The Image and Cult of Sette Arcangeli facing Roman Censorship

St Andrews University Journal of Art History and Museum Studies, 2011

For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways Psalm 91:11 Today the concept of the guardian angel tends to be thought of as an 'old' idea, but there is little indication that the belief achieved any widespread liturgical or artistic attention before around 1600. However, the largely forgotten cult of the Archangel Raphael, to which the concept of the guardian angel is closely linked, predates it by some length. This article considers how popular devotion to one specific angel developed into a more general belief in angelic intervention, through an examination of the iconography associated with the Archangel Raphael in sixteenth-century Venice. The understanding and representation of the role of guardian angels is examined, and I show how the imagery developed from the iconography of Raphael and his relationship with his attribute Tobias. In addition, I examine how the effect of Protestant criticism of the cult of saints -of angels in particular -and the efficacy of prayer affected the cult of Raphael and the saint's representation in Venice.

Church History and Religious Culture, 2022

This article sets forth, through a small collection of case studies, the extent to which the literal and pictorial figures of the Beati moderni constituted potentially provocative and disputed hermeneutical territory between particular religious constituencies, in this case the Oratorians and the Jesuits, and an increasingly stringent Curia ca. 1600. A reexamination of Beati moderni hagiographic imagery, and curial censorship of such imagery, potentially problematizes scholarly assumptions that these images served the Counter-Reformation Church’s demands to control the meaning of religious images and the cult of the saints. Such reassessment calls for the reevaluation of a newly-constituted, uniquely post-Tridentine genre of hagiographic imagery: the Beati moderni devotional altar image and its reproductive printed devotional derivatives.

Reti Medievali Rivista, Vol. 32, 245-65 , 2019

Parergon, 2015

Gesta, 2016

PDF free at https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.1086/687153. The ecclesiastical art and architecture of early twelfth-century Rome are often interpreted as communicating political positions in a period of conflict between the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire. This article addresses the processes and ramifications , medieval and modern, of this politicization of Rome's ecclesiastical landscape through three interwoven cases. The first is the monastic church of Sant'Elia, built about 1125 near Nepi. Earlier studies of Sant'Elia's architecture, frescoes, and Cosmati marble work generally dismiss the church as a provincial emulation of Roman structures, but art historical and historical evidence reveals a fully Roman church built by an important patron to demarcate the northern limit of papal territory , a meaning lost through both historical change and scholarly bias. A fresco in Sant'Elia of the Madonna della Clemenza, the famous icon of Sta. Maria in Trastevere, is a primary sign of the church's romanitas and connections to the early twelfth-century popes Calixtus II and Anacletus II. Examination of the icon's history demonstrates how it came to symbolize Calixtine and Anacletan authority and the repercussions of this link after Anacletus's postmortem redefinition as antipope to Innocent II. Applying the results of these two cases to Sta. Maria suggests that the Trastevere church was built by Anacletus to honor its icon but was later claimed by Innocent through the insertion of an apse mosaic that both annulled the icon's Anacletan symbolism and replaced that pope's patronal memory with that of Innocent—an act of historical erasure perpetuated by medieval and modern authors.

After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the political rhetoric between the Venetian Republic and the Ottoman Empire sharpened, culminating with the War of Cyprus in the second half of the 16th century. At the same time the emergence of Lutheranism started to erode Christian Europe from the north. In these times of crisis, the Church did not hesitate to use all available resources in the combat against infidels. Several Christian monks preached and claimed that they had foreseen the triumph of Christians over Muslims. Their words were printed on various pamphlets, leaflets and brochures which were distributed throughout the Venetian territory and beyond. In 1509 a monk, Pietro Nanni, predicted that, after losing all their dominion due to their sins, the Venetians would regain their territorial possessions after a 'flagellation' of two and a half years. Nanni also said 'Il Turcho si fará Christian'. An Ottoman will become a Christian! During those years, another priest was present in Venice: Paolo Angelo, a refugee who had fled from the Ottoman Albania, the author of several prophetic texts in which Ottomans and Protestants were represented as the most dangerous enemies of Christianity. Prompted by the failure of the Ottomans in Vienna in 1529 and due to the fact that the previous prophecies had not come true, in 1534 ‘De eversion Europae Prognosticon’ was printed. The publication has had a great reception. It was printed in several editions during the 16th and 17th century. According to the 'Prognosticon', the Ottoman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire would be united under a single emperor. The Muslims and Jews would receive a Christian baptism. It was supposed to occur in 1538. That kind of propaganda was supported and reinforced by visual narratives. In this text, the author analyzes the impact of historical circumstances and of the ecclesiastical and political propaganda on the iconography of the Renaissance painting in Venice, particularly focusing on how two Venetian painters – Girolamo and Francesco da Santa Croce – responded to those impulses. From this perspective, several iconographic themes in the paintings from the Santa Croce workshop are analyzed which, in accordance with the social, political and artistic circumstances of the time, were depicted anachronistically. Thus, for example, one of the magi in the 'Adoration of the Magi' painting (Walters Art Museum in Baltimore) was shown as a high-ranking member of the Ottoman court, wearing a ceremonial kaftan and a turban. For Christians, the magus shown as a Muslim who came to bow before the Christ Child offered faith in the triumph of the cross over the crescent. In the eyes of the Catholics, the triumph of the Church over Islam could be accomplished only through conversion of the Sultan and his Empire to Christianity. The theme of conversion of Muslims is also encountered in the famous epic 'Orlando Furioso', written by Ludovico Ariosto in the early 16th century. Based on a graphic source printed in Venice in 1556 to accompany the Canto XIV of the famous epic, Francesco da Santa Croce made the painting which depicts the siege of the city of Paris at the time of Charlemagne. Here the painter portrayed the Saracen king Agramante as wearing a turban after the Ottoman fashion, thus putting a contemporary stamp on the topic. Similarly, the anachronistic method was used to render the following iconographic themes from the Santa Croce workshop which are dealt with in this paper: the Flagellation of Christ, the Crucifixion, and the Martyrdom of Christian Saints, wherein the historical adversaries of the Catholic Church were represented as its contemporary enemies. The author would also like to highligh that in the creation of the paintings which are analyzed in the paper, the painters from the Santa Croce workshop heavily relied on prints, especially those by Dürer from the cycles known as The Large Passion (1497-1500), Small Passion (1511), and The Engraved Passion (1507-1512).

Icoana Credinței, 2024

The II-III centuries represented the period of the birth of Christian sacred art through Christians imitating the custom of pagans, from whose ranks most of them came, to decorate their graves, sarcophagi or mausoleums with images and even by borrowing some pagan symbols and themes, to which they obviously gave a new, Christian meaning, to which, of course, exclusively Christian themes were added, most often of biblical origin, most of them having a narrative-historical character. In the 4th-5th centuries, under the careful supervision of the Church, a synthesis was made regarding the themes addressed, by abandoning some, by taking over others from the imperial imaginary, prevalence acquiring a dogmatic character, from the desire to express and through the mediation of figurative art, not only through the poetic, transposed into songs, the truths of faith formulated at the first four ecumenical synods, but also in terms of styles. In this second stage of the history of Christian sacred art, especially in the 5th century, as a result of the synthesis achieved in the capital of the empire between the two great artistic currents that manifested themselves in painting, the Hellenistic-Alexandrian and the Syro-Palestinian, was formed the Constantinopolitan painting school and the stylistic features specific to this school crystallized. The present study aims to point out the main characteristics and developments of Christian sacred art in the Byzantine Empire starting from the time of Emperor Justinian I until the outbreak of Byzantine iconoclasm.

Renaissance Quarterly, 2015