© Association of Art Historians 2011 433
Miraculous Images in Renaissance Florence
Megan Holmes
In Gabriele Paleotti’s treatise, Discorso intorno alle immagini sacre e profane (1582), in a short
chapter entitled ‘Sacred Images’, the author enumerates a number of ‘different
ways according to which an image can be defined as sacred’.1
In this systematic
categorization written in the aftermath of the Council of Trent, there is a hierarchy
imposed that privileges images authorized directly by God and manufactured, or
acted upon, by divine and sacred agents through imprinting, saintly touch, and
miraculous transfiguration. These most sacred images include contact relics of the
Holy Face, images made by early Christian saints, figurations produced ‘not by human
hand’ (acheiropoieta), and images ‘in’ and ‘through’ which God performs miracles. At
the top of Paleotti’s list are the cherubim on the tabernacle of the Ark of the Covenant,
fashioned according to God’s plan, described in the Old Testament Book of Exodus
(31:1–6; 37:1–9). The next four categories of sacralizing conditions correspond with
images that, in Paleotti’s day, were conventionally known as miraculous images
(immagini miracolose) – although Paleotti himself does not use this term.2
[An] image is called sacred if it enters into contact with the body, or with
the face or with other parts of our Lord or one of his saints, where, just by
means of that contact, the figure of the body or of the part that was touched
is printed there, as in the case of the Holy Face of Christ, left there by St
Veronica, kept in Rome; or the sacred sudarium in which the most beatified
body of Our Savior was wrapped following his death, which still today
preserves imprinted the image of Christ … preserved with great veneration
by the Duke of Savoy; or whatever other figure was painted or configured in
this way.
[An] image is called holy that would be made by a holy person, like those
made by St Luke or others still, painted by other saints.
[An image is called holy] because it was made in a miraculous manner, as is
said about the image of the Savior in Rome, that was for this reason called
αχειροποιητος [acheiropoietos], that is, not made by the hand of a man, but
invisibly, by the work of God, or by other similar means.
[An] image is called holy when God has performed manifest signs and
miracles in that image, as we know, for example to have occurred in that
[image] in the Holy House of Loreto, transported from such a far-away land,
Detail from Francesco
Pesellino, Madonna and Child
with Angels, 1450s (plate 5).
DOI:
10.1111/j.1467-8365.2011.00833.x
Art History | ISSN 0141-6790
34 | 3 | June 2011 | pages 432-465
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Miraculous Images in Renaissance Florence
Table 1 Florentine Image Cults, 1250-1600. (Key: blue = year of significance, e.g. plague, flood, 1399 Bianchi penitential movement;
green = nunnery; red = extant image.)
Origin of Cult Institution Image Subject/Title Media
1292 Orsanmichele Madonna di Orsanmichele fresco (new panel 1347)
by 1333 Baptistery Crucifix polychrome wooden sculpture
1344 S. Maria Novella (Chiostro Verde) Madonna del Sangue fresco
by 1360s SS. Annunziata La Nunziata fresco
1370s S. Maria delle Grazie Madonna delle Grazie fresco
late 14th century S. Maria del Carmine Madonna del Popolo panel
by 1384 S. Miniato al Monte Crocifisso di San Giovanni Gualberto panel
by 1397 Cathedral Madonna del Popolo (‘de’ Chierici’) fresco
1399 S. Pier del Murrone (moved to S. Michele
Visdomini in 1552)
Crocifisso dei Bianchi polychrome wooden sculpture
1399 S. Lucia sul Prato Crocifisso dei Bianchi polychrome wooden sculpture
1399 S. Spirito Crocifisso dei Bianchi polychrome wooden sculpture
1399 (legend) S. Croce Crocifisso dei Bianchi polychrome wooden sculpture
by 1399 (legend) S. Lucia di Camporeggi Crucifix wooden sculpture
1439 (legend) S. Pier Maggiore Maria Vergine Gravida panel
1440 S. Maria del Carmine Crocifisso del Chiodo polychrome wooden sculpture
c. 1450 Orsanmichele Crucifix polychrome wooden sculpture
by 1462 Chiarito Crocifisso dei Bianchi polychrome wooden sculpture
1472 S. Maria Novella Madonna della Pura fresco
1473 S. Maria del Carmine Crocifisso della Provvidenza panel
1493 Orsanmichele Madonna della Rosa marble sculpture
by 1501 S. Clemente Crucifix wooden sculpture
1501 S. Maria dei Ricci Annunciation fresco
1506 S. Michele Berteldi Madonna and Child fresco
1509 S. Giuseppe Madonna del Giglio panel
1512 (legend) S. Caterina Madonna and Child panel
1515 La Crocetta Madonna and Child panel
1520 Madonna della Querica Madonna della Querica fresco or panel
by 1527 Annalena Madonna della Palla stone sculpture
1527 S. Maria Novella Madonna della Peste panel
by 1530 S. Lorenzo Madonna and Child panel
1530 (legend) S. Maria degli Angioli Madonna and Child terracotta sculpture
1536 S. Jacopo tra’ Fossi Crucifix wooden sculpture
c. 1540 S. Marco Annunciation (variant of SS. Annunziata image) fresco
by 1550 Le Murate Crucifix wooden sculpture
1552 (?) S. Pier del Murrone (removed from S.
Niccolo dei Freri at this date)
Crucifix panel
1557 Le Murate Madonna della Neve relief marble sculpture
1557 (legend) S. Elisabetta in Capitolo Crucifix wooden sculpture
1557 (legend) S. Jacopo in Via Ghibellina Crucifix wooden sculpture
1557 (legend) S. Maria degli Angioli (‘degli Angiolini’) Crucifix small sculpture
1564 Madonna della Pace Madonna della Pace fresco
by 1570 (Oratory behind) SS. Annunziata Crocifisso delle Misericordie sagomata painted panel
1576 S. Maria Novella Crucifix polychrome wooden sculpture
1588 Cathedral Madonna and Child marble sculpture
1589 S. Veridiana Madonna and Child terracotta sculpture
by 1591 S. Maria Nipotecosa Crucifix wooden sculpture
1595 Oratory of the Madonna della Tosse Madonna della Tosse panel
? SS. Annunziata Crocifisso dei Bianchi polychrome wooden sculpture
? S. Trinita Crocifisso dei Bianchi polychrome wooden sculpture
? S. Orsola Crocifisso dei Bianchi polychrome wooden sculpture
? S. Lucia di Camporeggi Crucifix painted canvas
? S. Jacopo in Campo Corbolini Madonna del Giglio panel
? S. Stefano in Pane Madonna and Child panel
? Tabernacolo delle Cinque Lampade Madonna and Child (two images) fresco (street-side tabernacle)
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Megan Holmes
which has performed so many miracles, as can be seen there everyday. The
same is said of other images that are found elsewhere and that, by divine
means, are seen at times with the face radiant, at times with tears spilling
from the eyes, or drops of blood, or they make some movement as if they
were alive, or also, because in them is recognized the goodness of God who,
through them (per mezzo loro), has, in an instant, healed the sick, restored the
vision to the blind and liberated others from various dangers.3
In this hieratic sequence, miraculous images like the Veronica, the Sudarium, the Lateran
Christ, and the Madonna of Loreto, occupy a prominence that was reflective of their
revered status as potent sacred objects venerated within contemporary devotional
culture.
Paleotti’s text on the sacralization of images, though written in the late sixteenth
century by a Bolognese reformer with an interest in imposing a systematic order
on a fluid domain of religious practice, provides a useful point of departure for this
investigation of Florentine Renaissance miracle-working images. Paleotti points to
types of highly venerated images from the Italian Renaissance to which art historians
have paid little attention until fairly recently. Miracle-working images have been
considered primarily in terms of their typologies and have been dismissed as archaic
in style, of little aesthetic interest, and irrevocably compromised by ritual dressing-
up.4
Or they have been simply ignored, as in the case of the Marian cult image
enshrined within Bramante’s innovative illusionistic choir at San Satiro in Milan
(c. 1480).5
This situation is changing now as scholars, beginning with Richard
Trexler and Hans Belting, and followed by Michele Bacci, Paul Davies, Klaus Kruger,
Robert Maniura, and Gerhard Wolf, among others, have begun to investigate
the dynamic relationship between prominent image cults and late medieval and
Renaissance artistic discourse and practice in Italy.6
Even with this encouraging recovery of the miraculous image, it must be
acknowledged that these are extremely difficult objects and related religious
phenomena to study from an art historical perspective. One problem lies in
the nomenclature itself – ‘miraculous image’. While, as noted above, this was a
designation that had currency in the Renaissance, it does not generate a tidy category,
a closed set of objects that looked and functioned in a manner markedly distinct from
that of other devotional images from the period. Any religious image was potentially
the site of miraculous manifestation and potent sacred intercession. However, it was
only the images that performed repeatedly for a wide populace, that were officially
recognized by religious and civic authorities, that acquired the physical signs of
enshrinement and votive offerings, and that had active custodians who preserved the
memory of the cult, that acquired reputations as immagini miracolose and left traces of
their performative pasts.
These highly venerated images, when they do survive, are rarely available
for close examination and technical analysis in the way that museum objects are.
Their material and formal composition have often changed significantly over
time through devotional accretion and ritual manipulation, compromising their
legibility as historical documents. They have been physically re-contextualized
through the acts of translation and enshrinement, and materially transformed
through repainting, reverential crowning, bedecking with votive offerings, and
modern restoration attempts to recover an ‘original’ image beneath layers of cultic
accretion.7
The art historian’s task is further complicated by the fact that religious
sanctuaries do not keep neat curatorial files or detailed conservation reports. Cultic
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Miraculous Images in Renaissance Florence
memory is transmitted through votive objects, miracle stories, and retrospective
legends and from the ideological perspectives of devotees and sanctuary custodians.
Furthermore, the representational modality of miraculous images during the
Renaissance period is quite hard to define. Theologians struggled to articulate this
semiosis in contradistinction to idol worship, particularly in the sixteenth century
when image cults were criticized by Protestant reformers and defended by the
likes of Paleotti. Devotional practices indicate that cultural attitudes about sacred
immanence, in and through miraculous images, were fluid, ambiguous, and full
of contradictions. The miraculous phenomena associated with highly venerated
images, too, were open to question in the Renaissance period and have proven to
be particularly difficult for modern and contemporary scholars to comprehend
with the critical tools of post-Enlightenment, Durkheim-influenced, secularizing
academic inquiry.8
This study focuses on miraculous images and image cults within a single region –
Florence and Florentine territory – from c. 1250 to 1600. The Florentine case provides
1 Map of Florentine Territorial
State, c. 1250–1600. (Based on
the map by E. Fasano Guarini
in The Journal of Italian History,
2: 2, 1979, with the boundaries
of the Florentine contado and
Grand Duchy.)
© Association of Art Historians 2011 437
Megan Holmes
a useful complement to recent studies of cultic activities in Rome, where celebrated
icons of the Virgin and Christ date back to the sixth century.9
Florence did not have
any prominent image cults prior to the late thirteenth century, in contrast to Rome
and papal territories, towns along the principal pilgrimage routes to the ‘Holy City’
(like Lucca), and areas under the direct influence of Byzantine culture (like Venice).10
The situation changed very quickly, however, with image cults proliferating rapidly
during the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries, transforming the sacred
geography of the region.11
Table 1 lists the foundation dates of over forty image cults
in the city of Florence between 1292 and 1600, providing some idea of the frequency
with which new cults sprang up over this period. Image cults were also founded in
the Florentine contado and in the subject towns that were absorbed into the expanding
Florentine territorial state (plate 1).12
This pattern is similar in many of the Italian
city-states at this time, and an investigation of Florentine developments can provide
a useful set of parameters for exploring the common characteristics of image cults
during the Renaissance, as well as regional variations and changes over time.13
The
development of image cults within Florentine religious devotional culture also
corresponds precisely with the period during which critical transformations were
taking place in the visual arts in Florence, and the city was among the most important
artistic centres in Europe. The Florentine case thus provokes a consideration of
the relationship between miraculous images and image cults, and broader artistic
practices during the Renaissance.
Utilizing an interdisciplinary approach, this article will consider the surviving
miraculous images from the region of Florence and the cultural conceptions about
miraculous images that are embedded within a variety of historical texts: chronicles,
sanctuary histories, miracle stories, and literary novelle. A particular attentiveness will
be paid to the miraculous images themselves, as physical, fashioned material objects
that were seen, touched, and imagined. Of interest will be how this materiality
was understood by contemporaries and the extent to which it was integral to the
extraordinary supernatural qualities with which these sacred images were endowed.
The premise here is that the formal and material properties of miraculous images
should not be ignored by art historians because they played an important role in
structuring cultic experience and in characterizing the sacred beings and the variety
of mediation offered in, and through, the images.
The Material and Formal Properties of Florentine Renaissance Miraculous
Images
What then can be said about the materiality of Florentine Renaissance miraculous
images? For one thing, this materiality was highly mutable and was perceived as
such by the participants in sanctuary culture. The very designation of a sacred
image as ‘miraculous’ marked a change in the phenomenology of the object – a
recontextualization within a new ritual framework of an image previously deployed
for other purposes. The Madonna dei Ricci (plate 2), for example, was a fresco of the
Annunciation above the side door on the exterior of a Florentine parish church until,
according to the contemporary foundation legend of the cult, Antonio Rinaldeschi
threw horse dung at it in 1501 (plate 3), triggering a series of events which led to its
veneration and enshrinement within an oratory.14
Most Florentine Renaissance
miraculous images were conventional works like this Annunciation prior to
becoming the focus of cultic veneration. They were sacred representations, almost
exclusively of the Virgin and Christ, in the local stylistic idiom, sometimes of recent
manufacture, displayed in accessible locations – a lateral altar or an exterior wall of a
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Miraculous Images in Renaissance Florence
church, a city gate, a street-side tabernacle – that were
not tied to local authorities, to prestigious lineages
through patronage or ritual, or to acclaimed painters
or sculptors.15
Unlike a number of the Venetian and
Roman image cults, Florentine miraculous images did
not acquire their authority, at least not initially, through
ties with Byzantium and the celebrated miraculous
images of Constantinople, or with early Christian
image culture.16
In some instances, Florentine miracleworking
images were said to have been painted by
St Luke, or to have been miraculously made ‘without
human hand’, but these legends were elaborated
retrospectively, as a form of cultic accretion, after the
images had gained fame.
Miraculous images were usually made out of
less expensive materials – fresco, painted panel,
polychrome wooden sculpture – rather than more
valued and magnificent media like gold, silver, bronze,
marble, or mosaic. The Madonna del Morbo (plate 4), for
example, was a venerated image in the provincial town
of Poppi to the east of Florence and was considered
to offer protection against the plague. This painting
was the product of serial production in the booming
Florentine Madonna industry in the second half of the
fifteenth century. It was manufactured with a cartoon
taken from a tracing of a painting by Pesellino (plate 5),
and is known in seventeen surviving variations.17
I do not mean to trivialize Florentine miraculous
images by emphasizing these characteristics. On
the contrary, the modest material qualities and the
accessibility of these sacred figurations allowed them
to be drawn into a relationship of intimate votive
address, without intimidating or overawing devotees.
This accessibility was key to the efficacy of Renaissance
miraculous images, particularly at the onset of cultic
devotion, and was a dimension of the vernacular
culture within which image cults were rooted. For
image cults in Florence, while undoubtedly influenced
by precedents in Byzantium and Rome, developed
in tandem with the vernacularization of religious devotional culture in the later
middle ages. There was a marked rise in the number of sanctioned image cults just
at the time that vernacular religious culture began to flourish in Tuscany. A growing
body of vernacular devotional literature was available, including texts composed
specifically about miraculous images that constructed a very intimate form of
address and exchange between the laity and sacred beings, which had an impact on
sanctuary culture.18
Miracles involving sacred images became standard features in
manuscript and printed editions of the Miracoli della Vergine, saints’ lives, and sanctuary
miracle collections, while vernacular poems and laude about specific miraculous
images circulated.19
Furthermore, certain characteristics of the miraculous images
themselves are analogous to literary features associated with vernacularization: the
2 Madonna dei Ricci, 1470s.
Fresco. Florence: Santa
Maria dei Ricci. Photo: Megan
Holmes.
3 Filippo di Lorenzo Dolciate,
‘Antonio Rinaldeschi throws
horse dung at the fresco of
the Annunciation’, detail from
the Foundation Legend of
the Madonna dei Ricci, 1502.
Tempera on panel, 34 × 38 cm.
Florence: Museo Stibbert.
Photo: Nicolò Orsi Battaglini.
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Megan Holmes
variety of media and formats, the relative legibility of these highly venerated images,
and their site-specificity.
Most Florentine miraculous images acquired their initial reputation for efficacy
through ‘hierophany’ – a term coined by the comparative religion scholar, Mircea
Eliade. Hierophany, in this context, signifies the manifestation of sacred immanence
in, or in the vicinity of, the image, through some kind of observable sign – like a
detected movement or change in the image, an apparition of the saint in proximity to
the image, or the material evidence of a healing, exorcism, or some other response to
prayer.20
Once an image had proven its efficacy through repeated demonstrations of
hierophany, its materiality was again modified through enshrinement, which
repositioned miraculous images in new spatial settings that had implications for how
their ‘objectness’ was perceived. An image located on an exterior wall of a church or
in an outdoor tabernacle could be moved to an elaborate tabernacle above the main
altar of an oratory or church and covered with a veil drawn back only on feast days –
with all of the liturgical implications of such a transposition. In churches that were
not primarily sanctuaries, the inner façade wall was a convenient locus for cultic
veneration and a number of miraculous images in Florence were enshrined in this
location. The Madonna dei Chierici (plate 6), for example, was originally painted in fresco
on a lateral interior wall of the new Florentine Cathedral circa 1350–75, but was
detached and removed to the inner façade wall once the cult gained momentum at
the end of the century.21
The enshrinement structures that framed Florentine miracle-working images
ranged from intricate free-standing micro-architectural monuments embellished
with sculpture and ornament, like the tabernacle enshrining the Madonna of Orsanmichele
4 Filippo Lippi and Pesellino
Imitator, Madonna del Morbo,
c. 1475. Tempera on panel, c.
74 × 45 cm. Poppi: Madonna
del Morbo. Photo: Megan
Holmes.
5 Francesco Pesellino,
Madonna and Child with
Angels, 1450s. Tempera on
panel, 72.4 × 54 cm. Toledo:
Toledo Museum of Art.
Photo: Toledo Museum of
Art, Toledo.
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Miraculous Images in Renaissance Florence
(plate 7), to more modest wall frames. The decorative idiom was characterized
by the virtuoso articulation of micro-architectonic structure and ornament and
the conspicuous display of costly materials. Veiling rituals were introduced soon
after images became active as sites of potent sacred intercession.22
The Madonna of
Impruneta (plate 8), for example, was unveiled in the sanctuary at Impruneta on the
6 Madonna dei Chierici, c.
1350–75. Fresco. Florence:
Santa Maria del Fiore. Photo:
Opera del Duomo, Florence.
7 Bernardo Daddi, Madonna di
Orsanmichele, 1347 (enshrined
within Andrea Orcagna’s
tabernacle, 1355–59).
Tempera on panel, 250 × 150
cm. Florence. Photo: Nicolò
Orsi Battaglini.
8 Madonna of Impruneta, late
thirteenth century (enshrined
in the della Robbia tabernacle
chapel). Tempera on panel,
122 × 54 cm. Impruneta: Pieve
di Santa Maria. Photo: Scala/
Art Resource, NY.
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Megan Holmes
first Sunday of each month for confraternal devotions,
on the second Sunday each May for an anniversary
celebration, and during processions to Florence,
which occurred on average once every three years,
at the behest of the Florentine priors. As miraculous
images gained in prestige, they spent more time under
cover.23
The Madonna of Orsanmichele (plate 7) was unveiled
weekly during the late thirteenth and early fourteenth
centuries, but toward the end of the following century,
a Domenican poet observed that the image: ‘always
remaining covered by a curtain of precious veils, it is
rarely shown’. The celebrated SS Annunziata (plate 9), after
the middle of the fifteenth century, could go for years
without being unveiled.24
Miraculous images were also implicated in
continual processes of accretion and modification
through cultic dressing-up and renewal. Votive
offerings, usually crowns and jewels, could be
physically affixed to the objects, while on festive
occasions and in times of crisis, vestments were draped
over sculpted effigies and around portable processional
panels.25
Images were repainted as a form of renewal
designed to honour the cultic persona associated with
the image and to enhance the efficacy of the object as
a conduit for sacred intercession.26
Bernardo Daddi’s
striking monumental Madonna of Orsanmichele (1347) is
best understood as the repainting of a pre-existing
cult image on the site, which involved the complete
renewal of the image, from the support up, and its
re-enshrinement within Orcagna’s sumptuous new
tabernacle. As noted earlier, the most prestigious
miraculous images acquired retrospectively legends of
Eastern origin and divine or sacred authorship as a form
of cultic accretion, which influenced the perception of
their materiality. By the mid-fifteenth century, the face
of the Virgin in the Annunciation at the SS Annunziata
was said to have been painted by an angel, making it
the only officially recognized miraculous image in
Florence made ‘not by human hand’ (acheiropoieton). By
the late fourteenth century, the Madonna of Impruneta was
said to have been painted by St Luke.27
These were the
two most prestigious Florentine miraculous images
in the Renaissance, rivalling the celebrated Roman
Luke Madonnas and the Lateran Christ.28
It is fair to say
that if a Florentine had been asked, in the middle of
the sixteenth century, to identify the most important
painting in the city, the miraculous Annunciation in the SS
Annunziata would have been the response – even from
an educated elite member of Florentine society or a
discerning patron of the arts.
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Miraculous Images in Renaissance Florence
Cultic enshrinement, veiling/unveiling, and ritual dressing-up operated in
dynamic tension with the materiality of the cult object – the mere wood, plaster, and
pigments out of which it was made. The richness of the trappings of enshrinement
and dressing-up reified the high valuation given to an object that was materially
modest. There was an ideological function to this arrangement too, allowing the
mere wood, plaster and pigments to assert themselves as such in a defence against
accusations of idolatrous worship. One of the definitions of idolatry in this period
was the veneration of mere matter, as opposed to the transcendent sacred being
represented by the effigy.29
Thus, miraculous images, as objects of intense desire,
should not be adored for their media. As a consequence, they did not exhibit
materials and forms considered at this time to be alluring – precious metals and
gems, virtuoso displays of artistry, and seductive figurations. It could even be argued
that it was their very lack of an aesthetic appeal aligned with contemporary artistic
tastes at the high end of production that made these images suitable objects of
cultic veneration. Francesco Bocchi, for example, was intent to point out that in the
miraculous image of the SS Annunziata (plate 9), the neck and face of the Virgin, said to
have been made by an angel, were ‘not in the manner (maniera) of Michelangelo or
Andrea del Sarto, but sweetly full of marvelous vigor’.30
As an image cult acquired
prestige and age, an aesthetic of archaism could prevail, enhanced by a legend of
Eastern or early Christian origins, or sacred authorship, which gave worth and
visual interest to an object that was stylistically outmoded or had darkened – like the
celebrated Volto Santo of Lucca (plate 10), said to have been manufactured by Nicodemus
who had been present at the Crucifixion of Christ.31
Enshrinement, dressing-up, and retrospective legends could place pressure upon
the material image to justify the extraordinary value that it was accorded. There
are interesting examples where the visual idiom of miraculous images and the very
notion of ‘sacred likeness’ were challenged according to other competing conceptions
about representation. Franco Sacchetti wrote about the Volto Santo of Lucca in the late
fourteenth century:
9 Annunciation, c. 1350.
Fresco, 285 × 220 cm.
Florence: SS Annunziata.
Photo: reproduced with kind
permission of the Padri Servi
di Maria of the SS Annunziata,
Florence.
© Association of Art Historians 2011 443
Megan Holmes
… for a long time now the Volto Santo has been in the city of Lucca: is there
anyone who has ever said how it would be if it were not for belief? Who
would want to say that this is the image of our Lord (were it not for the
veneration of the one who would say it)? Because Christ had the most
beautiful and well-proportioned body that ever was; he did not have
popping-out or terrified eyes.32
One sixteenth-century Florentine sceptic of cultic culture, Agnolo Firenzuola,
mused that there was really nothing intrinsically different between the celebrated
Annunciation at the SS Annunziata (plate 9) and a similar image in nearby San
10 Volto Santo, twelfth century
(?). Polychrome wood, 278 ×
245 cm. Lucca: San Martino.
Photo: Scala/Art Resource,
NY.
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Miraculous Images in Renaissance Florence
Marco (plate 11) that would justify the higher level of veneration accorded the
Annunziata fresco. Cult value, he implied, was purely a function of ‘the manner of
displaying it with so much ostentation’.33
There is a story told in Francesco Bocchi’s sanctuary history of the Annunciation
at the SS Annunziata, written in 1592, in which Michelangelo was asked by Duke
Alessandro de’ Medici to verify the authenticity of the face of the Virgin in the
fresco as the product of divine artifice, on an occasion when the Duke had the image
unveiled for some visiting foreign dignitaries. If there is any historical basis for this
story, the event would have taken place sometime between 1530 when Alessandro
became duke, and 1534 when Michelangelo left Florence for Rome, never to return.
In Bocchi’s account, Duke Alessandro addressed Michelangelo, who had dropped to
his knees before the image, and said, ‘Tell me a little about your impression of this
Image.’ Michelangelo remained mute and immobile, either in ‘a stupor … brought
upon the senses by the divine face (divin volto) or with his spirit overcome by fear
of the divine beauty’.34
The Duke repeated his question and Michelangelo finally
answered him:
If someone were to say to me, because this is my expertise, that this Image
was painted by human means (da senno umano), I would say that it is a lie:
because in truth the skill (artifizio) of a man and his talent (ingegno) could not
arrive at the heights of which this is worthy. Therefore, I conclude that this
11 Annunciation, 1371. Fresco.
Florence: San Marco. Photo:
Nicolò Orsi Battaglini.
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Megan Holmes
divine likeness (divin sembiante) was miraculously (miracolosamente) done by God
and the Angels without others.35
Later, when asked by a friend why he had begun to demonstrate a new reverence for
the Annunciation image, he responded:
After I was allowed, in the company of those noblemen, … to see the likeness
of the Holy Virgin Annunciate from close up, which I had never before seen,
I say now the same thing that I said then, that here it is not the skill of brushes
(arte di pennelli) that made the face of the Virgin, but something truly divine
(divina veramente). It therefore is fitting that I humbly admire and adore it.36
This anecdote is interesting on many counts, not the least of which is the suggestion
of the extremely limited access to this highly venerated Florentine cult image that the
populous would have had in the early years of the Medici Dukedom, to the extent that
the Michelangelo of the story – a Florentine – had never had a good, close look at the
fresco prior to this privileged viewing made possible by a Medici Duke. The story also
reveals a certain characteristic tension embedded within the discourse on, and the
experience of, miraculous images in the Renaissance period. In Bocchi’s account the
sacred image is put to the test. The form and matter of the holy face are scrutinized
for signs of divine or human manufacture, for features that would place it beyond
12 Pietà, 1470s. Fresco.
Bibbona: Madonna della
Pietà. Photo: Bridgeman
Art Library.
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Miraculous Images in Renaissance Florence
or within conventional perceptual boundaries and thresholds. At the same time, the
holy face is inscrutable, irreducible; it resists reductive or even metaphoric readings.
Michelangelo, in the end, is without words to describe the divin sembiante and can only
assume a devotional posture before the image.
Transfiguration and Sacred Immanence
There was another way in which the distinct materiality of miraculous images
was critical to the extraordinary status that these venerated objects were accorded
during the Renaissance period. The materiality of miraculous images was directly
13 Attributed to Desiderio
da Settingnano or Donatello,
Madonna della Neve, c. 1460.
Marble relief, 85 × 50 cm.
Florence: Oratorio della
Madonna (Le Murate). Photo:
Gabinetto Fotografico
della Soprintendenza
Speciale per il Patrimonio
Storico, Artistico, ed
Etnoantropologico e per il
Polo Museale della Città di
Firenze, Florence.
© Association of Art Historians 2011 447
Megan Holmes
implicated in a category of miracle, known as a
‘transfiguration’ (trasfiguratione), that was fundamental
to sanctuary culture. The transfiguration of an image
involved a perceived change in the visual appearance
of the material figuration and was usually understood
as a portent or a sign of saintly or divine agency.37
Many miraculous images were initially activated as
cult objects through transfiguration and these miracle
stories were told and retold in the form of foundation
legends recounting the origins of the cults. The
figure of the Virgin in the Pietà of Bibbona (plate 12), for
example, was suddenly transformed on 5 April 1482,
when, as Luca Landucci described in his diary, it ‘was
transfigured (si transfigurava), that is it changed from
blue to red, and from red to black and then various
other colors’.38
A marble relief of the Madonna and Child
in the Florentine nunnery of Le Murate (plate 13) was
witnessed floating upon the floodwaters during the
tremendous inundation of the Arno River in 1557,
buoyant as heavy stone truly should not be.39
The
Bianchi Crucifix in Santo Spirito in Florence (plate 14)
miraculously survived the fire that gutted Brunelleschi’s
church in 1471. The wood of the sculpture failed to
burn, as ‘the fire was seen visibly to withdraw from
around [it]’.40
Outside of Florentine territory, in Forlì,
a similar instance of miraculous flame resistance was said to have occurred in 1428
when a woodcut print of the Virgin and Child did not burn when the schoolmaster’s
house in which it was displayed went up in flames. The image became known
henceforth as the Madonna del Fuoco – the Madonna of the Fire – and it was translated to
the Cathedral where it was venerated.41
The materiality of the image – the light, thin
delicate medium of the cotton rag paper – was thus critical to the public perception
of its sacred qualities, as was the blue pigment of the Bibbona Pietà, the marble of
the Madonna and Child at the nunnery Le Murate, and the wood of the Bianchi Crucifix of
Santo Spirito. Portable images could miraculously become so heavy that they could
not be physically moved, like the crucifix said to have been carried in procession to
the Augustinian nunnery church at the Chiarito in Florence by a group of itinerant
flagellants during the Bianchi devotional movement in 1399. According to legend,
the penitents were forced to leave behind the now unbearably heavy image of Christ
and it was subsequently enshrined and venerated in the church.42
This kind of sign
was usually interpreted as an emphatic preference, on the part of the sacred being
represented, that the image remain in that specific location rather than be transported
to another destination. In this regard images were behaving just as saints’ relics had
for centuries in determining the desired topographical locus of the related cult. The
marble Madonna and Child at Le Murate, for example, was considered to have floated to a
more accessible location within the convent so that the image could be venerated by
the public as well as by the nuns.43
The majority of miracles of transfiguration, however, involved the material
image behaving ‘as if’ it were an animate body, moving, speaking, exuding bodily
fluids like blood, tears, and sweat, and demonstrating emotive states.44
These
miraculous manifestations were perceived to act directly upon the mimetic
14 Crocifisso dei Bianchi,
fourteenth century.
Polychrome wood, c. 100 × 80
cm. Florence: Santo Spirito.
Photo: Kunsthistorisches
Institut, Florence.
© Association of Art Historians 2011 448
Miraculous Images in Renaissance Florence
physiognomy of the image. Figurations nodded or inclined their heads, observed
what took place before them, closed their eyes, and wept. They spoke to supplicants
through their represented lips and listened to responses through their painted ears.
Tacky blood oozed from gaping wounds on the body of the crucified Christ. Timely
bodily movements saved people from danger while more subtle gestures indicated a
blessing or approbation. Examples abound in the chronicles recounting the Bianchi
devotions of 1399. Luca Dominici, who was himself a participant in the penitential
processions, recorded the following miracle that took place on 21 August 1399,
outside the city of Prato:
In the panel of our Lady which was in the room of Bartolommeo di Battifolle
Panciatichi, St John the Evangelist was painted at the side of the Crucifix, as
was the custom, and it was an old panel, and St John was crying. At once the
Bishop and the Officials and every person went to it in procession. And the
Bishop and the Officials arrived after some time and found that St John had a
large, beautiful tear in his right eye; then the Bishop carried it in his hands to
the altar set up at San Giovanni Fuorcivita. There everyone saw it and I, too,
and I touched St John: all the time the tear remained fixed. And here mass
was sung and the Bishop thought that this miracle was made to show that
Christ had approved of the peace that Bartolommeo had spontaneously made
with the Lassari family.45
On another occasion, Luca Dominici reports with anatomical precision ‘the Crucifix
that the Florentines carried was that from Santa Croce [and] after they placed it on
the altar of the Church in Passignano, it miraculously poured out living blood (sangue
vivo) in great quantities from many parts of the body and from its head and from its
kidneys and from its arms and other places.’46
A theological understanding of the miraculous transfiguration of images was
available in the metaphysics of Thomas Aquinas. While Aquinas did not directly
address this specific type of miracle when parsing the different ranks and orders of
miracles in his Summa contra Gentiles, the transfiguration of a sacred image would have
fallen under the highest of his three categories, in that it was an event ‘in which
something is done by God which nature never could do’.47
In the Summa Theologica,
Aquinas discussed a somewhat similar type of miracle that occurred when the
infant Christ Child or the flesh of Christ appeared in the host. When just one person
witnessed such an occurrence, Aquinas noted that this could be a miraculous
apparition, caused by God, acting on the visual perception of the beholder, involving
no outward change in the host itself. The same would hold true in the case of a
sacred image that was seen transfiguring by a single supplicant, while it maintained
its static ‘quality’ in the eyes of others. Aquinas acknowledged a different order of
miracle, however, when many people observed these changes in the host, and they
appeared to endure for some time. This, he explained, involved an actual change
in the outward appearance of the host, in its so-called ‘accidents’ (accidentia).48
The
transfiguration of sacred images can be understood in a similar vein, in spite of the
significant differences between the host and sacred images. Image transfiguration,
from a Thomistic perspective, involved ‘accidental’ changes involving certain
‘qualities’ (qualitas) of the images, like their colour, weight, and configuration (figura).
These were not changes in the substance (substantia) of the images. A crucifix was
still an image fashioned out of wood, even after the wood miraculously appeared to
behave in a very un-wood-like fashion, and the marble Madonna relief at Le Murate
© Association of Art Historians 2011 449
Megan Holmes
was still made of stone, even as it was seen floating. This was emphatically not a
case of ‘transubstantiation’, when the very substance of the thing was changed or
converted. Transubstantiation was reserved for the consecrated host and wine when
they were converted from bread and wine into the body of Christ.49
This same
order of explanation can be extended to miracles of transfiguration that involved the
exudation of bodily fluids. A wooden crucifix that bled or wept, like the transfiguring
processional image from Santa Croce described by Luca Dominici above and the
Florentine Baptistery Crucifix (plate 15 and plate 16) which was also witnessed bleeding
in 1399,50
did not itself experience transubstantiation or incarnation. It remained
a carved wooden crucifix, even as it behaved like a human body and effused blood
and tears that were understood to be real carnal substances (sangue vivo). These
distinctions, however, even when maintained in practice, could be very confusing,
particularly when the effluvia of miraculous images were collected and adored as
relics.51
Furthermore, repeated hierophany ‘in’ and ‘through’ the image effectively
consecrated the object as sacred and left some ineffable trace, or tackiness, of sacred
presence attached to the image. Miraculous images were treated like holy relics,
even if their link with sacred beings was mimetic rather than metonymic, and their
materiality not as obviously consecrated.
Religious and secular authorities were nervous about the possibility of an
overly literal interpretation of sacred embodiment in the image, labelling this kind
of devotional behaviour idolatrous and associating it with the unlearned and the
simple-minded.52
As a consequence, image cults were under constant surveillance.
Efforts were made to investigate some of the more spectacular reports and repeated
instances of miraculous transfiguration, in order to ensure that all potential natural
causes for the phenomenon be considered. In Pistoia, authorities made certain that
the bodily sweat issuing forth from the fresco of the Madonna dell’Umiltà in 1490 was
15 Attributed to Giovanni
di Balduccio, Crucifix,
early fourteenth century.
Polychrome wood, 190 ×
176 cm. Florence: Museo
dell’Opera del Duomo
(originally in the Baptistery).
Photo: Megan Holmes.
16 Detail of Giovanni di
Balduccio (attrib.), Crucifix,
early fourteenth century.
© Association of Art Historians 2011 450
Miraculous Images in Renaissance Florence
not caused by excessive humidity in the wall.53
In Rome, at the height of the Bianchi
devotional movement that had extended down from Liguria and Tuscany in the year
1399, woodworkers and painters were called in to examine a sculpted processional
crucifix that bled at the command of a charismatic penitent who claimed that he was
St John the Baptist. When one of the experts probed the side wound, the chest cavity
appeared to be hollow. The papal investigator cried out ‘Do it with more conviction!’
and the artisan ‘cracked open the side wound of the crucifix’ and discovered within
an internal mechanism that, when squeezed, caused three or four drops of a bloodlike
substance to issue forth from a little leather sack through the wound.54
Images
were scrutinized; the testimony of witnesses was examined; suspicions of fraud were
investigated; and the orthodox position on the image as the sign (signum) of the sacred
prototype was reiterated in the sanctuary context.55
Miraculous Images and Sacred ‘Personhood’
In considering miracles of transfiguration and the notion of immanence in and
through the image, I want to work with the concept of agency proposed by the
anthropologist Alfred Gell. According to Gell, works of art and artifacts can, on
occasion, be understood to support ‘the abduction of agency’, allowing the people
who interact with them to attribute active agency to them. This is because objects
can be endowed with a kind of ‘personhood’ and the behaviours and characteristics
associated with human agency.56
Understood as such, Renaissance miraculous
images were ‘social agents’ whose material and figurative features, under certain
circumstances, were ascribed intentioned behaviour by religious beholders. The
materiality of miraculous images – the very matter and form out of which they were
made – thus had the potential to contribute to the perception that the images were
responsive to the needs of supplicants and were animate in this responsiveness. An
example of this kind of agency attributed to the material image can be seen in the
case of the miraculous Madonna dei Terremoti (‘Madonna of the Earthquakes’; plate 17)
from the town of Scarperia located to the north of Florence, where the miracle of
transfiguration that launched the cult was motivated by an unusual iconography. The
fresco, dating to the late fifteenth century, represents the Virgin with the swaddled
Christ Child nestled within the drapery of her lap, with a pillow resting beneath
his head. The Virgin’s hands, which typically support the baby in images of the
enthroned Virgin and Child, are here brought together in prayer. This is a very odd
format that, not altogether successfully, conjoins the typology of the Madonna and
Child enthroned with a relatively new Florentine iconography of the Adoration of the
Christ Child where the Virgin kneels upon the ground, popularized by Fra Filippo
Lippi’s altarpiece for the Medici Palace Chapel (1459). The fresco in Scarperia appears
to have become the object of cultic veneration in 1542 when a strong and destructive
earthquake rocked the region.57
As the legend goes, the Madonna, who had originally
been cradling the Christ Child in her arms, transfigured, dropping the baby into her
lap in order to pray to God to cease the tremors.
According to Gell, there are two basic strategies by which inanimate objects are
transformed by humans into what he calls ‘quasi persons in artifact-form’.58
Gell
refers to the first of these strategies as ‘externalist’ because it involves a projection,
from the outside, by the people within a religious community, of the role of a ‘social
other’ onto the object. The image is the passive recipient of ritualized acts that
enmesh it in ‘the structured routines of daily life’.59
The dressing-up and procession
of miraculous images, as well as the intimate prayers addressed to the sacred being
associated with a specific sanctuary image (the ‘Madonna of Orsanmichele’), would
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Megan Holmes
fall under this category. The second strategy of animation that Gell describes he calls
‘internalist’ because it treats the inanimate material as if it possessed within it, a
mind or animating spirit, a homunculus. An inner–outer dichotomy is thus set up in
relation to the object – the inner, animate soul or mind and its outer, visualized form,
or body. Representational features in the outer body that suggest access to the inner
spirit or mind are thus of key importance, as they open up ‘routes of access to this
17 Madonna dei Terremoti, c.
1470–1500. Fresco. Scarperia:
Oratorio della Madonna dei
Terremoti. Photo: Megan
Holmes.
© Association of Art Historians 2011 452
Miraculous Images in Renaissance Florence
inwardness’. Mimesis, too, can play a significant role in the perception of the objectas-person.
Gell’s ‘internalist conception of agency’ helps account for how the physical
materiality and the representational features of cult images – gaping wounds (see plate
15) and wide staring eyes (see plate 6, plate 7, plate 10 and plate 18) – were implicated in
miracles of transfiguration and imaginative encounters with the cultic personae. Gell
allows us to move beyond a generalized notion of animation as a superficial result of
an artist’s tricks of the trade, like the eyes in the portrait that follow the beholder, to
more culturally specific conceptions of anthropomorphism and embodiment. Late
medieval and Renaissance theories of human physiology were extremely attentive to
how inner, vital spirits manifest themselves on the exterior physiognomy and passed
out of (and into) the body through critical orifices.60
There are, however, a number of problems inherent in Gell’s universalizing
formulation. The theory of the ‘homunculus within the object’ relies unproductively
upon an ahistorical mind/body binary, which fails to differentiate the complex
operations of the mind and soul, which Caroline Walker Bynum argues must be
treated as two distinct elements in late medieval Christian conceptualizations
18 Madonna delle Carceri, c.
1350–1400. Fresco. Prato:
Madonna delle Carceri.
Photo: Mandragora, Florence.
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Megan Holmes
about human physiology and behaviour.61
Gell’s theory of ‘personhood’ also
forces miraculous images to assume personhood and to conform to human
behaviours when they often clearly did not. These were, after all, supernatural
embodiments. Sacred effigies were seen to weep precious crystals, rather than tears;
their exudations of sweat were interpreted as a form of lament; and a ‘face-to-face’
encounter with the Veronica in Rome could blind the beholder.62
Certain anatomical
parts of miraculous figurations could be considered more sacred than others. It was
just the face of the Virgin, for example, that was said to have been painted by an angel
in the Annunciation at the SS Annunziata and this feature was often isolated in prayers
and in copies of the cult image.63
Nor does the metaphor of interiority quite get at the
slippery and variable relationship in the Renaissance between the sacred being and
the transfiguring effigy.
The ambiguity of this relationship is evident in a devotional poem that was
written about a miraculous image known as the Madonna delle Carceri (plate 18) in Prato.64
The poem describes how the cult originated when the Virgin ‘descended from Heaven
on July 6th, 1484’. According to the temporality of the poem, at the very same time
that the Virgin was in transit from Heaven, she was also ‘accustomed to be’ in ‘her
perfect effigy’ on the wall of the abandoned prison in Prato. The vernacular word
used to describe the Virgin’s habitual relationship to her frescoed image is interesting:
prochurare – meaning literally ‘to arrive at’ or ‘to obtain’ and usually used in relation
to a state of being or material property. It implies the process of becoming, so that
the immaterial transcendent Virgin in the poem assumes a state of visibility in her
image. The material effigy frescoed on the wall is conceived as a superficial skin that,
through transfiguration, becomes ‘unstuck’ or ‘detached’ (dispicchar) from the plaster
supporting structure and moves about freely through the old prison grounds. The
‘Queen of Heaven’ then returns ‘to that wall with her saintly feet, where great miracles
are seen to take place’. The mobile image thus operates with its saintly prototype
immanent in the vicinity, orchestrating its every move. The author of the poem is
careful, however, to avoid the explicit conflation of the Virgin and her material image.
Transfiguration was ultimately a kind of material performance that signalled
sacred presence and divine agency operating in the world. The conceptualization of
the celestial Virgin momentarily ‘inhabiting’ her image helps us to appreciate, too,
how the repainting, dressing-up, and enshrinement of a miraculous image were acts
that were understood to enhance the dynamic material integrity of the image and
make it a more fitting accommodation for the Virgin when she chose to preside in her
sanctuary.
Satirizing the Animate Image in the Novella
During this period a new critical perspective on miracles of transfiguration and
sacred immanence developed, and with it a literary genre that satirized the miracle
story and took particular delight in exposing the apparent contradictions and
paradoxes inherent in miracles of image animation. These ribald tales appear first
in Italy in the second half of the fourteenth century in novelle and in the following
century, within the more specialized humorous genre of the burla or facezia.65
They
are modelled after thirteenth-century French fabliau about Christian images and
after Boccaccio’s satires on the authenticity of sacred relics. It is telling that this
genre in Italy came to embrace miraculous images when it did, at precisely the
time that miracles of transfiguration were becoming a commonplace within cultic
devotion. The stories of Franco Sacchetti, Poggio Bracciolini, and the Piovano
Arlotto offer a kind of critique of image cults from within Catholic religious
© Association of Art Historians 2011 454
Miraculous Images in Renaissance Florence
culture before the stakes of the debate were ratcheted up in the sixteenth century
with the Reformation.66
These tales turn on the problematic role played by fallible
human sensorial perception in identifying and comprehending the miraculous
transfiguration of images and in discerning between natural, divine, and diabolical
causes when witnessing the phenomenon.67
They satirize the misperceptions of
simple, uneducated people and the creative manipulation of spurious miracles by
wily characters. We encounter pictures that chatter away with devotees and painted
crucifixes that are ‘alive’ but can be killed, should the need arise – all with risibly
natural explanations for the apparently miraculous. In the Piovano Arlotto stories,
there is an evening devoted to a competitive exchange of these fashionable and
entertaining stories between the Piovano and Piero de’ Medici.68
A particularly entertaining example of this genre is an over-the-top novella by
Franco Sacchetti about an incarnate crucifix.69
The foolish protagonist in the story is
a painter from Siena named Mino whose wife was philandering with another man.
Mino finds out about this and surprises the lovers by returning unexpectedly to his
house one night.
This Mino was a painter of crucifixes more than of other works, particularly
those that were carved in relief; he always had in his house, among those
completed and in progress, sometimes four and sometimes six; and he
kept them, as was the practice of painters, on a panel or a long board, in his
workshop, leaning against the wall, one alongside the other, each covered
with a large cloth. At the time he had six of them – four carved and in relief,
and two that were painted in two-dimensions.70
Mino arrived home and began to hammer on the door. The lovers scrambled for a
quick solution to their problem and ran to the painter’s workroom. The woman said:
‘You want to do something good? Climb up on this board, and position yourself
on one of these two-dimensional crucifixes with your arms on the cross, just as the
others are, and I will cover you with the same linen cloth ...; then some saint will
help us.’71
The man did as he was told, comically assuming the position of a veiled
sculpted crucifix. The painter searched the house and eventually made his way into
the workshop. Sacchetti savours the paradox, writing with evident irony: ‘When the
incarnate crucifix (crocifisso incarnato) heard him there, he thought about how he should
seem to be; and it was fitting for him to be like the others that were of wood.’72
Mino
initially found nothing amiss and eventually retired to bed with his wife. The next
morning, however, he returned to his workshop where the lover was still splayed
against the cross beneath the cloth:
Looking at his crucifixes, he saw two toes of one of the feet of the man who
was covered [by the cloth]. Mino said to himself, ‘For certain, this is the
friend!’ And looking over the various tools with which he roughed out and
carved those crucifixes, he failed to see among them one that was more
suitable to him than the axe. He took this axe and made ready to climb up to
the living crucifix (crocifisso vivo) in order to cut off the principal thing that had
brought him there ….73
The lover then succeeds in fleeing through the open door of the shop, although
Sacchetti plants the suggestion that he may not have escaped with his offending organ
intact.74
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Megan Holmes
Mino, deeply distressed at being ‘cuckolded by the crucifix’ (scornato del crocifisso),
confronts his wife about her infidelity. A tussle ensues in which the woman beats
up her husband and then compares him to Boccaccio’s famously dim-witted painter
Calandrino who was forever mistaking illusions for reality. Mino finally backs down,
accepts his wife’s dalliance, and explains away his bruises to his fellow townsmen as
having come about when one of his crucifixes fell on his face.
This story, in which a painter is ‘cuckolded’ by a libidinous ‘incarnate crucifix’
that escapes from his shop, parodies conventional miracle tales featuring image
transfiguration and the veiling rituals associated with highly venerated images.
Sacchetti was criticizing the kind of popular piety practised by people who
privileged this type of spectacular miracle and had an overly literal understanding
of transfiguration as incarnation or transubstantiation – the image as Real Presence.
Sacchetti also exhibits an awareness of considerations related to the visual arts. He
satirically mobilizes the powerful theological and artistic tropes of the Deus artifex
and the imago Dei, and highlights the mimetic underpinning both of Christian image
theory and Trecento artistic discourses based upon classical antique models of
naturalism. The mimetic claims of religious representation in this period placed
certain pressures upon miraculous images, where competing conceptions about
‘likeness’ and its effects could undermine the authority of the cultic objects as
representational figurations (just as Sacchetti himself had challenged the Volto Santo
of Lucca). However, Sacchetti should not be understood as debunking image cults
in general. On the contrary, he was an active participant in the Florentine image
cults of his day, designing the programme of Marian miracles for the stained glass
windows at Orsanmichele and advising on the relocation and enshrinement of a
newly activated Madonna fresco (plate 6) in the Cathedral.75
He was advocating a
more theologically precise understanding of the ‘signs and wonders’ of miraculous
transfiguration in order to discourage imaginative licence in this cultural domain, as
well as the idolatrous veneration of mere matter and mundane figurations. Sensory
perception was fallible and phenomena that appeared to be miraculous needed to be
verified by multiple witnesses and processed through the faculty of reason – which he
considered the province of secular and clerical literati who were necessary mediators
in cultic activities.
The witnessing and the interpretation of the materiality of miraculous images by
participants in sanctuary culture were thus potentially charged and contested acts.
The introduction of veiling rituals, after an image acquired a reputation for potent
intercession, had the effect of significantly reducing the possibility for new miracles
of transfiguration to occur outside of the sanctioned periods of ritual celebration
conducted by the resident clergy and authorized by the custodians of the cult. Veiling
effectively ‘de-materialized’ miraculous images as objects of corporeal vision in
the sanctuary. However, whenever cultic authorities intervened to reduce the direct
sensorial contact that devotees had with miraculous images, alternative possibilities
tended to open up. When people encountered the veiled cult object, as was the
norm when they made their daily or weekly devotions or visited the sanctuary as
pilgrims on non-festive occasions, the sacred presence inherent in the object could
still be experienced. The intercessory powers of the image could be activated through
objects that had come into direct contact with it, including reproductive prints
like the woodcuts of the Madonna delle Carceri that were rubbed against the unveiled
image and sold to supplicants.76
Miraculous images also generated satellite cult sites
featuring copies of the image that were more physically accessible to touch and sight,
like the fresco on the inner façade wall at San Marco (plate 11) that reproduced the
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Miraculous Images in Renaissance Florence
composition of the perpetually veiled miraculous Annunciation just down the road
at the SS Annunziata (plate 9).77
There was also a rich votive culture which involved
intimate encounters between supplicants and the sacred beings associated with
specific miraculous images, that occurred at a distance from the images themselves,
in the form of visions. People in crisis would pray to ‘La Nunziata’ – the toponym of
the Virgin associated with the miraculous Annunciation fresco – and she would appear
to them in a vision and intercede on their behalf, as visualized in a print from a
collection of miracles from the SS Annunziata (plate 19). Devotion to an image like the
Annunciation, which by the mid-fifteenth century was rarely unveiled, could also be
complemented by participation in other image cults in the city that featured material
effigies that could be touched and kissed on a regular basis and that mediated in the
affairs of distinct social groups and religious sub-cultures.78
The Dialectic in Image Veneration
The efficacy of Florentine Renaissance miraculous images ultimately depended upon
the apparently contradictory conditions of devotees’ immediate, intimate sensorial
experience of these sacred material objects (and the extended cultural memory of this
contact), and their awe-struck acknowledgement of the inapprehensible, ineffable
alterity of these same objects.79
Perceptions of sacred immanence in and through the
image, and of the responsiveness of the Virgin and Christ to votive supplication, were
generated out of a certain tension or dialectic. Miraculous images were experienced
by devotees as both accessible and inaccessible, close and distant, familiar and
‘other’. In making this assertion, I am going against the grain of the conventional
view where cult images are associated with aura (think of Walter Benjamin, for
example, in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’).80
Enshrined
miraculous images are typically folded into the public sphere of orchestrated,
formalized ritual, and are considered to have communicated their extraordinary
status by means of a distancing effect and through their manifest visible difference
from normative religious representations displayed in sacred and secular spaces.
This cultic veneration is set up as a binary to private devotion and mysticism, both
characterized by immediacy, access, and an unmediated and personal relationship
with the sacred.81
This polarizing schema is not borne out by the historical record. Ricordi, laude
prayers that were sung before cult images by lay confraternities, miracle stories, and
the imagery of ex-votos all exhibit a yearning for the image and the corresponding
sacred persona, conceived of as entities that were both fearsome and ardently desired.
The devotional practices oriented toward miraculous images – prayer, liturgy,
pilgrimage, procession, votive exchange, veiling/unveiling – facilitated both direct,
close, and even quotidian engagement with the images and their surrogates, and
more mediated forms of ritualized reverence conducted on special occasions.
At certain times miracle-working images were immediately perceptible to the
senses of the supplicant. During intervals of unveiling, supplicants could kneel down
before the image and fix their eyes upon the face of the figure, addressing Christ or
the Virgin directly with generic prayers for mercy or requests for more personalized
acts of intercession. This kind of dynamic, embodied, and sensorial image devotion
is akin to what Christopher Pinney has called ‘corpothetics’ (or ‘sensory corporeal
aesthetics’) in his work on South Asian rural Hindu image culture.82
It involves an
intimate and interactive mode of addressing a sacred image as if the sacred being
were immanent, attentive, and responsive. In the context of Florentine miracleworking
images, this variety of devotion was sustained by certain conventions and
© Association of Art Historians 2011 457
Megan Holmes
practices. Votive supplication established a highly personalized relationship between
the devotee-in-crisis and the sacred being, with a sense of mutual accountability in
the exchange of salvic sacred intercession for material offerings of thanks. The images
themselves also had agency in structuring this intimate and direct manner of address.
The corpus of surviving Florentine Renaissance miracle-working images reveals a
large percentage of figures of Christ and the Virgin with large, wide-open eyes that
appear to engage the viewer in an exchange of looks (see plate 6, plate 7 and plate 18).
The sacred figures also exhibit active intercessory gestures (see plate 18) and there is
often tender interaction between the Madonna and Child (see plate 4, plate 6, plate 7
and plate 13) that could have functioned as a visual metaphor for Marian misericordia.
The images are also composed in what would have been a familiar visual idiom, as
devotees encountered iconography, typologies, figuration, motifs, and styles that
were in common use in Florentine visual arts at the time. This kind of devotional
intimacy and sensorial engagement with the image could also occur at a remove from
the enshrined miraculous image in the sanctuary. People could experience mental
images and interior visions of miracle-working paintings and sculptures in their
domestic devotion and during moments of crisis. These visualizations within the
mind’s eye were understood as perceptual experiences of memory images imprinted
in the mind or visions implanted by divine means.83
The accessibility and familiarity of miraculous images were counterbalanced by
occasions and characteristics that contributed to a sense of the images’ ‘alterity’ and
an attitude of awe and reverence on the part of beholders. There were distancing
mechanisms within the enshrinement structures that rendered miraculous images
physically inaccessible: the veils covering the images, balustrades and grills that
enclosed the more elaborate tabernacle chapels, and the high elevation of the simpler
wall frames. A familiar pictorial idiom could be effectively transformed through the
ceremonial dressing-up of the images, through the enshrinement setting, or by the
signs of age that older images gradually acquired (darkening, style and iconography
from an earlier period). When images were activated on feast days and during
moments of civic crisis, their unveiling was orchestrated by the clergy and followed
set liturgical protocols. Here the extraordinary treatment accorded the images and
the respect shown by the assembled community bespoke of the tremendous prestige
and power of both the cult objects and the sacred beings represented.
This dialectic of accessibility and inaccessibility, of familiarity and radical
‘otherness’, of closeness and distance, that attended image veneration, shaped and
sustained belief in powerful, yet intimate sacred intercessors who operated in and
through their sanctuary images. This dialectical dynamic heightened the intensity of
veneration and votive supplication, generating charged emotions, vivid sensations,
and great personal expectations during times of dire need. ‘Blessed is the one who is
able to kiss it!’ ‘Blessed is the one who was able to touch it!’ exhorted a witness to the
procession of the miraculous crucifix from Santa Maria a Ripalta in Pistoia in 1399,
describing how people crowded round to embrace and kiss the sculpture as it was
carried through the streets of Tuscan towns and placed on display within churches
and piazze.84
Miraculous Images and Florentine Renaissance Visual Art
In conclusion, I’d like to return to the question of the broader impact of image
cults and the materiality of the miraculous image on the visual arts in Renaissance
Florence. Evidence suggests that Florentine practitioners were active participants
in the rich devotional culture associated with miraculous images. We see traces
© Association of Art Historians 2011 458
Miraculous Images in Renaissance Florence
of their veneration of miraculous images in the ex-votos left by Antonio Filarete
at the SS Annunziata and by Francesco da Sangallo at Santa Maria Primerana in
Fiesole.85
Visual artists contributed to the enshrinement of miraculous images
and to the decoration of the sanctuaries built to house them. The sculptors
Orcagna, Michelozzo, and Luca della Robbia produced the tabernacles for the
Madonna of Orsanmichele (plate 7), and the SS Annunziata and the Madonna of Impruneta (plate
8), respectively, while Francesco di Giorgio, Vittorio Ghiberti, and Giuliano and
Antonio da Sangallo all designed centralized churches in the all’antica architectural
style for Marian miraculous images in Florentine subject towns (Cortona, Prato,
Bibbona, and Montepulciano).86
Bernardo Daddi, in a very unusual commission,
was asked to make anew the Madonna of Orsanmichele in 1347. The iconography and the
visual effects of Florentine miraculous images also influenced the manner in which
painters and sculptors represented the Virgin, the Christ Child, and the crucified
Christ. The Annunciation at the SS Annunziata (plate 9) has evident echoes in Florentine
Annunciation imagery from the 1360s through the eighteenth century, while
Michelangelo, when designing the sculpture of the Virgin and Child for the New Sacristy
in San Lorenzo, derived the iconography and the dynamic position of the Christ Child
from an early fourteenth-century miracle-working image, later known as the Madonna
di San Zenobio, enshrined within a transept chapel in the church.87
One can go even further, however, in demonstrating the close interrelationship
between miraculous images and image cults, and Florentine artistic culture during
the Renaissance period. Image cults, as they proliferated throughout Florence
and Florentine territory and were bound up in an emergent Florentine identity,
engaged a form of imagistic veneration that was predicated upon the possibility
and the expectation of sacred immanence manifest in the immediate vicinity of the
images, through tangible, physical, material signs. This was a highly performative
and spectacular domain of devotional culture where Christ and the Virgin were
experienced as if present in the church or sanctuary environment. Healing miracles
took place before the images and the abundant ex-votos on display attested to the
potency of the miraculous images as conduits for sacred intercession. Intimate
visionary encounters with the sanctuary protagonists, like ‘La Nunziata of Florence’,
were vividly perceptible to the interior senses of supplicants in their prayers (plate 19).
On rare occasions, images miraculously transfigured before the eyes of witnesses
and this dynamic form of sacred embodiment, featured in countless foundation
legends and miracle stories, stimulated the mimetic
imagination of devotees and encouraged the conflation
of the miraculous image and the sacred being
represented. This modality of the sacred associated
with miraculous images – perceptible to the senses,
immanent in the immediate physical environment,
and dynamically interactive with the religious
supplicant – is of a similar order to that found in the
most progressive contemporary Florentine religious
art. There were also compelling convergences between
the discourse on ‘the miraculous’ in religious devotion
and the emergent discourse on the marvelous qualities
of the visual arts.88
Painters and sculptors, like Giotto,
Masaccio, Donatello, Leonardo, and Michelangelo,
staged vivid and immediate encounters between the
beholder and sacred subjects through the manipulation
19 ‘With his house in ruins
around him, Domenico Giusti
remains unharmed’, woodcut
illustration from Luca Ferrini,
Corona di sessanta tre miracoli
della Nunziata di Firenze,
Florence: Giorgio Marescotti,
1593. Photo: Biblioteca
Marucelliana, Florence.
© Association of Art Historians 2011 459
Megan Holmes
20 Masaccio, Trinity,
1426–27. Fresco, 667 × 317
cm. Florence: Santa Maria
Novella. Photo: Nicolò Orsi
Battaglini.
© Association of Art Historians 2011 460
Miraculous Images in Renaissance Florence
of perspective systems, the effects of naturalism, and narrative interaction and
settings. The visuality operative in Masaccio’s Trinity (plate 20) in the nave of Santa
Maria Novella, for example, is not so very different from that activated in devotion
before the unveiled Madonna of Orsanmichele, enshrined within Orcagna’s tabernacle
chapel (plate 7).89
In both cases, monumental sacred subjects, set within architectonic
spaces, would have been revealed to the Renaissance beholder. This imposing hieratic
staging is countered, however, by an intimacy that is forged through the visual
engagement between the beholder and the outward-looking sacred figures – the
Virgin in Daddi’s painting at Orsanmichele, and the Virgin and God in Masaccio’s
Trinity. The sense of the physicality and the presence of the sacred figures produced
through Masaccio’s extraordinary handling of perspectival pictorial space would
have been akin to the effect, at Orsanmichele, of the revelation of the customarily
veiled miraculous Madonna in the sanctuary space, with the very act of pulling back
the veil visualized just above the painting in the sculptural decoration of Orcagna’s
tabernacle chapel. For the beholder positioned in Orsanmichele before the enshrined
Madonna and in Santa Maria Novella before the Trinity, in the dynamic experience
of viewing, clear distinctions between fictive representation, the material world,
visionary apparition, and the transcendent spiritual realm would have broken down
and the sacred subjects would have appeared to be present in the physical space of the
beholder and responsive to direct address in a highly personalized relationship. It is
compelling to imagine that Masaccio was striving to visualize certain effects of the
sacred-made-manifest that had emerged during the Trecento in the context of image
cults like that associated with the Madonna of Orsanmichele. The recovery and integration
of miracle-working images and sanctuary culture within art-historical accounts of
the Florentine Renaissance should foster a more nuanced understanding of the nature
of the relationship and the reciprocal influence between this domain of religious
culture and wider practices in the visual arts.
Notes
This article is related to my forthcoming book The Miraculous
Image in Renaissance Florence. Versions were presented at
the Getty Research Institute, Johns Hopkins University,
Northwestern University, and Columbia University, and I
benefited from the lively discussions that ensued. I would like to
thank Aden Kumler and the anonymous readers for Art History
for their extremely insightful comments, which I hope I have
adequately addressed. Thanks are also due to Samuel Bibby, Paul
Davies, John Najemy, Patricia Simons, and Elizabeth Sears.
1 Paleotti lists eight different ways according to which an image can be
considered to be ‘sacred’. Gabriele Paleotti, Discorso intorno alle immagini
sacre e profane, Rome, 2002, 58–61; see also Michele Bacci, Il pennello
dell’Evangelista: Storia delle immagini sacre attribuite a san Luca, Pisa, 1998,
340–1.
2 The term ‘immagine miracolosa’ is found most frequently in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, particularly in sanctuary histories, such
as Francesco Bocchi’s Opera di M. Francesco Bocchi sopra l’immagine miracolosa
della SS. Nunziata di Firenze, Florence, 1592. Most earlier writers refer to
images by their titles (‘Nostra Donna di Santa Maria Impruneta’ or
‘La Nunziata di Firenze’) or with reference to miracles or a special
devotion (‘una figura di Nostra Donna … [che] aveva fatto miracoli’
(Lucca Landucci, Diario Fiorentino, Florence, 1883, 279). Paleotti’s
eschewal of the term ‘immagine miracolosa’ is very likely on account of
the Tridentine context in which his treatise was conceived. This kind
of image and related image cult had been criticized by Protestant
reformers and defended at the Council of Trent. On the nomenclature
found in the scholarly literature, see Michele Bacci, Il pennello
dell’Evangelista, 18–20; Michele Bacci,‘Pro remedio animae’: Immagini sacre e
pratiche devozionali in Italia centrale (secoli XIII e XIV), Pisa, 2000, 13–14.
3 ‘In secondo luogo un’immagine si dice sacra se è entrata in contatto
con il corpo, con il volto o con altre parti di nostro Signore o di
qualcuno dei suoi santi, in quanto, anche solo per quel contatto, in
essa si imprime la figura del corpo o della parte che è stata toccata,
come nel caso del volto santo di Cristo, lasciatoci da santa Veronica,
conservato a Roma; o come per il sacro sudario in cui fu avvolto il
beatissimo corpo del nostro Salvatore dopo la morte, che ancora oggi
conserva impressa l’immagine di Cristo, sudario che viene conservato
con grande venerazione dal sig. Duca di Savoia; oper qualsiasi altra
figura che si sappia essere dipinta o raffigurata nel modo suddetto.
‘In terzo luogo, si dirà santa un’immagine che sia stata composta
da una persona santa, come quelle fatte da S. Luca o altre ancora
dipinte da altri santi.
‘In quarto luogo, perchè essa è stata fatta in modo miracoloso,
come si dice a proposito dell’immagine del Salvatore a Roma, che
è stata per questo detta αχειροποιητος, cioè non fatta per mano
dell’uomo ma, come invisibilmente, per opera di Dio, o di altre
simili.
‘In quinto luogo si dirà santa un’immagine quando Dio abbia
operato manifestamente segni e miracoli in tale imagine, come
sappiamo ad esempio essere accaduto in quella della santa casa di
Loreto, trasportata da un così lontano paese, la quale ha operato così
numerosi miracoli, come ogni giorni se ne possono vedere. La stessa
cosa si dirà di altre immagini che si trovanoaltrove e che, per opera
divina, si erano vedute talora con il volto radioso, talora versare
© Association of Art Historians 2011 461
Megan Holmes
see Walter Angelelli, ‘La diffusione dell’immagine lateranense: le
repliche del Salvatore nel Lazio’, in Morello and Wolf, Il Volto di Cristo,
46–9.
11 On the substantial increase in the number of religious sanctuaries
and image cults in Tuscany and elsewhere in Europe at precisely
this time, see Anna Benvenuti and Isabella Gagliardi, ‘Santuari in
Toscana. Primo bilancio di una ricerca in corso’, in Giorgio Cracco,
ed., Per una storia dei santuari cristiani d’Italia: approcci regionali, Bologna, 2002,
265–310; William J. Connell in his review of Giorgio Cracco’s Per una
storia dei santuari cristiani d’Italia: approcci regionali, The Catholic Historical Review,
91: 2, 2005, 345; and Mary Lee Nolan, ‘Shrine locations: Ideals and
realities in Continental Europe’, in Sofia Boesch Gajano and Lucetta
Scaraffia, eds, Luoghi sacri e spazi della santità, Turin, 1990, 75–84. The
Piovano Stefano, in his prologue to the statutes of the Confraternity
of the Madonna of Impruneta, written around 1370, testifies to the
great number of image cults throughout Italy, noting: ‘Onde di non
più dire delle imagini di Nostro Signore e sua Madre nelle parti
d’Italia ci rendiamo scusati: imperò che tanti sono i luoghi, il dove la
divina misericordia, per antico e per moderno, ae operati et aopera
innumerabili et indicibili miracoli, che non ne bisogna prolissa
scrittura.’ Antonio Cecchi, ed., Capitoli della Compagnia della Madonna
dell’Impruneta, Florence, 1866, 10.
12 In my forthcoming book I address the relationship between
the expanding Florentine territorial state and image cults in the
Florentine contado and subject territories.
13 I address the significant changes that occur within Florentine image
cults over this extended period to a greater extent in my forthcoming
book.
14 William J. Connell and Giles Constable, Sacrilege and Redemption in
Renaissance Florence: The Case of Antonio Rinaldeschi, Toronto, 2005.
15 The exceptions in Florence are the Madonna della Neve at Le Murate (plate
13), which features a marble relief attributed to Donatello or Desiderio
da Settignano, venerated beginning in the second half of the sixteenth
century (Kate Lowe, Nuns’ Chronicles and Convent Culture in Renaissance and
Counter-Reformation Italy, Cambridge, 2003, 340–1), and the Madonna
of Orsanmichele (plate 7), which Bernardo Daddi was commissioned
to make as a replacement for an existing venerated image (Diane
Finello Zervas, Orsanmichele, Modena, 1996, vol. 1, 62–5). In Venice,
at San Rocco, an image of Christ on the Way to Calvary, that has
been attributed to Titian or Giorgione, was venerated by the midsixteenth
century (Peter Humfrey, Titian: The Complete Paintings, Ludion
and New York, 2007, 43 and Christopher Nygrem, forthcoming
PhD dissertation, ‘Titian’s artistic icons: Venetian religious painting
between theology and devotion’, Johns Hopkins University). In Rome,
veneration directed toward a sculpture of the Madonna and Child by
Jacopo Sansovino in Sant’Agostino began at some point in the early
modern period (Bruce Boucher, The Sculpture of Jacopo Sansovino, London
and New Haven, 1991, vol. 2, 320–1). Marco Ruffini and Francesco
Caglioti have recently convincingly identified a miracle-working
crucifix in the Servite church in Padua as a work of Donatello in their
articles in the 2008 volume of Prospettiva (130/131): ‘Un’attribuzione a
Donatello del “Crocifisso” ligneo dei Servi di Padua’ (22–49) and ‘Il
“Crocifisso” ligneo di Donatello per I Serviti di Padova’ (50–106). In
all of these cases, however, the identity of the artists does not appear
to have been a significant factor in the prestige of the image in cultic
devotion.
16 The Nikopeia Madonna in San Marco in Venice, for example, is considered
by art historians to be an eleventh-century Byzantine icon, which,
by the sixteenth century was said to have come from Constantinople
to Venice following the 1204 sack of the former city (Francesco
Sansovino, Venezia città nobilissima, Venice, 1581, 38; Belting Likeness and
Presence, 195–6 (and 195–205 on Byzantine icons in San Marco); Bacci,
Il pennello dell’Evangelista, 317–18). There was also a cult in parts of Italy,
including the Veneto, known as the ‘Madonna di Constantinopoli’,
that was linked with the Hodegetria icon in Constantinople (Michele
Bacci, ‘The legacy of the Hodegetria: Holy icons and legends between
East and West’, in Maria Vassilaki, ed., Images of the Mother of God.
Perceptions of the Theotokos in Byzantium, Aldershot, 2005, 79–90). There are
icons in Rome that may be as old as the sixth and seventh centuries:
the Lateran Christ, the icons of Peter and Paul in the Sancta Sanctorum,
the Madonna images of San Francesca Romana, Transtevere, Santa Maria
lacrime dagli occhi, o gocce di sangue, or fare qualche movimento
come se fossero vive, o anche perchè in esse si sarà riconosciuta la
bontà di Dio che, per mezzo loro, ha in un istante risanato i malati,
ridato la vista ai ciechi e liberato alcuni da pericoli vari.’ Paleotti,
Discorso intorno alle immagini sacre e profane, 58–61.
4 For an example of a connoisseurial approach, see the integration
of Florentine miracle-working images in Miklós Boskovits’s
continuation of Richard Offner’s A Critical and Historical Corpus of
Florentine Painting: The Origins of Florentine Paintings 1100–1270, Section I,
vol. 1, Florence, 1993, 198–204, 218–22, 282–5, 452, 510–23. For a
discussion of the critical fortunes of the miracle-working Annunciation
fresco at the SS Annunziata, see Megan Holmes, ‘The elusive origins
of the cult of the Annunziata in Florence’, in Erik Thunø and Gerhard
Wolf, eds, The Miraculous Image in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance, Rome,
2004, 97–122.
5 The fresco of the Madonna and Child, originally on the exterior of the
church, was venerated by the fourteenth century, with a foundation
legend that traced the origin of the cult to 1242. Tim McCall and Paul
Davies have forthcoming articles that link Bramante’s innovative
architecture with the miraculous image (McCall, ‘Architecture of the
miraculous in Milan: Bramante’s Coro Finto and the cult of the Madonna
of S. Maria presso S. Satiro’, forthcoming, Renaissance Quarterly; Davies,
‘Framing the miraculous: The use of perspective in Italian renaissance
tabernacle design’, forthcoming).
6 Richard Trexler, ‘Florentine religious experience: The sacred image’,
Studies in the Renaissance, 19, 1972, 7–41; Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence:
A History of the Image before the Era of Art, Chicago, IL, 1994; Michele
Bacci, Il pennello dell’Evangelista; Michele Bacci, ‘Pro remedio animae’; Paul
Davies, ‘Studies in the Quattrocento Centrally Planned Church’, PhD
dissertation, The Courtauld Institute of Art, London University, 1992;
Klaus Kruger, Das Bild als Schleier des Unsichtbaren: Ästhetische Illusion in der
Kunst der frühen Neuzeit in Italien, Munich, 2001; Robert Maniura, ‘The
icon is dead, long live the icon: The Holy Image in the renaissance’,
in Antony Eastmond and Liz James, eds, Icon and Word: The Power of Images
in Byzantium, Aldershot, 2003, 87–104; Robert Maniura, ‘The images
and miracles of Santa Maria delle Carceri’, in Thunø and Wolf, The
Miraculous Image in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance, 86–93; Gerhard Wolf,
Salus Populi Romani. Dei Geschichte römischer Kultbilder im Mittelalter, Weinheim,
1990; Gerhard Wolf, Schleier und Spiegel: Traditionen des Christusbildes und die
Bildkonzepte der Renaissance, Munich, 2002; Gerhard Wolf, ‘Le immagini
nel Quattrocento tra miracoli e magia. Per una “iconologia”
refondata’, in Thunø and Wolf, The Miraculous Image in the Late Middle Ages
and Renaissance, 305–20.
7 The Lateran Christ in the Sancta Sanctorum in the Lateran palace in
Rome, which probably dates from the seventh century, was most
recently restored in the 1990s, leaving little legible figuration on the
panel (Giovanni Morello and Gerhard Wolf, eds, Il Volto di Cristo, Milan,
2000, 36; Maria Andaloro, ‘L’acheropita in ombra del Laterano’, in
Morello and Wolf, Il Volto di Christo, 43–5).
8 A detached, ethnographic perspective on religious culture was
significantly influenced by Emile Durkheim’s Formes élémentaires de la
vie religieuse (1917). A recent assessment of this interpretive tradition
is found in Thomas Idinopulos and Brian Wilson, eds, Reappraising
Durkheim for the Study and Teaching of Religion Today, Leiden, 2002. An
interesting anthropological perspective on cultural attitudes
(ethnographic and contemporary) toward so-called ‘magical’ beliefs
and practices is provided by Michael Taussig in his article ‘Viscerality,
faith, and skepticism: Another theory of magic’, in Walter Benjamin’s
Grave, Chicago, IL, 2006, 121–55.
9 On image cults in Rome, see Belting, Likeness and Presence; Gerhard
Wolf, Salus Populi Romani; Shelly Zuraw, ‘The efficacious Madonna in
Quattrocento Rome: Spirituality in the service of papal power’, in
Andrew Ladis and Shelly Zuraw, eds, Visions of Holiness: Art and Devotion in
Renaissance Italy, Athens, 2001, 101–35.
10 On the cult of the Volto Santo of Lucca, featuring a wooden crucifix
dating to the twelfth or thirteen century, see Giuliano Agresti,
Italo Alighiero Chiusano, and Aurelio Amendola, Volto Santo, Lucca,
1989. On the Madonna icon in Spoleto in the papal territories, dated
to the twelfth century and active in cultic devotion in the early
thirteenth century, see Belting, Likeness and Presence, 241 and 323. On
the proliferation of venerated copies of the Lateran Christ in Lazio,
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Miraculous Images in Renaissance Florence
practices, see Jeffrey Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary: Art and
Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany, New York, 1998, 23–5; Alfred
Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory, Oxford, 1998, 96–154;
David Areford, ‘In the Viewer’s Hands: The Reception of the Printed
Image in Late Medieval Europe, c.1400–c. 1500’, PhD Dissertation,
Northwestern University, 2002, ch. 2; Diana Webb, Patrons and Defenders:
The Saints in the Italian City States, London and New York, 1996, 209;
Richard Trexler, ‘Being and non-being: Parameters of the miraculous
in the traditional religious image’, in Thunø and Wolf, The Miraculous
Image in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance, 22–3.
26 Cathleen Hoeniger, The Renovation of Paintings in Tuscany, 1250–1500,
Cambridge, 1995; Barry Flood, ‘Between cult and culture: Bamiyan,
Islamic iconoclasm, and the museum’, Art Bulletin, 84, 2002, 641–59.
27 The Annunciation in the SS Annunziata was venerated by the 1360s,
with the foundation legend first documented in 1456 (Holmes, ‘The
elusive origins of the cult of the Annunziata in Florence’, in Thunø
and Wolf, The Miraculous Image in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance, 97–122).
The Madonna of Impruneta was venerated by 1330, acquiring the legend
of Lucan authorship by 1385 (Giovanni Battista Casotti, Memorie istoriche
della miracolosa immagine di Marie Vergine dell’Impruneta, Florence, 1714, vol.
1, 93 and 155; Franco del Grosso, ‘Origine del culto alla Madonna
d’Impruneta e suoi rapporti con la città di Firenze’, in Impruneta. Una
pieve, un paese. Cultura parrocchia e società nelle campagna Toscana, Florence,
1983, 33–77; Carlo Nardi, ‘La “Leggenda riccardiana” di Santa Maria
all’Impruneta: Un anonimo oppositore del pievano Stefano alla fine
del Trecento?’, Archivio storico italiano, 149, 1991, 503–51). The reference
to St Luke in the preface to the capitoli of the confraternity of the
Madonna of Impruneta, composed by Piovano Stefano circa 1375
and published by the Accademia della Crusca (Cecchi, Capitoli della
Compagnia della Madonna dell’Impruneta, 13) and discussed by Nardi, is a
later insertion in the manuscript (Florence, Archivio di Stato, Capitoli
delle compagnie religiose soppresse 78, 13). On venerated images
associated with St Luke, see Michele Bacci, Il penello dell’Evangelista.
28 The most prestigious Roman miracle-working images during the
renaissance were the Veronica, the Lateran Christ, the Madonnas of Santa
Maria Maggiore, San Sisto, Santa Maria in Trastevere, the Aracoeli,
Santa Maria del Popolo, and the Pantheon. See Belting, Likeness and
Presence, 311–29, and Wolf, Salus Populi Romani.
29 See for example, Antonio degli Agli, De rationibus fidei (Biblioteca
Nazionale, Florence, Conventi Soppressi, B.9.1268, 50r). On idolatry,
see Jean-Claude Schmitt, ed., L’idolatrie, Paris, 1990; Thomas Lentes,
‘Idolatrie im mittelalter. Aspekte des traktates “de idolatria” zwischen
dem 12. und 15. Jahrhundert’, in Gudrun Litz, Heidrun Munzert and
Roland Liebenberg, eds, Frömmigkeit — Theologie — Frömmigkeitstheologie.
Contributions to European Church History, Boston, MA and Leiden, 2005,
31–45; Journal of the History of Ideas, 67: 4, 2006, edited by Jonathan
Sheehan, dedicated to ‘Idolatry’; Michael Cole and Rebecca Zorrach,
eds, The Idol in the Age of Art, Aldershot, 2009.
30 ‘La maniera della gola e del volto non è simile a maniera del
Buonarroto nè di Andrea del Sarto, ma dolcemente piena di mirabil
vigore;…’ Francesco Bocchi, Della imagine miracolosa della SS.Nunziata di
Firenze, Florence, 1852, 71.
31 On archaism and the alterity of miraculous images, see Bacci, Il
penello dell’Evangelista, 13–32 and 257; Michele Bacci, ‘Pro Remedio Animae’,
19ff. On the Volto Santo of Lucca, see Giuliano Agresti, Italo Alighiero
Chiusano and Aurelio Amendola, Volto Santo, Lucca, 1989; Herbert
Kurz, Der Volto Santo von Lucca: Ikonographie und Funktion des Kruzifixus in der
gegürteten Tunika im 11. Jahrhundert, Regensburg, 1997; Bacci, ‘Pro Remedio
Animae’, 25–9.
32 ‘… lungo tempo sia stato il Volto Santo nella città si Lucca: fu mai
alcuno, che dichiarasse che cosa fosse, se non per credenza? Chi vuol
dire, che sia la immagine del nostro Signore? (salvo la reverenza di chi
il dice) che Cristo fu il puì bello e ‘l meglio proporzionato corpo che
mai fosse, e non ebbe gli occhi travolti né spaventati.’ Quoted in Bacci,
‘Pro Remedio Animae’, 25, from Franco Sacchetti, I sermoni evangelici, le lettere
ed altri scritti inediti o rari, Florence, 1857, 217. Sacchetti writes in a similar
manner about the Volto Santo in one of his novelle (Franco Sacchetti, Il
Trecentonovelle, Rome, 1996, LXXIII, 215).
33 ‘niuna altra cosa aveva dato tanta riputazione a quella de’ Servie ...,
se non il mostrarla così per l’imbicco e con tanta sicumera.’ Agnolo
Firenzuolo, Opere, Florence, 1958, 607.
Maggiore, the Pantheon, and the Madonna of San Sisto (see Belting,
Likeness and Presence; Wolf, Salus Populi Romani; Bacci, Il pennello dell’Evangelista,
235–80).
17 The Madonna del Morbo in Poppi was venerated by at least 1530 ( I mille
santuari mariani d’Italia illustrati, Rome, 1960, 339; Patrizia Freschi, ‘“Sub
tutela Matris”: L’Oratorio della Madonna del Morbo di Poppi’, in
Liletta Fornasari, ed., Il Seicento in Casentino: dalla controriforma al tardo barocco,
Florence, 2001, 169–73.) On the serial production of this painting
and others from the same Florentine workshop, see Megan Holmes,
‘Copying practices and marketing strategies in a fifteenth-century
Florentine workshop’, in Stephen Campbell and Stephen Milner,
eds, Artistic Exchange and Cultural Translation in the Italian Renaissance City,
Cambridge, 2004, 38–74.
18 On the rise of the vernacular in religious culture in the fourteenth
century, see Lina Bolzoni, La stanza della memoria. Modelli letterari e iconografici
nell’eta della stampa, Turin, 1995; Cesare Segre, ed., Volgarizzamenti del due e
trecento, Turin, 1953; Giuseppe De Luca, ed., Prosatori minore del Trecento.
Scrittori di religione, Milan, 1954; Carlo Delcorno, ‘La predicazione
volgare in Italia (sec. XIII–XIV): Teoria, produzione, ricezione’, in
Revue Mabillon, 4, 1993, 83–107.
19 Vernacular versions of the lives of saints Francis of Assisi and
Giovanni Gualberto, for example, contain crucifix miracles and
the miracula and histories the Madonna delle Carceri in Prato and the SS
Annunziata in Florence recount numerous miracles of transfiguration
and prayers addressed to the Virgin (Anna Benvenuti, Santa Maria
delle Carceri a Prato: Miracoli e devozione in un santuario toscano, Florence,
2005, 104–53; Luca Ferrini, Corona di Sessanta Tre Miracoli della Nunziata di
Firenze, Florence, 1593). Poems about the Madonna of Orsanmichele by the
fourteenth-century writers Giovanni Cavalcanti and Franco Sacchetti
are quoted in Zervas, Orsanmichele, text volume, 39–40 and 99.
20 I am following Michele Bacci here in his discussion of ‘hierophany’
in relation to early Tuscan miraculous images: ‘Pro remedio animae’, 19.
On hierophany in Eliade, see Patterns in Comparative Religion, New York,
1958; The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, London and New York,
1959, 11–13; entry on ‘hierophany’ by Eliade and Lawrence E. Sullivan
in Mircea Eliade, ed., The Encyclopedia of Religion, New York, 1989, vol. 6,
313–18.
21 The Madonna dei Chierici is now in a chapel in the tribuna of the
Cathedral. Giuseppe Poggi, Il Duomo di Firenze, Florence, 1988, vol. I,
CVII. Timothy Verdon, ‘The Intercession of Christ and the Virgin
from the Florentine Cathedral: Iconographic and ecclesiological
signficance’, in Annalisa Innocenti and Timothy Verdon, eds, La
cattedrale e la città: Saggi sul Duomo di Firenze, Florence, 2001, vol. II, 131–49.
22 I address the enshrinement and veiling of Florentine miracle-working
images in my forthcoming book. For discussions of veils and veiling,
see Mary Pardo, ‘The subject of Savoldo’s Magdalen’, Art Bulletin, 71,
1989, 67–91; Herbert Kessler, Spiritual Seeing. Picturing God’s Invisibility in
Medieval Art, Philadelphia, PA, 2000; Klaus Krüger, Bild als Schleier des
Unsichtbaren; Gerhard Wolf, Schleier und Spiegel; Suzanne Conklin Akbari,
Seeing Through the Veil: Optical Theory and Medieval Allegory, Toronto, 2004;
Paul Hills, ‘Titian’s veils’, Art History, 29, 2006, 771–95; Daniel M.
Gurtner, The Torn Veil: Matthew’s Exposition of the Death of Jesus, Cambridge,
2007.
23 In my forthcoming book I argue that the veiling of miraculous images
differed from the conventional practice of veiling altarpieces in the
greater amount of time that miraculous images spent under veils
and in the significance of the act of unveiling as a form of divine
revelation.
24 On the unveiling of the Madonna of Orsanmichele in the 1333 statues of
the Compagnia di Orsanmichele, see Arnaldo Cocchi, Notizie storiche
intorno antiche imagini di Nostra Donna che hanno culto in Firenze, Florence, 1894,
32–3. In his poem the Theotocon, written c. 1469, Domenico da Corella
claimed the Madonna of Orsanmichele was rarely uncovered (‘Semper
operta manens pretiosi tegmine veli, Monstratur rara’) (Giovanni
Lami, Deliciae Eruditorum, Florence, 1742, vol. 13, 84). On the unveiling
of the Madonna of Impruneta, see the statutes of the Compagnia della
Madonna, in a redaction dating to c. 1375: Cecchi, Capitoli della Compagnia
della Madonna dell’Impruneta, 16 and 25. On the veiling of the SS Annunziata,
see Ottavio Andreucci, Il Fiorentino istruito nella chiesa della Nunziata,
Florence, 1858, 94–5.
25 On the transformation and the dressing-up of images in devotional
© Association of Art Historians 2011 463
Megan Holmes
34 ‘Ditemi un poco, che vi pare di questa Imagine? In questo, o fosse
lo stupore che nella vista del divin volto gli avea i sensi occupati, o
soprapreso l’animo da timore di divina bellezza, altrimenti non fece
motto il Buonarroto.’ Bocchi, Della imagine miracolosa, 82.
35 ‘Se alcun mi dicesse (perocchè questa è arte mia) che questa
Imagine da senno umano fosse stata dipinta, io direi che e’dicesse
bugia: perchè di vero l’artifizio dell’uomo, e il suo ingegno non
puote, come è questo valore, tanto alto arrivare: onde io avviso, che
miracolosamente sia stato fatto questo divin sembiante da Dio e dagli
Angeli senza più.’ Bocchi, Della imagine miracolosa, 82–3.
36 ‘dopo che e’ mi fu conceduto in compagnia di que’Signori,... di vedere
il sembiante da presso della santissima Nunziata, la quale prima
veduta non avea, dico ora il medesimo che dissi allora, come quivi
non è arte di pennelli, onde stato sia fatto quel volto della Vergine, ma
cosa divina veramente: la quale, come conviene umilmente ammiro e
adoro, ....’ Bocchi, Della imagine miracolosa, 83.
37 The theological underpinning of the miraculous transfiguration of
images was the traditional definition of a miracle as an act of God that
transpired contrary to natural occurrences. Benedicta Ward, Miracles
and the Medieval Mind, Philadelphia, PA, 1987, 3–19; Michael Goodich,
Miracles and Wonders: The Development of the Concept of Miracle, 1150–1350,
Burlington, VT, 2007. Image transfiguration was analogous to the
Transfiguration of Christ (Matthew 17:2). This kind of image miracle
became commonplace in the fourteenth century in Italy, undoubtedly
influenced by the encounter of St Francis of Assisi with the speaking
Crucifix of San Damiano. Within middle Byzantine religious culture,
images that underwent this kind of material transformation were
understood as ‘inspirted’ (empsychos graphe) and included an icon of
Christ known as ‘Antiphonites’ (‘he who responds’). Belting, Likeness
and Presence, 185 and 512; Bissera Pentcheva, Icons and Power: The Mother of
God in Byzantium, University Park, PA, 2006, 149–52.
38 ‘si trasfigurava, cioè diventava d’azurra rossa, e di rossa poi nera e di
diversi colori.’ Luca Landucci, Diario Fiorentino, Florence, 1883, 41–2. On
the cult of the Pietà of Bibbona, see Gemma Landolfi and Maddalena Paola
Winspeare, Bibbona. Guida ai beni storici e artistici, Livorno, 1994, 85–107.
39 This miracle is described in the 1596 chronicle of the nun of Le
Murate, Giustina Niccolini. See Lowe, Nuns’ Chronicles and Convent,
340–2; Giuseppe Richa, Notizie istoriche delle chiese fiorentine, Florence,
1754–62 (reprint: Rome, 1989) vol. I, 100.
40 ‘quando Santo Sprito abbruciò si vidde visibilmente cavarsi il fuoco
intorno.’ Luca Dominici, Cronache, Pistoia, 1933, vol. I, 98. This
comment was added after 1600 by the copiest of Luca Dominici’s
Cronache, which was composed in the early fifteenth century. This
fourteenth-century crucifix is currently enshrined above an altar in
the right transept of Santo Spirito.
41 This image is illustrated by Lisa Pon in ‘Place, print and miracle:
Forli’s “Madonna of the Fire” as functional site’, Art History, 31: 3,
2008: 303–21 (fig. 1). See also Bartolomeo Ricceputi, Istoria dell’immagine
miracolosa di Maria Vergine detta la Madonna del Fuoco della città di Forlì, Forlì,
1686; Adamo Pasini, Storia della Madonna del Fuoco di Forlì, second edn,
Forlì, 1982; Areford, ‘In the Viewer’s Hands’, 1ff.
42 Veneration to the Chiarito Crucifix (now in the nunnery of San
Domenico in Querceto, Sesto Fiorentino) is first documented in 1460,
with the cult becoming one of the most prominent in Florence in the
early sixteenth century (Richa, Notizie istoriche delle chiese Fiorentine, vol.
5, 199–207; Acta Sanctorum, Paris, 1863, May, vol. VI, 164–5). Many
Florentine miraculous crucifixes were retrospectively associated with
the 1399 Bianchi penitential movement. This retrospective legend
of the Chiarito Crucifix is recounted in Richa, Notizie istoriche delle chiese
fiorentine, vol. 5, 207.
43 Lowe, Nuns’ Chronicles, 340–1.
44 The conjunction ‘as if’ (come) was frequently deployed in miracle
stories and accounts of the miraculous transfiguration of sacred
images, thereby presenting the actions of the transfiguring image as
analogous to human corporeal behaviour. See, for example, Paleotti’s
use of ‘come se fossero vive’ in discussing images that weep, bleed,
and move, at the end of the long quotation in note 3 above.
45 ‘... essendo per cantarsi la messa a S. Giovanni fuor Civita, venne
la novella che nella tavola di nostra Donna, che era nella camera
di Bartolommeo di Battifolle Panciatichi, era dipinto S. Giovanni
Evangelista a llato al Crocifisso, come è usanza, e era una tavola
antica, e che S. Giovanni piangea. Subito il Vescovo e li Ufiziali e ogni
persona mandornola a processione, e m. lo Vescovo e gli Ufiziali
andorno su pezza e trovorno che S. Giovanni aveva una lagrima
grossa bellissima all’occhio destro; allora m. lo Vescovo l’arregò con
le sue mani su l’altare fatto a S. Giovanni Fuorcivita. Ivi ciascuno la
vidde e io similmente e toccai S. Giovanni: tuttavolta la lagrima stette
ferma. E quivi si cantò la messa e m. lo Vescovo predicò e fu tenuto
un grandissimo miracolo e bello. Disse m. lo Vescovo pensava che
questo miracolo fusse per mostrare che Cristo aveva grata la pace
che Bartolommeo fece spontaneamente co’ Lazzari.’ Luca Dominici,
Chronache, vol. I, 89. On the Bianchi image miracles, see Daniel
Bornstein, The Bianchi of 1399: Popular Devotion in Late Medieval Italy, Ithaca,
NY and London, 1993, 145–61.
46 ‘il Crocifisso che portarono i Fiorentini fu quello di S. Croce,
avendolo ellino posato in sull’altare della Chiesa di Passignano, gittò
sangue vivo in gran quantità per molte parti del corpo e per il capo e
per le reni e per le braccia e per altri luoghi miracolosamente.’ Luca
Dominici, Chronache, vol. I, 113. This miracle is said to have occurred
on an unspecified day in September 1399.
47 Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles, Book III, question 101 (Opera
Omnia, ed. Roberto Busa, Stuttgart, 1980, vol. 2, 94; English from
edition: London, 1905). Aquinas gives as an example of this first
rank of miracles the sun reversing its course. Within this rank, he
distinguishes different gradations, based upon how far removed
from nature the event is, with the reversal of the sun being of a higher
order than the parting of the sea. The transfiguration of images would
assumedly have been a lesser degree of miracle within this top rank.
The second rank of miracles consisted of occurrences that were also
found in nature, but not in the particular order, with the example of
a blind person recovering sight and a dead person living again. The
third and bottom rank of miracle involved occurrences that were
also found in nature, but not according to the same principles, like a
person cured of a fever by divine means. See also Goodich, Miracles and
Wonders, 19–21.
48 Summa Theologica, Part III, Question 76, article 8. On the interpretation
of Eucharistic miracles in the medieval period, see Peter Browe, Die
eucharistischen Wunder des Mittelalters, Breslauer Studien zur historischen Theologie,
Breslau, 1938 and Die Eucharistie im Mittelalter: Liturgiehistorische Forschungen
in kulturwissenschaftlicher Absicht, Münster, 2003, 251–63 and 265–89;
Caroline Walker Bynum, Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late
Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond, Philadelphia, PA, 2007, 85–111. I
thank Aden Kumler for these references.
49 James A. Weisheipl, ‘The concept of matter in fourteenth century
science’, in Ernan McMullin, ed., The Concept of Matter, Notre Dame,
IN, 1963, 147–69; David Burr, Eucharistic Presence and Conversion in Late
Thirteenth-Century Franciscan Thought, Transactions of the American Philosophical
Society, Philadelphia, PA, 1984; John Wippel, ‘Thomas Aquinas’s
Derivation of the Aristotelian Categories (Predicaments)’, Journal of the
History of Philosophy, 25: 1, 1987: 13–34; Joseph Bobik, Aquinas on Matter and
Form and the Elements: A Translation and Interpretation of the ‘De principiis naturae’
and the ‘De mixtione elementorum’ of St Thomas Aquinas, Notre Dame, IN, 1998.
50 This polychrome wooden crucifix with moveable arms, once in
the Baptistery and now in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, was
venerated by 1333 (Louisa Becherucci and Giulia Brunetti, Il Museo
dell’Opera del Duomo a Firenze, Milan, 1970, vol. I, 231–2). Luca Dominici
recorded in his chronicle under the date 27 September 1399: ‘Item un
Crocifisso, chè in S. Giovanni Ritondo, si disse gittava sangue; perchè
Fiorentini ebbono gran paura.’ Luca Dominici, Cronache, vol. I, 113.
On the veneration of this image in the sixteenth century, see note 78
below.
51 The tears of the Madonna delle Carceri, for example, were wiped with
a silk tassel that was venerated as a relic (Benvenuti, Santa Maria
delle Carceri, 52). On relics of the blood from the miraculous Beirut
Crucifix, see Michele Bacci, ‘The Berardenga Antependium and the
Passio Ymaginis Office’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 61,
1998, 8. Aquinas approved of blood relics derived from images, but
not of blood relics said to come from the body of Christ, with the
understanding that blood relics derived from images did not contain
Christ’s actual blood (Summa Theologica, Part III, Question 54, article 3).
See also Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 96–111.
52 On Thomas Aquinas’ formulation of the ‘image as sign’ see Jean
© Association of Art Historians 2011 464
Miraculous Images in Renaissance Florence
Wirth, ‘Structure et fonctions de l’image chez Saint Thomas d’Aquin’,
in Jérôme Baschet and Jean-Claude Schmitt, eds, L’image: Fonctions
et usages des images dans l’Occident médiéval, issue of Cahiers du Léopard d’Or,
5, 1996, 39–42. For the Florentine context, see Richard Trexler,
‘Florentine religious experience: The sacred image’, 18–23. The
connection between idolatry and superstition is raised by the
Florentine Antonio degli Agli in his De rationibus fidei (1460s), Florence,
Biblioteca Nazionale, Conventi Soppressi, B.9.1268, 50r–52r.
53 Gaetano Beani, S. Maria dell’Umiltà: Notizie storiche della sua imagine e del suo
tempio in Pistoia, Pistoia, 1885.
54 ‘A tutti parea che fussi vero sangue, e pure, come Dio volse, uno di
loro cominciò con una punta di coltellino a rastiare e subito li parve
non fusse vero sangue. Rastiando così sentì che questo crocifisso
ere vuoto dentro. Subito il Senatore disse: “Fa’ arditamente”. E elli
fesse il costato del Crocifisso e trovollo che era voto dentro e eravi
un bocciolo di cuoio cotto e entrovi sangue e acqua, perchè non si
rappigliasse, e meglio corresse e paresse piú vera cosa: avealo così
ordinato che a certo punto e con citato modo quando voleva ne
gittava 3, o 4 gocciole per lo costato, e pare vero sangue e pareva gran
miracolo e sì non se ne potea avvedere persona, sì l’avea acconcio
mirabilmente e sottilmente.’ This event took place in late October,
and is described in the chronicle of Luca Dominici (Dominici,
Chronache, vol. I, 205; Bornstein, The Bianchi of 1399, 158–9).
55 Vincenzo Federici, ‘Il miracolo del crocifisso della compagnia
dei Bianchi a Sutri’, Scritti di storia, filologia, e d’arte per le nozze Fedale-De
Fabritiis, Naples, 1908, 107–18 (on an episcopal inquest involving a
transfiguring image). On other challenges to the miracles reported
during the Bianchi movement, see Bornstein, The Bianchi of 1399, 166–7.
See also Paleotti, Discorso intorno alle immagini sacre e profane, 60. Stuart Clark
discusses a notorious case of fraudulent miracles of transfiguration
that took place in Berne in 1509 when four Dominicans were
executed for simulating a bleeding host and an animated statue of the
Virgin. The incident was seized upon by Protestant reformers and
circulated throughout Europe in Latin and vernacular texts on the
excesses and abuses of Catholic imagistic devotion. Vanities of the Eye:
Vision in Early Modern European Culture, Oxford, 2007, 174–5.
56 Gell, Art and Agency, 12–27.
57 Francesco Niccolai, Mugello e Val di Sieve, Rome, 1974. Lia Brunori Cianti,
‘Il patrimonio artistico’, in Scarperia. Storia arte artigianato, Florence, 1990,
39–40. The cult image has been associated with a document of 1448
and related in style to the work of Francesco d’Antonio. This dating
and authorship, however, seems too early to me.
58 Gell, Art and Agency, 133.
59 Gell, Art and Agency, 134–5.
60 For a general account of the physiology of bodily ‘spirits’ and fluids,
see Nancy G. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Modern Medicine: An Introduction to
Knowledge and Practice, Chicago, IL, 1990, 97–113. Art historians have
investigated how conceptions about emissive vision influenced
portraiture and the representation of beautiful female subjects in
the renaissance (see, for example, Regina Stefaniak, ‘Correggio’s
Camera di San Paolo: An archaeology of the gaze’, Art History, 16, 1993,
203–38).
61 Caroline Walker Bynum, ‘Why all this fuss about the body? A
medievalist perspective’, Critical Inquiry, 22, 1995, 1–33. I thank Pat
Simons for calling my attention to this counter-position to Gell.
62 The Madonna delle Carceri in Prato was observed sweating blood in 1484
(Lorenzo di Jacopo degli Obbizi, Miracoli della Vergine Maria delle Carceri,
Florence, c.1485, 5v). The sweat issuing from the Madonna dell’Umiltà in
Pistoia in 1490 was considered to be a form of lament by the Virgin
for the factional strife in the city (Gaetano Beani, S. Maria dell’Umiltà:
Notizie storiche della sua imagine e del suo tempio in Pistoia, Pistoia, 1885), while
the tear seen hanging from the eye of the painted figure of St John the
Evangelist in a painted Crucifixion in Prato in 1399 (described in the
text above) was interpreted as a sign of approval of the reconciliation
that had taken place between two families that same day (Dominici,
Cronache, vol. I, 89). On the Veronica, Debra Birch, writes ‘Gervase of
Tilbury noted that because of its fearsome effect upon the viewer
it had to be kept covered, while Gerald of Wales had heard how a
pope, who had presumed to peer too closely at it, had been struck
blind’ (Birch, Pilgrimage to Rome in the Middle Ages, New York, 1998, 85).
She cites Gervase of Tilbury, Oita Imperialia, ed. G. G. Leibnitz, Scriptores
Rerum Brunsuicensium, Hanover, 1707, 967 and Gerald of Wales, Speculum
Ecclesiae, 278.
63 I would like to thank Amy Powell for this observation. According to
Francesco Bocchi, some claimed that the figure of Gabriel, too, was
painted by an angel (Della imagine miracolosa della SS. Nunziata di Firenze, 25).
In his Ricordi, Alessandro Allori records numerous commissions for
the heads of both the Virgin and Gabriel in isolation, between 1579
and 1583 (Alessandro Allori, I ricordi, ed. I. B. Supino, Florence, 1908,
17–23).
64 Lorenzo di Jacopo Obbizi, Miracoli della Vergina Maria delle Carceri, Florence,
c. 1485. I consulted the copy of Obbizi’s rare incunabulum in the
Huntington Library in San Marino, California (Rare Books, 101498).
The poem, printed on twenty-two quarto-size leaves, presents the
foundation of the cult, early miracles, and a lauda to the Madonna
delle Carceri. See Marco Villoresi, ‘Un poemetto e una lauda sulla
Madonna delle Carceri di Prato di Lorenzo di Jacopo degli Obizzi’,
Rivista di Storia e Letteratura Religiosa, 36, 2000, 238–70. Here is the relevant
section of Obizzi’s poem discussed in this section of my article: ‘[2r]
Onde la madre di noi peccatori / piu non potendo avanti agliocchi
sancti / vedersi far si facti disonori. // Diciel discesa cosuo sancti
amanti / a sei diluglio et mille quattrocento / octanta quattro anona
senza chanti [this last stanza is underlined by a reader in iron gall
ink]. // [2v] Operar volle a nostro salvamento / che in quel luogho
tanto dissoluto ove ogni di si facea mancamento / ... un fanciullecto
tenerello allora. // Deta docto anni/et con lasua manina / un certo
grillo volendo pigliare / quel seguito con ogni sua doctrina. // Di
passo in passo si lo fe volare / inquel tal luogho ove egli aldirimpecto
/ di nostra donna usando procurare. // Visibilmente senzalchul
difecto / chostui che Iacopino e nominato / Iavidde dispicchar dal
muro decto. // Et inquel luogho vile et violato / posarsi in terra dove
ginocchioni / el suo sancto figliuolo hebbi adorato // Et che orandol
con sancte orationi / con lasua mano il pecto si battea / standogli
appresso con gran divotioni. // [3r] Dipoi ponendo mente lavedeva /
levarsi quindi et lasciare el figliolo / che lesue braccia tenere moveva.
// Et vidde il rondinin che quasi avolo / vivo parendo si voleva levare
/ siche questo fanciullo essendo solo. // Vidde lavergin po in basso
andare / in quella schura charcere disotto / et con laman tre volte
ivi nectare. // Et che cio facto su torno dibotto / et ilfigliuolo in
braccio si ripresi / ghardando Iacopin sanza far motto. // Dipoi di
facto in alto sidistese / et su nel muro si fu ritornata / che tutto vidde
tal fanciul palese. // O madre di Iesu glorificata / la quale orando il
pecto tibattevi / dinanzi altuo figliulo inginochiata... // [3v] Tu dogni
peccator ben se colonna / et sempremai per lor gratia intercedi /
ritraendogli alciel sotto tua gonna. // Ma ritornata cosuoi sancti piedi
/ la reina del cielo inquel tal muro / over gran miracholi far sevedi.’
65 On the facezia as a literary form, see Giovanni Fabris, ‘Per la storia della
facezia’, in Raccolta di studi di storia e critica letteraria dedicata a Francesco Flamini
dai suoi discepoli, Pisa, 1918, 93–138; Barbara Bowen, ‘Renaissance
collections of faceziae, 1344–1490, a new listing’, Renaissance Quarterly,
39, 1986, 1–15 and ‘Renaissance collections of faceziae, 1490–1528’,
Renaissance Quarterly, 39, 1986, 263–75. See also the essays in Gabriella
Albanese, Lucia Battaglia Ricci and Rossella Bessi, eds, Favole parabole
istorie, Rome, 2000.
66 Examples of this kind of story are found in Poggio Bracciolini’s facezie
and in the tales told about the Piovano Arlotto (Poggio Bracciolini,
Facezie, ed. and trans. Marcello Ciccuto, Milan, 1983, 129–31; Facezie,
motti e burle del Piovano Arlotto, Florence, 1982, 64–7).
67 For a comprehensive historical treatment of discernment in vision
during this period, see Clark, Vanities of the Eye.
68 Facezie, motti e burle del Piovano Arlotto, 64–7.
69 This particular novella is very close to the French fabliaux entitled ‘Le
prestre crucifié’, recounted by Michael Camille in The Gothic Idol: Ideology
and Image-making in Medieval Art, Cambridge and New York, 1989, 213 (I
thank the anonymous reader for Art History for this information).
70 ‘Era questo Mino dipintore di crocifissi più che d’altro, e spezialmente
di quelli che erano intagliati con rilevamento; e aveane sempre in
casa, tra compiuti e tra mani, quando quattro e quando sei; e teneagli,
come’è d’usanza de’ dipintori, in su una tavola, o desco lunghissimo,
in una sua bottega appoggiati al muro l’uno allato all’altro, coperti
ciascuno con uno sciugatoio grande; e al presente n’avea sei; li
quattro intagliati e scolpiti, e li due erano piani dipinti ....’ Sacchetti, Il
Trecentonovelle, LXXXIV, 250.
71 ‘Disse la donna: – Vuo’ tu far bene? Sali su questo desco e pònti su uno
di quelli crocifissi piani con le b[r]accia in croce, come stanno gli altri,
e io ti coprirò con quel panno lino medesimo ...; poi qualche santo ci
aiuterà.’ Sacchetti, Il Trecentonovelle, LXXXIV, 250–1.
72 ‘Quando il croifisso incarnato lo sente ivi, pensi ciascuno come gli
parea stare; e gli convenía stare come gli altri che erano di legno.’
Sacchetti, Il Trecentonovelle, LXXXIV, 252.
73 ‘guardando Mino questi suoi crocifissi, ebbe veduto due dita d’uno
piede di colui che coperto stava. Dice, Mino fra se stesso: – Per certo
che quest’è l’amico –. E guardando fra certi ferramenti, con che
digrossava e intagliava quelli crocifissi, non vidde ferro esser a lui più
adatto che un’ascia che era tra essi. Presa quest’ascia, e accostatosi per
salire verso il crocifisso vivo, per tagliargli la principal cosa che quivi
l’avea condotto ....’ Sacchetti, Il Trecentonovelle, LXXXIV, 253.
74 ‘E levala fuori dell’aperta porta; Mino drietoli parecchi passi ....’
Sacchetti, Il Trecentonovelle, LXXXIV, 253. Sacchetti plays on the word
‘levala’ which can mean both ‘he gets up from there’ (i.e. the lover
raises himself from the painted crucifix) and ‘he removes it’ (i.e. the
painter cuts off ‘la principal cosa’, the lover’s penis). The sentence
really only makes sense when read as the lover getting up and out of
the door, but Sacchetti, with his love of language, carefully chooses a
word that brings to mind the more dire scenario. In the earlier French
version of this story, there is no ambiguity, as the sculptor, before
realizing how he had been tricked, pauses to trim away a little ‘excess
material’ that he observes on the crucifix (Camille, The Gothic Idol, 213;
again, I thank the anonymous Art History reader for calling this to my
attention).
75 On Sacchetti’s involvement with the cult of the Madonna of Orsanmichele,
see Zervas, Orsanmichele a Firenze, text volume, 165–70; for his
involvement with the cult of the Madonna dei Chierici, see Poggi, Il Duomo
di Firenze, vol. I, 202.
76 Robert Maniura describes this process in ‘The images and miracles of
Santa Maria delle Carceri’, in Thunø and Wolf, The Miraculous Image in the
Late Middle Ages and Renaissance, 86–93.
77 Evidence for the veneration of the San Marco Annunciation, in addition
to Firenzuola’s story about one man’s special regard for the image,
comes from Vasari and Richa. In the expanded 1568 edition entry
on Pietro Cavallini, Vasari describes the image as covered up (‘sta
coperta’; Le vite de’ piu eccellenti pittori scultori e architettori nelle redazioni del 1550
e 1568, eds Paola Barocchi and Rosanna Bettarini, Florence, 1966–87,
Text vol. II, 187), while Richa notes the votive offerings and continued
veneration in his day (Notizie istoriche delle chiese fiorentine, vol. VII, 157).
78 We get a sense of this dynamic participation in multiple image cults in
Florence from a humorous novella written by Agnolo Firenzuola in the
1530s, where he parodies a man who pays his devotion to miraculous
crucifixes in the Chiarito, the Baptistery, and San Pier del Murrone,
and prefers the San Marco Annunciation to the more celebrated image in
the SS Annunziata (Firenzuola, Opere, 607).
79 I am using the term ‘alterity’ in a manner similar to that found in
discussions of venerated images (see note 81 below), and distinct
from the usages within philosophy, anthropology, gender studies,
and post-colonial theory.
80 Walter Benjamin considers the ‘aura’, ‘cult value’, and the ritual
function of the sacred image in his essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age
of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936), published in translation in
Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, London, 1973, 217–52.
81 This visible difference is held to have marked these objects as closer
in their essence to the modality of the supernatural than to that of
the mundane and the familiar, communicating aura and sacred
immanence. This quality of ‘alterity’, it has been argued, was
produced through the elaborate framing structures that encased
miraculous images and by means of veiling, votive display, and
ritual observances. The images themselves are often considered to
be Byzantine in origin or style, and archaizing in appearance, and
to reproduce typologies associated with highly venerated icons in
Byzantium and Rome. This characterization is diffused through the
art-historical literature on late medieval and early modern image
cults. A more nuanced position is found in Belting, Likeness and Presence,
484–5. Michele Bacci provides the richest discussion of ‘alterity’
in the context of miracle-working images in Il pennello dell’Evangelista,
13–32; ‘Pro remedio animae’, 19ff; and ‘Le sculture lignee nel folklore
religioso: alcune considerazioni’, in Clara Baracchini, ed., Scultura
lignea: Lucca 1200–1425, Florence, 1995, 38.
82 Pinney situates the practice of ‘corpothetics’ within a rural
community in modern India, and associates it with subaltern Indian
religious cultural practices. He aligns ‘corpothetics’, however,
with pre-modern European modes of visual experience, with
reference both to Hans Belting’s Christian image culture ‘before
the era of art’ and Michael Fried’s paradigm of modern Western art
in transition from a ‘theatrical’ to an ‘absorptive’ mode, with the
gradual effacement of the beholder’s presence within the pictorial
constructions. ‘Photos of the Gods’: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in
India, London, 2004, 23ff. and 193ff.
83 See Clark, Vanities of the Eye.
84 ‘beato chi lo potrà baciare!’ (19 August 1399, in Pistoia); ‘Beato chi lo
poteva toccare!’ (26 August 1399, in Pistoia) (Dominici, Cronache, vol.
I, 87 and 107).
85 Filarete’s votive offering at the SS Annunziata does not survive
(Antonio Filarete, Trattato di architettura, eds Anna Maria Finoli and
Liliana Grassi, Milan,1972, vol. II, 691). Francesco da Sangallo’s relief
is still in the church, with the inscription ‘Eius intercessione liberatus
Franc. Sangallius Iuliani fili civis Flor. Facie A.D.N.S. MDXXXXII’
(Maria Grazia Ciardi Duprè Dal Poggetto, ed., Santa Maria Primerana.
Chiesa del popolo fiesolano. Le opere d’arte, Florence, 1988, 65–7; fig. 24).
86 On the centralized Marian sanctuary churches, see Davies, ‘Studies in
the Quattrocento Centrally Planned Church’, 222–4.
87 Sheryl Reiss, ‘A medieval source for Michelangelo’s Medici Madonna’,
Zeitschrift fur Kunstgeschichte, 50, 1987, 394–400 (illustrated in figs 2,
3). The venerated Madonna image in San Lorenzo, dating to the
fourteenth century, was attributed to the St Cecilia Master by Richard
Offner (A Critical Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting, New York, 1931,
Section III, Vol. I, 92ff. The date of the origin of the cult is unknown.
The image later became known as the Madonna di San Zanobi and was
considered to be a Byzantine painting given to San Zanobius (Richa,
Notizie istoriche delle chiese fiorentine, Vol. V, 58). The panel is currently in
the transept chapel adjacent to the Old Sacristy; it was apparently
on a column in the church by 1464 and was in the north transept
chapel by the early sixteenth century (Reiss, ‘A medieval source for
Michelangelo’s Medici Madonna’, 397–8).
88 Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature: 1150 –
1750, New York, 1998; Pamela Long, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical
Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance, Baltimore,
MD, 2001; Goodich, Miracles and Wonders.
89 I am using the Madonna of Orsanmichele as a comparative example,
even though the painting was made by a celebrated artist, because
it provides a useful instance of an enshrined miraculous image in
a sanctuary setting that has remained more or less unaltered since
Masaccio’s time. The high level of artistry manifest in the painting and
the association of the image with Bernardo Daddi do not undermine
the particular point that I am making here about the visual engagement
of the beholder with the unveiled enshrined miraculous image.
465