Fredrika Jacobs

The miracle book of the local-shrine of the Madonna of Tirano, compiled between 1504-1519, describes distraught parents carrying the bodies of their dead infants for hundreds of miles over the course of many days to reach the miracle-working image of the Madonna. They did so with the hope that their child (almost exclusively male) would be miraculously resuscitated long enough to be baptised and thus afforded a seat at the Lord's table. In addition to the description of the miracle in the shrine's miracle book, it was noted in a 1601 history of the site that also described the miracle's depiction within the sanctuary. Utilising texts and images, this chapter examines the different ways the miracle was commemorated, adapting to changing theological winds in the wake of the Reformation.

Responding to a provocative passage in Mario Equicola's "Libro di natura d'amore" in which male beauty is cast in feminine terms and female beauty is appreciated for its masculinity, this paper considers the aesthetics of gender in 16th century Italian art.

Considers the significance of the mythic figure of Marsyas to Michelangelo and the advent of anatomical science as it informed artistic practices, with a focus on the funerary imagery for the master as employed by Florence's Accademia del Disegno.

Although known to have been dedicated to intercessory deities in antiquity, small panel paintings appear not to have been among the votive objects left at sacred sites in grateful recognition of a miraculous cure or rescue during the medieval period. Then in the late fifteenth century, these images, which are known as tavolette votive, began to accumulate around reliquary shrines and miracle-working images of the Virgin Mary. Although many of these objects, humble in both their materiality and style, represent their donors in prayer, a greater number of the approximate 1,500 15th and 16th century tavolette that managed to survive depict a supplicant petitioning a saint at a dramatic moment of crisis. Picturing everything from roadside attacks, falls from rooftops and into wells, exorcisms, parturition and judicial interrogation, votive panels afford a rare glimpse into the trials and tribulations of the quotidian some five-hundred years ago. But the significance of tavolette goes beyond what can be learned by the representation within the pictorial frame. Like any votive object, tavolette functioned within the complex web of cultic culture, yet unlike other ex-votos they at once visualized their raison d’ être and presented shrine visitors with a saint’s post-mortem – and open-ended - life of miracles. Thus, in addition to shedding light on life in the past, tavolette votive illumine the ways in which the popoli and the devotional images and objects they made and used colluded with one another to accrue meaning and enhance significance at a time when image use had come under intense scrutiny for signs of superstition and idolatry.

Shared Experience & Affective Impact:
    Votive Images, Donation and War

Fredrika Jacobs


Within the theoretical frameworks of trauma studies that began to be formulated in response to the 1985 release of Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah, documentaries focused on the devastations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and video works responding to South Africa’s trials of reconciliation, attempts to identify and understand a class of visual works dealing with post-traumatic memory have acquired momentum. In the United States these efforts were galvanized by the tragic events of September 11, 2001. In the wake of this and other catastrophic occurrences spawned by nature as well as wrought by human tyrannies, critics and theorists directed attention first to works of art realized in mediums matching the modernity of the events they reflect and refract. This privileging of the recent may be the consequence of the process of remembrance and the passage of time, which allow lived memory to be recalled in the form of  “dispassionate” historical narrative. It may also be the result of the perception that film and installations utilizing image projection are more effective than static images when it comes to drawing a viewer into heteropathic identification with a traumatized subject. This favoring of the present has been challenged by changes in the research landscape. Scholars now look beyond the realist aesthetic structured with and around testimonial film to find expressive language of affect in abstract art. Additionally, the critical lens has been broadened to bring into view - and under scrutiny – images made centuries ago and by the more traditional means of brush and pigment. The expansion in trauma studies comes with a degree of risk. Dissecting fifteenth and sixteenth-century images with a methodological scalpel honed for analyzing contemporary works made in response to distinctly modern situations is arguably susceptible to anachronistic interpretation. Historicization can create dissonance between past and present. While it “nurture[s] insights that would otherwise be inaccessible,”  it also dulls the sensate impact of living memory, casting doubt on the possibility that an experienced trauma given visual expression can be grasped beyond its domain. I admit that temporal distance presents certain obstacles, but the modern methodologies of post-traumatic memory need not be one of them. As the history of art history has shown, methodologies are neither era-exclusive nor thematically restrictive.
Focusing on the trauma of war and vacillating between 16th and 20th century images and texts, this paper tests the applicability of modern methodologies, specifically that of sense memory and affect theory, in appreciating the impact of images of traumatic experience made in the past. Although not restricted to votive panel paintings offered to a holy intercessor by survivors (both combatants and non-combatants) of horrific events, particular attention is given to these small pictures, which commonly are referred to as tavolette votive, and, critically, their display within a communal space activated by shared cultic practices. These late 15th and 16th century images are paired with contemporaneous texts, among them: Angelo Beolco’s play The Veteran, ca. 1529, the diary of Pasquier le Moyen, a non-combatant witness of the bloody Battle of Marignano in 1515, and the miracle book from the Neapolitan Sanctuary of the Madonna dell’ Arco, 1608, which has a witnessed account of a votive panel’s donation. 
This paper confronts many challenges. Two are especially significant. The first is endemic to all attempts to confront and give expression, whether verbal or visual, to post-traumatic memory. How can the unspeakable be voiced, how can the unbelievable be made comprehensible? The second is specific to the objects under consideration here. Because tavolette votive visualize an individual experience, can they be understood to represent communal response? Put another way, can horror be circumscribed in a way that triggers the psychic process of transferential identification between primary and secondary witnesses so that the latter ‘feels’ the interiorized pain and fear of the former and, if so, how? Does comprehension required the experience to have been shared in general terms if not specific circumstances? In seeking to answer these questions, I use the distinction between “sense” and “ordinary” memory advanced by Charlotte Delbo in her trilogy Aushwitz, and After, written in 1946-47 yet not published in its entirety until 1970. In an effort to cross the divide between individual and communal grief, I consider the installations by Sandra Johnston and Richard Roth, two contemporary artists who address violence and grief in their work. I don’t mean to mitigate the differences between early modern displays of tavlette votive produced by a myriad of hands and contemporary installations created by single artists. My objective is to suggest that modern methodologies might prove useful in our attempts to reconstruct the visual effect of images of post-traumatic memory on viewers long ago, specifically how personal experience was embedded in the fabric of communal understanding.

Operating within a shared system of faith, all ex-votos – both pietistic acts and material objects – are intended to accomplish the same basic function of fulfilling a sacred vow. The way a voto discharges that obligation, or the mode by which meaning is constructed, transmitted, and thus received is an altogether different matter. Consider, for example, votive effigies and counterweights (contrepoids, massae cera). While both perform the same function (vow fulfillment) by referencing the same thing (the votary) using a like substance (wax), their respective modes of doing so cannot help but elicit different responses from spectators. If, in this comparison, the most essential and defining difference between votive forms can be attributed to the manner by which the relationship between the votive and votary is asserted, then the representations on tavolette votive can be seen as not only providing donors with another option for self reference but as uniquely offering them one with the potential to communicate the story behind the devotional act. In this sense they can be best defined in terms of Labov’s and Waletzky’s definition of narrative as “one technique for recapitulating [an] experience” occurring in space and unfolding in time.  But the pictured incidents on tavolette, which vary from monoscenic to synoptic, or double-time, structures to framed sequences do not tell the whole story.  Narratives exist beyond the frame.  They are conveyed in acts of donation and through the spatial relationships of display. This paper, which rejects the notion of votive offerings as “gifts,” considers how the narrative modes of tavolette interrelate and thereby constitute meaning between people and things and one image and another.

This essay, chapter 4 in "Agents of Faith," ed. Ittai Weinryb, considers the actions and objects involved in votive donation. While the focus is on 16th and 17th-century practices in Italy, the discussion broadens both chronologically and geographically in accordance with the scope of the exhibition, Agents of Faith.

Page 1. Bibliography Cartari, V., Imagini delli dei de gl'antichi, Venice, 1647. McCorquodale, C., Bronzino, London, 1981. Panofsky, E., "Father Time," in Studies in Iconology, New York, 1939. Ripa, C., Iconologia, Rome, 1603. ...

Votive objects or ex-votos are a broad category of material artifacts produced with the intention of being offered as acts of faith. Common across historical periods, religions, and cultures, they are presented as tokens of gratitude for prayers answered, as well as the physical manifestation of hopes and anxieties. Agents of Faith explores votive offerings in the context of material culture, art history, and religious studies to better understand their history and present-day importance. By looking at what humans have chosen to offer in their votive transactions, this volume uncovers their most intimate moments in life and questions the nature, role, and function of one of the most fundamental aspects of the relationship between people and things—the imbuing of objects with sentiment. Encompassing exquisite works of art as well as votives of humble origin and material, with objects dating from 2000 B.C. to the twenty-first century, the beautiful illustrations and wide-ranging text expose the global reach of votive practices and the profoundly personal nature behind their creation.

By one recent count, no less than 120 portraits have been attributed to the north Italian painter Giovanni Battista Moroni (ca. 1521/1524-1579/1580). Among them are three sacred portraits, paintings that depict their sitters offering devotion to holy figures. This paper considers whether or not the sacred portraits can be seen as constituting a discrete category of portraiture, as has been proposed. Additionally, it examines the degree to which each work deviates from the established norms of devotional painting, thus revealing Moroni's creative capacity, while calling on scholars to rethink the artist's contribution to sixteenth-century Italian painting.

"Shoes" is a meditation that follows something akin to a stream of consciousness, moving from Van Gogh's painting of boots, a passage from Virginia Woolf's 'To the Lighthouse', coding of social status with shoes (specifically the length of their curled point during the Medieval and height of their heel in Renaissance Venice), the practice of secreting shoes in attics and under stairways as talismanic objects, fairy tales and law cases involving the 'power' of shoes, paintings of shoes by Philip Guston and Miro,  Charlie Chaplin making  a meal of stewed shoe in the film The Gold Rush (1925), etc.