The matter of miracles: Neapolitan baroque architecture and sanctity 9781526100382

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The matter of miracles

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series editors

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Amelia G. Jones, Marsha Meskimmon series editors

Rethinking Art’s Histories aims to open out art history from its most basic structures by foreAmelia G.work Jones, Meskimmon grounding thatMarsha challenges the conventional periodisation and geographical subfields of traditional art history, and addressing a wide range of visual cultural forms from the early modern period to the present.

Rethinking Art’s Histories aims to open out art history from its most books basic will structures by foregrounding workscholarship that challenges These acknowledge the impact of recent on our understanding of the complex temporalities and cartographies that have emerged through of centuries of worldthe conventional periodisation and geographical subfields wide trade, political colonisation and the diasporic movement of people traditional art history, and addressing a wide range of visual and ideas across national and continental borders. cultural forms from the early modern period to the present. Also available in the series

These booksand will acknowledge the impact of recent scholarship on Art, museums touch  Fiona Candlin

our‘do-it-yourself’ understanding of the complex temporalities andaesthetics  cartographies The artwork: Participation from fluxus to relational that have emerged through centuries of world-wide trade, political Anna Dezeuze (ed.) colonisation and the diasporic movement of people and ideas Helen Hills The matter of miracles: Neapolitan baroque sanctity and architecture  across national and continental borders.

The face of medicine: Visualising medical masculinities in late nineteenth-century Paris Mary Hunter Otherwise: Imagining queer feminist art histories  Amelia Jones and Erin Silver (eds) After the event: New perspectives in art history  Charles Merewether and John Potts (eds) Photography and documentary film in the making of modern Brazil  Luciana Martins Women, the arts and globalization: Eccentric experience  Marsha Meskimmon and Dorothy Rowe (eds) Flesh cinema: The corporeal turn in American avant-garde film  Ara Osterweil After-affects|after-images: Trauma and aesthetic transformation in the virtual Feminist museum  Griselda Pollock Vertiginous mirrors: The animation of the visual image and early modern travel  Rose Marie San Juan The paradox of body, building and motion in seventeenth-century England  Kimberley Skelton The newspaper clipping: a modern paper object  Anke Te Heesen, translated by Lori Lantz Screen/space: The projected image in contemporary art  Tamara Trodd (ed.) Art and human rights: Contemporary Asian contexts  Caroline Turner and Jen Webb Timed out: Art and the transnational Caribbean  Leon Wainwright Performative monuments: Performance, photography, and the rematerialisation of public art  Mechtild Widrich

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The matter of miracles

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Neapolitan baroque architecture and sanctity

Helen Hills

Manchester

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Copyright © Helen Hills 2016 The right of Helen Hills to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Millard Meiss Publication Fund of the College Art Association

MM ISBN 978 0 7190 8474 4 hardback

First published 2016 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or any third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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To the dream of the thing — What you thought was a patch of earth Contained the whole world.

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Contents

List of plates List of figures Acknowledgements

Introduction: openings Prologue: the analogous relic



Part I  The miracle

 1  The matter of miracles: San Gennaro’s blood and the Treasury Chapel

 2 Blood, bronze, Vesuvius: material transformations  3 Miraculous witness: exclusive affects

page viii xiii xx 1 39

65 123 174



Part II  Patrons and protectors

 4  5

The machinic chapel and the production of protectors

215

From prayer to presence

270



Part III  The choreography of sanctity

 6 Niche and saints: folding the wall  7 Saints on the move and the choreography of sanctity  8 Holiness and history: relics and gender  9 Heads and bones: face to face 10 Silver saints: between transformation and transaction

446



479

Conclusion: the miraculous chance

319 351 386 410

Bibliography497 Plates and figures 537 Index591

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Plates

Plates can be found in the plates and figures section beginning on page 537  1 Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples. Entrance gate and chapel façade from the south aisle of the Cathedral. By kind permission of the Eccellentissima Deputazione della Reale Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro. Photo copyright © Helen Hills.   2 Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples. Entrance gate open with view of liturgical south-east of chapel. By kind permission of the Eccellentissima Deputazione della Reale Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro.   3 Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples. Interior view looking towards liturgical east. By kind permission of the Eccellentissima Deputazione della Reale Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro. Photo copyright © Helen Hills.   4 Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples. Interior view looking towards (liturgical) south-west. By kind permission of the Eccellentissima Deputazione della Reale Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro. Photo copyright © Massimo Velo – Napoli.   5 Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples. View of left-hand chapel (liturgical west). By kind permission of the Eccellentissima Deputazione della Reale Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro.   6 Reliquary bust of San Gennaro, 1304–05, by Étienne Godefroyd, Guillaume de Verdelay, and Milet d’Auxerre. Gilt silver, enamel, precious and semiprecious stones. By kind permission of the Eccellentissima Deputazione della Reale Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro. Photo copyright © Massimo Velo – Napoli.   7 Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples. Presbytery with bronze fulllength sculptures and silver bust reliquaries of protector saints. Main altar designed by Francesco Solimena, 1722. By kind permission of the Eccellentissima Deputazione della Reale Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro.   8 Carlo Schisano, Saint Irene of Thessalonica, 1733, reliquary fenestella. Naples, Museo del Tesoro di San Gennaro. By permission of the Museo del Tesoro di San Gennaro. Photo copyright © Helen Hills.

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List of plates

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  9 Carlo Schisano, Saint Irene of Thessalonica, 1733, silver and gilt silver reliquary. Detail with model of the city of Naples. Museo del Tesoro di San Gennaro, Naples. By permission of the Museo del Tesoro di San Gennaro. Photo copyright © Helen Hills. 10  S. Ianvuarii Neapoli Sangvis ebvllit, fresco in Pope Gregory XIII’s gallery in the Vatican Palace showing the relics of San Gennaro outside the Porta Capuana, Naples. Photo copyright © Helen Hills. 11 The Succorpo, Naples Cathedral. Detail with statue of Oliviero Carafa. Photo copyright © Massimo Velo – Napoli. 12 The Treasurer of the Deputazione and Chapel of San Gennaro adorns the reliquary bust of San Gennaro in preparation for the miracle and procession, 4 May 2013. By kind permission of the Eccellentissima Deputazione della Reale Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro. Photo copyright © Helen Hills. 13 Jusepe de Ribera, San Gennaro Emerges Unharmed from the Furnace, altarpiece, oil on copper. Frame set with gilt bronze and lapis lazuli by Onofrio D’Alessio, 1646. Altarpiece of right-hand lateral chapel of the Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples. By kind permission of the Eccellentissima Deputazione della Reale Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro. 14 Micco Spadaro (Domenico Gargiulo), Procession of Relics and Intervention of San Gennaro to Save Naples from Vesuvius, oil on canvas, 126 × 177 cm. Private collection. 15 ‘San Gennaro Stems the Flow of Lava from Vesuvius’, engraving from Nicolò Carminio Falcone, L’Intera Storia ... di San Gennaro (Naples: Felice Mosca, 1713), facing p. 64. By permission of the British Library. Copyright © British Library Board, BL shelfmark 663.k.20. 16 Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples. Bronze gate to lateral chapel by Onofrio D’Alessio and Gennaro Monte, 1662–84. Detail. By kind permission of the Eccellentissima Deputazione della Reale Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro. Photo copyright © Helen Hills. 17 Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples. Left: Onofrio D’Alessio and Gennaro Monte, gate to lateral chapel, 1662–84, with San Gennaro and Saint Asprenus, bronze and gilt bronze. By kind permission of the Eccellentissima Deputazione della Reale Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro. Right: Cosimo Fanzago (here attrib.), San Gennaro, design for lateral gate, drawing (ATSG). Photo copyright © Helen Hills. 18 Gesù Nuovo, Naples. Cappella Fornaro by Michelangelo Naccherino and assistants, 1600–02. Photo copyright © Helen Hills. 19  The Virgin Enthroned between San Gennaro and Saint Restituta, Chapel of Santa Maria del Principio, Santa Restituta, Duomo, Naples. Photo ­copyright © Helen Hills.

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20 Domenichino, San Gennaro Intervenes and Saves the City of Naples from the Eruption of Vesuvius, fresco above entrance. Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples. By kind permission of the Eccellentissima Deputazione della Reale Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro. 21  Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples. Cupola with Giovanni Lanfranco, The Saints in Paradise, 1643, fresco. By kind permission of the Eccellentissima Deputazione della Reale Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro. Photo copyright © Massimo Velo – Napoli. 22 San Gregorio Armeno, Naples. Nuns’ winter choir and raised west-end choir, with frescoes by Luca Giordano depicting the arrival of the Basilian nuns in Naples. Photo copyright © Massimo Velo – Napoli. 23 Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples. Main gate by Cosimo Fanzago viewed from the aisle of the Cathedral. By kind permission of the Eccellentissima Deputazione della Reale Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro. Photo copyright © Helen Hills. 24 Procession of the reliquaries from the Treasury Chapel to Santa Chiara, Naples, May 2013. Photo copyright © Helen Hills. 25 Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples. Main gate by Cosimo Fanzago. Detail. By kind permission of the Eccellentissima Deputazione della Reale Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro. Photo copyright © Helen Hills. 26 Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples. Main gate by Cosimo Fanzago. Detail of bust of San Gennaro. By kind permission of the Eccellentissima Deputazione della Reale Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro. Photo copyright © Helen Hills. 27 Giuseppe Sanmartino, Giuseppe Del Giudice, and Gennaro Del Giudice, Tobias and Archangel Raphael, silver and gilt silver reliquary. Museo del Tesoro di San Gennaro, Naples. By permission of the Museo del Tesoro di San Gennaro. 28 Lorenzo Vaccaro and Gian Domenico Vinaccia, Saint Michael Archangel, 1691, silver, gilt silver, bronze and gilt bronze reliquary, 160 × 65 cm. Naples, Treasury of San Gennaro. By kind permission of the Eccellentissima Deputazione della Reale Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro. 29 Cosimo Fanzago, Guglia of San Gennaro, Naples. Detail with bronze figure of San Gennaro. Photo copyright © Helen Hills. 30 Naples, the Guglia of San Gennaro by Cosimo Fanzago and the cupola of the Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro crowned by blood relics. Photo copyright © Joseph Connors. 31 Jusepe de Ribera, San Gennaro Intercedes on Behalf of Naples at the Eruption of Vesuvius. Church of the monastery of the Agustinas Recoletas di Monterrey, Salamanca. 32 Onofrio Palumbo and Didier Barra, San Gennaro Intercedes on Behalf

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of Naples, c.1652, oil on canvas, 392 × 600 cm. Santissima Trinità dei Pellegrini, Naples. 33 Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples. Pavement detail. By kind permission of the Eccellentissima Deputazione della Reale Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro. Photo copyright © Helen Hills. 34 Succorpo Chapel, Naples Cathedral. Vault with relief of San Gennaro. Photo copyright © Helen Hills. 35 Filippino Lippi, The Annunciation with Saint Thomas Aquinas Presenting Cardinal Oliviero Carafa to the Virgin, 1488–93(?). Chapel of the Annunciation and St Thomas Aquinas, Santa Maria sopra Minerva, Rome. Image in the public domain. 36 Domenichino, Christ Entrusts Naples to San Gennaro’s Protection, fresco in crossing pendentive with ground plan of the Treasury Chapel. Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples. By kind permission of the Eccellentissima Deputazione della Reale Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro. Photo copyright © Helen Hills. 37 Benedetto Sersale, Discorso Istorico intorno alla Cappella de’ Signori Minutoli sotto il titolo di S. Pietro Apostolo e di S. Anastasia Martire dentro il Duomo Napoletano (Naples: Stamperia Raimondiana, 1778), pp. 30–31, ‘Pianta delle due Antiche e Odierna Cattedrale di Napoli’ and ‘Prospettiva delle due Antiche Cattedrali di Napoli’. By permission of the British Library. Copyright © British Library Board, BL shelfmark 1572.188. 38 P. Petrini, Pianta ed alzata della Città di Napoli (Naples, 1718). Detail showing the processional route for the ‘feast of Vesuvius’. Adapted from British Library Board, BL shelfmark Maps *24045 (29). Map by Helen Hills. 39 Church of the Certosa di San Martino, Naples. The New Treasury Chapel with Jusepe de Ribera’s Pietà, signed and dated 1637; Gennaro Monte, reliquary cases, 1691, ebony and gilt copper; Luca Giordano, Story of Judith, frescoes. Photo copyright © Helen Hills. 40 San Gennaro, on his way to Santa Chiara, passes the church of Santi Filippo e Giacomo, Naples. Procession celebrating the translation of San Gennaro’s relics to Naples, May 2013. Photo copyright © Helen Hills. 41 Domenichino, The Beheading of San Gennaro and Companions, oil on copper. Altarpiece of left-hand lateral chapel, Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples. By kind permission of the Eccellentissima Deputazione della Reale Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro. 42 Franz Vervloet, The New Treasury Chapel in the church of the Certosa di San Martino, 1848. Museo Nazionale di San Martino. 43 Lorenzo Vaccaro (attrib.), Saint Mary of Egypt, 1699, silver and gilt silver reliquary, 80 × 70 cm. Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples. By kind

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permission of the Eccellentissima Deputazione della Reale Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro. 44 Lorenzo Vaccaro (attrib.), Saint John the Baptist, reliquary, silver and gilt copper reliquary, 80 × 62 cm. Detail. Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples. By kind permission of the Eccellentissima Deputazione della Reale Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro. Photo copyright © Helen Hills. 45 Gennaro Monte, Silver flowers and vase (one of a pair), c.1670, silver, 120 × 20 cm. Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples. By kind permission of the Eccellentissima Deputazione della Reale Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro. Photo copyright © Helen Hills. 46 The processional route taken during the translation of the relics of San Francesco di Paola from the Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro in the Cathedral to the church of San Luigi in Naples in 1629. Adapted from Paolo Petrini, Pianta ed alzata della Città di Napoli (Naples, 1718)BL shelfmark Maps *24045 (29). 47 The processional route taken during the translation of the relics of San Francesco di Paola from the church of San Luigi to the Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro in the Duomo in Naples in 1629. Adapted from BL shelfmark Maps *24045 (29). Alessandro Baratta, Fidelissimae urbis Neapolitance […] 1629. Intesa Sanpaolo Collection, Gallerie d’ltalia – Palazzo Zevallos Stiglian0, Naples. Map by Helen Hills. 48 Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, 1610, oil on canvas, 143 × 180 cm. Intesa Sanpaolo Collection, Gallerie d’Italia – Palazzo Zevallos Stigliano, Naples. 49 Gaspar Miguel de Berrio, Descripción del Cerro Rico y la villa imperial de Potosí, 1758, oil on canvas. Museo Universitario Colonial Charcas, Sucre. By kind permission of the Universidad San Francisco Xavier.

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Figures

Figures can be found in the plates and figures section beginning on page 537 1 Reliquary of the blood of San Gennaro with stand by Aniello Treglia. Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples. By kind permission of the Eccellentissima Deputazione della Reale Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro. Photo copyright © Massimo Velo – Napoli. 2 Feast of San Gennaro, Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples, 4 May 2013. Waiting in anticipation for the miracle. By kind permission of the Eccellentissima Deputazione della Reale Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro. Photo copyright © Helen Hills. 3 Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples. View looking towards the presbytery’s (liturgical) south-east wall with reliquaries and sculptures of St Euphebius, St Severus, and St Patricia on the wall and reliquary bust of San Gaetano on the crossing pier. Bronze sculpture of St Patricia by Giuliano Finelli, 1646–48. Photo copyright © Helen Hills. 4 Ostension of San Gennaro’s blood on the steps of Naples Cathedral, 4 May 2013. Photo copyright © Helen Hills. 5 Silver gilt chalice made in Naples, c.1700 (V&A: M.42-1951). Copyright © Victoria & Albert Museum. 6 The Old Treasury Chapel, Naples Cathedral. Blocked window. Photo copyright © Genoveffa Palumbo. 7 Basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano, Rome. Sacrament altar. Left transept. Photo copyright © Giovanni Tiralongo. 8 Naples Cathedral, The Succorpo Chapel, by Tommaso Malvito and workshop. Photo copyright © Massimo Velo – Napoli. 9 Newspaper report of the miracle of San Gennaro, September 2010. 10 Gian Domenico Vinaccia, The Translation of San Gennaro’s Relics from Pozzuoli to Naples in 1497, detail of silver paliotto of main altar, Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples. Begun 1683 by Domenico Marinelli from drawings by Dionisio Lazzari and finished by Gian Domenico Vinaccia, 1692–95. Photo copyright © Helen Hills. 11 Ground plan of the Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples, sacristy,

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and attendant rooms. Adapted from F. Strazzullo, La Cappella di San Gennaro nel Duomo di Napoli (Naples: Istituto Grafico Editoriale Italiano, 1994). 12 Left: Gate of the Treasury Chapel of Santissima Annunziata, Naples; right: Gate of San Martino, church of the Certosa, Naples. Photo copyright © Helen Hills. 13 Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples. Main gate. The strange alphabet written in bronze. By kind permission of the Eccellentissima Deputazione della Reale Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro. Photo copyright © Helen Hills. 14 Madrid, Convent of Las Descalzas Reales. Chapel of Relics, begun 1556. Photo copyright © Juan Benito. 15 Naples Cathedral, The Succorpo. Detail of bronze door. Photo copyright © Massimo Velo – Napoli. 16 Domenico Di Nardo, Reliquary, 1677, polychrome and gilt wood, to accommodate a group of earlier reliquary busts carved from 1617 on by Girolamo Manfredi, Carlo Manfredi, and Tomaso Velasco under the supervision of Gian Domenico Vinaccia. Chapel of St Anne (San Francesco de Geronimo), Gesù Nuovo, Naples. Photo copyright © Massimo Velo – Napoli. 17 Luca Giordano, Saint Nicholas in Glory, 1658, oil on canvas, 311 × 240 cm. By permission of the Museo Civico di Castel Nuovo, Naples. Photo copyright © Massimo Velo – Napoli. 18 Anon., Procession of San Gennaro, oil on canvas, 150 × 207 cm, Naples Cathedral. 19 Paolo Petrini, Pianta ed alzata della Città di Napoli (Naples: Paolo Petrini, 1718), By permission of the British Library. BL shelfmark Maps *24045 (29). 20 Michele Luigi Muzio, ‘Translation of the Body of San Gennaro from Naples to Benevento’, engraving, from Camillo Tutini, Memorie istoriche della vita, miracoli, e culto di San Gianuario Martire Vescovo di Benevento, e principale protettore della Città di Napoli (Naples: Michele Muzio, 1710), facing p. 72. By permission of the British Library. BL shelfmark RB.23.a.3552. 21 Tiberio Malfi, Il Barbiere (Naples: Ottavio Beltrano, 1626), p. 93. By permission of the British Library. BL shelfmark 549.k.7. 22 P. Gaultier, ‘Conspectus Apsidis Thesauri S Januarii M.’ (‘View of the Apse of the Treasury of San Gennaro Martyr’), engraving. A: Safe with head of San Gennaro; B: Safe for blood of San Gennaro; 1 and 2: Holes for keys held by the Archbishop; 3 and 4: Holes for keys held by the Deputation of the Treasury; CCCC: Site of main altar. Archivio del Tesoro di San Gennaro, Naples, 158/39 4512 DB/38. By kind permission

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of the Eccellentissima Deputazione della Reale Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro. Photo copyright © Helen Hills. 23 Paolo Regio, La Vita del B. Iacopo della Marcha (Naples: Gioseppe Cacchi, 1589) Title page. Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli. By permission of il Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali – Italia. Photo copyright © Massimo Velo – Napoli. 24 Francesco Marchese, Unica Speranza del Peccatore Che consiste nel Sangue del N. S. Giesù Cristo. Spiegata con alcune verità, con le quali s’insegna all’Anima un Modo facile d’applicar à se il frutto del medesimo Sangue (Rome: Giacomo Dragondelli, 1670), engraving following title page. By permission of the British Library. BL shelfmark C.47.e.4 (2). 25 Antonio Bulifon, ‘Gate of the Treasury’, from Pompeo Sarnelli, Guida de’ Forastieri, Curiosi di vedere, e d’intendere le cose più notabili della Regal Città di Napoli, e del suo amenissimo Distretto (Naples: Giuseppe Roselli, 1697), fol. 72. Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli. By permission of il Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali – Italia. 26 Giovanni Elia Morghen and Domenico dell’Acerra, ‘Prospetto del Vesuvio e sue Adiacenze prima dell’Eruzione dell’Anno 1631’, engraving, from Giuseppe Maria Mecatti, Racconto Storico-filosofico del Vesuvio. E particolarmente di quanto è occorso in quest’ultima Eruzione principiata il dí 25 Ottobre 1751, e cessata il dí 25 Febrajo 1752 (Naples: Giovanni Di Simone, 1752), facing p. 1. Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli. By permission of Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali – Italia. 27 Nicolas Perrey, ‘Stato del Monte Vesuvio doppo l’ultimo Incendio de 16 di Decembre 1631’, from Gianbernardino Giuliani, Trattato del Monte Vesuvio e de’ suoi Incendi (Naples: Egidio Longo, 1632), facing p. 224. Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli. By permission of il Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali – Italia. 28 Naples, Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro. Main gate by Cosimo Fanzago. Details with head and blood relics of San Gennaro. By kind permission of the Eccellentissima Deputazione della Reale Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro. Photo copyright © Helen Hills. 29 Naples, Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro. Main gate by Cosimo Fanzago. Looking upwards while standing on the threshold with view of the busts of San Gennaro on both sides of the gate. By kind permission of the Eccellentissima Deputazione della Reale Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro. Photo copyright © Helen Hills. 30 Cosimo Fanzago, design for main gate of the Treasury Chapel, Naples, ink and watercolour on paper, 28.8 × 16.0 cm. Courtauld Institute of Art. 31 Michele Luigi Muzio, Temporary altar outside the Porta Capuana with relics of San Gennaro exposed during eruption of Vesuvius, from

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Camillo Tutini, Memorie istoriche della vita, miracoli, e culto di San Gianuario Martire Vescovo di Benevento, e principale protettore della Città di Napoli (Naples: Michele Muzio, 1710), facing p. 60. By permission of the British Library. Copyright © British Library Board, BL shelfmark RB.23.a.3552. 32 Paolo Regio, Le Vite de’ Sette Santi Protettori di Napoli (Naples: Horatio Salviani, 1579): Title page and image of San Gennaro. Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli. Photo copyright © Massimo Velo. 33 View over the rooftops of Naples with the Cathedral and cupola of the Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro in the centre. Photo copyright © Helen Hills. 34 Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples. Main gate by Cosimo Fanzago. Detail showing ampoule-like bronze. By kind permission of the Eccellentissima Deputazione della Reale Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro. Photo copyright © Helen Hills. 35 Giovan Battista D’Aula, reliquary of the blood of St John the Baptist, 1727, silver. Photo: Giovanni Tiralongo. 36 Gianlorenzo Bernini. Cornaro Chapel, Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome. 37 Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, Rome. Interior view looking east with Stefano Maderno’s St Cecilia, 1600. 38 Massimo Stanzione, San Gennaro Cures the Possessed Woman, 1643–46, oil on copper. Sacristy of the Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples. By kind permission of the Eccellentissima Deputazione della Reale Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro. Photo copyright © Massimo Velo – Napoli. 39 Naples Cathedral, Old Treasury Chapel. Vault. Photo copyright © Pedicini. 40 The Guglia of San Gennaro in the small square (now Piazza Riario Sforza) to the south of Naples Cathedral with the façade of Pio Monte della Misericordia beyond. Photo copyright © Helen Hills. 41 Ferdinando Sanfelice, Monument to commemorate San Gennaro’s intervention against Vesuvius, 1707, in front of the church of Santa Caterina a Formello, 1707. Photo copyright © Helen Hills. 42 Carlo Schisano, Saint Irene of Thessalonica, 1733, reliquary. Naples, Museo del Tesoro di San Gennaro. By kind permission of the Eccellentissima Deputazione della Reale Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro. Photo copyright © Helen Hills. 43 Fra Girolamo Maria di Sant’Anna, Istoria della Vita, Virtù e Miracoli di S. Gennaro Vescovo e Martire, Principal Padrone della Fedelissima Città di Napoli (Naples: Stefano Abbate, 1733), Title page and anteporta, designed by Francesco Solimena and engraved by Antonio Baldi. By

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kind permission of the Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli. Photo copyright © Massimo Velo – Napoli. 44 Domenichino, San Gennaro Overcomes Heretics, fresco in crossing pendentive, Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples. By kind permission of the Eccellentissima Deputazione della Reale Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro. Photo copyright © Helen Hills. 45 Guarini Guarini, Chapel of the Santissima Sindone, Turin. Detail of vault. Image in public domain. 46 Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples. Left-hand lateral chapel. Giuliano Finelli, Sant’Andrea di Avellino, with empty niche while reliquary bust is in procession, May 2013. By kind permission of the Eccellentissima Deputazione della Reale Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro. Photo copyright © Helen Hills. 47  Santini or prayer cards. San Gennaro and St Patricia, Naples 2015. Photo copyright © Marina Cotugno. 48 Design for apparati for ‘festival of lights’ (‘Disegno della macchina per Lumi’), Naples, Archivio del Tesoro di San Gennaro, 158/49 DB/39. By kind permission of the Eccellentissima Deputazione della Reale Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro. Photo copyright © Helen Hills. 49 Record of expenses by Cosimo Fanzago in relation to the Guglia of San Gennaro. Archivio del Tesoro di San Gennaro, Naples, 59/9 (1587), fol. 250. By kind permission of the Eccellentissima Deputazione della Reale Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro. Photo copyright © Helen Hills. 50 Decree of 1633 relating to controversy between Deputies of the Treasury of San Gennaro and the Dominicans over the Kingdom of Naples’ principal patron. Archivio del Tesoro di San Gennaro, Naples, AA/6. By kind permission of the Eccellentissima Deputazione della Reale Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro. Photo copyright © Helen Hills. 51 Paolo Petrini, Pianta ed alzata della Città di Napoli (Naples: Paolo Petrini, 1718). Detail. By permission of the British Library. Copyright © British Library Board, BL shelfmark Maps *24045 (29). Letter ‘O’: Seggio of Capuano. 52 Giuseppe Aloja and Niccolò Carletti, Veduta Scenografica a ponente della Città di Napoli in Campagna Felice (Naples, 1775). Detail showing the Cathedral (257), Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro (258), and Pio Monte della Misericordia (265). By permission of the British Library. Copyright © British Library Board, BL shelfmark Maps 184.a.1. 53 Florence, Orsanmichele. Tabernacles with patron saints of Florence. Photo copyright © Helen Hills. 54 Naples. Traces of Seggio di Capuano. Photo copyright © Helen Hills. 55 Rome. Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, Cappella Sistina, 1585–89. Image in the public domain.

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56 Naples, San Domenico Maggiore, Chapel of the Crucifix. Wall tomb for Francesco Carafa commissioned by Oliviero Carafa. Photo ­copyright © Marina Cotugno. 57 Naples, Catacombs of San Gennaro. Photo copyright © Helen Hills. 58 Naples, Pio Monte della Misericordia. Caravaggio’s Seven Works of Mercy viewed from the meeting room of the deputies. Photo copyright © Jane Hawkes. 59 Naples, Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro. Reliquary bust of St Patricia in its niche. By kind permission of the Eccellentissima Deputazione della Reale Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro. Photo copyright © Helen Hills. 60 Naples, Procession of San Gennaro. Reliquary of St Patricia glitters in the sunshine, 5 May 2013. Photo copyright © Helen Hills. 61 Rome, Basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano. Reliquary cage with relics of the heads of saints Peter and Paul. Photo copyright © Helen Hills. 62 Spanish colonial coins, from Potosí, eight piece Reales silver, Philip IV, 1650. Image in public domain. 63 Pierre Miotte, Cita di Napoli (Rome: Gio: Battista Rossi, 1648). Fondazione Pagliara. Photo copyright © Massimo Velo – Napoli. 64 Giovanni Battista Manso, Vita e Miracoli di S. Patricia vergine Sacra con il compendio delle reliquie, che si conservano nella Chiesa del monasterio di detta santa in Napoli (Naples: Constantino Vitale, 1619). ‘St Patricia Virgin. Patron of the city of Naples 1626’. Frontispiece. Photo copyright © Massimo Velo–Napoli. 65 Paolo Regio and Cleonte Torbizi, Vita di S. Patricia vergine Figlia dell’Imperator Costante e Protrettrice della Città e Regno di Napoli (Naples: Francesco Savio, 1643). ‘St Patricia Virgin. Patron of the city of Naples, 1625’. Frontispiece. Biblioteca Nazionale, Naples. By permission: al Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali–Italia. 66 Luca Giordano, Basilian Nuns Arrive in Naples with the Relics of Saint Gregory of Armenia, fresco on nuns’ west-end elevated choir, in church of San Gregorio Armeno, Naples. Photo copyright © Massimo Velo – Napoli. 67 Naples, Gesù Nuovo. Ex votos, silver. 68 Domenichino, San Gennaro is Tortured; San Gennaro and his Companions in the Amphitheatre of Pozzuoli; San Gennaro Restores Timotheo’s Sight, 1631–41, frescoes, Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples. By kind permission of the Eccellentissima Deputazione della Reale Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro. Photo copyright © Massimo Velo – Napoli. 69 Drawing to demonstrate the correct composition of brancard holders

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and order of participants. Naples, Archivio del Tesoro di San Gennaro, 59/4 1587. ATSG 9/2/113. 70 Nicola Oddi, ‘True Likeness of the Servant of God Veronica Laparelli’, engraving to design by Antoine Podevin from Antonio Maria Bonucci, Vita della Ven. Serva di Dio Veronica Laparelli Monica Cisterciense (Naples 1714). Biblioteca Nazionale, Naples. Photo copyright © Massimo Velo – Napoli. 71 Domenico Antonio Ferri, Gennaro Parascandalo and Lorenzo Vaccaro (attrib.), St Candida, 1699 (restored by Vincenzo Caruso, 1842), silver reliquary. Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples. By kind permission of the Eccellentissima Deputazione della Reale Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro. Copyright © Massimo Velo – Napoli. 72 Alessandro Baratta, Fidelissimae urbis Neapolitanae cum omnibus viis accurata et nova delineatio, 1629. Intesa Sanpaolo Collection, Gallerie d’ltalia Palazzo Zeuallos Stiglian0, Naples. BL shelfmark *24045 (2).

Every effort has been made to obtain permission to reproduce copyright material, and the publisher will be pleased to be informed of any errors and omissions for correction in future editions.

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Acknowledgements

Naples is a wonderful city, but not the easiest place to undertake research. Many people and institutions helped me along the way. My most sincere thanks to the British Academy for its generous support, without which research for this book would not have been possible. A British Academy Research Readership in 2005–07 and British Academy Small Research Grants in 2004, 2006, and 2012 were transformative. I gratefully acknowledge also the AHRC Matching Leave Award 2008–09, which was vital. Funding for historical research beyond the UK is now under such press­ure that I am doubly grateful to these institutions. The Eccellentissima Deputazione della Reale Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro in Naples granted me invaluable access to its splendid archive and I remain very grateful for that. I thank in particular Vice-President Riccardo Carafa d’Andria, for his organizational assistance, the Conte Don Alessandro d’Aquino del Principe di Caramanico for his enthusiastic encouragement, the Coordinatore della Segreteria, Dottore Francesco Pavolini, for his efficiency, and the archivist Cavaliere Michele Spinelli. Many of the silver reliquaries and devotional objects destined for the Treasury Chapel are now conserved in the Museo del Tesoro di San Gennaro. The Director of that museum, Dott. Paolo Jorio, and his staff courteously afforded me special access to their collections, for which I am much obliged. To undertake research at the Biblioteca Nazionale in Naples is always a pleasure. No library has a more evocative setting; and its holdings are astonishing. The staff there were unfailingly helpful. Dott.ssa Patrizia Nocera provided particularly meticulous assistance. Likewise I owe much to many at the Archivio di Stato in Naples, where I have lived all manner of emotions. I am grateful to the Soprintendenza per i Beni Architettonici e per il Paesaggio e per il Patrimonio Storico Artistico e Demoetnoantropologico di Napoli e Provincia for crucial assistance. Nicola Spinosa, Director of the Soprintendenza Speciale per il Polo Museale, for many years granted with astonishing efficiency my many requests for permissions to access buildings and take photographs. The superb collections of the Gabinetto delle Stampe

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at the Fondazione Pagliara in Naples enriched my research, and I would like to thank all the staff there, especially Dott.ssa Alessia Avallone. I am pleased also to acknowledge the thoughtfulness of Dott.ssa Tina Barbatelli, Director of La Certosa e Museo Nazionale di San Martino, Naples. Beyond Naples I owe particularly thanks to library staff at the British Library for their unfailing assistance, to the Biblioteca Angelica Vaticana, and to the Warburg Institute. Those institutions provide profoundly sustaining environments in which to study rare and special books. Naples remains relatively unknown even to scholars of Italy. For that reason it was essential to include here many images and colour plates. Their publication was made possible by two grants, one from the Scouloudi Foundation in association with the Institute of Historical Research, and the other from the Millard Meiss Publication Fund. I am delighted to thank these institutions. The History of Art Department of the University of York also assisted towards costs of publication and photography. Massimo Velo assisted always cheerfully with requests for photography in Naples; and Marina Cotugno helped out at the last minute. Lectures, research seminars, and papers that I have given at many institutions informed the writing of this book. I thank in particular colleagues and friends who listened to papers at various stages of this project and posed stimulating comments and questions at the University of Adelaide, Colorado University at Boulder, the Early Modern Seminar at the Courtauld Institute and University College London, Duke University, the University of East Anglia, Emory University, Harvard University, the University of Manchester, the Renaissance Research Seminar at the University of Oxford, Reading University, Smith College, Stockholm University, and the University of York. Teaching and supervising students compelled me to clarify ideas and think again. Many students gave a great deal along the way and I am glad to acknowledge their contribution. Many scholars, friends, and colleagues read one or more chapters, discussed ideas, made invaluable suggestions, and offered wise advice. I am deeply indebted to Tommaso Astarita, Andrew Benjamin, Joseph Connors, Claire Farago, Craig Felton, Michael Gnehm, Dalia Judovitz, Margaret Littler, Mary Pardo, Walter Melion, and Mike Savage. I am grateful to the series editors Amelia Jones and Marsha Meskimmon for their support of the project throughout. In addition the following people made helpful contributions of all kinds ranging from rigorous discussion of ideas to providing the homeliest of apartments in Rome: Paola d’Agostino, Franco Benigno, Anna Botta, Caroline Bruzelius, Tom Conley, David Peters Corbett, Gérard Delille, Antonio Denunzio, Jorge Fernández-Santos Ortiz-Iribas, Giacomo di Fiore, Kirstin Kennedy, Dana Leibsohn, Emanuele Lugli, the late John Marino, Giovanni Muto, Nick Napoli, Genoveffa Palumbo, Alina Payne, Marcia

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Acknowledgements

Pointon, Charlotte Purkis, Abraham Ravett, Dee Reynolds, Louise Rice, Rose Marie San Juan, Maria Antonietta Visceglia, Massimo Visone, and Genevieve Warwick. Lucia Binotti, Roger Ling, Michele Vescovi, and Alessandra Pompili were unstinting in their assistance with translating and interpreting documents of all kinds, and Mary Pardo with mercurial wit transformed baffling Italian into pellucid English when pressed for help on far too many occasions. Daniel Bridgman retrieved data and expertly prevented technological catastrophe. Maria-Anna Aristova and Giulia Zaffaroni undertook the task of taming an unruly bibliography and assisting with images with characteristic assiduity. My appointment for a semester as Ruth and Clarence Professor of Renaissance Studies at Smith College in Massachusetts in 2014 offered me a wonderful combination of academic energy, beautiful surroundings, and collegial generosity that was perfect for my work. I warmly thank the Principal of Smith College, the members of the Kennedy Committee, and all my colleagues there – in the Art Department and beyond across the Smith campus and further afield in the Five College Consortium – for their warmth of welcome and intellectual engagement. Anna Botta, Brigitte Buettner, Craig Felton, and Alessandra Di Maio in particular gave hospitality and friendship way beyond the call of duty. Writing this book was thrown off course when my laptop and external hard drive with the entire manuscript on them were burgled from our home in 2011, during events at York in 2012, and in 2015 during the very last stages of preparing the manuscript for press when my mother’s wonderful nursing home, The Hope in Cambridge, was peremptorily and scandalously closed down by Healthcare Management Trust and the Holy Family of Bordeaux. My greatest debt is to all my friends who so generously gave inspirational kindness and support during those difficult times. My many thanks also to Emma Brennan at Manchester University Press. I can now smile at these words with which in 1632 Cesare D’Engenio Caracciolo opened his book on the sacred in Naples: ‘Opera un pezzo fa desiderata, ma hora la prima volta vede la luce delle stampe.’ I hope that my parents, Eva Rainbow-Hills and Frederick Hills, will smile, too. I hope that all these people know something of what I owe them. Helen Hills York, June 2015.

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Introduction: openings

The grand and imposing Treasury Chapel, which truly can be called a treasure, both for what is conserved there, and for that which was spent on it. (Carlo Celano, Notizie del bello dell’antico e del curioso della Città di Napoli)1

What are we to make of the Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro in Naples Cathedral? What do we risk it making of us? We enter the Treasury Chapel via the aisle of the Cathedral (Plates 1 & 2), through the vast subdued architectural frame of the majestic bronze gate – and suddenly the chapel presents itself to our gaze (Plates 3 & 4). It is overwhelming: an explosion of glittering surfaces and colour, a space as large as a small church, crowned with a towering cupola, dazzlingly frescoed (Plates 5 & 21), a space where polished coloured marbles seem to tilt with glittering silver busts, while dark selfabsorbed bronze figures brood in recesses (Plate 7). This exuberantly decorated baroque chapel is home to Naples’ many protector saints, particularly the miraculously liquefying blood relic of San Gennaro (St Januarius) (Plate 6 & Fig. 1).2 Here are intertwinings, a refusal of a univocal sense of direction or reading: a proliferation that implicates the viewer. Altars, altarpieces, frescoes, marbled walls, precious metals, and semi-precious stones brandish colour and polished surfaces in intense competition for attention in a flickering unstable light (Fig. 3). Everywhere one looks, there is an abundance of luxuriant, exuberant claims, from the soaring recesses of the dome, splashed with light, to the shadowy presbytery populated by busts and statues peering from darkened niches, to the vast glittering silver candlesticks and ‘[L]a grande e maestosa cappella del Tesoro; che veramente dir si può tesoro, e per quello che vi conserva, e per quello che speso fu` ’. C. Celano, Notizie del bello dell’antico e del curioso della Città di Napoli, ed. Giovanni Battista Chiarini, 5 vols (Naples: Agostino de Pascale, 1856–58), vol. III, tom. 1, 235.  2 The city of Naples also succeeded in appointing Gennaro as patron of the Kingdom of Naples during the plague of 1656. See J. M. Sallmann, Santi barocchi: modelli di santità, pratiche devozionali e comportamenti religiosi nel Regno di Napoli dal 1540 al 1750, trans. Carla Rabuffetti (Lecce: Argo, 1996), 83.  1

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the i­llusionistic pavement that conjures depth in grey, creamy white, and Spanish brocatello (Plate 33). Building from 1608 to fulfil a vow made during the plague of 1526–27, the chapel remains one of the most venerated sanctuaries in the city (Fig. 2). Here is revered the prodigious blood of Naples’ principal protector saint, San Gennaro, Bishop of Benevento, beheaded as a Christian in 305 in Pozzuoli. The miraculous liquefaction of his blood affirms the intercession of San Gennaro with God in heaven on behalf of Naples. This it does when it encounters his head relic (Plate 6 & Fig. 4), including on auspicious occasions, such as his feast days, with tremendous celebration (Fig. 9).3 The chapel is a multiple deployment of surfaces, colours, and textures, making possible not one or two unambivalent and singular significations, but entire constellations of meanings (Plate 4). What is to many, especially those of northern and Protestant sensibilities, most readily characterized as ‘excessive’ or ‘over the top’ seems to pull the visitor in all directions at once. Material richness, surface sheen, and formal and iconographical complexity engulf us. A treasury indeed. What is found here? Lessons in paint for the poor and unlettered? Hardly. Rather, rich labyrinths in which knowledge loses its way in a great displacement, a great multiplication of forms, relics, images, and surfaces, in which we must first lose ourselves before anything can be found. The system is a displacement, which takes over. Indeed, art would be nothing more than opinion if it did not allow an element of chaos to enter in and transform and mobilize thinking.4 Destruction of mere opinion is achieved by disrupting the supposed harmony or unity of experience. Thus the chapel takes us out of the ordinary, through a visible and ‘natural’ spectacle encompassing history, away from history, spectacle, and nature as given. We are made present at the mystery, rather than it presenting itself to us. But to be present is to be changed. Baroque particularity

I have chosen to examine the matter of the miracle through the prism of baroque architecture, because the very material insistence of the latter has often defeated analysis.5 The Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro is characteristic Gennaro’s blood and head are relics. A ‘relic’ is etymologically ‘that which remains’, but its meaning was strengthened by Christianity, so as to render it the equivalent of ‘holy body’ or ‘sacred remains’. Such holy matter, vehemently attacked by Protestant reformers, received new visibility. It drew worshippers, swelled reserves, established boundaries, and accused dissidents and outsiders.  4 G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchill (London: Verso, 1994), 204.  5 The term ‘baroque’ is useful for designating an emphatic Catholic emotive visual aesthetic.  3

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Introduction: openings

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in many ways of the sort of baroque art that is still too readily marginalized within art history, squeamishly ignored, or too hastily characterized as ‘excessive’ or ‘over the top’.6 The study of a single work of architecture offers an opportunity to reflect on the baroque in general via the particular. This permits clear contradistinction to the more conventional approach that seeks to interpret the particular in terms of the general (the chapel as consequence or manifestation of ‘the Counter-Reformation’, for example). I approach this issue without assuming that the architecture at the heart of the study represents a universal or that it is continuous with other buildings of the same chronological ‘moment’ or reducible to the literal presence of the chapel. Indeed far from it. Responding to baroque architecture’s self-declaratory assertiveness and drama, scholars have too easily assumed that it is necessarily overt, extrovert, and fundamentally representational or transmissive. This is to confuse baroque’s effects with the intelligible, if arcane, iconographies that it wears. Thus the baroque has been read overwhelmingly in terms of ‘propaganda’ and as an articulation of renewed Catholicism after Trent.7 It has been interpreted, in other words, as little more than illustration of ideas and hopes effected and held elsewhere, bundled together in an appeal to ‘emotions’ or to ‘rhetoric’. Yet the strength of its address should not be confused with apparent simplicity of message. Indeed, it should not be conflated with ‘message’ at all. Rather As a chronological term, ‘baroque’ conventionally is usually treated as coinciding more or less with the Catholic Reform from the mid-sixteenth century to the mid-­eighteenth century. For discussion of the ‘baroque’ that does not depend on chronological period, see G. Deleuze, Le pli: Leibniz et le baroque (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1988); C. BuciGlucksmann et al., eds, Puissance du Baroque: les forces, les formes, les rationalités (Paris: ditions Galilée, 1999); R. Harbison, Reflections on Baroque (London: Reaktion Books, 2000); V. H. Minor, The Death of the Baroque and the Rhetoric of Good Taste (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); H. Hills, ‘The Baroque as Decadence: From the Beads of a Rosary to Baroque Folds’, in Marcello Fantoni and Chiara Continisio (eds), Catholicism as Decadence, Italian History & Culture 12 (Florence: Mauro Pagliai Editore, 2007), 185–211. A useful discussion of architectural history and the longue durée is provided by D. Calabi, The Market and the City: Square, Street and Architecture in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 21–24. For the baroque as thorn in the flesh or sand in the oyster of academic art history, because without contemporaneous articulation, see H. Hills, ‘Introduction: Rethinking the Baroque’, in H. Hills (ed.), Rethinking the Baroque (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011), 3–10, and ‘The Baroque: The Grit in the Oyster of Art History’, in H. Hills (ed.), Rethinking the Baroque (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011), 11–36.  6 Art historians in particular persist in treating the Italian south as necessarily less sophisticated than the north. The consonance of political and cultural prejudices has been critically interrogated by sociologists and modernist historians, but not by art historians. See for example R. Lumley and J. Morris (eds), New History of the Italian South (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).  7 The literature here is too extensive to encompass, but see in particular E. Levy, Propaganda and the Jesuit Baroque (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

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than ‘propagandistic’, rather than a rhetorically effective and visual version of Tridentine decrees, baroque’s demands on the viewer are more than persuasive. This is not to pit the rational against the emotive. Far from it. Baroque emerges as far more crepuscular and muscular than is permitted by any interpretation that privileges representation and ‘history’ over ‘art’. Here it is more allusive and elusive, more unpredictable than representational, and more affective, crueller, and more subtle. Above all, it is transformative. The very visual richness – of form, colour, materials, and flagrant display of virtuoso technique – of the Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro is productive in terms other than conveying a message from ecclesiastical authority to worshipper (Plate 2). Baroque materiality must be thought in terms of potentiality. Thus the baroque chapel may be seen as presenting singular affects and percepts, freed from organizing and purposive points of view. The material richness of the chapel, its exciting visual complexity, and its excessive demands – so often treated as simply overwhelming or vulgar – are approached here not as an obstacle to interpretation, nor even so much as something to be understood – in the sense of explicated, explained, and tamed – but as material effects that are imbricated in the very productiveness of the chapel itself. Thus rather than treat the Treasury Chapel in standard terms of baroque as ‘propaganda’, or as a manifestation of ‘liturgy’ or ‘the Counter-Reformation’, or as apparently straightforward response to, or consequence of, a particular local event, such as the plague, the vow, or the translation of relics, I will show that it can offer a material framing of baroque and of the work of architecture that permit materiality’s development. This is, then, what might seem to be a contradiction in terms – ‘material spirituality’ – a spiritual materiality that is also generative. There are many reasons why the Treasury Chapel is a compelling work of architecture, permitting an examination of the relationships between form and excess, holiness and materiality, and place as productive of saints, reasons which this book brings to the fore, but the focus on a particular building is undertaken for more significant theoretical reasons, too. Dwelling on a single building allows a detailed examination of the many registers in which its architecture (in an extended sense) operates. To alight upon a single building demonstrates how architecture’s work is far from single. It permits the machinic to emerge. It permits recognition of its particularity and peculiarity while also demonstrating the depth and breadth of its reach. More than this, such a focus allows the chapel to emerge as event, as something that generates and disrupts. Thus the chapel is interrogated here in terms of the miracle and temporality, materials and materiality, local topographies and telluric philosophy, form and affect, niche and mobility, sanctity and transformation. It is investigated as an engine in – not as origin of – the production of protectors, and in the aristocratization of sanctity in the city.

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Thus I trace its intimate involvement in the production of protector saints, its salvific interventions in disasters, its capacity to remake the city, and its subtle reworkings of aristocratic politics and spiritual authority – in short, issues that extend far beyond the walls of the chapel building, but that are also wrought within and by them. This is to address the chapel as baroque assemblage that brings into productive relation relics, place and places, sanctity, materiality, blood and miracles, and the politics of the Seggi. The Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro in Naples and the excess of art history

To many, especially those from the Protestant north, the Treasury Chapel seems ‘excessive’ or ‘over the top’ (Plate 3). But the experience of feeling overwhelmed by it is neither new nor limited to visitors from the north. The responses of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century visitors to the chapel indicate similar difficulties. ‘It is wholly precious’, writes Domenico Antonio Parrino in 1700.8 But he, like most early modern authors, quickly slips into enumeration, as if the impact of the chapel leaves him grappling to reassert control by counting and recording the number of columns and statues, and, above all, by calculating its cost. Preciousness slides into value. Quantification takes over. The impulse to enumerate perhaps springs from a wish to steady the ground and counter the sense of being swept away. Parrino opens his discussion of the Treasury Chapel which runs to five pages in his Nuova Guida de’ Forastieri (Naples: Parrino, 1714): ‘One would need all the energy in the world to describe the chapel of San Gennaro.’9 Thus its infinite refinements lie beyond any feasible description; indeed, simply to describe it would demand energy without limit. The chapel is introduced in terms of excess. It exceeds and exhausts energy and description. Parrino then briefly refers to the miraculous liquefactions as a ‘lively testimony’ to San Gennaro’s love of the Neapolitans, before turning to the cost envisaged in 1526 of 10,000 ducats: ‘As it is seen today, it is entirely precious [tutto prezioso], both for its sacred relics and for the wealth of golds, silvers, stones, sculpture, and painting.’10 ‘[È] tutto prezioso’. D. A. Parrino, Napoli Città Nobilissima, Antica, e Fedelissima Esposta à gli Occhi, & alla mente de’ Curiosi, divisa in due parti, Contenendo in questa prima le sue più belle Vedute intagliate in Rame, Chiese, Castelli, Fabbriche, magnificenze, Notizie degli antichi Dogi, Regnanti, Arcivescovi, Nobiltà, Popolo, Tribunali, Quadri, Statue, Sepolchri, Librarie, e ciò che più di notabile, bello, e buono in essa si contiene, Epilogata da suoi Autori impressi, e manoscritti, che ne hanno diffusamente trattato, vol. I (Naples: Parrino, 1700), 396.  9 ‘Tutta l’energia del Mondo ci vorrebbe à descrivere la cappella.’ Parrino, Napoli Città Nobilissima, vol. I (1700), 396. 10 ‘In questo quanto ora si vede, è tutto prezioso, ò per le sacre reliquie, ò per le ricchezze d’ori, argenti, pietre, scoltura, e dipintura.’ Parrino, Napoli Città Nobilissima, vol. I (1700), 396.  8

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Thus relics, precious materials, and artifice are brought together under the epithet prezioso. The whole is ‘precious’ and so is everything about it. Parrino, like most writers, presents sacred relics, architecture, sculpture, and painting of the chapel as bound in a whole precisely through their value, their preciousness. That the chapel cost a treasure and held a treasure was repeatedly articulated by early modern commentators. Writing in 1623, Caracciolo says that already 150,000 scudi had been spent on the chapel, which was at that time still far from finished, but which on completion, he claims, ‘would be one of the principal and splendid treasuries of Italy’.11 Commentators are less ready to enter into a discussion about what lay between its cost and its contents. Thus Carlo Celano in 1692: ‘The grand and imposing Treasury Chapel, which truly can be called a treasure, both for what is kept there, and for what was spent on it’.12 The chapel combines the treasures that it contains with those that were spent to produce it; that is, the chapel is presented as ‘container’ and in terms of its expense. The celebration of cost and contents tends to eclipse the matter and work, indeed, paradoxically, even the very materiality of the chapel itself. Carlo de Lellis, writing in 1654, does indeed refer to materials and form. He situates the chapel in a European-wide comparative perspective and emphasizes the use of ‘the finest marbles’, of ‘bronze’ for the patronal saints’ statues, and of ‘the noble Corinthian order’. But enumeration swiftly supplants qualitative engagement: in truth this new Treasury has proved to be one of the most beautiful and splendid temples of Europe; appropriately its order is Corinthian, and it consists entirely of the finest marbles. There can be seen there 40 columns of broccatello, 14 statues of bronze, of a value of 4,000 ducats each of 14 patron saints of the city.13 ‘uno de più principali, e superbi Tesori dell’Italia’. C. D’Engenio Caracciolo, Napoli Sacra: Ove oltre le vere origini, e fundationi di tutte le Chiese e Monasterij, Spedali, & altri luoghi sacri della Città di Napoli, e suoi Borghi. Si tratta di tutti li corpi, e Reliquie di Santi, e Beati vi si ritrovano … Ad istantia de Francesco Buonocore (Naples: Ottavio Beltrano, 1623), 8. 12 ‘[L]a grande e maestosa cappella del Tesoro; che veramente dir si può tesoro, e per quello che vi conserva, e per quello che speso fu` ’. Celano, Notizie del bello, vol. III, tom. I, 235. He justifies the chapel as a ‘treasure’ in terms of what it holds and what it cost. 13 ‘Et in verò è riuscito questo nuovo Tesoro un de’ più belli e superbi Tempii d’Europa; imperciò che essendo d’ordine Corinto, e tutto composto di finissimi marmi, vi si scorgono 40 colonne di broccatello, 14 Statue di bronzo, di valuta di 4,000 ducati l’una de’ 14 Padroni della Città.’ C. de Lellis, Parte Seconda ò vero supplimento a Napoli Sacra di D. Cesare D’Engenio Caracciolo: ove si aggiungono le Fondationi di tutte le Chiese, Monasteri, & altri luoghi sacri della Città di Napoli e suoi Borghi (Naples: Roberto Mollo, 1654), 17. 11

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It is as if, overwhelmed by the richness and complexity of what lies before him, all he can do is to count: columns, statues, cost, and number of saints. The chapel becomes a computational machine or magic number system. In his well-known Vite de’ Pittori, Scultori, ed Architetti Napoletani (Naples, 1743) Bernardo De Dominici adopts a different approach: Here I will not undertake a detailed description of its structure, its magnificence, or its lavishness, nor the hundreds of thousands of scudi that have been spent on it, since all these things can be read in [works by] various of our writers, who have gone into minute detail on the subject; what is clear is the fame of so noble and sumptuous a chapel throughout almost the entire world.14

Striking here are the almost obligatory paralipses, the repeated, apparently bewitched references to ‘magnificence’, ‘richness’ or ‘lavishness’ (ricchezza), and to the vast sums of money spent. Money is materialized; and the descriptions quickly return to enumerate the cash sums spent. Like Carlo de Lellis, De Dominici is quick to emphasize the fame of the chapel, ‘throughout almost the entire world’. He characterizes the chapel as nobile and sontuosa. These are part of its constitution, not simply aristocratic in patronage and conception, but in richness, materials, and effects. Matter, money and materiality are interfused, and cost, price, and value become confused in these early descriptions of the Treasury Chapel. Accounts become accounts. It is the very preciousness of the chapel that is regarded as defying description. Thus the chapel is evoked as something excessive, exceeding budgets and description. Enumeration rapidly replaces evaluation, and terms associated with high social rank, such as magnificence and nobility, elide comparative architectural interpretation and even discussion of ritual practices during the miracle. Rewriting the ex-voto chapel

In the face of the chapel’s overwhelming visual complexity and affective demands, it is no wonder that modern historians and art historians have responded to it, much as their baroque counterparts, by trying to produce order out of its apparent chaos. Modern scholars have sought to master the chapel by treating it in terms of physical and chronological extent. The ‘Quì non si descrive a minuto la struttura di essa, la magnificenza, e la ricchezza, nè la gran migliaja di scudi, che vi si spesero, da poichè tutte queste cose si leggono in varj nostri Scrittori, che minutamente ne han fatto parola; essendo chiara la fama di sì nobile, e sontuosa Cappella quasi per tutto il Mondo.’ B. De Dominici, Vite de’ Pittori, Scultori, ed Architetti Napoletani Non mai date alla luce da Autore alcuno dedicate agli Eccellentiss. Signori Eletti della Fedelissima Città di Napoli (Naples: Francesco & Cristoforo Ricciardi, 1743), 251–252.

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strongest impulse has been towards producing a chronological narrative account.15 To organize the dates of the numerous interventions into a conventional linear narrative to correspond to the physical fabric of the chapel is to treat and reproduce the chapel as simply extensive. Without exception, art historians and historians have to date interpreted the Treasury Chapel as a teleological fulfilment of a vow made during the plague of 1527.16 Its concentrated artistic splendour has been explained, overwhelmingly, in terms of struggles and triumphs of individual artists. Existing scholarship consistently characterizes its architecture as exemplifying ‘Neapolitan devotion of the Counter-Reformation’, and less insistently as the centre of the cult of San Gennaro.17 Architectural studies tend to ignore the painting and metalwork, dismissing them as ‘later additions’ that obscure the ‘original intentions’ for the chapel.18 Altarpieces and frescoes are treated as way markers in the oeuvres of individual artists. The bronze figural sculpture has been approached in isolation, without being related to the chapel’s magnificent bronze gates (Plates 1 & 3).19 Insofar as they have been A. Bellucci, Memorie storiche ed artistiche del Tesoro nella cattedrale dal secolo XVI al XVIII desunte da soli documenti inediti (Naples: Antonio Iacuelli Libraio Editore, 1915); E. Catello and C. Catello, La Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro (Naples: Edizione del  Banco di Napoli, 1977); F. Strazzullo, La Cappella di San Gennaro nel Duomo di Napoli (Naples: Istituto Grafico Editoriale Italiano, 1994); S. Savarese, Francesco Grimaldi e l’architettura della Controriforma a Napoli (Rome: Officina Edizioni, 1986), 116–125; V. Cerino, San Gennaro: un santo, un voto e una cappella (Naples: Rolando Editore, 2005). 16 Scholars who have reinforced the chronologizing impulse in interpreting the Treasury Chapel include Bellucci, Memorie storiche, 1–30; F. Strazzullo, La Real Cappella  del Tesoro di San Gennaro: documenti inediti (Naples: Società Editrice Napoletana, 1978); Strazzullo, La Cappella di San Gennaro; G. Cantone, Napoli barocca (Bari: Laterza, 1992), 109, 144, 214; Catello and Catello, La Cappella del Tesoro. The document recording the formal vow is dated 13 January 1527: ‘Die XIII Januarii 1527, Neapoli. In maiori Ecclesia Neapolitana coram nobis constitutis magnificis dominis Elettis Civitatis Neapolitanae qui, moti fervore devotionis, promettono et fanno voto donare delli denari publici di questa Città ducati undecimillia, videlicet mille d’oro per lo Tabernacolo della Ven. Eucharistia et Sacramento t dieci millia altri per lo Sacello da riponere lo reliquiario del Beato Januario Protettore di questa Citta; acciò interceda avanti lo cospetto de Dio per la liberatione alla peste di questa Città.’ Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli, Ms II-E-2, fol. 357. There were outbreaks of plague in Naples in 1522, 1526, 1527, 1528, and 1529. Most scholarship deems 1727 to be the worst of these. And most of the baroque accounts do not refer to the 1729 outbreak. See A. White, Plague and Pleasure: The Renaissance World of Pius II (Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2014), 377. 17 The identification of the Treasury Chapel and the ‘Counter-Reformation’ is most starkly drawn by Savarese, Francesco Grimaldi, 116–126. See also Cantone, Napoli barocca, 109, 144, 214. 18 See, for instance, A. Blunt, Neapolitan Baroque & Rococo Architecture (London: Zwemmer, 1975), 43–44. 19 Paola d’Agostino’s excellent study of Cosimo Fanzago thus considers his gates, without 15

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studied at all the silver reliquaries have been hived off into specialist studies of silverwork.20 Attempts to embrace architecture and sculpture together have invariably assumed a purely chronological lens.21 Thus the decoration, like the miracle, has not to date been effectively related to the architecture of the chapel. Indeed, the chapel has been treated overwhelmingly as either a passive receptacle for objects, or as mere representation of events and changes produced and existing already somewhere else. The narrative of the Treasury Chapel as a built response to the terrible plague of 1526–28 was first circulated in the seventeenth century, and has been repeated many times. In brief, it runs like this. In 1526 plague seized Naples in its deathly grip. Coinciding with a bloody war with France, this was a terrible time for the city and kingdom.22 In increasing desperation, ‘the Neapolitan people, unable to find any other solution, had recourse to the help of the saints’.23 In particular, they turned to San Gennaro, their principal patron. On 13 January 1527, the feast day of the translation of his relics to Naples from Montevergine, following the traditional procession of their patron’s relics, the Eletti of the city, an overwhelmingly aristocratic group, who constituted the  Tribunale di San Lorenzo and were responsible for the administration of the city of Naples, made a vow in the presence of the  Vicario Generale Monsignor Donato, Bishop of Ischia. They swore to raise 11,000 ducats, including 1,000 within a year for a tabernacle for the sacrament and the remaining 10,000 to build within ten years a sumptuous and magnificent chapel in San Gennaro’s honour ‘so that he will intercede in the presence of God to free our city from plague’.24 Thus a showcase for San Gennaro’s relating them in visual terms to the bronze figural work in the chapel. See P. d’Agostino, Cosimo Fanzago scultore (Naples: Paparo Edizioni, 2011), 288–292. 20 See, for example, E. Catello and C. Catello, Scultura in argento nel Sei e Settecento a Napoli (Naples: Franco Di Mauro, 2000), 32–55. 21 See, for example, Strazzullo, La Cappella di San Gennaro. 22 In 1526–27 during the absence of the Viceroy from Naples and after the death of Andrea Carafa, Count of Santaseverino, in June 1526, the Angevins once again invaded to try to recapture the Kingdom of Naples from Spain. French soldiers disembarked at Salerno and Gaeta, and got as far as Castellammare and Torre del Greco. The viceroy hurried back to Naples with a fleet of thirty ships and 16,000 infantry troops. The end of the serious French threat to the Kingdom of Naples was marked by the failure of the invasion in 1528 under the command of Odet de Foix, Monseigneur de Lautrec. Lautrec himself died of plague and the French soldiers, demoralized, retreated from the siege of the capital, suffering a severe defeat at Aversa (1528). See J. Marino, Becoming Neapolitan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 103, 115. 23 Celano, Notizie del bello, vol. III, 235. 24 ‘acciò che interceda avanti lo cospetto de Dio per la liberazione dalla peste di questa Città’. C. Tutini, Memorie della Vita Miracoli, e culto di San Gianuario Martire Vescovo di Benevento, e principal protettore della Città di Napoli, Raccolte da Don Camillo Tutini Napoletano (Naples: Ottavio Beltrano, 1633), 114. The deed of 13 January 1527 was

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relics was to be built and the basis of the constitution of the Deputation, or commssion of the chapel was established.25 By doing this, the Eletti hoped to propitiate San Gennaro and persuade him to safeguard the already devastated city of Naples from even worse disasters. Thus the city, as the municipal administration was then known, was to have patronage rights over the chapel, and the tabernacle was to belong to the Eletti.26 Many years passed before the vow of 1527 was discharged.27 The vow failed to halt the plague and, undeflected, the disease slaughtered somewhere in the region of 60,000 people in the city between 1526 and 1528. More significantly, the political will to forge ahead with the project was lacking. It was not until 5 February 1601– a full thirty-four years later – that the Eletti notarized by Vincenzo de Rosis and was signed by Marino Tomacelli for the Seggio of Capuana, Francesco d’Alagno for Nido, Galeazzo Cicinello and Antonio Sanfelice for Montagna, Alberigo de Liguoro for Porta Nova, Antonio d’Alessandro for Porto, and Paolo Calamazza for the Seggio del Popolo. See A. Bellucci, Memorie storiche, 1–2. It was made in the presence of Monsignore Donato, Bishop of Ischia, Vicario Generale of Cardinal Vincenzo Carafa, Archbishop of Naples (Strazzullo, La Real Cappella, 3). The seat of Naples’ civic administration was the Piazza di San Lorenzo, next to the basilica of San Lorenzo. From the end of the fifteenth century Naples was administered by a group of ‘Eletti’, in which the nobility had five votes and the ‘Popolo’ (‘people’) only one. Every six months each Seggio elected its own representative, the Eletto, who sat in the Tribunale. Thus the government of the city, whose population by the midseventeenth century was an astonishing 450,000, was effectively in the hands of a mere 150 noble families. Social disequilibrium, quite usual in seventeenth-century Italy, was thus dangerously pronounced through sheer force of numbers in Naples. The elect of the Popolo was chosen by the Viceroy from six names proposed for election by the fifty-eight procuratori of the twenty-nine ottine, or city districts (two procuratori for each district). After 1548 the Eletto of the people was no longer selected from the fiftyeight ­procurators of the people’s ottine, but by the Viceroy from three names voted by the procurators. G. Muto, ‘Il patriziato napoletano e il governo della città capitale’, in G.  Muto, E.  Capasso Torre delle Pastene, and Pierluigi Sanfelice di Bagoli (eds), Patriziato napoletano e governo della città (Naples: Cappella del Tesoro, 2005), 17–23. 25 Deputations or committees were bodies with specific functions. Some of them were administrative, others jurisdictional, such as the Tribunale della fortificazione, acque e mattonata. Other deputations had no jurisdictional power, but considerable political weight, such as the Deputazione contro il Santo Uffizio, the Deputazione dei capitoli e privilegi, the Deputazione della Moneta, and the Deputazione del Tesoro di San Gennaro. Muto, ‘Il patriziato napoletano’, 21. 26 See Strazzullo, La Real Cappella, 3. 27 Meanwhile the hospital of San Gennaro dei Poveri for plague victims went ahead: its vestibule was decorated with frescoes in the 1530s illustrating the life of San Gennaro, attributed to Sabatino. In 1566 Carlo Caracciolo di Vico established an annual procession on 4 November from the Annunziata to the catacombs of San Gennaro. Part of the revenue from this event was used to build homes for the poor to protect them better from the plague. C. Nichols, ‘Plague and Politics in Early Modern Naples: The Relics of San Gennaro’, in L. Dixon (ed.), In Sickness and in Health: Disease as Metaphor in Art and Popular Wisdom (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 42 n. 50.

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nominated a commission, or Deputazione, of twelve members charged with the building of the chapel. At that meeting, it was agreed to establish a chapel in the Cathedral, and to entrust responsibility for worship to a college of six chaplains and four deacons, with a Treasurer, responsible for the relics, to be chosen from the chaplains. On 21 April 1603 the deputies agreed to increase the number of chaplains from six to twelve, indicating their fast-growing ambition.28 Pope Paul V officially authorized the building of a ‘magnificent chapel’ in a Bull of 1605, and gave permission for six canons and four clergymen.29 Even then it was not until another outbreak of plague that the building of the new chapel began. On 8 June 1608 the Bishop of Calvi, Monsignor Fabio Maranta, delegating for Cardinal Ottavio Acquaviva who was in Rome, blessed the first stone in the presence of the Viceroy, the Neapolitan patriciate, and a great gathering of Neapolitans, ‘with noble pomp and display’.30 By 1615 the chapel’s basic structure was complete and marble work including the columns was begun.31 And in 1646 the deputies announced that, as the chapel was complete in structure and essential ornament, the translation of all the relics from the old Treasury Chapel (Fig. 6) could now begin.32 Costs kept pace with ambitions and rapidly spiralled. In 1633 Camillo Tutini recorded in his Memorie della Vita Miracoli, e culto di San Gianuario Martire that, while the vow had sworn to spend 10,000 ducats, even though the chapel was not yet finished, by 1633 a prodigious 140,000 ducats had already been spent ‘for its magnificence’.33 Decoration continued well into the 1770s. And new protector saints were welcomed in and accommodated until the twentieth ­century.34 Indeed, the doors are potentially open to new saints to this day. Strazzullo, La Real Cappella, 3. The six canons were to be decided by the Seggi, which also were to take it in turns to choose the Treasurer from the same group of canons. Meeting on 30 January 1606, the deputies agreed to ask the Holy See to institute twelve chaplains in addition to the six canons, indicating a renewed spiritual and institutional ambition. Strazzullo, La Real Cappella, 3–4. 30 Tutini, Memorie (1633), 114. The foundation stone was inscribed on one side: ‘Divo Ianuario, D. Aspremo, D. Agnello, D. Thomae Caeterisq: Tutelaribus, Neapolitana Civitas saeviente vi pestis, Anno 1527 sacellum vivit, 1608 fecit’; and on the other: ‘Divo Athanasio D. Severo, D. Euphebio, D. Agrippino, Paulo V. Pontif. Max. Philippo  III Rege Octavo Aquaviva S.R.E. Cardinale Archiepiscopp. Io. Alphonso Pimitello Veneventanorum Comite Prorege.’ Tutini, Memorie (1633), 114. 31 On 1 June 1615 the Deputies, considering that the basic fabric (‘la fabrica rustica’) of the chapel was complete, released Giovanni Cola Franco from his role as supervisor and engaged Cristofero Monterosso to superintend the work of the master carvers and those involved in the marble work and columns. See ATSG, 66/2, fol. 18. 32 Strazzullo, La Real Cappella, 8–9. 33 Tutini, Memorie (1633), 115. 34 The most recent silver reliquaries are those of Santa Rita (1928), St Gertrude (1927), St Lucy (1902), and St Maria Francesca of the Five Wounds (1901). 28 29

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A linear chronological account of the building and decoration of the chapel is therefore readily conceived. And, indeed, it has been repeatedly undertaken. The story focuses on great artists and their interventions in an attempt to insert the Treasury Chapel into the canon.

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An art history without artists

Scholarship has treated the Treasury Chapel as product of an individual architect, seen as providing the necessary link to developments in Rome. The Theatine architect Francesco Grimaldi was already known in Naples for his churches of the Sapienza, San Paolo Maggiore, Sant’Andrea delle Dame, Santa Maria degli Angeli, Trinità delle Monache, and Santi Apostoli.35 Thus Grimaldi emerges as caught in locality and propelled by an overpowering Hegelian stylistic current. Silvia Savarese describes him as ‘an artist who, while remaining tied to a traditional vocabulary, marked in Naples a change of taste as the hinge between local tradition and early baroque architecture’.36 The early stages of the design process are far from clear. A host of architects produced designs for the new chapel: Ciccardo Bernucci, Giovan Battista Cavagni, Bartolomeo Cartaro, Giulio Cesare Fontana, Alessandro Cimminelli, Giovan Cola di Franco; D.e d’Azzurro, Gesuè d’Angelo; Michelangelo Naccherino, Dionisio di Bartolomeo; Giovan Giacomo di Conforto.37 These designs were sent to Rome to an ‘expert committee’ and Francesco Grimaldi’s design was selected. From the start, the Deputazione snubbed local Neapolitan architects and artists, seeking instead to involve those from elsewhere. Thus on 26 January 1608 the Deputazione determined that ‘as the work is of great import, quality and expense, in order that it should reach successful completion with correct proportions and measurements, according to the design’, they would ask the Theatine Francesco Grimaldi ‘to design, direct and visit the work as necessary’, knowing his ‘intelligence and excellence sufficient to the job’. They turned to Grimaldi because ‘almost all the architects in this city are either not Grimaldi was born in Oppido Lucano in 1543, entered the Theatine order in 1574, and between 1585 and 1598 was in Rome for the building of Sant’Andrea della Valle. He died on 1 August 1613 in the Casa of Santi Apostoli in Naples, which he himself designed. S. Savarese, ‘Francesco Grimaldi e la transizione al Barocco: una rilettura della Cappella del Tesoro nel Duomo di Napoli’, in G. Cantone (ed.), Barocco napoletano (Rome: Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato Libreria dello Stato, 1992), 120. 36 Savarese, ‘Francesco Grimaldi’, 120. 37 ATSG, AB/1 (10/25-166), fol. 87r: 4 October 1607: ‘Si nota come si sono ricevuti dalli SSri Deputati l’infra[scri]tti disegni per la Cappella del gl.so S. Gennaro. Dip. di Ciccardo Bernucci di Gio Battista Cavagni, Bart.o Cartaro, Giulio Cesare Fontana, Alessandro  Cimminelli, Gio Colafranco di Gio: d.e d’Azzurro, Gesuè d’Angelo di Michel’Angelo Naccarino di Dionisio di Bart.o di Gio Giacomo di Conforto.’ 35

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above suspicion or not disinterested’ and were resentful of those appointed or whose designs were selected.38 Giovan Cola di Franco was appointed as supervisor, in recognition of his ‘hard work’ in producing a design for the chapel, which in Rome had been selected ‘in part’.39 There thus began a pattern of rivalry and division that runs through the story of the art patronage of the chapel. Thus in 1612 the deputies were searching for artists from Rome, ‘due to the scarcity in this city of sufficient artists and craftsmen necessary to an undertaking of such high quality’, as they wrote to Conte di Castro, Philip III’s ambassador in Rome.40 This replayed something of the dynamic at the Certosa of San Martino in Naples when the Carthusians at the start of work had turned to Rome, Genoa, Venice, and the Low Countries for artists.41 The deputies were initially eager to commission famous artists from outside Naples, in order to secure unquestionable prestige. Gradually those ambitions were thwarted by entrenched local artistic interests. Thus energetic historians and art historians have concentrated on chronologizing, identifying, and attributing individual artworks within the chapel.42 At first sight, indeed, a chronological narrative seems the best way to accommodate the chapel and its lengthy creation. For the chapel was not conceived or planned in its entirety at its inception: the archives amply demonstrate that the building and decoration of the chapel were long-drawn-out and complex affairs. Controversy centred on the sore ques-

‘E perchè l’opera è di molta importanza qualità e spesa, affinchè venghi con le proporzioni e misure giuste e riesca a punto, conforme al disegno di detta Capella, essendo che l’architetti sono in questa Città, quasi tutti sono sospetti et interessati per non essere presi et eletti i disegni da loro fatti, et in alcuni altri cardendo [backbiting] le difficoltà e rispetti discorsi fra essi Deputati, sapendosi la bontà sufficienza et intelligenza del padre D. Francesco de Clerici Regolari Teatini è stato concluso che se scrivi pregando il Padre generale della loro religgione che dia licenza e comandi a detto Padre D. Francesco che poss, secondo sarà necessario, revedere quell’opra si fa e designarla e regolarla di modo che venghi con ogni perfezione.’ ATSG, 10/25, n.f. (published in Catello & Catello, La Cappella del Tesoro, 397–398, doc. VI). The following deputies signed the document: Annibale Spina, Marcello Muscettola, Francesco Rosso, D. Cesare Pappacoda, Domenico Imparato, Matteo Golino, Marc’Antonio Torre. 39 ‘ha fatigato nel fare il disegno della Cappella, e nella scelta fatta in Roma il suo ha partecipato nell’essere eletto in parte’. ATSG, 10/25, n.f. 40 ‘per la scarsezza che è in questa Città di maestri et artefici sufficienti come bisognano in una opera di tanta qualità’ (27 September 1612). ATSG, 10/25, n.f. 41 R. Causa, L’arte nella Certosa di San Martino a Napoli (Naples: Cava dei Tirreni, 1973), 38. 42 See especially Bellucci, Memorie storiche, 1–30; Strazzullo, La Real Cappella; Strazzullo, La Cappella di San Gennaro; [Archdiocese of Naples], San Gennaro: tra fede, arte e mito (Naples: Elio de Rosa Editore, 1997); Catello and Catello, Scultura in argento; Cerino, San Gennaro; Savarese, Francesco Grimaldi, 116–125. 38

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tion of whether the best artists were to be attracted from elsewhere, notably Emilia Romagna and Rome, or whether they might be found in Naples itself. The competition, selection of artists, and bullying and intimidation of nonNeapolitans by native artists and their henchmen resulted in a prolonged and disputatious affair. More than most buildings the chapel was promised, stalled, begun, interrupted, and added to; ideas were altered, shelved, and reconsidered over a long period of time; attempts to secure prestigious artists ran constantly into the sands; and its primary occupants, the reliquary busts of the protector saints, shifted and proliferated as new patron saints were elected. Direction there was – above all from the Deputation, the aristocratic administrative body in charge of the chapel – but what was directed and who directed it were ever changing. The chapel underwent many alterations and developments which were unforeseeable at the time of the completion of the structural shell, let alone of the vow itself. Such a shifting story appears to demand a chronological narrative, which scholars have dutifully sought to supply. Dates and names; a chronological string; a linear history on to which to hang this overwhelming richness, to peg it out in narrative clarity, repair (and impair) the imbroglio, and produce order out of apparent chaos. There has been an apparently irresistible urge to name, to identify, to date, and to chronologize, with regard to the architecture, the frescoes in the dome and vaults, the altarpieces and altars, the reliquary busts and statues. Indeed, a chronological compilation of interventions might, at first sight, seem to be a fitting response to the nature of the documents in the Treasury’s own archive. Fragmented and lacunary though they are, records of payments and cursory notes of the Conclusioni of the meetings of the Deputazione, together with extensive correspondence with artists and agents provide names, dates, figures, and indications of what was bought and from whom, what was delivered, and how much was paid (Fig. 49). After the dating of artworks and naming of artists has followed a patient iconographical decipherment, as if the naming and identifying, the dating, listing, and ordering were to perform the ‘history of art’.43 Indeed, Georges Didi-Huberman has suggested, in a radically different context, that the history of art ‘has wanted to bury the ancient problematics of the visual and the figurable by giving new ends to artistic images, ends that place the visual under the tyranny of the visible (and of imitation), the figurable under the tyranny of the legible (and of iconology)’.44 43 44

See note 15 above. Didi-Huberman’s challenge was quite the reverse of that posed by the ‘over-filled’ Treasury Chapel: the apparently ‘empty’ whiteness in the centre of Fra Angelico’s Annunciation (c.1440–41) in the monastery of San Marco, Florence. G. Didi-Huberman,

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The pressure towards closure, and methodological sufficiency work against this chapel. It poses problems for conventional art-historical narrative, which does not seem capable of responding to it. Precisely for this reason, then, the chapel is of interest to art history: it requires alternative and less orthodox approaches. In particular, an approach willing to let go of the assumed necessary precedence of the temporal ‘frame’. An approach, then, that does not wield history to confine eventful architecture, and one that would not dismiss excess, nor so much simply grant it room, as to recognize its transgressive force as necessary and generative. The ‘artist narrative’ and ‘patronage narrative’ threaten to flatten the chapel into a linear timeline of events, at once teleological and unable to engage effectively with the effects of the chapel’s astonishing richness and sumptuous decoration. The claim here is first that a continuous historical narrative does not ‘explain’ the chapel, but locates it in a peculiarly linear  conception of history that is also circular, in which what precedes (artists’ aims or patronage) is both explained by and extrapolated from what follows (the chapel conceived as fixed and static), in which the requirements of artists or patrons are discerned from the appearance of the finished building (or designs en route), whose consequences are regarded as already envisaged, indeed desired and willed by the patrons before the first stone was laid. The dominant ‘explanation’ of the chapel in terms of the 1527 plague and subsequent vow is fundamentally flawed in assuming that we understand prima facie the workings of monuments and holy sites in the perpetuation of a cult. Instead I examine here how the cult itself has fashioned and refashioned its own explanation of the monument’s political and spiritual role, in the process disclosing its own understanding of history. Moreover, a linear narrative threatens too hastily to produce the ‘finished’ chapel as telos. Site is thereby reinvested with the desire for continuity in an anxious historicist impulse. The chapel cannot be understood through a painstaking ‘reconstruction’, which seeks to find an origin and then to trace a coherent and extensive history from that point. Not only does historicism work to abandon the historical object by equating it with its literal presence, but it tends to suspend contingency and discontinuity in favour of narrative coherence, guided by a notion of time as continuous and progressive, at least in the sense of linearity. My discomfiture with historicism runs deeper than this, however. Historicism is allied to relegating architecture (and images) to the sphere of the simulacrum, or document. This manoeuvre (sometimes conjured in response to the imperative to subordinate art work to Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art, trans. J. Goodman (University Park, Penn.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), 8, 12–52.

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‘context’) severs architecture and art from their phenomenological specificity, from their materiality and substance, and from their generative potentiality.45 In short, the Treasury Chapel as operative is eliminated in such an approach. Such an account hardly permits the chapel to do anything; it is simply an instantiation of an idea that preceded it and foretold it. This is to underestimate the capacities of architecture. A good deal of architectural history, presumably unintentionally, has the effect of limiting architecture’s own compass by proceeding in this manner.46 Architectural history too glibly assumes that there is an autonomous and stable ‘base’ or ‘origin’ ‘outside’ architecture which can serve to ‘explain’ it, and which architecture seeks to ‘represent’, to house and accommodate (or exclude).47 This is to treat architecture as expressing the social forms which are also those capable of generating it and of being generated by it. In such a model the building of a church sets up a place that did not exist before and yet at the same time its ­inhabitants – God, clergy, worshippers, ‘the Counter-Reformation’ – required the place before it was invented.48 Instead this book proceeds from the notion that architecture is not an illustration or ‘mirror’ of anything else and – above all – that it is productive.49 I depart from architectural history that posits religious buildings as ‘reflecting popular devotion’ (or anything else for that matter).50 This book therefore For a good discussion of how historicism manufactures its own unimaginable, see G. Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 30–47. 46 Recent instances abound in the scholarship focused on British architecture and Christopher Wren in particular. Thus architecture is said to ‘express’ religious devotion, power, learning, or civic ambition. Architecture is presented as mirror or representation of qualities that precede it. Too often architecture is discussed naively in terms of ‘function’ as if this can be reduced to the purely utilitarian, or as if it is selfevident. For a usefully rich discussion of the way in which ‘architecture’ is representational in its excess of building, and for the argument that that representational quality is necessarily ideological, see Denis Hollier, ‘Architectural Metaphors’, in K. M. Hays (ed), Architecture Theory since 1968 (Cambridge, Mass., London, and New York: MIT Press, 1998), 190–197. 47 See the discussion in A. Benjamin, ‘Eisenman and the Housing of Tradition’, in A. Benjamin, Art, Mimesis, and the Avant-Garde: Aspects of a Philosophy of Difference (London: Routledge, 1999), 23–29. 48 Indeed, the ‘spiritual’ is readily seen as essentially opposed to the architectural, and therefore ‘outside’ it (rendering the displacement of architecture almost salvational, redemptive). Spiritus, immaterial breath, is the counterpart to the materiality of architecture; the immateriality of the spirit and of spiritual matters is readily opposed to the body and to the matter that constitutes architecture. 49 That architecture ‘reflects’ or ‘expresses’ something that precedes it remains a common assumption in architectural history, but it is fundamentally flawed, as its dependency on the mode of the mimetic relies on binary logic to describe phenomena of entirely different natures. 50 This is a common claim in Renaissance and baroque architectural history. Thus Santa Maria dei Miracoli in Venice is described as having the ‘aim of reflecting the intensity 45

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resists both the idea that there is necessarily coherence between architecture and non-architecture (between ‘text’ and ‘context’) and also that architecture is equivalent to mere building. Thus while this book engages with various contexts of the chapel, it refuses to treat any or all of them as either unifying or determining. I present here instead an interpretation of the particular in order to understand the general; not the other way about. Thus rather than see Trent as a collective phenomenon compelled to reproduce and repeat itself indefinitely in architecture (explaining the ‘lesser’ fact of the chapel by the ‘greater’ of Trent), I think of it the other way about, that is, fractally, the greater in terms of the lesser and the whole in some way encapsulated within the part.51 Architecture is far more than a literal building. Even if one lingers on the conflicts, the false starts and dead-ends, there remains the risk of presenting the chapel as their unity, their culmination, or, worse (in the manner of much architectural history), as the end triumph over interim failures and errors of judgement which were inherently doomed to fail. For, of course, the chapel is not simply the unifying consequence of these conflicts and false starts and successes. It is also their disruption and counterpoint. But even a narrative acutely sensitive to contingency would betray the chapel. What matters here is the work that the chapel itself does. A narrative of what was done by whom at what time does not adequately explain or engage with the processes at work in the chapel, its architectural effects on the Neapolitan spiritual landscape, let alone its affective effects and what we see and feel in it. How can then one best write about this chapel art historically – as opposed to writing its linear chronological history? I emphasize here the work of the chapel, particularly in its discontinuities: that is, what the chapel produced that was not and could not have been foreseen; and what the chapel did disrupts the more readily told narratives of closure and continuity. Thus the chapters are jolts, cuts, and openings made at various angles to the chapel, rather than a continuous narrative. This is not a historical narrative of the Treasury Chapel’s building and decoration. In a famous essay, Walter Benjamin distinguished between a child’s view of colour and an adult’s.52 He suggested that adults understand colour as a layer superimposed on matter to such a degree that colour is seen as ‘a of popular devotion’. A. Schiavoni ‘Santa Maria dei Miracoli: una fabbrica “cittadina”’, in M. Piana and W. Wolters (eds), Santa Maria dei Miracoli a Venezia: la storia, la fabbrica, i restauri (Venice: Istituto veneto di scienze, lettere ed arti, 2003), 3. 51 Trent should perhaps be viewed not as producing a new frame through which to read art and architecture, but rather as an attempt to control what was uncontrollable – meaning in art and architecture. 52 W. Benjamin, Early Writings 1910–1917, trans. H. Eiland and others Belknap Press (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011), 211–213.

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deceptive cloak’. For children, on the contrary, colour is ‘fluid, the medium of all changes, and not a symptom’.53 It is with adults’ eyes in a similar sense that architectural historians are prone to approach exuberant baroque architecture such as the Treasury Chapel. There is a prevailing sense that the  very effects that produce excitement and energetic engagement are precisely those  that the scholar should strip away in order to produce an effective and rigorous analysis. Such an impulse runs deep in architectural history. Thus architectural historians have long tended to treat ground plans – – an abstraction – as the privileged form for analysis.54 In this book, instead, I seek neither to prioritize ‘structure’ over ‘decoration’, nor to distil or essentialize the chapel, not to reduce it to a single unifying narrative, and certainly not to simplify or dispel its overwhelming qualities, its disquieting tendencies, its contradictions, and its opacities. Rather, I wish to dwell within precisely those most unruly fields. The intensity of the demands the Treasury Chapel makes upon a visitor are part of its distinctive claims and are central to my analysis. I treat the visual richness of the chapel, its colour, textures, materials, not as ‘deceptive’ or misleading superficialities that must be dispelled before the ‘true’ chapel beneath can emerge, not as barriers to a clear grasp of what the chapel actually is or what it represents, but as the energetic matter of the chapel itself. This book aims, then, to see, in Benjamin’s terms, with children’s eyes, baroque architecture, materiality, and holiness. Materiality of holiness

There is no architecture in and of itself. Its status and effects have varied according to radical changes of technology and beliefs. Neither architecture nor religion existed in the first place: how the chapel and the power of the protector saints produced each other is my concern here. It is, then, architecture itself that is desirable and affective; not a concealed belief or meaning behind it. There is no autonomous ‘base’ or ‘origin’ ‘outside’ architecture which can serve to ‘explain’ it, and which architecture seeks to ‘represent’, to house, to 53 54

Benjamin, Early Writings, 211–213. Thus, for example, Anthony Blunt, a scholar of extraordinary visual sensibilities and unusually sensitive to baroque architecture, distinguished between baroque architecture which comprises ‘spatial movement’ from subordinate architecture whose effects are seen as ‘decorative’. In his discussion of Balthasar Neumann’s architecture, for example, Blunt writes, ‘Fundamentally, the churches are Baroque in that they depend on complex structural forms which are left clearly visible.’ Despite his emphasis on ground plans and abstractions, Blunt emphasizes the ‘appeal to the emotions’ of baroque architecture and its ‘rhetorical’ nature. A. Blunt, Some Uses and Misuses of the Terms Baroque and Rococo as Applied to Architecture, Lectures on Aspects of Art, Henriette Hertz Trust of the British Academy, 1972 (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), 8, 9, 29.

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embody (or exclude).10 Architecture is not the expression of meaning, but the production of sense, allowing new perceptions, new worlds. The chapel is a treasure and a treasury. The challenge is to think of a treasury as more than something that holds or whose cost can be counted. That is, to think of treasure as material and devotional potential, a potential that, implicated in the miraculous, works to produce worshippers, and forms part of their salvation, but that also facilitated and was part of the exploitation of the weak by the aristocratic elite of baroque Spanish Naples. Rather than to treat ‘excess’ as a problem that defies interpretation, or as an embarrassment to be redressed or curbed, I take it seriously and explore the manner in which the chapel exceeds. Thus this book interrogates relationships between matter, form, and the sacred, while avoiding an easy reference to a transcendent. Drawing on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Mark Wigley, among others, I argue below that what might prematurely be designated ‘container’ is activated and exceeded in unforeseeable ways by what it ‘contains’. That which it is deemed to ‘hold’ is not only partly withheld but transformed. And the city, far from being merely locus where the chapel is situated, was opened to new dynamics. Far from holding the chapel, the city is profoundly and repeatedly re-ordered by it. The relation architecture–miracle necessarily brings the relation between materiality and the sacred into focus. This book addresses that relation via architecture in the widest sense. Drawing on the brilliant work of Caroline Walker Bynum, Andrew Benjamin and other scholars, I seek to show materiality as potential and productive. Caroline Walker Bynum repositions ‘the body’ from simple ‘human individual’ to reposition it in conceptions of matter (materia).55 She explores the paradox at the heart of late medieval Christianity whereby matter was seen as both threatening and offering salvation because of its capacity to suffer change.56 For Bynum, medieval art encapsulates this paradox by insistently displaying and commenting on its own materiality; images do more than reference the divine, they ‘lift matter towards God and reveal God through matter’. I relate this to architecture drawing on Mark Wigley’s profound insights into the complex relation between architecture and the body to side-step a simple claim that architecture is productive. In place of linear historicism, this book offers a new approach to architecture by examining the matter of the miracle in relation to baroque architecture through an interrogation of the relationship between architecture and the sacred in the economy of the relic. Thus this is a study of the materiality of baroque holiness. C. W. Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (New York: Zone Books, 2011), 32. 56 Bynum, Christian Materiality, 34–35. 55

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Making matter matter

Materiality is more than sign. I consider the materials in play at the Treasury Chapel as not simply material because of their sensuous origin, for that is to risk treating origin and development as identical. Instead the approach here is to identify material in motion, in operation, at work. This is not simply the association of ideas. It is to recognize that materiality is part of the process of the exploration and development of materials, even as counterbodies are involved. Thus Cosimo Fanzago’s tremendous bronze gates (Plate 23) do not simply refer to an ideal incarnated in material form, but themselves produce an interaction between bronze, matter, form, and worshippers, all of which are conceived as historically contingent, to produce new possibilities of protection, new sensations and directions of bronze and of veneration and exclusion, necessarily unforeseeable by Fanzago and his patrons. ‘Materiality’ is emphatically not to be confused with ‘material culture’, with which the humanities are currently awash. ‘Material culture’ was advanced as part of the imperative to take matter seriously. Ironically, however, in practice such studies tend either to dissipate ‘materiality’ into a curious obdurate residue apparently beyond analysis, or to immaterialize the material in treating it too hastily as instantiation of idea.57 ‘Affect’ is then the hook that is thrown to relate ‘art’ to ‘material culture’, often depending on art to ‘represent’ affect, as in the portrayal of emotion. Art and architecture as affective thus tend to be overlooked.58 But the principal problem with ‘material culture’ is that it implies that there is an ‘immaterial culture’ from which it is distinct, that is located off-piste, as it were. These problems have arisen largely because of a ­premature haste in assuming that the ‘material’ is identifiable with the literal object (and even sometimes that this is given, known, fixed and stable). Discussions of ‘material culture’ and of ‘affect’ tend to avoid art in embarrassed silence, as if the ‘materially affective’ necessarily refers to shrouds and  handkerchiefs, aprons and marginalia – indeed, to anything other than art and architecture. As if art and architecture were anything but materially affective. Paradoxically, therefore, studies of material culture have tended to ignore the huge resource of artworks, despite the fact that art not infrequently  offers a critique of assumptions about materials and materiality. Throughout the humanities there is a renewed interest in materials and materiality. Yet architecture has hardly featured in these debates. And the relationship between potentiality and materiality has been u ­ nnecessarily ­flattened See, for instance, H. Smith, ‘Grossly Material Things’: Women and Book Production in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 58 Rather than simply assuming that art is affective, the precise ways in which this worked must be examined. 57

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by a tendency to emphasize materials and technique. Thus Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood, otherwise perspicacious scholars, resoundingly reject what they call ‘a materialist approach to historical art’: a materialist approach to historical art leaves the art trapped within its original symbolic circuits. It tends not to even notice that the artwork functioned as a  token of power, in its time, precisely by complicating time, by reactivating  prestigious forebears, by comparing events across time, by fabricating memories.59

In fact, there is no good reason to suppose that a consideration of materiality should lock artworks into time past as closed and fixed. Far from it. Arguably, thinking materiality critically is precisely one means by which architecture can be freed from the reductionism of ‘reconstructions’ of the past and of the sort of architectural history in which architecture features as no more than index of its efficient causes. In this regard, the most useful contributions have come from outside of the discipline of art history. In his consideration of materiality in relation to both architecture and potentiality, Andrew Benjamin argues that ‘matter reconceived in terms of work becomes a locus of potentiality. Potentiality is a quality intrinsic to materials once materials no longer have to bear the weight of being architecture’s irreducible essence.’60 Thus the immaterial emerges through the severance of the material and the empirical: ‘once the material and the empirical have been separated, then implicit within the work and as part of the object’s material presence is an active quality that is inherently immaterial’.61 That quality is always in excess of that which is there to be described and yet which is at work within what would have been described. This permits thinking of the object as material and within materialism rather than as idea or sensation. This book engages with materials and their potentiality, but attempts to do so historically, while allowing history to be non-linear, riven, thrawn, and productive. This is to recognize that potentiality is both historically contingent and historically productive. It is part of the possibilities that may be opened historically. Resisting the reduction of matter to a literal material presence, permits work instead with an evocation, not of transcendence, but of immanence. Thus I assume that all culture is material, but that the nature of that ‘material’ is not given. Materiality is discovered and invented in the process of making, itself a process that is not identifiable with the fabrication of discrete objects. A. Nagel and C. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2010), 18. The reference to architecture’s irreducible essence is to K. Frampton, ‘Rappel à l’ordre: The Case of the Tectonic’, in Labour, Work and Architecture. Collected Essays on Architecture and Design (London: Phaidon, 2002), 92. 61 A. Benjamin, ‘Endless Touching: Herder and Sculpture’, Aisthesis, 3:1 (2011), 76. 59 60

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Materiality is not the mere matter of an object conceived as fixed, bounded and stable. Thus this book enquires into the making that materials do. Not in the sense of technique, virtuosity, or fixed ‘function’ of a stable object, but in productive terms in which materiality exceeds the literal object, in which matter may work analogously, extensively, and intensively to permit artworks to bear a potentiality that is materially and historically implicated. Materials are treated as fluid and potential, indeterminate and changeable. Miracles and catastrophe, the relationship between the human body and change, decay and the divine, hierarchy and gender, surface and salvation are exposed here as intricately interwoven in material terms. I approach the potentiality of materials as necessarily historically contingent and thus, while avoiding a simple resort to ‘context’, or indeed to anything already given, I seek to treat materiality as inflected – that is, as always in process, vulnerable, threatened, and unrepeatable. In short, as political and controversial. This book seeks to explore materiality’s production of potentiality and its offering itself up, that must, of necessity, also entail exploitation and sacrifice. The matter of religion

In spite of insistence on the ‘treasure’ the chapel holds, the early descriptions seem better fashioned for an aristocratic palace than for a chapel. This is, of course, telling; and this book sets out to explicate the ways in which the chapel was marked as aristocratic, papal, and urban, rather than ecclesiastical or episcopal. It sets itself the task of engaging emphatically with the matter of the chapel – – that which the cited writers tend to vault over: the astonishing marshalling of metals, the complex runnels linking inside and out (such as to abolish any easy distinction between them), the potentialities without and within the chapel that are opened up and linked by procession and  movement  between urban fabric and ornate interior, and, above all, between architecture, relics, and redemption, time that returns and time and chances that are lost. For it is the chapel’s implication in religious beliefs and the sacred that is most notably absent from the early modern accounts.  I  address these matters without resort to a transcendent or to a  notion of  ‘ritual’ as  a ‘practice’ distinct from architecture, and without treating architecture as  that which makes belief visible or gives worshippers  a space in which to pray. Instead, I think architecture as that which permits the worshipper to take place, and as implicated in the self-displacing play of excess. Consequently, this book examines the relationship between relic, miracle, architecture, and city. The baroque city was reconceptualized and reformulated in visual terms. This occurred partly through refiguration of the holy,

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such that holiness was reinscribed in urban terms. But the city should be thought not as simple location of holiness, but as material part of its production. Thus I interpret the making of a patron saint as an important event in early modern Italian devotional and urban history, and – more especially – of the city itself as an event in holiness and sanctity. It is well established that both sanctity and the city were subject to renewed attention in baroque Italy, but while the mapping of early modern cities has received considerable attention, the conceptual redrawing and visual reforming of cities in baroque culture in relation to saint and relic has not received the attention they deserve. Christianity’s sanctification of history and place – often orchestrated through the relic is always provisional, always requiring confirmation, a process of infinite deferral. Not a travelling to, not a pilgrimage by a believer, but a dislocation. This is not simply dislocation of the worshipper, but a demonstration of the dislocation that is holiness’s place. Thus place is the place of difference, of dislocation, because it is holy and involved in redemption. In the Treasury Chapel holy space pertains to a specific mode of enunciation – the enunciation of the relic, of the protector saint, that is of the possibilities – and the predicament – of salvation through the city. It is necessary to consider holy place, not in terms of what it represents or means, but in terms of what it does. I treat architecture and the art object above all relationally, and in terms of relations, not as additional, but as intensificational. Thus baroque place, especially the city, is seen less as passive location for spiritual event than as active presence in constituting holiness. By conceiving the holy city not only in terms of measurable extent, but in terms of densifications, intensifications, and intercalations, we can think of both holiness and the city as fluid and mobile, in terms of intensities, rather than of either as occupying fixed geometric space. Thus, in turn, holiness and city may more effectively be thought together – including in terms of affective involvement. This is a departure from anthropological approaches to social authority and charismatic emotions. According to Geertz charisma is ‘an abiding, if combustible, aspect of social life that occasionally bursts into flame’ that he seeks to separate from questions of place and geographies.62 Geertz sees rulers as ‘justifying their existence and ordering their action’ in terms of ‘a collection of stories, ceremonies, insignia, formalities, and appurtenances’ that they inherit or invent: ‘stamping a territory with ritual signs of dominance’, making territory ‘almost physically part of them’.63 In this model place remains passive like modelling clay, imprinted with the active force of C. Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretative Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 122–123. 63 Geertz, Local Knowledge, 124–125. 62

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the ruler’s will. And the significance of the role of territory or place remains unclear. If it can be so readily impinged upon and imprinted, why was its involvement also so necessary? The notion of space as both extensive and intensive, developed by Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, is central here. In thinking holiness and architecture together, I want to avoid rehearsing them in representational terms (liturgy, ritual) or in linear, dualistic, and hierarchical terms (such as ecclesiastics/laity). Thinking space and architecture intensively permits thinking of them as unmeasurable, unfixed, and unrepresentational. This is to think a new rhizomatic form of urban holiness and architecture. In using the term ‘rhizomatic’, I am deliberately trying to invoke a non-genealogical conception of relationships of patron–architect–architecture. Ecclesiastical architecture of this date has generally been seen in terms of arboreal relations that are dualistic and hierarchical. If instead we use an entirely different schema, one favouring rhizomatic rather than arboreal functioning, which no longer operates by dualisms, a greater complexity is brought into focus. First, there are no beginnings, like those from which a linear sequence derives, and no measurable extent, but rather densifications, intensifications, reinforcements, intercalations. Further, by conceiving the holy city not in terms of measurable extent, but in terms of densifications and intensifications, we can think of both holiness and the city as fluid and mobile intensities, rather than of either as occupying fixed geometric space. Thus, in turn, holiness and city may more effectively be thought together. Rather than wielding labels like ‘baroque’ or ‘excess’ or ‘overwrought’ to dismiss the chapel, or to neatly house and contain it, or to diminish the demands it makes, I wish to engage with its multiplicity, its visual complexity, and with the sensational and affective assault that this chapel produces. The saint’s fundamentally revelatory quality has been dismally eclipsed through discourses of representation (historical and archaeological) in recent scholarship on sanctity. If we think of the chapel neither as mimetic representation of San Gennaro’s life, nor as the combined politico-spiritual ambitions of the Deputazione and archbishop, but instead as producing zones of intensity, or pure ‘affect’, of saintly might, which can enhance the human power to become, then, rather than the structuring of and container for ‘sanctity’, or for Trent, its decrees, and Catholic liturgy, architecture might be thought affectively. An affective approach to the chapel, in which architecture is not only extensive (measurable, stable), but also intensive, is pursued here. Affect is intensive and potentially redistributive. It takes place less to me, or even across me and in ways of which I am not conscious, than it elicits me. Affect occurs through the darkness of the chapel, the glinting of the silver, a flicker of candlelight, the hollowed-out niches in which darkened figures loom; a sense of foreboding and dread that spread; the dance of the trompe l’oeil floor, the dome above

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that sings. Here we are not in the realm of the pure intensities, the becoming of qualities, of which Deleuze has eloquently written (the infra-red light that we eventually will see as red), but in that of intensities that are organized, imposed upon, refracted, that produce our sense of ourselves as response to this chapel. The chapel bewilders, glamours, and leaves one thrawn. Naples was excessive also in its saints. Throughout the seventeenth century, it boasted more protector saints than any other city in Europe.64 By 1731 as many as thirty-two protectors swarmed in the chapel and by 1928 there were an astonishing fifty-two (Plates 4 & 7). Most precious of all was the relic of the miraculous blood of San Gennaro (Fig. 1). The chapel was both productive of and ‘home’ to its protector saints, but what does this mean both for their ‘home’ and for the city of Naples? The superlative richness of the chapel was also affectively productive; the chapel was productive of new forms of holiness in the heart of Naples. The chapel was literally the home of the city’s protectors, and it bound the institutions in its shadows to its own ends. Spanish silver and colonial politics ignite the chapel’s spark. This dazzling temple of heroes of the faith, this museum of sacred osteology, managed to thread precious stones and metals through withered bones and blood. The poet and Bishop of Foligno Federico Frezzi (1346–c.1416) brilliantly evoked the entwining of martyrs’ bodies with precious stones: Their hair, it looked like thread of gold, and their vermilion veins as coral seemed, and purplish their wounds. Their flesh and bones? More clear than crystal, All inlaid with gems of precious stone, Filled up with sapphire and yellow topaz.65

This book takes seriously that entwining of bodies and metals, of saintliness and stone (Plate 2 & Fig. 3). It treats that superlative richness as productive of more than excess, the chapel itself as productive of new forms of holiness in the heart of Naples, and thus of its own present and future. ‘Religious beliefs’, ‘holiness’, and ‘spirituality’ readily dissolve into opacity; indeed, they are terms whose appeal lies in their unboundedness. On what terms, then, may architecture speak in their regard? What sort of relationship between the two may be thought to take place? And where would this relationship be located? For Deleuze speakers are the effects of investments in language. Might worshippers be thought as the effects of investments in architecture? Conceiving holiness as a relationship between the absolute and the local, I treat the forms in which it appears as vital to negotiations in social, The best study of patronal sanctity in Italy remains Sallmann, Santi barocchi, esp. 83–93. F. Frezzi, Il Quadriregio (Bari: Laterza, 1914), 347.

64 65

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political, ecclesiastical, and urban relationships, but not reducible to them. Thus figural sculpture of protector saints is analysed as agent of change in urban politics, as material metaphor, as machinic, rather than in terms of iconography or vehicle of representation. Architecture, sculpture, print culture, and painting in Naples between about 1600 and 1733 rearticulated saint and city in baroque culture in terms that reorganized that key relationship and thereby altered saint and city for ever. I am not suggesting that to take holiness seriously requires detaching it absolutely from social-political stakes.66 The material implications of Christianity are profound and also necessarily social and political. Indeed Chapters 6–8 are devoted to analyses of its socio-political implications and the politics of religious issues. Chapter 5 focuses on the patronage of the Deputation of the Treasury of San Gennaro. My reading of the Treasury Chapel in relation to the aristocratic city Seggi – indirectly via their representatives in the Deputation – argues that the apparent homogeneity of ‘the chapel’ conceals radical institutional heterogeneity across the city, including alliances and enmities, competition and profound divergence. I seek to demonstrate that the apparent homogeneity of ‘the city’ that patronal sanctity  institutes, requires, conjures – and, indeed, to some extent even holds in place – is both illusionary and political in both motivation and consequence.  However, it is not exclusively socio-political. The work of spiritual materiality matters here, too. Thus I resist the notion, current in much art-historical  writing from the late twentieth century onwards, that holiness  is best understood exclusively through the lens of the social or the political, as if the socio-political precedes or stands outside the dynamics of holiness and beliefs, and as if it matters more than religion. As if, in short,  religion belongs elsewhere (beyond scholarly interpretation). Even political  motivations and political consequences are never the same: the material holy transforms the nature of the political, even as it is transformed by it. Architectural form tends too readily to be understood as the empirical instantiation of the ideal.67 An appeal to ‘spirituality’, ‘religion’, or even ‘liturgy’ risks explaining it too hastily (away), even as it might seem to proffer a useful key to unlock ecclesiastical architecture. Architecture, conceived as separate from and as constituting the material embodiment of religion or Latour has usefully remarked that ‘Religion does not have to be accounted for by social forces because in its very definition – indeed, in its very name – it links together entities which are not part of the social order’, B. Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 7. Nevertheless, it is socially implicated. Thinking of religion in relation to architecture does require the thinking of the social, albeit without treating it as a stable given. 67 This applies at all levels in the evocation of the material. 66

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spirituality, its material evocation – a ‘pointing to’ of something which either is imagined or actually exists already ‘elsewhere’ – haunts much architectural history, displacing and replacing architecture with its imagined predecessor (‘religion’) or destiny (‘spirituality’ or ‘transcendence’). Architecture thus becomes a sort of interloper, an illegitimate occupier of a space, which is more appropriately occupied by something else. Architecture, approached this way, is already off limits, always elsewhere, a mere representation of an abstract idea. Thus architecture is conceived as a technique separate from thought (and affect and spirit) and either as coming after thought (and affect and spirit) to accommodate them, or as preceding them and producing them. Conceived like this, architecture – especially ecclesiastical architecture – is like a gigantic butterfly net, able to trap ‘spiritual experience’ and pass it on to its users. This conception of architecture as ‘capturing’ or ‘expressing’ pre-existing transcendent effects, termed ‘spiritual’, because visitors ‘recognize’ them as such (like the identification of the butterfly by reference to the pre-existing wallchart), reduces architecture to conveyor belt or tunnel through which something else can be transmitted. Like the butterfly, too, such ‘spirituality’, treated as transcendent, is divorced from and indeed obviates material history. I seek instead to avoid defining either ‘architecture’ or ‘holiness’ by confining them to a fixed and stable identity in a box of periodization in terms of a (finished) past. Instead I consider both architecture and spirituality as dynamic, productive, and pluralistic, while also tending to produce each other’s limits. This is to adopt a strategy of the ontology of immanence to replace a notion of architecture as mimesis with that of becoming. This book draws together material and spiritual approaches that have too often excluded each other. Working with the understanding that truths are not declared but betrayed, I resist those approaches to holiness that tend to reduce spirituality to the explicit declarations of church councils, or to ‘liturgy’ or ‘practice’, and to those gestures conceived as effected somewhere somehow outside the material. It is also important to avoid reducing either holiness or the material to political and social concerns.68 The sociology of art neglects the technical processes and precise form of works of art. And phenomenologies of perception slight the historical religious and cultural aspects of looking practices. While I acknowledge that the socio-political is deeply significant in the formation of visual culture, the originality of my approach here consists in connecting more precisely material and spiritual concerns. In seeking to relate architecture to religion, architectural history often Recent work on ritual, praxis, piety, and theology has, by separating them from each other, either lapsed into description or served to reduce them to socio-economic mechanisms, the tools of elites, or instruments of popular resistance.

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accelerates hastily, like a hit-and-run accident. Referring to ‘religious belief’ ‘religious practice’, or ‘religious context’ or ‘ritual’, it speeds up to connect vast arrays of life and history. Frequent is the leap from a single church to ‘the Counter-Reformation’ (the latter offered as explanation of the former; the former an example of the latter). Although this book engages with issues that are conventionally subsumed under umbrella terms such as ‘Counter-Reformation’ or ‘Catholic Reformation’, I avoid these terms as  they substitute mere labels for attentive analysis. Too often buildings are described as  ‘in the  spirit of the Counter-Reformation’ or as executed to ‘serve Catholic Reform’, as if religious clouds spread an ineluctable shadow across Europe,  or as if diversity and dissension were subsumed in an early modern ‘clash of cultures’. Worse, as if architecture simply houses religion which precedes it.69 I seek here to do something more than to explain away forms assumed in architecture, sculpture, and print by simply labelling them ‘Counter-Reformational’. I also resist the notion of a pre-given social, political, or religious. This study offers an interpretation of those forms in terms of production, potential, and possibilities that are formed and reformed materially and socially in complex and specific relations. Neither religion nor architecture exists in the first place. This necessitates  a  move away from interpretations based on secure identities, a hermeneutics of depth and linear historical time, to think instead about the relationships between architecture and spirituality in baroque Naples as a continuing travail of openings, fissures, and delays. Rather than a substantative, having an essence that can be identified, holiness or spirituality is better termed an actative. This actative is conflictual and therefore unable to support an essential. Thus these categories – ‘architecture’ and ‘holiness’ – are sharpedged, cutting into other matters, rather than stable; erosive and creative, rather than static. Holiness and spirituality are not restricted here to church architecture (nor teleologically corralled within a ‘pre-modern’ period enclosure), but are intensity of affects produced in the relation of the absolute to the particular which depend on and require the mobilization of architecture. The matter of the relic: temporality and event

This book interrogates sanctity in relation to place and architecture in new ways. It departs from a conception of holiness as located within the divine or the saint, to conceive instead of place as part of a relationship with holiness, Such reductionism mars the fine scholarship of Steven Ostrow, Art and Spirituality in Counter-Reformation Rome: The Sistine and Pauline Chapels in S. Maria Magggiore (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996) and pervades most histories of Catholic art and religion.

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rather than simply its location. Space as intensive, fluid, and mobile, rather than only static and extensive, is thought in relation to the theological. To the relation city-saint, the role of relic, reliquary and reliquary chapel are treated as central. Since through the relic a saint could be present in heaven and on earth simultaneously, in the relic both the non-localizable quality of sanctity and the quality of space as intensive rather than extensive are at their sharpest. I suggest that if we broaden the focus of recent scholarship which tends to reduce holiness either to liturgy and ecclesiastical issues, or to urban politics and mundane rivalries, then architecture, holiness, and the saints emerge as important actors in the baroque. This is not simply to reinstate an older approach, since this time they are not treated as transcendent. If we think the holy city not in terms of measurable extent, but in terms of densifications and intercalations, we can think of both holiness and the city as fluid and mobile, in terms of intensities, rather than of either as occupying fixed geometric space. Thus, in turn, holiness and city may more effectively be thought together – including in terms of affective involvement. Thus this book seeks to demonstrate that we need both to conceive of the making of a patron saint as an important event in early modern Italian devotional and urban history, and of the city itself as an event in holiness and sanctity. Thus this book cuts new ground in exploring the visual economy of the relic in baroque Naples. The new chapel was justified almost exclusively in terms of reverence for relics, both in terms of housing the precious relics in more suitably respectful mode, and in terms of providing better accommodation for the increased numbers of faithful drawn to worship them. But is it possible to ‘house’ a relic? And more specifically what did it mean to ‘house’ the relics of patron saints? What is the limit of the relic? What is the matter of the relic? How did the limits and matter of relics undermine the matter of housing? The matter of the miracle [The blood] immediately liquefies, just as if it were wax placed in a fire.70

All relics are potentially miraculous. San Gennaro’s blood relic supports a particularly lively miracle (Figs 2 & 4). In relation to the orbit of relic-­ architecture the miracle appears like a vital moon. The dusty blood of San Gennaro runs crimson on feast days and special occasions, warns of, or celebrates, august or catastrophic events, but always indicates the saint’s ‘[L]’ordinario miracolo, che in esso si vede, è, che stando separato, e fuori l’aspetto della Testa del Santo, esso se ne stà tutto indurito, ed immobile; in porsi però dirimpetto la Testa, subito si liquefà, come se fusse cera posta nel fuoco.’ ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc. 83 bis n. 1), ‘Registro dei Miracoli’, fol. 2r.

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intercession in heaven with God. San Gennaro’s blood has been investigated in relation to many things, including ecclesiastical conspiracy, the laws of physics, and its historical origins.71 But – surprisingly – it has not yet been related to the architecture of the chapel which stages it. Scoffing at the miracle or dismissing it in terms of southern superstition misses the point. I am interested in the miracle’s architectural effects and I have no wish here to explain it away. The miracle is contrary to nature and disorders the matter of life and death. Thus it puts materiality into question. It invites the contemplation of matter, change of state, body, and death in relation to the divine. In disturbing, it poses the question as to what ways matter is necessary to salvation. What does it mean to ‘house’ a miracle? Can architecture begin to contain such a monstrous thing? Does the latter contain the architecture? Or is this about a housing that is not containing? What demands do miracles call forth from architecture? The miracle requires thinking architecture as part of a miraculous metamorphosis (and thus more than stage in any sense of the term). This book seeks to relate architecture to relic, reliquary, religious institutional, and aristocratic investment, to the city, and to the miracle, to the problem of the relation between change and the unchanging, and to salvation. I seek to expose the ways in which architecture is not simply responsive to pre-existing ‘religion’ (whether in theology, doctrine or liturgy, devotional practice or belief), but as operative. This is not a question of pitting ‘clericalism’ and ‘superstition’ against ‘rationality’, ‘freedom’ or ‘autonomy’ – a tendency particularly vexed in relation to the Italian south. Instead this book explores architecture as productive – that is, generative in unforeseen and  unforeseeable ways – and asks whether the worshipper might usefully be conceived as an effect of architectural effects in the broadest sense. From warm worshipping body to cold silver reliquary to noisy chaotic procession joined in desperation in the teeth of catastrophe, to the burst of red blood from grey dust, the chapel is part of an assemblage, part human, part mineral, part movement, part plural temporality, that exceeds the apparent limits of the constituent parts, even as it transforms them. It is the work of the chapel to transform visitor into worshipper and worshipper into witness. Thus this book examines the relationship between matter and miracle. How did the miracle inform the chapel and inflect its matter? In what ways was architecture implicated in the miracle? The miracles – whether the daily miracle of the Mass, or the less frequent miracle of the bloody liquefaction – 71

On the ‘scientific’ analysis of the miracle and blood, see G. B. Alfano and A. Amitrano, Il miracolo di S. Gennaro: documentazione storica e scientifica, 2nd edn (Naples: Vincenzo Scarpati, 1950).

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bring heaven to earth, death to life, and appear to dispel difference between past, present, and future. In what ways is temporality implicated in the chapel? In short, this book examines the relationships between baroque, holiness, materiality, and history through the architecture of that extraordinarily richly decorated chapel and its miracles in order to rethink spatiality and materiality in relation to holiness, and architecture in relation to religious devotion through the material. Attention to the specificity of the complex forms and temporalities at work in the Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro demonstrates that a re-evaluation of the role and nature of place – and especially of the baroque city – in thinking about holiness is urgently required. Excess and event: taking place

Finally, why Naples? What is at stake in the claim that Naples matters particularly? To focus on Naples is important for three inter-related reasons. First, Naples permits a focus on European colonialism within Europe and thus illuminates the ways in which culture was implicated in the Spanish imperial project. While colonialism outside Europe has attracted considerable scholarly attention, European colonialism within Europe remains an embarrassment, almost untouched by academics. A truly critical account of Spanish colonialism in Italy is still awaited. The self-glorifying terms of Spanish rule continue to reverberate at international conferences. Even the designations ‘colonial’ and ‘imperial’ remain fiercely contested by local and Spanish historians alike. Yet Spanish imperial rule (1503–1707) rendered Neapolitan politics and culture particularly fraught and significant, and thus complex and rich. The Spanish Crown and local aristocracy tended to bail each other out to maintain their disproportionate privileges through processes in which architecture, urbanism, and religion were intimately implicated. We urgently need to understand this. Second, Naples is a crucial site for the investigation of sanctity, particularly patronal sanctity. By the end of the sixteenth century Naples had seven patron saints (Plate 15); this already high number swelled prodigiously during the seventeenth century, with a further twenty-one recognized between 1631 and 1710 – far more than any other European city.72 What part did patronal saints play in aristocratic and institutional rivalries and urban politics and in the streets and chapels of Naples? How did patronal sanctity affect the depictions of the city of Naples in maps, paintings, sculpture, and prints; and in what ways, if at all, was this distinctive? How can architecture be thought in terms of producing holiness rather than simply housing it? How did the Besides these amassed protector saints, a swarming crowd of would-be saints and living saints occurred at all levels of society. See Sallmann, Santi barocchi, esp. 83–122, 190–257.

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Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro function less as housing for saints’ relics than as a ‘machine’ for producing patron saints? And in what ways was the city part of the production of sanctity? That is, how did the relic and the saint open the city to question? Both sanctity and the city were subject to renewed pressure in baroque Italy. While the mapping of early modern cities has received considerable attention, the conceptual redrawing and visual reforming of cities in baroque culture in relation to saint and relic have not yet received the attention they deserve.73 Historians and art historians have energetically explored ‘CounterReformation sanctity’ and its depictions, and the development of early modern cities and their visual representations in painting, maps, and prints, but their inter-relationship has received less attention.74 Indeed, that relationship as figured in a remarkable number of artworks of the period has been largely ignored by art historians. Architectural history has fruitfully examined individual buildings for the imprint of conceptions of sanctity; and some architectural historians have ventured beyond the discussion of individual buildings in comparative isolation to search for ways in which the sacred seeped out of the ‘hot spots’ into street shrines, house façades, and buildings which might seem to be predominantly secular.75 However, the question of how the city as a whole was conceived and For mapping of early modern cities see J. Pinto, ‘Origins and Development of the Ichnographic City Plan’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 35:1 (1976), 35–50; J. Schulz, ‘Jacopo de’ Barberi’s View of Venice: Map Making, City views, and Moralized Geography before the Year 1500’, Art Bulletin, 60 (1978), 425–475; D. Woodward, Art and Cartography: Six Historical Essays (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987); H. Hills, ‘Mapping the Early Modern City’, Urban History, 23:2 (1996), 145–170; C. de Seta (ed.), Tra oriente e occidente: città e iconografia dal XV al XIX secolo (Naples: Electa Napoli, 2004); M. Bury, ‘The Meaning of Roman Maps: Etienne Dupérac and Antonio Tempesta’, in M. Dorian and F. Pousin (eds), Seeing from Above: The Aerial View in Visual Culture (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2013), 26–45. 74 Outstanding in its concern with the city–saint–relation is P. Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981). Studies of sanctity of particular import include A. Vauchez, La sainteté en Occident aux derniers siècles du Moyen Âge d’après les process de canonisation et les documents hagiographiques (Rome: École française de Rome, 1981); D.  Weinstein and R. M. Bell, Saints and Society: The Two Worlds of Western Christendom, 1000–1700 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1982); S. Boesch Gajano, ‘Il culto dei santi: filologia, anthropologia, e storia’, Studi storici, 23 (1982), 119–136. The not always helpful tendency among early modernists to analyse sanctity predominantly  in terms of difference between Catholic and Protestant has usefully attenuated since c.2000. 75 Particularly important studies of individual buildings include A. Herz, ‘Cardinal Cesare Baronio’s Restoration of SS. Nereo ed Achilleo and S. Cesareo de’ Appia’, Art Bulletin, 70:4 (1988), 590–620; for consideration of the religious outside the ecclesiastical, see 73

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visualized through and in relation to saints, and the concomitant question of the relationship between images of the city and notions of (patronal) sanctity, have dropped out of focus.76 Likewise, scholarship concerned with the relation of a patron saint to the urban has proceeded via studies of individual buildings, or concentrated on the socio-political aspects of their cults. The question of how sanctity, including patron sanctity, contributed to the production of a visual image of a city – and hence shifted ‘visual identity’ from the Ideal City of the Renaissance to the holy city of the baroque while retaining its principal topographical features – has not been examined.77 Thus this book contributes to scholarship interrogating sanctity in relation to place. It does so by departing from a conception of holiness as located within especially M. Camille, ‘At the Sign of the “Spinning Sow”’, in A. Bolvig and P. Lindley (eds), History and Images: Towards a New Iconology (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), 250–251. An ambitious attempt to compare different urban dynamics in relation to saintly images in the streets of Venice, Florence, and Naples is E. Muir, ‘The Virgin on the Street Corner’: The Place of the Sacred in Italian Cities’, in S. Ozment (ed.), Religion and Culture in the Renaissance and Reformation (Kirksville, Mo.: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1989), 25–42. For the notion that Catholic urban space had ‘hot points and cold points’, while Protestants tended to dissolve the link between the sacred and place, see N. Zemon Davies, ‘The Sacred and the Body Social in Sixteenth-Century Lyons’, Past and Present, 90 (1981), 59–60. 76 The city as locus of sanctity has generally been treated in predominantly socio-political terms. See, for instance, Zemon Davies, ‘The Sacred and the Body Social’; P. Golinelli, Culto dei santi e vita cittadina a Reggio Emilia (Modena: Aedes Muratoriana, 1980); A. M. Orselli, L’immaginario religioso della città medievale (Ravenna: M. Lapucci, 1985); J. Bilinkoff, The Avila of Saint Teresa (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989); G. Labrot, ‘Le carnival des reliques’, L’arte, 9 (1970), 28–48. For scholarship more engaged with holiness in relation to materiality and the built environment, see T. M. Lucas, Landmarking: City Church & Jesuit Urban Strategy (Chicago: Loyola Press, 1997); T. M. Lucas, Ignatius Rome and Jesuit Urbanism (Vatican City: BAV, 1990). For the place and spectacle of canonization itself, see N. N. Rasmussen, ‘Liturgy and Iconography at the Canonization of Carlo Borromeo, 1 November 1610’, in John Headley and John Tomaro (eds), San Carlo Borromeo (London: Associated University Presses, 1988), 264–276. Louise Marshall offers fresh readings of sacred images during plagues: L. Marshall, ‘Manipulating the Sacred: Image and Plague in Renaissance Italy’, Renaissance Quarterly, 47:3 (1994), 485–532; L. Marshall, ‘Confraternity and Community: Mobilizing the Sacred in Times of Plague’, in B. Wisch and D. Cole Ahl (eds), Confraternities and the Visual Arts in Renaissance Italy: Ritual Spectacle Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 20–46. However, in retaining Richard Trexler’s notion of ‘framing of the sacred’, Marshall persists in thinking of the city as backdrop, of ‘a ritual landscape’ as occurring within the city (rather than including the city). 77 Useful work on patron saints includes H. C. Peyer, Stadt und Stadtpatron im mittel­ alterlichen Italien (Zurich: Europa, 1955); G. Fiume (ed.), Il Santo patrono e la città. San Benedetto il Moro: culti, devozioni, strategie di età moderna (Venice: Marsilio, 2000). A reading of the patron saint in instrumental terms is S. Kaplan, ‘Religion, Subsistence, and Social Control: The Uses of Saint Genevieve’, Eighteenth Century Studies, 13:2 (1979–80), 142–168.

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the divine or the saint, to conceive instead of place, particularly the city, as part of a relationship with holiness, rather than simply its location. ‘Naples’ is posed as a question, rather than given as a solution. To the relation city–saint, the roles of relic, reliquary, and reliquary chapel are treated as central. Since through the relic a saint could be present in heaven and on earth simultaneously, in the relic both the non-localizable quality of sanctity and the quality of space as intensive rather than extensive are at their sharpest. In turn, this requires a reconsideration of the role of the patron or protector saint. We need to consider holy place, not in terms of what it represents or means, but in terms of what it does. I treat architecture and the art object above all relationally, and in terms of relations, not as additional, but as intensificational. Thus baroque place, especially the city, is seen less as passive location for spiritual event than as active presence in constituting holiness. Above all, to focus on Naples is to challenge meridionalismo, which, as it remains – alas – alive and well, must urgently be tackled. Indeed, reactionary cultural trends in Europe are presently reifying and reinforcing it. Mainstream art history still treats southern Italy as beyond the pale, albeit quaintly exotic. Even today respectable art history departments flinch from referring to Naples on their websites, lest it deter easily frighted applicants. Stereotypes die hard. In spite of increasingly sophisticated scholarship focused on Naples, studies of baroque architecture or of early modern Italy continue to treat Naples as ‘extra’, additional, superfluous (a form of excess), and as that which can only be understood by reference to ‘the centre’, mistakenly but conventionally, conceived as Rome – in fact, the most anomalous of cities. Meridionalismo persists in the characterization of the south in terms of extremes, of the exotic, and of the unsophisticated. Neapolitan history is still approached in terms that would not be used in relation to Florence or Rome.78 Some would have it that ‘religiosity’, not ‘religion’, is found here; Neapolitan practices and rituals remain exoticized, deemed ‘extreme’, ‘excessive’, and ‘exaggerated’.79 ‘The masses’ and ‘the people’ are imagined as holding sway down south, a people far removed from the loci of reason and erudition (necessarily further north). In terms of temporality the south is imagined as behind, backward, struggling to ‘catch up’. Naples and Neapolitans are represented as less sophisticated than their northern counterparts, subject to impulsive urges, rooted in body and in matter conceived as base. This is not to treat the south This is a form of primitivization which, to date, has been studied within art history in relation to colonialism outside Europe. 79 On the north–south divide in Italian culture and history, see T. Astarita, Between Salt Water and Holy Water: A History of Southern Italy (New York: W. W Norton, 2006), 7–9; Lumley and Morris (eds), New History of the Italian South; R. D. Putnam, La tradizione civica nelle regioni italiane (Milan: A: Mondadori, 1993); P. Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics, 1943–1988 (London: Penguin, 1990). 78

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relationally, but to judge it against an imaginary ‘norm’. I have tried in this book to write a non-normative architectural history of particularity, one that takes the south, baroque as excess, and the excess of sanctity seriously. This is necessarily to engage with southern baroque architecture in terms of ‘excess’. The question of ‘excess’ is itself also one of extremes. Neapolitan architecture, religious practices, and beliefs are still routinely presented as extreme, exotic, and excessive in order, precisely, to be taken less seriously than the supposedly less extreme, exotic, and peculiar practices at play in the canonical ‘centres’, Venice, Florence, or Rome. All this makes Naples matter more. While architectural history has generally proved intensely resistant to materiality (as opposed to materials and techniques), the history of the Italian south has been made to matter too much (characterized in terms of unrestrained appetite, unruly bodies, profligate adornment, rubbish mountains, and dirt). Where better, then, to focus an enquiry into the relationships between matter and religion and place? Organization of the book

The structure of this book is designed to hold the issues introduced above in tension. Part I, ‘The miracle’ (Chapters 1–3), focuses on the miraculous blood and its consanguine fields to examine how the miracle distinguished itself in relation to place. Thus the miraculous blood is treated as part of the production of a specific materiality of place, in both the broadest and narrowest of terms. Part II, ‘Patrons and protectors’ (Chapters 4 and 5), examines the interplay between patrons and protectors; and Part III, ‘The choreography of sanctity’ (Chapters 6–9), considers the Treasury Chapel as the interaction of movement and sanctity in relation to matter and affect, particularly the transport of salvation. Chapter 1 focuses on the miracle of San Gennaro, the blood that courses through the chapel and its telling. This chapter examines the blood as change. The blood changed. It changed itself from brown to red, from still solid to mobile fluid. But it did more than change itself. It wrought change in others. And in so doing it rooted itself in Naples. In the miracle, material, nature, and the divine interact. The blood’s capacity to change, indeed, its capacity as change, cuts into two related questions. The problem of temporality and its relationship to repetition and the problem of how mutable matter could refer to the immutability of God. In its appearance and disappearance the miracle raised some of the questions posed by the sacrifice of the Mass: how could it be momentary, yet eternal? How was change to be understood in relation to the divine? Unlike an iconic sign which established reference through visual resemblance, the miraculous blood, like the consecrated host, offered identity without resemblance, thus bypassing the image problem. It also offered

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(apparent) repetition without difference in contrast to the drift and variation exhibited by images.80 That is, the blood combined change in state with continuity, repetition that did not risk formal drift, devotional love that alteration finds. Gennaro’s blood as the desire to reconcile the changeable and the unchangeable is explored in relation to the miracle seen less as repetition than as a series of ‘only onces’. My book recasts the relationship city–saint via relics and telluric philosophy. Chapter 2 considers liquefaction, the shift from something solid to liquid and back again in relation to blood, bronze, and volcano. Nature, matter, and the divine are considered as operating in analogous relation thorough heat in the working of the Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro. Cosimo Fanzago’s great bronze gate (Plate 1) is interpreted through telluric philosophy, as part of the relationship between saint, blood, and Vesuvius, the transformation of metals and other materials through heat. The miracle as witness and the witness of the miracle are explored in Chapter 3, ‘Miraculous witness: exclusive affects’. A ‘miracle’ etymologically is an event that produces wonder or marvelling. In addition, a ‘martyr’ was a ‘witness’. Here the moods and affect of the miraculous blood, its capacity to produce communitas, along with its intolerant, accusatory, and exclusive tendencies to isolate heretics and foreigners are investigated. Chapter 4, ‘The machinic chapel and the production of protectors’, addresses the Treasury Chapel as part of a machinic interlinking of saints, bodies, minerals, and investment. The chapel is superabundantly inhabited by relics and saints and, by extension, by external institutions which were invested in the chapel through their espoused saints. The effect is not of simple population, but of over-population, a synthesis of heterogeneity, of saintly reproduction and overflow. I argue that the Treasury Chapel generates protector saints, including San Gennaro. That production is necessarily intimately related to Naples’ spiritual topography, since to produce patronal saints is also to produce the city. Thus the chapel’s production of patronal sanctity reconfigures Naples’ spiritual topography. Chapter 5, ‘From prayer to presence’, focuses on the Renaissance Succorpo chapel (1497–1506) below the main altar of Naples Cathedral as the principal precursor to the Treasury Chapel (Plate 11 & Fig. 8). This allows the Treasury Chapel to emerge as a significant reorchestration of the cult of San Gennaro, moving it from an introverted, if politically ambitious, Carafa family affair to a divine address articulated in terms of the city of Naples as a whole. The new Treasury Chapel is presented here as a calculated repudiation of that Carafa chapel, as the Deputation sought to widen its address to the city as a 80

A. Nagel, The Controversy of Renaissance Art (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 204.

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whole. The Seggi aristocracy thereby laid claim to a ‘proper place’, a sphere of influence where their political will could be mobilized and transformed into saintly influence.81 Claiming such a place (the Treasury Chapel) enabled them to accumulate and exchange material goods, cultural capital, and spiritual authority. Thus aristocratic deputies were implicated in a web of practices in which their power was extended and simultaneously disguised.82 Chapters 6 and 7 investigate the weaving of relationships between chapel interior and the city through the extraordinary mobility of the silver reliquaries. Relics were not simply moved from one point to another (translation), but in that movement they transformed and became (variation); on assuming residence in the chapel, each new reliquary statue altered it. The translation of the relics represented the acquisition of a power that the community regarded as superior to human nature. Chapter 6, ‘Niche and saints: folding the wall’, takes as its focus the apparently insignificant niches that line its walls and that hold the reliquaries (Figs 3 & 11). It explores the multiplication and fragmentation of saintly bodies and of architecture in the Treasury Chapel in the fractured and contradictory relationship between architecture and saintly body, relic and wall. While Chapter 6 considers the chapel from within and as introverted, Chapter 7, ‘Saints on the move and the choreography of sanctity’, conversely sees it as extroverted, and turns it inside out to trace the translation of relics and the processions of saints beyond its walls. Thus it focuses on the singular mobility of its numerous silver bust reliquaries of protector saints. Most of those reliquaries belonged not to the Treasury Chapel itself, but to churches, monasteries, and convents across the city of Naples, to which institutions they solemnly returned on their respective feast day processions. This c­ hapter interrogates the urban address of the chapel, its distinctively centrifugal forces, and its enzymatic characteristics in relation to those busts and the processions associated with them. It suggests that the silver busts radically perforated the chapel and extended it across the city, such that the chapel became a point of intensified deterritorialization and reterritorialization, social and spiritual, in the city. Interior space is shown to be harnessed to external institutional dynamics beyond it, and the chapel is revealed as a machine producing new forms of urban spirituality. Thus the chapter examines the chapel in terms of the peripatetic, of perforation, prosthesis, and movement to tell of the chapel’s Michel de Certeau: ‘le lieu propre’, or ‘the proper place’ – a concept taken from P.  Bourdieu, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. S. Randall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 55. 82 See S. Lindenbaum, ‘Ceremony and Oligarchy: The London Midsummer Watch’, in Barbara A. Hanawalt and Kathryn L. Reyerson (eds), City and Spectacle in Medieval Europe (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 173, for ­comparable examples in a radically different context. 81

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shifting topography in relation to the making of Naples city, or, rather, its continual remaking in the face of sanctity. Chapter 8, ‘Holiness and history: relics and gender’, explores how the enclosed aristocratic convent of Santa Patrizia used its relics of St Patricia – a female rival to San Gennaro – to vault its enclosure walls and to intervene in the Treasury Chapel, quite beyond its own confines, in order to secure and extend its own spiritual authority in Naples. This chapter demonstrates that print culture and relics worked to connect physically distinct architectural spaces (female convent and city chapel) and open up routes for urban intervention for nuns bound by enclosure. ‘Heads and bones: face to face’, Chapter 9, examines the reliquaries’ predominant bust form (Fig. 59), especially its religious significance, and Chapter 10, ‘Silver saints: between transformation and transaction’, investigates the relationships between silver and salvation activated and opened by the Treasury Chapel’s many splendid reliquaries. Silver, the material from which the patronal saints’ reliquaries are overwhelmingly made, is treated not as passive given matter, but – like bronze in Chapter 2 – as a quality to be discovered and invented. The silver of the reliquaries is related to Spanish imperial power and the flow of capital from the so-called ‘New World’, and to exchange and transformation. Material and immaterial, intimacy and desire, surface and depth are explored through silver. In their shimmering surfaces the reliquaries have the capacity to shift between silver as profit and silver as salvation, between wonderful transformation and mere instrumentalism. Silver, then, as the shimmering possibility of salvation as a promise. And with it the possibility of shifting sacrifice into redemption – a possibility that can so easily tarnish into mere calculating transaction.

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Prologue: the analogous relic

Mostly running, everyone [made] at once for Naples, like madmen, not, indeed, in the hope that these walls would be sufficient to protect them, but to come to die – as they said to anyone who asked them – in a city populated, and filled with saints’ bodies and relics; there not being, in truth, among those one encountered, a single person with [any] breath or strength [left] to retell what he had seen or heard; but carrying with them nothing other than [their] fear and apprehension, confused, dispirited, and dumbfounded, they could only cry out, without pausing in their flight: ‘Great ruination, great ruination, Last Judgement, death, fire, wrath of God!’ (Giulio Cesare Braccini, Dell’Incendio Fattosi nel Vesuvio, 1632)1

The matter of the relic

To think of San Gennaro’s Treasury Chapel (Plates 1 & 3) as extensive in physical or temporal terms produces a linear narrative, an orderly description of the chapel, and is to organize it spatially and chronologically into distributed blocks. It orders different parts of the chapel into discrete functions. To think of the chapel as sheltering the relics – of San Gennaro and of the other protectors – is insufficient to them. Relics were not simply moved from one point to another (translation); in that movement they transformed and became (variation). And, on assuming residence in the chapel, each new reliquary statue altered it. The translation of relics represented the acquisition of a power that ‘correndo per lo più tutti alla volta di Napoli, come forsennati, non già con speranza, che queste mura fussero sufficienti alla sicurezza loro, ma per venire a morire, come dicevano ad ogn’uno, che li interrogava, dentro di una Città popolata, e piena di Corpi, e  ­reliquie di santi: non essendo però veruno tra quelli, che si incontravano, il quale avesse lena, o spirito di ridire ciò, che veduto, ò sentito aveva: ma non portando con loro altro, che il timore, e il remore, confusi, avviliti, e sbigotti gridavano solo, senza ritener la fuga: Rovine grandi, rovine grandi, Giudizio Finale, morte, fuoco, ira di Dio.’ Giulio Cesare Braccini, Dell’Incendio Fattosi nel Vesuvio a XVI di Dicembre M.DC.XXX (Naples: Secondino Roncagliolo, 1632), 33.

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the community regarded as superior to human nature. Simply to tell such events in linear sequence is insufficient to them. This book centres on relics as occupying particularly fertile points at the intersection of materiality and spirituality, holiness and spatiality, body and place. The Chapel of San Gennaro, as a treasury for the relics of Naples’ proliferating protector saints, permits a consideration of the relationships between relic and place in both the narrowest and a more extended sense. Rather than think in terms of fixed linear scales and thus of the city as the site of the chapel, and chapel, in turn, as site for the conservation and veneration of relics and their miracles, this book proposes that the economy of the relic produces change in place and place as change. Relic as locus of the sacred does not secure place. Thus the implication of holiness in the architectural production of place is brought into view. A relic is a trace which guarantees aura (Plate 8). Through the relic intersect orbits of time, movement and place. In other words, relics combine different orders of time and different orders of place. That intersection focuses on a corporeal remnant of the body of a human being deemed to be a saint, which, in turn, permits and requires thinking the interplay of time, movement, and space in relation to the materiality of the sacred. Desire enmeshes one flow with another through the relic. Yet relics emerge as relics only through their staging in a reliquary. Relics are staged architecturally. Architecture stages, comments on, amplifies, and produces the relics that it supposedly simply houses. Though apparently at one step removed, architecture is, on the contrary, essential to the economy of the relic. The Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro forged and sustained such an economy and, indeed, continues to do so. More than this, relics displaced and changed the place of their staging, including the place of architecture. Thus architecture enters forcefully into the configuration. Architecture must therefore be considered in relation to trace and aura, the materiality of the sacred, and the interplay of temporality, spatiality, and movement. This is the challenge that the relic throws down to architecture and that I take up in this book. For long objects of distaste, especially to art historians, relics are now widely recognized as significant for histories of theology, devotion, art, and architecture. Sofia Boesch Gajano, Caroline Walker Bynum, Patrick Geary, Barbara Drake Boehm, Jean-Claude Schmitt, Peter Dinzelbacher, and Dieter Bauer have transformed the field.2 In recent years art historians have ­followed On the cult of relics, see especially P. Dinzelbacher and D. R. Bauer, Heiligen Verehrung in Geschichte und Gegenwart (Ostfildern: Schwabenverlag, 1990); C. W. Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995) and ‘The Female Body and Religious Practice in the Later Middle Ages’, in M. Feher with R. Naddaff and N. Tazi (eds), Fragments for a History of the

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these scholars. In art history Alexandra Herz and Ingo Herklotz have situated relics and architecture in an archaeologizing and reactionary devotional impulse that they see as characteristic of early modern Rome.3 John Beldon Scott interprets the Shroud as fulcrum for the articulation and consolidation of Savoyard rule and dynastic authority in Turin.4 Paul Binski treats Canterbury Cathedral as glorious reliquary and gigantic representation of St Thomas Becket’s relics.5 Cynthia Hahn’s study of medieval reliquaries examines a great variety of beautiful reliquaries as ‘containers’ and ‘works of art’ that mediate religious experience and political and institutional demands in terms of ‘representation’.6 She is particularly interested in the relationship between the nature of the relic and the form of its housing. Beyond the history of art, remarkable new thinking about relics has come from Georges Human Body, pt I (New York: Zone, 1989), 163; P. Geary, Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994) and Furta Sacra: Theft of Relics in the Central Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978); A. Joblin, ‘L’attitude des Protestants face aux reliques’, in E. Bozóky and A. M. Helvétius (eds), Les reliques: objets, cultes, symboles (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999), 23–141; J. C. Schmitt, ‘Les reliques et les images’, in E. Bozóky and A. M. Helvétius (eds), Les reliques: objets, cultes, symboles (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999), 145–168; F. Scorza Barcellona, ‘Le origini’, in A. Benvenuti et al. (eds), Storia della santità nel cristianesimo occidentale (Rome: Viella, 2005), 52–61; S. Boesch Gajano, ‘La strutturazione della cristianità occidentale’, in A. Benvenuti et al. (eds), Storia della santità nel cristianesimo occidentale (Rome: Viella, 2005), 105–108; E. Bozóky, ‘Voyages de reliques et demonstration du pouvoir aux temps féodaux’, in Voyages et voyageurs au Moyen Âge (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1996), 267–280; H. Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. E. Jephcott (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1994), esp. xxi. The excellent exhibition held at the British Museum, London, in 2011 and its rich catalogue attest to growing popular interest in relics; see M. Bagnoli et al. (eds), Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics, and Devotion in Medieval Europe (London: The British Museum Press, 2010), esp. A. Angenendt, ‘Relics and their Veneration’, 19–28.  3 I. Herklotz, ‘Katakomben: Begräbnisstätten, Gedächtnisorte und Arsenale im Glaubensstreit’, in C. Strunck (ed.), Rom: Meisterwerke der Baukunst von der Antike bis heute. Festgabe für Elisabeth Kieven (Petersberg: Imhof, 2007), 104–109; I. Herklotz, ‘Historia sacra und mittelalterliche Kunst während der zweiten Hälfte des 16. Jahrhunderts in Rom’, in R. De Maio et al. (eds), Baronio e l’arte: atti del convegno internazionale di studi (Sora, 10–13 ottobre 1984) (Sora: Centro di studi sorani Vincenzo Patriarca, 1985), 21–74; I. Herklotz, ‘Wie Jean Mabillon dem römischen Index entging: Reliquienkult und christliche Archäologie um 1700’, Römische Quartalschrift für Christliche Altertumskunde und Kirchengeschichte, 106 (2011), 193–228. Important studies of individual buildings include A. Herz, ‘Cardinal Cesare Baronio’s Restoration of SS. Nereo ed Achilleo and S. Cesareo de’ Appia’, Art Bulletin, 70:4 (1988), 590–620.  4 J. B. Scott, Architecture for the Shroud: Relic and Ritual in Turin (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003).  5 P. Binski, Becket’s Crown: Art and Imagination in Gothic England, 1170–1300 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004).  6 C. Hahn, Strange Beauty: Issues in the Making and Meaning of Reliquaries, 400-circa 1204 (University Park, Penn.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), 23.

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­ idi-Huberman. His reflections on ex-voto artefacts and on the Shroud of D Turin have interrogated the indexical presupposition about these objects. A divide has arisen in relics scholarship. Art historians have concentrated overwhelmingly on reliquaries, while historians are more concerned with the use of relics in worship or for political ends. Early modern historians and architectural historians have focused on a historiographical and archaeological deployment of relics conceived in terms of representation. Thus relics’ role in religious devotion, pilgrimage, and the consolidation of authority by secular and ecclesiastical rulers has received attention.7 Inter-relationships between ecclesiastical and courtly power have been approached from the point of view of secular patronage, and thus the spiritual and ecclesiastical are posited as an important mode by which secular power extended and consolidated its claims. Thus relics have been treated overwhelmingly in representational terms. Their strange spatial and temporal capacities have been smoothed out in linear historicism and ignored. I am indebted to the work of all these scholars, but I depart from them in two significant respects. First, I draw the instability and destabilizing qualities of relics into direct relation with issues of materiality, spatiality (particularly architecture), and temporality. Second, I challenge the way in which what might loosely be termed the ‘religious’ dimension of relics has tended to be condensed too hastily into something called ‘ritual’ seen as an extension of secular power.8 This book explores the implication in and through relics of the The relationship between relic, architecture, and urban space has tended to be treated in terms of representation. For example, Richard Schofield’s marvellous essay on relics in Milan treats relics and reliquaries as passive objects that are translated, processed, or contained across space which remains stable, rather than as vehicles of metonomy, capable of disrupting and accelerating or striating space (see Schofield, ‘Architecture and the Assertion of the Cult of Relics in Milan’s Public Spaces’, Annali di architettura: rivista del Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio di Vicenza, 16 (2004), 79–120). In an important contribution on the relationship between architecture and relic, Scott discusses the ostension of the Turin Shroud in relation to the growing ambitions of the Savoy dynasty (Scott, Architecture for the Shroud). Thomas Dale argues that the twelfth-century mural painting in the crypt of Aquileiea Cathedral occupied a complementary relationship to the relics of Hermagoras (the cathedral’s founding bishop) in their distinctive devotional and political roles. Significantly he locates this in relation to the Carolingians’ promotion of the city’s status as patriarchal see of Venetia, its preeminent locus sanctus, permanent resting place of the founding bishop of the regional church (T. E. Dale, Relics, Prayer and Politics in Medieval Venetia: Romanesque Painting in the Crypt of Aquileia Cathedral (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), esp. 42–56, 83).  8 Relics and ritual have received considerable attention from historians in recent years, having been studied predominantly in relation to the exercise of political and courtly, as well as ecclesiastical, power. Francesco Freddolini, for example, has brilliantly examined the appropriation of liturgical spaces within churches in Livorno by Medici courtiers and grand ducal officials, and grand ducal power in relation to courtly rituals  7

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registers of the theological, ecclesiastical, and devotional in materiality, spatiality, and temporality. Thus I aim to trouble the currently too steady grounding of relic in ‘place’ treated as if that place is fixed and stable and is simply enriched spiritually and politically through close identification with saintly remains. In short, I wish to free the relic from the shackles of representation and to treat it less in terms of identity than in terms of difference and analogy. In their brilliant book Anachronic Renaissance, Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood argue that alongside the timeless object that resists  anchoring in time and whose historicity is unclear is ‘a completely different kind of  object whose historicity, its link to a point in time is the entire basis of its value’.9 Such an object, Nagel and Wood suggest, is called a relic. Writing of relics in medieval religious culture, Nagel refers to relics as marking ‘a limit point in the system of signs’, seeing them in distinction to images,  ‘even the most revered’, which, they suggest, were ‘eminently replaceable’.10 By contrast with images that tended to propagate their power through replication, the relic, suggests Nagel, ‘was defined as the unsubstitutable sign, a sign whose physical relationship to its origin was a necessary part of its meaning’.11 He argues that as relics were demoted, artworks were ‘raised to relic-status’, but ‘the idea that powerful originals were somehow effective through their copies never died away’.12 For the purposes of Nagel and Wood’s argument, a great range of objects falls into this category. Nagel and Wood distinguish this sort of object from the ‘structural object’ which ‘hesitates’ between its possible historical identities, not settling on any of them, and thus able to function both as a marker of a great span of time and as a usable instrument in a living ritual. For Nagel and Wood, the artwork most effectively generates the effect of doubling or bending of time, in an and ‘Medicean sacred spaces’, distributed throughout many centres in Tuscany during Cosimo III’s duchy (1670–1723). See F. Freddolini, ‘Scultori e mecenati a Livorno nel primo Settecento: liturgia, spazi del sacro e spazi della corte’, in A. Prosperi (ed.), Livorno 1606–1806: luogo di incontro tra popoli e culture (Turin, London, Venice, and New York: Umberto Allemandi, 2009), 243–255; F. Freddolini, ‘Courtly Rituals and Spaces in Medicean Tuscany under Cosimo III’ (unpublished paper, 2010) and ‘John Talman in Florence: The Court, the Courtiers, and the Artists’, in C. M. Sicca (ed.), John Talman: An Early-Eighteenth-Century Connoisseur (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008), 127–157.  9 Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, 8. 10 A. Nagel, ‘The Afterlife of the Reliquary’, in M. Bagnoli et al. (eds), Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics, and Devotion in Medieval Europe (London: The British Museum Press, 2010), 212. Images revered on account of their authorship or miraculous nature play a more complex role than Nagel’s claim here allows. 11 Nagel, ‘The Afterlife of the Reliquary’, 212. 12 Nagel, ‘The Afterlife of the Reliquary’, 214.

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event whose relation to time is plural. They show how even ‘irreplaceable’ relics have indeed been replaced. Thus after the emperor Nero stripped many temples of  their gifts  and melted down images of gold and silver including  those of the  Penates, the next emperor, Galba, simply had the statues recast.13 For Wood and Nagel what is of interest is the way in which artworks maintain identity despite alteration or renovation. This they see as a ‘sustaining myth of art in premodern Europe’.14 They argue that the power of the image, or the work of art, to fold time was neither discovered nor invented in the Renaissance, but that what was distinctive was its ‘apprehensiveness about the temporal instability of the artwork, and its recreation of the artwork as an occasion for reflection on that instability’.15 The work is late, they suggest, first because it succeeds some reality that it re-presents, and then late again when that re-presentation is repeated for successive recipients. To many that double postponement ‘came to seem troublesome, calling for correction, compensation, or, at the very least, explanation’.16 They suggest that in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Christians wondered whether the temporal instability of images made them more or less suitable for religious devotion. Thus while the use of the term ‘anachronism’ implies a requirement to see art in euchronic terms, a coeval witness in relation to a singular time, and history as having an inalienable relationship with historicism, a consideration of the artwork as ‘anachronic’, by contrast, describes what an artwork does, qua art, in a ‘late’ relation to time. Nagel and Wood’s work lends support to my approach to architecture as something that cannot adequately be dealt with in purely historicist terms and as more than index that points to its own efficient causes. I wish to develop their treatment of the relic through a consideration of its theological and spatial import, to show that the ‘origin’ and ‘place’ of the relic were necessarily plural and unstable.17 In play here, then, are relics’ productive capacities to destabilize linear conceptions of time and space. The story, told by Suetonius in Lives of the Twelve Caesars, is quoted by Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, 8. The Penates, according to Ovid’s Fasti, were the fragmentary remains wrested from the ruins of Troy and carried by Aeneas to Italy. Thus, though regarded, like relics, as irreplaceable, they differ from Christian relics in ways that Nagel and Wood do not observe. 14 Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, 8, 9. 15 Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, 13. 16 ‘The work of art when it is late, when it repeats, when it hesitates, when it remembers, but also when it projects a future or an ideal, is “anachronic”’. Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, 13. 17 While Nagel and Wood do consider some architectural examples, their work privileges painting and sculpture; and they tend to treat architectural and urban space as containers or in terms of embedded semantic ‘meaning’. Thus their discussion of Leon Battista’s 13

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Relics and the Eucharist

Christian theology bases the legitimacy of the cult of relics on the sacred character of the body of Christ destined to transmit a message of spiritual health through his incarnation, the Eucharist, his death, his Resurrection, and the guarantee of the resurrection of bodies on the day of the Last Judgment. The resurrection of the body seems to demand a theory of the person in which body is integral. God became incarnate and died for the sins of others. Thus all bodily events (including the terrible wounds of martyrs) were possible manifestations of grace. While the cult of relics depends on the Resurrection, it is not focused on Christ’s body. A belief in Christ’s corporal relics is logically contradicted by the Ascension and the Eucharist, as Guibert of Nogent made clear. While the whole body of Christ mounted to heaven, the corpus sacramental, the host, is not a relic, a dead body, but a living body. Aquinas argues that the blood of Christ in its entirety is elsewhere. Christ’s blood, free from original sin, is entirely glorified and revived. He admits, however, that ‘certain churches preserve as a relic a small amount of Christ’s blood. His body is therefore not revived in the integrity of all its parts.’ Aquinas resolves this apparent conundrum: ‘As for the blood that certain churches preserve as a relic, it did not flow from the side of Christ, but miraculously, they say, from an image of Christ [imagine Christi] that someone had struck.’18 Thus this miraculous blood is superfluous, extracorporeal, and the image from which it flows is prosthetic, almost cyborgian. In the West the cult of relics began theologically with St Augustine, but was further defined in the Middle Ages, under the pressure of heretical movements which denied their value.19 Initially Augustine opposed the cult of relics, but Tempio Malatestiano of the 1540s in Rimini depends on authorial will as driving a distinction between the older building and the new, core and shell, ‘relic and reliquary’. The gap Alberti created between the two is interpreted as symbolizing ‘the distinction between a building that simply existed, fulfilling its functions, and a new kind of building capable of conferring intentional meaning’. Thus for Nagel and Wood much ends up depending on authorial intentionality, even if they do not identify the task of the art historian as simply being to decipher it. Likewise architectural deployment of spolia is seen as ‘touching off a subtle semantic interchange between spoliation and citation’, as if what is at stake is principally a relationship between buildings that is ‘intertextual’. See Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, 176–177, 184. 18 Aquinas, Summa theologica, pt 3, q. 54, art. 3; ed. and trans. C. E. O’Neill (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1965) (all English translations included are from this edition except where otherwise stated). Didi-Huberman and Repensek wittily observe that thus it is ‘imag(inary) blood. And no less miraculous for that’. G. Didi-Huberman and T. Repensek, ‘The Index of the Absent Wound (Monograph on a Stain)’, October, 29 (1984), 81. Images and relics are more intimately bound than may at first be apparent. 19 See P. Courcelle, Recherches sur les ‘Confessions’ de saint Augustin, 2nd edn (Paris: E. de Boccard, 1968), 139–153, and S. Boesch Gajano, ‘Reliques et pouvoirs’, in E. Bozóky and

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towards the end of his life he became convinced of the relics of St Stephen and their miraculous powers, which he advanced in the final books of De civitate Dei. In effect, Augustine proposes that the power of the saints and their relics, based on the resurrection of Christ, were capable of accomplishing miracles of healing and resurrection of bodies, as sign and guarantee of the possibility of the final resurrection of all bodies through analogy with the resurrection of Christ.20 Thus relics receive theological affirmation in analogical terms. Their analogous capacities are recognized and operate analogically. Important contributions to the theological significance of relics came from various quarters, but vital for Western European thinking were Gregory the Great and St Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas justified the cult of relics as a consequence of the cult of saints, ‘temples and organs of the Holy Spirit which lived in them and which worked in them’.21 God shows his agreement by multiplying miracles in their presence. For Aquinas, as for Gregory, there is no relationship of cause and effect between relic and miracle. The relic does not possess power to execute miracles; through the miracle God reveals the virtues of the saint. The relic is the analogous site of the saint for the divine. Aquinas attributes dignity and sanctity to saints’ bodies ‘because of the soul which once was united with them and now enjoys God, and because of God, of whom the soul and the body were servants’.22 Thus the relic is the privileged site of dislocation as analogy for the divine. But the relic is important, because it is the body. The human person for Aquinas is a tight and integral union of soul and body. Indeed, the doctrine of the resurrection of the body seems to require a theory of the person in which body is integral. According to Aquinas, the soul survives the death of the body, but the full person does not exist until matter (the body) is restored to its form at the end of time. ‘The soul … is not the full man and my soul is not I.’23 What is temporary is not physical distinctiveness – including A. M. Helvétius (eds), Les reliques: objets, cultes, symboles (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999), 260–261; S. Boesch Gajano, ‘Verità e pubblicità: i racconti di miracoli nel libro XXII del De civitate Dei’, in E. Cavalcanti (ed.), Il ‘De civitate Dei’: l’opera, le interpretazioni, l’influsso (Rome, Freiburg, and Vienna: Herder, 1996), 367–388. 20 Augustine, De civitate Dei, XXII, 8. 21 Aquinas argues that no form of veneration should be paid to dead saints, but that they should be accorded religious honour. ‘quae fuerunt templa et organa Spiritus Sancti in eis habitantis et operantis’. Aquinas, Summa theologica, pt 3a, q. 25, art.6. 22 ‘sed propter animam quae fuit ei unita, quae nunc fruitur Deo; et propter Deum, cujus fuerunt ministri’. Aquinas, Summa theologica, pt 3a, q. 25, art.12 23 ‘anima … non est totus homo et anima mea non est ego’ Aquinas, commentary on 1 Corinthians 15, in Super I Epistolam B. Pauli ad Corinthios lectura, lect. 2. The body was necessary for Aquinas, but he tended to telescope body into form by seeing soul as sufficient to count for individual continuity and soul as the forma corporeitatis. Soul thus accounts for the ‘whatness’ of body; any matter that soul informs at the end of time will be its body. Aquinas’ opponents gave even greater positive significance to the body, holding that there is a separate forma corporeitatis, and material continuity in

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gender – but decay of material being. It is this conception of body as integral to personhood that helps explain why relics were treated as if they were the saints. Most objects, unlike relics, were not objects of veneratio. Thus images are, in this context, inferior to relics and sacred objects, such as the Eucharist or the Cross, which is a signum and not an imago. Much debate circulated around the location and quality of virtus. Cyril of Jerusalem (d. 386) and Gregory of Nazianzus (d. c.390) credited relics with a special power of virtus. Cyril refers to the healing power of St Paul’s handkerchief and belt, arguing that saints’ bodies possessed a comparable healing power.24 Virtus was contagious, activated as much as transmitted by touch. According to Gregory of Nazianzus, virtus was present when relics were touched or venerated.25 Later John Chrysostom (d. 407) claimed that martyrs’ shrines could exercise as great a power as the bones they contained.26 Gregory the Great suggested that the saints’ virtus works through their living bodies and through their mortal remains, sanctifying the places marked by their contact. But this virtus, which appears to work spontaneously, is related theologically to God and to faith in God.27 Relics were signs of the non-putrefaction of the saintly body. Each fragment keeps the virtus of the integral whole body.28 Thus a relic was a trace that guaranteed aura; in turn, the auratic made demands. The intense concern with relics is bound to a materialist conception of bodily resurrection, related to both Eucharistic theology and a concern with body as locus of biological process. Far more than simply markers of sanctity or precious objects to be venerated, relics were productive and disruptive spatially and temporally. the Resurrection. In Bonaventure’s view, the blessed in heaven pray for sinners more intensely because they will receive their bodies only when the number of the elect is complete and Judgement comes. Bynum, ‘The Female Body and Religious Practice’, 192. 24 Cyril of Jerusalem, in J.-P. Migne (ed.), Patrologiae cursus completus: series graeca 33 (Paris: Migne, 1886), 1038; N. Hermann-Mascard, Les reliques des saints (Paris: Klincksieck, 1975), 28; G. J. C. Snoek, Medieval Piety from Relics to the Eucharist: A Process of Mutual Interaction (Leiden and New York: Brill, 1995), 11. 25 Gregory of Nazianzus, in Migne (ed.), Patrologia cursus completus: series graeca 35 (Paris: Migne, 1886), 589. 26 Snoek, Medieval Piety, 11. 27 Gregory the Great, Dialogues, II, 38,ed. Adalbert de Vogué (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1979), 246–258. See also J. M. McCulloh, ‘The Cult of Relics in the Letters and Dialogues of Pope Gregory the Great’, Traditio, 32 (1975), 145–184. 28 Gregory the Great suggested that the saints’ virtus works through their living bodies and through their mortal remains, sanctifying the places marked by their contact; but this virtus, which seems to work spontaneously, is always related theologically to God and to faith in God. Gregory the Great, Dialogues, II, 38, ed. de Vogué, 246–248; McCulloh, ‘The Cult of Relics’, 145–184. Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621) argued in De ecclesia militante that relative doulia (veneration) was due to relics and absolute doulia was due to the saints.

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The metaphors Aquinas uses to describe the work of the Holy Spirit in the relic are architectural and biological. Relics were ‘temples’ and ‘organs’, an assemblage of inorganic, organic, and Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit dwelled in, worked through, and transfused them. Architecture was bound in the relic to the innermost recesses of the body. Architecture, therefore, does not follow after the relic, as has been assumed.29 Relics were already architecturalized. And that architecturalization and incorporation informed their operationality in analogous terms. Historical and heavenly imaginaries are combined in the relic: bodies reflected the glory of their souls in God’s presence, and were also the place where persons were rewarded in their specificity. Relics were signs of the non-putrefaction of the saintly body. Saints’ bodies and objects that had been in close contact with them (brandea) occupied a privileged position in terms of Catholic devotion, as markers of the saint’s presence in heaven and of the saint’s body on earth.30 Some viewed saints’ bodily remains as pignora, or security deposits, left by the saints on their deaths as guarantees of their continuing interest in those living on earth. At the end of the world the saint’s body would rise and be glorified; in the meantime, the saint continued to live and to work through it. In the relic historical and heavenly imaginaries are combined. They not only reflected the glory of their souls in God’s presence, but were also the place where persons were rewarded in their specificity. Through the centuries the history of sanctity remains the history of living saints and dead saints, indissolubly united in corporeal relics.31 A default position is that relics were not merely prompts to holiness, but the saints That assumption is most apparent in the scholarship that treats reliquaries in representational terms. 30 A ‘relic’ is etymologically ‘that which remains’, and in classical Latin the word is also used for the body of the dead. Christianity strengthened its meaning, to render it the equivalent of ‘holy body’ or ‘sacred remains’. Relics became an object of investigation, objects capable of confirming the ancientness of a cult but also of belying or betraying it, depending on historical evidence. The holy bodies, as bodies of saints who had really existed, were consequently objects endowed with a power capable of shining outwards and of impregnating not only the place of burial but also all objects coming into contact with them. See Boesch Gajano, ‘Reliques et pouvoirs’, 255–269. Most literature focuses on relics in the medieval period, but for Carlo Borromeo’s famous procession of relics, see C. Bescapè, De vita et rebus gestis Caroli Borromaei, trans. Giuseppe Fassi (Milan: Veneranda Fabbrica del Duomo, 1965), esp. 300–306, 554–561, 564–567, and for its impetus see G. Signorotto, ‘Cercatori di reliquie’, Rivista di storia di letteratura religiosa, 21:3 (1985), 383–418. Filippo Neri often descended into the Roman catacombs, where he became enraptured by the presence of early Christian martyrs. See Ludwig Freiherr von Pastor, The History of the Popes, vol. XXX: Gregory XIII (1572–1585), 164. 31 S. Boesch Gajano, ‘Santità e miracoli: un rapporto tormentato’, in G. Fiume (ed.), Il santo patrono e la città. San Benedetto il Moro: culti, devozioni, strategie di età moderna (Venice: Marsilio, 2000), 364. 29

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themselves, already living with God in the incorrupt and glorified bodies that ordinary mortals would achieve only at the end of time. At the end of the world the saint’s body would rise and be glorified; in the meantime, the saint continued to live and to work through the relic. Either way, the cult of relics emphasized the body as analogous locus of the sacred.32 Thus the relic is a site of potentiality and a particularly dense transfer point for material–spiritual interaction. Relics are less traces of saints than saints are potential relics. Hence, there is a relationship between the crucial place of female virginity in female sanctity and the emphasis on the intactness of female saints’ bodies long after burial.33 Relics occupy an ambiguous position at the crossroads of the mundane and the divine. The saint’s relic is at once historical, bearing the gesta of the saint, and also celestial, referring to someone invisible, present, and eternally alive. It is this ability to look in both directions simultaneously forward and back, into heaven and onto life on earth, and (unlike Christ) to be still unequivocably embodied, that gives saints’ relics their authority and power.34 Crucially, the cult of relics emphasized the body as the locus of the sacred,

On the cult of relics, see especially Dinzelbacher and Bauer, Heiligen Verehrung; Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body; Bynum. ‘The Female Body and Religious Practice’; Geary, Living with the Dead, 200–205; Joblin, ‘L’attitude des Protestants face aux reliques’, 123– 141; Schmitt, ‘Les reliques et les images’, 145–168; Scorza Barcellona, ‘Le origini’, 52–61; Boesch Gajano, ‘La strutturazione della cristianità occidentale’, 105–108; Bozóky, ‘Voyages de reliques et demonstration du pouvoir aux temps féodaux’, 267–280. On art and the relic, see Belting, Likeness and Presence, esp. xxi; Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, 8, 195–198, 294–295. On reliquaries, see Hahn, Strange Beauty, esp. 117–134. 33 Bynum, ‘The Female Body and Religious Practice’, 195. 34 Not all relics were equal. It is sometimes assumed that whole bodies (corpora) were the most valued relics, distinguished from reliquiae or fragments. But this was not universally the case. It was blood-stained earth that St Helena herself brought to the foundations of her Jerusalem Chapel at the Sessorian Palace behind and beneath the high altar of the basilica of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme in Rome. Objects imbued through contact with Christ, the Virgin, and saints were sometimes referred to as ‘real relics’. Fragments of the Cross, instruments of the Passion, and the blood-stained soil at Santa Croce numbered among these most prized relics. But relics included brandea, which were ordinary objects which had become holy by coming into contact with holy people or places. They included objects which had touched the bones of the saint or her or his tomb, such as oil of the lamp burning on a tomb, pieces of cloth or flowers left there, dust, a rosary or flowers that touched the corpse, or cloth imbued with blood or sweat. The most valued relics tended to be whole body limbs, the heart, and the tongue. Generally less valued relics, ‘peripheral’ relics, included hair, skin, and clothes. Fragments of modest dimension are usually known as ‘simple relics’. Most images, unlike relics, were not objects of veneratio. They are, in this context, inferior to relics and sacred objects, such as the Eucharist and the Cross. See Belting, Likeness and Presence, 297–310. 32

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in an ambiguous relationship to place.35 Body, place, and the divine occupy analogous relationships in the relic. Their analogousness is not incidental. Rome’s claim to be città sancta lay in its particularly literal relation to analogous sanctity, to its concentration of particular holy localities.36 The classic Roman saint of Catholic Reform was linked to a specific locus through martyrdom and burial: places throughout the city were infused with sanctity through blood-stained soil.37 But in Naples sanctity worked otherwise. The Treasury Chapel sought a special relationship between saints and place, Naples as ‘whole’ (‘Naples’ as redeemable). Thereby it brought that ‘whole’ into view. Thus the relationship between saint and place via the relic was not simply reactionary, as repeatedly claimed by recent scholarship focused on Rome. More than simply reaffirming place in terms of ancient miraculous events, it was also productive. The ‘invention’ and deployment of relics, Naples’ silver saints, and its would-be saints did not simply give form to pre-existing ideas about sanctity in the same place; they were a vital part of its production, altering its course.38 Saints did far more than simply make places sacred; in the For Aquinas the human person is a tight and integral union of soul and body. The soul survives the death of the body, but the full person does not exist until matter (the body) is restored to its form at the end of time. ‘The soul … is not the full man and my soul is not I’ (‘anima … non est totus homo et anima mea non est ego’). Aquinas, commentary on 1 Corinthians 15, lect. 2. The body was necessary for Aquinas, but he tended to telescope body into form by seeing soul as sufficient to count for individual continuity and soul as the forma corporeitatis. Soul thus accounts for the ‘whatness’ of body; any matter that soul informs at the end of time will be its body. Aquinas’ opponents gave even greater positive significance to the body, holding that there is a separate forma corporeitatis, and material continuity in the Resurrection. In Bonaventure’s view, the blessed in heaven pray for sinners more intensely because they will receive their bodies only when the number of the elect is complete and Judgement comes. Bynum, ‘The Female Body and Religious Practice’, 192. 36 Exemplary discussion of ‘Holy Rome’ is given in F. J. McGinness, Right Thinking and Sacred Oratory in Counter-Reformation Rome (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), esp. 108–138, 167–190. 37 Relics became an object of investigation, objects capable of confirming the ancientness of a cult but also of belying or betraying it, depending on historical evidence. The holy bodies, as bodies of saints who had really existed, were consequently objects endowed with a power capable of shining outwards and of impregnating not only the place of burial but also all objects coming into contact with them. 38 Through the relationship with the relic, the traditional system of urban signs – the bishop and the city walls – was refashioned between the middle and late medieval periods into an iconographic scheme that was exclusively Western: St Petronius for Bologna, San Geminiano for the eponymous city, Terenzio for Pesaro – with hand outspread to rule and support an entire city. Peter Brown brilliantly demonstrated that the relationship between saint and city was a key component in the rise to prominence of bishops of the former cities of the Roman Empire in Western Europe. Bishops orchestrated the cult of the saints so as to base their power within the old Roman cities on ‘new towns outside the town’, a ‘studiously articulated relationship’ with great shrines 35

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visualization of sanctity, place – whether a particular locale or a city – was reformed, made ganz anders.39 The role of the relic, as embodiment of nonhomogenous space, is central to a concept of holy space or the place of the saint as inherently non-homogenous, and intensive rather than extensive.40 While their logic depends on the restoration of the whole body in the resurrection of the dead, relics disrupt ready assumptions that the whole is the sum of its parts, or that parts are subordinate to the whole. Thus they challenge a conception of the body or the place of the body as extensive. Instead, each fragment was believed to retain the virtus of the integral whole saintly body. Thus it is not sufficient to treat relics as bones of saints who are dead. They are both dead and in glory; on earth and in heaven. Thus, paradoxically, relics offered resistance to the devouring power of death. More than this, in their capacity to be in heaven and on earth, dead and in glory, relics split location and open up place as necessarily plural. They permit, too, different possibilities of place as connected in and through the relic. This is not the transcendent in the spiritual, or the spiritual as transcendent. The material relic – analogous and intensive – transfuses one place with another. Despite relics’ dependence on place, the mobility of saints is central to their economy. The cult of relics and translations of saints’ relics forms part of a restless, even agonistic, searching for contact, a process in which movement of bones and worshippers is vital. The relic is thus an opening and an entering into circulation. Movement to the relic is supplemented by the relic’s analogous relation to place, since the relic both is and is not where the worshipper literally encounters it. Indeed, it displaces this encounter. Thus relics were less the remains or embodiments of redemptive virtue, reflections of divine order, than a potential explosion of energy bequeathing contact with the divine. This study of the Treasury Chapel conceives of architecture’s some distance from the city. Brown, The Cult of the Saints, 8. Thus the close relationship between bishop-saint and city has ultimately Antique origins. The relationship between female saint and place is more difficult to map. On the development of the iconography of the bishop-patron saint, see A. M. Orselli, ‘I santi vescovi’, in C. Leonardi and A. Degl’Innocenti (eds), I santi patroni: modelli di santità, culti e patronati in Occidente (Milan: CT, 1999), 35–41. Orselli points out that neither civic Christianity, la religion civique, nor the relationship of protection is exhausted in the relationship bishop–city; and that that relationship, moreover, never achieves final resolution, but is always in the process of being established (Orselli, ‘I santi vescovi’, 40). 39 See M. Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961). 40 Relics and reliquaries were objects of devotion with peculiar capacities in terms of place, always embodiments of non-homogenous holy space, but perhaps especially so in baroque art, which makes special claims with regard to fluidity, movement, and the slippage of the fold. For these claims, see Deleuze, Le pli. For a corrective to any glib transposition of fold and baroque, see A. Vidler, Warped Space (Cambridge, Mass., and London: MIT Press, 2000), 219–233.

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engagement in the relic (the sacred) as necessarily material, but also as prosthetic and proleptic.41

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Relics and spatiality

While relics established both authority and boundaries, crucially, they constantly undermined them. They, like baroque architecture, are characterized by the excessive. They tend to exceed. Relics wonderfully destabilize things spatially and temporally. All the more so in the case of San Gennaro’s blood, which worked miracles that were displayed to all several times a year. The chapel’s relics disturb a notion of either homogenized time or of homogenized place. Saints’ relics indicated their presence both in heaven and on earth. For saints ‘are never altogether in one place’. The relic has the potential to connect different places and times. It opens up past and future within the present. It presents possibilities within the present for grasping that relation. It is not in a fixed relation to only ‘one time’, conceived as a fixed point in a stable past that is over and gone. Thus describing the work of the relic throws open a particularly productive tension between two models of temporality. But the relic does more than this. It also opens up similar and related tensions to two contrasting models of spatiality. The relic appears to work precisely through its non-substitutability. Indeed, the economy of the relic depended precisely on the special quality of irreplaceability. The discovery of a relic – its inventio – was therefore always its rediscovery, an affirmation of and homage to something that precisely could not be remade or invented.42 That economy depended, too, on theft and mysterious losses, and on pilgrims of all social ranks undertaking sometimes arduous journeys to visit relics. It was not simply that the pilgrim was required to travel to the relic, since, in normal circumstances, relics did not travel. More than that, the journeying was an important part of the paying of respect, paying homage to something that depended on its place. Even magnates moved to relics. Relics’ irreplaceability was apparently at their very heart and pilgrimage was in part a renewed acknowledgement of and dramatization of that irreplaceability.43 But the nature of that irreplaceability has perhaps too readily The temporal aspect is important and is developed throughout this book. Thus I depart from Clifford Geertz’s fictive and centralized mode of conceiving the sacred. Geertz argues that the ‘inherent sacredness of central authority’, its numinousness, comes from deep intimate involvement in the ‘master fictions by which that order lives’ (Geertz, Local Knowledge, 146). This approach tends to dissolve the sacred into ‘master fictions’, and materiality becomes a cladding or embellishment that follows after. 42 On this, see my ‘Miraculous Affects: Inventing Corpses in Baroque Italy’, forthcoming. 43 On pilgrimages to relics see A. Sanger, Art, Gender and Religious Devotion in Grand Ducal Tuscany (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), esp. 93–111. Sanger sees pilgrimages not only 41

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been identified with the relic tout court. It was not only that relics were unsubstitutable. More than that, their relationship with place informed them and yet was uneven. Even more important than paying homage to the relic, the pilgrimage recognized the relic’s singular relationship to place – to its peculiar place which it altered by occupying it. This was not true of all relics, but the most potent enjoyed a particularly intimate and inseparable relationship to place. Their irreplaceability was, then, the possibility they opened in place. There were, of course, many relics that were portable and formed part of extensive collections, such as that of King Philip II of Spain and the dazzling ensembles amassed by the nuns of Las Descalzas Reales, Madrid, and displayed like eyes in a peacock’s tail in the relics chapel from 1566 (Fig. 14), and of Grand Duchess Maria Maddalena of Austria, made splendid in the finest workmanship in silver, ebony, and tortoiseshell reliquaries in her chapel at Palazzo Pitti in Florence.44 Even so, the terms, modes, and circumstances of acquisition and translation were sensitive matters, requiring acute attention to the constellation of the donor–recipient relation, the date of the gift, and the nature of the relic. If time can be bent and doubled, so too can space. Indeed, thinking space in exclusively extensive terms – as something linear that can be measured – is precisely parallel to thinking of time and history in purely historicist terms. In addition to thinking space as that which is coherent, stable, and in terms of distance that can be measured, space can be thought intensively, as folded, under pressure, short-circuited, and immeasurable.45 Indeed, relics’ relationship to space and place specifically depends on its capacity to make such demands of space and place. The promise of the relic is to undo unidirectionality in either time or space. It offers a chance to access time and place that are neither past nor finished, not present in a literal sense, but full of potential of past, present, and future in a new relation. The fundamental aim in this book is to investigate the consequences of thinking the temporality and spatiality of relics as more than one and in relation to each other through Gennaro’s Treasury Chapel, powerhouse of relics. in terms of performativity, but also as acquisitive processes in which devotees collected sacred experiences. 44 Such collections assumed a significance that was more than the sum of their parts, owing to the economy of irreplaceability of relics and the logic by which any collection is more than the sum of its parts. For Philip II’s collection, see R. Mulcahy, Philip II of Spain: Patron of the Arts (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004); for Maria Maddalena of Austria’s relics, see Sanger, Art, Gender and Religious Devotion, 72, 79–83, and M. Mosco, ‘The Medici Collection in the Museo degli Argenti’, in M. Mosco and O. Casazza (eds), The Museo degli Argenti: Collections and Collectors (Florence: Fiunti, 2004), 8–15. 45 ‘Folding’ refers not so much to the bending of shapes of materials, but more especially to the convergence of thought and matter, history and substance.

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Relics’ profound sense of place explains their refusal to leave one place for another, their sudden inexplicable immovability, and their mysteriously dogged return to where they wish to be.46 In short, relics depend on and remake place to a remarkable degree. Arguably even an exceptional flying relic, the Casa Santa di Loreto, is less anomalous than it might at first appear, since in that case it was precisely ‘place’ itself that moved.47 The town of Borgo San Sepolcro almost moved place, built as it was on rubble broken off from the Holy Sepulchre. The fragment of the tomb housed in the village church rendered, through a form of holy contagion, the whole town into not so much ‘a new Jerusalem’ as an analogous Jerusalem. Thus relics even have the capacity to replace place. Relics could not be relics out of place. The place of the relic

The presence of the sacred in localized space was a major issue in the theological disagreement between Catholics and Protestants. Nevertheless, modern analyses of post-Tridentine culture assume that God was in heaven and that the locus of divine power was supraterrestial and unified. Despite the problematization of such assumptions in the 1970s by Richard Trexler and others, the idea of ‘civic ritual’, conceived by Donald Weinstein and popularized by Edwin Muir, which depends on a (once) clear distinction between ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ spaces, remains largely unchallenged.48 ‘Civic ritual’ is part of what Weinstein calls ‘secularization’, referring to the replacement of ecclesiastics with laymen as ritual specialists and spiritual instructors in Renaissance Venice. This is part of a transfer of religious ritual from ecclesiastical or monastic space to ‘public, civic space’, together with ‘the religious legitimation of formerly worldly and temporal activities and institutions’. There are two problems with this. First, it presupposes a time when the ‘religious’ and the ‘secular’ were distinct and occupied discrete spaces. Second, it assumes that a ‘transfer’ occurred across pre-existing extensive spaces, which remained unchanged. I suggest instead that what is produced is a different form of space. Movement does not simply shift a body from one point to another (translation); in each block of movement bodies become (­ variation). In Naples the relics of St Patricia are a striking example of this stubborn refusal to be moved from where they wished to be. These issues are richly explored for medieval relics in Geary, Furta Sacra; on the legality of relic thefts, see esp. 110–112. 47 For opposing interpretations of the Casa Santa at Loreto, see F. Grimaldi, Il sacello della Santa Casa: storia e devozione (Loreto: Cassa di risparmio, 1991), esp. 40–43; Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, 195–218; Sanger, Art, Gender and Religious Devotion, 26–29, 101–110. 48 E. Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981). 46

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Thus movement is change of space, rather than simply a shift from one space to another. Weinstein and Muir argued that the shift to secular space occurred once and for all (in Renaissance Venice). I argue that it is not so much that the secular and religious were not sharply delineated, but rather that there was a constant deterritorialization and reterritorialization between them, with claims and limits extended first in one direction and then in the other. Indeed that which we call ‘secular’ is differentiated from that which we name ‘religious’ precisely through this process. Indeed, if there was a directional shift, it was towards an aristocratization of holiness. Such a dynamic conception also demands a more sophisticated explanation of architecture than that of ‘expression’ or mimesis offered by Muir.49 This book addresses these issues to argue that reconsidering the inter-relationship between holiness and place necessarily requires a more dynamic conception of place – and of architecture – than is generally imagined. This book resists the current tendency to see ‘the early modern’ as simply a continuation of the religious devotion and civic ritual of ‘the long Middle Ages’. Place was remade in the name of the saint in a remarkable refashioning of place in baroque Italy. Indeed, San Gennaro and the other seven protector saints were largely reinvented in the late sixteenth century, as Paolo Regio explains in his ‘Dedication’ dated 1578 to Le Vite de’ Sette Santi Protettori di Napoli (Naples: Horatio Salviani, 1579) (Fig. 32). Regio claims that to modern Italians the lives of the seven protector saints were ‘almost strange (peregrine), and unknown’.50 Half a century later such a claim would have been untenable. History without historicism

Relics were bodily, holy, and – last, but not least – historical. They attested to gesta of saints as historical events. Thus the relic assumed a heightened significance at a time when history was evoked as arbiter in polemical disputes. But the nature of that history has too hastily been claimed as historicist. Catholic ecclesiastics, archaeologists, and historians dug deep into the soil of Rome to discover the lost subterranean cities of the catacombs and ancient Christian lives and practices. Municipal historians reimagined their cities’ Christian past. But these were not claims to continuity, a resuscitation of dead corpses. Place was reactivated through the analogous saintly body. Filippo Muir, Civic Ritual. P. Regio, Le Vite de’ Sette Santi Protettori di Napoli Descritte dal M. Rever. Signor Paolo Regio Professore di Sacra Theologia. Di Nuovo Ristampate, Corrette, & alla loro vera lettione ridotte. Con molte aggiuntioni, che prima vi si desideravano. Gli ESSEMPI [sic], e MIRACOLI de’ QUALI ogni Cristiano leggendo potrà apprender la perfettion del vivere, & stupir l’alte meraviglie de’ servi di CHRISTO (Naples: Horatio Salviani, 1579), Dedication, 2.

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Neri called for a relationship with the early Church in the moral and spiritual regeneration of Rome that was itself analogous to the relic; Onofrio Panvinio investigated Rome’s early basilicas; Pompeo Ugonio studied Rome’s station churches; Antonio Gallonio researched the early martyrs, and Antonio Bosio investigated the catacombs and early Christian archaeology; and Cesare Baronio’s Annales Ecclesiastici (1588–1607) offered a twelve-volume history of the Church starting with the Incarnation and ending in 1198.51 In his presentation of Annales Ecclesiastici he writes: I undertook this immense task so that it would be profitable and fruitful to you and others. Covering for you the period of each year from the time of Christ to today, it is intended that one constant is the Catholic faith and that the Church is continuously preserved in its unity although agitated by the change of things and of the times. That is why, just as links connected to links form one chain, so years joined to years present open and the same work, and they represent to you the Church, which has always been one and the same. Certainly, nothing more pleasant can recur to a pious mind, covetous of this truth: while considering the Christian faith, one believes that it has always been the same since the beginning of the Church and so taught for all the intervening centuries, purely conserved and holy guarded.52

Thus, in the name of history, history was denied. Historians today argue that ancient relics fortified the Catholic Church and attested to the bravery and commitment of early Christians. Thus they posit a supposedly continuous thread between the earliest emergence of the Church and its present. But that thread was not one of historical continuity but of divine possibility and the temporal capacities of saint and relic beyond linear time. Thus relics did far more than merely bear witness to individuals’ self-sacrifice and faith, and far more than provide tangible continuity with that revalorized past, as  recent  scholarship claims. They unified past, present, and future in Christ and on earth analogously. The renewal of interest in relics was partly, but not entirely, a riposte to Protestant criticism of relics as superstitious and idolatrous, spearheaded by Calvin’s Traité des reliques (Geneva, 1543). The twenty-fifth session of the Council of Trent reaffirmed that bodies of saints were members of the Church and could be intermediaries.53 A great effort of ecclesiastical historiography Snoek, Medieval Piety, 381. Reverence for mortal remains of martyrs dates from the second century. After the edict of Milan in 313 permanent altars were built above the graves of saints in martyria, small buildings which expanded into mortuary basilicas. 52 Baronio, Annales Ecclesiastici, vol. VI (Antwerp: Ex officina Plantiniana, 1596), vol. IX (Venice: Ex officina Plantiniana, 1604); W. C. Kirwin, Powers Matchless: The Pontificate of Urban VIII, the Baldachin, and Gian Lorenzo Bernini (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), 5. 53 ‘Those who maintain that veneration and honor are not due to the relics of the saints, or that these and other memorials are honoured by the faithful without profit … are to be 51

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conferred on relics a theoretical and historical legitimation. But this was a legitimation that implicated the historical in the miraculous. Cesare Baronio’s Martyrologium Romanum (Rome, 1584, second edition 1586) and the monumental work of the Bollandists, Acta sanctorum quotquot toto orbe coluntur (published from 1643), advanced the miraculous as historical in the relic.54 Relics became objects of enquiry, anxiety, investigation. At once objects capable of confirming the ancientness of a cult, they were also capable of belying or betraying it. Holy bodies, as bodies of saints who had really existed, were powerful historical and sacred objects endowed with a power capable of shining outwards and of impregnating not only the place of burial but also all objects coming into contact with them.55 Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621) argued in De ecclesia militante that relative doulia (veneration) was due to relics and absolute doulia was due to the saints. Saints’ relics were marshalled as proof of the  saints’ power during their life and after their death, and as guarantees of the afterlife of the soul and of the resurrection of the body at the end of time. While they remained anonymous, one bone was the same as another. What made one a relic was its authenticity, a social recognition of its origin and its power.56 This required a staging that was material, ritual, and imaged, utterly condemned.’ Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, trans. H. J. Schroeder (St Louis: TAN Books, 1960), 215. From the sixteenth century onwards Reformers criticized the cult of relics as superstitious, idolatrous, and corrupting to the Church. Martin Luther criticized the veneration of relics, which he associated with indulgences and pilgrimages in the 1537 Schmalkaldic Articles. According to Luther the cult of relics led people to place their faith `elsewhere’ than in God. See Joblin, ‘L’attitude des Protestants face aux reliques’, 123–141. But Calvin’s attack was more radical. He did not want relic practices to be corrected but to be abolished altogether, and he firmly rejected a religion of ‘ostentation which affords a large place to bodies’ (‘l’ostentation qui donne une grande place aux corps’). Jean Calvin, Traité des reliques ou advertissement très utile du grand profit qui reviendrait à la chrestienté s’il se faisoit inventaire de tous les corps saints et reliques qui sont tant en Italie qu’en France (Geneva: Jean Gerard, 1543), 132. 54 This extraordinary effort of historical erudition found official recognition in the work of Prospero Lambertini, future Pope Benedict XIV, in Benedictus XIV, De servorum Dei beatificatione et beatorum canonizatione (Bologna: Longhi, 1734–38). See also L. Fiorani and A. Prosperi (eds), Storia d’Italia, annali 16: Roma, la città del Papa (Turin: G. Einaudi, 2000). 55 Boesch Gajano, ‘Reliques et pouvoirs’, 255–269. Most literature concentrates on relics in the medieval period, but for Carlo Borromeo’s famous procession of relics, see Bescapè, De vita et rebus gestis Caroli Borromei, esp. 300–306, 554–561, 564–567, and for its impetus see Signorotto, ‘Cercatori di reliquie’, 383–418. Filippo Neri often descended into the Roman catacombs, where he became enraptured by the presence of early Christian martyrs. Pastor, The History of the Popes, vol. XXX, 164. 56 Although the power of relics might seem to be an interior immanent power, or virtus, a sort of mana, recognizable in itself, beyond the manifestations which served to confirm it, nevertheless, that power had a social dimension.

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in which the ostensio played a crucial part (Fig. 4). A relic is therefore a social product. But it also makes demands on that ‘social’.57 Relics might become precious objects, capable of confirming prestige on their possessors and donors, but, as with any currency, their value was never fixed. Even an authenticated relic, without a cult, becomes just a bone. This collective and material dimension does not preclude a spiritual and individual one. The play of power resides in attempts to manage and control the sacred, as the Jesuits understood when they proudly displayed their amassed relics in a bank of spiritual capital in the Gesù Nuovo in Naples (Fig. 16) and as Cardinal Federico Borromeo famously acknowledged in a sermon in Milan Cathedral to celebrate the translation of a grand collection of relics, displayed for the occasion in a pyramid at the altar in 1609.58 Such relic treasuries nicely mingled signs of sanctity and benefaction. Chapter 8 below shows how the nuns of Santa Patrizia sought to organize the cult of their prized relics, and to transform the relic from a passive object into a ‘site’, recognized as possessing holy authority, and to use that to enhance the standing of their own convent. This capacity could not be effected once and for all; it had to be constantly renegotiated and maintained. At the very least, therefore, relics required maintenance. They did not require mourning; they required trust, attention, and investment. In the right hands these bodily remains re-opened the way to the inauguration of something new. Time, temporality, and event

A refusal to reduce matter simply to a material presence that informs this book  is particularly important in relation to the relic – both the claims it makes about relics and the claims that relics make. The domain of relics can be opened up further to the domain of sensation, instability, and matter and its problematic status. San Gennaro’s miraculous blood (Fig. 1), at times dust and It is not sufficient, of course, to imagine the ‘social’ as set apart from religious issues such that we can appeal to it to stabilize an argument or claim (I am using the term ‘social’ in the manner of a sociologist). See Latour, Reassembling the Social, esp. 165–172. 58 ‘Sei tu peccatore? … Sei tu terra? Ecco che avanti a te è il Paradiso. Ecco i corpi de’ Martiri e de’ Confessori’, he announced. Quoted by Signorotto, ‘Cercatori di reliquie’, 401. The relics at the Gesù Nuovo are listed in ‘Catalogus Sanctorum Quorum Corpora, vel Reliquiae’ of 1681, a long document held in the archive and library of the Gesù Nuovo, Naples (shelfmark 8.b.33). The logic which presides in the enumeration of each item indicates the reservoir of the unlimited powers of the relics, as well as furnishing a litany of saints’ names which could be invoked for intercession. For the reliquiaries of the Gesù Nuovo, see R. U. Montini, La chiesa del Gesù (Naples: Aziènda Automnoma di soggiorno cura e turismo, 1956), 66–67; A. Gonzalez-Palacios, ‘Un adornamento vicereale per Napoli’, in Civiltà del Seicento a Napoli, exhibition catalogue, Museo di Capodimonte, 24 October 1984–14 April 1985, and Museo Pignatelli, 6 December 1984–14 April 1985 (Naples: Electa, 1998; 1st edn 1984), vol. II, 286. 57

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at times liquid, in its intrinsic capacity to modify, stages a particular i­ nstability within sensation’s object. The Treasury Chapel celebrates and intensifies these effects. Rather than solidity or form defined by empirical singularity or something measurable, fluidity and potentiality define the substance of the miraculous relic. Relics permit a liberation from axiomatic equation with form and literal presence with particular grace. They eloquently permit a relationship between ‘form’ and ‘spirit’, not as a gesture to idealism, but through the presence of immateriality as a potentiality within materiality and their analogous capacities. The formlessness of relics is part of their insistence on matter. The relic permits apparently mere matter, dust or fragments of bone, to be a peculiarly pregnant locus of potentiality. For it is the virtus of the ‘whole’ saint that is made available through the dusty fragment. The immaterial occurs in the space opened by the severance of the equation of the material and the empirical – a quality that is always in excess of that which is apparently there to be described and yet which is at work within the describable.59 A relic’s insistence  on place is part of its material manner and it operates within a materialist economy, rather than as idea or mere sensation. The saint’s virtus animates the relic’s material presence, defined in terms of internality and analogy rather than externality and literal presence. Saints’ relics needed art and architecture to bear their burden and to realize their potential. The relic together with art permits a prosthetic relation. Thus the Treasury Chapel brought together diverse place and space, literal location of the relics and place of potential redemption and an opening to redemption in a reconfiguration of the city of Naples through its heavenly representatives. The problem of habitation – of citizens and saints – is raised and remade through the Treasury Chapel. Relics indicate a wish to transcend a limit of the real in a search for the remains that are the limit of the real. The cult of the remains is not a mere mourning or nostalgic search – and it is more than an archaeological enquiry – since the indexicality of the relic extends into imago. Thus Braccini compares the weeping of the miraculous image of the Madonna dell’Arco to drops of blood.60

The co-presence of the immaterial and material is constitutive of the object if matter is not reduced to the empirical. See Benjamin, ‘Endless Touching’, 6. 60 G. C. Braccini, Dell’Incendio Fattosi nel Vesuvio a XVI di Dicembre M.DC.XXXI. E delle sue cause ed effetti. Con la narrazione di quanto è seguito in esso per tutto Marzo 1632. E con la Storia di tutti gli altri Incendij nel medesimo Monte avvenuti. Discorrendosi in fine alle Acque, le quali in questa occasione hanno danneggiato le campagne, e di molte altre cose curiose (Naples: Secondino Roncagliolo, 1632), 77. The significance of this extends beyond the claim that miraculous images and miracles model responses for the devout. 59

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Bodily potentiality

Relics were part of the pressing question of what accounts for the identity of the earthly and risen body. Bodily continuity was central to the economy of the relic (the person survived corruption and reassemblage). Thomas Aquinas’ conception of the human being as a hylomorphic (form–matter) union of soul and body meant that matter mattered: ‘the soul is not the whole person and the soul is not I’. Soul and body were in close union, and this is the logic of the relic. Some Catholic philosophers argue that Aquinas’ teaching threatens the body, since, in denying the plurality of forms, Aquinas must assert that the soul (our only form) is the form of our bodiliness, too, thereby reducing what is left over to mere primary matter or potency.61 The body we have at the moment is formed and therefore existing second matter, packed into the soul.62 The potential of body to reveal the divine. Body was locus of temptation and of encounter with the divine. Aquinas asks, ‘Should we worship the relics of the saints?’ Aquinas quotes St Augustine that the bodies are dearly loved garments, temples of the Holy Spirit, aids to memory, and tools for the working of miracles: ‘a dead body is not of the same species as a living body’. Thus it should be worshipped only for the sake of the soul that was once united with it. But he adds, ‘The dead body of a saint is not identical to that which the saint held during life, because of its differences of form – that is, the soul; but it is the same by identity of matter, which is destined to be reunited to its form.’63 Identity of matter mattered therefore in terms of what was to be. For others, veneration of relics was not merely mneumonic, bringing to memory the life and suffering of the saints. It was the veneration of the saints. Peter the Venerable asserted that ‘the bodies of the saints live with God’.64 Saints were not rendered obsolescent by death, and their bodies were more than vacant containers. The cult of relics, Peter Brown suggests, is a determination to block out the fear of death and destruction and ‘all the countless ways of going wrong’ that this world has.65 Yet the relic is more than a block to an unpleasant truth. St Augustine emphasizes perseverance and overcom Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books. 1991), 255. 62 Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 255. 63 Aquinas, Summa theologica, pt 3a. q. 25, art. 6. 64 Peter the Venerable, ‘Sermo in honore sancti illius cuius reliquiae sunt in presenti’, in G. Constable, ‘Petri Venerabilis sermones tres’, Revue bénédictine, 64 (1954), 265–272. 65 ‘The gift of perseverance that this world should be overcome, this world in all its deep loves, in all its terrors, in all its countless ways of going wrong’. St Augustine, De corruptione et gratia, 12, 35; trans. in On the Free Choice of the Will, On Grace and Free Choice, and Other Writings, ed. and trans. P. King (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 61

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ing: ‘the gift of perseverance that this world should be overcome, this world in all its deep loves, in all its terrors, in all its countless ways of going wrong’.66 Thus the relic can be read in terms of potentiality through death, rather than in terms of decay or avoidance of death. The relic was more than pious archaeology, far more than affirmation of continuity for Catholics, far more than remnant from the past to defend the present. It made present the immensity of God’s mercy and announced a moment of amnesty. It brought the possibility of deliverance and pardon into the present. The dialogue with sanctity settles on the matter of habitability. At stake is what it takes to make a city habitable, in whose name, and for whom. The growing early modern city with its rapidly increasing population provoked rampant anxieties among rulers and inhabitants. In that urban malady, protector saints were points of intensified concern, nodes around which correct order might be asserted or claimed, even while they embodied an ambivalent sense of location in relation to what was already an ambivalent sense of place as threat and sanctuary. The populating of the Treasury Chapel with new protectors posed the question of not so much how heaven would affect the city, but how the city might affect heaven. Thus the city of Naples was refashioned by its saints simultaneously as bulwark to stave off the worst, potential asylum of salvation, and as a last resort. This produces divergence within the space of the chapel, like montage, the piecing together of different – heterogeneous – moments, speeds and places of time, being, and place. This multiplicity and heterogeneity is conflictive only if we conceive of time and being as linear. For time and place here are not a series of nows and points. The chapel has a dominant drama (that of the liquefaction of the blood of San Gennaro), but it has others, which are not unifiable ‘subplots’. These include the dies natalis, or ‘birth day’, of a saint’s death, including martyrdom that both ended their life on earth and effectively began their heavenly existence, their salvific interventions in times of crisis, annual celebrations commemorating such events, and those undertaken to thwart their recurrence. The chapel is above all a great potential force, even as it stages its claims in relation to the past. The past is fashioned facing forward and the future is fashioned looking back. It is overwhelmingly anticipatory. There is therefore no single line of time or of place. The chapel appears indirectly as a whole that allows these different and incommensurable movements of time and place to take place. That apparent ‘whole’ is the effect of this taking place. This book explores that work. In their discussion of Renaissance art, Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood argue that ‘Ensembles of shrine and enshrined, of reliquary and relic, Augustine, De corruptione et gratia, 12, 35.

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of building and spolium, of text and citation are meaning-making machines. Meanings are set in motion by the perception of the seam between shrine and enshrined. The enshrined fragment of the past – whether a fragment made of stone or a fragment made of code – now stands out in conceptual relief against its container.’ My book is, in part, a critical exploration of the relation between relic and chapel that works against the seam. I argue that what is apparently ‘contained’ is not only uncontainable, but perforates the ‘containing’ qualities of the architecture that supposedly contains. Furthermore, in this book I conceive of meaning as the work of interpretation and not the work of the art object. Thus the work of architecture makes possible new configurations and new assemblages, which demand new interpretations. In this way the work of relic-architecture is presented here as assemblage, rather than as architectural housing of protector saints’ relics. The effect of coming afterwards is an ideological effect of the work of architecture. Protector saints’ relics were produced in and by the chapel’s ‘housing’ and incorporation of them. Thus this assemblage generated new saints and sensations, and brought into view a new Naples.

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Part

The miracle

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I

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The matter of miracles: San Gennaro’s blood and the Treasury Chapel

1

First the body. No. First the place. No. First both. (Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho, 1983) To the blood of San Gennaro that protects us from famine, war, plague, and the fire of Vesuvius. (Dedicatory inscription on the gateway to the Treasury Chapel)

The miraculous liquefaction of the blood of San Gennaro is at the heart of the Treasury Chapel (Fig. 1). The transformative and productive blood in the miracle is akin to the transformative and productive chapel. Since desire to house Gennaro’s relics appropriately, and since the design of the new custodia preceded even the choice of architect or design for the chapel, this relation has been repeatedly interpreted in terms of the Treasury Chapel’s housing relic and miracle (conceived as one) and thus of following after and, at most, assuming a role of representation in their regard. In contradistinction to that approach, in this book I treat Gennaro’s blood, the bronze, silver, and other materials that constitute the miraculous working of the chapel, not as essences to be excavated, but as qualities to be discovered and invented in relation to each other. This chapter opens that discussion by examining Gennaro’s blood as site of potentiality and part of processes of transformation and their exploration. Materials and place are treated not simply as the marker and limit of what they permit, but as productive and implicated in each other and in the miraculous and its staging.1 Naples gave San Gennaro devotion, worship, and spectacular housing; in return San Gennaro gave protection and intercession. But he did so prophetically in the miracle. In what ways did the prophetic Andrew Benjamin argues that effects necessitate that a distinction be drawn between, on the one hand, materials – understood as sites of potentiality and implicit g­ eometries – and, on the other, the reduction of architecture’s material presence to the strictly empirical and thus to brute matter. Connection between materiality and both the conceptual and the ideational is possible through the way in which matter works. A. Benjamin, ‘Plans to Matter: Towards a History of Material Possibility’, in K. Lloyd Thomas (ed.), Material Matters: Architecture and Material Practice (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2007), 13–28.

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blood produce the chapel? To answer those questions we must return to the bloody liquefaction. The manner of the miracle

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Cesare D’Engenio Caracciolo lovingly describes the miraculous liquefaction of San Gennaro’s blood in Napoli Sacra (1623). From the arrangements necessary to its occurrence, he moves to its extraordinary transformation: each time this miraculous blood is brought together with the head of the holy Martyr [Plate 8], or when a priest says the antiphon or when the Mass in honour of the saint is celebrated on the altar where the blood stands, the sediment of dry earth that lies congealed and immobile at the bottom of the little ampoules is returned again to living, vermilion blood.2

That miraculous change encompassed colour, texture, viscosity, temperature, and volume. Matter was transformed and time pulled off its hinges. Old wounds re-opened and blood poured fresh. It is the spilling of the blood and blood as spilled that endures in its miraculous moments, like cuts in time: [Vermilion blood] permeating every part in liquid form, it fills up the ampoules entirely, and as it irrigates, so it then grows and expands, becoming very liquid, and it boils, just as if it were at that moment in the blow of the executioner’s sword, or at the point of an arrow pulled from the saint’s bust.3

The miracle is violent in the violence of bloodshed and the exposure that sacrifice reveals. Yet it seems that for Caracciolo perhaps its most powerful aspect is the blood’s capacity to return to its erstwhile state in an astonishing volte-face: And heaping marvel upon marvel, what overcomes astonishment with another [even] greater, is that after the ceremony, mass, praying, and saint’s antiphon, and the encounter with the head, that living blood returns once more to its congealed state.4 ‘È questo miracoloso sangue tutte volte, che s’incontra col capo del santo Martire, ò che un sacerdote dice la sua antifona coll’oratione, ò sopra l’Altar, ov’esso sangue stà, il sacrificio della Messa in honor del santo Martire celebra, di posa arida terra, ch’immobilmente è nel fondo delle carrafine congelata, ritorna vivo, e vermiglio sangue.’ Caracciolo, Napoli Sacra, 7.   3 ‘[E] per ogne parte liquidamente trascorrendo, tutte le riempie, & irriga, indi cresce, e si dilata, divien liquidissimo, e boglie, come se pur all’hora fusse à viva forza di mannaia, ò di acuto strale tratto fuori dal santo busto.’ Caracciolo, Napoli Sacra, 7.   4 ‘[E] quel che reca maraviglia à maraviglia, e vince lo stupore con un’alro [sic] maggiore, che dopò la solennità, sacrificio, oratione, & antifona del santo, e lo scontro della testa, quel vivo sangue ritorna di nuovo à congelarsi [five illegible words crossed out].’ Caracciolo, Napoli Sacra, 7.

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That radical change of appearance both is and is not also a change of substance. Nature itself hangs its head, unable to compete, outdone and undone in the miracle:

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and this shift from one state to another and back again occurs as many times as it is placed in the manner mentioned above [which] is the cause of such an evident miracle, to the amazement and shame of nature itself, as everyone knows.5

Caracciolo’s wonderful account gives us much to work with. He emphasizes  the undoing of nature that is the miraculous. Gennaro’s miracle is also the matter of prophecy. Here is explored what is made to matter in the miracle. Death’s dryness becomes life’s liquidity. Clotted blood, immobile, dull, indifferent, and desiccated as dust, shrivelled in the bottom of two small ampoules, moistens, swells, becomes capable of movement, responsive to level and the gauge of an eye, able to dart like an animated thing (Figs 1 & 4). Hot to touch, and brilliant red in colour, it is made to flourish again, and brought into a boiling raging tumult of life. In this revitalization, lifeless, motionless dust is remade as mobile fire and water, as living ‘scarlet elixirs’.6 Change itself is brought into view. Through a mysterious encounter death is remade as life and resurrection visibilized. In the transformation of this blood, new witnesses are forged. The Treasury Chapel takes place in the miracle and the staging of holy matter. For the divine is in place when a miracle takes place; the miracle works as a place of prophecy and to secure the place of place. Thus the prodigy restages relationships between matter and the divine, between place and sanctity. San Gennaro’s relic literally erupts into visibility and reconfigures relationships among the city of Naples, Gennaro as its saintly protector, and threats to that place, particularly Vesuvius.7 This chapter relishes the bloodiness of the miracle at the heart of the Treasury Chapel – the liquefying of San Gennaro’s blood – in order to see chapel and blood in a relation of analogical material metaphor. It opens an extended discussion pursued through this ‘e ciò vicendevolmente avviene, quante volte se li porge nelli sopradetti modi occasione de sì evidente miracolo, con istupore, & vergogna dell stessa natura, com à tutti è noto.’ Caracciolo, Napoli Sacra, 7.   6 G. Lubrani, Il fuoco sacro della Divinità Racceso negl’Altari del Clero Mitrato, e Religioso.  Panegirici del P. Giacomo Lubrani della Compagnia di Giesù. Dedicati all’Illustriss., e  Reverendiss. Signore D. ALESSANDRO CARACCIOLO de’ Marchesi dela  Motta Giojosa (Naples: Domenico Antonio Parrino and Michele Luigi Mutii, 1694), 25.   7 Chapter 2 pursues the argument that the miracle forges San Gennaro in (relation to) place – both the chapel and ‘Naples’.   5

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book of the relationship between materiality, holiness, and the production of place. This chapter posits the bloody miracle as crucial to an interrogation of those relationships.8 The miracle distinguished itself in relation to place. Thus the miraculous blood is examined here as productive in relation to a specific materiality of place, in both the broadest and narrowest of terms. The divine is thus staged, produced, and revealed in relation to material particularity through place and the remaking, even dislocation, of place. The miracle was revelatory in other ways also. It cuts across time, allowing past, present, and future to realign and to affirm the future. And in its changing it opens to question the relationship between matter, change, and the unchanging divine. It works as a material exploration of change and changeability. The relationship with the supernatural recovers the exceptionality of religious experience, and the question of the nature of the relationship between unchanging divinity and passible, sinful humanity is staged and ranged in and through the chapel. Existing scholarship on Gennaro’s miracle is overwhelmingly devoted either to disproving it scientifically, or to claiming it as a miraculous event, in which case it is consequently assumed to be transcendent and to lie beyond historical interpretation. A less developed thread of scholarship investigates Neapolitan bloody miracles more broadly in terms of cult, interpreted historically, anthropologically, and sociologically.9 To date no-one has attempted to interpret Gennaro’s miracle in relation to Neapolitan architecture and urbanism, except in so far as the Treasury Chapel has been unquestioningly treated as a container in which the prodigiosity takes place. Even less has the miracle been related to broader questions of materiality and transformationality in relation to that architecture.10 This ellipsis is the graver, since blood as holy matter and redemptive  was  central to theological enquiry into the relationship between God’s presence  and humanity. Gennaro’s miracle is related to other bloods – the transubstantative blood of Christ at the Mass and the blood of local saints that liquefied miraculously. In its miraculous changeability San Gennaro’s blood These ideas are developed below. The analogous relation between material and miracle is investigated in Chapters 2, 7, and 10, in which I treat the blood of the miracle, the bronze of the chapel gate, and the silver of the reliquary busts as materially and soteriologically analogous.   9 M. Niola, Il corpo mirabile: miracolo sangue estasi nella Napoli barocca (Rome: Meltemi, 1997); G. Sodano, ‘Miracoli e ordini religiosi nel Mezzogiorno d’Italia (XVI–XVIII secolo)’, Archivio storico per le province Napoletane, 105 (1987), 293–414; G. Sodano, ‘“Sangue vivo, rubicondo e senza malo odore”: i prodigi del sangue nei processi di canonizzazione a Napoli nell’età moderna’, Campania sacra, 26 (1995), 293–310.  10 Caroline Walker Bynum’s brief references to San Gennaro’s miracle are to date the only scholarly consideration of that blood as Christian materiality. Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 315 n. 42, 324 n. 73.   8

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participated in the exploration of the relationship between the immutability of the divine and the changeability of physical matter. Thus San Gennaro’s miracle brings into view blood as vital substance, blood as process, blood as change, blood as sacrifice and salvation; and it brings these into focus in relation to practices of seeing, witnessing, sight, and insight and the production and qualities of material change. Changeability, prophecy and sacrifice, sight and witness can be seen to inform and inhabit miraculous portent and chapel. Miraculous occasions

There were basically three sorts of occasions when Gennaro’s blood liquefied, or when it significantly failed to do so. First, there were the three principal feast days of the saint: his dies natalis (19 September); the feast of the translation of his relics (celebrated on the Saturday before the first Sunday in May); and, after 1631, the ‘feast of Vesuvius’ (16 December) (Fig. 18).11 Second, the blood liquefied on the occasion of visits by dignitaries or significant visitors to the Treasury Chapel, such as distinguished visitors from Protestant England. Third, it liquefied prematurely or remained obdurately hard during times of peril, thereby warning of impending danger to Naples or to the entire Catholic world. On each occasion, the speed of deliquescence, the viscosity of the liquid, its colour, and other signs were carefully noted and interpreted. Gennaro operated miracles principally on behalf of the city of Naples, but by no means exclusively for it. Indeed, his reach in the seventeenth century was greater than it is today, extending beyond the Kingdom of Naples to the After 1631 the head and blood relics were displayed during the three main feasts: the octave of the saint in September, the Saturday before the first Sunday in May (the feast of the Translation); and 16 December (the ‘feast of Vesuvius’). They were also displayed on the feast of Christ’s Circumcision, Epiphany, the day of Resurrection, and Pentecost. Fra G. Maria di Sant’Anna, Istoria della Vita, Virtù, e Miracoli di S. Gennaro Vescovo e Martire, Principal Padrone della Fedelissima Città, e Regno di Napoli. Nella quale parimente si ragiona delle Traslazioni del suo Corpo, Protezzione della sua patria, suo Prodigioso Sangue, Chiese, Riti circa i Divini Uffici, e di altre varie materie appartenenti al culto e venerazione dello stesso Santo, Scritta dal Padre F. Girolamo Maria di S. Anna … (Naples: Felice Mosca, 1707), 228. Much of the ceremonial in the Treasury Chapel circulated around the three main festivals of San Gennaro, but he was also credited with saving the city from plague in February 1692, when a good part of the kingdom was afflicted. Thus on 27 February 1692, as the barriers to trade were lifted, it was decided to establish a solemn feast with the procession of the relics of head and blood, accompanied by the cardinal and viceroy, following the form of the ‘feast of Vesuvius’ of 16 December, since ‘the liberation from such a scourge in this city and in other parts of the Kingdom [had been] obtained in particular through the intercession of our protector saint’. ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc. 83 bis n. 1), fol. 118.

 11

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Mediterranean world, and even, as Girolamo Maria di Sant’Anna claimed in 1710, throughout the Catholic world:

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the miracle of the liquefaction of the Blood of San Gennaro is a fact which belongs not only to matters relating to the city and Kingdom of Naples of which he is principal protector, but to the whole of the Catholic world, too.12

The celebration of San Gennaro’s blood – the work of the Treasury Chapel – repositioned baroque Naples at the crux of the Catholic world. Just as the blood’s liquefaction was a signal from Heaven, so, too, was its refusal to liquefy. Non-liquefaction indicated Heaven’s obduracy and foretold threats to the city and Kingdom of Naples and to Catholicism more widely. Failure to liquefy or a partial liquefaction signalled the siege of Constantine by Muhammed II in 1453, the Sack of Rome in 1527, the Ottoman siege of Calabrian cities in 1550, 1555, and 1558 and of Malta in 1571, the terrible famine of 1569 that afflicted the entire kingdom, and the Battle of Lepanto.13 The miracle’s wide reach justified its inclusion among the most renowned facts and miracles of the Catholic Church that graced Pope Gregory XIII’s gallery in the Vatican Palace (Plate 10). But while the miracle’s reach was wide, it was towards the city of Naples that Gennaro’s protection was particularly directed. ‘The Register of Miracles’ invokes the memory of 1656, year of the terrible plague which killed over 400,000 people in Naples: first the blood emerged from the safe already entirely liquid; then, after its solidification, it remained obdurately hard before the head for a long time, refusing to liquefy, ‘demonstrating by the first prodigy the seriousness of the scourge, and by the second the earnestness of the  entreaties of his continuous intercession’.14 Plague, famine, volcanic eruption, earthquake, and even revolt: Naples was unusually imperilled and the blood was able to warn of these threats. That liquid, sensitive as a breath of destiny, indicated the destiny of the city. Failure to liquefy indicated that the city or kingdom was about to suffer war, plague, or other disaster.15 Thus the blood was a barometer of Naples’ spiritual health, moral corruption, and Fra Girolamo Maria di Sant’Anna, referring to Tommaso Costo’s Istoria del Regno, in his Aggiunte all’Istorie della Vita, Virtù, e Miracoli di S. Gennaro Vescovo, e Martire, Principal Padrone della Fedelissimia Città, e Regno di Napoli. Nella quale si rapportano varie erudizioni, e molte curiose notizie, Scritte dal Padre F. Girolamo Maria di S. Anna Carmelitano Scalzo (Naples: Felice Mosca, 1710), 18–19.  13 Regio, Le Vite de’ Sette Santi Protettori di Napoli, 10(B)r; Maria di Sant’Anna, Aggiunte all’Istoria, 9, 137, Caracciolo, Napoli Sacra, 7–8.  14 ‘dimostrando col primo prodigio la gravezza del flagello, e col secondo le vive istanze del suo intercedere continuo’. ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc.83 bis n. 1), fol. 3r.  15 Caracciolo recalls that non-liquefaction in 1588 was followed by the Turks sacking towns in Calabria, Sorrento, and Massa; and in 1569 by famine in Naples and its kingdom. Caracciolo, Napoli Sacra, 7–8.  12

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relation with divine. Of all the forces which threatened Naples, during the seventeenth century, as we shall see in Chapter 2, it was with Vesuvius that the blood was drawn into closest relationship (Plate 20). If much was at stake for the Neapolitans, so was it for San Gennaro. Miracles could easily slip into sorcery. Gennaro’s prodigy constituted and signalled the saint’s fama (reputation). Since the signum was not mechanical and did not occur automatically, the drama of his miracle resided in its unpredictability and in the precariousness of the fate of city and saint. In short, San Gennaro depended on the city, just as it did on him. That was the drama. Nevertheless, the chapel worked to produce a new ‘San Gennaro’ through its flamboyant celebration of his wonder. Liquefying for Naples The city of Naples abounds in the blood of many glorious martyrs, not because it was shed in martyrdom there, but because it is conserved in various churches with much glory and [to] the honour of this city, and amongst the others is that which is kept in the Duomo, that belongs to glorious San Gennaro, and it is a ceaseless miracle to his Naples, and a wonder throughout the world.16

Camillo Tutini’s Memorie della Vita Miracoli, e culto di San Gianuario Martire (Naples, 1633) claims Gennaro for Naples, and the centrality of Naples to Gennaro. Naples possesses extraordinary riches in martyred blood, and that custody redounds directly to the city’s glory and honour. Of all the Neapolitan bloods, San Gennaro’s is supreme. Naples’ custody of his blood renders Gennaro Neapolitan; and Gennaro shows his approval and elicits further devotion through the miracle that also makes Naples glorious. His miracle is ‘continuous’ – not a series of sporadic events. It sustains Naples and keeps it in place. Gennaro’s miracle was important because, like all miracles, it signified divine intervention, but it was special because it was specifically Neapolitan. Indeed, it can be seen as the making and staging of napoletanità.17 The Vatican fresco declares the inseparability of Gennaro’s miracle and ‘Naples’ ‘Abbonda la Città di Napoli del sangue di molti Gloriosi Martiri, non che in essa per mezzo del martirio vi fosse sparso, mà perche in varie Chiese si conserva con molta gloria, & onore di questa Città, e trà gli altri è quello, che nel Duomo si costodisce, ch’è del Glorioso San Gianuario, & è un continuo miracolo alla sua Napoli, e maraviglia di tutto il Mondo.’ Tutini, Memorie (1633), 77.  17 I do not wish to reduce Naples or its inhabitants to an unchanging identity in the sort of anthropologizing interpretations advanced by some British historians in the 1980s, which understandably provoked indignation, but even today descendants of San Gennaro’s family assume prime position in the Treasury Chapel on his feast days, loudly praying to, even occasionally hectoring, the saint.  16

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to an international audience (Plate 10). Inseparable, one remakes the other. In the fresco Gennaro’s blood relics on a brancard, borne by gentlemen with the Archbishop following, arrive at the temporary altar out of doors where his head awaits. A great crowd of priests and regulars joins the event to the city’s great monuments behind. The Neapolitanness of the miracle is not incidental to it. Yet San Gennaro was not inherently or unequivocally Neapolitan. Indeed, his origins were fiercely contested. Undisputed was the fact that he was bishop, not of Naples, but of neighbouring Benevento. Thus the making Neapolitan of Gennaro and his miracle was part of the work of the Treasury Chapel. It was the brilliant Neapolitan production of the bloody miracle that made San Gennaro Neapolitan, and it was Naples that was favoured by the miracle as locus for the liquefaction and focus of the protection that it augured. And Naples was made anew by that conjunction. At the heart of all this is the Treasury Chapel, locus and focus of transformative staging of material transformationality. Consider the question of Gennaro’s place. Gennaro, Bishop of Benevento, was a relatively obscure saint, who heroically resisted persecution during Emperor Diocletian’s reign.18 His obscurity and the fact that he was not closely identified with other cities meant that his story and blood were ready for espousal. Thrown to wild animals, hurled into a raging furnace, and imprisoned, he and his companions miraculously escaped unharmed. Episodes in Gennaro’s holy career extend across the chapel frescoes and altarpieces and include his miraculous restoration of sight to Timotheo (Fig. 68), his persecutor, from whom he had deprived it, his emerging unscathed from a furnace (Plate 13), and his healing a possessed woman, and his beheading on 19 September 305 at the Solfatara in Pozzuoli, on Timotheo’s orders.19 His life, death, and prodigiosities smother the chapel’s surfaces. After Gennaro’s execution, there followed a series of translations of his body, head, and blood. There is disagreement about location and chronology, but broadly, while his head and blood were taken early to Naples, his body followed later.20 His body was translated many times. From the Early sources for Gennaro’s life include: Regio, Le Vite de’ Sette Santi Protettori; L. Ioele Napoletano, Rappresentazione della vita del Glorioso San Gennaro, Vescovo di Benevento, Patritio e Protettore di Napoli (Naples: Per Camillo Cauallo, 1645); Tutini, Memorie (1633 and subsequent edns), which constituted an important contribution to securing his fame and favour; di Sant’Anna, Istoria della Vita (1707 and subsequent editions).  19 The story of the martyrdom of Gennaro and his companions, Sossio (or Sosso), Eutichete, Proculo, Acuzio, Festo and Desiderio was recounted in the Acta Boneniensia, known to Bede. 20 According to Girolamo Maria di Sant’Anna, Gennaro’s blood, head, finger  and  bones were preserved after his decollation (Maria di Sant’Anna, Istoria della Vita, 53). ‘Mà che scrittura facesse mentione del predetto Sangue, e quando venisse in Napoli sin hora non  18

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Solfatara (Fig. 19) it was secretly buried by pious Christians in Marciano and from there translated to San Severo’s church just outside Naples and thence to Benevento.21 ‘The Translation of the Body from Naples to Benevento’, published by Camillo Tutini in his history of San Gennaro of 1710, depicts priests, clergy, monks, and laity in a procession bearing a small urn containing Gennaro’s relics in 817 (Fig. 20). Sico, Prince of Benevento, ‘rejoiced for having taken San Gennaro’s body, more than for having subjugated Naples, and having rendered it his tributary’.22 The body was translated again (with the bodies of Festo and Desiderio), probably in the mid-twelfth century, to the monastery at Monte Vergine, twenty-eight miles from Naples and twelve from Benevento, where the monks buried it under the main altar.23 In 1480 the monastery passed in commendam to the Cardinal of Aragon, son of King Ferdinand I, and during embellishments, the saint’s body was rediscovered. That rediscovery ‘aroused the desire of the Neapolitans to possess appare’. Tutini, Memorie, 77–78. Gennaro Luongo has argued that Gennaro’s special association with the church of Naples received early elaboration in Uranio’s De obitu Paulini, the Nolan presbyter’s account of Paulinus of Nola’s last days in 431, during the very period when the body of San Gennaro was brought to Naples. Uranio refers to San Gennaro as bringing special glory to the church of Naples as bishop and martyr ‘Ianuarius, episcopus simul et martyr, Neapolitanae urbis illustrat ecclesiam’. The term illustrat refers both to Gennaro’s illumining and glorifying of the Neapolitan church and to his purifying or cleansing by sacrifice, thus the reviving and protective function of the city. G. Luongo, ‘Neapolitane urbis illustrat ecclesiasm (Uranio, De obitu Paulini  3)’, in G. Luongo (ed.), San Gennaro nel XVII centenario del martirio (305–2005). Atti del Convegno internazionale (Napoli, 21–23 settembre 2005) (Naples: Campania Notizie, 2007), vol. I, 15–36.  21 Tutini, Memorie (1633), 77.  22 ‘e giubilo il Principe Sicone in aver preso il Corpo di s. Gianuario, più che se avesse soggettata Napoli, e resala sua tributaria.’ (C. Tutini, Memorie istoriche della vita, miracoli, e culto di San Gianuario Martire Vescovo di Benevento, e principale protettore della Città di Napoli. Raccolte da Don Camillo Tutini Napoletano. Aggiuntevi in questa impressione da Michele Luigi Muzio bellissime figure in rame dell’illustre martirio del sudetto Santo. E si dà distintamente contezza delle Statue, Marmi, Pitture, Argenti, Suppellettili, Reliquie, Indulgenze, e Doni fatti sistenti nella gran Cappella del Tesoro del sudetto Principale Protettore, et oltre gli narrati Incendj del Vesuvio dal Tutini per tutto il 1631, se ne descrivono altri dodeci successi in appreso, con molte efficaci Orazioni da farsi allo stesso SANTO (Naples: Michele Muzio, 1710), 74). Immediately in Benevento, San Gennaro began to perform a series of miracles, including healings: ‘Lo stesso giorno, che fù levato il Corpo di s. Gianuario dal Sepolcro, cominciò ad oprar miracoli’ (Tutini, Memorie (1710) 74).  23 Again, when and why the translation to Montevergine took place is subject to dispute. Some claim that it occurred in 1134, 1154, 1156, and even 1240; still others date it to 1266 when Charles I was sent by Clement IV to extirpate Manfredi, who had usurped the Kingdom of Naples and was in rebellion against the Church (Tutini, Memorie (1710) 87). According to Frà Berardino Siciliano, the Archbishop of Benevento was the abbot of Montevergine’s brother. The sources agree, however, that the various marble urns with their names in lead were buried beneath the main altar at Montevergine.

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that holy body of their citizen and protector’.24 When Cardinal Oliviero Carafa replaced the Cardinal of Aragon in commendam at Montevergine in 1485, ‘spurred on by the devotion of the popolo napoletano and the prayers of  King Ferdinand I, who intervened in this regard with Pope Alexander VI, he determined to secure the precious relics for Naples’.25 Against their will, Archbishop Carafa stole Gennaro’s body from the monks and translated it to Naples Cathedral to join his head and blood relics (Fig. 10).26 Gennaro’s body,  fragmented, scattered, and disputed, thus chased after his head and blood. The bloody miracle’s preference for Naples preceded and exceeded – even while it served to justify – the building of the Treasury Chapel.27 The story runs that after the beheading of Gennaro and his companions at Pozzuoli, Christians came, planning to secretly bury them. Among them a Neapolitan, particularly devoted to Gennaro during his lifetime, was planning to bury the relics in Naples. Gennaro appeared in a blaze of light, and instructed him to search out one of his teeth, hidden in the grass and thorns, and to place this in his tomb together with his head: ‘I promise you that for such a good deed, with the favour of my Lord, I will assume protection of your homeland [Patria] in perpetuity, and I shall be its strongest and swiftest defender.’28 The Neapolitan accordingly secretly hid the head and tooth in Marciano, near Pozzuoli. Meanwhile, on hearing about the saints’ murder, a Neapolitan ‘Sentì gran contento il Cardinale d’Aragonia d’aver ritrovato si gran tesoro, e sparsa la fama di tal’Invenzione in Napoli, subito s’accesero di desiderio i Napoletani di aver quel santo Corpo del loro Citadino, e Protettore.’ Tutini, Memorie (1710), 89.  25 ‘Questi [Oliviero C] desideroso di unire col santo Capo il Corpo del Glorioso San Gianuario alla Chiesa di Napoli, governata un tempo dal detto Cardinale, spronato in ciò non solo dalla devozione del Popolo Napoletano, mà ancora dalle preghiere del Rè Ferrante Primo, che strettamente per pettere lo pregava, che s’adoprasse con Alessandro VI Sommo Pontefice, che gli concedesse questo Santo Corpo.’ Tutini, Memorie (1633), 109, and (1710), 90.  26 Tutini, Memorie della Vita Miracoli, e culto di San Gianuario Martire Vescovo di Benevento, e principale protettore della Città di Napoli. Terza impressione (Naples: Giovan-Francesco Paci, 1703; reprint of 1633 edn), 48, and Memorie (1710), 83. The story goes that while the monks resisted during the absence of the prior of Montevergine, on his return, everything was smoothed over. The translation from Benevento to Montevergine is variously dated.(see n. 23 above). For the life story of San Gennaro and the views of various authorities, see especially Maria di Sant’Anna, Istoria della Vita (1707), 29, 44, 49, 65–66, 95.  27 Paolo Regio’s important account of the lives of Naples’ seven protector saints, Le Vite de’ Sette Santi Protettori, reaffirms San Gennaro’s crucial relation to Naples in this regard. Regio (1545–1607) was Bishop of Vico Equense, and a member of the Accademia degli Svegliati and prolific author before dedicating himself to writing of saints’ lives. He became the single most prolific author in sixteenth-century Neapolitan publishing history. Marino, Becoming Neapolitan, 26, 120–121.  28 Regio, Le Vite de’ Sette Santi Protettori, 9v.  24

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woman resident in Pozzuoli, who was ill and perhaps had come to Pozzuoli for its waters, raised herself from her bed and with virile spirit (con animo virile) gathered up the saint’s blood: She took two small ampoules and betook herself to the place where through the shedding of their blood those saints had been assumed in heaven …, she gathered up the immaculate and chaste blood of blessed Gennaro, putting the purer part in one ampoule and the rest somewhat mixed with straw in the other … Thus the Holy Spirit took care not only of the soul and body of its saints, but even of the drops of their blood.29

Regio addresses the woman directly: O woman most worthy of praise, far more than one reads in the ancient histories … Since your action preserved for your city the sacred liquid that bestows wonderment on whomever wonders at it, and enhances the faith of whomever contemplates it; [a] deed of wondrous God on earth to astound all human reason, and to raise each devout mind up to him.30

Unanticipated, the miracle of liquefaction occurred when the head and blood of San Gennaro came together again by chance on entry into Naples. Some years after Gennaro’s martyrdom, the Christian who had saved the saint’s body, together with bishop, clergy, and people of Naples – by then predominantly Christians – singing hymns and psalms, returned to the place where he had hidden it and, finding it uncorrupted and sweet smelling, carried it to Naples and deposited it in the Cathedral.31 Paolo Regio continues: Likewise the woman who had saved that purest blood, although many years had passed, hearing that his citizens had gratefully received the saint’s body, let them know of the precious relic conserved in the ampoule. [And] they, filled with greater joy, this being the utmost they could wish for; for their safety, taking the head of the martyr with the same solemnity with which they had brought it to the city, went to find her.32

The woman, cured from the moment she gathered up Gennaro’s blood, took those relics and went to meet them: Whence on encountering them near the city, there occurred something worthy of wonder that was also quite new. For the blood which for a long time had Regio, Le Vite de’ Sette Santi Protettori, 10(A)r–v. The immaculacy of Gennaro’s blood evokes ‘the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb unspotted and undefiled’ (I Peter 1:18–19).  30 Regio, Le Vite de’ Sette Santi Protettori, 10(A)v.  31 Regio, Le Vite de’ Sette Santi Protettori, 10(A)v.  32 Regio, Le Vite de’ Sette Santi Protettori, 10(A)r.  29

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hardened like a stone, in drawing close to the holy head, all at once recognized it; and just as snow melts in the sun, or as wax froths near fire.33

The miracle, unexpectedly occasioned by the encounter of head and blood near Naples, guaranteed the authenticity of the relics: ‘[The bishop] after having recognized them [the relics], took the sacred ampoules, where the blood of the saint was hard and frozen, at the sight of his head (o marvel!) it began to liquefy, bringing certainty to all there gathered, that that was the blood of the holy martyr.’34 At such an extraordinary miracle, everyone raised their eyes and their voices to heaven. To verify the miracle, the Bishop had the venerable head moved some good distance away; and straight away the miraculous blood became hard again. Thus by these miracles that were so readily manifest everyone knew that that was the true and whole-hearted blood of the most blessed Gennaro.35

The miracle marked a covenant between God/Gennaro and Naples/ Neapolitans: perhaps forging, by means of this supernatural sign, a pact with the Neapolitans indicating his protection; thereby imitating the highest Creator, who made a bond with Noah by means of the rainbow not to flood the universe again in future.36

Neapolitans become Gennaro’s chosen people. Place – the city of Naples – is not incidental to this covenant. It is crucial to it. Thus Gennaro was rendered ‘Neapolitan’ through the devotion of Neapolitans, the translation of his Regio, Le Vite de’ Sette Santi Protettori, 10(B)r. Havendo S. Severo edificata una Chiesa fuor di Napoli al Santo, procurò d’ivi trasferire il suo Corpo (come raccontato habbiamo) sì che volsero ancora portare in Napoli il suo Sangue, che fin’à questo tempo incorrotto si conserva, & essendo andato molta gente à prendere queste sagre Reliquie (circa il 381 in Pozzuolo con lumi accesi, e soavi canti lo riportarono in Napoli; e nella Villa d’Anignano, dove oggi si dice il Vomero, si posarono in un luogo, aspettando, che il Clero col Popolo solennemente venisse: riceverlo. S’avviarono la Città, e il Clero processionalmente con ghirlande di fiori in segno d’allegrezza, & insieme Gio: Vescovo di Napoli, Santo Severo parimente, & i parenti del santo; e giunti al luogo predetto (dove poi se gli è fabricata una Cappella in suo nome) e postosi in camino quel santo Corpo co’l suo sangue, il Vescovo co’l Clero, e tutto il Popolo gli furono all’incontro, adorandolo, e benedicendolo; e volsero quei, che portato aveano da Pozzuolo queste Reliquie, consegnarle al Vescovo; il quale dopò d’averle riconsciute, prese le sacre Ampolle, dove era il Sangue del santo duro, e gelato, alla vista del Suo Capo (o maraviglia!) comincia à liquefarsi, dando certezza à tutti ivi radunati, che quello era il Sangue del Santo Martire.’ Tutini, Memorie (1710), 103–104.  35 Regio, Le Vite de’ Sette Santi Protettori, 10(B)r.  36 Regio, Le Vite de’ Sette Santi Protettori, 10(B)r.  33  34

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relics, but above all by his miracle. Unusually for a bishop saint, his patria was forged posthumously by claims to devotion and miraculous event rather than by place of birth or episcopal see. His strange miracle showed the saint’s pleasure at being brought (back) to Naples. More than signum of Gennaro’s intercession, the miracle recognizes Naples as Gennaro’s chosen home. Cause and sign of Gennaro’s commitment to Naples, the miracle is divine guarantee and prophetic injunction. It does not simply take place in and affirm Naples, but forges a new divine identity for it. Although the date of the blood’s translation to Naples is unknown and likewise the date of the first ceremonial ostension of the miracle to the people, it was claimed as an ‘extremely ancient’ (antichissimo) Christian custom.37 We shall see in Chapter 2 that the miracle–Naples connection was forged overwhelmingly via Vesuvius.38 The miracle is first recorded as taking place in Naples Cathedral in 1389 when blood and head were brought into contact.39 One of the best-known early sources is a poem of 200 octaves, written mainly in Italian, by the Sicilian Fra Bernardino, a member of the Franciscan community in Naples and a doctor in canon law, which celebrates the life, martyrdom, and miracles of San Gennaro, probably written over a period of time between 1503 and 1505. Bernardino records that when two phials containing the saint’s dried blood (Fig. 1) were placed next to the reliquary containing the skull (Plate 6), the blood was liable to liquefy. Fra Bernardino’s reference to the miracle occurring on a May feast day appears to be the earliest documentary reference to this event. According to Tutini in 1633, the ‘ancient constitutions of the Church of Naples record that on the Saturday before the first Sunday in May, for quite  some time, it was customary for clergymen to carry the head of the ‘E che questo Sangue sia antichissimo in Napoli è cosa certa, perche non habbiamo scrittura della sua venuta, nè tampoco quando fù la prima volta, che si fece questa cerimonia di mostrare il Sangue liquefatto al Popolo’ (Tutini, Memorie (1710), 104). Tutini states that the first liquefaction probably occurred in 381 when San Gennaro’s head and blood were reunited in Naples, but that the first time that it was displayed to the people is not recorded; for him this confirms its antiquity: ‘when an ecclesiastical rite recognized by all is of unknown origin, it is clear that it is extremely old, and is a tradition of the ancient Christians’. Tutini, Memorie (1710), 104.  38 Thus Tutini interprets Fabio Giordano’s observation in his treatise on Mount Vesuvius that in 685 the head and blood together quelled the volcano, as evidence ‘such that one can probably say that before the eruption, this glorious blood was to be found in Naples’. Tutini, Memorie (1710), 104–105.  39 The event of 1389 is recorded in the Cronicon Siculum incerti authoris ab anno 340 ad annum 1396 in forma diarii [sic] ex inedito Codice ottoboniano Vaticano, cura et studio Josephi de Blasiis, in Società Napoletana di storia patria, Monumenta storici, ser. 1: Cronache (Naples, 1887).  37

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Glorious San Gennaro under a canopy to a church of the Archbishop’s choosing’ (Fig. 18).40 ‘The next day the Archbishop with clergy and the saint’s blood, joined it in procession, and the miracle took place.’41 This ritual continued until 1525, when Geronimo Pellegrino, early in his tenure of office of Eletto del Popolo, requested Archbishop Giovanni Vincenzo Carafa that the solemnity should take place that year ‘in the middle of the Piazza della Sellaria’. That bold gesture, seeking to detach Gennaro’s miracle from ecclesiastical control and to claim it for the popolo in the space most sharply identified with them, was justified as a ‘commemoration’ of the first miracle that occurred in the Piazza d’Antignano, when the blood was translated to Naples.42 The aristocratic Seggi quickly muscled in, nervous lest the cult should be wrested from their control. After 1528 the honour rotated amongst the Neapolitan Seggi – from Popolo, Capuana, Montagna, Nido, Porto to Portanova. Each year the Seggio responsible for solemnizing the festival produced an apparato, precious hangings, triumphal arches adorned with statues, and other architectural curiosities (curiose architetture).43 At the centre of these festivities was a richly adorned altar, on which the saint’s head was displayed, as shown in the Vatican fresco (Plate 10), and where the miracle occurred: ‘on its right was the seat of the Archbishop and a stall for his chapter, and facing the altar was the special portable baldacchino [dossello] of the Viceroy, and in the most comfortable places were seats for cavalieri and gentlewomen, and for people The 1337 ritual of Archbishop Giovanni Orsini required commemoration of the passio of San Gennaro on 19 September, and re-enactment of his translation on the first Saturday in May. The celebration occurs the day before the anniversary of the translation. On that day, the head of the saint was carried from the cathedral to one of the city’s churches and then returned to the cathedral in the afternoon, attended by the Archbishop and clergy (Tutini, Memorie (1633), 98). The blood is recorded in the archiepiscopal records as accompanying the head to perform the miracle only after 1525, although earlier records of the miracle antedating the sixteenth century exist, including 6 October 1496. See G. Passero, Storie in form di Giornali, ed. V. M. Altobelli and M. M. Vecchioni (Naples: Vincenzo Orsino, 1785), 108; D. Norman, ‘The Succorpo in the Cathedral of Naples: “empress of all chapels”’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 49:3 (1986), 331–332.  41 ‘Il giorno poi andava l’Arcivescovo processionalmente co’l Clero, e co’l Sangue del Santo, e si facea il miracolo.’ Tutini, Memorie (1710), 109. The chosen churches included Santi Apostoli, San Paolo Maggiore, Santa Maria Maggiore, San Giorgio Maggiore, and Santa Maria in Piazza.  42 During the first few months of Pellegrino’s tenure of office, as Giovanni Battista Bolvito records, in c.1525 he asked Giovanni Vincenzo Carafa, Archbishop of Naples, that the solemnity that was to have taken place that year in one of the usual churches, should be celebrated instead in the ‘middle of the piazza of the Sellaria’ in remembrance of the first miracle that occurred on the Piazza d’Antignano, when the blood was translated to Naples. Tutini, Memorie (1710), 109–110.  43 Tutini, Memorie (1710), 110.  40

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deputed by that Piazza’.44 Thus the miracle claimed the city outside ecclesiastical space as its own.45 The sight of sight

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By what awakening is this blood kindled to see again the bitter hours of its ­torments? By what heat is it rarefied, what virtue makes it move, and from where does it draw such beauty?46

In the miracle the intersection between material nature and the divine is made manifest.47 God’s power is seen to exceed all merely natural limits and to produce things that natural reason and dialectic considered absurd, such as the Trinity, the Incarnation, or the attempt to cross spirit with the flesh in the doctrine of the real presence (transubstantiation). But while the sacraments remained essentially a mystery, the liquefaction of blood was publicly disclosed; and its power lay precisely in its public visibility. While the real presence in the Mass produced no sensible transformation in wine or bread, San Gennaro’s blood was sensationally transformed from solid to liquid and in its transformed state was offered to the assorted worshippers to be seen and kissed. It required faith in the domain of sense perception and especially ‘Mà in ispecialtà vi s’apparecchia un ricco, ornato Altare pieno di lui per riporvi la Testa del Santo, alla cui destra si pone la sedia del Signor Arcivescovo con lo scanno per lo suo Capitolo, & all’incontro dell’Altare il dossello del Sig. Vicerè, e ne’ luoghi più comodi si collocano altre sedie per i Cavalieri e Gentildonne, e persone deputate di quella piazza.’ Tutini, Memorie (1710), 110–111.  45 Parrino, Napoli Città Nobilissima (1700), 126. For a discussion of the involvement of the Seggi in the cult of San Gennaro, see H. Hills, ‘Did the Seggi have a Religious Architecture? Forging New Urban Devotion in Naples Cathedral and Civic Holiness’, in G. Heidemann and T. Michalsky (eds), Ordnungen des sozialen Raumes: Die Quartieri, Sestieri und Seggi in den fruehneuzeitlichen Staedten Italiens (Berlin: Reimer, 2012), 159–188, and see below, Chapter 7.  46 ‘Picciola ampolla mi mostra ristretto l’universo delle maraviglie. Da quale svegliatoio è questo Sangue destato à riveder l’hore amare de’ suoi martiri? À qual fuoco così s’interpedisce? À qual calore si rarefà qual’è di lui la virtù motiva, e donde attinge bellezza tanta?’ T. Basile, IL CIBO DIVINO DISCORSI PREDICABILI. Ove con ingegnose Invenzioni, pie Moralità, e nuovi pensieri fondati in Teologia, e Santi Padri si tratta appieno. Delle Grandezze, Maraviglie, e de’ stupendi Effetti DELL’AUGUSTISSIMO SACRAMENTO DE’ SACRAMENTI. Degl’Apparecchi per prendersi degnamente; e di ciò, che si deve dopo l’essersi ricevuto (Rome: Pietro Antonio Facciotti, 1638), 4.  47 Cardinal Cajetan registered the matter/spirit opposition and denied that faith could only have a spiritual object. Sensible objects were merely ‘extrema rerum creditarum’ and many objects of faith ‘consistunt in coniunctione rerun sensibilium cum rebus insensibilibus’. Cajetan, ‘De erroribus contigentibus in Eucharistiae sacramento (Dec  1525)’, quoted in E. M. Henning, ‘The Architectonics of Faith: Metalogic and Metaphor in Zwingli’s Doctrine of the Eucharist’, Renaissance and Reformation, 22 (1986), 324–325.  44

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in the power of sight. While the Mass, if performed by a priest in a state of grace, was dependable and repeatable, this was not true of San Gennaro’s liquefaction, which was undependable, unpredictable, indeed quixotic. When head and blood were brought together, accompanied by antiphon, Mass, and prayer, the miracle might occur, or it might be withheld. It was not an act of grace, but a signum, and prophetic. The miracle staged the sight of change and sight as a means to change. The relics, too, had the capacity to see. Although sometimes the miracle occurred when head and blood were simply brought together, most commentators insist that it was the sight of the blood by the head that produced the miracle.48 Cesare D’Engenio Caracciolo is specific: ‘on being placed in the sight of the head, the glorious blood became very liquid’ (italics added).49 And in his 1694 panegyrics Giacomo Lubrani identifies Gennaro’s eyes as cause of the miracle, and able to see and be seen to see: ‘In your head will always triumph the eyes [that are the cause] of our joys.’50 The power of sight was activated. Head and blood had to be in view of each other (Plate 6, Figs 1 & 9). That the head needed to ‘see’ the blood might not surprise; but the reverse was true, too. The blood might also behold the head and be seen to do so. In the second half of the fifteenth century Loise de Rosa expressed it thus: And now I tell you that Naples has the most beautiful relic that exists anywhere in the world: it has the head of San Gennaro … and a little carafe of his blood, [which] stands like a stone [preta], and in seeing the head [como vede la testa] it liquefies, as if it issued from it, and it works and has worked many miracles.51

Thus the blood standing apart from the head and out of its sight (‘fuori l’aspetto della Testa del Santo’) was set hard and immobile; but when placed to face the head, ‘it immediately liquefies, just as if it were wax placed in a fire’.52 This did not necessarily occur instantly. It often liquefied after about Thus Francesco De Magistris refers to the ampoules of blood as ‘brought together’ with the blood (‘qui quoties cum capite coniungitur’). F. de Magistris, Status rerum memorabilium tam Ecclesiasticarum, quam politicarum, ac etiam aedificiorum Fidelissimae Civitatis Neapolitanae (Naples: Luca Antonio de Fusco, 1678), 270.  49 Caracciolo, Napoli Sacra, 9.  50 ‘Nel tuo capo trionferanno sempre gli occhi delle nostre allegrezze.’ Lubrani, Il suoco sacro, 8.  51 ‘E più, vi dico che have Napole la più bella relliquia che sia per tutto lo mundo: have la testa de santo Iennaro, che fo arciepiscopo de Napole; e have una caraffella de lo sangue suo, e sta como una preta, e como vede la testa se fa liquido, como mo’ fosse insuto da la testa, e fa e have fatto più miracule.’ A. Altamura (ed.), Napoli aragonese nei Ricordi di Loise De Rosa (Naples: Libreria Scientifica Editrice, 1971), 191.  52 ‘l’ordinario miracolo, che in esso si vede, è, che stando separato, e fuori l’aspetto della Testa del Santo, esso se ne stà tutto indurito, ed immobile; in porsi però dirimpetto la  48

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fifteen minutes or half an hour.53 But it was the coming together of head and blood, the sight of one by the other, that returned the blood to its living state. That head was body, the part the whole, was the logic of relics. More than a symbolic reconstitution of the saint’s body, the bringing of the head and blood together was repeatedly articulated in terms of sight.54 Seeing is staged  as transformational. It is to witness in the most profound sense. Witnessing the miracle transformed worshippers into believers and potentially saved them. Thus it is sight or recognition that is staged as capable of witness and as potentially transformative. Visual contact between head and  blood was vital to the miracle, and, in turn, the seeing of that sight effected salvation in  the  hearts of those who truly beheld; and it effected witness, communicated the wonder to all and sundry. Thus on 27 March 1674: ‘after the Mass was over, the Treasurer took up again the glorious Blood and it liquefied in sight of the head and of many cavalieri and people’ (my italics).55 Ocular reception precipitated the miracle and confirmed it. The miracle was revelatory. One seeing allowed others to see in an altered incorporation. In effect, the miracle was a recognition of recognition that required recognition. Yet the desire for access to God, like the power of the martyr, was complex and ambiguous. Seeing the miracle was not a simple matter. There was always something less and something more than ‘seeing’. The miracle was as much veiled as seeable. The blood relics, encased in their ancient glass ampoules, themselves worn with age, remained obscured as much as revealed (Fig. 4). The ambivalence and complexity of the visual transformation is recorded even in the Register of Miracles itself, which attests to apparent shifts in divine will as the blood switched rapidly from its hard state to liquid and back again, and to the many variations in its partial liquefactions. Even as it staged sight as miraculous, the miracle also demonstrated the deceptions and illegibilities of seeing, the ambiguities and indeterminacies at the crux of the relation between the material and the divine. Invisibility is also made visible in c­ ertain Testa, subito si liquefà, come se fusse cera posta nel fuoco.’ ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc. 83 bis n. 1), ‘Registro dei Miracoli’, fol. 2r. 53 For instance on 1 February 1661 when the miracle was displayed to a Knight of Malta, the French representative of the Knights in Rome, the blood was found hard but liquefied after fifteen to thirty minutes, ‘to the consolation of all’. ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc. 83 bis n.1), fol. 9r. 54 The thinking that the instance is (has being) because it participates in the exemplar is, in a sense, a conception of representation. St Bernard’s idea that the imago must return to the similitudo is part of this tendency to think that part is the whole. 55 ‘Il Sig[no]r Tesoriero ripigliò il glorioso Sangue e si liquefè a vista della testa, e di molti cavalieri, e popolo.’ ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc. 83 bis n. 1), fol. 97v.

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occasions of the miracle: ‘the blood was beginning to grow in such a way that sometimes it was visible at other times invisible … producing a foam’. Here ‘foam’, like sperm, appears as the possibility of something new, at once apparently the essential part and ambiguity of language, a fecund intersection between incomprehensible utterance and divine enunciation.

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The intensive miracle

North European miraculous blood was extensive; Neapolitan blood was intensive.56 Caroline Walker Bynum has shown that whereas liquids in thirteenth-century visions (even of wounds and hearts) were water, honey, and milk, the liquid in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century visions was blood ‘ever more copiously pooling or shed’, as in Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Schneeberg altarpiece of 1539, in which blood jets from the side wound of Christ on the cross directly into Adam’s cup.57 Bloody miracles in and around Naples operate differently. At stake in the north European visions is the emission of blood, the manner of its shedding, the question whether it is alive or dead, the manner of its spillage, its drips and splashes. In the Neapolitan miracles blood does not collect, pool, or ooze from a dying body. Its shedding matters intensively. It is already shed and it is re-shed miraculously. It lives again to be shed again. What is at issue is the state of matter and thus the circumstances in which dust turns to liquid, when that liquid boils, or when it returns to dust – what physics refers to as ‘phase transition’.58 Those actions and their presence are brought under renewed scrutiny in the miracle. The blood changes its colour, texture, consistency, and viscosity. It is the miraculous material transformation and the timing and implications of phase transitions that are of concern here. Is that radical change of appearance a change of substance? How might the blood be at once shed and alive, on earth and yet with Gennaro glorified in heaven? Premature liquefaction was not a good sign. If Gennaro’s blood liquefied in its ampoule in the hands of the Treasurer behind the main altar and before it had been placed in view of the head, it provoked alarm and consternation.59 Not mere liquefaction, but liquefaction in the correct constellation of location and relation of blood–head–ceremony was what was desired. The visibility and the staged effects of sight were intrinsic (not accidental) to the miracle. Geographically blood devotion was especially, though not exclusively, a northern ­phenomenon. Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 6.  57 Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 6.  58 Phase transition marks the point of passage from solid to liquid to gaseous state of matter.  59 Thus in 1694 the deputies grew alarmed by its premature liquefaction. ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc.83 bis n. 1), fol. 127r–v.  56

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The occasion and mode of the blood’s liquefaction – more than liquefaction tout court – was what was deemed to matter. References to boiling, frequent in the Register of Miracles and in contemporaneous descriptions, might be interpreted as emphasizing Gennaro’s virility, since heat is male and potent in the humoural system. The blood reassured by liquefying, and called for change of heart and display of contrition in its non-liquefaction. But its premature liquefaction spelled time out of joint, heavenly agitation: ‘if the Blood is found in a liquid state before being placed before the Head, it is a sign that [Gennaro] is interceding with the Holy Divinity for some urgent reason’.60 This occurred during war between Paul IV and Philip II. Yet this, too, was twisted about and interpreted by Girolamo di Maria di Sant’Anna as a sign of Gennaro’s protection; he argued that to find the blood already in liquid form ‘was a portent that the city or kingdom was due to suffer some serious tribulation and troubles, and that through the saint’s intercession it would remain free [from this], thereby giving a dependable sign of this with its premature liquefaction’.61 Fluidity signified saintly frenzy as Gennaro sought to avert disaster through fervid intercession; the liquid state of the blood demonstrated his heated engagement and his willingness to sacrifice himself for the city of Naples.62 To find the blood already liquid was, therefore, a warning of impending catastrophe, but also a sign of San Gennaro’s urgent engagement in heaven on the city’s behalf. The blood was responsive and thus gauged change in its surroundings – heavenly and earthly. It responded to the presence of dignitaries and notables visiting the chapel and it even sensed when its housing was altered. The city commissioned a new silver tabernacle for the miraculous blood (Fig. 1), and seeking the Cardinal Archbishop’s approval, it asked him to transfer the ampoules of blood from the old to the new tabernacle. The master of ceremonies of the Cathedral recorded in his diary on 1 September 1649: His Eminence, thinking that he would not have to do more than remove the blood in its sphere and replace it, not in another sphere, but in the new tabernacle, immediately agreed. But later, once he understood that the little ampoules had to be removed from the old sphere and replaced in the new one,

‘Ma per lo contrario quando il Sangue si ritrova liquido prima di porlo dirimpetto la Testa; segno è, che sta intercedendo appresso la Divina Pietà per qualche urgente bisogno.’ ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc 83 bis n. 1), fol. 2v.  61 ‘all’ora suol esser presagio, che la Città, o Regno patir dovea qualche grave tribulazione, e molestia, e che per intercessione del santo nè sia rimasto libero, dandocene sicuro segno coll’anticipata liquefazzione.’ Maria di Sant’Anna, Istoria della Vita (1707), 138.  62 ‘istanze del suo intercedere continuo’. ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc 83 bis n. 1), fol. 3r.  60

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he began to have his doubts about it, and to feel averse [to the undertaking], as he feared the danger he was running of breaking the said ampoules, as they were very old, and because he had to do it all with tongs; for even though the Saint was so miraculous in nature, there was nevertheless no need to provoke him into making miracles.63

The Archbishop himself feared that San Gennaro might well automatically respond simply to the physical conjunction of his relics. For this reason, too, head and blood are kept in a special compartmentalized safe beneath the bronze statue of San Gennaro, a division to prevent contact between them (Fig. 22).64 The safe required two keys to open it: one held by the Deputation and the other by the Archbishop, thereby bringing together city and Church. The miracle might be brought about inadvertently and without due reverence, with a consequent squandering of the saint’s virtus. The miracle could take place accidentally. The Archbishop’s nervous cavils demonstrate the degree to which mere liquefaction was insufficient. For fulfilment of its miraculous potential, everything else had to be in place, too. Indeed, miraculous virtus is autonomous from spiritual will, as the story of the woman diseased with an issue of blood testifies.65 In that story Jesus asks, ‘Who has touched me? Someone touched me, because I felt a virtue leave me’, (Luke 8:45–47). The adjustment to its housing, which produced the miracle, shows that the blood’s liquefaction was not merely a sign of Gennaro’s activity in heaven; it possessed sensory attributes, because it was alive. The blood could feel. Ergo the blood was alive. But the blood occupied a paradoxical relation to both life and death. Though alive, it was alive at the moment of the saint’s death, the point at which it spilled. And insofar as it sought restitution with its body, this was not to seek a return to its living body, but to be united in an entirely different register in heaven. ‘Sua Emin.a cala in chiesa à levare le caraffine del sangue di San Gennaro dal vecchio tabernacolo e porle nel nuovo. Havendo la Città fatto un nuovo tabernacolo d’argento per il sangue del Glorioso S. Gennaro, vollero trasferire il Sangue in d.to tabernacolo, per il che elessero la prima giornata di sett.re il mese nel q.le si celebra la sua festa andarono da sua Em.a accio si degnasse dar licenza di far d.ta traslatione, et anco d’intervenirvi. Sua Em.a. imaginandosi che non dovesse far altro che prendere il sangue con tutta la sfera, e riporlo non in altra sfera, mà nel nuovo tabernacolo, subbito condescese, ma havendo poi inteso che doveano le caraffine levarsi dalla sfera vecchia e riporsi nella nuova cominciò a dubbitare un poco, et à ripugnare, temendo del pericolo nel quale s’esponeva che li rumpessero d.te caraffinelle essendo vecchissime e dovendosi il tutto fare per via di ferri e benche il Santo fusse tanto miracoloso, non bisognava però tentarlo à far miracoli.’ ASDN, ‘I Diari dei Ceremonieri della Cattedrale di Napoli’, 1 September 1649, fol. 25r.  64 Parrino, Napoli Città Nobilissima, vol. I (1700), 398–399.  65 See Boesch Gajano, ‘Santità e miracolo’, 363.  63

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Behold the seer

San Gennaro’s is an extreme potential of address, confrontation, and beholding. It has within it prediction, it establishes the scene of the seer. As a story that revolves around a transformative gaze, a beheading, and shed blood that gives life, it evokes Ovid’s story of Medusa. Medusa’s gaze, unlike San Gennaro’s, worked with terrible effect. It turned men to stone. San Gennaro’s gaze, by contrast, turned solid to fluid and back again. And holding a perpetual vigilance, through his blood he could elicit life, bestow movement and permit a form of grace. Nevertheless what is stirred is the relation between confrontation, sight, and decapitation. Death threatens. The specular crossing of gazes affords death or salvation. Perseus looks at Medusa in a mirror, so as not to cross her gaze; the blood is enlivened by the bust’s sight. A subjectless vigilance is required. The worshipper is indirectly conscripted into the economy of San Gennaro’s address, even though she is not the direct address of his gaze. The bust is not equivalent to a decapitated head, even as it evokes it. Its severe gaze is part of the economy of severance. Its command is not to reinstate wholeness. It is not a matter of the head and body being reassembled. The blood relic is revelatory, forward-looking, rather than representational and backward-­looking. What is staged is the sight of seeing, a seeing that is transformative and has the potential to transform sight to turning point. San Gennaro, was thought, in the habit of concomitance, as already fully present in his blood and in every one of his relics and yet also fully present before the throne of God in heaven.66 It is less a question of reassembly than of the address of recognition that recognizes its own enlivening. The enlivening beyond that of the dusty blood is that of the worshippers, now to be awakened from their spiritual somnolence, analogous to inert dust. It is they who, with insight, will be restored, made whole, made as one in a sort of cyborgian becoming. ‘In your head [O Gennaro] will always triumph the eyes of our joyousness’, writes Giacomo Lubrani, Neapolitan Jesuit, famous teacher and poet.67 It is our joy that his looking secures; his eyes kindle and bear our joy. His seeing, our seeing, sight and insight, are made at one in the head, in joy. Indeed, according to Domenico Antonio Parrino the bust itself was capable of miraculous affect, ‘being at times joyous and at times sorrowful’.68 Thus the address is not reciprocal or mutual, nor symmetrical or measured. The economy Christian thinking of concomitance, that Christ is indivisible and that no part of his substance can be divided, explains how Christ’s blood could be present on earth in reliquaries and joined with his glorified body in heaven. Thinking part as whole became a habit of thinking concomitance.  67 ‘Nel tuo capo trionferanno sempre gli occhi delle nostre allegrezze.’ Lubrani, Il fuoco sacro, 8.  68 ‘vedendosi alle volte allegra, ed alle volte mestà’. Parrino, Napoli Città Nobilissima, vol. I (1700), 398–399.  66

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of the gaze among San Gennaro, blood, and worshippers is off balance, asymmetrical. It requires dislocation. The pooling of sight and joy depends on that. Sight’s visibility and its sensational effects were intrinsic to the miracle and necessary for its occurrence. It was San Gennaro’s gilt silver reliquary bust that spectacularly effected this (Plate 6). The bust is a compelling and majestic work. Commissioned by Charles II in 1304, it was made by Charles II’s court goldsmiths, Étienne Godefroyd, Milet d’Auxerre, and Guillaume de Verdelay, probably in honour of the millennium of Gennaro’s martyrdom (rather than as thanks for the return of Filippo di Taranto from Sicilian captivity, as has been supposed).69 In general, the head of a saint was regarded as the most vital relic, since the head was seat of the brain, the ‘sensus et intellectus’.70 While the blood of San Gennaro (Fig. 1) was the most flamboyant and precious relic, his head was vital to the miracle. It secured the miracle, gave it authority. Gennaro’s head is immensely dignified, its expression grave and calm, imbued with a solemn and attentive presence. Its noble asceticism is highlighted by the fabulous carapace of bejewelled garb that juts up stiffly around the neck – producing a clear disjunctive void between the simplicity of the face and the grandiloquent celebratory trappings. Thus Gennaro is both modest and majestic,  austere and awesome, aloof and engaged.71 He is regal in patronage and materials. Charles II’s patronage should be seen as part of a concerted attempt to establish San Gennaro’s presence in Naples in support of Angevin rule, later developments of which will be discussed further in Chapter 2. On the reliquary bust of San Gennaro, see P. L. De Castris, Arte di Corte nella Napoli Angioina (Florence: Cantini, 1986), 163, 194; É. Bertaux, ‘Les artistes français au service de rois angevins de Naples’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 34 (1905), 40–45, 89–114, 313–325; Catello and Catello, La Cappella del Tesoro. The same group of goldsmiths were responsible for a long series of sacred and secular goldsmithery, including altars of gilt silver, binding plates, gold jugs, crosses, reliquary crosses and other reliquary caskets, such as the silver arm of San Biagio, which Queen Maria gave to the monastery of Sasn Pietro a Castello. From this enormous productivity, apart from the bust of San Gennaro, the only object that survives is the large stational silver cross, reliquary of the true Cross in the Treasury of Santa Nicola, Bari (fig. 40 in De Castris, Arte di Corte), probably given to the church between 1296 and 1312 by Charles II, who elevated it to a royal chapel and endowed it correspondingly. The artists and date of this cross are not documented, but it appears in an inventory of early 1313. De Castris, Arte di Corte, 163 and 172 n. 80. Its elegant enamel work is very similar to that of the bust of San Gennaro, where small roundels are decorated with the Angevin arms in blue and red enamels set in a support of gilt silver.  70 For example Baldo degli Ubaldi’s commentary in the Justinian Corpus iuris argues that the head is the divine organ of man, because it holds the ‘sensus et intellectus’. Thus the place holding the saint’s head should also celebrate his principal feast. G. Vitale, Ritualità monarchica cerimonie e pratiche devozionali nella Napoli aragonese (Salerno: Laveglia Editore, 2006), 161–162.  71 The eloquent economy of the medieval reliquary bust of San Gennaro contrasts with the stylized rich gilt silver base, which bears a dedicatory inscription of 1609 on which  69

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Medieval devotional images called attention to their own materiality.72 That very materiality was quasi-sacramental: it was access to the divine. In his discussion of the Eucharist in 1525 Cardinal Cajetan registered the matter/spirit opposition and denied that faith could only have a spiritual object. Sensible objects were merely ‘extrema rerum creditarum’ and many objects of faith ‘consist in the conjunction of sensible tings with insensible things’.73 God’s power exceeds all merely natural limits. But the material is more than mere deposit for the spiritual. Contestation permits triumph. In Gennaro’s head are justified the eyes of joy that see joy and bring it about. Depictions of the procession to halt Vesuvius’ eruption, including Domenichino’s fresco in the Treasury Chapel (Plate 20) and the oil painting Procession of Relics and Intervention of San Gennaro to Save Naples from Vesuvius by Micco Spadaro (Domenico Gargiulo) (Plate  14), show clearly both the figure of the saint hovering between heaven and city, figured as a truncated figure, perhaps a bust engulfed in swirling cloak, and the reliquary bust in the procession itself.74 I pursue this further in Chapter 9, but here it is important to note that the presence of the reliquary bust was an essential part of both appeasement and miracle. Such an insistence on the literal presence of the reliquary bust in depictions of miracles, while not by any means unique, is unusual. Saints are more usually figured in heaven above the miraculous event or on earth in full bodily form, as in Luca Giordano’s Saint Nicholas in Glory (1658) (Fig. 17). The literal presence of the reliquary in Spadaro’s Procession of Relics and Intervention of San Gennaro to Save Naples from Vesuvius (Plate 14) indicates no simple conflation of relic, reliquary, and saint. The relics perform the miracle as much as the saint, who resembles his relics’ reliquary. It is the relics that prompt and are celebrated by the miracle. The relics-reliquaries displace the glorified saint. Gennaro’s blood manifested the most celebrated visible and tactile signs of change, but on rare occasions the gilt bust showed signs of life. On 13 September 1660, while a perished silver clasp that gave access to the head relic was being replaced, the relic emitted a special fragrance. ‘With infinite solace and tenderness’, Cardinal Archbishop Filomarino and the are scenes in relief of Gennaro’s miraculous deliverance from wild beasts and his martyrdom. Originally loftily distinct from any explicit link to earth or history, in 1609 the bust was thus narrativized in relation to Gennaro’s martyrdom and historical sacrifice.  72 H. L. Kessler, Seeing Medieval Art (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2004).  73 ‘consistunt in coniunctione rerum sensibilium cum rebus insensibilibus’. Cajetan, ‘De erroribus contigentibus in Eucharistiae sacramento, 1525, quoted in Henning, ‘The Architectonics of Faith’, 324–325.  74 For the patronage of Spadaro’s The Eruption of Vesuvius of 1631, see C. R. Marshall, ‘“Cause di Stravaganze”: Order and Anarchy in Domenico Gargiulo’s Revolt of Masaniello’, Art Bulletin, 80:3 (1998), 478–497, esp. 479, 483–484.

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deputies including the Treasurer witnessed the venerable relic, to their great wonderment, produce ‘a very sweet fragrance, that they had never smelled before, the scent of heaven’.75 Sweet smells were closely associated with saintly bodies and were one of the telling signs of their miraculous nonputrefaction; but here it is as if the relic produced the scent to communicate its appreciation of its decorous care, even a spontaneous response to being handled. And although it was the scent of heaven, nevertheless, it was new to these devout men. Thus Gennaro and/or his relic were intensively sensuous  – oozing novel smells as well as altering matter. Divine operations involved sensuousness, sensoriality, sensation. Not so much demonstrating something of heaven in representational manner extensively as reforming things on earth intensively. Registering the miraculous

The manner of the miracle was as momentous as its occasion for those with the ability to divine its ways. Simple change of state from solid to liquid was not enough. A correct ritualized sequence of events was crucial. Time, tempo, order of events, the speed of liquefaction were carefully attended to and, attuned, and the deputies led the city in appropriate response. A strange document, the ‘Register of Miracles 1659–1733’, conserved in the Treasury Chapel archive, describes, sometimes in considerable detail, the liquefactions – and their non-occurrences.76 Attentive and attesting to the ambiguity and indeterminacy at the crux of the relation between material and divine, it is also a barometer of the delicate sensitivities of its authors, witnesses to the coded presence of the divine. The Register was kept to record the correlation between miracle, history, and catastrophe or its wonderful avoidance, and to attest to spread the word. Indeed, it is frequently quoted in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century publications on the chapel. It attests to the way in which the Treasurer and deputies and, indeed, all of Naples became expert decipherers of Gennaro’s messages, like augurs of entrails. Just as the relics responded sensually to attentions bestowed, so, too, the worshippers responded to its alterations. Matter, in this case, altered when it alteration found. While recognizing the miracle as divine, the Register seeks to secure it as history. Its opening words proclaim its historical ambition: ‘The variety of the miracles, seen in the display of the precious Blood of our Glorious Protector San Gennaro, is so constant and prodigious, that it is rightly ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc. 83 bis n. 1), fol. 7r–v. The surviving document is a copy made 30 July 1792 of an earlier register. ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc. 83 bis n. 1), ‘Registro dei Miracoli’.

 75  76

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deemed necessary to keep the most accurate record for the future.’77 The Register recognizes the significance of the miracle as much in its variety as in its simple occurrence and seeks to interpret the work of Providence in relation to the deeds of humankind. What makes the Register fascinating is its attempt to descry the soteriology of the miracle in terms of visual specifics of the miracle and to interpret them in relation to specific events – as warning or as response.78 Gennaro’s liquefaction, though awaited, even expected, was never guaranteed and could not be taken for granted. Alive, it was as unpredictable as any living thing, and as divine conductor, as unpredictable as God’s will. Possessed of nothing other than itself, it was at once more dead and more alive than dead bodies stuffed with congealed blood or living bodies pulsing with rich vermilion. That is to say, it signified more than mere life or mere death. Always there was suspense and uncertainty about whether the miracle would occur; long delays before it was granted; and relief and celebration as it did. It was necessarily unpredictable, beyond the control of its witnesses, and not simply a repetition of the same. Writing of the miracle is not accidental. Language was vital to its occurrence, its record and its celebration. Cesare D’Engenio Caracciolo’s account, quoted at the opening of this chapter, makes clear that language in its spoken and sung form (oratione and antifona), the saying of the antiphon, prayer, and the Mass were crucial to the miracle. Likewise, the significance of the correlation between material change and (historical) circumstances – at the  moments of phase transition in its transformation – allows miracle to emerge as event – that is, event beyond merely becoming molten. Thus the miracle puts visibility and history to the test. In spite of all this, the Register orchestrates the miracle in bureaucratic terms. It brings the miracle under surveillance. A magisterial miracle was not enough. Though the blood might be the Word incarnate, Gennaro’s blood had to be inspected and inventoried, documented and dated, validated, and ‘La varietà de’ miracoli, che si vedono nell’esporsi il prezioso Sangue del nostro Glorioso Protettore S. Gennaro, è così continua, e prodigiosa, che con ragione si è stimato di doversene conservare per l’avvenire più esatta memoria.’ ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc. 83 bis n. 1), ‘Registro dei Miracoli’, fol. 2r.  78 This all matters the more, because formal theology does not openly detain itself with these matters. The Register also confirms the close relation between the miracle and language. It states that the ‘variety of miracles’ is seen in the ‘display of the precious Blood’, but then adds that in view of that variety ‘it is deemed necessary to keep the most accurate record’. In keeping that record, the miracle is transformed into language and history: the linguistic trace. The written record is the means by which the future is to be convinced of the miracle. Just as the antiphon, prayer, and Mass were part of the conditions for the miracle, the linguistic transformation of the miracle is ‘necessary’ not only as proof of its taking place, but as part of its enactment.  77

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recognized. In short, it had to be inscribed into the bureaucratic order, tamed such that it might not seep out unpredictably, and bound so as to serve.

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Moody blood

According to Hippocratic wisdom, life is heat and moisture attuned, and blood is composed of fire and water.79 Thus blood lies at the wellsprings of existence. Blood was the most vital and highly esteemed of the humours and thus at the heart of temperament. It was the ‘father of all humours’, claimed Tarduccio Salvi in his treatise Il Chirurgo. Indeed, the other humours were merely intermediate stages in the generation of blood. Blood transports the spiritus, or vital spirit, from the heart. Blood’s alliance with the heart, the noblest of the organs in Aristotelian physiology, increased its significance. Galenic physiology distinguished arterial from venous blood.80 The arteriality of decapitation is emphasized in Domenichino’s lateral chapel altarpiece in the severed necks of his companions, the blood red fringe of Gennaro’s stole, and the inside furl of his chasuble at the back of his neck where the decapitating blow is about to fall (Plates 5 & 41). As part of the respiratory system, connecting heart, lungs, and arteries, arterial blood was regarded as superior to venous blood.81 The discovery of the circulation of the blood displaced this duality, but far from diminishing the status of blood, it renewed its crucial role in supporting life and the spirit and as a source of vital heat.82 In its transports Gennaro’s blood combined the four elemental qualities (hot, cold, wet, and dry), and it carried ‘coronic heat’, the innate heat which living beings receive at birth.83 Since it encompassed life and salvation, blood was particularly able to register mood. Indeed, in the humoural system, blood was fundamental to mood, N. G. Siraisi, History, Medicine & the Traditions of Renaissance Learning (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), G. Pomata, Contracting a Cure: Patients, Healers, and the Law in Early Modern Bologna (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), and P. Camporesi, Juice of Life: The Symbolic and Magic Significance of Blood, trans. R. R. Barr (New York: Continuum, 1995), 20–21.  80 Blood from the veins was coarse in substance (‘in sostanza grosso’), black in colour, and without pulsating motion, while arterial blood was smooth in texture (‘in sostanza sottile’), bright in colour (‘in color flavo’), hot and with pulsating motion (‘fervente, & col moto pulsativo’). T. Salvi, Il Chirurgo. Trattato breve di Tarduccio Salvi da Macerata, diviso in diece parti, Dedicato all … Don Virginio Orsino Duca di Bracciano (Rome: Stefano Paolini, 1608), 29.  81 See S. Cavallo, Artisans of the Body in Early Modern Italy: Identities, Families and Masculinities (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 46.  82 ‘Sanguis, non cor, est pars corporis princeps’ (‘Blood, not body, is the principal part of the body’). Phlebotomia Damnata a Dominico La scala Messanensi (Pavia, 1696), 8, quoted by Cavallo, Artisans of the Body, 59, n. 33.  83 Telesio identified ‘cosmic heat’ with the World-Soul or its physical manifestation.  79

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marker of the sanguine and the choleric, as affective as much as nutritive.84 For physicians, moralists, and theologians, the heart was the seat of emotions. As such blood was already inherently privileged conveyer of mood, disposition, and affect. More than that, blood embodied mood, and in Gennaro’s miracle blood materialized affect. Moody and unpredictable, San Gennaro’s blood skulked darkly at the bottom of the ampoules or joyously erupted, accessible and open in responsiveness. This is mood as contagious. As sensitive barometer of heavenly mood and predisposition, it demanded a corresponding sensitivity from its interpreters and a related change of heart. Its material change – sign and substance of divine presence and human sacrifice – depended on, required, and invited devotional and spiritual change in its witnesses. Treasure of life and seat of the soul

Blood was imagined variously as the occasion of life, as sustaining life, and as life. Blood of childbirth separates and brings new life, but the blood of sacrifice, more than mere life, was the possibility of redemption. Thus in his rapturous address to San Gennaro’s blood, Lubrani quotes Ezekiel 16: 6: ‘Live: yea, I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live.’85 Levinus Lemnius argues in his Della complessione del corpo umano (Venice, 1564) that blood, ‘life’s treasure’ (‘questo tesoro della vita’), was ‘the food of life’. For him the soul ‘is submerged in blood, and life is maintained by blood as the flame of the wick [is maintained] by its pool of oil’.86 As carrier of soul or life, blood was equated with spirit, allegorically or symbolically. Thus it was that in theological discussion and devotional writing the body–blood contrast was used explicitly to symbolize the opposition of body and soul.87 It is not humanitas, but sanguis, argues Bynum, that joins divinity in the Incarnation.88 Blood was controversially claimed as sedes animae, seat of the soul. Medical theories in early modern Italy differed on the soul’s true physical

Salvi, Il Chirurgo, 6–7, 30. ‘Vive, dixi tibi, in sanguine tuo vive.’ See Lubrani, Il fuoco sacro, 116. The verse from Ezechiel is as follows: ‘And when I passed by thee, and saw thee polluted in thine own blood, I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live; yea, I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live’ (Ezekiel 16:6).  86 L. Lemnius, Della complessione del corpo umano, libri due: nuovamente di latino in volgare tradotti e stampati (Venice: Domenico Nicolino, 1564), 70. The designation ‘treasure of life’ is not unusual: Salvi calls blood ‘the treasure of the human body’. Il Chirurgo, 29.  87 Thus Aquinas: ‘corpus exhibetur pro salute corporis, sanguis pro salute animae’. Aquinas, Summa theologica, pt, 3 q. 74, art. 1; q. 76, art. 2, ra 1.  88 Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 165.  84  85

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location.89 It was variously located in the blood, heart, and brain. Scholastic theologians advanced differing theories about the relationship of blood to bodily life. Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure both cite Leviticus 17: 11, ‘Anima carnis in sanguine est’: ‘for the life of the flesh is in the blood’. For Aquinas blood was the seat of life and the whole body in potentia: ‘The blood of Christ, or his own corporeal life which is in the blood, is the price of our salvation.’90 But Franciscans saw blood as joined to self only via body’s form (the forma corporeitatis). They did not think blood was self or even that blood was per se assumed by the Word in the Incarnation.91 Even to Thomists there was no implication that soul was literally in the blood. Nevertheless, as carrier of soul or life, it was equated with the spirit. All core aspects of the body were informed immediately by soul, which indeed made them the person’s body. It had to be present throughout the body – whole in every part, by a kind of concomitance. Blood was not only nutritive but what the university theologians called veritas humanae naturae and thus signified human life in the deepest sense. Without the truth of human nature (veritas humanae naturae), including blood, the person would not be the person. Even though soul or spirit, as non-material, could not have a physical location, a good deal of devotional writing and preaching treated blood as carrier of life and therefore as seat of life and soul. Gennaro’s blood participated in the habit of concomitance, a tendency to think that part is whole, along the lines of thinking of Christ as present in every celebration of Mass and in every particle of fragmented host. That tendency to see whole in part and part in whole was a characteristic conception of the saints, who were regarded as fully present in every bodily fragment and yet fully present before the throne of God in heaven. The idea of blood as sedes animae made blood a special kind of synecdoche: a body part that not only stood for body, but also for soul or person. That the miracle of San Gennaro was linked to matter mattered terribly. Blood, the matter of his miracle, brought to bear a tremendous force field of resonance embracing almost every aspect of life and its crossing into salvation. For, as we have seen, blood infused a plurality of registers from the sustenance of human life at its most basic to its interfusion with the soul. It traversed discourses from the animalian, through the medicinal, social, and political, to the highest and most spiritual. Crucial to the power of Gennaro’s A natural philosophical approach to the study of the soul played an increasingly important role throughout the sixteenth century. See E. Kessler, ‘The Intellective Soul’, in C. B. Schmitt et al. (eds), The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 485–534.  90 Aquinas, Summa theologica, pt 3, q. 48, art. 5, quoted by Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 162.  91 Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 161; J. D. Scotus, Quaestiones in lib. III Sententiarum, in Opera omnia, vol. VII, pts 1, 2 (Lyons: Luke Wadding, 1639, reprint 1968).  89

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miracle was blood’s remarkable capacity to traverse from matter to life, to make matter life, and life matter. Blood could be matter without form, and it was capable of being informed life. The question of blood and its relationship to life went to the heart of the matter of living beings and their generation, at the very heart of natural philosophy.92 In the traditional Aristotelian framework of hylomorphism, every natural thing was believed to be a composite of ‘matter’ (hulê) and ‘form’ (morphê or eidos). Matter was conceived as a principle, namely the indefinite substrate, completely passive and inert in itself, to which the form provides the quiddity to define it. According to Aristotelian embryology, while the father is form, the mother is matter. Coagulated uterine blood is given form – which it desires – by sperm.93 Thus it carries with it desire and a search. How could matter, thought as inert and passive, constitute living organisms? How can such lifeless matter be activated and animated, or even ‘ensouled’, if it is the soul that is responsible for the emergence of life? What is the vehicle of the soul and of its transmission? Giambattista Vico noted that since ancient times an almost continuous line of philosophers and medical humanists had seen blood as root of life and intimately associated with procreation and life’s renewal: [The ancients] reduced the [body’s] liquids to blood alone. They called the spermal substance ‘blood’ …, and correctly, since that substance is the flower and cream of blood. And, again with reason, they deemed the blood the juice of the fibres of which the flesh is composed: whence the Latins used succiplenus, ‘full of juice’, to denote ‘plump, fleshy’, or ‘basted with good blood’. And the poet theologians, again correctly, posited the flow of life in the flow of blood.94

Gennaro’s blood was, therefore, intricately caught up in the question of life. In liquefying, Gennaro’s blood became alive and forcefully affirmed life. The blood could come alive, a living creature, almost breathing inside its glass: ‘9 May 1714, the Pro-Treasurer Don Emilio Pignone found the blood in a hard state … and after half an hour, it liquefied, and all day long it remained so with some variety, at times rising, and at times dropping and sticking to the glass. But in the evening it fell to rest somewhat, and [in this condition] it could be See D. Des Chene, Physiologia: Natural Philosophy in Late Aristotelian and Cartesian Thought (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996); H. Hirai, Medical Humanism and Natural Philosophy: Renaissance Debates on Matter, Life and the Soul (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 4–18.  93 Aristotle, De generatione animalium, 2.1. Aristotle claims ‘the female desires the male and the ugly the beautiful’, Physics, 1.9.  94 G. Vico, La scienza nuova, introduction by P. Rossi (Milan: Rizzoli, 1977), 491–492. ‘The flower and cream of blood’ evoke the ‘foam’ of Gennaro’s blood noted by baroque ­commentators, as ejaculatory.  92

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enjoyed more, and like this they put it back [into the safe].’95 The blood here assumes autonomy, feels pleasure, is tired by exertion, and needs to rest. The Treasury Chapel and its miracle inhabited an intersection between theology and the body. In another context, Piero Camporesi speaks of ‘a continuous transfusion between theological language and corporeal language’.96 This is materialized in Gennaro’s blood. Blood was life and was nutritive of life. A widely held notion that certain elements expelled by the body in life or in death held medicinal functions and could cure and drive the body was supported by new medical arguments.97 Blood could pollute, but it also cleansed. Bleeding and leeching were ways to rebalance and cleanse the body. The transformation of Gennaro’s blood from dusty dry earthy substance to seething liquid coincided with the medical ideology for evacuating degenerate humours and ‘asspions’ through the purifying letting of blood. Thus the chapel was a sort of portentous apothecary shop that rendered otiose the blood sold in spice shops: [The] ointment of graces … gushing from a sacrosanct head – the blood of Januarius – furnished abundant surrogate for goods offered venally by druggists, and rendered superfluous any visits to the chemical laboratories of Fallopio or Crollio to suck human blood up through a thin straw in one’s mouth in order to quench the destructive inflammations of the body, or curdle it in oil to feed the flickering, dying lamp of the vital spirits, or drink it hot to cleanse the scabs of leprosy or quell the vehemence of lunatical paroxysms.98

Blood might carry disease; and bloodletting was its cure. Bloodletting allowed ‘all the superfluous and intemperate humours’ to depart a diseased body and remained the principal evacuative therapy in Naples until well into the eighteenth century. Tarduccio Salvi’s medical treatise Il ministro del medico (Rome, 1608) and Tiberio Malfi’s Il Barbiere (Naples, 1626) offer sustained discussions of phlebotomy, extending to the time of year, age of patient, illness, and others conditions affecting its efficacy (Fig. 21).99 Neapolitan butchers’ ‘Dal Protesoriero D. Emilio Pignone fu ritrovato duro … e dopo un quarto si liquefè, e tutto il giorno si mantenne con qualche varietà, e le ora si alzava, ed ora si calava attaccandosi al vetro. Pero la sera si rimise un poco, e meglio si godeva, e così si ripose.’ ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc. 83 bis n. 1), fols 200v–201r.  96 Camporesi, Juice of Life, 104.  97 Siraisi, History, Medicine; Pomata, Contracting a Cure, 129–140; P. Camporesi, The Incorruptible Flesh (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 68–80.  98 Lubrani, Il fuoco sacro, 25.  99 T. Salvi, Il ministro del medico. Trattato breve (Rome: Giovanni Battista Robletti, 1642), 1–34; T. Malfi, Il Barbiere di Tiberio Malfi da Monte Sarchio barbiere, e consule dell’arte in Napoli. Libri tre ne’quali si ragiona dell’eccellenza dell’arte e de’suoi precetti (Naples: Ottavio Beltrano, 1626), 79–130, 194. Quesnay’s two treatises on the effects of  95

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shops, apothecaries, bloodletters, witches, gallows, scaffolds, flagellants, and physicians oozed, displayed, and revelled in blood every day.100 Blood could heal. At its most literal, Christ’s blood in the Mass was curative. Many are the cures wrought by the blood sacrament. The frontispiece to Giacomo della Marca’s vita by Paolo Regio, published in Naples in 1589, shows Blessed Giacomo della Marca (1393–1476) famously saved by the host (Fig. 23).101 ‘Having fallen into an incurable consumption, with a flux of blood’, and finding no relief in human medicine, he turned to divine aid and immediately ‘the Divine Blood’, held aloft in the chalice during the consecration of the wine, took effect: ‘at that very instant he recovered perfect health, growing ruddy in the face and recovering his forces with great vigour’.102 Saints’ blood was deployed as divine medicine and offered as antidote to various maladies. Thus the blood of Antonio Torres, General Proposito of the Congregazione de’ Padri Pii Operaij, established in Naples by Carlo Carafa, and one of the few members of that confraternity to survive the 1656 plague, was extracted from his body and applied as a remedy to the ailments of others.103 Just when the circulation of blood and its relation to the heart, to breath, and air were subject to renewed scrutiny, even as natural scientists peered down microscopes to see blood yield its secrets of life, the blood of San Gennaro celebratedly defied all the laws, new and old.104 Yet, as Giacomo Lubrani insists in his panegyrics of 1694, Gennaro’s blood was no ordinary blood and could not be understood through a scientific lens: If the observations of Boyle, of Hegenardo [Cornelis van Hooghelande], and of Willis suggest that blood is nourished from nitrates in the air; that it heats up in the forge of the heart, whence it gushes impetuously to the veins, and with tortuous meanders of continuous circulation returns there to reheat and to be refined; that amortized it is extinguished, if it is not ventilated either through the twists of the trachea, or through the openings of pores, that placed outside the body, grow cold empty of spirit, leavened of putridness, dried of

­ loodletting were written as late as 1730 and 1736 (D. Jacquart, La médicine médiévale b dans le cadre Parisien XIVe–XVe siècles (Paris: Fayard, 1998), 29 n. 38). 100 For barber-surgeons and bloodletting, see Cavallo, Artisans of the Body, 41–48, 64–80. 101 P. Regio, La Vita del B. Iacopo della Marcha (Naples: Gioseppe Cacchi, 1589). 102 C. G. Rosignoli, Maraviglie di Dio nel Divinissimo Sacramento e nel santissimo sacrificio (Turin: G. B. Bertoni, 1615), 211. 103 See G.-M. Perrimezzi, Della Vita del P. D. Antonio Torres (Naples: Gennaro Muzio, 1733), 257. 104 The work of medical humanists contributed in diverse ways to the redirection of philosophy towards natural questions. Thus Cardano, Marsilio Ficino, Jean Fernel, and Julius Caesar Scaliger were fundamental figures for Bacon, Descartes, Gassendi, Hobbes, Leibniz, and Newton.

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corruption. These experiments are contradicted by the blood of San Gennaro, which without aerial influences, without diastoles, without air-holes, sparkles in little coralline flames, and is attired in purple finery.105

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Thus for Lubrani, while ordinary blood participates in the circulation of particles, San Gennaro’s precisely did not. Its movements, ordinarily akin to the volcanic, broke with natural forces. Blood of Christ

Gennaro’s blood both refers to Christ’s sacrifice and works to displace its customary centrality. Christ’s divine blood, shed in sacrifice, looms over both Gennaro’s blood sacrifice and the Gennaro miracle. Both bloods were sacrificial and salvific. Christ’s blood (even more than his death) was associated with salvation. Trust in the blood of the Lamb would cancel the sins of the world, as the remarkable frontispiece to Francesco Marchese’s Unica Speranza del Peccatore (Rome, 1670) amply testifies (Fig. 24).106 Streams of blood pour from Christ’s body into a bath and are tapped into chalices. Not only had Christ died for the sins of the world, but his blood was a medicine for all wounds.107 Christ’s blood was salvific, not only in his sacrifice, but in its purity. Living blood (sanguis) brings life in a continuous stream from Christ to the faithful and differs from Christ’s shed blood (cruor), which is depicted as globules and discrete drops that fall to the ground. This is sanguis that is outside the body in order to be imbibed by other bodies. Thus Christ’s death is a vast well of blood in which the Christian encounters and becomes one with him. It is decay of blood extruded beyond the body, and not the shedding itself, ‘Se le osservazioni del Boyle, dell’Hegenardo, del VVillis, voglion che ’l sangue si nutrisca dagli elementi nitrati dell’aria; che si riscaldi nella fucina del cuore, donde schizza impetuoso alle vene, e con tortuoso Meandro di continovi circolamenti vi ritorna a ricucersi, e raffinarsi; che ammortito si affoghi, se non si sventola ò per gli spiragli della Trachea, ò per l’aperture de’ pori, che tratto fuor de’ corpi, si raffreddi vuoto di spirito, lievito di putredini, seccia di fracidumi. Questi sperimenti si smentiscono dal sangue di Gennaro, che senza influssi aerii, senza diastoli, senza sfogatoi, brilla in coralline fiammelle, si abbiglia in gale di porpora.’ Lubrani, Il fuoco sacro, 19. Cornelis van Hooghelande, ‘a medical Cartesian’, posited the existence of a nitrosulphurous ferment in the left ventricle. I am grateful to Mark Jenner for his assistance in identifying ‘Hegenardo’. Thomas Willis (1622–1678) broke with Aristotelian cardio-centricism. See R. G. Frank, Harvey and the Oxford Physiologists: A Study of Scientific Ideas and Social Interaction (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1992), 49, 211. 106 F. Marchese, Unica Speranza del Peccatore Che consiste nel Sangue del N. S. Giesù Cristo Spiegata con alcune verità, con le quali s’insegna all’Anima un Modo facile d’applicar à se il frutto del medesimo Sangue da Francesco Marchese, Prete della Congregatione dell Oratorio di Roma (Rome: Per Giacomo Dragondelli, 1670). 107 St Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians, 1:7. 105

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that is called the death of blood. Living blood is both within and outside. ‘The basic dichotomy’, argues Bynum, ‘is not inside versus outside blood, but living (which includes inside and outside) blood versus blood that is sick or dead (decaying or decayed).’108 Anchored in the deepest centre of the Mass-sacrifice was the challenge to an imitation of Christ that did not shrink at the sight of the Cross, that was ready to lose its life in order to win it and able to follow in Christ’s agony of suffering and his path of death.109 Thus the Mass evoked an impulse to be swallowed up in the mystery of Christ’s Passion, to be with Christ already in his glory; to be embraced by him and hallowed by the fire of his godhead.110 Early modern writers, like their medieval forebears, emphasized the shedding and immensity of Christ’s blood. Francesco Marchese writes of Christ’s blood as like a large river that has left its bed and runs freely through the streets to flood houses to reach ‘the rooms where we live’.111 Without limit, it can travel down the most mundane routes, find us, overwhelm us, drown us, or save us. Its regenerative virtue and salvific power made blood a special liquid, which knew no lines of demarcation between the sacred and profane. It flowed across boundaries, and its transfusions dissolved them even as new runnels were made. Gennaro’s blood flowed in part like Christ’s. It did more than regenerate itself. Its regeneration offered new life to the city. Christ’s free yet obedient choice to suffer and die, to be the hostia, is ­crucial, in that God – not the perpetrator – is priest, sacrificer, and victim. The theological basis centres on the sacredness of Christ’s body as a means of the message of salvation: Incarnation, the Eucharist, death, resurrection, guarantee of the resurrection of bodies on Judgement Day. The figure of Jesus, as recounted by the Evangelists, represents a new event inherent as God’s son and in his Resurrection. This renders him mediator par excellence, he who having overcome physical death is guarantee of the immortality of the soul and body of every human being. In addition, his entire spiritual journey consisted of a journey directed towards the reuniting with God the Father, destined to become the dominant model of Christian sanctity: love for God and for one’s neighbour, continuous struggle against material and See Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 168. J. A. Jungmann, The Mass of the Roman Rite: Its Origins and Development (Missarum Sollemnia), trans. F. Brunner, 2 vols (New York, Boston, and Chicago: Benziger Brothers, 1950–55), vol. I, 192. 110 The Church does not wait for the redemptive grace that pours down on it anew. The Church sets out to offer God its gift, a gift that, at the height of its ascent, is changed for the Church into the oblation of Christ. Jungmann, The Mass of the Roman Rite, vol. I, 193, 194. 111 Marchese writes of ‘the immense river of the most divine blood of the Redeemer’ and ‘the hugely vast sea of the Saviour’s blood’, and quotes St John Chrysostom, ‘hic sanguis effusus universum abluit Orbem terrarum’. Marchese, Unica Speranza, 33, 34, 102. 108 109

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spiritual temptations, whence the acquisition of powers over nature (miracles of transformation and of multiplication of goods, of healing, and of resurrection of bodies), sign of his capacity for mediation, both spiritual and material, between God and humankind, up to the miracle of the transformation of wine and bread into blood and body at the Last Supper. Gennaro’s bloody imitation of Christ was not mimetic in terms of iconicity, but in terms of process. The miracle of transubstantiation was indirectly evoked each time the blood was handled and held up as liquid at the altar in its glass ampoules. Giacomo Lubrani parallels Gennaro’s blood to the wine of Christ, ‘the mystic wine of faith’. ‘The sacrament enriches the altars in its paradoxes, he writes, ‘sweeter when it is disturbed, more responsive to entreaties when it bites [quando morde]; riper for grace when it effervesces [quando ribolle]’.112 The Eucharist is not a Platonic representation (adumbratio) of historical events; its rite imparts grace. Hoc est corpus meum: in the sacrament one eats the essential body, or the bodily flesh of Christ in order to be saved. San Gennaro’s miracle does not impart grace so much as signal its promise. In this respect the liquefaction differs from the sacrament. In San Gennaro’s miracle something solid becomes liquid. Blood, cold and congealed, announcing rigor mortis and the end of life, is transformed into warm, vibrant fluid, enunciating life itself. This is not a resurrection of a dead body; and in its changeability, it differs entirely from Christ’s unchanging blood. Gennaro’s blood was most starkly unlike Christ’s in that it metamorphosed visibly. Indeed, that was the whole point. While Christ’s blood was screened  by a veil over the pyx, shielded from the view of worshippers, Gennaro’s blood was held aloft by the Treasurer to show its change (Fig. 4). Annihilation and decay were made horrifyingly evident. After its transformation, its congealed brownness returned to haunt it. Gennaro’s blood was inherently unstable, a substance between two states, an uncanny blood that could turn against those gathered near. Sacrificial blood

Gennaro’s blood is more than sight of life. It takes part in sacrifice. Sacrifice brings destruction and immutability, death and life together. ‘Cultic devotion to the divine sacrifice’, writes Piero Camporesi, ‘and a convulsive, obsessive, almost maniacal taste for blood are profoundly related’.113 Sacrifice requires ‘equivoco del Sacramento arricchisce gli Altari; più dolce quando si turba, più maturo alle grazie quando ribolle’. Lubrani, Il fuoco sacro, 11. Giacomo Lubrani (1619–1693), Neapolitan Jesuit, teacher and poet. 113 Camporesi, Juice of Life, 29–33. 112

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blood: it is not simply any gift made to God, but the pouring of blood. Blood is essential to sacrifice: it purifies the earth in its spilling and redeems life, because it is life.114 Exodus and Leviticus, the books of the Hebrew Bible most concerned with sacrifice, abound with the terms effundere and spargere. Central to sacrificial ritual is that blood be poured out and sprinkled afresh on the altar, a sprinkling and spreading that marks and cleanses. An animal is killed and given to God, but part of the animal is burned in fire, and the sweet odour of the fire has something to do with the presence of God. The blood that is poured out is taboo, sacred, and highly charged; yet as taboo, it creates sacrality.115 In the shedding of blood is an element of propitiation, of recognition of God’s power. Blood flow, the dying, and the killing consecrate and set apart the victim and those in whose name the sacrifice is made. Aquinas argues: a sacrifice properly so called is something done for that honour which is properly owed to God in order to appease him: and hence it is that Augustine says: ‘A true sacrifice is by good work done in order that we may cling to God in holy fellowship …’ … and this voluntary enduring of the Passion was most acceptable to God as coming from love. Therefore it is manifest that Christ’s passion was a true sacrifice.116

God himself (not the perpetrators) is priest and sacrificer. Relics were pignora, like goods left as part of a debt, a marker of something owed. Blood shed in sacrifice was also owed. And it incurs further debts. Blood is salvific, in part because it is owed. It was Christ’s shedding of blood that redeemed. ‘Without shedding of blood is no remission’ (Hebrews 9:22).117 The blood shed by Christ – but also by Gennaro – was something due to God, rather than something given up. Something was due, and thus it could redeem and sanctify (make holy). Shed blood has the capacity to purify. Blood crops up most intensely in technical questions of Christology and the Eucharist – the nature of Christ’s body in the triduum, human identity, and transubstantiation. Tertullian emphasizes the bloodiness of Christ’s death and connects sanguis Christi to martyrdom as well as to the Eucharist and baptism. For Tertullian the spilling of blood is crucial to salvation; and he emphasizes the cleansing, purifying, vivifying, and redeeming qualities of bloodshed. Antidote to death Aquinas, Summa theologica, pt 3, q. 48, art. 5. H. Hubert and M. Mauss, Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function (1899), reprint (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964); Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 210. The sacred is ­comparable to the flame that destroys the wood by consuming it. 116 Aquinas, Summa theologica, pt 3, q. 48, art. 6. 117 Pope Pius II claimed in 1462 that only after it had been shed did blood have the power of absolution. Pius II, Pii secvndi pontificis max. commentarii revm memorabilium, qvae tempribus svis contigervnt, a r.d. ioanne gobellino (Frankfurt: Aubriana, 1614), 282–291, quoted by Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 123–124. 114 115

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and viaticum for paradise was the Eucharistic wine. Christ’s was the blood of redemption (per hunc sanguinem redemptus est genus humanum) and the blood of all martyrs followed its vermilion promise. Horror and lure, the wanton destruction of life was symbolized by the spilled blood, the rejection of the Creator’s gift, which ultimately delivered deliverance. It is that aspect of blood and bloody sacrifice that assumes powerful momentum in San Gennaro’s miracle as agent of religious and confessional discrimination, of spiritual and political cleansing and exclusion, as I show below.118 Christ’s blood is redemptive: ‘Knowing that you were not redeemed with corruptible things … But with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb unspotted and undefiled’ (1 Peter 1:18–19).119 The theory of Christ’s sacrifice is at once representational, ontological, and incorporational. Christ incorporated humankind in his death and Resurrection. The substitution at the heart of redemption is also a substitution in which the individual is subsumed into – is – species; part is whole.120 Offered to God in the sacrifice of Christ is not only one man as substitute for man, but all humanity subsumed into Christ. Sin and guilt are lifted into God. Adam’s disobedience made many men sinners; by Christ’s obedience many are made just. The imago returns to similitudo. Part is whole. Bataille argues that the horror of the sacred is ‘ambiguous’. What is sacred attracts and possesses a value beyond compare. But it also appears vertiginously, dangerous for the ‘clear and profane world where mankind situates its privileged domain … The reality of a profane world, of a world of things and bodies, is established opposite a holy and mythical world.’121 John of Capistrano, writing in mid-fifteenth-century Rome, argues that spilled blood is the blood that saves. In the blood of sacrifice is the promise of incorruption.122 For Dominican theologians the paradox of the Crucifixion as that in which death brings life was also necessarily present in Christ’s shed The miracle worked to bring together a community capable of recognizing it and in whose presence it took place. That unity of a group had the ability to direct violence outside itself. Thus, although external violence is antithetical to sacrifice, the political and social dynamics of the miracle operated according to contrary dynamics. This is explored below in Chapter 3. 119 Although the Last Supper was not a literal sacrifice it bears reference to the sacrifice of Hebrews 9: ‘Now when these things were thus ordained, the priests went always into the first tabernacle, accomplishing the service of God. But into the second went the high priest alone, once every year, not without blood, which he offered for himself and for the errors of his people (Hebrews.9:6–7); ‘And almost all things are by the law purged with blood; and without shedding of blood is no remission’ (Hebrews 9:22). 120 Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 202. 121 G. Bataille, Theory of Religion, trans Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 36, 37. 122 N. Cocci, ‘Il sangue di Cristo in San Giovanni in Capestrano’, in F. Vattioni (ed.), Sangue e antropologia nella teologia 3: atti della VI settimana, Roma 23–28 novembre 1989 (Rome: Unione del Preziosissimo Sangue, 1991), 1309. 118

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blood. The characteristics of cruor, which can pour out yet remain red and vibrant, are analogous to Christ the hostia, who remains with God and yet spills onto humankind (Fig. 24).123

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Prophecy

Gennaro’s miracle worked in an unusual way. The response of miraculous objects usually indicates that a particular grace is granted. A supplicant makes a prayer or vow, and a smile or shedding of tears by the object indicates that grace and favour are underway.124 Gennaro’s liquefaction, by contrast, is portentous. It indicates that evil will be stayed, that things will be well. Valerio Petrarca characterizes this as ‘logical or chronological anteriority’.125 ‘There remains’, he writes, ‘the logical and chronological anteriority (or, if you like, the non-coincidental and contemporaneousness) of the miracle in relation to the benefit, such that the miracle of San Gennaro is interpreted by the devout exactly as a sign.’126 More than sign, Gennaro’s miracle assumes the role of prophecy and he of the prophet. In foreseeing disaster, castigating his people, threatening punishment, and in the shedding and re-shedding of blood, Gennaro is a prophet of sacrifice. Changes in and movement of Gennaro’s blood were interpreted as a sign of divine presence, and as sacred signs that were also historical. Both engender a kind of impotent horror. The blood’s flow conjured the moment of Gennaro’s martyrdom. San Gennaro’s blood, writes Giulio Cesare Capaccio in 1631, ‘is seen to boil, to leap, and to foam, as if at that moment it was flowing because of the strike of the sword or axe, from the mutilations of the living body of the invincible martyr, and as if it searched to rejoin its origins [e cercasse di unirsi a suoi principj], impatient to await the universal resurrection of bodies’.127 Thus the living blood occupied a paradoxical relation to both life Franciscans took a different view. For them Christ’s shed blood was without divinity during the triduum. His death became more glorious in proportion to the degree to which it was humiliating. 124 J. Garnett and G. Rosser, ‘Translations of the Miraculous: Cult Images and their Representations in Early Modern Liguria’, in E. Thunø and G. Wolf (eds), The Miraculous Image in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance (Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 2004), 205–222; R. Trexler, ‘Being and Non-Being: Parameters of the Miraculous in the Traditional Religious Image’, in E. Thunø and G. Wolf (eds), The Miraculous Image in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance (Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 2004), 15–28. 125 V. Petrarca, ‘Un miracolo rituale: la liquefazione del sangue di San Gennaro’, La ricerca folklorica, 29 (1994), 57. 126 Petrarca, ‘Un miracolo rituale’, 57. 127 G. C. Capaccio, Descrittione della Padronanza di S. Francesco di Paola nella Città di Napoli e della Festività fatta nella traslazione della Reliquia del suo Corpo dalla Chiesa di S. Luigi alla Cappella del Tesoro nel Duomo (Naples: Egidio Longo, 1631), 41–42. 123

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and death. Though alive, it was alive at the moment of the saint’s death, the point at which it spilled. It was alive in its moment of maximum violence and of utmost redemption. And insofar as it sought restitution to its body, this was not to seek a return to the living body, but to seek to be united with it in heaven. Thus it was sacred and sacrifice, spilled and redeemed, propitiatory and ominous. Through the miracle the blood was made anew in sacrifice, ‘as if it had just emerged from the saint’s veins’.128 The question of matter’s relation to change was written in blood. Christ’s blood, Bynum argues, paradoxically displays both the immutabilitas and the mutation and division of God: ‘Blood is not only a symbol of triumph over death and decay; it is also a sign that the immutable changes, the whole divides, and that exactly that change is necessary for salvation.’129 Immutabilitas is not merely changelessness and impassability. Christ’s blood, even in its resistance to and sublimation of mutation, is living, rosy, pulsing, not simply unchanging and stable.130 Thus the paradox of Christ as changing yet immutable, Bynum argues, is engaged in ‘the paradox of blood that is living and in continuity with body as well as shed and separated from body’.131 Blood was central to the question of immutability and decay, presence and absence, matter and immortality. But it was more than that. It did not simply assist philosophizing; it did something. It did not simply ensure forgiveness. Had God wanted to forgive, he could simply have done so. Blood made sacrifice. ‘And almost all things, according to the law, are cleansed with blood; and without shedding of blood there is no remission’ (Hebrews 9:22). It was necessary to sacrifice. For blood was at the heart of sacrifice. Blood devotions were more than frantic efforts to act in the interests of one’s own salvation. Blood accomplished the work of salvation, not by ascending into heaven but by being shed: ‘And almost all things are by the law purged with blood; and without shedding of blood is no remission’ (Hebrews 9:22). The martyr’s blood – the sacrificial blood of the Lamb – shed and sacrificed, becomes an instrument of salvation. Thus blood is not mere synecdoche for Christ or Incarnation; it works objectively. Something happens in its spilling. The shedding of blood changes the history of humankind and re-orders the ontological and moral economy of the universe. The paradox of sacrifice is Tutini, Memorie (1633), 88. Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 152. 130 Marchese, Unica Speranza, 121. 131 Christ’s blood was both living and separated, incorruptibilis, sacer. In the Eucharist it is a second species, becoming present by a second consecration, and hence signifies death and division. For these reasons, Bynum argues, medieval crucifixions in northern Europe usually show sanguis Christi as liquid and flowing, not as dried or coagulating. Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 153. 128 129

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that life lies in killing, and redemption in the shedding of blood.132 In light of this, the boiling and return to life of Gennaro’s blood assumes sharper focus. It becomes the blood just as if ‘at that moment it spurted from the saint’s veins’.133 It is unmistakably the blood of sacrifice. And in sacrifice something was offered and something was received. Sacrifice involves the worshippers, marks them, enriches and elevates them. It ‘remove[s] the plant and the animal, together with the farmer and the stock raiser, from the world of things’, argues Bataille.134 In the sacrifice, animal as property becomes the sacred as immanent. Blood touches, stains, and changes. In the ontology of blood lies what Bynum identifies as a ‘theory of access to God’.135 This is the theory of sacrifice. Sacrificial theology, the demand for reparation, the participation in Christ’s suffering saturated in guilt and empathetic pain, is widespread in baroque Italy in devotional texts, sermons, hagiographies. Without the spilling of blood, there is no remission of sin. Sa-unctus derived from sanguine unctus: ‘holy’ means anointed or marked ‘with blood’.136 Blood, then, is more than symbol, does more than make present the suffering of Christ or the martyred saint Gennaro. It accomplished the work of salvation, precisely in its shedding, and offered salvation. Gennaro’s blood dust mixed with the dust of earth become hot red liquid indicates that the blood was the spilled blood itself respilled. The paradox of sacrifice, that life lies in killing and redemption in spilling of blood, is central to the miracle. Sacrifice always implies violence, even if what comes to sight oscillates between phantasm and the ‘real’. This inflicted violence is at the origin of the revelation that opens one’s eyes from sensible light to supernatural light. Thus Bernard of Clairvaux’s exegesis of Hebrews 5:8 (‘he learned obedience by the things that he suffered’) is an exploration of the individual’s return to God. He expresses this as the restoration of similitudo (likeness) to the imago in which humankind was created (Genesis 1:26).137 The human being, lost in sin (self-absorption), is turned, with grace, from self-love to love of God and compassion through the encounter of the suffering Christ. For Bernard we are able to co-suffer, because we are created in the image of God. Christ’s suffering on the Cross induces humans towards empathy and provides an unearned and undeserved God-given reparation to the breach torn by Adam’s disobedience in Eden. The blood on the Cross is both satisfaction due for sin and the See Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 192. Maria di Sant’Anna, Aggiunte all’Istoria, 167. 134 Bataille, Theory of Religion, 43. 135 Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 189. 136 See Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 191. 137 Bernard of Clairvaux, Steps of Humility and Pride, in Selected Works, ed. Gillian Evans (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 99–121; Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 188–198. 132 133

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arousal of love. Compassion and imitation are in part a pattern for Christian life, but more than that the suffering and life-giving presence enclose the individual, who is thereby lifted to heaven. More than arousal of love, blood shed is the locus of life, anguish, intimacy, and joy. Death and execution were understood as retribution, payment, and satisfaction, but they did not need to be bloody to have this capacity. It is sacrifice that necessitates bloodshed. Thus Leviticus 17:1–3: This is the thing which the Lord hath commanded, saying, What man soever there be of the house of Israel, that killeth an ox, or lamb, or goat, in the camp, or that killeth it out of the camp, And bringeth it not unto the door of the tabernacle of the congregation, to offer an offering unto the Lord before the tabernacle of the Lord; blood shall be imputed unto that man; he hath shed blood; and that man shall be cut off from among his people’.

At the heart of atonement and redemption was sacrifice. The shedding of blood required an offering to God; failure to do so meant ostracism from the community. In the blood shed there is propitiation and the recognition of God’s power. These aspects of Hebrew sacrifice were taken over in the Christian Bible for the Crucifixion and Eucharist: ‘Knowing that you were not redeemed with corruptible things … But with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb unspotted and undefiled’ (1 Peter 1:18–19) and ‘This is the blood of the testament … And almost all things, according to the law, are cleansed with blood; and without shedding of blood there is no remission … So also Christ was offered once to exhaust the sins of many’ (Hebrews 9:20–28).138 ‘This is my blood of the new covenant, which is shed for many for the remission of sins’ (Matthew 26:28). A deed bestows a gift (salvation), redeems, purifies, and sanctifies (makes holy), and creates a new community between those marked by the blood and between them and God. The theology of relics is a sort of inversion of sacrifice. Relics were left behind, as pignora like pledges or even pawned goods. They are that which open a possibility in the present to buy back, expiate, or redeem. In the same tense as the tense of sacrifice, they address what will have been. ‘The principle of sacrifice’, writes Bataille, ‘is destruction, but though it sometimes goes so far as to destroy completely (as in a holocaust), the destruction that sacrifice is intended to bring is not annihilation.’ In Bataille’s terms, ‘The thing – only the thing – is what sacrifice means to destroy in the victim.’139 Bataille argues that sacrifice destroys the victim’s ties of subordination, draws it out of the world of utility, and restores it to that of ‘unintelligible caprice’, Compare also Ephesians 5:2: ‘And walk in love, as Christ also hath loved us and hath delivered himself for us, an oblation and a sacrifice to God for an odour of sweetness.’ 139 Bataille, Theory of Religion, 43. 138

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passing from the world of things that are closed to man that he knows from the outside ‘to the world that is immanent to it, intimate, known as the wife is known in carnal consummation’.140 Thus killing in the literal sense is not necessary, but ‘life’s disappearance in death reveals the invisible brilliance of life that is not a thing. … life’s intimacy does not reveal its dazzling consumption until the moment it gives out’.141 Sacrifice therefore works aporetically like death in restoring a lost value through a relinquishment of that value. Sacrifice makes present and offers up life and death. In J. C. Heesterman’s words, sacrifice ‘presents the aporia of a gift that must be destroyed in order to be a gift’.142 Bataille insists on the absolute unbankability of sacrifice: Sacrifice is the antithesis of production, which is accomplished with a view to the future; it is consumption that is concerned only with the moment. This is the sense in which it is gift and relinquishment, but what is given cannot be an object of preservation for the receiver: the gift of an offering makes it pass precisely into the world of abrupt consumption.143

Thus sacrifice re-opens a gaze into the unfathomable: The animal opens before me a depth that attracts me and is familiar to me … It is also that which is farthest removed from me, that which deserves the name depth, which means precisely that which is unfathomable to me … it is not always, and never entirely, reducible to that kind of inferior reality which we attribute to things. Something tender, secret, and painful draws out the intimacy which keeps vigil in us, extending its glimmer into that animal darkness.144

Thus the sacrifice at once grasps shared life in its intimacy and an opening to the unknown that ‘plunges me into the night and dazzles me, brings me close to the moment when – I will no longer doubt this – the distinct clarity of consciousness will move me farthest away, finally, from that unknowable truth which, from myself to the world, appears to me only to slip away’.145 Since gift and giver must be distinct conceptually, Christ has nothing to give (to God or humanity) unless his blood spills from his body. In Bataille, Theory of Religion, 43–44 (translation modified). The analogy to the wife is a whisper of the masculinized nature of sacrifice. 141 Bataille, Theory of Religion, 47. 142 J. C. Heesterman, The Broken World of Sacrifice (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 15–19. 143 Bataille, Theory of Religion, 49. 144 Bataille, Theory of Religion, 22–23. 145 Bataille argues that ‘it is clear that the need for duration conceals life from us, and that, only in theory, the impossibility of duration frees us. […] The power that death generally has illuminates the meaning of sacrifice, which functions like death in that it restores a lost value through a relinquishment of that value.’ Bataille, Theory of Religion, 23, 48. 140

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Christianity, therefore, cruor is required. The blood of Christ is the death of Christ. But Christ has nothing to give unless his blood is life (sanguis). Unless the blood lives red and vibrant, it cannot mark and make sacred those it touches and acknowledge the life that comes from God. And this is forged through sacrifice: Anima carnis in sanguine est, ‘and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls; for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul’ (Leviticus 17:11). Blood, poured out, was thought of as the result of and the doing of salvation. For Albertus Magnus, ‘shed blood is the doing of redemption’.146 Satisfaction, cleansing, and reconciliation combine. Sacrifice could not be any old gift to God. For Aquinas it is pouring blood which purifies the earth in its spilling and redeems life because it is life. It is superior to Hebrew Bible sacrifice, because it is human. In this the destruction of sacrifice is different from the offering of oblation.147 From the thirteenth century to the sixteenth century, two contradictory pressures grouped around ideas of the Mass and Passion as sacrifice. Devotional theology and university discourse moved increasingly to emphasize sanguis Christi as drops, bloodshed, as something ‘poured out’. On the other hand, theologians sought to keep sacrifice of the Mass bloodless, without the spilling anew of blood.148 The Council of Trent struggled with the question of whether the Crucifixion could be re-enacted in the Mass and, if it were not, how Christians then participated in its salvific effects. While the Mass was a sacrifice, they generally determined that Christ is not sacrificed anew in it. His blood sacrifice, a momentary sacralizing of matter, was understood to endure eternally. Gennaro’s blood was sacrificial cruor, but it was also prophetic. Despite its similarities to the blood of Christ in terms of martyrdom, it differs from the Eucharistic blood in its operation. Christ’s blood in the Mass symbolizes the sacred, is a visible form of grace, and also is God.149 Gennaro’s blood, living, prophesied. Unlike that of the Eucharist, its call to community was made not in terms of the present, but of the future. ‘Sanguis … effusus effectus habet redemptionis’. Albertus Magnus, Commentarii in IV sententiarum, bk 4, dust. 8, A, art. 2, quoted by Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 216. 147 ‘ita quod si aliquid exhibeatur in cultum dibvinum quasi in aliquod sacrum quod inde fieri debeat, consumendum, et oblatio est et sacrificium’: if a thing be offered to be destroyed in worship of God, as though it were being made into something holy, it is both an oblation and a sacrifice’. Aquinas, Summa theologica, pt 2-2, q. 86, art. 1. 148 Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 210–228. 149 According to the decrees of the Council of Trent, ‘The most holy Eucharist has indeed this in common with the rest of the sacraments, that it is a symbol of a sacred thing, and is a visible form of an invisible grace; but there is found in the Eucharist this excellent and peculiar thing, that the other sacraments have then first the power of sanctifying when one uses them, whereas in the Eucharist, before being used, there is the Author Himself of sanctity’ (Session 13). 146

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The colour of time

The colour of blood mattered; indeed, it was its matter. Scooped up with grass and soil, Gennaro’s blood was indistinguishable form the dust of the earth.150 Dull dust, the colour of decayed matter, blood as dust indistinguishable from the earth dust scooped up with it, contaminated with the fear of matter as corruption, was transformed into bright red living blood: ‘the sediment of dry earth that lies congealed and immobile at the bottom of the little ampoules is returned again to living, vermilion blood’.151 This was cruor, spilled blood of sacrifice, arterial blood, the most precious. The shedding of cruor could be heroic; when it was separated, blood could decay. It flowed out in pain and violence. It could stain and contaminate. It  could coagulate and clot. It could rot and stink. It was therefore loss, destruction, disintegration, and filth. But it was also the very stuff of life. Gennaro’s blood embodied not only the divine, but changeability. Indeed, it was capable of staging changeability itself. That paradox was central to its spiritual and material significance. The brownness and dryness of San Gennaro’s blood are precisely what distinguished it from the blood of Christ, which in its divine immutability was always fresh, shining, and red.152 In Gennaro’s devotional economy, his blood becomes alive: ‘red’, ‘liquid’, ‘hot’, ‘living’, and ‘boiling’.153 Blood’s colour also indicated age, so the transformation from dust to bright red was a particularly stark renewal of youthful life.154 Indeed, these terms indicate blood’s phase transitions from old to young, dead to living, sanguis to cruor, blood as it erupted at the moment of Gennaro’s execution. Thus Gennaro’s liquefaction combines the radiance and splendour of the blood of martyrs with a violent interruption of continuous time that becomes one of possibility. It was the cleaner blood in the larger ampoule, which, in sight of the sacred head, came to perform the miraculous liquefaction. Maria di Sant’Anna, Istoria della Vita (1707), 53. The blood is kept in two glass ampoules, enclosed in a reliquary or teca which is circular and c.12 cm in diameter. The ampoules are unequal in size: one is large, elliptical in section, with capacity of about 60 cc; the other is smaller cylindrical in shape and has a capacity of about 25 cc. Alfano and Amitrano, Il miracolo di S Gennaro, 59. 151 Caracciolo, Napoli Sacra, 7. 152 In fact, the position was a little more complex than this, since late fifteenth-century Franciscans argued that such dried blood meant that it was Christ’s inessential blood, not part of Christ’s core human nature. Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 171. 153 Similar terms were used for other blood miracles. Thus Clement V cited the liquefaction and boiling of the holy blood in Bruges which occurred every Friday between 1303  and 1309 from morning until the ninth hour. See Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 168–169. 154 Di Levino, Della complessione, 71. 150

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Gennaro, who in the ampoules of his blood never ceases to renew his death at the sight of his head, with an unfailing reserve of loving intercessions [con indificienza di amorozi suffragii], so that the people of his diocese celebrate his memory, with a more ardent yearning of Christian spirit; and the sacred harvests of his martyrdom allow all to hear at the close of their lives the promises of David. They shall be inebriated with the plenty of thy house [Psalm 35:9].155

In its transformation from dust to bright red liquid, Gennaro’s blood changed from being particularly dead to being particularly alive. ‘I do not say merely incorrupt, but more than that, alive; and alive with a new sort of life’, the Register of Miracles declares.156 The miracle did not simply attest to San Gennaro’s intercession in heaven. It represented and indicated his redeemed presence in heaven, his willingness to die again, and his prophetic dying again. Thus when the blood was found in a liquid state throughout the octave of September 1665, the Treasurer noted in the Register: ‘the glorious saint thereby gave us to understand his readiness to spill anew his precious blood in defence of our Catholic faith and in service of God’.157 Here San Gennaro’s heartfelt intervention with God is envisaged, along with something more resolute and altogether bloodier. Despite being in heaven with God in a state of grace, Gennaro is willing to suffer and die again for the Catholic faith. The premature fluidity of his blood signals his readiness to spill his blood anew. In this way, Gennaro’s death was remade, apparently almost at will, the circumstances of the original martyrdom disappear, and, in a remarkable paradox, he appears to assume control of his own fate. Thus his miracle is edged closer to being a repeated sacrifice, akin to Christ’s at the Mass. Boiling blood was thought to be a sign of youthfulness.158 The blood becomes young again. Flowing blood is the locus of love and joy. The emphasis on its bubbling hotness evokes the spurting of blood from a huge gash, a fresh wound. Gennaro’s blood is hot and living at the time of his death, at the miracle, and at the end of time. It was thus a sort of male living pregnancy, the bearing of a soul in God: not in the dry, coagulated blood but in birthing blood, ‘Gennaro sì che nell’Ampolle del sangue non finisce di rinovar la sua morte a veduta del Capo, con indificienza di amorozi suffragii, accioche i suoi Diocesani ne celebrino le memorie, con sete più calda di spirito Cristiano: e le Sagre Vendemmie del suo martirio faccian udire a tutti nel fin della vita le promesse di David. Inebriabuntur ab ubertate domus tuae.’ Lubrani, Il fuoco sacro, 15. 156 ‘Non dico solo incorrotto, ma anco vivo, e vivo con nuova sorte di vita.’ ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc. 83 bis n. 1), fol. 2r. 157 ‘dandoci d.o glorioso Santo ad intendere la prontezza della sua volontà in spargere di nuovo il suo prezioso sangue in defenzione della nostra fede Cattolica, ed in servizio di Sua Divina Maestà.’ ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc. 83 bis n. 1), fols 22v–23r. 158 Di Levino, Della complessione, 77. 155

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which was rosy and living. Flowing blood is locus of life and joy. Thus past, present, and future, death and birth are at one in the renewed blood. The question of time is presented in the colour of the miracle. The event of the miracle opens the question of time. It was an event, not another moment within time, but something that let time change its flight; an event through which the movement of life alters. It shows that the past is not finished. Engagement with the past necessarily takes its concerns from the present. Sacrifice and salvation are not bounded within time. Openings in the present allow access to the past. But this ‘present’ cannot be understood as a contemporary ‘now’. The present, too, has an unstable relation to the movement of complex historical time. The miracle and the chapel can open up. The domain of sensation is brought to bear on matter and its problematic status. The particular instability within sensation’s object is literalized and celebrated here in shed blood. Shed blood that is alive, separated blood that affords wholeness. That miraculous blood at once foretells and betrays possibility. The potentiality of matter, of time, and of transformation is opened up. Substance is manifest as fluidity and potentiality. Discontinuities are not located in the passage of chronological time, but they are made. They involve the creation of juxtapositions of which the effect is the possible continual overcoming of the hold of historicism.159 The miracle is not eternal recurrence, but a repetition that links a politics of time to one of intervention. The miracle was often treated as a miraculous event within historicist temporality, and as such demanding and requiring continuity and convention, obeisance to hierarchy and the status quo. But its event also permits a challenge to historicism, laying open a relation with the past and future of discontinuity and difference that does not depend on repetition and continuity. The miracle brings not just the shock of the supernatural occurrence, which, once one has grown accustomed to it, has no value. The miracle permits time’s disruptive power. The miracle’s temporality, as potentiality, is not extensive as in the connection of distinct units. Rather it is intensive, assuming the form of divergent and different durations. The miracle can be thought as making new lines of time or lines of flight. They do not chart, represent, or even contest events within history. Instead they offer a new experience of history and lay time open. On the one hand, there is time as repetition, and the chapel represents the miracle which represents events. On the other, the time of the miracle disrupts a unified, linear sense of time and opens the way to the promise of something new and renewed. The miracle does not occur within time, but is the eternal production of transformation. Rather than See A. Benjamin, Architectural Philosophy (London and New Brunswick: The Athlone Press, 2000), 5–68.

159

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being located within time, it produces a new line of time. The imago of the miracle is also signum, a manifestation of the power acquired in the journey towards union with God, a power that derives from God and is effected through the human sanctified by faith, virtue, and mortification. It was itself life and death, their inseparability, their threat and their promise. The unclotting of Gennaro’s blood was the guarantee of his intercession with God. If everything was aright on earth, then everything could be aright in heaven, San Gennaro would intercede, and everything would be aright on earth. The miracle was part of a mimetic cycle that restored order where there was order; and was withheld when the correct order was absent. Miraculous images, paintings of the Virgin that shed tears or milk were common in Renaissance and baroque Italy.160 Gennaro’s miracle differed from these in two principal ways. First, his blood was not an image. Second, it performed its miracle with greater regularity than most miracle-working images and relics, producing an economy of expectation. The well-being of the entire city came to depend on it and even to be equated with it. Thus Carlo Celano – echoing Baronio – referred to it as a ‘continuous miracle’.161 Gennaro is in unceasing intercession on behalf of Naples. His real miracle is Naples’ salvation. Although the liquefaction, in broad terms, referred to Christ’s sacrifice, seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century commentators veered from interpreting it primarily in those terms. Instead, they insist that it indicated the presence of San Gennaro in heaven and his willing intercessions with God on behalf of Naples. This marks a departure from an Augustinian view of modern miracles. For Saint Augustine new miracles were wrought to procure and confirm the world’s belief in Christ: But how comes it, say they, that you have no such miracles nowadays, as you say were done of yore? I might answer, that they were necessary, before the world believed, to induce it to believe; and that he that seeks to be confirmed by wonders now is to be wondered at most of all himself in refusing to believe what all the world believes besides him.162

For a contrasting approach to this see J. Garnett and G. Rosser, ‘Miraculous Images and the Sanctification of Urban Neighborhood in Post-Medieval Italy’, Journal of Urban History, 32:5 (2006), 729–741. 161 ‘un continuo miracolo’. Celano, Notizie del bello, vol. II, 268. The phrase derives from Baronio, who termed it ‘perenne miraculum’ in his annotations to the Martyrologium Romanum. C. Baronio, Martyrologium Romanum ad novam kalendarii rationem, et ecclesiasticae historiae veritatem restitutum (Rome: Dominici Basae, 1586), 291, 19 September, letter A. 162 St Augustine, The City of God (De Civitate Dei), bk 22, cap. 8, trans. J. Healey and ed. R. V. G. Tasker (London: Dent, 1947), vol. II, c366. 160

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San Gennaro did not so much refer to Christ’s blood and sacrifice. It slipped into its place and replaced it. Christ all but disappears from early modern discussions of Gennaro’s miracle. The miracle announced San Gennaro’s presence in heaven and guaranteed his engagement with God on behalf of Naples. It also evoked San Gennaro’s own death and martyrdom. San Gennaro’s blood runs again; San Gennaro is killed again; San Gennaro dies and lives again; San Gennaro is with God again. It is San Gennaro, not Christ, who incessantly saves and who will deliver Naples. Martyrdom and witness

Camillo Tutini sketches the saints in terms of patriarchal lineage and of art. They are, he writes, ‘portraits of Christ’. The martyr saints ‘express him best, because Charity itself has painted them with the red of their own blood’. Thus it is their suffering that makes them both like Christ and apprehensible to others; the materiality of their bodily suffering permits the imitation of Christ. Their shed blood is not only the means, condition, and consequence of their imitation, but the very paint that renders it visible. It is not simply inevitable result, but badge of honour and legible sign. It is not simply ‘indexical’, as repeatedly claimed in current scholarship. It opens the very possibility of the representation of the unenunciable. Tutini writes: All the saints of paradise are portraits of Christ; but the martyr saints are those who most vividly express him, because Charity itself paints them with a brush dipped in the crimson of their own blood; and as they die for Christ, who is the martyr of martyrs, no wonder they come to represent the love of him who likewise shed his blood for our salvation in bearing witness to his mighty Father. So it is, that martyrdom’s being of such great price and carrying the human creature to such a state of perfection, it conveys a gracious spectacle to the angels, and wonderment to the Church, which, magnified by their trophies, and adorned by their crowns, has succeeded in preserving the martyrs’ memorials [relics], and honoring their remembrance in their feast days.163

‘Tutti i Santi del Paradiso sono ritratti di Cristo; mà i Santi Martiri sono quelli, che più vivamente l’esprimono, perché la Carità stessa li pennelleggia col minio del lor proprio sangue; e morendo essi per Cristo, ch’è ’l Martire trà Martiri, à maraviglia vengono à rappresentare l’amor di lui, che similmente sparse il Sangue à nostra salvezza i testimonianza del suo gran Padre. Quindi succede, ch’essendo di tanto pregio il Martirio, e portando l’umana creatura à tanto stato di perfezione, rechi e grazioso spettacolo à gli Angeli, & ammirazione alla Chiesa, la qual pomposa de’ lor trofei, & ornata delle loro corone, hà procurato conservar le memorie de’ Martiri, & onorarne in ciascun tempo la rimembranza.’ See Tutini, Memorie (1633), 2.

163

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The blood of the martyr was witness of witness. It was to participate in the dying of Christ in order to merit a share of His life. Gennaro’s miracle, like his martyrdom, was a form of imitatio Christi. The martyr’s suffering and death were an imitation of Christ, a concrete and literal realization of that death and burial with Christ which is figuratively enacted in every convert’s baptism (Romans 6:3, Colossians 2:12) and which receives a particularly sharp expression in 1 Peter: ‘Rejoice in so far as you share in Christ’s sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed’ (1 Peter 4:13).164 In this Christocentric fashion it is the actual suffering and death of the martyr that is of primary significance, for Christ himself suffers in the body of the martyr and defeats the devil there.165 The soteriology of martyrdom assumes that the death of the martyr effects atonement by expiating the people’s sins or propitiating the wrath of God. The martyr’s death makes satisfaction on behalf of the people and his soul is a ransom for their souls.166 San Gennaro’s miracle is, in part, a reversal of this process. He dies again. His blood is spilled anew. The battle is fought again. Martyrdom is offered up again, like the sacrifice of Christ. Unlike Christ’s blood, Gennaro’s does not directly bestow grace. Instead it signals that God’s wrath will or will not be stayed. Thus Gennaro’s blood blends the Christological with the Old Testament prophet. Gennaro’s blood is prophecy. The liquescence of his blood stages his imitatio Christi and his sacrifice. But far from bestowing grace, it signals unrest in heaven. Doom and punishment are threatened, their threat made visible, their restraint sensible. In this sense the chapel stages a strange displacement of Christ’s blood. The entrance to the Treasury Chapel is flanked by Peter and Paul, greatest apostles and early martyrs (Plate 1 & Fig. 25). Standing in deep niches, they are part of This idea was early developed among the Church Fathers by Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch in the first part of the second century CE, who wrote about his future martyrdom, though without using the terminology of ‘martyr’, in seven letters to local Christian communities. Dwelling on his approaching death as his entry into true discipleship, Ignatius refers to the attainment of Christ by which he becomes ‘an imitator of my God’. In the Martyrdom of Polycarp, the earliest extant ‘history’ of a Christian martyrdom, the theme of the imitatio Christi is developed in the claim that the martyr becomes a participant in Christ. G. W. H. Lampe, ‘Martyrdom and Inspiration’, in W. Horbury and B.  McNeil (eds), Suffering and Martyrdom in the New Testament (Cambridge, London, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 120. 165 Thus the Letter from Vienne and Lyons, which describes the suffering of martyrs in Lyons in 177 or 178, quoted by Eusebius: ‘But his body bore witness to what had happened: for it was all wounds and weals, shrunk and torn up, and had lost externally the human shape. In him Christ suffering wrought great wonders, destroying the adversary, and showing for an example to the rest that there is nothing fearful where there is the Father’s love, and nothing painful where there is Christ’s glory.’ Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, Books 1–5, trans. K. Lake, Loeb Classical Library 153), (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1926), bk V, 129. 166 4 Maccabees 6:28, 1:11. See Lampe, ‘Martyrdom and Inspiration’, 121. 164

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the chapel’s magnificent façade and its enunciation to the Cathedral, as they exceed the niches and burst forwards into the south aisle. Two large columns of dark-green-streaked marble flank the entrance, dark and foreboding, like an entrance to a tomb. Thus visitors pass beneath the half-length figure of San Gennaro in bronze immediately above the entrance (Plate 1), slipping between Peter and Paul, gigantic and triumphant, the Roman Church and its teachings, and between the sepulchral columns to enter the chapel, like a vortex, in which everything yields before San Gennaro, his blood, his living miracle (Plate 3). The matter of change and the redemption of matter

Blood’s association with victory over mutability and fragmentation was profound. Yet blood also symbolizes the irreversible change of death, and the horror of blood poured out. Gennaro’s blood makes visible the suffering and death of the saint and his intercession with God. What is hidden in the past erupts into visibility in the miracle, as liquid shed and alive. Thus the miracle abolishes difference through time, and annuls history to instantiate divine time. In the miracle the blood becomes fluid and animated, ‘as if just at that moment it had spouted from the veins of the body of the martyr saint’, writes Girolamo Maria di Sant’Anna in 1710.167 Thus the miracle obliterates time conceived as its continuous steady-paced passage. The miracle witnesses both the historical dies natalis of San Gennaro and his present intervention in heaven beyond the realm of earthly time. It both repeats the moment of the saint’s death and simultaneously acts as witness to the divine influence that is the consequence of that death. Thus the miracle brings ‘time off its hinges’. The revivification of Gennaro’s blood demonstrated his readiness to shed his blood all over again. It is this that lies behind the repeated emphasis on the aliveness of the blood, on its movement and its bright red colour. Baronio’s Martyrologium Romanum and the Roman Breviary treat the liquefaction as making visible Gennaro’s martyrdom and the specific moment of his decapitation and loss of life, as if just released from the martyr’s veins.168 The Maria di Sant’Anna, Aggiunte all’Istoria, 167. Thus the Roman Breviary: ‘Praeclaraum illud quoquo (scilicet miraculum) quod ejus sanguis, qui in ampulla vitrea concretus asservatur, cum in conspectu Capitis eiusdem Martyris ponitur admirandum in modum colliquefieri, & ebullire perinde atque recens effusus, ac hacek sue temporal crenature.’ Cardinal Baronio termed it ‘a continuous miracle’ in his annotations to the Martyrologium Romanum: ‘Porro insigne, ac perenne miraculum Sanguinis ejusdem S. Januarii, qui cum in ampulla vitrea concretus contineatur, liquescere tamen, & fluere perindè ac si recens effusus saepè conspicitur.’ Baronio, Martyrologium Romanum, 19 September, letter A.

167 168

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r­ evisiting of that moment is significant, because it marks the saint’s dies natalis and shows the blood’s operating at the limit, at the very edge of life and mouth of death, and its ability to crease one into the other to unfold one from the other in its capacity to switch from an extensive relation to an intensive relation and back again. The blood’s expressiveness, its dramatic shifting, living, breathing, and moving, even after the saint was received in heaven, was part of this and made it a particularly attractive relic. The tension between unique historical event and sacrifice lay at the heart of debates over transubstantiation between the thirteenth century and the Council of Trent.169 Bynum, discussing Christ’s blood, offers a useful insight: ‘To adherents, the blood is always in the present tense. In its fluid redness, it resists mutatio and manifests the life that endures beyond physical change,’170 In its dustiness, Gennaro’s blood, unlike Christ’s, did signal corruption. But its opening to the moment of death in the miracle was an opening to life, to the past within the present – and in a present made present to itself precisely in and through the miracle. Blood represents violent death, and its return to life showed San Gennaro’s willingness to die – horribly – all over again. Thus Gennaro’s blood and his miracles visibly engaged – like all blood miracles – with cruelty (cruor) and horror. Since blood was the seat of the soul, seeing it shed was truly horrible. Horror cruoris meant that the real presence in the Eucharist was veiled by God: it was blood, rather than flesh, that offered potential offence. The paradoxical reasoning of violent death is that learning to live comes to fulfilment only in death. Violent death is a road to this goal, established by the early Christian martyrs.171 Suffering for Christ’s sake was a sign not only of perdition to the persecutors, but of salvation to the sufferer. The person who suffered for God received an outpouring of the Spirit of Christ (Philippians 1:12–14, 19–20, 27–29). Thus Gennaro’s bloody boiling was a sign, not of his death, but of his true life. The promise of that true life, witnessed in the miracle, was also communicated by it.172 Martyrs’ blood, far from being simply the end of something, was the promise of a new beginning. See P. J. Fitzpatrick, ‘On Eucharistic Sacrifice in the Middle Ages’, in S. W. Sykes (ed.), Sacrifice and Redemption (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 129–156. 170 Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 149. 171 The description of Ignatius’ execution is found in legendary writings much later than his death. The Martyrdom of Ignatius dates from the fifth or sixth century. See the translation in J. W. van Henten and F. Avemarie, Martyrdom and Noble Death (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 107–111. The oldest Christian document devoted to martyrdom is the Martyrdom of Polycarp probably from 155–60 CE. See the translation in van Henten and Avemarie, Martyrdom and Noble Death, 114–116. 172 ‘The blood of Christians is seed’, wrote Tertullian. ‘The more you mow us down, the greater our numbers become; our blood is the seed from which new Christians spring.’ Tertullian, Apologeticum, 50.13. 169

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Just as the Mass produces the miracle of transubstantiation which represents Christ’s martyrdom in salvific terms, so the uncongealing of San Gennaro’s blood makes visible in material terms the sacrifice of the martyred saint and the aliveness of the dead saint. The miracle is not merely a representation of historical events; it is a material sign of the saint’s presence both in heaven and on earth. It announces San Gennaro’s presence in heaven and promises his intercession with God on behalf of Naples. Gennaro’s blood did more than dazzle with its supernatural tricks, and more than simply symbolize love and guilt. In Gennaro’s miracle the oxymoron of holy matter was laid bare. In it lay the question as to what sort of sacrality could and should be present in matter, and visible on earth. Matter and body were problematic – in spite of and because of being redeemed. The blood’s capacity to evince change went to the heart of the question of the relationship between the divine and matter. The matter of change was a fundamental issue to scholastic theologians, to natural philosophers, to historians and vulcanologists. God cannot change, but his universe is traversed and informed by change. The privileging and denying of change fuelled attempts to promote and authenticate relics, and to deny that divine presence can inhere in matter.173 It resounded in the debates about transubstantiation and consubstantiation throughout the early modern period. It was the basic philosophical problem in theories of how embodied identity might survive or return in resurrection. In Gennaro’s blood the problems of matter, change, and sacrifice converged. Its miraculous transformation raised some of the crucial theological questions in the sacrifice of the mass. How could it be momentary yet eternal? What was the relationship between the divine, redemption, and changing matter? Matter, which by definition was mutable, was expected to maintain the immutability of God. How was change to be understood in relation to the divine? The blood’s deliquescence acts to keep change alive, to sustain the manifestation, and to make the moment of sacrifice and presence endure. The miracle made visible the paradox of blood that is living and in continuity with That God could not change was made clear by Bernard, Aquinas, and many other theologians, but they recognized that his universe was informed by change, both the change of the physical corruption of decay and that of the moral corruption of sin. The penitential system, advancing into purgatory, channelled the expiation and alleviation of moral corruptio. L. Pinelli, Del Sacramento della Penitenza quanto appartiene a sapersi al penitente, per confessarsi bene, et della preparatione alla santa Confessione, et modo per farlo con frutto (Venice: Gio. Battista Ciotti, 1607), 9–12. This book was completed in Naples in 1603, but published in Venice four years later. See U. Parente, ‘Aspetti della Confessione dei peccati nella Compagnia di Gesù a Napoli tra XVI e XVII secolo’, in B. Ulianich (ed.), Ricerche sulla confessione dei peccati a Napoli tra ’500 e ’600 (Naples: La Città del Sole, 1997), 170.

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the body as well as shed and separated from body. Thus in the question of the blood and its miracle lay three related issues: the issue of holy matter, its changeability, and the question of access to God or of God’s absence and presence – albeit delegated. If matter signifies change and change signifies decay, how can God inhere in matter? Yet an incarnate God must inhere. If Christ has departed in resurrection and ascension, how do Christians find him on earth? Without some access, there is no opening of devotion, but what is the nature of the access afforded by a saint? Caroline Walker Bynum has brilliantly explored these questions primarily in relation to Christ’s blood, its depiction, and its presence at the Eucharist in late medieval northern Germany.174 The burden of her argument is useful in relation to San Gennaro. At first glance, Bynum suggests, blood miracles  seem to fit only awkwardly into basic assumptions about sacred immutability. How can change signal non-change? How can transformation indicate the unchanging nature of the divine? ‘In a sense’, she suggests, ‘blood makes  apparent the continuity, the potential for survival, within corruptible matter. Its sudden eruption into visibility is a change that sublimates and transcends change. Poured out in death, it nonetheless lives and brings life.’175 Blood’s relation to the body was imprecise. It was both whole and part. In this blood relics differed significantly from other body relics, which had fixed locations in the body. Blood, which is life and death, expresses that which both continues and separates. Both Christ’s blood and the miraculous blood of saints were separated yet alive. It was an earthly image of change (matter, body, decay, and death) that has been redeemed. Blood was both present and absent, left behind as well as gone ahead to glory. Christ’s blood was a separation that is also a vehicle for return. The sacrament signifies the blood of Christ as poured out as the price of redemption. But blood cannot be separated without wounding the body. Blood is not only sanguis (blood inside, the stuff of life): it is also cruor, blood that is outside the body, blood that is shed. Christ’s blood on earth is a part left behind. It was the only aspect of Christ that could claim both to be cut off from him and to continue his presence.176 Thus, Bynum argues, ‘blood imaged and evoked a Christ left behind’, something separated from God that could lift the desiring Christian to the wholeness and oneness of

See Bynum, Wonderful Blood. Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 148. 176 Blood was the only part, according to Scripture and patristic theology, that was separated from the ever-living Christ. The holy foreskin was a rarer devotion and, in any case, it was a form of blood devotion. 174 175

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the divine.177 But that part left behind also signifies and makes possible the wholeness of resurrection. Those who are ‘afar off’ can be made nigh by the blood of Christ: Wherefore remember, that ye being in time past Gentiles in the flesh, who are called Uncircumcision by that which is called the Circumcision in the flesh made by hands; That at that time ye were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world: But now in Christ Jesus ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace, who hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us. (Ephesians 2:11–14)

Aquinas argues that blood is a special image (imago) of the Passion.178 According to him the separate presence of the whole Christ under each species is not without purpose, since ‘this serves to represent Christ’s passion, in which the blood was separate from the body; hence in the form for the consecration of the blood mention is made of its shedding’.179 Separation through blood is the means to salvation, unification, and pacification. Blood, therefore, embodied the desire to reconcile the changeable and the unchangeable. The quality of Gennaro’s blood that continued to be alive even while separated from his body made it particularly redolent soteriologically. It could signify at once both Gennaro dying and Gennaro alive, on earth (that is shed blood, cruor) and gone to glory (blood that is alive, sanguis). Cruor requires the wounding of the body, to shed and scatter not just life, but also death.180 Blood was therefore paradoxical. It was capable of being the separation that provides access. In it there was the immutability of the glory already achieved and the price eternally being paid. Blood provides comfort and contact in a continuing presence and loss that is the promise of present hope. Thus Gennaro’s blood was more than reminder of the saint’s death and martyrdom’s anguish of the martyrdom, and more than symbolic reference Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 178. ‘Sanguis specialius est imago dominicae passionis’ (the blood is a special image of the passion of our Lord’) Aquinas, Summa theologica, pt 3, q. 83, art. 2, ra 2. Aquinas argued that it is blood more than body (host) that signifies the Passion. This is because of its special capacities to be separated and united with body, living and shed, within and without. See Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 173–192. 179 Aquinas, Summa theologica, 3, q.76, art.2, ra 1. Quoted by Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 173. Aquinas stresses the importance in the Eucharist of the separation of the bread and wine as an image of the separation of blood from body in the Passion. See Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 326 n. 2. 180 For Christ’s blood in this respect, see Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 173. 177 178

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to Christ’s blood, the sacrament. Rather it was the power of life within it – life itself. Some of the discussion of Christ’s exsanguination stresses the difference between ordinary blood, which coagulates, and Christ’s, which does not.181 But theology, devotion, and practice also simply assumed that blood itself was the sedes animae, alive with life.182 Since blood was the fluid from which all other body fluids were thought to be formed, it is the only body part that is capable of retaining life while separated from the body. Thus blood is particularly able to represent life in and through death; it is the power of life within it – the power of the divine itself. It was the shedding of blood that made it able to absolve. Insofar as Christ’s blood was poured out (Fig. 24), it could represent and incorporate the blood of others and of all: ‘Blood is then an earthly image of change that has been redeemed, of part that, though whole, is also and forever part.’183 This helps explain the emphasis on the change that takes place in Gennaro’s miracle from brownish dust to vibrant red that we find in the Register and in other baroque texts. His miracle was not simply the transformation of matter, the rendering fluid what had been solid. It showed again the shedding of blood and blood as shed and salvific. Blood shed was dying and violation; but also source, origin, and birth; and in this, of course, it ran counter to ordinary physiology. This was the paradox of the shed living blood. Gennaro’s blood was, therefore, paradoxical. It permitted the discreteness of a part that was nevertheless a whole. Life-affirming and threatening, pledging and warning, alive and dead, doom-laden and pacific. Seat of the soul and fountain of life, blood was also real loss, violation and death. It was that which was left behind, the absent saint, departed, yet glorified. A sign of death and of an absent presence, Gennaro’s blood was also a renewed or spiritual presence, his miracle ambivalent and paradoxical. Exclusionary blood

Yet even as San Gennaro’s blood offered comfort and contact, reassurance and promise, it was also accusation and reproach. Christ’s blood, too, as Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 168. The Dominicans in Rome in 1462 argued that only sick blood can be called dead. It is decay of blood extruded outside the body, and not the extrusion itself, that is called the death of blood. Living blood is both within and without (or shed). The basic dichotomy, then, is not between blood that is inside and blood that is outside, but living blood (inside or outside) as opposed to blood that is sick or dead, decaying or decayed. The Franciscans disagreed with this in various ways: in particular, their emphasis on the waves of Christ’s blood tended to assume that salvific blood was flowing and red. Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 168. 183 Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 188. 181 182

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consequence of the attack on Christ, of the violation of his body and of his death, accused as well as liberated. Even as it might purify and cleanse, it was a stain and proof of humankind’s guilt. The guilt associated with Christ’s blood was projected outwards especially onto Jews; that of San Gennaro was projected onto Muslims, Protestants, and foreigners. Understood in terms of punishment and accusation, San Gennaro’s miracle – and even more its absence – was interpreted in terms of an accusation against. Thus an opening of possibility was foreclosed in terms of securing an identity to blame. Worshippers were caught between the immutability of glory already achieved and the price eternally being paid (for which humankind was eternally responsible). Blood is kinship and heirs, lineage and relationship more broadly. But in Gennaro’s withholding of the miracle, it became enmity, ­division, and – once more – separation. Conclusion The blood of San Gennaro boils again at the sight of his head. The blood of Gennaro encased in glass so fragile by a prodigy continuous and most rare enchants the wings of time Death wonders at it astonished and confused: enclosed within glass enreddened, weeps unceasing  that a head alone condemns it to life.184

Giovan Battista Marino’s sonnet lingers on the strange power of Gennaro’s blood to combat time and defeat death, even as it is encased in fragile glass. The spirit is so close to the blood that the blood never ceases to be haunted, so much so that if death risks reducing it to the condition of mere matter, the spirit is more present than ever. The blood betrays death to enter an enchanted accord with time. Gennaro’s life, death, and relics were excessively turbulent. Violent death, loss, and fragmentation of his remains and their contested ­ translations resurfaced in unruly blood that defied nature. Life and death, his blood

‘Il Sangue di san Gennaro ribolle a vista del capo’: ‘Il sangue di Gennaro / entro vetro sì frale / con prodigio continüo e più raro / incanta al Tempo l’ale. / La Morte il mira attonita e confusa: / fra trasparenze chiusa / sempre piange arrossita / che un Capo solo la condanni a vita.’ Giambattista Marino, Amori, ed. and with notes by A. Martini (Milan: Rizzoli, 1982), 163, Sonnet 141.

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was something more – survival. His blood was metamorphic and polymorphic, disturbing, uncontainable, disobedient, and discrepant. An unnatural history, for sure. Its very unruliness seemed to tempt irresistibly those who relished control to try to tame it, to bring it back down to earth, and to ride on its back. Yet it remained uncanny and defiant. Gushing blood shocks and disturbs. It reinvents the reliquary bust – which royal patronage and austere sculpture had managed to transpose almost completely into art – as cut-off head (Plate 6). Gennaro’s blood was mortifying. In turning into red bubbling liquid, the blood encouraged, but it also mortified. It returned the ampoule to the cadaverous, returned the bust of San Gennaro to a head that had been cut from its body. At once index, signum, and imago, blood exceeds art history’s usual categorical limits. The miracle worked as allegory, in Walter Benjamin’s sense of allegory. That is, not as a failed symbol or abstract personification, but as a power of configuration entirely different from that of the symbol. While the  symbol combines the eternal and the momentary, nearly at the centre of the world, allegory uncovers nature and history according to the order of time. Thus Gennaro’s blood can be seen as producing a history from nature and as transforming history and nature in a world that no longer has a still centre. Affective piety and soteriological theory draw together and interfuse past and future, saint here and saint in glory, death and resurrection, sacrifice and salvation, matter and miracle. If sacrifice was instantiated in making apparent matter as more than mere matter, the problem of matter and the problem of sacrifice converged and fused. Matter was mutable, yet it was expected to convey and preserve the immutability of the divine. Thus the miracle of San Gennaro, switching from decay and dried dust to vibrant crimson fluid, figured the anxiety at the heart of the matter of matter and the heart of the matter of sacrifice. San Gennaro’s miracle was transformative in marvellous ways. It possessed remarkable anthropological power. It worked on principles similar to a metaphor and was as powerful as one. Like metaphor, it entailed a conjuncture of categories: the sensuous and the spiritual, the literal and the figurative. It effected transformation of worshippers and sceptics, faithful and heretics, citizens and city, chapel and street. Metaphor and miracle share something paradoxical and uncanny. Their own curious logic is characteristically a form of transgression, of movement, and of slippage. It was the uncanny that had the capacity each time to house again. It was the capacities of the miracle in its uncanniness that wrought a new home for the citizens of Naples. The Treasury Chapel was a pressure-machine that worked to transform unreliable worshippers into worthy Christian citizens. Saints were exemplars, a community of the righteous. Such an exemplar ceases to be merely a past human paradigm reactivated, by human means, in the present: ‘the “man of God”, the

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“righteous man” has a revelatory quality about him’.185 The saint is a gift of God to his or her age and place. In the re-liquefaction of San Gennaro’s congealed blood, the miracle was seen, and seen to be seen; and its witnesses were staged and seen (Figs 2 & 4). The whole was a fervent celebration of the miracles of seeing, and of seeing together, seeing differently and at once. More than spectacle, the blood was matter, matter transformed, matter sacrificed, and matter redeemed. The Treasury Chapel offered visible testament to that miracle in both its threat and its reassurance. Here the miraculous liquefaction of blood was less transcendental than transformative. The miracle demonstrated the praesentia of the saint, the exercise of ‘clean’ power that centred on the tombs or reliquaries of the saints. San Gennaro’s miracles were the drama of authority and the drama of reintegration. They worked to ensure the exclusion of the demon or sin among the Neapolitan people, the exclusion of heretics, and the recuperation of the city in its fullness. Spurred on by fervent prayer, the blood made worshippers witnesses of Gennaro’s martyrdom and presence; the severed head and spilled blood made the miracle inside the chapel, concentrated the saint’s virtus among the thronged crowds. It is obligatory for sophisticated visitors to Naples to sneer at the miracle and its bad form, its over-stepping of boundaries, its vulgar lack of restraint. The miracle, then, holds out an uneasy promise. Disturbingly audacious, it seems to seek to outdo and displace Christ’s blood. It could not be relied on. And it exposed – even as it justified – the horrifying logic of Christian sacrifice. The liquefaction was non-repetition, a sign of the opening between present and past, the safety of Naples and the spiritual weal of its inhabitants. Yet in spite of everything, the ambivalence and complexity of the visual transformation were evinced even in the miracles and their register. The desire for access to God was ambiguous, and the miracle remained, like it, a glimpse of something terrible, full of promise yet also of threat, the violence of sacrifice, the gulf of something owed. Gennaro’s blood is not only a marker of violence. It is violent. It severs. Christ’s blood remains living; Gennaro’s blood dies and then returns to life, before turning to dust again. Its liquefaction is defiantly anachronic. It violates temporality conceived in linear form. The Treasury Chapel, then, was a sort of charnel house, a temple to sacrifice and the place of spilled blood (Plate 2). The terms used for the shedding of blood over and again in Exodus and Leviticus – fondere, effondere, spargere, diffondersi – are also the terms used in smelting and melting, fusing and working of metals. It is precisely the emphasis on the miraculous blood’s deliquescence and its induration that P. Brown, ‘The Saint as Exemplar in Late Antiquity’, Representations, 1:2 (1983), 6.

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makes the metals in the chapel effective as analogous materials for its fluxibility, as I explore below. The Treasury Chapel was a sort of fonderia, a foundry or casting house, the place where spilling blood and melting metal worked together to offer salvation (Plate 3). The chapel’s work was part of the work to turn the human, who was capax Dei, to the love of God. The shedding, spilling, gathering, offering, and shedding again of Gennaro’s blood, the melting, forging, bending, and arresting of bronze, silver, and gold, and the melting and opening and forging and offering of the human heart are the analogous material work of the Treasury Chapel. This is where I turn next in Chapter 2.

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2

All these things each person recounted in common as marvels or miracles of nature, showing each other ashes or stones as in stupendous novelty. (Braccini, Dell’Incendio Fattosi nel Vesuvio, 1632)1

The Treasury Chapel cost a treasure and contained a treasure. It is resoundingly metallic. Bronze, silver, and gold abound there to a degree unsurpassed in early modern Naples and even the entire peninsula (Plate 7 and Fig. 10). The absence of carved and inlaid marble in the Treasury Chapel is striking and makes it anomalous among the grandest Neapolitan chapels of its epoch. Polychromatic marble, richly worked, and sumptuous stuccowork clads Naples’ other important baroque chapels, such as the Cappella Fornaro in the Gesù Nuovo (1600–02) by Michelangelo Naccherino and assistants (Plate 18) or the Certosa di San Martino. While the Treasury Chapel boasts gleaming marble columns and revetment, it is its spectacular display of highly worked metals, exploited with relish and bravura, that sets the chapel apart (Plates 1 & 2). From the majestic bronze entrance (Plate 1) to the dark bronze figures that articulate the interior walls of the chapel (Fig. 3), from the fulvescent bust of San Gennaro (Plate 6) to the crowd of glittering silver reliquary busts pressing in from every side (Plate 4), from the bronze lateral chapel gates (Plates 5, 16, 17 & 23) to the splendori (Fig. 3) and the solid silver frontal of the main altar (Fig. 10), it is metals and metallurgy that are on display and that prevail. Even the altarpieces are painted, not on panel or canvas, but on copper (Plate 5). The very name ‘Treasury’ reverberates with the sound of metal. The word aerarium (treasury), claims Isidore of Seville, contains both ‘gold’ (aurum) and ‘bronze’ (aes, aeris). The emphasis on metals is appropriate. Traditionally, a treasury both stored and minted money. ‘Treasury’ (thesaurus), writes ‘Tutte queste cose da ciascuno communemente si raccontavano per maraviglie, o miracoli di natura, mostrandosi l’un l’altro e ceneri, e pietre per novità stupenda.’ Giulio Cesare Braccini, Dell’Incendio Fattosi nel Vesuvio a XVI di Dicembre M.DC.XXX (Naples: Secondino Roncagliolo, 1632), 37.

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Isidore, is named after the Greek term δέσις ‘positing’, that is ‘deposit’. The term δέσις (positing) combines the Greek element δές meaning ‘deposit’ with the Latin aurum (gold), so that the word thesaurus sounds like the combination of ‘gold deposit’: The treasury (aerarium) is so called because formerly minted bronze (aes, gen aeris) was hidden away there. It was in use in former times when gold and silver were not yet minted; although money was afterwards made from gold and silver, the name aerarium still remained, after the bronze from which money took its first name.2

If metals resurface in its name, the Treasury Chapel was more than a mere storehouse, however splendid, for metals or relics. Its work was that of transformation, to open up the possibility of miraculous alteration, shape-shifting change, and redemption. This chapter examines the material work of bronze in the chapel in that regard. It considers metals, particularly bronze, as more than mere matter or inert material, but as part of an assemblage, opening to renewed potential, thereby permitting the architecture of metals to be more than enactment of ideals, ideas, ‘function’, technique, or virtuosity. I propose that Cosimo Fanzago’s great bronze gates (Plates 23 & 25) are best understood as material metaphor for San Gennaro’s miraculously liquefying blood, and that this necessarily entails his blood’s protection against Vesuvius – also a portentous liquefaction. The extraordinary bronze gates of the chapel are interpreted in relation to the transformation of matter in heat and through the prodigy. I treat the bronze of the chapel gates – like San Gennaro’s blood itself – not as an essence already given, but as qualities to be discovered, excavated, and invented, as possibilities yet to come. Materials are presented as sites of potentiality, part of a process of exploration. This is to recognize that the protean activities of metals and the continuous variability of alloys permitted artists to discern a life in metal and thus to collaborate with it.3 But more than that, materiality is here investigated in terms of analogy – both material and metonymic. Solids that turn to fluids, sanguinary and salvific and incandescent and deadly, are seen in relation to shape-shifting bronze and the work of protection – saintly and architectural. Thus place, displacement, and the reforging of place are at the nexus of the analogous work of blood, metals, and volcano. Gennaro’s miraculous blood, with its peculiar quixotic capacity for transformation, is staged as material analogue for bronze and its capacities Isidore of Seville, The Etymologies, XV.v.3, trans. in The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, ed. and trans. Stephen Barney et al. (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 310.   3 C. S. Smith, A History of Metallography: The Development of Ideas on the Structure of Metals before 1890 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988), 3.   2

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(Figs 1 & 4). That blood is not simply an unstable substance (all substances are unstable), but one whose very instability is its most characteristic and soteriologically significant feature. Its presence thus holds open not so much change and transformation per se, as their very possibility. In turn, the liquefaction of Gennaro’s blood worked in materially analogous but soteriologically oppositional terms to the volcanic threat of Vesuvius. Just so, the bronze gates can be seen as material analogy for the liquefying blood. Thus blood, volcano, and bronze are bound together in and by the Treasury Chapel in analogical material relations of liquidity and obduracy, transformational capacity, threat to and promise of salvation. In this way, rather than to treat architecture as static representation of something already determined and fixed, the ideationality of architectural materiality can be demonstrated as a potential and an opening of possibility, something necessary to soteriological transformation. The Theatine father Francesco Grimaldi, principal architect of the chapel, was noted by Bernardo De Dominici in his great work on the lives of Neapolitan artists (Naples, 1742) as a remarkable metalsmith: Truly a great artificer of architecture, but he was also very expert in the art of metalsmithing, so much so that he was frequently employed and involved in giving advice and assistance to many sculptors and smiths/casters of metal and silver.4

De Dominici continues: A witness to this might be Antonio Monte, who under [Grimaldi’s] direction perfected the difficult art of casting statues, from which point he then made the beautiful works, that on his commendation are to be seen, such as, for the sake of example, some putti made of silver, that can be seen in the church of the SS Annunziata, that have bas reliefs cast to a marvel of perfect beauty, and other objects he made in other churches, for which one hears report of high praise; and he always would attribute a good part of that to Father Grimaldi to which he [the latter] would protest that he was indebted to the [material] with which he worked: a rare example of a grateful heart, since generally great advantages are repaid with ingratitude.5 De Dominici, Vite, 257. ‘Fu il P. Francesco Grimaldi veramente un grande Artefice in Architettura, ma fu eziandio peritissimi nell’arte del Getto, e tanto, che fu in molte occasioni adoperato, e serviva di consiglio, e d’ajuto a molti Scultori, e Gettatori di metallo, e di argento; Testimonio ne sia Antonio Monte, che sotto la sua direzione venne a perfezionarsi nella difficile arte del gettare le statue, laonde fece poi le bell’opere, che di lui con sua lode si veggono; come per ragion d’esempio sono alcuni Puttini d’Argento, che si veggono nella Chiesa della Santissima Nunziata, con bassi rilievi gettati a maraviglia con bella perfezione, ed altre opere che fece in altre Chiese, delle quali ne riportò molta lode; ed egli sempre ne

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Not by chance, then, Grimaldi’s chapel was made of metals and brilliantly exploited metallurgical virtuosity. Yet to ascribe this simply to the artist as if it were a matter of personal preference or technical virtuosity is to miss the point. Instead, this chapter explores the matter of bronze and its analogous implication in blood and volcano.

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‘Una opera di metalo’: the chapel gate The gate is of bronze, well worked, with two statues of the saints, designed by Cav. Cosmo, like the façade already mentioned, and they say that it cost 36,000 scudi. (Parrino, Nuova Guida de’ Forastieri, 1714)6

Just as metal is the analogy for the assaying of the saint, metals and metallurgy structure, define, occupy, and defend the Treasury Chapel in relations of material analogy. Metals endure. They can survive extremes of heat and manipulation. It was partly to secure their ‘everlasting’ capacities that the deputies sought them out and insisted on using copper, rather than panel or canvas, for the chapel’s altarpieces.7 Metals were seen to participate in the natural and the supernatural, to be immanent and transcendent: ‘Metals were made for a purpose and generated in earth to those ends and created by God’, claimed Georgius Agricola.8 These capacities are intensely engaged in the Treasury Chapel. Metals are particularly able to gesture elsewhere in a manner suitable for a reliquary chapel. Indeed, etymologically ‘metal’ (metallum) was thought to derive from the Greek μεταλλάυ, ‘to search’ or ‘seek after other things’.9 This is abundantly true of a chapel where dust changes to living blood, and where sinners turn to God. contribuiva gran parte al P. Grimaldi al quale protestava di essere obligato di ciò che egli operava: Esempio raro di animo grato, perciocché per lo più vediamo pagare i gran beneficj con grande ingratitudine.’ De Dominici, Vite, 257.   6 D. A. Parrino, Nuova Guida de’ Forastieri Per osservare, e godere le curiosità più vaghe, e più rare della real Fedelissima Gran NAPOLI Città Antica, e Nobilissima, In cui si dà distinto ragguaglio delle varie opinioni dell’origine di essa, le Strade, Fabbriche, Chiese, pitture, Statue, Dogi, e Regnanti, Vescovi, & Arcivescovi, che governarono, con tutto ciò, che di più bello, e di più buono dalla medesima Città si trova. Ricavati dagli Autori impressi, e manoscritti, che di essa trattano (Naples: Parrino, 1714), 306.   7 On 11 June 1632, having sought the opinion of Domenichino and other experts, the deputies decided that the six paintings in the lateral chapels should be on copper and not on wood. On 27 October 1636 they agreed that copper would permit oil painting to be ‘everlasting’ (‘le pitture che vengono ad oglio siano perpetue’). Strazzullo, La Real Cappella, 20.   8 G. Agricola, De la generatione de le cose, che sotto la terra sono, e de le cause de’ loro effetti e nature (Vinegia: M. Tramezzino, 1550), 65v.   9 Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, ed. and trans. Barney et al., 328–329.

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Metals bring together philosophers, alchemists, artists, craftsmen, and astrologers.10 Thus metals fuse and interfuse threads of thought, philosophies of the world, and hopes for change through the chapel. Metal is unthinkable without fire. It is in its infusion that bronze exceeds marble. And it is heat that produces infusion. Heat is latent, implied in, transfused through the chapel. Thus fire and Vesuvius are evoked, lurking just below the surface of things. We need to backtrack here, to turn back to the entrance to the chapel and to enter it again (Plates 1 & 2). If Ribera’s formidable altarpiece can best be understood as an opening of the relationship between matter and salvation and as an urgent exploration of the very matter of becoming, this time we must pause in the majestic bronze gateway, allowing ourselves to become aware of the demands it makes on us in this regard and the possibilities that it opens. Cosimo Fanzago’s gateway to the chapel (Plate 23) has to date been studied principally either in relation to its fraught patronage history between 1629 and 1669 or as a prodigal technical achievement in sculpture and bronze casting.11 It has not been discussed as an integral part of the chapel, or in relation to See Agricola, De la generatione de le cose, 65v. See especially Strazzullo, La Real Cappella, 19, 67, and Catello and Catello, La Cappella del Tesoro, 72; see also D. Colonnesi, ‘Il cancello della Deputazione della Real Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro’, in S. d’Aquino di Caramanico (ed.), L’archivio del miracolo (Naples: Luciano Editore, 2001), 71–80, and Bellucci, Memorie storiche, 55–57. For the gate’s long gestation, see Strazzullo, La Cappella di San Gennaro, 15–16. On 13 June 1623 the engineers Giovan Giacomo di Conforto, Orazio Campana, Alessandro Ciminiello, and Dionisio Necioni di Bartolomeo met the deputies to discuss ‘making the gate of the chapel’ (‘Lo fare la porta della cappella’). On 13 April 1628 Giovan Giacomo di Conforto’s design was accepted; and on 24 August the deputies agreed that ‘the model for the ironwork for the chapel gate should be made with all refined diligence’ (‘lo modello della ferriata della porta della Cappellasi facci con ogni esquisita diligenza’). But on 16 August 1629 a design by Cosimo Fanzago was considered and selected; in the meantime in June 1630 Giovan Giacomo di Conforto died, and the Deputazione definitively adopted Fanzago’s design. In September 1630 Orazio Scoppa and Biagio Monte promised to consign the bronze gate to Fanzago’s design within two years (this is cited in a documented dated 3 February 1638, ATSG, 59/9 1587, fol. 257r). There then followed years of delay and controversy, including suspension of all payments to Fanzago in 1639 (ATSG, 59/9 1587, fol. 258r) and criticism of the feasibility of Fanzago’s design. The gate itself seems to have been put in place by July 1664. In an indication that it was almost ready, on 4 April 1663 the deputies of the Treasury Chapel agreed that when the bronze door was finished the temporary wooden door should be removed and given to the newly built church of Santa Maria del Pianto; payments to Domenico Sparango for removing the door followed in July 1663 (ATSG, AB/11 - 1602, Conclusioni 1661–1673, fols 21r, 25r); and on 14 June 1663, when the deputies took stock of finishing the chapel, they referred to the silver Mass card and the little gates by Onofrio D’Alessio as still outstanding (ATSG, AB/11 - 1602, fol. 22v).The goldsmith Gennaro Monte completed the execution of the gate, including the heads of San Gennaro. But it was not until 1668 that the gate was finally finished. On 24 July 1668 Dionisio Lazzari was paid to set the ‘statue’ of San Gennaro up on the gate.

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the miracle. I turn now to do this, seeking to relate the transformative nature of Gennaro’s miraculous blood to the gateway itself. In doing so, I treat the blood of the miracle, considered in Chapter 1, and the bronze of the chapel gate not simply as the marker and limit of what they permit, nor as essences to be excavated, but as qualities to be invented.12 Thus with the opening of the gate and the entry into the chapel (Plate 2), the worshipper is asked to open herself to transformation. As Van Gennep observed, blood rites are rites of passage and of liminality, rites of advent, birth, and initiation.13 The great bronze gates enunciate the blood rites of the chapel, and install a magisterial threshold for them. They allow San Gennaro and his relics to define the edge and relation between Cathedral and chapel, between that which is kept out and that which is let in. The synecdochal saint

San Gennaro erupts from the bronze portal, pushing forwards at the springing line – the most dynamic point of the gateway – at once disrupting the architecture and inhabiting it (Plates 1 & 26). Almost volcanic, he even evokes the ‘two-headed Vesuvius’, firmly embedded in humanist writings and depicted in treatises about the eruption of 1631 (Figs 26 & 27).14 Fanzago’s doubled halflength virtuoso figures – one on each side of the entrance – evoke the figure of San Gennaro blessing the people, which was widely reported as appearing over the city and above the entrance door of Naples Cathedral in 1631 (Plates 15 & 20). Here the blessing saint refers to that momentous portent, affirming the connection and the promise. Thus in his gate Fanzago marries the blessing saint – via the miraculous delivery from Vesuvius – to chapel and to blood (Plates 15 & 23). The erupting figure of San Gennaro assumed dominance during the design process, developing from an earlier version, known from a preparatory Andrew Benjamin argues that a distinction should be drawn between, on the one hand, materials – understood as sites of potentiality and implicit geometries – and, on the other, the reduction of architecture’s material presence to the strictly empirical and thus to brute matter. The possibility of connection between materiality and both the conceptual and the ideational is then opened through the way in which matter works. Benjamin, ‘Plans to Matter’, 13–28.  13 A. Van Gennep, Les rites de passage (Paris: Nourry, 1909), 22–24, 129.  14 ‘Vesuvius was, as we might say, two-headed, rising into the sky with twin and very high cliffs’, claimed the Jesuit Father G. C. Recupito, De Vesuviuano incendio nuntius (Lovanii: Everardi de Witte, 1639), 76. Vesuvius was frequently referred to as ‘biceps’ by humanists, referring back to ancient writers, such as Cassiodorus and Cassius Dio Cassius (who are cited in Recupito’s margins). S. Cocco, Watching Vesuvius: A History of Science and Culture in Early Modern Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 97.  12

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drawing, in which two busts, probably San Gennaro and St Agnellus, adorned the upper part of the doors (Fig. 30). That drawing suggests that in the course of the design process, the dramatic figure of San Gennaro came to usurp the coat-of-arms of the Deputazione and to oust any reference to any other protector saint. Thus the design worked towards emphasizing San Gennaro as the crucial figure, through his iconographical attributes, but above all through the remarkable portrait relief, the double-headed Gennaro. Thus the gate developed in light of 1631. Gennaro leans both forwards and down, eyes raised, straining against and uncontainable within the frame (Plate 23 & Fig. 29) – a striking feature and not uncommon in baroque marble sculpture, including Gianlorenzo Bernini’s Gabriele Fonseca of c.1668–75, in S. Lorenzo in Lucina, Rome, and in Andrea Bolgi’s Vittoria de Caro and Giovan Camillo Cacace (1652–53) in San Lorenzo in Naples. But in bronze, in an openwork gate, and operating in two opposing directions simultaneously, forwards and backwards, such an extroverted and animated figure is most remarkable. It animates the gateway and produces the sense of an all-encompassing tutelary figure (Plate 26). A figure that, beyond containment, disrupts quotidian boundaries and limits. The imposing half-length figures of San Gennaro that occupy each side of the gate were set up in 1669 (Plate 1). One figure leans towards the Cathedral, straining slightly towards Santa Restituta, across the nave; behind him, within the chapel, the other pulls towards the altar, his bust, and his blood (Fig. 25, Plate 1). At once intimidating and imploring, St Januarius, like Januas, looks in two opposing directions (Fig. 29). He leans out, away from the grille, in an imprecatory gesture, out to the Cathedral, the city, and beyond, to the world of Vesuvius, plague, and earthquakes, while his alter ego looks inwards towards the chapel’s altar and the relics, to miraculous glimpses of heaven. Thus the figures of the saint in the door, like the relics themselves, like Januas at the beginning and end of the year, mediate between threat and place, earth and heaven, and look forwards and backwards simultaneously, being here and also there. The presence of these half-length figures pulls the gateway in two directions and lend an ambiguity to it from the outset. Most gateways simply divide or cut off (Fig. 12). This gateway separates, but draws together; divides, but scans (Plate 2). The evocation of San Gennaro plays on a theme set in motion by the Succorpo chapel (Plate 11 & Fig. 8), built to house San Gennaro’s body relics by Oliviero Carafa in 1497–1506, which is discussed below in Chapter 5.15 A quick comparison of Fanzago’s gate and the Carafan Succorpo chapel entrance (Plate 1 & Fig. 15) demonstrates Fanzago’s brilliance in throwing The Succorpo chapel is discussed in detail below in Chapter 5.

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open the chapel, detaching it from a restricted familial or clan address, to one ostensibly open to all, which permits Gennaro to assume an inclusive appeal.16 If the theme of the two-headed Janus appears for the first time on the entrance to the Succorpo (Fig. 15), on the Treasury Chapel entrance gate it assumes enunciatory grandiloquence. San Gennaro is presented here as ‘gateway to heaven’ (Plate 26 & Fig. 29). More than applied decoration, the two-headed Gennaro structures the entrance way to his miraculous chapel, the conceit no longer limited to a single clan through the Carafan impresa of the Carafa. Just as Janus, the ancient god of doors, whether city gateways or doors to humble residences, in Ovid’s Fasti presides over the gates of heaven, here Gennaro, St Januarius, is janitor to heaven.17 Thus the Ianua Coeli, the The inscription over the south entrance to the Succorpo chapel reads: ‘You, who desire the rewards of heavenly life, hasten and bring here pure prayers, since this door opens the way to heaven [haec Ianua Coeli]. Here God offers mercy to the vows and tears of those who pray to him. He who, through the martyrdom and prayers of San Gennaro and with his consent and powerful will, purges Naples of every crime committed. Hasten, since the royal door of the heavenly kingdom gives strength.’ Thus the Ianua Coeli, the door to heaven, plays on the idea of Januarius as gateway to heaven. The Succorpo chapel door – significantly, also of bronze – was, as Diana Norman notes, aptly marked by Carafa’s impresa of the stadera (referring to the Stadera branch of the Carafa), with its weight the two-headed Janus (Fig. 15). The stadera (balance) was adopted by the Stadera branch of the Carafa clan by Tommaso Carafa. Oliviero Carafa used the book and stadera, to which he added the Janus head as his impresa. A. Reynolds, The Private and Public Emblems of Cardinal Oliviero Carafa’, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 45 (1983), 273–284; A. Dreszen, ‘Oliviero Carafa committente “all’antica” nel Soccorpo del Duomo di Napoli’, Römische historische Mitteilungen, 46 (2004), 172; Norman, ‘The Succorpo’, 348.The stadera appears in the Succorpo both in the choir near the figure of Prudentia, and on the bronze entrance door, with his motto ‘hoc fac et vives’ (‘do this and thou shalt live’, Luke 10:28). The Janus head on the stadera alludes to St Januarius, and was associated with Prudentia, as his two faces could look backwards and forwards at once, indicating that vigilant prudence was one of Carafa’s qualities (see Norman, ‘The Succorpo’, 347–349). A Renaissance medal attributed to Girolamo Santacroce depicts in profile the head of Andrea Carafa, Count of Santa Severina, on one side; and on the other a female figure sitting cross-legged and holding a double-headed Janus. This is Prudence in tunic and mantle, seated left (that is, with her left side facing us), legs crossed, holding a double-headed (male and female) head on a handle in her right hand and a serpent in her left (see G. F. Hill, A Corpus of Italian Medals of the Renaissance before Cellini, 2 vols (London: British Museum, 1930), vol. I, 87 n. 349, vol. II, plate 57, n. 349; also B. Aldimari, Historia genealogica della Famiglia Carafa, divisa in tre libri, 3 vols (Naples: Antonio Bulifon, 1691), vol. III, 160). ‘Nil abest’ seems to be an allusion to a verse of Juvenal (x.365), ‘Nullum numen habes, si sit prudentia’, which is said to have been a favourite of Carafa’s.  17 Referring to Oliviero Carafa’s use of the Janus weight emblem on his Succorpo door, Norman observes that in his commentary on the opening passage of Ovid’s Fasti, where Janus presides over the gates of heaven, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola reserves the symbol of Janus for ‘celestial souls’, a text that Carafa could have known. Norman, ‘The Succorpo’, 351–352 n. 68.

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‘gate to heaven’, produces Januarius as its gateway. And the conceit is thrown wide to all who enter there (Plate 2). Mircea Eliade’s classic studies of the role of blood in metal casting informed his belief that ‘life can only be engendered from another life that has been immolated’.18 The half-length figure (though more than a head) also evokes the beheading of the martyred saint: ‘He died, beheaded, that he could come to the head of his victories’, writes Giacomo Lubrani in his panegyric, Il fuoco sacro della Divinità (Naples, 1694), emphasizing the paradox of the saint who is more powerful once beheaded.19 A similar play occurs here. The bronze half-length of the saint, powerful in his martyrdom by decapitation, evokes the flow of blood beyond the body, and through the miracle of that blood, the saint comes to possess the chapel, and even to occupy the Cathedral and the city of Naples, stretching towards the volcano itself. The half-figures of Gennaro on the gate bind the saint’s sacrifice to the prophylactic bronze in a formidable undertaking against the depradation of the volcano. Gennaro’s ritual gesture denotes the episcopal sign of the cross, with which as bishop healed, prevented, and protected (Plate 26). This gesture is not only thaumaturgical; it is also liturgical and an important source of the bishop’s power.20 With the sign of the cross and an impression of the hand, the bishop seals the soul to the Lord at the final moment of the ritual of baptism. The repetition of that gesture by laity was believed to renew the seal. The sign of the cross as a means of protecting or healing is to be distinguished from the common protective gesture and was reserved for God’s special representatives. Martyrs tend to use the sign passively against the encroachment of evil; but bishops use the sign actively, as a liturgical gesture that they wield by prerogative: as God’s instruments – the limbs, arms of the body of the Church – bishops transmit God’s power. Here, of course, it is both – the sign of the martyr saint and of the saintly bishop. Strikingly, therefore, here in his iconography as protector from Vesuvius’ outpourings, Gennaro is unequivocally shown not so much as martyr saint, but as bishop, and, what is more, as bishop in a cathedral which was not his see. Therefore, the iconography does double duty. It denotes the bishop-protector saint Gennaro; and it declares that the Treasury Chapel is not part of the Cathedral’s jurisdiction.21 It separates, M. Eliade, Forgerons et alchimistes (Paris: Flammarion, 1956), 31, 62–65. ‘Morì decollato, per venire a capo di sue vittorie.’ Lubrani, Il fuoco sacro, 10.  20 C. Hahn, Portrayed on the Heart: Narrative Effect in Pictorial Lives of Saints from the Tenth through the Thirteenth Century (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2001), 159.  21 ‘The face is the Icon proper to the signifying regime, the reterritorialization internal to the system.’ G. Deleuze and F. Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: The Athlone Press, 1988), 115.  18  19

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even as it connects (Fig. 29). And it connects by disrupting boundaries. Even as one leaves the chapel, San Gennaro looks out ahead, opens the way (Plate 4). The gateway thus shows the face of a protector who looks two ways. Fanzago’s gates do more than mark a distinction between the province of the Cathedral with its Archbishop and canons and that of the lay Deputazione responsible for administering the Treasury Chapel. And it does more than elevate the figure of the bishop-saint. The elongated pilaster forms that frame the gate hold on the left the decapitated head of San Gennaro and on the right the ampoules of his blood (Fig. 28). They evoke Gennaro’s martyrdom, the repeated miracles, and the presence of the saint. Thus the gate’s iconography directs worshippers towards the central feature of the chapel, the blood relics of San Gennaro, while binding blood and bronze and prophylactic miracle together. Just as the blood heated up and boiled, just as the volcano transformed rock to liquid, so the bronze of the gate was transformed through heat. In the gate the ampoules containing and restraining the blood are ­counterpoint to the flow of bronze (Fig. 34). Naples gave San Gennaro devotion, worship, and spectacular housing; in return San Gennaro and the other patron saints gave protection and intercession. But what did that exchange look like on the ground? How did San Gennaro produce the chapel? Fanzago himself spoke of the gate in terms of a huge work of metal and of the enormous quantity of bronze required: ‘I have the opportunity and good luck to make a big work of metal [opera di metalo] which will consume 80,000 lire of bronze’, he wrote on 30 October 1629 in a letter to his patron, the abbot of San Nicolò al Lido.22 Metal and work, superlative in size, cost, and number: the language of treasuryship. I shall return to heat and to bronze. But first let us examine the gate in its architecturaliconographical relation. Hugely ambitious in terms of size and complexity, gripped between two monolithic columns of Sicilian mischio verde, the gate sings of material transformation (Plate 1). To consider the bronze gateway as an opening and barrier to the chapel is to see that, far more than mere screen between one space and another, the gate extends the division itself (Plate 2 & Fig. 25). As the architectural orders are elongated, stretched to schematic marks of scansion between iconographical symbols and virtuoso technical mastery of bronze metal (Plate 23), the space within the gate itself is opened up in depth, just as the elongation of the architectural order stretches the grille vertically as if towards heaven, as if freed from the restraints of gravity and with it of the classical idiom itself. The Treasury gateway thus stages becoming in terms of ‘[H]o occasione o fortuna di fare una opera di metalo, dove ve andarà da ottanta mila lire di ottone.’ ASV, Convento San Niccolò del Lido, busta 4, processo 5, 30 October 1629, quoted by d’Agostino, Cosimo Fanzago, 414 (documentary appendix, n. 81).

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delay, extenuation, and extension. It emphasizes the incontrovertible distance between the Cathedral and the chapel, between the chapel’s interior and the gate’s interstices, and between the visitor outside and one who opens herself in stepping through the fabulous gateway to be open to the miracle of the chapel. The huge doors are themselves enclosed in the bronze framework that occupies and defines the gateway (Plate 23). This framework rises the full height of the arcade opening, such that it seals off the entire chapel from ready view. When the gate is closed, gate and gateway become one, and in spite of its perforated nature, it almost seals the chapel visually from the nave. From close to, face against metal, one can peer through its involutions into the chapel, but from further away the backlighting serves to produce a splintered silhouette that is a form of fractured closure, an unassailable barrier, partial glimpses, and fragmented apprehensions. The towering bronze framework consists of a curiously extenuated architectural aedicule that is also perforated and tripled. It is at once materially emphasized and undercut. Ionic pilasters, two on each side of the doors, with openwork decoration in the bays between them, support an openwork Doric frieze. The order is at once extraordinarily elongated and uncomfortably attenuated, as if it has been stretched in its liquid state to its extreme limits. In the frieze seven staunch bronze triglyphs stamp their way across the opening and support what might be seen as a series of segmental ‘pediments’, one within another and each reduced to skeletal metal or their rib-like carcasses (Plate 26). Surface and structure become perforated; what is conventionally solid is pierced and opened up. A decorative element, the triglyph, assumes a quasi-structural architectural role, as support for the pseudo-pediment, which is itself reduced to a decorative band. This inter-crossing, an interrogative exchange between structure and decoration, interrogates, excavates, and hollows out the role of classicism in their definition. Thus all that is solid melts into air. At the top of the gateway, three arches, like perforated triple segmental pediments or ribs, spring across the arcade opening (Plate 1). The two lower ones are straightforward and complete, but the apex of the third breaks through into the arabesques above, to house the head of a cherub. That displacement or rupturing of registers is echoed below in the half-length figure of San Gennaro in the frieze (Plate 23). His mitre bursts forward and rises over the lowest of the metal segmental ribs, emphasizing the uncontainability of the figure and presenting San Gennaro as one who sunders boundaries, traverses incompatible registers, and in so doing remakes them. The shifting, indeterminate effect achieved in terms of form has a counterpart in colour and texture. Here the possibilities of alloy are pushed to extremes. The colours of the bronze range wonderfully from silvery gold in the capitals to dark oily green of the bust (Plates 23 & 25). Thus the shifting

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colour splashes across the gateway, like the dappling of sunshine. Even within the bust of San Gennaro extraordinary colour variations work in a virtuoso combination with relief such that the saint’s face and left hand and the folds of his clothing are rendered saffron yellow, while simultaneously through their pronounced relief they catch the light. Fictive light – produced through chromatic manipulation – and real light glance off each other, their combinations endlessly chasing across the saint and gate, like the flickering of flame.23 A comparison of the Treasury Chapel gateway with the chapel of St Teresa in Santa Teresa agli Studi (1640–52), which is also of bronze and by Fanzago, nicely clarifies the idiosyncracies of the Treasury gate.24 The St Teresa chapel gate dances daintily across the space between nave and chapel. Head-height, it invites us to vault it, encourages an awareness of the interpenetration of air, sight, and body. Its limit in terms of height is marked by a playful decorative vertical fringe. It keeps people out, but allows them to explore the chapel visually all the same. No such ready access is permitted by Fanzago’s gateway when the door is closed. In this respect this gateway resembles more closely those of other treasury chapels, such as that of the Treasury Chapel in the Santissima Annunziata in Naples (Fig. 12, left). Like the Gennaro gate, the Annunziata gate rises the full height of the chapel’s entrance to permit no trespassers, no stealing of the precious relics inside. But whereas the Annunziata gate consists of two doors, each composed of eight flat panels decorated with wrought bronze geometrical pattern conceived in two dimensions, the Treasury Chapel gateway is at once more architectural and more figurative; and, above all, it exploits the effects of colour and depth, to create new dimensions of surprise and speed. Rich, formally complex, full of twists and turns, redundancies, repetitions, apparently inconsequential swerves that seduce the senses and lead the eye racing through curls and queues to curlicues and arabesque dead-ends, it resists ready decipherment. While the gates of the Certosa di San Martino (Fig. 12, right) and the Annunziata Treasury Chapel (Fig. 12, left) in Naples are conceived in two dimensions, a pattern stretched across an opening, like a perforated skin over a drum, San Gennaro’s gateway (Plate 23) has a thickness to it that produces sculptural elements within its depth. Open or closed, the gate’s heavy massiveness is borne in upon the visitor. In its massy solidity and thickness, it acts The skilful deployment of a range of materials combined with controlled lighting to produce the effect of light (or, rather, light as representational) was undertaken by Gianlorenzo Bernini in particular. In the setting of the Cathedra Petri and the conches of the reliquary niches at St Peter’s, and in the conches of the Raimondi and Pio Chapel apses, Bernini exploited gilded rays in relief. At the Cornaro Chapel (Fig. 36) solid gilded metal rays are deployed in conjunction with a directed source of light, a device closer to that used by Fanzago in Naples.  24 For Fanzago’s work at Santa Teresa, see d’Agostino, Cosimo Fanzago, 276–278.  23

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like a brake, slowing the transition, emphasizing the materiality of boundary, producing itself not as a division but as a connection – a connection that violates boundaries even as it draws attention to them, allowing the figure of San Gennaro to mark the edge and relation between Cathedral and chapel, between that which is kept out and that which is let in. Bronze was particularly suitable for doorways, emphasized Isidore of Seville, because of its strength.25 The gate is not as heavy as it looks. Mighty and momentous, it swings deftly on its hinges, a masterpiece of bronze technology. Indeed the Deputies wanted it to have a specific kind of ‘fineness and lightness’ (sottigliezza e legerezza) to avoid heavy stolidity.26 Although the half-length figure of San Gennaro readily snatches the eye and steals attention, the non-figurative decoration of the gateway is also important. Here in the doors and in the framework which holds them, the bays between the architectural order contain abstract forms. From the ground up, panels of strapwork resemble letters of an unknown alphabet, indecipherable signs, that hint at something more (Fig. 13). Next to them curiously reinforced balusters, each resembling the bloody ampoules, effect a measured rhythm (Fig. 34). Above these, in the doors, a mire of entwined golden fronds, a pleasure of surface and interlocking tendrils, as slippery as snakes around Medusa, seethe around cherub heads (Plate 23). Here action is dislocated and betrayed, signs borrowed, translated, rendered recognizable but indecipherable. Rich, formally complex, full of twists and turns, redundancies, repetitions, apparently inconsequential swerves that seduce the senses and lead the eye racing through curls and queues to curlicues and arabesque dead-ends, the baroque bronze resists ready decipherment. When open, the gate is not just the place to change your pace, but itself an elongation, for you to catch your breath, your spiritus, as you enter the compression chamber (Plate 2). The fascination of the twists and turns wrought in bronze is for feeling anew (Plate 25), for the pause before entering, not so much to create a liminal space of ambiguity on the threshold, but the change of pace, the slowing of step, and the quickening of heartbeat as you enter the  darkened chapel, aglimmer with saints’ reliquary busts. This chamber ‘Of all the metals, bronze is the most resounding and has the greatest strength. For this reason thresholds are bronze.’ Isidore refers to Vergil’s Aeneas (bk I, 449): ‘The hinge on the bronze doors screeched’. Isidore of Seville Etymologies, ed. and trans. Barney et al., 330.  26 Thus in October 1664 they complained about the work undertaken on the bronze gate by maestro Bartolomeo Rampinelli in the presence of Andrea de Ponte: ‘That much of the work has been made of greater weight, and not of that subtlety and lightness agreed in the contract’ (‘che molti lavori sono stati fatti di maggior peso, e non di quella sottiliezza, e legerezza convenuta nel’istromento’). ATSG, AB/11 - 1602, Conclusioni, 1661–1673, fol. 46v.

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(Plate 4) is a place where things become something else, and in entering which you too are changed. Below I argue that the gate embodies the relationship between Gennaro, his blood, and the nearby volcano Vesuvius that constantly threatened Naples. I now turn to consider the nature of the relationship between San Gennaro and Vesuvius before returning to see how it is played out in the chapel. The matter of Vesuvius The structure of the world and the nature of the bodies it contains should not be investigated by means of reason, as the Ancients did, but they should be perceived by sense and extracted from the things themselves. (Telesio, De rerum natura, 1570)27 ‘How often we saw the fires of Aetna boil over from its burst furnace … hurling gouts of flame and molten rocks’28 and elsewhere he says, ‘and with a rumbling Noise in wreathy Heaps convolves in Air molten Rocks, and boils up from the fathomless abyss.’29 (Paragallo (citing Virgil), Istoria Naturale del Monte Vesuvio, 1705)30

The saint looks out towards the volcano and inwards towards his own blood; and he holds them apart in apotropaic relation (Plate 26 & Fig. 29). Gennaro’s blood worked in close bond with the perilous and subterranean movements of Vesuvius in three principal ways. Gennaro was closely associated with ‘Mundi constructionem corporumque in eo conentorum naturam non ratione, quod Antiquioribus factum est, inquirendam, sed sensu percipiendam et ab ipsis habendam esse rebus.’ B. Telesio, De rerum natura.  28 ‘Vidimus undantem ruptis fornacibus Aetnam / Flammarumque globos, liquefactaque volvere saxa’. Virgil, Georgics, I, 471–473, trans. in The Works of Virgil, trans J. Rose (London: Joseph Davidson, 1763). Virgil was drawing here on Lucretius, De rerum natura 1.722–725, which alluded to the tradition that Aetna was the prison of Typhoeus and the forge of the Cyclops. While Lucretius sought to demonstrate that the volcano was not a manifestation of divine displeasure but a natural occurrence with mechanistic explanation, Virgil presents Aetna as symbol of cosmic disorder in a list of portents following the murder of Julius Caesar and presaging the Battle of Philippi. Thus he remythologizes Lucretius and blurs and problematizes the clear and certain contours of the Epicurean universe. For this see M. R. Gale, Virgil on the Nature of Things (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 122–123.  29 ‘liquefactaque saxa sub auras / Cum gemitu glomerat, fundoque exestuat imo,’ Virgil, The Aeneid, bk III, cap. 23, 577–578). The translation (slightly amended) is from The Works of Virgil, trans Rose, 343. Virgil here speaks of Aetna as a product and sign of the war of the Giants and the Gods, in which Encephalus was struck by Jove and buried under Mount Aetna, whose convulsions were the effect of his shifting and turning.  30 G. Paragallo, Istoria Naturale del Monte Vesuvio: Divisata in Due Libri (Naples: Giacomo Raillard, 1705), 339.  27

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volcanic action, first through his martyrdom at the Solfatara, and second through his special protection from Vesuvius, especially after its potentially devastating eruption of 1631. Third, the blood was bound to the volcano in analogical material terms whereby the manner of the blood’s liquefaction may be read as material analogy for the eruption itself. Thus the two are intimately intertwined. Even before his martyrdom Gennaro was closely associated with fire. His miraculous escape from Timotheo Dragontino’s murderous furnace seared that link. Ribera’s 1646 altarpiece in the Treasury Chapel articulates it indelibly (Plate 13). When the saint emerged alive from the flames, Timotheo ordered that the furnace be opened, whereupon a huge tongue of flame burst forth and devoured many pagans and infidels who stood near by, while San Gennaro, clothes, hair, and all, was quite untouched by the flames.31 But it was Gennaro’s execution at the Solfatara which forged his association with earthly fire and, indeed, with volcanic activity. He died at the place known as Vulcan’s Forum because of its ‘abundance of igneus and sulphuric materials’, near Pozzuoli, about fifteen kilometres from Naples (Figs 19 & 72).32 Thus, in Giacomo Lubrani’s words, he died ‘among the seething springs of sulphur, so as later to extinguish the chimeras of Vesuvius’ incendiaries’.33 The time of year – September – and the place of Gennaro’s beheading linked him closely to Vulcan, blacksmith god of lava, smoke, and fire, including volcanoes. In turn, Vulcan was closely associated with Hephaestus, the Greek god of smithing, and thus with metalworking. The Carmelite Girolamo di Maria di Sant’Anna interprets Gennaro’s death through its place as a tyrannical sacrifice to a false god: This place was dedicated to Vulcan by the superstitious gentiles, a deity who, they foolishly thought had survived fire, and to whom was consecrated for that reason of the months of the year September, [as it was in that] month … that the Vulcanic feasts were celebrated. And so, since our Saint died in September, and in the place mentioned above, it seems that it can very rightly be said that he was consecrated by the godless Tyrant as an innocent victim to their false numen Vulcan.34

Gennaro’s close association with Vesuvius was renewed by Paolo Regio (1541– 1607), Neapolitan lawyer, theologian, and author of many saints’ lives, including the first early modern account of San Gennaro in 1573 (1579 edition, Fig. 32) Maria di Sant’Anna, Istoria della Vita (1707), 31, 49. This was first recorded at length by Caracciolo, Napoli Sacra in 1623; Maria di Sant’Anna, Istoria della Vita (1707), 51.  33 ‘Morì nel Foro di Volcano fra bulicimi di Zolfo, per estinguere poi le Chimere d’incendiarii Vesuvii.’ Lubrani, Il fuoco sacro, 10.  34 Di Sant’Anna, Istoria della Vita (1707), 51.  31  32

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and Cesare Baronio (1538–1607), Oratorian priest, cardinal, and ecclesiastical historian. Baronio describes the terrible eruption of Vesuvius  of 471 in his Annales Ecclesiastici of 1596, but without reference to San Gennaro.35 The office of San Gennaro in the Roman Breviary links the two:

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[The miracle] is first to be remembered when it extinguished balls of flame erupting from Mount Vesuvius, carrying with them the threat of laying waste not only to regions nearby, but even to those far away.36

And Baronio links the miraculous deliverance from that eruption to San Gennaro in Martyrologium Romanum (19 September): We have in our library a very old homily given in front of the people during the solemnity for the same St Januarius. It starts: thanks to the divine mercy, the longed-for solemnity came back amid the general vows, and the day etc. There is recounted the huge eruption of flames from Mount Vesuvius, which seemed to threaten not only the adjacent city and the surrounding regions, but almost the whole of Europe. [The conflagration], however, was rebuffed by the virtue of St Januarius.37

He adds, ‘this was the year 471’ (‘est hic Domini 471’).38 Giulio Cesare Braccini suggests that the 471 eruption actually occurred over a three-year period between 471 and 473, and that it was during the procession on the fifth Sunday of Lent to the church of San Gennaro extra Moenia that the key

‘Sub huius quoque anni Consulibus prodigiosa haec habet Marcellinus in Chronico: Vesuvius mons Campaniae torridus intestinis ignibus aestuans, exusta euomit viscera, nocturnisque in diem tenebris omnem Europae faciem minuto contexit puluere.’ Baronio, Annales Ecclesiastici, vol. VI, 291.  36 ‘Sed illud (idest miraculum) in primis memorandum, quod erumpentes olim è monte Vesuvio flammarum globos, nec vicinis modò, sed longinquis etiam regionibus vastatis metum afferentes, extinxit.’ Baronio, Martyrologium Romanum, 291, 19 September. The Roman Breviary refers also to the relationship thus: ‘Sed illud (idest miraculum) in primis memorandum, quod erumpentes olim è monte Vesuvio flammarum globos, nec vicinis modò, sed longinquis etiam regionibus vastatis metum afferentes, extinxit.’ Baronio, Martyrologium Romanum, 19 September; Roman Breviary, Office of 19 September.  37 Baronio, Martyrologium Romanum, 19 September.  38 ‘Habemus in nostra Bibliotheca homiliam peruetustam in eiusdem Sancti Ianuarij solemnitate ad populum habitam incipit: Operante divina misericordia, redijt comunibus votis optata solemnitas, & dies &c. Recensetur ibi immensa illa flammarum eruptio è Vesuvio monte, ex qua quidem non tantum proximè adiacentis Civitatis, ac circum circa positarum regionum, sed totius ferè Europae conflagratio imminere videbatur, quae tamen Sancti Ianuarij est virtute compressa.’ Girolamo Maria di Sant’Anna’s and other early modern Neapolitan lives of Gennaro refer to Baronio’s Annales Ecclesiastici for the year 471.  35

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intervention actually occurred.39 Paolo Regio credits Gennaro with defeating Vesuvius in 685: During the pontificate of Benedict II, Mount Vesuvius alight with raging fires, released through its shafts sulphureous emissions; and as punishment for the sins of the local inhabitants, it intensified with each passing day, and destroyed the dwellings and towns nearby, there being found no effective response. And with terrifying earthquakes and rain of ash Naples was not only defeated, but overcome with fear, its citizens awaited the ruin of their homeland in a final fire. As a result, each and every [inhabitant] was overcome with lamentations, wept, and heaving sighs, raised their eyes to heaven – those heavens that were barely discernible, veiled as they were by the smoggy darkness, emanating from the intensely dense smoke. Everyone dedicated themselves entirely to begging God for mercy for their sins, to wailing, to prayers, and to penitential acts. And as a result, miraculously, they were liberated from that most evident danger; many towns and lands nearby had already been devoured by the terrible fire (Psal. 106). And in them took effect as it is written: And God regarded their affliction when he heard their cry and from their tribulations they were released: through the intercession of blessed Ianuarius. In such terrible danger they remembered the promise offered by the martyr, whose protection they had adopted; they prayed likewise [to him], that the propitious salvation granted him should be theirs. And in short their prayers were granted, and the furious vortex all of a sudden died down; and the earthquakes and raining ash miraculously ceased.40 Braccini, Dell’Incendio, 12–14. According to Caracciolo, Gennaro intervened in 472, 512, and 685. In his Memorie (1710) Camillo Tutini claims that San Gennaro’s head and blood were already in Naples when they extinguished Vesuvius in 685 (Tutini, Memorie [1710], 104–105).  40 ‘Imperoche nel tempo di Benedetto II Pontefice Max. il monte Vesevo brugiando d’ardentissima fiamma, che da sulfureimeati per le vertici usciva; & per li peccati de’ paesani di giorno, in giorno aumentava, & l’habitationi, & le vicine Ville consumava, non ritrovandovisi rimedio alcuno. Et con horribili terremoti, & cenerose pioggie Napoli non sol conquassava; ma pieni di spavento così i Cittadini havea, che l’ultimo incendio, & ruina della lor Patria aspettavano; onde ciascuno era pieno di gemiti, ciascuno piangeva, & ciascuno sospirando gli occhi al cielo alzava; quello velato dalla tenebrosa caligine, che dal densissimo fumo usciva, scorgendo. Tal che dimandando misericordia de loro peccati ad IDIO, ai geiunij [sic], all’orationi, & alle penitenze tutti si diedero. Perloche miracolosamente da quello evidentissimo pericolo furo liberati; essendo state già molte Città, & Terre ivi prossime dal crudel incendio dinorate. Psal.106 Et in loro hebbe effetto quel che è scritto: Esclamaro al Signore mentre erano tribolati, & dalle loro necessità fur liberati; intercedente il beato Gianuario. Consciosa che in sì gran pericolo ricordatisi della libera promessa del Martire, che la loro protettione havea presa; quello con lagrime parimente pregorno, che à loro scampo propitio stato fosse. Et in breve furo essauditi, che l’ardentissima voragine in un tratto s’estinse; & i terremoti, & le pioggie di cenere miracolosamente cessarò.’ Regio, Le vite de’ Sette Santi Protettori, 10(B)v [sic].  39

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The eschatological nature of Vesuvius’ relation with Naples and Gennaro’s emergence from the murky volcanic ash and smoke are emphatically interlinked (Plate 15).

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Volcanic blood: the matter of minerals

Smelting and purification, metalwork and sacrifice course through the connections binding Gennaro to the volcanic. Gilbert Burnet’s description of Vesuvius during his Italian journey of 1685 evokes the earth liquefying or vaporizing into air and implicates the melting of metals: It is plain, there are vast Veins of Sulphur all along in this Soil, and it seems in this Mountain they run along through some Mines and Rocks; and as their slow consumption produceth a perpetual smoke, so when the Air within is so much rarified that it must open itself, it throws up those masses of Mettle and Rock that shut it in; but how this Fire draws in Air to nourish its Flame, is not so easily apprehended, unless there is either a conveyance of Air under ground, or a more insensible transmission of Air, through the pores of the Earth.41

The relationship between Gennaro’s miraculous blood and Vesuvius was particularly intimate. Although the volcano was feared, it was also admired and cherished; its soils were unusually fertile, its wines and citrus fruits especially prized. Gianbernardino Giuliani gives us the image of Vesuvius as weeping, referring both to the Greco wine that it abundantly produces and to the mountain’s regret for its past fires.42 The volcano itself was long credited with supernatural powers. There was an ancient belief that Jove inhabited Vesuvius, and from this stemmed the belief that the volcano’s thunderbolts were ‘sacred’, as testified by Pliny and reported by Gaspare Paragallo in his Istoria Naturale del Monte Vesuvio (Naples, 1705).43 The ancient notion that the earth was animated and that its exhalations of fire demonstrated its breathing, recounted by Ovid, the Pythagoreans, Platonists, and Stoics, was reiterated in early modern accounts.44 Lucretius argued that seawater, constantly in motion, nourished the subterranean fires. And Kircher was cited as claiming that holes in volcanoes were ‘open spirals’ through which those

G. Burnet, Some Letters, containing an Account of what seemed most Remarkable in Travelling through Switzerland, Italy, some parts of Germany, &c in the years 1685 and 1686; 2nd edition corrected and altered by the author. To which is added an appendix containing some Remarks on Switzerland and Italy writ by a person of Quality, & communicated to the Author (Rotterdam: Abraham Acher, 1687), 213.  42 G. Giuliani, Trattato del Monte Vesuvio e de’ suoi Incendi (Naples: Egidio Longo, 1632), 31.  43 Paragallo, Istoria Naturale del Monte Vesuvio, 20, 24.  44 Paragallo, Istoria Naturale del Monte Vesuvio, 204–208.  41

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underground fires could emerge.45 Describing the causes of Vesuvius’ fires, in his book dedicated to the 1631 eruption of Vesuvius (Dell’Incendio fattosi nel Vesuvio a XVI di Dicembre MDCXXXI, Naples: Secondino Roncagliolo 1632), Giulio Cesare Braccini argued that bitumen and sulphur, capable of burning underground, are their material cause.46 As for the efficient cause, some claim that it is the heat of the sun; others that heat increases; others that there is a movement as with clouds.47 Quoting Plato, Aristotle, and Lucretius, Braccini argues that the entrails of the earth have great heat and that this provokes volcanic eruptions. But, he adds, it is not possible to know the hand of God in these affairs.48 Indeed, volcanic eruptions were frequently interpreted as direct intervention by God, a punishment for sins, even as a glimpse of the fires of hell.49 Those currents of awe, fear, and wonder inhabit baroque considerations of Gennaro’s miracle and of Vesuvius (Plates 15 & 20). Wonder at and attempts to explain the volcanic run parallel to and inflect interpretations of blood in general and of Gennaro’s blood in particular. What caused vulcanicity, the composition of lava, the role of minerals, metals, and water in eruptions were live questions in seventeenth-century Europe, especially Naples. And Vesuvius’ terrible eruption of 1631 reinvigorated them. Natural philosophy, alchemy, astrology, metallurgy, pyrotechnics, and mineralogy were all brought to bear in the search for the secrets of the volcanic. Telluric philosophy suggested that fragmentation and circulation of particles was responsible. Significantly for my interpretation of the Treasury Chapel, that ‘particle’ theory of materials and material change was thought to be at work in the volcanic system and in blood. Circulation of particles and their transformation from solid to gas to liquid embraced both blood and earth. Particles of various substances were believed to intermingle in the air and eventually to fragment and to infiltrate gaps and perforations vacated by other particles of the same size. This occurs, claimed Paragallo, in our bodies, where the continuous movement of a host of tiny particles of blood (‘una copia grande di particelle di sangue’) and other mobile substances ‘atomize them such that like air they escape through pores and tiny holes in the flesh’, while similar particles enter food, air and the blood and replace them.50 Likewise, the circulation of particles occurred in the earth, where its Paragallo, Istoria Naturale del Monte Vesuvio, 207. Braccini, Dell’Incendio, 65.  47 Braccini, Dell’Incendio, 72.  48 Braccini, Dell’Incendio, 79, 89.  49 Cocco, Watching Vesuvius, 85.  50 ‘Il che col medesimo irrevocabile tenore vediamo manifestamente ne’ nostri corpi avvenire; perche disciogliendosi continuamente una copia grande di particelle del sangue, e dall’altre discorrenti, e salde sostanze, le quali per causa del loro continuo movimento, assottigliate in sembianza di aura per i ciechi pori, e forellini della carne n’escono  45  46

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accelerated processes produced the volcanic. Under the earth minerals and other substances are in continuous motion, dissolving and fissurating, until they rise through holes in the earth to mix with each other in the air.51 The Stoics’ ancient claims were reiterated: ‘We are not the same that once we were, if through the continuous mutation of the particles constituting our body, they are also changed.’52 That parallel processes were seen to be at work in the subterranean caverns of Vesuvius as in the very blood of human beings – and therefore of San Gennaro’s relic – allows us better to grasp the ways in which San Gennaro’s Vesuvian associations worked. The liquefaction of Gennaro’s blood readily assumed a transformational telluric resonance that also embraced the transformational capacities of the human body. Volcanoes contained the secrets of material change. They were alchemical transformers of metals, including precious metals. Juan de Quiñones’ El Monte Vesuvio Aora la Montaña de Soma, printed in Madrid in 1632, claimed that many Spaniards believed that lava was metallic and even contained gold.53 Likewise, Paragallo cites the doctor Bernardo O’Connor’s claim that Neapolitans thought Vesuvius’ lava contained ‘seeds of gold and of silver [ariento]’.54 Speculating on the composition of lumps of dried lava (ghiaja) in his Istoria Naturale del Monte Vesuvio (1705), Paragallo notes that there were some who believed it to be composed of metals (corpi di metalli), and claimed to have found in it ‘copper, lead, quicksilver, and other similarly

fuori: a metter compenso allo smaltimento di quelle forz’è, che vi si introduchino altre simili particelle e dal cibo, e dall’aria, e nel sangue, e nell’altre accennate sostanze’. Thus our bodies are subject to continuous mutation, he notes, citing St Jerome. Paragallo, Istoria Naturale del Monte Vesuvio, 371–372.  51 Paragallo cites Robert Boyle to this effect. It is significant that for Paragallo the holes in the earth’s surface are themselves produced through heat, such that in summer the escape of arsenic-laden sulphuric, nitric, and acidic gases is far greater than in winter. Paragallo, Istoria Naturale del Monte Vesuvio, 371–372, 381, 382–383; 387.  52 ‘noi non siamo ora gli stessi, che un tempo fummo, se a cagione della continua mutazione delle componenti particelle de’ nostri corpi, venissero anche essi a mutarsi.’ Paragallo, Istoria Naturale del Monte Vesuvio, 371.  53 J. De Quiñones de Bevante, El Monte Vesuvio Aora la Montaña de Soma. Dedicado a Don Felipe Quarto el Grande nuestro Señor por El Doctor Don Ivan de Quinones, Alcalde de su Casa y Corte (Madrid: Iuan Goncalez, 1632), 40v.  54 Paragallo, Istoria Naturale del Monte Vesuvio, 333–334. Bernard O’Connor, Irish medical doctor and naturalist (1666?–1698) published a remarkable series of treatises often demonstrating that the supposedly supernatural could be naturally explained. Among them were two publications focused on Naples: Zoothanasion thaymaston: seu mirabilis viventium interitus in Charonea Neapolitana crypta. Dissertatio physica (Venice: Jo. Jacobus Hertz, 1994) and De Montis Vesuvii Incendio (Oxford, 1695). See G. Stone, ‘Connor [formerly O’Connor], Bernard (c.1666–1698), physician and writer on Poland’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, www.oxforddnb.com/view/ article/6086?docPos=1 (accessed 1 January 2014).

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made matter [ed altresì fatte cose]’.55 Paragallo, however refutes this view on the grounds that sulphur, copper, iron, and other metals cannot occur in the same place, because ‘the acidic salts of the sulphur’ penetrate iron, erode copper and weaken it, giving birth to vitriol [vitriolo]’.56 Vanucci and Agricola both attest, he continues, that sulphur has never been found in metal quarries, and indeed not even near them. Indeed, had quicksilver occurred in these mines, in conjunction with the sulphur, it would have formed vermilion (il cinabrio), thereby suggestively evoking an impossible apparition of Gennaro’s vermilion blood.57 Why Vesuvius exploded, roared, trembled, flamed, and smoked was hotly debated in baroque Naples and beyond. The question of ignition was key. Minerals such as bitumen, closely associated with volcanoes since Agricola, were believed to be produced in the decay of organic matter. Paragallo attributed the flames of Vesuvius to sulphur, bitumen, and saltpetre, and ‘marchesites’, and stated that other minerals generated the eruptions’ other effects.58 Indeed, the ‘boiling of minerals’ was a possible cause of the roaring sound that Vesuvius issued.59 Particles of sulphur, saltpetre (nitro), and other minerals in ceaseless motion between earth and air fuelled the volcano.60 ‘The rich matter in sulphur’, suggest Paragallo, ‘is composed of branching particles, tightly packed in a composite mixture, so that it contains, more than [any] other substance formed like this, the seeds of fire in the greatest abundance. [Those fire seeds] are so tightly packed among those particles [that they are] tightly confined and unable to move.’61 Vesuvius epitomized the capacity of nature to transform matter. Observers thought water, fire, smoke, minerals, and metals were variously – some thought miraculously – interchanged by it. Paragallo reported a claim by Sigonius that ‘the red hot rivers that emerged from Vesuvius were formed of sand that had liquefied’.62 Other authorities claimed that sulphur, bitumen and similar materials could form glass.63 If sand, quicklime, earth, and stones were exposed to great heat in the volcano and their exits blocked, they Paragallo, Istoria Naturale del Monte Vesuvio, 332–333. Paragallo, Istoria Naturale del Monte Vesuvio, 333.  57 Paragallo, Istoria Naturale del Monte Vesuvio, 333.  58 Paragallo, Istoria Naturale del Monte Vesuvio, 279.  59 Paragallo, Istoria Naturale del Monte Vesuvio, 282.  60 Paragallo, Istoria Naturale del Monte Vesuvio, 386.  61 ‘Siccome ci fà credere, che la pingue sostanze del solfo sia di particelle ramose, ed infra loro strettamente intralciata composta, perche racchiude più che altra si fatta sostanza, in grandissima copia i semi del fuoco, i quali, frà quelle particelle stanno si strettamente racchiusi, ed impriogionato, che non permettono, che si muovono.’ Paragallo, Istoria Naturale del Monte Vesuvio, 41.  62 Paragallo, Istoria Naturale del Monte Vesuvio, 334.  63 Paragallo, Istoria Naturale del Monte Vesuvio, 335.  55  56

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could eventually emerge in the form of liquefied glass or molten metal (‘a guisa di vetro liquefatto, o fonduto metallo’).64 Thus Vesuvius’ transformational capacities metamorphosed minerals into liquids and metals, changed one substance into another in parallel with the transformations worked by Gennaro’s relics. Metals were a crucial component. Metals – copper, iron, lead, quicksilver, and gold – constituted Vesuvius’ metallurgical wizardry. They lay in ‘veins’ in the earth, akin to the veins that transported blood in a body. Alchemy’s subterranean currents suggested that metals were generated by ‘seeds’ and blood.65 Thus the volcano can even be seen as ‘seeding’ the metals used in Gennaro’s chapel. The ingredients of bronze and, indeed, all the Treasury Chapel’s metals were thought to be produced by it. Metals and Vesuvius were closely bonded. And blood and metals were incorporated into theorization of the capacity for material alteration in discussions of Vesuvius. Change of pace and place: the 1631 eruption

Gennaro was long associated with fire, with sulphureous telluric activity, and with mercurial, ungovernable Vesuvius. Its violent eruption in 1631 definitively consolidated that identification. In that year Vesuvius exploded with terrible force, and it was San Gennaro’s intervention alone that saved the city. This event is celebrated in Domenichino’s fresco above the entrance to the chapel (Plates 4 & 20). Thus 1631 reconfirmed Gennaro’s protection from Vesuvius and usefully diverted interpretation of the volcano’s wrath from criticism of Spanish rule. The 1631 eruption prompted a spate of tracts and pamphlets in Spanish and Italian and reforged the relationship between Gennaro and Vesuvius (Figs 26 & 27).66 In that year, following terrifying earthquakes and a massive Paragallo, Istoria Naturale del Monte Vesuvio, 337. Agricola, De la generatione de le cose, 67.  66 Many of these publications follow Baronio in tracing Gennaro’s sparing the city from Vesuvius’ fires back to the year 471 at least. They include: de Quiñones, El Monte Vesuvio Aora la Montaña de Soma; A. Gerardi, Relatione dell’horribil Caso & Incendio occorso per l’esalatione del Monte di SOMMA, detto VESVVIO vicino la Città di Napoli. Sommariamente descritta, & estratta da diverse Lettere di Religiosi, e particoloari venuti da Napoli (Rome: Lodovico Grignani, 1631); V. Bove, Novissima relatione dell’incendio successo nel Monte di Somma à 16 Dicembre 1631 (Naples: Egidio Longo, 1632); Braccini, Dell’Incendio; C. De Martino, Osservationi giornali del Successo nel Vesuvio Dalli XVI di Dicembre M DC XXXI fino alli X di Aprile M DC XXXII D’Ordine dell’Illustrissimo Sig. Marchese di Bel Monte Regente Carlo di Tapia di Cesare De Martino Filosofo, & uno delli Medici della Sanità di questa fedelissima Città di Napoli (Naples: Ottavio Beltrano, 1632); and I. Sorrentino, Istoria del Monte Vesuvio, Divisata in due Libri da D. Ignazio Sorrentino Sacerdote secolare della Torre del Greco, dedicate all’Ill.mo Signor  64  65

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eruption, the air of Naples was thick with ash and smoke, and ‘everyone was terrified; it seemed to all that death was before their eyes and that heaven’s trumpet intimated to them the day of universal judgement’.67 As the eruption mounted in the distance, apprehension and fear turned into despair in Naples. ‘The more simple folk ran screaming along the streets’, records Braccini, who courageously perched at a window, alternating between watching the expanding cloud, studying the frenzy of dismayed Neapolitans, and calming his own fears by studying Pliny’s letters to Tacitus, in which he found recorded ‘that which, after all, we are seeing today’.68 The eruption of December 1631 continued for several days, preceded by awful earthquakes, the whole earth shuddering and groaning. On 16 December, with a hideous explosion, magma burst through rock above it, shooting ash and smoke into the sky, engulfing the land between it and the sea, and killing at least six thousand people.69 That ash soon reached as far as Constantinople. And this, claims Giuliani, faithful Hispanophile, prompted ‘Muslims to redouble their abominable prayers to their false prophet Mohamed to spare them from such evils’, thereby inscribing volcanic eruption into the very economy of heresy and infidelity against which Gennaro was pitted.70 Vesuvius’ violence threatened to merge history and nature and render them indistinguishable. It was Gennaro’s intervention that prevented this and made legible the hand of God. Engravings by Nicolas Perrey of Vesuvius before and after the eruption of 1631 in Gianbernardino Giuliani’s Trattato del Monte Vesuvio e de’ suoi Incendi (Naples: Egidio Longo, 1632) and G.  M.  Mecatti’s Racconto Storico-filosofico del Vesuvio dramatically convey the transformation of the mountain, much depleted in terms of volume, and the huge surge of lava cascading down its slopes and into the sea (from which it is indistinguishable) (Figs 26 & 27). In an interesting allusion to Gennaro, D. Celestino Galiano Arcivescovo di Tessalonica, e Cappellano Maggiore del Regno di Napoli (Naples: Giuseppe Severini, 1734). Fra G. M. di Sant’Anna dates it to the moment when San Gennaro became Naples’ special protector, and cites in evidence the old Office once used by the nuns of San Vittorino in Benevento (‘Beati Januarii velo contra ignem posito, ignis extinctus est, ut ostenderet, sicut promiserat, suae Patria liberationem’). Maria di Sant’Anna, Istoria della Vita (1707), 118. Cocco points out that 1632 was ‘an extraordinarily good year for Neapolitan printers’, including Egidio Longo, Lazzaro Scoriggo, Giovanni Domenico Roncagliolo, and Secondino Roncagliolo. See Cocco, Watching Vesuvius, 55. Much of this eagerness to interpret the eruption was part of the Spanish colonialist project.  67 Braccini, Dell’Incendio, 34.  68 Braccini, Dell’Incendio, 33–50.  69 Braccini estimates that six thousand people were engulfed in the liquefied mass of eruptive clasts, ash, mud, and rock from the volcano; others that ten thousand people perished. Braccini, Dell’Incendio, 44.  70 Giuliani, Trattato del Monte Vesuvio, 95–96.

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they depict it as ‘decapitated’ and rendered ‘two-headed’ by the eruption. Thick clouds punctuated by thunderbolts tower over the volcano, swamping the skies, just as the lava smothers the earth, leaving exposed only occasional islands of habitation unsubmerged. In the midst of the billowing smoke, already merging with heavenly clouds, appears San Gennaro to put a stop to it all and thus also to make sense of it. Wearing a bishop’s mitre, right hand to his chest, he raises his left hand in blessing and protection from a billowing chasuble (Plate 15 & Fig. 27). The saint is figured here, and in Domenico Bottoni’s Pyrologia topographica, much as he appears in Fanzago’s door (Plate 26). Neither a full-length figure nor quite a bust or half-length, but more than a representation of the bust relic itself, he is something between the two, a prosthetic hybrid, at once both reliquary bust and miracle-working saint (Plate 12). Here Gennaro’s apparition disrupts disruption, stills metallic fury and wrath of God. Giuliani’s description, which depends on Pliny the Younger’s account of the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE, is particularly attentive to colour and form. Noting that 16 December is consecrated to Mars, Giuliani writes that on that very day the mountain broke open at a point towards the sea, known locally as Ciammella, that lay well below the ancient crater crowning Vesuvius’ summit: From its summit … smoke quickly assumed the form of a tree, the whole resembling a tall and lofty pine; but whose foot, or sturdy trunk, was twisted in the manner that we see today in the columns of the main altar of the royal church of Santa Chiara: and which brought to whoever saw it at first an extreme delight, it not being possible on such a lovely start to a serene day, as that day was, either to imagine anything more beautiful, or to wonder at anything more joyful. But it did not long remain [in that form], but changing shape, it became a cloud of immense size: which no longer white as before, but rather black, and gathering height in an astonishing fashion, and easily surpassing, with a boundless fury, its first aerial extent, [began to] assume the form of monstrous chimaeras, varying in its frightening appearance, at one moment an appalling cavity, at another an immense tower, at still another a vertiginous mountain, jolting horribly, and crags, now [resembling] a huge elephant, now the most audacious dragon, now a formidable giant, one minute assuming one aspect, the next another.71

That Friday many processions ‘continuously departed from various religious institutions’.72 Notable among them was that of almost 200 Jesuits, which visited ‘the most devout temples of Naples’.73 Meanwhile, the Reverend Frati Giuliani, Trattato del Monte Vesuvio, 63–64. Giuliani, Trattato del Monte Vesuvio, 124–125.  73 Giuliani, Trattato del Monte Vesuvio, 126.  71  72

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Minori bore the sacred image of the Virgin beneath a beautiful white palio, and paid homage to San Gennaro’s relics in the Cathedral, the church of Santa Maria di Costantinopoli, Sant’Agnello, and other ‘very devout temples’; and a procession involving the Viceroy included two miles of torches carried two by two.74 At this juncture San Gennaro was not the only protector to be wheeled out. The venerable body of San Giacomo della Marca, recently added to the array of Naples’ protector saints, was borne ‘by the principal titulars of the kingdom’ in his crystalline casket beneath a rich canopy (‘sotto ricchissimo palio’) from his usual resting place in the church as far as the Ponte della Maddalena, facing the volcano. By the eighth day of the eruption, a Tuesday, the Cardinal let it be known that he wanted a Theatine procession. Duly just such a cortège, including Giuliani himself, departed from Santa Maria degli Angeli a Pizzofalcone that evening at nine o’clock, carrying ‘three figures in relief’, a Madonna with Child in her arms, St Peter, and Pope Gregory, that were special to the venerable mother Orsola Benincasa – in a desperate attempt to rally combined forces of living and dead saints.75 This procession also included the Eletti of the city bearing the statues, captains, and Consultori of the Piazza del Popolo, the Viceroy with his Counsellors of State and Justice, other royal ministers, and officials ‘in great majesty’ and returned to the Cathedral.76 Sean Cocco has observed that the actions of Archbishop Francesco Boncompagni and the Spanish Viceroy, Manuel de Acevedo y Zuñiga, Count of Monterrey, whether actually undertaken, merely imputed, or neglected, assumed a key role in interpretations, circulating in the shadow of the eruption, as to what had saved Naples from disaster. While some saw both Church and Viceroy as dilatory and cowardly, pro-Spanish factions insistently claimed the episode as a triumph for the Viceroy. Desperate people flocked to Naples from the surrounding area, seeking the safety of the city walls and alarming the Spanish Viceroy, who feared public disorder. Boncompagni ordered a general procession, but withdrew to his residence, from illness, cowardice, or exhaustion, and did not participate.77 Thereupon the Viceroy, ‘as a most religious prince’, ordered that all the councils and tribunals, together with the Eletti of the city, should gather at the Cathedral ready to start the procession, with Gennaro’s head and blood relics, at eight o’clock in the evening.78 Thus spiritual and political leadership at that crucial juncture, according to Giuliani, Trattato del Monte Vesuvio, 126–127. Giuliani, Trattato del Monte Vesuvio, 140.  76 Giuliani, Trattato del Monte Vesuvio, 141.  77 The Archbishop’s equivocal behaviour evidently drew fire, since many of the accounts take pains to praise his courage in returning to Naples at the start of the eruption and his efforts to organize spiritual defence around the relics of San Gennaro.  78 Giuliani, Trattato del Monte Vesuvio, 66.  74  75

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the pro-Spanish Giuliani and others, switched from Church to aristocracy and viceroy.79 In the morning, despite the distance between the relics, to everyone’s alarm, the blood was found in a liquid state, a clear presage of impending disaster.80 After three hours, the procession reached the church of the Carmine, where ‘the Viceroy repeatedly beat his breast, while he bowed his head to the miraculous image’, surrounded by a huge crowd of people.81 Faced with apocalyptic extinction, the Archbishop gave permission for the multitude of confessors in the squares and churches to absolve people’s sins, even the most serious: Infinite they were, of every sex, rank, and age, equally fearful of staying at home or remaining in church, gathered in various ill-defined groups; and if in such confusion they were unable to cling to a crucifix or other sacred image, they would fashion for themselves roughly a cross with whatever pieces of wood they could lay hands on, and bearing it, I do not know whether out of devotion or fear, in as many makeshift processions, through the city they went throughout the night, their voices, through tears and sighs, very dismal and distressed, singing various litanies and prayers.82

The following day, Wednesday, displeased that he had been unable to participate in the first general procession, or perhaps seeking to save face and regain civic authority, the archbishop ordered another procession for that evening at eight o’clock. Certainly the situation was dire. The volcano had entered a second, even more violent, phase of eruption. An order went out that no-one should frequent prostitutes, for fear of further enraging God.83 Furious rain and winds delayed the departure of the procession until ten o’clock, when it travelled to the church of the Annunziata. There ‘the sacred blood of the glorious martyr Gennaro was placed on the right of his holy venerable head, under a very ornate pallium’; the Archbishop in his Cardinal’s garb led the procession followed by a huge crowd of people ‘who in acute need, that such a great and manifest danger to placate the wrath of God required the help of the saintly Protector’ (Fig. 31). The miraculous vision of San Gennaro before they left the Cathedral seemed to promise that assistance.84 Where prayer, penitence, procession, and flagellations all failed, Gennaro’s relics worked. Cardinal Archbishop Boncompagni led a procession with the head and blood, and, interrupting his planned route when almost at the To counter anti-Spanish claims, Giuliani and pro-Spanish writers insist that ‘the Viceroy never fled from the royal palace’. Giuliani, Trattato del Monte Vesuvio, 81.  80 Giuliani, Trattato del Monte Vesuvio, 66–67.  81 Giuliani, Trattato del Monte Vesuvio, 67.  82 Giuliani, Trattato del Monte Vesuvio, 78–79.  83 Giuliani, Trattato del Monte Vesuvio, 85–87.  84 Giuliani, Trattato del Monte Vesuvio, 93.  79

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Porta Capuana, exposed the relics ‘to the impious, and wild vortex’ (Plate 20 & Fig. 31).85 Raising the blood in the air toward the spitting mountain, he made with it the sign of the cross, whereupon straightaway the deadly dark clouds advancing towards Naples began to withdraw.86 Holding up the phial, he made an oration so eloquent ‘as would have drawn tears from the hardest stone’, and three times made the sign of the cross and blessed it. ‘And behold, at the first sign of his blessing, the grimmest and hugest of the volcanic clouds towering at such a height that it threatened to crush Naples completely, miraculously turned away from the city’:87 And behold, by the force of God’s power through his saints, all of a sudden, a cloud, more astonishing in size and more dreadful in its darkness than any human intellect could ever have grasped, at exactly midnight, raised itself higher than ever above the point of the chasm; at an incredible height, it threatened [as if it] wanted to destroy and raise Naples to the ground in a really savage deed, at the first sign of blessing that the most Eminent Shepherd made to the mountain, immediately and not without [further] astonishment [to others], it at once drew away from the city over which it was looming dreadfully, and departed in a brown and oppressive smog in a long mountain wonderfully assuming form from the furthest edge of the Isle of Capri as far as the most extreme point visible to the human eye out to see towards the ancient Enaria.88

Unlike the pro-Spanish accounts, Michele Luigi Muzio’s depiction in Camillo Tutini’s Memorie istoriche della vita, miracoli, e culto di San Gianuario (Naples: Michele Muzio, 1710) puts San Gennaro’s bust centre stage and renders the figure with upraised arm indistinguishable from the others present (Fig. 31). Giuliani, Trattato del Monte Vesuvio, 85–96. Maria di Sant’Anna, Istoria della Vita (1707), 129; Braccini, Dell’Incendio, 43; A. Bulifon, Raguaglio Istorico dell’incendio del monte Vesuvio succceduto nel mese d’Aprile M.DC. LXXXXIV con una breve … incendj antecedenti (Naples: Antonio Bulifon, 1696), 35.  87 Giuliani, Trattato del Monte Vesuvio, 94.  88 Et ecco, ò forza della Divina potenza ne’ Santi suoi, che ad un tratto una Nuvola la più maravigliosa in grandezza, e la più horribile nella oscurità, che giamai possa in humano intelletto capere, la quale à quell’hora à punto, che la vigesima quarta era del giorno, alzatasi via più che mai dal luogo della voragine; ad una incredibile altezza, minicciava di volere in atto assai fiero abbattere, & atterrar Napoli, al primiero segno di beenedittione, che l’Eminientissimo Pastore al monte fece, tosto dalla nostra Città, à cui spaventevolmente soprastava, non senza altrui stupore dilungatasi, se ne andò ella di bruna, e gravosa nebbia una lunga Montagna mirabilmente à formare dall’ultimo confine dell’Isola di Capri infin dove à vedere gli estremi termini del nostro mare verso l’antica Enaria può l’occhio humano arrivare.’ Giuliani, Trattato del Monte Vesuvio, 94.  85  86

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At once the people began to shout in triumph, dedicating themselves to the saint and glorifying in him. As the volcanic cloud lifted, San Gennaro, in full episcopal regalia, appeared over the town (Plates 14 & 15). With one hand he dispersed the clouds of fire and ash, and with the other made an act of benediction.89 Thus San Gennaro vanquished Vesuvius to save Naples. Giovanni Battista Manso (1560–1645), Marquis of Villa and founder of the Pio Monte della Misericordia and the scholarly Accademia degli Oziosi, then in his seventies, had a privileged view of the ostension of the relic outside the Porta Capuana: I was the closest to the Cardinal, since he had asked me to find a place where this could best be done, which I did on a high platform, [at the distance of] perhaps an arquebus’ shot from the gate, where once the Cardinal had arrived, he had the holy blood brought out from the baldacchino and lifted up to the sight of the fire and cloud, but nothing happened. Then the Cardinal took the glorious blood from its tabernacle within which it had been carried, and holding it in his hands, raised it towards the fire, making the sign of the most holy cross. Then that immeasurable, very tall, and limitless cloud lowered itself, almost bowing its head to the holy relic, and all of a sudden receded.90

Thus even nature bowed to the relic; and the unbounded was reined in. Recognizing this as a sign of God’s clemency, the crowd near the Porta Capuana ‘with infinite humility of heart’ gave thanks to God.91 Thereupon, full of thanksgiving and humility, the people flocked to the Annunziata and thence to the Cathedral, renewing vows and praying to Gennaro. At the Cathedral the saint, in bishop’s garb, ‘his hand raised in blessing, appeared in the window above the main door’. At the time, many people assumed that what they saw was an image in the glass; but, despite the dark and rain, a strangely brilliant ray of sunlight penetrated through the glass into the Cathedral, whereupon, the people recognized the vision as miraculous.92 The accounts vary somewhat: in some he appeared ‘over the city’ and in others at the Cathedral. But they all agree that his appearance marked the deliverance of the city. Vincenzo Bove in L’incendii del monte Vesuvio (Naples: Egidio Longo, 1632) describes the saint as appearing over the city, while Braccini restricts that scene to the Cathedral. Braccini, Dell’Incendio, 44.  90 ‘Lettera del Signor Giov. Battista Manso’, 503, quoted by Cocco, Watching Vesuvius, 68 (translation amended). For Manso, see Cocco, Watching Vesuvius, 52–53.  91 ‘con infinita humiltà di cuore, le dovute grazie; e con isperanza grande d’haverne ad essere al tutto dà pericoli di quello Incendio tratti, dirittamente all’Annuntiata se ne andarono, e poscia all’Arcivescovado tornando, rinovarono quivi al glorioso Martire i voti, e le preghiere’. Giuliani, Trattato del Monte Vesuvio, 96. Giuliani claims that his report will be canonically verified.  92 Giuliani, Trattato del Monte Vesuvio, 96. This topos recurs in most if not all the descriptions of the 1631 eruption, including Maria di Sant‘Anna, Istoria della Vita, 129. See,  89

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At such a signal moment Gennaro, never Archbishop of Naples, made the Cathedral his ‘home’. His intercession was driven by ostension of his relics, particularly the blood. Braccini regarded the repentance shown by Neapolitans, the liquefaction, and the saint’s intercession as necessarily connected: We understand through the liquefaction that for God and to placate himself, and because he [San Gennaro] seeks not the ruin, but rather the preservation of his beloved people, not wishing for the death of the sinner, but that he should live and be converted to him, exhausting himself in promising our emendation, and in instilling in us the spirit of contrition and devotion, now for love, now for joy, without any other incentive, it liquefies.93

Thus Gennaro soothed Vesuvius and saved the city (Plate 14). A great procession to pay tribute to San Gennaro was held on 20 May 1632 and included all the city’s religious, clergy, Cardinal Archbishop, and Viceroy with Genaro’s head and blood. Thus the city presented itself as unified under the auspices of the saint. That procession wended its way from the Cathedral to San Gennaro fuori le Mura (Fig. 19). Sumptuous standards were left at the church of Santa Maria di Constantinopoli at and at the Cathedral in honour of San Gennaro ‘as testimony to the grace that by means of their intercession had been received from God’.94 Thereafter ‘the procession of Vesuvius’ (Plate 38) took place annually on 16 December to commemorate his glorious intervention in 1631. After 1631 San Gennaro was always first port of call when Vesuvius threatened. In the early summer of 1698, an eruption completely blocked the sun and covered the surrounds of Naples with ashes. Archbishop Cantelmo, with the consent of the Deputazione, on 6 June ordered a procession from the Cathedral to the church of Santa Caterina a Formiello. As the procession advanced, the participants marvelled to observe that the dense clouds of ash withdrew. At Santa Caterina, the archbishop placed the Head on a temporary altar ‘in view of the Mountain’ (Fig. 31). After three days the city was liberated. The Treasurer expresses Gennaro’s work in terms of conversion and transformation: ‘Lord God converting through the saint justice into mercy’.95 for instance, ASDN, ‘I Diari dei Ceremonieri della Cattedrale di Napoli’, vol. II, fols 39v–40v.  93 ‘Ma nel secondo conoscendo per la sudetta, che per Iddio e per placarsi, e che non vuole la ruina, ma la conservatione del suo diletto popolo: qui non vult morten peccatoris, sed ut vivat, et convertatur ad eum; affaticandosi in prometerre per noi emendazione, e in impetrarci spirito di contrizione, e divozione or per amore, ed or per allegrezza senz’altro incentivo si liquefaccia’, Braccini, Dell’Incendio, 33.  94 Giuliani, Trattato del Monte Vesuvio, 177–179.  95 ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc. 83 bis n. 1), fols 141v–142r.

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Thus 1631 reforged Gennaro’s relation with Vesuvius and with the city. Naples was already volcanic through and through. It was built from the volcanic: from tufo giallo (known as Neapolitan tufo), from piperno, lapillo, and pozzolana, all Flegrean or Vesuvian in origin (Fig. 54).96 Only lime was brought from outside.97 And its stone was praised for its metallic qualities. ‘The Neapolitan manner of building’ (‘modo del fabricar napoletano’) depended on the capacities of pozzolana stone that was extraordinarily light, but made buildings ‘as strong as iron’.98 Volcanic stone that was like metal kept Naples standing. Naples’ metallic qualities were indebted to the volcanic and saved it therefrom – a paradox that surfaces most starkly in its Treasury Chapel. 1631 was skilfully used to consolidate Gennaro’s identification, not with a specific clan or faction in Naples, but with the city as a whole. It was Vesuvius’ threat that facilitated this transformation. Thus just as Gennaro’s blood was transformed by his intercession and just as it in turn miraculously transformed the eruption – itself an awesome material transformation – so Vesuvius transformed Gennaro into an unassailable primary protector – primus inter pares – for the city of Naples. And, mediated by chapel, Deputazione, and Viceroy, his relation with the city was as fertile as the waves of lava on Vesuvius’ slopes. Blood and volcano

Gennaro’s blood and Vesuvius were thus intimately interfused. Giacomo Lubrani describes their close relationship in his 1694 panegyrics: While other wines deteriorate over time and their spirits dull, that coralline [blood] staunches the malign influences of the air; with a sprinkling of purple tinges the elements with modesty, the figure of Iris serene in heaven: [they are] witnesses those small clouds pregnant with thunderous ash, that, flung from Vesuvius against our city, at the first glimpse of the blood were dispersed.99

Bound together generically and elementally, Gennaro’s blood and Vesuvius itself enjoyed a clear pact. Blood was believed to contain, like the volcano, the M. Russo, ‘Magisteri murari “a cantieri” nell’età del viceregno spagnolo’, in G. Fiengo and L. Guerriero (eds), Murature tradizionali napoletane: cronologia dei paramenti tra il XVI ed il XIX secolo (Naples: Arte Tipografica, 1999), 91, 113.  97 In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, lime was brought from the Sorrentine peninsula. See Russo, ‘Magisteri murari’, 113.  98 G. C. Capaccio, Il forasteriero (Naples: Roncagliolo, 1634), 850–851; B. Capasso, Napoli descritta ne’ principi del secolo XVII da Giulio Cesare Capaccio’, Archivio storico per le province napoletane, 7 (1882), 85–86.  99 ‘testimonii quei nuvolini pregni di ceneri fulminose, che scagliati dal Vesuvio contro la nostra Città, al primo aspetto, al primo scorso del sangue si dileguarono’. Lubrani, Il fuoco sacro, 11.

 96

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cosmic elements of earth, water, air, and fire.100 ‘Blood and volcano could be either solid or fluid, or both simultaneously. And they were locked in close relation: while one liquefied the other would put on its hardest face. In 1579 Paolo Regio describes the liquefaction in terms of heat: ‘and just as snow in sunshine turns liquid, or like wax in fire becomes foam, perhaps with such a supernatural sign, making a pact with Neapolitans of his protection’.101 ‘Mount Vesuvius spewing forth a lot of fire and smoke, along with a liquid bitumen, and has been enflamed for many days’, runs the record in May 1698 in the ‘Register of Miracles 1659–1733’, conserved in the Treasury Chapel archives, paralleling careful observation of the physical state of the volcano with that of the saintly blood.102 Just as fire roared out of the earth in a volcanic eruption, it was fire that burned through the chapel’s blood. Its liquefaction ensured the non-liquefaction of the earth; its tumescence meant that the volcano was less likely to blow its top. Yet uncertainty plagued any easy interpretation of the state of either blood or volcano. The descriptions of Vesuvius in the Register of the miracle and those of the liquefying blood share uncertainty, anxiety, a search for a clear interpretation of opaque signs and their relation. The variations in the miracle sometimes accorded with specific historical events and were eagerly interpreted in their relation. But the blood had its own wilful agency and could be neither readily manipulated nor predicted. Both were miracles of sorts. Giulio Cesare Capaccio calls Vesuvius ‘insidious’ in his Mergellina (Venice, 1598); Giuliano suggests this epithet perhaps referred to its smoke ‘which hides within itself damage to others’.103 That deceitful quality Capaccio saw in ‘the rock of Vesuvius, which like a forked tongue, [while] nourishing fire beneath barren cinders, in what is almost a natural miracle, maintains frozen snow on its top’.104 Like the volcano, the blood did not simply switch from being congealed and dry as dust to seething liquid form. In the uncertain border between abstract and concrete, between allegorical and literal, it wavered and was declared both liquid and solid; part one state, part the other. ‘A little ball’ might remain, like a hardened heart, remorseless and unyielding, amid a heart-warming liquefaction. On some occasions the blood semi-liquefied. On 16 December 1661, in advance of the usual procession for San Gennaro, the Treasurer found the ‘Fire and water cohabit beneath the earth … Water penetrates more bodies than air, [which] is not the contrary of fire, but coexists with it.’ D. Bottoni Leontini, Pyrologia topographica, id est, de igne dissertatio juxta loca cum eorum descriptionibus (Naples: D. A. Parrino and M. A. Muzio, 1692), 124, 181. 101 Regio, Le Vite de’ Sette Santi Protettori, 10(B)r. 102 ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc. 83 bis n. 1), fol. 141r. 103 Giuliani, Trattato del Monte Vesuvio, 30. 104 Quoted by Giuliani, Trattato del Monte Vesuvio, 30. 100

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blood hard, but when placed before the head, ‘half of it liquefied and the other half remained unyielding’ (observed by many cavalieri and religious); but after he had gone to the main altar of the Cathedral for Mass, the other half liquefied, too; and it was kissed in the Treasury for the entire day.105 Occasionally half of the blood remained intractable throughout the whole process, without liquefying at all. This was the case in December 1671 during the Vesuvius procession: in the middle of the blood, all day long, a little of the said blood could be seen [which] remained hard; and in this state it was put away.106

Sometimes the blood was strangely sclerotic inside, but soft outside.107 At other times, the blood was indurate on its removal from the safe, but then it quickly liquefied before clotting again. On 14 May 1702 it was found hard, quickly liquefied, repetrified, and then liquefied once more after quarter of an hour of being presented to be kissed.108 Thus even liquefactions were accompanied by an undertow of anxiety, lest the blood should stiffen and blessings be torn unexpectedly away. Observing the blood and interpreting its signs was like reading its state of mind: sometimes impenetrable, often ambiguous, frequently reassuring, occasionally alarming. Divine moods were the semantics of life’s liquid force. Like the volcano, Gennaro’s blood transformed in viscosity and also in colour and volume. It could pass from dark and cloudy to light and clear, like the sky during and after eruptions.109 It could even assume the colour and consistency of ashes and smoke. On the last day of the octave of May in 1710 the blood emerged obdurate and, ‘to the huge terror and fear of the city’, it remained so. Worse still, like a terrible warning of an eruption, it was ‘black and like ashes’.110 After the blood turned ominously black, processions marched through Naples ‘carrying skulls of the dead, bones, and even pieces of putrefied corpses, recently buried’.111 On 7 May during that same octave, the ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc. 83 bis n. 1), fol. 11v. ‘Si ritrovò duro, ed a visto della testa si liquefè, ma in mezzo del sangue s’osservò per tutto il giorno un poco di d.o Sangue duro, ed in questo modo si ripose.’ ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc. 83 bis n. 1), fols 46v–47r. 107 The Register records on 6 May 1673 that the usual May procession occurred; and that ‘on that day the glorious blood was found soft on the outside, but hard inside’ (‘Ed in d..o giorno il glorioso Sangue si ritrovò tenero da fuora, e di dentro duro’). ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc. 83 bis n.1), fols 49v–50r. 108 ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc..83 bis n1), fol. 157r. 109 This was the case, for instance, on 10 May 1714, ‘quando s’oscurava, e quando si schiariva’. ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc. 83 bis n. 1), fol. 201r. 110 ‘negro e cinericio’. ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc .83 bis n. 1), fol. 191v. 111 ‘Racconto di varie notizie accadute nella città di Napoli dall’anno 1700 al 1732’, Archivio storico per le province napoletane, 31 (1906) 428–508, 693–736; 32 (1906), 132–181, 378–426, 587–635, 798–840. 105 106

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blood performed even more like an erupting volcano, complete with swelling foam and rising volume: ‘the blood was hard, and after half an hour it liquefied, beginning to grow in such a way that sometimes it was visible, at other time invisible, because it reached to the top of the ampoule, producing a foam that rose up right to the very top of that carafe’.112 In September 1714, ‘half the ampoule was black blood, and the other half foam, the colour of tobacco, reaching to its rim; in the evening it rested in such a way as to be invisible, as the blood stuck [to the sides of the glass]’.113 Tobacco, associated with burning and smoking, and black the colour of lava, spelled out the threat of Vesuvius, a warning as opaque as the volcano was treacherous and unpredictable. As the blood liquefied so it swelled; volume and mass altered. It did not simply regenerate in its miraculous transformations, but like the heated entrails of the earth, it expanded, filling the ampoule to the brim, a tumescence akin to the volcano’s, like a boiling cauldron. Tumidity and liquefaction were in unpredictable relation, forces of anxiety. Thus on 3 May 1683 after the blood had remained adamantine, unyielding for an hour and a half, it partially liquefied, while there remained in the middle of the blood ‘a small hard ball’ (‘un poco di globo duro’). As the blood liquefied it swelled almost to fill the ampoule, and ‘it was observed that the carafe was as full as when the blood has [fully] liquefied’.114 The blood, running free from the binds of natural science, could assume various volumes and different forms, like the Godhead itself. In its hardening, tumescent swelling, eruption, and liquefaction, evoking erection, ejaculation, the comfort of the seed, the miracle is masculinized. The analogous gateway

The bronze of the chapel gate is materially analogous to the blood of the miracle (Plate 1 & Fig. 1). In turn, the blood enjoyed an analogical material kinship to Vesuvius (Fig. 31). That analogical relationship bronze–blood–Vesuvius should be understood as part of the material reforging of the relationship between San Gennaro and Naples through Vesuvius. It was part of the chapel’s revitalization of San Gennaro and reshaping of ‘Naples’. Shape-shifting bronze is a good analogical material for the blood of San Gennaro: from something solid to something liquid and back again (Fig. 34). More than that, bronze, like the blood and the volcano, represented the work ‘Sangue duro, e dopo mezz’ora si liquefè incominciando a crescere detto sangue in modo che alle volte si rendeva visibile, altre volte invisibile, perche giungeva alla cima di detta carafina, facendo una spiuma che si sollevava sino alla sommità di detta ­carrafina.’ ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc. 83 bis n.1), fol. 190r. 113 ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc.83 bis n.1), fol. 202r. 114 ‘ed in d.o giorno s’è osservato la carafina essere piena conforme fosse liquefatto, ed anco s’osservò essere duro’. ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc. 83 bis n. 1), fols 84v–85r. 112

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that is done with heat. The transformation of dust to fluid and of viscous bronze to protective gate wrought with iconographical embellishment, almost talismanic, worked to hold at bay the transformation of rock to molten lava. As such, it worked in opposition to the destructive work wrought by heat from the volcano. One thinks of Vincenzo Danti’s ‘Capitolo against Alchemy’: ‘more wood and more coals did I burn in vain than that most ancient Sicilian smith fired in Etna’.115 The gate advertised the privileged access enjoyed by San Gennaro and his Deputation to rare, beautiful, and valuable materials, formidable skills, and holiness. This was loudly amplified by the chapel. The Treasury boasted virtuoso architecture, lavish paintings and sculptures, and the invaluable holiness of the relics. But more than that, the gate worked not just to advertise, but – like the blood – to protect. Bronze protected. As Michael Cole has brilliantly argued, Vanoccio Biringuccio’s 1540 De la pirotechnia, the most important early modern Italian treatise on the subject, demonstrates that bronze sculpture was ‘a subfield of pyrotechnics’ and as such was closely bound up with the science of arms, guns, and cannon, with the work of defence and the protection of peoples.116 Imperial equestrian monuments of bronze, from the statue of Marcus Aurelius on, forged a close association between military might and bronze.117 In the Treasury gate and in the full-length sculptures of protector saints that guard the chapel, bronze, associated with military might, assumes a renewed defensive power. Thus the bronze gate calls on divine intervention to defend the chapel and guard its spiritual and material wealth. Since Antiquity bronze was regarded as apotropaic, an effective means of warding off evil influence. The city of Naples claimed that a bronze archer, aiming his arrows at Vesuvius, protected the city against eruptions from the volcano.118 As much for this protective quality as for its physical strength, from Antiquity onwards bronze was much favoured for the making of D. Summers, The Sculpture of Vincenzo Danti: A Study in the Influence of Michelangelo and the Ideals of the Maniera (New York: Garland, 1979), 505–512. 116 The chapter entitled ‘On the techniques and methods used to form figures, especially in bronze’ follows directly a chapter ‘On the differences between cannon, and one their measurements’ and directly precedes a chapter ‘On the techniques and methods used to form cannon’. See M. W. Cole, Cellini and the Principles of Sculpture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 40. 117 Pietro Tacca’s equestrian monument of Francesco I (1608) in the piazza of the Santissima Annunziata in Florence bears the inscription across the horse’s girth ‘Dei metalli rapiti al fero Trace’ (‘made of metals taken from the fierce Thracians’), asserting the relationship between the use of bronze, defeat of Turkish armies, and the destruction of enemy arms. F. Baldinucci, Notizie dei professori del disegno da Cimabue in qua, ed. F. Ranalli (Florence: Batelli, 1846), vol. II, 577; see Cole, Cellini, 42. 118 N. Gramaccini, ‘Zur Ikonologie der Bronze im Mittelalter’, Stadel-Jahrbuch, new ser., 11 (1987), 158–160. 115

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doors.119 The chapel’s bronze gate worked to hold Vesuvius at bay. The gate is studded with the icons of Gennaro’s head and the ampoules of his blood (Plate 23 & Fig. 28), the two ingredients necessary to the liquefaction, and which here guard the chapel.

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Shape-shifting bronze

The shifting states and peculiar qualities of metal are brilliantly transmuted into textured colour in the bronze of the gate. From murky green, dank as a pond, through glistening gold, to a sunset orange, bronze struts its stuff. Thus while the head of San Gennaro is a dark green, his mitre is tinted orange, and the arch which encompasses the half-length figure shimmers gold (Plate 23). And those colours further shift and mutate across the protuberances and hollows as the light changes. This dazzling display at once shows off its own materiality, while simultaneously disavowing it. Burnished metal declares itself to be of more than one substance in the flickering variation of its colouring.120 Bronze (aes, gen. aeris), writes Isidore of Seville, is named from its gleaming in the air (aer, gen. aeris), just as gold (aurum) and silver (argentum) are.121 Thus while the very name of bronze connects it to air, to the aetherial, so it draws it into association with silver and gold. Indeed, the rich yellow of gold and dark metallic sheen of silver are rendered present in the chromatic virtuosity of the gate. Making manifest what its name implies, the bronze of the door lives up to its name and exceeds it (Plate 25). Much of the nuancing of surface and texture was done after the cast was made. Gilding was undertaken to burnish and highlight. But the range and depth of colour in the bronze was achieved largely in the furnaces themselves, through skilful adjustment of relative quantities of copper and tin. Low proportions of copper produce bronze that is silvery, and higher amounts of copper lend to a golden brown and even green finish. Clever exploitation of On Antique and medieval bronze doors and gates, see L. V. Borrelli, ‘La porta romana’, in S. Salomi (ed.), Le porte di bronzo dall’Antiqità al secolo XIII (Rome: Marchesi Grafiche Editoriali, 1990), 1–9, and ‘La porta del Pantheon’, in S. Salomi (ed.), Le porte di bronzo dall’Antiqità al secolo XIII (Rome: Marchesi Grafiche Editoriali, 1990), 11–21. 120 Metal sculptures cast by lost-wax process began with a model, from which a mould was made in many pieces, from which in turn wax casts were made. These wax casts would then need to be cleared up. These waxes were not solid, but consisted of a coating of wax around a core of some friable material, while iron rods held the core and outer mould together. After the wax was covered with its mould, the whole was heated so that the wax would melt and the space where it had been would be taken by molten metal. The cast was then cleaned and finished, including repairs, chiselling, and chasing. Details were sharpened, surfaces nuanced and polished, and textures differentiated. Thus a work made of bronze by wax cast was cast in pieces and fitted together. 121 Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, XVI.xx.1, ed. and trans. Barney et al., 330. 119

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the effects of ‘bloom’ and fumes, applications of cold water, remelting and reliquefaction further nuanced the finish.122 Thus this bronze, like the blood it protects and celebrates, was born not from one but from many and various, subtly differing, liquefactions. According to Pliny, bronze was used ‘to assure permanence to monuments … reminding one of the bronze tablets on which the laws of the state were inscribed’.123 Bronze, he recorded, was used for figures of gods and goddesses, and also for famous people. The Treasury gate holds a bronze Gennaro, and it strikes a chord across the chapel to the larger than life-size bronze figures in the presbytery, which represent Saints Gennaro, Asprenus, and Agrippinus (Plates 2 & 3). Yet the gate does more than provide material connection across the chapel to its east wall. In forging direct connections between the figure of San Gennaro and the principal protector saints in the presbytery, it also asserts the primacy of both Gennaro and of Fanzago, as Giuliano Finelli’s work was outshone by Fanzago’s dazzling skills on the gate (Plate 23). The overflowing volcano held at bay by the flux of bronze parallels the miraculously liquefying blood, which that great bronze prodigy protects and celebrates. The silver reliquaries borne across the city processionally formed another metallic flow (Plate 24), as they bound institutions to each other and threaded the city on their axes, spreading the effects of the chapel and spilling Gennaro’s blood in a further flow of silver. It was in their peculiar mobility and ability to cross boundaries, eliminate limits, and blur distinction that fluid metals and miraculous blood worked their wonders both within the chapel and gate and beyond. Heat and matter: the work of heat For every battle of the warrior is with confused noise, and garments rolled in blood; but this shall be with burning and fuel of fire (Isaiah 9.5). (Marchese, Unica Speranza, 1670)124 ‘The drosses of bronze are cadmia [zinc oxide] and verdigris, and the “bloom” of bronze [cuprous oxide]. Cadmia originates in furnaces from the metals of bronze and silver as a result of fumes settling above them. Indeed, just as the ore from which bronze is made is called cadmia, so it reappears in furnaces and receives its original name. Bronze bloom is made or originates in the casting process, when bronze is remelted and reliquefied, and cold water is poured on top, for the “bloom” is produced from a sudden condensation, as from spittle. Bronze also generates verdigris.’ Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, XVI.xx.11–14, ed. and trans. Barney et al., 331. 123 ‘usus aeris ad perpetuitatem monimentorum iam pridem tralatus est tabulis aeries, in quibus publicae constitutions inciduntu’. Pliny, Natural History, 37.12. 124 ‘Vestimentum mixtam sanguine erit in combustionem, & cibis ignis’. Marchese, Unica Speranza, 131. 122

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In Gennaro’s miracle heat was at play. Purifying heat informed Christ’s sacrifice and redemption: ‘Water and fire are the elements that purify’, claimed Francesco Marchese in his celebration of the blood of Christ.125 Heat ran through the body of the volcano. Heat binds. Heat and water were thought to constitute the wellspring of life: ‘Fire and water cohabit beneath the earth … Water penetrates more bodies than air, [which] is not the contrary of fire, but coexists with it.’126 Fire and liquid are conjured in the miracle; and the fiery eruptions of Vesuvius were held at bay by the coursing of lively heat through blood and through bronze. Indeed, the process of the blood’s liquefaction was expressly likened to fire: ‘it immediately liquefies, just as if it were wax placed in a fire’.127 Like wax into fire: a solid into a liquid that is capable of returning, at the removal of heat, untransmuted, to solid form. Through material analogy, as we have seen, the miracle offered protection. Just as the blood heated up and boiled, so the bronze of the chapel gate was transformed into elements of worship through heat. Blood and bronze can be thought of as analogous, if the miracle is thought of in terms of the tensions and desires it generates in relation to its solid and fluid states. Here heat is the implied metaphor for the transformation of both bronze and blood, and for the fires of Vesuvius which the chapel, gate, and blood were to hold at bay. Heat, metal, and belief are moving forces, subject to unpredictable oscillations. In the oscillation between obduracy and fluidity, Gennaro’s blood is heated. Heat, like the divine breath that animates creatures, is the excess that allows forms to live and flow. In its working as analogy for the flow of blood and lava, the bronze gate fused the miraculous relic of the saint with the threat of Vesuvius; and out of that fusion the figure of San Gennaro was brought alive. The notion that bronze could be brought to life drew on ancient and Renaissance conceptions about metals, stemming from an ancient Greek belief that metals formed when waters, or waters-to-be, were trapped in the earth and congealed.128 In De generatione animalium Aristotle claims that all things start as liquid: all animate things, like all species of plants, are in their first essence liquid matter; similarly, all species of stones, metals and minerals are formed of liquid matter, in their first essence.129 Marchese, Unica Speranza, 130. Bottoni Leontini, Pyrologia, 124, 181 127 ‘in porsi però dirimpetto la Testa, subito si liquefà, come se fusse cera posta nel fuoco’. ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc. 83 bis n. 1), ‘Registro dei Miracoli’, fol. 2r. 128 Plato, Timaeus, 58d–59b; such ideas are reiterated in the seventeenth-century accounts of Vesuvius. 129 Aristotle, De generatione animalium libri V. 125 126

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As Michael Cole has argued, in acknowledging the watery substance of metals, early modern metallurgists would recall what Aristotle said about water itself: ‘There is moisture in the earth, spirit in that moisture, and life-heat in all of those things, such that all, in some way, are charged with soul.’130 Aristotelian pneumatology offered accounts of the origins of human blood – and therefore of spirit and life – and of metals. Both were infusions of water into earth. Since volcanoes were also deemed to derive from the admixture of water and earth, blood, volcano, and gate were tightly conjoined – precisely in their capacities for transformation. Vesuvius was regarded as a great producer of minerals. ‘According to Aristotle’, writes Cesare De Martino in his discussion of the 1631 eruption, ‘we can assume that in the subterranean entrails of Vesuvius we will find the mother of the producers of minerals, and I believe of minerals, too.’131 This kind of naturalist, material, and spiritual understanding of the challenges and potential of bronze faced Fanzago and the casters in designing and casting the gates. Such an understanding would also have informed the experience of educated residents of Naples who used and observed the gates in conjunction with the miracle. Blood, minerals, and metals were intricately interconnected, and Vesuvius and San Gennaro were inextricably entwined. Fanzago’s gate can be seen as a material exploration of that complex relationship. It is fire that burns through the chapel’s blood. It is heat that sets things in motion. ‘Fire and water cohabit beneath the earth’, writes Domenico Bottoni in his Pyrologia (Naples, 1692); ‘water penetrates more bodies than air, [which] is not the contrary of fire, but coexists with it’.132 ‘Fire and water live together under the earth’, he claims, and it is fire under the earth that causes earthquakes and the eruptions of Vesuvius.133 Commentators on Vesuvius advanced the theory, following Lucretius, that seawater even nourished the flames of the volcano.134 The heat of both life renewed and of the fervour of Gennaro’s intercession made his blood boil. And heat fused copper and tin to cast bronze to proclaim the triumph of Januarius and to thwart Vesuvius’ spew. Bronze and blood contained the cosmic elements of earth, water, air, and fire. The blood, liquefied by divine heat, metamorphosed from solid to liquid, just as Vesuvius transformed solid rock to molten lava. Cole, Cellini, 41, 60; Aristotle, De generatione animalium libri V, 276v (762a). Agricola, referring to Aristotle, sees metals as ‘part water and part not water’. Agricola, De la generatione de le cose, 66v. 131 Martino, Osservationi Giornali, 8. 132 Bottoni Leontini, Pyrologia, 124, 181. 133 Bottoni Leontini, Pyrologia, 124, 218. 134 Paragallo, Istoria Naturale del Monte Vesuvio, 208–209; ‘while a little sea water inflames flames, a lot extinguishes them’. Paragallo, Istoria Naturale del Monte Vesuvio, 214. 130

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Fire, that mysterious element, inextricably connected to the body, made solid earth run liquid, liquefied saintly blood, and forged urban devotion and bronze metal into protective and celebratory form. Fire purified metal and tested and delivered the saintly. Transformative, powerful, rejuvenating, and purifying, fire was the element at play in the chapel, in its brilliant metals, and in its liquefying blood. Stefano Breventano in his Trattato degli elementi (Pavia, 1571) waxed lyrical on the qualities of fire – the element that in his view was ‘the noblest and the most active’ of all elements.135 For Breventano there are two sorts of fire, elemental and earthly: ‘the first is that element, pure simple and without the slightest admixture, the germ of being and the generation of things; the other is the cause of decay and destruction, and not of being or of generation of anything whatsoever, and to us always familiar.’136 Earthly fire, argues Breventano, resembles in some aspects the elemental sort, but differs from it in many ways: since ours is not an element, but a specific matter, a composite of terrestrial density and viscosity, from which it is created: [and from which] it feeds and sustains itself, and it consumes the matter to which it clings, and once this is lacking, it dies, and is converted into another element, which, belching smoke, thickens, and transforms itself into air. Celestial fire does not consume anything else; rather, it is the cause of being and of preservation, and it nor does it needs sustenance or other matter to maintain it. This is tranquil, while the other is turbulent. Celestial fire gives life, while earthly fire burns up. They resemble each other, in that each possesses light and heat.137

The Treasury Chapel can be seen as drawing celestial and earthly fire into relation through blood and bronze. Breventano emphasizes fire’s transformational capacities: This our earthly fire dissolves stones into metals and glass, softens iron, reduces burned stones into lime, renders white things black, and black things white, since burning white woods, it makes them turn black, and baking black stones, it makes them turn white, without this [sort of] fire it is impossible to smelt or cast any metal, it renders soft and fragile those things that are hard and solid, and it hardens soft and tender things, it gives durability to things that decay, loosens things that are tight, and binds scattered ones, in this one grasps God’s immense power to make one substance capable of producing so many contrary effects, O almighty God how marvellous art thou and in thy works.138 ‘il più nobile & più attivo de gli altri’. S. Breventano, Trattato degli elementi raccolto da varii autori di filosofia, et ridotti in chiaro e breve sommario (Pavia: Girolamo Bartoli, 1571), 3v. 136 Breventano, Trattato degli elementi, 3v. 137 Breventano, Trattato degli elementi, 6v–r. 138 Breventano, Trattato degli elementi, 6v–r. 135

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Fire closely resembles Gennaro’s blood: corporeal, and yet in some manner incorporeal, immeasurable, unknown, mobile and immobile, transparent, powerful in its capacity to penetrate all things, separating, feeding them from below, tending towards the highest [attrahente ad alto], artisan of ancient things, sensitive [apprensivo], immutable, never diminishing, purgative of all metals … Corporeal … fire is the body of the element and that which ensues [corpo semplice, e quel che segue]; he calls it also incorporeal, for the subtlety, rarity [rarezza], and mobility of its substance and it is intermediate between visible and invisible things, whence it comes about that it is understood in a certain way to be incorporeal, and is said to be immeasurable because of the actions of its virtue.139

Gennaro’s blood was in relation to elemental fire, as bronze was to earthly fire. The blood, like fire, was transformational, capable of conversion and renewal. It was even likened in its indurate state to metal, ‘hard as iron’, and when it liquefied, to wax.140 Cold obdurate metal and flesh-like wax were, then, qualities implied in the blood. And metal and wax were exploited to cast the great bronze gates in lost-wax and indirect cast processes. Frequently, however, the blood did not simply liquefy; it boiled. On each day of the September octave in 1659, it was found in a liquid state, and when brought before the head it began to boil.141 This is not simply blood that coursed through the veins of a living human; it is more than enlivened, it is beside itself, enraged, furiously engaged. It is blood doubly supernatural, in its revivification and in its capacity to boil. Boiling blood changes not only temperature, but appearance: it becomes agitated, moving, violent, inhabited by something both invisible yet formidable. Boiling, it warned of danger and  told of Gennaro’s fervent intercession. Boiling blood signalled wrath and frightening fires. After all, Marsilio Ficino warned against blood that was too fiery: We use the term ‘good blood’ for blood that is not cold, not dry, not murky, but warm and moist and clear: warm, not hot; humid, not watery; and clear, but not extremely subtile, for very fervid, ardent blood raises the natural heat beyond measure and dries out the humour … Thus, blood ought not be fiery, or watery, but airy – yet not like a heavy wind, that inclines not to water, nor resembling a most subtle air, lest it eventually readily become fiery.142 Breventano, Trattato degli elementi, 4r. ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc. 83 bis n. 1), fol. 5v. 141 ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc. 83 bis n. 1), fols 3r–4v. 142 Marsilio Ficino, Della religione christiana … insieme con due libri del medesimo del mantenere la sanità e prolungare la vita per le persone letterate (Florence: Giunti, 1568), 65–66. 139 140

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A theory of heat as closely associated with both life and the celestial was developed in Naples by Bernardino Telesio in De rerum natura (1570). Although Telesio was concerned with the working of nature and not of the supernatural, his philosophy of paying careful attention to the appearance of things to understand them, rather than to proceed from the Ancients, abstraction, and reason, resonates with the attention to the various states of Gennaro’s blood. Telesio claimed that Aristotle’s doctrine conflicted with the senses as well as with Scripture, while his own was based on sense perception and nature alone, rather than through Aristotelian abstraction. Nature should be studied in itself and in its own principles, which are matter and the two active forces, heat and cold. Telesio identifies two active principles, heat (heaven) and cold (the earth), and a passive substratum, matter, which is substantially the same everywhere. The cold earth at rest was opposed to the hot sun in motion. Unlike Aristotelian prime matter, which is pure potency, Telesian matter is concrete, actual, and sensible. This cut across the traditional Aristotelian dichotomy between the substance of the heavens and that of the earth. According to Telesio, sense works through heat. Celestial heat and terrestrial cold are the active principles of life for the world, and they vie for sole mastery of matter as passive substratum. Thus the interaction of heat and cold is the source of natural activity. This achieves an identity between being and thought, a philosophy of instinct and sensation. Sensation involves a perception of feeling or passion from outside: ‘Flames themselves in reality demonstrate that heat and light diminish or are weak in tenuity, while instead they grow stronger and are intense in corporosity: when they are lit in things that are quite solid [corpose] they appear extremely hot and luminous; while, when they are lit in tenuous things, they are weak to such a point even if we touch them [sforiamo], they do not even manage to warm us, and however near they are placed, they become merely visible, but not also bright [splendenti] and luminous.’143 The desire for access to God was complex and ambiguous. Gennaro’s blood, though always beneficent, was disturbing, even threatening, in both its fieriness and in its immobility. It held the city in its thrall. Its heat was part of its fervour, sign and consequence of its feverish engagement with God, and of its urgent desire to communicate with and to save the people of Naples. Heat, the essence of life, informed the blood, consumed it, and in its vitalism spread ‘Le fiamme stesse in realtà mostrano che il caldo e la luce diminuiscono o sono intense nella corporosità; quando vengono accese in cose alquanto corporose appaiono estremamente cald e luminose; al contrario, quando vengono acccese in cose molto tenui sono deboli a tal punto che anche se lo tocchiamo e le sforiamo non rirescono neppure a riscaldarci, e poste quanto si voglia vicine diventano soltanto visibili, ma non anche splendenti e luminose’. B. Telesio, La natura secondo i suoi princìpi, ed. Roberto Bondì (Milan: Bompiani, 2009), 7.

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the offering of salvation to observers. But heat, like fire, had a dark side. The heat of the earth belching forth from Vesuvius threatened life in Naples with a choking ashy extinction (Plate 14). Just as in people heat produces pustules and inflammation, so heat produced mountains and volcanoes, claims Gaspare Paragallo in 1705.144 Although identifiable with the ardour of sanctity, the light of knowledge and fervour of the spirit, heat and flame were also associated with lust, wrath, hell fire, and damnation. Much was at risk and at play in the heated moment of liquefaction, in the intensity of the boiling blood. Threat there was, subterranean and implied, as well as the promise of deliverance. And while worshippers’ hot blood would turn cold at death, the saint’s blood reversed this process, ran contrary to nature, showing the promise of redemption along with its terrible warning. Alchemical transformation

The chapel was alchemical in its transformation of dust to blood, of earth to gleaming silver, dull alloys to bronze, and matter to spirit.145 Alchemical theory constated that the human body was the microcosm of a natural cosmos. Blood and its transformation thus cut across its heart. Humankind achieved redemption through working within the natural world to sustain itself and to separate God’s vital traces from material dross that resulted from the Fall; alchemy demonstrated the processes by which the dross of matter could be separated from pure essence and the redemption of humankind

Paragallo, Istoria Naturale del Monte Vesuvio, 9. Close analogies existed between alchemy and anatomy and alchemy and metallurgical  practices. Since the days of Leonardo Fioravante (1517), surgeon and ardent champion of the ‘new art of alchemical medicine’, which thrived under the patronage of Giovanni Baptista d’Azzia, Marchese della Terza, alchemy had noble and powerful practitioners in Naples. The Accademia Segreta, a Neapolitan academy formed in the 1540s, comprised a group of men devoted to testing alchemical and medicinal secrets, and is better known because of Girolamo Ruscelli’s detailed account of it. Fioravante’s residence near Castel Nuovo became a centre where ‘alchemists and distillers from various nations began to practise’ and ‘every day they made new things and rare experiments’. L. Fioravanti, Il Tesoro della vita humana (Venice: Apresso gli eredi di Melchior Sessa, 1570), 50. Alchemy in Naples still awaits its own transformative scholar, and at this stage it is difficult to delineate any but the loosest connections between the Treasury Chapel’s transformations and alchemical practices. In so far as William Eamon’s study is concerned with Naples, it concentrates on sixteenth-century alchemy. W. Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 156–159, 197–198, 200; see G. Ruscelli, Segreti nuovi di maravigliosa virtù (Venice: Eredi di Marchiò Sessa, 1567), preface. See also W. Eamon and F. Paheau, ‘The Accademia Segreta of Girolamo Ruscelli: A Sixteenth-Century Italian Scientific Society’, Isis, 75 (1984), 327–342.

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could be achieved.146 It seems to have been a particular characteristic of the Neapolitan intellectual tradition that alchemical research was associated with efforts to implement moral and religious reform.147 The Treasury Chapel was a form of alchemy, undertaken by a group of prominent nobles from the Piazze (Seggi), assisted by Spanish interests, mobilizing and centralizing scattered spiritual investment and transforming it into highly wrought precious metals, which, in turn, attracted and fermented a new form of urban piety and refashioned Naples’ spiritual topography. There was a close relationship between alchemy and metallurgical techniques. From the dyeing of drab cloth, there arose the idea of dyeing metals, or alchemically converting drab metals into gold and silver. Metallic transmutation or its appearance could be effected through processes that produced the colour of the noble metals or by separation of noble metals already present in base metal.148Alchemists explained transmutation as an acceleration of the ripening of base metals to their perfected noble state. They regarded the transformation of base metals to gold in ‘true transmutation’ as occurring instantaneously through the projection of the philosopher’s stone, or ‘tincture’ over the base metal.149 In the huge gate of the Treasury Chapel dull bronze was transmuted at intervals into gold. The cherubs’ heads, the huge rivet-like studs on the exterior of the gate and inside on the shoulder of the bust of San Gennaro, the back of his left hand and his forehead – through the virtuosity of the metal workers, it is as if we see the shift from deep green to yellow, from dross to gold (Plates 23, 25 & 26). But it is the small bronze gates of the chapels that display greatest alchemical verve (Plates 16 & 17). In this regard what initially may strike the viewer as a pronounced fetishism on openings in the form of doors and gates in the chapel comes into play. Here the little gates to the side chapels, also of bronze, varnished and gilded and highly wrought, made by Onofrio D’Alessio and Gennaro Monte between 1662 and 1684, add a syncopated rhythm to the chapel (Plate 5).150 P. Smith, The Business of Alchemy: Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 173–198. 147 Pietro di Toledo, concerned at the spread of heresy in his realm, asked Benedetto Varchi in 1544 to give his written opinion as to whether according to Aristotle’s principles ‘alchemy can be proved or demonstratively confirmed to be either possible or impossible’. Varchi warned in his reply that ‘sophistical’ alchemy, of the sort that claimed to transmute metal, led to wickedness, but that forms used by artisans were valid. For this and several other sixteenth-century examples, see Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, 158–159. 148 On transmutation of metals see Smith, The Business of Alchemy, 174. 149 Smith, The Business of Alchemy, 174. 150 Initially the altars were not raised and the space allocated to them was too small to do so. Thus when they were raised by three steps, the lateral chapel areas were slightly 146

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Between low marble balustrades lie the dark bronze ornate gates, adorned with richly cut arabesques, cherubs’ heads, and a diminutive, brilliantly gilded figure, designed by Cosimo Fanzago, of a protector saint (Plate 17). These gates, claimed Onofrio D’Alessio, surpassed any in Naples and were technically unprecedented.151 What draws the eye is the extraordinary eruption of ornament cresting these gates. Two winged putti lie prone, facing each other, slightly raised on a scroll that ripples erotically beneath them (Plates 16 & 17). They surge forwards, pushing up between them a densely worked wreath of martyrdom, through which are wended plumy palms, which cross to support cast bronze ampoules of Gennaro’s sacred blood. The palm fronds interlock with each other to comprise an elegant fastening, a closure that completes the iconography and seals the martyr’s wreath. Head of putto and palm leaf are thus the means by which these gates are opened, their elaborate ‘handles’, as the bronze, burnished by countless hands, attests. Symbols of martyrdom  and  provocative putti, touched and held, gripped and pulled apart, give access to the altars. Through them, by touching them, the priest gains access to the altars beyond; but only when they are closed do their iconographies cohere. While the purposive touch of the sculptor set the work in motion, it is the inadvertent touch (in distraction) of the priest and chaplains expanded. The deputies commissioned Onofrio D’Alessio on 3 August 1662 to make three metal gates for the presbytery and two lateral chapels, and to submit the first in March and the other two in August of the following year. However, the work dragged on until 1686. P. Giusti, ‘Metalli’, in Civiltà del Seicento a Napoli, vol. II, 332–336; Bellucci, Memorie storiche, 57–67; Catello and Catello, La Cappella del Tesoro, 111; Strazzullo, La Real Cappella, 54–56. A note made in the summer of 1665 refers to ‘varnishing the entire work’ (‘inverniciare tutta d.a opera’). ATSG, 59/9 1587, fol. 357r. 151 This work, claimed Onofrio D’Alessio on 27 May 1665, was technically unprecedented in Naples: ‘Onofrio d’Alessio having made a small bronze door [with] a cornice and vases for the Chapel of S. Gennaro, above the marble pilasters, which was very expensive­– and because to some people the cost and workmanship of said door appear exorbitant, mainly because it is [a type of] work not previously undertaken in this city – and in order to justify the difficulties and costs of said works, since they are of welded bronze and silver, with many and various refinements necessary to said works, the said Onofrio offers to [re]produce with greater ease, for a comparison with the door, cornice, and vase, any two silver panels, that is to say, altar frontals, from any church or monastery in this city, comparable [in quality] to any that may be found in this city.’ (‘Havendo Onofrio d’Alessio fatto una portella, cimmasa e vasi di rame sopra li pilastri di marmo per la cappella di S.G., per la quale vi è andata molta spesa, e perche appresso ad alcune persone pare esorbitante la spesa, e magistero di d.a portella, il tutto per esser opera non pratticata ancora in questa città e per autenticare le difficoltà, e spese, che sono in d.e opere per essere di rame saldate, et argento, ed molto et altre dilgenze, che sono ncessarie per detta opera, il d.o Onofrio si obliga, che al incontro di d.e portella, cimmasa, e vasi fare più facilmente due panni, seu paliotti per Altare di qualsiasi Chiesa on monastero di q.a Città di argento à paro di quals.a che al p[rese]nte in questa città si ritrovi.’) ATSG, 59/9 1587, fol. 347r.

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en route to the altar that perpetuates this alchemical transformation. By his touch on the gate, priest and gate are changed. Bronze, burnished over time by innumerable openings and closings, by the brief caress as the hand pauses, bears the effects of human touch, changes colour and texture, a material memory. Through worship dark bronze is alchemized into shimmering gold (Plate 16). Thus base metal was alchemized through metalworking virtuosity and repeated actions made in distraction for religious devotion. Gold’s appearance in the base metal gates was an indelible marker of virtue. Religious virtue and artistic virtuosity performed metallurgical alchemy in diverse rhythms and times. In a process analogous to the activation of dormant human potentiality in the glorified Christian body, time and touch recolour the surface, and bring to visibility something precious that has been dormant within the material world. The material surface, like the liquefying blood, is glorified into gold. Ribera and the smelting of the saint

Where it does not meet the eye directly, metal is just below the surface.152 Jusepe de Ribera’s San Gennaro Emerges Unharmed from the Furnace (1646), the altarpiece of the right-hand lateral chapel, is painted on a gigantic sheet of copper (Plates 4 & 13). It sets the Treasury Chapel alight in its brilliant exploration of fire, miracle and conversion. This is an extraordinarily large oil to be painted on copper. Most copper panels in the early modern world were exceptionally small, usually about the size of a sheet of paper. If not the largest oil on copper panel ever produced, this may well be the largest to survive. Yet it wears its surface lightly. While the properties of gilt copper are exploited in terms of its luminosity and endurance, the metal itself is hidden, coated in pigment, camouflaged beneath a glimpse of another sort of material transformation. The very nature of materials is here under investigation and pressure. Thus in spite of the evident revelling in the qualities and capacities of materials, especially minerals and metals, the chapel is not simply a matter of material display. All is not what it seems, and the chapel demonstrates this and exploits this at every turn. Sanctity, sacrifice, salvation, and transformation animate this painting and, indeed, the Treasury Chapel itself.153 In the altarpiece heat and its Precious materials not only were expensive, but were regarded as enduring. Thus, for example, having heard the opinion of Domenichino and other experts, the deputies decided on 11 June 1623 that the six paintings of the lateral chapels should be on copper rather than wood; and on 27 October 1636 affirmed that copper would ensure that they be ‘permanent’ (‘le pitture che vengono ad oglio siano perpetue’). Strazzullo, La Real Cappella, 20. 153 For Ribera’s altarpiece, see N. Spinosa, Ribera (Naples: Electa Napoli, 2003), 205–209. 152

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ally light are the means and metaphor through which they are addressed (Plate 13). Miraculous and spiritual transformations are pursued in the painting and throughout the whole chapel through material analogy, particularly in the transformational capacities of heat and metal. The emphasis is on flux and potential, on changeability, rather than on change as having already taken place. In turn, the very possibility of the openness of time itself is made miraculously visible and tangible. Gennaro stands amid the flames of threat and salvation (Plate 13). The saint, who protects the city of Naples against Vesuvius and who demonstrates his presence by making a solid melt, is figured here as at once resistant to fire and fire-like. Stunned, he emerges in a terrifying if triumphant holy isolation, still and silent amid the mayhem of gestures and shouts all about him, still bound, but miraculously untouched by the flames and choking smoke. Trial by fire was the clearest proof of purity of a saint.154 The analogy is to the smelting of metals in furnaces to purify them. And San Gennaro emerges as quite literally made of other stuff. Painted on metal and with the qualities of metal, Gennaro’s substance is more than simply fleshly. He raises his eyes to heaven as his special apodeictic fate is borne in on him. By burning Christians, their enemies hoped destroy more than the body, but along with it all hope for resurrection.155 Thus here San Gennaro’s survival is a renewed promise of the resurrection of the body in Christ. He is alone, estranged in the moment, disengaged from the cast of flailing figures below him. Enmeshed with each other, with smoke and arms, tangled in an incomprehensible submersion of matter, undifferentiated, and lacking knowledge of and access to the divine and with it differentiation and salvation, those figures are distraught and damned in a chaos of disorientation and fear. Yet in spite of Gennaro’s serenity, his awful aloneness, his irrelation to the crush of people who surround him, is shown to be the disjunctive consequence of his apparently arbitrary election by God. The necessary relationship between miracle, witness, and conversion is demonstrated here. First the miracle and the saint. The blast of fire from the furnace leaves the saint simultaneously untouched, but also marked and separated. More than that, it serves to define his celestial flame. A splash of radiant gold, like yellow flame, clothes San Gennaro and singles him out from the confused limbs and dark panic all around. That gold darts upwards, like the leap of fire, into the register above, in the golden sash threaded through a serpentine twisting of cherubim lifted upwards to heaven. Seen from below, his eyes upcast, Gennaro is silhouetted against the caerulean sky, which yawns On fire and martyrdom, see Hahn, Portrayed on the Heart, 70. See H. Klein, ‘Sacred Things and Holy Bodies: Collecting Relics from Late Antiquity to the Early Renaissance’, in Bagnoli et al. (eds), Treasures of Heaven, 55.

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open, engulfing almost one-third of the canvas in a huge unfilled new possibility between clouds and arms. Gennaro recalls the cry of Stephen, the first Christian martyr, ‘I see the heavens opened’ (Acts 7:56). Heaven stood open; through Gennaro place was made holy. That ultramarine empyrean is made from lapis lazuli. It contains large irregular crystals of varying transparency and clusters of particles of mica, quartz, calcite, and pyrite, producing what Anita Albus has aptly termed ‘a glittering firmament’ with calcite stars that ‘sparkle like stars within the deep blue’.156 It is a particularly brilliant display of the working of matter to reveal itself in a profoundly different register – in this case a stone is revealed as celestial. Thus the possibility of redemption is opened up within mere matter. Heavenly stars are exposed as present already within the pigment. The extraordinary frame of this altarpiece extends this material play. It is adorned at intervals with gilt-winged putti, and in the frame lapis lazuli crops up again – the very material that is smashed into sparkling heaven in the painting that it surrounds – this time in the form of polished gems set in embossed gilt mounts. The frame here artfully connects what conventionally a frame sets apart: matter and art. The possibility of redemption is opened up in the potential of jewels and crushed stone. Likewise the gilded cherubim, whose head and wings punctuate the corners and centre of each side of the picture frame, return as full-bodied winged putti dancing their way to heaven in the top right-hand corner of the painting. And gold, their element, detached from figure, surfaces in flashes on chasuble, mitre, and swirling fabric. In vanquishing mundane fire, the saint stands like a golden column, and a flicker of golden cloth darts upwards from behind his shoulders twisting amid winged putti, spiralling up to heaven. Behind that dazzling figure of the saint, the roar of the furnace belching heat, like a dragon’s mouth, flings the others aside. Hands – upraised, outstretched, bracing, clutching – hands flash like semaphore, through the chaos of twisted bodies, desperate signals of witness, conversion and fear. A range of responses, a spiral of possibilities twists down anticlockwise from San Gennaro to the bottom right-hand corner of the canvas. Hands reach out of the tangled mass of bodies of the damned. In each case those hands, outspread and open, hold open a question, mark a pause, a possible intimation of something apprehended. They mark moments and paradoxes of conversion and its denial. Shielding themselves from the incomprehensible truth, searching for something to cling to, some reassurance in the chaos of the startling event, those hands, at once defensive, refusing, and searching, mark the opening as a void. At once they slide on emptiness, as down a pane of glass, find nothing; at once they hold open a possibility of acceptance or change of heart. They signal A. Albus, The Art of the Arts: Rediscovering Painting (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), 66.

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the arbitrary and terrifying moment of the miracle, the terrible moment and inexorable demands of conversion. The realm of mankind – it is indeed here exclusively male – is a tangle of hands, limbs, swivelling heads, and the roar of confusion. Limbs flicker across the canvas, as if amputated by flashes of light, sharp movement, violence, and panic. Haste and clamour, angular gestures, outstretched hands, and loss of balance are all about. In sharp contrast to all this, the stalwart figure of the saint, immobile and vertical, raises his eyes to heaven. Above him, detached from the human realm, winged putti deftly sketch a harmonious interlocking dance of joy. Their graceful unconstraints contrast vividly with the stumbling struggles of humanity below. Despite the cords that bind him, San Gennaro is infinitely freer than the headlong blunders all around. In the human realm, figures function like cogs and levers in a sort of hideous and relentless mechanism. In their gestures and their relationship with the saint, each figure is paired with another in the same picture plane: thus the two men at the rear, the two at the front corners, and two dark heads clasped in hands and arms at the level of Gennaro’s knee. Again there is a partial symmetry between figures at the rear of the picture plane and those at its fore. Yet these couplings perform a grotesque repetition rather than a harmonious coupling. These shattered mirrorings across and between picture planes aggravate the disturbance that the painting generates, producing an unresting quasi-mechanical propulsion and expulsion, like spokes shattering from a wheel rim and sputtering apart. All the relationships with the figure of San Gennaro are partial, broken, splintered, sundered, elliptical, disturbed. Sanctity itself is an eruption, a violence, a possibility that does not fit. The matter of the moment and the very cusp of time are thus delineated between the saint and the rest. The unchangeability of the saint’s body in the furnace is here the very mark of divine intervention. Material that does not change is as miraculous as that which does. And like it, too, it makes of its witnesses the profoundest of demands. The men are staged in homologous but opposing pairs. Silhouetted against the sky two men twist in a jerky ambiguous dance; their outstretched hands, raised, cruelly cancel each other out. One turns partly towards the saint, the other away, the first beshadowed, the second splashed in light, one fast, one slow. They occupy each other’s counterpoint, paradoxical, awkward, at a loss. Indecipherability marks them both, as they at once apparently close down and open up to faith. Neither is completely lost and yet neither saved. On the right, the man in muddy green turns away from the saint, but raises his eyes to heaven. Even as his bellowing mouth spells a gaping vacancy, his hand accosts heavenly space. Even as that encounter leaves him empty-handed, his face and uplifted arm are bathed in golden light. His jagged engagement, violent and brusque, speaks less of conversion than of blundering panic, but his body holds open

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a chance of change. A figure of flight and retreat, he is also one of possibility. Meanwhile, his counterpart, darkened, head down, his raised arm mired in shadow, turns away to disappear into the margins of the painting. Or does he just start to raise his head, to turn towards the saint? Does he dare raise his eyes and see? Both men are swathed in contradictions, and those very ambiguities are intensified by the interplay of the formal resonances with each other. One closes off contact with the saint just as his counterpart seems perhaps to begin to acknowledge what he has seen. They bear witness to their own unwitnessing. At the forefront of the painting two men restage, in an altogether more optimistic key, the complementary counterpoint of those figures at the back. Both have fallen. From the ground, they turn, twist, and raise themselves towards the saint, channelling the energy of the painting upwards from its corners, from the foremost picture plane, from the level of the viewer, backwards and upwards, casting a giant cross that intersects on Gennaro’s glowing face and that is then borne aloft, carried up by putti and clouds and the rush of heat and light. Dazed and felled, the soldier on the left swivels in disarray. One hand clutches his weapon on the ground; the other, the figure of his ambivalence, reaches up, as shield from the seering furnace, in exclamation at the miracle. Twisted, contradictory, ambivalent. He is the felled counterpoint to the dark-haired man immediately behind the saint, at the rear of the picture plane, who flees, his mouth wide open. Their gestures mirror each other, turned through 270 degrees around the pivotal point of San Gennaro himself. Held aloft, its palm toward the viewer, it is picked out in light. At once searching and shielding, defensive and unacknowledging, that hand shields the soldier’s eyes and blocks the viewer, holds us back. Brightly lit against the pictorial logic of divine or natural light, that hand simultaneously pushes back the viewer, bids her pause, renders illegible its owner’s face, and frames the sight of the divine. His counterpart, a bearded old man at the extreme right of the canvas, turns. That turn renders him the only figure, besides Gennaro, of secure conversion. True witness of the miracle, he turns. His elbow thrust towards the viewer, the pivot of his rotation, is splashed in the same heavenly blue that frames Gennaro’s head. Grasping the truth of the moment, his forehead lit in divine recognition, the old man raises his eyes to heaven and to the saint. His left hand, planted parallel to the saint’s foot, affirms him. His right hand begins to reach up, and, almost touching Gennaro’s golden chasuble, it already absorbs its glowing light. Gennaro raises his eyes to heaven in a perplexed questioning of God. The tips of his fingers drawn towards his chest, barely touching, indicate that the implications of his astonishing salvation are just dawning on him. This is not quite a simple external projection of the inward struggle of the human soul between the flesh and the spirit. It is not quite the tussle of 4 Maccabees, between, on one hand, the lower nature or passions, and the higher, rational self on the other, in which the martyrs’

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heroic resistance to every form of torture and their steadfast refusal to yield are exemplary of the conquest of the passions by reason: For like a most skilful pilot, the reason of our father Eleazar steered the ship of religion over the sea of the emotions, and though buffeted by the stormings of the tyrant and overwhelmed by the mighty waves of tortures, in no way did he turn the rudder of religion until he sailed into the haven of immortal victory … O aged man, more powerful than tortures; O elder, fiercer than fire; O supreme king over the passions, Eleazar! (4 Maccabees 7:1–10)

Such a martyr is divinely inspired and fortified: he raises his eyes to heaven. Nevertheless, Gennaro’s cardinal virtues of fortitude and self-control contrast sharply with the panic, flight, and confusion among those around him. A bridge between Christian martyrdom and the philosophical tradition of heroic virtue is sketched here in terms of Stoic morality. Yet there is a provisionality, an uncertainty, and an haphazardness. Nothing is guaranteed in terms of divine reward. Thus the conquest of the flesh by the spirit through Christian dedication and miraculous intervention here combine to produce the sanctity of Gennaro, humble but chosen, marked in the painting as a sign of exceptionality. Fire, suffering, and the unfathomable touch of the divine are shown in the very process of transformation, of apprehension, of asking and of becoming. The miraculous intervention is presented here as sudden and decisive, but also as unpredictable and confusing. Far from delivering emphatic answers, it triggers uncertainty, opening up terrible possibilities. Above all, it is shown as a process rather than as an outcome. We are offered a glimpse into the matter of becoming and the becoming of matter as a question of irrecoverable, inexorable, unending yet decisive instants. Time is as malleable and as transformative as matter. In their instability they are, make possible, and briefly offer a chance for a future that is different. Ribera’s altarpiece sets fire to the Treasury Chapel (Plate 4). Fire figures brilliantly as punishment, damnation, and salvation. The distinction between threat and promise is exposed as unstable and shifting, as perilous as a darting flame in which matter dematerializes into light and heat. To be consumed by fire can be to be lost or to be saved. To be transformed from one substance to another can yield to hell or heaven. One looks through flame and everything is changed. Conclusion

Elio and Corrado Catello present the chapel as ‘a true theatre’, its presbytery ‘the holy stage’, with balconies like theatre boxes for musicians (Plate 3).157 Catello and Catello, La Cappella del Tesoro, 19.

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But the architecture is far more than setting for a drama. And the action, if it succeeds, must necessarily involve the audience, who must be moved to be changed. Indeed, the very position of the boxes, located as they are in the crossing piers overlooking the main body of the chapel, rather than in the presbytery, serves to underscore the centrality of the faithful, located in that central space (Fig. 2). As the miracle occurred, so they too were changed. More than mere setting for the miracle, the chapel is its advertisement, its warning, and its collaborator. Its metals – like San Gennaro’s blood – are not stable essences, but qualities to be discovered, possibilities and chances yet to come. Materials are here part of the process of possibility. Here bronze becomes a material analogy for the miraculous transformations of Gennaro’s blood, which in its instability holds open not so much change and transformation as its very possibility. Just as the liquefaction of Gennaro’s blood works as material analogy for the volcanic threat of Vesuvius, so the bronze gate operates as material analogy for the liquefying blood. Thus the ideationality of architectural materiality permits an opening of potentiality, rather than a return to the dead treatment of architecture as static, representation of something already determined, or passive container for liturgy and relics. Colour, redemption, and renewal, the blood imparted what was essential, even as it dissolved its possibility materially. That shimmering chance informs bronze, licks it into shape, and chases it into gold. More than anything else the chapel transforms. But it does so analogically, indirectly, with a knight’s move. In the miracle-working saint Christianity created the possibility of a constant and persistent victorious mediation between the natural and the supernatural, between the material and the spiritual, between bad and good, between death and life. The ‘place’ par excellence of this mediation was the miraculous blood. But this ‘place’ was neither stable nor unique. Rather, in it workings it spilled over, over-spilled to draw together through heat’s work, threat and protection, victim and worshipper, blood and bronze, life and death, volcano and city. Indeed, not least among the Treasury Chapel’s transformations was its transformation of itself into a generator of protectors for the city as a whole through its marvellous alchemical and analogical material transformations – albeit with specific institutional affiliations and allegiances – and thus, with it, of the city itself.

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Miraculous witness: exclusive affects

To witness with thine eyes what some perhaps Contented with report heare onely in heav’n. (Milton, Paradise Lost, iii.700) My heart so hardened that I cannot repent. (Christopher Marlowe, The Tragicall History of the Life and Death of Dr. Faustus, scene vi)

Witnessing the miracle

Ribera’s superb altarpiece in San Gennaro’s Treasury Chapel explores what it is to witness a miracle (Plates 4 & 13). Gennaro witnesses in miraculously surviving the furnace, while those around him, uncomprehending, are dashed against the edges of confusion, fear, and conversion. The matter of what it means to witness informs the Treasury Chapel at diverse speeds and registers and is part of its transformational economy. Indeed, the chapel can be seen as a grand witness chamber built to make witness, to permit and provoke that which is to be witnessed, to house witness, and to resonate and make visible the miracle, that is, itself to bear witness and permit witness to be made. The chapel is both witness to and an exploration of witnessing. All architecture produces witnesses, but the Treasury Chapel makes witnesses to a particular miraculous event. This chapter explores what it was to witness the miraculous liquefaction. It asks how witnesses were made and reformed; and what of witness withheld? To witness is to bear witness, to be present and attest to something, especially, in early use, to see with one’s eyes or to hear with one’s ears. A ‘miracle’ etymologically derives from the Greek thaumasion and Latin miraculum as that which causes marvel or wonderment. It transforms. In Italian the synonyms prodigio and portento indicate something that lies beyond the limits of the natural world, events that induce awe, stupour, and fear. Thus to witness a miracle is to be at a loss to know or to understand, to see something that cannot, by rights, be seen. It is to bear witness to the loss of one’s senses in any

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normal sense. In order to make sense of what has been witnessed, it is the witness who is changed. While San Gennaro, like other saints, performed miracles during his lifetime, it was his blood’s liquefaction, repeated, re-witnessed, and intensified, that was key (Figs 1, 2, 4). The miracle is a power superior not only to human nature, but to nature itself – more powerful, therefore, than the terrible forces which it held at bay: plague, famine, and even the cataclysmic movements of the earth itself. The word ‘martyr’ derives from the Greek martureo, ‘to bear witness in favour of another’.1 To witness was to see change and be changed. The liquefying of the blood of the martyr San Gennaro took place renewedly, restaged as acts, deeds, performances, pretences, claims, and obligations. Its return was a promise. It promised, at the least, the enabling and resurrected togetherness of religion. The miracle bore its viewer out of the ordinary, through a visible and supernatural spectacle beyond history and nature. Rather than the miracle simply presenting itself to them, viewers were in some way reconstituted, made present at the mystery, and reforged as a communitas. Yet like all promises, even while the prodigy affirmed the bonds between those with whom it was shared and excluded those to whom the promise could not be made, the promise was always conditional, suspended, unstable, a gift that was never quite given, that indicated the yet to come. Thus it breaks and tears as it takes place, rupturing the context, finding again a form that dissolves and unbinds. It was a spectacle that tore time off its hinges and changed hearts. And in rendering its audience a spectacle, it incorporated them in a disciplinary machine. It made difference visible. It exposed differences that were supposedly invisible or that were hidden, kept secret. Responding to confessional difference, to social status, to the difference in blood among its audience, it distinguished between them. A gauge of such distinctions, in its gauging it became the calculator of difference, the producer of exclusion, an ­instrument The emphasis on Christian martyrdom as participation in the suffering and death of Jesus resulted in the tendency of the word µάρτνς and its cognates to lose the sense of ‘witness’, at least as preliminary meaning; and a distinction emerged between the martyr who died with Christ and the confessor who witnessed to him before persecutors, but was not put to death. Thus the verb μαρτνρείν moves from ‘to witness’ to ‘to be a martyr’ in second-century writings such as the Martyrdom of Polycarp and Iraenaeus, Adversus haereses. For this reason Tertullian did not employ the Latin equivalent of µάρτνς, but used the Greek word in Latin as a technical term for ‘martyr’, a person who has died for and with Christ. For Christianity the martyr as ideal disciple was even more central than to the Jewish tradition, because of the death of Christ at the heart of the Christian Bible. The Christian martyr resists through torture and death the efforts of the authorities to make him renounce his faith, and thus actively testifies to the Gospel. Martyrdom was a mode of evangelism. Death by public execution sealed the testimony in the presence of a multitude; and the written Acta that were circulated secured a wider and more lasting publicity. Lampe, ‘Martyrdom and inspiration’, 118, 120, 134.

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of intolerance. Thus it could serve and sway political power. In short it ­operated over a wide spectrum from social exclusion to status affirmation from binding to drawing open, from inert indifference to detecting and exposing difference. Gennaro’s miracle was, then, the sight of the community’s presence to itself. While this might be unifying in effect, it also worked to exclude and to separate. Miraculous and liberatory, the blood was also accusatory. Its refusal to liquefy pointed at sinners and prompted them to penitence. And it withheld its favours in the presence of heretics, worked to identify them, to separate, and to drive them away. This sort of affective effect, always excessive, displacing itself, lies at the heart of materiality and is the matter of the miracle. This chapter examines these miraculous effects to argue that the affective miracle worked to reforge the citizen body. Naples, urbs sanguinum

San Gennaro was not alone. The Campania region as a whole and the Sorrentine peninsula in particular were known for their bloody liquefactions.2 But Naples, urbs sanguinum, city of blood, boasted more miraculous blood than anywhere else. Giulio Cesare Capaccio, writing in 1607–08, refers to ‘six most marvellous bloods’ in Naples: the liquefying relics of San Gennaro, St John the Baptist (kept in three separate churches: Santa Maria Donnaromita, San Gregorio Armeno, and San Giovanni Carbonara) (Fig. 35), St Stephen protomartyr (conserved at San Gaudioso), St Patricia (Santa Patrizia), St Nicholas of Tolentino (church of Sant’Agostino), and St Pantaleon (in the ‘Scodes’ reliquary).3 Even the blood of would-be saints, Blood miracles were not limited to Campania. For bloody miracles that were part of canonization proceedings, see Sodano, ‘Sangue vivo’, 293–310.   3 G. C. Capaccio, Descrizione di Napoli ne’ Principii del secolo XVII Società napolitana di storia patria (Naples: F. Giannini: 1882), 25–26; Parrino, Napoli Città Nobilissima, vol. I (1700), 53; Maria Di Sant’Anna, Aggiunte all’Istoria, 23; Caracciolo, Napoli Sacra, 181–182. St John the Baptist’s blood was conserved with a piece of bone from his head in the female convent of Sant’Arcangelo à Bajano. After the suppression of that foundation in 1577, the nuns were redistributed between the convents of Santa Patrizia, San Gregorio Armeno, and Santa Maria Donna Romita; the blood relics were taken to San Gregorio Armeno and Donna Romita; and the bone relic went to the nuns of San Gaudioso (see Tutini, Notizie della Vita e Miracoli di due Santi Gaudiosi, l’Uno Vescovo di Bittinia, e l’altro di Salerno: e del Martirio di S. Fortunata, e Fratelli, e del loro culto, e veneratione in Napoli. Raccolte per D. Camillo Tutini Napolitano. Et data in luce ad istanza della Rever. Archiabbadessa & Monache di S. Gaudioso (Naples: Ottavio Beltrano, 1634), 66). The blood of St Nicola di Tolentino was noted as miraculous by Gio. Antonio Summonte in 1675; see G. A. Summonte, Historia della Città, e Regno di Napoli … ove si trattano le cose piv notabili accadute dalla sua Edificatione fin’ à tempi nostri (Naples: Gio. Iacono Carlino, 1601), 289. According to tradition, the blood   2

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including Andrea Avellino, was accredited with this miraculous capacity.4 It was as if the city itself had the effect of producing this special quality in its bood relics. ‘The city of Naples abounds in the blood of many glorious martyrs, not because they were martyred there, but because they are conserved in churches there to the great glory and honour of this city’, writes Camillo Tutini in 1633.5 Thus while in baroque Rome artists and intellectuals explored the relationships between sanctity and place through martyrdom and burial, in Naples the shed blood of saints assumed a role detached from the place of martyrdom or even the place of burial to articulate a special relationship with the city through its miraculous transformation at critical junctures. Naples’ saintly bloods were prodigiously rivalrous. St John the Baptist’s blood, conserved at the monasteries of San Giovanni a Carbonara, San Gregorio Armeno, and Santa Maria Donnarómita, was particularly celebrated in Naples, second only to San Gennaro’s, until its decline in the later seventeenth century. Liquefactions regularly occurred on the feast of St John the relic of St Pantaleon of Nicomedia, who, like Gennaro, was martyred in 305 under Diocletian, was translated from Naples to Madrid by Viceroy Juan de Zuñiga, Count of Miranda, at the end of the sixteenth century or by his daughter, first abbess of the convent of the Encarnacion in Madrid, founded by Queen Margaret of Austria in 1611, where the miraculous liquefaction occurs. In his chronicle of 1552–96 the Jesuit Giovan Francesco Araldo lists the blood of eight saints in Naples (San Gennaro, St John the Baptist, St Stephen, St Bartholomew, St Lawrence, St Francis of Assisi, San Nicola di Tolentino, and St Patricia) (see Marino, Becoming Neapolitan, 204). Baronius reports that after Gregory XIII’s reform of the calendar, St Stephen’s blood, which habitually liquefied on the feast of its inventio, followed the new calendar, thereby indicating its approval of the papal decree. For the ampoules of blood of St Stephen brought from Naples to San Gaudioso in Naples, see Tutini, Notizie della Vita e Miracoli di due Santi Gaudiosi, 56–63. In addition, Naples boasted miraculous liquids other than blood, most notably the liquefying milk of the Virgin, a relic bestowed on the church of San Luigi by Cardinal Granville during his viceregency. Capaccio, Descrittione della Padronanza di S. Francesco di Paola, 54–55.   4 Among the miraculous blood of would-be saints, that of the Theatine father Andrea Avellino was found to boil and foam in front of witnesses eight days after his death (G. B. Castaldo, Della Vita del Padre Don Andrea Avellino Chierico Regolare. Breve Relatione del P. D. Gio. Bat.a Castaldo Della stessa Religione. Alla Ser.ma Infanta Donna Isabella di Savoia Principessa di Modona (Naples: Gio: Domenico Roncagliolo, 1613), 183–184). The surgeon Giulio Insoleno cut the venerable’s right ear and filled two ampoules, which were kept in the sacristy of San Paolo Maggiore, the Theatine church in Naples. The miracle was first verified on 10 November 1612 when the Princess of Stigliano, Isabella Gonzaga, went to see the state of the blood and found it to be part solid and part liquid. Thereafter the miracle recurred annually. Sallmann, Santi barocchi, 390. As is recorded in the Processo di beatificazione, the ampoules containing his blood kept in the convent of Sant’Andrea in Naples began miraculously to emit a sweet smell in November 1616 at the opening of the process for his beatification and filled the entire convent with the sweet smell. Sallmann, Santi barocchi, 388.   5 Tutini, Memorie (1710), 102.

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Baptist (23–24 June), until the 1670s one of Naples’ most important feasts.6 Like San Gennaro’s blood, the Baptist’s would deliquesce in thrall to threat or feast and also when placed in contact with part of the saint’s own body. Thus when a relic of his blood was translated in 1577 to the convent of Santa Maria Donnarómita his blood made ‘prodigious liquefactions’, thereby bestowing the sign of divine approval on the translation.7 Capaccio reports that each time that vial of blood at Donnarómita was brought into contact with the reliquary of the saint’s rib, the blood would run liquid.8 And his blood conserved by the nuns of San Gregorio Armeno unclotted annually on the vigil of the feast of his decollation to great devotional acclaim. The convent of Santa Patrizia (SP in Plate 46) was fortunate enough to possess two miraculous bloods – of St Patricia and St Bartholomew. When St  Bartholomew’s blood and skin were brought together, the blood would liquefy.9 The convent also owned one of St Patricia’s molar teeth and two ampoules of blood that gushed from her body when, a century after her death, a Roman knight tried to extract a tooth. When tooth and blood were close, the latter would revitalize, grow red, liquefy, and boil. This occurred every Friday all year round, and ‘when the sacrifice of St Patricia was offered at her own altar’ the blood could be seen ‘distilling into fluid droplets, and then once again setting hard’.10 How the convent exploited its relics to advance the cause of St Patricia and its own institutional interests is explored below in Chapter 8. Important though these liquefactions were, none occurred with the regularity or surrounded by the sort of flamboyant cult as that of San Gennaro. He started ahead of Naples’ other bloody saints, and the building of the Treasury Chapel hugely accelerated his lead. In its transformation, Gennaro’s miracle bore witness to the martyr and witnessed the martyr’s witness in favour of Naples; while to witness it was to be changed. Indeed, the relationship between head and blood worked like a St John’s Day assumed direct political significance with the municipal statutes of 1522. They show that the officers of the Santissima Annunziata and the investiture of the Eletto del Popolo took place on the feast. For the feast and its entwining with viceregal rule, see Marino, Becoming Neapolitan, 67, 92–93, 203–227. For the feast’s decline, see V. Petrarca, La festa di San Giovanni Battista a Napoli nella prima metà del Seicento: percorso macchine immagine scrittura, Quaderni del Servizio Musografico della Facoltà di lettere e filosofia dell’Università di Palermo 4 (Palermo: STASS, 1986), 20–25.   7 Marino, Becoming Neapolitan, 204. The prodigies of 1580 and 1581 were also reported as remarkable. Sodano, ‘Sangue vivo’, 309 n. 66.   8 ‘Ogni volta che’l sangue di quel santo s’incontra con la Costa dell’istessa Reliquia che in detto loco si conserva, fa l’istesso effetto che fa il sangue del glorioso S. Gennaro.’ Capaccio, Il forastiero, 990.   9 Caracciolo, Napoli Sacra, 181–182.  10 Maria di Sant’Anna, Aggiunte all’Istoria, 23.

  6

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metaphor for the power of witnessing. The visibility of sight and its sensational effects were intrinsic to the miracle. Gennaro’s miracle, then, stages the significance of witness, particularly ocular witness, to the miraculous. The drawing together of head and blood staged the sight of sight itself, which, through the miracle, was seen to be transformative. Paintings in the chapel take as their theme transformational processes, such as Gennaro’s miraculous restoration of sight to Timotheo, from whom he had deprived it (Fig. 68), and Gennaro’s healing of a possessed woman (Fig. 38). If the relationship between head and blood visibilized the power of witnessing, the chapel activates this witnessing, this seeing and the sight – almost the sight of sight itself, the work of witnessing. The restoration of sight parallels that which Gennaro accomplished for and at the expense of Timotheo, who had first to be deprived of sight in order to be transformed into a witness of San Gennaro’s restoration of that same sight. As Derrida has emphasized, blindness is first and foremost the very experience of sacrifice in general, including from the side of the sacrificer.11 Sacrifice in the moment proper to it makes one blind, both choosing and chosen (and its effect on the place proper to it is analogous). The sacrificer who is blind is therefore blinded as a punishment. The blow that makes Timotheo lose his sight and the blow that decapitated Gennaro inscribe sacrifice into the economy of a kind of justice.12 In relation to martyrdom and therefore to witnessing, blindness is the price to pay for one who must finally open his eyes, or someone else’s eyes, in order to gain access to a spiritual light. But in tandem with such emphasis on sight and seeing, blinding and blindness, is the very difficulty of seeing blood relic or miracle. Usually shut away, locked out of sight, accessible only under double key, the blood encased in cloudy glass, even when brought out, even when held aloft, is hard to see. Even as the miracle must be seen, the witness is blind. Even while the miracle lies in that beholding, the seeing, the making to see, the witness cannot show, see, and speak, and attest at the same time. No authentification can show what the witness sees – or, better, has seen. In the making to see lies the remaking of the one who sees and the remaking of place. Spirit level miracle

While baroque accounts of the prodigy of San Gennaro and its effects tend to remain choked and at one remove, Teofilo Basile’s Del sangue m ­ iracoloso del J. Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. P.-A. Brault and M. Naas (Paris: Louvre, 1993), 100.  12 Here San Gennaro imitates St Paul’s striking Elymas with blindness. The punishment of Elymas restores to the proconsul the faith from which the magician had tried to turn him away. See Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, 104.  11

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Gloriosissimo S. Giovan Battista does something quite remarkable. Apparently written at full emotional throttle by the Roman Celestine monk and published in Naples in 1649, it is dedicated to the Abbess and nuns of San Gregorio Armeno, in whose keeping the relics lay. Basile’s text is fascinating in tone and detail and offers a remarkable account of material affect.13 It is worth attending to at length, as Basile skilfully leads his reader into vivid proximity with his encounter with the divine. Basile’s supposedly chance brush with the miraculously liquefying blood of St John the Baptist in the sweltering streets of Naples opens up the relationship between miracle, witness, materiality, and affect: On the 27th of the most fervent month of the year, seeing an uproarious gathering, I asked a man what caused such a crowd and he replied that it was the miracle of St John the Baptist, that is wont from the vigil of his Decollation to liquefy, resuming (once the feast was over) its erstwhile hardness. I, who profess a devotion beyond the ordinary for the saint, in hearing something I’d never heard before, nor seen, was filled with tender and reverent joyfulness [riverente allegrezza], which pressing on my heart, expressed a few little tears from my eyes.14

Surprise is key: the miracle cannot be anticipated or planned for. The witness must be taken aback. Of concern here is the thinking of materiality in affective terms: [I entered] the Temple, which the noble and rich apparato that left no part uncovered by its cloth [specially] cut to measure, and the sweetest music, that vied with the harmony of the celestial spheres, which the perfumes that Arabia had brought here, which the multitude of lights, that flickering there like

According to Carlo Celano in 1692, the feast of St John the Baptist, increasingly associated with the popolo, and without real support of the clergy, had been by that point fragmented and weak for about twenty years. For a rich account of the causes of the brief flowering and subsequent decline of the feast of St John the Baptist in seventeenth-century Naples, see Petrarca, La festa di San Govanni Battista, esp. 23.  14 ‘era il miracolo di S Giovanbattista, che dalla viglia della sua Decollazione si da à liquefarsi, ripigliando (terminata la festa) la primiera direzza. Io, che al santo professo divozione non ordinaria, nell’udior cosa da me prima non udita, ne veduta, fui ripieno di tenera, e riverente allegrezza, che premendomi il cuore, n’espresse per l’occhio qualche lagrimetta.’ T. Basile, Del Sangue Miracoloso del Gloriosissimo S. Giovan Battista Esistente nel Bello e Divoto Tempio di santo Ligorio di Napoli. Discorso del Padre D. Teofilo Basile ROMANO, Monaco Celestino. Alla Reverendiss Sig. ra Madre Badessa D. Silvia della Marra. Et a tutte le MM. RR. Sig.re Monache del Nobiliss. Monastero di santo Ligoro (Naples: Secondino Roncagliolo, 1649), 2. I am much indebted to Mary Pardo for her inspired assistance with translating Basile’s text.  13

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stars, caused me to see as like a little Empyrean, or like that holy and new City descended from heaven, and adorned by God for her spouse.15

Just as the relic enhanced the church, so the adornment of the church was more than mere setting for the event. The temporary apparato, complete with hangings, music, odours, and lights, transformed the church into a little Empyrean or, indeed, a new Jerusalem, far beyond a passive architectural ‘setting’. Thus the event dislocated the church, lifted it elsewhere, to a marvellous metaphoric place. Within one highly wrought interior, out came the Baptist’s blood, in its reliquary, also highly wrought. Basile describes the reliquary, of which survives an altered descendant (Fig. 35), noting its architectural metonymics: I saw an artful little machine [reliquary] [macchinetta] whose form resembled a tribune. The material of which it was composed was pure silver, inset with jewels, and strewn with precious stones: from its sides there projected stumps of the same metal, that joined with various little flowers also of silver to form a handle, and [fashioned] a rich garland around the sacred relic. In the centre of [this] beautiful work was a small rock crystal [cristalletto] in the form of a column, and in the centre of the crystal a little piece of the blood of that [man], greatest among men born of Women, blood bowed to by Kings and adored by Monarchs.16

The reliquary today (Fig. 35) holds the blood in a column, mainstay of architectural order and support. Paradoxically that column is tiny and is itself tightly contained: displayed like an ostensory, it is yet sealed within a crystal window and encircled with rings of silver, and crystal and silver adornments. This little shrine was fashioned from silver, crystal, and gems, materials associated with purity, refinement, and the sacred.17 The term Basile uses for the ‘Entra nel Tempio, che’l nobile, e ricco apparato, che luogo non lasciava non coverto dal suo drappo tagliatovi à misura, la soavissima musica, che gareggiava con l’armonia delle celeste sfere, gli odori, che quivi l’Arabia havea portati, la moltitudine de’ lumi, che vi stellificavano me lo fecero vedere simile à picciolo Empireo, ò à quella santa e nuova Città del Cielo discesa, e da Iddio ornata al suo Sposo.’ Basile, Del Sangue Miracoloso, 2.  16 ‘Viddí artificiosa machinetta, che la forma esprimea di Tribuna. La materia, di cui si componea, era di puro argento, intersiato di gioie, e tempestato di pietre preziose: da’ fianchi spiccavasi troncono dello stesso metallo, che à vari fioretti pur d’argento faceano mano, & alla sacra Reliquia ricca ghirlanda intorno. Nel centro della bell’opera era un cristalletto in forma di colonna, e nel centro del cristallo un pezzetto di sangue di quel Nato maggiore tra i nati delle Donne, Sangue inchinato da’ Regi, & adorato da’ Monarchi.’ Basile, Del Sangue Miracoloso, 2.  17 ‘Well do vessels of silver and crystal suit that Blood, which is nothing other than clarity and purity. Well is the form of the column given to it, to denote the steadiness that was bestowed on John by divine grace, and as a sign of the perpetuity of his passion towards [love for] infinite Goodness, or also to demonstrate the fortitude in his glorious breast  15

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reliquary, macchinetta, denotes a little machine or apparatus, and evokes the macchine and apparati of feast days. That is, it was a composite object of transformational potential and formal complexity, ‘a transcendental addressing machine’.18 Indeed, it was a little machine that worked in machinic conjunction with the larger architectural machine of the church, transformed in its splendid festival apparato, together with the gathered excitable crowd to encompass something unencompassable. Slowly the blood transformed, but the impact on its witness is abrupt, shocking and profound: The crystal was turned upside down so that the miracle could be more clearly seen. That purest blood had already begun to shed its hardness, was assuming the appearance of soft gum, and moving towards the centre of the container, whence suddenly with a tremor of reverence I apprehended the miracle.19

But the miracle is also interrupted, discontinuous, fraught with tension and frustration: But because the holy Blood was tardy, weighty, and majestic in its resolution, and in its movement, it would not fully occupy its container until twenty-four hours had elapsed, and [as] I was called away for other religious matters, with extreme displeasure I was constrained to deprive myself of that consolation, determining to return there the following day, which was the feast of the Decollation.20

Filled with longing, Basile returned at vespers: At the hour of vespers, I returned to that most yearned-for vision, and I found the Blood that for a thousand and many hundreds of years had been in the presence of tyrants, by whose will he would rather be crushed than bend.’ (‘Ben si sonvengono vasi d’argento, e di cristallo à quel Sangue, che non à, che chiarezza, e purità. Ben se gli deve forma di colonna, per dinotarsi la fermezza che fu in Giovanni della grazia Divina, & in segno della perpetuità degl’affettti suoi verso l’inifinita Bontà, o pur per dimostrarsi la fortezza del di lui glorioso petto alla presenza de’ tiranni, à cui vuoti vole essere più tosto infranto, che piegatò.’) Basile, Del Sangue Miracoloso, 2.  18 The phrase is from J. Derrida, Acts of Religion, ed. and with an introduction by G. Anidjar (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 64.  19 ‘Era il cristallo rivolto sossopra à fin più chiaro spiccasse il miracolo. Havea già quel purissimo Sangue esordiato à spogliarsi della durezza, & in forma di molle gomma compariva, ch’al centro del vase s’inviava, ond’io subbito il miracolo con riverente tremore appresí.’ Basile, Del Sangue Miracoloso, 4.  20 ‘Ma perché il sacro Sangue era tardo, grave, e maestoso nella risoluzione, e nel moto, non occupando intieramente il suo continente per meno dello spazio di vintiquattro hore, ed io ero da altri religioso affari chiamato, con estremo dispiacere costretto fui à privarmi di quella consolazione, determinandovi nel seguente giorno, che’era il festivo della Decollazione, il mio ritorno.’ Basile, Del Sangue Miracoloso, 5.

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separated from his veins, and detached from his limbs, and that left to the laws of nature should not have demonstrated any properties beyond those of earth or stone, I found [it], I tell you, softened, liquefied, and dilated throughout its container.21

In its feverish, shape-shifting registers, Basile’s account nicely matches its subject. For him, access to God was a soteriological and ontological matter: how could the unchangeable and omnipotent meet humanity and how could humanity encounter it? How might the eternal reside in time and matter? Sweat and blood, silver, rock crystal, gems, and anxious worshippers were brought together in an assemblage with midsummer heat, the dark clamminess of the church interior adorned with magnificent apparati, music, candlelight, the smell of wax and bodies, sharp inhalations of awe, and fear in the miraculous machinic event. That event turned his world upside down. The compelling attraction and transformative qualities of the miracle run parallel to its effects. Subject and object divisions are dissolved. It engenders yearning for contact, closeness, a sense of wholeness restored. The working of the miracle on the blood has a corresponding working on its witness. To witness is to be changed. To witness is to enter into an unending process, which requires constant repetition and renewal. To witness is to lose sense through the senses, the point where what one sees and senses disrupts and disempowers all sense of sense. Basile continues: ‘I was left deprived of my senses, stupefied, and almost immobilized. My heart, clamorous, spoke: ‘O my God, you are marvellous in all your works; but in your saints you bring the finest wonders to light, What do I see now, or rather what do I not see?’22 A ready response to such an account is to describe it as an affective response to a miraculous transformation of matter (and on the whole, it is in those sort of representational terms that emotion is currently treated within art history in relation to both art and religion). However, that sort of interpretation of affect as representation – that is, an emotion is experienced and is then represented, textually, or visually – is inadequate to address the complex implication of affect and materiality in relation to the miracle. Instead, the question is, how is materiality implicated affectively in the miracle? Not ‘Giunta l’hora del Vespero, ritornai alla desideratissima visione, e trovai il Sangue da mille, e tante centinaia d’anni spiccato dalle sue vene, e separato dalle membra, e che lasciato alle leggi della natura, non dovria mostrare altre condizioni, che di terra, o sasso, lo trovai, dico, ammollito, liquefatto, e per tutto il continente dilatato.’ Basile, Del Sangue Miracoloso, 5.  22 ‘Rimasi privo de’ sensi, stupido, e quasi immobilito. Voscifero il mio cuore, e disse: O mio Iddio, voi mirabile sete in tutte l’opere vostre, ma ne’ santi vostri fate rilucere le maraviglie più fine, Che veggo hor io, anzi che non veggo?’ Basile, Del Sangue Miracoloso, 5.  21

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in the sense of technique, virtuosity, or fixed ‘function’ of a stable object, but in productive terms in which materiality exceeds the literal object, in which matter may work analogously, extensively, and intensively to permit a potentiality that is material, but that is more than merely matter.23 This requires the consideration of the intersection of affect, matter, materiality, and artistic invention without presupposing that any of these terms is stable. In Basile’s account, the compelling attraction and transformative qualities of the miracle run parallel to its effects. Subject and object divisions are dissolved. Yearning is resolved in contact, closeness, and a sense of wholeness. The working of the miracle on the blood has a corresponding working on its witness: Even in death, I said, the blood of Christ’s Precursor wants to move itself, and to run before, and if it already has gone before exclaiming ‘Make ready for the coming of the incarnate Word as flesh’; now perhaps it runs through the crystal preaching ‘Make ready for the second coming to judgement’, and cries out for penitence, and purity.24

To witness is to be changed. To witness is to enter into an unending process that requires constant repetition and renewal. To witness is to lose sense through the senses, the point where what one sees and senses disrupts and disempowers all sense of sense. One’s very being is transformed in a manner alien to sense. To be deprived of one’s senses is effectively to die, to be dead. Seeing the miracle deprived Basile of his senses. It was a sight that was at once both more and less than seeing allowed and that permitted less and more than sight. He wonderfully evokes the displacement at the heart of the miracle and its witnessing. Derrida argues that blindness is first and foremost the very experience of sacrifice in general, including on the side of the sacrificer. Or the opposite: ‘one no longer sees because one sees far too well’.25 Deprived of his senses and almost immobilized, Basile is virtually shut down, while his heart, opened up, is animated and endowed with visionary and enunciatory capacity. Yet what his heart sees and that of which it is capable of speaking remain confused, veiled, intensely paradoxical: ‘What do I see now, or rather what do I not see?’ Here in a transfusion between theological and corporeal language, Basile indicates that seeing the miracle is at once to see everything and nothing. There is an abyssal paradox at its heart. There is nothing that the miracle See Benjamin, ‘Plans to Matter’, 13–28. ‘Anche morto, dissi, il sangue del Precursore di Christo vuol muoversi, e precorrere, e se già precorse esclamando apprecchi, alla venuta del Verbo in carne; hor forse corre per il cristallo predicando apparecchi per la seconda venuta al giudizio, e grida penitenza, e purità.’ Basile, Del Sangue Miraculoso, 4–5.  25 Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, 100.  23  24

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does not show, nothing that cannot be seen, even as seeing becomes occluded and nothing is seen. Thus Basile sees and does not see; sees everything even as he sees nothing: ‘what do I not see?’ The miracle brings a form of blindness.26 Yet simultaneously the miracle affords the witness access to a vaster stage. Thus Basile refers to ‘a universe of wonders’: ‘[A] little ampoule shows me in a concentrated form the universe of wonders’. The blood is at once synecdoche for the body and life of the baptism and microcosm of the world. Such a traumatic encounter is made possible through the saint’s charity, through his readiness to suffer again: I believe that the stimulus of the most intense Charity, which still lives in that most spirited Blood, recalls it in that hour at the final turn of the year to die again, to shed itself anew, and to renew his death for that highest truth and justice, on whose behalf he in another time acted. Thence perhaps it is reanimated, and further rekindles.27

Affective engagement works on both sides of the glass. The miracle bears witness to the saint’s willingness to suffer again; and that testimony to sacrifice demands its new witnesses to bear witness in the profoundest sense, to make their amends: Rather like a ball of empirical heat, it seems that with a nice prosopopeia [the most intense Charity that still lives in that most spirited Blood] says: I was already once drained from the veins and shed [sparso] in witness to that first Truth that I adore: but I do not feel satisfied on that account. I would like to join again with my veins, with my body, and be reimprisoned anew, and [thus] to requalify for martyrdom’s suffering. I would wish to see in myself the torments multiplied, and the shedding equal to the atoms of my blood: but since this is not permitted me, I will enjoy remaining imprisoned in this receptacle until the end of time. Thus there will always live the memory of my testimony, and of that fire, of which I was always the burning soul.28 In this respect, Gennaro’s striking of Timotheo blind – recalling St Paul’s striking Elymas with blindness – and his restoration of his sight depicted in the Treasury Chapel’s frescoes allude to this aspect of the miraculous.  27 ‘Io credo, che lo stimolo dell’intensissima Carità, che ancor vive in quello spiritosissimo Sangue, lo richiami in quell’hora della terminante rota dell’anno à rimorire, à diffondersi di nuovo, & à rinovare la morte per quella somma verità, e giustizia, per cui altra fiata vi si condusse. Indi forse si risente, e vi è più s’accende.’ Basile, Del Sangue Miracoloso, 5.  28 ‘che lo stimolo dell’intensissima Carità, che ancor vive in quello spiritosissimo Sangue, lo richiami in quell’hora della terminante rota dell’anno à rimorire, à diffondersi di nuovo, & à rinovare la morte per quella somma verità, e giustizia, per cui altra fiata vi si condusse. Indi forse si risente, e vi è a più s’accende, a fatto simile ad un globo d’ardore empirico, pare, che con bella prosopopeia dica: Io fui già una volta svenato e sparso in testimonio di quella prima Verità, che adoro: ma non però sodisfatto mi  26

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Notable here is that blood at once both is and is not the saint. The relationship between matter and agency is at once unusually close and literal and yet also distant. The blood that yearns to be ‘reimprisoned’ and to reinhabit its body must remain instead imprisoned in the crystalline column, all the better to inflame you with, my dear. Life, palpable in the palpitating blood, has here loss inscribed into it. Loss is not here an anxious flirtation. It is present, literal, palpable: So ardent did that sacred blood appear to me, and like one of the most beautiful lamps in the firmament. The blood appeared to me to be oil, and the bloody colours its fervours, and I said to myself: O most fortunate virgins, who with your pious devotions and lofty honours [eccellsi honori] you render yourselves worthy of the possession of so precious a lamp. You do not need to fear rejection in the sudden coming of the celestial Spouse, in your hands burns the lamp of rare beauty [pel’egrina bellezza] and of inextinguishable ardour, no less than a star.29

And as blood marks passion, so colour is passion realized. Yet from there it is a short step to patriotic pride: A star so inflamed, fixed in its crystalline sphere, that it delights the eye, awakens stupor in the breast, evokes devotion in the heart, renders illustrious the beautiful temple, glorifies the most noble convent, and renders the city of Naples more famous, whence I am led to believe from the beauties, and from the marvels of that blood, that perhaps the most glorious soul of John the Baptist in that day [his feast] takes pleasure in visiting and reuniting itself with his dear blood, with that Blood that served it [the soul] as minister in the service of God, [his token of] faithfulness, and [his] pulpit for proclaiming the coming of the Word.30 sento. Vorrei riunirmi alle mie vene, al corpo mio per rincarcerarmi di nuovo, & habilitarmi alli martiri. Vorrei veder in me moltiplicati li tormenti, e l’effusioni al pari de’ miei atomi sanguigni: ma poiche ciò non mi si permette, goderò restare carcerato in questo vase infin’alla consumazione de’ secoli. Così sempre viverà la memoria della testimonianza mia, e di quel fuoco, di cui fù sempre l’anima ardente.’ Basile, Del Sangue Miracoloso, 5.  29 ‘Così ardente parvemi quel sacro sangue, & à guisa d’una lampada delle più vaghe del firmamento. Parvemi il sangue esser’olio, e i colori sanguigni gli ardori, e tra medissi: O fortunatissime Vergini, che con i vostri affetti pij, & eccellsi honori degne vi rendete del possesso di sì preziosa lampana. Non havete da temere ripulse nell’improvisa venuta del celeste Sposo, arde nelle vostre mani lampana di pel’egrina bellezza e  d’inestinguibile ardore, non men che una stella.’ Basile, Del Sangue Miracoloso, 5. Thus the blood confers honour on the nuns who conserve it. Their devotion renders them worthy of it. See also Chapter 8 below.  30 ‘Stella sì infocata fissa nella sua cristillina sfera, che diletta l’occhio, desta stupore nel petto, chiama divozione nel cuore, illustra il bel tempio, glorifica il nobilissimo

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Basile implies that the Baptist delights in returning to Naples, to celebrate the city, just as the reputation of his blood is seen to resound to the glory of the place, both convent and city, to enhance both. Thus the blood miracle and its effects are less described than produced. Like the miracle its effects take place and place is not secondary to them. They engage and undermine and enhance the idea and place of place (convent and city). Thus lives on that day the most holy Blood of John the Baptist, and it speaks, and it laments. All those movements are words, [and] those boilings and rarefactions are lamentations. And how could it not lament? [E come non deve lamentarsi?] In wanting as he did souls to be reconciled with justice and with reason, was it necessary for the divine precursor’s head to be severed from his body?31

Shed blood frees. The blood cries out and laments. A wail of regret and loss lies at the heart of an extended promise of possibility. Linear time is ruptured. A death can occur again for the first time. Lost blood indicates the way of the martyr not back to his own body but marked it out in others to come. Thus its movement marks the connection of what has been and what is to come, not as the same, but as difference. Colour is matter. It does not come after. Redness does not inform the blood. It is life and passion. It is substance and affect. And the sparkle of the reliquary crystal is the crystalline sparkle of heaven: They are not ordinary beauties, those of that most sacred Blood on that day. To say that it seems like a dissolved vermilion rose, or like a ruby ground into a balm, able to enhance the sun’s purple, and [add] loveliness to the Dawn, are comparisons too vile. The eye could swear that it saw mixed in it the subtlest lights, and the most minute splendours, perhaps reverberations of that most blessed soul that reunites with his blood, and courses through that crystal, adumbrating the joyful walks that it enjoys through the immortal crystals of the heavens.32 Monastero, e rende più famosa la Città di Napoli, onde à credere son portato dalle bellezze, e dalle maraviglie di quel sangue, che forse l’anima gloriossissima di Giovanbattista in tal giorno si compiaccia di visiatre, e di riunirsi col sangue caro, con quel Sangue, che le fu ministro al servigio d’Iddio, fede, e pulpito per proclamare la venuta del Verbo.’ Basile, Del Sangue Miracoloso, 6.  31 ‘Così vive in quel giorno il santissimo Sangue di Giovanbattista, e parla, e si lamenta. Sono parole tutti que’ moti, sono lamenti que’ bollori, e quelle rarefazioni. E come non deve lamentarsi? Dunque per volere il divino Precursore comporre con la giustizia, e con la ragione l’anime, scomporre doveasi à lui il capo dal busto?’ Basile, Del Sangue Miracoloso, 5–6.  32 ‘Non sono bellezze ordinarie quelle di quel sacratissimo Sangue in tal giorno. Il dire, che si vegga come rosa vermiglia distemperata, ò come rubbino machinato à balsamo

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The incoherence and unintelligibility of the event in terms of everyday experience open the possibility of seeing differently, even as they do not guarantee it. Above all, the literal is exiled. Yet a facility to make sense of what disrupts sense also informs this account. Materials communicate directly and are intelligible. Colour works as fervour, sight as sensation; blood caught long ago, entrapped in a crystal case, signals the angelic presence of the Baptist. The ‘where’ (usually contingent) and ‘what’ (here distinctly contingent) become one, elided in a vermilion transformative truth. Yet even as the worshipper and witness is changed, the truth cleaves not to her, but to the blood. There it rises and descends. And what are these, if not angelic movements, as we are taught by Jacob’s ladder? And what other motions can issue from him, who was Angel incarnate, sent by God to sow heavenly virtue on earth?33

Blood frees from the name. ‘In a cinder of words’, Derrida writes, ‘in the cinder of a name, the cinder itself, the literal – that which he loves – has disappeared.’34 The instant a name is used, it stands in place of, obliterates, burns the real, whose identity is called to witness. The blood freed from the body allows essence not to be obliterated by identity. The blood might be seen as a material marking, a refusal to satisfy the question of who or why or what – indeed, a means to trouble the assumptions that prompt those very questions. Thus the blood permits materially the very witness of witness. Blood, distinction, and purification

Basile’s account is notably asocial. Once he has pushed through the unexpected throng, he is as if alone with the Baptist’s blood. The spiritual encounter occurs between him and blood in a close and privileged intimacy (albeit interrupted, frustrated, filled with yearning and loss), alone. The miracle is divorced from the social. Indeed, it separates. By contrast, San Gennaro’s miracle was notably socially and politically aware. Most of its extraordinary liquefactions occurred in the presence of the  great and the good (or, at least, this is the line spun by the Register of potente ad accrescere porpora al Sole, e vaghezza all’Aurora, sono troppo vili paragoni. Potrebbe giurar l’occhio di vedervi mescolati sottilissimi lumi, e minutissimi splendori, forse riverberi di quell’anima beatissima, che col suo sangue si riunisce, e cammina per quel cristallo, additando i giocondi passeggi, ch’essa gode per l’immortali cristalli de’ Cieli.’ Basile, Del Sangue Miracoloso, 6.  33 ‘Sale ivi, e scende. E che son questi, se non movimenti Angelici, come la scala di Giacobbe n’insegna? E che altri moti uscir possono da quello, che fù Angiolo in carne, da Iddio mandato a seminar virtù di Cielo in terra?’ Basile, Del Sangue Miracoloso, 6.  34 J. Derrida, Cinders (Posthumanities), trans. N. Lukacher (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), 49.

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Miracles). And sheer masses of ordinary people also might sway the saint. The regularity of his feast dates which made likely the miraculous event meant that its occurrence or non-occurrence was readily witnessed by leading figures of the city and beyond. On each occasion, an expectant throng enhanced the miracle and its portentous effects (Figs 2 & 4). Excited Treasurers not infrequently noted in the ‘Register of Miracles’ the presence of ‘an infinite’ number of ordinary people.35 Thus witnesses high, low, and in impressive number were part of a galvanizing of authority for the miracle. Witnesses received small gifts, images of San Gennaro, signs of the miracle, to take away with them, to spread the message and reputation of the prodigy. Even witnessing was materialized. The miracle was seen to bestow its favours more willingly on the powerful. These were the people of substance, those who mattered and in whose presence matter was made to matter. The divine had an eye for class. The Register of Miracles records the status of the more significant witnesses to each miracle, such as cavalieri (knights), religiosi (religious), and devoti (the devout), and it scrupulously attests to the presence of illustrious personages, including visiting dignitaries, the viceroy, and the Archbishop of Naples. Their witnessing carried more weight. In operating his miracle San Gennaro was not only prodigious, but prodigal, especially when powerful people were involved. The blood performed special liquefactions for eminent visitors, publicly affirming them in the eyes of God. Thus, for example, it liquefied on 7 January 1656 for a visit by the Viceroy of Sicily, and in 1630 Maria of Austria, Queen of Bohemia and Hungary, greatly moved by seeing it once before, returned and was blessed with a second chance. On the occasion of a visit by Cardinal Orsini (Benedict XIII) on 31 January 1687, the blood was found liquid surrounding an obdurate ball; after Mass, it was ‘almost liquid’: special events for a special visitor. When Cardinal Giudice came to see the glorious blood, he was received by the deputies, a special carpet was laid for him, and he was rewarded by the miracle’s occurrence and presented with a print of San Gennaro and a bunch of flowers.36 In gifts the deputies merged their respect with the blood’s response. More than permanent or temporary tokens of the saint’s blessings, these gifts marked the deputies’ recognition of the recognition of his honour that also hallowed them. St Augustine insisted that miracles occur in order for the holy story to be Thus on 12 May 1691, the blood liquefied in front of ‘an infinite crowd of people’ (‘un infinito popolo’). ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc. 83 bis n. 1), fol. 116v.  36 ‘Ed in detto giorno fu a visitare d.o glorioso Sangue l’Emo Sigr Cardinale Giudice, e se li diede strato, figura di S. Gennaro, e grambaglietto, e fu ricevuto dall’Illri Sig.i Deputati del tesoro.’ 11 May 1690, ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc. 83 bis n. 1), fol. 112v. I am grateful to Alessandra Pompili for her assistance with interpreting this document.  35

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spread: high social standing expedited the propagation of the blood’s reputation locally, nationally, and internationally.37 The miracle thus affirmed social prestige, and by appearing to powerful figures, it made itself more widely known. Important personages had the capacity to ensure that the miracle would be recorded and news of it spread. As St Augustine remarked about comparable circumstances with regard to the necessity of making miracles known: ‘So great a city, so great a person in the city cannot lie unknown to any that are inquisitive.’38 More than simply upholding the authority of social elites, miracles produced it. In his discussion of miracles in De civitate Dei Augustine’s chief concern lies with their advertisement while also avoiding their becoming hostages to fortune. He treats them as events around which great care is necessary to ensure that they are taken seriously (in order to procure the world’s belief in Christ): This I say to silence fools: for we cannot deny that the miraculous ascension of Christ in the flesh was ratified unto us by the power of many other miracles. The scriptures do both relate them, and the end where unto they tended. They were written to work faith in men, and the faith they wrought has made them far more famous. They are read to induce the people to believe, and yet would not be read unless they are believed. And as for miracles, there are some wrought even now in His name, partly by the sacraments, partly by the commemorations and prayers of the saints; but they are not so famous, nor so glorious as the other; for the scriptures which were to be divulged in all places have given lustre to the first, in the knowledge of all nations, whereas the latter are only known unto the cities where they are done, or some regions about them. And generally, there are few that know them even there, and many that do not, if the city be great; and when they relate them to others, they are not believed so fully and so absolutely as the others, although they be declared by one Christian to another.39

Just as the public recognition of the saint lay in his miracles, so his miracles had to be divulged to the greatest possible audience. Witnessing alone was not enough. Witness also had to be witnessed. But an important shift had occurred. For St Augustine all miracles refer back to the miracles of Christ: ‘And what does all this multitude of miracles do, but confirm that faith which holds that Christ rose again in the flesh, and so ascended into heaven? For the martyrs were all martyrs, that is, witnesses of this; and for this they suffered the malice of the cruel world, which they Augustine, The City of God, bk 22, cap. 8, 366. Augustine, The City of God, bk 22, cap. 9, 373.  39 Augustine, The City of God, bk 22, cap. 8, 366.  37  38

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never resisted, but subdued by suffering.’40 The baroque San Gennaro did not work along the lines indicated by St Augustine: his miracle, although evocative of Christ’s sacrifice, was interpreted in autonomous terms by early modern witnesses and was not directly linked to Christ in the way advocated by St Augustine. Indeed, baroque patron saints were treated as having greater autonomy than their predecessors. For Augustine, Christ’s miracles, recounted in the Scriptures, remained of incomparable worth and were unmatched by more recent miracles. But the baroque miracle left Christ in the shadows. It served to distinguish place and affirm the future through the material saintly body, usually with only the briefest reference to Christ or the most cursory mention of God, and often with none at all. Salvation was sought less through the transcendent than within miraculous matter. The kiss of august lips could be transformative. Because of heavy rain, the procession of the ‘feast of Vesuvius’ on 16 December 1692 took place inside the Cathedral. The blood remained hard. But ‘after the service, the Cardinal took up the said glorious Blood to let the Viceroy kiss it, and in this act it began to liquefy, and when it was returned to the Treasury all of that glorious Blood finished liquefying.’41 It is as if the exchange between Cardinal and Viceroy, or the touch of the Viceroy’s lips, set the miracle in motion on this occasion. And here it is important to note that this is one of many examples of the way in which the miracle and the viceregal authority in Naples were skilfully drawn together.42 Diana Carrió-Invernizzi has persuasively argued that the viceroys’ growing involvement in the feasts of San Gennaro, Corpus Domini, and San Giovanni a Mare in Naples formed part of a strategy of legitimation of Spanish power in Italy.43 And, indeed, allegiance between the miracle and the viceregency increased notably during the seventeenth century. Viceroy and Vicereine were frequently granted special access to the miracle, which, in turn, generally proved to be especially responsive to their presence in the Treasury Chapel. Soon after the Spanish recovered control of Naples following Masaniello’s revolt, the miracle worked to confirm Spanish and archiepiscopal power. On 14 May 1648, on his way to an important appointment with the Archbishop, the Viceroy arrived in the Cathedral at ten o’clock at night, Augustine, The City of God, bk 22, cap. 9, 375. ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc. 83 bis n. 1), fols 121v–122r.  42 The Count of Monterrey’s involvement with the Treasury Chapel predated his tenure as Viceroy. The Deputies petitioned him in Rome while he was ambassador of Spain at the Holy See for his assistance in securing Domenichino to decorate the chapel. ATSG, DA/9 (60-1588), fols 413r and 415r.  43 D. Carrió-Invernizzi, El gobierno da las imàgenes: ceremonial y mecenazgo en la Italia española de la segunda mitad del siglo XVII Madrid (Frankfurt am Main: Vervuet, 2007), 392–393.  40  41

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and ‘went to pray to the saint in the prepared area [strato preparato] near his chapel at the crossing of the Cathedral; then he went to the Treasury where he saw and kissed the blood of San Gennaro, whereupon the miracle occurred in his presence’; and thence he went on to visit the Archbishop.44 Thus the saint endorsed the old alliance of Church and Spanish monarchy, while lending a new charismatic divine napolitaneità to their hold. An especially close relationship developed between the miracle and viceroy Pedro de Aragón and his wife Ana Fernández de Córdoba y Figuerra. Thus on Shrove Tuesday 1667, the Vicereine saw the blood run from solid to liquid; again on 5 April that year it liquefied during a special visit from the vicereine; and on 28 May, impelled by ‘her devotion’, she returned and again was honoured by the miracle’s occurrence.45 Again, the blood responded to a special visit from the Vicereine on 16 November 1668. It was found liquid on 17 December 1667 in the presence of her husband, Viceroy Pedro de Aragon, and on 8 January 1669 it deliquesced when he visited it specially. When he left Naples temporarily on 16 April 1667, the blood was found semi-clotted, as if signalling its displeasure, and when, on his return on 8 June 1667, he made a gift to the Treasury, the miracle responded by liquefying. It should not be forgotten that the viceroy and his wife were crucial in adorning the old Treasury Chapel in the tower near the entrance to the Cathedral for Naples’ protectors, which served to detach San Gennaro from the Carafan Succorpo chapel at the east end (Figs 6 & 8).46 While the building of the new Treasury Chapel marked yet another swerve in the patronage of the miraculous relic, this time away from the viceroy to conjure an ambitious yet less evidently mediated relationship to the city, a steady concurrence between divine blood and viceroy coloured that impetus. In part, then, Gennaro’s miracle was a sort of homage to august persons. In part, their witness of the miracle was a witness by the blood of their blood. Heavenly and earthly order seemed often in accord. Nevertheless, even the most eminent visits did not invariably secure the miracle. Thus during King Philip V’s visit in 1702, the miracle did not occur, even though the monarch remained in the chapel for the duration of no fewer than five Masses. Indeed, the miracle took place only after the King had returned to the royal palace.47 The blood remained lawless, unbiddable, defiant.

‘Andò a far orat[ion]e al sant.o nello strato preparato vicino la sua cappella nella croce della chiesa poi and ò nel Tesoro, ove vidde, e baciò il sangue di s. Gennaro facendosi il miracolo alla sua presenza.’ ASDN, ‘I Diari dei Ceremonieri della Cattedrale di Napoli’, vol. I, fol. 14r.  45 ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc. 83 bis n.1), fols 29r–30v.  46 See Chapter 5.  47 Alfano, Il miracolo di S Gennaro, 83.  44

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Change of heart: the affective miracle Whence with those meeting within the city, there occurred something wonderful and new. The blood, which for a long time had been as hard as stone, in drawing close to the holy head seemed to recognize it. And just as snow in sunshine turns liquid, or just as wax turns to foam in fire, thereby forging, with this supernatural sign, a pact with Neapolitans of his protection; imitating [thus] the highest Creator, who with a heavenly rainbow made a treaty with Noah to flood no more the universe with waters.48

As Paolo Regio’s reflections on the first encounter inside the city of Gennaro’s blood with his head show, the miracle affirmed the re-union of blood and head, and the location of that encounter. Naples mattered markedly. The blood registered pleasure to be there. The blood was affective. It conveyed analogically San Gennaro’s gratitude or pleasure, the urgency of his intercession, and even God’s wrath or mercy. Thus Parrino in 1700: [San Gennaro] has left a living testimony of his love, in his Blood, because in its liquefaction, or its hardness, it shows them signs either of the ire, or of the mercy of God; as also remaining hard at the sight of heretics; all experienced many times.49

All blood communicated mood as part of the humours, but Gennaro’s did so with particular eloquence. Its form, obdurate or mollified, hardening or soft­ ening, indicated God’s will, and revealed the feelings of the saint in heaven. In turn, that state produced affective response in the attentive devout. It was, then, affect that informed and transformed both blood and faithful. The miracle changed. Its transformation of substance both provoked and worked as material analogy and metaphor for transformations wrought beyond it. Gennaro’s blood worked causally and analogically for emotional and spiritual conversion, from false beliefs in heretics, and from sin to contrition among Catholics. In this it participated in the wider economy of relics

‘Laonde con quei incontrandosi presso la Città accadì cosa admirabile, & nuova. Imperoché il sangue; che per lo lungo tempo era come pietra indurito, in approssimarsi al santo capo, tosto lo riconobbe; & qual neve al Sole liquido, ò come cera al foco spumante divenne, facendo, forse con tal sopra natural segno, patto con Napolitani della sua protettione; imitando l’altissimo Creatore, che con l’arco celeste fè patto con Noe di non inondar l’universo più cō acque (Gen.9) per l’avvenire.’ Regio, Le Vite de’ Sette Santi Protettori, 10(A)v–10(B)r.  49 ‘e gli hà lasciato un vivo testimonio dell’amor suo, nel Sangue, perche nella liquefazione, ò durezza, loro mostra i segni ò dell’ira, ò della misericordia di Dio; come anche restando duro à vista degli Eretici; tutto più volte esperimentato’. Parrino, Napoli Città Nobilissima, vol. I (1700), 396.  48

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that worked by contagion.50 Matter gained holiness through contact with other holy matter.51 For blood also evoked flesh, death, and sinfulness.52 Bloody transformations twisted across the boundaries between sinfulness and redemption, life and death. Not only was the blood itself transformed, it in turn transformed its witnesses, softening them and offering them reassurance and comfort, as if modelling a response.53 The blood’s mollification wrought a concomitant softening in the hearts of beholders, including on occasion even some Protestants. Most often the Register records that the liquefaction conferred ‘consolation’ or ‘relief’ on its witnesses, but sometimes emotions ran higher. On 21 January 1696, for instance, when the Catholic convert Lord James Drummond, fifth Earl and second titular Duke of Perth, saw the blood liquefy after two hours’ exposition, he burst into tears ‘of tenderness’.54 Blood and convert melted and wept together. In his Treatise on Mount Vesuvius (Naples, 1632), Gianbernardino Giuliano, Segretario del Popolo Napoletano, characterizes Vesuvius as ‘weeping’, referring to its abundant production of On this essential quality of the relic, see D. Krueger, ‘The Religion of Relics in Late Antiquity and Byzantium’, in M. Bagnoli et al. (eds), Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics, and Devotion in Medieval Europe (London: The British Museum Press, 2010), 5–7.  51 Elsewhere liquefaction was entwined with conversion in Franciscan thought in particular, but not in Naples; in Naples it spread far more broadly. ‘Hora liquefacta est anima eius’, states Thomas de Celano of St Francis of Assisi’s vision of the crucifix that moved its lips, from which day forth Francis could not hold back his tears as if he continuously saw before him the vision of the Passion of Christ (Fr Thomas de Celano, ‘Vita prima’, Analecta franciscana, 10 (1926), §119, 94). St Francis’ change of heart is described in terms of a phenomenology of liquefaction, as perfusus, infusus, absorptus totus, pulsatus, compulsus, liquefactus, repletus, transformatus. For a discussion of this, see G. Didi-Huberman, ‘Un sang d’image’, Nouvelle revue de psychoanalyse, 32 (1985), 135.  52 For Bryan Turner, dead meat ‘indicates the homelessness of human kind’. B. S. Turner, The Body and Society, 2nd edn (London: Sage, 1996), xiii.  53 Accounts of saintly intervention emphasize the emotional response of the people. That bodily display of affect was sign and symptom of the protection of patronal saints. Thus Braccini in 1632 describes the Madonna dell’Arco’s affect before the eruption of Vesuvius of 1630: ‘from the shadows under those pious eyes hung two tears, like two rubies, or drops of blood … One of the Fathers said that that growing paler, reddening, and weeping of the would have been a sign of the affection with which he had placated the wrath of God against us.’ (‘sotto di quei pietosi occhi pendevano tuttavia due lagrime, come due rubini, o goccie di sangue … che quello impallidirsi, arrosirsi, e piangere della Vergine fusse stato segno dell’affetto, co’l quale aveva placato l’ira di Dio contro di noi.’) Braccini, Dell’Incendio, 77. Thus the miraculous image modelled a response for the devout. Similar accounts occur in much of the Vesuvian literature, including F. Ceraso, L’Opre Stupende e Maravigliosi Eccessi dalla natura Prodottti nel Monte Vesuvio della Città di Napoli. liberata per intercessione della Beatissima Vergine, e de’ Gloriosi Santi Gennaro, Tomaso, & altri Protettori (Naples: Secondino Roncagliolo, 1632), n.p.  54 ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc. 83 bis n. 1), fol. 131v.  50

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Greco wine and to its remorse for past explosive fires.55 In many ways, volcano and blood brought tears. As Gennaro’s blood changed from impervious dust to heated liquid, in a form of weeping, so it wrought an analogous transformation in its witnesses, softening the hardest hearts, converting heretics to Catholicism, and confirming conversions. On 10 May 1726, in response to the presence of a Protestant, after quarter of an hour facing the head, the blood produced a hardened excrescence on one side of the ampoule, and then partially liquefied. But ‘as he drew closer to see it, it hardened completely, and after a short while before the aforementioned Protestant and all the people, the said glorious Blood liquefied completely and reached boiling point. [Whereupon] the Protestant showed signs of tenderness by crying.’56 Here the blood responded in relation to, even in synchrony with, the Protestant, at first hardening at his proximity, but then, along with him, tenderly yielding and liquefying. Thus the miracle on such occasions wrought liquid tears from a heretic’s stony heart. Indeed, the Jesuit Fabio Placidi’s Dialogo sopra il Miracolo di San Gennaro (Siena, 1729) suggests that the blood’s liquefaction was less vital than its effect on William, Prince of Saxe-Gotha: the liquefaction and simmering of the blood of the martyr saint when the sacred ampoule is placed on the altar facing his head was not as worthy of wonder as the interior agitation, alteration, and softening of that prince’s heart.57

The liquefaction was a melting of the heart. Basile’s joyful veneration prompted tears: ‘I … was filled with tender and reverent joyfulness [riverente allegrezza], which pressing me by the heart, expressed through my eyes a few little tears’.58 Those few tears were shed before the miracle. Accounts of the miracle of San Gennaro emphasize the shedding of tears as part of the miracle itself. Tears as liquefied language declare the absence of any rigid meaning. Perhaps the change in blood wrought the form of weeping less than the weeping witness wrought the transformation from the blood. Indeed, the blood stayed Giuliani, Trattato del Monte Vesuvio, 31. ‘mentre questo s’accostò per osservarlo s’indurì perfettamente, e dopo pochi momenti avanti detto Protestante, e tutto il Popolo si liquefè compitamente d.o glorioso Sangue con fare una ebullizione dimostrando d.o Protestante segni di tenerezza con lagrimare’. ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc. 83 bis n. 1), fol. 239r.  57 F. Placidi, Dialogo sopra il Miracolo di S Gennaro Recitato da Fabio Placidi della Compagnia di Gesù nell’Accademia degl’Intronati E dedicato all’Illustrss. e clariss. Sig. Senatore Marchese Marcello Malaspina Aud. Gen. per S.A.R. della Città, e Stato di Siena (Siena: Stamp. del Pub., 1729), 7.  58 ‘Io … fui ripieno di tenerae riverente allegrezza, che premendomi il cuore, n’espresse per l’occhio qualche lagrimetta’, Basile, Del Sangue Miracoloso, 2.  55  56

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hard and provoked people of all social ranks to be ‘oppressed by a deep, mournful melancholy, so much so that everywhere people could be seen crying’. After two days of such crying, the blood liquefied. Thus it is perhaps no wonder that witnesses of the liquefaction do ‘not see’ anything: their weeping, their tears show the blood in its liquid state, but what they see is not the liquid blood, but their own tears liquefying their vision. Thus the alteration from mournful weeping in front of the dead congealed blood to a joyful weeping when the blood liquefies is miraculous. That transformation is paralleled by the transformation of an awful nature (Vesuvius) into a joyful artwork (the chapel). Gennaro’s miracle is thus finally the miracle of art as much as the miracle of the transformational quality of tears. Moreover, the ambiguity of tears is inscribed in the head of San Gennaro, in the reliquary bust (Plate 6), which is itself reported to be ‘miraculous’, sometimes cheerful and sometimes melancholy’. Thus the reliquary bust and Gennaro’s head display a sort of smiling, an ambiguous smiling conflated in its qualities with tears. Vis vivificans: blood of community

Blood bears both the destruction and the continuation of the personal and social self. It is synecdochal: the human part that is the human and the social whole. All humans share blood; and therefore blood can create community. Yet blood can set people apart. Gennaro’s blood also set to work to exclude. His refusal to liquefy in the presence of Protestants and Muslims required their expulsion. The soteriological and ontological imperative of blood rendered it powerful in conversion – and also as a weapon of exclusion. Holy blood is transformative. In discussing the Passion, Aquinas asks why God chose to save by violence, which ‘is a destruction or severance of nature [excisio, seu casus] of nature’. He gives many answers, of which the first is that God chose to save by death and blood so that man might know how much God loves him and be stirred to love in return. Thus in Christ’s blood the sinner encounters and unites with love.59 Blood in its transfusion is transformative. The economy of Gennaro’s blood worked to transform, and thus also to produce communitas. Alive and warm, it melts sinners’ cold hearts and blood; it restores life’s liquid, just as heat softens hard wax. Thus – like Christ’s blood itself – Gennaro’s blood fuses with the blood of the self. The heat of San Gennaro’s blood caused the blood running through the veins of its witnesses to burn with heavenly love, along the lines of the fervid evocations of blood articulated by holy women, by would-be saints, such as Maria Villani, and Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 200.

 59

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by canonized saints, such as St Catherine: ‘In the blood that was shed in that fire of love and true patience, Grace has been created for us … In the heat of the blood the ice has melted, and our lukewarmness has caught fire.’60 Blood shed in martyrdom and blood burning with Christian zeal brought together martyr and citizen, apparently from within. And a saintly bloody discourse was masculinized. Just as Christ’s divine blood was marvellous at uniting, so, on a humbler plane, was Gennaro’s. The confluent effect of the divine spirit, a vis vivificans – the metaphor for the unifying power of the divine spirit – came to be used literally, associated with purifying, regenerating fire, with the sun, and the heavenly saviour.61 Blood was salvific and capable of annihilating evil: ‘If the precious blood of Christ be taken with faith, any disease is snuffed out by this remedy’, claimed St John Chrysostom.62 During the Mass a conjunction with and fusion in blood and flesh took place between the Almighty and the believer; as Camporesi points out, more than coniunctio, there was blood-steeped copulatio: ‘nostra cum Deo copulatione per Christi sanguinis communicationem’.63 The literal and the allegorical exchange places: ‘Salus erat in sanguine.’ Blood was productive of the whole, restoring integrity to the shattered body: It is the Most Precious Blood of Christ alone which, truly and actually, has this wondrous virtue and efficacy: that it rejoins and reunites to the body severed members … And to this end principally it was shed, that His Members – the elect of God – who had been scattered, might be gathered into one body.64

Holy blood forged communitas materially. After its liquefaction Gennaro’s blood, still held by the Treasurer, was offered to the lips of witnesses to the miracle. One after another, they kissed it passionately: a ritual that could last for hours. In 1741 Archbishop Spinelli reported: the octave [of 19 September] is celebrated with great solemnity in the cathedral church, with [San Gennaro’s] blood and head in their ‘statues’ [reliquaries] exposed on the main altar every day with those of all the other patron saints,

St Catherine of Siena, Le lettere, ed. P. Misciattelli, notes by N. Tommaseo (Florence: Marzocco, 1939), vol. II, 72–73. For the concern with blood evinced by female would-be saints, see Chapter 8 below.  61 Camporesi, Juice of Life, 31–32.  62 ‘Pretiosus Christi sanguis, si cum fiducia sumatur, omnis hoc remedio morbus extinguitur’. St John Crysostom, Sancti Joannis Chrysostomi: opera omnia quae existant (Montfaucon: Gaume, 1839), 74. The passage is cited and glossed by I. Bosio, La trionfante e gloriosa Croce (Rome: A Ciacone, 1610), 160–161.  63 A. Rocca, De Sacra Summi Pontificis Communione Sacrosanctam Missam Solemniter Celebrantis Commentarius (Rome: Ex Typ. G Facciotti, 1610), 13.  64 Bosio, La trionfante e gloriosa Croce, 160, quoted by Camporesi, Juice of Life, 14–15.  60

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and they are given to be kissed to the people, who devoutly take part in unfathomable number.65

During the feast of 16 December, San Gennaro’s head and blood relics left the Cathedral in a solemn procession around it (Plate 38), returned to the main altar, where they were incensed before being exposed for ‘a short time’ for kissing, and then returned to the Treasury Chapel.66 The reliquary passed from lips to lips, sealing communitas in an intimate act of devotion. Almost invariably the blood is kissed con gusto, that is ‘with pleasure’; the phrase carries overtones of taste and savour, conjuring up lip-smacking hunger for this flavoursome liquid.67 Kissing a relic was like a symbolic eating, a divine meal shared. Beautiful to the sight, hot to the touch, sweet in perfume, why would this blood not be exquisite on the tongue? Kissing relics showed tenderness and closeness, beholdenness. But this orchestrated communal kissing of the ampoule evoked both the supping of Eucharistic wine and a sort of mass bodily embrace of the populace in an intimate exchange. Bodies and body fluids drew together: trembling lips towards saintly blood in an intimate bond, blood and moist lips, a communal exchange of saliva, binding the individual to saint, and person to person. Hot breath, sticky lips, everyday liquids made holy by being shared. There was a nervousness about kissing, however, which was a fear of contact with the unelevated and ordinary. The cult of San Gennaro had to dodge and weave between popularity and irrelevance in favour of privilege. Exceptional kisses from exceptional people might be acceptable, but not those of a more lowly kind. Concern that premature kissing was dangerously forcing the pace of the saint meant that inappropriate kissing was curbed. During the octave in September 1697 the blood several times liquefied before ­encountering ‘se ne celebra con molta solennità l’ottavario nella chiesa cattedrale, esponendosi nel di lei Altare maggiore il Sangue e la testa nelle loro Statue con quelle di tutti gl’altri Sant Padroni ogni giorno, e dandosi a baciare al popolo, che divotamente in numero incomprensibile vi concorre.’ Archivio Segreto degli Arcivescovi (Curia Arciv. di Napoli., Archivio di Santa Visita), fasc. 17, inc. 2), ‘Relazione dello stato della Chiesa Metropolitana formata a tenore degli ordinamenti di S. E. il Sign. Cardinale Spinelli Arcivescovo nel’istruzione per la visita, a 20 settembre 1741’, fol. 2r, quoted by F. Strazzullo, Saggi storici sul Duomo di Napoli (Naples: Istituto Editoriale del Mezzogiorno, 1959), 139.  66 ‘si danno per breve tempo a baciare’. Archivio Segreto degli Arcivescovi (Curia Arciv. di Napoli, Archivio di Santa Visita), fasc. 17, inc. 2, ‘Relazione dello stato della Chiesa Metropolitana formata a tenore degli ordinamenti di S.E. il Sign. Cardinale Spinelli Arcivescovo nel’istruzione per la visita, a 20 settembre 1741’, fol. 2v, quoited by Strazzullo, Saggi storici sul Duomo di Napoli, 139.  67 For example on 22 May 1686 on observing the miracle, the Duke of Mantua is described as kissing it ‘con grandissimo suo gusto, e consolazione’ (‘with the utmost heartiness and sense of consolation’). ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc. 83 bis n. 1), fol. 98v.  65

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the head. The deputies reckoned that this was caused by an innovation by the Treasurer, who had been offering the blood to be kissed directly on its removal from the safe. They therefore directed that the blood be first displayed before it was offered to the touch of lips. Consequently, the Treasurer amended his practice and, sure enough, the blood immediately liquefied at the end of the special sung Mass, just as it was being given to be kissed.68 The kissing, which brought the people together, was thus positioned carefully after the miracle; it was not allowed to precede it and thus perhaps to appear to produce it. The people of Naples might be deeply involved in the liquefaction and its celebration, and indeed they were an essential part of the whole, but their role was carefully circumscribed as staged in the rituals of the Treasury Chapel: they were staged as witnesses of the miracle – not participants in it. Accusatory blood Why on the sudden is your colour changed? (Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta, II.iii.323)

Gennaro’s was blood shed for. But it was also blood shed against. Besides protecting, it accused. In addition to drawing together, it separated and spurned. Unlike many miracles which were treated as suspicious and questionable, San Gennaro’s miracle put others on the spot. You were under suspicion if the miracle refused to occur in your presence.69 Blood is kinship and heirs – not only lineage, but relationship – and the miraculous blood was capable of making visible the absence of those primordial bonds. The miracle simultaneously indicated and ‘resolved’ the absence of connection and cohesion, thereby identifying, producing, and expelling ‘outsiders’ from the social body in its very working.70 Blood represents the destruction and the continuation of the personal and social self. Christ’s connected, continuous, and ever-living blood was also its opposite, as Bynum has eloquently argued: Whole and alive, it is also divided and changed. A sign of death, it breaks away from body, which it breaches and transgresses. In contrast to body – symbol, This occurred on 25 September 1697. ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc. 83 bis n. 1), fol. 138v. On the judicial procedures, an increasing emphasis on first-hand ocular witness, and scepticism about miracles in the canonization processes, see Vauchez, La sainteté, 561–581; R. Michetti, ‘Presentazione’ in R. Michetti (ed.), Notai, miracoli e culto dei santi (Milan: Giuffrè, 2004), 1–27; F. Vidal, ‘Miracles, Science and Testimony in PostTridentine Saint-Making’, Science in Context, 20:3 (2007), 486–501.  70 Pius II, Pii secvndi pontificis max. commentarii revm memorabilium, qvae temporibus svis contigervnt, a r.d. ioanne gobellino (Frankfurt: Aubriana, 1614), 282–291, quoted by Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 123–124.  68  69

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since the patristic period, of ingathering and community – blood erupts across boundaries. Whereas body encloses, blood separates from. In the process, it violates, although its release can also cure and cleanse.71

Natural blood is, therefore, the ultimate synecdoche, the human part that is the human and the social whole’.72 ‘Blood of Christ save me’ precisely evokes that sense of each part as the whole of Christ. Even when poured out in separation and violence, blood provided access and continuity. Blood worked to forge community, and San Gennaro’s blood was particularly eloquent in its capacity to either welcome or to exclude from its preferred community – a community it worked to identify, indeed to forge. While Eucharistic blood might represent humanitas, Gennaro’s blood could encapsulate the humanity of Naples – and not a past Naples, but a future one. It bound and was the sign of connection between good Neapolitans. Community was consanguinity. Such claims in Naples were at once literal and metaphorical. Gennaro’s blood coursed through more than metaphoric veins in that city. A blood family’s claims were never far away.73 Nicolò Falcone’s sumptuously printed L’Intera Istoria di San Gennaro, della Famiglia, Vita, Miracoli Traslazioni, e Culto del Glorioso Martire S. Gennaro Vescovo di Benevento Cittadino, e Principal Protettore di Napoli, published in Naples in 1713, explicitly situates Gennaro amid his blood family, including his descendants in eighteenth-century Naples. Indeed, the book is dedicated to Signore D. Nicolò Maria di Gennaro, Prince of San Martino, Duke of Cantalupo and Belforte, Marquis of San Massimo in the Kingdom of Naples. San Gennaro’s blood relations proved that his was not just a miraculous blood, but a familial blood, too. The chosen community of Naples was a consanguineità.74 The counterpart to these claims was that Gennaro’s blood and its liquefaction were also signs of division, separation, and violation of boundaries. Shed blood is a body part. It breaks away from the body. It breaks the body apart. San Gennaro’s blood worked to break apart the body by social rank and by religion. It set hard in the face of Muslims and heretics. Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 154. Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 187.  73 See H. Hills, Invisible City: The Architecture of Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Neapolitan Convents (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 62–89; T.  Astarita, The Continuity of Feudal Power: The Caracciolo of Brienza in Spanish Naples (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 36–67, 108–157, 159–200.  74 For the role of the Parenti di san Gennaro (the relations of San Gennaro), a group of women who followed singular devotions distinct from those of the church hierarchy up until the 1960s, their refashioning under Cardinals Marcello Mimmi (1952–58) and Corrado Ursi (1966–87) into the Consorelle di san Gennaro, and their specific devotions, see Petrarca, ‘Un miracolo rituale’, 57–67.  71  72

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In bloody terms, part is whole. Separated blood was conceptualized as blood shed against, as well as for. It accused as well as liberated.75 The blood that saves was therefore also a blood that called for revenge. Gennaro’s could even discern between good and bad Catholics. It accused sinners and unrepentant Neapolitans and called them to penitence. Thus it could work to identify with deadly implacability an enemy within. Gennaro’s blood was jealous and possessive of its city. It worked to keep Naples Catholic, loyal to the Spanish monarchy, and to mark out difference, to marginalize foreigners, and to expel heretics. The miraculous event, claimed Caracciolo, worked ‘to the confusion of the godless heretics, who deny the rightful veneration due to relics and the bodies of the saints’.76 Its refusal to liquefy could be caused by the mere presence in the Treasury Chapel of a heretic. Indeed, ‘foreigners’ were readily assumed to be heretics: ‘when it is shown to foreigners, either it is found already liquefied before it is brought out, or when placed facing the Head, it remains hard without liquefying at all’.77 Xenophobic and intolerant, Gennaro’s blood forged a renewed Naples in its own image. In its opening pages the Treasury Register describes an incident in January 1659 when a group of cavalieri from north of the Alps came to visit Naples. On their request, the blood was brought out and placed before Gennaro’s head, but for a long time it did not liquefy. The sacristan informed the visitors that as a rule it would not liquefy in the presence of someone ‘lacking in the Catholic faith’: whereupon they confessed that there was among their number a non-Catholic; but so as not to expose him, they agreed among themselves to leave all together [as a group]; almost as soon as they had resolved to leave, having learned the cause, the Glorious Saint at last chose to console them, because suddenly [the blood] liquefied to the marvel and stupefaction of all who were present.78 For this aspect of Christ’s blood, see Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 181. Caracciolo, Napoli Sacra, 7.  77 ‘perché alle volte, o si ritrova già liquefatto prima di cavarlo fuora, o essendo già posto dirimpetto la Testa, pure seguita a star duro senza punto liquefarsi’. ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc. 83 bis n. 1), ‘Registro dei Miracoli’, fol. 2r.  78 ‘come appunto è soccceduto nel principio di quest’anno 1659, perche essendo venuto un gran numero di cavalieri Oltramontani, e ad istanza loro cavandosi il Sangue, e ponendosi dirimpetto la Testa, per un gran pezzo non si liquefece, fino a tanto, che dicendo il Sacristano a quei Cavalieri, che il Sangue non si suole liquefare, quando vi è presente qualcheduno che manchi nella nostra Sante fede; a tale avviso confessarono esservi tra di loro, chi non era Cattolico; ma per non iscoprirlo determinanarono fra di loro di andarsene via tutti insieme; appena però avendo udito tal causa, si erano risoluti di partirsi, che il Santo Glorioso volle finalmente con solargli; perche all’improviso si liquefece con maraviglia, e stupore di quanti vi erano presenti.’ ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc. 83 bis n. 1), fol. 2v.  75  76

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Here the blood first demonstrated uncanny awareness of the Protestant in its presence, before choosing to bestow the blessing, against the odds. Thus, ostensibly displaying considerable social skills, it worked to expose the heretic, without openly shaming an individual knight. Yet effectively the heretics were ousted. Likewise on 28 September 1669, the Duke of Mirandola blamed the ‘presence of many Huguenots’ for the blood’s stubborn refusal to liquefy before a large crowd, including the Marquis of Piaquart.79 In such a manner the saintly blood steadfastly refused to manifest the miraculous to heretics, but worked to ‘excommunicate’ them, by pointing its bloody finger at them and expelling them from the chapel. Yet, predictably, the miracle operated unpredictably. It took place, for example, for an English knight who visited the Treasury Chapel on 24 November 1659.80 Although Protestant, the visitor was socially distinguished. Perhaps the blood was making a stab at conversion. While Gennaro’s blood signalled the presence of heretics particularly inside the chapel, its operations extended beyond it. Thus on 6 May 1719 the customary procession for the feast of the translation of Gennaro’s blood reached the Piazza di Capuano, but ‘since there were many heretics in the piazza, despite many prayers, the blood did not liquefy’.81 Cardinal Archbishop Pignatelli was away in Rome, so it fell to the viceroy to take charge. He ordered all non-ecclesiastics to leave the piazza. As soon as it was in the presence of Viceroy and churchmen alone, ‘immediately the Blood deigned to perform the miracle much to the joy of all’.82 Here, taking advantage perhaps of the Archbishop’s absence, the Viceroy moved in to call the shots, but the hierarchical distinction that was drawn on this occasion proved to be one between ecclesiastics and non-ecclesiastics – with the Viceroy in exceptional position. Tellingly, the blood, orchestrated by the Viceroy, articulated a distrust of the Neapolitan lay populace. Also striking in this account (and others) is that securing the liquefaction of the blood was the principal priority: a heretic-free situation was secured in order for the miracle to occur. The miracle operated as an exclusive instrument, but is not presented in those terms. Securing divine approval is the ostensible logic that the presence of the blood necessitates. Agency and reponsibility thus dissolved, even as they were accorded and recognized. ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc. 83 bis n.1), fols 39r–40r. ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc. 83 bis n. 1), fol. 4v  81 ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc. 83 bis n. 1), fol. 218v.  82 ‘Il Sig. Conte Vicerè prevedendo che il Sangue di S. Gennaro non si liquefacesse per la presenza degli Eretici ordinò che tutti li Secolari uscissero dalla Piazza, e rimanessero solo l’Ecclesiastici, onde uscendo fuori, subito il Santo si compiacque di far il miracolo con allegrezza di tutti, e tutto questo seguì dopo lo spazio di mezz’ora, e mezzo quarto.’ ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc. 83 bis n. 1), fol. 218v.  79  80

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Thus the blood could act as faith-detector, instrument of distinction, and generator of hierarchy. It was able to identify heretics even in the midst of a crowd of faithful; and it could affirm the inferiority of layfolk vis-à-vis ecclesiastics. In the name of the miracle, it worked to destabilize community. Indeed, it served to alert the faithful to the enemy within, generating insecurity and a requirement to be perpetually on guard. In a continuous state of emergency that it engendered and policed, Gennaro’s blood worked to convert heretics and reunite them to the true Church. It repaired damage to a torn social fabric and brought Neapolitans together in a sense of shared transcendental experience, even while it tore that fabric anew.83 Intolerant of outsiders, its nonliquefaction formed a line of demarcation that pointed in a readily identifiable direction. Aggressive and exclusive, unrelenting and declamatory, at its worst the blood was more than a simple instrument of intolerance: it was an instrument for producing distrust and division, for generating a perpetual state of emergency even while ostensibly it protected and soothed. In this the miracle participated in a soteriology, anthropology, and demonology of martyrdom.84 Just as the real object of the persecutor’s attack of martyrs was not primarily their individual victims but the Christian faith and, ultimately, the god they professed, so the Christian martyrs were really ranged against the devil. Satan is always the present and active enemy until the final overthrow (Revelation 2:13, 12:9, 20:2).85 It is the witness before hostile authorities, in which the inspiration of the spirit finds expression in evangelic witness, that is the essence of martyrdom. Paradoxically, the repetition of or return to that martyrdom that was the miracle was withheld in the presence of hostile witnesses. Thus the chapel, with the miracle at its heart, became a sort of spirit level, a place where heretics would be discerned, identified, and sent packing. In terms of the message of salvation for the city, the blood’s guidance could not be clearer: the longed-for miracle would not occur in the presence of heretics: heretics could not be tolerated. The price of a miracle was a change of heart. The real cost was intolerance of difference. Gennaro’s miracle operated in a city colonized by the Spanish and informed by the notion of limpieza de sangre, or purity of blood, that emerged in fifteenth-century Spain. The Spanish monarchy relentlessly emphasized purity of blood as desirable and devout. Blood is a theological concept through and through. Following the narrative lines of divine transformation and transubstantiation, the community of Christians becomes a community of blood. In an important article on limpieza de sangre, Gil For the tradition of blood as healer, see Camporesi, Juice of Life, 21–22. The terms are from Lampe, ‘Martyrdom and Inspiration’, 121.  85 It is the witness before hostile authorities, in which the inspiration of the spirit finds expression in evangelic witness, that is the essence of Christian martyrdom.  83  84

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Anidjar argues that ‘the Christian community is dependent on theology as blood and on blood as theology’.86 As underscored most strikingly by the purity of blood statutes, no distinction was henceforth possible between the theological community and the blood-based, racialized, and nationalized community of modernity.87 The dissemination in Spanish society – including colonized Naples – of the notion that lineage is blood, that different bloodlines have greater worth than others based on their purity and their antiquity, perhaps began, at least ostensibly, with the statutes, but it soon came to define the entire social field. Individuals began to see themselves as part of a blood line and to value others with varying degrees of worth. Far from inventing the notion, the nobility (under constant suspicion of impurity because of the frequency of marriage alliances with families of converts) adopted and participated in what was already an existing, widespread theological discourse. Thus Gennaro affirmed select blood lineages, and coordinated certain blood lines across groups in Naples. Anidjar argues that it is ‘precisely when the social and political body comes to be formally understood as just that – a body – that blood becomes a privileged site of the social bond as well as a primary site of collective and social distinction’.88 The rise of blood to prominence in the life of Christian communities and the Christian polity can hardly be consistent with the disappearance of blood from representation in political thought. The change occurs when the conception of the Church as a mystical body, a conception inherited from St Paul, undergoes a development – ­theological metamorphosis of blood – the mystical body becomes the body politic, the visible community of Christians. Thinking the body politic ostensibly eschewed blood. The disappearance or occlusion of blood from medieval and early modern political writings that deploy and formalize the figure of the body politic demands careful reflection. Blood is the site and marker of the theological, rather than of biological or even medical investments. Apparently opposed to spirit, blood functions as the embodiment of spirit, as a figure of divine presence or immanence. Blood is the site of the G. Anidjar, ‘“Lines of blood”: limpieza de sangre as Political Theology’, in M. Gadebusch Bondio (ed.), Blood in History and Blood Histories (Florence: Sismel Edizioni del Galluzzi, 2005), 119–136, esp. 120. The major contribution of the purity of blood to history is not to be found in the exceptional construction of difference on the basis of blood, and in the ensuing exclusion of specific groups and collectives. On the contrary, the purity of blood was part of a massive transformation, a general reconfiguration of the body politic as a whole, and first in it the community of Christians. The statutes on the purity of blood were part of a larger theological process whereby a new notion of kinship and a new community was invented: the Christian community was a community of blood. Anidjar, ‘Lines of blood’, 122–123.  87 Anidjar, ‘Lines of blood’, 120.  88 Anidjar, ‘Lines of blood’, 126.  86

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community’s presence to itself.89 Announcing novel arrangements of the theologico-bio-political, theories of blood’s motion, the becoming-present of spirit in blood, follow the trajectory of transubstantiation according to which the wine and the host become Christ’s flesh and blood. The community of blood performed through the Eucharist, which Christians had come to experience in a regular manner only in the recent past, is also the becomingimmanent of the community.90 Blood’s repeated metamorphosis in the ritual of liquefaction transformed blood into a figure of presence and testified to the presence of the divine as the community. Its non-liquefaction – which was also its further transformation as the very ground of social and political ties – is therefore fundamentally linked to the disappearance or blockage of the divine and, more precisely, a blockage of the transformation of the community into the divine embodiment which blood is.91 By realizing, rather than promising, the organic community, blood apparently transforms the community into a theological body that is ostensibly given rather than made. Blood makes the community – God himself, incarnate – immanent to itself. Once its members are related to each other by virtue of blood ties, the community is no longer made, no longer produced or performed. And whereas it was once made by God, by the sovereign, and even by performing the ritual of Corpus Christi, the community is now already made of its members. And always already so. The community immanent, the community of blood, lives as what it already is.92 ‘The representation of a bloodless body politic’ argues Anidjar, ‘from John of Salisbury, Christine de Pizan to Thomas Hobbes – is thus structurally and historically dependent on a perception of the community as a community of blood, as an always existing, pre-political community. Alternatively, the very construction of the body of the community emerges in response to, itself produces the desire for, a pre-political community, one grounded precisely in what is missing from political doctrine and figurations as they are expounded by political writers: blood.’93 If the European-wide perception of the Christian community as a community of blood was accompanied by the development of these figurations, the obsession with blood emerges as a necessity: ‘The bloodless state (or the bloodless figure of the body politic)’, suggests Anidjar, ‘would have, as its other face, the community of

Anidjar, ‘Lines of blood’, 129. Anidjar, ‘Lines of blood’, 129.  91 ‘What is only apparently paradoxical is that the two moments (appearance and disapearance) are one and the same result of blood’s motion, of the becoming-present of the community to itself as divine blood and through it.’ Anidjar, ‘Lines of blood’, 130.  92 Anidjar, ‘Lines of blood’, 130.  93 Anidjar, ‘Lines of blood’, 130.  89  90

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blood.’94 Naples was no bloodless state, of course. Its community of blood, urban, Catholic, and Neapolitan, bore an aristocratic face.

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Urban transformations

Januarian blood affected the city. Important though his miracle was in celebrating dignitaries and in converting prominent heretics, its principal civic effect lay in its hold over large numbers of Neapolitans and even more in the implication that it represented the whole of Naples, transcending specific religious orders or interest groups. When the relics of head and blood stood, alongside the relics of Naples’ other protector saints, on the main altar of the Cathedral for the octave of September, ‘there gather’, writes Girolamo Maria di Sant’Anna, ‘an innumerable people to venerate it, and to observe the miracle of the liquefaction of the blood, which, after it is liquefied, is given to all to be kissed by the Canon Treasurer and Deputy by the Archbishop’.95 It was available to all without let or hindrance (even as it was orchestrated by Treasurer and Archbishop). Processions bearing the relics were ritualized on feast days, undertaken preventatively when threats loomed and in celebratory thanksgiving when Gennaro had intervened and saved the city (as, for example, on 14 March 1702 when he delivered the city from earthquakes) (Plate 14 & Fig. 18).96 When the blood signalled displeasure, the ‘people and city and kingdom’ were filled with alarm and plunged into an intense penitential display’.97 Thus the blood, like the volcano, orchestrated wave after wave of communal emotion: fear, trepidation, repentance, remorse, consolation, and, finally, relief. The devotion to San Gennaro can be thought in terms of territorial claims and waves of emotion spilling out from the chapel, occupying bodies transfused through processions, temporary altars, and eventually permanent monuments, such as the Guglia (Plates 29 & 30, Figs 40 & 51) and the Januarian monument outside the church of Santa Caterina a Formiello erected following the ­eruption of Vesuvius in 1707 (Figs 31 & 41).98 Liquefactions occurred not only Anidjar, ‘Lines of blood’, 131. Fra Girolamo Maria di Sant’Anna, Istoria della Vita, Virtù e Miracoli di S. Gennaro Vescovo e Martire, Principal Padrone della Fedelissima Città di Napoli (Naples: Stefano Abbate, 1733), 276.  96 ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc. 83 bis n. 1), fols 154v–155r.  97 ‘Onde il Popolo, la Città, ed il regno fè gran dimostrazione di penitenza’. ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc. 83 bis n. 1), fol. 191v.  98 The monument was designed by Ferdinando Sanfelice and begun by Lorenzo Vaccaro, who completed two putti. The relief bust of San Gennaro was executed by his sons, Antonio and Niccolo Vaccaro (ATSG, 59/9 1587, fol. 150r). They were also responsible for cutting the inscription: ‘DIVO JANUARIO / URBIS NEAP INDIGENTUM PRINCIPI / QUOD MONTIS VESUVI ANNO MDCCVII CUM MAXIMA / IGNIS  94  95

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in the chapel, but outside in the streets of the city during the procession of Gennaro’s relics. Thus on 6 May 1662, the blood remained hard in the chapel, but liquefied in the piazza after the customary procession;99 on 2 May 1682 the blood was found ‘tender’ and it liquefied in the Piazza del Popolo.100 Thus the miracle was urbanized and the city as an entity produced through it. 101 The blood miracle had to wring change of heart from individual witnesses and alter the face of the city of Naples itself. Just as the miracle took its viewer out of the ordinary, so it positioned Naples itself beyond history and nature. The city, like the individuals gathered before the miracle, rather than its simple locus or passive audience, was in some way reconstituted by it. Its miracle drove fear and anxiety, along with the heretics, from the city, even if only briefly. It lavished longed-for ‘relief’ and ‘consolation’ on its anxious citizens.102 Although the blood might become agitated, it exerted a pacific effect on the people of Naples, as it did on Vesuvius, and it could even quell revolt. On 24 September 1701, during civic disturbances, the Archbishop prayed before the saint for half an hour, then took the blood ampoules in his hand, whereupon the blood liquefied. That evening at quarter to eleven o’clock, ‘the revolt was put down by miracle of the saint, who calmed it’.103 Thus, even as the blood could draw people anxiously across the city towards it and set pulses racing in nervous apprehension of its obduracy, so it could reassure and calm, soothe the very anxieties it had previously set in motion, restore correct order. Above all, the miracle worked to produce and stage a supposedly harmoni­ ous community amongst the citizens of Naples. Freed from close associations ERUPTIONE FACTA DIES COMPLUREIS MAGIS / MAGISQ FEROCIRET IAM UT CERTISSIMUM URBI TOTIQ. / CAMPANIAE INCENDIUM MINARETUR SACRI OSTENTU /CAPITIS IN ARA HIC EXTRUCTA EXCIDIOSOS IMPETUS /EXTEMPLO OPPRESSERIT ET OMNIA SERENARIT /NEAPOLITANI /EIUS DIVINI BENEFICI UTI ET INNUMERUM /ALIORUM QUIBUS A BELLO FAME / PESTILENTIA TERRAEMOTU URBEM /CIVITATEMQUE LIBERAVIT MEMORES / P.P.’ G. B. Alfano, Epigrafia Vesuviana (Napoli: Domenico di Gennaro, 1929), 34–36; see also A. Spinelli, ‘Il monumento di San Gennaro a Santa Caterina a Formiello’, in S. d’Aquino di Caramanico (ed.), L’archivio del miracolo (Naples: Luciano Editore, 2001), 61–70.  99 ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc. 83 bis n. 1), fol. 12v. 100 ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc. 83 bis n. 1), fol. 80v. 101 These ideas are developed further in Chapter 5 (on the Seggi) and Chapter 7. 102 Thus, for example, ‘1 Feb 1661 con l’occasione di fare vedere il miracolo del Sangue del glorioso S Gennaro ad uno Cavaliero di Malta francese ambasciatore per la sua Religione a Roma, e ad altri Cavalieri suoi paesani s’espose Iusta solitu la testa con il Sangue, qual’essendosi ritrovato duro si liquefè dopo mezzo quarto d’ora restandone tutti consolati.’ ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc. 83 bis n. 1), fol. 9r. 103 ‘e la sera a ore 23 meno un quarto fu sedata la revoluzione per miracolo del Santo, che la sedo’. ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc. 83 bis n. 1), fol. 154r.

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with a specific religious order, and housed in the Treasury Chapel in the Cathedral under the direction of representatives of the Seggi, the blood and head were ostensibly universal, disinterested, capable of representing and protecting the city as a whole, rather than particular interests and factions. In this respect, the logic of the occurrence of the miracle outside in the streets of the city during processions and feasts of Gennaro’s relics is particularly powerful, as we shall see in more detail in Chapter 6. The miracle, or lack of it, informed that civic and urban mass that was known as Naples. Response to the blood extended beyond the Treasury Chapel and beyond the Seggi. Faced with obdurate blood, on 5 May 1678 the deputies, in consternation, agreed to send 500 ducats to specific churches to be spent on celebrating Mass, on wax, and on Forty-Hour expositions of the Holy Sacrament. They also invited all religious to come to the chapel the following Friday to pray to the relic as usual: ‘in order to placate the Saint, so that through glorious San Gennaro, our Protector, the city would be consoled’.104 ‘But the blood remained unyielding in its housing, and, still hard, it was locked away, to the great dismay of the city’.105 ‘The next day the blood was found still hard, which distressed the whole city’; all the religious met at the Treasury to celebrate Mass and to pray, and all novices took communion; ‘and while the glorious Blood was being kissed by a large crowd of people, as the Treasurer held it, it liquefied at half past one o’clock, and on that day the Viceroy came to pay honour to the saint, for whom the whole city exulted with joy’.106 Curiously, the blood then hardened again for about half an hour, before once again liquefying.107 Likewise when, to ‘the great vexation [disgusto] of the people’, it refused to liquefy on 16 December 1702, the Eletti of the city, fearing divine punishment, sent 50 ducats for the celebration of Mass in the Treasury Chapel, and the deputies arranged for the exposition of the head of San Gennaro and the reliquary busts of all the other saints in

ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc. 83 bis n. 1), fol. 68v. ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc. 83 bis n. 1), fols 68v–69r: ‘che l’avessero spesi in opera pia, e devozione, acciò il Santo si fosse placato, che per mezzo del glorioso S Gennaro nostro Protettore avesse consolato la Città, che steva tutta afflitta … in fare celebrare messe, ed anco mandare cere, e fare quarantore in esporre il SS.mo Sacramento con fare anco intendere alli d.i Religiosi di venire il venerdi seguente, e fare orazione al d.o tesoro conforme ferno. Ed il glorioso sangue continuò a stare duro dentro della sua Casina, e si serroò con grandissima mestizia della Città.’ 106 ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc. 83 bis n. 1), fols 68v–69r. 107 ‘la Città stava afflitta. Tutti li Religiosi si conferirno al d.o Tesoro con celebrare Messe, fare orazione, e li novizii tutti si communicorno, e mentre si baciava il glorioso Sangue da una gran moltitudine di persone in mano del Sigr Tesoriero si liquefè ad ore 13½, ed in d.o giorno venne il Sigr Vicerè à riverire il Santo, del che tutta la Città giubilò d’allegreza.’ ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc. 83 bis n. 1), fol. 69r–v. 104 105

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the chapel for eight days.108 Its obduracy was met with anxiety and service – including the Deputazione’s growing bureaucracy. Right always lay with the blood. It could signify the fate of the city only because it never failed. Liquefaction meant that San Gennaro was efficacious and God was beneficently willing to forgive the people their sins. Nonliquefaction signalled not that Gennaro was inefficacious or absentee, but that the people of Naples were sinful and must be punished. It made demands. Caracciolo interprets non-liquefaction as requiring placation: With such a sign did San Gennaro warn his beloved citizens of future calamities and sufferings, brought about by their sins, so that they could try to placate God’s wrath through prayers, fastings, and penitential exercises.109

Thus the holy liquid equipped the people to avoid future catastrophe by assuming responsibility, displaying contrition, and amending behaviour. Popular devotion and divine response were not only consecutive realities, cause and effect. Both were the effects of the miracle.110 On occasion the blood behaved with cruel obduracy, in spite of everyone’s efforts, and to the consternation of all. Such a denial of any sign of grace might work to unite diverse groups within the populace, much as could its successful transformation. On 29 October 1732 a terrible earthquake shook Naples. The people were terrified, but the blood remained unyielding ‘as the Lord remained unmoved by either public prayers or clamorous and hearty shouts, and sobs from the crowds of people who had gathered there’.111 When it was time to put the blood back, ‘people of all social classes, nobles together with plebeians, were oppressed by a deep, mournful melancholy, so much so that everywhere people could be seen crying, and others beating their breasts, and again others hitting themselves, nobles as much as plebeians, seeing that up to then, the saint did not deign even to console them with the usual miracle’.112 In fact, the blood did not liquefy until two days later when it was being kissed, and even then a hard ball remained in its centre. Thus power lay unequivocally with the offended saint, whose absence ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc. 83 bis n. 1), fol. 159v. Caracciolo, Napoli Sacra, 7–8. 110 See R. Trexler, ‘Florentine Religious Experience: The Sacred Image’, Studies in the Renaissance, 19 (1972), 7–41 for illuminating discussion. 111 ‘non compiacendosi il Signore nè alle pubbliche orazioni, nè alla strepitosa, e cordiale grida, e signozzi fatte dal Popolo numeroso che ivi era concorso’. ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc. 83 bis n. 1), fol. 259r. 112 ‘stando ogni ceto di persone, li nobili come Plebei oppressi da una profonda, luttuosa malinconia, tanto che dapertutto si osservano le persone, alcune che piangevano, altre che si percitevano il petto, altre che si davano delli sciaffi tanto nobili, come Plebei vedendo il Santo sino a quell’ora neppure compiaciuto consolarli con il solito ­miracolo’. ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc. 83 bis n. 1), fol. 259r. 108 109

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made his punishment the more remorseless. The people could only punish themselves in an effort to propitiate him. Guilt and powerlessness thereby enwrapped the citizen body in a smothering blanket the colour of Gennaro’s blood. Conversely, Neapolitans were not a passive audience to the miracle; they were essential to its occurrence. Without their devotion, there would be no miracle and no intervention by San Gennaro. It is not enough to see the people’s participation in devotion and processions as merely a product of cynical manipulation of the masses by an elite group of cunning prelates and viceroys. The people participated because they were necessary to Gennaro’s intervention, to his saving the city, and to the working of the miracle which procured this. Thus Gennaro was both the dynamic repository and relation of power.113 He was present and alive when the miracle occurred and when he was worshipped. He manifested his power by protecting Naples from eruption, but also in the devotion he engendered; and his devotees played a productive role in invoking and worshipping him, reforming the city to give him pleasure. Conclusion

Miracles alone were not enough. They had to be seen, be seen to be seen, and made widely known to spread belief. The miracle was worthless without wonder and recognition. It was the chapel that produced that wonderment and orchestrated the miracle, brought it to sight, made it take place. If initially the Treasury Chapel was conceived largely to house the relics in dignity, it soon became a theatre for wonder, a carousel for the celebration of the miracle (Plate 3) – and, with the ensuing attention, it attracted the investment of more and more protector saints and a wider and more fervid audience ready to act as witness (Fig. 2).114 The miracle disturbed as it consolidated. Deleuze suggests that societies are always en fuite (leaking, fleeing) and can be understood in relation to the way they deal with those fuites (lines of flight, leaks).115 The eruption of See Richard Trexler’s brilliant discussion of this issue with regard to the Florentine Impruneta Madonna. Trexler, ‘Florentine Religious Experience’, esp. 24. 114 During the eighteenth century, in the era of the Grand Tour, the blood lured tourists to Naples, and its peculiar transformations added to the exoticization of the south. The performance of the miracle produced not conversion to Catholicism, but rather, akin to the tarantella, a renewal of the sense of authentic encounter with an exoticized southern essence, untamed, untameable, and frozen in time. See my ‘Grand Tourists’ Bloody Encounters in the Italian South’ (forthcoming). 115 On Deleuzian flights, see J. Rajchman, The Deleuze Connections (Cambridge, Mass., and London: MIT Press, 2000), 12. 113

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Vesuvius and the depradations of the plague upset relations that Neapolitans had with the divine, themselves, and each other. The chapel can be seen as an attempt to ‘reterritorialize’ in the face of this, to re-establish order and renew social hierarchies; but its extraordinary display and affective engagement were also deterritorializing, forging new connectivities between the people of Naples, offering encounters with what had not been foreseen and could not readily be determined or agreed upon. The liquefaction of the blood of San Gennaro might usefully be thought not as an experience which enlists the individual into corporate identity, but rather as the incorporation of the event into the individual and collective body. Thus as the miracle takes place, it brings believers into place. The citizens of Naples became temporarily unified through this miracle. The investment and the body gave form to that which shaped them. The architecture of the Treasury Chapel was not a vehicle for messages about sanctity, about San Gennaro, but rather it was a creative intensive event that produced its users (believers). Just as the blood became a relic through the reliquary, the reliquary chapel produced San Gennaro’s centrality in devotional life in Naples and produced his followers and entered into the circulation of blood and menace. Colour, redemption, renewal, Gennaro’s blood appeared to instantiate essence, to impart what was asserted, even as it dissolved its possibility materially. Gennaro’s martyrdom and his blood’s miracle were worthless without wonder and recognition. It was the Treasury Chapel that secured that wonderment and orchestrated the miracle. An oculus through which the miracle could be seen, and could be seen to be seen, the chapel was not the least of its own transformations. It worked as witness, as witness to witness, and as a call to witness.

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Part II

Patrons and protectors

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The machinic chapel and the production of protectors

4

The unceasing protectorship that our glorious martyr shows towards our patria in a continuous miracle, which is never benumbed, but with boiling of affection the blood speaks in a glass [ampoule]; most illustrious gentlemen, this properly obliges this most faithful city to a continuous and rightful homage. (Giovanni Francesco Paci, August 1703)1

Excessive protectors

Naples was excessive in its protector saints. In number and intensity, in splendour of devotion and accommodation, the city’s patron saints occupied a peculiar prominence. Italy led the way among Catholic countries, the Kingdom of Naples boasted more protectors than anywhere else in the peninsula, and the city of Naples was blessed with the highest numbers of all. Thus the augmentation of protectors was more intense in the Treasury Chapel than anywhere else. And the chapel was crucial to their generation. To leave aside the chapel in relation to the question as to how and why the city of Naples was the place where protector saints were generated so fruitfully, and why the Treasury Chapel in particular was so fertile a place for their proliferation, to assume that that belongs elsewhere – outside architecture  – to the ‘social’ or the ‘political’, or to a ‘religious’ history, to ‘the Counter-Reformation’ (the glib label and hasty resort of a history told from a north European, Protestant, and Whiggish point of view), is to overlook the ‘L’Incessante Padronanza, che dimostra verso la patria il nostro Glorioso Martire in un miracolo continovo, ove giamai s’interpedisce, mà con bollori d’affetto parla il Sangue in un vetro; ben’obliga questa fedelissima Città ad un continovo, e dovuto ossequio, Illustrissimi Signori’, Giovanni Francesco Paci, prefatory remarks to C. Tutini, Memorie della Vita Miracoli, e culto di San Gianuario Martire Vescovo di Benevento, e principale protettore della Città di Napoli. Terza impressione, (Naples: GiovanFrancesco Paci, 1703; reprint of 1633 edn), n.p. Paci expresses hope that Tutini’s book will serve as an incentive to citizens, beholden to the saint, to celebrate Gennaro’s ­triumphs with greater fervour.

  1

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force of architecture and its generative affect. It is my contention that more than simply housing this saintly swarm, the chapel was part of its production. Thus it did more than accommodate pre-existing cults, more than intensify existing cults, and more than simply provide a desirable container, attractive to the masses, in which to worship the saints. It generated patron saints. In doing so, it participated in the ‘repositioning’ of the city of Naples in relation to heaven. The claim of the patron saint was that the city should become shrine and that the shrine should incorporate the city. In its concentration of protector saints, the Treasury Chapel localized the relationship between city and saint within itself, and thus it participated in the process of production of saints that entailed its own dislocation. Chapel as machine

The Treasury Chapel, writes Domenico Antonio Parrino, was consecrated in a vow by ‘the piety of the Neapolitans’ to their tutelary saint ‘who assists at every need’.2 While San Gennaro ‘assists at every need’, what is striking in the Treasury Chapel is the swarming of a host of further saints like worker bees around a queen. That swarming starts in the Cathedral nave at the entrance to the chapel where St Peter and St Paul, with their traditional attributes, frame the entrance (Fig. 25). Not as protector saints of Naples, but as founders of the Apostolic Church, these ecclesiastical fathers establish an impressive genealogy for Gennaro.3 Both saints had specific Neapolitan links. St Paul landed at Pozzuoli on his way from Malta to Rome (Acts 28:13–14); St Peter was reputed to have visited Naples and baptized many Neapolitans, including Asprenus and Candida (who were also later adopted as patrons).4 The Treasury Chapel bulges with protector saints. Literally. Its walls are punctuated, distended, by eighteen niches in which relics are stored in gorgeous silver reliquaries (Plate 7 & Fig. 11). And many more reliquaries perch on platforms and stands erected throughout the chapel (Plate 5). Nineteen bronze full-length figures occupy the lateral chapels and presbytery (Figs 3 & 22). Everywhere one turns, a saint looks back.5 We can understand this apparent excess of saints and relics by thinking the chapel as a ‘machine’ in Deleuze’s sense, as a production that is immanent: not the production of something by someone, but production itself. Not a machine in mechanical terms, but a ‘mechanosphere’, or set of ever-changing Parrino, Napoli Città Nobilissima, vol. I (1700), 396. They also denote the Treasury Chapel’s jurisdictional dependence on Rome.   4 See A. Caracciolo, De sacris Ecclesiae Neapolitanae monumentis (Naples: Ottavio Beltrano, 1645), 41–105.   5 Maria di Sant’Anna, Istoria della Vita (1707), 381.   2   3

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systems and networks, machinic assemblages which intermix spiritual, technical, corporeal, biological, social, ecclesiastical, economic, and material matters and qualities. Because a machine has no subjectivity or organizing centre, it is nothing more than the connections and productions it makes. It is what it does. It therefore has no home or ground. It is constantly in process of deterritorialization – that is, of becoming other than itself. The machine is not a metaphor, and the chapel is not representational. Linking worshippers, powerful patrons, and city institutions, protector saints and God, the chapel was part of a markedly city-focused machinic economy. Protectors’ relics were tools; but the chapel was far more than simply a tool-box. For these were tools that grew into the existence of worshippers, citizens, and the city.6 The chapel can be usefully illuminated in terms of tensions between the aristocratic lay deputation and the Archbishop and Cathedral chapter, and the story of its decoration can be told as a struggle between Neapolitan artists and rivals from elsewhere.7 But these accounts are inadequate to the task of allowing the chapel itself to be dynamic. That is, they stop short at its ‘completion’. To explain why a work of art was made, or how its use was envisaged by its patrons, is not the same as tracing how it was used, or (different again) how it worked. In the situation in which a new building was to be erected in Naples, whether in 1527 at the time of the vow or in 1608 when the foundation stone was laid, innovations proliferated and group boundaries were uncertain; the participants’ new associations cannot be used as an explanation for the chapel, nor can they be assumed to have preceded the chapel. Too often, art historians confuse these separate problems.8 This chapter departs from architectural history’s habitual concern with ‘completion’, ‘use’, or ‘function’, to veer from assumptions that architecture either represents something preceding it (such as power or spirituality) or that it ‘fills’ space which precedes it. Intead it emphasizes the work of architecture as process and production, and in particular, the production of saintly protection as ongoing, unfinished. This chapter therefore interrogates the Treasury Chapel both as locus for patronal saints’ relics and as productive of yet more protector saints. I argue that, in spite of its initial appearance of homogeneity and coherence, the chapel is radically heterogeneous in institutional, urban, spatial, and spiritual terms; and this heterogeneity is part of the process and product of that generation. I begin with a discussion of the nature of patronal or ­protector The Deleuzo-Guattarian sense of machine does not separate the technical from the social or the natural. Indeed, technics breaks down a clear distinction between subject (organism) and objects (environment). Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaux, 73.   7 For the tensions between the Deputazione and the Cathedral, see Chapter 5.   8 See, for instance, the otherwise excellent article by Michelle O’Malley, ‘Altarpieces and Agency: The Altarpiece of the Society of the Purification and its “invisible seeing ­relations”’, Art History, 28:4 (2005), 417–441.   6

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saints, with particular regard to place and locality, before turning to the formidable – indeed, unsurpassed – generation of protector saints in Naples during the long Catholic Reformation. Since the proliferation of protector saints also worked to demonstrate the essentially imperilled nature of the city, I suggest that the chapel worked as machine to produce yet more protectors to staunch the lack that their production foregrounded. Thus this is an exploration of what might be termed ‘spiritual production’ in architecture, a working through of the potentiality of materiality and affect discussed in Part I above. Naples: capital of protectors

Patron saints were, of course, nothing new.9 The exceptionality of Naples lay in the sheer number it espoused – and the speed with which it did so. By the end of the sixteenth century the city already vaunted seven patron saints, in excess of any other Italian city.10 Siena, also unusually well endowed with patronal saints, had but four ‘advocate saints’ (santi Avvocati), each of whom was celebrated by an elaborate chapel encompassing an altarpiece and intarsia choir stalls in its cathedral.11 The number of Naples’ protector saints increased exponentially. By the late sixteenth century Naples enjoyed the special protection of Saints Agrippinus, Agnellus, Asprenus (first Bishop of Naples), Athanasius, Euphebius, Severus, and, most important, St Januarius (San Gennaro) (Plate 6).12 St Thomas Aquinas, whose patronage was strongly supported by the Carafa clan and advanced on the basis of his local connections, was added in 1605. In quick From the end of Antiquity and throughout the Middle Ages most developing settlements adopted them. The literature on patronal sanctity in early modern Europe remains fragmented and specialist, if not localist. Among the wider studies, see Fiume (ed.), Il santo patrono e la città; S. Boesch Gajano, L. Ermini Pani, and G. Giammaria (eds), I santi patroni del Lazio, 2 vols (Rome: Tipografia della Pace, 2006).  10 Agrippinus, Agnellus, Asprenus, Athanasius, Euphebius, Severus, and most prestigious of all, St Januarius, whom the city managed to impose as patron of the kingdom during the plague of 1656.  11 They were Saints Ansanus, Savinus, Victor, and Crescentius. See Aronow, ‘A Description of the Altars in Siena Cathedral’, in Henk van Os (ed.), Sienese Altarpieces 1215–1460: Form, Content, Function, vol II: 1344–1460 (Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1990), 230. In addition the Virgin was Siena’s crucial protector.  12 Sallmann, Santi barocchi, 83. San Gennaro and St Agrippinus were venerated as patron saints. St Agrippinus, sixth Bishop of Naples, is named in the Liber pontificalis S. Neapolitanae Ecclesiae as ‘amator patriae et defensor civitatis’. Both saints were named in a Bull of Archbishop Sergius in 1183 as protectors (‘Sub protectione b. Ianuarii et Agrippini quorum io communimur’; Tutini, Memorie (1633), 45). Following the controversy between the Deputies of the Treasury and the Dominicans over the principal patron saint of Naples, in 1663 Pope Alexander VII issued a brief recognizing San Gennaro as principal protector.   9

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succession patronal elections of the following saints ensued: Blessed Andrea Avellino (1625), St Patricia (1625), Blessed Giacomo della Marca (Fig. 23) (in this period, there was no obstacle to electing a simple Blessed), and San Francesco di Paola (1625).13 There followed elections and reliquaries of Saints Ignatius Loyola (1628); Anthony of Padua (1629); Dominic (1640; Gregory of Armenia (1646); Francis Xavier (1656); Teresa of Avila (1664); Filippo Neri (1667); Gaetano da Thiene (1671); Nicholas of Bari (1675); Clare of Assisi (1689); Blaise, St Joseph, and Peter Martyr (1690); Francis of Assisi and Cecilia and Archangel Michael (1691); Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi (1692); John of Capistrano and John the Baptist (1695); Francesco Borgia (1695); Candida (Fig. 71) and Mary of Egypt (1699) (Fig. 43); Mary Magdalen (1705); Anthony Abbot (1707);14 Augustine (1711); Irene of Thessalonica (1731) (Fig.  42); Emiddius and Raphael (1792).15 Thus it was not just the number, but the rate of production that made Naples remarkable in its generation of saints. It had seven at the end of the sixteenth century, but between 1600 and 1731 an astonishing twenty-eight new protectors were elected.16 By 1928 there were fifty-one. The flourishing of the Treasury Chapel in terms of artistic activity and finish corresponded to those years during or directly preceding their

Sallmann, Santi barocchi, 85. Strazzullo, La Real Cappella, 167.  15 The date when a saint became protector saint is not always straightforward, especially given the destruction of most of the Seggi archives. The date of a saint’s election is not always clear, since the process involved elections at each of the Seggi, followed by the assent of clergy and chapter. The date when the saint’s silver reliquary was commissioned or that when the silver saint took up occupation in the chapel are also sometimes regarded as the real markers of the process. Considerable delays sometimes occurred between the commissioning of the silver reliquary statue and its consignment to the Treasury Chapel. Thus the ‘statue’ of St Anthony of Padua elected in 1640 was received in 1646 (ATSG, CB/24 (Fasc. 58 n. 15)) and the silver statue of the Virgin was agreed for the sacristy on 25 January 1675 (ATSG, CB n. 9 (101) 1641, n.f.). St Nicholas of Bari was made patron saint of the city in 1648 without the assent of the chapter and clergy of Naples, which followed only in 1674. St Gregory of Armenia was elected as protector in January 1646, but his silver ‘statue’ was brought to the Treasury Chapel only in March 1660. For the patronage of St Gregory of Armenia, see ATSG, AB/12, Conclusioni, fol. 16r, and ATSG, CB/7, fasc. 58 n. 34 bis 1568, ‘Padronanza di S Gregorio Armeno’.  16 They were Saints Asprenus, Athanasius, Euphebius, Agrippinus, Severus (all five bishops of Naples), St Agnellus, St Thomas Aquinas, Blessed Andrea Avellino (1625), St  Patrizia (1625), St Francesco di Paola, St Antonio of Padua (1640), St Dominic (1641), Blessed Giacomo della Marca (1647), St Francis Xavier (1656), St Teresa (1664), St  Filippo Neri (1667), St Gaetano (1671), St Nicolo Bishop (1675), St Gregory of Armenia (1646), St Chiara (1689), St Joseph (1690), St Peter Martyr (1690), St Blaise (1690), St Michael Archangel (1691), St Francis of Assisi (1691), St Maria Maddalena de Pazzi (1692), St John the Baptist (1695), St Francesco Borgia (1695), St Candida (1699), St Mary Egiziaca (1699). St Anthony Abbot followed in 1707. See Maria di Sant’ Anna, Istoria della Vita (1707), 224.  13  14

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most intense multiplication. The chapel was inhabited by and, indeed, overpopulated with saints. The proliferation of protectors in and through the Treasury Chapel served both to meet and to exacerbate a sense of lack and to generate yet more protectors. The acceleration in generation of protector saints that occurred in Naples between the 1620s and 1730s was echoed to some extent elsewhere, as JeanMichel Sallmann’s groundbreaking study reveals.17 Thus by the end of the sixteenth century L’Aquila had four patron saints (Bernardino da Siena, Massimo the Martyr, Pietro Celestino – Pope Celestine V – and Irene of Thessalonica), Oronzo and Irene of Thessalonica safeguarded Lecce, and St Felice protected Nola. Small centres, too, had their protectors: Anthony Abbot served Sorrento, and Tropea in Calabria was shielded by St Domenica. Between 1630 and 1750, 225 cities and other settlements elected 410 new patron saints, in 347 elections.18 In this respect, Italy exceeded all other Catholic countries, and the Kingdom of Naples surpassed all other regions of Italy. But the city of Naples had more than any other centre. In that city between 1631 and 1670, five new protector saints were elected (21 per cent of the kingdom as a whole), and 1671–1710 – a particularly energetic period – saw that figure rise to sixteen (66.6 per cent of the kingdom’s protector saints); while between 1711 and 1750 the number fell to three (12.5 per cent of the kingdom’s total).19 A comparison with Lecce, also a southern city that experienced an increase in protectors, is useful. At the end of the sixteenth century Irene of Thessalonica was Lecce’s only patron saint. There followed Saints Francis of Assisi (1654); Just, Oronzo, and Fortunato (1657); Anne (1667); then in 1689, a bumper year, Anthony of Padua, Ignatius Loyola, Francis Xavier, Dominic, Francesco di Paola, Nicholas of Tolentino, Gaetano da Thiene, Francesco Borgia, Rosa of Lima, Joseph, and Stanislaus Kostka; Pietro Celestino (Pope Celestine V) and Maurus in 1695; and Filippo Neri in 1703.20 By 1703 Lecce therefore enjoyed the protection of twenty saints – an impressive number. In the absence of specialist studies, it is hard to interpret this particular accumulation of saints. But by 1705 Naples had almost twice as many. Thus the phenomenon was not restricted to Naples, but the increase in protectors was more spectacular there than anywhere else in Europe. As to why this occurred, some scholars – following somewhat uncritically claims

Sallmann first demonstrated that it was in southern Italy, especially in the city of Naples itself, that the cult of patron saints made its greatest impact. Jean-Michel Sallmann, Naples et ses saints à l’âge baroque (1540–1750) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994; Italian translation, Santi barocchi).  18 Sallmann, Santi barocchi, 83–84.  19 Sallmann, Santi barocchi, 90, Table 6.  20 Sallmann, Santi barocchi, 118 n. 28.  17

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advanced in baroque Naples – have suggested that Naples was either particularly vulnerable to catastrophe – earthquake, plague, volcanic eruption – or particularly fearful of those disasters. Fear of the plague in particular, epecially after the terrible attack of 1656, which almost halved the population of Naples, has been identified by some scholars as explanation of the increase, especially in the period 1689–92.21 Yet fear of the plague was by no means limited to Naples or more acute there than in other port cities, such as Venice, Genoa, or Palermo, so while it can be seen as an important factor, it is insufficient as an explanation. And while the destabilization of a city through fear of everimpending disaster, natural or otherwise, perhaps made it potentially readier to accept Spanish rule, not all cities under Spanish rule responded by augmenting heavenly protectors. The swelling in the number of protectors began in the early seventeenth century. In the period 1630–90 it was still moderate and relatively stable, with twenty to thirty elections each decade, apart from the decade 1641–50, which saw Masaniello’s revolt of 1647 and the crisis of municipal institutions. In that decade the number of elections dropped to nine, with ten new saints selected. Sallmann interprets the irregular progress of elections until about 1680 as indicating that southern communities ‘were not yet persuaded of the need’ to augment the number of saints who could intercede on their behalf, and interprets this in part as a sign of the destabilizing effects of the great depression of the seventeenth century on the social organization in the kingdom. The absence of a response to the plague of 1656 in terms of manufacturing a new patron is a sign of this, he argues. Between 1680 and 1710 recourse to request for intercession increased on the occasion of the earthquakes which repeatedly devastated the region. Beyond these contingent occasions, the steady increase in elections – even if not continuous – is interpreted by Sallmann as a sign of the rebirth of populations devastated by plague, ‘of a renewal of social life, of the reconstruction of economic life and of a return to a collective and communitarian consciousness’.22 Indeed, for Sallmann high population density, a resident nobility, an open economy, and profitable commerce rendered certain areas both more prosperous and more open to Catholic Reform – even to the extent that he sees the election of patron saints as an economic indicator.23 This relative prosperity occurred in the first decades of the eighteenth century. During this period, Sallmann suggests, the election of R. De Maio, Religiosità a Napoli (1656–1799) (Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1997), 23–30, 53, 101, 130–133, and C. Catello, ‘Argenti’, in Civiltà del Seicento a Napoli, exhibition catalogue, Museo di Capodimonte, 24 October 1984–14 April 1985, and Museo Pignatelli, 6 December 1984–14 April 1985 (Naples: Electa, 1998), vol. II, 307.  22 Sallmann, Santi barocchi, 88–89.  23 Sallmann, Santi barocchi, 91, 93.  21

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a new protector saint became a normal practice, no longer a reactive response to a natural disaster to repair damage done, but rather a request for preventative protection which would guarantee well-being in future. In the city of Naples the pattern differed slightly from that in the kingdom. In southern Italy the greatest demand for the election of patronal saints occurred in the thirty years between 1691 and 1720. In Naples, however, the decade 1601–10 five new protectors were made; each decade between 1611 and 1650 saw the election of nine protector saints each year; a peak of eleven occurred in the decade 1651–60 before the numbers fell to five in 1661–70 and also 1671–80; there were six in 1681–90 and three in 1691–1700.24 Sallmann attributes this remarkable increase to ‘the effects of the CounterReformation and the renewal of the Catholic world after the Council of Trent’.25 This explanation is not entirely satisfactory. First, it is notable that the greatest increase in protectors occurred long after Trent and cannot be attributed to a post-Tridentine glow. Second, Sallmann interprets the increase in patronal saints as a consequence of ‘the renewal of the Catholic world’ of which it was also a manifestation. That is to say, the flowering of its saints was part of ‘the renewal of the Catholic world’ after Trent. Sallmann argues that in the Kingdom of Naples the high point for protector saints coincided with the greatest production of hagiographic literature, with the return of the Inquisition to the kingdom, and with what he calls ‘baroque piety’, as evinced in the discourses on death and votive practices.26 ‘Symptoms’ of the ‘Counter-Reformation’ are adduced as its substance, its effects, and its consequences, in a circular argument. Third, Sallmannn’s hypothesis fails to explain why comparable increases in patronal numbers did not occur throughout the Catholic world and why, indeed, protectors were particularly concentrated in Naples. We shall return to this problem, but in the meantime, let us continue to trace the proliferation and management of protector saints in Naples. The rise in number of patronal saints corresponded broadly with the period of elaboration of centralized bureaucratic regulation of sanctity. Thus in part Sallmann, Santi barocchi, 83–84 and 90 (Table 6). The politics of Neapolitan patronal elections are probed by G. Galasso, ‘Ideologia e sociologia del patronato di San Tommaso d’Aquino su Napoli (1605)’, in G. Galasso and C. Russo (eds), Per la storia sociale e religiosa del Mezzogiorno d’Italia, vol. II (Naples: Guida, 1982), 215–249; G. Sodano, ‘Ipotesi politiche sull’elezione di san San Francesco di Paola a patrono di Napoli’, in F. Senatore (ed.), S. Francesco di Paola e l’Ordine dei Minimi nel Regno di Napoli (secoli XV–XVIII) (Naples: Istituto italiano per gli studi filosofici, 2008), 130–135; and G. Sodano, ‘Il patronato a Napoli nel XVII secolo: i casi di San Gaetano e San Francesco Saverio’, in G. Fiume (ed.), Il santo patrono e la città. San Benedetto il Moro: culti, devozioni, strategie di età moderna (Venice: Marsilio, 2000), 217–230.  25 Sallmann, Santi barocchi, 84.  26 Sallmann, Santi barocchi, 87 and 116 n. 11.  24

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the intensification of the production of protector saints should be understood in a Foucauldian relation to the development of the disciplinary machinery and centralization of the Catholic Church. That regulation included the canonization of saints, patronal election procedures, and elig­ibility, as well as the visual representation of saints. In the first decades of the seventeenth century, there was no obstacle to electing a simple Blessed as patron. Pope Urban VIII’s canonical reforms of 1630 regularized what had been an anarchic system. Before that date, it is difficult even to trace the mode by which the cult of patron saints was organized or the processes by which new protectors were chosen.27 Up until 1630, therefore, an election of a new protector does not appear in the records of the Congregazione dei Riti. Requests for particular services in honour of saints recently elected as protectors are the only formal indication of their collective protection.28 Election processes were localized and disparate. Sallmann shows that papal control increased during the years leading up to 1630 and thereafter.29 Thus on 11 June 1629 the Order of Minims in Naples asked the Congregazione to confirm the 1626 election of St Francesco di Paola as protector and to authorize the translation of his remains to the Treasury Chapel with a solemn procession; the cardinals replied that they wanted first to check the records of the election. After 1630 the Papacy asserted its control and imposed on the Congregazione dei Riti surveillance over all elections. Thus the Congregazione worked to ensure that only those saints who were venerated as such by the whole Church, or canonized by the Pope, or registered in the Roman martyrology could be elected; the election had to be made by the people (populus) through its representatives (consilium generale), or by the notables (officiales), by local clergy and the diocesan bishop; the processo verbale had to be examined by the Congregazione dei Riti, which checked that the previous two conditions had been respected.30 Sallmann, Santi barocchi, 82. Thus when he investigated the election of new patron saints from the end of the sixteenth century, he found it impossible to make even an effective list. The autonomy of municipalities and of local churches in this regard was absolute. The Congregazione dei Riti, established by Sixtus V, had no say in the matter: it was in charge only of the organization of holy worship, ceremonies, and services. Thus it was involved in the election of a patron saint only in agreeing to a city’s request to hold a special religious service. Sallmann, Santi barocchi, 85.  28 Sallmann, Santi barocchi, 84–85. On the Congregazione dei Riti, see n.79 below.  29 Thus in 1627, following the earthquake that hit the region, Capua chose the recently beatified Andrea Avellino as its protector. The city asked the Congregazione to allow regular and secular clergy of the diocese permission to hold a service according to the breviary and the Roman missal. Having consulted the archbishop, the Congregazione granted permission on 8 April 1628. Such an investigation by the Roman Congregazione into local ecclesiastical authorities was a canonical innovation. The strengthening of papal control was underway. Sallmann, Santi barocchi, 84–86.  30 Sallmann, Santi barocchi, 86.  27

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‘Local sanctity was condemned by these decrees’, claims Sallmann.31 And indeed it is clear that the processes of recognition and election were coming under tighter centralized administrative scrutiny and control. But it is perhaps overly hasty to claim that local sanctity was at an end. After all, sanctity in all its registers was always intensely localized, and the ‘centre’ was composed of shifting competing groups, informed by and rooted in local interests. Arguably, what changed was the nature of the local. The city did indeed change address. To better grasp this requires a consideration of the peculiarly close relationships between protector saints and place. While not wishing to detract from Sallmann’s powerful insights, I suggest that religious fervour and hunger for new protectors cannot be explained by appeal to economic or social factors or to generic religiosity. I propose here that the Treasury Chapel was a vital part of that ardent proliferation. It gathered within its brilliant embrace an increasing number of patron saints, surrounded by rich materials and artworks that intensified that multiplication and their miracles. It elevated irrefutably to an urban stage and scale Gennaro’s spectacular miracle. In turn, that miracle occurred thrice a year before the assembled representatives of the whole city, and drew dignitaries from far and wide to see it, intensifying the demand for new protectors from each sector of the city. Yet more institutions sought to secure for their own saint presence where it mattered most – among the Treasury’s glittering array. The chapel filled up with saints’ relics at a speed and volume quite unanticipated. Thus in about 1700 a list of work outstanding at the chapel included its expansion: ‘the expansion of the said chapel is necessary in order to receive there the companions of the holy relics accepted in the said Treasury’.32 Protectors had to be housed; that brilliant housing generated more protectors, which, in turn, necessitated expansion and produced overflow. Crowded with saints, the chapel offered the reassurance of life beyond death, the comforting possibility of resurrection, and issued sweet sounds of urban harmony and spiritual delivery as one. Multiplication and redemption

The Treasury Chapel is superabundantly inhabited by relics and saints and, by extension, external institutions which invested in the chapel and occupied it prosthetically through their espoused saints. In short, the effect is not of simple population, but of over-population, a synthesis of heterogeneity, of saintly reproduction and overflow. The chapel’s holy population was Sallmann, Santi barocchi, 87. ‘Et più è necessario l’ampli.at.ne di d.a Cappella per recettacolo delli Compagni delle sante Reliquie accettate in d.o Tesoro’. ATSG, DA/9 (60-1588), fol. 135r.

 31  32

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­ aradoxical, its saintly bodies and virtuous relics, at once fragmented and p proliferate, present and remote. The chapel swells the protectors pictorially, architecturally, and sculpturally and excessively, non-figuratively and beyond itself (Plate 1). The walls of its presbytery and lateral chapels serve to multiply and reproduce the saints, and to range them. Niches sunk into its very walls house the saints’ relics (Plate 7). Directly above them stand full-length bronze sculptures of the same saint (Fig. 3). Indexical fragment and life-size statues work in different registers but in close conjunction to evoke the saints. Thus in the presbytery there are silver bust reliquaries and full-length bronze sculptures of (from left): Saints Thomas, Agnellus, and Athanasius (on the left wall); Asprenus, Gennaro, and Agrippinus (on the liturgical east wall); Euphebius, Severus, and Patricia (on the right wall) (Figs 11 & 59). San Gennaro predominates and is here the most multiplied of saints. He alone figures pictorially in the altarpieces and frescoes of the vaults (Fig. 68), as well as in a towering bronze full-length sculpture (Fig. 22) and in bust and blood (Plate 6 & Fig. 1).33 He commands the dominant position. His bronze statue receives special architectural emphasis, occupying the most prominent aedicular niche, directly behind the main altar in the centre of the east wall (Plate 3 & Fig. 22). That niche is enhanced with an inlaid coloured marble shellhead and a bold segmental pediment crowned by angels. Nevertheless, the bronze figures are so dark that they tend to retreat into the wall niches; and the figure of San Gennaro is no exception to this. Thus his figure conveys both celebration and emphasis and a curious ‘absence’, a reticence. This ­ambiguity defers primacy from his sculpture to his relics. The proliferation of indexical relics and figural representations stalls any ready resolution of where the saints, especially San Gennaro, are ‘located’. On the contrary, their ‘location’ is held open by their proliferation across the chapel. Sculptural figure, reliquary head, ampoules of blood, altarpieces, and frescoes: there is no single location for Gennaro here; rather his presence is diffused, far and wide but is undispersed. Below his bronze figure, his relics The altarpiece of the east lateral chapel depicts The Decapitation of San Gennaro (Plate 41). Apart from Ribera’s, the remaining altarpieces depict post mortem miracles performed by San Gennaro in heaven, a theme picked up in the vaults above. Gennaro’s life is celebrated in several of the frescoes in the vaults, including Domenichino’s San Gennaro Visits his Companions in Prison, San Gennaro Meets Sossio, and San Gennaro and his Companions in the Amphitheatre at Pozzuoli, untouched by the wild beasts rendered docile at his feet; and San Gennaro Restores to Timotheo his Sight (Fig. 68). These frescoes show not only saintly resistance and courage, but the cruelty of human beings who torture and mutilate their fellows. Threats to the saint take the form not only of the supernatural, such as Vesuvius, but rulers, accomplices, obedient servants. Thus the frescoes make possible a reading of sanctity as struggle against complacent power.

 33

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are kept (separated by silver) in a locked and curtained safe (Fig. 22), and bones of his body lie in the Succorpo (Fig. 8). The re-evocation of the saint directly in relic-reliquary bust, and representationally in the full-length bronze statue, frescoes, and altarpieces stages the swarming and contamination that is inherent in the economy of relics and in the chapel’s framing, organization, and operative system. While this is particularly pronounced in the case of San Gennaro, it is in operation for all the saints conserved here. Thus an announcement is made and reiterated of a presence with no precise location. Indeed, the very architecture of San Gennaro’s chapel demanded new saints to occupy its niches. The nine niches in the presbytery, closest to San Gennaro and marked by prestigious bronze statues of the saints, were particularly enticing (Plates 3 & 7, Fig. 11). Their restricted number intensified competition between rivalrous saints and their supporting institutions. As we shall see in Chapter 8, a particularly protracted battle took place between St Patricia and Blessed Andrea Avellino and their supporting institutions over the ninth niche – much coveted as the last available niche in the presbytery (Fig. 3). Once all the niches were filled, competition continued, with reliquary busts posed in niches and perched on stands throughout the chapel and crowded into the adjacent sacristy and oratory (Plate 4 & Fig. 11). Freed from the constraints in size imposed by the loculi, the silver reliquaries grew larger and departed from the half-length/bust format to embrace more adventurous sculptural forms, narratives, and multiple figures. Thus St Irene with her magnificent model of Naples (Plate 9 & Fig. 42), and the magnificent full-length figures by Lorenzo Vaccaro and Gian Domenico Vinaccia, Saint Michael Archangel (1691) (Plate 28), and Tobias and Archangel Raphael (1757) by Sanmartino, Giuseppe Del Giudice, and Gennaro Del Giudice, burst onto the scene (Plate 27).34 By centralizing and concretizing Neapolitan protector saints in this way, the Treasury Chapel accentuated and concentrated their presence, and thereby stirred more institutions to participate by advancing their own saints as city protectors. At the same time, however, in its undertones, it raised the spectre of the city’s insecurity and of the unceasing nature of the threats it faced, reminding worshippers of the precarity of their city and their own vulnerability. Thus its logic was always of lack, of something or someone missing. In spite of apparently being saturated in saints, the chapel wanted more. It begged and demanded always more: more prayers and more self For an extended discussion of the St Irene reliquary, see H. Hills, ‘How to Look Like a Counter-Reformation Saint’, in M. Calaresu, F. de Vivo and J. P. Rubies (eds), Exploring Cultural History: Essays in Honour of Peter Burke (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 207–230. Tobias and Archangel Raphael (Plate 27) reasserts the Treasury’s theme of blindness and witness in the reliquaries. For technical information on this reliquary, see Catello and Catello, Scultura in argento, 132.

 34

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sacrifice, another protector, another pursuant of salvation, another heavenly bulwark to help on earth to keep dark at bay. Something or someone was still necessary, still required, still absent, and still to come. Thus the chapel, more than mere housing for protector saints already made elsewhere, became a machine for producing them and a measure of the inadequacy of such steps so far. It depends on and demands a map of connections for a group, for assistance that is missing, a necessary investment to secure the future. The Treasury Chapel gathers saints between its walls, marshals them in hierarchical order defined by columns and niches; and rallies them, ready to act, and asks for more (Plate 7). What was a protector saint?

Friends in high places are useful at the best of times. At the worst, they are indispensable. Patron saints offered access to God and a special dispensation towards a particular place or group or need. Protector saints protected locally. Closely identified with a place, they looked out for its inhabitants. In 1579 Paolo Regio, self-appointed specialist in Neapolitan sanctity, refers in his text to ‘Neapolitans’ (rather than ‘Naples’, as in his book title) as the object of protector saints.35 It is thus the calibrating of relations between saints and subjects that orchestrates place. Sanctus (saint, holy) derives from sancire, ‘to solemnly ratify or sanction’; thus sanctus is that which is secured by religious sanction, that which is sacred and inviolable. This term, used in classical culture, was later attributed to the office of bishop, to the state of virginity, to the community of the faithful. It then passed as a title of honour to martyrs and finally to confessors: that is, those on whom a cult was bestowed.36 Yet while that which is inviolable, sacred, and virginal might initially invoke enclosure and secure boundaries, sanctity effectively is a destroyer of limits. In return patron saints had to be courted. The idea of the patron saint derived from the Antique model of jurisdiction, the Roman patrocinium, which bound patronus and cliens together.37 While the patronus–cliens relationship was hierarchical, it was one of mutual obligation. The patron offered patronage, defence, or protection to his client, perhaps in the form of legal protection or financial assistance, and in return his client was expected to ‘[G]li altri Santi Protetttori di Napolitani’, he writes: Neapolitans, rather than their city, are protected. Regio, Le Vite de’ Sette Santi Protettori, 10(B)r.  36 See Vauchez, La sainteté and Boesch Gajano, ‘Santità e miracolo’, 360.  37 See Sallmann, Santi barocchi, 113–114. The term patronus, derived from pater, indicates the patriarchal nature of this relationship – and was pregnant for the heavily gendered nature of patron sanctity later, too.  35

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offer his services as necessary. The bonds were not so much legal as moral, or socio-political, and depended on the fides (reliability, trust, and trustworthiness) of the patron and the pietas (dutiful devotion) of the client. And they could be complex, extending across a network that implicated the patron as a client elsewhere.38 Each needed the other, in a system based ultimately on fear, threat, and violence. A man demonstrated his dignitas by the number of clients he had. The uneasy bond between weak and powerful lay at the heart of the economy of patronage, including that of the patron saint. A superabundance of patron saints weakened the exclusivity of that bond. The election of ever more saints effectively diminished the power of existing saints. The renewal of the principal protector, raised above others, to occupy a key role in the community as a whole is partly a response to that proliferation. Thus Gennaro’s primacy was necessary to sustain the whole currency of divine protection given the wild inflation in Naples. Along with this development, the saints’ role shifted from patron to intercessor.39 The tutelary semideus became intercessor with God. In the controversy about what constituted a saint, Cardinal Robert Bellarmine suggested in De ecclesia triumphante in 1596 that, rather than seeking to demonstrate the existence of saints in the primitive church, at issue was authoritative theological argument. Saints were blessed immediately with the presence of God, he claimed: ‘The souls of pious men that are detached from their bodies and that have no need of being purged are immediately admitted to rejoice in the beatitude of clearly seeing God.’40 Thus saints were blessed with the presence of God immediately after death, without need of purgatory. According to Bellarmine, Christ alone was able to intercede directly with God. While saints could not do that, their presence in God’s sight accorded them special access. Thus – once again – saints were defined by the In the late Republic the system of patronage was extended to whole communities, such that the Marcelli were patrons of the Sicilians, because Claudius Marcellus (c.268–208 BCE) conquered Syracuse. See E. Gabba, Republican Rome: The Army and the Allies, trans. P. J. Cuff (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 24–26; K.-J. Hölkeskamp, Reconstructing the Roman Republic: An Ancient Political Culture and Modern Research (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 34.  39 Sallmann, Santi barocchi, 114; H. Hills, ‘“The face is a mirror of the soul”: Frontispieces and the Production of Sanctity in Post-Tridentine Naples’, Art History, 31:4 (2008), 547– 574; H. Hills, ‘Demure Transgression: Portraying Female “Saints” in Post-Tridentine Italy’, Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 3 (2008), 153–208.  40 Bellarmine directly poses the question whether the spirit of pious men, separated from their bodies, and not in need of purgation, might be immediately admitted to enjoy the blessing and be in clear site of God (‘piorum hominum spiritus, qui et corpore soluti sunt, et nulla purgatione egent, jam ad fruendam beatitudinem, quae in clara Dei visione sita est, admissi?’) and goes on to find that this is indeed so. See R. Bellarmino, Septima controversia generalis de ecclesia triunphante tribus libris explicita, in Opera omnia (Paris: L. Vivès, 1870), vol. III, 141, 131–132.  38

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special place they held. It was, then, place that marked saints out as special – both in heaven and on earth. Thus the role of city patron changed in seventeenth-century southern Italy. Patrons became protectors. The term ‘protector’ refers to the ancient tutelary household god and thus to the protection of place and people together as one (the household): ‘The Gentiles customarily assigned protector Heroes or demigods to cities and even households and private people also had them’, writes Girolamo Maria di Sant’Anna in 1733, ‘but Christians detested these superstitions and from the beginning they chose saints as protectors.’41 Election and translation records generally refer to saints as ‘patron and protector’, indicating that the terms were not precisely synonymous and that Naples retained the right to both. The term ‘protector’ rather than ‘patron’ is almost invariable for San Gennaro and became usual in seventeenth-century Naples. This shift from ‘patron’ to ‘protector’ took place throughout southern Italy during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and it had contradictory aspects.42 While bonds of obligation persisted, the terms shifted from feudalism to absolute sovereignty. In short it paralleled the growing claims of Spanish monarchical rule over its European dominions. The term ‘protector’ denotes a change from a conception of God arrayed in a heavenly court of patron saints, whose role it was to intervene between man and God, to a wrathful and vengeful God and universe from whom protection was necessary and effected directly by saints (and, by implication, by the Spanish monarchy via the viceregency). Thus place, saint, and monarchical rule tended to replace a feudal model in the divine economy of dependence. Saints interceded between humans and God. Heavenly go-betweens, they shared the secrets of both worlds. Intimates of God and familiar to humans, they bridged the gulf between a wrathful and intemperate divinity and his powerless subject people below. Uniquely, saints had a foot in both worlds. Saints were useful to God, too. They had particular capacities to gather worshippers around them and to bind them together. Peter Brown has suggested that saints’ capacity to attract human following arose in large measure because they shared the human state. He cites St Augustine’s claim in The City of God that men who as martyrs had shown themselves to be true servants of God were able to bind their fellows even more closely to God than could the angels.43 Saints were closer to humans than were the angels, because they shared their fate. Since, like their worshippers, they had faced throughout Maria di Sant’Anna, Istoria della Vita (1733), 101–102. Sallmann attributes it to ‘Catholic Reform’s devotional models’ and their redefinition from the 1680s. Sallmann, Santi barocchi, 113–114.  43 Brown, The Cult of the Saints, 61.  41  42

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their lives the inexorability of death, saints readily gathered followers about them. Protector saints were therefore particularly intimately intertwined with the fates of their protected flocks, first, like all saints, through their shared humanity, and again specifically as protectors, through place, by which, and to which, they were particularly bound.

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Advocates and intercessors

Protector saints were advocates (avvocati) and, as such, were charged with pleading their appellants’ cases before the heavenly court (Plates 20 & 21). Heavenly patrons, just like their mundane counterparts, were chosen for their capacity to amplify and make heard the voice of their protected people, and thus to bend to their ends the designs of Providence. Gifts given to the saint, just as those given to powerful men, were to bring their donor to mind, to constrain the saint to stay God’s hand of punishment, and to deliver graces accordingly. Thus the inflation of saints increased access, influence, and efficacy, and permitted the storing up of good will against future disaster, and a prudent hedging of bets. Thus St Francesco Borgia’s election in 1695 was justified partly in relation to graces he had already granted and partly as future safeguard. He had intervened on behalf of Naples and the Spanish monarchy many times already and thus deserved recognition and honour. And those interventions, particularly in Naples and Granada, indicated his potential. Imminent disasters and recent dire warnings increased the urgency of appointing him to ensure ‘that he would deign to continue his particular protection of this city [Naples]’.44 Thus recognition and honour were exchanged for graces past and future in an uneasy relationship of continuing and continuous tension between sinners and the glorious in the sight of God and  imperial might. The imperatives of Spanish rule resound through the rhetoric. The relationship between community and saint reproduced in heavenly register the hierarchical society of the ancien régime, in which the clientage relationship reciprocally bound the lowly and the powerful.45 Indeed, it strengthened that relationship and should be seen as part of the thraldom of the aristocracy, as well as one more weapon in the arsenal of Spanish occupation of Naples. Spain ruled Naples by entering into collusive alliance with the Neapolitan aristocracy. That Spanish Naples was thronged with h ­ eavenly courtiers engaged in similar tactics worked to naturalize – or, better, to ‘Per tanto attente le cose p.tte, à finche d.o Glorioso Santo si degnasse continuare la sua particloare prottetione diquesta Città e Regno in casi simili’. ASN, Corporazioni religiose soppresse, 3633, n.f.  45 Sallmann, Santi barocchi, 102.  44

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‘­sanctify’ – this system of rule. Yet saints were never mere puppets of political rulers; they remained always independent, their favours unpredictable. Moreover, the role of the patron saint could prompt a questioning of the relationship between mundane patrons and their vassals below. The nature of power in heaven both blessed – literally sanctioned – the working of power in the world and opened it to question – particularly the relationship between power, mercy, and justice. The Treasury Chapel was, then, in part respectful acknowledgement of Naples’ mighty intercessors, a gift of honour from their vassals. But it was far more than mere repository of objects or sign of respect and petition; it was also productive of wonder and awe; generative of patron saints and their protection; and a pivot for the repositioning of the place and pitch of city–saint relations. Praying to saints for intercession was encouraged. In his Istoria della Vita, Virtù, e Miracoli di S. Gennaro (1733) (Fig. 43) Girolamo Maria di Sant’Anna cites St Ambrose, who makes no bones about it. Praying to saints for their intercession is a sensible course of action, he argues, because it is more likely to be efficacious than a direct address to God: The saints, servants of the Holy Lord, are worthy to intercede and also have the right to impetrate. These intercessors, therefore, should be addressed in such a manner that the Lord might pardon – due to his regard for them – that which to us he could deny46

The surplus of merit could even forge community in permitting the weakest to benefit from the virtues of the strong. Ambrose writes: Great is the Lord who forgives some through the merits of others, and while he praises some, others he comforts when they move away from the right path. Why is it that with you man lacks the capacity to be of help, while with the Lord [even] the servant has the merit to intercede and the right to beseech? You who judge, learn to forgive; you who are sick, learn to pray. If you despair of the remission of serious sins, invoke the intercessors, invoke the Church that it might pray on your behalf, so that, due to his regard towards it, God might pardon what he could deny you.47 ‘Sanctos Divini luminis servos, & interveniendi habere meritum, & jus etiam impetrandi. Adhibendos esse igitur ejusmodi praecatores, quorum contemplatione, quod nobis Dominus negare posset, ignoscat’. Ambrose, Sancti Ambrosii Mediolanensis Opera, pars IV, Expositio Evangelii Secundum Lucam, 20, quoted by Maria di Sant’Anna, Istoria della Vita (1733), 101.  47 ‘Magnus Dominus qui aliorum merito ignoscit aliis, et dum alios probat, aliis relaxat errata. Cur apud te, homo collega non ualeat, cum apud dominum seruus et interueniendi meritum, et ius habeat inpetrandi? Disce qui iudicas, ignoscere, disce qui aeger es, inpetrare. Si grauium peccatorum diffidis ueniam, adhibe precatores, adhibe ecclesiam quae pro te precetur, cuius contemplatione quod tibi dominus negare possit  46

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The saints were crucial intercessors, because God was terrible. Good relations with them held everything else in place. They were the key players in the economy of grace, as the Eletti of Naples made clear in their justification of St Nicholas of Bari’s election as protector in November 1648: Every good, and all the graces, that are received from his divine Majesty are in this city conceded through the intercessions of its protector saints; even the endurance of kingdoms, and the preservation of cities is due to the observance of the holy Catholic religion.48

Protector saints, Catholicism, the safety of cities, kingdoms, and empires, and the very place of place were inextricably bound. Saintly bulwarks

Saints were effective intercessors not through merit alone, but because they had access to and intimate knowledge of God. Pope Clement VIII’s Bull that confirmed to Naples the protectorship of St Thomas Aquinas tellingly describes patron saints as ‘guardians of humankind and effective ambassadors with God’.49 They were ‘defenders and bulwarks of human well-being’, because, knowing divine secrets, ‘they obtain with their prayers and through their intimacy with God his mercy for the sufferings of men’.50 Saints thus interceded as ‘ambassadors’, official high-ranking diplomats at the Heavenly Court, on behalf of their protégés. The system alluded to is a network of asymmetrical power, intimacy, and secrets in which trust is forged as much through necessity as by other means. Discomfiting secrets in a delicately balanced system of access and power. As ‘bulwarks’, the saints deflected and absorbed potential and actual suffering. Thus their role was a sort of heavenly counterpart to monastic and conventual institutions in the earthly city, which were also thought of as ‘bulwarks’ and treated as such architecturally.51 ignoscat’. Ambrose, Sancti Ambrosii Mediolanensis Opera, pars IV, Expositio Evangelii Secundum Lucam, 138.  48 ‘Consideratosi dall’Illmi Sig.ri Eletti, che ogne bene, e tutte le gratie, che si ricevono da sua divina Maestà sono in questa città concesse per l’intercessioni de santi suoi Protettori, et il stabilmento dei Regni, e Conservatione delle Città proviene dall’osservanza della santa Religione Cattolica.’ ATSG, Fascio CB/11, n.f., copy of a document of 24 November 1648.  49 BNN, MS Branc. VI.A.15, fol. 434r; Galasso, ‘Ideologia e sociologia del patronato di San Tommaso d’Aquino’, 214.  50 BNN, MS Branc. VI.A.15, fols 434r–435v; Galasso, ‘Ideologia e sociologia del patronato di San Tommaso d’Aquino’, 214–215.  51 Female convents themselves were seen as bulwarks, physically and spiritually protecting their city from divine disgrace. An ecclesiastical treatise on the role of women by Agostino Valier, Bishop of Verona, describes cloistered virgins as playing an important

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A terrible sense of vulnerability combined with institutional rivalries stirred an insatiable hunger for ever more spiritual defences on earth. San Gennaro’s Treasury Chapel seemed to merely accommodate what it required and generated.

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The Crow and the Hopi

Saintly intervention recalls the story retold by Deleuze from Robert Lowie of the different reactions of Crow and Hopi men when their wives cheat on them (the Crow are nomadic hunters, and the Hopi sedentaries with an imperial tradition). A Crow Indian will slash his wife’s face; a Hopi, remaining calm, will withdraw and pray for famine and drought to afflict the village. Deleuze says, ‘It is easy to see where the paranoia resides, the despotic element or signifying regime.’52 For Lévi-Strauss, ‘In effect, for a Hopi everything is connected: a social disturbance or a domestic incident calls into question the system of the universe, the levels of which are united by multiple correspondences; a disruption in one place is only intelligible, and morally tolerable, as a projection of other disruptions involving other levels.’53 Akin to the Hopi world, the eruption of Vesuvius, plague, and the chapel were projections of disruptions from other levels. Deleuze speaks of jumps from ‘one sign to another on a different spiral … The jumps are not made at random, they are not without rules […] Jumping from circle to circle, always moving the scene, playing it out somewhere else: such is the hysteric operation of the deceiver as subject, answering to the paranoid operation of the despot installed in his center of signifiance.’54 The army of saints, worshipers, relics, and statues participate in such a jumping from circle to circle. The Treasury Chapel was studded with an armoury of silver reliquaries projecting and refracting the wishes and investments of a court of saints that in turn interceded with the distant divinity, and a promise to put things right. Heavenly patronage and the place of the saint

Place was at the heart of the matter of sanctity. Sanctity was first and foremost the place of the saint’s body, of her or his martyrdom, burial, and relics. Thus it dissolved the very boundary between life and death and between place of role in reconstituting the discipline of their city, by furnishing through their wellordered, respected convents a bulwark (baluardo) against evil. Hills, Invisible City, 23–35, 179–181.  52 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 113.  53 Lévi-Strauss, preface to Don C. Talayesva, Soleil Hopi (Paris: Plon, 1968), vi, quoted by Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 113.  54 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 113–114.

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the relic and place of the saint in heaven. Thus place was no simple matter in terms of saints and their whereabouts. Crucially, the cult of relics emphasized the body of the saint as the locus of the sacred, in an ambiguous relationship to place.55 The body of the living saint was already a saintly body; and all saints continued to live in their dead bodies. The centrality of the body in the journey of sanctity leads directly to the ascription to it after death of thaumaturgic (wonder-working) power, a power that is also proof of the survival of the soul. The spiritual journey was inscribed on the saint’s body. That place bears witness to the possible unity between the human and the divine, a unity that death or the union of the soul with God cannot interrupt, but can only strengthen or develop. The saint’s tomb was traditionally the privileged place for this encounter – a place that relics made variable, if not portable. Place is, then, always at issue for saints. And especially so in the case of patron or protector saints. The protector saint specifically represents the localization of the joining of heaven and earth at the grave, or in the ‘place’ of a saintly human being in which heavenly interests are as if at one with earthly concerns in the place of the saint in his right place. The Christian cult of saints was localized through the joining of tomb and altar in Latin Christianity, as Peter Brown has demonstrated.56 Thus place (the grave) was always fundamental to Christian sanctity. The shrine containing a grave or, more frequently, a fragmentary relic was often called quite simply ‘the place’, loca sanctorum, ό τόπος.57 While other tombs remained private (familial), saints’ tombs became public.58 They were accessible to all and became the focus of ritual common to the whole community. Moreover, the ‘place’ of the saint could extend beyond the tomb. The place of martyrdom in For Aquinas the human person is a tight and integral union of soul and body. The soul survives the death of the body, but the full person does not exist until matter (the body) is restored to its form at the end of time. ‘The soul … is not the full man and my soul is not I’ (‘anima … non est totus homo et anima mea non est ego’). St Thomas Aquinas, commentary on 1 Corinthians 15, lect. 2. The body was necessary for Aquinas, but he tended to telescope body into form by seeing soul as sufficient to count for individual continuity and soul as the forma corporeitatis. Soul thus accounts for the ‘whatness’ of body; any matter that soul informs at the end of time will be its body. Aquinas’ opponents gave even greater positive significance to the body, holding that there is a separate forma corporeitatis, and material continuity in the resurrection. In Bonaventure’s view, the blessed in heaven pray for sinners more intensely because they will only receive their bodies when the number of the elect is complete and judgement comes. See Bynum, ‘The Female Body and Religious Practice’, 192.  56 For the emergence and orchestration of the cult of saints in late Antiquity, see Brown, The Cult of the Saints.  57 The bishops of Western Europe came to orchestrate the cult of saints so as to base their power within the old Roman cities on ‘towns outside the town’ – in cemeteries. Brown, The Cult of the Saints, 10–11, 8.  58 Brown, The Cult of the Saints, 9.  55

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the case of martyr saints, and that of the diocesan see in the case of confessor saints, were imbued with the virtus of sanctity. Indeed, in Western Europe the power of the bishop coalesced with the power of the shrine. Bishops in death parcelled up the geography of Europe into areas of patronage and influence, territories of leverage and obligation. Gregory of Tours claimed that regions were ‘nourished’ by a local saint as leader and intercessor, and their boundaries of influence could be drawn to exclude evil.59 While a saint was ‘granted’ to an area, a town might not have room enough for two.60 Thus while sanctity operated through place, it was not contained by place. Even as the virtus of the saint became contaminatory through localization and place, so place was activated and altered by it. Protector and patron saints in Naples as elsewhere were above all local (although intrinsic to them was the capacity to delocalize). Indeed, Naples continued to display great devotion to saints that were relatively unknown elsewhere, chosen from Naples’ first bishops or from among the myriads martyred for their faith in Antique persecutions. Bishops and martyrs enjoyed and deployed very specific relations to place. Within his or her own domain, a patron saint might exercise almost unlimited power as intercessor for his people. Bishops – quintessentially local saints, closely identified with their sees – predominated among Naples’ first seven protectors and constituted its saintly nucleus.61 Secular and spiritual control over his episcopal territory was the most important legacy for a holy bishop. Locality and ‘localness’ continued to matter, despite papal emphasis on the ‘whole Church’. Bishops displayed the character and hierarchy of social order, the epitome of spiritual power. It was through miracles that the bishop demonstrated his sanctity and his service to the community; and his most important miracles were those that demonstrated his control of divine power through his place in the Church. Most of these miracles involved spiritual healing and resulted, implicitly, in conversion or in strengthening the ties of faith: curing paralytics, giving sight to the blind and exorcizing the possessed.62 Martyr saints were held to be particularly efficacious in this regard. In his Istoria della Vita, Virtù e Miracoli di S. Gennaro (Fig. 43), the Carmelite Girolamo Maria di Sant’Anna approvingly cites St John Chrysostom in Gregory of Tours, Glory of the Confessors, 94 and 83, quoted in Brown, The Cult of the Saints, 13.  60 Gregory of Tours, Glory of the Confessors, 73, quoted in Brown, The Cult of the Saints, 13.  61 Exceptional bishop-saints like Cuthbert were more widely known because his territory was expanded by the movement of his relics; and Ambrose’s fame was due not to his miracles but to his theology. Hahn, Portrayed on the Heart, 168.  62 These are the most commonly represented episcopal miracles of healing; it is these themes that appear in the Treasury Chapel’s altarpieces.  59

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this regard: ‘the prayers of the martyrs are more powerful in heaven, just as soldiers wounded in battle are more tightly bound to their king, so martyr saints, carrying their severed heads in their hands and acting as intermediaries, have a greater claim on the King of Heaven’.63 Neapolitans, he claims, made Gennaro their patron saint immediately after his death, ‘and there is no doubt at all that San Gennaro, like the other martyr saints, his companions, began straightaway after their happy death to favour and to protect the cities of which they were chosen patrons’.64 The Treasury Chapel’s reliquary busts, borne aloft in processions to act as intermediaries with heaven, work analogously to the heads of saints decapitated as martyrs. The martyr was the patronus, the invisible, heavenly concomitant of the bishop. The martyr’s patronage reproduced in the heavenly sphere that which was exercised visibly and tangibly on earth by the bishop.65 Thus the bishop assumed an important role as the visible patronus under the invisible patronus.66 In this way, the protector saint par excellence represents a series of significant adjoinments: the joining of public and private (the private grave and public worship); the joining of traditional religious leadership and the power of the holy dead. Thus the joining of person and place in the saint was the joining of the earthly and the divine. In Rome the places of martyrdom and burial became favoured as sites yielding special contact with saints and thus the divine. Architects and artists worked to highlight these privileged points of contact of both place and body. Cardinal Cesare Baronio’s restoration of Santi Nereo ed Achilleo and of San Cesareo de’ Appia, and the sumptuous underground altar for St Martina’s relics begun in 1643 by Pietro da Cortona at Santi Martina e Luca, Rome, were justified in terms of archaeological and architectural reconstruction. History is posited as that which can be reconstructed and repeated – in frankly historicist claims.67 ‘L’orazioni de’ Martiri sono più potenti in Cielo, assegnandone egli di ciò la ragione dicendo: Sicut milites vulnera in praeliis sibi inflicta Regi monstrantes fidenter loquuntur; ita & Martyres in manibus obsecta capita gestantes, & in medium afferentes, quaecumque voluerint apud Regem Coelorum impetrare possunt’. Maria di Sant’Anna, Istoria della Vita (1733), 102.  64 ‘E non è dubbio alcuno, che così S Gennaro, come anche gli altri Santi Martiri suoi Compagni, subito cominciarono dopo la lor felice morte a favorire, e proteggere le Città, delle quali furono per padroni eletti’. Maria di Sant’Anna, Istoria della Vita (1733), 103.  65 On this and how it developed, see Brown, The Cult of the Saints, 36–38.  66 See Brown, The Cult of the Saints, 22–49. Augustine of Hippo early on opposed the cult of relics, but towards the end of his life he became convinced of the miraculous powers of the relics of St Stephen, which he advanced in The City of God, bk 22, sermons 320–324. And see Courcelle, Recherches, 139–153.  67 Herz, ‘Cardinal Cesare Baronio’s Restoration’, 590–620; E. Hubala, ‘Roma sotterranea barocca’, Das Münster, 18 (1965), 157–170; J. M. Merz, Pietro da Cortona and Roman Baroque Architecture, incorporating a draft by A. Blunt (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008), 61.  63

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The extreme logic of this relation was explored in the staging of martyrs’ dead bodies in lifelike marble sculpture, as in Stefano Maderno’s Saint Cecilia (1600) in the basilica of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere (Fig. 37) and Francesco Aprile and Ercole Ferrata’s Saint Anastasia (1686) in the main altar of the church of Sant’Anastasia.68 There the holy shrine where body, relic, sculpture, and place become one is staged in a white marble figuration of the saint’s martyred corpse. In the right place sculpture and relic become one, and can even perhaps change places. Place, conceived in terms of the saint’s body, was quite literally the guarantor of sacrality. The Treasury Chapel in Naples worked to render the chapel itself this privileged place – and thus to displace the catacombs and sites of martyrdom as sites of saintly generation. In the chapel the body of the saints indicated not only the possibility  of the unity between the human and the divine, but more than that, the possibility of an assemblage between city and divine. Thus the work of the chapel was more than to celebrate or amplify (and far less to merely accommodate) sanctity; it was to produce place, a privileged place, divinely protected. While place may be articulated in relation to threat perceived as external, place may also – perhaps more usefully – be conceived as crystallizing through apprehension of and protection from punishment. Thus place concretizes into a perceptible relation alongside divine action. Paolo Regio in 1579 (Fig. 32) claims that ‘Neapolitans’ are the focus of saintly protection. Indeed, people and place are conflated through sanctity. Clement VIII’s pontifical brief according Thomas Aquinas’ patronage to Naples opens with a declaration that just as guardian angels not only take care (‘curam gerunt’) of single individuals, but even watch over cities and countries (‘verum etiam urbibus et provinciis praesident’), so too ‘Saints, who reign with Christ and who deserved the life of angels, provide uninterrupted protection for cities and kingdoms.’69 It continues: ‘These saints are common guardians of humankind and the most powerful intercessors with God.’70 While the saints For Sant’Anastasia see F. Barry, ‘“Building History”: The Baroque Remodelling of S. Anastasia al Palatino’, Storia dell’arte, 95 (1999), 45–97. When the remains of the saint were discovered in 1678, it was decided to build a new main altar in the church for her. It was probably commissioned by Cardinal Francesco Maria Febei. Francesco Aprile commenced the work including a modello in grande that remained in his studio after his death. A small modello of unfired clay was listed in the inventory of Ercole Ferrata’s studio in 1686. V. Golzio, ‘Lo “Studio” di Ercole Ferrata’, Archivi d’Italia, 2 (1935), 66. See also O. Ferrari and S. Papaldo, Le sculture del Seicento a Roma (Rome: Ugo Bozzi, 1999), 24.  69 The juxtaposition of publica civitas and regnum (‘verum etiam urbibus et provinciis praesident’) is important: the former refers to the city (or city-state) and the latter to a kingdom of a territorial monarchy.  70 ‘Sancti cum Christo regnantes qui vitam meruerunt Angelorum’; ‘publicas civitates et regna continua protectione defendunt … communes generis humani custodes et legati apud Deum potentissimi’. BNN, MS Branc. VI.A.15, quoted by G. Galasso, Napoli capitale: identità politica e identità cittadina. Studi e ricerche 1266–1860 (Naples: Electa, 1998), 144.  68

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are figured as soldiers, ‘the unbeatable troops and advance guard of our safety’, it is their intimacy with God that is crucial. They are envisaged as enjoying a privileged position, close to God, ‘aware of divine secrets, such that they may most intimately entreat God’s clemency for our hardships’.71 The logic here is that the benefits of intimacy combine with number to provide the best protection. Indeed, the Brief acknowledges the general rule that the higher the number of protector-intercessors, so much more easily could people attain what they desired and keep it for longer.72 Safety lay in numbers. Place as imperilled and the swarming of protectors

St Francesco Borgia’s formal recognition as patron saint of Naples in September 1695 was accompanied by a particular rhetoric of God as distant, awesome, remote and terrible: And conscious that in this most faithful city and kingdom for many years now earthquakes have been continually felt in these parts, with such enormous ruin to our poor cities and their lands that it can truthfully be said that the might of the Lord lies always close at hand to punish us.73

His wrath was imminent, his clemency scarce and not readily forthcoming. The task of the protector was to stay the hand of punishment, to intercede between the wrathful God and the place that was to be punished. Vulnerability distinguished the city and kingdom as much as their faithfulness. The unceasing and oppressive menace of natural disasters, regarded as punishments from God, rendered saintly protection indispensable. The logic was one of urgent necessity, rather than of proliferation. Those impending and unending threats were levelled at place (city and kingdom) – ‘our poor cities and their lands’ – rather than at people, albeit occasioned by the sins of their inhabitants. It was place that needed protection; place that was threatened. While individuals and even specific groups might have provoked God’s wrath through their sins, it was place that would bear its brunt. Individuals were singled out for punishment less than punishment was visited upon place, on the city as a whole. In short, punishment of sin was less individualized than localized. Divine punishment and salvation worked to produce place, to p­ roduce a ‘cunei inexpugnabiles et nostrae salutis praesules’, ‘secretorum conscii divinorum, familiarissime clementiam Dei pro nostris exorant laboribus’. Quoted by Galasso, Napoli capitale, 145.  72 BNN, MS Branc. VI.A.15, c. 435r.  73 These words were used in the record of his election in the church of Santi Francesco Saverio and Francesco Borgia in Naples. ASN, Corporazioni religiose soppresse, 3633, Croce di Lucca, ‘Copia dell’Instrumento della padronanza di questa Città del Glorioso S. Francesco Borgia’, n.f.  71

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sense of the city as a whole and to unify it. The task of protector saints was to protect place, even more than it was to protect individuals – though protector saints could also do that – and thus they thereby produced it. Thus if place is what is protected and threatened, the question of the nature of that place and its governance readily becomes available to discourses besides that of sanctity. One such was Spanish rule.74 Early modern Naples was relentlessly assailed.75 Catastrophe of one kind or another – pestilence, plague, heresy, famine, earthquake, or volcano – was always waiting in the wings. Was any city ever so conspicuously – indeed, so magnificently – afflicted and threatened? Squeezed between sea port to the south – fount of trade and wealth, but also of plague and unorthodoxy – and Vesuvius to the east, whose fertile slopes sustained rich fields, citrus orchards, and vineyards, but whose eruptions were terrible, unpredictable and deadly, Naples faced a paradox of menace and promise (Plates 15, 31 & 32). Many of the instabilities that plagued Naples were fundamentally political in origin, as the Spanish secured their rule by ceding local barons all manner of unwarranted privileges and favours. But the discourse of catastrophe and protection was earnestly topographical, geographical, telluric, natural, and divine. It worked to generate civic discipline and obedience, but, more significantly, this was how the city was experienced and produced. As scores of local writers and preachers constantly reminded its populace, even the earth on which Naples stood was untrustworthy, riven as it was by seismic faults and frequent earthquakes. Thus the city of Naples was punished in and by its very location. Its very advantages were also its greatest vulnerabilities. Assailed from all directions, from outside and from within, from above and even from below, Naples even had the elements ranged against it. The air brought terrible rains and raining ash, water carried plague, the earth was riven by quakes, and fire exploded from Vesuvius (Plates 14, 15, 31, 32). The place of future anterior

In a landscape of dread, a city vulnerable to such diverse assaults needed powerful supernatural allies – and as many of them as it could get. The ­intermediaries best able to intervene between a wrathful God and castigated city, and between the sinful populace and its fraught location, were the ‘protectors’, or patron saints, of Naples. The Treasury Chapel assumed meaning only in relation to renewed proceedings of destruction. Its working depended The implications of this lie beyond the scope of this book. It is to be hoped that future research will take it up.  75 I am not suggesting it was a more dangerous place than anywhere else; rather, that discursively it was produced as such; attention was perpetually drawn to its precariousness.  74

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on a perpetual state of emergency, which it also helped to produce. The saints’ reliquaries and relics served not as assurance that ‘all will be well’, but as articulate reminders that all manner of things were far from well, and that worse was probably to come. Struggle and troubles were regarded as more than signs of conflict with the order of God, disruptive of form and subversive of virtue, but as perhaps its purest expression. Apprehension of worse scourges and disaster spurred hunger for more prodigies and more protection from ever more saints. God in some way generated them. The work of the protector was partly react­ ive response to disasters – Gennaro’s and Blessed Giacomo della Marca’s thwartings of the plague are cases in point. Since disaster could strike at any moment, advance protection will have been necessary. Present existence and future survival depended on investing in and accruing a vast spiritual reserve that could be mobilized from one instant to the next, a sort of banking and hedging in saintly futures. The protectors’ role was thus akin to that of finance bankers today.76 But the logic of protectors was, above all, anticipatory. The protectors’ principal task was to alter the direction of the future. Thus the Treasury Chapel worked in quasi-prophetic fashion. It occupied the tense of the future anterior. It opened what will have been. Electing protectors

It was in decisively urban terms that the election of St Francesco Borgia in 1695 was justified. Sin, the treasury of merit of saints, and the ‘scourges that loom over cities’ are linked in general terms: The gentlemen Eletti, cavalieri, and citizens [of the most faithful city of Naples], having considered that the mercy of omnipotent God has bestowed countless favours on man created in his image, and deformed through the first sin in our first father, and for that man’s sin, and to him given the assistance by which he could break the ties of his debts, and earn forgiveness, and be reconciled with the Creator, among which assistance must be counted the merits of the saints, through whose intercession the scourges that loom over cities and peoples have been seen a great many times to be mercifully pardoned.77 Even after the 2008 financial crisis, bankers today continue to occupy roles comparable to those of protector saints. Credited with responsibility for the economy’s success in good times, bankers are not held responsible for economic problems, which are, on the contrary, figured as sign of the failings of the toiling masses in running up ‘private debts’, and consequently necessarily to be borne by them in an orgy of publicly privatized guilt termed ‘austerity’.  77 These are the terms of the official recognition of St Francesco Borgia’s election as protector, written in the church of Santi Francesco Saverio e Francesco Borgia in Naples on 21 September 1695: ‘come d[ett]a fed[elissi]ma Città, e suoi SS[igno]ri Eletti,  76

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This is followed by claims that public governent is equivalent to the observance of Christianity: ‘and having considered also that the government of the public consists first and foremost in the observance of the Christian Religion’. Thus catastrophe is a categorical punishment for sin: when peoples have deviated from it [Christian Religion], then have occurred the shortages, disasters, illness, and other misfortunes, so that, having been warned by these means, not only must we abstain from doing evil, but see to it to do good, and attend to the worship of God, as must a city so Catholic and Christian, in having recourse in such dire circumstances to his divine Majesty, with the saints’ intercession.78

At that point a claim is advanced that an increase in protectors will afford real protection for the city. Precisely how this will occur is glossed over, since it is ‘God in his clemency’ who will spare the city. But this clemency is pitted as a likely consequence of increasing the number of protectors: they deliberated increasing the number of protector saints of the said most faithful city, so that with the number of intercessors augmented, God in his clemency would deign to free the said city of the evils threatening it.79

The emphasis on the city is easily taken for granted, given the mandate of a  protector saint to protect the city as a whole. Yet it deserves attention. While Naples’ earthly rulers depended on a strategy of ‘divide and rule’, its heavenly protectors forged a sense of Naples ‘as a whole’, rather than a Cavalieri, et cittadini havendono considerato, che la misericordia di Dio onnipotente hà fatto innumerabili beneficij all’huomo creato à sua imagine, e deformato per il primo peccato nel n[ost]ro primo padre, et per la colpa d’esso huomo, et à quello dato gli agiuti, con li quali potesse rompere li legami de suoi debitti [sic], et meritare il perdono, e reconciliarci altro creatore, trà quali deveno connumerarsi li meriti de santi, per intercessione de quali assai volte s’è visto essersi perdonati misericordiosamente li flagelli sovrastante alle città, e Popoli.’ ASN, Corporazioni religiose soppresse, 3633, Croce di Lucca, ‘Copia dell’Instrumento della Padronanza di questa Città del Glorioso S. Francesco Borgia’, n.f.  78 ‘et havendono considerato anco, che il Christiana Religione, e che quando li Popoli hanno da quella deviato, sono successe le miserie, calamità, infermità, et altre d ­ isavventure, acciò avvisati per questo mezzo, non solo ci dovessimo astenere dall’oprar male, ma procurare di far bene, et attendere al culto divino, come deve una città tanto cattolica, e christiano, col ricorrere in bisogno cosí grandi à sua divina Maestà, con intercessione de santi’, ASN, Corporazioni religiose soppresse, 3633, Croce di Lucca, ‘Copia dell’Instrumento della Padronanza di questa Città del Glorioso S. Francesco Borgia’, n.f.  79 ‘che però deliberorno accrescere il numero de Santi Protettori di d[ett]a fed[elissi]ma Città, acciò moltiplicati l’intercessori, la divina clemenza si degnasse liberare d[ett]a città dall’imminenti mali.’ ASN, Corporazioni religiose soppresse, 3633, Croce di Lucca, ‘Copia dell’Instrumento della Padronanza di questa Città del Glorioso S. Francesco Borgia’, n.f.

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city of divided  interests and quarters. Indeed, when a saint was selected to be  city protector, each ­aristocratic Seggio voted on the decision independently. Thereafter the Piazza del Popolo voted. Representatives from all the Seggi then gathered at San Lorenzo to discuss and formally record their joint decision, which was then forwarded to the Archbishop and canons and the Viceroy.80 Thus elements of the city – mostly aristocratic – made the decision on behalf of and in the name of the whole. Protectors thus served in part to make Naples more governable by the Spanish Crown, while also aristocratizing a new urban economy of sanctity. Principal protector: San Gennaro and patria

‘If great was San Gennaro’s protection in securing his country from wars, and enemy invasions’, writes the Carmelite Girolamo Maria di Sant’Anna in his Istoria della Vita … di S Gennaro (1733), ‘it was considerably greater in having liberated it from the most violent enemy that can be found, that is that of the plague.’81 San Gennaro’s miracle brought him forcefully into the city. There he assumed a powerful patriotic force as staunch defender of malign attacks. Far more than a distant intercessor before the throne of God, he was guardian and source of the identity of the patria – more Neapolitan than the Neapolitans – even a personification of Naples. The presence of Gennaro’s relics was crucial in forging protection. Not only for individuals who venerated them, but for an entire city. A saint’s body was closely bound to patria and was able to reactivate it. Yet for Gennaro, Naples was his patria, not by birth or bishopric, but by posthumous choice, and all the more important for that. Indeed, the translation of his body to his After 1630 the Archbishop referred the decision to the Sacra Congregazione dei Riti. The Sacra Congregazione dei Riti was established in 1588 by Pope Sixtus V to determine canonization processes and liturgical texts and to assess requests for the confirmation of particular saints’ local cults and festivals. Later the Congregazione assumed the right to determine questions of precedence betwen saints and after 1630 to confirm the elcetion of patronal saints. M. Gotor, Chiesa e santità nell’Italia moderna (Bari: Laterza, 2004), 103–105; J.-M. Sallmann, ‘Il santo patrono cittadino nel ’600 nel Regno di Napoli e in Sicilia’, in G. Galasso and C. Russo (eds), Per la storia sociale e religiosa del Mezzogiorno d’Italia, vol. II (Naples: Guida, 1982), 187–211. That this procedure was followed for Neapolitan protector saints emerges clearly, for example, from the document of 9 July 1695 in favour of St Francesco Borgia’s election. ASN, Corporazioni religiose soppresse, 3633, Croce di Lucca, ‘Copia dell’Instrumento della padronanza di questa Città del Glorioso S. Francesco Borgia’, n.f.  81 ‘Se grande è stata la protezzione di S Gennaro in aver più volte fatta sicura la sua Patria dalle guerre, & invasioni de’ nemici; assai maggiore è stata quella in averla liberata dal più fiero nemico che ritrovar si possa, quale appunto è quello della peste’. Maria di Sant’Anna, Aggiunte all’Istoria, 109.  80

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chosen patria worked as a reintegration that was analogous to the bringing together of his blood and head, making a whole that was more than mere reconstitution, producing a miraculous change and joy: ‘In 1497 the plague began to withdraw’, writes Girolamo Maria di Sant’Anna, ‘on the same day that [San Gennaro] came to console his patria with the presence of his Holy Body, and where until then Naples seemed desolate, emptied of its inhabitants, because they had fled elsewhere, from then on, it grew with numerous people and was full of joy and celebration.’82 The patria was ‘consoled’ and changed by the body of the saint. Its population increased and became joyous. The city was renewed. Relics bypassed clergy and ecclesiastics to draw directly together saint’s body, place, and people in a frisson of pleasure. If the saint’s body reconfigured locality and topography when body and soul ‘returned’ to revive place, so the saint’s intercession reactivated time. Rather than a momentary miracle or a transfornative interval, the saint’s intervention was perpetual and unending, continuous and unceasing – or, at least, potentially so. Any interruption in his protection was therefore attributable to failure among his venerators, a direct sign that their behaviour was displeasing and in need of amendment. Giovanni Francesco Paci emphasizes the limitless temporal dimension that the ­protector saint opens up: The unceasing protectorship that our glorious martyr shows towards our patria in a continuous miracle, which is never benumbed, but with boiling of affection the blood speaks in a glass [ampoule]; most illustrious gentlemen, this properly obliges this most faithful city to a continuous and rightful homage.83

Protection here exceeds the temporal conceived in worldly terms. Saints were able to deliver continuous graces on the city, as a result of their continuous intercessions with God. Only engaging the protectors without pause might prevent heaven only knew what disasters. Gennaro’s Treasury Chapel itself was part of that necessary and unceasing engagement that opened up time without end (Plate 21). ‘[Nel 1497] la peste cominciò a cessare nell’istesso giorno ch’egli venne a consolar la sua Patria colla presenza del suo Santo Corpo, e dove prima la nella Napoli vedevasi desolata, evota de’ suoi abitatori, perche altrove se n’eran fuggiti, da indi in poi divenne accresciuta di numeroso Popolo, e tutta allegrea, e festante.’ Maria di Sant’Anna, Istoria della Vita (1733), 108–109.  83 ‘L’Incessante Padronanza, che dimostra verso la patria il nostro Glorioso Martire in un miracolo continovo, ove giamai s’interpedisce, mà con bollori d’affetto parla il Sangue in un vetro; ben’obliga questa fedelissima Città ad un continovo, e dovuto ossequio, Illustrissimi Signori’, see Paci, prefatory remarks to Tutini, Memorie (1703), n.p. Paci expresses hope that the book will serve as an incentive to citizens, beholden to the saint, to celebrate his triumphs with greater fervour.  82

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The ‘exchanges’ (ricambi) between city, citizen, and saint were sometimes conceived in quite mechanistic terms. Thus in his history of San Gennaro published in 1713 (Plate 15), Nicolò Falcone writes:

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And these [San Gennaro’s public miracles, made for the benefit of his city after 345] are the repayments since that time from the city and its citizens, of churches and other pious works, in honour of such a great, gracious, beneficial, and always loving great Protector.84

Thus the plague of 1646 did not let up: until in the Treasury Chapel, in front of the relics of our Protector Saint, a vow was made to establish a hospital for poor mendicants; in the words of St Ambrose, ‘when the martyr suffers, he does not do so for himself alone, but for his fellow citizens also; for himself indeed, he suffers to achieve his eventual peace and for his fellow citizens for their salvation.’85

The language is that of the pawnbroker, of debt and credit and good turns done. The city undertook copious works in exchange for the saint’s ­continuing good will and ‘loving’ protection. The saint bestows miracles on his city; in return, its citizens demonstrate their gratitude through pious works, particularly building churches dedicated to him. Thus the city is remade in joy, in the dedication of its population, and architecturally because of and in homage to its protectors (Plates 31 & 32). What is significant here is that the city, rather than its inhabitants, was at once at the heart of the exchange, location of the saint’s relics, and focus of his good will and of its citizens’ obsequies and efforts. It was the city that was remade in honour of the saint, to secure his good will and future protection. Thus churches and chapels dedicated to Gennaro in and around Naples and Vesuvius did more than pay homage to ‘E questi sono per lo più, i pubblici miracoli di S Gennaro, fatti a pro della sua Città, fin dal CCCXLV. E questi sono i ricambì della Città e suoi Cittadini, fin d’allora, di Chiese ed altre opera di pietà; in onore d’un tanto, sempre propizio, sempre opportuno, sempre amoroso gran Protettore’. Nicolò Carminio Falcone, L’Intera Istoria di San Gennaro della Famiglia, Vita, Miracoli Traslazioni, e Culto del Glorioso Martire S. Gennaro Vescovo di Benevento Cittadino, e Principal Protettore di Napoli Scritta dal Prete Nicolò Carminio FALCONE Napoletano. Fatiga promossa dal P.F. Ilarione da San Pietro del Sagro Reale, e Militare Ordine de’ Padri Scalzi della Redenzione de’ Cattivi, di Nostra Signora della Mercede. Dedicata all’Illustrissimo ed Eccellentissimo Signore D. Nicolò Maria di Gennaro in Regno Principe di San Martino, Duca di Cantalupo, e di Belforte, Marchese di San Massimo, ecc. e Discendente dall’Istessa Famiglia di San Gennaro (Naples: Felice Mosca, 1713), 7.  85 ‘[N]ell’accennata Cappella del Tesoro avanti le reliquie del nostro Santo Protetore, fatto voto d’istituitire un’Ospedale per i poveri mendicanti. Martyr cum patitur non sibi tantum patitur, sed, & Civibus: sibi enim patitur ad quitem, Civibus ad salutem’. Maria di Sant’Anna, Istoria della Vita (1733), 110.  84

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the ­powerful ­protector.86 They acknowledged graces received, renewed investment in future favours, and remade the city.

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New protectors for Naples

Protector saints are central to a cultural history still to be written of telluric trauma, volcanic eruption, and earthquakes in southern Italy.87 The reasons for electing a new patron saint were many and varied. Each time that Vesuvius erupted, the harvest failed, or the earth quaked, new demands resounded. Patronal saints were sometimes swept forward on the wave of a disaster or impelled by popular devotion, as was the case with Saint Anthony of Padua in 1689. Two earthquakes in 1688 and 1694 unleashed an unprecedented wave of elections: St Michael Archangel was elected at Naples, Nola, and Altamura. In 1600 an epidemic, caused by incessant rain, persuaded the municipality of Naples to support the election of St Thomas Aquinas. Long intervals between disastrous event, saintly election, and its confirmation could obscure such relationships between disaster and protectoral election. But some saints were chosen in anticipation, quasi-prophetically. Each case was different. To advocate the election of a martyr from Antiquity, whose fame was often limited to the local region, was very different from making an appeal for a recently canonized saint.88 Powerful local support – including familial interests – was always necessary. Indeed, many of the same dynamics well established in the processes of beatification and sanctification operated in relation to patrons. Thus San Francesco di Paola’s election was assisted by the fact that at a time when plague and the French threatened Naples, his supporters rehearsed his promise to King Ferdinand I of Aragon to pray unfailingly for the health of monarch and kingdom. Locality mattered most. Thus, Sallmann suggests, universal saints were sharply disadvantaged when it came to patronal sanctity, since they were hampered when it came to assuming an intimate part in the weave of local devotions.89 On the whole, local saints, such as Francesco di Paola, fared Chapels and churches dedicated to San Gennaro in and around Naples are listed at length and sometimes described in the major vite of San Gennaro of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  87 Jean-Michel Sallmann first made this observation in 1994 (Sallmann, Naples et ses saints). Sean Cocco’s Watching Vesuvius goes a good way to address this lacuna, although the visual dimension is not part of his project.  88 Sallman studied the distribution of patron saints in the Kingdom of Naples in the following groups: Antique, medieval, modern, and New Testament (eg St Joseph, the Virgin). He found that Antique saints were more common that medieval saints, but the various groups were much more equally represented as patron saints than they were in the hagiographic literature of the same period. Sallmann, Santi barocchi, 93.  89 Sallmann, Santi barocchi, 97.  86

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better. St Ignatius of Loyola, St Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi, and St Pasquale Baylon were fairly run-of-the-mill patrons, though locally held relics gave them a particular inflection, and support was mustered to publish in Naples their vite.90 Elsewhere local support focused on saints homonymous with the town, such as Martiniano, patron saint of Martignano in the diocese of Otranto from 1652. Something similar occurred in Naples, at a micro level. The convent of Santa Patrizia ardently advocated St Patricia for patronal status and secured her election in 1625. Thus ‘localization’ could be very local indeed, as sponsors and saints’ identities merged into each other without losing distinction. Indeed, this was a hallmark of a good protector. Despite the smattering in Naples of protector saints associated with Catholic Reform, including St Francis Xavier and St Francesco Borgia, most patron saints had strong ties to the locality. Blessed Andrea Avellino (1528–1608) (Fig. 46), St Patricia, Antique virgin and martyr (d. c.665) ­ (Figs 59 & 63), and Blessed Giacomo della Marca (1393–1476) of the Observant branch of the Friars Minor (Fig. 23) all had strong Neapolitan associations. Indeed, all had died in Naples. Sallmann has observed that after initially preferring ancient saints, during most of the seventeenth century Naples privileged recent saints. Indeed, it espoused Andrea Avellino and Giacomo della Marca immediately after their beatification. Nevertheless, while the ‘four flowers of the Counter-Reformation’ were indeed elected in Naples – Francis Xavier (elected at the height of the plague in 1657), the Reformed Carmelite Teresa of Avila (1664), the Oratorian Filippo Neri (1667), and the Theatine Gaetano da Thiene (1671) – their advocates suffered many setbacks. Although the Jesuits bid persistently from 1657 to elect St Francis Xavier, he was not elected until 1689, while the Theatines, advocates of Gaetano da Thiene’s election from the months of plague in 1656, achieved this only in 1671.91 From the last quarter of the seventeenth century, Antique saints were again preferred. Of seventeen saints elected between 1675 and 1731, twelve were Antique, four medieval, and only two contemporary.92 Close ties to locality and its nobility counted more than topicality in protectoral elections. St Thomas Aquinas’ election in 1605 marked the beginning of what Giuseppe Galasso has called ‘a development towards the strongest The vite include Giuseppe Giovanni Gualtieri, Vita del Glorioso S. Pasquale Baylon (Naples: Erede del Pittante, 1729).  91 Sallmann, Santi barocchi, 100.  92 Sallmann, Santi barocchi, 105. Sallmann also observes that while Naples had sought to impose its own saints on the kingdom, as with St Dominic in 1640 and San Gennaro in 1663, there appears to be a reverse tendency by which the city of Naples adopted saints from the provinces. Thus in 1675 St Nicola di Mira, patron of Bari, in 1688 St Michael, and in 1731 Irene of Thessalonica, patron of Lecce, were adopted by the city. See Sallmann, Santi barocchi, 105.  90

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­ ossible claim to Neapolitanness’.93 It might better be interpreted as a marker p of the grip exerted over the process by the local aristocracy, who seized on these occasions to redefine ‘locality’ along with sanctity in terms that suited their own interests. The relevant documents, including papal Brief, markedly emphasize locality and attempt to root Aquinas’ sanctity in Naples. Thus the Brief refers to Pope Clement IV’s offer to Aquinas of the archbishopric of Naples, which he ‘with outstanding modesty’ (‘insigni cum modestia’) had refused. It seemed to be divine will that his proclamation as patron saint should bestow on him in heaven the bishopric of the city that in life ‘because of his deepest humility’ he had not accepted. Thus, in accord with well-­established practice, the male saint who had refused episcopal honours while alive became a heavenly bishop as patron saint. Such napolitaneità is embedded in broader claims to exceptionality in St Thomas’ teaching and doctrinal work: Of his learning indeed, the evidence is the huge quantity of books that he composed in a very short time in almost all manner of disciplines, with extraordinary order and wonderful perspicuity, and without any error whatsoever.94

Aquinas’ direct divine inspiration for his teaching is also emphasized: ‘Sometimes he has the Apostolic saints Peter and Paul speaking together with him, and explaining to him some Scriptural passages through God’s instruction’; ‘he heard express approval for what he had written from the clear voice of Christ our Lord’.95 But while learning and inspiration from God counted, Aquinas’ Neapolitan blood was crucial. Giuseppe Galasso has drawn attention to Giulio Cesare Capaccio’s emphasis in his Panegyricus on the exceptional nobility of Thomas Aquinas’ family, from its Longobard origins to the later d’Avalos connections, such that his proclamation as patron saint might readily be regarded as redounding to the honour of both families. ‘The divine Thomas’, claimed Capaccio, ‘ties the Aquinas and D’Avalos families together and binds them in a knot’.96 In St Thomas local blood, aristocratic power, and priestly and saintly authority conjoined. Capaccio emphasizes Aquinas’ Swabian lineage and his father’s support for the Papacy: ‘having followed the side of the Church, G. Galasso, Napoli capitale, 144. The text of the pontifical Brief is given in the deed of acceptance of St Thomas Aquinas in BNN, MS Branc. VI.A.15, cc. 434r–435v.  94 ‘doctrinae quidem, testis est ingens librorum numerus, quos ille brevissimo tempore in omni fere disciplinarum genere singulari ordine ac mira perspicuitate sine ullo prorsus errore conscripsit’. See above, n. 92.  95 ‘interdum Sanctos Apostolos Petrum et Paulum colloquentes locosque illi quosdam Dei iussu enarrantes habuit’; ‘libros scriptos expressa Christi Domini voce comprobatos audivit’. BNN, MS Branc. VI.A.15, c. 434v.  96 ‘Aquinas Davalosque veluti nexus Divus Thomas religat atque conglutinat’. Quoted by Galasso, Napoli capitale, 145.  93

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he took up arms against Federico who was stirring up most wicked impiety against the Papacy’.97 The final part of Capaccio’s panegyric suggests that the new protectorship sprang from the fit between Aquinas and the religious and ecclesiastical traditions of Naples, rather than owing anything to pontifical favour. And then one comes to the promise of Aquinas’ particular capacities as protector: ‘he will protect the city from plague, famine, and war, as well as from other misfortunes; and he will keep it in faith’.98 Thus (and here I depart from Galasso’s interpretation), Aquinas’ intellectual and theological achievements are reduced to the policing of orthodoxy (‘faith’); his value is transmuted into one of practical guardian of the status quo, protection from plague, famine, and war. The very terms of his election serve to reposition Aquinas’ contribution from the intellectual sphere to the rudely pragmatic and politically partial. The cement is provided by the protector’s ties with Naples – through blood and secular power – and his capacity to defend those very privileges in his defence of ‘Naples’. Thus what is most prized – most in need of ‘protection’ – in Naples is also refashioned discursively in the selection and justification of protectors to suit specific narrow political interests. Institutions beyond the Seggi, especially the mendicant orders, promoted their own patron saints to assert their presence. The Dominicans worked relentlessly to replace San Gennaro with St Dominic as principal patron saint of the kingdom.99 Their forceful challenge to Gennaro in espousing St Dominic was supported by barons of the kingdom and received papal endorsement on 23 August 1640.100 Naturally, the deputies of the Treasury of San Gennaro protested that the Sacra Congregazione dei Riti had declared San Gennaro principal patron in 1630.101 The issue was finally settled in favour of San Gennaro by the Congregazione dei Riti in 1663 (Fig. 50). Just as patron saints protected their devotees, so they required their patronage. Perhaps unsurprisingly given Aquinas’ intellectual reputation, there was no significant popular cult for him. Instead, the impulse in his favour came from the Carafa family and from the lower nobility with its links to the professional and intellectual bourgeoisie of the city.102 Above all, emphatic sponsor ‘Ecclesiae partes sequutus, contra Federicum, sceleratissimam in Pontificem impietatem molientem, dimicavit’. BNN, MS Branc. VI.A.15, c. 434v.  98 ‘urbemque à Peste, Fame, et Bello et ceterisque infortuniis vindicet’, ac tueatur et n fidem’. BNN, MS Branc. VI.A.15, c. 435v.  99 Sallmann, Santi barocchi, 95. 100 ATSG, AA/6 ‘Questione col Monastero di S Domenico’, n.f. 101 This was reiterated in 1656 and 1663. 102 Oliviero Carafa’s espousal of St Thomas Aquinas in his beautiful chapel in Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome (Plate 33) is significant testimony to his fervour. For the cult of St Thomas in Rome, see J. O’Malley, ‘The Feast of Thomas Aquinas in Renaissance  97

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ship of his patronage by the nobility of the Seggio helped to secure his election. In turn, through St Thomas’ proclamation, as an exceptionally illustrious scion of a family directly connected through the d’Avalos – no less – to the city and as signal representative of supposedly orthodox religious values (and therefore also of certain political and social values), the Seggio nobility secured a significant platform for their own interests. Indeed, St Thomas provided a visible figurehead for the reaffirmation of an aristocratic tradition as the tradition of the city as a whole. His election reaffirmed the notion that aristocratic and spiritual nobility were inseparable; bound the Seggio’s primacy in the city to what were apparently ecclesiastical imperatives; and clothed the operation with respectability (irreprehensible given the Thomist tradition). Thus the nobles of the Seggio were Aquinas’ most powerful patrons, just as he, in turn, was their greatest advocate. Indeed, the selection of and investment in protectors was part of the aristocratization of baroque Naples.103 The passion for improvisation and the play of hazard

Protector saints were specialists. As we have seen, Clement VIII’s Brief for the election of St Thomas Aquinas claimed that the higher the number of intercessors, the easier it was for humans to secure what they desired. Specific saints were chosen – at least, ostensibly – to address specific difficulties, to staunch particular deficits. The justification given for St Francesco Borgia’s protectorship is informative in this regard. It openly acknowledges that the Eletti, cavalieri, and citizens ‘deliberated increasing the number of protector saints of the said most faithful city, so that having multiplied the intercessors, God in his clemency would deign to free the said city of the evils threatening it’.104 Protector saints Rome: A Neglected Document and its Import’, Rivista di storia della Chiesa in Italia, 35 (1981), 1 –27, reprinted in J. W. O’Malley, Religious Culture in the Sixteenth Century (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1993), 1–27. 103 For this, see H. Hills, ‘“Enamelled with the Blood of a Noble Lineage”: Tracing Noble Blood and Female Holiness in Early Modern Neapolitan Convents and their Architecture’, Church History, 73:1 (2004), 1–40. 104 ‘come d[ett]a fed[elissi]ma Città, e suoi SS[igno]ri Eletti, Cavalieri, et cittadini havendono considerato, che la misericordia di dio onnipotente hà fatto innumerabili beneficij all’huomo creato à sua imagine, e deformato per il primo peccato nel n[ost] ro primo padre, et per la colpa d’esso huomo, et à quello dato gli agiuti, con li quali potesse rompere li legami de suoi debitti [sic], et meritare il perdono, e reconciliarci altro creatore, trà quali deveno connumerarsi li meriti de santi, per intercessione de quali assai volte s’è visto essersi perdonati misericordiosamente li flagelli sovrastante alle città, e Popoli, et havendono considerato anco, che il Christiana Religione, e che quando li Popoli hanno da quella deviato, sono successe le miserie, calamità, infermità, et altre disavventure, acciò avvisati per questo mezzo, non solo ci dovessimo astenere dall’oprar male, ma procurare di far bene, et attendere al culto divino, come deve

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competed with each other for pre-eminence, yet co-operated by offering specialist services. The economy of protector saints relied on particular expertise and specific needs. The higher the number of protector-intercessors, the more vulnerabilities were covered, and so more easily could humans attain what they needed. The economy of protectors was therefore, paradoxically, inherently provisional and necessarily incomplete. Protectors put hazard in play. There was always a potential ailment or disaster, yet another sphere uncatered for in an economy marked by the passion for improvisation. Protector saints were the precursor of the Neapolitan lottery.105 Hazard was supreme. Opportunity to invent the next protector had to be maintained. A timely investment might guard against the worst misfortune; bad luck required a return to the saintly roulette. A new protector was a gamble or a proleptic investment. To multiply patrons was to strengthen the city’s hand against continuing threats and the various scourges it might face in future. Protector saints assisted with present travails, and also constituted an investment, a bank of resource for the troubled future. But, in turn, they demanded investment of resources. The costs of feasts, not least their inauguration as urban protectors, were substantial. And devotion could not be allowed to grow lukewarm. Thus their increase  was always a gamble and set in motion demands that might not be met. Saintly specialists

Saints were selected for specific strengths. The more specialized the capacity, the more likely their efficacy. In 1648 St Nicholas of Bari was chosen to deliver Naples from a serious shortage of grain: May the said glorious saint with every merciful affection deign to intercede in heaven with the Lord God and with the most glorious Virgin Mary for the health, peace, and plenty of this city and kingdom; especially in these present times, in which we live in such great shortage of corn; hoping that by means of his holy intercessions this city not only will return to the abundance in which it formerly stood with regard to corn, but in greater plenty for everyone, for the sustenance of its citizens, and that it will enjoy that fertility of which his mercy gives hope.106 una città tanto cattolica, e christiano, col ricorrere in bisogno cosí grandi à sua divina Maestà, con intercessione de santi, che però deliberorno accrescere il numero de Santi Protettori di d[ett]a fed[elissi]ma Città, acciò moltiplicati l’intercessori, la divina clemenza si degnasse liberare d[ett]a città dall’imminenti mali.’ ASN, Corporazioni religiose soppresse, 3633, Croce di Lucca, ‘Copia dell’Instrumento della padronanza di questa Città del Glorioso S. Francesco Borgia’, n.f. 105 See W. Benjamin and A. Lacis, ‘Naples’, in Walter Benjamin: Reflections, trans. E. Jephcott (London: Cape, 1970), 170. 106 ‘Pregando detto glorioso Santo con ogni pietoso affetto se degni intercederli in Cielo

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St Nicholas’ election, the Eletti hoped, might bring merciful end to the present dearth, and also augur fairer times. Likewise during an epidemic of sore  throats, the patronage of St Blaise was sought, because of his ability to  prevent and cure them.107 And in July 1695 the formal record of St  Francesco Borgia’s election makes clear that his specific expertise in defence from earthquakes was at issue: For many years continuous earthquakes have been felt in these parts … as most recently this city [of Naples] has experienced two terrible scourges from earthquakes that have occurred in it, one on 5 June 1688 and the other 8 September 1694, with such fear and trembling, and with so much damage, death, and ruination in this city and in part of the kingdom that are and will be of tearful memory to the living and to posterity, which certainly would have engendered far greater ruin, if the potent intercession of the saints, among whom Glorious San Francesco Borgia, it is devoutly believed, had not mitigated divine justice.108 Moreover, St Francesco Borgia’s election was justified on the grounds that he had an established track record specifically against earthquakes in the Spanish monarchy. ‘[M]any parts of the new Kingdom of Granada in Spain’, claimed the deed, ‘since the date of his election as patron in 1625’, have been, ‘through [his] intercession completely immune, in spite of the continuous affliction of this horrible scourge, by such a sign that he has made apparent there through palpable miracles just how powerful with God is his patronage.’109 To the modern ear, such an economy sounds like crass appresso Nro Sigre Iddio e la gloriosissima Vergine madre Maria la salute, pace e abbondanza in questa Città, e Regno, e particolarmente ne i presenti tempi, che si vive in tanta scarzezza de grani; sperando che per mezzo delle sue santi intercessioni essa Città non solo tornerà all’opulezza, che prima stava de grani, mà in abbondanza mag. re per tutto, a sostentamento de suoi cittadini, e si goderà di quella fertilità, che si spera della sua pietà.’ ATSG, Fascio CB n. 11, copy of a document of 24 November 1648. 107 ATSG, CB n. 4 and CB n. 6. 108 ‘E conoscendosi, che in questa fed.ma Città e Regno da molti anni à questa parte si fan sentire di continuo i terremoti cotanta ruina delle povere città e Terre d’esso … come più frescamente si è anco esperimentato da questa città in due terribili flagelli di terremoti succeduti in essa, uno à cinque giugno dell’anno 1688, e l’altro à otto settembre del prossimo passato anno 1694, con tanto timore, e tremore, e con tanti danni, mortalità, e ruine in questa Città, et parte del Regno, che sono, e saranno di laggrimevole memoria à viventi, et à Posteri, i quali certamente haverebbero apprtato ruine assai maggiori, se la potente intercessione de Santi, frà quali piamente si crede, anco di detto Glorioso S. Francesco Borgia, non havesse mitigata la divina giustizia.’ ‘Istromento della Padronanza di questa Città del Glorioso S. Francesco Borgia’ of 9 July 1695; copied September 1695 (ASN, Corporazioni religiose soppresse, 3633, Croce di Lucca, ‘Copia dell’Instrumento della padronanza di questa Città del Glorioso S. Francesco Borgia’, n.f.). 109 ‘che per intercessione di d[ett]o Santo, benché travagliate di continuo di questo orribil flagello, ne furono sin dall’anno 1625, quando fù eletto per Padrone d’esse’. BNN, MS Branc. VI.A.15, c. 435r.

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i­ nstrumentalization by which secular authorities could opportunistically gesture to the saints as best able to right wrongs or address inequalities and injustices and thereby let themselves off the hook. Surely there was an element of this, but to claim that this was the sum of the matter would be both reductive and to overlook its material imbrications. The economy of the protector saint was inextricable from the well-being of city and citizen (albeit fairly narrowly defined), materiality, and corporeality in complex ways. Number and specificity were important with regard to protector saints. Each offered particular areas of intervention, and their concerted powers amounted to a protection disproportionate to their number as competition for pre-eminence intensified. As we shall see, the chapel both emphasized the subordination of all the saints to San Gennaro and, while articulating a degree of hierarchical importance between them, worked to produce an impression of homogeneity or shared purpose, rather than differentiated institutional interests. In spite of each saint’s specializations, the spiritual economy was also conceived as collaborative and as more than the sum of its parts. There circulated the hope that patron saints would pull together or that their combined weight might sway the heavenly scales. For example on 16 January 1649 the Piazza of Capuana adjudged it ‘very useful and expedient’ to confirm St Nicholas of Bari’s protection, and expressed the hope that ‘with this protection joined with the others’, the assistance that was so desperately needed would be forthcoming.110 And, as one might expect, the election of each new patron stipulated that she or he receive all honours and privileges accorded to existing protectors – all of whom were listed individually by name, a list rehearsed like a magic invocation – thereby emphasizing the commonality of the vast task of protection, and perhaps also to prevent interlopers among their number. It was above all individual religious institutions – the convent of San Gregorio Armeno, rather than the Benedictines – that sought to secure a position for their own saints’ relics in the Treasury Chapel. As much as saints might protect the whole city and seek benefits for all, they kept a special eye out for their home institution. The Treasury Chapel became a focal point of display, affirmation, and recognition that sucked all ambitious institutions into its currents. The logic of lack

Even so, uninterrupted protection fell short of total protection.111 An unguarded moment was as perilous as an unforeseen disaster. Reading the ATSG, Fascio CB n. 11, unfoliated document of 16 January 1649. ‘Li Deputati del thesoro … espongono come per le continue gratie che si riceve questa

110 111

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documents in the Treasury Chapel’s archive, one is struck by the paradox that despite a magnificent orchestra of protector saints, presided over by San Gennaro himself, saintly protection never sufficed. The vast array of protectors, while incessantly at work, in increasing number, to protect the city from its formidable enemies and natural threats, also simultaneously demonstrated the fragility of that city (Plates 3 & 4). The saintly economy resisted death and obliteration, even as it exposed urban life as the capacity to err, indeed, as an open invitation to divine punishment. Concomitantly, while the chapel spectacularly demonstrated a willingness to ally the city to saints to make amends for sins, the unparalleled devotion to their protectors, housed amid silver, gold, semi-precious stones, rich oil paintings and frescoes, in gleaming silver reliquaries in a sumptuous chapel, equally evinced Naples’ waywardness and its urgent need of heavenly intercession. Thus the chapel emerged as a crucial fold in the pleated relationships  between citizen and God, between citizen and their saints. And as hinge  and more than hinge, the chapel operated to produce saints, and with them institutional and spiritual obligations. It produced the city itself as at once ever protected and ever vulnerable, and thus ever in need of greater protection. The logic of the chapel was that of deficit and hazard. Fragile threads and networks of fear combined with a strategy of dazzling brinkmanship to hold vast kingdoms in place in an explosion of devotional splendour. Such logic was inherently treacherous, of course, since if protector saints were indeed efficacious, there would be no need to add to their number; while if they were not, their number, however great, would never be sufficient. The rapid crescendo of protector saints during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries can thus be seen as simultaneously both staving off ills from the city and insistently drawing attention to its imperilled nature. The Treasury Chapel, which housed them in unparalleled conspicuousness, was, therefore, less a celebration of salvific miracles than a declaration that Naples was in a perpetual state of emergency. A city imperilled, but embattled, at war, and with right on its side. In this context the repeated demonstration of the city’s righteousness in the miraculous liquefaction of the blood of San Gennaro, which, sacrament-like, declared the city to be in a state of grace, assumes sharper significance. And, naturally enough, that state of emergency justified arbitrary and absolutist acts by the Spanish monarchy,  its ­representatives the viceroys, and its essential and compromised allies, the barons.

Città per mezzo delle continuij intercessioni, che ottengono da nostro S.re Iddio verso di questa Città.’ ATSG, H121, n.f.

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Enough, no more: an excess of saints The many graces that our city and kingdom has at various times received from Almighty God through the intercession of the saints its advocates […] have moved it to declare and acclaim them as its Patrons. This also causes us to consider it fitting, indeed essential, to provide an appropriate place for their holy relics among the other patron saints. And having taken into consideration that there are no places more apt or proportionate to achieve this, than that which was set up to support the statue of Our Lady where it currently stands; [in order to achieve] a decidedly decorous outcome, in terms of both capacity and quality, [the deputies] have agreed that loculi should be made in the spaces that there are on both sides [of the chapel], where then the said patron saints are to be placed, each of them in the order in which they were received, and that Mass should be celebrated, thereby returning to position the sacristy in the place where it was initially.112

Soon the chapel was full. All the loculi were taken. The very architecture of the chapel that had generated protectors now had to be altered in order to accommodate yet more. First new loculi were inserted into the chapel itself, and extra stands were added (Plates 3 & 4).113 Once they were filled, the sacristy was first moved and then expanded (Fig. 11).114 Concern at the sheer number of protectors in Naples prompted the Sacra Congregazione dei Riti ‘Le molte gratie che la n[ost]ra Città, et Regno hanno in div.i tempi ottenuto da S.D.M. per l’intercessione de’ santi suoi avvocati; conf.e l’hà mosso à dichiararli, et acclamarli per suoi Padroni, così anche fà stimarci convenevole, ansi necessario il dar luoco conveniente alle loro sante Reliquie frà gli altri santi Padroni; Et essendosi considerato, che non vi è luoco più atto ne’ più proprtionato per detto effetto, di quello, che fù eretto per riponervia la statua di n[ost]ra Sig.ra dove al presente stà posta; essendo, così per la capacità, come per la qualità assai decente, stannno conchiuso che si facciano le caselle nelli vacui che sono dall’una parte, et dall’altra, dove si habiano poi à riponere detti santi Padroni ogn’uno di essi secondo la precedenza con la quale sono stati ricevuti, et se ci faccia celebrare la Santa Messa, ritornanosi à ponere la sacristia nel luoco dove per prima si ritrovava.’ Document dated 26 October 1662, ATSG, AB/11 - 1602, Conclusioni 1661–1673, fol. 17v. 113 The statue of St Francis Xaverio was inserted opposite the sacristy doors; and then, ‘so as not to ruin the architecture of the Treasury’ (acciò non si guasti l’architettura del Tesoro), another was made opposite it in September 1661. ATSG, AB/11 – 1602, Conclusioni 1661–1673, document dated 7 September 1661, fol. 4v. 114 By November 1666 the sacristy was much too small to hold all the silver and apparati ‘that have been recently made’ and the Deputies began to acquire more land. ATSG, AB/11 - 1602, Conclusioni 1661–1673, fol. 74r. In April 1672 the Treasury Chapel bought a garden and other spaces from the Duke of Roscigno and others to permit its expansion. ATSG, E/002, n.f. By June 1671 the Deputies expressed dissatisfaction that access to the sacristy was via aside chapel, thereby disturbing religious offices. It was proposed to acquire the adjacent chapel of the late Bartolommeo Caracciolo, and the Duca di Flumari was put in charge of this. 3 June 1671, ATSG, AB/11 - 1602, fol. 126v. 112

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in Rome to issue a decree in 1699 halting any more petitions from the City of Naples.115 The increase in protectors for Naples did not suit everyone. The Congregazione dei Riti in particularly became quite exercised about the excessive number and sought to limit it. Thus the election of St Augustine, initially agreed in Naples in 1647, was not officially recognized until 1711. On affirming the election of St Mary of Egypt (Plate 43), the Congregazione tried to stem the endless flow of demands for new protectors issuing from Naples and on 22 August 1699 issued a decree that banned such requests in future. The exceptionally high number of protectors, confusion among saintly offices, and overcrowding of the chapel were advanced as reasons to stem the tide of saints. Again local interests and rivalries informed this resistance. Thus the nuns of Santa Maria Regina Coeli claimed: In 1699 during the time when St Mary of Egypt was elected as patron and protector of [Naples], the Sacra Congregazione dei’ Riti, in confirming her election, prohibited ‘further requests of this sort to be admitted in future’. The reasons for the imposition of this decree were the multiplicity of protector saints of the city of Naples, more than in any other; and that there was barely any more space for the statues of the same in the Treasury Chapel, where they are all situated; and that it would lead to greater confusion in the rubric of the Office of Saints.116

What is fascinating here is the degree to which the Treasury Chapel itself is assumed to be legitimate basis for and measure of an appropriate number of protectors. To the admixture of bureaucratic concern about the disproportionate number of protectors that Naples had already accrued, and the aggravation of confusion over the correct celebrations and offices for feasts for such a multitude, is added their accommodation in the chapel. Protector saints and Treasury Chapel had become unthinkable without each other. ‘Memoriale delle Ragioni e delle Scritture prodotte nella causa tra il Real Monistero di S. Maria Regina Coeli e i RR. PP. Eremiti Agostiniani del monistero di s. Agostino Maggiore.’ ASN, Corporazioni religiose soppresse, Regina Coeli, 1976, Fasc. 4, n. 3, fol. 32. 116 ‘[N]ell’anno 1699 nel tempo che fu eletta per Padrona, e Protettrice della medesima Città S.M. Egizziaca, per la Sagra Cong. de Riti, confermandosi l’elezione suddetta si proibì in avvenire “huiusmodi instantias amplius admitti”, ed i motivi per i quali fu interposto detto decreto si furono la molteplicità de’ Santi Padroni di detta Città di Napoli più d’ogni altra, che quasi non restava luogo alle Statue delli meddesimi nella Cappella del Tesoro, ove tutte sono collocate, e che s’accrescerebbe maggior confusione nella rubrica dell’officio del Santo.’ Quoted by G. Sorge, ‘Memoria delle Raggioni e delle Scritture prodotte nella causa tra il Real Monistero di S. Maria Regina Coeli e i RR PP Eremiti Agostiniani del Monistero di s. Agostino Maggiore, Naples, 1715’, ASN, Corporazioni religiose soppresse, Regina Coeli, 1976, Fasc. 4, num.8, p. 32. 115

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This decree appears to have curbed elections and proposals, at least to some extent for a time, but it did not put an end to either new requests or eventual elections. In addition, there were other reasons for periodic pauses. While specific religious institutions might be eager to foreground the precious relics of their saints, the relevant Seggio was obliged to bear the brunt of expenses for the magnificent city celebrations. And on occasion it dragged its feet. Thus in December 1645 the deputies of Capuana flatly declared that their Seggio was not in a position to support the election of any more protectors for the next twenty years.117 The current state of research on the Seggi precludes nuanced interpretation, but it looks as if rivalry between the Seggi – and thus also amongst the most powerful religious institutions within their boundaries – played a crucial role in the generation and adoption of new saints, while financial pressures could always be advanced to oppose their rivals’ aims.118 Thus not least among the forces generating protectors was the Treasury Chapel itself. The Neapolitan historian Francesco Capecelatro noted in 1640 that in less than a decade the number of patron saints had doubled, ‘each religious wanting to place his own saint there [in the Treasury Chapel]’.119 This is a contemporaneous recognition that, over and above rivalry between religious institutions and orders, and beyond the clamour of miracolati, what mattered most was a visible presence in the Treasury Chapel. In short, the Treasury Chapel itself worked to produce protectors. The accumulation of patron saints in Naples threatened to destabilize existing networks of spiritual power, which had to respond by adopting the logic of protectorship and by adapting to its dynamics. The Seggi at times sought to resist the unending logic of the generation of yet more saints. In December 1645, following the patronal election of St Gregory of Armenia, the Piazza di Capuana protested that in the difficult circustances facing the city, they were not willing to support the election of any more protectors for the next twenty years.120 ‘havendo concluso d.a Ill.ma Piazza, che da hoggi avanti per il spatio d’anni venti non si possa trattare d’agregare altri santi per Padroni, e Protett.ri di detta nostra fedelissima Città’, Document of 16 December 1645, ATSG, CB/7 (Fasc. 58 n. 34 bis-1568), n.f. 118 On the intimate interconnections between seggi politics and religious institutions, see Hills, Invisible City, 35–44 and Hills, ‘Did the Seggi Have a Religious Architecture?’, 159–188. 119 Capecelatro was discussing the proclamation in 1640 of St Dominic as thirteenth protector saint of Naples. See F. Capecelatro, Degli Annali della città di Napoli, parti due (1631–1640) (Naples: Tipografica di Reale, 1849), 181–182. 120 ‘havendo concluso d.a Ill.ma Piazza, che da hoggi avanti per lo spatio d’anni venti non si possa trattare d’agregare altri santi per Padroni, e Protett.ri di detta nostra fedelissima Città’ (‘the said illustrious Piazza having concluded that from today on, for an interval of twenty years, the consideration of admitting further saints as patrons and protectors is not feasible’). ATSG, CB/7 (Fasc. 58, n. 34 bis – 1568), n.f. 117

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Some responded by decrying multiplication as a devaluation. Faced with the proclamation in 1640 of St Dominic as ‘thirteenth’ protector saint, the Neapolitan historian Francesco Capecelatro noted with irritation in his Annali: ‘in our times even pious and spiritual matters have shifted among monastic persons from devotion to supreme ambition’. In less than a decade, he grumbled, the number of patron saints had doubled ‘as each religious is eager to position his own saint there [in the Treasury Chapel]’.121 Capecelatro seeks to discredit spiritual competition between rivalrous institutions as mere individual ambition and spiritual and social impertinence. That Capecelatro was particularly incensed by monastic espousal of patron saints is significant. The connection between institutional monastic patronage and the election of patronal saints had become too close for comfort. The fragmentation of patronal sanctity, or what might be termed its over-localization, the too close or too ready identification of the saint with a monastic institution or even with individuals, disturbed him. To some, then, the relation between patron and protector had become blatantly self-serving. Indeed, as we shall see in Chapter 8, even an enclosed convent like Santa Patrizia could deploy affiliation with a patron saint to extend the reach of its spiritual authority over its enclosure walls. Gender politics were thus redefined. Thus the shift from bishop-protectors to protectors with more specific local interests should not pass unremarked. Even as the architecture of the Treasury Chapel smoothed over the distinct allegiances and constituencies of each saint, their local affiliations remained and were intensified. And as vested interest groups were nudged out of prime position, they turned to denounce in righteous tones the debasing of the currency of saintly protection. The saintly court and the affective chapel

An arsenal of protector saints, though useful, was insufficient in itself. They had to be petitioned, courted, and served. Decorous treatment of their relics was crucial in this economy of affect and honour. Before the building of the Treasury Chapel, the relics of Naples’ patron saints were preserved in a tower near the main entrance of the Cathedral (Plate 37 & Fig. 6), as Caracciolo recorded in 1623: To the left and right of the main door [of the Cathedral] are two towers, where of old the relics of these saints used to be kept; Don Ferrante of Toledo, Duke of Alva, Viceroy of the Kingdom of Naples, and Donna Maria di Toledo, his wife,

‘essendo nei nostri tempi anche le cose pie e spirituali passate fra le persone claustrali dalla divozione ad una somma ambizione … volendo ciascun religioso porvi il suo santo.’ Capecelatro, Degli Annali della città di Napoli, 181.

121

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through their most intense devotion to San Gennaro, determined in 1557 to adorn the tower on the left at their own expense with various paintings showing the holy bishop’s miracles and martyrdom [passione], where [now] are kept the heads of the protector saints of Naples and other holy relics, among which are the two little glass ampoules filled with the precious blood of San Gennaro.122

Viceregal intervention dignified the care of the relics and offered the Spanish rulers local spiritual purchase (Fig. 39). In April 1648 all the patron saints’ relics and statues were transferred from the old Treasury to the new Treasury; and steadily thereafter more relics were centralized in the new Treasury from disparate religious institutions across the city.123 Protector saints were moved by the fate of their beloved sees, cities, citizens, and intercessors; and their protection spurred investment in the chapel. In part, this investment took the form of recruitment of more protectors. Thus the Treasury Chapel worked to breed protector saints and to intensify their veneration. A reliquary niche in the chapel was an honour to the saint and made possible wider engagement with him or her, so investment in the chapel grew. In turn, the rising number of protectors also increased the pressure on Neapolitans to be worthy of them. In this regard the saints, their relics, and the chapel operated together as a disciplinary machine. Possession brought responsibility. Relics could not simply be owned like a jewel. They had their own autonomy and requirements. Indeed, the refusal of relics to be moved from one place to another, their own stubborn will, characterizes them and their translations.124 They demanded respect. Rich housing of protector saints’ relics was part of this. The creation of the Treasury Chapel and its continuing embellishment throughout the seventeenth century marked an escalation in the currency of honour for patronal relics in Naples. In short, the stakes were raised, even as they seemed to be distributed more widely. Minor players were ruled out of the game. The architecture of the chapel itself ranged the protectors hierarchically in broad groups, thereby intensifying competition between them and thus between the institutions that espoused them. This dynamic is examined in greater detail in Chapter 6. Installation in the Treasury Chapel was but a first step. Next a favourable position had to be secured there, and rival candidates pushed into subordinate positions. Thereafter the celebrations spilled out back into the city whence the saint had sprung, using the Treasury Chapel as a prominent launch-pad for ambitious urban parades.125 Thus Blessed Andrea Avellino (Fig. 46), elected Caracciolo, Napoli Sacra, 7. Falcone, L’Intera Istoria … di … San Gennaro, 514. 124 Geary, Furta Sacra. 125 See, for instance, Roberto Mollo, ‘Relatione delle Sollenni Feste Celebrate in Napoli in honore del B. Gaetano Tiene, Fondatore de’ Chierici Regolari nell’Anno 1655’, 122 123

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­ rotector on 29 September 1625, was celebrated with a magnificent feast on p the last Tuesday of March 1626 that included a public cavalcade and all the powerful. Partly a celebration of thanksgiving, this was also part of a tense rivalry with St Patricia over the ninth niche in the chapel (No. 11 in Fig. 11). For just as patrons were as powerful as their ability to intercede with God, so their power was relative to their support in the city.126 The politics of sanctity were charged with cunning and deceit. While protectors’ specializations and institutional engagement proliferated, their architectural treatment in the Treasury Chapel was, on the contrary, homogenizing. The contrast with the Succorpo chapel in Naples Cathedral (Plate 11 & Fig. 8) is notable in this regard. The vault of the Succorpo chapel, resting place for San Gennaro’s bones, is adorned with saints including protector saints of Naples. Each section of the ceiling depicts an individual saint and emblematically alludes to his specialist prowess (Plate 34). Asprenus defends with his crosier (baculo defendit); Agrippinus deters enemies with his presence (praesentia hostes arcet); Januarius nourishes with his blood (sanguine fovet); Agnellus liberates with his standard (vexillo liberat); Severus judges justly (iusto iudicio iudicat); Euphebius returns invisible enemies to the devil (invisibiles Diabolo reddit); Athanasius protects through speech (oratione protegit); Thomas Aquinas protects through his nobility, holiness, and learning (nobilitate, sanctitae, doctrina tuetur). Thus distinctive qualities of each saint are articulated even as their amassed force is produced. By contrast, in the Treasury Chapel, despite emphasis on each saint’s specialist strength in the process leading up to their election, these are visually underplayed. Indeed, they are barely expressed. Minimally differentiated iconographically, the full-length bronze sculptures and the early reliquary busts hardly visualize or itemize their protective specialities (Plate 6 & Figs 3 &  46). Thus Giuliano Finelli’s elegant Saint Thomas (1646–48) and his St Patricia (Figs 3 & 59), Cosimo Fanzago’s Saint Teresa (1675), and Domenico Martinelli’s San Gaetano (1676) and Saint Filippo Neri (1674) (paid for by the Theatines and the Oratorians respectively), are marked by conventional iconographies, rather than in terms of specific Neapolitan constituencies or specialist protective powers.127 This was also the case with silver reliquary busts until MS, BNN, B. Branc. 102.I.9/21, which describes the festival celebrations and apparati espoused by institutions throughout Naples in honour of Gaetano Thiene. 126 See G. de Montemayor (ed.), Diurnali di Scipione Guerra (Naples: Società Napoletana di Storia Patria, 2011), 172. 127 Fanzago’s St Teresa (1675) gazes upwards, dressed in the Carmelite nuns’ habit, and holds a book; Finelli’s St Dominic (1646–48) is marked by conventional iconography. He clasps the Holy Scriptures and treads heretical works (pagan philosophy) underfoot. He holds a monstrance, and a shiny sun on his breast denotes the ‘Lumen Ecclesiae’ and ‘Doctor Angelicus’. Domenico Marinelli’s San Gaetano (1676), in the niche on the

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the likes of Carlo Schisano’s Saint Irene of Thessalonica and her magnificent city of Naples burst on the scene in 1733 (Plates 8 & 9, Fig. 42).128 Generally speaking, therefore, articulation of the protectors’ specific aptitudes and constituencies remained  recoded and celebrated at the administrative  level and at the level of  participating institutions and advocates in the process of election, rather  than visually advertised in the chapel itself. Consequently, while  individual identities and divergent institutional affiliations are not forsworn, the  saints tend to  work as a group in subordinate relation to San Gennaro. Distinct enunciation of episodes in San Gennaro’s life history, his miracles and  martyrdom, especially in pictorial form in the altarpieces and frescoes (Plates 4 & 5, Fig. 68), are not granted to other saints. They are, if anything, under-differentiated to form a sort of background chorus. In this way the chapel wields a crowd of civic saints, apparently united in the service of the city as a whole under Gennaro’s auspices in a swarm. The currency of sanctity

The Treasury Chapel minted protectors. It made available a charged reserve of silver and sanctity. The economy of sanctity circulated Saints’ vite, episodes and images of saints, particularly San Gennaro, as currency. In 1664 the deputies paid Agostino di Tomaso, a printer, ten ducats for printing and distributing to devotees 1,000 pamphlets (libretti) on the martyrdom of San Gennaro.129 And in 1670 the deputies arranged for the publication of 404 copies of little books of ‘meditations on the torments’ of San Gennaro.130 ‘Figures’ of San Gennaro, were frequently bestowed on patrons, often in recognition of particular support or gifts. Thus in May 1726 Reverend Don Domenico Fabro received two figure di raso, small images embroidered on satin, akin to the small paper santini cards still used today (Fig. 47).131 The left of the entrance, is one of the most highly elaborated of the bronze sculptures, his dalmatic, alb, and surplice worked with dramatic sleeves and flourish. The Theatines and Oratorians requested and obtained niches in which to place the bronze statues of their founders between 1671 and 1672. Marinelli worked as both sculptor and founder on these statues. See Catello and Catello, La Cappella del Tesoro, 57–61. 128 The model of the city of Naples was made in one cast. Schisano’s mark is both on the bust of the saint and on the city. See Catello and Catello, La Cappella del Tesoro, 85; see also Hills, ‘How to Look Like a Counter-Reformation Saint’, 207–230. 129 ‘10 ducati ad Agostino di Tomaso stampatore per haver stampato mille libretti delli martirij del gl.o S. Gen.o per distribuirsi à devoti del s.o gl.o Santo’, ATSG, AB/11 - 1602, Conclusioni 1661–1673, fol. 44v. 130 Luc’Antonio di Fusco was paid for the printing of 404 booklets of ‘meditations on the torments of glorious San Gennaro’ (libretti ‘delle meditationi de tormenti del gl.o S. Genn.ro’) on 1 October 1670. ATSG, AB/11 - 1602 Conclusioni 1661–1673, fol. 116v. 131 ATSG, AB/19, Fasc. 52 n. 10, Indice degli Appuntamenti 1726–1738, document dated May 1726, n.f.

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economy of the chapel thus generated, endorsed, invested in, reproduced, imitated, and exchanged relics, images, lives, and devotional texts across a range of registers and at differing speeds between and across institutions and interest groups. This intensification of the saintly economy repositioned the chapel at what seemed to be its centre. Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood have argued that different models of the temporality of an image came into conceptual focus in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, especially in works of art. One powerful model proposed the perfect interchangeability of one image or work for another. Thus the work simply was its own predecessor, ‘such that the prior was no longer prior but present’.132 Nagel and Wood dub this a ‘magical mode of reasoning’, because it asserts the identity of like and like.133 There is something of this in the proliferation of images of saints – although here we have multiplication of likeness rather than replacement of image. This multiplication functioned akin to replication, since the images were taken away to work their wonders elsewhere, and worked as if their figural quality – their likeness – endowed them with the capacity to incorporate the saintly virtus of the relic. Thus a logic of contagion guided the economy of saints’ relics and images. Consequently, the relationship between saint, relic, and place was at once particularly important and also profoundly ambiguous. The location of a relic brought the presence of the saint to bear, but since relics could spread virtus by contact, and since images of the saint appeared to have similar capacities, the place of that presence was at once portable, apparently infinitely extensive, and yet singular. The deputies doggedly held that images of a saint would enhance ­devotion to him or her. Thus on 10 June 1671 they noted that a statue of St Filippo Neri would help greatly ‘to increase the devotion to that glorious saint’.134 Likewise, when devotion flagged, new images of saints – particularly San Gennaro – were advocated as regenerative. Thus text and print, saints’ vite, and engraved portrait images were generated and circulated. On 29 May 1686 ‘in order to promulgate to a greater extent the cult of and devotion to our glorious protector San Gennaro’, the deputies ordered a further one hundred copies of Camillo Tutini’s Memorie della Vita Miracoli, e culto di San Gianuario Martire, first published by Ottavio Beltrano in 1633, already reprinted under their auspices by Giovanni Francesco Paci in 1680.135 This policy continued into the 1720s and 1730s when Tutini’s Memorie della Vita and Fra Girolamo Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, 11. Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, 11. 134 ‘per maggiorm.e ingrandire la divotione di d.o gl.o s.to’. ATSG, AB/11 - 1602, fol. 127r. 135 ‘Et acciò sè promulgarsi maggiormente il culto, e la divotione verso il n[ost]ro Gl[orio] so Protettore San Gennaro’. ATSG, AB/14, Libro de Conclusioni 1686–1746, fol. 5; and ATSG, AB/13, Conclusioni 1682–1691, fol. 47r. Camillo Tutini’s Memorie was first ­published in Naples by Ottavio Beltrano in 1633. 132 133

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Maria di Sant’Anna’s Istoria della Vita, virtù, e miracoli di S Gennaro Vescovo e Martire, Principal Padrone della Fedelissima Città, e Regno di Napoli (Fig. 43) were reprinted at the deputies’ instigation. Copies unsold from the 1,000 printed were to be kept in the sacristy and not distributed without express instruction.136 This was part of their currency of holiness, which they needed to control. And yet by 1737 the deputies were growing concerned at a certain tepidity in devotion towards the protectors other than San Gennaro – a sort of saintly burn-out. During expositions of the reliquary busts, including those during San Gennaro’s feasts, they complained: very few of the devout [worshippers] hasten to visit the aforementioned glorious saints; as one sees that fervour of devotion owed as it were cooled on account of the many obligations to so glorious a tutelary saint.137

The second-rank saints were losing their devout followers, in a sort of veneration fatigue, to Gennaro’s more glittering and frequent celebrations. When visual strategies palled, music was deployed. In an attempt to counter ‘lukewarmness’ and to ‘do our utmost re-awaken in the hearts of the devout the old honour and devotion in a new and beautiful manner’, the Deputies arranged for musical performances every morning and evening to accompany ostensions during the novenas and the triduum.138 Music, they hoped, would draw ‘a greater concourse of visitors’.139 Indeed, the chapel’s architecture placed music at its heart. While the presbytery glistened as visual focus, the body of the chapel was the crossing where the worshippers gathered; and the elevated organ and four choir galleries (coretti) were raised immediately above them (Plates 2 & 4). Choirs were elevated in the chapel, their singing to rise into the soaring dome (Plates 4 & 21), reverberating in an astoundingly clear acoustic through its dematerializing heaven and wafted in These undated notes occur in the unfoliated index volume ‘Indice degli Appuntamenti’ (1726–38); that referring to the ‘Libretti della Vita del Glorioso S. Gennaro composti dal P. Fra Girolamo Maria di S. Anna’ refers to three folios. ATSG, AB/19 (Fasc. 52 n. 10). 137 ‘[M]olti pochi divoti concorrano a visitare d.i gl[orio]si SS.ti veggendosi quasi intepidito quel fervore di divozione dovuto per le tante obbligationi ad un si glorioso Santo Tutelare.’ Summary of meeting by Deputazione on 27 August 1737, ATSG, AB/14, Conclusioni, fol. 268. Grateful thanks to Mary Pardo for her help with this text. 138 ‘[P]er ovviare una si fatta tepidezza, e per isvegliare per quanto possiamo nel cuore dei divoti fedeli di bel nuovo l’antico onore e divoz.ne abbiamo concluso, come per la presente concludiamo che in tutte dette Espositioni di Novena, e Triduo di Dicembre debbasi fare un trattenimento di musica mattina e sera in ciasched.o de giorni delle sud.e Esposiz.ni’. ATSG, AB/14, Conclusioni, fol. 268. 139 ‘che in tal forma venghino con più frequenza visitate le SS Reliquie’. They went on to specify precisely what sort of music could be performed. Document of 27 August 1737, ATSG, AB/14, Conclusioni, fol. 268. 136

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a paler, more evanescent palette. In short, veneration of the saints intensified kinaesthetically, synaesthetically, and affectively. The Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro should, therefore, be seen as an investment in sanctity spiritually and materially; but it was an investment that continued to overflow the chapel itself and slip through the hands of convents, monasteries, Seggi, and deputies alike. That investment continued to ripple across the city, renewed in processions of relics out into the Piazze (Seggi), through the repetition of saintly figures in relic, reliquaries, and full-length statues in the chapel, humble woodcuts, and elegant folios. Those ripples gathered into the gigantic Guglia of San Gennaro that stands in the shadows of the Treasury Chapel and casts its reach across the city (Plate 29, 30 & Fig. 40). Saintly uncontainability: the Guglia of San Gennaro

Even as the Treasury Chapel was built to contain saints and their relics, so it demonstrated that they were uncontainable. The chapel overflows with saints, their gestures, their faces, their bodies, their voices, and their claims. They rise to the height of the dome (Plate 21), seethe around the walls (Plate 4), and crowd into the space for the faithful (Fig. 2). And finally they were no longer contained even within the chapel itself. On 20 August 1636, in memory of the eruption of 1631, the Deputazione decided to erect a marble guglia or special obelisk surmounted by a statue of San Gennaro himself in front of the small door of the Cathedral (Plate 30, Figs 51 & 52). Thus most spectacularly, in the Guglia of San Gennaro, the saint can be seen as having overflowed outside the chapel into the small piazza outside the south transept, spilling out, uncontained and uncontainable, into the city (Plate 29 & Fig. 40). There the saint directly occupies the city, and even further afield, following the eruption of Vesuvius of 2 August 1707, a further monument to San Gennaro was erected at Santa Caterina a Formello (Fig. 41). In the guglia, claims Domenico Antonio Parrino in Napoli Città Nobilissima (Naples, 1700), Cosimo Fanzago ‘surpassed himself’, even including a self-­portrait in relief in the base.140 Unabashedly, artist and saint, in close identification, took possession of the city. And every year during the feast of 19 September, a ‘feast of lights’ was held there. The square was transformed into an open air theatre with festival machines, gracious viewing boxes for the nobility and visiting dignitaries, and fireworks for all to see (Fig. 48). ‘Here it is lovely at dusk on the feast day until 19 September’, writes Parrino, ‘for three evenings this guglia is illuminated with a most beautiful macchina, select music, and a great gathering of foreigners, and the Viceroy participates at one Parrino, Napoli Città Nobilissima, vol. I (1700), 380.

140

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of these with a royal volley from the Royal Castle.’141 Thus from among the concentration of saints in the Treasury, San Gennaro advances boldly into the urban fabric, striding out into the square, a new line of flight outside the sanctuary, to extend both the claims of the saint over the city and the pretensions of the chapel over the city and to take up occupation of the street itself in a time out of joint. Conclusion

‘The law coincides with its imprint on hearts and in flesh. But it does not thereby even give us a final knowledge of our faults, for what its needle writes on us is Act through duty (and not merely in conformity with duty) … It writes nothing else.’142 Thus, Deleuze contends, the more we observe the law with exactitude, the more severe it becomes. Even the most holy are not spared. It never acquits us, neither of our virtues nor of our vices or our faults: at every moment there is only an apparent acquittal, and the moral conscience, far from appeasing itself, is intensified by all our renunciations and pricks us even more strongly.143 ‘In conformity with the viewpoint of a progress that continues to infinity in its ever increasing conformity with the law (sanctification as the consciousness of perseverance in moral progress)’, this path, which exceeds the limits of our life and requires the soul’s immortality, follows the straight line of time, inexorable and incessant, upon which we remain in constant contact with the law.144 But this indefinite prolongation, rather than leading us to a paradise above, ‘already installs us in a hell here below … When time is out of joint, we have to renounce the infinite route of the slow death, the deferred judgment, or the infinite debt.’145 The vast number of protector saints in Naples was produced in an out-of-jointness of time and the repeated deferral of acquittal or relief. Protectors’ relics worked as interceptors and transmitters in the desiring machine, riven by interruptions or breaks that disrupted any smooth process or promised delivery in a time that was out of joint. In worshipping the saints, Jerome claimed, ‘the city has changed address’.146 He referred to the move to worshipping saints in the cemetery areas peripheral to the cities in early Christianity. In their claims to a special relation with the city and in their concentration in a city chapel, it is the protectors who change

Parrino, Nuova Guida de’ Forastieri (1714), 290. G. Deleuze, ‘On Four Formulas’, in Essays Critical and Clinical (London: Verso, 1998), 32. 143 Deleuze, ‘On Four Formulas’, 32. 144 Deleuze, ‘On Four Formulas’, 33. 145 Deleuze, ‘On Four Formulas’, 33. 146 ‘Movetur urbs sedibus suis’. Jerome, Epistula 107.1. 141 142

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address, but in doing so, it is the address of the city, its location in relation to a divine axis of appeal, that is fundamentally altered.147 While theologically what the saints achieve is a consequence of their prayers and intercession in heaven, here in the chapel they are visibilized as active, institutionally allied, able to ‘network’, and weave the Treasury Chapel together with institutions that, apart from the politics of the Seggi, otherwise remained independent and distinct. Their active presence secured by the chapel gave the future of Naples a different sort of chance. If the Treasury Chapel is thought as operating in intensive rather than extensive terms, and not as signification (representing something which already existed elsewhere), then we can think of it as producing investments and a sense of community which were new. The chapel can be seen to act virtually, in the sense of the virtual as unactualized potential within the real, for which art provides a possible world. Thus the world of the Treasury Chapel is not simply continuous with the situation of plague, endangerment, and panic in Naples that preceded it and that helped bring it into being; nor is it best understood as the product of – or the representation of – the ambitions of the aristocratic deputation, or any other institution. It might be thought instead in terms of an event that brings new relations and new time into being. Thus agency is not in the subject (or in an ‘environment’ outside it), but in the process, a force taking form. This removes us from an idea of the chapel as something made to something in the making. This chapel is better understood as a relation underway, rather than as an object. Discerning a relation is different from the cognition of an object. As we have seen, the chapel operated in terms of ‘lack’ and ‘desire’, rather than in the more familiar art-historical register of baroque ‘excess’ and ‘propaganda’. Seen as an event, the chapel is best thought as a coming into relation in the name of what will have been. The future anterior tense produces the present as lack. Space is not entered into; the event creates new spaces and vectors, which produce new relations with saintly presences – or, at least, their conditional promises. In the Treasury Chapel through their prodigious relics, housed in fabulously wrought silver reliquaries, all Naples’ protector saints, martyred in diverse places and times, and restituted through sanctification at different times, are now present simultaneously in heaven and on earth, both alive and dead (Plate 3). As such, they can be thought as oscillating between extensive time and place and intensive time and place, or even as converting one to the Luigi Canetti has argued that the concept of immortality is inextricably connected to the progressive segregation and removal of the dead from the city between the third and eighth centuries (Luigi Canetti, ‘La città dei vivi e la città dei morti: reliquie, doni, e sepolture nell’alto medioevo’, Quaderni storici, 100 (1999), 207); the return of the saints’ relics to the city in the patronal saint was a significant reversal of this relationship.

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other and back again, or as thwarting linear time and relationships, working like compressors, linking heaven to earth, in a sort of instantaneous circularity. Machines in the cityscape, the protectors challenged boundaries between the domains of earth and heaven, and then reterritorialized them again in the form of architecture, statues, and processions, worshippers and relics, as one. With the increased number and intensification of protector saints we move from the city which is the sum of its parts to the city with the vocation of capital. The Treasury Chapel orchestrated that claim in terms of civic sanctity more resoundingly than any other locus in the city. While the viceregal palace announced not only that Naples was the viceregal capital, but that the city was a viceroyalty subordinate to Spain, the chapel, by contrast, represented the city Seggi – not the Spanish Crown, the viceroyalty, or the kingdom – both through its secular urban aristocratic deputation and, above all, in its glittering array of heavenly protectors. Yet beneath the glitter and the dazzle, barely perceived, the interests of Spain crystallized and formed. The Treasury Chapel did not contain something that pre-existed it elsewhere. It produced the multiplication of Naples’ patron saints and rendered them able to act. Under the aegis of the city’s Seggi, but right under the nose of the Archbishop, indeed in the Cathedral itself (Plate 37 & Fig. 33), the chapel gathered together an army of patron saints, marshalling an unparalleled spiritual force on behalf of various groups of Naples, to protect them from cataclysmic nature, from Vesuvius, earthquakes, and the depradations of the plague. One after another, in the name of the city, patron saints were promoted and pushed forwards by rival religious orders and institutions. To think the Treasury Chapel as a machine for producing saints is insufficient in itself to account for its apparent generative capacities. Here it is useful to think of style and effect in productive terms. In this view, style is not the external or accidental adornment of a message; it is the creation of affects from which speakers and messages are discerned. Style is not something that ornaments voice or content. Voice, meaning, or what a text says is at one with its style. There is no message ‘behind’ architectural affect and becoming; any sense of a message or underlying meaning is an effect of its specific style. Likewise, the energy of worship is effected from the investment that constitutes and is refracted in and intensified by saintly relics, sculpture, and architecture of the Treasury Chapel. If we think of architecture not on the basis of a concept or in terms of representation, but in terms of a mode of thinking as an event, we may think of the event as a repetition without a model. Thus we might usefully view this chapel not as a transcendental-empirical doubling (that is, the chapel as representing sanctity or redemption or heaven), but instead as producing effects in which something new arises. Initially, patrons and citizens, fearful of the plague and ambitious for their own spiritual profile, wanted something

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powerful and sumptuous that would rank with the best in the world. But the chapel and its related interventions became less something ‘international’, projecting the idea of Naples into a transcendental, but rather something more ‘native’, more ‘Neapolitan’, while producing that ‘Neapolitan’, even in the streets of the city itself. Deleuze argued that speakers are the effects of investments in language. Naples’ civic believers might best be thought as the effects of (architectural) investments in the Treasury Chapel. To grasp the chapel as machinic requires thinking of society as an experiment, rather than as a contract, to think of it as a series of plateaus – into which the pieces enter or settle along with the web of their interpretations. The parts thus do not work together like those of a well-formed narrative. The whole is not at any moment entirely given; things are always starting up again in the middle, falling together in another looser way. There is no map for the voyage, no blueprint made at the inception of the chapel, or on the architect’s desk. Arguably, the citizens of Naples became apparently more unified – or at least their potential unity became visible, only partly, only temporarily, on the way and provisionally – through the worship of patron saints, drawing together in celebration before pulling apart in furious competition over relative prestige and position, spiritual authority, and precedence, before again drawing together in a procession of fear at the onslaught of volcano, plague, revolt, and earthquake. The architecture of the Treasury Chapel was thus not a vehicle for messages about sanctity, or about San Gennaro. Rather it was a creative intensive event that produced its users (believers). Just as the bones became a relic through the reliquary, the reliquary chapel here produced the centrality of the protector saints and of San Gennaro above all in Neapolitan devotional life. In the Cathedral, but not under the archbishop’s tutelage; under the aegis of the deputies, drawn from each of the Seggi, but inside the Cathedral, the chapel is like the centre of a Venn diagram of Naples’ most powerful political and spiritual forces. But in the chapel, unlike the mathematical diagram, there was more than mere overlap; there was multiplication rather than addition, intensification more than mere extension. The amassed relics of Naples’ growing population of protector saints opened a zone where the contrasted poles of heaven and earth were able to conjoin. Art would be nothing more than opinion if it did not allow an element of chaos to enter in and transform and mobilize thinking.148 That destruction of opinion is achieved by disrupting the supposed harmony or unity of experience. The Deputazione and the people of Naples perhaps thought themselves able to control the chapel. But to no small a degree it produced them as Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 204.

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c­ ustodians and worshippers of certain visions and effects of spirituality. This might be termed ‘spiritual materiality’. The chapel thus did not simply represent the power of the deputies or the power of the saints; it effected instead a capacity for being affected, a puissance. While Deleuze uses the term pouvoir in a sense very close to Foucault’s, as an instituted and reproducible relation of force, a selective concretisation of potential, he uses the term puissance – as opposed to pouvoir – in particularly suggestive ways.149 For him puissance refers to a range of potential, as a ‘capacity for existence’, ‘a capacity to affect or be affected’, a capacity to multiply connections that may be realized by a given ‘body’ to varying degrees in different situations. It may be thought of as a scale of intensity or fullness of existence, analogous to the capacity of a number raised to a higher ‘power’.150 It is in this sense that protector saints formed a puissance in baroque Naples. The Treasury Chapel was site of the affective investment in individual saints with their undertow of institutional and political interests; but it was also focus of collective veneration. More than that, architecture-saints and worshippers together formed an assemblage, a capacity for veneration, and also a demand for worship. an urgent request that was also a possibility of recognition, of being moved. Of course, we must beware of an interpretative science of ‘sacred geographies’ becoming indistinguishable from what it seeks to extinguish: the belief in an immediately intuited history, confirmed in architecture.151 For sure, while new bonds and new hopes of protection were anchored through it, the chapel’s architecture does not express social unity in a material form. The Treasury of San Gennaro registered links between unstable and shifting frames of reference rather than stabilizing or even framing them. This chapter has considered the chapel in terms of investment of desire. Relics and their works are not exemplified in the chapel. The chapel is composed of rich materials, fine paintings, and highly fashioned silver reliquaries. These affects are already politically coded. The desire for redemption becomes an interest when it is coded as protector saint, which, far from being the effect of desire, seems to be what governs desire. Political formations or ‘social machines’ thus produce interests from desires. A group of bodies – including the city’s relic-holding institutions and the deputies of the Treasury Chapel – connects to expand their power; this is desire. The protection of the saints became the very ground of human life; this is interest. Interest and desire are Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, xvii. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, xvii. 151 For an interesting discussion of this problem, see D. B Monk, An Aesthetic Occupation: The Immediacy of Architecture and the Palestinian Conflict (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002), 8. 149 150

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formed through what we think of as the chapel. Deleuze’s method refuses to post a being outside power and imaging. Thus cultural forms like the chapel do not manipulate or deceive us through ‘propaganda’. On the contrary, the chapel is a way in which desire organizes and extends its investments. The chapel is, then, untimely, in Deleuze’s sense: ‘untimely’, because it has the power to make new lines of time or ‘lines of flight’. Such lines of flight do not chart, represent, or even contest events within history; they open a new experience of history – time as open to the future. The protector saints bring a transformation of malaise into celebration; of threat into protection; of well-being into dread. A protection without guarantee. A promise whispered to the winds. Protection, then, that brought with it more uncertainty, a proffering that entailed the terror of protection withheld. If the claim of the patron saint was that the city should become shrine, then the chapel, in its fracturing and funnelling and manufacture of saintly power, unpredictable as it remained, combined with its concentration of urban institutional patronage, forcefully produced itself in relation to its urban connections as shrine to unsurpassed extent. But in so doing it produced a different place. For better and for worse: new worshippers of new saints in a new place.

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From prayer to presence

The Treasury Chapel was in claims and ambition a chapel of the city and for the city, far exceeding the limits of the Cathedral and its jurisdiction even as it apparently occupies that space. Indeed, it resembles less a subordinate chapel than an independent church, as it bursts from the side of the Cathedral like a tumour (Plate 37, Figs 33 & 51). A church within the Cathedral, no less. Its bold space and grand proportions, centralized plan with two subsidiary chapels and seven altars, its soaring cupola entangled in the bodies of saints along with its dazzling marble revetment, frescoes, and altarpieces are unrestrainedly grandiloquent and avowedly aristocratic in tone (Plates 4 & 5). Indeed, the chapel flamboyantly alludes to the Cappella Sistina (Fig. 55) and the Cappella Paolina in Santa Maria Maggiore, the most notable of fashionable papal reliquary chapels in Rome. Perhaps propelled by those associations, scholars have to date overwhelmingly concurred in interpreting the monumental grandeur of the Treasury Chapel in terms either of the ‘Counter-Reformation’ or of struggles and triumphs of individual artists, while its existence has been posited unproblematically as simple fulfilment of a vow made during the plague of 1527 for Naples’ safe deliverance.1 These approaches naturalize the chapel, treating it as somehow inevitable and, paradoxically, vault over the specificity of its idiosyncratic patronage. That oversight is the more striking given the still powerful tendency within art history (especially ‘early modern’ architectural history) to interpret artworks as fulfulments of their patrons’ intentions (this tendency is challenged here). The Deputazione del Tesoro di San Gennaro, the Treasury’s anomalous patronal body, deserves more consideration than it has received. Unusually, it consisted of elected laymen, mostly noble, in their capacity as Strazzullo, La Real Cappella; Strazzullo, La Cappella di San Gennaro, 14; Blunt, Neapolitan Baroque & Rococo Architecture, 43–44; Cantone, Napoli barocca, 109, 144, 214; Catello and Catello, La Cappella del Tesoro. The most emphatic reading of the Treasury Chapel in terms of the Counter-Reformation is Savarese, Francesco Grimaldi, 116–125.

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representatives of the city Seggi. Thus the members of the Deputation were independent, at least in theory, of the Cathedral, even as their chapel was building like a cancer bulging from its side (Plate 37 & Fig. 33). San Gennaro’s Treasury Chapel was as anomalous as its curious patronage and, although it cannot be explained by it, must surely be understood in relation to it. Thus at once papal, aristocratic, and in the Cathedral but not under its jurisdiction, the Treasury Chapel and its Deputation occupy a paradoxical and eccentric role and place. Capable of drawing on cathedral status, yet determinedly allied to the administrative districts and aristocratic governance of Naples city, papal in reference yet Neapolitan in address, the chapel assumed a prominent, ambivalent, contradictory register – a prominence and ambivalence that endowed it with extraordinary potential. In spite of appearances (Plates 1 & 37, Fig. 33), San Gennaro’s Treasury Chapel was strictly not part of the Cathedral of Naples, and was exempt from canonical jurisdiction, and its allegiances and energies were focused elsewhere.2 To consider the Treasury Chapel in relation to the patronage of the Deputation exposes the political tensions at work in it – indeed, that were set to work by it – as productive of a new form of holiness that was at once emphatically urban, indeed, civic (and, as such, apparently all-inclusive), and yet unflinchingly aristocratic. In turn, this makes evident the extent to which the chapel is a deliberate departure and radical reworking of its principal predecessors in Naples – the Carafan Succorpo chapel (1497–1506) (Plate 11 & Fig. 8), in the crypt of Naples Cathedral directly beneath the main altar, which held San Gennaro’s bones, and the viceregal Old Treasury Chapel, where the relics of Naples’ protector saints were preserved (Figs 6 & 39).3 The Treasury Chapel’s address to the city in terms of material magnificence (Plates 3 & 21) deliberately ran counter to the tone and address of both these chapels. Understood through this lens, the Treasury Chapel emerges as a ­strategic redirection by the Deputation of the cult of San Gennaro away from its ­previously close and explicit identification with either the Carafa family or the  Spanish viceregency, towards the city of Naples as a whole (thereby refashioning the notion of the city in the process).4 In turn, the material ambition of the Treasury Chapel inevitably drew it beyond the orbit of the Deputazione. Part of a strategy by its patrons that was determinedly secular and aristocratic, the chapel’s address was upgraded from familial clan, or selfevidently viceregal, to avowedly civic. The Deputation marked its control of The limits of its own jurisdiction are marked by stones inset into the pavement in the southern aisle of the Cathedral.   3 For the viceregal chapel, see Chapter 4, pp. 257–258.   4 Indeed, the Seggi were deeply implicated in the form and rituals of the Treasury Chapel, as we shall see below in Chapter 7.   2

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San Gennaro’s relics to produce something in stark differentiation from both the Old Treasury Chapel and from the relatively ascetic Succorpo. In their desire for ‘a sumptuous and magnificent chapel’, the deputies strategically distanced the Treasury Chapel formally from its predecessors – particularly from the Succorpo.5 Simultaneously, in increasingly close conjunction with Viceroy and Archbishop, they engaged a wider social group from the city. In turn, that strategy permitted the development of a ‘civic holiness’ in a web of divine protectors – ostensibly for the city of Naples as a whole, but tending to hold in place an uneasy truce between barons, Viceroy, and the Seggi. Existing accounts of the Treasury Chapel render its patronal strategy invisible and neatly vault the Carafas’ skilful exploitation of the relics of San Gennaro and the building of the Succorpo chapel. In fact, it is impossible to understand the chapel unless it is seen in relation to all this, especially to the Succorpo. Indeed, the Treasury Chapel marked a significant change of key in the orchestration of the cult of San Gennaro, moving it from an introverted Carafa family affair to a divine address, orchestrated by the aristocratic deputation, supported by the viceroy, but articulated in terms of the city of Naples as a whole. The Deputation and the Seggi were therefore implicated in the production of a new form of aristocratic civic holiness. The chapel is a crucial part of the territorialization and deterritorialization of the deputies and the Seggi, Archbishop, and Viceroy in the city of Naples that was implicated in the production of a new form of aristocratic material civic holiness. Rather than viewing the chapel as instantiation of its patrons’ will, I suggest here that the Deputation and its civic claims must be seen as partly produced by the chapel. Relics were not simply moved from one point to another; in that movement they transformed and changed place. Their unpredictable address was part of what the patrons sought to capitalize on and hoped to control by building the chapel. Thus the chapel was a mode of patronal control over  cult, relics, and miracle, and also something that necessarily slipped beyond that  control, staged its own patronage, and opened possibilities unforeseen. By harnessing the ambitions and investment of a variety of external religious institutions and encouraging their investment, the deputies of the Seggi managed to forge a unifying and remarkably flexible new focus of urban spirituality – ostensibly for the city of Naples (Fig. 33). This illuminates the central paradox of the chapel. Despite its coherent appearance, it was informed by radical heterogeneity as a result of multiple investments by external institutions from across the city. Yet despite that heterogeneity, its spiritual claims ‘una cappella somptuosa e magnifica’. ATSG, AB/1 (Fasc. 10 n. 25), document of 5 February 1601.

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were made in the name of the city as a whole, through the claims of its many and multiplying protector saints, including San Gennaro himself.

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The Seggi and the sacred

The claim that the Seggi, overwhelmingly secular and administrative institutions might have played a significant role in the production of what remains one of Naples’ most spectacular religious buildings demands examination. This serves both to enrich our understanding of the cultural and urban significance of the Neapolitan Seggi, particularly the interpenetration of the Seggi with religious institutions and their contested nature, and to throw new light on the Treasury Chapel as producing a new form of place, a new understanding of the city, and a new form of urban holiness. While the importance of individual members of the various Seggi as patrons of religious art and architecture has been recognized, this chapter argues for a new form of patronage by the Seggi working together for specific institutional ends. Thus this chapter explores the chapel’s implication of the Seggi in its orchestration and production of civic holiness, which was partly an aristocratization of spirituality and partly a re-energization of a dialogue with the divine in urban terms. Let us now turn to the Seggi. The Seggi were involved in the Treasury Chapel in three important ways. First, they elected the deputies who ran the chapel; second, they elected the protector saints who inhabited it; and third, they were involved in staging the protector saints’ festivals and processions. Comparable to but more important than the rioni of Rome or the alberghi of Genoa, the Neapolitan Seggi were at once a marker of nobility, a political institution, the representatives of a city quarter, and a specific place in the city marked with a special form of portico (Figs 51 & 54). The Seggi (seats) were also known as tocci (a corruption of the Greek topos), teatri (theatres), piazze (squares), and portici (porticoes) – terms all indicating the entwined nature of power, place, and architecture. Thus Neapolitan city government was defined in terms of particular locality and precise places, which entailed distinction between nobles and commoners and among the nobility between those who were not aggregated to the Seggi.6 From the end of the fifteenth century Naples was administered by a group of ‘Eletti’, in which the nobility had five votes and the popolo only one. Five noble neighbourhood districts – the Seggi of Capuana, Nido, Montagna, Porto, and Portanova – consolidated from the original twenty-nine ottine, enjoyed a strong tradition of decentralized political organization; while a single seat, the Seggio del Popolo, represented the people.7 In effect, the ­institution of the Marino, Becoming Neapolitan, 3. Naples’ civic administration had its seat in the Piazza of San Lorenzo, next to the

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Seggi worked to marginalize the popolo civile while ostensibly representing it. The elect of the popolo was chosen from six names proposed by fifty-eight ­procuratori of the twenty-nine ottine or districts of the city for the Piazza del Popolo (two procuratori for each one) not by one of their own, but by the Viceroy himself. Thus Spanish monarchical interests could be served by the least likely constituency. Despite Naples’ gigantic population, reckoned to be in the region of 450,000 by the mid-seventeenth century, its government was in the hands of a mere 150 noble families. The noble Seggi outnumbered the Seggio del Popolo and thus they governed the city, with notable cultural, political, and economic repercussions throughout the Mediterranean.8 The nobility of the Seggio was at the heart of Neapolitan political and social life and citizenship: it was, in Giuseppe Galasso’s words, ‘in effect,  everything’.9  The two oldest Seggi were the most important. Their key  strength lay in their principal clans: the Carafa for the Nido and the Caracciolo for Capuana. Capuana in the north-east, associated with the Porta Capuana, the gateway to the north, had its seat on the decumanus major, just east of the cardo crossing (Plate 46 & Fig. 52). The Seggio di Nido dominated the south-western quarter of the city around the old Capuana gate to the west, where the Carafa clan was concentrated. The Seggio di Montagna took its name from the sloping terrain of the north-western quarter and, after the terrible fourteenth-century plagues, was amalgamated with the Seggio di Forcella in the south-east. Those Seggi occupied the four quarters of the city within its ancient walls. Two newer Seggi lay outside the ancient city. Porto lay in the ancient port near San Giovanni Maggiore, and Portanova near the new port. As John Marino pointed out, the two oldest Seggi can be seen as dominating the important east and west gates of the city, while the MontagnaForcella Seggio was squeezed between them: ‘the perception that the center of the city was its most sacred precinct (near the site of the Duomo) is neatly confirmed, because that was precisely the contested territory’.10 Thus in the Seggi intersected territory, nobility, and claims to sacrality. Each Neapolitan Seggio had its own small meeting place, a colonnaded basilica of San Lorenzo. Every six months each Seggio elected its own representative, the Eletto, who sat in the Tribunale. From the end of the fifteenth century Naples was administered by a group of Eletti, in which the nobility had five votes and the popolo only one. Thus the government of the city was effectively in the hands of 150 noble families, even though its population was by mid-seventeenth century c.450,000. After 1548 the Eletto of the people was no longer selected from the fifty-eight procurators of the people’s ottine, but by the Viceroy from three names voted by the procurators. Muto, ‘Il patriziato napoletano’, 17–23, 20.   8 Galasso, Napoli capitale, 151.   9 In Galasso’s words, ‘in practice the Seggio was everything’ (‘in pratica, tutto’): Galasso, Napoli capitale, 151.  10 Marino, Becoming Neapolitan, 14.

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rotunda or portico with cupola (Figs 51 & 54), and it is generally assumed that this was the only architecture the Seggi patronized. Indeed, the Seggi are usually conceived in steadfastly secular terms. Yet in the Treasury Chapel they sponsored – albeit indirectly – a significant religious building to house sacred relics on behalf of the whole city. Consequently the Seggi emerge as architectural patrons – at least indirectly – on a far more ambitious scale than hitherto recognized, with significant consequences for the spiritual profile of the city of Naples. The Deputazione del Tesoro di San Gennaro

It was the Deputazione del Tesoro di San Gennaro, or Deputation of the Treasury of San Gennaro, that linked the Seggi to the Treasury Chapel, and thus the sacred to the secular, the chapel to the city. Neapolitan deputations or committees were bodies with specific functions. Some were administrative, others jurisdictional, such as the Tribunale della Fortificazione, Acque e Mattonata. Others, such as the Deputazione contro il Santo Uffizio, the Deputazione dei Capitoli e Privilegi, the Deputazione della Moneta, and the Deputazione del Tesoro di San Gennaro itself, had no jurisdictional authority, but enjoyed considerable political weight.11 Established in 1601, this last was charged specifically with choosing a suitable site for the chapel in the Cathedral and directing its building.12 Composed of twelve laymen, two deputed from each of the five aristocratic Seggi, a representative from the Seggio del Popolo, and a Treasurer – usually a high-ranking abbot – who was charged with supervising the miracle itself, it was an extraordinary body in Neapolitan political society, and remarkable – indeed, unique – as a patron.13 Indeed, the Deputation of the Treasury Chapel successfully extended its initial narrow remit and – mutatis mutandis – exists today.14 The singular focus Muto, ‘Il patriziato napoletano’, 21. Strictly speaking established in 1527, the Deputazione was effectively established in 1601. Its twelve members were charged with building the chapel dedicated to San Gennaro ‘pro sacello sub invocatione Beati Januarii Pontificis et Martyris aedificando et construendo’ (F. Strazzullo, San Gennaro ‘defensor civitatis’ e il voto del 1527 (Naples: Arte Tipografica, 1987), 10). Papal permission for the chapel was given in a Bull in 1605, and the first stone was laid in 1608. The chapel was to be served by six canons and four clerics. The canons were to be chosen by the six Seggi, which were to take it in turn to elect a Treasurer from their number. In 1664 the period of service of each deputy was limited to two years.  13 The Treasurer was elected from the chapel’s canons, who were chosen by the six Seggi.  14 See Muto, ‘Il patriziato napoletano’, 21. The sedili (Seggi) were abolished in 1800. In 1806 the nomination of the deputies became a royal privilege; with the decree of 23 January 1811 the Deputazione was placed under the presidency of the mayor. Strazzullo, San Gennaro ‘defensor civitatis’, 10.  11  12

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of the Deputation of the Treasury of San Gennaro’s ambitions and desires was the Treasury Chapel.15 The deputies thus represented their Seggi directly ex officio at the Treasury Chapel. To this extent the chapel can be read as produced by the Deputation as a delegated form of joint patronage by the Seggi. As a group, the Seggi did not pool resources in any other institution or patronize any other important piece of architecture in this way.16 This patronage – anomalous, distinguished, and distinctive – accounts for some of the Treasury Chapel’s most striking singularities. Almost from its inception, the chapel was run administratively and financially by the Deputation, but was accountable to the Archbishop, while its jurisdiction lay in Rome.17 Thus, in spite of tensions and compromises with archbishops and Cathedral canons – to which I return below – the Treasury Chapel was first and foremost a city chapel, run by city representatives: always more aristocratic than ecclesiastical in organizational terms, more civic than see in compass. Its governance was singular in that, in spite of  the  injunctions of Trent affirming episcopal power and authority,  and  in  spite of the  fact  that this chapel was located inside the Cathedral, nevertheless  its  governance  was  independent of both Cathedral and Archbishop. The deputies fashioned the Treasury Chapel to produce an urban spiritual centre which welded viceregal and archiepiscopal to civic engagement  under their own aegis in two principal ways. The Treasury Chapel was strategically distanced formally and devotionally from its predecessors (Plates 3 & 11) – a distancing that allowed the Treasury Chapel to engage the devotion to San Gennaro with a far wider urban social group. Even so, the The initial vow of 13 January 1527 was made by the Eletti of the city of Naples in the presence of the Vicar General Monsignor Donato, Bishop of Ischia. See Strazzullo, La Real Cappella, 3. The deed of 13 January 1527 was notarized by Vincenzo de Rosis; it was signed by Marino Tomacelli for the Seggio of Capuana, Francesco d’Alagno for Nido, Galeazzo Cicinello and Antonio Sanfelice for Montagna, Alberigo de Liguoro for Porta Nova, Antonio d’Alessandro for Porto, and Paolo Calamazza for the Seggio of the Popolo. See Bellucci, Memorie, 1–2. Thus ‘the city’, as the municipal administration was called, had patronage rights over the chapel and the tabernacle was to be the property of the Eletti. Strazzullo, La Real Cappella, 3.  16 Cesare D’Engenio Caracciolo in 1624 identified c.1.8 per cent of churches in Naples as of the Seggi (both noble and del popolo), while a substantial 28 per cent of churches were under noble family jurisdiction. See M. A. Visceglia, Identità sociali: la nobiltà a Napoli nella prima età moderna (Milan: UNICOPLI, 1997), 35.  17 According to a long-standing decree of the Reale Camera della Sommaria, issued in January 1477 in relation to endowed chapels and estaurite administered and governed by laymen, ‘bona sunt laicorum et non ecclesiarum’. The Bull of Paul V required the Treasurer and Deputazione to give account each year to the Archbishop of its income from pious alms and legacies. Strazzullo, La Real Cappella, 5.  15

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material splendour that formed that challenge provoked opposition, as is argued below.

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The Carafa and San Gennaro

Prior to the building of the Treasury Chapel, San Gennaro’s fate in Naples was tightly bound up with the ambitions of the Carafa family, one of the most powerful clans in Naples. The Carafa rose to pre-eminence through their support of the newly established Aragonese dynasty in southern Italy, and exploited the archbishopric, the most powerful and wealthiest ecclesiastical office in southern Italy, with cunning. They claimed special episcopal hegemony precisely as patrons of San Gennaro, his spiritual heirs, and worthy guardians of his relics.18 Oliviero Carafa (1430–1511), Archbishop of Naples in 1458–84 and 1503–05, took the lead on this.19 On his assumption of the see in 1458, his first act of Vitale, Ritualità monarchica, 178–181; G. Vitale, ‘Il culto ianuariano in età aragonese’, in Gennaro Luongo (ed.), San Gennaro nel XVII centenario del martirio (305–2005): Atti del Convegno internazionale (Napoli, 21–23 settembre 2005), 2 vols (Naples: Industria Poligrafica, 2007), vol. I, 327–357; Nichols, ‘Plague and Politics in Early Modern Naples’, 23–44, esp. 31.  19 Oliviero Carafa was Archbishop of Naples first between 1458 and 1484, when he ceded the title to his twin brother Alessandro. Having retained the right to the title in the event of his brother’s death, he succeeded to it again after Alessandro died in 1503, remaining until 1505, when he ceded it first to his nephew Bernardino, and after Bernardino’s death to another nephew, Vincenzo. Franco Strazzullo, ‘Il Cardinale Oliviero Carafa mecenate del Rinascimento’, Atti dell’Accademia Pontaniana, 14 (1965), 158–159 n. 1; Aldimari, Historia genealogica, vol. III, 9. He was named cardinal on 18 September 1467 and entered the College of Cardinals as cardinal presbyter of Santi Pietro e Marcellino. From 1467 until his death in 1511 he resided in Rome, visiting Naples four times as papal legate on behalf of successive popes. He rose steadily to cardinal presbyter of Sant’Eusebio (1470) and Cardinal Bishop of Albano (1476), working his way up the hierarchy of the College of Cardinals to the position of dean of the college and cardinal bishop of Ostia in 1503. His significance in the Dominican order is marked particularly by his appointment to the Suburbicarian seat of Santa Sabina (1483), the early Christian basilica acquired by St Dominic and his followers in 1221 where St Thomas Aquinas took refuge when fleeing from his family in 1242; his appointment as commendatory abbot of Montevergine (1485); and, most notably, by his appointment as Cardinal Protector of the order in 1488. A candidate at five papal elections, he missed by the narrowest margins on three occasions. For his career in Rome and his proposed reforms of cardinal income and conclave behaviour, see F. Petrucci, Oliviero Carafa’, in A. M. Ghisalberti, Dizionario biografico degli italiani, vol. XIX (Rome: Scarano, 1976), 588–596; M. Pellegrini, ‘A Turning-Point in the History of the Factional System in the Sacred College’, in G. Signorotto and M. A Visceglia (eds), Court and Politics in Papal Rome, 1492–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 15, 26. A significant patron of the arts, Oliviero Carafa undertook building and decoration in Rome at San Lorenzo fuori le Mura, Santa Maria in Aracoeli, San Pietro in Vincoli, Santa Maria della Pace, and, most spectacularly, Filippo Lippi’s beautiful chapel of St Thomas Aquinas at  18

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patronage proclaimed a special link with Gennaro. He restored the fifthcentury church of San Gennaro extra Moenia and established a lazaretto or plague hospital in 1464 in an abandoned Benedictine monastery situated immediately next to the catacombs of San Gennaro (Fig. 57) outside the city walls at the foot of Capodimonte, where Gennaro’s body was transferred in the early fifth century (Fig. 19).20 Indeed the catacombs could be accessed directly Santa Maria sopra Minerva (1488–93?) with scenes from the life of St Thomas Aquinas on the west wall and The Annunciation with Saint Thomas Aquinas Presenting Cardinal Carafa to the Virgin (Plate 35) on the altar wall. The fresco of Virtues Overcoming the Vices on the east wall of the Carafa chapel in Santa Maria sopra Minerva were destroyed with the installation of the tomb of Pope Paul IV (Carafa) to Pirro Ligorio’s design in 1559. Oliviero Carafa left property and other income for divine worship in the chapel and for annual dowries for several young women. Aldimari, Historia genealogica, vol. III, 9, 15–17; Strazzullo, ‘Il Cardinale Oliviero Carafa’, 158–159 n. 1; Norman, ‘Cardinal of Naples’, 77.  20 There from the time of Bishop Giovanni I, the catacombs of San Gennaro underwent prolonged restructuration and monumentalization lasting well into the high Middle Ages. The body remained there until its translation to Benevento early in the ninth century. In the same cemetery were buried various Neapolitan bishops, the object of strong veneration. Even after the removal of their bodies to Naples by Bishop Giovanni IV (842–49), the complex remained important and Athanasius I (849–972) underook various restorations in the catacombs and established a monastery dedicate to Gennaro and Agripino. By the second half of the fifteenth century, when Cardinal Oliviero Carafa founded there his lay confraternity under the protection of San Gennaro and instituted the lazaretto in the monastery, the area appears to have been in an abandoned state. The basilica of San Gennaro extra Moenia was restored and the nearby cemetery, stripped of many marble inscriptions used for the church flooring, was uased to bury plague victims. In the second half of the sixteenth century in Naples the ‘discovery’ or ‘rediscovery’ of ancient places of worship included the catacombs of San Gaudioso, San Severo, and Santa Maria della Vita, where new churches and monasteries – Santa Maria della Sanità, San Severo fuori le Mura, and Santa Maria della Vita respectively – were founded and built. M. Amodio, ‘Riflessi monumentali del culto ianuariano: le catacombe di S. Gennaro: dalla “curiositas” degli erudite alle indagini archeologiche’, in Gennaro Luongo (ed.), San Gennaro nel XVII centenario del martirio (305–2005): Atti del Convegno internazionale (Napoli, 21–23 settembre 2005), 2 vols (Naples: Campania Notizie, 2007), vol I, 126–127. On Santa Maria della Sanità at the Catacombs of San Gaudioso, see N. Ciavolino and A. Spinosa, S. Maria alla Sanità: la chiesa e le catacombi (Naples: L. Regina, 1979); O. Zerlenga, ‘S. Maria della Sanità: dall’ultimo esempio di architettura claustrale a pianta ovata’, in A. Buccaro (ed.), Il Borgo dei Vergini: storia e struttura di un ambito urbano (Naples: CUEN, 1991), 199–209; L. Trapanese, ‘S Severo a Capodimonte’ in A. Buccaro (ed), Il Borgo dei Vergini: storia e struttura di un ambito urbano (Naples: CUEN, 1991), 275–279. Aldimari describes the hospital built within the monastery as ‘sumptuous’, ‘with bedrooms [camere] and other necessary things’ (Aldimari, Historia genealogica, vol. III, 17). Carafa established a lay confraternity of nobles and representatives of the people to supervise the hospital. The establishment of this board coincided with the formation of a health board by King Ferdinand I of Aragon to which two Neapolitans, including Antonio Carafa, were appointed. This was the first documented health board of plague control in Naples. Nichols, ‘Plague and Politics in Early Modern Naples’, 30; Tutini, Memorie (1633), 117. For Oliviero Carafa, see Aldimari, Historia genealogica, vol. III, 8–26; Petrucci, ‘Oliviero Carafa’, 588–596.

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from within the monastic church.21 Carafa’s hospital therefore was intimately connected with one of the principal sites of San Gennaro’s cult. When in June 1496 plague struck Naples for the fifth time in fifty years, infected victims were required to enter the lazaretto.22 That outbreak of plague was also the occasion for the Carafan capture of San Gennaro’s relics and their forcible translation from Montevergine to Naples Cathedral. Thereafter between 1497 and 1695 the Carafa family strategically promoted San Gennaro through institutional and art patronage to enhance their own spiritual authority and socio-political power in Naples, in sharp contradistinction to the Spanish viceregal governments, which tended to respond defensively to plague emergencies.23 Thus the Carafas shrewdly entwined their fortunes with San Gennaro, surfing on the waves of the suffering of the plague. The translation of San Gennaro’s relics to Naples Cathedral in 1497 (Fig. 10) was the centre-stone of this strategy and brilliantly encapsulated the identification between the Carafas and Naples’ principal patron saint. It was Oliviero and Alessandro Carafa who were the principal architects of the translation of San Gennaro’s remaining relics to Naples Cathedral on 13 January 1497 and Oliviero who clinched Carafan identification with the saint by building the Succorpo chapel.24 The May translation

The story of the various translations of San Gennaro’s relics is long and not always clear.25 After his death in 305, Gennaro’s body was hidden in the San Gennaro’s relics were removed from the church of San Gennaro extra Moenia in the early ninth century and taken to Benevento. Tutini, Memorie (1710), 68. The catacombs were used as a cemetery for victims of the fifteenth-century epidemic. Nichols, ‘Plague and Politics in Early Modern Naples’, 30.  22 See Nichols, ‘Plague and Politics in Early Modern Naples’, 23–44.  23 In 1656 the Spanish Viceroy, apparently alarmed at the prospect of economic damage and social disturbance, imprisoned a doctor for announcing an outbreak of the plague after treating Spanish soldiers recently arrived from Sardinia. See E. Nappi, Aspetti della società e dell’economia napoletana durante la peste del 1656 (Naples: Banco di Napoli, 1980), 12–13.  24 On the claim that at the time of the translation from Montevergine in 1497 Gennaro’s cult was strong in Naples and for its subsequent development, see G. Luongo, ‘Saint Janvier/San Gennaro’, in Dictionnaire d’histoire et de géographie ecclésiastiques (DHGE), vol. XXVI (Turnhout: Brepols, 1996), cols 983–989, and G. Luongo, ‘Gennaro’, in E. Guerriero et al. (eds), Il grande libro dei santi: dizionario enciclopedico (Turin: San Paolo, 1998), 765–770.  25 There is debate about the number of translations, the precise location of many of these, and even whether his head was separated from his body. See A. Galdi, ‘Quam si urbem illam suae subdiderit: la traslazione delle reliquie di san Gennaro a Benevento’, in G. Luongo (ed.), San Gennaro nel XVII centenario del martirio, Naples: Editoriale  21

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Marciano plain (Agro Marciano) in the Flegreian fields. According to Paolo Regio in 1573, once the persecution of Christians was over, St Severus, eager to honour him, had a church dedicated to San Gennaro about a mile outside Naples and arranged for his body to be taken there (Fig. 19).26 According to the Gesta episcoporum Neapolitanorum, Gennaro’s body was translated from the Agro Marciano by the Bishop of Naples, Giovanni I (413–32), to the cemetery outside the walls of Naples at the foot of Capodimonte (Fig. 57).27 Accoring to Camillo Tutini, following his failed attack on Naples in 817, the Duke of Benevento transported San Gennaro’s body to his old bishopric of Benevento (Fig. 20). Some time after 1124, probably during the time of Frederick Barbarossa, the body was moved a third time (supposedly for safe-keeping) from Benevento to Montevergine, a monastic church dedicated to the Virgin, founded by St William of Vercelli (1085–1142), which was ‘enriched’ with the bodies of various saints, including Gennaro, Festo, and Desiderio.28 Over time, the location of San Gennaro’s body at Montevergine was forgotten. When it was rediscovered, the news ‘ignited the desire of the people of Naples’ to have [for themselves] that holy body of their citizen and protector’.29 In 1485 Cardinal Oliviero Carafa was appointed commendatory abbot of Montevergine, and thus was quickly alerted to the rediscovered relics. The  Carafas and the Aragonese recognized the opportunity this offered.  King Ferdinand (Ferrante) I of Aragon wrote to Cardinal Carafa in Rome  in  January 1490 to ask him to persuade Pope Innocent VIII to Comunicazioni Sociali (ECS), 223–242, A. Vuolo, ‘Rilettura del dossier agiografico di San Gennaro e compagni’, Campania sacra: rivista di storia sociale e religiosa del Mezzogiorno, 37 (2006), 179–221, and V. Lucherini, La cattedrale di Napoli: storia, architettura, storiografia di un monumento medievale (Rome: École française de Rome, 2009), 132–133. The account offered above is based on Maria di Sant’Anna, Istoria della Vita (1707). The presence of Gennaro’s relics in the Stefania in the early fourteenth century is mentioned in the Chronicon di Santa Maria del Principio. See V. Lucherini, Il Chronicon di Santa Maria del Principio (131 ca.) e la messa in scena della liturgia nel cuore della cattedrale di Napoli’, in Stefania Adamo Muscettola et al. (eds), Dall’immagine alla storia (Pozzuoli: Naus, 2010), n.p.  26 P. Regio, Le Vite dei sette santi protettori di Napoli (Naples: Giuseppe Cacchi, 1573); Tutini, Memorie (1703), 40.  27 Gesta episcoporum Neapolitanorum 6, quoted by Luongo, ‘Neapolitanae urbis’, 24.  28 The date of the translation is disputed. Tutini suggests 1226 and 1240 (Tutini, Memorie (1633), 42–49); Fra Bernardino dates it to the rule of Frederick I Barbarossa (i.e. 1152–90), a period when the Archbishop of Benevento’s brother was the abbot of Montevergine (see Tutini, Memorie (1710) 86); Caserta and Lambertini suggest 1154 (A. Caserta and Lambertini, Storia e scienza di fronte al miracolo di S. Gennaro (Naples: AGAR, 1968)); see also F. Strazzullo, ‘La Cappella Carafa del Duomo di Napoli in un poemetto del primo Cinquecento’, Napoli nobilissima, new ser., 5 (1966), 59–71.  29 Tutini, Memorie (1710), 89.

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authorize the translation of San Gennaro’s body from Montevergine to Naples Cathedral in order to increase the flow of pilgrims there.30 The relationship between Ferdinand and Innocent VIII was severely strained, and consequently Ferdinand depended on Carafa as mediator for papal approval.31 Anticipating that the relics would set in motion a groundswell of support and civic fervour in Naples, and prompted by ‘both the devotion of the Neapolitan people and the prayers of King Ferdinand I’, Oliviero Carafa, seizing the chance to tighten the Gennaro–Carafa alliance, sought to reunite San Gennaro’s body with the holy head and blood already in Naples Cathedral.32 But the occupation of Rome and the invasion of Naples by King Charles VIII of France muddied matters between Carafa and Pope Alexander VI, and it was not until 1494, after the restoration of the throne of Naples to the House of Aragon, that Pope Alexander VI finally granted permission for San Gennaro’s body relics, recently moved to the convent of Montevergine, to be transferred to the Cathedral of Naples where the rest of his relics were conserved.33 According to seventeenth-century commentators, having received papal permission, Oliviero Carafa sent the papal Brief to his brother, Alessandro, Archbishop of Naples, who then sought the translation of Gennaro’s relics from Montevergine. But the monks of Montevergine, in their abbot’s absence, obstructed this plan by hiding Gennaro’s relics.34 Thereupon, the Archbishop sent for 200 infantrymen to besiege the monastery, a display of force that indicates the urgency of the Carafan ‘strategy of sanctity’. The same sources suggest that it was the abbot’s return to Montevergine, rather than Carafa’s brutal use of force, that prompted the monks’ surrender of Gennaro’s precious bones.35 In any case, Archbishop Alessandro Carafa extracted the relics The letter is printed in full in Caracciolo, De sacris Ecclesiae Neapolitanae monumentis, 251.  31 Carafa’s only surviving humanist text is a funerary oration written in 1494 in honour of King Ferrante (Norman, ‘Cardinal of Naples’, 87).  32 Tutini, Memorie (1710), 89–90. Tutini claims that San Gennaro’s head and blood were brought to Naples at the same time as the body was carried there (Tutini, Memorie (1703), 61).  33 In 1490 Cardinal Oliviero Carafa petitioned Pope Innocent VIII, on behalf of King Ferdinand of Naples, for permission to transfer the relics of San Gennaro to Naples Cathedral. Innocent VIII refused; permission was eventually granted by Pope Alexander VI. For this episode, see C. Celano, Notitie del bello dell’antico e del curioso della Città di Napoli (Naples: G. Raillard, 1692), 193; F. Strazzullo, ‘La politica di Ferrante I nei riflessi della traslazione delle ossa di San Gennaro’, Atti dell’Accademia Pontaniana, 15 (1966), 73–89. See also Tutini, Memorie (1703), 41. For his role as Archbishop of Naples see n. 19 above.  34 Tutini, Memorie (1710), 92–93.  35 This aspect of the story does not appear in Regio’s Le Vite de’ Sette Santi Protettori of 1579.  30

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from the abbey at midnight, and brought them directly on horseback to Naples prominently celebrated in the main altar’s paliotto (Fig. 10).36 Thus it was that at one o’clock in the morning on 13 January 1497 the Archbishop carried Gennaro’s body back to Naples in a fourth translation that bore little sign of the brute force that guaranteed it: ‘Nearing Naples, he dismounted his horse, removed his shoes and, barefoot, carried the heavenly treasure in his arms to the main altar of the Cathedral.’37 The city was almost deserted. Most Neapolitans had fled the plague, but even so, according to some, a jubilant celebration greeted the relics’ return.38 Soon after the translation, the plague miraculously lost its bite. According to a much-quoted epithet by Fra Bernardino Siciliano, ‘After the saint came to Naples, because of his many virtues and merits, the plague ceased’.39 San Gennaro’s reputation as protector from plague was clinched. The Succorpo chapel was built as the last resting place for Gennaro’s relics and for Oliviero Carafa himself and his immediate family. To be buried in such august company would surely secure the fate of the Carafas spiritually and politically. The capture of San Gennaro’s relics occurred at a crucial time for Naples when both plague and syphilis beleaguered the city.40 Shrewdly, the Carafa clan immediately harnessed San Gennaro to the plague to promote their political and spiritual power in the city and beyond. Plague was a particularly opportune adversary for them to bridle in this way. After 1348 and until the eighteenth century the plague was an almost continuous threat in the Italian peninsula, producing a constant well of fear that could be skilfully exploited.41 An aggressive, ravaging force – not so much on individual bodies as on the spiritual community – plague was a catastrophic collision with the life and Tutini describes the careful measuring of matching bones (left leg and right leg, and so on) to ‘remove any suspicion’. Tutini, Memorie (1710), 94.  37 Tutini, Memorie (1703), 52.  38 Tutini, Memorie (1710), 95.  39 ‘La dicta peste non ando piu innante / dal di che el sancto in Napoli fo intrato / per le virtute et meriti soy tante / el morbo sopradicto hebbe cessato / Ogn’un chi per timore andava errante /In Napoli fo presto ritornato / Ho contemplato che tutta sta terra / Defesa fo per lui da tanta guerra.’ Fra Bernardino Siciliano, ‘Vita di San Gennaro’, fol. 38v, quoted by G. Luongo, ‘Il poemetto di Bernardino Siculo su s. Gennaro’, in G. Luongo (ed.), Munera parva: studi in onore di Boris Ulianich (Naples: Fridericiana Editrice Universitaria, 1999), vol. II, 1–32.  40 Nichols, ‘Plague and Politics in Early Modern Naples’, 31. The conquering French troops introduced syphilis to Naples in 1495, following the victory of Charles VIII over Aragonese forces. J. Arrizabalaga, J. Henderson and R. French,. The Great Pox: The French Disease in Renaissance Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 21–25.  41 See J.-N. Biraben, Les hommes et la peste en France et dans les pays européens et mediterranées, 2 vols (Paris: École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 1975–76) and Dr. Herlihy (ed.), The Black Death and the Transformation of the West (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997).

 36

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values of the ideal Christian communitas.42 Arbitrary, unpredictable, but recurrent, mocking human agency and no respecter of status, the disease was often seen as an embodiment of Fortuna, whose cycles circumscribed the ambit of civic virtue.43 Plague profferred the chance to combine a religious agenda of spiritual community with a political agenda, centred on issues of order, welfare, and prosperity. Thus plague was a potentially powerful ally.44 Plague was a sign of God’s righteous wrath, at once a brutal attack on the biological body, the mystical body of the church, and the social body of the urban community.45 Thus particularly shocking was the damage that was seen to be done to the community of saints and the disruption of religious ritual. Nature, heterodoxy, women, and the marginalized were available as scapegoats. Yet while plague was feared, it could also be mobilized. It was no respecter of persons and, although it was associated with the poor (and indeed only the better-off could afford to flee), it was by no means restricted to them. To tackle the plague was thus to address at once that which was awry in the body, the church, and the community as a whole. For the Carafa and later for the Eletti, it was in many ways the ideal public opponent, combining a universal threat, readily mobilized scapegoats, and, in San Gennaro, a revitalized protector. The translation of Gennaro’s relics defeated the plague and enhanced his standing in Naples – in the slipstream of the Carafa. Each translatio of relics was more than a simple relocation. Every translation enhanced the saintly martyred bishop’s aura and propelled its translators to greater spiritual prominence. Yet San Gennaro did not belong to Naples. It was neither his diocesan see nor the place of his martyrdom. Therefore Naples’ claim to Gennaro and Gennaro’s to Naples were necessarily delicate. Absence of appurtenance was hidden in reuniting body, blood, head relics, making Naples the rightful C. Jones, ‘Plague and its Metaphors in Early Modern France’, Representations, 53 (1996), 97–127, esp. 108; J. Nohl (ed.), The Black Death: A Chronicle of the Plague Compiled by Johannes Nohl from Contemporary Sources, trans. C. H. Clark (New York, 1924); A.  G.  Carmichael, Plague and the Poor in Renaissance Florence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); G. Calvi, Histories of a Plague Year (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).  43 Jones, ‘Plague and its Metaphors’, 98.  44 The cause of plague was usually attributed to those who had provoked God’s righteous wrath, especially Jews for the crucifixion of Christ, the poor for carrying the disease, and a miasma of poisonous air which upset the balance of bodily humours. Women were a perennial target, their crime being the disruption of the natural order; and prostitutes came in for particularly cruel abuse. See Jones, ‘Plague and its Metaphors’, 108–110; Calvi, Histories of a Plague Year, 333–334. For the association of plague with lower social class, see R. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 361–364.  45 Jones, ‘Plague and its Metaphors’, 108–110; L. Barkan, Nature’s Work of Art: The Human Body as Image of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975).  42

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place. And Gennaro’s occupation of Naples was shown to be God’s will, in the occurrence of the miracle itself on ‘his’ entry to the city. The miracle therefore belonged as much to Naples as to the saint whose name it bore. The city did more than celebrate the miracle. It achieved it. The Carafas’ translation of San Gennaro’s relics thus worked as a restitution, rather than as an innovation, which in turn served to disguise the violent theft and with it Carafan self-promotion. Thus a spiritual triumph for Naples over Benevento in the cities’ rivalry for San Gennaro was also a triumph of archiepiscopal over monastic power. The Carafa were quick to realize their triumph, ‘a sort of privatization of the cult of San Gennaro under their guardianship’.46 Cardinal Oliviero Carafa in Rome commanded that a sumptuous chapel be built for the saint’s bones.47 And this was quickly done. The Succorpo, an ambitious but elegant chapel under the main altar of the Duomo to house the precious relics, was promptly begun in October 1497 (Plate 11). On its completion in 1506, San Gennaro’s body was transferred there from the Cathedral’s main altar. The Treasury Chapel later restaged San Gennaro’s housing in deliberate contradistinction to the Succorpo, and it cannot be understood except in relation to it. It is thus to the Succorpo that I now turn. The Succorpo chapel

Cardinal Oliviero’s chapel, known as the Succorpo (Plate 11 & Fig. 8), unequivocally announced the Carafa clan’s acquisition of Gennaro’s relics and staged its audacious spiritual, cultural, and political claim to be his rightful custodians and heirs. Elegant and ambitious, the Succorpo was built directly beneath the main altar of Naples Cathedral between 1497 and 1506 by Tommaso Malvito.48 In his Descrittione dei luoghi sacri della città di Napoli (Naples, 1560) Pietro de Stefano describes it as ‘in the manner of a small church … a marvellous work, The translation aroused controversy. See Vitale, Ritualità monarchica, 180. Unfortunately the new office, composed to commemorate the January feast, which was published in 1497, and which would undoubtedly illuminate these politics, is not currently available for consultation in ASDN. See Vitale, Ritualità monarchica, 161, and G. Vitale, ‘Il culto di S. Gennaro a Napoli in età aragonese: una rilettura delle fonti’, Campania sacra, 20 (1989), 67–95, esp. 82–87.  47 Tutini, Memorie (1703), 56.  48 The sculptural adornment and perhaps the building works were entrusted to Tommaso Malvito and his workshop, where his son, Giovanni Tommaso, also worked, as Fra Bernardino’s panegyric attests. See Strazzullo, ‘La Cappella Carafa’, 59–71. Camillo Tutini claims the chapel cost 10,000 scudi (Tutini, Memorie (1710), 86). Tommaso Malvito came from Lombardy and managed to establish a successful practice in Naples. See Y. Ascher, ‘Tommaso Malvito and Neapolitan Tomb Design of the Early Cinquecento’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 63 (2000), 115–117.  46

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and of great expense, built entirely of fine marbles [marmi gentili]’.49 Its name, ‘Succorpo’, fuses saintly and architectural bodies, referring to the main body or altar of the Cathedral under which it lies, as well as to the body of the saint hallowed below the main body of the Cathedral.50 However, the body to which the chapel overwhelmingly refers is that of Cardinal Oliviero Carafa (Plate 11). A delicate subterranean chapel, it worked in effect as a classic confessio for the relics of patronus San Gennaro and a funerary chapel for Oliviero Carafa, but above all as a grandiose orchestration of Oliviero Carafa as patronus in continuity with holy patrons already in heaven.51 The Succorpo is reached from the Cathedral by two flights of stairs, between which a fine marble portal leads to a sacristy. This arrangement of a high altar in a raised chancel with flights of steps leading down to the crypt imitates the arrangement of chancel and confessio in old St Peter’s, a cultural reference of superlative ambition, not to say hubris, given Oliviero Carafa’s designation of the Succorpo as his own burial place.52 His adoption of the P. de Stefano, Descrittione dei luoghi sacri della città di Napoli. Con li fondatori di essi, reliquie, sepolture, et epitaphii scelti che in quelle si ritrovano (Naples: Raymondo Amato, 1560), 7v. Although ‘marmi gentili’ is usually translated as ‘soft marbles’, the term also carries associations of social refinement, which are significant here. Based on his work for Oliviero Carafa designing and supervising the cloister (1504) at Santa Maria della Pace, Bramante’s involvement has long been mooted (particularly espoused by Roberto Pane), including as an early consultant, in producing such an innovative chapel, but the attribution to Tommaso Malvito rests. A. Bruschi, Bramante architetto (Bari: Laterza, 1969), 826; R. Pane, Il Rinascimento nell’Italia meridionale, 2 vols (Milan: Edizioni di Comunità, 1975–77), vol. II, 107; R. Pane, ‘Bramante e il Succorpo del Duomo di Napoli’, Napoli nobilissima, 23 (1984), 221; A. Dreszen, ‘Oliviero Carafa committente “all’antica” nel Soccorpo del Duomo di Napoli’, Römische historische Mitteilungen, 46 (2004), 191–192.  50 Fra Bernardino refers to the chapel as the ‘subcorpo’ in his early account of the chapel, written probably over a long period between 1503 and 1505. See Tutini, Memorie (1710), 80–92; Strazzullo, ‘La Cappella Carafa’, 62–63; Norman, ‘The Succorpo’, 328, 339.  51 See Dreszen, ‘Oliviero Carafa’, 165–200; Daniela del Pesco, ‘Oliviero Carafa e il Succorpo di San Gennaro nel Duomo di Napoli’, in Francesco Paolo di Teodoro (ed.), Donato Bramante: ricerche, proposte, riletture (Urbino: Accademia Raffaello, 2001), 176–182, and Norman, ‘The Succorpo’. See also Strazzullo, ‘Il Cardinale Oliviero Carafa’, 157; Strazzullo, ‘La Cappella Carafa’, 59–71; L. De Rosa and F. Abbate, ‘Le sculture del “Succorpo” di San Gennaro e i rapporti Napoli-Roma tra Quattro e Cinquecento’, Bollettino d’arte, 11 (1981), 89–108; R. Pane, Architettura del Rinascimento in Napoli (Naples: Editrice Politecnica, 1937), 208–210.  52 Oliviero Carafa intended his chapel at Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome to be his first burial place. In his last will of 12 March 1509 he requested burial in the Minerva and then later transfer to the Succorpo: ‘Corpus autem relinquo et mando tradi ecclesiastice sepulture et presens deponi intra cappellam meam beate Marie et beati Thome Aquinatis super Minervam [illegible] ac deinde trasfererendum Neapolim ac sepelliendum in catedrali ecclesia in alia cappella mea ubi corpus et sanguis beati Ianuarii requiescit tumulo mihi moderate et sine pompa facto.’ (‘Moreover [my] body I leave to receive a church burial and be laid within my chapel of the blessed Mary and St  49

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early Christian architectural form of a confessio evoked powerful associations with the devotional practices of Christian antiquity, a new example of Napoli sotterranea, a strikingly early example of placing relics in a confessio, a practice later energetically espoused by Charles Borromeo and justified as ‘the ancient custom’.53 Refined and restrained, its walls decorated in relief all’antica, the chapel boasts nave, aisles, lateral chapels, a choir at one end, and a sacristy, amounting to a distinctive autonomous church (Fig. 8). The effect is of exquisite whiteness, walls and vault in white marble, strangely luminous beneath the ground (Plate 34). Only the beautiful opus sectile floor is soaked in colour (Plate 11).54 Despite alterations to the original layout in the configuration of sculpture and main altar, including the bronze sarcophagus (1511), the chapel’s original refined treatment and disciplined palette remain. Its ten columns ‘of the Ionic order in cipolazzo marble’, were reputed, writes Parrino, ‘to be remains [reliquie] of the temple of Apollo’.55 Indeed, the basilica of Santa Restituta (Plates 19 & 37) and the Duomo were believed to occupy the site of Apollo’s temple. Thus the powerful infusion of the past in Neapolitan soil informed the sense of precious remains and relics offering proleptic shelter to each other. Meanwhile, Carafa ensconces himself fabulously at the heart of this erudite elegance (Plate 11). The Succorpo’s columnar articulation unmistakably references Antique basilicas and follows the three-aisled crypts that are found under many Thomas Aquinas in [Santa Maria] sopra Minerva and then be transferred to Naples and buried in the cathedral in my other chapel where the body and blood of St Januarius resides, in a tomb made for me with restraint and without splendour’) For his will, see Strazzullo, ‘Il Cardinale Oliviero Carafa’, 148–152 and Norman, ‘Cardinal of Naples’, 85. His burial in Rome would have been in the small side chamber adjacent to the Minerva chapel, which he acquired in 1486 and adorned with the Carafa arms, directly to the left of the Minervan transept chapel (G. L. Geiger, ‘Filippino Lippi’s Carafa Annunciation’: Theology, Artistic Conventions, and Patronage’, Art Bulletin, 63:1 (1981), 71 and n. 54). Access to that side chamber would originally have been direct from the Carafan chapel, but this was obviated by the building of the tomb for Pope Paul IV, which also destroyed Filippino Lippi’s fresco of the Virtues Overcoming the Vices on that wall. Vasari refers briefly to this tomb chamber in his lives of Filippino Lippi and Raffaellino del Garbo (G. Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori,scultori ed architettori, ed. G. Milanesi, 9 vols (Florence: G. C. Sansoni; reprinted Florence: Casa editrice Le Lettere, 1998), vol. III, 469–70, vol. IV, 235). For the chancel and confessio at St Peter’s, see J. B. Ward Perkins, ‘The Shrine of St. Peter and its Twelve Spiral Columns’, Journal of Roman Studies, 42 (1952), 21–24, figs 1 and 2, and I. Lavin, Bernini and the Crossing of St Peter’s (New York: New York University Press, 1968), 14 and n. 62. The reference to St Peter’s was first noted by Diana Norman (Norman, ‘The Succorpo’, 340).  53 F. Voelker, ‘Charles Borromeo’s Instructiones fabricae et supellectilis ecclesiasticae, 1577: A Translation with Commentary and Analysis’, www.memofonte.it/home/files/pdf/ scritti_borromeo.pdf (1977) (accessed 1 February 2012).  54 For the Succorpo floor, see Dreszen, ‘Oliviero Carafa’, 183.  55 Parrino, Napoli Città Nobilissima, vol. I (1700), 389.

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Romanesque cathedral choirs, especially in southern Italy, somewhat in the manner of late Antique hypogea, or ancient underground tombs.56 Many of the barrel-vaulted house tombs along the Via Appia or in the Isola Sacra necropolis at Ostia have comparable lavishly decorated interiors, including motifs which reappear at the Succorpo, such as pilasters decorated with vine and acanthus scrolls, candelabra, winged putti, and shell niches (Plate 11 & Fig. 8).57 However, while the Roman interiors are generally of stucco, Carafa’s chapel strikes an aristocratic note in its finely carved white marble. The altar of relics mimics the location of sarcophagi, centrally placed in some Roman hypogea. Thus the impetus in the design of the Succorpo was markedly archaeologizing. It referenced tombs of Roman martyred saints in a manner appropriate to San Gennaro. The Succorpo thus relocates San Gennaro temporally in a Roman past in a register that is refined, aristocratic, and Carafan. The chapel ceiling is divided into fifteen panels, each of which bears a relief of a saint, such that the viewer in looking at them is also looking up towards the altar in the main Cathedral. They represent the Madonna and Child, Saints Peter, Paul, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome, and Gregory the Great, Januarius (Plate 34), Asprenus, Agnellus, Agrippinus, Severus, Euphebius, and Athanasius. These figures constitute a holy Christian genealogy from the Madonna through Christ, his followers, the Evangelists, and the four principal Doctors of the Church, to the seven early bishops and patron saints of Naples. And the latter were, of course, direct predecessors of Oliviero and Alessandro Carafa, as primates of Naples. Thus the iconography makes a bid for Oliviero Carafa’s sanctification.58 The ceiling establishes the Carafa family in a linear relation to San Gennaro and to Naples’ other episcopal patron saints.59 The side walls of the Succorpo are impressed with twelve delicately sculpted shell-headed niches (Plate 11), which, according to Carlo de Lellis, were intended to house relics of saints and protectors with marble statues, but which in his day held wooden statues (statue di legno) of all the protectors of the city.60 Thus the Blunt, Neapolitan Baroque & Rococo Architecture, 24. These generally were to contain urns for female burials, or busts of females, as the shells allude to Venus. My thanks to Sarah Cormack for these observations.  58 Parrino, Napoli Città Nobilissima, vol. I (1700), 389.  59 The side walls are impressed with twelve delicately sculpted shell-headed niches; the seventeenth-century writer Carlo de Lellis claims that these were to house the relics of other saints, including the protector saints, which were to be given marble statues but in his day held wooden statues (statue di legno) of all the protectors of the city. Lellis, Parte Seconda ò vero supplimento. Aldimari states that there were thirteen altars destined for the chapel, of which the main one was dedicated to San Gennaro and the remaining twelve to the apostles. Aldimari, Historia genealogica, vol III, 16.  60 C. de Lellis, Aggiunta alla ‘Napoli sacra’ dell’Engenio Caracciolo: Napoli, Biblioteca Nazionale Vittorio Emanuele III, mss. X.B.20 ‒ X.B.24), ed. Elisabetta Scirocco, Michela  56  57

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chapel attests as much to the Cardinal’s faith and position as to the efficacy of Gennaro’s relics.61 The body to which the Succorpo overwhelmingly refers is not San Gennaro’s, however, but that of Oliviero Carafa. The extraordinary over-lifesize sculpture of Cardinal Oliviero Carafa kneeling in prayer dominates the interior of the chapel (Plate 11). Its present position is the result of a restoration campaign in 1964, but in its probable original position in front of the bishop’s throne in the chapel choir, it would have been equally commanding (Fig. 8).62 Tarallo and Stefano De Mieri (Naples: Università degli Studi Federico II, 2013), 49–50. These statue di legno sound like reliquary busts. Indeed, Celano claims that in the twelve niches Cardinal Oliviero wanted to place the relics of the protector saints ‘which was not done, because of the death of the cardinal’. Celano, Notizie del bello, vol. II, 106. Pompeo Sarnelli’s Guida de Forastieri of 1697 states that ‘on the other altars there are the statues of the patron saints of Naples, but of stucco, which should be equally of marble, like the whole chapel’ (‘E sù gli altri Altari vi sono statue de’ Santi padroni di Napoli, mà di stucco, le quali dovevano essere parimente di marmo, com’è tutta la Cappella’ (P. Sarnelli, Guida de Forastieri, Curiosi di vedere, e d’intendere le cose più notabili della Regal Città di Napoli, e del suo amenissimo Distretto (Naples: Giuseppe Roselli, 1697), 69). Tutini follows Celano in claiming that the Cardinal wanted the heads of the other bishop-saints and protectors of Naples set up in the Succorpo’s wall niches, and that this plan was disrupted by his death. Tutini, Memorie (1710), 147.  61 The inscriptions on marble panels above the bronze entry gates also acknowledge the combination of reliquary and funerary chapel, with that on the gospel side referring to Oliviero Carafa (‘Oliviero Carafa, Bishop of Ostia of the Holy Roman Church, Cardinal of Naples. He has dedicated this tomb to the holy martyr and bishop, patron of Naples, Januarius. He built the chapel in marble, a work of miraculous skill, he decorated it and assigned priests to it who sacrifice daily to God. He established a perpetual endowment and wished the rights of patronage for the chapel to remain with the members of his family. He sought first the honour of God and the praise of the saints. Give support to their souls and pour forth prayers to God the creator. In the year 1506’); while on the other it reads, ‘You, who desire the rewards of heavenly life, hasten and bring here pure prayers, since this door opens the way to heaven [haec Ianua Coeli]. Here God offers mercy to the vows and tears of those who pray to him. He, who through the martyrdom and prayers of St Januarius, with his consent and powerful will, purges Naples from every crime committed. Hasten, since the royal door of the heavenly kingdom gives strength.’ Translations by Norman, ‘The Succorpo’, 350, with minor alterations.  62 On the Spanish characteristics of the statue of Oliviero Carafa, see Norman, ‘The Succorpo’, 345–346. For attributions of the sculpture to Guido Mazzoni, see del Pesco, ‘Oliviero Carafa e il Succorpo’, 176–182. The Byzantine imperial tradition of placing miracle-working icons in mausolea with portrait likenesses nearby of the entombed was reworked to incorporate the Church’s highest officials into the apostolic tradition of icon use. Thus Julius II’s portrait was placed annually in front of the Lukasbild in Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome; Pasquale Cati’s portrait of Cardinal Altemps with his benefactor Pius V was located immediately above the image tabernacle in the Cappella Altemps in Santa Maria in Trastevere; and in Cappella Paolina in Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome, the figure of Pope Paul V on his tomb faces the icon and directs his prayers towards it. See Belting, Likeness and Presence, 519; Kempers, ‘The Pope’s Two Bodies’, 135–150; M. Holmes, ‘Ex-Votos: Materiality, Meaning and Cult in the

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This is best understood in light of Oliviero Carafa’s dramatic self-assertion in the right transept chapel dedicated to the Annunciation and St Thomas Aquinas in Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome, his most important act of patronage before the Succorpo. Filippino Lippi’s altarpiece The Annunciation with Saint Thomas Aquinas Presenting Cardinal Carafa to the Virgin (1488– 93?) adopts an unprecedented scale and position for the Cardinal patron (Plate 35).63 Cardinal Carafa (whose features, while apparently depicted without vanity, are therefore all the more readily recognized) is figured at the same scale and in the same sacred precinct as the Virgin herself, and immediately in front of St Thomas Aquinas, to whom he was distantly related through his mother’s family. The Virgin Annunciate is as close to Carafa as to the Angel Gabriel, thereby emphasizing Mary’s role in the Incarnation and in mediation for human attainment of Divine Grace, while according notable significance to Carafa.64 The Virgin receives Gabriel’s salutation, but turns away from the Archangel to face the Cardinal; and although her raised hand might be considered a response to Gabriel, it more urgently conveys a blessing upon the Cardinal.65 Significantly Carafa holds a privileged relationship not only with the Virgin, but with St Thomas Aquinas, too (Plate 35). Gail Geiger observes, ‘In the altarpiece St Thomas almost seems to be sponsoring someone [Carafa] who was more than a mere mortal petitioner.’66 Thus the altarpiece stages a rather extraordinary ‘holy family’, propelling Carafa to extraordinary spiritual prominence through blood, position, and piety.67 Reformation World’, in M. Cole and R. Zorach (eds), The Idol in the Age of Art: Objects, Devotions and the Early Modern World (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 168–179.  63 In October 1486 Cardinal Oliviero Carafa bought property to expand his chapel at the Minerva. Work began in 1487 and finished in 1493 or soon afterwards. See Dreszen, ‘Oliviero Carafa’, 168 n. 21 and Geiger, ‘Filippino Lippi’s Carafa Annunciation’, 63 n. 2. The terminus date for the chapel is disputed, though it was probably complete when Pope Alexander VI celebrated the feast of the Annunciation and visited it in 1493. For Carafa’s chapel at the Minerva, see D. S. Chambers, Patrons and Artists in the Italian Renaissance (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan and Co., 1970), 24–25 and Geiger, ‘Filippino Lippi’s Carafa Annunciation’, 62–75. In Rome Oliviero Carafa’s art patronage included paintings and a gilded ceiling for San Lorenzo fuori le Mura; vaulting in the south aisle of Santa Maria in Aracoeli; and repair funds for Sant’Eusebio (Norman, ‘Cardinal of Naples’, 82).  64 See Geiger, ‘Filippino Lippi’s Carafa Annunciation’, 64.  65 Gail Geiger convincingly proposes that the unusual intimacy between patron and protagonists of the Annunciation was probably prompted by Carafa himself. Geiger, ‘Filippino Lippi’s Carafa Annunciation’, 69.  66 Geiger, ‘Filippino Lippi’s Carafa Annunciation’, 71.  67 Oliviero Carafa also ensured that his chapel was the focal point of prestigious ­celebrations in the liturgical calendar of the Dominican Order and of the Papacy. For his promotion of the feast of St Thomas Aquinas in the context of his chapel, see M. O’Malley, ‘Some Renaisssance Panegyrics of Aquinas’, Renaissance Quarterly, 27:2 (1974), 174–192; Norman, ‘Cardinal of Naples’, 84–85.

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The Succorpo sculpture picks up the figure of the kneeling cardinal from Lippi’s altarpiece to stage his relation to the divine in equally dramatic and privileged terms (Plate 11). Here he is alone, revering the relics, in direct line with previous archbishop-saints – a position of unique privilege and purpose. The Succorpo was thus a reliquary not so much for San Gennaro’s relics as for those of Cardinal Carafa himself. It departs dramatically from the wall tomb commissioned by Oliviero for his father, Francesco Carafa, which, in turn, drew closely on that of Diomede Carafa in the Cappellone del Crocifisso in San Domenico, Naples (Fig. 56).68 But it shares with that tomb an all’antica vocabulary, while claiming close identification between saint, miracle, and the Carafa. Oliviero Carafa thereby conceived the Succorpo as his own mortuary chapel, a gracious resting place for his remains in a charismatic relation with those of San Gennaro.69 The white marble figure is the only piece of sculpture in the round in the chapel and all the more striking because it shows the cardinal, not dead, as was usual in funerary chapel sculpture, but alive (Plate 11).70 Moreover, although he faces the relic casket, it is he, rather than the relics, which holds the chapel in his thrall. The sculpture is currently placed in the centre of the The epitaph on the tomb of Francesco Carafa (c.1490) in the Cappellone del Crocifisso in San Domenico, Naples, indicates that it was commissioned by his son, Oliviero Carafa. For that chapel, see F. Abbate, La scultura napoletana, del Cinquecento (Rome: Donzelli, 1992), 42–45; B. de Divitiis, Architettura e committenza nella Napoli del Quattrocento (Venice: Marsilio, 2007),137–155. It was in this very chapel that the thirteenth-century image of Christ crucified addressed St Thomas Aquinas himself. Diomede Carafa’s ambitious tomb (1470–77) in that same chapel combines a triumphal arch with elements from Roman and Tuscan funerary sculpture, drawing together Christian devotion with the ancient classical rigour. It is positioned to the right of the main altar of the crucifix. Although Francesco died thirty years before his younger brother, his tomb was the later of the two and follows the model established by Diomede. See de Divitiis, Architettura e committenza, 150, 155. Oliviero Carafa commissioned it in honour of his father in c.1490, almost certainly from Tommaso Malvito (H. Leppien, Die Neapolitanische Skulptur des späteren Quattrocento (Tübingen: Universität Tübingen, 1962), 295). This tomb clinches the Carafan–miraculous image– St Thomas relation, securing the miraculous image associated with St Thomas between two Carafan tombs. But it does so in decisively modern terms, thereby indicating the degree to which the privileged relationship was not so much commemorative as a new manner in the present and decisively forward-looking. Carafa’s favourable experience of working with Tommaso Malvito was extended at the Succorpo.  69 For Oliviero Carafa’s will and burial in Rome, see n. 52 above.  70 For example, the elaborate early fifteenth-century monument to Cardinal Enrico Minutolo in Naples Cathedral shows angels sweeping back curtains to reveal the Cardinal lying in his liturgical garb, dead and at peace. See Strazzullo, Saggi storici sul Duomo di Napoli, figs.74–77. The wall tomb for Francesco Carafa (c.1490) in the Cappellone del Crocifisso in San Domenico Maggiore in Naples, commissioned by Oliviero Carafa for his father, probably also by Tommaso Malvito, bears a full-length effigy of the dead Cardinal. See Leppien, Die Neapolitanische Skulptur, 295.  68

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first bay of the chapel facing the relics, the consequence of several reconfigurations during the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. The original relationship between kneeling Cardinal Bishop, altar-sarcophagus containing the relics, and the empty bishop’s throne in the crypt’s apse (Fig. 8) is not clear.71 Most early descriptions of the chapel refer to San Gennaro’s relics in vague terms as being below the main altar.72 Pompeo Sarnelli’s Guida de Forestieri of 1697 refers to the statue of Oliviero Carafa as ‘standing behind the altar’, and adds, ‘on the other altars there are the statues of the patron saints of Naples, but of stucco, which should be equally of marble, like the whole chapel’. In 1700 Domenico Antonio Parrino described the statue as ‘behind the altar’.73 If the relics were, as seems likely, originally in the altar niche, the statue of Cardinal Carafa probably faced them, forcefully addressing the viewer entering from the west, as Fra Bernardino indicates in his poem.74 Either way, the figure of Oliviero (Plate 11), while adopting a stance of patron in an altarpiece, dominates the chapel and assumes a position, unique in Naples, of heir to a dynastic, heavenly, and archiepiscopal lineage. Carafa’s personal religious conviction and spiritual authority are the principal concern of the Succorpo in the absence of saintly mediation or miracles. His pious gaze, slightly raised towards the reliefs of saints on the ceiling, links him to earlier metropolitan archbishop-saints.75 That link to the saints above is strengthened materially through the use of white marble, at once ascetic, refined, and sumptuous. Restricted as colour is to the earthly realm of the floor (Plate 11 & Fig. 8), the whiteness of the worshipping Cardinal corresponds to the white marble ceiling reliefs of the heavenly saints and locates him in a related spiritual register (Plate 34). Their candid whiteness embodies the spiritual light and moral probity of both Cardinal Carafa and patronal The altar-sarcophagus containing San Gennaro’s relics is a simple reliquary casket on the back of which are a relief of San Gennaro, an inscription with his name, and the date 1511; it now stands in the centre of the fourth bay from the entrance. An open grating on the front permits a glimpse of the relics within. Diana Norman suggests that during the eighteenth century it was incorporated into an elaborate altar scheme and placed in the choir. Norman, ‘The Succorpo’, 342 and Fig. 8.  72 Norman, ‘The Succorpo’, 342.  73 Parrino, Napoli Città Nobilissima, vol. I (1700), 389. The statue was moved from this position in 1964.  74 Strazzullo, Saggi storici sul Duomo di Napoli, 86–87; Strazzullo, ‘La Cappella Carafa’, 63. Aldimari also states that the statue of Oliviero Carafa was in front of the main altar and sepulchre of San Gennaro. Aldimari, Historia genealogica, 16.  75 For the alignment of Oliviero Carafa’s statue with the relief of St Severo, who first brought San Gennaro’s head and blood relics to Naples Cathedral, see Dreszen, ‘Oliviero Carafa’, 200. While securely aligning him with his distinguished ecclesiastical antecedents, the chapel also produced a figure of Oliviero that initiated an important new tradition of heroic episcopal imagery for the Carafa family; see Romeo de Maio, Pittura e controriforma a Napoli (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1983), 151–152.  71

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saints and draws them together.76 Thus the figure of the Cardinal Bishop is mobilized on a number of registers. Intensely identified through prayer with the relics of San Gennaro, the object of his spiritual engagement, and materially with the patron saints and other holy figures above, he also works as intercessor on behalf of worshippers in the chapel. He is mediator between earth-bound worshippers and heavenly saint, positioned in close devotional and material relationship to Naples’ protector saints. Thus it is his presence that justifies and consumes the chapel. It leaves little space for other worshippers. At best they can kneel in all too earth-bound imitation of the spotless ethereal bishop. Thus the unusual figure of the kneeling Cardinal Archbishop emerges (modestly) as key mediator between worshippers and saint, and as privileged linear descendant to Gennaro and the saintly archbishops figured in the vault. A saint in waiting (and in perfect humility). Triumphantly, ­therefore, the Succorpo is a superb culmination of Oliviero Carafa’s claims. Here he is starkly identified with San Gennaro in a manner not dissimilar to his intimacy with the Virgin and St Thomas staged by Filippo Lippi (Plate 35). The success of the Carafan Succorpo chapel can be measured in part by the degree to which the new Treasury Chapel was a calculated repudiation of it, as the Deputazione, in growing conjunction with Viceroy and Archbishop, sought to widen its address to the entire city. The Treasury Chapel as antithesis to the Succorpo

In so far as the Succorpo chapel was part of a Carafan strategy to consolidate their spiritual authority in Naples closely to San Gennaro, it was first directly challenged by Maria Enríquez de Toledo y Guzmán, wife of Fernando Álvarez de Toledo y Pimental, third Duke of Alba and Viceroy of Naples (1556–58) during the so-called ‘Carafan War’ between Pope Paul IV Carafa and Philip  II. Up to this point the relics of protector saints appear to have been stored in a chamber in the tower at the north entrance to the Cathedral, equipped with three altars (Fig. 6).77 In 1557 the Vicereine arranged for a complete rebuilding in far grander elevated chapel.78 An old spiral staircase was See Strazzullo, ‘Il Cardinale Oliviero Carafa’, 145, 156 n. 38 bis. Archbishop Francesco Carafa’s visitation of April 1542 refers to the chamber ‘nuncupata lo Tesoro sitam et positam in turri existente in angulo majoris ecclesiae a manu dextra exeundo per portam majorem’. Here among other relics were the head and the ampoules with the blood of San Gennaro: ‘In primis caput beati Ianuari et martiris copertum argento cum mitra argentea supra caput cum certis gemmis inibi affixi. Item prope locum huiusmodi existit alius locus in quo est quoddam tabernaculum argenteum in quo sunt due ampulle vitree plene sanguinis prefati beati Ianuarii.’ Quoted by F. Strazzullo, Il Duomo di Napoli nel Cinquecento (Naples: Napoli Tipografica,1965), 70.  78 To both sides of the main doorway to the Cathedral were two towers where the relics  76  77

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removed, and walls and ceiling were decorated with rich stuccowork and colourful paintings (Fig. 39).79 Thus the new space for San Gennaro at the opposite end of the Cathedral from the Succorpo allowed the viceregency to rip his cult, gaining in popularity, from the hands of the anti-Spanish Carafa.80 Maria de Toledo’s interventions, richly adorned in fresco and stucco, framed San Gennaro as a sort of prophet, and forged closer connections between San Gennaro and the viceregency, while snubbing the Carafa and detaching the cult from that axis. The new Treasury Chapel ostensibly challenges the overt viceregal claims to San Gennaro’s cult represented by the ‘old Treasury Chapel’ and Carafan claims staged in the Succorpo. The materials, form, and register of the Treasury Chapel were deliberately antithetical to those in play in both these chapels, especially the Succorpo. This allows us to understand the Treasury Chapel not only as a calculated rebuttal to Carafan identification with San Gennaro, but as a repositioning of the saint and his cult in wider institutional and political terms with resoundingly civic claims. Everything about the earlier Succorpo, especially its proudly declared Carafan hallmark, was subverted in the new Treasury Chapel.81 The Treasury Chapel emphatically advertises itself from without and within the Cathedral – in sharp contradistinction to the apparent self-effacement of the subterranean Succorpo. With its distinctive tall dome, the Treasury Chapel erupts into the Naples skyline, surging above the roofline of the Cathedral itself (Fig. 33). From within the Cathedral, its spectacular gateway, framed by giant figures of Saints Peter and Paul (Plate 1) (unlike the Succorpo’s entrance), insistently marks the chapel’s internal elevation, while also effectively announcing the chapel’s dependency on and allegiance to Rome, rather than the Neapolitan Curia.82 The Succorpo’s rectangular plan, its austere, monochrome interior had long been kept. In 1557 the Viceroy, Ferdinand of Toledo, Duke of Alba, and his wife, Maria di Toledo, prompted by their intense devotion to San Gennaro, decorated the left-hand tower with paintings of the miracle and passion of San Gennaro at their own expense, whereafter the relics, including the patronal saints’ heads and the ampoules of San Gennaro’s blood, were kept until their translation to the new Treasury Chapel. Caracciolo, Napoli Sacra, 7.  79 ‘la fe rifabricar tutta alla moderna’. Falcone, L’Intera Istoria di San Gennaro, 59. The vicereine also presented the chapel with rich silk and gold cloth and magnificent silver lamps.  80 Thanks to Carlos Hernando Sánchez for pointing this out to me.  81 Despite the difficulties of inserting the chapel in a restricted space, the interior of the chapel is spacious and magnificent. Quite what sort of interior Grimaldi envisaged is not clear: the rich silver and gilt of reliquaries and paliotti, the frescoes, and the paintings followed after his time. But the four interlocking triumphal arches that constitute the lower storey of the interior elevation are surely due to him.  82 Grimaldi proposed three arches supported by monumental columns as a façade for the chapel in the nave. But while its central arch corresponded to the earlier ogival arch,

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of simple materials elegantly treated, the forest of columns supporting the flat ceiling are all banished. Instead, the new chapel boasts a centralized plan (Plate 37 & Fig. 11) with soaring vault and cupola supported on massive piers (Plate 21) – all internal columns banished – producing a verticalized interior, which bristles with colour and rich materials from floor to vault, from walls gleaming with coloured marble revetment to precious metal and stone altars (Plate 4). In place of the pale almost translucent finely cut marble of the understated Succorpo (Plate 34), the Treasury Chapel unashamedly amasses dense coloured marbles, richly veined like flesh, bulging precious stones, and gleaming metals in an unashamed celebration of material preciousness (Fig. 3). It is as if one chapel is the obverse of the other. While the subterranean Succorpo suggests an airy ethereality, the Treasury rejoices in the pleasure of matter. Many of the Treasury Chapel’s most extraordinary characteristics derive from this. Its size, grandeur, and location near the entrance to the Cathedral distance it from the Succorpo and bind it instead to the city. The range and richness of its adornment and its singular reliance on metalwork also differentiate it starkly from the Succorpo to produce a chapel that effects holy protection in peculiar terms. Meanwhile the Succorpo remains pre-eminently ecclesiastical and – despite its ambition – restrained, with its solitary sculptural figure of the praying Cardinal, refined palette, and ostensibly abstemious use of materials. Both chapels refer as much to Santa Restituta as to the Duomo itself. The Succorpo gestures to ancient basilicas in its ground plan, while the Treasury Chapel pays homage to Santa Restituta through its site (Plate 37). The Treasury Chapel lies on the same axis as the Archbishop’s formal entrance to the Cathedral via Santa Restituta.83 Thus the Treasury opens up a devotional axis at cross-purposes to the longitudinal west–east axis towards the main altar of the Duomo. By contrast with the spectral Succorpo, the Treasury Chapel seethes with colour and texture in its full-length dark bronze sculptures, silver busts, colourful altarpieces, and frescoes. The Succorpo’s archaeologizing arabesques, garlands, and putti are unapologetically replaced with rich coloured marble revetment, comparable to the modern finery of the Cappella Sistina (1585–89) the two lateral arches resulted off-centre from their precursors; and this generated sufficient anxiety for the Deputies to ask the architect Dionisio di Bartolomeo in May 1623 for a wooden model of the facade (ATSG, 66/2, fol. 118r); M. Borrelli, L’architetto Nencioni Dionisio di Bartolomeo (1559–1638) (Naples: Tip. Agar, 1967), 120. St Peter was thought to have visited Naples and to have baptized may of her inhabitants, including Saints Asprenus and Candida, who were later adopted as city patronal saints. St Paul landed at Pozzuoli on his way from Malta to Rome (Acts of the Apostles 28:13–14). For the inscriptions of the chapel facade, see F. Strazzullo, Neapolitanae ecclesiae cathedralis inscriptionum thesaurus (Naples: Arte Tipografica, 2000), 38–40.  83 For Santa Restituta, see Celano, Notizie del bello, vol. II, 170–225.

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(Fig. 55) or Cappella Paolina (begun 1605), both papal funerary and reliquary chapels in Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome. But the Treasury Chapel avoids depictions of its own patrons, the deputies. Thus it eschews the role of mortuary chapel or reductive service of its patrons to something of potentially far wider address. Materially referencing Rome and the Papacy, its address is towards Naples the city writ large. In contradistinction to Cardinal Oliviero in the Succorpo, the Deputation did not represent itself directly. Ostensibly the Treasury Chapel celebrates only its heavenly patrons, not its earthly ones. Only the coats-of-arms of the Deputazione on the altar balustrades modestly indicate its patronage (Fig. 3). Thus there are no images of obsequious aristocrats venerating the saint. The Carafa clan, the archiepiscopacy, and the ecclesiastical hierarchy as a whole are effectively eliminated from the picture. Archbishops and bishops figure, not as patrons of the chapel, but as protectors of the city – in an entirely different register. The exception is Gian Domenico Vinaccia’s solid silver altar paliotto (1691–95), where Cardinal Alessandro Carafa on horseback brings San Gennaro’s relics to Naples (Fig. 10). Even here, however, the cardinal is part of the relics’ narrative: a crucial player in their translation to Naples – depicted here as a discrete historical event, but miniaturized (albeit in silver and on the main altar), and as such quite unlike the timeless, intimate prayer of the life-size Oliviero Carafa in the Succorpo (Plate 11).84 If the iconography of the Treasury Chapel eschews the deputies, this is not due to circumscribed ambitions. On the contrary. The absence of specific patronal  iconography frees the chapel to engage San Gennaro directly with the city at large – framed in terms that were unmistakably ambitious and aristocratic, but now freed from a restrictive identification with specific family or institution.85

Discussions about the design of the paliotto began in earnest in the 1680s, when fourteen designs were considered. For documents relating to the main altar paliotto see Strazzullo, La Real Cappella, 24–25, 89–90, 92–93, 131, 135–138. In 1700 the altar frontal, recently completed, was in the sacristy to the Treasury Chapel: ‘an altar frontal recently made, with the istoria of the translation of the body of the saint by Cardinal Olivieri Carafa from Monte Vergine’ (Parrino, Napoli Città Nobilissima, vol. I (1700), 400); and the claim remained unchanged in the later editions in 1714 and 1725 under the new title Nuova Guida de’ Forastieri (1714), 309; Nuova Guida de’ Forasteri per osservare, e godere le curiosità più vaghe, e più rare della Fedelissima Gran NAPOLI Città antica e Nobilissima, in cui si dà anco distinto ragguaglio delle varie opinioni dell’origine di essa, Dogi, Regnanti, Vescovi, e Arcivescovi che la governarono, con tutto ciò che di più bello, e di più buono nella medesima si ritrova. Ricavato dagl’Autori impressi, e manoscritti, che di essa trattano. Adornata con Figure delle sue più nobili Vedute, intagliate in rampe. OPERA DI DOM. ANTONIO PARRINO Accresciuta con nuove, e moderne notizie da Nicolò suo Figlio, dedicata all’Illustrissimo Signore il Signor D. Diego Ripa de’ Baroni di Piachetella (Naples: Parrino, 1725), 345.  85 Indeed the chapel is marked as distinctly aristocratic and urban.  84

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In the Treasury Chapel it is thus San Gennaro himself who triumphs, as if freed from terrestrial patronage. A magnificent mosaic in Santa Restituta’s Santa Maria del Principio chapel depicts the Madonna and Child flanked by San Gennaro and Santa Restituta (Plate 19). The Treasury Chapel puts San Gennaro uniquivocally centre stage. While the Succorpo recognized his presence in the relics in the ancient clay urn (Fig. 8), and in the relief bust in the ceiling’s central panel (Plate 34), in the Treasury Chapel his presence is sharply amplified. He is repeatedly staged, figured and represented in all manner of media and forms. His bust bursts out from both sides of the towering entrance gate (Plate 1). His relics are present in the extraordinary reliquary bust and in the mysterious ampoules of blood (Plate 6 & Fig. 1) and figure in the cupola frescoes (Plates 21 & 36), the altarpieces (Plates 4, 13, 41), and the huge bronze gate (Fig. 28). The central bronze statue in the ­presbytery is San Gennaro (Plate 3 & Fig. 22). He is the principal subject of Jusepe de Ribera’s altarpiece San Gennaro Escapes Unharmed from the Furnace (Plate 13), of Domenichino’s Beheading of San Gennaro (Plate 41) and Miracle on the Tomb of San Gennaro. He is principal subject of the frescoes in the lunettes and pendentives including Domenichino’s Christ Entrusts Naples to San Gennaro’s Protection (Plate 36) and San Gennaro Intervenes and Saves the City of Naples from the Eruption of Vesuvius (Plates 4 & 20), and in Lanfranco’s The Saints in Paradise in the cupola (Plate 21). Moreover, as Chapters 1 and 2 showed, he is borne materially in the chapel’s materiality. Domenichino’s Christ Entrusts Naples to San Gennaro’s Protection (Plate 36) diagrams the new relationship between San Gennaro, city, and architecture, wrought by the Treasury Chapel. That fresco, in the (liturgical) south-east pendentive of the chapel, depicts the protector in episcopal garb bearing his shield inscribed ‘Patronus’. Singular patron in a chapel teeming with patrons. His mitre and staff erupt over the cornice, merging fresco and architecture. Archangels Gabriel, Raphael, and Michael follow on his heels. At his feet are the virtues of Hope, Humility, and Munificence, who displays the plan of the Treasury Chapel itself. Munificence personifies the municipality of Naples which spent so lavishly on making this a ‘magnificent chapel’. Behind her, in ghostly green hues, stands San Gennaro, right hand raised in blessing, embracing his miraculous blood relic. Thus San Gennaro ranks among the archangels. Arresting is the prominence given to the ground plan of the Treasury Chapel. San Gennaro, ‘Patronus’, is positioned directly above ‘Humilitas’, foundation of the spiritual edifice, to indicate that the spiritual virtue of humility and religious sacrifice underpin his patronage – and artfully distance the chapel (in plan) from its evident pomp and magnificence. The frescoes’ diagram can been seen as a symptomatology of social and ­spiritual  forms, enunciated in depoliticizing tones, rooted in

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allegorical abstractions – a new form of civic spiritual architecture, at once aristocratic, holy, and magnificent, that denies its socio-political moorings and imperatives – funnelled through claims, not about earthly, but about heavenly patronage. While the Succorpo eschewed a pictorial programme of the life and ­miracles of San Gennaro, the Treasury Chapel took up that challenge. While the earlier chapel is pre-eminently ecclesiastical, with its solitary figure of the praying cardinal, the Treasury Chapel throbs with multifarious protectors in sculptures, silver busts, altarpieces, and frescoes. An evocation of a solitary and reflective personal piety in the Succorpo is replaced in the Treasury by a busy, competitive public throng, a clamour of competing faces and bodies, a surge of energy jostling the viewer-worshipper this way and that. Thus attention shifts from the powerful cardinal praying to the saint to an overwhelming celebration of the saints themselves. Their presence is secured now by bringing them down to earth – more specifically, by lodging them both within and beyond the chapel. It is the chapel that makes their lodging apprehensible. Thus the ambition has shifted from explicit redemption of a pre-eminent figure in the Succorpo to implied redemption of the entire city of Naples, represented through its patron saints. In short, the Treasury Chapel aspires to transcend social and political divisions. Its heavenly patrons are centre-stage; San Gennaro is celebrated as miracle-maker and redeemer of Naples. Thus simultaneously evocation of Carafa patron-supplicant was dispensed with, and links between Carafa family and the cult of San Gennaro were radically diminished, while the new patrons, the deputies, emerged to orchestrate matters from the shadows without declaring their hand. Concomitantly, the Succorpo’s redemption through prayer (and patronage) of prominent clergy in relation to relics, obscurely contained in a non-figurative urn (Fig. 8), switched to the Treasury Chapel’s amplification of the saints (Plate 4). Prayer was replaced by presence. It was the presence of the saints that the new chapel desired. And their presence was secured by bringing them down to earth. Thus the ambition of the chapel shifted from an explicit redemption of a single pre-eminent figure to an implied redemption of the city of Naples as a whole. The saints severally and combined protected specific places, groups, interests, sufferings, and the city. And, as is shown in Chapter 6, their silver reliquaries brought into the Treasury institutional concerns from right across the city. In other words, the aspiration of the Treasury Chapel was to address and encompass ‘Naples’, divergent, divided, as a whole, ostensibly unifiable. To the elegant, discrete, and pointedly Carafan Succorpo, the new chapel was a flamboyant civic counterpoint. The Treasury Chapel orchestrates the espousal of San Gennaro as preeminent patron saint of Naples in opulent material terms, supposedly by the

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city as a whole, but in fact by the Deputies, its aristocratic a­ dministrators, in order to stage San Gennaro and his chapel as representative of the whole city, rather than merely of a small elite group.86 Since Gennaro had not been claimed as patron saint by any other city, Naples’ relationship with him could be both exclusive and demanding.87 More than that, competing clans and social groups within the city were able to make and remake San Gennaro in their own image. Thus San Gennaro, holy martyr for the new Christian order, is exalted as prophet of a new spiritual order in Naples. Thus the chapel emerged as focal point through which tensions between competing  urban institutions assumed apparent harmony. Napoli fedelissima, indeed. Tensions at the chapel’s heart

It is a commonplace of Italian history that competing political forces in the city treated the Cathedral as a location where artistic patronage could be deployed to assert strategic control. In a study concentrated on the Medici and Soderini families in Florence, Kate Lowe has demonstrated the selfconscious insertion of artworks by individual families into spaces associated with other family groups.88 John Paoletti has examined the patronage history of important public works commissioned in early sixteenth-century Florence to show that competing political forces in Florence treated at least two sites – the Cathedral and the Palazzo della Signoria (town hall) – as locations where artistic patronage was employed ‘to express political control over the state’, and he characterizes these sites as places where ‘patronage functioned as clear metaphor for power’.89 He views the town hall and the Duomo as ‘stage sets for civic propaganda’.90 Paoletti argues that ‘the most important religious site I am, of course, claiming that the Deputazione was concerned with appearing to do this, rather than with actually doing so.  87 In central Italy St Sebastian and in Venice St Roch were established by the end of the fifteenth century as principal protectors from the plague. On the cults of Sebastian and Roch, see Marshall, ‘Manipulating the Sacred’, 485–532; C. M. Boeckl, Images of Plague and Pestilence: Iconography and Iconology (Kirksville, Mo.: Truman State University Press, 2000).  88 K. J. P. Lowe, ‘Patronage and Territoriality in Early Sixteenth-Century Florence’, Renaissance Studies, 7:3 (1993), 258–272.  89 J. Paoletti, ‘Cathedral and Town Hall: Twin Contested Sites of the Florentine Republic’, in T. Verdon and A. Innocenti (eds), La Cattedrale e la Città: saggi sul Duomo di Firenze (Florence: Edizioni Firenze, 2001), 630.  90 He is attentive to the ways in which placement and context ‘superimpose meaning from without’, for example, the settings and histories of the sculpture programmes for the north buttress of the Duomo and the ringhiera of the Palazzo della Signoria altered the meanings of Michelangelo’s David, which was commissioned for the former and moved to the latter in 1504, where the Medici later drained it of its Republican content  86

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of the city was also a civic site’ and that, ‘as a civic site, the Duomo was also a contested space mirroring the shifts in rulership that we normally locate too exclusively at the other end of the Via Calzaiuoli at the Palazzo della Signoria’.91 He interprets this as maintaining ‘a fiction’ of political change and republican renewal when actual power remained in the hands of more or less the same ottimati who had always held the major offices within government. Naples Cathedral was a civic site and the Treasury Chapel presented its most intensified civic edge. Here, however, the terms ‘territory’, ‘control’, and ‘propaganda’, as applied to the Florentine case studies, generate an inappropriately static and passive a conception of place. Patronage here was less ‘metaphor’ for power than one of its strategic loci. The Treasury Chapel nestled at the heart of institutional political and religious tensions in Naples (Fig. 52). The Deputazione produced a markedly aristocraticized spiritual centre that welded viceregal and archiepiscopal to civic engagement under their own aegis. The deliberate distancing in terms of visual appearance of the Treasury Chapel from its principal predecessor, the Succorpo chapel, was part of this strategy to allow the Treasury Chapel to engage the devotion to San Gennaro with a far wider urban group in a specifically aristocratic form. Gennaro’s role in relation to the Eletti, the city of Naples, and the Seggi was crafted to produce not just a patron saint of Naples, but a civic devotional identity wrought materially and inflected by nobility. Through these principal axes were woven the often strained relations between the deputies of the Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro, the Archbishop of Naples, and the viceroys. Thus San Gennaro thrived at the intersection of a series of intersecting but competing familial and institutional claims to spiritual authority in Naples. And the Treasury Chapel demanded an unprecedented degree of investment from diverse religious institutions across the city. These two strategies deeply marked the chapel visually. It was sharply distinguished visually from its non-Seggi-sponsored predecessor, marking the important shift in its patronage and its porosity to and perforation by institutions across the entire city. Thus by pairing it with Bandinelli’s Hercules and Cacus. Paoletti, ‘Cathedral and Town Hall’, 631, 642–665.  91 Paoletti, ‘Cathedral and Town Hall’, 649. Paoletti’s examination of the Opera of the Duomo’s project for the twelve apostles for the interior of the Cathedral, reactivated in 1511, also shed valuable light on the complex interaction between the ecclesiastical heart of the city and Florence’s ruling powers, particularly the way in which the Medici attempted to assert control over this central cultic site. The Medici can be seen as undermining the apostles project, initiated by the Republic. For example, in 1516 Leo X symbolically transformed seven chapels in the Duomo into the seven Roman basilicas, affording Florentines the chance to secure the spiritual benefits of pilgrimage to the stational churches without going to Rome. The gift, of course, violated the programme of the apostles for the tribune altars and overlaid the Cathedral space with a specifically papal and Medici programme. Paoletti, ‘Cathedral and Town Hall’, 652–664.

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the Seggi, via their deputies, produced a dazzling chapel, which was rhizomatic in its capacities both to import institutional spiritual and material investment from without and to export spiritual authority, even as that exportation served to further enhance it. In short, the Deputation produced a chapel that operated precisely to establish itself as the heart of Neapolitan urban spirituality. Tensions between deputies, Archbishop, and Cathedral canons were aggravated by the fact that although the chapel was situated in the Cathedral and therefore able to draw on its authority, its administration was largely independent from it. The absence of archiepiscopal control over a substantial chapel inside the Cathedral was a running sore, but to make matters worse, it was increasingly clear that no expense was to be spared in its adornment, and its running was bedecked by privileges and exemptions. Moreover, the miraculous liquefaction of blood drew an important local cult and real international and political significance, including close involvement of the Viceroy and Vicereine. Thus the cuckoo in the nest threatened to upstage Archbishop, canons, and Cathedral. In Rome and in Naples Cardinal Archbishop Francesco Boncompagni and the Cathedral canons criticized the overweening claims (pretendenze) of the Deputies. There were four intermeshed issues which provoked particular resentment: whether the Deputazione could outlast the actual erection of the chapel; the extent to which direction of the chapel necessarily meant control of the precious relics of San Gennaro; the precise nature of the relationship between Deputation and Treasurer and Archbishop, hebdomadaries, and Cathedral canons in the administration and running of the chapel and its relics; and the jurisdiction of the chapel, which was bitterly contested by the archiepiscopal court, where the most controversial issues included whether alms and income for a chapel administered by laymen were ecclesiastical or lay property. The Deputation and the Archbishop bickered over many aspects of the chapel – its income, legacies, and privileges, and the ownership and control of the relics – but at their heart was the question of who would control the sacred precisely where it was defined most prominently in urban terms – and, conversely, where the urban was defined most sharply in sacred terms. These tensions, which circulated around the control of the holy relics of Naples’ protectors, tended to focus on jurisdictional issues, but materially infuse every aspect of the chapel. Paul V’s Bull of 1605 conceded permission for a ‘magnificent chapel’ to be founded by the city in honour of San Gennaro in the Cathedral, with an income of 894 ducats a year and served by six canons and four clergymen. The canons were selected by the six Seggi of the city, which, in turn, chose a Treasurer from their number. They were to enjoy rights to a stall in the Cathedral choir in a position after the subdiaconal canons and were permitted to participate in services and solemn processions only when the Archbishop

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of Naples was present.92 The silver bust and reliquary of the blood of San Gennaro, the relics of all the other compatronal saints, all sacred vessels, and precious objects and furnishings, along with the indulgences, were to be transferred from the old Treasury to the new Treasury. Two keys to the safe where San Gennaro’s relics were stored were held by the Archbishop of Naples and by the Treasurer (Fig. 22), indicating their dual and divided claims to ownership of those precious relics, even though the Archbishop’s jurisdiction officially stopped at the threshold to the chapel.93 Alms, offerings, and bequests were to go neither to the Archbishop nor to the six canons, but solely towards costs of worship in and upkeep of the chapel. Income from alms and pious legacies were to be reported by the Treasurer annually to the archbishop.94 Thus, although they were administratively responsible for the chapel, the deputies were bound in various ways to the archbishop. From the start, therefore, the recognition of the powers of both Deputation and Archbishop together with ambiguities about the precise relationship of their jurisdictional claims apparently accommodated their divergent ambitions (along with the divergent Seggi), while also fomenting dispute between them.95 From the start, the deputies’ aspirations outstripped even the generous terms of the foundation. As early as 1606, they requested no fewer than twelve more canons.96 And they refused to be disbanded after building was complete, instead extending their reach across all matters pertaining to the chapel. Giuseppe Galasso has usefully argued that the issue of precedence and etiquette should be resituated away from the history of customs and mentalities to that of relationships and conflicts amongst classes and ranks.97 The story of the Treasury Chapel is in part the story of the way in which the holy was part of those conflicts and relationships, and was neither extraneous to them nor purely instrumental. Tensions between deputies and Archbishop focused on the cult of San Gennaro, including ownership of the relics, precedence in celebrations, the appropriate place (chapel, Cathedral) for the ostension of his relics, and the number of canons allowed to accompany the Archbishop A prebend of 150 ducats a year was allocated to the Treasurer, to the other canons 120 ducats a year, to the four clergy a monthly allowance of three ducats each.  93 The limit of the jurisdiction of the Cathedral canons is marked in the pavement of the aisle outside the chapel.  94 Strazzullo, La Real Cappella, 5.  95 In fact, tensions over who held the precious blood of San Gennaro pre-existed the building of the new Treasury Chapel, since by 1509 it seems that it had been removed from the Treasury tower to the Succorpo, but by 1542 it had been returned to the Treasury tower. San Gennaro’s body was allowed to remain in the Carafan Succorpo chapel, but the blood was clearly far more highly valued by the Cathedral and civic authorities. See Norman, ‘The Succorpo’, 352.  96 See Strazzullo, La Real Cappella, 3.  97 Galasso, Napoli capitale, 158 n. 29.  92

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into the chapel, and extended to the correct dress of the chapel’s chaplains while bearing the processional brancard. On 2 May 1641 Monsignore Altiero, the papal nuncio, brokered an agreement between the City of Naples and Cardinal Filomarino on many of these matters (Fig. 69).98 Significantly the document ends with a note affirming the procession of relics to the Seggi and declaring that the city agreed to the capitulation only in so far as it ‘does not impede the veneration and cult that is owed to the glorious holy Protector and saint Gennaro, with the customary procession to be made around the Seggi for the most faithful city’. It adds that as the reasons for the customary mode of celebration of both octaves for the saint were followed in the old Treasury, ‘with so much more reason should it be observed in the chapel of the new Treasury, which has been built to the tune of 300,000 ducats by that most faithful city under its ius patronato’.99 Sheer financial outlay was reason enough to justify the Deputation’s case. Investment became its own reward. Material magnificence

The Treasury Chapel was part of a Seggi-led strategy to co-opt San Gennaro’s relics in the name of the city. Archbishops of Naples, particularly Francesco Boncompagni (1626–41) and Ascanio Filomarino (1641–66), resisted this.100 The chapel and its prodigious miracle usurped the Cathedral, and allowed the Seggi – albeit indirectly – to acquire a spiritual arm, an authority reaching ‘Stabil[i]mento delle differenze circa la Processione e Reliquie, che si conservano nella Cappella del nuovo Thesoro dentro la chiesa Arcivescovile, fatto trà l’Em.o S.re Card.le Ascanio Filam.o Arc.o, et la fed.ma Città di Napoli coll’intervento di Mon.re Ill.mo Altieri Vescovo di Camerino Nunzio Apostolico.’ ATSG, A/30, Doc. 9-2-1b, fols 1r–3v.  99 ‘Con dichiaratione però, et non altrimente che in tanto questa fidelissima Città ha acconsentito alla sud.a Capitolat.ne, in quanto non s’impedischi la veneratione e culto, che si deve al glorioso Santo Prot.e San Gennaro colla solita process.ne da farsi in giro per li Seggi per la fid.ma Città, et per obedire alla santa mente di N.S.re quale con somma benignità s’è degnato ordine che non si tralasci uso cossi pio in servitio del Santo, et con cond.ne espressa, che gli restano intatte, et illese le raggioni, che tiene, conf.e era l’antico solito di celebrarsi, tutte due le ottave del santo nella sua 3v prop.a cappella del tesoro vecchio, che con molte più rag.ni s’haverà da osservare nella Cappella del tesoro novo, che con spesa di ducati 300 M da essa fid.ma citta s’e costrutta come suo ius patronato, dove per esseq.ne delle Bolle de Somme Pontefici Paolo Quinto, et Urbano Ottavo sono trasferite le reliquie di loro santi protettori alle q.li ragione non intende la Città far pregiudizio nessuno per la pnte Capitolat.ne; mà quelle riserbarsi come se le riserva espressamente per rappresentarli alli piedi della Santità Sua, con speranza sicura d’ottenerne giusta, e favorevole sped.ne.’ ATSG, A/30 Doc. 9-2-1b, fol. 3v. 100 A letter dated 3 December 1631 from Father Giovan Battista Sersale, a Theatine at Santa Maria della Vittoria in Naples, to an unknown addressee, possibly the papal Nuncio, makes clear that Francesco Boncompagni was adamant on the question of ecclesiastical jurisdiction.  98

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across the city of Naples beyond – an authority which directly undermined the Archbishop and his hierarchy. Although the Deputation was established to oversee the building of the new chapel, soon the chapel became the raison d’être for the perpetuation and aggrandisement of the deputation. This did not go uncontested. In 1635 Cardinal Boncompagni appealed to the papal court to thwart the municipal administration. He argued that no new claims should be extrapolated from the Brief of Paul V of 1605, since that Brief did not foresee that the Deputation should remain in place after the chapel was built and endowed. Rather, it indicated that the government and administration of the chapel should remain the Treasurer’s responsibility. Boncompagni contended that there was no need whatsoever to prolong the existence of the Deputation, since the Treasurer would be able to provide for repairs from alms and pious legacies, just as occurred at the Succorpo chapel, ‘which has twelve chaplains and a sacristan, and no deputation or congregation of laymen, but which is well governed, without such multiplication of personnel and exemptions, and so it has been governed for 300 years’. The reference to the Succorpo is telling. It was the preferred model for the Archbishop: modest by comparison with the luxury of the Treasury Chapel; discrete, underground, and visually and liturgically innocuous to the Cathedral; and, above all, modestly administered, clearly under ecclesiastical jurisdiction, inscribed firmly in relation to Cardinal Carafa, and thus of the archiepiscopacy of Naples. The Treasury Chapel, by contrast, was administered by noble laymen, and unabashedly vaunted its jurisdiction in the face of ecclesiastical hierarchy through the Seggi, even in the name of the city itself. The Treasury Chapel was a presumptuous upstart. The subordination of ecclesiastical to lay authority lay at the heart of Boncompagni’s objections. The deputation of laymen should be disbanded. Its continued existence was against the terms of the original Bull. Worse, the deputies wanted to keep canons and clergy ‘almost like servants’ (‘quasi per servitori’), an indication that it was not simply laicization that galled him, but the particularly aristocratic manner and overweening presence of the Deputation. And he saw its jurisdiction as the thin end of the wedge. Once the lay Deputation was accepted, the Regio Collaterale would appoint a royal lay ‘protector’ (Protettore) to settle disputes, a person who would take issue with the Archbishop, and who would assert prerogatives and authority through the chapel, ‘just as in many other churches in Naples where with regard to such matters, the archbishop is hardly recognized’. Moreover, he argued, whenever a congregation of laymen was set up to conduct the actual building process, when legacies were made to the church in question, royal officials invariably claimed them as bona laicorum, which therefore could be alienated without papal agreement. Indeed, protested Boncompagni, this was precisely what was going on already at the Annunziata, the Incurabili,

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and ‘other similar places’. An insidious cluster of overweening Neapolitan institutions was bypassing archiepiscopal authority in this way. Worse, such practices were defended by lay judges ‘and all day long in Naples all that is done is to argue over these matters’.101 The snub to the Archbishop could hardly have been sharper: ‘it is no good to go tolerating such congregations of laymen in churches and especially not in the Cathedral, right in the face of the Archbishop himself’. Boncompagni also resented the deputies’ acquisition of financial rights through the chapel. In particular, he referred to a bequest to the chapel made about fifteen years earlier by Ottavio Bambacario of a farm of about 60 moia, worth 18,000 ducats, that brought just over 800 ducats a year in rent. To meet the chapel’s building costs the deputies had assumed the role of beneficiaries of this bequest, without permission from the Apostolic See or Archbishop, ‘such that one cannot enquire what has become of it or whether it has been spent on the chapel, even though the chapel was to have been built de bonis communitatis, as the Brief states, and not from pious legacies’. In short, ‘in observing a vow and paying a debt, they are arrogating prerogatives prejudicial to ecclesiastical jurisdiction’.102 All to little avail. In March 1635 Urban VIII recognized in full the Deputazione and the college of twelve chaplains from which each Seggio was in turn to choose the Treasurer. The Bull claimed that the right of patronage derived not from apostolic privilege, but from ‘a recent, authentic, real, actual, plenary, unaltered, and unlimited [omnimodus] foundation and from a lay endowment, originating from exclusively lay and patrimonial property, [and as such] it certainly should not be considered under the derogation of Ius Patronatus as by apostolic privilege, but should always be considered as originating as a lay foundation and endowment’.103 Exemption from the Ordinary’s oversight was limited to the administration of the building, whose accounts in this regard had to be submitted each year to the papal nuncio in Naples. Thus the Deputation came to insist that Bulls of Paul V and Urban VIII recognized that their right of patronage did not stem from apostolic privilege, but from a lay endowment. On 8 May 1635 Father Giovan Battista Sersale informed the ‘e tutto il giorno in Napoli non si fa altro che contrastar di queste cose’. Bellucci, Memorie storiche, 13. 102 ‘[N]é si può dimandare che cosa se ne facci, e se bene forse l’havranno impiegati in fabrica di detta Cappella, nondimeno erano tenuti far detta fabrica de bonis communitatis, come dice detto breve, e non delli legati pij.’ Document of 1635 instigated by Boncompagni, quoted by Strazzullo, La Real Cappella, 6. 103 ‘non ex privilegio Apostolico sed ex primaeva vera reali actuali plena integra et omnimoda fundatione et dotatione laicali ex bonis mere laicalibus et patrimonialibus tantum competere nec non sub derogatione juris Patronatus ex privilegio Apostolico ullatenus comprehendi sed tamquam ex fundatione et dotatione laicali competens semper censeri debere’. Strazzullo, La Real Cappella, 6–7. 101

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deputies that Pope Urban VIII had formally exempted the chapel from the Ordinary’s oversight in ‘the widest sense, even in relation to that delegated by the sacred Council of Trent’ (‘amplissima forma, etiam tamquam delegatum a sacro Concilio Tridentino’).104 The Pope also granted permission for the city to keep a key to the Treasury, to be held by each Piazza in turn for a month. Friction between the deputies on the one hand and the Archbishop and canons of the Cathedral on the other flared up again under Archbishop Filomarino. In the summer of 1643 the Deputation sent the cardinal a copy of Urban VIII’s Bull, supplicating him to see to its execution.105 Twelve years of struggle ensued before that occurred. On one side were the decrees of the Council of Trent, the Cardinal, and the canons of the Cathedral; on the other, the deputies, who insisted on special rights deriving from the chapel’s foundation. Things came to a head during the feast of the translation of the relics (5 May) in 1646. That year responsibility for the celebrations including the temporary The reference to Trent’s decrees was necessitated because, as a defence of diocesan bishops’ Ordinary authority, some potentially contentious areas were specified in certain decrees as being where a bishop could act as delegate of the Holy See (‘tamquam Apostolicae Sedis delegatus’). Thus a persistent diocesan could act as apostolic delegate to counter any resistance to episcopal audit of financial accounts by a holy institution, for instance. Before 1635 the Deputazione’s accounts had to be submitted to the bishop; and the amplification of the exemption clause was needed to overcome that claim unambiguously. I am grateful to Anthony Wright for his clarification of this. 105 ‘They supplicate your Eminence that you will permit the execution of [the Bull] in accordance with its order, content, and tenor; and they offer to arrange for the assignment from the same city and its elect the sum of 1,614 ducats a year, on the first income that the same city possesses of 100,000 ducats a year, assigned to them [i.e. the city and the Eletti] by the food office [annona] on the old duties on flour, barley, oats, maize, and spelt, with their capital property and rate of domain to the said Treasury Chapel, for the establishment and maintenance of all the chaplains, treasurers and clergy, with all the prelacies, exemptions, privileges, promises, that are deemed necessary on the advice of the wise [a sort of senate council] for the validity of the said assignment and caution of the said chaplains, treasurers, and clerks to be nominated as the occasion demands by that city to officiate in the said new Treasury Chapel, according to the form laid out in the said apostolic Bull sent on this matter; that everything else [beyond what the Bull says] is right is received by the grace of your Eminence, as God [wishes], etc …’ (‘supplicano Vostra Eminenza resti servita procedere al esequtione d’essa iuxta ipsius seriem, continentiam et tenorem, offerendo di fare assignare validamente dal istessa Città et suoi Eletti l’annui dociati 1614, sopra le prime entrate che possiede la medesima Città di ducati 100.000 annui, assignateli per l’annona sopra le gabelle vecchie della farina, orgio, avena, grano d’India et speltro con la loro proprietà capitale e rata del dominio a detta Cappella del Tesoro per la dote e mantinemento di tutti i Cappellani, Tesorieri e clerici, con tutte le prelationi, esentioni, privilegij, promessioni che sarando necessarie a conzeglio de savij per la validità di detto assignamento e cautela di detti Cappellani, Tesoriero et clerici che sarando nominati pro tempore da essa Città ad officiare in detta nova Cappella del Tesoro, servata la forma di quanto sta disposto in detta Bolla Apostolica sopra de ciò spedita, che il tutto oltre è giusto si riceverà per gratia de V. Eminenza, ut Deus, etc.’; quoted by Strazzullo, La Real Cappella, 7). 104

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altar fell to the Seggio of Capuana to prepare the special temporary ­festival altar in their piazza (Plate 10 & Fig. 31). On the morning of the feast, when the deputies of the Seggio of Capuana asked for the bust of the saint, Canon Vincenzo Carmignano, the Treasurer, replied that he was not able to release it without express permission from the Archbishop.106 The deputies responded that the archbishop’s ‘lofty claims’ (aeree pretensioni) would not prevent the customary solemn celebration. But the archbishop was inflexible. The Viceroy intervened trying to avoid serious rioting, by beseeching Filomarino to display the relics in the Cathedral. Filomarino eventually permitted the procession to take place, but a little later than usual, and without passing the Seggio of Capuano. The nobles, incensed by this second affront, pursued the Cardinal on his new itinerary. Catching up with him at the crossing between the Seggio of Montana and via Nilo, the Prince of Atena declared: ‘These cavalieri are here in the name of their Piazza to make clear to you their objection.’ The Archbishop haughtily  replied, ‘Camminiamo’ (‘let us walk on’). Thereupon the Duke of Maddaloni and Tommaso Caracciolo intervened, forcing him to stop, and a notary began to lecture him. But the Archbishop ignored them: ‘The relics are mine; I will see you in Rome. Camminiamo!’ Taking umbrage, the cavalieri replied that the relics belonged ‘to the city’. A sword was unsheathed and the canons took flight. The brancard bearers, still with the relics on their shoulders, in spite of the protection of the cavalieri, sought refuge inside the courtyard of the nearby palace of Signor Don Aniello Pignatelli, Prince of Montecorvino. And they locked the doors. The relics were now unquestionably in the control of the city. In turn, the cardinal withdrew to the palace of the Signori di Bologna close by. During the night the cavalieri bore the relics to the church of Sant’Angelo a Nilo, where the octave was celebrated. And there – ­indicating divine approval of the city’s possession of the relics – the miracle occurred again.107 It seems that the relics remained at Sant’Angelo a Nido until 13 December, when Cardinal Trivulzio, who happened to be in Naples, managed to unblock the deadlock. On the evening of 13 December, with Filomarino’s permission, the Treasury Chapel was blessed by Monsignor Maranta, and towards midnight the sacred relics were returned to the Cathedral, accompanied by the Viceroy and 400 cavalieri. After a sung Te Deum, the cardinal withdrew to his palace, without a word to the nobles. The next day, the Eletti of the city and the deputies of the Treasury, along with other cavalieri, paid their respects to the Archbishop, and asked his forgiveness for the insult done to him (the Prince of Atena speaking on behalf of all). According to the ‘Diario della Cattedrale di Napoli’, the Archbishop then uttered a few words, which At that date the relics were still kept in the old Treasury. Caracciolo, Napoli Sacra, 7. BNN, MS X, B-65, quoted by F. Strazzullo, La vertenza tra Cosimo Fanzago e la Deputazione del Tesoro di S. Gennaro (Naples: Grimaldi, 1954), 170–171 n. 2.

106 107

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brought them to tears. Thus while apparently saving face, the archbishop had to recognize the power of the city in these affairs.108 The Deputies invited the papal nuncio, Monsignor Altieri, to visit the chapel to give an account of the work done to date and to report to Rome so that the Pope could order Cardinal Filomarino to execute Urban VIII’s Bull. That order finally arrived in June 1646. On hearing that the cardinal had capitulated, the metropolitan chapter immediately protested to the Archbishop. Affronted at being bypassed, the chapter insisted that no innovation should be allowed in the procession of San Gennaro or the exposition of his blood on the Cathedral’s main altar. It even insisted that the precious relics and other objects conserved in the old Treasury should not be consigned to the new Treasury. ‘They [the relics] were acquired by the said Cathedral, which is dedicated to both Blessed Mary and St Januarius’, they scolded, and added, ‘especially because in the Papal Brief no mention was made of them’.109 They finished by threatening recourse to the courts of the Roman Curia and Naples. These issues were by and large eventually resolved, generaly in favour of the Deputation. A formal agreement between the parties signed on 2 May 1647 states that Gennaro’s relics are to be taken first to the main altar in the Cathedral, before departing in procession, while the other relics were to leave the Treasury Chapel directly.110 Thus more than a nod was given to the Cathedral. Since the relics had become vital to the role and authority of the Deputation, Archbishop, and Cathedral chapter, the Treasury Chapel embodied those tensions as much as it paid tribute to a heavenly protector. The deputies justified this magnificent new chapel in terms of spiritual decorum: it housed its august relics decorously. In turn, its very cost and material investment came to justify its importance, renewed investment, and legitimized its claim to the relics. In short, a discourse of spiritual-material decorum. Thus on 4 June 1646 in summarizing its case to the archiepiscopal Curia of Naples as papal delegate in the case between the Eletti, Consultori, and Deputation on the one hand, and the Reverend Fiscal Procurator of the Neapolitan Curia on the other, the Deputation declared that the old Treasury Chapel was ‘cramped and inconvenient and consequently ill suited to the dignity of so many outstanding relics, [and] to the great number of faithful who concourse to visit and venerate the said Chapel and relics’. 111 It was ‘Diario della Cattedrale di Napoli’, II, 5 May 1646’; see Strazzullo, ‘La vertenza, 171 n. 2. ‘cum sint acquisita dictae Ecclesiae Metropolitanae, quae similiter est dedicata B. Mariae et divo Januario, eo maxime quia in dictis Litteris Apostolicis nulla fuit facta mentio de eis’. Quoted in Strazzullo, La vertenza, 174–175. 110 ATSG, A/30, Doc. 9-2-1b, n.f. 111 ‘In primis essi articulati deputati pongono et vogliono provare come la verità fu et è che la cappella del Tesoro dove al presente se conservano le reliquie del Glorioso S.to Gennaro et del altri santi protettori et patroni di questa Città, per essere 108 109

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in terms of spiritual-material decorum that they justified the new chapel as ‘more outstanding in building and magnificence’, and reported that between 1607 and 1646 about 237,000 ducats had been spent ‘as can be seen from the records of the aforesaid Deputation […] and as is also evident from seeing the place’.112 In other words, its expense was evident and that was the point. In 1646 the Deputation declared that the new chapel was complete in terms of structure and essential adornment and that the translation of all the relics from the old Treasury to the new Treasury Chapel ‘recently built and constructed’ meant that the relics were now ‘kept with greater magnificence and venerated with greater ease by the devout and the faithful, who gather for that purpose there’.113 In short, the new chapel was justified almost exclusively in terms of reverence for the relics, housing them respectfully, and offering improved accommodation for the increased numbers of worshippers. Thus the Treasury Chapel can be seen as a point of intensification of worship, display, and material value – and of their disavowal. Financial investment in the housing of the relics was, therefore, justified as a spiritual investment. The great cost and material richness of the chapel were argued to be appropriate for such spiritual treasures. Housing the spiritual treasure was justified in terms of the material investment already made. The logic of magnificence knows no rest. It was not long before the splendour of the silver reliquaries arrayed on the main altar in the Treasury Chapel at each festivity sharpened desires for the most splendid possible frontal for that altar and for gorgeous coverings for it. In August 1676 the deputies agreed that a carpet to cover the main altar ‘proportionate to the richness of the silver [objects] with which it is adorned for festivities’ was needed and that for the coming September festival a carpet should be specially made of crimson velvet trimmed with gold.114 Silver busts, therefore, begat more silver. They served to justify a splendid altar cloth with gold trimmings, the manufacture angusta et incommoda et per consequenza poco atta per la dignità di tante reliquie insigni  per  la frequenza de fedeli che concorrono a visitare et venerare la predetta Cappella et Reliquie, si resolsero l’anni passati per questa causa, et anco acciò restasse à posteri in perpetuum  memoria delli singulari beneficij et gratie ricevute da sua divina Maestà per intercessione del Glorioso S.to Gennaro da questa fedelissima Città di Napoli, di fundare un’altra Cappella per edificio et magnificenza più insigne sotto titulo del medesimo S.to Gennaro a sue proprie spese con provederla de paramenti, ornamenti ed altri seppellettili, necessarij, quod fuit et est verum.’ Document quoted by Strazzullo, La Real Cappella, 8–9. 112 Document quoted by Strazzullo, La Real Cappella, 8–9. 113 Document quoted by Strazzullo, La Real Cappella, 8–9. 114 ‘[U]no tappetto proportionato alla ricchezza degl’argenti con li quali si adorna d. altare nelle festività.’ ATSG, AB/12, Conclusioni 1673–1685, document dated 26 August 1676, fol. 34v.

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of magnificent new solid silver ‘splendori’ (Fig. 3), and the creation of the flamboyant solid silver altar frontal (Fig. 10).115 Investment required more investment; silver flowed from mobile points in the chapel to inhabit its surfaces, to collect in pools, to harden into solid forms, and finally to reconstitute the entire main altar itself. An exponential thirst for material display drove the chapel forwards. In May 1683 the deputies decided to make a silver altar frontal for the main altar ‘for the dignity and embellishment of our chapel (‘per decoro et abbellimento della nostra Cappella)’.116

There were four old splendori, or large candelabra, in the presbytery, and these were replaced in 1744 by two modern splendori designed by Bartolommeo Granucci and worked by Filippo Del Giudice. One silver splendour is supported by Faith, Hope, and Charity; the other by Fortitude, Strength, and Humility. The Deputazione promised 1,800 ducats if the work was completed before the end of April 1745. But then funds ran short. The deputies turned to the charity of the people and of the patriciate consisting of a committee of noblewomen. It included Duchessa di Castropignano, Principessa di Stigliano, Contessa di Convesano, Principessa della Roccella, Duchessa di Termoli, and Duchessa Riario, ‘who had to undertake through the afore-mentioned seeking of alms through their efforts to secure that sum sufficient to permit the completion of the two aforementioned splendori’. Strazzullo, La Real Cappella, 30. 116 The deputies Prince of Marsiconuovo and Duke of Regina were put in charge of this. Fourteen artists participated in the heated competition. Their designs were sent to an unknown recipient in Rome for adjudication. He chose two of these, after which Dionsio Lazzari in Naples was asked to select one to direct. In May 1683 deputies turned directly but separately to three silversmiths, Gian Domenico Vinaccia, Domenico Marinelli (Marinello), and Domenico d’Angelo. The work was entrusted to Domenico Marinelli, but on 2 August 1684 he was ordered to suspend his work for lack of money. On 27 June 1685 the deputies returned the artists’ drawings to them. The matter continued to founder until 26 February 1692, when the silver altar frontal in silver was lodged with Lorenzo Vaccaro, most highly esteemed virtuoso (virtuoso di tutta stima), with the obligation of consigning it within eighteen months for 2,000 ducats. Gian Domenico Vinaccia offered to do the work for 1,700 ducats. Vaccaro at first refused to lower his price, but then offered to do the work for 1,600 ducats. The deputies then switched the job to him (‘considering all the work undertaken by Vinaccia already for the chapel’), even after Vaccaro had offered to do it for 1,500 ducats. On 4 March 1692 the work was awarded to Vinaccia for 1,500 ducats. It is not clear whether he used part or all of Marinelli’s design. On 13 February 1693 the painters Pietro del Pò, Andrea Malinconico, and Domenico Viola approved the design of the centrepiece with the translation of San Gennaro’s bones from Montevergine to Naples. Vinaccia took almost two years to complete the work and contested the sum to be paid, eventually asking for more than 2,000 ducats. On this, see Strazzullo, La Real Cappella, doc. 321. On 4 March 1692 Gian Domenico Vinaccia was charged with making the altar frontal according to the design and model that would be consigned to him by the deputies ‘and to do it by completing the story at the centre, that is currently only sketched in by the person chosen by the illlustrious deputation’: ‘e quello farlo con perfectionare l’historia di mezzo, che si ritrova solamente abozzata dalla persona ad’elettione dell’Illma Dep.ne’). ATSG, 59/9 1587, fols 420r–420v. 115

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In terms of silverwork, the altar frontal represents a virtuoso compendium of techniques (Fig. 10).117 Its cost and value sparked immediate comment. What is of interest here is the relationship between subject and material in the altar frontal. Alessandro Carafa’s victorious return to Naples of San Gennaro’s relic is depicted in solid silver. Working the whole in silver effaces boundaries between history and miraculous event, earth and heaven, and provokes marvellous reflections for entranced viewers, weaves worshippers and history together in its glinting surfaces. More than pious archaeology, it made present the immensity of God’s mercy and announced the moment of amnesty, as deliverance and pardon were brought into the present and into the city and made memorable in costly silver. But the brilliant frontal exposed the shabbiness of its surrounds. Pressure quickly grew for an altar of corresponding splendour.118 Soon the main altar was regarded as of unsuitably humble materials compared with the rest of the chapel and it was determined to build it in the most precious material possible: ‘as a sign of gratitude for so many and such great blessings recently received by the said saint, that the main altar of the said chapel, that presently is of wood, should be made of the most precious material feasible, it being befitting, that this, insofar as possible, should be as suitable as possible with all that is in the said Treasury’.119 Silver and porphyry met the bill.120 Silver altar frontals of this period, besides Vinaccia’s in the Treasury Chapel, include those of Santa Maria la Nova, Naples (by Domenico Marinelli and, after his death, Matteo Treglia to models by Lorenzo Vaccaro); San Nicola in Bari, executed by Marinelli and Avitabile with the probable involvement of Lorenzo Vaccaro; Brindisi Cathedral; and the altar of the Virgin of Constantinople in the Cathedral of Acquaviva delle Fonti (1708);. E. Catello, and C. Catello, Argenti napoletani dal XVI al XIX secolo (Naples: Edizioni d’arte Giannini, 1973), 7. 118 A new main altar had been discussed in 1702; Solimena’s design was selected; but ­execution was suspended because no money was available. 119 ATSG, DA/9 (60-1588), fol. 454r., 13 August 1707: ‘Copia: I Deputati hanno uniformamente deliberato, che in segno di gratitudine per tanti, e gran’ beneficij ultimamente ricevuti da detto Santo si facci l’Altar maggiore di d.a Cappella, che presentem.te, e di legno della materia la più preziosa, che mai potrà farsi, essendo conveniente, che questo per quanto è possibile sia preportionato à tutto il di più ch’in detto Tesoro; E perché non vi è speranza di potere haversi dinaro dall’Illmi Sig.ri Eletti, essendo quasi restata esausta la cassa dell’Annona. Hanno parimente conchiuso che si domandi alli devoti di detto Glorioso Santo, sia’ come si è pratticato altre volte, et in particolare quanno si fè il Tabernacolo dove si ripone li Gl.so Sangue di detto Santo; con destinarsi persona per tutti i quartieri della Città accioché col dovuto zelo, et amore verso del N.ro Protettore, e santo concidadino se’ pigliano l’incomodo di raccogliere cio chè la pietà di ciascuno devoto vorrà contribuire per detto effetto. D Ferdinando Sanfelice, etc etc.’ 120 In 1719 initiative in favour of main altar was reassumed. The deputies had gathered 3,064 ducats. On 8 August 1719 it was decided to discuss the matter again with Solimena and to ask him whether he would prefer to make the altar of silver or of porphyry. Solimena said that a main altar of gilt porphyry with cornices of gilt copper would cost 117

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No wonder then that the Treasury Chapel provoked unease among the great and the good at the Cathedral. Its lavishness, characterized from the start as ‘magnificent’, was always at issue, yet served to justify more magnificence and outlay. Insofar as the chapel was aristocratic, it was marked as such not literally through aristocratic bodies, but materially. The finely sculpted monochrome stone of the Succorpo was replaced in the Treasury by a blaze of polished coloured marbles, semi-precious stones, rich and rare precious metals, silver, gold, porphyry, and prized frescoes and altar paintings on copper. The chapel’s desirability enhanced the authority of the Deputation. Archbishop, and canons wanted to control it not simply in order to possess the precious relics it held, but because its orchestration of them was so effective. Its was a logic of sumptuosity. This is not to speak of a delusion through ‘propaganda’, but of bodies that respond to the pre-personal investments in the sensible intensities of brilliantly coloured marbles, light, mysterious shadow, the apprehension of the forthcoming miracle. The chapel both disrupts affect, allowing the staging of intensities, and delivers as divine the renewed world that emerges. Conclusion

The Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro (Plate 4) can usefully be seen as an architecture of the Seggi, undertaken at one remove, via the patronage of the deputies, elected by the Seggi, and through the election by the Seggi of patronal saints and their sumptuous housing in what can be seen as a civic treasury. To effect this the Treasury Chapel departed dramatically from the Succorpo chapel in order to radically re-present San Gennaro, to detach him from the Carafa clan, and to entwine his fortunes with those of the Seggio and thus with many – competing – religious institutions across the city that invested their specific saints among those housed in the Treasury. Through these principal axes were woven the often strained relations between deputies, Archbishop of Naples, and Viceroy. Thus San Gennaro thrived at the intersection of many competing but overlapping familial and institutional claims to spiritual authority in Naples. While the deputies worked hard to harness the chapel to their own ends, to produce coherence and order and subservient external institutional homage, its unruly inhabitants constantly stirred up dissent and radical heterogeneity. Thus the chapel must be seen c.15,000 ducats. Under Solimena’s direction Nicola de Turris executed the cornices of copper and the silver decoration. Gaetano Sacco worked the porphyry. Work was completed on 30 April 1722 and, including the silver frasche and puttini executed by de Turris, cost 19,778 ducats.

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as more than the sum of its patrons’ investment. Indeed, its most peculiar qualities were due to the multiplication and mobility of the protector saints’ reliquary busts. Despite the Council of Trent’s injunctions affirming episcopal authority, the Treasury Chapel’s governance was broadly independent of both Cathedral and Archbishop. Through the chapel, strategic control of the cult of San Gennaro was wrested away from the Carafa family and from the Cardinal Archbishop and canons of the Cathedral. The many urban processions of the relics of San Gennaro and the proliferation of reliquary busts of other protector saints gathered in the Treasury Chapel served to bind the chapel to the ­ onasteries, deputies, to the Seggi, and to a host of religious institutions – m convents, churches – across the city. These dynamics marked the chapel deeply. The distancing from its predecessor, to mark an important shift in patronage, and the unusual degree to which the chapel was perforated by institutional investments and connections, enacted by processing the reliquaries across the city, produced a chapel dazzling in its capacities to import institutional spiritual and material investment from without and to export spiritual authority across the city. Thus it established itself as a new heart in urban spirituality. Indeed, the chapel’s force grew as it was dispersed. The Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro was part of a cumulative and intensifying spiritual and material investment involving the Deputazione, the Seggi of Naples, and numerous outlying institutions that produced a new sense of the city. That investment was uncontainable within the chapel and constantly overflowed it. It extended across the city through the regular processions of Gennaro’s relics out into the Seggi. It reached into churches, chapels, monasteries, and convents which owned relics of protector saints through processions and feasts. Most spectacularly, after the eruption of Vesuvius in 1631, it spilled out of the chapel and assumed residence in the form of the Guglia of San Gennaro in the little square to the south of the Duomo, permanently assuming form in the cityscape (Fig. 40). This was followed, after Vesuvius’ eruption on 2 August 1707, by the monument to San Gennaro raised at Santa Caterina a Formiello (Fig. 41), marking his protection over the city and far beyond the bounds of the civic treasury. The Seggi were, via the deputies, its indirect patrons. They played a crucial role in the investment across the city in patronal saints, including their processions, and were intensely involved in the miraculous liquefaction of Gennaro’s blood in their own piazze, and in their sumptuous housing in the Treasury Chapel. Thus the chapel became a civic treasury. I have argued that to effect this, it was necessary for the Treasury Chapel to be visually markedly distinct from the Succorpo chapel in order to radically re-present San Gennaro, detach him from the Carafa clan, and entwine his fortunes instead with the Seggi and numerous homes of patronal relics. Those institutions in

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turn invested in adding their own saints to the rapidly proliferating patronal saints housed at the Treasury Chapel. While the Treasury Chapel can usefully be seen as architecture of the Seggi, it was always also more than that. It worked as an important machine in the production of forms of urban spirituality that were distinctive and new. It infiltrated the city and was porous to claims from a plethora of convents and churches. It was penetrated both inwards and outwards, transforming secular and political concerns into manifestations of the holy. By harnessing the ambitions of a diverse range of external religious institutions, and encouraging their investment, the deputies of the Seggi managed to forge a unifying and remarkably flexible new focus of urban spirituality – supposedly for the entire city of Naples. Thus the unequalled proliferation of Neapolitan protector saints is best seen as part of the operative work of the chapel itself. While the interests represented were in fact very partial and overwhelmingly aristocratic, the chapel, secular in patronage, located within the Cathedral, and engaged with the question of the protection of the city, appeared to be beyond factional interests. The Treasury Chapel is of vital significance for an understanding of the development of baroque Naples as a capital city that was more than the sum of its parts. Governed by a committee of aristocratic laymen deputed from the city’s Seggi, the chapel was uniquely extroverted and urban in its coordinates, organization, constitution, field of influence, and ambitions. Yet its location positioned it to draw on the status and power of the Cathedral and Cardinal Bishop, even as it struggled to remain independent from them. It infiltrated and orchestrated rituals in both Cathedral and city, playing one off against the other. Its hybridity fostered a new form of holiness in Naples – a civic holiness focused on protector saints and miraculous blood, which at once implicated religious institutions as ‘owners’ of relics of protector saints, invested in the chapel, and participants in its ritual and celebrations. Straddling divided jurisdictions and competing realms, the Treasury Chapel took advantage of them, even as it was shaped and limited by them. Its location implied loyalties to Archbishop and Cathedral, and its architecture nodded grandly to Rome, particularly to the glorious new papal chapels built by Sixtus V and Paul V in the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, but its ‘inhabitants’, the numerous and multiplying protector saints, wedded the chapel to a range of diverse institutions across Naples and above all to the city Seggi. Thus the chapel generated a new civic holiness in an expressly aristocratic timbre. The secular elite of the Seggi sought to extend their power in the city through new forms of civic holiness in specifically aristocratic form. While metaphorically and materially, the expensive and ambitious chapel staged and enhanced the prominence and power of the Deputation and, through them, the aristocrats of the Seggi, it also exceeded their control. Spiritual forces were at

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once centralized within the chapel in the form of protector saints’ relics, and decentralized in the miraculous liquefactions in the piazze of the Seggi. The chapel formed a sort of bellows, furrowing and creasing the lungs of the city with forces that zigzagged between fault lines and switched from religious to secular like shot silk. The deputies fashioned the Treasury Chapel to produce an urban spiritual centre which welded viceregal and archiepiscopal to civic engagement under their own aegis. Between the Succorpo and the Treasury Chapel the ambition shifted from the redemption of the Archbishop to that of an entire city. From the redemption of an individual through prayer – an individual represented in terms of ecclesiastical hierarchy, aristocratic might, and individual piety – the new chapel moved to the redemption of the city of Naples as a whole (or something encompassing it) apparently above all social divisions. This is not to say that the Treasury Chapel offered a democratic or egalitarian vision – far from it. Rather, a shift occurred in the claim: from soteriological emphasis on lineage and dynasty – institutional, familial, and saintly – to saint and city more broadly, from the city which is the sum of its occupants to the city with the vocation of capital. The relation between sanctity and social recognition became a localization of holy space where claims to urban unity became manifest. The customary narrative which explains the Treasury Chapel as simple outcome of a vow taken in the teeth of the plague is inadequate. The plague provided less the motive than the moment for the chapel – which is in part its morphological metaphor. The chapel rose from the ground to master Fortuna through virtù, to resist chaos and restore order, to produce new configurations of holy order and thus of the city. Thus the new chapel effectively secured San Gennaro at the heart of a new civic spiritual-institutional remapping of Naples. His relics and chapel were separated from the claims of individual magnates, and extended to the whole city – albeit under the control of the aristocratic Committee. And that remapping continued in the processions of his relics out into the Piazze (Seggi), through the Guglia of San Gennaro (Plate 38), and in the monument to San Gennaro at Santa Caterina a Formiello following the eruption of of 2 August 1707 (Fig. 41). The Deputation produced a chapel that established itself as the heart of Neapolitan urban spirituality, perforated and informed by institutional connections across Naples. The chapel, as an assemblage – social, architectural, and material – produced investments and a sense of community which were new. It thus acted virtually, in the sense of the virtual as unactualized potential within the real, for which art provides a possible world. Thus the world of the Treasury Chapel was not simply continuous with the situation of plague and panic in Naples that preceded it and helped bring it into being; nor is it best

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understood as the product of – or the representation of – the ambitions of the aristocratic deputation. Instead it was itself an event that brought new relations and new time into being. Yet even as the chapel’s deputies thrust further into the realms of embellishment and expense through rich and rare materials, just over the road a very different chapel was building. Barely a stone’s throw away, across the little square where the Guglia of San Gennaro stood, Francesco Antonio Picchiatti’s elegant and restrained chapel (1658–70) in the Pio Monte della Misericordia was rising (Figs 40 & 52). Also patronized by a group of aristocratic laymen, established in the same years as the Deputazione di San Gennaro, and equally ambitious to reform religious devotion, it offered simple lucidity, white stucco on walls and vault, plastic architecture, and a marvellous play of space and light to frame its remarkable altarpieces. Instead of marvellous metallurgy, expensive silver and gold, coloured marbles, and frescoes, the Misericordia offers clarity, restraint, and ­spatial excitement. Caravaggio’s Seven Works of Mercy (1606) was expressly designed for it.121 As the principal altarpiece, it is emphasized at ground level. But more remarkably, Picchiatti’s architecture worked to stage it dramatically from the upper floor of the Pio Monte. Opening off the meeting room of its a­ ristocratic patron philanthropists is a richly decorated gilded elevated balcony box exclusively for their use. Its gilded window frames Caravaggio’s masterpiece, literally focusing them on their social and spiritual duties, even while emphasizing their privileged gilded elevated point of view (Fig. 58). Meanwhile a window in that same room opens in the opposite direction – through a generous window and balcony – onto the little square with the Guglia of San Gennaro and above it the cupola of the Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro itself (Plates 29 & 30). Thus a spectacular axis between Caravaggio’s painting and the new Treasury Chapel was opened up, as if to contrast the extroverted urban spectacle of San Gennaro with the framed invitation to contemplate Seven Works of Mercy.

For the Pio Monte delle Misericordia, see M. P. Massamormile, Il Pio Monte della Misericordia di Napoli nel quarto centenario (Naples: Electa Napoli, 2003). Caravaggio was paid the final instalment of 400 ducats on 9 January 1607, so the altarpiece must have been painted in the last months of 1606. Originally Caravaggio’s painting was in a new church attached to the Pio Monte della Misericordia. Picchiatti’s new centralized chapel was designed expressly for it as the main altarpiece, with seven subordinate altars dedicated to individual works of mercy. H. Hibbard, Caravaggio (London: Thames & Hudson, 1988; 1st edn 1983), 213. For the painting, see R. Mormone, ‘Per una rilettura delle Sette opere di misericordia’, Napoli nobilissima, 25:3–4 (1986), 91–100.

121

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Part III

The choreography of sanctity

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Niche and saints: folding the wall

6

In the city of immortals there are a hundred or so irregular niches … furrowed by the mountain and the valley. In the sand there were shallow pits; from these miserable holes (and from the niches) naked, grey-skinned, scraggly bearded men emerged. I thought I recognised them; they belonged to the bestial breeds of the troglydytes. (Jorge Luis Borges)1

Imagine entering the Treasury Chapel via the small dark niches that punctuate its interior (Figs 3 & 59).2 Excavated into the chapel’s walls these copper-lined loculi hold the silver reliquary busts of twenty-one of Naples’ many proliferating protector saints and work in tandem with the nineteen full-length bronze statues of the same saints above.3 Insignificant and unadorned as they are, those loculi seem a most unlikely point of entry. But in fact they are a crucial hinge on which the chapel turns, a fold that draws together interior and exterior in labile exchange, and that stages exteriority that is not simply the exterior of the chapel and interiority that is distinct from its interior. While they hold the silvery reliquaries of Naples’ protector saints, the peculiar openness of the niches frees the reliquaries to be peripatetic, while also locating them within the chapel’s interior.4 Thus they at once display the reliquary busts, Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Immortal’, in Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings, eds Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970), 138.  2 They were referred to as nicchie both in documents relating to the building of the chapel and by later commentators such as G. B. Pacichelli, Memorie de’ Viaggi per l’Europa Cristiana (Naples: Giacomo Raillard), 1685, 60. Parrino in 1700: ‘sotto le statue in cappellette vi stanno in mezzi busti d’argento de’ sudetti Padroni’. Parrino, Napoli Città Nobilissima, vol. I (1700), 341.  3 An undated document, probably from the 1720s, that lists the work remaining in the chapel includes ‘to make all the little loculi and gates of copper, where the statues of the holy relics are kept (‘fare tutti li casini et portelle di Ramo, dove vanno riposte le statue della Sante Reliquie’). ATSG, DA/9 (60–1588), fol. 133v.  4 The niches are unglazed, but may once have been more like little cupboards with small doors. On 20 March 1669 Domenico Marinello was paid 200 ducats for the ‘cornucopias’ that were to adorn the little doors of the Patron saints’ (‘a conto del cornucopij che stà facenno per avanti le portelle de’ Santi Padroni’). ATSG, AB/11 - 1602, fol. 97r.  1

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permit them remarkable mobility, and stage their extraordinary autonomy and the ambiguity of their ownership and dwelling. Thus more than mere shelves, the niches incorporate the saints’ relics, but do not contain them. And while they evoke the burial of saints in catacombs, the ancient burial of saints’ bodily remains that was decisively extra-urban, they reorientate the saintly address to articulate an urbanized sanctity with plural allegiances that is new. Reliquary chapels are common in Europe, but the combination of fulllength statues in bronze and mobile silver reliquary figures is most unusual (Plate 7). And even more unusual is its generation of more protector saints and their dramatic exoduses across and their reweaving of the urban fabric. That paradoxical fragmentation and multiplication of saints is examined here. Elizabeth Grosz has pointed out that if the city is a significant context and frame for the body, the relations between bodies and cities are more complex than may have been realized.5 In a Humanist or a Marxist conception the body produces the city; the city is a product or projection of the body. Thus the body is subordinated to the mind while retaining a link with binary opposites. Body is merely a tool or bridge linking an unspatial (Cartesian) consciousness to the materiality and coordinates of the built environment, a kind of mediating term between mind and inorganic matter. Such a view posits a one-way relation between the body and the city. In this model the body is the cause and the city the effect. Another view such as that articulated by Hobbes, Locke, or Rousseau sees the state or city as represented as head of the body-politic. For Grosz the causal and representational models are unsatisfactory in that they give primacy to one or other term in body/city. If, asks Grosz, the relation between bodies and cities is neither causal nor representational, then what kind of relation might exist between them? She suggests instead that body and city might be thought of as mutually defining, without a mirroring of nature in artifice. They might thus be conceived not as total and distinct entities, but as assemblages or collections of parts, capable of crossing thresholds between substances to form linkages. This is not a holistic view that stresses the unity or integration of city and body; but rather a disunified series of systems and interconnections, disparate flows, and events, brought together or drawn apart in temporary alignments. In spite of appearances, the reliquary busts belonged not to the Treasury Chapel itself, but to a variety of diverse religious institutions across the city of Naples. On their respective feast days the saints’ relics returned in their silver reliquaries to their home churches, monasteries, and convents. Additionally, they were – and are – solemnly processed outside the chapel for celebrations of San Gennaro’s feasts and in the teeth of catastrophe and crisis (Plate 40 & Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Women, Chora, Dwelling’, in S. Watson and K. Gibson (eds), Postmodern Cities and Spaces (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 47–58.

 5

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Fig. 18). Thus through regular and emergency processions and their occupation of the chapel’s niches, the reliquaries threaded the Treasury Chapel to the Seggi and to their institutional homes right across the city (Plate 24). Consequently, those apparently insignificant loculi lie on the fold of the chapel’s peculiar address to the city of Naples, its simultaneous singular extroversion and intense introversion. And through those recesses punched into the chapel’s skin the peripatetic silver reliquary busts gain sacred resonance and institutional force. Those curious niches thus provide a special opening to an understanding of the chapel. And they demonstrate that the chapel’s edges and boundaries are occupied by forces it does not possess and cannot contain. Thus they form a crucial part of the chapel’s profound ambiguity as a machine, part of a system of connections that it forges, maintains, and is implicated in, but by which it is also produced, kept in motion, and extended. This chapter departs from a treatment of the chapel in terms of stasis, hierarchy, and separation to approach it through the niches in terms of a moving of grace, grace through movement, and the wall as fold. Niche, tabernacle, loculus

The niche can be thought in terms of the holy of holies, the central shrine, and threshold-pilgrimage centre, that is as a place that intersects linear time at an oblique angle, that works towards miraculous transformation. The etymological derivations of the word ‘niche’ from Latin nidus, French niche, and Italian nicchio (shell) declare its homely nature, place of nurture and point of flight. The conched niche affirmed secular and spiritual authority for Roman emperors and Christian saints. Remnant and frame, it both indicates something left behind whose work is not yet done and points beyond itself to what the frame frames. Niche, tabernacle, aedicule, and shrine are elements that have long been bound together by association with sheltering, housing, enshrining, and framing the holy, both nomadically and permanently under canvas or in stone. In Western Europe they were bound together formally above all through framing holy objects and later secular sculpture – associations in Judaic and Christian traditions that can be traced back to Golgotha, Christ’s tomb, and the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, although they do not form a genre or a formal corpus or correspond to a simple scheme of historical development. ‘To tabernacle’ is to occupy a tabernacle, tent, or temporary dwelling, or one that can be moved around; to dwell for a time, to sojourn. Christ tabernacled on earth or ‘in the flesh’, and humans, as spiritual beings, dwell in the ‘fleshly tabernacle’ of the body. The niche, then, is freighted with religious associations, its accumulated cultural freight a superstitio of old habits into the midst of a new and changing state of things. The niche, with a tabernacle framing, like a little temple or house, an aedicula (the diminutive of the Latin

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aedis or aedes, a temple or house) or aedicule, is a customary and apposite setting for a relic or reliquary. Two especially glorious baroque niches open the hidden recesses and possibilities of the niche. The apparently insignificant niches of the Treasury Chapel are at once starkly simple and a crucial component of the machinic and prosthetic capacity of the chapel, the reliquary-statue-saint-processional pulse that traversed and pierced the walls of the chapel. Consider the most famous baroque aedicule of all, Gianlorenzo Bernini’s aedicule of St Teresa of Avila in the Cornaro Chapel in Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome (Fig. 36). While the chapel is articulated as part of the church through a continuous entablature resting on columns at the centre, pilasters at the corners, and side walls, a second and dramatic architectural framework is inserted at its centre. A convex pedimented altar tabernacle staging St Teresa’s ecstasy bursts forwards towards the viewer. The architectural systems are attuned to each other: the foliate scrollwork in the frieze of the smaller system echoes the moulded frames of the vault above. Two distinct realms interlock into each other. Crowned by a convex triangular pediment resting on paired columns, the tabernacle bows forwards to frame an oval niche for the altarpiece. The effect, Irving Lavin brilliantly argued, is to make the Teresa niche a complete little temple in its own right.6 Or almost: its immanent relation to its surroundings affords it greater complexity and rather less autonomy than that. It is half within and half emerging from the wall, and the uncanny relationship with the Cornaro family members witnessing in the wings destabilizes any apparent unity or coherence. Unlike that of a classical statuary niche, the interior here is both wider and higher than the opening; consequently the group appears less displayed from than screened within the tabernacle, which simultaneously struggles to contain it. The outstanding precedent for such a double sanctuary in the transept of a church is the sacrament altar in San Giovanni in Laterano (Fig. 7).7 As the Cathedral of Rome, the Lateran basilica is heir to the Temple of Jerusalem and mother church of the eternal city and of all Christianity. The manna conserved in the sanctum sanctorum of the Temple of Jerusalem was the most important Old Testament prefiguration of the Eucharist. Thus the Lateran’s sacrament altar embodies the fulfilment of the old Law in the new through the sacrifice of Christ. The Teresa chapel is another opening to a sanctum sanctorum and I. Lavin, Bernini and the Unity of the Visual Arts (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1980), vol. I, 77–142.  7 In the sacrament transept altar at San Giovanni in Laterano the main tabernacle with a triangular pediment projects increasingly forwards in pairs of columns and forms part of a continuous order that also embraces the lateral walls. Within this structure, framed by a smaller tabernacle of its own and serving as the altarpiece, is the central-plan ciborium that contains the Eucharist.  6

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gateway to heaven. Teresa’s niche takes the form of a tempietto and houses a sacred event that alludes to the Eucharist. This extends, as Andrea Bolland has observed, to St Teresa’s facial expression, which reiterates the crucified Christ, as in Michelangelo’s Pietà.8 The niche thus emerges as locus sanctus where something sacred might be beheld.9 By contrast, the astonishing dome of the Chapel of the Santissima Sindone in Turin (Fig. 45) can be read in terms of aedicular niches that activate the vault to produce a sense of gravity-defying depth to the soaring cupola. Daringly open, spectacularly empty, they reassert the motif of the niche and evoke by contrast the magnificent reliquary that contains its sacred relic below. The simple niches in Gennaro’s Treasury (Figs 11 & 46) could not be further from the elaborate aedicules in the Lateran or those by Bernini or Guarini. In comparison to those spectacular baroque niches, the Treasury Chapel’s are distinctly earth-bound and dull. A simple rectangulate excavated block that lacks any aedicular framing. It would be hard to imagine a less prepossessing niche. Yet those very niches permit the chapel’s peculiar urban address, its distinctively centrifugal force, and its enzymatic capacity. Indeed, the Treasury Chapel as a whole can be read as an extended aedicular framing for the simple little niches where the relics were lodged. They point in the opposite direction: to the loculi in the ancient Neapolitan catacombs where the bodies of Christian saints were first conserved (Fig. 57). Thus the Neapolitan catacombs, in a strange way, haunt this place. The Scottish historian Gilbert Burnet found them superior to the much betterknown catacombs in Rome. His account, offered in Some Letters, containing an Account of what seemed most Remarkable in Travelling through Switzerland, Italy, some parts of German, &c in the years 1685 and 1686, is worth citing at some length since it draws attention to what made them so distinctive: Without the Gates, are the Noble Catacombs: which because they were beyond anything I saw in Italy, and to which the Catacombs of Rome are not to be compared, and since I do not find any account of them, in all the books that I have yet seen concerning Naples, I shall describe them particularly. They are vast and long Galleries cut out of the Rock: there are three stories of them one above the other … . These Galleries are generally about twenty foot broad, and about fifteen foot high: so that they are Noble and spacious places, and not little and narrow as the Catacombs at Rome.10

A. Bolland, ‘Alienata da’ sensi: Reframing Bernini’s S. Teresa’, Open Arts Journal, 4:4 (2014–15), 134–154.  9 In his glorious niche-aedicule Bernini used solidified rays with a specific light source and that stand free of the niche wall to indicate divine revelation. 10 Burnet, Some Letters, 198–199.  8

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The loculi of the Neapolitan catacombs, though large, were without covering or doors:

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but I could see no marks either of a cover for these holes, that looked like the bellys of Chests, or of a facing to shut up the niches when a dead Body was laid in them … For the Niches shew plainly, the Bodies were laid in them wrapt in the dead Cloaths, they being too low for Coffins.11

Thus the simplicity of the Treasury Chapel’s niches both references the distinctive loculi of the Neapolitan catacombs and opens the way to a continuous circulation, institutional participation and sharing of the saints’ body parts.12 In a striking passage, Burnet compares one of the spacious chambers in the catacombs to ‘a little Chappel’, with its ‘Niches all round about’: In some places of the Rock there is as it were a little Chappel hewen out of the Rock that goes off from the Comon Gallery, and there are Niches all round about; but I saw no marks of any Wall, that shut in such places; tho I am apt to think, these might be burying places appropriated to particular Families.13

This ‘little Chappel’, hewn from rock with its ‘Niches all round about’, conjures an ancient version of the Treasury Chapel. Burnet goes on to suggest that the Neapolitan catacombs were deliberately shrouded in obscurity because they throw open to question the claims that the Roman catacombs were made by early Christians: This made me reflect more particularly on the Catacombs of Rome than I had done; I could imagine no reason why so little mention is made of those of Naples, when there is so much said concerning those of Rome; and could give myself no other account of the matter, but that it being a maxim to keep up the reputation of the Roman Catacombs, as the Repositaries of the Reliques of the primitive Christians, it would have much lessened their credit, if it has been thought, that there were Catacombs far beyond them in all respects, that yet cannot be supposed to have been the work of the primitive Christians.14 Burnet, Some Letters, 199–200. Burnet observes that these practices must have rendered the catacombs ‘monstrous unwholesome and stinking places’. Some Letters, 200. 12 It is not clear whether the Treasury’s niches ever had doors, but I think not. Michele Foschini’s drawing of the east end of the Treasury Chapel, engraved by P. Gaultier (c.1750) (Fig. 22), shows that only the relics’ safe had doors. The other loculi are not readily interpretable. They do not clearly show doors, but nor do they show the silver busts. 13 Burnet, Some Letters, 200. 14 Burnet, Some Letters, 202–203. He continues, ‘But because it cannot be pretended, that there was such a number of Christians at Naples, as could have wrought such Catacombs, and if it had been once thought, that those were the common Burial-places of the ancient Heathens, that might have induced the World to think, that the Roman 11

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Thus Burnet concludes that the Neapolitan catacombs, like those of Rome, must have been the work of ‘ancient Heathens’. But particularly notable here are his observations of the impressive extent and spaciousness of the Neapolitan catacombs, the lack of attention to them compared with those of Rome, and the distinctive openness of their niches. In his Memorie della Vita Miracoli, e culto di San Gianuario (Naples, 1633) Camillo Tutini refers to the Januarian complex, including the cemetery, to indicate the depth of Neapolitan devotion to San Gennaro.15 He writes: St Severus Bishop of Naples was most devoted to the martyr saint Gennaro; and down to the present we can see the effect of this devotion in a church erected by the said bishop-saint to San Gennaro, excavated from the hill in a place known as the valley of the Sanità, at that time a mile outside Naples, that of old was called San Gennaro de foris [outside] because it was outside the city, and at other times was called ad Corpus [to the Body] for those saintly bodies that were buried there, and with them the body of that saint, transferred there as we have said by St Severus.16

Thus the simplicity of the Treasury Chapel’s niches both references the loculi of the catacombs and opens the way to a continuous circulation, institutional participation, and sharing of the saints’ body parts. Burnet points out that the adornment of walls and vaults in mosaic and fresco occurred some time after burial, and thus indicate their use as places of worship: There is in some places on the Walls and Arch, Old Mosaick Work, and some Painting, the Colours are fresh, and the Manner and Characters are Gothick, which made me conclude, that this might have been done by the Normans, about 600 hundred years ago, after they drove out the Saracens: In some places there are Palm trees painted, and Vines in other places. The freshness of the Colours shews these could not have been done while this place was imployed for burying; for the Steams and Rottenness of the air, occasioned by so much Corruption, must have dissolved both Plaister and Colours.17 Catacombs were no other; therefore there hath been no care taken to examine these. I thought this deserved a large discourse, and therefore I have dwelt perhaps a little too long on this subject’ (Burnet, Some Letters, 212). 15 Amodio, ‘Riflessi monumentali’, 128. 16 Tutini, Memorie (1633), 93. Tutini includes a discussion of the different burial practices found in the catacombs in Rome and Naples. Memorie (1633), 102–107. Tutini’s Memorie was an early example of archaeological impulse that also informed Antonio Bosio’s Roma sotterranea. Opera postuma di A. Bosio Romano Antiquario Ecclesiastico Singolare de’ suoi tempi compita, disposta, & accresciuta dal M.R.P. Giovanni Severani da Severino sacerdote della Congregatione dell’Oratiorio di Roma (Rome: Guglielmo Facciotti, 1632) (the book was finished in 1632 but not published until 1634), which recorded about thirty cemeteries in Rome that had been effectively lost to memory. 17 Burnet, Some Letters, 200–201.

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Peripatetic saints: mobility and figuration

Sculptures displayed on one monument that were commissioned and paid for by institutions elsewhere are perhaps less unusual than one might think. The sculptures of patron saints of guilds that adorn the exterior of Orsanmichele, the early fourteenth-century grain market converted into a chapel for Florence’s artisanal and trade guilds, are a case in point (Fig. 53). From 1399 the city charged guilds to commission statues of their patron saints to embellish Orsanmichele. The guild of doctors and apothecaries commissioned Pietro di Giovanni’s Madonna in 1399; the linen weavers and pedlars secured Saint Mark (1411) from Donatello; and Lorenzo Ghiberti produced Saint John the Baptist for the Arte of Calimaia (1414–16) and St Matthew for the Arte del Cambio (1419–20), both in expensive bronze. Those sculptures were proudly displayed in niches adorning the exterior of the building on one of the principal thoroughfares of the city. Thus the saints marked Orsanmichele as at once guild, civic, and chapel; its institutional affiliations were splendidly declared and made part of the material fabric; and the building was implicated in competing interests across the city. But Orsanmichele’s patron saints did not stir from their splendid niches. Displayed on the exterior of the building, they extended a prominent, public, extroverted, and extravagant address without having to move. San Gennaro’s saints are different. Silver reliquaries work in tandem with immured bronze full-lengths. While the bronzes remain inside, still and silent, the silver reliquaries cross thresholds of chapel and Cathedral, pour out noisily and brilliantly into the city, and return to lodge in their second homes during saints’ festivals for a few days or an octave (Plate 24). An interesting counterpoint between silver reliquary and bronze sculptural figure thus comes into play in the Treasury Chapel. While the dark bronze statues are fixed permanently in place in their niches ranged around its walls, rather in the manner of the wall reliquaries at the Gesù Nuovo (Fig. 16), the bright silver reliquaries were shiny mobile objects, peripatetic and never fully at home or at rest (Figs 59 & 60). Representational statue and ontological relic combine and split. And the chapel’s architectural organization becomes processional order, as the silver reliquaries solemnly process through the city en masse in the hierarchical order of their niches in the chapel. The exceptional mobility of the Treasury Chapel reliquaries and its effects  emerge sharply in comparison with two contrasting reliquary chapels in early modern Naples. At play is the challenge of accommodating multiple relics without imprisoning them. The chapel of St Anne (now San Francesco Geronimo) on the left of the high altar in the Gesù Nuovo (Fig. 16) by Domenico Di Nardo (c.1682) and the new Treasury Chapel in the grand Carthusian monastery complex of San Martino (c.1690s) (Plate 39) epitomize

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divergent approaches to staging multiple relics and maintaining coherence within a chapel setting.18 The Gesù Nuovo chapel shares one of the more widespread approaches to reliquary chapels, quite common in Naples, including the Gesù Vecchio and San Paolo Maggiore. An impressive array of polychrome busts of saints, with their relics and authentications visible in little boxes below them, is ranged in rows to encompass two walls of the chapel.19 The elegant Carthusian Treasury Chapel offers an unusual and conceptually refined pictorial-narrative solution (Plate 39). There, unlike the Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro, relics are not treated figuratively, but remain visible as bones. The reliquary chapel in the Gesù Nuovo in Naples (Fig. 16) deploys figurative reliquaries comparable to those in Gennaro’s chapel, but the reliquaries are here handled representationally, rather than ontologically, a formidable array of holy bones aligned beneath busts of their saintly owners, like a barracks, in a splendid visual taxonomy of sanctity.20 Each side wall of this chapel is divided into thirty-five small compartments framed in feverishly Bernardo De Dominici records that Domenico Di Nardo, a pupil of Pietro Ceraso, was responsible for the reliquaries in the Gesù Nuovo (De Dominici, Vite, 391). See also K. Fiorentino, ‘Domenico Di Nardo’, in Civiltà del Seicento a Napoli, vol. II, 172. For the Treasury Chapel in the Certosa, see V. Rizzo, Ferdinando Spinelli di Tarsia: un principe napoletano di respiro europeo (1685–1753) (Aversa: Macchione, 1997). 19 For the wooden reliquaries in the Gesù Vecchio, see Civiltà del Seicento a Napoli, vol. II: A. González-Palacios, ‘Un adornamento vicereale per Napoli’, 286, and Fiorentino, ‘Domenico Di Nardo’, 171–172. 20 Beneath the busts in the Gesù Nuovo Chapel bone relics are arranged in glass-fronted boxes, although there is no necessary correspondence with the saint represented (some contain two skulls, for example). The relics were a gift from Isabella Feltria della Rovere (1552–1619), Princess of Bisignano, daughter of Guidobaldo II, Duke of Urbino, and Vittoria Farnese. In 1594 she gave numerous relics to her Jesuit confessor, Vincenzo Maggio, for the church of the Gesù Nuovo. She had acquired a vast relic collection through her mother, Vittoria Farnese, niece of Paul III, and her uncle Cardinal Odoardo Farnese. See BNN, MS XI-A-52, [Niccolò B. Sanseverino, SJ], ‘Vita di Isabella Feltre della Rovere, Principessa di Bisignano’ (1619). Unhappily married to Niccolò Bernardino Sanseverino, son of Pietro Antonio Sanseverino, Prince of Bisignano, she made strong spiritual and patronage connections with the Jesuits, and the foundation of the Jesuit Casa Professa in Naples is due to her patronage. See Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu (ARSI), Provincia Romae, vol. 162, I, fol. 166r; P. Litta, Famiglie celebri italiane: supplemento. Pianciatichi di Pistoia, vol. III Milan, 1867), tab. 6; P. Litta, Famiglie celebri di Italia, 16 vols (Milan: G. Farrario, 1819–83), s.v. ‘della Rovere’, tab. 6. Maria Ann Conelli suggests that the burial of the body of their great benefactor, the Princess of Bisignano beneath the high altar in the Gesù Nuovo ‘enshrined in a place reserved for saints’ indicates that the Jesuits hoped she would be the most valuable relic of all. M. A. Conelli, ‘The Ecclesiastical patronage of Isabella Feltria della Rovere: Bricks, Bones, and Brocades’, in Ian F. Verstegen (ed.), Patronage and Dynasty: The Rise of the Della Rovere in Renaissance Italy, Sixteenth Century Essays & Studies 77 (Kirksville, Mo.: Truman State University Press, 2007), 134. 18

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carved gilt wood, dating from shortly before 1682.21 Each niche, painted to resemble veined marble, holds a small bust or half-length figure of a saint, supported on a wooden base containing the relics, which are visible through glass panels. More bones are arranged in glass-fronted boxes between the rows, with no clear correspondence between bones and busts. Some boxes contain two skulls. A small full-length sculpture (Ignatius Loyola and Francis Xavier) occupies the centre of the reliquary walls so that the ensemble as a whole evokes a miniaturized saintly army, martialled around the leading saints of the Jesuit Society. Spectacular effect is achieved through sheer force of number; individual saints are radically subordinated to the overall effect. Saintly presence is evoked by insistence on massing and repetition, as if to secure salvation quantitatively. Indeed, while authentications identify each relic, the sculpted busts are barely differentiated. Taxonomy takes precedence over identity in terms of resemblance. Thus the head, the body part that best represents that which is most human, is here rendered generic. Consequently, that which visually bears identity – the head and face – is here de-identified, less a portrait of a mortal than a sign of a ranged spiritual power. Instead of evoking individual saints, therefore, the whole depends on uniformity and number, like an army, to fight the good fight. And uniformity here achieves impressive effect. Relics and busts of the saints assume a passive relation to the architecture of the chapel, simply cladding two of its facing walls in uniform niches, rather like books on shelves. Martialling and ordering saints’ relics is more important here than the specificity of saint or relic. Gennaro’s Treasury differs markedly from this. Here architecture works in consonance with relics, figural reliquaries, and statuary to produce a sharper sense of the presence not simply of saints’ relics, but of the saints as autonomous and unbounded, extending beyond their bones. By contrast, the new Treasury Chapel in the grand Carthusian monastery complex of San Martino (Plate 39) orchestrates its relics in elegant form encompassing altarpiece and architecture in a soteriological narrative or drama that defies linear temporality. At its heart is Jusepe de Ribera’s beautiful Pietà altarpiece (signed and dated 1637).22 Painted for the church The date of the Gesù Nuovo reliquary is 1682 or earlier, since in that year Di Nardo received payment for work destined for an unknown church comprising a statue of St Nicholas of Bari and two figures of virgin saints and martyrs ‘similar to that of St Theodora situated in the reliquary of the Gesù Nuovo’. See Fiorentino, ‘Domenico Di Nardo’, 171. 22 Ribera’s Pietà was commissioned in 1637 by Prior Giovan Battista Pisante, and Ribera was paid 400 ducats on 3 October that year. See A. E. Peréz Sànchez and N. Spinosa (eds), Jusepe de Ribera, 1591–1652, exhibition catalogue, Castel Sant’Elmo, Certosa di San Martino, and Cappella del Tesoro, Naples, 27 February–17 May 1992 (Naples: Electa Napoli, 1992) 108, and Spinosa, ‘Ribera a San Martino’, in Peréz Sànchez and Spinosa 21

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sacristy at the Certosa, it was moved to the new Treasury Chapel probably between 1689 and 1692 and is at the heart of a narrativized treatment of the relics.23 The exquisite reliquaries, in fine ebony and gilt copper, like elegant jewel cases, by Gennaro Monte, were added in 1691.24 Thus Christ’s sacrifice, staged centrally, is amplified by the relics of saints displayed on each side in Monte’s transparent urns. Relics and altarpiece work together to extend the implications of Christ’s martyrdom from the central altarpiece outwards into the chapel via the relics. A spasm or holy continuum between relicartefact, sacrifice of saints, and Christ’s sacrificial death is thereby implied. The parallel between relics and Christ’s dead body is not simple identification, since his body was assumed entirely into heaven in the Ascension, but is made in terms of sacrifice and the promise of redemption, a cutting across time to expose its ragged edges and the open possibilities of the present in the past. In turn, the miracle of the Resurrection reverberates through the bones, pointing the way to their role at the Last Trump. Christ’s death and sacrifice directly underpin the relics, as if to guarantee the potential miracles

(eds), Jusepe de Ribera, 1591–1652, 290–313. A copy painted in 1791 by G. G. Lethière is in the Musée de Beaux Arts in Dijon; a drawing by G.-L. Ango is in a collection in Paris, and a drawing by G.-H. Fragonard is in the Norton Simon Foundation, Pasadena; attributed to Fragonard is an oil-on-paper sketch in a private American collection. See Spinosa, Ribera, 308. 23 In 1692 Carlo Celano records that Ribera’s panel had been moved to the recently completed new sacristy, thereby providing a terminus post quem for its reinstallation, although the precise date when it was moved is unknown. See Celano, Notizie del bello, vol. V, tom. 1, 686. The Banco di Napoli archives record Carthusian payments to Andrea Canale, as ‘Capo Mastro Fabricatore’, ‘for the building works he is undertaking in our monastery’ (‘à conto delle fabriche che sta facendo nel loro Monastero’) as late as July 1689 (see V. Rizzo, Lorenzo e Domenico Antonio Vaccaro: apoteosi di un binomio, Naples: Altrastampa, 2001). While these payments do not specify the exact space in the monastery where he was doing the building, it seems likely that he was working on what would become the new Treasury. Thus the installation of Ribera’s Pietà is likely to have occurred between May 1689 and early 1692 – and is likely to have been contemporary with Gennaro Monte’s sacristy cases. I am grateful to Nick Napoli for helpful discussion on these points. 24 Gennaro Monte is recorded between 1646 and 1697 as designer, silversmith, founder, and cesellatore. He was responsible for casting in bronze the two-headed San Gennaro moulded in clay by Cosimo Fanzago for the gateway to the Treasury Chapel; and also for the candlesticks (1661–66), the two putti with cornucopias, and six urns for its main altar. He executed some of the most astonishing and expensive altar frontals in Naples, including that for the altar of San Giacomo della Marca in Santa Maria la Nova (at a cost of 1,860 ducats in 1667) and for the main altars in Santa Maria in Portico (1681) and San Gregorio Armeno (1690). At San Martino Monte worked regularly between 1646 and 1677 and later until 1697, but his silverwork has all been lost apart from the reliquary caskets and his Immaculate Conception, in gilt copper with pedestal and puttini. See A. Catello, ‘Gennaro Monte’, in Civiltà del Seicento a Napoli, vol. II, 305.

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they afford.25 The effect of the whole depends less on colour or grandiloquence – marble’s sensual splendour is eschewed in favour of ebony’s arch restraint – than on workmanship of the highest order and overall conception that extends to Luca Giordano’s frescoes of the story of Judith in the vault and lunettes. The dark depths of the ebony and the superficial highlights of the gilt copper work superbly together. Two paintings by Franz Vervloet suggestively evoke the whole schema.26 Inside the Sacristy of the Church of the Certosa di San Martino (Museo Nazionale di San Martino, 1845) dramatically evinces the architectural framing of Ribera’s altarpiece flanked by reliquaries, while The Treasury Chapel in the Church of the Certosa di San Martino (Museo Nazionale di San Martino, 1848) (Plate 42) depicts the lipsanoteca doors as opened to reveal its treasures hieratically arranged inside. They suggestively correspond to the celestial opening in the vault above: material and immaterial pathways to heaven. The chapel as a whole thus functions like a stage set, complete with openable wings, onto which visiting dignitaries could enter. The opening of those wings connected holy networks and accorded special honour to visitors as in an enfilade in a noble apartment. The entire ensemble stages the Carthusian prior and visiting dignitaries as much as the relics that surround them in an unfolding assemblage. An integral part of the narrative of Christ’s sacrifice and ensconced in their gorgeous wall reliquaries, the relics in the Certosa Treasury Chapel are necessarily immobile, their force deriving precisely from that fixity, as the world around them shifts and is dramatically reconfigured in relation to them. San Gennaro’s Treasury Chapel (Plate 3) emerges from these comparisons as remarkable in two important ways. First, it is the largest and most ambitious reliquary chapel in the city of Naples, and indeed one of the most important The Council of Trent (session V, cc. 3, 7, 16 and canons 3, 10) repeatedly connects the merits of Christ and the development of humankind’s spiritual life. Canon 3 of Session V proclaims anathema to whomever claims that original sin is cancelled except by the merits of Jesus Christ, and Canon 10 of Session VI states that man cannot merit without the justice through which Christ merited that justification. 26 For Luca Giordano’s Story of Judith frescoes of 1703–04, see Plate 38 and O. Ferrari and G. Scavizzi, Luca Giordano (Naples; Edizione scientifiche italiane, 1966), I, 230–231; W. Prohaska, handlist to exhibition, in Il secolo d’oro della pittura napoletana: da Battistello a Luca Giordano, pittori del Seicento nei musei di Napoli, exhibition catalogue. Naples, 1994–95 (Naples: Elio de Rosa, 1994). 144; N. Spinosa (ed.), [Luca Giordano 1634–1705 exhibition catalogue] Museo e gallerie nazionali di Capodimonte, Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2001–02 (Naples: Electa Napoli, 2001), 348. F. Vervloet’s paintings, The Treasury Chapel of the Certosa di San Martino (1848), inv. 23928, and Interior of the Sacristy of the Church of the Certosa di San Martino (1845), inv. Real Pinacoteca 189, are both displayed in the Museo Nazionale di San Martino in room 26. 25

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in Europe. Its dazzling internal carapace extends beyond marbles to semiprecious stones, to oil paintings, frescoes, and the whole glittering orchestration of bronze statues and silver busts of its saints. The principal spatial effectuation and affective engagement of the chapel is realized by its ‘cladding’ in this extended sense. Second – and this is the key point in this context – unlike those of the chapels examined above, and indeed the vast majority of reliquary chapels, its relics were neither an immovable display sealed behind glass, as in the Jesuit chapel, nor part of a Christological narrative or multimedia kaleidoscope, as at the Certosa. On the contrary, they remained fully exposed, touchable, and transportable, at once particularly vulnerable and invincible. And this is where the niche loculi come in to the picture. The reliquary busts regularly journeyed across the city – to altars set up by the Seggi to celebrate San Gennaro and to their home institutions for their own feast days. Thus the niches and reliquaries they contain both permitted and represented that connectivity.27 We see, therefore, that the Treasury Chapel is striking in its extroversion. Its saints are living presences, not a peep-show of bones behind glass, but part of our world, mobile and fluid, animating not just the chapel, but beyond. On feast days the saints’ reliquary busts threaded chapel to streets, temporary altars, the Seggi, and religious institutions scattered through the city, to their churches of provenance and back (Plates 24 & 40). These diverse reliquary chapels incorporate body matter in remarkably diverse ways and thus announce them as saints differently. The Certosa Treasury’s relics remain visible as bones, and there is no attempt to portray the saints to whom they belonged. Their indexicality takes precedence over iconicity. By contrast, the relics in the Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro are a range of bones – arm bones, leg bones, and other body parts. But all the saints The Neapolitan reliquary chapel of San Gennaro keeps its principal relics far more mobile, too, than the Roman examples (and, of course, especially than the celebrated Bildtabernakeln). In Italy the housings created for highly venerated images essentially followed two types from the medieval period on: the architectural altar tabernacle and the inserted image or Bildtabernakel, in which the miraculous image is inserted into another painted image surrounding it. In the architectural altar tabernacle (free-standing or attached to the wall) architecture is the dominant element and acts as a frame to the relic. Thus Andrea Orcagni’s mid-fourteenth-century tabernacle of the Virgin in Orsanmichele, Florence, houses its image, the Madonna delle Grazie, in a richly encrusted Gothic aedicule, and presents the image within a precious enclosure. In the case of the Pauline altar tabernacle in Santa Maria Maggiore, Camillo Mariani’s angels, large and active, appear to carry the image, evoking a narrative in which inserted and framing elements are conjoined. The angels reclining on the pediments further connect the altar tabernacle with that outside it, the scene painted in the dome. Steven Ostrow argues that the angelic surround, together with the framing lapis field, evoking the sky, activates the Marian icon, transforming it from a static immagine into the central element of an istoria, either as a heavenly apparition or as the Virgin’s Assumption (with the altar below representing her tomb). Ostrow, Art and Spirituality, 158–160.

27

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are represented figurally; the earliest were busts that pay direct homage to the gilt silver bust of San Gennaro himself (Plates 6 & 7). Here, then, the iconic is asserted over the indexical. While many of the relics in the Treasury Chapel, like those in the Jesuit chapel, are encased in the lower chassis of the reliquary, separate from and below the head (Plate 43), some relics are incorporated within the reliquary bust, visible through a small window (fenestelle) at its heart (Figs 42 & 71). Thus while at the Gesù Nuovo the figurative merely represents – or simply taxonomizes – the saints whose relics remain in distinct form as bones (Fig. 16), here the silver figures incorporate the relic, become part of a machinic assemblage of bone-silver-procession-possession in a process of becoming that effects a different and more urbanized sanctity (Plate 24). Niche and institutional investment

A peculiar combination of saintly incorporation and autonomy – an apparent autonomy produced in part by the investment of a host of external institutions – permits the silver reliquary busts to do more than occupy a glorious reliquary chapel. The reliquaries seem to be at home, all of silver, slippery mobile, snug in their wall loculi or perched on stands (Plate 4), yet they did not belong to the Treasury Chapel and were not commissioned directly by its Deputation. Instead they belonged to external institutions, the erstwhile ‘homes’ of the saintly relics, who also commissioned them under the watchful auspices of the deputies. Convents, monasteries, and parish churches were required to translate their precious relics of Naples’ protector saints in specially made silver reliquary busts to the Treasury Chapel, where the deputies allocated them specific loculi.28 Thus although the Deputies controlled the form and location of each reliquary saint, the responsibility and expense of their commission lay with their various ‘home’ institutions. Exceptionally, the Deputation might meet part of the costs involved. Thus they agreed to pay for additional iconographical symbols – book, three balls, and a small putto – to adapt an existing statue to become St Nicholas of Bari, as ‘a small price [relative] to what is owed to so miraculous a saint’.29 Sometimes individuals, rather than religious institutions as a whole, paid for the reliquaries. Thus Agostina Riccardo, a lay sister in the convent of Regina Coeli, paid the goldsmith Domenico Marinelli a 1,000 ducats in August 1677 for the silver bust of St Augustine.30 For example, St Ignatius Loyola’s election, statue, and niche were allocated and recorded by the Deputation. ATSG, CB/24 fasc. 58 n. 15 (1548), n.f. 29 ‘e questo tutto à spese della n[ostr]ra Cappella essendo molto poco à quello si deve ad un santo cossi miracoloso’. December 1672, ATSG, CB/11, n.f. 30 ‘A 16 Agosto 1677 si finì la statua del S. Agostino fatta di proprio denaro di sor Agostina 28

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The question of who should pay for the reliquaries was contentious. Formal agreements accepting new protector saints expressly stipulated an external institution as liable to meet all the costs of the reliquaries and, usually, all costs entailed in a new patron saint. The Seggi, like the Treasury Chapel, shrank from such financial commitment. Thus in agreeing to the election of St Francesco Borgia, all the Seggi stipulated that they were not to be held responsible for the expense of the reliquary (or any other costs), which were to be borne entirely by the Jesuit College.31 In these ways diverse ecclesiastical institutions invested materially and spiritually in the Treasury Chapel in the form of precious relics and silver reliquary busts. Thus diverse relics representing a plethora of competing urban institutions were tamed, made relatively uniform, to pay clear homage to the Treasury Chapel and its first reliquary bust. Institutions external to the Treasury – churches or monastic institutions that had held their relic before their election as protectors – paid for the splendid silver reliquaries and remained their saints’ second homes. Back to those same institutions the silver reliquary busts were processionally escorted on their saints’ days. Thus Blessed Andrea Avellino (Fig. 46) and St Gaetano went to the Theatine church of San Paolo Maggiore, St Patricia (Fig. 60) returned to the convent of Santa Patrizia, and St Giacomo della Marca returned to San Francesco la Nova, and so on.32 The splendid new silver bust of St Augustine made in 1677 for the Regina Coeli convent was processed with special trappings.33 Some busts even belonged to two institutions. St John the Baptist (Plate 44) alternated in his festive returns between Riccardo monaca conversa in d[ett]o monastero, e vi fù d’argento netto docati 880, et oltre di ducati >880 altri ducati 420 fatto per l’orefice Signor Domenico Marinello.’ ASN, Corporazioni religiose soppresse, Regina Coeli, 1972, F. 4 n. 3, n.f. This is a frequent pattern within female convents. See Hills, ‘The Housing of Institutional Architecture: Searching for a Domestic Holy in Post-Tridentine Italian Convents’, in S. Cavallo and S. Evangelisti (eds), Domestic Institutional Interiors in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2009), 119–152 and Hills, Invisible City, 111–114. 31 ‘[San Francesco Borgia should be granted] all those honours prerogatives and privileges received by the other patronal saints, but without incurring to this most faithful city or the most Illustrious Piazze any expense whatsoever whether for making the case for the said patronage, or for the silver statue, or for any other matter that may happen to occur.’ This is stipulated by the Seggio di Nido in October 1694, the Piazza di Capuano in November 1694, the Piazza del Porto in November 1694, the Piazza del Porta Nuova in November 1694, and the Piazza del Popolo in 1695. ASN, Corporazioni religiose soppresse, 3633, n.f. 32 For the agreement made in October 1625 for the silver statues, see ATSG, ser. III, CB/5 n. 11 1544, n.f. 33 Abbess D. Maria Caterina Pignatelli sought permission in 1677 from the Congregazione de’ Riti and Archbishop Caracciolo for it to be processed with special trappings. ASN, Corporazioni religiose soppresse, Regina Coeli, 1976, Fasc. 4, n. 3, n.f.

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the convents of Santa Maria Donnaromita and San Gregorio Armeno, and St Mary of Egypt (Plate 43) was shared between the convents of Santa Maria Egiziaca in Pizzofalcone and Santa Maria Egiziaca a Forcella.34 The silver reliquaries belonged at once to both the Treasury Chapel and their ‘home’ (external) institutions; and the chapel symbolically released them, under the sharp eye of the Deputation, to return across the city to church or chapel whence they had come. Through patronage, institutional affiliation, physical movement, and relocation, the reliquaries bound the Treasury Chapel to institutions beyond it, and brought prominent institutions into the chapel. Through their dual institutional affiliations, the silver reliquary busts both enriched and ‘contaminated’ the Treasury with the investments and presence of as many external institutions. Prostheses of the Treasury Chapel, they wended their way across the city and infiltrated the most intimate recesses of churches and chapels, extending the mechanosphere of the Treasury Chapel and enmeshing it, strengthening the Treasury Chapel’s claims over the city, while allowing external interests to occupy and deterritorialize or infiltrate it. In short, the reliquaries bound the chapel to the city beyond it and gathered together in a silver swarm; they implied that the city was spiritually unified (Plate 24). But they also stratified the chapel and rendered it institutionally heterogeneous. Thus their effect was to produce a chapel that was as porous horizontally across the city as it was vertically to heaven. While apparently merely holding protectors’ relics and thus merely representing external institutions, the chapel is the place where those institutions’ own investments are subordinated to an effect of unity, voices that become a chorus, a claim that is more than the sum of its parts. Heavenly intercession of saint and God thus assumed a material analogous form in the silver reliquaries to external institutions (including their congregations), saints’ relics (including their devout worshippers) to chapel (and Deputation). The multiplicity of saints and their routes across town were thus part of an intensification of permeability, interconnection, movement, and intercalation. The Treasury Chapel produced a swarming of investment of relics and reliquaries from external religious institutions. Thus it operated centripetally with gathered saints glorifying San Gennaro, the Treasury Chapel, and the deputies and centrifugally – above all through the export and processing of 34

The reliquary bust of St John the Baptist was initially commissioned by the convent of Santa Maria Donnaromita; but the protestations of the nuns of San Gregorio Armeno, where St John the Baptist’s famously liquefying blood was kept, led to an agreement whereby the two convents paid jointly for the reliquary (executed in 1695) and each hosted its homecoming every alternate year. For the bust, see E. Catello, ‘Lorenzo Vaccaro scultore argentiere’, Napoli nobilissima, 21 (1982), 14–16; Catello and Catello, La Cappella del Tesoro, 84–85; G. B. Chiarini, in Celano, Notizie del bello, vol. II, 112; Civiltà del Seicento a Napoli, vol. II, 321–322.

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those busts. Processions bore the saints’ relics across the city and wove the Treasury Chapel to the Seggi seats and disparate religious institutions across the city, extending the sway of the Treasury Chapel across the city and threading the investment of the participants, fabulous apparati, and macchine, back into the Treasury Chapel (Plates 24 & 40).35 Processions during feast days intensified San Gennaro’s hold in and through the city and renewed the city as porous membrane of protector sanctity and sacrality.36 In an elaborate embroidery whose threads ran in many directions and at diverse speeds, the chapel shimmered with refracted splendour. Via the Seggi diverse institutions invested materially and spiritually in the form of precious relics and silver reliquary busts in the Treasury Chapel and, in doing so, transformed it, continuously perforating it, forging new connections, tentacles leading out to churches, monasteries, and convents, all over the city. In spite of the appearance of coherence within the Treasury Chapel, on which the deputies placed such emphasis, it was nothing without the support and presence of the many diverse – and rivalrous – institutions represented there prosthetically via their saints (Plate 7). In turn, of course, the presence of their reliquaries in the Treasury Chapel enhanced the visibility and spiritual status of their saint and thus their institution, even as their investment in the Treasury Chapel intensified its spiritual authority. The material relation reliquary-chapel is analogous to that of saint-divine. To locate the reliquaries in the Treasury Chapel was to subordinate the saints to San Gennaro and the diverse institutions to the deputies (and thus the Seggi). But it also opens a process that is not one of mere containment or ‘representation’. Just as the court does not simply house its aristocratic residents, once inside the chapel, the reliquaries and institutions become part of it opening new lines of flight, There were, broadly speaking, two types of procession: first, those that focused on the relics of San Gennaro himself, both regular feasts and special intercessionary processions undertaken in times of emergency; and second, processions centred on individual reliquary busts other than that of San Gennaro. The latter included formal processions when a new saint was elected by the city as a protector, including the translation of his or her relics to the Treasury Chapel and their annual export back to their home institution on their feast day. Permission was sought for each of these processions. See ATSG, CB/25, fasc. 129 bis n. 4 (2761); ATSG, CB/32, Fasc. 55 n. 18 1505. 36 ‘Liminality’ is a term formulated by Arnold van Gennep in relation to rites of passage, transition rites, which accompany every change of state or social position. They are marked by three phases: separation, margin (limen or threshold), and reaggregation. A.van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1909). Victor Turner suggests that although the term ‘liminal’ signifies the importance of real or symbolic thresholds at the middle stage, the term cunicular (‘being in a tunnel’) ‘would better describe the quality of this phase in many cases, its hidden nature, its sometimes mysterious darkness’. V. Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1974), 232. 35

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new tensions and alliances, new relations with heaven. It was an investment, much as the marriage of their daughters to powerful scions was an investment for aristocratic families. The party was never over: it was always just about to commence.

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The saint multiplied and fragmented

Like a gigantic kaleidoscope, the Treasury Chapel multiplies and fragments the bodies of its saints. Above each loculus looms a full-length statue in darkest bronze of the same protector saint (Figs 3 & 46). Those sculptures by Giuliano Finelli, Cosimo Fanzago, Gian Domenico Vinaccia, and Domenico Marinelli offer corporeal form to the glittering otherworldly busts.37 Ensconced in shell-headed aedicular niches in the chapel’s walls that are in turn framed by red brocatello columns, these figures receive far grander architectural framing than do their relics below them (Plate 7).38 Sculpture and relic both ‘are’ and ‘are not’ the saint. While the tiny fragments of bone have an ontological significance that their physical form belies, while they are at once deposit, mere remnant, and promise of what is to come, the bronze sculptures evoke the saints as at once human beings, that is what has been, and hieratic timeless glorified saints. An interesting counterpoint between white metal reliquary and dark bronze sculpture of the saint thus comes into play (Plate 7 & Fig. 3). While A statue of St Asprenus, executed by Tommaso Montani and the Monterosso brothers, was accepted by the Deputazione in 1621, but in March 1646 was substituted for one by Finelli (ATSG, STR, 203), while the statue of St Anastasio by the same artists was retained. On 4 September 1638 Finelli undertook to make eighteen bronze statues. He had made only thirteen of these after ten years. He was responsible for the statues of San Gennaro (completed in 1645), St Aspreno, St Agnellus, St Thomas Aquinas, St Andrea Avellino, St Dominic, St Nicholas of Bari, St Giacomo della Marca, St Francesco di Paola, St Patricia, St Severo, St Euphebius, and St Agrippinus; Cosimo Fanzago made the statue of St Teresa; G. D. Vinaccia that of St Francis Xavier; and Domenico Marinelli those of San Gaetano and St Filippo Neri. See Bellucci, Memorie storiche, 49. 38 Nine protectors are in the presbytery, four in each of the lateral chapels (Fig. 11), and two more were added on each side immediately inside the chapel entrance (Plate 4). The protectors in the presbytery are (from left to right): St Thomas Aquinas, St Agnellus, St  Athanasius, St Asprenus, San Gennaro (in the centre), St Agrippinus, St Euphebius, St Severus, St  Patricia; in the left-hand lateral chapel (from left to right) St Anthony of Padua, St Dominic, Blessed Andrea of Avellino (Fig. 46), St Francis Xavier; in the right hand lateral chapel (from left to right): St Filippo Neri, St Francesco di Paola, Blessed Giacomo della Marca, St Teresa; and in the entrance bay: St Gaetano da Thiene and St Nicholas of Bari. Thus Naples’ first seven protector saints are all in the presbytery, and saints elected later are ranged in niches elsewhere. The twenty-four marble columns for the presbytery and lateral altars were acquired from Tortosa in Valencia by Cristofero Monterossi, and arrived in Naples in 1612 before the principal structure of the chapel had been completed. For his letter to the deputies of 9 May 1624, see ATSG, DA/9 (60-1588), fol. 506r. 37

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the dark bronze statues remained in the chapel, fixed permanently in place in their niches ranged around its walls, the bright silver reliquaries were brilliantly mobile objects, peripatetic and never fully at home or at rest. That multiplication and repetition of saintly relics and representations produces a remarkable sort of teamwork of heterogeneous elements that overflows the usual architectural limits. Thus the saint, while presented variously, is never quite present. Already necessarily ‘elsewhere’, the saint is present most fully when most partial, and in a relation between past, present, and future promises that are neither continuous nor linear. Thus the very walls of the Treasury’s presbytery and lateral chapels multiply, reproduce, and range the saints, while fracturing any easy relation between saint and time. Even while presented, the saints retreat. Their presence and punctuality are insisted on, multiplied, fractured, yet occluded and diffused. In the presbytery the bronze sculptures and silver bust reliquaries (from left) are: Saints Thomas, Agnellus, and Athanasius; Asprenus, Gennaro, and Agrippinus (on the liturgical east wall); and Euphebius, Severus, and Patricia (Plate 7 & Fig. 11). San Gennaro commands the dominant position in the centre of the east wall (Plate 3 & Fig. 22). His statue occupies prime position, its niche enhanced by a bold segmental pediment and framed by red brocatello columns. Yet the bronze figures are so dark that they tend to retreat into the wall niches; and the figure of San Gennaro is no exception to this. Thus there is both emphatic celebration and emphasis, a curious ‘absence’ or withdrawal into an oddly unemphatic figure. Unlike the reliquaries, which have an ontological relation to the saints, the bronze sculptures merely represent them. Despite their recessive colour, there is nothing apologetic about them in size or material. Bronze, more expensive even than marble, calls attention to itself. Such ambiguity serves to prevent a clear designation of the ‘location’ of San Gennaro – and, indeed, of his compatrons. Sculptural figure, reliquary head, ampoules of blood, altarpieces, and frescoes: there is no single ‘location’ for them here; rather their presence is diffused throughout the chapel. Nor is it a question of the presence of the relics set against representational fields. Multiscalarity is an indicator of different registers, diverse simultaneous assemblages, and divergent speeds and temporalities. The repetition of the saint, both directly in relic-reliquary bust, and representationally in the full-length bronze statue, frescoes, and altarpieces, introduces the topos of multiplication as inherent in the chapel’s framing, organization, and operative system, as in that of sanctity. The relation of saint to relic is analogous to that of relic and chapel. Presence and the present are refracted, split, and multiplied in non-coterminous relations. Just as the praesentia of the relic exceeds mere physical presence, so the sculptures do more than merely represent the saints. Relic and representation exceed each other. The chapel’s apparent excess is the bringing into being of that transitory configuration.

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The bronze sculptures thus ‘double’ the presence of the saints whose relics are contained in the silver reliquary busts below them.39 This duplication was effected partly to ensure that when the reliquary busts were removed from their niches for festive engagements – whether displayed on the altar of the chapel or Cathedral, or exported entirely from the Treasury Chapel and processed across the city to their ‘home’ institution – the bronze statues would mark their place and continue to represent them, as if to hold the saints ‘in place’ (Figs 46 & 60). Thus there is a sense in which the role of the bronze statues is to endure, to mark time, as it were, as if the bronze statues were ‘standing in’ for the relics, proleptically ‘replacing’ them during their absences and reiterating their presence in darker colour but fuller form. Bright lustrous metal is reserved for partial bodies; full bodies are static, dark and withdrawn. Colour, materials, and form are brought into complex interplay.40 The relation between the full-length figures and the fragmentary relics in the busts troubles any hasty assumptions about location or ‘presence’ of saints. Fragmentary relics, consisting of a diverse range of bones, are contained in reliquary busts that are fundamentally homogenizing in formal terms. But in some sense bodily bones are converted into heady silver. In turn, silver heads are set below bronze representations of the whole body of each saint. This series of ‘transformations’ or synecdochal substitutions of bone, bronze, and silver and of body, bone, and fragment, which does not constitute a ‘part’ of the bronze ‘whole’, brings into view the saint precisely as non-commensurable and heterogeneous materially and temporally, the divergence of speeds and presences in the chapel. Praesentia is not equivalent to presence; the occupancy of the reliquaries is distinct temporally and temporarily from that of the bronze figures. Bronze affirmed the presence of the bodily, the saint as mortal in an enduring and powerful material form, while bone gestures to an elsewhere, a heaven of glorious redemption, even as it indicates bodily decay and absence. Bones, silver reliquaries, and statues refer both to each other and to the saint in heaven in a series of elliptical substitutions (Plates 7, 8, 43). A form of restitution of part to whole, of head to body, of real relic to representational image, takes place, even as it is simultaneously undercut. However, this is best understood less as question Freud underlines the insight of his pupil, Otto Rank, that the double was ‘originally an insurance against the destruction of the ego’, that it functioned as a protection against death. Indeed, Freud suggests that ‘the “immortal” soul was the first “double” of the body’. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Work of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. J. Strachey, vol. XVII (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), 235. For a brilliant discussion, see Eric Santner, On Creaturely Life: Rilke / Benjamin / Sebald (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 40 That relation holds true for all the silver reliquaries conserved in the loculi. Full-length reliquaries were added later only after all those niches were filled. 39

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of ‘representation’ than as exploration of the matter of the matter of sanctity. The divine-material is allowed here to resonate in its paradoxical character. While the full-length statues and busts represent the saint, they are set apart materially, rather than drawn together. Bronze figures and silver reliquaries spectacularly insist on that of which they are made and on the contrast between them. Thus the darkness of the bronze, which is emphasized by the contrast – in terms of shininess, colour, and texture – to the marble niches in which they stand, is distinguished sharply from the gleaming silver of the reliquaries. Full-length figures and the truncated busts present saints in radically different, contrasting, and disruptive ways, ‘distributed’ across the chapel. Thus the chapel seems to bring sanctity into focus, but its effect is to diffuse, spread, and dismantle it. It defies the materials that seek to define or represent it. Saints, sculpture, relics enter into, appear in, depart from the assemblage that is known as the chapel in different forms and materials, speeds, and moments. This is not a coherent intentional ‘whole’ that secures San Gennaro, or the significance and purpose of patronal identity in Naples, but an effect of the interconnecting and divergent relations of its splintering parts. The relic removed from the chapel and brought to the chapel in its glorious silver encasement is no longer the same. Rather than sit at the head of its feast day in its church, it here becomes nomadic, part of a swarm, a whiff of its institutional source, part of the chapel’s constitutive excess. Shifts in scale and the flaunting of contrasting effects of silver, bronze, and marble set in motion unstable and incommensurate relations across the chapel even at the points of apparently greatest proximity. Thus bone and silver, silver and bronze, niche and wall are accorded physical contiguity, but effect material dissonance. Image here insists on that of which it is made as excessive, fragmentary and part of the disclosure of God. Thus the counterpoint between fragment and whole, between bone, silver, and bronze, resists the stable, coherent or revealed, and instead shelters the possibility of that which is to be apprehended as what, in the words of the iconophile, John of Damascus, ‘declares and makes manifest that which is hidden’.41 There is, then, a repetition and multiplication of saints at work within the walls and across the floor of the chapel, even as the chapel generated protectors, as we saw in Chapter 4. A proliferation, a restoration, and a denial of the corporeal take place, just as their relics represented both the body’s fragmentation and the promise of its redemption. The Treasury Chapel, through niche, aedicule,

In his discussion of the image, John of Damascus, Orationes pro sacris imaginibus, Oratio 2, PG 94, cols 1300B-D, groups flesh, bread, ink, and paper as matter to suggest that the image ‘declares and makes manifest that which is hidden’, rather than to encompass the working of matter itself (or simply show what is already visible).

41

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brocatello columns, bronze sculptures, silver reliquaries, processions, and exchange, engaged in a multiplication and repetition, hierarchical placing and replacing of saintly presence that requires, incorporates, and overflows architecture’s limits. The effect is at once to intensify the presence of each saint and to disperse it through the chapel and beyond, so that relics, bust, statue, wall, worshipper, and city are interfused. Indeed, the effect of saintly presence is what is produced by this unending process of exchange between external engagement, departure, fluidity, and fragmentation on one hand, and representation, rigidity, and repetition on the other. While the full-length bronze sculptures are continuously present beneath them, the loculi sometimes gape empty when a reliquary is on its way elsewhere (Fig. 46). Those gaps signified not only loss or absence, but extension and connectivity. In this way the place of the saint became not one (the relic), but multiple and refracted through relic, reliquary, statue, and chapel as a whole, as well as through the movement of reliquaries and veneration elsewhere. The chapel therefore became the place where bodies and body parts are simultaneously commingled, united figuratively, such as to presage their eventual unification in heaven, and disparaged, dismantled, and distorted in incomparable registers of scale and in complex unending alliances and movement to sever unifying interpretations of their partial presences and absences. Consequently, in these multiple ways, the chapel’s architecture can be viewed as a machine that multiplies and fractures sanctity as it works to refract the relations between matter, materiality, and presence. Interacting saints drawing together interacting institutions yield a city of protectors vested in a chapel. City and chapel can be seen as effects of interaction between institutions external to the chapel that were made possible by, generated and effected within it. Disciplining the chapel: pressure for place and the production of coherence

The loculi were, therefore, nodes in capillary systems of investment and exchange that fuelled the chapel’s energetic and productive forces. But in spite of their investment in the reliquary busts financially and spiritually, the sponsoring institutions did not own them. The last word lay always with the deputies who managed that heterogeneous investment, on the whole to great effect. This, too, served to centralize the protectors and to intensify the chapel’s spiritual authority. This is not to say that the deputies could not impose direction and restraint. Faced with the potential for a confusing, perhaps even dangerous, proliferation of saintly claims, the deputies worked to narrow these down, to channel and control them. Thus their energies were directed towards shaping the heterogeneous investment in the Treasury Chapel to

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produce apparent uniformity, coherence, and thus obeisance to San Gennaro, even as it proliferated his effects beyond the chapel’s boundaries. Individual relics and reliquaries are best understood as component parts of ensemblages, rather than particular members of a general category. Thus the silver reliquaries, rather than being seen simply as examples of a category ‘reliquaries’ already known and enacted, are better understood in terms of the historical processes that required them, in which they were engaged, and that continued to produce them, even after their translation to the chapel, as participants in overlapping processes that involved Deputazione, Seggi, competing external institutions, always provisional and sometimes precarious. Eventually the Treasury Chapel boasted an astonishing fifty-two silver reliquaries of patronal saints, whose housing stretched the capacities of both Deputation and chapel.42 The silver reliquary busts (Plate 43) and the bronze full-length figures of saints that stand above them are more than the sum of their parts (Fig. 3). The chapel’s architecture strives to present them as an integrated united whole by organizing them in niches and aedicules. But what we see also represents considerable heterogeneity of institutional affiliation and, indeed, earnest institutional competition: in short, jockeying for position. That could lead to intense rivalries, as I shall show in Chapter 8, but I turn now to consider the ways in which the Deputies sought to orchestrate heterogeneity as harmony and homogeneity. The Deputation always maintained that the new chapel was to house the relics of San Gennaro in appropriate decorum ‘in a more fitting manner’ and to facilitate their veneration.43 When they announced that the structure and essential adornment of the new chapel was finished, they urged translation of all the relics from the old Treasury to the new Treasury Chapel ‘recently built and constructed’ to begin, so that the relics could now be ‘kept with greater magnificence and venerated with greater ease by the devout, and the faithful who gather for that purpose there’.44 Thus the deputies insisted on the Perhaps more silver saints were produced in Naples than anywhere else in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Elio Catello suggests that the output exceeded production anywhere else in the world. E. Catello, ‘Argenti napoletani del Seicento: considerazioni su documenti inediti’, Ricerche sul ’600 napoletano (1998), 7. 43 Thus the record of the Deputazione’s meeting of 5 February 1601 reads: ‘acciò le Reliquie d’esso glorioso Santo si conservino con maggior decentia e custodia e li divoti quali continuamente confluiscono alla devotione di dette sante reliquie, e delli gloriosi miracoli entrino con maggior commodità e devotione’’. ATSG, AB/1, fol. 1r, ‘Copia di tutte le riunioni per l’erezione della Cappella’. 44 On 4 June 1646 the deputies reported that the Treasury Chapel was complete structurally and in terms of ‘essential ornament’ (ornamenti necessarij). See ATSG, AB/009, n.  1268. According to Falcone, the relics of San Gennaro and the old reliquary busts of the other protector saints were transferred there from the old Treasury Chapel on 18 April 1648. Falcone, L’Intera Istoria di San Gennaro, 514. 42

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s­ ubordination of all the protectors saints to the primary saint, San Gennaro, and, indeed, sought to effect just that in and through the chapel. The deputies worked hard to control the appearance of the chapel as a whole, striving to protect its architectural coherence, its symmetry, and its balance. They endlessly insisted that the work paid for by external institutions should be of both high quality and high coherence to try to ensure that the silver reliquary busts were more or less uniform.45 Thus they granted a single institution a specific niche for a saint’s bust, and with it the obligation to provide within a year a statue to their satisfaction and of the same degree of finish and quality as the others in the chapel.46 Thus they also decided to replace in silver the older busts made of copper and wood (Saints Agnellus, Asprenus, Athanasius, Agrippinus, Severus, Thomas Aquinas, and Dominic), since the existing wooden reliquaries were ‘not of suitable decorum’. Instead they wanted, at the least, plate silver (piastro d’argento), at a cost of 7,000 ducats, for which they turned to the city.47 Uniformity, too, was prized: for instance, in May 1671 and October 1672 Aniello Treglia was charged with making the remaining busts similar to those already made of Saints Agnellus and Asprenus and supplied with drawings and models by Andrea Falcone to that end.48 Thus although individual saints were to be properly honoured and despite the belief that busts and statues would enhance the devotion to each individual saint, nevertheless, ­uniformity – that is, the overall appearance of the chapel and the notion that the protector saints recognizably had much in common – was deeply prized by the deputies. In promoting and defending the symmetry and aesthetic appearance of the chapel, the deputies were also holding at bay undue populist influence or the too-prominent emergence of any interested party. It was a matter of An exception to the basic pattern of more or less uniform statues was that of the Immaculate Conception that the deputies agreed on 12 June 1697 to have made ‘similar to the others of the patron saints, which stand in the niches of the said chapel, with the particularized detail however of the lights and finishes in gold’. ATSG, AB/14, Conclusioni, fol. 75r, document of 12 June 1697. They stipulated that this statue was to be set up between the two large marble angels above the bronze statue of San Gennaro, something that was not carried out – perhaps because located there the figure might have been confusing, and risked overshadowing the figure of San Gennaro himself. 46 These were the conditions under which, for example, they allocated a niche in the Treasury Chapel for St Anthony of Padua to the Reverend Fathers at San Lorenzo on 25 November 1671. ATSG, AB/11 - 1602 fol. 130v. 47 ‘non condicenze conforme’. ATSG, H121, n.f. 48 On 13 May 1671 the deputies agreed that the two silver statues of Saints Euphebius and Athanasius should be made by Treglia in the same manner and for the same price as established for those of Saints Severus and Agrippinus (as agreed on 18 March 1671). ATSG, AB/11 - 1602, fol. 125v. Andrea Falcone had also produced drawings and models for the statues already completed. ATSG, AB/11 - 1602, fols 137v–139v. 45

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primus inter pares. Gennaro and the chapel bestowed quasi-episcopal status on the deputies. Their emphasis on the aesthetic coherence of the chapel can be read as ensuring their own primacy in this regard. Thus their control was tripped out in the honour and dignity of San Gennaro. The Treasury chaplains’ dress distinguished them clearly from the chaplains of the Cathedral, and the deputies themselves struck magnificent figures, bedecked in their special attire, grand, almost episcopal, in stature. Much was at stake in the allocation of niches and in the precise form or dress of a saintly statue, attested by a quarrel over the garb of St Anthony of Padua which persisted for two generations between 1631 and 1681.49 For Sallmann this had ‘social and political implications […] beyond rivalry between monasteries and religious orders’.50 St Anthony of Padua was elected thirteenth patron of Naples in 1629 and consequently was to figure in the Treasury Chapel.51 But was he to wear the habit of the Friars Minor Conventual (Observants), as the Franciscans of the powerful monastery of San Lorenzo wanted, or the habit of the Friars Minor Capuchin, with its distinctive large pointed hood that reached to the waist, as advocated by the Capuchins themselves and by citizens as prominent as the Prince of Cellamare, whose grand feudal family had paid for his silver statue? In 1652, in an attempt to stop the endless disputes between Franciscans and Capuchins, Pope Urban VIII prohibited the representation of saints in habits other than those of their original order. In response the Capuchins switched tack and called up the support of local men of substance. Thus in 1681 an impressive coalition of six Eletti from the Seggio of Capuano, five from the Seggio of Nido, and the Eletto del Popolo requested permission from the Congregazione dei Riti to display the controversial statue in the church of Santissima Annunziata. The Conventuals of San Lorenzo protested against this as scandalous. And the cardinals found in their favour.52 At stake were institutional presence in the Treasury Chapel, the right to ‘possession’ of the prestigious silver saint, and the ‘correct’ identity of the saint. A Franciscan presence in the Treasury Chapel was insufficient; it mattered more which external institution could claim the saint as its own, and thus which networks he could activate. This determined relative position in processions and the right to host the relic on feast days. Movement and exchange between Treasury Chapel and external institution of relic, reliquary, and bodies in procession allowed the reiteration of urban claims of both saint and institution, and energized and renewed the spiritual and material force of saint, Treasury Chapel, and institution. Sallmann, Santi barocchi, 113. Sallmann, Santi barocchi, 113. 51 Sallmann, Santi barocchi, 113. 52 Sallmann, Santi barocchi, 113. 49 50

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Since the deputies did not themselves pay for the silver statues, in many ways their hands were tied. When the Carmelites were slow to produce the statue of St Teresa, the deputies reluctantly granted them a further year to get it made.53 The Theatine fathers of San Paolo Maggiore received a twoyear extension in August 1674 to produce their statue of St Gaetano, because, they claimed, they were still out of pocket for the high costs of the celebrations of his sanctification and patronal election.54 In the event, the bust of St Gaetano, realized by Arcangelo Lombardo, to a model by Andrea Falcone, was achieved through a conspicuous gift from Anna di Guevara, Princess of Montesarchio.55 Thus what might appear to be straightforward institutional patronage was, in fact, more complex, involving individuals, religious orders, and familial allegiances. Again, the silver reliquaries can be thought of as an unusually mobile and prominent point of exchange for spiritual and political ambitions on all sides. A place in the chapel was worth a great deal to the gentlemen of the Seggi in terms of honour and connection. In June 1628 the Seggio of Montagna deliberated how best to honour St Blaise. They had 2,000 ducats plus interest accrued since 1620 for a suitable project, which was also to involve all the Piazze. They considered expanding the church of San Biagio in the Piazza de’ Librai, building a new church there, and erecting an altar dedicated to St  Blaise in the Treasury Chapel either ‘in the place that today is earmarked for the sacristy of the said Treasury, or in another place adjacent to the Treasury Chapel’.56 They opted for the last of these. A presence in the Treasury Chapel was evidently an expeditious means to accelerate recognition. An altar in or near the Treasury Chapel was much less costly, of course, than an independent church, but it is telling that this was proposed as in some way commensurable. It was impulses such as these that the deputies had to respond to, and harness, to sustain the chapel so as not to eclipse San Gennaro or alienate sponsors. The Treasury Chapel was built expressly to accommodate an unusually large number of patron saints, but the extraordinary explosion in protectors was not anticipated and posed problems for the deputies in managing competing interests and accommodating all the statues effectively. Once the presbytery niches were all occupied, the silver reliquaries were housed in niches in the lateral chapels, sometimes with disaccord over who should be ATSG, AB/12, Conclusioni, document dated December 1674, fol. 15v. ATSG, AB/12, Conclusioni 1673–1685, document dated December 1674, fol. 13v. 55 Corrado Catello refers this fact to V. Rizzo’s research in the Archivio Storico del Banco di Napoli, but does not give precise details. Catello, ‘Argenti’, 307. 56 ATSG, Fasc.CB n. 6, 349, ‘Conclusioni dei Sedili della Città di Napoli relative alla ­padronanza di S. Biagio’, n.f. 53 54

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sited exactly where. As the demand grew for more and more niches to house new patrons, finding suitable niches for each patron saint proved a challenging business for the deputies. Despite the ever-growing number of protectors and the pressure to house them in the chapel, the Deputation always regarded the chapel as more than the sum of its parts, as their notes evince. They strove to safeguard its architectural integrity and symmetry, while also accommodating new protectors. Thus on 7 September 1661 the deputies decided to create a little niche (casella) above the door to the sacristy, to match the niche which housed St Francis Xavier above the staircase door in the lateral chapel opposite (Fig. 11). This, they noted was necessary ‘so as not to spoil the architecture of the Treasury’.57 Likewise, when the Theatines approached the deputies to ask for a niche to be created in the pier to the left of the entrance to house the statue of St Gaetano da Thiene, the deputies’ first concern, noted on 16 December 1671, was that this should not ‘detract from the symmetry and architecture of our chapel’.58 More common problems arose from competition between external institutions over specific niches, and from occasional bungled or confused administrative arrangements whereby the same niche was accorded to more than one saint. The arrangements could get complicated, especially in the period when external institutions were undertaking the production at their own expense of both a silver reliquary bust and a bronze statue of their own saint, in accord with models or designs provided or agreed by the Deputation. The statue and relic of St Nicholas of Bari were, from the time of his first unconfirmed election in 1648, allotted the third niche in the right-hand lateral chapel, facing the sacristy.59 This arrangement was confirmed with minor modifications on 19 October 1662: the deputies noted that his relic should be placed in the ‘new niche which is being made opposite the sacristy door, together with the relics of St Gregory of Armenia and St Teresa, and it is agreed that in the middle position will be St Gregory, in the second St Teresa, and in the third St Nicholas’.60 But the deputies faced real difficulties in juggling limited places between competing institutions; and they tended to favour those that actually produced statues. A document ‘acciὸ non si guasti l’architettura del Tesoro’. ATSG, AB/11 - 1602, fol. 4v. ‘non levasse la semetria, et architettura della n.ra Cappella’. ATSG, AB/11 - 1602, fol. 131r. 59 St Nicholas of Bari was made patron saint of the city in 1648 without the assent of the chapter and clergy of Naples, which followed in 1674, as a document of 12 December 1674 makes clear. ATSG, AB/12, Conclusioni, fol. 16r. 60 ‘Hanno conchiuso che la sua santa reliquia si riponga nella nuova Casella che si sta facenno all’incontro la Porta della sacristia insieme con quelle di S Gregorio Armeno, et di Sta Teresa, et si intenda che nel luoco di mezzo si ponga S Gregorio nel 2.do luoco S.a Teresa, et nel 3.o S Nicola.’ ATSG, AB/11 - 1602, fol. 17r. 57 58

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of 25 April 1668 shows that when the statue of the newly elected St Filippo Neri arrived in the chapel, there was nowhere for it to go, apart from a niche already assigned to St Nicholas of Bari and to ‘San Ligorio’ (St Gregory of Armenia). But as those statues had not yet been made, it was decided to place St Filippo Neri there, while the deputies noted somewhat anxiously that this decision neither cancelled the earlier allocation, nor represented any sort of ‘prejudice’.61 In August 1672, noting that Nicholas of Bari’s niche was already occupied by Saints Teresa and Filippo Neri, the deputies decided to position his statue immediately to the right on entering the chapel, opposite the position already conceded to the Theatines for San Gaetano – and here their express concern was with the balance and appearance of the chapel, to keep it molto proportionato, or ‘nicely balanced’.62 But when the silver statue of St Nicholas finally arrived in the chapel on 27 December 1675, after his formal election, it was, in fact, placed in St Teresa’s and St Filippo Neri’s niche opposite the sacristy.63 Perhaps the Carmelites and Theatines were ‘bumped’ for being slow to produce their silver reliquary. When even these spaces were taken, new reliquaries were housed just outside the chapel in the Treasury complex, in the sacristy, and in the chapel of the Immaculate Conception (Fig. 11). Thus the statue of the Virgin was placed in the sacristy in 1641, as agreed in January 1635; and in 1688 the deputies agreed with the governors of the church of San Giuseppe Maggiore that St Joseph should have the first niche on the right in the chapel of the Conception.64 Even so, it was hard to squeeze in another reliquary with appropriate decorum. On 3 February 1706 the deputies noted that it would be necessary in future to enlarge the chapel ‘to conserve the statues of the patron saints, that are continuously being made in this our most faithful city, or for other requirements of the sacristy’, and to that end they charged the Duke of Flumeri to engage an engineer to see where and how the sacristy could be expanded.65 It may well have been partly as a result of the resort to the sacristy that institutions responded by producing larger and ever more dramatic ATSG, AB/11 - 1602, fol. 84v. ATSG AB/11 - 1602, fol. 135r, 17 August 1672; a document of December 1672 repeats this decision, describing the solution as ‘very balanced’ (‘molto proportionato’). ATSG, CB/11 - 1602, n.f. 63 ‘Havendo l’Illmi Ssri Dep.ti del gl.o S Nicola portata la statua d’arg.to di d.o gl.o s.to nella detta nra Cappella, e preso il possesso come pne di questa fid.ma città da d.i Ill. mi SS.ri Dep.ti del d.o tesoro si è ricevuta d.a statua, e si è posta nel 3.o luoco della casella incontro la porta della sacristia dove vi risiedono gl’altri gloriosi Sta Teresa e S Filippo, e questo per esegutione d’altre Conclusioni di detta illma Dep.ne di d.o Tesoro, e dell’Illme Piazza.’ Document dated 27 December 1675, ATSG, AB/12, Conclusioni, n.f. 64 For the Virgin, see ATSG, CB n. 9 (101), n.f. 1635; for St Joseph, see ATSG, AB/14, Conclusioni, fol. 28r, document dated 2 December 1688. 65 ATSG, AB/14, Conclusioni, fol. 109r. 61 62

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reliquaries. Thus modest busts were replaced by full-length, even multiple, narrativizing figures, which would outshine their rivals and draw attention in even the most obscure corner (Plates 27 and 28). The deputies took pains to ensure that the reliquary busts were treated with due reverence and sumptuously adorned with the best Florentine crimson satin embroidered with gold (Fig. 59).66 But they did not permit specific devotions to override the effect of the chapel as a whole. Thus when the Duke of Spezzano invited devout Neapolitans to tie special silver voti to the chapel’s gate, the Deputation asked Archbishop Pignatelli to prohibit this: ‘The said votive offering, when made, should not be left in the place mentioned, because it will spoil and encumber the architecture of the said chapel.’67 The gate’s work was not to be cluttered and obscured by popular ex-votos; the orchestration of the chapel was to remain firmly in the hands not of the people, but of the deputies, and the efficacy of the chapel in terms of aligning temporal and celestial hierarchies was safeguarded. The deputies emphasized uniformity and conformity to maintain control and efficacy of visual effect and permit the intricate parts of the machine to mesh. They protected their interests jealously. Thus on 20 February 1669 in response to a request from the Discalced Carmelites for the return of their reliquary bust in order to make some repairs and to set it on a silver support, the deputies allowed them the statue, but withheld the relic, and insisted that the reliquary must be back in time for the next festival so that the relic could be exposed along with all the others.68 Although the external institutions paid for the silver work, that work was protected and policed by the deputies in the name of the chapel; material damage resulted in spiritual punishment, and material investment worked on behalf of the chapel and is capacity to interlock the politics of the city of Naples with its diverse religious and civic institutions with that of a saintly band in heaven. Securing a suitable niche for every protector saint challenged the administrative and diplomatic capacities of the deputies as much as the space of their chapel. It was a tight squeeze in all senses. Nevertheless, the initial effect of unity and orchestration that the chapel bestows is not to be dismissed too quickly. The whole display summons not only the saints in heaven to do all The silver reliquaries were to be adorned in special Florentine crimson satin cloth embroidered with gold paid for by their respective monasteries and churches. ATSG, Serie 3, Fasc. CB n4 (99), n.f. The document is not dated, but as it refers to the statues from the monastery of Santa Maria Egiziaca and from the church of San Antonio Abbate, whose saints were made protectors in 1699 and 1707 respectively, it should probably be dated to c.1710. 67 ‘detto voto, quando sarà fatto, non si potrà ponersi in detto luogo a causa che viene a guastare et occupare l’architettura della detta Cappella’. Bellucci, Memorie storiche, 144. 68 ATSG, AB/11 - 1602 fol. 95v. 66

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they can for the troubled city and its sinful populace, but all the city’s institutions and citizens to add to the chorus yet another voice, another face, partly to articulate their own specific interests, partly to tip the heavenly balance. Despite the rivalry and disagreement, the jostling for precedence, and the reluctance to meet the bills, the city and its saints are brought into splendid visibility, engaged with their counterparts in heaven, two complex courts in alignment, and alternately were energized by and refuelled the various intersecting local ‘courts’ of church, monasteries, and convents machinically interconnected through the mobility of their special relics. The body of the niche The rich can only make temples. They may not be or become temples by what they do. Further what is made is amoral artefact, but what one is is immortal – things standing shall fall, but the moving ever shall stay. (Basavaņņa A. K. Ramanujan, Speaking of Siva)69

This chapter opened through one of the unassuming niches that hold the reliquaries containing saints’ relics in the Treasury Chapel. Those reliquaries and their loculi permit the remarkable mobility which has such profound implications for the chapel. Unlike most reliquary chapels, the Treasury Chapel looked after the reliquaries and relics only on loan; and although they were incorporated into, or at least implied within, the chapel’s structure, they remained portable, semi-autonomous, and capable of opening up new lines of flight (Plate 24 & Fig. 60). Thus although the chapel appears to be visually coherent, in it diverse, competing external institutions were present, as well as diverse saints, and it was thus always more than the sum of its parts, always gesturing beyond its boundaries from the very niches and loculi in its walls. Those niches and silver statues radically perforated the chapel and extended its spiritual force across the city, such that it became a point of particularly intensified contact and exchange – material, spiritual, and social – in the city and of the city. It gave the city a new spiritual presence and possibility. The processions are explored in greater detail in Chapter 7, but I have argued above that niches, reliquaries, and statues rendered the chapel open to perforation, movement, and exchange and that it was precisely its unfixed connectivity that rendered the chapel powerful and productive. Thus the niches and the mobility of the reliquaries work (even today) to dissolve the stasis of the mere building, always implying and producing movement, hovering, transience, and nomadism: a fierce rebellion against petrification. In short, the humble niche made possible the chapel-city. 69

Basavaņņa A. K. Ramanujan, Speaking of Siva (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1973), 19.

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The body of the saint is organizationally, biologically, and narratively incomplete. It is indeterminate and amorphous, a series of uncoordinated potentialities which require social framing and ordering in what Foucault calls the micro technologies of power. The chapel-city is one of the crucial factors in the social production of corporeality, material presence, and praesentia of Naples’ protector saints. The chapel-city provides the order and organization that links otherwise unrelated bodies. It is the condition and milieu in which saintly corporeality and heavenly intercession are socially, liturgically, ritually, and discursively made possible. In light of Grosz’s insights, we can think of each loculus not simply as closed-niche, but as window-opening into the city. Thus the saints’ bodies transform and reinscribe the urban landscape. The city-chapel macchina, made possible through the niche, wall, external institution, and processional relationships and investments, emerges as an active force in constituting the saintly bodies; and it leaves its traces on their corporeality. The relics of an ever-growing army of protector saints gathered, like witnesses around the periphery of the reliquary chapel, encased in gorgeous silver reliquaries, a form of tabernacle, not receptacles for the reservation of the consecrated Eucharist, but for the bodily remains of saintly intercessors in heaven. The fragment was made relic through the reliquary – and the fragment of the body socially inscribed. Yet more than this, that ‘receptacle’ was then able to energize the relic, to permit it to cross thresholds, from Treasury to Seggio to church and back again, gathering force of veneration and economic investment, threading a new city into relation to heaven. The relics assumed civic significance through their housing in the chapel. In turn, their ordering in the niches and urban processions directly determined their spiritual importance. Thus they also assumed a new hierarchical order – generated by the architecture of the Treasury Chapel – through their occupation of niches which accorded them privileges of prominence, and order of ranking among Naples’ protectors both in the chapel and in city processions. The niches thereby produce a relation of introjections and projections – neither relic of saint nor the building can be assumed to form a unified system  – both centripetally, towards the central miracle of the chapel, and centrifugally, out to the rivalrous institutions of the city. The city is made and is also made over into simulacrum of the saint’s body and held in place in the loculus; the body in its turn is transformed, urbanized as distinctively city-body. There is at play in the Treasury Chapel a powerful dialectic between fragment and duplication or multiplication between the relic and the saint. The chapel’s saintly populace was not only unfixed and mobile in the city beyond the chapel, but disparate, fragmented, and multiple. Thus the Treasury Chapel

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of San Gennaro is forcefully articulated as superabundantly ‘populated’ by protector saints, a saintly populace that was not only multiple but unfixed, mobile in the city beyond the chapel. Paul Virilio has demonstrated the tendency towards hyper-reality in cities today: the replacement of geographical space with the screen interface, the transformation of distance and depth into pure surface, the reduction of space to time, of the face-to-face with the face to the terminal’s screen: On the terminal’s screen, a span of time becomes the surface and the support of inscription; time literally … surfaces. Due to the cathode-ray tube’s imperceptible substance, the dimensions of space come inseparable from their speed of transmission. Unity of place without unity of time makes the city disappear into the heterogeneity of advanced technology’s temporal regime.70

In the screen we have the implosion of space into time. In the reliquary niche in the Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro time – historical time of the saints’ lives and deaths and the singular time of the miracle – is made present in its movement in and across a space that exceeds itself. So might we not now be tasked with reinvisaging the niche anew? That is, niche reinvisaged, not in terms of depth to accommodate a relic or sculpture, but as surface, as screen.

70

In P. Virilio, ‘The Overexposed City’, trans. A. Hustveldt, in Zone 1–2 (New York: Urzone, 1986), reprinted in K. M. Hays (ed.), Architecture Theory since 1968 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), 19.

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7

Everything joyful is mobile: music, toys, ice cream circulate through the street. (Walter Benjamin and Asia Lacis, ‘Naples’, 171)

The choreography of sanctity

A swarming of relics glorified San Gennaro, the Treasury Chapel, and the deputies (Plates 5 & 7). That clustering of saints together with the export and processing of their relics (Plate 24, Figs 18, 60, 69) bound the chapel to institutions across the city and laced them in a net of subordination, aspiration, and hope. That mapping of different kinds of space made and remade, makes and remakes the city as a labyrinth, an indirect and contorted line, a continuous and indivisible thread, that fashions the chapel as lodestar of a shifting constellation. The reliquary saints of the Treasury Chapel were nomadic, at home in several places, never permanently fixed, and often on the move (Plate 40). Multiple locations coexisted in them. They brought churches, convents, monasteries, neighbourhoods, streets, squares, and excited crowds into the Treasury Chapel.1 They brought the divine to earth. And they participated in heaven through intercession and pleading – a chorus of voices on behalf of a myriad appellants, in the name of something called ‘Naples’. Their mobility mingled different kinds of spaces and connections – social, political, material, biological, economic, and aesthetic – in an assemblage. They made possible its operation at the cutting edge of processes of aggrandizement and influence, through which the Treasury Chapel seemed to be centre stage, and of service and homage, pulling it into the orbit of institutions and forces beyond. This ­chapter is a mapping of those intersecting forces. Processions marked the city, as a tide marks the beach. They bore the saints’ relics across the city and interwove the fates of Treasury Chapel The form of variation that Deleuze calls ‘becoming’ is effectively a movement between different forms of intensity, from high to low intensity, for example.

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and powerful religious institutions across the city, drawing the sway of the Treasury Chapel down dark narrow streets, pooling its energy in chapels and churches scattered across town, and threading participants, apparati, and macchine back into the Treasury Chapel, renewed and resplendent (Plates 24 & 40). And they bound the saints, too, to the Seggi, the largely aristocratic district subdivisions of Naples. Thus Treasury Chapel, churches, monasteries, convents, and the Seggi were repeatedly intercalated in shifting processional patterns. These actions and relations were at once stratificatory and rhizomatic. They intensified and extended the sway of the Treasury Chapel across the city, and renewed the charisma of San Gennaro with the energy of his coprotectors and re-energized the deputation with the devotional commitment of numerous churches and convents. Those boisterous and colourful processions, full of pomp, self-importance, and rivalry, drew participants together and ranged them at odds in reconfiguring the city. If San Gennaro supplied the head and the blood, Naples was the body, through which the blood of processional bodies could flow in strange and jagged pulses – a body to which life could be given through movement, investment, redistribution of impulse and exchange. Processions were more than merely representations of existing social hierarchies, and more than merely ‘ritualistic’ in the sense of performing familiar routines. It was the movement of the procession that opened up new possibilities. The glittering transport of silver heads plotted the interdependence of Treasury Chapel and disparate religious institutions, while forging and testing those alliances. Paradoxically, in removing the reliquary busts from the Treasury Chapel, bearing them through the streets, and accommodating them in their discrete institutions, processions reactivated the busts, chapel, and churches and their intercalation. While the Treasury Chapel was temporarily deprived of their presence and forces, it gained a renewed spiritual authority, together with reinforced institutional affiliation, on each return. Thus absences marked by niches gaping empty (Fig. 46) were paradoxically a sort of renewed opening, a re-engagement capable of enlivening, even perhaps redirecting the chapel’s spiritual claims. Temporary apparati transformed place, rendering it unfamiliar, extraordinary, indeed heavenly (Fig. 48). Participants in the procession passed through enfilades and under arches, squeezed between façades draped in brocade and damask, paused to decipher elegant inscriptions and cartouches, were bedazzled by heavenly abundance on the city streets, by cornucopias, saints, and cherubim that lifted them temporarily into defamiliarized and magical worlds. Thus in 1665 the deputies produced an apparato for the celebration of San Gennaro that included four gateways. Painted in chiaroscuro with pale blue on a heavenly lapis lazuli background, it displayed all the protector saints of Naples, with vases, cornucopias, festoons, and a glory, along with puttini,

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frontispitij (‘frontispieces’ or ‘façades’), and entablatures (cornicioni) on both sides of the street.2 Thus everyday streets were transformed into sumptuous new spatialities, at once a richly embellished architectural framing and an invitation to a new chance, a fantastic civic heaven. Fabulous macchine made for feast days elevated aristocracy, Viceroy, and deputies on towering platforms around the Guglia. Drawings display the wealth of figurative and iconographic freight they bore (Fig. 48). Aristocrats, deputies, clergy, and lesser people, saints, statues, architecture, sculpture, lights, sounds, and smells orchestrated a new configuration of the city, celebratory, unified, stratified, in which heaven and earth were invited to do what they seemed already to have done – to merge in a new dream in which everything stayed the same. Glittering processions of patronal relics through city streets whose steep narrow sides, like cliff faces, were transformed by hangings, brocades, temporary altars, and triumphal arches, rendered the city far more than mere spectacle. It was the most active, the most desired, flirtatious, and selfadvertising participant of all – at once transformed and transformative (Plate 22). San Gennaro thus united rivalrous Seggi, reformed the city visually, and altered the terms of its circulation. Apparati glamoured dark streets; altars elevated squares into temples; hangings brought coherence and extroversion to ordinarily rivalrous and self-serving façades. Doors were flung open, processions snaked from one church to another, one neighbourhood to another, paid homage at one Seggio and then the next. Distance, distinction, and divorce were abolished. An astonishing porosity crossed people and place. Architecture, pavement, worshipper, relic, apparati formed an assemblage that was each time entirely new, exciting, enlivening, riven with unpredictable currents. Simultaneously hierarchies and visibility seemed to make matters orderly and mappable, even as much remained riven and impenetrable. The Seggi, via the deputies, made as if to claim the entire city as their own through the saint. Those claims were – along with the apparati that staged heaven on earth – necessarily temporary, transitory, fleeting. De Certeau claims that in space there is the liberty to experiment, to try new things, but the price is that one cannot keep what one gains. San Gennaro appeared to transform the city and to meld differences, to smooth over institutional rivalries and social differences. These dynamics have been interpreted elsewhere in terms of sleight of hand by the principal beneficiaries who hid their interests behind the divine. Thus Lindenbaum argues that while the London Watch secured material advantages to its producers and principal participants, these advantages could never be explicitly Ascanio Luciano and Natalino Tronci were paid on 29 July 1665 for this macchina, which assumed the form of one made by Luciano in 1662. ATSG, 59/9 1587, fol. 364r.

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stated: ‘It was important that the oligarchs’ exploitation of the lesser crafts and the unliveried members of their own companies be disguised, from themselves as well as others; otherwise, the political system that guaranteed their power would reveal itself as a human arrangement that could be changed, rather than the natural and inevitable way of the world.’3 The profit the rulers earned from these ceremonies was construed as ‘honour’ and ‘worshyppe’ that the governed owed them. This ‘honour’ is what Pierre Bourdieu calls ‘symbolic capital’ – an accumulation of intangible debts and obligations by the governed that can be transmuted back to material advantages, such as fees and obedience.4 At stake was the future of the city, marginalizing intruders, holding at bay natural catastrophes, heresy, plague. Processions were symbolic gestures that affirmed territorial interest. Visual splendour and drama renewed claims to civic terrain. That terrain was shown to be far more than merely mundane. Yet that very enlivening can also be seen as a powerful territorial strategy.5 The processions of San Gennaro

Processions in baroque Naples focused largely on San Gennaro – including his regular feasts and special appeals for intercession undertaken in the face of catastrophe (Plate 14 & Fig. 18). Processions for other saints included those to mark a saint’s election as protector, the translation of his or her relics to the Treasury Chapel, and their annual export back to their home institution on their feast day. These processions, like planetary orbits, intersected and relied on each other for surface and shape, to position the Treasury Chapel, monasteries, convents, churches in interdependent relations of lode stars and satellites, of a constellation that brought a decipherability to unrelated distant and divergent points. They traced, mapped and shaped sinful flesh, flickering silver, indifferent bone, lava paving, stone, frescoes, sound, and fear – in a shifting deceptive veil, an urban assemblage for which ‘urban devotion’ and ‘Naples’ remain but inadequate names. San Gennaro was the centrepiece of Naples’ processional economy. His regular feasts comprised his dies natalis (19 September), the translation of his relics (from Marciano to Naples) celebrated on the Saturday before the first Sunday in May (supposedly it was in this translation that the miracle of Lindenbaum, ‘Ceremony and Oligarchy’, 176. P. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. R. Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 175–184.   5 The festival is necessary and tolerated to the extent that it reserves the necessities of the profane world. It is essential and integrated into the duration of the community. See Bataille, Theory of Religion, 56–58.   3   4

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l­iquefaction first occurred) (Plate 40), and, after 1631, the ‘feast of Vesuvius’ of 16 December (also known as the ‘festival of lights’) (Plate 38).6 In addition, when catastrophe threatened, Gennaro and other saints were processed across the city in a form of ‘communitas of crisis’, what Turner terms ‘a spring of pure possibility’.7 The feast of the translation of Gennaro’s relics is particularly important in relation to our present theme. It celebrated the miracle’s first occurrence during the translation of San Gennaro’s relics, as described by Paolo Regio and imagined in Domenichino’s fresco of the ghirlandati.8 Suffragan bishops and priests, wearing special garlands, traditionally gave their obedience to the prelate in the ‘feast of the ghirlandati’ (or ‘be-garlanded’), coincidentally the moment of the translational miracle.9 ‘This procession is one of the most beautiful and devout religious functions of our city’, writes Girolamo Maria

Maria di Sant’Anna, Istoria della Vita (1707), 388. The translation of San Gennaro’s relics from Montevergine to Naples occurred on 13 January 1497 and was orchestrated by Alessandro Carafa, Archbishop of Naples, and his brother, Oliviero Carafa. The annual commemoration of this event was added to the Januarian feasts already celebrated in the city of Naples. Some traces of this are to be found in the Officium Sanctorum ac Protectorum civitatis Pathenopae published in Naples in 1525. This granted Gennaro considerable importance in the liturgy of the Neapolitan church, as principal patron saint of the city. On the development of the cult after the translation from Montevergine, see Officium Sancti Ianuarii episcopi una cum officio sancti Athanasii, Anelli, Asprenii, Agrippini, Eusebii, et Severi nec non cum officio sanctae Restitutae et Candide numquam ante impressum (Naples, 1525); Luongo, ‘Saint Janvier/ San Gennaro’, cols 983–989, and Luongo, ‘Gennaro’, 765–770.   7 Victor Turner adopts the term ‘communitas’ to distinguish it from ‘community’ (a geographical area of common living) and identifies various types of communitas. He argues that the sacred component is acquired during rites of passage, through change of positions in liminality. V. Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969). 96–97, 131–165. ‘Communitas … is not structure with its signs reversed, minuses instead of pluses, but rather the fons et origo of all structures and, at the same time, their critique. For its very existence puts all social structural rules in question and suggests new possibilities. Communitas strains toward universalism and openness; it must be distinguished, for example, in principle from Durkheim’s notion of “mechanical solidarity”, which is a bond between individuals who are collectively in opposition to another solidarity group.’ Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors, 202. In dramatic contrast to the pronounced emphasis on sinfulness and guilt and to the focus on specific social groups, such as prostitutes, as causal of catastrophe in Naples, Turner, however, suggests that the ‘social mode appropriate to all pilgrimages represents a mutually energizing compromise between structure and communitas; in theological language, a forgiveness of sins, where differences are accepted or tolerated rather than aggravated into grounds of aggressive opposition’. Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors, 208.   8 See Regio, Le Vite de’ Sette Santi Protettori, 10(A)v–10(B)r.   9 The requirement that suffragan bishops should participate was removed in 1578 by the Council of Trent. Maria di Sant’Anna, Istoria della Vita (1733), 406.   6

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di Sant’Anna.10 Thus the feast was adopted in such a way as to endorse clerical hierarchy, while the miracle was Neapolitanized. But a competing current ran through the feast. Until 1525 it was ­celebrated in one of a handful of churches in turn. But in that year the Eletto del Popolo, Girolamo Pellegrino, petitioned the Archbishop to request that the 1525 celebration should be held in the Piazza della Sellaria.11 His request was highly significant. It declared an ambition to wrest the cult from the hands of an aristocratic elite and to identify it more closely with the popolo. More than that, the celebration was to take place in the Piazza associated with the popolo of Naples, rather than in one of their most ‘popular’ city churches, such as the Carmine. Thus this impulse was double-pronged: it was informed  by  a powerful sense of the sacred as embedded in the city ‘fabric’, understood in its broadest sense as encompassing squares, quarters, government, and people, rather than in churches and ecclesiastical hierarchy. Thus people and city were identified here as particularly intimately connected through San Gennaro. Shortly after this in 1527 the city Eletti vowed to spend 10,000 ducats on a ‘tabernacle to conserve the reliquary of Blessed Januarius’ (‘per lo Sacello da riponere lo reliquiario del Beato Januario’), indicating a strengthening of his cult and the Eletti’s urgent ambition to control and secure it under aristocratic governance.12 That impetus gained momentum and eventually reached its apogee in the building of the Treasury Chapel. After 1525, therefore, Gennaro’s feast circulated between the piazze of the Seggi.13 The Seggi, or Piazze – the very name indicates their inseparability from the built fabric of the city – were the five district subdivisions of the

‘Questa processione è una delle più belle, e divote funzioni, che si fanno nella nostra Città’. Maria di Sant’Anna, Istoria della Vita (1733).  11 Maria di Sant’Anna, Istoria della Vita (1733), 390–391. The Seggio del Popolo rebuilt its sixteenth-century seat in the south-east quarter below the defunct noble Seggio of Forcella at the monastery of SantAgostino alla Zecca, near its original site in Via della Sellaria. E. Gardiner (ed. and trans.), Naples: An Early Guide by Enrico Bacco, Cesare D’Engenio Caracciolo & Others (New York: Italica Press, 1991), 48.  12 BNN, MS II-E-2, fol. 357; Strazzullo, La Cappella di San Gennaro, 14.  13 Gregorio Rosso observed in his diary, written in the 1550s but published only in 1635, that at the start of the French siege led by Lautrec, ‘on the first Saturday in May, which was 2 May that year, the blood of San Gennaro was processed as usual through the city, and the catafalque was made in the Seggio di Nido, where the blood failed to liquefy in sight of the head, which was taken as a terrible sign, and throughout the city it was said that the saint’s blood predicted that Naples would lose in that siege.’ (‘Il primo sabbato di maggio, che fu alli due quell’anno, si fece la processione del sangue di San Gennaro, conforme allo solito per la città, e il catafalco si fece nello seggio di Nido, dove non essendosi liquefatto il sangue, alla vista della testa, fù tenuto per malissimo segnale et per la città si parlava che il sangue del santo pronosticava Napoli doversi perdere in quell’assedio.’) G. Rosso, Diari, 18.  10

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city of Naples in which the urban aristocracy was concentrated.14 They were joined by the single non-aristocratic Seggio, the Seggio del Popolo, representing ‘the people’. Indeed, the role of the Seggi in this and other feasts and processions was vital in implicating the early modern cult and rituals of San Gennaro in the civic, and vice versa. Insofar as the Seggi were the districts of the city and the administrative centres for their governance, Gennaro was drawn into closer association with them. However, since the Seggi were always more noble than popular, and since viceroy and archbishop also played critical roles in the miraculous liquefactions in the city squares, what might at first glance seem to be a ‘popularization’ of the cult concealed a more complex reality.15 Even as the circulation of the feast amongst Seggi required collaboration, each Seggio strove to outshine the others in splendour.16 The head of San Gennaro was processed to each of the Seggi in turn annually, where it was welcomed with competitive outburst of torches, apparati, and macchine. Then Gennaro’s blood relics, accompanied by the silver ‘statues’ of the other six protectors, were brought to join it (Plate 10 & Fig. 69).17 Bringing together blood and head like this invited the miraculous liquefaction to take place in the Seggi themselves. Thus the miracle affirmed the city and vice versa, while San Gennaro’s urban affiliations were shown emphatically to be lay, rather than clerical; and civic or urban, rather than ecclesiastical. Pellegrino’s request was thus of the utmost consequence, even if its radically popular potential was swiftly undermined by the noble Seggi. Thereafter  – in addition to the usual locations in the Treasury Chapel and Cathedral – the miraculous liquefaction was made to occur regularly outside in space that was markedly secular – in the piazze of the Seggi themselves. Large numbers of people reluctant to go to church were thus readily able to attend and – this is the key point – the members of the Seggi alongside the popolo of the neighbourhood took part in the orchestration of the miraculous in their

Their membership was closed at the beginning of the sixteenth century. On the Seggi, see Muto, ‘Il patriziato napoletano’, 17–23.  15 Maria di Sant’Anna, Istoria della Vita (1733), 390–391.  16 Maria di Sant’Anna, Istoria della Vita (1733), 390–391. Thus on 11 December 1646 the deputies wrote to the gentlemen of the Seggio di Nido arranging for them to accompany the procession of San Gennaro’s head and blood from the church of Sant’Angelo a Nido to the Cathedral with torches. (‘Per giovedi il 13 del presente, si potara la testa, et sangue del Glorioso S. Gennaro n.ro Padrone nell’ecc.a Cattedrale di q.ta fidelissima Città, dall’eccl.a di S.to Angelo à Nido. Intanto pregamo le SS.re V.e Ill.me, avisare di cio li SS.ri Cavallieri di loro piazza, accio venghino ad accompagnare il d.o Rev. do Santo, che se li daranno le torce, quale se ritroveranno pronte in dett’eccl.a di S.to Angelo, et all SS.re V.e Ill.me baciamo le mani.’ ATSG, C/5, fol. 1r.  17 Regio, Le Vite de’ Sette Santi Protettori, 10(B)r.  14

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own piazze – on their own terms and turf.18 The seats of the Seggi were at the heart of all this. Gennaro’s relics were processed to the altars erected expressly in the seats and there the miracle was conducted. All this rendered the miracle and its saint less ecclesiastical and more intensely local and urban. The ‘city of Naples’ in the Seggi – on these special occasions – became miraculous, capable of transformation. The miracle, frequent if neither regular nor quite dependable, wedded San Gennaro to the people, rooted him in its administrative institutions, its very fabric, its dark lava-dirty streets. Their investment in the miracle thus allowed the Seggi to play a role akin to a religious institution. Thus the interfusion between saints’ relics, processions, Seggi, and city streets produced the effect that the miracle belonged to Naples – and, indeed, that there was a ‘Naples’ to which it could belong. On the Saturday morning of the translation in May, San Gennaro’s head was borne on a brancard to the Seggio whose turn it was to solemnize the feast. Gentlemen and cavalieri of that Piazza and their guests led the way, followed by the deputies of the Treasury Chapel, carrying burning torches. On reaching the Seggio, the sacred head was placed on a sumptuous temporary altar, where one of the two gentlemen chaplains (Signori Cappellani) from the Seggio remained to guard and venerate it.19 Afterwards the Archbishop received the obedience of all the Neapolitan clergy in what was claimed to be an ancient custom, before conducting vespers in the Cathedral. During the singing of vespers, a long and splendid procession, joined by all the clergy and regulars of the city, took place. Thus territory was staked out and bound to the cult of San Gennaro within the chapel and across the city through processions embedded in the Seggi. A strategy for Spain

To hold such a ceremony at the Seggi, rather than in the Cathedral, opened it to the Viceroy.20 Indeed, the Viceroy’s participation – customary after 1596, in the wake of various disputes – is highly significant. Diana Carrió-Invernizzi has suggested that the viceroys’ growing involvement in the feasts of San Gennaro, Corpus Domini, and San Giovanni a Mare in Naples formed part of a strategy of legitimation of Spanish power in Italy.21 This is undoubtedly the case; but the feasts were differently inflected. While the feast of the St John Girolamo Maria di Sant’Anna follows Antonio Sorgente in claiming that the liquefaction in the square was an aspect of developing devotion of the faithful. Maria di Sant’Anna, Istoria della Vita (1733), 395.  19 Maria di Sant’Anna, Istoria della Vita (1733), 391–392.  20 Carrió-Invernizzi, El gobierno da las imàgenes, 387–403.  21 Carrió-Invernizzi, El gobierno da las imàgenes, 392–393.  18

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the Baptist lost standing as a result of over-identification with the popolo and a concomitant withdrawal of clerical support, this was not at all the case with San Gennaro.22 Indeed, San Gennaro’s support was always more institutional than individual or popular. But this should not blind us to its force, since in relation to San Gennaro the institutions – including the viceroy – were in competition, while mutually dependent. The early decades of the seventeenth century were difficult economically and politically for the capital and Kingdom of Naples. Famine, monetary, economic, political crises and grotesque inequality between rich and poor erupted in the revolt of Masaniello in 1647. The city of Naples retained its hegemonic role in the kingdom, even though it was broadly ‘a feudal capital’.23 This situation rendered more tense and difficult the relationships between the noble Seggi and the Seggio Popolare, as well as between the aristocracy and viceroy. Meanwhile the Spanish crown increased the instrumentality of its presence throughout the whole of southern Italy. The cult of San Gennaro can be seen as a fulcrum that steadied some of the forces that were threatening to pull apart a city, and allowed it to continue to sustain aristocratic and Spanish interests. The logic of Gennaro and of the myriad co-protectors was that a unified city already existed and its unified interests were divinely protected. If San Gennaro was primus inter pares in spiritual terms, so his socio-political allies were analogously sanctioned in mundane terms. There was a close relationship between civic power, governability, and the blood’s liquefaction. During Masaniello’s revolt, the blood remained  lique­ fied, and this was interpreted by some as a sign of his desire for an end to the challenge to authority. Giuliana Boccadamo has demonstrated that support for Gennaro did not depend on the fervour of individuals.24 Unlike Andrea Avellino, who attracted mountains of gifts from men, women, and children of all ranks, Gennaro received comparatively modest acclaim (with fewer, if valuable, gifts). He performed his miracles for the city, rather than for individuals. The fates of the great institutions of Naples and Gennaro were miraculously and perilously interwoven. The feast of St John the Baptist was solemnized exclusively by the Eletto popolare and was financed by the lower social ranks. The subsequent split between the popular festival and the liturgical celebration seriously undermined the festival’s significance. In time the Corpus Domini festival assumed the role of the traditional St John the Baptist’s festival, at least in terms of ecclesiastical endorsement and clerical support. See Petrarca, La Festa di San Giovanni Battista.  23 See T. Astarita, The Continuity of Feudal Power: The Caracciolo of Brienza in Spanish Naples (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 58.  24 ASN, S. Paolo Maggiore 1179 lists the ex-vot0 left for Andrea Avellino. See also G. Boccadamo, ‘San Gennaro e Napoli in età moderna: miracoli e devozioni’, ‘San Gennaro e Napoli in Età moderna’, Campania sacra (2007), 41–68.  22

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The Carmelite Girolamo Maria di Sant’Anna observes in his Istoria della Vita, Virtù, e Miracoli di S. Gennaro of 1707 that tensions rapidly developed between viceroy and archbishop over the feast of San Gennaro in the Seggi: ‘in ancient times there were many disputes between the cardinal archbishops and viceroys about the [particular] ceremony to be observed in the Seggio’.25 The Viceroy did not join the procession in the Cathedral, either outward or homeward bound, but went direct to the Seggio to be present at the miraculous liquefaction of the blood. There he was honoured by a ceremonial baldacchino in the presence of the Cardinal also under a baldacchino, something not done in any other function, even in the chapel of the royal palace itself. This anomalous ceremonial ritual is best explained, suggests Maria di Sant’Anna, by the fact that it takes place outside any church, in the Seggio itself, ‘which is considered to be a non-sacred place’ (‘il quale si considera per luogo non sacro’). In short, the miracle of the liquefaction of San Gennaro’s blood, conducted in the open air in the Seggi, elevated the Piazze beyond their administrative and neighbourhood responsibilities to become part of the divine at work in the city. Thus Viceroy, Cardinal, and populace were brought together in the piazze of the Seggi, as nowhere else – not in the chapel of the royal palace or even in the Cathedral – and the miracle became part of the interaction between Seggi, Viceroy (Spanish Crown), Church, and popolo. Indeed, such events produced ‘the viceregal city’ itself and a sense of it as distinct, special, and blessed. Intercalating saints and Seggi

It was through processional movement of relics worshippers and saints that the Seggi were incorporated into the miraculous. And this momentum bound both saint and city tightly to the authority of the – largely aristocratic – Seggi themselves. Through processional movement, the participation of diverse institutions and their investment in the Treasury Chapel occurred, was rendered legible, and was transformed into a civic, aristocratic, and hierarchical order. And the claim of a special relationship between city and saints was built into the substance of that order. Through the cult of San Gennaro and his urban processions, through miracles in their very seats, and in conjunction with their key role in the election of new protector saints, the Seggi consolidated their close identification with San Gennaro and the web of the Treasury Chapel, and thus with a ‘civic holy’ in Naples.

‘e ne’ tempi antichi vi sono state molte differenze trà li Signori Cardinali Arcivescovi, e Signori Vicerè intorno al ceremoniale da osservarsi nel Seggio’. Maria di Sant’Anna, Istoria della Vita (1707), 393.

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More than anything else, the processions inscribed the miraculous in the urban fabric, building and body, thereby reforging it. Miracle, Treasury Chapel, the built city, and its inhabitants were facets of a renewal in what Mircea Eliade calls ‘a time of marvels’ that fashioned a new mystical body.26 Nevertheless, the same processions were also routes of delimitation, lines of separation and differentiation, of assertion and counter-assertion, rivalrous claims and veiled critique. The rapid proliferation of protector saints further implicated the Seggi with the Treasury Chapel in two principal ways. First, they were critical players in the election of new protector saints. Each Seggio, starting with the noble Seggi, was required to vote on and agree to the election of each new protector. At these meetings new stipulations might be added to the terms of the elections, such as specifying which institution would pay for the statue or simply that no costs were to accrue to the Seggio. Soon afterwards, the representatives of all the Seggi met at San Lorenzo to reach a joint decision. They passed their decision in writing to the Archbishop for his consent and action and to the Viceroy. The next stage took place when the relics of the new protector, encased in a new silver reliquary, were translated to the Treasury Chapel. The existing protector saints were processed to meet it, and together they escorted the new saint back to the Cathedral, stopping to pay homage to the city’s key institutions, including all the Seggi. Those same routes were subsequently adopted for the annual procession of the new protector when they returned to their second homes for their feast day. In addition to the regular annual feasts, extraordinary processions and outdoor liquefactions – always involving the Seggi – were staged to ward off particular threats or to give thanks for their aversion. In March 1709, during an acute grain shortage, San Gennaro’s reliquary head was exposed in the Treasury Chapel and his intervention ardently implored. Sure enough, ships which several months before had set off to Apulia for grain and oil appeared in the port on the night of 15–16 March, followed by others the next day, loaded with grain and oil. And ‘the whole city hurried together to the grand Treasury Chapel, rendering the most humble and fulsome thanks to [San Gennaro]’.27 There followed on the feast of the Annunciation (25 March) a solemn procession bearing the saint’s head through ‘the city’s principal streets’, and passing through each of the piazze of the five Seggi, accompanied by the Archbishop, Viceroy, deputies, and other nobles, ‘followed by a huge and multitudinous crowd of people’.28 The procession ended with the return of the relics to the main altar of the Cathedral amid prayers. The cardinal blessed the people with Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, 69. Maria di Sant’Anna, Aggiunte all’Istoria, 15.  28 Maria di Sant’Anna, Aggiunte all’Istoria, 16.  26  27

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the ampoules of blood, which were then handed to the Treasurer for kissing. At the gateway of the Treasury Chapel the Treasurer solemnly handed the ampoules to the chapel’s own chaplains. Distinct jurisdictions were thereby both marked and intertwined by the movement and halting of Gennaro’s relics, which were able to flow out beyond the chapel and Cathedral into the streets, now under the sway of the deputies, now under that of the Cardinal Archbishop, the Viceroy, and the Seggi, recognizing both their discrete jurisdictions and their interdependence. The blood thus held together powerful institutions that might otherwise have split the city and kingdom apart. Thus the export of the relics from the Cathedral can be seen as a mechanism by which the city’s streets and squares and its principal secular urban institutions (the Seggi) were incorporated into the devotion of San Gennaro and the religious practices of his chapel, as well as a means by which the saint infiltrated the city. Passed from hand to hand and place to place, he not only connected diverse social strata and functionaries, linked ecclesiastical to lay, and ignored social divisions, but also marked those very divisions and hierarchies, thereby at once striating and smoothing political, religious, and social fields. Excited crowds followed in procession and gathered to greet the relics on their arrival. Alenka Zupančič has suggested that religion, far from being an ‘opium of the people’ that allows them to escape harsh reality, actually works more as a stimulant and ‘an “excitation-raiser” which binds believers to a reality by activating a mortifying passion’.29 ‘Discomfort is soothed (or silenced)’, she argues, ‘by crises and states of emergency in which a subject feels alive. But this “alive” is nothing other than “undeadness”, the petrifying grip of surplus excitation and agitation.’30 An unresting readiness to address crises with the parading of saints, an apparently endless rearming of the defence with new protectors were forms of this ‘undeadness’, comparable to the deadening frenzy of the Cold War in modern times. The claims of San Gennaro and his Treasury Chapel and its deputies were thus extended as Gennaro was processed into the city and taken to each of the Seggi in turn. But more than this, they were intensified perhaps in the sort of ‘mortifying passion’ of which Zupančič speaks. Thus the streets and squares of the city were marked by the saint, torn open to his authority. That authority encompassed the divine, the deputation, archbishop, viceroy, and the patria, and drew together disparate interests, and paraded them as a coherent whole. In turn, when the saint was returned to the chapel, now so much more a ‘citysaint’ after performing his miracle in the very squares and streets of the city of A. Zupančič, The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), 49.  30 Zupančič, The Shortest Shadow, 49.  29

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which he was protector, the Treasury Chapel was at once contaminated, reenergized, and enriched by those urban claims and acknowledgement. In the process, the seats of the Seggi were transformed into sacred spaces, through the erection of altars, the arrival of the precious relics, and, above all the miracle – that blessing that spelled divine approval and that lay beyond any claim or assertion that mere mortals might advance. San Gennaro’s peculiarly urban role as protector of Naples was thereby staged in the streets and squares of the city itself, under the particular aegis of the Seggi. And the city itself became part of the miraculous transformation. More than mere setting, it was participant and beneficiary. Naples thus owed San Gennaro more than its protection; it owed him its very identity as a saintly city. That which Eliade has called a ‘theophany’ occurred in the city, literally took place, thereby transforming it.31 These energies might hold conflicted interests together, fortify the vulnerable to withstand further tribulations. And yet to what end? Beyond the explosive brilliance of the chapel, what was achieved? Nomadic saints and the reforging of the city

San Gennaro’s urban processions and miracles were profoundly important in drawing together Treasury Chapel and Seggi and in traversing and recasting relations between the chapel and prestigious and ambitious religious institutions throughout Naples physically, topographically, spiritually, and affectively. That work was reiterated and varied, as it were in minor key, by each protector saint travelling to and from her or his home institution. Effectively, a living network across the city. The movement of silver reliquaries across Naples brought change in spiritual intensity, ‘temperature’, and valence. Their restless transits rendered lumpen metal and bone into object of veneration, travelling saint, and holy centrepiece. Once elected, a new protector’s relics were formally translated to the Treasury in the Cathedral by procession through the city. Each feast day they would return home along the same route. Institutions external to the Treasury paid for the reliquary busts and also remained their saints’ second homes. Back to those same institutions the silver reliquary busts were processionally escorted on their saints’ days, not stochastically but on choreographed routes. Those processional routes threaded external institutions to the Treasury Chapel, drawing them together via the Seggi, and emphasized close connection between Seggi and Treasury Chapel in the production and maintenance of sacral protection for Naples. M. Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), xii.

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External institutions made substantial investments in the chapel through their reliquary busts, and on occasion the Treasury Chapel invested in the celebration of its saints outside the chapel. For instance, on 1 October 1670 the chapel’s sacristy lent the nuns of San Francesco its two largest silver splendori, six candelieri, six urns, six frasche (literally ‘branches’: presumably silver ­flowers) (Plate 45), and a cross for their celebrations of the forthcoming feast of St Francis.32 Such a devotion bound the Treasury Chapel to San Francesco delle Monache through shared spiritual investment and material objects. There thus formed a capillary network in which the Treasury Chapel and external institutions accrued spiritual significance through their exchange of relics. This was an exchange that did more than simply transfer an object across space. It altered that space and simultaneously exchange became exponential increase. Silver reliquaries are extracted from the chapel and are plugged into varied assemblages in which their interactions are different. This implies less that the external institutions are present in the Treasury Chapel than that those networks are part of what the chapel is enabled to become. Each time a new patron was elected to join the throng in the Treasury Chapel, existing protectors processed to their home church to greet him or her and join in celebrations held there, and then accompanied him or her back to the Treasury Chapel via the Seggi in a formal incorporation into the saintly urban body. By centralizing and strengthening the cult of San Gennaro, the deputies sought to focus his power and that of all the protectors in one place, thereby better to develop and control it. Paradoxically, while the investment of external institutions intensified veneration for San Gennaro and focused attention on the chapel, it produced currents and impulses quite beyond the boundaries and control of chapel or Deputazione. Times of anxiety provoked pleas to the protectors for their intervention. This necessitated exporting the relics from their usual abodes and transporting them outside into the city streets and squares to motivate and reactivate their intercessionary capacities and the devotion of Neapolitans. In November 1600 ceaseless rain and epidemic engulfed Naples and the bell-tower of the church of Santa Croce ominously collapsed during a storm. The immediate response was to appeal to the saints and instigate processions: Recourse was made to prayers of the Forty Hours and to processions, for which the sacred relics were brought outside, and in particular the head with the blood of the Glorious Martyr San Gennaro; [and] there was seen an immediate clearing of the skies, the calming of Neapolitans’ souls, and the end of the sickness.33 Strazzullo, La Real Cappella, 33–34. ‘s’ebbe ricorso all’orazioni delle 40 hore ed alle processioni, con le quali cavate fuori

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Heaven, soul, weather, and material fortune were altered through an activation of relics that remained as mysterious as it was miraculous. Thus during harvest failure in 1607, processing San Gennaro through the city prompted the immediate arrival of ships loaded with grain in Naples’ port.34 One movement might engender another. The relics were re-animated through their mobilization out of doors across the city. The city–relic relation was reactivated by movement of both relics and the devout through the streets. And thus the city was redrawn. Neapolitans demonstrated their piety and their penitence, and through their displays the city actually became a different place. Thus the procession should be thought not as mere representation of a pious relation to the saints, nor as a movement through space, but as a forging and remaking of devotion, homage, and space. It was precisely the mobility of the silver reliquaries, their capacity to be both somewhere else and somewhere else differently, combined with the potentiality that movement unlocked, that endowed the  matrix of chapel-relics-procession with their capacity for urban reactivation. ‘Everything joyful is mobile’

The procession did more than set institutions in visible relation. Processions afford a symbolic expression and, more than that, a shared exploration of feeling a stranger on this earth, journeying, in the body ensnared in time, and in movements beyond the edge of time, already traversed but not repeated, going to meet Christ.35 Silver reliquaries left the Treasury Chapel on their feast days and were borne joyously aloft through the city, sparkling in sunlight, glimmering in the dark, above the heads of mere mortals, as disconcerting as spectres (Plate 40 & Fig. 69). Back in the Treasury, they were received at each ‘return’ with renewed veneration and enthusiasm. By 1761 twenty-nine of the silver statues wound their way through the streets for their own annual feast days.36 Thus on their respective feast days St Asprenus traversed the Cathedral to a chapel dedicated to him within it; St  Agrippinus went to the homonymous Basilian church. St Severus’ statue processed to rejoin his body at San Giorgio Maggiore. A complex le sacre Reliquie, ed in ispezialtà la testa col sangue del Glorioso Martire S. Gianuario, si vidde in un subito rassenata l’aria, tranquillati gl’animi de’ Napoletani, e cessate l’infermità’. De Montemayor (ed.) Diurnali di Scipione Guerra, 172; see T. Costo, Memoriale delle cose più notabili accadute nel Regno di Napoli dell’incarnazione di Cristo per tutto l’anno MDLXXVI (Naples: Salviani, 1594), 77–78, 82.  34 De Montemayor (ed.), Diurnali di Scipione Guerra, 172; Costo, Memoriale, 77–78, 82.  35 Snoek, Medieval Piety, 250.  36 ATSG, CB/25, Fasc. 129 bis n. 4 (2760), fol. 1.

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c­horeography and cartography of sanctity saw the export of St Thomas Aquinas on 7 March to San Domenico Maggiore; St Patricia (Fig. 60) to Santa Patrizia on 26 August; St Andrea Avellino to San Paolo dei Teatini on 10 November; and St Giacomo della Marca to Santa Francesco la Nova to rejoin his body on 28 November; Blessed Andrea Avellino and St Gaetano travel to the Theatine church of San Paolo Maggiore, and St Gregory of Armenia heads to the church of the same name on 1 October.37 Some relics belonged to two institutions. The reliquary bust of St John the Baptist (Plate 44) was initially commissioned by the convent of Santa Maria Donnaromita; but the protestations of the nuns of San Gregorio Armeno, who conserved his famously miraculous blood, led to an agreement whereby both convents paid for the reliquary (executed in 1695) and the two hosted its homecoming every alternate year. Just as St John the Baptist (Plate 44) alternated between Santa Maria Donnarόmita and San Gregorio Armeno, so St Mary of Egypt (Plate 43) was shared between the convents of Santa Maria Egiziaca in Pizzofalcone and Santa Maria Egiziaca a Forcella, while Santa Maria Maddelena dei Pazzi travels alternately to the Carmine Maggiore and to Santa Maria della Vita on 25 May.38 Such was the desire to join this whirling saintly economy that even when a church had no particular claim to a protector’s relics, it might seek a role. Thus in September 1724 the nuns at Santa Maria Donnalbina requested to host the reliquary statue of St Agnellus in their church on his feast day on 14 December. His statue, they explained, was usually exposed on the main altar of the Cathedral, and ‘he does not go to any church, as is the case with most of the [other] statues of the patron saints’.39 In agreeing to this request, the deputies noted that the nuns of Donnalbina already customarily celebrated St Agnellus’ feast with great pomp in their church, where they also venerated his relics, and therefore decided that, provided the nuns sought the agreement of the Archbishop and chapter, ‘they would grant the statue to Santa Maria Donn’Albina in the same way that they gave other statues of protector saints to their churches’.40 Thus export practices pertaining to protector saints elected after the foundation of the Treasury Chapel were applied retrospectively to Naples’ most ancient protectors.41 History was reinvented to match the logic of the chapel. Strazzullo, Saggi storici sul Duomo de Napoli, 140–143. See Chapter 6 n. 31.  39 ‘non va’ à niuna Chiesa, come si prattica con la mag.re parte dell’altre statue dei Santi Patroni’. ATSG, AB/14, Conclusioni, document of 5 September 1724, fol. 201.  40 ‘condescesì di dare detta statua dal Gl.o S. Agnello alla Chiesa di d.o Ven.le Monistero di D. Alvina nell’istessa maniera, che si danno l’altre statue de’ Santi Protettori alle loro Chiese’. ATSG, AB/14, Conclusioni, fol. 201.  41 For instance, Donna Albina requested permission on 17 April 1747 for St Agnellus to be processed. ATSG, CB n. 23, n.f.  37  38

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Meanwhile the peripatetic saints produced a drama of authority and of ownership, bringing in their wake fabulous silver accoutrements and gifts like a dowry. And a drama of reintegration: deterritorialization demanded reterritorialization. ‘Relics that go out to the main church or that go beyond that should be exposed the following day of their feast with lights on the altar in the Treasury’.42 The Treasury Chapel marked their return with a ritual of reincorporation. Through their dual affiliation, the silver reliquary busts enriched and ­‘contaminated’ the Treasury with the investment and presence of as many external institutions. They permitted external institutions to deterritorialize and infiltrate the Treasury Chapel. That is, they disrupted processes which Deleuze and Guattari call ‘territorialization’ that homogenize heterogen­­ eous blocks of space-time into regulated units. Thus the reliquaries bound the chapel to the city more broadly, and together mapped a city that was at once apparently spiritually unified, while remaining institutionally heterogeneous and stratified. Simultaneously, this movement of relationality produced a chapel that was as porous ‘horizontally’ across the city as it was ‘vertically’ to heaven. The cult of San Gennaro may, in turn, thus be thought not as something preceding or a response to them, but as the effect of these porosities, interconnections, movements, relations, disjunctions, and interpolations. Devotion to particular saints ran deep and was marked on the body, internally and externally, of the devout, as well as of the city. Thus just as façades of buildings were emblazoned with paintings of saints, so saints’ mottoes and devices were worn on people’s backs, extending the chain of devotional transformation. All the senses were deployed. The devout abstained from certain foods on days consecrated to specific saints; fasted on the days leading up to their festivals. And on feast days the air was alive with music, prayer, cries of triumph, the singe of candles and torches, the smell of excited crowds.43 Confraternities and monks, clergy, worshippers, and lookers-on, bodies pressed close, squeezed down Naples’ narrow deep streets, bearing the dense weight of solid silver. Everything was underway. Special music, clothing, fasting, processing, eating intensified San Gennaro’s hold in and through the city. Bodies, metal, bone, sounds, smells, architecture in a porous membrane of machinic sacrality.44 The threads of this processional embroidery ran in many ATSG, H121, undated document, n.f. Capaccio, Descrittione della Padronanza di S. Francesco di Paola, 5.  44 ‘Liminality’ is a term formulated by Arnold van Gennep in relation to rites of passage, transition rites, which accompany every change of state or social position. They are marked by three phases: separation, margin (limen or threshold), and reaggregation. Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage. Victor Turner suggests that although the term ‘liminal’ signifies the importance of real or symbolic thresholds at the middle stage, the term ‘cunicular’ (‘being in a tunnel’) ‘would better describe the quality of this phase in  42  43

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directions and at diverse speeds. At its heart, the chapel shimmered with refracted and renewed splendour. Saints and silver reliquaries in the Treasury Chapel transformed it, continuously perforating it, forging new connections, tentacles leading out to churches, monasteries, and convents all over the city. Conversely, diverse relics representing a plethora of competing urban institutions were tamed, to pay clear formal homage to the first reliquary bust of San Gennaro, and housed at the Treasury Chapel. Letters and petitions in the archive of the Canonesses Regular of the Lateran of Santa Maria Regina Coeli, one of the very grandest of Neapolitan enclosed convents, reveal how keenly an enclosed female convent recognized the spiritual, historical, and institutional potential of ownership of a silver saint, with its concomitant rights to processions and precedence in feasts. That convent possessed a relic of St Augustine on whose protectorship all the city’s Piazze voted and agreed in 1647. But his election was not formally sanctioned. Prevarication upon prevarication ensued, partly driven by discomfort in Rome at the sheer number of protector saints that Naples was busy generating. It appears that the nuns of Regina Coeli, frustrated at the delays, attempted to jump-start the process by going ahead and commissioning a silver reliquary so that Augustine’s relics could assume their place in the Treasury Chapel, even before his election had been formally sanctioned. Thus in 1677 Sister Agostina Riccardo, a lay nun at Regina Coeli, paid for the reliquary, at a cost of 880 ducats for silver and a further 420 for the work of a goldsmith, Domenico Marinelli.45 Meanwhile the abbess and nuns of Regina Coeli appealed to the viceroy to intervene on their behalf to secure Augustine’s formal election. That election was finally officially sanctioned in 1710.46 This episode indicates not only that the presence in the Treasury Chapel of a saint’s reliquary was more important to local interests than formal elections, but that it could speed the process along. Perhaps, to some extent at least, by this date a saint really became an official protector more through the presence in the chapel of its reliquary bust than through formal elections. many cases, its hidden nature, its sometimes mysterious darkness’. Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors, 232.  45 The final payment was made on 16 August 1677. ASN, Corporazioni religiose soppresse, Regina Coeli, 1976, Fasc. 4, n. 3, ‘Notizie per la statua e processione de [sic] S. Agostino’, n.f. The bust of St Augustine presently in the Treasury Chapel dates from 1836.  46 Giovanna Caterina Pignatelli, abbess-elect, relative of Pope Innocent XII Pignatelli, played a crucial role in promoting St Augustine at this juncture and securing papal recognition. Giuseppe Sorge, ‘Memoria delle Raggioni e delle Scritture prodotte nella causa tra il Real Monistero di S. Maria Regina Coeli e i RR. PP. Eremiti Agostiniani del Monistero di s. Agostino Maggiore, Naples, 1715’, ASN, Corporazioni religiose soppresse, Regina Coeli, 1976, Fasc. 4, num.8, p. 5.

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Thus the nuns of Regina Coeli appealed to the Sacra Congregazione dei Riti in about 1700: The city of Naples, most humble supplicant of Your Excellence, reverently informs you that on account of the great devotion that it bears towards Glorious Father St Augustine, as a result of the innumerable graces received from him, has resolved to take him as patron and Protector, as will be apparent from the attached [formally agreed] decisions of the Piazze of that prayerful [city]. That [city devoted] in prayer humbly entreats your Excellencies that, not withstanding the decree of this Sacra Congregazione issued in 1699 in which it is stated that there were not to be received any more petitions from the city of Naples, that you would deign to concede to her, the aforementioned grace, so that it will be possible to render to the aforementioned saint all the honours that are rendered by this petitioner city [Oratrice] to its other Patrons and Protectors, and particularly that the statue of the said saint may be carried on the day of his feast from the Treasury Chapel in the Cathedral to the church of the nuns of Santa Maria Regina Coeli, who profess the same Rule of the Lateran Canonesses, that was professed by the said Saintly Father, and because the said church is the oldest of its order, and so as to keep in it the outstanding and authentic relic of the said saint, [and also] to allow each year the procession through the conventual church by the said nuns.47

In any case Abbess D. Maria Caterina Pignatelli, quite independently of the Treasury Chapel, secured permission from the Sacra Congregazione dei Riti to process this reliquary statue. The procession had pretension. It involved ‘all the Fathers of S. Pietro ad Aram, and behind the baldacchino [with the statue] five abbots wearing the mozzetto’.48 When the Archbishop enquired by whose authority they wore the mozzettas, the Visitatore Buonocore replied ‘Emm.mi e RR.mi SS.ri. La Città di Napoli humiliss.me Orattrice dell’EE. VV. riverentemente l’espone come p. la gran devot.ne ch’hà verso il Glorioso P.re Santo Agostino, à causa dell’Innumerabili gratie ricevute hà risoluto pigliarlo p. suo p.rone e Protett.ne. Si come appare dall’annesse conclusioni delle Piazze d’essa Oratrice; Supp. ca p. tanto humilm.te ll’EE.VV. che non ostante il degreto di questa Sacra Congreg.ne emanatao nel 1699 in cui si disse che non si fossero ricevute più simili instanze della Città di Napoli, si degnino concederle, la sud.a Grazia, affine di poterse fare à d.o S.to tutti l’onori che si rendino dall’Oratrice all’altri suoi Padroni, e Protett.ri, e specialmente che la Statua di d.o Santo si porti nel dí della festa dalla Cappella del Tesoro della Cattedrale alla Chiesa delle Monache di S. M Regina Celi, professando quell’istessa Regola de Canonici Lateranensi, professta dal d.o Sto Padre, e p. esser d.a Chiesa la più antica dell’ordine sud.o, e per conservarsi in essa la Reliquia insegne, et autentica di d.o Santo, con farsi anche ogn’anno dalle d.e monache la porcessione p. abitum Ecclesiae della Statua di d.o Santo, e l’haver à Gratia ut Deus.’ ASN, Corporazioni religiose soppresse, Regina Coeli, 1976, Fasc. 4, n. 8, n.f.  48 ASN, Corporazioni religiose soppresse, Regina Coeli, 1976. Fasc. 4, n. 3, ‘Notizie per la statua e processione de [sic] S. Agostino’, n.f.  47

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that it was a privilege of the order.49 On the eve of the feast of St Augustine, 27 August 1677, the reverend fathers of Santa Maria delle Grazie and of San Pietro ad Aram, joined by more priests, processed the statue ‘with all pomp and music from the enclosure of the venerable convent of Santa Maria Regina Coeli, along the street where stood the convent of Sant’Andrea, and bore it inside the convent church of the Regina Coeli through the main door’.50 The Archbishop and the Congregazione dei Riti granted permission for this procession, which was regularly reiterated via Santa Maria delle Grazie and Sant’Andrea. Following the long-delayed formal ratification of his election as protector of the city, it was later cited as a precedent in Regina Coeli’s claims to the right to process St Augustine’s relics. However, it seems that shortly after 1740 the Cardinal Archbishop refused to grant a licence for the procession, although it had been ratified in previous years.51 Donna Ottavia Riario, a particularly well-connected nun, daughter of Ottaviano Riario, maestro di casa of Cardinal Rospigliosi (Senator of Rome in 1691 and 1711) and Maria Teresa Raggi, played a key role in negotiating on behalf of Regina Coeli, drawing on family connections in Rome.52 What emerges is the nuns’ eager determination to receive the body of St  Augustine in their church, in recognition of their status in the city of Naples and confirmation of their close identification with the saint and their rightful claim to his relic. The procession rendered affirmation and recognition, earthly and heavenly.53 The nuns’ claims to St Augustine’s relics were, however, fiercely contested by the influential Augustinian Fathers of Sant’Agostino Maggiore in ‘the gravest disputes’ (gravissime controversie). Controversy over the election was

ASN, Corporazioni religiose soppresse, Regina Coeli, 1976, Fasc. 4, n. 3, n.f. A document dated 1 September 1685 records this event as a precedent in the quarrel over the right of the convent of Regina Coeli to process St Augustine’s statue. ‘Notizie per la statua e processione de S. Agostino’, ASN, Corporazioni religiose soppresse, Regina Coeli. 1976, Fasc. 4, n. 3, n.f.  51 Processions were certainly authorized in 1738, 1739, and 1740. ASN, Corporazioni religiose soppresse, Regina Coeli, 1976, Fasc. 4. The case was heard in the Tribunale della Reale Giurisdizione, because Regina Coeli was from its foundation under royal protection.  52 Ottavia Riario’s elder sister, Eufemia, was also a nun at the Regina Coeli convent in Naples.  53 Further documents reveal that the nuns appealed to Marianna of Austria, Queen of Spain, to support them in their supplications to the Pope to secure a holy day of obligation for the feast day of St Augustine in Naples. In this they were successful. Papal agreement was given on 7 August 1690. Sorge, ‘Memoria delle Raggioni e delle Scritture prodotte nella causa tra il Real Monistero di S. Maria Regina Coeli e i RR PP Eremiti Agostiniani del Monistero di s. Agostino Maggiore, Naples, 1715’, ASN, Corporazioni religiose soppresse, Regina Coeli 1976, Fasc. 4, n. 8, p. 4.  49  50

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f­ ollowed by conflict over the statue and the rights to its display.54 They disputed which church should be privileged as point of departure for the silver reliquary on his accession as city protector. Tortuous arguments were advanced, teetering between acknowledging ‘universal support’ for St Augustine and claiming a particular ability to generate devotion to the saint, supposedly stemming from historical claims to his relics and processional rights. The Augustinian monks argued that since theirs was the principal seat of the Augustinians in Naples, precedence in celebrating St Augustine’s feasts and displaying his reliquary bust was rightly theirs. Flourishing documents in support of their claim, they insisted that at the very least the statue should alternate annually between Sant’Agostino Maggiore and Regina Coeli. The nuns of Regina Coeli rejected this, arguing that, as theirs were the oldest foundation and the order closest to that professed by St Augustine himself (a Regular Canon and not an Augustinian Hermit), the statue should always go to their church.55 This would thus uphold, they countered, a tradition that antedated the claims of their opponents by thirty years. More than petty bickering between institutions within one religious order, this episode should be seen as an indicator of the significance of ownership of relics in the Treasury Chapel and the capacity of the Treasury Chapel to stir up rivalries far beyond its borders and jurisdiction. To own and process the statue was to possess the saint. The rituals of the Treasury Chapel made visible the new cartographies and choreographies of spiritual authority that fed it and that it espoused and generated. St Francesco di Paola crosses the city

The election of St Francesco di Paola, founder of the Order of Minims, as protector of Naples in 1629 and the celebrations that ensued are described by Giulio Cesare Capaccio in Descrittione della Padronanza di S. Francesco di Paola nella Città di Napoli e della Festività fatta nella traslazione della Reliquia del suo Corpo dalla Chiesa di S. Luigi alla Cappella del Tesoro nel Duomo (Naples: Egidio Luongo, 1631). His account is worth exploring in some detail, because it reveals the complexity of process and potential for alliance and enmity unleashed by a saintly election.56 The process was extended For the delay in securing St Augustine’s election as protector saint, see Chapter 4 above. Sorge, ‘Memoria delle Raggioni e delle Scritture prodotte nella causa tra il Real Monistero di S. Maria Regina Coeli e i RR PP Eremiti Agostiniani del Monistero di s. Agostino Maggiore, Naples, 1715’, ASN, Corporazioni religiose soppresse, Regina Coeli 1976, Fasc. 4, n. 8, p. 6.  56 San Francesco di Paola (1416–1507) was a native of Paola, Cosenza, in the Kingdom of Naples. Capaccio’s Descrittione della Padronanza di S. Francesco di Paola is a rich and clearly idealized account of the event and helps in this case to compensate for the destruction of the records of the Seggi themselves.  54  55

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chronologically and geographically as part of the competing forces for urban dominance. On 1 October 1625 the cavalieri of the noble Piazze met separately in their various Seggi to decide whether to support Francesco di Paola’s election. The deputies of these Seggi then gathered together two weeks later in San Lorenzo, where their decisions were formally discussed and recorded, along with the saint’s most pertinent miracles, which included the magnificent victory over the Ottomans at Otranto led by Giovan Cola Count of Avena, Captain General to Ferdinand I of Naples (achieved through St Francesco di Paola’s fervent prayer while enclosed in his cell for eight days).57 Duly ‘with common celebration and applause, he was elected patron and protector of the city’.58 Next the Piazza del Popolo, meeting in Sant’Agostino, was consulted in what appears to have been little more than a formality: ‘And likewise finding the city oppressed by calamity, they adjudged it just and salutary to add him to the other patrons and protector saints.’59 The Seggi then elected their deputies, who drew up a document, signed with an oath, on behalf of all the Seggi, to commend the new protector.60 The deputies of the Seggi then notified Archbishop Boncompagni and Viceroy Antonio Álvarez de Toledo, fifth Duke of Alva, of their decision.61 Next, the new protector was formally announced. This was a splendid event on 2 November in San Luigi, home of the saint’s relics, attended by by the great and the good including forty-two deputies, together with ‘many other princes and cavaliers’ and a great crowd of people. San Luigi’s advantageous location on the great square opposite the Viceroy’s palace added to the sense of occasion (No. 8 in Plate 46). Indeed, Gilbert Burnet remarked of the Minims at San Luigi that their position on the great square in front of the Viceroy’s palace was well suited to their trade of selling wine by retail, ‘Although Neapolitans do not drink a lot, Yet the house growth extream rich, and hath one of the finest Chappels that is in all Naples.’62 The church was richly incensed and adorned, with seats of velvet ‘arranged like a theatre’ on carpets and with brocade cushions, and the air filled with music and singing. One hundred brothers of the Order of Minims entered holding lit torches, along with the Reverend General of the Order, Fra Simone Bachillier. The Treasury deputies formally signed the documents justifying Francesco di Paola’s claims to protectorship with shouts of ‘Viva! Capaccio, Descrittione della Padronanza di S. Francesco di Paola, 10–11. Capaccio, Descrittione della Padronanza di S. Francesco di Paola, 7–11.  59 Capaccio, Descrittione della Padronanza di S. Francesco di Paola, 13.  60 Capaccio, Descrittione della Padronanza di S. Francesco di Paola, 14.  61 Capaccio, Descrittione della Padronanza di S. Francesco di Paola, 13.  62 Burnet, Some Letters, 192–193.  57  58

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Viva! San Francesco!’, whereupon the bells of San Luigi and nearby churches rang out in support, mortars were fired, and shouts of joy filled the air. The Father General of the order intoned the hymn Te Deum laudamus and then presented the saint’s ‘spinal neck bone, the most precious and inestim­ able joy’, to the city of Naples so that it could be ‘perpetually enjoyed and conserved’ together with the other protector saints’ relics in the Treasury Chapel.63 ‘And so that it could be placed there with magnificence equal to the other protector saints, the friars of San Luigi decided to gather alms to have a silver statue made, in which to place the relic, and which then would be transferred to that chapel with a solemn procession’.64 Capaccio adopts terms of treasure, precious gift, and generosity. Yet the transfer can be seen as a provisional loan, an investment expecting to accrue interest. It was felt, claims Capaccio, that no greater or more precious gift could be made to the city, ‘which was deemed to be happy, enjoying such a great treasure’.65 In the meantime, while the silver reliquary was made, the city magistracy, comprising six cavalieri from the noble Piazze and one citizen from the Piazza del Popolo, ‘eager to show themselves to be reverent and obsequious to the new patron, in the name of the whole city’, formally agreed to hold a public celebration in the church of San Luigi on 2 April, the dies natalis of the saint, with the musicians of the royal palace singing motets in praise of the saint.66 This was another occasion for dazzling artifice, fireworks filled the air with explosions and flashes of flame, shared by the ‘whole city’, as Capaccio tellingly describes it, in a sort of charged porosity in which architecture bristled with explosive celebration: through windows, loggias, across roofs of the houses of princes, cavalieri, leading citizens, and everywhere of the people, and even of secular and regular priests, and of all the religious orders, even nuns.67

Capaccio likens the fireworks to the miraculous light over his parents’ house that had betokened the birth of St Francesco di Paola. ‘[The fireworks], a new invention, with very pretty and ingenious arrangements, divided into numerous lights that almost rivalled the stars in the sky’.68 Fireworks and celebration drew artifice, nature, and the divine in a splendid new urban assemblage, in which dark became light and saint remade the city. Capaccio, Descrittione della Padronanza di S. Francesco di Paola, 19–20, 21. Capaccio, Descrittione della Padronanza di S. Francesco di Paola, 20.  65 ‘la quale si riputava felice godendo un tanto tesoro’. Capaccio, Descrittione della Padronanza di S. Francesco di Paola, 21.  66 Capaccio, Descrittione della Padronanza di S. Francesco di Paola, 23.  67 ‘Per le finestre, per le loggie, e per i tetti’. Capaccio, Descrittione della Padronanza di S. Francesco di Paola, 21.  68 Capaccio, Descrittione della Padronanza di S. Francesco di Paola, 21.  63  64

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At San Luigi celebrations continued late into the night until the church doors were locked and the holy statues processioned into the argentierie or saferoom.69 The following two evenings were similarly lit up with sounds of joy, lights, fires, flashes, and peals of bells from all the churches.70 The next morning the statues were repositioned in the same order on the altars and a huge crowd celebrated holy communion. At two o’clock that afternoon, the Eletti, many nobles, including the Prince of Stigliano, the Marchese di Villa, two bishops, along with cavalieri, citizens, regulars, and a great crowd of people celebrated Mass together. The deputies returned to San Luigi an hour before vespers, along with the secretary Giovanni Domenico Siniscaldo and the city notary Giovanni Leonardo d’Aulisio to authenticate the relic and formally record its consignment.71 The Minims promised to seek alms in order to replace their wooden statue with one in silver, ‘so that it could be set up with pomp equal to that of the other protector saints’.72 The deputies for their part promised to set it in position with the others in the Treasury Chapel as soon as the new ‘more sumptuous chapel’ was finished. They also agreed that each year on the anniversary of the relic’s translation, they would release the reliquary to the Minims and it would be ceremoniously transported to their church of San Luigi and back to the Treasury Chapel, with the same prerogatives that were established for the translation of the relic of St Thomas Aquinas.73 The Congregation of San Luigi led the procession, holding aloft a standard adorned with the Madonna della Carità, St Francesco di Paola, and St Louis, King of France, members of the Congregation of Minims kneeling below, and at their feet the city of Naples.74 Thus again the city of Naples figured in a representation that celebrated a protector and was transported through it. Naples assumes a position at the bottom of a tripartite hierarchy of city, religious order, and saints and Virgin. Thus the city is subordinated to the Minims, who assume the role of intercessor between heaven and city that is usually conferred on a saint. Even as ‘the city’ is refashioned and reconfigured, it occupies a subaltern and even obsequious relation to the Minims. Opposite San Luigi, the Palazzo Reale was made sumptuous with marvellous hangings on walls, windows, and balconies: ‘silver and gold competed with, not to say outshone, the Shah of Persia’.75 The walls of the monastery opposite San Luigi were cloaked with rich damask hangings, interspersed Capaccio, Descrittione della Padronanza di S. Francesco di Paola, 99. Capaccio, Descrittione della Padronanza di S. Francesco di Paola, 100.  71 Capaccio, Descrittione della Padronanza di S. Francesco di Paola, 101.  72 Capaccio, Descrittione della Padronanza di S. Francesco di Paola, 20.  73 Capaccio, Descrittione della Padronanza di S. Francesco di Paola, 103–104.  74 Capaccio, Descrittione della Padronanza di S. Francesco di Paola, 107.  75 Capaccio, Descrittione della Padronanza di S. Francesco di Paola, 395.  69  70

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with the most beautiful velvet curtains, ‘producing a graceful prospect’.76 A marvellous altar in front of the church of Santo Spirito was surmounted by a baldacchino of rich gold brocade and ‘a canvas sky’ (un cielo di tela) stretched across the piazza.77 The city was thus turned inside out, outside in, nature was outshone in artifice, and everything rendered extraordinary. Plates 46 and 47 show the processional routes taken during the t­ ranslation of the relics of St Francesco di Paola to the Treasury Chapel after his ­election as city protector in 1629, as recorded by Giulio Cesare Capaccio. That proces­ sion assumed two parts. First the Minims carried the reliquaries of the existing ­protectors out of the Cathedral to meet the new saint at his home church (Plate 46). The processing of protectors’ relics to greet a new protector at his or her ‘home’ church was customary by this date. Thus existing protectors paid a form of homage to the new saint, and with it their institutional seat, while visibly incorporating him or her into their number on 26 May 1629. As many as two hundred Minims processed to the Cathedral, carrying six reliquary busts, including San Gennaro himself grandly dressed in his embroidered and bejewelled chasuble and silver mitre, back to San Luigi ‘for the greater glory of the translation of the relics’.78 Their route from the Cathedral is shown in green in Plate 46. From the Cathedral (Plate 46 n. 1) they headed towards San Paolo Maggiore (2), passing the Seggio of Montagna (‘B’ in Plate 46) and Santa Maria Maggiore, before descending into the piazza of San Domenico (4), then on past the Gesù Nuovo (5) and thence into Via Toledo (6), to the piazza of the Palazzo Reale (7), where the standard of St Francis was greeted by a salvo of mortars and arquebuses. That route paid homage to the Theatines, Dominicans, Jesuits, and Viceroy. At the sound of the guns, hundreds more Minims, holding burning candles, emerged from the church of San Luigi (Plate 46 no. 8), behind them the silver statue of St Francesco di Paola under a baldacchino of white ormesino (a particularly prized fine silk), worked with gold, emerged to greet the statues of the other patron saints; whereupon the statue of St Francesco di Paola joined that of principal patron saint, San Gennaro, to be transported under the same baldacchino.79 The Minims’ route back to the Cathedral – this time with the new protector – was more elaborate (Plate 47). It called at each of the Seggi and nodded to the most important orders and churches, including the Clarissans, Franciscans, Jesuits, Theatines, Olivetans, Clerics Regular Minor, and Dominicans. Important landmarks en route marked viceregal, civic, ‘rendeano vaga prospettiva’. Capaccio, Descrittione della Padronanza di S. Francesco di Paola, 108.  77 Capaccio, Descrittione della Padronanza di S. Francesco di Paola, 114.  78 Capaccio, Descrittione della Padronanza di S. Francesco di Paola, 95, 96.  79 Capaccio, Descrittione della Padronanza di S. Francesco di Paola, 97.  76

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and aristocratic power, and included the piazza in front of the royal palace (2) and the Castel Nuovo (6), as well as noble palaces and whole streets. The newly elected patron and his Minims therefore paid ritual homage to all the major institutions of the city while they were formally greeted, honoured, and accepted by them. This more complex route was reiterated every feast day – once again affirming and making visible the connection between protector saints, their relics and their home institutions, the Treasury Chapel and the Seggi, past and present, in a form of urban pact. San Gennaro’s Guglia and the sanctography of the city

The processions that wended their way down narrow streets, between palaces, and into the seats of the Seggi and churches were preceded by sudden eruptions of temporary architecture and decoration. But for the ‘feast of Vesuvius’ a towering fantastical monument in stone, designed by Cosimo Fanzago the Guglia, was erected in the small square to the south of the Cathedral (Plates 29 & 30, Figs 40 & 52).80 The ‘feast of Vesuvius’, celebrated on 16 December annually after 1631, became also the feast of his patrocinio. The processional route for 16 December was quite short and more or less simply encircled the Cathedral. From the Duomo, it ran via the Seggio of Capuano, along the vico del Seggio Capuano, and in front of the Archbishop’s palace, before returning inside the Cathedral (Plate 38). Relative position in carrying the brancard (palio) was a matter of fierce hierarchical contention (Fig. 69); it was formerly decided that the poles of the brancard transporting the head and blood should be borne by the Eletto of the Popolo (first on the left) and by the five Eletti of the noble Seggi.81 Meanwhile the ‘feast of Vesuvius’ or ‘festival of lights’ became highly elaborated with lights, scenography, and raised seating platforms in the square, later organized around the Guglia (Fig. 48). The Guglia, commissioned by the deputies of the Treasury in 1636, comprises a glorified column shaft supporting a bronze figure of the saint aloft. After many delays, it was finally erected and consigned to the city on 6 December 1660 (Plates 29 & 30, Fig. 40).82 This festival, in its intense focus on the Guglia served to Fanzago’s Guglia was commissioned in 1636 by the Deputazione of the Treasury of San Gennaro – but was not erected until 1660.  81 Maria di Sant’Anna, Istoria della Vita (1733), 414.  82 Like so many of Cosimo Fanzago’s projects, it had become enmired in dispute and delay, which are effectively documented elsewhere. A document in the BNN (MS S. Martino 265), ‘Raggioni per il Cavaliere Cosmo Fansagha con l’Ill.mi Deputati del Tesoro del Glorioso S. Gennaro sopra la construttione del piedestallo Colonna et ornamenti per la statua del detto Glorioso Santo’, reports that Deputies of the Cappella del Glorioso Santo Gennaro in 1637, ‘in recognition of the grace received by the city of Naples as a result of his intervention, especially in relation to Vesuvius’, reached  80

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extend San Gennaro’s sway out of the Cathedral and Treasury Chapel and into the city towards the most popular and poorest districts, even while the elaborate staging and seating erected for the occasion rendered it a socially hierarchical and aristocratic affair. The Guglia renounces all liturgical functions to be festive, protective, and celebratory. This permitted it to occupy part of the city as a permanent feast, not merely honouring San Gennaro, but incorporating his celebration, indeed the saint himself (Fig. 40), into the fabric of the square and the sky above. The Guglia thus marks the supreme culmination of San Gennaro’s extroversion. The saint standing atop the column, who keeps the city under protection and surveillance, is of bronze (Plates 29 & 30). Far more expensive and more eye-catching than marble, bronze also links the figure materially to the Treasury Chapel itself, and thus marks the saint’s leap, as it were, through the great bronze gate. It draws the eye to the figure atop the column, like an ancient idol.83 San Gennaro’s figure thus refers to the statues of Rome’s patron saints, Peter and Paul, which were placed on top of the ancient Roman columns of Trajan and of Marcus Aurelius by order of Pope Sixtus V in 1588. In this the Deputazione initially followed closely the Roman model of using agreement with Cavalier Cosimo Fanzago to erect ‘the statue of the glorious saint atop a column, with its pedestal, according to the design by the aforementioned Cavaliere Cosmo’ (‘vennero a conventione con il Cavaliere Cosmo Fansago d’erigere la statua d’esso Glorioso santo sopra una colonna con suo piedestllo, et ornamento, conforme il disegno del detto Cavaliere Cosmo’). This suggests that Fanzago’s drawing formed a basis for his work, rather than a final indication of finished work; Fanzago continued to elaborate and improve the work. See also Strazzullo, ‘La vertenza’, 173. See also N. Napoli, The Ethics of Ornament in Early Modern Naples (Farnham: Ashgate: 2015), 210–211; D’Agostino, Cosimo Fanzago. ‘The pyramid was made in two stages: the pedestal was begun in 1637, and until 1645 only up to the lower cyma [cimmase abbasso] had been completed. In that period, from 1637 to 1645, various payments totalling 7650 ducats were made by the Deputazione. All of which were received by Cavaliere Cosmo for the costs of manufacture and marble. Then in 1657 it was taken up again, and again the said work was embarked upon anew, and it was completed in December 1660, and 5530 ducats were spent on it, as confirmed by the note made by the Duke of Flumeri.’ ATSG, DC-14, 1637, n.f. For the claim that in the guglie, two models meet: Roman obelisks, as in the employment of the column in the guglie of San Gennaro and San Gaetano, and the wooden or cardboard pyramids frequently used for urban festivals in the viceregal period, see G. Cantone, ‘L’architettura’, in Civiltà del Seicento a Napoli, vol. I, 66–67.  83 The free-standing figure-on-column format referenced a type. In medieval images the free-standing figure on top of a column represented the pagan idol. M. Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Michael Cole usefully emphasized this and argued that the device and the reference to pagan idol would still have been readily recognizable in Sixtus V’s time. M. Cole, ‘Perpetual Exorcism in Sistine Rome’, in M.Cole and R. Zorach (eds), The Idol in the Age of Art: Objects, Devotions and the Early Modern World (Farnham and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2009), 61.

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a pagan work to support the Christian image. The Deputies first aimed to re-use an Antique column for the shaft (which would have even more literally evoked a pagan idol).84 Even without an Antique column, the cultural reference to Christian triumph over pagan Antiquity in the saint martyred by a pagan ruler is powerfully declared. Column and figure open a kind of portal, a channel through which heaven and earth might reach to touch each other.85 In the Guglia, as in the Treasury Chapel gate, the architectural order is problematized, excavated, and deformed (Plate 1 & Fig. 40).86 A drawing in the Treasury archives by Fanzago shows his swift pencil additions to the column, buttressing it with brackets altering it into something more dynamic. He introduced a bulge in the shaft that recalls ‘cannon’ columns of Renaissance Lombardy, particularly Milan.87 It has been claimed that ‘sculpture becomes architecture’, or that ‘the naturalistic element is rewritten’.88 But even more than this, the classical order is less embellished or refashioned into something already known, than imperilled and transformed. San Gennaro’s address is wonderfully extroverted. He locks the citizen into an incontrovertibly privileged relationship with the chapel, while he himself looks away from it, out across the city towards the sea (Plates 29 & 30). He reaches out across the city, achieving in an exaggerated and permanent form the protection afforded in 1631 against Vesuvius. More than this, the figure refers to all the processions, including those that had passed and were yet to pass below. The sculpture atop the column salutes all the passing saints as they pass below in homage, including even his own – in a strange multiplication and proliferation in different registers – static and mobile, stone and bronze, permanent and ephemeral – becoming the assemblage that is the city. San

The Deputation recorded on 22 April 1637, ‘Cardinal Boncompagno has granted to this most faithful city the two parts of the column that are to be found in the space of the main door of the said church, and the other at the small door’. ATSG, 59/9, 1587, fol. 254. On 10 October 1668 the Treasury deputies agreed to offer the column at the main door, unused in the Guglia, to the Theatines at San Paolo to use in their statue to Blessed Gaetano da Thiene, with the request that the city’s coat-of-arms should be added to commemorate the donation. ATSG, AB/11 - 1602, Conclusioni 1661–1673, fol. 90v. Soon afterwards, on 20 March 1669, they decided instead to offer the column for the piramide to the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception proposed by Viceroy Pietro d’Aragona ‘to increase devotion of the faithful to the most glorious Virgin of the Immaculate Conception’. ATSG, AB/11- 1602, fol. 96v.  85 Michael Cole points out the effect that earlier idols had on allied armies, such as Constantine at the Milvian Bridge. See Cole, ‘Perpetual Exorcism in Sistine Rome’, 57–76, esp. 67–69.  86 Cantone, ‘L’architettura’, 67.  87 The drawing is located in ATSG, 59/9 1587, fol. 207v.  88 For the claim that architecture and sculpture become one, see Cantone, ‘L’architettura’, 67.  84

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Gennaro is here more than a distant intercessor before the throne of God; he is guardian and moral compass for the city – almost a personification of its identity. Gennaro reaches across the city, a defensive portent, an annunciatory presence. An idol becomes a prophet. Less ‘theatrical’ than admonitory, the Guglia invokes San Gennaro’s protection of the city (particularly the chapel, the Deputation, the Duomo), and calls upon the citizens of Naples to honour and venerate him in order to strengthen that protection.89 High up above the citizens is this real sacred presence in the world. A heavenly shield, able to deter attack, extinguish disease, and deflect divine punishment, he stands as hope for the city’s health, for the possibility of grace, and for God’s power and mercy. The Guglia elevates urban misfortune and deliverance on high, combines them both, along with pagan allusion and Christian promise, in a declaration of triumph that is simultaneously past admonition and futural warning. In an open declaration of institutional rivalry, San Gennaro confronts the facade of the Pio Monte della Misericordia (Fig. 40). The congregation of laymen of the Misericordia was founded in 1631, the year in which Gennaro triumphed over Vesuvius.90 The two aristocratic institutions, radically divergent in aims and aesthetics, both overlooked the small square outside the southern aisle of the Cathedral (Fig. 52). Francesco Picchiatti’s white stuccoed chapel, artfully unshowy, elegantly exploited framing devices to position the viewer spatially and optically to view the magnificent painted altarpieces, especially Caravaggio’s Seven Works of Mercy (Fig. 58). The two institutions were at sharp variance aesthetically and politically. The Guglia allowed the Deputation to occupy the square they both addressed and to assert the ascendancy of Gennaro and his splendid court of saints over competing aristocratic claims to good works and simplicity. The Guglia unequivocally announced the deputies’ urban ambitions. To the citizen, standing in the square outside the Pio Monte della Misericordia and gazing up at San Gennaro high up on his column, the imposing cupola of the Treasury Chapel looms behind the saint, announcing his bloody miracles in the ampoules on its cusp (Plate 30). The sculpture works like a rivet to secure the visual axis citizen-San Gennaro-Treasury Chapel, even when the citizen is not a worshipper, but is in the street, moving about her or his daily business. Thus the Guglia pinions the citizen’s relation to the protector saint to the Deputation’s institutional and spiritual power. Among the first to describe the Guglia as ‘theatrical’, an epithet much repeated by subsequent scholars, was Gaetana Cantone. See Cantone, ‘Architettura’, 67. The term ‘theatrical’ risks simply transposing architectural politics and religion to a register of representation and another sphere.  90 Falcone, L’Intera Istoria di San Gennaro, 512.  89

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Thus the Guglia statue was a redefinition of the salus publica, part of the exploitation and intensification of the vehicular capacities of the saint in delivering messages and visions from God to the world. Inside the Treasury Chapel worshippers encounter sculptural saints at eye level or just above (Fig. 2), but on the Guglia, San Gennaro is silhouetted high above them, threat and promise against the sky (Plate 30). The obelisk, writes Parrino in 1700, ‘is in the form of a column trimmed with embellishments and festoons, at the summit is the statue of the saint in bronze, with four small putti in marble, holding his insignia; at the base a Siren holds the inscription: “To San Gennaro most outstanding protector of the patria and Kingdom, by the grateful city of Naples in the highest merit”.’91 From top to bottom San Gennaro replaces Parthenope in a new force field. San Gennaro looks down at the citizens of Naples, who must squint up at him against the sky (Plates 29 & 30). Thus the baroque city as force field is fragmented and brought into focus via the saint, in something akin to what Bruno Latour has termed an ‘oligopticon’, a series of partial orders, localized totalities, with the ability to gaze in some directions, but not others.92 The Guglia is a device which records and organizes the city’s encounters with San Gennaro to re-order the city accordingly, thereby developing a new choreography and a new sancto-geography. Whereas angels merely communicate, saints possess bodies somewhat like demons, occupying statues and living persons. San Gennaro looks down on the people below and on the knotted deep dark streets and soaring palazzi and churches of the most densely inhabited quarter of Naples. Poised above and in command of the city, Gennaro, triumphant against idols, himself resembles an idol. An ambivalent figure, he hovers above the people, scorning what he saves, detached from the filth, noise, and hurly-burly, the intrigue and chicanery, halfway to heaven, with a vision of hell. Constellatory potential

Immediately above the entrance to the Treasury Chapel two small frescoes by Domenichino stage an important claim for the identification of Gennaro’s miracle with the city of Naples. In the fresco on the left, amid the slaughtered martyrs at Pozzuoli, a solitary woman gathers San Gennaro’s blood from the ground in two little ampoules. The fresco on the right, directly opposite, shows the head of San Gennaro processed on a brancard by garlanded priests. Here, ‘D. Januario Patriae Regniq: Praestantissimo Tutelari. Grata Neap. Civ. Optimo merito’. See also Parrino, Napoli Città Nobilissima, vol. I (1700), 380.  92 See A. Amin and N. Thrift, Cities: Reimagining the Urban (Cambridge and Malden, Mass.: Polity, 2002), 92.

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passing the sacred ampoules to a senior priest, the same woman falls to her knees. The priest holds one ampoule up, close to the saint’s head. When the other follows, the miracle will take place. While this was unforeseen (indeed, unforeseeable) by the protagonists in the drama, later Neapolitan viewers of the fresco could see it in terms of anticipation, the holding in suspension, a miracle as that which is awaited. These frescoes foreground the witnessing of the miracle, what is required of the witness, the extent to which the witness is one altered, and thus the significance of witnessing in the economy of redemption (including urban redemption). Linking these two events is the city of Naples and its miraculous salvation from Vesuvius by San Gennaro, the subject of the large fresco (Plate 20). Thus at the entrance to the chapel, the small frescoes enunciate an important claim for the city of Naples and the Treasury Chapel. They underscore the centrality of Naples and Neapolitans to the miracle. If the miraculous liquefaction of Gennaro’s blood first occurred as his relics were united as they neared the city of Naples, this was a sign that Gennaro approved Naples’ special claim to his relics, and thus a signal of his special regard for it. The miracle recognized Naples as a special place. Moreover, the fresco shows this event, of enormous spiritual and historical importance, as if precipitated by a procession. It was the relics’ movement that elicited the miracle. Thus it is the constellation of relic, city, and procession that is staged as potentially miraculous. The procession of the blood was, therefore, the recognition of that constellatory potential. And it was that constellatory potential that the many ritual processions of saints and Gennaro’s relics that were subsequently organized in Naples sought, made evident, and reactivated as they striated streets and squares, and permeated the Seggi and churches, with their strange faces and hidden hopes. Victor Turner argues that all rituals of any length represent a passage from one position, constellation, or domain of structure to another. ‘But in passing from structure to structure many rituals pass through communitas’, which, he suggests, is almost always thought of ‘as a timeless condition, an eternal now, as a “moment out of time”, or as a state to which the structural view of time is not applicable’.93 This chapter argues that the processions of relics in Naples generated by and circulating through the Treasury Chapel were more than mere reiterations of historically significant routes, more than mere representations of rituals, and more than mere staging of socio-political hierarchies. They were a renewed search for the potential of the constellatory. More than a staging of a petition for divine assistance, they set out to seek and became part of the provision necessary for the providential. Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors, 238. ‘It would be unwise, and in fact incorrect, to segregate structure too radically from communitas.’ Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors, 253.

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Domenichino’s frescoes above the chapel entrance thus reveal a secret about the miracle and its particular investment in the city of Naples. The formal instruments of the Catholic Church – the Breviarium Romanum (1568), the Missale Romanum (1570), and the Martyrologium Romanum (1584) – are silent on the occasion of the first miracle of the liquefaction of San Gennaro’s blood.94 While they refer to the liquefaction of the blood when placed before his head, none of them specifies the first occasion on which this miracle occurred; and none refers to the gathering of the blood in ampoules by the devout Neapolitan woman, or to the recent translation on 13 January 1497 of the relics from Montevergine to Naples and the corresponding liquefaction of Gennaro’s blood.95 But in Naples – in the Treasury Chapel itself – precisely those claims, linking the miracle to the saint’s bond with the city, are declared. That the miraculous blood in some way claimed Naples for itself was suggested in a surge of hagiographies published in Naples from the 1570s. The Vita Ianuarii (Life of Januarius), first published in 1571 by Davide Romeo in his Septem Sancti Custodes ac Praesides urbis Neapolis, was soon republished in Italian by Paolo Regio in 1573, and a revised version quickly followed from Regio in 1579 (Fig. 32).96 Both Romeo and Regio claim that after the saint’s The Kalendarium, effectively a list of sanctioned festivals and saints’ days, added to the Breviarum Romanum in 1568, does not prescribe any feasts for San Gennaro. Thus 19 September, celebrated in Naples as his dies natalis, is not dedicated to him. The Breviarium Romanum itself includes no hagiographical reference to san Gennaro. The first complete edition of the Martyrologium Romanum (the second version to appear in 1583) celebrates San Gennaro and his companions on 19 September; and this is repeated in all subsequent editions (1584, 1586). G. A. Guazzelli, ‘Il culto di San Gennaro nella liturgia post-tridentina’, in G. Luongo (ed.), San Gennaro nel XVII centenario del martirio (305–2005): atti del Convegno internazionale (Napoli, 21–23 settembre 2005) (Naples: Campania Notizie, 2007), vol. II, 18, 23–24.  95 Likewise in accounts of the liquefaction written outside Naples, these details are not specified. See Guazzelli, ‘Il culto di San Gennaro’, 15–17.  96 Regio, Le Vite de’ Sette Santi Protettori. Regio claims that he began to write the vite of the seven protector saints in 1570 and that the volume was ‘printed immediately’. I have not been able to trace any volume prior to 1573. Regio argues that at the time of his writing the saints were ‘almost unheard of and were unknown to modern Neapolitans’ (‘io mosso l’anno della nostra Salute MDLXX presi la penna à descrivere le vite de’ sette Santi Protettori di Napoli, che quasi peregrine, & incognite erano ai moderni Napolitani’). He explains that dissatisfied by the incomplete nature of that first account, he undertook the task again, gathering material together from friends, chronicles, writings, and other worthy antique sources (‘mi diedi à trascriverle di nuovo, raccogliendo a mano, in mano da diversi amici diversi fragmenti di Croniche, di Scritture, & d’altre degne antichità; acciὸ ridotta in meglior forma, & ordine, s’havese possuto leggere più autenticata, & della sua verita arricchita questa cosí esemplare Historia’). Regio, Le Vite de’ Sette Santi Protettore, 2v. See also David Romeo, Septem Sancti Custodes ac Praesides urbis Neapolis. His adscipsimus sunt Thomam Aquinam et Franciscum Paul … (Naples: Giuseppe Cacchi, 1571). See Guazzelli, ‘Il culto di San Gennaro’, 9–13;  94

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martyrdom in Pozzuoli, an old Neapolitan woman secretly gathered up his blood from the ground in two ampoules. Some years later, on hearing that some Neapolitans had saved his body, the old woman let it be known that she had the blood and took it to them. When the ampoules happened to encounter Gennaro’s head, borne in a procession, their contents miraculously liquefied. The liquefaction therefore occurred when San Gennaro’s relics were brought to Naples. Regio describes the moment when the old woman with the ampoules chanced to meet the Neapolitans bearing the head: There where they met, close by the city, there happened something wonderful and new. For the blood, which over the long period of time [since it was shed] had grown hard like stone, [now] in drawing close to the saintly head, immediately recognized it; and became liquid just like snow in the sun, or frothy, like wax near fire, perhaps by such a supernatural sign entering a pact with Neapolitans of his protection.97

Regio, like Romeo, thus locates the first liquefaction in late Antiquity, a sign to Neapolitans of Gennaro’s wish to be reunited in Naples, a sign of his identification with that place. The first historical occurrence of the liquefaction is presented as a recognition – by the blood, by the saint – of the close physical connection between San Gennaro and Naples. What mattered was that this was brought to bear by Neapolitans, close to Naples, a movement in the blood that recognized the city and its citizens. The miracle depended on the city, just as the city came to depend on it. In his frescoes in the Treasury Chapel Domenichino stages the miraculous coincidence of saint, procession, miracle, and the city of Naples in an understated manner that subtly emphasizes, less the official Roman view, than the local Neapolitan and patriotic view of the miracle. Conclusion

Gennaro’s processions (Plates 24 & 40, Fig. 18), then, do not draw together, do not secure order through enactment of hierarchy, but search to secure place within a local hierarchical order. They are part of a making of place in terms of order, rather than order in terms of place. Processions of the providential on Davide Romeo, see G. Luongo, ‘Un agiografo calabro napoletano del Cinquecento: Davide Romeo’, in G. Luongo (ed.), Erudizione e devozione: le raccolte di vite de santi in età moderna e contemporanea (Rome: Viella, 2000), 37–72.  97 ‘Laonde con quei incontrandosi presso la Città accadì cosa admirabile, & nuova. Imperoche il sangue; che per lo lungo tempo era come pietra indurito, in approssimarsi al santo capo, tosto lo riconobbe; & qual neve al Sole liquido, ò come cera al foco spumante divenne, facendo, forse con tal sopra natural segno, patto con Napolitani della sua protettione.’ Regio, Le Vite de’ Sette Santi Protettori, 10(B)r.

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blood, focused on San Gennaro or his co-protectors, may seem to be secondary and ‘external’ to the Treasury Chapel, but they actually lie at the heart of its generative capacity. The identification of Gennaro with the city as more than the sum of its parts was forged through movement. Movement staged itself through formal procession. That movement embraced and restaged history, restaged the translation to Naples of Gennaro’s relics, and remade it in the urban processions of his and other saintly bodies. The miraculous liquefaction of blood that occurred during these translations and processions was more than divine sanction of these acts. It bound city and saints together in holy movement – a movement which the city’s inhabitants, as individuals, as institutional groups, and as a whole, constitute both corporeally and figuratively. Saints, relics, people, and city were bound together through displacement and movement, in which critical moments or conjunctions were brought into being, opened up, signalled, and sanctioned by the movement of the miracle. Thus the movement of citizens, saints, and miraculous blood worked analogously to reform the city. The city was moved, its citizens transported, potentiality made possible. Movement was the effect of time  reconfigured. And, in  the bloody miracle, time was reconfigured miraculously. The deputies incessantly sought greater devotion for San Gennaro and his co-protectors, more attention, and more alms. The saint who saved the city was first brought inside the Cathedral, tamed and subordinated to the power of archbishop in the Succorpo chapel (Plate 11 & Fig. 8) and thereafter refashioned in the Treasury Chapel and its deputies (Plate 3), before moving into the city again, in a new line of flight (Plate 40). Thus Gennaro’s move from relic translation to urban transformation served to protect and represent the city, to embody it, and finally to fold it in his own image in new terms, even as he appeared simply to triumph over it. Immanence is represented as transcendence. The wending of silver saints through the city (Plates 24 & 40), their processional criss-crossing between institutions, bound the people of Naples, their saints, Seggi, and Treasury Chapel together. Thus the Treasury Chapel became a civic Treasury. As shown in Chapter 5, it was necessary for the Treasury Chapel to be markedly different in visual terms from the Succorpo chapel in order to radically re-present San Gennaro, to detach him from the Carafa clan, to intertwine his fortunes instead with those of the Seggi and especially with the many competing religious institutions across the city. Those bodies in turn invested by adding their own saints to the rapidly proliferating patronal saints housed at the Treasury Chapel. Through these principal axes were woven the often strained relations between the deputies of the Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro and the Archbishop of Naples, and between the saint and cult of his miracle and the Viceroys.

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The proliferation of saints and institutional dynamics that were delin­ eated, rehearsed, and contested through the repeated export and import of silver reliquaries across the city was the operation of the Treasury Chapel in the formation of urban spirituality. And that formation was quite new. The chapel infiltrated the city and was porous to institutional claims across the city, whose investment and implication in the chapel served also to transform secular and political concerns into spiritual claims. By harnessing the ambit­ ions of a diverse range of external religious institutions, and encouraging their investment, the deputies of the Seggi managed to forge a unifying and remarkably flexible new focus of urban spirituality – supposedly for the city as a whole. Thus while the unequalled proliferation of Neapolitan protector saints is best seen as part of the operative work of the chapel itself, the saints evaded its embrace. While the interests represented were in fact very partial and overwhelmingly aristocratic, the chapel, secular in patronage, located within the Cathedral, and engaged with the city’s protection, appeared to be beyond factional interests. The Treasury Chapel thus was vital for the development of early modern Naples as a capital city that was more than the sum of its parts. The movement of processions makes of the city a labyrinth: in its indirect contorted line a continuous and indivisible thread shows a way. The time of the procession is not the cosmic time of a celestial movement, nor the rural time of desired meteorological movements. It is the time of the city, a pure order of time.98 ‘It is not succession that defines time’, writes Deleuze, ‘but time that defines the parts of movement as successive in as much as they are given a dwelling and name determined within it.’ ‘Things succeed each other in diverse times, but they are also simultaneous in the same time, and they subsist in an indeterminate time’, he argues.99 ‘It is no longer a question of defining time by succession, nor space by simultaneity, nor permanence by eternity. Permanence, succession, and simultaneity are modes or relations of time (duration, series, set). They are the fragments of time.’100 In the time of the miracle and processional time is a tension between time curved by a God that makes it depend on movement and rectilineal time. This is what Deleuze calls ‘the subordination of time to the circular movement of the world, a labyrinth opening onto its eternal origins’.101

This is the time that Deleuze attributes to Hamlet. Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 28.  99 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 28. 100 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 28. 101 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 27.  98

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8

Holiness and history: relics and gender

Prosthetic relics

On the parapet of the nuns’ choir above the entrance of the convent church of San Gregorio Armeno in Naples three frescoes painted by Luca Giordano in 1684 depict the arrival of Greek Basilian nuns in Naples (Plate 22). The central scene, with God above, shows the nuns bearing ashore an urn containing St Gregory of Armenia’s precious relics, a treasure indeed (Fig. 66). The subject of the relic’s arrival, not an easy one for a painter, must have been stipulated by the convent. Why were the noble nuns of San Gregorio, well connected and strategically positioned as they were by lineage and site, intent on the depiction of their relics? How did they use the relics to vault their confines, affirm history, and presage a glorious future? Recent scholarship has usefully examined how dynasties, such as the Savoy in Turin, exploited relics to advance their spiritual authority, but their deployment by women and especially by enclosed nuns remains relatively unexplored.1 As Jean-Claude Schmitt has emphasized, Incarnation was not only a peculiar dogma, but a way of thinking, which marked all practices of Christianity.2 The Eucharist For an exemplary treatment of the dynastic exploitation of a relic, see Scott, Architecture for the Shroud. For women’s use of relics, particularly the avid collector of relics Maria Maddalena of Austria, see A. Sanger, ‘Women of Power: Studies in the Patronage of Medici Grand Duchesses and Regentesses 1565–1650’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Manchester, 2002), 143–169; U. Strasser, ‘Bones of Contention: Cloistered Nuns, Decorated Relics and the Contest over Women’s Place in the Public Sphere of Counter-Reformation Munich’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 90 (1999), 255–288. For the Discalced Carmelites of Antwerp’s exploitation of their relics of Ana de San Bartolomeo in attracting the patronage of Marie de’ Médicis, see C. van Wyhe, ‘Reformulating the Cult of Scherpenheuvel: Marie de’ Médicis and the Regina Pacis Statue in Cologne’, Seventeenth Century Journal, 22:1 (2007), 41–74. For the church and convent of San Gregorio Armeno, see R. Pane, Il monastero napoletano di San Gregorio Armeno (Naples L’Arte Tipografia, 1957), 86; and for an account of the frescoes by Giordano, fifty-two in all, most of which were executed in 1684, see V. Rizzo, I cinquantadue affreschi di Luca Giordano a S. Gregorio Armeno (Naples: Arte Tipografica, 1992), esp. 8, 52–53.  2 Schmitt, ‘Les reliques et les images’, 148.  1

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and the relic enjoy a complementary and contradictory coupling. While women’s special relationship with the Eucharist has been energetically explored, their relationship with relics remains neglected. This is particularly true with regard to enclosed female orders’ deployment of relics beyond the confines of their own institutions – that is, in relation to the dynamic between convent, relic, and city. Convents were porous, as much scholarship shows. But that porosity tends to be conceived from outside in, in terms of dynastic interests enclosing surplus daughters or establishing familiar networks. And studies of female convents, by contrast, persist in depicting them in stolidly introverted (and pious) terms. By contrast, I consider here how aristocratic nuns made their convent more porous through skilful deployment of their relics. They deployed relics to extend their spiritual presence across the city of Naples and to negotiate recognition of their spiritual authority in spite of the constraints of enclosure. This chapter examines how post-Tridentine enclosed female convents used holy relics to negotiate relative status, both social and devotional, within the city, and deployed relics to vault the walls of enclosure to advance their spiritual claims beyond them. It therefore considers the Treasury Chapel as at once a great chamber of amplification for the voice of enclosed nuns (a form of ‘institutional ventriloquism’) and a highly visible stage on which they could play at one remove, rather like puppeteers manipulating marionettes. But its relation to the convent exceeded that of representation. More than stage or amplifier, the Treasury Chapel offered a transformative possibility for the convent’s dynamic exploitation of relics. Thus this chapter exposes crucial relationships between one interior space (the Treasury Chapel) and another (the enclosed noble convent) in relation to the city and its divine protection. Thus two interiors, apparently self-contained and separated in the city, are shown to have worked in intimate relation to each other – a form of urban dynamic that has been neglected by architectural historians. Moreover, their inter-relationship necessarily altered both chapel and convent and the constellation of patronal saint-city. Urban ambition and female devotion were enmeshed in the strange folding of movement and history that is the translation of a relic, such that the relationship between the convent of Santa Patrizia in north Naples (marked ‘SP’ on Plate 46) and the Treasury Chapel (‘1’ on Plate 46) is not so much a manifestation of female enclosed spirituality and its urban ambitions as part of their very formation. Precious bodies of virginal noble nuns and of saintly relics (also more often than not noble and virginal) were conserved safely behind conventual walls. The exterior architecture of enclosed convents, unlike the architecture of other institutions, such as hospitals, had to represent its inmates in their absence (not alongside them). As the architecture worked in analogous

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­ aterial relation with nuns’ virginal aristocratic bodies, might the relics m owned and displayed by convents have operated partly as its spiritual counterpart, enfolding temporality and history into the spatial? Thus this chapter investigates the ways in which enclosed female orders sought to capitalize on spiritual resources, both centripetally, by attracting devotion to relics inside their churches, and, more unusually, centrifugally, by mobilizing relics outside their enclaves to extend their urban presence and spiritual authority, via the Treasury Chapel. It explores how Santa Patrizia used patronal sanctity and relics to take advantage of the great soundingboard of San Gennaro’s Treasury Chapel to advance claims to spiritual and urban authority, when other routes were either directly or indirectly denied them. Baroque architecture’s preoccupation with the relic is shown to be particularly inflected in relation to gender. Relics of their saints operated not only metonymically, but analogously and prosthetically for the bodies – material and spiritual – of enclosed nuns. Beyond the limits of enclosure

Architecture permitted enclosed orders to articulate a powerful urban presence, while apparently subject to self-effacement and humility. Thus Dominican nuns at the convent of Santa Maria della Sapienza constructed an impressive facade, raised above the rest of the city, which draws on the vocabulary of aristocratic palaces.3 Urbanistically, too, convents forged powerful urban presences for themselves by creating squares in front of their church façades in a densely populated city, or by aggressively constructing ‘the vertical city’ with towering belvederes, soaring campanili, and commanding terraces, such as at the convent of San Gregorio Armeno. Conventual architecture and urbanism were modes of articulating presence in an urban environment despite the demands of enclosure. Although strict enclosure was rarely adhered to, and although nuns frequently maintained close relationships with their blood families and enjoyed remarkable privileges within their convents, nevertheless – or indeed because of these irregularities – conventual architecture articulated a different story: the official narrative of enclosure, fortification, and regularity, in which apparent uniformity and regulation proclaimed an absence of hierarchy within, and even a lofty disregard for, what lay outside their blank and indifferent walls.4 Relics offered possibilities which architecture did not. Unlike architecture, authenticated relics were recognized as inherently holy – and indeed See Hills, ‘Enamelled with the Blood of a Noble Lineage’, 1–40. For a discussion of the architecture and urbanism of Neapolitan baroque convents, see Hills, Invisible City, esp. 19–44, 120–138.

 3  4

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were one of the most potent forms of authority. Unlike architecture, relics were only intermittently on display – the time and mode of that display lay under the aegis of the convent and could be strategically exploited. Unlike architecture, relics were portable. They could be processed strategically into the city to occupy key sites during feasts, to make the presence of absent nuns felt urbanistically – even prosthetically – in what Patrick Geary, in a different context, has called the ‘restructuring of sacred geography’.5 The nuns of Santa Patrizia deployed the cult of their prized relics to enhance their standing across the entire city. This capacity could not be effected once and for all; it had to be constantly renegotiated and maintained. Thus conventual power always depended in part on the successful promotion of their relics. In particular they transformed the arm relic of Santa Patrizia from a passive object, conserved in their convent, into a ‘site’ that was able to operate in several locations and between them, at once object and trajectory, a relic recognized as incorporating virtus and capable of bestowing transformative potential, and as a particularly dense transfer point for relations of spiritual authority. Gender and relics

The mobility of relics was not only inevitable: it was through movement that relics became something more than they once were. Movement puckered their force. Translation, processing, and reframing were central to the economy of relics and represented far more than the transfer of an object between two fixed points. Their motility is not only physical (translational, processional), but also temporal, a form of occupation of one place by a site at once smaller and greater than it, a claim that is made in terms of history and sacrifice that is futural and redemptive. The baroque was hungry for relics, for their possession, for close contact with them by touching and kissing.6 Relics promised a relationship with the sacred that was particularly direct and personal, potentially bypassing ecclesiastical machinery. But to the desire to see, to touch, to eat was opposed the refusal to have frequent communion, the enclosure of relics, the closure of the retable.7 From the sixth and seventh centuries, attempts were made to ensure that relics – res sacrae – could be touched only by men, by priests or subdeacons (although practice shows otherwise).8 For thefts of relics, see Geary, Furta Sacra, 56–107. See Chapters 1 and 9 in this book.  7 Schmitt, ‘Les reliques et les images’, 149.  8 A. Dierkens, ‘Du bon (et du mauvais) usage des reliquiares au Moyen Âge’, in E. Bozóky and A.-M. Helvétius (eds), Les reliques: objets, cultes, symboles (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999), 246.  5  6

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Just as the spaces of the most personalized, intense devotion in enclosed convents were the very spaces – clerestory-level corridors and the bays of gelosie – produced by the imperative to enclose nuns and to prevent contact between them and layfolk, so the relic, supposedly set apart and regulated, was subject to the most intimate and fleshly devotional practices – handled, opened, caressed, clasped to the breast, kissed, and soaked with tears. The Church was anxious that women should not appropriate the authority of relics. The Congregation of Bishops and Regulars decreed on 7 March 1627 that saints’ relics should not be kept inside female convents, but should be conserved decently in their exterior churches.9 In spite of this decree, as Marc’Antonio Boldetti observed in his Osservazioni sopra i Cimiterj de’ Santi Martiri (Rome, 1720), relics continued to be conserved and venerated in the enclosed area of many convents in Rome, including San Silvestro in Capite, Regina Coeli, and Santa Teresa on the Quirinale, with the justification that in their churches, there ‘is no suitable place for their more secure and more suitable conservation’.10 Opposition to nuns holding relics in their enclosed convents was similar to that to seculars holding relics in their private homes. Boldetti reminded his readers that Antique Christians had not allowed saints’ remains to be kept in private houses and that when St Paul wanted to keep holy relics in his father’s house, he first had it consecrated as a temple.11 Keeping bodies of saints and illustrious relics in private houses was not fitting and not to be tolerated. At issue was the question of place. The sacred place was being designated a priori and separated from the domestic realm. Thus relics should be kept in holy places, such as churches. Above all, the issue was one of access to holiness and authority. Boldetti argues that relics in churches afforded public benefit to all worshippers, but, above all, it meant they were under priestly control. Referring to the authority of the Church Doctors, Boldetti argues that lay people may not properly exercise any control over relics.12 Opposition to nuns’ holding relics in their enclosed (inner) churches was thus challenged in terms of improper appropriation of power and spiritual privilege. Gender was central to this. Thus, in spite of the high social standing of the nuns of Santa Maria in Campo Marzio in Rome, Pope Gregory XIII (1572–85) justified ‘Reliquiae non in Monasteriis monialium, sed in exterioribus Ecclesiis asservari debent, ut de locis decentibus provideatur’. M. A. Boldetti, Osservazioni sopra i Cimiterj de’ Santi Martiri, ed antichi cristiani di Roma. Aggiuntavi la Serie di tutti quelli, che sino al presente si sono scoperti, e di altri simili, che in varie Parti del Mondo si trovano: con alcune riflessioni pratiche sopra il Culto delle Sagre Reliquie (Rome: Maria Salvoni, 1720), 729. 10 Boldetti, Osservazioni, 727–728. 11 Boldetti, Osservazioni, 726–727. 12 ‘reliquiae non possunt esse Laicorum, nec in dominio eorum’. Boldetti, Osservazioni, 727.  9

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removing the body relic of St Gregory of Nazianzus (329–389) from their convent on the grounds that ‘it did not seem fitting to him that such a sacred relic should be kept locked up in such a humble place’. In 1580 it was deposited with all due ceremony in the Cappella Gregoriana in St Peter’s Basilica. The Pope, however, magnanimously left the convent one of the saint’s arms, since it was, after all, the nuns who had brought the saint to Rome.13 From their point of view, however, holding relics in their inner churches allowed nuns to form and assert exclusive and intimate relationships with their saints, which articulated crucial matters in their own history. And it permitted them to sidestep the oppressive condescensions of the male ministry.14 The Treasury Chapel and the prosthetic relic

The dynamic between the enclosed aristocratic convent of Santa Patrizia, the prized body and relics of St Patricia, and the Treasury Chapel is particularly interesting. Born in about 340, grand-daughter of Constantine and raised by St Helena, who had discovered the True Cross and thereby become the first relic collector, Patricia showed particular affection for the church of Santi Nicandro e Marciano in Naples, declaring that here would be her resting place (‘haec est requies mea’); and when in 365 the oxen pulling her coffin abruptly stopped there, it was decided to bury her there. Her followers’ reluctance to leave the monastery thereafter led to the foundation of the convent of Santa Patrizia.15 The nuns preserved St Patricia’s body and other prized relics inside their inner church, which was larger than the outer one and was of greater sacred value, since it was the ancient church of Santi Nicandro e Marciano. G. Vasi, Delle Magnificenze di Roma antica e moderna Libro Ottavo che contiene i  Monasteri Conservatori di Donne (Rome: Niccolò e Marco Pagliarini, 1758), viii; F. Borsi, ‘L’antico convento di Santa Maria in Campo Marzio’, in F. Borsi, P. B. Storoni et al. (eds), Santa Maria in Campo Marzio (Rome: Editalia, 1987), 18; L. Beltrami, La Roma di Gregorio XIII negli avvisi alla Corte Sabauda (Rome: Allegretti, 1917), 36; L. Rice, The Altars and Altarpieces of New St. Peter’s: Outfitting the Basilica, 1621–1666 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 289–291. 14 See Hills, ‘The Housing of Institutional Architecture’, 119–150. 15 Celano, Notizie del bello, vol. III, tom. 1,78. The convent and church were partly built with money left by Patricia. Soon many aristocratic women, inspired by her name, took the veil there. P. Regio and C. Torbizi, Vita di S. Patricia vergine Figlia dell’Imperator Costante e Protettrice della Città, e Regno di Napoli, Descritta già da Monsignor Paolo Regio, Vescovo di Vico Equense, e poi rinovata, & ampliata da Cleonte Torbizi, ad istanza delle molte Reveren. Monache del Monasterio di S. Patricia di Napoli (Naples: Francesco Savio, 1643), 40. For the absence of a regular order and rule at the convent of Santa Patrizia before Trent, see A. Facchiano, ‘Monasteri Benedettini o Capitoli di Canonichesse? L’esempio di S. Patrizia di Napoli’, Benedictina, 38 (1991), 38, 35–60. After Trent it was Benedictine. 13

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Thus saint’s will, body relic, institutional foundation, and nuns became tightly identified. The Neapolitan historian Carlo Celano notes the fine reliquary for St Patricia’s body, kept in the altar of the nuns’ church:

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In this altar there is a silver casket, seven palmi long, and gilded in many places, with very fine glass windows, where the body of the holy virgin Patricia is conserved, who, for the many graces received by Neapolitans, is inscribed in the number of Patron saints.16

St Patricia is marked as a special model for the nuns at the convent dedicated to her. Her body, her relics, are kept in particularly intimate, visible, accessible, and exclusive association with the nuns, through the harbouring of the glass reliquary case in the privileged space of their inner church. St Patricia was as possessive of the convent as its inmates were of her, according to Giovanni Battista Manso’s Vita di S. Patricia vergine (Naples,  1619), written and published at the insistence of the nuns of Santa Patrizia. The frontispiece’s vignettes insist on a closely woven relationship between saint, place, and relic (Fig. 64). The Vita’s text reveals that the holiness of St Patricia and her relics was contagious in several ways. First, the authors suggest that the celebratedly noble blood of the convent’s virginal inmates is due to St Patricia herself. They directly link her high birth with her exalted spirituality and to that of her successors: ‘one could expect no less from the presence and name of St Patricia, who conjoined nobility of blood with holiness of spirit, to the point that one could not say which in her was greater’.17 Indeed, by the seventeenth century Santa Patrizia was among the most socially exclusive of Naples’ many convents. Most of its inmates were from aristocratic families in the prestigious Seggi of Nido and Capuana, from which number the four protectors or governors of the convent were also drawn.18 The ­convent’s ­nobility was exalted by the preacher Francesco Porcelli, who described it Celano, Notizie del bello, vol. III, tom. 1, 80. The report of the visitation of the convent of Santa Patrizia made in 1617 notes the many relics including those of St Patricia around the main altar of the nuns’ church. ASDN, Vicario delle Monache 471–22, S. Patrizia (S. Visita, 1617), n.f.; that of 11 July 1642 expressly refers to the exposition on the altar in the inner church of the relics and blood of St Patricia and relics of other saints. ASDN, Vicario delle Monache 471–22, S. Patrizia (S. Visita, 1642), n.f. 17 Regio and Torbizi, Vita di S. Patricia, 41–43. On this issue in other related contexts, see Hills, ‘Enamelled with the Blood of a Noble Lineage’, 1–40. 18 For a more detailed discussion of the relationship between the Seggi and convents, see Hills, Invisible City, 35–44. In 1585 the convent of Santa Patrizia held members of the socially distinguished Brancaccio, Caracciolo, della Tolfa, de Tocco, Piscicello, Galeotta, Bozzuto, de Loffredo, and Capece families, among others. ASN, Corporazioni religiose soppresse, S. Patrizia, 3459, O.Maz.III, n. 13, n.f.. The protectors supervised the accounts and administration of the procurators of the convent; see Facchiano, ‘Monasteri Benedettini’, 36. 16

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in 1625 as ‘rather like a rich and exclusive exchequer, which does not admit jewels except from the fine nobility of the Seggi, and no rubies apart from daughters of noble blood’.19 Noble blood and dead saints’ bones formed the dual currencies of this exclusive exchange. Female aristocracy and female spirituality gilded the lily of noble virginity. They were intimately interfused and exchanged in the exclusive exchequers of monastic institutions. Just as harbouring St Patricia’s noble and holy body set the tone for the convent socially, so the nuns’ religious life was shaped and stimulated there by the relics which St Patricia had brought with her from Constantinople. These included fragments of the Cross, part of the very first relic celebratedly found by Patricia’s adoptive mother, St Helena, the first relic collector, a blood-stained nail, hair and milk of the Virgin, and skin and the miraculous blood of St Bartholomew. The nuns safeguarded these relics, just as the relics safeguarded them: ‘just as they are reverently kept and honoured by the … nuns, so in return they protect from heaven those devoted [nuns], and constantly encourage them to reach every sort of perfection’.20 Four particularly precious relics, of impeccable genealogy (‘probably inherited from St Helena’), worn by St Patricia on her right arm as a sign that she was not only Christ’s spouse but also his slave, just as she wanted her daughters to be, were especially prized. These relics were far from passive treasures. They pricked and disturbed Patricia and her sister nuns to a more virtuous life. The thorn that had pierced Christ’s temples was to be ‘a constant thorn in their hearts’, the fragment of Christ’s clothing was to remind them that they should always strive to dress as Christ, and the nail invited them to nail themselves perpetually to the cross of perfect mortification of the senses, affect, and emotion.21 Like family heirlooms, St Patricia’s relics, handed down to her successors, shaped their sense of spiritual identity and consequence; but they also disturbed and disrupted. In his Vita di S. Patrizia (Fig. 64) of 1643 Cleonte Torbizi, referring to St Bernard’s teaching, emphasizes that educating women about the angelic life of female saints is at least as useful as writing about male saints: ‘quasi ricco e serbato erario, non amette altri gioielli che de fina nobiltà de piazza, e non altri rubbiuni che figlie di cavallerscho sangue’. F. Porcelli, Breve discorso nel quale si narrano i motivi della città di Napoli in reintegrare alla sua Padronanza la vergine  s.  Patrizia (Naples: Ottavio Beltrano, 1625), appendix to C. Torbizi, Vita di S. Patricia vergine (Rome: Francesco Savio; 1643). 20 Regio and Torbizi, Vita di S. Patricia, 41–43. 21 Regio and Torbizi, Vita di S. Patricia, 41–43. It is, incidentally, worth noting a certain gendered quality to these relics and their uses. On Good Friday the nail oozed drops of sweat like blood. When the nuns immersed the nail in holy water while praying, the water assumed miraculous properties which were particularly efficacious for women in childbirth. Celano, Notizie del bello, vol. III, tom. 1, 80. 19

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Female saints who with their purity have ennobled the weaker sex, and who have so exalted it with the breadth and generosity of excellent deeds, that they have raised the doubt whether they [the female saints] in the field of sanctity and perfection have surpassed men, or whether they may have been outdone by them.22

Their close identification with St Patricia allowed the nuns to make significant claims for their own spiritual status as equal to, if not greater than, their male counterparts. Close identification between saint, convent, and nuns and relics was probably widespread. Dominican nuns at Santi Domenico e Sisto in Rome, for instance, pursued their special devotions to the apostles and other saints by securing large numbers of their relics, which they conserved in special reliquaries. Nuns often assumed for themselves the names of these apostles and saints, the better to meld their close identification with them.23 Nuns and relics protected each other, and enhanced each other’s spiritual capacities through possession, provocation, touch, disturbance, excitation, and display – in a constant interchange and exchange between what was seen to matter and what it could become. On a daily basis, therefore, the most intimate relationship between the relics and the Benedictine nuns was forged more or less secretly in the nuns’ inner church and in their hearts and souls. But twice a year on feast days the nuns threw open their church and put their relics on public view. In his 1692 description of this exhibition of relics in the nuns’ church, Celano draws a suggestive parallel between the nuns and these relics, between the viewing of nuns’ dedicated spaces during their absence and the worship of relics, and the absence and presence of saints: And it is notable that this place has two churches. One is that which is seen every day and is called the outer church, where the nuns recite divine office. And here on the main altar is to be seen a very beautiful painting, known as Tutt’i Santi … The other is called the inner church, a most beautiful and magnificent structure. This one opens to the public only twice a year, from the first vespers until the morning after the day following the birthday feast of the saint, and on Ash Wednesday until the evening of Good Friday, and on that day all the holy relics, which are special and admirable there, are displayed.24 Regio and Torbizi, Vita di S. Patricia, 7. For instance, Sister Taddea Giovanna assumed her particular monastic names ‘per meglio raccordarsi che à detti nomi doveva accompagniare una vita Apostolica et Santa’. Rome, Archivio di S. Maria del Rosario, Domenica Salamonia, ‘Memorie del Monastero di SS Domenico e Sisto’, vol. I (1653), fol. 110. 24 Celano, Notitie del bello, vol. III, 79–80. Domenico Antonio Parrino gives the dates when the inner church stood open as Holy Thursday to Good Friday and from prime to second vespers on St Patricia’s feast day, Parrino, Napoli Città Nobilissima, vol. I (1700), 45. 22 23

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In other words, when the nuns’ church was opened to public view, it displayed not the nuns’ bodies directly, but the convents’ precious relics, which represented them metonymically. Displaying their relics within their church allowed the nuns not only to receive directly the blessings secured by them, but also to draw the faithful (with alms) into their inner church on special occasions, and to associate the relics’ holiness directly with the nuns themselves. The cult of public devotion enhanced the holiness of St Patricia’s relics and of the nuns, her patrons. The practice of opening their inner church to display its relics began in 1583.25 After 1642 the nuns combined this centripetal exploitation of their relics with one that was centrifugal, more ambitious, and, above all, more sharply urbanistic in conception. Although they could not leave their enclosure, their sacred relic could do so prosthetically on their behalf. It could cross the city, draw acclamation, and accumulate spiritual and social capital for the convent. This parading of their relic was made possible by the centralization of protector saints’ relics in the Treasury Chapel of Naples Cathedral (Plate 7), and it was reiterated annually, repeatedly asserted and displayed to the inhabitants of the city. It was also in this way that the convent entered directly into competition with the Theatines and their cult of Blessed Andrea Avellino in launching St Patricia as a principal female protector saint of Naples, partly subordinate to and partly rivalrous with San Gennaro himself.26 An account of the first procession, in the form of a letter from Maria Agnese Carafa, abbess of Santa Patrizia, dated as if written on 3 April 1642 and addressed to Cardinal Ascanio Filomarino, describes in detail the transport of the silver reliquary ‘statua’ of St Patricia to the Treasury Chapel.27 Such an idealized account, probably written in advance of the celebrations it purports to describe, is itself part of a strategy to elevate St Patricia and her relics in terms of urban spirituality. Precisely for these reasons, it is invaluable in revealing how the nuns of Santa Patrizia sought to deploy their prized relic to their convent’s advantage. The nuns’ inner church was conventionally open on 24 and 25 August each year, as well as on Good Friday and the preceding Thursday. In what seems to have been episcopal effort to exercise control over the nuns’ spiritual ambitions, Cardinal Boncompagno attempted in 1641 to prevent the nuns from opening their church on 24 August. ASN, Corporazioni religiose soppresse, S. Patrizia, 3459, O.Maz.III, n. 37, copy of document of 18 March 1583, n.f. 26 See Chapters 3 and 4 above. 27 ‘Relazione della Festa fatta nel portar la statua di S. Patrizia al Sacro Tesoro del Vescovato fatta al Cardinale Ascanio Filomarino’, in N. Rispoli, Vita, Virtù, e Miracoli Principali di S. Patrizia, raccolta del Cav. Manzo Naopolitano e stampato nel 1611 ad istanza delle Signore Dame Monache del Monastero di S. Patrizia in Napoli. Ristampata ora a divozione e spese delle medesime con distinta relazione delle Reliquie insigni, che si conservano nella loro Chiesa (Naples: Niccolò Rispoli, 1741). 25

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The reliquary bust of St Patricia, containing an arm bone, was commissioned by the convent of Santa Patrizia in silver and copper from the silver­ smith Leonardo Carpentiero in 1625 at a cost of 1,000 ducats (Figs 59 & 60).28 In this object, which belonged simultaneously to the convent and to the Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro, nature, artifice, and the holy were combined and refracted. Silver assumes the place of St Patricia’s flesh and skin, and of her convent and its noble nuns. The reliquary presents St Patricia dressed in simple habit; on its base a crown with crossed sceptre and lily testify to her imperial descent. The reliquary is referred to in Carafa’s letter in a number of ways – as statua and venerando corpo, but mostly simply as la Santa – demonstrating the degree to which relic, reliquary, and saint were inextricably entwined.29 Indeed, the relic is important because it was and remains the body. It is decay, not physical distinctiveness, that is temporary. Thus gender does not end at death, but is part of the body in its resurrection. Gender was thus an integral aspect of St Patricia – as body, relic, and saint. And given the centrality of monasticism to the definition and articulation of gendered difference, gender was central, not additional, to the identity of the conventual relic and its occupation of the city. The bust of St Patricia formally defers to that of San Gennaro (Plate 6), even while her liquefying blood can be seen in rivalrous relation with his. It was crucial in establishing the significance of St Patricia as a key protector of Naples, itself a formidable task even for a rich and well-connected convent.30 Indeed, the convent ably exploited the transformational capacities of the Treasury Chapel to its own advantage. In this dynamic the Treasury Chapel became an exclusive exchequer where noble female bodies were at once presented, recognized, celebrated, and transformed through their proxy, the saintly body relic, into stake-holders in the city, a city that was, in turn, recast as that which was held in place through the incorporation of those very bodies. In the case of St Patricia, the claim to the city could not be asserted through the topographical field of the jurisdiction of the diocesan see – a ter The reliquary bears the consular stamp of Orazio Scoppa; the hallmark on the back of the statue is attributed to Leonardo Carpentiero, who came from a prominent family of silversmiths active in the first half of the century. L. Stabile, Guida storico-artistica della Real Cappella Monumentale del Tesoro di S. Gennaro (Naples: F. Giannini, 1877), 70; Treasure of San Gennaro: Baroque Silver from Naples, exhibition catalogue, (Naples: Electa Napoli, c.1987), 11; Catello, ‘Argenti’, 309. 29 Celano states clearly that while the body of St Patricia was kept in the church of Santa Patrizia, her silver statue (‘la sua statua d’argento’) was kept in the chapel of the Tesoro. Celano, Notizie del bello, vol. III, tom. 1, 80. 30 Santa Patrizia was a relatively small convent, with only twenty-eight professed nuns, six novices, and twenty-two lay sisters in 1607. Nine of these nuns did not participate in communal life. ASDN, Vicario delle Monache 471–22, S. Patrizia (S. Visita, 1607), n.f.

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ritorial claim that was readily available to male bishop-saints. And the role of physical protector and defender of a city was also less available to a female than to a male saint. St Patricia’s claim to the city of Naples had, therefore, to assume a different cast. The Treasury Chapel made possible that claim by producing a new orbit for the circulation and formation of sanctity that was abstractly ‘urban’ in conception, rather than territorial. And it permitted a diagrammatic reiteration of a territorial claim in the repeated processions to and fro from enclosed female convent to public city chapel. Processing the nuns’ proxy body

The procession of 1642 – and all its subsequent reiterations – accorded St Patricia a prestigious place in the Cathedral Treasury Chapel and mapped her into that new Neapolitan cartography. It is now well established that conservatories paraded their nubile inhabitants through city streets to catch the eye of potential husbands and that nuns frequently processed their relics within conventual enclosures during times of crisis, but the fact that enclosed nuns organized their relics’ transportation beyond closed doors across the city has been overlooked and requires more careful consideration.31 The procession of the silver reliquary bust from Santa Patrizia in 1642 was by no means the first or only procession of such a reliquary by a female convent in Naples. In 1561, for instance, following the discovery at San Gaudioso of relics of St Fortunato, during rebuilding of an altar dedicated to him, Abbess Laura Piscicelli arranged for the ‘infinite’ bones of martyrs, including the relics of St Fortunato’s brothers, to be processed around Naples, and then replaced in the altar, apart from the saints’ heads, which were placed in silver reliquary busts.32 And the processing of female protectors in and out of the Treasury Chapel extended beyond St Patricia to include Saints Teresa, Candida, Mary of Egypt, Clare, and more. But St Patricia was the first female protector to cut the grade, and she remained the most prominent female saint, part sister, part rival to San Gennaro. The argument here is that the relics processed across town worked in proxy for the nuns’ own hidden and disciplined bodies and therefore must For the monastery of S. Caterina dei Funari in Rome and its young female inmates, see R. M. San Juan, Rome: A City out of Print (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 95–128. During plague in Rome, the nuns processed precious relics given by Anna Barberini around the convent of Regina Coeli. See Fra P. Biagio della Purificatione, Vita della Ven. madre Suor Chiara Maria della Passione Carmelitana Scalza: Fondatrice del Monastero di Regina Coeli. Nel Secolo Donna Vittoria Colonna Figlia di Don Filippo Gran Conestabile del Regno di Napoli (Rome: Vanacci, 1681), 223, 244. 32 Tutini, Notizie della Vita e Miracoli di due Santi Gaudiosi, 122 (an account instigated by the nuns of San Gaudioso). 31

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be understood as part of the formation of those bodies as well as of an urban spirituality that was also gendered. Santa Patrizia’s nuns took advantage of the requirement to centralize relics at the Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro by adding to their established repertoire of drawing the devout to their convent church to venerate relics, a trans-urban display that was extroverted and urbanistic in conception. A grand procession transported St Patricia’s relic from her convent to the Treasury Chapel, paying homage to and accruing the endorsement of important civic and religious institutions en route.33 Thus the  nuns decorously advanced St Patricia as Naples’ spiritual leading lady, female counterpart to San Gennaro himself (Fig. 60). On the eve of the procession of 6 April 1642, the ‘heads of the patron saints’, including that of San Gennaro, were brought by torch-light to the church of Santa Patrizia.34 Our saint went out to receive ‘her dear companions’, encircled by priests and cavalieri carrying torches. When Patricia met San Gennaro himself, Abbess Carafa proudly records that he ceded to her, thereby claiming relative spiritual superiority for her saint. The street leading to the convent was bedecked with decorations, apparati, and a triumphal arch, festooned with eulogies in her honour. ‘The public piazza’, writes Carafa, ‘had become almost a temple, in which both religion and the worship of God and of our honoured little virgin triumphed.’ Thus, with all appearance of modesty, Carafa suggests that Patricia dominates and transforms the entire city: ‘the public square was almost transformed into a church to St Patricia’, and the city ‘almost subsumed to her devotion’.35 The saint transformed the city square into a church; she rendered Naples holy, and all of Naples bowed its knee to her. Next all the patron saints squeezed inside the nuns’ inner church (‘which could only just be done for the multitude of people gathered there’), which was opened and adorned expressly for the occasion. A special Mass was sung by the ‘gentlemen chaplains’ (signori Cappellani) of the royal chapel of Palermo. The interior nuns’ church of Santa Patrizia resounded to the viceregal choir and assumed a role analogous to the Treasury Chapel in the Cathedral itself, as it formally accommodated all the patron saints of Naples during this special church service. The solemn procession then traced a claim through the city, and drew these two unlikely sites – an inner church of an enclosed female convent and a publicly accessible civic chapel in the Cathedral – phenomenologically together. It was more than a line linking two dots. It brought together bodies and buildings, sight and sound, smells San Gennaro, Bishop of Benevento, was martyred in Pozzuoli in 305. His body was later buried in the catacombs of Naples and later removed to Benevento, thence in 1159 to Montevergine, and in 1497 definitively to Naples. See Chapter 1 above. 34 Rispoli, Vita, Virtù e Miracoli, 151–152. 35 Rispoli, Vita, Virtù e Miracoli, 152. 33

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and fervour. The city was reformed through bodies in movement and as bodies redistributing the city streets, relics, chapel, buildings in an indivisible pulse of sound, sight, smell, touch, and movement that opened up the city to change and the possibility of change made tangible. That procession, headed by trumpets, followed by street captains, drew crowds ‘from every quarter’ of the city. Dominant monastic institutions of the city, including Oratorians, Dominicans, Jesuits, and Theatines, were supposedly unanimous in their support of St Patricia. Carafa emphasizes the united support for Patricia offered by groups that were socially and devotionally diverse, from aristocratic Seggi to the principal religious orders, male and female, thereby demonstrating her capacity to unite the city across social, administrative, topographical, institutional, and religious divides. Even the rivalrous nuns of San Gaudioso hung a beautiful image of the saint on their altar. Each religious institution and Seggio staged its commitment urbanistically in decorated piazze and outdoor altars.36 In a cacophany of posted eulogies, the city was euphorically rewritten. In sight and sound the city drew St Patricia to its heart. Bells sang out to bells, crisscrossing across rooftops in invisible arcs between bell-towers. Delight was urbanized: ‘almost so that with loquacious echo each corner, each church resonated [with] joy and celebration in honour of our patron saint’. The gentlemen of Capuana, one of the most influential Seggi, organized particularly fulsome celebrations, an all-out assault on the senses and emotions. Their entire Seggio building was extravagantly adorned, and an altar erected, which ‘in its richness and grace resembled heaven, resonating with many voices, so sweet that even those of hardest heart in such surroundings could be swayed’. At last, the procession reached the Cathedral. The new protector saint entered with such majesty that it was a ‘joyous sight to see her among those sacred heroes, as she, too, assumed the protection of the city; there was singing in her honour praises to heaven, adulation received, vows and prayers accepted from those who begged her protection, and finally she was set up among the glorious patron saints of the city.’37 The procession paid homage to and received enthusiastic impulse from ecclesiastical and administrative, popular, and aristocratic centres across the city, like the processions of San Gennaro, whose focus rotated annually from Seggio to Seggio.38 In short, the Benedictine nuns confidently aggrandized For instance, the Seggio of Montagna created a beautiful altar and organized music. Rispoli, Vita, Virtù e Miracoli, 153. 37 Rispoli, Vita, Virtù e Miracoli, 153–154. 38 The procession for San Gennaro comprised the saint’s head in the morning and the miraculous blood in the afternoon, preceded by all the patron saints of the city. The Seggi of Montana, Nido, Capuano, Portanova, and Porto and the Piazza of the Sellaria were all involved. Rispoli, Vita, Virtù e Miracoli, 154. The nobles of each Piazza engaged in fierce emulation of devotional display with elaborate apparati; see Chiarini in Celano, 36

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the cult of St Patricia in direct emulation of the most celebrated patron saint of Naples. And, in recognition of St Patricia’s urban significance, in 1649 the Eletti (the representatives of the Seggi) agreed to present torches and a silver chalice every year on her feast.39 More than merely foundress of a prominent aristocratic convent, St Patricia was now protector saint of the city, enmeshed in the weft and warp of its spiritual claims. The prosthetic Treasury Chapel

The focus of the procession and the destined resting place for the reliquary bust of St Patricia was the magnificent Treasury Chapel (Fig. 3). A bitter dispute between Santa Patrizia’s Benedictine nuns and the Theatines of San Paolo Maggiore over where precisely that resting place was to be erupted in 1625 and lasted over fifteen years. By the time of St Patricia’s election only one niche remained unoccupied in the presbytery of the Treasury Chapel: the ­so-called ‘ninth niche’ on the extreme right-hand side of the presbytery (No. 11 in Fig. 11). This was a prestigious site close to the main altar, to San Gennaro, and to worshippers in the chapel. And with it came the right to the ninth position in processions outside the chapel of protector saints. During the period 1625–26 four new patron saints were elected: Blessed Andrea Avellino, St Patricia, Blessed Giacomo della Marca, and St Francesco di Paola. This produced unprecedented pressure on accommodation in the chapel and erupted in an explosive battle for the coveted ninth position.40 The Theatines’ espousal of Blessed Andrea Avellino and Santa Patrizia’s advocacy of St Patricia were well orchestrated and relentless, as a series of letters written between 1625 and 1641, now in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Naples, attests.41 The nuns argued that Andrea Avellino, merely beatified, was inferior to their sponsor, a fully blown saint. Should he, a mere Blessed, they enquired, really receive precedence over the fully sanctified Patricia? Was the date of election, in the case of Andrea Avellino (29 September 1625), just a few days Notizie del bello, vol. II, tom. 1, 114–115. In 1646 on an occasion similar to the 1642 procession for St Patricia, the relics of San Gennaro were carried in solemn procession from the church of Sant’Angelo a Nido to the Tesoro in the Duomo, by order of the Pope. Chiarini in Celano, Notizie del bello, vol. II, tom. 1, 107. See Chapter 6. 39 ASN, Corporazioni religiose soppresse, S. Patrizia, 3460, O.IV, n. 58, n.f. 40 Sallmann, Santi barocchi, 85. 41 ‘Lettere originali scritte dalli Deputati di questa Città di Napoli da Cardinali e da altri Persone concernanti la Padronanza di S. Andrea Avellino di questa Città, e la lite che verté tra la casa di S. Paolo, ed il monastero di S. Patrizia per la precedenza della statua del detto Santo a quella di S. Patrizia’. BNN, S. Martino 523. For the Theatines’ espousal of Andrea Avellino, see for instance G. A. Cagiano, Successi Maravigliosi della Veneratione del B. Andrea Avellino Chierico Regolare Patrone, e Protettore delle Città di Napoli, di Palermo, e d’altre molte (Naples: Egidio Longo, 1622).

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before St Patricia’s, really to be the determining issue?42 In 1626 the Sacra Congregazione de’ Riti in Rome found in favour of Andrea Avellino, on the grounds that precedence in election mattered more than relative sanctity. But a great deal was at stake, not least – much reiterated in the correspondence – the ninth position in the Treasury Chapel choir. Consequently, the nuns of Santa Patrizia shunned this decision, and continued to petition Rome. In early 1641 the Theatines had reason to hope that the ruling of the Sacra Congregazione dei Riti would be upheld. The Theatine Father Giovanni Antonio of San Paolo in Naples received word from Rome that Cardinal Pamphilj, responding to a petition from Santa Patrizia, had sharply reminded the nuns that the fact that Patricia was fully canonized, while Andrea Avellino merely beatified, was irrelevant, because as patrons they did not compete in terms of status, but in priority of election.43 Nevertheless, the issue gathered heat. By 18 May 1641 the royal councillor Di Marco admitted to Father Giovanni Antonio that, although ‘the city’s letter to Cardinal Barberini is excellent’, the cardinal doubted that the nuns would regard it as binding, and added darkly, ‘the issue requires considerable intervention’.44 The nuns continued to lobby Rome, through Cardinal Pamphilj, and finally their efforts paid off. A Brief awarding the coveted ninth place to St Patricia was issued by Pope Urban VIII in 1641.45 Her reliquary now proudly occupies that ninth niche, and it is her figure that looms over it in bronze (Figs 3 & 59). The implications for the convent were considerable. Meanwhile, Andrea Avellino was consigned to a niche on the right of the altar in the lefthand lateral chapel: a dignified position, for sure, and one which also guaranteed the provision of a bronze full-length figure, in this case by Giuliano Finelli, above his reliquary niche (Fig. 46). But it was inescapably a subordinate position, outside the principal arc of San Gennaro and the main altar in the presbytery, and unquestionably not as grand as that accorded his arch-rival St Patricia.46 Simply securing a place in the Treasury Chapel was not, however, the end of the Benedictine nuns’ urban ambitions. Annually the abbess petitioned the Archbishop for permission to process the reliquary bust out of the Cathedral Treasury Chapel and back into the convent church of Santa Patrizia for her feast day. And each year the silver saint processed solemnly across the city and home again. These processions brought to the city’s surfaces the claim to spiritual and civic power of St Patricia and the convent of Santa Patrizia. The drawing together of disparate force fields in the Treasury Chapel and the nuns’ BNN, S. Martino 523, fols 10r, 20r; Sallmann, Santi barocchi, 102. 6 October 1625 is the date given for election in the documents in the controversy with Santa Patrizia. 43 BNN, S. Martino 523, fol. 30r. 44 ‘Il negozio ha bisogno di grande aiuto’. BNN, S. Martino 523, fol. 40r. 45 ASN, Corporazioni religiose soppresse, S. Patrizia, 3460, O.IV, n. 53, n.f. 46 Sallmann, Santi barocchi, 85.

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inner church opened new possibilities for female urban sanctity and enclosed nuns that eddied across worshippers and streets and left them differently.

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The urban claim

The convent’s leap from a spirituality that was introverted and hermetic to one that was powerfully urbanized was orchestrated through interplay amongst architecture, urban procession, and print. Indeed it was in print that St Patricia’s most ambitious claims at the highest urban register were advanced. And the leap can be measured by the difference between two remarkable frontispieces published in 1619 and 1643. The first of these graced Giovanni Battista Manso’s Vita et Miracoli di S. Patricia Vergine Sacra con il compendio delle reliquie, che si conservano nella Chiesa del monasterio di detta santa in Napoli, published in Naples by Constantino Vitale in 1619 (Fig. 64); the second was published in 1643 as the frontispiece to the Vita di S. Patricia vergine Figlia dell’Imperator Costante e Protrettrice della Città, e Regno di Napoli by Paolo Regio in an expanded version by Cleonte Torbizi at the instigation of the nuns of the convent of Santa Patrizia (Naples: Francesco Savio) (Fig. 65). Both frontispieces consist of a central image of St Patricia, surrounded by seven small medallions of scenes from her life, that weave saint, place, and relic tightly together. In both versions the central image shows St Patricia, kneeling, hand on heart, holding lilies and wearing the relics of St Helena gazing up at an image of the Madonna and Child.47 They are identical, apart from the background to the central scene, its inscription, and the verse below. In the version of 1619, which helped pave the way for St Patricia’s successful election as protector in 1625, she kneels before an altar on which rest the convent’s prized ampoules of miraculous liquefying blood (Fig. 64).48 That miraculous blood rendered her worthy of the honour of protector, and a significant female counterpart – even a rival – to San Gennaro. In 1643 altar and relics are replaced by a bird’s eye view of the city of Naples seen from high over the sea (Fig. 65).49 Thus a claim to special status is maintained in terms of St Patricia’s intimacy with Virgin and Child, but the viewpoint shifts from one of privileged access within the convent to miraculous relics in the convent’s possession and to the city as seen from a divine point of view. It is the city as a whole that assumes pride of place. The altar, St Patricia herself had worn on her arm four precious real relics, of impeccable genealogy (‘probably inherited from St Helena’). These relics prompted both Patricia and the nuns to a more virtuous life. Regio and Torbizi, Vita di S. Patricia, 41–43. 48 The depiction is compositionally similar to the successful image of Blessed Filippo Neri published in Antonio Gallonio’s Vita Beati R. Philippi Nerii (Rome, 1600). 49 Jean-Michel Sallmann described this image as ‘the first example of contamination of ancient sanctity with the baroque aesthetic in Naples’. Sallmann, Santi barocchi, 60. 47

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place of Christ’s sacrifice, saint’s body, relic, miracle, is replaced by or transformed into the place and figure of Naples; and the saint’s fate and identity, her very being as saint, are intimately interlinked with the fate of the city, on whose behalf she intercedes, and its transformation, staged here in dramatic register. Divine approval holds saint and city in place and recognizes their correct relation. It was the translation of St Patricia’s reliquary bust to the Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro in Naples Cathedral in 1642 that prompted the second frontispiece. That event allowed Patricia to bask among Naples’ protector saints, but risked reducing her to simply one of many. The frontispiece renders her claim exclusive and privileged in its capacity to transform the city’s relation with the divine from miraculous relics to harmonization with the divine point of view.50 The peripheral scenes in ovals are identical, but the central rectangular scene differs from the earlier print in one significant detail. St Patricia kneels as before in the foreground, with a vision of the Virgin and Child at top left and a holy curtain drawn back at upper right. But here instead of the altar to Patricia’s right, a bird’s-eye view of Naples seen from out to sea sweeps round filling the scene behind her. Thus the city of Naples assumes the place of the altar and relics in the central image. In the first print St Patricia’s sanctity was justified in terms of her miraculous relics; in the second it is as protector of the city of Naples. The city itself, rather than her attributes, becomes her just­ ification. A banderole snaking from the virgin’s mouth indicates an abbreviated utterance from Isaiah 37: ‘For I will defend this city to save it for mine own sake.’51 St Patricia responds: ‘I will protect this city so that I will save it’ (‘Protegam civitatem hanc ut salvem’). Prophecy, protection, and redemption are fused through the protector saint’s relation with the city. The city is that which will be preserved and redeemed and, thus saved, that which will save. St Patricia’s claim is literally urbanized, and the city itself is staged as part of a relationship with holiness, rather than simply its location. The speech banderole on the 1643 frontispiece (Fig. 65) concisely replies to the prayer that filled the field beneath the central scene in the first frontispiece, as both a direct assertion to Virgin and Child and a citation from Isaiah 37:35 ‘et protegam civitatem istam ut salvem eam propter me [et propter David servum meum]’. These are God’s words in response to King Hezekiah’s prayer for the deliverance of Jerusalem from the threat of the Assyrians. That very prayer is now replaced by an extended enumeration of the saint’s immediate ancestors, thereby cementing the ‘genetic’ relation between Naples and For the anxieties of the convent of Santa Patrizia in this regard, see H. Hills, ‘Nuns and Relics: Spiritual Authority in Post-Tridentine Naples’, in C. van Wyhe (ed.), Female Monasticism in Pre-Industrial Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate), 2007, 11–39. 51 ‘et protegam civitatem istam ut salem eam propter me’. Isaiah 37:35. 50

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Constantinople – personified in the saint’s miraculous ‘emigration’ – and including Jerusalem. The replacement of the altar with vials by the prospect of Naples appears to ‘activate’ the translation of the saint’s vision into a ‘conversation’ with the divine beings in which Patricia Virgo enacts – rather than symbolizes – her role as civic protectress. The ground on which Patricia kneels in 1643 is no longer a church floor (or the floor of the Treasury Chapel, onto which the saint had not yet ‘stepped’ in 1619), but a kind of anagogical place, part-way between earth and heaven, where relics ‘come alive’ as agents of the divine. The change in the mise-en-scène thereby also delivers the logic of the postmortem scenes along the right side of the image, which insist on the saint’s relics’ miraculous ‘choice’ of a specific Neapolitan resting place where they could continue their miraculous beneficence. Visually the interplay of text/ image of compartmentalized marginal scenes balances a series of topological relations, including outdoor/indoor and flight/displacement/return, against the central image and text. While the emphasis in the earlier frontispiece on the ampoules of St Patricia’s miraculously liquefying blood established her as female counterpart and rival to San Gennaro, the later frontispiece, made after her patronal election in 1625, renders absolute her spiritual pre-eminence over Naples. The central scene in the 1643 frontispiece, therefore, acknowledges St Patricia’s uniquely privileged relationship over the city; and the city replaces the relics as the object of the saint’s devotion and efforts. In short, the claims to sanctity are urbanized. The city leaps from background setting to spiritual focus. The city is the saint’s spiritual focus, but it is now also her justification. Thus a saintly private devotion, which also celebrates the convent’s relics (Fig. 62), is replaced by a claim to civic significance in soteriological terms in which convent apparently cedes to city (Fig. 64). Here a convent ably exploits a front­ ispiece to advance its claims to spiritual leadership beyond the confines of enclosure, in a form at once mobile and authoritative that would find its way into monastic and domestic libraries, the hands of learned readers, the devout and the influential. But more than that, the nature of sanctity’s relation with the city is rearticulated. While the city becomes visible, it is presented as the binding promise between saint and Mother of God. Indeed, the city replaces the altar itself, stepping literally into its place as site of holy sacrifice and covenant. Thus the claim is made by both city and saint simultaneously – one through the other indissolubly. The city, figured as setting for the saint and protected by the divine, emerges as focus, locus, and unique guarantee of the correct relation between the saint and the divine. The mobility and pervasive capacities of frontispieces made them particularly effective for advancing such politicized and particularized ambitions. For an enclosed convent with spiritual ambition, the frontispiece, capable

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of vaulting over, without violating, the walls of enclosure, was a powerful instrument. Throughout the seventeenth century, frontispieces presented strong links between saints, aura, and specific institutions and places, thereby re-drawing the geographies of holiness. Neapolitan topography, whether specific buildings or the whole city, was shown to be central to this. Increasingly, frontispieces bound saints to identifiable place: frontispiece images of San Gennaro and St Patricia (Figs 43 & 64) are thus far removed from the detachment of Blessed Giacomo della Marca (Fig. 23) or Paolo Regio’s San Gennaro (1579) (Fig. 32). The city of Naples itself steadily became the key protagonist in the drama of sanctity, displacing personal claims and replacing itself as setting. City, saint, and salvation become indivisible as imagined from God’s point of view. Place came creeping out of the shadows to replace altars and devotions as agents of the sacred. Secured by the saint, place in turn justifies the saint. Nuns as relics

As citizens walked through seventeenth-century Naples, they knew they were observed from on high by nuns, veiled behind bulging iron balconies and tucked out of sight on their craning belvederes. Was this analogous to the watchful eye of the city’s protectors, who line the skies in maps of Naples in this period, such as that by Pierre Miotte (Fig. 63)? Could it be that nuns, regarded as intercessors on behalf of the city, were thought of rather like saints, or as potential saints? Convents themselves were seen as bulwarks, physically protecting the city from divine disgrace. In his ecclesiastical treatise on the role of women, Agostino Valier, Bishop of Verona, describes cloistered virgins as playing an important role in reconstituting the discipline of their city, by furnishing through their well-ordered respected convents a bulwark (baluardo) against evil. A city’s safety could be strengthened by the intercessive prayers of religious, which depended on the strength of its religious institutions. Nuns’ bodies functioned like relics in that, like them, they enhanced the spiritual significance of the place where they were housed and functioned extrovertedly to benefit those in contact with them. To return in light of this discussion above to Luca Giordano’s frescoed image of the nuns of San Gregorio Armeno (Fig. 66), the power of showing their arrival in Naples alongside that of their most treasured relic, their spiritual identity, and claim to civic fame is stark. Just as they validated their relics, so they were their most vital spiritual currency and authentication. The painting fronts the nuns’ choir: precious relics and choir nuns are conjoined. Moreover, the splendid wooden ceiling, by Teodoro d’Errico and collaborators (1580–82), which covers the nave and this same nuns’ choir, is studded with paintings which celebrate the convent’s precious relics (Plate 22). The nuns, gathered beneath this ceiling, or glimpsed through a grille just above it,

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are thus part of this celebration of relics, in ceiling and fresco, part of the fabric of the convent church itself.52 ‘If an authenticated relic requires a reliquary, it can be said that it is the reliquary that makes the relic’, suggests J.-C. Schmitt.53 Visually and publicly the container predominates over the bones it holds; indeed, as the latter often cannot be seen, their presence is generally made implicit only through the reliquary, which separates the bones from their original context, transforms them, and makes them distinctive. This suggestive relationship parallels exactly that between enclosed nuns and the architecture of their convent. In theory, invisible to the outside world, the nuns’ presence was made tangible and present through the architectural carapace of the convent which adumbrated and amplified it, both externally in the city and internally especially through the nuns’ church. After Trent, it was the convent, their enclosure, which made nuns holy. Just as reliquaries represented the relics they held both metaphorically and metonymically, so conventual buildings represented nuns’ bodies. The austerity of their outer walls paralleled the austerity of monastic habits, while the richly decorated interiors represented the precious balsam of virginity. Architecture and the body of the nun occupied mimetic fields, while the denial of the corporeal endlessly evoked it. Conventual churches, such as that of San Gregorio Armeno, were part of a complex dialectic of screening and revealing, a play between sacrifice and revelation, the temptation and fear of sight. The church of San Gregorio emphasized architecturally the nuns’ separation from laity, while ambiguously consolidating and fragmenting the religious body (Plate 22). Coverings of walls, grilles, habits, and pyx that revealed and concealed the bodies of nuns and Christ coalesced metonymically and metaphorically. Gilded lattices, behind which nuns sheltered inside their churches, celebrated them as the decorated pierced metal of a reliquary stages, protects, and screens its treasures. In a sense, nuns were transformed architecturally into living relics, their convent their gorgeous reliquary. Nuns were like relics in that they enhanced the spiritual significance and salvific chances of the cities and churches which housed them. The gilded grilles behind which nuns sheltered inside their churches celebrated them analogously to the relation between a pierced precious metal reliquary and its treasures. Relic and nun are emphatically protected through separation – spatial and optical – that also offers them up as objects of holiness. The For a wonderful account by Abbess Fulvia Caracciolo of the history of San Gregorio Armeno, and especially of the changes demanded by enclosure, see ASN, Corporazioni religiose soppresse, S. Gregorio Armeno, 3435, ‘Esemplare delle nobili memorie della reverenda D. Fulvia Caracciola’ (1577). 53 Schmitt, ‘Les reliques et les images’, 151. 52

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nuns’ inner church at Santa Patrizia, where the prized relics of St Patricia and other saints were housed, was separated from the outer church by just such a window, secured by a double grille, through which nuns listened to Mass, and by an iron-grilled communion window that at once frames, separates, and invites nuns, worshippers, and priests to draw close.54 Thus from without, nuns appeared like sacred objects behind grilled windows, like relics themselves. A special door with window was opened on the feast day of St Patricia and on Good Friday.55 Opening the nuns’ inner church as a public reliquary chapel twice a year fomented its holiness, and enhanced the spiritual presence of the nuns who daily frequented this privileged space. The dialectical movement between being shown and being hidden, between rituals of veiling and unveiling, common to relics and to nuns, is at the heart of the dual nature of holiness. Grilles shielded nuns and relics from scrutiny, made snatched glimpses all the more tantalizing. Made of metal, woven like cloth, grilles and gelosie trouble easy distinctions between wall and decoration, surface and depth, cladding and structure. What is celebrated is the screen; what is made glorious is the metallic veil. Nuns occupied the place of relics in other terms, too. Nun as martyr is almost a commonplace in seventeenth-century devotional writings. The founder of the Regina Coeli convent in Rome, Vittoria Colonna (1610–15), often told her sister nuns that, while in the early centuries of the Church holy virgins suffered torment and blood-shed as a result of espousing Christianity, now nuns dedicated to divine service in convents through their exacting observance ‘confess the same faith, the religious life being a continuous and prolonged martyrdom’.56 Similarly, in his vita of St Patricia, produced at the insistence of that Neapolitan convent, Paolo Regio insists that according to St Jerome the name of martyr is due not only to those who spill their blood, but to nuns also, since ‘the immaculate service of the devout mind should be called a daily martyrdom’.57 It was but a short step to thinking of nuns in terms of martyrdom, to considering them as martyrs and potential saints, indeed, even as saints, like those saints they honoured. In this respect, Vittoria Colonna’s response to her spiritual advisor, who reminded her that all nuns could not be perfect, is telling. She replied that having persuaded her sister, Anna Colonna, and Barberini, Princess of Palestrina and Prefect of Rome, to build the new convent of Regina Coeli, and having herself departed from the convent of San This arrangement is described at some length in ASDN, Vicario delle Monache 471–22, S. Patrizia (S. Visita, 1607), n.f. 55 The visitation of 1711 ordered the window in this door to be barred. ASDN, Vicario delle Monache 471–22, S. Patricia (S. Visita), n.f. 56 Biagio della Purificatione, Vita della Ven. madre Suor Chiara Maria della Passione, 347. 57 Regio and Torbizi, Vita di S. Patricia, 8. 54

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Egidio to be its founder, she intended ‘not to increase the number of monasteries by one, or to multiply nuns of ordinary virtue, but that they could all be saints, and that was her aim in going to such efforts and care’.58 Nuns, saints, and relics formed part of a complex machine that refracted and splintered the play of holiness and enhanced it.

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Conclusion

It is instructive to compare Santa Patrizia’s deployment of relics with the way Cardinal Paolo Camillo Sfondrati used the relics of St Cecilia and her two brothers in Rome.59 Both managed to combine an element of extroversion with intensification of their own seat. Keeping Cecilia’s skull for his own splendid relic collection, Cardinal Paolo Camillo sent his sister Agata Sfrondrati, abbess of the convent of San Paolo, Milan, fragments of the saint’s remains. At San Paolo, as Renée Baernstein has shown, the relics were kept in Agata’s chapel, dedicated to the virgin martyrs, as part of her strategy to promote herself in conventual devotional life.60 Meanwhile at Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, Stefano Maderno’s sculpture assumed the form of a relic, presenting the martyred saint, supposedly just as she had been found, now in the centre of the main axis of the public church (Fig. 37). Both Cardinal Sfondrati and the nuns of St Patrizia used relics to change place. Besides confirming his family status, enhancing his spiritual authority and that of his titular church, Sfrondati’s sculpture reinscribes the basilica back to the beginning, to the origin, and therefore the end of something old and the start of something new. The nuns at Santa Patrizia in Naples used their relics to generate reverentia for their convent, to confirm themselves as the family of St Patricia, to forge powerful connections between the Treasury Chapel in the Cathedral and their own inner church, to affirm the relation between city as a whole and St Patricia in particular as salvific (Fig. 60). But the nuns of Santa Patrizia also used St Patricia’s relics to ‘occupy’ the city, to convert parts of it to her cult, to realign themselves in the spiritual topography of Naples, to make of that something new. This implied a competitive relationship with San Gennaro Biagio della Purificatione, Vita della Ven. madre Suor Chiara Maria della Passione, 381–382. 59 The relics were found in excavations commissioned by Cardinal Paolo Sfondrati at the cemetery of Calistus. Bosio, Roma Sotterranea, 18D, 186. See also J. von Henneberg, ‘Cardinal Caesar Baronius, the Arts and the Early Christian Martyrs’, in F. Mormando (ed.), Saints and Sinners: Caravaggio and the Baroque Image (Chestnut Hill, Mass.: McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, 1999), 150. 60 R. Baernstein, A Convent Tale: A Century of Sisterhood in Spanish Milan (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 6. 58

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himself, and made grand claims for their inner church as a tesoro (shrinedestination) like that at the Duomo. Relics not only represented a person but also were treated like a person, being worshipped, or carried from place to place in processions (Fig. 60). They did more than merely ‘serve in the symbolic exchange of power’ and more than’ embody the public claims of a community’. Edward Muir has argued that just as the idea of Christ as the head of the body-church became eventually, through a series of ideological and ritual borrowings, the relationship between the king and his kingdom, so in a parallel development cities came to represent themselves as body or corporation.61 At issue in the interplay of Treasury Chapel relic, saint, and convent is the holiness of that body and its spiritual salvation. Here we have seen how an enclosed convent became a spiritual urban body through the saintly body. Much has been made of how ‘CounterReformation’ Rome was enriched through its catacombs and soil, soaked in the blood of saints and martyrs. In Naples nuns’ exploitation of relics reminds us of the fluidity of relics, of their contagious qualities, of their ability to transport holiness, to spread it through a city, and simultaneously to transform city and the soteriological economy. Their very fluidity made relics particularly valuable to static enclosed convents. Just as Bosio’s Roma Sotterranea conjured up a subterranean holy city, so the Neapolitan nuns and their publications chased a holy city above ground through translating, transporting, encasing, displaying, refolding relics to map a spiritual city with them and their relic at its heart. At once liability, tool, point of contact, artifice, and energy, relics remapped convent-city and nun-saint. If we return to the letter of Maria Carafa, written in advance of the ceremony she purported to describe, the imaginings of St Patricia’s relics out in the city streets, receiving the blessings of gentlemen of the Seggi and religious orders alike, were enablements, the relic a prosthetic extension. The convent was not merely drawn into another context, a spectator of other worlds, but was made able to act.62

Muir, Civic Ritual, 232. For a stimulating discussion of cultural prosthetics, see M. Strathern, Partial Connections (Savage, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1991), 116.

61 62

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9

Heads and bones: face to face

An idiot holds his bauble for a god. And keeps the oath which by that god he swears. (Shakespeare, Titus Adronicus, V.i.70–71) Deus interior intimo meo, superior summo meo (God deeper within me than I myself am, higher than my highest). (Augustine, Confessions, bk 3, cap. 6, 11)

The saints of the Middle Ages wrought miracles. But the saints of the Counter Reformation were miracles. They all possessed the gift of vision, the aureole of ecstasy which astonished their contemporaries and inspired the wonder of succeeding ages. Their biographies are filled with these marvels. They are like explorers returning from a journey into another world. They have seen God face to face.1

Émile Mâle’s brilliant evocation of baroque saints throws down the gauntlet to any interpretation of the saints that crowd Gennaro’s Treasury Chapel (Plate 3). There more than thirty saints swarm round the miracle-working chamber as glittering silver reliquary busts and figures.2 Dazzling, difficult to apprehend, they hold the visitor in their sway. Hard to fathom, remote, and solemn, like their prototype, the stern and uncompromising San Gennaro, they have sublimated the idea of the idol and do not readily yield their secrets (Plate 6). In withholding, they hold much and hint at more. If they are ­explorers returning from another world, then their journey is far from over. There is something ghostlike and haunted about them, wreathed as they are in the impenetrability of refracted reflections, glancing light, and the sudden dazzle of a promise. They seem utterly impassable, and yet their adventures have left them strangely (Plates 43 & 44). They tell less of their É. Mâle, Religious Art from the Twelfth to the Eighteenth Century (New York: Noonday Press, 1958), 179.   2 There are over fifty silver reliquaries, but some are stored in the museum of the Treasury of San Gennaro and the sacristy of the Treasury Chapel.   1

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own ­transports, even as they are made to be transported and to transport (Plate 24, Fig. 60). Theirs is the matter of transformation and of the transformation of matter, but in spite of their alluring visual shininess, their utterances are far from distinct. It is the viewer they spin about, while flashing their silver sheen. They r­ edefine the world about them in their silvery motility – in something evasive and on the move that reflects back, that cannot quite be grasped. Mobility incarnate, they are part of the journey from one matter to another (Plate 40). Their capacity for movement, for transformation, is almost all they are, as elusive and allusive and transgressive as lightning in a dark sky. Explorers from worlds both old and new, border-crossing migrants, the saints gesture towards what is yet to come in an entelechy that is also – ­paradoxically – potentiality (Plates 6 & 40). This is less a temporal movement than an ontological one. Saintliness is not the observance of the Law, but the opening to what is addressed to faith, the opening to the proclamation.3 This chapter and the one that follows investigate that opening, wrought in shining silver. Thus the reliquaries are thought in terms of their potential for opening and, like Christianity itself, as an address towards something that there is no possibility of reaching. Just as in Christianity the promise is at once already realized and yet to come, these strange baroque reliquaries may usefully be thought as that which also opens the possibility of what is to come. They gesture towards the existence of what is not in this world, without being another world for all that. Thus this chapter and the next explore the silver reliquaries not as enclosure or container for something stable and containable, or as a closure that therefore inevitably disencloses, but in terms of immanence, as that which makes possible new openings without resorting to a t­ranscendent. They do this within the triple optic of God, nature, and politics. In silver capitalism and sanctity meet their match. The implications of that meeting are investigated in this chapter and the following one through the prism of San Gennaro’s silver saints. This chapter focuses on the reliquary busts’ form and its religious significance. Chapter 10 examines the implications of the wider politics of silver from its mining to its sustenance of Spanish monarchy and Spanish rule in Naples to its surfacing in those reliquaries. Together the chapters address the question of how and why silver affords a peculiarly Neapolitan bridge between the brutality of the mines and the saints’ whispers in heaven.

See J.-L. Nancy, Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, trans. B. Bergo, G. Malenfant, and M. B. Smith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 155.

  3

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Reliquary heads

The superb Angevin gilt bust of San Gennaro set the gold standard (Plate 6). The massed hoardes of silver saints pay homage to their golden master. Thronging the Treasury Chapel, the silver reliquaries of Naples’ many protector saints (Plate 7, Figs 2 & 3), encircle, like courtiers, the silver-gilt bust of San Gennaro to which they refer and defer.4 It was the first bust, given by a king, and remains unique in the chapel, heavily studded with precious stones, splendid in its almost oily golden opulence.5 ‘Head reliquaries are in fact rather disturbing, decapitated objects’, remarked Michael Camille, going straight to the heart of the matter.6 Indeed, in spite of well-intentioned but anodyne reassurances, such as Linda Nochlin’s, that earlier ‘concern with images of the fragmented body are different from ours’, there remains something unnerving about the amassed gathered heads in the chapel.7 And it may be more productive to abide by that uneasiness than to seek to discredit it or tame it. More than our encountering them, the busts encounter us; and they disturb through the very face of that encounter. Like any meeting, it is fraught with ambiguities, but here they are brought to the surface, as the face of silver, its gleaming slippery surface, shines back, returns the look, and dazzles (Plate 43 & Fig. 71). These reliquary busts disturb any easy boundary between face and metal, heaven and earth, life and death, sculpture and cultic object, indeed between subject and object. These silver faces are at once mockingly superior to faces of corruptible flesh, yet they are uncanny, argyrian, ensilvered (Plate 44 & Fig. 60). They leave one ill at ease, exposed, and blemished. These saints do more than inhabit the chapel. Their silvery presence, which depends on their very absence and Barbara Drake Boehm refers to the bust of San Gennaro by French goldsmiths and the head of St Agatha in the Treasury of Catania as two examples of ‘great works of art that have not been adequately studied’. B. Drake Boehm, ‘Body-Part Reliquaries: The State of Research’, Gesta, 36:1 (1997), 17.   5 Barbara Drake Boehm suggests that at the end of the thirteenth century it mattered that the head reliquary of France’s royal saint Louis should resemble the head reliquary of St Denis in appearance and construction – since it was the visual metaphor that served to link the saints. Drake Boehm, ‘Body-Part Reliquaries’, 16. See also C. Enlart, ‘L’Emaillerie cloisonné a Paris sous Philipe le Bel’, Monuments et mémoires publiés par l’Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres (Fondation Eugène Piot), 29 (1927–28), 36.   6 Camille, The Gothic Idol, 279.   7 Linda Nochlin was referring specifically to the gulf between medieval and late twentieth-century assumptions about body parts (L. Nochlin, The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity (London: Thames & Hudson, 2001, 2). She suggests that depictions of fragments since the French Revolution have none of the medieval sense of pars pro toto. More recently Cynthia Hahn notes: ‘after the initial shock, modern viewers feel comfortable with these reliquaries’ (Strange Beauty, 117). I am not so sure.   4

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implies always a presence elsewhere, their gleaming triumphalism in their evocation of beheading, their glinting surfaces that refract light and hint at the glamour of wealth combine disconcertingly and can only discomfit the too stolidly embodied visitor. Art historians were long reluctant to take body-part reliquaries s­ eriously. It was still necessary in 1972 for Ilene Forsyth to refute Harald Keller’s assert­ ion that they were simply the first halting efforts by sculptors of limited ability, part of a teleological progress towards canonical sculpture. Instead Forsyth treated them as a distinct genre of sculpture with its own aesthetic, drawing particular attention to the hieratic quality of the figures, their otherworldly mien, and their exploitation of precious metal and stones.8 While the suggestion that head reliquaries form part of the history of images is no longer controversial, their study remains largely restricted to medievalists; and their later resurgence remains all but ignored. Moreover, how ‘head’ or ‘bust’ reliquaries worked to particular effect, how they differed in operation from, say, sarcophagus-shaped chasses, and the reasons for and consequences of the variety among them remain under-investigated in any period.9 Body-part or ‘speaking’ reliquaries are known as early as the late ninth century, but became prominent in the West only in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.10 Hans Belting observed that ‘the plastic image often gives a bodily relic the human appearance that it has lost in decay and division’.11 This cannot be taken literally since, as J. Braun pointed in 1940, many bodypart reliquaries do not contain the bone or body part depicted.12 Since then Cynthia Hahn has coined the term ‘shaped reliquaries’ to recognize that there is not necessarily any homologous relationship between bone and container, and that the shape of the object may denote ritual significance.13 Thus an arm reliquary (whatever bones it may contain) may be used to offer the I. H. Forsyth, The Throne of Wisdom: Wood Sculptures of the Madonna in Romanesque France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), 1–3.   9 Recent scholarship includes Bagnoli et al. (eds), Treasures of Heaven; C. Freeman, Holy Bones, Holy Dust: How Relics Shaped the History of Medieval Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011); and Hahn, Strange Beauty, esp. 117–141, including a discussion of ‘the ­definition of the type’ (pp. 120–123).  10 C. Walker Bynum and P. Gerson, ‘Body-Part Reliquaries and Body Parts in the Middle Ages’, Gesta, 36:1 (1997), 4. The earliest body-part reliquary in France is the head of St Maurice, of 879–887. Bynum and Gerson, ‘Body-Part Reliquaries’, 7 n.10.  11 Belting, Likeness and Presence, 330.  12 J. Braun, Die Reliquiare des christlichen Kultes und ihre Entwicklung (Freiburg: Herder, 1940) pioneered the work of art-historical analysis of the form of reliquaries. The question of the place in art history of objects like reliquaries that are not ‘art’ in a conventional modern sense was most sharply posed by Hans Belting in Bild und Kult: Eine Geschichte des Bildes vor dem Zeitalter der Kunst (Munich: Oscar Beck, 1990); trans. Likeness and Presence.  13 C. Hahn, ‘The Voices of the Saints: Speaking Reliquaries’, Gesta, 36:1 (1997), 20–31.   8

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blessing traditionally given by a living bishop in the liturgy. The term ‘shaped’ is insufficiently precise to be useful and it implies that some reliquaries were ‘unshaped’, which is unhelpful.14 Certainly, in the Treasury Chapel there is no ready consonance between relic and reliquary shape. Of the relics only San Gennaro’s is actually the head. While Gennaro’s reliquary evokes the bone it contains, such holomorphism is not the case for his court of saints whose relics range from skull bones to a wide assortment of bones and body parts.15 St Thomas Aquinas’ relics are arm bones, San Francesco di Paola’s neck bones, St Blaise’s four drops of blood and an arm bone, St Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi’s a molar tooth; St Agnellus’ bust contains his chin bone, and St Patricia’s (Fig. 59) a piece of arm bone.16 What matters then is not fidelity to a literal body part, but the evocation of a persona, a silver saint. Yet all the saints in the presbytery niches are represented by reliquary ‘busts’ or half-length figures. Thus the formal reference was always primarily to the reliquary bust of San Gennaro himself (Plates 6 & 7). This produces an impressive effect of uniformity and coherence, of an army of saints subordinated to the chapel and city and to the heavenly community. Thus to the extent that it is totalizing, the chapel stages a hierarchical order and conformity, an army martialled and at the ready. The reliquaries and chapel together guaranteed the local Christian tradition, the identity of the city in a public proclamation of a story, a form equivalent to a writing of sacred history. Nevertheless, the saints defy simple uniformity and subordination. Specific iconographies identify specific saints: thus St Patricia wears a crown and carries a lily (Fig. 59). Some are even full-length, such as the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception (Plate 5), and others involve multiple figures, presenting narrative tableaux, rather like floats used in Passion processions (Plates 27 & 28, Fig. 42). The effect is cacophonous, rather than a regulated choir. Glances, heads, arms gesture in diverse directions, as confusionary as the frescoed epiphanies of baroque heaven are unifying (Plate 4). These saints display a fundamental indiscipline, a volatile sense of duty. All the silver busts refer synecdochally also to the saint in heaven, that is to the saint elsewhere, whole and complete, while what they contain is part only, truncated, martyred, and of the earth. Consider, for example, the complex reliquary that consists of a foot shape reposing on the top of a portable altar illustrated in T. Head, ‘Art and Artifice in Ottonian Trier’, Gesta, 36:1 (1997), 65–82. It is suggestive that footprints were produced by Roman sculptors as ex-voti and that feet are not infrequent remains of Greek and Roman Antique sculpture, as in the beautiful examples in the Agora Museum, Athens.  15 Celano provides a list, as does Tutini. Celano, Notizie del bello, vol. II, tom. 1, 111–114; Tutini, Memorie (1710).  16 For Agnellus, see ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc. 83 bis n. 1), fol . 23r.  14

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Reliquaries in the form of a bust or half-length figure appear throughout Catholic Europe from Granada in Spain to Poland between the early Middle Ages and the present. Among the most striking bust relics are those of Saints Peter and Paul in the basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano in Rome. From high up in a gilt reliquary cage, raised like a crow’s nest above the papal altar on the tabernacle erected for Urban V in 1367, they command the whole nave (Fig. 61). The Neapolitan Treasury Chapel depends not on spatial elevation, but on the gleam of silver and sheer number. San Gennaro’s bust combines political and religious impact, distinguished patronage and provenance with aesthetic power (Plate 6). Presented to Naples in 1305 by Charles II, son of Charles I of Anjou (conquerer of the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily in the 1260s), it is effortlessly regal, a particularly grandiloquent ex-voto gift from a king eager to commemorate his ‘victorious’ reign. Indeed, as Barbara Drake Boehm pointed out, often the primary offering took the form of a lavishly jewelled crown, and thus, rather than think of crowns made for heads, it is more apt to think of heads made for crowns.17 San Gennaro, then, implicitly bore an Angevin crown and proclaimed the authority of a distant ruler at the heart of Neapolitan devotion. Although by no means limited to Naples, the use in that city of the ‘portrait’ bust as reliquary may stem from a long-established tradition of adorning its bishops’ tombs with an imago depicta, a portrait of the deceased bishop, from the tomb of the catacombs of San Gennaro onwards.18 Indeed, Mazzochi claims that the gilt silver reliquary bust of San Gennaro was modelled after the face of the saint in the mosaic of the chapel of Santa Maria del Principio in Santa Restituta, which enjoyed particular authority in its reputation as Constantinian (Plate 19).19 Most striking in the Treasury Chapel, however, is the sheer number of such heads clustered in one place, the insistent deployment of silver, rather than wood, bronze, or other materials, their artistic virtuosity and silver sheen, and their prominence around the chapel (Plates 3 & 5, Fig. 3). The impression B. Drake Boehm, ‘Medieval Head Reliquaries of the Massif Central’ (PhD diss., Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 1990), 171–172. Birgitta Falk has shown that crowns not infrequently preceded heads. B. Falk, ‘Bildnisreliquiare: Zur Entstehung und Entwicklung der metallenen Kopf-, Büsten-, und Halbfigurenreliquiare im Mittelater’, Aachener Kunstblätter, 59 (1991–93), 178.  18 Romano points out that the Neapolitan speciality of the imagines depictae reserved for the commemoration of dead bishops emerges from Chronicon episcorum, 402–439, Liber pontificalis, Caracciolo, Napoli Sacra (1623), Celano’s Notizie del bello, and Chioccarello’s Antistitum (1643). See S. Romano, Arte e iconografia a Roma: dal tardoantico alla fine del Medioevo (Milan and Rome: Jaca Book, 2002), 8–9.  19 ‘Carolus II Andegartensis curavit … ut simulacrum aureum, in quo caput Januarii inclusit, eodem vultu effingeretur, quo idem Martyr in musico S. Maria de Principio conspicitur’. A. S. Mazzochi, Dissertatio historica de Cathedralis Ecclesia Neapolitana semper unicae variis …. Vicibus (Naples: Regia Tipografica, 1751), 54.  17

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is of a multitude of saints, jostling and crowding in. This is, of course, starkly at odds with the treatment of the relics in the earlier Succorpo reliquary chapel, where the relics remain as bones, and where it is the worshipper, Cardinal Carafa, who is represented in bodily form (Plate 11). Instead, in the Treasury Chapel the relics, reliquaries, and silver operate to enhance value in an exchange that is intensified through the heads and extended beyond them. The reliquaries accrued added spiritual power from the chapel. Thus at the time of the election of St Francis of Paola, the Minims agreed to request alms for a silver reliquary bust ‘so that [his relics] could repose in it with pomp equal to that of the other protector saints’ and to transfer his relics to the Treasury Chapel in a solemn procession.20 Not only was the saint honoured when his relics were translated to the chapel, but the city received a priceless gift. ‘A greater and more precious gift to the city could not be made’, declares the published account.21 The chapel can thus be seen as generating honour inwards and outwards, to heaven and earth, to saint and city simultaneously. Saints’ relics and reliquaries populate the chapel, take possession of it, and overflow it. They are not restricted to the main altar or to walls alone, as is often the case, but they inhabit the entire chapel with their gleaming presences. They nestle into loculi in the walls, perch on special stands, and occupy the body of the chapel (Fig. 3). Busily they jostle each other and compete with worshippers for space, air, and light. Thus architectural body, holy body, and pious bodies are infiltrated by bronze sculpture and silver reliquaries. Sharing the same space and more or less at the worshippers’ head height, the busts occupy the same size and scale, apparently breathe the same air. At once familiar, similar, and consonant, they demand our recognition and acknowledgement. Yet in their silver sheen, they remain distant, chilling, hieratic, and unassailable (Plates 43 & 44, Fig. 71). Familiar and human, distant and saintly, silver also produces an unnerving merging of the very distinctions on which it so powerfully insists. Silver draws us together, reflecting our own faces and movements in the saint’s skin and clothes, fusing our surfaces together, crossing worshipper and reliquary in a form of animated prosthesis or cyborgian divinity. In its cold metal surfaces it provides an indecipherable glimpse of the habitation of another world. Chapter 10 takes up the issue of silver in greater detail.

Capaccio, Descrittione della Padronanza di s. Francesco di Paola, 21. On 15 April 1629 the Minims applied to the Archbishop for permission for the solemn translation of the recently completed reliquary bust to the Treasury Chapel; the Archbishop claimed that authority to solemnize this translation lay entirely with him and that there was no need to go to the Pope. Capaccio, Descrittione della Padronanza di s. Francesco di Paola, 22, 27.

 20  21

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Head to head

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Barbara Drake Boehm has suggested that body-part reliquaries destabilize distinctions that are fundamental to the discipline of art history: Body-part reliquary images, by virtue of their style and/or their materials, often fall outside the canons we have constructed for the art of Greece and Rome or of the Renaissance. Even for medievalists, their revetment with precious materials distances them from the now colourless and consequently dispassionate limestone of the portal figures of Gothic cathedrals. The insistent presence of these reliquary objects is frankly unsettling.22

Art historians are not alone in being discomfited by body parts. Especially to Protestants, suggests Drake Boehm, they are ‘unsettling’ and ‘insistently cultic’.23 Those cultic claims continue to keep us at a distance, disturbing uneasy ambivalence to body, matter, and death. One response to these strange objects is to seek to tame them, to render them familiar, to secure them in evolutionary family trees, and thus to un-unsettle them. But perhaps a more responsive response would be not to approach them unflinchingly. Indeed, to flinch before them. And, in flinching, to allow them to continue to unsettle and to disturb, to contaminate us and transport us away from our comfortable ground to show us the things they are capable of permitting us to see. For Isidore of Seville, the head is the ‘primary part of the body’, from which all senses and nerves originated and ‘every source of activity around it’.24 The head renders reliquaries most eloquent, yet strangely specious. It is as if the reliquary head restores to the relic-bone that which is most human, but in so doing transforms it into something that is most saintly. Let us draw closer to the silver reliquaries. This chapter turns away from their peripatetic movements, to their dressing and adornment, and to their intimate openings. This takes us to the relic at the very heart of the matter itself; and to the peculiarly non-homogeneous space that the relic engenders and necessitates. Naples’ patronal saints had not always been glittering silver. That brilliant surface sheen of silver was produced along with the Treasury Chapel. Silver replaced wood as part of the upgrade to the new Treasury. Six of the first patron saints were transformed into silver under Maria of Toledo’s patronage. Gradually, orchestrated by the Deputazione, old wooden busts were replaced with silver, and new silver busts were added to house relics of newly minted Drake Boehm, ‘Body-Part Reliquaries’, 14. Drake Boehm, ‘Body-Part Reliquaries’, 14.  24 Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, XI.i.25, ed. and trans. Barney et al., 232.  22  23

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protector saints.25 Thus the incorporation of various relics into silver busts is a form of translation that produces a new place of redemption, part of a process in which veneration and remembering are to transform. Despite their underlying uniformity, the busts here are more dramatically individuated than the reliquary busts in the wall reliquaries of the Gesù Nuovo (Fig. 16). Their individuation is largely, though not exclusively, iconographic. For example, St Thomas Aquinas (in the loculus first on the left side of the presbytery), a reliquary made by Alfonso Balsamo in 1605, holds a monstrance. St Severus (1671, elected 1628), designed by Andrea Falcone and executed by Aniello Treglia, holds a book, and his pluvial is pinned with a fibula adorned with green gemstones.26 But it is above all the truncated form of the reliquary itself that carries such power. In the Treasury Chapel the auratic intensity of its reliquaries is increased by the restriction of their form to busts or half-lengths.27 Compared with fullfigure reliquaries, such as Gian Domenico Vinaccia and Lorenzo Vaccaro’s Saint Michael Archangel (1691) (Plate 28), the curtailed reliquaries are wond­ erfully liberated from the restriction of scale that the full-length human form brings with it. ‘The head is located above and over the body, so that it may command and govern over everything’, writes Tiberio Malfi in his book Il Barbiere (Naples, 1626), citing Lattantio Firmiano, Galen, and other authorities. He goes on to say that if the head is found buried separately from the rest of the body, no matter how entire, the place where the head is found is the place declared sacred, because ‘we are recognized by our faces, not by the rest of our body’. In the face is reflected celestial beauty: Hence, as the semblance of celestial beauty is depicted on the face, the laws commanded: that a man (even though otherwise condemned to a severe punishment) could not be branded on the face, so that no stain should mar in him that which on earth shines as a thing almost divine. Emperor Constantine Ad Euthymio Praetorian Prefect, quis in metallum, ch. 17 De Poenis.28

For example, St Agnellus’ wooden bust was replaced in silver for the feast of St Francesco d’Assisi on 4 October 1665. ATSG, CA/67, Fasc. 83 bis n. 1.  26 Catello and Catello, La Cappella del Tesoro, 145.  27 In fact, several of the later reliquaries comprised half-lengths and even whole figures, but these were not displayed in the niches comprising the main articulation of the chapel.  28 ‘Per tanto sendo, che nella faccia stà figurate la somiglianza della bellezza celeste, comandauano le legi: c’huomo (ancorche per altro a’ graue pena dannato) non fusse però nella faccia bullato, acciò non si macchiasse in lui quel, che quasi cosa diuina riluce in terra, come si scriue l’Imperadore Costantino ad Euthymio Prefetto del Pretorio, quis in metallum. 17.c. de poenis.’ Malfi, Il Barbiere, 7.  25

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The reliquaries are necessarily not portrait likenesses, which depend on living models, at least in principle.29 Rather than ‘what did he look like?’, they respond to the question ‘What would it be to inhabit a transformed world?’ According to an eleventh-century chronicle, in 979 Abbot Stephen of Tournus made a caput vero to house the skull of St Valerian ‘in a likeness, to a certain point, of the martyr’.30 For it is the head that allows the soul to preside over the body. ‘In [the head], all sensations become evident. Whence it plays the role, so to speak, of the soul itself, which watches over the body.’31 Thus these are portraits of souls, rather than of persons. They are ‘presences’ that offer an uncanny impersonal intimacy.32 Thus the chapel reliquaries permit the ‘facialization’ of the saint (Plate 44). ‘It is not the individuality of the face that counts, but the efficacy of the ciphering it makes possible’, write Deleuze and Guattari, ‘and in what cases it makes it possible:’33 This is an affair not of ideology, but of economy and the organization of power (pouvoir). We are certainly not saying that the face, the power of the face (la puissance du visage), engenders and explains social power (pouvoir). Certain assemblages of power require the production of a face, others do not.34

The busts in Gennaro’s chapel are more than heads, however. Most of them comprise head, shoulders, and chest (Plates 43 & 44, Fig. 3). The relics are generally located in the chest (Figs 42 & 71). As Kohl perceptively observes, the chest is a special receptacle whose significance lies in the fact that it is found in humans and not in animals. Isidore of Seville locates soul and mind in the head and chest: The Greeks called the front of the torso from the neck to the stomach the thorax, this is what we call the chest (arca), because in that place is a hidden (arcanus), that is, a secret thing, from which people are shut out (arcere). From this a strong box [that is, a chest, coffer, casket or shrine] (arca) and an altar (ara) also derive their names, as if the words meant ‘secret things’.35 A portrait likeness depended on the persona or role of the person rather than tracing superficial idiosyncrasies of face. On these issues, see S. Perkinson, ‘Rethinking the Origins of Portraiture’, Gesta, 46:2 (2007), 135–158, and T. E. Dale, ‘Convention, Vision and Real Presence in Romanesque Portrait Sculpture’, Gesta, 46:2 (2007), 101–120.  30 ‘Caput vero juxta memoratum loculum in imagine quaddum velut ad similitudinem martyris’. Quoted in Drake Boehm, ‘Medieval Head Reliquaries’, 168–170.  31 Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, XI.i.25, ed. and trans. Barney et al., 232.  32 Hahn argues instead that they are best thought of as ‘a representation of the presence of the saint’. Hahn, Strange Beauty, 117.  33 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 175.  34 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 175.  35 Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, XI, i.73, ed. and trans. Barney et al., 236. See also J. Kohl, ‘Body, Mind, and Soul: On the So-Called Platonic Youth at the Bargello, Florence’, in  29

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Kohl emphasizes Isidore’s etymological link between chest and altar via the arcanum to illuminate the connection between the chest and container of special things: ‘Man’s intimacy, his inner constitution, is locked up in his thorax … [or] “chest”, which means both the body part and a locked up box.’36 For Kohl the significance of this connection permits the portrait bust to emerge more sharply as a portrait of the sitter’s soul. According to Plato, the soul is split into a rational (logisticon), a volitive (thymoeides), and an appetitive (epithymeticon) part. While the logisticon has its seat in the head (nous), the volitive is located in the chest and the appetitive in the stomach.37 Busts are therefore loci animae, representations and containers of man’s arcanum of the soul and its parts.38 For the reliquary bust, the link between chest, altar, and secret special thing is staged through the relic. It is the staging of the special hidden thing that animates the whole. Saints alive

Whereas angels merely communicate, saints possess bodies somewhat like demons, occupying statues and living persons. Devotion before relics and images of saints exploits their vehicular function, their role in delivering messages and visions from God to the world; relic, bust, and statue were portals, through which heaven and earth might reach each other, through which blood and bone shine as silver and gold, through which cold metal might pulse with the promise of flesh. Reliquary busts were treated as alive. Rather like living dignitaries, they were dressed and adorned and formally processed (Plate 40). Their shoulders were adoringly draped in precious capes and stoles. The busts of patron bishops were bestowed with silver-embroidered mitres that they wore in processions.39 The Treasury’s inventory is like a pirate’s dream. San Gennaro’s wardrobe might make an archbishop blush. He was dressed and draped with fabulous jewels, necklaces, and an extravagantly precious mitre, as rich as could be Alexander Nagel and Lorenzo Pericolo (eds), Subject as Aporia in Early Modern Art (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 58.  36 Kohl, ‘Body, Mind, and Soul’, 59.  37 Plato Timaeus, 2.4.1.1, 69e and 70e, quoted by Kuhn, ‘Body, Mind, and Soul’, 59–60.  38 Kohl, ‘Body, Mind, and Soul’, 60.  39 ‘le mitra di lama d’argento alle statue d’argento de SS P[adro]ni Vescovi’. ATSG, B/11 (1602), fol. 135v. This practice predates the Treasury Chapel, as Pietro de Stefano records: ‘Mitres with pluvials of brocade and gold cloth and of silver, as clearly are seen in … processions’ (‘con piovali e mitre di imborcati, & tele d’oro, & d’argento, como chiaramente son’ viste in dette processioni’). De Stefano, Descrittione dei luoghi sacri, 10.

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(Plate 12). It is after all the miraculous relic more than the life and actions of Bishop Gennaro that is celebrated. ‘The head of San Gennaro in a bust of gilt silver … is adorned with bejewelled mitre, piviale, and necklace’, Domenico Parrino notes in his guide book to Naples.40 In addition, Parrino notes that the saint ‘has many dressed gems [gioje parati], and precious things given him by princes, Viceroys, Vicereines, and devout gentlemen’.41 Dressing the bust in episcopal mitre, cope, and pectoral cross and dangling necklaces round his neck formed part of the votive economy of honour and grace. Among many pluvials listed is ‘a small pluvial [piuvaletto] of crimson satin, entirely embroidered with gold bordered by Walloon [cloth] also embroidered with its hood also embroidered made in 1730 for the service of our glorious protector San Gennaro’.42 Dressing San Gennaro’s bust with cope, mitre, and necklace precedes its encounter with his blood. A superb mitre of gold thread, embroidered with small and large pearls and sapphires of the highest quality, with crystals of ‘diverse colour’, valued at 241 ducats even before its completion, is referred to in a document dated 21 January 1665.43 Despite such splendours, in 1712 Matteo Treglia undertook to make another magnificent new gilt silver mitre for San Gennaro using ex-voto offerings and gifts (jewels and silver) from the devout, in time for his May feast.44 Nicolò Carminio Falcone reckoned the finished mitre to be worth 40,000 scudi.45 Some years later the deputies bestowed Gennaro’s old embroidered mitre as ‘a mark of devotion’ on the Prince of Castellaneta, who donated a new one.46 Thus nobles provided new vestments for San Gennaro and he, in turn, passed on to them his old ones, now imbued with saintly virtus, in an exchange of economic and spiritual investment that was not so direct as to be contaminated by vulgar instrumentality. The reliquaries were held, kissed, dressed, and perambulated (Plates 12, 24, 40 & Fig. 60) Special clothes were made new for the statues and some used clothing was given, being valued because of who had worn it.47 Frapponi of Parrino, Nuova Guida de’ Forastieri (1714), 308. ‘Hà il Santo molte gioje parati, e cose preziose donategli da Principi, Vicerè, Viceregine, e Signori divoti’. Parrino, Nuova Guida de’ Forastieri (1714), 308.  42 ‘Un piuvaletto di raso cremesino tutto ricamato di oro con vallone intorno ancora ricamato con il suo cappuccio anche ricamato fatto nel’anno 1730 quale serve per il n.ro Gl.o Protettore S. Gennaro’. ATSG, HE/15, Fasc. 84 n. 3.  43 ATSG, AB/11 - 1602, Conclusioni, fol. 49r.  44 The deputies sold a gold chain and many pearls to acquire the jewels; four deputies asked the goldsmiths for money and jewels, another four approached convents and monasteries ‘searching for money to completely finish the said bejewelled mitre’. ATSG, AB/11 - 1602, Conclusioni 1661–1673, fol. 49r.  45 Falcone, L’Intera Istoria di San Gennaro, 512.  46 ATSG, AB/19, fasc. 52 n. 10 (Indice degli Appuntamenti, 1726–1738), n.f.  47 The identity of those who had worn the clothing before it was put on the statue became part of its identity. Trexler observes that it was more common for women to bequeath  40  41

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crimson satin (raso cremesino) from Florence, embroidered with gold, were ordered for all the protectors (Fig. 59). The costs were borne by monasteries, convents, and churches across the city in relation to their saints.48 It is not quite clear what these ‘heavy fringes of crimson satin’ were. Perhaps they adorned the brancards on which the reliquaries travelled during processions (Plate 14, Fig. 69); more likely they lined their chapel niches like thrones (Fig. 59). Fabulous rich fabrics, worked in silver and gold thread, New World substances painstakingly translated by skilled women in intricate blood-shedding needlework (Plates 7 & 12). The people who made that cloth – mostly women – thus became part of the dressed saint’s identity.49 Richard Trexler has argued that this practice should not be thought of as simply seeking to heighten realism.50 The claim that such dressing is expressive of ‘obsessive baroque realism’ would, as Trexler points out, make sense only if dressing up of women by other women, which is the common referent in experience, were a similarly impressive and unquestioned ‘realism’.51 In the silver reliquaries that brocade was woven into commerce with sanctity (Fig. 71). San Gennaro’s bust was not only dressed and treated as if living. It became San Gennaro the saint. Thus San Gennaro is repeatedly depicted not as a whole figure, a human being, but as truncated, as a bust or half-length figure, as in Jusepe de Ribera’s magnificent San Gennaro Intercedes on Behalf of Naples at the Eruption of Vesuvius (Salamanca, 1631) (Plate 31). In other words, the their old clothes in their wills to holy sculptures than it was for men. R. Trexler, ‘Dressing and Undressing Images: An Analytic Sketch’, in Religion in Social Context in Europe and America, 1200–1700 (Temple, Ariz.: Arizona Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2002), 377.  48 The churches that contributed to the costs of the frapponi (large fringes) were: ‘Il Monist.o de’ PP Gelorminio, Il Monist.o de’ PP di S Paolo, Il Monisto de’ PP Domenicani in S. Dom. Magg.re, Il Monist.o de’ PP Giesuiti, Il R Monistero di S Chiara, Il Mon.ro de PP di S. Ma la Nova, Il Mon.ro dei PP di S Pietro Martirre, Il Mon.ro di D. Romita, Il Monistero de PP Carmelitani, Il Monistero di S Lorenzo, Il Moni.ro de’ PP Scalzi Teresiani, Il Mon.o di S. Francesco di Paola, Il Monist.o di S. Patrizia, La Ven.ble Chiesa di S Giuseppe, La Ven.ble Chiesa di S. Angelo a Nido, Il Monist.o di SM Egiziaca, La Ven.ble Chiesa di S. Ant Abbate, La Ven.ble Chiesa di S. Severo, La Ven.ble Chiesa di S Agrippino, La Ven.ble Chiesa di S Nicolò.’ ATSG CB n. 6, 349, n.f.  49 It has been suggested that sculpture began with clothes thrown over stumps of wood. G.  Van der Leeuw, Sacred and Profane Beauty: The Holy in Art (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963), 165. In Spain imágenes de vestir are intended in advance to be covered by real clothes and they tend to be relatively small, in contrast to the sea of baroque cloth that envelopes them. It is possible that life-size ex-voti have always been made in this way. F. Solà I Moreta, ‘Las imágenes marianas de talla y los vestidos postizos’, Certamen público, 7:2 (2010), 199; J. von Schlosser, ‘Geschichte der Porträtbildnerei in Wachs’, Jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen Sammlungen des allerhöchsten Kaiserhauses, 29 (1910–11), 171–258; Trexler, ‘Dressing and Undressing Images’, 375, 406.  50 Trexler, ‘Dressing and Undressing Images’, 375.  51 Trexler, ‘Dressing and Undressing Images’, 407.

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saint was imagined not so much as a human being, alive or dead, but as the reliquary bust itself. San Gennaro – more than any other saint – became his reliquary bust. There is nothing extraordinary in the depiction of his reliquary bust as it features in Domenichino’s fresco Procession of the Garlanded Priests or as it is invoked against the monsters of heresy in the liturgical north-west pendentive. In both instances, the subject is the reliquary and relics and not the saint. But the redeemed San Gennaro in heaven working miracles is habitually depicted more as bust than as a human body. Even if his billowing chasuble discreetly obscures the limit of his figure, San Gennaro appears in engravings – often depicting of his intervention against Vesuvius in 1631 – as a quasi-reliquary bust (Figs 27, 32). In Micco Spadaro’s oil painting Procession of Relics and Intervention of San Gennaro to Save Naples from Vesuvius (Plate 14), the saint flies overhead, in abbreviated bust-like form, while trailing robes and supportive cherubs disguise the abruptly truncated body. A particularly striking example is the frontispiece by Francesco Solimena to Girolamo Maria di Sant’Anna’s Istoria della Vita, Virtù e Miracoli di S. Gennaro Vescovo e Martire, published in Naples by Stefano Abbate in 1733 (Fig. 43) and for which a drawing survives in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Here the bust of San Gennaro, with a living human face, wearing mitre and chasuble, stands atop an elaborate pedestal and base. Two angels kneel before him, one carrying the ampoules of blood and the other a martyr’s palm and wreath. At the base of the plinth, a winged putto stumbles under the weight of the shield of the Deputazione of the Treasury. Solimena clearly depicts the reliquary bust, rather than the saint in heaven, as object of veneration. Yet the bust’s features are unmistakably those of a living man. The setting is also unequivocably on earth: the Cathedral and cupola of the Treasury Chapel are readily visible in the background; and the hierophanic clouds of heaven are firmly above (not below) the angels and saintly bust. Yet the bust is more than a bust; it is alive. The idea of a living portrait that reveals the affect of the soul, which goes back to Antiquity, is here combined with that of a living relic.52 Just as in the miracle, as we have seen, San Gennaro’s blood was brought to life, it is in the bust that he is shown to be most intensely alive. In short, it was his reliquary that best represented San Gennaro’s miraculous powers. His bust became a fabulous synecdoche for the miracle-working saint. The concept of immortality is inextricably linked to the relic and to the reliquary. As Oleg Grabar observed in a different context: ‘The imagery of a martyr’s relics is never in any case an imagery of the memento mori; rather it strives by all means in its power to proclaim the suppression of the fact

Philostrate declared in his Imagines that the aspects that distinguish a man’s character or mind should be shown in art.

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of death.’53 The familiar claim that ‘the saint never dies’ refers less to the saint’s victory in heaven than to the fact that the saint was never definitively removed from the symbolic exchange, as happens for ordinary corpses.54 In depictions of San Gennaro intervening to stop Vesuvius, he is shown not as saint or bishop, but as a curiously truncated more or less half-length figure. The emphasis is on his face, mitre, and chasuble. Thus the bishop, so magnificently depicted in Ribera’s altarpiece (Plate 15), becomes the synecdochal figure in Domenichino’s fresco above the entrance to the chapel (Plate 20) and in Micco Spadaro’s Procession of Relics and Intervention of San Gennaro to Save Naples from Vesuvius (Plate 14). The chasuble Gennaro wears is the Mass garment proper. The chasuble, like Christian love, covers everything and encloses everything like a fortress.55 Its very name, casula, or ‘little house’, is reminiscent of the form and language of reliquaries.56 Like an aedicule, it wraps round and stages the body of the saint. The saint thus becomes synecdochal. This form, a hybrid, becomes synonymous with San Gennaro in early modern depictions after 1631 (Plate 31). Not a full-length figure, but more than a representation of the bust relic itself, he is at once both reliquary bust and miracle-working saint. Indeed, in such a form, he becomes a prosthesis of the chapel itself. Just as paintings depict San Gennaro as his reliquary, so the reliquary is recognized as alive. In describing the grandiose celebrations in 1629 for the election of San Francesco di Paola as protector saint of the city of Naples, Giulio Cesare Capaccio remarks on his reliquary bust: His head was girt with a graceful diadem of gilt silver; at his breast he bore a Charitas [heart] equally of gilded silver; and on his sash a buckle of solid gold. In his left hand he carried a small book in silver, the symbol of the Rule that he gave to his brethren; and he held his right hand outstretched, above Naples, which was sculpted in the base; his face was turned up to heaven, in the act of commending the city to God.57 A. Grabar, Martyrium: recherches sur le culte des reliques et l’art chrétien antique, 2 vols and atlas (Paris: Collége de France, 1943–46), vol. II, 39.  54 Canetti, ‘La città dei vivi’, 208; Sallmann, Santi barocchi, 419.  55 The vesting formula for the chasuble is ‘Indue me, Domine, ornamento caritatis et pacis, ut indique unitis virtutibus possim resistere vitiis et hostibus mentis et corporis.’ Jungmann, The Mass of the Roman Rite, vol. I, 286.  56 Jungmann, The Mass of the Roman Rite, vol. I, 276–277.  57 ‘Cingeale il capo un vago diadema d’argento dorato; haveva nel petto una Charitas parimente d’argento indorato; e nelle cintura un cingolo d’oro massiccio: nella sinistra mano, un libretto d’argento: simbolo della Regola, ch’egli diede à suoi Frati; e teneva la destra distesa, sopra Napoli, scolpita nella base; et il viso rivolto al Cielo, in atto di racomandar a Dio la città.’ Capaccio, Descrittione della Padronanza di S. Francesco di Paola, 98. Capaccio’s description suggests that this reliquary bust, since lost or refashioned, was an early precursor of a saint with a literal figuration of the city, such as  53

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Capaccio continues:

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It was in sum worked with fine skill; and so very true to life, that it prompted the hearts of everyone to revere it with that same veneration that they would have had for the real person.58

His emphasis here is less on the mimetic orectic (sensory) quality of the reliquary-saint than on its ability to stimulate veneration, religious devotion, and desire. It is not that the reliquary assumes the likeness of the living saint; rather, its ‘life-likeness’ elicits from the faithful the response that they would have had for the person of the living saint. The reliquary draws something out of the viewers, moves them in reverence, as they would have been moved by the presence of the living saint that was not equivalent to form or likeness. The reliquary permits what would have been to endure. The truthfulness to life of the reliquary lies in its energeia. The smith’s skill permits the image to be more than a mere faithful copy of the saint’s physiognomy. Instead the bust produces the response elicited by the saint himself, and it is the interaction between bust and worshipper that is the measure of this transformative capacity. In his discussion of persuasion, Aristotle defines both enargeia, or vividness, and energeia, actuality or motion: It has already been mentioned that liveliness is achieved by using the proportional type of metaphor and by making our ears hear things. We have still to explain what we mean by their seeing things, and what must be done to effect this. By making them see things I mean using expressions that represent things as in a state of activity … . In all these examples the things have the effect of being active because they are made into living beings.59

The bust was a form of the vow to the saint and of a promise (Fig. 71). More than representing the saints, the reliquaries fuse relic, promise, and potential. They thus extend and constitute the time of the vow. Or more exactly, rather than represent relic or saint, the presence of the saint is made  possible, as Capaccio indicated. For venerated relics are not objects, but true presences, although this status is not necessarily irreversible. Virtus,  the attribute of relics, permeates the silver flesh of the reliquary (Plate  44). That extraordinary substance, virtus, invisible, marvellous, and spiritual, containing efficacy and life, imbued relic, reliquary, the bedazzling St Emiddius (1760), designed by Gaetano Fumo and executed by Domenico De Angelis, or Carlo Schisano’s marvellous Saint Irene of Thessalonica (1733) (Fig. 42, Plates 8 & 9).  58 ‘Era in somma con gentil maestria lavorata; e tanto al vivo, che eccitava gli animi di tutti a riverirla con quella medesima riverenza, che alla sua vera persona havrebbono fatto.’ Capaccio, Descrittione della Padronanza di S. Francesco di Paola, 98.  59 Aristotle, Rhetoric Bk3 cap.11, in J. Barnes, The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), vol. II, 2252–2253.

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flash of light. The reliquaries, the silver, the relic, at once and severally were ‘mobile and fluid without having to stir’.60 The reliquary busts thus constitute and extend the time of the vow. The artistry of the silversmith produces veneration equivalent to that which worshippers would have shown for a living saint. It is not that his skill seems to bring the saint back to life; rather, his skill conjures effects to which the response is as that to the saint alive (Plate 43). ‘May the industrious artisan who made it also be blessed’, writes Capaccio.61 Thus what lives is the effect of sanctity, the demands it evokes in her or him who encounters it. It is time and decay that are banished, even while the material world is not restored. To a remarkable degree, the effect of presence is produced through it. ‘Recognition of presence’, suggests Rose Marie San Juan in her discussion of Jesuit devotional prints in seventeenth-century Naples, ‘is akin to doubling of the self.’62 For Capaccio the silver bust produces an effect equivalent to that of encounter with the saintly persona. The reliquary sculpture thus moves instead of the relic and living body. Its work is to bring the effect of the departed to life – on earth. This substitutionary principle, which is at work within all reliquaries, is particularly marked in those of pronounced material value and visual splendour. It is thus particularly present in the silvery reliquary busts of the Treasury Chapel. The reliquaries transformed ‘the chill anonymity of human remains’ into the glowing dazzling effect of the presence of the particular saint.63 Bone, human matter at its most generic, is reworked into the most specific, the most particular, in the features of the face. Yet this is not an evocation of a face, a portrait, an attempt to bring back the dead. The reliquary opens up the question of what it is to matter once decay and death depart the human trace (Plates 43 & 44). According to Christian theology, in glorified bodies the corrosive effects of time that bind matter and human bodies are shed through the activation of a human potentiality. That human potentiality is imagined as dormant but within the material world – that is, in spite of everything, as an integral part of it. Thus what is lost is not matter – including gender which informs the human body – but decay and death. For Capaccio it is the silver reliquary that The phrase is from M. Mauss, A General Theory of Magic (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), 117.  61 ‘era in somma con gentil maestria lavorata; e tanto al vivo, che eccitava gli animi di tutti a riverirla con quella medesima riverenza, che alla sua vera persona havrebbono fatto.’ Capaccio, Descrittione della Padronanza di S. Francesco di Paola, 98.  62 R. M. San Juan, ‘Contaminating Bodies: Print and the 1656 Plague in Naples’, in H. Hills and M. Calaresu (eds), New Approaches to Naples c.1500-c.1800 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 73.  63 The quotation is from Brown, ‘The Saint as Exemplar’, 12.  60

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is able to evoke the saint as an at once alive and glorified body. It is as if the reliquary bust, in its beauty, silver sheen and similitude to the saint, substitutes for the charisma of the living saint and for his glorified body. As if silver lets something else be seen. Capaccio also makes clear that the liveliness and reverence generated by St Francesco di Paola’s bust were not occasioned by simple imitation of the outward appearance of the saint: It was a beautiful sight to see the majestic statue of the martyr saint Gennaro on the right of the central altar; just as equally it was [to see] that of San Francesco di Paola on the left. May the industrious artisan who made it also be blessed. It was not of full size, but not less than five palmi high, entirely of solid silver, on a similar and uniform base of the same solid metal, but with more gilding.64

Amassed reliquaries gained force from their number, their consonance, and their arrangement. The whole was more than the sum of the parts: No less elegant [leggiadra] a display was made on the right-hand side [of San Luigi] on the altar by the statues of Aaints Athanasius, Agrippino, Agnello, and Thomas of Aquinas; and on the altar on the left side, those of Saints Agrippino, Eufebio, Severo, and Blessed Andrea Avelllino, and each one balancing the other [tutte l’una con l’altra corrispondendosi].65

Thus while arousing response through a ‘life-likeness’ that is posited on death, the busts are compelling in their capacity to be arranged, in symmetrical patterns. Here, as each balances the other, individuality and likeness are not what achieves effect. Paradoxically, despite individualized iconographies and form, it is their similarities, even their substitutability, their capacity to constitute pattern and thus new sense together that is remarked. Their grace is in the constellation, rather than in the individual stars. Face to face

‘The face is the Icon proper to the signifying regime, the reterritorialization internal to the system’, claims Deleuze, ‘The signifier reterritoralizes on the face. The face is what gives the signifier substance; it is what fuels interpretation, and it is what changes, changes traits, when interpretation reimparts sig ‘Faceva pur bellissimo vedere la maestosa statua del Santo martire Gennaro nella destra dell’altare di mezo; come parimente faceva nella sinistra la di S. Francesco di Paola; sia pur benedetto l’industre Artefice, che la formò; non era ella d’intiera statura, ma alta nondimeno cinque palmi, tutta d’argento massiccio, sopra base simile et uniforme dell’istesso metallo massiccio, ma indorato ancora.’ Capaccio, Descrittione della Padronanza di S. Francesco di Paola, 98.  65 Capaccio, Descrittione della Padronanza di S. Francesco di Paola, 23.  64

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nifier to its substance.’66 The saints demand recognition. We are surrounded by faces that address us and that we come to recognize. The characteristic form (figura) of a human being and her or his recognizability resides in the face. The word for face (facies) derives from ‘visible likeness’ (effigies). Vera effigies is the term repeatedly used to denote a likeness of a saint or venerable or would-be saint. Truth, authenticity, and divine likeness are in the face. The making of a ‘true likeness’ during the saint’s life as death approached or as soon as possible thereafter is a marked symptom of the vite of saints. The vera effigies thus substitutes for the facies in relation to death. Indeed, the saint is a living relic. To treat a holy person as a saint, to call her or him saint and to make portraits of living saints, was not as uncommon as one might imagine to judge solely from prescriptions issued in Rome. In his fascinating Vita della Ven. Serva di Dio Veronica Laparelli Monica Cisterciense (Naples, 1714) (Fig. 70), Antonio Maria Bonucci, SJ, describes the way in which during Veronica’s lifetime (she died in 1620), people sensed her singular devotion, and afterwards confessed that the veneration they felt was that which they were accustomed to show to relics and bodies of the saints.67 In other words, Veronica Laparelli was treated as a relic in her lifetime, and as a saint, productive of more relics. People of Cortona called her Santa, and ‘suora santa’, and her handwritten letters (brevetti) and the holy water that she used were treasured even beyond Cortona and Tuscany.68 Besides the wish to hold and touch and kiss the objects that might bestow virtus, there was a desire to see her face. A ‘true portrait’ was desired. A certain Signore D. Francesco Fermadura from Palermo requested a portrait of Veronica ‘as much from life as possible’ that he could take with him to Palermo, where it was ‘much longed for’.69 Such stories abound in saints’ vite. Such likenesses might memorialize a saintly life and work as relic. Any part of the body could act as relic, but the face best demonstrated and betrayed saintliness, because it combined nature and will. Facial expression (vultus) necessarily displayed voluntas, the inclination of the will. Hence the address of the saint to the worshipper is literalized on the face. The saintly heads in Gennaro’s chapel (Fig. 3) are less and more than the prized portrait made of the venerable Veronica. They declare themselves to be presences in their own right. And thus they foreground the question of Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 115. F. M. Salvatore, Vita della Venerabile Veronica Laparelli di Cortona (Rome: Giovan Generoso Salamoni, 1779), 139.  68 Salvatore, Vita della Venerabile Veronica Laparelli, 138.  69 ‘un ritratto più al vivo che si potesse’. Salvatore, Vita della Venerabile Veronica Laparelli, 140.  66  67

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incarnation. Leon Battista Alberti argued in his fifteenth-century treatise on painting that the human body was a mirror of the soul, that the motions of body and face reflect the soul’s affects.70 The reliquaries are far from portraits in terms of mere external appearance. They are not representations filled with their models (what the patriarch Nicephorus calls a ‘circumscription’), but instead are ‘inscriptions’. While circumscription shows, inscription betrays. Circumscription includes all that brings the senses into relief and all that is shown. Inscription brings into relief the capacity of reflection. It is the reflection on what remains when all is gone. The face is a sort of prophecy and, indeed, the Treasury saints assume a prophetic role. The heads are insistently alert. Watching, listening, smelling, sensing. They occupy the chapel in these senses and thus place the worshipper under surveillance. The faces of the reliquary busts are marked above all by hermetic composure, the sweetness of the presence of God. St Severus combines the gentleness of piety in his gaze and the hardness of power in his mouth. Saint Mary of Egypt raises her hand to heaven, her eyes heavy with sadness at the world (Plate 43). Mary Magdalen looks down at the simple cros in her left hand, not in remorse, but in reflection. Likewise St Candida, despite a morse extroverted mien, gestures towards her own relic (Fig. 71). Sweetness reigns. Her forehead smooth, untroubled. To a modern eye, indeed, the faces may seem inert, insufficiently psychologically complex. In short, too sweet. The forehead was particularly closely associated with movement of the soul. According to Isidore of Seville: ‘the forehead [frons] derives its name from the eye-sockets [foramen oculorum]. This, a kind of likeness of the soul, expresses the movement of the mind, whether it is joyful or sad, through its own look.’71 St Emiddius and St Irene (Fig. 42) gaze heavenwards, lips parted in adoration, but in spite of the responsibility heaped on their shoulders and the urgency of their task as intercessors for the city they protect, their expressions remain serene; cheeks and forehead are smooth, unperturbed, and unperturbable (Fig. 71).72 Jeanette Kohl has pointed out that in Florentine Renaissance marble bust portraits, the face ‘is here not the place of emotions but rather the site of their successful control’.73 Indeed, this is a control that no longer registers as control, but as its superfluity in the ‘face’ of complete harmony and ease. It is not because the reliquaries are not portraits and not Leon Battista Alberti, Della pittura e della statua (Milan: Società Tipografica de Classici italiani, 1864), 130.  71 Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, XI.i.35, ed. and trans. Barney et al., 233.  72 For Saint Irene of Thessalonica, see Hills, ‘How to Look Like a Counter-Reformation Saint’, 207–230.  73 Kohl, ‘Body, Mind, and Soul’, 44.  70

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because they figure saints that they downplay facial expression. Saints’ faces could be animated by powerful emotion.74 Yet the reliquary figures are, with a few exceptions, composed and serene – true to their virtue and to their privileged relationship with God. A certain impenetrability and aloofness implies the gift of subtilitas received by the glorified body.

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Decapitation

Even as the reliquary busts are more than merely heads; they haunt the chapel with their implicit decapitation. All about the chapel, heads are lost. It is the explicit subject of Domenichino’s altarpiece, The Beheading of San Gennaro (1640), in the left-hand lateral chapel, where the head of one of Gennaro’s companions rolls forwards towards the viewer, its bloody stump exposed, obscene (Plate 41). It is conjured in the miraculous blood sponged up at Gennaro’s execution, in his reliquary bust, and in the great half-lengths in the bronze gate (Plate 23). The violently severed head of San Gennaro, on the left hand side of the gateway as one enters, corresponds to the ampoules of his blood on the right (Fig. 28), a conceptual meeting, rather than a formal symmetry, separated by the swing of the gate. Scooped into a martyr’s palm frond amid the tracery, the saint’s head is brutally truncated, jolted backwards, at an awkward angle. Just under the chin, a fold of skin underlines and apparently remakes the cut. His eyes are almost closed; he is not yet in paradise. The head is turned across the gate and upwards to face the triumphant head and shoulders of San Gennaro above. That half-length figure, by contrast, emerges full-square from the plane of the gate, looking directly out across the Cathedral on one side and the chapel on the other (Plate 1): back in control, redeemed and sanctified, resplendent protector and mighty defender of the city. The heads, violently severed at the neck, thus contrast sharply with the busts, arbitrarily cut. One rolls and lolls, swivelling out of control; the other, in control, commands the scene, addresses the worshippers squarely, like emperor and prophet. The reliquary busts speak sotto voce of decapitation, of decapitation as a terrible measure of sanctity’s uncontainability and the violence that sanctity Saints in ecstasy or at the point of martyrdom are the pre-eminent examples of this, such as Gianlorenzo Bernini’s St Teresa in the Cornaro Chapel, Santa Maria della Vittoria, Melchiorre Caffà’s Ecstasy of Saint Catherine of Siena on the main altar of Santa Caterina da Siena a Magnanapoli, and Ercole Ferrata’s St Agnes on the Pyre (1660) in Santa Agnese in Piazza Navona, Rome, which also evoke Christ’s expression in Michelangelo’s Pietà and elsewhere. Depictions of non-ecstatic saints also filled with emotion do occur, for example, Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Saint Bibiena (1624–26) on the main altar of Santa Bibiena, his Habakuk and the Angel and Saint Daniel in Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome, and most signally in Naples, Cosimo Fanzago’s Jeremiah (c.1646) in the Gesù Nuovo.

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attracts. They emphasize face and skull – the essence of life and death. Thus while head and face imply the soul, they also evoke the body that is missing. And thus is posed the question of the relation between body and soul, and of the fragmented body – historically, theologically, soteriologically. The early busts demonstrate a stripping away of the body, whereas St Clare (attributed to Lorenzo Vaccaro, 1689), St Francesco Borgia (1695), and St Emiddius (Domenico De Angelis, 1760) bring with them a chronological narrative of accoutrements, clothing, haloes, and gestures. A reliquary bust, such as San Gennaro’s (Plate 6) or Aniello Treglia’s St Eusebius (1672), indicates the body as aporia (a blind alley), even as in its aporia, it is located. The body itself is a form of excess, a site of surplus for the saint. The saint’s own body is unstable. Surplus and excess triumph. The heads conjure the contradictory meaning of sanction as both reward and punishment.75 At once vulnerable and in command, sanctioned and sanctified. Thus the busts speak to the uncontainability of sanctity itself as a process of containing excess. Excess bears with it notions of the unrestrained, labile, allusive, and deferred (différance). Transgression or excess, or that which precedes the religious/juridical distinction is inextricable from the concept of sanctity itself: ‘excess’, suggest Meltzer and Elsner, ‘cannot but provoke excessive response’.76 Saints are imprisoned, burned alive, and beheaded: ‘all more or less successful attempts at containment’.77 But sanctity is not to be contained. Indeed, it is to not be contained. The economy of the relic

Relics are at once superfluous, residual, and quintessential essence. Parts do not add up to make a whole, but already constitute it. That part-whole, in its terrific ambiguity, occupies a metonymic relation to the whole body and to the saint elsewhere. Fragmented and ruptured, the body’s fragmentary presence speaks of suffering that continues, wounds that, far from healing, pour forth fresh blood. Bodies that are broken remain unfixed, unstable, deferred, and unfinished. The decapitated head reliquaries are unnerving, because they starkly foreground the problems of bodily continuity, the relation between body and death, and between identity, body form, bodily decay or fragmentation, and redemp F. Meltzer and J. Elsner, ‘Introduction: Holy by Special Application’, Critical Inquiry 35 (Spring 2009), 376–377.  76 Meltzer and Elsner, ‘Introduction’, 376.  77 Meltzer and Elsner, ‘Introduction’, 377. Meltzer and Elsner point out that this excess extends to the language of sanctity in which a saint is justified or rejected on the basis of rhetorical forms such as polemic and apology, that are ‘by definition exorbitant’. Meltzer and Elsner, ‘Introduction’, 377.  75

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tion. These questions are of course implicit in the relics they hold and are therefore present in any reliquary, but the Treasury Chapel’s reliquaries stage most emphatically the problem of identity and death. The question of identity was at the heart of the belief in resurrection. With it came the body as question. ‘What of “me” must rise in order for the risen body to be “me”?’78 In a sense, the silver reliquaries, together with the bronze full-length sculptures of the saints, stage that question repeatedly. The Treasury Chapel is possessed by it. Thus the reliquaries register an intense concern – a concept whose material analogue, silver, is explored in Chapter 10 – with the materiality of the body and its survival through intercorporeality, incorporation, and death. Thomas Aquinas’ theory of the human being as a hylomorphic (form/matter) union of soul and body actually threatens not the immortality of the soul, but the body, because he made material continuity the principle of identity. In denying the plurality of forms, Aquinas asserts that the soul (our only form) is the form of our bodiliness. What is left over is reduced to mere primary matter or potency; for him the body in life has, of course, form and is therefore existing ‘second matter’. In Caroline Walker Bynum’s words, ‘what it is is, so to speak, packed into the soul’.79 The problems the reliquaries engage in are first, how far material continuity is necessary for identity and, second, the nature of the relationship between resurrection/salvation, matter, body, and form. The sculpted silver body performs the material analogue of the coming together of flesh and soul. Bernard of Clairvaux expressed that relationship in terms of the service the body offers the soul: The sick, dead and resurrected body is a help to the soul who loves God: the first for the fruits of penance, the second for repose, and the third for consummation. Truly the soul does not want to be perfected, without that from whose good services it feels it has benefited.80

Silver does ‘good service’ to body as soul and to soul as body. It has particular capacities in thus respect, as will be shown in Chapter 10. According to John of Damascus, re-surrectio depends on the same human being rising again.81 What was at stake was the nature of ‘the same’. ‘Not a hair of your head For a brilliant discussion, see Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 239–273. Thus Aquinas in his emphasis on material continuity departed from the Aristotelian theory that in conception the father provides form, the mother matter. Aquinas pulls back at certain points from a purely formal theory of identity, for instance in asserting that humans do not have to receive all their previous matter in the Resurrection, since God can make up the difference. See Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 255, 260.  80 St Bernard, The Works of Bernard of Clairvaux, trans. R. Walton, Treatises, vol. II, Cistercian Fathers Series 13 (Washington DC: Consortium Press, 1974), 122–124.  81 John of Damascus, In librum de fide orthodoxa, bk 4, ch. 27, quoted by Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 258.  78  79

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shall perish’ (Luke 21:18) offered assurance of the redemption of the entire body. But what constituted the body’s entirety, given its changing form? The theory of form as identity advanced by Aquinas was an elegant solution to these questions, but it was by no means universally accepted.82 Questions, doubts, uncertainties, and fears remained. The theory of identity, espoused by Thomas Aquinas, John of Paris, and Durandus, distinguishes between the corpse body and the living body. Since only substances exist, matter does not exist apart from form. Prime matter is potential. When the human being dies, its body or its matter no longer exists. Thus the body does not wait to be reassembled. When the human being is resurrected, the body that is matter to its form will be its body by definition. The corpse that exists after death, like the body that exists before, is second matter – formed matter – but the cadaver is informed not by the form of the soul but by the form of the corpse. The matter of the body was therefore at issue. Indeed, the matter touches the bone. Yet the silver reliquaries in ever more grandiloquent gestures seek to distract attention from the bone to the silver surfaces and to the sculpture’s ­extremities – such as St Anthony Abbot’s tinkling bell, literal and audible – that seem to be at odds to the bone. No wonder, then, that the body-part reliquaries continue to disturb. In the matter of relics’ role in redemption, the relationship between part and whole is crucial. In miracles remains of bodies – relics – mediate between heaven and earth. Heaven itself was the overcoming not of the body, but of fragmentation and decay: ‘For I know that my Redeemer liveth and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God’ (Job 19:25–26).83 The reliquaries reveal pieces of more or less formless bone in settings that both celebrate and deny their evident fragmentation and friability (Plate 43 & Fig. 16). As such they locate access to the eternal in change and dissolution itself.84 The body is thus not an end, and even less a trap, but a means to access the divine. However, the silver-coated bodies in the Treasury Chapel, collectively extroverted and fragmented, even slightly frantic, evoke instead the body as in some way trapped, encased, sealed in. The reliquary busts disturb further because of their uneasy relationship to worship. Calvin’s contempt for relic worshippers is well known. But the questions he raised had a long pedigree. Michael Camille demonstrated that a principal concern was already articulated in the thirteenth century by William See Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 259. Vulgate: ‘Scio enim, quod Redemptor meus vivit, et in novissimo die de terra surretus sum. Et rursum circumdabor pelle mea, et in carne mea videbo Deum meum.’  84 Bynum emphasizes this point with regard to blood of Christ relics. See Bynum, Wonderful Blood.  82  83

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of Auvergne: ‘there are many simple folk who make no distinction in their prayers between the images of saints and the saints themselves; nay those prayers which they should make to the saints they make to the images themselves’.85 This distinction is not as clear as it might initially appear. To mistake the image for the saint was to enter into idolatry, but what was at issue in the fear that some were praying to an image rather to the saint? Robert Maniura argues that attention has come to settle unhelpfully on the ‘issue of ontology: did the devotees think the images were holy people?’86 He suggests that the ‘apologetic response … accepted the battleground, relying heavily on an ancient formula insisting that the images were understood as signs, with the veneration shown to the image transferred to what is represented’.87 The issue thus becomes one of the ‘confusion’ of certain worshippers. Relics, of course, appear to sidestep the distinction between images and holy people, since the relic was quite literally part of the body of the saint. Maniura suggests that rather than on what the devotee thinks the picture/saint is, focus should be on what the devotee should or can do: ‘The characteristics of saints are to be sought not in the inherent qualities of a category of persons but in the behaviour of those who interact, or attempt to interact, with them’, he suggests.88 ‘We may be dealing with a set of behaviours considered suitable in dealings with a saint irrespective of the ritual focus’, writes Maniura.89 He acknowledges that this behaviour is not arbitrary: a saint is ‘a dead person from whom the devotee wants something’.90 Indeed, as Peter Brown argues, the mortality of saints is what gives them heightened significance over and above angels or even God. More than that, the saint can be asked and is capable of delivering. Maniura perhaps too quickly moves to suggest that this is then a matter of ‘ritual possibilities’. For Maniura the saint ‘is constituted by ritual’ as an active component of religious life.91 But one could equally argue that ‘rituals’ are tributes to the saints. Saints’ bodies are formed from investments and interactions which permit bone to become saint. And what of the question of presence? The body was central to the conception of personal identity; contact with a relic was both more and less than contact with a cadaver. The saints became Camille, The Gothic Idol, 208. R. Maniura, ‘Persuading the Absent Saint: Image and Performance in Marian Devotion’, Critical Inquiry, 35 (2009), 642.  87 Maniura, ‘Persuading the Absent Saint’, 642.  88 Maniura, ‘Persuading the Absent Saint’, 629.  89 Maniura, ‘Persuading the Absent Saint’, 645.  90 Maniura, ‘Persuading the Absent Saint’, 646. For Maniura ‘ritual seeks to influence, not cause’. ‘Persuading the Absent Saint’, 652.  91 ‘The saint as an active component of religious life emerges distinctly from ritual, therefore, because the saint is constituted by it … The saints are those whom devotees petition, and this petitioning is not a matter of inward dedication but of outward display.’ Maniura, ‘Persuading the Absent Saint’, 654.

 85

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such through the will of God, more than as a result of inherent qualities as a ‘category of persons’. Once they were dead, the nature of saints’ lives on earth mattered less than their continuing relationship with God – and, thus, their power of intercession in, as it were, fomenting miracles. While Maniura argues that those who pray to the saint ‘do not ask for the impossible’, I suggest that the impossible is precisely what they do ask for.92 A miracle is the impossible made possible through the intervention of the divine. And the request and waiting are themselves a mobilization. The ontological issue therefore cannot be so easily sidestepped. What and where the saint was were part of the same matter. That relation is part of the insistence of the reliquaries and their chapel. Openings and intimacies

All surface and promise are the reliquaries. The oculus sets itself apart (Plate 8, Figs 1 & 71). In contrast, it promises depth, substance, and access to truth. Embedded in the relic, the window invites one to peer in to see a fragment of bone and, on occasion, beside it a tiny strip of paper on which to decipher the name of a saint. The text – signed and dated by a notary, like the purchase of a plot of land – testifies to inspection, translation, and rehousing – part of the work of substitution that attests to continuity and, in effect, to sanctity.93 A bone fragment is not a guarantee of relic status, and the authentication is rarely decipherable and anyway simply attests to an official recognition of a claim, but the window itself stages relic and authentication as evidentia, proof positive. Thus the reliquary has a fundamental relation to secrecy: not with a secret matter or object to be discovered, but with the form of the secret which remains impenetrable, whereas the Host has a relation to the revelatory. In the authentication the relic is even equipped with clues – clues that send one chasing to notarial office and official seals – lines of writing that curl up on themselves and conjugate with other lines, life lines, lines of immanence, that lie between the lines of writing. Apparent transparency declares truth manifest. The reliquary is, then, a machine for prophesying proof and truth. Despite the relic’s operation through contact and contagion, relics are rarely touched directly. More often they are kissed and caressed through the reliquary and through glass (Fig. 9). They are veiled, even as they oper ‘Ritualists do not ask for the impossible’, (Maniura, ‘Persuading the Absent Saint’, 653). I have avoided the term ‘ritualist’ since it sets up an unhelpful focus on means rather than ends. While ritual is undeniably part of worship, the issue of holiness goes beyond it.  93 Many of them incorporate the relic in the statue itself; in just a few it is presented in the chassis below.  92

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ate like veils.94 Their matter is held at one remove. San Gennaro’s liquefaction is visible only through glass ampoules. It cannot be touched. The relic remains behind glass, like an exit wound, an eye looking out. It makes visible that which is external to it, operating by implication, deferral, and delay, proleptically. The window allows a glimpse through immeasurable time and space to the relic, allows the witnessing of that place where past and future, flesh and spirit, are one (Plate 8). The oculus hides horror while allowing the worshipper to peek through, to search for visual confirmation that there is something present. Rock crystal was the preferred material for reliquary oculi.95 Cynthia Hahn points out that rock crystal was far from transparent.96 Grainy crystalline glass clouds the view, shuns the viewer. Behind misty crystal or glass, hard to see, in its own obscurity lies the relic. We know now in part. The glass glints, small and round, like an exit wound, or an eye looking back. Thus glass permits a tantalizing glimpse and insists on an incompossible separation. Now we see through a glass darkly, but then we shall see face to face. Desire for access to God was complex and ambiguous. While the reliquaries stage ‘seeing’ and ostension, the relics are veiled as much as visible. The sacred remains at a distance, out of reach, indeed, part of distance and a presence to which distance is a necessary part. Even San Gennaro’s blood relics in the ampoules are obscured as much as revealed. The fenestella, and indeed the entire reliquary, can be seen as a sort of veil. They substantiate what they claim merely to contain and show. The fenestella draws attention to the possibility of seeing, opens up seeing, and lays it bare. A web of subjectivities is permitted by this central eye, a black hole that captures, beholds, and betrays. The oculus works to obscure the relic that it displays; ‘although closed up, in a certain way the contents are revealed’.97 While crystal was strongly associated with Christ and his body and was often used for relics, many of the reliquaries in the Treasury Chapel are sealed with glass (Plate 43). Glass, like bronze, was closely associated with heat, fire, transformation – and even with Vesuvius itself. For Gaspare Paragallo, seek See H. Hills, ‘The Veiling of Architecture’, in M. G. Muzzarelli and G. Zarri (eds), Il velo in area mediterranea fra storia e simbolo: tardo Medioevo–prima Età moderna (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2014), 345–366.  95 The relics of St Blaise, for example, consisted of a fragment of arm bone and four drops of blood concealed in crystal, as a document of 8 October 1690 attests. ATSG, CB n. 6, n.f.  96 Hahn, Strange Beauty, 216.  97 ‘Anything contained inside other minerals is hidden, but any sort of liquid or visible thing contained in glass is displayed to the outside; although closed up, in a certain way the contents are revealed.’ Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, XVI.xvi.1, ed. and trans. Barney et al., 328.  94

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ing to understand the strange movements and phenomena of Vesuvius, there were many similarities between lava and glass, despite their apparent differences. Not only did their hardness emerge directly from fluidity, but if sand of various sorts was thrown into a glass furnace, what emerged looked just like lava. According to Paragallo, glass was transparent because its constituent particles were ‘uniform, and of identical shape and hardness’, and when in its liquid state it cooled and began to harden, ‘the breath of the flames that surrounded it produced numerous channels, through which the smallest particles that constitute the matter of ether can freely pass, spreading light in a straight line in all directions’.98 Chapter 2 above demonstrated the intimacy between bronze and blood via the volcanic. Here is notable a different form of proximity in which glass is like a purified version of lava, capable of sending light on its way. The glass windows opening to the relic invite the opening of the mouth, to kiss, to pray, to address (Figs 1 & 9). In Antiquity it was the practice to honour the temple by kissing the threshold; but it was also customary to greet the images of the gods by means of a kiss. Likewise the ancient altar was greeted with a kiss. Christendom continued the practice of greeting holy places with a kiss. The kiss was intended first for the altar only; but it was extended by the idea that the altar built of stone represented Christ himself, and so the came to kiss include him too.99 With the growth of the cult of martyrs, it became a rule from the early medieval period that every altar must enclose a ‘sepulchre’ or little reliquary.100 ‘Thus the kissing of the altar is transformed into the kissing of the martyr and, through him, of the whole Church triumphant’.101 Kissing was the symbol and expression of love, going beyond the profane. The face is not exterior to the person who speaks, thinks, or feels. ‘Faces are not basically ‘Perche l’esser lucido, e trasparente del vetro nasce da ciò, che le particelle, che lo compongono sono fra di loro uniformi, e di una igual figura, e durezza dotate, ed igualmente liquide, e fluide roirovansi all’or che incominciano a raffodarsi, e ad indurirsi, sicche gli aliti del fuoco, che loro vanno d’intorno possano fra esse cavarsi innumerabili meati, per li quali le sottilissime particelle formantino la sostanza eterea liberamente passando, spandono per linea retta da per tutto il lume.’ Paragallo, Istoria Naturale del Monte Vesuvio, 338–339.  99 Jungmann, The Mass of the Roman Rite, vol. I, 315. 100 Jungmann insists that the kissing of the grave, which was customary in very ancient times, could not have played into these practices, ‘because the span of time since the altar was regularly associated with a martyr’s tomb was much too long’. Jungmann, The Mass of the Roman Rite, vol.I, 315 n.28. 101 ‘In the prayer said nowadays while kissing the altar, the memory of the martyrs is combined with a longing for purification from sin reminiscent of the prayers at the foot of the altar: Oramus te, Domine. This formula appears for the first time in the eleventh century, with the rubric dum osculatur altare. The formula is a private and personal prayer of the priest to accompany the kiss.’ Jungmann, The Mass of the Roman Rite, vol. I, 315.  98

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individual; they define zones of frequency and probability and delimit a field that neutralizes in advance any expression or connection unanswerable to the appropriate significatorial.’102 The face constitutes the frame or screen. The head, even the human head, is not necessarily a face. The face is produced only when the head ceases to be a part of the body, when it ceases to be coded by the body, when it ceases to have a multi-dimensional, polyvocal, corporeal code. Facialization operates not by resemblance, write Deleuze and Guattari: ‘To the point that if human beings have a destiny, it is rather to escape the face, to dismantle the face and facialization, to become imperceptible, to become clandestine.’103 The desire for intimacy with saints became a tactile encounter with their relics. Holding, stroking, caressing, and kissing. Relics were treated like lovers. Lips that shape words into language mark the end of words in a kiss. The kiss marks the limit. The touch of the lips marks a limit, the possibility of ingest­ ion, the edge of speech, the meeting of inside and out, the point where one becomes two, where one and two are as one. But what was kissed was usually the glass window rather than bone. Even at their closest, therefore, worshippers were held apart by that glossy slippery material that granted visual access (Plate 8). The very materials that allowed sight of bone, glass and crystal, held at bay, permitted proximity but held apart. Window is to the bone what veil is to truth: the necessary intermediary that clouds, obscures, and yet guarantees. Isidore of Seville links window to ‘light’ and suggests that windows ‘lend light’: Windows (fenestra) have a narrow exterior and a widened interior … . They are so called because they lend (fenerari, i.e faenerari) light – for light in Greek is called φώς – or because a person inside sees (videre) out through them. Others suppose that window is so called because it provides (minestrare, i.e. ministrare) light, with the name a blending of a Greek and a Latin word, for light in Greek is φώς (i.e. φώς + minestrare).104

The window ‘lends light’ from the dark object within, from an eye that looks out: ‘The eyes are also called lights [lumen] because light [lumen] emanates from them’, claims Isidore.105 Indeed the relic is the pupil in the ‘eye’ of the reliquary. The pupil that is, according to the same source, ‘pure’ (pura) and unpolluted (inpolluta), just like a young girl (puella). The windows ‘lend’ light in the sense of borrowing it from one place and bestowing it elsewhere. In the case of the reliquary, the light is cast or ‘borrowed’ in both direc Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 168. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 170. 104 Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, XV.vii.6, ed. and trans. Barney et al., 311. 105 Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, XI.i.36, ed. and trans. Barney et al., 233. 102 103

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tions, a  light from the exterior which penetrates the interior cocoon, and a light from the relic, which radiates forth, to the world of the worshipper. As the interceding saint lends his or her voice and the worshipper’s prayers and entreaties to the ear of God, so the relic lends heavenly light to the eye. The windows of the relic lead to interiors which are ‘widened’, in the sense that the interior is truly capacious, able to hold something larger than its measurable size would suggest. The fenestella, a little window, gives access in both directions (Plate 8 & Fig. 1). It does not simply allow worshippers to look inside: it allows ‘someone inside to ‘see out’, permits the divine to look back. Indeed, according to Isidore of Seville, the fenestella is like an eye, an oculus, that possesses a ‘hidden light’: Eyes (oculus) are so called either because eyelids like a membrane cover (occulere) them so as to protect them from the harm of any chance injury, or because they possess a ‘hidden light’ (occultum lumen), that is, one that is hidden or situated within. Amongst all the sensory organs, they are the closest to the soul. Indeed, every indication of the mental state is in the eyes, whence both distress and happiness show in the eyes.106

Relic windows are also doors (Figs 42 & 71). They open things up. In particular, they open the body. According to Augustine, John says that the soldier ‘opened up’ (aperuit) the side of Christ, not that he was struck or wounded. Vincent of Beauvais, following Augustine, explains that John carefully selected the verb ‘to open’, rather than ‘to stab’, because Christ’s side is the door of salvation, opened as a gift, not violated. Likewise, Dionysius the Carthusian (d. 1471) writes: ‘For truly a door, like a window, is opened, and thus the soldier opened for us the spiritual door through which the sacraments of the church flow, without which no one enters into true life … The opening of his side was prefigured in Genesis 6 when Noah at God’s command made a window in the side of the ark.’107 Thus the relics dwell in an ark, a ‘little house’ with glass window, which, in turn, is housed within another little house, the silver reliquary, in its own little niche, ensconced within the chapel. Interiors within interiors within interiors fracture any simple interior/exterior opposition and disrupt a simple hermeneutics of depth. They serve instead to frame and reframe in a relation in which not only is a smaller object contained within a larger one, but that which is ‘contained’, the relic, overcomes and elides its multiple containers. Thus John Chrysostom comments on Hebrews 9:11: Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, XI.i.36, ed. and trans. Barney et al., 233. See also Kohl, ‘Body, Mind, and Soul’, 59. 107 Dionysius the Carthusian, Expositio passionis, art. 25, 545–546, quoted by Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 171. 106

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See how he calls the body tabernacle and veil heaven. The heaven is a veil, for as a veil it walls off the Holy of Holies; the flesh is a veil hiding the Godhead; and the tabernacle likewise holding the Godhead. Again, Heaven is a tabernacle, for the Priest is there within.108

The body-reliquary-tabernacle-chapel relation produces bodies within bodies in a system of veiling. Such relations not only hold and protect, hide and reveal, but gesture towards place as body displaces one to afford an apprehension of the other. Although their presence alone, numerous and concentrated as it was, represented a treasury of protection, it was possible to activate the relics further, to encourage them to work, by processing them, arranging them, and opening up their little windows to proffer intimate access. Thus what is staged is less the literal relic than a privileged access to holiness, intimate and unmediated. As was customary, the feast day of the Immaculate Conception (8 December) was celebrated in the Treasury Chapel in 1663 with first and second vespers and a sung Mass with two choirs. The head of San Gennaro stood exposed on the main altar of the chapel for the entire day, and ‘all the holy relics were opened up inside their little houses’.109 Likewise, for all San Gennaro’s feasts, the reliquaries were opened each day of the octave from morning until ­evening.110 Thus relics were activated – in synchrony with their adorers – by being displayed, being seen, and by being exposed. The bones were laid bare. The play of access and exclusion enhances the presence of something that, although very precious, is physically very small and visually dull, inertly shapeless, a dried-up fragment of bone. Yet, conversely, its exposure serves to emphasize its fragility and smallness, the vestige without God. In Isidore’s discussion of openings, including windows and doors, he turns to the ‘hinge’ (cardo), ‘the place on which a door swings and is always moved. It is so called after the term καρξία (“heart”), because as the heart (cor) governs and moves the whole person, so this pivot governs and moves a door. Whence the ­proverbial expression’, claims Isidore, ‘for the matter to be “at a turning point” (in cardine).’111 Thus not only were the relics made more accessible by the opening of the little windows and doors, but the hearts of the matter might be turned and opened, the saint in heaven moved. The opening of the fenestrella as a turn on a hinge made evident the moment as turning-point or crisis: it makes evident the presence of the present and invites a necessary and corresponding change of heart. Chrysostom, Homily 15 on Hebrews, 4 (on Hebrews 9:11). ‘S’aprirono tutte le S.te Reliquie dentro delle loro Casine’. ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc.83 bis n. 1), fol. 17r. 110 For example, this occurred on 5 May 1664. ATSG, CA/67 (Fasc. 83 bis n. 1), fol. 18r. 111 Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, XV.vii.7, ed. and trans. Barney et al., 311. 108 109

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Although they occupy a house within a house, a container within a container, the relics are never housed and never contained; instead they are always excessive, always overflowing, exceeding, spilling out, beyond simple positioning, summoning, or placement. Opening these doors one after the other allows the inclusion in each other of what is usually excluded. That relation is not continuous; it is interrupted, and staged. Yet, despite the opening of repeated gates, doors and windows, of chapel, of reliquary, in spite of their display, the relics remain resolutely inaccessible, ever more distant and elusive, even as they become ever closer and more present. While the emphasis on and elaboration of doors, windows, and openings in the chapel, especially with regard to the silver reliquaries, may seem to imply a straightforward hermeneutics of depth, the problematic presence in heaven and on earth of the saint through the relic disturbs such an interpretation. Instead, we see a fracturing of the hermeneutics of depth and the production of heterogeneous spaces and presences, which are incommensurable and yet folded and hinged in relation. Gates, doors, and windows served at once to keep apart, and in their opening to draw together, produce an access, a closeness, even a union, that depended for its production on that very separation and on those barriers. Caravaggio’s Martyrdom of Saint Ursula (Plate 48), painted in Naples in 1610 for Prince Marcantonio Doria, can be seen in analogous mode, as evoking a silver reliquary and its capacity for flesh–spirit exchange. St Ursula is dying. Blood pours from her chest from the deadly arrow flung by the King of the Huns, furious at her rejection of his marriage proposal. The young woman is becoming a saint before our eyes.112 More than that, it is as if her body is transforming into a silver reliquary, the bloody wound in her breast analogous to the relic window, so that we see at once and together woman-saintand-reliquary bust, as if in montage. All colour drains from her; she gleams a silvery white, the very colour of the Neapolitan silver reliquary busts, her metallic sheen emphasized by the close proximity of the glistening oily steely armour of the soldier to her left. Wound and blood indicate at once the heart of the bust, martyrdom, and becoming saint, the point where time splits and is still. That ‘punctum’ of sanctity is analogous to the relic window in a reliquary bust (compare Plate 48 & Fig. 71). The approach of the distant and incommensurable. Naples’ celebrated silver busts that Caravaggio knew from his Neapolitan sojourn erupt from within his canvas, like a barely acknowledged memory.

That is, she is becoming recognizably a saint, since saints were saints in life as well as in death.

112

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Conclusion

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Far from relics requiring architectural representation, as early modernists have argued, relics depend on architecture implied already within and through the relic. ‘Should we worship the relics of the saints?’ asks Aquinas, and he responds: As Augustine says (De Civ. Dei i, 13): ‘If a father’s coat or ring, or anything else of that kind, is so much more cherished by his children, as love for one’s parents is greater, in no way are the bodies themselves to be despised, which are much more intimately and closely united to us than any garment; for they belong to man’s very nature.’ It is clear from this that he who has a certain affection for anyone, venerates whatever of his is left after his death, not only his body and the parts thereof, but even external things, such as his clothes, and such like. Now it is manifest that we should show honor to the saints of God, as being members of Christ, the children and friends of God, and our intercessors. Wherefore in memory of them we ought to honor any relics of theirs in a fitting manner: principally their bodies, which were temples, and organs of the Holy Ghost dwelling and operating in them, and are destined to be likened to the body of Christ by the glory of the Resurrection. Hence God Himself fittingly honors such relics by working miracles at their presence.113

For Aquinas, then, saints and their relics are akin to cladding or garments and to ‘temples of the Holy Ghost’. That is, they house and adorn, they clad and contain. If saints’ bodies were already temples, they do not require a temple to represent them, but are better understood in analogous terms. That analogous nature is both historical (in terms of a saint’s lived body) and anticipatory, since they are destined for likeness to the glorified and resurrected body of Christ. Aquinas cites Jerome to say that the worship of latria is not that used for relics (‘or even the angels’). And he continues to make the claim that their worship is for the sake of the soul, which was once united with the body, and now is with God, and of God.114 He draws an important distinction between form, implying the soul, and matter, which is that which will be reunited to the soul: The dead body of a saint is not identical with that which the saint had during life, on account of the difference of form, viz. the soul: but it is the same by identity of matter, which is destined to be reunited to its form.115 Aquinas, Summa theologica, pt 3a, q. 25, art. 6. ‘We worship that insensible body, not for its own sake, but for the sake of the soul, which was once united thereto, and now enjoys God; and for God’s sake, whose ministers the saints were.’ Aquinas, Summa theologica, pt 3a, q. 25, art. 6. 115 Aquinas, Summa theologica, pt 3a, q. 25, art.6. 113 114

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The body that is dead, the body in the tomb, the fragment of the saint, is indeed the very body, as matter, that will be joined in the saint in heaven. Identity of matter will be reunited to its form. The Treasury’s silver reliquaries stage both matter and form. They offer a glimpse of that reunification of body and soul that will be the justified body and soul in heaven, just as they stage the gulf between them. The saints are divided by death into two parts, but the reliquaries offer us matter and form as one and more than one in a veiled relation: as dead bodily remains of the saint and matter as holy body redeemed. The bodies of the saints both live with God and are dead on earth.116 Thus the silver of the reliquary busts occupies a strange – indeed, an uncanny – role. It offers material continuity as flesh transformed. Silver assumes both the flesh of what is now dead matter and the glory of the living body with God together as what will have been (Plate 44). It is that strange metal that assimilates the body living on earth and the glorified body in heaven. In his commentary on the story of Isaac and Rebecca (Genesis 24:53, 60–63), St Ambrose shows how the sight of Rebecca coming with the ‘vessels of gold and silver’ prompts Isaac (the soul) to open himself to God with kisses, which in turn fires Rebecca with desire to kiss Isaac: And so the soul of the patriarch Isaac, seeing the mystery of Christ, seeing Rebecca coming with vessels of gold and silver, as if she were the Church with the people of the nations, and marveling at the beauty of the Word and of His sacraments, says, ‘Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth’ (Cant. 1.2). And Rebecca, seeing the true Isaac, that true joy, and true source of mirth, desires to kiss him.117

The reliquaries are thus far more than mere sculptures of saints. They trigger and bear the potential of yearning and transformation. Vessels of precious metal, they straddle presence and absence, past and future, and offer a riddle of consolation. They are heavily contaminated by contact: contact with the relics they contain and, through them, with heaven and divine will. The palpable and material are therefore potentially also the spiritual and transcendent. The saint and the relic both do and do not inhabit the same place; nor is one ‘I say that the bodies of the saints live with God’, argued Peter the Venerable in his sermon in honour of the saint in the mid-twelfth century, ‘And that they live with God innumerable miracles everywhere on earth demonstrate.’ Quoted by Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 265. Although the development of the doctrine of purgatory and increased discussion of the nature of the soul’s condition between death and Last Judgement forced theologians to make it clear that the body is restored and glorified only at the end of time, it was sometimes suggested that the ability of martyrs to withstand pain and bodily corruption was due to the assimilation of their bodies on earth to the glorified bodies of heaven. 117 St Ambrose, ‘Isaac, or the Soul’, in Seven Exegetical Works, ed. and trans. M. P. McHugh (Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1972), 15. 116

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a simple substitution for the other. To displace the relationship onto liturgy, ritual, ecclesiastical hierarchy, episcopal decree, or visitation is to withdraw it to the level of representation, to enact a simple displacement while disavowing the real displacement that the reliquary allows to take place. The silver saints bear witness to another kind of belonging, another kind of justice, one of terrible cruelty and unequalled pity and witness to other relations, because these are relations of becoming, rather than implementing binary distributions between body/soul, life/death. In some way, the saints are indeed forms of exteriority – of another species, another nature, another origin, as Mâle suggested. The reliquary circulates around the relic at the heart of the matter (Fig. 71). An emphasis on the static fragment of bone is at odds with baroque pictorial depictions which locate aesthetic and spiritual intensity through agitated movement at the extremities of the human body. Thus in Rubens’ Presentation and Deposition in Antwerp Cathedral the extremities of the protagonists’ bodies, especially their hands, orbiting towards and about each other, foment and express spiritual intensity, human connection, and loss. While Saint Irene of Thessalonica (Fig. 42) by Carlo Schisano (1733) is exceptional in her extroversion, many of the Treasury’s saints, like Alfonso Balsamo’s St Thomas Aquinas (1605), are introverted, at one, in the heart of the matter. The wellknown ‘relic’ sculptures at the crossing of St Peter’s Basilica in Rome consisting of gesturing saints – unapologetically ecstatic and extroverted – do not actually house their relics, which are instead encased above them. By contrast, in the Treasury Chapel the relics are made visible, but they are screened and enclosed, sealed off in busts, some without limbs to gesture, their energy not communicated or dispersed, but contained and concentrated within, and they depend on external movement to transport them (Fig. 3). These are reliquaries that come alive through an assemblage of devout worshipper, brancard, and saint coursing through the city’s dark arteries in a new form of urban currency (Plates 24 & 40; Fig. 60). Restriction to head, shoulders, and thorax reduces the organic weight of the body and its encumbering and stifling presence. That auratic intensification permits the reliquary to enter into circulation. This is akin to the process which Georges Didi-Huberman identifies in the ex-voto (Fig. 67): ‘it enters into civilization [or circulation], in some way, acceding to the status of an object both substitutable and mobile’.118 From fragment to head to full body, as the representation becomes more literal, so it loses its direct contact with the saintly virtus. Thus even in the reiteration, there is a distancing. The bust ‘[I]l se civilise, en quelque sorte, il accède à un statut d’objet substituable et mobilier’. G. Didi-Huberman, Ex-voto: images, organe, temps (Paris: Bayard, 2006), 84. I return to this issue in Chapter 10.

118

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or half-length form establishes the relic in direct relation to the human body and, through the head, to the mind and soul, while freeing it from being bound to mere corporeal appearance. It thus sets it free in an economy of exchange and correspondence, both in the literal patterning to which Capaccio referred and to a patterning of exchange and substitution, a reassemblage of body and hope. How these exchanges are implicated in silver is the subject of the next chapter.

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10

Silver saints: between transformation and transaction

In history up to the present it is certainly an empirical fact that separate individuals have, with the broadening of their activity into world-historical activity, become more and more enslaved under a power alien to them … a power which has become more and more enormous and, in the last instance, turns out to be the world market … [Thus] the transformation of history into world history is not indeed a mere abstract act on the part of the ‘self-­ consciousness,’ … or of any other metaphysical spectre, but a quite material, empirically verifiable act. (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 1846)1 The graven images of their gods shall ye burn with fire: thou shalt not desire the silver or gold that is on them, nor take it unto thee, lest thou be snared therein: for it is an abomination to the Lord thy God. (Deuteronomy 7:25) It is wholly precious, whether for its wealth of works of gold and silver, or its gemstones, sculpture and painting.2 (Domenico Antonio Parrino, 1714)

The shining countenance

All the reliquaries are made of silver – and solid silver at that (Plate 43). It is silver, more than anything, that bestows their disturbing shifting quality. Silver opens a special triple optic – at once political, natural, and divine – and brings the divine, nature, and politics into relation materially through its time-warping, boundary-crossing capacities. It offers at once a vantage point on the flow of capital and imperial power, a window on the production of nature, and a superficial contact with the divine. The chance to turn base metals into silver and gold pushed alchemists to frenzy. But the ensilvering of flesh is more than a dream. It is also a nightmare. The capacity to turn what K. Marx and F. Engels, The German Ideology, ed. C. J Arthur (New York: International Publications, New York, 1970), 55, 58.   2 ‘È tutto prezioso, ò per ricchezze d’ori, argenti, pietre, scoltura, e dipintura’. Parrino, Nuova Guida de’ Forastieri (1714), 306.

  1

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he touched to gold first thrilled King Midas and then, as he turned food wine and his beloved daughter into lifeless metal, tormented him. The Spanish monarchy’s ‘silverizing’ extended beyond the economic sphere, with which it has predominantly been associated, to the furthest reaches of social refinement and religious aspirations. The silver saints of the Treasury Chapel are part of that complex nexus whose interjunctions this chapter explores. Silvering the world

Wrested from the earth by the blood of conquest and the savagery of colonial mining, refined Spanish silver was shipped to Naples, where it was beaten into beneficence personified. Wrought, chased, engraved, repoussaged, and embossed, silver metal was transformed into chalices, pyx, patens, carte di gloria, devotional book covers, altar flowers and reliquaries (Plate 45, Figs 5 & 59). It came, too, to mark the acme of social respectability in silver canes, furniture, mirrors, silver fabrics. Naples’ massive imports of silver from the New World after the conquest of Mexico (1521) were such that many noble Neapolitans, including the Prince of Avellino, the Marchese of Campolataro, and the Duke of Atripalda boasted very considerable domestic silver collections.3 Numerous small sculptures in silver, most often of religious subjects, adorned desks and other pieces of furniture, especially in bedrooms.4 And the Treasury Chapel’s spectacular collection of silver heads, busts, and figures must be understood within this economy of colonialism, refinement, and salvation. But if silver was the lifeblood of the Spanish Empire, it was also its death rattle.5 Spain’s permanent war strategy accelerated its own demise, fuelled the rise to world power of its chief rival, the United Provinces, and intensified the extension of commodity production and exchange throughout the northern Atlantic.6 Silver seemed to offer the imperial Spanish what they most desired: a (reducible) meaning and a means to substantialize every relation, even the relationship with the divine. But while silver might work to exchange and Catello, ‘Argenti’, 307. Catello, ‘Argenti’, 307.   5 ‘Early capitalism developed rapidly because it generated successive local ecological crises, not in spite of them. J. Moore, ‘“Amsterdam is Standing on Norway”, Part I: The Alchemy of Capital, Empire and Nature in the Diaspora of Silver, 1545–1648’, Journal of Agrarian Change, 10:1 (2010), 40. The enormous silver flows enabled the Crown to dispense with the kind of internal restructuring of state machinery and ecological regime that was really necessary to pursue its permanent war strategy.   6 On this cycle, see S. J. Stein and B. H. Stein, Silver, Trade and War: Spain and America in the Making of Early Modern Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).   3   4

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transform, it was also always at risk of simply transacting. Mere transaction, a gleaming threat barely veiled, that traduced potential and reduced the possibility of salvation into shrivelled bones and lumps of metal. A huge quantity of Spanish bullion from the New World was concentrated in the Treasury Chapel (Plate 3). Product of excavation from the dark earth, of smelting and refining, of transportation across half the world, that silver had passed from hand to hand, part of a system of colonial exploitation and domination (Plate 49). By the time it reached the Treasury Chapel, the silver represented exploitation and destruction on a terrible scale. It had amassed unpayable debts in its journey of pillaging and exploitation. Thus the address of the silver saints in the Treasury is no easy exchange of glances and familiar recognition. Silver was a key commodity of exchange in early modern Europe. Marx nicely referred to it as ‘a highly energetic solvent’.7 It was the lifeblood of the Spanish Empire. Spain had no golden age; but it did have a silver age. King Philip II’s motto, emblazoned on Potosí’s second coat-of-arms, read, ‘For the wise king this lofty mountain of silver could conquer the whole world’.8 Massive amounts of silver from the Andean mines traversed the Atlantic. Silver more than any other material commodity formed a world trade system involving Asia, especially China.9 The prodigious profits that were made from the globalized silver industry benefited, above all, the Spanish crown, such that the revenues from overseas mines largely financed the sprawling Spanish Empire.10 Spain controlled the mining and the minting of silver. Special incentives encouraged bullion owners to take their treasure to Spanish mints. There reputable minters essentially certified the coins’ content, and thus there they accrued additional value, while Spain collected seigniorage (Fig. 62).11 The Marx–Engels Reader, ed. R. C. Tucker, 2nd edn (New York: Worth, 1978), 507. Quoted by J. Moore, ‘Amsterdam is Standing on Norway’, 44.   9 Europeans were intermediaries in the trade between the ‘New World’ and China. Silver was the key commodity distributed globally, and it was exchanged for items, mainly silk and porcelain, but also gold from the Asian mainland. D. O. Flynn and A. Giráldez, ‘Born with a “Silver Spoon”: The Origin of World Trade in 1571’, Journal of World History, 6:2 (1995), 201–221.  10 The financial foundation of the Spanish Empire was based on resources outside the Iberian peninsula. The Spanish Crown received huge wealth from its control and taxation (direct and indirect) of low-cost ‘New World’ mines, especially Potosí. Flynn and Giráldez, ‘Born with a “Silver Spoon”, 200–211. According to Earl Hamilton, 27.5 per cent of the total registered precious metals entering Seville between 1566 and 1645 belonged to the Crown of Castile. E. Hamilton, American Treasure and the Price Revolution in Spain, 1501–1650 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1934), 34.  11 The Spanish monarchy decreed that private bullion, mined in its territories, be taken to an authorized mint in America or Castile. A. Motomura, ‘New Data on Minting, Seigniorage, and the Money Supply in Spain (Castile), 1597–1643’, Explorations in Economic History, 34 (1997), 333.   7   8

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It has been estimated that the Spanish monarchy minted about 4.55 million kilograms of silver and 2,800 kilograms of gold in the years between 1600 and 1639. Outputs during the early seventeenth century of the gold and silver mints owned by the Spanish monarchy were considerably greater than in the later sixteenth century and were certainly much higher than those in England or France.12 Spain’s imperial ambitions fed on American silver. The New World accounted for almost three-quarters of the world’s silver production in the sixteenth century.13 Most of that silver came from Potosí, where the discovery of silver reserves by the Spanish in 1545 was of global consequence (Plate 49). The decline of Saxon and Bohemian silver mining was reinforced by the rise of Potosí; it was not a consequence of it. Silver mining in central European regions, sites of huge capital investment from the 1450s on, reached its peak by the 1540s.14 Metallurgical industries formed part of the transformation of wealth into capital and the formation of large-scale industrial capital and a metallurgical proletariat that, in turn, compelled further growth.15 Capitalism’s urge towards rapacious and expansionary forms was driven by the economic logic of European mining that also ensured the success of ‘New World’ silver.16 Abundant supplies of ‘New World’ silver coexisted with cheap local labour. Indians mined silver ore and paid a good deal of this to the Spanish as tribute. Silver tributary payments were then sold back to the Indians, who smelted the ore in thousands of guayras (small wind-ovens). Spanish control of the coca leaf trade sharpened their purchasing power. By the 1570s, the Cerro Rico (‘rich mountain’) was the epicentre of a commodity Motomura, ‘New Data’, 332. After 1624 Spanish output and market share declined sharply, partly because of financing Spain’s war against the Dutch Republic.  13 W. Barrett, ‘World Bullion Flows, 1450–1800’, in James D. Tracy (ed.), The Rise of Merchant Empires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 225.  14 Central European mining encompassed southern Germany, southern Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. The annual output of central Europe’s silver mines expanded five-fold between 1460 and 1530, achieving outputs unequalled until the nineteenth century. Global expansion both redressed and spread the socio-ecological contradictions of that mining spree that poisoned water, air, wildlife, and humans with its ­unprecedented deforestation, polluting smoke, mining dust, uranium poisoning, and gigantic quantities of poisonous smelting lead. See J. U. Nef, The Conquest of the Material World (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 40–44.  15 J. Moore, ‘Silver, Ecology, and the Origins of the Modern World, 1450–1640’, in Alf Hornborg, John Robert McNeill, and Juan Martínez Alier (eds), Rethinking Environmental History: World System History and Global Environmental Change (Lanham, New York, and Plymouth: Altamira Press, 2007), 124.  16 For a full development of this argument, see F. Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism 15th–18th Century, vol. II: The Wheels of Commerce, trans. S. Reynolds (Berkeley: University of California Press: Berkeley, 1992), 324–326, and Moore, ‘Silver, Ecology, and the Origins of the Modern World’, 123–142.  12

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revolution that reorganized and subordinated Peru’s peoples and landscapes to serve capital and empire.17 Jason Moore argues that the mining of silver in the ‘New World’ is best understood in terms not of Smithian logic of rising demand driving geographical expansion of a reified ‘Europe’, but of the logic of the commodity frontier, which included tobacco, fisheries, wheat, timber, indigo, and dyewood, but above all sugar and silver. Spain was able to import vast quantities of grain from as far afield as the Ukrainian steppe by the 1590s and gargantuan quantities of Baltic timber, because it could pay for them in silver. ‘At every turn’, claims Moore, ‘land (forests, silver veins, fertile soil) was organized by empires … as a force of production in servitude to the commodity form, as a mechanism for maximizing the productivity of labour’.18 These flows of materials across the world depended on silver, on a world ecology and a world economy that fuelled the rise of capitalism and that were the ruthless logic of the commodity frontier.19 Silver consumed more fuel than any other commonly smelted metal in this era. Viceroy Francisco de Toledo’s reorganization of Peruvian mining to improve declining output exacerbated this hunger. Potosí’s revival after 1571 depended on the exploitation of the failing ore that defied the smelters. Smelting was replaced by mercury amalgamation, a technique that pulverized ore with mercury to extract silver and caused terrible ecological and human damage. J. Moore, ‘“This lofty mountain of silver could conquer the whole world”: Potosí and the Political Ecology of Underdevelopment, 1545–1800’, Journal of Philosophical Economics, 4:1 (2010), 58.  18 Moore, ‘Amsterdam is Standing on Norway’, 36. ‘The spectrum of vital food, labor and resource sectors – comprising the production and extraction of sugar, silver, forest products, iron, copper, fish, flax, grain, slaves, and livestock – was characterized by a profoundly restless historical geography. In contrast to the centuries-long drift of regional primacy in premodern civilizations, these vital sectors were rapidly remade through successive frontier movements.’ Thus in silver mining ‘Potosí’s ascent was enabled by the crisis of Central European mining, the preeminent producer of the “first” sixteenth century; in time Potosí would yield its primacy to New Spain. The explanation for this pattern is straightforward. New commodity sectors moved to regions where the commodification of land and labor was low, and where indigenous capacities for effective resistance were minimal. There was, as a result, a bonanza of free gifts that could be easily appropriated. Sooner or later, however, the era of “windfall profits” comes to an end. Silver veins are depleted, trees are cut down, soil fertility exhausted, peasant formations undermined. Under the conditions of the time, this translated to declining labor productivity, and the region’s competitive position with it.’ Moore, ‘This lofty mountain of silver’, 60–61.  19 Moore, ‘Amsterdam is Standing on Norway’, 35. Relative, not absolute, exhaustion was what really mattered, and this relative exhaustion was a product of the contradictory relations of markets, states, and social classes in Central Europe and the capitalist world ecology. Large-scale mining did not disappear in Central Europe; its centrality was merely displaced through global expansion. Moore, ‘This lofty mountain of silver’, 61.  17

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Thus close behind silver lay quicksilver with its swift deceits. Quicksilver, often found in mines and in silver-working furnaces, was necessary for silver extraction (once it replaced smelting) and for gilding silver and bronze. ‘Argentum vivum, living silver, formerly named hydrargyrum, from Greek hydr (water) and argyros (silver)’, claims Isidore of Seville, ‘is so called, because it etches out the materials onto which it is thrown.’20 Classified as a liquid because it flows, it could yet behave like a solid. Its particular responsiveness to the nature of substances in contact with it marked it out. It could bite into them, etching its way through them, and it could stubbornly resist or eagerly flow: It has such power that if you place a one hundred pound rock on top of a sextarium (about a pint) of quicksilver, it steadfastly sustains the rock. But if, on the other hand, you place a mere gram of gold on top of it, it quickly yields to the gold’s light weight by forming a hollow. From this we may understand that it is not the weight of a substance, but rather its nature, to which quicksilver yields. It is best kept in glass vessels, for it eats through other materials.21

Thus quicksilver could free silver from the earth yet also embodied its properties in intensified manner. Quicksilver was mercurial. Discerning yet unstable, necessary but undependable, responsive yet corrosive. The agent of transmutation, Mercury, was the paramount artificer, god of eloquence, patron of merchants, and friend of thieves. Quicksilver shared his capacities, and silver followed hard on its heels. Artifice, persuasion, deception, and theft interlaced silver’s production. As quicksilver techniques replaced smelting, the mita – rotating conscripted labour drafts – swept away the guayra system, and thus control at the point of production was wrested from Indians to Europeans. The ruthless mitayo regime maimed and killed its workers. It was perhaps even more deadly than slavery. In the 1570s the annual draft mobilized about 13,500 workers drawn from a vast area extending hundreds of miles in all directions. Conditions favourable to the transplantation and exploitation of workers brought epidemic disease and the destruction of villages and social systems.22 But silver production soared. Even so, the ore made available by these ruthless methods was exhausted by the late 1570s. More tunnels had to be dug, and deeper. Accidents, fatalities, disease, misery soared. The ever-extending silver mining frontier pumped ecological resources from countryside to mining town and sent silver, profit, and success flowing from colonial city to imperial metropole. ‘Spain and its territories were Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, XVI.xix.2, ed. and trans. Barney et al., 330. Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, XVI.xix.2, ed. and trans. Barney et al., 330.  22 See Moore, ‘This lofty mountain of silver’, 63.  20  21

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not merely a conveyor belt for silver as it moved from the Cerro Rico to Amsterdam’, argues Jason Moore, ‘but a conveyor belt for the geographical expansion of the commodity system.’23 More, too, than conveyor belt, Spain and its European territories were riven and stained by the transfer of silver. Those dynamics fashioned the Kingdom of Naples and wrapped it in a bloodcurdling embrace. As a repository of silver from the viceroyalty of Peru, the Treasury Chapel bears the stamp of Spanish imperial ambition. It celebrates Spain’s conquest of the ‘New World’, its command of the trade in silver, the wonderful inter-exchange of conquest into bullion and bullion into conquest. And, like a money-laundering enterprise, it offered a form of absolution. It offered the chance to change conquest, exploitation, and suffering, mere cruel metal into eternal redemption in paradise. ‘The entire world economy was entangled in a global silver web’, claim Dennis Flynn and Arturo Giráldez, who refute the simplistic Europe/nonEurope dichotomy to contend that a ‘highly integrated global economy’ existed since the sixteenth century.24 They argue that the global silver market broadly divides into two phases. The first phase – the Potosí/Japan Cycle – spanned the 1540s to the 1640s and generated the birth of global trade. A second silver phase – the Mexican Cycle – endured over the first half of the eighteenth century, was related to significant demographic growth in China, and was partly attributable to the introduction of new crops from America.25 China was the ‘primary end-market’ for world silver for several centuries. During the silver cycles of 1540–1640 and of 1700–50, surges in global silver flows towards China took place, ‘because silver prices were significantly higher in China than elsewhere in the world’.26 By the end of the sixteenth Moore, ‘Amsterdam is Standing on Norway’, 45. Silver was not homogenous, of course. Particular types of silver dominated the trade routes ending in China; and much was smuggled. Flynn and Giráldez, ‘Born with a “Silver Spoon”’, 201; D. O. Flynn and A. Giráldez, ‘Cycles of Silver: Global Economic Unity through the Mid-Eighteenth Century’, Journal of World History, 13:2 (2002), 392.  25 Their analysis of these two silver cycles is part of their contention that a highly integrated global economy existed since the sixteenth century; and thus that all analyses of world regions must recognize long-standing interconnected and powerful economic, demographic, and ecological forces operating at the global level. Flynn and Giráldez, ‘Cycles of Silver’, 392. Flynn and Giráldez suggest that 1571, the date of the foundation of the city of Manila as a Spanish entrepôt, marked the birth of global trade. Thus while there was important continental trade before 1571, there was no direct link between America and Asia, so the ‘world market was not yet fully coherent or complete’. Flynn and Giráldez, ‘Born with a “Silver Spoon”’, 201.  26 Bimetallic rations were much lower in China than elsewhere in the world (in sixteenthcentury China the bimetallic – gold:silver – ratio was 1:6 while in Europe it was 1:12): ‘silver’s value within China was much greater than elsewhere’. Flynn and Giráldez, ‘Cycles of Silver’, 393. The surge in population and markets in eighteenth-century China (partly a consequence of Chinese adoption of New World crops of – d ­ epending  23  24

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century the Mexican peso was widespread in southern China, where more Mexican money circulated than in Mexico.27 The period 1700–50 saw unpre­ cedented quantities of silver again pouring into China, at an even faster rate than during the Potosí/Japan earlier cycle. More Spanish American silver was produced in the eighteenth century than in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries combined.28 Spain profited immensely from this trade, along with other European, Asian, American, and African groups and individuals. Pedro de Baeza, a merchant from Madrid, recognized the opportunity for profit that such discrepancies offered: Commonly a peso of gold is worth five and a half silver pesos, and if there is a shortage of silver [in China], it is brought from other parts and the price rises to 6 or 6½ silver pesos for one peso of gold; and the most expensive that I have seen and bought gold in the city of Canton in China was seven pesos of silver for one of gold, and I never saw it go beyond this price, and here in Spain a peso of gold is commonly worth twelve of silver; therefore it is easy to see that bringing gold from China means a gain of more than seventy-five or eighty percent.29

Silver from the ‘New World’ also flowed directly to Asia. The Dutch East India Company has recently been characterized as simply acting ‘as a European way station for the flow of New World silver … pump[ing] this out to its trading stations in the east as a commodity’.30 More often than not, reales valued by weight remained in their original boxes packed at the Mexican or Peruvian mints that were set up adjacent to the mines. Only after arrival at Batavia or any of the other Dutch trading stations did the reales pass into circulation or bullion enter local mints. It was not until about 1640 that bimetallic ratios converged across the world, and by that time the price of silver in China had dropped to that in the rest of the world.31 Arbitrage advantage returned in the period 1700–50, when once again the value of silver in China surged above on local geographical conditions – maize, sweet potatoes, and peanuts) implied a further increased demand for silver, since the economy of China was ‘silverized’ long before that surge. Flynn and Giráldez, ‘Cycles of Silver’, 407.  27 D. G. López Rosado, Historia del peso mexicana (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Ecónomica, 1975), 32.  28 J. R. Fisher, ‘Mining and Imperial Trade in 18th-Century Spanish America’, in C. E. Nuñez (ed.), Monetary History in Global Perspective 1500–1808: B6 Proceedings, 12th International Economic History Congress (Seville: Universidad de Sevilla, 1998), 109–119.  29 Quoted in C. R. Boxer, ‘Plata es sangre: Sidelights on the Drain of Spanish-American Silver in the Far East, 1550–1700’, Philippine Studies, 18:3, 461.  30 J. F. Richards, ‘Introduction’, in J. F. Richards (ed.), Precious Metals in the Later Medieval and Early Modern Worlds (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 1983), 23.  31 Flynn and Giráldez, ‘Cycles of Silver’, 395.

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that in the rest of the world.32 In the meantime (1640–1700), the quantities of silver that flowed to China were still huge, but reduced.33 Silver flowed eastwards through Europe, while gold flowed persistently from China to Europe.34 China’s importation of vast quantities of silver required export of fabulous quantities of Chinese silks and ceramics, which commanded higher prices abroad than in China’s domestic market, although these markets were less dependable than the silver market.35 The price of silver within China was eventually lowered in the 1540s–1640s to the price elsewhere in the world, as even China’s hunger for the white metal was offset by gigantic imports. Arguably, then, it was China’s hunger for silver that supported Spain’s rise as a world power. Direct and indirect taxation of the silver industry financed the Spanish Empire, even as efforts to maintain and increase crown revenues inadvertently encouraged smuggling on a gigantic scale.36 Flynn and Giráldez suggest that ‘by the time silver’s value had finally declined to its cost of American production around 1640, silver mining profits had been reduced Arbitrage trade depends on the purchase of an item cheaply in one area and its subsequent sale more cheaply elsewhere. Silver was purchased cheaply in markets such as Amsterdam and sold at progressively higher prices towards China.  33 In the 1700–50 phase the premium was 50 per cent, rather than the 100 per cent premium during the 1540–1640 period. Flynn and Giráldez, ‘Cycles of Silver’, 395. In 1717 Sir Isaac Newton bewailed the situation in Representation to the Lords of the Treasury: ‘in China … the [silver:gold] ratio is 9 or 10 to 1 and in India 12 to 1, and this carries away the silver from all Europe’. Quoted by Flynn and Giráldez, ‘Cycles of Silver’, 395.  34 Gold, silver, copper, and cowries flowed independently to distinct regional markets. Thus Flynn and Giráldez argue that it is a mistake to aggregate them into ‘money’, which tends to preclude an understanding of the various flows of monetary substances across the world. Flynn and Giráldez, ‘Cycles of Silver’, 397. They also argue against the conventional characterization of early modern monetary flows in ‘East-West’ terms. Japan was the source of a substantial fraction of world silver production during the 1540–1640 silver cycle and most of that went to China, while Chinese gold flowed to Japan. Japan imported gold from China up to the middle of the seventeenth century, but then exported gold late in the seventeenth century. D. O. Flynn, ‘Comparing the Tokugawa Shogunate with Hapsburg Spain: Two Silver-Based Empires in a Global Setting’, in J. Tracy (ed), The Political Economy of Merchant Empires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 332–359.  35 Chinese silks sold more cheaply than comparable Spanish silks in Peru. But the price of Chinese silk in Spanish America was high compared with Chinese silk prices in Manila, which, in turn, outstripped Chinese silk prices in China itself. China’s importation of millions of pesos in silver stimulated Chinese exports in equivalent values of silks, ceramics, tea, and other products in circuits that were normally considered local or regional in scope but were part of more complex global circuits of exchange. Flynn and Giráldez, ‘Cycles of Silver’, 401 n. 19, 416.  36 Flynn and Giráldez argue that the decline by the 1640s of imperial Spain, the Ottoman Empire, and the Ming dynasty was linked to the global silver market. D. O. Flynn and A. Giráldez, ‘China and the Spanish Empire’, Revista de historia economica, 2nd ser., 14:2 (1996), 309–338.  32

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to a level no greater than those common in other sectors’.37 By the mid-­ seventeenth century, silver was losing its shine. Spanish silver freely entered Naples as part of the Spanish Empire. Silver was profit for the Spanish; its working in Naples contributed to the nexus of Spanish rule. Economically, politically, and materially silver informed the culture of Spanish-ruled Naples. Neapolitan silversmithing was particularly prized. As many as 350 workshops of silversmiths were concentrated in the Orefici quarter of the city, in each of which worked family groups of varying size, repositories of astonishing technical and artistic skills.38 In a somewhat obscure remark, Domenico Antonio Parrrino praises the very fine work (accuratissima) of the workers in silk and wool and notes that among these guilds’ highest privileges was access to a dedicated tribunal to settle issues of a commercial nature, and that this privilege was extended to the guild of goldsmiths, which included and indeed was overwhelmingly dominated by silversmiths.39 Silversmithing in Naples apparently benefited from efficient and integrated commercial infrastructure. ‘Dead and useless’ silver

Even as silver and gold were common images for the treasury of heaven, they surface equally relentlessly in the Bible as tokens of mammon, signal diversion from the path of God and the seduction of this world. Thus silver was at once pure and impure, promise and threat, innocent and corruptor. Thus it is that betrayal is the colour of silver and silver is the currency of deceit: Then one of the twelve, called Judas Iscariot, went unto the chief priests, And said unto them, What will ye give me, and I will deliver him unto you? And they covenanted with him for thirty pieces of silver. And from that time he sought opportunity to betray him. (Matthew 26:14–16)

Just as Christ was sold for silver – one thinks of Rembrandt’s bewitching Judas Returning the Thirty Pieces of Silver (1629) – so precious metals epitomize temptations that jeopardize the soul: ‘For what does it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, but suffer the loss of his soul?’ (Matt. 16.26) It is not redeemed for gold or for silver … He that loves silver will not be satisfied with silver.40 Flynn and Giráldez, ‘Cycles of Silver’, 404. Catello, ‘Argenti’, 307.  39 ‘La plebe è accuratissima, e nell’arti particolarmente della seta, e della lana, havendo per privilegio l’attributo di nobili, con Tribunali a parte, come anche l’arte degli Orefici’. Parrino, Napoli Città Nobilissima, vol. I (1700), 20.  40 St Ambrose, ‘Death as a Good’, in Seven Exegetical Works, 83, 91.  37  38

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Silver does not simply tempt down a slippery slope. It is the slippery slope:

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The snare lies in gold, the lime in silver, the bond in an estate, the nail in love. When we seek the gold we choke; when we search after silver, we are stuck in the lime; when we enter upon the estate, we are bound to it.41

The pointlessness of worldliness is compounded in silver and gold with the futility of humankind’s most prodigious physical efforts: ‘Gold is in mines, silver is in mines; from the mine they are dug out and into the mine they return.’42 There was a lot that was wrong about silver. And there was a lot wrong with silver in early modern Naples, in particular. It was a matter that was particularly subject to abuse. Its very purity corrupted. Coins were clipped, silver accumulated and pointlessly hoarded, and it represented, far from a fountain of life, the great deadening hand of the Church itself. Silver had a particularly concentrated effect on Naples, because Naples’ monetary economy was not bimetallic as were the economies almost everywhere else. Naples’ monometallism made it particularly vulnerable to clipping. Gilbert Burnet reported: As for the Coin, it, as all the other Spanish Mony [sic], is so subject to Clipping, that the whole mony of Naples is now light, & far below the true value … He hath laid some Taxes on the whole Kingdon, & hath got a great many to bring in some Plate to be cyned: and when he hath thus prepared a quantity, as may serve for the circulation that is necessary, he intends to call in all the old Mony, & to give out new Mony for it.43

Indeed, political success was to take control of silver: The Viceroy of Naples, Marquis of Carpy, son of Lewis de Haro, has corrected many abuses … [He has] repressed the insolence of the Spaniards … has brought the Markets & Weights of Naples to a true exactness; resisted the bandits and regulated the coin.44

Naples came to be closely identified with clipped coins circulating in the streets while masses of high-quality silver unproductively gathered dust in its churches. The lavishness of Neapolitan church silver was notorious. Abbot Giovanni Battista Pacichelli remarked in his Memorie de’ Viaggi per l’Europa Cristiana (Naples, 1685) on the superabundance of Neapolitan silver and the high quality of workmanship: St Ambrose, ‘Death as a Good’, in Seven Exegetical Works, 83. St Ambrose, ‘The Prayer of Job and David’, in Seven Exegetical Works, 367.  43 Burnet, Some Letters, 188–189.  44 Burnet, Some Letters, 185–187.  41  42

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If, however, I wanted to enumerate and distinguish between all the churches and monasteries, I would be spread too thin, since there are more than three hundred: the precious furnishings, the silverwork, which in the opinion of experts, exceed the rest of Italy, including those of private individuals, and the almost unbelievable pledges or deposits [pegni] of the eight public banks. It is not appropriate to judge on the basis of the exterior of sacred buildings, because they are not very resplendent, but the wonderment is rather within.45

While Pacichelli wondered at the splendours held within unsplendid exteriors, for many visitors, especially from the north, such profligate splendour was mere waste. For Gilbert Burnet the silver in the hands of the Church, stored up and out of circulation, was useless and dead: [T]he Plate that is in the Treasury here and in the Dome (which is but a mean building, because it is ancient, but hath a Noble Chappel and a vast Treasure) and in a great many other Churches, are so prodigious, that upon the modestest estimate, the Plate of the Churches of Naples amounts to eight millions of Crowns … Every year there is a new Governour of the Annunciata, who perhaps puts in his owne Pocket twenty thousand Crowns; and to make some Compensation when he goeth out of Office, he giveth a vast piece of Plate to the House, a Statue for a Saint in Silver, or some Coloss [sic] of a candlestick; for several of those pieces of plate are said to be worth ten thousand Crowns; and thus all the Silver of Naples becomes dead and useless.46

The fabulous Treasury and church collections of silver in Naples did more than simply hoard. They rendered dead and useless a material which possessed remarkable capacity for movement, exchange, and vitality. Indeed, the Treasury Chapel, and Naples’ other church reserves, can be seen as an immobilization of capital. That was part of its point. While Naples boasted eight banks – a remarkable number – their purpose was to facilitate and profit from the movement of capital. But the Treasury’s exchange did not so clearly generate more silver. It was a sign of surplus par excellence, of capital that did not have to move to return its profits in eternity. Thus the silver, even as it proclaimed itself triumphant and redemptive in the faces of the saints, even as it represented vast wealth for the Spanish Crown and for Neapolitan religious institutions, was also a sign of poverty and destruction, human and ecological. Profit for the Spanish, silver already owed an unpayable debt, was the blood of others. In this tidal wave of silver the Spanish Crown sought to set itself free.

Pacichelli, Memorie de’ Viaggi per l’Europa Cristiana, 50. Burnet, Some Letters, 191–191.

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Silver’s change

The reliquaries were fashioned of privileged silver, a form of miraculous materiality (Plate 43 & Fig. 71). Silver is a slippery substance, both material and colour, substance and surface; an internal quality of the element, a secret but precise quality that directly links density to surface and that produces its sheen. The intrinsic richness of the surrounding material enhanced the value of the reliquary, but also set it apart from the everyday world, reaffirming its miraculous nature.47 How did silver convey and enhance the charisma of the saint? Silver and gold, though capable of transformation, were also unusually transparent. The value of silver and gold coins consisted in the value of their metal content – though also in their capacity to bear the face of Habsburg power legitimately across the globe (Fig. 62). Likewise, precious silver reliquaries declared the preciousness of the relics inside. In spite of silver’s superficial simplicitas and unearthliness, the truth was that the silver busts were solid, heavy, valuable, and costly. And that was also their point. In 1690 the ‘effigy’ of St Blaise alone was valued at about 1,500 ducats.48 This was a treasury in the most literal sense, a storehouse of bullion. The Treasury Chapel is uniquely informed by the cold clarion call of the metallurgist, the petrified acrobatics of metal’s particular malleability. And it is silver that performs this role with greatest panache and dazzle. While its marble revetment is striking, the chapel eschews inlaid coloured marble sculpture, the grotesque faces that surface in the inlay at the Certosa, and the brilliant cacophony of surface, colour, and relief of the Gesù Nuovo and San Paolo Maggiore (Plate 18). Metals, in contradistinction to marble, engage above all in material transformation, not figurative or representational, but in terms of viscosity. From solid to liquid to something else entirely. Metals are not carved into shape, nor baked hard, but assume their form while in liquid state. And it is that working that makes them pure. More than that, silver came to be the preferred medium of valuation and exchange. While the value of coins lay in their metal, not in the mint, silver could be assayed for purity, while copper could not. Price was set in silver.49 Silver, therefore, more even than gold, was equivalent to exchange, the most mobile of currencies, the most exchangeable and best able to represent something that was not itself. The use of silver points towards the ex-voto and to a Likewise in the chapel, altar paintings boast frames set around with lapis lazuli (see Chapter 3). Compare the discussion in D. Freedberg, ‘The Origins and Rise of the Flemish Madonnas in Flower Garlands: Decoration and Devotion’, Münchner Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst, 32 (1981), 125–127.  48 ATSG, CB n. 6. document dated 7 October 1690, n.f.  49 Flynn and Giráldez, ‘Born with a “Silver Spoon”’, 207–208.  47

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parallel devotional practice of venerating saints. Silver figurines and anatomical ex-votos became popular from the early fourteenth century as conspicuously expensive material dedication (Fig. 67). Silver ex-votos outshone their wax counterparts in votive displays, and lent their sheen to the largesse of candelabra, oil lamps, and jewels (Fig. 3). In the ex-voto, as in the relic, the body is cut into parts. Heads, thorax, legs, lungs, cast in silver, dangle on ribbons in front of miraculous objects. Modelled in relief, hearts and eyes besought the saints, crowded on their altars and relics. Ex-votos are above all forwardlooking: they represent that which is wrong, that which threatens or causes or will cause suffering, but also that which will be – or which may be – put right. They are propitiatory, made in expectation and hope; exposed in yearning and aspiration; omens always of encouragement, indicators of a better future. A silver ex-voto – not unlike a silver coin – is sign of a future promise. Silver ex-votos, readily gathered up and melted down or sold, represented valuable income for saintly sanctuaries (Fig. 67). The weight of silver ex-votos was symbolic more than merely financial. Thus a dedication might be made precisely equivalent in weight to that of a sick child. A register of the mountainous heaps of ex-votos left for Andrea Avellino in San Paolo Maggiore in Naples shows that while particularly spectacular gifts were carefully identified by name, most silver ex-votos were noted simply in terms of their amassed weight.50 Even as it was left, therefore, on a saint’s shrine, the holy dedication of the ex-voto was changing not only into spiritual currency, but into cash or, better, into weight, potential for change into something else. It was hoped that the saints would redeem, but meanwhile silver ex-votos were unhesitatingly redeemed for cash. Through their brightness and their presumed origins in planetary influences, metals were as celestial as any materials available, and silver more so than most. Silver was thus more than shining surface and valuable material. It possessed and represented the ability to shift one material into another, to transform and exchange, to cross continents and traverse cultures, to slip from one from to another, to exchange earth for heaven and back again. Silver is a good analogical material for the currency of relics: apparent guarantor of value located elsewhere, yet always available through exchange (Plate 44). For relics depend on a metonymical relation, as the earthly part refers to the effective, miracle-working saint in heaven. In his early twelfth-century treatise on relics Guibert of Nogent vehemently criticized the practice of moving and dividing the bodies of saints.51 ASN, Corporazioni religiose soppresse, S. Paolo Maggiore, 1180, ‘Nota delle voti e offerte che sono venuti al sepolcro del beato Andrea Avellino’.  51 Guibert of Nogent, De pignoribus, in J.-P. Migne (ed.), Patrologiae cursus completus: series latina 156, cols 607–680. See also J. F. Benton, ‘Introduction’, in J. F. Benton (ed.),  50

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He found cults of the holy foreskin intolerable, because they implied that  Christ had not risen in total bodily perfection and thus that other resurrections might also be incomplete. For Guibert nothing of Christ’s resurrected body was left on earth; and his resurrected body was the paradigm  for  the bodies of all, including saints. Martyrs knew that every severed and flayed  part of their body would return in the end. Even when it was crunched into pieces in communicants’ mouths, the Eucharistic host, he argued, was nothing less than the whole body of Christ and, moreover, was the very guarantee that  wholeness was God’s undertaking and pledge to humanity. Thus relics may appear as fragments, but they are part of an economy of the redeemed whole. The economy of the relic was that of the fragment. This is a fragmentation that was not ruination, but glorious multiplication, connection, and concomittance. The whole was in each part. Again, the analogy was to the body of Christ. The body of Christ was in the Eucharist: ‘And when he had given thanks, he brake it, and said, Take, eat: this is my body,  which is broken for you: this do in remembrance of me’ (1 Corinthians 11:24). To remember Christ was thus to both break and reconstitute his body. The Treasury Chapel, however, seems to celebrate not so much restoration and wholenes, as fragmentation and multiplication of saintly bodies, a proliferation of potential (Plate 2). The reliquary busts have formal characteristics in common, and thereby they subordinate their holy bodies to the institutional whole, but they also conjure up the presence of various and multiple saints, arrayed and dispersed across the chapel. Thus the chapel both multiplies and fragments the precious bodies of its saints which it celebrates. Beyond the prodigality of its increasing number of protector saints, the chapel multiplies their figures from silver reliquaries to bronze full-length immured figures (Plate 7). Portable and stationary, gleaming silver and sullen bronze, whole figures and body parts – saints are demonstrably shifting, unstable, and excessive. In indexing the holy person and her or his life, the relic affords an opening back to a life and a way of life lived as an opening on earth, to a historical moment that is unique. But it also points forward, since the relic is far more than the life lived and more than the mere moment of death of the body. Death is almost an irrelevance for the saint; indeed it is death and decay, not the body, that sanctity leaves behind. The relic points to a redeemed life in heaven, where the saint now is in glory, in divine company, in the beatific vision. The magic of the relic is to link heaven to earth by way of the body of a holy man or woman, a mortal, now justified with God. Thus the relic offers a Self and Society in Medieval France: The Memoirs of Abbot Guibert of Nogent (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1970), 26–31.

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bridge between earth and heaven, death and redemption, through the human body. But it is the reliquary that makes the relic. It is silver that materializes these transformations. It is silver that gives us eyes to see the potential of the redeemed body in glory.

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Purity and purification But who may abide the day of his coming? and who shall stand when he appeareth? for he is like a refiner’s fire, and like fullers’ soap: And he shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver: and he shall purify the sons of Levi, and purge them as gold and silver, that they may offer unto the LORD an offering in righteousness. (Malachi 3:2–3)

Silver and gold were noble metals, which, unlike base metals, did not merge with lead during assaying. Saturn could not digest gold and silver, and vomited them up, purified, the noblest of his children.52 Pure, but intolerable, silver’s shine is borne of that strange intolerance. Silver was synonymous with purity and purification. It was fire and flame that purify both silver and the soul. Polycarp’s miracle occurred in fire; fire surrounded Polycarp and assayed him: After he had sent up the amen and had finished his prayer, the people at the stake kindled the fire. A great flame flashed forth and then we saw a miracle. To us it was given to see … . The fire took the form of a vault and bellied out through the wind like the sail of a ship. It walled all around the body of the martyr. He was in the middle of it, not like burning flesh, but like bread being baked or gold or silver being refined in the furnace.53

‘Good then is love’, writes St Ambrose, ‘having wings of burning fire, that flies through the breasts and hearts of the saints and consumes whatever is material and earthly but tests whatever is pure and with its fire makes better whatever it has touched.’54 He continues: Therefore the wings of fire are the flames of the divine Scripture. Indeed, he explained the Scriptures, and the fire went forth and entered into the hearts of His hearers. And truly they were wings of fire, because ‘the words of the Lord are pure words, as silver tried by the fire’ Ps. 11 (12).7.55

Smith, The Business of Alchemy, 173. Martryrdom of Polycarp, 14–15, trans. in van Henten and Avemarie, Martyrdom and Noble Death, 115.  54 St Ambrose, ‘Isaac, or the Soul’, in Seven Exegetical Works, 60–61.  55 St Ambrose, ‘Isaac, or the Soul’, in Seven Exegetical Works, 60–61.  52  53

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Silver is essential; it cuts to the heart of the matter. The saints were assayed, like metal, in flame. Thus St Ambrose reflects on the story of Eleazar and the tyrant: Thanks be to you, O Lord, because you have permitted us to say, ‘We have passed through fire’ (Ps. 66.12), even as the psalmist expresses the same thought in another passage, ‘You have tried us by fire, as silver is tried by fire’ (Ps. 66.10). I will stand beside you, cleansed by the fire like gold, and whatever guilt I had the fire has burned away.56

Silver then is cleansed of sin, has been tried and tested, assayed, punished, beaten. Silver was a metonym for the pure in heart and the purified, for purification and the cleansing of sin – including the cleaning away of the sinful: It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honour of kings is to search out a matter. The heaven for height, and the earth for depth, and the heart of kings is unsearchable. Take away the dross from the silver, and there shall come forth a vessel for the finer. Take away the wicked from before the king, and his throne shall be established in righteousness. (Proverbs 25:2–5)

Ribera’s San Gennaro Emerges Unharmed from the Furnace, the altarpiece of the right-hand lateral chapel (Plates 4 & 13), is an extended exploration of the assaying of the saint. The capacity to dominate one’s body, to live beyond what are considered to be the limits of human nature, was fundamental to the social recognition of supernatural exceptionality, and is here brought to the fore. Figured as both resistant to fire and fire-like, San Gennaro emerges in a terrifying if triumphant clarity of holy isolation, stunned, still, and silent, amid the mayhem of clamour, panicky gesticulation, noise, and confusion all about him, still bound, but miraculously untouched by the flames and choking smoke. A splash of radiant gold, like golden flame, clothes him and singles him out from the confused limbs and dark panic of his companions, and it carries on, like the leap of fire, into the register above, in the golden sash lifted through a serpentine twisting of cherubim upwards to heaven. The martyr, who vanquished nature in his spirit and body, is here ready to dominate nature, to protect and heal, and to defeat death, including on behalf of others from whom he is singled out. Once refined, silver is beaten, hammered out, like the body of a martyr, punished, extended, and tested (Plates 8, 44, 45). Silver metal is prized for its ductility and malleability. Like martyrs’ bodies that absorb blows that mark them out, set them apart, these processes produced finishes that were prized. ‘This Ductility of Spirit commendeth Men, as well as that other doth Mettals’, St Ambrose, ‘Jacob and the Happy Life’, in Seven Exegetical Works, 179.

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declared Richard Whitlock in 1654.57 Thus silver emerges as a powerful force and metaphor within a prosopopoeia, and a material and medium in a spiritual economy of refinement and purity, body fragments and fragmentation, beating and testing, and delivering as purified. Silver’s particular capacity to be purified, which made it such practical currency, lent it also sacramental resonance. ‘Well do vessels of silver and crystal suit that Blood, writes Basile which is nothing other than clarity and purity.’58 Sacramental altar vessels – chalice, pyx, and plate for the host – were overwhelmingly made of silver (Fig. 5). Silver crept onto missals; it encased gifts from nuns and priests, such as the silver box given by Teresia Capece Galeota and Maria Ana Galeota, canonesses at Santa Patrizia, to their Reverend Father Benedict in 1712 and probably made to hold an agnus dei or rosary beads. The Treasury Chapel was crammed with silver ‘crosses and candelabra, carte di gloria, and those of the Gospel of St John’.59 Silver was the material most closely associated with altarware. Silver vessels were imbricated with the spiritual and material transformations of transubstantiation in the Mass, and bore those miraculous particles between God and man, altar and priest, priest and communicant (Fig. 5). In short, silver was most adept at both spiritual and material transformations.60 In the sacrament silver bridged the gap between doctrine and desire, between sin and grace. In saying, ‘This is my body’ and ‘This is my blood’, while distributing the bread and wine, Christ established the metaphorical equivalence between his body and blood and the bread and the wine.61 ‘This cup’, says Christ, ‘is that new Testament in my blood, which is shed for you’ (Luke 22:20). As the priest drinks the blood of Christ, his lips kiss the silver cup; in the miracle it is silver that transfers God to man, that transfers his incorporation. Silver as a mode of exchange, even of counterfeit, effects contact and transmission, communicates between the holy and the material and permits their exchange. Richard Whitlock, Ζωοτομια or Observations on the Present Manner of the English (London: Tho. Roycroft, 1654), 44.  58 ‘Ben si sonvengono vasi d’argento, e di cristallo à quel Sangue, che non à, che chiarezza, e purità.’ Basile, Del Sangue Miracoloso, 2.  59 C. Tutini, DISTINTA DESCRIZIONE della Gran Cappella del Tesoro di S. Gennaro, Ove minutamente si dà contezza della Statue, marmi, Pitture, Argenti, Suppellettili, Reliquie, Indulgenze, Donativi, ed annue Entrate; come anco si descrivono dodeci altri Incendij del Vesuvio, oltre delli narrati dal TUTINI, dalli quali sempre è stata preservata questa Fedelissima Città coll’intercessione del Glorioso Santo (Naples: Michele Luigi Muzio, 1710), 210.  60 For a discussion of ‘the spiritual value of communion silver’, see M. A. Peterson, ‘Puritanism and Refinement in Early New England: Reflections on Communion Silver’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 58:2 (2001), 307–346, esp. 309.  61 Matthew 26:26–28; Mark 14:22–24; Luke 22: 19–20.  57

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Indeed, in the Treasury Chapel the main altar itself was eventually fashioned from silver (Fig. 10). The deputies for long put up with a temporary wooden version, but they wanted to make it ‘out of the most precious material from which it could ever be made, in due proportion to everything that is in the said Treasury’.62 Since the city had no money available for such a project, the deputies agreed to collect the money from ‘the devout’, according to the practice adopted for the tabernacle of the blood ‘by nominating people for each of the city’s quarters to take on the task of collecting whatever money the piety of each person may provide’.63 As the donations grew, the design developed from gilt bronze to solid silver.64 Thus the silver altar brings Neapolitan artifice, visual splendour, superlative value, and material sacrifice in a dazz­ ling combination of splendour and collaboration appropriate for the Mass as sacrifice that achieves community. Lustrous virtue, aerial silver

Silver bears light and bears the soul upwards. Its aerial qualities derive from its capacity to respond to the air itself. ‘Silver (argentum)’, claimed Isidore of Seville, ‘is named from its gleaming in the air (aer, gen. aeris), just as bronze (aer, gen. aeris) and gold (aurum) are.’65 Silver is therefore particularly suitable for a treasury, whose etymology Isidore traces to the same origins. Lustrous silver is a good analogous material for what St Augustine called the lustre of saints’ virtue. He argued that the wounds of martyrs were not bodily, but reflected the light of the saints’ virtue: Our love unto the martyrs is of that nature that we desire to behold the scars of their wounds (borne for the name of Christ) even in their glorification, and perhaps so we shall. For they will not deform, but grace them then, and give out a lustre of their virtue, not bodily, albeit in the body.66

ATSG 59/9 1587, undated document (post-1677, pre-October 1705), n.f.. ‘Si faccia l’altare maggiore di detta Cappella che presentemente è di legno, della materia la più preziosa che mai potrà farsi, essendo conveniente che questo sia proporzionato à tutto il di piu ch’è in detto Tesoro … che si faccia à spese delli devoti di detto gloriosissimo Santo siccome si è capitato altre volte, et in particolare quando si fa lo tabernaculo ove si ripone il glorioso Sangue de detto Santo, con destinanzi persone per tutti i quartieri della Città, acciò che con il dovuto zelo, et amore verso detto Glorioso Santo se piglino l’incommodo di raccogliere accioche la pietra di ciascuno denaro uovra contribuisce per detto affetto’. ATSG 59/9 1587, undated document (post-1677, pre-October 1705), n.f.  64 ATSG, 59/9 1587, fols 136r–141v. Solid silver was worth far more than gilt bronze at this point.  65 Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, XVI.xx.1,ed. and trans. Barney et al., 330.  66 St Augustine, The City of God, bk 22, cap. 20, vol. II, 385.  62  63

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Silver was particularly suitable for depicting saints’ faces, since it guaranteed to demonstrate their union with God more than mere semblance of feature (Plates 44 & 48). Brightness and clarity – closely associated with silver – are intimately involved with the recognition of divinity and piety, and particularly with the saintly face. Light (associated with silver) identifies saintly virtues and blessings. Thus in 1774 in his biography of the venerable Cistercian nun Veronica Laparelli of Cortona (Fig. 70), Filippo Maria Salvatore writes: ‘And for this the Church inspired by her Divine Spouse decided to bestow on her most eminent holiness the honour of the altars; not only because in this way the heroes placed above the candelabrum may scatter the light of their holy examples throughout God’s house’.67 Silver’s colour is often referred to as ‘white’ – indeed, it is known as ‘the white metal’ – in early modern writing. Whiteness or brightness of colour was a sign of sanctity. Thus on Veronica Laparelli’s death, Antonio Maria Bonucci, SJ, reports in 1714 that not only did her body remain miraculously fluid, in spite of terrible cold in Cortona, but ‘in her eyes themselves, and in her face there shone a liveliness of colour far more fair [una vivacità di colore assai più bianco] than that which she had when living’, itself interpreted as a sign that she was already in heaven.68 The candour, clarity, and purity of saints were readily recognized in the shine and unsullied surface of silver – a surface that was also depth. Francesco Olimpio was noted in his Vita (Messina, 1664; Naples, 1685) for his fear of God, whence came his concern to protect the ‘innocence (candore) of his mind’, which, touched by Heaven, ‘was entirely directed to the traffic of virtue’.69 His confessor used to say that to paint a portrait of Olimpio, the best time would be while he was celebrating Mass, since then ‘his devotion rendered his face extremely beautiful, as his features were joined with divine ‘E per questo la Chiesa dal divino suo Sposo ispirata determinò all’esimia santità l’onor degli altari’; non solo perchè così gli Eroi posti sopra del candelabro spargesser la luce de’ loro santi esempj per tutta la Casa di Dio, ma ancora per unirsi anch’ella a premiare in quella maniera, che può, i loro gran meriti, aggiungendo cogli ossequi suoi un maggior componimento all’accidentale beatitudine, che oltre la visione e fruizione di Dio in ciel godono i Santi’. Salvatore, Vita della Venerabile Veronica Laparelli, 172–173.  68 ‘Neglli occhi stessi, e nel viso splendeva una vivacità di colore assai più bianco di quello, che avesse quando viveva’. A. M. Bonucci, Vita della Ven. Serva di Dio Veronica Laparelli Monica Cisterciense Sotto la Regola del patriarca S Benedetto nel Monistero della SSma Trinità di Cortona; scritta da Anton Maria BONUCCI Della Compagnia di Giesù, e dedicata all’Altezza Reale di Cosimo III Gran Duca di Toscana Da i Capi della medesima Famiglia de’ Laparelli (Naples: [s.n..], 1714), 128–129.  69 ‘come la sua mente, tocca dal Cielo, era tutta rivolta al traffico della virtù’. G. Silos, Vita del Venerabile Servo di Dio D. Francesco Olimpio dell’Ordine de’ Cherici Regolari. Composta da Don Giuseppe Silos Bitontino dell’istesso Ordine. E dal medesimo autore dal Latino traportata in lingua Italiana (Messina: Stamperia dell’Illustrissimo Senato, Per Paolo Bonocotta, 1664; Naples: Salvatore Castaldo, 1685), 12.  67

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love’.70 Clarity and clearness, fairness and candour were signs of virtue, of proximity to the divine, and characterized the saintly face, most especially at the miracle of the Eucharist. Shining out. Just as in Christ the original beauty of Adam had shone out, in the life of the Christian saint her or his imitatio Christi would shine out.71 So the imitation of Christ of those saints is appropriately fashioned in shining silver (Plates 43 & 44). Silver surfaces

Polished silver is specular. It reflects candlelight, oil light, and sunlight inside the chapel. Outside during processions blinding sunlight glances off silver to dazzle bearers and viewers and redirect rays of dazzling light heavenwards like searchlights or beacons probing through the distance that holds things apart (Plate 40 & Fig. 60). The silver reliquaries reflect buildings and clouds, sweaty brancard bearers, and the highest Neapolitan sky, transforming stone, flesh, and air into metal, metal into air, to bridge the greatest distances, refract the shifting light of the heavens, and bring heaven down to earth (Plate 22). Just as embossed adornment inside silver vessels might be designed to be seen through moving liquids, such as water or wine, so silver heads and embossed gowns of the saints are most fiercely alive and haunting when seen through reflections of clouds and sky, halfway to heaven and back again. Depth and surface expose each other. Glittering silver polishes light. Light glances off the busts to look elsewhere. Silver speeds light on its way, shatters it, mobilizes it, accelerates it (Plate 44). In the silver saints illuminating light (lux), and lumen, the glimmer of the illumined thing, become as one. The relics as god-signal are fugitive: what arrives leaves, in leaving remains absent, remains outside its own arrival. The sharp lights that glance off the busts convey something that is immediately stolen away, in the hint that is suddenly hidden, and whose truth consists in vanishing. The bones which can literally be seen (Plate 43), that facilitate the mediation of the saint, both are and are not the saint, since they are the earthly remains of one who was a saint on earth, but now, as a saint, is in the presence ‘Soleva dire il Confessore, che per ritrarre l’immagine d’Olimpio, non v’havea tempo più opportuno, che quando celebrava Messa: poiche la divotione in quel tempo gli abbelliva oltre modo il volto, e aggiungevagli etiandio suoi loneamenti l’amor divino’. Silos, Vita del Venerabile Servo di Dio D. Francesco Olimpio, 18.  71 Brown, ‘The Saint as Exemplar’, 7. Brown draws a careful distinction between the Late Antique form of the Imitation of Christ and the ‘disciplining of the religious sensibility associated with late Christocentric devotion in the late Middle Ages and Reformation. Repraesentatio Christi, making Christ present by one’s own life in one’s own age and region, appears to be the aim and effect of the Early Christian Imitatio Christi.’ Brown, ‘The Saint as Exemplar’, 8.  70

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of the glory of the Lord. Brilliance blinds. It reflects and scatters light, refusing to accommodate or absorb the gaze, the address, of the worshipper, whose face is smashed against this silver face, and dashed to be returned, fragmented and incomprehensible, uncomprehending back. Silver’s surface insists on itself as the subject in play. Surface and source, depth and material are interfused, a material anagogic metaphor for incarnation. Light and silver are in a relation analogous to person and soul in which the soul is a relation to a person who fixes it in his gaze while at the same time remaining beyond the reach of the gaze of that soul. The glancing look, the darting glimmer, askance. ‘Silver is the soul and the blood of mortals’, claimed Georgius Agricola, quoting Timocles.72 Yet in the reliquary busts silver assumes the place of flesh and skin, resplendent with the bones that it covers in an anagogic analogy of the glorification of the flesh. Thus the reliquaries, as material allegories, image the soul through the body. But this is not simply a symbol or sign for something that is elsewhere. Saints’ relics embody the promise of God’s power to remake the human body at the resurrection. Thus the relic promises a future integration of flesh and spirit. It is the surface in which the charismata of grace are reflected. Silver, as smooth surface replacing skin and flesh, operates this material analogy anagogically (Plate 44 & Fig 60). Thus silver also implies flesh: flesh for which the silver substitutes and that it makes subsist. Silver is naked, bareness stripped bare. It possesses nothing, not even a colour, since its colour is itself. The silver reliquary vessels, pure and refined as they are, may be seen as embodying the promise of future physical perfection as members of the body of Christ. They rendered glorification visible. Human beings, as flawed vessels, sinful and mortal, might glimpse immortality through the silver saints. Silver was surface and skin, the skin of the saint. As such it was part of the search for the mystery of incarnation. Skin proclaims identity from fingerprints to facial features.73 Skin is not simply a covering, but a sense organ. Silver assumes a sensory capacity of its own. Thus the silver reliquary saints become anticipation incarnate, the glory of the saint’s body transfigured for eternity, reunited with its happy soul, on earth and in heaven. They show us what will have been. Machinic, not sealed organisms, they are transforming and transformative. They indicate what they will have become. The Agricola, De la generatione de le cose, 6. Consider the conception of skin visible in Michelangelo’s representation of St  Bartholomew in the Sistine Chapel. The flayed skin does not bear the face of the bearded saint, but that of Michelangelo himself. L. Steinberg, The Line of Fate in Michelangelo’s Painting’, in W. J. T Mitchell (ed.), The Language of Images (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 85–128.

 72  73

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reliquaries are thus more than simple representations of saints. There is a textural connivance between this material and flesh, between matter and salvation, between fragment and whole. They combine, refract, and offer in oblique exchange nature, artifice, and the holy; and it is silver that effects this. Even Job seems to insist that silver will be transformed into God’s light: Submit to God and be at peace with him; in this way prosperity will come to you. Accept instruction from his mouth and lay up his words in your heart. If you return to the Almighty, you will be restored: If you remove wickedness far from your tent and assign your nuggets to the dust, your gold of Ophir to the rocks in the ravines, then the Almighty will be your gold, the choicest silver for you. Surely then you will find delight in the Almighty and will lift up your face to God. You will pray to him, and he will hear you, and you will fulfill your vows. What you decide on will be done, and light will shine on your ways. (Job 22:21–28)

Kohl’s suggestion that the form of reliquary busts served as a model of selfsacrifice and self-discipline for the beholder is a good one.74 These are glorified bodies, endowed with impassibilitas (inability to suffer), even while compassion and emotions are implied. Yet almost everything about the silver reliquaries in the Treasury Chapel emphasizes their inaccessible apartness, their hieratic distinctness from worshippers who gaze at their resplendent surfaces. The silver imparts to them a glassy coldness and, in terms of value and cost, glassy reflection, and colour-leeching surfaces, sets them apart. The saint is staged in terms of separation, self-sacrifice, and self-discipline. Saintliness is thus classed and sealed as caste. The white metal sends any address glancing back, shattered, deformed, rivuleted, refracted. Hermetic and frozen, the busts dispense with character and individuality in favour of something less accessible, safeguards of an impersonal promise beyond reach. Precious silver

Silver is not just shiny, smooth, gorgeous, and valuable; it was above all a material of and for re-use and retransformation. Silver was malleable, soft, ready to be used, ready to be of service. It was the substance from which other objects had already been made; already passed on, already used, refashioned, reformed, and melted into liquid. Malleable, reproductive, metamorphic; the material of value itself, of coins and exchange (Fig. 62); it was profit, the gain of flesh through material through the material that it imitates. Kohl, ‘Body, Mind, and Soul’, 57.

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Herbert Kessler has emphasized the way in which devotional images called attention to their own materiality.75 That very materiality was quasisacramental. It permitted access to the divine. Silver calls attention to itself while simultaneously denying it, making itself look like something else. It is the material most capable of making charisma visible. In spite of its value, silver manifests its own simplicity. This apparently modest quality of silver allows it to celebrate the saints without vulgarity. For silver, whose colour is itself, seems to possess nothing, not even colour. Thus it assumes something of the qualities of a transparent material or veil. It is auratic: it seems to permit the saint to shine through. It appears less to add value than to reveal it. In the surfaces of the accumulated saints, the quality of the human exemplar, beauty, mimesis, and artifice are made one and are made forward-looking, towards the possibility of grace. The touch of silver

Chased and embossed silver bears the mark of the work of the smith (Fig. 1). It is imprinted and touched. Touching is central to worship. The process of impression forms a conceptual model for devotional affect. The worshipper touches and is touched. Relics worked by touch, contagiously. Gregory of Tours describes pilgrims lowering scraps of cloth down to touch the tomb of St Peter in Rome, which as brandea became impregnated with virtus.76 Without contact, the power of a relic was lost. In the relic touch was made to matter.77 Silver has a paradoxical relationship to touch. It both invites and repels touch. Lips that speak the word and eat the body also kiss the relic. The shining saints respond to human caresses and kisses. Lips that shape words into language mark the end of words in a kiss. The kiss and the lips mark a limit, the possibility of ingestion, the meeting of inside and out, the edge of speech, the point where one becomes two, where one and two are as one. A kiss meets metal in a cloudy film that continues to expand like a body breathing on its own. But silver is tarnished and diminished by such attentions; its gloss dulls to matt beneath the grainy grime of fingerprints, the smudge of lips, and the smear of breath. Since travelling saints were readily damaged, the d ­ eputies Kessler, Seeing Medieval Art. Gregory of Tours, De gloria martyrum, in Migne (ed.), Patrologia cursus completus: series latina 71, cols 728–729.  77 Touch could be carried by ‘third-party’ matter even in the case of miracle-working images. Cloth or other materials that had touched a miracle-working image might heal a sick person when brought into contact with her or him. Maniura, ‘Persuading the Absent Saint’, 638–639.  75  76

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repeatedly inveighed against their ill-treatment and for their prompt return.78 Ultimately, they might threaten to withhold them altogether. Thus on 13 December 1673, they determined that if busts were returned in a damaged state or without due veneration to the Treasury Chapel, they would not be released the following year.79 Human proximity resurfaces and defaces these objects. Thus the reliquaries bring worshippers constantly down to earth, re-emphasize their limits, even as they breathe the promise of paradise. Even as the reliquaries are woven into social networks through peripatetic processions, even as they fuse to the worshipper in caresses, they segregate themselves through their super-sensible surface. They draw the worshipper closer and hold them at bay, invite intimacy and underscore their distance, to suggest that the sticky human clamour for proximity and contact is mistaken, destroys what it seeks. Silver is high-maintenance, like the Christian soul. Silver protectors resemble the ‘shining countenance and gleaming hair’ of the Lord of the Apocalypse. Silver shines with light (Plate 8). It seems to speed light up, to split it up, and to send it more dazzlingly on its way. But silver tarnishes and grows dull without care. It mists over with the breath of a kiss. Its lustre dims. Silver is a good analogous material for the Christian body, hungry for salvation, but tainted by original sin and other stains. For Isidore of Seville the ‘marvelous quality’ of silver is that ‘although it is white, when it is rubbed against a body it leaves black lines’.80 However lustrous it might be, silver leaves behind a dark mark – indeed, this characteristic is diagnostic – like a stain, consonant to sin and to its own hidden, violent secrets. A material of contrasts, it contains within itself the capacity for marking opposites. However shiny, it will tarnish. Its shininess fades away, sends out dimmer signals of electrical alertness, until dreary greeniness clouds over and eventually smears its entire surface, betraying it from within.81 To keep all this at bay, the saints were polished within an inch of their hides. On 8 April 1676 the deputies noted that as the May festival was nearly upon them, it was time to polish the silver; and on 22 April Gian Domenico Vinaccia was paid the remainder of the sum total of 130 ducats owed him for arranging and polishing all the silver in the chapel.82 Feasts unleashed a On 13 May 1676 the deputies threatened excommunication for any damage. ATSG, 59, fol. 161r.  79 Document dated 13 December 1673, ATSG, AB/12, Conclusioni, fol. 6r.  80 Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, XVI, xix.1, ed. and trans. Barney et al., 330.  81 The patination of silver is the result of the formation of sulphides. On the production and removal of these, see J. C. Rich, The Materials and Methods of Sculpture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1947), 209.  82 ATSG, AB/12, Conclusioni 1673–1685, fol. 30v; ATSG, AB/12, Conclusioni 1673–1685, fol. 32r.  78

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whirlwind of polishing of marble, as well as silver. Even cleaning had its ritual rhythms: by the end of the eighteenth century the politore di marmi cleaned the balusters regularly in April, August, and December, the floor in April and August, the bronze statues every month, and the pedestal of the guglia in September. All for 20 ducats a year.83 Polished and shining, marble and silver enhanced each other. The polishing enhanced the value of the Treasury Chapel’s silver reserve. It was a bank of sumptuous silver furnishings, lent to institutions for celebrations. Thus on 1 October 1670 the nuns of San Francesco borrowed the two large silver splendori (Fig. 3), six candlesticks, six jars, six floral branches (frasche) (Plate 45), and a cross for the forthcoming feast of St Francis.84 Silver criss-crossed the chapel and the city, passed from hand to hand, always ready to assume a new role, a new incarnation. Yet it could also be withheld. Dents and disfigurements, precious cabuchons missing from their bezels were the costs exacted by processions. Thus in 1676 a ‘ban on lending the silver’ was pinned up in the chapel’s sacristy, following the cleaning and ­re-accommodation of all the silver following the May festival of San Gennaro. The silver reliquaries ‘were in disrepair due to the damage received’ when they had been lent, and henceforth they would bear a ticket indicating their condition on pain of excommunication’.85 Even as silver could redeem it could also condemn, and that threat lay on its surface. Thus cleaning and polishing, rubbing and coaxing the sharpest gleam from metal was part of the cares of the Treasury Chapel. It was labour that redeemed those surfaces. The shine itself is the surplus of labour, energy made visible, pure profit expended. What goes around comes around in silver. Always it hides in its seductive sheen the labour, the sweat, the violence of its origins, its transmission, its social polish. Is there any material better able to bear its own dark secrets? The matter of silver

Glittering silver was part of the thrill of the feast days, paying homage to the saints and producing a gleam of excitement in chapel and visitor. The transformation of the church of Santa Maria la Nova by the Minor Observants for the feast to celebrate the canonization of San Giacomo della Marca, Francesco Strazzullo, La Real Cappella, 11. Cleaning of the marbles and floor of the chapel was undertaken at the same time of year in preparation for feasts as the cleaning of the  pyramid of San Gennaro, including steps, base, and column, together with the façade of the Treasury Chapel. In 1666 Michele de Luliis scopatore was responsible for these duties. ATSG, 59/9 1587, fol. 131r–v.  84 For a list of the silver objects on the chapel altars see Strazzullo, La Real Cappella, 33–34.  85 ‘Divieto di prestare gli argenti’, 1676. ATSG, 59/9 1587, fol .161r.  83

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Solano, and Margherita of Cortona is a case in point. The old stucco decoration of the nave and ceiling were replaced ‘with gold’ (presumably gilt stucco).86 The arches of the great crossing piers were gilded, and in the arch facing the main nave silver and gold were amassed: they had the celebrated sculptor Signore Domenico Catogno make a large statue of Faith, supported by clouds, and various small putti, some of whom hold the symbols of that virtue, and some support a big impresa of the seraphic religion, above which borne by two little putti was a tablet on which was written, ‘Shield of the Faith’ … But what rendered the finishing touch to such a valuable macchina [of the main altar] was a large hanging, or canopy of new wool of gold, that had not been used elsewhere, which was held aloft by lots of angels in relief that were coated in silver, [such that] it seemed to be a heap [una massa] of gold above a Mountain of Silver [un Monte d’Argento].87

It could almost have been the Cerro Reale of Potosí itself that was rebuilt in the nave of the Neapolitan church to celebrate this special triple feast. In the end, allegory, emblems, and legends were outshone by a literal mass of gold and a mountain of silver. The glories of heaven are intimated in a ‘mountain of silver’ (Plate 49). Amassed silver and gold had become the best imaginary for heaven. Anagogical materialism has focused, above all, not on matters of everyday life, but on rare and expensive things. The relentless emphasis on price and ‘Apparato dentro la Chiesa PP Minori Osservanti sin dall’antecedente vedendo tutto annegrito per l’antichità l’oro, e lo stucco della detta chiesa, pensarono, e con gran senno, di rifarla, e modernarla prima di detta Festa; Quindi buttato a terra tutto l’antico stucco dal cornicione alla soffitta, lo fecero tutto modernare, e porre in oro col far pulizare non solamente le Pitture del Simbolo, opra del celeberrimo Belisario, ma ancora tutte quelle della soffitta, buona parte delle quali possono veramente dirsi Prodigj dell’arte,perché da S. Fede, Imparato, ed altri sceltissimi Autori … ha la detta Chiesa acquistato un non sò che i nuova Maestà, e vaghezza.’ Trionfo della fede Celebrato con singolar pompa Dalli PP Minori Osservanti di S. Francesco nella Reale Chiesa di S. Maria la Nova di Napoli per la Canonizazione de’ Gloriosi Santi Giacomo della Marca e Francesco Solano Dell’ Ordine de’Minori Osservanti; e Margarita da Cortona Del Terz’ Ordine de’ Penitenti di S. Francesco alli 8 di Maggio 1729. Dedicato alla Divotissima Pietà dell’Ecc. Sig. D. Giulio Cesare di Capoa [sic] Principe di Conca, Duca di Mignano, etc. (Naples: Francesco Ricciardo, ed Ametrano, 1729), n.p.  87 ‘Frontespizio dell’Arco, che riguarda la Nave maggiore della chiesa fecero dal Celebre Scultore Sig Dom.o CATOGNO fare una statua grande della Fede sostenuta da un gruppo di nuvole, e vari puttini, parte de’ quali tengono i geroglifici della d. virtù, e parte sostengono una grande Impresa della Religione Serafica, sopra la quale vien sostenuta da due puttini una cartella nella quale si legge “Scutum Fidei’ … Quello però che dava tutto il finimento ad un si preziosa macchina, era un gran panneggio, overo Padigliolne di lama d’oro nuova, e non altrove usata, il quale sostenuto da moltissimi Angioli di rilievo inargentati sembrava una massa d’oro sopra di un Monte d’Argento.’ Trionfo della fede Celebrato con singolar pompa, n.p.  86

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preciousness in the Treasury Chapel, particularly emphasized in its reliquaries, implies this and the Spanish gloating over their bullion. ‘To me, I confess, it always has seemed right that the most expensive things should be used above all for the administration of the holy eucharist’, writes Abbot Suger during the 1140s. ‘If golden vessels, vials and mortars were used to collect “the blood of goats or calves or the red heifer, how much more” should gold vases, precious stones and whatever is most valuable among created things be set out with continual reverence and full devotion “to receive the blood of Jesus Christ” (Heb. 9:13f)’, he urges.88 Suger’s conception of rich materials is that they lift up, pointing towards the life to come of eternal significance. Gems had a metonymous relationship with the bodies of saints. Adornment to the militant church, they both were capable of transmitting something beyond themselves.89 On the golden frontal of his altar, Suger writes: Thus sometimes when, because of my delight in the beauty of the house of God, the multicolor loveliness of the gems has called me away from external cares, and worthy meditation, transporting me from material to immaterial things, has persuaded me to examine the diversity of holy virtues, then I seem to see myself existing on some level, as it were, beyond our earthly one, neither completely in the slime of earth nor completely in the purity of heaven. By the gift of God I can be transported in an anagogical manner from this inferior level to that superior one.90

Paradoxically, in their very preciousness and marvellous qualities, rare stones and metals present a call beyond and invite precisely the step from material to immaterial. They transport to a parenthetical place, neither earth nor heaven. Uplifting they suspend. The Book of Suger Abbot of St. Denis on What was Done during his Administration is one of two works by Abbot Suger concerning the abbey church of St Denis. It was probably begun shortly after the consecration of the choir in 1144 and finished no earlier than the end of 1148. See The Book of Suger Abbot of St. Denis on What was Done during his Administration, XXXII, www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/sugar.html (accessed 22 July 2013).  89 It is in those terms that the relics of saints at the convent of San Gaudioso were described in 1634: ‘This sacred convent was enriched with most prized gems of the militant Church, that are the bones of the saints, cherished by faithful Christians, like Temples, where divine grace shelters; whose souls in heaven take pleasure in God, and in the sight of him, [and] are rendered blessed’ (‘Vien questo sacro monastero [San Gaudioso] arricchito delle più pregiati gemme della Chiesa militante, che sono l’ossa de’ Santi, da fedei Cristiani riverite, come Tempi, dove albergò la divina gratia; le cui anime in cielo godono di Dio, e della di lui vista, si fatte beate’). Tutini, Notizie della Vita e Miracoli di due Santi Gaudiosi, 52.  90 The Book of Suger Abbot of St. Denis, XXXI.  88

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Suger’s anagogical argument sets in dynamic relation the precious metal of his doors and their capacity to brighten the mind and set it travelling to Christ, who is the true opening: Whoever thou art, if thou seekest to extol the glory of these doors, Marvel not at the gold and the expense but at the craftsmanship of the work. Bright is the noble work; but, being nobly bright, the work Should brighten the minds, so that they may travel, through the lights, To the True Light where Christ is the true door. In what manner it be inherent in this world the golden door defines: The dull mind rises to truth through that which is material 
And, in seeing this light, is resurrected from its former submersion.91

Something akin to Suger’s anagogical manner of thinking of saints and precious materials informs the Treasury Chapel. The busts containing relics do more than represent dead saints or simply promise future redemption. They materialize anagogically the possibility of a relation between the two. If the bronze door opens the way to the chapel’s transformational capacities, its silver saints take up that possibility. One may glimpse in them the saint’s true metal. Polishing light

Gold, unlike silver, was too soft a metal to be well adapted to sculpture. It gilds the silver of the pre-eminent head of San Gennaro, giving him pride of place (Plates 6 & 7). Elsewhere it picks out haloes or attributes, special marks of identity (Plates 8 & 27). It is pushed to the edges of the reliquaries, denot­ ational, definitional, and iconographical, rather than substantial, in their regard. It is silver that assumes centre stage. Silver stages itself. It brings light to life, attracts and reflects it, to produce ripples of reflection across the Treasury Chapel on even the darkest days, constantly animating and bringing it to life. The play of light and shadow on silver enhances the mobility that is inherent in the reliquaries and that characterizes them. Silver sets the reliquary apart in its sheen and capacity to reflect the world around it. Indeed, in its very quality as metallic surface silver operates as a reflector, apparently without depth or another side. Its substance and surface are the same. It insists on itself and on surface. It dissolves its own substance and surface into reflection and light. It glorifies by dazzling. Silver sets light and the chapel in motion, as light plays, flickering and glancing off silver. The interplay between metal, surface finish, and form refracts, reflects, and The Book of Suger Abbot of St. Denis, XXVII

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absorbs light in constant and endlessly shifting ways. Surface is always more than the literal surface of the object. We cannot see light, but silver makes us aware of surface as light, of surface as depth, of celestial rays reaching down and transforming earthly objects with its electrifying touch. The chased, engraved, chiselled, punched, and polished surfaces of the reliquaries send light glinting, winking, and flashing; dazing the viewer; conveying a glimmer of a stranger way of seeing. Enargeia is a fundamental method of rhetoric that appeals to the senses, especially the sense of ‘placing before the eyes’. It is connected with light. Caroline van Eck has demonstrated that the concept of enargeia and its Latin counterparts, evidentia or illustratio, emerged as visual metaphors.92 Thus initially enargeia referred to making something stand out, to singling out or shining a bright light on something. It was widely believed in classical rhetoric that enargeia was conjured through the use of light.93 Light was used as a figure of speech that not only shed light on and clarified an event, but also made it seem alive. In his discussion of rhetoric, Quintilian uses the term lumina orationis in the sense of the light of the eyes, which ultimately indicates life and biological existence.94 If we think of light as a visual metaphor that bestows a sense of the living presence on a representation, then the light (lumen) of the silver busts can be seen as making them live, or live again. In refracting light, not simply reflecting it as a flat mirror would do, the uneven surfaces of the busts split it, crush it, make it move and dance. Thus it is light itself that is made to move, rather than the body represented. This is particularly appropriate since relics embody God’s promise to remake the human body at the resurrection. Thus the artifice of the silversmith snatched the saint’s body from death to produce a saintly presence that was ‘true to life’, even capable of provoking the same emotional response that the living person would have done, thus almost of bringing back to life. Yet these saints are not ‘lifelike’ in a sense of artistic verisimilitude (Plates 27 & 28). The blood that is set racing is in the veins not of the sculpture, as in the story of Pygmalion, but of the worshipper. It is the worshipper, therefore, who is brought back to life, or re-enlivened spiritually by the statue. Moreover, the effect of the presence of the reliquary bust, conjuring the effect of being in the presence of the saint while alive, even while bearing testimony to the saint’s death, gestures not to liveliness, but towards the promise and condition of resurrection after death. In a powerful and disturbing manner, therefore, the reliquary busts do not so much mark C. Van Eck, Classical Rhetoric and the Arts in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 60.  93 Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, bk VIII, v, 34.  94 Van Eck, Classical Rhetoric and the Arts, 60.  92

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the presence of a dead saint, or even of the saint before his death, as that of the saint, having died and now in the presence of God, and thus by extension of the worshipper who will have died and will have been justified or resurrected. The reliquaries thereby provide a sense of the past as present and of future as present; and as such of a present full of potentiality.

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Silver’s energetic solvency: between transformation and transaction

Jean-Luc Nancy suggests that the sacred is an encounter via which one approaches what cannot be grasped in itself, but is perceptible, though in an unfinishable manner, through material things: The sacred thing and being are withdrawn, situated at a distance, out of reach, because this distance forms their whole truth. It is truth which does not let itself be verified, but verifies itself. Literally makes itself true. It shows itself and shows thus that it is – and that it is at a distance. It reveals itself: not unveils itself, but heralds and attests to its isolated presence. The true cannot fall right into my hands; it has to be ahead of me. There, ahead, it glows.95

While Nancy was thinking of the trembling towards a lover’s body or the song of a bird and not at all the sort of object associated with Christian cult, the sense of deferral that he identifies is also in operation in the silver saints. It is not simply that they consist of traces which spill over boundaries. The relics are traces that introduce the physical body which is itself an image (man in the image of God). But that their greatest potential in material, form, and the relics within is precisely to defer and to side-step, and to promise exchange. But this is also deferred, even as they set about making demands, which appear to be immediately conferred. In the silver reliquaries, the relic, the physical body is apparently transcended by an aesthetic and material and theological transformation. The very presence of the amassed silver reliquary busts and half-lengths, perched provocatively in niches and on stands throughout the chapel, implies and requires passionate action (Plate 5 & Fig. 3).96 The busts are a means of being passionately; they do not simply ‘represent’ the saints. They make demands. They extend the action of the chapel, the involvement of the worshipper, as a ‘mechanosphere’, a shifting, altering network and assemblage which cuts across institutions and categories, including the holy and the secular, the biological and the architectural, the social and the economic, ecclesiastical and lay, with the boundaries of practice and meaning constantly exposed and subject to change. J.-L. Nancy, ‘Notes on the Sacred’, Theory & Society Journal, 30 (2013), 155. On passionate action, see Amin and Thrift, Cities, 87.

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Relics were not simply moved from one point to another; each new relic in its reliquary re-made the chapel differently. And, on assuming residence in the chapel, each new reliquary statue altered it. The translation of the relics represented the acquisition of a power that the community regarded as superior to human nature. While theologically what the saints achieve is a result of their prayers and intercession in heaven, rather than through their work, here in the chapel they are produced as active, institutionally allied, and able to ‘network’, or weave together the Treasury Chapel with otherwise quite separate monastic institutions. It was, therefore, their active presence that it was important to secure and entertain.97 The silver reliquaries have as their correlate the glory of heaven and Naples’ dark lavic streets. The silvery line of the cityscape-face spins towards the black hole of the worshipper deep in prayer. The city is facialized as the silver is landscapified. These assemblages – authoritarian formations – give the Spanish Crown the meaning of its imperialism: ‘The face is a politics.’98 The reliquary sought to domesticate the relic, but in the reliquary busts a whole army of saints was set in motion.99 Silver passes along, sliding through social relations without substantializing them. In its trail, it leaves mayhem, devastation, and despair. Yet silver slips through, passes this by, as innocent and pure as can be. The saints guarantee the silver, just as it guarantees them. Silver, as an object of desire, was that into which dross might be made to turn, whose relation with matter depended on extraction, transportation across the known world, refinement, assaying and working, betrayal and disguise. Within the Treasury Chapel through layers of colour and light, metals and pigments work through indirection and not by means of conscious direction or rational message to be interpreted; not because the real treasure of the chapel is inaccessible to the intellect, but because the treasure lies beyond the horizon and is not accessible. In the irreducibility of material presence to empirical presence lies the force of the relic, silver, and chapel.100 Just as the saints required their work to be done in silver, so it was silver, with its long and bloody trail of expropriation, exploitation, and destruction, that required the saints. Augustine of Hippo early on opposed the cult of relics, but towards the end of his life he became convinced of the relics of St Stephen and their miraculous powers, which he advanced in the final books of The City of God. See Courcelle, Recherches sur les ‘Confessions’, 139–153 and Augustine, The City of God, bk 22, caps 8 and 9.  98 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 181.  99 ‘To sanctify excess is a form of domestication; in the institutionalisation of a saint there frequently lies the attempt to neutralize … or to otherwise bring under the rule.’ Meltzer and Elsner, ‘Introduction’, 378. 100 For the irreducibility of material presence to empirical presence, see Benjamin, ‘Endless Touching’, 73–92.  97

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Sanctity is a call to the future. In its excess it makes a claim on the present and past. The relic, as that which is left behind, that which remains the past, makes a claim on the present and future; it is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or that what is present casts light on what is past. The light that is shed has no temporal capacity. Each now is the now of a particular recognizability, in the prayer, in the address, in the grace, in the miracle. The chapel was filled with ‘the very special dead’.101 But its emphasis shifts from death to salvation: that is, to salvation and protection as identified with and delivered through a very special place. The currency of reliquaries in circulation makes virtus present and thus the chapel becomes a theatre of virtue – an exemplary world. Thus the silver reliquary busts in their stillness and in their movement, in their processions in and out and around the chapel, make sense, or certain senses, of it. What makes sense is what does not cease to circulate and to begin to exchange. Like coins, like silver, in fact. But coins whose currency is incommensurable with any possible equivalent. Just as the silver, shifting from dark to brightest gleam, from blocked to intensified and dazzling light, releases a sense of the invisible brilliance of life that is not to be apprehended until it gives out.

The phrase is from Brown, The Cult of the Saints.

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Conclusion: the miraculous chance

The miracle opens up the chance of hope. It guarantees nothing. It shows itself in the world, and while it is snatched up and harnessed to keep things as they are, it provides the glimmer of hope that they may yet be otherwise. The anti-historicist quality of the miracle informs the focus of this book – a nonhistoricist interpretation of materiality. The chapel both disciplines and disorders. It became the principal apparatus in Naples that disciplines and poses order on the saints. Its niches and ledges, its feasts and practices, require and instantiate order and hierarchy (Plate 3). The chapel reduces the swarm of silver saints into a file, an order, traps the saints and turns one against another. The chapel takes place only in its connections and in its metamorphoses, including the miraculous boiling of dust, the noise of feasts, and the movement of processions. It becomes part of a circuit involving external institutions and interests and in technological inventions, flows and currents, that only secondarily allow themselves to be appropriated by the Spanish Crown. It is in terms not of independence but of coexistence of competition in a perpetual field of interaction that it consolidates identity, produces interiority and engagement. The chapel is part of the flow of blood, particles, processional bodies, and prayers. It does not represent, but engenders and traverses. This book departs from the established reading of the Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro as epitome of the Counter-Reformation chapel. In such accounts, the Chapel itself is missing, or is simply held up as the mirror of a process extraneous to it. The very idea of the ‘Counter-Reformation’ obscures far more than it reveals. Rather than see Trent as a collective phenomenon compelled to reproduce and repeat itself indefinitely in architecture (explaining the lesser fact of the chapel by the greater of Trent), it is more useful to think of it the other way about. San Gennaro’s chapel emerges in terms of its exceptionality and its intensification. Seizure and display, confusion of direction and dynamic (vector), overwhelming richness of materials and surface, reliquaries and sculpture, divergent depths and direction of floor, wall, and cupola leave one pulled in many competing directions, aware that the ‘sense’

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of the chapel lies not within it, nor within a tightly closed narrative which touches on and relates each of these aspects together, but elsewhere, in the dislocation that the chapel is and effects. Architecture is not the expression of meaning, but the production of sense, allowing new perceptions, new worlds. It is more useful to think of ecclesiastical architecture less as an enactment or representation of the decrees of the Council of Trent than as a departure, that is as their translation in a Benjaminian sense, as a form of mobilization of potential unrepresented in the original. Such architectural translation is neither an image nor a copy. If there is a relationship of ‘original’ to version between the decrees and the architecture that followed, it cannot be representative or reproductive. Architecture does not represent or reproduce, nor does it restitute. In writing about translation, Walter Benjamin uses the image of the core and the shell, the fruit and its skin, a body and a cloak: ‘the language of the translation envelops its content like a royal robe with ample folds. For it signifies a more exalted language than its own and thus remains unsuited to its content, overpowering and alien.’1 Thus translational architecture does not seek to say this or that, or to house or transport this or that concept, or to convey such and such a meaning, but to exhibit its own possibility, and to do so in a mode that is anticipatory, annunciatory, prophetic. The Treasury Chapel was, then, a form of mobilization and assemblage, exceeding anything that preceded it or that it supposedly contained. The relics change the place of the paintings, crowds, and chapel. There is an orchestration that is more than extensive in space. This orchestration is an assemblage of matter that includes, but is not limited to, painting, relics, reliquaries, celestial vault, and viewer, although all of them are intricately implicated. I have rejected here the commonplace notion that the baroque architecture, sculpture, and painting of the chapel form parts of a complex ‘whole’, as in the notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk, to argue instead that the painting, relics, saints, and viewer and all the rest enter into percussive and disjunctive relationships, while the chapel is part of an assemblage that connects architecture, streets, floats, feasts, saints, metals, volcano, and Spanish imperialism. Rather than produce ‘a whole’ or posit an answer, the chapel exerts demands, opens possibilities and uncertainties, and stages incapacities and greed. Alessandro Baratta’s large and beautiful map of Naples, Fidelissimae urbis Neapolitanae cum omnibus viis accurata et nova delineatio (Fig. 72), published in 1627, accomplishes in a minor key what the Treasury Chapel does on a grand scale. It can be seen as a cartographic analogy for the Treasury Chapel, while the differences between the two are also instructive. In this map urban W. Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator: An Introduction to the Translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens’, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. H. Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 75.

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a­ ristocracy, Spanish rule, and the buildings and streets of the city receive a new formulation. The map cut new ground in including the surrounding countryside to show the city of Naples poised upon its gulf ‘like a natural amphitheatre of cultural wonders’.2 Thus nature, architecture and Spanish rule are powerfully aligned to produce ‘Naples’. Baratta’s map conjures a significant cultural, military, and demographic presence that is the city of Naples and simultaneously evinces its apparently harmonious subordination to Spanish rule. Thus in the lower half of the historical centre of Naples, associated with the Seggi of Porto, Portanova, and Popolo, Baratta presents the urban fabric from a low viewpoint that elides the network of streets to show a string of massive residential buildings of the sort co-occupied by numerous families and common people, all along the waterfront and bordering the central market, thereby to suggest a vast and dense population while eliminating signs of the local patriciate in favour of features that indicate the popolo.3 Density of construction and a vast population are thereby evoked, even as elsewhere in the city the grand palaces of the urban patriciate and signal churches and monasteries are carefully delineated and emphasized. Above all, Baratta’s map celebrates the Spanish colonial administration. It is dedicated to the Spanish Viceroy Antonio Álvarez de Toledo, fifth Duke of Alba; Spanish monarchical emblems brand the city as a territory of Spain. The Via Toledo and Via Medina, streets cut by Spanish viceroys, are subtly rotated to display their full splendour of fashionable palaces and monuments, including the Spanish church, San Giacomo degli Spagnoli, while the Quartieri Spagnoli, home to the Spanish garrison, its size vastly exaggerated, looms over the Greco-Roman centre. The Habsburg coat-of-arms flies from the Castel d’Ovo and from the large ship that bears Baratta’s name in the bay. The Spanish stronghold of Castel Sant’Elmo commands the highest point of the horizon, holding the city and surrounding territory under surveillance. Meanwhile the Castel Nuovo and Palazzo Reale assert Spanish control from the foreground. Spanish galleons, identified by their armorial banners and white flags, occupy the bay. Thus the Spanish viceregal presence commands the entire city, the sea, and the air. While the actual occasion for this marvellous map is not known, its emphatic aggrandizement of the Spanish administration is clear. A huge Barbara Naddeo argues that the sense that the city is an outgrowth of nature is achieved primarily through the use of curvilinear perspective, dramatically tapering the rim of the volcanic crater just beyond the stretch of the readily identifiable buildings of the city. B. Naddeo, ‘Topographies of Difference: Cartography of the City of Naples, 1627–1775’, Imago mundi, 56:1 (2004), 28.  3 Among the monolithic elevations are indications of industry and commerce associated with the popolo, such as the stalls and tents on the Piazza del Mercato and the inscriptions indicating points of entry for particular commodities and speciality goods markets.  2

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cavalcade parades along the bottom of the map, described as a ‘true drawing of the equestrian parade that is customarily mounted in this most faithful city of Naples just as for the entry of each Viceroy so as on occasion of the contributions given to his Royal Catholic Majesty, or on other joyful celebrations or particular occasions when the fidelity and magnificence of the entire kingdom is demonstrated’.4 Here the social order of the city is represented as overwhelmingly noble and Spanish. At its head were trumpeters, eight captains of justice, one hundred members of the royal army, then counts, marquises, dukes, princes, followed by the Eletti of the city, twenty-four porters, the bearers of the royal arms, the usciere, the captain of the guard, Viceroy Duke of Alba, Counsellors of State, Consiglio, Collaterale, regents and heads of the tribunals, Councillors of the Royal Council of Santa Chiara, presidents of the Royal Chamber, and judges of both the criminal and civil Vicaria. Kingdom and commoners were thus overshadowed by Spanish and urban aristocrats. Thus the perspective plan’s political dualism is underscored by the cavalcata’s fulsome celebration of Spanish and patrician elites, which, in Naddeo’s words, ‘acted as a reminder that the orders constituent of the traditional centre of the city were both a distinct political force and yet subordinate to the Spanish. In case this vision of the Neapolitan polity prompted contention between the two powers, there was, lastly, the presence of the Madonna, to whose grace both worldly powers were unequivocally subject’.5 The Madonna, the Spanish Crown, and city nobles thereby justly ruled the city, and this is presented as an outworking of nature itself, unquestionable and God-given. But Baratta makes clear that it is not the Madonna alone who constitutes divine protection for the city. In his brief account of Naples’ history and urbanism, squeezed in just below the topographical drawing, Baratta moves to the question of religion, reminding his readers that St Peter himself undertook baptisms in Naples. He then continues: Furthermore, [the city of Naples] has always so much valued the perfection of the Saints for its preservation and well-being, that having at various points accepted to be Patrons and Protectors up to twelve of them possessed of unfailingdependability, that almost like twelve very strong towers, they are obliged always to protect it and to defend it from every enemy affront; and with certain faith, and shielded by these saints and blesseds, there will always ‘Vero disegno della nobilissima cavalcata che si suol fare in questa fedelissima città di Napoli così nell’ingresso di ciascheduno Vicerè come in ogn’altra occasione di donativi alla Cattolica Real Maestà o d’altre allegrezze e particolari accidenti ne quali si dimostra la fedeltà e magnificenza di tute [sic] il Regno’. From the version of Baratta’s map in the British Library, Fidelissimae urbis Neapolitanae cum omnibus viis accurata et nova delineatio ([Naples], 1627).  5 Naddeo, ‘Topographies of Difference’, 35.  4

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flourish celestial blessings, due to the defence of the most miraculous blood of San Gennaro.6

Baratta thus compares the protector saints to ‘towers’, part of the architecture of the defence of the city itself. Since the ‘towers’ most in evidence in the carefully delineated perspective map above these very words are those fortified and occupied by the Spanish viceregal forces, Baratta effectively presents protector saints, the urban fabric, its defence, and Spanish rule as one. Rather like Baratta’s map, the Treasury Chapel, brings the city’s nobles, urban administrative structures, and religious institutions and Viceroy into a new alignment with the saints and the divine. But the chapel does this without overt identification with Spanish rule. Miracle, music, movement, and Mass are brought into play; time itself is restaged and miraculous transformation brought to the fore. While Baratta’s map works to suggest that Spanish imper­ ialism and the flourishing of the city are inseparable, the Treasury Chapel works to re-align the saints, the urban nobility, and the divine to demonstrate that they are already in harmony as one, and that is ‘Naples’. To organize the dates of the numerous interventions into a conventional linear narrative to correspond to the physical fabric of the chapel is to treat and reproduce the chapel as simply extensive. To think of the chapel as extensive, in either physical or temporal terms, produces a linear narrative or orderly description of the chapel and is to organize it spatially and chronologically into distributed blocks. It orders the different parts of the chapel into discrete functions. Relics were not simply moved from one point to another (translation); in that movement they transformed and became (variation). And, on assuming residence in the chapel, each new reliquary statue altered it. The translation of the relics represented the acquisition of a power that the community regarded as superior to human nature. Simply to tell such events in linear sequence is insufficient to them. If the chapel is thought not only as extensive, but also as intensive, both spatially and chronologically, then it is permitted greater capacities to differ from and to disturb its surroundings or contexts, whether they  6

‘Ha in oltre sempre stimato tanta la perfettione de Santi per suo mantenimento e salute, che avendone in diversi tempi accettatone al numero de Dodici per Padroni e Protettori con certezza infallibile, che quasi dodici fortissime Torri, debbano sempre protegerla e defenderlla d’ogni inimico insulto; e con sicura fede con gli scudi di questi Santi e B.ti overa’ sempre prosperi i celesti favori venendo difes[-?] del Miracolosissimo Sangue di Santo Gennaro, dal valore di S. Angnello, dalla Vigilanza di s. Aspremo, da gli Esempi di s. Agrippino, dalla santità di s. Severo dell’astinenza di s. Eusebio dall’Oratio.e di s. Atanasio dalla Penna di S. Tomaso d’Aquino dal zelo del B. Andrea Avellino dalla predicatione del B. Iacomo della Marca dalla Real Umiltà di Sta Patritia dalla Carità di s Francesco di Paola’. Part of the legend from Alessandro Baratta’s map, Fidelissimae urbis Neapolitanae of 1627.

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be t­opographical, chronological, or cultural. The relationships between the intensive and the extensive, and the part played by materiality in their intersection, exchange, and transfer can then be exposed. Such an approach permits materials to be treated in relation to their potentiality, rather than as representation, loci of meaning, or the staging of ideals. And so it is that the Treasury Chapel is an important case study of baroque materiality. Above I have discussed various heterodox elements which contribute to this, but which all operate in specific rather than general ways. Dynamic processes assemble these parts into an assemblage itself. It is this that constitutes the chapel as an intensive formation, rather than as a static list of place, architecture, contained objects. This book has approached the matter fractally. To read fractally is to read architecture inside out, so to speak. That is, rather than reading ‘inwards’ from ‘whole’ to chapel (or apparently vice versa), rather than assuming that the smaller is a ‘part’ that necessarily fits into a (pre-conceived) notion of the whole, and rather than assuming that the chapel is necessarily ‘part’ of ‘the Counter-Reformation’, I have sought to read the whole in the miniature. Naples’ streets are paved with lava from Vesuvius and its skies filled with protector saints.7 I have shown how the Treasury Chapel ranges these forces and brings them into relation. City, nature, and the divine are orchestrated here through an unsurpassed material splendour. Threat and protection, the natural and the supernatural, the everyday and the exceptional are brought into analogous material relation in the chapel, even while the chapel is itself produced by them. It does this above all through an orchestration of the architectural, ritual, and staging of saints’ relics. As we have seen, the deputies skilfully and successfully involved the Viceroy in its rituals, while holding the Archbishop at arm’s length. The close alliance between Deputation and Viceroy in regard to the miracle of San Gennaro is remarkable. In the same years, the attempt to associate the feast of San Giovanni Battista in Naples with the institutional life of the viceregal court was one of the key causes of its disintegration.8 The miraculous adventure

The chapel is not so much the place where the rules of nature are broken as the plane where prophecy takes place. The miracle presents Gennaro as Paragallo, Istoria Naturale del Monte Vesuvio, 343. In contrast to the feast of San Gennaro, the feast of St John the Baptist in Naples became separated from clerical and ecclesiastical support. While the clergy moved to strengthen the celebration of Corpus Domini festival, held almost at the same time of year, the popular feast of St John the Baptist became dangerously aligned with popular support. For an important discussion of this, see Petrarca, La Festa di San Giovanni Battista, esp. 13–15. See also above, 176–178.

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prophet and the chapel as part of that prophecy, a place of prophecy. A place where what will have been provides for what takes place. Since societies are always en fuite (leaking, fleeing) and are best understood in relation to the way they deal with those flights, then the Treasury Chapel emerges as crucial to any interpretation of baroque Naples.9 The eruption of Vesuvius and the depradations of the plague, earthquakes, invasion, and war constantly threatened the inhabitants of Naples and destabilized their relations with each other. The chapel might be seen as a part of a process to restabilize volatile forces in the face of such threats. Naples was a city divided territorially by its six Seggi and by a vast number of churches, convents, and monasteries that were locked in often competing relationships. The processions of san Gennaro and his protector companions not only traversed the distinct quarters, but paused and paid homage to religious and princely centres of power en route. When the miracle occurred in the Piazze of the Seggi in the presence of deputies, Seggi representatives, Archbishop and Viceroy, quotidian territories and divisions were dislocated and new processes of territorialization set in motion. We have to think of the vectors of energy involved not as moving within the city but as reconstituting it. For the chapel is more than instrument of hegemony, a tool for the Seggi aristocracy and viceregal court. It, too, was a deterritorializing force, making possible new connectivities between institutions and groups, between the deputies, Cathedral, clergy and external institutions who invested their relics in the chapel, and opening encounters with San Gennaro and the other protector saints. The Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro was the crucial focus for a spiritual and material investment by the Seggi of Naples. That investment cumulated and intensified and overflowed the chapel itself, even as it continued to attract further investments. It extended across the city, first, through the regular processions of Gennaro’s relics out into the Seggi, and second, through the building of the Guglia of San Gennaro in the little square to the south of the Duomo after the eruption of 1631 (Fig. 40), and in the erection of the monument to San Gennaro at Santa Caterina a Formello (Fig. 41) following that of 2 August 1707. The chapel helped to manage uncertainty in the rapidly changing superpopulous city, largely on behalf of the aristocrats of the Seggi, the deputies, and the Viceroy. Because the deputies were drawn from the Seggi, the interests that were represented were overwhelmingly of the urban patrician, but they were modulated and inflected through issues drawing on alchemical, mineralogical, and theological discourses. My claim is not simply that new On this, see Rajchman, The Deleuze Connections, 12.

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forms of reverence shown to new objects in new relationships, orchestrated by new leaders, produced a new place and new forms and exercize of power, new bonds between people, new hopes for protection, new desires, new aspirations towards justice and mercy in a challenging and changing world. This is simply to string things out causally and extensively. The point here is that the chapel worked intensively, disruptively, and unpredictably. Thus in the blood’s miraculous command, that which was threatening could be courted, tamed, and announced, but it might also be magnified, amplified, and released. The Treasury Chapel worked to define Naples in exclusive terms. The deputies in their well-minuted meetings strove to cement a chapel which was to be at least as good as any in Italy, with artists drawn from abroad to bring prestige and prominence to themselves, the cult of San Gennaro, and the city of Naples.10 But their aims fell by the wayside in the face of Neapolitan politics. Rather than producing a chapel touting the ‘best’ artists’ work, the deputies had to accept those artists willing to tough it out in Naples. Obstruction from Neapolitan artists unwilling to cede to foreigners extended even to murder, and became a way in which Neapolitan art was defined. Rather than see it as a ‘loss’ to Naples that Cavalier d’Arpino or Guido Reni was not engaged, it might be better to see this as part of the production and reproduction of Naples itself. Likewise the bloody miracle identified and expelled heretics, flattered the powerful, courted viceroys and their consorts. The chapel can be seen as ruthlessly exclusive, allied to an urban patriciate already intolerant and conservative. Yet there is more to the chapel than this. It does more than merely represent the interests of the deputies who ran it or the institutions whose interests were directly bound up with it (even as it presented an opportunity to enclosed female convents to stage their spiritual riches and authority). The chapel’s desirable affects were vital to the Deputation to enhance its authority, not simply because of the precious relics it held, but because its orchestration of them was so effective. This is not to speak of a delusion through ‘propa10

Artists involved included Cosimo Fanzago from Bergamo, Guido Reni from Bologna, Domenichino and Giovanni Lanfranco from Emilia Romagna, the Cavalier d’Arpino from Rome, Jusepe de Ribera from Spain, and Massimo Stanzione, Domenico Vaccaro, Francesco Solimena, and a host of others from Naples. On the story of the attempts to secure artists from outside Naples, see Bellucci, Memorie storiche, 35–42; Strazzullo, La Real Cappella, 11–34; S. D. Pepper, Guido Reni: A Complete Catalogue of his Works (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 29–30. Guido Reni was attacked by someone put up to the job apparently by Belisario Corenzio (ATSG, DA/9 (60-1588) fol. 413r). To attract Domenichino against the current of rumours of native hostility, the deputies sought the good offices of the Manuel de Acevedo y Zúñiga, Count of Monterrey, Spanish ambassador in Rome and later Viceroy of Naples (ATSG, DA/9, fol. 415r).

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ganda’, but of bodies that respond to the pre-personal ‘investments’ in the sensible intensities of colour, light, mysterious shadow, the apprehension of the forthcoming miracle. The question of the miracle, of how it may be seen, the question of what it means to witness it, the saint, Vesuvius, the fear of fire, the power of fire to refine and cast, in the presence of saintly relics, of miracles, the disjunctive and multiplicity of this space – all this and more – assumes resonance and speed and dissonance from the chapel itself, a speed and dissonance that is accelerated and intensified as it enters into the visual economy of spiritual production that is the chapel. The chapel both disrupts affect, allowing us to think intensities, and delivers as divine the ordered world that emerges. For sure, the chapel’s architecture does not express social unity in a material form. But, more than that alone, the investment produces the body – not the other way about. It may work to register the links between unstable and shifting frames of reference rather than by trying to keep one frame stable. Far more than that, the chapel was itself operative and, above all, it worked to transform, to open potentiality within matter. Indeed, not least among the Treasury Chapel’s transformations was its transformation of itself into a generator of protectors for the city as a whole – albeit with specific institutional affiliations and allegiances – and thus, with it, of the city itself. Its lavish adornment is eclipsed when viewed through the long-established and unhappy formulae of baroque architecture as ‘excessive’, ‘over the top’, ‘propagandistic’, or ‘rhetorical’.11 Rather, the chapel is an engine of desire, investment and interest – affective and instrumental. As Deleuze has vigorously argued, art would be nothing more than opinion if it did not allow an element of chaos to enter in and transform and mobilize thinking.12 That transformative capacity is achieved in the chapel’s disruption of the supposed harmony of worship or unity of experience in baroque Naples. The Deputation and the people of Naples perhaps thought themselves able to control the chapel. But to no small a degree it produced them as custodians and worshippers of certain visions and effects of spirituality, in other words what I am terming ‘spiritual material potential’. We have seen how the Treasury Chapel operates extrovertedly through the supposedly secular domain of city streets and squares as well as through religious institutions external to it, thereby demonstrating that religious architecture could be generative in ways unforeseen by patrons or architects. In turn, this demonstrates the necessity of thinking of religious buildings in The idea of ‘propaganda’ in relation to baroque architecture is discussed at length by Levy, Propaganda and the Jesuit Baroque; see also my critique of the notion, H. Hills, ‘Too Much Propaganda’, Oxford Art Journal, 29:3 (2006), 446–452. 12 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 204. 11

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relation to network forces that, while strategically and tactically connected to them, extend beyond and also transform them. This book has approached the study of the ‘relic’ (including reliquary chapels and the sites that sustain them) from the past as if its future (our future, as well) were still in the making. How the chapel and the power of the protector saints produce each other is of particular concern here. The baroque machinic chapel participated in the production of a new urban holiness, in which relics, bones, worshippers, patrons, silver reliquaries; and past, present, and future were brought into new alignments. It cannot be thought apart from the saints whose relics it conserves and whose processions it fosters; it cannot be thought away from the piazze of the Seggi in which the miraculous liquefactions of San Gennaro’s blood occurred. Yet the saints whose relics it supposedly ‘held’ were multiplied in and by it, and they filled it up and overflowed it. The chapel and piazze were not simply places where processions and liquefactions took place, but were transformed by them and in relation to each other. Spiritual material production worked in and through the chapel. The excess of the chapel is, then, not an obstacle to its interpretation after all, but is at its endlessly self-displacing heart. In terms of patronage, institutional affiliation, and physical movement and relocation, the saints’ reliquaries bound the Treasury Chapel to institutions beyond it, and threaded prominent institutions into the chapel. Through their dual engagements the silver reliquary busts enriched and ‘contaminated’ the Treasury with the investments and presence of as many external institutions. In short, in their translations and peripatetic weaving, the reliquaries bound the chapel to the city more broadly, and together articulated a conception of the city that was at once rhetorically spiritually unified while remaining institutionally heterogeneous and stratified. Thus the reliquary niches form conditional perching places, half in, half out of the chapel, and the mobility thus afforded them permits the chapel to operate as a mechanosphere – an interaction of multiple connections between technological and biological ­systems – in relation to discrete religious institutions across the city.13 It is not so much that boundaries between secular and religious, interior and exterior, are necessarily blurred in the baroque city, but that possibilities of the city itself are produced through their dynamic inter-relation. With respect to San Gennaro’s relic, it is striking that the miraculous liquefaction was made to occur not only outside the Treasury Chapel and Cathedral but also in supposedly secular space, in the piazze of the Seggi themselves. Large numbers of people reluctant to go to church were able to participate in this 13

For a mechanosphere as a machinic assemblage of complex foldings and movements of deterritorialization that cut across their stratifications, see Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 89, 69.

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way, and, furthermore, the lay aristocrats of the Seggi directly participated in the miraculous in their very own Piazze. While the secularization of the religious has been argued to be an important development in this period,14 this model maintains overly rigid conceptions of space as that in which distinctions between supposedly distinct spheres are dissolved. Instead we need to think in terms of processes of deterritorialization that also transform the spatial. The portability of the reliquaries and their institutional affiliations and engagements produced the chapel as mechanosphere across the city. These processions did more than connect the Treasury Chapel via the Seggi physically, ceremonially, and spiritually to a significant range of religious institutions across the city. Through them the relics reconstituted urban space, and rendered streets and squares – spaces that we might think of as mundane or secular – ceremonial and holy. Indeed, this was part of a miraculous process which, in its opening of past to present and in linking saintly relic, religious institutions, and the Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro, wove the Treasury Chapel into the very heart of a new urban spirituality. The population of protector saints of the Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro was therefore multiple, unfixed, and markedly mobile outside the chapel and across the city. Moreover, the chapel is striking in its treatment of the saints as living presences, not a peep-show of bones behind glass in the customary way of relic display, but part of our world, peripatetic and fluid, animating not just the chapel, but also the street during annual processions to their churches of provenance. The Treasury Chapel thereby engages in a complex economy of the relic involving the multiplication and repetition of saints, a sort of teamwork of heterogeneous elements that overflowed architecture’s customary limits. Thus the Treasury Chapel shows that religious architecture may usefully be thought as machinic; not as a sealed organism so much as transforming and transformative. While it linked heterogeneous institutions across the city together, it was itself refashioned through those shifting and contested relationships that worked to produce it as the centre of a newly cast network of protector saints that represented the whole city. Thus it is apparently guardian to that which continuously produces it. In the miracle-working San Gennaro there opened the possibility of a constant and persistent victorious mediation between the natural and the supernatural, between the material and the spiritual, between bad and good, between death and life. The ‘place’ par excellence of this mediation was the miraculous blood. But this ‘place’ was neither stable nor unique. Rather, in its Muir, Civic Ritual.

14

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workings it spilled over, over-spilled to draw together through heat’s work, threat, and protection, victim and worshipper, blood and bronze, life and death, volcano and city. Architecture is, then, not merely a locus for what it contains. It does more and less than ‘house’ the religious. Less container than producer, architecture brings into being, accelerates and activates, intensifies and increases. Even while it stages a painting, it is itself staged by it; even as it orchestrates relics, it is itself displaced by them. The colour, iconography, and materials of the painting alter the ways in which the architecture works. Thus for example the assaying of San Gennaro can be interpreted in relation to the work of metallurgy in the chapel as not only a metaphor for sanctity, but as part of the prophylactic work of the chapel in holding Vesuvius at bay. This is not to claim that architecture and painting should be read as a coherent whole with a single unified meaning.15 Relics and their works are not exemplified in the chapel. The parts do not simply cohere into a unified greater whole and cannot be understood in additive terms as adding up to a ‘whole’. This book has considered the chapel in relation to investments and desire. Just as the chapel does not represent life in harsh seventeenth-century Naples, so it does not simply provide a refuge from it. It offers a possibility of redemption and becoming through affect. These affects are already politically coded. The desire for redemption becomes an interest when it is coded as protector saint – which, far from being the effect of desire, seems to be what governs desire. Political formations or ‘social machines’ thus produce interests from desires. A group of bodies – across the city’s relic-holding institutions and the deputies of the Treasury Chapel itself -connects to expand their power; this is desire. That same group of deputies forms an image of themselves as the very ground of human life; this is interest. A transcendental method refuses to post a being outside power and imaging. Thus a cultural form, the Treasury Chapel, does not manipulate or deceive us through ‘propaganda’; rather it may be conceived as a way in which desire organizes and extends its investments. The chapel is, then, ‘untimely’, in Deleuze’s sense. ‘Untimely’, because it has the power to make new lines of time or ‘lines of flight’. They do not chart, represent, or even contest events within history; they open a new experience of history – time as open to the future. Thus the reliquaries of the Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro did more than bind the chapel to institutions external to it and more than simply extend its influence beyond its walls. The extroverted chapel pulled back into its own operational circuit more than it exported. It was in itself transformed in these 15

See H. Hills, ‘Beyond Mere Containment: The Neapolitan Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro and the Matter of Materials’, California Italian Studies Journal, 3:1 (2012), 1–21, www.escholarship.org/uc/item/7d49p517 9 (accessed 1 March 2012).

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processes of circulation, enabled to address the city and to make a claim for itself as the hub of a new form of urban spirituality. Place was staged through displacement; and architecture held in place only as it was itself displaced. The chapel is the counterbody of the relic, which is in turn the counterbody of the glorious saint. The redeemed saint in heaven has something like a counterbody: the body of the tortured, or better, of the excluded. And yet the two bodies communicate.16 Concertedly architecture and decoration epitomize a state of emergency in the soul that must be kept under control and redistributed before it can be allowed to be recognized. That is the work required of the chapel. Thus the operation of the chapel is multiple and conflicted: an opening, a recognition, and a denial. This twisting turning architecture is not a polite representation of an underlying human norm, but the creation and exploration of new styles of perception, of refusal, and of becoming. Only by moving beyond the slow time of the chapel’s built fabric, which seems to form an empty container, to the faster speed of the incessant movements that sustain that building, can we think of the chapel in terms of affect. Architecture creates new possibilities for the eye and perception. It creates new affects. For Luigi Canetti ecclesiastical control of the beyond was a fundamental aspect of the objectification of the world of things and of the constitution of the modern subject.17 But the case of the Treasury Chapel suggests rather that the beyond was always at play, always close and present, implicated materially in exchange and relation through bronze, silver, blood, Vesuvius, and always traversed fear and longing. Thus we might think of the worshipper as an effect of these forces, rather than that which brought them into being. Following Keith Ansell Pearson, we may think behaviour and affect not as ‘localized in individuals conceived as preformed homunculi; but … epigenetically as a function of complex material systems, which cut across individuals and which traverse … boundaries’.18 Thus in thinking of the work of the Treasury Chapel, of its saints, its relics, reliquaries and miracles, as an intricate nest of boundary crossings, migrations, exchanges, and transformations, we see that, above all, it works to displace and defer, rather than to instantiate and settle the desires, longing and passions, generated in conjunction with the relics, saints and hope for salvation around which they are organized. The chapel is better seen as a force field, disturbing, re-routing, traversing, than as a locus that defines and settles. To no small degree, then, San Gennaro’s Chapel may be read as material analogy for his bloody miracle and, as such, a material means by which we See also Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 115. Canetti, ‘La città dei vivi’, 209. 18 K. Ansell-Pearson, Germinal Life (London: Routledge, 1999), 171. 16 17

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might grasp the affective investment of its various human participants. This allows us to think of the chapel in terms of the miracle analogically materialized. The deputation and people of Naples perhaps thought themselves able to control the chapel, as witnesses to the miracle. But to no small degree it produced them as custodians and worshippers – indeed, as its effects – in what might be termed a ‘material spiritual production’. My claim is not that we all experience identically the chapel’s intensities (far from it); nor that a present-day scholar has access to the way in which seventeenth-century Neapolitans might have experienced it. My approach is different. The Treasury Chapel requires a gaze that would not draw close only to recognize and to name and to chronologize, an approach which permits oneself first be grasped, before grasping, which lets oneself go in letting go one’s knowledge about it, labyrinths in which knowledge loses its way, in which the system becomes a great displacement, a great multiplication of forms and surfaces, in which we must first lose ourselves before anything can be found. In worshipping the saints, Jerome claimed, ‘the city has changed address’.19 He referred, of course, to the move to worshipping saints in the cemetery areas peripheral to the cities in early Christianity. In the assertion of baroque protector saints’ relation to city, as both a vertical axis (from city to saint to God) to saintly city chapel to God, it is the saint who changes address, but in doing so, it is the address of the city, its location in relation to a divine axis, that is fundamentally altered.20 While Pierre Miotte’s little map of Naples of 1648 (Fig. 63) shows an impressive bank of urban saintly protectors separated from the city by hierophanic clouds, the Treasury Chapel sought to bring the saints down to earth, but in so doing, the saints were fragmented, multiplied, redistributed through the chapel, and across the city. Even as the Treasury Chapel was built to contain saints and their relics, so it demonstrated that they were uncontainable. The chapel overflows with saints. They rise to the height of the dome, seethe around the walls, and crowd into the space for the faithful. And finally they were no longer contained even within the chapel itself. In the Guglia of San Gennaro, erected in memory of Vesuvius’ 1631 eruption, the saint can be seen as having overflowed outside the chapel into the small piazza outside the south transept, spilling out, uncontained, and uncontainable. The claims of the saint were urbanized, and the city redistributed accordingly. 19

‘Movetur urbs sedibus suis’. Jerome, Epistula 107.1. Luigi Canetti has argued that the concept of immortality is inextricably connected to the progressive segregation and removal of the dead from the city between the third and eighth centuries (Canetti, ‘La città dei vivi’, 207). The forthright return of the saints’ relics to the city in the patronal saint was a very sharp reversal of this relationship.

20

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To treat the chapel as more than mere setting for the miracle, as its advertisement, its warning, and its collaborator has required thinking a ­re-energizing of materials. This book therefore has approached materials, as accomplices and in terms of potentiality. Rather than materials as matter, or materials as the stage for technical virtuosity, the book has shown that materiality is potentiality, part of transformative processes that matter analogously. Its metals – like San Gennaro’s blood itself – are qualities to be discovered or invented, possibilities yet to come. Materials here are sites of potentiality, part of the process of exploration, and material analogies for the miraculous transformations of Gennaro’s blood, which in its instability, holds open not so much change and transformation, as its very possibility. Potentiality as an as yet to be realized possibility; not as re-enactment, that would be representation, reproducing an already envisaged state of affairs. Instead material is potential and generative. Just as the liquefaction of Gennaro’s blood can be read as material analogy for the volcanic threat of Vesuvius, so the bronze gate can be seen as the material analogy for the liquefying blood, and the silver reliquaries as material analogy for the redemption of body and soul at the end of time. Thus the i­deationality of architectural materiality can be seen as an opening of possibility, rather than to treat architecture as static representation of something already ­determined, as mere container (or propaganda) for the miracle and ritual. The silver reliquaries borne across the city processionally form new metallic flows (Plate 24), as they bind institutions to each other and thread the city on their axes, and are constantly remade in terms of participants, bodies, movements, speed, direction. It is in that peculiar mobility and ability to cross boundaries, eliminate limits and blur distinction that fluid metals and miraculous blood work their wonders both within the chapel, at its limits, and beyond. Above all, the chapel transformed. In the miracle-working saint Christianity created the possibility of a victorious mediation between the natural and the supernatural, between the material and the spiritual, between bad and good, between death and life. The ‘place’ par excellence of this mediation was the miraculous blood. That site is not found in the past, but in the present – and thus the activation of the past by the present. This ‘place’ was neither stable nor unique; rather, in it workings it spilled over, over-spilled to draw together through heat’s work, threat and protection, victim and worshipper, blood and bronze, life and death, volcano and city. Indeed, not least among the Treasury Chapel’s transformations was its transformation of itself into a generator of protectors –for the city as a whole (albeit with specific institutional affiliations and allegiances) and thus, with it, of the city itself. The chapel is thus more than setting of the miracle, and more than mere instantiation of idea. It operates as if it were located at opposing compass

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points, at once north and south, east and west. But while the chapel amounts to much, I have sought in this book to show that it is not best understood as the sum of its parts, but rather is best approached as a warning of the divergence in the interests ranged within it, a measure of the dissonance of forces it martials, and a glimpse of the promise it can never deliver. The chapel is less stable structure than event, in terms not of what happens, but of something made possible through what might happen; not something present, but an opening that might be permitted to take place in what is present. The chapel might haul us out of the ordinary, through a dazzling natural and supernatural spectacle, encompassing polished coloured marble and stone and the miracle of the liquefaction that testifies to San Gennaro’s intercession with God, to offer a glimpse of a promise, an encounter, an offer, a possibility – all and each of which is beyond itself and which it cannot deliver, but which cannot take place without it. The saints are a determination that is more than thinghood, but that participates in corporeality, and even implies a sort of esprit de corps. At the limit all that counts is the shifting borderline. The chapel may generate the saint, and even attempt to get the saints to settle down. Imagine the trouble for the Crown of Spain and the Viceroy faced with nomadic, itinerant, and impatient saints. St John the Baptist, after all, constituted such a threat that he was neutralized. Setting and sedenterizing the saints was also the work of the chapel, to regulate their flow, assign it channels and conduits, and proscribe its temporalities of opening and encounter. Thus the reliquaries of the Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro did more than simply bind the chapel to institutions external to it and more than simply extend its influence beyond its walls. The extroverted chapel pulled back into its own operational circuit more than it exported. It was in itself transformed in these processes of circulation, enabled to address the city, and to make a claim for itself as the hub of a new form of urban spirituality. Holy place was staged through displacement; and architecture held in place only as it was itself displaced. Rather than think of architecture as representation of something external to it (patron, architect, religion, belief, regulation), it is more useful to think it as departure – departure from continuity, or a pointing towards an opening, a line of flight, towards the extremity and extenuation of sense of which God is a witness, a martyr, for all. Thus architecture, as witness of a call to holiness, foments in itself the overflowing of its rational ground. A circle turns unceasingly from manifestation of sense to the syncope of the soul. Architecture was thus traced and traversed by that which remained withdrawn and by the withdrawal of an origin. Just as it was God’s absence in life that created divinity, so it was the self-displacement at the heart of baroque architecture that produced both its sense of excess and its address stretched towards that which there was no possibility of reaching, and yet which was opened nevertheless.

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I imagine now the chapel, empty of worshippers and visitors, gates locked; door to the sacristy secured, the oil lamps burning, and the sunlight, falling through the windows in the drum, slowly creeping across the burnished floor. The silver reliquaries, the bronze statues, gathered together, held together, waiting. In the ranging and martialling of saints, their gathered silent forces, there is a sense of something in attendance that is waiting to be sought. That is what the chapel bears, makes immanent, but cannot complete.

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Plates and figures

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1  T reasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples. Entrance gate and chapel façade from the south aisle of the Cathedral.

2  T reasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples. Entrance gate open with view of liturgical south-east of chapel.

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3  Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples. Interior view looking towards liturgical east.

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4  Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples. Interior view looking towards (liturgical) south-west.

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5  Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples. View of left-hand chapel (liturgical west).

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6  R  eliquary bust of San Gennaro, 1304–05, by Étienne Godefroyd, Guillaume de Verdelay, and Milet d’Auxerre. Gilt silver, enamel, precious and semi-precious stones.

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7  T reasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples. Presbytery with bronze full-length sculptures and silver bust reliquaries of protector saints. Main altar designed by Francesco Solimena, 1722.

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8  Carlo Schisano, Saint Irene of Thessalonica, 1733, reliquary fenestella. Naples, Museo del Tesoro di San Gennaro.

9  Carlo Schisano, Saint Irene of Thessalonica, 1733, silver and gilt silver reliquary. Detail with model of the city of Naples. Museo del Tesoro di San Gennaro, Naples.

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Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document 10  S . Ianvuarii Neapoli Sangvis ebvllit, fresco in Pope Gregory XIII’s gallery in the Vatican Palace showing the relics of San Gennaro outside the Porta Capuana, Naples.

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11  T he Succorpo, Naples Cathedral. Detail with statue of Oliviero Carafa.

12  T he Treasurer of the Deputazione and Chapel of San Gennaro adorns the reliquary bust of San Gennaro in preparation for the miracle and procession, 4 May 2013.

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13  J usepe de Ribera, San Gennaro Emerges Unharmed from the Furnace, altarpiece, oil on copper. Frame set with gilt bronze and lapis lazuli by Onofrio D’Alessio, 1646. Altarpiece of right-hand lateral chapel of the Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples.

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14  M  icco Spadaro (Domenico Gargiulo), Procession of Relics and Intervention of San Gennaro to Save Naples from Vesuvius, oil on canvas, 126 × 177 cm.

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Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document 15  ‘San Gennaro Stems the Flow of Lava from Vesuvius’, engraving from Nicolò Carminio Falcone, L’Intera Storia ... di San Gennaro (Naples: Felice Mosca, 1713), facing p. 64. British Library Board. BL Shelfmark: 663.k.20.

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16  T reasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples. Bronze gate to lateral chapel by Onofrio D’Alessio and Gennaro Monte, 1662–84. Detail.

17  T reasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples. Left: Onofrio D’Alessio and Gennaro Monte, gate to lateral chapel, 1662–84, with San Gennaro and Saint Asprenus, bronze and gilt bronze. Right: Cosimo Fanzago (here attrib.), San Gennaro, design for lateral gate, drawing (ATSG).

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18  Gesù Nuovo, Naples. Cappella Fornaro by Michelangelo Naccherino and assistants, 1600–02.

19  T he Virgin Enthroned between San Gennaro and Saint Restituta, Chapel of Santa Maria del Principio, Santa Restituta, Duomo, Naples.

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20  D  omenichino, San Gennaro Intervenes and Saves the City of Naples from the Eruption of Vesuvius, fresco above entrance. Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples.

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21  T reasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples. Cupola with Giovanni Lanfranco, The Saints in Paradise, 1643, fresco.

22  S an Gregorio Armeno, Naples. Nuns’ winter choir and raised west-end choir, with frescoes by Luca Giordano depicting the arrival of the Basilian nuns in Naples.

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Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document 23  T reasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples. Main gate by Cosimo Fanzago viewed from the aisle of the Catheral.

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24  Procession of the reliquaries from the Treasury Chapel to Santa Chiara, Naples, May 2013.

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25  T reasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples. Main gate by Cosimo Fanzago. Detail.

26  T reasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples. Main gate by Cosimo Fanzago. Detail of bust of San Gennaro.

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28  L orenzo Vaccaro and Gian Domenico Vinaccia, Saint Michael Archangel, 1691, silver, gilt silver, bronze and gilt bronze, reliquary, 160 × 65 cm. Naples, Treasury of San Gennaro.

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Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document 27  G  iuseppe Sanmartino, Giuseppe Del Giudice, and Gennaro Del Giudice, Tobias and Archangel Raphael, silver and gilt silver reliquary. Museo del Tesoro di San Gennaro, Naples.

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29  Cosimo Fanzago, Guglia of San Gennaro, Naples. Detail with bronze figure of San Gennaro.

30  Naples, the Guglia of San Gennaro by Cosimo Fanzago and the cupola of the Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro crowned by blood relics.

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32  O  nofrio Palumbo and Didier Barra, San Gennaro Intercedes on Behalf of Naples, c.1652, oil on canvas, 392 × 600 cm. Santissima Trinità dei Pellegrini, Naples.

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Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document 31  J usepe de Ribera, San Gennaro Intercedes on Behalf of Naples at the Eruption of Vesuvius. Church of the monastery of the Agustinas Recoletas di Monterrey, Salamanca.

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33  Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples. Pavement detail.

34  Succorpo Chapel, Naples Cathedral. Vault with relief of San Gennaro.

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36  Domenichino, Christ Entrusts Naples to San Gennaro’s Protection, fresco in crossing pendentive with ground plan of the Treasury Chapel. Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples.

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Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document 35  Filippino Lippi, The Annunciation with Saint Thomas Aquinas Presenting Cardinal Oliviero Carafa to the Virgin, 1488–93(?). Chapel of the Annunciation and St Thomas Aquinas, Santa Maria sopra Minerva, Rome.

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37  Benedetto Sersale, Discorso Istorico intorno alla Cappella de’ Signori Minutoli sotto il titolo di S. Pietro Apostolo e di S. Anastasia Martire dentro il Duomo Napoletano (Naples: Stamperia Raimondiana, 1778), pp. 30–31, ‘Pianta delle due Antiche e Odierna Cattedrale di Napoli’ and ‘Prospettiva delle due Antiche Cattedrali di Napoli’. British Library Board, BL shelfmark 1572.188.

38  P. Petrini, Pianta ed alzata della Città di Napoli (Naples, 1718). Detail showing the processional route for the ‘feast of Vesuvius’.

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39  C  hurch of the Certosa di San Martino, Naples. The New Treasury Chapel with Jusepe de Ribera’s Pietà, signed and dated 1637; Gennaro Monte, reliquary cases, 1691, ebony and gilt copper; Luca Giordano, Story of Judith, frescoes.

40  S an Gennaro, on his way to Santa Chiara, passes the church of Santi Filippo e Giacomo, Naples. Procession celebrating the translation of San Gennaro’s relics to Naples, May 2013.

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41  Domenichino, The Beheading of San Gennaro and Companions, oil on copper. Altarpiece of left-hand lateral chapel, Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples.

42  Franz Vervloet, The New Treasury Chapel in the church of the Certosa di San Martino, 1848. Museo Nazionale di San Martino.

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45

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43  L orenzo Vaccaro (attrib.), Saint Mary of Egypt, 1699, silver and gilt silver reliquary, 80 × 70 cm. Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples.

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44  L orenzo Vaccaro (attrib.), Saint John the Baptist, silver and gilt copper reliquary, 80 × 62 cm. Detail. Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples. 09/09/2016 15:37

45  Gennaro Monte, Silver flowers and vase (one of a pair), c.1670, silver, 120 × 20 cm. Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples.

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46  T he processional route taken during the translation of the relics of San Francesco di Paola from the Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro in the Cathedral to the church of San Luigi in Naples in 1629. In green, the route taken by Minims and others the evening before the translation from the Cathedral to San Luigi. Key: 1 Duomo; 2 San Paolo Maggiore dei Teatini; 3 S. Maria Maggiore; 4 Piazza San Domenico; 5 Gesù Nuovo Casa Professa; 6 via Toledo; 7 Piazza of the Royal Palace; 8 S. Luigi; A Seggio di Capuano; B Seggio di Montagna; C Seggio di Porto; SP Santa Patrizia

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47  In red, the processional route taken during the translation of the relics of San Francesco di Paola from the church of San Luigi to the Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro in the Duomo in Naples in 1629. Alessandro Baratta, Fidelissi urbis Neapolitance [. . .]. Intesa Sanpaolo Collection, Gallerie d’Italia – Palazzo Zevallos Stigliano, Naples. Key: 1 San Luigi; 2 Piazza of Royal Palace; 3 Via Toledo; 4 La Concezione; 5 San Giacomo degli Spagnoli; 6 Piazza di Castel Nuovo; 7 Strada di san Giuseppe; 8 Strada di Monteoliveto; 9 Santa Maria di Monteoliveto; 10 Casa Professa del Gesù; 11 Santa Chiara; 12 Piazza San Domenico; 13 Santa Maria Maggiore; 14 Seggio di Montagna; 15 San Paolo Maggiore; 16 San Lorenzo Maggiore; 17 San Gregorio Armeno; 18 Strada dei Librai; 19 Sacro Monte di Pietà; 20 Seggio di Nilo; 21 Mezzocannone; 22 Seggio di Porto; 23 San Pietro a Fusarello; 24 Strada di Santa Caterina de’ Trenettari; 25 Seggio di Portanova; 26 Sellaria; 27 Strada di Forcella; 28 Sant’Agrippino a Forcella; 29 Strada dell’Annunziata; 30 Chiesa della SS Annunziata; 31 Strada della Duchesca; 32 Santa Caterina a Formiello; 33 Piazza della Vicaria; 34 Monte de’ Poveri a Nome di Dio; 35 Santa Maria della Pace; 36 Seggio di Capuano; 37 San Filippo Neri; 38 Duomo

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48  C  aravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, 1610, oil on canvas, 143 × 180 cm. Intesa Sanpaolo Collection, Gallerie d’Italia – Palazzo Zevallos Stigliano, Naples.

49  G  aspar Miguel de Berrio, Descripción del Cerro Rico y la villa imperial de Potosí, oil on canvas. Museo Universitario Colonial Charcas, Sucre.

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Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document 1  R  eliquary of the blood of San Gennaro with stand by Aniello Treglia. Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples.

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2  F east of San Gennaro, Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples, 4 May 2013. Waiting in anticipation for the miracle.

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3  T reasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples. View looking towards the presbytery’s (liturgical) south-east wall with reliquaries and sculptures of St Euphebius, St Severus, and St Patricia on the wall and reliquary bust of San Gaetano on the crossing pier. Bronze sculpture of St Patricia by Giuliano Finelli, 1646–48.

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5  S ilver gilt chalice made in Naples, c.1700 V & A, London (V&A: M.42-1951).

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4  O  stension of San Gennaro’s blood on the steps of Naples Cathedral, 4 May 2013.

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6  T he Old Treasury Chapel, Naples Cathedral. Blocked window.

7  B  asilica of San Giovanni in Laterano, Rome. Sacrament altar. Left transept.

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Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document 8  Naples Cathedral, The Succorpo Chapel, by Tommaso Malvito and workshop.

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9  Newspaper report of the miracle of San Gennaro, September 2010.

10  G  ian Domenico Vinaccia, The Translation of San Gennaro’s Relics from Pozzuoli to Naples in 1497, detail of silver paliotto of main altar, Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples. Begun 1683 by Domenico Marinelli from drawings by Dionisio Lazzari and finished by Gian Domenico Vinaccia, 1692–95.

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11  G  round plan of the Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples, sacristy, and attendant rooms. 12/09/2016 08:37

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12  L eft: Gate of the Treasury Chapel of Santissima Annunziata, Naples; right: Gate of San Martino, church of the Certosa, Naples.

13  T reasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples. Main gate. The strange alphabet written in bronze.

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14  M  adrid, Convent of Las Descalzas Reales. Chapel of Relics, begun 1556. Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

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15  Naples Cathedral, The Succorpo. Detail of bronze door. 12/09/2016 08:37

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16  Domenico Di Nardo, Reliquary, 1677, polychrome and gilt wood, to accommodate a group of earlier reliquary busts carved from 1617 on by Girolamo Manfredi, Carlo Manfredi, and Tomaso Velasco under the supervision of Gian Domenico Vinaccia. Chapel of St Anne (San Francesco de Geronimo), Gesù Nuovo, Naples.

17  Luca Giordano, Saint Nicholas in Glory, 1658, oil on canvas, 311 × 240 cm. Museo Civico di Castel Nuovo, Naples.

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18  Anon., Procession of San Gennaro, oil on canvas, 150 × 207 cm, Naples Cathedral.

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19  Paolo Petrini, Pianta ed alzata della Città di Napoli (Naples: Paolo Petrini, 1718), BL shelfmark Maps *24045 (29).

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21  Tiberio Malfi, Il Barbiere (Naples: Ottavio Beltrano, 1626), p. 93. British Library Board, BL shelfmark 549.k.7.

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20 Michele Luigi Muzio, ‘Translation of the Body of San Gennaro from Naples to Benevento’, engraving, from Camillo Tutini, Memorie istoriche della vita, miracoli, e culto di San Gianuario Martire Vescovo di Benevento, e principale protettore della Città di Napoli (Naples: Michele Muzio, 1710), facing p. 72. British Library Board, BL shelfmark RB.23.a.3552.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document 22  P  . Gaultier, ‘Conspectus Apsidis Thesauri S Januarii M.’ (‘View of the Apse of the Treasury of San Gennaro Martyr’), engraving. A: Safe with head of San Gennaro; B: Safe for blood of San Gennaro; 1 and 2: Holes for keys held by the Archbishop; 3 and 4: Holes for keys held by the Deputation of the Treasury; CCCC: Site of main altar. Archivio del Tesoro di San Gennaro, Naples, 158/39 4512 DB/38.

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23  Paolo Regio, La Vita del B. Iacopo della Marcha (Naples: Gioseppe Cacchi, 1589). Title page. Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli.

24  Francesco Marchese, Unica Speranza del Peccatore Che consiste nel Sangue del N. S. Giesù Cristo. Spiegata con alcune verità, con le quali s’insegna all’Anima un Modo facile d’applicar à se il frutto del medesimo Sangue (Rome: Giacomo Dragondelli, 1670), engraving following title page. British Library Board, BL shelfmark C.47.e.4 (2).

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25  A  ntonio Bulifon, ‘Gate of the Treasury’, from Pompeo Sarnelli, Guida de’ Forastieri, Curiosi di vedere, e d’intendere le cose più notabili della Regal Città di Napoli, e del suo amenissimo Distretto (Naples: Giuseppe Roselli, 1697), fol. 72. Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli.

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26  G  iovanni Elia Morghen and Domenico dell’Acerra, ‘Prospetto del Vesuvio e sue Adiacenze prima dell’Eruzione dell’Anno 1631’, engraving, from Giuseppe Maria Mecatti, Racconto Storico-filosofico del Vesuvio. E particolarmente di quanto è occorso in quest’ultima Eruzione principiata il dì 25 Ottobre 1751, e cessata il dì 25 Febrajo 1752 (Naples: Giovanni Di Simone, 1752), facing p. 1. Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli.

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27  N  icolas Perrey, ‘Stato del Monte Vesuvio doppo l’ultimo Incendio de 16 di Decembre 1631’, from Gianbernardino Giuliani, Trattato del Monte Vesuvio e de’ suoi Incendi (Naples: Egidio Longo, 1632), facing p. 224. Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli. 12/09/2016 08:37

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28  N  aples, Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro. Main gate by Cosimo Fanzago. Details with head and blood relics of San Gennaro.

29  N  aples, Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro. Main gate by Cosimo Fanzago. Looking upwards while standing on the threshold with view of the busts of San Gennaro on both sides of the gate.

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30  C  osimo Fanzago, design for main gate of the Treasury Chapel, Naples, ink and watercolour on paper, 28.8 × 16.0 cm. Courtauld Institute of Art.

31  M  ichele Luigi Muzio, Temporary altar outside the Porta Capuana with relics of San Gennaro exposed during eruption of Vesuvius, from Camillo Tutini, Memorie istoriche della vita, miracoli, e culto di San Gianuario Martire Vescovo di Benevento, e principale protettore della Città di Napoli (Naples: Michele Muzio, 1710), facing p. 60. British Library Board, BL shelfmark RB.23.a.3552.

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32  Paolo Regio, Le Vite de’ Sette Santi Protettori di Napoli (Naples: Horatio Salviani, 1579). Title page and image of San Gennaro. Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli.

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33  V  iew over the rooftops of Naples with the Cathedral and cupola of the Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro in the centre.

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35  G  iovan Battista D’Aula, reliquary of the blood of St John the Baptist, 1727, silver.

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34  T reasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples. Main gate by Cosimo Fanzago. Detail showing ampoule-like bronze.

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36  Gianlorenzo Bernini. Cornaro Chapel, Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome.

37  S anta Cecilia in Trastevere, Rome. Interior view looking east with Stefano Maderno’s St Cecilia, 1600.

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39  Naples Cathedral, Old Treasury Chapel. Vault.

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38  Massimo Stanzione, San Gennaro Cures the Possessed Woman, 1643–46, oil on copper. Sacristy of the Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document 40  The Guglia of San Gennaro in the small square (now Piazza Riario Sforza) to the south of Naples Cathedral with the façade of Pio Monte della Misericordia beyond.

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Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document 41  Ferdinando Sanfelice, Monument to commemorate San Gennaro’s intervention against Vesuvius, 1707 in front of the church of Santa Caterina a Formello, Naples.

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42  Carlo Schisano, Saint Irene of Thessalonica, 1733, reliquary. Museo del Tesoro di San Gennaro, Naples.

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43  F ra Girolamo Maria di Sant’Anna, Istoria della Vita, Virtù e Miracoli di S. Gennaro Vescovo e Martire, Principal Padrone della Fedelissima Città di Napoli (Naples: Stefano Abbate, 1733). Title page and anteporta, designed by Francesco Solimena and engraved by Antonio Baldi.

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44  Domenichino, San Gennaro Overcomes Heretics, fresco in crossing pendentive, Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples.

45  Guarini Guarini, Chapel of the Santissima Sindone, Turin. Detail of vault.

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Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document 46  T reasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples. Left-hand lateral chapel. Giuliano Finelli, Sant’Andrea di Avellino, with empty niche while reliquary bust is in procession, May 2013.

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47 Santini or prayer cards. San Gennaro and St Patricia, Naples 2015.

48  Design for apparati for ‘festival of lights’ (‘Disegno della macchina per Lumi’), Naples, Archivio del Tesoro di San Gennaro, 158/49 DB/39.

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49  R  ecord of expenses by Cosimo Fanzago in relation to the Guglia of San Gennaro. Archivio del Tesoro di San Gennaro, Naples, 59/9 (1587), fol. 250.

50  D  ecree of 1663 relating to controversy between Deputies of the Treasury of San Gennaro and the Dominicans over the Kingdom of Naples’ principal patron. Archivio del Tesoro di San Gennaro, Naples, AA/6.

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51  Paolo Petrini, Pianta ed alzata della Città di Napoli (Naples: Paolo Petrini, 1718). Detail. British Library Board, BL shelfmark Maps *24045 (29). Letter ‘O’: Seggio of Capuano. 12/09/2016 08:37

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52  G  iuseppe Aloja and Niccolò Carletti, Veduta Scenografica a ponente della Città di Napoli in Campagna Felice (Naples, 1775). Detail showing the Cathedral (257), Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro (258), and Pio Monte della Misericordia (265). British Library, BL shelfmark Maps 184.a.1.

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53  Florence, Orsanmichele. Tabernacles with patron saints of Florence.

54  Naples, Traces of Seggio di Capuano.

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56  N  aples, San Domenico Maggiore, Chapel of the Crucifix. Wall tomb for Francesco Carafa commissioned by Oliviero Carafa.

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55  R  ome, Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, Cappella Sistina, 1585–89.

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57  Naples, Catacombs of San Gennaro.

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58  N  aples, Pio Monte della Misericordia. Caravaggio’s Seven Works of Mercy viewed from the meeting room of the deputies.

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59  N  aples, Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro. Reliquary bust of St Patricia in its niche.

60  N  aples, Procession of San Gennaro. Reliquary of St Patricia glitters in the sunshine, 5 May 2013.

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61  R  ome, Basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano. Reliquary cage with relics of the heads of saints Peter and Paul.

62  Spanish colonial coins, from Potosí, eight piece Reales silver, Philip IV, 1650.

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63  Pierre Miotte, Cita di Napoli (Rome: Gio: Battista Rossi, 1648). Fondazione Pagliara.

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Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document 64  G  iovanni Battista Manso, Vita e Miracoli di S. Patricia vergine Sacra con il compendio delle reliquie, che si conservano nella Chiesa del monasterio di detta santa in Napoli (Naples: Constantino Vitale, 1619). ’St Patricia Virgin. Patron of the city of Naples 1626’. Frontispiece.

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Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document 65  P  aolo Regio and Cleonte Torbizi, Vita di S. Patricia vergine Figlia dell’Imperator Costante e Protrettrice della Città e Regno di Napoli (Naples: Francesco Savio, 1643). ‘St Patricia Virgin. Patron of the city of Naples, 1625’. Frontispiece. Biblioteca Nazionale, Naples.

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66  Luca Giordano, Basilian Nuns Arrive in Naples with the Relics of Saint Gregory of Armenia, fresco on nuns’ west-end elevated choir, in church of San Gregorio Armeno, Naples.

67  Naples, Gesù Nuovo. Ex-votos, silver.

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68  Domenichino, San Gennaro is Tortured; San Gennaro and his Companions in the Amphitheatre of Pozzuoli; San Gennaro Restores Timotheo’s Sight, 1631–41, frescoes, Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples.

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70  N  icola Oddi, ‘True Likeness of the Servant of God Veronica Laparelli’, engraving to design by Antoine Podevin from Antonio Maria Bonucci, Vita della Ven. Serva di Dio Veronica Laparelli Monica Cisterciense (Naples, 1714). Biblioteca Nazionale, Naples.

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69  D  rawing to demonstrate the correct composition of brancard holders and order of participants. Naples, Archivio del Tesoro di San Gennaro, ATSG 9/2/113.

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71  D  omenico Antonio Ferri, Gennaro Parascandalo and Lorenzo Vaccaro (attrib.), St Candida, 1699 (restored by Vincenzo Caruso, 1842), silver reliquary. Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples.

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72  Alessandro Baratta, Fidelissimae urbis Neapolitanae cum omnibus viis accurata et nova delineatio,           

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           1629. Intesa Sanpaolo Collection, Gallerie d’Italia – Palazzo Zevallos Stigliano, Naples.

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Index

Acquaviva, Cardinal Ottavio (1560–1612) 11 affect (and emotion) 3–4, 24–25, 91, 193–199 Agnellus, saint 218, 225, 259, 287, 337, 366, 414 Agricola, Georgius 126, 143, 467 Agrippinus, saint 158, 218, 225, 259, 287, 337, 365 Alberti, Leon Battista 429 Albertus Magnus 106 alchemy and alchemists 127, 144, 164–167, 446, 461 Alexander VI, Pope 74 Álvarez de Toledo, Fernando. Viceroy of Naples, III Duke of Alba de Tormes 257, 292–293 see also viceroy Álvarez de Toledo y Beaumont, Antonio, V Duke of Alba de Tormes. Viceroy 372, 481–482 see also viceroy Ambrose, saint 231, 244, 443, 461 anachronic, anachronism 44 Andes 448–461 see also silver mining Andrea Avellino 177, 219, 226, 246, 258, 395, 400–401, 459, Fig.46 Anidjar, Gil 203–204 Anne, saint 220 Anthony Abbot 219, 220 Anthony of Padua 219, 220, 225, 343 Aquinas see Thomas, Aquinas archaeology 61 see also catacombs Archbishop of Naples 83, 84, 132, 151, 189–192, 197, 202, 206, 207, 217, 242,

Hills (4 colour).indb 591

276, 299–308, 357–358, 384, 484 Aristotle 93, 141, 159–160, 163, 306–308, 425 Asprenus, saint 158, 216, 218, 225, 259, 287, 337, Plate 17 Athanasius, saint 225, 259, 287, 337 Augustine, saint 45–46, 60, 110, 189, 219, 229–230, 255, 370, 439, 442, 464 d’Auxerre, Milet, goldsmith 86, Plate 6 Avellino, Andrea see Andrea Avellino Baldi, Antonio Fig.43 Balsamo, Alfonso 418 Baratta, Alessandro 480–483, Plate 47, Fig.72 Baronio, Cesare (Caesar Baronius) 56, 57, 110, 113, 138, 236 baroque 2–5, 23, 24, 414, 484, 494 Bartholomew, saint 178, 393 Basile, Teofilo 179–188, 195 Bataille, Georges 100, 104, 105 Bellarmine, Robert 57, 228 Beltrano, Ottavio 261 Benedictine Order 252, 394–399, 400–401 Benincasa, Orsola 147 Benjamin, Andrew 19 Benjamin, Walter 17, 120, 351, 480 Bernard of Clairvaux, saint 103–104, 393, 432–433 Bernardino of Siena, saint 220 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo 129, 322, Fig.36 Bernucci, Ciccardo, architect 12 Biringuccio, Vanoccio 156 Blaise, saint 219, 252, 343, 414, 458 blood 59, 65–122, 91, 479, 493 and bronze 123–173, 493

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592

Index blood (cont.) and Christ (Christianity) 96–98, 100–115, 196, 200 see also Mass circulation of 90–91, 95 and colour 107–111, 173, 186–188, 211 and humours 90–91, 193 and kinship 199–206 and life 84, 90–94, 186, 194 and purity 203–206 and sacrifice, 96–100, 102–107, 121–122, 167, 179, 187, 196–201, 473, 476–478 sedes animae 91–92 see also cruor; miracle of san Gennaro bloodletting 94, 95 Boesch Gajano, Sofia 40 Boldetti, Marc’Antonio 390 Bolgi, Andrea 129 Bollandists, the 57 Bonaventure, saint (Giovanni di Fidanza) 92 Boncompagni, Archbishop Francesco 147–149, 151, 302–304, 372 see also Archbishop of Naples Bonucci, Antonio Maria 428, 465 Borgia, Francesco, saint see Francesco Borgia, saint Borromeo, Cardinal Federico 58 Bosio, Antonio 56, 409 Bottoni, Domenico 146, 160 Braccini, Giulio Cesare 39, 123, 138, 141, 151 Breventano, Stefano 161 brocatello 6, 340 bronze 65, 121–122, 123–173, 319, 331, 336–339, 377, 460 Brown, Peter 229, 234 Burnet, Gilbert 140, 323–325, 372 Bynum, Caroline Walker 19, 40, 91, 102, 116, 117, 199, 432 Cajetan, Thomas (Gaetanus) 87 Calvin, Jean 56, 434 Camille, Michael 412, 434 Candelabra see splendori Candida, saint 216, 219, 397, 429, Fig.71 Canetti, Luigi 491 Cantelmo, Giacomo, Archbishop of Naples 151 see also Archbishop of Naples

Hills (4 colour).indb 592

Capaccio, Giulio Cesare 101, 153, 176, 247, 371–376, 424–428, 445 Capecelatro, Francesco 256, 257 capitalism see silver and capitalism Caracciolo, Cesare D’Engenio 6, 66–67, 80, 89, 209, 257 Caracciolo clan 274, 284 Carafa, Alessandro 279, 281, 287, 295, 310 Carafa, Diomede 290 Carafa, Maria Agnese 395, 398, 399, 409 Carafa, Oliviero 74, 129, 130n16, 277–284, 287, 288–292, 295, 416, Plates 10, 11, 35 Carafa, Tommaso 130n16 Carafa clan 36, 129, 130, 218, 271, 274, 277–283 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da 315, 441–442, Plate 48, Fig.58 Carrió-Invernizzi, Diana 191 Cartaro, Bartolomeo, architect 12 Carthusians 13 see also Naples, Certosa di San Martino Catacombs 55–56, 278, 323–325, Fig.57 Catherine of Siena, saint 197 Cavagni, Giovan Battista, architect 12 Cecilia, saint 219 Celano, Carlo 6, 110, 392, 394 Celestino, Pietro, saint (Pope Celestine V) 219, 220 Cerro Ricco see Potosí; silver Charles II of Anjou 415 chasuble 424 China 448–450, 452 city implicated in architecture and sanctity, 22–25, 32–34 see also Naples, city ‘civic ritual’ 54 Clare of Assisi, saint 219, 397 Clement VIII, Pope 232, 237, 249 Cola di Franco, Giovan, architect 12, 13 Cole, Michael 156, 160 Colonna, Anna 407 Colonna, Vittoria 407 colour see blood and colour Congregazione dei Padri Pii Operaij 95 Congregazione dei Riti 223, 248, 254, 343, 369, 401 copper 144, 157, 160, 311, 329 Corpus Christi see Corpus Domini Corpus Domini, feast 191, 205, 358 Council of Trent 3, 4, 56, 114, 222, 305

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Cranach, Lucas the Elder 82 Crucifixion 96–98, 99–101 cruor 96–97, 101, 106, 107, 116–118 Cyril of Jerusalem 47 D’Alessio, Onofrio 165, 166, Plates 16, 17 Danti, Vincenzo 156 D’Avalos family 247, 249 De Acevedo y Zúñiga, Manuel, Viceroy of Naples. Count of Monterrey 147–148, 151 see also viceroy De Aragón, Pedro Antonio, Duke of Segorbe y Cardona. Viceroy of Naples 192 see also viceroy De Dominici, Bernardo 7, 125 De Guevara, Anna, princess of Montesarchio 344 Deleuze, Gilles 24, 25, 210, 216, 233, 267, 367, 385, 419, 438, 487, 490 De Lellis, Carlo 6, 7, 287 Del Giuseppe, Gennaro 226 Del Guidice, Giuseppe 226, Plate 27 De Martino, Cesare 160 Deputation (Deputazione) of the Treasury of San Gennaro 10, 11, 12, 14, 24, 88, 135, 152, 199, 206, 217, 261–267, 270–272, 275–279, 295–296, 298–315, 332, 340–348, 384, 486–487 see also Treasurer (Pro-Treasurer) of Deputation of the Treasury of San Gennaro De Quiñones, Juan 142 de Rosa, Luise, 80 Derrida, Jacques 179, 184, 188 De Stefano, Pietro 284–285 Di Bartolomeo, Dionisio, architect 12 Di Conforto, Giovan Giacomo, architect 12 Didi-Huberman, Georges 14, 42, 445 Di Nardo, Domenico 326–327, Fig.16 Di Tomaso, Agostino 260 Domenica, saint 220 Domenichino (Domenico Zampieri) 87, 90, 144, 296, 355, 380, 381, 383, 423, 424, 430, Plates 20, 36, 42, Figs. 44, 68 Dominic, saint 219, 220, 248, 257 Dominicans, the Dominican Order, 100, 248, 375

Hills (4 colour).indb 593

Index

593

Dominici, Bernardo de see De Dominici, Bernardo Doria, Marcantonio 441 Drake Boehm, Barbara 417 Drummond, James, fifth earl of Perth 194 Eletti of Naples 10, 147, 208, 240, 249, 283, 299, 356, 482 Eliade, Mircea 131 Emiddius, saint 219, 430, 431 emotions see affect empire see Spanish rule energeia 425, 475 England 69 Enríquez de Toledo y Guzmán, María. Duchess of Alba and vicereine of Naples 292–293, 417 see also viceroy, vicereine, vicerealty Etna, Mount 136 see also volcano, volcanic Eucharist see Mass Euphebius, saint 225, 259, 287, 337 excess 5–7, 19, 34 see also baroque ex-voto 7–12, 42, 445, 459, Fig.67 Ezekiel, 91 Falcone, Andrea 342, 344, 418 Falcone, Nicolò Carminio 200, 244, 421, Plate 15 Fanzago, Cosimo 20, 36 124, 127, 129, 132, 259 and Santa Teresa agli Studi, Naples 134 and Treasury Chapel, 126–140, 158, 259, 336, Plates 17, 23, 25, 26, Figs. 28, 29, 30, 34, 49 feast days 69, 181, 191, 198, 259, 352–385, 371–376, 470–471, 484–485 see also Vesuvius, feast of Ferdinand I of Aragon, King 73, 74, 245, 280–281 Fernández de Córdoba y Figuerra, Ana (vicereine) 192 Ferrata, Ercole 237 Ferri, Antonio Fig.71 festivals see feast days see also San Gennaro, feast days; processions Ficino, Marsilio 95, 162 Filippo Neri, saint 56, 220, 246, 261, 346 Filippo di Taranto 86

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594

Index Filomarino, Ascanio (Archbishop of Naples) 87, 302, 305–308, 395 Finelli, Giuliano 158, 259, 336, Fig.46 flagellants, 95 Florence 34, 35 Orsanmichele 326, Fig.53 Fontana, Giulio Cesare, architect 12 Fortunato, saint 220, 397 Forty Hour devotions see Quarant’Ore Fra Bernardo Siciliano 77 Francesco Borgia, saint 219, 220, 230, 238, 240, 246, 249, 252, 333 Francesco di Paola, saint 219, 220, 245, 371–376, 400, 414, 416, 424–426 Francis of Assisi, saint 219, 220 Franciscans 77, 246, 343, 375 Francis Xavier, saint 219, 220, 246, 328, 345 Frezzi, Federico, Bishop of Bologna (1346–c.1416) 25 Gaetano da Thiene, saint 219, 220, 246, 344, 345–366 Galasso, Giuseppe 246, 248 Galeota, Maria Ana 463 Galeota, Teresia Capece 463 Gallonio, Antonio 56 Gargiulo, Domenico Micco Spadaro 87, 423, 424, Plate 14 gate of Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro see Cosimo Fanzago; bronze Gennaro, San (saint Januarius), Bishop of Benevento blood see Gennaro, San, relics; Gennaro San, miracle and blood churches dedicated to 244–245, 278 clothes of see Gennnaro San, mitre, jewels and clothes feast days of 69, 69, 77, 108, 137, 154–155, 263–264, 273, 305–307, 320–321, 334–335, 352–385, 470–471 see also feasts; Vesuvius, feast of Guglia of San Gennaro see Naples, Guglia di San Gennaro life of 69, 71–73, 131–132, 200, 260, 430 miracle and blood 29–31, 34–35, 52, 58–59, 65–122, 152–172, 175–211, 224, 352–358, 362–368, 380–385, 405, 430, 436, 479, 480–486, 488, 491–494, Figs.1, 2

Hills (4 colour).indb 594

miracle as analogy for bronze 123–173, 493 see also bronze miracle of, as intolerant 119, 193–194, 195–206 mitre, jewels and clothes 420–421, 423–425, Plate 12 protector saint 29–31, 218, 248–249, 260–261, 458–485, Plates 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, 20, 21, 23, 26, 29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 36, 40, 42, Figs.47, 50 relics 9–10, 72–74, 80–122, 142, 147, 225, 242, 272, 301–302, 307, 352, 375–376, 380–384, 430, 436, 488, Fig.1, 31 reliquary bust 80, 86–87, 410, 412–413, 415–426, 440–441, Plates 12, 40 translations of 9, 70–77, 242–243, 278–284, 354–360, 382–383 Genoa 221 Giacomo della Marca 95, 147, 219, 240, 246, 366, 400, 405, Fig.23 Giordano, Luca 87, 330, 386, 405, Figs.17, 66 Giudice, Cardinal Francesco del 189 Giuliani Gianbernardino 140, 145, 146, 148, Fig.27 glass 143, 144 Godefroyd, Étienne, goldsmith 86, Plate 6 gold 122, 123, 142, 144, 157, 165, 167, 311, 421, 449, 457, 461, 475 Granada, Spain 230, 251, 415 Gregory of Armenia, saint 219, 256, 345–366, 366, 386 Gregory the Great 46 Gregory of Nazienzus 47, 391 Gregory of Tours 235 Grimaldi, Francesco, architect 12, 125 Grosz, Elizabeth 320, 349 Guattari, Félix 24 Guibert of Nogent 45, 459–460 Hahn, Cynthia 41, 413, 436 heart 90–91, 95, 122 Heesterman, J.C. 105 Hephaestus 137 historicism 14–16, 19 Hobbes, Thomas 205 honey 82 Hooghelande, Cornelis van 95

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humours and humoural system see blood and humours hylomorphism 93, 432 Ianuarius, saint see Gennaro, San Ignatius Loyola, saint 219, 220, 246, 328 imago 59, 100, 120 invention 52 Irene of Thessalonica 219, 220, 226, 260, 430, Plates 8, 9 Isidore of Seville 123, 135, 157, 417, 419, 429–430, 438–441, 451, 464, 470 Januarius, saint see Gennaro, San Januas 129 Janus 130 Jerusalem 54, 321, 322, 403, 404 Jesuits (Society of Jesus) 58, 146, 246, 333, 375 jewels 420–421 Jews 119, 199, 321 John the Baptist, saint, and feast 176–178, 180–188, 191, 219, 333, 358, 366, 484, Plate 44, Fig.35 John of Capistrano, saint 100, 219 John Chrysostom 47, 197, 235, 440 Joseph, saint 219, 220 Judaism 321 Just, saint 220 Kingdom of Naples see Naples, Kingdom of Kircher, Athanasius 140 Kohl, Jeanette 419–420 Lanfranco, Giovanni Plate 21 Laparelli, Veronica 428, 465, Fig.70 lapis lazuli 169 Lecce 220 Lemnius, Levinus 91 Lepanto, Battle of 70 light 464–468, 473–478 Lippi, Filippino 289–290, Plate 35 liquefaction of blood in Campania and Sorrentine peninsula 68, 82, 176–179 and Naples urbs sanguinum 68, 176–179 outside Italy 29, 116 see also Gennaro, miracle; John the Baptist

Hills (4 colour).indb 595

Index

595

London Watch 353–354 Loreto, Casa Santa 54 Loyola, Ignatius see Ignatius Loyola, saint Lubrani, Giacomo 80, 85, 91, 95, 98, 131 Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Carus) 140, 141 Maderno, Stefano 237, 408, Fig.37 Madrid 142 Las Descalzas Reales 53, Fig.14 magnificence 6–8 Mâle, Émile 410, 444 Malfi, Tiberio 94, 418, Fig.21 Malvito, Tommaso 284 Manso, Giovanni Battista, Marquis of Villa 150, 392, 402–405 Maranta, Fabio, Bishop of Calvi 11 marble 127, 132, 166, 286 see also brocatello Marchese, Francesco 96, 158–159, Fig.24 Marciano 74, 280 Margherita (Margaret) of Cortona, saint 471–472 Maria of Austria, Queen of Bohemia and Hungary 189 Maria di Sant’Anna, Girolamo 113, 137, 206, 229, 231, 235, 242, 243, 262, 355–356, 423, Fig.43 Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi 219, 246, 366, 414 Marinelli, Domenico 259, 332, 336 Marino, Giovan Battista 119 martyr and martyrdom 61, 77, 79, 96–106, 166–172, 175–176, 234–235, 260, 380–382, 393, 409, 461–465, 493–494 Marx, Karl 446, 448 Mary of Egypt, saint 219, 255, 366, 397, 429, Plates 43, 44 Mary Magdalen 219 Masaniello 359 Mass (Eucharist) 45, 47, 68, 80, 81, 89, 92, 95, 96, 106, 108, 114–118, 192, 197, 205, 208, 386–387, 463–464, 472–474, 483 materiality 3–5, 20–22, 158–170 Maurus, saint 220 Mecatti, G.M, 145, Fig.26 Medusa 85, 135 mercury (quicksilver) 144, 450–452 meridionalismo 34

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596

Index metals and metallurgy 121–122, 126, 142, 143, 146, 152, 164–173 in the Treasury Chapel s 121–122, 123–173, 463–478 see also bronze, silver, gold Mexico 447, 453–455 see also ‘New World’ Michael, archangel 219, 226, 245, 296, Plate 28 Milan, S. Paolo 408 milk 82, 110 Minims, Order of 223, 371–376, 416 Miotte, Pierre 405, 492, Fig.63 miracle of blood of John the Baptist see John the Baptist, saint and materiality 29–31, 58–60, 67–70, 89, 100–121, 167–173, 174–211, 490–495 and social exclusion 188–192 see also Gennaro, Miracle of as intolerant and time 107–111, 479–480 see also Gennaro, miracle; liquefaction Monte, Antonio (bronze caster) 125 Monte, Gennaro (bronze caster) 165, 329, Plates 16, 17, 45 Montevergine 9, 73, 279, 281, 382 Muir, Edwin 54, 55, 409 music 262–263, 483 Muslims 119, 145, 196, 200, 372 Muzio, Michele Luigi 149, Figs.20, 31 Naccherino, Michelangelo 12, 123, Plate 18 Nagel, Alexander 21, 43, 44, 61, 261 Nancy, Jean-Luc 476 Naples, city 9, 19, 25–26, 31–35, 50, 62, 69, 71, 76–77, 110, 115, 120, 163, 173, 176–179, 186–187, 207, 216, 220, 222, 238–239, 241, 253, 260, 297–298, 314–315, 351, 374, 396–399, 402, 477–478, 481–484, 486–487, 492–495 see also Naples, Kingdom of; Naples, Seggi; napoletanità Naples, city: individual institutions, churches, convents, monasteries, palaces Castel Nuovo 376, 481 Castel Sant’Elmo 481

Hills (4 colour).indb 596

Cathedral (Duomo) 77, 83–84, 128–129, 133, 147, 150–151, 154, 191–192, 206, 257, 259, 299–302, 307, 343, 360–362, 398–399, 403, 457, 485, 488 Cappella di S. Aspreno 365 Chapel of S. Maria del Principio 415, Plate 19 Old Treasury Chapel 11, Fig.6 S. Restituta 129, 286 Succorpo chapel, 36, 129, 130, 259, 271–311, 416, Plate 34, Figs. 8, 15 Certosa di San Martino 13, 123, 124, 134, 458, Fig.12 New Treasury Chapel 326–331, Plates 39, 41 Duomo see Naples, cathedral Gesù Nuovo 123, 458 Cappella Fornaro Plate 18 Reliquary chapel of St Anne 326, 327–328, 331, Fig.16 Gesù Vecchio 327 Guglia di San Gennaro 263–264, 312, 315, 353, 376–380, 471, 485, 492, Plates 29, 30, Fig.40 Lazaretto di san Gennaro 278–279 Madonna dell’Arco 59 Ospedale degli Incurabili 303 Palazzo Reale 374, 481 Pio Monte della Misericordia 315, 379, Fig.58 Ponte della Maddalena 147 Porta Capuana 149, 150 Quartieri Spagnoli 481 S. Agnello 147 S. Agostino 176, 370–371, 372 S. Agrippino 365 S. Andrea delle Dame 12 SS. Annunziata 134, 148, 150, 303, 343, 457, Fig.12 SS. Apostoli 12 S. Biagio de’ Librai 344 S. Caterina a Formiello 151, 206, 312, 485 S. Domenico Maggiore 290, 366 S. Francesco delle Monache 364, 471 S. Francesco la Nova 333 S. Gaudioso 176, 397 S. Gennaro fuori le Mura (extra Moenia) 138, 151, 278 S. Giacomo degli Spagnoli 481 S. Giorgio Maggiore 365

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S. Giovanni a Carbonara 176, 177 S. Giuseppe Maggiore 346 S. Gregorio Armeno 176, 177, 178, 180–185, 252, 366, 386, 388, 405, 406, Plate 22 S. Lorenzo 129, 242, 343, 361 see also Naples, Tribunale di San Lorenzo S. Luigi 371–375 S. Maria degli Angeli 12, 147 S. Maria del Carmine 356, 366 S. Maria di Costantinopoli 147, 151 S. Maria della Croce 364 S. Maria Donnalbina 366 S. Maria Donnarómita 176, 177, 178, 333, 366 S. Maria Egiziaca a Forcella 334, 336 S. Maria Egiziaca in Pizzofalcone 366 S. Maria delle Grazie 370 S. Maria la Nova 471 S. Maria Regina Coeli 255, 332, 333, 368–369, 371 S. Maria della Sapienza 12, 388 S. Maria della Vita 366 S. Martino see Certosa di San Martino SS. Nicandro e Marciano 391–392 S. Paolo Maggiore 12, 327, 333, 344, 399, 458, 459 S. Patrizia 176, 178, 246, 257, 295, 366, 387, 391–409, 463 S. Pietro ad Aram 370 S. Restituta see Naples, Cathedral, S. Restituta S. Spirito 375 S. Teresa agli Studi 134 SS. Trinità delle Monache 12 Tribunale di San Lorenzo 9 Vicaria 482 see also Naples, Kingdom; Naples, Seggi Naples, Kingdom of 69, 70, 359, 452–453 see also Naples, city Naples, Seggi (‘Piazze’) 26, 37, 69, 78, 165, 208, 242, 249, 256, 263, 272–275, 299, 312–314, 343, 352–377, 372, 373, 375, 393, 399–400, 409, 481, 485, 488–489 Seggio Capuana 78, 252, 256, 274, 306, 343, 392, 399, Fig.54 Seggio di Forcella see Seggio di Montagna Seggio di Montagna 78, 274, 306, 344 Seggio di Nido 78, 274, 343, 392

Hills (4 colour).indb 597

Index

597

Seggio del Popolo 78, 147, 207, 242, 273–274, 343, 356–360, 372, 373, 481 Seggio di Porto 78, 274, 481 Seggio di Portanova 78, 274, 481 napoletanità, 71 Neri, Filippo see Filippo Neri ‘New World’ 38, 422, 447, 448 see also silver and Spanish empire niche 37, 225, 226, 319–350, 476 Nicholas of Bari, saint 219, 232, 250–251, 252, 345–346 Nicholas of Tolentino 176, 220 Oddi, Nicola Fig.70 Olimpio, Francesco 465–466 Olivetans 375 Oratorians 259 Oronzo, saint 220 Otranto 246, 372 Ottomans see Muslims 372 Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) 130, 140 Paci, Giovanni Francesco 215, 243 Pacichelli, Giovan Battista 456–457 Padri Pii Operaij see Congregazione dei Padri Pii Operaij Palermo 221, 398, 428 Pantaleon, saint 176 Panvinio, Onofrio 56 Paragallo, Gaspare 140–142, 143, 164, 437 Parascandalo, Gennaro Fig.71 Parrino, Domenico Antonio, 5, 85, 126, 193, 216, 421 Pasquale, Baylon, saint 246 Patricia, saint 176, 178, 219, 225, 226, 246, 259, 337, 391–409, 414, Figs.47, 59, 60, 64, 65 patron saints see protector saints Paul V, Camillo Borghese, Pope (1605–21) 11, 300 Paul, saint 112, 204, 216, 247, 293 Pellegrino, Girolamo 356 Perrey, Nicolas 145, Fig.27 Peter, saint 112, 147, 216, 247, 293, 482 Peter Martyr, saint 219 Petrarca, Valerio, 101 Petrini, Paolo Figs. 19, 51 Philip II, King of Spain 53, 292 see also Spanish rule Philip III, King of Spain 13 see also Spanish rule

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598

Index Philip V, King of Spain 192 see also Spanish rule phlebotomy 94 Picchiatti, Francesco Antonio 315 Pietro da Cortona 236 Pignatelli, Francesco, archbishop 202, 347 see also Archbishop of Naples Pignatelli, Maria Caterina 369 Pignone, Emilio, Pro-Treasurer of Deputation 93 pignora 48, 99, 104 Piscicelli, Laura, abbess 397 Placidi, Fabio 195 Plague 2, 8–12, 15, 70, 221, 233, 239, 248, 279, 282–283, 314 Plato 141, 420 Pliny the Elder 140, 158 Pliny the Younger 145, 146 Porcelli, Francesco 392 portento 174, 485 see also miracle Potosí 448, 449–451, 472, Plate 49 pozzolana 152 Pozzuoli 2, 72, 74, 75, 137, 216, 380, 383 processions and cavalcades 146–149, 151, 206–207, 259, 314, 320–321, 333–336, 351–385, 397–401, 416, 421–422, 445, 469–471, 481–482, 493, Plates 24, 40, Fig.69 prodigio 174 protector saints 39, 55, 61, 62, 88, 197–198, 208, 215–269, 290–292, 296–297, 319–322, 351–383, 398–405, 427–429, 460–463, 479, 482–483, 490–491, 494 and silver reliquaries see silver reliquaries Protestants 54, 69, 119, 194, 195, 196, 201–202, 215 Quarant’ore devotions 208, 364 quicksilver see mercury Raggi, Maria Teresa 370 Raphael, archangel 219, 226, 296, Plate 27 Regio, Paolo 55, 75–76, 95, 137, 139, 193, 227, 237, 355, 382, 383, 402, 407, Figs.23, 32, 65 relics 9, 25, 28–31, 39–62, 104, 179–191, 198–199, 233–235, 258, 261–262, 338–339, 349–356, 351–385,

Hills (4 colour).indb 598

400–409, 421–445, 458–478, 480–482, 483–489, 493 and Christ 45, 104–107 economy of the relic 432–442 and Eucharist 45–52 and gender 386–409 see also Gennaro, saint; relics and gender reliquaries 41, 42, 61–62, 181–186, 260–262, 326–332, 335–346, 351–385, 396–399, 412–445, 488–489 clothing of reliquary busts 420–426 and decapitation 430–432 and fenestrella or oculus 435–442 see also Gennaro, reliquary bust; Gennaro, blood, silver reliquaries Rembrandt van Rijn 455 Reni, Guido 486 Riario, Ottavia 370 Riario, Ottaviano 370 Ribera, Jusepe de Pietà (Certosa di San Martino) 328–330, Plate 39 San Gennaro Escapes Unharmed from the Furnace 127, 167–172, 173, 174, 424, 462, Plate 13 San Gennaro Intercedes on Behalf of Naples 422–423, Plate 31 Riccardo, Agostino (lay sister at Regina Coeli) 332 Rome 14, 34, 35, 50, 70, 100, 236, 409 Rome buildings, basilicas, churches, palaces S. Anastasia 237 S. Cecilia in Trastevere 237, 409, Fig.37 S. Cesareo d’Appia 236 SS. Domenico e Sisto 394 S. Giovanni in Laterano 322, 323, Figs.7, 61 S. Lorenzo in Lucina 129 S. Maria in Campo Marzio 391–392 S. Maria Maggiore Cappella Paolina 270, 294–295, 313 Cappella Sistina 270, 294–295, 313, Fig.55 S. Maria sopra Minerva 289 S. Maria Regina Coeli 390, 407 S. Maria della Vittoria 322 SS. Martina e Luca 236 SS. Nereo ed Achilleo 236

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S. Silvestro in Capite 390 S. Teresa al Quirinale 390, Fig.36 Rosa of Lima, saint 220 Rubens 444 Sacra Congregazione dei Riti see Congregazione dei Riti sacrifice see blood and sacrifice; cruor; Mass saints see protector saints; sanctity Sallmann, Jean-Michel 220, 221, 224, 245 Salvi, Tarduccio 94 sanctity 32–34, 37, 50–51, 56–58, 103, 118, 167–172, 196–197, 215–269, 336–340, 349–350, 351–385, 410–445, 470–494 see also semideus Sanfelice, Ferdinando Fig.41 San Gennaro see Gennaro, San sanguis, see blood Sanmartino 226 Sanmartino, Giuseppe Plate 27 santini cards 260 Sarnelli, Pompeo 291, Fig.25 Schisano, Carlo 260, 444, Plates 8, 9, Fig.42 Schmitt, Jean-Claude 40, 386 Seggi see Naples, Seggi seigniorage 448–449 see also silver semideus 228 Sersale, Benedetto Plate 37 Severus, saint 218, 225, 259, 280, 287, 325, 337, 418, 429 Sfondrati, Cardinal Paolo Camillo 408 Siena 218 silk 454 silver 38, 65, 121–122, 142, 157, 165, 181, 295, 308–310, 320, 342, 354, 364, 412–420, 425–426, 441–442, 443–444, 446–478 assaying and purification 461–464, 470–473 and capitalism 410–411, 456–457, 468, 477–478 cleaning see silver, polishing collections 447–448 and light 464–468, 473–478 mining 411, 448, 449–451, 472, 477 polishing (cleaning) 469–471, 474–477 purification see assaying and purification reliquaries 320–321, 333–339, 341,

Hills (4 colour).indb 599

Index

599

352–385, 446–478, 488, 489, 493–494 silver and the soul see silver, assaying and purification and Spanish empire 447–457, 460–477 see also silversmiths silversmiths 455–456, 469 see also individual names Siniscaldo, Giovanni Domenico 374 smelting see metals Society of Jesus see Jesuits Solfatara 72, 137 Solimena, Francesco 423, Plate 7, Fig.43 Sorrento 220 Spain see Spanish rule Spanish rule 31, 38, 147–148, 191–192, 201–207, 221, 229, 230, 239, 242, 253, 258, 266, 273–276, 411, 447–463, 479, 481–483 Spinelli, Giuseppe (Archbishop of Naples) 197 splendori 123 Stanislaus, Kostka 220 Stanzione, Massimo Fig 38 Suger, Abbot of St Denis 473–474 tears 110, 194–196 Telesio, Bernardino 136, 163 Teresa of Ávila 134, 219, 246, 322, 345–347 Tertullian (Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus) 99 Theatines 125, 259, 375, 400, 401 Thomas Aquinas, saint 45, 46–47, 60, 92, 106, 196, 218, 225, 232, 237, 245, 246–249, 259, 289, 337, 366, 374, 414, 418, 433, 442, 443 Timotheo Dragontino 72, 137, 179 Torbizi, Cleonte 402, Fig.65 Torres, Antonio (General Preposito) 95 translations of San Gennaro’s relics see Gennaro transubstantiation 68, 79, 98 see also Eucharist treasure 6, 22, 91 Treasurer (and Pro-Treasurer) of Deputation of Treasury of San Gennaro 81, 88, 93, 151, 153, 189, 206, 275–276, 306 see also Deputation of Treasury of San Gennaro; Treasury Treasury 123–124, 301

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600

Index Treglia, Aniello 342, 418, 421, 431 Trent see Council of Trent Trexler, Richard 54 Tridentine Decrees see Council of Trent Turin 41, 323 Tutini, Camillo 11, 71, 77, 111, 149, 177, 261, 325, Figs.20, 31

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Urban VIII, Pope (Maffeo Barberini) 223, 304–305, 343 Vaccaro, Lorenzo 226, 418, Plates 28, 43, Fig.71 Valier, Agostino 405 Vatican, Gallery of Maps and San Gennaro’s miracle 71–72, 78 Venice 35, 132, 221 Verdelay, Guillaume de, goldsmith 86, Plate 6 Vervloet, Franz 330, Plate 41 Vesuvius 67, 70, 77, 87, 124, 128, 136–159, 194–195, 206, 233, 239, 244, 245, 312, 378, 381, 423, 484, 485, 487, 490, 492, 493 Vesuvius and bronze 123–173 ‘feast of Vesuvius’ 69, 151, 191, 198, 376–377 Vicario Generale (Naples) 9 viceroy, vicereine, vicerealty 78, 147, 148, 151, 189, 191–192, 202, 253, 258–259,

Hills (4 colour).indb 600

266, 272, 292–293, 299–301, 311, 358–360, 384, 421, 456, 481–484, 485 Vico, Giambattista, 93 Villani, Maria 196 Vinaccia, Gian Domenico 226, 295, 336, 418, 470, Plate 28, Figs. 10, 16 Virgil 136 virginity 49, 227 Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus 393, 402, 404, 482 Immaculate Conception 414, 440 Virilio, Paul 350 virtus 47, 51, 59, 84, 421, 425–426, 464–466, 478 volcano, volcanic 67, 128, 140–150, 239, 245 see also Vesuvius vows see ex-voto Vulcan 137 wax 162 weeping see tears Willis, Thomas, 96 witness and witnessing 36, 167–172, 174–211 Wood, Christopher 21, 43, 44, 61, 261 Xavier, Francis saint see Francis Xavier, saint Zampieri, Domenico see Domenichino Zupančič, Alenka 362

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