Catholic Art

Title: Flagellant Confraternities and Italian Art, 1260-1610: Ritual and Experience

Author: Andrew Chen

Publisher: Amsterdam University Press

Series: Visual & Material Culture, 1300-1700

This book examines the art and ritual of flagellant confraternities in Italy from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries. Meeting regularly to beat themselves with whips, members of these confraternities concentrated on the suffering of Christ in the most extreme and committed way, and the images around them provided visual prompts of the Passion and the model suffering body. This study presents new findings related to a variety of artworks including altarpieces, banners, wall paintings, illuminated manuscripts, and paintings for the condemned, many from outside the Florence-Rome-Venice triangle.

Author: Anne L. Williams
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Series: Visual & Material Culture, 1300-1700

Satire, Veneration, and St. Joseph in Art, c. 1300.1550 is the first book to reclaim satire as a central component of Catholic altarpieces, devotional art, and veneration, moving beyond humor™'s relegation to the medieval margins or to the profane arts alone. The book challenges humor™'s perception as a mere teaching tool for the laity and the antithesis of ™'high™' veneration and theology, a divide perpetuated by Counter-Reformation thought and the inheritance of Mikhail Bakhtin (Rabelais and His World, 1965). It reveals how humor, laughter, and material culture played a critical role in establishing St. Joseph as an exemplar in western Europe as early as the thirteenth century. Its goal is to open a new line of interpretation in medieval and early modern cultural studies by revealing the functions of humor in sacred scenes, the role of laughter as veneration, and the importance of play for pre-Reformation religious experiences.

Contents:

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Ridicule or Reverence? A History of Scholarship on St. Joseph       
Sanctity, Humor, and the Gap between Material Reality and Religious Experience        

Chapter One: Joseph’s Hosen, Devotion, and Humor: The ‘Domestic’ Saint and the Earliest Material Evidence of His Cult          

1.1 Introduction: Rethinking ‘Higher’ Levels of Literature and Art

1.2 Joseph’s Hosen and Early Material Evidence of His Cult

1.2.1 The Ivories

1.2.2 The Power of Relics in Fourteenth-Century Europe

1.2.3 The Hosen and Humor in Royal Commissions: The Antwerp-Baltimore Polyptych of Philip the Bold

1.3 Nutritor Domini and Bumbling Old Fool: The Hamburg Petri-Altar

1.3.1 The Kindelwiegenspiele

1.4 Conclusion

Chapter Two: Satire Sacred and Profane
       
2.1 Introduction: Laughter as Veneration

2.2 From the Margins to the Center: Humor and the ‘World Upside Down’ in Sacred Art and Ritual

2.3 Diaper-Washer Josephs and the ‘Battle for the Pants’

2.4 Joseph, the Ass, the Peasant, and the Fool

2.5 Complexities of Early Modern Humor: The Virtue of the ‘Natural Man’        

2.6 Dirty Old Man: The Bawdy and the Chaste Saint

2.7 Conclusion: Satirizing the Sacred

Chapter Three: Urbanitas, the Imago Humilis, and the Rhetoric of Humor in Sacred Art

3.1 Sacred Humor Beyond Edification

3.2 Urbanitas, Facetia, and Courtliness in Medieval and Renaissance Europe

3.3 Dissimulatio, Christian Irony, and the Imago Humilis

3.4 The Art of Rhetorical Humor and the Artist as vir facetus: Early Humanism and Social Exchange

3.5 Conclusion

Chapter Four: The Miserly Saint and the Multivalent Image: Sanctity, Satire, and Subversion

4.1 The Early Modern paterfamilias and the Profit Economy      

4.2 Treasurer or Miser?

4.3 Satire, Subversion, and the Multivalent Image

4.4 Conclusion

Conclusion                
Bibliography

Index