by Mary Hoffman
In the Middle Ages in Italy, the word ‘convent’ was used for the religious house of either friars or nuns, but I have followed the modern usage in giving the Poor Clares a convent and the Franciscans a friary.
The Falconer’s Knot takes place in the summer and early autumn months of 1316 – the early fourteenth century, or Trecento as the Italians call it. I have taken the consensus view of art historians that Simone Martini had finished his frescoes in the chapel of Saint Martin in Assisi by 1317, some months after the action in the book, and that Pietro Lorenzetti’s work was started after Simone’s, and was influenced by him.
There is no historical evidence that I could find for where the pigments were ground for the artists working on the Basilica in Assisi. But such work was sometimes undertaken by friars and it has suited my narrative purposes to build a whole edifice on some very slight references in the literature, especially from Cennino Cennini’s Il Libro dell’Arte. The colour rooms and Colour Mistress and Master are my own invention.
I have been in touch with art historians and mediaevalists, have visited Assisi, Perugia and Gubbio for research, and have read and consulted a huge number of books and journals about falconry, pigments, fresco-painting techniques of the early Trecento, life in the Franciscan and Poor Clare Orders in the Middle Ages, and the status of widows in Umbria and Tuscany.
But I have taken some huge liberties, in particular in letting a young Franciscan novice, albeit a sham one, spend time with a young novice Poor Clare. This could not have happened in fourteenth century Umbria. But earthquakes did and do!
The Falconer’s Knot is not an academic treatise, but a novel so, with a novelist’s magpie instinct, I have seized upon the bright and shiny fragments which caught my eye and discarded much else that didn’t. I hope that the many authors whose theories I have read and the kind academics who let me consult them will forgive this single-minded tendency of the storyteller. It is certain that any historical errors or stretching of the truth are mine and not theirs. It only remains to say that no one but myself ever suggested that the great Simone Martini was ever involved in any murders, even in the role of detective.
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Women and Society in the Middle Ages
It is hard for us to put ourselves in the position of a woman in the Middle Ages, whether that of a teenage girl or a middle-aged wife or widow. Meg Bogin, author of The Women Troubadours, puts it better than I can: ‘Throughout the Middle Ages women were the pawns of men. Depending on their class, they lived in varying degrees of comfort or misery. Only in the most exceptional circumstances did they have any say in their own destiny. Marriage was a creation of the aristocracy, an economic and political contract designed to solidify alliances and guarantee the holdings of the great land-holding families. Following the rise of commerce, it was adopted by the bourgeoisie for these same reasons – as a means of maintaining and advancing their economic and political status . . . Love or affection had little to do with the making of marriages.’
And she goes on to say, ‘Women of all ranks, even those who held property, were wards throughout the Middle Ages, always under the official guardianship of a man.’
Not that men had it easy either. Life expectancy was short, much shorter than today, and those who worked on the land, growing crops and looking after animals, had to do so in all weathers and without the benefits of modern farming techniques. Peasants might have looked up to merchants, whose power began to grow in the Middle Ages, but both had to show respect to the aristocracy.
The country we now call Italy was divided into many little principalities and dukedoms. Counts, barons and marquises abounded. Only the nobles – people with titles – were known by names like da Montacuto (from Montacuto) or de’ Oddini (one of the Oddini family). Ordinary families did not have established surnames in the fourteenth century. So a man might be known as Tommaso the sheep farmer or Ubaldo the wool merchant, which a hundred years later might be passed down as the surname Farmer or Merchant. Simone Martini’s name means ‘Simone son of Martino’. Surnames in Italy, as in England, were formed from place names, fathers’ names, nicknames (like Rosso for a redheaded man) or the words for occupations.
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Simone Martini
Very little is known of the life of this most sophisticated of Trecento painters. He was probably born in 1284, in Siena. And probably (this word comes round a lot when you try to research Simone Martini’s life) he was apprenticed to Duccio di Buoninsegna from the age of twelve to twenty. His reputation was made by the commission to paint the Maestà – Mary in Majesty – in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena, when he would have been only thirty-one.
Shortly afterwards he went to work on the Saint Martin frescoes in the Lower Church of San Francesco in Assisi, paid for by the late Cardinal Gentile da Montefiore. By 1317 Simone was a knight and was getting many commissions for paintings. In 1324 at the age of forty, he married Giovanna, the younger sister of his fellow painter Lippo Memmi.
The great poet Petrarch, who befriended Simone in Avignon, implies that he wasn’t very handsome and it was suggested first in 1957 that the sceptical observer with the down-turned mouth in the fresco St Martin Reviving the Dead Child might be a self-portrait.
Simone was in Avignon, where the Papal Court was, by 1336. Petrarch mentioned him in two sonnets and got him to paint the portrait of the poet’s beloved Laura. Sadly it hasn’t survived. Simone died in Avignon in 1344 but was buried in Siena. He had no children.
You can see images of all the paintings in the Saint Martin chapel at Assisi described in this book on the Internet at:
http://www.wga.hu/tours/siena/index_c2.html
Websites are frequently subject to change and may not be permanently online or updated regularly. If you find this website is no longer working, just type ‘Simone Martini’ and ‘Montefiore’ into a search engine and you will find other websites that feature the works of art which appear in The Falconer’s Knot.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
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I am grateful to Dr Cathleen Hoeniger of Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, for generously sharing relevant parts of her PhD dissertation, ‘The Painting Technique of Simone Martini’, and to my invaluable Italian researcher, Dr Manuela Perteghella, for a wealth of useful facts and comments on my text. Jeryldene M. Wood, Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, kindly answered my questions on the Poor Clares.
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The London Library sent a stream of books to this country member and the British Library and Bodleian provided relevant books not only in English but Italian. And the Sackler Library most of all.
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I have taken Joel Brink’s theory about the references to Siena in the fresco of St Martin Reviving the Dead Child from his paper in Simone Martini: atti del convegno, 1998, L. Bellosi ed.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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Mary Hoffman is a bestselling children’s writer and critic, and the author of the hugely popular Stravaganza series. Mary is also the editor of Armadillo, a children’s literature review magazine. She has three grown-up daughters and lives with her husband in a converted barn in West Oxfordshire.
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www.maryhoffman.co.uk
www.bloomsbury.com
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Also by Mary Hoffman
Troubadour
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The Stravaganza Sequence:
City of Masks
City of Stars
City of Flowers
City of Secrets
City of Ships
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Bloomsbury Publishing, London, Berlin, New York and Sydney
First published in Great Britain in 2007 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
36 Soho Square, London, W1D 3QY
Text copyright © Mary Hoffman 2007
Map illustration © Peter Bailey 2007
The moral rights of the author and illustrator have been asserted
This electronic edition published in September 2010 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
All rights reserved.
You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise
make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means
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printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the
publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 4088 1295 2
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