Articles by Erin Giffin
Print Quarterly, 2021
Uninterpreted inscriptions incised across a pair of etchings by the Flemish artist Pieter de Bail... more Uninterpreted inscriptions incised across a pair of etchings by the Flemish artist Pieter de Bailliu reveal an ephemeral, decorative tradition once practiced in the heart of Rome. These prints, together with a third by de Bailliu, shed light on the ephemeral flower mosaics from which the artist worked. This paper revises preconceived notions regarding the little-understood early modern decorative tradition and the artistic oeuvre of Benedetto and Pietro Paolo Drei. De Bailliu’s prints reveal the large-scale ephemera once decorating the seventeenth-century floors of new Saint Peter’s Basilica, and the debt modern scholarship owes to prints that reconstruct lost, altered, or stripped early modern interiors.
I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance , 2020
An etching by the painter and engraver Giovanni Battista Braccelli (ca. 1584-1650) marks the poin... more An etching by the painter and engraver Giovanni Battista Braccelli (ca. 1584-1650) marks the point of departure for an exploration of the bronze cult statue located today inside Saint Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican, where it has acted as a devotional locus for centuries. Braccelli’s print reveals the ephemeral gifts that once adorned the sculpture’s flanking pilasters of new Saint Peter’s Basilica, and an episode of early modern interaction with the sculpted image. By uniting print and sculptural studies with the history of lay religious practice, this evaluation explores the impetus behind Braccelli’s representation of the statue and its new context. The artist’s representation showcases an object held in great esteem by the local and pilgrimaging communities and opens a window onto the lost ephemera revolving around this central cult locus, demonstrating how the bronze sculpture effectively mediated the new basilica for the early modern viewer.
Thinking 3D , 2019
Online publication, Thinking 3D (a research initiative between the University of St Andrews, Magd... more Online publication, Thinking 3D (a research initiative between the University of St Andrews, Magdalen College, and the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford): Images and textual descriptions of the Santa Casa di Loreto circulated widely in print throughout the early modern period. Such was the popularity of the devotional interior that devout communities sought to replicate the sacred edifice in urban and rural centers across Europe, from Italy to Poland, Slovakia to Spain. In in an era before standardized measurement and axonometric representation, print culture provided textual and visual detail for dedicated devotees and powerful patrons alike, and potentially served as structural manuals for artists and craftsmen in the construction of regional Sante Case. This presentation traces the evolution of schematic engravings of the Santa Casa di Loreto, such as the Prospetto interiore della Santa Casa di Loreto. With careful renditions of all four walls of the Holy House—including structural, decorative, and deteriorative minutiae—these prints manifest a comparable iteration of the Santa Casa in miniature, complete with a measurable floorplan, shrine, and cult altar. In their inventive specificity, these two-dimensional Sante Case shed light on a tradition of architectural replication nascent in the sixteenth century that evolved over the centuries following.
Authoritative prints of the Santa Casa di Loreto traversed Europe and colonial territories, providing key information for three-dimensional replication, and potentially acting as devotional foci unto themselves. This presentation will address the communicative nature of Santa Casa prints through local recreations of the Holy House, and the fetishistic quality of printed sacred architecture. By tracing the chronology of renaissance print production and its effect on regional Sante Case, this project examines decorative and structural revisions to the idea of the pilgrimage prototype in distant communities, and comments on the role of authored and anonymous early modern print culture behind new norms in Santa Casa replicas.
Perspective, 2018
Article published in Perspective: Erin Giffin, « Détruire, reconstruire, redéfinir : la fragmenta... more Article published in Perspective: Erin Giffin, « Détruire, reconstruire, redéfinir : la fragmentation volontaire de la Santa Casa de Loreto et ses altérations répliquées », Perspective, 2 | 2018, 209-217.
As the site of the Annunciation, the Santa Casa di Loreto resonates with the past, acting as a potent pilgrimage destination in Catholic Europe. But this Nazarene building does not receive devotion in the Holy Land. The Santa Casa resides first in the eastern Italian town of Loreto – to which the edifice purportedly flew in the thirteenth century – and also in the many copies of the edifice populating church naves, chapels, and cloisters throughout Europe. Signs of tactile communion appear in many of these Sante Case, carefully rendering uneven brick and stone with purposefully crumbling frescoed surfaces. Each Holy House effectively conveys the contemporary structure into new communities, “performing” devotion through perpetual acts of fragmentation that reinforce Loretan adoration.
Chapters by Erin Giffin
The Routledge Companion to Global Renaissance Art, 2024
The cult of the Santa Casa, or Holy House of the Virgin at Loreto, was integrated into Catholic c... more The cult of the Santa Casa, or Holy House of the Virgin at Loreto, was integrated into Catholic communities worldwide through recreations of the supposed relic structure and its internal cult statue, the Madonna di Loreto. In response to regional cults of the Virgin, as well as to other members of the Holy Family (Saints Joseph, Anne, Joachim), and the apostles, recreations of the pilgrimage center responded to the priorities of lay and religious groups, integrating the relic structure into the fabric of local communities. Its flexible messaging inspires questions of its intended audience and cultural allegiance: for whom were these replicas made, and to whom did they belong? New trends in replicability, assisted by widely disseminated textual and visual print media, resulted in replicas of the structure and its cult statue throughout Europe and in colonial territories across the Americas. These replicas remake the modern cult center, with its generations of decoration and interactive wear, to produce the veritable “Santa Casa di Loreto” in new space. Through this case study, students will examine the dissemination of popular religious beliefs via mostly anonymous media to uncover how replicas reinforced the original and simultaneously inspired new interactions with the Virgin’s home.
Modelled, Fired, Transformed: Materiality of Terracotta Sculpture 1400-1600, 2023
In response to the terracotta sculpture of Antonio Begarelli (1499-1565), Michelangelo is quoted ... more In response to the terracotta sculpture of Antonio Begarelli (1499-1565), Michelangelo is quoted to have said: “If this clay were but marble, woe to the sculptures of antiquity.” Just before firing, Begarelli would coat his sculptures in a layer of white kaolin clay to create a monochromatic, uniform surface, as in the case of his multi-figural Deposition at San Francesco in Modena (1530-1531). Vasari attests to Begarelli’s material association, writing that the artist added the “color of marble” to give the impression of real stone. Michelangelo’s reported favor, together with Vasari’s material interpretations, imply a level of respect and status accorded to the medium and the Emilian artist, and speaks to a level of competence that remains underacknowledged today. But the ascribed quote also bears a derogatory effect: “If this clay were but marble…” It never can be, and so terracotta—at least in the eyes of much marble scholarship—never approaches the same status of the exalted, classical medium.
Across Begarelli’s oeuvre, the sculptor toyed with the material limitations of sculpture. Rather than obey the restrictions of marble to manifest exact skeuomorphic likeness—like the limits of gravity, as in the Deposition—Begarelli relies on capabilities inherent to the medium of clay to stretch the boundaries of marble. This chapter traces the reception history of Begarelli's artistic innovation through the case-study of his Deposition. By consciously manipulating the expectations of the viewer, the artist reflected on the material discourses surrounding terra-cotta and marble, which demonstrate how art theory stretched well beyond the more traditionally studied metropoles of early modern Italy.
Sacred Images and Normativity: Contested Forms in Early Modern Art, 2021
The Republic of Venice boasts a longstanding relationship with the Virgin Mary: as the first patr... more The Republic of Venice boasts a longstanding relationship with the Virgin Mary: as the first patroness of the city, the Virgin is a guiding beacon for the water-bound community, assuming multiple Marian personae through local acts of popular devotion. The Madonna di Loreto, as one of the more popular iterations, appears in sacred spaces citywide, representing the original sculpted Lucan icon of the Madonna embracing the Christ Child, as well as the house in which the Annunciation took place, what is known today as the Santa Casa di Loreto. Devotion to the Loretan Madonna and her Santa Casa take multiple forms in the Laguna, manifesting a uniquely regional vision of a broad iconographic program.
This paper addresses local ideations of the Madonna di Loreto through two- and three-dimensional media, including painted, printed, and sculpted replicas of the cult statue, and in life-sized recreations of the Santa Casa itself across the city of Venice. Re-examinations of locally-produced Marian imagery reveals the individuality of Venetian interpretations regarding the Madonna di Loreto, and the constantly evolving visual program appended to the sacred home of the Holy Family. Through this focused study of local Loretan image production and devotion, this discussion problematizes the assumption of authoritative originals in early modern religious art production, and sheds light on the independent agency of regional cults across Catholic Europe throughout the turbulent sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In various recreations of the Loretan Madonna and her Santa Casa across the Veneto, the Virgin effectively becomes characteristically Venetian.
Digital Humanities by Erin Giffin
ArcGIS, 2020
Intended as a companion tool for the monograph Translating Space (see above), this digital humani... more Intended as a companion tool for the monograph Translating Space (see above), this digital humanities initiative maps Holy House replicas constructed globally based on extant structures and surviving documentation. This project takes a multidisciplinary approach to explore the impetus behind structural recreations and their enduring cult value, but also seeks to identify probable sources of structural and iconographic information. By comparing textual and visual print culture, local histories, and eyewitness accounts in addition to the structural replicas, the project reveals how trends enter new communities, and the ways in which each new group reinterprets the devotional prototype.
To see this digital humanities project tin progress, visit ArcGIS StoryMaps online, or follow this link: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/01dbd5ff3a5d4037b8567c7b6b760fa6
Dissertation by Erin Giffin
Body and Apparition: Material Presence in Sixteenth-Century Italian Religious Sculpture Erin Giff... more Body and Apparition: Material Presence in Sixteenth-Century Italian Religious Sculpture Erin Giffin Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Associate Professor Stuart Lingo Department of Art History In early modern church interiors across the Italian peninsula, religious devotees gazed upon, spoke to, and touched sculptural sacred objects. These forms of contact reinforced the sensation of presence and communication between the devotee and the sacred figure, often inciting offerings of garlands, jewelry, and other adornment at many cult sites. Bound up in this religious practice, multiple materials are at work: in the offerings bequeathed—ephemera, wax, precious metals—but also in the sculptures themselves. Over the course of the sixteenth century, multiple artists and patrons used sculpture to underscore the sacred message of their subject matter through resonant materials: in the canonical materials of marble and bronze, but also in terracotta, wood, and wax. All of these materials ha...
Thesis by Erin Giffin
Talks by Erin Giffin
Public Lecture (24 May 2023) at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz -- Max-Planck-Institut,... more Public Lecture (24 May 2023) at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz -- Max-Planck-Institut, followed by a closed, on-site workshop.
The lecture examines the Santa Casa, or Holy House of the Virgin Mary, a relic in constant motion. Legend holds that at the end of the thirteenth century, a company of angels flew Mary’s small brick and stone house—the site of the Annunciation and Jesus’s childhood home—out of Nazareth before eventually depositing it in Loreto, in the Marche region of Italy. Over the ensuing centuries, the House prompted the movement of people to the sanctuary that was built to encompass it: migrant communities that had been excluded from other Italian cities came to settle in Loreto just as a growing number of Christians set out on pilgrimage to visit the miraculous incorporation of the Holy Land into Europe. As the site grew in prominence, it attracted artists from various places who produced opulent votive adornments in painting and sculpture. At the same time, the sanctuary became a point of transmission for devotional memorabilia, including prints, statuettes, ceramics, and tattoos. As the cult of the Holy House and its miraculous sculpture spread across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, so did architectural reproductions of the building, which emerged throughout Europe and as far afield as the Amazon Basin and modern-day Canada. Through contact with the original relic, or with one of its surrogates located across the globe, Loreto has continued to inspire devotional and artistic responses into the present day.
The evening lecture will investigate how a small town in the Italian hinterland became a central node in an expansive geographic network, discussing broader themes of mobility, migration and cultural contact, conversion, colonization, patronage, artistic and cultic reproduction, and the development and articulation of place, among others. The lecture also marks the beginning of a private workshop to be held in Loreto on 25–26 May, itself a follow-up to ‘The Itinerant Shrine: Art, History, and the Multiple Geographies of the Holy House of Loreto’, a conference held in June 2022 at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. The workshop, bringing together twelve scholars working in a variety of disciplines and employing a range of methodological approaches, will serve as a steppingstone for an edited volume.
Workshop participants include: Luisa Elena Alcalá (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid); Josip Belamarić (Institute of Art History – Center Cvito Fisković, Split); Ferruccio Botto (Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa); Matteo Chirumbolo (The Courtauld Institute of Art/Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz–MPI, Florence); Francesca Coltrinari (Università di Macerata); Erin Giffin (Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY); Mattia Guidetti (History of Islamic Art, Università di Bologna); Bianca Lopez (Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX ); Margaret Meserve (University of Notre Dame, IN); Eelco Nagelsmit (University of Groningen); Emily Price (Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne ); Antongiulio Sorgini (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore); Gerhard Wolf (Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz–MPI, Florence).
International conference (June 30 - July 1, 2022), held at the Courtauld Institute of Art, co-org... more International conference (June 30 - July 1, 2022), held at the Courtauld Institute of Art, co-organized by Erin Giffin, Matteo Chirumbolo, and Antongiulio Sorgini.
Presentation abstract: Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Santa Casa di Loreto was recreated in communities throughout the Catholic world. Major trends in iconography, location, and cult use reveal associations that crossed communal and territorial boundaries. Consequently, these connections elucidate the cultural and religious value of the sacred structure through its many replicas. This presentation will explore some of those apparent connections discovered in my ongoing ArcGIS digital humanities initiative, entitled “Replicas of the Santa Casa di Loreto: Networks of Geographic Translation.” By tracking these trends, modern scholarship can better examine interrelationships wrought between early modern Catholic communities, and ultimately pose new questions about the cultural resonance of devotional replicas.
Access the proceedings of the conference on The Courtauld Institute of Art's YouTube page at: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwzRO-e5y3pKi_dIjYWj54_YpK02OHdNC
Scolpire nel Rinascimento: un'arte per (com)muovere Milano CASTELLO SFORZESCO Sala della Balla Gi... more Scolpire nel Rinascimento: un'arte per (com)muovere Milano CASTELLO SFORZESCO Sala della Balla Giovedì 30 settembre 2021 CONVEGNO
presentation abstract: The Santa Casa di Loreto is atypical among renaissance religious objects because of its status as biblical architecture and relic. The encompassing basilica at Loreto recast the edifice as a devotional sculpture. Its marble revetment, appended to the cult object across the first half of the sixteenth century, aligns the architectural edifice with contemporary sculpted religious representations in Florence and Rome, like Francesco da Sangallo’s Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Jacopo Sansovino’s Madonna del Parto. The classicizing architecture, sculptural relief, and three-dimensional figures across its surfaces create an interactive plane composed with hallmarks of contemporary humanist design. Through acts of circumambulation, touch, and votive adornment, the Santa Casa bridged medieval traditions of devotion with the marble foci of the renaissance. This revetment effectively projected the miraculous narrative of the Santa Casa, moving viewers to interact with the Virgin’s home.
Conference: Modeled, Fired, Transformed: Materiality of Terracotta Sculpture 1400 - 1600, Warsaw,... more Conference: Modeled, Fired, Transformed: Materiality of Terracotta Sculpture 1400 - 1600, Warsaw, Poland (9 – 10 September) [Rescheduled due to the pandemic]
In response to the terracotta sculpture of Antonio Begarelli (1499-1565), Michelangelo is quoted to have said: “If this clay were but marble, woe to the sculptures of antiquity.” Just before firing, Begarelli would coat his sculptures in a layer of white kaolin clay to create a monochromatic, uniform surface, as in the case of his multi-figural Deposition at San Francesco in Modena (1530-1531). Vasari attests to Begarelli’s material association, writing that the artist added the “color of marble” to give the impression of real stone. Michelangelo’s reported favor, together with Vasari’s material interpretations, imply a level of respect and status accorded to the medium and the Emilian artist, and speaks to a level of competence that remains underacknowledged today. But the ascribed quote also bears a derogatory effect: “If this clay were but marble…” It never can be, and so terracotta—at least in the eyes of much marble scholarship—never approaches the same status of the exalted, classical medium. Across Begarelli’s oeuvre, the sculptor toyed with the material limitations of sculpture. Rather than obey the restrictions of marble to manifest exact skeuomorphic likeness—like the limits of gravity, as in the Deposition—Begarelli relies on capabilities inherent to the medium of clay to stretch the boundaries of marble. This presentation resituates Antonio Begarelli as a catalyst of sculptural innovation by confronting the function and reception of material-defying representations through terracotta.
International Conference: Paper Religion: Affordances and Uses in Christian Practices between the... more International Conference: Paper Religion: Affordances and Uses in Christian Practices between the 15th and 18th Centuries, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, Netherlands (27-29 May)
Over the last quarter of the sixteenth century and into the century following, multiple prints were produced of the Santa Casa di Loreto, a cult site believed to be the home of the Virgin Mary located on the eastern coast of Italy. These images were manufactured for mass distribution, intended to educate and inculcate new devotees with visions of the cult site, the first known set of which consisting of elevations of the structural exterior and floorplan produced following a 1567 contract between publisher Perino Zecchini de Guarlotti of Loreto and the Roman engraver Giovanni Battista de’ Cavalieri. Engravings and etchings of the exterior would soon be followed by views of the sacred interior, documenting the deteriorative minutiae of crumbling frescoed surfaces and uneven stones, often overlaid with votive accoutrements and ephemera.
These detailed and carefully rendered two-dimensional media of the Santa Casa perpetuated acts of devotion, including pilgrimages to the structural original, and also inspired regionally produced, three-dimensional reconstructions. The transition from the page to the wall, ink to plaster, resulted in interpretive definitions of the cult object and its constituent parts. By exploring the changes wrought through printed resources about Loreto, modern viewers can better comprehend those visions that shaped the Santa Casa for new contexts, and how successive cultural epicenters reinterpreted information impressed upon the page. Through a select series of cases, this presentation will delve into the impact of print culture on Loretan devotion, and the medium’s relevance to the cult’s evolving dissemination.
RSA panel: Copying prints in the Early modern period: production, use and semantic approach (22 A... more RSA panel: Copying prints in the Early modern period: production, use and semantic approach (22 April 2021)
Presentation Abstract: Print culture is one of the dominant media connecting the Santa Casa di Loreto cult site, located on the eastern Italian coast, with the holy edifice’s many structural replicas across Europe. Surviving prints—like the versions in Adam Philippon’s and Hubert Vincent’s seventeenth-century publications—hint at the broad diversity between printed imagery ignited via image transfer (neither author personally travelled to Loreto), and spurred various Loretan constructions. More often than not, the originator of these prints remain unidentifiable. As a result, imagery of the Holy House has been reformatted and reused for new distribution by myriad publishers and copyists since their seventeenth- (and possibly sixteenth-) century origins. By tracing the pathways of surviving prints, this presentation tackles the inherent semantics of anonymity undergirding sacred reproductions. As authorlessness roots the cult site in question, so too does its imagery predispose the viewer to claim unmediated access to the Virgin’s home.
Biblioteca Hertziana guest lecture for the course Cities and Spaces in Pre-Modernity (29 April): ... more Biblioteca Hertziana guest lecture for the course Cities and Spaces in Pre-Modernity (29 April): The Santa Casa di Loreto recreated in the Czech community of Slaný encapsulates the trend for the cult’s spread throughout Europe. The edifice, one of hundreds constructed in the period, was created to express local devotion to the Loretan cult. In its careful rendition of the contemporary cult site, the Slaný replica encourages devotees to pass from the modern church into the permeable contact relic, communing intimately through its crumbling fresco and exposed brick and stone. Such translations of the sacred structure were predominantly facilitated by printed media. This presentation looks to the case at Slaný to engage with the larger trend of circulating printed information that transported the Santa Casa di Loreto to new communities.
Between 18-22 November 2019, the SACRIMA Team participates in the second installment of the DAAD-... more Between 18-22 November 2019, the SACRIMA Team participates in the second installment of the DAAD-Waseda seminar at Waseda University, Tokyo.
A presentation at the "Message, Messenger, or False Friend? Early Modern Print as Intermediary" w... more A presentation at the "Message, Messenger, or False Friend? Early Modern Print as Intermediary" workshop supported by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, in association with the SACRIMA project, Zentralinstitut für Kunsgeschichte and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, Germany (28-29 June, 2019).
This presentation investigates the phenomenon of alternative visual and structural norms of replicas of the Santa Casa di Loreto through the tradition of print culture circulating Loretan devotion. Adam Philippon's Le veritable plan, et pourtrait, de la maison miraculeuse de la S.te Vierge, ansy quelle se voit a presente à Lorette (Paris, 1649) claims to offer an accurate rendition of the Virgin’s Holy House, yet the reality of the text's structural referents is far more complex.
Philippon’s publication is one in a growing field of the seventeenth-century Loretan imagery that shaped early modern devotion. In comparison with other Santa Casa prints, Philippon’s etching at first seems fairly normative; however, the longer you compare versions, the more key differences appear. This presentation intends to put forward a conundrum, and my methods thus far in untangling it. The problem at hand hinges on regional modes of Loretan imagery, supplied by local structural replicas, and reinforced and disseminated by print culture purporting to convey the original. This presentation will confront a print’s assumed status as a reliable resource by identifying and articulating the regionality of the image presented, and posit a rationale for its creation, which may stem in part from a key decorative addition. The face-value acceptance of prints such as Philippon’s—reflected in many two- and three-dimensional replicas of the Santa Casa throughout Europe—demonstrates how structural recreations relied on transportable media, and showcase the ways in which facets of the cult site are effectively reframed through replication.
Paper presented at the Renaissance Society of America, Toronto, Ontario, 17-19 March 2019.
Abs... more Paper presented at the Renaissance Society of America, Toronto, Ontario, 17-19 March 2019.
Abstract: The pilgrimage site of the Santa Casa di Loreto assumes many names. Early modern treatises liken the structure to the Temple of Solomon, the Ark of the Covenant, and Noah’s Ark. Such biblical associations declare the structure to be a monument of faith, but also a portable tabernacle, and conveyor of salvation. This tripartite interpretation unfolds across the Adriatic, over which the original structure purportedly flew from Nazareth to Croatia before settling on the Italian peninsula. Throughout the early modern period, island and costal replicas of the Santa Casa encircled this body of water, dotting Venetian colonies, and communities in the Papal States. This paper addresses the transfer of Santa Casa imagery throughout the Adriatic, and the iconographic permutations that reinterpret the structure into regional devotional foci. Each Santa Casa replica is simultaneously individualistic—as if the structure has relocated once again—as well as an extension of the original.
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Articles by Erin Giffin
Authoritative prints of the Santa Casa di Loreto traversed Europe and colonial territories, providing key information for three-dimensional replication, and potentially acting as devotional foci unto themselves. This presentation will address the communicative nature of Santa Casa prints through local recreations of the Holy House, and the fetishistic quality of printed sacred architecture. By tracing the chronology of renaissance print production and its effect on regional Sante Case, this project examines decorative and structural revisions to the idea of the pilgrimage prototype in distant communities, and comments on the role of authored and anonymous early modern print culture behind new norms in Santa Casa replicas.
As the site of the Annunciation, the Santa Casa di Loreto resonates with the past, acting as a potent pilgrimage destination in Catholic Europe. But this Nazarene building does not receive devotion in the Holy Land. The Santa Casa resides first in the eastern Italian town of Loreto – to which the edifice purportedly flew in the thirteenth century – and also in the many copies of the edifice populating church naves, chapels, and cloisters throughout Europe. Signs of tactile communion appear in many of these Sante Case, carefully rendering uneven brick and stone with purposefully crumbling frescoed surfaces. Each Holy House effectively conveys the contemporary structure into new communities, “performing” devotion through perpetual acts of fragmentation that reinforce Loretan adoration.
Chapters by Erin Giffin
Across Begarelli’s oeuvre, the sculptor toyed with the material limitations of sculpture. Rather than obey the restrictions of marble to manifest exact skeuomorphic likeness—like the limits of gravity, as in the Deposition—Begarelli relies on capabilities inherent to the medium of clay to stretch the boundaries of marble. This chapter traces the reception history of Begarelli's artistic innovation through the case-study of his Deposition. By consciously manipulating the expectations of the viewer, the artist reflected on the material discourses surrounding terra-cotta and marble, which demonstrate how art theory stretched well beyond the more traditionally studied metropoles of early modern Italy.
This paper addresses local ideations of the Madonna di Loreto through two- and three-dimensional media, including painted, printed, and sculpted replicas of the cult statue, and in life-sized recreations of the Santa Casa itself across the city of Venice. Re-examinations of locally-produced Marian imagery reveals the individuality of Venetian interpretations regarding the Madonna di Loreto, and the constantly evolving visual program appended to the sacred home of the Holy Family. Through this focused study of local Loretan image production and devotion, this discussion problematizes the assumption of authoritative originals in early modern religious art production, and sheds light on the independent agency of regional cults across Catholic Europe throughout the turbulent sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In various recreations of the Loretan Madonna and her Santa Casa across the Veneto, the Virgin effectively becomes characteristically Venetian.
Digital Humanities by Erin Giffin
To see this digital humanities project tin progress, visit ArcGIS StoryMaps online, or follow this link: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/01dbd5ff3a5d4037b8567c7b6b760fa6
Dissertation by Erin Giffin
Thesis by Erin Giffin
Talks by Erin Giffin
The lecture examines the Santa Casa, or Holy House of the Virgin Mary, a relic in constant motion. Legend holds that at the end of the thirteenth century, a company of angels flew Mary’s small brick and stone house—the site of the Annunciation and Jesus’s childhood home—out of Nazareth before eventually depositing it in Loreto, in the Marche region of Italy. Over the ensuing centuries, the House prompted the movement of people to the sanctuary that was built to encompass it: migrant communities that had been excluded from other Italian cities came to settle in Loreto just as a growing number of Christians set out on pilgrimage to visit the miraculous incorporation of the Holy Land into Europe. As the site grew in prominence, it attracted artists from various places who produced opulent votive adornments in painting and sculpture. At the same time, the sanctuary became a point of transmission for devotional memorabilia, including prints, statuettes, ceramics, and tattoos. As the cult of the Holy House and its miraculous sculpture spread across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, so did architectural reproductions of the building, which emerged throughout Europe and as far afield as the Amazon Basin and modern-day Canada. Through contact with the original relic, or with one of its surrogates located across the globe, Loreto has continued to inspire devotional and artistic responses into the present day.
The evening lecture will investigate how a small town in the Italian hinterland became a central node in an expansive geographic network, discussing broader themes of mobility, migration and cultural contact, conversion, colonization, patronage, artistic and cultic reproduction, and the development and articulation of place, among others. The lecture also marks the beginning of a private workshop to be held in Loreto on 25–26 May, itself a follow-up to ‘The Itinerant Shrine: Art, History, and the Multiple Geographies of the Holy House of Loreto’, a conference held in June 2022 at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. The workshop, bringing together twelve scholars working in a variety of disciplines and employing a range of methodological approaches, will serve as a steppingstone for an edited volume.
Workshop participants include: Luisa Elena Alcalá (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid); Josip Belamarić (Institute of Art History – Center Cvito Fisković, Split); Ferruccio Botto (Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa); Matteo Chirumbolo (The Courtauld Institute of Art/Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz–MPI, Florence); Francesca Coltrinari (Università di Macerata); Erin Giffin (Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY); Mattia Guidetti (History of Islamic Art, Università di Bologna); Bianca Lopez (Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX ); Margaret Meserve (University of Notre Dame, IN); Eelco Nagelsmit (University of Groningen); Emily Price (Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne ); Antongiulio Sorgini (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore); Gerhard Wolf (Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz–MPI, Florence).
Presentation abstract: Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Santa Casa di Loreto was recreated in communities throughout the Catholic world. Major trends in iconography, location, and cult use reveal associations that crossed communal and territorial boundaries. Consequently, these connections elucidate the cultural and religious value of the sacred structure through its many replicas. This presentation will explore some of those apparent connections discovered in my ongoing ArcGIS digital humanities initiative, entitled “Replicas of the Santa Casa di Loreto: Networks of Geographic Translation.” By tracking these trends, modern scholarship can better examine interrelationships wrought between early modern Catholic communities, and ultimately pose new questions about the cultural resonance of devotional replicas.
Access the proceedings of the conference on The Courtauld Institute of Art's YouTube page at: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwzRO-e5y3pKi_dIjYWj54_YpK02OHdNC
presentation abstract: The Santa Casa di Loreto is atypical among renaissance religious objects because of its status as biblical architecture and relic. The encompassing basilica at Loreto recast the edifice as a devotional sculpture. Its marble revetment, appended to the cult object across the first half of the sixteenth century, aligns the architectural edifice with contemporary sculpted religious representations in Florence and Rome, like Francesco da Sangallo’s Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Jacopo Sansovino’s Madonna del Parto. The classicizing architecture, sculptural relief, and three-dimensional figures across its surfaces create an interactive plane composed with hallmarks of contemporary humanist design. Through acts of circumambulation, touch, and votive adornment, the Santa Casa bridged medieval traditions of devotion with the marble foci of the renaissance. This revetment effectively projected the miraculous narrative of the Santa Casa, moving viewers to interact with the Virgin’s home.
In response to the terracotta sculpture of Antonio Begarelli (1499-1565), Michelangelo is quoted to have said: “If this clay were but marble, woe to the sculptures of antiquity.” Just before firing, Begarelli would coat his sculptures in a layer of white kaolin clay to create a monochromatic, uniform surface, as in the case of his multi-figural Deposition at San Francesco in Modena (1530-1531). Vasari attests to Begarelli’s material association, writing that the artist added the “color of marble” to give the impression of real stone. Michelangelo’s reported favor, together with Vasari’s material interpretations, imply a level of respect and status accorded to the medium and the Emilian artist, and speaks to a level of competence that remains underacknowledged today. But the ascribed quote also bears a derogatory effect: “If this clay were but marble…” It never can be, and so terracotta—at least in the eyes of much marble scholarship—never approaches the same status of the exalted, classical medium. Across Begarelli’s oeuvre, the sculptor toyed with the material limitations of sculpture. Rather than obey the restrictions of marble to manifest exact skeuomorphic likeness—like the limits of gravity, as in the Deposition—Begarelli relies on capabilities inherent to the medium of clay to stretch the boundaries of marble. This presentation resituates Antonio Begarelli as a catalyst of sculptural innovation by confronting the function and reception of material-defying representations through terracotta.
Over the last quarter of the sixteenth century and into the century following, multiple prints were produced of the Santa Casa di Loreto, a cult site believed to be the home of the Virgin Mary located on the eastern coast of Italy. These images were manufactured for mass distribution, intended to educate and inculcate new devotees with visions of the cult site, the first known set of which consisting of elevations of the structural exterior and floorplan produced following a 1567 contract between publisher Perino Zecchini de Guarlotti of Loreto and the Roman engraver Giovanni Battista de’ Cavalieri. Engravings and etchings of the exterior would soon be followed by views of the sacred interior, documenting the deteriorative minutiae of crumbling frescoed surfaces and uneven stones, often overlaid with votive accoutrements and ephemera.
These detailed and carefully rendered two-dimensional media of the Santa Casa perpetuated acts of devotion, including pilgrimages to the structural original, and also inspired regionally produced, three-dimensional reconstructions. The transition from the page to the wall, ink to plaster, resulted in interpretive definitions of the cult object and its constituent parts. By exploring the changes wrought through printed resources about Loreto, modern viewers can better comprehend those visions that shaped the Santa Casa for new contexts, and how successive cultural epicenters reinterpreted information impressed upon the page. Through a select series of cases, this presentation will delve into the impact of print culture on Loretan devotion, and the medium’s relevance to the cult’s evolving dissemination.
Presentation Abstract: Print culture is one of the dominant media connecting the Santa Casa di Loreto cult site, located on the eastern Italian coast, with the holy edifice’s many structural replicas across Europe. Surviving prints—like the versions in Adam Philippon’s and Hubert Vincent’s seventeenth-century publications—hint at the broad diversity between printed imagery ignited via image transfer (neither author personally travelled to Loreto), and spurred various Loretan constructions. More often than not, the originator of these prints remain unidentifiable. As a result, imagery of the Holy House has been reformatted and reused for new distribution by myriad publishers and copyists since their seventeenth- (and possibly sixteenth-) century origins. By tracing the pathways of surviving prints, this presentation tackles the inherent semantics of anonymity undergirding sacred reproductions. As authorlessness roots the cult site in question, so too does its imagery predispose the viewer to claim unmediated access to the Virgin’s home.
This presentation investigates the phenomenon of alternative visual and structural norms of replicas of the Santa Casa di Loreto through the tradition of print culture circulating Loretan devotion. Adam Philippon's Le veritable plan, et pourtrait, de la maison miraculeuse de la S.te Vierge, ansy quelle se voit a presente à Lorette (Paris, 1649) claims to offer an accurate rendition of the Virgin’s Holy House, yet the reality of the text's structural referents is far more complex.
Philippon’s publication is one in a growing field of the seventeenth-century Loretan imagery that shaped early modern devotion. In comparison with other Santa Casa prints, Philippon’s etching at first seems fairly normative; however, the longer you compare versions, the more key differences appear. This presentation intends to put forward a conundrum, and my methods thus far in untangling it. The problem at hand hinges on regional modes of Loretan imagery, supplied by local structural replicas, and reinforced and disseminated by print culture purporting to convey the original. This presentation will confront a print’s assumed status as a reliable resource by identifying and articulating the regionality of the image presented, and posit a rationale for its creation, which may stem in part from a key decorative addition. The face-value acceptance of prints such as Philippon’s—reflected in many two- and three-dimensional replicas of the Santa Casa throughout Europe—demonstrates how structural recreations relied on transportable media, and showcase the ways in which facets of the cult site are effectively reframed through replication.
Abstract: The pilgrimage site of the Santa Casa di Loreto assumes many names. Early modern treatises liken the structure to the Temple of Solomon, the Ark of the Covenant, and Noah’s Ark. Such biblical associations declare the structure to be a monument of faith, but also a portable tabernacle, and conveyor of salvation. This tripartite interpretation unfolds across the Adriatic, over which the original structure purportedly flew from Nazareth to Croatia before settling on the Italian peninsula. Throughout the early modern period, island and costal replicas of the Santa Casa encircled this body of water, dotting Venetian colonies, and communities in the Papal States. This paper addresses the transfer of Santa Casa imagery throughout the Adriatic, and the iconographic permutations that reinterpret the structure into regional devotional foci. Each Santa Casa replica is simultaneously individualistic—as if the structure has relocated once again—as well as an extension of the original.
Authoritative prints of the Santa Casa di Loreto traversed Europe and colonial territories, providing key information for three-dimensional replication, and potentially acting as devotional foci unto themselves. This presentation will address the communicative nature of Santa Casa prints through local recreations of the Holy House, and the fetishistic quality of printed sacred architecture. By tracing the chronology of renaissance print production and its effect on regional Sante Case, this project examines decorative and structural revisions to the idea of the pilgrimage prototype in distant communities, and comments on the role of authored and anonymous early modern print culture behind new norms in Santa Casa replicas.
As the site of the Annunciation, the Santa Casa di Loreto resonates with the past, acting as a potent pilgrimage destination in Catholic Europe. But this Nazarene building does not receive devotion in the Holy Land. The Santa Casa resides first in the eastern Italian town of Loreto – to which the edifice purportedly flew in the thirteenth century – and also in the many copies of the edifice populating church naves, chapels, and cloisters throughout Europe. Signs of tactile communion appear in many of these Sante Case, carefully rendering uneven brick and stone with purposefully crumbling frescoed surfaces. Each Holy House effectively conveys the contemporary structure into new communities, “performing” devotion through perpetual acts of fragmentation that reinforce Loretan adoration.
Across Begarelli’s oeuvre, the sculptor toyed with the material limitations of sculpture. Rather than obey the restrictions of marble to manifest exact skeuomorphic likeness—like the limits of gravity, as in the Deposition—Begarelli relies on capabilities inherent to the medium of clay to stretch the boundaries of marble. This chapter traces the reception history of Begarelli's artistic innovation through the case-study of his Deposition. By consciously manipulating the expectations of the viewer, the artist reflected on the material discourses surrounding terra-cotta and marble, which demonstrate how art theory stretched well beyond the more traditionally studied metropoles of early modern Italy.
This paper addresses local ideations of the Madonna di Loreto through two- and three-dimensional media, including painted, printed, and sculpted replicas of the cult statue, and in life-sized recreations of the Santa Casa itself across the city of Venice. Re-examinations of locally-produced Marian imagery reveals the individuality of Venetian interpretations regarding the Madonna di Loreto, and the constantly evolving visual program appended to the sacred home of the Holy Family. Through this focused study of local Loretan image production and devotion, this discussion problematizes the assumption of authoritative originals in early modern religious art production, and sheds light on the independent agency of regional cults across Catholic Europe throughout the turbulent sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In various recreations of the Loretan Madonna and her Santa Casa across the Veneto, the Virgin effectively becomes characteristically Venetian.
To see this digital humanities project tin progress, visit ArcGIS StoryMaps online, or follow this link: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/01dbd5ff3a5d4037b8567c7b6b760fa6
The lecture examines the Santa Casa, or Holy House of the Virgin Mary, a relic in constant motion. Legend holds that at the end of the thirteenth century, a company of angels flew Mary’s small brick and stone house—the site of the Annunciation and Jesus’s childhood home—out of Nazareth before eventually depositing it in Loreto, in the Marche region of Italy. Over the ensuing centuries, the House prompted the movement of people to the sanctuary that was built to encompass it: migrant communities that had been excluded from other Italian cities came to settle in Loreto just as a growing number of Christians set out on pilgrimage to visit the miraculous incorporation of the Holy Land into Europe. As the site grew in prominence, it attracted artists from various places who produced opulent votive adornments in painting and sculpture. At the same time, the sanctuary became a point of transmission for devotional memorabilia, including prints, statuettes, ceramics, and tattoos. As the cult of the Holy House and its miraculous sculpture spread across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, so did architectural reproductions of the building, which emerged throughout Europe and as far afield as the Amazon Basin and modern-day Canada. Through contact with the original relic, or with one of its surrogates located across the globe, Loreto has continued to inspire devotional and artistic responses into the present day.
The evening lecture will investigate how a small town in the Italian hinterland became a central node in an expansive geographic network, discussing broader themes of mobility, migration and cultural contact, conversion, colonization, patronage, artistic and cultic reproduction, and the development and articulation of place, among others. The lecture also marks the beginning of a private workshop to be held in Loreto on 25–26 May, itself a follow-up to ‘The Itinerant Shrine: Art, History, and the Multiple Geographies of the Holy House of Loreto’, a conference held in June 2022 at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. The workshop, bringing together twelve scholars working in a variety of disciplines and employing a range of methodological approaches, will serve as a steppingstone for an edited volume.
Workshop participants include: Luisa Elena Alcalá (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid); Josip Belamarić (Institute of Art History – Center Cvito Fisković, Split); Ferruccio Botto (Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa); Matteo Chirumbolo (The Courtauld Institute of Art/Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz–MPI, Florence); Francesca Coltrinari (Università di Macerata); Erin Giffin (Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY); Mattia Guidetti (History of Islamic Art, Università di Bologna); Bianca Lopez (Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX ); Margaret Meserve (University of Notre Dame, IN); Eelco Nagelsmit (University of Groningen); Emily Price (Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne ); Antongiulio Sorgini (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore); Gerhard Wolf (Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz–MPI, Florence).
Presentation abstract: Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Santa Casa di Loreto was recreated in communities throughout the Catholic world. Major trends in iconography, location, and cult use reveal associations that crossed communal and territorial boundaries. Consequently, these connections elucidate the cultural and religious value of the sacred structure through its many replicas. This presentation will explore some of those apparent connections discovered in my ongoing ArcGIS digital humanities initiative, entitled “Replicas of the Santa Casa di Loreto: Networks of Geographic Translation.” By tracking these trends, modern scholarship can better examine interrelationships wrought between early modern Catholic communities, and ultimately pose new questions about the cultural resonance of devotional replicas.
Access the proceedings of the conference on The Courtauld Institute of Art's YouTube page at: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwzRO-e5y3pKi_dIjYWj54_YpK02OHdNC
presentation abstract: The Santa Casa di Loreto is atypical among renaissance religious objects because of its status as biblical architecture and relic. The encompassing basilica at Loreto recast the edifice as a devotional sculpture. Its marble revetment, appended to the cult object across the first half of the sixteenth century, aligns the architectural edifice with contemporary sculpted religious representations in Florence and Rome, like Francesco da Sangallo’s Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Jacopo Sansovino’s Madonna del Parto. The classicizing architecture, sculptural relief, and three-dimensional figures across its surfaces create an interactive plane composed with hallmarks of contemporary humanist design. Through acts of circumambulation, touch, and votive adornment, the Santa Casa bridged medieval traditions of devotion with the marble foci of the renaissance. This revetment effectively projected the miraculous narrative of the Santa Casa, moving viewers to interact with the Virgin’s home.
In response to the terracotta sculpture of Antonio Begarelli (1499-1565), Michelangelo is quoted to have said: “If this clay were but marble, woe to the sculptures of antiquity.” Just before firing, Begarelli would coat his sculptures in a layer of white kaolin clay to create a monochromatic, uniform surface, as in the case of his multi-figural Deposition at San Francesco in Modena (1530-1531). Vasari attests to Begarelli’s material association, writing that the artist added the “color of marble” to give the impression of real stone. Michelangelo’s reported favor, together with Vasari’s material interpretations, imply a level of respect and status accorded to the medium and the Emilian artist, and speaks to a level of competence that remains underacknowledged today. But the ascribed quote also bears a derogatory effect: “If this clay were but marble…” It never can be, and so terracotta—at least in the eyes of much marble scholarship—never approaches the same status of the exalted, classical medium. Across Begarelli’s oeuvre, the sculptor toyed with the material limitations of sculpture. Rather than obey the restrictions of marble to manifest exact skeuomorphic likeness—like the limits of gravity, as in the Deposition—Begarelli relies on capabilities inherent to the medium of clay to stretch the boundaries of marble. This presentation resituates Antonio Begarelli as a catalyst of sculptural innovation by confronting the function and reception of material-defying representations through terracotta.
Over the last quarter of the sixteenth century and into the century following, multiple prints were produced of the Santa Casa di Loreto, a cult site believed to be the home of the Virgin Mary located on the eastern coast of Italy. These images were manufactured for mass distribution, intended to educate and inculcate new devotees with visions of the cult site, the first known set of which consisting of elevations of the structural exterior and floorplan produced following a 1567 contract between publisher Perino Zecchini de Guarlotti of Loreto and the Roman engraver Giovanni Battista de’ Cavalieri. Engravings and etchings of the exterior would soon be followed by views of the sacred interior, documenting the deteriorative minutiae of crumbling frescoed surfaces and uneven stones, often overlaid with votive accoutrements and ephemera.
These detailed and carefully rendered two-dimensional media of the Santa Casa perpetuated acts of devotion, including pilgrimages to the structural original, and also inspired regionally produced, three-dimensional reconstructions. The transition from the page to the wall, ink to plaster, resulted in interpretive definitions of the cult object and its constituent parts. By exploring the changes wrought through printed resources about Loreto, modern viewers can better comprehend those visions that shaped the Santa Casa for new contexts, and how successive cultural epicenters reinterpreted information impressed upon the page. Through a select series of cases, this presentation will delve into the impact of print culture on Loretan devotion, and the medium’s relevance to the cult’s evolving dissemination.
Presentation Abstract: Print culture is one of the dominant media connecting the Santa Casa di Loreto cult site, located on the eastern Italian coast, with the holy edifice’s many structural replicas across Europe. Surviving prints—like the versions in Adam Philippon’s and Hubert Vincent’s seventeenth-century publications—hint at the broad diversity between printed imagery ignited via image transfer (neither author personally travelled to Loreto), and spurred various Loretan constructions. More often than not, the originator of these prints remain unidentifiable. As a result, imagery of the Holy House has been reformatted and reused for new distribution by myriad publishers and copyists since their seventeenth- (and possibly sixteenth-) century origins. By tracing the pathways of surviving prints, this presentation tackles the inherent semantics of anonymity undergirding sacred reproductions. As authorlessness roots the cult site in question, so too does its imagery predispose the viewer to claim unmediated access to the Virgin’s home.
This presentation investigates the phenomenon of alternative visual and structural norms of replicas of the Santa Casa di Loreto through the tradition of print culture circulating Loretan devotion. Adam Philippon's Le veritable plan, et pourtrait, de la maison miraculeuse de la S.te Vierge, ansy quelle se voit a presente à Lorette (Paris, 1649) claims to offer an accurate rendition of the Virgin’s Holy House, yet the reality of the text's structural referents is far more complex.
Philippon’s publication is one in a growing field of the seventeenth-century Loretan imagery that shaped early modern devotion. In comparison with other Santa Casa prints, Philippon’s etching at first seems fairly normative; however, the longer you compare versions, the more key differences appear. This presentation intends to put forward a conundrum, and my methods thus far in untangling it. The problem at hand hinges on regional modes of Loretan imagery, supplied by local structural replicas, and reinforced and disseminated by print culture purporting to convey the original. This presentation will confront a print’s assumed status as a reliable resource by identifying and articulating the regionality of the image presented, and posit a rationale for its creation, which may stem in part from a key decorative addition. The face-value acceptance of prints such as Philippon’s—reflected in many two- and three-dimensional replicas of the Santa Casa throughout Europe—demonstrates how structural recreations relied on transportable media, and showcase the ways in which facets of the cult site are effectively reframed through replication.
Abstract: The pilgrimage site of the Santa Casa di Loreto assumes many names. Early modern treatises liken the structure to the Temple of Solomon, the Ark of the Covenant, and Noah’s Ark. Such biblical associations declare the structure to be a monument of faith, but also a portable tabernacle, and conveyor of salvation. This tripartite interpretation unfolds across the Adriatic, over which the original structure purportedly flew from Nazareth to Croatia before settling on the Italian peninsula. Throughout the early modern period, island and costal replicas of the Santa Casa encircled this body of water, dotting Venetian colonies, and communities in the Papal States. This paper addresses the transfer of Santa Casa imagery throughout the Adriatic, and the iconographic permutations that reinterpret the structure into regional devotional foci. Each Santa Casa replica is simultaneously individualistic—as if the structure has relocated once again—as well as an extension of the original.
The case of Orsanmichele devotion relates to the conference On Absence on multiple levels, from immateriality and metaphysical artwork, to the reconstruction of religious practice. Through primary research at the Medici Archives in Florence, Italy, I intend to illuminate the auditory nature of religious devotion at Orsanmichele, with a particular focus on the understudied Crucifixion and Saint Anne altar.
23 November Toyama Campus, building 36-6F, room 682
13:00-13:10
Welcome: Yoshie Kojima
13:10-13:50
MADONNAS/RELICS/CULTS
Chiara FRANCESCHINI, Professor, Institut für Kunstgeschichte, LMU “Local and Global Madonnas: ´la Madonna della Lettera´ and the question of the painted relic in Sicily, Malta and Rome”
Respondents: Yoshe Kojima, Mayumi Kuwabara
13:50-14:30
PRINTS/COPIES
Nelleke DE VRIES, PhD Student, Institut für Kunstgeschichte, LMU
“Mobile Devotion: The Influence of Prints on Netherlandish Portable Altarpieces in the Sixteenth Century”
Respondents: Yoshie Kojima, Suijun Ra
14:30-15:10
RELICS/COPIES/TECHNIQUES
Erin GIFFIN, Research Associate, Institut für Kunstgeschichte, LMU
“Relic and Replica: Constructions of the Santa Casa di Loreto in New Contexts”
Respondents: Suijun Ra, Yoshie Kojima
15:10-15:20
Coffee Break
15:20-16:00
ICONOGRAPHIES/PRINTS/SAINTS
Cloe CAVERO DE CARONDELET, Research Associate, Institut für Kunstgeschichte
“Crucified Children between Norwich and Nagasaki: Iconography and the Question of Scale”
Respondents: Kikuro Miyashita
16:00-16:40
TECHNIQUES/MATERIALS
Clement ONN, Senior Curator, Asian Export Art, Asian Civilisations Museum
“Visual hybridity of Asian Christian art”
Respondents: Koji Kobayashi, Hiroaki Nabara
16:40-17:10
SAINTS/ICONOGRAPHY
Francesco MORES, Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter, Evangelisch-Theologische Fakultät, LMU/Adjunct Professor, History Department, Università degli Studi “La Statale”, Milan
“Images and stories of Francis of Assisi”
Respondents: Hisashi Yakou
17:10-17:30
Round Table
The term “Mannerism” carries a fraught and contentious historiography that plays a significant role in shaping both the definition and scope of current scholarship. Formative studies by Jacob Burckhardt, Heinrich Wölfflin, Werner Weisbach, and Kurt Heinrich Busse imbued the term “Mannerism” with a pejorative connotation that effectively marginalized mid and late sixteenth-century art. The rehabilitation of Mannerism in the early twentieth century by Walter Friedländer and Max Dvořák offered new interpretations of the period. Perhaps the greatest sea change occurred during the 1960s in the wake of a series of publication from scholars, such as: Craig Hugh Smyth, John Shearman, Sydney Freedberg, Nikolaus Pevsner, Franzsepp Würtenberger, Giuliano Briganti, Jacques Bousquet, and Arnold Hauser. What appeared to be a moment of renewed interest in artists typically relegated to the periphery, and innovative analyses about the various influences on artistic style, gave way to a post- 1970s New Art History that championed the disruption of totalizing narratives, and encouraged the value of micro-histories over the long-established period/style conventions. In the present day, scholars working on sixteenth-century art are heirs to a historiography that resists consensus and offers a variety of interpretive and methodological possibilities.
Rather than rehearse the previous debates on the validity of the term “Mannerism,” this workshop brings together a range of scholars to assess the applicability of the numerous concepts outlining the subject, rethink the polemics and rhetoric of the field, propose original methodological inroads, and to signal pioneering topics and themes that offer creative approaches. Participants will present works-in-progress that stimulate a roundtable discussion, touching on questions like: what subjects, materials, or motifs were overlooked in the original assessments of the art commonly called “Mannerist”; what elements of these texts retain their usefulness, and which hold up under the pressure of our current valuation; how do we develop, refine, or recalibrate extant period/style definitions; how do we avoid the traditional bias of particular artists, workshops, or epicenters of production?
This dissertation addresses the position of sculpture in early modern acts of devotion. The case studies explore original installations and sacred ritual—specifically, how sculpture fit within the sacred interior—as well as the ways in which the medium physically, materially, and symbolically fostered a religious experience for early modern believers. This discussion begins with the Santa Casa di Loreto, or Holy House of the Virgin (1511-1579); Chapter One focuses on how this cult site, seemingly composed of discordant materials, effectively transports the viewer into a biblical space, the home of the Virgin and supposed site of the Annunciation. Between crumbling bricks and polished marble, the Holy House combines a pilgrimage destination with an apparitional experience that is reinforced by the combination of material trompe l’oeil and tactile devotion. This multimedia experience appears also in the case of the Sacro Monte at San Vivaldo (ca. 1500-1530). As the first case study of Chapter Two, this Tuscan holy site combines innovations of sculpture and architecture to guide and instruct the visiting pilgrim through the stages of Christ’s life, death and resurrection. Again, touch and physical proximity reinforce the sacred message. Conversely, the second case study of this chapter, Antonio Begarelli’s Deposition in Modena (1531), compounds its sacred meaning through multiple material references. Through the surface treatment of the sculptures, Begarelli visually transforms his terracotta bodies into marble, and as such the artist conveys twice as many symbolic referents as would a single medium. Finally, this dissertation concludes with Chapter Three and two marble altarpieces: Michelangelo’s Risen Christ (1514-1521), and Francesco da Sangallo’s Virgin and Child with Saint Anne (1522-1526). As with the Santa Casa and Begarelli, marble assumes multiple material significances, referring to antiquity, immortality, and the immateriality of the apparition. The case studies explored in this dissertation illuminate the multivalence of sculptural imagery across sixteenth-century Italy in an effort to reveal the divine presence in sacred space.