates with a contemporary work that the opening cluster of essays argues is equally concerned with representations of compassion: the Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio, written roughly a decade after Bulgarini painted his lamentation for a Franciscan devotee. The title of Gur Zak’s essay quotes from the first sentence of Boccaccio’s influential masterpiece: “umana cosa è aver compassione.” Zak opens his own article discussing patristic theories of compassion and contrasting them with the Stoic tendencies of Boccaccio’s most important influence, Petrarch—a Petrarch who tended to define manliness as emotional control. As he goes on to consider two novelle from Day 4, Zak suggests that Boccaccio “offers an alternative vision of humanism, one that underscores human vulnerability and the value of expressions of compassion between friends.” Such friendship could be said to be demonstrated in Bulgarini’sCrucifixionwith respect toMary and her companions—and aMary, moreover, who was depicted as a model of maternal compassion throughout the late medieval period, while Jesus was increasingly depicted as “a