Renaissance Religions: Modes and Meanings in History (Europa Sacra, 26) 9782503590691, 2503590691

Table of contents :
Front Matter
Peter Howard. Approaching Renaissance Religions
Sabrina Corbellini. Urban Laity and the Construction of Religious Identities in Renaissance Italy
Tamar Herzig. Rethinking Jewish Conversion to Christianity in Renaissance Italy
Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby. Creating Early Modern Martyrs in the Venetian–Ottoman Encounter
Constant J. Mews and Marika Räsänen. Remembering Thomas Aquinas and the Saints of Dominican Renewal: Tommaso of Siena and the Cividale Legendary
Francesca Mattei. Architecture and Religion in Renaissance Palaces: Patronage, Humanism, and Reformation in Northern Italy
Grace Harpster. Sacred Images in Carlo Borromeo’s Instructiones: Between Liturgy and the Antique
Daniel M. Unger. Iconography and Visual Hagiography: Saint Carlo Borromeo’s Portrayal in Bolognese Churches (1611–1618)
Steven F. H. Stowell. Purging the Eye: Images and the Cure for Lust in Catholic Reformation Italy
Gioia Filocamo. Sins, Emotions, and Sounds: Dealing with Death in the Laudario of the Bolognese Confraternity of Santa Maria della Morte
Xavier Torres. The Beginnings of the Musical Oratorio in Bologna (1660–1699): Between the Church and the Academy
Rebecca M. Gill. Early Experiments in Catholic Reformation Architecture: Galeazzo Alessi and the Church of Santa Maria Assunta di Carignano, Genoa
Sally J. Cornelison. Art and Religion in Late Renaissance Arezzo: Reconsidering Vasari’s Church Renovations
Giorgio Caravale. Pulpits on Trial in Renaissance Italy: Some Methodological Issues Concerning Preachers, Inquisitors, and Historians
Serena Quagliaroli. The Artistic Decoration of Organ Shutters: Hearing and Seeing Redemption in the Renaissance
Nicholas Terpstra. Renaissance Religions – Afterwards?
Index

Citation preview

Renaissance Religions

EUROPA SACRA Volume 26 Editorial Board under the auspices of Monash University General Editor Carolyn James, Monash University Editorial Board Megan Cassidy-Welch, Australian Catholic University David Garrioch, Monash University Peter Howard, Australian Catholic University Thomas Izbicki, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey Constant J. Mews, Monash University M. Michele Mulchahey, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto Adriano Prosperi, Scuola Normale di Pisa

Previously published volumes in this series are listed at the back of the book.

Renaissance Religions Modes and Meanings in History

Edited by

Peter Howard, Nicholas Terpstra, and Riccardo Saccenti

F

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

© 2021, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. ISBN: 978-2-503-59069-1 e-ISBN: 978-2-503-59070-7 DOI: 10.1484/M.ES-EB.5.120915 ISSN: 2030-3068 e-ISSN: 2406-5838 Printed in the EU on acid-free paper. D/2021/0095/7

Table of Contents List of Illustrations

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Acknowledgements 11 Approaching Renaissance Religions Peter Howard

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I. Negotiating Boundaries Urban Laity and the Construction of Religious Identities in Renaissance Italy Sabrina Corbellini

47

Rethinking Jewish Conversion to Christianity in Renaissance Italy Tamar Herzig

63

Creating Early Modern Martyrs in the Venetian–Ottoman Encounter Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby

81

II. Modelling Spirituality Remembering Thomas Aquinas and the Saints of Dominican Renewal: Tommaso of Siena and the Cividale Legendary Constant J. Mews and Marika Räsänen

109

Architecture and Religion in Renaissance Palaces: Patronage, Humanism, and Reformation in Northern Italy Francesca Mattei

127

Sacred Images in Carlo Borromeo’s Instructiones: Between Liturgy and the Antique Grace Harpster

155

Icono­graphy and Visual Hagio­graphy: Saint Carlo Borromeo’s Portrayal in Bo­lognese Churches (1611–1618) Daniel M. Unger

175

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ta bl e o f co n t e n t s

III. Sense & Emotion Purging the Eye: Images and the Cure for Lust in Catholic Reformation Italy Steven F. H. Stowell

207

Sins, Emotions, and Sounds: Dealing with Death in the Laudario of the Bo­lognese Confraternity of Santa Maria della Morte 231 Gioia Filocamo The Beginnings of the Musical Oratorio in Bo­logna (1660–1699): Between the Church and the Academy 255 Xavier Torres

IV. Space & Form Early Experiments in Catholic Reformation Architecture: Galeazzo Alessi and the Church of Santa Maria Assunta di Carignano, Genoa Rebecca M. Gill

277

Art and Religion in Late Renaissance Arezzo: Reconsidering Vasari’s Church Renovations Sally J. Cornelison

301

Pulpits on Trial in Renaissance Italy: Some Methodo­logical Issues Concerning Preachers, Inquisitors, and Historians Giorgio Caravale

325

The Artistic Decoration of Organ Shutters: Hearing and Seeing Redemption in the Renaissance Serena Quagliaroli

343

Renaissance Religions – Afterwards? Nicholas Terpstra

365

Index 375

List of Illustrations Peter Howard Figure 1.1. Gentile Bellini (1430/35–1507) and Giovanni Bellini (1425/30–1516), St Mark Preaching in Alexandria, 1504–07, oil on panel, 3.47 x 7.7 m.

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Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby Figure 3.1.

‘The City Aqueduct’, Venice, BMC, MS Cicogna 1971, fol. 29r. Second half of the seventeenth century.

Figure 3.2. ‘The Great Fire of 1660’, Venice, BMC, MS Cicogna 1971, fol. 35r. Second half of the seventeenth century. Figure 3.3.

‘Interrogation’, Venice, BMC, MS Cicogna 1971, fol. 36r. Second half of the seventeenth century.

Figure 3.4. ‘Procession’, Venice, BMC, MS Cicogna 1971, Second half of the seventeenth century. Figure 3.5.

fol. 37r–38r.

‘The Arrest of Giovanni Soranzo’, Venice, BMC, MS Cicogna 1971, fol. 39r. Second half of the seventeenth century.

90 91 93 94 95

Figure 3.6. ‘Secretary Ballarino beng Led to Prison’, Venice, BMC, MS Cicogna 1971, fol. 44r. Second half of the seven­teenth century.

96

Figure 3.7. ‘The Prison of Secretary Ballarino’, Venice, BMC, MS Cicogna 1971, fol. 46r. Second half of the seventeenth century.

97

Figure 3.8. ‘Portrait Bust of Giovanni Battista Ballarino’, Murano, Church of St Peter Martyr, Capella Ballarino. Late seventeenth century.

99

Figure 3.9. ‘Sculpted Relief of Venetian Secretary Ballarino being Led to Prison’, Murano, Church of St Peter Martyr, Capella Ballarino. Late seventeenth century.

100

Figure 3.10. ‘Sculpted Relief of the Release of Ballarino’, Murano, Church of St Peter Martyr, Capella Ballarino. Late seventeenth century.

102

Francesca Mattei Figure 5.1.

Facade of Palazzo Naselli, Ferrara. After 1527.

Figure 5.2. Courtyard of Palazzo Naselli, Ferrara. After 1527. Figure 5.3.

Facade of Palazzo Contughi, Ferrara. After 1527.

Figure 5.4. Giulio Bonasone (attr.), Project of Palazzo Bocchi in Bo­logna, Roma, Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica. 1545. 

128 130 132 134

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l i s t of i llustr ation s Figure 5.5. Giulio Bonasone (attr.), Project of Palazzo Bocchi in Bo­logna, Firenze, GDSU, A 12232. 1555. 

136

Figure 5.6. Camillo Mantovano, ‘Sala a fogliami’, Palazzo Grimani in Santa Maria Formosa, Venice. 1560s.

138

Figure 5.7. Inscription on ceiling, Chapel in Palazzo Grimani, Venice. 1560s.

140

Figure 5.8. Inscription over doorway, Chapel in Palazzo Grimani, Venice. 1560s. Figure 5.9. Facade of Palazzo Grimani, Venice. 1560s. Figure 5.10. Courtyard of Palazzo Grimani, Venice. 1537. Figure 5.11. Antiquarium in Palazzo Grimani, Venice. 1560s. Figure 5.12. Fireplace in the Sala di Proserpina, Palazzo Thiene, Vicenza. 1540s. Figure 5.13. Villa Trissino, Cricoli, Vicenza. 1530s.

141 142 143 144 145 146

Grace Harpster Figure 6.1. Michelangelo, Last Judgement, Vatican City, Vatican Museums, Sistine Chapel. 1534–1541.

156

Figure 6.2. Veronese, Feast in the House of Levi, Venice, Galleria dell’Accademia. 1573.

158

Figure 6.3. ‘Printed ruler from the Instructiones’, in Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis (1599 edition), p. 638. 1582.

162

Daniel M. Unger Figure 7.1.

Lorenzo Garbieri, St Carlo Borromeo’s Procession of the Holy Nail, Bo­logna, San Paolo Maggiore. 1611.

178

Figure 7.2. Lorenzo Garbieri, Carlo Borromeo Administers the Last Communion to the Plague-Stricken, Bo­logna, San Paolo Maggiore. 1611.

180

Figure 7.3. Lorenzo Garbieri, The Proclamation of the Barnabites’ Rule by Carlo Borromeo, Bo­logna, San Paolo Maggiore. 1611.

181

Figure 7.4. San Paolo Maggiore seen from the entrance with Garbieri’s Proclamation of the Barnabites’ Rule by Carlo Borromeo in the first chapel. Bo­logna, San Paolo Maggiore. 1611.

182

Figure 7.5. Lorenzo Garbieri, St Carlo Borromeo’s Procession of the Holy Nail (detail), Bo­logna, San Paolo Maggiore. 1611.

183

Figure 7.6. Alessandro Tiarini, Cappella San Carlo Borromeo, Bo­logna, San Michele in Bosco. 1614/15.

185

Figure 7.7. Alessandro Tiarini, Last Communion of St Carlo, Bo­logna, San Michele in Bosco. 1614/15.

186

list of illustrations Figure 7.8. Alessandro Tiarini, The Angel Descending from Heaven, Bo­logna, San Michele in Bosco. 1614/15.

188

Figure 7.9. Giovanni Francesco Gessi, St Carlo Borromeo’s Procession of the Holy Nail, Bo­logna, Santa Maria Regina dei Cieli (also known as Santa Maria dei Poveri). 1612/14.

190

Figure 7.10. Giovanni Francesco Gessi, St Carlo Borromeo’s Procession of the Holy Nail (detail), Bo­logna, Santa Maria Regina dei Cieli (also known as Santa Maria dei Poveri). 1612/14.

191

Figure 7.11. Guido Reni, Pietà dei Mendicanti, Bo­logna, Pinacoteca Nazionale. 1613–1616.

192

Figure 7.12. Lucio Massari, St Carlo Boromeo Adoring the Crucifix, Bo­logna, Santa Madonna del Baraccano. Early seventeenth century. 194 Figure 7.13. Ludovico Carracci, St Carlo Borromeo Praying in the Sacro Monte in Varallo, Bo­logna, Santi Bartolomeo e Gaetano. Early seventeenth century.

195

Figure 7.14. Francesco Brizio, San Carlo in Prayer, Bo­logna, San Petronio. 1615.

196

Figure 7.15. Alessandro Tiarini, Santi Alberto e Carlo, Bo­logna, San Martino. Early seventeenth century.

197

Figure 7.16. Ludovico Carracci, St Carlo Borromeo Adoring Baby Jesus with the Madonna, St Joseph and Angels, Forlì, Pinacoteca Civica. Early seventeenth century.

198

Steven F. H. Stowell Figure 8.1. Titian, Penitent Magdalen, Florence, Palazzo Pitti, Galleria Palatina. c. 1533–1535. 

214

Figure 8.2. Titian, Penitent Mary Magdalen, Naples, Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte. c. 1550.

216

Figure 8.3. Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri), Susanna and the Elders, Parma, Galleria Nazionale. 1649–1650. 

220

Figure 8.4. Anonymous Florentine ( Jacopo di Cione?), The Annun­ciation of the Virgin, Florence, Santissima Annunziata. Traditionally dated to 1252, now believed to be from the fourteenth century.

226

Xavier Torres Map 10.1.

Itinerary of the procession of the Seven Churches in Bo­logna. 261

Rebecca M. Gill Figure 11.1. Galeazzo Alessi, ‘Santa Maria Assunta di Carignano’, Genoa. 1549.

278

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l i s t of i llustr ation s Figure 11.2. ‘Plan of Santa Maria di Carignano de Signori Sauli’, London, RIBA Library Drawings and Archives Collections. 1607. 279 Figure 11.3. Galeazzo Alessi, ‘Interior, Santa Maria Assunta di Carignano’, Genoa. 1549.

280

Figure 11.4. Desiderio da Settignano, ‘Ciborium for the Sacrament’, Washington, National Gallery of Art. Fifteenth century.

287

Figure 11.5. Pierre Puget, ‘Project for an altar and baldachin for Santa Maria di Carignano, Genoa’, Marseille, Musée des BeauxArts, drawing inv. 264. Mid-seventeenth century.

290

Figure 11.6. Michele Sanmicheli, ‘Tornacoro Screen’, Verona, Cathedral. c. 1534.

293

Sally J. Cornelison Figure 12.1. Arca of St Donato, Arezzo, Cathedral. Mid-1360s – c. 1374.

304

Figure 12.2. Cristofano Donato Conti, Plan, Pieve, Arezzo, Archivio Storico Diocesano Arezzo, Archivio della Pieve. Before 1799. 305 Figure 12.3. Pietro Lorenzetti, ‘Pieve Polyptych’, Arezzo, Pieve di Santa Maria. 1320–1324. Photo courtesy of Marco Botti.

307

Figure 12.4. Giorgio Vasari, ‘Albergotti Altarpiece (Coronation of the Virgin)’, Arezzo, Badia of Sts Flora and Lucilla. c. 1566–1570.

308

Figure 12.5. Giorgio Vasari, ‘Pieve Altar’, Arezzo, Badia of Sts Flora and Lucilla. 1560–1564.

309

Figure 12.6. ‘Sts Donato and Stephen’, detail of Giorgio Vasari, ‘Pieve Altar’, Arezzo, Badia of Sts Flora and Lucilla. 1560–1564. 

311

Figure 12.7. ‘Sts Paul and George’, detail of Giorgio Vasari, ‘Pieve Altar’, Arezzo, Badia of Sts Flora and Lucilla. 1560–1564. 

312

Figure 12.8. ‘Sts Donato and Peter’, Arezzo, Cathedral, Altar of St Donato. After the late thirteenth century.

315

Figure 12.9. ‘Blessed Pope Gregory X and St Paul’, Arezzo, Cathedral, Altar of St Donato. After the late thirteenth century. Figure 12.10. Plan, Arezzo Cathedral.

316 318

Serena Quagliaroli Figure 14.1. Ercole Procaccini the Elder, Saint Cecilia, Parma, Cathedral. 1560/62.

348

Figure 14.2. Camillo Boccaccino, Isaiah and David, Piacenza, Musei Civici di Palazzo Farnese. 1530.

351

Figure 14.3. Cosmè Tura, Annunciation, Ferrara, Museo della Cattedrale. 1469.

353

Figure 14.4. Alessandro Bonvicino, called Moretto, Saints Peter and Paul Sustain the Church, Brescia, San Pietro in Oliveto. c. 1550. 359

Acknowledgements The conference that initially generated this volume was a collaboration between the Harvard Uni­ver­sity Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (Villa I Tatti) in Florence, Monash Uni­ver­sity’s Centre for Medi­eval and Renaissance Studies, the Monash Uni­ver­sity Prato Centre, and the Uni­ ver­sity of Toronto. Special thanks are due to the then Director of Villa I Tatti, Professor Lino Pertile, who, in 2011, supported the concept, and also to Professor Rae Frances, then Dean of Arts, Monash Uni­ver­sity, and Dr Cecilia Hewlett, Director of the Monash Prato Centre, whose foresight and generosity facilitated the translation of the concept into reality. The original comitato scientifico comprised Frances Andrews (Uni­ver­sity of St Andrews), Jonathan Nelson (Villa I Tatti), Lino Pertile (Villa I Tatti), Adriano Prosperi (Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa), Michael Wyatt, and the editors. The second conference saw also the generous collaboration of the Fondazione per le Scienze Religiose Giovanni XXIII (FSCIRE) in Bo­logna. The editors wish to acknowledge and thank all participants of the two conferences, including those whose papers were not included in this volume, since the lively exchanges and conversations extended and contributed to the ideas that find expression here. Special thanks are due to Nicholas Watson of Harvard Uni­ver­sity, whose incisive commentary at the end of the 2015 conference in Florence spurred further energetic discussion that led to the follow up 2016 conference in Bo­logna. The editors also wish to thank the anonymous reviewers whose assessments and suggestions were critical to strengthening the contributions in this collection.

Peter Howard

Approaching Renaissance Religions Introduction The illustrative miniatures which adorn the cover of this volume, and the painting from which they are excised (see Fig. 1.1), could well be claimed to preside over the volume’s content. Commissioned from Gentile Bellini by the Scuola di San Marco in 1504 and destined to be hung above and behind where the confraternity leadership presided over meetings, this large-scale canvas panel of nearly twenty-seven square metres envisages the conversion of Alexandria to Christianity by the preaching of St Mark.1 To today’s informed viewer, the panoramic and imaginative re-creation of Alexandria draws together recognizably Eastern elements (minarets, camel, giraffe) as well as pointedly Venetian features, including the Temple that projects features of temple, mosque, and Venice’s own basilica of San Marco. The members of the confraternity of San Marco stand in orderly array behind the saint, with Venetian bystanders mingling amongst the Mamluk Egyptians before the saint. While reminiscent of earlier paintings of preaching scenes, Bellini’s image, in keeping with Venetian history painting, reflects the expansion of the world by the early sixteenth century.2 The event that

* This essay has benefited from discussions with my co-editors, along with the commentary to the first conference ( June 2015) generously undertaken by Nicholas Watson of Harvard Uni­ ver­sity. I am grateful to the following for perceptive comments: Nicholas Terpstra, as well as Fellows in the Medi­eval and Early Modern Studies Research Program at Australian Catholic Uni­ver­sity, and in particular Christopher Ocker, the program’s director. Much of the research for this essay was generously funded by the Australian Research Council (DP110102941).  1 Fortini Brown, Venetian Narrative Painting in the Age of Carpaccio, pp. 203–09, for the context and complexities of the execution of the painting. The scholarly consensus is that the panel was largely complete by his death in 1507, and then, at some stage, was completed by his brother Giovanni. For the significance of St Mark and local myth in Venetian identity, see Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice, pp. 78–92; for the legend of St Mark more broadly, see De Voragine, The Golden Legend, trans. by Ryan, i, 243.  2 See the recent study on religious mobility by Terpstra, Religious Refugees in the Early Modern Peter Howard ([email protected]) is Professor and Director of the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry at Australian Catholic Uni­ver­sity. He has published widely on the Florentine Renaissance and medi­eval and early modern sermon studies.

Renaissance Religions: Modes and Meanings in History, ed. by Peter Howard, Nicholas Terpstra, and Riccardo Saccenti, ES 26 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2021) pp. 13–44 10.1484/M.ES-EB.5.121898

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Figure 1.1. Gentile Bellini (1430/35–1507) and Giovanni Bellini (1425/30–1516), St Mark Preaching in Alexandria, 1504–07, oil on panel, 3.47 x 7.7 m.

Bellini depicts was at once historical and contemporary, the present, the past, and the implied future (in eschato­logical hope) enclosed within a single historical frame.3 As with most other cities of Christian Europe, the depiction of a patron saint was a topos. Bellini’s imaginative istoria, like that of a preacher, was drawn from legends of the saint, most likely Jacopo da Voragine’s Legenda aurea, and would have resonated with the confraternity’s membership. Confraternal members undoubtedly had heard sermons annually for the saint’s feast (25 April) drawn from Voragine’s redaction. Many of World, esp. pp. 1–21. On paintings depicting preaching, see Rusconi, Immagini dei predicatori e della predicazione.  3 On historicity and anachronism, referenced to art, see Koselleck, Futures Past, esp. pp. 3–5.

ap p roac h i n g re nai ssance re li gi o ns

them, too, like Gentile Bellini himself, were well travelled. Bellini spent time (1479–80) at the court of Sultan Mehmed II at Istanbul-Constantinople, the new capital of the Ottoman Empire.4 Indeed, Bellini — distinguished by the golden chain that had been bestowed on him by Mehmed II — depicts himself in the panel as an office holder of the Scuola at the very front of the group of Venetians.5 Though the landscape is exotic, the panel illustrates a familiar scene and, very neatly, the link between preacher, crowd, and (noting the repetiteur seated behind the preacher taking down St Mark’s words) the written text, which often remained as the artefact of the encounter. The painting cen  4 Confraternity member Ambrogio Contarini (1429–99) had returned to Venice with a relic of the True Cross and bequeathed it to the scuola of San Marco on his deathbed. Klein, ‘Cardinal Bessarion, Philippe de Mézières and the Rhetoric of Relics’, pp. 30–31.  5 See Humfrey, Painting in Renaissance Venice, p. 142.

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tralizes preaching, a distinctive feature of the religious culture of the period. The scribe recording the words of St Mark is reminiscent of many a merchant endeavouring to remember and record sermons preached in Florence or of Fra Angelico’s depiction, for the Draper’s Guild, of St Mark recording the words of St Peter.6 While articulating and pointing to fundamental dynamics in the culture of preaching in the Renaissance period, the panel also bears witness to the interactions that were common in the churches and piazzas of Italy and projects a religious engagement with a larger world. The theme of St Mark’s sermon, underscored visually by the way in which both saint and obelisk constitute the one vertical axis, is depicted in the hieroglyphs inscribed on the obelisk. These form the following reading, in Charles Dempsey’s rendering: ‘Serapis [the god of the cult introduced into Alexandria by Ptolemy I] willingly vowed to his subjects: out of ignorance and envy his [that is, Serapis’s own] fortune will diminish in the face of the hope of future salvation’.7 The painter, like the preacher he depicts, drew on a shared language, that ‘symbolic economy’ made of up of ‘myriad signs’.8 That Bellini could construct his hieroglyphs was grounded in the efforts of generations of humanist scholars who delved into hieroglyphic studies in the context of their philo­logical endeavours to recover ancient texts and their languages.9 All were trying to understand not simply how their society functioned, but the mysterium, the sacred that lay at the heart of it. There was a sense in which the collective body of society was considered to be more than its parts; a city itself was sometimes regarded as a heavenly Jerusalem and the locus of collective salvation, as Florence was at the end of the fifteenth century. Increasingly, as we advance through the chrono­logy from the late fourteenth through to the eighteenth century, we encounter the ways in which humanists, and, indeed, society more generally, grappled with the implications of ancient texts and the question of how humankind was to be situated and understood in a broader historical frame in a world in which relations between cultures and beliefs were increasingly juxtaposed and interacting, though rarely harmoniously.10 This framing of society in the larger cosmic panorama of Last Judgement and salvation was the implicit assumption of all preaching — oral, visual, behavioural — indeed, in Christian faith itself, and

 6 See Howard, ‘Languages of the Pulpit’, p. 41.  7 See Dempsey, ‘Renaissance Hieroglyphic Studies’, p. 362.  8 Cf. Greenblatt, ‘Culture’, p. 230. This notion of language as ‘symbolic economy’ undergirds my forthcoming Experiencing Religion in Renaissance Florence.  9 Poggio Bracciolini, as early as 1417; the list includes Poliziano and Ficino. See Dempsey, ‘Renaissance Hieroglyphic Studies’, pp. 343–44.  10 For what can be adduced about relations between Venice and the Islamic world from Bellini’s Saint Mark Preaching, see Schmidt, ‘“Orientalist” Painting in Venice’, pp. 128–34; Barry, ‘Renaissance Venice and her “Moors”’, pp. 148–50; and Carrier, ‘A Renaissance Fantasy Image of the Islamic World’. More generally, see Debby below in this volume.

ap p roac h i n g re nai ssance re li gi o ns

here was underlined, at least for Bellini, by the hieroglyphs.11 References to Muslim architecture were to be expected: Islam was imprinted on the materiality of Venice, and there was a significant Muslim population in the city.12 In view of the role of the Jewish community in the economy of the city, and its ghetto, the absence of identifiably Hebraic figures in the scene is, perhaps, remarkable. The scene, completed ten years before Luther’s emerging conflict with conventional Catholicism, serves as a reminder of the reach of the ongoing entanglement of Mediterranean Christianity with other cultures and beliefs beyond the Ottoman to the ‘new worlds’ of the Americas, Africa, and Asia.13 As Catholic Europe fragmented, Reformed Catholicism — only one of the religions of Renaissance Italy — ventured beyond the horizons in a globalized world of empire building and commerce.14 The notion of ‘the sacred at the heart of society’, mysterium, points to the initial term of our book’s title — the ‘renaissance’ in Renaissance Religions — and focuses attention on belief, the believer, and what was believed. The language deployed instantly betokens a plethora of conceptual interrogations. ‘Renaissance’ is often currently supplanted by ‘early modern’, a designation that itself is no stranger to historio­graphical quandaries as it positions fields of inquiry in relation to conceptions of modernity. ‘Renaissance’ as a hermeneutical umbrella has shown itself to be pliant, as can be discerned, for example, in the way in which the interests of professional associations endorse, even anticipate, trends across an ever-increasing range of disciplines. The usefulness of the term for a volume dedicated to religion in the period is that it recognizes the contingency and plurality of culture, marked by diversity, fragmentation, and contestation.15 No longer need the term be redolent of innovation over tradition, as envisaged by its nineteenth-century progenitors, Jules Michelet and Jacob Burckhardt.16 In chrono­logical terms, ‘Renaissance’ allows for a continuum of reform endeavours without jettisoning the notion of change and a pluralism in ideas across centuries, which could be claimed by medi­evalists through (if we look beyond Italy) to students of the Wars of Religion (where pluralism was a problem to be dealt with) and the world of Descartes.17 That is why it has been adopted by the On depictions, anachronism, and eschato­logy, see Koselleck, Futures Past, pp. 13–15. See Trivellato, ‘Renaissance Italy and the Muslim Mediterranean’. See Terpstra, Religious Refugees in the Early Modern World. Well symbolized by the establishment of the papal Congregation of Propaganda Fide; see Pizzorusso, ‘Cardinals and the Congregation of the Propaganda Fide’. For early modern Catholicism as a global institution, see Terpstra, ‘Early Modern Catholicism’, pp. 607–17.  15 For influential appraisals, see Bowsma, ‘The Renaissance and the Drama of Western History’, Starn, ‘A Postmodern Renaissance’, and, most recently, Scott Baker, ‘A Twenty-First-Century Renaissance’.  16 See Terpstra’s insightful and incisive ‘Burkhardt’s Beliefs and Renaissance Religions’.  17 See Descartes, Discourse on Method, pp. 87–89. For the Wars of Religion, see Holt, ‘Putting Religion Back into the Wars of Religion’, p. 551. (Holt provides an excellent analysis of the transformation in the historio­graphy of religion delivered by the generation of cultural

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editors, rather than the (possibly) more freighted term ‘early modern’, even though most of the essays in the volume are concerned with the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and so reach beyond the traditional periodization of ‘Renaissance’.

A Challenge Historians are always aware that a grasp of the past is rarely immediate, and even familiar landmarks in the landscape are seldom commensurate in meaning and as dynamic as our contemporary imaginings. This is particularly true of religion, which challenges the sophistication of the historian methodo­logically in accessing the materials of that past and then communicating that understanding to an audience in a way that positions the same audience to perceive with a period mind, eye, ear, and — with the advent of the history of emotions — heart. The complexities of the interrogation are further underlined by the imperative to ensure that the different species of the nature of belief are not treated ‘as commensurate with one another’.18 The question underpinning this volume could be summarized: ‘How does one do religious history in a secular age?’ — an apposite cue appropriated from Charles Taylor’s influential book.19 At issue is conceptualization and method. The current collection’s larger framing relates to concepts and approaches to religion and what these have meant for historians as they seek to understand the cosmos informing the lives of people of a distant age. It has its origins in two conferences that aspired to take stock of the study of religion in the Italian Renaissance. Contributions focused on expressions of religion (‘modes’) and what they signified for people in particular historical contexts, and so placed them in the exigencies of the moment (‘meanings’), as conveyed by the subtitle of this volume. Use of the word ‘religion’ has been subject to critique in recent decades. In tandem, if not in concert, ways of thinking about religion as a hermeneutic, or even as a heuristic device, have undergone waves of refinement, nuance, and evaluation, in departments of history and anthropo­logy, certainly, but also in those of religious studies. In a classic text of the 1960s, prescient but often overlooked, W. C. Smith, in The Meaning and End of Religion, offered a genealogy of the term ‘religion’ from Antiquity to modernity. By the end of the 1990s, Jonathan Z. Smith was similarly historians (Natalie Davis, John Bossy, et al.)). It will be clear in what follows that editors and authors emphasize continuity, not rupture, where earlier scholarship would demarcate Reformation and Counter-Reformation rather than reform, including Catholic reform, over a more encompassing span of time.  18 Shagan, The Birth of Modern Belief, p. 5. Shagan’s book explores and historicizes ‘belief ’ as a category, not as content, i.e. what it means and meant ‘to believe’.  19 Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age has generated, very quickly, a substantial literature of its own.

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drawing attention to how the meanings and character of religion change over time and how that is something scholars need to take seriously.20 The historical analysis of the category and how it functions heuristically has been further explored by Christine Caldwell Ames in her incisive ‘Medi­ eval Religious, Religions, Religion’ (2012) and Brent Nongbri in his Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (2013), both studies, at least in part, driven by the genealogical approach of religious studies. While having limitations in terms of their capacity to address the complexities of the phenomenon, these and other similar studies do articulate how theoretical conceptualizations and constructions of ‘religion’ are unstable, relative, and change over time, with the notion of religion with which we are familiar — religion referring to a set of propositional beliefs — arguably not emerging until the seventeenth century.21 Some of these meta-discussions reflect debates that have been ongoing about the relationship between disciplines such as theo­logy and religious studies.22 The choice of ‘Renaissance religions’ rather than ‘Renaissance religion’ in the title signals the constructed and contingent nature of the word ‘religion’ in relation to its genealogy, the experience to which it points, and its role as a heuristic tool in the hands of historians. The plural form also reflects our aim at least to gesture towards the range of religions practised/ observed in some form or other in Renaissance Italy, including Judaism above all, but also Islam. And it is a reminder of the need to be wary of any homogeneous approach to Christianity itself. The studies that comprise Renaissance Religions: Modes and Meanings in History reflect how the field has advanced, particularly in terms of methodo­ logy and theoretical framing, since the ‘religious turn’ in medi­eval and early modern history, signalled forcefully by the 1972 conference organized by Heiko Oberman and Charles Trinkaus and the publication of its proceedings as The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medi­eval and Renaissance Thought. Revisionist approaches to humanists (humanisti), the studia humanitatis, and the impact on culture of the recovery of texts have obliged a re-evaluation of the framing of belief; the boundaries between Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are seen to be more fluid and porous; a keen interest in devotion and materiality has lent new voice to ‘subaltern’ elements in society with ground-breaking studies on confraternities and the domestic space as the loci of devotion; sermon studies has emerged as a distinct discipline; the printed word and religious transformations in the sixteenth century and the role of the Inquisition have moved to the foreground in the defining of early  20 Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion.  21 See Harrison, The Territories of Science and Religion, esp. p. 7, for whom the overriding current conception of ‘religion’ (as well as ‘science’) is a relatively recent Western invention dating from the seventeenth century when religion came to denote something generic and defined by sets of beliefs and practices, rather than an interior disposition.  22 See e.g. Turner, ‘Doing Theo­logy in the Uni­ver­sity’.

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modern Catholic culture and identity; spatiality and religious geo­graphy, conceptions and meanings of the body, along with emotions, have more and more garnered attention; globalization, mass migration, and issues surrounding social inclusion have repositioned our understanding of reform in the late medi­eval and early modern periods.23 As a consequence of these changes to foci, method, and framing, Renaissance studies in all the disciplines have been transformed, including those traditionally categorized as music history, art history, architectural history, and social history. Amidst these exciting ‘turns’ in history, however, there remains some disquiet about how adequately to address the phenomenon of religion in a period when, in Lucien Febvre’s characterization, ‘tous les actes, toutes les journées sont comme saturés de religion’ (all their activities, every day, are saturated with religion).24 How do we uncover the ways in which religion worked as a permeating influence, especially if people at the time were only more-or-less aware of such influence? How do we reconstruct its impact on their turns of thought and behaviour and the cast or colouration it gave to even their most common-sense notions? How do we bring to light, in its diversity and/or commonality, a body of assumptions, rarely, or perhaps only obliquely, expressed, yet accepted?25

Genealogies of Italian Renaissance Religions In his classic 1969 book, Renaissance Florence, Gene Brucker observed that religion was generally ignored by all but Church historians.26 This comment was explicable in terms of the genealogy of the field. The term ‘renaissance’ itself was made canonical in the mid-nineteenth century by Jakob Burkhardt, the lapsed Swiss Protestant, who (like his near contemporary, Max Weber, a lapsed German Protestant) identified the rise of modern society with the

 23 For some useful surveys of the field, see the contributions in Laven, Bamji, and Janssen, Ashgate Research Companion to the Counter-Reformation, especially the contribution by Terpstra, ‘Lay Spirituality’; for the later period, see also Terpstra, ‘Early Modern Catholicism’. Not-so-recent, but nonetheless instructive, surveys are those of Hudon, ‘Religion and Society in Early Modern Italy’, Peterson, ‘Out of the Margins’, Lansing, ‘Religion in the Renaissance’, and Scribner, ‘Elements of Popular Belief ’. For Europe more generally, see Caldwell Ames, ‘Medi­eval Religious, Religions, Religion’. Though not specifically treating religion, I Tatti Studies, 22.2 (2019) provides valuable perspectives.  24 Febvre, Le Problème de l’incroyance au xvie siècle, p. 370. On the possibility of unbelief in this period, see e.g. Wootton, ‘Lucien Febvre and the Problem of Unbelief ’, and the reworking of the problem around boundaries of orthodoxy by Celenza, ‘Late Antiquity and Florentine Platonism’, pp. 72–73. See also Celenza, ‘Pythagoras in the Renaissance’, pp. 668–69.  25 Here I appropriate Marie Dominique Chenu’s articulation of mentalité, in Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelfth Century, p. 102.  26 Brucker, Renaissance Florence, p. 290. He notes in the 1983 reprint that the situation has much changed.

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secularization of religious ideals in the Protestant Reformation.27 Indeed, as Nicholas Terpstra observes: ‘[For Burckhardt] religion is […] not a thing in itself, but a costume made of borrowed parts that are retailored to purpose’, before pursuing a refreshing reappraisal of this field-defining thinker by attending to the twenty-first-century concerns of cultural historians.28 The progenitors of the post-war expansion of renaissance studies in the Anglo world, Philip Jones and Nicolai Rubinstein, were interested in religion in its institutional dynamics and not so much as a field of historical inquiry per se, especially in relation to the then (and perhaps even now!) much studied Florence.29 But even recently, within the last ten years, one group of historians of Florence has been more comfortable, in its own estimation, talking about the Church when trying to grapple with religion.30 The Church is more easily identifiable as a juridical and institutional entity, and lends itself to the sort of analysis that we apply to other institutions and polities. Generally predicated upon interest in the processes underpinning Medici power in the city, it is, of course, understandable that the discussion of religion has revolved around power and politics. The Florentine Church and the papacy are often reduced to institutions within which the political negotiations that characterized the everyday political life of Florence were brought to bear. Themes are often expressed in oppositional terms: first, the dichotomies of ecclesiastical and lay power and the permeability of the juridical constructs delineating Church and State; second, the interaction of the local (in this instance, Florentine) and universal (that is, papal) interests; and third, the Church as a sacralizing, mediating presence, more and more embodied in the trappings of a worldly court. A concern evident through all three of these themes is the interrelationship of power and cultural representation along the lines of Foucault. That is to say, reorganizations of knowledge are seen to be intertwined with forms of power and domination.31 Religion and the Church, while not easily equated, nonetheless

 27 On Burckhardt, see Howard, ‘Jacob Burckhardt, Religion, and the Historio­graphy of “Crisis” and “Transition”’, and, now, Terpstra, ‘Burkhardt’s Beliefs and Renaissance Religions’; on Weber, see D’Avray, Medi­eval Religious Rationalities; also Turner, ‘Introduction to Max Weber’. Thanks also to Nicholas Watson for his perceptive comments about Burckhardt and Weber.  28 Terpstra, ‘Burkhardt’s Beliefs and Renaissance Religions’. I am grateful to Nicholas Terpstra for sharing the pre-print text of his forthcoming essay.  29 See the introduction to Black and Law, The Medici, the volume arising from ‘Medici in the Fifteenth Century: Signori of Florence?’, a conference in 2011 at Villa I Tatti and the Monash Uni­ver­sity Prato Centre.  30 As became clear during discussions at a 2012 conference on the Medici and Florence at Villa I Tatti: The Harvard Uni­ver­sity Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (Day 1) and the Monash Uni­ver­sity Prato Centre (Day 2). Discussion at this conference was the impetus for the conferences that underpin this volume.  31 See Black and Law, The Medici, intro. pp. 8–9, and Part III: Religion and the Church, pp. 169–217 with contributions by David Peterson (‘The Albizzi, the Early Medici, and the Florentine Church, 1375–1460’), Paolo Orvieto (‘Religion and Literature in Oligarchic,

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did condition one another. The term ‘religion’, however, emerges as the more elusive, even when applied to the Florentine pater patriae Cosimo de’ Medici (in Michael Baxandall’s apt phrase) ‘the Church-going merchant citizen’.32 More generally, the challenge lies in grappling with phenomena, here religion, that enlarge ‘the relevant environment beyond the unquestionably plausible human one’.33 That challenge remains, even though the ‘new religious history’ is now ‘not-so-new’. In introducing the volume that, as noted above, could be considered as marking the ‘religious turn’ in modern historio­graphy, The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medi­eval and Renaissance Religion (1974), Charles Trinkaus observed that all participants (in the volume and the conference that preceded it) had ‘a strong concern with the importance of religious thought, feeling, behavior and expression’ in the period, ‘as distinguished but not separated from ecclesio­logy, church history and the relationships between church and state’.34 The shared understanding was that ‘the character of religion, as a part of late medi­eval and Renaissance culture, was coming to be regarded in a substantially different way than it had been’, and it was time to take stock of new developments and directions. Essays in that volume by Natalie Davis, Richard Trexler, and Charles Trinkaus moved religion from the margins of Renaissance studies and helped drive what is now termed the ‘Geertzian Turn’ in the study of religious phenomena.35 Approaches driven by intellectual history (for instance, studies on nominalism), have given way to new approaches driven by socio­logy, anthropo­logy, and psycho-history.36 The focus was now on believers themselves, rather than on a body of beliefs. For many historians of Renaissance Italy, John Bossy was making this point in his articles of the 1970s, and, above all, in his 1985 Christianity in the West.37 Of this ‘new religious history’, Robert Medicean, and Savonarolan Florence’), and David Chambers (‘A Cardinal in Rome: Florentine and Medici Ambitions’).  32 See Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici and the Florentine Renaissance, p. 18, referring to Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy, p. 109.  33 Shannon-Henderson, Religion and Memory in Tacitus’ Annals, p. 351, adopting the definition of Rüpke, ‘Religious Agency, Identity, Communication’, p. 348.  34 Trinkaus and Oberman, The Pursuit of Holiness, p. ix.  35 In the early 1970s, Geertz observed that many of his fellow Indonesianists were exploring and writing about religion, but no one had thought about how they were conceptualizing what they were observing. So, he wrote his now famous essay, becoming a conduit of Emile Durkheim and the idea that religion took on cultural forms.  36 Geertz, ‘Religion as a Cultural System’. At the Michigan conference, papers by Heiko Oberman (‘The Shape of Late Medi­eval Thought’), William J. Courtney (‘Nominalism and Late Medi­eval Religion’), and Steven Ozment (‘Mysticism, Nominalism, and Dissent’).  37 Bossy, ‘The Counter-Reformation and the People of Catholic Europe’ (1970, presaged in a 1966 conference on popular religion). Indicative is Bossy’s nineteen-page review of Trinkaus and Oberman (‘Holiness and Society’, 1977), where in the last three pages he opens up his own view that is explored around the term ‘convivium’ and a panoramic display around religious change, which he explores in his book-length essay Christianity in the West.

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Scribner wrote: ‘Religion is a newly fashionable subject among historians of early modern Europe, but it is a fashion with a difference, for the history of religion is approached with new aims, new methodo­logies and virtually a new subject matter’.38 Over the next few decades, a flurry of studies ensued on religious life and practice in urban contexts such as Venice, Rome, Genoa, Bo­logna, and Bergamo. The new aims and methods included studies of ritual life, shrines and charitable institutions, lay institutions such as confraternities, and forms of dissemination and community building including theatre, music, and visual culture.39 Much of this work expanded under the broad heading of ‘civic religion’, reflecting the fact that locale was at least as significant as liturgy in framing religious consciousness and expression.40 Christianity in rural areas and its interrelationship with urban centres also became the focus of important studies.41 Those writing the new religious history of Europe shared the conviction that the period 1350 to 1550, in the North and Italy alike, rather than being seen as rent by the rupture of Protestant Reform, was one with an ‘underlying unity characterized by a fervent piety and a merging of the sacred and the profane which itself affirmed man’s [sic] power of action [and] thought’.42 This was linked to the expansion and population growth of urban centres and the ‘burgeoning networks of economic, political and ecclesiastical communication’.43 In other words, there was a new cadre of laity embellishing ecclesiastical institutions, creating new intellectual materials, and requiring new pastoral efforts for which new guidebooks were devised as supports. The guiding concern of the new religious historians was how the religion of clergy and elites related to that of ordinary people — though more and more chary of any two-tiered model — and how religiously informed ideas and concepts about the world translated into practice.44 With this new approach to religion, in Scribner’s review, interest centred on ‘popular religion’ and ‘religiousness’ or ‘religiosity’, rather than on religion defined through its doctrinal or ecclesiastical purity. Religion was not abstract and idealized but, instead, was located in places and objects. Religion was

 38 Scribner, ‘Interpreting Religion in Early Modern Europe’, p. 90.  39 The plethora of studies are too numerous to list and too invidious to sample.  40 See, for example, Herlihy, Medi­eval and Renaissance Pistoia, pp. 241–58; Terpstra, ‘Civic Religion’; Brown, ‘Civic Religion in Late Medi­eval Europe’.  41 See, for example, Rubin, ‘Religious Culture in Town and Country’; Hewlett, Rural Communities in Renaissance Tuscany.  42 Trinkaus and Oberman, The Pursuit of Holiness, p. xi.  43 Trinkaus and Oberman, The Pursuit of Holiness, p. xii.  44 Scribner, ‘Interpreting Religion in Early Modern Europe’, p. 91; Caldwell Ames, ‘Medi­eval Religious, Religions, Religion’, p. 336. For an analysis of the ‘popular’/‘two-tiered’ notion of religion, see Brown, Cult of the Saints, pp. 12–22.

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a localized experience where the sacred was manifest in and through ‘the worldly’ — what Scribner called a ‘sacramental religion’. From Peter Brown to Richard Trexler, from Late Antiquity to the early modern era, it was acknowledged that the cross-fertilization of history and anthropo­logy/ socio­logy had revolutionized our way of looking at the past. Indeed, in an extreme formulation of this approach, Richard Trexler rather disarmingly (though understandably in the framework of Durkheim’s functional socio­ logy) described his project — Public Life in Renaissance Florence (published in 1980) — as one to construct a religious cosmo­logy ‘without mentioning ideas, beliefs, or dogmas’, but on the basis of an ethno­graphic approach to sources with which ‘[Renaissance] Florentines [themselves] would not have agreed’.45 In short: his interest was in religion beyond the Church, and certainly beyond theo­logy. Inherent here is a perplexing claim: that you can adduce reasons for observed behaviour that belong to potentially anachronistic frameworks such as anthropo­logy. This is an extreme statement of Trexler’s ethno­graphic conversion, and here he is aiming to find ways to explore a broader range of popular religious expression than theo­logy itself can fully describe. The issue is less the limits of theo­logy and more the limits of language. And we should not forget that reading his work shows that even he, despite his disavowal, could not ultimately write about the practice of religion without attending to the complex ideas that may have, at some level, informed it. (I will return to this issue of religious thought in the next section of this essay.) Though inspired by these new developments, some historians of both Italy and Europe more generally voiced caution. Natalie Davis herself, for example, in an article entitled ‘Anthropo­logy and History in the 1980s’, cautioned against eclecticism, and more seriously, ‘the misapplication of anthropo­logical interpretation and fieldwork to historical cases’. She argued that anthropo­logical approaches are to be consulted for suggestions and comparisons, but not for prescriptions and universal rules of human behaviour.46 Peter Brown, much influenced by Mary Douglas’s functionalist anthropo­logy, put it more prosaically: only when open to the present and ‘when the insights of other disciplines have worked their way into his mind’ can the historian bring them to the study of the past. Theories can help us do that, so long as we wear them lightly.47 In 2001, to take another example of an ongoing debate, Philippe Buc published a book entitled The Dangers of Ritual, in which he urges historians to be critical in their use of scientific models as heuristic tools and to be aware of their intellectual genealogies.48

 45 Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, p. 45.  46 Davis, ‘Anthropo­logy and History in the 1980s’, pp. 273, 275.  47 Brown, Religion and Society in the Age of Saint Augustine, p. 20. For a similar view, see Burke, History and Social Theory, pp. 164–65.  48 Buc, The Dangers of Ritual, p. 1.

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What emerges from significant, influential interventions that have further scrutinized the conception of the notion of religion as an analytical term, and the way in which historical work ensues, is, to a degree, already built into the category itself.

Religion and a Web of Words Restoring the web of words to religion and focusing on cultures of preaching, along with performance, the visual, lay reading habits, and lay religious literacy, reconnects theo­logy to the sacred (ruptured, as it were, by Durkheim) and so to the everyday in terms of meaning. Bellini’s St Mark Preaching in Alexandria focuses attention on preaching as a dominant form of discourse across, before, and beyond the period encompassed by Renaissance Religions. The spatially evocative scene, depicting preacher, scribe, and hearers, takes us into a world where words become the oblique mirrors that allow us to catch glimpses of meaning and the tribe of language that held a distant society together. While we can no longer hear the sounds, the textual and visual artefacts that remain lead us to ponder the patterns, values, benedictions, and, sometimes, blasphemies. Words were relentlessly creative and powerful. Pioneering scholarship has shown the centrality of preaching as part of the development of the Renaissance city at the time when civic consensus was coming to the fore.49 With the coming of the friars, the very shape of the city was transformed to accommodate the preached word by these harbingers of Observant religious reform.50 Preaching itself was shaped by the expectations of audiences; hearers themselves had a reciprocal power to collude in the shaping of a preacher’s discourse, even participating in weekly conferences held in convents to explore the key moral implications of the ‘notable authorities’ (e.g. Lombard, Aquinas, even Aristotle and Cicero) in light of the realities of urban life.51 By the end of the sixteenth century, reform, in terms of a medium of communication such as the sermon, was a two-way street: laypeople shaped preachers and their preaching as much as preachers themselves sought to shape lay belief. Reform was a collaborative process.52 For the generations following the Council of Trent, the reality of the Catholic Church, newly situated as one faith amongst many, was both communicated and formed through sermons. Words preached were envelopes of meaning and created the conditions of possibility.  49 Delcorno, La Predicazione nell’Età Comunale; Rusconi, Predicazione e vita religiosa nella società italiana. Sermon studies has become a distinct field in the last three decades and generated a significant biblio­graphy. Three authors in this volume have been, and are, significant contributors, viz. Caravale, Debby, Howard.  50 Howard, ‘Aural Space of the Sacred’.  51 On hearers shaping discourse, see Howard, ‘Making a City and Citizens’. On ‘collationes de moralibus’, see Howard, ‘“Doctrine, when preached, is entirely civic”’.  52 See Michelson, The Pulpit and the Press in Reformation Italy.

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Exacting studies over the past thirty or more years, and now more recent studies, some mobilized in part by the astonishing power of Islamic preaching at the start of the twenty-first century, have sought to understand the power that preachers exerted over their audiences.53 For many historians, sermon materials of the period have moved from being a source of ‘social nuggets’ to being analysed for meaning and message. The genre itself is now understood in terms of its malleability in the hands of its adept practitioners, who constantly sought to appropriate and adapt new cultural forms, the better to communicate and be responsive to changing social, political, and intellectual circumstances.54 There was a close relationship between theo­logical knowledge, adaptation of that knowledge, and the exigencies of the hearers’ circumstances. The sermon was a fluid medium. Its best practitioners drew on the rich possibilities of long theo­logical traditions and combined broad reading with pastoral sensitivity. The latter meant that lay audiences could be demanding of their preachers in terms of both content and style. The emphasis here is on reciprocity between audience and preacher, not just in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but throughout the period associated with the coming of the friars to the urban centres of Italy and Europe more generally.55 Preachers reflected and shaped values, gave language to belief, and defended the borders of orthodoxy, especially in the turbulent years of the reformations, when printed sermons extended their reach.56 At the same time, ecclesiastical authorities — the Inquisition — became increasingly less disposed to tolerate the ambiguity of the preaching of the likes of Don Ippolito Chizzola, who attracted good audiences and popular favour.57 Effective preachers appealed to both the learned and the unlearned, attracted huge crowds, and were everywhere in demand.58 Preaching was therefore an ‘engaged theo­logy’, deeply grounded in perceptions of audience, and thereby shaped by it, but at the same time open to and conversing with political and social realities. Attention to the content of preaching has moved the historio­graphy from notions of fixed doctrine and indoctrination to theo­logy — sacra doctrina in the technical sense — as an interpretive endeavour, emmeshed in the particular, even local, social, political, intellectual, and cultural milieu.  53 Jansen and Rubin, ‘Introduction’, p. 1; Milner, ‘Rhetorics of Transcendence’.  54 A justly celebrated study is O’Malley, Praise and Blame in Renaissance Rome.  55 I have explored this idea on the basis of Antoninus of Florence’s understanding of the skills required for good preaching. See Howard, ‘Making a City and Citizens’.  56 See Michelson, The Pulpit and the Press in Reformation Italy.  57 Caravale, Preaching and Inquisition in Renaissance Italy; see his essay in this volume.  58 A good discursive example of the many possible is Vespasiano da Bisticci’s profile of Bartolomeo Lapacci Rimbertini OP: ‘Ebe maravigliosa gratia nel predicare et grandissimo concorso nelle sua predicationi, et fu molto istimato per la sua dottrina, che pochi frati aveva l’ordine suo in quello tempo, della dottrina ebe lui. Aveva nelle sua predicationi grandissima concorso, così da’ dotti come dagli indotti, per essere eloquentissimo, et posedeva bene la sua dottrina’, in Da Bisticci, Le Vite, ed. by Greco, p. 287.

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It therefore proffers clues to the changing beliefs and values underpinning, encouraging, or constraining social endeavour. But understanding the sermon as a performance — not simply text — shifts the locus of preaching from the classroom to the piazza, and the reciprocal engagement of people in ideas, meaning, and emotion. If we can take as an indication of ‘spiritual mobility’ the zibaldone or notebook of an anonymous Florentine merchant, with its sophisticated and detailed recollections of notable sermons, people would cross parish and neighbourhood boundaries to attend the sermons of preachers whose message and meaning they found instructive and consoling.59 As this merchant observed of a famous preacher whom he heard on 16 March 1488: ‘[the preacher] said in his sermon many beautiful, and indeed, very beautiful things which I don’t know how to express’.60 The historio­graphical shift to which this example gestures could be termed a ‘theo­logical turn’ in studying ‘Renaissance religions’, and the possibility of a heuristic that reconnects what Durkheim’s functional socio­logy had separated: theo­logy and the sacred.61

Renaissance Religio In the ‘web of words’ of a long Renaissance, what did the word ‘religion’ connote, and what would a preacher have found if he had consulted available texts? Consultation with the most published, and therefore influential, author of the fifteenth century, Archbishop Antoninus of Florence, a Dominican preacher and writer, yields a capacious articulation of religio which proffers the possibility of evaluating the weight and emanation of the word in a precise context, wrenched free from familiar, generally anachronistic assumptions. Antoninus’s use of language in his Summa theo­logica reflects his own public usage and that of other preachers. He begins his tract on the vocation of religious with a preface on understandings of ‘religio’, which is beyond the strict, medi­eval, narrow sense.62 Like the accomplished preacher that he was, he opens his treatment with a theme drawn from scripture: ‘Religiousness (religiositas) shall keep and justify the heart’ Ecclesiastes 1. 18. This he develops, in a way consistent with Aquinas, by discussing the ‘vocation of religion’ as a moral virtue, called ‘religio’, which he explains as a service that displays the duty of worship and ceremony and a way of honouring God, for  59 The Florentine merchant attended the cathedral, Santa Maria Novella, and Santa Croce, but predominantly he was at San Lorenzo. See Zafarana, ‘Per la storia religiosa di Firenze’.  60 ‘Disse in questa predicha molte belle e bellissime chose, le quali io non so dire’. Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana, Florence, MS1186C, fol. 54r, transcribed in Zafarana, ‘Per la storia religiosa di Firenze’, p. 1079. The preacher was the Augustinian Fra Mariano da Genazzano.  61 See Holt, ‘Putting Religion Back into the Wars of Religion’, p. 531.  62 On this sense of religio, see Caldwell Ames, ‘Medi­eval Religious, Religions, Religion’, p. 335.

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example, through sacrifice, oblations, inclinations. He then draws on a fourteenth-century canonist to distinguish four understandings of religio. The first way concerns due worship of the one true God with respect to faith, and this embraces all Christians and is called the Christian religion (religio Christiana): ‘And if any man think himself to be religious, etc. [viz. not bridling his tongue, but deceiving his own heart, this man’s religion is vain. James 1. 26]. And this is called the Christian religion’. The second meaning to be drawn emphasizes devotion to the true God as not just through faith (per fidem), but also through good works, and on the authority of an early chapter of Acts of the Apostles (Acts 2. 5: ‘Now there were dwelling at Jerusalem […] devout men, out of every nation under heaven’). The third and fourth meanings of ‘religio’ narrow to refer to those in the clerical state who are more dedicated to divine observance, more particularly those who through making religious profession, subject themselves to the authority of a superior, so dedicating the whole of the self to God. This leads to the remainder of the tract’s introduction which expands on how those in these last categories reach to perfection through the transformative power of love.63 So here ‘religio’ links moral virtue and interior disposition, which relates to good works, and worthy worship, grounded in a reading of the biblical text. Antoninus, like any preacher who consulted the entry ‘religio’ in a book of distinctions or biblical concordance, would be aware of who was excluded by such definitions: those who pursued false and vain religion.64 Such consultation led the preacher to the only passage in the New Testament using the term ‘religio’ in Jerome’s Vulgate (translating threskeia): ‘And if any man think himself to be religious, not bridling his tongue, but deceiving his own heart, this man’s religion is vain. Religion clean and undefiled before God and the Father, is this: to visit the fatherless and widows in their tribulation: and to keep one’s self unspotted from this world’ ( James 1. 26–27). The context of the passage is the injunction ‘to be doers of the word, not hearers only’ ( James 1. 22). The overarching meaning here is that religion is a form of worship that involves acts of charity rather than ritual observance. Such a meaning comes through very clearly in sermons, such as one ‘on generosity’ by an unknown preacher who urged, with reference to religion clean and undefiled, visiting the poor and the afflicted without distinction or judgement, with ‘religio’ here relating to justice as it does in Aquinas.65 The limits of the views expressed by such thinkers as Antoninus and his predecessors were being tested as the fifteenth century progressed as readers sought to accommodate the wave of ancient writings recovered in

 63 Antoninus of Florence, Ordinis Praedicatorum Summa Theo­logica [hereafter Summa], vol. iii, title 16, chap. 1, cols 843–44.  64 See e.g. Florence, Bib. Naz. Centr., MS CS J.VII.37, Distinctiones bibliae, fol. 55r.  65 Florence, Bib. Naz. Centr., MS CS H.VIII.1023, Sermones varii diversorum auctorum, ‘Sermo de Elemosinarum Largitione’, fol. 181v. See Aquinas, Summa Theo­logiae, II-II, q. 81, aa. 5–6.

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the fifteenth century. Christianity had always lived with and accommodated classical texts. So Antoninus, as with any preacher committed to adapting preaching to circumstances (de circumstantiae), was continuously negotiating and accommodating to the cultural shifts that were taking place, as his own extended discussion in the tract De Fide shows: deep faith about God and higher things is supported by the noble philosophers such as Aristotle, Plato, and Boethius, including on such matters as the first and eternal cause, and the highest power.66 His own preaching and writing reflects the way in which the impact of humanistic concerns was permeating society.67 But he was not as tolerant with the increasing interest in Epicurus that was awakening in Florence in the fifteenth century.68 In historio­graphical terms, ‘religio’ was being redefined, not as Christian versus pagan, but rather as the porous and fluctuating boundary between orthodoxy and heterodoxy.69 Marsilio Ficino is a case in point. A proponent of the studia humanitatis as well as a preacher (though generally less well known as such), he treated religion at length in most of his writings and — like Augustine — held that all religion has good in itself, so long as it is directed towards God the creator of all things, thereby allowing Plato and Aristotle and other proponents before Christ to be appropriated and redeemed, as it were, for the Christian intellectual endeavour.70 In his vernacular De Christiana Religione of 1474 (and appearing in other versions across the following decade), on the basis of a range of patristic and more recent sources, especially Eusebius of Caesarea and the Contra Judeos by Gerónimo de Santa Fe (fl. 1400–1430), Ficino tackled the question of the naturalness of religion for humankind — how religion differentiates humankind from other creatures and connects them to the divine — and the continuity between ancient wisdom, not only pagan, but also Jewish, and Christian: a unitary theo­logical tradition.71 Here, for Ficino, ‘religio’, as for Aquinas and Antoninus, was an interior disposition, connecting humankind to the most perfect (i.e. divinity), and separating them from animals, consisting of interior devotion and leading to worship.72 It was his reading of Plato that led him to discover the two

 66 Antoninus of Florence, Summa, vol. iv, title 8, cols 431–34: ‘Fatetur etiam fides nostra altiora de Deo & nobiliora, wherefore unde nobiles philosophi, ut Aristotiles et Plato, quae de Deo noscibilia sunt, ut circa hoc, quod sit una caussa prima et aeterna, quod summae potentiae’.  67 Howard, ‘The Remembered Past as Present Exemplar’.  68 Antoninus of Florence, Summa, vol. iv, title 8, col. 433.  69 See e.g. Celenza, ‘Late Antiquity and Florentine Platonism’, pp. 72–73; and Brown, The Return of Lucretius to Renaissance Florence, pp. 10–13.  70 On Ficino as a preacher, see Rees, ‘Considering Marsilio Ficino as a Preacher’, pp. 81–82. Hankins, ‘Marsilio Ficino on Reminiscentia and the Transmigration of Souls’. For Augustine, religion existed before Christianity; what is key for him is that it is about worship offered to the true object. See De vera religione, chs 3–7.  71 Bartolucci, ‘Varianti e constanti nel pensiero religioso di Marsilio Ficino’; see Edelheit, Ficino, Pico, and Savonarola, pp. 212–29.  72 Ficino, De Christiana Religione, ed. by Bartolucci, p. 137. Thomas Aquinas in various places,

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most important matters, as he wrote to his patron, Lorenzo de’ Medici, in the preface to his Theo­logica Platonica: ‘the worship of God with piety and understanding, and the divinity of souls. On these depend our whole perception of the world, the way we lead our lives, and all our happiness’.73 Religion, for Ficino, is certainly worthy worship of God, but it is also amorphous, colouring how one lives and experiences life.74 A near contemporary and member of Ficino’s circle, Lorenzo di Domenico, wrote in 1473 the first of what was intended to be three treatises, focused on ‘the various religions and theo­logies of the gentiles’ where by religion he had in mind ‘ceremonies [of worship]’ and by theo­logies he was referring to ‘beliefs’.75 Noteworthy here is the phrase ‘the religions of the gentiles’ which is only generally encountered in some seventeenth-century works.76 The understandings of both Ficino and Di Domenico accord broadly with the idea of religion expressed by Antoninus, and allows theo­ logy to be linked to language which expresses the invisible sensibilities of belief and ‘religio’ to worship. This said, what is apparent in Di Domenico is a sense of a plurality of religions. The other tracts that Di Domenico laid out in prospect would seem to resonate with the ideas that Ficino was exploring. If this were the case, it is possible to conclude that belief and practice were being historicized more broadly in Florentine society where a spectrum of the population had developed facility with ancient languages and new-found manu­script sources continued to be much prized, sought after, and circulated. Through the period the endeavour was to domesticate, or reconcile, the religions and theo­logies of the ancients, even when such texts as Lucretius’s De rerum natura with its form of Epicureanism, though at odds with Christian orthodoxy, nonetheless had a significant appeal and coloured the texture of belief of many in Renaissance Florence and beyond.77 Renaissance Christianity

 73  74  75

 76  77

but principally in Summa Theo­logiae, II-II, q. 81. Aquinas begins his response (a.10) by referring to Cicero via Isidore of Seville that religion pertains ‘ad cultum divinum’ and goes on to quote Augustine’s De civitate Dei and De vera religione. Ficino, ‘Proem’, Theo­logia Platonica, ed. by Hankins, trans. by Allen, pp. 8–11. See also Ficino, Letters, ed. by Rees, Bertoluzzi, and Farndell, no. 83 (p. 101), no. 111 (p. 136). ‘Nel primo delle varie religioni et theo­logie de gentili et modi di sacrificii tractereno [sic]. Nel laltro glierrori et vane superstitioni degli antichi riprovate saranno. Nel terzo elvero et divino culto et mosaica religione secondo lantico rito degli Hebrei con lauctorita de philosophi dichiarereno [sic]’. Florence, Bib. Naz. Centr., MS Magl. XXXVII.319, Lorenzo di Domenico, Antiquarum religionum libros, fol. 1r. See Howard, Experiencing Religion in Renaissance Florence. See also Bartolucci, ‘Varianti e constanti nel pensiero religioso di Marsilio Ficino’, pp. 25–26. I am grateful to Professor Peter Harrison for the observation that he has encountered the expression only in some seventeenth-century works, but not before. See Brown, The Return of Lucretius to Renaissance Florence, especially for the impact on the writings of Renaissance Florentines such as Ficino and Machiavelli; and for the sixteenth century and reform movements, Prosperi, ‘Lucretius in the Italian Renaissance’.

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was therefore a variegated rather than a ‘homogeneous religion’ in the later generic sense, where exclusion and difference defined religion in different modes across Europe as Christendom fragmented into competing belief systems. Recent historio­graphy has shown that not just devotional practice, but also theo­logical literacy was common throughout Florence and other cities of Italy.78 An index of this is the lay preaching that took place in confraternities, including those comprising youths. Even as unlikely a figure as Machiavelli preached to his youthful confreres, since confraternal statutes exhorted youthful members to learn the art of sacred oratory and to give sermons to their peers.79 Even an artisan, not just learned laymen, could become a well-known, sought-after preacher to youth confraternities. The sermon of Pietro Bernardo da Firenze, an artisan — sculptor and goldsmith — and member of several youth confraternities, not only shows his grounding in in the faith of the catechism, but also reveals him to be conversant with ideas from Origen, Thomas Aquinas, Catherine of Siena, and Antoninus of Florence, along with a range of classical authors. If a historian is concerned to appraise how the laity may have understood the scriptures, then Pietro Bernardo’s sermon proffers a clue. He begins with a pedagogical induction of his adolescent audience (along with the boys’ fathers) into the traditional four senses or modes of understanding (literal, allegorical, tropo­logical, and anagogical) and how they led into the very depths of the meaning of the scriptures, unlocking their ‘infinite array of meanings’ — a way of scriptural understanding that involved ‘the spiritual intellect’, as another artisan text puts it.80 This gives insight into people’s possible perception, understanding, and way of experiencing the world metaphorically through the lens of the biblical text. The implications for what could be termed the capacity for ‘visual exegesis’ shifts the historian’s gaze on ‘the period eye’, now looking beyond the apparent linear narratives to more complex interpretations not just of art, but also of the sacre rappresentazioni — miracle plays — which were so much a part of urban life in the period.81 Recent research by Sabrina Corbellini and an array of other scholars has shed new light on the religious  78 See e.g. Terpstra, ‘Boundaries of Brotherhood’.  79 For statutes, see Eisenbichler, The Boys of the Archangel Raphael, pp. 185–88. For Machiavelli, see Pugliesi, ‘Machiavelli and Confraternities’.  80 Florence, Bib. Naz. Centr., MS Magl. XXXV.202, Pietro Bernardo da Firenze, Predica, fol. 1r–v. See Howard, ‘Preaching, Brotherhoods, and Biblical Literacy’, pp. 120–22. A similar understanding of scripture can be found in manu­scripts owned and copied by laymen, e.g. Florence, Bib. Ricc. MS 2957, fol. 2r: ‘triplice intelletto spirituale, cioe’ Morale, Allegorio, Anagogyco’. For the classic study of the four senses, see de Lubac, Exégèse médiévale. In relation to preaching, see Caplan, ‘The Four Senses of Scriptural Interpretation and the Mediaeval Theory of Preaching’.  81 On preaching and theatre, see e.g. Ventrone, ‘La sacra rappresentazione Fiorentina’. The now classic phrase ‘period eye’ is Baxandall’s. See Baxandall, Painting and Experience in FifteenthCentury Italy, p. 29.

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reading habits, not just of merchants and the more learned, but also of artisans, who even copied religious texts.82 As a more textured understanding of religion in Italian society emerges less surprising is the complexity and sophistication of sermons preached, including ones incorporating obscure material from Dionysius the Areopagite, that were clearly assumed to be understood.83 Viewed in time and place, Renaissance religions are varied and textured, with a sophistication and accessibility in many modes and not limited to elites — what is emerging in the historio­graphy as ‘vernacular theo­logy’.84 This aligns well with Walter Ong’s claim that attention to the process by which the word — ‘at root the spoken word’ — becomes entangled with the complex of sensory contrivances of a culture through the interplay of the oral, the visual, and the performative.85 Renaissance Italian religions remain local, even through the period of the Catholic Reformation, as Simon Ditchfield showed several decades ago in his study of local liturgy reinventing itself against the centralizing tendencies of the Roman Curia, so inimical to previous medi­eval diversity.86 In sum, what should be evident from the preceding discussion is that Renaissance religion in its modes of expressions and its meanings was varied and capacious, and for the historian, its interpretation is contingent upon the very arbitrariness of definitions and conceptualizations of religion, as well as assumptions, that mobilize different methodo­logical and analytical strategies. At issue for the scholar is the capacity to penetrate beyond the patina of the obvious to the elusive, non-empirical realities of belief and therefore religion by way of such signifiers as the visual, textual, material, and the spatial. This is the challenge faced by the authors contributing to this volume. Religion, in the hands of historians, is probably therefore best regarded as a cluster concept and assumes an inflection determined by the particular issues being explored and the perspectives which are brought to bear. The editors of this volume themselves bring several complementary approaches.

 82 See e.g. Corbellini and Hoogvliet, ‘Artisans and Religious Reading’. See Corbellini in this volume.  83 ‘In die Sancti dionisiy. In ecclesia cathedrale coram dominis Florentinis’. Florence, Bib. Naz. Centr., MS CS G.I.646, Bartholomaeus Lapaccis de Rimbertinis, Sermones, fols 69v–72r.  84 Eliana Corbari has appropriated the term ‘vernacular theo­logy’ from Nicholas Watson (‘Censorship and Cultural Change in Late-Medi­eval England’), who, in turn, had borrowed it from Bernard McGinn (The Flowering of Mysticism, pp. 19–22); for each it had a slightly different meaning and purpose. For Corbari, it is an inclusive category: ‘Vernacular theo­logy embraces media other than the written word, such as secular music and the visual arts. This means that material culture can also offer primary sources for its study’ that may include ‘sermons, poetry, laude, reportationes, letters, hagio­graphies, medi­eval plays, […] and brief treatises often derived from preaching’, Corbari, ‘Lost and Found in Translation’, p. 265.  85 Ong, The Presence of the Word, p. 11.  86 Ditchfield, Liturgy, Sanctity and History in Tridentine Italy.

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Riccardo Saccenti is strongly intellectual in his approach to medi­eval ethics, metaphysics, and psycho­logy, embracing natural law, the history of ecclesiastical institutions, and the history of various doctrines. Nicholas Terpstra is an innovative archival historian of ‘civic religion’ whose research lies at the intersection of politics, religion, gender, and charity, with a focus on issues dealing with poverty, institutional structures of charity, and urban space and the senses in Renaissance Italy. Peter Howard has a particular interest in ‘public theo­logy’, tailored to and negotiated within the changing circumstances of local contexts, with the pulpit as the focus of the interactions which created and re-created the discourses which comprised the cultural capital of the city.

The Present Volume The essays in this volume have been grouped into four themes that reflect some of the newer historio­graphical and methodo­logical developments in historical scholarship: Negotiating Boundaries, Modelling Spirituality, Sense and Emotion, and Space and Form. We have aimed in this organization to underscore how analysis of religious life clarifies the questions that are at the core of Renaissance studies today. Sabrina Corbellini opens the section on ‘Negotiating Boundaries’ with a discussion of religious identities that draws us away from the traditional boundaries between elite and popular religious practices. Her focus is the vernacular-literate urban laity and how these non-religious professionals developed into users, producers, and distributors of religious knowledge. She shows us how they significantly contributed to the construction of religious identities and meanings, both personal and communal. This can be seen in their personal miscellanies, produced and used in a domestic, private, or semi-private space, and vividly reflecting the process of reading, writing, collecting, and selecting religious knowledge. They visualize strategies of appropriation, transformation, and domestication of religious content and should be considered, Corbellini argues, testimonies of intentional religious self-representations. Transformation, too, is a theme explored by Tamar Herzig. For her, exploring the multiple transformations that characterized the process of conversion, as well as attitudes towards it, is crucial for understanding Renaissance Italian religion, proposing that Jewish conversion should be explored within this conceptual framework rather than that of Tridentine or Catholic Reformation Italy. Herzig therefore explores conversion from Judaism in central and northern Italy as a distinct phenomenon, where it differed not only from the conversion of other non-Jews to Catholicism, but also from the conversion of Jews in those parts of early modern Europe that experienced mass conversions. In Ferrara, conversion was often a very public phenomenon, with the convert eloquently discoursing from

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the pulpit on the reasons that led to Christian baptism. Rebalancing the historio­graphy, Herzig focuses on the striking role of gender: that the status of Jewish women, excluded from God’s covenant with Abraham, contrasted with the gender equality offered by the Catholic sacrament of baptism. The sight of a Jewish girl receiving the sacrament of baptism became a powerful manifestation of Christianity’s triumph over Judaism. The way in which visual media of the Italian Renaissance bear traces of the crossing of the very boundaries that define religious groups and differentiate them from each other is explored by the following chapter where memorialization, inscribed decisively into visual representations, is pursued in the context of conflict between the Venetian officials in Constantinople and the Ottoman authorities during the tense period of the War of Candia in the mid-seventeenth century. In Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby’s contribution the interrogation, arrest, and execution of some Venetian diplomats in Constantinople gave rise to a commemorative ritual in Venice, which featured them as heroes, and even as early modern martyrs, in the Venetian legacy and historical memory. In particular, Debby focuses on miniatures, fresco cycles, and sculpted marble reliefs which constructed the myth of these Venetian civil servants as patriotic martyrs unjustly persecuted by the Ottomans. She provides context for and commentary on an intriguing volume, the Memorie Turchesche, which richly illustrates the dynasty and history of the Ottoman sultans and daily life in Constantinople, and is an example of Venetian visual propaganda against the Ottomans, one which highlights religious and cultural difference. We then move to a number of contributions which explore how different modes of representation — text, architecture, and image — model spirituality. A fifteenth-century manu­script by Tommaso of Siena (the Cividale Legendary) reveals a selection of both eminent and little known and uncanonized saints, as well as a unique account of a secret translation of the relics of Thomas Aquinas. Constant Mews and Marika Räsänen argue that this legendary represents broadening ideas of sanctity within the Dominican Order, after a period of schism in the order between two rival Masters. The legendary, in this view, reflects a conscious desire to overcome the problem of schism within the Dominican Order, promoted by a new Master General, Tommaso of Firmo, in 1401. This manu­script advances a broader historio­ graphy, with demands for reform as the central impetus for revised texts. Francesca Mattei then considers how architecture can also be a tool for expressing and modelling spiritual values. Mattei examines a number of Renaissance palaces in Ferrara, Bo­logna, and Venice and the way in which architectural features relate to religious ideas in the sixteenth century. Not only do these palaces display an erudite literary programme and cultural ambition on the part of the patrons, but Mattei’s analysis of epi­graphs on the facades indicates the religious inclination of the patrons towards interest in the heterodox ideas. By contrast, Grace Harpster focuses on Catholic reform orthodoxy with her examination of Carlo Borromeo’s Instructiones fabricae

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et supellectilis ecclesiasticae. Copies of this guide to proper church building and furnishings quickly spread throughout the Catholic world, helped by Borromeo’s reputation as the very exemplar of ‘Counter-Reformation’ piety and austerity. Borromeo’s treatment ‘Sacred Images and Pictures’, with its call for decorum, accuracy, and dignity in religious representations, provides fundamental clues as to the definition of sacred images in cinquecento Italy: in the space of the late sixteenth-century Catholic church, images became sacramental objects, using liturgy to link early modern Italy with an ambiguously defined antique. Borromeo’s reputation for austerity and piety becomes the model for the reforming order of the Barnabites and was shaped by Lorenzo Garbieri’s paintings of scenes from the life of the newly canonized Borromeo in the newly erected Barnabite Church of San Paolo Maggiore, Bo­logna. Daniel Unger argues that in these representations of the saint are found not only his altruistic activities, but also the Barnabites’ own participation in those deeds, and so establish a propagandist connection between the saint and the Barnabite Order. The third section on ‘Sense and Emotion’ considers a number of examples of how sight and sound are mobilized for spiritual and emotional effect in the Catholic Reformation. Steven Stowell addresses the issue of sacred art’s mixed spiritual and artistic/technical qualities by examining a range of early modern Italian writings on art, observing how the spiritual efficacy of images was understood as both a result of artistic technique and scientifically understood principles as well as miraculous intervention. To obtain a clearer picture of how religious images were perceived as being spiritually efficacious, he examines writings on art — theoretical writings as well as miracle tales pertaining to images — that discuss sexual responses to images, focusing specifically on the sacred image’s ability to decrease sexual temptations. This material is considered alongside scientific and medical writings from the period regarding the nature of sexual arousal and the role played by vision in stimulating and decreasing desire. This analysis demonstrates that the art object was thought to combine scientifically understood qualities while also serving as a conduit for miraculous acts of grace, both of which could address the desired need to regulate sexual impulses. Self-consciously, Stowell draws on the writings of anthropo­logist Alfred Gell, who suggests that human techno­logies are ‘haunted’ by magical thinking, and this presentation argues that the work of art is a hybrid of artistic techno­logy and spiritually miraculous ‘magic’. By contrast, Gioia Filocamo is attuned to the theo­logical sensitivities of laity. By the fourteenth century belief in Purgatory had been well established and had led to a serious change: the Supreme Judge would no longer impose a collective judgement at the end of the world, but instead pass judgement at the end of every individual’s life. As a consequence, personal responsibility received much greater emphasis. At the same time, the idea that one could ‘negotiate’ eternal personal salvation took hold, especially encouraged by the Franciscans: money, pious works, or prayers in exchange for deliverance from sins passed from the commercial

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sphere to the spiritual world. Purgatory became a place manageable from earth. In this context she examines how these notions are present in the mental images of the huge lauda collection (laudario) assembled by members of the Bo­lognese Confraternity of S. Maria della Morte to assist in their work of offering spiritual comfort to those condemned to death. These laude help to clarify the strategic dimension of what she terms civic religiosity of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Bo­logna, the first Italian city to have a Company of Justice and one of the oldest to sponsor a Monte di Pietà. While the practical function of laude is clear, what is yet unclear, Filocamo notes, is how this happened when the brothers musically performed laude: did they use monody, polyphony, or ‘simple polyphony’? This admitted, laude provide clear evidence of lay appropriation of the theo­logical concepts circulating at the time on what was necessary to gain individual salvation in the afterlife. Xavier Torres also explores sound and its role in local religious communities, focusing on the origins of the sacred oratorio in the latter part of the seventeenth century, and more generally on music as a mode of expression of spirituality. Torres shows that in the splintered religious culture of the Reformation period, participation in sacred music served to build social bonds and to strengthen communities of believers. In particular, he links the development of the new musical genre of the oratorio in Bo­logna to the interests of the local urban aristocracy and argues that it was only in the late seventeenth century that this elite constructed a genealogy linking it to the oratory of St Filippo Neri (1515–1595) and his spiritual exercises in order to defend the oratorio from charges of banality and theatricality. In Torres’s neat phrase: the oratorio became more overtly Oratorian. The final set of essays are linked together around another mode of religious expression: Space and Form. Rebecca Gill opens the section with an article that draws upon unpublished archival research and combines questions of patronage, religious, and social context to bring a new understanding to bear on the innovative Church of Santa Maria Assunta di Carignano in Genoa. She shows the widespread connections between various members of the patron family, the Sauli, and individuals and institutions associated with early Church reform, such as their close links with the important early reformer and Bishop of Verona, Gian Matteo Giberti. Gill argues that the architect Galeazzo Alessi responded to the concerns and ideas of his reform-minded patrons in his design of the internal spatial arrangements of the church, notably the placement of the high altar and the Eucharistic tabernacle which prefigure ideas later taken up by Pellegrino Tibaldi for Archbishop Carlo Borromeo at the cathedral of Milan. In this way, Gill shows Alessi to be a bridge between the work of two great reforming bishops: Giberti and Borromeo. Sally Cornelison’s study is concerned with the nature of the religious art of the period, and how works in a variety of media effectively embodied, codified, and shaped beliefs and practices that were central to the Christian

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faith. She raises the issue of continuity and change as relevant to the history of saints’ cults and relics. In an approach that is primarily phenomeno­ logical, she addresses questions related to the way in which religious art was conceived by those who commissioned and perceived (or consumed) it within sacred environments and during public rituals. Taking Giorgio Vasari’s renovation of the Pieve di Santa Maria (1559–64) in his native Arezzo as a point of departure, Cornelison questions the degree to which Catholic Reformation ideo­logy impacted the late Renaissance religious environment generally and the presentation of saints’ relics specifically. She concludes that site-specific structural and icono­graphical continuity, more than reformatory change, is a defining characteristic of the late Renaissance religious environment. Giorgio Caravale deftly draws together two hitherto generally separate genres of research: sermon and inquisitorial studies. He forges a dialogue between these two parallel historio­graphical paths and reflects on the methodo­logical and conceptual challenges that such an encounter involves. In particular, he draws on a number of inquisitorial sources concerning Italian preachers from the first half of the sixteenth century who were accused of spreading Lutheran ideas around the Italian peninsula. His key considerations are about oral transmission and the ways in which historians are able to utilize the textual artefacts that remain to us as oral testimonies. His hermeneutical key is the skilful use of dissimulation by these heterodox preachers to mask their ideas: they achieved their ends by silence and omission, not by positive affirmations of Lutheran tenets. Serena Quagliaroli draws the volume to a close by linking the high symbolic meaning of music embodied by the organ, ‘king of the instruments’, to the icono­graphy of organ shutters. This icono­graphy was inspired by a ‘musical’ relationship, Quagliaroli argues, which conjoins mankind with the Lord, and represented a visual translation of the long journey of man’s Redemption. The scenes decorating organ doors in the Po Valley were devised as reformist propaganda against Catholics, especially in their depiction of the founding apostles Peter and Paul, statically supporting the church so that the eternity of such gestures would antagonize the ephemeral success of heresies. When taken collectively, these essays, by drawing on and extending the methodo­logical and interpretive experience of scholars across disciplines over the past five decades, add further to our understanding of the rich tapestry of religious experience of a period that continues to fascinate.

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Works Cited Manu­scripts and Archival Sources Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, MS CS G.I.646, Bartholomaeus Lapaccis de Rimbertinis, Sermones Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, MS CS H.VIII.1023, Sermones varii diversorum auctorum (Santa Maria Novella) Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, MS CS J.VII.37, Distinctiones bibliae Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, MS Magl. XXXV.202, Pietro Bernardo da Firenze, Predica Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, MS Magl. XXXVII.319, Lorenzo di Domenico, Antiquarum religionum libros Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana, MS 1186C, transcribed in Zafarana, ‘Per la storia religiosa di Firenze’ Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana, MS 2957 Primary Sources Antoninus of Florence, Sancti Antonini Archiepiscopi Florentini Ordinis Praedicatorum Summa Theo­logica (Verona: Augustus Caratonius, 1740; repr. Graz: Akademische Druck – Universitäts Verlagsanstalt, 1959) Da Bisticci, Vespasiano, Le Vite, ed. by Aulo Greco, 2 vols (Florence: Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento, 1976) Descartes, René, Discourse on Method in the Study of Human Nature: A Reader, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 2000) De Voragine, Jacobus, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. by W. Ryan, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni­ver­sity Press, 1993) Ficino, Marsilio, De Christiana Religione, ed. by Guido Bartolucci (Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2019) —— , The Letters of Marsilio Ficino, vol. i, ed. by Valery Rees, Adrian Bertoluzzi, and Arthur Farndell, 2nd edn (London: Shepheard-Walwyn, 2018) —— , Theo­logia Platonica, vol. i, ed. by James Hankins, trans. by Michael J. B. Allen, The I Tatti Renaissance Library, 2 (Cam­bridge MA: Harvard Uni­ver­sity Press, 2001) Secondary Studies Barry, Michael, ‘Renaissance Venice and her “Moors”’, in Venice and the Islamic World, 828–1797, ed. by Stefano Carboni, trans. by Deke Dusinberre (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­sity Press, 2007), pp. 146–72 Bartolucci, Guido, ‘Varianti e constanti nel pensiero religioso di Marsilio Ficino’, in Marsilio Ficino, De Christiana religione, ed. by Guido Bartolucci (Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2019), pp. 11–72

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Baxandall, Michael, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 1988) Black, Robert, and John E. Law, eds, The Medici: Citizens and Masters, Villa I Tatti Series, 32 (Florence: Villa I Tatti, The Harvard Uni­ver­sity Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, 2015) Bossy, John, Christianity in the West (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 1985) —— , ‘The Counter-Reformation and the People of Catholic Europe’, Past & Present, no. 47 (1970), 51–70 —— , ‘Holiness and Society’, Past & Present, no. 75 (1977), 119–37 Bowsma, William J., ‘The Renaissance and the Drama of Western History’, American Historical Review, 84 (1979), 1–15 Brown, Alison, The Return of Lucretius to Renaissance Florence (Cam­bridge, MA: Harvard Uni­ver­sity Press, 2010) Brown, Andrew, ‘Civic Religion in Late Medi­eval Europe’, Journal of Medi­eval History, 42 (2016), 338–56 Brown, Peter, Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: Uni­ver­sity of Chicago Press, 1981) —— , Religion and Society in the Age of Saint Augustine (London: Faber & Faber, 1972) Brucker, Gene, Renaissance Florence (New York: Wiley, 1969; new edn with appendix and supplement, Berkeley: Uni­ver­sity of California Press, 1983) Buc, Phillipe, The Dangers of Ritual: Between Early Medi­eval Texts and Social Scientific Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni­ver­sity Press, 2001) Burke, Peter, History and Social Theory (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Uni­ver­sity Press, 1992) Caldwell Ames, Christine, ‘Medi­eval Religious, Religions, Religion’, History Compass, 10 (2012), 334–52 Caplan, Harry, ‘The Four Senses of Scriptural Interpretation and the Mediaeval Theory of Preaching’, Speculum, 4 (1929), 281–90 Caravale, Giorgio, Preaching and Inquisition in Renaissance Italy: Words on Trial (Leiden: Brill, 2016) Carboni, Stefano, ed., Venice and the Islamic World, 828–1797, trans. by Deke Dusinberre (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; New Haven: Yale Uni­ ver­sity Press, 2007) Carrier, David, ‘A Renaissance Fantasy Image of the Islamic World: Gentile and Giovanni Bellini’s “Saint Mark Preaching in Alexandria”’, Notes in the History of Art, 28 (2008), 16–19 Celenza, Christopher, ‘Late Antiquity and Florentine Platonism’, in Marsilio Ficino: His Theo­logy, his Philosophy, his Legacy, ed. by Michael J. B. Allen and Valery Rees with Martin Davies (Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp. 71–97 —— , ‘Pythagoras in the Renaissance: The Case of Marsilio Ficino’, Renaissance Quarterly, 52 (1999), 667–711 Chenu, M. D., Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelfth Century: Essays on New Theo­ logical Perspectives in the Latin West, with a preface by Etienne Gilson, selected, ed. and trans. by Jerome Taylor and Lester K. Little (Chicago: Uni­ver­sity of Chicago Press, 1968)

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Corbari, Eliana, ‘Lost and Found in Translation: The Heart of Vernacular Theo­logy in Late Medi­eval Italy’, Franciscan Studies, 71 (2013), 263–79 Corbellini, Sabrina, and Margriet Hoogvliet, ‘Artisans and Religious Reading in Late Medi­eval Italy and Northern France (ca. 1400 – ca. 1520)’, Journal of Medi­ eval and Early Modern Studies, 43 (2013), 522–54 Courtney, William J., ‘Nominalism and Late Medi­eval Religion’, in The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medi­eval and Renaissance Thought, ed. by Charles Trinkaus with Heiko Oberman (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1974), pp. 26–59 Davis, Natalie Zemon, ‘Anthropo­logy and History in the 1980s’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 12 (1980), 267–75 D’Avray, D. L., Medi­eval Religious Rationalities: A Weberian Analysis (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2010) Delcorno, Carlo, La Predicazione nell’Età Comunale (Florence: Sansoni, 1974) Dempsey, Charles, ‘Renaissance Hieroglyphic Studies and Gentile Bellini’s Saint Mark Preaching in Alexandria’, in Hermeticism and the Renaissance: Intellectual History and the Occult in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Ingrid Merkel and Allen G. Debua (Washington: Folger Shakespeare Library; London: Associated Uni­ver­sity Presses, 1988), pp. 342–65 Ditchfield, Simon, Liturgy, Sanctity and History in Tridentine Italy: Pietro Maria Campi and the Preservation of the Particular (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­ sity Press, 1995) Edelheit, Amos, Ficino, Pico, and Savonarola: The Evolution of Humanist Theo­logy, 1461/2–1498 (Leiden: Brill, 2008) Eisenbichler, Konrad, The Boys of the Archangel Raphael: A Youth Confraternity in Florence, 1411–1785 (Toronto: Uni­ver­sity of Toronto Press, 1998) Febvre, Lucien, Le Problème de l’incroyance au xvie siècle: La Religion de Rabelais (Paris: Michel, 1962) Fortini Brown, Patricia, Venetian Narrative Painting in the Age of Carpaccio (New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­sity Press, 1988) Geertz, Clifford, ‘Religion as a Cultural System’, in Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (London: Fontana, 1973), pp. 87–125 Greenblatt, Stephen, ‘Culture’, in Critical Terms for Literary Study, ed. by F. Lentricchia and T.  McLaughlin (Chicago: Chicago Uni­ver­sity Press, 1990), pp.  225–49 Hankins, James, ‘Marsilio Ficino on Reminiscentia and the Transmigration of Souls’, Rinascimento, 45 (2005), 3–17 Harrison, Peter, The Territories of Science and Religion (Chicago: Uni­ver­sity of Chicago Press, 2015) Herlihy, David, Medi­eval and Renaissance Pistoia (New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­sity Press, 1967) Hewlett, Cecilia, Rural Communities in Renaissance Tuscany: Religious Identities and Local Loyalties, Europa Sacra, 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009) Holt, Mack P., ‘Putting Religion Back into the Wars of Religion’, French Historical Studies, 18 (1993), 524–51 Howard, Peter, ‘The Aural Space of the Sacred in Renaissance Florence’, in Renaissance Florence: A Social History, ed. by Roger J. Crum and John T. Paoletti (New York: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2006), pp. 376–93

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—— , ‘“Doctrine, when preached, is entirely civic”: The Generation of Public Theo­logy and the Role of the Studia of Florence’, in Communities of Learning: Networks and the Shaping of Intellectual Identity in Europe, 1100–1500, ed. by Constant Mews and John Crossley (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), pp. 295–316 —— , Experiencing Religion in Renaissance Florence: Theo­logies of the Piazza (London: Routledge, forthcoming) —— , ‘Languages of the Pulpit: The Preacher as Translator in Renaissance Florence’, in City, Court, Academy: Language Choice in Early Modern Italy, ed. by Eva del Soldato and Andrea Rizzi (London: Routledge, 2018), pp. 31–46 —— , ‘Making a City and Citizens: The “Fruits” of Preaching in Renaissance Florence’, in Medi­eval Urban Culture, ed. by Andrew Brown and Jan Dumolyn (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017), pp. 59–73 —— , ‘Preaching, Brotherhoods, and Biblical Literacy’, in Faith’s Boundaries: Laity and Clergy in Early Modern Confraternities, ed. by Nicholas Terpstra, Adriano Prosperi, and Stefania Pastore (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), pp. 113–29 —— , ‘The Remembered Past as Present Exemplar in Florentine Renaissance Preaching’, in Renaissance Studies in Honor of Joseph Connors, ed. by Machtelt Israëls and Louis Waldman, 2 vols (Florence: Olschki, 2013), ii, 221–29 Howard, Thomas Albert, ‘Jacob Burckhardt, Religion, and the Historio­graphy of “Crisis” and “Transition”’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 60 (1999), 149–64 Hudon, William V., ‘Religion and Society in Early Modern Italy – Old Questions’, American Historical Review, 101 (1996), 783–804 Humfrey, Peter, Painting in Renaissance Venice (New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­sity Press, 1995) Jansen, Katherine L., and Miri Rubin, ‘Introduction’, in Charisma and Religious Authority: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Preaching, 1200–1500, ed. by Katherine L. Jansen and Miri Rubin (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), pp. 1–16 Kent, Dale V., Cosimo de’ Medici and the Florentine Renaissance (New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­sity Press, 2000) Klein, Holger K., ‘Cardinal Bessarion, Philippe de Mézières and the Rhetoric of Relics in Late Medi­eval Venice’, in La Stauroteca di Bessarione fra Costantinopoli e Venezia, ed. by Holger A. Klein, Valeria Poletto, and Peter Schreiner (Venice: Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, 2017), pp. 3–39 Koselleck, Reinhart, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. by Keith Tribe (Cam­bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985) Lansing, Carol, ‘Religion in the Renaissance’, in The Italian Renaissance in the Twentieth Century: Acts of an International Conference Florence, Villa I Tatti, June 9–11, 1999, ed. by Allen J. Grieco, Michael Rocke, and Fiorella Gioffredi Superbi (Florence: L.S. Olschki, 2002), pp. 137–51 Laven, Mary, Alexandra Bamji, and Geert Janssen, eds, Ashgate Research Companion to the Counter-Reformation (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013) Lubac, Henri de, Exégèse médiévale: Les Quatre Sens de l’Écriture, 2 vols in 4 (Paris: Aubier, 1959–64) McGinn, Bernard, The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism, 1200–1350, vol. iii: The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism (New York: Crossroad, 1998)

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Michelson, Emily, The Pulpit and the Press in Reformation Italy, I Tatti Studies in Italian Renaissance History, 8 (Cam­bridge, MA: Harvard Uni­ver­sity Press, 2013) Milner, Stephen J., ‘Rhetorics of Transcendence: Conflict and Intercession in Communal Italy, 1300–1500’, in Charisma and Religious Authority: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Preaching, 1200–1500, ed. by Katherine L. Jansen and Miri Rubin (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), pp. 235–51 Muir, Edward, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni­ver­ sity Press, 1981) Nongbri, Brent, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­sity Press, 2013) Oberman, Heiko A., ‘The Shape of Late Medi­eval Thought: The Birthpangs of the Modern Era’, in The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medi­eval and Renaissance Thought, ed. by Charles Trinkaus with Heiko Oberman (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1974), pp. 3–25 O’Malley, John W. S. J., Praise and Blame in Renaissance Rome: Rhetoric, Doctrine, and Reform in the Sacred Orators of the Papal Court, c. 1450–1521 (Durham, NC: Duke Uni­ver­sity Press, 1979) Ong, Walter J. S. J., The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (Binghamton, NY: Global Publications, 2000) Ozment, Stephen, ‘Mysticism, Nominalism, and Dissent’, in The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medi­eval and Renaissance Thought, ed. by Charles Trinkaus with Heiko Oberman (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1974), pp. 67–92 Peterson, David S., ‘Out of the Margins: Religion and the Church in Renaissance Italy’, Renaissance Quarterly, 53 (2000), 835–79 Pizzorusso, Giovanni, ‘Cardinals and the Congregation of the Propaganda Fide’, in A Companion to the Early Modern Cardinal, ed. by Mary Hollingsworth, Miles Pattenden, and Arnold Witte (Leiden: Brill, 2020), pp. 419–32 Prosperi, Valentina, ‘Lucretius in the Italian Renaissance’, in The Cam­bridge Companion to Lucretius, ed. by Philip Hardie and Stuart Gillespie (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2007), pp. 214–26 Pugliesi, Olga Zorzi, ‘Machiavelli and Confraternities: Oratory and Parody’, in Faith’s Boundaries: Laity and Clergy in Early Modern Confraternities, ed. by Nicholas Terpstra, Adriano Prosperi, and Stefania Pastore (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), pp. 131–49 Rees, Valery, ‘Considering Marsilio Ficino as a Preacher: Sermons and Exegesis in Fifteenth-Century Florence’, Bruniana & Campanelliana, 19 (2013), 77–88 Rubin, Miri, ‘Religious Culture in Town and Country: Reflections on a Great Divide’, in Church and City, 1000–1500: Essays in Honour of Christopher Brooke, ed. by David Abulafia, Michael J. Franklin, and Miri Rubin (Cam­bridge: Cam­ bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2002), pp. 3–22 Rüpke, Jörg, ‘Religious Agency, Identity, Communication: Reflections on History and Theory of Religion’, Religion, 45 (2015), 344–66 Rusconi, Roberto, Immagini dei predicatori e della predicazione in Italia alla fine del Medioevo (Spoleto: Fondazione CISAM, 2016)

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—— , Predicazione e vita religiosa nella società italiana da Carlo Magno allo controriformo (Turin: Loescher, 1981) Schmidt, Catarina, ‘“Orientalist” Painting in Venice, 15th to 17th Centuries’, in Venice and the Islamic World, 828–1797, ed. by Stefano Carboni, trans. by Deke Dusinberre (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; New Haven: Yale Uni­ ver­sity Press, 2007), pp. 120–39 Scott Baker, Nicholas, ‘A Twenty-First-Century Renaissance’, I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, 22 (2019), 273–78 Scribner, Robert, ‘Elements of Popular Belief ’, in Handbook of European History, 1400–1600, ed. by Thomas A. Brady Jr., Heiko A. Oberman, and James D. Tracy (Leiden: Brill, 1994), pp. 229–62 —— , ‘Interpreting Religion in Early Modern Europe’, European Studies Review, 13 (1983), 89–105 Shagan, Ethan, The Birth of Modern Belief: Faith and Judgement from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni­ver­sity Press, 2018) Shannon-Henderson, Kelly E., Religion and Memory in Tacitus’ Annals (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 2019) Smith, W. C., The Meaning and End of Religion (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991) Starn, Randolph, ‘A Postmodern Renaissance’, Renaissance Quarterly, 60 (2007), 1–24 Taylor, Charles, A Secular Age (Cam­bridge, MA: Harvard Uni­ver­sity Press, 2007) Terpstra, Nicholas, ‘Boundaries of Brotherhood: Laity and Clergy in the Social Spaces of Religion’, in Faith’s Boundaries: Laity and Clergy in Early Modern Confraternities, ed. by Nicholas Terpstra, Adriano Prosperi, and Stefania Pastore (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), pp. xi–xxxii —— , ‘Burkhardt’s Beliefs and Renaissance Religions’, in A Renaissance Reclaimed: Jacob Burckhardt’s ‘Civilization of the Renaissance’ Revisited, ed. by Simon Ditchfield and Stephen Bauer (London: British Academy, forthcoming) —— , ‘Civic Religion’, in The Oxford Handbook of Medi­eval Christianity, ed. by John Arnold (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 2014), pp. 148–65 —— , ‘Early Modern Catholicism’, in The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern History, ed. by Hamish Scott (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 2015), pp. 601–25 —— , ‘Lay Spirituality’, in Ashgate Research Companion to the Counter-Reformation, ed. by Mary Laven, Alexandra Bamji, and Geert Janssen (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 261–80 —— , Religious Refugees in the Early Modern World: An Alternative History of the Reformation (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2015) Trexler, Richard, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (New York: Academic Press, 1980) Trinkaus, Charles, ed., with Heiko Oberman, The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medi­ eval and Renaissance Thought (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1974) Trivellato, Francesca, ‘Renaissance Italy and the Muslim Mediterranean in Recent Historical Work’, Journal of Modern History, 82 (2010), 127–55 Turner, Bryan S., ‘Introduction to Max Weber on Religions and Civilizations’, Revue internationale de philosophie, 276 (2016), 137–40

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I

Negotiating Boundaries

Sabrina Cor bellini

Urban Laity and the Construction of Religious Identities in Renaissance Italy Ò ritrato io Marcho di Francisco questa storia o voi tu dire asembramento di festa del santo patriarca abraam ò ritrata io marcho di Francisco a chontemprazione di francesco mio figlulo e perché gli venga voglia di rasemprala in più bela forma diletar quando per lui saprà. Fata ne la pasqua de lo spirito santo anni 1477.1 [I, Marco di Francesco, have copied this story, or you may say composition on the feast of the saint patriarch Abraham, for the use of my son Francesco and I hope he will be willing to reproduce it in a well-designed layout when he wishes it. Copied on Easter Day 1477.] With these words the Sienese wool merchant Marco di Francesco concludes his transcription of the sacra rappresentazione of Abramo e Isac by Feo Belcari. First represented in 1449 in the Florentine Church of Santa Reparata in Cestelli, this religious play presents the Old Testament narrative in light of urban values: Abraham is the perfect citizen, faithful to a perfect lord and disposed to obedience and sense of duty.2 Abraham is in some way Marco di Francesco’s alter ego. As a merchant, father, and member of the Sienese ruling elite, Marco strives to be prudent and virtuous, to inculcate civic virtues in his son and fellow citizens, and to perform religious duties. One of Marco’s strategies for accomplishing his duty as a well-educated and responsible citizen is to copy and gather texts that he considers fundamental for his own and his son’s earthly success and eternal salvation.

* Research for this article was conducted in the framework of the research project ‘Cities of Readers: Religious Literacies in the Long Fifteenth Century’ (2015–19, funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research).  1 Siena, Biblioteca Comunale, MS I.VIII.37, fol. 160v.  2 Newbigin, ‘Il testo e il contesto dell’Abramo e Isac di Feo Belcari’.

Sabrina Corbellini, Uni­ver­sity of Groningen ([email protected]), is, since 2017, Professor in the History of Reading in Premodern Europe. She specializes in the reconstruction of late medi­eval literacies and reading cultures.

Renaissance Religions: Modes and Meanings in History, ed. by Peter Howard, Nicholas Terpstra, and Riccardo Saccenti, ES 26 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2021) pp. 47–62 10.1484/M.ES-EB.5.121899

FHG

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Marco compiles, in fact, a religious zibaldone, an auto­graph multi-text manu­script (Siena, Biblioteca Comunale, MS I.VIII.37), and is also responsible for the creation of a medi­eval convolute (Siena, Biblioteca Comunale, MS I.V.31), consisting of several booklets copied at his request, successively bound together, and introduced by a table of contents in his own hand. Blank spaces are filled with his comments, in which he describes why he has chosen to copy the text (or have it copied), how the text should be read, and which lessons should be learnt after the performance of reading activities.3 Various aspects of both manu­scripts suggest Marco’s desire to make his ‘authorship’ clear: he presents himself as scribe in colophons; he profusely comments on the texts; and he goes so far as to include paratextual elements that introduce future readers and users to the circumstances of the compilation, besides adding information about reading techniques and the salvific power of religious reading. His manu­scripts contain a wide variety of religious and devotional texts, ranging from a description of the principles of Christian faith to the vernacular sermons by Cherubino da Spoleto, all geared to developing a religious habitus for a citizen involved in urban politics and associational life.4 The contents of Marco’s manu­scripts will form the starting point for contributing to the study of religious practices and the construction of religious identities in Renaissance Italy. Straying away from traditional boundaries between elite and popular religious practices, this essay will focus on the vernacular-literate urban laity of the fifteenth century. Central to this study is to understand how these non-professionals became users, producers, and distributors of religious knowledge — or even brokers and intermediaries in the dynamics of the dissemination of such knowledge and in the negotiation of its meanings — thus significantly contributing towards the construction and transformation of religious identities. Paraphrasing Angel Rama’s ground-breaking study, it could even be argued that literate and lettered lay individuals such as Marco di Francesco actively participated in the creation of the ‘religious city’ and formed the nexus of religious and urban culture.5 In fact, religion and religious meaning will be approached in this contribution as building blocks of ‘spiritual and religious capital’, in line with Bourdieu’s description.6 The construction of ‘religious capital’ is clearly more than the search for the spiritual guarantees only traditionally available to those in professional religious life. It constitutes an active engagement in a process of transformation of the self that is based on and inspired by texts, practices, and meanings connected to the late medi­eval Church, which in  3 About zibaldoni and multi-text manu­scripts, see Murano, ‘Zibaldoni (Commonplace Books)’ and Maniaci, ‘Miscellaneous Reflections on the Complexity of Medi­eval Manu­scripts’.  4 For a recent overview of the practice of ‘signing’ vernacular manu­scripts in fifteenth-century Italy, see Mattiazzo, ‘Di mia propria mano’.  5 Rama, The Lettered City.  6 Verter, ‘Spiritual Capital’.

U r ba n L a i t y an d R e l i g i o u s I d e n t i t i e s i n Re nai ssance Italy

turn have been propagated through sacramental and doctrinal activities and have been appropriated by lay readers and listeners. The study of the religious textualities transmitted by the selected manu­ scripts follows a methodo­logical approach according to which words do not merely reflect social and religious reality, but are rather held as instruments for creating and transforming reality by drawing from existing social and cultural repertoires and practices.7 Studied from this perspective, religious zibaldoni evolve into ‘spaces of the spiritual’ in which religious knowledge is exchanged, transformed, and negotiated in a dynamic process that goes beyond a simple categorization in terms of the ‘purity’ of theo­logical knowledge versus the ‘impurity’ or ‘accretions’ of heterodoxy and dissent movements.8 While being linked to a specific individual, the selected religious miscellanies also stress the importance of networks and ‘new communities of interpretation’, formed by lay and religious alike, in the creation of religious identities and meanings.9

Marco di Francesco As mentioned earlier in this paper, the scribe and compiler names himself as Marco di Francesco in the colophon to Feo Belcari’s sacra rappresentazione. In his convolute manu­script (Siena, Biblioteca Comunale, MS I.V.31), Marco reinforces his ‘authorship’ by adding more information about his background and his professional, political, and social position. At the end of the vernacular version of Augustine’s sermon on peace, he states: Questa opera ouero tratato de la pacie Jo marcho di francesco l’ò ritrato nel palazo dela residenza de magnifici signiori dela citta di Siena al tempo che io mi trouai essere del numero dessi magnifichi e d’ecielsi signori E per me magiori e charisimi chonpagni si furo e nomi loro quj apresso schriti e primo marcho benzi Kapitano di popolo.10 [I, Marco di Francesco, have copied this work or treatise on peace in the residence of the magnificent signori of the city of Siena [the  7 Lutter, ‘Social Groups, Personal Relations, and the Making of Communities’.  8 Crum and Paoletti, Renaissance Florence, pp. 1–16, 329; Scribner, ‘Interpreting Religion in Early Modern Europe’, p. 90.  9 The term ‘new communities of interpretation’ has been used in the framework of the research project ‘New Communities of Interpretation: Contexts, Strategies and Processes of Religious Transformations in Late Medi­eval and Early Modern Europe’ (COST Action IS 1301, 2013–17, chaired by Sabrina Corbellini and John Thompson) to indicate groups formed by an urban laity active in politics, finance, and commerce. Over time, this respublica laicorum took a growing interest in the organization of cultural and religious activities and in the production of literary, religious, and scientific texts — and, most interestingly, recognized the opportunities offered by reading and writing in the vernacular to further their interests.  10 Siena, Biblioteca Comunale, MS I.V.31, fol. 4v.

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Palazzo Pubblico] in the time that I happened to be one of these magnificent and high-ranking signori and my companions, all more prominent and eminent than me, are listed below, the first [being] Marco Benzi, capitano del popolo.] Marco di Francesco had indeed been member of the Concistoro in the period January to February 1485, the year in which Marco di Francesco Benzi was capitano and confaloniere. The list in Marco’s manu­script is identical to the official list found in the report compiled by the notary Giovanni di Mariano Pacinelli and shows clearly the relevance of this position in Marco’s bio­ graphy and identity.11 He supplements this essential information by referring to the fact that he has been elected as priore on the day of Candlemas and has offered fourteen candles. The Concistoro’s official documentation also mentions his family name, ‘Chiechi’, and his profession, lanista (wool merchant). This information is confirmed by the colophon following Domenico Cavalca’s Medicina del Cuore (also known as Trattato della Pazienza): Questo ò fatto ritrare io marcho di francesco di giouanni Ciechi lanaiuolo perche legendo l’esempro di questo mi parve è di grande autorità e dessempro essendo di cristo nostro saluadaore ed essendo de suoj santissimi santi intorno al cuore chome buoni crjstiani e dauendone jo autochonsolazione e piacere di liberta di auerne la chopia e per me e per altrj nostrj amen. Nota che no lo presti che non uegga bene di chj perche vale un tesoro a chi bene lo gusta e tielo a mente.12 [I, Marcho di Francesco di Giovanni Ciechi, wool merchant, have demanded to copy this because after reading the exemplar I have come to the conclusion that it has a great authority and can function as a good example as it regards Christ our Saviour and his holy Saints and brings them to your heart as good Christians and as I felt autoconsolazione (self-consolation) and pleasure in having the possibility to have a copy for me and our loved ones. Please note that he should take care not to lend it to someone who could lose it as it is worth a treasure to the one who relishes and minds it.]

 11 Siena, Archivio di Stato, Concistoro-Deliberazioni, 710, c. 1r. An intriguing detail is that the cover of the Biccherna for the year 1485 shows the ‘Sacrifice of Isaac’, the same theme that is central in the sacra rappresentazione by Feo Belcari in Marco’s zibaldone. The tasks of the Concistoro comprised, in the first phase, all the activities of the Sienese State and all the magistrature that depended on it. In a second phase, specific commissions, called balie, were created. Head of the Consistory was the Capitano del Popolo. The members, chosen by ballot, were appointed for two months (in the case of Marco di Francesco, January to February 1485) and lived in the Palazzo Pubblico. They were only allowed to leave the palace for stringent reasons, but they had to cover their faces with masks and be accompanied by an official called a rotellino.  12 Siena, Biblioteca Comunale, MS I.V.31, fol. 102v.

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This autobio­graphical note also conveys essential information about the creation of Marco’s miscellanies: he combines auto­graph parts with booklets copied by other scribes at his specific request, after having read (or listened to) the text. His selection principles are based on the emotional impact experienced after the reading of the text: in the case of the Medicina del Cuore, he experiences the ‘self-consolation’ of finding in the text answers to the pressing issues of organizing his public and personal life.13 The choice for the inclusion of two sermons by Cherubino da Spoleto is also motivated by the importance of the texts as guidelines for Marco and his future readers: In queste quaderno sonno scritte due notabilissime prediche fatte per lo uenerabile uomo frate cherubino da spuleto de l’ordine del’osservanza di santo francesco predichatore ne la chiesa chatedrale del duomo di siena a l’entrata della quaresima anno 1474 e negli anni 1477 e predichò la quaresima. Nota che le dette due prediche sonno necessarie d’ognj fedele cristiano a uolere essere buono cristiano perché in queste due chontiene la chonseguenzia di tutte l’altre prediche chomprendendo bene queste e io entese che l’ebbj me ne namoraj essi per me ed ancho per altri jo determinai auerle per escritte e chosi le ò fatte isuolgarizare accio che ogni uno le possa bene entendere e gustare. E per la grazia di messer domenedio metterlo adaseguzione.14 [In this quire, two noteworthy sermons have been copied, preached by the venerable Father Cherubino da Spoleto of the Franciscan Observant Order in the Cathedral Church of Siena at the beginning of Lent in the years 1474 and 1477. Please note that the two sermons are essential for every Christian willing to be a good Christian because these two sermons are key to the understanding of all others and I instantly fell in love after listening to them and decided to have them written down and I had them vulgarized so that everyone will have the chance to understand and relish them. And with the help of God, to put the teachings into practice.] The agency of Marco emerges clearly from this note, added in his own mercantesca hand at the end of the sermons copied in an anonymous humanistic hand. It is not certain if the wool merchant had listened to Cherubino’s preaching, but he is well aware of the presence of the Franciscan preacher in Siena during Lent in 1474 and 1477.15 The use of the term ‘fatte isuol-

 13 On emotional reactions to religious reading activities, see Corbellini, ‘Uncovering the Presence’.  14 Siena, Biblioteca Comunale, MS I.V.31, fol. 126v.  15 For a bio­graphy of Cherubino da Spoleto, see Rusconi, ‘Cherubino da Spoleto’. In Rusconi’s overview, no reference is found regarding the circulation of Cherubino’s sermons in the vernacular. Marco’s manu­script could thus be a unique testimony to a vernacular circulation of Cherubino’s sermons.

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garizare’ also suggests the possibility that Marco requested a vernacular translation of the text based on one of the manu­scripts of the Latin Sermones Quadrigesimales, which circulated in the last quarter of the fifteenth century. This reconstruction is corroborated by a comparison of the vernacular text with the rubrics in a Latin manu­script and in the 1502 print edition of the Sermones (Dominica in lx in mane de verbo dei and Dominica in septuagesima post prandium uerum de verbo dei): Instancia mea quotidiana sollicitudo omnium ecclesiarum 2a ad Cor. xj. Diuina prouidentia est tanta et talis erga humanam generationem.16

L’insistentia mia di ogni di la sollicitudine di tutte le chiese 2 del cor. al nono La diuina prouidentia e tanta e tale inuerso la humana generatione.17

[That which comes upon me daily, the care of all Churches, Second Letter to the Corinthians 11. There is so much divine providence towards human generation.] Instantia mea quotidiana sollicitudo omnium ecclesiarum ij ad Cor. ij. In precedenti sermone proposuimus de verbo diuino tria mysteria.18

L’insistentia mia di ciascuno di la sollicitudine di tutte le chiese 2a al cor. ij Innella precedente predicazione proponemo de la parola di dio tre misteri.19

[That which comes upon me daily, the care of all Churches, Second Letter to the Corinthians 2. In the previous sermon we discussed the three mysteries of God’s Word.] Interestingly enough, the two selected sermons touch specifically on the theme suggested in Marco’s note to the text: the sharing of acquired religious knowledge amongst families, groups, and kindred spirits and the re-elaboration of the ephemeral act of predication into a stable and long-standing process of the transfer of religious knowledge. Cherubino sketches a process that can be summarized by referring to the keywords he uses: sollicitatione

 16 Cherubino da Spoleto, Sermones Quadragesimales, fol. 34v. For a description of a manu­script containing Cherubino’s sermons that have not been edited, see Les Enluminures in the works cited. It offers the largest and most wide-ranging inventory of text manu­scripts currently on the market. The system of rubrics in the manu­scripts of Cherubino’s sermons and the 1502 printed edition is a matter of discussion. A comparison of available manu­scripts has, however, made clear that the apparatus of rubrics was part of the sermon cycle from its start and can thus be attributed to Cherubino himself. The sermons were printed in Venice by Giorgio Arrivabeni (1502).  17 Siena, Biblioteca Comunale, MS I.V.31, fol. 107r.  18 Cherubino da Spoleto, Sermones Quadragesimales, fol. 39v.  19 Siena, Biblioteca Comunale, MS I.V.31, fol. 117v.

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(willingness to listen to the sermon and to engage in religious activities), attentione (attentiveness during the sermon in order to better understand the explanation of the Scriptures), discretione (thoughtfulness), devotione (devotion), ruminatione (rumination), comunicatione (communication, i.e. retelling the central message of the sermon to those who did not attend), and operatione (action, i.e. applying the lessons explained by the preacher to daily behaviours and deeds). The religious instruction conveyed by the sermons should be memorized by carefully listening to the sermons, and later ruminated on, thought over, and communicated to others, and finally transformed into action or active engagement in a process of conversion. A note in the margin beside the final part of the second sermon testifies that Marco was performing this process while reading his own manu­script. He remarks: Nota chome ò letto del udire la messa quanto è meritoria chi l’ode chon fede e diuozione chome el diche l’ode non può arriuare male ne in quanto al chorpo ne in quanto a l’anima pure che l’oda fedelmente e deuotamente.20 [Please note how I have read about attending Mass and how praiseworthy it is to attend with faith and devotion and how it states that nothing negative could happen to both body and soul of the ones attending with faith and devotion.] Marco seems to have followed all the steps described by Cherubino. His miscellanies are the result of a process of ‘communication’ and ‘action’, especially in order to engage in the promotion of translation activities geared to disseminating the contents of Cherubino’s teaching.21 He also provides future readers with a reading key to the two sermons, stating their centrality to the understanding of the process of transformation of sermons into guidelines for private and domestic devotional life.

 20 Siena, Biblioteca Comunale, MS I.V.31, fol. 126v, left margin.  21 For a first discussion of this theme, see Corbellini, ‘Beyond Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy’, pp. 39–41, and Corbellini, ‘Creating a Domestic Sacred Space’. It is worth noting that Cherubino da Spoleto successively re-elaborated these instructions in two widely spread treatises, Regola della vita spirituale and Regola della vita matrimoniale, written at the insistence of the Florentine merchant Jacopo Bongianni. In these treatises, the instructions given in the sermons are further formalized, as Cherubino advises the reader to buy religious books such as the Treatise on Mortal Sins by the archbishop of Florence Antonino Pierozzi, the Quadriga Spirituale by Niccolò da Osimo, and the Monte dell’Oratione, the Specchio della Croce, and the Libro della Patientia by Domenico Cavalca, and to read them with his family. Domenico Cavalca’s Libro della Patientia is one of the texts that Marco copied in his miscellany.

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Two Manu­scripts The evidence of Marco’s active involvement in the composition process, through the placing of notes and colophons, makes clear to what extent the selected texts mirror his religious identity. In his auto­graph miscellany (Siena, Biblioteca Comunale, MS I.VIII.37, dated 6 April 1477), Marco copies biblical and apocryphal texts (Pianto di Santo Pietro, fols 5r–10r; Vita de la vergine Maria, fols 10r–32v; Legienda de la fine dela nostra donna beata vergine Maria madre di Iesu Christo beata e humile, fols 33r–40r; Vendeta di Iesu Cristo fata per Tito e Vespasiano, fols 40r–58v; Legienda di Iob santissimo amicho di Dio, fols 58v–62v and 119v–124r; Storia di Iacob patriarcha, fols 63r–114r), texts of religious instructions (principles of Christian faith, fols 115r–119r; religious poems, fols 135v–145v; Antonio da Ferrara, Credo di Dante, fols 146r–149v; the sacra rappresentazione by Feo Belcari, fols 150r–160v), and finally a prayer (fol. 161r–v) and a poem on the regulation of family life (fols 162r–169v). The convolute (Siena, Biblioteca Comunale, MS I.V.31) shows a thematic focus on sermons (Sermone di sancto Agostino de la pacie, fols 1r–4v; Oratio di Sant’Ambrogio del Sancto Sacramento, fols 9r–11v; and Cherubino da Spoleto, fols 107r–126v), together with Domenico Cavalca’s Medicina del Cuore (fols 1r–102v) and an extract from the Fiore di virtù (fols 127r–129v the chapter on Prudentia and Mattezza (Prudence and Folly)). Blank spaces have been filled by shorter texts: the Epistles of Saint Peter (flyleaf), an Inno del notturno del Corpus Domini (fol. 3r), and Veni creator spiritus (fol. 103v). All texts are mentioned in a table of contents in Marco’s hand, which has the purpose of guiding the reader through the manu­script and putting forward the process of ‘salvation of his soul’.22 The textual dynamics emerging from the analysis of Marco’s miscellanies raise questions about the activities of copisti per passione (‘non-professional’ scribes), who copied texts for personal use or for circulation within a restricted circle of users such as families or confraternities.23 Medi­eval Tuscan merchants are traditionally described ‘with the pen in hand’, as they were used to applying their knowledge of the far ragione (writing and keeping books of accounts) outside their strict professional activities. They generally collected and copied texts, especially in the vernacular, as a form of leisure, intellectual activity, or devotion and, in so doing, they used the materials (paper), ­graphic systems (for example, mercantesca), and paratextual elements (invocation to Christ and God in the upper margin, extensive use of internal references, and table of contents) that

 22 Siena, Biblioteca Comunale, MS I.V.31, flyleaf. The manu­script shows a complex foliation system. The references in the notes are to folium numbers as indicated in the manu­script.  23 Branca, ‘Copisti per passione’.

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were typical of mercantile books of accounts and administration.24 As in the case of Marco, blank pages and open spaces were often filled with personal annotations, revealing the rapporto di lettura (reading relationship) between the scribe and his own book. The copying process was, in many cases, a first step towards a ‘dialogue with the text’, stressing the usefulness of the selected passages for the personal and professional life of the scribe and transforming the manu­script into a ‘monument and document of reading’.25 It is also important to stress that this process of writing is strictly connected to self-reflection and meditation. As Hugo of St Victor states in his Didascalicon, probably the first treatise on reading and meditating, the meditational process starts with the lectio, the act of reading and writing. The ‘performance of writing’, especially in books resulting from a process of personal textual selection and for personal use, leads to the creation and the rise in the awareness of a personal identity and could then be shared and communicated to other readers and users of the manu­scripts.26 These scribal activities could even turn into a second professional activity, next to mercantile practices, as in the case of the fifteenth-century Florentine moneychanger Bese Ardinghelli. In his memorial book, next to life events and details of his commercial activities, he described his moonlighting occupation as a scribe pro pretio (for a fee). He copied manu­scripts in the vernacular, with a strong preference for texts in prose, including religious and devotional texts such as the Libro della Carità by the Dominican Giovanni Dominici, The Passion of Christ, and The Lives of the Fathers.27 His clients were mostly fellow merchants and artisans acquiring books for their own domestic libraries, as well as cartolai (book sellers) who bought books for their clients and for sale in their own shops. To provide just one example, one of his clients was the apothecary Benedetto di Bartolomeo degli Alessandri, who, on 21 May 1468, acquired six quires containing a passion of Christ in prose.28 Similar activities, especially those related to the dissemination of religious books, could also be performed by religious individuals, in particular, members of the mendicant orders. The Sienese Dominican Niccolò Galgani, prior of San Domenico in Camporegio, recorded in his Memoriale (1399–1423) detailed information about manu­scripts and texts: the books he read, owned, lent, and borrowed. Members of his book network were

 24 Cursi, ‘Il libro del mercante’, p. 159.  25 This termino­logy has been introduced by Luisa Miglio in her article ‘Lettori della Commedia’, as cited by Cursi, ‘Il libro del mercante’, p. 177.  26 Neuber, ‘Exscribo ergo sum’, pp. 121–23. On the issue of ‘writing the self ’ and ‘the performance of writing’, see von Greyerz, ‘Observations on the Historio­graphical Status of Research on Self-Writing’; Arlinghaus, Forms of Individuality and Literacy.  27 Cursi and Miglio, ‘Un libro mercantile un po’ speciale’. On memorial books, see Ciappelli, Memory, Family, and Self, pp. 12–29.  28 Cursi and Miglio, ‘Un libro mercantile un po’ speciale’, p. 227.

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fellow friars, friars of other Dominican convents (e.g. Santa Maria Novella in Florence), members of other religious institutions in Florence and Siena, as well as laypeople, for whom he served as an intermediary for the acquisition of religious books (psalters, Hours of the Virgin, a Specchio della Croce by Domenico Cavalca).29 Copying activities and participation of book networks, including lay cartolai, merchants, and religious individuals, resulted in the creation of domestic libraries that were often open to consultation by members of a personal and professional extended family. The probate inventory of the Sienese camerlengo (chamber officer) Giovanni di Pietro di Fece (d. 1449) reveals indeed the presence of at least thirty manu­scripts, all in vernacular, kept in his study room. He owned, among others, a manu­script with the Lives of the Fathers, Augustine’s Soliloquy, a book with the ‘leggenda di santo giusaffà’, and a Psalter.30 These briefly sketched book networks bring into question how non-professional scribes found the needed exemplars for selecting the texts to be included in their zibaldoni and multi-text manu­scripts. In his notes, Marco reveals that he has asked other scribes to copy booklets, which he successively included in his convolute and appropriated by placing auto­ graph notes and comments. But he also mentions at least three places in his hometown of Siena where he has found exemplars for inclusion in his manu­ scripts. He declares that he has copied Augustine’s sermon on the theme of peace (Siena, Biblioteca Comunale, MS I.V.31, fol. 4v) from the copy kept at the Palazzo Pubblico during his service as one of the signori.31 According to Marco, the collection of texts that form the ‘principles of Christian faith’ has been copied from ‘una tauola atachata ne la chiesa chatedrale del duomo. Fata di mano d’uno prete d’esa chiesa’ (a table hanging in the Cathedral church of the Duomo, made by a priest of that church).32 It contains the Ten Commandments, the Works of Mercy, the sacraments, the gifts of the Holy Ghost, the Twelve Articles of Faith, a list of feast days, fasting days, and deadly sins, and it had thus been made available to the church visitors in order to instruct and educate them.33 Moreover, after the Hymn on the  29 Gadrat, ‘Dans et hors le couvent’.  30 Mazzi, ‘Libri e masserizie di Giovanni di Pietro di Fece’, pp. 164–66.  31 No information is available about the presence of a library in the Palazzo Pubblico at the disposal of the members of the city council and the Concistoro. It is known that the Costituto of Siena had been translated into the vernacular around 1309 at the expense of the city council. The camerlengo had indeed been asked to pay for ‘a copy of the statutes of the Commune in vernacular in a neat and clear letter on good parchment so that all poor citizens and other non-Latinate persons could have a chance to see and copy it, if they wish’. On the Costituto, see Capelli and Giorgi, ‘Gli Statuti del Comune di Siena fino allo “Statuto del Buongoverno”’ and Giordano and others, Siena nello Specchio del suo Costituto.  32 Siena, Biblioteca Comunale, MS I.VIII.37, fol. 116v.  33 The lists are on the building blocks of religious and devotional miscellanies copied by lay people. In several cases, the scribes mention that this information has been copied from a

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Corpus Domini (Siena, Biblioteca Comunale, MS I.V.31, fol. 103v), a reference to the confraternity of Santa Maria della Scala is added. Although it is not known if Marco had been a member of the confraternity, the reference is extremely important for understanding the dissemination of religious texts in late medi­eval Siena. The confraternity did indeed have a library open to members where fifteen vernacular religious manu­scripts were kept chained to a lectern to be read and copied.34 Some of these manu­scripts had been copied or donated by confraternity members, to be used and copied by the brethren.35

The Power of Reading Drawing from varied sources and from different ‘places of religious knowledge’ in late medi­eval Siena, Marco authored two manu­scripts containing a wide array of religious and devotional texts.36 In order to overcome the apparent haphazardness of his collection, he has added to the manu­scripts information about how to navigate through the text: Richordo a chi questo libreto leggie che lo riguardi jnel modo vede è stato riguardato assaj tempo fa che lo feci ritrar perché è da stimare assai a chi bene l’ontende ma uolsi gustare con distryone le sue sentenzie che sono autentiche e degnissime essi el primo tratato del’ ira essi el tratato de la pazienza.37 [I would like to remind the reader of this booklet that he should cherish it as it has been cherished since the moment it has been copied for me because it is of great value for the one who understands it. If you want to relish its contents, which are authentic and valuable, remember that the first treatise is on ire and then follows a treatise on patience.]

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table hanging in a church, but these compilations were also transmitted through statutes of confraternities. About the circulation of these lists in vernacular miscellanies, see Corbellini, ‘Vernacular Bible Manu­scripts in Late Medi­eval Italy’, p. 278. These compilations were also transmitted through statutes of confraternities. Manetti and Savino, ‘I libri dei Disciplinati di Santa Maria della Scala’, pp. 158–59. Siena, Biblioteca Comunale, MS I.V.11, a vernacular miscellany, was copied between 4 November 1450 and 2 April 1451 by ‘ser Bartolomeo camerlengo della Scala’; Siena, Biblioteca Comunale, MS I.V.25 and MS I.V.26 with the Revelations of Birgit of Sweden was financed by Cristofano di Gano, notary of the confraternity. The term ‘place of knowledge’ is inspired by the definition lieu de savoir coined by the French historian Christian Jacob. See Jacob, Qu’est-ce qu’un lieu de savoir? It implies the study of the transmission of knowledge by studying the specific spaces and places where knowledge is produced and exchanged. By inventorying these ‘places of knowledge’, it is possible to map networks and patterns of knowledge transmission. Siena, Biblioteca Comunale, MS I.V.31, flyleaf.

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The impact of reading and a description of specific reading techniques are also included by Marco in his instructions: Nota tu che leggi chome in questo quasi a l’ultimo è una vtilissima e necesaria opara a la salute de l’anime nostre. […] Item vna notabile legienda a salute e honore del chorpo a l’ ultimo di questo libro. […] Esse uoj legiare di suariate materie del’ ira prechura in questa sichunda facia e trouare a foglio a foglio sichondo el tuo gusto. […] Richordoti che lege ordinatamente fo che l’una materia amaiestra altra del quel dica de segreti di dio va al chapitolo de la pazienza chapitolo 21.38 [Note that at the end of this book a work has been copied that is very useful and necessary for the health of our souls. […] A notable legend giving health and honour to the body at the end of this book. […] If you want to read about all different topics about ire, go to the second page and leaf through the text according to your own taste. […] Remember to read following the order of the chapters, but should you want to know about God’s secrets, go directly to the treatise on patience, chapter 21.] He makes it clear that reading has a healing impact on body and mind, and that the ‘power of reading’ can be unleashed by carefully following the order of the chapters. The reader has, however, the choice to navigate through the text and to make his own selection according to his wishes and curiosity, and he is asked to take his own responsibility in transforming the performance of reading into ‘healthy’ activities for body and soul. Marco’s attitude towards reading, writing, and ruminating is made clear by the reading traces he left in his manu­scripts, through the above-mentioned personal notes and the addition of maniculae in the margins. Although he has selected the contents of his manu­scripts with great care, he emphasizes two textual clusters: first, the sermons by Cherubino da Spoleto, in which the responsibility of each believer in listening, understanding, disseminating, and operationalizing the knowledge acquired by attending to the predication is stressed; and second, Domenico Cavalca’s Medicina del Cuore. Marco’s manicula points to one specific chapter in Cavalca’s treatise, ‘Come lleggiere e orare e meditare aiuta d’essere prudente’ (How reading and praying and meditating helps to be prudent). Through meditation on the Holy Writ, the reader learns how to counter tribulations and adversities by following the narrated examples, through a process that involves becoming aware of his own sinfulness and understanding the function and reasons of adversaries. His religious reading experience is geared at developing resilience and strengthening his virtuous behaviour, which stimulates a

 38 Siena, Biblioteca Comunale, MS I.V.31, flyleaf.

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process of self-evaluation and identity formation as a citizen, a father, and a member of the civic elite. It is essential to highlight, in conclusion, that Marco’s manu­scripts, as representatives of a large corpus of late medi­eval personal miscellanies with religious and devotional contents, are mirrors of the compilers’ and owners’ spirituality, of their search for a personal approach to religiosity, and the fulfilment of their spiritual ambitions. Marco is, as defined by Branca, one of the many copisti per passione, even though his ‘passion’ goes beyond the ephemeral joy of owning or collecting ‘favourite’ or ‘fashionable’ texts.39 His manu­scripts are the materialization of his search for a distinctive religious identity within the ‘multiple options’ offered by the late medi­eval and religious panorama.40 As a matter of fact, the creation of religious identities is characterized by a form of bricolage, resulting from a dynamic process of search, selection, composition, and transformation. The process of selection and reorganization is, however, not accidental and fortuitous. Members of the urban laity, like Marco di Francesco, were particularly keen in selecting religious texts with a strong ‘active’ component linking reflections on civic responsibilities with care for the soul. As a member of a (vernacular) literate group, Marco promotes, moreover, the importance of ‘communicating’ and transmitting religious contents: attending services, reading religious texts, and listening to sermons is the first step in a process of transmission of knowledge that connects the individual with the groups in which he is participating. Renaissance religious identities are ‘shared’ identities, geared to educating the individual to grow towards social awareness through a continuous process of self-evaluation and self-education.

 39 Branca, ‘Copisti per passione’.  40 The ‘multiple options’ of late medi­eval religion have been discussed by Van Engen, ‘Multiple Options’.

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Works Cited Manu­script and Archival Sources Cherubino da Spoleto, Sermones Quadragesimales praeclarissimi, (Venice: Giorgio Arrivabeni, 1502), Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Digital, [accessed 17 June 2020] Les Enluminures: Textmanu­scripts, Cherubino da Spoleto, Sermones Quad­ ragesimales, [accessed 23 June 2020] Siena, Archivio di Stato, Concistoro-Deliberazioni, 710 Siena, Biblioteca Comunale, MS I.V.11 Siena, Biblioteca Comunale, MS I.V.25 Siena, Biblioteca Comunale, MS I.V.26 Siena, Biblioteca Comunale, MS I.V.31 Siena, Biblioteca Comunale, MS I.VIII.37 Secondary Studies Arlinghaus, Franz-Joseph, ed., Forms of Individuality and Literacy in the Medi­eval and Early Modern Periods (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015) Branca, Vittore, ‘Copisti per passione, tradizione caratterizzante, tradizione di memoria’, in Studi e problemi di critica testuale: Convegno di studi di filo­logia italiana nel centenario della commissione per i testi di lingua (7–9 Aprile 1960) (Bo­logna: Commissione per i testi in lingua, 1961), pp. 69–83 Capelli, Valeria, and Andrea Giorgi, ‘Gli Statuti del Comune di Siena fino allo “Statuto del Buongoverno” (secoli xiii–xiv)’, Mélanges de l’École française de Rome – Moyen Âge, 126 (2014), [accessed 17 June 2020] Ciappelli, Giovanni, Memory, Family, and Self: Tuscan Family Books and Other European Egodocuments (14th–18th Century) (Leiden: Brill, 2014) Corbellini, Sabrina, ‘Beyond Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy: A New Approach to Late Medi­eval Religious Reading’, in Cultures of Religious Reading in the Late Middle Ages: Instructing the Soul, Feeding the Spirit, and Awakening the Passion, ed. by Sabrina Corbellini (Turnhout: Brepols 2013), pp. 33–53 —— , ‘Creating a Domestic Sacred Space: Religious Reading in Late Medi­eval Italy’, in Domestic Devotions in Early Modern Italy, ed. by Maya Corry, Marco Faini, and Alessia Meneghin (Leiden: Brill, 2018), pp. 295–309 —— , ‘Uncovering the Presence: Religious Literacies in Late Medi­eval Italy’, in Discovering the Riches of the Word: Religious Reading in Late Medi­eval and Early Modern Europe, ed. by Sabrina Corbellini, Margriet Hoogvliet, and Bart Ramakers (Leiden: Brill, 2015), pp. 68–87

U r ba n L a i t y an d R e l i g i o u s I d e n t i t i e s i n Re nai ssance Italy

—— , ‘Vernacular Bible Manu­scripts in Late Medi­eval Italy: Cultural Appro­pri­ ation and Textual Transformation’, in Form and Function in the Late Medi­eval Bible, ed. by Eyal Poleg and Laura Light (Leiden: Brill, 2013), pp. 261–81 Crum, Roger J., and John T. Paoletti, eds, Renaissance Florence: A Social History (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2006) Cursi, Marco, ‘Il libro del mercante: tipicità ed eccezioni’, in La produzione scritta, tecnica e scientifica nel Medioevo: libro e documento tra scuole e professioni, ed. by Giuseppe De Gregorio and Maria Galante (Spoleto: CISAM, 2012), pp. 147–77 Cursi, Marco, and Luisa Miglio, ‘Un libro mercantile un po’ speciale: il “quaderno di chassa” di Bese Ardinghelli e di Maddalena Gianfigliazzi (BNCF, ms Tordi 2)’, in Scriptoria e biblioteche nel basso Medioevo (secoli xii–xv) (Spoleto: CISAM, 2015), pp. 213–41 Gadrat, Christine, ‘Dans et hors le couvent: La Circulation des livres autour de Niccolò Galgani (O.P. † 1424) dans la société siennoise et florentine’, in Entre stabilité et itinérance: Livres et cultures des ordres mendiants xiiie–xve siècles, ed. by Nicole Bériou, Donatella Nebbiai-Dalla Guarda, and Martin Morard (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), pp. 203–13 Giordano, Nora, and others, eds, Siena nello Specchio del suo Costituto in volgare del 1309–1310 (Pacini: Pisa, 2013) Greyerz, Kaspar von, ‘Observations on the Historio­graphical Status of Research on Self-Writing’, in Mapping the ‘I’: Research on Self-Narratives in Germany and Switzerland, ed. by Claudia Ulbrich (Leiden: Brill, 2014), pp. 34–57 Jacob, Christian, Qu’est-ce qu’un lieu de savoir? Savoir et savoirs (Marseille: Open Book Editions, 2014) [accessed 11 June 2020] Lutter, Christina, ‘Social Groups, Personal Relations, and the Making of Communities in Medi­eval vita monastica’, in Making Sense as Cultural Practice: Historical Perspectives, ed. by Jörg Rogge and others (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2013), pp. 45–61 Manetti, Roberta, and Giancarlo Savino, ‘I libri dei Disciplinati di Santa Maria della Scala’, Bullettino senese di storia patria, 97 (1992), 122–93 Maniaci, Marilena, ‘Miscellaneous Reflections on the Complexity of Medi­eval Manu­scripts’, in Late Medi­eval Miscellanies, ed. by Sabrina Corbellini, Giovanna Murano, and Giacomo Signore (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018), pp. 11–22 Mattiazzo, Sissi, ‘Di mia propria mano: Le sottoscrizioni dei copisti “italiani” del Quattrocento nei codici della Biblioteca Riccardiana di Firenze’ (unpublished master’s thesis, Uni­ver­sity of Padua, 2015) Mazzi, Curzio, ‘Libri e masserizie di Giovanni di Pietro di Fece (Fecini) nel 1450 in Siena’, Bullettino senese di storia patria, 18 (1911), 150–72 Miglio, Luisa, ‘Lettori della Commedia: i manoscritti’, in ‘Per correre miglior acque…’: Bilanci e prospettive degli studi danteschi alle soglie del nuovo millennio. Atti del convegno internazionale di Verona-Ravenna, 25–29 ottobre 1999 (Rome: Salerno, 2001), pp. 295–323 Murano, Giovanna, ‘Zibaldoni (Commonplace Books)’, Scriptorium, 67 (2013), 394–406

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Neuber, Wolfgang, ‘Exscribo ergo sum: Self-Reflection and Meditation in Early Modern German Family Books’, in Meditatio: Refashioning the Self. Theory and Practice in Late Medi­eval and Early Modern Intellectual Culture, ed. by Walter S. Melion and Karl A. E. Enenkel (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 109–24 Newbigin, Nerida, ‘Il testo e il contesto dell’Abramo e Isac di Feo Belcari’, Studi e problemi di critica testuale, 23 (1981), 13–37 Rama, Angel, The Lettered City (Durham, NC: Duke Uni­ver­sity Press, 1996) Rusconi, Roberto, ‘Cherubino da Spoleto’, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. xxiv (Rome: Enciclopedia Italiana, 1980), pp. 446–53 Scribner, R. W., ‘Interpreting Religion in Early Modern Europe’, European Studies Review, 13 (1983), 89–105 Van Engen, John, ‘Multiple Options: The World of the Fifteenth-Century Church’, Church History, 77 (2008), 257–84 Verter, Bradford, ‘Spiritual Capital: Theorizing Religion with Bourdieu against Bourdieu’, Socio­logical Theory, 21 (2003), 150–74

Tamar Herzig

Rethinking Jewish Conversion to Christianity in Renaissance Italy Religious conversion is the crossing of the very boundaries that define faith communities and differentiate them from each other.1 This phenomenon, which involves elements of individual experience blended with broader problems of historical change, has attracted considerable attention from scholars of early modern Europe in the last few decades.2 Italian historians, in particular, have become increasingly aware of the importance of studying religious conversion for understanding key facets of pre-modern Europe and the Mediterranean, as the five special issues that leading Italian historical journals have devoted to the topic since 1996 make clear.3 One of the recent special issues is dedicated to a specific type of religious conversion, that of conversion from Judaism to Christianity on the Italian peninsula throughout the ages.4 In light of these advances in historical research, the present essay examines the specificity of Jewish conversion in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy, and argues that expounding the multiple transformations that characterized this kind of conversion, as well as contemporaries’ attitudes towards them, are crucial for understanding Renaissance Italian religions.



* Support from the Israel Science Foundation (Grant no. 389/15) has made this research possible.  1 For methodo­logical approaches to the historical study of religious conversion, see Baer, ‘History and Religious Conversion’; Katznelson and Rubin, ‘Introduction’; Ditchfield and Smith, ‘Introduction’.  2 Prosperi, ‘Convertirsi nel Cinquecento’; Mazur and Shinn, ‘Conversion Narratives in the Early Modern World’; Aers and Beckwith, ‘Conversions’.  3 Foa and Scaraffia, ‘Conversioni nel Mediterraneo’; ‘“Dall’infamia dell’errore al grembo di Santa Chiesa”’; Calvi and Malena, ‘Conversioni’; Fiume, ‘Schiavitù e conversioni nel Mediterraneo’; Perani, ‘Strategie e normative per la conversione degli ebrei dal Medioevo all’età contemporanea’.  4 Perani, ‘Strategie e normative per la conversione degli ebrei dal Medioevo all’età contemporanea’.

Tamar Herzig ([email protected]), Professor of Early Modern History and Director of the Curiel Institute for European Studies at Tel Aviv Uni­ver­sity, is Vice Chairperson of the Historical Society of Israel.

Renaissance Religions: Modes and Meanings in History, ed. by Peter Howard, Nicholas Terpstra, and Riccardo Saccenti, ES 26 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2021) pp. 63–79 10.1484/M.ES-EB.5.121900

FHG

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The first part of this essay delineates the main traits of Jewish conversion to Catholicism in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy, and shows why it differed from the conversion of other non-Christians to Catholicism on the peninsula as well as from the conversion of Jews to Christianity in other parts of Europe during this period. The second part proposes that Jewish conversion should be explored within the conceptual framework of the Renaissance rather than within that of post-Tridentine or Catholic Reformation Italy. The essay’s last part then points to the need to refocus scholarly attention on the meanings that neophytes, their former coreligionists, and those who persuaded or compelled them to accept baptism ascribed to these acts of boundary crossing, and contends that these meanings were profoundly shaped by gendered presumptions.

The Peculiarities of Jewish Conversion to Christianity In central and northern Italy, Jewish conversion was never a mass phenomenon. Unlike the conversion of Iberian Jews and of the Jews residing in the Spanish-ruled regions of southern Italy, in the central and northern parts of the peninsula Jews either converted alone or, in the case of male converts, instigated the conversion of their entire families.5 Thus, their experiences varied considerably from those of the conversos, who became Christians along with their erstwhile coreligionists and formed new communities with distinct, but communal, religious identities.6 Elisheva Carlebach has shown that the experience of an individual’s moving from Judaism to Christianity in Italian lands paralleled that of Jewish converts in German regions in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Nonetheless, after the mid-sixteenth century, the missionary efforts to convert the Jews in Italian territories became increasingly institutionalized, following the establishment of the Roman Inquisition (1542) and the creation of Houses of Catechumens, first in Rome (in 1543), and then in other Italian cities. The pressure exerted by these institutions on Jews who contemplated crossing over to Catholicism, on those who received baptism, and on those who tried to resist conversion or to revert to Judaism had no equivalents in German society — where

 5 Stow, ‘The Papacy and the Jews’. On converts from Judaism in the late sixteenth and seven­ teenth centuries see Mazur, Conversion to Catholicism in Early Modern Italy, pp. 18–42, 66–82. No such overview exists for Jewish conversions in pre-Tridentine Italy, but see note 20 below for local studies noting individual cases.  6 The history of the Jews in the southern parts of the Italian peninsula that were subject to the Spanish crown in the early modern era significantly diverged from that of their coreligionists in central and northern Italy (except for the Spanish-ruled duchy of Milan). The Sicilian version of the Spanish Edict of Expulsion was promulgated as early as 1492, and in 1541 Jews were also expelled from the Kingdom of Naples (Zeldes, The Former Jews of this Kingdom; Mazur, The New Christians of Spanish Naples).

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Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, and Anabaptists struggled for authority and could not direct such concerted efforts to the conversion of the Jews.7 The presence of numerous conversos from Spain and Portugal further complicated attitudes to Jewish conversion in sixteenth-century Italy.8 The wealth of material originating in the archives of the Houses of Catechumens and of the Roman Inquisition has been intensively explored in the last few decades. Analyses of these institutions’ records have elucidated the mechanisms of power of the Tridentine Church, shedding light on its modes of disciplining and control of the Italian population through confessionalization.9 Due to the nature of these institutions, though, conversion from Judaism in early modern Italy is often discussed in tandem with conversion from other religions, and especially from Islam.10 However, from the theo­logical viewpoint, the baptism of Jews — those ‘unbelievers par excellence’ whose embracing of Christianity constituted a crucial part in the divine plan for the eventual salvation of humankind — has traditionally held a far greater significance than the baptism of all other non-Christians.11 Kenneth Stow has argued that Jewish conversion acquired an increased significance in Renaissance Italy when, because of the new humanistic focus on the reading of sacred texts in their original languages, converts who could read Hebrew were perceived as the creators of a unique link between contemporary Catholics and the very fonts of Christianity itself.12 Marina Caffiero has further demonstrated that, because of the greater symbolic value that Italian ecclesiastic and lay authorities ascribed to their conversion, Jews remained the primary object of conversionary activities throughout the early modern era.13 Comparing attitudes towards baptized Jews and converts from other religious groups, Pierre Savy has reaffirmed the specificity of Jewish conversion to Catholicism.14 It is also worth noting that baptism held a different meaning for Jews than for Muslims, who could adhere to the tradition of taqiyya, or of externally conforming to the dominant culture while concealing their internal adherence to Islam.15 Jews who converted to Christianity, on the other hand, were considered meshumadim: apostates cut off from the House of Israel, for whose ultimate destruction the Jews prayed daily,16 although in practice  7 Carlebach, Divided Souls, pp. 7–9, 56–59.  8 Ruderman, Early Modern Jewry, pp. 160–63, 186–89.  9 Prosperi, ‘L’Inquisizione Romana e gli ebrei’; Pullan, The Jews of Europe and the Inquisition of Venice. See also Sluhovsky, ‘Authority and Power in Early Modern Italy’.  10 Ioly Zorattini, I nomi degli altri; Rothman, Brokering Empire, esp. pp. 87–162; Al Kalak and Pavan, Un’altra fede; Marconcini, Per amor del cielo.  11 Bonfil, ‘An Infant’s Missionary Sermon’, p. 155.  12 Stow, ‘Conversion, Christian Hebraism, and Hebrew Prayer in the Sixteenth Century’.  13 Caffiero, Forced Baptism, p. 9; Rothman, Brokering Empire, pp. 137–46.  14 Savy, ‘Baptême et hérédité’.  15 See Lammens, Islam, pp. 145, 167–69.  16 Malkiel, ‘Jews and Apostates in Medi­eval Europe’; Goldin, Apostasy and Jewish Identity in

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they often continued to have contacts with them and sometimes attempted to facilitate their return to Judaism.17 Jewish Halachic law also considered conversion to Christianity as the most serious kind of apostasy, so Jews who embraced Christianity were perceived as greater sinners than converts to Islam.18

Renaissance Conversions Jewish conversion in Italy, then, differed both from the conversion of nonJews to Catholicism and from conversions from Judaism in other parts of early modern Europe. As a distinct phenomenon, though, it is often studied within the chrono­logical framework of Tridentine or Catholic Reformation Italy. As is well known, the revitalization of the Catholic Church following the outbreak of schismatic Church reform movements north of the Alps, which gravely harmed its claim to universality, featured a zealous campaign to convert the Jews.19 Yet, as remarkable as the results of this proselytizing campaign were, focusing exclusively on the post-Tridentine era elides the historical significance of the growing importance that Italian elites had already begun to ascribe to Jewish conversion in the fifteenth century. Local studies indicate that a notable surge in the number of converts was already apparent in the early quattrocento, and that a substantial rise in the baptisms of Jews was a notable feature of the second half of the century.20 Moreover, it was in the last decades of the fifteenth century that Jewish conversion began to feature in various literary, musical, and theatrical genres, including humanist orations, sacre rappresentazioni, and carnival songs.21 The last quarter of the quattrocento, which saw the intensification

High Middle Ages Northern Europe; Carlebach, Divided Souls, pp. 24–28.  17 Stow, ‘A Tale of Uncertainties’, pp. 257–66; Toaff, Il Vino e la carne, pp. 195–202; Esposito, Un’altra Roma, pp. 154–55; Pullan, The Jews of Europe and the Inquisition of Venice, pp. 287–90; Caffiero, Legami pericolosi, pp. 194–96; Mazur, Conversion to Catholicism in Early Modern Italy, p. 26; Herzig, ‘The Hazards of Conversion’.  18 Bornstein-Makovetsky, ‘Conversion to Islam’.  19 Stow, Catholic Thought and Papal Jewry Policy, pp. 3–17; Prosperi, ‘La Chiesa e gli ebrei nell’Italia del ’500’; Segre, ‘Neophytes during the Italian Counter-Reformation’, p. 132. See also Foa, ‘Il gioco del proselitismo’.  20 The Jews in the Duchy of Milan, ed. by Simonsohn, i, 391–92, 553–54; Toaff, Il Vino e la carne, pp. 181–95; Esposito, Un’altra Roma, pp. 154–57; Esposito, ‘Gli ebrei a Roma tra Quattro e Cinquecento’, p. 843 n. 108; Ruggiero, The Boundaries of Eros, p. 88; Ruderman, The World of a Renaissance Jew, pp. 21–22, 43–47; Rinaldi, ‘Topografia documentaria per la storia della comunità ebraica bo­lognese’, p. 65; Muzzarelli, ‘I banchieri ebrei e la città’, pp. 123–24; Luzzati, ‘“Satis est quod tecum dormivit”’, pp. 262–63; Traniello, Gli ebrei e le piccole città, pp. 170–76; Chambers and Dean, Clean Hands and Rough Justice, pp. 243–44; Weinstein, Savonarola, pp. 83–85.  21 Harrán, ‘“Adonai con voi”’, pp. 428–29 and n. 6; Bowd, ‘The Conversion of Margarita’; Delcorno, ‘Corruzione e conversione in una sacra rappresentazione fiorentina’, pp. 281–82.

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of anti-Jewish preaching that went hand-in-hand with calls for the expulsion of the Jews,22 was also characterized by a surge in the writing of anti-Jewish polemics aimed at encouraging conversions, some of which were authored by recently baptized Jews.23 Turning our attention to the representations of Jewish conversion in these works, as well as to their portrayal in letters, chronicles, and Hebrew tracts, makes it possible to discern the roots of Tridentine developments in the pre-Reformation era. The writings of several men and one woman from Ferrara enable us to grasp the notable significance that Christians, as well as Jews, already ascribed to the phenomenon of conversion from Judaism prior to the breakup of Western Christendom. Thus, in 1491, Eleonora of Aragon (1450–1493), the duchess of Ferrara who had masterminded and sponsored the baptismal ceremony of three Jews, described it in a letter to her consort, Duke Ercole I d’Este (1431–1505), who was absent from Ferrara at that time, remarking: Domenica intervenni al baptismo de Salomone et de suo figliolo et de q[u]ella ebrea […] che si fece i[n] vescoato molto solennemente, et post baptismu[m] Salomone salito i[n] pulpito disse molto accommodamente et eloquentemente le cagione ch[e] lo havevano mosso a farsi christiano, precipue p[er] cognoscere la n[ost]ra esser[e] la vera fede, et addusse molti testi i[n] ebraico a provar[e] la Trinità, lo advenimento de X.po nato da virgine, la passione sua, et il baptismo; et da chi ha ingegnio et cognitione fu molto laudata.24 [On Sunday I attended the baptism of Salomone and his son, and of this Jewess […] which was done very solemnly at the cathedral, and after his baptism, Salomone mounted the pulpit [and] said very opportunely and eloquently the reasons that led him to become a Christian, mainly due to having realized that ours is the true faith, and he put forward many texts in Hebrew to prove [the veracity of] the Trinity, the advent of Christ and his virgin birth, his passion, and the baptism. And by whoever has intelligence and perception he was much praised.] Eleonora’s dispatch attests to the importance that Jewish conversion held for members of the ruling elites, who were often personally involved in compelling Jews to consent to baptism.25 Other unpublished missives that described the three Jews’ baptism further disclose the impact that

 22 Antoniazzi Villa, Un processo contro gli ebrei nella Milano del 1488; Salter, ‘The Jews in Fifteenth-Century Florence’.  23 Fioravanti, ‘Polemiche antigiudaiche nell’Italia del Quattrocento’, esp. p. 20.  24 Eleonora of Aragon’s letter to Ercole d’Este of 11 October 1491 (Modena, ASMo, ASE, Casa e Stato, busta 132), reproduced in Chiappini, ‘Eleonora d’Aragona’, pp. 75–76.  25 Herzig, ‘The Future of Studying Jewish Conversion in Renaissance Italy’, p. 314.

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it had on the broader Christian populace that came to watch it.26 In a letter to Eleonora’s daughter, Isabella d’Este (1474–1539), the marchioness of Mantua, the Ferrarese nobleman Girolamo Magnanino (d. c. 1549) affirmed that the baptism ceremony was a laudable demonstration of the expansion of the Christian faith.27 The ducal chancellor Bernardino de’ Prosperi (d. 1528), who also described the baptismal ceremony in a dispatch to Isabella, observed that in his sermon the neophyte Salomone/Ercole added ‘multe proficie che li hebrei le tirano a tristo sentimento e anche le occultano’ (many prophecies of which the Jews distort, and even hide, the meaning), and remarked: ‘a questo acto gli fo tuta Ferrara’ (all of Ferrara was present at this feat).28 The Ferrarese chronicler Bernardino Zambotti (d. after 1504) reported the abovementioned conversion ceremony,29 as well as several other baptisms of Jews that were celebrated in Ferrara in the last decades of the fifteenth century. Zambotti’s chronicle reveals that alongside the many Christians who flocked to witness the baptism rites and were reassured about the veracity of their own faith by watching them, local Jews were also forced to attend the ceremonies. Describing the baptism of a Jewish man in Ferrara in 1476, Zambotti affirmed: Uno hebreo, che era facto Christiano, hozì predicò in la chiesia cathedrale, dove tuti li Hebrei veneno ad oldirlo. Il quale provò per raxone hebraiche che la fede nostra hè migliore che la hebraicha, che fu cosa notabile per la fede.30 [A Jew who became a Christian preached in the cathedral church today, where all the Jews came to listen to him. Using Jewish arguments, he proved that our faith is better than the Jewish [one], and this was a noteworthy thing for the faith.] Compelling Jews to listen to conversionary sermons was a long-standing practice, dating back to the thirteenth century. While historians have noted its revival in mid-sixteenth-century Italy,31 Zambotti’s account attests to its importance as a conversionary tool in Ferrara already during Ercole d’Este’s reign. We may glean some information about Jewish reactions to

 26 In addition to the two letters cited below, the ceremony was described in Francesco da Bagna­cavallo’s letter to Isabella d’Este of 10 October 1491 (Mantua, ASMn, AG, busta 1232, c. 93).  27 Girolamo Magnanino’s letter to Isabella of 10 October 1491 (Mantua, ASMn, AG, busta 1232, c. 167).  28 Bernardino de’ Prosperi’s letter to Isabella d’Este of 10 October 1491 (Mantua, ASMn, AG, busta 1232, c. 40).  29 Zambotti, Diario Ferrarese, ed. by Pardi, p. 223. On Zambotti, see Folin, ‘Le cronache a Ferrara e negli Stati estensi’.  30 Zambotti, Diario Ferrarese, ed. by Pardi, p. 12.  31 Bonfil, ‘An Infant’s Missionary Sermon’, p. 155.

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the sermons of the former members of their faith that they were forced to attend from the Hebrew tract Magen Avraham, which was penned by Zambotti’s contemporary Abraham ben Mordecai Farissol (1452–c. 1528), who resided in Ferrara in the late fifteenth century. In this tract, the Jewish author disapprovingly noted a false religious notion, affirming: ‫שמעתי אותו מרבים מבני ישראל אשר יצאו מן הכלל אשר האמינו הדעת הלז וילכו‬ ‫ויצטיירו וילבשו בגדים אחרים ויקראו בקול גדול בין הנוצרים‬

[I heard it from the many sons of Israel who had left Judaism who believed it and, adopting new customs and new clothes, called out in a loud voice among the Christians.] Farissol’s assertion that he heard an erroneous religious view publicly proclaimed by ‘many’ converts from Judaism in his own days attests to the effect that the public sermons that were aimed at reaffirming the power of Christianity had on local Jews in the last decades of the quattrocento.32 Farissol’s choice of the word ‘‫( ’האמינו‬believed) when discussing the tenets upheld by apostates from Judaism serves as a reminder that early modern Jews did not preclude the possibility that conversion could sometimes be motivated by changes in religious belief. At least one Jew in Renaissance Ferrara, Immanuel Tremellius (1510–1580), seems to have indeed converted primarily for religious reasons. After becoming a Catholic, this baptized Jew embraced Calvinism and ended up fleeing Italy to evade persecution for his reformed beliefs.33

The Gendered Aspects of Conversion Farissol’s Magen Avraham seems to create the impression that Jewish conversion in Italy was essentially a male affair.34 That all known homilies, apo­logetic tracts, and other works by apostates from Judaism from Renaissance Italy were written by men reinforces this inaccurate impression.35 So does Paolo Sebastiano Medici’s later Catalogo de’ neofiti illustri

 32 Farissol’s Hebrew text, which refers specifically to a spiritualized view of Christianity that was adopted by Jewish neophytes, is cited in Ruderman, The World of a Renaissance Jew, p. 189 n. 36.  33 Austin, From Judaism to Calvinism.  34 On the gendered aspects of Jewish conversion in post-Tridentine Italy, see Foa, ‘Le donne nella storia degli ebrei in Italia’, pp. 25–26; Van Boxel, ‘Dowry and the Conversion of the Jews in Sixteenth-Century Rome’; Caffiero, ‘Le doti della conversione’; Lirosi, ‘Monacare le ebree’; Marconcini, ‘The Conversion of Jewish Women in Florence’. For the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, see Bowd, ‘The Conversion of Margarita’; Herzig, A Convert’s Tale, pp. 139–61.  35 On these homilies and tracts, see Furstenberg-Levi, ‘The Boundaries between “Jewish” and “Catholic” Space’; Furstenberg-Levi, ‘The Sermons of a Rabbi Converted to Christianity’; Furstenberg-Levi, ‘The Book of Homilies’; Bonfil, ‘Chi era Ludovico Carretto, apostata?’.

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(Catalogue of Illustrious Neophytes, 1701), which in over one hundred pages featuring well-known medi­eval and early modern converts from Judaism, does not mention a single woman. Although the author — himself a baptized Jew — does note several family conversions, these presumably involved no women at all. The ‘illustrious neophytes’ who did not embrace Catholicism alone, Medici’s readers are led to believe, were accompanied solely by their son(s), or occasionally by their brother(s).36 Medici’s exclusive concern with male apostates from Judaism reverberated traditional Jewish notions — and is, in turn, reflected in the modern historio­graphic tendency to stress Jewish women’s lesser susceptibility to conversionary pressure in the pre-modern era.37 Most rabbinic responsa dealing with Jewish apostasy in early modern Italy addressed the issue of male, rather than female, converts. This was because men’s apostasy triggered greater halakhic problems in cases in which only one of two spouses apostasized. Thus, when a woman embraced Christianity and her husband remained a Jew, he was free to remarry, but when a man left the Jewish fold and his wife refused to convert, she nonetheless depended on the apostate’s granting of a divorce before she could marry another Jewish man.38 Non-rabbinical Jewish sources, too, were mainly concerned with men’s apostasy. As we saw earlier, Farissol was preoccupied solely with the conversion of male Jews, who became preachers or polemists and often assumed key roles in instigating anti-Jewish polemics.39 In his sixteenth-century Hebrew chronicle, Joseph HaCohen (1496–1578) similarly rebuked male converts. Acknowledging the conversion of Jewish women, HaCohen nonetheless designated them as the victims of ruthless missionary efforts, expressing a lenient view of their apostasy. In one case, he asserted that a Jewish girl was forcibly taken and placed in the midst of Christians where, ‘'‫( ’ויפצירו אותה עד בוש ותשב מאחרי ה‬under constant pressure, she turned away from her God).40 Although many of the men who converted to Catholicism also became Christians only under duress, HaCohen’s condemnation of them was much harsher. Indeed, HaCohen reproved such ‘undignified’ men for having become

 36 Medici, Catalogo de’ neofiti illustri. Anna del Monte’s diary, recounting the efforts to compel her to accept baptism in the 1740s (see Stow, Anna and Tranquillo), is a rare female testimony of a (failed) conversionary experience. I am not aware of any such first-hand account by fifteenth- or sixteenth-century Jewish or baptized Jewish women.  37 On this tendency, see Dursterler, ‘To Piety or Conversion More Prone?’, pp. 25–29.  38 Carlebach, Divided Souls, pp. 25–26; Tartakoff, ‘Jewish Women and Apostasy in the Medi­eval Crown of Aragon’.  39 Ruderman, The World of a Renaissance Jew, pp. 43–47.  40 HaCohen, The Vale of Tears, ed. by Letteris, p. 127; English translation cited from HaCohen and the Anonymous Corrector, The Vale of Tears, trans. by May, p. 87.

rethinking jewish conversion to christianity in renaissance italy

‫ וימאסו את בריתו אשר כרת‬,’‫בליעל […] ויקשו את ערפם ויזנו מאחרי ה‬-‫אנשים בני‬ ‫את אבותינו‬

[stiffnecked and [of having] abandoned God and scorned the Covenant into which God had entered with our forefathers.]41 HaCohen’s different treatment of male and female conversions from Judaism is closely related to the idea of the biblical covenant between God and Abraham, the sign of which was the circumcision of the flesh of the patriarch’s male (and only male) descendants. Christian polemists often equated Jewish circumcision with baptism, which they presented as a ‘circumcision of the heart’. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, they therefore specifically targeted Jewish women and tried to persuade them that they had the most to gain from converting to Christianity because of their anomalous status within Judaism, as Jews who were excluded from God’s covenant with Abraham. Hence, in an oration that the letterato Luigi Groto delivered at the baptismal ceremony of the Matuan Jew Rosa Levi (fl. 1565–71) in 1565, Groto emphasized the ritual imparity inherent in Judaism, which he contrasted with the gender equality offered by the Catholic sacrament of baptism.42 Groto’s oration attests to the peculiar significance that erudite Catholic authors — as opposed to their Jewish counterparts — ascribed to conversions of Jewish girls and women. Regarding circumcision as both the prefiguration and the functional equivalent of baptism, Christian thinkers assumed that its sacramental nature left an indelible mark that turned male Jews into unmanly men.43 As Shaye Cohen has shown, however, the stereotypical weak and ugly Jewish man was traditionally paired within Christian culture with the figure of the young and beautiful Jewess. By virtue of their gender, baptized Jewish girls were seen as converts who could be fully assimilated into Christian society — in contrast with male Jewish converts, whose circumcised flesh served as a constant reminder of their origins and who could thus never fully shed their Jewish past.44 In this manner, the mere sight of a Jewish girl who received the sacrament of baptism became a powerful manifestation of Christianity’s triumph over Judaism, and of a more complete erasure of Jewishness. Once again, extant sources indicate that the public visibility of Jewish girls’ consent to baptism already had begun to gain an amplified significance prior to the outbreak of the Protestant Reformation. During the 1490s, humanists such as the Brescian Giovanni Britannico (fl. 1470–1518) and  41 HaCohen, The Vale of Tears, ed. by Letteris, p. 128; English translation in HaCohen and the Anonymous Corrector, The Vale of Tears, trans. by May, p. 87.  42 Noted in Bowd, ‘The Conversion of Margarita’, p. 154 n. 63. On Groto and Levi, see Harrán, ‘The Levi Dynasty’, pp. 167–70; Harrán, ‘Levi, Rosa (fl. 1571)’.  43 Savy, ‘Baptême et hérédité’, p. 388.  44 Cohen, Why Aren’t Jewish Women Circumcised?, pp. 67–92, 133–37, 158–61.

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chroniclers like the Florentine Luca Landucci (1436–1516) mentioned in their writings the baptism of Jewish girls who had converted despite their parents’ opposition, presenting the converts as heroines.45 That some of these girls did choose to convert in defiance of their family’s expressed wishes is documented in letters written by Jews in Hebrew and in Italian, like those reporting the vicissitudes of the neophyte Anna Antonia, whose original name remains unknown.46 In 1491, this sixteen-year-old daughter of Stella and Elia Caio ran away from home, taking some of the family valuables with her.47 She was baptized in Ferrara a couple of months later together with the aforementioned Jew Salomone, whose baptismal oration was lauded by Eleonora of Aragon, and with Salomone’s nine-year-old son.48 Reporting the baptism ceremony of these three Jews, the Ferrarese chronicler Bernardino Zambotti typically designated Anna Antonia in his chronicle as ‘una Zudea bella’ (a beautiful Jewess).49 Because of her gender, Anna Antonia could not deliver a sermon expounding Jewish perfidy the way her fellow male catechumen Salomone did. Nonetheless, her mere physical presence at the baptismal font in and of itself served as a public display of Christianity’s ultimate victory. In the same vein, the celebrations of the monachization of baptized Jewish girls assumed a unique significance.50 Descriptions of these ceremonies, which epitomized the transformation of former female Jews into the brides of Christ, were recorded and disseminated — as in the case of Salomone’s daughter, who was christened Caterina. An eyewitness account of Caterina’s vestition ceremony in 1501 reveals that Duke Ercole d’Este timed it to mark the completion of the Dominican convent of Santa Caterina da Siena, the largest pious foundation that he had had built in Ferrara. The spectacle of the neophyte’s monachization was intended to publicize the ducal family’s piety, showcasing the achievements of its ongoing support of Jewish conversion.51

 45 Landucci, Diario Fiorentino, ed. by del Badia, p. 132; Bowd, ‘The Conversion of Margarita’. See also Cassuto, Gli ebrei a Firenze nell’età del Rinascimento, p. 203.  46 For a similar, later case noted in one of Abraham Carmi’s Hebrew letters, see Letters of the Carmi Family, ed. by Boksenboim, p. 157.  47 On 29 July 1491 Stella and Elia had a letter sent to Duchess Eleonora of Aragon, asking for her help in enabling them to see their daughter (Modena, ASMo, ASE, Archivio per materie: Ebrei, busta 19/A, c. 33). On 21 August 1491, the parents asked Duke Ercole d’Este to intervene in the affair (Modena, ASMo, ASE, Archivio per materie: Ebrei, busta 19/A, c. 32).  48 The girl’s baptism is noted in Eleonora of Aragon’s letter to Ercole d’Este of 11 October 1491 (Modena, ASMo, ASE, Casa e Stato, busta 132); and in the letters that Girolamo Magnanino, Francesco da Bagnacavallo, and Bernardino de’ Prosperi sent Isabella d’Este on 10 October 1491 (Mantua, ASMn, AG, busta 1232, cc. 167, 93, 40).  49 Zambotti, Diario Ferrarese, ed. by Pardi, p. 223.  50 Herzig, ‘The Hazards of Conversion’.  51 Herzig, A Convert’s Tale, pp. 146–61.

rethinking jewish conversion to christianity in renaissance italy

Conclusion This essay has drawn chiefly on Ferrarese evidence, because Ferrara is often overlooked in discussions of Jewish conversion in Italy, which tend to deal with Rome, Venice, and, occasionally, Florence. Studies devoted to conversions from Judaism in Ferrara often draw on the extant registers of the Ferrarese House of Catechumens from the post-Tridentine era.52 As demonstrated in this essay, though, the largely unpublished archival documents from Ferrara disclose the intensification of conversionary efforts over fifty years before the establishment of the Roman Inquisition, and about a century prior to the institution of a House of Catechumens in Ferrara proper (1584).53 Disclosing the significance as well as the meaning that members of two rival communities of faith ascribed to Jewish apostasy at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Ferrarese sources also call attention to the differences in how Christians and Jews understood the gendered nature of crossing the religious divide. They thus point to a fruitful direction for future research on Jewish conversion to Christianity in Renaissance Italy.

 52 See for example Faoro, ‘Prime ricerche sulla Casa dei catecumeni di Ferrara’; Lattes, ‘Un elenco di conversi’. A notable exception is Austin, From Judaism to Calvinism.  53 On the establishment of a House of Catechumens in Ferrara, see Lattes, ‘Gli ebrei di Ferrara’, p. 46; Lattes, ‘Un elenco di conversi’, pp. 117–18; Al Kalak and Pavan, Un’altra fede, p. vii.

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Works Cited Manu­script and Archival Sources Mantua, Archivio di Stato di Mantova, Archivio Gonzaga [ASMn, AG], busta 1232 Modena, Archivio di Stato di Modena, Archivio Segreto Estense [ASMo, ASE], Archivi per materie: Ebrei, busta 19/A Modena, Archivio di Stato di Modena, Archivio Segreto Estense [ASMo, ASE], Casa e Stato, busta 132 Primary Sources HaCohen, Joseph, The Vale of Tears: The Chronicle of all the Troubles Suffered by the House of Israel, ed. by M. Letteris (Krakow: Josef Fischer, 1895) [Hebrew] HaCohen, Joseph, and the Anonymous Corrector, The Vale of Tears (Emek Habacha), trans. with a critical comment by Harry S. May (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971) The Jews in the Duchy of Milan, ed. by Shlomo Simonsohn, 4 vols ( Jerusalem: The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1982) Landucci, Luca, Diario Fiorentino dal 1450 al 1516 di Luca Landucci continuato da un anonimo fino al 1542, ed. by Iodoco del Badia (Florence: Sansoni, 1883) Letters of the Carmi Family: Cremona 1570–1577, ed. by Yacov Boksenboim (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Uni­ver­sity, 1983) [Hebrew] Medici, Paolo Sebastiano, Catalogo de’ neofiti illustri usciti per misericordia di Dio dall’ebraismo e poi rendutisi gloriosi nel Cristianesimo per esemplarità di Costumi, e profondità di Dottrina (Florence: Per Vincenzio Vangelisti, 1701) Zambotti, Bernardino, Diario Ferrarese dall’anno 1476 sino al 1504, ed. by Giuseppe Pardi, in Rerum italicarum scriptores, ed. by L. A. Muratori, vol. xxiv (Bo­logna: Nicola Zanichelli, 1934) Secondary Studies Aers, David, and Sarah Beckwith, eds, ‘Conversions: Medi­eval and Early Modern’, special issue, Journal of Medi­eval and Early Modern Studies, 48 (2018) Al Kalak, Matteo, and Ilaria Pavan, Un’altra fede: Le Case dei catecumeni nei territori estensi (1583–1938) (Florence: Olschki, 2013) Antoniazzi Villa, Anna, Un processo contro gli ebrei nella Milano del 1488: Crescita e declino della comunità ebraica lombarda alla fine del Medioevo (Bo­logna: Cappelli, 1985) Austin, Kenneth, From Judaism to Calvinism: The Life and Writings of Immanuel Tremellius (c. 1510–1580) (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007) Baer, Marc David, ‘History and Religious Conversion’, in The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion, ed. by Lewis R. Rambo and Charles E. Farhadian (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 2014), pp. 25–47

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Creating Early Modern Martyrs in the Venetian–Ottoman Encounter In a particularly dramatic interval during the War of Candia between the Venetians and the Ottomans (1645–69), members of the Venetian embassy in Constantinople were arrested, tortured, and even executed. The story is recounted in several forms of artistic media and in various texts. These include an album of miniatures, a cycle of painted frescoes, and works of art in a chapel on the island of Murano dedicated to the Venetian ambassador Giovanni Battista Ballarino (d. 1666). This contribution to Renaissance Religions discusses these representations in connection with textual sources and highlights their role in creating the myth of Venetian diplomats as early modern martyrs. Much attention has been focused in recent years on the cultural connections between East and West or, more specifically, those between the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Venice — Islam and Christianity. Whereas some research has emphasized the common values and close affinities between these two worlds, I present herein a specific case of conflict between the Venetian officials in Constantinople and the Ottoman authorities during the tense period of the War of Candia in the mid-seventeenth century. I suggest that the interrogation, arrest, and execution of some of the Venetian diplomats in Constantinople gave rise to a commemorative ritual in Venice. This ritual featured them as heroes and even as early modern martyrs in the Venetian legacy and historical memory. Various artistic media including Turkish miniatures, exquisite fresco cycles, and sculpted marble reliefs created the myth of these Venetian civil servants as patriotic martyrs unjustly persecuted by the Ottomans.1

 1 Some of the material in this chapter appears in my book, Debby Ben-Aryeh, Crusade Propa­ ganda in Word and Image in Early Modern Italy, but I have added here a new compara­tive discussion of the Ballarino Chapel in Murano and a more detailed examination of the crisis between the Venetian diplomats and the Ottomans as represented in texts and visual images.

Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby ([email protected]) is Professor and the Evelyn Metz Memorial Research Chair in Art in the Arts Department, Ben-Gurion Uni­ver­sity of the Negev, Israel.

Renaissance Religions: Modes and Meanings in History, ed. by Peter Howard, Nicholas Terpstra, and Riccardo Saccenti, ES 26 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2021) pp. 81–105 10.1484/M.ES-EB.5.121901

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Perceptions: Relations between Ottomans and Venetians The specific crisis during the War of Candia under discussion should first be viewed within the context of its times and in relation to humanist thought about the Ottomans. In the early modern period, many Venetians were touring Constantinople and wrote travel accounts of their experiences. When a Venetian went to Constantinople to acquire an office, often he was accompanied by fellow patricians, and a visit to the Porte was part of the preparation for a diplomatic life in Venice.2 In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many educated Europeans were visiting Constantinople on diplomatic, scholarly, or commercial enterprises. The travelling antiquarians Augier Ghislain de Busbecq (1522–1592), Pierre Gilles (1490–1555), Melchior Lorichs (1526–1583), Pieter Coecke van Aelst (1502–1550), and Nicholas de Nicolay (1517–1583) produced a diverse range of printed works based on their first-hand experiences in the Ottoman Empire. They used traditional Renaissance genres such as the urban encomium, the city view, historia painting, and the costume book to depict the Turks either as the enemies of antiquities or as exotic objects of study. Although some of the antiquarian travellers, most notably Lorichs, Coecke, and Nicolay, demonstrated the diversity that could be found among the Turks, the ultimate impact of sixteenth-century European antiquarian accounts of the Ottoman Empire was to deepen the Western perception of Eastern difference.3 By the sixteenth century there was an enormous corpus of printed material — prophesies, warnings, sermons — in circulation, which informed European popular opinion about the Turks. As the Ottoman Empire advanced westward during the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, humanists responded on a grand scale, leaving behind a large body of fascinating works, including Crusade orations and histories; ethno­graphic, historical, and religious studies of the Turks; epic poetry; and even tracts on converting the Turks to Christianity. Nancy Bisaha and Margaret Meserve, following a pioneering book-length article by James Hankins, offer an in-depth look at Renaissance humanist works focusing on the Ottoman Empire, Islam, and the Crusades. Throughout, these authors probe the texts to reveal the significant role Renaissance writers played in shaping Western views of ‘self ’ and ‘other’. Medi­eval concepts of Islam, in which Muslims were depicted as enemies of the faith, were generally informed and constrained by Christian religious attitudes and rhetoric. Although humanist thinkers of the Renaissance were never able to progress beyond this stance, these works suggest that their understanding of secular and cultural issues was remarkably complex and marked a watershed between medi­eval and modern thought. Humanist histories of the Turks were sharply polemical,

 2 Dursteler, Venetians in Constantinople, pp. 99–100.  3 Wunder, ‘Western Travelers, Eastern Antiquities, and the Image of the Turk’.

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portraying the Ottomans as a rogue power, but writings on other Muslim polities include some of the first positive appraisals of Muslim statecraft in the European tradition.4 Some modern scholarship that explored the relations between Europe and the Ottoman Empire emphasized the differences, conflicts, and antagonism between these two civilizations. This treatment of conflict was heavily influenced by the theories of Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations and Edward Said’s Orientalism.5 Recent scholarship has proposed a diverse approach that posits more complex contacts between the Europeans and the Ottomans, as one finds in the works of Ottomanists such as Cemal Kafadar, Suraiya Faroqhi, and Palmira Brummett.6 Based on archival research of neglected sources, recent studies by Eric Dursteler, E. Natalie Rothman, and Molly Greene have altered the overall perception of confrontation and have charted a different picture that portrays varieties of coexistence between the two cultures. Based on diplomatic reports and letters, travellers’ accounts, and official and notarial documents, Dursteler suggests that coexistence, rather than conflict, was typical of Veneto-Ottoman relations in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Constantinople. Rothman explores the intersecting worlds of those who traversed early modern Venetian-Ottoman lines, including colonial migrants, redeemed slaves, merchants, commercial brokers, religious converts, and diplomatic interpreters. Rothman reveals the existence of populations that were situated between the two cultures as trans-imperial subjects, and Dursteler describes those who crossed the lines, such as renegade women.7 Two important contributions examining the complex relations between Ottomans and Venetians, East and West, are offered by Palmira Brummett and Noel Malcolm. Brummett offers a wide-ranging study of written and pictorial descriptions of the Ottoman state and its borderlands, including a focus on maps and material culture as shaping European perceptions of the East. She examines varied textual and visual material, such as printed manuals, costume books, travelogues, maps, and city views. An especially interesting chapter is dedicated to the representations of the beheading and dismemberment of bodies in political executions, a theme that is also relevant in the sources discussed in this paper. Malcolm provides an overview of political writings in the West about the East between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries. He explores in depth the ways in which Western European writers like Machiavelli, Bodin, and Montesquieu wrote about the Ottoman Empire and examines concepts such as ‘oriental despotism’ and  4 See Hankins, ‘Renaissance Crusaders’; Bisaha, Creating East and West, pp. 1–12; Meserve, Empires of Islam, pp. 1–22.  5 For a survey of the literature, see Dursteler, Venetians in Constantinople, pp. 5–10.  6 See Kafadar, Between Two Worlds; Faroqhi, The Ottoman Empire and the World around It; Brummett, Ottoman Seapower and Levantine Diplomacy.  7 See Dursteler, Renegade Women; Rothman, Brokering Empire; Greene, Shared World.

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their importance to Western political thought. His conclusion is that the negative perception of Islam was adopted by Western radical thinkers who expanded their criticism to all religions.8

Representing Diplomatic Indignities The mid-seventeenth century was marked by heightened tensions between Constantinople’s Venetian residents and its Ottoman rulers owing to the Turkish invasion of Crete (1645). In 1649, the Venetian bailo in Constantinople, Giovanni Soranzo, and his delegation were summoned to the Topkapi Palace and, in the context of the Venetian refusal to cede Crete, were interrogated in the presence of an executioner. Dispatches record that the entire Venetian delegation was subjected to the indignity of stocks and chains and led in procession through the city.9 In the following pages I deal specifically with the textual descriptions and pictorial narratives depicting these dramatic events. The major Venetian institution in Constantinople was the bailate, which consisted of Venetian delegates, the ambassador, and his staff. The Venetian embassy served as the focal point of the Venetian nation in the city and as a diplomatic and commercial centre for the Venetian community.10 The Venetian embassy included a famiglia that ranged from twenty-five to thirty-five officials attached to the bailo. It usually included a secretary, assistants, an accountant, a chaplain, a doctor, a household manager, dragomans, giovanni della lingua (young men training to be dragomans), and servants. The most important position in the embassy after that of the bailo was the secretary, who was responsible for communication between the bailo and his many correspondents in Venice, such as the Senate, the Council of Ten, and other officials, and served as a notary for the entire Venetian community. The secretaries also helped the bailo in his diplomatic and consular roles. In the mid-seventeenth century the secretary was Giovanni Battista Ballarino, chief advisor to bailo Giovanni Soranzo, who had an impressive career as a diplomat serving in Vienna and Candia before being sent to Constantinople. Another prominent member of the Venetian embassy was the chaplain, the Conventual Franciscan friar Niccolò Guidalotto da Mondavio, who served from 1647 to 1655, celebrating Mass daily in the embassy’s small chapel with the bailo and the famiglia in attendance and acting as a spiritual  8 See Brummett, Mapping the Ottomans; Malcolm, Useful Enemies.  9 For the reports of the Venetian ambassadors delivered before the Venetian Senate, see Albéri, Relazioni degli ambasciatori veneti.  10 On the Venetian Embassy in Constantinople, see Valensi, The Birth of the Despot; Raby, ‘The Serenissima and the Sublime Porte’, pp. 91–98; Bertelé, Il palazzo degli ambasciatori; Coco and Manzonetto, Baili veneziani alla Sublime Porta. On the bailo, see Benzoni, ‘A proposito dei baili veneziani a Costantinopoli’; Dursteler, ‘The Bailo in Constantinople’, pp. 1–8.

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advisor to the bailo. In 1636, Alvise Contarini described the embassy’s small chapel as ‘collapsing in numerous places, without an altarpiece, and indecorous’.11 Elsewhere, I have discussed Fra Guidalotto’s activities as a carto­grapher and his political propaganda advocating a Crusade at the same time that he created an impressive panorama of Constantinople and sent it to Pope Alexander VII.12 Here, I focus on his eyewitness account as related in the manu­script that accompanied the panorama (currently in the Vatican Library) of the Venetian–Ottoman confrontation during that period. Fra Guidalotto mentioned various officials in his manu­script, including Secretary Ballarino, describing him as one of the most devoted servants of the Holy Republic of Venice and noting that he was mistreated by the Ottomans.13 The period witnessed the background of the Ottoman siege of Candia, which eventually ended in the island’s surrender in 1669. The War of Candia was waged between the Republic of Venice and her allies (chief among them the Knights of Malta, the Papal States, and France) and the Ottoman Empire and lasted nearly twenty-five years. There were battles on the island itself and naval engagements and raids around the Aegean Sea, with Dalmatia serving as a secondary theatre of operations.14 The events described here happened in the mid-seventeenth century, around the outbreak of the war. In 1644, a ship of Hospitallers attacked the Turkish fleet in the Aegean Sea, and Giovanni Soranzo, who was bailo at the time, and the French ambassador, Jean Delahaye, were summoned before the grand vizier for an enquiry. The Venetians were accused of assisting in the Hospitallers’ aggression, but Soranzo and the Venetian dragoman Giovanni Antonio Grillo denied any Venetian involvement. In April 1645, an Ottoman fleet under the command of Yusuf Pasha was able to conquer most of the island of Crete except for the port city of Candia. The Ottomans were partially supported by the local Greek community of the island, but their progress was stopped at the walls of Candia. In June 1645, Soranzo became a prisoner of the Porte for three weeks and was put under house arrest. He sent a message to the Austrian ambassador, Count Hermann Czernin, insisting that his arrest was contrary to international law. Notwithstanding his confinement, Soranzo was able to send dispatches to Venice and to receive them from there. He was finally released, but tension between the Venetian embassy and the Ottoman government continued to escalate.15

 11 Dursteler, Venetians in Constantinople, p. 27.  12 See Debby Ben-Aryeh, Crusade Propaganda in Word and Image in Early Modern Italy.  13 Guidalotto, Parafrasi di opera, fol. 41r: ‘Et alla fine l’empie, e spietate crudeltade usate contro ogni giustitia al presente Bailo Capello, a Ballarino’.  14 On the War of Candia, see Setton, Venice, Austria and the Turks in the Seventeenth Century, pp. 106–08.  15 Setton, Venice, Austria and the Turks in the Seventeenth Century, pp. 114–27; Pedani-Fabris, Venezia Porta d’Oriente, p. 157.

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A few years later, in March 1649, during the siege of Candia, Soranzo and his Venetian delegation, including the secretary Ballarino and the chaplain Fra Guidalotto, were summoned to the Topkapi Palace and interrogated in the presence of an executioner.16 A key role in these events was apparently played by the dragoman Grillo, who was executed as a result of his efforts to negotiate between the Ottoman Court and the bailo and his party. Grillo was declared a martyr by the Venetian government and became a symbol of Venetian heroism against the Ottomans.17 Fra Guidalotto and another member of Soranzo’s staff were allowed to return to Constantinople to keep watch over the official Venetian residence. Two secretaries who had escaped the interrogation were able to gather important papers and bring them to the French embassy. Jean Delahaye worked hard to achieve the release of the rest of the Venetian delegation, and Soranzo was finally set free two months later, in May 1649. Guidalotto returned to Italy in 1655 and recorded in his manu­script that diplomats in Constantinople continued to be expelled, arrested, and humiliated. He noted particularly that the French ambassador, Jean Delahaye, who was a prominent figure in the Ottoman capital and served as a major protector of the Catholic ecclesiastical institutions and of the Catholic citizens at large, was also imprisoned and humiliated by the Ottomans. Fra Guidalotto called Delahaye the most kind and prudent knight, the most excellent Christian ambassador, and saw him as a great friend and protector of Venice who had also suffered from the Ottomans.18 Finally, in 1660, Delahaye was jailed in the Seven Towers in Constantinople on the accusation that he had defaulted on a debt and left for France. Niccolò Guidalotto’s experience in Constantinople was characterized by a deep sense of humiliation. When reading his manu­script, one gets a strong sense of a call for vengeance. The friar constantly argued that he, personally, was mistreated by the Ottomans and laments the humiliation of the Venetian delegation in general. Fra Guidalotto had left Constantinople with bitter feelings of disillusionment vis-à-vis the Ottomans and saw himself as a victim who was unjustly mistreated and then banished after serving his Republic. The friar lamented the fate of Alvise Contarini (1597–1651), who was the Venetian bailo in Constantinople from 1636 to 1641 (before Soranzo) and who, according to the friar, was mistreated by Sultan Murad IV and by the Ottoman ‘barbarians’. Guidalotto then turned to the events of his time. Lamenting the ill treatment of foreign ambassadors, Guidalotto wrote:

 16 Setton, Venice, Austria and the Turks in the Seventeenth Century, pp. 124–26.  17 Pedani-Fabris, Venezia Porta d’Oriente, p. 163.  18 Guidalotto, Parafrasi di opera, fol. 41r: ‘et ultimamente contro del gentilissimo, e prudentissimo Cavaliere Giovanni dell’Haye eccelentissimo Ambasciador Christianissimo’.

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In che mai peccò sagacissimo Ambasciator d’ Inghilterra, quando per ordine d’ Ibraimo con furiosissima barbarie tratto, e (si può dir) strascinato fuori di Casa con strapazzi horribili à vista d’un mondo, publicamente per Pera, e Galatà condotto.19 [The wisest Ambassador of England never erred, when through the order of Ibraim he was treated with furious barbarism and one can say was dragged out of his House and subjected to horrible treatment in the sight of the world, publicly conducted, through Pera and Galata.] He described the miserable fortune of the Austrian ambassador, who, ‘quando con pesantissimi ferri a’ piedi, in un publico balcone, a vista di tutta Constantinopoli fu tenuto per più di tre mesi misaramente per la gola’ (with the heaviest irons upon his feet, was held for three months on a public balcony, in the sight of the whole of Constantinople, miserably chained around the throat).20 Yet most tragic of all was the fate of the Venetian ambassador: Che scempij inauditi, ne mai più veduti non si fecero per le publiche, e più cospicue strade di Constantinopoli del Cavalier Giovanni Soranzo Bailo degnissimo per la Serenissima alla rimembranza de quali tanto s’inhorridisce la mente, quanto il cuore s’inchina al merito di quei sudori, co’ quali questo constantissimo heroe in servitio altretanto funesto, quanto laborioso per il principe, per la patria, e per la fede, s’è reso degno d’una corona di martire all’hora, che reggeva l’ Imperio Acrep Bassà Primo Visir nella minorità del hora Regnante Sultan Mehmeth?21 [What unprecedented destruction, of a like never seen since, was not carried out in the public and busy streets of Constantinople on the Knight Giovanni Soranzo, most worthy ambassador of his most strict [holiness]: in remembrance of which the mind is so much horrified, when the heart bows to the merit of those noble efforts with which his faithful Hero so laboriously served the Prince, for the Fatherland, and for the Faith, now makes himself worthy of a martyr’s crown, who holds up the Empire of Köprülü Mehmet Pasha Primo Vizier as a minority under the now reigning Sultan Mehmed?] Fra Guidalotto concluded his elegy with a prophecy that God will revenge the ill treatment of the ambassadors and will destroy the Ottoman monster. One should note the vocabulary used by Fra Guidalotto, who called the Venetian ambassador ‘worthy of a martyr’s crown’, a religious termino­logy that would be vividly illustrated in the pictorial tradition.

 19 Guidalotto, Parafrasi di opera, fol. 42r.  20 Guidalotto, Parafrasi di opera, fol. 42r.  21 Guidalotto, Parafrasi di opera, fol. 42v.

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Memorie Turchesche The intriguing manu­script Memorie Turchesche offers a visual interpretation of the events described by Guidalotto. It is a fascinating book, which contains a great deal of information on the history of the Ottoman Empire, on daily life in Constantinople, and on political events of the mid-seventeenth century, with a particular focus on Venetian and Ottoman relations. The sixty-one-page volume, which is made up of a text accompanied by miniatures, measures 21 × 30 cm. Dated to the second half of the seventeenth century, it is part of the Cicogna collection of books and works donated by the Venetian nobleman Emmanuele Antonio Cicogna to the Correr Museum and Library in 1865 (the museum was founded in 1830).22 The first page of the volume notes: ‘Questo curioso libro spetta a costumi turcheschi e a quella storia. Ma spetta anche alla storia veneta per quanto vi si narra del Soranzo ambasciator e altri’ (This curious book concerns the costumes of the Turks and their history. But it also concerns Venetian history as narrated by Ambassador Soranzo and others).23 The volume includes fifty-seven folios, plus a two-page appendix and two architectural illustrations, and has fifty-nine richly coloured and marvellously executed miniatures. It can be divided into four major sections: the first describes the dynasties and histories of the Ottoman sultans in chrono­logical order (fols 1r–17r), the second illustrates daily life in Istanbul (fols 18r–35r), the third depicts the events following the clash between the Venetian embassy and the Turkish government in the mid-seventeenth century (fols 36r–46r), and the fourth tells of the naval battles during the War of Candia and concludes with a schematic and generic city view of Constantinople (fols 47r–59r). At the end of the manu­script there are two vivid architectural illustrations: Yedikule (the fortress of the Seven Towers)

 22 Venice, BMC, Memorie Turchesche, MS Cicogna 1971. This manu­script was first examined in 2012 by E. Natalie Rothman in ‘Visualizing a Space of Encounter’. Rothman discusses the Memorie Turchesche in the context of diplomatic history, suggests that it was written by Giovanni Battista Ballarino, and dates it to the early 1660s. She also argues persuasively that this album and one contemporary to it, now lost, but reproduced in facsimile as Alt-Stambuler Hof- und Volksleben: Ein Türkisches Miniaturenalbum aus dem 17. Jahrhundert by Franz Taeschner in 1925, may have originally formed a single work. I would like to add further discussion to Rothman’s analysis especially regarding the volume’s third section, which deals with the confrontation between the Venetian delegates and the Ottoman authorities.  23 Venice, BMC, Memorie Turchesche, MS Cicogna 1971, fol. 1r. The book then notes that it relates the life of Giovanni Ballarino, the first chancellor of the Venetian Republic, as told by Marco Trevisan in 1671, in which the hanging of the dragomen and the death of the giovanni della lingua and the two letter carriers are described: ‘Veggansi l’immoralità nella vita del Giambattista Ballarino primo cancelliere della Repubblica Veneta, desunti di Marco Trevisan ove ricordansi il Tarsia giovine di Ligna, il dragoman Scillo strangolati- i due Portalettere, uno impalato, l’altro inganzato, ecc’.

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and the Rumeli Hisari (the fortress on the Black Sea) (fols 60r–61r). On the cover there is an indication that the events described in the book are told from the perspective of Ambassador Giovanni Soranzo and other officials, further fostering the notion that the volume was composed by a member(s) of the Venetian embassy. The section that deals with the dynastic history of the Turks discusses the reigns of the Ottoman sultans: Osman Orkhan, 1328; Murad I, 1350; Bayezid I, 1373; Mehmed I, 1398; Murad II, Mehmed II, and Bayezid II, 1482; Selim I, 1511; Suleyman I and Selim, 1567; Murad III and Mehmed III, 1596; Ibrahim, Mehmed IV, Mustafa II, and Ahmed II, 1617, with a commentary (a few lines or up to two pages on each) on their characters and deeds. The sultans are figured similarly, wearing colourful oriental garments with turbans on their heads, and they are portrayed kneeling on oriental rugs, gesturing ceremoniously. It is hard to distinguish among them as they all appear to belong to the same generic type and resemble Bellini’s celebrated depiction of Mehmed II. These portraits belong to a long Venetian tradition exemplified by the work of the Venetian artists Giacomo Franco, Paolo Ramusio, and Nicollo Nelli, wherein the sultans are imaged with beards and turbans, and the illustrations were produced in great numbers.24 The section that deals with the customs and habits of the Turks is illustrated with colourful miniatures depicting daily life in Constantinople during the seventeenth century. The scenes include the court of the great Sultan; three obelisks and three pyramids that had been in Constantinople from ancient times; the khan (merchant’s hostel) of Constantinople, showing men and horses resting; the khan of the valide sultan; the women of the Great Sultanate playing music, female musicians and dancers appearing before the sultan and his wife; shops selling vegetables and fruits; the city’s great aqueduct; an enigmatic depiction of a bridge with a man on either side; a horse fair; two shops with different kinds of commodities; the central market, where food, clothes, and other merchandise are being sold; a hamam (a Turkish bath); an impressive parade at the gates of the city; images of the 1660 fire in Constantinople, depicted in detail on two pages; various vessels, including battleships, from the Ottoman and Venetian navies; the castles near the Black Sea; and various buildings in the city. One typical miniature highlighting the city’s prosperity shows merchants selling flowers, fruits, and poultry to female customers (possibly servants) dressed in Muslim outfits, while other merchants weigh wheat and bread.25 Other illustrations depict brisk trade being conducted in the market, with an impressive obelisk with scenes of kneeling people, cannons being fired, fish and horses, and elaborate geometric designs. In these illustrations, two minarets are shown at a distance beyond a short wall, indicating that

 24 Wilson, The World in Venice, pp. 221–47.  25 Venice, BMC, Memorie Turchesche, MS Cicogna 1971, fol. 27r.

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Figure 3.1. ‘The City Aqueduct’, Venice, BMC, MS Cicogna 1971, fol. 29r. Second half of the seventeenth century. Photo: Author.

this market is in the Muslim quarter of the city.26 There is a special emphasis on a highly embellished obelisk, which is a tribute to Constantinople’s Byzantine and Christian heritage. In another miniature, we see a schematic and a simple city view, including private homes and mosques, which also highlights the centrality of the aqueduct completed by the Roman Emperor Valens in the late fourth century ce, represented on a huge scale as a major focus in the cityscape.27 The choice of the aqueduct as the city’s major monument was clearly a tribute to its Roman past (Figure 3.1). I contend that the author of the Memorie Turchesche focused on the Roman past of the city and emphasized Classical remains and Byzantine buildings. The choice to depict numerous architectural monuments from the city’s ancient history was an attempt to appropriate the city back to Christianity, a tendency shared by various Western carto­graphers and Venetian authors of the period. The richly dramatic illustration that portrays the great city fire of 1660 shows burning houses, churches, and mosques, with Muslims in turbans and Christian clergymen running from the disaster and then working  26 Venice, BMC, Memorie Turchesche, MS Cicogna 1971, fol. 28r.  27 Venice, BMC, Memorie Turchesche, MS Cicogna 1971, fol. 29r.

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Figure 3.2. ‘The Great Fire of 1660’, Venice, BMC, MS Cicogna 1971, fol. 35r. Second half of the seventeenth century. Photo: Author.

together to quench the fire (Figure 3.2). The left-hand side of the picture, which depicts the very early stages of the conflagration, figures a couple escaping from a burning house above and some Muslims raising their hands in despair below. The right-hand side shows the fire at its peak, with a group of Muslims standing on the sidelines, while others are trying to put the fire out. In the centre of the picture is an image of a Greek Orthodox clergyman trying to escape.28 In a sense, much of the material in the first and second sections of the Memorie Turchesche manu­script is reminiscent of the costume book genre, revealing interesting details of daily life in Constantinople. The source for many of the Turkish costumes depicted in sixteenth-century European works was Nicolas de Nicolay’s illustrated diary of his visit to the Ottoman Empire as part of the French delegation sent by Francis I. Another source was Pieter Coecke van Aelst’s Costumes and Fashions of the Turks published in 1553, which shows views of Istanbul and describes Turkish customs,29 and a third was Melchior Lorichs’s rich ­graphic record of Turkish life and landscape, which includes drawings and prints that were published posthumously in a book entitled Well-Engraved and Cut Figures (1619).30  28 Venice, BMC, Memorie Turchesche, MS Cicogna 1971, fol. 35r.  29 Wilson, The World in Venice, pp. 70–132.  30 On Lorichs, see Wunder, ‘Western Travelers, Eastern Antiquities, and the Image of the Turk’.

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The first Italian Turkish costume book was printed in Venice in 1563 with engravings by Enea Vico showing servants and various female figures. In 1580, a book of Oriental and European costumes was published by Martino Rota. Cesare Vecellio’s famous costume book Habiti antichi et moderni di tutto il mondo (Of Ancient and Modern Dress from Different Parts of the World) was published in Venice in 1590, and the seventh volume of the book was devoted to the Ottoman Empire (Habiti dei Turchi). Costume books with Western portrayals of the habits and customs of the Turks became even more popular in the seventeenth century. One such volume (Cod. Ita. 491), which can be found in the Marciana Library in Venice, illustrates individual occupations in Constantinople and their associated dress. It includes captions in Italian and illustrates the portraits of various sultans and their wives, officials of the court, officers and soldiers, and merchants and traders, as well as activity in the markets and other scenes of daily life in the city.31 Some of the portrayals in Memorie Turchesche that show daily life in the city reveal piquant information. For instance, the image that includes the Ottoman fireplace might suggest the drinking habits of the Turks, since there are some interesting comments on the drinking of coffee, and it might be fruitfully compared to the picture in the Marciana Library costume book showing a boy serving coffee.32 The depiction of the sultan’s women playing music might suggest the type of musical instruments that were used in the court as well as the status of women in the sultan’s circles, and one might well compare it to the scene in the Marciana Library costume book that shows various female musicians at the court.33 These costume books, which were often produced by Turkish artists, served as practical guides to Turkish society by depicting the sultans and their courts, the military and religious officials, the city’s trade and economic life, and its diverse populations.34 Memorie Turchesche reflects a similar interest in Turkish daily life, architectural monuments, and trade. The first and second parts of the Cicogna Memorie Turchesche manu­script, which explore Ottoman political history and daily life in Constantinople, are characterized by a neutral, or even positive, approach towards the Turkish population and its leaders. Ottoman history and the portraits of the sultans are presented chrono­logically, and the images of daily life in the city reveal commercial prosperity and thriving cultural activity. Various mercantile enterprises such as the horse fair, the grain market, and the khan for foreign merchants are described along with leisure pursuits.  31 On this costume book, see Curatola, Eredità dell’Islam, pp. 266–67: ‘Fogge diverse di vestire de’ turchi’ (Diverse Turkish Habits of Dress); Concina, Venezia e Istanbul, pp. 216–18, 233–42; Carboni, Venice and the Islamic World, pp. 298–99, 318.  32 Venice, BMC, Memorie Turchesche, MS Cicogna 1971, fol. 33r, Venice, BNM, Cod. Ita. 491, fol. 69r.  33 Venice, BMC, Memorie Turchesche, MS Cicogna 1971, fol. 24r; and Venice, BMV, Cod. Ita. 491, fols 42r and 49r.  34 On the tradition of Ottoman costume books, see Raby, ‘The Serenissima and the Sublime Porte’.

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Figure 3.3. ‘Interrogation’, Venice, BMC, MS Cicogna 1971, fol. 36r. Second half of the seventeenth century. Photo: Author.

The members of the grand vizier’s court and the wives of the sultan residing in the Old Palace are shown in a positive light, emphasizing the strength and prosperity of the Turkish elite. Furthermore, occasionally Muslims, Christians, and, perhaps, Jews are imaged in a shared world of mercantile activity and life in the city, which suggests peaceful coexistence. In the third section of the Memorie Turchesche, however, the author’s tone changed completely as he described the cruelty of the Turks in what might be seen as a fierce political and religious accusation against the Ottoman authorities and their ill treatment of the Venetians. Various episodes are portrayed in detail. Each stage in this chain of events is described in full, with images illustrating the Turkish government persecuting the innocent and virtuous Venetian officials during the War of Candia. The events are portrayed in eight specific scenes: in the first, Ambassador Soranzo and the secretary Giovanni Battista Ballarino are shown kneeling on a rug, being interrogated by the grand vizier’s executioner with a group of Ottoman officials standing by (Figure 3.3).35 Next, a two-page illustration shows a long line of Venetian officials in chains in a humiliating procession  35 Venice, BMC, Memorie Turchesche, MS Cicogna 1971, fol. 36r.

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Figure 3.4. ‘Procession’, Venice, BMC, MS Cicogna 1971, fol. 37r–38r. Second half of the seventeenth century. Photo: Author.

(Figure 3.4).36 The following scene shows the grand vizier leading a chained Soranzo into the Rumeli Hisari, the fortress where he was incarcerated (Figure 3.5).37 In the next scene, the Venetian dragoman Grillo is being dragged by the executioner at the entrance to the Rumeli Hisari in a dramatic and intense portrayal (1649).38 We then see an image of the body of the previous dragoman Marcantonio Borisi, who was executed in 1620, hanging on a wooden structure with four Muslim spectators standing at the side chatting.39 The succeeding depiction shows a Venetian courier being tormented and hanged in a brutal rendition, with a sword in his stomach and blood pouring out.40 The next scene is a ferocious depiction showing another Venetian courier being sliced through by a long knife, which is protruding out of his mouth.41 A particularly vivid image shows the entire Venetian embassy’s staff in chains sitting in a row at a table with Ottoman officials conferring in the background.42 Two additional scenes portray later developments: when Ballarino became de facto the new ambassador (replacing Giovanni Cappello, who had succeeded Soranzo) and was interrogated, arrested, and taken on horseback to a prison in Adrianople (Figures 3.6 and 3.7).43  36  37  38  39  40  41  42  43

Venice, BMC, Memorie Turchesche, MS Cicogna 1971, fols 37v–38r. Venice, BMC, Memorie Turchesche, MS Cicogna 1971, fol. 39r. Venice, BMC, Memorie Turchesche, MS Cicogna 1971, fol. 40r. Venice, BMC, Memorie Turchesche, MS Cicogna 1971, fol. 41r. Venice, BMC, Memorie Turchesche, MS Cicogna 1971, fol. 42r. Venice, BMC, Memorie Turchesche, MS Cicogna 1971, fol. 43r. Venice, BMC, Memorie Turchesche, MS Cicogna 1971, fol. 44r. Venice, BMC, Memorie Turchesche, MS Cicogna 1971, fols 44r, 46r.

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Figure 3.5. ‘The Arrest of Giovanni Soranzo’, Venice, BMC, MS Cicogna 1971, fol. 39r. Second half of the seventeenth century. Photo: Author.

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Figure 3.6. ‘Secretary Ballarino being Led to Prison’, Venice, BMC, MS Cicogna 1971, fol. 44r. Second half of the seventeenth century. Photo: Author.

What is striking about these scenes is their narrative and picturesque quality and the realistic portrayal of events, with each member of the Venetian embassy represented individually with his particular dress and facial features in portrait-like depictions. The principal Venetian officials are recognizable by their attire: Soranzo is shown in a brown robe and a red hat; Ballarino is in black and is wearing a black hat; and chaplain Fra Guidalotto is dressed as a friar. The images are very vivid and are rendered in minute detail. An artistic issue associated with these scenes is the use of pictorial narrative and the question of composition: how the author was able to introduce dramatic quality and represent action occurring over time convincingly. The imperative to create a dramatic pictorial narrative played an important part in the design of the Memorie Turchesche, especially in the third section, where the various episodes are portrayed in detail and each stage of the interrogation and the persecution of the Venetians is illustrated in full. There is a strong sense of humiliation and a desire for revenge: the Venetian bailo is being led by a rope around his neck, the grand vizier is stepping over the body of the dragoman Grillo, and the Venetians are figured as prisoners chained to one another. These Venetians officials are shown being publicly humiliated and physically tormented in a manner very similar to the way in which Christian religious martyrs are represented in the visual tradition; their corporal

creating early modern martyrs in the venetian–ottoman encounter

Figure 3.7. ‘The Prison of Secretary Ballarino’, Venice, BMC, MS Cicogna 1971, fol. 46r. Second half of the seventeenth century. Photo: Author.

suffering and reactions as they are being stabbed through their stomachs or throats or as they are being hanged are very similar to the portrayals of executions of earlier martyrs in the Christian tradition.

Miniatures, Frescoes, and Reliefs Compared When considering the icono­graphy of these images, a comparison might be drawn between the miniatures in the Memorie Turchesche that portray the confrontation between the Venetians and the Ottomans and the same kind of scenes in a unique series of seventeenth-century frescoes created by an anonymous painter for the Valtorta family. Part of the family’s private collection and conserved in their private villa in Dolo, a small town near Venice, these frescoes feature similar scenes of Ambassador Soranzo and his arrest, as well as portrayals of his deeds and glories. The frescoes illustrate a narrative sequence that begins with Soranzo being led in chains; in the second scene the grand vizier is ordering Soranzo’s 1649 arrest; in the third, Soranzo is shackled; in the fourth, he is being taken to the castle of the Rumeli Hisari; the fifth scene shows his arrival at the Rumeli Hisari; the sixth depicts the Turkish military forces looting the Venetian Embassy during Soranzo’s absence; and the seventh scene shows Soranzo’s return from the prison and his release by the grand vizier. In con-

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trast to the miniatures that accent the tragedy of Grillo, who was hanged, and the humiliation of the Venetian embassy staff as a collective tragedy for the Venetians, the frescoes tend to emphasize a heroic Soranzo as a victim of Turkish cruelty and a Venetian martyr.44 We can also compare the scenes depicting the persecution of Ambassador Ballarino in the Memorie Turchesche with sculpted reliefs showing similar events in the Capella Ballarino in the Church of St Peter Martyr in Murano. There we find a monument dedicated to Ballarino, with sculpted reliefs completed by a local artist in 1680, showing him being taken to prison and being abused by the Ottoman authorities, illustrated in a manner very similar to the renditions in the Memorie Turchesche miniatures. Ballarino was a successful politician and diplomat in the Venetian Republic. He carried out several diplomatic missions abroad as secretary to Francesco Molino on Crete (1627–31) and to Francesco Zeno in Dalmatia (1632–34) and then as resident diplomatic delegate in Vienna (1635–38). In Constantinople, Ballarino first served as secretary to Ambassadors Simone Contarini and Giorgio Giustinian (1624–26) and then to Ambassador Soranzo. From 1653 on, he served as a replacement for Ambassador Cappello when the latter attempted suicide. Ballarino was persecuted by the Ottoman authorities on numerous occasions: during his first sojourn in Constantinople he was led by a rope through the streets of the city and imprisoned together with Soranzo and other Venetian officials. He returned to Venice in 1650, but went to Constantinople a second time in 1653 as a Venetian representative. He was incarcerated again, suffering, according to his bio­grapher, terrible humiliation and various tortures. He was rearrested in 1656 in the same degrading manner. Ballarino was elected great chancellor of Venice in 1660 but never assumed the position as he was detained in Constantinople and died on his way back to Venice in 1666. He was buried in the city of Isdin in Macedonia in the Franciscan Church of Santa Maria. There was a public ceremony in his memory in Venice as a token of respect and admiration, but his body was never brought back to the Venetian Republic.45 The Ballarino Chapel commemorating Giovanni Battista Ballarino is in the Church of St Peter Martyr in Murano, which was founded in 1348 along with a Dominican monastery, and was originally dedicated to St John the Baptist. The church was destroyed in a fire in 1474 and rebuilt in 1511. The interior is based on the basilica plan, with three naves divided by two series  44 On the frescoes depicting Soranzo’s arrest, see Bertelé, Il palazzo degli ambasciatori, pp. 178–95.  45 See Torcellan, ‘Ballarino, Giovanni Battista’. For Ballarino’s extensive bio­graphy, see Trevisan, L’immortalita di Gio. The interrogation is described in some detail in Trevisan, L’immortalita di Gio, pp. 92–95. For a comprehensive history of the Ballarin family, see Ballarin, I Ballarin di Murano, pp. 7–10. See also Rothman, ‘Visualizing a Space of Encounter’ for a detailed survey of Ballarino’s life.

creating early modern martyrs in the venetian–ottoman encounter

Figure 3.8. ‘Portrait Bust of Giovanni Battista Ballarino’, Murano, Church of St Peter Martyr, Capella Ballarino. Late seventeenth century. Image from Sailko [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:San_Pietro_Martire_(Murano)__Interior] issued under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

of large columns and a wooden ceiling. The presbytery is quite large, with barrel vaults and two small side chapels. Apart from the high altar, there are other minor altars, three for each nave. The Ballarino Chapel, built in 1506 following the death of an important member of the distinguished Ballarino family of glassmakers and civic officials for the Venetian Republic, is in the right-hand wing.46  46 On the Church of St Peter Martyr in Murano, see Benorchia, La chiesa di San Pietro Martire.

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Figure 3.9. ‘Sculpted Relief of Venetian Secretary Ballarino being Led to Prison’, Murano, Church of St Peter Martyr, Capella Ballarino. Late seventeenth century. Image from Sailko [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:San_Pietro_Martire_(Murano)_-_Interior] issued under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

The Ballarino Chapel was dedicated to the Virgin and to St Joseph. There is a marble sculpture of God the Father on the main altar with two angels at the sides, which was created in 1681. The right-hand side of the chapel has a portrait bust of Giovanni Ballarino’s grandson, Giovanni Battista Padavino. Next to that are two paintings by Giovanni Contarini (1549 and 1604): St Joseph with a lily in his hand, and a prophet. On the left there is a monument dedicated to Giovanni Ballarino (Figure 3.8). Many Latin inscriptions in the chapel praise the Ballarino family at large, several relatives including Ballarino’s sons and grandsons, but they especially laud the great courage of Giovanni Ballarino himself, who is acclaimed for surviving the cruelty of the Turks.47 Two cupids support a portrait bust of Giovanni Ballarino, while another two prop up the eulogy; two bas reliefs at the sides show the prison where he was kept by the Turks and his liberation. Under the portrait bust is a  47 See Ballarin, I Ballarin di Murano, pp. 35–36, for the full inscription: ‘Etenim apud turcs labors vincula crceres mortis minas sibi crudeliter intentatas plurimorum annorum ambitu constntissime perpessum’.

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lengthy inscription lauding his great merits.48 The sculpted reliefs were done by an anonymous seventeenth-century artist and complement the two miniatures in the Memorie Turchesche manu­script. Taken together, these establish Ballarino’s legacy as a Venetian hero and martyr. Ballarino’s two sons, Domenico, who succeeded his father as the great chancellor of Venice but never gained the same fame as his father, and Alessandro, were also buried in the chapel.49 The first miniature dedicated to the story of Ballarino in the Memorie Turchesche shows him and his household being led to prison in Adrianople. He is mounted, and his servants and officials are standing next to him; the accompanying glossary notes: ‘Venetian Secretary Ballarino Led to Prison’. The next scene in the book shows the prison where he was held, a square khan with two Turkish guards at the entrance (Figures 3.6 and 3.7). Here the accompanying text indicates that it was ‘the first Han of Edirne’, where the Venetian Ambassador Giovanni Cappello was also detained.50 There are two sculpted reliefs in the Ballarino Chapel. One shows Ballarino and his household being taken to Adrianople with groups of Ottoman spectators following the procession, in a depiction that is almost identical to the miniature in the Memorie Turchesche (Figure 3.9). There is an inscription under the relief that explains that the image is of Ballarino being led to a prison, where there are the towers of the Black Sea and the khan of Adrianople, and that he was liberated from there through the divine intervention of the Virgin Mary.51 The second sculpted relief shows Ballarino being released from prison in a triumphant parade with his servants and belongings, this time heading in procession back in the direction of Constantinople (Figure 3.10). The inscription below the relief reads that because of the cruelty of the Turks, Ballarino was imprisoned in Adrianople, and that he was set free owing to divine intervention.52 In both scenes, the Madonna and Child appear in the upper corner of the relief with an inscription praising the Virgin for saving the glorious Ballarino from his dubious fate. Both reliefs show the Ottoman fortresses in the background and the prison in which Ballarino was kept in detail. It is interesting to note that the two impaled couriers that are shown so vividly in the book’s miniatures  48 For the inscription under the portrait bust praising Ballarino, see Ballarin, I Ballarin di Murano, pp. 37–38: ‘Soli Deo Gloria. Joannes Baptista Ballarinus eq. magnus Venetiarum Cancellarius muneribus diversis domi forisque apud Europae Principes sum cum laude perfuctus tandem post varios casus post multa rerum discrimina ultimum diem apud Turcas clausit’.  49 On the Ballarino Chapel, see Benorchia, La chiesa di San Pietro Martire, pp. 55–65.  50 Venice, BMC, Memorie Turchesche, MS Cicogna 1971, fols 44r, 46r.  51 Ballarin, I Ballarin di Murano, p. 38: ‘Catenis compendibusque vinctus in istis jacet Ballarinus carceribus. Quae sunt turres as Pontum Euxinum et gemino Kam. Adrianopoli a quibus Deiparae Verginis ope et misericordi liberator’.  52 Ballarin, I Ballarin di Murano, p. 38: ‘Turcarum sevitia et foeritate recrudescente in Adriano­ polis carceres nuper detruditur Ballarinus qua stamen divino praesidio illesus evadit’.

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Figure 3.10. ‘Sculpted Relief of the Release of Ballarino’, Murano, Church of St Peter Martyr, Capella Ballarino. Late seventeenth century. Image from Sailko [https://commons. wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:San_Pietro_Martire_(Murano)_-_Interior] issued under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

also appear in the background of the sculpted scene, which attests to the centrality of these bloody incidents in the Venetian legacy. When comparing the painted miniatures and the sculpted reliefs, the Memorie Turchesche’s written glossary and the inscriptions on the reliefs, it is interesting to note the similarities and differences. In both artistic media there is much admiration for Ballarino and a strong emphasis on the realistic and minute details of the prison in which he was kept. Ballarino is portrayed as a brave Venetian hero. In the book, the emphasis is on a downto-earth account of the events and the details of the persecution, whereas in the sculpted reliefs there is an additional focus on divine help and his miraculous release. The differences are connected to the distinct media and context: a diplomatic treatise in the form of a book of memories featuring realistic narrative versus a commemorative monument in a church chapel stressing divine intervention. Some of the details also reflect the time lapse between the production of the two works: the reliefs were created about twenty years after the miniatures, by which time Ballarino had died and his legacy as a Venetian hero and martyr was well established.

creating early modern martyrs in the venetian–ottoman encounter

Conclusion The artistic images and texts analysed in this paper belong to a tradition distinct from both the travelling Europeans and the learned humanists. These texts and works of art reveal an intimate knowledge of Constantinople’s cultural and social environment and, especially, of its international diplomacy. The authors and artists discussed here were deeply involved in internal and external politics and committed to the Venetian interests. These examples can tell us much about Venetian–Ottoman relations at the time as well as about the use of the visual icon for political ends. The various visual sources discussed above — the painted miniatures, the frescoes, and the sculpted reliefs — illustrate a tense moment of confrontation between the Venetian diplomats and the Ottoman authorities in mid-seventeenth-century Constantinople, when the Venetian representatives were interrogated, imprisoned, and, in a few cases, even executed. The Venetian visual tradition aspired to commemorate these individuals as patriotic heroes depicting their tortures and persecutions and establishing their images as Venetian martyrs. My intention here was thus twofold: first, to show that the clashes between the Venetians and the Ottomans due to a political crisis were mixing together both diplomacy and religion and, second, to highlight the power of art in creating the myth of early modern martyrs in the city. Analysing a specific moment of crisis in the relations between the Venetians and the Ottomans in detail indicates that the relations between the Serenissima and the Porte were complex, alternating between periods of peace and cooperation and times of harsh confrontation. Religious factors had a major impact on promoting hostility between the two nations, and religious sentiments and vocabulary played an important role within diplomatic circles. Political and religious aspects created a complex and multilayered network of interreligious clashes between Islam and Christianity, as evidenced by the fate of Venetian officials working in the Ottoman city. The depictions I have discussed, both verbal and visual, show the way in which depictions of the scenes of crisis and conflict appropriated the motifs of the Christian tradition.

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Works Cited Manu­script and Archival Sources Guidalotto da Mondavio, Niccolò, Parafrasi di opera a penna rappresentante in dissegno un prospetto dell’Imperiale Città di Constantinopoli (Pesaro, 1622) (Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Chig. D. II, 22) Venice, Biblioteca di Museo Correr [BMC], Memorie Turchesche, MS Cicogna 1971 Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana [BNM], Cod. Ita. 491 Primary Sources Albéri, Eugenio, ed., Relazioni degli ambasciatori veneti al Senato durante il secolo decimosesto, vol. iii: I Turchi (Florence: Società editrice fiorentina, 1840) Trevisan, Marco, L’immortalita di Gio: Battista Ballarino Cavaliere, della Sereniss. Repub. di Venetia gran cancelliere descritta dalla penna amica di Marco Trivisano Nobile Veneto l’amico heroe (Venice: Pinelli, 1671) Secondary Studies Ballarin, Sergio, I Ballarin di Murano (Venice: Mestre Stamperia, 2006) Benorchia, Giuseppe, ed., La chiesa di San Pietro Martire (Venice: Stamperia Fabrizio Olivetti, 1980) Benzoni, Gino, ‘A proposito dei baili veneziani a Costantinopoli: qualche spunto, qualche osservazione’, Studi veneziani, 30 (1995), 69–77 Bertelé, Tomasso, Il palazzo degli ambasciatori di Venezia a Costantinopoli e le sue antiche memorie (Bo­logna: Apollo, 1932) Bisaha, Nancy, Creating East and West: Renaissance Humanists and the Ottoman Turks (Philadelphia: Uni­ver­sity of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) Brummett, Palmira, Mapping the Ottomans: Sovereignty, Territory, and Identity in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2015) —— , Ottoman Seapower and Levantine Diplomacy in the Age of Discovery (Albany: State Uni­ver­sity of New York Press, 1994) Carboni, Stefano, ed., Venice and the Islamic World, 828–1797, trans. by Deke Dusinberre (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; New Haven: Yale Uni­ ver­sity Press, 2007) Coco, Carla, and Flora Manzonetto, Baili veneziani alla Sublime Porta: Storia e caratteristiche dell’ambasciata veneta a Costantinopoli (Venice: Stamperia di Venezia, 1985) Concina, Ennio, ed., Venezia e Istanbul: Incontri, confronti e scambi (Venice: Il Forum, 1985) Curatola, Giovanni, ed., Eredità dell’Islam: Arte islamica in Italia (Rome: Silvana Editore, 1993)

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Debby Ben-Aryeh, Nirit, ‘Crusade Propaganda in Word and Image in Early Modern Italy: Niccolò Guidalotto Panorama of Constantinople’, Renaissance Quarterly, 67 (2014), 503–43 —— , Crusade Propaganda in Word and Image in Early Modern Italy: Niccolò Guidalotto’s Panorama of Constantinople (1662) (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2016) Dursteler, Eric, ‘The Bailo in Constantinople: Crisis and Career in Venice’s Early Modern Diplomatic Corps’, Mediterranean Historical Review, 16 (2001), 1–30 —— , Renegade Women: Gender, Identity, and Boundaries in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Baltimore: John Hopkins Uni­ver­sity Press, 2011) —— , Venetians in Constantinople: Nation, Identity and Coexistence in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Baltimore: John Hopkins Uni­ver­sity Press, 2006) Faroqhi, Suraiya, The Ottoman Empire and the World around It (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006) Greene, Molly, Shared World: Christians and Muslims in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni­ver­sity Press, 2002) Hankins, James, ‘Renaissance Crusaders: Humanist Crusade Literature in the Age of Mehmed II’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 49 (1995), 111–207 Kafadar, Cemal, Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State (Berkeley: Uni­ver­sity of California Press, 1995) Malcolm, Noel, Useful Enemies: Islam and the Ottoman Empire in Western Political Thought, 1450–1750 (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 2019) Meserve, Margaret, Empires of Islam in Renaissance Historical Thought (Cam­bridge, MA: Harvard Uni­ver­sity Press, 2008) Pedani-Fabris, Maria Pia, Venezia Porta d’Oriente (Bo­logna: Il Mulino, 2010) Raby, Julian, ‘The Serenissima and the Sublime Porte: Art in the Art of Diplomacy, 1453–1600’, in Venice and the Islamic World, 828–1797, ed. by Stefano Carboni, trans. by Deke Dusinberre (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­sity Press, 2007), pp. 90–119 Rothman, E. Natalie, Brokering Empire: Trans-Imperial Subjects between Venice and Istanbul (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Uni­ver­sity Press, 2012) —— , ‘Visualizing a Space of Encounter: Intimacy, Alterity, and Trans-Imperial Perspective in an Ottoman-Venetian Miniature Album’, Osmanlı Araştırmaları/ Journal of Ottoman Studies, 40 (2012), 39–80 Setton, Kenneth, Venice, Austria and the Turks in the Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1991) Torcellan, Gian Franco, ‘Ballarino, Giovanni Battista’, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. v (Rome: Treccani, 1963), pp. 570–71 Valensi, Lucette, The Birth of the Despot: Venice and the Sublime Porte, trans. by Arthur Denner (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Uni­ver­sity Press, 1993) Wilson, Bronwen, The World in Venice: Print, the City, and Early Modern Identity (Toronto: Uni­ver­sity of Toronto Press, 2005) Wunder, Amanda, ‘Western Travelers, Eastern Antiquities, and the Image of the Turk in Early Modern Europe’, Journal of Early Modern History, 7 (2003), 89–119

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II

Modelling Spirituality

Constant J. Mews and Marika Räsänen

Remembering Thomas Aquinas and the Saints of Dominican Renewal Tommaso of Siena and the Cividale Legendary

Introduction The Observant reform movement among the Dominicans had a profound impact throughout Italy, including both in Florence and in Naples. In this paper, we present research into a relatively little studied Dominican legendary from Cividale del Friuli of great relevance to the beginnings of the Observant reform movement in Venice. We argue (following Silvia Nocentini) that this legendary was produced under the supervision of Tommaso ‘Caffarini’ of Siena (c. 1350–1434) at Santi Giovanni e Paulo (San Zanipolo), Venice, between 1396 and 1409.1 Tommaso of Siena is most known for promoting the memory of Catherine of Siena (1347–1380) through his Legenda minor, an abridgement of Raymond of Capua’s Legenda maior written between 1385 and 1395, as well as the separate Libellus de supplemento.2 Tommaso is also remembered for recording the lives of a number of other holy women, some of quite modest reputation, notably Maria of Venice, a devotee of Catherine who died in 1399 at around twenty  1 Silvia Nocentini mentions this manu­script as emanating from Tommaso’s scriptorium in ‘Lo “Scriptorium” di Tommaso Caffarini a Venezia’, p. 117 n. 123, referring to the manu­script at BAV, MS Vat. lat. 15237.  2 His name is given in various forms and spellings; see Tomaso Caffarelli, Sanctae Catherinae Senensis Legenda Minor, ed. by Franzeschini; Tommaso of Siena, Libellus de supplemento legende, ed. by Cavallini and Foralosso.

Constant J. Mews ([email protected]) is Director of the Centre for Religious Studies, Monash Uni­ver­sity. He publishes widely on medi­eval intellectual and religious history, in particular of the twelfth century. Marika Räsänen ([email protected]) is Adjunct Professor of Cultural History and Deputy Director of the Centre for the Study of Christian Cultures, Uni­ver­sity of Turku. She specializes in late medi­eval hagio­graphy.

Renaissance Religions: Modes and Meanings in History, ed. by Peter Howard, Nicholas Terpstra, and Riccardo Saccenti, ES 26 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2021) pp. 109–126 10.1484/M.ES-EB.5.121902

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years of age. Fernanda Sorelli, who edited Tommaso’s Italian translation of this text, produced in 1403, noted that his auto­graph copy of that Life of Maria of Venice, composed in 1402, is preserved in the Cividale Legendary.3 Yet, just as important as these lives was a history Tommaso wrote between 1402 and 1406 of the Order of Penitents that Tommaso had founded in 1396.4 Tommaso became a prior at San Zanipolo in late 1394, just as his friend Giovanni Dominici was setting up Corpus Domini in Venice, a convent whose history would later be recorded by one of its first members, Bartolomea Riccoboni.5 Tommaso benefited from the support he gained from Dominici, who rose to influence at Florence between 1375 and 1388. Through Riccoboni’s chronicle we learn of the continuing tension in Venice created not just by the papal schism, but by the schism within the Order of Preachers, created when Raymond of Capua deposed Elias Raymundus as Master of the Order in 1380 for following Clement VII at Avignon rather than Urban VI. In 1399, however, Dominici was expelled from Venice for his political activities. The Cividale Legendary, we argue, became in Tommaso’s hands not just a collection of saints’ lives, but a historical compilation, serving to defend the cause of Dominici as a whole, as well as a foundation for the History of the Observant reform that he compiled after 1406. Tommaso was doing more than simply writing about devout women like Catherine of Siena. He was drawing on Dominican records to develop a model of sanctity based on the lives of people of modest background as well as those of famous saints. In his own way, Tommaso may have compiled the legendary to help heal the rift in the order created by the schism between Elias and Raymond of Capua, as well as to defend the controversial reputation of Dominici. Tommaso’s creation of this legendary fits into a broader picture in the Italian quattrocento, masterfully described by Alison Knowles Frazier as a period of intense revisioning of older hagio­graphy. Frazier concentrated on humanist writers and their interests in the history of their local churches and of the broader Roman Church of Rome as well as on the demands of reform as central impetus for revised texts.6 Looked at from this angle, Tommaso of Siena’s tireless activity in collecting and translating texts, as well as in crafting new narratives, fits into this larger agenda, addressing current issues within the Order of Preachers. Together with the increasing demands for reform, the most urgent problem was the schism. As Renate BlumenfeldKosinski has pointed out, a large variety of literary genres were generated to  3 Sorelli, La santità imitabile, pp. 22 and 45; Sorelli, ‘Imitable Sanctity’. See also Bornstein’s introduction and translation in Tommaso of Siena, The Legend of Maria of Venice.  4 Tommaso of Siena, Tractatus de ordine fratrum et sororum, ed. by Laurent; Tommaso of Siena, Tractatus de ordine fratrum et sororum, ed. by Cornaro.  5 Riccoboni, Life and Death in a Venetian Convent, ed. by Bornstein; Duval, ‘Done de San Domenego’.  6 Frazier, Possible Lives.

remembering thomas aquinas and the saints of dominican renewal

find innovative ways of resolving the schism.7 Yet, hagio­graphical narratives, both literal and pictorial, still served institutional ends, as they had done in previous centuries.8 Through the Cividale Legendary, we argue, Tommaso sought to find a model for reform in a situation in which the order was accused of having loosened its traditional discipline. He included new types of saintly models in the legendary as a means of promoting renewal. In this way, he collected texts that he hoped could create the foundation on which a reunited order could prosper in future. The death of Raymond in 1399 meant that leadership of the reform movement passed to Giovanni Dominici and Tommaso of Siena. The former returned to Florence while the latter was allowed to remain in Venice. Since Elias, master of the Avignon obedience of the order, had died in 1389, the feud between Raymond and Elias was now over. New masters were elected for both the Avignon and also the Roman obedience. Raymond’s successor was Thomas of Firmo in 1401, whose selection seems to have offered hope of reconciliation within the order. These faint hopes failed quickly when Thomas followed Pope Alexander V, who had been elected at the Council of Pisa in 1409. The order now had three general masters instead of two: Jean de Puinoix for the Avignon obedience, Ugolino de Camerino for that of Rome, and Thomas for that of Pisa.9 A spirit of compromise is evident from the decisions of its General Chapter at Udine in that year to celebrate the Feast of the Translation of the relics of St Thomas Aquinas, which Elias had initially instituted in 1370, and which he had tried to enforce in 1376 and 1378. Raymond of Capua, however, never mentioned these in any of the decisions over which he had responsibility. At the same time, Thomas of Firmo imposed prayers and antiphons inspired by Raymond of Capua.10 He supported Tommaso of Siena in his plan for an Order of Penitents, particularly through a 1402 treatise about such an order for male and female penitents, which he claimed had originally been established in 1280 by Munio de Zamora.11 In fact, as Maiju Lehmijoki-Gardner has brilliantly argued, Munio had never created an official third order, but his rules

 7 Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Poets, Saints, and Visionaries of the Great Schism. On the Dominican activity to reform the order by creating narrative historio­graphy, see Huijbers, Zealots for Souls.  8 For an example from the Renaissance Florentine context, see Lawless, ‘Myth, Ritual and Orthodoxy’. See also the very recent article of Diana Bullen Presciutti on the role of St Peter Martyr in Renaissance society: ‘Sleeping with the Enemy’. There is much literature on the tradition of combining hagio­graphy and politics, a recent essential example is Bozóky, Hagio­ graphie, idéo­logie et politique au Moyen Âge en Occident.  9 Montagnes, ‘Le Rôle du midi dominicain au temps du Grand Schisme’.  10 Acta capitulorum generalium, ed. by Reichert, p. 105. Some evidence of Thomas of Firmo’s efforts can be found in the Dominican convent of Colmar. The existing manu­script collection contains both liturgical materials, that of Thomas Aquinas’s translation and of Raymond of Capua’s antiphons, as additions from the turn of the fifteenth century. See Meyer, Collections d’Alsace.  11 Tommaso of Siena, Historia Disciplinae regularis, ed. by Cornaro.

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were used by women in Italy to establish a penitent way of life. Tommaso of Siena’s contribution was to consolidate the movement by creating a formal lineage through his historical research.12 He followed up his treatise with a second account, available only in an edition of 1755, of the evolution of the Observant reform in Venice, which includes a letter of Dominici included in the Cividale Legendary.13 Fernanda Sorelli observed in 1984 that Tommaso of Siena had copied the Life of Maria of Venice in the Cividale Legendary, without noticing that the same hand was responsible for headings and corrections throughout the codex (identified as T in the appendix).14 This leads us to conclude that it was compiled and annotated under Tommaso’s supervision at San Zanipolo between 1396 and 1409. The choice and combination of texts in this manu­script are very different from traditional Dominican legendaries, like the Speculum sanctorum of Bernard Gui (1261–1331) from the early fourteenth century. Bernard’s vast lectionary, produced and preserved at Toulouse and elsewhere, incorporates all the official saints in the Roman calendar (organized into martyrs, bishops, virgins, and confessors), including many local saints from his own region as well as official Dominican saints, accorded the highest honour, like Dominic, Peter Martyr, and (after 1323) Thomas Aquinas.15 By contrast, most of the saints included in the Cividale Legendary — listed in the appendix — are, with a few exceptions, much less well known. The legendary, we argue, offers an alternative view of Dominican history, much more relevant to the Observant reform. It involved both women and men and included those of high social rank as well as those of much more modest origins. In a sense, it provides a lens through which we can observe the historical sensitivity of Tommaso of Siena which is traditionally considered only in relation to penitent women.

The Contents of the Cividale Legendary and their Significance The legendary was described in detail in 1751 by Bernardo Maria De Rubeis as the eighth of ten manu­scripts belonging to the Dominicans of Cividale. His massive and meticulous study of the Dominican Order in the province of Venice was much concerned with the impact of the Observant reform in this region.16 The ninth manu­script described by De Rubeis contained two

 12 Lehmijoki-Gardner, ‘Writing Religious Rules as an Interactive Process’.  13 Tommaso of Siena, Tractatus de ordine fratrum et sororum, ed. by Laurent.  14 Sorelli, La santità imitabile, pp. 22 and 45; Nocentini makes only brief reference to the manu­ script in ‘Lo “Scriptorium” di Tommaso Caffarini a Venezia’, p. 117 n. 123.  15 On the hagio­graphical activity of Bernard Gui, see Kaeppeli, Scriptores Ordinis Praedicatorum Medii Aevi; Dubreil-Arcin, Vies de saints, légendes de soi.  16 De Rubeis, De rebus congregationis, pp. 141–45.

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major texts by Tommaso of Siena: the first, his account of the rise of the Observant movement in Paris (only available in the 1749 edition by Cornari from this manu­script) and the second, his version of the life of Catherine of Siena.17 This volume, which unfortunately is no longer extant, clearly complemented the Cividale Legendary in offering a historical narrative about the Observant reform. It situates Catherine of Siena within a longer Dominican hagio­graphical tradition. How these texts of Tommaso of Siena came to Cividale is not certain, but the city had an important Observant community to which he may have himself entrusted these volumes.18 The survival of the Cividale codex is something of a miracle. It was not catalogued after coming into the Dominican historical archive in Bo­logna sometime in the nineteenth century (never having been part of those manu­scripts of San Domenico that were transferred to Bo­logna’s communal library in 1866), and temporarily disappeared in the early 1990s. By amazing good fortune, it was noticed in Rome at the flea market of the Porta Portese by Fr Leonard Boyle, who then brought it into the Vatican Library, where it was rebound and given a new shelf mark in 1992 (Vat. lat. 15237). On 9 November 1996 it was returned to the Dominicans at Bo­logna.19 Some might say St Thomas was looking after it. The legendary’s existence had first been signalled at Bo­logna by a Dominican scholar, Marie-Hyacinth Laurent, in two articles published in 1940, one about the legendary and another about the Life of Margaret of Città di Castello that it contained.20 He noted that it included not just an unusual range of lives of Dominican  17 Described by De Rubeis as Libellum sive tractatum de origine seu ortu atque processu status fratrum et sororum de paenitentia Sancti Dominici in civitate Venetiarum. It is mentioned within a full listing of Tommaso’s writings in Schönberger and others, Repertorium edierter Texte des Mittel­alters, pp. 3670–71.  18 As the manu­script seems to have been completed by 1409, we can speculate as to whether it had been brought already to Cividale by Giovanni Dominici — or perhaps by Tommaso of Siena — who in summer 1409 stayed at Cividale at the council of Gregorio XII, the pope of Roman obedience. The manu­script is not clearly listed in an inventory of the convent compiled in 1440. On the Dominican library and the edited inventory list, see Scalon, La biblioteca archivescovile di Udine, esp. pp. 40–49. Surviving manu­scripts of San Zanipolo are identified by Quinto, Manoscritti medi­evali nella Biblioteca dei Redentoristi di Venezia. See also Nocentini, ‘Lo “Scriptorium” di Tommaso Caffarini a Venezia’, p. 117. On the Dominicans of Cividale, see Tilatti, Benvenuta Boiani, esp. p. 123.  19 The shelf mark of the codex is now MS Serie VII 10160 at the Archivio storico San Domenico, Bo­logna. The archives retain possession of a significant collection of Dominican choir-books, described in detail by d’Amato, ‘Il patrimonio librario’. In the Cividale codex, a new folio 1 was added with rebinding at the Vatican, folio 0 being modern paper with a watermark; on the recto side there is the addition of ‘BAV 20.X.1992’ and on the verso is the following addition: ‘Questo è MS A; Archivio del convento di S. Domenico a Bo­logna, descritto e studiato da M.-H. Laurent “Un légendier dominicain peu connu”, Analecta Bollandiana, 58 (1940), 28–47. Apparteneva una volta alla biblioteca dei Domenicani a Cividale. 3.xi.1992. Scritto e miniato al convento di San Giovanni e Paolo, Venezia?’.  20 Laurent, ‘Un légendier dominicain peu connu’; Laurent, ‘La Plus Ancienne Légende de la B. Marguerite de Città di Castello’.

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saints, but also an account of the translation of the relics of Thomas Aquinas from Fossanova and Fondi to Toulouse between June 1368 and January 1369. The account was written by Raymundus Hugonis, secretary to Elias Raymundus, then Master of the Dominican Order and mastermind of the move of the relics. While Laurent noted a few differences between its text and the only other known manu­script of this narrative (Toulouse, Bibl. mun., MS 610), he did not realize that it contained an original version of the translation account, prior to correction and with much new detail that had been added through a process of polishing after it had been reviewed by Master Elias.21 Our concern is not with the detail of this narrative, which we have studied elsewhere, but with the legendary as a whole, which we believe has much to offer about perspectives on history in the Observant movement in the early fifteenth century. An excellent study of the scriptorium of Tommaso of Siena was written by Silvia Nocentini in 2005, describing the diffusion of his writing about Catherine of Siena and his interest in 1409 in collecting the lives of Helen of Hungary, the first Dominican stigmatist, and her protégé, Margaret of Hungary, daughter of King Bela IV. Yet Nocentini made only a passing reference to the Cividale codex, which she identified as Vat. lat. 15327 (even though it had been returned to Bo­logna in 1996), and did not consider its broader significance.22 Tibor Klaniczay had noted that Tommaso of Siena had written to the Dominicans of Hungary in the first years of the 1400s, asking about the reports of stigmata and leading the Dominican prior, George, to send to Venice the lives of Helen and Margaret that are preserved in sections B and G of the Cividale lectionary. The disruption to the original folios in this manu­script, containing the Life of Margaret of Città di Castello, another thirteenth-century Dominican saint, implies that these non-Italian women were added to the manu­script only in 1409.23 Corrections made to the table of contents in the hand of Tommaso of Siena confirm that the legendary was enlarged in this way. The few scholars who have referred to the Cividale codex have done so only in relation to individual texts. We argue that Tommaso of Siena was responsible not just for the Life of Maria of Venice, but for adding headings

 21 An edition and close critical study of this text is forthcoming by Mews and Räsänen, ‘The Translation of the Holy Body of Thomas Aquinas from Fossanova to Toulouse’. The edition follows the three studies published by Mews, ‘The Historia translationis’, Räsänen, ‘The Memory of St Thomas Aquinas in Orvieto’, and Richards, ‘Ceremonies of Power’, in Räsänen, Hartmann, and Richards, Relics, Identity, and Memory in Medi­eval Europe.  22 Nocentini, ‘Lo “Scriptorium” di Tommaso Caffarini a Venezia’, p. 117 n. 123, with comments on Margaret of Hungary at pp. 103–04.  23 On the chrono­logy and diffusion of Margherita’s cult in Italy, see Klaniczay, ‘La fortuna di santa Margherita d’Ungheria in Italia’; Nocentini, ‘Lo “Scriptorium” di Tommaso Caffarini a Venezia’, p. 103; Deák, ‘The Birth of a Legend’; Deák, ‘The Techniques of a Hagio­grapher’; Klaniczay, ‘Proving Sanctity in the Canonization Processes’.

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and corrections throughout the manu­script. He created a legendary very different from that of Bernard Gui. Few of the saints in Tommaso’s legendary were officially canonized. It also has more the character of a historical compilation of texts relevant to his own interests. Most of the figures introduced in this legendary are of Italian origin. The first section (A) opens with a man from Tommaso’s own city of Siena. Ambrogio Sansedoni (1220–1286) was from a local noble family, his father being imperial podestà of the city.24 He studied initially at Paris under Albert the Great in 1245, at the same time as Thomas Aquinas, and then in Co­logne in 1248. Unable to compete with Thomas in theo­logy, he returned to Siena and became a significant preacher much concerned with the affairs of women. He also served as a missionary to Hungary from 1260 to 1266, where there was significant Dominican expansion in the period. Sansedoni negotiated a papal pardon for Siena following its moves to support the imperial cause. The second text provides our only known copy of the Life of Venturino of Bergamo (1304–1346), a Dominican who would be imprisoned for eight years (1335–43) by Pope Benedict XII for leading a pilgrimage to Rome, only to be released by Clement VI. The fact that Tommaso also copies a letter of Venturino suggests that he saw this manu­script not just as a legendary, but as a historical archive. Just before the letter he includes a copy of the Treaty of Venice between Pope Alexander III ‘of Siena’ and Frederick Barbarossa signed on the Feast of the Ascension at San Marco.25 Tommaso adds a note that he had found it in a book of the Bishop of Justinopolis (Capo d’Istria) and that there was another copy at the Dominican convent at Treviso, suggesting that he was interested in historical matters as much as moral edification. It fitted into Tommaso’s vision that the Dominicans should work for harmony between secular and spiritual authorities. The second section (B) introduces two thirteenth-century women and a Eucharistic miracle. Neither Zita of Lucca (d. 1278) nor her bio­grapher were Dominicans, but they articulated values of poverty and obedience that Tommaso valued. Helen of Hungary (d. 1270), a great admirer of Francis of Assisi, was the first Dominican nun to become a stigmatist. Her Life is followed by a record of the holy blood at Mantua, here recorded as taking place in 1048, but authenticated in Hungary in 1279 (and thus likely transmitted with the Life of Helen of Hungary).26 All these texts articulate Tommaso’s interest in both stigmata and the Eucharist through

 24 Acta Sanctorum, Martii iii, cols 180–201, by various authors, including Aldobrandino Paparonis da Siena (d. 1287). His Life was retold by Sansedoni, Vita del Beata Ambrogio Sansedoni. Knowledge of the saint always seems to have been local. See Redon, ‘Le Père du bienheureux’; Redon, ‘Le Bienheureux qui aimait les femmes’; Redon, Una famiglia, un santo, una città; Del Populo, ‘Dittico domenicano’.  25 Böhmer, Die Regesten des Kaiserreiches, ed. by Opll, pp. 163–65 no. 2282. On another witness to this event, see Thomson, ‘An English Eyewitness of the Peace of Venice’.  26 Ex translatione sanguinis domini, ed. by Waitz; Vincent, The Holy Blood, pp. 54–56.

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a Dominican lens, providing a precedent against which to understand Catherine of Siena. The third section (C) begins with a life of Petrus de Morrone, the Celestine monk who became Celestine  V before being deposed by Boniface VIII.27 His cult was important for Italians at the time of the schism. Traditionally celebrated by spiritual Franciscans, its inclusion effectively reinforces public criticism of Boniface VIII, as do the materials for Celestine’s canonization by Clement V in 1313 that begin section D. Having offered an alternative range of men and women as spiritual models, Tommaso uses Petrus de Morrone to illustrate the ‘true spiritual leader’, whose destiny was to suffer. This offers a thematic connection to an anonymous Dominican text about the crown of thorns, a devotion valued in France.28 This is followed by texts about St Servatius, Bishop of Tongres, made a patron of the Dominican Order in the 1330s when he was thought to have helped the order escape persecution from Louis of Bavaria. The four early martyrs then described — Alexander, Theodore, Eventius (executed in 117), and Juvenal (martyred in 377) — reinforce this theme of suffering leading to a glorious reward. The final item in this section, a brief account of a miracle by which a priest (called Pelagianus) was allowed by an angel to see in the host a Christ child, just as Simeon held the Christ child, completes this series of texts about the sacrifice of Christ on the cross, lived out through his saints.29 Section D begins with texts asserting the sanctity of Petrus de Morrone — certainly not a figure admired by Bernard Gui. Yet it also introduces two major figures, both highly esteemed by traditional Dominicans, not sympathetic to the Observant reform. One was Raymond of Penafort (1175–1275), famous as a canon lawyer and promoter of the cause of the study of languages in the kingdom of Aragon. While Raymond was proposed for canonization by Aragonese friars in the early fourteenth century, he would not acquire this status until 1601. On fol. 109v, a closing note to the text reports that its scribe (frater T.) found it in Barcelona but could record only a few things, as he was not able to stay longer.30 This note suggests that Tommaso of Siena may have deliberately sought out particular texts. The  27 An Italian version of his Life is Cordesci, Celestino V e la Renuncia Gloriosa, pp. 104–50. Another Life, in verse, is preserved in Rome, Bibl. Vallicelliana, MS H 46, fols 72–81v; it was published in Gatto, Celestino V, Pontefice e Santo, pp. 114–33. The Vita in the Bo­logna MS is not used in the extensive literature on the subject, such as Capezzali, S. Pietro del Morrone, Celestino V nel medioevo monastico; Capezzali, Celestino V e i suoi tempi; Valeri, Celestino V nel settimo centenario della morte.  28 Mercuri, Corona di Christo, corona di re.  29 A slightly fuller version of this story about a priest called Pelagianus who sees the Christ child in the host is told in Bartolomea da Ferrara, De Christo Iesu abscondito, p. 251, where it is told immediately before the miracle of Bolsena.  30 Bo­logna, Archivio storico San Domenico, MS Serie VII 10160, fol. 109v: ‘Ego frater T. scripsi pauca et truncata quia in barthinona non potui diu stare’.

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second figure introduced in this section is Aquinas, initially through a sermon about the translation of the relics of Aquinas from the Cistercian abbey of Fossanova to the Dominican convent at Toulouse. The heading, we argue, is in the hand of Tommaso of Siena himself. This sermon is relatively widely diffused, most often divided into nine parts, namely the nine readings used for the Feast of the Translation on 28 January.31 The sermon offers a highly stylized and abbreviated account of the complex process by which Elias got wind of the fact that Count Onorato of Fondi had taken possession of the body of Aquinas, buried at Fossanova since 1274, and, in 1368, managed to secure it for the Dominican Order. Its theme is that of how Aquinas was able to secure his liberation from an alien abbey and return to the bosom of the Order of Preachers.32 Although the feast had been officially instituted by Elias in 1370, his repeated attempts, in General Chapters in 1376 and 1378, to insist that the Office be transcribed into Dominican liturgical manu­scripts suggests that it was far from popular, particularly in Italian convents aligned to Raymond of Capua. The inclusion of the sermon in this manu­script from exactly the same time as Thomas of Firmo reasserted in the General Chapter of 1401 the need to observe the Feast of the Translation of Aquinas’s relics suggests that its presence in the Cividale Legendary marked a conscious effort to implement a policy of reconciliation between two factions within the order. Perhaps the most remarkable text in the entire Cividale Legendary is that which takes up section E. It is an unvarnished account by Raymundus Hugonis, secretary to Elias, of the complex manoeuvring by which Elias negotiated with Count Onorato of Fondi to gain possession of Aquinas’s body, and the particular difficulties of securing the head, kept under separate lock and key at Priverno, a town adjacent to Fossanova. While its presence in this manu­script was noticed by Laurent, he did not realize the radical difference between its text and the much longer and polished version preserved in Toulouse, Bibl. mun., MS 610. To illustrate the shift, where the Cividale manu­script mentions that Aquinas’s body was stolen, that of Toulouse says that it was ‘received in secret’. While Raymundus Hugonis was writing within a hagio­graphical tradition of claiming that a saint could watch over his body being given new honour in preparation for final glory, his text in the Cividale manu­script is one of exceptional historical value. It tells us, for example, that Raymond of Capua was heavily involved in the plans of Elias to win official papal permission to gain access to Aquinas’s remains (even after the Dominicans had obtained control of most of the relics, but not the head). The fact that Raymond never mentions in any of

 31 Bibliotheca hagio­graphica Latina antiquae et Mediae Aetatis, nos 8164–65.  32 On Thomas Aquinas’s relics before they were translated in Toulouse, see Räsänen, Thomas Aquinas’s Relics as Focus for Conflict and Cult in Late Middle Ages. On the significance of the relics at the end of the fourteenth century, see Räsänen, ‘The Cult of Thomas Aquinas’s Relics’.

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his later writings this involvement with Elias, whom he would depose in 1380, makes it remarkable that Tommaso of Siena should have included this narrative in a compilation which was becoming more than a legendary: it was becoming a precious historical dossier.33 Nonetheless, he felt it important that alongside his account of relatively little-known men and women of the Dominican Order, he should show that such a major figure as Thomas Aquinas was also important to the Observant reform.34 The account of the translation included by Tommaso of Siena in his legendary (from a text that must have been obtained in Toulouse, perhaps by the brother who visited Barcelona for a short while) concludes with an account of how Aquinas’s arm was brought to Paris, and then a much longer account, as yet partly unpublished, of the many miracles that Thomas’s relics effected throughout the region of Toulouse.35 Given the very serious animosity between the two wings of the order in Venice in the early fifteenth century, the inclusion of both Aquinas and Raymond of Penafort in the legendary clearly reflected a conscious desire to bring together the two wings of the order, one defined by Thomist theo­logy, the other by more mystical devotion. Tommaso of Siena valued both dimensions. The final three sections of the legendary combine individuals of modest social rank with those of great birth who adopted a spiritual life of great simplicity. At the same time, these sections are highly interesting in respect of the dating of the manu­script, the ongoing schism, and the geo­graphical area covered by the texts: in 1409 Rimini and Naples, and also Cividale, which hosted the council of the Roman obedience right after the Pisan pope was elected, were the most fateful supporters of Pope Gregory XII.36 Hungary can also be included in the Roman circle, when Venice and many other areas had already withdrawn from the political set-up of the schism.37 Thus, section F introduces a little-known Simon, a Dominican lay brother of Rimini, before including two letters of Giovanni Dominici from 1396 and 1398 respectively, and concluding with the Dominican pope, Benedict XI (in papacy 1303–04), who is presented as turning the papacy back to a spiritual path after the digression of Boniface VIII.38 Sections G and H  33 An interesting discussion on texts that present series of Dominican figures in the central place of Dominican historical narrations is Huijbers, Zealots for Souls, pp. 143–73.  34 Thomas’s image in reform discourse is often neglected in research, although his cult seems to have become popular together with Observant reform; see a recent approach to the theme, Räsänen, ‘Ecce novus’.  35 Acta Sanctorum, Martii i, cols 735–40; Miracula intercessione b. Thomae de Aquino, ed. by Percin, pp. 226–27.  36 Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Poets, Saints, and Visionaries of the Great Schism.  37 The controversial feelings of the Venetian people can be grasped from Riccoboni’s chronicle, Life and Death in a Venetian Convent.  38 These and other letters by Dominici and Raymond of Capua were included by Tommaso of Siena in his Historia Disciplinae regularis, ed. by Cornaro, pp. 171–75, 179–80, 183–84, 186–93, 196–97, 200–203, 218–25, 230–33.

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may originally have concluded with two local spiritual women, neither of whom were officially canonized as saints, but whom Tommaso of Siena felt worthy of example: Maria of Venice (a Life composed in 1402), who was imitating Catherine of Siena, and Margaret of Città di Castello (1287–1320), a precursor to Catherine of Siena. While Catherine was not included in this manu­script, presumably because Tommaso of Siena had described her in another manu­script that once belonged to Cividale, these narratives elucidate the longer tradition of Dominican exemplars of true holiness to which Catherine belonged. Tommaso of Siena wrote to Dominican contacts in Hungary to learn more about Margaret of Hungary (1242–1271), a Dominican nun and daughter of Hungarian royalty who had come under the influence of Helen of Hungary, whose Life he had included near the beginning of his legendary. Just as Raymond of Penafort and Thomas Aquinas evoked the presence of the Dominican mission in both Aragon and France, so the story of Margaret of Hungary illustrated a further region of Dominican influence. Moreover, it illuminated the same tradition that Catherine of Siena exemplified and that Margaret and Maria of Venice did in their own ways. The Cividale Legendary is notable for the way in which it embraces holy men and women over a wide geo­graphical region and embracing different obediences within the order.

Conclusion Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the Cividale Legendary is the breadth of historical insight into the Dominican movement that it presents. It brings together some local Dominican friars from Tuscany (like Sansedoni) and Lombardy (like Venturino) with the memory of spiritual women in both Italy and Hungary. By introducing accounts of Raymond of Penafort and of Thomas Aquinas not as a theo­logian, but as a saint who exerted influence through his material remains, Tommaso of Siena was performing the work of reconciliation. There was an urgent need to heal the cleavage between French and Italian factions that had resulted in schism, not just between Urban VI and Clement VII, but between two parts of the Order of Preachers. In this legendary, which also served as a historical dossier for the account of the Observant reform that he would write after 1406, Tommaso of Siena gave historical legitimacy to the movement of the penitent men and women that he sought to promote as true heirs to the message promoted by St Dominic. The legendary also included important letters of Dominici, who had been exiled from Venice in 1399, that helped defend his cause and which Tommaso would cite in his History of the Observant reform in Venice. In 1409, Tommaso of Siena added the Lives (those of Helen and Margaret of Hungary) to the manu­script. By paying attention to the combination of narratives about different saints, some famous (like

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Thomas Aquinas) and others much less well-known (like Maria of Venice), historians of religious reform in the early fifteenth century can observe the particular strategy adopted by Tommaso of Siena to resolve very serious divisions within the order. Historical narratives served to provide a version of reform that recalled both Master Elias, who sought renewal of the order around the cult of Thomas Aquinas, and Master Raymond of Capua, who looked to female saints to promote the cause of reform. Raymond’s successor as general master, Thomas of Firmo, was present at the Council of Pisa and supported the election of Alexander V. The Cividale Legendary may have been put together by Tommaso of Siena as part of an effort to resolve the schism within the order. In any case, it provided a historical dossier through which Tommaso of Siena helped promote religious renewal in the first decade of the fifteenth century.

Appendix: The Cividale Legendary (Bo­logna, Archivio storico San Domenico, MS Serie VII 10160) Compiled by (T) Tommaso ‘Caffarini’ Antonio da Siena OP, Santi Giovanni e Paulo (San Zanipolo), Venice, between 1396 and 1409

A 1. fols 1r–23v: Life of Ambrosio Sansedoni da Siena OP (1220–1286), with prefatory letter by Aldobrandino da Siena OP (BHL 383). 2. fols 24r–43v: Life of Venturino of Bergamo OP (1304–1346), written 1347 (BHL 8535). 3. fols 44r–48r: Treaty of Venice, 1177, between Alexander III ‘of Siena’ and Frederick Barbarossa, made at Venice. ‘Taken from the book of the bishop of Justinopolis (Capo d’Istria)’, with note in hand of T that a copy is found in the convent of Dominicans of Treviso. 4. fols 48r–51r: Letter of Venturino of Bergamo, in hand of T.

B 5. fols 52r–68r: Life of Zita of Lucca (d. 1278) by Bernard, canon of St Frediano (BHL 9019, 9020). 6. fols 68v–70v: Legend of Helen of Hungary (d. 1270), novice mistress at Vesprim, first Dominican to have stigmata (BHL 3790m); heading in hand of T. 7. fols 70v–75r: Account of miraculous blood of Christ at Mantua (originally from 804), reasserted by Pope Nicholas III in 1279 (BHL 4155b).

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C 8. fols 76r–96r: Life of Petrus de Morrone, formerly Pope Celestine V, Vita S Petri de Morrone, condam Celestini pape quinti (BHL 6750). 9. fols 96r–99v: Account of finding and translation of crown of thorns (BHL 4205g). 10. fols 99v–102r: About St Servatius (d. 384), made patron of Dominican Order c. 1330 (BHL 7641d). 11. fol. 102r–v: About early martyrs, Alexander, Theodore, Eventius (d. 117), and Juvenal (d. 377). 12. fols 102v–103r: Account of miracle of Corpus Christi.

D 13. fols 104r–107r: Privilege of canonization of Petrus de Morrone (1313, by Pope Clement V; BHL 6745); heading in hand of T. 14. fols 107v–109v: Life of Raymond of Penafort (d. 1275) (BHL 7070): ‘Ego frater T. scripsi pauca et truncata quia in barthinona non potui diu stare’. 15. fols 109v–112r: Sermon (nine readings) about translation of holy body of Thomas Aquinas (BHL 8164–65), in hand of T.

E 16. fols 113r–118v: Original account by Raymundus Hugonis (secretary to Master Elias) of translation of holy body of Thomas Aquinas (cf. BHL 8165); heading in hand of T. 17. fol. 119r–v: Addition about translation of arm of Thomas Aquinas to Paris (BHL 8166) 18. fols 120r–135v: Miracles achieved by relics of Thomas Aquinas (BHL 8163) (unpublished); heading in hand of T.

F 19. fols 136r–137r: Life of Simon, lay brother of Rimini (d. 1319, in Cividale) (BHL 7761). 20. fols 138r–140r: Letter of Johannes Dominici to Raymond of Capua (1396). 21. fols 140r–141v: Letter of Johannes Dominici to Antonio Bonci (1398), edited by Tommaso of Siena in his Tractatus de ordine fratrum et sororum de paenitentia S. Dominici, ed. by Flaminio Cornaro, in Ecclesiae Venetae antiquis monumentis, vol.  vii: Decadis undecimæ pars prior (Venice: Pasquali, 1749), pp. 64–69. 22. fols 142r–143v: [Bernard Gui] Life and death of blessed Benedict XI (d. 1304) (BHL 1094a).

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G 23. fols 144r–154r: Life of Margaret of Hungary (1242–1271), Dominican nun, daughter of Bela IV of Hungary (BHL 5330); only known copy, received by Tommaso of Siena in 1409. 24. fols 154v–157v, 171r–172v, 183v, 191v: Canonization proceedings (1276) about Margaret of Hungary (BHL 5330); correction in hand of T. 25. fols 158r–170v, 173r–183r: Life of Maria of Venice (1380–1399), written in Latin in 1402 and in Italian in 1403 (BHL 5522); in hand of T.

H 26. fols 184r–190v: Legend and miracles of Margaret of Città di Castello (1287–1320) (BHL 5313az) 27. fol. 191r: list of contents of MS in hand of T.

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Works Cited Manu­scripts and Archival Sources Bo­logna, Archivio storico San Domenico, MS Serie VII 10160 Rome, Biblioteca Vallicelliana, MS H 46 Toulouse, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 610 Primary Sources Acta capitulorum generalium, ed. by B. M. Reichert, Monumenta Ordinis Praedicatorum Historica, 8 (Rome: Institutum historicum fratrum praedicatorum, 1900) Acta Sanctorum, 62 vols (Antwerp: Apud Ioannem Meursium, 1643–1902) Bartolomea da Ferrara, De Christo Iesu abscondito pro solemnitate corporis eiusdem Domini nostri libri sex (Venice: Cominum de Tridino, 1555) Böhmer, J. F., Die Regesten des Kaiserreiches unter Friedrich I, 1152–1190, vol. iv.2 of Regesta Imperii, ed. by Ferdinand Opll (Vienna: Böhlau, 2001) De Rubeis, Bernardo Maria, De rebus congregationis sub titulo beati Joacobi Salomonii in Provincia S. Dominici Venetiarum erectae Ordinis Praedicatorum commentarius (Venice: Pasquali, 1751) Ex translatione sanguinis domini, ed. by D. G. Waitz, Monumenta Germaniae Historica Scriptores, 4 (Hannover: Hahn, 1841) Miracula intercessione b. Thomae de Aquino, in Monumenta Conventus Tolosani ordinis fratrum praedicatorum, ed. by J. J. Percin (Toulouse, 1693), pp. 226–27 Raymundus Hugonis, Historia de translatione sacre corporis S. Thome de Aquino, ed. by Constant J. Mews and Marika Räsänen, ‘The Translation of the Holy Body of Thomas Aquinas from Fossanova to Toulouse: The Original Narrative by Raymundus Hugonis’, Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum, n.s., 6 (forthcoming) Riccoboni, Bartolomea, Life and Death in a Venetian Convent: The Chronicle and Necro­logy of Corpus Domini, 1395–1436, ed. by Daniel Bornstein (Chicago: Uni­ ver­sity of Chicago Press, 2000) Sansedoni, Giulio, Vita del Beata Ambrogio Sansedoni da Siena (Rome, 1595; republished Florence: B. Sermartelli, 1611) Tommaso of Siena (Tommaso da Siena, Tomaso Caffarelli), Historia Disciplinae regularis instauratae in coenobiis Venetis Ordinis Predicatorum, nec non Tertii Ordinis de Poenitentia S. Dominici in Civitate Venetiarum propagati, in Ecclesiae Venetae antiquis monumentis, ed. by Flaminio Cornaro, 15 vols (Venice: Pasquali, 1749), vol. vii: Decadis undecimæ pars prior, pp. 167–234 —— , The Legend of Maria of Venice, trans. by Daniel Bornstein, in Dominican Penitent Women, ed. by Maiju Lehmijoki-Gardner (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2005), pp. 105–76 —— , Libellus de supplemento legende prolixe virginis s. Catherine de Senis, ed. by Giuliana Cavallini and Imelda Foralosso (Rome: Edizione caterinianae, 1974) —— , Sanctae Catherinae Senensis Legenda Minor, ed. by Ezio Franzeschini, Fontes vitae S. Catherinae Senensis Historici, 10 (Siena: Uni­ver­sity of Siena, 1942)

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—— , Tractatus de ordine fratrum et sororum de paenitentia S. Dominici, in Ecclesiae Venetae antiquis monumentis, ed. by Flaminio Cornaro, 15 vols (Venice: Pasquali, 1749), vol. vii: Decadis undecimæ pars prior, pp. 1–166 —— , Tractatus de ordine fratrum et sororum de paenitentia S. Dominici, ed. by Marie-Hyacinthe Laurent, Fontes vitae S. Catherinae Senensis Historici, 21 (Florence: Sansoni, 1938) Secondary Studies Bibliotheca hagio­graphica Latina antiquae et Mediae Aetatis [BHL], 2 vols (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1986) Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Renate, Poets, Saints, and Visionaries of the Great Schism, 1378–1417 (Uni­ver­sity Park: Pennsylvania State Uni­ver­sity Press, 2006) Bozóky, Edina, ed., Hagio­graphie, idéo­logie et politique au Moyen Âge en Occident (Turnhout; Brepols, 2012) Capezzali, Walter, ed., Celestino V e i suoi tempi: realtà spirituale e realtà politica. Atti del 4. Convegno storico internazionale, L’Aquila, 26–27 agosto 1989, Convegni celestiniani, 2 (L’Aquila: Colacchi, 1990) —— , ed., S. Pietro del Morrone, Celestino V nel medioevo monastico: Atti del Convegno Storico Internazionale, L’Aquila, 26–27 agosto 1988, Convegni celestiniani, 3 (L’Aquila: Colacchi, 1989) Cordesci, Antonio, Celestino V e la Rinucia Gloriosa (Memorie e Inni) (L’Aquila: Colacchi, 2003) d’Amato, Alfonso, ‘Il patrimonio librario’, in La biblioteca di San Domenico in Bo­logna, ed. by Alce Venturino and Alfonso d’Amato (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1961), pp. 71–138 Deák, Viktória Hedvig, ‘The Birth of a Legend: The So-Called Legenda Maior of Saint Margaret of Hungary and Dominican Hagio­graphy’, Revue Mabillon, 20 (2009), 87–112 —— , ‘The Techniques of a Hagio­grapher: The Two Legendae of Saint Margaret of Hungary’, in Promoting the Saints: Cults and their Contexts from Late Antiquity until the Early Modern Period, ed. by Otto Gecser and others (Budapest: Central European Uni­ver­sity, 2011), pp. 125–36 Del Populo, Concetto, ‘Dittico domenicano: Ambrogio Sensedoni e Giordano da Pisa’, Italianistica: Rivista di letterature italiana, 35 (2006), 11–18 Dubreil-Arcin, Agnès, Vies de saints, légendes de soi: L’Écriture hagio­graphique dominicaine jusqu’au Speculum sanctorale de Bernard Gui (d. 1331) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011) Duval, Sylvie, ‘Done de San Domenego: Moniales et pénitentes dominicaines dans la Venise observante de la première moitié du xve siècle’, Mélanges de l’École française de Rome – Moyen Âge, 122 (2010), 393–410 Frazier, Alison Knowles, Possible Lives: Authors & Saints in Renaissance Italy (New York: Columbia Uni­ver­sity Press, 2005) Gatto, Ludovico, Celestino V, Pontefice e Santo (Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 2006) Huijbers, Anne, Zealots for Souls: Dominican Narratives of Self-Understanding during Observant Reforms, c. 1388–1517 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018)

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Kaeppeli, Thomas O. P., Scriptores Ordinis Praedicatorum Medii Aevi, vol. i (Rome: S. Sabina, 1970), pp. 205–26 Klaniczay, Gábor, ‘Proving Sanctity in the Canonization Processes (Saint Elizabeth and Saint Margaret of Hungary)’, in Procès de canonisation au Moyen Âge: Aspects juridiques et religieux, ed. by Gabor Klaniczay (Rome: École française de Rome, 2004), pp. 117–48 Klaniczay, Tibor, ‘La fortuna di santa Margherita d’Ungheria in Italia’, in Spiritualità e lettere nella cultura italiana e ungherese del basso medioevo, ed. by Santi Graciotti and Cesare Vasoli (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1995), pp. 3–27 Laurent, Marie-Hyacinthe, ‘Un légendier dominicain peu connu’, Analecta Bollandiana, 58 (1940), 28–47 —— , ‘La Plus Ancienne Légende de la B. Marguerite de Città di Castello’, Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum, 10 (1940), 109–31 Lawless, Catherine, ‘Myth, Ritual and Orthodoxy: Cosimo de’ Medici and St Peter Martyr’, Cultural and Social History, 2 (2005), 273–300 Lehmijoki-Gardner, Maiju, ‘Writing Religious Rules as an Interactive Process: Dominican Penitent Women and the Making of their “Regula”’, Speculum, 79 (2004), 660–87 Mercuri, Chiara, Corona di Christo, corona di re: La monarchia francese e la corona di spine nel Medioevo, Edizioni di storia e letteratura (Rome: Centro alti studi in scienze religiose, 2004) Mews, Constant J., ‘The Historia translationis sacri corporis Thome Aquinatis of Raymundus Hugonis: An Eyewitness Account and its Significance’, in Relics, Identity, and Memory in Medi­eval Europe, ed. by Marika Räsänen, Gritje Hartmann, and Earl Jeffrey Richards, Europa Sacra, 21 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), pp. 185–204 Meyer, Christian, Collections d’Alsace, de Franche-Comté et de Lorraine, vol. i, Colmar, Bibliothèque municipale (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006) Montagnes, Bernard, ‘Le Rôle du midi dominicain au temps du Grand Schisme’, in Le Midi et le Grand Schisme d’Occident, Cahiers de Fanjeaux, 39. Collection d’Histoire religieuse du Languedoc au Moyen Âge (Toulouse: Privat, 2004), pp. 305–30 Nocentini, Silvia, ‘Lo “Scriptorium” di Tommaso Caffarini a Venezia’, Hagio­ graphica: Rivista di agiografia e biografia della Società internazionale per lo studio del Medio Evo Latino, 12 (2005), 79–144 Presciutti, Diana Bullen, ‘Sleeping with the Enemy: Infertility and Wife Murder in a Miracle of St Peter Martyr’, in Lived Religion and Everyday Life in Early Modern Hagio­graphic Material, ed. by Jenni Kuuliala, Rose-Marie Peake, and Päivi Räisänen-Schröder (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), pp. 127–51 Quinto, Riccardo, Manoscritto medi­evali nella Biblioteca dei Redentoristi di Venezia (S. Maria della consolazione, detta ‘della Fava’): catalogo dei manoscritti, catalogo dei sermoni. Identificazione dei codici dell’antica biblioteca del Convento domenicano dei Santi Giovanni e Paolo di Venezia (Padua: Il poligrafo, 2006) Räsänen, Marika, ‘The Cult of Thomas Aquinas’s Relics in the Dawn of the Dominican Reform and the Great Western Schism’, in The Intellectual

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Francesca Mattei

Architecture and Religion in Renaissance Palaces Patronage, Humanism, and Reformation in Northern Italy

Introduction The Sack of Rome (1527) marked a decisive turning point in Renaissance Europe. Aside from its immediate consequences for religious, political, and economic circles, the precarious situation of the Urbs — Rome — induced some of the era’s most important artists, hitherto in the pope’s service, to move to other urban centres. Their dispersal led to the effective diffusion of the language of art and architecture that had developed at the courts of Julius II and Leo X. This, in turn, generated highly original results. In various regions of Italy, admiration for the art produced at the papal court — confirmed by the spread of the Roman maniera — existed side by side with constant criticism of religious orthodoxy. It is here that we find publications bordering on heresy, some of which were subject to censorship in the following decades. Seemingly in opposition to each other, this simultaneous fascination with Rome and criticism of the Church came together brilliantly in painting; harnessing the power of language inspired by the art of the popes, various artists helped spread reformist ideas through their work.1 In this context, architecture is a unique phenomenon. Since it is not figurative, it conveys its message in a more cryptic manner than other media. Scholars have tried to interpret the language of architecture by basing their analyses on the convictions of the designing architects themselves. For instance, the simplicity of the final works of Jacopo Sansovino, who reached his peak in the Church of San Martino in Venice, has been used to  1 On the relation between art and the Reformation, see Firpo, Gli affreschi di Pontormo a San Lorenzo; Firpo, Artisti, gioiellieri, eretici; Firpo and Biferali, Battista Franco ‘pittore viniziano’.

Francesca Mattei ([email protected]) is Associate Professor of History of Architecture at the Università degli Studi Roma Tre, Rome. She has published widely in the areas of early modern architectural history and architectural drawings.

Renaissance Religions: Modes and Meanings in History, ed. by Peter Howard, Nicholas Terpstra, and Riccardo Saccenti, ES 26 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2021) pp. 127–153 10.1484/M.ES-EB.5.121903

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Figure 5.1. Facade of Palazzo Naselli, Ferrara. After 1527. Photo: Author.

investigate his ‘pauperistic’ religious leanings. Similarly, Sebastiano Serlio’s deviation from Vitruvian orthodoxy, as exhibited in his Extraordinario libro (Lyon, 1551), has served as evidence of his ‘heterodox views’.2 Although these are fascinating hypotheses, their limitations have long since come to the fore. The appearance of a building cannot, in fact, be regarded as a reflection of ideo­logical choices, and it would be fallacious to interpret architectural forms as if they were simply compositional components of a painting. The meaning of a building must instead be sought in the complex relationship  2 On Serlio and Sansovino’s religious leanings, see Carpo, La maschera e il modello and Morresi, ‘La storia come trappola’.

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between the cultural values of the patron and the pragmatic views of the architect involved. With the aim of reading architecture through the lens of religion, this essay offers a comparative analysis of several building commissions from the perspective of their patrons, who leaned towards heterodox or reformist ideas.

Ferrara The first cases that we consider are those in Ferrara. In 1528, Renée of France, the daughter of Louis VII and Anne of Brittany, assumed the ducal throne as Ercole II d’Este’s wife. Much of the religious ferment at the Este court can be credited to her. Although she was barely eighteen when she arrived in the city, her Calvinist leanings were clear, so much so that John Calvin himself sought refuge with the duchess in 1536 and initiated a kind of migration to Renée’s court with other French men of letters soon following in his footsteps. For this reason, a Franciscan preacher referred to the contacts maintained by the duchess as a ‘dangerous network’.3 Political instability — due in part to papal claims on Ferrara — helped to aggravate religious tensions within the city. Indeed, with the lack of a direct heir, the possibility loomed that the duchy would devolve to the Papal States. This indeed proved to be the case in 1598. It was within this context that the Apostolic Protonotary Giuliano Naselli decided to build himself a residence (1527–37), combining a repertory of conventional Roman forms with inscriptions of a religious bent. Sebastiano Serlio refers to the palace in his dedication to Ercole II d’Este in the Regole generali di architettura (Venice, 1537). The architect stresses the building’s importance and includes it alongside some of the most important examples of sixteenth-century architecture, such as Palazzo Farnese in Rome, Palazzo Te in Mantua, Villa Imperiale in Pesaro, and Sansovino’s structures in Venice. By the same token, Serlio celebrates the architectural knowledge of the patron, whom, along with the Ferrarese humanist Celio Calcagnini, he refers to as an expert in the ‘theory’ of the discipline.4 A formal analysis of Palazzo Naselli reveals the novelty of the structure within the context of Ferrara and confirms the basis of Serlio’s praise. The front elevation reiterates the canonical features of the Roman palazzo that had been established in the early decades of the sixteenth century in buildings such as Palazzo Baldassini (1514), a low-key contemporary reinterpretation of Palazzo Farnese (Figure 5.1). The intentions announced in the facade find their confirmation in the cortile, articulated by the superposition of two orders: Doric in the lower register and Ionic above — the first and only

 3 On religion in Ferrara, see Firpo, Immagini ed eresie nell’Italia del Cinquecento, pp. 310–26.  4 Serlio, Regole generali di architettura, p. iv.

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Figure 5.2. Courtyard of Palazzo Naselli, Ferrara. After 1527. Photo: Author.

example of this all’antica solution in Ferrara (Figure 5.2). The desire to conform to Roman prototypes is reiterated in the arrangement of the ground plan, with the building progressing according to the usual sequence of rooms of the Roman domus (vestibule–portico–courtyard–stairs accessible from the side). The same solution is evident in many palazzi of the capital but is far less common in the Este context.5 It is no coincidence that in the 1550s, so relatively soon after the structure was completed, the chronicler Paolo da Legnago noted the Roman quality of Palazzo Naselli, confirming its uniqueness within the urban fabric.6 Alongside its general configuration, the palazzo displays architectural details drawn from Vitruvius’s De Architectura: the holes in place of metopes in the Doric frieze of the cortile’s lower register (De Architectura, 3. 5. 15); the Vitruvian Ionic bases of the upper register (De Architectura, 4. 2. 4); the leonine protomai used as dripstones on the topmost cornice (De Architectura, 3. 5. 2).7 Reference to the treatise is a display of erudition common among  5 On the sequence of rooms in Roman palaces, see Frommel, Der Römische Palastbau der Hochrenaissance.  6 ‘A dì 23 d’Aprille [1538] morì in Ferrara il reverendo canonico messer Zuliano Nasello qual haveva fabricato un pallazo alla romana, nel Borgo del Leone in bocha et in fronte della contra’ de’ Cagarusco’ (On 23 April, the Canon Giuliano Naselli, who built a Roman style palazzo in Borgo del Leone in front of the district of Cagarusco, died in Ferrara). Modena, Archivio di Stato, MS 69, Paolo da Legnago, Cronaca, fol. 258r.  7 The English edition is Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture, trans. by Morgan. On a comment of the solutions, see Mattei, Eterodossia e vitruvianesimo, pp. 214–15.

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the most educated architects and architecturally knowledgeable patrons of the day. The building’s sophistication derives, in fact, from the culture of its patron. Giuliano Naselli was an expert in architectural theory, knew Latin and Greek, was an avid reader of the classics, frequented the Curia and courts, and participated in discussions in scholarly circles in various cities. Naselli also maintained contact with some of the most enlightened patrons of his time, including Blosio Palladio and Melchiorre Baldassini, who had entrusted two of the period’s most important architects — Baldassare Peruzzi and Antonio da Sangallo the Younger — with the task of giving shape to their architectural ambitions.8 Besides flaunting its patron’s architectural erudition, the palazzo has another tale to tell. Its principal elevation displays four epi­graphs from the Adagia of Erasmus of Rotterdam; to these can be added eighteen inscriptions in the cortile.9 Unlike those on the facade, the ones in the cortile are drawn from some of the most famous authors of Antiquity and the early modern era. The epi­graphs promote prudence and moderation, urge caution, and encourage the reader to withdraw inward; they deal with the sort of moral dilemmas evoked by the thorny problem of dissemblance and religious dissimulation in the wake of the sack.10 The message expressed by the inscriptions thus adds a heterodox tinge to the Vitruvian quality of the building.11 The programme at Palazzo Naselli can be set side by side and compared with another building in Ferrara: Palazzo Contughi (Figure 5.3). Although there is little information on the latter’s construction, an inscription on the interior suggests that the building was completed in 1542. The elevation follows the logic of Palazzo Naselli: a brick surface with details in stone. The building’s most monumental element is a marble gate — designed in 1543 by the painter Girolamo da Carpi (most likely the designer of the building as well) — the first example of opera rustica in the Este court.12 On the facade

 8 On Giuliano Naselli’s bio­graphy, see Mattei, Eterodossia e vitruvianesimo, pp. 59–74. On the patronage of Blosio Palladio, see Bentivoglio, ‘La presenza di Baldassarre Peruzzi’; Ricci, ‘Un progetto di palazzo peruzziano’; Ricci, ‘“Villula ter quaterque felix”’.  9 On the facade: staterem ne transilito, from the motto: stateram ne trans­ grediris, Adagia, I, I (Exceed not the balance); ignem gladio ne fodito, Adagia, I, I (Stir not the fire with a sword); leonem ne tondeto, from the motto: leonem radere, Adagia II, V (Don’t remove hair from the lion); umbram ne metiare, from the motto: umbram metiri, Adagia I, V (To measure the shadow). The first edition of the Adagia was published in 1500 (Adagia Collectanea), and reborn in 1508 as the Adagiorum Chiliades. There is also a Ferrarese edition as Proverbia, published by Giovanni Mazzocchi in 1514. The English edition is Erasmus, Collected Works of Erasmus: Adages, ed. by Mynors and Mann Philipps.  10 Cf. Caravale, ‘Pulpits on Trial’, in this volume.  11 On the sources of the epi­graphs in the courtyard, see Mattei, Eterodossia e vitruvianesimo, pp. 113–44.  12 Mattei, ‘Un inedito di Girolamo da Carpi’.

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Figure 5.3. Facade of Palazzo Contughi, Ferrara. After 1527. Photo: Author.

of Palazzo Contughi, as on that of Palazzo Naselli, are five inscriptions drawn from the Adagia.13 Here, however, the literary source has been taken one step further as the maxims are inscribed in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew.14 Apart from demonstrating the interests of the building’s patron, Girolamo Mario Contughi, who knew all three languages, the inclusion of all three is consistent with the tenets of Erasmus. In the Convivium religiosum (The  13 serpentis oculus, Adagia I, IX (Serpent’s eye); lingua clavus, from the motto: lingua quo vadis? Adagia II, II (Tongue, whither wouldst thou?); OIKOΣ ΦΙΛΟΣ OIKOΣ ΑΡΙΣΤΟΣ, from the motto: domus amica, domus optima, Adagia III, III (A loved home is the best home); Η ΤΡΙΣΕΞ Η ΤΡΕΣ ΚΥΒΟΙ, from the motto: aut ter sex, aut tres tesserae, Adagia, II, III (Either three times six dice, or three); deror tàchat gaghechà al tèhi, ‫ דרור תחת גגך אל תהיה‬from the motto: hirundines sub eodem tecto ne habeas, Adagia I, I (Don’t have swifts under your roof). In addition, there is a sixth inscription, written in Hebrew: ashre’ hamithchakem beholeluth zulato, ‫( אשרי המתחכם בהוללות זולתו‬Happy is he who learns by causing other people’s folly), which recalls the Praise of Folly. See Erasmus, Collected Works of Erasmus: Adages, ed. by Mynors and Mann Philipps. On the comment of the inscriptions and their sources, see Torboli, Il serpente e la rondine, pp. 53–59.  14 On the use of Hebrew in Ferrarese works of art, see Mattei, ‘“Tribus linguis alloquitur ingredientem”’.

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Godly Feast), the humanist describes the entrance into the hortus conclusus as a door adorned with inscriptions that greet visitors in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. This passage from Erasmus helped to disseminate hopes of a trilingual culture, filling scholars with the desire to read sacred texts in their original language.15 What remains to be understood is the manner in which erudite choices of this kind were made. At Palazzo Naselli, the Vitruvian and Erasmian citations most likely owe their existence to the culture of the building’s patron. In terms of its more technical aspects, the question of attribution remains unresolved. Girolamo da Carpi was credited with the design of the building in the eighteenth century. More recent studies, however, suggest that the older attribution should be revised and posit Serlio’s involvement in the project. More convincing is the attribution of Palazzo Contughi to Girolamo da Carpi, supported by the artist’s role in the design of the building’s gate, which suggests his intervention in the project as a whole. Apart from the identity of the architect of the two buildings in Ferrara, it is interesting to look at other figures who contributed to the creation of such erudite structures. Worthy of mention above all is Celio Calcagnini, humanist and friend of both patrons. He possessed a sophisticated understanding of architecture and is mentioned along with Naselli in the pages of Serlio’s treatise. Calcagnini’s work and library demonstrate a particular interest in architecture and antiquarianism. References to Vitruvius and the most popular artists of the period — Raphael and Giulio Romano — appear in his writings. Furthermore, his collection of books included many texts on the art of building and on antiquarianism.16 Equally, the religious leanings of the Ferrarese humanist must be taken into account. His library contained writings by nearly all the representatives of the new theo­logy: Erasmus of Rotterdam, Philip Melanchthon, Ulrich von Hutten, Guillaume Budé, and Johannes Reuchlin. His letters confirm his relations with Pellegrino Morato, known for his polemical writings against the Church, as well as Morato’s daughter, Olympia. He also maintained ties with Jacob Ziegler and Willibald Pirckheimer, both representatives of German heterodox circles. Among book publishers, Calcagnini preferred those who were less than complacent, above all, Johann Froben and Aldo Manuzio, renowned marketers of dissident publications.17

 15 ‘Tribus linguis alloquitur ingredientem’ (He greets the caller in three languages). Erasmus, Convivium religiosum, trans. and annot. by Thompson, p. 177.  16 On Celio Calcagnini’s architectural culture, see Mattei, ‘Celio Calcagnini, Terzo Terzi e la cultura architettonica’. On his library, see Ghignoli, Chartacea supellex.  17 On the relation between Calcagnini and Aldo Manuzio, see Modena, Archivio di Stato, Ambasciatori, Venice, b. 13, letter from Celio Calcagnini to Alfonso I d’Este, 23 July 1512. The document was hitherto unknown.

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Figure 5.4. Giulio Bonasone (attr.), Project of Palazzo Bocchi in Bo­logna, Roma, Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica. 1545.

The nearly contemporaneous reference to the Adagia on the facades of the two palazzi calls for a reconsideration of the fortune of their writings within visual art circles, especially in Ferrara, where the use of the works of the Rotterdam humanist by artists was not an isolated phenomenon: Girolamo da Carpi did a painting inspired by the motto ‘Occasionem arripere’, which a recent study has claimed to be a commission by Renée of France rather than Ercole II d’Este, as has traditionally been thought.18  18 On Erasmus and the visual arts, see Panofsky, ‘Erasmus and the Visual Arts’. On Ferrara, see Torboli, ‘Erasmo da Rotterdam alla corte di Ferrara’.

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Bo­logna In Bo­logna, the second most important city within the Papal States, we see the emergence of heterodox groups and movements fuelled by the book trade, preachers, and the presence of a large German community. Evidence of this phenomenon is offered by Martin Butzer’s 1542 letter to the ‘brothers’ at the churches of Modena and Bo­logna, congratulating them on the success of their proselytizing. In 1543, the city underwent its first round of repression by the Inquisition; the second wave of trials took place in 1549. The spread of Anabaptist and anti-Trinitarian doctrines was uncovered among the ranks of the Spanish College in 1553.19 In terms of architecture, the example most often cited as a sign of the presence of a multifaceted humanistic culture, which often deviates from Catholic orthodoxy, is the residence of Achille Bocchi, where the Accademia Ermathena, founded by the patron of the building, met. Generally attributed to Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola (despite the lack of archival evidence), and begun in 1545,20 the building was inspired — at least in the early phases of its construction — by two engravings of 1545 and of 1555. These have been attributed to Giulio Bonasone, who also designed those in Bocchi’s literary masterpiece, Symbolicarum Quaestionum de quas serio ludebat libri quinque, an example of the literary-visual textual genre (Figures 5.4 and 5.5).21 Close observation of the palazzo makes it is clear that Achille Bocchi wanted to distance himself from local tradition, except for the rusticated basement, which can be found in other palazzi as well as the city’s towers. The layout, as in the case of Palazzo Naselli, is drawn from the Roman tradition. It is no coincidence that the building in Ferrara has been mentioned as the possible model for the residence of Achille Bocchi, by considering the proximity between the two cities.22 The articulation of the layout is consigned to various types of windows, which are derived from the rustication introduced by Giulio Romano in many buildings in Mantua, and which Vignola used later in Rome, above all at Villa Giulia (1555). A second feature that binds the Bo­lognese structure to the one in Ferrara is the presence of inscriptions on the facade, which, in the case of Palazzo Bocchi, are drawn from both the Psalms and Horace.23 These inscriptions have long

 19 Firpo, Immagini ed eresie nell’Italia del Cinquecento, pp. 290–91.  20 Fagiolo, ‘Il Vignola e Bo­logna’; Fagiolo, Vignola; Schmidt, ‘Zu Vignolas Palazzo Bocchi in Bo­logna’; Tuttle, ‘Palazzo Bocchi’.  21 On the Symbolicae Quaestiones, see Watson, Achille Bocchi and the Emblem Book; Bocchi, Symbolicae quaestiones, ed. by Rolet.  22 On the relationship between the facades of Palazzo Naselli and Palazzo Bocchi, see Frommel, ‘Vignola architetto del potere’, pp. 43–44.  23 An inscription drawn from Psalm 120. 2 appears on the main facade: adonai hatzilah nafshi mispat-sheker milashon remiah, ‫אדוניי הצילה נפשי משפת שקר ומלשון רמייה‬ (Deliver my soul, o Lord, from lying lips, and from a deceitful tongue). A sentence from

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Figure 5.5. Giulio Bonasone (attr.), Project of Palazzo Bocchi in Bo­logna, Firenze, GDSU, A 12232. 1555.

been interpreted as evidence of Achille Bocchi’s possibly reformist leanings by those interested in establishing a close relationship between the humanist’s residence and his literary work. According to this theory, his principal Horace’s first epistle, 59–61, follows on the side: rex eris aiunt, si recte facies. hic murus aeneus esto: nil conscire sibi, nulla pallescere culpa (You’ll be king, if you do right: Be this our wall of bronze, to have no guilt at heart, no wrongdoing to turn us pale). The English edition of Horace is Quintus Horatius Flaccus, Satires, Epistles and ars poetica, trans. by Rushton Fairclough, p. 249.

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aim was to convey a cryptic message to a small circle of the elect. More recently, the Bocchi programme has been read in a different light, as a sort of extreme projection of humanist ideals.24 Instead of a trace of reformist ideas, this more recent hypothesis sees in the building the interest in the esoteric culture that was a sort of koinè among writers such as Pierio Valeriano and Andrea Alciato. It draws its support from the ornament of the Benedictine monastery of San Giovanni Evangelista in Parma, which was inspired by the icono­graphy of the Symbolicae Quaestiones, Alciato’s Emblemi, and Valeriano’s Hyeroglyphica — a choice that draws on cryptic images not in order to allude to heterodox doctrines, but rather in conformity with the passion for allegory typical of the years of Gregory XIII.25

Venice and its Surroundings Many Erasmian works were published in Venice, a centre of intellectual exchange among writers, ambassadors, officials, politicians, and men of the church. The cultural and natural openness of the city was a pivotal element in the diffusion of heresy there. The presence of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, a permanent colony of German merchants, made easier the quite extensive circulation of non-orthodox ideas and the dissemination of Lutheran books in various cities within its domain (Padua in particular). The religious ideas of the reformers seem to have penetrated the population on every level, not only the clergy and men of letters, but also ordinary people and artists. It is in this respect that the aforementioned studies on Jacopo Sansovino and the ones on Lorenzo Lotto are so famous.26 Evidence of Sansovino’s ideas can likewise be traced in his will of 16 September 1568, where he asks to be borne to his grave on a wooden plank that is not adorned with any trappings.27 The religious position of the artist must be set within the cultural, social, and political context of Venice,28 which witnessed an emergence of architectural experts who were equally intrigued by esoterica, alchemy, and heterodox views. In particular, the possible influence of the writings of the Neoplatonist Francesco Zorzi on Sansovino’s project for the Church of San Francesco della Vigna has long been discussed.29 This aspect of the problem will not  24 Angelini, Simboli e Questioni, pp. 7–8; Firpo, Immagini ed eresie nell’Italia del Cinquecento, p. 295.  25 Firpo, Immagini ed eresie nell’Italia del Cinquecento, p. 340.  26 Firpo, Artisti, gioiellieri, eretici; Firpo, Immagini ed eresie nell’Italia del Cinquecento, pp. 366–94.  27 ‘cataleto non […] ornato de panni nessuno’, quoted in Firpo, Immagini ed eresie nell’Italia del Cinquecento, p. 368. On Jacopo Sansovino, see Morresi, Jacopo Sansovino.  28 Foscari and Tafuri, L’armonia e i conflitti, p. 31. On religion in Venice, see Martin, Venice’s Hidden Enemies; Tafuri, Venezia e il Rinascimento (English trans. Venice and the Renaissance). The following references are from the Italian edition.  29 Foscari and Tafuri, L’armonia e i conflitti, pp. 29–42; Firpo, Immagini ed eresie nell’Italia del Cinquecento, p. 368.

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Figure 5.6. Camillo Mantovano, ‘Sala a fogliami’, Palazzo Grimani in Santa Maria Formosa, Venice. 1560s. Photo: Author.

be pursued here. I will focus rather on the subsequent phase of the project. It was in the mid-1560s that the church was completed by Andrea Palladio at the request of Giovanni Grimani, the Patriarch of Aquileia. The all’antica forms of the elevation — a paradigmatic example of the Palladian combined pediment, rendered famous by Rudolf Wittkower’s analysis — are supplemented by cryptically religious inscriptions that turn the church into an open marble book.30 Statements made by Grimani, along with his associations, led to a ten-year process by the Inquisition that was not laid to rest even after he delivered a canonical purgation in the presence of Pope Julius III. Although this confession of faith, which was corroborated by the pope, saved Grimani from a formal trial, it prevented him from receiving a cardinal’s hat. It was precisely from this incident that the inscriptions on the facade of San Francesco della Vigna derive. A second episode explains Grimani’s situation. It relates to the icono­ graphy of the sala a fogliami at Palazzo Grimani in Santa Maria Formosa. The room, painted in the 1560s by Camillo Mantovano, was inspired by the  30 deo utriusque templi aedificatori ac reparatori; accede ad hoc ne deseras spirituale non sine iugi esteriori interiorique bello (To the Lord, who built the one and the other temple; enter the temple, without forgetting the Spirit, with the weight of external things and with an inner conflict); minister umbrarum (Minister of shadows); dispensator lucis (Minister of light). On an interpretation of the facade, see Foscari and Tafuri, L’armonia e i conflitti, p. 159; Firpo, ‘Le ambiguità della porpora e I “diavoli” del Sant’Ufficio’, pp. 854–56; Firpo, Storie di immagini, immagini di storia, p. 154. For Wittkower’s analysis: Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, pp. 101–54.

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garden of delights in the Song of Songs: nature illuminated by a glimpse of heaven is disturbed by hawks and other predators — an allusion to Grimani’s enemies — who threaten the serenity of the garden. The author of the icono­ graphic programme was none other than Grimani himself. The meaning of the ornamentation is rendered even more explicit by the inscriptions alongside the scenes in the room’s lunettes, which may relate to a penchant for emblems, already noted in the case of Achille Bocchi (Figure 5.6).31 The unravelling of the meaning of these representations is entrusted to the viewer, who is left to interpret the images through the message implied by the biblical quotations with which they are paired. The palazzo’s chapel reconfirms the implications of the sala a fogliami, for on its vault appears the inscription ‘protexisti me domine tabernaculo tuo in a co[n]traditio[n]e linguarum’ (You sheltered me in thy tent from the calumny of tongues), an adaptation of Psalm 30. 21 (‘Proteges eos in tabernaculo tuo a contradictione linguarum’). Here is yet another denunciation of Roman theo­logians, referred to as ‘devils dressed in black’.32 This allegation, in turn, is complemented by a plaque reading: ‘dirige nos domine in veritate tua’ (Drive us, our God, toward your Truth) (Figures 5.7 and 5.8). Unlike the one in the sala a fogliami, the inscription here is not bound to any figurative representation and enters into a dialogue solely with the chapel’s architectural forms. Right next to this autobio­graphical message on the facade of the building in Santa Maria Formosa, Grimani affixed what amounted to a dedication to the city with the inscription: ‘Genio Urbis Aug[ustae] Usuiq[ue] Amicorum’ (for the dignified inclination of the city and the use of friends), since the Patriarch of Aquileia’s collection of antiquities, though housed in his residence, were accessible to both friends and, indeed, the population of Venice (Figure 5.9).33 This instance of an eloquent or ‘speaking’ architecture — one whose function was explained by inscriptions — was not unique in the Serenissima. Early in the century Andrea Loredan had already inscribed two verses from Psalm 113 — ‘Non nobis, Domine, non nobis, sed nomini tuo da gloriam’ (Give the Glory not to us, our Lord, but to your name) — on the facade of his palazzo overlooking the Grand Canal, which Francesco Sansovino listed among those Venetian palazzi inspired by the architecture of the ancients.34 Palazzo Grimani can be read as an attempt to undermine the Venetian architectural tradition. Traces of this desire can already be detected in the early sixteenth century, as attested by Andrea Loredan’s building, and were  31 On the epi­graph in the sala a fogliami, see Firpo, ‘Le ambiguità della porpora e I “diavoli” del Sant’Ufficio’, pp. 854–56.  32 Firpo, Immagini ed eresie nell’Italia del Cinquecento, p. 374.  33 On Grimani and antiquarianism, see Favaretto, Arte antica e cultura antiquaria. In Venice a similar epi­graph can be found on the facade of Cà Dario.  34 On Palazzo Loredan, see Martinis, ‘Cà Loredan Vendramin Calergi a Venezia’. On his epi­ graphs: Tafuri, Venezia e il Rinascimento, p. 10.

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Figure 5.7. Inscription on ceiling, Chapel in Palazzo Grimani, Venice. 1560s. Photo: Author.

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Figure 5.8. Inscription over doorway, Chapel in Palazzo Grimani, Venice. 1560s. Photo: Author.

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Figure 5.9. Facade of Palazzo Grimani, Venice. 1560s. Photo: Author.

forcefully reiterated with Jacopo Sansovino’s arrival in the city of the lagoon. In keeping with these instances of renewal, the plan of the Palazzo Grimani demonstrates a desire to re-create an arrangement centred around a cortile of the kind seen in Roman residences: despite being eccentric and having only two loggias, the cortile accommodates a series of columns joined by a tripartite entablature (Figure 5.10). It is precisely this solution that has led scholars to agree on Sebastiano Serlio’s intervention in the project of the courtyard. Serlio did have contacts with the family; in his books of drawings of exotic antiquities, he made known that Marco Antonio Grimani had provided him with materials during some of his trips. In addition to this close

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Figure 5.10. Courtyard of Palazzo Grimani, Venice. 1537. Photo: Author.

intellectual relationship, the Bo­lognese artist shared Grimani’s religious leanings.35 The architectural forms of the Palazzo Grimani, the collection housed within the building, and the patron’s culture merged in a unique synthesis: the architectural language, especially that of the Antiquarium, was conceived as a montage of various fragments that made the architecture a parallel of Grimani’s collection of antiquities (Figure 5.11).36 The project of Palazzo Grimani has been not certainly attributed until now, and it has to be considered as a collective work. Among the latest hypotheses, it has recently been proposed that the antiquarian Jacopo Strada of Mantua be added to the Antiquarium’s traditional attribution to Bartolomeo Ammannati and Giovanni Bertani.37 This suggestion is of particular interest given Strada and Giovanni Grimani’s common fate: the antiquarian fled Italy to escape  35 Piana, ‘La storia costruttiva del palazzo’, pp. 40–42.  36 Tafuri, Venezia e il Rinascimento, p. 15.  37 On the attribution to Jacopo Strada, see Jansen, Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court, p. 389 n. 15. On Ammannati, see Stefani Mantovanelli, ‘Giovanni Grimani Patriarca di Aquileia’. On Bertani, see Tafuri, Venezia e il Rinascimento, p. 16 n. 36. The chapel has also been attributed to Giovanni Grimani himself; see Perry, ‘A Renaissance Showplace of Art’.

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Figure 5.11. Antiquarium in Palazzo Grimani, Venice. 1560s. Photo: Author.

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Figure 5.12. Fireplace in the Sala di Proserpina, Palazzo Thiene, Vicenza. 1540s. Photo: Author.

the inquisitorial interrogations held in the court of the Gonzaga in Mantua between 1567 and 1568, on the occasion of which he was burned in effigy. Reformist ideas also circulated in the court of Mantua thanks to the complicit attitude of Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga.38  38 On Mantua and Ercole Gonzaga, see Murphy, Ruling Peacefully; Firpo, Immagini ed eresie nell’Italia del Cinquecento, pp. 326–40.

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Figure 5.13. Villa Trissino, Cricoli, Vicenza. 1530s. Photo: Author.

The impulses and ideas that spread across the lagoon reached the mainland as well. Vicenza, in particular, was a centre stirred by the ferment of reformist ideas. The interior of Palazzo Thiene, begun by Giulio Romano in 1542 and completed by Palladio after 1546, contains allegories that help shed light on the patron’s leanings.39 A mantlepiece with a unicorn bearing an acanthus-leaf crown can be seen on the ground floor. The figure is an icono­graphic reference to Christ; its upward-turned face seems to direct the viewer to the story above, from which rises an anthropomorphic fireplace with a single eye at its centre — the all-seeing biblical eye (Psalm 33. 18) (Figure 5.12). Frequent visits by members of the Thiene family bring to light various ties with the milieux of reformists. Adriano Thiene, for example, emigrated to France in 1550 to escape the repressive climate of Vicenza; his nephew Ottavio left Vicenza and, after marrying the heiress of the Count of Scandiano, became the count of a small state under the aegis of the Duke of Ferrara; Giulio took refuge in Geneva; Odoardo published a Confessio fidei of a Calvinist stamp in Heidelberg in 1571, in which he paid homage to Orazio, the son of Andrea Palladio, and Leonida Da Porto.40 If we relate the

 39 On Palazzo Thiene, see Burns and Bazzotti, ‘Giulio Romano e palazzo Thiene’.  40 On the background of Vicenza and the palazzo’s decorations, see Firpo, Immagini ed eresie nell’Italia del Cinquecento, pp. 420–21.

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décor to the culture of the Thiene family, the message — thanks likewise to the figurative component — becomes clearer. It falls in line with the more cryptic thread initiated by the Erasmian epi­graphs at Palazzo Naselli and Palazzo Contughi as well as at Giangiorgio Trissino’s villa in Cricoli. In the 1530s, this person of letters, who was in contact with various members of the Este court, decided to renovate his suburban villa. Retaining the underlying structure of the existent building, Trissino opted to redesign his residence in the more antiquo. Among the turreted structures enclosing the building, he inserted an elevation with superimposed architectural orders. The cornice of the facade is adorned with lion heads, while the upper register is distinguished by a Vitruvian Ionic base, also seen at the Palazzo Naselli (Figure 5.13). This was the earliest building in the city of Vicenza to be inspired by classical architecture. Like Giuliano Naselli, Girolamo Contughi, Achille Bocchi, and Giovanni Grimani, Trissino could count on his own knowledge of the art of building as well as a consultant with specialized technical expertise. The possibility that the Vicentine humanist’s advisor was Serlio has been suggested.41 Trissino did decorate some rooms in the villa with a series of inscriptions, and Latin and Greek inscriptions of an antiquarian stamp once existed in the salone, but these were removed along with coats of arms and stucco-work in the late nineteenth century.42 The concepts to which he devoted himself were study and otium, the cornerstones of both the type of life that he coveted and the inclinations of the literary academy that he hosted at his residence.

Speaking Architecture The buildings examined in these pages have many points in common: all were built after the Sack of Rome in urban centres that were far from the city yet influenced by its architectural language. An important initial consideration has to do with hypotheses regarding attribution. Worth highlighting is Serlio’s presence in each of the projects under consideration.  41 On the role of Serlio as artistic adviser, see Wolters, ‘Sebastiano Serlio e il suo contributo alla villa veneziana prima di Palladio’; Burns, ‘“Da naturale inclinatione guidato”’, pp. 382–83; Morresi, ‘Giangiorgio Trissino, Sebastiano Serlio e la villa di Cricoli’; Olivato, ‘Con il Serlio tra i “dilettanti di architettura” veneziani della prima metà del ’500’, p. 252; Puppi, Scrittori vicentini d’architettura del secolo xvi, p. 81; Puppi, ‘Un letterato in villa’, p. 85. The theory has not been unanimously accepted; on a different interpretation, see Günther, ‘Studien zum vene­zianischen Aufenthalt des Sebastiano Serlio’, p. 47; Frommel, Sebastiano Serlio architetto, p. 60.  42 What we know about the inscriptions comes from sources dating prior to the restoration: there were one Greek epi­graph, ΠΑΝ ΤΟ ΖΗΤΟΎΜΕΝΟΝ Α ΛΩTON (you can achieve what you sought), and the Latin ones: genio et studiis, otio et musis, virtuti et quieti (with diligence and commitment, thanks to ozio and Art, virtue and quiet). See Rumor, ‘Villa Cricoli’.

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The architect appears among the possible advisors of Giangiorgio Trissino, was in touch with members of the Grimani family, and figured within Achille Bocchi’s inner circle. He mentions Palazzo Naselli in the dedicatory preface of his treatise, thus testifying to his relationship with the building’s patron and the humanist Celio Calcagnini. As noted, Serlio’s religious views have become a historio­graphical topos. His reference to temples in Book v, in which he speaks of ‘the hearts of devout Christians, within which resides, through faith, Jesus Christ our Saviour’,43 is an interesting indication of his spiritual leanings as confirmed by his associates. Indeed, in Venice he was in contact with Sansovino, Lorenzo Lotto, Pietro Aretino, and Giulio Camillo Delminio, all of whom were open to the ideas of the reform movement.44 Although we lack documents that would allow us to assign the design of each building definitively to Serlio, his affiliation with the cultural and religious circles to which their various patrons belonged makes the possibility of his role as artistic adviser worthy of serious consideration. Whatever the case, these buildings convey a piece of the religious history of sixteenth-century Italy. Each of them emanates from the cultural values of a patron who intended to incorporate into his home signs of his religious convictions. Thus, in contrast to other studies in the field, this one does not attempt to read religious meaning in ‘pauperistic’ or ‘heterodox’ forms, but rather to interpret the history of buildings from the perspective of the patrons’ intentions. These buildings, as noted, exhibited common characteristics since the patrons either shared a network of common acquaintances or were in direct contact with one another. Consequently, the buildings described here should no longer be regarded as isolated cases, but rather should be read as part of a joint enterprise and the result of a growing clientele. Research on epi­graphs has shown how the religious convictions of patrons penetrated architecture with the intention of influencing its meaning through the display of cultural and religious programmes: Palazzo Naselli and Palazzo Contughi, for example, reveal the allegiance of both Giuliano Naselli and Girolamo Mario Contughi to the ideas of Erasmus, while Palazzo Grimani and the facade of San Francesco della Vigna tell the complicated tale of the religious controversy surrounding Giovanni Grimani. In other cases, the link between religion and architecture seems weaker: although Giangiorgio Trissino and Achille Bocchi were clearly involved in reform circles, for instance, their residences were bearers chiefly of humanistic meaning.

 43 Serlio, Quinto libro d’architettura, p. 1v.  44 Tafuri, Venezia e il Rinascimento, pp. 79–124; Tafuri, ‘Ipotesi sulla religiosità di Sebastiano Serlio’; Carpo, La maschera e il modello, pp. 53, 85–105; Fontaine, ‘Serlio et l’entourage de Marguerite de Navarre’, pp. 105–08, 112–18.

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If images are endowed with the power to educate, then buildings are capable of flirting with their own evocative and cryptic value. On the other hand, the fact that not everyone could grasp their meaning instantly protected their patrons from the Inquisition. Despite the fundamental ambiguity of the messages entrusted to these buildings, the examples discussed here testify to the kaleidoscope of religious beliefs in Italy in the era of the Reformation while also offering a new key for interpreting the architecture of the Renaissance.

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Works Cited Manu­scripts and Archival Sources Modena, Archivio di Stato, Ambasciatori, Venice, b. 13 Modena, Archivio di Stato, MS 69, Paolo da Legnago, Cronaca Primary Sources Bocchi, Achille, Symbolicae quaestiones, ed. by Anne Rolet (Tours: Presses Univ. François-Rabelais de Tours; Rennes: Presses Univ. de Rennes, 2015) Erasmus, Desiderius, Collected Works of Erasmus: Adages, ed. by Roger Aubrey Baskerville Mynors, and Margaret Mann Philipps, vols xxxi–xxxv (Toronto: Uni­ver­sity of Toronto Press, 1982–2005) —— , Convivium religiosum, in Collected Works of Erasmus: Colloquies, trans. and annot. by Craig R. Thompson, vol. xxxix (Toronto: Uni­ver­sity of Toronto Press, 1997), pp. 171–243 Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Horace), Satires, Epistles and ars poetica, with an English trans. by Henry Rushton Fairclough (Cam­bridge, MA: Harvard Uni­ver­sity Press, 1929; repr. 1961) Serlio, Sebastiano, Quinto libro d’architettura di Sabastiano Serlio bo­lognese (Paris: M. de Vascosan, 1547) —— , Regole generali di architettura sopra le cinque maniere de gli edifici cioè thoscano, dorico, ionico, corinthio […] (Venice: Francesco Marcolini, 1537) Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture, trans. by Morris Hicky Morgan (Cam­bridge, MA: Harvard Uni­ver­sity Press, 1914; repr. New York: Dover Publications, 1960) Secondary Studies Angelini, Annarita, Simboli e Questioni: L’eterodossia culturale di Achille Bocchi e dell’Hermathena (Bo­logna: Pendragon, 2003) Bentivoglio, Enzo, ‘La presenza di Baldassarre Peruzzi nei lavori della casa di Blosio Palladio’, in Baldassarre Peruzzi: Pittura, scena, architettura, ed. by Marcello Fagiolo and Maria Luisa Madonna (Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1987), pp. 193–204 Burns, Howard, ‘“Da naturale inclinatione guidato”: il primo decennio di attività di Palladio architetto’, in Il primo Cinquecento, ed. by Arnaldo Bruschi (Milan: Electa, 2002), pp. 373–413 Burns, Howard, and Ugo Bazzotti, ‘Giulio Romano e palazzo Thiene’, in Palladio, ed. by Guido Beltramini and Howard Burns (Venice: Marsilio, 2008), pp. 40–53 Carpo, Mario, La maschera e il modello: teoria architettonica ed evangelismo nell’Extraordinario Libro di Sebastiano Serlio (1551) (Milan: Jakabook, 1993)

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Fagiolo, Marcello, Vignola: L’architettura dei principi (Rome: Gangemi 2007) —— , ‘Il Vignola e Bo­logna: il tempio, il foro, la rocca della Virtù’, Quaderni di storia dell’architettura e restauro, 1 (1989), 5–22 Favaretto, Irene, Arte antica e cultura antiquaria nelle collezioni venete al tempo della Serenissima (Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 1990) Firpo, Massimo, Gli affreschi di Pontormo a San Lorenzo: Eresia, politica e cultura nella Firenze di Cosimo I (Torino: Einaudi, 1997) —— , ‘Le ambiguità della porpora e I “diavoli” del Sant’Ufficio: Identità e storia nei ritratti di Giovanni Grimani’, Rivista storica italiana, 117 (2005), 825–71 —— , Artisti, gioiellieri, eretici: Il mondo di Lorenzo Lotto tra Riforma e Controriforma (Rome: Laterza, 2001) —— , Immagini ed eresie nell’Italia del Cinquecento (Bari-Rome: Laterza, 2016) —— , Storie di immagini, immagini di storia: Studi di iconografia cinquecentesca (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2010) Firpo, Massimo, and Fabrizio Biferali, Battista Franco ‘pittore viniziano’ nella cultura artistica e nella vita religiosa del Cinquecento (Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2007) Fontaine, Marie-Madeleine, ‘Serlio et l’entourage de Marguerite de Navarre’, in Sebastiano Serlio à Lyon, ed. by Sylvie Deswarte-Rosa (Lyon: Mémoire Active, 2004), pp. 98–118 Foscari, Antonio, and Manfredo Tafuri, L’armonia e i conflitti: La chiesa di San Francesco della Vigna nella Venezia del ’500 (Turin: Einaudi, 1983) Frommel, Christoph Luitpold, Der Römische Palastbau der Hochrenaissance, 3 vols (Tübingen: Wasmuth, 1973) —— , ‘Vignola architetto del potere: Gli esordi e le ville nell’Italia centrale’, in Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola, ed. by Richard J. Tuttle and others (Milan: Electa, 2002), pp. 35–59 Frommel, Sabine, Sebastiano Serlio architetto (Milan: Electa 1998); English translation: Sebastiano Serlio Architect (London: Phaidon Press, 2003) Ghignoli, Antonella, ed., Chartacea supellex: l’inventario dei libri di Celio Calcagnini (Rome: nella sede dell’Istituto, 2016) Günther, Hubertus, ‘Studien zum venezianischen Aufenthalt des Sebastiano Serlio’, Münchner Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst, 3rd ser., 32 (1981), 42–94 Jansen, Dirk Jacob, Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court: The Antique as Innovation (Leiden: Brill, 2019) Martin, John Jeffries, Venice’s Hidden Enemies: Italian Heretics in a Renaissance City (Berkley: Uni­ver­sity of California Press, 1993) Martinis, Roberta, ‘Cà Loredan Vendramin Calergi a Venezia: Mauro Codussi e il palazzo di Andrea Loredan’, Annali di architettura, 10–11 (1998–99), 43–61 Mattei, Francesca, ‘Celio Calcagnini, Terzo Terzi e la cultura architettonica a Ferrara nel primo Cinquecento (1513–1539)’, Arte lombarda, 166 (2012), 40–61 —— , Eterodossia e vitruvianesimo: Palazzo Naselli a Ferrara (1527–1538) (Rome: Campisano, 2013) —— , ‘Un inedito di Girolamo da Carpi: Il portale di palazzo Contughi e l’intro­du­ zione dell’opera rustica a Ferrara (1543)’, Annali di architettura, 24 (2012), 55–70

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—— , ‘“Tribus linguis alloquitur ingredientem”: Ebraismo e architettura parlante a Ferrara nel Cinquecento’, in Ebrei a Ferrara, ebrei di Ferrara: Aspetti culturali, economici e sociali della presenza ebraica a Ferrara (secc. xiii–xx), ed. by Laura Graziani Secchieri (Florence: Giuntina, 2014), pp. 61–78 Morresi, Manuela, ‘Giangiorgio Trissino, Sebastiano Serlio e la villa di Cricoli: ipotesi per una revisione attributive’, Annali di architettura, 6 (1994), 116–34 —— , Jacopo Sansovino (Milan: Electa, 2000) —— , ‘La storia come trappola: La religione degli artisti nel primo Cinquecento. Riflessioni di metodo e proposte per Jacopo Sansovino’, in Tante storie: Storia delle idee, delle istituzioni, dell’arte e dell’architettura, ed. by Fabia Cigni and Valeria Tomasi (Milan: Mondadori, 2004), pp. 38–81 Murphy, Paul V., Ruling Peacefully: Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga and Patrician Reform in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Washington: Catholic Uni­ver­sity of America Press, 2007) Olivato, Loredana, ‘Con il Serlio tra i “dilettanti di architettura” veneziani della prima metà del ’500: Il ruolo di Marcantonio Michiel’, in Les Traités d’Architecture de la Renaissance: actes du colloque tenu à Tours du 1er au 11 juillet 1981, ed. by Jean Guillaume (Paris: Picard, 1988), pp. 247–54 Panofsky, Erwin, ‘Erasmus and the Visual Arts’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 32 (1969), 200–228 Perry, Marilyn, ‘A Renaissance Showplace of Art: The Palazzo Grimani at Santa Maria Formosa’, Apollo, 113 (1981), 215–21 Piana, Mario, ‘La storia costruttiva del palazzo’, in Palazzo Grimani a Santa Maria Formosa: Storia, arti, restauri, ed. by Annalisa Bristot (Verona: Scripta, 2008), pp. 31–59 Puppi, Lionello, ‘Un letterato in villa: Giangiorgio Trissino a Cricoli’, Arte veneta, 25 (1971), 72–91 —— , Scrittori vicentini d’architettura del secolo xvi: G.G. Trissino, O. Belli, V. Scamozzi, P. Gualdo (Vicenza: Accademia Olimpica, 1973) Ricci, Maurizio, ‘Un progetto di palazzo peruzziano: un’ipotesi sulla casa romana di Blosio Palladio’, Quaderni del Dipartimento Patrimonio Architettonico e Urbanistico, 4 (1994), 71–80 —— , ‘“Villula ter quaterque felix”: Baldassarre Peruzzi e la villa di Blosio Palladio a Monte Mario’, in Baldassarre Peruzzi, 1481–1536, ed. by Christoph L. Frommel (Venice: Marsilio, 2005), pp. 273–83 Rumor, Sebastiano, ‘Villa Cricoli’, Archivio Veneto Tridentino, 17–18 (1926), 202–16 Schmidt, Johann-Karl, ‘Zu Vignolas Palazzo Bocchi in Bo­logna’, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 13 (1967–68), 83–94 Stefani Mantovanelli, Marina, ‘Giovanni Grimani Patriarca di Aquileia e il suo Palazzo di Venezia’, Quaderni utinensi, 2 (1984), 36–54 Tafuri, Manfredo, ‘Ipotesi sulla religiosità di Sebastiano Serlio’, in Sebastiano Serlio: Atti del Sesto Seminario Internazionale di storia dell’architettura, ed. by Christof Thoenes (Milan: Electa, 1989), pp. 57–66 —— , Venezia e il Rinascimento: Religione, scienza, architettura (Turin: Einaudi, 1985); English translation: Venice and the Renaissance, trans. by Jessica Levine (Cam­bridge: MIT Press, 1989)

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Torboli, Micaela, ‘Erasmo da Rotterdam alla corte di Ferrara: Nuove proposte per “Kairos e Metanoia” di Girolamo da Carpi’, Ferrara, 32 (2010), 45–48 —— , Il serpente e la rondine: Palazzo Contughi-Gulinelli di Ferrara nei percorsi della storia (Ferrara: Centro Stampa Comune di Ferrara, 1998) Tuttle, Richard J., ‘Palazzo Bocchi’, in Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola, ed. by Richard J. Tuttle and others (Milan: Electa, 2002), pp. 149–52 Watson, Elizabeth See, Achille Bocchi and the Emblem Book as Symbolic Form (Cambridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 1993) Wittkower, Rudolf, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (London: Tiranti, 1962) Wolters, Wolfang, ‘Sebastiano Serlio e il suo contributo alla villa veneziana prima di Palladio’, Bollettino del Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio, 11 (1969), 83–94

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Grace Harpster

Sacred Images in Carlo Borromeo’s Instructiones Between Liturgy and the Antique

The Catholic Reformation art historian is repeatedly confronted with the terse and unsatisfying text of the Council of Trent’s 1563 decree on images.1 The council’s vague orders that bishops monitor church artworks for indecorum and lasciviousness fail to map onto the complex reality of artistic production.2 Few systematic cases of artistic impropriety exist in the historical record, leading to frequent repetition of the two most infamous incidents: the amusing anecdote of the ‘Breeches-Painter’ Daniele da Volterra covering the genitalia in Michelangelo’s Sistine frescoes in 1564, and Paolo Veronese’s defence of the frivolities in his 1573 Last Supper before the Venetian Inquisition (Figures 6.1 and 6.2). An immense pressure has been placed on these overdetermined episodes, contributing to a definition of Catholic Reformation art as counter reform or, for that matter, counter Renaissance: censorious, excessively proper, and hostile to artistic license. A closer look, however, reveals certain peculiarities. Veronese, for his part, makes due mention of the painter’s recourse to invention and ornament, but the inquisitorial tribunal has other priorities.3 They inquire about the artwork’s material support, repeatedly reference the depiction of Germans, and discuss a prior’s request that the dog in the foreground be replaced with a Mary Magdalen. Michelangelo’s Last Judgement attracted similarly myopic critiques a decade earlier. In addition to its problematic

 1 The image material is, tellingly, folded into the decree on the cult of the saints, see Session 25 (3–4 December 1563): ‘On invocation, veneration, and relics of the saints, and on sacred images’, in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. and trans. by Tanner, pp. 774–76.  2 The problem of image decorum after Trent is treated in Hall and Cooper, The Sensuous in the Counter-Reformation Church, though the volume focuses on the categories of the senses and sensuousness in particular.  3 Transcription of the interrogation record in Fehl, ‘Veronese and the Inquisition’, pp. 348–51. English translation in Kaplan, ‘Veronese and the Inquisition’, pp. 108–11.

Grace Harpster ([email protected]) is Assistant Professor of Art History in the Ernest G. Welch School of Art & Design at Georgia State Uni­ver­sity in Atlanta.

Renaissance Religions: Modes and Meanings in History, ed. by Peter Howard, Nicholas Terpstra, and Riccardo Saccenti, ES 26 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2021) pp. 155–174 10.1484/M.ES-EB.5.121904

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gr ace ha r p s t e r Figure 6.1. Michelangelo, Last Judgement, Vatican City, Vatican Museums, Sistine Chapel. 1534–1541. Photo courtesy of Joseph S. Martin/Artothek/Alinari Archives.

nudity (which Veronese’s inquisitors defend), the Sistine fresco came under fire for matters like Christ’s lack of facial hair, or the depiction of angels, who, as celestial weightless entities, should not struggle to hold a column.4 The vague language of Trent and the moments of fixation on unexpected particularities point to something more than clerical restriction or ineptitude. Rather than examine these anecdotes on their own terms, we might place pressure on the concerns that steered them. This reveals a preceptive and liturgical system of thinking that did not fail to understand images, but instead insisted on understanding them within that same system. In a sacred space, such as the Sistine Chapel or the refectory of Santi Giovanni e Paolo, where Veronese’s painting originally hung, artworks in all of their material and conceptual complexity often collided with this post-Tridentine framework. In many ways, Cardinal-Archbishop Carlo Borromeo (1538–1584) is an archetype of this early Catholic Reformation culture. He participated in the Council of Trent, published volumes of ecclesiastical legislation, enacted major reforms in his diocese, allegedly converted Swiss Lutherans, and performed a zealous piety that quickly propelled him to sainthood in 1610.5 Borromeo here functions as a window into  4 Veronese brings up Michelangelo’s fresco in defence of his artistic license, but the inquisitors remind him that ‘it was not necessary to paint clothing’ because bodies would rise without dress at the Last Judgment. English after Kaplan, ‘Veronese and the Inquisition’, p. 110. The critique of Michelangelo’s struggling angels comes from Giovanni Andrea Gilio’s 1564 treatise on the errors of painters; see transcription in Barocchi, Trattati d’arte del Cinquecento, ii, 46. For the recent English translation, see Gilio, Dialogue on the Errors and Abuses of Painters, ed. by Bury, Byatt, and Richardson, trans. by Bury and Byatt, p. 177. Critiques on Christ’s beardlessness recur in the reception of Michelangelo’s Last Judgement. See discussion in Barnes, Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, pp. 78, 95–96, 100.  5 Borromeo was active at the council via correspondence from Rome, where he acted as secretary and papal nephew to Pope

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Figure 6.2. Veronese, Feast in the House of Levi, Venice, Galleria dell’Accademia. 1573. Reproduced with the permission of the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali/ Raffaello Bencini/Alinari Archives, Florence.

a clerical mode of conceptualizing reform, based in canon law, liturgical decency, and practical implementation. He carved out a pathway, however, through a diverse landscape of miraculous images, proliferating relics, and famous artworks. Scipione Saurolo’s famous letter from 1561 condemning Pius IV. There is no space here to give a survey of the vast literature on Borromeo’s bio­graphy and influence. For a summary, see de Certeau, ‘Carlo Borromeo, santo’.

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the nudity of Michelangelo’s robust saints, for example, was addressed to the very same Borromeo, then apostolic secretary.6 Borromeo stands at the locus of many such collisions, between church space and theory, legislation and implementation, precept and artwork. We might thus turn away from anecdotes and art treatises to examine sacred images through the lens of Borromeo’s 1577 manual on proper church edifices and furnishings, the Instructiones fabricae et supellectilis ecclesiasticae.

 6 Full transcription of this letter in Sala, Documenti circa la vita e le gesta di S. Carlo Borromeo, iii, 90–91.

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This Latin work acts as a set of instructions for clergy to use in evaluating the churches under their jurisdiction. One chapter of a total of thirty-three is dedicated to sacred images, and the classical orders are given a single brief mention. The Instructiones contains none of the theoretical or stylistic insight characteristic of architectural and artistic treatises.7 Instead, we find page after page of minutia and measurement. Nevertheless, an evaluation of Borromeo’s Instructiones and its particular brand of descriptive limitation provides fundamental clues about a Tridentine conception of art, in which sacre immagini become essential liturgical instruments effectuating a Christian historical timeline into the early modern present.

Images and the Language of Precept Borromeo’s guide to proper church outfitting, the Instructiones fabricae et supellectilis ecclesiasticae, contains two parts, the first dedicated to matters of church structure and its major components, and the second listing the requisite liturgical objects and their proper form.8 Examples from the former include the relatively brief chapter on the proper location for a church, Chapter 3 on external walls, and the much longer chapters on monastery regulations. The topics tend from more general to more specific, with later chapters addressing relic containers at length or church lamps.9 The second book, meanwhile, provides inventories for four different types of churches: cathedral, collegiate, parish, and simple. After these initial four sections, it records ninety-nine general dicta about various church furnishings, such as the cross, the mitre, the surplice, and even the missal bookmark.

 7 Despite its non-theoretical character, the Instructiones is most often discussed in the secondary literature on cinquecento art theory and architectural history. For its examination among theoretical treatises, see Blunt, Artistic Theory in Italy, pp. 127–31, and Barocchi, Trattati d’arte del Cinquecento, iii, 383–402. For views of the Instructiones as it relates to architectural theory, see Benedetti, Fuori dal classicismo, pp. 105–31. An emphasis on Lombard architecture is in Scotti, ‘Architettura e riforma cattolica nella Milano di Carlo Borromeo’, Gatti Perer, ‘Le “Istruzioni” di san Carlo’, and Voelker, ‘Charles Borromeo’s Instructiones’, pp. 5–8. On that of Rome, see Alexander, From Renaissance to CounterReformation, pp. 231–40, and Sénécal, ‘Carlo Borromeo’s Instructiones’.  8 All my citations of the work are from the 1599 edition of the Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis, which includes the full Latin text of the 1577 Instructiones, inserted on pages 561–638. My decision to cite from the primary source instead of Barocchi’s authoritative Latin transcription is because she only includes Book i of the Instructiones (see Barocchi, Trattati d’arte del Cinquecento, iii, 1–113). For an English translation of the Instructiones, see Voelker, ‘Charles Borromeo’s Instructiones’, pp. 21–451. An English translation of Book ii, as well as a PDF of Book i, can be found on Evelyn Voelker’s website: . For an Italian translation of Books i and ii, see Borromeo, Instructionum, ed. and trans. by della Torre and Marinelli. All translations are my own, unless otherwise noted.  9 Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis, pp. 573, 576.

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One quickly discerns the practical concerns that pervade the text. The work was designed in this capacity: much of the Instructiones reflects decrees from provincial councils and synods in Milan, designed to implement the general Tridentine decrees on a diocesan level.10 The Instructiones operated as a serviceable guide for clerics to use in their local churches. Its portable size facilitated its use in the frequent visitations Borromeo vigorously promoted.11 Provincial consistency was paramount. Borromeo writes to an apostolic nuncio in the Duchy of Savoy, ‘mi parrebbe cosa monstruosa, che questa medesima Provincia havesse differente ordinationi’ (it would seem to me a monstrous thing, that this same province would contain different ordinances).12 These printed precepts were intended to facilitate regularity as part of Borromeo’s agenda of reform. Although specific to the Milanese diocese, Borromeo’s precepts offered a model for parish priests throughout the expanding Catholic world.13 Its Latin text enjoyed wide circulation, especially through its inclusion in Borromeo’s Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis, a massive compilation of synodal and conciliar decrees, other instructions, and numerous edicts and pastoral documents.14 Borromeo’s legislation was important enough to act as evidence of his holy virtue: both the Instructiones and the Acta factored into the early seicento trials for Borromeo’s canonization.15 There must have been great need for such a guide: there were seventeenth-century reprints in Venice, Paris, and Lyon, and there were copies in Poland, France, and likely in New Spain, already in Borromeo’s lifetime.16 Borromeo personally sent copies of his conciliar decrees or the Instructiones to ecclesiastical

 10 For an examination of Borromeo’s strategies of social discipline as well as his implementa­ tion of Tridentine ideals, see de Boer, The Conquest of the Soul.  11 On the involvement of visitations in the production and use of the Instructiones, see Scotti, ‘Architettura e riforma cattolica nella Milano di Carlo Borromeo’.  12 Rome, Archivio Storico dei Barnabiti di Roma, Lettere di San Carlo Borromeo, Diverse, V, fol. 61v.  13 Borromeo tells Gabriele Paleotti, for example, that he has sent copies of the Provincial Councils of Milan not so that they are followed exactly, but so they may provide a model to which Paleotti should apply his own judgement for the diocese of Bo­logna; see Milan, BAM, P. 20 inf., fol. 280r. See a similar comment in a letter to the Bishop of Padua, Milan, BAM, P. 20 inf., fol. 273r.  14 First published in 1582. For an editorial history, see Barocchi, Trattati d’arte del Cinquecento, iii, 403–06.  15 See Milan, BAM, S.Q.+.II.28, fols 52v–53r for just one example.  16 Alexander, From Renaissance to Counter-Reformation, pp. 260–62; Barocchi, Trattati d’arte del Cinquecento, iii, 403–04. For the early implementation of Borromean church instruction in New Spain, see Kubler, Mexican Architecture of the Sixteenth Century, pp. 249–50, 279, 414–15, and Bazoli and Daglio, ‘Le chiese del Borromeo e le chiese latinoamericane’. Hundreds of copies of the Acta were requested in France already in 1582, with one sent to the library of the King of Spain: Sala, Documenti circa la vita e le gesta di S. Carlo Borromeo, ii, 211. For an examination and full biblio­graphy on the fate of the Acta, see Ditchfield, ‘Carlo Borromeo and the Making of Roman Catholicism’.

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Figure 6.3. ‘Printed ruler from the Instructiones’, in Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis (1599 edition), p. 638. 1582. Photo courtesy of the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.

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leaders in Poland, Bo­logna, Venice, Naples, and to the Spanish Nuncio.17 The Instructiones factored into seventeenth-century deliberations over the facade design of the Milanese Duomo, and after eight different editions over the next two centuries, it would still be held up as a pastoral ideal during the episcopacy of Cardinal Alfredo Ildefonso Schuster during World War II.18 As the Instructiones travelled through vast geo­graphical and chrono­ logical spaces, its practical utility ensured its applicability. We find a description of the necessary gratings to keep pesky dogs out of chapels and a command that the dais on a shrine platform be precisely a cubit and a half wide.19 Gratings for the monastery locutory windows were to be double iron, carefully measured, veiled with a black curtain, and backed by an iron plate with openings roughly the size of chickpeas (cicera).20 The ruler printed directly on the final page of the Instructiones confirms the practical exactitude required of its readers (Figure 6.3).21 This ecclesiastical scale complements the traits of the text, signalling that both should be used as tools. Chapter 17 of the Instructiones is dedicated to sacred images.22 Borromeo recommends that artists and clerics who fail to conform to his image decrees be fined and punished, but if his tone is severe, the restrictions themselves are consolingly vague.23 Once again, we see the vague art descriptors from Trent: apocryphal, false, and superstitious artworks violate his rules, as do images that are profane or obscene.24 Extraneous caprices should also be avoided, including any inappropriate animals, unless the story requires them.25 Borromeo’s idea of proper imagery is similarly nondescript, calling for fitting, decorous, and dignified pictures.26  17 Borromeo sent copies of various provincial Milanese council decrees to the Cardinal Alciati in Rome (Milan, BAM. P. 16 inf., fol. 181r), the Nuncio of Venice, the Monsignor di Verona, the Bishop of Padua, the Cardinal of Toledo (Milan, BAM, P. 20 inf., fols 272r–273r), to Gabriele Paleotti, Bishop of Bo­logna, to the Nuncio of Spain, to the Archbishop of Urbino, to the Bishop of Berinero as Polish Nuncio, and to the Archbishop of Naples (Milan, BAM, P. 20 inf., fols 280r–281v). He also sent copies of the Instructiones to Monsignor di Perugia and the Monsignor d’Imola (Milan, BAM, P. 16 inf., fol. 337r).  18 See Alexander, From Renaissance to Counter-Reformation, pp. 257–60, and Barocchi, Trattati d’arte del Cinquecento, iii, 403–06.  19 Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis, pp. 571, 574.  20 Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis, p. 595.  21 Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis, p. 638. In the 1577 princeps edition, the ruler is printed on a foldout page. See also the printed Regulae for visitors to use in creating their reports, which also features a printed ruler, in Scotti, ‘Architettura e riforma cattolica nella Milano di Carlo Borromeo’, pp. 58, 66.  22 Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis, p. 576. The chapter is entitled ‘De sacris imaginibus picturisve’. On images in the Instructiones, see Prodi, Ricerca sulla teorica delle arte figurative, pp. 19–21, and Vitta, ‘La questione delle immagini nelle Instructiones di san Carlo Borromeo’.  23 Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis, p. 575.  24 Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis, p. 575.  25 Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis, p. 575.  26 Typical is the one-sentence section ‘De decore sacrarum imaginum’ (On the decorum of sacred images), Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis, p. 575.

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From the vantage point of an art-historical discipline invested in the historical specificity of style and icono­graphy, the Instructiones disappoints. Aesthetic values are minimized in favour of material ones: the crucifix brought to the sick and dying should be of gold, silver, brass, or, if need be, gilded wood.27 It is treated in the same manner as the peg on which one hangs the biretta, which should be of iron, and the altar niche for relics, which should be of stone or marble and incised with a crucifix.28 Icono­ graphy emerges only in basic, broad directives. The Eucharistic tabernacle should be topped with a Christ figure, while its base must feature angels or other ‘religiosum ornatum’ (religious ornament).29 The baptismal altar, predictably, should have an image of John the Baptist.30 Stylistic shifts that mark the passage of cultural and historical time find no notation here. Complex objects instead lie behind traditional phrases, with terms like ‘sumptuous’ or ‘decorous’ concealing a multitude of artistic decisions. If we refrain from attaching these labels to objects that they cannot circumscribe, the preceptive genre of the Instructiones can tell us much about the relationship between art and reform in the late sixteenth century.31 The documents of art history often fail to express the visual. This, as Michael Baxandall writes in Patterns of Intention, occurs despite the centrality of description in the art-historical task of interpreting images.32 Historical inventories likewise suppress disciplinary concerns of attribution and style, instead communicating a system of economic notation that at times values the costly frame over the many anonymous Madonnas and portraits within. Yet, these documents remain essential. Baxandall’s own excavations of broad terms like commensurazione or splendore still provide windows into a specific humanistic context.33 In the Instructiones, the characteristics of image precepts can also elucidate the values and categories of critique. Certain preoccupations point to an underlying internal logic of sacramental objects. When Christ is depicted, his nimbus must contain a cross.34 Within ornamental borders, the artist should avoid excessive profanity, allowing neither grotesque masks, ‘non aviculae, non mare, non prata virentia’ (nor small birds, nor the sea, nor green pastures).35 All extraneous effigies Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis, p. 624. Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis, pp. 571–72. Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis, p. 568. Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis, p. 577. I use the adjective ‘preceptive’ in reference to the Italian precettistica, as used, for example, in the critical commentary of Barocchi’s translation; see Barocchi, Trattati d’arte del Cinquecento, iii, 383–89. It refers to the system of normative, precept-based thinking that I argue characterizes Borromeo’s concerns in the Instructiones.  32 Baxandall, Patterns of Intention, pp. 1–10.  33 Baxandall, Patterns of Intention, pp. 114–21.  34 Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis, p. 576.  35 Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis, p. 576. Translation from Voelker, ‘Charles Borromeo’s Instructiones’, p. 231.

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‘iumentorum, canum, piscium’ (of beasts of burden, dogs, fish) should be avoided as well.36 Borromeo plainly states that cemetery portals must portray a crucifix with a skull at its base.37 Particular preoccupations pervade other descriptions of ornament as well. The Instructiones takes care to legislate that Passion scenes should adorn the base of the Eucharistic chalice, but equally importantly, this ornament must not impede the celebrant’s hand.38 The priest’s linen surplice or superpellicium should not have any elaborate ornament, especially around the shoulders.39 Against a backdrop of vague and infrequent references to pious images, such specificities fall into high relief. The nature of these precepts recalls those regarding consecrated objects, treating artworks alongside relics and liturgical instruments. Indeed, the Roman Pontifical book instructs bishops on how to bless altar cloths, pectoral crosses, and images of the Virgin Mary.40 The Instructiones explicitly states that images should be blessed: Nec vero loci solum habenda ratio est, sed antiqui ecclesiasticique ritus: ut cum scilicet expressae sunt Sanctorum imagines, solemni bene­ dictione statisque precibus pontificali sacerdotalive libro praescriptis consecrentur. [Attention is to be given not only to the place of the images, but also to the ancient Ecclesiastical rite, so that, when the images of the saints have been made, they should be consecrated by solemn benediction and the stated prayers prescribed in the Pontifical or the Ceremonial book.]41 In a decree from 1582, the point is strengthened: images should not be put in place until the priest has performed this blessing.42 Sacred artworks, according to the liturgical books themselves, participate in the holy apparatus of church furnishings. With this in mind, some of Borromeo’s particular insistences become logical. He clearly states, for example, that sacred images must not be painted on the external oratory walls unless they are elevated enough to

 36 Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis, p. 575. Translation from Voelker, ‘Charles Borromeo’s Instructiones’, p. 229.  37 Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis, p. 588.  38 Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis, p. 628.  39 Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis, p. 365. This should not be taken as an aversion to splendid liturgical vestments in general, which were essential to solemn Catholic ceremony, but rather as a rule specific to the surplice.  40 See for example the revised Pontificale Romanum Clementis VIII from 1595, which includes those sections and another for blessing images of other saints, pp. 509–10.  41 Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis, p. 576. Translation from Voelker, ‘Charles Borromeo’s Instructiones’, p. 231.  42 Borromeo’s Fifth Diocesan Synod, Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis, p. 384.

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escape staining and mud.43 In his chapter on pavements, Borromeo forbids any religious image, including a cross, from the floor designs.44 If wall paintings and floor decorations are viewed as blessed sacramentals, soiling them or trampling upon them amounts to sacrilege.45 The Fourth Provincial Council of 1576 reiterates a previous precept forbidding the dirtying of the holy crucifix or setting it on the ground — and it expands these rules to include other sacred depictions like saints’ lives and sacred mysteries.46 Another decree demands that soiled crucifixes or images be removed within fifteen days.47 The 1576 text specifies that decaying altar cloths must be burned and the ashes must be buried, and adds, ‘Imagines quoque sacrae sculptae, si deformatae sint, amoveantur; & sub pavimento ecclesiae, aut salem sub coemiterij solo collocentur’ (sacred statues, if deformed, should be removed and placed under the pavement of the church or at least under the ground of the cemetery).48 These precepts clearly articulate a sacramental understanding of the materials of sacred imagery, sculpture, and altar cloth alike. When not overtly sacramental, image precepts in the Instructiones emphasize the utility of art. The sacristy, for example, should have an icon, a crucifix, or ‘alia pia imagine’ (another pious image) for the priest to use in preparing for Mass.49 Borromeo demands that confessionals place a print of the crucifixion in view of the confessant to inspire piety, still in practice today.50 A visitation of the Roman Seminary from 1586 also legislated image use, as its list of required items for its resident priests included ‘un quadretto con l’imagine’ (a small painting with an image).51 Such an emphasis on

 43 Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis, p. 591.  44 Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis, p. 565.  45 See Coriden’s definition of sacramentals: ‘Sacramentals are sacred signs, something like the sacraments, which signify spiritual effects obtained through the prayer of the church’, Coriden, Introduction to Canon Law, p. 148. See also Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe, pp. 155–57, although his emphasis on lay ritual is less relevant for sacramentals specific to hierarchical position, such as rituals of benediction in the pontifical liturgy.  46 Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis, p. 118. First cited in Voelker’s commentary. She notes a similar decree from a 1517 synod in Florence. See Voelker, ‘Charles Borromeo’s Instructiones’, p. 95.  47 Fifth Diocesan Synod in 1578, Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis, p. 383.  48 Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis, p. 118. First cited in Voelker, ‘Charles Borromeo’s Instructiones’, pp. 241–42. English translation from Voelker. The decree on burning altar cloths and curtains is probably from Durand’s Rationale — this medi­eval text contains the exact same reference to Pope Clement I on the matter, suggesting it was Borromeo’s source. Durand, Rationale divinorum officiorum, fol. 19r.  49 Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis, p. 589. Translation from Voelker, ‘Charles Borromeo’s Instructiones’, p. 362.  50 Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis, p. 584 (the Latin is imago in charta). Borromeo is largely respon­sible for popularizing the modern confessional; see de Boer, The Conquest of the Soul, pp. 84–125.  51 BAV, MS Vat. lat. 5524, fol. 55r. The Roman Seminary was founded in 1565 for the purpose of training diocesan clergy, though its residents took classes at the Jesuit Roman College, a system that caused no shortage of conflict. On this history, see O’Malley, The First Jesuits, pp. 236–37.

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functionality collates images into the category of ritual equipment. Strange fixations on an artistic rubric thus transform into critical issues on a liturgically motivated one.

Images and the Antiquity of Tradition The blessing of images, as Borromeo writes, is a ritual that is antique as well as sacred.52 Indeed, references to antiquity fill the pages of the Instructiones. Already in the preface Borromeo reminds the reader to strive towards an ancient apostolic model, praising the venerable buildings and liturgical furnishings at Rome, Jerusalem, Constantinople, and Milan.53 He frequently cites patristic authors throughout the Instructiones. John Chrysostom (d. 407) testifies that the use of a partition to separate the congregation by gender was antique.54 He praises the old tradition of labelling images of obscure saints by referencing a verse of St Paulinus (d. 431).55 Borromeo, who was himself considered a ‘second Ambrose’, gives especially frequent recourse to St Ambrose’s texts. Naming these venerable early Christian churchmen, often bishops, bestows his own office with the authority of an ancient era, much closer to the virtuous apostolic age.56 In the Instructiones, however, Christian antiquity is not a simple synonym for the fourth-century Church. The text relies heavily on the French bishop Guillaume Durand’s influential thirteenth-century tome on church spaces and liturgies, the Rationale Divinorum Officiorum, in its sources on ancient practices.57 A reference on antique church dividers cites the Venerable Bede (d. 735), probably by way of Durand.58 At times Borromeo relies on the Liber Pontificalis for antique exemplars; his comment that church lamps can have wooden dolphins ‘ut veteris olim usus fuit’ (in common with ancient usage) likely hails from the medi­eval compilation’s description of Constantine’s dolphin chandeliers.59 Antiquity also reveals itself through ritual and tradition, two ways of accessing Christian history that allow for a more pliant notion of antiquus. The Instructiones notes, for example, that ‘the ancients’ sometimes called the  52 Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis, p. 576.  53 Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis, p. 562.  54 Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis, p. 585.  55 Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis, p. 576.  56 Benedetti, Fuori dal classicismo, p. 120.  57 For the influence of Durand on the Instructiones, see Voelker, ‘Charles Borromeo’s Instructiones’, pp. 41–42. She also points out particular moments of influence throughout. See also Borromeo, Arte sacra, trans. and ed. by Castiglioni and Marcora, p. 14.  58 This is traced in Voelker, ‘Charles Borromeo’s Instructiones’, p. 101.  59 Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis, p. 576. There are several references to dolphin lamps and decoration in the Liber Pontificalis, including in the description of Constantine’s donations to the Lateran basilica during the time of Pope Sylvester I (The Book of Pontiffs, trans. by Davis, p. 16).

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sacristy a camera or secretarium, and monasteries with common dormitory quarters also observe antique tradition.60 Borromeo frequently describes rituals as ancient, such as when clergy process solemnly to the altar for Mass or when holy bodies are interred in the church’s confessio.61 As we have seen, the blessing of sacred images also falls into this category.62 The Roman rite makes claim to sacramental truths from the New Testament, but liturgy and canon law nonetheless developed historically, if slowly. Borromeo collapses these two facts under the subject of ancient tradition, not distinguishing between an apostolic liturgy and one formed through centuries of accrued practices. In a 1581 pastoral letter addressed to the diocese of Saronno, Borromeo exhorts the faithful to venerate image cults, describing this practice as ‘di antichissima divotione’ (of most antique devotion).63 The hanging of wax and painted votives is similarly described as ‘ex antiquo more institutoque’ (after ancient practice and tradition), leaving the reader to determine if this belief can be traced to patristic texts, ceremonial books, or merely the observation of contemporary praxis.64 This temporally broad idea of sacred antiquity at times also exhibits geo­ graphical expansiveness. For Borromeo, St Jerome’s gilding of religious texts invites us to imitate ‘foreign’ examples of ancient piety as well as ‘domestic’ ones.65 In the Saronno pastoral letter, Borromeo exhorts his followers to venerate image cults, citing church councils, the St Luke legend, and Marian image cults ‘nell’Asia, et nell’Africa già, et nell’Europa, in tutte le provincie, et particolarmente in Italia, non solo a Roma, et nella sacra casa di Loreto, ma anco specialmente nella Città, et Diocese di Milano’ (in Asia, Africa, and Europe, in all its provinces, but especially in Italy, not only in Rome and in the Holy House of Loreto, but especially in the city and diocese of Milan).66 Here we might discern a universality that helps to compress distinct strata of time. The Instructiones also relies on examples of extant buildings, suggesting that Borromeo gleaned material evidence of ancient tradition from the churches he encountered in Rome and Milan. One witness in Borromeo’s canonization trials recalls specifically that the future saint travelled all around the diocese to survey church structures for his book.67 Indeed,  60 Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis, pp. 588, 598.  61 Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis, pp. 389, 573. The terms institutum and mos are used here for ‘custom’ or ‘ritual’, and are used throughout the text interchangeably with ritus (such as the example in the subsequent note).  62 Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis, p. 576.  63 Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis, p. 1094.  64 Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis, p. 576. Translation slightly different from that in Voelker, ‘Charles Borromeo’s Instructiones’, p. 232.  65 Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis, p. 562: the Latin adjectives are externus and domesticus. See also the translation from Voelker, ‘Charles Borromeo’s Instructiones’, p. 24.  66 Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis, p. 1094.  67 From the 1603 deposition of Ottaviano Abbiate Forerio, Milan, BAM, S.Q.+.II.28, fol. 423v.

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Borromeo favours the cruciform floor plan because of its apostolic roots, ‘ut plane ex sacris basilicis Romanis maioribus ad eum modum extructis perspicitur’ (as is plainly seen in the buildings of the major holy basilicas of Rome).68 Advocating carved or painted images in the window recesses, Borromeo wants those ‘ut in antiquis, iisque insignioribus basilicis Mediolanensibus perspicitur’ (as may be seen in the most ancient and important basilicas of Milan).69 The Instructiones frequently uses the direct observation of actual churches as evidence of antique custom. Borromeo does this, for example, with his norms for facade windows and baptismal fonts.70 In a particularly interesting example, Borromeo writes that the tradition of depicting flanking lions at a cathedral portal goes back to the Temple of Solomon, as evidenced by the present-day Milanese churches that copied this motif.71 Evidence of sacred antiquity abounds in Borromeo’s Italy, even in those elements only descended from Solomonic models. Each day celebrants enact ancient rituals with sacred images and instruments, often in churches that are themselves redolent of antiquity, despite centuries of restoration and rebuilding.72 The vacillating parameters of Borromeo’s antique demonstrate a liturgically informed conception of the antique, in which image ritual, extant materials, and the accrued change of tradition continue to be promulgated into the present while harking back to an ancient truth. For a document so invested in antiquity, the wonders of imperial Rome are conspicuously absent from the Instructiones. Borromeo mentions the classical orders but once, writing merely that they are not prohibited.73 His silences might seem to support an oft-posited hostility on the part of post-Tridentine clerics towards the forms of the classical world and its Renaissance resurgences. However, the Instructiones suggests that a fear of classical culture and its concomitant pagan idolatry was not a guiding principle in post-Tridentine church design and decor.

First cited in Borromeo, Arte sacra, trans. and ed. by Castiglioni and Marcora, p. 10.  68 Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis, p. 563. Translation from Voelker, ‘Charles Borromeo’s Instructiones’, p. 51.  69 Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis, p. 565. Translation from Voelker, ‘Charles Borromeo’s Instructiones’, p. 97.  70 Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis, pp. 565, 578.  71 Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis, p. 565. The Temple of Solomon was considered the pinnacle of ancient splendour in this time; see Barocchi, Trattati d’arte del Cinquecento, iii, 426, and Moore, Architecture of the Christian Holy Land, esp. ch. 16.  72 This conflation of medi­eval churches with early Christian edifices is noted in Alexander, From Renaissance to Counter-Reformation, p. 206; Jobst, ‘Cultural Changes in Later Sixteenth-Century Italy’, p. 180; Krautheimer, ‘A Christian Triumph in 1597’, p. 175; and Sénécal, ‘Carlo Borromeo’s Instructiones’, p. 243. This phenomenon is often referred to as a mistake or substitution, but I interpret it as one of many instances in the Instructiones in which sacred antiquity is flexible, allowing for accretions of ritual or material without losing the designation as antique.  73 Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis, p. 601.

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Claims of anti-classicism come to a head in the debate about central-plan versus basilica-form churches, with many scholars seeing the Catholic Reformation in opposition to centralized architecture, too evocative of paganism and a secularizing Renaissance.74 Proponents of this view target Borromeo’s vague aside in the Instructiones, where he notes that, ‘Illa porro edificij rotundi species, olim idolorum templis in usu fuit; sed minus usitata in populo christiano’ (As far as round edifices are concerned, this type of plan was used for pagan temples and is less customary among Christian people).75 The round churches of these ancient idolaters are not placed into a polarizing dialectic between pagan and Christian, but are simply more common among the former.76 Borromeo’s architectural landscapes of reference, particularly Rome and Milan, provide numerous examples of decorous, round Christian temples. He would preach in the central-plan Church of San Lorenzo in Milan, for example, and, in gratitude for deliverance from the Milanese plague, even commissioned the construction of San Sebastiano, a classicizing, central-plan church explicitly aligned with the Pantheon in Rome.77 If Christian ideals have an enemy in the Instructiones, it is not the pagan, but the profane. Borromeo rails against family coats of arms and personal altars in churches; he decries those who use the church as a shortcut to the marketplace.78 His rule about square doorways instead of arched ones, for example, is not to avoid classicizing architecture, but rather to distinguish church edifices from city gates.79 Borromeo ends Book i by declaring that

 74 Blunt, Artistic Theory in Italy, p. 127; Sénécal, ‘Carlo Borromeo’s Instructiones’, pp. 245–48; Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, pp. 27–28; and Benedetti, Fuori dal classicismo, p. 120. See also the discussion in Barocchi, Trattati d’arte del Cinquecento, iii, 429–31.  75 Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis, p. 563. Translation from Voelker, ‘Charles Borromeo’s Instructiones’, p. 51.  76 On Borromeo’s lack of hostility towards the central plan, see Jobst, ‘Cultural Changes in Later Sixteenth-Century Italy’, pp. 181–83. Both Alexander and Voelker agree that Borromeo seems to have accepted central-plan churches, but they nevertheless ascribe to him an anticlassical bias. See Alexander, From Renaissance to Counter-Reformation, p. 237, and Voelker, ‘Charles Borromeo’s Instructiones’, pp. 52–57. For contemporary beliefs in the appearance of the Temple of Solomon in relation to this debate, see Moore, Architecture of the Christian Holy Land, pp. 255–57.  77 Milan, BAM, S.Q.+.II.28, fol. 90r: ‘Fu’ autore alla citta’ di far quelsi nobil tempio di S.to Sebast.o unico in Italia dopo’ la rotunda di Roma’. This connection was made more explicitly in a manu­script of Urbano Monti, who describes San Sebastiano as ‘a imitatione et disegno di farla simile ala rotonda di Roma’, Milan, BAM, P. 249 sup., fol. 1r.  78 Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis, pp. 565, 587. See discussion in Voelker, ‘Charles Borromeo’s Instructiones’, pp. 103–05, 350–53.  79 Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis, p. 565. Blunt and Voelker see this comment as an anti-pagan precept: Blunt, Artistic Theory in Italy, p. 129, and Voelker, ‘Charles Borromeo’s Instructiones’, p. 100. Gatti Perer disagrees, interpreting it as an aesthetic preference with spiritual ends. Gatti Perer, ‘Le “Istruzioni” di san Carlo’, p. 115.

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nothing should be seen in churches that relates to worldly pomposity or insignia of the nobility.80 The profane, more than the pagan, is placed in contentious opposition with the sacred ideals of the Instructiones. Exhuming concepts that lie beneath the term antiquus, we find a Christian antiquity with chrono­logical brackets loosened by medi­eval sources, liturgical texts, accrued ritual praxis, and complex church monuments. In the Instructiones, sacred images belong in this realm, viewed as instruments of ancient piety rather than potential sites of moral laxity and excessive artifice. Borromeo’s nondescript calls for decorum and exacting descriptions of ecclesiastical cubits speak to a particularly Tridentine form of prescriptive language. As with an inventory, artists and stylistic innovations disappear between the lines of a utilitarian document. Holistically, however, the Instructiones reveals a type of preceptive thinking that collides with the layered material and artistic reality of the late cinquecento. Incidental moments of pictorial improbability, such as Michelangelo’s labouring angels, run up against the weight and antiquity of liturgical imperative, while that same rubric endorses miraculous Renaissance frescoes. Rather than the anecdote, it is the genre itself that allows a deeper window into the immense importance of sacred images to even the most austere of Tridentine reformers. The fixations of legislative decrees and Inquisition records point to this understanding of images as sacramental and antique, confirming once again that late Renaissance art is deeply bound up with religion, if not precisely in the way one expects.

 80 Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis, p. 601.

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Works Cited Manu­scripts and Archival Sources Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana [BAM], P. 16 inf. Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana [BAM], P. 20 inf. Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana [BAM], P. 249 sup. Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana [BAM], S.Q.+.II.28 Rome, Archivio Storico dei Barnabiti di Roma, Lettere di San Carlo Borromeo, Diverse, V Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana [BAV], MS Vat. lat. 5524 Primary Sources Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis: a Carolo Cardinali S. Praxedis Archiepiscopo condita, Federici Card. Borromaei Archiepiscopi Mediolani ivssv undique diligentius collecta, & edita (Milan: Pacifici Pontij, 1599) The Book of Pontiffs (Liber Pontificalis): The Ancient Bio­graphies of the First Ninety Roman Bishops to ad 715, trans. by Raymond Davis (Liverpool: Liverpool Uni­ ver­sity Press, 2000) Borromeo, Carlo, Arte sacra (de fabrica ecclesiae), trans. and ed. by mons. Carlo Castiglioni and Don Carlo Marcora, preface by S. E. mons. Giovanni Costantini (Milan: Biblioteca Ambrosiana, 1952) —— , Instructionum fabricae et supellectilis ecclesiasticae [1577], ed. and trans. by Stefano della Torre and Massimo Marinelli (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2000) Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. and trans. by Norman Tanner, vol. ii (London: Sheed & Ward; Washington, DC: Georgetown Uni­ver­sity Press, 1990) Durand, Guillaume, Rationale divinorum officiorum, vol. i (Lyon, 1612) Gilio, Giovanni Andrea, Dialogue on the Errors and Abuses of Painters, ed. by Michael Bury, Lucinda Byatt, and Carol M. Richardson, trans. by Michael Bury and Lucinda Byatt (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2018) Pontificale Romanum Clementis VIII. Pont. Max. iussu restitutum atque editum (Rome, 1595) Voelker, Evelyn C., ‘Charles Borromeo’s Instructiones Fabricae et Supellectilis Ecclesiasticae, 1577: A Translation with Commentary and Analysis’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Syracuse Uni­ver­sity, 1977)

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Secondary Studies Alexander, John, From Renaissance to Counter-Reformation: The Architectural Patronage of Carlo Borromeo during the Reign of Pius IV (Milan: Biblioteca Ambrosiana; Rome: Bulzoni, 2007) Barnes, Bernadine, Michelangelo’s Last Judgment: The Renaissance Response (Berkeley: Uni­ver­sity of California Press, 1998) Barocchi, Paola, ed., Trattati d’arte del Cinquecento: fra manierismo e controriforma, vols ii and iii (Bari: Laterza, 1960–62) Baxandall, Michael, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­sity Press, 1985) Bazoli, Fulvia, and Laura Daglio, ‘Le chiese del Borromeo e le chiese latinoamericane: un’ipotesi di lettura’, in Instructionum fabricae et supellectilis ecclesiasticae [1577], ed. and trans. by Stefano della Torre and Massimo Marinelli (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2000), pp. 376–85 Benedetti, Sandro, Fuori dal classicismo: sintetismo, tipo­logia, ragione nell’architettura del Cinquecento (Rome: Multigrafica, 1984) Blunt, Anthony, Artistic Theory in Italy, 1450–1600 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940) Boer, Wietse de, The Conquest of the Soul: Confession, Discipline, and Public Order in Counter-Reformation Milan (Leiden: Brill, 2001) Certeau, Michel de, ‘Carlo Borromeo, santo’, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. xx (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana, 1977), pp. 260–66 Coriden, James A., Introduction to Canon Law, rev. edn (London: Continuum International, 2004) Ditchfield, Simon, ‘Carlo Borromeo and the Making of Roman Catholicism as a World Religion’, in Carlo Borromeo e il Cattolicesimo dell’eta moderna: Nascita e fortuna di un modello di santità, ed. by Maria Luisa Frosio and Danilo Zardin, Studia Borromaica, 25 (Milan: Biblioteca Ambrosiana, 2011), pp. 3–23 Fehl, Philipp, ‘Veronese and the Inquisition: A Study of the Subject Matter of the So-Called “Feast in the House of Levi”’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 58 (1961), 325–54 Gatti Perer, Maria Luisa, ‘Le “Istruzioni” di san Carlo e l’ispirazione classica nell’architettura religiosa del Seicento in Lombardia’, in Il mito del classicism nel Seicento, ed. by Stefano Bottari (Messina: D’Anna, 1964), pp. 101–23 Hall, Marcia B., and Tracy E. Cooper, eds, The Sensuous in the Counter-Reformation Church (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2013) Jobst, Christoph, ‘Cultural Changes in Later Sixteenth-Century Italy: The Particular View of Catholicism on Architecture of Classical Antiquity and Early Christianity’, in Antiquity Renewed: Late Classical and Early Modern Themes, ed. by Zweder von Martels and Victor M. Schmidt (Leuven: Peeters, 2003), pp. 167–84 Kaplan, Paul H. D., ‘Veronese and the Inquisition: The Geopolitical Context’, in Suspended License: Censorship and the Visual Arts, ed. by Elizabeth C. Childs (Seattle: Uni­ver­sity of Washington Press, 1997), pp. 85–124

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Krautheimer, Richard, ‘A Christian Triumph in 1597’, in Essays in the History of Art Presented to Rudolf Wittkower, ed. by Douglas Fraser, Howard Hibbard, and Milton J. Lewine (London: Phaidon, 1967), pp. 174–78 Kubler, George, Mexican Architecture of the Sixteenth Century, vol. ii (New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­sity Press, 1948) Moore, Kathryn Blair, Architecture of the Christian Holy Land: Reception from Late Antiquity through the Renaissance (New York: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2017) Muir, Edward, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 1997) O’Malley, John W., The First Jesuits (Cam­bridge, MA: Harvard Uni­ver­sity Press, 2007) Prodi, Paolo, Ricerca sulla teorica delle arte figurative nella riforma cattolica (Bo­logna: Nuova Alfa Editoriale, 1984) Sala, Aristide, ed., Documenti circa la vita e le gesta di S. Carlo Borromeo, vols ii and iii (Milan: E. Besozzi, 1857–63) Scotti, Aurora, ‘Architettura e riforma cattolica nella Milano di Carlo Borromeo’, L’arte, 18 (1972), 55–90 Sénécal, Robert, ‘Carlo Borromeo’s Instructiones fabricae et supellectilis ecclesiasticae and its Origins in the Rome of his Time’, Papers of the British School at Rome, 68 (2000), 241–67 Vitta, Maurizio, ‘La questione delle immagini nelle Instructiones di san Carlo Borromeo’, in Instructionum fabricae et supellectilis ecclesiasticae [1577], ed. and trans. by Stefano della Torre and Massimo Marinelli (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2000), pp. 386–96 Wittkower, Rudolf, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (London: Warburg Institute, 1949)

Daniel M. Unger

Icono­graphy and Visual Hagio­graphy Saint Carlo Borromeo’s Portrayal in Bo­lognese Churches (1611–1618) Strolling through the churches of Bo­logna, one cannot fail to be impressed by the number of images of St Carlo Borromeo that adorn the chapels. Many of these representations were made in the years immediately following Borromeo’s canonization in 1610. Indeed, in between 1611 and 1618, the most prominent painters working in Bo­logna received commissions to depict the newly canonized St Carlo. Ludovico Carracci, who is today considered the city’s leading painter during that period, created at least three works in which the saint is the main protagonist, and two of these paintings were installed in Bo­lognese churches. Other painters of note who received commissions to portray the saint were Lorenzo Garbieri, Giovanni Francesco Gessi, Guido Reni, Lucio Massari, Alessandro Tiarini, and Francesco Brizio. Additional images of the saint continued to be created in Bo­logna during later periods.1 One particularly important example is in the Cattedrale Metropolitana di San Pietro, where the famous eighteenth-century painter Donato Creti produced an altarpiece titled St Carlo Giving Alms to the Poor, a theme highlighting the most important deed for which he was reputed in the city. The paintings discussed in this essay were all completed in the years immediately following St Carlo’s canonization and thus reflect the way



* Research conducted for this study was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (Grant no. 312/14).  1 Malvasia mentions additional depictions of Borromeo by painters discussed in this article. One example is Brizio’s Madonna and Child with St Francis and St Carlo, which was made for the Church of San Antonio Abate. See Malvasia, Felsina Pittrice, i, 539. For a further discussion of Borromeo’s fame and the many representations of his portrait in art, see Aresi, Panegirici fatti in diverse occasioni, pp. 41–42. Daniel M. Unger ([email protected]) teaches early modern art history in the Department of the Arts at Ben-Gurion Uni­ver­sity of the Negev, Israel. His recent book is Redefining Eclecticism in Early Modern Bo­lognese Painting: Ideo­logy, Practice, and Criticism (Amsterdam Uni­ver­sity Press, 2019).

Renaissance Religions: Modes and Meanings in History, ed. by Peter Howard, Nicholas Terpstra, and Riccardo Saccenti, ES 26 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2021) pp. 175–203 10.1484/M.ES-EB.5.121905

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in which the saint was perceived in Bo­logna during that time. Three key themes are emphasized in these Bo­lognese representations: his care for the poor, his leadership, and his religious devotion. What also seems important is his saintly status, which was demonstrated in depictions of his apotheosis. It is important to note that during this period, the city was emerging as a major artistic centre, and its painters were garnering influence in the art world that had developed in Rome. Bo­lognese painters who were commissioned to depict the saint for churches outside of Bo­logna thus had a significant influence on the saint’s emerging icono­graphy beyond this local context.2 Perhaps the most famous example is Guido Reni’s fresco of St Carlo for the facade of San Carlo ai Catinari in Rome.3 Borromeo’s portrayal by Bo­lognese painters was undertaken at the height of the saint’s popularity. A sixteenth-century clergyman active in the struggle for reform within the Catholic Church, as well as in the conflict with the Protestants, Borromeo was remembered by Catholics twenty-six years after his death as having supernatural powers to support and console the faithful. Books published in the years after his canonization credited him with numerous miracles in places ranging from Milan to Poland, including Bo­logna.4 Borromeo was the first among the clerics of his time to be canonized. Considered the standard-bearer of Tridentine Reform, he inspired Catholics to strive for unity within the Catholic fold and symbolized the negation of Protestantism. An Italian translation of the papal bull La Bolla della Canonizatione di San Carlo was published by Marco Aurelio Grattarola in 1614. It indicates the extent of Borromeo’s popularity and the degree to which he was appreciated as a worthy example of a determined and strong Catholic leader in the time before the Thirty Years’ War.5

 2 One famous rendition of the saint that was clearly influenced by the work of a Bo­lognese predecessor was a painting by Pietro da Cortona, whose version of the St Carlo Borromeo’s Procession of the Holy Nail was made for the main altar of San Carlo ai Catinari, the Barnabites’ principal church in Rome. Da Cortona must have been familiar with the Borromeo Chapel decorations, and maybe even with Gessi’s painting in Santa Maria dei Poveri. For a discussion of this influence, see Unger, ‘The Barnabites’ Contribution’, pp. 577–82. For the icono­graphy of San Carlo, see Jones, ‘San Carlo Borromeo and Plague Imagery in Milan and Rome’; Jones, ‘Bare Feet, Humility, and the Passion of Christ’, pp. 323–26; Knox, ‘Philip III of Spain, Carlo Borromeo, and the Politics of Canonization’; Burzer, San Carlo Borromeo. For other aspects of Borromeo’s connection with art, mainly in relation to architecture and church interiors, see also Debby Ben-Aryeh, The Renaissance Pulpit, pp. 169–75.  3 Pepper, Guido Reni, cat. no. 38.  4 For miracles taking place in Bo­logna, see, for example, Giussano, Vita di S. Carlo Borromeo, p. 679.  5 On the canonization of Carlo Borromeo, see Grattarola, Successi maravigliosi della venera­ tione di S. Carlo, pp. 595–605; on the ceremonies that accompanied the canonization, see pp. 236–48. Grattarola also described the ceremonial procession bringing the saint’s relics to the Duomo of Milan in 1612. See also Rasmussen, ‘Liturgy and Icono­graphy at the Canonization of Carlo Borromeo’.

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St Carlo’s popularity in Rome and Milan seems natural, since these cities were the principal centres of his activity, as has been acknowledged by modern scholars.6 Yet his numerous portrayals in Bo­logna attest to his similarly high status in that city, with which Borromeo had a special connection. He was remembered as a former papal legate of the city, having been appointed to that position in 1560 by his uncle, the Medici pope Pius IV.7 Together with his vice-legate, Pier Donato Cesi, and with the encouragement of the pope, he promoted important projects, such as the establishment of a central poorhouse under the management of the Opera Pia dei Poveri Mendicanti, and the construction of the Archiginnasio. The poorhouse was meant to pull the city’s paupers and beggars off the streets and gather them under one roof, while the university building was meant to bring all the university teaching in the city to the same place. Both buildings were inaugurated in 1563.8 Giussano recalls a meeting with a local elderly man who claimed that, during his time as papal legate, Borromeo would not allow grain to be exported while there were still hungry people in the city.9 When Borromeo was canonized in 1610, all of Bo­logna celebrated the event. Francesco Luigi Barelli da Nizza noted the ready response of the Bo­lognese to Carlo Bascapè’s efforts to promote Borromeo’s canonization and to the news of the approaching ceremony in Rome. The Bo­lognese celebrated the event three days after the Roman rites.10 This would have been all but unthinkable

 6 In Rome, Borromeo, who was raised to the rank of cardinal, played a vital role during the pontificate of his uncle Pius IV. In Milan, where he served as archbishop, he initiated important reforms designed to implement the decisions of the Council of Trent. Two major artistic ‘cycles of deeds’ were commissioned in those cities to celebrate his beatification on 4 November 1602 (Milan) and canonization on 1 November 1610 (Rome). The twenty quadroni in Milan’s Duomo were commissioned for the beatification. These quadroni established the principal narrative themes of Borromeo’s plague icono­graphy. For the celebration of the canonization in Rome, San Pietro was adorned with ephemeral decorations with scenes taken from the saint’s hagio­graphy. This last set of decorations is known today owing to the testimony of Grattarola, as well as from Raphael Guidi’s engraving after Antonio Tempesta, which illustrates twenty out of the original thirty-nine scenes. These two cycles, together with a third set in the Collegio Borromeo in Pavia, were important elements in the codification of San Carlo’s icono­graphy. See Boeckl, Images of Plague and Pestilence, p. 59; Jones, ‘San Carlo Borromeo and Plague Imagery in Milan and Rome’, pp. 65–75; Burzer, San Carlo Borromeo, pp. 236–38.  7 Giussano, Vita di S. Carlo Borromeo, p. 19; Coulson James, Bo­logna, p. 162; Terpstra, Cultures of Charity, p. 197.  8 The poorhouse was designed in accordance with his plans from the 1540s, when he acted as vice legate to the city. See Terpstra, Cultures of Charity, p. 84; Alexander, From Renaissance to Counter-Reformation, p. 276; Terpstra, ‘The Qualità of Mercy’, p. 129.  9 Giussano, Vita di S. Carlo Borromeo, p. 17. For the English translation, see Giussano, The Life of St. Charles Borromeo, p. 26.  10 Barelli da Nizza, Memorie dell’ origine, ii, 209. See also Chiesa, Vita di Carlo Bascapè, ed. by Pagano, pp. 137–42. Richard DeMolen writes that Bascapè was a major force behind the Barnabites’ attempts to promote Borromeo’s canonization soon after his death. See DeMolen, ‘The First Centenary of the Barnabites’, p. 77.

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Figure 7.1. Lorenzo Garbieri, St Carlo Borromeo’s Procession of the Holy Nail, Bo­logna, San Paolo Maggiore. 1611. Photo: Author.

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a century earlier, when Bo­logna’s civic religion emphasized local saints and shrines in opposition to Rome, which was the city’s titular overlord.11 Widely resented and often ignored, Rome’s authority increased steadily after Julius II expelled the local signorial family in 1506 and 1511.12 The many images of Borromeo in Bo­logna’s major churches point not only to the fact that Rome’s campaign for local hearts and minds was still ongoing, but also that its local patrons were aiming to bridge the distance by associating the Tridentine saint with prominent Bo­lognese events, projects, and religious sites.13 In what follows, I would like to focus on Bo­lognese artistic responses to the saint’s popularity in the formative years after his canonization, and to attend to the unique features of his representations in Bo­logna. Beyond the religious aspects of his portrayals in the city’s churches, one may find additional layers of meaning that relate to seventeenth-century religiosity in terms of religious-political sentiments and local religious agendas. Therefore, in my consideration of St Carlo’s popularity in religious paintings intended for the public sphere, I will also focus on two examples in which the representations of the saint may be seen within specific religious-political contexts. The first example relates to the Barnabite Order — the Clerics Regular of St Paul. The second example relates to the Opera Pia dei Poveri Mendicanti (OPM), the Bo­lognese welfare service. The earliest representations of St Carlo in a Bo­lognese church are those by Lorenzo Garbieri, who, according to his early bio­graphers, completed three paintings of the saint in 1611 for the newly erected Barnabite Church of San Paolo Maggiore.14 The set was commissioned by Cardinal Benedetto Giustiniani, the papal legate to Bo­logna (1606–11) who is better known today for being a patron of Caravaggio, together with his younger brother Vincenzo. Giustiniani asked the painter to depict three scenes taken from the new saint’s hagio­graphy.15 Above the altar, Garbieri portrayed St Carlo Borromeo’s Procession of the Holy Nail (Figure 7.1). On the left wall, he painted Carlo Borromeo Administers the Last Communion to the PlagueStricken (Figure 7.2), and on the right, The Proclamation of the Barnabites’ Rule by Carlo Borromeo (Figure 7.3). In these representations, one can find  11 For the tension between Bo­lognese authorities and the papacy during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, see Terpstra, Lay Confraternities and Civic Religion, pp. 31–37; Terpstra, Cultures of Charity, pp. 123–35. For a discussion of Bo­lognese public rituals reflecting local priorities, see Terpstra, Lay Confraternities and Civic Religion, pp. 14–28, 205–25.  12 For the expulsion of the Bentivoglio from Bo­logna by Julius II, see Terpstra, Lay Confraternities and Civic Religion, pp. 175–77.  13 I would like to thank Nicholas Terpstra for adding this point to my essay.  14 Scannelli, Il microcosmo della pittura, p. 366; Malvasia, Le pitture di Bo­logna, pp. 198–99; Malvasia, Felsina Pittrice, ii, 211–12. See also Greco Grassilli, ‘Lorenzo Garbieri e la commissione per Sant’ Antonio Abate in Milano’, p. 194.  15 Masini, Bo­logna Perlustrata, p. 144; Barelli da Nizza, Memorie dell’ origine, ii, 210 and 212; Bo­lognini Amorini, Vite dei pittori ed artefici bo­lognesi, p. 120.

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Figure 7.2. Lorenzo Garbieri, Carlo Borromeo Administers the Last Communion to the Plague-Stricken, Bo­logna, San Paolo Maggiore. 1611. Photo: Author.

manifestations of two aspects of the saint’s personality: his assistance to the poor and his leadership. Yet, what is also accentuated is the Barnabites’ participation in the deeds for which Borromeo became known during his lifetime as a living saint, and the pestilence that was called ‘Carlo Borromeo’s plague’.16 In two of his representations, Garbieri related primarily to St Carlo  16 De Boer, The Conquest of the Soul, p. xii; Jones, ‘San Carlo Borromeo and Plague Imagery in Milan and Rome’, p. 65.

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Figure 7.3. Lorenzo Garbieri, The Proclamation of the Barnabites’ Rule by Carlo Borromeo, Bo­logna, San Paolo Maggiore. 1611. Photo: Author.

as a man of faith, highlighting both his efforts to end the devastating plague that had struck Milan in 1576 and his care for the sick. In the third painting, he portrayed the saint in his role as the reformer who hands over the new constitution of the Barnabite Order to an older Barnabite friar. This event actually took place in 1579. As I have argued elsewhere, in this chapel one can find not only representations that eventually came to be associated with Borromeo’s accepted icono­graphy, but also Barnabite propaganda meant to accentuate the order’s

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Figure 7.4. San Paolo Maggiore seen from the entrance with Garbieri’s Proclamation of the Barnabites’ Rule by Carlo Borromeo in the first chapel beyond the pulpit on the left. Bo­logna, San Paolo Maggiore. 1611. Photo: Author.

connections with the newly canonized saint.17 I would like to focus here on the significant placement of the two lateral paintings. Garbieri seems to have devoted much thought to the arrangement of these scenes and to have considered the paths that viewers would take towards their seats in the church. It is worth noting that the Barnabite Church of San Paolo Maggiore in Bo­logna resembles the motherhouse of the Barnabites in Milan, in that there is a row of interconnecting chapels on both sides of the nave that are separated from the nave itself by a balustrade. The entrance to these chapels is from the presbytery. According to Rebecca Gill, these chapels were designed to accommodate the members of the Barnabite Order, whereas the lay people occupied the nave. This separation was meant to preclude contact between the friars and the laity during Mass.18 Garbieri produced his paintings for the third chapel, so that the image of Borromeo as a cardinal faces

 17 See Unger, ‘The Barnabites’ Contribution’.  18 For a discussion of the interconnecting chapels in San Barnaba, see Gill, ‘The Road to Redemption’, pp. 12–13; Gill, ‘Galeazzo Alessi’, pp. 179–81. See also Della Torre and Schofield, Pellegrino Tibaldi architetto e il San Fedele di Milano, p. 308.

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Figure 7.5. Lorenzo Garbieri, St Carlo Borromeo’s Procession of the Holy Nail (detail), Bo­logna, San Paolo Maggiore. 1611. Photo: Author.

the entrance to the church (Figure 7.4). The image of the dead Barnabite, a victim of the plague, faces the entrance to the chapel from the presbytery. The two groups, the Barnabite friars and the lay people, thus faced different images when they approached their seats. The altarpiece focuses on the penitential processions that the saint conducted during the 1576 plague in Milan in the hope that they would help to end the plague. Borromeo is shown kneeling, dressed in his bluish-violet penitential cape and holding a large crucifix with a single nail visible at the intersection of the two beams of the cross.19 The Barnabites appear on the left. One of them is holding Borromeo’s scarlet biretta (Figure 7.5), emphasizing the order’s connection with St Carlo as well as its role during the plague. The lateral scenes depict events from the history of the Barnabites in which Borromeo demonstrated his leadership. In Carlo Borromeo Administers the Last Communion to the Plague-Stricken, Borromeo, at the centre, is offering a sacramental wafer to a sick Barnabite friar kneeling in front of him. In the right corner, a dead Barnabite friar is lying on the floor, depicted in very bold foreshortening.20 On the right, Garbieri portrayed The Proclamation of the Barnabites’ Rule by Carlo Borromeo, a scene that underscores his vocation as a reformer. St Carlo is shown seated on the right, dressed as a cardinal, and either giving a booklet to an old Barnabite friar or receiving one from him, thus emphasizing the saint’s role in attempts  19 According to tradition, this holy nail is a relic of the Crucifixion that was found by St Helen. See Bascapè, I Sette Libri della Vita, p. 310; Jones, ‘San Carlo Borromeo and Plague Imagery in Milan and Rome’, p. 70; Jones, Altarpieces and their Viewers, p. 137.  20 According to Bisciola’s report, the Barnabites paid dearly for their aid to the sick, with two friars falling victim to the disease. DeMolen mentions that in 1576 there were forty-five Barnabite priests, twenty-one brothers, and fifteen clerics. See Bisciola, Relatione verissima, p. 6; DeMolen, ‘The First Centenary of the Barnabites’, p. 76.

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to reform the Church. Borromeo had commissioned Carlo Bascapè, a member of the order since 1578, who had been his secretary and, like Borromeo himself, had studied canon and civil law in Pavia, to reformulate the Barnabite constitution.21 In view of an earlier Barnabite experience with accusations made by the Inquisition, the prelate wanted to protect the order by regulating its members’ conduct in a new constitution.22 In this painting, the friars are all dressed similarly, emphasizing their membership in the Barnabite Order.23 The placement of the two lateral paintings, with Cardinal Borromeo facing the entrance and a dead victim of the plague facing the Barnabite friars entering the chapel from the other side, was significant for both groups of worshipers when they approached the chapel. Whoever entered the church from its main entrance would first see the image of St Carlo in the Proclamation of the Barnabites’ Rule by Carlo Borromeo (Figure 7.4), where he is represented as a cardinal wearing what became his customary outfit in the Papal States. The position of the chapel makes it impossible for anyone entering the church to initially see any other figure. Yet, when the Barnabites entered the chapel, approaching from the presbytery, they faced Carlo Borromeo Administers the Last Communion to the Plague-Stricken and saw their two fellow Barnabites who had fallen victim to the plague: Cornelio Croce and Giacomo Maria Berna.24 Most significant for a Barnabite viewer was the dead Barnabite friar portrayed in bold foreshortening on the lower right-hand side. The portrayal of the friars may have been designed to remind the Bo­lognese Barnabites of their true vocation and of the sacrifice expected of them. In his sermon Will you risk your life for the flock?, which was delivered at the time of the 1576 plague, Borromeo called on priests to put their lives on the line: The same Son of God, who for the sake of the salvation of all men, including his enemies and the impious, was fixed to the cross and died  21 For Borromeo’s insistence on revising the 1552 Barnabite constitution, see DeMolen, ‘The First Centenary of the Barnabites’, pp. 73–74 and 84.  22 The Barnabites used to stage penitential public processions in the streets of Milan. In these processions, they wore heavy ropes around their necks, carried large wooden crosses, and flogged themselves while openly confessing their sins. The ritual elicited complaints against the order, culminating in a formal trial on 5 October 1534. Eventually, the Inquisition’s accusations of violating standard public devotion were dismissed. See DeMolen, ‘The First Centenary of the Barnabites’, p. 71; Jones, ‘San Carlo Borromeo and Plague Imagery in Milan and Rome’, p. 80.  23 In two paintings that were made for the Duomo in Milan and the Collegio Borromeo in Pavia by Carlo Buzzi and Cesare Nebbia, respectively, Borromeo is portrayed surrounded by representatives of the different orders or seminars, distinguishable by their unique outfits, who are receiving their constitution. Burzer, San Carlo Borromeo, pp. 93–94. Katja Burzer writes that Cesare Nebbia must have seen Buzzi’s painting before completing his own. Burzer, San Carlo Borromeo, p. 129.  24 Barelli da Nizza, Memorie dell’ origine, ii, 212.

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Figure 7.6. Alessandro Tiarini, Cappella San Carlo Borromeo, Bo­logna, San Michele in Bosco. 1614/15. Photo: Author.

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Figure 7.7. Alessandro Tiarini, Last Communion of St Carlo, Bo­logna, San Michele in Bosco. 1614/15. Photo: Author.

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in the greatest shame and the bitterest torment, invites us to go forward into the danger of a quiet and glorious death for devout brethren. He to whom we owe as much repayment as we could not obtain by dying a thousand times without end, does not even request this pathetic life of ours, but only that we put it at risk.25 For an early seventeenth-century visitor to the church, the Garbieri decorations had an even stronger impact. When Garbieri completed his work in the chapel, his paintings made up the only complete set of decorations in the entire church, and nobody entering the building at that point in time could have ignored them. One especially prominent detail must have been the scarlet colour of the mozzetta, which is still very distinctive today and must have been especially striking soon after the decorations were completed. Even if the Barnabites decorated the church with provisional adornments, the distinctive scarlet colour would have caught the viewer’s attention and gaze. Coming closer to the chapel, the visitor would have had no difficulty recognizing the saint’s distinctive facial features — the elongated face under the monk’s tonsure with a long, aquiline nose, prominent cheekbones, sunken pale cheeks, and thin lips; equally recognizable were his long white shirt, the rochette, under a scarlet short cloak, the mozzetta.26 These two elements, his facial features and his cardinal’s attire, became the most common attributes in his depictions.27 One may well wonder why the newly canonized saint was the subject of visual attention in that church before any other saint, including St Paul himself, the church’s dedicatee.28 The most striking influence of the Borromeo Chapel decorations can be found in Bo­logna itself. Alessandro Tiarini completed a set of decorations for a chapel in the Church of San Michele in Bosco in 1614/15, with five scenes from the saint’s hagio­graphy (Figure 7.6).29 Tiarini’s choice of scenes is unique in that they represent events that were not among the popular scenes typically portrayed in early modern representations of the saint. For our discussion, it is interesting to note that Tiarini followed Garbieri in his consideration of the viewer’s point of view for the sake of emphasizing the saint’s role as a cardinal dressed in his scarlet attire. This is evident in his Last Communion of St Carlo (Figure 7.7), the most important painting in

 25 Borromeo, Selected Orations, Homilies and Writings, ed. by Cihak, p. 93.  26 On the rochette, see Braun, Die Liturgische Gewandung im Occident und Orient, p. 126; Norris, Church Vestments, p. 172. On the mozzetta, see Braun, Die Liturgische Gewandung im Occident und Orient, p. 357; Norris, Church Vestments, p. 179.  27 For the importance of Borromeo’s cardinal vestments in representations in the Papal States, see Rasmussen, ‘Liturgy and Icono­graphy at the Canonization of Carlo Borromeo’, p. 265.  28 St Paul became the subject of visual attention at the church only some forty years later, in 1650, when Alessandro Algardi completed his famous Beheading of St Paul, and six different painters (among them Garbieri’s son, Carlo) rendered seven scenes from his life. These were installed beyond the altar above the choir.  29 Malvasia, Felsina Pittrice, ii, 200.

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Figure 7.8. Alessandro Tiarini, The Angel Descending from Heaven, Bo­logna, San Michele in Bosco. 1614/15. Photo: Author.

the set, which is located across from the entrance to the chapel. This is the only painting in the cycle in which the saint is depicted as a cardinal, albeit on his deathbed. Tiarini, like Garbieri before him, positioned the saint in a prominent location so that the viewer entering the chapel would first be drawn to this image. When we consider this representation in connection with what is rendered on the vault of the chapel, it becomes clear that the subject being emphasized is the saint’s apotheosis. The Last Communion of St Carlo is at the centre of the chapel. On the far left is the Birth of St Carlo, and beside it is Carlo Borromeo Being

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Appointed as Archbishop of Milan. On the other side, Tiarini depicted the Burial of Carlo Borromeo, with the Canonization of Carlo Borromeo on the far right. The Angel Descending from Heaven, which is painted on the vault (Figure 7.8), offers the dying saint a garland of flowers. Beyond the angel, one can see a majestic, foreshortened Christ and St Peter, who are both looking at the dying saint in anticipation of his joining them in Heaven. Tiarini’s paintings are positioned in chrono­logical order from left to right. The chapel’s underlying theme, however, is revealed when, on his deathbed, St Carlo is configured in connection with the painting on the vault. The ready response and acceptance of the saint by Christ and St Peter in Heaven is a sophisticated way of emphasizing his apotheosis. The two scenes on the left are taken from the saint’s life, while the two on the right relate to his burial and canonization. What seems conspicuous in Tiarini’s set of decorations is the presence of St Carlo in his scarlet cardinal’s attire at the centre of the main painting, in which he appears larger than in any of the other representations. In three of the other paintings, the principal activity takes place in the distance instead of in the foreground. In the Birth of St Carlo Borromeo, four women are occupied with baby Carlo, but the actual delivery is shown on a distant plane on the right-hand side. In the Burial of St Carlo Borromeo, the body is seen being carried in the distance, while the foreground is occupied by two friars praying on the left and two half-naked youths sitting at the centre, one of them with prayer beads in his hand. A young woman carrying a baby is positioned on the right. Pope Paul V is at the centre of the second plane in the Canonization of Carlo Borromeo, sitting on his throne with two high-ranking officials kneeling on either side of him. On the left, a soldier is pushing back the crowd that wants to have a better look at the ritual. On the right are trumpeters who add formality to the ceremony. In Carlo Borromeo Being Appointed as Archbishop of Milan, the saint is kneeling at the centre, receiving the mitre, and is surrounded by other men of rank. There is no doubt that this is a unique set of scenes from St Carlo’s hagio­ graphy, which was meant to reflect his virtuous life as well as to highlight his linkage to the papacy (the cardinal’s attire) and his new saintly status. Garbieri’s paintings had also an immediate impact on Francesco Gessi, Guido Reni’s student, which is reflected in his St Carlo Borromeo’s Procession of the Holy Nail (Figure 7.9) in Santa Maria Regina dei Cieli (also known as Santa Maria dei Poveri due to its affiliation with the Compagnia dei Poveri, another of Bo­logna’s confraternities that originated from an effort to organize mutual assistance amongst poor artisans). According to Carlo Cesare Malvasia, the bio­grapher of the Bo­lognese painters, Gessi’s work was commissioned by the Simonini family, and Andrea Emiliani dated it to 1612/14.30 St Carlo is at the centre, holding the large cross with the holy  30 For the commission, see Malvasia, Felsina Pittrice, ii, 247. For the dating, see Fanti, La chiesa e la Compagnia dei Poveri in Bo­logna, p. 160.

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Figure 7.9. Giovanni Francesco Gessi, St Carlo Borromeo’s Procession of the Holy Nail, Bo­logna, Santa Maria Regina dei Cieli (also known as Santa Maria dei Poveri). 1612/14. Photo: Author.

nail and gazing at it while surrounded by a crowd. In the foreground are a number of dead figures, most notably a young woman lying on the right with an infant still clinging to his dead mother, and the foreshortened figure of a dead man being carried by a bearded figure on the other side.31 The resemblance between this painting and Garbieri’s rendition of the procession can be noted in the composition, with the saint in both paintings holding the cross in the same way at the centre while gazing at the nail in front of a rounded column. St Carlo is bareheaded and is wearing the same bluish-­  31 For the dead mother and living infant motif, see Boeckl, Images of Plague and Pestilence, p. 50.

i co n o g ­ r ap h y an d vi sual hagi o g ­ raphy Figure 7.10. Giovanni Francesco Gessi, St Carlo Borromeo’s Procession of the Holy Nail (detail), Bo­logna, Santa Maria Regina dei Cieli (also known as Santa Maria dei Poveri). 1612/14. Photo: Author.

violet penitential garb as in Garbieri’s rendition. Gessi, like Garbieri before him, placed Borromeo’s scarlet biretta in the hands of one of his Barnabite companions (Figure 7.10). The thematic and icono­graphical resemblance between Gessi’s painting and the altarpiece in the Borromeo Chapel attest to a similar purpose — that of accentuating an admired and worthy religious leader, whose care for the community was behind his initiative to conduct the procession of the Holy Nail. Yet Gessi’s painting, which was commissioned for Santa Maria dei Poveri, was imbued with an additional religious-political layer of meaning in its local context. At the time of its commission, the Opera Pia dei Poveri Mendicanti, a multifaceted welfare service established in 1560 as one of the most progressive and imaginative generators of mutual aid programmes for labourers and artisans, was undergoing a political crisis and a related reformulation of goals and attitudes. In the early seventeenth century, as stressed by Nicholas Terpstra, the confraternity in whose church Gessi’s painting was installed was challenged by clerical opponents who engineered a change of membership, which brought about a steady aristocratization of its members. According to Terpstra, The metaphor of poverty was clearly a powerful one in the self-fashioning and public positioning of the city’s elite in the years after the Council of Trent, particularly as they were expected to perform public acts of charity and so demonstrate through their mercy the qualità that made them fit rulers of Bo­logna.32 In this context, the choice of a scene taken from Borromeo’s charitable work emphasized the saint’s personal background as scion of two respectable aristocratic families as well as his deeds, while also indicating who were  32 For the quote, see Terpstra, Cultures of Charity, p. 270. See also pp. 240 and 263–74.

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Figure 7.11. Guido Reni, Pietà dei Mendicanti, Bo­logna, Pinacoteca Nazionale. 1613–1616. Photo: Author.

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his successors in aiding the poor — the members of the confraternity. The well-born Bo­lognese members of the confraternity wanted to be seen and acknowledged as followers of St Carlo, a highly esteemed modern saint who devoted his life to helping the poor. It seems reasonable to assume that the main protagonist in Gessi’s painting was chosen not only because of his saintly reputation, but also because of his important involvement in the construction of a central poorhouse in Bo­logna and because of his status as an aristocrat who chose to dedicate his life to helping the poor. As the son of Count Gilbert Borromeo and Countess Margaret de Medici, St Carlo was a perfect role model for a well-born and rich patron, who could identify with Borromeo’s aristocratic genealogy and concern for aiding the poor, even if he had not committed himself to a life of abstinence, poverty, and humility similar to that of St Carlo.33 The high-born members of the confraternity sought to demonstrate what Terpstra characterized as ‘the duty of the rich to act as patrons whose selfless generosity in meeting the needs of the poor would mirror the generosity of saints and of Christ himself to believers’.34 The saint in Gessi’s painting was meant to represent those who were involved in what Terpstra defines as ‘patronal charity’. A similar religious-political attitude can be related to Guido Reni’s Pietà dei Mendicanti (Figure 7.11), which was produced during the same period (1613–16) for Santa Maria della Pietà. The church was adjacent to the Opera Pia dei Poveri Mendicanti’s main poorhouse for men within the city walls. Today, the painting is part of the collection of the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bo­logna.35 In this altarpiece, Reni emphasized Borromeo’s leadership by placing him at the centre of the composition, surrounded by the four patron saints of Bo­logna: Dominic, Francis, Petronio, and Proculus. The large altarpiece (704 × 341 cm) is divided into three hierarchically arranged sections. A semicircular surface separates the display of the Pietà in the upper part from the representation of the patron saints of Bo­logna in the central section. This surface forms the floor supporting the Madonna and two angels mourning the dead Christ, who is lying in front of them. The group is positioned against a hilly landscape, with the three crosses seen in the distance on the right-hand side. In the celestial section, the Madonna stands in contemplation in front of the dead Christ, who is laid out on a bed. The Madonna and angels are gesturing with their hands in a manner emblematic of their faith: the Madonna is folding her fingers  33 For ‘Humility’ as St Carlo’s crowning virtue, see Jones, ‘The Court of Humility’, pp. 166–81.  34 Terpstra, Cultures of Charity, p. 20.  35 See Scannelli, Il microcosmo della pittura, p. 350. For Reni’s two representations of Carlo Borromeo in Bo­logna, see Pepper, Guido Reni, cat. no. 39 and cat. no. 46. For the circum­ stances surrounding the commission of Reni’s Pietà dei Mendicanti, see also Terpstra, Cultures of Charity, p. 266. For a discussion on this painting, see also Unger, Redefining Eclecticism in Early Modern Painting, pp. 128–35.

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Figure 7.12. Lucio Massari, St Carlo Boromeo Adoring the Crucifix, Bo­logna, Santa Madonna del Baraccano. Early seventeenth century. Photo: Author.

while her head is tilted up towards the heavens, a sign that she is crying (ploro).36 The angel to her right is holding a handkerchief close to his face, while the second angel has his arms crossed over his chest in another typical gesture expressive of faith. Christ is rendered with a fallen right hand, a common gesture associated with his death. This gesture is similarly seen in Michelangelo’s Pietà (Rome, San Peter, 1499); Titian’s three representations of the Entombment (Paris, Louvre, 1525; Madrid, Prado, 1559; and Madrid, Prado, 1565); and Caravaggio’s Entombment for Santa Maria in Vallicella (Rome, Pinacoteca Vaticana, 1603/04). The five saints on the intermediate level are depicted in different positions, with St Carlo at the centre. Dressed as a cardinal, he is portrayed kneeling and adoring a crucifix that he holds close to his heart, looking at it with great affection. The group is rendered against an entrance to a building flanked by pillars, with the four other saints surrounding St Carlo to suggest his importance and leadership. On the step below them is a three-dimensional, illusionistic miniature of Bo­logna. St Carlo and the city’s four patron saints thus appear to be mediating between Bo­logna below and  36 See Bulwer, Chiro­logia, ed. by Cleary, pp. 32–33, p. 115.

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Figure 7.13. Ludovico Carracci, St Carlo Borromeo Praying in the Sacro Monte in Varallo, Bo­logna, Santi Bartolomeo e Gaetano. Early seventeenth century. Photo: Author.

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Figure 7.14. Francesco Brizio, San Carlo in Prayer, Bo­logna, San Petronio. 1615. Photo: Author.

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Figure 7.15. Alessandro Tiarini, Santi Alberto e Carlo, Bo­logna, San Martino. Early seventeenth century. Photo: Author.

the Madonna and Christ above. One wonders about the choice to render St Carlo at the centre of the composition. The saint’s popularity in the years following his canonization and his active role in the Opera Pia dei Poveri Mendicanti, and particularly in the opening of its original poorhouse in the old religious house of San Gregorio a kilometre outside the eastern city wall, seem to have been major factors in this decision. At the same time, this commission, like the painting created by Gessi, can be related to the new trend of aestheticized poverty that was developing among wealthy citizens who dominated the Opera Pia dei Poveri Mendicanti.37 Another painting that seems related to Bo­lognese welfare service is Lucio Massari’s depiction of Borromeo that adorns the Church of the Madonna del Baraccano (Figure 7.12).38 Massari painted Carlo Borromeo adoring the crucifix while gazing at a skull. At the time of the commission, the building in which the church is located was used as a girls’ orphanage. One may note a similarity in the saint’s attitude towards the crucifix in this painting and Reni’s St Carlo in the painting described above.  37 Terpstra, Cultures of Charity, p. 266.  38 See Malvasia, Felsina Pittrice, i, 556.

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Figure 7.16. Ludovico Carracci, St Carlo Borromeo Adoring Baby Jesus with the Madonna, St Joseph and Angels, Forlì, Pinacoteca Civica. Early seventeenth century. Photo reproduced with permission of the Musei San Domenico.

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In other paintings completed during the same years, St Carlo is depicted in a devotional stance. An important example is in Ludovico Carracci’s altarpiece St Carlo Borromeo Praying in the Sacro Monte in Varallo (Figure 7.13). This painting can still be seen in the Church of Santi Bartolomeo e Gaetano, which is adjacent to the city’s two famous towers.39 Carracci depicted the saint kneeling in front of an open sarcophagus, with his hands clasped together and his gaze directed towards the open tomb. On the other side of the sarcophagus is an angel pointing towards the tomb. Francesco Brizio painted devotional representations of St Carlo in prayer in 1615, for the Basilica di San Petronio (Figure 7.14).40 The saint is kneeling in front of the altar with his hands clasped together. On the left, a young friar is looking towards the saint. In the right-hand corner, two cherubs peek at the saint from behind the clouds. Alessandro Tiarini, like Guido before him, added other saints to his portrayal of St Carlo in the Church of San Martino (Figure 7.15). The saint, who is positioned before the altar in a devotional stance, turns his head to the left towards a figure identified by Malvasia as St Alberto.41 On the righthand side are two female figures, one of whom is the newly beatified Teresa of Avila, identified by the arrow in her heart. The other is St Francesca Romana, a fifteenth-century noblewoman who was canonized just two years before St Carlo and who is depicted alongside a guardian angel, which became her attribute. A female donor is standing between the two groups of saints. Carlo Borromeo’s visionary experience is represented in an altarpiece by Ludovico Carracci that was commissioned for the Church of San Fabiano and can now be viewed in the Pinacoteca Civica, Forlì.42 The painting, titled St Carlo Borromeo Adoring Baby Jesus with the Madonna, St Joseph and Angels (Figure 7.16), shows the saint on his knees in front of a kneeling Madonna, who is holding the baby Jesus. An ox behind her and the humble setting suggest that this encounter is imagined to have taken place in Bethlehem. On the left, St Joseph is leaning on a staff, an allusion to the Holy Family’s upcoming journey to Egypt. Adoring angels stand behind St Joseph, and a group of cherubs appears above them. The dominant brownish-yellowish colours endow the painting with a dreamy, unrealistic atmosphere. This scene calls to mind a similar scene painted by Carracci, in which St Francis encounters the Madonna and the baby Jesus in a vision.43

 39 Francesco Scannelli saw the painting in its present location. See Scannelli, Il microcosmo della pittura, p. 342. See also Malvasia, Felsina Pittrice, i, 495; Martyn, The Gentleman’s Guide, p. 96.  40 Malvasia, Felsina Pittrice, i, 539.  41 Malvasia, Felsina Pittrice, ii, 200.  42 The painting was still in situ when Thomas Martyn visited the church in the second half of the eighteenth century. See Martyn, The Gentleman’s Guide, p. 97.  43 For Ludovico’s painting, see Emiliani, Ludovico Carracci, cat. no. 14.

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This short survey would not be complete without reference to one additional composition that highlights St Carlo’s saintly status — Guido Reni’s fresco of the Apotheosis of St Carlo, which was created in 1613 for Santa Maria dei Servi.44 The painting was destroyed, and what can still be seen in situ is only the saint’s half-length figure, which is foreshortened upwards with his hands raised and flanked by the faces of two pairs of putti. The angle from which the saint is portrayed suggests his ascent to heaven, as befits an apotheosis. It calls to mind another rendition of the saint that Reni produced for San Carlo ai Catinari, as mentioned above.45 In conclusion, St Carlo Borromeo occupied a prominent place in Bo­lognese religious culture and was the subject of much visual attention in the first decade after his canonization in 1610. The most renowned painters working in the city produced paintings of the saint that depicted his charitable work, his centrality as a Church leader, his religious devotion in accordance with Catholic aims and ideo­logy, and his new saintly status. Among these many representations are ones that also contain clear references to a political agenda, endorsing Borromeo for the purposes of civic self-fashioning and of publicly positioning religious orders, such as the Barnabite Order, as well as lay institutions, such as the Opera Pia dei Poveri Mendicanti. At the same time, this emphasis on a saint from outside Bo­logna who so powerfully represented the values and authority of Rome underscores how much the religious reform movements of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had redirected the determinedly local civic religion of the fifteenth century.

 44 For the painting, see Malvasia, Le pitture di Bo­logna, pp. 277–78; Pepper, Guido Reni, cat. no. 39.  45 In his 1787 The Gentleman’s Guide in his Tour through Italy, the botanist Thomas Martyn described the painting as ‘S. Carlo, and his apotheosis, with boys holding the attributes of episcopacy’; Martyn, The Gentleman’s Guide, p. 105.

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Works Cited Primary Sources Aresi, Paolo, Panegirici fatti in diverse occasioni (Milan: Francesco Mognaga, 1644) Barelli da Nizza, Francesco Luigi, Memorie dell’ origine, fondazione, avanzamenti, successi, ed. Uomini illustri della congregazione de’ Chierici Regolari di S. Paolo Chiamati volgaramente Barnabiti, vol. ii (Bo­logna: Costantino Pisarri, 1707) Bascapè, Carlo, I Sette Libri della Vita, & de’ fatti di San Carlo Card. di S. Prassede Arcivesc. di Milano (Bo­logna: Heredi di Gio. Rossi, 1614) Bisciola, Paolo, Relatione verissima del progresso della peste di Milano (Bo­logna: Alessandro Benacci, 1577) Borromeo, Charles, Selected Orations, Homilies and Writings, ed. by John R. Cihak (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017) Bulwer, John, Chiro­logia: or the Natural Language of the Hand and Chironomia: or the Art of Manual Rhetoric, ed. by James W. Cleary, rev. edn (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Uni­ver­sity Press; London: Feffer and Simon, 1974) Chiesa, Innocenzo, Vita di Carlo Bascapè: Barnabita e vescovo di Novara (1550–1615), ed. by Sergio Pagano, rev. edn (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1993) Giussano, Giovanni Pietro, The Life of St. Charles Borromeo, Cardinal Archbishop of Milan, 2 vols (London: Burns and Oates, 1884) —— , Vita di S. Carlo Borromeo Prete Cardinale del titolo di Santa Prassede Archivescovo di Milano Scritto dal Dottore Gio. Pietro Giussano, Nobile Milanese. Et dalla Congregatione delli Oblati di S. Ambrogio dedicate alla Santità di N. S. Papa Paolo Quint (Rome: Camera Apostolica, 1610) Grattarola, Marco Aurelio, Successi maravigliosi della veneratione di S. Carlo, Cardinal di S. Prassede e Archivescovo di Milano (Milan: P. Pontio & G. B. Piccaglia, 1614) Greco Grassilli, Rosaria, ‘Lorenzo Garbieri e la commissione per Sant’ Antonio Abate in Milano: Notizie biografiche e artistiche’, Atti e memorie, 60 (2009), 189–224 Malvasia, Carlo Cesare, Felsina Pittrice: vite de pittori Bo­lognesi, vols i and ii (Bo­logna: Giovanni Francesco Davico, 1678) —— , Le pitture di Bo­logna (Bo­logna: Giacomo Monti, 1686) Martyn, Thomas, The Gentleman’s Guide in his Tour through Italy, rev. edn (London: C. and G. Kearsley, 1791) Masini, Antonio di Paolo, Bo­logna Perlustrata: Terza impressione notabilmente accresciuta in cui si fa mentione ogni giorno in perpetuo delle fontioni Sacre, e Profane di tutti l’anno, vol. i (Bo­logna: Vittorio Benacci, 1666) Scannelli, Francesco, Il microcosmo della pittura, rev. edn (Bo­logna: Nuova Alfa Editoriale, 1989)

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Secondary Studies Alexander, John, From Renaissance to Counter-Reformation: The Architectural Patronage of Carlo Borromeo during the Reign of Pius IV (Milan: Biblioteca Ambrosiana; Rome: Bulzoni, 2007) Boeckl, Christine M., Images of Plague and Pestilence: Icono­graphy and Icono­logy (Kirksville, MS: Truman State Uni­ver­sity Press, 2000) Boer, Wietse de, The Conquest of the Soul: Confession, Discipline, and Public Order in Counter-Reformation Milan (Leiden: Brill, 2001) Bo­lognini Amorini, Antonio, Vite dei pittori ed artefici bo­lognesi, vol. iv (Bo­logna: Tipi governativi alla volpe, 1841/43) Braun, Joseph S. J., Die Liturgische Gewandung im Occident und Orient: Nach Ursprung und Entwicklung, Verwendung und Symbolik (Berlin: Herder, 1907) Burzer, Katja, San Carlo Borromeo: Konstruktion und Inszenierung eines Heiligenbildes im Spannungsfeld zwischen Mailand und Rom (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2011) Coulson James, Edith E., Bo­logna: Its History Antiquities and Art (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 1909) Debby Ben-Aryeh, Nirit, The Renaissance Pulpit: Art and Preaching in Tuscany, 1400–1550 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007) Della Torre, Stefano, and Richard Schofield, Pellegrino Tibaldi architetto e il San Fedele di Milano: Invenzione e costruzione di una chiesa esemplare (Milan: Fedele Edizioni; Como: Nodolibri, 1994) DeMolen, Richard L., ‘The First Centenary of the Barnabites (1533–1633)’, in Religious Orders of the Catholic Reformation: In Honor of John C. Olin on his Seventy-Fifth Birthday, ed. by Richard L. DeMolen (New York: Fordham Uni­ ver­sity Press, 1994), pp. 59–96 Emiliani, Andrea, ed., Ludovico Carracci (Bo­logna: Nuova Alfa; Forth Worth: Kimbell Art Museum, 1993) Fanti, Mario, La chiesa e la Compagnia dei Poveri in Bo­logna (Bo­logna: Centro Editoriale Dehoniano, 1977) Gill, Rebecca, ‘Galeazzo Alessi: Church Architecture and Church Reform, 1548–1569’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Uni­ver­sity of Reading, 2012) —— , ‘The Road to Redemption: The Reconstruction of the Church of San Barnaba and Early Church Reform’, North Street Review, 18 (2015), 7–19 Jones, Pamela M., Altarpieces and their Viewers in the Churches of Rome from Caravaggio to Guido Reni (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008) —— , ‘Bare Feet, Humility, and the Passion of Christ in the Cults of Mary Magdalene and Carlo Borromeo in Seicento Rome’, in Gifts in Return: Essays in Honour of Charles Dempsey, ed. by Melinda Schlitt (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2012), pp. 321–36 —— , ‘The Court of Humility: Carlo Borromeo and the Ritual of Reform’, in The Possessions of a Cardinal: Politics, Piety, and Art 1450–1700, ed. by Mary Hollingsworth and Carol M. Richardson (Uni­ver­sity Park: Pennsylvania State Uni­ver­sity Press, 2010), pp. 166–84

i co n o g ­ r ap h y an d vi sual hagi o g ­ raphy

—— , ‘San Carlo Borromeo and Plague Imagery in Milan and Rome’, in Hope and Healing: Painting in Italy in a Time of Plague, 1500–1800, ed. by Gauvin Alexander and others (Worcester, MA: Clark Uni­ver­sity, College of the Holy Cross, Worcester Art Museum, 2005), pp. 65–96 Knox, Giles, ‘Philip III of Spain, Carlo Borromeo, and the Politics of Canonization’, Protocols, History and Theory, 10 (2008), unpaginated Norris, Herbert, Church Vestments: Their Origin and Development (London: J. M. Dent, 1949) Pepper, D. Stephen, Guido Reni: A Complete Catalogue of his Works with an Introductory Text (New York: New York Uni­ver­sity Press, 1984) Rasmussen, Niels, ‘Liturgy and Icono­graphy at the Canonization of Carlo Borro­ meo, 1 November 1610’, in San Carlo Borromeo: Catholic Reform and Ecclesi­astical Politics in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century, ed. by John M. Headley and John B. Tomaro (Washington, DC: Folger Books, 1988), pp. 264–76 Terpstra, Nicholas, Cultures of Charity: Women, Politics, and the Reform of Poor Relief in Renaissance Italy (Cam­bridge, MA: Harvard Uni­ver­sity Press, 2013) —— , Lay Confraternities and Civic Religion in Renaissance Bo­logna (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 1995) —— , ‘The Qualità of Mercy: (Re)building Confraternal Charities in Renaissance Bo­logna’, in Confraternities and the Visual Arts in Renaissance Italy, ed. by Barbara Wisch and Diane Cole Ahl (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2000), pp. 117–45 Unger, Daniel M., ‘The Barnabites’ Contribution: Veneration, Art, and Politics in the Representations of St Carlo Borromeo in Bo­logna’, Religion and the Arts, 20 (2016), 553–86 —— , Redefining Eclecticism in Early Modern Painting: Ideo­logy, Practice, and Criticism (Amsterdam: Amsterdam Uni­ver­sity Press, 2019)

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Sense & Emotion

Steven F. H. Stowell

Purging the Eye Images and the Cure for Lust in Catholic Reformation Italy

Renaissance historians have for a long time grappled with the mingling of sacred and erotic imagery in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century art. In the classic study of late medi­eval culture, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, Johan Huizinga suggested that eroticism in sacred art was a sign of religious decline, noting the example of Jean Fouquet’s portrait of Agnes Sorel as the Virgin Mary with an exposed breast.1 Possible erotic responses to the Virgin’s breasts have also been contemplated by Megan Holmes and Margaret Miles.2 In his well-known study, The Sexuality of Christ, Leo Steinberg also identified sexual themes in many images of Christ, proposing that the imagined human, and thus sexual, nature of Christ became a motif expressing theo­logical ideas.3 While this is an old historio­graphical problem, it is gaining in importance again as scholars focus on the art of the Catholic Reformation, when sexual or lascivious images were a central concern.4 Many contemporary sources confirm that sacred and erotic themes mingled in religious images, indicating that this question is not anachronistic. Giorgio Vasari, for example, describes a painting of the almost-nude Saint Sebastian that aroused the sexual appetite of female viewers.5 Similarly, Leonardo da Vinci recounts how a patron wished to have the religious motifs removed from a painting so that he might kiss the image without  1 Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, p. 182.  2 Holmes, ‘Disrobing the Virgin’ and Miles, ‘The Virgin’s One Bare Breast’.  3 Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion. See also Bynum, ‘The Body of Christ in the Later Middle Ages’.  4 Talvacchia, ‘The Word Made Flesh’; Delenda, ‘Sainte Marie Madeleine et l’application du décret Tridentin’; Hall, The Sacred Image in the Age of Art.  5 Vasari, Le Vite de’ piu eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architettori, ii, 39.

Steven F. H. Stowell teaches at Concordia Uni­ver­sity, Montreal. His research focuses on the devotional experiences of Italian Renaissance art and the intersections between art and language.

Renaissance Religions: Modes and Meanings in History, ed. by Peter Howard, Nicholas Terpstra, and Riccardo Saccenti, ES 26 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2021) pp. 207–230 10.1484/M.ES-EB.5.121906

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shame.6 Girolamo Savonarola also complained that, in his time, images of the Madonna showed her dressed in the clothes of courtesans.7 Such anecdotes suggest that sexuality and spirituality sat together uncomfortably in many works of religious art, though there was, nonetheless, a tendency to picture the two together. Endeavouring to make sense of how and why two apparently incompatible categories were merged together in early modern art, this essay explores how devotional images could have agency over a viewer’s sexuality. It pays particular attention to two groups of sources that have so far not been extensively examined in connection with this question: popular spiritual literature, focusing primarily on miracle-working images, and the medical and scientific literature on sexual arousal. Investigating the relationship between images and sexual responses in these varied discourses, I will argue that, according to early modern ideas about the body’s response to images, it was believed that sacred images had the potential to purge the soul of lust, despite their sometimes apparently sexual content. A miracle tale in which an image of the Virgin purges the soul of Count Francesco Sforza just as he is on the brink of rape demonstrates many key themes in this essay. The account appears in an edition of Silvanno Razzi’s (1527–1611) collection of miracle stories of the Virgin, Miracoli della Gloriosa Vergine Maria Nostra Signora. Razzi collaborated on Giorgio Vasari’s (1511–1574) collection of artists’ bio­graphies and, not surprisingly, many stories in Razzi’s collected Miracoli feature images that have a psycho­ logical impact upon the viewer.8 As Razzi recounts, having been forced to undress in Francesco’s bed, a young woman whom Sforza is about to violate sees an image of the Virgin that moves her to tears, and she begs to be returned to her husband an honest woman. She beseeches Francesco ‘humilmente, cadendole da gli occhi un fiume di lagrime, che volesse per amore di Maria Vergine, la cui effigie haveva dinanzi a gli occhi, restituirla inviolata al suo sposo’ (with humility, with a river of tears falling from her eyes, that for the love of the Virgin Mary, who’s effigy she has in front of her eyes, to be returned unviolated to her husband).9 Francesco is then miraculously moved to release the woman since her pleas ‘hebbe tanta forza nel petto di lui, per gratia di Maria Vergine gloriosa, che fuggitogli subito dell’animo ogni cattivo pensiero’ (had such force in his chest, by grace of the glorious Virgin Mary, that any bad thought fled from his soul).10 The Virgin’s agency, manifest in the image and the young woman’s tears, cleanses Francesco’s soul, thereby exemplifying beliefs in the power of sacred art to purge the soul.  6 Leonardo da Vinci, Paragone, ed. by Farago, p. 231. See also Holmes, ‘Disrobing the Virgin’, p. 182.  7 Savonarola, Les Illustrations des écrits de Jérome Savonarole, ed. by Gruyer, pp. 206–07.  8 Ruffini, Art without an Author, pp. 73, 88, 187 n. 5.  9 Razzi, Miracoli della Gloriosa Vergine Maria, p. 151. All translations are by the author unless a translated edition is cited.  10 Razzi, Miracoli della Gloriosa Vergine Maria, p. 151.

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Far from being unique, the story affirms belief in the agency of sacred images, miraculous or otherwise. A quick overview of art theory written during the Catholic Reformation makes this clear. The Bo­lognese cardinal Gabriele Paleotti (1522–1597), who wrote a book expanding upon the Council of Trent’s laconic statements on images, tells the story of a pious Bo­lognese painter who was frequently asked to create indecent and lascivious portraits of lovers; when the requests became too insistent to ignore, a religious man suggested that: quando era richiesto di tali ritratti, di dipingerli in iscambio una molto divota imagine di Cristo flagellato, o della Madonna, o d’altro santo o santa; la quale poi presentando al giovine lascivo […] restavano stupefatti del santo inganno e sodisfattissimi del cambio.11 [when he was requested to make such a portrait, to paint for them in place a very devout image of Christ being flagellated, or of the Madonna, or of another holy saint; which then, being presented to the young lascivious person […] they are left stupefied by the holy deception and fulfilled by the exchange.] In this amusing anecdote, Paleotti affirms that images can change sexual feelings. Another ecclesiastical writer from the post-Tridentine period, Gillio da Fabriano (d. 1584), conveyed similar confidence when he wrote that artists’ works should make ‘gli occhi casti di chi mira’ (the eyes of he who looks [at their works] chaste).12 Gian Paolo Lomazzo (1538–1600) passionately declared similar beliefs in his Trattato dell’ arte della pittura, scoltura et architettura. He writes: molti scelerati, & peccatori scordatisi gia di Dio, vedendo la santissima imagine di Christo flagellato […] ritornando in se stessi, & spargendo da gl’occhi fiumi d’amare lagrime hanno fatto asprissima penitenza; molti superbi, & lussuriosi vedendo l’imagini di nostra Donna, hanno seguito l’humiltà & castità; molti impenitenti, vedendo il ritratto di Maddalena, di Santa Maria Egittiaca, & d’altri santi hanno lasciato le delitie de le città, & seguito l’asprezza de la solitudine; […] Non dico che le imagini siano causa totale di cosi grandi effetti, […] mà dico che la pittura muove l’occhio, & questo custodisce tutti […] le imagini de le cose che vede nella memoria, & quelle li rapresenta à l’intelletto, il quale intende poi la verità, & falsità di quelle cose, & intesala, la rappresenta à la voluntà; la quale, essendo le cose male, le abomina, essendo buone le ama.13

 11 Paleotti, ‘Discorso intorno alle imagini sacre e profane’, ed. by Barocchi, p. 344.  12 Gilio da Fabriano, ‘Due Dialogi’, ed. by Barocchi, p. 79.  13 Lomazzo, Trattato dell’ arte della pittura, scoltura, et architettura, pp. 5–6.

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[many wicked people and sinners who had forgotten God, having seen the Holy image of Christ flagellated […] returning in themselves and spreading rivers of bitter tears, have made the most harsh penitence; many proud and lustful people seeing the image of Our Lady, have followed in humility and chastity; many impious people, seeing the portrait of the Magdalen, of Saint Mary of Egypt, and other saints have left the pleasures of the city and have followed the harshness of solitude; […] I do not say that images are the total cause of such great effects, […] but I say that paintings move the eye, and this keeps all […] the images of the things that it sees in the memory and represents them to the intellect, which understands the truth and the falsity of these things, and having understood, it represents this to the will, which rejects bad things and loves good things.] Lomazzo describes two kinds of images that induce sexual conversion: images of penitents, such as Mary Magdalen or Saint Mary of Egypt — who both had troubled and sexual pasts — and images of the Virgin, which produce humility and chastity. In so doing, his text recalls Francesco Sforza’s story in several ways. Lomazzo’s ‘rivers of bitter tears’ recalls those of the woman desired by Sforza. Also, as the art theorist predicts, the image that inspired the woman whom Sforza wanted to violate was an image of the Virgin. The tearful woman in Francesco’s bed, in turn, would have been similar to many contemporary images of the penitent Magdalen: many images of Mary Magdalen crying in these decades show her either beautiful, naked, or both, as will be discussed further below. Thus, Sforza converted while gazing upon a beautiful undressed woman whose eyes were filled with tears, and an image of the Virgin. Juxtaposing the miracle tale with contemporary art theory texts reveals the difficulty in differentiating between a miraculous event and the effects of artistic skill. Is it a miraculous event to be cleansed of sexual urges, like Francesco Sforza, if any painting of the Virgin, or of Mary Magdalen, should be able to do the same thing? The similarities between miracle stories and art theory affirms that beliefs regarding the power of images traversed disciplinary or cultural boundaries, thus validating the method adopted here of looking broadly across a range of texts to assess in what ways images could control the sexuality of viewers. I will argue that though there was a diversity of opinions, one school of thought in early modern Italy advocated for the use of images to control sexual desire based on the scientific belief that the eye played a central role in arousal, and thereby had to be part of its cure. According to this theory, the cause of inordinate sexual obsession was the imprinting of a tempting image in the memory and then an overestimation of its value. This image then needed to be modified and purged to find relief. Many sacred images which may seem erotic might instead be interpreted as an attempt to modify a memory image.

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The Science and Spirituality of Sexual Temptation Affirming beliefs held from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, early modern scientific literature on sexuality stated that the eye was the key to sexual arousal. A visual image entered through the eye, igniting sexual desire, which began in the brain. Alternately, the visual stimulus could impress itself in the memory for later recall. Studying the philosophical and medical writings on love, Donald Beecher summarizes that the beloved ‘must enter through the eyes, that it must be transformed from substance to species, and that the copy must be passed from ventricle to ventricle of the brain until it lodged in the imagination and memory’.14 Danielle Jacquart and Claude Thomasset confirm this view, explaining that in the Middle Ages, in ‘the essence of sexual pleasure […] the eyes were given great importance’, since ‘the thing perceived is imprinted on the memory and imagining a renewal of this joy […] sets the physio­logical mechanisms into motion’.15 Such views stem in part from Plato’s view of love originating in the sensible, visible perception of beauty.16 In a later description of sexual desire, Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) echoes the Platonic belief that ‘love […] has its origin in sight’, and elaborates on the lingering presence of the visual stimulus, characterizing the beloved’s image as an infection.17 ‘Light sent out from the eyes draws with itself a spiritual vapor’, Ficino writes, which also draws blood; this ‘ray stretches out to that person opposite and, along with the ray, a vapor of corrupt blood comes out, and by its contagion, the eye of the onlooker is infected’.18 Among early modern writers, in the sixteenth century Levinio Lennio (Levinus Lemnius, 1505–1568) wrote simply that ‘desiderio, & appetito carnale’ (desire, and carnal appetite) arises in us by ‘imaginatione, o per aspetto di donna, o d’huomo, che piaccia, massimamente bello’ (imagination, or by the aspect of a woman or man that pleases, especially beautiful).19 Visual stimuli did not only ignite psycho­logical desire, they also initiated physio­logical reactions, notably stirring heat and the sexual organs. Beecher and Massimo Ciavolella quote Arnald de Villanova’s (c. 1240–1311) synthesis: When something pleasing or enjoyable is presented to the soul, the joy coming from the apprehended pleasure multiplies the spirits in the

 14 Beecher, ‘Quattrocento Views on the Eroticization of the Imagination’, p. 50.  15 Jacquart and Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages, pp. 82–83.  16 Ferrand, A Treatise on Love Sickness, ed. by Beecher and Ciavolella, p. 44.  17 Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium, ed. by Jayne, p. 198.  18 Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium, ed. by Jayne, p. 221. See also Beecher, ‘Quattrocento Views on the Eroticization of the Imagination’, pp. 54–55.  19 Lennio, De gli occulti miracoli, fol. 22v.

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heart. Suddenly they heat up, and this heat […] causes the spirits to be spread to all the members of the body.20 Thus, de Villanova establishes a causal link between pleasurable visual perception and the generation of heat stirring sexual appetite. Later in the sixteenth century, Scipione Mercurio (d. 1615) observes how vision and the reproductive organs are sympathetically linked: hanno molta simpathia, e convenienza insieme; […] quantunque siano di luogo distanti, cioè la Fantasia nella testa, e la generativa ne i testicoli […] quando il pensiero, e la imaginatione rivolge cose amorose per la mente, all hora quasi in subito (come adviene particolarmente ne i giovani) le parti genitali si gonfiano.21 [they have much sympathy, and concord together […] no matter how far the distance is between them, that is, the fantasia in the head and the generativa in the testicles […] when the thought and the imagination turn with the mind to an amorous thing, then almost instantly (as happens particularly with youths) the genitals enlarge.] These two sources, though separated by several centuries, attest to the persistent belief that visual stimulus was a natural cause for sexual stimulation. In both sources, there is an emphasis on the natural, unmediated link between cause and effect: with words like ‘suddenly’ and ‘almost instantly’, sexual response is nearly outside the domain of human will. There is also a key humoral relationship between sexual arousal and sight: the writings of several authors suggest a connection between the eye and seminal fluid, which originated in part in the brain and then descended to the genitals. For instance, Albert the Great (c. 1200–1280) argued that the ‘whiteness, softness and moistness [of the brain], corresponded to that of semen’.22 The relationship between the eyes and sexual arousal was also the reason for the medi­eval belief that overindulgence in sex would lead to shrunken eyes, apparently indicating, according to Albert the Great, that ‘coitus drains, above all, the brain’.23 In the Generation of Animals, Aristotle likewise states that ‘the eyes are the most seminal, as is proved by the fact that this is the only region which unmistakably changes its appearance during sexual intercourse’.24 Thus, visual stimulus was connected to the production of semen in the brain, a belief that was not unknown to artists such as Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), who once illustrated the seminal duct of the penis attached to the spinal cord and, thus, to the mind, as per  20 As quoted in Ferrand, A Treatise on Love Sickness, ed. by Beecher and Ciavolella, p. 81.  21 Mercurio, La comare o ricoglitrice, p. 50.  22 As quoted in Jacquart and Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages, p. 55. See also Laqueur, Making Sex, p. 35.  23 Jacquart and Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages, p. 56.  24 Jacquart and Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages, p. 56.

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medi­eval anatomical belief.25 Lennio writes similarly that among the things that contribute to reproduction, ‘il seme, […] procede dal cervello’ (the seed […] comes from the brain).26 In both spiritual literature and art theory, descriptions of sexual temptation conform to the medical beliefs outlined above, validating the methodo­ logy of exploring these three discourses together. For instance, awareness of the medical link between sight and sexual desire appears in a book of popular spiritual literature, Don Marco de Masellis’s Dell’ Icono­logia della Madre di Dio Maria Vergine. Crediting Isidore of Seville, de Masellis warns readers that ‘la custodia de i nostri sensi giova molto à conservar la Castità, perche l’occhio è principio della fornicatione’ (guarding our senses aides greatly to conserve chastity, because the eye is the origin of fornication).27 In the enormously popular Spiritual Combat, Lorenzo Scupoli (c. 1530–1610) writes that impure desires arise from ‘the curiosity of the eyes or ears’.28 Likewise, he warns against the power of erotic images to be impressed in the memory, writing ‘when you perceive such thoughts presenting themselves and like to make any Impression, recollect yourself ’.29 In the Trionfo della castità, Pietro Giustinelli (1579–1630) argues that the eyes are the most dangerous of all the senses and in need of discipline. Summarizing the medical opinion that sense impressions alter the soul and memory, he writes that the ‘sentimenti esterni sono le porte, per dove entrano tutte le tentationi dell’huomo, tutta volta che non siano ben custoditi, e disciplinati. Perche, per mezzo di questi passano l’imagine de gli oggetti all’animo, & in esso s’imprimono […] eccitano l’intelletto’ (exterior senses are the doors through which the temptations of man enter, whenever they are not well disciplined and guarded. Because, by means of these, images of objects are passed to the soul, and in this they imprint themselves […] they excite the intellect).30 These medical beliefs are also consistent with the views of many writers on art in the sixteenth century — particularly those mindful of the Council of Trent’s decrees on images — who argue that erotic images are to be avoided at any cost.31 Paleotti, for example, discouraged painters from depicting the Virgin’s face in ways that were ‘quasi lasciva’ (almost lascivious).32 Paleotti’s distaste for anything lascivious in sacred art was so vehement that he planned to write a further volume of his treatise dedicated

 25 Noble, DiFrancesco, and Zancani, ‘Leonardo da Vinci and the Origin of Semen’.  26 Lennio, De gli occulti miracoli, fol. 22v.  27 Masellis, Dell’icono­logia della Madre di Dio Maria Vergine, p. 198.  28 Scupoli, The Spiritual Combat, p. 57.  29 Scupoli, The Spiritual Combat, p. 51.  30 Giustinelli, Trionfo della castità, p. 538.  31 See Delenda, ‘Sainte Marie Madeleine et l’application du décret Tridentin’; Loh, ‘“La Custodia degli Occhi”’.  32 Paleotti, ‘Discorso intorno alle imagini sacre e profane’, ed. by Barocchi, p. 373; Paleotti, Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images, trans. by McCuaig, p. 228.

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Figure 8.1. Titian, Penitent Magdalen, Florence, Palazzo Pitti, Galleria Palatina. c. 1533–1535. Photo Credit: Scala / Art Resource, NY.

entirely to lascivious pictures, with a chapter tentatively titled, for example, ‘Delle figure ignude, e quanto dagli occhi casti debbono essere schifate’ (‘On nude figures, and how much chaste eyes should flee from them’).33  33 Paleotti, ‘Discorso intorno alle imagini sacre e profane’, ed. by Barocchi, p. 505; Paleotti, Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images, trans. by McCuaig, p. 332.

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The Florentine Raffaello Borghini (1537–1588) voiced similar sentiments; in his dialogue on art, Il Riposo, an interlocutor argues that images should be composed so that ‘i santi misteri del Signor nostro […] commuovano gli animi a piamente e santamente vivere; e non più tosto, come molte pitture moderne fanno, a folli e lascivi pensieri gli destino’ (the holy mysteries of our Lord […] move the soul to pious and holy life, and not, rather, as many modern pictures do, arouse folly and lascivious thoughts).34 Despite universal agreement about the danger of erotic, visual stimuli, there is considerable debate among modern art historians — as among early modern writers — as to what truly constituted a transgression of this principle. Such debates are emblematized by one group of images: namely, those of Mary Magdalen in penitence, such as examples by Titian (Figures 8.1 and 8.2). When we compare Titian’s Magdalens to his other secular, and unquestionably erotic, nudes, it is obvious that the painterly presentation of the saint’s hair, face, and flesh is beautiful according to Renaissance canons. Titian’s painting would seem to be a perfect example of the kind of image that Catholic Reformation authors opposed.35 Yet, Giorgio Vasari, for instance, in his Vite de’ piu eccellenti pittori, scultori et architettori (1568) describes a version of Titian’s Penitent Mary Magdalen by writing that the grief evident on her face ‘muove […] chiunche la guarda […] E […] ancorche sia bellissima, non muove a lascivia, ma a comiserazione’ (moves […] whoever looks at it […] And […] even if she is beautiful, she does not move to lust, but to pity).36 Following Vasari, many scholars have defended the spiritual content of Titian’s painting.37 The deeply spiritual poet Vittoria Colonna likely owned one of Titian’s Magdalens, perhaps the version now in the Pitti Palace. In a letter to Titian, her agent requests an image of the Magdalen ‘as tearful as possible’.38 As Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby has argued, the sensuous nudity of the painting apparently did not inhibit her from appreciating it, and she conveyed gratitude to the artist and composed spiritual poems in which she identified with the penitent Magdalen, picturing her in ways analogous to Titian’s painting.39 Cardinal Federico Borromeo also praised a similar composition by Titian, writing that the artist knew how to ‘maintain the honesty of the nude’.40 Debby thus attempts to reconcile the spiritual response with the apparently sexual nature of the image, arguing that the saint’s beauty was viewed as a reflection of virtue in Colonna’s context.

 34 Borghini, Il Riposo, pp. 119–20.  35 Delenda, ‘Sainte Marie Madeleine et l’application du décret Tridentin’.  36 Vasari, Le Vite de’ piu eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architettori, iii, 816.  37 Aikema, ‘Titian’s Mary Magdalen in the Palazzo Pitti’; Debby Ben-Aryeh, ‘Vittoria Colonna and Titian’s Pitti “Magdalen”’; Graham, ‘Renaissance Flesh and Woman’s Devotion’.  38 Aikema, ‘Titian’s Mary Magdalen in the Palazzo Pitti’, p. 49.  39 Debby Ben-Aryeh, ‘Vittoria Colonna and Titian’s Pitti “Magdalen”’.  40 Graham, ‘Renaissance Flesh and Woman’s Devotion’, p. 141.

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Figure 8.2. Titian, Penitent Mary Magdalen, Naples, Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte. c. 1550. Photo Credit: Scala / Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali / Art Resource, NY.

Likewise, Heather Sexton Graham argues that the Magdalen’s sensuous skin is meant to recall the ‘female’ nature of Christ’s flesh, a motif in contemporary spiritual literature.41 These arguments can be viewed as part of a larger tendency in scholarly discussions of erotic imagery in sacred art, in which  41 Graham, ‘Renaissance Flesh and Woman’s Devotion’.

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authors demonstrate how sexual imagery had theo­logical meanings.42 I do not dispute the validity of these contributions. However, given the medical beliefs discussed above, we must also account for the involuntary sexual feelings that an image of a nude person might arouse: What role could this have played in a spiritual experience? Indeed, Paleotti and Borghini both warn that beautiful sacred images can induce lust; even Vasari’s comments on Titian’s painting seem to acknowledge that the composition could evoke sexual responses in the hands of an inferior artist. Bernard Aikema explains the sensual emotions aroused by Titian’s Magdalen as a spiritual test for viewers.43 His hypothesis makes the erotic response integral to the devotional experience. Additional evidence both supporting and complicating Aikema’s thesis will be discussed below, though I argue that sensuous sacred images reshape and alter the memory image of erotic stimulus while encouraging purgation. I arrive at this conclusion by investigating anecdotes recounted in spiritual literature that describe how sacred images could remedy lust, and by comparing these to medical cures. Scrutinizing sensuous sacred images from this perspective reveals sacred art as a form of therapy: an art that follows the rational and scientific as well as the spiritual principles of the time in order to manage excessive lust.

Spiritual and Scientific Cures of Sexual Temptation In early modern medical literature, the problem of overabundant sexual desire was often a form of lovesickness, or heroic love: an unnatural attachment to one person. It is in discussions of this mental illness that we find opinions on the cause and treatment of unnaturally strong sexual desire. Physio­logical problems with the mind and memory caused erotic fixation: according to Arnald de Villanova, as Jacquart and Thomasset have shown, patho­logical obsession ‘occur[s] when [the estimative virtue in the median ventricle of the brain] estimates that the pleasure to be obtained [from a beautiful person] surpasses all others and constitutes the one sole good to be sought’.44 Likewise, Mary Frances Wack has discussed how various medical writings of the late Middle Ages — by authors such as Dino del Garbo (1280–1327) and Gerard de Solo (fourteenth century) — show that ‘the principle cause of lovesickness is a pleasurable object imprinting its species on the imagination and the estimation’.45 Beecher and Ciavolella explain that

 42 See, for example, Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, and Bynum, ‘The Body of Christ in the Later Middle Ages’.  43 Aikema, ‘Titian’s Mary Magdalen in the Palazzo Pitti’.  44 Jacquart and Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages, p. 84.  45 Wack, ‘From Mental Faculties to Magical Philters’, p. 15.

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pleasure from the perception of the beloved ‘causes a rapid multiplication of the vital spirits which overheat and spread throughout the body’.46 The overheating then leads to dryness, making the phantasma, or memory image, of the beloved ‘firmly imprinted in the organ of memory’ causing the psycho­logical fixation.47 Thus, people who are sexually obsessed are those whose memory is especially sticky and unable to rid itself of sexual images. Melancholy people, who were believed to have especially good visual memories, were prone to sexual obsession. Ficino writes that ‘from the dry, thick, and black blood, melancholy, that is, black bile, is made, which fills the head with its vapors, dries out the brain, and unceasingly vexes the soul day and night with fearful, hideous images’.48 Sexual excitement was caused by visual stimulus, and sexual obsession was caused by the stimulus’s impression in the memory and a false estimation of its value. Several writers of spiritual literature similarly acknowledge that memory impressions are the cause of obsessions. Miracle stories of lust and sexuality often begin by noting that a person was habitually accustomed to seeing someone who tempted them sexually. In one story from Razzi’s collection of miracles, we read that a soldier is tempted to sin with the wife of his lord, ‘instigato dal diavolo, e dalla giovinezza: ma molto più […] di spesso vedersi, le cui forze sono grandissime’ (instigated by the Devil, and by youth, but mostly […] by seeing [her] frequently, the force of which is great), thus suggesting that temptation arises when the sense image has been imprinted on the imagination through habituation.49 As this example makes clear, demons were also a major cause of lust, but here again it is through their power to manipulate memory visions, as is established in the Malleus maleficarum, the famous treatise on demono­logy. The author notes that the devil can through local motion excite the fancy and inner sensory perceptions of a man […]. For fancy or imagination is as it were the treasury of ideas received through the senses. And through this it happens that devils so stir up the inner perceptions.50 Cures for lovesickness include pharmaceutical and surgical remedies, though here I focus on cures that relate most closely to the use of images, as these are most relevant to discussions on art. Cures for lust were visual in as much as they required avoiding the original infecting image and reshaping the memory image. Ficino notes that the cure will require avoiding reinfection of the eyes, writing that ‘one must especially be very careful not to let the light of his eyes

 46 In Ferrand, A Treatise on Love Sickness, ed. by Beecher and Ciavolella, p. 80.  47 In Ferrand, A Treatise on Love Sickness, ed. by Beecher and Ciavolella, p. 81.  48 Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium, ed. by Jayne, p. 194.  49 Razzi, Miracoli della Gloriosa Vergine Maria, p. 152.  50 Institoris and Sprenger, The Malleus Maleficarum, ed. by Summers, p. 50. Modern scholarship now disputes Sprenger’s role as a co-author.

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meet those of the beloved’.51 Jacques Ferrand (b. c. 1575) writes that one should ‘divert the thoughts of the lover, erase the memory of past pleasures’.52 And Raymond Lull (c. 1232–1315) writes that ‘the man who wishes to extirpate and annihilate lust from his sensibility should imagine other things which are neither beautiful nor attractive’.53 The issue here appears to be limiting the effect of the memory impression by not reinforcing it. While avoiding visual stimulus is relatively straightforward, erasing a memory image is not. The author of the Malleus maleficarum reports Avicenna’s cures for lovesickness, advocating avoidance by distracting the mind with work, and, more importantly, changing the memory image of the beloved. If the lover ‘is open to correction, he may be admonished and expostulated with, to the effect that such love is the greatest misery’.54 The author also describes a cure advocated by Avicenna that may amount to a primitive form of aversion therapy: speaking with older women who will insult the beloved so that her image will be recalled differently by the lover. The lover should be directed to ‘someone who […] will vilify the body and disposition of his love, and so blacken her character that she may appear to him altogether base and deformed’.55 This strategy implies changing the principal cause of lust, which is the memory image of the beloved. The effort to distort the original image through vilification is not dissimilar to the process of forgetting discussed by Mary Carruthers in her studies of medi­eval memory, whereby new pictures are painted over old memory images rather than trying to destroy the original.56 The image of the penitent Magdalen by Titian might in fact encourage reshaping the mind’s sexual stimulus: while it recalls a sexually arousing image, through the tears it shows how ‘love is the greatest misery’.57 It may therefore be capable, I argue, of changing the original image. Early modern art theorists were adamant that images could indeed make a lasting impression on the soul. Paleotti, for instance, remarks that ‘secondo i varii concetti che apprende la nostra fantasia dalle forme delle cose, si fanno in essa così salde impressioni, che da quelle ne derivano alterazioni e segni notabili nei corpi’ (according to the various concepts that our fantasy apprehends of the forms of things, there strong impressions are made, from which are derived alterations and notable signs in bodies).58 Similarly, in books of spiritual literature, substituting lustful memories with pious paintings appears to have been an accepted method of curing lust. In a treatise on a miraculous

 51 Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium, ed. by Jayne, p. 229.  52 Ferrand, A Treatise on Love Sickness, ed. by Beecher and Ciavolella, p. 353.  53 Jacquart and Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages, p. 150.  54 Institoris and Sprenger, The Malleus Maleficarum, ed. by Summers, p. 171.  55 Institoris and Sprenger, The Malleus Maleficarum, ed. by Summers, p. 171.  56 Carruthers, The Craft of Thought, pp. 54–57.  57 Institoris and Sprenger, The Malleus Maleficarum, ed. by Summers, p. 171.  58 Paleotti, ‘Discorso intorno alle imagini sacre e profane’, ed. by Barocchi, p. 230.

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Figure 8.3. Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri), Susanna and the Elders, Parma, Galleria Nazionale. 1649–1650. Photo Credit: Scala/Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali / Art Resource, NY.

painting in Pistoia, the author advises ‘se alcuno è tentato d’amor carnale, si proponga innanzi à gli occhi l’Immagine del casto Ioseph, & della Beata Susanna’ (if one is tempted by carnal love, one places in front of the eyes images of the chaste Joseph and of the Blessed Susanna).59 Susanna is a particularly surprising example, since images of her are often considered the most sexually enticing to modern eyes (Figure 8.3), but it may be that a deeper understanding of her chastity and the sinful nature of the elder intruders have drained the sexual appeal of the image. In these images, the sight of tears, such as those cried by the Magdalen (Figures 8.1 and 8.2) and Susanna, were particularly significant, as they are associated with spiritual compunction. Seeing a woman weeping may therefore make thoughts of sexual pleasure distasteful since the tears are, in a sense, the bitter consequence of sensual indulgence.60 The tears may  59 Bracciolini, Trattato de’ miracoli, p. 71.  60 Stowell, The Spiritual Language of Art, pp. 25–30.

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create a dissonance that repels sexual desire; this may even be part of the ‘cure’ that affected Francesco Sforza, since the tears of his victim are, in part, credited with delivering lust from his soul. Other miracle stories illustrate the repellent power of combining tears with sexual desire, such as one tale told by Razzi involving a knight who obtained the right to sleep with a woman from her father; upon seeing her tears, and hearing her sighs and laments over losing her virginity, we are told that ‘discendendo lo Spirito del Sig. nella mente del Cavaliere, si sentì egli partir dal cuore ogni fiamma di libidine’ (the spirit of the Lord descended into his mind, and he felt it take away from his heart any libidinous flame).61 While to modern eyes Titian’s painting may only be an image of a beautiful woman, for the early modern viewer it may have been primarily an image of a beautiful woman crying, the sight of which may have been genuinely distasteful. While Aikema suggests that Titian’s image constitutes a kind of test — raising lust in order to tempt the viewer — I would argue that lust is combined with tears in order to reshape the sexual stimulus and thus teach the mind to change its memory. One of the most popular books of spiritual literature from the sixteenth century, Scupoli’s Spiritual Combat, appears to both support and contradict Aikema’s study. Like the medical authors quoted above, Scupoli’s text advises readers to avoid any sexual temptation and acknowledges the danger of frequent habituation ‘by frequent visits, too long conversations, and indiscreet familiarity’.62 Scupoli considers whether a spiritual test is advisable for lust, concluding that he is not of the opinion, when the Temptation is most violent that you should, as several authors advise in order to form a Horror of Impurity, consider the shameful and insatiable Nature of such sins, that they are followed by disgust, remorse, and vexation […]. The reason is such considerations […] frequently, instead of freeing us from Danger, only serve to increase it: for if on the one hand the understanding drives away the evil thoughts, such reflections naturally call them back on the other […] [they] renew the impure ideas, and imprint them deeper without perceiving it.63 For Scupoli, therefore, the danger of further imprinting the stimulus into the memory made such spiritual tests undesirable. Similarly, Giustinelli in the Trionfo della castità writes that it would be ‘complete madness he who would wish to think of succeeding this enemy by putting himself in front of it, to fight it himself ’.64 Perhaps puzzlingly, Scupoli recommends instead meditating on Christ’s passion and ‘sometimes embracing a Crucifix,

 61 Razzi, Miracoli della Gloriosa Vergine Maria, pp. 90–91.  62 Scupoli, The Spiritual Combat, p. 55.  63 Scupoli, The Spiritual Combat, p. 58.  64 Giustinelli, Trionfo della castità, p. 537.

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representing your dying Saviour, kiss the marks of the sacred wounds! [and say to Christ:] Imprint your figure deep in my heart, fill’d as it is with Abomination, and preserve me from consenting to sin’.65 Here, lustful kisses are replaced with kisses of spiritual devotion, with the hope of impressing a new image into the memory. There were, therefore, differing opinions as to the proper cures for lust. Whilst Avicenna and his followers might encourage ‘blackening’ the memory image of the beloved, spiritual authors believed the stimulus so strong that it needed to be avoided. While this may be a case of spiritual writers disagreeing with medical discourse, their arguments are premised on the same medical interpretation of the problem: lust is caused by visual stimulus and its memory. Furthermore, Scupoli’s recommendation to meditate on Christ’s Passion and to impress it into the memory is in harmony with the medical writers who advise distracting the mind and erasing the memory of sexual temptation; the spiritual and medical cures are therefore similar. The tears of Titian’s Magdalen may have reshaped the sexual stimulus such that, in Vasari’s words, ‘even if she is beautiful, she does not move [the viewer] to lust, but to pity’, though this interpretation may not have satisfied writers like Scupoli. Beyond being emblems of spiritual compunction, the Magdalen’s tears may also be evidence of her own sexual thoughts being purged from her mind. In several miracle stories, the experience of sexual purgation seems to evoke the evacuation of something from the mind, often including tears. As reported in the Miracoli della croce santissima, Saint Mary of Egypt, a woman consumed by sexual sin, finds that she is withheld from seeing the relic of the true cross by an unseen force. When she understands that her sin prevents her from seeing the relic, la fece risolvere in lagrime per horrore de’suoi gravi falli. Sospirò ivi, lagrimò, si battè il petto, & alzando alquanto gli occhi, perche vide un imagine di Maria Vergine, cominciò à pregarla […] promise di mutar vita e far penitenza.66 [she cried for the horrors of her great sins. Sighing there, and crying, she struck her breast and looking up she saw an image of the Virgin, she began to pray to her […] [she] promised to change her life and make penance.] In this miracle story, the saint’s spiritual blindness is accompanied by the sight of a painting of the Virgin, which then sets in motion her tears. Indeed, scientific writings agreed that purgation of some kind was needed to eliminate temptation. For Ficino, lust is a sign of bodily infection requiring

 65 Scupoli, The Spiritual Combat, p. 58.  66 Astolfi, Miracoli della croce santissima, p. 30.

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purgation of the diseased substance: ‘when the blood has been purified, or the phlegm removed, the itch ceases’.67 He even recommends frequent coitus in order to be rid of the problematic seed, and if intercourse is not an option, one should ‘exercise often until one perspires […] so that through it the passages of the body may be opened for expurgation to take place’.68 Avicenna also writes that the sexual act involves the purgation of sexual obsession and the ‘dissolution of the spermatic vapours that accumulate in the brain of melancholics’.69 This raises the question as to whether readers of spiritual literature and viewers of sacred art connected the tears of spiritual compunction in some way to the purgation necessary to cure sexual obsession. Though historical sources do not go so far as to say that tears are signs of sexual obsessions being purged, several passages make it tempting to link the evacuation of sexually impure thoughts to the tears leaving the body. For instance, the emission of tears was thought to create different sensations in sight; the author of the Malleus maleficarum writes that by tempting men with sexually enticing images, demons confuse ‘the organ of sight so that a clear thing appears cloudy: just as after weeping, owing to the collected humours, the light appears different’, therefore creating a parallel between tears and sexually pure sight.70 In ancient ophthalmo­logy some authors believed that the aqueous humour was the source of tears.71 Hugo Magnus writes that in pre-Galenic medicine ‘tears work on the eye approximately like a purgative of the entire organism, purifying and draining off ’.72 In Aristotle’s Problems, people with eye diseases causing tears see more acutely ‘because the eyes are cleaned off […]. For often the external thickness keeps out the vision, but this is cleared by tearing’.73 Hot tears were also related to hot sweat, which remove disease.74 Pliny similarly stated that ‘man alone is cured of blindness by the emission of fluid from the eye’.75 He also links tears to the mind itself, asking ‘what is the nature of this moisture that at a moment of sorrow flows so copiously […]. In point of fact it is the mind that is the real instrument of sight […]. This explains why deep thought blinds the eyes by withdrawing the vision inward’.76 Likewise, Galen maintained that some tears were a fluid produced by the cerebrum, and similar beliefs were received by Avicenna.77

 67 Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium, ed. by Jayne, p. 229.  68 Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium, ed. by Jayne, p. 229.  69 As quoted in Jacquart and Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages, p. 83.  70 Institoris and Sprenger, The Malleus Maleficarum, ed. by Summers, p. 120.  71 Magnus, Ophthalmo­logy of the Ancients, i, 143–44.  72 Magnus, Ophthalmo­logy of the Ancients, i, 148.  73 Aristotle, Problems, ed. and trans. by Mayhew, pp. 325–27.  74 Aristotle, Problems, ed. and trans. by Mayhew, p. 335.  75 Pliny, Natural History, trans. by Rackham, iii, 525.  76 Pliny, Natural History, trans. by Rackham, iii, 523–25.  77 Murube, ‘Concepts of the Origin and Physio­logy of Tears’.

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In Pliny and Aristotle, therefore, the purgative nature of tears can be associated with corrected vision, and therefore, we may speculate that to readers aware of these views, the tears of Mary of Egypt (and others possessed by sexual obsession) liberated her and permitted her to see the spiritual. Although the medical texts do not go so far as to say tears effectively purge erotic memory images, it is tempting to suppose that through their tears and penitence, people suffering from sexual obsession are liberated from the memory image that causes lust. Seeing an image of a beautiful penitent woman may have disgusted sexual feelings, as noted above, because it transformed the memory image from something sexually tempting into something distasteful. In cases of nude crying women, we presume a potential male viewer. But the pictured tears may have also been meant to provoke tears of empathy among viewers who could identify with the saint. The tears in the painting are meant to provoke the viewer’s own tears, thus upholding the biblical dictum that we should ‘weep with those who weep’ (Romans 12. 15), a sentiment repeated in Renaissance art theory by Leon Battista Alberti and Leonardo da Vinci.78 In this sense, we can relate the provocation of tears not only to spiritual cures for lust, but also to medical beliefs about the functioning of the mind.

Lust and Time Medical cures for lust require time. This is natural, since time and habituation were the cause of the original problem: sexually lascivious images are stamped on the memory through habitual and repeated acts of looking. For example, Ficino writes that the cure for lovesickness ‘is brought about by a certain interval of time’; the ‘process requires a long time in everyone, but in melancholic persons a very long time, especially if they have been snared in the rising of Saturn’, confirming the notion that the sticky minds of melancholics needed more time to be cured.79 As Jacques Ferrand similarly states: Galen recognized the importance of time and its passage in the healing of our passions, describing it as a remedy for erotic melancholy. Time achieves the desired ends by allowing all manner of new thoughts and activities to preoccupy our minds, unravelling and fading the formerly frenzied and enraged imagination.80 Time is required in order for the strength of the memory image to fade. It is also likely that altering the memory image required habitual practice. Continual concentration upon paintings that could change the memory

 78 Stowell, The Spiritual Language of Art, pp. 112, 124.  79 Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium, ed. by Jayne, p. 229.  80 Ferrand, A Treatise on Love Sickness, ed. by Beecher and Ciavolella, p. 354.

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image of lust could therefore be thought of as a time-consuming method to repair the memory and remedy the problem. Some authors agree that sacred images can be etched into the imagination, though it requires time. This view of images is confirmed in a miracle tale in Carlo Bovio’s Esempi e miracoli della SS. Vergine Maria, which recounts how a hermitic monk was tempted by sexual thoughts through the work of a demon. The demon promised to leave the monk alone if he agreed to stop praying to an image of the Virgin every day. Seeking advice on this matter, the monk was told that if he stopped praying to the Virgin’s image, he would become even more tormented by sexual thoughts, since then his own weakness would begin to torment him.81 Author Bovio summarizes: il demonio togliendo al Romito il sagro culto dell’Immagine di nostra Donna, lo volea ben far mancare nella Santa fede Cattolica, mà non per questo sarebbono à lui mancati gli stimoli della carne, […]. Senza che più il demonio lo tentasse, si sarebbe egli tentato più, e peggio da se.82 [the demon, taking the monk away from the sacred cult of the image of Our Lady, wanted him to lack in holy Catholic faith, but the urges of the flesh would not be taken from him [because he had complied with the demon] […] without the demon tempting him anymore, he would be more and worse tempted by himself.] The story has a preface about the need to shape the mind through habit in childhood, indicating that the moral of the tale is about shaping proper habit in the mind, in this case, through frequent exposure to an image. The story finishes with the author exhorting readers to honour images of the Virgin: ‘Da primi anni della fanciullezza devesi imparare una tal purità’ (from the first years of youth one must learn such purity).83 Likewise, the author who advises looking at images of Susanna to tame lust specifies that this should be done with ‘continue contemplationi’ (continuous contemplation).84 In miraculous cures of sexual temptation, the miracle seems to be not the purging of the unwanted thoughts, but rather the fact that the thoughts are purged instantaneously. As noted, repeated viewing of proper images could tame the sexual impulse, but not so in the case of a miracle-working image. In his treatise on the miraculous image of the Santissima Annunziata in Florence (Figure 8.4), Francesco Bocchi notes that repeated viewings of the image would be unnecessary. Of the miracle-working image of the Annunciation in Florence, normally concealed and only ever briefly unveiled, Bocchi claims that the Madonna’s saintly face stays in the memory: ‘ma dura oltra cio un certo gentile stimolo, non dirò molti giorni, ne molti  81 Bovio, Esempi e miracoli, pp. 184–95.  82 Bovio, Esempi e miracoli, p. 191.  83 Bovio, Esempi e miracoli, p. 194.  84 Bracciolini, Trattato de’ miracoli, p. 72.

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Figure 8.4. Anonymous Florentine ( Jacopo di Cione?), The Annunciation of the Virgin, Florence, Santissima Annunziata. Traditionally dated to 1252, now believed to be from the fourteenth century. Photo Credit: Scala / Art Resource, NY.

anni, ma & vive sempre in tutti una voglia accesa di divini pensieri’ (but lasting beyond this a certain gentle stimulus, not only for many days, nor even many years, but in all [who look at this painting] lives forever a desire shining and burning together with divine thoughts).85 The miracle of cheating time is forcefully evoked in the miraculous tale of Caterina Corner, Queen of Cyprus, recounted in at least two collections on the miracles of the Santissima Annunziata.86 In both versions, the queen prays to the Annunziata to have her carnal desires removed. In his late sixteenth-century account, Luca Ferrini wrote that upon making her  85 Bocchi, Sopra l’immagine miracolosa, p. 20.  86 Ferrini, Corona di sessanta tre miracoli; Lottini, Scelta d’alcuni miracoli.

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prayer, ‘Affermò la Regina medesima che si sentì talmente allora restringere i lombi, e toccare il cuore, che in Estasi restando, e dell’Estasi uscendo, vivè dipoi con grandissima castità’ (the Queen herself affirms, that she felt greatly at that moment [the Virgin] restrain her loins and touch her heart, that being in ecstasy, and coming out of ecstasy she lived from then with great chastity).87 In Ferrini’s account, the miracle lies particularly in the fact that the queen’s transformation took place so quickly and so completely: ‘Vivere castamente può esser cosa naturale, ma […] fare un’ metamorfosi cosi tantosto di se medesima (è miracolo)’ (living chastely can be a natural thing, but […] making a metamorphosis so suddenly and of oneself [is a miracle])’.88 The implication therefore is that the true miracle performed by the image includes the circumvention of time, the ability to overcome in a moment habits that have accrued through repetition over years. The miracle here does not happen completely outside of early modern beliefs about cause and effect; rather, it merely accomplishes this with greater rapidity. Examining the literature on art alongside spiritual stories pertaining to images, as well as the medical literature on sexuality, reveals a number of agreements between the three discourses. Visual stimuli fixed in the memory were universally believed to be the cause of sexual arousal. Art theorists, scientific authors, and writers of spiritual texts likewise affirmed that images could be part of the cure. Reconsidering through the lens of medical and spiritual texts paintings that have sometimes been considered erotic suggests how such images could actually have reshaped and modified existing sexual stimuli. The tears encouraged purgation. This was a time-consuming process, and when a miracle intervened to achieve the same result, its main advantage was to speed up the process. As we look more closely into contemporary views of how the body responded to images and recognize that many believed that sacred images had the potential to purge the soul of lust despite their sometimes apparently sexual content, we can come to a more nuanced view of the mingling of sacred and erotic imagery in Renaissance art and religion.

 87 Ferrini, Corona di sessanta tre miracoli, fol. 43v.  88 Ferrini, Corona di sessanta tre miracoli, fol. 43v.

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Works Cited Primary Sources Aristotle, Problems: Books 20–38, ed. and trans. by Robert Mayhew (Cam­bridge, MA: Harvard Uni­ver­sity Press, 2011) Astolfi, Don Felice, Miracoli della croce santissima (Venice: Giunti, 1609) Bocchi, Francesco, Sopra l’immagine miracolosa della santissima Nunziata di Firenze (Florence, 1592) Borghini, Raffaello, Il Riposo di Raffaello Borghini, in cui della pittura e della scultura si favella (Florence: Giorgio Marescotti, 1584) Bovio, Carlo, Esempi e miracoli della SS Vergine Maria Madre di Dio (Rome: Eredi del Crobelletti, 1700) Bracciolini, Cosimo, Trattato de’ miracoli della sacra immagine della Gloriosa Vergine Santa Maria dell’Humiltà di Pistoia (Florence: Bartolomeo Sermartelli, 1580) Ferrand, Jacques, A Treatise on Love Sickness, ed. by Donald Beecher and Massimo Ciavolella (Syracuse: Syracuse Uni­ver­sity Press, 1990) Ferrini, Luca, Corona di sessanta tre miracoli della Nunziata di Firenze (Florence, 1593) Ficino, Marsilio, Marsilio Ficino’s Commentary on Plato’s Symposium, ed. by Sears Reynolds Jayne (Columbia: Uni­ver­sity of Missouri, 1944) Gilio da Fabriano, Giovanni Andrea, ‘Due Dialogi di M. Giovanni Andrea Gilio da Fabriano’, in Trattati d’arte del Cinquecento: fra manierismo e controriforma, ed. by Paola Barocchi, 3 vols (Bari: Laterza, 1960–62), ii (1961), 3–115 Giustinelli, Pietro, Trionfo della castità contra il vitio dell incontinenza (Milan, 1610) Institoris, Heinrich, and Jakob Sprenger, The Malleus Maleficarum of Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, ed. by Montague Summers (New York: Dover, 1971) Lennio, Levinio, De gli occulti miracoli, & varii ammaestramenti delle cose della natura (Venice: Lodovico Avanzo, 1567) Leonardo da Vinci, Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Paragone’: A Critical Interpretation with a New Edition of the Text of the ‘Codex Urbinas’, ed. by C. Farago (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992) Lomazzo, Giovan Paolo, Trattato dell’ arte della pittura, scoltura, et architettura (Milan: Paolo Gottardo Pontio, 1585) Lottini, Giovanni Angelo, Scelta d’alcuni miracoli della sanctissima Nunziata di Firenze (Florence: P. Cecconcelli, 1616) Masellis, Don Marco de, Dell’icono­logia della Madre di Dio Maria Vergine (Naples: Onofrio Savio, 1654) Mercurio, Scipione, La comare o ricoglitrice (Venice: Gio. Battista Cioti, 1596) Paleotti, Gabriele, ‘Discorso intorno alle imagini sacre e profane’, in Trattati d’arte del Cinquecento: fra manierismo e controriforma, ed. by Paola Barocchi, 3 vols (Bari: Laterza, 1960–62), ii (1961), 117–509 —— , Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images, intro. by Paolo Prodi, trans. by William McCuaig (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2012) Pliny, Natural History, trans. by H. Rackham, 10 vols (Cam­bridge, MA: Harvard Uni­ver­sity Press, 1938–62)

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Razzi, Silvano, Miracoli della Gloriosa Vergine Maria Nostra Signora (Venice: Domenico Farri, 1603) Savonarola, Girolamo, Les Illustrations des écrits de Jérome Savonarole publiés en Italie au xve et au xvie siécle, et les paroles de Savonarole sur l’art, ed. by Gustave Gruyer (Paris, 1879) Scupoli, Lorenzo, The Spiritual Combat (Waterford: T. Lord, 1793) Vasari, Giorgio, Le Vite de’ piu eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architettori, 3 vols (Florence: Appresso i Giunti, 1568) Secondary Studies Aikema, Bernard, ‘Titian’s Mary Magdalen in the Palazzo Pitti: An Ambiguous Painting and Its Critics’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 57 (1994), 48–59 Beecher, Donald A., ‘Quattrocento Views on the Eroticization of the Imagination’, in Eros and Anteros: The Medical Traditions of Love in the Renaissance, ed. by Donald A. Beecher and Massimo Ciavolella (Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 1992), pp. 49–65 Bynum, Carolyn Walker, ‘The Body of Christ in the Later Middle Ages: A Reply to Leo Steinberg’, Renaissance Quarterly, 39 (1986), 399–439 Carruthers, Mary, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 1998) Debby Ben-Aryeh, Nirit, ‘Vittoria Colonna and Titian’s Pitti “Magdalen”’, Woman’s Art Journal, 24 (2003), 29–33 Delenda, Odile, ‘Sainte Marie Madeleine et l’application du décret Tridentin (1563) sur les saintes images’, in Marie Madeleine dans la mystique, les arts et les lettres, ed. by Eve Duperray (Paris: Editions Beauchesne, 1989), pp. 191–201 Graham, Heather Sexton, ‘Renaissance Flesh and Woman’s Devotion: Titian’s Penitent Magdalen’, Comitatus: A Journal of Medi­eval and Renaissance Studies, 39 (2008), 137–54 Hall, Marcia B., The Sacred Image in the Age of Art: Titian, Tintoretto, Barocci, El Greco, Caravaggio (New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­sity Press, 2011) Holmes, Megan, ‘Disrobing the Virgin: The Madonna Lactans in FifteenthCentury Florentine Art’, in Picturing Women in Renaissance and Baroque Italy, ed. by Geraldine Johnson and Sara F. Matthews Grieco (Cam­bridge: Cam­ bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 1997), pp. 167–95 Huizinga, Johan, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, trans. by Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch (Chicago: Uni­ver­sity of Chicago Press, 1996) Jacquart, Danielle, and Claude Alexandre Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages (Cam­bridge: Polity Press, 1988) Laqueur, Thomas Walter, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cam­bridge, MA: Harvard Uni­ver­sity Press, 1992) Loh, Maria H. ‘“La Custodia degli Occhi”: Disciplining Desire in Post-Tridentine Italian Art’, in The Sensuous in the Counter-Reformation Church, ed. by Marcia B. Hall and Tracy E. Cooper (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2013), pp. 91–112

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Magnus, Hugo, Ophthalmo­logy of the Ancients, trans. by Richey L. Waugh, 2 vols (Ostend: JP Wayenborgh, 1998) Miles, Margaret, ‘The Virgin’s One Bare Breast: Female Nudity and Religious Meaning in Tuscan Early Renaissance Culture’, in The Female Body in Western Culture, ed. by Susan Suleiman (Cam­bridge, MA: Harvard Uni­ver­sity Press, 1986), pp. 193–208 Murube, Juan, ‘Concepts of the Origin and Physio­logy of Tears: From Prehistoric Times through the xviii Century’, The Ocular Surface, 9 (2011), 191–96 Noble, Denis, Dario DiFrancesco, and Diego Zancani, ‘Leonardo da Vinci and the Origin of Semen’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 68 (2014), 391–402 Ruffini, Marco, Art without an Author: Vasari’s Lives and Michelangelo’s Death (New York: Fordham Uni­ver­sity Press, 2011) Steinberg, Leo, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (Chicago: Uni­ver­sity of Chicago Press, 1996) Stowell, Steven, The Spiritual Language of Art: Medi­eval Christian Themes in Writings on Art of the Italian Renaissance (Leiden: Brill, 2015) Talvacchia, Bette, ‘The Word Made Flesh: Spiritual Subjects and Carnal Depictions in Renaissance Art’, in The Sensuous in the Counter-Reformation Church, ed. by Marcia B. Hall and Tracy E. Cooper (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2013), pp. 49–73 Wack, Mary Frances, ‘From Mental Faculties to Magical Philters: The Entry of Magic into Academic Medical Writing on Lovesickness, 13th–17th Centuries’, in Eros and Anteros: The Medical Traditions of Love in the Renaissance, ed. by Donald Beecher and Massimo Ciavolella (Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 1992), pp. 9–31

Gioia Filocamo

Sins, Emotions, and Sounds Dealing with Death in the Laudario of the Bo­lognese Confraternity of Santa Maria della Morte This essay focuses on the rich body of laude — devotional poetic texts, mostly in Italian and occasionally in Latin, intended to be sung — associated with the activity of the Bo­lognese confraternity known as the Compagnia dei Battuti di Santa Maria della Morte in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Given the peculiar mission of this flagellant lay institution, which directed an interest in the afterlife to a group of human beings who were indubitably at the end of their lives (condemned to death and terminally ill), it is worthwhile to analyse the poetry assembled by its members in order to capture more of their social and emotional world and what we might describe as their ‘sentimental pedagogy’. This is possible thanks in large part to the fact that more than one-third of these laude can be exclusively connected to the inclusive goals of the confraternity. A careful reading of these texts forms a distinct starting point for exploring many social aspects of the group that assembled and, probably, partially composed the body of laude. In fact, through their laude, the Bo­lognese brothers show a multifaceted social world portrayed with care. Close attention to the contents of these poems and some of their specific details can usefully give more clarity to some technical investigations (literary, linguistical, musico­logical). Which concepts do they contain? Which human and social raw nerves do they reveal? What fears do they exorcise? What social contexts do they presuppose? What model of personal and spiritual thoughts do they imply? What function does their musical performance have?

* I am most grateful to Bonnie Blackburn, who has revised the English version of this paper and its following incarnation. The final version also benefited from Nicholas Terpstra’s revisions, the anonymous reader’s suggestions, and my long stay at St John’s College, Cam­bridge (2018), which greatly favoured the biblio­graphical side of this essay. Gioia Filocamo ([email protected]) teaches at the Istituto superiore di Studi musicali di Terni and at the Uni­ver­sity of Parma. She received a PhD in the Philo­logy of Music and a PhD in Modern History.

Renaissance Religions: Modes and Meanings in History, ed. by Peter Howard, Nicholas Terpstra, and Riccardo Saccenti, ES 26 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2021) pp. 231–254 10.1484/M.ES-EB.5.121907

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The Sources with Laude The huge and heterogeneous corpus of over two hundred texts collected for the Bo­lognese confraternity of Santa Maria della Morte over two centuries varies in length and poetic structures.1 Almost entirely compiled in Italian, this laudario (a collection of laude) testifies to the focused commitment of those who gathered the poems and who were seriously devoted to the spiritual comfort of a special kind of prisoners: those condemned to death. We have no knowledge of any similar institution so well documented before Bo­logna’s Compagnia della Morte (Company of Death), which dates from 1336.2 Before that time, it was not common to deal with the morituro per giustizia (a prisoner condemned to die) using systematic psycho­logical and religious interventions formalized in written form.3 In fact, in the manu­scripts with laude produced for the Bo­lognese confraternity, the laude normally follow a comforters’ manual (confortatòrio). This is an unusual document extraordinarily rich in historical, social, and human dimensions, the main aim of which was to provide the comforters with precise recommendations and suggest proper behaviour. They were advised to be professional and firm in their job of assisting the prisoners, and to transmit to them the best theo­logical doctrine based on concrete and logical reasoning. In the first version of the manual, composed of two books, the first book prepares the comforter to urge the condemned to make confession and receive the sacrament; more practically, the second book gives advice on how comforters should assist the condemned at each stage of the process until the prisoner’s death.4 An alternative version of the confortatòrio includes twenty-five chapters with some auctoritates (authorities) at the end, in Latin or Italian. Considered as a genre, the laude were born in Italian confraternal environments during the first half of the thirteenth century, under the influence of the mendicant orders. They were devotional texts for music bearing  1 Filocamo, ‘“Orationi al cepo overo a la scala”’ includes a transcription of all these texts except for forty-nine laude already published in Troiano, Il Laudario di S. Maria della Morte di Bo­logna. Pamela Gravestock attempted a survey of the laude of the Bo­lognese confraternity, but her list is problematic in many aspects (Gravestock, ‘Comforting with Song’).  2 A large biblio­graphy exists on the Bo­lognese Confraternity of Death. Among the most important studies in chrono­logical order we should at least mention Fanti, La Confraternita di S. Maria della Morte; Prosperi, ‘Il sangue e l’anima’; Mancini, ‘Giustizia in piazza’; Terpstra, ‘Piety and Punishment’; Prosperi, Misericordie; Terpstra, The Art of Executing Well; Terpstra, ‘Theory into Practice’; Troiano, Il Laudario di S. Maria della Morte di Bo­logna; Medica, ‘Un nome per il “Maestro delle Iniziali di Bruxelles”’; Medica and D’Apuzzo, Tra la Vita e la Morte; Filocamo, ‘“Orationi al cepo overo a la scala”’.  3 On this subject, see at least Prosperi, ‘Consolation or Condemnation’.  4 The attribution of the first book to the learned Augustinian friar Cristoforo da Bo­logna is controversial (see Terpstra, ‘Comforting by the Books’, p. 186 n. 9). The modern edition of the first typo­logy of confortatòrio was realized by Troiano, ‘Il Manuale quattrocentesco della Conforteria di Bo­logna’; ‘The Bo­logna Comforters’ Manual’, trans. by Das.

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different poetical structures and were composed as monophonic or polyphonic songs used during informal devotional situations, like processions, prayers, or vigils, rather than in official religious contexts. Their subjects were most often related to morality, the Madonna, saints, and Christ. My reconstruction of the whole body of laude employed by the comforters of the Bo­lognese Compagnia di Santa Maria della Morte has identified 211 laude in total; eighty-four of them lack known concordances in other sources, so they are considered unica. In spite of their dissemination among many books, as many as seventy-seven laude out of 211 — therefore more than a third of the total — are present in two or more manu­scripts. As a consequence, these manu­scripts with laude can be considered interconnected, which leads me to qualify the whole collection of laude used in Bo­logna as a unified corpus of poems. To my knowledge, 107 laude have not yet been published, and seventy-four of them have no known concordances in other sources. This very high number of exclusive texts testifies once again to the singular specificity of the Bo­lognese confraternity’s collection of laude in the context of contemporary lauda collections circulating in the fifteenth century in central and northern Italy. In fact, about 40 per cent of the whole Bo­lognese corpus of poems seems specifically connected to the sources of the local confraternity. Classified as laude (songs) or orazioni (prayers), the texts are distributed quite irregularly in twelve manu­scripts out of fourteen that can be directly connected to the Bo­lognese institution:5 the sources and their sigla are listed in the Appendix. The manu­script sources of the Bo­lognese confraternity give the names of poets/authors for only sixteen texts: eleven are attributed to Giovanni Marco Pio (d. 1469), co-ruler of Carpi,6 one to Gregorio Roverbella (fl. 1420–1490), a notary from Bo­logna and probably also a comforter of the confraternity, one to Antonio Beccari (1315 – c. 1373), the wandering poet called ‘Maestro Antonio da Ferrara’, one to Antonio Barbadoro da Firenze (fl. c. 1430–1465), one to Andrea Viarani da Faenza (d. 1469), chancellor of Giovanni Ludovico Pio da Carpi (brother of Giovanni Marco),7 and one to the unknown Hyeronimus Dalza. Through the help of some external concordances, I have confirmed twenty-two more authorial attributions, and am able to suggest another twenty-one:

 5 The only exceptions are two sources with the confortatòrio, but no laude at all: Bo­logna, BA, MS 4808 (olim Aula 2a C.VIII.15) and MS 4881 (olim Aula 2a C.VI.5/1).  6 He is the author attributed with the largest number of texts. Giovanni Marco was beheaded in Ferrara on 22 September 1469 for political conspiracy against Borso d’Este; see Forner and Varanini, ‘Devozioni e sentimento religioso di un aristocratico in carcere’ and Filocamo, ‘The Thoughts of a Noble Prisoner’.  7 Andrea Viarani was involved in the same political conspiracy and shared Giovanni Marco Pio’s sad destiny. On his poems, see Troiano, ‘Specchio di un condannato a morte’; in English: ‘Mirror of a Condemned’.

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Leonardo Giustinian,8 il Bianco da Siena, Giovanni Boccaccio,9 Simone Serdini da Siena, called ‘il Saviozzo’, Feo Belcari, Nicolò di Mino Cicerchia da Siena, Iacopone da Todi, Enselmino da Montebelluna, Antonio da Montefeltro, Giovan Battista Refrigerio, Matteo Griffoni, Antonio Tebaldi, called ‘il Tebaldeo’, Giovanni Quirini, Cristofano di Miniato Ottonaio, Niccolò Salimbeni, called ‘il Muscia’, and Ser Suavis.10

Why Collect Laude? The collective occasions when laude were used are only mentioned in a recently discovered set of statutes for the Bo­lognese confraternity.11 The prior of the confraternity allowed the performance of laude when the brothers flagellated themselves in the oratory, at major religious celebrations, after Mass on the last Sunday of every month in the Church of San Giovanni Decollato (built for the public executions in the market square), and during the processions accompanying prisoners to the gallows. The procession taking the prisoner to the gallows started in Piazza Maggiore and moved north along Via de’ Malcontenti (lit. the ‘Street of the Unhappy’) to the market square at the Montagnola, just inside the city walls, where the execution took place.12 Even if we do not know the individuals who assembled the various texts comprising the Bo­lognese laudario, it is obvious that its compilers mainly shared the same spiritual ideas and concepts circulating in contemporary

 8 In many fifteenth-century sources there was a very common habit to overattribute texts to Leonardo Giustinian. Francesco Luisi’s attempt to reconstruct a reliable corpus of texts by Giustinan (see Luisi, Laudario giustinianeo) has been criticized by Jonathan Glixon, review of Luisi, Laudario giustinianeo.  9 On the four sonnets attributed to Boccaccio, see Filocamo and Delcorno Branca, ‘Quattro sonetti di Boccaccio nel repertorio di un confortatore bo­lognese’.  10 On this strange name, see Filocamo and Delcorno Branca, ‘Quattro sonetti di Boccaccio nel repertorio di un confortatore bo­lognese’, p. 33 and n. 17.  11 The two sets of statutes (of 1522 and of c. 1393) are bound together in a private manu­script shown for the first time in the exhibition Tra la Vita e la Morte: Due confraternite bo­lognesi tra Medioevo e Età Moderna, at the Museo Civico Medi­evale di Bo­logna (12 December 2015 – 28 March 2016). Their contents are described in Fanti, ‘Un nuovo codice statutario’. Other manu­scripts shown on the same occasion — all preserved in the Biblioteca Comunale dell’Archiginnasio of Bo­logna — can be seen at [accessed 3 May 2021].  12 The original passages taken from both the early statutes are published in my article ‘Musica dagli Statuti’. Some accounts suggest that the evocative name of the Bo­lognese street was taken from this passage of condemned prisoners, while others claim that it derives from the Malcontenti family living there. Even in Florence a street called Via de’ Malcontenti was the final part of the route by which those condemned to death were brought in procession with their comforters to the Prato della Giustizia, outside the town. See Fanti, La Confraternita di S. Maria della Morte, pp. 167–72, and Terpstra, ‘Theory into Practice’, pp. 128–29.

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lay confraternities. But the peculiar lexicon of some of these laude clarifies something of the mental dimension of the comforters who assembled and, in some cases, probably even composed them. In fact, some verses clarify that the brothers themselves to some extent identified with the comforted prisoner, and ‘rehearsed’ their own death as well. In this way they could earn spiritual benefits for their own afterlives.13 The brothers’ purpose was clearly twofold: on the one hand, they wished to appropriate the spiritual dimension without denying the materiality of their practical life, and at the same time they used this materiality as the foundation for an equally strong secular spirituality. To this end the brothers used laude that paraphrased prayers and scriptures or clarified dogmas of faith.14 On the other hand, they clearly wanted their sometimes-frenetic secular and lay religious activity to be socially recognized as worthy and holy. So, looking at these laude, we can clearly understand that the intention of those who compiled and used them was to fill the gap between the active and the contemplative life, with the aim of being useful to a particular class of sinners. In my opinion, the entire operation of assembling this peculiar corpus of laude could be considered as a sort of binary construction in poetry: the pars destruens, or critical part, lessens uncertainties and fears, while the pars construens, or constructive part, confirms the bases of faith and gives strength to face death properly. Confession becomes the real bridge of life through the passage to death. The parts of confession fixed by the thirteenth century (contritio cordis, confessio oris, satisfactio operis, or contrition, confession, and satisfaction),15 are recalled very often in the Bo­lognese laudario along with another way to make confession: the confessio generalis (general confession) in which the detailed examination of real personal sins is replaced with a complete list of all the possible sins that is introduced by the prepositional phrase ‘Dico mia colpa’ (I speak my guilt).16

 13 This hypothesis was inspired by Bonnie Blackburn’s considerations of singers of mottetti, who also sang for themselves (see Blackburn, ‘For Whom Do the Singers Sing?’).  14 On the lay reappropriation of the scriptural culture, much discussed among scholars, see the useful synthesis made on the Tuscan reality by Corbellini, ‘La diffusione delle traduzioni bibliche nella Toscana medi­evale’ (also in English: ‘Plea for Lay Bibles in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Tuscany’), and Dessì, ‘Parola, scrittura, libri nelle confraternite’.  15 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theo­logiae, III, quaestio XC, articulus II. See Rusconi, L’ordine dei peccati, p. 24.  16 On this topic, see Rusconi, ‘“Confessio generalis”’; with the title Libretti per confessarsi bene also in Rusconi, L’ordine dei peccati, pp. 258–65. An example with both kinds of confession is the anonymous text Al nome del Padre, Figlio e Spirito Sancto (Bo­logna, BU, MS 157, fol. 143r–v), but see also the text Quel summo Padre che rege e governa (anonymous, Bo­logna, BU, MS 157, fols 146v–148r). On the healing value of confession see also the anonymous text S’io me confeso de le colpe mie (Bo­logna, BU, MS 401, fols 4r–6r).

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Thoughts and Subjects in the Laude It is difficult to summarize the many subjects contained in the laudario, since a number deal with more than only one. Yet a list of the main themes can nonetheless be assembled: thirty-nine moralistic texts; thirty-five laude and litanies of the Blessed Virgin Mary and other intercessors; twenty-nine laude to God and others in Heaven; twenty-seven catechetical texts; eleven paraphrases on Ave Maria; eleven theatrical texts; ten unidentifiable texts; six laude to the Cross; four paraphrases of the Pater noster; four litanies to many recipients; four paraphrases of the Salve Regina; two paraphrases on Psalms; one paraphrase of the Magnificat; one lauda to various saints and martyrs; one lauda to the Holy Spirit. This classification underscores that the greatest attention is devoted to the Virgin, who was considered the supreme intermediary between sinners and God. Then we have moralistic laude, which are very interesting because they challenge conventions and ‘reread religious sources in a didactic key that is edifying but close to daily life, much like the ideas of the Dominican preachers who were in touch with the lay people of the Communes’.17 In fact, according to Peter Howard, ‘preaching played a particular role in shaping urban identities and reflected and transformed those already existing, and forged new ones as circumstances changed’.18 Many of the literary expressions contained in some of the poems are quite vivid, as the metaphors for the ‘physical’ perfection of Jesus. The meditative emphasis on the body of Christ can be seen as a reaction to Catharism and an affirmation of the dogma of transubstantiation as proclaimed in the Fourth Lateran Council (1215); it appears in many laude. Here, the metaphor of perfection recalls a pupil in the eye: ‘Beato quelo ventre ove statisti | com’ochio bianco negro à la pipilla’ (Blessed that womb where you were | as a black pupil in a white eye);19 or the yolk of an egg: ‘in megio a lor, come in uovo sta ’l tórlo’ (in the middle of them, as a yolk in an egg).20 In the Bo­lognese laudario, the end of life is often called the ‘point of death’ (hard, extreme, narrow) or the ‘extremity of life’ at least thirty times. This is a rare literary image in the standard laude which, in accordance with the mission of the comforters trained in the contemporary ‘art of dying well’ (ars moriendi), clearly aims to address the spiritual and psycho­logical  17 ‘Questa rilettura delle fonti religiose, effettuata in una chiave didascalica, edificante e prossima al vissuto quotidiano, appare in particolare sintonia con l’azione svolta dall’ordine dei Predicatori presso il laicato popolare dei Comuni’: Nerbano, Il teatro della devozione, p. 18.  18 Howard, ‘Making a City and Citizens’, p. 60. On the twelfth–fourteenth centuries, see also Thompson, Cities of God.  19 See the anonymous lauda In prinzipio de questo era ’no Verbo (Bo­logna, BU, MS 401, fols 22v–26r), ll. 5–6.  20 See the text Volendo de la rexurection sancta by Niccolò di Mino Cicerchia da Siena (Bo­logna, BU, MS 157, fols 163v–174r), l. 1483.

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vulnerability of a prisoner facing imminent death and focusing on a decisive moment for the eternal salvation of his soul.21 We often find references to folia (madness) in these laude. This madness or insanity rises from an attachment to the false or earthly life that leads the condemned to forget the true or celestial life, both concepts producing a paradoxical oxymoron very useful to face the imminence of physical death. In short, the prisoner was supposed to rely on the death of his body in order to reach the true spiritual life. For example: io racomando a vui l’anema mia […] ché senza el vostro aiuto non aspeta altro che morte per la mia folia. [I entrust to you my soul […] because without your help it deserves only death due to my madness.]22 Rationality is the opposite of madness, and it must constantly be supported if one is not to slip into Hell: ‘Ma dove voluntà tien la radice, | ivi convien che ’l vitio e il sceptro tenga’ (But where willingness is at the root, | there it is convenient that vice rules with its sceptre).23 Consistent with the aims of the Bo­lognese confraternity which also ran a hospital for the terminally ill, the major concern of this kind of devotional poetry was the afterlife. Anguish about the individual’s judgement and eternal fate dominates, exacerbated by forms of judgement which are active while the sinner is still alive, and which play a role in determining pain and suffering in Purgatory. In this laudario we frequently find reference to records of human actions and reactions, and to the divine response: a quaderno (register), where personal sins and merits are written down. For example: ‘e quando l’anima dal corpo se parte | de ciò ch’à facto ne mostra le carte’ (and when soul will be divided from its body | the papers will show the body’s actions);24 and ‘Trasse el demonio fuori il libro scripto | pien di

 21 The interest in this topic started with the classic Tenenti, ‘“Ars moriendi”’, but see also O’Connor, The Art of Dying Well. The relevant biblio­graphy on the subject is quite large and in many languages. To limit the references to a few titles in English of some last thirty years, see Beaty, ‘The “Ars moriendi”’; Binski, Medi­eval Death; Reinis, Reforming the Art of Dying; Gertsman, The Dance of Death; Tomaini, Dealing with the Dead.  22 See the text Ave Maria, de tuti grazia piena by Giovanni Quirini (Bo­logna, BU, MS 401, fols 29v–33v), ll. 47–50. Other examples are in Al nome del Padre, Figlio e Spirito Sancto (anonymous, Bo­logna, BU, MS 157, fol. 143r–v), l. 47; or in Quel summo Padre che rege e governa (anonymous, Bo­logna, BU, MS 157, fols 146v–148r), ll. 57 and 264.  23 See the anonymous text Guardate a me, o voi ch’al mondo sète (Bo­logna, BU, MS 157, fols 203v–204r), ll. 37–38.  24 See the anonymous text Madre de Cristo, Vergene Maria (Bo­logna, BU, MS 157,

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peccati ch’aveva comesso’ (The Devil pulled out the written book | full of the sins committed);25 or: ‘i’ trovo scripto in un mio bel quaderno | de’ gran peccati ch’egli ha facti molti’ (I can see written down in a beautiful notebook of mine | information on the great and many sins done by him).26 These descriptions are obviously connected with the mercantile or arithmetical mentality of many fifteenth-century Italian commercial towns like Bo­logna, where commercial registers were used to record debts and credits in double-entry account books. According to Blake Wilson, Inevitably, the mercantile mental habits of calculating and negotiating also shaped religious outlook. A strong motivation for the pious layman to sing or to hear laude was the opportunity to earn spiritual credit against his long-standing penitential debt. Indulgences, in precise quantities of days, were available from the ‘store of supplemental merit and good works on deposit there from the lives of Christ, Mary, and the saints’.27 Many other examples of the language of account books are found throughout the group of Bo­lognese laude: the record of sins is written ‘with permanent ink’,28 demons read sins from the sinner’s register,29 the register of martyrs is filled out by God,30 an angel has nothing written down on his paper,31 Christ’s register is filled with merits.32 These references underscore

fols 204r–205v), ll. 15–16.  25 Madre de Cristo, Vergene Maria (anonymous, Bo­logna, BU, MS 157, fols 204r–205v), ll. 154–55.  26 Madre de Cristo, Vergene Maria (anonymous, Bo­logna, BU, MS 157, fols 204r–205v), ll. 235–36.  27 Wilson, Music and Merchants, p. 12 (but see at large pp. 11–13). Other studies which emphasize this practical disposition among confraternities include Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood in Renaissance Florence; Henderson, Piety and Charity in Late Medi­eval Florence; Howard, Creating Magnificence in Renaissance Florence.  28 ‘e zerco el mio registro in la memoria | là dove è scrito e mai non canzelato’ (and I look for my register in that memory | wherein all is written down without deleting anything): see S’io me confeso de le colpe mie (anonymous, Bo­logna, BU, MS 401, fols 4r–6r), ll. 14–15.  29 ‘perch’io vedea la carta luminosa | in mano a li demon di mei peccati | facti per me, e per orden segnati’ (because I saw the bright paper | in the hands of demons where my sins were written down | and ordered in a precise list): see the anonymous text Deh, piaccia un poco a ciaschedun pensare (Bo­logna, BU, MS 157, fols 198r–199r), ll. 118–20. Moreover, while he fights for the sinner’s soul, the devil tells the angel: ‘et come è mio mostreroti le carte’ (I will show you the right papers which demonstrate why he is mine): see Madre de Cristo, Vergene Maria (anonymous, Bo­logna, BU, MS 157, fols 204r–205v), l. 60.  30 ‘fa’ ch’io mi trovi scripto in quel quaderno | de li toi màrtori che portono pena e guai’ (may I find myself written in that register | of your martyrs who suffered pains and trouble), in the anonymous text O gratiosa, o Vergine Maria (Bo­logna, AGA, Archivio Consorziale del Clero Urbano di Bo­logna, MS IX.B.1, fols 31r–32r), ll. 27–28.  31 ‘Oimè, che l’angiol non dicea niente | per me, né in sua carta non haveva | scripto pur sol un bene’ (Alas, the angel was not saying anything | in my favour, nor on his page did he have | written down a single good thing), O gratiosa, o Vergine Maria (anonymous, Bo­logna, AGA, Archivio Consorziale del Clero Urbano di Bo­logna, MS IX.B.1, fols 31r–32r), ll. 121–23.  32 ‘pieno de grazia tuto è ’l suo guaderno’ (his register is completely full of grace), in the

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an attitude regarding the precise evaluation of things.33 The ‘distancing which writing effects develops a new kind of precision in verbalization by removing it from the rich but chaotic existential context of much oral utterance’, assuming a critical precision resulting from a ‘feel for precision and analytic exactitude’.34 At the same time, writing also refers to Pontius Pilate’s quod scripsi, scripsi (I have written what I have written; John 19. 22), a sentence connected to the unavoidability derived from ‘fixing on paper’, and an image that was probably intensified after the diffusion of printing and its related psycho­logical effects. Many laude refer to sinful money and culminate with blaming usury, a sin derived from the sacrilegious exploitation of time, which, as Jacques Le Goff noted, should be considered holy and inviolable because it is God’s own property.35 We find, in relation to this conviction, the anonymous Latin prose in the Bo­lognese laudario that speaks of usury under the eloquent rubric Nota de usurario.36 However, we can also find a new positive ethic that considers profit as a consequence of healthy commercial activities: ‘Et chi a lui non crederà per questo | molt’oro si darà et ariento’ (And who will not believe in him | will be awarded a lot of gold and silver).37 Observant movements within the mendicant orders encouraged consciousness of an ‘economy of death’, and this became the engine regulating the presence of money in the Christian’s life. It was the Franciscans who first expressed in the mid-thirteenth century a constructive role for money, proposing an idea of wealth that could be consistent with moral perfection.38 If well managed, money could be rescued from its association with the Devil. Every Christian should deal with money in a detached way, without treasuring it, as stressed by St Paul (i Corinthians 7. 30 and ii Corinthians

 33

 34

 35  36  37  38

already quoted text In prinzipio de questo era ’no Verbo (anonymous, Bo­logna, BU, MS 401, fols 22v–26r), l. 152, but also the pain felt by Christ ‘che al ciel te guida e mena | se liegi ben la nota’ (which can guide you to heaven | if you read the note well), in the anonymous text Deh, lèvati horamai (Bo­logna, BU, MS 157, fol. 145r), ll. 51–52. Speaking with Mary, Christ complains because the sinner ignores him: ‘Se tu sapissi quanto odio mi tene | et hame a capital men che una foglia’ (If you could know how much he hates me | and considers me less than a leaf): see the anonymous text Imperatrice di quel sancto regno (Bo­logna, BU, MS 157, fols 223v–225r), ll. 202–03. See Ong, Orality and Literacy, pp. 102 and 103. The act of homogenization due to printing led to an elaboration of the concepts of uniformity and diversity: ‘A fuller recognition of diversity was indeed a concomitant of standardization […]. In this regard one might consider the emergence of a new sense of individualism as a by-product of the new forms of standardization’ (see Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, p. 84). See Le Goff, ‘Au Moyen Âge’, p. 417. Peior est diabolo, quia ille fugit crucem (anonymous, Bologna, BU, MS 157, fol. 151r). On the controversial relationship with money, see the biblio­graphy cited in notes 38 and 39. See the anonymous lauda Al nome sia de l’alto Idio superno (Bo­logna, BU, MS 157, fols 191v–196r), ll. 105–06. Even the Florentine Dominicans supported this, as Howard demonstrates in Creating Magnificence in Renaissance Florence. See also his ‘“Where the poor of Christ are cherished”’.

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6. 10). Emphasis on the ethics of wealth functioned as means to gain salvation in the afterlife, and Bo­logna had one of the oldest of the Italian pawn banks known as Monte di Pietà, an institution started in 1473 under the encouragement of the Observant Franciscan Michele Carcano da Milano. This monte functioned for little more than a year before closing, and was re-established again in 1504–05 by another Franciscan, Bartolomeo Nibbia.39 The idea of a precise account refers also the post mortem life described in laude. For example: O madre sancta, o Vergene Maria, poich’a lo ’Nferno condennati siamo, […] nostro tormento priega che fin dia, dua millia o tre millia anni, e poi n’usciamo. [O holy mother, o Virgin Mary, because we are condemned to Hell, […] pray for the end of our pain, two or three thousand years, and then we will leave.]40 Or ‘tutte le pene sarano adoppiate’ (all the pains will be redoubled).41 Very often we can read words drawn from financial accounting given a theo­logical resonance:42 ‘Cristo per caritade | te venne a recomperare’ (With his compassion Christ | came to repurchase you);43 and ‘verace Idio dal tuo padre mandato | del grembo suo per far de noi acquisto’ (truly God sent by your father | from his womb to purchase us).44  39 On the important influence of the Franciscans on Monti di Pietà, see Todeschini, Ricchezza francescana, also in English: Franciscan Wealth, especially the fourth chapter (‘The Market as a Form of Society: From Barcelona to Siena’, pp. 151–96). On the history of Monti di Pietà and other ethical credit institutions, see the rich multilingual biblio­graphy listed at [accessed 3 May 2021], website of the Centro studi Monti di Pietà founded in 2001 under the supervision of Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli, Vera Zamagni, and Mauro Carboni. On the Bo­lognese Monte di Pietà, see Fornasari, Il ‘Thesoro’ della città.  40 See Al nome sia de l’alto Idio superno (anonymous, Bo­logna, BU, MS 157, fols 191v–196r), ll. 833–38.  41 See Al nome sia de l’alto Idio superno (anonymous, Bo­logna, BU, MS 157, fols 191v–196r), l. 886. A similar threat can be read in the anonymous text O buona gente, piacciavi ascoltare (Bo­logna, BU, MS 157, fols 205v–206v): ‘in quell’Inferno tanto angustioso: | là si debbon le pene radopiare’ (in that so distressing Hell: | there pains must be doubled), ll. 205–06.  42 For example, ‘allowance’ in reference to the Trinity at l. 15 of the anonymous text Chi ’nanzi a tute cose eser vol salvo (Bo­logna, BU, MS 401, fols 47v–50r).  43 Anima che guardi, a text perhaps by Leonardo Giustinian (Bo­logna, BU, MS 157, fol. 144r–v), ll. 5–6.  44 See the anonymous text Dolcissimo Signor mio Yhesù Christo (Bo­logna, BU, MS 157, fols 215r–216v), ll. 2–3; in the same text: ‘el cielo a noi ricomperasti’ (you repurchased heaven for us, l. 23), and ‘tu col tuo sangue me recomparasti | promettendomi il cielo e la sua altura’ (with your blood you have repurchased me | also promising the height of heaven, ll. 218–19).

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Certainly, one of the more interesting lexical areas in these laude emphasizes the macabre horrors of Hell. These passages are very material in describing direct contact with bones and worms, and the smell of demons: ‘sarai portato e messo ne la fossa, | e mangieranoti i vermi, o tapinello’ (you will be put inside the grave, | and the worms will eat you, o poor wretch);45 and ‘Morto Antichristo n’uscirà tal puzza | chi fia d’intorno caderà per terra’ (When the Antichrist dies, he will stink so much | that people around will faint on the floor).46 The texts of the laudario include many paraphrases of common prayers, which may in part reflect ignorance of their authorized Latin versions. In fact, while the Pater noster was found in two versions in the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew 6. 9–13 and Luke 11. 2–4), the Ave Maria in its present structure was a prayer formalized in the fifteenth century, when the second part (‘Sancta Maria …’) was added and the cult of the Virgin was humanized:47 ‘e certo il Paternostro i’ non lo saccio | e non so ancor tutta l’Ave Maria’ (and certainly I do not know the Pater noster | and I do not yet know the complete Ave Maria).48 Lust was considered one of the worse diabolic temptations: ‘Nel mondo la carne dal nimico è percossa’ (In the earthly world flesh is struck by the enemy);49 and Le giovinette belle i’ vorie havere, tutte le sozze e vechie mandar via; a quatro a quatro le vorei d’intorno. [I would like to have beautiful young girls, I would send away all the dirty and old women; the girls around me in groups of four each.]50 Sin, especially carnal sin, is also denounced among clergymen and monks. These attacks follow criticisms by the Observant mendicant preachers, who exalted the examples of plain virtue found among the famous founders of the medi­eval orders:51

 45 See O buona gente, piacciavi ascoltare (anonymous, Bo­logna, BU, MS 157, fols 205v–206v), ll. 186–87.  46 See the anonymous text Quel vero Verbo Idio, mente incarnata Christo (Bo­logna, BU, MS 157, fols 196r–198r), ll. 185–86.  47 On the origin of the Pater noster, see Clark, The Lord’s Prayer. On Ave Maria, see Jounel, ‘The Veneration of Mary’, p. 143, and Ellington, From Sacred Body to Angelic Soul, pp. 29–34. On the problematic comprehension of Latin prayers, see Niccoli, ‘Pregare con la bocca’. Versions in national languages of both prayers had been circulating since the Middle Ages (see, for example, Pierno, ‘Riscritture del “Padre nostro” in lingua italiana’; Rubin, Mother of God, pp. 318–19).  48 See O buona gente, piacciavi ascoltare (anonymous, Bo­logna, BU, MS 157, fols 205v–206v), ll. 181–82.  49 See Imperatrice di quel sancto regno (anonymous, Bo­logna, BU, MS 157, fols 223v–225r), l. 22.  50 See O buona gente, piacciavi ascoltare (anonymous, Bo­logna, BU, MS 157, fols 205v–206v), ll. 133–35.  51 On ‘dolce povertà’ (sweet poverty): ‘da po’ la cui partita stette in lucto | fino a Francesco,

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Quando al proximo dovevate insegnare ch’el si guardasse da vici e peccati, di qua, di là, stavate a solazare con acti e facti ben descelerati: o che odor da te poten pigliare gli seculari, femine o soldati? Fusti ignoranti del divino offitio, pien di catività e d’ogni vitio. [When you had to teach people that they must avoid vices and sins, you were instead enjoying everywhere a deplorable behaviour: oh, what kind of example can you be for secular priests, women, and soldiers? You have been ignorant of the divine office, full of malice and vices.]52 And on monks: O voi che ne la Regola entrasti, dove è la fede che havete observata? Observar castitate sì giurasti, povertà, obedientia acompagnata, e mai niuna di quelle observasti, sempre vita lasciva havete amata: misericordia aiutar non vi può, secundo la giustitia hor vi farò’. [O you who entered the Rule, where is the faith you have observed? You swore to be chaste, poor and also obedient, but you have not observed any oaths, you have always loved lascivious life: mercy cannot help you, you will be judged with justice.]53

a cui sposata fune | mille, cento anni e più, senza far fructo’ (who left and producing mourning | until Francis came, who married poverty | one thousand, one hundred and more, without bearing fruit), in the anonymous text Ave regina celi, tante volte (Bo­logna, BU, MS 157, fols 218v–219r, ll. 79–81). On antifraternal literature and friars’ misconduct, see Geltner, The Making of Medi­eval Antifraternalism.  52 See Al nome sia de l’alto Idio superno (anonymous, Bo­logna, BU, MS 157, fols 191v–196r), ll. 641–48.  53 Al nome sia de l’alto Idio superno (anonymous, Bo­logna, BU, MS 157, fols 191v–196r), ll. 649–56.

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The only way to escape the Devil’s influence is to reject this brief and false earthly life: Però che mortal cosa alfin non dura, ché tutto in questo mondo si consuma, et come vana schiuma sen va la vita de qualunque altero. [But earthly things are precarious, because all is consumed in this world, and as useless foam even arrogant lives will finish.]54 And ‘el mondo e suo piacere | son tutti rete e lacci’ (the world and its pleasure | are all nets and laces);55 or ‘el mondo è pien d’ingiuria, | congiurra e gran tempesta’ (the world is full of injustice, | conspiracies and big storms).56 As a consequence, the body must not be considered important: ‘Se la mia carne fusse tuta taliata | niente non curo, pure che sia salvata’ (If my flesh were all cut | I would not mind, as long as it were saved).57 On the contrary, rationality invoked by the ‘eye of mind’ should help to give the right meaning to sorrows, as we can read at least in another lauda: ‘O anima devota, pensa e astima: | apri del cuore e de la mente gli occhi’ (O pious soul, think and consider: | open the eyes of your heart and mind).58 This laudario has some examples of adaptations of previous texts to the particular demands of the situation and location, as happens with il Bianco da Siena’s ballata Cum desiderio vo cercando, where the standard l’amore (love) is easily converted to la morte (death): ‘La morte fami lamentare | d’inamorato lamento’ (Death will let me complain | with an amorous lament).59 The name of the town is changed from Siena to Bo­logna, in order to localize invocations of the Virgin’s protection.

 54 See the text by Giovanni Marco Pio da Carpi Chi ben rimira e guarda la natura (Bo­logna, BU, MS 157, fol. 202r–v), ll. 5–8.  55 See the anonymous text Anima, ascolta e piangi (Bo­logna, BU, MS 157, fol. 144v), ll. 50–51.  56 See the anonymous text Anima che nel mondo (Bo­logna, BU, MS 157, fol. 144v), ll. 45–46.  57 See O gratiosa, o Vergine Maria (anonymous, Bo­logna, AGA, Archivio Consorziale del Clero Urbano di Bo­logna, MS IX.B.1, fols 31r–32r), ll. 46–47.  58 See the text by Niccolò di Mino Cicerchia da Siena O increata maiestà de Dio (Bo­logna, BU, MS 157, fols 152r–163v), ll. 1833–34.  59 See the text by il Bianco da Siena Cum desiderio vo cercando (Bo­logna, AGA, Archivio Consorziale del Clero Urbano di Bo­logna, MS IX.B.1, fols 40v–41v), ll. 41–42. For the version normally circulating, see Il Bianco da Siena, Laudi, ed. by Serventi, p. 875.

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The Function of Laude What function did these texts perform? I believe that the laude functioned as a sort of useful ‘theatrical catechism’. The ‘official’ catechism taught by the comforters that we can find in various forms in the manual as it was repeated and excerpted in the Bo­lognese manu­scripts was reinforced by the simpler emotional approach of the laude, in which we can find essentially the same ideas. The theatricality in these texts is strictly connected to the ‘visual’ aspects of the concepts being expressed. Kathleen Falvey has noted an interesting relationship between the development of assistance to condemned prisoners and the flourishing of the confraternal plays known as sacre rappresentazioni between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. Performances took place in the same civic places, and in both cases the lay brothers were in charge.60 Falvey thinks that confraternal comforting rituals influenced both the composition and performance of Passion plays in particular, and that there was a strong relation between the rituals of public execution and the performances of these sacre rappresentazioni.61 Adriano Prosperi makes a similar point: The consideration of prisons and gallows as places especially suitable for reliving the drama of the Passion was nurtured by an intense pedagogical program on the symbolic level. In carrying out this educational function icono­graphy allied itself to the laude and sacred representations to convince Christians to see themselves among the personages in the religious theater and to await the sentence on their own souls resulting from the deliberation which Justice, Mercy and Truth were conducting before God as judge.62 Many detailed images — in particular those found in gospel texts devoted to the Passion of Christ or in Apocryphal accounts of the sorrows of Mary and Mary Magdalen — become examples of sentimental pedagogy. We will find a similar intense emotionality a couple of centuries later with the deep feelings expressed in opera, again with the crucial support of music.63

 60 Falvey, ‘Scaffold and Stage’, p. 13.  61 Falvey, ‘Scaffold and Stage’, pp. 18 and 28.  62 Prosperi, Justice Blindfolded, p. 113 (emphasis added).  63 ‘Il segreto della vitalità e della longevità del teatro d’opera va cercato altrove: nell’Italia e poi nell’Europa moderna e contemporanea esso ha costituito, fino all’avvento del cinematografo, una potente scuola dei sentimenti; ha offerto cioè ai suoi spettatori la rappresentazione formalizzata di un universo sentimentale’ (The secret of the vitality and longevity of opera must be sought elsewhere: in Italy and then in modern and contemporary Europe it constituted, until the advent of cinema, a powerful school of feelings; opera offered its viewers the formalized representation of a sentimental universe): Bianconi, ‘La forma musicale come scuola dei sentimenti’, p. 85.

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And we can see a parallel modus operandi in preaching, above all through the edifying exempla used in late medi­eval sermons that confirmed the thrust of their message.64 Laude were very often sung outdoors. Public performance implied a real sharing of their concepts through immediate emotional musical communication. To my knowledge, the Bo­lognese Compagnia della Morte did not hire professional musicians in order to perform laude. If the brothers themselves were singing them, it is very possible that their performance would have been monodic or in the so-called ‘simple polyphony’.65 The term refers to an improvised polyphonic vocal repertory,66 despite the fact that at least some polyphonic musical intonations of these texts were in circulation (I have found from other sources that eleven of them were also in the Bo­lognese laudario).67 It is also possible that, in this context, music amplified the authoritativeness of the concepts contained in the laudario, making them more audible over the excited murmuring of the city crowd. It is unlikely that this would work in quite the same way inside the prison cell where comforters offered their pastoral care to condemned individuals throughout the night before execution. In that setting, reading the same texts aloud or silently could have the same effect of removing the psycho­ logical resistance of the prisoner towards his own death. To be clear, I think it possible that the almost complete absence of musical indications in all the conforteria manu­scripts with laude means that there was a fluidity and freedom in their use, depending, perhaps, on the kind of prisoner or situation. We can imagine that it was common to sing both psalms and laude, but also that sometimes laude were simply read without any music.68 I am convinced that laude were often used as personal prayers with no music,69 and that in the difficult night before his execution, the prisoner also needed space for silent meditation, particularly if he was able to read. In fact, the comforters’

 64 Rusconi, ‘La vita religiosa nel tardo Medioevo’, p. 222. See also Dessì, ‘Parola, scrittura, libri nelle confraternite’. On the organization of the sermo modernus, see Delcorno, Lazzaro e il ricco Epulone, p. 17, which contains more biblio­graphy. The most recent biblio­graphy in English on medi­eval sermon studies is listed in Howard, ‘Making a City and Citizens’, n. 4.  65 There is at least one relevant example of clear rejection of polyphony in the fifteenth-century lauda repertory: Girolamo Savonarola’s attitude. See Macey, Bonfire Songs, pp. 91–117 (‘Savonarola against and for music’).  66 On this kind of performance, see Bent, ‘The Definition of Simple Polyphony’.  67 See Filocamo, ‘Bo­lognese “Orations” between Song and Silence’, pp. 9–12.  68 About ‘laude and orazioni’ as poetry and/or hymns to be sung or read during the assistance to the condemned, depending on the comforters, see also Falvey, ‘Scaffold and Stage’, pp. 14–15. In Matteo Al Kalak’s opinion, a text ‘that is adapted, sung, and more and more is recited’ (‘che si adatta, si canta, e sempre più si recita’) is typical of the laudistic genre used by the confraternities: Al Kalak, ‘Parole e musica nelle confraternite del Rinascimento’, p. 324.  69 The concept of lauda as a prayer is also in Rondeau, ‘Prayer and Gender in the Laude of Early Italian Confraternities’; but the author always refers to the performances of laude, not to their reading as literary texts.

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manual reports that the prisoner could have some personal devotional reading. Laude were perfect in this context, and comforters were advised to also take along books ‘on Christ’s life or holy fathers’ or other pious subjects’.70

Conclusions The prominence of laude in the comforting process can be explained if we think of this repertory as a valuable form of meditative prayer and an important emotional support for both the condemned prisoners and the comforters. Reading the poetic metre or singing it had a deep resonance and profound inner emotional power that could penetrate to areas of the self that were otherwise impossible to reach. As many historians have noted, the Bo­lognese comforters genuinely wanted to bring the prisoners into the spiritual community of their confraternity, merging them with the brothers.71 But the opposite was surely also true: the comforters knew themselves to be sinners, no less in need of support to escape incessant earthly temptations. The benefit of laude as tools for the spiritual care of self and other was certainly very real.72 Exploring the verses and penetrating the concepts of the laude can be an effective way of exploring different sides of late medi­eval and early modern Italian society, in which the many intersections between politics, civic religion, mercantile ethics, and sense of the sacred were alive and complex. The significant presence of many laude in many books of the Bo­lognese confraternity of Santa Maria della Morte confirms that this kind of devotional repertory ‘was deemed strong spiritual currency’73 that deeply shaped how the brothers comforted the prisoners in their charge. As already noted, the laude functioned ‘as aural tools’ whose ‘incantational tone’ helped comforters divert the prisoner’s attention from lay distractions.74 Their aural effect could be powerful even when not linked to the visual effect of performance in front of a holy image, or when the verses were only read instead of sung.75 Thanks to the laude, the

 70 ‘el libro de la vita de Christo o el libro de la vita di sancti padri o altra cosa devota’: see ‘De quelli che sonno vaghi de legere’, ch. VI of the second book of the manual of the Bo­lognese comforters edited in Troiano, ‘Il Manuale quattrocentesco della Conforteria di Bo­logna’, p. 443. The same passages are found in ‘The Bo­logna Comforters’ Manual’, trans. by Das, p. 253.  71 See, for example, Fanti, La Confraternita di S. Maria della Morte, pp. 102–03; Prosperi, ‘Il sangue e l’anima’, pp. 962–64; Terpstra, ‘Theory into Practice’, pp. 137–39; Terpstra, ‘Body Politics’, pp. 10–12.  72 The intention to make changes in the individual is recognized in the laudistic genre: see Østrem and Petersen, Medi­eval Ritual and Early Modern Music, p. 42.  73 This definition can be found in Wilson, Music and Merchants, p. 7.  74 See Gravestock, ‘Comforting with Song’, pp. 35–36 and 39.  75 Gravestock, ‘Comforting the Condemned and the Role of the Laude’ insists on this joined effect in the process of comforting prisoners condemned to death.

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celestial world came immediately and overwhelmingly close to those who sang or read them. The comprehensible language clarified their basic moral contents, and the poetic structure organized their presentation. In this way, sins, emotions, and sounds could together define a Christian moral world where the intermediation of the clergy was not the only possible bridge between humankind and God. Devotional poetry in the vernacular could reach the Lord through lay lips, read or sung in the Italian language by every sincere devotee.

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Appendix: List of manu­scripts with laude assembled for the Bo­lognese Compagnia di Santa Maria della Morte Some unica to this repertory may be shared by more manu­script sources: Bo­logna, Biblioteca Universitaria, MS 157 (paper; second half of the fifteenth century): 106 texts,76 with 49 unica among them New York, Morgan Library and Museum (formerly Pierpont Morgan Library), MS M.188, olim Bo­logna, Biblioteca Universitaria, MS 703 (parchment; third quarter of the fifteenth century): 74 texts (tabula only, with only a single fully written lauda: Iesù, spiandore de la prima luce), with 15 unica among them Bo­logna, Archivio Generale Arcivescovile, Archivio Consorziale del Clero Urbano di Bo­logna, MS IX.B.1 (paper; second half of the fifteenth century): 52 texts,77 with 6 unica among them New Haven, CT, Yale Uni­ver­sity, Beinecke Rare Book and Manu­script Library, MS 1069 (paper; last quarter of the fifteenth century): 50 texts, with 13 unica among them Ravenna, Istituzione Biblioteca Classense, MS 464 (paper; dated 5 April 1490): 35 texts,78 with only one unicum among them79 Bo­logna, Biblioteca Arcivescovile, MS 4880, olim Aula 2a C.VI.4 (paper; end of the fifteenth century): 25 texts80 Bo­logna, Biblioteca Universitaria, MS 401 (paper, in four books; between the fourteenth and fifteenth century; it is the oldest source in this list): 25 texts, all in the fourth book, with 14 unica among them

 76 Two texts have double presence in the source: the anonymous O Padre eterno, vero iusto e pio (fols 149v and 208r–v with the incipit O Padre eterno, vero giusto e pio) and Quando contemplo a quella potestate by Antonio Barbadoro da Firenze (fols 214r–215r and 217v–218v).  77 Two texts, both anonymous, have a double presence in the source: Ben te possemo laudare, o dolce legno (fols 25r and 44v) and O Signore mio, io te chiamo de core (fol. 44v) / O Signore mio, dame forteça (fol. 47r), respectively incipits of different strophes connected to the text O Signore mio, che ’l tuto governi.  78 Three texts occur twice in the source: Anima benedecta (by Leonardo Giustinian?, fols 11v–12r (Anima benedicta) and 16r), Cristo mio, dami fortecia (anonymous, fols 9r–v and 24v–25v (Cristo mio, dami fortezza)), and Salve regina, e germinante ramo (by Leonardo Giustinian?, fols 9v and 15r).  79 Audi figlia, vide e inclina (anonymous, fols 40v–41r).  80 The anonymous text Cristo mio, dami forteccia is present twice in the source: fols 13r–v and 28r–v (Cristo mio, dami forteçça).

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Bo­logna, Biblioteca Universitaria, MS 702 (parchment; end of the fifteenth century); 10 texts Bo­logna, Biblioteca Universitaria, MS 858 (parchment; fifteenth century): 5 texts Bo­logna, Biblioteca Arcivescovile, MS 4824, olim Aula 2a C.VIII.30 (paper; dated 29 August 1525): 4 texts, with only one unicum among them81 Bo­logna, Biblioteca Universitaria, MS 3763 (paper; first half of the sixteenth century): 2 texts Bo­logna, Biblioteca Universitaria, MS 528 (paper; first half of the sixteenth century): one text, with the only trace of performance in the whole laudario: the rubric ‘Coro’ (fol. 57r)

 81 O dulcissimo Signor, clemente e pio (anonymous, fols 96v–98v).

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Works Cited Archival and Manu­script Sources Bo­logna, Archivio Generale Arcivescovile [AGA], Archivio Consorziale del Clero Urbano di Bo­logna, MS IX.B.1 Bo­logna, Biblioteca Arcivescovile [BA], MS 4808 (olim Aula 2a C.VIII.15) Bo­logna, Biblioteca Arcivescovile [BA], MS 4881 (olim Aula 2a C.VI.5/1) Bo­logna, Biblioteca Universitaria [BU], MS 157 Bo­logna, Biblioteca Universitaria [BU], MS 401 Primary Sources Il Bianco da Siena, Laudi, critical ed. by Silvia Serventi (Rome: Antonianum, 2013) ‘The Bo­logna Comforters’ Manual’, trans. by Sheila Das, in The Art of Executing Well: Rituals of Execution in Renaissance Italy, ed. by Nicholas Terpstra (Kirksville, MO: Truman State Uni­ver­sity Press, 2008), pp. 193–275 Filocamo, Gioia, ‘“Orationi al cepo overo a la scala”: le laude della confraternita bo­lognese di S. Maria della Morte’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Uni­ver­sity of Bo­logna, 2015) Troiano, Alfredo, ‘Il Manuale quattrocentesco della Conforteria di Bo­logna: Il ms Morgan 188 della Pierpont Morgan Library (New York)’, in Misericordie: conversioni sotto il patibolo tra Medioevo ed età moderna, ed. by Adriano Prosperi (Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2007), pp. 347–479 Secondary Studies Al Kalak, Matteo, ‘Parole e musica nelle confraternite del Rinascimento’, in Studi confraternali: Orientamenti, problemi, testimonianze, ed. by Marina Gazzini (Florence: Firenze Uni­ver­sity Press, 2009), pp. 317–35 Beaty, Nancy L., ‘The “Ars moriendi”: Wellspring of the Tradition’, in The Craft of Dying: A Study in the Literary Tradition of the Ars Moriendi in England (New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­sity Press, 1970), pp. 1–53 Bent, Margaret, ‘The Definition of Simple Polyphony: Some Questions’, in Le polifonie primitive in Friuli e in Europa: Atti del Congresso internazionale, Cividale del Friuli, 22–24 agosto 1980, ed. by Cesare Corsi and Pierluigi Petrobelli (Rome: Torre d’Orfeo, 1989), pp. 33–42 Bianconi, Lorenzo, ‘La forma musicale come scuola dei sentimenti’, in Educazione musicale e Formazione, ed. by Giuseppina La Face Bianconi and Franco Frabboni (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2008), pp. 85–120 Binski, Paul, Medi­eval Death: Ritual and Representation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Uni­ ver­sity Press, 1996) Blackburn, Bonnie J., ‘For Whom Do the Singers Sing?’, Early Music, 25 (1997), 593–609

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Clark, David, The Lord’s Prayer: Origins and Early Interpretations (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016) Corbellini, Sabrina, ‘La diffusione delle traduzioni bibliche nella Toscana medievale: Il ruolo delle confraternite’, in Brotherhood and Boundaries / Fraternità e barriere, ed. by Stefania Pastore, Adriano Prosperi, and Nicholas Terpstra (Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2011), pp. 227–47 —— , ‘Plea for Lay Bibles in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Tuscany: The Role of Confraternities’, in Faith’s Boundaries: Laity and Clergy in Early Modern Confraternities, ed. by Nicholas Terpstra, Adriano Prosperi, and Stefania Pastore (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), pp. 87–112 Delcorno, Pietro, Lazzaro e il ricco Epulone: metamorfosi di una parabola fra Quattro e Cinquecento (Bo­logna: Il Mulino, 2014) Dessì, Rosa Maria, ‘Parola, scrittura, libri nelle confraternite: I laudesi fiorentini di San Zanobi’, in Il buon fedele: Le confraternite tra medioevo e prima età moderna (Caselle di Sommacampagna: Cierre, 1998), pp. 83–105 Eisenstein, Elizabeth L., The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 1979) Ellington, Donna Spivey, From Sacred Body to Angelic Soul: Understanding Mary in Late Medi­eval and Early Modern Europe (Washington, DC: Catholic Uni­ver­sity of America Press, 2001) Falvey, Kathleen, ‘Scaffold and Stage: Comforting Rituals and Dramatic Traditions in Late Medi­eval and Renaissance Italy’, in The Art of Executing Well: Rituals of Execution in Renaissance Italy, ed. by Nicholas Terpstra (Kirksville, MO: Truman State Uni­ver­sity Press, 2008), pp. 13–30 Fanti, Mario, La Confraternita di S. Maria della Morte e la conforteria dei condannati in Bo­logna nei secoli xiv e xv (Perugia: Arti grafiche Città di Castello, 1978), pp. 3–101; repr. in Mario Fanti, Confraternite e città a Bo­logna nel Medioevo e nell’età moderna (Rome: Herder, 2001), pp. 61–173 —— , ‘Un nuovo codice statutario (secoli xiv–xvi) della confraternita bo­lognese di Santa Maria della Morte’, in Tra la Vita e la Morte: Due confraternite bo­lognesi tra Medioevo e Età Moderna, ed. by Massimo Medica and Mark Gregory D’Apuzzo (Cinisello Balsamo: Silvana Editoriale, 2015), pp. 35–37 Filocamo, Gioia, ‘Bo­lognese “Orations” between Song and Silence: The Laude of the Confraternity of Santa Maria della Morte’, Confraternitas, 26 (2015), 3–17 —— , ‘Musica dagli Statuti della Confraternita di S. Maria della Morte di Bo­logna: “letanie, laude et altre oratione cum canto digando”’, Recercare, 30 (2018), 15–31 —— , ‘The Thoughts of a Noble Prisoner: Giovanni Marco Pio da Carpi’s “Laude” as Examples of Good Morality’, Confraternitas, 30 (2019), 6–17 Filocamo, Gioia, and Daniela Delcorno Branca, ‘Quattro sonetti di Boccaccio nel repertorio di un confortatore bo­lognese’, Studi sul Boccaccio, 18 (2015), 29–52 Fornasari, Massimo, Il ‘Thesoro’ della città: Il Monte di pietà e l’economia bo­lognese nei secoli xv e xvi (Bo­logna: Il Mulino, 1993) Forner, Fabio, and Gian Maria Varanini, ‘Devozioni e sentimento religioso di un aristocratico in carcere: Giovanni Marsiglio Pio nel Castelvecchio di Ferrara

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(1469–1477)’, in La religione dei prigionieri, ed. by Maria Clara Rossi (Caselle di Sommacampagna: Cierre, 2015), pp. 233–67 Geltner, Guy, The Making of Medi­eval Antifraternalism: Polemic, Violence, Deviance, and Remembrance (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 2012) Gertsman, Elina, The Dance of Death in the Middle Ages: Image, Text, Performance (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010) Glixon, Jonathan, Review of Luisi, Laudario giustinianeo, Journal of the American Musico­logical Society, 41 (1988), 170–79 Gravestock, Pamela, ‘Comforting the Condemned and the Role of the Laude’, in Early Modern Confraternities in Europe and the Americas: International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. by Christopher Black and Pamela Gravestock (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 129–50 —— , ‘Comforting with Song: Using “Laude” to Assist Condemned Prisoners’, in The Art of Executing Well: Rituals of Execution in Renaissance Italy, ed. by Nicholas Terpstra (Kirksville, MO: Truman State Uni­ver­sity Press, 2008), pp. 31–51 Henderson, John, Piety and Charity in Late Medi­eval Florence (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ ver­sity Press, 1994) Howard, Peter, Creating Magnificence in Renaissance Florence (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2012) —— , ‘Making a City and Citizens: The “Fruits” of Preaching in Renaissance Florence’, in Medi­eval Urban Culture, ed. by Andrew Brown and Jan Dumolyn (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017), pp. 59–73 —— , ‘“Where the poor of Christ are cherished”: Poverty in the Preaching of Antoninus of Florence’, in Poverty and Devotion in Mendicant Cultures, 1200–1450, ed. by Constant J. Mews and Anna Welch (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 198–209 Jounel, Pierre, ‘The Veneration of Mary’, in The Church at Prayer: An Introduction to the Liturgy, ed. by Aimé Georges Martimort, vol. iv: The Liturgy and Time, ed. by Irénée Henri Dalmais, Pierre Jounel, and Aimé Georges Martimort (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1986), pp. 130–50 Le Goff, Jacques, ‘Au Moyen Âge: Temps de l’Église et temps de marchands’, Annales E.S.C., 15 (1960), 417–33 Luisi, Francesco, ed., Laudario giustinianeo, 2 vols (Venice: Fondazione Levi, 1983) Macey, Patrick, Bonfire Songs: Savonarola’s Musical Legacy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998) Mancini, Donata, ‘Giustizia in piazza: Appunti sulle esecuzioni capitali in Piazza Maggiore a Bo­logna durante l’età moderna’, Il Carrobbio, 11 (1985), 143–49 Medica, Massimo, ‘Un nome per il “Maestro delle Iniziali di Bruxelles”: Giovanni di fra’ Silvestro’, Arte a Bo­logna, 7–8 (2010–11), 11–22 Medica, Massimo, and Mark Gregory D’Apuzzo, eds, Tra la Vita e la Morte: Due confraternite bo­lognesi tra Medioevo e Età Moderna (Cinisello Balsamo: Silvana Editoriale, 2015) Nerbano, Mara, Il teatro della devozione: Confraternite e spettacolo nell’Umbria ­medievale (Perugia: Morlacchi, 2006)

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Niccoli, Ottavia, ‘Pregare con la bocca, con gli occhi e col cuore nell’Italia della prima età moderna’, The Italianist, 34 (2014), 418–36 O’Connor, Mary Catharine, The Art of Dying Well: The Development of the Ars Moriendi (New York: Columbia Uni­ver­sity Press, 1942) Ong, Walter J., Orality and Literacy: The Techno­logizing of the Word (London: Methuen, 1982; 30th edn, New York: Routledge, 2015) Østrem, Eyolf, and Nils Holger Petersen, Medi­eval Ritual and Early Modern Music: The Devotional Practice of Lauda Singing in Late Renaissance Italy (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008) Pierno, Franco, ‘Riscritture del “Padre nostro” in lingua italiana prima del Concilio di Trento nei volgarizzamenti biblici e in testi liturgici’, in Réécritures: Regards nouveaux sur la reprise et le remaniement de textes dans la littérature française et au-delà, du Moyen Âge à la Renaissance, ed. by Dorothea Kullmann and Shaun Lalonde (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2015), pp. 285–98 Prosperi, Adriano, ‘Consolation or Condemnation: The Debates on Withholding Sacraments from Prisoners’, in The Art of Executing Well: Rituals of Execution in Renaissance Italy, ed. by Nicholas Terpstra (Kirksville, MO: Truman State Uni­ver­sity Press, 2008), pp. 98–117 —— , Justice Blindfolded: The Historical Course of an Image, trans. by John Tedeschi and Anne Tedeschi (Leiden: Brill, 2018) —— , ed., Misericordie: conversioni sotto il patibolo tra Medioevo ed età moderna (Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2007) —— , ‘Il sangue e l’anima: Ricerche sulle Compagnie di Giustizia in Italia’, Quaderni storici, 17.51 (1982), 959–99 Reinis, Austra, Reforming the Art of Dying: The ars moriendi in the German Reformation (1519–1528) (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007) Rondeau, Jennifer Fisk, ‘Prayer and Gender in the Laude of Early Italian Confraternities’, in Gender Rhetorics: Postures of Dominance and Submission in History, ed. by Richard C. Trexler (Binghamton, NY: Medi­eval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1994), pp. 219–33 Rubin, Miri, Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary (New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­ sity Press, 2009) Rusconi, Roberto, ‘“Confessio generalis”: Opuscoli per la pratica penitenziale nei primi cinquanta anni dalla introduzione della stampa’, in I Frati Minori tra ’400 e ’500: Atti del XII Convegno internazionale di studi francescani (Assisi: Società Internazionale di Studi Francescani, 1986), pp. 189–227 —— , L’ordine dei peccati: La confessione tra Medioevo ed età moderna (Bo­logna: Il Mulino, 2002) —— , ‘La vita religiosa nel tardo Medioevo: fra istituzione e devozione’, in Chiesa, chiese, movimenti religiosi, ed. by Glauco Maria Cantarella, Valeria Polonio, and Roberto Rusconi (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2004), pp. 189–254 Tenenti, Alberto, ‘“Ars moriendi”: Quelques notes sur le problème de la mort à la fin du xve siècle’, Annales E.S.C., 6 (1951), 433–46 Terpstra, Nicholas, ed., The Art of Executing Well: Rituals of Execution in Renaissance Italy (Kirksville, MO: Truman State Uni­ver­sity Press, 2008)

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—— , ‘Body Politics: The Criminal Body between Public and Private’, Journal of Medi­eval and Early Modern Studies, 45 (2015), 7–52 —— , ‘Comforting by the Books: Editorial Notes on the Bo­logna Comforters’ Manual’, in The Art of Executing Well: Rituals of Execution in Renaissance Italy, ed. by Nicholas Terpstra (Kirksville, MO: Truman State Uni­ver­sity Press, 2008), pp. 183–92 —— , ‘Piety and Punishment: The Lay Conforteria and Civic Justice in SixteenthCentury Bo­logna’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 22 (1991), 679–94 —— , ‘Theory into Practice: Executions, Comforting, and Comforters in Renaissance Italy’, in The Art of Executing Well: Rituals of Execution in Renaissance Italy, ed. by Nicholas Terpstra (Kirksville, MO: Truman State Uni­ ver­sity Press, 2008), pp. 118–58 Thompson, Augustine, O.P., Cities of God: The Religion of the Italian Communes, 1125–1325 (Uni­ver­sity Park: Pennsylvania State Uni­ver­sity Press, 2005) Todeschini, Giacomo, Franciscan Wealth: From Voluntary Poverty to Market Society (Saint Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute, Saint Bonaventure Uni­ver­sity, 2009) —— , Ricchezza francescana: Dalla povertà volontaria alla società di mercato (Bo­logna: Il Mulino, 2004) Tomaini, Thea, ed., Dealing with the Dead: Mortality and Community in Medi­eval and Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2018) Troiano, Alfredo, ed., Il Laudario di S. Maria della Morte di Bo­logna: Il ms 1069 della Yale Beinecke Library (Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2010) —— , ‘Mirror of a Condemned: Religious Poems of Andrea Viarani’, in The Art of Executing Well: Rituals of Execution in Renaissance Italy, ed. by Nicholas Terpstra (Kirksville, MO: Truman State Uni­ver­sity Press, 2008), pp. 52–78 —— , ‘Specchio di un condannato a morte: le rime devote di Andrea Viarani’, Archivio italiano per la storia della pietà, 19 (2006), 127–69 Weissman, Ronald F. E., Ritual Brotherhood in Renaissance Florence (New York: Academic Press, 1982) Wilson, Blake, Music and Merchants: The Laudesi Companies of Republican Florence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992)

Xavier Torres

The Beginnings of the Musical Oratorio in Bo­logna (1660–1699) Between the Church and the Academy

In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century society, so deeply marked by the impact of a wide variety of Reformation movements, the creation of a renewed and unequivocal Catholic identity was never a merely reactive or repressive phenomenon. Many initiatives that aimed at religious renewal within the Catholic Church developed prior to the emergence of Luther and Calvin. Many were quite alien to the precepts and programmes subsequently adopted at and after the Council of Trent. The historio­graphy of recent decades has explored the variety of methods and strategies that reformers advocated across Catholic Europe, including the caring apostolate of certain religious orders, the promotion of the cult of the saints, and the incorporation of men, women, and children into a large number of devotional confraternities. In other words, the worlds of Catholic renewal witnessed not only the disciplinary methods associated with the Index or with intermittent inquisitorial persecution, but also a systematic process of long-term acculturation that often emerged from fifteenth-century spiritual, educational, and cultural movements for religious reform.1 In such a context, music was a critical instrument used for spiritual development and confessional persuasion. Following classical precepts and the opinion of some of the Fathers of the Church, Renaissance music theorists and religious reformers shared the belief that music, whether heard or played, promoted the moral education of individuals, while also being pleasing to God. In a scarcely literate society, musical expression also offered other advantages. While few individuals were capable of reading or writing, music in its various forms and dimensions was frequently part of common  1 Prodi, Il paradigma tridentino, pp. 31–41; Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal, ch. 14. See also O’Malley, Trent and All That, pp. 56–57. Xavier Torres ([email protected]) is Professor of Early Modern History, Uni­ver­sity of Girona. His research has focused on the social and political history of early modern Spain.

Renaissance Religions: Modes and Meanings in History, ed. by Peter Howard, Nicholas Terpstra, and Riccardo Saccenti, ES 26 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2021) pp. 255–274 10.1484/M.ES-EB.5.121908

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people’s everyday experience. Easily memorized liturgical songs and hymns were a very effective means of transmitting the religious message to large populations. Music encouraged individual devotion. More than that, since there could be no music without performance, the act of singing together and, in particular, singing a certain repertoire together led to many forms of fraternization and mutual recognition. In the splintered religious Europe of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, sacred music was not only a (para) liturgical or ornamental element, but also a way of building social bonds. Music was one of the critical tools that turned individual Christians into communities of believers.2 In spite of this reality, there are few studies on the overlap between music and the Catholic Reformation, and certainly not as many as can be found for the main branches of Reformation Protestantism.3 Certainly, the key emphasis emanating from the Council of Trent is both well known and repeatedly mentioned: words must take priority over music. Moreover, neither word nor music were to be too ‘lascivious’ or worldly and thus more likely to stimulate human passions than encourage chaste devotion. The Tridentine emphasis on the intelligibility of religious lyric and singing did not facilitate musical innovations. It often worked in the other direction, as witnessed in the Catholic Church’s distrust of the then-novel development of polyphony. Yet, the Council of Trent was not as restrictive as is sometimes presumed, and it appears that even local synodical authorities were sometimes firm in their decrees but more permissive in practice.4 Nonetheless, a certain mistrust of some Renaissance musical innovations certainly remained. Misgivings regarding the potential contamination of sacred music by secular forms were exacerbated with the diffusion of the musical oratorio, a somewhat operatic sacred music genre featuring soloists, choirs, and instruments that developed in papal Rome and other Italian cities from the mid-seventeenth century.5 Musical oratorio began as a kind of holy melodrama that depicted edifying lives or models of virtue drawn mainly from Catholic hagio­graphy or the texts of the Old Testament. It was often attributed to Filippo Neri (1515–1595) and his spiritual exercises, a combination of prayer, song, and meditation that Neri had introduced to his Roman congregation a century earlier. But even the pedigree of an influential reformer canonized in 1622, little more than two decades after his death, was not sufficient to completely eliminate suspicions over musical oratorios. As this essay shows, this new modality of sacred music was inseparable from  2 Oettinger, Music as Propaganda, pp. 47–48; Brown, Singing the Gospel, p. 20.  3 But see, recently, Filippi and Noone, Listening to Early Modern Catholicism and a comparative view in Bertoglio, Reforming Music, especially ch. 9.  4 Monson, ‘The Council of Trent Revisited’; and Curti and Gozzi, Musica e liturgia nella riforma tridentina, pp. 9–17.  5 Alaleona, Studi sulla Storia dell’Oratorio musicale in Italia; Pasquetti, L’oratorio musicale in Italia; Smither, A History of the Oratorio.

the beginnings of the musical oratorio in bo­l ogna (1660–1699)

the aristocratic sociability of the time, particularly in association with the so-called sacred academies. The musical form of the oratorio had social and even spiritual contexts far removed from both the pious intentions of Filippo Neri and the strict precepts of Trent, and these contributed significantly to its mixed reputation and reception.

Music in Filippo Neri’s Religious Reform We actually cannot be certain what Filippo Neri’s opinion on music was. The founder of the Congregation of the Oratory was a man of action above all else, and not much inclined to write about this or any other matter.6 However, we do have some idea of his musical thought thanks to the observations of some members of his own congregation and even some composers closely related to it. The celebrated spiritual exercises or ‘protocol of processions’ that he initiated, above all, that of the Seven Churches, are also instructive. Finally, we may find some help in the opinions of other contemporary religious reformers, such as Carlo and Federico Borromeo of Milan (with whom Neri was in contact), or predecessors like Savonarola, whom the Florentine Neri probably took as an example in more than one sense.7 Unlike Filippo Neri, Girolamo Savonarola wrote voluminously and very widely on highly diverse topics ranging from contemporary prophecy, to Florentine republicanism, to right forms of piety, charity, and worship. Yet he never wrote about music, at least not directly. There can be no doubt that this radical Observant Dominican reformer considered singing an indispensable means of propagating and strengthening the moral regeneration of society, as demonstrated by the stunning processions of children, dressed all in white and singing laude, that he instituted in Florence in the 1490s. His conception of truly Christian music was quickly and firmly established in some of his sermons in 1495 and 1496. In keeping with his ideal of a pious inner life cloaked under an overt mundane austerity, Savonarola flatly rejected the elaborated Latin polyphony of French-Flemish origin that had been introduced in the days of Lorenzo de’ Medici. In his view, polyphony was an invention of the Devil that gratified the senses rather than favouring meditative and focused contemplation of God and prayer. Hence the need to return, in music as in so much else, to ‘primitive simplicity’. In the case of devotional music, this meant adopting the traditional vernacular and monophonic lauda to the exclusion of other forms.8

 6 See Filippo Neri, Gli scritti e le massime, ed. by Cistellini, pp. 6–7.  7 On Savonarola’s influence on Neri, see Fenlon, Music and Culture in Late Renaissance Italy, p. 46.  8 Macey, Bonfire Songs. The biblio­graphy on Savonarola and music may be complemented with

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The Borromeos of Milan were less strict than Savonarola and accepted some musical variations rooted in Renaissance innovations, although always in an ordered form. Carlo Borromeo recommended from the outset that sacred music be above all intelligible music, as mandated by the Council of Trent. That allowed at least intelligible polyphony. Later, this prelate would instigate an active campaign against the holding of dances and theatrical performances in sacred places or their surroundings, and in those parts of the liturgical year meant to foster reflection and devotion, such as Lent or Carnival. He took a severe view of music in women’s convents, although in this case his concern was driven largely by the conviction that their performances were a means for nuns to have excessive, undisciplined contact with the secular world.9 Carlo’s cousin Federico, who as a young man would frequent the Oratorian congregation in Rome, also had a marked preference for musical ʻsimplicity’. This he described on more than one occasion as a kind of music sensitive to the ʻaffetti’ and even sung by good voices, but whose purpose should always be ʻtrue inner devotion’ and not vanity or delight.10 We have nothing to indicate that Filippo Neri thought any differently than these influential reforming clerics, and, if anything, the background to and the form of his spiritual exercises confirms his adherence to the same values. Moreover, some members of the first generation of the Oratorian congregation, such as Giovenale Ancina, did not hesitate to undertake a veritable crusade against ʻdamned secular songs’, so there is considerable evidence that the early Oratorians shared the view of contemporary reformers that sacred music should be intelligible, simple, and devotional.11

The Oratorian Spiritual Exercises Oratorians were much like other religious orders in emphasizing that music always had to have a pragmatic, if not propagandistic, function. Music was conceived of primarily as a way of gaining devotees (‘fishing for souls’, as they said) and even as a means of facilitating the catechesis of the faithful.12 The printed regulations governing Oratorian spiritual exercises praised the some historically informed recordings of laude and motets inspired by the Dominican friar, such as Scattered Ashes and Refuge from the Flames.  9 Ghiglione, ʻS. Carlo e la musica sacra’, p. 1015; Kendrick, ʻMusica e riforma nella Milano di Carlo Borromeo’; Castiglione, Sentimenti di S. Carlo Borromeo.  10 Federico Borromeo e la musica, ed. by Bizzarini, pp. 162–66; Kendrick, ʻFederico Borromeo e l’estetica della musica sacra’.  11 Damilano, Giovenale Ancina musicista filippino, p. 36. On Ancina, see also Piéjus, Musique, censure et création.  12 Mompellio, ʻSan Filippo Neri e la musica “pescatrice di anime”’; Piéjus, ‘Stratégies pastorales, stratégies musicales à l’Oratoire de Rome’; Piéjus, Musique et dévotion à Rome à la fin de la Renaissance, ch. 5.

the beginnings of the musical oratorio in bo­l ogna (1660–1699) Table 10.1. Daily Spiritual Exercises of the Oratorio Congregation

Tue, Thurs, Sat Mental prayer (half an hour); recitation (litanies (afternoon/evening) of the saints) Mon, Wed, Fri Mental prayer (half an hour); ‘Lugubrious chant’ (evening) from the Passion; ‘the discipline’; recitation (psalms: Miserere, De Profundis) Sun (morning) Reading of a spiritual book (aloud); meditation; recitation (litanies of the saints); sermon (half an hour); various prayers; hospital visits Winter holidays Mental prayer (half an hour); litanies of the Virgin (‘si cantano in Musica’); brief sermon (recited by a child); music: first part of a ‘sagro componimento’; sermon (half an hour); music: second part of a ‘sagro componimento’; various prayers Summer holidays Outdoor day; music: a ‘sagro mottetto’; brief sermon (recited by a child); brief sermons (2) with interludes for music; more music: ‘divote cantate’ Sources: Gallonio, Vita del Beato P. Filippo Neri, p. 59; Idea degli esercizi dell’Oratorio istituiti da S. Filippo Neri, Book i, Chapter 3, pp. 10–11.

founder of the congregation as a sympathetic soul who knew how to use certain mundane ʻamusements’ like music to make the daily lives of hardworking believers more pleasant.13 The late sixteenth-century compiler of Oratorian laude, Abirelli da Gubbio, argued that singing could facilitate the spiritual concentration of the congregants and make some of their regular obligations, such as prayer, more bearable. Praying assiduously was essential for maintaining a healthy spiritual life, but it could also become quite strenuous, which is why it required some help. Abirelli da Gubbio suggested that one answer to this difficulty was to start the prayer with a spiritual song or hymn that could stimulate individual introspection and meditation.14 When Neri instituted his programme of spiritual exercises, he included both prayers and songs as well as other devotional variants. Weekday rituals at the Roman church of the Oratorians, Santa Maria in Vallicella, included four sermons through the course of the day, each of which was followed by the singing of ʻa spiritual song […] accompanied by the organ’.15 Musical activity increased appreciably on festive days and during festivals, and  13 Idea degli esercizi dell’Oratorio istituiti da S. Filippo Neri, Book i, Chapter 10, pp. 42–44.  14 Abirelli da Gubbio, Delle laudi spirituali.  15 Marco, Vida y hechos milagrosos de S. Filipe, p. 95.

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vespers were sung, followed by a sermon of half an hour and a spiritual meditation of unspecified length. In summertime, the congregation would go out into the fields to hear two or three short sermons (of about fifteen minutes each) with musical interludes between them. In winter, this activity was transferred to the church oratory, where ʻvery sweet and pleasant music’ could be heard, according to one of Neri’s hagio­graphers.16 This extensive musical activity was largely reserved for holidays, and music did not occupy as much space in the strict programme of daily activities followed by members of the Congregation (see Table 10.1). Neri also instituted another of the Congregation’s characteristic musical activities, the so-called procession of the Seven Churches, which was a ritualized display of walking piety around the city of Rome. He began holding the procession at Carnival time (‘Il Giovedì Grasso’) as a way of keeping people from mundane amusements. Neri’s hagio­graphers claimed that the initiative was a big success since the processions regularly brought out more than two thousand individuals ʻfrom all states’, although women were not allowed to participate in it. Many of the processants were actually men in religious orders.17 Furthermore, some later pictorial testimonies show groups of rather affluent individuals, at least in the foreground, suggesting that the procession was quickly integrated into the local civic religion, which tended to be patrician and aristocratic.18 The Seven Churches procession included some musical episodes, although not many. Prayers and meditations took up the most part, and these were not too simple or popular, given that the preponderance of hymns and motets were in Latin. Latin motets were also sung and ʻfinely tuned instruments were played’ during the lunch period, which took place in a garden belonging to one of Rome’s noblemen or cardinals.19 The Roman procession of the Seven Churches was quickly imitated elsewhere, and the comparisons between different cities offer some insight into how the Congregation of the Oratory and the musical form of the oratory evolved. The example of Bo­logna, a seedbed of the baroque and a very active musical centre, is particularly telling in how it brought together some key houses of the new orders of the Catholic Reformation that emphasized music and some of the traditional centres of the city’s civic religious geo­graphy. Bo­logna’s procession of the Seven Churches began in the Oratorian Church of Santa Maria di Galliera, a small chapel on a side street close to the cathedral, which the Congregation acquired in 1622, the year of Neri’s canonization (Map 10.1). The church had an extraordinarily ornate  16 Gallonio, Vita del Beato P. Filippo Neri, p. 59; for a more detailed account: Marco, Vida y hechos milagrosos de S. Filipe, pp. 95–97.  17 Sonzonio, Vita novíssima del santo patriarca e taumaturgo Filippo Neri, p. 55.  18 This can be seen in an eighteenth-century anonymous painting entitled La refezione a Villa Mattei, which is preserved in the Roman house of the Congregation of the Oratory.  19 Bacci, Vita de S. Filippo Neri, p. 59; Sonzonio, Vita novíssima del santo patriarca e taumaturgo Filippo Neri, p. 56; Marco, Vida y hechos milagrosos de S. Filipe, pp. 73–74.

the beginnings of the musical oratorio in bo­l ogna (1660–1699)

Map 10.1. Itinerary of the procession of the Seven Churches in Bo­logna. Map by Vanessa McCarthy.

carved Renaissance facade, and the Oratorians would soon build a larger church next to it. The day began with a Mass in the Church of Santa Maria di Galliera and a sermon that set out the many objectives of the procession, from praising the Lord and doing penance to praying for the conversion of heretics. Processants then exited Santa Maria di Galliera, moving east past the cathedral and then north along Via de’ Malcontenti, the route taken by condemned prisoners to the place of execution. At the corner (cantone) of San Tommaso, the procession turned south-east and followed Via di Mezzo di San Martino, passing through the quarter of the tanners (pellacani) as far as the Carmelite Church of San Martino. Here the processants might recite Tertullian’s De Corona Militis (the ʻCorona per li morti’), a set of prayers for the souls of the deceased, and the litanies of the Virgin, the rosary,

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or the psalm De Profundis. They also meditated intermittently on some episodes of the Passion of the Lord (the Garden of Gethsemane) or certain Christian virtues, such as abstinence. Moving further along, the procession turned east onto strada San Donato, south onto what is now Giuseppe Petroni Street (then via dei Pellacani), east onto the main thoroughfare of San Vitale, and followed it out through the San Vitale gate. The penitents continued for about a kilometre beyond the city gate until they reached the church and civic workhouse of San Gregorio de’ Mendicanti.20 From time to time, the musicians or singers in the entourage (possibly professionals) encouraged the penitents by urging them to sing some simple devotional verses, such as ‘Blessed be the name of Jesus and Mary’ or ‘Let us always praise the glorious Virgin and Saint Filippo [Neri] with devout singing’. But the music was only intermittent, since the procession often moved in silence in order to facilitate personal introspection by the processants. The musicians or the Oratorians themselves would determine in advance when to start singing and when to maintain silence. San Gregorio de’ Mendicanti was the furthest point east on the processional route. From here, the penitents returned to the city, entering by way of the Porta Maggiore and then following Strada Maggiore as far as the conventual basilica of Santa Maria dei Servi. Here they turned south and followed the route of the twelfth-century city wall to the major artery of Castiglione Street and the next church on the processional route. This was Santa Lucia, a fifth-century foundation that the Jesuits assumed in the sixteenth century and that they renovated in 1623 to bring it closer to the style of Il Gesù in Rome. After a brief stop at Santa Lucia, the procession made its way west through side streets to San Domenico, stopping at the Rosary gate in order to sing the Miserere and hear a meditation on chastity. A prayer was offered inside the church, and the procession then made its way from the Dominican complex further west to Corpus Domini, the convent of the Clarissan nuns that Caterina de’ Vigri had founded in the middle of the fifteenth century. Here, the group turned south on San Mamolo Street, one of Bo­logna’s major processional routes, and exited the city through the San Mamolo gate. The procession entered the Gesuate church dedicated to Santi Girolamo and Eustachio, which, with the Observant Franciscan Church of the Annunziata across the road, was a spiritual sentinel marking the passage from the city to the Apennine hills. The processants stopped at the Gesuate church to hear Mass, receive communion, and hear a brief sermon given by a child (fanciullo).21 Returning then into the city while intoning the litany

 20 For more on San Gregorio and his cult at the Ospedale dei Mendicanti, see Terpstra, Cultures of Charity, pp. 19–54.  21 At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Mass was held in the Church of Santa Maria Regina de’ Cieli, also known as Santa Maria de’ Poveri, in Via Nosadella; see Direttorio per l’essercitio, p. 2.

the beginnings of the musical oratorio in bo­l ogna (1660–1699)

of the Virgin Mary, the entourage moved west and north to the Conventual Franciscan Church of San Francesco, where they said prayers at the altar and heard a meditation on charity and envy. The procession then turned back towards the centre of the city, and after passing the newly constructed Church of San Salvador (1605–23) and continuing to recite several psalms, the procession entered the civic basilica of San Petronio on Piazza Maggiore, where it marked the memory of Christ’s journey to Calvary. The procession finally returned to Santa Maria di Galliera by way of the metropolitan Church of San Pietro, the eighth and final church to be visited. Once back in their own church, the Oratorians recited the Te Deum, and the musicians sang a motet with organ accompaniment. The Oratorians directed their Seven Churches procession in a large circular route that entered at least ten churches and passed by many more, and their selection included both some of the large basilicas of the high medi­eval mendicant orders, like San Domenico and San Francesco, and also a number of newly built or renovated churches, like Santa Lucia and San Salvador, whose structures were built to meet Tridentine expectations for worship. Most of the churches were associated with religious orders, though only one was attached to a female house. Unlike the Roman procession, there is no mention of Bo­logna’s Oratorians pausing to eat at patrician palaces.22 It is clear from the route and description of the itinerary that music was a significant part of the Oratorio congregation’s outdoor devotional activities, and also their indoor ones on certain days or occasions. The Oratorians were not unique in this. The Theatines of Ferrara, for example, also compiled and periodically published their particular spiritual songs (lodi spirituali) for the enjoyment and edification of their respective members.23 The custom was undoubtedly quite old, dating back to well before the time of Filippo Neri’s Roman apostolate. Confraternities across Italy from the thirteenth century onwards had taken the name of laudesi from their custom of singing devotional songs in worship and in procession. In fifteenth-century Florence, members of the compagnia of S. Giovanni Evangelista sang vernacular songs (laude volgari) after listening to a sermon, while those of the youth branch of the archconfraternity of the Arcangelo Raffaello intoned both laude in the vernacular and hymns in Latin.24 Neri did not invent anything, then, but rather adopted the uses of music he knew from his native city, above all, the laude that the laity had sung for centuries and which Savonarola had turned into a key part of his devotional reform movement.

 22 Direttorio per la visita delle sette Chiese. This volume also includes the lyrics of psalms and songs (all in Latin) that were sung in the Procession of Seven Churches.  23 Armonia celeste di lodi spirituali.  24 Hill, ʻOratory Music in Florence’; Eisenbichler, The Boys of the Archangel Raphael.

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The Origins of the Musical Oratorio Nevertheless, the Savonarola-inspired lauda did not last long in the traditions of the Oratorian Congregation. Changes came as cardinals and local nobility began joining the Roman Oratorio and taking part in its activities. Unlike Savonarola, Neri was a rather pragmatic reformer. He did not propose subverting the society of his time, and was less anxious about adopting some of its newer cultural and artistic forms if these had proven effective vehicles for moving hearts and minds. Moreover, the Oratorians, like other religious congregations, were always in need of patronage from the wealthy and had to develop a strategy for gathering resources. It is safe to assume that music always formed a substantial part of this. Hence, the musical facet of Neri’s spiritual exercises had to be adapted to a much more refined audience than those who had been present and involved at the Oratory’s beginnings, as acknowledged in the oft-cited pro­logue to the second Libro delle laudi by Giovanni Animuccia, published in 1570.25 The change in the socio­logical context of the Roman Oratorian congregation was not an isolated phenomenon. In fact, from the end of the sixteenth century, many lay confraternities in Rome and elsewhere were undergoing an ‘ennobling’ process. In one particularly ironic example, Bo­logna’s Compagnia de’Poveri, which had originated as a mutual aid group for artisans, filled up with wealthy citizens who preferred to see poverty in spiritual, rather than material, terms, leading them to close down the confraternity’s programmes for the poor and unemployed, expel artisanal members, and direct funds to ornamenting their Church of Santa Maria della Pietà.26 The Bo­lognese case also demonstrates how the growing sophistication and secularization of sacred music, and particularly the rise of the musical oratorio, also arose out of the literary academies of the second half of the seventeenth century. These changes responded to the growing aristocratic demand for civic visibility and secular entertainment, especially during Lent, when theatres were closed and there were no other alternatives for the public display of conspicuous consumption. In this season, many literary academies spontaneously transformed into ‘spiritual’ or ‘sacred’ ones without losing any of their gallant style.27 And it was in this context, which many churchmen found highly suspicious, that the triumph of the musical oratorio came about.

 25 Animuccia, Il secondo libro delle laudi, p. 2 (dedication).  26 Fanti, La chiesa e la Compagnia dei Poveri in Bo­logna, pp. 79–102. Terpstra, Cultures of Charity, pp. 233–41. On the Bo­lognese confraternities and ʻaristocratization’, see Fanti, Confraternite e città a Bo­logna and especially Terpstra, Lay Confraternities and Civic Religion, pp. 96–102.  27 Polizzotto, Children of the Promise, p. 291 (accademie sacre). On academic sociability, see Everson and others, The Italian Academies, 1525–1700 and Testa, Italian Academies and their Networks.

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the beginnings of the musical oratorio in bo­l ogna (1660–1699) Table 10.2. The Beginnings of the Musical Oratorio in Bo­logna (1660–1699)

Period   1660–1669 1670–1679 1680–1689 1690–1699  

Performances in churches

a 14 6 19 21 60

b 10 4 16 19 49

Performances in palaces

a 8 10 4 4 26

b 6 10 4 5 25

Unspecified locations

a 1 5 13 13 32

b 3 5 8 8 24

Total a 23 21 36 38 118

Sources: (a) Crowther, The Oratorio in Bo­logna, pp. 144–54, and (b) La librettistica bo­lognese nei secoli xvii e xviii, ed. by Callegari and others.

In Bo­logna, the emergence and expansion of the musical oratorio came out of the patronage of local patricians, including nobles, senators, and local magistrates, who were already accustomed to hosting the activities of academies in their urban palazzi.28 In fact, at one point during the 1670s, more oratories were performed in palaces than in churches (see Table 10.2). The Oratorians of Bo­logna arrived at Santa Maria di Galliera in 1615, but it was only from the 1680s that they would come to all but monopolize this kind of musical performance in the city, at least according to extant printed libretti.29 The libretti of the first Bo­lognese oratories are unusual in giving information on the places where they took place and the audiences that were present. They sometimes add further contextual details about the performances. Such information is unfortunately not at all common in the libretti from other places and was not continued for long in Bo­logna, either. One of the earliest Bo­lognese oratories was performed in the private residence of  28 Crowther, The Oratorio in Bo­logna, pp. 10–15. On oratorios ʻd’accademia’ or of the ʻpalazzo’, see, respectively, Franchi, ʻIl principe Ruspoli’ and Morelli, ʻGli oratori di Bernardo Pasquini’.  29 On the establishment of the Oratorian congregation in Bo­logna, see Poli and Urbini, L’Oratorio di San Filippo Neri, pp. 10–19; Poli and Rubbini, La Chiesa di Santa Maria di Galliera (on the restored church); and Comelli, L’Oratorio in Bo­logna. For his part, Vitali, ʻGiovanni Paolo Colonna, maestro di cappella dell’oratorio filippino in Bo­logna’, p. 137, suggests that the Oratorians performed musical oratorios much earlier, but did not print their libretti. In fact, the Direttorio per la visita delle sette Chiese from 1678 (p. 34) states that once the procession is finished, ‘the usual oratorios’ (‘gli Oratorii soliti’) will be announced for days of Carnival, although it says the same thing in the Direttorio per l’essercitio from 1637 (p. 36), when this type of sacred music did not yet exist. This leads us to believe that the term ʻoratorio’ designated in both cases a genre of musical dialogue, as suggested by a handwritten note in the text of 1678 (oratorios will be held ‘with music and dialogues’, it states), and in the style of the Como Oratorians from the middle of the seventeenth century; see the Ratis recording, Dialoghi con l’Angelo. In any case, in the early 1680s the Bo­lognese congregation had around three hundred oratory scores, according to Mischiati, ʻPer la storia dell’Oratorio a Bo­logna’.

b 19 19 28 32 98

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the abbot Carlo Antonio Sampieri in 1661.30 Yet through the 1660s and 1670s, when it was still an incipient musical genre, the most common location for the performance of oratorios was in the residence of a member of the local nobility. Early performances commonly took place in the palace of the marquis and senatore Paleotti,31 or even more often in that of Count Astorre Orsi, a true enthusiast of oratories judging by the amount of musical activity taking place at his home on Santo Stefano Street.32 Performances would later move to the homes of other city dignitaries, such as the marquis and senatore Francesco Azzolini, who would later form part of the Roman circle of Queen Christina of Sweden,33 the Pepoli family, also senatori of long standing,34 or families of similar rank like the Caprara,35 the Spada,36 and others.37 There is little doubt that these evenings were framed as academic occasions. Although the musical event might occasionally include a brief sermon interspersed between the first and second parts of the oratorio in the manner of church oratorios, it was customary for the nature of these musical meetings to be primarily recreational, like an aristocratic divertimento.38 The oratorio held at the Pepoli palazzo in 1682, Il Nabal, was produced by members of the Academia degli Inabili (the Academy of the Unskilled) at the request of an anonymous gentleman who ʻwanted to offer noble fun (un nobile divertimento) to the Ladies of the city’.39 A few years later, when the Pepoli wished to acknowledge the presence of the well-known oratorio enthusiast Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni in the city, they also ordered the preparation of some ʻmusical fun’.40 It is easy to imagine the sort of people who attended such social events. Moreover, some oratorio libretti are quite explicit in providing textual accounts of who was in the audience. Count Astorre Orsi, in particular, almost never forgot to record his gratitude to the ladies and gentleman who had been present at the musical session.41 Senator  30 Where L’orto di Getsemani was performed.  31 Where the Oratorio di S. Christina was performed.  32 La vittoria di S. Filippo Neri; Agare; Lo sposalitio di Rebecca; Gli sponsali d’Ester. On Astorre, see Crowther, The Oratorio in Bo­logna, pp. 12–13.  33 See, for example, La vittima generosa.  34 See, for example, Il Nabal overo l’ingratitudine punita; Agar.  35 See, for example, Abramo vincitor de proprii affetti.  36 See, for example: L’enigma di Sansone.  37 All these families appear in Dolfi, Crono­logia delle famiglie nobili di Bo­logna. Nearly all of them formed part of the Senate, which comprised forty life members and was in practice hereditary, instituted by Pope Julius II at the beginning of the sixteenth century. The exception, if there was one, would have been Count Astorre Orsi, who was not a senator, although the main branch of his family, located in San Vitale Street, enjoyed this status from the end of the fifteenth century onwards.  38 As occurs with the Oratorio di S. Christina.  39 Il Nabal overo l’ingratitudine punita, p. 4.  40 Agar, p. 5.  41 See, for example, Gli sponsali d’Ester, and also Lo sposalitio di Rebecca (ʻRingratiamento alle Dame, che hanno assistito all’Oratorio’).

the beginnings of the musical oratorio in bo­l ogna (1660–1699)

Caprara did the same, although more poetically, when he appended to the end of the oratorio text an acknowledgement (Ringratiamento) dedicated especially to all the ladies who had attended.42 Many oratorio libretti expanded on dramatic stories from the Old Testament, giving musical expression to the trials of figures like Abraham, Moses, Ruth, or Esther and moving to moral evaluation of their actions. The Bo­lognese academic oratorios from the second half of the seventeenth century were no exception. Yet we can distinguish them from many others by the fact that all shared the peculiar feature of having a mainly female thrust. In some cases, this was simply a consequence of the gallant framing of many of the stories and the obligatory presence of ladies in them. Yet we also see that many of these oratorios were focused explicitly on female stories, as was sometimes explicitly indicated in the title itself, such as Lo sposalitio di Rebecca (The Wedding of Rebecca), Il Nabal (Nabal), and Abramo vincitor dei proprii affetti (Abram, Conqueror over His own Desires).43 The Bo­lognese audiences heard musical performances full of heroines: Agar, Sara’s slave, the wife of Abraham (according to Genesis 16); the beautiful Rebekah, the future wife of Isaac, son of Sara and Abraham (Genesis 24); Ester, an orphaned Hebrew girl who would eventually become the wife of the Persian king Asuero (Esther 1–2); Abigail, the wife of the rich and ruthless Nabal, who intercedes before David (i Samuel 25); or the anonymous and unfortunate daughter of Jephthah ( Judges 11). Taken together, these biblical heroines comprised a feminine model perfectly consistent with the ideals of Catholic reform: they were women obedient to the will of Providence, occasionally (though not always) expressed through the will of their parents, and also endowed with a great capacity for persuasion or intercession. All the oratorios ended with one moral or another, often exalted in a dramatic final chorus, which underscored the evils of envy or the value of hope, and always emphasized the necessity of accepting the inscrutable design of Divine Providence. The scores of Italian musical oratorios have rarely been preserved, and this is no less the case in Bo­logna. The corresponding libretti also tend to be quite sparse in musical directions, apart from the mention of an unidentified initial symphony ‘with several instruments’ (e.g. Agare, Gli sponsali d’Ester, La vittima generosa), and some references to instruments such as violas (Agare) and French horns (Lo sposalitio di Rebecca), as well as arias and ariettas, which were combined with choruses and recitatives.44 However, we  42 ʻRingratiamento’, in Abramo vincitor de proprii affetti, p. 15.  43 By contrast, oratorios dedicated to governors used to use celebrated leaders from the Old Testament like Moses; see, for example, Lora, ʻIl “duca” Mosè’, in Perti’s recording, Il Mosè (booklet), an oratorio performed in 1685 and dedicated to the Duke of Modena.  44 For comparative purposes, a Bo­lognese academy of the mid-eighteenth century could gather about eight musicians: four violins, two recorders, and two harpsichords; see Accademia di lettere e d’esercizi cavallereschi.

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can glean a more accurate idea of the musical and instrumental content of the oratorios performed in the Bo­lognese academies by comparing some of the recent historically informed recordings of musical events that took place in the Bo­logna of the second half of the sixteenth century. Some oratorios that one would have expected to be ‘serious’ or solemn, could sometimes be quite joyful, with many string parts (violas, but also violins and cellos) and a continuous bass harpsichord.45 We see something similar in the so-called sinfonie da chiesa which were performed in San Petronio on Piazza Maggiore; these often had much more elementary string instrumentation but reinforced it with the vast civic basilica’s powerful organ.46 A recent recording of arias and duets composed for these performances shows them to have been highly evocative.47

The Academy in the Church Oratories performed inside churches were not always very different from those presented in private palaces: the aristocratic sociability of Bo­logna’s academies also infiltrated its places of worship. One example is the oratorio and literary academy that were held in San Petronio on the vigil of the Feast of Sant’Antonio di Padua (12/13 June 1676) to honour both the saint and also a prince of Tuscany, the future Fernando III, who spent a few days in the city. To pay tribute to the saint while appropriately receiving all the ladies and gentlemen in attendance, the chapel was sumptuously decorated and a luxurious ʻtheatre’ (sic) was built in front of it. A contemporary account of the event records that this theatre had an antependium, a tabernacle, many candlesticks and lapis lazuli vases, and other elaborate altar ornaments made with silver and precious stones. In addition, the reliquary of the saint was garnished with a collection of gems and diamonds. The patron of this munificence was the Marquis Ferdinando Cospi, who was one of the oldest members of the very aristocratic Bo­lognese Academia de’ Gelati (Academy of the Frozen Ones).48 What would Filippo Neri, such an austere adherent of Savonarola, have thought had he been in San Petronio to witness this!49 Yet it was precisely at this time and in the context of growing suspicion and criticism of the excessively mundane or profane character of many musical oratorios that we find increasing invocations to the retrospective patronage of San Filippo Neri. These were, perhaps, a means of justification, and we find

 45 This can be heard in the selections found on the recording Bo­logna 1666.  46 See the description in Manfredini, Sinfonie da chiesa, booklet, pp. 12–13.  47 Sacred Duets.  48 See La morte di S. Antonio di Padova.  49 On Neri’s semplicitas, see Piéjus, Musique et dévotion à Rome à la fin de la Renaissance, ch. 6.

the beginnings of the musical oratorio in bo­l ogna (1660–1699)

the trend to be especially the case with those librettists, playwrights, and scholars who rubbed shoulders in their homes or in the churches with the local aristocracy who paid for this new kind of sacred music. A detailed examination of literary treatises and musical compilations from the second half of the seventeenth century reveals that the first explicit example of this, dated at the end of the 1680s, was penned by a Bo­lognese dottore and librettist, Giovanni Battista Neri. In the preliminary notes of his libretto for the oratorio Le Tavole della Legge, Neri traced the origins of the musical oratorio to the ‘devoted poetics of Saint Filippo Neri’.50 Many other librettists followed Giovanni Battista Neri’s example, and in this way aimed to deflect criticism and make the oratorio more overtly Oratorian. Their efforts were directed above all by the desire to defend the turn in non-liturgical religious music from the spare confraternal laude of the Renaissance towards the more sensory worship found in the Bo­lognese and Roman baroque. In order to refashion religious music, they had also to turn the ascetic disciple of Savonarola, who had founded the Congregation of the Oratory, into the defender of a kind of sacred music that was, above all else, a form of aristocratic entertainment and display. Acknowledgements

This article has been developed in the framework of the research project ‘Biblical Politeia and Civic Religion in the Catholic Monarchy (16th–19th centuries)’, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, ref. PGC2018-095458-B-100. I would like to thank the following for their help and comments: Angela De Benedictis, Elisabetta Pasquini, Francesco Lora, and especially Nicholas Terpstra and the staff of the Fondazione Cini in Venice.

 50 Neri, Le Tavole della Legge, pp. 5–6.

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Works Cited Primary Sources Abirelli da Gubbio, Federico, Delle laudi spirituali, che si sogliono cantare dopo i ragionamenti delli rev. padri della Congregazione dell’Oratorio. Con l’aggiunta di alcun’altre di diversi buoni autori. Parte prima (Fermo: Heredi di Sertorio de’ Monti et Giovanni Bonibello, 1595) Abramo vincitor de proprii affetti: Oratorio… cantato nella Sala dell’illustriss. Sig. Co. Francesco Carlo senatore Caprara (Bo­logna: Bartolomeo Recaldini and Giulio Borzaghi, 1687) Accademia di lettere e d’esercizi cavallereschi… del collegio de’ Nobili di S. Francesco Saverio (Bo­logna: Ferdinando Pisarri, [1744]) Agar: Oratorio cantato nella Sala del sig. Conte Senatore Ercole Pepoli (Bo­logna: Stampa Camerale, 1689) Agare: Oratorio cantato nella sala del co. Astore [sic] Orsi la sera del [blank] di febraro 1671 (Bo­logna: Antonio Pisarri, 1671) Animuccia, Gio., Il secondo libro delle laudi, dove si contengono mottetti, salmi, et altre diverse cose spirituali, vulgari et latine (Rome: per gli heredi di Antonio Blado, 1570) Armonia celeste di lodi spirituali raccolte e stampate in gratia delli fratelli dell’Oratorio delli RR. PP. Teatini di Ferrara (Ferrara: Suzzi, 1693) Bacci, Pietro Giacomo, Vita de S. Filippo Neri fiorentino fondatore della Congregatione dell’Oratorio, raccolta da’ processi fatti per la sua canonizatione (Rome, appresso Iacomo Mascardi, 1625) Castiglione, Giambatista, Sentimenti di S. Carlo Borromeo intorno agli spettacoli (Bergamo: appresso Pietro Lancellotti, 1759) Direttorio per l’essercitio che fanno i Padri della Congregatione dell’Oratorio di S. Filippo Neri, essistente nella Chiesa della Madonna di Galiera di Bo­logna, nel andare alle Sette Chiese il Giovedì dopo la Sessagesima, detto il Giovedì Grasso, a similitudine de’ Padri dell’Oratorio di S. Maria in Vallicella di Roma (Bo­logna: presso Clemente Ferroni, 1637) Direttorio per la visita delle sette Chiese che fanno i PP. della Congreg. dell’Oratorio di S. Filippo Neri di Bo­logna nel giovedì grasso, a similitudine de’ padri dell’Oratorio di Roma (Bo­logna: per l’erede di Domenico Barbieri, 1678) Dolfi, Pompeo Scipione, Crono­logia delle famiglie nobili di Bo­logna (Bo­logna: presso Gio. Battista Ferroni, 1670) L’enigma di Sansone: Oratorio del sig. co. Angelo Antonio Sacco, da cantarsi in casa del sig. marchese e senatore Giacomo Filippo Amatore Spada (Bo­logna: Erede di Vittorio Benacci, 1690) Federico Borromeo e la musica: Scritti e carteggi, ed. by Marco Bizzarini (Rome: Bulzoni, 2012) Filippo Neri, San, Gli scritti e le massime, ed. by Antonio Cistellini (Brescia: Editrice ‘La Scuola’, 1994) Gallonio, Antonio, Vita del Beato P. Filippo Neri, fiorentino, fondatore della Congregatione dell’Oratorio (Roma, Luigi Zanetti, 1601)

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Idea degli esercizi dell’Oratorio istituiti da S. Filippo Neri: Da un prete della Congregazione dell’Oratorio di Venezia. Seconda veneta edizione, notabilmente accresciuta (Venice: appresso Simone Occhi, 1748) La librettistica bo­lognese nei secoli xvii e xviii: Catalogo ed indici, ed. by Laura Callegari and others (Rome: Edizioni Torre d’Orfeo, 1989) Marco, Luis Bertran, Vida y hechos milagrosos de S. Filipe (sic) Neri, clérigo florentin, fundador de la Congregación del Oratorio (Valencia: Felipe Mey, 1625) La morte di S. Antonio di Padova: Oratorio da cantarsi in S. Petronio la vigilia di detto santo, dedicato all’altezza… di Ferdinando Terzo, principe di Toscana (Bo­logna: Giacomo Monti, 1676) Il Nabal overo l’ingratitudine punita: Oratorio havutosi in casa degl’ill.mi sig.ri senatore conti Ercole e Cornelio Pepoli, la sera delli 5 aprile 1682 (Bo­logna: Manolessi stamp, 1682) Neri, Giovanni Battista, Le Tavole della Legge: Oratorio del dott. Gio. Battista Neri unito alla musica del sig. Nicolo Giovanardi, e consecrato all’eccellenza del sig. d. Gio. Francesco Gonzaga (Bo­logna: Eredi del Sarti, 1688) Oratorio di S. Christina, rappresentato… in casa dell’illustriss. Sig. marchese senatore Paleotti (Bo­logna: Giacomo Monti, 1666) L’orto di Getsemani, glorioso ne’ sudori di Cristo, Espresso in Casa dell’Illustrissimo e Reverendiss. Sig. Abbate Carlo Antonio Sampieri. Colla musica del Sig. Giulio Cesari Aresti (Bo­logna: Giacomo Monti, 1661) Sonzonio, Domenico, Vita novíssima del santo patriarca e taumaturgo Filippo Neri, Appostolo di Roma (Rome: Stamperia del Seminario, 1733) Gli sponsali d’Ester: Oratorio per musica dedicato [al] duca di Modana… dal Co. Astorre Orsi, e cantato nella di lui sala la sera de [blank] marzo l’anno 1676 (Bo­logna: Erede del Barbieri, [1676]) Lo sposalitio di Rebecca: Oratorio per musica cantato nella sala del Co. Astorre Orsi (Bo­logna: Erede del Barbieri, 1675) La vittima generosa: Oratorio cantato in Casa dell’Illustriss. Sig. Marchese Senatore Francesco Azzolini, Gentilhuomo di Camera della Sacra Reale Maestà di Christina Alessandra Reina di Suezia. La sera del 6 Marzo 1679 (Bo­logna: Herede di Vittorio Benacci, 1679) La vittoria di S. Filippo Neri, oratorio cantato in casa del co. Astorre Orsi la sera del [blank] di marzo 1669 (Bo­logna: Giacomo Monti, 1669) Secondary Studies Alaleona, Domenico, Studi sulla Storia dell’Oratorio musicale in Italia (Turin: Fratelli Bocca, 1908) Bertoglio, Chiara, Reforming Music: Music and the Religious Reformations of the Sixteenth Century (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017) Brown, Christopher Boyd, Singing the Gospel: Lutheran Hymns and the Success of the Reformation (Cam­bridge, MA: Harvard Uni­ver­sity Press, 2005) Comelli, Giovanni Battista, L’Oratorio in Bo­logna: Note storiche per ricordo del terzo solenne centenario della morte di S. Filippo Neri. Anno 1895 (Bo­logna: Tipografia Pontificia Mareggiani, 1895)

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Crowther, Victor, The Oratorio in Bo­logna (1650–1730) (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 1999) Curti, Danilo, and Marco Gozzi, Musica e liturgia nella riforma tridentina ([Trento]: Provincia Autonoma di Trento, 1995) Damilano, Piero, Giovenale Ancina musicista filippino (1545–1604) (Florence: Olschki, 1956) Eisenbichler, Konrad, The Boys of the Archangel Raphael: A Youth Confraternity in Florence, 1411–1785 (Toronto: Uni­ver­sity of Toronto Press, 1998) Everson, Jaybe E., and others, eds, The Italian Academies, 1525–1700: Networks of Culture, Innovation and Dissent (Cam­bridge: Modern Humanities Research Association; Abingdon: Routledge, 2016) Fanti, Mario, La chiesa e la Compagnia dei Poveri in Bo­logna (Bo­logna: Edizioni Dehoniane, 1977) —— , Confraternite e città a Bo­logna nel Medioevo e nell’età moderna (Rome: Herder, 2001) Fenlon, Iain, Music and Culture in Late Renaissance Italy (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­ sity Press, 2002) Filippi, Daniele V., and Michael Noone, eds, Listening to Early Modern Catholicism: Perspectives from Musico­logy (Leiden: Brill, 2017) Franchi, Saverio, ʻIl principe Ruspoli: l’oratorio in Arcadia’, in Percorsi dell’oratorio romano: Da ‘historia sacra’ a melodramma spirituale, ed. by Saverio Franchi (Rome: Ibimus, 2002), pp. 245–316 Ghiglione, Natale, ʻS. Carlo e la musica sacra’, in San Carlo e il suo tempo: Atti del Convegno internazionale nel IV centenario della morte, vol. ii (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1986), pp. 1013–19 Hill, John Walter, ʻOratory Music in Florence (I): “Recitar cantando”, 1583–1655’, Acta Musico­logica, 51 (1979), 108–36 Hsia, R. Po-Chia, The World of Catholic Renewal, 1540–1770, 2nd edn (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2005) Kendrick, Robert L., ʻFederico Borromeo e l’estetica della musica sacra’, in Cultura e spiritualità borromaica tra Cinque e Seicento, ed. by Franco Buzzi and Maria Luisa Frosio (Milan: Bulzoni, 2006), pp. 339–50 —— , ʻMusica e riforma nella Milano di Carlo Borromeo’, in Carlo Borromeo e l’opera della ‘Grande Riforme’: Cultura, religione e arti del governo nella Milano del pieno Cinquecento, ed. by Franco Buzzi and Danilo Zardin ([Milan]: Credito Artigiano, [1997]), pp. 177–84 Macey, Patrick, Bonfire Songs: Savonarola’s Musical Legacy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998) Mischiati, Oscar, ʻPer la storia dell’Oratorio a Bo­logna: Tre inventari del 1620, 1622 e 1682’, in Collectanea Historiae Musicae, vol. iii (Florence: Olschki, 1963), pp. 131–70 Mompellio, Federico, ʻSan Filippo Neri e la musica “pescatrice di anime”’, Chigiana, 12 (1965), 3–33 Monson, Craig, ‘The Council of Trent Revisited’, Journal of the American Musico­ logical Society, 55 (2002), 1–37

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Morelli, Arnaldo, ʻGli oratori di Bernardo Pasquini: problemi di datazione e di committenza’, in Percorsi dell’oratorio romano: Da ‘historia sacra’ a melodramma spirituale, ed. by Saverio Franchi (Rome: Ibimus, 2002), pp. 67–94 Oettinger, Rebecca Wagner, Music as Propaganda in the German Reformation (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001) O’Malley, John W., Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era (Cam­bridge, MA: Harvard Uni­ver­sity Press, 2000) Pasquetti, Guido, L’oratorio musicale in Italia: studio d’arte e d’ambiente, 2nd edn (Florence: Successori Le Monnier, 1914) Piéjus, Anne, Musique, censure et création: G. G. Ancina et le ‘Tempio armonico’ (1599) (Florence: Olschki, 2017) —— , Musique et dévotion à Rome à la fin de la Renaissance: Les laudes de l’Oratoire (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013) —— , ‘Stratégies pastorales, stratégies musicales à l’Oratoire de Rome’, in La musica dei semplici: L’altra Controriforma, ed. by Stefania Nanni (Rome: Viella, 2012), pp. 289–309 Poli, Marco, and Manuela Rubbini, La Chiesa di Santa Maria di Galliera (Bo­logna: Costa, 2002) Poli, Marco, and Silvia Urbini, L’Oratorio di San Filippo Neri a Bo­logna (Bo­logna: Costa, 2000) Polizzotto, Lorenzo, Children of the Promise: The Confraternity of the Purification and the Socialization of Youths in Florence, 1427–1785 (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 2004) Prodi, Paolo, Il paradigma tridentino: Un’epoca della storia della Chiesa (Brescia: Morcelliana, 2010) Smither, Howard E., A History of the Oratorio, vol. i (Chapel Hill: Uni­ver­sity of North Carolina Press, 1977–2000) Terpstra, Nicholas, Cultures of Charity: Women, Politics, and the Reform of Poor Relief in Renaissance Italy (Cam­bridge, MA: Harvard Uni­ver­sity Press, 2013) —— , Lay Confraternities and Civic Religion in Renaissance Bo­logna (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 1995) Testa, Simone, Italian Academies and their Networks, 1525–1700: From Local to Global (Basingston: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) Vitali, Carlo, ʻGiovanni Paolo Colonna, maestro di cappella dell’oratorio filippino in Bo­logna: Contributi bio-bibliografici’, Rivista Italiana di Musico­logia, 14 (1979), 129–54 Disco­graphy Bo­logna 1666: Perti, Torelli, Colonna, Kammerorchester Basel, Sony 88985315592 Manfredini, Francesco, Sinfonie da chiesa, Bo­logna 1709, Capricornus Consort Basel, Peter Barczi (dir.), Christophorus CHR 77380 Perti, Giacomo Antonio, Il Mosè conduttor del popolo ebreo, Ensemble ‘Les Nations’, Maria Luisa Baldassar (dir.), Tactus TC661603, booklet by Francesco Lora

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Ratis, Francesco, Dialoghi con l’Angelo: Dramatic Cantatas & Popular Songs (1657), Nuovo Aspetto, Michael Dücker (dir.), Accent ACC 24290 Refuge from the Flames: Miserere and the Savonarolan Legacy, ORA, Suzi Digby (dir.), HMW 906103 Sacred Duets, Núria Rial and Valer Sabadus (soloists), Kammerorchester Basel, Sony 88985323612 Scattered Ashes: Josquin’s Miserere and the Savonarolan Legacy, Magnificat, Filippo Cave (dir.), Linn CKD 517

IV

Space & Form

Rebecca M. Gill

Early Experiments in Catholic Reformation Architecture Galeazzo Alessi and the Church of Santa Maria Assunta di Carignano, Genoa

The Church of Santa Maria Assunta di Carignano, designed by Galeazzo Alessi in 1549 for the Sauli family, is one of many chiese gentilizie built in Genoa by patrician families for their private use (Figure 11.1). Most of these chiese gentilizie are relatively small buildings, located in the medi­eval heart of the city. By contrast, however, Santa Maria Assunta is the second largest church in the city (only the cathedral is bigger) and is located on the Carignano hill, above the narrow streets of the centro storico, from where it dominates the Genoese skyline. This family church dedicated to the Assumption of the Virgin Mary is planned on a quincunx, a type of church plan composed of a cross set within a square. In this church, a large hemispherical dome rises from the centre, while the four corners feature what Galeazzo Alessi referred to as ‘tempietti’ (little temples) that are capped by smaller domes (Figure 11.2). Separating these domed spaces are the four arms of the Greek cross, which are covered by impressive barrel vaults. This type of floor plan had not previously been employed in Genoa and seems to have been introduced to the city by Alessi, who knew of it from his work in central Italy and in particular Rome, where he had spent six years during his early career.1 In Rome Alessi was in contact  1 Not much is known of Alessi’s early career. It seems that he may have received some sort of architectural training in Perugia from Giovan Battista Caporali before 1536 when he moved to Rome. In 1542 he returned to Perugia as an architect working under Antonio da Sangallo the Younger on the construction of the Rocca Paolina. Conforti, ‘Galeazzo Alessi e il suo tempo’, and Antonucci, ‘Galeazzo Alessi’. See also De Negri, Galeazzo Alessi Architetto a Genova, pp. 23–26; Algeri, ‘Alessi in Umbria’; Miarelli Mariani, ‘Aggiunte e notazioni sulla formazione di Galeazzo Alessi’. Rebecca M. Gill ([email protected]) is Ahmanson Fellow and Curator in Art and Religion at the National Gallery, London. Her book, on Galeazzo Alessi and the development of Catholic Reformation architecture, is forthcoming.

Renaissance Religions: Modes and Meanings in History, ed. by Peter Howard, Nicholas Terpstra, and Riccardo Saccenti, ES 26 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2021) pp. 277–299 10.1484/M.ES-EB.5.121909

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Figure 11.1. Galeazzo Alessi, ‘Santa Maria Assunta di Carignano’, Genoa. 1549. Photo: Author.

with Antonio da Sangallo the Younger and the workshop of Saint Peter’s, the early plans for which were also based on a quincunx. Indeed, as Christoph Theones has amply demonstrated, Alessi’s design for Santa Maria Assunta was clearly influenced by both Sangallo’s and Donato Bramante’s designs for the great basilica.2 It is therefore clear where the idea for the quincunx came from, but why did Alessi and his patrons choose this type of floor plan and what might their choice tell us about how architectural forms provide a means of understanding Renaissance religion?  2 Theones, ‘Santa Maria di Carignano’.

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Figure 11.2. ‘Plan of Santa Maria di Carignano de Signori Sauli’, London, RIBA Library Drawings and Archives Collections. 1607. Image courtesy of RIBA Library Drawings and Archives Collections.

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Figure 11.3. Galeazzo Alessi, ‘Interior, Santa Maria Assunta di Carignano’, Genoa. 1549. Photo: Author.

It has been argued in the past that Santa Maria Assunta’s location at the summit of the Carignano hill lent itself to a quincunx plan, because it meant that each of the four facades could give onto a different aspect of the city, including the port and medi­eval centre.3 It may also be the case that the choice of a quincunx was prompted by the patrons’ links with the papacy. Several members of the family were closely involved in the Curia, and one of  3 Ghia, ‘Il cantiere della Basilica di S. Maria di Carignano’, p. 350.

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them, Bendinelli Sauli II, had been made a cardinal. Bendinelli II, however, had died in disgrace in 1518 having been wrongly implicated in the plot to kill Pope Leo X.4 By modelling their church on Saint Peter’s the Sauli may therefore have been expressing their allegiance to the papacy following this scandal. Yet, by the time that Alessi came to design the church in 1549 several years had passed, a different pope was in the Vatican, and the Sauli seem to have regained their position within the Church and Curia. It may therefore have no longer been necessary to make such a statement of allegiance. What else might therefore have prompted the choice of a quincunx plan? As with any centralized building, a church built on a quincunx will naturally emphasize the importance of whatever is placed at its centre. Yet, the centre of Santa Maria Assunta is totally empty apart from modern church pews (Figure 11.3). Given that this was a private church, patronized by a single family, one might expect to find a funerary monument to an important family member at its centre, but there is no such monument, or even a dedicatory floor plaque. What, therefore, was destined to go at the centre of this imposing church, and does this help us to explain why this church was built on a quincunx? The answer to these questions lies, I believe, in the interests of the patrons in early Church reform. This essay will first establish the Sauli’s links with various Church reformers and their possible attitude towards reform, before turning to examine how these factors may have influenced the architecture of the church, including the choice of the quincunx. Recent scholarship has examined the impact of reform movements on the art and architecture of sixteenth-century Italy. Jörg Stabenow, Sible de Blaauw, and Christoph Jobst have expanded on such themes as the relationship between architecture and liturgy, the use of sacred space, and the influence of reform-minded patrons on the development of ecclesiastical architecture.5 Richard V. Schofield and Francesco Repishti, in work focused on the debates around the facade of Milan cathedral, have opened up new methodo­logical possibilities in questioning how the theo­logical debates of certain key reformers had a direct influence on architecture.6 Alexander Nagel has demonstrated the influence of reformers such as Gian Matteo Giberti, the Bishop of Verona, on the intense experimentation and controversies that characterized the art and architecture of the sixteenth century.7 The questions posed in this essay around the influence of reform and the choice of a quincunx plan continue the themes developed in this recent scholarship. Considering Alessi’s design of Santa Maria Assunta as

 4 Hyde, Cardinal Bendinello Sauli and Church Patronage.  5 Stabenow, Lo Spazio e il culto. This collection originated in a 2003 conference of the same name held at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence.  6 Repishti and Schofield, Architettura e Controriforma.  7 Nagel, The Controversy of Renaissance Art.

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a case study allows us to explore the impact on the built environment of some critical discourses on Renaissance religion by further illuminating the complex web of connections that ran between various early Church reformers. It highlights Genoa’s role as a hub for reform and demonstrates how the mid-sixteenth century was a critical period of genuine innovation and experimentation, as patrons and architects grappled with the idea of how to translate into architecture the concepts and debates being conducted amongst religious thinkers.

The Sauli Family and Early Church Reform The Church of Santa Maria Assunta was financed by one individual. Bendinelli Sauli I ordered in his 1481 will that 240 luoghi, or shares, be invested in the Bank of Saint George for sixty years, with the interest used to construct a Sauli family church.8 Since the investment was tied for sixty years, it fell to Bendinelli’s grandsons to construct the church. Several members of the family were involved in the project in the mid-sixteenth century, but one name emerges from the documents as Alessi’s main contact for the construction: Stefano Sauli, son of Bendinelli I’s eldest son, Pasquale. Stefano was an apostolic proto-notary and intellectual who became patron to several humanist scholars and founded an academy in his villa in the Genoese countryside.9 Through his scholarly work Stefano developed a network of friends and associates that included many humanists and churchmen who were actively involved in attempts to reform the Catholic Church in the first half of the sixteenth century. Many of these familiars were also associates of other members of the Sauli family, most notably Stefano’s first cousins, Filippo and Domenico. Stefano Sauli had been involved in humanistically oriented religious reform movements long before his collaboration with Galeazzo Alessi. In 1518, he travelled to the monastery of Saint Honorat, in the Lérins Islands just outside the Bay of Cannes, which had recently been taken over by the reformed Benedictine Cassinese Congregation. There he met Gregorio Cortese, an important reformer who would come to play a crucial role in paving the way for the Council of Trent.10 Cortese had been installed as abbot of Saint Honorat only two years earlier, in 1516. Charged with the task of reforming the monastery, he worked to turn it into a lively centre for

 8 Genoa, SA, Archivio della Basilica di S. Maria Assunta di Carignano, Filze e buste, scritture ‘rerum magni momenti’, 7 1552–1678, contains copies of extracts of Bendinelli Sauli’s 1481 will.  9 Pastore, Marcantonio Flaminio, pp. 42–43. See also Tiraboschi, Storia della Letteratura Italiana, pp. 261–64.  10 The most comprehensive study of the life and work of Gregorio Cortese is still Cesareo, Humanism and Catholic Reform. See also Fragnito, ‘Il Cardinale Gregorio Cortese’ and Anderson, ‘Gregorio Cortese and Roman Catholic Reform’.

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study and a meeting place for scholars.11 It was this that attracted Stefano Sauli, who at that time was searching for a place where he and his friend and tutor Cristophe de Longueil could study. Stefano was so impressed by what Cortese was developing on the island that he planned to stay for three years, but Longueil dissuaded him and the two went to Padua instead.12 Nonetheless, this marked the start of a strong friendship between Gregorio Cortese and Stefano Sauli, as evidenced by their very active correspondence. In the autumn of 1519, Cortese fell ill and travelled to Genoa to recuperate, where he was cared for by Stefano and other members of the Sauli family. He remained in the city until 1520 and then returned again in 1522.13 During this time, Cortese forged or renewed friendships with various Genoese citizens, including Stefano Sauli’s cousin Filippo, the Bishop of Brugnato, seventy kilometres north-east of Genoa. Consecrated as bishop in 1512, Filippo had immediately set about reforming the diocese, conducting pastoral visits during which he addressed key areas of concern, such as how often mass was said in the cathedral, how the Eucharist was housed, and how the altar was furnished. Bishop Filippo Sauli also wrote the Opus noviter editum for the clergy in his diocese, giving detailed guidelines for clerical learning and behaviour and pastoral directions on the Mass, the care of souls, and the seven sacraments.14 The impact of Bishop Sauli’s text was felt beyond the small diocese of Brugnato, and had a critical influence on later Church reformers, including Gian Matteo Giberti. Furthermore, Filippo Sauli was also a scholar, particularly of Greek, and his library contained over three hundred Greek manu­scripts. When he met Gregorio Cortese in Genoa in 1519 it was therefore something of a meeting of minds and spirits, given their shared interest in Church reform and Greek.15 In Genoa, Cortese also came into contact with the Compagnia del Divino Amore (Company of Divine Love), a lay confraternity founded in the city in 1497 by Ettore Vernazza, whose principles and aims matched many of the ideas promoted by Cortese himself.16 Influenced by the example of Catherine Fieschi-Adorno (1447–1510; canonized 1737), the confraternity members organized themselves in order to help the sick and the poor. They stressed the importance of an ascetic moral life, discipline, regular confession and communion, and charitable acts.17 This focus on charitable

 11 Cesareo, Humanism and Catholic Reform, pp. 68–105.  12 Cataldi Palau, ‘Filippo Sauli ed i suoi rapporti con umanisti contemporanei’, p. 41. Hyde, Cardinal Bendinello Sauli and Church Patronage, pp. 52–54.  13 Hyde, ‘Early Cinquecento Popolare Art Patronage in Genoa’, pp. 429–31.  14 Hyde, Cardinal Bendinello Sauli and Church Patronage, pp. 59–63. See also Tomaini, Attività pastorale di Filippo Sauli.  15 Hyde, Cardinal Bendinello Sauli and Church Patronage, p. 66.  16 Hyde, ‘Early Cinquecento Popolare Art Patronage in Genoa’, p. 183.  17 Black, Italian Confraternities in the Sixteenth Century, p. 6. For more on the confraternity, see Solfaroli Camillocci, I Devoti Della Carità, especially chs 1 and 2.

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works also led to the foundation of the Ospedale degli Incurabili (Hospital for Incurables) in 1500 to aid and cure those suffering from syphilis. In 1511, Vernazza founded a second branch of the confraternity in Rome, aided by Stefano Sauli’s brother, Cardinal Bendinelli Sauli II.18 Membership in the Company of Divine Love was secret, which makes it difficult to establish with certainty who was a member. The Rome branch, however, numbered amongst its members the influential reformers Gian Matteo Giberti, Gaetano Thiene, and Gian Pietro Carafa (later Pope Paul IV). It is quite clear that Cardinal Bendinelli Sauli II was a member of the Rome branch, while in Genoa both Stefano and his cousin Filippo were also supporters of the confraternity and were very likely members. Both included bequests to the hospital in their wills, Stefano bequeathing 1500 scudi and Filippo leaving the company a large part of his library.19 In addition to his links with Cortese and the Compagnia del Divino Amore, Stefano Sauli came to befriend Ettore Vernazza during his time at Padua Uni­ver­sity (1520–21). In these same years he established personal relationships with a number of men who would go on to play important roles in the movement for Catholic reform. Key amongst them was Marcantonio Flaminio, the neo-Latin scholar, poet, and religious reformer, who worked under Sauli’s direct patronage from 1519 to 1521, when both lived in Padua, before then leading the group of scholars that met at Sauli’s villa in Genoa.20 By 1524, Flaminio had passed into the circle of Giberti, the great early reformer and Bishop of Verona. At this time, he also joined the Compagnia del Divino Amore in Rome, which, together with the influence of Giberti, seems to have exposed Flaminio to the problems inside the Church and the need for structural and theo­logical reform. Flaminio later moved to Naples, where he came under the influence of Juan de Valdes and the so-called ‘spirituali’, before relocating to Viterbo to join the household of Reginald Pole. At this time, Flaminio undertook to revise the Beneficio di Cristo, one of the most controversial texts of the period that was viewed by many as heretical, placed on Giovanni della Casa’s 1549 Venetian Index of Prohibited Books, and subsequently burned in great numbers.21 Flaminio was an increasingly important player in the networks of early Catholic reform, and although his activities in this regard multiplied after he moved out of Stefano Sauli’s household, it seems likely that both shared many

 18 Solfaroli Camillocci, I Devoti Della Carità, pp. 78–85; Hyde, Cardinal Bendinello Sauli and Church Patronage, pp. 50–51.  19 Hyde, Cardinal Bendinello Sauli and Church Patronage, pp. 50–54, 58.  20 Pastore, Marcantonio Flaminio, pp. 40–44.  21 For Flaminio’s years in Viterbo and his additions to the Beneficio di Cristo, see Pastore, Marcantonio Flaminio, pp. 117–33. For the Beneficio di Cristo, see Ginzburg and Prosperi, Giochi di pazienza, and Collett, Italian Benedictine Scholars and the Reformation, pp. 157–85. Today only one copy of the first edition survives in the library of St John’s College, Cam­ bridge. Corry and others, Madonnas and Miracles, pp. 170–71.

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convictions about the need for reform and the intersections of active charity and humanist biblical scholarship that best defined it. While Flaminio only joined Pole’s household in the 1540s, it is likely that the two had first met some twenty years earlier, when they were both in Padua, along with Stefano Sauli. Pole had arrived in Padua in 1521 and, like Sauli, was a student of Lazzaro Buonamico; both were also closely connected to the circle of Christophe de Longueil.22 Pole, Sauli, and Flaminio were thus contemporaries as part of the same academic set in Padua, which at the time was a critical meeting place for this network of reform-minded humanist scholars. Longueil was also closely connected to Cortese, Gian Matteo Giberti, Pietro Bembo, and Jacopo Sadoleto, who were all involved in Catholic reform and whom Sauli also likely met in these years in Padua.23 It is noteworthy that a codex owned by Stefano included verses by Flaminio, Bembo, and Sadoleto.24 Stefano Sauli was without doubt a familiar of Gian Matteo Giberti, for the Sauli and Giberti families were closely intertwined.25 Giberti’s father, Franco, was Genoese and had worked for the Sauli in the early sixteenth century. When Bendinelli Sauli II was implicated in the plot to kill Leo X in 1517, Franco Giberti contributed 1000 ducats towards his release.26 As noted above, Giberti drew on the example and work of Filippo Sauli for ideas on how to reform and build the spiritual life of the diocese of Brugnato, particularly with regard to regular pastoral visits and disciplinary actions aimed at renewing the morality and piety of his clergy.27 Giberti was also a friend of Filippo’s younger brother Domenico Sauli, who, in his diary, wrote that ‘between said Giberti and myself there has been great friendship and good feeling for many years’.28 Gian Matteo Giberti was clearly very close to a number of Sauli men, and while Filippo may have influenced him in terms of diocesan reform, Giberti was an even greater influence on the Sauli when it came to matters of religious architecture. Through an examination of the careers, networks, and activities of Stefano, Filippo, and Domenico Sauli, it is therefore possible to build a picture of a family whose members were well aware of the movements for Church reform that were gathering apace around them, and who had strong connections with many important early reformers. Filippo himself was actively involved in trying to reform the Catholic Church from within

 22 Mayer, Reginald Pole, pp. 48–50; and Parks, ‘Did Pole Write the “Vita Longoli”?’, p. 274.  23 Kidwell, Pietro Bembo, pp. 193–94, 309.  24 Bo­logna, Biblioteca Universitaria di Bo­logna, MS 400. Pastore, Marcantonio Flaminio, p. 41.  25 For the latest scholarship on Giberti, see Agostini and Baldissin Molli, Gian Matteo Giberti.  26 Hyde, Cardinal Bendinello Sauli and Church Patronage, p. 64.  27 Hyde, Cardinal Bendinello Sauli and Church Patronage, pp. 64–65, and Cataldi Palau, ‘Filippo Sauli ed i suoi rapporti con umanisti contemporanei’.  28 Rome, Biblioteca Angelica, MS 1826, fols 3–4, cited in Hyde, Cardinal Bendinello Sauli and Church Patronage, p. 64.

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by reforming the diocese of Brugnato. It is also likely that these three men, and potentially other members of the family, too, were members of the Compagnia del Divino Amore and therefore observed and promoted reform-minded practices such as the regular taking of communion, a more Christocentric personal piety, and active social charity. While it is true to say that the Sauli were on the periphery of Church reform, through their impressive network of contacts they must have been well versed in the religious debates of the period. In the absence of archival documents or printed texts, we can only speculate on their personal involvement. Yet, as we will see, architecture may also provide a clue to their interest in reform, and in that context the traces we find in the Sauli family Church of Santa Maria Assunta can be read as a document of sorts.

Santa Maria Assunta and its Eucharistic Tabernacle The construction history of Santa Maria Assunta has been well documented by Andrea Ghia, who made extensive use of the correspondence that survives in the Sauli archive between Alessi, his patrons, their notary, and the master builders whose task it was to construct the church while Alessi himself was working in Milan and Perugia.29 Within this correspondence is a letter from Alessi to the master builder, Angelo Doggio, dated 25 August 1567, which contains important clues as to what may have been destined for the centre of Santa Maria Assunta. The letter addressed problems that Doggio had encountered in interpreting the drawings for the main dome of the church: ‘Ho recevute le vostre lettere insieme con il disegno l’altro giorno mandatovi, con una copia che diti haver levata dalla cupola ch’ è sopra il tabernaculo, e parendomi molto differente l’una dall’ altra vi generava confusione’ (I received your letter the other day together with the drawing, with a copy that you say you made from the dome which is above the tabernacle, and the two appear to me to be very different from one another and they create confusion).30 While a useful document in terms of the construction history of the church, it is also important because it reveals that a tabernacle was to be located at the centre of the church, under the main dome. This would have

 29 Ghia, ‘Il cantiere della Basilica di S. Maria di Carignano’, pp. 263–380. See also Gill, ‘Galeazzo Alessi’, pp. 46–77. In 1558 Alessi was called to Milan by the Genoese ex-patriot Tomasso Marino to design his private palace, with the consequence that from this date on Alessi spent less and less time in Genoa and instead managed the construction of Santa Maria Assunta remotely, via letters and drawings that were sent between architect, patrons, and master builders. See my ‘Conception and Construction’.  30 Genoa, SA, Archivio della Basilica di S. Maria Assunta di Carignano, Scritture contabili, Filze e buste, 105 1560–69. Published in Varni, Spigolature artistiche nell’archivi della basilica di Carignano, pp. 37–38.

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Figure 11.4. Desiderio da Settignano, ‘Ciborium for the Sacrament’, Washington, National Gallery of Art. Fifteenth century. Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

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been an extraordinary feature for a mid-sixteenth-century Genoese church, but unfortunately, it seems that this tabernacle was never built. To make matters worse, there are no further documents that cast light on what form this tabernacle might have taken or what it might have housed. Nonetheless, the letter is an important clue as what was to occupy the centre of Santa Maria Assunta. Locating a tabernacle at the centre of the building means that it must have been a free-standing structure, rather than the more conventional wall tabernacle. Furthermore, as this was a completely new church and because there is no record of any item of particular devotion having been brought to the church, one has to assume that this was not a tabernacle for a relic or an image, but one destined to hold the holy sacraments. This would fit with a stipulation included in the 1555 will of Stefano Sauli that once the church was completed, his bones were to be transferred to Santa Maria Assunta and placed underneath the tabernacle of ‘Corpus Domini’.31 If we take Alessi’s letter as proof of the intention to place a Eucharistic tabernacle at the centre of the church, then this would have been a highly charged burial place, but one that was entirely in keeping with Stefano Sauli’s position within the family and the lead role he played in the patronage of the church.32 The lack of further information on the tabernacle makes it difficult to establish how it would have been arranged. It is unlikely that such an important piece of church furniture would have been placed directly on the floor, so we can speculate that it may have been raised on a pedestal. Hans Caspary has identified a type of free-standing ciborium that could be found in sixteenth-century Italy, for example, the ciborium designed by Desiderio da Settignano, today held in the National Gallery of Art, Washington (Figure 11.4).33 Such an arrangement would have endowed the sacraments housed inside with an appropriate amount of dignity while also rendering the tabernacle highly visible from this raised position. Alternatively, the tabernacle may have been placed on an altar at the centre of the church. This is a more likely arrangement than a free-standing pedestal, especially given the size of the crossing at Santa Maria Assunta, which would have dwarfed a pedestal but could easily have accommodated an altar. Such an arrangement would also be in keeping with the wider,

 31 Genoa, ASG, Notaio Antico 2049, 1v–7r. ‘Il corpo poi vuole sia posto in deposito nela chiesa di S. Dominico in Genua […] perche poi quando sara fatta la chiesa, la quale di ordine del fu messer Bendinello Sauli suo avo […] dove sara il tabernacolo del Corpus Domini in terra siano resposte le ossa sue coperte di [una] pietra di marmo bianco, con questa [ins]crittione Ossa Stephani SAULII expectantia resurectionem’.  32 Stefano Sauli’s body was buried in the Church of San Domenico, where the Sauli had a family chapel that had been established by Bendinelli I, where it remained until the church was demolished in 1826.  33 Caspary, ‘Das Sakramentstabernakel in Italien’, p. 6. See also Timmermann, Real Presence, pp. 188–90.

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emerging trend among reforming bishops to bring the Holy Sacraments out from the sacristy or side chapel where they were previously normally found, and to house them instead on the high altar. One important early example of this can be seen in Siena, where in 1506 Francesco di Giorgio Martini (1439–1501), working under the patronage of civic signore Pandolfo Petrucci, relocated the Eucharistic tabernacle that Lorenzo Vechietta (1412–1480) had originally made for the Hospital of Santa Maria della Scala, and moved it across the square to the high altar of Siena cathedral.34 This was in keeping with a treatise that Martini had published a few years earlier, in which he wrote that the Holy Sacraments should be arranged: ‘in mezzo o sopra dell’altare inornato tabernaculo in modo che quelli che entrano nel tempio il corpo di Cristo in prima si representi’ (so that it is in the middle or above the altar decorated in a tabernacle in such a way that those who enter the temple see first the body of Christ represented).35 In this way, the body of Christ would be the first thing that people entering the church would see. The problem is that there is no record of an altar at the centre of Santa Maria Assunta in the sixteenth century. Today, two side altars can be found in each of the corner tempietti and the high altar is located in the apse at the east end, in front of the choir, in keeping with Alessi’s original design. If Alessi’s tabernacle was originally placed on an altar at the centre of the church, it was therefore not the high altar. While this might seem like an awkward arrangement, a precedent for it can be found in Book v of the treatise on architecture published by Sebastiano Serlio (1475–1554) in 1548, the year before Alessi began work on Santa Maria Assunta. Serlio noted that in a church built on a circular plan ‘even though the chapel opposite the door could be used for the principal altar, nevertheless another altar could be erected in the middle of the temple which would be seen by everyone, as is shown on the plan’.36 So, to have a secondary altar in the centre of a church that also had a high altar opposite the doorway was therefore not necessarily a problem. In this instance, those entering Santa Maria Assunta would see a high altar placed in front of the choir in the apse of the east end and a secondary altar under the dome at the centre of the church, on top of which was placed the Eucharistic tabernacle. This, however, raises further questions. Was the Eucharistic tabernacle permanently located at the centre of the building, or could it be moved to the high altar so that the canons could celebrate Mass there? Or was Mass celebrated at the altar in the centre, rather than at the high altar? Unfortunately, these questions remain unanswered for now.  34 Nagel, The Controversy of Renaissance Art, pp. 206–11. Vechietta’s tabernacle was made between 1467 and 1472 and originally graced the hospital Church of Santa Maria della Scala.  35 Martini, Trattati di architettura, ed. by Maltese and others, p. 237. See also Sinding-Larsen, ‘Some Functional and Icono­graphical Aspects of the Centralised Church’, p. 212; Stabenow, ‘Introduzione’ to Lo Spazio e il culto, p. 13; and Nagel, The Controversy of Renaissance Art, p. 211.  36 Serlio, Sebastiano Serlio on Architecture, trans. and ed. by Hart and Hicks, p. 398.

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Figure 11.5. Pierre Puget, ‘Project for an altar and baldachin for Santa Maria di Carignano, Genoa’, Marseille, Musée des Beaux-Arts, drawing inv. 264. Mid-seven­ teenth century. Image courtesy of Marseille, Musée des Beaux-Arts.

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No altar was built at the centre of the church during Alessi’s time. Yet, in 1663, members of the Sauli family commissioned Pierre Puget to design a new high altar that was indeed to be located at the centre of the building.37 This project was also never executed, but Guy Walton linked it to two drawings by Puget: one large drawing (measuring nearly two metres in height) in the Musée Granet in Aix-en-Provence and another, smaller drawing in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Marseilles (Figure 11.5).38 The drawings show a large baldachin, supported by pairs of barley twist columns standing on a round platform, on which is located the altar. The superstructure of the baldachin is very ornate and supports a sculpture of the Assumption of the Virgin. This seems to be the only part of the project to have been completed and can now be found above the main portal on the church’s facade. Although this later project was never executed, it demonstrates how well suited the centre of this church was as a location for such an altar. It could also be argued that this seventeenth-century plan was in fact a revival of Alessi’s original idea, adding weight to the argument that Alessi planned for an altar to be located at the centre of this church, on top of which was to be placed the Eucharistic tabernacle. To have placed the Eucharistic tabernacle on top of an altar at the centre of the building would have made the tabernacle and its contents the visual focal point for anyone entering the church from any of its three doors, thereby emphasizing the significance of what was held inside. Such an arrangement again recalls Francesco di Giorgio Martini, who in the mid-1480s addressed the question of where the sacrament should be housed in a centrally planned church. According to him, the ideal solution was to place it at the centre of the church, at equal distance from any entrance, as this would endow it with great dignity. Just as God occupies the centre of the circle of creation, so the sacrament should occupy the centre of a church. Furthermore, the centre is unique within the space of a church and is therefore an appropriate location for Christ, present in the Eucharist, who is also unique.39 Francesco di Giorgio Martini’s words about the appropriate location for the holy sacraments and his project at Siena Cathedral some twenty years later reflect the strong interest in the importance of the Eucharist that was a hallmark of movements for spiritual reform through the fifteenth century.

 37 The account books for Santa Maria Assunta record payments to Pierre Puget and other unnamed masters, for their work on the model for the high altar. According to the account books this high altar was destined to go in the middle of the church, under the dome. Genoa, SA, Archivio della Basilica di S. Maria Assunta di Carignano, Scritture contabili, Filze e buste, 116 1655–75. Published in Varni, Spigolature artistiche nell’archivi della basilica di Carignano, p. 72.  38 Walton, ‘Pierre Puget’s Projects for the Church of Santa Maria Assunta di Carignano’.  39 Martini, Trattati, 2.409 (Codice Magliabechiano II.I.141, fol. 44v), cited in Nagel, The Controversy of Renaissance Art, p. 211.

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This devotion only grew in the sixteenth century as a result of Protestant criticisms of the doctrine of transubstantiation. It is in this context that we must view Alessi’s planned tabernacle. Alessi’s patrons must have been well aware of the controversy surrounding the Eucharist, not least because the Compagnia del Divino Amore actively promoted the importance of the Mass and the belief of the Real Presence of Christ in the consecrated Eucharist. In his reforms in the diocese of Brugnato in the early sixteenth century, Bishop Filippo Sauli had been particularly concerned that the sacraments should be housed in such a way that they were endowed with an appropriate level of dignity.

Gian Matteo Giberti and the Tornacoro of Verona Cathedral Alessi’s plan to place a tabernacle at the centre of the building, probably on top of an altar, also reflects the influence of Giberti, whose work Alessi must have known of either directly or through the Sauli. Giberti himself was particularly devoted to the Eucharist, an interest that he had developed during his early career in Rome and that he would have exercised as a member of the Compagnia del Divino Amore, which promoted the practice of taking communion on a frequent basis, rather than just once or twice a year.40 Such practices are reflected in Giberti’s treatise, the Constitutiones, published in 1542, which outlined the primacy of the Eucharist in the Catholic faith and stipulated that all churches in the diocese should have a tabernacle on the high altar.41 These ideas were also translated into architecture at the cathedral of Santa Maria Matricolare in Verona by Michele Sanmicheli, working under Giberti’s patronage. Both the treatise and the Verona Cathedral seem to have influenced Alessi and his Sauli patrons.42 Much of Sanmicheli’s attention was focused on the area of the chancel, where work was underway by 1534 (Figure 11.6). In this part of the cathedral, Sanmicheli erected the tornacoro screen, behind which was located a new high altar and on top of which was placed the Eucharistic tabernacle.43  40 Davies and Hemsoll, Michele Sanmicheli, pp. 111–12, and Cervato, ‘Funiculus triplex difficile rumpitur’, pp. 40–42.  41 Giberti, Constitutiones editae. Pasquali, ‘Nelle Costituzioni per il clero la riforma della Chiesa veronese’.  42 It should be noted here that Frommel has recently argued for an attribution of the tornacoro screen to Giulio Romano; see Frommel, ‘Gian Matteo Giberti e Giulio Romano’.  43 For a detailed analysis of the chancel of Verona Cathedral, see Davies and Hemsoll, Michele Sanmicheli, pp. 101–14. See also Puppi, Michele Sanmicheli; Boucher, ‘Il tornacoro di Sanmicheli nel duomo di Verona’, pp. 162–63; Moore, ‘Sanmicheli’s Tornacoro in Verona Cathedral’; Puppi, Michele Sanmicheli architetto; Brownwell, ‘La figura di committente del vescovo Gian Matteo Giberti’; Serafini, ‘Gian Matteo Giberti e il Duomo di Verona’; Jobst, ‘Liturgia e culto dell’Eucaristia nel programma spaziale della chiesa’.

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Figure 11.6. Michele Sanmicheli, ‘Tornacoro Screen’, Verona, Cathedral. c. 1534. Photo: Author.

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Although the tabernacle is now lost, we know from descriptions that it was further raised by four supporting angels.44 This was a highly unusual arrangement. Not only was the tabernacle placed directly on the high altar, it was also located close to the centre of the chancel, which gave it a natural prominence.45 By placing the tabernacle on the high altar within the structure of the tornacoro, Giberti fulfilled his wish to encourage devotion to the Eucharist, for from its raised position at the centre of the chancel, the tabernacle became both the figurative and literal focal point of the building. From a passage in Pier Francesco Zini’s contemporary bio­graphy of Giberti, it would appear that Giberti had chorum ipsum miro quodam artificio pulchriorem amplioremque […], ut in medio tamquam cor in pectore, & mentem in animo, tabernaculum ipsum, ubi sacrosanctam Domini Jesu Christi corpus ponitur, contineret. [made the choir larger and more beautiful with great skill […] in such a way that it contained the tabernacle for the body of Lord Jesus Christ like the heart in the middle of the breast and mind in the centre of the soul.]46 The significance of the tabernacle as the spiritual heart of the building meant that it had to be as visible as possible, so that, according to Zini, it would inspire devotion in the minds of the priests and laymen.47 From its location at the front of the presbytery, protected by, but still visible through, the tornacoro, and raised up so that it could be seen by everyone, Giberti’s tabernacle acted as a focal point for the congregation of the cathedral. Alessi’s tabernacle was not placed on the high altar. Yet, its location at the centre of the church fits with Giberti’s ideas about the importance of the tabernacle and the need to place it at the heart of the building, where it could be seen by everyone and act as a focus for Eucharistic devotion. It can also be said that by placing the tabernacle at the centre of a centrally planned building, Alessi developed yet further Giberti’s arrangement of the tabernacle at Verona Cathedral. In Verona, Sanmicheli was able to place the high altar and tabernacle at the centre of a centrally planned space created by the oval of the tornacoro in the chancel at the east end of the cathedral. Alessi was able to take a centrally planned church and arrange it around a central tabernacle. Santa Maria Assunta can therefore be seen to reflect the concept of Verona’s chancel, but on a much larger scale. From this it is possible to conclude that it was the desire to locate a Eucharistic tabernacle at the centre of the church that led Galeazzo Alessi and his patrons in the Sauli family to choose a quincunx plan. Indeed, the  44 Baldissin Molli, ‘Ipotesi per un tabernacolo’, pp. 157–58.  45 Davies and Hemsoll, Michele Sanmicheli, pp. 108–12.  46 Zini, Boni pastoris exemplum, pp. 258–59, cited in Davies and Hemsoll, Michele Sanmicheli, p. 112.  47 Zini, Boni pastoris exemplum, cited in Davies and Hemsoll, Michele Sanmicheli, p. 112.

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tabernacle is so fundamental to the whole design of Santa Maria Assunta that it must have been planned from the very start. By virtue of this choice, Alessi was able to confer the tabernacle with the highest level of dignity and make it the visual focus, while at the same time neatly housing the other functions of the church, such as the side altars and canon’s choir, in other, discreet, and clearly defined spaces such as the four tempietti and the apse. Whilst an unusual arrangement, precedents for it can be found in the treatises of Francesco di Giorgio Martini and Sebastiano Serlio, which Alessi must have known. It was, however, the Sauli and their attitude towards reform that drove the desire to underline through architecture the importance of the Eucharist. Given their close relationship with Gian Matteo Giberti, they must have been aware of his plans for the redevelopment of the cathedral of Santa Maria Matricolare in Verona and prompted their architect to look at what Sanmicheli had achieved there and to incorporate those ideas into the design of Santa Maria Assunta in Genoa. The result is a remarkable church, planned around the concept of a Eucharistic tabernacle that would be the actual and liturgical heart of the building. Designed in 1549, this arrangement of the tabernacle at Santa Maria Assunta predates by fifteen years Carlo Borromeo’s arrangement of the Eucharistic tabernacle in Milan Cathedral, which only gained its definitive form in 1564.48 While the examples of the Eucharistic tabernacle at Verona and Milan cathedrals are better known today and arguably had a wider influence, Alessi’s plan for Santa Maria Assunta is an important stepping stone between the work commissioned by the episcopal reformers Giberti and Borromeo. Alessi was, of course, not the only link between these two reforming bishops. Niccolò Ormaneto, who was hired by Borromeo in 1564 as his vicar general, had previously worked as Giberti’s principal minister in Verona.49 Yet Alessi, who by 1559 was working in Borromeo’s Milan, had developed at least a decade earlier an architectural language that realized the centrality of the Eucharist in a form that went beyond theo­ logical argumentation and into the direct worship experience of believers. Galeazzo Alessi’s design for Santa Maria Assunta, with its architectural plan and central Eucharistic tabernacle, acts as a bridge between the better-known cathedrals of Verona and Milan. It underscores the broader scope of spiritually inspired innovation that was occurring in sixteenth-century Genoa, a city seldom recognized for more than the Compagnia del Divino Amore in the early stages of the movement for religious reform that would transform Italy over the course of the sixteenth century. The plans that Alessi and the Sauli developed for the church demonstrate how the Eucharistic devotion of that brotherhood might also inspire built forms.

 48 Jobst, ‘Liturgia e culto dell’Eucaristia nel programma spaziale della chiesa’, p. 115.  49 Nagel, The Controversy of Renaissance Art, p. 255. For further information, see Filipazzi, ‘L’influsso di Gian Matteo Giberti’.

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That exciting and important innovations might emerge at the margins confirms what we already know about how art and architecture developed during the early Catholic Reformation — from the periphery to the centre and not the other way around. It also underscores the importance of those networks of reform-minded and often peripatetic individuals that were found throughout Italy during this period and whose members transmitted not only theo­logical concepts but also artistic and architectural ideas, musical forms, and institutional innovations. It was this capillary system of reform-minded patrons, theo­logians, architects, artists, and ecclesiastics that drove the most significant developments of Renaissance religion in a period of intense change.

Works Cited Manu­scripts and Archival Sources Bo­logna, Biblioteca Universitaria di Bo­logna, MS 400 Genoa, Archivio di Stato di Genova [ASG], Notaio Antico 2049 Genoa, Sauli Archive [SA], Archivio della Basilica di S. Maria Assunta di Carignano, Filze e buste, Scritture ‘rerum magni momenti’, 7 1552–1678 Genoa, Sauli Archive [SA], Archivio della Basilica di S. Maria Assunta di Carignano, Scritture contabili, Filze e buste, 105 1560–69 Genoa, Sauli Archive [SA], Archivio della Basilica di S. Maria Assunta di Carignano, Scritture contabili, Filze e buste, 116 1655–75 Rome, Biblioteca Angelica, MS 1826 Primary Sources Giberti, Gian Matteo, Constitutiones editae per Reverndiss. in Christo patrem D. Jo. Matthaeum Gibertum episcopum Veronen. ac in civitate et dioc. Veronen. legatum apostolicum, ex Sanctorum Patrum dictis et canonicis institutis ac variis negotiis quotidie occurrentibus et longo rerum usu collectae et in unum redactae (Veronae: apud Antonium Putelletum, 1542) Martini, Francesco di Giorgio, Trattati di architettura, ingegneria e arte militare, ed. by Corrado Maltese and others (Milano: Edizioni Il Polifolo, 1967) Serlio, Sebastiano, Sebastiano Serlio on Architecture, trans. and ed. by Vaughan Hart and Peter Hicks (New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­sity Press, 1996) Zini, Pier Francesco, Boni pastoris exemplum ac specimen singular ex Jo. Matthaeo Giberto Episcopo expressum atque propositum, in G. and P. Ballerini, Jo. Matthaei Giberti episcopi veronensis opera (Verona: 1733), pp. 258–59

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Secondary Studies Agostini, Marco, and Giovanna Baldissin Molli, eds, Gian Matteo Giberti (1495– 1543): Atti del convegno di studi, 2–3 dicembre 2009 (Cittadella: Biblos, 2012) Algeri, Giuliana, ‘Alessi in Umbria’, in Galeazzo Alessi e l’architettura del Cinquecento: Atti del convegno internazionale di studi Genova, 16–20 aprile 1974, ed. by Ennio Poleggi and others (Genoa: Sagep, 1975), pp. 193–201 Anderson, Marvin W., ‘Gregorio Cortese and Roman Catholic Reform’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 1 (1970), 75–106 Antonucci, Micaela, ‘Galeazzo Alessi: l’estro silenzioso di un maestro dell’architettura del Cinquecento’, in AID Monuments: Galeazzo Alessi Architetto-Ingegnere, ed. by Claudia Conforti and Vittorio Gusella (Rome: ARACNE editrice, 2013), pp. 29–39 Baldissin Molli, Giovanna, ‘Ipotesi per un tabernacolo’, in Gian Matteo Giberti (1495–1543): Atti del convegno di studi, 2–3 dicembre 2009, ed. by Marco Agostini and Giovanna Baldissin Molli (Cittadella: Biblos, 2012), pp. 155–62 Black, Christopher F., Italian Confraternities in the Sixteenth Century (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 1989) Boucher, Bruce, ‘Il tornacoro di Sanmicheli nel duomo di Verona’, in Palladio a Verona, catalogo della mostra, ed. by Paola Marini and Howard Burns (Verona: Pozza, 1980), pp. 162–63 Brownwell, Penelope C., ‘La figura di committente del vescovo Gian Matteo Giberti’, in Veronese e Verona, ed. by Sergio Marinelli (Verona: Museo di Castelvecchio, 1988), 53–83 Caspary, Hans, ‘Das Sakramentstabernakel in Italien bis zum Konzil von Trient Gestalt, Ikono­graphie und Symbolik, kultische Funktion’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Munich, 1965) Cataldi Palau, Annaclara, ‘Filippo Sauli ed i suoi rapporti con umanisti contemporanei’, Res Publica Litterarum, 10 (1987), 39–45 Cervato, Dario, ‘Funiculus triplex difficile rumpitur: Giberti, il circolo spirituale di Gian Pietro Carafa (Paolo IV) e san Gaetano Thiene e altri circoli italiani’, in Gian Matteo Giberti (1495–1543): Atti del convegno di studi, 2–3 dicembre 2009, ed. by Marco Agostini and Giovanna Baldissin Molli (Cittadella: Biblos, 2012), pp. 39–45 Cesareo, Francesco C., Humanism and Catholic Reform: The Life and Work of Gregorio Cortese (1483–1548) (New York: Peter Lang, 1990) Collett, Barry, Italian Benedictine Scholars and the Reformation: The Congregation of Santa Giustina of Padua, Oxford Historical Mono­graphs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985) Conforti, Claudia, ‘Galeazzo Alessi e il suo tempo’, in AID Monuments: Galeazzo Alessi Architetto-Ingegnere, ed. Claudia Conforti and Vittorio Gusella (Rome: ARACNE editrice, 2013), pp. 23–28 Corry, Maya, and others, eds, Madonnas and Miracles: The Holy Home in Renaissance Italy (London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 2017)

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Davies, Paul, and David Hemsoll, Michele Sanmicheli (Milan: Electa, 2004) De Negri, Emmina, Galeazzo Alessi Architetto a Genova (Genoa: Sagep, 1957) Filipazzi, Antonio, ‘L’influsso di Gian Matteo Giberti attraverso l’azione di Nicolo’ Ormaneto’, in Gian Matteo Giberti (1495–1543): Atti del convegno di studi, 2–3 dicembre 2009, ed. by Marco Agostini and Giovanna Baldissin Molli (Cittadella: Biblos, 2012), pp. 73–87 Fragnito, Gligliola, ‘Il cardinale Gregorio Cortese (1483?–1548) nella crisi religiosa del Cinquecento’, Benedictina, 30 (1983), 129–71 Frommel, Christoph Luitpold, ‘Gian Matteo Giberti e Giulio Romano’, in Gian Matteo Giberti (1495–1543): Atti del convegno di studi, 2–3 dicembre 2009, ed. by Marco Agostini and Giovanna Baldissin Molli (Cittadella: Biblos, 2012), pp.  131–40 Ghia, Andrea, ‘Il cantiere della Basilica di S. Maria di Carignano dal 1548 al 1602’, Atti della Società Ligure di Storia Patria, 39 (1999), 263–399 Gill, Rebecca M., ‘Conception and Construction: Galeazzo Alessi and the Use of Drawings in Sixteenth-Century Architectural Practice’, Architectural History, 59 (2016), 181–219 —— , ‘Galeazzo Alessi: Church Architecture and Church Reform, 1548–1569’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Uni­ver­sity of Reading, 2012) Ginzburg, Carlo, and Adriano Prosperi, Giochi di pazienza: Un seminario sul Beneficio di Cristo (Turin: Einaudi, 1975) Hyde, Helen, Cardinal Bendinello Sauli and Church Patronage in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2009) —— , ‘Early Cinquecento Popolare Art Patronage in Genoa, 1500–1528’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Uni­ver­sity of London, Birkbeck College, 1994) Jobst, Christoph, ‘Liturgia e culto dell’Eucaristia nel programma spaziale della chiesa: I tabernacoli Eucaristici e la trasformazione dei presbiteri negli scritti ecclesiastici dell’ epoca intorno al concilio di Trento’, in Lo Spazio e il culto: relazioni tra edificio ecclesiale e uso liturgico dal xv al xvi secolo, ed. by Jörg Stabenow (Venice: Marsilio, 2006), pp. 91–126 Kidwell, Carol, Pietro Bembo: Lover, Linguist, Cardinal (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Uni­ver­sity Press, 2004) Mayer, Thomas F., Reginald Pole: Prince & Prophet (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ ver­sity Press, 2000) Miarelli Mariani, Gaetano, ‘Aggiunte e notazioni sulla formazione di Galeazzo Alessi’, in Galeazzo Alessi e l’architettura del Cinquecento: Atti del convegno internazionale di studi Genova, 16–20 aprile 1974, ed. by Ennio Poleggi and others (Genoa: Sagep, 1975), pp. 203–10 Moore, Derek, ‘Sanmicheli’s Tornacoro in Verona Cathedral: A New Drawing and Problems of Interpretation’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 44 (1985), 221–31 Nagel, Alexander, The Controversy of Renaissance Art (Chicago: Uni­ver­sity of Chicago Press, 2011) Parks, George B., ‘Did Pole Write the “Vita Longoli”?’, Renaissance Quarterly, 26 (1973), 274–85

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Pasquali, Roberto, ‘Nelle Costituzioni per il clero la riforma della Chiesa veronese per la riforma della Chiesa universale’, in Gian Matteo Giberti (1495–1543): Atti del convegno di studi, 2–3 dicembre 2009, ed. by Marco Agostini and Giovanna Baldissin Molli (Cittadella: Biblos, 2012), pp. 61–72 Pastore, Alessandro, Marcantonio Flaminio: Fortune e Sfortune di un Chierico nell’Italia del Cinquecento (Milan: F. Angeli, 1981) Puppi, Lionello, Michele Sanmicheli (Padua: Marsilio, 1971) —— , Michele Sanmicheli architetto: Opera completa (Rome: Caliban, 1986) Repishti, Francesco, and Richard V. Schofield, Architettura e Controriforma: I dibattiti per la facciata del duomo di Milano, 1582–1682 (Milan: Electa, 2004) Serafini, Alessandro, ‘Gian Matteo Giberti e il Duomo di Verona. 1. Il programma, il contesto’, Venezia Cinquecento, 11 (1996), 75–161 Sinding-Larsen, Staale, ‘Some Functional and Icono­graphical Aspects of the Centralised Church in the Italian Renaissance’, Acta ad archaeo­logiam et artium historiam pertinentia, 2 (1965), 203–52 Solfaroli Camillocci, Daniela, I Devoti Della Carità: Le confraternite del Divino Amore nell’Italia del primo Cinquecento (Naples: La Città del Sole, 2002) Stabenow, Jörg, ed., Lo Spazio e il culto: relazioni tra edificio ecclesiale e uso liturgico dal xv al xvi secolo (Venice: Marsilio, 2006) Theones, Christoph, ‘Santa Maria di Carignano e la tradizione della Chiesa centrale a cinque cupole’, in Galeazzo Alessi e l’architettura del Cinquecento: Atti del convegno internazionale di studi Genova, 16–20 aprile 1974, ed. by Ennio Poleggi and others (Genoa: Sagep, 1975), pp. 319–25 Timmermann, Achim, Real Presence: Sacrament Houses and the Body of Christ, c. 1270–1600 (Brepols: Turnhout, 2009) Tiraboschi, Girolamo, Storia della Letteratura Italiana (Venice, 1824) Tomaini, Placido, Attività pastorale di Filippo Sauli, vescovo di Brugnato (1512–1528) (Città di Castello: Unione Arti Grafiche, 1964) Varni, Santo, Spigolature artistiche nell’archivi della basilica di Carignano (Genova: Tipografia del Regio Istituto Sordo-Muti, 1877) Walton, Guy, ‘Pierre Puget’s Projects for the Church of Santa Maria Assunta di Carignano’, Art Bulletin, 46 (1964), 89–94

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Sally J. Cor nelison

Art and Religion in Late Renaissance Arezzo Reconsidering Vasari’s Church Renovations

For several decades, scholars have rightly stressed that the history of Italian Renaissance art and architecture is characterized by both continuity and change. That is, during the early modern period, patrons and artists transformed visual vocabularies and styles, but the fundamentally medi­eval meanings and functions of many objects, spaces, and images remained largely unaltered. Nowhere is this more evident than in the religious art of the period in general, and, more specifically, that associated with saints’ cults and relics — a topic that has long been a focus of my research. Indeed, my study of the visual culture of relic cults, such as that of the sainted Florentine archbishop Antoninus Pierozzi (1389–1464, canonized 1523), has led me to explore Renaissance religion on a variety of levels.1 I have considered the secular and clerical patrons who carefully shaped sacred sites and objects to promote themselves, the religious orders with which they were affiliated, and the effectiveness of saintly intercessors. I have also been particularly interested in religion as a lived phenomenon, one practiced by people from a variety of social classes who approached their faith and the cult of saints as a means to influence positively events as varied as the conception or

* I thank Peter Howard and Nicholas Terpstra for inviting me to present an earlier version of this paper at the 2015 conference ‘Renaissance Religions: Modes and Meanings in History’, as well as my fellow presenters for two days of thoughtful scholarship and stimulating discussions. I am indebted to Don Vezio Soldani, formerly of the Badia of Sts Flora and Lucilla in Arezzo, for giving me the opportunity to study closely and photo­graph Vasari’s high altar and the Albergotti Altarpiece on several occasions. I am also grateful to the staffs of Arezzo’s Archivio di Stato, Biblioteca Città, Archivio Storico Diocesano, and the Vasari Archive at the Casa Vasari, as well as those of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, and Syracuse Uni­ver­sity’s Libraries and Interlibrary Loan service for their invaluable resources and assistance.  1 Cornelison, Art and the Relic Cult of St Antoninus.

Sally J. Cornelison (Syracuse Uni­ver­sity, [email protected]) is a specialist in the history of late medi­eval and early modern Italian sacred art. Her current research focuses on the religious paintings of artist, architect, and bio­grapher Giorgio Vasari.

Renaissance Religions: Modes and Meanings in History, ed. by Peter Howard, Nicholas Terpstra, and Riccardo Saccenti, ES 26 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2021) pp. 301–323 10.1484/M.ES-EB.5.121910

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birth of a child, a long journey, or a drought.2 The faithful encountered the objects of their religious devotions within fixed, sacred environments like the St Antoninus Chapel by Giambo­logna at the Florentine Church of San Marco, or as transient events such as relic processions of the type Gentile Bellini depicted in his famous late quattrocento painting of a confraternal procession in Venice’s Piazza San Marco. What I have discovered along the way is that the history of Renaissance religion as it relates to sacred sites and objects often is reduced to discussions of institutional competition — that is, it is presented predominantly in terms of success or failure or as a continual jockeying for primacy, power, and revenue from pious pilgrims. This approach, however, tends to obscure the more subtle realities of the nature and the rural and urban landscapes of early modern religion. For example, I have disproven the long-standing notion that the cult of St Antoninus was a sacred non-starter. Instead, visual and documentary evidence make it clear that his early burial site attracted its fair share of devotees, particularly women concerned with fertility issues. In fact, the chapel held its own quite well in an intercessory niche market dominated by other sacred sites, such as the devotional juggernaut of the miraculous Annunciation image at the Church of Santissima Annunziata, which is only a short distance from San Marco. I have also shown that, like many sacred commissions, St Antoninus’s chapel was designed to maintain and stress well-established visual traditions and ritual practices. Key elements of the chapel and its liturgy linked Antoninus to his episcopal predecessor, the early Christian bishop-saint Zenobius (d. c. 424), and to the St Zenobius Chapel in the east tribune of Florence Cathedral.3 Zenobius, in turn, has been regarded as placing a distant second to John the Baptist in the ranks of Florence’s patron saints. However, his proven record of effecting miracles, status as the patron of the Florentine bishopric, and the extensive ritual and artistic pairing of Zenobius’s and the Baptist’s relics and images instead present Zenobius as a key part of a powerful saintly cohort that collectively met Florence’s spiritual and protective needs.4 It is these qualities of interconnectedness, multivalency, and non-exclusivity that, perhaps more than any others, have defined my approach to the study of Renaissance religion — an approach that has drawn me in

 2 This aspect of lived religion in the early modern period has been associated with the influential idea of ‘popular religion’ — the socio-historical study of devotions shared by elites and non-elites alike that historians such as Peter Burke and Natalie Zemon Davis defined and championed in the late 1970s and 1980s. See Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe; Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France.  3 Cornelison, ‘Tales of Two Bishop Saints’; Cornelison, Art and the Relic Cult of St Antoninus, pp. 131, 154–55, 160–61, 202–03.  4 Cornelison, ‘Saints & Status in Late Medi­eval and Early Renaissance Florence’. See also Cornelison, ‘Art Imitates Architecture’ pp. 650–55.

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particular to Robert Maniura’s nuanced examinations of Marian cult sites.5 By focusing on the image cult of the Madonna delle Carceri at Giuliano da Sangallo’s eponymous church in Prato and the relic cult of the Virgin Mary’s belt, known as the sacro cingolo, at Prato Cathedral, Maniura demonstrated that these sacred objects and the building and chapel that house them, respectively, were interdependent parts of an ‘established devotional network’, rather than localized and fragmented ones that perpetually competed for devotees.6 I find especially compelling his proposal that ‘devotional inclusivity is not incompatible with institutional rivalry’.7 In other words, Maniura maintains that, although some shrines and churches did vie with each other for pilgrim traffic, this competition existed primarily at the administrative level and did not necessarily affect popular devotions, which, more often than not, were directed at both holy sites, as well as others beyond them. In this essay, I will delve further and chrono­logically later into these rather large issues of continuity, change, and interconnected multivalency, using Giorgio Vasari’s (1511–1574) renovation of the Church of the Pieve during the 1560s in his hometown of Arezzo and, to a lesser extent, his contemporary work at Arezzo Cathedral as case studies. The literature on Vasari’s interventions in those churches rarely ventures beyond discussions of the rivalry that existed between the two sacred sites, considerations of his work there as products of Catholic-Reformation sensibilities, and their general treatment as minor preludes to the better-known, Medici-sponsored renovations he carried out in the Florentine mendicant basilicas of Santa Maria Novella and Santa Croce.8 A contextual reconsideration of Vasari’s Aretine projects gives me an opportunity to address a question that has troubled me for some time: How revisionary was the Catholic Reformation when it came to saints’ shrines, chapels, and relics? Within the past decade or so, scholars such as Gauvin Bailey and Douglas Dow have rightly questioned the degree to which the Council of Trent (1545–63) and Catholic Reformation transformed late sixteenth-century religious art.9 Like Bailey and Dow, I see a dearth of evidence of a new piety or an increased interest in saint’s cults and relics in the period. Instead, with Maniura’s model of  5 See Maniura, ‘Image and Relic in the Cult of Our Lady of Prato’; Maniura, ‘Persuading the Absent Saint’; Maniura, ‘Two Marian Image Shrines’; Maniura, Art and Miracle in Renaissance Tuscany.  6 Maniura, ‘Two Marian Image Shrines’, p. 219.  7 Maniura, ‘Two Marian Image Shrines’, p. 220.  8 For Vasari’s church renovations, see Isermeyer, ‘Il Vasari e il restauro delle chiese medi­evali’; Hall, Renovation and Counter-Reformation; Lotz, ‘Le trasformazioni vasariane’; Conforti, Vasari architetto, pp. 209–23; Satkowski, Giorgio Vasari, ch. 6; Romby, ‘Scenografia dello spazio sacro’.  9 Bailey, ‘Catholic Reform and Bernardino Poccetti’s Chiostro dei Morti’; Bailey, Between Renaissance and Baroque; Dow, Apostolic Icono­graphy and Florentine Confraternities, esp. pp. 2–3; Dow, ‘Tradition and Reform in Sixteenth-Century Florentine Painting’.

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Figure 12.1. Arca of St Donato, Arezzo, Cathedral. Mid-1360s – c. 1374. Photo: Author.

interdependent devotional networks in mind, we shall see that Vasari treated Arezzo’s two most prestigious churches and the relics they housed as complementary units in a cohesive sacred cityscape that were every bit as firmly grounded in Aretine sacred tradition and religiosity as they were in a climate of institutional reformation. First, some background information is in order. At the request of his friend, the Bishop of Arezzo, Bernardetto Minerbetti (1507–1574), between 1554 and 1556, a full decade before the start of his Florentine church renovations, Vasari developed a plan to renovate Arezzo Cathedral’s east end. His programme included demolishing the tramezzo, or rood screen, the structure that spanned the width of the church’s nave whose primary purpose was to segregate the clergy and laity during Mass, to provide an unobstructed

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Figure 12.2. Cristofano Donato Conti, Plan, Pieve, Arezzo, Archivio Storico Diocesano Arezzo, Archivio della Pieve. Before 1799. Photo: Author. A: High altar; B: Albergotti altar; C: Camaiani altar; D: Fraternita altar.

view of the elevation of the host. He also intended to relocate the high altar,10 which is part of an elaborate shrine (arca) that houses the body of Arezzo’s early Christian-era bishop and patron saint, Donato (d. c. 362), closer to the nave (Figure 12.1). That change was predicated on moving the cathedral’s choir, which stood before the high altar, to the polygonal apse behind it.11  10 A large sacrament tabernacle was to be added to the high altar, and Vasari designed walnut stalls for the new, apsidal choir. See Arezzo, ASA, Opera del Duomo di Arezzo, Deliberazioni degli operai 5, 1542–71, fol. 146v; Arezzo, ASA, Albergotti, ‘Notizie istoriche delle chiese’, fol. 51r; Pasqui and Pasqui, La cattedrale aretina e suoi monumenti, p. 211; Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori, ed. by Milanesi, v, 359; Torriti, ‘I mobili di Giorgio Vasari tra novità e tradizione classica’, pp. 77, 86 n. 10.  11 For Donato as Arezzo’s patron saint and his relics at Arezzo Cathedral, see Webb, Patrons and Defenders, pp. 38–39; Freni, ‘Studies in Art, Architecture and Patronage in Arezzo’, i, 112–17,

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Due to protestations on the part of the cathedral operai, ten years passed before the renovation was carried out.12 In the meantime, Vasari undertook another, more extensive project at the prestigious Romanesque Church of the Pieve (Figure 12.2). It echoed in type, but exceeded in scale, a previous renewal of the church that had occurred in the 1320s, when Pietro Lorenzetti (d. c. 1348) painted his important polyptych for the Pieve’s high altar (Figure 12.3), the choir was refurbished, and four new vaults were added, very possibly to the church’s east end.13 Giovanni Freni identified this late medi­eval decorative and architectural campaign at the collegiate church as the Pieve’s possibly competitive response to a flurry of building activity at the ‘rival’ cathedral;14 similar conclusions could be drawn about Vasari’s projects at the cathedral and Pieve in the 1550s and 1560s.15 Vasari may have replaced the Pieve’s original, open-timber roof with barrel vaults in the nave and side aisles, but this remains uncertain.16 What is clear is that he widened some existing windows and opened new ones in the basilica’s east end. As he had planned to do at the cathedral, Vasari eliminated the tramezzo that bisected the Pieve’s nave and moved the choir from its position in front of the high altar to the apse behind it.17 By his own account, the latter modification vastly improved the acoustics in the church and provided more room for the faithful in the nave, as well as achieved his goal of providing a clear view of the ritual elevation of the host, which the laity had previously struggled to see over the tramezzo and a music stand.18 Due to a radical restoration of the Pieve during the second half of the nineteenth century, no trace survives of Vasari’s architectural modifications or his other contributions to the church. The latter include several altar-

136–39. For the arca of St Donato, see Agnolucci, ‘L’arca-altare di San Donato’; Moskowitz, Italian Gothic Sculpture, pp. 170–73; Freni, ‘Studies in Art, Architecture and Patronage in Arezzo’, i, 140–77; Pfisterer, ‘The “Arca di San Donato” at Arezzo’; Freni, ‘Visual Hagio­graphy and its Context’; Freni, ‘Images and Relics in Fourteenth-Century Arezzo’, pp. 39–42, 46–50.  12 Isermeyer, ‘Il Vasari e il restauro delle chiese medi­evali’, p. 232; Hall, Renovation and CounterReformation, p. 4; Conforti, Vasari architetto, p. 210; Satkowski, Giorgio Vasari, pp. 85–86. For Vasari’s correspondence related to this project and the Opera’s reluctance to realize it, see Arezzo, ASA, Opera del Duomo, Corrispondenza 1, 1500–1688, fols 18v–19r.  13 Freni, ‘Studies in Art, Architecture and Patronage in Arezzo’, i, 99–100; Freni, ‘The Aretine Polyptych by Pietro Lorenzetti’, pp. 90–93.  14 Freni, ‘Studies in Art, Architecture and Patronage in Arezzo’, i, 101.  15 For the adversarial relationship between the two churches, see Freni, ‘The Setting of Rituals’, pp. 13–15.  16 Parts of the Romanesque basilica had long been structurally unsound, although the degree to which Vasari remedied these unstable areas is uncertain. See Mercantini, La Pieve di S. Maria ad Arezzo, pp. 11–15.  17 For the original locations of the choirs in both churches, see Freni, ‘The Setting of Rituals’, p. 6.  18 Conforti, Vasari architetto, p. 210; Satkowski, Giorgio Vasari, pp. 84–85. He also replaced the fifteenth-century Gothicizing bishop’s cathedra with a new one of his own design. Mercantini, La Pieve di S. Maria ad Arezzo, pp. 11–12, 68–69 doc. 12.

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Figure 12.3. Pietro Lorenzetti, ‘Pieve Polyptych’, Arezzo, Pieve di Santa Maria. 1320–1324. Photo courtesy of Marco Botti.

pieces that have not been adequately considered as they relate to each other, much less to Vasari’s reconfiguration of the Pieve or his contemporary work at the cathedral. The Florentine Filippo Salviati commissioned one of the paintings in question, a Coronation of the Virgin for the Dominican nunnery of San Vincenzo in Prato (Figure 12.4).19 Vasari tells us that he completed the  19 Droandi, ‘Giorgio Vasari, Incoronazione della Vergine’; Fornasari, Le opere di Giorgio Vasari in Arezzo e provincia, pp. 45–46 no. 11; Cornelison, ‘Recycling, Renaissance Style’.

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Figure 12.4. Giorgio Vasari, ‘Albergotti Altarpiece (Coronation of the Virgin)’, Arezzo, Badia of Sts Flora and Lucilla. c. 1566–1570. Photo courtesy of Foto Tavanti.

painting in 1567, but for reasons that remain unclear, it was never installed at San Vincenzo.20 Three years later, Vasari’s brother Pietro sold the panel to the Aretine jurist Nerozzo Albergotti, who had it placed on his altar located  20 Arezzo, AVA, MS 30, Giorgio Vasari, ‘Ricordanze’, [1527-1573], fol. 27v; http://www.memofonte.it/home/files/pdf/vasari_ricordanze.pdf.

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Figure 12.5. Giorgio Vasari, ‘Pieve Altar’, Arezzo, Badia of Sts Flora and Lucilla. 1560–1564. Photo courtesy of Foto Tavanti.

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at the end of the Pieve’s left aisle.21 That altar had long been dedicated to the Tuscan virgin-martyr St Mustiola, and in 1559 Vasari himself had been granted patronage rights to it, which he relinquished the following year to build a new high altar for the Pieve (1560–64) that also served as his family’s funerary chapel (Figure 12.5).22 In 1568, Vasari painted the Virgin in Glory with Saints for the Camaiani Chapel dedicated to St Honofrius in the Pieve’s left aisle,23 but he died in 1574 before he could fulfil an additional commission for a Marian panel to decorate an altar on the opposite side of the church that belonged to the Fraternita dei Laici, an important local confraternity.24 In 1574, the Fraternita transferred Vasari’s commission to Federico Barocci (1535–1612), who executed for the confraternity’s chapel the Madonna del Popolo (1575–79), now at the Uffizi.25 Three of Vasari’s four Pieve altarpieces had or, in the case of the Fraternita’s commission, were to have, Marian subjects, which was appropriate for a church dedicated to the Virgin’s bodily assumption into heaven. A small oval panel depicting the Assumption and a statue of the Virgin at the top of Vasari’s high altar constitute the entirety of its Marian imagery. Indeed, the altar’s icono­graphy is more closely related to its function as a Vasari family funerary monument and its association with the Pieve’s most important relics, which were housed in a crypt below it. Nerozzo Albergotti’s altar, likewise, was a combined family and relic chapel, and it is the relationship between it, the Pieve’s high altar, and related chapels in Arezzo Cathedral on which the remainder of this essay will focus, addressing  21 Although Vasari dates the sale of the painting from 1567, primary sources show that Albergotti acquired it late in 1570. Del Vita, ‘Di alcune lettere di Papa Leone XI’, p. 223; Del Vita, Lo Zibaldone di Giorgio Vasari, p. 272; Mercantini, La Pieve di S. Maria ad Arezzo, pp. 69–71. A previously unpublished document of 1575 records the cancellation of a debt of 300 scudi on the part of Nerozzo Albergotti for the panel: ‘Ricordo come al dj 23 d’aprile 1575, se fatto conto et saldo di ogni et qualunche cosa che la buona memoria del Signore Cavaliere Giorgio vasarj havessi hauto affare con il magnifico messer Nerozzo albergotti cittadino Aretino et particolarmente di una Tavola et ornamento di essa et sua appartenere nella Pieve di Arezzo la quale se fatta scudi 300 di moneta quali cancellano scudi 300 di moneta che ’l detto Signore Cavaliere haveva per la dreto riceuti conto come al suo libro grosso 5 et fatto fine l’uno a l’altro di tutto quello havessino auto affare insieme sino a questo dj sopra detto’. Arezzo, AVA, MS 22, fol. 201r.  22 For the documents related to Vasari’s burial chapel in the Pieve, see Moriani, ‘Giorgio Vasari e Arezzo nelle fonti documentarie aretine’, pp. 48–50. Vasari noted his acquisition of patronage rights to the church’s high altar in a letter of 25 September 1560 to Vincenzo Borghini. See Fondazione Memofonte, Carteggio vasariano, no. 333.  23 Corti, Vasari, pp. 128–29 no. 106; Fornasari, Le opere di Giorgio Vasari in Arezzo e provincia, pp. 48–49 no. 13a–d.  24 Gualandi, Nuova raccolta di lettere, pp. 130–32; Mercantini, La Pieve di S. Maria ad Arezzo, pp. 15, 32 n. 41.  25 Barocci’s painting remained in the Pieve until 1786. For the commission, see Olsen, Federico Barocci, pp. 163–69; Pillsbury and Richards, The Graphic Art of Federico Barocci, pp. 25–27, 58–59; Lepri and Palesati, Fuori dalla corte, pp. 95–96 no. 77; Lingo, Federico Barocci, pp. 48–61; Hall, The Sacred Image in the Age of Art, pp. 206–11.

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in particular what the connections they share can tell us about how religion and its history were framed during the Renaissance. During the Pieve’s nineteenth-century renovation, Vasari’s Albergotti Altarpiece and high altar were relocated to Arezzo’s Badia of Sts Flora and Lucilla,26 where the high altar stands in the Badia’s east end and the Albergotti Altarpiece decorates an altar on the counter-facade at the end of the right aisle. The former has altars at the front and back and is decorated with twenty-six panel paintings depicting saints, narratives of their lives, virtues, portraits of Vasari’s ancestors, and Eucharistic scenes. Vasari painted the altar’s central panel depicting Christ Calling Sts Peter and Andrew in 1551 for Pope Julius III, but after waiting years to be compensated for his work, he reclaimed it in 1560 and had it sent from Rome to Arezzo, where he showcased it on the front of his altar.27 A majority of the high altar’s panels have onomastic and patronal connections to Vasari, his family, and the city of Arezzo. For example, there is an image on the far left of the altar’s front of St Donato, who was, as the beleaguered little beast

26 Ristori, Diario dei restauri del tempio di S. Maria, pp. 8–9, 23–24, 32–38; Mercantini, La Pieve di S. Maria ad Arezzo, p. 48. 27 For the painting, see ‘Ricordanze’, Arezzo, AVA, MS 30, fol. 20r; Giorgio Vasari: Principi, letterati e artisti nelle carte, pp. 340–41; Fornasari, Le opere di Giorgio Vasari in Arezzo e provincia, pp. 40–42; Cornelison, ‘Recycling, Renaissance Style’.

Figure 12.6. ‘Sts Donato and Stephen’, detail of Giorgio Vasari, ‘Pieve Altar’, Arezzo, Badia of Sts Flora and Lucilla. 1560–1564. Photo courtesy of Foto Tavanti.

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under his left foot indicates, a dragon-slayer (Figure 12.6).28 Another destroyer of dragons, Vasari’s name saint, George, appears on the altar’s back in Vasari and Giovanni Stradano’s St  George Killing the Dragon and twice on the front: in a predella panel on the far right that depicts one of his miracles, and standing to the right of St Paul in the narrow, vertical panel above it (Figure 12.7). The latter figure of St  George complements that of St Donato, as he, too, tramples a dragon. Moreover, the shield that the sainted soldier holds before him is cleverly decorated with Vasari’s coat of arms, on which two dragon heads face each other. The Pieve’s most important relics were translated to the Vasari altar’s crypt shortly after Bishop Minerbetti consecrated the altar on the 25 March Feast of the Annunciation in 1564.29 A small door at the base of the altar’s right side provided access to the subterranean chamber. The door is situated below a portrait of Vasari in the guise of a male saint of uncertain identity who stands next to Mary Magdalen.30 The relics kept in the crypt included the head of St Donato, which is contained in a striking, fourteenth-century reliquary bust that was displayed each year on 6 August, the eve of Donato’s feast.31 On that Figure 12.7. ‘Sts Paul and George’, detail of Giorgio Vasari, ‘Pieve Altar’, Arezzo, Badia of Sts Flora and Lucilla. 1560– 1564. Photo courtesy of Foto Tavanti.

 28 For Donato as dragon-killer, see Freni, ‘Visual Hagio­graphy and its Context’, pp. 73, 87–90.  29 Pieri and Volpi, Visite pastorali dal 1521 al 1571, p. 499.  30 For the door and the portrait, see Cornelison, ‘Vasari’s Relics’, pp. 10–11.  31 For the bust and its display, see Vasari, Le

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occasion, it probably was placed on the Pieve’s high altar. If so, it would have provided a three-dimensional complement to the similarly mitred image of the saint in the left panel on the front of Vasari’s altar. St Donato also appears on the left side of the Albergotti Altarpiece (Figure 12.4). The Aretine patron is one of several images of saints that frame the altarpiece’s central panel and have onomastic connections to members of Nerozzo Albergotti’s family or depict holy persons venerated at the Pieve. Donato’s presence in the painting’s frame probably has everything to do with the fact that, in November 1570, a marble casket purportedly containing his remains was found inside the St Mustiola altar.32 Vasari’s correspondence signals his interest in the discovery of St Donato’s relics at the Pieve, an event that immediately sparked a conflict with Arezzo Cathedral, which had long claimed to possess Donato’s headless body.33 In the eyes of the cathedral’s clergy, the discovery at the Pieve of a relic casket with Donato’s name on it undermined the sacred integrity of the arca of St Donato as the sole repository of the saint’s remains. It also marked the third time in more than 250 years that the two Aretine churches clashed over the Pieve’s claim to house more than the head of the city’s patron saint. The first occurred in 1306, the second in 1486, and each time Church officials ordered the Pieve to keep the controversial contents of its casket out of sight, permitting it to display only the St Donato reliquary bust on the eve of his feast day.34 Celebration of the saint’s annual feast on 7 August took place at the cathedral and included the requisite liturgy and offerings from subject communities, Aretine civic officials, and others.35 Although the rediscovery of the St Donato casket in 1570 led to a ruling that the Pieve was once again expected to hide it away, three years passed before this decision became official. In the interim, Vasari added St Donato’s figure to the Albergotti Altarpiece, effectively doing precisely what previous ecclesiastical rulings had prohibited the Pieve to do: acknowledge the presence of the disputed relics within the St Mustiola altar. But, rather than interpreting this as a subversive act or as one intended to promote the Pieve at the expense of the cathedral, the addition of St Donato to the altarpiece appears to be one of several ways in which Vasari built on long-standing civic, liturgical, and ritual traditions that unified the two churches, rather than privileged one over the other.

 32  33  34  35

vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori, ed. by Milanesi, i, 138; Freni, ‘Studies in Art, Architecture and Patronage in Arezzo’, i, 122–36; Freni, ‘The Aretine Polyptych by Pietro Lorenzetti’, p. 90; Freni, ‘Images and Relics in Fourteenth-Century Arezzo’, pp. 44–45. Freni, ‘The Aretine Polyptych by Pietro Lorenzetti’, p. 100. Fondazione Memofonte, Carteggio vasariano, nos 875, 911, 1116. See Freni, ‘Studies in Art, Architecture and Patronage in Arezzo’, i, 133–34; Freni, ‘Images and Relics in Fourteenth-Century Arezzo’, pp. 43–45. Freni, ‘Images and Relics in Fourteenth-Century Arezzo’, pp. 42–44; Freni, ‘The Setting of Rituals’, pp. 7–9.

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We have seen that, between 1554 and 1564, Vasari eliminated the tramezzi at both the Pieve and the cathedral and moved their respective high altars closer to the nave so as to establish retrochoirs behind them in the apses. These types of reconfigurations traditionally, and understandably, have been closely associated with Catholic Reformation tenets and treatises regarding sacred art and architecture.36 But, as Donal Cooper and others have shown, Reformation-era texts are remarkably vague on the subject of church renovation, and as Cooper states: ‘the realignment of altar and choir [in sixteenth-century Italy] was often dictated as much by custom and taste as by liturgical necessity or function’.37 It does, indeed, appear that local and regional tradition impacted Vasari’s work in Arezzo as much, if not more, than reformatory rhetoric ever did. By establishing retrochoirs behind double-sided relic altars at Arezzo’s Pieve and cathedral, he implemented an architectural and liturgical custom that was widespread in Tuscany and Umbria from the later Middle Ages. This tradition was associated with Franciscan churches in particular and, to cite one of several examples, could be seen at the Church of San Francesco in San Sepolcro, where the choir was located behind Sassetta’s (c. 1400–1450) free-standing high altarpiece (1437–44), which in turn stood above a crypt that housed the holy remains of the Blessed Ranieri Rasini (d. 1304).38 The Pieve’s high altar and chapel were similarly configured, and it is likely that Vasari and his clerical advisors viewed the one at San Sepolcro, and other double-sided, late medi­eval relic altars like it, as particularly appropriate models for the two Aretine churches. What is more, in Arezzo, Vasari both created and built upon a functional, icono­graphical, and patronal cohesion within and between the cathedral and Pieve. Not only did he remove the tramezzi and remodel the east ends of those churches in a similar manner, but for the high and Albergotti altars at the Pieve he also appears to have borrowed the placement of the figure of St Donato to the left of a central image from Pietro Lorenzetti’s Pieve polyptych and the sculpted altar-shrine of St Donato at the cathedral. That arrangement and icono­graphy marked Vasari’s two Pieve altarpieces and the fourteenth-century arca at the Duomo as repositories of Donato’s relics. Furthermore, the arca, the Lorenzetti painting, and the Vasari high altar are connected in that each has a small image of the Assumption of the Virgin above its larger central panel. The Albergotti Altarpiece shares this theme in that it combines the icono­graphy of the Assumption with that of the Coronation of the Virgin. The Marian icono­graphy in these works is not unexpected, but the inclusion of a depiction of Christ Calling Sts Peter and Andrew on the front  36 These include the edicts of the Council of Trent and treatises such as Charles Borromeo’s Instructiones fabricae et supellectilis ecclesiasticae of 1577. See Voelker, ‘Charles Borromeo’s Instructiones’; Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, ed. by Schroeder.  37 Cooper, ‘Franciscan Choir Enclosures’, p. 2.  38 Cooper and Banker, ‘The Church of San Francesco’, pp. 55–63, 69–76, 87–94, 104.

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Figure 12.8. ‘Sts Donato and Peter’, Arezzo, Cathedral, Altar of St Donato. After the late thirteenth century. Photo: Author.

of Vasari’s Pieve altar is, and it has never been fully explained beyond Joan Stack’s logical observation that Peter was the name saint of Vasari’s brother, Pietro.39 Images of the onomastic saints of Vasari and his family members decorate all four sides of the altar, but Vasari may have had an additional reason to place the painting he originally made for Julius III on its front, in that it gave him an opportunity to replicate imagery previously associated with the Pieve. It visually fostered an additional icono­graphic bond between the Pieve and the cathedral and referenced a local visual tradition of associating St Donato with the apostles.40 To be specific, images of Sts Peter and Andrew appear along with those of other apostles in the enamel plaques that decorate the mitre of the St Donato reliquary bust at the Pieve. As Freni  39 Stack, ‘The Lost Tomb of Giorgio Vasari’, p. 205.  40 Freni, ‘Visual Hagio­graphy and its Context’, p. 90. There was a chapel at the Pieve dedicated to St Andrew. Arezzo, ASA, Opera del Duomo, 1, Libri della lira ‘Del Chiericato Aretino’, fol. 8r.

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Figure 12.9. ‘Blessed Pope Gregory X and St Paul’, Arezzo, Cathedral, Altar of St Donato. After the late thirteenth century. Photo: Author.

has noted, this icono­graphy stressed Donato’s role as an apostolic saint for Arezzo, a theme that is also abundantly present in the saint’s hagio­graphy.41 Moreover, the cathedral was begun in the late thirteenth century on the site of a medi­eval monastic foundation dedicated to St Peter, the Church of San Pier Maggiore, and it bears a double dedication to the prince of the apostles and St Donato.42 This explains why sculpted figures of the cathedral’s two titular saints stand next to each other on the back of the St Donato shrine (Figure 12.8). An apostle statuette between the reliefs of the Madonna and Child and Gregory X on the front of the shrine is likely St Peter, whose missing right hand probably held his attribute of a key. At the Pieve,  41 Freni, ‘Studies in Art, Architecture and Patronage in Arezzo’, i, 125–27.  42 Freni, ‘Studies in Art, Architecture and Patronage in Arezzo’, i, 22–23; Paturzo, Il Duomo di Arezzo, pp. 22–23, 37–39.

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Donato, Peter, and Christ’s other disciples are juxtaposed once again in the Albergotti Altarpiece, where the Aretine bishop-saint appears to the left of a scene in which the apostles gather around Mary’s flower-filled tomb, with St Peter kneeling prominently in the centre of the painting’s foreground. Vasari made a further reference to Aretine Church history on the left side of the Pieve’s high altar, for the pairing of Sts Donato and Stephen may be explained by the fact that, until its demolition in 1561, Arezzo’s first cathedral was dedicated to those saints, and according to tradition, Donato himself was responsible for its construction.43 Instead of Stephen, the half figure of the Blessed Pope Gregory X serves as a pendant to St Donato’s image on the front of the cathedral arca, which leads us to another connection between the Pieve and the cathedral that, to the best of my knowledge, has not been noted.44 Gregory X died in Arezzo in 1276, and it did not take long for the Aretines to begin to venerate him as a patron saint.45 In addition to his prominent image on the front of the arca, the saintly pontiff also appears under a trefoil arch next to St Paul on the shrine’s back (Figure 12.9).46 The Blessed Gregory was also honoured in the cathedral with an elevated wall tomb, near which the cathedral’s alms box was located.47 Until the early nineteenth century, the tomb stood against the left wall of the chapel dedicated to St Sylvester to the left of the high altar and choir (Figure 12.10). Freni has noted that from the late fourteenth century, local sources reported that Gregory X provided a testamentary bequest to help finance the cathedral’s construction. Each year on the beato’s feast of 24 April, Arezzo’s civic officials made a public offering in support of the cathedral’s building programme, and the feast was likely celebrated at the Duomo’s high altar.48 Indeed, according to Freni, the cathedral’s east end

 43 Boase, Giorgio Vasari, p. 65; Freni, ‘Visual Hagio­graphy and its Context’, p. 93; Paturzo, Il Duomo di Arezzo, pp. 25–26.  44 For the reliefs of the Madonna and Child and Sts Donato and Gregory X on the Arca di San Donato, see Freni, ‘Studies in Art, Architecture and Patronage in Arezzo’, i, 151–52.  45 Freni, ‘The Setting of Rituals’, pp. 4, 6; Freni, ‘Images and Relics in Fourteenth-Century Arezzo’, p. 38; Freni, ‘Studies in Art, Architecture and Patronage in Arezzo’, i, 117–18; Licciardello, ‘Culto dei santi e vita cittadina’, pp. 432–33, 442–43. Despite proof of Gregory X’s intercessory abilities, an appeal to canonize him in the early seventeenth century was not successful. See Ditchfield, Liturgy, Sanctity and History in Tridentine Italy, ch. 10; Ditchfield, ‘Thinking with Saints’, p. 568.  46 Paul also makes an appearance on the Pieve’s high altar, where he stands next to St George on the right side of the front of the altar. There were chapels dedicated to Sts Peter and Paul in both the cathedral and the Pieve, and a further chapel dedicated to the conversion of St Paul at the Pieve. Arezzo, ASA, Opera del Duomo, 1, Libri della Lira ‘Del Chiericato Aretino’, 1474–1475, fols 5v, 7v–8r.  47 See Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori, ed. by Milanesi, i, 363; Tigler, ‘La tomba di Papa Gregorio X ad Arezzo’.  48 Del Vita, Il Duomo d’Arezzo, pp. 23–26; Freni, ‘Studies in Art, Architecture and Patronage in Arezzo’, i, 27, 31, 167–68; Freni, ‘The Setting of Rituals’, pp. 4, 9–11, 16; Paturzo, Il Duomo di Arezzo, pp. 93–96.

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Figure 12.10. Plan, Arezzo Cathedral. Courtesy of Jessica Libby.

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was conceived as an appropriate setting for the relics of both Donato and Gregory that were situated on a processional route along which, during communal rituals and on feast days, civic and religious officials and devotees approached Donato’s tomb and high altar via the side aisles and the chapels that flanked the high chapel.49 The clerics who celebrated Mass at the high altar presumably processed to the high altar from the sacristy off the church’s left aisle and through the St Sylvester Chapel. The St Sylvester Chapel, in which the Blessed Gregory is still buried, belonged to the Albergotti, the same family that possessed patronage rights to the St Mustiola altar in the Pieve.50 I am unaware of any corresponding images of the Blessed Gregory at the Pieve, but it should be noted that there and at the cathedral there were double-sided high altars that housed relics of St Donato that were flanked on the left by secondary relic chapels, one associated with St Donato, the other with the Blessed Gregory X, that were patronized by the Albergotti. The connections between the similarly configured east ends of each church would have been especially evident when the Feast of St Donato was celebrated, first at the Pieve on its vigilia and then at the cathedral the following day. This decorative, ritual, and patronal cohesiveness speaks to an artistic and liturgical history that, until now, scholars have addressed primarily in terms of institutional competition over Donato’s relics or the revisionist demands of the Catholic Reformation. Instead, Vasari stressed the continuity and cohesion of ritual and icono­ graphic tradition between the two churches and created an interdependent local network of sacred history, family, and religiosity in the heart of his hometown.

 49 Freni, ‘Studies in Art, Architecture and Patronage in Arezzo’, i, 139; Freni, ‘Spazio liturgico e luoghi sacri nella Cattedrale e nella Pieve’, pp. 210–15.  50 Freni, ‘Studies in Art, Architecture and Patronage in Arezzo’, i, 61–62, 221; Pieri and Volpi, Visite pastorali dal 1521 al 1571, p. 210; Paturzo, Il Duomo di Arezzo, p. 95.

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Works Cited Manu­scripts and Archival Sources Arezzo, Archivio di Stato di Arezzo [ASA], A. Albergotti, ‘Notizie istoriche delle chiese e luoghi pubblici di Arezzo e della Diocesi’, 1800 Arezzo, Archivio di Stato di Arezzo [ASA], Opera del Duomo, 1, Libri della Lira ‘Del Chiericato Aretino’, 1474–75 Arezzo, Archivio di Stato di Arezzo [ASA], Opera del Duomo, Corrispondenza 1, 1500–1688 Arezzo, Archivio di Stato di Arezzo [ASA], Opera del Duomo di Arezzo, Deliberazioni degli operai 5, 1542–71 Arezzo, Archivio Vasariano [AVA], MS 22 Arezzo, Archivio Vasariano [AVA], MS 30, Giorgio Vasari, ‘Ricordanze’, [1527–1573] Primary Sources Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, ed. by Henry Joseph Schroeder (Rockford, IL: Tan Books and Publishers, 1978) Pieri, Silvano and Carlo Volpi, Visite pastorali dal 1521 al 1571 (Arezzo: Archivi Diocesani, 2008) —— , Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori, ed. by Gaetano Milanesi, 10 vols (Florence: Sansoni, 1906) Voelker, Evelyn Carole, ‘Charles Borromeo’s Instructiones fabricae et supellectilis ecclesiasticae, 1577. A Translation with Commentary and Analysis’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Syracuse Uni­ver­sity, 1977) [accessed 14 June 2020] Secondary Studies Agnolucci, Ersilia, ‘L’arca-altare di San Donato nella cultura artistica del trecento aretino’, Antichità viva, 27 (1988), 32–38 Bailey, Gauvin Alexander, Between Renaissance and Baroque: Jesuit Art in Rome, 1565–1610 (Toronto: Uni­ver­sity of Toronto Press, 2003) Boase, T. S. R., Giorgio Vasari: The Man and the Book (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art; Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni­ver­sity Press, 1979) Burke, Peter, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York: New York Uni­ ver­sity Press, 1978) Conforti, Claudia, Vasari architetto (Milan: Electa, 1993) Cooper, Donal, ‘Franciscan Choir Enclosures and the Function of Double-Sided Altarpieces in Pre-Tridentine Umbria’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 64 (2001), 1–54

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Cooper, Donal, and James R. Banker, ‘The Church of San Francesco in Borgo San Sepolcro in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance’, in Sassetta: The Borgo San Sepolcro Altarpiece, ed. by Machtelt Israëls, 2 vols (Florence: Villa I Tatti; Leiden: Primavera Press, 2009), i, 53–105 Cornelison, Sally J., Art and the Relic Cult of St Antoninus in Renaissance Florence (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012) —— , ‘Art Imitates Architecture: The Saint Philip Reliquary in Renaissance Florence’, Art Bulletin, 86 (2004), 642–58 —— , ‘Recycling, Renaissance Style: Hybridity and Vasari’s Pieve Altarpieces’, in Hybridity in Late Medi­eval and Early Modern Art, ed. by Ashley Elston and Madeline Rislow (London: Routledge, forthcoming) —— , ‘Saints & Status in Late Medi­eval and Early Renaissance Florence’, in Circling Giotto: Essays on Late Medi­eval Italian Art in Honour of Joanna Cannon, ed. by Donal Cooper and Beth Williamson (Woodbridge: Boydell, forthcoming) —— , ‘Tales of Two Bishop Saints: Zenobius and Antoninus in Florentine Renaissance Art and History’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 38 (2007), 627–56 —— , ‘Vasari’s Relics’, in Encountering the Renaissance: Celebrating Gary M. Radke and 50 Years of the Syracuse Uni­ver­sity Graduate Program in Renaissance Art, ed. by Molly Bourne and A. Victor Coonin (Ramsey, NJ: The WAPACC Organization, 2016), pp. 3–14 Corti, Laura, Vasari, catalogo completo (Florence: Cantini Editore, 1989) Davis, Natalie Zemon, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford Uni­ver­sity Press, 1975) Del Vita, Alessandro, ‘Di alcune lettere di Papa Leone XI’, Rivista delle biblioteche e degli archivi, n.s. 2 (1924), 220–36 —— , Il Duomo d’Arezzo (Milan: Alfieri & Lacroix, 1914) —— , ed., Lo Zibaldone di Giorgio Vasari (Arezzo: Tipografia Zelli e C., 1938) Ditchfield, Simon, Liturgy, Sanctity and History in Tridentine Italy: Pietro Maria Campi and the Preservation of the Particular (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­ sity Press, 1995) —— , ‘Thinking with Saints: Sanctity and Society in the Early Modern World’, Critical Inquiry, 35, (2009), 552–84 Dow, Douglas N., Apostolic Icono­graphy and Florentine Confraternities in the Age of Reform (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014) —— , ‘Tradition and Reform in Sixteenth-Century Florentine Painting: Altar­pieces by Naldini and Poccetti for the Company of Sant’Agnese in Santa Maria del Carmine’, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 60 (2018), 255–77 Droandi, Isabella, ‘Giorgio Vasari, Incoronazione della Vergine: Scheda di inizio lavori’, in L’ingegno e la mano, restaurare il mai restaurato: Il restauro della Pala Albergotti di Giorgio Vasari nella Badia delle Sante Flora e Lucilla di Arezzo, ed. by Isabella Droandi (Florence: Edifir, 2009), pp. 19–32 Fornasari, Liletta, Le opere di Giorgio Vasari in Arezzo e provincia (Milan: Skira, 2011) Freni, Giovanni, ‘The Aretine Polyptych by Pietro Lorenzetti: Patronage, Icono­ graphy, and Original Setting’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 63 (2000), 59–110

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—— , ‘Images and Relics in Fourteenth-Century Arezzo’, in Images, Relics, and Devotional Practices in Medi­eval and Renaissance Italy, ed. by Sally J. Cornelison and Scott B. Montgomery (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medi­eval and Renaissance Studies, 2005), pp. 27–54 —— , ‘The Setting of Rituals: Fourteenth-Century Monuments in Arezzo Duomo’, Sculpture Journal, 9 (2003), 4–18 —— , ‘Spazio liturgico e luoghi sacri nella Cattedrale e nella Pieve’, in Arte in terra d’Arezzo: Il trecento, ed. by Aldo Galli and Paola Refice (Florence: EDIFIR, 2005), pp. 209–28 —— , ‘Studies in Art, Architecture and Patronage in Arezzo, 1277–1400’, 2 vols (unpublished doctoral thesis, Courtauld Institute of Art, 2000) —— , ‘Visual Hagio­graphy and its Context: The Narrative of the Shrine of San Donato’, Studies in Icono­graphy, 26 (2005), 59–119 Giorgio Vasari: Principi, letterati e artisti nelle carte di Giorgio Vasari. Casa Vasari: pittura vasariana dal 1532–al 1554, Sottochiesa di S. Francesco. Arezzo, 26 settembre–29 novembre 1981 (Florence: EDAM, 1981) Gualandi, Michelangelo, Nuova raccolta di lettere sulla pittura, scultura ed architettura scritte da’ più celebri personaggi dei secoli xv a xix, vol. i (Bo­logna: Tipografia Sassi, 1844) Hall, Marcia B., Renovation and Counter-Reformation: Vasari and Duke Cosimo in Sta Maria Novella and Sta Croce 1565–1577 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979) —— , The Sacred Image in the Age of Art: Titian, Tintoretto, Barocci, El Greco, Caravaggio (New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­sity Press, 2011) Isermeyer, Christian-Adolf, ‘Il Vasari e il restauro delle chiese medi­evali’, in Studi vasariani: Atti del convegno internazionale per il IV centenario della prima edizione delle ‘Vite’ del Vasari (Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1952), pp. 229–36 Lepri, Nicoletta, and Antonio Palesati, Fuori dalla corte: Documenti per la biografia vasariana (Montepulciano: Le Balze, 2003) Licciardello, Pierluigi, ‘Culto dei santi e vita cittadina ad Arezzo in età comunale: Premesse e primi risultati di una ricerca’, Archivio storico italiano, 166 (2008), 425–51 Lingo, Stuart, Federico Barocci: Allure and Devotion in Late Renaissance Painting (New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­sity Press, 2008) Lotz, Wolfgang, ‘Le trasformazioni vasariane e i nuovi edifici sacri del tardo ’500’, in Arte e religione nella Firenze de’ Medici, ed. by Massimiliano G. Rosito (Florence: Edizioni Città di Vita, 1980), pp. 81–89 Maniura, Robert, Art and Miracle in Renaissance Tuscany (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2018) —— , ‘Image and Relic in the Cult of Our Lady of Prato’, in Images, Relics, and Devotional Practices in Medi­eval and Renaissance Italy, ed. by Sally J. Cornelison and Scott B. Montgomery (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medi­eval and Renaissance Studies, 2005), pp. 193–212 —— , ‘Persuading the Absent Saint: Image and Performance in Marian Devotion’, Critical Inquiry, 35 (2009), 629–54 —— , ‘Two Marian Image Shrines in Fifteenth-Century Tuscany, the “Icono­ graphy of Architecture” and the Limits of “Holy Competition”’, in Architecture

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and Pilgrimage, 1000–1500: Southern Europe and Beyond, ed. by Paul Davies, Deborah Howard, and Wendy Pullan (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 213–29 Mercantini, Maria, La Pieve di S. Maria ad Arezzo: Tumultuose vicende di un restauro ottocentesco (Arezzo: Società Tipolitografica Editoriale, 1982) Moriani, Antonella, ‘Giorgio Vasari e Arezzo nelle fonti documentarie aretine’, in Giorgio Vasari: Disegnatore e pittore ‘Istudio, diligenza, et amorevole fatica’, ed. by Alessandro Cecchi (Milan: Skira, 2011), pp. 45–52 Moskowitz, Anita Fiderer, Italian Gothic Sculpture, c. 1250–c. 1400 (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2001) Olsen, Harald, Federico Barocci (Copen­hagen: Munksgaard, 1962) Pasqui, Angiolo, and Ubaldo Pasqui, La cattedrale aretina e suoi monumenti (Arezzo: Ernesto Bellotti, 1880) Paturzo, Franco, Il Duomo di Arezzo: Settecento anni di storia, fede, e arte (Arezzo: Letizia Editore, 2011) Pfisterer, Ulrich, ‘The “Arca di San Donato” at Arezzo and the Crisis of the Saint’s Tomb around 1400’, in Decorations for the Holy Dead: Visual Embellishments on Tombs and Shrines of Saints, ed. by Stephen Lamia and Elizabeth Valdez del Alamo (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002), pp. 219–32 Pillsbury, Edmund P., and Louise S. Richards, The Graphic Art of Federico Barocci: Selected Drawings and Prints (New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­sity Art Gallery, 1978) Ristori, Giovan Battista, Diario dei restauri del tempio di S. Maria della Pieve eseguiti dall’anno 1864 all’anno 1878 con appendice di altri documenti e illustrazioni fuori testo (Arezzo: Scuola Tipografia Aretina, 1928) Romby, Giuseppina Carla, ‘Scenografia dello spazio sacro: I rinnovamenti vasariani delle chiese medi­evali e l’allestimento della cattedrale di Pistoia’, in Giorgio Vasari: Tra capitale medicea e città del dominio, ed. by Nicoletta Lepri, Simona Esseni, and Maria Camilla Pagnini (Florence: EDIFIR, 2012), pp. 53–58 Satkowski, Leon, Giorgio Vasari: Architect and Courtier (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni­ver­sity Press, 1993) Stack, Joan, ‘The Lost Tomb of Giorgio Vasari: The Self-Commemoration of a Great Commemorator’, in Constructions of Death, Mourning, and Memory Conference, October 27–29, 2006: Proceedings, ed. by Lilian H. Zirpolo (Woodcliff Lake, NJ: The WAPACC Organization, 2006), pp. 204–07 Tigler, Guido, ‘La tomba di Papa Gregorio X ad Arezzo: Da Gano di Fazio a Camaino di Crescentino’, Atti e memorie della Accademia Petrarca di Lettere, Arti, e Scienze, 76 (2015), 205–54 Torriti, Paolo, ‘I mobili di Giorgio Vasari tra novità e tradizione classica’, in Percorsi vasariani tra le arti e le lettere, ed. by Maddalena Spagnolo and Paolo Torriti (Arezzo: Le Balze, 2004), pp. 77–87 Vasari, Georgio, ‘Catholic Reform and Bernardino Poccetti’s Chiostro dei Morti at the Church of SS. Annunziata in Florence’, Apollo, 158 (2003), 23–31 Webb, Diana, Patrons and Defenders: The Saints in the Italian City-States (London: Tauris Academic Studies; distributed by St Martin’s Press, 1996)

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Pulpits on Trial in Renaissance Italy Some Methodo­logical Issues Concerning Preachers, Inquisitors, and Historians

Introduction: Preaching as a Medium of Communication In the study of preaching, historians confront a series of methodo­logical problems connected to the specific nature of the sermon, which is, by definition, a speech presented orally. It may be delivered in a private context or (more frequently) in a public environment, from a church pulpit, the corner of a square, a princely court, or a room within the Roman Curia, and before an audience of ignorant peasants, a mixed congregation of townsfolk, or select members of the educated elite. The form of a sermon can vary from the traditional theme-based approach to the moralizing homily more characteristic of Baroque culture. It may be based on detailed, almost literal, analysis of the Holy Scriptures or take its cue from a biblical verse to provide a lesson in moral pedagogy. In terms of style, it may have a flat and simple delivery or use rhetoric packed with evocative allegories and images. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the oral nature of a preacher’s sermon makes it ambiguous, if not elusive. In an age devoid of a means of communication that could accurately record the content of a conversation or speech, it is difficult, if not impossible, to decipher a significant part of the communication exchange. Written communication — first in manu­script form and then in print — only compensates for this lack to a small extent. For centuries, even after Gutenberg’s invention, many men and women (especially the latter) were unable to read and exchanged all information verbally. Almost all of these verbal exchanges have been lost without trace, and it could even be claimed that we will never be able to have an adequate history of communication in the early modern age until the most important missing element — orality — can be reconstructed. How can this piece of the puzzle be retrieved, and how can this significant gap be bridged? Giorgio Caravale ([email protected]) is Professor of Early Modern European History at the Uni­ver­sity of Roma Tre.

Renaissance Religions: Modes and Meanings in History, ed. by Peter Howard, Nicholas Terpstra, and Riccardo Saccenti, ES 26 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2021) pp. 325–342 10.1484/M.ES-EB.5.121911

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With regard to preaching, reportationes constitute an extraordinary resource. These were notes taken during the course of a sermon by scribes, who were given the task of reporting the content of the sermon as accurately as the speed of the preacher’s delivery and the limited means available (pen and paper or, in some cases, even stylus and wax tablet) would allow. In some cases, the preachers themselves recruited a scribe because they wanted a written record of their performance. More often though, scribes took their own initiative for commercial ends, intending to sell their copies of the sermons to devout members of the laity who could afford them, or simply for devotional reasons. For example, Savonarola’s followers took notes on their master’s sermons and often rushed them to a printer in order to guarantee a wider distribution. In other cases, the scribes kept reportationes for private use, as a source of reflection and devotional development. However, reportationes are, unfortunately, somewhat rare documents, especially with regard to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.1 Equally rare were cases in which preachers delivered sermons based on notes written in advance. Indeed, they hardly ever wrote out their sermons in full before delivering them from the pulpit; they more often used a brief written outline in order to remember the main points to cover. For example, the Bishop of Bo­logna, Gabriele Paleotti, only prepared an almost-complete written text when he had to give a sermon in Latin before a select audience, preferring to improvise his sermons to the less educated believers at the parish churches in his diocese.2 Apart from the scarce reportationes and preachers’ notes, judicial records are the main source available to historians for capturing the orality of the preached word (or, at least, some of it). They often contain evidence of verbal exchanges that caused offence for some reason: for example, because they insulted an important figure in the ecclesiastical or political world, threatened established power, or were seen as heretical — or at the very least suspicious — by the authorities appointed to control orthodoxy, regardless of their origin and context. The rich collection of trial records drawn up by lay and ecclesiastical courts, and especially those held in the Inquisition archives, mainly consist of verbal testimonies or, to be precise, written records of verbal statements. Carlo Ginzburg and others have observed on several occasions that these records are comparable to anthropo­logists’ notebooks recording fieldwork;3 such sources clearly require various degrees of methodo­logical caution.  1 Delcorno, ‘Forme della predicazione cattolica fra cinque e seicento’, p. 280. On reportationes, see also Muzzarelli, Pescatori di uomini, pp. 39–44; Zafarana, ‘Bernardino nella storia della predicazione popolare’; and Bériou, ‘La Reportation des sermons parisiens’.  2 Prodi,  Il cardinale Gabriele Paleotti, ii, 90–91.  3 Ginzburg, ‘L’inquisitore come antropo­logo’, in Ginzburg, Il filo e le tracce, pp. 270–80. This essay, first published in Studi in onore di Armando Saitta, ed. by Prosperi and Pozzi, pp. 23–33, has been published in an English translation in Ginzburg, Clues, Myths and Historical Method.

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This essay deals with a specific source type, namely, verbal testimonies of sermons given by ‘suspect’ preachers. It would be wishful thinking to expect the trial records to contain faithful accounts of an entire series of Lent sermons, general homiletic sermons, or even parts of them. The archive documents mostly just contain fragments of sermons repeated by the preachers themselves when questioned by the inquisitors and recorded in writing by the notary on duty, or by trial witnesses who related their respective versions of the words they had heard from the pulpit. Even so, these inquisitorial sources do help us to reconstruct parts of oral discourse that would otherwise be lost forever.

Working with Inquisitorial Sources Using inquisitorial documentation as a source for the history of preaching involves some methodo­logical risks. The first of these is the uncritical adoption of the inquisitors’ perspective. As a result of their profession and education, inquisitors tended to interpret the society of the time using rigid controversialist categories that labelled men as either black or white, good or bad, and, in this case, orthodox or heretical. When dealing with inquisitorial documents, historians must be aware of this distorting lens, which retrospectively illuminates the entire history of Christianity and prevents them from fully understanding its meaning and development if embraced uncritically. The history of Christianity is not one of simple oppositions, as many inquisitors would have us believe. Instead, it consists of slight contrasts and nuances with fine, mutable boundaries between orthodoxy and heresy: the same accusation of heresy is used with bewildering frequency to support endless battles within the Christian world between competing religious orders, opposing theo­logical currents, and even conflicting Church institutions. The inquisitors’ controversialist categories are, therefore, an instrument to be approached with great caution, especially when applied to a period of Italian religious history such as the 1530s and 1540s, when doctrinal boundaries were particularly fragile and ambiguous. Indeed, the confines of Catholic orthodoxy were anything but well defined both before and immediately after the approval of the decree on justification by faith and works during the sixth session of the Council of Trent in 1547. Many men of the Roman Church, including some of its most influential members, reworked Protestant doctrines in their own way, thereby embracing the wind of change blowing from Germany, albeit to a minor extent. The climate of openness and dialogue that characterized the phase of religious colloquies — most notably the Colloquy of Regensburg in 1541 between Cardinal Gasparo Contarini and the Lutheran Philip Melanchthon — had a lasting effect on the Italian peninsula despite the resistance of the majority of the Roman Curia. On many issues, such as confession and

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justification by faith, the boundary between orthodoxy and heresy was not as clearly defined as the inquisitors made out until the late 1540s. The categories of spirituali (spirituals) and intransigenti (intransigents) that Italian historio­graphy has often used to describe a firm rift within the Roman Curia between one faction that was open to dialogue and interaction with Protestants, and another group that intransigently defended Catholic orthodoxy, do not always reflect the bio­graphies of the individual protagonists of the decade.4 On the other hand, the logic of an increasingly polarized clash forced many key players in the religious landscape to align themselves more clearly than they probably would have imagined or desired. For example, many Augustinian preachers such as Agostino Mainardi or Ambrogio Quistelli of Padua were soon branded heretics by their critics because of their chosen ‘evangelical path’; they developed a preaching model intended to be a reading of and meditation on the Gospel and that was Christocentric and antiphilosophical, a form of preaching that took shape ‘without questioning’ and was explicitly opposed to ‘scholastic-style’ preaching.5 With their habitual word-for-word vernacular readings and interpretations of the Pauline Epistles (the text that Luther had regarded as a symbol of his rift with Rome), they were the subject of an alarmed letter from Rome to the Papal Nuncio in Venice, Girolamo Aleandro, asking him to prevent the scandal that the decision to allow simple believers to address the ‘difficilia fidei’ (difficult questions of the faith) was sure to cause.6 Augustinian preachers defended themselves against accusations of preaching the ‘Augustinian’ doctrines of divine foreknowledge and predestination, grace and free will, faith and works in a heterodox way by saying they had restricted themselves to preaching against the ‘Pelagian heresy’,7 thereby pursuing a ‘middle path’ between Lutheranism and Pelagianism that was now extremely difficult to follow because of the nature of the head-on clash.8 The second risk that historians face when working with inquisitorial sources is the temptation to reason that the men and women who were tried by the Inquisition represented the majority (or even the entirety) of people in society at the time. When underlining the presence of a high number of preachers who became conveyors of heterodox doctrines, or were perceived as such by the Roman Inquisition, we must remember that an even greater

 4 Caravale, Beyond the Inquisition.  5 Peyronel Rambaldi, Dai Paesi Bassi all’Italia, p. 80.  6 Rusconi, ‘Predicatori e predicazione (secoli ix–xviii)’, pp. 988 and 990.  7 Peyronel Rambaldi, Dai Paesi Bassi all’Italia, pp. 80–81.  8 The two Augustinians followed different destinies. Agostino Mainardi embraced Lutheranism by escaping to Chiavenna in late 1541 after receiving an arrest warrant from the Governor of Milan, Alfonso d’Avalos; cf. Adorni Braccesi and Feci, ‘Mainardo, Agostino’. Ambrogio Quistelli managed to maintain the difficult balance between Pelagianism and Lutheranism; cf. Olivieri, ‘L’agostiniano Ambrogio Quistelli e il dibattito sulla grazia’.

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number never came under the spotlight of the Inquisition simply because they had nothing to hide and limited themselves to performing their duties without venturing onto the slippery terrain trodden by their colleagues.9 One sure way to avoid the aforementioned risks is to adopt different points of view on the historical phenomenon or individual episode under analysis. With regard to inquisitorial trials against preachers, it is useful to identify alternative documentary sources that are not cast in the same inquisitorial mould. One needs to integrate the study of Inquisition documents as much as possible with other material: letters, bio­graphical documents, and other forms of legal testimony. As these are often Church (although not inquisitorial) sources, you probably need to return to the trial documentation in order to hear the non-ecclesiastical voices; the procedural files contain some oral testimony by members of the laity of different social extractions who had been called upon by the inquisitors for various reasons to provide their versions of events. The range of voices provided by inquisitorial sources is invaluable in helping historians to understand the complexity of the issue. In short, it is clear that the records of an inquisitorial trial focusing on more-or-less openly heretical sermons by a preacher raise serious problems with regard to reliability and verisimilitude. How much of what the preacher asserted before the Inquisition court corresponds to the real content of the sermon he delivered from the pulpit? How can the original content be distinguished in light of the defensive strategies employed by the defendant during the trial in order to escape a barrage of questions from the inquisitors, or, put another way, how can the historian sidestep the filtering effect of the preacher’s attempt to turn the accusations against him back in his favour? Furthermore, how can we check the reliability of statements made by those testifying in support of or in opposition to the presumed heterodoxy of the preacher? These issues are not easy to solve, and historians working with such documents need to be accustomed to dealing with them.

Strategies of Dissimulation When analysing the records of a trial against a preacher suspected of heterodoxy, historians are faced with a further obstacle in their attempt to reconstruct the original oral version of the sermon or, more simply, a reliable religious profile of the preacher. This other filter consists of the strategies of dissimulation implemented by the preacher, above all, when the sermon was delivered from a church pulpit. Those addressing groups of believers of varying sizes from pulpits in the mid-1500s often employed a series of devices of varying degrees of subtlety in order to camouflage their

 9 On Catholic preachers struggling against the diffusion of Lutheran heresy in the Italian peninsula, see Michelson, The Pulpit and the Press in Reformation Italy.

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heterodox message behind a layer of apparent doctrinal orthodoxy, as they were usually perfectly aware of the progressive tightening of the margins of freedom that accompanied the growing hold of the Inquisition on Italian society at the time. It has recently been calculated that more than a hundred preachers who were heretics or suspected of heresy appeared before the Cardinal inquisitors in person or in actis between 1548 and 1559. These preachers had refined their rhetorical techniques and strategies of dissimulation over the years, and it was not always easy for inquisitors to decipher their coded language. This coded language, the art of omission and ‘talking by remaining silent’ — which the great Capuchin preacher Bernardino Ochino was a master of — had spread to such an extent that the defenders of Roman orthodoxy were forced to improve their tools and methods of surveillance. When the Papal Nuncio in Venice, Fabio Mignanelli, summoned ‘different members of the Church separately’ at the beginning of the 1540s to collect information on the preaching of Ochino, the unanimous answer was that his preaching […] was not heretical, but he knew the art of omission, because in many circumstances it was necessary to mention the Holy Scripture when preaching and declare it to be against the Lutherans in accordance with the Catholic faith, which he never did, in such a way that his silence aroused the suspicion of learned and good men.10 Bernardino Ochino was a trendsetter; almost a decade after his escape across the Alps, preachers were becoming increasingly sophisticated in implementing an aggressive version of the art of ‘remaining silent and dissimulating’. Fra Domenico da Imola, vicar to the Bishop of Modena, Egidio Foscarari, observed with some concern that Giovanni Francesco Vacca da Bagnacavallo, a Canon Regular and Lent preacher in Modena, had achieved the impossible task of giving Lutheran meaning to a passage of the Holy Scripture that ‘clearly’ sang the praises of works of righteousness.11 A few years previously, during Lent in 1544, Modena had been the setting for a much-debated sermon by Bartolomeo Golfi, better known as Bartolomeo della Pergola, a Friar Minor Conventual. Careful observers like Lancilotti, a chronicler from Modena, immediately noticed the less-thanfully orthodox nature of the words spoken by Golfi: ‘The said friar does not preach the Gospel and never mentions the saints or doctors of the Church, and does not speak about Lent or fasting, and many other things that are to the taste of academics’.12 The clamour caused by this Lent cycle was so great

 10 Letter from Fabio Mignanelli to Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, 12 October 1542, quotation in Tacchi Venturi, Storia della Compagnia di Gesù in Italia, pp. 325–26.  11 Letter of 17 February 1551, quotation in Rotondò, ‘Atteggiamenti della vita morale italiana nel Cinquecento’, p. 1019.  12 Bianco, ‘Bartolomeo della Pergola’, p. 10.

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that Golfi was forced to retract his doctrines publicly a few months after starting work in Modena. However, instead of removing the accumulated suspicions about him, these two sermons in June 1544 (the so-called retraction or ritrattatione) had the effect of confirming the Nicodemite nature of his preaching and the skilful dissimulation strategy that had characterized his recently concluded Lent cycle. Just to give a few examples, when confronted with the fact that ‘on the second day he completely removed the invocation of the Virgin and saints in a highly astute way, by never mentioning them’, Golfi justified his omission by remembering that ‘I never denied the intercession of the saints in any of my sermons or the act of addressing them’.13 With regard to the statement attributed to him that the Church had been erring for hundreds of years, he tried to wrap things up by concluding that, in any case, ‘even if they were my intended words, it was a slip of the tongue’,14 and that on closer inspection ‘none of the audience can say that they understood me saying a single word against the Church or its prelates’.15 The caution with which he carefully avoided speaking out on certain issues, letting his taciturnity speak the language of the heterodox message for him, came to light clearly with regard to confession, a theme which, as we will see, was a constant focus of inquisitorial attention.16 The accusation levelled at him at the end of the Lent cycle in Modena was that, while ‘speaking about confession’, he said that it was by divine right, but did not say that men were obliged to do it, or how often, or when, or whether or not they sin by not confessing. Rather, he said ‘When you confess at Easter, confess first to God and then go to a Father and seek advice from him and learn what you could not do by yourself ’.17 For Roman orthodoxy, the tacit negation of the obligation to confess and the reduction of the priest’s sacramental absolution to a moment of reflection and personal counsel (the ‘Father’s advice’) was the most dangerous thing that could be affirmed from a church pulpit.18 In addition to the numerous testimonies collected in this period, what was extremely worrying and irritating for the inquisitors was the realization that the packed audiences of believers at ‘public sermons’ were increasingly refining their listening skills in tandem with the more-andmore sophisticated dissimulation skills of the preachers. In this way, they learnt to grasp nuances, barely concealed allusions, and implicit omissions,

 13 ‘Ritrattazione di fra Bartolomeo della Pergola’, ed. by Firpo and Marcatto, esp. pp. 265–66. Certain aspects of Golfi’s Nicodemite preaching are also covered by Rotondò, ‘Anticristo e Chiesa romana’, now republished in Rotondò, Studi di storia ereticale del Cinquecento, esp. pp. 150–53.  14 ‘Ritrattazione di fra Bartolomeo della Pergola’, ed. by Firpo and Marcatto, pp. 244–45.  15 Bianco, ‘Bartolomeo della Pergola’, p. 38.  16 See Caravale, Preaching and Inquisition in Renaissance Italy, pp. 83–106.  17 ‘Ritrattazione di fra Bartolomeo della Pergola’, ed. by Firpo and Marcatto, p. 252.  18 Caravale, Preaching and Inquisition in Renaissance Italy, pp. 83–91.

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and were ready to transform silences and rhetorical reticence into matters for collective heated discussion at the end of the sermon along city streets and in private homes. Certain cases were not isolated episodes, such as the teacher Giovanni Pellotti, who told inquisitors that the preacher had never claimed that works were ineffective, but that when ‘preaching about baptism, […] he seemed to attribute everything to the mercy of God, not saying anything about works’.19 Then there was the merchant Angelo Zocchi, who did not overlook the fact that in a sermon ‘that was supposed to be about the judgement and therefore the second coming of the Lord’, the preacher had instead ‘moved it to the first coming by saying that the Lord came to save the world’.20 A few years later, clearly sensitive to the hidden dangers of heterodox propaganda from the pulpit, a Franciscan friar proposed a model of preaching ‘to be done to the people’, at the same time also offering a list of the phrases that could be used to identify whether a preacher was a heretic or not.21 It is necessary to understand this skilful communication strategy and the strength of a form of preaching that dissimulated its message behind a veil of silence and omission in order to appreciate both the emphasis that the Roman inquisitors placed on what Ippolito Chizzola — a canon regular of the Lateran summoned by the Holy Office in Rome in 1549 — did not say and the evasive stance he adopted towards his interrogators, of which there are numerous examples. Chizzola was accused of never having spoken about the annual obligation to confess, even after having been told to do so. He denied the inquisitors’ insinuation but, in doing so, added some details that actually worsened his position; he recalled that during a sermon held in Venice at the Church of San Daniele, he had said ‘that the Church obliged us to confess a single time a year’.22 This statement seemed innocent enough, but clearly came with other considerations that Chizzola was striving to conceal from the inquisitors. Indeed, it had caused a scandal among ‘several priests’ present at the sermon, who understood that ‘by speaking in this way’ he wanted to ‘say that it was not necessary to confess when one was in mortal sin and wanted to take Holy Communion’.23 Shortly afterwards, pressed by the inquisitors’ questions, Chizzola was forced to admit that he had only spoken about satisfaction after having been warned and reproached about it by a certain Maestro Gian Stefano, a Carmelite theo­

 19 Firpo and Pagano, I processi inquisitoriali di Vittore Soranzo, i, 1020.  20 Firpo and Pagano, I processi inquisitoriali di Vittore Soranzo, i, 1020.  21 Francesco da Medde, Liber elucidationis veritatum catholicarum, cc. 235v–237r; quoted by Prosperi, L’eresia del Libro grande, p. 144 and nn. 49–50 on p. 419.  22 Brescia, BCQ, Legato Martinengo, I. II. 11, fols 1r–36r, quotation on fols 10v–11r; Caravale, Preaching and Inquisition in Renaissance Italy, pp. 206–07.  23 Brescia, BCQ, Legato Martinengo, I. II. 11, fol. 11r; Caravale, Preaching and Inquisition in Renaissance Italy, pp. 196–97.

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logian.24 On another occasion, when explicitly accused of not believing in Purgatory ‘except in the way of Lutherans’, he responded by stating during his next sermon that he believed in it according to the precepts of the ‘Holy Church’. In this case, too, however, he was reproached by ‘Maestro Adriano’, who was scandalized by the fact that he had used the term ‘Holy Church’ instead of ‘Holy Roman Church’. As a result, he was again forced to correct himself in public the next day, specifying that, when using the term ‘Holy Church’, he had meant to express himself ‘in accordance with the beliefs of the Roman Church’.25 The dynamics did not change radically when the subject changed to issues other than confession. With regard to the question of justification, Chizzola recounted that he had often ‘had cause to discuss justification by living faith’, referring to living faith that, as St Paul writes, ‘worketh by charity’ (‘per charitatem operatur’) and justifies man before God. He then admitted that, on other occasions, he perhaps ‘did not explain [him]self so clearly’, which might have been ‘so as not to repeat the same thing again and again’, limiting himself to saying ‘that faith alone justifies’. He did not refer to this event because he remembered the ‘particular’ circumstance in which it happened, but only because ‘I was so peeved by the number of people that, on numerous occasions, I avoided saying anything altogether’.26 Whether it was out of annoyance or boredom, as a result of adding one word too many, or due to the bother caused by his increasingly large audience, Chizzola ended up admitting that he had preached justification by faith alone in the Lutheran way. Therefore, finding himself in increasing difficulty with the inquisitors’ insistent questioning, he admitted (albeit implicitly) his strategy of dissimulation: ‘I rightly said that God does not justify us for our works, but I never denied that works do not contribute equally’.27 After learning the useful lesson of preaching positive statements rather than negative ones from Celso Martinengo, he skilfully made it his own. The doubts harboured by his audience and the inquisitors were not always dissipated by the constant corrections he was forced to make or by the mask of misunderstanding behind which he tried to conceal his unguarded and secretive statements. On one occasion, for example, he made a real slip of the tongue when he wanted to say that ‘many in the Church believed things opposed to the Gospel’, but instead he affirmed that ‘the Church is opposed to the Gospel in many things’. The words that he used

 24 Brescia, BCQ, Legato Martinengo, I. II. 11, fols 14v–15r; Caravale, Preaching and Inquisition in Renaissance Italy, pp. 202–03.  25 Brescia, BCQ, Legato Martinengo, I. II. 11, fol. 16r–v; Caravale, Preaching and Inquisition in Renaissance Italy, pp. 204–05.  26 Brescia, BCQ, Legato Martinengo, I. II. 11, fol. 30v; Caravale, Preaching and Inquisition in Renaissance Italy, pp. 230–31.  27 Brescia, BCQ, Legato Martinengo, I. II. 11, fol. 30v; Caravale, Preaching and Inquisition in Renaissance Italy, pp. 230–31.

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before the judges in an attempt to vindicate himself (‘a slip of the tongue is often made when reasoning’) only confirmed how revealing his involuntary mistake had been.28 It was to remedy this situation that, on 20 May 1550 — in the midst of Chizzola’s trial — the Roman Holy Office made it compulsory for all preachers to speak out against Protestant doctrines.29 It was therefore no longer enough to be careful not to let slip heretical or scandalous statements that could unsettle the souls of the faithful and raise the ire of the custodians of orthodoxy; preachers now needed to assume a clear position against Protestant doctrines, making their words from the pulpit an instrument in the common struggle against heresy. In the meantime, Chizzola’s trial moved on and reached its conclusion. The verdict was read out on 19 December 1551, and Chizzola’s abjuration was placed in the hands of Michele Ghislieri, the Commissioner of the Holy Office. Chizzola was given a list of errors collected during the course of the investigations and trial hearings, and the defendant expressed his willingness to abjure. After his abjuration, Chizzola started his second life. He had to offer tangible proof of his conversion to show that he had really repented, so that he could be fully rehabilitated and regain the same rank, dignity, and honour that he had enjoyed before his trial for heresy. In his new role as an orthodox preacher, Chizzola’s first concern was to clear the field of potential misinterpretations of his past. He did this by publicly repudiating the ‘hidden’ way of talking that had characterized his previous preaching, thereby assuming a harsh anti-Nicodemite position. According to Girolamo Muzio, ‘in his interpretation of the Catholic voice he debated learnedly and at length that true believers must speak publicly and clearly in their faith, and not teach their doctrine either in secret or with words of dubious sentiments’.30 According to the same source, Chizzola also made a point of emphasizing what he had omitted in his previous sermons on too many occasions, namely, the value and centrality of the apostolic tradition in ecclesiastical teaching.31 Moreover, as if in response to what he had been criticized for most, he dwelt on the jurisdictional power of prelates, rejecting the accusations of heretics about the ‘wicked life of prelates’ by maintaining that the strength of the designation that comes from Christ goes beyond the actions and qualities of individual priests.32 Above all, however, it was through his Discorsi per confutar le heresie — a work printed in 1562 that collected together the arguments he used in his  28 Brescia, BCQ, Legato Martinengo, I. II. 11, fol. 21v; Caravale, Preaching and Inquisition in Renaissance Italy, pp. 214–15.  29 Seidel Menchi, ‘Origine e origini del Santo Uffizio dell’Inquisizione romana’, p. 301.  30 Letter from Girolamo Muzio to Camillo Olivo, secretary to Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga, Venice, February 16 1552, in Muzio, Lettere catholiche, pp. 147–48.  31 Muzio, Lettere catholiche, p. 147.  32 Muzio, Lettere catholiche, p. 147.

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new role as an orthodox preacher — that Chizzola managed to reformulate the key concepts in his doctrine, eliminating the ambiguities that had led him to be subjected to the inquisitorial process at the end of the 1540s.33 Inevitably, the subject of sacramental confession, debated at great length in the trial interrogations, played a prominent role in his doctrinal reworking project. In the pages of his Discorsi, Chizzola threw off the subtle nuances that had characterized his defensive strategy. He adopted an explicit position against ‘heretics’ who said that they did ‘not believe that priests can really pardon or retain sins in the sacrament of penance’ and who stated, further, that ‘the absolution of the priest is useless, and the power he has usurped to release from sins is ungodly’ because only ‘God erases and forgives sins’. Chizzola held that all this was ‘clearly false’ and that they needed to understand once and for all ‘that out of his generosity God imparted his own power to others’.34 Equally ‘foolish’ was the position of those who saw the sacrament of penance as anything ‘other than two parts, namely contrition and faith’, thereby neglecting or, even worse, cancelling the satisfaction of sins.35 Another example concerns the worship and invocation of saints. According to what emerges from his inquisitorial trial, during a 1548 sermon he aroused the suspicion of a certain Pellizzari, who then reported him for having suggested a distinction between a prayer addressed to God and one addressed to the saints, claiming that the saints need to be addressed as mediators between us and God, but not as the authors of grace, which only comes from God. Chizzola defended himself by stating that he had never seen it written in any book of hours, missal, or in a conciliar or papal decision that the saints should be invoked as the authors of grace. Yet, when the inquisitors pressured him by asking whether it was true that he had preached that one should only pray to Christ, he offered the umpteenth indirect confirmation of his subtle modus operandi, answering that he did not remember his ‘exact words’, but that, in any case, the court could rest assured that he had never denied that the ‘advocates of God’ could be invoked by us ‘in the aforementioned way’.36 Once again, it was a question of preaching positive statements and never negative ones. Chizzola removed any doubt about his position regarding the invocation of saints by providing a five-point explanation during a sermon ‘given in Mantua cathedral on the third Sunday of Advent and the Feast of the Conception of the Madonna’.37 It was explicitly dedicated to the ‘worship and invocation of saints’ and was published soon afterwards by Tommaso Porcacchi in his Raccolta di prediche in Venice in 1566. Point one: ‘we must  33 Chizzola,  Discorsi del reverendo padre.  34 Chizzola,  Discorsi del reverendo padre, fol. 106r.  35 Chizzola,  Discorsi del reverendo padre, fol. 106v.  36 Brescia, BCQ, Legato Martinengo, I. II. 11, fol. 20r; Caravale, Preaching and Inquisition in Renaissance Italy, pp. 212–13.  37 Chizzola, Predica fatta nel duomo di Mantova, pp. 62–104.

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believe that the saints in heaven pray for us’; point two: ‘we must pray to the saints’; point three: the ‘saints can grant us such graces that in addition to saying ora pro nobis to the Virgin, we can also add Santa Maria succurre miseris, iuva pusillanimes, etc.’; point four: ‘in our prayers to God we can propound the merits of saints, so that we can say, per merita sanctorum’; point five: ‘when we pray for ourselves, the saints can rightfully call themselves our advocates’.38 Once again, the written word, published in the mid-1560s, provided incontrovertible evidence of the preacher’s complete orthodoxy, far removed from the ambiguities of the word preached a couple of decades previously.

Conclusions: From Spoken to Written Word These examples remind the historian of one more important methodo­ logical issue involving the relationship between orality and writing.39 This concerns the inevitable temporal, spatial, and semantic separation between the spoken word and the written word and the methodo­logical challenges that the historian of preaching faces as a result. For a number of decades after the invention of the printing press, preachers and other individuals frequently decided to have sermon texts printed. They soon realized the communicative potential offered by the new medium. While a sermon delivered from a church pulpit or square could reach hundreds of believers, a printed edition could significantly broaden their audience, as the potential users of the volume not only included the individual purchasers of copies sold in bookshops. A book could be loaned around, even dozens of times, or read out in public by its owner to different groups of illiterate and literate people. In some cases, the preachers themselves, desiring to spread their religious message as widely as possible, were keen to see their sermons printed and made arrangements with a press; but it was not always thus. Others, for example, were more interested in the financial return that a printed volume of sermons could guarantee them. Given the popularity of many of these preachers, a reportator or printer who managed to procure the text of a sermon saw the printing of a volume as a promising source of income. Yet obviously, whether the publication was supervised by the preacher himself or another party, printed versions were inevitably different from the sermons delivered orally from a pulpit. A recent study by Arnold Hunt, The Art of Hearing, underscores that ‘if we neglect the tension between preaching and printing — the sense that these were two

 38 Chizzola, Predica fatta nel duomo di Mantova, pp. 63–64.  39 On this relationship, especially with regard to preaching, in addition to Arnold Hunt’s volume quoted in note 40, see Lake, The Anti-Christ’s Lewd Hat, pp. 335–76; Meek, ‘The Pulpit and the Pen’; Caravale, ‘Le ambiguità della parola’; and, especially, Dall’Aglio, ‘Faithful to the Spoken Word’.

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separate and not entirely compatible activities — then we may be missing something very important’.40 Hunt refers to McKenzie’s well-known theory that the transition from orality to writing (such as moving from manu­script to print) features crucial ‘moments of anxiety and hesitant adjustment’.41 Hunt emphasizes the fact that the means of communication necessarily influences the message by changing its nature. With specific reference to sermons, he stresses that printed versions were not simply a way to spread the spoken word more widely. Rather, they undermined the primacy of orality, triggering a profound change in the style of preaching as sermons lost their distinctive oral character and became indistinguishable from other forms of literature.42 The ‘moments of anxiety’ and ‘adjustment’ referred to by McKenzie could take on radically different connotations. The first aspect of the variance between orality and writing concerns the ways and forms in which words spoken from the pulpit were adapted to a written format. The style of preaching, including the preacher’s gestures, the intonation of his voice, his exclamations, and his expressions, melted away in the transition from the spoken word to the printed page. Moreover, as Jean-François Gilmont has shown in the case of John Calvin, an author’s style could change significantly according to the register — oral or written: he could be verbose in his preaching and succinct in his writing.43 The second aspect of the difference between orality and writing concerns more the substance of the preaching than its style, and it pertains to the context and historical moment in which the sermon was published. In many cases, whether the publication was endorsed by the preacher himself or someone not directly authorized by him, the sermon was printed sometime after the occasion on which it had been delivered from the pulpit. The text was therefore published in a cultural, religious, and political landscape that was significantly different from the context of the preacher’s original performance. This is especially true with regard to turbulent years characterized by momentous change, such as the period of the mid-sixteenth century. The decision to print a sermon or a complete cycle of preaching was followed by (often radical) editing work on the text. This involved adapting it to the new circumstances by making modifications and removing sentences, para­graphs, or whole pages deemed inappropriate or no longer in tune with the changed times, as well as adding new sections to satisfy the tastes and religious sensibility of the target audience. In other words, the difference between orality and writing was linked not only to the diverse nature of the respective communication tools, but also to the different historical circumstances in which the text (oral or written) was made public.

 40 Hunt, The Art of Hearing, p. 118.  41 McKenzie, ‘Speech–Manu­script–Print’.  42 Hunt, The Art of Hearing, p. 119.  43 Gilmont, John Calvin and the Printed Book.

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The gap in publication times, therefore, inevitably led to a reformulation of the content, which sometimes produced a result that was the exact opposite of the initial sermon, as preachers could use the written word with very different — and frequently opposite — intentions from those that had inspired their preaching. In such circumstances, the printed word was explicitly used to subvert the intended message that had been conveyed from the pulpit. In the case of Ippolito Chizzola, as we have seen, the preacher supported the publication of his sermons in the years following his abjuration before the Roman inquisitors, with the precise intention of absolving himself from the numerous accusations of heresy that had led to an inquisitorial process against him. In his new guise as an orthodox preacher in the 1560s, he decided to publish a selection of sermons delivered in the years after the conclusion of his trial and abjuration, seizing the moment to affirm his doctrinal orthodoxy regarding many of the controversial questions at the centre of the long interrogations he had been subjected to some years before in Rome.44 Therefore, in this case, the transition from orality to writing officially set forth Chizzola’s switch from heterodoxy (whether real or presumed) to religious orthodoxy. In other instances, there was movement in precisely the opposite direction. For preachers such as Bernardino Ochino or Giulio da Milano, who were also accused of heterodoxy in the 1540s, the written word instead became — following their tormented choice of exile for religious reasons — a way to cast off the mask that they had been forced to wear when preaching from pulpits around the Italian peninsula; it was an instrument of liberation from the ties of dissimulation that had often accompanied their preaching. Ochino wrote to his closest friends that he would finally be able to stop ‘preaching Christ in a mask using jargon’,45 a sentiment echoed by Giulio da Milano when he reached Protestant soil: ‘It is no wonder that my writing is now freer than my preaching ever was’.46 In short, for those who chose to remain on the Italian peninsula, the written and printed word became a means to reaffirm their orthodoxy and regain a role in society, while for those who decided to break ties with their homeland, writing was instead used to finally reveal their heresy and demonstrate the extent of their distance from Catholic doctrine. In both cases, however, writing and printing became a way to leave behind the ambiguity that had characterized the preached word. Preachers still saw writing as a symbol of transparency and sincerity in the mid-sixteenth century, in contrast to their perception of the nature  44 See above.  45 Quotation is from the well-known letter sent to Vittoria Colonna on 22 August 1542 in Colonna, Carteggio, ed. by Ferrero and Mueller, pp. 257–59.  46 Giulio da Milano, La prima [-seconda] parte de le prediche, i, 3. This text, published in Basle after his escape from the Italian peninsula, revisited the text of sermons delivered in Venice during Lent in 1541, explaining many of the doctrinal positions adopted during his preaching in Protestant terms.

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of orality as elusive, unfathomable, and enigmatic. They were members of a generation of men born and raised in the early sixteenth century in a climate still influenced by the success of Venetian publishing and the free circulation of ideas, a generation that had not yet absorbed the prohibitions that would characterize the second half of the century. There was still some way to go (although not a great distance) to the age in which the progressive reduction of the margins of freedom and the growing climate of control exerted by the Roman censors forced Italian authors to apply the art of dissimulation to the printed word and ‘write between the lines’, practicing the form of writing influenced by persecution that Leo Strauss later identified as one of the distinctive features of Baroque culture.47

 47 The reference is obviously to the classic work by Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing.

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Works Cited Archival Sources Brescia, Biblioteca Civica Queriniana [BCQ], Legato Martinengo, I. II. 11 Primary Sources Chizzola, Ippolito, Discorsi del reverendo padre donn’Hippolito Chizzuola, canonico regolare lateranense. Per confutar le particolari heresie. Con privilegio del sommo pontefice Pio IIII, dell’illustrissima Signoria di Venetia, et d’altri principi d’Italia (Venetia: appresso Andrea Arrivabene, 1562) —— , Predica fatta nel duomo di Mantova la terza domenica dell’Avvento et festa della concettion della Madonna, in Delle prediche di diversi illustri theo­logi, et catholici predicatori della parola di Dio, raccolte per Thomaso Porcacchi a commun benificio di qualunque si diletta d’intender sanamente le Scritture sacre (Vinetia: presso Giorgio de’Cavalli, 1566) Colonna, Vittoria, Carteggio, ed. by G. Ferrero and E. Mueller (Turin: Loescher, 1892) Francesco da Medde, Liber elucidationis veritatum catholicarum contra enitentes doctrinam catholicam oppugnare per Franciscum Meddensem (Genuae: apud Antonium Bellonium, 1557) Giulio da Milano, La prima [-seconda] parte de le prediche del reveren. padre maestro Giulio da Milano, dell’Ordine di s. Agostino predicate ne la città di Vinetia, nel tempio di S. Casciano del MDXLI, 2 vols ([Basle, no later than 1547]) Muzio, Girolamo, Lettere catholiche (Venice: appresso Giovanni Andrea Valvassori, detto Guadagnino, 1571) ‘Ritrattazione di fra Bartolomeo della Pergola (Modena, 15–16 June 1544)’, in Il processo inquisitoriale del cardinal Giovanni Morone, ed. by Massimo Firpo and Dario Marcatto, 6 vols (Rome: Istituto storico italiano per l’età moderna e contemporanea, 1981–89), iii, 236–79 Secondary Studies Adorni Braccesi, Simonetta, and Simona Feci, ‘Mainardo, Agostino’, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. lxvii (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 2006), pp. 585–90 Bériou, Nicole, ‘La Reportation des sermons parisiens à la fin du xiiie siècle’, Medioevo e Rinascimento, 3 (1989), 87–123 Bianco, Cesare, ‘Bartolomeo della Pergola e la sua predicazione eterodossa a Modena nel 1544’, Bollettino della società di studi valdesi, 151 ( July 1982), 4–49 Caravale, Giorgio, ‘Le ambiguità della parola: eresia e ortodossia tra oralità e scrittura nella predicazione italiana del Cinquecento’, The Italianist, 34 (2014), 478–92

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—— , Beyond the Inquisition: Ambrogio Catarino Politi and the Origins of the Counter-Reformation (Notre Dame: Notre Dame Uni­ver­sity Press, 2017) —— , Preaching and Inquisition in Renaissance Italy: Words on Trial (Leiden: Brill, 2016) Dall’Aglio, Stefano, ‘Faithful to the Spoken Word: Sermons from Orality to Writing in Early Modern Italy’, The Italianist, 34 (2014), 463–77 Delcorno, Carlo, ‘Forme della predicazione cattolica fra cinque e seicento’, in Cultura d’élite e cultura popolare nell’arco alpino fra cinque e seicento (Boston: Mirkhaeuser Verlag, 1995), pp. 275–302 Firpo, Massimo, and Dario Marcatto, Il processo inquisitoriale del cardinal Giovanni Morone, critical edn, 6 vols (Rome: Istituto storico italiano per l’età moderna e contemporanea, 1981–95) Firpo, Massimo, and Sergio Pagano, eds, I processi inquisitoriali di Vittore Soranzo, 1550–1558, critical edn, 2 vols (Vatican City: Archivio Segreto Vaticano, 2004) Gilmont, Jean-François, John Calvin and the Printed Book (Kirksville, MO: Truman State Uni­ver­sity Press, 2005) Ginzburg, Carlo, ‘L’inquisitore come antropo­logo’, in Studi in onore di Armando Saitta dei suoi allievi pisani, ed. by Adriano Prosperi and Regina Pozzi (Pisa: Giardini, 1989), pp. 23–33; now also in Carlo Ginzburg, Il filo e le tracce: Vero falso finto (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2006), pp. 270–80, and Carlo Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and Historical Method, trans. by John Tedeschi and Anne C. Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni­ver­sity Press, 1989) Hunt, Arnold, The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and their Audiences 1590–1640 (Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 2010) Lake, Peter, with Michael Questier, The Anti-Christ’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England (New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­sity Press, 2002) McKenzie, David F., ‘Speech–Manu­script–Print’, Library Chronicle of the Uni­ver­sity of Texas at Austin, 20 (1990), 86–109; reprinted in David F. McKenzie, Making Meaning: ‘Printers of the Mind’ and Other Essays, ed. by P. D. McDonald and M. F. Suarez (Amherst: Uni­ver­sity of Massachusetts Press, 2002), pp. 237–58 Meek, Donald E., ‘The Pulpit and the Pen: Clergy, Orality and Print in the Scottish Gaelic World’, in Spoken Word: Oral Culture in Britain 1500–1850, ed. by Adam Fox and Daniel Woolf (Manchester: Manchester Uni­ver­sity Press, 2003), pp. 84–118 Michelson, Emily, The Pulpit and the Press in Reformation Italy, I Tatti Studies in Italian Renaissance History, 8 (Cam­bridge, MA: Harvard Uni­ver­sity Press, 2013) Muzzarelli, Giuseppina, Pescatori di uomini: predicatori e piazze alla fine del Medioevo (Bo­logna: Il Mulino, 2005) Olivieri, Achille, ‘L’agostiniano Ambrogio Quistelli e il dibattito sulla grazia (1537–1544)’, Atti e memorie dell’Accademia patavina di Scienze, Lettere e Arti, 104 (1991–92), 73–91 Peyronel Rambaldi, Susanna, Dai Paesi Bassi all’Italia: ‘Il Sommario della Sacra Scrittura’. Un libro proibito nella società italiana del Cinquecento (Florence: Olschki, 1997)

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Prodi, Paolo, Il cardinale Gabriele Paleotti (1522–1597), 2 vols (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1959–69) Prosperi, Adriano, L’eresia del Libro grande: Storia di Giorgio Siculo e della sua setta (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2000) Rotondò, Antonio, ‘Anticristo e Chiesa romana: Diffusione e metamorfosi d’un libello antiromano del Cinquecento’, in Forme e destinazione del messaggio religioso: Aspetti della propaganda religiosa nel Cinquecento, ed. by Antonio Rotondò (Florence: Olschki, 1991), pp. 19–164; reprinted in Antonio Rotondò, Studi di storia ereticale del Cinquecento, 2 vols (Florence: Olschki, 2008) —— , ‘Atteggiamenti della vita morale italiana nel Cinquecento: la pratica nicodemitica’, Rivista storica italiana, 79 (1967), 991–1030 Rusconi, Roberto, ‘Predicatori e predicazione (secoli ix–xviii)’, in Storia d’Italia, Annali, vol. iv: Intellettuali e potere (Turin: Einaudi, 1981), pp. 951–1030 Seidel Menchi, Silvana, ‘Origine e origini del Santo Uffizio dell’Inquisizione romana (1542–1559)’, in L’Inquisizione: Atti del Simposio internazionale, Città del Vaticano, 29–31 ottobre 1998, ed. by Agostino Borromeo (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 2003), pp. 291–321 Strauss, Leo, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1952) Tacchi Venturi, Pietro, Storia della Compagnia di Gesù in Italia, vol. i.2: Documenti, 2nd edn (Rome: Edizioni La Civiltà cattolica, 1950) Zafarana, Zelina, ‘Bernardino nella storia della predicazione popolare’, in Da Gregorio VII a Bernardino da Siena: saggi di storia medi­evale, ed. by Oliviero Capitani, Claudio Leonardi, Enrico Menestò, and Roberto Rusconi (Perugia: La Nuova Italia, 1987), pp. 249–78

Serena Quagliaroli

The Artistic Decoration of Organ Shutters Hearing and Seeing Redemption in the Renaissance

In the cultural system of the Renaissance, music was never conceived of only as a practical discipline or a simple form of entertainment. It was a deeply intellectual activity able to connect a single individual to the universe and to God. Church organs had an important task in this regard, for they played a privileged role among musical instruments when it came to liturgy. This essay examines these dynamics through an art-historical analysis of organ shutters and, in particular, their decoration. Shutters quite literally occupied the ground between music and painting. Their unique position gave distinctive characteristics to these peculiar paintings, turning them into something that differed from other artistic representations in churches, like altarpieces or devotional sculptures. This essay will examine the paintings on organ shutters from the end of the fourteenth century to the beginning of the seventeenth century, in order to determine what the use and decoration of these shutters might tell us about how relationships between music and religion generally were conceptualized in the Renaissance. Might these material objects, quite literally suspended between two leading art forms, be useful tools for opening new questions in the study of Renaissance religions? Looking to aesthetics, musico­logy, and material culture, this essay aims to offer an interdisciplinary examination of an overlooked art form that may help us reconstruct the complex sixteenth-century religious world.



* I am very grateful to the editors of this book, Peter Howard, Riccardo Saccenti, and Nicholas Terpstra. I also thank my sister, Sara, for her precious support. This essay comes from my master’s dissertation at the Uni­ver­sity of Bo­logna (2012). Serena Quagliaroli ([email protected]) is Post-Doc researcher at Archivio del Moderno, Università della Svizzera italiana. She obtained her PhD in History of Art at Sapienza – Uni­ver­sity of Rome (2019).

Renaissance Religions: Modes and Meanings in History, ed. by Peter Howard, Nicholas Terpstra, and Riccardo Saccenti, ES 26 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2021) pp. 343–363 10.1484/M.ES-EB.5.121912

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The Organ and the Decoration of its Shutters The pipe organ has often been considered a kind of compendium of earthly art aimed at soli Deo gloria, the invocation frequently written on the upper part of its wooden case. Following the invocation in Psalm 150 to praise God in his sanctuary and heavens,1 the organ has played a crucial role in the celebration of the Almighty, and has been perceived as the ‘king of instruments’, capable of gathering the sound nuances of all the others. This complex mechanical invention was a demonstration of Alexandria’s technical capacity and became the musical expression of power in the Roman world. It figured in the Pythagorean-Platonic conception of the cosmos as a reproduction of the harmony of the divine music governing the celestial spheres.2 A broad metaphorical use of the organ can also be found in the earliest Christian authors and Patristic texts.3 Paola Dessì has demonstrated that the organ was often employed as a spectacular component of Byzantine imperial ceremonials and that in the medi­eval period it was also considered an insigne regiae dignitatis, a diplomatic gift and vehicle of sovereignty.4 Organs are documented in churches from at least the twelfth century. In his work De diversis artibus, the monk Theophilus (c. 1070–1125) described the organ as part of the liturgical furnishings.5 The instrument was fully framed within Christian liturgy and started to perform a primarily catechetical task according to the three degrees of rhetorical persuasion: docere, delectare, and movere (to instruct, to please, to move). In 1511, the German  1 ‘Alleluia | Praise God in his sanctuary, | praise him in his mighty heavens. | Praise him for his acts of power, | praise him for his surpassing greatness. | Praise him with the sounding of the trumpet, | praise him with the harp and lyre, | praise him with timbrel and dancing, | praise him with the strings and pipe [the pipe organ], | praise him with the clash of cymbals, | praise him with resounding cymbals. | Let everything that has breath praise the Lord. | Alleluia’.  2 For a deeper account of meanings and uses of the instrument through the centuries, see Markovitz, Die Orgel im Altertum, and Sachs, The History of Musical Instruments, pp. 143–45, 286–378.  3 To cite just a few examples: Tertullian, A Treatise on the Soul, 14, 4: ‘Look at that very wonderful piece of organic mechanism by Archimedes, I mean his hydraulic organ, with its many limbs, parts, bands, passages for the notes, outlets for their sounds, combinations for their harmony, and the array of its pipes; but yet the whole of these details constitute only one instrument. In like manner the wind, which breathes throughout this organ at the impulse of the hydraulic engine, is not divided into separate portions from the fact of its dispersion through the instrument to make it play: it is whole and entire in its substance, although divided in its operation’; Saint Gregory the Great, Morals on the Book of Job, xx, 78: ‘Whereas the organ gives its sounds by means of pipes, and the harp by chords; it may be that by the “harp” right practising is denoted, and by the “organ” holy preaching’. For other quotes, see Moretti, L’organo italiano, Bowles, ‘The Symbolism of the Organ in the Middle Ages’, and Music, Instruments in Church.  4 Dessì, L’organo tardoantico, especially pp. 63–92.  5 For an analysis of Book iii, Chapter LXXXI, see Teofilo Monaco, Le varie arti, ed. and trans. by Caffaro, pp. 356–69.

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organist Arnolt Schlick (c. 1455/60 – after 1521) wrote his brief text, The Mirror of Organ Builders and Organ Players, in which he prescribed that the instrument be placed in the middle of the church, at the right distance from both the priest and the believers. Schlick asserted that the organ must be covered with appropriate decorations because, although it was intended primarily for hearing and praising God, it nevertheless contributed to the ornamentation of the church sanctuary and, above all, to increasing spiritual contemplation by worshippers.6 The oldest intact organ with decorated shutters — still in situ — is found in the Church of Notre-Dame de Valère in Sion in the southern Swiss canton of Valais. Archival documents testify that the painter Peter Maggenberg from Freiburg (1380–1462/63) decorated its internal shutters around 1434/37 with depictions of the Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine on the left and Saint John the Baptist and Mary Magdalen on the right; he also painted The Annunciation on this organ’s external shutters.7 The custom of decorating organ shutters was widespread from at least the fifteenth century. Despite this fact, it is surprising that there are no contemporary sources specifically aimed at investigating the status of this kind of ornamentation or the figures that were most often represented. The only authoritative discussion is Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo’s treatise Trattato dell’ arte della pittura, scoltura et architettura, published in 1584 but probably written by the early 1570s. Lomazzo (1538–1592) provided both a systematic codification of Mannerist aesthetic theories and a set of practical principles. In Book vi, with regard to decoration for musical instruments, the Milanese artist states: Or perché ancora gli instromenti musicali richiedono le pitture et gli ornamenti della qualità loro, giudico che primamente a gli organi de i templi, le coperte, o tavole di tela che si chiamino, non vorebbero essere dipinte di altro soggetto che di quello che si fa. Onde essendo fatte l’ante ò vogliono dir coperte per chiudere l’organo, il quale per la musica si fa et non per contrario essendo fatto l’organo per le ante; si come egli è fatto per la musica, così ricerca che le coperte corrispondendogli, non contengano altro che soggetto di musica.8 [As musical instruments require a decoration that suits their nature, I believe that covers or canvases must be painted for the organs inside the churches, with no other subject than the one they are used for. Hence the shutters or covers have been made to close the organ, which has been created to play music, rather than the organ having been made for the shutters; just as it is created to play music, so it

 6 Schlick, Miroir des organiers et des organistes, ed. and trans. by Meyer, p. 10.  7 See Hering-Mitgau, ‘Die Flügelbilder und ihr Maler Peter Maggenberg’.  8 Lomazzo, Trattato dell’ arte della pittura, scoltura, et architettura, p. 346.

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is necessary that the covers correspond to this and do not have any other subject than music itself.] Lomazzo argued that only musical themes and subjects should be employed when decorating organ shutters. He was strongly critical of the common practice of painting narrative scenes in which the melodic element was not immediately perceptible. One example of the kind of subject that Lomazzo believed was more appropriate to the nature of the organ was angelic choirs.9 We can find examples on the inside shutters of the Church of San Nicola in Almenno San Salvatore, a small village near Bergamo, or those painted by Francesco d’Antonio (b. 1393, active until 1452) in 1429 for the organ of Florence’s Church of Orsanmichele and now at the Uffizi Museum.10 Yet angelic choirs appear most often only as a secondary element relegated to the background of compositions. We can see this in Paolo Veronese’s workshop’s paintings for the Venetian Church of Ognissanti (1580s, now in the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan) and on the shutters of the organ in the cathedral of Santa Maria Matricolare in Verona, completed by Felice Brusasorzi (1542–1605), in which the main characters are surrounded by angelic children playing various instruments.11 Returning to Lomazzo’s Trattato, the author suggests another possibility for depicting angels on organ shutters: Et chi non approvasse tali ordini d’historie dove entrano se non canti, potrebbe per essempio dipingere il nascimento di Christo, dove ad ogni modo si possono rappresentar per segno di allegrezza diversi Angeli con vari suoni, che cantando appaiono à pastori.12 [And whoever does not approve of these kinds of subjects consisting solely of songs, could, for example, paint the birth of Jesus Christ, where one could represent several joyful angels who with various instruments and singing songs appear to the shepherds.]  9 The author complains about the habit of representing improper subjects like Esther and Ahasuerus, the conversion of Saul, and any kind of battle scenes, sacrifices, miracles, annunciations, or other stories which do not own musical features; see Lomazzo, Trattato dell’ arte della pittura, scoltura, et architettura, pp. 346–47: ‘Ne vi si dipingano come per lo più si costuma prieghi di Hester, conversioni di San Paolo, Battaglie, sacrifici, miracoli, annonci et altri simili soggetti che non tengono punto della musica […] doverebbero esser tali, che fossero di accrescimento di dolcezza alla vista, convenienti alla musica […] Angeli in diversi modi con varie maniere di canti, et instromenti di suoni, dove si possono far vedere sopra le nubi, concerti di musica, et scorti ne l’aria mirabili d’Angeli’.  10 The Annunciation and Angelic Choirs in Almenno are now attributed to Pietro Maria Bagnatore (c. 1550–1627) as mentioned in Pagani, L’organo Antegnati. For Francesco d’Antonio’s organ shutters, see Donati, ‘L’arte degli organi nell’Italia del Quattrocento’, pp. 210–11.  11 Regarding the first pair of organ shutters, see Pirovano, Pinacoteca di Brera, pp. 264–67; regarding the second, executed between 1598 and 1602, see dell’Antonio, ‘Felice Brusasorzi’, pp. 174–77.  12 Lomazzo, Trattato dell’ arte della pittura, scoltura, et architettura, p. 345.

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The Lombard painter most likely approved of nativity scenes because the angels praising God had come from Heaven in order to honour the Son. They embodied heavenly joy and took part in human celebrations for the fulfilment of the new covenant. The angels were intermediaries and, in a sense, could be seen as ‘instruments’ that shared a critical religious function with organs: they were media which gathered all the earthly symphonies and raised them towards heaven, translating two languages which were so different at their origin and turning them into a single song of praise.

Saint Cecilia and King David Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo describes two other figures who are appropriate subjects to be represented on organ shutters: Saint Cecilia and King David. Both are traditionally associated with music: the king as ‘the humble shepherd psalmist’ and the saint mentioned in the Passio as audiens, ‘she who hears the voice of Christ’.13 With regard to Saint Cecilia, Thomas Connolly notes that her connection with a musical organ derives from the interpretation of her Passio and joins a long line of features — partly descending from the Roman goddess Bona Dea Oclata — which represented her as a wise and enlightened woman whose thaumaturgical powers protected sight and hearing. As the one who heard the voice of Christ despite the noise from the musical instruments around her, Cecilia was filled with the light of divine illumination, thus becoming able to turn mourning into joy.14 The music that she ‘sang in her heart to God alone’ provided solace and was rooted in two age-old topoi derived from antiquity and the Bible: the Pythagorean concept of the harmony of the celestial spheres (also connected to the proper concord between the body and the soul), and the positive psycho­logical effects of music on the listeners as demonstrated by legendary bards such as Orpheus, Amphion, and King David.15 Cecilia’s divine illumination is one of several features that link her to the Virgin Mary. The two women each had a celibate marriage, having made the choice to save their virginity, and both were visited by an angel bringing a

 13 The organ shutters realized by Francesco Mazzola called Parmigianino (1503–1540) in the Church of Santa Maria della Steccata, in Parma, are an example of David and Cecilia represented together: see Ghidiglia Quintavalle, ‘Le ante d’organo del Parmigianino e del Sons alla Steccata’.  14 ‘Cantantibus organis, Caecilia virgo in corde suo soli Domino decantabat dicens: fiat Domine cor meum et corpus meum inmaculatum ut non confundar’ (While the music played, Cecilia sang in her heart to God alone, saying: ‘Let my heart and my body be immaculate, that I may not be confounded’). See Connolly, ‘The Legend of St. Cecilia’, especially p. 4, and Delehaye, Étude sur le légendier romain, pp. 73–96.  15 Trinchieri Camiz, ‘Music Performance and Healing in Renaissance Rome’, p. 356.

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Figure 14.1. Ercole Procaccini the Elder, Saint Cecilia, Parma, Cathedral. 1560/62. Photo: Photo­graphic Archive SABAP of Parma and Piacenza.

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divine message. This strong association between them is evident in one of the four organ shutters executed by Ercole Procaccini the Elder (1520–1595) for the cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta of Parma (Figure 14.1). The protagonist, Cecilia, sitting close to an organ, looks towards God in order to obtain divine inspiration while above her, in an elliptical frame at the top of an architectural structure, the Virgin Mary is depicted in the exact moment of the Annunciation.16 The life of King David was rich with subjects traditionally associated with music.17 David was celebrated not only as the composer of the Psalms, but as a gifted performer. He triumphantly marked his victory against Goliath by singing and playing, and he cured King Saul from his sickness through the sound of his music. As Lomazzo writes in his treatise: Over David, che canta nel salterio i salmi, et che acqueta con soavità del suono Saul agitato dal maligno spirito, ò quando con l’istesso salterio, giva sonando doppo l’arca foederis con gli altri, la qual historia fu già pinta sopra le ante di fuori del grandissimo organo della Chiesa maggiore di Milano, per Gioseffo da Meda.18 [Or David, who plays the psaltery, and, with the beauty of its sounds, calms down Saul who is shaken by an evil spirit, or when, playing the same psaltery, he carries the Ark with the Israelites, the same history depicted by Giuseppe Meda on the external shutters of the huge organ in the duomo of Milan.] Here Lomazzo references the work of Giuseppe Meda (1534–1599) in Santa Maria Nascente, the cathedral of Milan: Meda painted David Dancing before the Ark for the organ to the north of the apse, receiving the commission in 1565 and completing the work by 1581. Milan’s Duomo had two organs, and Ambrogio Figino (1553–1608) was commissioned to add four paintings at a later date to the one in the north of the apse, while Camillo Procaccini (1561–1629) painted the others between 1592 and 1602.19 Procaccini also painted two representations of David. One of these depicts him triumphantly returning to Jerusalem after he has defeated Goliath and has won the battle against the Philistines. The other shows him playing the lyre to comfort King Saul who, ‘ill and tormented by an evil spirit’, was soothed by ‘the sweet harmony of David’s song’, which ‘restored order and vigour to the Prince’s troubled soul’, following an ancient topos regarding the power of music to enchant and summon the magical, occult forces of nature.20

 16 See Pellegri, ‘L’organo’.  17 While this paper was already in drafts, a new essay focused on this topic was published: Perina, ‘David, les psaumes et l’orgue’.  18 Lomazzo, Trattato dell’ arte della pittura, scoltura, et architettura, p. 347.  19 For a complete study of all these paintings, see Arslan, Le pitture del Duomo di Milano, pp. 37–44.  20 Trinchieri Camiz, ‘Music Performance and Healing in Renaissance Rome’, p. 360.

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The famous Jewish dancing master Guglielmo Ebreo da Pesaro (c. 1420 – c. 1484) wrote about music’s spiritual powers in his treatise On the Practice or Art of Dancing (c. 1463), which he wrote shortly before converting to Catholicism. Guglielmo wrote that God in heaven is moved by the devout prayers of men who, by singing, playing instruments, and dancing during the holy sacrifices, obtain the grace they have begged for.21 He then cites examples from the Jewish Bible, or Old Testament, including King Solomon, and also Moses, his sister Miriam, and the women who played timbrels and other instruments, dancing in exultation after the Israelites escaped from Egypt. So, despite the opinion of the early Church Fathers, who had claimed that Christian worship did not need dancing or liturgical instruments and excluded them from churches in order to distinguish themselves from other cults, the Christian liturgical tradition that derived from Judaism underscored the importance of music and dance in celebrating divine services. This is particularly true regarding the Psalms, which were commonly believed to have been written by David himself, and especially the seven penitential psalms (Psalms 6, 31, 37, 50, 101, 129, 142), which were linked with the crucial events in David’s life: his adultery with Bathsheba, the orchestrated death of her husband, and the prophet Nathan’s condemnation. These actions, and David’s response in lyric and song in the penitential psalms, made him the most remarkable example of the repentant spirit in the Church.22 Moreover, David was seen to be the link between the first and the last Adam, Jesus Christ. He was Christ’s human ancestor (following the genealogy in Matthew 1. 2–17, which traces Christ’s descent from Jesse), and he embodied and testified to the divine promise of Redemption. Erich Auerbach described this traditional way of interpreting the relation between the Old and New Testaments as a figural interpretation, or mimesis, with figures of the Old Testament interpreted as foreshadowings of a more complete manifestation of a veritas fulfilled only in Christ.23 In making Moses or David into forerunners or ‘types’ of Christ, Jesus becomes a New Moses or a David Reborn, and this theo­logical pairing was particularly well adapted to visual presentation on church furnishings with paired elements, like organ shutters. No other Old Testament figure achieved as prominent a position in Christian tradition as David. One significant pictorial representation that encompasses all his icono­graphical features is the one painted by Camillo Boccaccino (1505–1546) in the Church of Santa Maria di Campagna in Piacenza (1530) (Figure 14.2).24 David is carrying a viol while the decapitated head of Goliath lies under his foot. On the plinth

 21 Guglielmo Ebreo of Pesaro, On the Practice or Art of Dancing, ed. and trans. by Sparti, pp. 88–89.  22 See Connolly, Mourning into Joy.  23 Auerbach, Mimesis.  24 See Arisi, Le ante d’organo di Santa Maria di Campagna, pp. 3–14, and Quagliaroli, ‘Le ante d’organo di Santa Maria di Campagna’.

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Figure 14.2. Camillo Boccaccino, Isaiah and David, Piacenza, Musei Civici di Palazzo Farnese. 1530. Photo: Musei Civici di Palazzo Farnese.

beside him are inscribed fragments from different Psalms: ‘viderunt om|nes termini | terrae salu|tare Dei psal|lite psallite | in cythara | et organo’ (All the ends of the earth have seen the salvation of our God, praise him, praise him with the strings and organ).25 In this instance, David is associated and paired with the prophet Isaiah, depicted on the opposite shutter and accompanied by an inscription related to the messianic prophecy: ‘ecce virgo | concipiet et | pariet fili|um et vo|cabitur no|men eius E|manuel’ (The virgin will  25 Psalm 97. 3 and Psalm 150.

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Figure 14.3. Cosmè Tura, Annunciation, Ferrara, Museo della Cattedrale. 1469. Photo: Musei di Arte Antica e Museo della Cattedrale.

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conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel).26 The imagery draws a line to the incarnation of Christ, and so links king, prophet, and redeemer in a visual and aural whole.

‘Conceptio per aurem’: The Aural Dimension of Redemption When James H. Turnure discussed the content of the sixteen enormous canvases for the organs in the Duomo of Milan, he asserted that ‘when considered together rather than in isolation, a pattern emerges which helps both to explain these shutters and to increase our understanding of this entire period of crisis and division’.27 Turnure related these icono­graphic subjects to Catholic and Protestant Reformation conflicts, particularly around such core issues as the nature of the sacraments, the organization of the Church on earth, the role of saints and holy images, and, most relevant of all, the question of Justification, the act by which God moves a willing person from the state of sin to the state of Grace. Indeed, the theme of Redemption is crucial to understanding the icono­ graphy of organ shutters, not just of those in the Duomo of Milan — an influential centre that modelled Catholic Reformation approaches to architecture, liturgy, and church furnishings. As a matter of fact, the restoration of the covenant between God and Humanity is represented on a large number of organ shutters across northern Italy, with a focus on key moments after the Fall: from the sin of Adam and Eve, breaking humanity’s direct contact with the Creator, and then along the path of the Redemption which restores that contact, beginning with the first covenant with Abraham, moving to the Exodus and the Ark, and then through the prophecies of Sibyls and Prophets, to the completion of the new covenant represented by the Annunciation to Mary and the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.28 Turnure’s analysis of the paintings in the cathedral of Milan did not focus enough attention on the Annunciation, which was, in fact, the most common episode represented on organ shutters. We can understand the frequency of these depictions as deriving from the common Renaissance belief that Christ’s sinless incarnation in Mary’s virgin body came through her ear.29

 26 Isaiah 7. 14.  27 Turnure, ‘The Organ Shutters of Milan Cathedral’, p. 224.  28 To name just a few of many examples: Paolo Fiammingo, Adam and Eve, originally in Venice, San Nicolò della Lattuga, now Gallerie dell’Accademia, ante 1582; Jacopo Palma the Younger, The Sacrifice of Isaac, Salò (Brescia), cathedral, 1603/04; Pier Francesco Ferranti, Isaiah and Jeremiah, originally in Piacenza, Santa Maria di Campagna, now Rivalta (Piacenza), San Martino, 1652; Pomponio Amalteo, Adoration of the Shepherds, Oderzo (Treviso), cathedral, 1549; Francesco Vecellio, Transfiguration and Resurrection, Venice, San Salvator, c. 1530/34.  29 On this issue applied to artistic matters and for many of the following quotes, see Appiano

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The so-called conceptio per aurem (conception through hearing), which Saint Anselm (1033–1109) discussed in De conceptu virginali (c. 1099), was one of the most intricate theo­logical matters discussed by fifteenth-century theo­ logians. The Italian Carmelite humanist and reformer Battista Mantovano (1447–1516), in his Tractatus de parte corporis beatae Mariae in qua conceptus est Christus and also in De annuntiatione beatissimae, defended the late antique elaboration of this idea, according to which fertilization took place via the ‘insufflation’ of the Holy Spirit, brought into Mary’s ear by the words of the archangel. The invention of this kind of procreative mechanism took root in the Alexandrian speculative universe: according to Origen (c. 184 – c. 253), the Virgin Mary conceived Jesus-the-Verb when she heard the words of God’s messenger, underscoring the characteristically Hellenistic vision of the generative power of the Word.30 The most remarkable extant example of the pictorial representation of this issue on Renaissance Italian organ shutters can be found on those which Cosmè Tura painted on the organ of the cathedral of San Giorgio Martire in Ferrara, where Mary humbly offers her right ear to the whispering of a dove (Figure 14.3).31 The thesis of conceptio per aurem flourished in western Europe into the early modern period,32 while after Saint Ephrem (c. 306–373) the Orthodox Church was far more sensitive to heresies and hence more cautious with the concept. There was a fear that the incarnation might be misinterpreted with something like an image of God blowing a child into the ear of the Virgin through a kind of microscopic pipe. This was a visualization that reforming Bo­lognese archbishop Gabriele Paleotti (1522–1597) explicitly warned against in his Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images (1582), arguing that it could alter the understanding of Mary’s role and the significance of the moment.33 Safeguarding and enhancing Mary’s acceptance of the incredible task assigned to her by God was necessary in order to maintain the theo­logical scheme underpinning the whole concept of Redemption. The relationship

Caprettini, Lettura dell’Annunciazione, pp. 37–47, and Steinberg, ‘“How Shall This Be?”’, especially pp. 26–32.  30 See the comment to Sannazaro, De partu Virginis, ed. and trans. by Prandi, pp. 264–65, and the quote in Campbell, Cosmè Tura of Ferrara, p. 150.  31 Campbell, Cosmè Tura of Ferrara, pp. 131–61.  32 We should consider, for instance, Bernard de Clairvaux as analysed in Giordano, ‘San Bernardo e Maria’.  33 Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti’s prohibition is in Book ii, Chapter VI: ‘A similar example would be what Saint Antoninus writes about the mystery of the Annunciation of the Madonna being depicted with the rays of the Holy Spirit descending from heaven and among them the body of a little babe descending toward the womb of the glorious Virgin: the point is that this gives rise to suspicion of the opinion of Valentinus the heretic, or the Eutychians, who believed that Christ our Lord brought his ethereal body with him from heaven and that it was not formed from the exquisitely pure blood of his mother’. See Paleotti, Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images, trans. by McCuaig, p. 165.

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between Eve and the Virgin Mary, as well as their typo­logical antithesis as sinner and redemptrix, are based not only on the contrast between guilt and innocence, but also on the fact that the transformation of both came through the ear. Bishop Zeno of Verona (c. 300 – c. 371) observed that the Devil had convinced Eve to let him slip into her ear with his ability with words; likewise, it was through the ear that Christ came into Mary.34 Saint Ephrem further elaborated on this theme, noting that in the Garden of Eden the snake had seized Eve’s ears and spread its venom all over her body, while Mary, in the Annunciation of the Archangel Gabriel, received the token of all eternal bliss through her ears.35 Mary herself was not convinced of the angel’s announcement: in the Homily for the Annunciation of the Most Holy Mother of God, a kind of theatrical text written by Saint Germanus of Constantinople (c. 634 – c. 730), she astonishingly confesses: ‘I fear and tremble for these words of yours: and I think that you came to deceive me as another Eve’.36 But the angelic salutation should have comforted her: by declaring her ‘full of grace’, Gabriel prophesied redemption and the end of estrangement from God. Giving priority to hearing is thus deeply rooted in Christian antiquity. Lactantius (c. 240 – c. 325) urged people to protect their hearing from vice more than any other sense, since it had been given to understand divine teachings.37 Yet the idea that ‘faith comes from hearing, and hearing comes from the word of Jesus Christ’ was first expressed by Paul in the epistle to the Romans.38 Reformers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries drew increasingly on Pauline theo­logy, and in the great spiritual and religious debates of the period, the Pauline expression of fides ex auditu (faith through hearing) became a common part of the ongoing discussions in both Catholic and philo-Protestant circles on faith, redemption, and liturgy. Roberto Cessi first coined the term ‘Prelutheran Paolinism’ to indicate the early fifteenth-century fascination with Pauline doctrine that characterized much of the Italian theo­logical culture.39 We see it emerging first in numerous communities of regular clergy, including what Giuseppe Billanovich described as ‘the magnificent school of San Benedetto Po’, the Mantuan monastery where some of the brightest humanistic Benedictine intelligentia professed.40 It was also particularly true for the Benedictines of the Congregation of Santa Giustina

 34 As cited in Steinberg, ‘“How Shall This Be?”’, p. 43 n. 17.  35 The quote is in Appiano Caprettini, Lettura dell’Annunciazione, pp. 26–27.  36 Author’s own translation from Germano di Costantinopoli, Omelie mario­logiche, ed. and trans. by Fazzo, p. 81.  37 Lattanzio, Divinae Institutiones, ed. and trans. by Mazzoni, Book vi, Chapter 21.  38 Romans 10. 17: ‘ergo fides ex auditu auditus autem per verbum Christi’ (Consequently faith comes from hearing [the message of God], and [the message of God] is heard through the word about Christ). On this subject see Cooper, Faith Comes by Hearing.  39 Cessi, ‘Paolinismo preluterano’.  40 Billanovich, Tra don Teofilo Folengo e Merlin Cocaio.

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in Padua, where the study of Paul, the Bible, and the Fathers was inflected by Neoplatonic reinterpretations of Augustine and Erasmus, and would later go on to inspire those philo-Protestant reformers of the early sixteenth century known as spirituali.41 Benedictine houses commissioned many organ shutters in the Renaissance. This includes those painted by Girolamo Romanino (1484–1566) for the monks of Santa Giustina in Padova, whose icono­graphy is unknown,42 and those painted for the abbey of San Pietro in Modena by the brothers Giulio and Giovanni Taraschi (fl. c. 1524–61), who took the less conventional subject of The Egyptian Army Drowning in the Red Sea.43 The most important Benedictine commission of organ shutters was made by the monks of San Benedetto in Polirone with Antonio Allegri, better known as Correggio, in 1514. This commission expanded beyond the shutters of the organ to include decorating the baluster of the instrument and a fresco in the refectory that illustrated the progress of redemption from Abraham to Christ.44 Some scholars attribute the fresco, based on an icono­graphic programme by Gregorio Cortese (1480/83–1541), to the Dominican friar Girolamo Bonsignori (1472–1529).45

Not Open and Shut: The Ambiguities of Imagery in the Venetian Republic Commissions for organ shutters demonstrate that an openness to new religious ideas could combine with discipline and loyalty to the Church of Rome, and the subject matter seldom indicates clearly the views that patrons held on the Catholic Church. We see significant examples in various parts of the Venetian Republic, including in the Patriarchate of Aquileia, which embraced Friuli north-east of Venice and was the spiritual ‘domain’ of the Grimani family for much of the sixteenth century, and the areas in the west of the Venetian terraferma, which were within the archbishopric of Milan, and hence controlled by the Tridentine reformers Carlo (1538–1584) and Federico (1564–1631) Borromeo.46

 41 Collett, Italian Benedictine Scholars and the Reformation.  42 See Savy, Romanino ‘per organo’, pp. 33–34.  43 See Cavicchioli, ‘“Scatola sonora”’.  44 Romano, ‘Correggio in Mantua and San Benedetto Po’, p. 25; The commission was dated 8 September 1514. Romano identifies one of the two organ shutters as a canvas in a private collection in Turin which features the procession headed by King David returning the Holy Ark to Jerusalem.  45 Piva, Correggio giovane e l’affresco ritrovato, especially pp. 79–100.  46 To better understand this complex background, see Caponetto, La riforma protestante nell’Italia del Cinquecento, pp. 227–63, and Del Col, ‘L’Inquisizione romana’.

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Among the important organ shutter commissions found in Friuli are the ones in the cathedral of Santissimo Corpo di Cristo in Valvasone, one hundred kilometres north-east of Venice. Giovanni Antonio de’Sacchis, called Pordenone (1483–1539), was paid for Abraham and Melchisedech, The Sacrifice of Isaac, and The Gathering of Manna in 1535, but it was his son-in-law, Pomponio Amalteo (1505–1588), who actually completed these paintings a few years later. Caterina Furlan has noted that the icono­graphic programme could be determined by the sympathies that many members of distinguished local families had for the ideas of the spirituali, particularly from the early 1540s when a reformed concept of the Eucharist spread and took hold, leading some towards Calvinism at the end of that same decade.47 Pordenone’s images on the shutters in Valvasone may be interpreted as Christocentric anticipations or figures of the Eucharist: the sacrifice of Isaac as the flesh of the Son of God sacrificed for humankind, the offering of bread and wine by Melchisedech as eternal food on the table of the Lord, and manna, the nourishment providentially provided to the Israelites fleeing Egypt, as the material counterpoint of that ‘spiritual meal’ which can be enjoyed through such sacrament. A few years later, Pomponio Amalteo painted the organ shutters in the cathedral of Santa Maria Annunziata in Udine. He painted The Raising of Lazarus and The Pool of Bethesda on the inside of the shutters and Christ Driving the Money Changers from the Temple on the outside. While the first two subjects demonstrate the theme of salvation miraculously and directly administered by Jesus Christ, the third subject could very easily be seen as an implicit criticism of the practice of selling indulgences.48 Many commissions do not align clearly with one or the other side of the sixteenth-century religious divide, though there is no shortage of efforts to attempt just this. In 1524, Pordenone had already decorated the shutters of the cathedral of Santa Maria Maggiore in Spilimbergo — a small town between Pordenone and Udine — with The Assumption of the Virgin on the outside and The Fall of Simon the Sorcerer and The Conversion of Saint Paul on the inside, and scholars have long debated this choice of themes.49 Some claim that the outer image was a strong stance against Protestant heresies, since Mary’s holiness is exalted in her Assumption to heaven, a theo­logical doctrine that Protestants rejected as lacking biblical foundation. Other scholars believe that the representations on the inside of the shutters combine to offer a philo-Protestant message: the reference to simony hints at the Catholic practice of selling indulgences, and when pictured in con-

 47 Furlan, ‘“Iuxta modellum”’, p. 32; see also Del Col, ‘Fermenti di novità religiose’, especially p. 253.  48 Furlan, ‘Pomponio Amalteo’, p. 44.  49 See Furlan, Il Pordenone, pp. 122–31.

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Figure 14.4. Alessandro Bonvicino, called Moretto, Saints Peter and Paul Sustain the Church, Brescia, San Pietro in Oliveto. c. 1550. Photo: Photo­graphic Archive of Fondazione Federico Zeri. Copyright and related economic rights are extinguished.

junction with St Paul’s conversion, the two together give a strong message of salvation independent from good works. Yet such conjunctions are ambiguous at best. The story of Simon the Sorcerer could indeed easily be interpreted as reformist propaganda against Catholics guilty of wanting to profit from the holy gifts of God, yet that same subject was paired with a very loyal Catholic message in the Church of San Pietro in Oliveto in Brescia, at the western end of the Venetian terraferma. Alessandro Bonvicino, known as Moretto (1498–1554), decorated the organ shutters in the Duomo with scenes of The Fall of Simon the Sorcerer and

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Saints Peter and Paul Sustain the Church (Figure 14.4).50 Scholars suggest that Paul and Peter’s cooperation could point to the conviction that true religious authority lies in the institution as a whole, and not in a single preacher. When the organ was silent and the shutters were closed, viewers would see an image depicting the stability of a Church built on the granite foundation of these two apostles, their calm and firm support rendering all heresies ephemeral.51

Conclusion The craft of organ building and the rich production of organ shutters, especially in the Po Valley and the Republic of Venice,52 reached its peak before radically changing in the mid-seventeenth century. The new shape of organs — with pipes visible on the exterior — led patrons and builders to reject shutters entirely. This slow change was due both to the transformation of the instrument itself in the Baroque period and also to the evolution of Christianity under reforming movements of various kinds. The peculiar form that organs acquired during the Renaissance reflected a kind of vision that viewed the religious sphere according to the modalities of Renaissance culture and projected these through the specific icono­graphy adopted on the shutters. A unique syncretism existed during the period, which strove to keep Pagan antiquity and Christian tradition together, recognizing the millennial history of the instrument and holding the mystical power of music in high regard. A different set of musical, doctrinal, and aesthetic needs emerged by the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. As theo­logy moved towards new matters, the emphasis on depicting themes of Redemption on liturgical furniture — which had been a preoccupation of the previous two centuries — faded. The organ as ‘king of the instruments’ embodied the highly symbolic meaning of music as developed in neo-Pythagorean thought, and, as such, it expressed in musical terms the relationship that conjoined humanity and God. Once this theo­logical framework shifted, the organ shutters that had offered a visual translation of the long journey of redemption turned into nothing other than paintings.

 50 See Neher, ‘Moretto and the Congregation of San Giorgio’; Savy, Romanino ‘per organo’, pp. 51–54.  51 Begni Redona, Alessandro Bonvicino, p. 483.  52 The most recent academic research on this topic is D’Addio, ‘Painted Organ Shutters in Renaissance Italy’ (not consulted, under embargo until 2025). For an analysis of the Venetian situation, see Bisson, Meravigliose macchine di giubilo.

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Works Cited Primary Sources Germano di Costantinopoli, Omelie mario­logiche: le Omelie mariane e le Lettere sulle sacre immagini, ed. and trans. by Vittorio Fazzo, Collana di testi patristici, 49 (Roma: Città nuova, 1985) Guglielmo Ebreo of Pesaro, On the Practice or Art of Dancing, ed. and trans. by Barbara Sparti (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993) Lattanzio, Firmiano, Divinae Institutiones, ed. and trans. by Gino Mazzoni (Siena: Cantagalli, 1936–37) Lomazzo, Giovan Paolo, Trattato dell’arte della pittura, scoltura, et architettura (Milan: Paolo Gottardo Pontio, 1585) Paleotti, Gabriele, Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images, intro. by Paolo Prodi, trans. by William McCuaig (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2012) Sannazaro, Jacopo, De partu Virginis, ed. and trans. by Stefano Prandi (Roma: Citta nuova, 2001) Schlick, Arnolt, Miroir des organiers et des organistes, ed. and trans. by Christian Meyer (Paris: L’orgue, 1979) Teofilo Monaco, Le varie arti – De diversis artibus: Manuale di tecnica artistica medi­ evale, ed. and trans. by Adriano Caffaro (Salerno: Palladio editrice, 2000) Secondary Studies Appiano Caprettini, Ave, Lettura dell’Annunciazione: fra semiotica e iconografia, Pubblicazioni del Centro di Ricerche Semiotiche di Torino, 2 (Turin: G. Giappichelli, 1979) Arisi, Ferdinando, Le ante d’organo di Santa Maria di Campagna e altri dipinti sacri (Piacenza: Tip.le.co., 1978) Arslan, Edoardo, Le pitture del Duomo di Milano (Milan: Ceschina, 1960) Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur (Bern: Francke, 1946) Begni Redona, Pier Virgilio, Alessandro Bonvicino: Il Moretto da Brescia (Brescia: La Scuola, 1988) Billanovich, Giuseppe, Tra don Teofilo Folengo e Merlin Cocaio (Napoli: Pironti e figli, 1948) Bisson, Massimo, Meravigliose macchine di giubilo: L’architettura e l’arte degli organi a Venezia nel Rinascimento (Venezia: Fondazione Giorgio Cini, 2012) Bowles, Edmund A., ‘The Symbolism of the Organ in the Middle Ages: A Study in the History of Ideas’, in Aspects of Medi­eval and Renaissance Music: A Birthday Offering to Gustave Reese, ed. by Jan Larue (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966), pp. 27–39 Campbell, Stephen John, Cosmè Tura of Ferrara: Style, Politics and the Renaissance City, 1450–1495 (New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­sity Press, 1997)

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Caponetto, Salvatore, La riforma protestante nell’Italia del Cinquecento, Studi Storici (Turin: Claudiana, 1992) Cavicchioli, Sonia, ‘“Scatola sonora”: la decorazione dell’organo dell’abbazia di San Pietro a Modena’, in Nei secoli della Magnificenza: Committenti e decorazione d’interni in Emilia nel Cinque e Seicento, ed. by S. Cavicchioli (Bo­logna: Minerva Edizioni, 2008), pp. 75–84 Cessi, Roberto, ‘Paolinismo preluterano’, Atti della Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. Rendiconti. Classe di scienze morali, 12 (1957), 3–30 Collett, Barry, Italian Benedictine Scholars and the Reformation: The Congregation of Santa Giustina of Padua, Oxford Historical Mono­graphs (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 1985) Connolly, Thomas, ‘The Legend of St. Cecilia: I, The Origins of the Cult’, Studi Musicali, 7 (1978), 3–38 —— , Mourning into Joy: Music, Raphael and Saint Cecilia (New Haven: Yale Uni­ ver­sity Press, 1994) Cooper, Adam, Faith Comes by Hearing: A Pauline Motif in Theo­logical Tradition [accessed March 2020] D’Addio, Sophia, ‘Painted Organ Shutters in Renaissance Italy’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Columbia Uni­ver­sity, 2020) Del Col, Andrea, ‘Fermenti di novità religiose in alcuni cicli pittorici del Pordenone e dell’Amalteo’, in Società e cultura del Cinquecento nel Friuli occidentale, ed. by Andrea Del Col (Pordenone: Edizioni della Provincia di Pordenone, 1984), pp. 229–54 —— , ‘L’Inquisizione romana e il potere politico nella repubblica di Venezia (1540–1560)’, Critica storica, 28 (1991), 189–250 Delehaye, Hippolyte, Étude sur le légendier romain: Les Saints de novembre et de décembre (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1936) dell’Antonio, Sara, ‘Felice Brusasorzi: Un percorso tra “maniera” e natura. Materiali per una ricerca monografica’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Uni­ver­sity of Udine, 2006) Dessì, Paola, L’organo tardoantico: storie di sovranità e diplomazia (Padova: CLEUP, 2008) Donati, Pier Paolo, ‘L’arte degli organi nell’Italia del Quattrocento. III: Le carat­ teristiche degli strumenti’, Informazione organistica: bollettino della Fondazione accademia di musica italiana per organo di Pistoia, 15 (2006), 195–242 Furlan, Caterina, ‘“Iuxta modellum”: forme e figure del sacro nella pittura del Cinquecento in Friuli’, in Dal Pordenone a Palma il Giovane: Devozione e pietà nel disegno veneziano del Cinquecento, ed. by Caterina Furlan (Milano: Electa, 2000), pp. 25–40 —— , ‘Pomponio Amalteo, “pictor Sancti Viti”’, in Pomponio Amalteo, Pictor Sancti Viti 1505–1588, ed. by Caterina Furlan and Paolo Casadio (Milano: Skira, 2006), pp. 13–67 —— , Il Pordenone (Milano: Electa, 1988) Ghidiglia Quintavalle, Augusta, ‘Le ante d’organo del Parmigianino e del Sons alla Steccata: un importante recupero e una puntualizzazione critica’, Bollettino d’Arte, 53 (1968), 207–10

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Giordano, Nicola, ‘San Bernardo e Maria’, in Bernardo di Chiaravalle, Lodi alla Vergine Madre, ed. by Domenico Turco (Roma: Vivere In, 1991), pp. 5–18 Hering-Mitgau, Mane, ‘Die Flügelbilder und ihr Maler Peter Maggenberg’, in Die Valeria-Orgel: Ein gotisches Werk in der Burgkirche zu Sitten / Sion, ed. by Jakob Friedrich and others (Zürich: Verlag der Fachvereine, 1991), pp. 171–99 Markovitz, Michael, Die Orgel im Altertum (Leiden: Brill, 2003) Moretti, Corrado, L’organo italiano: Profilo storico, analisi tecnica ed estetica dello strumento, sintesi delle sue sonorità a servizio della liturgia cattolica (Cuneo: S.A.S.T.E., 1955) Music, David W., Instruments in Church: A Collection of Source Documents, Studies in Liturgical Musico­logy, 7 (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 1998) Neher, Gabriele, ‘Moretto and the Congregation of San Giorgio in Alga 1540–1550: Fashioning a Visual Identity of a Religious Congregation’, in Fashioning Identities in Renaissance Art, ed. by Mary Rogers (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 131–47 Pagani, Lelio, L’organo Antegnati, 1588–1996: Chiesa di San Nicola in Almenno San Salvatore (Almenno San Salvatore: Parrocchia di Almenno San Salvatore, 1996) Pellegri, Marco, ‘L’organo’, in Basilica cattedrale di Parma: Novecento anni di arte, storia, fede, vol. ii (Parma: Grafiche Step editrice, 2005), pp. 104–07 Perina, Hugo, ‘David, les psaumes et l’orgue dans l’Église italienne de la Renaissance’, in Figures de David d’hier à aujourd’hui, ed. by Bruno Bethouart and others (Cysoing: Les Cahiers du Littoral, 2018), pp. 209–23 Pirovano, Carlo, ed., Pinacoteca di Brera: Scuola Veneta, Musei e Gallerie di Milano (Milano: Electa, 1990) Piva, Paolo, Correggio giovane e l’affresco ritrovato di San Benedetto in Polirone (Torino: Allemandi, 1988) Quagliaroli, Serena, ‘Le ante d’organo di Santa Maria di Campagna: iconografia musicale nel cammino della redenzione’, Bollettino storico piacentino, 109 (2014), 177–92 Romano, Giovanni, ‘Correggio in Mantua and San Benedetto Po’, in Dosso’s Fate: Painting and Court Culture in Renaissance Italy, ed. by Luisa Ciammitti and others (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 1998), pp. 15–40 Sachs, Curt, The History of Musical Instruments (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2012) Savy, Barbara Maria, Romanino ‘per organo’: musica e decorazione a Brescia nel Rinascimento, Pittura del Rinascimento nell’Italia settentrionale. Quaderni, 5 (Padova: Padova Uni­ver­sity Press, 2015) Steinberg, Leo, ‘“How Shall This Be?” Reflections on Filippo Lippi’s “Annun­cia­ tion” in London, Part I’, Artibus et Historiae: An Art Antho­logy, 16 (1987), 25–44 Trinchieri Camiz, Franca, ‘Music Performance and Healing in Renaissance Rome Revealed by Text and Images’, in Art and Music in the Early Modern Period: Essays in Honour of Franca Trinchieri Camiz, ed. by Katherine A. McIver (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 353–65 Turnure, James H., ‘The Organ Shutters of Milan Cathedral’, in Il Duomo di Milano, ed. by Maria Luisa Gatti Perer, vol. i (Milano: La Rete, 1969), pp. 219–30

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Renaissance Religions – Afterwards? It may seem odd that so many of the studies in this collection on Renaissance religions focus on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a period often thought to be after the Renaissance. Isn’t this the Counter-Reformation? Or what Hiram Hayden called the Counter-Renaissance? We have aimed here to underscore that religious life in these centuries is not just what comes ‘afterwards’. It is not fundamentally reactionary, or locked in a dance with dynamic figures moving creatively north of the alps, its motions only shadows defined by what these transalpine reformers do in some brighter light. Religious life of the later Renaissance is fully and fundamentally continuous with that of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in Italy. The structures of that life do change, and the structures of its ecclesiastical forms above all. They will gradually shift religion into more professional — read clerical — forms that narrow the agency and varieties of lay religions in particular. Yet, when we look into the minds and convictions of even some of the firmest of those clergy, we see motivations and priorities and ambitions that are deeply shaped by Italian religions of the earlier centuries. Observantism above all, which deeply defined Italian religious life long before Luther thought to take a cowl, and which bridged lay and clerical long before he speculated on the priesthood of all believers. Roman antiquarianism, which lay and clerical writers, artists, and patrons plumbed enthusiastically as they drilled ad fontes into early peninsular traditions — both Christian and non — that might inspire and nourish a drier present. These played with the creative possibilities of what caput mundi might actually mean as Europeans began to experience a world larger than what they had imagined, even if those meanings were mixed. Will and emotion continued shaping believers’ responses to God even more than catechisms, and motion and materiality steered those responses more than words, so that the shape of a church, the movement around a city or up a rural hill, and the feeding of eye and ear could move both the body of the Christian and the Body of Christendom alike towards deeper discipleship. And all this expanded in ways that transalpine reformers would have found alien or objectionable. Nicholas Terpstra ([email protected]) is Professor of History at the Uni­ver­sity of Toronto, working at the intersections of social, political, religious, and gender history in early modern Italy. Renaissance Religions: Modes and Meanings in History, ed. by Peter Howard, Nicholas Terpstra, and Riccardo Saccenti, ES 26 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2021) pp. 365–373 10.1484/M.ES-EB.5.121913

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Traditional periodizations contort Renaissance religions into forms that exaggerate the impact of transalpine intellectual movements and ecclesiastical reorderings. The ghosts of Hegel, Michelet, Ranke, and Burckhardt continue to haunt the field, and the irony is that they sometimes seem to have a greater influence in the Italian academy than elsewhere. Here we can find no end of studies that position The Reformation as an all-but fleshand-blood historical actor who stomps over the Alps in the 1520s, inspires a few individuals and possesses many others, triggers a defensive response, and locks the peninsula into a morose and kill-joy Counter-Reformation by mid-century. We encounter this reactionary mode more often in intellectual and institutional histories than in social or cultural ones, and more often in their rhetorical framing than in the archival substance. And there’s really a double irony here: in the period we are studying, most Italians were far more fascinated with their own histories and traditions than with the actions of outsiders (with the exception perhaps of some thinkers and ecclesiastical politicians). In the past few decades, most of the studies that explore these continuities have come from outside the peninsula, while many Italian historians of religion and culture have remained indebted to the traditional Hegelian periodizations and conceptualizations that still shape a rigorous, but deeply traditional, formation from the level of the classical liceo. Their rhetoric has emphasized the disruptions, reactions, repressions, and insecurities that festered in the dark shadows cast over Italy by the transalpine Reformation. In these accounts, periods have firm boundaries and distinct characteristics, histories have turning points, and the sun really does shine from the north. We’ve aimed here to explore continuities in the negotiating of boundaries, the modelling of spirituality, the reliance on sense and emotion, and the use of space and form. There is no denying the impact of spiritual, political, and economic movements from northern Europe, which were realigning hierarchies and threatening the position that a deeply Italian Church had held over much of the continent. Yet, we have aimed to see how Italians took some of the spiritual forms that had emerged or expanded in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and used them to shape religious life in the sixteenth and seventeenth. In aiming to recover these later centuries for the long Renaissance, we are not simply playing some arid game of periodization. The Renaissance created a language that later centuries spoke as their mother tongue. Carlo Borromeo was a Renaissance man in much of his formation and many of his expectations. What does this mean in practice? It helps to continue with Carlo Borromeo as an example, since he appears in many of these essays, even if only fleetingly, and he has often been cast as the Counter-Reformer par excellence by partisans and opponents alike. Curial nephew of an ambitious pope who believed in centralizing power, and an active episcopal agent using dormant powers to bring some ideas pioneered by contemporaries into mainstream ecclesiastical practice, he was an individually intense and

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courageous pastoral leader who exercised personally what he expected of others. He was also a media-savvy innovator who had the benefit of active, later promotion within and beyond the family firm. There’s much here that resonates with Burckhardt’s characterization of the Renaissance hero-despot practicing political arts and personal formation (and having allies like the Barnabites and the Milanese who might promote you for their own interests). You don’t win canonization in two and a half decades just by counting rosary beads. Grace Harpster underscores a fundamental point: in his various reforms, Borromeo was not preoccupied with Protestants outside of Italy but with what he thought to be poor practice within it. He targeted what he considered profane, lax, and worldly practices, a broad category that indeed took in many Renaissance developments, like family and personal altars, lay agency in devotional practices, and music and art that prized aesthetic values as goods in themselves, rather than as vehicles for spiritual reflection. There is no denying that Borromeo had the Renaissance in his sights, though Harpster argues that he was not the anti-classicist that he is often portrayed as being. The weapons with which he fought his battles were also drawn from the Renaissance. Borromeo’s 1577 Instructiones was a practical manual giving the mechanics of reform that was influential across Europe, Asia, and the Americas, and was still being cited in the 1940s. While he emphasized material needs over aesthetic values, Borromeo drew on antique forms and apostolic models for sources of images, liturgy, and architecture, and advocated clarity, simplicity, and intelligibility of artistic message. His models were from ancient Rome, Jerusalem, Constantinople, and Milan. He sought a professional clergy, and his standards for their character and performance would be as familiar to Valla as to Calvin: education, morality, charity, asceticism, classicism (meaning Christian antiquity). Borromeo articulated these values within a community of like-minded reformers who, as Gill, Quagliaroli, and Torres show, implemented them in the arrangement and decoration of liturgical furnishings in Milan Cathedral and in art that had an agenda. David’s lyre and Gabriel’s Annunciation to Mary showed God’s Word working outside the limits of a printed and bound paper Bible, and picturing this distinctly Catholic Reform truth on organ shutters could educate, elevate, and inspire laity in continuity with older traditions of the biblia pauperum. Was it all continuity? Unger shows how in the image-savvy world of the seventeenth century, the medium became the message, as Bo­logna received a series of oversized and strategically located canvases with Borromeo as the heroic instantiation of key religious reform values — charitable, learned, and devout. Borromeo was canonized in 1610, and more than a dozen paintings produced from 1611 to 1618 and installed in eight major churches around the city certainly show what image some in the Church had for the ideal type of the religious reformer. Ranging from historical images to an apotheosis to a misericordia-like image that placed Borromeo in the Virgin’s intercessory role, they point to a strong body of

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local support for the Milanese cardinal bishop, who had served as Legate of Bo­logna early in his career. At the same time, these giant canvases covered over the Borromean-Tridentine erasure of local civic religion in a city that had a centuries-long testy relation to Rome. As such, the images could hardly be anything but political. Yet, in Rome’s post-Trent media campaign, churches, liturgies, music, and canvases were new facts on the ground that succeeded in superseding earlier forms simply by refusing to engage with them. Was Borromeo using Renaissance forms to counter Renaissance values? The question only makes sense if we assume that periods exist objectively and have the distinct character that nineteenth-century historians endowed them with. In the messier realm of discourse, we see networks, evolutions, doubts, and conversions that render periodization itself as, at best, a heuristic tool, and not an objective reality. If we reverse our approach and look not to individuals like Borromeo but to the networks in which they were formed, we see this discursive process at work across different cultural fields and through various artists, writers, and patrons. Religious identity was collectively constructed, shared, communicated, and acted on. It was a ‘bricolage’, as Corbellini explains, with pieces assembled from public sermons, spiritual texts, miracle tales, and sacre rappresentazioni that laity and clergy often shared. Peter Howard shows that many pieces were cast in medi­eval forms, but throughout the fifteenth century, some remarkably literate laity incorporated more items from Greek and Roman Christian classical antiquity in the mix. The vernacular compendium assembled by literate laymen like the Sienese wool merchant and minor official Marco di Francesco di Giovanni Ciechi in his notebook, or zibaldone, was one of those ‘spaces of the spiritual’ where their exchanges blossomed. Corbellini shows how Marco di Francesco’s transcriptions of sermons, plays, and texts exemplified the characteristics of active listening that he jotted down from Franciscan Observant Fra Cherubino da Spoleto’s Lenten sermons of the 1470s in Siena. Active spiritual listening started with the willing heart (sollicitatione) and attentive mind (attentione), involved reflection (discretione) and devotion (devotione), and moved into the public, civic sphere through sharing (communicatione) and action (operatione). The Sienese wool merchant noted carefully that he compiled his zibaldone in the Palazzo Comunale while living there as a public official. He was underscoring Siena’s civic palazzo as one of those ‘spaces of the spiritual’; others included lay confraternities with their libraries, oratories, processions, and rituals. Particular confraternities might take particular civic religious roles, as when lay members of Bo­logna’s confraternity of Santa Maria della Morte comforted prisoners headed for the scaffold. Filocamo’s expansion on the poetic and musical forms through which they assembled their bricolage highlights how these groups drew on popular song, devotional poetry, and saints’ lives to fashion instruments — the laude — that could be spoken or sung as the moment, the stage of comforting, or the prisoner or comforter determined.

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Lay merchants weren’t the only ones assembling and editing traditional or common texts for public and civic purposes. Mendicant Observants had long believed that the radical surgeries that purged and amputated could actually heal the rifts in their Orders and in the confraternities and cities that they pastored. One of the founders of the Dominican Observants, Tommaso Caffarini of Siena, assembled one such compendium while prior of Santi Giovanni e Paolo (San Zanipolo) in Venice from 1396, after fellow Observant leader Giovanni Dominici had been sent back to Florence. Fra Tommaso was defending the Observants against charges of disloyalty in the fraught period of the Avignon schism. His Latin compilation of largely Italian and largely fourteenth-century texts included sermons, legends, and histories of many popularly revered figures who had not been formally canonized. Mews and Räsänen show how these texts aimed to promote the spiritual regeneration of the laity by taking them ad fontes to purer exemplars like Thomas Aquinas, presenting them more as miracle workers than as scholars, and, above all, as agents of reconciliation. Laity and clergy had been assembling their bricolages for decades throughout the fifteenth century, sharing an Observant ethos with an aim of promoting spirituality, offering charity, healing rifts in religious orders, cities, and groups, and giving voice and material form to self-conscious devotion. Their observantist orientation drew them to older sources, including texts and practices from Christian antiquity, which they considered an exercise in ad fontes renovation, restoration, and reformation — and sometimes invention. Their varieties in a far-from-monolithic Catholicism justify our speaking of ‘religions’ in the plural. Their recoveries were part of the bricolage, and as Mattei and Cornelison argue, patrons and artists employed them as much for aesthetic as for ideo­logical effect when they carved quotations into a frieze or renovated two ambitious churches in a single, competitive town. Networks of like-minded reforming Catholic prelates and patricians evolved as they criss-crossed paths in university, in spiritual retreats, and in informal academies. As Gill demonstrates in the case of the network formed around Genoa’s Sauli family, they shared ideas and influences in youth and grew closer or further apart as they matured. As they gained financial and social capital, leading Sauli were able to test, implement, and share ideas by drawing in artists and architects who were often the active agents of a cross-pollination that shuttled forms and ideas across historical periods, between cities, and to distinct commissions through the course of the sixteenth century. There is a logical progression that connects Stefano Sauli, committed since the time that he was studying humanistic texts in his teens in the 1510s, to the goal of using purer Christian classical forms to refresh Catholic structures and practices, and to a classicizing commission for a central-plan church and tabernacle in the 1540s. Haphazardly realized, if at all, these clusters of ideas then adapt and mutate further as they move along lines of discussion, recommendation, and patronage to Verona later that decade and on to Milan in the 1550s. And while architecture

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could be a catechism in stone, aesthetic values and practical sensory needs still took priority. As Cornelison argues, Vasari’s nearly contemporaneous renovation projects in the 1550s and 1560s for two rival churches in Arezzo, the Cathedral and the Pieve di Santa Maria, followed principles of design, access, and reform shaped by those larger peninsular networks, discussions, and experimentation. Removing tramezzi (rood screens), making altars more visible, and improving light and acoustics were reforms that we can see a century earlier in Pienza Cathedral, considered by many to be the most complete realization of quattrocento spiritual and architectural values. Vasari, like Bernardo Rosellino and Pius II before him, was aiming for functional, icono­graphical, and patronal coherence. With altarpieces, chapels, and the relics of Arezzo’s patron saint Donato, he aimed to create a network of history, family, and religiosity in his home town. To attribute all of his architectural choices to the purely local competition between two rival ecclesiastical patrons restricts our analysis and understanding, and minimizes both local interconnectedness and the multivalent implementations of larger and longer-running discussions on art, will, and spirituality. Devotional inclusivity could coexist with institutional rivalry. This is not to minimize rivalry or animosity when it came to shaping the material or artistic forms in which Renaissance religions would be lived and expressed. Reform was certainly not a perpetually sunny path of open-minded incorporation of the new influences that had emerged in the quattrocento. The Inquisition asked questions. Some of the patrons that Mattei describes had to be discrete or dissembling in their epi­graphic allusions in order to avoid falling on the wrong side of hardening orthodoxies. Some theorists keen on sensual art could not see justifying it as a celebration of the bodies that God had created, but promoted it instead as the cure, and not the incitement, to lust. Stowell tracks arguments that brought together sensual art and Renaissance medical science as shaped by Plato and Ficino and the imprinting of images on the memory. Using fire to fight fire, these theorists argued that if the eye was the key to arousal, it could also be the key to a cure. Since semen originates in that biggest sex organ, the brain, careful and sustained exposure to sensual art could actually temper lust, though only over time and in combination with tears: the many sensuous Magdalens weeping at the point of repentance could stir men to repent of their baser drives. Moreover, people changed their minds. Preachers like Bartolomeo della Pergola and Ippolito Chizzola, who had been early and enthusiastic advocates of spiritual reforms that bypassed popular narratives of active saintly intercessors to connect believers more directly with Christ, became more discrete and even reversed themselves within a few decades. Was it that their ideas fell out of favour and threatened their advancement, particularly as the Inquisition turned its attention to suspect preachers, investigating a hundred of them from 1548 to 1559? Or were they alarmed by developments around Europe that made them wonder whether the cure of an open-access ‘priest-

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hood of all believers’ reform that drained magic, miracle, and intercession out of religion was worse than the disease of a sclerotic Church? Caravale tracks Chizzola’s move from the spirituali to orthodoxy when he argued for ever-stricter controls and moved aggressively against some his former allies. Caravale cautions that shifts in the preacher’s position also highlight methodo­logical problems around orality and print. The early views of many ‘suspect’ preachers are only known through the notes that people like our Sienese wool merchant Marco di Francesco could scribble during a sermon. Their later, more orthodox views often come through what they themselves later published and, as Caravale emphasizes, it was print that allowed many to recover their orthodoxy — or at least their reputations. This was not all strategy or hypocrisy or reaction. The fifteenth century had modelled many paths of spiritual reform, and switching tools did not mean abandoning the project. Girolamo Savonarola had gained a wide following by directing his purgative prescriptions against the kinds of art and painting we associate with the Renaissance celebration of human forms and emotions. Filippo Neri was formed in that same spiritual pharmacy, but was drawn to different medications for healing the human spirit. Neri gladly drew on Savonarola’s use of laude, of youths, and of public processions, but he prescribed a lighter dose and wanted to stimulate a wider range of emotions than only the repentance that made cynical Florentines dismiss the Savonarolans as ‘weepers’ (piagnoni). Both reformers had experienced the same mixing pot of spiritual forces that Corbellini, Mews, and Räsänen describe, and both used art and music to convey specifically biblical truths in intelligible and compelling forms — Neri admittedly more enthusiastically and polyphonically than Savonarola. Neri’s followers put yet more water in the Savonarolan wine and expanded this further into the oratorio, which was also built around biblical stories. It might not be too far-fetched to see the patrician audiences for seicento musical oratories as the counterparts to the merchant audiences for quattrocento sermons. These performances were also ‘spaces of the spiritual’, directed to touching the heart (sollicitatione), waking the mind (attentione), steering reflection (discretione) and devotion (devotione), and moving audiences from passive listening out into the public sphere through sharing (communicatione) and action (operatione). Both groups of listeners were, in their own ways and in times two hundred years apart, building the bricolage of a religious identity out of various textual, aural, visual, and sensory pieces. It’s no coincidence that both Corbellini and Torres emphasize that this activity is more collective than individual, with Torres asserting that music turned individual Christians into communities of believers. Catholicism of the later Renaissance continued to frame its communal identity in distinction from Mediterranean Abrahamic rivals as much — or more — than through opposition to transalpine Christianities. It also drew on distinctly quattrocento concepts and rhetoric to do so. Fifteenth-century Italians had reacted with a bracing anti-Semitism as the Jewish communities

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in their midst expanded with the refugees of transalpine and Iberian purgations. Few Italian Catholics saw diasporic communities of Jews as anything other than a problem, and almost all of the most active Observant spiritual reformers saw Jews as a threat, and Jewish males above all, since they were harder to convert and assimilate. Herzig shows that conversion and integration into the Christian community remained a common prescription for social and spiritual health and a preoccupation of Italian elites. Italy did not adopt the Iberian practice of mass forced baptisms, but it was unique in Europe for adapting the emerging Renaissance social tool of institutional enclosures, in the form both of ghettos and of Houses of Conversion, to the task of securing conversions. They certainly had an effect. It is estimated that at least one individual in every Jewish family in Italy converted over the early modern period. Convert Jews were more fully excluded from their birth communities than convert Muslims, though there were fewer of the latter. Islam was a different threat, but no less existential for being offshore. Ottoman ships and soldiers made its threat immediate and physical, while the wealth and power centred in Constantinople-Istanbul made it more dangerously seductive to merchants and political leaders. Spiritual reformers of the later Renaissance might experience that seduction while also seeing compromise and détente as treasonous motivations in the hearts of Christians. Debby shows these tensions emerging in a mid-seventeenth-century text and chapel that localizes them around the ritualized humiliations and torture of Venetian ambassadorial households during the extended War of Candia (1645–69), and the experience of ambassador (bailo) Giovanni Ballarino in particular. A Franciscan Conventual friar in Ballarino’s household, Niccolò Guidalotto, produced a richly illustrated compendium, the Memorie Turchesche, highlighting Constantinople-Istanbul’s ancient and recent history and the fascinations of its people, places, and monuments. He also detailed Ballarino’s humiliations in the antithetical forms and rhetoric of medi­eval martyro­logies and would return to Venice calling for crusade. Ballarino’s heirs later translated Guidalotto’s text into stucco and paint in the chapel they built in Murano to honour the ambassador who, though released by the sultan and immediately elected to high office in Venice, did not survive the voyage home. The various media employed by Guidalotto and the Ballarini gave print and visual form to fifteenth-century-style warnings of the persecutions, threats, and evil of Islam. Yet, the reality was that by the end of the seventeenth century, most of their Italian contemporaries were losing interest. * * * One approach to Renaissance religions would be to emphasize the variety of religious confessions on the peninsula — Catholic, radical, Calvinist, Jewish, Orthodox, Muslim, animist — each with their internal varieties. We’ve aimed, instead, to emphasize the varieties within pre-modern Italian Catholicism in order to move beyond depictions of it as monolithic (even

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if we highlight continuities) or as undergoing a fundamental rupture in the early sixteenth century. Fundamental continuities unify the often-messy varieties and the metamorphoses that emerged over the period in response to peninsular and geopolitical realities. Preconceptions about ‘Renaissance’ and ‘Reformation’, based in nineteenth-century characterizations, can obscure these continuities. Cardinals and curialists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were as single-minded and disciplinarian as fourteenth- and fifteenth-century signori and no less focused on burnishing their image. Carlo Borromeo fashioning himself a second Ambrose was not much different than Duke Cosimo I fashioning himself a second Octavian. The parallels had begun over a century earlier, when Florentine patricians commissioned portrait busts depicting them as Roman senators, or when the city’s Signoria appropriated the title ‘Pater Patriae’, once given to Cicero, and put it on Cosimo de’ Medici’s tomb. The quattrocento humanists who flattered those signori with images of Roman antecedents and ancestors were as opportunist and pliable as their sixteenth- and seventeenth-century descendants, answering to a different power structure with a very similar rhetoric. Both invented the images and traditions that became fixed in the more dogmatic versions of later periodizations. We have, for the most part, left aside treatises and catechisms in order to trace the diverse spiritual, material, and artistic expressions of religion across different cultural forms from literature to painting to music to architecture. We’ve pursued images of bricolage, palimpsest, and polyphony more than those of dichotomy, dispute, or battle. We aim to track the interpenetration of aesthetics, antiquity, spirituality, and tradition/novelty in the collective construction of identities. In their assembling of mosaics or layering of priorities, Italians were committed to finding in Christian antiquity and medi­eval traditions the architectural and liturgical forms that would refresh and reshape spiritual life. They would avoid different pressure points and privilege different connections. They would form different networks, and those networks would evolve in different ways. Views matured, fears grew, and opportunities beckoned through the sixteenth century. Yet, we still see here religious life drawing on and adapting a language of forms, traditions, and concepts that had taken clearer shape in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The results were less a monolithic orthodoxy than, as Mattei describes it, a ‘kaleidoscope of religious beliefs’.

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Index Page numbers in italics refer to maps, images, and plates. Page numbers in bold refer to the Cividale Legendary.

abjuration: 334, 338 Abraham: 47, 267, 358 and covenant with God: 34, 71, 354, 357 absolution, sacramental: 331, 335 academies: 282, 366 Academia de’ Gelati (Academy of the Frozen Ones): 268 Academia degli Inabili (Academy of the Unskilled): 266 Accademia Ermathena: 135 literary: 147, 264, 268 and music: 255–69 Adrianople, Adrianopolis (modern Edirne, Turkey): 94, 101 afterlife: 36, 231, 237, 240 Ahmed II, Ottoman sultan: 89 Aikema, Bernard: 217, 221 Albergotti family: 319 Albergotti, Nerozzo: 308, 310, 310 n. 21, 313 Albergotti Altarpiece (see under Vasari, Giorgio) Alberti, Leon Battista: 224 Alberto, St: 199 Albert the Great: 115, 212 Alciato, Andrea, Emblemi: 137 Aleandro, Girolamo: 328 Alessandri, Benedetto di Bartolomeo degli: 55 Alessi, Galeazzo: 277–96 Santa Maria Assunta di Carignano (Genoa): 278–80 Alexander, St: 116, 121 Alexander III, Pope: 115, 120 Alexander V, Pope: 111, 120 Alexander VII, Pope: 85

Alexandria: 13, 16, 344 Algardi, Alessandro: 187 n. 28 allegory: 137 altarpieces: 85, 175, 183, 191, 193, 199, 310–14, 317, 343, 370 Amalteo, Pomponio: 358 Ambrogio Sansedoni, St: 115, 115 n. 24, 119, 120 Ambrose, St, Bishop of Milan: 167, 373 Ammannati, Bartolomeo: 143 Anabaptists: 65, 135. see also radical Christianity Ancina, Giovenale: 258 Andrew, St: 315, 315 n. 40 Angelico, Fra: 16 animism: 372 Annunciation of the Virgin: 354, 355 n. 33, 356, 367. see also miracles Annuziata, santissima: 225, 226 in art: 225, 226, 302, 345, 349, 353 The Annunciation of the Virgin ( Jacopo di Cione?): 226 Anselm, St, De conceptu virginali: 355 anthropology: 18, 22, 24 antique: 35, 155, 167–69, 171. see also antiquity antiquities: 82, 139, 142, 143 antiquity Christian: 167, 168, 171, 356, 367, 369, 373 classical: 18, 24, 131, 211, 347, 360, 368 antisemitism. see under Judaism Antoninus Pierozzi, St, archbishop of Florence: 26 n. 55, 27–31, 301, 302, 355 n. 33 De Fide: 29 Summa theologica: 27–28

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i n dex Antonio, Francesco d’, 345 Antonio da Ferrara: 233 Credo di Dante: 54 apostasy, Jewish: 66, 70, 73 apostates: 65, 69, 70 Aquinas, Thomas, St. see Thomas Aquinas architecture classical: 90, 147 interpretation of: 128–29, 147–49 Islamic: 17 and religion: 34, 278, 281, 282, 285 Renaissance: 127–49, 168, 171 church: 36, 160, 163, 168–69 170, 169, 277–96, 301–19, 370 altars: 164, 289, 290, 291, 370 baptismal fonts: 72, 169 basilica: 98–99 choir: 289, 294, 305, 306, 314, 317 pulpits: 182, 325–39 quincunx: 277, 278, 280, 281, 294 sacristy: 166 tramezzi (rood screens): 304, 306, 314, 370 palazzi: 129 (see also palazzi) and Vitruvius: 130, 133, 140, 147 Ardinghelli, Bese: 55 Aretino, Pietro: 148 Arezzo: 37, 311, 370 churches: 301–19 Badia di Sante Flora e Lucilla: 308, 311 Pieve altar: 309, 311, 312 Cathedral: 303, 305–07, 310, 313–17, 318, 319, 370 arca of St Donato: 304, 313 St Sylvester Chapel: 317, 319 Pieve di Santa Maria: 37, 303, 306, 307, 310–19, 370 Albergotti Chapel and Altarpiece (see under Vasari) Camaiani Chapel: 305, 310 St Honofrius Chapel: 310 St Mustiola Chapel: 313, 319 San Pier Maggiore: 316

Aristotle: 25, 29, 224 Generation of Animals: 212 Problems: 223 art conceptions of: 35, 155, 160 history of: 13–14 and music: 343–60 and religion: 35, 166, 371 art, sacred: 223, 227 agency of: 208, 209 eroticism in: 207, 209, 210, 213, 216, 217, 227 (see also Christ; Mary Magdalen) and ornamentation: 164–65, 345 polyptychs: 306, 307 and the profane: 164, 170–71 and reform: 127, 164 art, sensual: 207, 213–17, 227, 370 Assumption of the Virgin: 277, 358 in art: 291, 310, 314, 358 attentione: 53, 317, 368 audiences: 18, 25–26, 31, 326, 331, 333, 336, 337, 371 and oratorios: 264–67 Auerbach, Erich: 350 Augustine, St: 29–30, 49, 357 Soliloquy: 56 aural. see hearing authorship: 48, 49 Avicenna: 219, 222, 223 Azzolini, Francesco: 266 bailate (Venetian embassy in Constantinople). see under Venetian Republic Bailey, Gauvin: 303 bailo (ambassador): 84–87, 96. see also Veneto-Ottoman relations; Venice Baldassini, Melchiorre: 131 Ballarino family: 99, 100. see also Padavino, Giovanni Battista Ballarino, Alessandro: 101 Ballarino, Domenico: 101

index Ballarino, Giovanni Battista: 81, 84–86, 93–94, 96–102, 372 (see also Memorie Turchesche; Murano) in art: 96, 97, 99, 100, 102 Capella Ballarina: 81, 98–101, 102, 372 baptism: 34, 332 baptismal orations: 71, 72 and consent: 67, 71 and conversion: 33–34, 64–71, 372 as sacrament: 34, 71 Barbadoro da Firenze, Antonio: 233 Barbarossa, Frederick: 115, 120 Barcelona: 116, 118 Barelli da Nizza, Francesco Luigi: 177 Barnabite Order (the Clerics Regular of St. Paul): 35, 187, 367. see also Borromeo, Carlo, St in art: 191, 200 The Proclamation of the Barnabites’ Rule by Carlo Borromeo (Garbieri): 179, 181, 182, 183, 184 churches: 182 San Paolo Maggiore: 35, 178–82, 182, 183 Barocci, Federico: 310, 310 n. 25 Bascapè, Carlo: 177, 184 basilica. see individual churches Baxandall, Michael: 22, 164 Bayezid I, Ottoman sultan: 89 Bayezid II, Ottoman sultan: 89 Beccari, Antonio: 233 Bede, Venerable, St: 167 Beecher, Donald: 211, 217 Bela IV, king of Hungary: 114, 122 Belcari, Feo: 234 Abramo e Isac (sacra rappresen­ tazione): 47, 49, 50 n. 11, 54 Bellini, Gentile: 14–16, 16 n. 10, 17, 23, 89, 302 St Mark Preaching in Alexandria: 14–15, 25 Bellini, Giovanni, St Mark Preaching in Alexandria: 14–15

Bembo, Pietro: 285 Benedictines (Order of St Benedict): 282, 355–57 convents and monasteries (see convents and monasteries (Benedictine)) Benedict XI, Pope: 118, 121 Benedict XII, Pope: 115 Bergamo: 23, 346 churches San Nicola (Almenno San Salvatore): 346 as urban context: 23 Berna, Giacomo Maria: 184 Bernardo da Firenze, Pietro: 31 Bertani, Giovanni: 143 Bianco da Siena: 234, 243 Billanovich, Giuseppe: 356 Bisaha, Nancy: 82 blindness, spiritual. see under sight Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Renate: 110–11 Boccaccino, Camillo: 350 Isaiah and David: 351 Boccaccio, Giovanni: 234 Bocchi, Achille: 135–37, 139, 147, 148 Symbolicarum Quaestionum de quas­ serio ludebat libri quinque: 135 Bocchi, Francesco: 225–27 bodies: 20, 208, 243. see also under Christ; relics, saints’ in art: 189, 370 breasts: 207 and death: 83 (see also Christ, the Resurrection) and death: 156 n. 4, 168, 236 and health and illness: 212, 218, 223, 227 Bodin, Jean: 83 Boethius: 29 Bologna: 36, 243, 255–69 Archiginnasio: 177 churches (see under individual cities) Basilica San Marco: 13 Cathedral of San Pietro: 175, 260, 261

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i n dex San Domenico, Bologna: 113, 262, 263, 288 n. 32 San Fabiano: 199 San Francesco: 263 San Giovanni Decollato: 234 San Gregorio de’ Mendicanti: 197, 262 San Martino: 127, 197, 199, 261 San Michele in Bosco: 185–88 San Paolo Maggiore: 35, 178–82, 182, 183 San Petronio: 196, 199, 263, 268 San Pietro: 263 San Salvador: 263 Santa Lucia: 262 Santa Maria dei Servi: 200, 262 Santa Maria di Galliera: 260, 261, 263, 265 Santa Maria Regina dei Cieli (also known as Santa Maria dei Poveri): 189–91 Santi Bartolomeo e Gaetano: 195, 199 confraternities: 189, 191, 193 Compagnia dei Poveri (Bologna): 189, 264 Monte di pietà (pawn bank): 36, 240, 240 n. 39 Palazzo Bocchi: 134, 135, 136 Procession of the Seven Churches: 257, 260, 261, 262, 263 Bonasone, Giulio: 135 Palazzo Bocchi (Bologna): 134, 135, 136 Boniface VIII, Pope: 116, 118 Bonsignori, Girolamo: 357 Bonvicino, Alessandro (Moretto): 359–60 Saints Peter and Paul Sustain the Church: 359 books accounting: 54–55, 240 double-entry: 238–39, 291 n. 37 ceremonial: 168 circulation of: 55–56, 336 collections of: 56, 133

commonplace (see zibaldoni) copying of: 47–57 costume: 82, 83, 88, 91, 92 (see also Vecelli) devotional: 48, 55, 57, 232 books of Hours: 56, 335 psalters: 56 Lutheran: 137 printed manuals: 82, 83, 161 publishers of: 133 book trade: 55, 135, 336 Borghini, Raffaello: 217 Il Riposo: 215 Borisi, Marcantonio: 94 Borromeo, Carlo, St: 155–71, 175–200 and architecture: 36, 159, 295 (see also architecture) in art: 175–200, 367–68 The Angel Descending from Heaven (Tiarini): 188, 189 Apotheosis of St Carlo (Reni): 200 Birth of St Carlo (Tiarini): 188, 189 Burial of Carlo Borromeo (Tiarini): 189 Canonization of Carlo Borromeo (Tiarini): 189 Cappella San Carlo Borromeo (Tiarini): 185, 187, 191 Carlo Borromeo Administers the Last Communion to the Plague-Stricken (Garbieri): 179, 180, 183, 184 Carlo Borromeo Being Appointed as Archbishop of Milan (Tiarini): 188–89 Last Communion of St Carlo: 186, 187, 188 The Proclamation of the Barnabites’ Rule by Carlo Borromeo (Garbieri): 179, 181, 182, 182–84 Santi Alberto e Carlo: 197 St Carlo Borromeo Adoring Baby Jesus with the Madonna, St Joseph and Angels (Carracci): 198, 199

index St Carlo Borromeo Adoring the Crucifix (Massari): 194 St Carlo Borromeo Praying in the Sacra Monte in Varallo (Carracci): 195, 199 St Carlo Borromeo’s Procession of the Holy Nail (Garbieri): 178, 179, 183, 190 St Carlo Borromeo’s Procession of the Holy Nail (Gessi): 189–91, 190, 191 St Carlo Giving Alms to the Poor (Creti): 175 canonization of: 156, 161, 168, 175–76, 179, 187, 189, 197, 200, 367 celebrations in Rome and Milan: 177, 177 n. 6 and care for the poor: 175–77, 180, 191, 192, 193, 197 as reformer: 156, 158, 161, 163, 167, 169, 176, 179–81, 183–84, 192, 193, 194, 200, 295, 357, 366–67, 373 decrees on art: 35, 158–59, 163 iconography of: 176, 181, 187, 191 on music: 257, 258 and plague miracles: 176, 177 n. 6, 179, 180, 181, 183, 184 works by Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis: 160 n. 8, 161, 162, 163–71 Instructiones fabricae et supellectilis ecclesiasticae: 34–35, 155–71, 367 Will you risk your life for the flock?, 184, 187 Borromeo, Federico: 215, 257, 258, 357 Borromeo, Gilbert, Count: 193 Bossy, John: 22 Bourdieu, Pierre: 48 Boyle, Leonard: 113 Bramante, Donato: 278 Branca, Vittore: 59 Brescia churches San Pietro in Oliveto: 359

bricolage: 59, 368, 369, 371, 373 Britannico, Giovanni: 71 Brizio, Francesco: 175 Madonna and Child with St Francis and St Carlo: 175 n. 1 San Carlo in Prayer: 196, 198 Brown, Peter: 24 Brucker, Gene: 20 Brummett, Palmira: 83 Brusasorzi, Felice , 346 Buc, Philippe: 24 Budé, Guillaume: 133 Buonamico, Lazzaro: 285 Burkhardt, Jacob: 17, 20, 366, 367 Busbecq, Augier Ghislain de: 82 Butzer, Martin: 135 Byzantine empire: 344 Caffiero, Marina: 65 Calcagnini, Celio: 129, 133, 148 Caldwell Ames, Christine: 19 Calvin, John: 129, 255, 337, 367 Calvinism: 65, 69, 129, 146, 358, 372 Candia. see War of Candia capital punishment: 34, 81, 84, 86, 103, 234, 244, 245, 261 in art: 83, 93, 94, 96–98 Cappello, Giovanni: 94, 98, 101 Carafa, Gian Pietro. see Paul IV, Pope Caravaggio: 179 Entombment: 194 Caravale, Giorgio: 37, 325–42, 371 Carcano da Milano, Michele: 240 Carlebach, Elisheva: 64 Carpi, Girolamo da: 131, 133, 134 Carracci, Ludovico: 175, 199 St Carlo Borromeo Adoring Baby Jesus with the Madonna, St Joseph and Angels: 198, 199 St Carlo Borromeo Praying in the Sacra Monte in Varallo: 195, 199 Carruthers, Mary: 219 catechism: 244, 365, 370, 373 catechumen: 72

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i n dex Caterina Corner, Queen of Cyprus: 226 Catherine of Siena, St: 31, 109, 110, 113, 114, 116, 119 Catholic Church: 17, 21, 35, 357 criticisms of: 127 history of: 29, 110, 327 as pluralistic: 372–73 Catholic Reformation , 17, 32, 35–37, 64, 66, 281, 283–85, 303, 327, 370–71 and architecture: 277–96, 303, 313, 314, 354 and art: 155, 156, 170, 207, 209, 215, 314, 319, 354 as collaborative process: 25 in Italy: 33, 207–27 and music: 256, 260 and the Renaissance: 30–31 as renewal: 17, 25, 33, 64–66, 70, 169, 176, 255, 282, 285, 350, 367, 369, 371, 372 (see also conversion) as sacralizing presence: 21 and women: 267 Cecilia, St: 347–49, 348 Celestine V, Pope. see Petrus de Morrone censorship: 127, 155, 339. see also Index of Prohibited Books Cesi, Pier Donato: 177 Cessi, Roberto: 356 charity: 28, 33, 191, 193, 257, 263, 285, 286, 333, 367, 369 chastity: 209, 210, 213, 214, 220, 227, 242, 262. see also sexuality and desire Cherubino da Spoleto: 48, 51–54, 58, 368 Chizzola, Ippolito: 26, 332–35, 338, 370, 371 Discorsi per confutar le heresie: 334, 335 Christ in art: 55, 146, 164, 165, 189, 193–94, 207, 209, 233, 311, 358 (see also Madonna and Child)

death of (pietà): 192, 193, 194 body of: 236, 289, 291, 294 (see also eucharist) incarnation and birth of: 67, 346, 354–56 (see also Annunciation of the Virgin) invocations and prayers: 54, 335 miracles of: 116, 292, 347 Passion of: 67, 210, 222, 244, 262, 263 (see also sacre rappresentazioni) the Resurrection of: 354 Christina, queen of Sweden: 266 Chrysostom, John: 167 Ciavolella, Massimo: 211, 217 Cicerchia, Nicolò di Mino: 234 Cicero: 25, 29–30 n. 72, 373 Cicogna, Emmanuele Antonio: 88 Cicogna collection: 88, 89–91, 93–97 circumcision: 71 cities. see also individual cities by name in art (city views): 82, 83, 88–90, 90, 194, 280 and culture: 137, 176 demographics in: 17, 23 and patron saints: 14, 193, 194, 302, 305, 313, 317, 370 and preaching: 25, 332 (see also preaching and sermons) and public life: 84, 92, 93 (see also processions) as religious locus: 16, 48, 103, 303–04, 365 (see also civic religion; confraternities) civic religion: 23, 33, 36, 179, 200, 246, 260, 264, 313, 367, 368 civic spaces: 234, 244, 262, 368 piazzas: 16, 27, 234, 263, 268, 302 Cividale Legendary: 34, 109–20, 120–22 Clairvaux, Bernard de: 355 n. 32 Clement V, Pope: 116, 121 Clement VI, Pope: 115 Clement VII, Pope: 110, 119

index Clerics Regular of St. Paul. see Barnabite order clothing, liturgical: 189, 194 biretta: 164, 183, 191 mozzetta (short scarlet cloak): 187 rochette: 187 surplice (superpellicium): 165 Coecke van Aelst, Pieter: 82 Costumes and Fashions of the Turks: 91 coexistence, cultural: 83, 93 coexistence, religious: 370 Cohen, Shaye: 71 Colloquy of Regensburg: 327 Cologne (Köln): 115 Colonna, Vittoria: 215 comfort, spiritual: 36, 232–35, 244–46, 349, 368 commerce , 17, 32, 54–55, 82–84, 246, 326, 369 in art: 89–90, 92, 93 in literature: 238–40 and religion: 35–36, 170, 239, 240 communicatione: 53, 368, 371 communion: 262, 283, 286, 292, 332 in art: 179, 180, 183, 184, 186, 187, 188 communities, religious: 36, 63, 64, 73, 246, 256, 356, 367, 371–72 compilation, textual: 48, 56–57 n. 33, 110, 115, 118, 161, 167, 269, 368–69. see also bricolage; Cividale Legendary; Francesco di Giovanni Ciechi, Marco di; laudario; Tommaso Caffarini; zibaldoni conceptio per aurem (conception through hearing). see under hearing condemned prisoners: 36, 231, 232, 234 n. 12, 235, 236–37, 244–46, 261, 368 confession: 166, 232, 235, 283 and heterodoxy: 327, 331, 333, 335 confraternities: 13–14, 19, 189, 191, 255, 263, 264. see also civic religion preaching in (see preaching)

confraternities (by name) Arcangelo Raffaello (Florence): 263 Compagnia dei Poveri (Bologna): 189, 264 Compagnia San Giovanni Evangelista (Florence): 263 Fraternity dei Laici (Arezzo): 310 San Marco (Venice): 13 Congregation of Holy Office. see Inquisition Connolly, Thomas: 347 consolation, self- (autoconsolazione): 50, 51 Constantinople (Istanbul): 82, 84, 90, 167, 367 in art: 89, 90, 91, 92, 101 fire (1660): 89, 90, 91 khan (merchant’s hostel): 89, 92, 101 in literature: 92–93 Muslim quarter: 17, 90 Old Palace: 93 and the Ottoman empire: 15, 34, 87, 88, 92, 372 the Porte: 82, 85 Rumeli Hisari (castle): 88, 94, 97 Topkapi Palace: 84, 86 views of the city: 88, 91 Yedikule (fortress of the Seven Towers): 86, 88 Contarini, Alvise: 85, 86 Contarini, Ambrogio: 15 n. 4 Contarini, Gasparo: 327 Contarini, Giovanni: 100 Contarini, Simone: 98 Conti, Cristofano Donato Plan for the Pieve, Arezzo: 305 Contughi, Girolamo Mario: 132, 147, 148 convents and monasteries: 25, 153, 168, 258. see also individual foundations by city convents and monasteries (Benedictine) Saint Honorat (Cannes): 282–83 San Benedetto Po (Mantua): 356–57

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i n dex San Giovanni Evangelista (Parma): 137 Santa Giustina (Padua): 356, 357 convents and monasteries (Dominican): 98, 115, 117 Convent of Santa Caterina da Siena: 72 Corpus Domini (Venice): 110, 262, 288 San Domenico (Bologna): 113, 262, 263, 288 n. 32 San Domenico (Camporegio): 55 Santa Maria Novella (Florence): 56, 303 San Vincenzo (Prato): 307–08 San Zanipolo (Santi Giovanni e Paulo): Venice: 109, 110, 112, 156, 369 St Peter Martyr (Murano): 98 convents and monasteries (Franciscan) San Francesco (Bologna): 263 conversion, religious: 261. see also baptism; identities, religious; Inquisition and families: 64, 70, 372 forced: 70 institutionalization of: 64, 66 from Islam to Christianity: 65, 82 from Judaism to Christianity: 33, 63–66, 372 and anti-Jewish polemics: 67, 70 artistic and literary representations of: 66 attitudes towards: 63 and gender: 69–71, 73 in Germany: 64, 65 in Iberia: 64, 65, 372 in Italy: 63–73 northern and central: 33, 64 southern: 64 and monachization: 72 from Judaism to Islam: 66 process of: 53 as public event: 33–34, 67–68, 71–72

symbolic value of: 65, 66 as transformative: 33, 63 conversos. see under Jews converts ( Judaism to Catholicism) as authors on conversion: 67 Caio, Anna Antonia: 72 Caterina, daughter of Salomone: 72 Levi, Rosa: 71 Medici, Paolo Sebastiano, Cata­ logo de’ neofiti illustri: 69, 70 Salomone/Ercole: 67–68, 72 Cooper, Donal: 314 Corbellini, Sabrina: 31–33, 368, 371 Cornelison, Sally J., 36, 37, 369, 370 Correggio (Antonio Allegri): 357 Cortese, Gregorio: 282–85, 357 Cospi, Ferdinando: 268 costume book. see under books Costumes and Fashions of the Turks: 91 Council, Fourth Lateran: 236 Council of Pisa: 111, 120 Council of Trent: 25, 156, 177 n. 6, 191, 255, 257, 282, 327. see also orthodoxy on art: 155, 156, 209, 213, 303 decrees of: 161 and music: 256–58 reforms of (see Catholic Reformation ) Counter-Reformation: 17–18 n. 17, 35, 365, 366 covenants: 34, 71, 347, 354. see also circumcision; conversion Crete, Ottoman invasion of: 84, 85, 98 Creti, Donato, St Carlo Giving Alms to the Poor: 175 Croce, Cornelio: 184 crown of thorns: 116, 121 crucifixes: 164–66, 221–22 in art: 183, 194, 197 crucifixion, in art: 166 crusades: 82, 85, 372 cults, image: 168 cults, saints’, 36–37, 116, 255, 301, 303, 304, 310

index cultures of the Renaissance: 19, 22, 32, 65, 169, 325, 339, 360, 366 intellectual: 133, 135, 137 material: 23, 32, 83, 131, 143, 147, 328, 343, 370 religious: 16, 20, 25, 36, 48, 71, 83, 156, 200, 356 visual: 23, 25, 301 Curia: 32, 131, 280–81, 325, 327–28 Czernin, Count Hermann: 85 daily life, depictions of: 34, 88, 89, 91, 92, 236 Dalza, Hyeronimus: 233 dancing: 89, 258, 350 David, king of Israel: 267, 347–51, 367 Davis, Natalie Zemon: 17–18 n. 17, 22, 24, 302 n. 2 death. see also laude ars moriendi: 235–37 Debby, Nirit Ben-Aryeh: 34, 215, 372 de Blaauw, Sible: 281 demons. see sexuality and desire; sin Dempsey, Charles: 16 De Rubeis, Bernardo Maria: 112 Descartes, René: 17 Dessì, Paola: 344 the Devil and music: 257 as tempter: 218, 238, 239, 243, 356 devotione: 53, 368, 371 Dionysius (pseudo-) the Areopagite: 32 diplomats imprisonment of: 84–86, 93–98 as martyrs: 81, 86, 87, 96–98, 101, 372 discretione: 53, 368, 371 dissimulation, religious: 37, 131, 329–35, 338, 339 taqiyya: 65 Ditchfield, Simon: 32 Doggio, Angelo: 286 Dolo (Veneto): 97

Domenico, Lorenzo di: 30 Dominic, St: 112, 119, 193 Dominicans (Order of Preachers): 109, 112–18, 236, 369 convents and monasteries (see convents and monasteries (Dominican)) in Hungary: 114, 115, 118, 119 individuals (see also individuals by name) George, prior: 114 Observants: 109, 110, 112–14, 116, 118–19, 257, 369 schism within: 34, 110, 111, 118–20 Avignon obedience: 111 Roman obedience: 111, 113 n. 18, 118 Dominici, Giovanni: 110–12, 113 n. 18, 118, 119, 121, 369 Donato, St: 305, 312–14, 316–17, 319, 370. see also under Arezzo in art: 304, 311, 315 Douglas, Mary: 24 Dow, Douglas: 303 duomo (cathedral). see under individual cities Durand, Guillaume: 166 Durkheim, Émile: 22 n. 35, 24, 25, 27 Dursteler, Eric: 83 early modern. see under Renaissance Egypt: 199, 350, 358 Mamluk sultanate: 13 Eleonora of Aragon, Duchess of Ferrara: 67, 68, 72 emotions: 231–47, 365, 366 and art: 217 history of: 18 and reform: 20, 371 enslaved peoples: 83 Ephrem, St: 355, 356 Epicureanism: 30 Epicurus: 29 epigraphs. see also Latin inscriptions Greek: 147 n. 42

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i n dex Erasmus, Desiderius: 148, 357 Adagia: 131, 132, 134 Convivium religiosum: 132–33 eschatology (the last judgement): 14, 16. see also salvation Este court (Ferrara): 130, 131, 147 Este family Este, Ercole I d’, Duke of Ferrara: 67, 68, 72 Este, Ercole II d’, Duke of Ferrara: 129, 134 Este, Isabella d’, Marchioness of Mantua: 68 Renée of France, Duchess of Ferrara , 129, 134 eucharist: 291, 292, 294, 295, 358 in art: 311 as miracle: 115 eucharistic devotion: 294, 295 eucharistic tabernacles. see under architecture Europe: 24 and boundaries of: 13, 82–83, 91–92, 103 Catholic: 14, 17, 31, 255 and religion: 18–19, 22, 23, 33, 63, 64, 66, 168, 256, 355 Renaissance: 127, 366, 367, 370, 372 Eusebius of Caeserea: 29 Eve: 354, 356 Eventius, St: 116, 121 exchange, commercial. see commerce exegesis, visual: 31 exemplars: 35, 50, 56, 119, 167, 369 Fabriano, Gillio da: 209 Falvey, Kathleen: 244 Farissol, Abraham ben Mordecai, Magen Avraham: 69, 70 Farnese, Alessandro: 330 n. 10 Faroqhi, Suraiya: 83 Febvre, Lucien: 20 Ferrand, Jacques: 219, 224

Ferrara: 33, 67–69, 72, 73, 129–35, 146 churches Cathedral of San Giorgio Martire: 67, 68, 353 convents and monasteries Santa Caterina de Siena: 72 Palazzo Contughi: 131, 132, 133, 147, 148 Palazzo Naselli: 128, 129–33, 130, 135, 147, 148 Ferrini, Luca: 226, 227 Ficino, Marsilio and Platonism (or, on love, or on the senses): 211, 218–19, 222–24, 370 on religion: 29–30 Theologica Platonica: 30 Fieschi-Adorno, Catherine, St: 283 figural interpretation. see mimesis Filocamo, Gioia: 35, 36, 368 flagellation of Christ: 209–10 self-, 234 Flaminio, Marcantonio: 284–85 Florence: 16, 21, 29, 30–31 churches Cathedral St Zenobius Chapel: 302 Orsanmichele: 346 San Marco St Antoninus Chapel: 302 Santa Croce: 303 Santa Maria Novella: 56, 303 Santa Maria Reparata (Cestelli): 47 Santissima Annunziata: 226, 302 Florentine Church: 21 Fondi: 114, 117 Foscarari, Egidio, Bishop of Modena: 330 Fossanova: 114, 117 Foucault, Michel: 21 Fouquet, Jean: 207 France: 85, 86, 146, 161, 161 n. 16 devotions in: 116 Dominican missions in: 119

index Francesca Romana, St: 197, 199 Francesco di Giovanni Ciechi, Marco di: 47–59, 368, 371 Franciscans, mendicant orders: 35–36, 84, 129, 314, 330, 332, 372 convents and monasteries (see convents and monasteries (Franciscan)) Observant reform movements: 51, 239–41, 262, 368, 369 Francis I, king of France: 91 Francis of Assisi, St: 115, 175 n. 1, 193, 199 Franco, Giacomo: 89 Frazier, Alison Knowles: 110 Freni, Giovanni: 306, 315–17 frescoes: 155, 171, 176, 200, 357 cycles: 34, 81, 97–98, 103 friars: 25, 26, 182. see also individual orders Friuli Valvasone Catedrale di Santissimo Corpo di Cristo: 358 Froben, Johann: 133 Furlan, Caterina: 358 Gabriel, archangel: 356, 367 Galgani, Niccolò, Memoriale: 55 Garbieri, Carlo: 187 n. 28 Garbieri, Lorenzo: 35, 175, 187, 187 n. 28, 188–91 Carlo Borromeo Administers the Last Communion to the PlagueStricken: 179, 180, 183, 184 The Proclamation of the Barnabites’ Rule by Carlo Borromeo: 179, 181, 182, 183, 184 St Carlo Borromeo’s Procession of the Holy Nail: 178, 179, 183, 190 Geertz, Clifford: 22 n. 35 Gell, Alfred: 35 gender. see also covenants; women and Christianity: 71 and conversion: 64, 69–73 and religion: 33, 34, 167

Genoa (Genova): 23, 277, 282–84, 286 n. 29, 295, 369 churches cathedral: 277, 282, 286 Santa Maria Assunta di Carignano: 36, 277–96, 290 (see also Alessi, Galeazzo; Sauli, Bendinelli I) architecture of: 278–80, 281, 288, 294, 295 construction of: 286, 286 n. 29, 288, 289, 291 n. 37 as urban context: 23 George, St: 312, 312, 317 n. 46 Germanus of Constantinople, St, Homily for the Annunciation of the Most Holy Mother of God: 356 Gessi, Giovanni Francesco: 175, 176 n. 2, 189, 191, 193, 197 St Carlo Borromeo’s Procession of the Holy Nail: 189–91, 190, 191 ghettoes: 372 in Venice: 17 Ghia, Andra: 286 Giambologna: 302 Giberti, Franco: 285 Giberti, Gian Matteo, Bishop of Verona: 36, 281, 283–85, 292–95 Constitutiones: 292 Gilio, Andrea: 156 n. 4 Gill, Rebecca M., 36, 182, 367, 369 Gilles, Pierre: 82 Gilmont, Jean-François: 337 Ginzburg, Carlo: 326 Giulio da Milano: 338 Giulio Romano (Giulio Pippi): 133, 135, 146 Giussano, Giovanni Pietro: 177 Giustinian, Giorgio: 98 Giustinian, Leonardo: 234, 234 n. 8, 240 n. 43, 248 n. 78 Giustiniani, Benedetto: 179 Giustiniani, Vincenzo: 179 Gonzaga, court of: 145 Gonzaga, Ercole: 145

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i n dex grace, divine: 35, 328, 335, 336, 350, 354. see also Mary, St Graham, Heather Sexton: 216 Grattarola, Marco Aurelio: 177 n. 6 Greek cross: 277 Greek Orthodox Church: 355, 372 in art: 91 Greek-Ottoman relations: 85 Greene, Molly: 83 Gregory X, Pope: 316, 316–17, 319. see also under Arezzo Gregory XII, Pope: 118 Gregory XIII, Pope: 137 Griffoni, Matteo: 234 Grillo, Giovanni Antonio: 85, 86, 94, 96, 98 Grimani family: 148, 357 Grimani, Giovanni: 138, 139, 143, 147, 148 Grimani, Marco Antonio: 142, 143 Groto, Luigi: 71 Gubbio, Abirelli da: 259 Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri): 220 Susanna and the Elders: 220 Guglielmo Ebreo da Pesaro, On the Practice or Art of Dancing: 350 Gui, Bernard: 115, 116, 121 Speculum santorum: 112 Guidalotto da Mondavio, Niccolò, fra: 84–88, 372 Guidi, Raphael: 177 n. 6 HaCohen, Joseph: 70, 71 hagiography: 110–14, 117, 177 n. 6, 179, 184, 189, 256, 260, 316. see also Vitae; individual saints visual: 175–200 hamam (Turkish bath): 89 Hankins, James: 82 Harpster, Grace: 34–35, 367 Hayden, Hiram: 365 hearing: 18, 32, 36, 231–47, 336, 347, 356, 365 and aurality: 246, 354, 371

conceptio per aurem (conception through hearing): 354–57 fides ex auditu (faith through hearing): 356 protection of: 347 and redemption: 343, 345 (see also music) spiritual listening: 368 and temptation: 355, 356 Heaven: 188, 189, 200, 236, 310 Hegel, Wilhelm Friedrich: 366 Helen of Hungary, St, Life: 114, 115, 119, 120 Hell: 237, 240, 241 heresy and heretics: 37, 127, 137, 326–30, 332, 334, 335, 338, 355, 358, 360. see also Inquisition heroic love. see lovesickness Herzig, Tamar: 33, 34, 372 heterodoxy: 34. see also Inquisition and architecture: 128–29, 131, 137, 148, 149 religious: 29, 37, 49, 133, 135, 328–32, 338 historiography: 255 and periodization: 18, 365–66, 368, 373 as vernacular theology: 32 turns in: 20 Holmes, Megan: 207 holy sacraments. see sacraments Holy Spirit: 236, 355, 355 n. 33 homilies: 69, 325, 356. see also under sermons Horace: 135–37, 137 n. 23 Houses of Catechumens: 65, 372. see also conversion in Ferrara: 73 in Rome: 64 Howard, Peter: 33, 236, 368 Hugonis, Raymundus: 114, 117, 121 Hugo of St Victor, Didascalion: 55 Huizinga, Johan: 207 humanism: 16, 19, 66, 82–83, 103, 110, 282 and architecture: 127–49, 164

index and reading: 65 and religious reform: 284–85, 355, 356, 369 humoral theory and sexuality and desire: 212, 218, 222, 223 humours. see melancholy Hunt, Arnold: 336, 337 Huntington, Samuel: 83 Ibn Sina. see Avicenna Ibrahim, Ottoman sultan: 89 iconography: 37, 97, 137–39, 164, 244, 314–16, 319, 350, 354, 360. see also individual saints identities construction of: 82, 191, 200, 236, 246, 373 identities, religious: 33, 54, 371 construction of: 20, 47–59, 64, 255, 368 image cults. see cults, image images interpretation of: 156, 164, 171 sexual responses to: 35, 207–08 images, profane: 163, 213–15 images, sacred: 35, 159–60, 163, 165, 166, 168, 169, 171. see also art, sacred; Borromeo blessing of: 165, 167, 168 and memory: 225, 226 imagination and desire. see sexuality and desire Imola, Domenico da, fra: 330 incarnation. see under Christ Index of Prohibited Books (Venice): 255, 284 Inquisition: 149, 184, 328–29 archives and records of: 37, 171, 326–29 and art: 155–56 courts and trials: 155, 329, 335 cultural impacts of: 19–20, 330 and preaching: 26, 325–39 processes: 145, 335, 338

and religious reform: 255, 370 Inquisitions (by city) Bologna: 135 Rome: 64, 65, 73, 328, 334 Venice: 138, 155 inquisitorial studies: 37 inquisitors: 156, 156 n. 4, 327–29, 331–33 Cardinal: 330 Michele Ghislieri: 334 Roman: 332, 338 institutions, ecclesiastical: 23 insufflation of the Holy Spirit: 355 Isdin (Macedonia): 98 Isidore of Seville, St: 29–30 n. 72, 213 Islam: 17, 19, 372 and baptism: 65 European concepts of: 83–84 medieval European concepts of: 82 relations with Christianity: 81, 103, 372 views on apostasy: 65, 372 Islamic architecture minarets: 13, 89 mosques: 13, 90 Islamic influence on: 17 Istanbul. see Constantinople Jacquart, Danielle: 211, 217 Jerome, St: 28, 168 Jewish population of: 17 Jews: 93, 371–72. see also Judaism absence of in art: 17 conversion of: 33, 63–73, 372 (see also conversion) conversos: 64, 65 expulsions of: 67, 371–72 individuals Caio, Elia: 72 Caio, Stella: 72 Jobst, Christoph: 281 John the Baptist, St: 98, 164, 302, 345 Jones, Philip: 21 Joseph, St: 100, 198, 199, 220 Judaism: 19, 372

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i n dex and anti-Semitism: 67, 70, 371–72 attitudes towards women: 70, 71 and Christianity: 34, 65, 350 and conversion (see conversion) views on apostacy: 65–66, 69, 70, 372 Julius II, Pope: 127, 179, 266 n. 37 Julius III, Pope: 138, 311, 315 justification by faith: 327, 328, 333 Juvenal, St: 116, 121 Kafadar, Cemal: 83 Klaniczay, Tibor: 114 Knights Hospitaller: 85 Knights of Malta: 85 knowledge, religious: 57 production and distribution of: 33, 48–49, 52, 53, 59 Köprülü, Mehmet, Pasha: 87 Lactantius (Lucius Caecilius Firmianus): 356. see also hearing laity theological sensitivities: 35 and understanding scriptures (see literacy, religious) urban: 33, 47, 49 n. 9, 59 Lancilotti: 330 Landucci, Luca: 72 Last Judgement. see eschatology Lateran Councils. see Council, Fourth Lateran Latin inscriptions: 136, 138, 147, 149, 369, 370 Ballarino chapel: 100 psalms: 139, 146 as reflections of patrons: 131–34, 139, 148 laudario (collection of laude): 36, 264 laude (devotional poems and songs): 231–47, 257, 269, 368. see also laudario; music; Psalms authors of: 233–34 as consolation for the dying: 231, 235–37, 245

and emotion: 231–47, 371 as sentimental pedagogy: 231, 244 mental imagery in: 36 performance of: 231, 234, 244–46, 263 as prayer: 245, 246 subjects: 231–33, 235–37, 239–41 Laurent, Marie-Hyacinth: 113, 114, 117 lay religion: 25, 33, 36, 235, 365, 367, 368. see also confraternities; preaching; sermons legendary. see Cividale legendary Le Goff, Jacques: 239 Lehmijoki-Gardner, Maiju: 111–12 Lennio, Levinio (Levinus Lemnius): 211, 213 Leonardo da Vinci: 207, 212–13 Leo X, Pope: 127, 281, 285 Liber Pontificalis: 167 libraries. see also Marciana library; Vatican Bologna: 113 of Celio Calcagnini: 133 of Filippo Sauli: 283, 284 of the Palazzo Pubblico: 56 n. 31 literacy: 325. see also reading multilingual: 65 musical: 255–56 religious: 25, 31 vernacular: 59 literature, medical: 211, 217, 221, 223, 224, 227. see also sexuality and desire literature, spiritual: 216, 218–19, 221, 223, 227 liturgical furnishings: 167, 344, 354, 360, 367. see also under architecture; musical instruments, organ ciborium: 287, 288 eucharistic chalice: 165 tabernacles: 36, 164, 268, 283, 286–92, 287, 294, 295 loci of devotion , 19, 301–19, 368 Lomazzo, Giovanni Paolo: 210, 347 Lombard, Peter: 25

index Longueil, Christophe de: 283, 285 Loredan, Andrea: 139 Lorenzetti, Pietro: 306, 307, 314 Pieve polyptych (Arezzo): 307, 314 Loreto, Holy House of: 168 Lorichs, Melchior: 82, 91 Well-Engraved and Cut Figures: 91 Lotto, Lorenzo: 148 Louis of Bavaria: 116 love Platonic: 211 as suffering: 219 as transformative: 28, 208 lovesickness: 217 cures for: 218, 219, 222–25, 227 (see also tears) and hearing: 221 and sight (see under sight) Lucretius, De rerum natura: 30 Luke, St: 168 Lull, Raymond: 219 lust: 215, 221, 241, 370. see also sexuality and desire cures for: 207, 208, 217–19, 224–27 as infection: 222–23 Luther, Martin: 17, 255, 328, 365 Lutheran books. see under books Lutheranism: 37, 328, 328 n. 8, 330, 333 as Catholic heresy: 329 n. 9 Lutherans: 65, 156, 333 Macedonia churches Santa Maria: 98 Machiavelli, Niccolò: 31, 83 Madonna (images of the Virgin Mary) in art: 164, 165, 193, 194, 197, 207–09, 225, 233 (see also Christ, death of ) and Child: 101, 199, 316–17 images of: 207, 210, 222, 225, 226, 310 Maggenburg, Peter , 345 Magnanino, Girolamo: 68

Magnus, Hugo: 223 Mainardi, Agostino: 328, 328 n. 8 Malcolm, Noel: 83 Malleus maleficarum: 218, 219, 223 Malvasia, Carlo Cesare: 175 n. 1, 189, 199 Maniura, Robert: 303–04 Mantovano, Battista: 355 Mantovano, Camillo: 139 ‘Sala a fogliami,’ Palazzo Grimani: 138 Mantua: 115, 120, 145, 335. see also d’Este, Isabelle; Gonzaga, Ercole architecture of: 135 Cathedral: 335 convents and monasteries San Benedetto Po: 356, 357 Palazzo Te: 129 manuscripts. see also laudario autograph: 47–48, 51, 54–56, 110, 112 convolute: 48, 49, 54, 56 devotional: 59 marginalia in: 53, 54, 58 miscellanies: 33, 49, 51, 53, 54, 56–57 59 Manuzio, Aldo: 133 maps Bologna: 261 Ottoman empire: 83 marble architecture: 131, 138 Marciana library: 92 Margaret of Città di Castello, St, Life: 113, 114, 119 Margaret of Hungary, St: 114, 119, 122 Marian image cults. see under Mary, St (Virgin Mary) Maria of Venice, St: 109, 110, 112, 114, 119, 120, 122 Life: 110 Mark, St: 13, 14–15, 15–16, 23 Martinengo, Celso: 333 Martini, Francesco di Giorgio: 289, 291, 295. see also Siena, churches

3 89

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i n dex martyrologies: 372 martyrs: 112, 116, 236, 238, 310. see also individual saints by name Venetian: 34, 81–103 Mary, St (Virgin Mary): 347, 356, 358. see also Annunciation; Assumption; Madonna cult of: 168, 241, 303 depictions of: 213, 349, 354, 355 iconography of: 310, 314, 315 coronation of the Virgin: 307, 308, 314 as intercessor: 101, 236, 243, 367 life and legends of: 54 miracles of: 208, 222–23, 225, 227 (see also Razzi) prayers to: 226, 331, 336 sorrows of: 244 as virgin, and chastity: 347, 354, 355 Mary Magdalen, St: 155, 244, 312 in art as penitent: 210, 215, 219, 220, 222, 345 (see also Titian) images of: 210 Mary of Egypt, St: 210, 222, 224 Massari, Lucio: 175, 194, 197 St Carlo Borromeo Adoring the Crucifix: 194, 197 materiality: 17 materials, intellectual: 23. see also books Mattei, Francesca: 34, 369, 370, 373 Meda, Giuseppe, David Dancing before the Ark: 349 Medici, Margaret de, Countess: 193 the Medici family: 21. see also Clement VII; Leo X; Pius IV and art: 303 Medici, Cosimo I de’, 22, 373 Medici, Lorenzo de’, 30, 257 as patron: 30 medicine. see literature, medical and sexuality (see under sexuality and desire)

meditation: 55, 58, 245, 256, 259, 260, 262, 263, 328. see also laude; reading; writing Mehmed I, Ottoman sultan: 89 Mehmed II, Ottoman sultan: 15, 87, 98 Mehmed III, Ottoman sultan: 89 Mehmed IV, Ottoman sultan: 89 melancholy: 218, 223–24 Melanchthon, Philip: 133, 327 Memorie Turchesche: 88–98, 90, 91, 93, 94–95, 101, 102, 372 memory images and desire: 210, 211, 217–19, 222, 224, 225 men and religious conversion: 64, 67, 69–71, 372 mendicant orders: 232, 239, 369. see also Franciscans, mendicant orders Mercurio, Scipione: 212 Meserve, Margaret: 82 meshumadim (apostates from Judaism): 65 Mews, Constant J., 34, 369, 371 Michelangelo: 155, 156, 156 n. 4, 159, 171. see also Sistine chapel The Last Judgement: 155, 156, 156 n. 4 Pietà: 194 Michelet, Jules: 17, 365 Mignanelli, Fabio: 330 migration: 83 religious: 20, 129 Milan: 167–70, 176, 177, 286, 369 churches Cathedral of Santa Maria Nascente: 36, 163, 281, 295, 349, 354, 367 San Lorenzo: 170 San Sebastiano: 170 provincial councils: 161, 161 n. 13, 163 n. 17, 166 Milan, duchy of: 64 n. 6 Miles, Margaret: 207 mimesis: 350

index Minerbetti, Bernardetto, Bishop of Arezzo: 304, 312 miniatures: 13, 34, 194 Turkish: 81, 88–90, 97, 98, 101–03 miracle narratives: 35, 116, 120, 122, 176, 368. see also individual saints about lust and sexuality: 208, 210, 218, 221, 222, 225, 226 (see also sexuality and desire) and time: 225–27 miracle plays. see sacre rappresentazioni miracles: 225–27, 302. see also Eucharist in art: 312 Corpus Christi: 121 eucharistic: 116 images as means of: 35, 208–10, 219–20, 222, 225–27, 302 relics as means of: 118, 121 of the Virgin Mary (see under Mary, St (Virgin Mary)) missionary efforts. see conversion Modena: 330, 331 churches: 135 San Pietro: 357 Molino, Francesco: 98 monasteries. see convents and monasteries Montebelluna, Enselmino da: 234 Montefeltro, Antonio da: 234 Montesquieu: 83 Morato, Olympia: 133 Morato, Pellegrino: 133 mortification. see flagellation Munio de Zamora: 111 Murad I, Ottoman sultan: 89 Murad II, Ottoman sultan: 89 Murad III, Ottoman sultan: 89 Murad IV, Ottoman sultan: 86 Murano: 81 churches St Peter Martyr Ballarino Chapel: 81, 98–101, 102, 372

music: 37 baroque: 260, 269, 360 as daily lived experience: 255–56, 259 and emotion: 244, 258 as meditative: 257, 259 monophony: 233, 257 motets: 260, 263 oratorio (see oratorio) as pedagogy: 255, 258 performance of: 256 audiences: 264–67, and processions: 260–62 polyphony: 233, 245, 256–58, 371, 373 Renaissance innovations to: 256, 258 writings on: 255 sacred: 36, 256, 258, 268, 269 and the celestial spheres: 344, 347 as salvific: 257 secularization of: 258, 264 secular or profane: 256, 268 opera: 244, 256 and spirituality: 36, 255–60, 264, 343, 371 musical instruments: 260, 267, 268, 349, 350, 367. see also organ shutters organs: 259, 267, 343, 344, 360 musicians. see also David, king of Israel in art: 89 women as: 92 Muslims. see also Islam in art: 90–91, 91, 93, 94, 372 women: 89, 92 Mustafa II, Ottoman sultan: 89 Mustiola, St: 310 Muzio, Girolamo: 334 mysterium: 16, 17 Nagel, Alexander: 281 Naples: 109, 118, 163, 284 Naples, kingdom of: 64 n. 6 Naselli, Giuliano: 129, 131, 133, 147, 148

391

392

i n dex Nelli, Nicollo: 89 Neoplatonism: 137, 357 Neri, Filippo, St: 36, 371. see also Oratory, Congregation of on music: 256, 257–60, 262–64, 268, 269 networks artistic: 303, 368, 373 civic: 319, 370 of communication: 23 cultural: 103, 148, 368 devotional: 303, 304 intellectual: 55–56, 282, 368 and religious reform: 49, 129, 284–86, 296, 369–70 Nibbia, Bartolomeo: 240 Nicholas III, Pope: 120 Nicodemite. see dissimulation, religious Nicolay, Nicholas de: 82, 91 Nocentini, Silvia: 109, 114 Nongbri, Brent: 19 obelisks, in art: 16, 89, 90 Oberman, Heiko: 19 objects, devotional: 23, 35, 160, 164–66, 171, 301–03 objects, material: 35, 301, 343 Observantism: 365, 369 Observant reform movements: 25, 372. see also Dominicans; Franciscans Ochino, Bernardino: 330, 338 Ong, Walter: 32 Onorato of Fondi, count: 117 Opera Pia dei Poveri Mendicanti (OPM): 177, 179, 191, 193, 197, 200 operatione: 53, 368, 371 orality. see communication; preaching oratorio: 255–69 libretti: 265–67, 269 and morality: 267 as musical form: 36, 256–57, 371 performance of: 265–68

oratory, art of. see preaching Oratory, congregation of (Oratorians): 257–60, 263–65, 269 Order of Friars Minor. see Franciscans Order of Penitents: 110, 111 organ shutters: 37, 343–60 decorative themes: 346, 347, 349, 354 Origen: 31, 355 Orkhan, Osman, Ottoman sultan: 89 Ormaneto, Niccolò: 295 Orsi, Astorre: 266, 266 n. 37 Orthodox Christianity: 372. see also Greek Orthodox orthodoxy: 26, 30, 34, 326, 327, 330, 334, 336, 338, 371, 373 Catholic: 135, 327, 328 critiques of: 127 and heresy: 29, 327, 328 Roman: 330, 331 Vitruvian: 128 Ottoboni, Pietro: 266 Ottoman empire: 15, 17, 81–103. see also Veneto-Ottoman relations and architecture: 88–89 in art: 88–92 (see also books, costume) European views on: 82–84, 86 and foreign diplomats: 84–87 grand vizier: 85, 93, 94, 96, 97 relations with Europe: 81–83, 372 sultans of (see also individual names) in art: 89 Ottoman Turks: 34 depictions of: 82–83, 88–93, 91, 100–01 (see also books, costume; Coecke van Aelst, Pieter; Lorichs, Melchior) as ‘barbarians,’ 86–87 Ottonaio, Cristofano di Miniato: 234 Pacinelli, Giovanni de Mariano: 50 Padavino, Giovanni Battista: 100

index Padua (Padova): 137, 283–85 convents and monasteries Santa Giustina: 356–57 painting. see art palazzi: 34, 127–49, 265. see also by city Paleotti, Gabriele, Bishop of Bologna: 161 n. 13, 209, 213, 217, 219, 266, 326, 355, 355 n. 33 Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images: 355 Palladio, Andrea: 138, 146 Palladio, Blosio: 131 Palladio, Orazio: 146 panorama: 16, 59, 85 papacy: 118, 189, 280–81 as institution: 21 Papal States: 85, 129, 135, 184 Paris: 113, 115, 118, 161 Parma churches cathedral, Santa Maria Assunta: 348, 349 convents and monasteries San Giovanni Evangelista: 137 passion. see love passion plays. see sacre rappresentazioni patronage: 36, 193, 365, 368, 369 and architecture: 34, 36, 127–49, 277–96, 301–19, 370 (see also architecture) and art: 179, 357, 360 and music: 264, 265, 268, 360 patron saints. see under cities Paul, St: 37, 187, 239, 317, 333, 356 in art: 187 n. 28, 312, 316, 358–60, 359 Paulinus of Nola, St: 167 Paul IV, Pope: 284 Paul V, Pope: 189 Pelagianism: 328 Pelagianus: 116 Pellotti, Giovanni: 332 penance, sacrament of: 222, 261, 335

penitence in art: 183, 215 in music: 350 penitents: 111, 112, 119, 262. see also Order of Penitents in art: 210, 224 (see also Mary Magdalen; Mary of Egypt) Pepoli family: 266 perfection: 28 performance, culture of: 25 Peruzzi, Baldassare: 131 Peter, St: 16, 37, 189, 315–17, 359, 360 Peter Martyr, St: 112 Petronio, St: 193 Petrucci, Pandolfo: 289 Petrus de Morrone, St: 116, 121 philosophy Platonic: 30, 211, 344 Pythagorean: 344, 347, 360 Piacenza churches Santa Maria di Campagna: 350–51, 351 piagnoni (weepers): 371. see also tears piazzas. see under civic spaces Pienza Cathedral: 370 pietà. see Christ, death of Pietro di Fece, Giovanni di: 56 Pio, Giovanni Marco: 233 Pio da Carpi, Giovanni Ludovico: 233 Piperno (Priverno): 117 Pippi, Giulio. see Giulio Romano Pirckheimer, Willibald: 133 Pius II, Pope: 370 Pius IV, Pope: 156–58 n. 5, 177, 177 n. 6 plague in art (see under Borromeo) in Milan: 170, 181, 183, 184 Plato: 29, 370. see also under philosophy Pliny: 223–24 pluralism, religious: 17

393

394

i n dex poetry devotional: 231, 237, 247, 368 (see also laude) epic: 82 Pole, Reginald: 284, 285 polemics anti-Church: 133 anti-Ottoman: 82–83 anti-Semitic: 67, 70, 71 polyphony. see under music Pontius Pilate: 239 Porcacchi, Tommaso, Raccolta de prediche: 335–36 Pordenone (Giovanni Antonio de’ Sacchis): 358 the Porte. see Constantinople Porto, Leonida Da: 146 portrait busts: 99, 100–01, 373 poverty: 33, 176, 191 in art: 175, 197 in religious life: 115, 193, 242 as spiritual lack: 264 and tending to the poor: 28, 180, 193, 264, 283 practices, devotional: 31, 367. see also laude; processions Prato churches Cathedral: 303 monasteries San Vincenzo: 307–08 prayers: 35, 111, 256, 257, 259–63, 335 in art: 196, 199 in laudarios: 233, 235, 241, 245, 246 preaching: 325–39. see also sermons and accusations of heterodoxy: 37 anti-Semitic: 67 in art: 13–16 and audiences: 25–27, 31 culture of: 16, 25 and humanism: 29 Islamic: 26 by Jewish converts to Christianity: 67–69, 72 and language: 27, 325

lay: 31 as oral: 16, 325 as public performance: 245, 325, 326, 336 and reform: 371 reportationes: 15, 16, 326 as visual: 16 presbyteries: 99, 182–84, 294 printing press: 19, 133, 239, 336, 338 Procaccini, Camillo: 349 Procaccini, Ercole, the Elder, Saint Cecilia: 348, 349 processions: 233, 261, 302, 371 of the Seven Churches (see under Bologna; Rome) Proculus, St: 193 profane: 23, 170, 171, 367. see also art, sacred; music propaganda, musical: 258 propaganda, religious heterodox: 332 reformist: 37, 359 propaganda, visual: 34–35, 85, 181 Prosperi, Adriano: 244 Prosperi, Bernardino de’, 68 Protestantism: 21, 23, 71, 176, 292, 338 and reformation: 256, 327, 328, 334, 354, 356–58, 367 Psalms: 135, 139, 146, 236, 259, 262, 263, 344, 349, 351. see also Latin inscriptions and music: 245, 347 penitential: 350 Puget, Pierre: 290, 291, 291 n. 37 Puinoix, Jean de , 111 Purgatory: 35–36, 237, 333 putti (cherubs): 199, 200 pyramids, in art: 89 Quagliaroli, Serena: 37, 367 quincunx. see under architecture Quirini, Giovanni: 234 Quistelli, Ambrogio: 328

index radical Christianity: 372 Rama, Angel: 48 Ramusio, Paolo: 89 Ranke, Leopold von: 366 Raphael: 133 Räsänen, Marika: 34, 369, 371 Rasini, Ranieri, Blessed: 314 Raymond of Capua: 110, 111, 117, 120, 121 Legenda maior: 109 Raymond of Penafort: 116, 118, 119, 121 Raymundus, Elias: 110, 114, 117, 118, 120, 121 reading: 57–59. see also writing devotional: 117, 245–46 habits: 25, 26, 28, 31–33, 55 as meditative: 53, 55, 58–59, 245–46, 259, 328 practices: 48, 51, 57–58, 65, 245 as salvific: 48, 58 redemption: 29, 354 in art: 37, 343–60 reform, Church. see Catholic Reformation ; CounterReformation; Protestantism reform, religious. see Catholic Reformation the Reformation: 26, 36, 149, 255, 366, 373 Refrigerio, Giovan Battista: 234 relics, saints’, 36–37, 158, 164, 165, 222, 301, 303 Donato: 312–14, 319, 370 Gregory: 319 John the Baptist: 302 Thomas Aquinas: 34, 111, 114, 117, 118 Zenobius: 302 reliefs marble: 34, 81, 164 sculpted: 97–98, 100–03, 316 religio: 27–30 religion, civic. see civic religion religion, popular. see lay religion religiosity: 179, 304, 319, 370 civic: 23, 36 personal: 59

religious practices: 33, 48 reliquaries: 160, 268, 312, 313, 315 Renaissance: 127, 169, 170 as concept: 17–18, 373 Italian: 18, 22 Renée of France, Duchess of Ferrara. see under Este family Reni, Guido: 175, 176, 189, 197 Apotheosis of St Carlo: 200 Pietà dei Mendicanti: 192, 193 repentance, in art: 370 Repishti, Francesco: 281 republic of Venice. see Venetian Republic responsa, rabbinic: 70 Reuchlin, Johannes: 133 Riccoboni, Bartolomea: 110 Rimini: 118 Romanino, Girolamo: 357 Rome: 127, 277–78 churches San Carlo ai Catinari: 176, 200 Santa Maria in Vallicella: 194, 259 St Peter’s: 278, 281 confraternities Palazzo Baldassini: 129 Palazzo Farnese: 129, 351 sack of: 127, 131, 147 (see also Vatican) as urban context: 23 Villa Giulia: 135 Procession of the Seven Churches: 260, 263 Rome, imperial: 169 Rosellino, Bernardo: 370 Rota, Martino: 92 Rothman, E. Natalie: 83 Roverbella, Gregorio: 233 Rubinstein, Nicolai: 21 Saccenti, Riccardo: 33 sacra doctrina: 26 sacramentals: 166 sacraments: 34, 56, 71, 232, 283, 288, 289, 291, 292, 358. see also individual sacraments

395

396

i n dex sacre rappresentazioni (miracle plays): 31, 47, 66, 244, 368 Sadoleto, Jacopo: 285 Said, Edward: 83 saints as intercessors: 236, 301, 302, 335, 370 as models: 35, 111, 116, 193, 224, 256, 267 saints’ cults. see cults, saints’ saints’ days: 14 saints’ lives and legends. see Vitae Salimbeni, Niccolò: 234 salvation: 240 in art: 351, 358–59 collective: 16, 184–85 and conversion: 65 individual: 35–36, 47–48, 54, 237 Salviati, Filippo: 307 Sampieri, Antonio: 266 Sangallo, Antonio da, the Younger: 131, 277 n. 1, 278 Sangallo, Giuliano da: 303 Sanmicheli, Michele: 292, 293, 294–95 San Sepolcro churches San Francesco: 314 Sansovino, Francesco: 139 Sansovino, Jacopo: 127, 129, 137, 142, 148 Santa Fe, Gerónimo de: 29 Sassetta (Stefano di Giovanni): 314 Sauli family: 36, 277, 281–86, 291, 292, 294, 295, 369 Sauli, Bendinelli I, 282, 288 n. 32 Sauli, Bendinelli II, 281, 284, 285 Sauli, Domenico: 282, 285 Sauli, Filippo, Bishop of Brugnato: 282–85, 292 Sauli, Pasquale: 282 Sauli, Stefano: 282–85, 288, 288 n. 32, 369 Saurolo, Scipione: 158–59 Savonarola, Girolamo: 326 on art: 208, 371 on music: 257–58, 263, 264, 268, 269

Savonarolans: 371 Savy, Pierre: 65 schisms Avignon: 369 in the Dominican Order: 34, 110–11, 118–20 papal: 110, 116, 119 and reform movements: 66 Schlick, Arnolt, The Mirror of Organ Builders and Organ Players: 345 Schofield, Richard V., 281 Schuster, Alfredo Ildefonso: 163 Scribner, Robert: 22–24 sculpture: 166, 291, 343. see also reliefs marble: 100, 313 Scupoli, Lorenzo, Spiritual Combat: 213, 221–22 Sebastian, St: 207 Selim I, Ottoman sultan: 89 senses: 366. see also hearing; sight hierarchy of: 356 Serapis: 16 Serdini, Simone (il Saviozzo): 234 La Serenissima. see Venice Serlio, Sebastiano: 133, 142, 147, 148, 289, 295 Extraordinario libro: 128 Regole generali di architettura: 129 sermons: 28, 259, 262, 325–39, 368. see also preaching collections of: 51–52, 54 (see also Cherubino da Spoleto) Sermones Quadrigesimales: 52 conversionary: 67–69 and genre: 26, 325, 327 heretical or heterodox: 329 and music: 259, 260, 263, 266 (see also music) as performance: 27, 245, 325 publication of: 326, 336–38 recording of: 14–15, 15–16 as religious instruction: 52–53 rhetoric of: 26, 325, 330, 332 as texts: 27 sermon studies: 19, 37

index Servatius, St, bishop of Tongres: 116, 121 Settignano, Desiderio da Ciborium for the Sacrament: 287, 288 sexuality and desire. see also lovesickness; sight; tears in art: 207–10, 213, 216–17, 220, 221, 227, 370 anxieties about: 155, 210, 215 literature on: 208, 211–15, 222 and religion: 208, 216–17 role of demons: 218, 223, 225, 238 and temptation: 211–25, 241 sexual obsession: 210, 217, 218, 223, 224 Sforza, Francesco: 208, 210, 221 Siena: 243 churches Cathedral: 51, 56, 289, 291 Palazzo Pubblico: 49–50, 50 n. 11, 56, 56 n. 31 sight: 18, 32, 35, 146, 236, 243, 365 and art: 343–60 and sexual arousal: 207–27, 370 and spiritual blindness: 222 and temptation: 213 Simon of Rimini: 118, 121 sin: 35, 231–47 carnal: 222, 241 and confession: 184 n. 22, 331, 332, 335 incarnation without (see incarnation) mortal: 56 records of: 237–38, 240 state of: 354 and temptation: 218 singing: 245, 246, 267, 347, 349, 350. see also music as communal activity: 256, 257, 259, 262, 263 Sion churches Notre-Dame de Valère: 345

Sistine Chapel: 155, 156, 156 n. 4. see also frescoes sketchbooks: 142 Smith, Jonathan Z., 18–19 Smith, W. C., 18 sociology: 22 functional: 24, 27 sollicitatione: 52–53, 368, 371 Solo, Gerard de: 217 song. see laude; singing Soranzo, Giovanni: 84–89, 93, 94, 96–98 in art: 93, 95 Sorelli, Fernanda: 110, 112 sound. see hearing spatiality: 20, 25, 32, 36, 336 Spilimbergo Cathedral of Santa Maria Maggiore: 358 spirituali: 284, 328, 357, 358, 371 spirituality: 366 and sexuality (see sexuality and desire) spiritual mobility: 27 Stabenow, Jörg: 281 Stack, Joan: 315 Stefano, Gian: 332–33 Steinberg, Leo: 207 Stephen, St: 311, 317 stigmata: 114, 115, 121 stigmatists: 114, 115 Stow, Kenneth: 65 Stowell, Stephen F. H., 35, 370 Strada, Jacopo: 143 Stradano, Giovanni: 312 Strauss, Leo: 339 studia humanitatis: 19, 29 Suavis, Ser: 234 Suleyman I, Ottoman sultan: 89 Susanna in art: 220, 225 Susanna and the Elders (Guercino): 220

397

398

i n dex tabernacle. see under architecture taqiyya. see dissimulation, religious Taraschi, Giulio and Giovanni, The Egyptian Army Drowning in the Red Sea: 357 Taylor, Charles: 18 tears: 194, 208, 210, 220–24, 370, 371 in art: 193–94, 370 (see also Mary Magdalen) and sexuality and desire: 215, 219–24, 227 Tebaldi, Antonio: 234 Teresa of Avila, St: 197, 199 Terpstra, Nicholas: 21, 33, 191, 193 Tertullian, De Corona Militis: 261 texts, devotional: 48, 55, 57, 232 textuality, religious: 49 Theatines (Congregation of Clerics Regular of the Divine Providence): 263 Theodore, St: 116, 121 Theones, Christoph: 278 Theophilus, De diversis artibus: 344 Thiene family: 146–47 Thiene, Adriano: 146 Thiene, Gaetano: 284 Thiene, Giulio: 146 Thiene, Odoardo: 146 Thiene, Ottavio: 146 Thirty Years’ War: 176 Thomas Aquinas, St: 34, 109–20, 121–22 as authority: 25, 31 relics: 111, 114, 117–19 on religio: 27–29 Summa theologica: 235 n. 15 Thomas of Firmo, master: 111, 117, 120 Thomasset, Claude: 211, 217 Tiarini, Alessandro: 175, 187–89, 197, 199 The Angel Descending from Heaven: 188, 189 Birth of St Carlo: 188, 189 Burial of Carlo Borromeo: 189 Canonization of Carlo Borromeo: 189

Cappella San Carlo Borromeo: 185, 187, 191 Carlo Borromeo Being Appointed as Archbishop of Milan: 188–89 Last Communion of St Carlo: 186, 187, 188 Tibaldi, Pellegrino: 36 Titian: 215–17, 219, 221, 222 Entombment: 194 Penitent Magdalen: 214 Penitent Mary Magdalen: 215, 216 Todi, Iacopone da: 234 Tommaso Caffarini of Siena: 34, 109–22, 369 Legenda minor: 109 Torres, Xavier: 36, 367, 371 Toulouse: 112, 114, 117, 118 tramezzi (rood screens). see under architecture travelogues: 82 Tremellius, Immanuel: 69 Treviso: 115 Trexler, Richard: 22, 24 Tridentine church. see Catholic church, reformed Trinkhaus, Charles: 19, 22 Trissino, Giangiorgio: 147–48 Tura, Cosmè, Annunciation: 353, 355 Turks. see Ottoman Turks Turnure, James H., 354 Udine: 111 churches Santa Maria Annuziata: 358 Ugolino de Camerino: 111 understanding, modes of: 31, 278. see also allegory Unger, Daniel M., 35, 367 Urban VI, Pope: 110, 119 urbs. see Rome Vacca da Bagnocavallo, Giovanni Francesco: 330 Valdes, Juan de: 284 Valens, Roman emperor: 90

index Valeriano, Pierio, Hyeroglyphica: 137 Valtorta family: 97–98 Vasari, Giorgio: 207, 208, 217, 301–19. see also architecture Cathedral (Arezzo): 303, 305–07, 310, 313–17, 318, 319, 370 Pieve di Santa Maria (Arezzo): 37, 303, 306, 307, 310–19, 370 Albergotti altarpiece: 301, 305, 308, 311, 313, 314, 317 Assumption of the Virgin: 314 Christ Calling of Sts Peter and Andrew: 311, 314 Coronation of the Virgin: 307, 308 St George Killing the Dragon: 312 Sts Donato and Stephen: 311 Sts Paul and George: 312 Virgin in Glory with Saints: 310 Vite de’ piu eccellenti pittori, scultori et architettori: 215, 222 Vasari, Pietro: 308, 315 Vatican: 281 library: 85, 113 Sistine chapel: 155, 156 Vecellio, Cesare Habiti antichi et moderni di tutto il mondo: 92 Habiti dei Turchi: 92 Vechietta, Lorenzo: 289 Venerable Bede. see Bede Venetian Republic: 81, 85, 86, 98, 99, 357–60 bailate (embassy in Constantinople): 84, 94 conflict with Ottoman empire (see Veneto-Ottoman relations) Council of Ten: 84 Veneto-Ottoman relations: 34, 81–103, 372 in art: 34, 81, 83, 84 (see also Memorie Turchesche) in Constantinople (Istanbul): 34, 81–86, 98, 103 and Crete: 84, 85

embassies (see under Venetian Republic) Venetian: 81 and the French: 86 Venice (Venizia) churches Ognissanti: 346 San Daniele: 332 convents and monasteries Corpus Domini: 110, 262, 288 San Zanipolo (Santi Giovanni e Paulo): 109, 110, 112, 156, 369 Fondaco dei Tedeschi: 137 Inquisition (see under Inquisition) Palazzo Grimani in Santa Maria Formosa: 142, 142, 143, 143, 144, 148 chapel: 140, 141 sala a fogliami: 138, 139 Palazzo Loredan: 139 Scuola di San Marco: 13, 15 Venturino of Bergamo, St: 115, 119, 120 Vernazza, Ettore: 283, 284 Verona: 369 churches Cathedral of Santa Maria Matricolare: 292–95, 346 Tornacoro: 292, 293, 294 Veronese, Paolo: 155–56, 156 n. 4, 346. see also Inquisition; inquisitors Feast in the House of Levi: 158 Last Supper: 155 vestments. see clothing, liturgical Viarani da Faenza, Andrea: 233 Vicenza Palazzo Thiene: 145, 146–47 Villa Trissino, Cricoli: 146, 147 Vico, Enea: 92 Vignola, Jacopo Barozzi da: 135 Vigri, Caterina de’, 262 Villanova, Arnald de: 211–12, 217 virginity: 221, 347. see also Mary, St; sexuality and desire Virgin Mary. see Mary

399

400

i n dex vision. see sight Vitae (saints’ lives and legends): 14, 54, 109–20, 120–22, 165, 259 Vitruvius, De Architectura: 130, 133 vocation, religious: 27 Volterra, Daniele da: 155 von Hutten, Ulrich: 133 Voragine, Jacopo da, Legenda aurea: 14 Wack, Mary Frances: 217 Walton, Guy: 291 War of Candia: 34, 81, 82, 84–86, 88, 93, 372. see also Veneto-Ottoman relations wars of religion: 17 Weber, Max: 20 weeping. see tears welfare. see Opera Pia dei Poveri Mendicanti (OPM) Wittkower, Rudolf: 138 women and girls: 83, 260, 302 holy: 109, 110, 119 Jewish: 34, 70, 71 narratives about: 110, 114–16, 118, 119–20, 267, 347, 349 Ottoman: 89, 92 penitents: 112 and reform: 112 and religious conversion: 67, 70–72 writing. see also literacy; reading as meditative: 55, 58 and orality: 336–39 as spiritual record: 238–39

Yusuf Pasha: 85 Zambotti, Bernardino: 68, 69, 72 Zeno, Francesco: 98 Zenobius, St: 302 Zeno of Verona: 356 zibaldoni (notebooks): 27, 48, 49, 56, 368. see also manuscripts Ziegler, Jacob: 133 Zini, Pier Francesco: 294 Zita of Lucca, St: 115, 120 Zocchi, Angelo: 332 Zorzi, Francesco: 137

Europa Sacra All volumes in this series are evaluated by an Editorial Board, strictly on academic grounds, based on reports prepared by referees who have been commissioned by virtue of their specialism in the appropriate field. The Board ensures that the screening is done independently and without conflicts of interest. The definitive texts supplied by authors are also subject to review by the Board before being approved for publication. Further, the volumes are copyedited to conform to the publisher’s stylebook and to the best international academic standards in the field. Titles in Series Religious and Laity in Western Europe, 1000–1400: Interaction, Negotiation, and Power, ed. by Emilia Jamroziak and Janet E. Burton (2007) Anna Ysabel d’Abrera, The Tribunal of Zaragoza and Crypto-Judaism: 1484– 1515 (2008) Cecilia Hewlett, Rural Communities in Renaissance Tuscany: Religious Identities and Local Loyalties (2009) Charisma and Religious Authority: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Preaching, 1200–1500, ed. by Katherine L. Jansen and Miri Rubin (2010) Communities of Learning: Networks and the Shaping of Intellectual Identity in Europe, 1100-1500, ed. by Constant J. Mews and John N. Crossley (2011) Alison Brown, Medicean and Savonarolan Florence: The Interplay of Politics, Humanism, and Religion (2012) Faith’s Boundaries: Laity and Clergy in Early Modern Confraternities, ed. by Nicholas Terpstra, Adriano Prosperi, and Stefania Pastore (2013) Late Medieval and Early Modern Ritual: Studies in Italian Urban Culture, ed. by Samuel Cohn Jr., Marcello Fantoni, Franco Franceschi, and Fabrizio Ricciardelli (2013) Thomas A. Fudge, The Memory and Motivation of Jan Hus, Medieval Priest and Martyr (2013) Clare Monagle, Orthodoxy and Controversy in Twelfth-Century Religious Dis­ course: Peter Lombard’s ‘Sentences’ and the Development of Theology (2013) Darius von Güttner-Sporzyński, Poland, Holy War, and the Piast Monarchy, 1100–1230 (2014)

Tomas Zahora, Nature, Virtue, and the Boundaries of Encyclopaedic Knowledge: The Tropological Universe of Alexander Neckam (1157–1217) (2014) Line Cecilie Engh, Gendered Identities in Bernard of Clairvaux’s Sermons on the Song of Songs (2014) Mulieres religiosae: Shaping Female Spiritual Authority in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, ed. by Veerle Fraeters and Imke de Gier (2014) Bruno the Carthusian and his Mortuary Roll: Studies, Text, and Translation, ed. by Hartmut Beyer, Gabriela Signori, and Sita Steckel (2014) David Rosenthal, Kings of the Street: Power, Community, and Ritual in Renaissance Florence (2015) Fabrizio Conti, Witchcraft, Superstition, and Observant Franciscan Preachers: Pastoral Approach and Intellectual Debate in Renaissance Milan (2015) Mendicant Cultures in the Medieval and Early Modern World: Word, Deed, and Image, ed. by Sally J. Cornelison, Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby, and Peter Howard (2016) Adriano Prosperi, Infanticide, Secular Justice, and Religious Debate in Early Modern Europe (2016) Studies on Florence and the Italian Renaissance in Honour of F.W. Kent, ed. by Peter Howard and Cecilia Hewlett (2016) Relics, Identity, and Memory in Medieval Europe, ed. by Marika Räsänen, Gritje Hartmann, and Earl Jeffrey Richards (2016) Boundaries in the Medieval and Wider World: Essays in Honour of Paul Freedman, ed. by Thomas W. Barton, Susan McDonough, Sara McDougall, and Matthew Wranovix (2017) Marie-Madeleine de Cevins, Confraternity, Mendicant Orders, and Salvation in the Middle Ages: The Contribution of the Hungarian Sources (c. 1270–c. 1530) (2018) Authority and Power in the Medieval Church, c. 1000–c. 1500, ed. by Thomas W. Smith (2020) Convent Networks in Early Modern Italy, ed. by Marilyn Dunn and Saundra Weddle (2020)

In Preparation Lucie Mazalová, Eschatology in the Work of Jan Hus Matteo Al Kalak, The Heresy of the Brothers, a Heterodox Community in Sixteenth-Century Italy