The present volume results from the conference L'immagine miracolosa nella cultura tardomedievale e rinascimentale, which was held at the Danish Academy in Rome, 31 May - 2 June 2002. The aim of the conference was to shed light on a body of visual material, often neglected by art history, and thus to call attention to a new field of study in the visual arts of the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

Structured around in-depth and interconnected case studies and driven by a methodology of material, contextual, and iconographic analysis, this book argues that early European single-sheet prints, in both the north and south, are best understood as highly accessible objects shaped and framed by individual viewers. Author David Areford offers a synthetic historical narrative of early prints that stresses their unusual material nature, as well as their accessibility to a variety of viewers, both lay and monastic. This volume represents a shift in the study of the early printed image, one that mirrors the widespread movement in art history away from issues of production, style, and the artist toward issues of reception, function, and the viewer. Areford's approach is intensely grounded in the object, especially the unacknowledged material complexity of the print as a portable, malleable, and accessible image that depended on a response that was not only visual but often physical, emotional, and psychological. Recognizing that early prints were not primarily designed for aesthetic appreciation, the author analyzes how their meanings stemmed from specific functions involving private devotion, protection, indulgences, the cult of saints, pilgrimage, exorcism, the art of memory, and anti-Semitic propaganda. Although the medium's first century was clearly transitional and experimental, Areford explores how its potential to impact viewers in new ways?both positive and negative?was quickly realized.

The book examines the process of symbolic and material alteration of religious images in antiquity, the middle ages and the modern period. The process by which the form and meaning of images are modified and adapted for a new context is defined by a large number of spiritual, religious, artistic, geographical or historical circumstances. This book provides a defined theoretical framework for these symbolic and material alterations based on the concept of iconotropy; that is, the way in which images change and/or alter their meaning. Iconotropy is a key concept in religious history, particularly for periods in which religious changes, often turbulent, took place. In addition, the iconotropic process of appropriating cult images brought with it changes in the materiality of those images. Numerous accounts from antiquity, the middle ages and the modern period detail how cult images were involved in such processes of misinterpretation, both symbolically and materially. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture and religious history.

Mexican statues and paintings like the Virgen de Guadalupe and the Se or de Chalma are endowed with sacred presence and the power to perform miracles. Millions of devotees visit their shrines to request miracles for health, employment, children, and countless everyday matters. When miracles are granted, devotees reciprocate with votive offerings. Collages, photographs, documents, texts, milagritos, hair and braids, clothing, retablos, and various representative objects cover walls at many shrines. Miraculous Images and Votive Offerings in Mexico explores such petitionary devotion in depth through extensive fieldwork supported by research in a vast body of interdisciplinary scholarship. The study's principal themes include sacred power and human agency, reification, projective animation, faith as a cognitive filter, sacred power transfer, social and narrative construction, positive framing, collaborative and deferred control, vows (juramentos), and miracle attribution. The book is written in two alternating voices, one interpretive to provide an understanding of miracles, miraculous images, and votive offerings, and the other narrative to illustrate the interpretive chapters and to bring the reader closer to experiences at the shrines. Among the many miraculous images treated in the book are the Cristo Negro de Otatitl n, Ni o del Cacahuatito, Se or de Chalma, Se or de la Misericordia (Tepatitl n), Se or del Rayo, Se or de las Tres Ca das (Teotilalpam), Virgen de los Dolores de Soriano, Virgen de Guadalupe, Virgen del Pueblito, Virgen de Juquila, Virgen de los Remedios, Virgen de San Juan de los Lagos, Virgen de Talpa, Virgen de Tonatico, and Virgen de Zapopan.

By the late Middle Ages, manifestations of Marian devotion had become multifaceted and covered all aspects of religious, private and personal life. Mary becomes a universal presence that accompanies the faithful on pilgrimage, in dreams, as holy visions, and as pictorial representations in church space and domestic interiors. The first part of the volume traces the development of Marian iconography in sculpture, panel paintings, and objects, such as seals, with particular emphasis on Italy, Slovenia and the Hungarian Kingdom. The second section traces the use of Marian devotion in relation to space, be that a country or territory, a monastery or church or personal space, and explores the use of space in shaping new liturgical practices, new Marian feasts and performances, and the bodily performance of ritual objects.

In Florence, in the summer of 1501, a man named Antonio Rinaldeschi was arrested and hanged after throwing horse dung at an outdoor painting of the Virgin Mary. His punishment was severe, even for the times, and the crimes with which he was formally charged, gambling, blasphemy and attempted suicide, did not normally warrant the death penalty. Sacrilege and Redemption in Renaissance Florence unveils a series of newly discovered sources concerning this striking episode. The authors show how the political and religious context of Renaissance Florence resulted both in Rinaldeschi's death sentence and in the creation by the followers of Savonarola of a new religious devotion, in the heart of the city, commemorating the event. -- Amazon.com.

The first in-depth study of the Utrecht artist to address questions beyond connoisseurship and attribution, this book makes a significant contribution to Ter Brugghen and Northern Caravaggist studies. Focusing on the Dutch master's simultaneous use of Northern archaisms with Caravaggio's motifs and style, Natasha Seaman nuances our understanding of Ter Brugghen's appropriations from the Italian painter. Her analysis centers on four paintings, all depicting New Testament subjects. They include Ter Brugghen's largest and first known signed work (Crowning with Thorns), his most archaizing (the Crucifixion), and the two paintings most directly related to the works of Caravaggio (the Doubting Thomas and the Calling of Matthew). By examining the ways in which Ter Brugghen's paintings deliberately diverge from Caravaggio's, Seaman sheds new light on the Utrecht artist and his work. For example, she demonstrates that where Caravaggio's paintings are boldly illusionistic and mimetic, thus de-emphasizing their materiality, Ter Brugghen's works examined here create the opposite effect, connecting their content to their made form. This study not only illuminates the complex meanings of the paintings addressed here, but also offers insights into the image debates and the status of devotional art in Italy and Utrecht in the seventeenth century by examining one artist's response to them.

Investigating the meanings and uses of "spiritus" in a variety of early modern disciplines and fields - natural philosophy, theology, music, literature and the visual arts - this book revisits the ambivalent history of a central ancient concept in a period of crisis and change.

An unprecedented art-historical account of practices of image ingestion from ancient Egypt to the twentieth century Eating and drinking images may seem like an anomalous notion but, since antiquity, in the European and Mediterranean worlds, people have swallowed down frescoes, icons, engravings, eucharistic hosts stamped with images, heraldic wafers, marzipan figures, and other sculpted dishes. Either specifically made for human consumption or diverted from their original purpose so as to be ingested, these figured artifacts have been not only gazed upon but also incorporated—taken into the body—as solids or liquids. How can we explain such behavior? Why take an image into one’s own body, devouring it at the risk of destroying it, consuming rather than contemplating it wisely from a distance? What structures of the imagination underlie and justify these desires for incorporation? What are the visual configurations offered up to the mouth, and what are their effects? What therapeutic, religious, symbolic, and social functions can we attribute to these forms of relations with icons? These are a few of the questions raised in this investigation into iconophagy. Iconophages aims to retrace, for the first time, the history of iconophagy. Jérémie Koering examines this unexplored facet of the history of images through an interdisciplinary approach that ranges across art history, cultural and material history, anthropology, philosophy, and the history of the body and the senses. He analyzes the human investment, in terms of culture and imagination, at stake in this seemingly paradoxical way of experiencing images. Beyond the hidden knowledge unearthed here, these pages bring to light a new way of understanding images, just as they illuminate the occasionally outlandish relations we maintain with them.

Tracing the history of St. Antoninus' cult and burial from the time of his death in 1459 until his remains were moved to their final resting place in 1589, this interdisciplinary study demonstrates that the saint's relic cult was a key element of Florence's sacred cityscape. The works of art created in his honor, as well as the rituals practiced at his fifteenth- and sixteenth-century places of burial, advertised Antoninus' saintly power and persona to the people who depended upon his intercessory abilities to negotiate life's challenges. Drawing on a rich variety of contemporary visual, literary, and archival sources, this volume explores the ways in which shifting political, familial, and ecclesiastical aims and agendas shaped the ways in which St. Antoninus' holiness was broadcast to those who visited his burial church. Author Sally Cornelison foregrounds the visual splendor of the St. Antoninus Chapel, which was designed, built, and decorated by Medici court artist Giambologna and his collaborators between 1579 and 1591. Her research sheds new light on the artist, whose secular and mythological sculptures have received far more scholarly attention than his religious works. Cornelison draws on social and religious history, patronage and gender studies, and art historical and anthropological inquiries into the functions and meanings of images, relics, and ritual performance, to interpret how they activated St. Antoninus' burial sites and defined them in ways that held multivalent meanings for a broad audience of viewers and devotees. Among the objects for which she provides visual and contextual analyses are a banner from the saint's first tomb, early printed and painted images, and the sculptures, frescoes, panel paintings, and embroidered textiles made for the present St. Antoninus Chapel.