Spectacular Miracles: Transforming Images in Italy from the Renaissance to the Present 1780231059, 9781780231051

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Time past grows no more real through sufferings endured. Incomprehensible, too, on the horizon, above the blue vapour spread over the land, after four days at sea, the smoke trails from Asia’s volcanoes. To get close to this vista they tack back beneath the coast, at one quarter of a knot per hour southward a good week long, by night pull at the oars, too, until, on the twenty-fifth of the month, they reach the harbour of Petropavlovsk, its plundered blockhouses and stores. In thanksgiving for the miracle of their release, and in accordance with Bering’s wish, they make a silver frame, beaten out of the coins left unspent to the last, for St Peter’s icon. W. G. Sebald, After Nature

SPECTACULAR MIR ACLES Transforming Images in Italy from the Renaissance to the Present * Jane Garnett and Gervase Rosser

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Published by Reaktion Books Ltd 33 Great Sutton Street London ec1v 0dx, uk www.reaktionbooks.co.uk First published 2013 Copyright © Jane Garnett and Gervase Rosser 2013 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers. Printed and bound in China by Toppan Printing Co. Ltd. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Garnett, Jane. Spectacular miracles : transforming images in Italy from the Renaissance to the present. 1. Mysticism and art — Italy — History. 2. Icons — Cult — Italy — History. 3. Christian art and symbolism — Italy — Renaissance, 1450-1600. 4. Christian art and symbolism — Italy — -Modern, 15005. Psychology and art — Italy — History. 6. Supernatural in art. i. Title ii. Rosser, Gervase. 701.1´5´0945-dc23 isbn: 978 1 78023 105 1

Contents

Preface 7 one

The Time and Space of the Miraculous Image 11 two

The Invented Image 63 three

The Activated Image 109 four

Communion with the Image 161 five

The Power of the Infinite Copy 191 six

Portrait in an Altered Landscape 221 references 269 select bibliograph\ 299 list of illustrations 301 acknowledgements 306 index 308

1 Domenico Fiasella, The Virgin Mary Queen of Genoa, c. 1638, oil on canvas.

Preface

n this book we confront an enduring Western culture of belief in the supernatural power of images. In presenting this material from Catholic Italy and its diaspora, we join a small number of others who in recent years have challenged the conventional categorical distinctions which enable educated people to hold at a safe distance practices surrounding images which, in so far as they are considered at all, tend to be patronizingly dismissed as ‘primitive’, ‘pietistic’ or ‘popular’. A challenging assault on the general avoidance of the sometimes disturbing ways in which images excite emotional response was launched by David Freedberg in The Power of Images, first delivered as the Slade Lectures in the University of Oxford in 1984.1 The broadening scope of the discipline of art history has by now made the subject-matter of Freedberg’s study more familiar, although many of the questions raised there await definitive answers. But the specific issue of the miraculous, not within the context of non-European or medieval cultures but of images in the modern Western world, remains largely off the cultural agenda. If this is so, it is partly because of continuing sensitivities surrounding the definition of art, from which the professional guardians of that category still tend to exclude the material traces of vernacular religion such as mass-produced prayer cards and plastic saints. Despite art history’s recent questioning of the canon, and the extension of its remit to embrace previously unconsidered aspects of visual culture, it remains fair to say that the discipline has yet to establish a modus vivendi with the kinds of evidence introduced in the following pages. The imagery in question in this book, and the ways in which it engages people’s lives, throw down a challenge to certain received definitions of art. The power understood by millions of people to reside in the statues and pictures we discuss has nothing to do with their aesthetic qualities as understood by traditional art history. Nor does it derive from mechanisms of patronage or the market, such as have been

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the focus of study of the recent social history of art. In discussing imagery of this kind, we need to find a way to do justice to its material aspects without imposing upon it the language and judgements of high art, and without reducing it to a deposit of religious politics or commerce. If the language and conventions of the history of art have contributed considerably to the marginalization of the subject-matter of this book, an even greater difficulty concerns the belief and practice of religion. Outside the professional realms of theology, medieval or Renaissance history, or an anthropology of ‘the other’, the religious veneration of images remains a difficult subject to communicate or even to broach in polite society. One or two recent museum exhibitions, however, appear to be symptomatic of a change, both in the willingness of curators to cross the conventional boundaries of the gallery display and in the responsiveness of a public evidently eager to engage with the devotional aspects of the material on show. Seeing Salvation:The Image of Christ, held at the National Gallery in London in 2000, attracted almost 360,000 visitors. Reflecting on the popular success of this exhibition, its curator, Gabriele Finaldi, declared:‘I had the impression that after a long exile, the religious image had come home.’2 In 2009 the same gallery presented The Sacred Made Real: Spanish Painting and Sculpture, 1600–1700, which attracted an enthusiastic response for its emphasis on the devotional functions of the striking images in the show, a number of which were loaned from religious institutions where they continue to be objects of devotion.3 Yet even with sympathetic treatment, the gallery context works against the grain of such material. As Robert Orsi, contributor to another such display on the theme of the Virgin Mary in art, acknowledged: ‘The Madonna cannot be fixed to museums’ walls.’4 The problem is not only the lack of context, however – the fact that the statue of Christ or icon of the Virgin in the gallery has by definition been deracinated from the cultural context which gave it life. The further and perhaps profounder difficulty, especially for the Protestant or atheist observer, is a perceived assault upon deeply held notions of propriety when attention is drawn to the religious force of such images. ‘It is outrageous. I thought that the Ashmolean Museum was about the promotion of art, not the promotion of superstition and bigotry.’ This was not an isolated response when we agreed in 2005 to mount a photographic exhibition of miraculous images.5 Through the design of the exhibition we attempted to capture something of the felt experience of the pilgrim at one of the image shrines 8

Preface

in an Italian church.This emphasis on the devotional purpose of the objects on view caused discomfort for certain visitors, who had no such misgivings about a painting of the Virgin Mary in an adjacent gallery, safely quarantined from religious contamination by an anachronistic frame and with a museum label nearby to fix its artistic status.6 The affronted response revealed how unsettling the very idea of the religious power of images is in a culture which, although in many ways secularized, also remains deeply marked by Protestantism. Mistrust of images of the gods is not, of course, confined to the Protestant tradition. Every culture manifests concerns on this score, and a tendency to oscillate between moments more and less sympathetic to the use of images in religion.7 We have been living in a time in which that debate has been dominated by scepticism towards such images. The challenge, therefore, is a daunting one. In our attempt to contribute to this set of issues, we have lived and conducted research over a number of years in the places in which the material we discuss is to be found, in many cases still today the focus of active cults.This book is the result of that experience, but it is also indebted to earlier writers who, from a range of perspectives, have engaged with the issues we discuss.8 We hope to provoke others to carry the debate forward.

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2 Frontispiece to Guilielmus Gumppenberg, Atlas marianus (Munich, 1672).

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The Time and Space of the Miraculous Image

n sunday evening which was the feast of the Conception, I saw the statue of the Madonna in the parish church, at the altar of Corpus Christi, clearly move her eyes. It happened after the blessing, while they were singing in the church ‘We are children of Mary’. Asked if anyone had told him about this or whether he had seen it without being warned, he answered: My friend Giovanni Vivaldi told me that a lady, whose name I don’t know, but she’s the butcher’s daughter, had told him. Asked in what manner the Madonna moved her eyes, he replied: I just saw her move her left eye: the black of the eye moved from its usual place towards the nose, then to the other end, and then upwards so that the black was almost completely hidden (see illus. 36).1

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Miracles and modernity The plate opposite shows a vision of the world protected by a web of miraculous images (illus. 2). The story of the supernatural transport of the Virgin Mary’s house from Nazareth to Loreto, in the Italian Marches, had first been told in the second half of the fifteenth century. It was claimed that two centuries earlier, angels had airlifted the building from Palestine, making short stops on the Dalmatian and Italian coasts before the final arrival at Loreto. The loss of the Christian crusader state in the Holy Land, which provided the plausible context for the removal of the Virgin’s house in the narrative, was echoed by the circumstances in mid-fifteenth-century Albania and Dalmatia, when numerous Christians fled those territories to escape Ottoman oppression, finding refuge around Ancona and Recanati. Also lending credibility to the miraculous account was the simplicity of the humble structure, which rests on the ground at Loreto without foundations. This 11

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engraving shows a view from the heavens as the holy house makes its supernatural passage from the ominous darkness of the eastern part of the globe to the enlightened region of Christendom and Europe. Produced in the age of Copernicus and Galileo, the picture shows the Earth to be illuminated not primarily by the sun but by rays of light emanating from the house of the Virgin Mary, supported in the mediating zone between the Heavens and the Earth by a team of angels. The simple domesticity of the house – this is clearly not a church, but the secular home of Mary, the mother of Jesus – underlines the accessible ordinariness of the Virgin herself, even as her proximity to the Heavens indicates her lofty status. The roof and floor of the house are composed of various portrait images of the Mother of God, holding the Christ Child now to her left, now on her other side.The dynamic form of the Virgin sits on the roof, the child in her arms holding the globe. She gestures towards her images above and below. Sheets of these images, as present in the heavens as in the structure of the house, fan out from the Madonna as she travels. Infused with light by the radiant agency of theVirgin, the images arrive on earth in multiple beams, irradiating the world with the illumination of their – and thus also of the Madonna’s – presence. She, through them, acts as mediator between Heaven and Earth: Mediatrix cæli et terrae. The evident meaning of the print is that diverse and multiple representations throughout the Christian world convey the presence of the same, single sacred prototype.The message is related to the print medium itself, which purports to communicate a unique reality to a scattered audience with no loss of authenticity. This engraving, which appeared in 1672 as the frontispiece to an impressive catalogue, by the learned Jesuit Wilhelm Gumppenberg, of 1,200 miraculous images of Mary throughout the world, makes use of the Loreto legend to show how the Virgin projected her presence in the form of her various depictions in painting and sculpture. Of the infinity of such images, a large but restricted number had revealed themselves to be miraculously charged, capable of working miracles of many kinds. Each of the light-beams represents a particular image; on the map beneath, a dot indicates the presence in the world of a statue or picture of reputedly miraculous powers.2 The house seems to hover directly above Liguria, a region known to Gumppenberg’s contemporaries for the strength of its Marian devotion. The vision of the world encapsulated in this engraving – shaped by the presence of and charged with the power of certain holy images – has for the past five centuries enjoyed a vast currency. 12

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3 Fiasella, The Virgin Mary Queen of Genoa (illus. 1), detail of Genoa.

Our project is to attempt to understand the reasons for this belief and for its endurance. For those who lived on the shores of the Mediterranean at any time before the twentieth century, the most significant map, like the one de picted in the Gumppenberg frontispiece, was one of holy shrines – whether Greek or Roman, Orthodox Christian, Catholic or Muslim. In all of these cultures, litanies to miraculous images were sung, prayers were said and gifts offered by travellers who passed by sea. Our principal focus is on one particular part of the Mediter ranean, the northwest coast of Italy; our concern in part is to define the experience of a region differentiated by geography and history from other places. But the sacred geography of the ocean has linked North and South, West and East. Travellers have always carried with them – and they still carry – the venerated images of their own town or neighbourhood. The region of Liguria, extending from the capital, Genoa, westwards to France and eastwards to Tuscany, hemmed in between mountains and the sea, possesses both a landscape rich in miracu lous images and a history which has always looked outwards (illus. 3). It has repeatedly drawn on other cultures. In the early twenty-first century, 13

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Peruvian immigrants have set up their own cult images alongside Genoese ones, and some Muslims participate in the annual procession to celebrate the mountaintop Madonna della Guardia, one of the focal points of the modern city’s Catholic devotional culture.3 These instances point to the wide ramifications of the phenomenon which this book explores in a particular context. The belief that a statue or painting can, like the holy house of Loreto, fly through the air, speak, weep or produce miraculous cures is both an ancient phenomenon and a contemporary one. It is by no means limited to one religious culture, to backward or rural communities, or to an ‘unenlightened’ past. Carlo Levi, as an intellectual exiled in the 1930s by the Fascist government to the southern Italian region of Basilicata, described in the tone of an anthropologist finding, on the walls of each house in the small town of his confinement, the same pair of images: the local cult statue of the Madonna di Viggiano, and the smiling face of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In a desperately poor region in which the hope of material salvation lay in emigration across the Atlantic and that of simple survival was entrusted to the Virgin Mary, each presence could be seen to have its raison d’être.4 But whereas Levi’s wonderful book has contributed to the myth of the Mezzogiorno, the deep south of Italy, as an archaic survival in an otherwise modernized West, our own study has found that it is not only ‘beyond Eboli’ that ideas about images quite different from those favoured by the ‘reason’ of the Enlightenment both endure and flourish. The rational critique of the intellectual, who professes not to understand how an inanimate object can be held to contain life, is as old as the evidence for the cults themselves. Characteristic of this superior tone is an anecdote related in the fifteenth century by Poggio Bracciolini: Once some people [from the castle of Aello] were sent to Arezzo to buy a wooden crucifix that was needed in the church.When they arrived at a certain manufacturer of such objects, he noticed that they were coarse and clumsy folk, and he saw a marvellous opportunity to poke fun at them. He asked if they wanted a living or a dead crucifix.They answered, after some time of thought and consultation, that they preferred a living one: after all, if their fellow townsmen did not appreciate it this way, they could still kill it.5 14

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As will emerge from many different narratives in this book, however, the pretended split between rustic naivety and urbane reason, although a recurrent motif in the debate surrounding miraculous images, cannot be taken as an objective analysis; nor can it account for the many educated people who, in all periods, have been numbered among their devotees. Among the latter are to be encountered not only highly educated clerics such as the Jesuit Gumppenberg, but also lay representatives of secular and rational positions. Michel de Montaigne, not a man given to vulgar credulity and indeed a founding father of what is often considered the modern sensibility, humane and quietly reasonable, was to be found in spring 1581 at the sanctuary of the Virgin Mary’s house at Loreto.The story of the carrying of Mary’s house from Nazareth to Ancona by angels, and the evident strength of the cult of this miraculous image in architectural form, moved Montaigne deeply. Inspired by the idea that this encounter might be a catalyst of personal transformation in more ways than one, the traveller emulated the behaviour of the other pilgrims. Anxious for the health of his daughter, his sole surviving child, and being himself a sufferer from kidney-stones, Montaigne put up his own ex-voto at the shrine, squeezed among countless others: I was able to find room there only with the greatest difficulty, and as a great favour, to place a tablet on which there are four silver figures attached: that of Our Lady, my own, that of my wife, that of my daughter.At the foot of mine there is engraved on the silver:‘Michel de Montaigne, Gascon Frenchman, Knight of the Order of the King, 1581’; at that of my wife’s, ‘Françoise de la Chassaigne, his wife’; at that of my daughter’s, ‘Léonor de Montaigne, his only daughter.’ All are in a row on their knees in the tablet, and Our Lady above them in the foreground.6

In 1619 the young René Descartes would plan his own pilgrimage, on foot, to the Madonna of Loreto.7 The miraculous image therefore proposes a subversive history of human sensibility and reason.The choice of Genoa and its region of Liguria as the hub of this study is intended to reinforce this fundamental point. From the Middle Ages to the present day, Genoa has been in the vanguard of modern ity: banking, industrialization and global communications were all rooted precociously in Genoa. Meanwhile, from sanctuaries in the city and along 15

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the mountainous coast of Liguria, miraculous images have for centuries looked out over this uniquely deep and dangerous part of the Mediterranean Sea, supervising the cosmopolitan commerce of the Genoese. Cult images have helped to shape the identity of emigrant communities in other countries, just as they have done for the Ligurian places from which the migrants have travelled. Nineteenth-century sailors from Camogli took copies of the painting of the Madonna del Boschetto, their miraculous image (see illus. 23), when they travelled abroad. At Berdyansk in the Ukraine in 1858 there was a niche containing such an image, and also a painting of her, covered in the manner of a Russian icon, above a ship-chandler’s shop belonging to a family from Camogli. Another copy of this image, syncretized with an indigenous cult, was being venerated at the same period in South America.8 From the perspective of the devotee, the cult image gives its own form to the map of the world. Moments of individual and social crisis or natural disaster have triggered special appeals to miracle-working images: childbirth, illness or accidents; revolutions; cholera outbreaks; industrial disasters; unemployment; storms at sea.The recourse to miraculous images in times of war has spanned the centuries. But to say that phenomena of this kind arise in times of personal and social stress is at best a truism, at worst reductive. Much more profoundly than this, such images have always formed, and still form, part of the daily life of believers: men on their way to work, in business suits and carrying briefcases, enter the cathedral of Chiavari to speak to the Madonna dell’Orto; every house in a small town displays a copy of the local miraculous image; a prostitute in the old city of Genoa until recently kept flowers before the Marian street shrine which was lit by her red light.9 The very ordinariness of the devotee’s rapport with a particular image runs the risk of being seen by the outsider as trivial. The Protestant or atheist observer has often been moved either to ironic amusement or else to vehement hostility by such apparent manifestations of mental weakness. But the evidence we have studied belies any such superficial understanding. Image cults have always been profoundly rooted in the belief systems of their advocates. Background presences for much of the time, their enormous strength is ready to be invoked at times of communal celebration and personal crisis. The images are in diverse media, and date from the high Middle Ages to the twenty-first century. Key periods for their proliferation were the Catholic Reformation at the turn of the seventeenth century, and the 16

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nine teenth century, which saw a further Catholic revival in the wake of the French Revolution and in response to the creation of the secular Italian state. Characteristic of nearly all these cults is their vernacular origin. Most of the images began life outside a church – as a statue ‘found’ in the fork of a chestnut tree; as a fresco painted on a garden wall; as the printed domestic image of the Virgin and Child, whose lack of colour was said to be due to its origin in a supernatural vision; as the prow of a wrecked ship, salvaged by sailors who turned the statue into a cult object, took it into a church and conducted exorcisms before it.There is a subversive potential here: because the believer can establish through his or her relationship to the image a direct and unmediated access to divine power, the stability of clerical authority is undermined. The Church hierarchy has responded to the upsurge of enthusiasm for particular images by investigations, which in a significant minority of instances have led to official sanction. But even in the case of authorized cults, brought inside churches and regulated there, the stories told about images and the relationships established with them remain unpredictable. Devotion is hard to control when the copy of a hallowed image is believed to carry the same supernatural potency as the original.

Theorizing the miraculous image How can miraculous image cults be explained? In this section we outline our theoretical and methodological approach to this question. A few years ago, reflecting on recent studies of ‘the power of images’, W.J.T. Mitchell posed the provocative question, ‘What do pictures really want?’10 Mitchell’s response to his own inquiry was to warn historians of art of the danger of distraction by a social and cultural history of images which lost sight of the central importance, for pictures, of visuality. That call to attention was expressed in general terms. Our contribution to the continuing debate about the power of both pictures and statues is to present and to interpret a vein of evidence which, out of concrete examples and specific historical experience of visual response, offers some definite answers to the general question of ‘how images work’. The particular material under scrutiny here, relating to images which have been the object of a religious cult, presents the researcher with certain problems, of which the principal one is that of establishing a necessary degree of empathy for the subject without becoming its apologist. The 17

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alternative ideal, of complete scientific detachment and objectivity, seems to us illusory. Hans Belting’s stimulating study of medieval cult images is vitiated by its rational and typological approach: preferring to classify his material rather than to historicize it, the author never comes close enough to the specific social and spiritual drama of a given cult to explain its dynamic force in a particular place and time.11 In this sense, Gerhard Wolf achieves more in his focused monograph on the Roman cult images of the Madonna Salus Populi Romani and the portrait of Christ at St John Lateran, which reconstructs the annual procession of the latter icon to visit the former at her church of Santa Maria Maggiore. The paucity of medieval sources, however, makes it hard to see far beyond the official, papal inter pretation of this ritual, although clerical condemnation of riotous lay behaviour during the night-time cavalcade of the image hints at other perspectives and meanings.12 Michele Bacci has provided an invaluable survey of so-called ‘Madonnas of St Luke’ venerated in various parts of the medieval Mediterranean, and has noted that, like the Roman example in Santa Maria Maggiore, these tended to be appropriated for primary use by clerical authorities. 13 The present book draws upon the richer documentation of the past five centuries to bring a multifaceted approach to a number of such cults, exploring their evolutionary dynamic in each case. The subtle yet significant ways in which the response to devotional images may be modulated across the spectrum of Christian perspectives are indicated by the different example of David Morgan’s study of religious imagery in North American Protestant culture. In that context, miracles have been attributed to individual copies of a much-reproduced portrait of Christ.14 On the other hand, differences of religious culture unsurprisingly emerge from the far greater proliferation and diversity, in the Catholic world of Italy, of particular image cults rooted in local communities. No simple and singular understanding of religion, therefore, can explain the phenomenon under discussion.We remain equally sceptical of the psychological hypothesis of David Freedberg, according to which the response to images is rooted in an essential human tendency to conflate a representation with its subject.15 Neuroscience can as yet tell us little about the brain’s reaction to visual stimuli; yet even were we better informed as to its generic functions, the brain alone could reveal nothing of the particular circumstances which have shaped and given meaning to the development of one or another image cult in the course of history.16 A different proposition 18

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has been that of Alfred Gell, who argued in Art and Agency that certain objects are endowed with the power to behave as ‘social agents’.17 The potential agency of certain material things (including clothing or money, no less than miraculous images) is evident. But although Gell captured a partial truth, his desire to enunciate a universal anthropological idea weakened his theory by its deliberate omission of the elements both of history and ideology. Caroline van Eck, rightly urging the need to complement an anthropological understanding of objects with a phenomenology of the beholder’s experience, suggests that this may be found in the Burkean language of the Sublime.18 But this appears to offer less an explanation than just another way to describe the problem. The challenge of responding to these ahistorical approaches is to define a methodology which can offer general insights while doing justice to contingency. The editors of a recent miscellany of studies on Presence: The Inherence of the Prototype within Images and Other Objects balked at the task of systematic analysis, asserting that ‘the only way to make progress with the study of this topic and advance beyond Freedberg’s pointed provocation is through detailed and fully contextualized studies of individual cases.’19 We consistently emphasize the specific historical circumstances which helped to give rise to particular cults. But this does not prevent us from deriving from our historical examples some general hypotheses concerning the ways in which, over a period of several centuries of European history, cultural traditions, ritual practices, and bodily and psychological dispositions have interacted both with the images themselves and with larger contexts of historical circumstances to catalyse an experience of the numinous, the mysterious and even of the miraculous. It is not for the historian, the art historian or the anthropologist of religion to judge whether the Virgin Mary really smiled from her image; but in order to begin to understand how the belief that she did so has shaped the lives of many people through the ages and into the present, we need to concede that this has, in certain circumstances, been experienced as a reality. Our understanding of historical events has been illuminated by engagement with contemporary devotional practices.This has helped us to understand how cults gather identity and momentum not merely through ‘belief ’ but through social interaction. As the sociologist of religion Paolo Apolito noted while he lived through a series of visionary events at Oliveto Citra near Salerno in 1985, the telling of stories helps to objectify the 19

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experience; the listener lends it authority.20 To find oneself in the side chapel of a church with an elderly woman who confides the graces worked in her life by the medieval crucifix on the wall is to appreciate how such a narrative, by its very telling, seeks and finds validation.The ethnographer in this situation has sacrificed objectivity and become a participant; but the gain is a deeper understanding of a larger process. As many of the historical sources cited in this book demonstrate, the circulation of stories has always been intrinsic to the construction of a cult.21 With Paolo Apolito and William Christian, we see the active process of constructing a devotional cult as a means by which lay men and women, in different times and places, have been able to re-enchant the world, and in that process to create a new sense of community.22 That process, as we shall see, has at times been complex, contested and frustrating.Yet it also has the potential to crystallize, foster and preserve social identities which would otherwise be at risk. On the day of the festa of a miraculous image, different social bonds are simultaneously reinforced.The annual procession at Sori on the feast of the Virgin Mary’s Assumption, in honour of the Madonna delle Grazie, balances the wider identity of the Ligurian town and the local autonomy of its constituent neighbourhoods and networks in a mutually supportive relationship. Among the groups which follow the cassa (float) of the miraculous Madonna in the procession, each proudly deriving social credit from their participation in the grand civic event, are the local firemen, the voluntary first aid unit and the organization of blood donors of the town. Although visitors come from outside the district to witness such occasions, the throng in the streets is overwhelmingly local, and the sense of both town-wide and more particular ties is strongly felt. Each quarter, or sestiere, prepares its own contribution to the collective event, a competitive display of mortars which go off sequentially as the image is processed through the various parts of the town.23 One of the principal challenges of understanding miraculous image cults is that of grasping a concept of the mysterious which for their participants readily coexists with the familiar: that which resists explanation sits alongside, and within, that which demands no explanation. What Michel de Certeau wrote of mystical literature applies to the interpretation of miraculous images.To transpose his metaphor, miracle-working images ‘mark out the boundaries of an “elsewhere” which is not remote, a place which they both produce and guard’.24 This is a place which has both spatial and temporal 20

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coordinates. Its parameters are defined by a complex of references in which the visual and other senses cross over and translate into each other.The very language which we habitually use of images – of figuration, representation, expression – threatens in this context to be reductive. A central argument of this book is that the language of the ‘visual’ is inadequate to capture the ways in which the image is experienced. So while we would not dispute Mitchell’s call to respect the integrity of visual experience, and to resist reducing this to another, verbal language, at the same time we find the visual played out through the lives of individuals in a variety of ways which criss-cross the senses and the intellect.25 Sounds, smells, musical cadences, atmosphere, movement, reflections of candlelight in a puddle beneath a street shrine – all can trigger connections and mark out the zones within which the miraculous can be felt. There is a dialectical (and historically specific) relationship between the accumulative and habitual nature of such everyday experience and the apprehension of the extraordinary. The inherent tension between the historian’s analytical purpose and the very particular nature of the experiences under review is bound up also with the relationship between image cults and Church teaching and discipline. Just as mystical literature sits at a necessary angle to systematic theology, although systematic theology strives to contain it, the miraculous is inherently unstable.The processes of investigation which diocesan authorities have regularly instituted into the credibility of miracle-working images are themselves designed to smooth out the rough edges of experience and to channel the expression of such phenomena into rational and theologically safe forms.This has been no less crucial a means to establish a position among competing interests within the Church than to confront sceptical voices outside. To a large extent religious doctrine and structures shape expectations and responses, in these investigations as elsewhere. But the structures themselves are not uniform, and doctrine is always modified by the context in which it is absorbed. And it is in the cracks which appear between the stones, the asides in the answers to questions, the details of practice, that insights into the lived reality of these cults emerge.26 For de Certeau the challenge of comprehending the mystic was a particular case of the broader difficulties of historical understanding. From a different philosophical perspective, Walter Benjamin found the image (specifically the photographic image) a helpful model for both the understanding of and the performance of history: a metaphor for an idea of 21

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history which could capture something of the dialectical relationship between the eternal and the contingent. He argued that the meaning of an image was only realized through the imaginative effort of reading it, and thus of developing it, like a photographic negative, towards the fulfilment of its historical significance. Benjamin proposed that ‘the optical unconscious’ was opened by the invention of photography; but his idea that visual engagement can, in particular circumstances, catalyse an imaginative connection with the past might also, as here, be applied to other kinds of image.27 Miraculous images – vernacular and endlessly reproduced, while relating magically to a transcendent presence – can be considered through an analogous lens.They move in and out of historical time, always evoking something beyond themselves, acquiring a particular focus and dimension at moments of devotional intensity, at others forming part of the more transitory movement of everyday life. Such moments may intersect both spatially and temporally, as ‘everyday life begins to seethe with a disturbing familiarity, a frequentation of the other’.28 There is an inherently dialectical relationship between attention and disattention, familiarity and unfamiliarity. Images can also be passive, inert, waiting for the occasion to be activated in a miraculous, transformative and spiritually moving guise. In performing their role, miraculous images simultaneously present themselves as timeless and accumulate provisional associations and contingencies of reference, which help in the construction and disruption of angles of vision in specific historical instances. The fundamental quality of movement in these temporal and spatial senses needs to be evoked and presented in order to engage with the particular nature of the historical experience. The adept of a miraculous image lives with a certain ambivalence. He or she acknowledges an ontological instability which makes it possible for an educated person (no less than an uneducated one) to live with a fluid relationship between the material object, the supernatural deity and the witnessing self. The devotee knows the limitations of the image as a compound of natural substances, manipulated by human techniques.Yet he or she also understands this object to be inhabited by a divine presence.29 The viewer’s ability to move between the two modes is close to that ‘perceptual capacity’ identified by Richard Wollheim, by which anybody may oscillate between seeing an image ‘as’ another thing represented and ‘seeing in’ the image a concept or presence beyond mere representation.30 We would agree with the suggestion that that there is an element of creative 22

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fiction or make-believe in the behaviour of devotees who willingly suspend disbelief in a real presence within the image.31 Yet if there is a degree of pretence at the outset of personal engagement (and chapter Three will instance consciously willed dramatic behaviour directed at ‘animating’ the image), this is not, for many, where the process of interaction with the statue or picture ends. Chapter Four will present evidence which goes beyond the gestures of ritualized practice to the phenomenological experience of complete union with the image. Our findings resonate with the recent study by Verity Platt on the intimate reciprocity between image and beholder in Graeco-Roman religious art.32 Indeed, without insisting upon an unbroken continuity of visual response, the correspondence between our findings and current scholarship on pre-Christian image cults indicates the relevance of both to a larger history of the image. Notwith standing the ontological distinction, from one perspective, between the beholder and the object, the observer may nonetheless experience the encounter with the holy image as an epiphany in which each merges with the other. While the language used to express such oscillation between diverse modes of perception has changed over time, a real presence response to the reputedly miraculous image has been recorded of reasonable and educated witnesses across the entire chronological span of this study. We therefore join those art historians who have called for a fresh understanding of the ways in which a beholder may be affected by an image.33 In doing so, we attach particular importance to the contribution to that impact made by personal and social memories. The sense of history embodied in memory explains the miraculous image’s stubborn resistance to co-option by the dominant discourses both of art history and of theology. These awkward relationships are reviewed in the following two sections.

Art and the miraculous image As modern critics of Catholic kitsch have been at pains to emphasize, miraculous images are not what the sophisticated connoisseur would recognize as art: ‘wunderthätiger Bilder sind meist nur schlechte Gemälde’. Art, as a distinct aesthetic category, was invented in the sixteenth century, and it has continued ever since to be conceived of as quite different from the kind of images which form the subject-matter of this book. Musing on this distinction at the turn of the millennium, James Elkins simultaneously 23

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lamented and vaunted the inability of ‘the art history professor’ to understand those who, in a church in which he was studying a ‘work of art’, preferred to devote their attentions to ‘a plastic baby-doll Jesus’.34 Writing in 1780 of the works of art in the church of San Vittore in Genoa, the art historian Ratti failed even to mention the cult image of the Madonna della Fortuna.35 When Giorgio Vasari wrote, in his Lives of the Artists published in the middle of the sixteenth century, that Raphael’s unfinished painting of the Trans figuration was, of all his works, ‘the most celebrated, the most beautiful, and the most divine’, he intended by this last adjective a form of secularized divinity defined by a priesthood of connoisseurs, or arbiters of beauty, such as himself.36 Vasari reproved those who presumed that a picture had to be ‘clumsy and inept’ (goffo et inetto) to be holy; yet his vindication of the fine arts as technically sophisticated and intellectually informed consolidated a view, already anticipated in earlier centuries and widely accepted since, that vulgar piety prefers its images to be trite, crude and unfashionable.37 Yet this very language, with which Vasari and others in his circle constructed their manifestos for a secular religion of aesthetic values, was heavily indebted to Neoplatonic and medieval Christian discussions of holy images.38 This legacy has left an enduring mark in practices surrounding the post-Renaissance concept of high art. The suggestion, indeed, that the modern veneration of art in galleries in the form of temples amounts to a ‘religion’ is more than a form of words.39 The very idea, which although debated retains wide currency, that art should be elevated on a pedestal apart – an idea elaborated by Kant in the hope of establishing a secular aesthetic sphere – continues to resonate with theological connotations.While, therefore, it remains clear that there are important distinctions between the queue of art-lovers for an exhibition of works by Manet at the Grand Palais and the file of pilgrims at the shrine of a miraculous image of the Virgin Mary, the phenomenon of cult images throws into fresh question the nature of art itself.The imagery we discuss is, in fact, art: these are manufactured images in a range of media, but their visual character and potentiality have been over looked because of prejudice about their use. As a result of its choice to stay close to a Vasarian notion of ‘art’ as a secular cultural phenomenon (and notwithstanding its recent expansion to include a larger field of visual culture), the discipline of art history has yet to engage with the miraculous potential of religious imagery. It is time that art history acknowledged its direct genealogical descent from the cult of holy and miraculous images. 24

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The new language of stylistic achievement and personal fame introduced in the sixteenth century did not prevent certain works of the most highly regarded artists of the Renaissance from acquiring a miraculous reputation in the devotional sense. Such cases further problematize the supposed distinction between cult images and the category of art. As Vasari himself acknowledged with a certain irony, the emotive painting of Christ Carrying the Cross in the Scuola Grande di San Rocco in Venice, executed in 1510 by Titian or by Giorgione, earned more money from the devout for its perceived supernatural powers than either artist ever did.40 A further case in point, which illustrates still more clearly the distorting effect of the

4 Michelangelo, Pietà, c. 1498–1500, marble. Photograph, 1880–90.

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Vasarian history of art, is Michelangelo’s carving of the Pietà, made at the commission of a French cardinal. Completed around 1499 for another church, from the later sixteenth century the marble image was displayed in the new papal basilica of St Peter. In Vasari’s eyes, this was a wonder of art: ‘it is certainly a miracle that a stone without any shape at the beginning should ever have been reduced to such perfection as Nature is scarcely able to create in the flesh.’41 But as a representation, relatively unfamiliar in Rome, of the lamentation over the dead body of Christ, the carving was in the early modern period an object of special devotion, and in particular on the part of Count Alessandro Sforza Pallavicini of Piacenza, who obtained a valuable crown which he had adapted for the head of the Madonna. Her coronation as a supernatural image took place on 31 August 1637 (illus. 4). The cult of this image seems to have diminished since the eighteenth century, being partially replaced from that period by the growing cult of the artist. The removal of the crown with its supporting angels in 1927, following the advice of the art historian Charles de Tolnay that these ‘disfigured the group’, was intended to sanitize the aesthetic object.42 But a particular perceived sanctity has continued to inhere in Michelangelo’s sculpture in modern times.The iconoclast who attacked the statue in 1972 paid implicit tribute to this enduring power, which has since been reinforced by the bullet-proof glass now surrounding the image in the west end of St Peter’s church.43 Few miraculous images, however, have been the work of celebrated craftsmen. Count Sforza Pallavicini eventually crowned a number of other reputedly miraculous images, but none of these was attributed to any named mortal artist.44 The count’s contemporary, Vincenzo i Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, evinced a similar visual piety and a concurrent lack of concern with contemporary aesthetic taste when in 1604 he ordered for his chapel a series of painted copies of ‘the images of Our Lady which are working or have worked miracles in diverse parts of the world’.45 When an earlier Sforza, Alessandro, lord of Pesaro, likewise sought copies of miracle-working Madonnas in the late fifteenth century, he – in common with other patrons of his day – commissioned contemporary painters capable of rendering the archaic style of venerated originals. From Melozzo da Forlì he ordered a version of the Madonna del Popolo in Rome: a thirteenth-century Italian copy of a Byzantine icon in the Carmelite church in Siena. 46 He also requested a copy of the palladium of the city of Rome, the Madonna 26

5 Antoniazzo Romano, Madonna with the Miracle of Pope Leo I, c. 1475, tempera on panel.

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Salus Populi Romani in Santa Maria Maggiore, a work probably of eighthcentury origin, repainted in the twelfth but ascribed to St Luke; in this case the artist was Antoniazzo Romano.47 This copy is now lost, but Antoniazzo’s ability to render the antique stylistic appearance of wonder-working Madonnas in the city of Rome was demonstrated in other works for patrons of similar taste, including the Madonna with the Miracle of Pope Leo I now in Dublin (illus. 5); the Madonna della Consolazione, an older fresco restored by the artist; and another version of the Roman Madonna del Popolo, painted for the bishop of Turin, which, as the ‘Madonna Consolata’ in its eponymous sanctuary, has played a prominent role into modern times as the miraculous palladium of the capital of Savoy.48 Together with antiquity, nothing recommended an image for cult status as much as a reputation of an Eastern origin. In the course of the Middle Ages, a number of prestigious Byzantine icons found their way to the West, whether in the ships of merchants or, as various legends had it, carried by angelic agency to new and safer homes.49 In the seventeenth century the memory was alive in Messina of a Sicilian nobleman who, early in the fifteenth century, bought a number of ‘pictures in the Greek manner’ which had been acquired in the Levant, thereby rescuing them from the now non-Christian east. One of these was subsequently said to protect Christians from danger at the hands of the Turks.50 In the majority of the cases about which anything is known, these objects were in fact made in the West – like a bleeding crucifix in Venice, said to have come from Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, which had a Latin inscription – but the tales were a vital part of their reputed power.51 The taste among cultured and influential patrons for holy images whose antique or Byzantine appearance lent them religious authority was wider, throughout the period commonly known today as the Renaissance, than has generally been recognized.52 Giambattista Lomellini was a scion of one of the grandest Genoese families, with commercial connections across the entire Mediter ranean. His branch of the family was driven from the island of Rhodes when it was lost to the Ottomans in the 1520s, and moved to Sicily. Here he became a priest, moving in 1567 to become Bishop of Isernia in Molise. To the high altar of his cathedral Lomellini proceeded to donate a retardataire panel of the Virgin and Child, painted earlier in the same century by the Cretan artist Markos Bathas (illus. 6). Its archaic appearance helps to explain the miraculous potency attributed to this image, which for centuries has 28

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been venerated as the Madonna della Luce. Bathas was one of a number of Cretan painters producing deliberately old-fashioned icons for a market which included sophisticated Westerners such as Venetian and Genoese noblemen no less than Orthodox patrons.53 The Vasarian view of art, which has come to enjoy such enormous influence in modern Western culture, prizes originality and modernity over repetition and the old-fashioned. A key criterion of excellence in the visual arts has been, for the past four centuries, ‘the shock of the new’. But as in the cases just mentioned, the majority of miraculous images have been venerated, in part, because of their appearance of antiquity. Outmoded in style and blackened by the devotional candle-smoke of ages, the typical miraculous image bears signs of long veneration and, perhaps, of a remote or supernatural origin. Stylistically it will tend to stand apart from what is currently in fashion. The other dominating criterion for the art historian was for a long period, at least until Duchamp, that of mimesis or lifelikeness. That art should be measured by and praised for its ability to mimic or to conjure reality was the guiding principle of certain ancient writers, well represented in the stories about art 6 Markos Bathas, Virgin and Child (the Madonna della recounted by Pliny in his Natural History, Luce), early 16th century, oil on panel. as it was also for Vasari and his followers in and after the Renaissance.The behaviour of devotees around any image held to be miraculous, however, problematizes still received assumptions concerning the relationship of art and nature.The worshipper’s concern, as will be evident from many accounts in this book, is not with the image as a supposedly faithful replica of something else – the aesthetic ideal of the mimetic attitude – but with a supernatural presence understood to lie within the object. A fresh review of cult images within the context of classical Greece has shown up the peculiarity of the notion, first articulated in 29

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that period, that all art should be tested by the measure of naturalism.54 The modern evidence presented here is equally challenging of the still influential grand narrative of evolving mimesis. The century of Vasari did not see the simple demise of the ‘cult image’ and its replacement by ‘art’. This thesis of Hans Belting – a powerful reworking of the myth of the end of the Middle Ages and the cultural Renaissance – is belied by the endurance and proliferation of miraculous image cults beyond the sixteenth century and into modern times.55 Virtually ignored by the history of art, these cults have continued largely unnoticed by scholars, remaining the preserve of a vast yet invisible parallel culture of visual devotion. Recent signs of a new interest in the phenomenon may partly be attributed to art history’s embrace of a broader visual field, transcending the former limits of the fine arts to include visual culture in a larger sense.56 At the same time, however, the miraculous image presents particular challenges to existing categories: simply extending the evidential scope of the discipline cannot, in this case, suffice to make sense of the historical record. One review has suggested that miraculous images may be brought into the same field as the fine arts on the basis that both generate in the viewer a sense of the image’s ‘presence’.57 But this cannot be said to establish much common ground between the modus operandi of a miracle-working fresco fragment on a house wall and a presentation drawing by Michelangelo. As the stories in this book make clear, the particular presence of the miraculous image is characterized by distinctive qualities of plurality, mobility and mutability which mark it out from other works of religious or secular art. The definition of art which to date has served the discipline of art history thus retains echoes of the world of the cult image while continuing to exclude it from the purview of serious scholarship. The narratives concerning miraculous images insist at once upon the modesty and anonymity of the object in question, and upon its supernatural quality.The foundational Christian image legends concerned the acheiropoi¯eton, the image ‘not made by hand’.The critical period for the formation of these stories was the eighth century, during which the Eastern Church was riven by debate about the justification of Christian images, in the light of the Second Commandment’s injunction against idols. This is the period in which we first find recorded the narrative of King Abgar of Edessa, who sent an artist to take a portrait of Christ: unable to execute the picture himself, the painter found his work 30

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7 The Face of Christ, date uncertain (Byzantine frame, 14th century), painted wooden panel.

completed by a miracle. Several claimants to be this object were subsequently venerated in the West: one is the Holy Face of Genoa (illus. 7), which will be discussed below.The eighth century also saw the emergence of St Luke’s reputation as a painter of the Virgin Mary, giving rise to numerous later legends concerning particular Madonnas allegedly from this august source.58 Frequently it was the role of professional artists to confirm that their human 31

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art would by itself have been incapable of creating a miraculous image. A panel known as Our Lady Causa Nostrae Laetitiae, owned and venerated in the mid-eighteenth century by a private citizen of Genoa, was in 1751 submitted to four painters for judgement as to its origin. In the age of enlightenment, the miraculous image would be subjected to the eminently rational process of connoisseurial inspection. After lengthy deliberation, and close comparison in particular with two other pictures believed to be by the hand of St Luke – one outside Bologna known as the Madonna of St Luke, the other in St Mark’s church in Venice – the artists concluded that this picture, too, was St Luke’s work.59 Pious narratives frequently invoke angelic intervention to account for the special powers of a given picture.The Florentine image of the Annunziata was said to have been begun in 1252 by a monastic artist who, having fallen asleep, awoke to find that his portrait of the Virgin Mary had been realized by an angelic hand.60 Variants on this narrative are encountered across the ensuing centuries. In 1885 at Stezzano near Bergamo, a statue group intended to serve a cult previously focused on a worn fresco was commissioned from a sculptor who then died, leaving his brother, who was not a craftsman, to undertake the task. After hundreds of witnesses testified to seeing the eyes of the Madonna in the new statue move, the amateur carver declared that ‘neither I, nor anyone else, could have given to a statue the expression of life seen in this image’.61 The discourse of art in the nineteenth century lent a new and particular resonance to such a claim of supernatural intervention and purpose. In an oration in 1888 celebrating the gift of a modern picture of the Immaculate Virgin to the church of Santa Maria della Cella in Sampierdarena – the town to the west of Genoa known in the nineteenth century as ‘the Manchester of Italy’ for its industrial modernity – the Franciscan Padre Parisi underlined the distinction which applied to all religious imagery: art was not true unless inspired by religion.‘Art for art’s sake is not what I mean: I mean art for life and virtue.’The message here was that true art could make a stand against the destructive hammers of the ‘invasive rationalism’ of the times, and restore the spirits of tired workers and their families. In contem plation of the painting, thought ‘clothed itself ’ in a hundred pure (candide) images.62 In the promotional magazine for the Madonna della Guardia in the early twentieth century, reference was made to a depiction in fresco of the apparition by a named contemporary artist,Venturini of Siena. The religious veracity of the painting was commended in the following terms: 32

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8 Crucifix of Sestri Levante, 13th century, carved and painted wood.

‘Whoever sees it cannot but say, “This is a true Madonna, and not a model got up to be the Virgin.”’63 While there have been examples of images being modernized to enhance their capacity to engage devotees,64 apologists for these cults have often drawn strength from the very refusal of their subjects to conform to prevailing norms of art. When in 1763, in the name of modern good taste, an old image of the Virgin and Child with Satan under their feet, long venerated at Corniglia in the Cinque Terre on the Ligurian coast, was replaced by a modern rendition of the Virgin and Child alone, a series of disasters was observed to strike the community immediately. After a further failed attempt to substitute a new statue of the Madonna, the inhabitants gratefully reinstated the ancient picture.65 As was said in 1928 of the thirteenth-century miraculous carved cross of Sestri Levante (illus. 8): The great value of the representation of the crucifix is found in its religious character, not in its formal beauty or archaeological accur acy; this is why the most venerable cross of Sestri, even if lacking in respect of art, is and will always be an eminently religious work.66

In distinguishing the religious qualities of the cross from formal criteria of beauty the writer was here deliberately distancing himself from the high 33

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aesthetic categories of his time, which firmly excluded this sort of religious object from the field of ‘art’. These instances draw attention to a recurrent debate, conducted over centuries and in a large social context, concerning the potential of art to precipitate a supernatural energy in the world. They remind us that every claim for the autonomy of ‘fine art’, from Giorgio Vasari to Clement Green berg, has been challenged by competing views of art’s potency within a larger religious perspective.

The theology of images and the history of the Church The miraculous image has always been a site of contestation and negotiation between different elements of the Catholic Church.To the embattled defenders of a local cult, faced with the incomprehension or downright hostility of bishops and bureaucrats, the found wonder can be a rallying point for community, a vindication of collective identity. To those in authority, on the other hand, the revealed site of power, if it can be controlled and channelled – a major caveat – is a potential resource for larger ends. At times, the rhetoric of debate presents the appearance of a binary rift between a vast, centralized and grandiose religious institution and a locally rooted, socially organic lay community. However, the story – like the history of the Church as a whole – is always more complex than this, chiefly because the ecclesiastical institution has never been as monolithic and powerful, nor the community of lay believers as limited in its horizons or in its resources, as many accounts have tended to assume.The history of miraculous images throws into question a number of larger assumptions commonly made about the nature and evolution of Catholic culture. The most visited Catholic shrine in the world today, after the Vatican, is that of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico, which houses an image of the Virgin Mary reputedly impressed by a miracle into a peasant’s cloak (illus. 9). According to the story first recorded in print in the following century, in December 1531 a peasant named Juan Diego experienced a vision of the Virgin, following which her picture materialized as a supernatural image, subsequently housed in the church she asked to be built at the rustic site of her appearance. Numerous further miracles have consolidated the global reputation of this humble object.67 Pilgrims come in their millions, especially for the annual festival: over just two days in December 2009, more than 6 34

9 Andrès de Islas, Our Lady of Guadalupe: Juan Diego Shows the Image to Bishop Zumaraga, 1773, oil on canvas.

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million people passed in front of the image. The Catholic Church in the early twenty-first century is suffering substantial losses of practising members, even in Latin America; but Mexicans and others continue to queue to submit their prayers – for a good harvest, for exam results, for a medical cure – to the miraculous Madonna of Guadalupe.68 The image, which has become both a national symbol of the country which houses it and Patroness of the Americas, has been made universally familiar by infinite reproductions, including a digital copy made in 1999 and blessed on the occasion by Pope John Paul ii.69 This pontiff, who also made two official visits to the miraculous painted Black Madonna of Cze˛stochowa in Poland, took a significant step in 1987, on the anniversary of the vindication of Christian art by the Second Council of Nicaea (ad 787), when he recommended to the faithful the veneration of icons and condemned the abuse of images in modern society. Insisting that religious art had nothing to do with ‘art for art’s sake’, the pope declared: The art of the Church should aim to speak the language of the Incarnation, and to express with material elements the One who ‘deigned to inhabit matter and to effect our salvation through matter’, in the beautiful formulation of Saint John of Damascus.70

Pope John Paul’s explicit insistence upon the value of holy images marked a significant shift of emphasis on the part of the Church’s leadership, by contrast with the greater stress, in preceding pontifical edicts over several centuries, upon clerical control and the discouragement of lay initiative. The statement was at the same time a clear ecumenical gesture towards the Orthodox churches in which, since the time of the eighth-century iconoclast controversy which the Council of Nicaea had helped to bring to an end, icons have played a prominent role. Yet Roman clerical authority remains wary of what it has always perceived as the danger of allowing too much licence to popular devotion focused upon images.Very rarely since the mid-twentieth century has the Vatican explicitly sanctioned the new cult of an image popularly deemed to be miraculous. The first of these occasions was in 1954, which the Church, as part of its post-war revival, had declared to be the first Year of Mary. Pius xii then approved the devotion to a plaster Madonna in the home of a married couple in the Sicilian city of Syracuse, which the 36

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previous year had apparently wept real tears. In 1994 a vast basilica constructed to frame this modest image was consecrated by John Paul ii.71 But the same pope stopped short of official endorsement for a more recent wonder: the Madonna of Civitavecchia. In this case the first seer of the miracle, in February 1995, was a little girl, the daughter of an electrician, who shouted from the garden to her father that ‘the little Madonna is weeping!’The local sensation caused by this event finds part of its meaning in the context of the economic depression in the decayed port of Rome. Regional and international enthusiasm for the cult received the support of the local bishop, and the plaster statue is now housed in its own sanctuary; but following a series of disputed technical analyses of the supposed tears of blood, and despite the favour of a visit from John Paul ii, the cult has remained otherwise coolly unmentioned by the Vatican.72 The prevailing official attitude was articulated by John Paul’s successor, Benedict xvi, while he was still a cardinal. This is the view that the hierarchy of the Church should be left to determine the facts, while the lower orders should be satisfied with the fruits of devotion: orthodox manifestations of piety around a cult site may be beneficial in themselves, whether the catalyst is (as authority alone may determine) a true miracle or not.73 The same Cardinal Ratzinger in 1988, exceptionally, sanctioned devotion to a wooden statuette of the Virgin Mary at Akita in Japan. Over six years from 1975, this image had been seen to weep repeatedly: in this case, the cardinal’s nihil obstat for the cult was certainly influenced by the fact that the statue’s owner, who also experienced the stigmata and various holy apparitions, was a respectable nun.74 The Catholic Church’s official, reserved stand on the issue continues to be marked profoundly by sixteenth-century debates, provoked by contemporary criticism in both Protestant and Catholic circles. Martin Luther was not a rabid iconoclast – he kept a picture of the Virgin Mary in his study – yet his insistence on the primacy of the word of scripture both deprecated and marginalized the holy image to an extent which continues in modern times to be widely felt.The Protestant cult of blindness to images – manifest in large parts of modern Western society – began here: ‘A right faith goes right on with its eyes closed; it clings to God’s Word; it follows that Word; it believes that Word.’75 The Catholic response to the reformers’ challenge took the form of a sharper definition of appropriate behaviour around religious images. By 37

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the relevant decree of the Council of Trent in 1563 it was allowed that images should continue to be put in churches, but it was categorically laid down that due honour and reverence is owed to them, not because some divinity or power is believed to lie in them as reason for the cult, or because anything is expected of them, or because confidence should be placed in images as was done by the pagans of old; but because the honour showed to them is referred to the original which they represent.

The cardinals proceeded: All superstition must be removed from . . . the use of sacred images . . . no one may erect or see to the erection of any unusual image in any church or site, however exempt, unless it has been approved by the bishop. Nor are any new miracles to be accepted . . . without the bishop similarly examining and approving them. And as soon as he learns of something of this kind, he should consult with theologians and other devout men and decide as truth and devotion suggest.76

These instructions, handed down to the bishops in their dioceses throughout Christendom, were intended to establish an orthodox culture of minimal and standardized images, sanctioned by the higher clergy and patronizingly justified as aids for the illiterate. Any public claim of miracles was to be regarded with scepticism and subjected to the rigours of episcopal investigation.77 Supported by the mechanisms of regular confession, monastic missions to the uncivilized countryside, and the Inquisition, the post-Tridentine Church has seemed to some observers well armed to impose these constraints upon the lay population of the Italian peninsula, and indeed upon the Catholic world at large. It has been argued that the Italians, in particular, have fallen victim to a papal stranglehold from which the late and hesitant creation of a secular Italian state has not, even today, been able to liberate them.78 Historians of sacred art have tended to be influenced by such arguments, to the extent that a clear shift has been hypothesized, from an 38

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acknowledged emphasis upon the materiality of the image in late-medieval devotion to a relatively distant, more intellectual and ultimately internalized and transfigured response to Catholic art of the early modern and more recent periods.79 A more convincing perspective on the Catholic Church during the past 500 years, however, must acknowledge both the difficulties encountered by its leaders in their attempts to regulate holy images, and the degree to which those spiritual guardians of the ecclesiastical centre have themselves been open to imagistic piety, which has never been a monopoly of the illiterate. To write about the use of religious images on the basis of ecclesiastical prescriptions alone would be illusory.The directives of Church councils have a historical existence only through the practice of their implementation, a process always complicated by other realities.80 The theological elite of the early modern period included a number who were, pragmatically, content to acknowledge and to build upon lay attachment to particular holy images, provided the mode of veneration could be kept within decent bounds. One of these was the Archbishop of Bologna, Gabriele Paleotti, whose influential Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images was published (although incomplete) in 1582. Like other contributors to this genre of Catholic apology for images, Paleotti rigorously eschewed all aesthetic judgements, insisting only upon clarity and simplicity as the essential qualities of an admirable holy image. Their importance, meanwhile, could not be overstated, for since their function was to represent not merely nature, but another and invisible reality, they were capable of lifting the beholder to a higher realm.81 On the other hand, Paleotti explicitly warned against what to the theologian was inappropriate behaviour, including the making of offerings to an image, or the carrying of it into the fields in the belief that this would improve the crop.82 In vindication of their lofty claims for holy pictures, some of these writers cited stories of bleeding and other wonderful images.83 The great ecclesiastical historian Carlo Baronio, who used a range of evidence in his defence of holy images against Protestant critics, listed the known supernatural images of Christ and Mary.84 Others went on to produce impressive catalogues of miraculous icons,85 of which the grandest in scale was Gumppenberg’s Atlas marianus.86 The effort invested by theologians and intellectuals in publicizing the potency of holy images at this period cannot be dismissed as a mere concession to popular piety. The Oratorian 39

10 Peter Paul Rubens, La Madonna della Vallicella, 1608, oil on slate.

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Filippo Neri (who had been confessor to Paleotti) experienced visions throughout his life in front of such images.87 Even the austere archbishop of Milan, Federico Borromeo, who liked to inhabit bare rooms with white walls, accumulated a substantial collection of devotional pictures and wrote a book in praise of them.88 The practice of reframing older cult images in new artistic contexts, which is occasionally recorded in the medieval period, became more widespread at this time.The process, even while it honoured an object of popular veneration, by the same means sought to contain its potential and to make respectable the forms of devotion practised around it. The outstanding instance is Rubens’s painting, designed to contain an older miraculous Madonna, in the Chiesa Nuova of the Oratorians in Rome (illus. 10). Ultimately hidden within this magnificent new work of religious art (visible within its oval frame only on rare occasions when Rubens’s Madonna was slid aside) was a humble fourteenth-century fresco formerly in a Roman street, which in 1535 had been seen to bleed when a stone was thrown at it. Its adoption from 1574 by Filippo Neri’s order was a characteristic instance of clerical attempts to mediate, for missionary purposes, a sanitized version of a popular cult. The Baroque reframing turned a democratic image, which encountered its devotees on an equal footing at street level, into a splendid image of theocratic power, venerated in heaven by an awed company of angels.89 The extensive promotion of miraculous Madonnas by the early modern missionary orders, concerned at this time both to respond to Protestant criticism of holy images and to reinvigorate devotion, evidently extended to the invention of medieval origin legends for particular cults.90 Some of the Ligurian image shrines discussed in this book had documented medieval histories (and may in certain cases have been older still); but others have no recorded historical basis earlier than the sixteenth century. On the other hand, as will become apparent, it would be misleading to attribute the boom in documented image cults during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the monastic orders alone. Each case involved a complex drama of intersecting interests and participants. Federico Borromeo’s cousin and predecessor in the Milanese diocese, Carlo Borromeo, has been identified as the epitome of the dour CounterReformation church leader: authoritarian, inflexible and intolerant of diversity and popular superstition.Yet he, too, was prepared to tolerate the cults of particular images, provided he felt he could keep them under 41

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control. Thus he celebrated the ancient image of the Madonna of the Tree in Milan Cathedral (which Pope Gregory vii in the eleventh century had pronounced patroness of the city), at the same time linking it to the newer devotion of the Rosary.91 Away from the city, however, in the mountain valleys and sometimes barely accessible villages of his archdiocese, one might have expected the saintly pastor to have been concerned to impose uniform moral standards in order to combat the perceived paganism of the countryside. Yet the records of the archbishop’s visitations reveal a more nuanced encounter with local religious culture. Certainly, Borromeo was assiduous in attending to due decorum in the fabric and decoration of all the churches in his care. But when he came, often in one of the remoter outposts, to an image much frequented by devotees, his sole purpose, consistent with the Conciliar decree, was to see the object of piety decently displayed and associated with the sacrament of the Eucharist on the altar. Thus in the oratory of a flagellant confraternity at Ghedi, south of Brescia, the archbishop required that a venerated fresco of the Virgin Mary, which was close to the ground and vulnerable to accidental damage from the attendant crowds, should be cut out and placed, with a glass cover to protect it, upon the high altar.92 In numerous other instances, frescoed images were excised so that they might be arrayed with more safety and, in the archiepiscopal view, greater decency.93 Part of that enhanced decency was imposed by the physical frame within which the relocated image in each case was now contained. Borromeo’s indulgent approach to the veneration of particular images in his north Italian archdiocese was motivated in part by a desire to strengthen Catholic identity on the confessional boundary with Protestant Switzerland.94 In other times and places, such practices received short shrift from the bishops: unquestionably, many more nascent image cults have been officially suppressed before they could leave any historical record. But the compromise exemplified here between the formal rigidity of the Tridentine edicts and the irregular peculiarities of local tradition was a pattern encountered in relation to numerous miraculous images throughout the past five centuries.95

The eyes of the Virgin The overwhelming majority of reputedly miraculous images in the Italian Catholic world since 1500 have been of the Virgin Mary. Mary has been central to Catholic experience since the first Christian centuries, and came 42

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during the later medieval period to enjoy enormous theological attention and popular veneration. In the eyes of many, she was even seen to act independently on behalf of sinful mankind. Bernardino da Busti in the fifteenth century went so far as to claim that Mary actively sought out human sinners whom she might rescue. In the sixteenth century, partly in response to Protestant criticism of Mariolatry, Catholic theologians, even while they continued to celebrate Mary as joined with Christ in the process of human redemption, gave careful emphasis to her obedience and subordination to God. Her spiritual virtues were held up for emulation, especially by the mendicant orders, which included some extreme enthusiasts; but preachers discouraged the idea which had previously gained wide popularity, that she was not only more sympathetic to human weakness and problems than the judgemental figure of Christ, but that she could act independently to assist mortals in spiritual or material need. 96 Yet notwithstanding this clerical tendency to downplay Mary’s autonomy as an advocate, the growing cult of her images testifies to a resilient popular desire to see her as an active defender of her supplicants and as a figure directly accessible through her material representations. The Apocalypsis nova, an eschatological text by a fifteenth-century Portuguese Franciscan writer, printed in 1502, assured readers that the Virgin Mary, although bodily assumed into heaven at her death, had left on earth the gift of her presence just as Christ had of his. But whereas Christ was present in the Eucharist, the Virgin was everywhere and always present in her images, from which she observed the world, and she manifested this in miracles.97 Marian devotion, and image cults in particular, have continued over the past half-millennium to testify to the endurance of these popular convictions. The clerical hierarchy of the Church over the same time-span has endeavoured to emphasize the supreme authority of Christ in the Eucharist and to tame Marian piety, tying it to the institutional centre; but our findings lend support to recent historians who have questioned the older tendency to see the centuries following the Reformation as marked by the successful imposition, by Church and state working together, of social discipline. ‘Confessionalization’ cannot be reduced to political or clerical policy; local devotional practice is always negotiated and multifaceted.98 Time and again, as will be seen in many of the stories which follow, an adopted image has proved the stubborn bulwark of resistance to hierarchical control. 43

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Nor should Marian piety be gendered as female. Although there have been devotional practices distinctive to men or women, at all periods both sexes have actively promoted, carried in procession and sung songs in celebration of particular miraculous Madonnas. It is particularly important to stress this point because of the scholarly emphasis which has been laid on the ‘feminization’ of Catholic culture since the eighteenth century.99 The participation of women in many aspects of Marian image cults certainly created a prominent role for an active, female Christianity which was otherwise restricted: this motif runs throughout this book.100 At the same time, however, we should be wary of the tendency in the sources themselves to distort the picture of gender roles in the cults. Clerical records and publications have persistently prioritized female participation, together with its idealized connotations of innocence, passivity and subordination.101 In reality, men have at all times tended to play an equal part in the promotion of these cults, whether staging festivals with fireworks and feats of strength in conveying the image, or carrying the devotion into military conflict or out to sea. Since the eighteenth century women have inclined to be more visible than men at divine service, but the religion of images is not to be measured by statistics of church attendance. Liguria has a particularly profound tradition of Catholic devotion, especially to the Virgin Mary.102 The company of port-workers (in existence from 1340 to 1952) was protected by the archbishop’s court in return for their carrying Marian and other sacred images during processions. In 1637 the Republic as a whole was dedicated to the Virgin as Queen of Genoa: a relationship celebrated symbolically by the ritual procession of senators to key sanctuaries on Marian feast days.The post-Napoleonic Restoration and the Risorgimento had significant Marian 11 The Madonna Salus Populi Romani, church of dimensions in Genoa. The city was for- Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome. 44

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12 Chapel of the Madonna Salus Populi Romani, Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome.

mally re-dedicated to the Virgin in 1941; in 1952 the statue of the Madonna of the City, inaugurated in 1637, was presented with a golden heart. In 1990, during a visit by Pope John Paul ii on the 500th anniversary of the legendary vision of the Madonna della Guardia on Monte Figogna above the city, a further act of dedication to Mary took place. This tradition, which has always been associated with image cults, has offered a space within which a wide variety of social identities and political positions can be con45

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tested and negotiated. It has developed between the poles of the official and the unofficial, the secular and the religious, the clerical and the lay – although such binary oppositions have rarely been so simply felt. There have been many interleavings in the process of construction and mutation; many registers in the telling and retelling of stories. During the early modern period the religious orders of the Dominicans, Franciscans, Carmelites and Jesuits played a very active role in fostering Marian devotion in the context of their missions, thereby helping to mediate between the institutional centre and the localized provinces of the Church.103 The language of Roman and papal leadership had to come to terms with the vernacular dialects of myriad provincial communities, which translated Catholic beliefs and practices into infinitely diverse forms. Emblematic of papal attempts in the Tridentine years to bring order to this chaos was Pope Paul v’s construction, in the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, of a magnificent new chapel to house the miraculous Madonna of St Luke, the Salus Populi Romani (illus. 11, 12). Completed in 1613, the space was explicitly designed to evoke Paradise, to which the Virgin, present in her image, is transported by carved and gilded angels. Flowers on the altar recall the story of Mary’s bodily Assumption at her death, after which flowers were discovered in her tomb.The pope’s ambition to present this as the supreme image of the Virgin in the possession of the universal Catholic Church was underlined by the global dissemination, through the agency of the Jesuit Order, of tens of thousands of engraved copies: in 1600 this was probably the most widely distributed image in the world.104 But for all the prestige of this Roman model, it could do nothing to contain the proliferation of hundreds of rivals, nor even to keep popular enthusiasm for Mary always within the bounds of orthodoxy.When, in the 1950s, a young man studying for the priesthood explained to a woman in Basilicata that there was only one Madonna, she replied: ‘You studied with the priests for eight years, and you haven’t even learned the differences between the Madonnas?’105 The mother of a crippled child, interviewed early in the present century at the Marian sanctuary of Caravaggio di Lombardia, drew another distinction: ‘I don’t believe any more in God: He has never answered my prayers. But I pray to the Madonna.’106 Both of these witnesses testify to a faith in a mother goddess, or in multiple goddesses, which in its heterodoxy from the Christian perspective betrays its roots in a much older world of Mediterranean cults. Notwithstanding the importance of the theological 46

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13 Reliquary statue of Ste Foy, late 10th century, detail.

shift represented by the triumph of Christianity, the medieval and modern cult of miraculous images has its origins in a more ancient past. Recent work on image cults in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds describes practices in many ways indistinguishable from those focused on Marian shrines and still current in the Catholic world.107

The image and the relic A major reason for the fecundity of the phenomenon of the miraculous image has been its elusiveness: with its infinite capacity to appear in unexpected 47

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places and then to reproduce itself in copies no less potent than the model, the image constantly evades control. This differentiates it, crucially, from the relic. With very rare and significant exceptions, most notably the Turin Shroud and the Veronica, which are contact relics of Christ that also function as images, miraculous paintings and statues differ from relics of the saints in important respects. Scholars working on medieval Christianity have argued that the miracle-working image should be understood as a form of extension of the relics of the saints. It has been asserted that between the thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries, the cult image acquired from the relic something of the latter’s long-standing role as a vessel of sanctity.108 Where previously a relic had sometimes been framed by an enlivening image with arresting eyes, such as the tenth-century head reliquary of Ste Foy of Conques (illus. 13), from the thirteenth century painted crucifixes were made to contain a splinter from the True Cross, and by the middle of the fourteenth century cult pictures such as the Florentine Annunziata could command devotional pilgrimages in their own right. Such a neat teleology will not, however, stand up to close scrutiny. That there were close connections between cults respectively of relics and certain images is clear enough, although it is most evident in the use of visual means to render more visually arresting the usually disappointing physical qualities of the holy remains. This procedure, exemplified in the Ste Foy reliquary, is also seen in the development in the thirteenth century of ostensories for the more dramatic display of relics; in the promotion of the Veronica image of Christ’s face, a relic of the Passion which had been kept in Rome for some time but which Pope Innocent iii and his successors made more engaging by the invention of an iconographic image which could be widely advertised; and similarly in the public display from the fourteenth century of the Turin Shroud (in addition to copies derived from this) as an ‘image-relic’ of the Crucifixion.109 But if the histories of relics and of images intersect in various ways, we should also observe their large degree of independence from one another. Images had, of course, been venerated for long before the arrival of Christianity.The apotropaic statues of antiquity did not depend for their potency on saintly figures of human history (or their relics) but on popular belief in the immortal inhabitants of a parallel universe.110 However, the incarnational character of the Christian religion lends a particular relevance to material images of its presiding powers. Neither Christ himself nor the 48

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Virgin Mary having left, according to the early accounts, much in the way of tangible relics of their presence on Earth, their depictions in images were all the more valuable. Theologians who defended Christian images emphasized in justification the deity’s incarnate presence in the world, although most tended to be more cautious than Thomas Aquinas, who was exceptional (and controversial) among ecclesiastical authorities in his conviction of the identity of the image with God.111 Beyond this peculiar role of the image in Christianity there also arises a critical difference between relics and images, in their respective relation to authority. Whereas the first have always, and especially following legal reforms of the twelfth century, been jealously guarded by clerical authority, tagged and supervised, by contrast the latter have proved very much more resistant to ecclesiastical control. The tightening of the Church’s rules on canonization and the authentication of relics in the twelfth century may, indeed, have contributed to the gradual proliferation in the following period of popular cults of images as perceived vessels of sanctity which did not require the same degree of official authorization. After the twelfth century the number of relics in private hands was strictly limited, and their veneration was likewise constrained. Between 1300 and 1523 there were no more than 28 new canonizations, and even the larger number of 58 registered between 1588 and 1798 was very restricted.112 The same arc of 500 years witnessed thousands of new cults of miraculous images. Many of these were suppressed before taking root, and many more will have flourished beyond the reach of the historical record. But even those for which the surviving evidence permits some analysis amount to a bewilderingly large and diverse body.

The icon in Eastern and Western Christianity Evident in all miraculous image stories is an implied assumption that the divinity – usually, as we have seen, in the form of the Virgin Mary – is in some sense present in the statue or the painting. As already noted, an older, pre-Christian history lies behind such understanding. At the same time, such an attitude aligns Western perceptions more closely than might be expected with those of Orthodox Christians, who communicate directly, and intimately, with holy icons.Those scholars who have considered the comparison have tended to posit an essential difference between the Latin and 49

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the Orthodox modes of visual response.113 As the great Yugoslav Byzantinist George Ostrogorsky expressed this: Whereas in the West the holy image serves to provoke a certain religious impulse and a pious state of the soul, by the picturesque description, the interpretation and the evocation of the person represented, the Orthodox icon is a means of communion between the one who prays and God, the Virgin or the saints, a means of union with the transcendental substance of the Divinity.114

Theologians of the Eastern no less than the Western churches, while defending holy images, have always been at pains to warn against excessive veneration, which could verge on idolatry, confusing the picture with the subject represented. Proper latria or honour displayed to the image was directed beyond the object to the saint.115 However, poor translations available in the West of the documents of the Council of Nicaea in 787 fostered a Western belief that the Byzantines in general were, in fact, idolaters.This Western prejudice – that Latins used images as pious aides-mémoire of the saints, whereas Greeks confused their icons with the holy beings themselves – has itself muddled understanding of the subject.The actual use of Christian images by lay men and women in both East and West appears from the historical record to have been a good deal more similar than is generally imagined.116 The assumption that an image may at any moment become fully charged with the power of the saint is documented equally in both cultural spheres. So too is an intimate familiarity with holy images, evinced in many stories told in this book. Greeting a familiar sacred picture; keeping a ‘beautiful corner’ of such images in the home; lighting personal candles before the household icons – all of these practices have been found in Catholic Italy as well as in Orthodox Russia.117 It has been written of miraculous icon cults in pre-Revolutionary Russia: Because these icons usually originated with the experiences of lay men and women from all social backgrounds, they gave lay people an independent means by which to exercise their spiritual discernment and express both their personal and communal involvement in the unfolding of sacred history.118 50

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The following pages will present similar findings about many cults recorded in the Catholic Church over the past five centuries. In both contexts we find lay communities discovering and promoting the veneration of reputedly miraculous images as an empowering vindication of their own identities, and occasionally in defiance of episcopal hostility.

Regulation and resistance Periodic attempts by authority to modernize and regulate Catholic devotion with respect to images have continued throughout our period to encounter problems, and even outright and violent resistance. While the reforming bishops of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were motivated by the fear of paganism in the remoter parts of their dioceses, the watchwords of some of their eighteenth-century successors were clarity and reason.Their impact, however, was partial at best. A sense of exasperation comes through the words of a Spanish Trinitarian in 1779: ‘It doesn’t seem that they remember she who is in heaven, they look only at this holy image [and] talk as if they were personally in front of her original.’119 Certain traditional practices were condemned by intolerant episcopal authority, such as the veneration of the claimed sweating and weeping of an outdoor frescoed Madonna at Musignano in the archdiocese of Milan in 1778.Yet in the same region, at Casorate, where in 1755 a new statue erected in a niche by a confraternity of the Rosary was reported to be working wonders, although the official inquest dismissed the alleged miracles and at first suppressed the cult, the archbishop eventually conceded that there had been ‘significant graces’, and validated the devotion.120 Also in the mid-eighteenth century, the Madonna of the Seven Veils of Foggia, in Apulia, was seen mysteriously to manifest herself through the material coverings by which she was normally hidden, leaning out from the enclosure of her shrine to reassure contemporaries of her continuing protection in times of earthquakes and other crises. This phenomenon was lent prestigious authority by Saint Alfonso de’ Liguori, who twice reported his own experience of the vision and who then described it to a painter so that a copy could be made of the Virgin in the miraculous image.121 It was in this context of debate that in 1786 the Jansenist bishop of Pistoia, Scipio Ricci, announced a radical reform which would have an impact well beyond the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. Ricci had been inspired 51

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by the rational views of the historian Lodovico Antonio Muratori, and intent, with the patronage of Grand Duke Leopold, on cleansing the Church of ignorance and superstition, he focused especially on the popular cult of miraculous images. In a set of diocesan decrees, he denounced the practices of venerating certain images under distinctive titles; of enhancing their mystery by covering them; and of honouring them with gifts of various kinds.122 To Ricci it seemed extraordinary that false beliefs in the supposed power of particular images should persist ‘in a century which calls itself enlightened’.123 This was indeed the voice of Enlightenment, and it intended to spell the end for the cult of miraculous images. But the attempt met with overwhelming hostility, not only from lay devotees of particular images, but also on the part of bishops and other clergy who, knowing their congregations, hesitated to impose so radical a change. Ricci’s episcopal chair was dismantled, and after widespread rioting he was forced to abandon his diocese.The Pistoia council’s recommendations having been circulated and discussed throughout the Catholic world, several of them were condemned by Pope Pius vi in the bull Auctorem Fidei of 1794.The momentum of the popular reaction against the Leopoldine reforms carried on through the 1790s, tensions at this time being amplified by the growing threat of Napoleon’s armies.124 In February 1796, at the height of this reactionary, anti-Enlightenment and anti-Jacobin movement, which came to be known as the ‘Viva Maria’, a painted Madonna on a public wall in Arezzo was popularly reported to have suddenly turned white. The bishop, conscious of his official duty to discourage such rumours, wrote of his inability to suppress the new cult: ‘I do not even know how to dismiss as imaginary such a mutation [of the image] of which this entire population is so persuaded that I should think it hazardous to declare anything else.’125 Later in the same year, following the course of the French advance, apocalyptic rumours spread throughout Europe that over 100 Madonnas in shrines on the public streets of the city of Rome were moving their eyes.126 A sonneteer of the day struck an ironic note: Hurry, ladies, hurry! Listen to what everyone has been talking about: At the Pedacchia, the Monte and by the Ghetto, The Madonnas are opening their eyes; ... 52

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Even though some are indiscreet enough to suggest That this is just another of the priests’ little money-spinners.127

But the satire was itself a tribute to the strength of the collective persuasion of the reality of this supernatural phenomenon. Notions of modernization and rationality will recur throughout this book’s discussion of miraculous images over the period from 1500 to the present. Repeatedly, however, the experience of image cults undercuts simplistic teleological assumptions. The twentieth century would see miraculous images threatened by intellectuals and leaders of the Catholic Church on a new ground: that of a decorum which was understood as aesthetic no less than it was moral. Characteristic of this temper were the strict injunctions issued in advance of a procession in August 1948 by the parish priest of Apparizione, high on a mountain above Genoa, where a little carving of the Virgin has been venerated since the late Middle Ages (see illus. 102): The practice of repeatedly lifting the image is firmly forbidden: a custom which is dubious in itself, and which endangers the secur ity of the statue. Nor should bundles of ex votos be hung on the arms of the Virgin and Child.

The concern for respectful religious behaviour had here become bound up with a fastidious clerical distaste for what were perceived as the indecent,

14 Santini, mid-20th century.

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half-pagan trappings of a festival too much in the hands of the laity.128 Around mid-century, there formed in France a Dominican group committed to purging Catholic churches of their characteristic clutter of cheap plaster Madonnas, brightly coloured portraits of the saints and vulgar copies of cult images. Known generically as Saint-Sulpicerie, from the concentration of such products in the neighbourhood of St Sulpice in Paris, the popular imagery of the Church filled the self-appointed guardians of religious artistic taste with horror. Their journal, L’Art sacré, from the 1940s to the 1960s advocated a ‘purification’ of churches and altars which, it was felt, was the only way to recover a due sense of mystery and reverence in these holy places. In the words of one of these polemicists, Pie-Raymond Régamey, ‘compromised architecture, superficial Saint-Sulpiceries, banalities committed by the crowd of mediocre artists, whether “modern” or not – amount to a horrible mask on the face of the Church’. Mass-produced santini, little coloured reproductions on paper which for centuries have played a vital part in the cult of miraculous images, were targeted as typical of Sunday school art and of the saccharine values of popular religious taste (illus. 14).129 The Second Vatican Council heeded the call, and in 1963 inaugurated a period of artistic minimalism which became a prominent aspect of the Council’s simplification of the liturgy.130 Favouring ‘a noble beauty rather than sumptuousness’, the Council issued a qualified defence of holy images in churches: The practice of putting worshipful symbols in churches for people to venerate should be uncompromisingly maintained. However, the number put out should be kept under control, and they should be arranged in a suitable pattern, in case they excite sensationalism among the Christian people or pander to a devotion that is not quite right.131

The Catholic Church during the ensuing decades has been so profoundly affected by this movement for aesthetic and moral purity, linked also to a fresh impulse towards the universal standardization of devotional practice, that it is hard for anyone born since 1960 to imagine the extent of the transformation. It is a characteristic of the modern Church that many parish priests have come to feel particularly uncomfortable with any manifestation of lay devotional life outside the liturgy of the sacraments. Not a few are reserved or irritated if asked about cults of holy images within their 54

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parishes, and it is very common to find that the ex-votos formerly massed around a venerated statue in a church have in recent years been removed from view.132 The clerical attitude (with exceptions) strongly favours a universalist language of Catholic piety, and tends to be slighting of what are seen as the excessively secular, even ‘backward’ and ‘pagan’ aspects of local and particular image cults. Our own experience echoes that of an anthropologist who in the early 1970s lived in Monte Castello di Vibio in Umbria: here she encountered widespread criticism of the parish priest for his indifference to the locally venerated Madonna dei Portenti.This fresco had been the patron ess of the town since its removal into the church from the original location on the wall of a farmhouse in 1740, shortly after performing the first of many miracles. The hostility to the priest in the 1970s 15 The Madonna delle Grazie, chapel of the Madonna had little to do with traditional anti - delle Grazie, Sori. clericalism, but was focused upon his deliberate subversion of the procession and festival of the Madonna: instead of participating, he organized and attended football games. He refused to teach children about local traditions and avoided all reference to the miraculous image. His own position was critical both of what he saw as the pagan provincialism of his parishioners, and of their communism (a political allegiance in fact wholly compatible, in the Italian context, with strong traditional Catholicism).The differences of perception recorded at Monte Castello are a microcosm of the larger position of miraculous image cults within the Catholic Church in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.133 On the other hand, the comments of a minority of priests and sacristans, more sympathetic both to popular Marian and imagistic devotion, have expressed a local sense that such interference with image cults has had a damaging impact on the relationship of the laity with the Church. The 55

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16 Matthew Seutter (1678–1757), Map of Liguria, 17th century, engraving.

research for this study found, notwithstanding the religious aesthetic offensive of the late twentieth century, that there remains widespread and enthusiastic support for particular image cults, with their rich supporting paraphernalia of holy lockets, illuminated reproductions and kitsch souvenirs to be worn on the person, carried in a purse, hung in a vehicle’s windscreen or displayed in a domestic shrine. The parish priest of Sori, a Ligurian coastal town of 4,000 inhabitants, reports that when he makes his house visits today, no home lacks its displayed reproduction of the locally revered Madonna delle Grazie (illus. 15 and see illus. 103). The dense array of holy images and candles, once commonly to be seen, has become less frequent in Italian houses and apartments of the early twenty-first century; but the myriad copies which radiate outwards from each miraculous prototype none the less lodge 56

17 Vico delle Monachette, Genoa, c. 1900, photograph.

themselves, perhaps more discreetly than in the past, in the daily existences of its devotees.134

Genoese horizons The local context and emphasis of these narratives about miraculous images underline a general truth that impresses itself upon every historian of Italy (map of Italy, p. 268, and illus. 16).The fragmentation of the territory, which 57

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18 View of Genoa, c. 1840, engraving.

in the region of Liguria is manifest to an extreme degree, resists grand narra tives about the rise of the state and the integration of culture. There is a paradox here. From an external perspective, Genoa and its hinterland have often appeared to comprise a precociously modern polity. Headquarters of a medieval commercial empire extending across the Mediterranean and into the Black Sea, Genoa in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries gave birth to modern financial capitalism. For 250 years from the mid-sixteenth century, the Genoese Republic played a prominent part in the diplomacy of Europe.The nineteenth century saw Italian industrialization begin here, and with it the first socialist movements of the peninsula.The port and financial institutions of Genoa remain powerful, and the dominant image projected by both the Genoese commune and the regional government of Liguria is of a thoroughly urbane and contemporary identity. Yet while these aspects have been part of the historical experience of northwest Italy, and notwithstand ing the impact over the past century and a half of modern transportation and media, there is another history which is coexistent. The capital city itself remains to this day a maze of narrow streets and alleys, difficult for the stranger to negotiate (illus. 17). Genoa is, moreover, hemmed in closely by mountains, which have always hampered communications (illus. 18). The hinterland in general is characterized by small coastal towns and tiny fishing harbours, narrow wooded valleys and remote mountain villages. 58

19 Liguria from the air. 20 The coast of Liguria near Rapallo.

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The geography of Liguria is officially described as comprising 65 per cent mountains and 35 per cent hills (illus. 19, 20).The mountains, indeed, come down to the sea, leaving no inter vening plain which could serve either arable cultivation or easy communications: only the tunnelling of the coastal railway in the mid-nineteenth century and of the motorway a century later have gone some way to address this challenge. Dante, wishing 21 Coast of Liguria near La Spezia, c. 1890. to convey the terror induced by looking up, in his vision, at the forbidding face of the mountain of Purgatory, compared this to the coast of Liguria (illus. 21).135 This harsh environment has done much to fragment both social experience and cultural expression. The ‘state’ of the Genoese Republic was never formally constituted. Although from the late sixteenth century until the advent of Napoleon in 1797 the coast was theoretically subject to the doge and senate, in reality the government’s claim to centralized control was vitiated by lack of means and by local resistance, which was periodically both violent and effective. Nor has the archbishop’s task of imposing norms of religious behaviour been made easy by this rugged landscape: the map of the archdiocese of Genoa is divided into a dozen dioceses and 600 scattered parishes.136 The historian who would understand such a territory needs – as Edoardo Grendi, the Ligurian scholar and advocate of local history, insisted – to be able to switch perspective from the centre to the locality.137 Yet both viewpoints have validity: indeed, a number of image cults acquired their particular cast and momentum in the context of tense negotiation between the Ligurian capital and its hinterland.138 Since the Middle Ages, therefore, Liguria has been distinguished by a sharply contrasting culture which has been at once profoundly traditional and given to innovation. In particular times and contexts, miraculous image cults in this environment have been subject to criticism as outmoded. Reformist clergy in the aftermath of the Council of Trent, rational critics of the age of Enlightenment, and secularists of the nineteenth- and twentiethcentury age of industry and urban reform have successively presented such 60

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devotions as pagan survivals, irrational peasant customs and superstitious obstacles to modernization. Yet these rhetorical positions have not gone unchallenged, nor have defenders of image cults been invariably aligned with the forces of conservatism. Precisely because of its openness to economic change over the past millennium, Liguria offers a peculiarly valuable case study in the endurance of social beliefs and practices grounded in faith in the miraculous power of images.139

Conclusion: Redrawing space, collapsing time To conclude this introductory chapter we cite two final examples indicative of the scope of the project. A further instance of the kinds of communitas which may be generated and sustained by an image cult is the Madonna of Shkodra, which for several hundred years has been an important point of reference for the many Albanians who have migrated across the Adriatic to the Italian peninsula. The holy legend ties the beginning of the cult to the takeover of Albanian territory by the Ottomans in the 1460s, at which time this venerated image was said to have flown by angelic force to find safety in a new home to the south of Rome, at Genazzano.The fabled ties with its land of origin have been maintained: in 1895 the council of Catholic bishops of Albania, in evident competition with other religious groups in the country, proclaimed this image to be the ‘patron of Albania’. The Italian sanctuary is still visited, especially around the feast day in April, by large numbers of Albanians now living in Italy.140 In the eastern Mediterranean today, at the Syrian monastery of Saidnaya, women gather to pray before an image of Mary the mother of Jesus. Some are Christian, some are Muslim.They have come in the shared convic tion that the Madonna of Saidnaya, and she alone, can help them to realize their frustrated desire to give birth to a child.The reputation of the image is ancient, and is renewed in each generation by mothers who return to the shrine with their newborn babies to offer thanks. From a balcony above the entrance, five women sing a Byzantine song in Arabic. Cutting across the cultural barriers which separate her devotees, the Saidnaya Virgin is the catalyst of a particular kind of shared identity.141 This book is about the distinctive, and sometimes surprising, ways in which reputedly miraculous images can crystallize community. 61

22 The Madonna della Fortuna, former ship’s prow venerated as a cult image from 1636, painted wood.

two

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here was the statue of Our Lady which had previously served as a decoration on the prow of the ship . . . in the crowd which pressed into the church I saw many people who said they had been liberated from possession by spirits, or had received other graces of healing (illus. 22).1

T

Placing the image from nowhere The miraculous image is an eruption into the world, in relation to which it always remains, in some degree, an outsider: beyond the bounds of normal experience, yet not altogether out of range. The accounts given of the arrival and behaviour of supernatural images are the more disturbing for their closeness to, indeed their direct engagement with, that unenchanted world of the everyday.2 Traditions about miracle-working images are always invented; but the invention takes a variety of forms, and proponents may be more or less conscious of what they are about.3 Origin myths, moreover, have different levels of historicity. All miraculous image cults need to establish religious authority: both officially, through ecclesiastical institutions and theological endorsement, and less officially, in the form of popular belief. Rival groups, religious and secular, and varying with historical circumstance, compete for control. The speed of travel of news and of the movement of people raises differential challenges for direction by any particular authority. In different periods and in diverse contexts, security, political power and large sums of money have been at stake. This chapter reviews a variety of types of ‘invented’ image in order to explore comparatively the frameworks of construction of different narratives of authenticity and authority. While every 63

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instance, in the detail and meaning of its historical circumstances, is unique, nevertheless a number of patterns repeat themselves across a very wide expanse of time, from antiquity to the present day. From what follows, some general conclusions emerge.These concern the creative role and the social character of the ‘discoverers’ of miraculous images; the relation of such images to visions; the part which political tensions can play in the creation of an atmosphere conducive to reports of image miracles; the myths of the Eastern origins of many such objects; the ways in which competing interests may dispute and negotiate the management of a cult; the difficulty (but also the possibility) of creating a miraculous image to order; and the complex dynamic which comes into play where multiple cults coexist within the same social and political arena.

Image finders Official tolerance of dubious devotional practices around images was often motivated by delicate considerations of local interest and power. When a disappointed gambler was miraculously punished with a broken arm for his attempted insult to a painted Madonna on the Porta dei Borghi of Lucca in March 1588, the assembly within days, according to eyewitnesses, of five to six thousand people must have played a large role in convincing the archbishop and the secular governors of the city to indulge the cult, with the removal of the image into the town hall.4 Without political considerations of a different nature, the Neapolitan cult of the Madonna della Sanità might otherwise have been stillborn. It arose in 1579 with the supposedly miraculous discovery of a fresco in the catacomb of Santo Gaudioso. Shortly afterwards, a renegade Dominican monk was accused of exploiting the shrine for his own profit. An episcopal inquest found that this Fra Antonino had published false miracles of the Madonna and that, having printed engraved reproductions, he had hung these around the necks of goats, from which he was taking what he advertised as miraculous and thaumaturgic milk. In the event, the enterprising friar was released, and the cult, with a substantial new church, received its licence – probably because the authorities, concerned at this time by the threatened introduction of the Spanish Inquisition, had no desire to draw public attention to this or other heterodox activities in the diocese.5 If the response of clerical authority to image cults was at times complex, the social and cultural roots of these phenomena were just as multivalent. 64

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Hostile critics have at all times patronizingly characterized such devotions as the products of the illiterate, the weak and the marginalized. Moreover, it suited early modern clerical interests to downplay the sophistication and to emphasize the simple purity of the witnesses who often acted as the first finders of miraculous images. Gumppenberg’s Atlas rehearses with tedious repetition the anodyne types of the innocent peasant girl and the good (often lame or mute) old man, who are described in this context as the utterly innocent agents of a higher power.6 But were the cults no more than this, and had they not found crucial support among the clergy, the educated and the urbane, we should hear virtually nothing about them in the historical sources. Examples throughout this book demonstrate the striking spectrum of patrons to be found sustaining particular cults of this kind. Commonly, behind an emerging cult there appears a locally revered figure, often recognized as a ‘living saint’, able to mediate between a diverse range of devotees. In the countryside near Lecce, in Apulia, in the late seventeenth century, a tailor’s assistant, Francesco Colella, acquired for a time a venerable reputation as a finder of miraculous images. After an initial apparition of the Virgin Mary in the summer of 1697, Colella reported that he had been told where to look for an image which would be the Madonna’s chosen site for a new chapel, to replace one that was in ruins. The discovery was duly made by a party including Colella and the local priest: the bishop’s vicar general then granted permission for the chapel’s construction. Ecclesiastical authority thus vindicated the status both of the visionary and of the nascent image cult.The resulting chapel at Vernole, with its image of the Madonna painted on a stone, is still extant. On another occasion it was following a vision experienced by someone else that Colella dreamed of an associated image, and was able to find this one also. He began to be treated as a living saint: it was said that ‘the people kissed his clothes out of devotion’. Unfortunately for Colella’s status as a holy visionary, he was subsequently observed to deteriorate in his behaviour, becoming suspected of practising magic as a means to find lost objects. But although this brought him momentarily under scrutiny by the Inquisition, the story testifies to the shrewdness and enterprise of a finder of miraculous images.7 The clerical desire to monitor lay piety had been intensifying even prior to the emergence of the Protestant critique.The Fifth Lateran Council had in 1516 issued an important regulation concerning visions: any report of heavenly apparitions was to be referred to the Holy See for verification.8 65

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A decline in recorded visions has been noticed in early modern Spain, which has been plausibly interpreted in the light of this papal decree.9 In the Italian context, 1530 has been identified as the approximate terminus for female visionaries. In the preceding decades, numerous female ‘living saints’ had been celebrated by both lay and clerical observers for their visions and prophecies. After the third decade of the sixteenth century, such women would receive only suspicion and hostility from clerical authorities.10 This evidence has tended to reinforce the view, discussed in chapter One, which sees the Council of Trent as a watershed, after which all Catholic devotion was canalized by a single, clerical (and masculine) power. But that assumption is subverted by the fact that, throughout the Catholic world during this very period, there was a marked increase in the number of reported miraculous images, many of which made their appearance in the aftermath, and as tangible testimony, of a vision. Paradoxically, the stricture on the authenticity of visions after 1516 provided fresh encouragement for the discovery of images which could be presented as justificatory evidence of such a revelation. The account of Francesco Colella, just described, is a case in point. Emblematic of the synergy between visions and images at the very period in which the former were coming under hostile episcopal scrutiny is the case of Angiola Schiaffino, a twelve-year-old peasant girl of Camogli in Liguria who, in 1518, driving a cow into a wood, had a series of visions of the Virgin Mary at a place where the Madonna was also painted on a post beside the track. A sanctuary was subsequently built around this image, now deemed miraculous (illus. 23).11 Also symptomatic was the instance of the Madonna of Paitone, near Brescia in Lombardy. The case broke in 1532 with the story of an appearance of the Virgin to a profoundly deaf young boy; two or three years later, to consolidate the testimony of the visionary a painter was commissioned to represent the event according to his description. 12 The inauguration of the cult of the Madonna of Montallegro, on the Ligurian coast above Rapallo, was also in this sense typical. In 1557, on 2 July – the feast day of the Visitation of the Virgin Mary – Giovanni Chighizola, a peasant who had been selling produce in the market at Genoa and was returning home, awoke from a sleep on the hillside to witness an appearance of the Virgin, who declared that ‘she had come from Greece to live’ in Liguria and required a church to be built on the spot, and – as witness to her presence – delivered an icon which Giovanni discovered on the ground after the vision’s disappearance 66

23 The Madonna del Boschetto, Camogli, c. 1510, oil on panel.

(illus. 24). This tiny image of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary is in fact an Orthodox icon, whose style suggests its possible origin in Dalmatia around 1500: it therefore had a plausible role in the story of the Madonna’s tactical retreat from former Eastern Christian lands now occupied by the advancing Ottoman Muslims. Miracles of healing followed, leading very shortly to an official inquest, which left the archbishop sufficiently 67

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convinced by the material evidence of the icon to authorize the construction of the chapel.13 Fresh interest in visions was sparked during the industrial nineteenth century, as the clergy looked for weapons with which to critique the secularism of the age.Yet aspects of traditional piety had become embarrassing to the clerical elite, anxious not to be thought outdated in the modern world.This is not to say that the supernatural was banished to the cultural margins with the advent of the age of industry: even a Voltairean freethinker such as J.A.S. Collin de Plancy could publish in Paris in the 1820s a Critical Dictionary of Relics and Miraculous Images.14 But leading Catholic clerics now felt it increasingly necessary to edit reports of divine manifestations. Floods in the Po Valley in 1872 triggered a spate of 24 The Madonna of Montallegro, c. 1500, icon. popular visions, reported especially by children who said they saw the Virgin Mary in humble settings such as barns and pigsties. Such homely familiarity with the divine was challenging, and indeed none of these particular visionary experiences was given a serious hearing by the priests.15 New cults were desired, but they would need careful clerical management. Following the papal declar ation of Mary’s Immaculate Conception in 1854, the Church’s desire for miraculous signs became especially palpable. It was in this context that Bernadette Soubirous experienced her vision at Lourdes in 1858, creating the opportunity to found a French national shrine which, in turn, provoked Catholics in Spain and the Italian peninsula, in the century of nascent nationalisms, to seek new Marian prodigies of their own.16 Even before Lourdes had taken off, Italy had experienced a wonder of the age in the allegedly moving eyes of a brand-new statue of the Virgin at 68

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Taggia, on the Ligurian coast not far from the French border, discussed later in this chapter. In 1871 a similar movement of the eyes was reported of a late medieval statue of the Virgin and Child, the Madonna delle Grazie, at an old chapel on the Ligurian coastal road near Chiavari (illus. 25, 26).17 The promotion of another visionary site, that of the Madonna della Guardia on a mountain overlooking Genoa from the west, was evidently motivated in part by a continuing desire to find ‘an Italian Lourdes’; indeed (as was celebrated at Taggia), to demonstrate chronological prior ity over the French shrine. Retrospectively, the nineteenth-century reactivation of the cult of the Madonna della Guardia was attributed to the reported appearance of the Virgin from Monte Figogna to two children in Torazza on 26 May 1856, the authenticity of which had immediately been

26 The Madonna delle Grazie. Engraving of 1872 recording the legendary origin of the image and the movement of the eyes in 1871.

25 The Madonna delle Grazie, Chiavari, 15th century, carved and painted wood.

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announced by Archbishop Charvaz.18 In the case of the Madonna della Guardia, the original vision by a peasant, alleged to have occurred on the heights above Genoa in 1490, had not been accompanied by the appearance of a tangible image; but since the cult was deliberately re-launched in the late nineteenth century, it has crystallized around a standardized and widely disseminated artistic representation of the kneeling peasant and standing Virgin (illus. 27). This propensity for a vision to generate an image as the focus of an ensuing cult is widespread. Certain of the images of the Madonna della Guardia have acquired miraculous reputations in their own right. 19 If the image, from one viewpoint, lends authen- 27 Antonio Canepa, The Madonna della Guardia Appears to Benetto ticity and authority to a reported Pareto, 1894, plaster sculpture group. La Guardia, Sanctuary vision, from another perspective it of the Madonna, photograph c. 1900. evidently satisfies a recurrent desire for a material means of access to that visionary experience.

A climate of apprehension In 1629 a bomb was discovered under the doge’s seat in the cathedral in Genoa. In January 1636 the senate issued a ban on the carrying of arms in the city. Tensions were running high in the Republic of Genoa and especially within the city during the 1620s and ’30s. There were incessant concerns over security, and pressures for enhanced military preparedness. The city was in a state of growing ferment: Genoa’s historic status as an international power, which had been kept alive during the sixteenth century by adept diplomacy, was now in crisis, threatened by the greater forces of Spain and Austria, France and Savoy. Inside the city, the aristocratic elite which had long controlled the senate was being challenged by a new 70

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political group which questioned the wisdom of maintaining the Austrian alliance, famously struck by the celebrated Andrea Doria in the 1520s.20 In this febrile atmosphere, rumour spread like wildfire.The religious context was no less volatile. On the one hand the senate was drawing on the support of the Church to reinforce its authority. Archbishop de Marini, as was often the case with the ecclesiastical leadership of the city, was himself a member of one of the most powerful Genoese clans, and he was naturally in close touch with the senate. Public prayers were ordered by the senate for the safety of the Republic, including the exposition of the sacrament. Pope Urban viii was petitioned for an indulgence in 1637 for the celebration of the feast day of the Annunciation, 25 March, in order to give public thanks for benefits received in times of war, plague and hunger. This feast was published in all churches; the religious were instructed to celebrate masses, and local officials were directed to fire artillery from the city’s forts and to let off mortars, soldiers firing their muskets in unison. On the same day, the Virgin was crowned Queen of Genoa in the cathedral, followed in July by the first appearance of silver money bearing the Madonna’s image.21 Complementing this official use of religious power to support the state was a popular devotional revival, encouraged especially by the Capuchins and the Jesuits, which simultaneously contributed to and threatened to undermine both the senate’s strategy and the archbishop’s attempts to keep control over religious life. In September 1630 it was reported that the Virgin had appeared to a sick young girl in the Hospital of Incurables. In the same month near Pontedecimo, in the Val Polcevera to the northwest of the city, there came news of a similar case.22 As accounts of these unverified miracles spread, women and priests in Genoa were reported to be gathering late at night and visiting churches, singing litanies and calling out for mercy. These night-time devotions were banned by the archbishop on pain of excommunication. Large crowds of people gathering at night were worrying to both Church and state, although control was differentially expressed (lay companies, for example, were often dependent on the senate). Other manifestations of devotional exuberance were specifically challenging to religious authority, and here the senate might play the popular card – for example, opposing the archbishop’s attempt in 1643 to ban painters and sculptors from producing unlicensed holy images.23 Throughout the seventeenth century a climate of feverish expectation remained, with intense storms of activity in response to particular moments 71

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of crisis in the internal or external affairs of the Republic. In June 1665 the archbishop’s notary examined a number of rumoured miracles, many of which proved to be unsubstantiated.The very ordinariness of these accounts testifies to the atmosphere within which cults could be longed for and had the potential to gain strength. Rumours spread that the Madonna in the church of San Giovanni il Vecchio attached to the cathedral of San Lorenzo was working miracles, and a number of people came forward to recount their experiences. A man reported that it had been said that his mute stepson had started to speak, although in fact he had been brought back home still voiceless. One woman announced that she had been rescued from spirit possession after falling down two or three times before the Madonna’s image in the cathedral. However, a second woman, aged 34 and by trade a maker of silk stockings but unable to work because for four years she had been possessed by spirits (‘which were killing her and talked to her and once threw her downstairs’), had gone to the church and ‘stayed there on the ground for three hours from 11 at night until 14 beset by spirits, who are still there – and I don’t know anyone who has been liberated’. In search of relief, she had previously set out to pray before another image, but this had proved to be too far from home, so she had clearly hoped that the cathedral image would prove efficacious. A 29-year-old slave of the aristocratic Spinola family, who had a bad leg, heard women saying that they were going to ‘take the pardon’, or in other words to visit the site of the miracles, at Nostra Signora in San Giovanni il Vecchio, and decided to go too. While there, he saw soldiers coming to turn the people out. His own, somewhat modest, claim was that as a result of his prayers he could now walk freely without his stick. He substantiated his story by saying that he had gone to the house of the Signora Teresa Sauli to take two eggs for his mistress, and from that point on, although his knee was still bad, he was not prevented from walking. (A doctor called as an expert witness took the edge off this account, saying that the man’s varicose veins had in fact been cured by a Bolognese surgeon.24) Touchingly trivial, and significant precisely because of this, such tales gathered credence and momentum at times of heightened political and religious excitement. In such circumstances, belief in the miraculous power of particular images acquired a devotional intensity and a social potency which were rightly perceived by the defenders of political order as a substantial threat. In the 1680s there was another crescendo of religious fervour, associated with hostility to the ruling aristocratic regime – especially in 1684, the 72

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year of a massive bombardment of Genoa by the French (an estimated 13,000 bombs fell on the city in just over a week), and in the apocalyptic year of 1688, when earthquakes in Naples and Benevento were reported, and Lenten sermons and missions stimulated the proliferation of prophets, predictions of scourges on the city, and reports of miracles. Genoa was full of processions of people pulling chains, carrying heavy crosses and huge rocks through the streets: it seemed that ‘everyone had become a visionary saint’.25 Stories circulated (unconfirmed but fostered by the local priests) that the crucifix in the church of San Carlo had moved its head, drawing huge crowds and threatening disorder. The senate became extremely anxious about these public gatherings of people by day and night. The archbishop was asked to direct parish priests to insist that parishioners make their devotions in their local church and not use devotion as an excuse to meet in different parts of the city. An edict was issued directing people to pray at home and not to gather at night, and in particular not to process with bells and form crowds. The Ave Maria was not to be recited in the evening, when the churches should be closed. Particular anxieties were expressed about hooded fraternities and processions of young women. Despite a prohibition on the wearing of hoods, on 17 July 1688 the company of San Marco in the port set off to process to the extramural church of Coronata, home of a miracle-working statue. Gathering and donning their hoods under the portico of the Doria palace, they provoked the prince to challenge them: their justification was that they were taking flowers and candles to the Madonna.26 In such a context of anxiety and anticipation some manifestations of the miraculous would prove both tangible and tenacious, and the crowds unstoppable. The following sections present two narratives of miracleworking images ‘found’ and established in the early seventeenth century. In both cases the images themselves pre-dated the activation of their miracleworking potential.The first is a dramatic case of the construction of a religious cult out of a secular image; the second of the cultivation of the energy of a pre-existing religious painting.

A Madonna found in the sea She felt heavy in the arms of the men, who strained to carry her with dignity across the threshold of the church. A strange translation for this gaunt and staring figure, recently risen from the waves – and one which would 73

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shortly be contested (see illus. 22).27 For was not this massive pinewood idol, with its alarming gaze, in fact a pagan deity, a figure of Charity – or perhaps the Queen of England? And even if the mariners who carried her were justified in maintaining that their image really did represent the Virgin Mary, supporting in her left arm the infant Jesus (a part of the statue which, given its awkwardness, had later to be authenticated by a professional sculptor), what claim to special reverence could be made for this one, of all the countless hundreds of Madonnas scattered across the early seventeenthcentury city of Genoa? What more was she than the ornamental prow of a ship which, after sailing from the north of Europe, had sunk in the port six months earlier during a storm, and had been purchased by a consortium of 27 opportunistic sailors intending to salvage her cargo of iron?28 Later, the foundation legend of the cult would be elevated by the addition of an appropriate miracle. It would be said that when the statue was first brought from the water and set up on the quay, a little girl, falling from a height but remaining unhurt, had recounted her sensation of being lifted up by a beautiful lady, whom she subsequently identified as the figure in the statue. But in the late spring of 1636, when the poor and illiterate sailors Marco Pasturino and Battista Busella offered to bring their statue into the seamen’s church in the harbour, the parish priest had no such example of uncomplicated piety and miraculous authentication to guide him. Orazio Pizzarello, the priest-in-charge of the little church of San Vittore dei Marinari, was well qualified to play the role of mediator between his teeming maritime parish and the universal Church of which he was the representative.The first secular prior of this former Benedictine house, he had been directly appointed five years before by Pope Urban viii.The parish was a challenging one, and far from prestigious: Pizzarello inherited his predecessors’ pastoral responsibility for the fluctuating and largely poor population of the Genoese waterfront beyond the medieval city wall. He blessed the ships and the warehouses of the port, and took the holy sacrament to the prisoners who served on the ships of the Republic. At the same time he was a highly educated man: a canon lawyer, he was also dean of the college of doctors of theology in Genoa. He was aware of the strictures of the Church councils on the inappropriate veneration of images, including those of the Council of Trent which in recent years had been publicized throughout the Genoese archdiocese. He was probably conscious, also, that this piece of nautical salvage had already been rejected by the nuns of the nearby convent of 74

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San Tommaso. Nevertheless, Father Pizzarello decided to take a chance. The humblest inhabitants of what he called ‘the neighbourhood of my parish’ were surely to be encouraged in their piety, no less than those of better education. The sailors were permitted to bring in their image on Monday in the week of Corpus Christi (the proposal of the feast day itself having been rejected as unseemly by the socially superior and scornful members of the lay fraternity of the Compagnia del Corpus Domini).They carried her in solemn procession, set her up on the side of the church which gave directly onto the harbour, and baptized her with the name Madonna della Fortuna, Madonna of the Storm. In this ceremony the priest took a back seat, refusing to write an oration – which was contributed instead by a blind songwriter whose sight had been restored by prayer to the Madonna della Fortuna. A Capuchin friar gave the sermon. None of the participants in this little drama can have anticipated the scale and intensity of the response.Within days, local people from the sailors’ quarter were crowding into the church at all hours, and especially towards evening when litanies of the Virgin were sung before the image. Soon word of the arrival of the remarkable statue spread throughout the city. The formerly blind songwriter was commissioned to compose a song in honour of the Madonna della Fortuna, which the sailors’ wives, accompanied by their daughters dressed as ‘little angels’, sang through the streets of Genoa. These women collected alms for a more splendid display of the statue. It was said that it was barely possible to pass in the streets within half a mile of the church. As townspeople of all social conditions flocked to the new shrine, the first wonders began to be reported. Oil from the lamps kept burning before the image, freely distributed by the sailors, was said to be effecting miraculous cures. A blind girl had recovered her sight. Another parishioner, whose life was endangered by her stillborn child, attributed her survival to the statue. Meanwhile the sailors, together with their wives, themselves proceeded to perform exorcisms upon the many who arrived at the shrine ‘possessed by demonic spirits’: suffering from a variety of bodily and psychological disorders. With difficulty holding still the spasmodically writhing sufferer, the sailors would hold out a crown with which they had touched the statue, throw holy water in the face of the possessed or else rub oil from the lamps into his or her forehead, and cry: ‘Vile beast! Get out in the name of Christ and the Madonna della Fortuna!’ Interviewed by the vicar of the 75

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archbishop of Genoa, who had become uneasily aware of the extraordinary scenes at San Vittore, Father Stefano Vasilio, curate to Father Pizzarello, affirmed that the church was echoing to the combined cries of the possessed and of the sailors as they proceeded to cast out the demons. Father Pizzarello himself answered the vicar’s questions with elaborate caution, deliberately distancing himself from the cult, about which he professed to know little. Although his protestations before the inquest about his own role were somewhat disingenuous, the cult of the Madonna della Fortuna, former ship’s prow turned miracle-working image, had indeed been initiated and was very largely promoted by the sailors and their families. From the accounts of others summoned before the archbishop’s tribunal during the summer of 1636, it is evident that in the eyes of many of the laity, no external authority was required to guarantee the potency of the Madonna della Fortuna, other than the assurance of relatives and neighbours. Angeletta Brigandelli, the wife of Oberto de’ Ferrari, who lived close by at the customs house later known as the Palazzo di San Giorgio, was initially sceptical, having previously been unsuccessfully treated for suspected spiritpossession in a series of different Genoese churches.The mother of sixteen children, Angeletta had her share of physical sufferings, which she catalogued at length. But brought by her family to San Vittore, I entered the church, although it seemed to me an error to adore such a Signora. As I did so, I felt my legs give way, and I couldn’t pray. I passed out [‘I found myself outside myself ’], and according to what people told me afterwards, I was violent and shouted, and left the church. But then I felt devotion to that Lady and a great desire to see her. And I continued to adore her for a week, and every time I had convulsions and shouted, and others, especially my sister, have said that if they had not held me I should have exposed myself completely. On St James’s day I went to hear mass and, feeling ill, I passed out. As my husband told me afterwards, I spat blood together with a little rotten stuff. Returning after dinner, I felt a great body coming out of me . . . it felt like a mountain and as though I would burst. Unable to stay on my knees before the Madonna, I was supported by my sister and others around, and it seemed as though I was expelling a great smoke from my mouth, and as if I had become light and was now liberated. I have had no pain since. 76

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To Angeletta and to a growing number of others who were exorcized in this way, this material wooden statue, composed of water and fibre, was perceived to be capable of controlling the fires of demonic spirits and of freeing its devotees from the dead weight of their mortal sufferings, so that they felt as light as air. Elemental, potent and accessible to all, the Madonna della Fortuna had rapidly established herself as a major new force in the city. The archbishop’s vicar and chancellor listened solemnly to those who claimed to have experienced miracles, and two notaries painstakingly transcribed their narratives. They were stories of the everyday life of the poor of the harbour district, whose hardships had been lightened by the abrupt appearance in the neighbourhood of a miracle-working statue. Witness after witness affirmed the veracity of the account of Giovanni Battista Pagano, whose five-year-old son suffered from a painful inability to urinate that the remedies of professional doctors had proved unable to cure. Anointed on the suffering part with oil from the lamp of the Madonna della Fortuna, the child had fully recovered. Cristoforo Busiono, a chandler who years before had been a slave in the East, related how he had at that time been struck with a rod about the head so that he suffered ever since from tinnitus. He could testify that application of the oil of the mariners’ Madonna had proved no less efficacious in his case. As a record of this wonder, he had brought as a gift to the shrine a wax model of his head.The ecclesiastics who contemplated these vignettes of popular Genoese life, like many of their kind in similar circumstances before and since, were torn between a desire to foster devotion and a compulsion to suppress superstitious practices that, from some clerical points of view, could only lead away from the Catholic faith. Their initial conclusion was that the church should be closed. However, crowds continued to assemble in the street outside, and the Madonna’s more agile devotees even climbed into the church through a window. It was therefore decreed that the statue should be walled up in its chapel, to remove it from view.This measure, in turn, had no effect whatever upon the rapidly growing cult. The same devotions as before continued in front of the new barrier, which for the believers in the statue evidently presented no obstruction to her powers. What mattered was the statue’s existence as a site of divine presence, not whether it could be seen.The tide of popular devotion to the Madonna della Fortuna was unstoppable.Yet in the eyes of the ecclesi astical and civil authorities of the city, something had to be done about 77

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these scandalous assemblies, at all times of day and night, of men and women from throughout Genoa and increasingly also from the hinterland. The unlicensed gatherings at San Vittore were as troubling for their perceived political threat as they were for their unofficial piety. For the Madonna della Fortuna, the outcome was a compromise. While the details of her cult remain unique to their time and place, the nature of this compromise was typical of most of the miracle-working images which we have examined.The official attempt at suppression having conspicuously failed, it was decided in September 1636 that the image of the Madonna should be reopened to public devotion.To put an official seal on the cult, Pope Urban viii was now induced to issue an indulgence for pious visitors to the statue.The chapel itself, however, was to be out of bounds to the laity, who were to cease to practise their pseudo-liturgical rites of exorcism and cures. Nor were they to continue to publish, as advertisements for the statue, unlicensed printed reproductions of the statue with a legend referring to her ‘miracles’, for no miracle had been properly authenticated. They were also to stop their disruptive habit of firing mortars in the street, in celebration of the Madonna’s powers.29 With the imposition of these norms by the archbishop, members of the secular aristocracy began to vie with one another for association with this miraculous statue whose prominence in the city now enjoyed a degree of official approval. When, in January 1637, the anniversary of the finding of the Madonna was celebrated in a ceremony in which a new crown was placed on her head, rich hangings were donated to the chapel on the occasion by no less a figure than the Doria duke himself. Cristoforo Centurione, head of another of the greatest Genoese families, then announced a wonder of his own: his sight, previously failing, had been restored by virtue of the Madonna della Fortuna. As lay patron of the church of San Vittore, he proceeded to fund the construction, in 1642–3, of a new chapel to house the statue. Next,Vincenzo Spinola, scion of yet a third leading house of the Republic, announced his own recovery from an incurable illness, following dramatic scenes of convulsions before the image. Such transformations were evidently not a monopoly of the poor. As these representatives of the old Genoese nobility aligned themselves publicly with the growing popular cult, they were joined by a member of that Spanish aristocracy with which they had cultivated close relations over the preceding century. By the archbishop’s special permission, the Duchess of Alcalà was allowed to enter the chapel with her 78

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household, in order to pass hours in devout and intimate veneration of the Madonna della Fortuna.30 Framed and supervised by clerical authority, the now official cult of the Madonna della Fortuna would subsequently enjoy a vastly increased reputation, not only in Liguria but throughout and beyond the Italian peninsula. For 300 years, until the mid-twentieth century, she remained one of the most celebrated of Italian miraculous Madonnas. Throughout this period, the authorized publications which promoted her fame were consistent in the bland politeness of their accounts. The first of these was written by a priest of San Vittore in the mid-eighteenth century. Father Zignago (who dedicated his volume to a lady of the great Durazzo family) alluded only briefly to the role of the sailors in bringing the Madonna into the church and – despite having at his disposal the full text of the initial enquiry of 1636 – made no reference whatever to the paraliturgical rituals practised by the illiterate port workers and sailors who had first created the cult.31 His catalogue of ‘graces’ worked by the statue (‘omitting’, as he wrote, ‘less honest and more dubious accounts’) was confined to a sober list of great personages who had been cured and had deigned to patronize the church, together with the recently invented story of the seven-year-old girl who had allegedly inaugurated the cult when she experienced a vision of the Madonna della Fortuna while falling from a wall in the harbour. Such a simple child was the idealized vehicle of divine grace, safely removed from the distastefully secular behaviour of the sailors. No less sanitized was the nineteenth-century history by the Reverend Antonio Pitto.32 Pitto, whose personal devotion to the Virgin Mary was extreme, recorded that the initial enthusiasm had brought devout citizens from throughout Genoa, but of the more vulgar expressions of piety, such as the exorcism of demonic spirits, he made no mention. By this date the statue itself had been translated, following the suppression in 1799 of the church of San Vittore, to the nearby house of Carmelite monks at San Carlo, still only a stone’s throw from the harbour. The Carmelites, who yielded to no one in their desire to celebrate the wonders of the Virgin, published histories of the Madonna della Fortuna at the end of the nineteenth century and again in the 1930s.33 While these books added a number of blessings attributed to the statue in more recent times, they otherwise repeated the sedate narratives of Zignago and Pitto. And yet, even after the clergy took formal charge of the statue in the autumn of 1636, the Madonna della Fortuna continued to elude her official 79

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guardians. For the great majority of her devotees in the city of Genoa and in parts beyond, she continued to be much more than an object of prayer and a sign of the grace of the Virgin Mary – the qualities emphasized by the various mouthpieces of the Church. In the wider context she remained, rather, a personal ally and a powerful source of magical aid. These roles are typified in the account of Bernardo Cosmelli, who in April 1637 recorded before a notary his own experience of the Madonna’s physical power. Bernardo was a shopkeeper in the small town of Campi, in the hinterland of Genoa. His family was involved in a violent vendetta with another clan of the town, in the course of which his brother had been shot. Advised by friends to take care, Bernardo took himself to Genoa, to pray for her assistance to the Madonna della Fortuna: ‘For I put far more trust in her protection than in the power of my weapons.’ When his enemies duly came for him, and shot him in his shop at pointblank range with an arquebus, he survived unscathed the impact of several bullets.These bullets were brought to the shrine by Bernardo as an advertisement to others of the power of the statue to intervene in the hazards of daily life in the seventeenth-century Republic.34 Whether through the existence of such ex-voto testimonies displayed in the chapel of the Madonna della Fortuna, or through the medium of countless cheap reproductions pinned up in the homes, workshops and boats of the people of Genoa, the statue persisted in making herself accessible to forms of popular belief and practice which coexisted uneasily with the official accounts. Whatever attempts were made to contain it, the power of the miraculous image persisted in leaking out, to make itself available to different uses in a wider community.

The Madonna of the Garden Also in the years after 1600 a major cult developed at Chiavari, from the thirteenth century the capital seaport of eastern Liguria, and thus another focus for the security concerns of the Genoese Republic. The image in question in this case was a fresco painted a little over a century before in a little shrine on a garden wall, just outside the cittadella which dominated the town and housed the captain who governed Chiavari in the name of the Genoese Republic (illus. 28). Painted originally at the end of the fifteenth century as an ex-voto image in thanks for deliverance from the plague, 80

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it had subsequently fallen into disrepair. The new cult of Nostra Signora dell’Orto (Our Lady of the Garden) arose in the first instance as the promotion of a group of poor inhabitants of the suburbs of the town, and in particular of the extramural parish of Rupinaro.The first reported miracles, in 1609 and 1610, were related by humble people of that district: a midwife and a young man who sold eggs. Both were members of an unofficial community of devotees of the image in question which had started to grow up in the preceding years. As in the case of the Madonna della Fortuna, the miracles multiplied rapidly, and thousands of visitors started to arrive by day and night.35 From being a source of comfort for the suburban poor, the Madonna dell’Orto rapidly became the focus of more powerful interests. In the decades around 1600 Genoa was beginning to impose itself more forcibly than ever before on the city of Chiavari, which was perceived as the key to the whole of eastern Liguria. Initially condemned, therefore, by the captain of Chiavari as seditious, and additionally by the archbishop’s vicar as heretical, the cult of the Madonna dell’Orto soon acquired the identity of an emblem 28 Flagellant fraternity and other devotees at the garden of communal civic resistance to these shrine of the Madonna dell’Orto, c. 1700, oil on wood. external authorities. Documentary evidence survives of the careful editing of the presentation of miracles and ‘graces’ allegedly performed by the image, which finally convinced the ecclesiastical authorities to authorize the cult. The miracles involving spirit possession and lay agency in the conduct of exorcisms were tactic ally excised from the published record.The Genoese senate was persuaded, in return for a measure of supervision, to remove its opposition, and the triumph was celebrated locally as a victory for the whole population of 81

29 The Madonna dell’Orto, c. 1490, fresco, formerly on a garden wall, in its transposed, 17th-century setting.

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Chiavari. On the completion of a new basilica to house the image, on 8 September 1634 the fresco, still attached to part of the garden wall, was carried in festive procession through all the main streets of the town before its installation in the purpose-built shrine (illus. 29).36

The sacred image moves west The earliest Christian stories of miracle-working images were recorded, in the early Middle Ages, in the eastern Mediterranean: the region, that is, of the historic sites of the origins of Christianity and, from the fourth century, of the imperial Christian capital of Byzantium. As, from about 1100, stories of wonder-working statues and pictures began to circulate in the West, it is evident that these cult objects frequently served not only local emulation of Eastern Christian practice but also developing claims that the centre of spiritual gravity had shifted from the Orient to the western Mediterranean sphere of Latin Christendom. It was alleged that the weakness of the Eastern churches, especially in the face of expanding Islam, accounted for the desire of these images to migrate to the West.37 Their importance in the eyes of their devotees, both symbolic and intrinsic, could hardly be exaggerated. Whether or not they were genuinely of Eastern origin, or truly ancient, they were held to be the most immediately recognizable testimony of God’s continuing presence in the world, and as super naturally efficacious as any less visually exciting relic. Genoa, both because of its history of commerce with the East and on account of its close ties and rivalry with Constantinople, became a prominent and distinctive site of such stories. An object of this kind is the Genoese Face of Christ (see illus. 7).This early medieval representation of the head of Christ, on cloth mounted on wooden board, has since the late fourteenth century been preserved in the Genoese church of San Bartolomeo of the Armenians.38 The story related in Genoa, following an older legend familiar in Byzantium, was that the image had been made by Christ Himself, by the impress of His face upon a piece of linen. Sent by Christ to King Abgar, ruler, according to Armenian trad ition, of Edessa and Armenia, the Mandylion cured the sovereign of his leprosy, converted him and consequently his kingdom to Christianity, and thereafter protected the city of Edessa from Persian attack. Having been brought in the tenth century to Constantinople, this potent image-relic 83

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was then reported to have been given by a grateful Byzantine emperor, John vi, in return for military support in a war with Venice, to the Genoese Leonardo Montaldo, by whom it was bequeathed in 1384 to the church of the Armenians in his native city.The Holy Face was adopted by the Genoese as their own palladium and as the proof of their divinely appointed role in the tradition of the early Christian cities of the East.The parallel was made explicit especially in moments of crisis, such as the invasion of Genoese territory by the armies of Austria and Savoy in the 1620s, when the image was brought within the walls and displayed in the cathedral.39 When the invader fell back, ‘it seemed’, according to some contemporaries, ‘that on that day the face of the God of armies triumphed over the enemies of so religious a nation’.40 The story of the translation of this image epitomized the idea of the translation of Christian leadership from the eastern to the western Mediterranean, and in this case, from Edessa, via Constantinople, to Genoa. Such was the triumphalist message of a celebratory publication on the Genoese Mandylion of 1639. Inside the cover of a copy of this work, which has always been in Genoa, its late seventeenth-century owner inscribed a prayer which includes the phrase: ‘May you who, when in the city of Edessa, always defended it from its enemies, now defend our fatherland [patria], which lives under your protection, from war, famine, and plague.’41 Genoa’s commercial ties with Armenia, and more generally with the Aegean, the Black Sea and the territories of the Levant, were so close that their adoption of a potent image deeply rooted in the early Christian culture of the East was presented by the Genoese as an entirely natural symbol of their preeminence in the Mediterranean world. A parallel significance was attached to another ‘Volto Santo’ venerated in the same part of the 30 The Volto Santo of Lucca, 11th–12th century, wood. 84

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western Mediterranean (illus. 30). The celebrated wooden crucifix of Lucca may, to judge by its inapposite title, meaning ‘Holy Face’, have succeeded in the role of an older, painted ‘Veronica’ image of Christ’s face, similar to the Genoese example. However, the large-scale promotion around 1200 of the cult of the cross, which was said to have been carved by Nicodemus himself, coincided with the climax of Lucca’s commercial expansion throughout the Mediterranean. The contemporary claim that it represented a direct and visible link with the historical Crucifixion in Jerusalem elevated the city of Lucca to an eternal plane.42 It seems likely that the spreading renown of the Lucchese Volto Santo was the impetus behind the fourteenth-century cult of a carved cross at Sestri Levante, on the eastern Ligurian coast towards Tuscany (see illus. 8). Twice in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Genoese chroniclers reported the Sestri cross acting in the service of the Genoese state, driving away from this important harbour the incursions of a Tuscan and Venetian force and another from Monaco. According to one story, the Sestri Levante crucifix was said to have come ‘from the East’: an important part of its claim to authority.43 Of many another Ligurian miraculous image, similar tales were related. Both the Madonna delle Grazie of Megli above Recco (illus. 31, 32) and that of Sori (see illus. 15) were reputed to have been brought home from the East by sea-captains in 1216 and 1509 respectively.44 Each of these paintings seems, on stylistic grounds, to have been made in Italy in the thirteenth or fourteenth century; but provided that there was about it something a little unusual – or perhaps just an air of antiquity – there was nothing to stop such a Madonna acquiring the renown of having come from Constantinople, or the Holy Land – or even of having been painted from life by St Luke. An Eastern provenance lent prestige to the Western owners of such an image. In a broader sense, legends of this kind expressed an idea of the unity of Mediterranean Christian culture, linking together as they did the Eastern and Western seaboards, conjoined thus across time and space. Such stories were stimulated by the presence in the West of genuinely oriental images, of which there were formerly many more than can now be documented. The honour accorded to images of Orthodox manufacture was due in part to their association with the cradle of Christianity, in part to their exotic appearance in a Western context. A case in point is the Madonna of Montallegro (see illus. 24).45 The first finders of this picture in 85

31 Captain Pellegro Peregallo Brings the Madonna to Megli, 19th century, fresco, church of the Madonna delle Grazie, Megli.

32 The Madonna delle Grazie, Megli, late 13th century, painted panel (the crowns and angels are later additions).

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1557 reported that it was accompanied by an inscription in the adjacent rock which read: ‘From Greece I have come to live here; let no one dare to remove me.’ This detail, recorded at the time, was precisely recalled by local people interviewed more than a century later. It testifies to a sense that not merely an icon, but the Virgin herself in her image, had escaped from the depredations of the advancing Ottoman Empire to find sanctuary on this part of the Ligurian coast.The designation of the site as ‘Mont’ Allegro’ – translated by learned commentators as ‘Mount Sion’ – dates from this time. The various places of origin to which early observers attributed the Montallegro picture are, once again, revealing of Ligurian mental horizons: Constantinople, Chios, Cyprus and Ragusa (Dubrovnik) were all mentioned.What all of these places shared was a history of close commercial links with the Genoese Republic, to which, in the post-Byzantine world of Ottoman expansion, it was locally assumed they would naturally turn for help. After the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453 a number of relics and icons were brought from Pera, the former Genoese colony there, to Genoa itself, to be installed in various churches of the city.46 Chios, too, had been a Genoese colony, ultimately falling to the Turks in 1566. Cyprus was lost to the Christians in 1570, while Ragusa remained under threat throughout the period. The association of the Madonna of Montallegro with the ability of the Genoese and Christian forces to control the Mediterranean despite the threat of Islam was underlined by an early ex-voto, given to the shrine by Genoese soldiers who had participated in the battle of Lepanto in 1571, during which they made a vow to the picture at Rapallo.47 A variety of tales concerning the picture’s Eastern origin thus converged on a common theme of the preservation in Liguria of holy images in the face of Muslim impiety and iconophobia. The story of the arrival of the Madonna di Montallegro consecrated the Genoese territory as a new Holy Land. The everyday reality of hazardous journeys across the sea led to the construction of origin myths in which the image was the agent of its own salvation. A vivid instance of this genre is the Madonna of Lampedusa, whose legend is summarized in a fresco and inscription of 1619 on the chapel erected to house it on the western Ligurian coast at Castellaro, looking out to sea above Taggia (illus. 33, 34). The picture was said to have been found in a cave on the island of Lampedusa to the south of Sicily by a native of Castellaro, the sailor Andrea Anfosso, who in 1561 had been 88

33 Sanctuary of the Madonna of Lampedusa at Castellaro di Taggia.

34 Chapel of the Madonna of Lampedusa, Castellaro di Taggia. Image and inscription over the door recording the miracle, 1619.

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35 Andrea Anfosso Carried Home by the Madonna of Lampedusa, 20th century, immaginetta.

abducted by Turks and reduced to slavery. Eventually evading his captors, he allegedly made a boat from a tree trunk and, using the picture of the Virgin and Child with St Catherine as a sail, successfully navigated his way home (illus. 35).48 The uninhabited island of Lampedusa was the East–West crossing point of miraculous translations in more than one respect. Strategically placed, then as now, for traffic from the East via Africa, in the past it was also a place of refuge for those fleeing bad weather or captivity. In the second half of the thirteenth century Templar knights from Pisa had been driven onto the island by a storm. The Pisans were on their way home from Jerusalem, carrying with them a marble statue of the Madonna supposedly carved in Cyprus in 733, and which they were saving from ‘the profanation of the infidels’. Having prayed to the Virgin that if they were spared they would leave the statue in the first Christian city they came to, 90

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they gave it to the Carmelite house at Trapani in Sicily, where it was to become the focus of a cult still vibrant today. A copy of this statue was to find its way to Liguria in the seventeenth century and to become the focus of a miracle-working cult in its own right, in the church of the Madonnetta in Genoa (see illus. 58).49 Meanwhile the existence in Lampedusa of a copy of the same statue was reported by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers. The Madonna was venerated in a sanctuary which served as a double cult for both Christians and Muslims who were washed up on the island or who stopped off to replenish their supplies of wood or water.50 A Venetian geographical text of 1576 recorded that a lamp was perpetually lit before this image of Our Lady, ‘which is confirmed by many never to have lacked oil, being refilled constantly by sailors, whether Christian or Muslim’.The writer went on to comment that the Turks and Moors, unlike the Jews and Zoroastrians, honoured the Virgin. Other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts recorded that there existed a tomb in the same cave-sanctuary of what was said to be a Muslim holy man, and that both the image and the tomb received regular offerings of biscuits, cheese, oil, salted meat, wine, jewellery, clothes and money. Reference was made to the availability of the food to fleeing slaves, of whatever country, to keep them alive while they waited for a passing friendly ship. But legend had it that if anyone tried to steal any of the gifts from the shrine, they would never be able to sail away. Only the knights of Malta, once a year, were permitted to take any money which had been left at the altar, so that it could be given to the Madonna of Trapani – an ongoing link with that miraculous image, of reputed Eastern origin, venerated in Sicily.51

The image made to be miraculous Sometimes the occasion called for an image to be made to purpose. The seventeenth-century Russian patriarch Nikon, as part of his programme to establish the status of Moscow as a new Jerusalem, commissioned from the monks of the Iveron monastery on Athos a copy of the most venerated icon of the Virgin on the holy mountain.The copy duly arrived in Moscow in 1648 with a certificate of authenticity and guarantee of miraculous powers. The document describes the process of manufacture, which had included mixing the paints with water previously used to wash the original image. The Athonite Virgin is still venerated in her dedicated chapel 91

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beside the Kremlin.52 The elaborate procedures adopted, however, underline the perceived difficulties facing the person who would create a new cult of this kind. Writing in the early twentieth century to promote the cult of the miraculous Madonna of the Sacred Heart in Taggia, on the coast below Castellaro and near Liguria’s border with France, the Abbé Ferrari defined three different types of devotional image in order to distinguish what made one miraculous. In the first category were those which commemorated a vision, where the image itself had nothing miraculous about it. Examples of this type – tellingly for Ferrari’s promotional purposes – included La Salette and Lourdes in France, as well as the Ligurian Madonnas of La Guardia and Savona. It was important that Taggia could be seen to trump these sanctuaries whose claims were themselves being strongly pressed at this time. In the second category were sacred images not originally miraculous, but which became so, like the Chiavarese Madonna dell’Orto (he did not

36 The Madonna Miracolosa del Sacro Cuore, 1851, painted scagliola.

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even conceive of the transmutation of a secular image like the Madonna della Fortuna). His third type, of which Taggia was one – a much smaller and more exclusive group – was that of images which had given miraculous signs by discernible changes in their own appearance, either in the process of manufacture or thereafter. The Madonna of Taggia in fact qualified in both respects, in particular mid-nineteenth-century circumstances that were very favourable to the development of such a cult (illus. 36).The sculptor, Salvatore Revelli, who worked in circles close to the Vatican, had given the statue to his home town in 1851. He carried the same surname as a canonized ninth-century bishop of Albenga, San Benedetto Revelli, whose chapel (with a relic and a sixteenth-century painting of him) is opposite that in which Revelli’s Madonna was placed in the parish church of Taggia. He kept in his studio in Rome a plaster model of the Taggia Madonna, which many cardinals and the pope himself came to see. In March 1855, during the eight days of prayer for the new feast of the Immaculate Conception, instituted the previous year, the statue of the Madonna in Taggia moved its eyes. Anna Maria, aged seven, said to her mother: ‘Mamma, the Madonna looked at me! Then she looked at another lady while I said three Hail Marys. She turned her eyes first to the right and then to the left, first up and then down.’ After promptly instituted and lengthy investigation, the moving of the eyes was proclaimed miraculous – the first miracle anywhere to lend its blessing to the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, which had been declared in December 1854. The statue was crowned by papal decree in June 1856.53 When questioned during the official investigation, on 8 April 1855 Revelli reported that when he had begun the statue of the Madonna he had been intending to carve St Philomena. He ‘could not explain how she had become a Madonna’: the material had taken on a life of its own.54 Here Revelli implicitly alluded to the legend of miraculous intervention in St Luke’s painting of the Madonna. He and the Ligurian investigators would also have known of the story attached to the hugely potent statue of the Virgin and Child commissioned by the important church of the Madonna delle Vigne in Genoa in 1616 from Giovanni Battista and Tommaso Orsolino, who were the most famous sculptors in the city and who came from a lineage of workers of miracles in stone.55 The story ran that when Tommaso was working on the marble, a black line appeared from the left arm to the shoulder, which professors of sculpture warned would crack the arm, and 93

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ruin the whole figure. He therefore prayed to the Virgin, and the statue was immediately restored to perfection. In the words of an early eighteenthcentury narrator of the cult, the resultant image inspired such devotion, love, reverence and tenderness that it seemed the work of an angelic rather than a mortal hand. This foundation narrative played a significant role in its authentication as a new and miraculous image. But it seems likely that Revelli had already in 1850 thought carefully about the sorts of effect his statue could have. In response to further questions on 21 April 1855, he gave very precise detail of its construction. He emphasized that he had used the composite stone-and-plaster technique known as scagliola, knowing that this would be both luxurious in appearance and (as clerical authority required) durable in its hardness, not subject to deterioration like wood or papier-mâché. The eyes, he explained, were of ordinary quality glass enamel, just like dolls’ eyes, ‘bought at a low price of two or three franchi, such as are commonly sold in a shop in Rome’. He described the mechanism of fixing the eyes, again to stress their solidity and immobility.56 What he did not mention, but is obvious to the naked eye, is that he had clearly positioned the eyes so that the direction of their respective gazes is very slightly differently aligned.This will have helped to facilitate the visual perception of movement, especially by candlelight at moments of heightened excitement and expectation. Significantly, the official investigation was careful to include several experiments (in one case involving two professors of physics) – altering the lighting, covering the windows and testing the air – in order to demonstrate by modern and scientific methods that the effects could not have been caused by the mere refraction of light. Moreover, witnesses testified that they had not been weeping at the key moment (one man claimed to have left the church to wash his eyes with fresh water in order to remove any danger of illusion) and that they had not been overcome with the heat of emotion. The alacrity with which the bishop of Ventimiglia started his investigation, the gathering of over 100 formal witnesses of different ages, sex and social status – ‘of diverse force of imagination’, as one commentator put it – and the coordination of all forms of secular and religious authority, spoke to the significance of the establishment of this cult for the local region, for the papacy and for Catholic Italy.The Abbé Ferrari emphasized that the Taggia Madonna was crowned before Lourdes, and that the first miracle of healing occurred immediately after the coronation ceremony. 94

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There was a further spate of eye-movements in 1865 in the wake of a missionary initiative. The miracles continued, and in 1904 a Pious Association of Prayers to the Immaculate Heart of Mary was set up with its base in Taggia, for the 50th anniversary of the institution of the dogma. At the end of the first year it was reported to have more than 100,000 members in Italy, France, Spain, England, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Austria and many parts of the United States; by 1911 this figure had risen to 1 million.57 This was a very consciously – and successfully – choreographed cult, in which the sculptor, the authorities at the local level and the Vatican all played their part. Geography and timing were critical. Although it was never contested (as the responses to the Madonna della Fortuna and the Madonna dell’Orto were), there was still a crucial measure of unpredictability about the popular reaction and the development of the international association.The participants may have been caught up in something which very effectively served higher ecclesiastical and political purposes, but they nonetheless claimed ownership of their own discovery of and witness to the process of animation of the image.

Competing cults It is not unusual to find multiple miraculous images in one place – or related places. The power of a newly promoted cult could be enhanced by association with older traditions, while also stimulating competitive in ventions. The interrelationship of the church of the Madonna delle Vigne and the cathedral in Genoa is a significant example of this phenomenon. The ancient church of Nostra Signora delle Vigne provocatively claimed to be older and therefore more significant than the cathedral (illus. 37). In the early seventeenth century a late medieval panel painting, once allegedly the object of a cult but now forgotten in the sacristy, was ‘rediscovered’ and called into service to promote a conscious process of revivifying the miraculous status of this church, which boasted in addition an older image of the Madonna and Child on a column, itself an object of veneration. Legend had it that this column came from the cathedral of the Roman town and early bishopric of Luni (near the eastern border of Liguria), thus endowing the Genoese church with even greater antiquity. In this context, the newly commissioned and highly promoted statue of the Virgin Mary carved by the Orsolino workshop, crowned in 1616 as the ‘Madonna 95

37 Church of the Madonna delle Vigne, Genoa, interior, with the chapel of the Madonna delle Vigne.

38 Tommaso Orsolino, the Madonna delle Vigne, 1616, marble.

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Incoronata’ and subsequently venerated as the Madonna delle Vigne (illus. 38) acquired prestige by association, and at the same time the older cults were reinforced. This was achieved visually by the hanging of the latemedieval painting (a work of Taddeo di Bartolo) immediately above the new statue, in the chapel to the south of the high altar (illus. 39).58 The assemblage of images drew simultaneously on the sacral connotations of the older painting and on the aesthetic impact of the modern sculpture. The cult enjoyed a great reputation among ordinary Genoese people, and copies of the statue were soon commissioned for churches in the hinterland of the city.59 The rhetorical promotion and popularity of this process evidently lay in part behind the decision of the Genoese senate, twenty years later, to commission another image of the Virgin, to be crowned in the cathedral (illus. 40). The installation of this statue of the Virgin as Queen of the City followed a recent papal order for international diplomatic ceremonial, which gave precedence, after cardinals and other prominent ecclesiastics, to crowned heads.60 To abandon the Republican title, deeply rooted in the Genoese self-image, was inconceivable; yet to avoid its becoming a handicap, a new stratagem was needed, which was offered by the coronation of 39 Chapel of the Madonna delle Vigne. the Virgin. An earlier example of civic submission to the heavenly queen had been provided by the Signoria of Florence in 1364, amid the tensions created by the Black Death.61 The government of Genoa came to the idea relatively late, but in the context of the challenges facing it in the early seventeenth century, it sought similarly to tap into a strong current of popular devotion to the Virgin Mary in the hope of channelling this in the direction of a common civic identity.There was, however, a sig nificant difference from the Florentine case, in which the civil government 99

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40 Domenico Fiasella, the Madonna della Città, 1653 (based on Fiasella’s first design of 1637), bronze.

adopted as its palladium a painted image, the Madonna of Orsanmichele, with a previously established reputation for working miracles. While the overarching idea of identifying Genoa formally with the Virgin was a potent one, precisely because it built on devotional traditions and the large number of pre-existing images revered as miraculous, the Genoese senate did not succeed in giving such a single popular icon a monopoly or in making the specific image itself central to the identity of the Republic. 100

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The image crowned in the cathedral of Genoa on 25 March, the feast of the Annunciation, in 1637 was commissioned for the occasion. At the climax of the ritual the carved wooden Madonna del Voto, also to be known as the Madonna della Città, was presented with a crown, a sceptre and the keys of the city. At the same time, a flag displaying the Virgin as Protectress of the state was raised over the Doge’s Palace – now rechristened the Palazzo Reale – and guns were fired from all of the ships in port, not only in Genoa but throughout the Genoese dominions along the Riviera.62 The regime then turned to the dissemination of quantities of Marian propaganda pointedly linked to the symbols of the secular state. Copies of the Madonna della Città in the cathedral were installed on each of the gates of the new circuit of city walls constructed for the better defence of the capital of the Republic (see illus. 141).63 By the end of the century, Genoa had been officially renamed ‘the city of the Virgin’.64 Preachers and publicists of the regime claimed that the many Marian image cults which flourished in Liguria were a demonstration of the peculiar virtue and coherence of the Genoese state. A Capuchin friar who addressed the senate in 1636, when plans for the coronation were in gestation, announced with pride that ‘whereas other nations think it glorious to live secure under the shadow of the great monarchs of the world, we, free of any servitude save that of the Madonna . . . say: “We have no Queen but Mary”.’65 And yet the reality is that each of these and many other venerated images of Liguria have always been seen by their primary devotees in a more local perspective, latently if not always explicitly in tension with the pretensions of the Genoese state. Meanwhile, no official image of the Madonna as Queen of Genoa has ever generated a strong particular devotion. For individuals and communities within the Republic, and since its demise, devotion has continued to be expressed to the various specific images of Mary – the Madonna delle Vigne among them. Nostra Signora delle Vigne indeed seemed to receive particular vindication when in 1715 the senate permitted it to stay open later than all other churches in the city, including the cathedral.66 The existence of such pluralistic routes to the Virgin of course in some ways served the state well in mapping its pious identity, but the meanings carried along these paths could be diverse. In the early seventeenth century, the cathedral of Genoa contained an older miracle-working image, although no attempt was made to use this to support the essentially secular promotion of the Madonna della Città. 101

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41 The Madonna del Soccorso, c. 1400, panel painting, Genoa cathedral.

However, a further and in some respects parallel response (this time on the part of the archiepiscopal curia) to the promotion of the Madonna delle Vigne was the re-narration of the story of Nostra Signora della Pietà e del Soccorso (illus. 41).This too involved the superimposition of one cult upon another, and entailed the need to demonstrate the antiquity of a miracleworking panel painting in order to gain Vatican approval and the right to crown the image.67 In 1399 a lay patron had set up a painting of Nostra Signora della Pietà in a chapel in the cathedral already dedicated to the Madonna, and a Marian company began to go in procession with white hoods, singing the Stabat Mater, visiting sites of Marian devotion at relevant feasts.This was the year of the Bianchi, the highly demonstrative penitential movement of lay men and women which was especially prominent in Genoa.68 The initially distinct cult of Nostra Signora del Soccorso began at the end of the sixteenth century when, in 1582, the currently venerated 102

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image was transferred to the cathedral from a convent of Benedictine nuns in Morcento, called Nostra Signora del Soccorso.When, at roughly the same period, the painting of 1399 seems to have disappeared from the cathedral, the two dedications became united and attached to the image subsequently known as Nostra Signora della Pietà e del Soccorso.When, a century later in 1682, the formal request went to the Vatican for crowning, the canon given the job of proving the antiquity of the image referred to a late fourteenthcentury origin for the cult, conflating various discrete devotions, not all of which had miracle-working status.The coronation in 1683 – the first of this papal kind in Liguria – was intended to stimulate the development of the cult now established under the dual title.69 A limited number of miracles and ex-voto gifts followed.70 In 1700 a company of Nostra Signora del Soccorso contra infideles was instituted, to be formally charged in 1741 with the aim of building and arming ships to fight pirates.The image was moved to a larger chapel in August 1808, and 5 August was fixed as its feast day. In 1854 the first Catholic workers’ society was dedicated jointly to Nostra Signora del Soccorso and San Giovanni Battista, giving another spur to the devotion.71 Around the mid-nineteenth century this portrait of the Virgin was even being attributed to St Luke.72 At this point, some older venerated images in the wider city were rededicated to Nostra Signora della Pietà or del Soccorso.This happened at Santi Cosma e Damiano, and also at San Marco in the port, where a preexisting image of the Madonna dell’Umiltà was renamed and given the same feast day as the cathedral image. A little statue of the Virgin (dressed, without child) at the church of Moranego in the hinterland, having been credited with working miracles at the time of the 1835 cholera epidemic, was venerated thereafter under the title Nostra Signora del Soccorso. In 1889 the parish priest of a church outside Genoa, where a cult of Nostra Signora della Pietà e del Soccorso had been promoted in the early nineteenth century around a copy of the cathedral image, was involved in the foundation of a new association: the Court of Mary. This group was dedicated to making weekly visits to different Marian images, returning every Saturday to the Madonna in the cathedral, and thus creating and reaffirming a strong centripetal association. The week’s chosen images were to be published in both of the popular local Catholic newspapers, the Settimana Religiosa and Il Cittadino.73 This conscious process of identification of local images with the cathedral again suggested the ongoing need for such revitalization. 103

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Cults rose where others declined, partly because of demographic and economic shifts.The Madonna della Guardia was seen in the nineteenth century to be taking over part of the role hitherto played by the Madonna delle Vigne, as there was a striking shift in the concentration of the working-class population of Genoa towards the industrial zone of the Val Polcevera to the northwest of the city, over which the Madonna della Guardia presided (illus. 42).74 Indeed the Madonna della Guardia was consciously promoted during the nineteenth century by successive archbishops in order to maintain the faith of migrant workers (from Liguria and Piedmont), and as part of the same process to foster a cult which could act as a focal point for the devotional life of the city as a whole. Images around the city and the region started to be renamed ‘the Madonna della Guardia’, or were retrospectively (and rather disingenuously) associated with the reactivation of the sanctuary on Monte Figogna.75 But as often proved nec- 42 Prayer booklet of the Madonna della essary, a synecdoche needed to be established Guardia near Genoa, 1912. between a historically prestigious and culturally embedded cult image and the new one being promoted. The Madonna della Guardia had never possessed a stable iconography, nor had earlier attempts to reinforce the cult been successful, despite the fact that a seventeenth-century statue of her (attributed, significantly, to the workshop of Tommaso Orsolino, who sculpted the miraculous image of the Madonna delle Vigne) was the second Madonna to be crowned in Genoa (by Archbishop Stefano Durazzo, whose family was linked to the sanctuary).The church of Santa Maria delle Vigne was directly involved in the unsuccessful mid-seventeenth-century promotion of the Madonna della Guardia; and when a (short-lived) Compagnia di Nostra Signora della Guardia was founded in 1650, the church of Nostra Signora delle Vigne was the point of reference (where information was published) for the inhabitants of the city of Genoa. The Capuchin Friar Giancardi wanted to link the Madonna della Guardia and the already well-established Madonnas 104

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respectively of Savona (along the coast to the west of Genoa) and Santa Maria delle Vigne. There was an attempt by the Compagnia di Nostra Signora della Guardia in 1655 to overcome the almost entire lack of secure history of the cult by adding justificatory inscriptions to a chapel in Santa Maria delle Vigne – for which the members failed to get archiepiscopal permission and which, like an earlier series of pictures displayed without licence in the sixteenth century, had to be removed.They also published a book of miracles and started to issue indulgences on their own authority. One of the images commissioned was of the Virgin as patron of the Val Polcevera, Genoa and Savona.76 In the late nineteenth century, when the modern iconography of the Madonna della Guardia became established by the commission of a new statue, realized in 1893–4 by the sculptor Antonio Canepa (see illus. 27), the design significantly merged the iconography of Santa Maria delle Vigne with that of the sculptural groups depicting the finding of the Savona and Montallegro images.This represented a conscious embodiment of the longfrustrated desire to create a popular cult, drawing on multiple associations and encompassing a wide religious geography from west to east of the region. At the end of the century, a painting of the Madonna della Guardia was inaugurated in the cathedral of Savona. At this point also the feast day of 29 August (significantly, the same day as that of the beheading of John the Baptist, one of the major patron saints of Genoa) was officially established. At the same time, versions of the new image destined for ancillary sanctuaries or altars dedicated to the Madonna della Guardia were given authority by first being exposed for public veneration in the church of Santa Maria delle Vigne (which, correspondingly, thereby re-vindicated its own status). A spectacular instance was the statue commissioned in 1893 for the sanctuary of Velva above Sestri Levante: in 1895 this statue drew huge crowds in Santa Maria delle Vigne, and subsequently in the Genoese church of San Torpete, from where it had to be removed in secret during the night of 29 August to avoid protests from devotees who wanted the statue to remain in the city.Two years earlier, in 1893, a painting of the Madonna della Guardia and Pareto (the peasant who had the original vision) had been blessed by a canon of Santa Maria delle Vigne and carried in procession by girls to the parish of San Rocco.77 At this point, when the cult of the Madonna della Guardia was really starting to take off, the inner-city church not only played a key role but retained its own significance, although it was more its historical and intellectual reputation which was to carry its 105

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symbolic authority forward into the twentieth century. In 1897 Giovanni Semeria, an influential and charismatic figure in the political and cultural formation of young Catholics, chose to organize an important series of youth conferences at Santa Maria delle Vigne, at which the concept of ‘Christian democracy’ was debated, and he invoked personal debts to the socialist Labriola and the social Catholic Toniolo. When the third centennial of the coronation of the statue of the Madonna delle Vigne took place in November 1920 (four years late because of the war), the image’s status was reinforced by reference to Pope Benedict xv’s Genoese birth, and to the links between the cult and other Ligurian miraculous images.78 The cult of the Madonna della Guardia continued to be promoted assiduously by the archdiocesan authorities, reinforcing the popular dimension which by then had finally developed. In 1951 thousands of small terracotta bas-reliefs, three-dimensional versions and ceramic tiles were distributed to parishes for erection above doorways or on the walls of houses. But even now, such direction from the centre did not cause the Madonna della Guardia to supplant local Madonnas. Altars dedicated to her in pre-existing and still vibrant sanctuaries have become sites of devotion, but alongside and by association with the respective titular Madonna of the church (as is the case, for example, at Montallegro). At the same time a small sculptural group of the Madonna and the devout shepherd Pareto has in recent years been placed by the altar-rail of the chapel dedicated to the Madonna della Pietà e del Soccorso in the cathedral in Genoa, in this case with an evident intention to refresh and reinforce the Marian status of the cathedral.

Conclusion: The creative potential of the image An image cult is always changing.The history of miraculous images shows how false is the recurrent myth of the stability of popular religious belief. Far from stable, credence in and support for a particular image is always in flux: emergent, contested, booming or in decline, or in the process of reappropriation and renaissance in a new guise and role.The perceived identity of the image thus changes with time. Its identity shifts also, at any given moment, with variations in perspective. Diverse interests, individual and collective, will typically claim a special relationship with the statue or painting which offers to its various devotees an irresistible promise of consolation, 106

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healing, protection and political strength. The incentive to discover one is ever-present; and the peculiarly subversive potential of the miraculous image lies in the fact that it may be found absolutely anywhere, by anyone. The salvaged prow of a vessel sunk in a storm; the tiny Orthodox icon ‘discovered’ on a mountainside; the faded fresco on a garden wall – each, in the right circumstances, has the potential to become the highly charged vehicle of personal and collective desires.

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43 Roman street shrine in a photograph of 1954.

three

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fixed a lamp in the church that was broken, I changed the veil on an image of Our Lady that works miracles. How many times have I asked those friars to keep her clean! And then people wonder why devotions have fallen off. I remember when there were five hundred ex votos here, and today we’re lucky if there are twenty. It’s our own fault, because we haven’t been able to keep up her holy reputation. Once we were in procession every evening after saying the offices, and we sang the lauds for her every Saturday. We ourselves regularly made pledges to her, so that people always saw new ex votos, and we encouraged men and women in confession to make new pledges to her. Now none of these things are done, and people wonder why religious enthusiasm has cooled. Oh how foolish my brothers are!1

I

Rites of consecration Candles, veils, ex-votos, processions, hymns: Fra Timoteo fusses over these things in the knowledge that, without them, popular veneration of the holy image would wane. The friar is the dramatic invention of the wry and sceptical Machiavelli, who wrote in an established Florentine vein of anticlerical satire exemplified earlier by Boccaccio and Sacchetti. Machiavelli had a particular personal dislike of Servite friars, and his reference here may be to the cult of the Madonna dell’Annunziata in the Florentine church of Santa Maria de’ Servi, where at the beginning of the sixteenth century the charisma of the fresco had recently been enhanced by a rich tabernacle, surrounded by a mass of candles and ex-votos donated by the faithful.2 For all the intended irony in his theatrical depiction, Machiavelli captured here, in part, the vital element of a different kind of dramatic 109

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ritual in the activation of an image cult. Machiavelli’s target was as much what he perceived to be the willing gullibility of the public as the corruption of the priests; and his pragmatic viewpoint draws attention both to the artifice involved in the promotion of image cults and to the active participation of large numbers of people in rituals designed to enhance the impact of the holy presence. Indeed, greater significance can at times be invested in such ritual than in the object that is its ostensible raison d’être. When the Black Madonna of Tournai was consumed by a fire in 1566, its clerical guardians took the charred, surviving fragment and dressed it in fine clothes: the devotion continued as before.3 The example throws into question the significance of representation in the cult image.4 That the form of the image is often in some way significant to devotees is clear enough; but the processes of consecration to be discussed in this chapter show the extent to which framing rituals can conjure an ineffable sense of divine presence, at what is the often invisible centre of the devotion. The role of human agency in the activation of a miraculous image is a paradox at the heart of the cult. The flame of supernatural life in the image is ignited by rites deliberately and rationally devised by its mortal guardians. Such artificial processes of consecration have also been observed in other visual and religious cultures. In the manufacture of Hindu images, formal procedures of ‘establishment’ are required to make a statue fit for a divine spirit to inhabit: the relationship between a deity and its image is commonly explained in terms of the power, shakti, possessed by all deities . . . According to this explanation, the image actually contains some or all of the deity’s power, so that the purpose of the consecration is to install that power in a particular location, the image. There is no limit to the number of separate images within which the deity’s power can be installed and the deity is never shackled by locating its power in images . . . Devotees who gaze upon an image . . . are touched by the power flowing out of that image.5

From a Western perspective, these ceremonies recorded in India may seem the less extraordinary in a context so self-evidently remote. That in large parts of modern Europe similar rituals are deliberately practised for the consecration and enlivening of holy images is probably not so readily or 110

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so willingly imagined.Yet this is what the evidence of Italian miraculous images has to tell us. Together with the endurance and currency of such rites in Western culture, we wish to emphasize the informing role of selfconscious deliberation.These are not ‘thoughtless’ acts of ‘mindless superstition’, but the considered gestures of those who understand the dynamic of the creative rituals in which they participate.6 The agency of lay devotees is quintessentially evinced in the lighting of candles to illuminate the object of their veneration. At the shrine of the Madonna of Orsanmichele in Florence in the mid-fourteenth century (see illus. 51), candles were being sold to pilgrims, presumably in many cases for lighting at the shrine, at a rate of more than 3,300 per day: the effect must have been spectacular, and similar evidence may readily be gathered of other miraculous images at later periods.7 But the act of lighting a flame is to be seen as just one among a plethora of performative gestures by which the life in the image is conjured by the worshipper.This scope for lay agency has always been a source of difficulty for clerical authorities, who have at various times expressed concern either to suppress such rituals, or at least to discipline them. The attempt by the Council of Trent, in response to Protestant jibes, to establish an austere decorum for behaviour around sacred images was one such moment: bishops were required to ensure that the decent reverence properly shown to such pictures and statues in churches should never be permitted to spill over into ‘superstition’, manifesting itself in ways which were ‘exaggerated . . . riotous . . . [or] profane’.8 The diocesan council of Pistoia in 1786 was another, at which the authorities, in the name of ‘reason’, denounced the ‘superstition’ of enhancing devotion by keeping venerated images covered.9 Another occurred at the turn of the twentieth century, when clerical leaders, embarrassed by manifestations of popular image devotion in a world increasingly hailed as ‘modern’, deprecated such behaviour as infantile. Following the First World War, the Venetian patriarch La Fontaine enforced the removal of what he called ‘ridiculous’ sacred images, which in his view were more redolent of ‘the bazaar’ than of the modern church. What provoked La Fontaine was not only what he saw as the tasteless vulgarity of much devotional imagery favoured by ordinary Catholics, but more particularly the ways in which certain images were hidden and displayed, undressed and dressed by their lay devotees in thaumaturgic rites which, although practised for centuries, had never been orthodox (illus. 44).10 111

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The issue was a more subtle one than it might appear: since medieval times – as Machiavelli observed – ecclesiastical author ities had themselves employed similar rituals as a means to contain and to channel popular devotion. The veiling of images is a case in point.When the thirteenth-century painting of the Madonna delle Grazie in Pisa was adopted as the palladium of the city at the time of the Italian wars at the end of the fifteenth century, the image in the cathedral was covered with a number of veils which, in the ensuing five centuries, have scarcely ever been removed.The picture, thus honoured by both secular and ecclesiastical powers in the city, is known locally as ‘the hidden Madonna’. The dreadful story of the archbishop who, around 1600, had the temerity 44 Madonnas for dressing, 17th–18th century. to remove the veils and who shortly afterwards committed suicide, underlined that the image made no exceptions in its treatment of violators.The exceptional moments of solemn revelation have largely been at times of civic crisis, such as the cholera epidemic of 1835 and an earthquake in 1846.11 Such ritual could therefore prove useful to authority. But in the hands of unauthorized lay men and women, it could also be troubling.

The Madonna on the street corner The presence of the miraculous image in daily life is most evident in its ubiquitous appearance in street shrines.The veneration of images in shrines on the exteriors of private houses used to be widespread in Liguria, as in other parts of the Italian peninsula (illus. 45, 46, 47). In the mid-nineteenth century in the city of Genoa alone there were 890 of these edicole, a high proportion of which contained copies of prestigious miraculous models or were held to be miraculous in their own right.12 Charles Dickens, as a Protestant (although far from unsympathetic) traveller in Italy, recorded on his arrival in Genoa in the 1840s ‘a feverish and bewildered vision of 112

45 Street shrine of the Madonna della Misericordia of Savona, Via Mura delle Grazie, Genoa.

46 Street shrine of the Madonna, Vico della Fava Greca, Genoa.

47 Street shrine of the Madonna dell’Orto in an arcaded street of Chiavari.

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saints’ and virgins’ shrines at the street corners’.13 On feast days of the Virgin, and especially the Assumption on 15 August, neighbours organized street festivals around these Madonnas, with flowers, torches, triumphal arches, processions and songs.14 Another visitor to the city in these years left a characteristic, if slightly sentimentalized, account: Before a Madonna surrounded by rich ornaments, though situated at the corner of a very poor house, I saw a touching scene: women of the people, with children in rags, were kneeling around her: in the middle of the group, an old woman sang the litanies and the little crowd replied with the responses.When the old lady had finished the litanies she sang the Ave Maris Stella.The group comprised a family of sailors, of whom the youngest, a lad of twelve, was to embark on the following day.15

Also slightly romanticized in treatment, but essentially veristic in its content, is a visual depiction of such a scene in early nineteenth-century Rome by Bartolomeo Pinelli (illus. 48).Tended throughout the year by madonnare (illus. 49), usually women of the neighbourhood who took this responsibility,

48 ‘The Litanies of the Virgin’, engraving by Bartolomeo Pinelli, from Nuova raccolta di cinquanta costumi pittoreschi (Rome, 1816).

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the lights kept burning before these shrines were, before the mid-nineteenth century, the only form of street lighting in the city.16 More recently, in a tiny back lane of Genoa in the mid-1960s, a passer-by looked up at one of these street-corner Virgins: A madonnetta is jealously cared for by an elderly lady who lives on the ground floor. The edicola is enclosed by a little iron grille. Before it, fresh flowers and a light. The lady kindly climbs up on a chair to open the grille. ‘You’re from the comune’, she says, ‘you want to take it away.’ ‘No, just to look at it.’ ‘It works so many miracles, you know’, she says, crossing herself.17

If these shrines are now less numerous than in the past, and the practice of singing litanies before them has been largely abandoned, the idea of making a tabernacle for a favourite image is still manifest in other ways.18 In very recent years, owners of newly built houses at Bacezza, a suburb of Chiavari, would not move in before copies of the celebrated image of the Madonna dell’Olivo in the church of Bacezza had been installed, thereby incorporating the new homes into the community under that image’s protection.19 In the 1950s this tie binding the inhabitants of the district of Bacezza was reinforced by a ritual in which a specially made copy of the prototype image was carried, over a period of two years, from house to house throughout the district, so that a thousand households could recharge their association with the picture and thus their common identity. In 1959 an edicola containing a version of this Madonna of Bacezza was set up at the local shipyard, underlining the ties that bound the community at sea no less than on land.20 Thus while their particular form, location and use have shifted with changing social circumstances, shrines of the Madonna have continued to signal the presence of the sacred within the city, and to catalyse neighbourhood identity.

49 A street shrine, decorated with oranges, tended by a madonnara. Photograph taken in Partinico, Sicily, 1954.

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The particular manner and intensity with which an image performs these roles will fluctuate in creative engagement with historical circumstances. The Roman cult of the Madonna of Divine Love originated in 1740 at a site outside the city, the Castel di Leva; but it received an extraordinary new impulse during the Second World War, when the shrine appeared to provide security against bombardment. In 1944 the image, accompanied by enormous crowds, was transferred within the walls, where it was credited with protecting the city from destruction during the Nazi retreat.21 Replicas of the Madonna del Divino Amore appeared on hundreds of houses during the post-war period, especially in working-class districts, and the annual pilgrimage to the original extramural site continues to involve substantial neighbourhood groups, retaining its secular and popular aspects.22

The image unveiled Weeping, the crowd present calls for mercy with ardent sighs.They forget their condition and put aside worldly thoughts, apparently uplifted by divine energy . . . When the cry goes up that this holy image should be uncovered, what emotion is born amongst the people, what yearning, what ardour?23

The miraculous image is a revelation.The metaphor of unveiling is recurrent in narrative accounts of the finding of such images: they draw attention to themselves by acquiring a previously unnoticed colour and beauty; they emerge from concealment in a cave, a ploughed field, a bush. To renew that experience of startling disclosure, the cult image has always been endowed with honorific coverings evocative of the most sacred mysteries.The transcendental connotations of oriental silks, gold carpets and jewelled doors in front of cult images formed a topos of ekphrastic descriptions in Byzantium.24 In the post-medieval West, where anxiety about the sensuous dimension of response to holy images has precluded such a literature, the material and documentary evidence of popular practice nonetheless shows an enduring and sophisticated understanding of the importance of regulating access to the image.The perceived possibility that the drawing back of the veil might precipitate a direct, visionary encounter with the living subject of the image was represented in a painting by the seventeenth-century 116

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50 Andrea Ansaldo, Mystic Marriage of St Catherine, c. 1625–8, oil on canvas.

Genoese artist Ansaldo, of the Mystic Marriage of St Catherine of Siena (illus. 50). In this picture, the features of the Virgin Mary of Catherine’s vision are notably similar to those in the archaic icon from which a cherub draws back the cover.25 From a very early date in the Christian tradition, access to certain holy images was controlled by the calculated use of curtains.While archival references privilege official interest in and management of these veils, their 117

51 Tabernacle of the Madonna, 1355–9. Chapel of Orsanmichele, Florence.

use was embedded in popular devotional practice. Small religious images with cloth covers or in the form of diptychs, the opening of which provided a controlled way to enhance the encounter with the divine subject, had a wide circulation among the late-medieval Italian laity.26 The covering with cloths of exterior images popularly reputed to be miraculous is also recorded.27 Moreover, veils in front of miracle-working statues and pictures within churches were often managed by the members of lay confraternities who thus undertook to enhance the reputation of the cult 118

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object.28 This was the case of the fresco of the Annunziata in Florence, referred to in the passage quoted above from Francesco Bocchi’s eyewitness account of 1592, and also of the painted Virgin of Orsanmichele, whose Florentine cult began in the 1290s, the first report of miracles being shortly followed by the creation of a confraternity dedicated to the image’s protection (illus. 51). The rules of the fraternity from 1294 and 1333 record the curtains, which a guild member would draw back for pious pilgrims.29 The disclosure of the image, thus regulated, was thereby given heightened impact: custodians have always been wary of the diluting effect of overexposure.30 So integral to the cult is the experience of unveiling that in the early modern period a form of engraving was developed that represented the miraculous image as a shadowy presence beneath a covering veil.31 If the Pisan Madonna delle Grazie has rarely been seen, historical circumstances have sometimes occasioned more frequent patterns of display. A miraculous carved wooden relief of the pietà at Albino, near Bergamo, was said in 1916 to be uncovered no fewer than 500 times in a year, a rate which had markedly increased since the beginning of the First World War.32 During the Second World War, the Bollettino (magazine) of the Madonna del Boschetto of Camogli (see illus. 23) regularly reported scoperte (uncoverings) of this image, at a rate of 1,000 times each year.33 Very few of these ritualized exposures and re-coverings of the miraculous image were witnessed by their intended beneficiaries, most of whom sent their requests for unveilings from the military front. Once again, the particular form of the image was less significant than its ability, with the covers removed, to extend its thaumaturgic gaze outwards to the world.To those Camogliesi in the army militia who sent, with a small offering, a request that the image be opened on their behalf, small immaginette of the picture were dispatched, generating in turn a correspondence of grateful acknowledgements published in the pages of the Bollettino.34 Even to the ship’s captain who found himself, at the beginning of 1942, in the Philadelphia County Gaol, the arrival of a miniature paper copy of the Madonna of Camogli was experienced as if the painting over the altar in the Ligurian sanctuary were itself being revealed.35 In the early modern period the painting of the Madonna delle Grazie of Acquapendente in the province of Lazio was for the most part concealed from public view, with the exception of Easter Saturday; but by special arrangement, she could also be revealed on other occasions. In 1734 Modesto Nordelli, of the same town, recalled that fifteen 119

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years before, he had been immobile and suffering from an incurable fever when his friends petitioned for the Madonna delle Grazie to be uncovered. At the moment of the decision to do this, he began to feel better; as soon as it was done, he was on the road to a full recovery.36 In certain cases the drawing back of the cover from the holy image was accompanied by other signs which would make devotees even at a distance aware of the portentous event. When the Madonna delle Grazie of Velletri, near Rome, was occasionally exposed in the nineteenth century, all the bells of the town were rung.37 The image was made present to its community in sounds and memories no less than in its material presence.

Sightlines The practice of unveiling extends to the activation of the sacred space by the devotee, whose kinetic engagement with the shrine is experienced as productive of power in the image. Coming within sight of the sanctuary brings to mind the image, whose power can be consciously invoked or even realized unconsciously. The very word scoperta was used by one late seventeenth-century witness to a miraculous cure, to signal the moment when his son, who was being brought to the shrine of the Madonna of Acquasanta in the hills above Genoa, felt a supernatural force. His reluctance to be taken to the shrine was underlined in the deposition, presumably in part to meet the charge of psychosomatic suggestibility. It was reported that he had been ill for five years, went with very ill grace to church and could not even bear mention of the Virgin Mary.Yet at the scoperta of the chapel containing the image – not yet within sight of the image itself – he had a sensation of being taken by the arm and made to fall to the ground. Other witnesses interviewed as part of the formal investigation concurred in stating that the miraculous process began when the chapel was first sighted.38 A more everyday ritual, which itself suspended briefly the secular work of the moment and reinforced the protective gaze of the image across the landscape, is that of prayers said from points where a traveller came within sight of a sanctuary. Such points – known in the past as perdoni because one who visited a miracle-working image would say that he was ‘taking the pardon’, that is, benefiting from the intercessory spiritual virtue of the site – might be marked by a little roadside chapel, or a column. In many cases there was no external sign, but the place was marked by tradition. At that 120

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52 Creusa leading up to the sanctuary of the Madonnetta, Genoa.

53 Chapel on the way to the sanctuary of the Madonnetta (glimpsed in the top right).

point caps would be taken off and the Salve Regina or Ave Maria said before resuming conversation or the journey.The approach to the image might also be marked in other ways and by multiple, unfolding stages. The narrow path (for which the local term is creusa) up to the church of the Madonnetta in Genoa, perched high above the city, was (before the development of the area with housing in the late twentieth century) a rustic climb punctuated by a series of wayside shrines (illus. 52, 53). Although the church was visible from far away, once on the climb up there was a sense of theatrical suspense, as only towards the end could the building be seen again (illus. 54). In this case the very architecture – the embodiment of an adolescent vision experi enced by its seventeenth-century founder – acted as a series of unveilings. Originally the walled courtyard in front of the church was decorated with biblical symbols exalting the Virgin (illus. 55). On first entering the church, the eye is still today drawn to the crucifix above the high altar, and to the relics of saints all around the octagonal space, representing the celestial court of Mary, their meaning underlined by plaques with biblical verses (illus. 56). Moving forward into the central space, in front of the high altar elaborate marble steps lead down to an intermediate level – at which is suddenly revealed the altar with the miraculous statue of the Virgin (illus. 57, 58). 121

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54 Luigi Garibbo (1782–1869), Church of the Madonnetta, Genoa, watercolour.

55 Facade and piazzetta of the sanctuary of the Madonnetta, Genoa, in an engraving from Descrizione dei santuari di Piemonte (1822).

Padre Giacinto, whose revelation provided the design for the entire complex, had envisioned a crowd of people in front of the image, in floods of tears.39 The centrally planned, late Baroque design of the church of the Madonnetta in Genoa drew in part on an architectural model for the display of miraculous images which had been established in the early Renaissance period.A series of structures erected from the late fifteenth century onwards, all created to frame images which had accomplished their initial wonders outdoors, adopted a cross plan, placing the image on a central altar, dramat ically illuminated beneath a great dome. These included the churches 122

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56 Sanctuary of the Madonnetta, Genoa, interior.

constructed for the images of the Madonna delle Lacrime outside Trevi (from 1475); of Santa Maria della Pietà at Bibbona, near Livorno (begun in 1482); the Madonna del Calcinaio outside Cortona (begun by Francesco di Giorgio in 1484); the Madonna delle Carceri in Prato (designed by Giuliano da Sangallo in 1485); the Madonna della Consolazione outside Todi (begun in 1508); and the Madonna di Vico at Mondovì (completed in the mideighteenth century) (see illus. 134, 135).The architectural design in each case evoked, in particular, the prestigious precedent of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.40 With that building was associated, in the minds of Western pilgrims in the later Middle Ages, the celebrated miracle of the Holy Fire: the flame that was said to be supernaturally ignited at the altar of the church each Easter Saturday, by the last rays of the setting sun as they penetrated a window in the dome.41 The similar architectural design and lighting arrangements adopted in the Italian churches for miraculous images would appear to have been modelled upon the structure in Jerusalem as a 123

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57 Sanctuary of the Madonnetta, scurolo with chapel of the image.

deliberate evocation of that supreme miracle. From extremely modest origins, as frescoes on the wall of a prison (at Prato) or in the equally lowly setting of a tannery (at Cortona), all of these Madonnas were thus elevated to the pantheon of the most honourable Christian sites.The dramatic placement within these buildings of the miraculous image deliberately intensified, for the pilgrim at the climax of the journey, the drama of the ultimate encounter.

Jewels of the Madonna To embellish a sacred image with jewellery or clothing has since ancient and medieval times been understood as an act of supernatural empowerment.42 Cases are recorded in which the image, as soon as it is finely dressed, begins to work miracles: ornamentation in such instances is not the acknowledgement but the catalyst of the supernatural presence.43 Referring as they do to the history of the image’s interventions in the lives of its devotees, clothing and jewels become integral to its identity. In June 1745 the Madonna di Soviore, perched high above Monterosso to the east of Genoa, received a precious pendant composed of a gold cross decorated with emeralds from Brazil, diamonds and rubies, the gift of a ship’s captain in fulfilment of a vow made in return for his salvation from shipwreck.The gem was to hang in perpetuity around the neck of this carved Madonna della Pietà as a record of the 124

58 The Madonnetta, Genoa, late 16th century, alabaster.

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miracle and renewal of the statue.44 Today the fifteenth-century wooden carving of the Madonna di Soviore survives, but not its ex-voto tributes of jewels. Once rich clothing or jewels have become attached to an image, their presence is perceived as an important guarantee of the potency of the object: clerical attempts, especially energetic since the 1960s, to sanitize the cults by the removal of these tributes have certainly damaged their popular status, where this has not been renewed in alternative ways. Old photographs of the Madonna del Parto in the Roman church of Sant’Agostino show the cult image largely obscured by the enormous quantity of necklaces and other decorations with which it was honoured; today it has been purged of all of these, and appears, in its exposed state, as a naked thing, deprived of life (illus. 59, 60).The reason given for the transformation is the danger of theft, which in the past has indeed occurred; but what really discomfits many modern priests is the folkloric character of these talismanic offerings.45 Colluding with the fastidiousness of modern clerics, art historical conservation has also contributed to this process of purgation whereby cult images have lost the accretions of ages of devotion, and with these a crucial part of their identity, in the name of historical authenticity. In earlier periods, any attempt to clean a cult image, thereby removing its evidence of venerable antiquity, would have met the effective resistance of its devotees. The nineteenth-century restorer who, finding such an image to be blackened with candle soot, was tempted to brighten the Virgin’s face with flesh-tones, would find himself compelled to cover the cleaned area with black paint.46 It was in the course of ‘conservation’ in 1975 that the Madonna of Soviore lost her rich clothes and jewels, including, it may be presumed, the cross first hung about her neck in 1745.47 The sacristan of Santa Maria di Nazareth in Sestri Levante in 1999 reported considerable popular disappointment both with the parish priest’s removal from the miraculous medieval crucifix in the church of its accumulated ex-votos and ornaments, and with the denuding effect of recent art historical conservation.The Sestri Levante cross appears now in its original guise as a late thirteenth-century wooden sculpture: stripped of its gesso covering and ornaments, it has lost that mediating layer which until recently played a vital part in the mutual communication between the cross and its devotees (see illus. 8).48 The Roman statue in Sant’ Agostino can now be appreciated, if not as the particular protectress of young women of the neighbourhood, then as a work of Renaissance art by Jacopo Sansovino.49 A similar contrast may be noted between the present, conserved 126

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60 Jacopo Sansovino, Virgin and Child (the Madonna del Parto), c. 1518, marble, as the statue appears today.

59 The Madonna del Parto, church of Sant’Agostino, Rome, in a photograph of c. 1880–90.

condition of the Genoese Madonna delle Grazie al Molo, and a photograph of the same image from a century ago (illus. 61, 62).50 It is thus not entirely true to say that art history has ignored the cult image: in these cases the intervention of restorers has taken the miraculous object to pieces, destroying its complex identity in the process, with the naïve and well-meaning intention of recovering an ‘original’ sculpture. But such transfiguration can never be considered final. Another act of restoration in the 1970s saw the miracle-working crucifix of Santa Maria di Castello in Genoa ‘liberated of Baroque incrustations of stucco and plaster of Paris’, with the result that it can now be recognized as a carving of the fourteenth century.Yet although this historic work of sculpture can now be seen in the nave of the church, popular devotion has shifted to a copy, made at the time of the restoration, of the image as it had evolved to that date, which retains the enlivening additions of paint, a head of human hair, a beard and crown of thorns (illus. 63, 64).51 This tension between the identities of miraculous image and work of art is repeated in other cases. A crucifix in the church of the 127

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61 The Madonna delle Grazie al Molo, Genoa, 13th century, painted wood. 62 The Madonna delle Grazie al Molo, photograph c. 1890.

Servites at Padua, venerated since 1512 for its miraculous effusion of blood, has only recently, following conservation and art historical analysis, been attributed to Donatello and hence placed in an altogether different category.52

The image crowned One of the ways in which the early modern papacy attempted partially to accommodate, and at the same time to control, the material aspect of popu lar image devotion was by the creation of a ritual for the coronation of miraculous statues and paintings (illus. 65). The origins of this practice are pre-Christian.53 The ritual was not, therefore, the invention in the late sixteenth century of Fra Girolamo Paolucci da Forlì. But this Capuchin monk, who took the habit in 1571, made it a central part of his pastoral mission to crown images of the Madonna wherever he preached; and his 128

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63 Crucifix, 1970s, wood. Since the restoration of the crucifix shown in illus. 64, this replica has been venerated as the miraculous cross of Santa Maria di Castello. 64 Crucifix, 14th century, wood.

obsessive example would have momentous consequences. Fra Girolamo carried with him his own image of Mary, wrapped in a cloth, which he would show to his congregations. North Italian by origin and in his preach ing career, he defied the Protestant iconoclasts beyond the Alps by relating miracles of the Virgin’s wonder-working images.54 He died in 1620 at Parma, where he had become a close friend of Count Alessandro Sforza Pallavicini. Pallavicini’s wife had contributed a pearl necklace to the ceremony in which Fra Girolamo had crowned the miracle-working Madonna della Steccata at Parma in 1601; and it is evident that the friar’s example was the inspiration behind the decision of Count Pallavicini to take up the practice himself.55 The count began in 1631 by crowning the Madonna della Febbre in St Peter’s Basilica in Rome: a fresco of c. 1400 which had gained its reputation during periods of plague in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Enthused with his project, Pallavicini proceeded to provide crowns for a number of 129

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other Roman icons; but realizing that his lifetime would not suffice to honour all the wonder-working images of Mary in this way, he bequeathed to the Chapter of St Peter’s a quantity of gold, with the stipulation that it be used to make crowns for miraculous paintings and statues of the Virgin throughout the world. The canons were charged with the responsibility of judging the merits of representations to be made on behalf of particular cases, according to the quality of the miracles and the antiquity of the cult.The model in broad terms was the process used for the canonization of saints. Roman goldsmiths made the crowns to measurements supplied by the petitioners, and the formal ceremony of coronation would follow, performed with an apposite liturgy either by a local minister or, upon special request and payment, by a cardinal dispatched from Rome. A copy was to be made of each crowned image, to be retained at St Peter’s.56 Between 1631 and 1981, when the Chapter of St Peter’s ceased to be involved, about 1,000 Marian images were crowned in this way.57 A long period which witnessed relatively few promotions to sainthood thus admitted a substantial number of officially venerable statues and pictures.58 A practice with pagan and popular pre cedents was appropriated to what became, at least in intention, a papal monopoly. Local and 65 The Madonna del Monte, Genoa, 15th century, unlicensed coronations of images contin - painted wood. The crowns were made for the figures’ coronation in 1829. ued to take place after the early seventeenth century; but the prestige of the Roman ceremony made it enormously attractive, even – perhaps especially – to small communities with limited resources.59 From the papal perspective, the connotations of the rite were slightly different. It is significant that the majority of the early crownings, prior to 1700, took place in Rome itself.60 The image of the crowned Virgin had already, since the twelfth century, been deployed in Rome as a symbol of papal government of the Church, and the association of the See of St 130

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Peter with all subsequent official crownings of venerated images was evidently intended in part to impose standards and to act as a restraint upon the free expression of the laity in the ritual of local cults.61 In the more recent pattern of these ceremonies, the outstanding feature is their global diffusion and enormous increase in quantity between 1850 and 1950. More than half of all the recorded coronations, 540 rituals of this kind, took place during the first half of the twentieth century.62 The crowning of miraculous images was evidently one of the more visible ways in which the Catholic Church responded to the contemporary challenges of secularism, modernity and globalization. In the ensuing period the practice continued, but on a lesser scale: as in the sixteenth century, there were concerns within the Church in the third quarter of the twentieth that popular Marianism was becoming excessive. Pope John Paul ii, whose personal desire in this context to revitalize the role of Mary in the Church made it natural for him to give a fresh impetus to image crownings by producing a new rite for the ceremony in 1981, also devolved wholly to bishops the right to determine locally whether an image was deserving of this honour, with the result that the process has recently ceased to be centralized.63 If the crowning of images by licence of the Chapter of St Peter’s was, for three and a half centuries, a means to stamp these cults with Roman authority, it was no less an empowering opportunity for each of the local communities that, in every case, initiated the rite by the submission of petitions and narratives of miracles. Their diverse representations are preserved in the archives of the Vatican, in a large (but little consulted) file labelled ‘Crowned Madonnas’.64 Characteristic in its general format was the application in the early 1820s, from the Ligurian port of Recco, for the coronation of a carved wooden Madonna and Child group, venerated since the sixteenth century in a local oratory (illus. 66). As was frequently the case concerning the early histories of these cults, precise historical evidence was lacking; but local tradition firmly associated the Madonna del Suffragio with the protection of Recco against the depredations of North African pirates, from the days of the infamous corsair Dragut, who had raided the town in 1557 (supposedly giving rise to the cult), to the very period of her coronation in the early nineteenth century.65 In 1823 the archbishop of Genoa was prompted to hold an inquest into recent miracles attributed to the image, and the transcript of that process formed part of the application to Rome. The vitality of the cult at this period was verified by witnesses who affirmed 131

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that the oratory was constantly visited by devotees of the image, and that even when the building was closed each evening, a group could be seen kneeling devoutly in the doorway, to commune with the familiar, if invisible, statue. The 60-year-old Giuseppe Ruggiero Pietro recalled that as a young man he had been so stricken with a chest illness that the doctors had despaired of him. Some of his friends had paid for intercessory prayers at the oratory, in front of the image, and when he, from his sickbed, heard the bell at the moment of the benediction at the conclusion of the Mass, he put his trust in the Blessed Virgin, and was immediately relieved of his sickness.66 Once again, released by the ritual opening of the shrine and carried by the sound of a bell, the presence of the image had been felt, and responded to, at a distance.The wider familiarity with the image was, as elsewhere, further

66 The Madonna del Suffragio, Recco, in an engraving of 1875.

67 The Madonna del Suffragio of Recco on the facade of a house in the town.

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promoted by representations on the facades of houses in the town, some of which continue to be renewed today (illus. 67). The ceremony of honouring the Madonna del Suffragio, with a gold crown each for the Virgin and Christ Child, was conducted in 1824 on 8 September, the feast of Mary’s nativity, by the archbishop of Genoa, Luigi Lambruschini. This was the traditional day of festa in the town, but in that year the bells, illuminations and fireworks were on an unprecedented scale. Many parts of the Latin world are famed for their fireworks, but this region of Liguria, and Recco in particular, have a peculiar and long-standing reputation in this respect.Teams from the town’s constituent districts traditionally compete to produce the loudest and most extensive sequences of mortars.The somewhat daunting figures who make and detonate these sub stantial explosives are viewed sceptically by the clergy, yet their terrifying contribution to the festival of the holy image has always been regarded by the attendant crowds as an essential preface to the spectacular fireworks at midnight. Residents contribute during the year towards the cost of the celebrations; traditionally sailors put aside a portion of their wages for the festival: all can therefore feel involved in the creation of this splendid image of their town as the preferred residence of the Madonna.67 ‘The Eighth’, as it is referred to locally, has been a red-letter day in the Recco diary for the past four centuries, and it continues today to be a major event in the life of the entire region, with pilgrims and visitors arriving in special buses and boats from along the coast. But the coronation of 1824 was a watershed in the history of the cult. As those involved in that ceremony were aware, this was something which, told to grandchildren, would enter into the communal identity of Recco.68 And to renew the sense of the town’s special relationship with the Madonna in her statue, at intervals of 25 years, particular celebrations have been held in recollection of that first, regal event.69 The coronation of the Madonna del Suffragio has thus entered into the common consciousness of inhabitants of the town, sealing the image’s status as the queenly palladium of the commune. From the clerical perspec tive, this has had the advantage of helping to anchor the church within the evolving public sphere – and civic calendar – of the modern city. Addres sing the crowd on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the coronation, Padre Giacinto Rossi asked rhetorically: ‘Do you only want secular festivals? Do you wish, in demonstrations of public joy, to reduce yourselves to reason, and to cut yourselves off from God?’ He concluded, however: 133

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‘Let us not divide the two orders, the religious and the civil . . . while Mary is surrounded with ecclesiastical festivities, at the same time she enters into and presides over the festivities of the town.’70 Lay participants might, now as then, place the emphasis a little differently; but the interpenetration of the sacred and the profane which Padre Giacinto identified was and remains characteristic of the festival which, more than anything else in the minds of the Recchesi, invests their town with a proud identity.

The Madonna dances All of the festive rituals which surround miraculous images partake, to an uneven degree, of both formal and spontaneous elements. Clerical and secular authorities privilege the first, with a tendency to suppress the second. Symptomatic of this recurrent tendency within the Church were the measures instituted by the higher clergy following the Council of Trent to subdue popular religious festivities. In 1567 Archbishop Cipriano Pallavicino forbade members of the Genoese confraternities to hold nocturnal processions or feasts, and even to recite prayers to the Virgin Mary in the vernacular. Fifteen years later the apostolic visitor from Rome to the archdiocese of Genoa, Francesco Bossio, extended the ban on confraternal banquets and declared that ‘there should be no games or other profanities, even if conducted in honour of the saints’.71 This was by no means the last time that churchmen would attempt to extinguish the celebratory spark in lay devotion. But at the core of any popular devotion is a charge of creative energy ignited by participants, who deliberately move some distance outside the conventions and decorum of normal social behaviour as a means to call the supernatural being into the holy image, and themselves into its presence. The different norms which prevail in the festival setting have both a levelling and a liberating effect, subverting hierarchy in the group and freeing the individual from inhibitions. Hard to capture in prose are the multisensual and dynamic qualities of the festive experience, which become inseparable from the engagement with the image at its heart. A boy growing up in Recco during the early twentieth century would later, as a Franciscan friar, recall the first impact of the procession of 8 September. First came the spectacle of the casse (sculptural floats): the dramatic, life-sized images of patron saints carried by members of the various confraternities, 134

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68 Processional cassa of the Madonna del Suffragio, 18th century.

their gold and silver ornaments catching the last of the evening sun.Then, at sunset, there erupted the stunning explosions of the mortars and the red flashes of fireworks which echoed in the child’s head late into the night. The climax was the emergence from the church of the cassa of the Madonna del Suffragio, which bore a copy of the miraculous statue in the sanctuary (illus. 68).The bearers – sailors and workmen, for whom the strenuous role was an honour – swayed in a dance as they carried the Virgin in her procession, making the metal decorations surrounding her tinkle in the evening air, answering to the deeper church bells. Conventional prayers were forgotten even by a pious youth, who closed his eyes and imagined himself holding fast to the beautiful dress of silk and gold worn by the Madonna as she looked down at him. Rapt in this private communion with the image, he was con scious at the same time of being part of a collective experience of devotion in the surrounding crowd.These memories would be renewed in subsequent celebrations, remaining for the older man an integral element of his relationship with the miraculous image in the oratory.72 The Madonna’s dance expresses the uninhibited energy, that celebratory joy, which for centuries has burned at the heart of the image cult.The dance in honour of divinity, marking out the space for the godly presence on Earth, is as old as history, although priestly authority, especially in the Hebrew and Christian traditions, has generally been inclined to reprove the Bacchanalian 135

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element. In the post-medieval centuries, it must be said that clerical moral censure together with policing by secular authority has done much to contain the wilder forces of celebration around miraculous images, reducing some of these festivals to an insipid echo of their former wildness.Yet the desire of both men and women to attract the deity by releasing their own stronger energies, and by demonstrations of punishing endurance, continues to infuse many such occasions with a drama capable of taking the individual ‘out of himself ’ – the original meaning of the word ‘ecstasy’. At Sori, a few kilometres along the coast from Recco, the 15 August festival of the painted Madonna delle Grazie has also traditionally been accompanied by a splendid procession, which the local archpriest has repeatedly attempted to subdue, blaming ‘modern times’ for their supposed corruption of an idealized, ‘pure’ religious function. In typical vein is the warning of the archpriest before the festival of the image in 1928: ‘The procession should not be an external parade, nor a choreographic spectacle which the people run to see for its amusement, nor yet a competition of muscular strength among participants who carry the huge crosses to win the admiration of a public of little intel ligence.’73 Yet notwithstanding the clerical reserve, which endures in the present day, the cross-bearers of Sori have continued on each feast day of the Assumption to go through spectacular, penitential trials to carry the enormous crucifixes of the confraternities (some weighing as much as 160 or even 180 kilograms) – and indeed to dance with them, making their gilded metallic ornaments ring to the beat.74 It is an important test of masculinity, as it is also of piety. Similar groups come from surrounding districts to the wooded mountain shrine of Acquasanta, to the west of Genoa, on successive Sundays in August, in order to carry both crosses and casse before the little carved Madonna in her miniature Baroque tempietto beside the miraculous spring which gives its name to the site (illus. 69, 70, 71). Since the construction in the late seventeenth century, a little further up the hill, of a church, the official celebration in the statue’s honour is focused upon a Mass cele brated in this building. But before they reach the sanctuary, the members of the confraternities, dressed in traditional costume, perform amazing feats of strength and dexterity by both dancing and running as they carry their enormous sculpted and painted burdens up a steep flight of steps, known as the Scala Santa, leading from the Virgin’s shrine to the figure of the suffering Christ at the top (illus. 72, 73, 74). The enormously tall and 136

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69 Sanctuary of Acquasanta in an engraving of 1833.

70 Sanctuary of Acquasanta, tempietto of the Madonna above the miraculous spring, constructed c. 1700.

heavy crucifixes, balanced in leather supports worn as belts and carried by a sequence of men who have been practising all year to perform this difficult and risky task, are made to bow to the Virgin before making their ascent. These penitential performances are received admiringly by the applauding crowd. In August 1879, the vicar of the local town of Voltri 137

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wrote indignantly to the archbishop in Genoa to complain about these displays and about the ‘music, bands, and pilgrims of both sexes who make bold to carry Christ’. He grumbled, too, about the festival atmosphere of café tables set outside the church and ball games played under the trees. The clergy appointed to guard the shrine have tended, on the other hand, to be more accommodating; and in any case, the scene is unchanged today, despite the diatribes of the more puritanical priests. A brass band playing popular, secular tunes heralds the procession, and stalls sell sweets and toys. The atmosphere is not less devotional for being festive, however, and there are many who fulfil their own individual penance by climbing the Scala Santa on their knees, intoning prayers and songs. All will, in due course, crowd into the church for the Mass – but not before they have 71 The Madonna of Acquasanta, c. 1600, painted plaster. participated in the emotional spectacle of the ‘Christ-bearers’ and the casacce making their swaying ascent before the little Madonna of the Holy Spring.75 The association with a confluence of waters and a curative spring is not the sole element in these rites at Acquasanta which recalls far more ancient cultic practices.The effort invested in carrying the casse and crucifixes in the processions is a proof of the superhuman strength which emanates from the images themselves and from the object of particular devotion, and the same conviction is recorded in pre-Christian contexts. Pausanias, in the second century, described the procession in honour of an ancient statue of Apollo near Magnesia: an image which ‘bestows strength equal to any task’.The male participants in the procession, ‘uprooting trees of exceeding height, walk with their burdens down the narrowest of paths’: replacing the trees with large crosses, the scene is replicated at Acquasanta today.76 In the ritual process of celebration, not only is the miraculous image consecrated but the space which it inhabits and watches over. Processions, 138

72 Cross-bearers of a confraternity at the shrine of the Madonna of Acquasanta.

74 The cassa of the Madonna about to be carried up the Scala Santa at Acquasanta.

73 Cross-bearers incline their crucifix before the tempietto of the Madonna of Acquasanta.

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dancing, light and music mark it out. A spectacular case was the festival mounted in 1716 for the centenary of the crowning of the Madonna delle Vigne in Genoa (see illus. 38). The event resounded throughout the city but was concentrated on the parish, close to the port and at the mercantile heart of the city, including the goldsmiths’ quarter.The church was dressed with rich hangings of crimson velvet and damask fringed with gold, with festoons cascading down from the cupola and the vault of the nave. Crystal lamps shone from the columns and around the high altar, and the chapel of the Madonna was adorned and illuminated ‘as a little portrait of Paradise’. All around the church and also over the outside doorways and the narrow mouths of the lanes leading up to the church hung painted cartouches depicting putti, ornaments and symbols of the Virgin, with Latin mottoes explaining them – sun, moon, eagle, phoenix, cedar, cypress, lily, rose and vine. From one of the columns under the cupola was suspended an image of a hortus conclusus, an enclosed garden, with the plan of a fortress at the centre of which was figured the Name of Mary. In the tiny piazza before the astonishingly vast church which rises out of it (see illus. 37), and in the surrounding streets, the presence of the Madonna was evoked and dramatized, the imagery inside the church carried out into the surrounding zones. The marble fountain in the next square was built up in the form of a tower filled with fireworks. In the vicolo (narrow street) known as ‘of the snow’, fictive columns draped with tapestries framed a miniature landscape of grasses, flowers and illuminated fountains, in the midst of which stood a ‘small but very beautiful’ image of the Virgin. As if to demonstrate the authenticity of her evocation, one evening late at night a fire from the plethora of fireworks surrounding it destroyed most of this display, yet spared the figure of Mary. At the beginning of the octave of celebration members of the senate came to the church and were presented with a ‘poetic crown’ narrating the glories of the Virgin and the miracles worked by her. After Mass, at the moment when fresh crowns were placed on the statue, the artillery of the city fired from the galleys and other ships in the port, to which in response came salvoes of mortars from the vicoli and squares around the church. Over eight days different preachers came, and large numbers of priests to celebrate Masses at all hours; crowds of people arrived to participate in a range of devotions until late into every night.Thousands of fireworks and illuminations radiated in every dark vicolo, light coming from torches outside and candles in every window; and the aristocratic 140

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palaces of the Strada Nuova – renowned at this period as the most beautiful thoroughfare in Europe – were lit so that the whole street became a theatre. In the piazza in front of the church were erected two large stands for musicians ‘of every sort’. The climax came on the night of 21 April, with an extraordinary display of fireworks and other special effects. The focus of attention was a semi-transparent image of the statue of the Madonna delle Vigne, which had been placed for the first two evenings of the octave above the terrace of the Palazzo Imperiale, but which on the final evening was set up on the roof of the residence of the Marchese Spinola, one of the chief patrons of the chapel. A series of functions was served by the particularities of the location of this image: first, the association with two key noble families of the neighbourhood; second, the achievement of maximum visibility in the rabbit-warren of vicoli of that part of the old city of Genoa – and the delineation of different zones of the parish, all the shopkeepers of which contributed to the costs of the illuminations. But most important and striking must have been the visual effect of this image of the statue against a blue ground, lit dramatically from behind. In the words of the text published at the time to commemorate this glorious event, the sense of reassurance felt by those who witnessed this spectacle was such that the terrors of the dark night were dispersed by the rays of celestial glory which seemed to shine down from Paradise, so that it was impossible to see her without contemplating her, and to contemplate her without feeling entirely suffused by her gentle tenderness.

The emphasis of this celebratory publication on the devotional focus of attention explains the phenomenological process: from material vision to the experience of collective ecstasy, to a personal feeling of contemplation, to the sense of consolation.77 The image at the centre of the ritual was ultimately engaged by the devotional act of contemplation, in which neighbourhood identity, vision, insight and imagination came together. Evoking the same contemplative outcome of collective ritual celebration, in the late nineteenth century a priest was to use a telling metaphor in defining the power of the miraculous image of a town just outside Genoa – that it was ‘the pupil of the eyes of this people’.78 141

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The transformative gift However hard its clerical guardians might try to delimit the scope and tenor of celebrations surrounding a particular venerated object, the cult continues to be shaped by its secular adherents through the medium of the gift and the ex-voto.The simplest present of a bunch of flowers stands as living testimony to the vitality of a cult, offering assurance of its power (illus. 75). The more enduring gift at the tomb of the saint or to the holy patron’s sacred image, promised in the moment of personal or collective crisis and subsequently brought to the shrine in fulfilment of the vow, is an ancient and universal phenomenon.79 Its functions are similar whether presented to a relic or to an image, and in either instance the focus of the rite is invariably a representation of the holy patron, whether or not this in itself is considered miraculous. In the particular case of the venerated image, however, in the absence of a canonical life of the saint to determine in some measure the parameters of devotion, the ex-voto has a more substantial, creative and unpredictable role to play in the definition of the cult. Moreover, the image, as has been noted, is not confined in the same way as the relic.80 Among the miracles of St Bridget of Sweden, collected the year after her death and burial in Rome in 1373, is the account of a soldier who, having vowed himself to the saint and been cured, presented to the Carmelite church in Naples an image of Bridget which in turn acquired its own reputation for performing graces, testified by a growing collection of ex-votos.81 The ex-voto takes a great range of forms: wax or metal heads and limbs; silver hearts; model ships; the chains of freed slaves and prisoners; painted representations of the dramatic historical circumstances of the miracle; and material traces of the supernatural intervention – discarded crutches, bloodied clothing, broken skis and motor- 75 Roadside shrine with flowers, near the sanctuary cycle helmets – are characteristic of the of the Madonna of Vico di Mondovì. 142

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miscellaneous objects to be found in the sanctuary of a holy image. The church of the Madonna di Montenero above Livorno still preserves thousands of ex-votos in diverse media, chiefly dating from the past two centuries (illus. 76).82 Here and elsewhere, a periodic clerical impulse to tidy the shrine has removed the overwhelming majority of these tributes, which formerly were very much more numerous.The walls of the chapel of the Madonna del Boschetto at Camogli in the nineteenth century were completely covered with 400 marine exvotos, of which just a few dozen survive today; in many other cases the loss has been total.83 The Madonna Incoronata (‘Coro nata’) to the west of Genoa was estimated in the mid-seventeenth century to be surrounded by 40,000 ex-votos, although a mere handful is to be seen today.84 Clergy have, moreover, tended to regard objects of diverse kinds with greater suspicion than pictorial ex-votos, with the result that the 76 Ex-votos at the sanctuary of the Madonna of Montenero, Livorno. latter figure disproportionately among the presently surviving material.85 The diversity of these gifts made to particular images is an important clue to their function.The wax portrait-head of the donor, and the painted panel with a depiction of the miracle, have clear representational qualities; yet it is easy to exaggerate the significance of figurative representation in this class of object. The approximate character of the ‘copies’ of the image which appear in ex-votos, as also in santini and other forms of reproduction, has never created difficulties for devotees, who evidently do not look for a material duplicate or artistic replica.86 In his classic study, Julius von Schlosser saw in the wax heads of miracolati at such image shrines as that of the Madonna Annunziata in Florence and that of the Madonna delle Grazie in Mantua the medieval and devotional origins of naturalistic Renaissance portraiture.87 David Freedberg, while free of Schlosser’s teleological 143

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commitment to an idea of developing naturalism, nonetheless emphasises what he sees as the essential importance of figuration in the ex-voto. He cites this material extensively in support of his larger claim that a perennial human instinct tends to identify any image with the thing it represents.88 However, consideration of the full spectrum of ex-voto offerings at the shrines of miraculous images indicates that something more is entailed than ‘the felt efficacy . . . of the exactly lifelike’.89 The ex-voto is less an image, either of a donor or an event, than it is a trace of remembered history which in turn becomes woven into a larger narrative of shared experience.90 Every gift is particular, the record of a unique experience; yet the means employed are standardized, and over centuries have changed very little. Even the painted panel, for all its visual rhetoric of journalistic reportage, follows a limited repertoire of types, adapted in some detail to the circumstances of a particular story. While some ex-votos have been made by the donors themselves, from an early date professional painters offered their services, becoming in some instances fulltime madonneri, or makers of panels on commission for image shrines. Dynasties of such manufacturers are known, such as that of the Roux family in nineteenth-century Marseilles.91 Others moved with the network of trade routes and customers. Louis Renault moved in the late nineteenth century from Marseilles to Liguria and thence to Livorno, leaving a trail of ex-voto paintings in shrines along the entire coast.92 These specialists would prepare panels in anticipation of demand: the pious pilgrim, eager to fulfil a vow, did not wish to wait for the gift to be ready. Another such artist was Sciù Erminiu, better known as ‘The Little Painter’, who at the time of the Crimean War would always have ready in his shop near the harbour in Genoa a supply of images of ships in storms at sea. In the clouds he left space to insert the image of this or that Madonna, according to the requirements of his customers. His little pictures thus found their way into all the Marian sanctuaries of Liguria.93 At the shrine of the Madonna of Vico di Mondovì there survives a heap of unused and unfinished ex-votos, testimony to this practice of serial production, including ten images of people thrown from carts, six of possessed demoniacs, and similar groups of other types.94 Even when the painter was furnished by the patron with specific details, the result was liable to be formulaic. Sicilian examples survive of tavolette bearing notes on the reverse evidently supplied to guide the commission. However, a characteristic instance reads: ‘man sick in bed 144

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– wife praying – tiny little child’, and the pictorial result naturally presents a series of figural stereotypes.95 Typically a workshop of this kind could, until the early twentieth century, be found at the beginning of the lane leading uphill to a shrine, where the grateful pilgrim could expect to acquire an appropriate gift to leave at the sanctuary.96 Since the invention of photography, the alternative convention has spread of including a photograph within the ex-voto, along identical lines to those of the hand-painted variety: the scene of a wartime bombardment or a traffic accident, or of the balcony from which a child had fallen, or of the patient in bed at home or in hospital.97 The use of photography carries the connotation of scientific veracity, exemplified in an early instance at the shrine of the Madonna di Montenero, which shows in alarming detail a patient strapped down and undergoing a form of modern medical treatment which in the context is understood to have been impotent without the intervention of the miraculous image (illus. 77).The miraculous image itself is shown in a haze, as if emerging out of the ether, the sense of magical transcendence being enhanced both by means of and by contrast with the very working of photographic technology. Photography has been used here to reconstruct (as became a common practice) the dramatic scenario of the reported miracle. Accompanied by a reproduction of the miraculous

77 Ex-voto in the Sanctuary of the Madonna of Montenero, Livorno, 1912.

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image, the posed photograph claims both to be direct testimony of and to evoke the intervention of the supernatural.98 In all these cases, however, and in whatever medium, the depiction functions not as a local embodiment of the grateful donor but as an index of the larger world in which the presence of the holy image is operational. Other types of ex-voto illustrate this function no less clearly. To the icon of Montallegro was brought in 1671 the bloodied coat, ridden with sixteen bullet-holes, of Vincenzo Pisanello, in memory of his miraculous protection. The shocking garment would remain as an enduring record and catalyst of local history.99 Another devotee of this Madonna, who at the same period survived an arquebus shot, subsequently maintained a lamp in front of a reproduction of the image in the square of Rapallo which had been the scene of his attempted assassination. The gesture of thanks underlined the perceived embrace by the little icon of a large and indeed infinitely extendable zone of her influence.100 The same general message was communicated by the ex-voto model of an island with a castle, given to the Madonna del Boschetto at Camogli in the 1790s by one who had been captured by a Greek pirate while fishing for coral near Sardinia and enslaved for ten years, until liberated by his brother.101 Even the simplest and most humble of gifts – a bunch of flowers – refers both devotionally to the image and indexically to the original context of the vow. In 2003, a young man brought roses for the Madonna of the Rosary of Pompei. He had vowed to pay tribute to her if she would help him to find work: no easy task in the Mezzogiorno, where one in two young people is unemployed. Now with a job, he came with his ex-voto offering in order to acknowledge that supernatural intervention in the everyday world of the south.102 The ex-voto refers to an individual event, whether experienced as a personal or a collective grace. Yet to bequeath an ex-voto offering to a shrine is at the same time to participate in a social ritual, one which cumulatively constructs the miraculous painting or statue in the image of the body of its devotees.The frame of ex-votos reclaims for the wider com munity the venerated object officially controlled by the clerical keepers of the sanctuary.The price of survival of a wonder-working image may have been its transference from a garden wall into an officially consecrated and supervised basilica; but the ex-votos which continue to be heaped around it speak the quotidian language of secular concerns and beliefs, heterodox though these may sometimes be. Sacchetti, with gentle irony, told a story 146

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of a wax cat given to a thaumaturgic image of the Virgin Mary following the lost pet’s rediscovery.103 When Cardinal Bossio conducted his visitation of the Genoese archdiocese in 1582, he testily required the removal of what seemed to him to be bizarre ex-votos in the Ligurian image shrines, including flags, weapons, model ships and displays of dogs, snakes and other ‘brute animals’. At Lavagna he observed, evidently with raised eyebrows, suspended from the rafters of the chapel of the Madonna del Ponte, a crocodile. This animal had been brought to the shrine in 1566 by sailors from Lavagna who had miraculously been saved from its jaws in the waters of the Nile.104 But notwithstanding the stern injunctions of the higher clergy, this form of public record of the interventions of a holy image was not to be so easily eliminated. At the sanctuary of the Madonna di Montallegro above Rapallo there is still to be seen, hanging from the ceiling, another stuffed crocodile (illus. 78).The creature, having in 1694 come off the worse in an equatorial encounter with two brothers who attributed their survival to the icon, con tinues to narrate to visitors the latter’s powers, as part of the history of her community of devotees.105 The ex-voto is not marginal to the cult, but essential to it: hence the many popular prints which reproduce the image framed by its offerings (illus. 79).106 Understood to be charged with the power of the holy image, the ex-voto is not to be tampered with. Witness to this perception is the story of the woman who, in 1590, sacrilegiously trod on an ex-voto at the

78 Ex-voto in the Sanctuary of the Madonna of Montallegro, Rapallo, 1690s.

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79 The Madonna of Montenero, Livorno, framed by scenes of miracles attributed to the image in the form of ex-votos. Engraving, 1622.

shrine of the Madonna dell’Arco near Naples. Her feet allegedly fell off, and were then displayed in the sanctuary as ex-votos in their own right.107 In 1769 Clara Maria Marcenaria reported the occasion when she had left a leg-iron as an ex-voto at the sanctuary of Virgo Potens near Genoa. On the way home she had suddenly collapsed in great pain. It was discovered that a servant of the church had removed the ex-voto, and when it was hung up again she was once more well.108 Clerical concerns have also at times 148

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been expressed regarding the theological implications of textual accompaniments to ex-votos. After the initial episcopal closure of the incipient cult of the Madonna of Vico di Mondovì, on completion of his inquest in June 1595 the bishop conceded that the diverse objects and images given in devotion to the Madonna of the roadside pillar – these included wax eyes (for the cure of a cow) and limbs, crutches, and depictions in diverse media – might be put back into the chapel, but insisted that the written accounts accompanying the ex-votos, which regularly referred in the language of popular devotion to ‘miracles’, should be replaced with the simple record of the name of the giver and the words ‘ex voto’.109 The clerk at the inquest noted that the donors of the recorded ex-votos at this shrine were illiterate; but their dictated narratives, or the single word ‘Miraculum’, were a promise to others of the potency of the holy image.110 The bishop felt justified in his anxiety, given the potential of a wall – and it might also be a ceiling – of ex-votos to communicate to a widening public the popular understanding of the presence and powers of a miraculous picture. The miraculous painting or sculpture therefore comes to be perceived and remembered not for its formal qualities as a particular portrait of the Virgin Mary but rather as the protagonist in a web of extraordinary stories. The transcribed narratives which accompany many pictorial ex-votos record the social world in which the accounts of miracles circulate, gaining credence and notoriety through repetition and in turn finding validation in the official version displayed at the shrine. At the distance of four and a half centuries, one hears the Genoese voice of Lorenzo Carrega: On the Monday, which was 20 September, 1569, at the third hour of the night I went to bed. I woke at the sixth hour, but it not yet being time to get up for work, I went back to sleep. In the space of an hour, I don’t know how, but a fire started in the house . . . and seeing the danger to myself and my family, I rescued my children as quickly as I could. Straight away on our knees we put ourselves in the hands of the Lord God, Our Lady and the glorious St John the Baptist, as the Crucifix of Castello came into our hearts.

The painted ex-voto to which this text serves as a caption shows the family in their nightclothes, thanking the miraculous cross of Santa Maria di Castello for their escape (illus. 80).The very ordinariness of such narratives 149

80 Ex-voto in the Sanctuary of the Miraculous Crucifix in the Monastery of Santa Maria di Castello, Genoa, 1569.

81 Ex-voto in the Sanctuary of the Madonna del Monte, Genoa, 1875.

82 Ex-voto in the Sanctuary of the Madonna of Montallegro, Rapallo, 1933.

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helps to naturalize the idea of the miraculous image in the everyday world of those among whom they circulate: On 15 October 1875, about 4 o’clock in the afternoon, Giovanni Battista Parodi of San Fruttuoso was dismantling a balcony on the third floor of his house, when he fell, breaking both his legs. But thanks to the intercession of the Blessed Virgin, he recovered, and he brings her this picture as a thank offering (illus. 81).

Or again: Little Sergio Marenco, born at Santa Margherita Ligure on 1 September 1930, having reached the age of three years, swallowed, first, a 20 centesimi coin, then another of 5 centesimi. Another day while playing he fell on a marble slab. His mother called upon the intercession of the Most Holy Madonna, and he remained unharmed.

The ex-voto in this case was accompanied by material evidence of the child’s escape (illus. 82).

83 Ex-voto in the Sanctuary of the Madonna del Monte, Genoa, 1882.

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84 Ex-voto in the Sanctuary of the Madonna dell’Orto, Chiavari, 18th century.

85 Ex-voto in the Sanctuary of the Madonna of Bacezza, Chiavari, early 19th century.

The authors of these testimonies reveal themselves capable of inventing particular and personal rituals for the invocation of the venerated image.When the seven-year-old Luigia Gallo fell ill with typhoid fever in 1882, her parents selected nine other girls of the same age who were to pray in their daughter’s bedroom to the miraculous Genoese statue of the Madonna del Monte, ‘and in fact the prayers of those innocent children obtained the miracle’ (illus. 83). To those who grow up with such stories, it becomes a natural instinct, in a moment of crisis, to invoke the holy image. A dinner party is stunned by a bolt of lightning which strikes through the window; an adult or a child falls downstairs; someone is thrown from a carriage whose horse is bolting, or is knocked over by a tram or a motor car; a farmhand is gored by a bull; a workman falls from scaffolding or becomes caught in factory machinery; fireworks explode during the festival of the image itself; and in each case the miraculous image, to which so many other people are known to have turned in similar circumstances, comes readily to mind (illus. 84–93). 152

86–93 Ex-votos, 19th and 20th centuries.

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94 Ex-voto, 1855.

95 Ex-voto, 1889.

Its appearance to some in dreams has seemed equally natural. Captain Raffaele Bozzo, far from home in the Crimea in 1855, was ill and on the verge of death, being brought nothing but a little hot water by his servant, when in a dream he saw the Madonna del Boschetto of Camogli, to whom he attributed his subsequent recovery (illus. 94). To countless sailors at risk from the dangers of the sea, past narratives of rescue ascribed to a particular Madonna give confidence to those who recall the same image in the teeth of a storm (illus. 95): On 9 September 1889, the ‘Caterina R.’ was off the coast of New York when, at 5 in the morning, a hurricane broke.The captain and 154

96 Ex-voto recording an incident in Serbia, 1942.

97 Ex-voto following the bombardment of Rapallo in 1944.

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four of the sailors perished.The remaining seven sailors were saved, after spending two days under the crow’s nest, without food, when a Prussian steamship came to their aid.

And the perils of war intensify such memories, giving rise in turn to yet more narratives of disaster averted, or at least survived (illus. 96, 97). To recollect the image, therefore, is simultaneously to recall the lengthening catalogue of stories which it trails in its wake. To invoke its power is not merely to visualize its material appearance, but to summon the memory of previous tales of its potency.

Spreading the word of the image Innumerable printed volumes, surviving today in the homes of devotees and in local libraries, testify to the importance, in the spread of a cult, of publications. Such pamphlets, taken home by pilgrims and distributed by preachers, have served since the sixteenth century to publicize particular shrines. Narratives are re-presented, and reinforced in new circumstances, sometimes to counter scepticism and to underline the respectability of the devotion, sometimes as part of the process of application for coronation of the image, sometimes simply in order to revitalize a cult. Since ancient times, such publicity has formed a vital part of the evolving debate surrounding the validity of image cults.111 New emphases may be introduced to meet what are perceived as new challenges or concerns. Such was the case with the 1873 Memorie storiche of the miracle-working image of Virgo Potens at Sestri Ponente, just to the west of Genoa, whose cult (originally popular and chaotic) dated from the early eighteenth century. A desire to refresh the cult in the newly industrializing working-class zone was allied with a concern to reinforce clerical authority over it.Thus the early miracles were re-narrated with a marked emphasis on the key role of the priest as intermediary. In the case of a cure which had taken place in 1739, the account of 1873 reported that the priest of the church had been asked by a dying man to take a ring and give it on his behalf to the Madonna. In another instance, an epileptic presented himself first to the priest, who was said (in the context of a revived emphasis on the Eucharist in the later nineteenth century) to have recommended that he first take the sacrament; only then did he conduct him to pray before the image.The text underlined that the Virgin was the 156

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refuge of sinners, but only of sinners seeking genuine conversion, not merely temporal graces. Up to a point, these emphases re-evoked early eighteenthcentury clerical attitudes (the image, originally on the roadside, had eventually been placed in a church already dedicated to the Virgin in order to contain disorderly behaviour, and to channel the considerable quantity of gifts); but the idiom was of the nineteenth century.112 Such an example further demonstrates that the spoken word, no less than images or print, needs also to be considered if we are to understand the ways in which miraculous images were incorporated into people’s daily lives. Indeed it would be sensible to assume that the tissue of shared stories, festivities celebrated in common and vows fulfilled in public rituals has at all times been sustained far more by oral culture than by printed texts, notwithstanding the status of the latter among theologians and scholars. The travelling storyteller or cantastorie, who until a few decades ago was a familiar figure in the smaller towns of Italy, traditionally carried in his repertoire the narrative of one or another miraculous Madonna, which he would illustrate with pictures and songs. Such troubadours can sometimes still be heard, in a small piazza, narrating in dialect the wonders of a local miraculous image.113 A priest and local historian of Chiavari in the mid-seventeenth century, Agostino Busco, rewrote his prose account of the recent beginnings of the local cult of the Madonna of the Garden into rhyming verse ‘for the contentment of all, so that when one is tired of reading one can sing’.114 Numerous songwriters lent their service to the cult of the Madonna of Montallegro. Some of these verses had a long currency: in 1673, 1,000 copies were printed in Genoa of a book of songs in praise of the Montallegro image which had first been published in 1557, the foundation year of the cult. A typical passage promised: Blind, lame or crippled, You’ll be cured, Seeking help as you should From the gentle Virgin of Montallegro. Sailors, wayfarers, travellers all, Greet one another As you pass on the way To the gentle Virgin of Montallegro. 157

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How many offerings you will see, How many graces you will hear, Blessings given and received By that gentle holy Virgin of Montallegro.115

In such songs, which were frequently reprinted and amplified in successive printed editions, devotees would address a particular image in the second person, as their immediate audience, as in this verse sung in the nineteenth century to the Madonna del Suffragio of Recco: Hail, image, the object of our prayer, Our fathers’ hope and ours; The clergy and the people Prostrate themselves devoutly before you. Come down and intercede for us, Goddess of charity.116 Unlike most ex-votos, the song is a collective expression, which reinforces the confidence of the group of participants both in the bond between them and in the protection of the holy image, in even the most hazardous circumstances. A recently collected popular song of the fishermen of Rodi Garganico in Apulia narrates (in dialect) a prodigy of the locally venerated icon known as the Madonna della Libera. To this image was attributed the salvation of an almost-drowned prelate: The Madonna della Libera Saved a monsignore In the middle of the sea; When the boat was sinking The Madonna by her power Lifted the vessel And carried it to safety.117

Conclusion: Acts of creation Such celebratory songs, together with the many sermons published on these and other miraculous images, tend now to be read, if at all, as though 158

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these texts were merely descriptive, referring back, at a distance, to the absent icon.Yet this is to underestimate the extent to which such speech and song could guide the listener or the reader directly to the same realm of experience as that to which the image itself, or its replicas in the form of immaginette or street shrines, pointed – indeed to the spiritual prototype, whose simultaneous absence and presence constituted the context for the miraculous.118 This paradox of the holy picture, at once both near and distant, real and imagined, mirrors that of its devotee. The person who exper iences the image as life-changing has already helped to constitute it and to give it particular definition, by his or her personal ritual of pilgrimage, procession and prayer, and of storytelling, dance and song.

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98 Presenting flowers to the Madonna. Photograph, Rome, c. 1940.

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he got up herself from her stretcher and with arms spread wide embraced the statue of St Bruno, and she felt recovered. She insisted that she saw St Bruno in his natural form, not in silver: he had a cheerful countenance, and she was healed at that moment. She shouted, ‘St Bruno has cured me!’1

S

Sight as fusion The ritualized approach to the sacred image described in the previous chapter has the potential, as we have seen, to bring the engaged observer to an epiphany. However, by giving priority in the sequence of this book to the role of ritual in the visionary encounter with a cult image, we do not mean to imply that such practices as were described earlier had absolute precedence in the creation of religious experience. One scholar has recently claimed that ritual performance does, in fact, have primacy in the instantiation and renewal of religious traditions, and not the subjective experience and emotions of the individual.2 But this is an unnecessary and misleading distinction. As is evident from many accounts in both the previous and the present chapter, the performance of rites, while vital to the creation of a space within which the numinous may be encountered, would remain empty were these not complemented by subjective experience, itself refracted through associations and recollections. In the presence of the cult image, the phenomenology of the emotions, memory and the imagination interacts with the observation of particular rites and practices to create the possibility of an epiphanic encounter. The physical and sensual nature of recorded responses to miraculous images throws into question the conventional understanding of vision as 161

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the encounter between a distinct observing subject and an image which remains the passive object of attention. The particular case of the aesthetic response has been understood to depend upon the separation, the ‘cutting out’, of the object of admiration from any context of human purpose or practical knowledge.3 In a more inclusive sense, the model of the detached observer has held such lasting sway in the Western tradition that we need to make an effort to realize that it has not, always and everywhere, been the exclusive or dominant concept of vision. Since the postmodern turn, it may be easier than in the past to recognize that, even within the scope of European history, different ideas of vision have been recorded and indeed have coexisted, arising in each case from diverse conceptions of reality. Alongside the more familiar model of the observer for whom the image, however wonderful it may be as a representation of something for which the viewer longs, remains forever out of reach in a separate realm, we also encounter – in Neoplatonic writings of late antiquity, in medieval Christian theology and in miraculous image cults at all periods – a sense of the visual encounter as potentially leading to a mystic union with the figure in the statue or the picture which transcends the distinction between subject and object.4 For one who is transported by an encounter with a miraculous painting or statue, the experience of life in the image has little to do with mimesis in the representation but is the result, rather, of this transcendent incorporation of the image within the self and of the self within the image. If on the one hand it is relevant to bear in mind, as we consider the encounter with the miraculous image, this Platonic idea of vision as absorption and union, it will also be helpful to recall the phenomenological insight of Maurice Merleau-Ponty: that it is ineluctably in and through the body that we can have any understanding of the world.5 The sensory encounter cannot be separated from a distinct mode of intellectual comprehension.What soi-disant rational observers find peculiar or even distasteful in the physical ways in which devotees behave around miraculous images is a manifestation of a larger reality, which our Enlightenment heritage has made it hard for us to acknowledge.

Making contact Recent study has revealed that in the later Middle Ages the decorum of behaviour around holy images included a degree of physical engagement, such 162

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as clutching and caressing doll-like statuettes of the Madonna, honouring the Virgin by kissing her foot in her image and self-flagellation before the image of the crucified Christ, which can seem unsettling in a later context.6 An emphatic materiality has been said, convincingly, to be characteristic of late medieval image devotion.7 Yet in the post-medieval period such haptic, sensory interaction with the image has by no means fallen out of use. Indeed, vision is better understood as part of a multisensory response.8 Miraculous image cults offer a rich vein of evidence which can deepen our understand ing of the interplay of different sensory and mental reactions to a given image. In the chapel in Genoa of a miraculous crucifix, within the Dominican convent of Santa Maria di Castello, on a Tuesday afternoon in August 2005, three lay people, two women and a man, all of middle age, communed with the life-sized image.The women climbed the steps behind the altar in order to stroke and kiss the cross. They then stood for some time, holding the image as they prayed.9 The more closely we look at the cult of particular images, the more the evidence throws into question conventional philosophical and art historical distinctions between beholder and image. In this context the two are inseparable, bound together in a mutual exchange which is no less physical than it is conceptual. In the sentient encounter, the devotee is displaced, led partially out of himself or herself, and interpenetrates with the image.

The life in the image The foundational stories of miraculous image cults very often convey the sense that the picture or carving is itself animate and sentient: that it shares capabilities and sentiments with its human audience.The feeling is mutual: these stories arise in situations in which those who perceive a miracle have focused hard and invested hopes and fears into their encounter with the image. An archetypal instance of momentous importance is that of the cross of San Damiano which seemed to St Francis, after he had prayed before it for a long time in an empty church, to speak to him.10 That prestigious Franciscan model would authorize similar behaviour in relation to other images over the following centuries. The original miracle of the painted Madonna of Piratello, on a pillar beside the Via Emilia near Imola, in March 1483, was that the Virgin was heard by a traveller, as he prayed before her, to address him by name and to request the construction of a chapel on the spot. 163

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As she did so, the observer noticed that roses had come into bloom around the niche containing the image, despite the early season, demonstrating nature’s harmony with the Madonna’s wish.11 Those who have turned with anxiety to iconic images, whether in the Byzantine or in the Western Christian tradition, have often had the sensation that the eyes of the image were especially responsive. In the Byzantine context, it has been noted that the viewer’s perception that his or her gaze was reciprocated could be catalysed by the play of candlelight on the rich material surface of the icon.12 The Catholic imagery reviewed here shows that diverse media and techniques could be equally conducive to such a response. The first miracle performed by the panel painting known as the Madonna della Costa at San Remo occurred in about 1400, at a time of plague: during a votive Mass offered for relief from the Black Death, it was said that the painted Virgin turned her eyes towards the apprehensive congregation.13 In fact, the motion of the eyes would continue to be one of the principal ways in which certain images would manifest their importance, in the context of diverse crises of war and suffering. It is through the eyes of her images that the Virgin Mary has often been said to watch over men and women, her children in the world.14 The eyes of all Christian images are central to their potency, as was realized by iconoclasts who scratched them.The same is true in other cultures: an image of the Buddha is invested with life, from the perspective of its devotees, by the painting of the eyes.15 In turn, communion with the holy image is crystallized by the interlocking of the gaze. The devotee who kneels and looks up at the face of the Madonna has the conviction that the image returns her regard. The reciprocity of this relationship draws the beholder towards identification with the image. As Alfred Gell described, such a mutual exchange between the gaze of the viewer and that of the cult object sets up ‘a kind of optical oscillation in which idol’s and devotee’s perspectives shift back and forth with such rapidity that interpersonal boundaries are effaced and “union” is achieved’.16 The ancient and traditional understanding of vision, as completed by the extromission from the eyes of rays of fire, finds its corollary in the conviction that the eyes of the image penetrate the viewer with their beams.17 The dominance in post-Enlightenment scientific thought of an intromission model for the understanding of sight should not be allowed to obscure the survival in vernacular culture of many traces of the older belief in the active power of the eyes. The malocchio, or evil eye, is testimony 164

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to this. Another body of such evidence are the miracles allegedly worked by certain images through the agency of their gaze. At the onset of a new cult, an old image is sometimes observed to draw attention to itself by fresh signs of vitality. On the last day of September in 1537 an archiepiscopal investigation took place into the miraculous events which were said to have taken place a fortnight before in the parish church of St John the Baptist at Cicagna, a small town in the Valle Fontanabuona to the east of Genoa and formally under Genoa’s civil and ecclesiastical jurisdiction (although in practice the area largely went its own way). In this church there was an old, woodwormed and neglected wooden statue of the Virgin and Child, sitting on a little altar attached to one of the columns of the aisle and dedicated to the Rosary. On 15 September word spread through the town that some lilies, which had been in front of the statue for a long time and were dead and dried up, had begun to revivify and become green again. A large crowd came to the church to see whether it was true, and were then present to see something more amazing. During Mass, the statue itself, which had been black and corroded, became beautiful and coloured, with an enchanting face (illus. 99). As one deponent reported a fortnight later to the archbishop’s vicar: ‘The face of the Virgin, which a little before had been dusty, black and deformed, made itself beautiful – as it now is – in the lips and the other parts of the face.’ Other witnesses com mented that the lips were the first to change and become red – then the whole face gradually transformed during the course of the Mass. On being asked whether he suspected any human contrivance to achieve this effect, the priest testified that he had done nothing of the kind, nor had he heard of anyone else doing so, and he believed that ‘everything proceeded from the Virgin Mary’. Here in the parish church of a market 99 The Madonna dei Miracoli, Cicagna, early town in the hinterland of Genoa, a crowd of 20th-century replacement of late medieval original, painted and gilded wooden sculpture. lay men and women attending Mass, who 165

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had come to witness one miracle and saw another, directed their collective focus of attention to a neglected image.The story of the revived lilies here stands as a metaphor for the necessary preliminary revival of devotional attention. In the process of investigation – mediated, of course, by the archbishop’s vicar-general – the consciousness and deliberation with which the witnesses distinguished between the image in its natural state and the supernatural process of transformation, which the priest explicitly attributed to the Virgin, are testimony to a sense of the animating power of the presence in the image. The first miracle in fact ensured the vital role of the large congregation to act not merely as witnesses to but as animators of the second. For the priest it was important to emphasize that everything came from the Virgin: no human artifice had tricked the beholders. Yet the viewers of the wonder – who proclaimed the miracle and who would come to pray to the Virgin in her image for help in their troubles – were themselves its agents in a different sense. Fresh attention to the neglected image found it imbued with greater attractions than had been thought – and this startled realization triggered the conviction that there was life within. As each wit ness excitedly told his neighbour, an individual’s first, fleeting impression became crystallized as a communally accepted reality.18 Most commonly, it is the Virgin Mary’s ability to care for her devotees as a physical mother and friend that is guaranteed by such accounts. A quintessential narrative from Cori, in Lazio, tells how in May 1521 the threeyear-old Oliva, lost on a hillside, met the Virgin Mary, who cared for her for a week. Whenever Oliva was hungry or thirsty, the Madonna put her finger in the girl’s mouth, and she felt restored. The old image which the little girl was said to have found at this time continues to be venerated as the Madonna del Soccorso.19 But the human characteristics of these Madonnas are not always healthy; they can be pathological. Earlier in the same year as the reported self-restoration of the Madonna dei Miracoli of Cicagna, at Ortonovo near La Spezia, a group of women members of a penitential confraternity, praying before an outdoor fresco of the Crucifixion near the cemetery, observed that the figure of the grieving Virgin Mary at the foot of the Cross was weeping tears of blood, red and moist to the touch.20 This, too, has proved a recurrent manifestation of life in the image: at the time of this event, a spate of images of the Virgin Addolorata were said to have bled; during the twentieth century there was a further proliferation of incidences of the phenomenon.21 Each occurrence finds meaning within 166

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its particular historical moment – that of Ortonovo included local anxiety about the spread of Protestantism – but in the present context the significant general point is the evidence of humanity, no less than divinity, in the image. Similar manifestations include the widespread story of the painted Madonna that bled when struck with a stone thrown by a disappointed gambler: the most celebrated case in point is the sanctuary of the Madonna dell’Arco at Naples, which was launched with a version of this narrative in 1450.22 Clerical writers such as Paleotti, defending the veneration of images in his treatise of 1582, would cite cases in which they bled as proof of their sanctity; but to the lay observer they seem to demonstrate, no less, the presence of a common human100 Graffiti addressed to the Madonnetta of Acquasanta (see illus. 71), on the tempietto of the ity.23 The perception of the Virgin Mary as statue, 2008. sharing the humanity of her petitioners, even while she enjoys high status in Heaven, has fostered a vernacular directness in human dealings with her images. This is manifested in respect for their feelings.When the monumental statue of the Virgin on the Porta della Lanterna of Genoa had to be taken down in 1878, it was necessary to pass a rope around the Madonna’s neck: no Genoese workman would agree to do this, and the job had to be given to someone from outside the city.24 No one feels inhibited about addressing requests and even challenges to Mary in her image (illus. 100). Girls from the villages around Cascia, near Spoleto, used to warn the miraculous fresco of the Madonna delle Grazie: Madonna of the Graces, Who stand so high up there, Find me a husband, Or I’ll not come any more.25

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Radiation of the image Radiating outwards from the shrine, the image impresses itself through its own multiples into the fabric of the city, weaves itself into the daily lives of the inhabitants. Because, as we have seen in chapter One, it is understood to be in the nature of the Virgin Mary to be omnipresent, it is equally natural for her power to be potentially present in multiple forms and places, ready to be catalysed into action by a particular concatenation of an image with its surrounding circumstances. This formulation makes better sense of the historical evidence, and of the theological ideas prevailing in this cultural tradition, than does the hypothesis, advanced by the anthropologist Alfred Gell, of ‘distributed personhood’.26 Gell’s proposition rested on an indexical link between an image and its this-worldly source, whether this link be encapsulated in a physical chain of bodily contact or, less tangibly, in the mind of the artist. The dynamic of the miraculous image is quite different. While it is true that in the case of the engraved copy of a venerated picture, the print medium embeds an indexical connection between the paper immaginetta and its model, we must also recognize that it is not by this token that the owner understands the printed copy to be a potential vehicle of the Madonna’s power. The actualization of the supernatural presence depends crucially upon circumstance, and upon the attitude, in the moment, of its beholder. The Madonna, therefore, is not ‘distributed’; she is everywhere. In the narrow alleys of the historic centre of Genoa, innumerable frescoed Madonnas seem to hold the crumbling medieval buildings together.27 Most are the outdoor reproductions of venerated images in one or another of the city’s churches (illus. 101 and see illus. 41). In the seventeenth century the pious and aristocratic Virginia Bracelli Centurione organized conservators of these Madonnas throughout the city. The fact that these conservators were all blind – they passed through the streets accompanied by children playing musical instruments, to light oil lamps and decorate statues with flowers – underlined the common perception that the images guaranteed the Virgin Mary’s benevolent presence, whether or not they were visible to the mortal eye.28 At any time, one or another of these representations might realize its potential to work miracles in its own right. In 1828, a copy of Nostra Signora del Soccorso, venerated in the cathedral of Genoa, was painted for a private layman on the exterior of his house at Pallareto, on the outskirts of the city. 168

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101 Street shrine of the Madonna del Soccorso of the cathedral of Genoa. Via dei Giustiniani, Genoa.

The new image soon became the focus of devotion, with ex-votos testifying to popular belief in its efficacy. A chapel was subsequently erected around the image.29 On the upper slopes of Monte Fasce at Apparizione, a village which takes its name from a Marian vision said to have been experienced in the early fourteenth century by a girl who found on the spot a carving of the Virgin and Child (illus. 102), it was recorded in the early twentieth century that the owners of every house decorated their exterior walls with copies of the venerated image, either in two or three dimensions.30 In the same village a few years earlier, an inhabitant attributed his survival of a lightning bolt, which entered and largely destroyed his house, to the presence of a domestic copy of the miraculous Madonna – which also was preserved unscathed.31 This is a world – and for many Italians it is in this respect unchanged today – in which the presence of the supernatural, medi ated through copies of particular holy images, is a familiar part of daily, family and community life. In the 1990s an indigenous observer of one of these cults, 169

102 The Madonna of Apparizione, c. 1400, painted and gilded wood.

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that of the painted Madonna of Fossa Lupara near Sestri Levante, expressed the view that History and tradition are distinct from nostalgia or blind attachment to the past, or simple folklore; they are the colours, sounds and sentiments of people who encounter one another in the routine of the everyday.32

At the mountain shrine of Montallegro, home of the miraculous icon of the Dormition of the Virgin (see illus. 24), Davide Bertolotti in 1834 encountered a middle-aged woman, well-to-do but pale and evidently close to death. She explained that she had come from Chiavari to pray to the Virgin for another six months of life. Asked why she did not go to ask the equally miraculous Madonna dell’Orto of Chiavari, closer to her home, she responded simply: ‘The Madonna of Montallegro has never abandoned me.’ She related the story of how she fell in love at sixteen with one Giorgio, a sailor from Rapallo. While fishing for coral off the coast of Sardinia, he had been taken prisoner by North African pirates, but refusing to despair, she went to the church of Montallegro, where she had first seen and met Giorgio. She believed that a pure love, born under the gaze (sotto l’auspizio) of the Virgin, must have her divine approval. Praying in the empty church, she heard a disembodied voice assuring her that her lover would be restored: ‘Giorgio will return.’ After two long years he was released, by the intervention of the religious order of the Mercedarians. Prior to marrying, they took two silver hearts to Montallegro, where in 1834 they were still displayed beside the miraculous image. In those days, the couple were poor: she made lace, he continued to work as a sailor.With an inheritance, he was able to set up as a tuna fisherman and prospered, so they moved to a new home in Chiavari. But Giorgio died young, leaving the widow with a young daughter. Now this child was due, in six months, to marry, and the mother had come to ask the Madonna that she might survive ‘in order that I may lead my Teresa to the altar’. When he returned to Chiavari the following year, Bertolotti asked about the woman, and heard that she had indeed lived long enough to see her daughter married, and that she had then died.33 Woven through the changing course of a lifetime, the miraculous image becomes a layered and many-faceted presence. 171

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The image as companion From the earliest recorded cases, image cults have generated portable versions of the holy icon which may be worn on the person or kept in the home or workspace of the devotee.The replica may be carried discreetly or displayed openly, as a badge of shared identity. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, shopkeepers in the area of the Ponte Spinola in the port of Genoa used to gather on the feast of the Assumption before an image of the Virgin painted on a wall of the harbour, in order to say prayers for the souls of deceased companions. Deciding to form a confraternity, they agreed to adopt a blazon of this Madonna, and to celebrate every Assumption day by attending Mass and later singing litanies in front of the image on the quay.34 Both aristocratic and peasant women of Liguria alike used to wear rings of gold or silver impressed with their favoured image: blessed at the sanctuary, the ring was a constant guarantee of the protection of the miracu lous Madonna.35 The wearing of holy medals received a particular impetus in Catholic culture from the confessional strife of the sixteenth century, in which context papal indulgences promoted the habit as a mark of religious allegiance. However, an important precedent existed in the lead badges acquired and worn by pilgrims to late medieval shrines. The medal worn on the person as the sign of a holy image or icon has endured into modern times as a source of protection against dangers of all kinds. The visionary origin of cult objects such as the miraculous Madonna of Montallegro lent particular authority to the production of medallions bearing the image of the icon, which over the past four centuries have been widely worn as talismans.36 Miniature images have also been worn by countless soldiers, like Giuseppe Machiavello of Recco, who in 1819 set out for military service with a copy of the local miraculous Madonna of Megli in his cap. During a manoeuvre, a cannon rolled out of control over the head of the young recruit, and his life was despaired of. But, emerging unscathed, Giuseppe pulled from his kepi the immaginetta, which seemed to all witnesses to have been his salvation.37 The physical presence of the copy was, like the fire insur ance mark on an eighteenth-century London house, the reassuring guarantee of help in a crisis.To the sailor caught in a violent storm, at least until very recent times, no earthly rescue service could offer what the Virgin Mary promised as she gazed out from one or another of her images in sanctuaries perched above the sea, watching each of her followers who sailed with her 172

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picture in his cabin. Identical stories can be related from 1787 and from 1911 of ships’ captains who reported that, after their crews, against all the odds, had survived the sinking of their vessels in the Tyrrhenian sea, the recovery of the wreck revealed an immaginetta of the respectively favoured image – the Madonna of Apparizione in the former case, that of Camogli in the latter – to have been preserved dry and unharmed.38 The technology of large ships in modern times has fostered greater confidence in human science: an article of 1931 observed that fewer sailors were taking images with them on board, yet did so in order to warn that the sea remained as unpredictable as ever, and the Virgin’s protection as vital.39 The ordinary familiarity of the image is a source of its latent energy: in the moment of need, it is there to be activated. In 1949 the priest of Apparizione, while acknowledging the mounting public excitement in anticipation of the annual festival of the local statue, urged his parishioners to admit the Virgin quietly into their homes as a member of the family. He emphasized that the Madonna was not a vague and distant vision in a golden cloud, but ‘a mother perfectly in tune with our needs and difficulties’.40 The local cleric may have been consciously echoing a published address of the previous year by the Genoese archbishop Giuseppe Siri. Presiding over the spectacular progress of a statue of the Madonna della Guardia, which over several months in 1948 visited the entire archdiocese, Siri passed from the physical image carried in public procession to the need to welcome Mary into the intimate realities of social life.41 And indeed, it is an index of just such domestic familiarity with the divine that in many 103 Commemorative engraving Italian homes a tinted engraving of the miraculous Madonna of the Madonna delle Grazie of Sori, framed with embroidered takes its place among the family photographs on the side roses c. 1920 as a wedding present board (illus. 103).The universal matriarch has become one’s for the grandmother of the own mother. Maria Ester Guglielmazzi, a young seamstress present owner. 173

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living in the parish of Santa Maria di Castello in Genoa in the 1890s, revealed when visited for a chronic illness that she had surrounded herself with pictures of the saints most important to her, and in particular of the newly miraculous image of the Madonna of Pompei. Resisting medical attention for what was evidently a gynaecological condition, Ester reported a vision in which she saw St Catherine of Siena and St Dominic flanking the throne of Mary – the precise iconography of the painting venerated at Pompei. Her remarkable cure was attributed by Ester to the Madonna of Pompei, who had become so familiar a figure in her life.42 Such easy familiarity with the Madonna of the household or the neighbourhood naturally underlay and influenced the form of visions in other cases, in recent centuries no less than in antiquity or the Middle Ages.43

The bodily impress of the image As these stories indicate, the miraculous image has been largely experienced not through an objective gaze at a particular picture or statue, but rather as a habitual and semi-conscious awareness of a presence in the visual field, itself reinforced not only by reproductions of the image itself but by associated experiences and sensations. An anthropological perspective is called for that can acknowledge the function of the image as a mediator of feelings and memories, which themselves become embedded in the living medium of the human body of the observer.44 The physiognomic aspects of sight are strongly in evidence in the history of image cults, which manifest multiple connections between diverse sensory and intellectual responses.The physical impact of visual stimuli was a prominent element in late medieval stories of Christian piety and images. A pre-modern assumption of the relative weakness and impressionability of the female body gave rise to numerous tales of medi eval nuns and laywomen who, after periods of prayer and visionary experience, were found to have holy images impressed on their bodies.45 A similar instance is that of the twelve-year-old Angiola Schiaffino of Camogli who, following her vision in the wood beside the painted Madonna del Boschetto in 1518, was said to have found imprinted on her hand, in red, the letter ‘M’.46 Such narratives point not only to culturally specific notions of gender but also to a larger history of physical engagement with miraculous images. In evident emulation of such experiences, it became common practice for the devotee of a particular miraculous Madonna to have the image 174

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engraved into his or her body in the form of a tattoo. Favoured sites were the forearm, the pulse of the wrist and the palm of the hand: places where the impressed Madonna could be readily seen and kissed. Such miraculous body ornament (often applied by tattoo artists who set up their stalls near the shrines, but sometimes also by artisans with suitable tools, especially barbers and carpenters) was a widespread phenomenon, in Liguria as elsewhere, before its condemnation by churchmen in the late nineteenth century as superstitious, and it has not entirely died out.47 Stories about miraculous images repeatedly demonstrate a visceral, physical exchange between the beholder and the image: characteristics not confined to statues and pictures deemed miraculous, but evident to a heightened degree in this context.This is not to say that the response in this context is ‘irrational’; but rather that the presumed distinction between reason and bodily sensation is false. The Cartesian dream of the detached observer, which for over three centuries has served the claims of rationalism, is incompatible with much of the evidence relating to image cults, in which the devotee’s engagement with the venerated object is no less sensory than it is mental.This is still, in the West, an uncomfortable thought.Walter Benjamin, noting modern man’s general horror of touching things, insisted: ‘He may not deny his bestial relationship with animals, the invocation of which revolts him: he must make himself its master.’48 Reason continues to stand between us and our environment; yet if we are to understand the behaviour of devotees in relation to images they hold to be supernatural, we need to recognize the possibility of a communion with the sacred object which is as much physical as it is a question of imagination or faith. Conversely, the evidence of such cults draws our attention to the larger reality of the interconnectedness of mind and body.

The cloak of power While other rites were the preserve of male devotees, the dressing and orna mentation of the Madonna are tasks which have always fallen to women.49 Already in the later Middle Ages, the practice of dressing and undressing Jesus and Mary dolls, as a form of empathetic piety, had developed among groups both of nuns and laywomen.50 Equally redolent of a corporeal sense of the Virgin’s presence in her image was the practice, at times of childbirth or sickness, of putting on a dress which had been worn by a venerated statue. 175

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At Venice in 1600, a popolana, Zanetta Polatti, gave to the Virgin of the Rosary in the church of San Domenico di Castello a fine silk dress, on the condition that ‘two or three times a year’ she might borrow it again so that she might wear what, having been in contact with the miraculous image, would evidently be a uniquely protective garment.51 The habit of wearing, especially at the point of death, a robe formerly worn by a cult statue was still recorded in the twentieth century, in relation to the Spanish image of Nuestra Señora del Pilar.52 The degree of control over the sacred which was embodied in these various rituals provoked male clerical disparagement of feminine sensibilities. It could also cut across lines of gender authority in the household, and arouse husbands’ anxieties about their wives’ independence of action. At a time of cholera in 1836, when women were giving rings and handkerchiefs to a venerated image near Genoa, a group of men of the fabbriceria (two of these churchwardens signed with a cross) wrote to complain to the priest that their wives had given offerings without their permission and, further, that they had given licence to the priest to sell them in order to have necklaces to the same value specially made for the Madonna and Child.53 Mistrust of women’s privileged access to holy images lies behind occasional criticism of the ‘scandal’ of female involvement in the promotion and the dramatic staging of particular cults. After the popular cult of the Madonna dell’Orto of Chiavari had been launched in 1609–10 by the midwife Donna Tuffa – a long-time devotee of the image and wearer of blue in the Virgin’s honour – together with her two female companions, there was evidently some muttering about the fantasies of ‘little women’. But to counter such aspersions, the story was told of the local nobleman Orazio Della Torre. He had begun by doubting the veracity of the women’s stories and still more the value of fall ing before the image, as many simple people were doing. But on visiting the site, he too found himself pulled to the ground and was moved to a dramatic repentance. Dressing himself in sackcloth, he went through the streets of Chiavari flagellating himself in penance.54 All of these narratives demonstrate not that the image cults were controlled by any particular group or sex, but that all social categories perceived and aspired to participate in their power. One of the ways in which the miraculous statue of the Virgin Mary at Sestri Ponente to the west of Genoa, known as Virgo Potens, could in the past reach those unable to come to the shrine was by means of a cloak which belonged to the image and which was regularly sent to the homes 176

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of women in childbirth and to the sick.The iconography of the image, the Madonna of Charity, gave prominence to the Virgin’s robe which was seen to embrace those who sought her help. Like a contact relic, the removable cloak of Virgo Potens, charged by the touch of the statue itself, was seen to convey its healing virtue to anyone enfolded in it. In March 1817 Angela Cambiaso, with a pain in her stomach which doctors could not cure, was given the Eucharist and covered with the mantle of the Madonna. At the same time an image of the statue on paper was applied to the affected part of her body. Falling asleep, the patient experienced a vision of the Virgin in which she requested Angela’s wedding ring. Having gained her husband’s approval, she recovered, and brought a silver ring engraved with the name of Mary to the sanctuary as an ex-voto.55 A few years after this, in the 1820s in Basilicata in the south of Italy, a young woman of a poor family who began to behave crazily was treated by her relatives with the forcible application of a small piece cut from the dress worn by the statue of the Madonna della Bruna in the city of Matera. Returning to her senses, the woman experienced a vision in which – although she had never yet seen the image – the Madonna appeared to her in the rich adornments which the statue wore for festivals.The Virgin of the vision gave elaborate instructions about how the woman should go towards Matera, take off her shoes where white butterflies flew out from two trees, walk to a church to make her confession, then proceed to the shrine of the miraculous image. At this point the woman discovered that she was pregnant. The child was duly christened Maria Bruna.56 The curative power attributed to the clothes of a venerated image is still attested to, for example at the shrine of the Madonna di Caravaggio at Fanzolo near Treviso (a derivative of the cult at Caravaggio itself), where the sick arriving for the festa on 24 May hope for a cure after having touched the Virgin’s cloak three times.57

The edible image When not wrapping themselves in the strength of the holy image by proxy, votaries have at all times been found to want to touch it, or even to ingest it. This became the standard means of engagement with the Madonna della Colonna, which began to work miracles at Savona in 1601 (illus. 104). The moment was highly significant, for it marked a new phase in Genoese domination of the city. The town’s medieval cathedral had already been 177

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104 The Madonna della Colonna, Savona, c. 1400, fresco.

demolished in 1542 in order to construct an enormous fortress, the Priamàr, from which officials of the Republic could supervise the subject population. Now the Franciscan convent was also being pulled down, in order to make way for the construction of a new cathedral. Resentment among the Savonesi was bitter. An already venerated fresco of the Virgin and Child, dating from about 1400 and situated on a column of the Mendicant church, became the focus of intensified popular interest, with talk of new miracles. People queued to kiss the image, and began to scrape at the stone in order to take away this material evidently perceived as impregnated with the virtue of the picture. Small quantities of the scrapings would be applied to infected parts of the body to induce a cure. The most spectacular miracle occurred when workmen were instructed that, to enable the destruction of the column, they should detach the fresco: at this point the image apparently obliged by removing itself. Its translation (together with a part of its column) to a nearby wall saved it from oblivion, to survive as a support for morale among the many who hated Genoese rule – and, ironically, as an apparent blessing on the new cathedral project.58 Just as devotees of the Madonna della Colonna were observed, as they kissed the stonework beneath the fresco, to intensify their engagement by 178

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105 Outdoor shrine in Umbria, the original frescoed image scraped for medicinal use. Early 20th-century photograph. 106 Bags containing scrapings from a roadside image of the Virgin Mary, used for healing and subsequently re-donated to the shrine. Early 20th-century photograph.

licking the material, so at the sanctuary of Coronata, above the Val Polcevera immediately to the west of Genoa, a chestnut tree in which the venerable statue was said to have lodged itself when it first appeared from the sea was regularly scraped to yield a powder to which healing powers were attributed. Mixed with water, it was reported to have saved the lives of patients despaired of by doctors.59 In Umbria in the early twentieth century it was still common practice in the countryside, when someone fell ill, for a woman of the household to go to the shrine of the Madonna at the nearest crossroads to take some of the plaster from the frescoed image. The scrapings would be hung in a bag around the neck of the patient and, in the event of a recovery, the bag would be hung from the image, together with others of the same provenance (illus. 105, 106).60 Analogies to this proximate magic of the statue can be found at many image shrines. In other instances, flowers which had been placed before the image were believed potent remedies, and wrapped with bandages on sick children; or earth taken from the ground touched by the Virgin’s feet during a peasant’s vision, spread at the corners 179

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of fields, was said to protect crops against storms.61 Numerous examples have been associated with springs, whose mineral properties have contributed to the health-giving reputation of the shrines, as visitors have combined the physical experiences of communing visually with the image and drinking, or bathing in, the water (illus. 107, 108). At Deruta near Perugia, a shrine on the upper reaches of the river Tiber, a spring of water and an oak tree have since the 1650s presided over a major cult of an image: a fragment of a ceramic cup, bearing the image of the Virgin and Child, which a passing tradesman found on the road and wedged between two branches of the tree. Over the years, the branches have enclosed the picture, and this composite image of divinity and nature has been framed by a little chapel, in which the humble painting in its living oak tree are the focus of attention behind the altar. From the commencement of the cult, the bark and leaves of the tree, and the earth from around its roots, have been considered

107 Pilgrim’s flask for the miraculous spring water of the shrine of the Madonna della Misericordia, Savona, 1775, painted ceramic.

108 Reverse of pilgrim’s flask with inscription: ‘Water of Our Lady of Mercy of Savona 1775’.

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therapeutic, being taken away for medical use.62 Another case in point is the sanctuary of the little statue of the Madonna at Acquasanta, in a clearing of the mountain forest high above the harbour of Voltri to the west of Genoa. The devotion to this statue was associated with a sulphurous spring by the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when a surge in the cult provided funds for the image to be framed in a new tempietto, constructed at the juncture of two streams and on the site of the health-giving fountain (see illus. 71). Since at least this period and still today, pilgrims have taken a cup of the water to drink in the presence of the statue.63 An emphatically physical encounter with the image was sought equally in Chiavari, at the inception of the cult of the Madonna of the Garden. Before its forced enclosure within a basilica, the image received the honours of its votaries in the open air (see illus. 28).Among the rites recorded by eyewitnesses at the site in 1610 was the making of crowns and medals which, having been held up to touch the fresco, were believed to be potent against sickness.64 Others, meanwhile, pressed for an even more direct contact with the Virgin. A distinguished aristocratic lady of Chiavari, Faustina della Torre, who since the trauma of her sister’s murder five years before suffered from growths on both her hands and face, visited the image over the course of a week and finally, at a moment when the crowd had abated, reached up to touch the fresco and the crowns which had been placed on the figures of the Virgin and Child, and then touched her own infected skin. The result was said to have been a complete cure.65 In other cases, thaumaturgic contact with the holy image could lead to its complete erosion.66 The consumption of the image underlines once again the relative unimportance of the element of representation in this context.The communion of the body with the image amounted to a personal sacrament which was understood to transfigure the devout person, making him or her into a differ ent being, proofed against the material or political dangers of the world.The practice has an ancient history, and is documented in the early centuries of Christianity in relation to the cult of the saints. Saint Symeon Stylites, a Syrian ascetic of the fifth century, assured his followers that tokens impressed with his image, made from the ‘holy dust’ of the soil around the column on top of which he lived, could be dissolved in water and drunk as a cure for any disease.67 The more recent instances discussed here are different, however, in so far as the focus of prayer and the source of the medicine in these cases has been not a living holy man, but a painted or sculpted image. 181

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The body yields to the image The early pilgrims to the Madonna of the Garden in Chiavari manifested in addition a tendency, recorded also at other image sanctuaries, to fall helplessly to the ground when they came ‘into the sight of the Madonna’. Deponents at the inquest into the events of 1610 spoke about having ‘fallen’, cascati, as though this were expected of them. A few years before, at the other end of Liguria, at the site of another outdoor miraculous image at Vico di Mondovì, where a painted Madonna on a roadside pillar began performing wonders in 1595, there was recorded a similar pattern of falling in the presence of the picture. A boy who in the morning had ‘fallen and sweated’ before the little chapel erected around the pillar ‘returned in the evening to fall in the same way, with sweating’. Sebastiano Caramello reported that, after experiencing multiple tremors in front of the image, he had fallen ‘not once but three times’.68 Bishop Castruccio of Mondovì, who from the start had been anxious about the eccentricity of these activities and at first attempted to suppress the cult altogether, wrote to the prefect of the Congregazione dei Riti in Rome: The cured, for the most part, as they obtain their grace, have been and are assailed by diverse accidents, fainting, tiredness and great tremors in their hands and in their whole bodies, falling to the ground with pains in their twisted limbs and an itching which they say is like crawling ants. And then, revived, they have experienced, with the return of their health, a lightness of spirit . . .69

The prefect, Cardinal Giulio Santoro, was indeed perturbed by this account, and in reply warned the bishop to study the physical movements of the miracolati carefully, in case their impulse to fall on the ground should be an operation of the Devil.70 In despite of such clerical concerns, the culture of the shrine fostered among the laity a physical response to the image which was both studied and spontaneous.The form of the pilgrimage, the attitude to adopt in the presence of the image and the language used to describe experience: all rapidly acquired a certain degree of formality.71 Norms of behaviour established themselves and were monitored by the lay guardians of the shrine, with the result that the narratives of subjects acquired a measure of standardization. Yet the conventions of response which had been invented for this encounter with the supernatural served to enable 182

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the individual to step outside the frame of his or her quotidian existence. Having chosen to enter the zone of the cult, prejudices and inhibitions were lowered, and he or she was potentially open to a new order of experience. A few would return from this journey transfigured in both mind and body.72 A woman unable to walk properly, who had come on mule-back with a confraternity from her town of Triora to Vico di Mondovì in the summer of 1595, spent a night in the chapel of the Madonna. According to her sister, her lameness was the result of having been bewitched: Triora, in the hills of western Liguria, is a place long associated with witchcraft, and early modern cosmological understanding sought the powerful magic of the holy image as a counter to this. In the morning (it was the feast day of the Virgin’s Assumption), the woman fell as though dead; she then got up and left the chapel, her limp departed, to perform (following a now established pattern) two circuits of the building, watched by a crowd of witnesses, before making her statement.73 A pattern in the behaviour of these pilgrims to Mondovì, as also among those to Chiavari and other shrines, suggests that petitioners knew what was expected of them. At the same time, once surrendered to the heightened atmosphere of the site and the moment of encounter, it is equally evident that many fully lost control of their bodies, to find themselves changed by the experience. Pellegro Robbio, who recorded the early days of the cult of the Madonna dell’Orto, observed the behaviour of her devotees closely. He noted that some fell ‘to cure themselves of their doubts’, while others collapsed as their bodies were convulsed. He wrote: The body of the supplicant was overpowered by a cold force which, seizing hold of his limbs, froze him utterly, so that the blood naturally moved away from the external parts and the animal spirits slept, leaving the bloodless person motionless, with no feeling from head to foot; and then falling to Earth, he lay stretched out as though dead for a good space of time.74

The same author recorded the experience of the sceptic, the local aristocrat Orazio della Torre, who had doubted the value of falling in front of the image, thinking it vulgar, but then found that he was moved to do this himself.75 The culture and atmosphere of the moment fostered new habits in the presence of certain images that, transcending social convention and prejudice, came to be experienced by widely diverse visitors as natural. 183

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Image miracles and magic The power perceived to lie in these images is always ambivalent. If the Madonna in her picture can heal and protect, she is also dangerous. In this respect, once again, she carries into the modern world a pre-Christian quality.76 The potent image broods ominously over its community. Carlo Levi, observing the festival of the Madonna di Viggiano in the 1930s, remarked:‘For the peasants, the black Madonna is neither good nor bad: she is much more than this. She burns the crops and lets them die, yet she also nourishes and protects. One must adore her.’77 Countless stories exemplify the threat contained in the image: a danger which makes clear the cult’s participation in a larger realm of magic. When two youths of Camogli had blasphemously dared to say that they wished they would die when the first Mass was celebrated in the new chapel of the Madonna del Boschetto above the harbour, the story ran that both lost their lives at this very moment, one in Camogli and the other out at sea,‘in the sight of the church’.78 In the Sardinian village of Gúspini, it was related in the early twentieth century how the local statue of the Madonna dell’Assunta, popularly held to be the sleeping figure of the Virgin herself in flesh and blood, had killed a sceptic who had rashly pricked it with a pin to demonstrate that it was merely made of wood.79 Belief in the enormous potential of the image has at all times been complemented by an instrumental tendency on the part of the devotee.The founders of the Christian Church had attempted to differentiate between demonic magic and the virtuous potency of the saints: but perhaps the nicety of this distinction was always likely to be lost on the majority, and in any event the history of what theologians would regularly denounce as ‘superstitions’ demonstrates the strong survival of popular magic throughout the Middle Ages and well into the modern era.80 Many of the narratives recorded throughout this book evince a conviction on the part of participants of the immediate efficacy of the sight, touch or taste of a particular image. The instrumental attitude associated with the practice of magic is sometimes demonstrated by the ritual humiliation of an image perceived to have let the petitioner down.81 The doctor who in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales carried ‘images for his patients’, to be hung on the body of the sufferer when the planets were in the desired configuration, lent (even in the ironic perspective of the poet) at least a semblance of professional respectability to the instrumental use of holy pictures as healing agents.82 But countless stories show lay men and women 184

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appropriating for themselves the perceived potency of the image. Some were popular sages, such as the wise women whom Dante referred to as ‘doing evil with herbs and with images’.83 The majority, however, were ordinary people whose most direct and reliable access to protection, at any time, appeared to lie in an image, whether this were the wax model of a personal enemy, a cult statue in the church, or a personally treasured medallion or engraving.The late fifteenth-century owner of a metalcut engraving of St Jerome and his lion added a handwritten note at the top of the sheet to record that ‘The picture is so powerful that when it appears the demon will fear and tremble.’84 This was not the copy of a wonder-working prototype, but a representation of the standard iconography of St Jerome. However, the saint’s then-familiar power to exorcize demons made the owner of this image confident that its production would stave off evil in whatever form. Indeed, the perceived power of images to control demons – although the language used to describe these has changed over time – has had a longue durée.

‘Get out in the name of the Madonna!’ Because of the legitimation required of any established cult, extant historical sources tend in general to give a restricted and bowdlerized account of the practices of devotion.The result is not only an impoverished impression of the true variety of religious behaviour, but also the concealment of the extensive common ground between Catholic practice and a wider context of traditional medicine and folk magic. On occasion, where the sources happen to lift the veil, the cults of miraculous images betray the full extent of this overlap with a pagan world of enchantment and demons. The case of the Madonna dell’Orto of Chiavari is a very rare instance in which a glimpse is afforded of the process by which lay advocates of the image selected supporting material for their case which they considered would be most likely to assuage the concerns and win the support of clerical authority. The fresco in the garden, below the city wall towards the sea, lay in a somewhat disreputable district, and it was characteristic of its social environment that the first reported wonders of the new cult concerned very humble individuals. In December 1609 a local midwife who frequented the garden image as she went about her business, concerned for the health of her son, experienced a vision of Mary, after which she heard that her son was well. On 2 July (the feast of the Visitation of the Virgin) 1610, a boy who 185

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sold eggs also saw the Virgin, above the site of the fresco, and was cured of a limp.85 The scenes which presented themselves to the archbishop’s vicar on his arrival a few days later were, in his view, far from edifying (see illus. 28): crowds of men and women singing litanies and even, with the help of priests, holding outdoor services in front of the niche with its image; companies of battuti, or flagellant fraternities, whipping themselves in penitence; lights and processions by night; the curing of pilgrims with oil from the lamps in front of the Madonna; and the casting out of demons. The last of these was perhaps the most troubling to the official of the Tridentine Church, who promptly announced that, starting on 15 July, depositions would be taken from all witnesses of the alleged wonders of this old fresco in its indecorous and morally dubious setting.The detailed transcript of those statements survives,86 and can be compared to some informal notes compiled at the same period by the cult’s promoters. One set of these is a list of cures reportedly worked by the Madonna, catalogued by Pellegro Robbio, the local man of letters who had been chosen (as he stated in his own manuscript history) to observe and record the events at the outdoor shrine.87 The list runs to some 30 briefly noted wonders; but of these, twenty are marked in the margin with a cross. The explanation of this is given on another of these informal papers, which is headed: ‘Miracles and graces. These seven are those approved by Monsignor Bishop. Do not have any of the others investigated.’88 Evidently an informal approach had been made to the archbishop to establish what evidence should be presented to the inquiry, and what, by implication, held back. The few wonders which did, indeed, find favour and eventual publication in official histories of the Madonna dell’Orto were standard and relatively unremarkable cures: of poor eyesight, lameness and difficult childbirth. By contrast, the early graces attributed to the image, but marked on the list with a cross and not submitted for formal examination at the vicarial inquest, included a number of pilgrims alleged to have been exorcized of malignant spirits by the fresco. Giovinetta Bossia, from a poor part of Genoa (the Piazza di Santa Brigida), was ‘freed from spirits after thirty-nine years on seeing the most holy Madonna’. One Susanna was said to have arrived from Rovereto with ‘spirits’ inside her which ‘revealed themselves in the presence of the most holy Virgin’; a young man of Rupinaro, whom many had denied to be possessed at all, likewise found that such spirits ‘disclosed themselves at the sight of the Madonna’; and Marco Gianone of Varese Ligure, immediately upon entering the garden, 186

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began to utter great shouts and blasphemies, which intensified as he came into ‘the presence of the Virgin’s image’, at which point the voice – evidently that of a demonic spirit – was heard to say that ‘it was burning, and could not bear to stay in the Madonna’s presence’.89 These scenes could be violent, and called for the involvement of friends and bystanders (but not, in most cases, ordained clerics, whose exclusive claim to be able and entitled to cast out demons was repeatedly ignored) to manage the exorcism. A painted ex-voto of around 1700 at the sanctuary of the Madonna delle Grazie at Megli shows a woman on the ground, gesturing wildly as a layman supports her from behind so that her face is turned towards the miraculous painting; a number of demons are shown escaping from the woman’s mouth (illus. 109). Another of the same period, at the shrine of the Madonna Consolata in Turin, records in the inscription that the woman concerned, the wife of a merchant of Savona, had been ‘for nine years possessed by the evil spirit’. It is stated that conventional exorcism had been attempted repeatedly but in vain, before she dedi cated herself to the Consolata (in the ex-voto she is shown wearing the blue robe which was conventional for those who vowed themselves in 109 Ex-voto, c. 1700, showing exorcism of a woman before the image of the Madonna delle Grazie of Megli. this way), with happier results.90 It is perhaps tempting for the historian to regard these textual and visual testimonies as in some sense metaphorical, as though their accounts of liberation from demons were ‘a manner of speaking’ about events which in reality were less ‘abnormal’. But the sources do not allow us to create such a comfortable distance between the imagery of exorcism and its experience. An intense, violent and on occasion traumatic engagement of the whole body characterized scenes of healing before miraculous images throughout early modern Italy. At the sanctuary of the image of the Madonna dell’Arco in Naples, exorcisms have continued into modern times to be preceded by public scenes of frenzied self-flagellation.91 In the past it was a widespread and common experience at an image shrine to see the patient consumed by 187

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paroxysms and to shout obscenities, as did Francesca Bozana when in the summer of 1672 she was tricked into coming against her will to the shrine of the little Madonna of Acquasanta in the woods above Voltri, near Genoa. ‘On the way she uttered a thousand blasphemies and at the sight of the church she began to scream like a dog.’92 Often the exclamations of the suffering person were understood to be a demonic voice. Benedetta Oliva of Voltri was at the same period brought to Acquasanta, where on coming in sight of the chapel, she began to wave her arms and shout. From her mouth were then heard to come the words: ‘O Mary! You are the very one who wants me to leave this body! I will go – I can’t go – I must go! Alas, poor me! Where can I go to . . . ?’93 At the climax, the patient commonly vomited some alien object such as an iron nail. Bystanders would understand by this that the malignant spirit had departed.Vincenzo Salomone, who for years had been eaten up by demons which made him swift to anger and prone to beat his wife, was also brought to Acquasanta in 1672. There, having fallen two or three times to the ground before finally collapsing, he vomited up a nail wrapped in hair.94 Nails are a common feature of such accounts.95 This aspect of exorcism before images may point to related magical practices in which individuals had previously attempted to heal or protect themselves by swallowing pieces of iron and other fetish objects. The healing Madonna is part of a larger system of supernatural powers. ‘Possession by spirits’ was a generic description used, before the advent of more comprehensive medical science, to refer to a variety of physical and mental illnesses. Exorcism, meanwhile, has persisted since the Middle Ages as a rite of the Catholic Church. Officially understood to be performable solely by those in religious orders, exorcism has, in practice, been carried out by others, including laywomen, often with the invocation of an image.96 Lay appropriation of the role may, paradoxically, have been encouraged in the period following the Council of Trent by ecclesiastical example: in the fullest contemporary account of exorcism, published by Girolamo Menghi at the period of the reform of the Roman liturgy in 1578, the priest was directed to perform the rite ‘before either an altar or an image’: the relics of the saints, preserved within altars, were useful, but away from a church, an image could be more convenient. He was also advised to burn an image of the demon inhabiting the possessed person.97 Ecclesiastical guidance in modern times has continued to recommend the use of images of the saints (santini), and has underlined in addition the value of supplementary sensory stimuli, including 188

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praying aloud, singing and the ringing of bells.98 The accounts of those said to have been cured by images often specify that at the moment of healing, they perceived the image itself to be the living body of the figure depicted; an example is recorded in the epigraph to this chapter. Historical accounts from image shrines at diverse periods underline the multisensory physical engagement of the sick person with the image and its surroundings. The spiritati, or possessed, were the extreme case on the spectrum of response to such images; but they are symptomatic of a more inclusive truth, which is that the encounter has tended always to be visceral, and to have physical no less than mental consequences. In the case of those considered possessed, it is most obvious that the meeting with the image could, at least on occasion, precipitate a thaumaturgic reaction, releasing pathological tensions. But in every instance – and at all historical periods – the sentient contact with the image (whether or not the visual encounter is supplemented by additional sensory contact, of touch or taste) draws the viewer out of himself or herself. Clerical authorities and spiritual guides have always pretended that it is possible and desirable to confine the exchange with a holy image to a cool, detached contemplation. Such transcendent vision is extremely hard or – as Merleau-Ponty would say – impos sible to achieve; and in any case, this is not at all the attitude adopted by the majority of those who have turned for assistance to a miraculous image.

Conclusion: Epiphanic encounters In the light of the evidence reviewed in this chapter, it is clear that the efficacy of the encounter with the image has more to do with the desires and behaviour of the viewer than with the formal appearance of the object in question. But we need to keep both participants in the interaction in view: the process cannot be reduced to the viewer’s response any more than it can to the intrinsic qualities of the image.99 The responses documented in the preceding pages show how readily the observer in such instances shuttles back and forth between the simultaneous sense of the object as a material image and of the represented divinity as a living presence. ‘The image’, however, turns out in the case of the cult object not to be a single, fixed entity, but to be experienced by devotees in multiple visual forms, whose formal resemblance to their prototype is unstable.The following chapter turns to a discussion of the miraculous image in its myriad reproductions. 189

110 Immaginetta of the miraculous image of Jesus the Nazarene in the church of Santa Maria in Monticelli, Rome, 1898.

111 Immaginetta of Jesus the Nazarene, reverse, bearing inscription recording the owners’ witness of a miracle of the image.

five

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aturday 7 may 1898 – in Santa Maria in Monticelli, Rome: the eyes of ‘Cristo Santo’, the image of Jesus the Nazarene, were seen to move from 3 to 3.25 p.m. by six people: Pietro, Elvira, Lina, Iside, Arturo Guida and Elena Guida. Handwritten in ink on the reverse of a copy on a prayer card of the ‘Cristo Santo’ (illus. 110, 111).1

S

The social image is never alone The labile nature of the cult image is manifested in its ability to reproduce itself. However firmly a reputedly wonder-working picture is tied down to an altar under the supervision of clerical guardians, the thaumaturgic strength of the object persistently manifests itself in derivative versions, to become available once more to the uncontrolled devotions of the laity. The owner of a copy image tends irrepressibly to invest the same confidence in this version as in the prototype. This inclination is ancient. The quantity and distribution of small copies in bronze and terracotta of the cult statue of Diana at Ephesus, from the first to the third century ad, are a strong indication that talismanic powers were invested in these modest reproductions.2 The miracles of the fifth-century Christian holy man Symeon Stylites record the saint’s promise: ‘when you look at the imprint of our image, it is us that you will see.’3 This confidence in the power of the reproduction is enormously liberating for the community of the cult. Art history has tended to consider the copy in terms of an objective dependence upon and correspondence to a prototype.The prominent role of copies in the cult of miraculous images, however, draws attention to a subjective dimension. It has rightly been emphasized, as a general truth, that 191

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artistic replication cannot be understood without an awareness of its context, and a similar point has recently been made regarding the copying of artworks in antiquity.4 The power of the copy of a miraculous image is derived not only from a measure of artefactual resemblance to its model, but also from the conventions and expectations of the social situation in which it is located. Both the subjective engagement of the observer which was explored in chapter Four, and the larger historical context which was emphasized in chapter Two, play significant roles in the recognition and activation of the copy. The unstable relationship between prototype and copy in an image cult throws into question the very idea of a whole and autonomous work of art. In the context of the cult, at least, the ideal of a unique work has no purchase.Without mediation, a cult image would have no social existence; and mediation, as we have already seen in previous chapters, takes a diversity of forms. The story, the procession, the vision, the memory – all of these can function as instantiations or, as we suggest below, ‘translations’ of, a cult image.The present chapter, however, is focused upon the material copy and upon its implications for our broader understanding of miraculous images. In order to understand the function of the copy in an image cult, it is necessary to recognize that both the image and the copy are unstable and contested categories. Platonic scepticism concerning the truth of images and Jewish anxiety about idolatry are both met in the incarnational culture of Christianity by the premise that man and woman were made in the image of God: ‘ad imaginem et similitudinem nostram’.5 The divine presence in the world legitimizes attention to its forms as signs of that sacred immanence. But on the other hand, the works of merely human artistry cannot be so regarded, for this would be blasphemy. In the context of debates surrounding the legitimacy of Christian images, stories grew up in the early centuries of the new religion that certain true likenesses of Christ, as the human incarnation of divinity, had been left in the form of acheiropoi¯eta, ‘images not made by hand’. Of these, the two most famous were both said to have been made by the impress of Christ’s face on a cloth: one, the Edessa image sent to King Abgar, was later kept in the imperial sanctuary at Constantinople, while the other, the Veronica, was preserved in Rome and, from the thirteenth century, displayed each Easter to the public in St Peter’s church.6 The existence of these images of God ‘not made by human hands’ lent authority to the making of icons, understood as versions or copies of these 192

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miraculous prototypes, and venerated – their defenders insisted – not for their material qualities nor for any element of human artistry, but as sites of divine presence in the world. The origin narratives of other miraculous images differ from those of the early medieval acheiropoi¯eta in that they do not claim the same direct contact with Christ.Yet they resemble the foundational stories of Christian images in their repeated insistence on the role of superhuman powers in their creation. As we saw in chapter Two, a process of supernatural revelation announces the arrival of a miraculous image, even in those instances in which a mortal artist is known to have given form to the constituent materials. In turn, the copy of a miraculous picture or statue – in whatever medium and by whatever technique it may be manufactured – is understood by devotees to participate in the same qualities of divine presence and potency as the prototype image. Here the image cult crucially differs from the perception of Christian images in general: for if the latter derive their ultimate justification from certain supernatural representations of Christ, it is not the case that all icons are understood to be, on this basis, miraculous. But to the Catholic believer, the copy of a miraculous Madonna is potentially miraculous. A distinction is observed by the pilgrim who makes a point to visit the shrine, site of the original manifestation of a particular wonder-working Madonna. Yet that very Madonna is understood to be equally present in every image proclaimed to be her copy, however approximate the formal resemblance may appear, and however modest or mass-produced the object may be. Such an understanding deconstructs the conventional view which holds the distinction between ‘the original’ and ‘a copy’ to be hierarchical, and a bastion of other hierarchies of social and cultural power.The historical dynamic of an image cult shows the impossibility, in every case, of confining the picture in question to a unique instantiation and meaning. A close analogy suggests itself with Jacques Derrida’s analysis of written language, which he showed to be, of its very nature, resistant to a single understanding because of the complexity and constantly changing character of the context in which it is both delivered and received.7 In the case of the cult statue or picture, the potentially infinite iterations of the Madonna’s image refuse to be reduced to a simple message or to a differentiated hierarchy of authority.

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Mass-produced Madonnas The material under discussion in this book poses in acute form a more inclusive question that has been widely debated over the past century and a half: what are the cultural consequences of the mass reproduction of images? The issue certainly pre-dates the nineteenth century, but the recent combination of technical means and social and economic circumstances has unquestionably intensified the impact of mass production. The most vocal participants in this argument have tended to take a negative view. The serially produced object has been slighted as a fake by contrast with the perceived authenticity of the individually crafted item. The sacred status of the unique work of art has been reinforced by virtue of its distinction from the kitsch products of industrial commerce. And the religiosity which favours plastic Madonnas and tawdry immaginette has been patronized by those according to whom a true religious experience cannot possibly grow out of such undifferentiated vulgarity. These views to some extent share both common ground and forms of expression; yet it is also necessary to distinguish between them. For whereas the designer bowl or dress, and the original artwork, have struck a profitable modus vivendi with the products of mass culture, on the existence of which indeed they continue to depend for their added value, the question of reproduction in the religious sphere is not so susceptible to easy compromise. The multiplication of means of access to the divine, in any religious system, will always be problematic to the extent that this is per ceived as pandering to the lowest common denominator and thereby cheapening what should be a more demanding spiritual initiation (an especially modern, post-industrial concern), or to the extent that it threatens the appointed guardians of religious orthodoxy (a perennial source of anxiety). Without claiming to resolve the underlying philosophical problems surrounding the ‘truth’ in images and copies, the evidence of our study does provide some clear historical answers to the question of the role of reproduction in the construction of a religious culture. It has been suggested that, since the invention of photography if not since the advent of printing, mechanical reproduction has not only trivialized the manufactured copy but has also tended to detract from the perceived aura of the venerated, unique object. However, the 194

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history of reproductions of miraculous images suggests that both of these views are in need of qualification. There is clearly a reciprocal relationship between copy and prototype, of which the history of image cults can show many examples.The reproduction, in all of these cases, at once takes from and gives back to its model. Walter Benjamin wrote in similar terms in his celebrated essay on ‘the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’. However, one sentence from this essay has too readily been taken to stand for Benjamin’s argument as a whole. He wrote, in a phrase which has been cited all too often in isolation: ‘that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art’. But, as has not always been duly emphasized, he went on, crucially, to elaborate the point: By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced.8

As Benjamin recognized, the process of reproduction need not be one of infinite dilution of significance, but may give potentially endless life to the prototype.The evidence of miraculous image cults supports this interpret ation. By the same token this evidence runs counter to the argument of Jean Baudrillard that simulacra tend to become ‘unreal’ substitutes for their ‘real’ and primary referent.9 In fact, the multiple plaster-cast statuettes and tuppenny coloured prayer cards bearing the copy of a miraculous image prove, on examination, to be part of the very strength of the original. At the same time, and to a degree which ecclesiastical authority cannot but find troubling, the imitations turn out to be quite as highly charged as their model – and a good deal more portable.

The approximate copy In her picture, the Madonna of a particular cult is known from others by some distinguishing iconographic feature; beyond this identifying marker, her devotees will allow her considerable leeway in the form of her appearance. The perceived value of a version of a cult image does not depend upon a notion of accurate visual resemblance. Indeed, this point needs to be made 195

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more strongly: mimesis is out of place here. The paradox of the faithful likeness is that it draws attention to difference: the more the work of art is admired for its fidelity to a model, the more the ‘copy’ is differentiated, by the perceived success of its mimetic artifice, from the ‘original’. The construction of art history as a series of experiments in mimesis, both before and since Vasari, has distracted scholarly attention from the multifarious ways in which visual recognition operates. In the first place, it relies upon social context, and second, it employs poetical modes of association and resonance more readily than it does tests of precise visual resemblance. This explains the commonly observed fact that the statue or painting venerated at the shrine is a replacement – and perhaps not the first – of the ur-image which gives its name to the site.The Virgin of Orsanmichele in Florence, despite having been commissioned from a known professional (Bernardo Daddi) in the 1330s, was and still is understood by its devotees to be the very image which worked the first miracles in the 1290s – a painting which had already been replaced once before the installation of Daddi’s third version (see illus. 51).10 From the perspective of the cult, the present image, although it may be recognized to be a substitute, is nonetheless understood to be the original: no distinction is drawn; there is no copy here. The same perception of identity (not replication) applies to the versions of the sacred image which emanate outwards from the shrine. The Madonna dell’Orto, which began life as a painting on a garden wall in the suburb of Chiavari, has been honoured since 1634 by a grandiose setting above the high altar of the Baroque basilica erected to contain it, and before which in the nineteenth century a pompous colonnade was added (illus. 113 and see illus. 29). Carried heavenward by a crowd of carved angels, disappearing from sight, the little icon is far out of reach of its many votaries. Meanwhile, at ground level, in various parts of the church, small printed santini or copies of the fresco attached to pews and lecterns offer a means of access to the holy image which is otherwise denied (illus. 112). Like ripples radiating outwards from a fountain, these reproductions touch, and can be touched – indeed, caressed and kissed and talked to – by the supplicant who would communicate with the Madonna of the Garden. To use another metaphor, they are understood as windows which open upon the same reality as that appearing in the picture above the altar. It is evidently of no matter to the shopper, the businessman or the pilgrim who stops today to pray before one of these ‘copies’ of the Madonna 196

112 Image of the Madonna dell’Orto fixed to a pew in the nave of the cathedral of Chiavari. The original fresco (see illus. 29) is framed above the high altar in the background.

113 Facade of the sanctuary of the Madonna dell’Orto (now the cathedral), Chiavari, in a late 19th-century photograph.

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114 Ex-voto, 1801.

115 Ex-voto, c. 1800.

dell’Orto that, beyond a broad iconographic correspondence, they do not closely resemble the ‘original’. Equally approximate are the various representations of this Madonna which appear within the painted ex-votos preserved in the basilica, depicting shipwrecks and other disasters from which the image is believed to have afforded rescue, and in which the supplicant is repeatedly shown in direct and intimate communion with the miraculous image. Sometimes the tavoletta depicts the worshipper sick in bed, 198

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or at sea, tossed by a frightful storm, in the act of holding up a paper version of the image in question, clearly indicating the sense of intense engagement that could be mediated by the portable reproduction (illus. 114, 115).

In a glass, darkly The perceived power of the reproduction of a potent image was tapped relatively early by Church leaders. At the beginning of the thirteenth century Pope Innocent iii, farsighted in this as in other aspects of his pastoral mission, launched the universal cult of the Roman Veronica image of the face of Christ. Multiple copies were made, bearing the text of a prayer and an associated indulgence: a spiritual privilege for the devout user. By the early 1300s the pictores veronicarum of the colonnade before the 116 Representation of the Veronica, the head of Christ shown on a cloth preserved in St Peter’s church of St Peter were a veritable factory, church in the Vatican, Rome, c. 1250, English. turning out thousands of reproductions of the marvellous prototype for growing numbers of pilgrims to take to their scattered homes; one might, however, equally well make the drawing at a distance, even without seeing the original (illus. 116).With the introduction of print technology in the fifteenth century, the rate of reproduction could be increased: there survives a fifteenth-century paper sheet with multiple hand-coloured woodblock engravings of the Veronica, ready to be cut out for distribution (illus. 117). The related prayer text makes explicit that the vicarious encounter with Christ’s face in the copy was understood to be no less direct than if it were experienced in the presence of the Veronica in St Peter’s itself: O God, you have left us the image of your face impressed as the Veronica on the sudarium. Grant us by your passion and cruci fixion that as we now adore your face in this image, as in a glass, 199

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117 Sheet of printed Veronicas, handcoloured, ready for cutting out, 15th century.

darkly, so when you come again as judge we may see one another face to face.11

The way in which reproductions can extend and consolidate the zone of influence of a given image is highlighted dramatically by Dante, who at the final climax of the Divine Comedy invokes the Roman Veronica itself as an image of Christ presumed to be known to all his readers. The protagonist of his vision is in a state beyond reason, in which he turns without realizing it from the face of Beatrice to that of the final guide on his spiritual journey, who turns out to be St Bernard. Both, for Dante, are prototypes of Christ, and it is therefore with stunning effect that the poet invokes, in this very context of visionary translation, the Roman Veronica, describing himself ‘As he who comes perchance from Croatia to look on our Veronica, and whose old hunger is not sated, but says in thought as long as it is shown, “My Lord Jesus Christ, true God, was then your semblance like to this?”’12 200

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The original effectiveness of Dante’s poetic simile depended precisely upon his readers’ and listeners’ participation in such a community of men and women familiar with the image and its potency, which the reference in the Comedy in turn validated and reinforced. The text assumes, in other words, an audience with a shared knowledge, derived primarily through the medium of the copies, of the Roman cult image. By means of the copy and its accompanying prayer the perception of the Veronica as a benevolent presence could, paradoxically, be strengthened even in the absence of the image itself.The sense of the simultaneous presence and absence of the divine, which can be created by any holy image, is intensified in this and other cases of reputedly miraculous images by the creation of a web of allusions and prompts to the memory: a portable Veronica on paper to carry at one’s belt; a street shrine with a copy of the venerated prototype; a visionary poem or a snatch of song overheard; a reference in a sermon; a traveller’s tale told at an inn.This is why no account of a miraculous image which is confined to the physical description of the object in its immediate setting can encompass the full extent of its visual and emotional impact. There is a difference, however, between the paper copies of the Roman Veronica on the one hand, and the miraculous images principally discussed in this book on the other. In the former case, the reproductions referred directly to the holy figure in the image – Christ – of whom the Veronica cloth (over which, as its custodian, the church of St Peter in Rome claimed control) was understood to be a unique contact relic.The miraculous image cult, by contrast, offers lay men and women the opportunity to ascribe a measure of autonomous power to an object of their own choosing, reinforcing and extending its potency through reproduction. And of such chosen objects there has come to be a very large number.

The Madonna’s mobile double The need to preserve the primary object of devotion safely within its sanctuary has at all times fostered the creation of a substitute for processional events. Such considerations appear to explain the relationship, in classical Athens, between the gigantic statue of Athena within the Parthenon, the ‘Athena Parthenos’, and the small, portable and more visible ‘Athena Polias’, which was regularly carried in festivals through the streets of the city.13 In the Christian era, the deity in the image in the shrine has commonly been 201

118 Processional cassa of the Madonna dei Miracoli, Cicagna.

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represented during processions in the form of a suitably theatrical version which, as the behaviour of the attendant crowd makes clear, is in this case understood fully to represent the perceived supernatural power of the prototype.Typically the miniature carving of the Madonna dei Miracoli in Cicagna is understood to be embodied, for the duration of her annual festival on 15 September, in the grandiose statue which is carried by bearers through the town and its suburbs (illus. 118 and see illus. 99). Throughout the remainder of the year the processional cassa sits in a transept of the parish church, awaiting the ritual moment when it is required to bring the presence of the Madonna into the larger public space of the commune. It is clear, however, that such a double identity only strengthens the perceived greatness of the Madonna dei Miracoli. The larger fame of the image was meanwhile disseminated through a plethora of further substitutable manifestations. The Genoese man who made a vow to the newly venerated Madonna of Vico di Mondovì in 1595 could fulfil his promise to visit her by making a pilgrimage to a copy of the painting already installed in a chapel of the Genoese cathedral – on either side of which he proceeded to hang his now useless crutches.14 The statue in gesso of the Madonna of Lezzeno in Lombardy, which wept blood in 1688 and performed other wonders, had begun life as a commissioned ex-voto that the artist had copied from an older miraculous image, that of the Madonna della Pace at Ponte di Nobiallo.15 Even a modest print could stand in for, and so spread the fame of, its model, as was demonstrated in a story concerning the Madonna della Ghiara at Reggio in Emilia. One Margharita, living at Fivizzano where she had been bedridden with an illness for eighteen years, begged a friend going to Reggio to bring her a copy of the image. In the event, the friend forgot – but as she began to despair, the two saw on a beam in her room the very engraving she had wished for, and she got up from her bed, quite healed. This happened in May 1596, before the newly founded cult had yet received any official sanction: its popular fame was evidently growing informally through the spread of unlicensed reproductions.16 The distribution of cheap, universally available printed reproductions of the holy image projects an image of its ever-fluctuating sacred space.17

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119 Immaginetta of the Madonna of Montenero, Livorno, framed and decorated with seashells.

The miraculous copy A particular devotion might at any moment leap into flame from a fragile immaginetta, itself a glowing spark from some pre-existing image cult. The potential may be enhanced by the provision of an honorific frame. An example which illustrates the splendid possibilities open even to the humblest owner of a cheap coloured engraving, to present this as a venerable object, is a reproduction of the Madonna di Montenero above Livorno 204

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(illus. 119).This simple print has been transformed, by its frame of seashells and cut-out cardboard cherubs, into something far more precious.18 The spontaneous recourse to such prints in moments of crisis can be documented over a long period.When, on 29 June 1663, a three-year-old boy fell into a well in a suburb of Genoa, to be pulled out half an hour later, believed dead, a passer-by, Antonio Maria Billa Vecchia, sped home to retrieve his printed image of St Francis Xavier (a framed paper immaginetta), which he applied to the child’s face. The boy’s recovery was popularly deemed a miracle.19 In much the same way, when a newborn baby was recently despaired of by the doctors, an immaginetta was ready to be drawn from the wallet of the non-practising Catholic father-in-law and placed in the child’s cot, where, after the child’s recovery, it remained as an advertisement of the miracle of healing. This typical story was reported by the grateful mother in December 2008, writing from Pescara to the shrine, at the foot of the mountain of the Gran Sasso, of the nineteenth-century San Gabriele dell’Addolorata. The saint’s tomb is visited by 2 million pilgrims each year, but his power is also mediated at a distance through countless images, which are understood to have the potential to operate local graces in their own right.20 A Neapolitan butcher, speaking at the same shrine in 2002, explained how, as a man who never went to church, he had been inspired to change his life (and saved from alcoholism) by an immaginetta of the saint, given to him by some monks to whom he was making a delivery. His wife, who, like her husband and many other contemporary Italians, attended church rarely and expressed a low regard for priests, confirmed that, thanks to the arrival in their lives of this little image, San Gabriele was now the protector of her family.21 Once it has proved its potency as a worker of wonders in its own right, the frail copy image may be reframed as an object of particular devo tion. While the noble Genoese family of Pittaluga were staying in Rome in 1769, the parents acquired for their daughter an engraved copy of an image of Jesus the Nazarene. This tiny coloured replica emanated from the Trinitarian church in Rome, home to an image of Christ which itself was modelled upon a famous, miracle-working portrait in Madrid. The paper version was at two removes from this distant prototype – yet to this humble object the girl attributed her recovery from a serious injury to her hand caused by the needle of a spinning wheel.The family thereafter made a gift of the print to their parish church of San Donato, where in turn it 205

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became the focus of a new cult in this part of Genoa (illus. 120).22 This ability of a copy to function as an ‘original’ miraculous image is dramatically demonstrated by the Madonnetta in Castelletto, on the heights directly above the port of Genoa. The object of devotion in this case is a small, sixteenth-century copy in alabaster of the thirteenth-century, miracle-working marble image of the Virgin and Christ Child at Trapani (see illus. 58). In October 1686, the portable statuette was being brought back from Sicily to Savona by its owner when his ship was caught in a storm. Attributing his survival to his prayer to the image, he sang its praises in Genoa, where he was begged by a devout Spanish noblewoman (and consort of a Genoese aris tocrat), Eugenia Moneglia, to give it to her. Word of the image’s power soon spread, 120 Jesus the Nazarene, miraculous print, 19th century. being taken up in particular by Carlo Giacinto, an Augustinian friar who was close to its owners and an obsessive promoter of the cult of the Virgin Mary. By the turn of the century, thanks to a flood of pious gifts – bank drafts from the rich, eggs from the poor – it was housed in a theatrical sanctuary (see illus. 55, 56, 57), and renowned as a palladium of the city. An illustrious visitor, Maria Vittoria Pinceti, while praying before the Madonnetta, experienced a vision in which the statue was wrapped in a bright effulgence and ringed with stars. Such a narration, reported to her confessor, added to the charisma of the image.When, in 1746, an invading Austrian army, against all the odds, turned back from its planned attack on Genoa, this was widely published as a miracle of the Madonnetta, the ‘Little Madonna’, literally standing guard above the walls of the old city.23

Reproduction as re-appropriation The controversy which arose in the early nineteenth century regarding proprietorship over a copy of Giovanni Battista da Sassoferrato’s image of 206

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Nostra Signora della Salute, installed half a century before in the Franciscan convent of the Madonna della Pace, illuminates vividly the scope for the competitive appropriation and re-appropriation of a miracle-working image. The painting is typical of the sweet style with which Sassoferrato made his living as an artist, a manner which may have acquired even greater popularity in the nineteenth century (illus. 121). After the suppression of the religious orders in 1810, permission was granted by the archbishop for this image to be set up in the Chiesa della Consolazione, the parish church of the quarter of San Vincenzo, where a chapel was newly decorated to receive it. It was duly installed in September 1814. In 1821, however, the Franciscans returned, and reclaimed their image. So resistant were the parishioners 121 Immaginetta of Nostra Signora della Salute, (supported, according to the Franciscans, formerly in the Church of the Madonna della by a rival body of Augustinian friars) that the Pace, Genoa, 19th century. police were called in to supervise the hand over, which, to reduce public attention, was scheduled for midnight. Following fruitless complaints to the senate about the violence with which the image had been taken, and reported jeering in the streets, the parishioners responded by having a copy of the picture made and set up in the same niche. The counter-cult thus established was the more provocative as the chapels containing the two images were only 30 paces apart, so that people attending services at the one could hear those at the other. Disorder and contention continued for a year when, under pressure from the police, the archbishop’s court ordered the parishioners of the Consolazione to dismantle their counter-altar. But although they took down the image, they proceeded to attach the name of Mary to the curtain which had covered it, and refocused the cult on this veil, lighting it day and night and holding the same services as before for the Madonna della Salute. The competing devotions thus continued by association with the now removed copy, to the fury of the Franciscans.24 207

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The intimate copy A scrap of paper bearing a mass-produced engraving after a famous image may seem a feeble thing; yet it carries an enormous potential charge which is in inverse proportion to its fragility. The domestic print and the pocket immaginetta invite an address to the miraculous statue or painting which is of a different order from that experienced in the public spaces of the shrine or the processional way. In a communal environment the human eye is liable to skid, sliding superficially across the everyday chaos of the visual field. By contrast, in a more intimate setting the hand-held, personal copy of the cult image fixes the gaze, holds the attention, fosters the recognition of previously unnoticed details in the familiar object. Here, one can concentrate.25 The palm-sized card is, moreover, as a personal possession, an object which can be inscribed with the owner’s presence by the ways in which it is handled, juxtaposed with family photographs, tucked into a framed examination certificate, or written upon as a record of intimacy with the image, as in the case recorded in the epigraph to this chapter (see illus. 111 and 112).To these techniques for the personalizing of one’s reproduced icon are now added the resources of the personal computer, the iPhone and the Kindle.The vision of Divine Mercy experienced by St Faustina Kowalska (d. 1938), and subsequently painted according to her instructions, is an example of a reputedly miraculous image now available as a downloadable application for portable telephones.26 The supernatural picture is available on-demand in a range of formats which make it possible to embed it, in ways which continue to evolve with current technologies, in the personal space and surroundings of the devotee.

The first age of mechanical reproduction The difficulties faced by Catholic pastors in the early modern period were compounded by the impact of printing, and in particular by the facility and speed with which any new image could be disseminated.The print medium turned its very artificiality to advantage, as the printed sheet declared itself to be the exactly replicated, authentic and unmediated image of the Madonna.27 In the early days of the new technology, examples of printed images may even have been perceived to have an exotic quality which at times conduced to their veneration. An instance of an early, probably Venetian woodcut on 208

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parchment of the Virgin and Child with St Christopher and St Antony, which has been revered as a miraculous image since the fifteenth century, is the Madonna Bianca of Portovenere, near La Spezia (illus. 122). A story was told about the source of this image that may originally have arisen from popular wonder at the technology of printing and that later, when prints became commonplace, served to dignify the veneration of a cheap immaginetta. The earliest surviving evidence is an early seventeenth-century copy of a text of 1513, which itself was an Italian summary of the notarial record of the original miracle together with a brief account of the early cult.28 On a Sunday in August, after vespers, in the house of a certain Luciardo in the town of Portovenere, an extraordinary event took place, the protagonist of which was a carta antica sculpita: a print of the Virgin Mary. It was said to have gone largely unnoticed on account of another image of the Madonna

122 The Madonna Bianca, Portovenere, early 15th century, coloured woodblock print.

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which Luciardo had placed in front of it. On this particular evening, having got ready to pray and then to go on the procession which he regularly made in his white habit – he was evidently a member of the penitential Bianchi movement which had taken central and north Italy by storm at the turn of the fifteenth century – and not yet having eaten, Luciardo was on his knees before the second image, praying to God to work the miracle of transforming the bad characters of those who did not fear His wrath. Looking towards the left-hand side of the room, he saw the image which had been hidden behind the other now attached by a nail to the opposite wall. And he seemed to see this image paint itself, and refresh itself with new colours – white and blue – and saw the Virgin move her left hand which held the Christ Child to lift Him upright and then put her hands up to pray to her son for the redemption of sinners. At this moment, in Luciardo’s account, a scroll became visible in the hands of the figure of Jesus on which were written the words: ‘My mother, I am happy with what pleases you, provided that the sinner repents of his ill deed.’ Stunned, Luciardo called all his neighbours to see the miracle, and a huge crowd arrived, both men and women of the town and also visitors from outside. While they stood watching, the faces of the Virgin and Child continued to become clearer, and whiter, where before the print had seemed so obscure that nothing could be seen. On the right of the Virgin appeared the image of St Christopher, and on the left that of St Antony, which had not been visible before. For hours people came, and saw the image continue to paint itself without being moved or touched by anyone. In the morning the crowd, together with the rector of the parish church of San Lorenzo and San Pietro and all the priests, came in a solemn procession to the sound of bells, to take the picture into the church, where it performed a number of miracles. It appears from this early narrative that the original wonder was a perception by multiple witnesses that two things happened to the colouration of the picture. From the faces of Mary and Jesus, a layer of dirt seemingly removed itself, revealing an original and dazzling brightness.To the robe of the Madonna, meanwhile, was miraculously added an element of blue that had been previously unnoticed. Later, however, colours temporarily seen in the image were said to fade to white. At one level, these responses seem to arise from a sense of fascination and puzzlement with regard to the novel technique of printing represented by this woodblock image.The black printed outlines on the white ground present a two-dimensional image of 210

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the subject. The account seems to allude to the way in which such early engravings could be enhanced by the manual addition of colour.The very story of Luciardo’s placing of one image in front of another, and of one emerging miraculously from behind, could itself be a metaphor for the wonder of the woodblock reproductive process. Most of the first Italian woodcuts, from the early 1400s, came from the northeast of the peninsula, from the region of Venice. It is probable that the Portovenere image is itself of Venetian origin – indeed, the text of Christ’s scroll is characterized by Venetian forms – and that it was brought to Liguria by its merchant owner.29 Once transported to a part of the world where the technology of the wood block was still relatively unfamiliar, the print would have struck its Ligurian audience as an exotic import from across the sea, similar in this respect to other images of real or alleged near Eastern origin. One especially strange aspect of the picture was its black-and-white design which, by leaving blank the areas of the picture understood to have substance, created a negative image. There appears here a rhetoric of inversion, from dark to light, which challenged conventional expectations of a two-dimensional image. It was also related that colours seen in this White Madonna were perceived mysteriously to evaporate – again offering miraculous explanation for a technical fact – that colour (which at the period would normally have been added to a print, especially to a relatively expensive example on parchment) is unstable and liable to fade.The ‘white’ appearance which was noted of the lady in the printed image suggests, in addition, both an association of ideas with the whiteness of the robes of the penitential ‘Bianchi’ with whom Luciardo was evidently associated, and that the Madonna Bianca was assimilated in the popular imagination to the ‘white lady’ who was the regular protagonist of rural visions. Over centuries, peasants in the countryside have reported seeing a spirit in the form of a white lady, hovering in a bush or in the branches of a tree. The name and the visionary manifestation of the Portovenere Madonna hint at the large context of folk tradition and stories with which the narratives of miraculous images, to the recurrent discomfort of clerical observers, have much in common.30 The spread of the story of the Portovenere Madonna appears to be further documented in the curious double image of the Madonna di Maralunga, now in the church of San Francesco at Lerici, a few kilometres along the coast road from Portovenere (illus. 123).The legend of the origin of this 211

123 The Madonna of Maralunga, 15th century, tempera on panel.

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image runs that in 1480, three sailors fishing near the shore of Maralunga found the painting floating in the sea.They took it back and set it up in the fishermen’s church, where it became the object of a miraculous cult. This church afterwards became the site of an Augustinian convent, and the image remained there until the Napoleonic suppression of 1798.The picture bears an inscription which seems to indicate that the work was commissioned, rather than found, by the sailors. From the fact that the Christ Child on the left carries a scroll bearing almost exactly the same inscription as that seen in Portovenere, it is evident that these two images are related. But the Madonna di Maralunga is clearly related to the Madonna Bianca of Portovenere not just in this respect, but also by virtue of its doubleness. The Madonna di Maralunga depicts, in a single image, two versions of the same subject, with some variations. One of the Virgins is dressed in white, the other in red, with a blue cloak. One is dark-haired, the other blonde. It is as if this very depiction were telling the story of the miraculous transformation of the Portovenere print – almost in the form of a photographic positive and negative – one side white, the other coloured: in one the contrast works one way, in the other, the opposite way (dark hair on white, blonde hair on dark colours). The picture seems to embody the narrative of the miracle, relating the story to prospective recruits to the cult.

The authentic reproduction By the seventeenth century cheap printing had put into the hands of almost anyone a potential catalyst of miracles.31 In the copy, the eyes of the image beam its presence into the lives of devotees, even at considerable distance. In the early modern period the caption ‘true image’, vera effigie, dis played on many printed reproductions of celebrated images, was at the same time a guarantee of authenticity (despite, once again, a lack of concern with very close formal correspondence) and a promise that something of the virtue, no less than the figure, of the prototype resided in the engraving. Sensing but not quite understanding a danger in this still novel medium of engraved reproduction, senior Catholic clerics of the early modern period busied themselves to vet, to censor and to edit these popular devotional images. Yet their interventions, focused as they were on details of iconographic and verbal orthodoxy which tended to be of secondary concern to the devotee, usually missed the mark. At Chiavari in the summer 213

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of 1610, the archbishop’s vicar-general, hastening to the disorderly scene in the garden, promptly declared an engraved version of the frescoed Madonna, which was already being distributed to pilgrims, to be illegal, and required all copies to be handed in for destruction.The local historian, Pellegro Robbio, lamented this high-handed intervention, perceiving it to be a deliberate – albeit unsuccessful – attempt to undermine popular devotion to the image. Robbio was also sensitive to the attention the ecclesiastical authorities paid to the words printed on the engraved images of the Madonna dell’Orto, for the original text referred unambiguously to ‘miracles’ worked by the picture.The engraving was subsequently licensed on condition that the accompanying legend was changed to remove the reference to miracula and to indicate merely that certain individuals claimed to have received grazie, ‘graces’, by means of the painting.32 In the clerical eye the difference was crucial; but to the majority of those who put their trust in the Madonna of the Garden, the distinction was a nice one. In any case, bishops had a difficult challenge in keeping track of the engravings in circulation.When he saw that the cult of the Madonna of the Pillar at Vico di Mondovì, once it had taken off in 1595, could not be suppressed, the local bishop licensed a particular painter with the privilege of reproducing it, simultaneously banning the circulation of other versions which had already been issued. Yet within months, diverse variants of the image were to appear, defiantly resisting censorship.33 Where the focus of a cult was a genuine exotic, it could trigger alarms in Tridentine circles concerned to eschew the ‘unusual’ in Catholic imagery. In the case of the Orthodox icon of the Dormition of the Virgin, venerated from the 1550s at Montallegro di Rapallo, concern for orthodoxy led the image’s most prolific publicist, the seventeenth-century Jesuit Giovanni Agostino Molfino, to an elaborate justification of its iconography (illus. 124 and see illus. 24).34 If the Byzantine type of the Dormition of Mary was relatively unfamiliar in the West, this was especially true of the Trinitarian representation, included within the picture, of the three-headed Christ. Such images had been known in late medieval Tuscany, when, however, Archbishop Antonino of Florence criticized painters for making these ‘monsters’: this literal representation of the triune deity was perceived by the fastidious theologian to be an invitation to mockery.35 The sixteenth century brought the iconography into further disrepute with the new generation of Catholic reformers who found it crude and vulgar. The 214

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124 The Madonna of Montallegro (illus. 24), detail.

climax of official hostility was its formal condemnation by Pope Urban viii in 1628.36 This ban must have been a source of some embarrassment, if not to the majority of devotees of the Madonna of Montallegro, at least to its educated, clerical promoters. Molfino’s way of dealing with this was to engage in his own polemic on the picture’s iconography. A representation of the Montallegro icon having been produced in the 1630s in Sicily for the local community of Rapallesi, Molfino condemned this version for its alleged inaccuracies, and went through all the details of the iconography to stress the orthodoxy of the original. The Palermo engraving evidently inserted the figure of the Devil beneath Dionysius the Areopagite at the head of the bed, and also showed the Virgin apparently emanating from Christ rather than clearly ascending to him. In particular, Molfino insisted that the Sicilian engraver must have been working from a faulty copy of the original, since he showed Christ with three heads emerging from only one body. He claimed that at Montallegro the picture depicted, rather, three distinct bodies – consistent with the three distinct Persons of the Trinity in Western 215

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125 The Madonna of Montallegro, mid-17th-century engraving.

126 The Madonna of Montallegro, mid-17th-century engraving.

Christian thought. In an attempt to prove his point, and to make it stick, Molfino issued his own engraving of the Montallegro image, and did his best to find and destroy examples of the other type. His argument, which tramples on the evidence – the icon in reality clearly shows the deity’s three heads on a single body – is a particularly striking example of the use of the medium of engraving purportedly to ‘authenticate’ a particular reading of an image, in this case a reading which deliberately departed from the model in order to claim its orthodoxy.37 The earliest surviving engraved replicas of the Montallegro Madonna follow Molfino’s model of the three-Person Christ, rather than the icon (illus. 125, 126). It was evidently this edited version which found its way, by the second half of the seventeenth century, into countless homes in the region. However, most of those who placed their hopes in their copy of the picture will have been less concerned than the 216

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Jesuit with the details of its theology.The real impact of the engraving was that the Virgin of Montallegro became a living presence in the homes and workplaces of countless devotees, even at a great distance from the shrine. It was plausibly claimed a few years later that there was not a house, workshop, public street or boat in the vicinity of Rapallo which did not display one or more reproductions.38

Supernatural snaps in the second age of mechanical reproduction We now live in an age of multiple reproductive media, and the miraculous image has embraced them all.The cult of miraculous images, far from being left behind by modernity, has repeatedly kept pace with technological inno vation.When photography was first introduced in the nineteenth century, popular uncertainty about the novel technique contributed to credulity in the appearance of fairies and spirits in printed images. One particular photograph made at the end of the century, of the Turin Shroud, was greeted as itself a kind of miracle, because of its apparent success in ‘capturing’ the traces of Christ’s body which remained invisible to the naked eye.39 In turn, the appearance in the early 1970s of cheap Polaroid cameras immediately produced a spate of reported miraculous photographs in this new medium of the instantaneous image. Since Veronica Lueken’s vision of Ste Thérèse of Lisieux in 1970, the area of Bayside, New York, has been frequented daily by devotees who, in the course of evening recitations of the Rosary, take random Polaroid photographs, many of which are believed to capture miraculously appearing divine presences in the form of strange patterns of light. Some of these are held to show the Virgin Mary herself, others to communicate her messages to the world. Consistent with the most vital strain of miraculous image cults throughout history, the Polaroid photograph (the truthfulness of which appears to be guaranteed by the fact that it cannot be tampered with) is utterly democratic: anyone can take such a photograph, and no clerical authority is required to authenticate it. The technological novelty of celluloid has now been compounded by the possibility of digital reproduction and universal dissemination through the Internet and its supported social networks. Many of these ‘Polaroids from Heaven’ have been made universally available on the website of the cult: ourladyoftheroses.org. Some have been linked to prophecies, reportedly 217

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delivered by the Virgin Mary to the visionary Veronica Lueken, which have at times been critical of the Church of Rome and of papal positions on controversial issues. The downloaded Polaroid is explicitly declared by the authors of the site to carry the same miraculous charge as the original.40 As so often in the past, the miraculous image continues, through the parthenogenic process of auto-reproduction, to renew its potential as a rallying point and supporting witness for the secular critique of clerical leadership in the Church.

Conclusion: Reproduction as translation The copy of a miraculous image, therefore, can serve as a complete reinstantiation of its prototype. On the other hand, whatever the degree of formal likeness to its model, the copy is changed by its particular engagement with a context that is always new. This is why Gertrude Stein asked the rhetorical question:‘Is there repetition or is there insistence? I am inclined to believe that there is no such thing as repetition. And really how can there be?’41 As has been noted in earlier chapters, the prototype emanates outwards through diverse media, including the written word, speech and song, no less than visual representation.The diverse forms by which the miraculous image is made available, whether in visual or other media, are best described not as ‘copies’, in so far as the term carries the connotation of formal mimesis, but as translations of an image. The process echoes that which Walter Benjamin described as the ideal of textual translation: translation gives voice to the intentio of the original not as replication but as harmony. It is emphatically not about the transfer of information – which, in the case of the image, would in the present day be communicated through the endlessly receding goal of the perfect digital copy. Indeed, ‘the larger the extent to which [the original] is information, the less fertile a field it is for translation.’ Benjamin cited Rudolf Pannwitz on the subject of German translation: ‘Our translators, even the best ones, proceed from the wrong premise.They want to turn Hindi, Greek, English into German instead of turning German into Hindi, Greek, English.’42 This provides a suggestive simile for what at times have been real tensions in cults of miraculous images. The Catholic Church in the early modern period can be seen as proceeding from Pannwitz’s ‘wrong premise’. In trying to affirm an orthodox approach 218

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to images in response to Protestant critiques and to the existence of an alarmingly expanded print technology, sixteenth- and early seventeenthcentury theorists of images attempted to fix and delimit visual forms, and demonstrated anxiety about the new juxtapositions and associations which could be created by the process of replication.They were worried about the potentiality of translation as an extension of a wider anxiety about unmediated access to the divine through images. The more translatable the image – in Benjamin’s terms – the less its meanings could be controlled.Yet neither in that period nor more recently have the Church’s leaders succeeded in imposing the envisaged visual order. In the hands of its particular owner, whether in 1500 or today, the immaginetta persistently refuses to be contained by the official definition of its relative at the shrine.

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127 Roadside pillar with venerated image, and view of Vicoforte, near the sanctuary of the Madonna of Vico di Mondovì, c. 1900.

six

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cannot help enquiring, what should be the Reason of a very whimsical, though very old Persuasion, which is firmly rooted in the Minds of the Vulgar, that a Picture of God, or of some Saint in one Place shall hear the Prayers of Votaries, when in another Place the Statue of the very same God or Saint shall be utterly deaf to them?1

I

The axis of the world The previous chapters have reviewed the stages by which a miraculous image is identified, ritually consecrated and activated, approached, witnessed and absorbed, and further disseminated through reproduction. These processes together amount to the creation, by means of the image, of holy space – the subject of this final chapter.The use of markers to give shape and meaning to otherwise undifferentiated space is more ancient than history. Recent work has intensified interest in the ways in which sacred landscapes are created and represented.2 A crucial insight is that expressed by Michel de Certeau, who underlined the artifice and contingency of human beings’ perception of the world: ‘Space is a practised place.’3 Geography is not a given but is, rather, an expression of the way in which people have chosen to live in the world.4 It follows that geographical landmarks are the deposits of history, whether that history is constituted by the sequence of human activity or by the creative power of collective memory.The role of the lieu de mémoire in the construction of national identities has of late received considerable attention; less studied have been the ways in which a more in clusive vision of the landscape has been articulated by particular religious traditions.5 The idea that the divine inheres in particular places and things has proved remarkably resilient even in the face of Protestant mockery, as 221

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has been demonstrated in the case of the British Isles after the Reformation.6 In the context of Catholic Italy, such assumptions have not gone uncriticized by theologians suspicious both of pagan materialism and of localist resistance to the institutional authority of the Church.Yet the Italian cults reviewed in this book demonstrate the resurgent force of memories and traditions surrounding religious images as means to project ideas of place – in effect, to create geographical space. Such practices have repeatedly shown themselves to be dynamic and creative, but also open to recurrent contestation between rival interests for the control of the perceived power of the image. As an interpretive device, however, the concept of ‘sacred space’ may contain a trap for the researcher. The field remains profoundly influenced by European debates of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which polarized the hypothetical opposites of ‘sacred’ and ‘secular’. Theorizing the subject in the context of contemporary argument about the nature of modernity and the respective roles of religion and science in an evolving society, Émile Durkheim envisaged the world as divided into distinct (if mutually permeable) categories, respectively ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’.7 But it has generally been understood by the makers of sacred markers in the landscape that all space is – more or less: and differences of degree will be in varying ways significant – potentially sacred. The sacred grove signifies that the whole of nature is latently enchanted; the patronal church invokes supernatural protection for the city in its entirety. In Catholic culture, as we have already had occasion to notice, the Virgin Mary is understood to be omnipresent. At the interface between this universal potentiality of divine immanence, and its activation in a particular time and space, lies the miraculous image. Here is the point at which the veil is drawn back, and the underlying potency of the supernatural presence is made manifest. The use of images to stake out the bounds and centre of a sacred geog raphy is both an ancient practice and a long-established subject of study, although the terminology has varied with times and changing disciplines. There have always been historians of religion sensitive to the power of a strategically placed image to redefine territorial horizons. Bede did so when he described, in the early eighth century, what he saw as the politically defin ing gesture of the Christian king Oswald of Northumbria who in ad 635 erected a cross at a site subsequently known as Heavenfield: a monumental crucifix to which – and to scrapings from which – frequent miracles were 222

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attributed.8 A Byzantine example which has recently been subjected to particular study is the ‘Tuesday miracle’ worked by a famous icon of the Virgin Mary in a marketplace in Constantinople each week throughout the later medieval centuries. The icon was carried several times around the square and then, held by a single cleric, it performed a spinning dance during which the gathered and expectant crowds experienced the sensation that the space was occupied by a heavenly presence. As the pre-eminent palladium of the empire (it was said to have defended the city during a siege in ad 626) this icon, in this very performance, regularly renewed the image of Byzantium as a world centred in and protected by this panel painting of the Virgin.9 The post-medieval and largely Western European examples discussed in what follows have appropriated similar techniques for the construction of sacred geography.Where, however, the richer survival of more recent sources enables a thicker description of these processes, a more vivid sense emerges of the degree to which the miraculous image may not only serve as an emblem of royal or imperial power and national identity, but may be otherwise invented and contested as a vehicle of local, subversive and rival interests and affiliations. The lack of a corresponding wealth of sources for earlier periods makes it difficult to determine which particular features of the post-medieval examples are peculiar to their historical moment. Nevertheless it is evident that the growing pretensions of the secular state, confessional conflict over territorial control, and efforts towards standardization of belief and practice on the part of the post-Tridentine Church have all made particular contributions to the dynamic of image cults during the sixteenth and the following centuries. When the peasant Giovanni Chigizola experienced his vision of the Madonna, high on a mountain above Rapallo in July 1557, and subsequently discovered the tiny icon of the Virgin’s Dormition, word of the prodigy soon reached the clergy of the town (see illus. 24).The reported declaration of Mary during her visionary appearance, that she had chosen Liguria for her permanent residence, would be a valuable means to present this part of Italy as a sacred landscape, a new ‘Holy Land’ and a bulwark against the Protestant menace to the north.10 A significant debate arose, however, concerning the precise location and custody of the icon. The authorities promptly declared that the image should be brought for safety into the mother church of San Gervasio in Rapallo. However, although twice solemnly escorted there, the picture each time escaped by night, to be 223

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rediscovered at the site of its first appearance near the summit of the mountain.We can safely imagine advocates of the local cult smuggling the image back to the place of its first finding. Ultimately yielding, albeit reluctantly, to this sign of the Virgin’s will, the clergy approved the construction of a chapel at the mountaintop location of the miracle, where the object continues to be venerated today.11 Following a pattern recorded in many other instances, the image’s ‘refusal’ to be removed from the marginal site of its discovery to the official setting of the city is symptomatic of the rural margin’s resistance to the metropolitan centre. Every miraculous image has the potential to subvert the dominant view: to vindicate the perspective of the outsider, and in doing so, to redraw the map. With a few notable exceptions (such as the Madonna of Taggia or the Madonna della Guardia), a successful cult image almost invariably originates with a group of lay people, typically of humble social background, for whom the picture or carving is invested with a particular connection to their own geographical locality. Indeed, the group crystallizes its shared sense of place and identity precisely in the common focus on this image.The presence of the cult image is proof that the place and the group have been elected by the divinity for special protection (illus. 128, 129).The myth recasts mundane geography, declaring the place ‘chosen’ by the image to be the privileged centre of the cosmos.The cult always has the potential to be controversial, because the group of devotees does not coincide with established districts of secular and religious organization and government. In the early medieval Christian city, the cults of saints and relics had shared this potential to confound and subvert administrative norms.12 But with the establishment of largely effective clerical monopolies on the definition and the physical possession of saints’ relics from the twelfth century, the holy image alone retained the widespread potential to serve as a supernaturally charged object operating within the lay community more or less independently of clerical authen tication. Of course, the Catholic priesthood continued to legislate for such cults, and indeed to capitalize on them.Yet the Council of Trent’s vindication of holy images, and the emphasis of the early modern Catholic Church upon the Virgin Mary as intercessor for all Christians, left the way open to continual lay variations on these themes. Consequently the image cult has retained into modern times the capacity to express the voluntary identity of a group of people who by this very means distinguish themselves from imposed frameworks of ecclesiastical and civil government. Indeed, the 224

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128 The Madonna of Montallegro brought by angels to protect the bay of Rapallo, mid-17thcentury engraving. 129 The Madonna of Montallegro, Protectress of Rapallo. Detail of illus. 128.

perceived excesses of clerical and secular rulers have regularly occasioned popular recourse to an allegedly miraculous image as the focus of communal resistance. Processes ostensibly inimical both to the expression of community and to the endurance of local religious culture, such as the growing authoritarianism of the early modern Church and the emergence of the modern secular state, have thus been paradoxically conducive to the construction (or reconstruction) of neighbourhood identities and to the invocation of supporting cults of miraculous images.13 225

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The image as sanctuary Such cults, therefore, in their origins can often be understood as giving voice to a sense of local and communal interest conceived in resistance to official authorities. The image is popularly recognized as a vindication of the group of its supporters, and a source of higher justice and mercy, whose presence is rendered the more vital by the advent of harsher regimes in Church and state. The miraculous picture or statue creates a zona franca, a sanctuary for the community or the individual in need of protection against the perceived inequity or insufficiency of secular and institutional power.14 An ancient phenomenon, sanctuary is a resort for those who, disempowered by the prevailing systems of law and economy, wish to appeal beyond that framework to a transcendent order of justice. Already in ancient times, cult images were resorted to by refugees from violence.15 The effective operation of this principle of immunity has always depended upon the consensus of local society.16 A number of miraculous images are situated at traditional places of secular judgement. A classic instance is that of Nostra Donna della Consolazione in Rome, located below the Tarpeian Rock, from which in antiquity traitors were thrown and where in the later Middle Ages civil punishment continued to be exacted. At the close of the fourteenth century a condemned man, hanged there for murder, bequeathed money for a picture of the Virgin Mary to be painted ‘opposite the gallows and the place of appeal’.When in 1460 the mother of an innocent man, sentenced to death at the same place, prayed to this image, and the rope failed to hang her son, the cult of the Madonna della Consolazione began. A little later the image was repainted by Antoniazzo Romano, and was removed to the altar of a newly constructed church at the site.The establishment of the cult lent real force to pleas subsequently made to the judgement of this Madonna: the magistrate could not lightly ignore its public reputation as a court of appeal.17 The cult of the Madonna della Colonnella at Rimini was launched when a man wrongly condemned in 1506 to hang for murder knelt before this roadside image, and the officers of the law, finding themselves unable to remove him, recognized his innocence.18 The story was still being told in the 1960s of a foreign sailor in the early seventeenth century being taken to prison near the city wall overlooking the port of Genoa, whose chains burst apart as he passed a street shrine, before which his guard knelt in amazement. The broken chain was left behind the statue to bear witness to the miracle.19 226

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130 Ex-voto, 17th century, left at the sanctuary of the Miraculous Crucifix in the monastery of Santa Maria di Castello, Genoa.

Ex-voto depictions catalogue a thousand such interventions attributed to particular images (illus. 130).20 The zone of immunity around a holy image was also invoked by the Venetian woman who in 1480, begging to be preserved from a violent brother-in-law, successfully prayed to a street fresco of the Virgin, which was subsequently, as a direct result of this protection, displayed in the church of the Miracoli.21 In all such cases, the effectiveness of the image as a sanctuary was a function of the willingness of the local population (or, on occasion, the officers of the law) to vindicate the petitioner by announcing the active potency of the picture. It was this active participation which Archbishop Siri of Genoa invoked when the Madonna della Guardia went on pilgrimage around the diocese in 1948. Saying boldly that ‘it is not simply her venerated image, it is She who comes’, he urged parishioners to take trouble over the festivities (‘Don’t leave the image alone at night’), but not only this; he stated: ‘When the Virgin is in your parish, observe the sacraments, fulfil works of penitence and charity, attend to irregularities in your life, abandon antagonisms between you.’22 Groups of very diverse kinds have made use of the charisma of the image shrine as a pole of attraction, source of protection and defining heart of their respective identities.The Madonna della Montagna of Polsi, in the toe of Italy, has for some decades been adopted as its presiding genius by the Ndràngata, the Calabrian mafia.The annual festival of this sixteenth-century 227

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statue, at its high and remote sanctuary, is attended by the bosses of the society who gather from around the world. New initiates of the organization are sworn in before the Madonna, to whom they make significant gifts. Despite its criminal activities, and notwithstanding the denunciation of the local bishop, the Ndràngata remains rooted in codes of honour, public order and piety which explain its appropriation of the power of the Madonna di Polsi.23 The prodigy worked by the Madonna in her image is the proof of the virtue of those who move in her orbit. It further defines a sacred geography which cuts across the jurisdictional limits of secular powers. Again, it deserves emphasis that the community of the virtuous, united by shared participation in a given image cult, can define its own topographical coordinates, which transcend those of political or economic forces. A typical instance comes from the small harbour town of Sori, on the Ligurian coast to the east of Genoa.To this place in 1509, a returning sailor brought home a panel painting of the Virgin Mary and Christ Child, which he had picked up on his travels (see illus. 15).The style of this picture, which is still venerated, places its origin in fourteenth-century Italy; but the marine motif in the story implied, from the outset of the cult, a prestigious Eastern pedigree.The sailor’s house lay in what was effectively a suburb of the little port, separated by a river from the urban centre and from the principal parish of the town. Very soon word spread that the picture had occasioned a miracle: upon its arrival in the house, the sailor’s daughter, who had been dumb from birth, had begun to speak. She announced that she had seen the Virgin Mary in a vision, dressed as in the image.The sailor promptly declared his wish to found a chapel adjacent to his home, in which the image might be honoured by all and in which services might be held, in particular for the inhabitants of the immediate neighbourhood.That neighbourhood was defined as Sori in the parish of San Michele, distinguished from the main town, which lay in the parish of Santa Margherita. In justification it was alleged that in winter weather it was impossible to reach the parish church of Sori.This was such an absurd claim – the river was traversed by a bridge, and the distance to the urban mother church was (as it still is) no more than 100 yards – that it underlines the strength of social feeling which was the real driving force behind the promotion of both the image and the chapel that housed it.The practical argument would clearly not, alone, have sufficed to permit the construction of a new chapel. But the stories of the first and then ensuing 228

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131 The Madonna delle Grazie, Protectress of Sori, 18th century, fresco, ceiling of the parish church of Santa Margherita, Sori.

miracles associated with the sailor’s picture, which upon investigation convinced the archbishop of Genoa, did provide the vindication that the people of this district had evidently been seeking. After the construction of the chapel of the Madonna delle Grazie, there were repeated conflicts between the inhabitants of the surrounding area, who funded the building and whose efforts were coordinated by a local lay oratory of Sant’Erasmo, and residents of the main town of Sori, who claimed a share in the control (including the economic profits) of the shrine. In an attempt to resolve these tensions, an annual procession linking the two parts of the town was being held by the mid-eighteenth century.This procession, which continues today on the feast of the Assumption in mid-August, entails the carrying of a large cassa with an image of the Virgin Mary from the mother church into the streets and hinterland of Sori, reaching its final climax at the little chapel of the Madonna delle Grazie. As the image passes, mortars are let off along the banks of the river that divides the town: a deafening and memorable image both of the continuing tension that underlies the ritual and of its symbolic resolution in communal festivity.24 During the year, the 229

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132 The Madonna delle Grazie of Sori on the wall of a house near the parish church.

133 The Madonna del Ponte of Sori. Shrine on the bridge linking the parish church to the chapel of the Madonna delle Grazie.

three-dimensional cassa is kept in the parish church of Santa Margherita, on the ceiling of which are painted scenes of the story of the miraculous image (illus. 131). A painted version of the image appears on the wall of a nearby house fronting on the sea, looking towards the chapel in which the miraculous image itself is framed (illus. 132). Exposed to erosion by sea air, this fresco is regularly and devotionally repainted. On the bridge between it and the chapel sits a little statue of the Madonna, miraculously saved from the severe bombardment of Sori in 1944 (illus. 133). This visual sequence provides a permanent physical and conceptual link between different parts of the community.

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Contesting sacred identities The Madonna delle Grazie of Sori is also typical of many such cult images in that it came over time to stand not only for the distinctive values of its immediate neighbourhood within the town, but also as a symbol of the special holiness of the town in its entirety as it faced the wider world.Yet this partial appropriation of the image as protector of the population at large has not eliminated a strong sense of its ties to a more restricted neighbourhood. A significantly different case is that of the painted Florentine Madonna of Orsanmichele (see illus. 51): as its cult expanded from its local origins in the late thirteenth century, in the mid-fourteenth century it became appropriated by the city government as the official figurehead of the Florentine state.25 The process by which successive powers and interests may attach themselves to the charisma of a miraculous image, overlaying and complicating its pattern of allegiances, is illustrated by the case of the Madonna of the Pillar at Vico di Mondovì.When, in 1595, Bishop Giovanni Castrucci of Mondovì heard of crowds gathering around an isolated pillar beside the old Via Flaminia (see illus. 128), he instituted enquiries, which established that the developing popular cult was being fostered by the local parish priest. The bishop, especially after his receipt of a stern warning from the prefect of the Inquisition in Rome, was reluctant to authorize the devotion. He went to some trouble, not merely to interview some of those who declared themselves cured by the image but also to correspond with authorities in the home towns of these pilgrims, in order to verify the stories of miracles. In a number of cases, the evidence of sanctity appeared weaker in the light of the information gathered. Nevertheless, as a means to contain the chaotic scenes in the open countryside, the bishop eventually approved the construc tion of a church – to replace the makeshift chapel initially erected by devotees – at the pillar’s prominent site in a natural bowl between hills. In the follow ing year, however, a prestigious and politically interested visitor, Duke Carlo Emanuele of Savoy, announced his own intention to construct a grandiose sanctuary around the pillar, which he would call the Temple of Peace. He would further consolidate his shaky control of this region on the margin of his territory by making the new shrine double as a mausoleum for his family. Rule in Piedmont was contested by the Kingdom of France, from which the region had only recently been separated: the miraculous Madonna was to be recruited as a bulwark of the principality of Savoy. The bishop’s partially 231

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134 Sanctuary of the Madonna di Vico, Mondovì.

completed structure was pulled down to enable the erection of what would now become a vast and splendid monument to ducal ambition. A spectacular, centrally planned and domed architectural design, executed in stages between the turn of the seventeenth and the mid-eighteenth century, links the cult deliberately to Roman models, even as it echoes a pattern previously adopted, albeit on a humbler scale, to frame other miraculous Madonnas at Bibbona and Prato (illus. 134, 135).The architectural form in all these cases drew on grandiose classical and oriental associations and enabled the image, centred on an altar beneath the dome of heaven, to be dramatically lit from above.26 A community of Cistercian monks was installed in the church, with papal privileges which also helped to make the site respectable in Roman eyes. In 1682 the ducal house would arrange the coronation of the Madonna of the Pillar as Queen of the Royal Mountain, Regina Montis Regalis.27 Still later, at the time of the creation of the Italian state, the Dominican bishop Tommaso Ghilardi would reclaim the Madonna of the Pillar as a spiritual bastion against the secular tendencies evinced by the occupation of Rome and by the politics of the then-duke of Savoy, Vittorio Emanuele ii. In a work on the sanctuary which he republished in 1862, Ghilardi’s praise for earlier members of the family who had been more committed to the image 232

135 The Madonna di Vico, formerly on a roadside pillar similar to that in illus. 127, in its architectural setting, completed in the mid-18th century.

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at Mondovì, was a veiled attack on its present representative.28 The case of the Madonna of the Pillar shows how the horizons and uses of an image cult could be pulled in quite different directions over time. The creativity of such gestures, different as they are in detail from one another, as the construction of the cults of the Madonna of Sori and of the Madonna of Mondovì, underlines the fact that there is nothing natural about neighbourhood or communal identities.The finding and promotion of an extraordinary image is always a strategic gesture which proposes to remake society on a new pattern. This strategy has often been provoked by a sense of threat. The image itself has sometimes been precipitated by tension between competing forces. A case in point is the significantly titled Madonna of Peace of Albisola, to the west of Genoa.The Madonna della Pace was originally made as an ex-voto following a mysterious apparition, which on 18 October 1482 had brought about a historic peace between the neighbouring communities of Albisola and Stella. The apparition, in the form of a bright light and the sound of the single word pace, ‘peace’, had been witnessed and heard by groups from both places, just as violence had been about to erupt between them in woodland where they had been disputing access to resources.The image subsequently commissioned gave permanence to the moment of suspended hostilities and became the focus of a sanctuary, which would remain as a lasting monument to the shared interests of the two villages.29 Perceived threats take many forms: the borgo of Sori, which expressed its separate identity vis-à-vis the town as a whole, is paralleled at a higher level by the town which developed an intensified sense of civic pride in the face of its imminent absorption within an expanding state.This was a particularly common experience in late medieval and early modern Europe. A telling case is that of Chiavari, where in the 1600s there arose the highly charged cult of the Madonna dell’Orto (illus. 136 and see illus. 28, 29).This movement began in the first instance at the initiative of a group of poor inhabitants of the suburbs of the town, and in particular of the extramural parish of Rupinaro.30 The first reported miracles were related, before the episcopal inquest, by humble people of that district, all of whom knew and testified to the good character of the others: a socially modest but evidently close-knit group, including the gardener and the gaoler of the cittadella.When a woman described the miracle of her daughter’s cure of lameness while she prayed before the image, she told of how the news was brought to her 234

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136 Chiavari and the Golfo del Tigullio, 1821, pen and ink (Strongwayes).

in the night by an excited neighbour (nostro vicino), and another deponent described his relationship to the girl’s family in these terms: ‘I am not their relative, nor their debtor, nor their creditor’, but, he added, they collaborated to ‘trade together’.31 At one level the Madonna dell’Orto was perceived as belonging to Rupinaro, and this lingering sense was demonstrated by the subsequent erection, on the bridge leading into Rupinaro from Chiavari, of a sculpted version of the prototype in the garden. The social distinction, and indeed the tensions, between the town of Chiavari and the suburban district of Rupinaro were ancient. When Chiavari had been built as a military outpost and commercial centre by the Genoese around 1200, the pre-existing settlement to the west remained marginal to the new town.When the wall defences were subsequently extended, the inhabitants of this area refused to contribute to the cost, and thereby retained their distinct identity. This was ironically underlined when in 1331 the suburb was sacked by Catalan pirates. However, the sixteenth century saw the extensive redevelopment of the extramural suburb of Chiavari, with much land being reclaimed from the sea and many new houses built. In 1596 the elected councillors of the borgo of Rupinaro petitioned for the suburb to be given the status of full citizenship with Chiavari, but were refused.The council of Chiavari, 235

137 The first miracles of the Madonna dell’Orto, 19th century, fresco, parish church of San Giacomo, Rupinaro, Chiavari.

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backed by the Genoese senate, justified the exclusion on the ground that the inhabitants of Rupinaro were nothing but a community of sailors and gardeners, unworthy of jurisdictional rights.The rebuff can only have intensified the sense of a separate identity among the people of Rupinaro. Just a few years later, in 1635, a large meeting of the università of Rupinaro determined to rebuild their local church on a grand scale.The area lacked the rich and aristocratic patrons who inhabited intramural Chiavari, but each resident offered what he or she could to the communal project: a small sum of money, building materials or a few days’ work. This was the community – marginalized, poor and disenfranchised – which had first promoted the cult of the Madonna dell’Orto. As late as the early nineteenth century a pair of pictures was painted for the church of Rupinaro showing the first miracles of the image in the garden being performed for local people (illus. 137). However, the destiny of the Madonna dell’Orto was to be caught up from the outset in a larger struggle over the image of Chiavari as a whole, with the result that Rupinaro lost its special claim to the cult. Instead, since the beginning of the eighteenth century the people of Rupinaro have continued to express their separate identity by means of a different, imported cult, known as the Madonna of Caravaggio and venerated in the image of an apparition which took place in Lombardy in the fifteenth century. This cult has remained locally distinct to Rupinaro, and continues to be strongly supported in the district, especially on the annual feast day of the image. Older inhabitants of Rupinaro, walking the few yards into the town centre, will still say that they are ‘going to Chiavari’.32 Meanwhile, from a source of comfort for the suburban poor, the Madonna dell’Orto rapidly became the focus of more powerful interests. When the Genoese senate was eventually persuaded, in return for a measure of supervision, to remove its opposition, the triumph was celebrated locally as a victory for the whole population of Chiavari.33 A series of patriotic townspeople wrote contemporary accounts of these events at Chiavari, celebrating them in terms of a community forged through shared loyalty to the Madonna dell’Orto.34 Describing both the scenes of devotion before the image and the collective efforts to erect the church which was to house it, these authors declared social distinctions and tensions to have been dissolved in the common cause.They claimed that through the cult of the image a new kind of urban community had been forged which would 237

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overcome internal social tensions and could therefore withstand the predatory intentions of the capital of the Republic. Agostino Busco, writing in around 1660 but drawing both on his own childhood memory and on the eyewitness descriptions set down at the time by Pellegro Robbio, put this into verse: Every evening crowds flocked here, Men and women, lords and ladies, Side by side To carry bricks and stones. Those walls were quickly built By common effort Of peasants and townspeople, Nobles and the poor.35

The involvement of members of the various aristocratic families of Chiavari in the development of the cult demonstrated their desire to be seen to patronize a highly successful popular and local initiative. Each church of the district boasted its own cult image, and the ancient dynasties of the Vaccà, Rivarola and Ravaschiera competed with the more recently wealthy Costaguta to contribute to the ornamentation of one local shrine after another.36 To the west of the town, the sanctuary of the Madonna dell’Olivo at Bacezza, an image popularly alleged to have been discovered in a nearby cave in the tenth century, having been supposedly hidden during iconoclastic times, began to attract substantial gifts in the 1630s, and a major rebuilding followed from 1660, in which year the image (a panel painting dating from around 1400) was enshrined in a scurolo beneath the high altar (illus. 138).37 The sense of neighbourhood rivalry at this time was expressed by a Capuchin preacher who, stimulated by the success of the Madonna dell’Orto, attempted to revive the cult of a different miraculous painted Madonna within the intramural church of San Giovanni Battista. ‘Since’, he declared in 1633, ‘the Madonna has recently performed so many graces outside Chiavari [i.e. in the extramural garden; the new basilica completed the following year also remained in the suburb], let her now come within the circuit of the walls and indeed within the heart of this church.’38 Educated clerics, urbane and cosmopolitan bankers and aristocrats, and less 238

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138 The Madonna dell’Olivo, Bacezza, Chiavari.

advantaged groups in the population of Chiavari each found motives to converge in the support for one or another miraculous image.

Imagined communities of the image The imaginary geography of the cult image is susceptible of continual reinvention and enlargement through shared experience and the telling of stories. A group of sailors from Camogli staying in Istanbul in 1877, having befriended some Muslim workmen at the great mosque of Hagia Sophia, succeeded in secreting an immaginetta of the Madonna del Boschetto of Camogli within the fresh plaster of a niche inside the building. Once again, the reproduction, despite being both invisible and inaccessible, inspired the collective imagination of those who knew of its whereabouts. The story of the Camogliese Madonna’s partial re-consecration of the former Byzantine 239

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imperial church of Hagia Sophia was told in the marine from Tunisia to Cape Town. The tale recorded how Constantinople, Genoa’s ancient sister city and commercial partner, had been reclaimed spiritually for Christianity by Liguria – and specifically by the Camogliesi.39 Such storytelling built upon the original narrative, helping to enlarge the social group for whom a common knowledge of the Madonna del Boschetto was a defining quality. As this example illustrates, if the image cult often entails the physical reunion of its devotees, the shared ownership of reproductions of, and stories about, a particular holy image can also create a kind of imagined community, analogous to the secular bond between those who, although never meeting face to face, open the same newspaper each morning.40 When the newly carved statue of the Virgin and Child had been installed in the ancient Genoese church of the Madonna delle Vigne in 1616, the cult began to ramify through the surrounding streets. In the 1640s, it was recorded that when the bell rang at the church to announce regular Saturday afternoon sermons in the chapel of the Virgin, in every house within earshot candles were lit at that moment before engraved copies of the miraculous Madonna of Santa Maria delle Vigne.41

Sacred space in the modern city The nineteenth century recast the argument about sacred space in the city, as the rational voice of modernization set itself against the perceived super stition and reaction of popular devotion.The miraculous image became the site of conflict, a catalyst of debate about the prevailing values of contemporary society. A memorandum from the chief of police in Liguria, addressed to the vicar-general of the archbishop in Genoa, dated 10 March 1817, epitomized the clash: It has been intimated to me, indeed it is a general rumour throughout the city, that a crippled woman living as a dependant at the Albergo dei Poveri [the civic hospital for the poor] has suddenly recovered her ability to walk on a damaged leg, so that she was able to walk back openly to the Albergo, leaving her crutch before the image of Our Lady in the piazzetta called Santa Maria Angelorum. The clamorous event is naturally stimulating popular devotion, bringing a continuous crowd of people to venerate this image. The 240

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people, who never reflect, and are not guided by the true spirit of religion, have made a kind of sanctuary in the piazza, and they want to honour the image, preferring to attend prayers before it than to attend functions scheduled for the same times in the nearby parish church of San Siro.

The secular officer, distressed by the public disturbance, urged the vicar to hold an ecclesiastical inquiry in order to verify the truth of the miracle and to have the image itself removed to the church where, as he tactfully intimated, it could be venerated ‘with more decorum’. He cast aspersions on the quality of the individuals responsible for the cult in the square and sought the support of the Church hierarchy for a clear segregation between the sanctuary of the parish church and the secular public highway.42 The progress of the nineteenth century, with the advent to Genoa of large-scale industry and the politics of Italian unification, would further polarize positions on the continuing relevance of sacred images in a modern city. In 1839 a commission made up of members of aristocratic families was formed to conserve street shrines and images on the walls of private houses, which were being removed both on aesthetic grounds and in the course of road-widening schemes.43 Tensions reached a climax during the early 1890s, as Genoa prepared to present itself to the world as forward-looking and advanced in the context of an international exhibition planned for 1892: the anniversary year of the first voyage of Columbus, boasted son of Genoa, to America. New street construction, inspired by the Haussmann boulevards of Paris, had already provoked conservative outcry as a number of churches were demolished, including the Dominican monastery (to be the site of the Carlo Felice Opera House), a large part of the Jesuit convent (cleared to create the civic Piazza De Ferrari) and the principal house of the Franciscans (over which strode a splendid new colonnaded shopping street, the Via Venti Settembre). In response, however, new development projects could in turn throw up new Madonnas, either as modern variants on the traditional Genoese over-door or, as in the case of an apartment block in the expanding middle-class quarter of Castelletto above the city, as the miraculous outcome of the building process itself (a person was saved from a falling beam), leading to the setting up of a shrine in the wall (illus. 139). In the late 1990s, as in the 1890s, this urban neighbourhood was rededicated to the Virgin around the annual feast day of 3 July. The Rosary was sung 241

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processionally around the Spianata – the large belvedere overlooking the port of Genoa on which the building stands – and the sea below was ritually blessed.44 The most fiercely debated issue in the late nineteenth century was the decision to demolish the northwestern gate of the city, the Porta Pila, in order to create a more modern and magnificent entrance to the city, overlooking the extramural area which would be occupied by the 1892–3 Colum bian exhibition. The issue became a cause célèbre in Genoa and in the Italian peninsula at large, polarizing the arguments of the Catholic revival on the one hand, and on the other those favouring an image of the new country as freed from both clerical interference and popular superstition. Presiding over the seventeenth-century gate was a carving of the Madonna della Città, the Queen of Genoa, to whose protection the 139 The Madonna of Castelletto, Genoa. city had repeatedly been entrusted in earlier centuries (illus. 140). Defenders of the image pointed out that this protection was now needed more than ever by the population of the new state of Italy; they reminded the modernizers that Mary had been credited in the past with having preserved the liberty of the citizens of the Genoese Republic on several famous occasions, and especially in the 1620s (against the depredations of the Savoyards and French) and in 1747 (against the imperial Austrians).45 The contemporary press was divided, the Corriere declaring the statue’s removal a good thing, because it was aesthetically repellant and therefore an unpleasant sight for foreign visitors to the exhibition, whereas the Eco d’Italia riposted with the charge against the moderns of sacrilege and barbarism.46 In the event, the gate was pulled down (to make way for the pompously splendid, and iconographically secular, Ponte Monumentale, which is still extant), and the Madonna of Porta Pila was removed, by a compromise, to an elevated niche on the city wall, from where she could preside over both the Columbian exhibition and the railway 242

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140 Porta Pila, the northwest gate of Genoa, late 19th-century lithograph.

station: twin emblems of modernity (illus. 141).47 Pious offerings continued to be made to the statue in its new location.48 On the eve of the twentieth century Genoa, the most industrialized and cosmopolitan city of the new state of Italy, was still the City of the Virgin. Another of the Madonnas which had adorned the seventeenth-century city gates, that above the Porta della Lanterna, had similarly been removed in 1878, equally surrounded by furious debate between conservatori and modernisti, and the subject of a petition bearing 83,000 signatures of protest. An article in the Settimana Religiosa the following year lamented the erosion of the popular festivities which in the past had surrounded these particular statues: With the arrival of [the revolutions of] 1848, a liberal and libertine spirit gradually began to infiltrate the working classes through the mutual aid societies, and the honouring of Mary in these images ceased.49

Yet despite such jeremiads, the workers’ movements in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in fact did much to encourage the maintenance of these devotional practices, partly through the founding of specifically Catholic societies, but also because of ongoing working-class attachment 243

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141 The Madonna of Porta Pila relocated above Stazione Brignole.

to images.50 In 1887 a project was announced to re-erect this latter Virgin on the new Porta della Lanterna; half a century later it would be relocated on the Molo Giano within the harbour, to be saluted by ships as they passed.51 Trains and ships continue today to enter and leave the city under the gaze of the Madonna. While the rhetoric of the late nineteenth-century press was combative and binary, there were many nuances in practice, and different distinctions were made about the perception of space in different contexts. In Savona, the major port to the west of Genoa, the socialist tradition held the whole cult of Savona’s Madonna della Misericordia to be a Genoese invention designed to enhance its domination (illus. 142); the memory of the early sixteenth-century Genoese crushing of the Savonese rebellion and the building of a fortress on the site of the former cathedral was alive into the late twentieth century, when there were still old socialists who on principle had refused ever to enter the castle grounds.Yet while socialism in Savona could identify itself in these terms for reasons of conflict with Genoa, particular categories of worker there (for example, the funicular operators who brought down minerals to the port from the hills) had always been very Catholic and devoted to the Madonna della Misericordia. And in other areas, such as Voltri, an industrial zone much closer to Genoa, socialists were also members of religious confraternities focused on very local cults, attached to the Madonna delle Grazie or the Madonna of Acquasanta.52 Both these latter images were located in the hinterland above Genoa, from which many of the industrial workers came, and with which they 244

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retained strong links, symbolically reinforced by the annual confraternal processions into the hills. Sampierdarena, the next settlement along the western coastline from Genoa, saw a huge flowering of mutual aid and other types of workers’ associations with a significant religious element in the mid-nineteenth century (despite the anxieties of Church, state and secular Mazzinians). As the cutting through of the railway transformed this district from an elegant summer resort of the Genoese aristocracy into the most important metallurgical, machine- and ship-building and sugar- and soap-refining centre of Italy, its patronal image was duly re context ualized. A painting of Christ carrying the cross, originally on a pilaster near the lighthouse of Genoa, moved to Sampierdarena in the early eighteenth century because of security concerns (so large were the crowds gathering before it, in what was a military zone), and 142 Edicola with the image of the Madonna della Misericordia re-sited in 1799, was consistently celeof Savona, 18th century, Via Pia, Savona. brated throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially during a series of epidemics and natural disasters (illus. 143). While the centenary of its first translation in 1822 was attended by the king, Carlo Felice (and in 1815 Pius vii had prayed before the image), by 1868 the mayor was invoking the Santissimo Salvatore as having been the inspiration for his first thoughts of the potentialities of the railway. The confraternity of the Santo Sacramento, focused on the image of the Santissimo Salvatore, embraced nearly the entire population, while other associations coexisted and overlapped with it. 245

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143 Christ the Saviour, 17th century, detached and framed fresco. Church of Santa Maria della Cella, Sampierdarena, Genoa.

In its intensified strength and plurality of forms, devotional practice seemed to be becoming more challenging to authority. In a climate of heightened concerns about the massing of working-class crowds, after the casaccia of San Martino came out in 1853 the archbishop prohibited further processions. In 1863 permission was requested on the basis that 96 confratelli had contributed 2 franchi each for the honour of carrying the float, and another six had offered an extraordinary 600 franchi in order to carry the heavy cross. The image of Christ acquired new vitality and resonance at the heart of the rapidly expanding and self-consciously distinctive industrial town. In 1929 a new chapel was inaugurated with great pomp and many commemorative panegyrics. Like many other local cults, 246

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144 Procession for the image of Christ the Saviour in Sampierdarena, 1999.

this one was maintained and developed through the Fascist period, steering a path between the parochial emphasis of the Azione Cattolica network and the regime’s encouragement of the folkloric – presenting an identity apparently compatible with either but conceptually independent of both. In 1999, the cassa of the image was serenaded by a band, and crosses were carried by every local confraternity to form a gleaming line against the port warehouses, in a procession which brought many hundreds of people onto the streets of the town, now virtually post-industrial but still a significant transport and commercial hub, segmented by roads, railway and seaport (illus. 144).53

The image of nature The Madonna of the city was also, and more anciently, a Madonna of the earth (illus. 145). The sobriquet of the Madonna of the Garden, in use from the outset of the major cult in Chiavari, points to a thread by which the wonder-working statue or picture regularly reconnects the city to the life-giving forces of nature. Prodigious images were in some instances believed to be formed organically. Gumppenberg collected a report of a nut said to have naturally assumed the form of the Virgin and Child.54 In other instances, nature itself is held to be the first to recognize a prodigious 247

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145 Rural shrine near Camogli, photograph c. 1870–90.

image. The tree which grows around a rustic image, to frame and protect it, and which is subsequently incorporated within a chapel constructed to house services before the picture, is found in several instances, including the Virgin of the Willow Tree outside Ferrara.55 In the case of the Madonna of Cortona, another outdoor, suburban fresco originally situated in the disreputable context of the marginalized leather-workers of that town, it was a pair of oxen which, in 1549, signalled the miraculous presence by kneeling before the picture.56 The image is a means to establish a positive relationship with the natural environment (differently as this may be under stood at diverse periods). A pattern repeated in many regions is that of the image shrine established in the rural hinterland of a city, and linked to the urban population by a regular pilgrimage. At Bologna, the hilltop shrine of the Madonna of St Luke is connected with the city to its south by an arcade, 3.5 kilometres in length, constructed between the late seventeenth and the late eighteenth century to protect the image during its regular procession to and from the town (illus. 146).57 The Tuscan Madonna di 248

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Impruneta, situated in a watery landscape a few kilometres to the south of Florence, was in the Renaissance period brought ceremonially into the city in times of general anxiety, especially to bring rain in times of drought: once she was set up in the main piazza, contemporaries recorded an immediate sense of public relief.58 The Madonna della Consolazione of Reggio Calabria, in a chapel 3 kilometres from the city, developed in the course of the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries into a vital point of reference for the urban population, which in a series of crises caused by plague,Turkish threats and earthquakes fetched the picture into the city for protection. From the time of a famine in 1676, the image has been brought down from its sanctuary every year into Reggio, in a procession in September accompanied by the dancing of the tarantella, residing thereafter in the cathedral until December.59 These connections of the image cult with the forces of nature are a strong indication of continuities linking medieval and post-medieval

146 Sanctuary of the Madonna of St Luke, Bologna, with processional colonnade connecting the shrine to the town. Photograph of c. 1880–90.

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practices to more ancient sites and rituals. The Madonna di Ripalta near Foggia in Apulia has since the twelfth century been housed in a chapel on a riverbank, where the painting was said to have been discovered. Each year from April to September the picture is brought to the mother church in the town, 9 kilometres distant, of Cerignola.The situation is resonant with earlier connotations: archaeological finds have identified a Roman temple on the rural site, dedicated to the goddess Bona, protectress of flocks and woods.60 Continuity of activity on a particular site from ancient times, and particularly continuity of perceived significance, should never be assumed. Nonetheless, the Mediterranean is ringed by sanctuary sites whose reuse over centuries points to enduring perceptions and practices with regard to the sacralization of the landscape.61 In the case of Genoa, surrounded as the city is by mountains on all sides except that towards the sea (see illus. 3), an arc of hilltop sanctuaries in the immediate hinterland, all constructed between the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries, offered the protection of a series of wonder-working images, many at locations with particular geographical features which may be indicative of pre-Christian origins of the cult at the site. Ligurian image sanctuaries associated either with trees or with curative springs are numerous. At Nostra Signora della Rovere (San Bartolomeo al Mare, Genoa) the Madonna appeared in an image in an oak tree; the image of Nostra Signora di Montebruno above La Spezia was found in a beech tree; those of the Madonna di Bacezza at Chiavari and of Nostra Signora di Roverano above Sestri Levante were discovered in olive trees; and Nostra Signora del Garbo (at Rivarolo above Genoa) and Nostra Signora del Castagno (at Quarto, Genoa) were found in the trunks of chestnut trees. Images found beside springs include, among many others, Nostra Signora dell’Acquasanta at Voltri near Genoa (see illus. 70) and Nostra Signora delle Tre Fontane at Montobbio.62 The historicity of all of these local legends is extremely un certain, and it would be wrong to assume continuity with earlier cults in the absence of archaeological evidence, but the sheer quantity of such cult sites of Christian images at significant natural locations is strongly indicative that, in some cases at least, the pilgrimage to these rural images had preChristian origins and retained elements of older credence in the power of the deity believed to be present in the image. When foreign armies had failed to penetrate or had been driven back from Genoa, as happened in 1625 and again in 1746‒8, either the 250

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Madonna, as protectress of the city, or Christ Himself was held to have worked the miracle through one or more of their images. In recognition of these perceived supernatural interventions, senators were dispatched to make regular pilgrimages to these lofty sites: this was not a light duty, and elderly senators petitioned to be exempted. The locae sanctae were the shrines of the Volto Santo in the church of San Bartolomeo degli Armeni

147 The Holy House of the Virgin Mary of Loreto in the church of Oregina, Genoa, early 20th century.

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(see illus. 7);63 the fifteenth-century statue of the Madonna del Monte (see illus. 65);64 the painting of the Madonna delle Grazie on the hill above Voltri;65 the seventeenth-century replica of the Holy House of Loreto at Oregina (illus. 147);66 and the little carving of the Madonnetta in its Rococo temple (see illus. 54-8).67 After one of the worst moments, when in 1625 a Franco-Savoyard army fortunately turned back from its passage across the mountains towards the city, a new shrine at the pass was dedicated to a specially created image of the Madonna of Victory.68 This was also the year in which new walls began to be built around the city (with a carved Madonna on every gate): stone and spiritual defences were envisaged as part of the same protective strategy. Genoa’s enemies at this time were seen in religious no less than military terms: at the end of the sixteenth century Bishop Bossio reminded the doge and senate in an address that the situation of Liguria, compounded by the trading activities of its merchants, rendered the region dangerously open to the easy access of Protestant heresies.69 Its outer ring of supernatural protectors defined the spiritual geography of the capital of the Ligurian Republic. A sacred orator of the mid-century catalogued the mountain shrines surrounding the city, and the walls and gates with their Marian iconography, as the effective defences of Genoa.70 As in other instances, the location of these image sanctuaries called both divine agency and the elemental forces of nature into the service of the city. The proliferation of such sites in the early modern period could be viewed somewhat differently from each of a range of perspectives. To the Genoese senate, state patronage of the shrine on the mountain supported the claim of the Virgin Mary’s protection of the Republic as it came under increasing threat from greater external powers.To the Carmelite, Servite or Jesuit monks who carried the Church’s mission to the countryside between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, stories of miraculous images in natural settings were a convenient point of convergence with popular culture.To lay men and women who lacked other ways to control the circum stances of their lives, the deliberate placement of a holy image could be an effective means of empowerment. Reviewing the evidence of visions and found images in early modern Spain,William Christian has described these processes as amounting to a Christianization of the landscape, achieved primarily by the economically and politically weak.71 The Italian experience also suggests that many image cults, in the hands of an otherwise disem powered laity, were being used to stake out a geographical and social order 252

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148 Procession up the mountain from Triora with the Madonna della Misericordia, c. 1990.

which resisted the claims of the city-based hierarchies of both state and Church. Implicit in many of the tales of the ‘first discovery’ of rural miraculous images is the clear suggestion that the site of the image’s appearance had already, for some considerable time, been important to local inhabitants.72 The mobility of the image lent itself in particular to the service of local culture and to the potentially subversive interests of subaltern society. In parts of the Italian peninsula less altered than others by the recent expansion of cities and the industrialization of agriculture, living memory still records the way in which sacred images were traditionally used to canal ize divine powers for the protection of animals and crops. Rustic processions with sacred images still endure in parts of Liguria, such as the Valle Argen tina, where an annual procession takes the Madonna della Misericordia from Triora up the neighbouring mountain, in the process blessing the fields and cursing harmful insects (illus. 148).73 In Friuli, it is possible to see frescoes on barn walls and edicole at field margins, before which offerings and imprecations used to be made. Country people can remember how, at least until the early part of the last century, a portion of the fruit crop was left as an offering to one of these rustic Madonnas in thanks for her help; farm animals were taken during rogations to an outdoor shrine for blessing; a niche with an image was erected to drive away poisonous snakes; and 253

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candles lit before another were believed to be an effective remedy against ants when they threatened the mulberry crop, so important to the local silk industry.74 Small edicole of this kind used to be ubiquitous in the area, and were commonly known, although not ecclesiastically consecrated, as altarüol.75 Such easy and familiar commerce between holy images and agricultural life helps to explain the rich vein of stories concerning statues discovered in tree roots and appearances of the Virgin in bushes. Especially since the decree of Trent in 1563, rustic shrines have been deprecated by bishops. Symptomatic was the treatment of the Madonna del Piano at Sesto Fiorentino in Tuscany, a roadside Madonna venerated since the fourteenth century when ploughing oxen were said to have discovered the image and knelt before it. At the beginning of the seventeenth century a chapel was constructed to enclose the fresco where it stood, in order to render it more respectable.76 The rustic image which becomes the object of a particular cult tends, over time, to conceal its origins beneath the pomp of a marble sanctuary and official regulation; but its roots remain in the fields.

Mary of the sea Liguria, like Friuli, has its Madonnas of the earth; but even more, its Madonnas of the sea. In this respect the region is profoundly tied to older and wider Mediterranean cults. The great mother goddesses, including Isis and Aphrodite, were all born from the sea, the primordial womb of life. Diana, deity of the moon, was also recognized to have powers both over the tides and over human birth.77 From these august forebears, the Virgin Mary inherited similar connotations and powers. One interpretation of her name derived it directly from the sea: Mary was herself the mar. St Jerome called her ‘a drop of the sea’, stilla maris, a phrase which an early mistranscription turned to stella maris, ‘star of the sea’. In the antiphon, Ave Maris Stella, dating from around 700 ad and recited by sailors from that day until the present, Mary is described as the pole star, guide to those who would travel across the sea.The sea’s dangers have since ancient times given rise, all around the shores of the Mediterranean, to a ring of protective sanctuaries, from each of which an image gazes benevolently out over the seaways. A Genoese nobleman, Anselmo Adorno, recorded in 1470 how, when his ship became lost in fog off Sicily, the entire crew 254

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sang and invoked the names of the saints and of almost all the sanctuaries of the sea: this song is called by Genoese sailors ‘the holy words’ (le sante parole). Mariners from Genoa are accustomed to sing this when for more than an hour they have lost the sight of land.78

A late fifteenth-century text of the Sante Parole is extant, and it reads as a litany of the names of Christian sanctuaries along the entire northern coast of the Mediterranean, beginning in the Holy Land and passing via Greece and the Ionian Islands to Italy and so to Spain. As travellers by sea scoured the horizon for reassuring landmarks, these holy places were familiar sources of protection.The extant text, in Tuscan and dating from around 1480, reads in part: Die n’ai’ [sc. Dio ci aiuti, ‘God help us’] e Santa Maria del Cavo delle Colonne [and the Madonna of Capocolonna near Crotone] ... Die n’ai’ e Santa Maria delle Grazie di Monte Nero [the Madonna of Montenero near Livorno] ... Die n’ai’ e Santa Maria di Corom [the Madonna Coronata above Cornigliano near Genoa] ... Die n’ai’ e Santa Maria del Garbo [Santa Maria del Garbo in Val Polcevera, near Genoa]79

A sailors’ calling song in Ligurian dialect recorded in the last century specifically invokes both the Virgin of Loreto and the more local Madonna of Boschetto at Camogli: To the shrouds, to the shrouds! ... Let us praise God and the Madonna – Our Holy Mother of Loreto And the one of Boschetto, That she may pray to her blessed Son That he should guard us from ill passing, 255

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Passed, or to come. Jesus Christ send us wind in the poop – Rudder on course, And away! Away!80

The intimate connection between these images and the ocean which for centuries they have been understood to protect is reinforced not only by prayers but by countless stories, ex-voto representations and public ceremonies. Many of these – once again – indicate a significant degree of continuity from the antique to the Christian period.The stories concerning images of the Madonna ‘found in the sea’, such as the Genoese Madonna della Fortuna and the Madonna of Coronata, or the similar legend of the miraculous crucifix of Sestri Levante, echo older narratives and point to en during traditions.81 As early as the eighth or seventh century bc, one of the Homeric Hymns describes the god’s abrupt appearance on the seashore: a figure whom the witnessing sailor, startled and confused, can only identify as divine. The same myth recurs in the much later, second-century ad account by Pausanias of the discovery by fishermen at Methymna of the image of Dionysus Phallen: the strange object in their nets surely has something of divinity about it.82 The marine origins of many Christian image cults betray underlying resonances across time, both of practice and belief. The Madonna of Capocolonna near Crotone on the coast of Calabria is venerated close to an ancient temple of the mother goddess Hera Lacinia, of which a single column remains to give the picture its sobriquet. Tradition has it that the image was given by Dionysius the Areopagite. Each May it is processed from the cathedral to Capo Colonna, from where it is brought back to the mother church by boat. As it crosses the water it is accompanied by fishing boats which are thus blessed by the Virgin; on arrival in the har bour it is received with gunfire and fireworks.83 Another procession by water, revived in modern times from 1924, is that by which the townspeople of Camogli in Liguria honour a statue of the Madonna associated with a tiny chapel on Punta Chiappa, the dangerously rocky point of Monte Portofino (illus. 149). On the first Sunday of August, a fleet of fishing and other vessels, each illuminated by candles, makes its way to and from the chapel, which at other times is saluted by sailors as they pass. Its name is Stella Maris.84 The idea that the image literally watches those under its protection as it gazes out to sea from one or another of these sanctuaries is conveyed by 256

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149 A. Poggi, Festival Procession of Boats to the Shrine of ‘Stella Maris’ at Punta Chiappa, mid-20thcentury fresco in the parish church of Camogli.

countless stories emblematic of the care of the picture or statue. Death at sea has always carried the particular fear of the lack of proper burial rites: stories tell of the screams of restless drowned sailors heard from ships.85 An old sailor of Gallipoli in Apulia spoke recently of the terrors of the sea and of the mariner’s dependence on one or another Madonna: No, even if I had to beg, I wouldn’t send my sons to sea, because a few times I’ve been beaten, kneeling in the boat and praying for the Madonna’s help, without oars or sail and only with the rudder, on account of a storm which was carrying us away.86

An ex-voto in the sanctuary of the Madonna del Boschetto instances – as one example among many – the salvation of one who, falling into the sea from his ship off Antibes in September 1856, was miraculously rescued, and hastened to bring his offering to the shrine.87 A sailor on an Italian sailing vessel which almost sank in the Atlantic, after both a storm and a night-time collision with a Scottish steam ship in December 1896, attributed the aversion of disaster to a light which had been kept burning on board, before a copy of the icon of the Madonna of Montallegro.88 The ex-voto collections 257

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of image sanctuaries include enormous numbers of pictures, but also model ships, helmsman’s wheels, lengths of rope, even whales’ teeth and the chains of liberated captives, as records of graces received.89 One further example of the grateful text on a marine ex-voto may stand for this almost infinite category: The Italian barque Ines, captained by Vincenzo Denegri, on the night of 19‒20 May 1901, in the Madagascar Channel was struck by a great cyclone which put the crew in immediate peril of their lives.They fought for many hours against the fury of the elements and by a miracle were saved. The seaman Giacomo Marconcini of Livorno, grateful for so much Grace, to the Most Blessed Mary of Montenero placed this memorial.90

The shrine itself, thus adorned, becomes a microcosmic image of the range of the Madonna’s power over the oceans.

The global image Since ancient times, the exportation of image cults has been a means of cultural and political expansion. In the first century bc the geographer Strabo described how a copy of the celebrated image of Artemis at Ephesus was installed in Massalia (Marseilles) and in turn replicated in further images, based on the Massalian version, which were implanted in daughter colonies of the latter city.91 Modernity, which has done so much to disrupt the population of the Italian peninsula, has carried the miraculous image with it, to articulate new and geographically more distant relationships in a global society. Modern warfare has carried immaginette to remoter places than ever before, reconfiguring once again the global landscape which already in the mid-seventeenth century Gumppenberg had envisaged as mapped accord ing to the protection of the diverse miraculous images of the Virgin (see illus. 2). A boy from Recco, conscripted into the army in 1943 and promptly taken prisoner, found himself stripped of everything but the immaginetta of the Madonna del Suffragio, miraculous statue and protectress of his home town. He wrote at the time of his anxiety for his mother, and his thought that while 258

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his mother was far away, this [Madonna] was his greater mother [la sua mamma più immensa], who alone, out of her great love, could grant his wish to return . . . Now, his little mother is no more . . . but her son still has that image of the Madonna del Suffragio, and looking at her he finds comfort, memory, and hope.92

During the Italian war in North Africa in the 1930s, a friar and son of Camogli, travelling with the army and assisted in his work by soldiers from that town, mounted a series of copies of the Madonna del Boschetto along all the major routes in Ethiopia.The process of colonization was to be carried forward by the enlargement of the zone of influence of the image.93 In this instance, the Italian colonial presence would be short-lived; but across the Atlantic, growing Italian communities were also at work to plant the familiar cults in new soil. The opening of Atlantic horizons in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries led 26 million Italians to emigrate. Of these, no more than half returned. The greater numbers of emigrants left from the Veneto and from the south; but many also departed from the northwest of the peninsula. The enormous numbers of emigrants from Europe to the Americas during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries tended to settle in commu nities with others from the same place of origin, and it is striking to find how extensive has been the use of image cults in providing both a link with the old world and a sense of distinct identity within the new. A native of Sori, writing in 1898, recalled visiting substantial communities of expatriates of the town in Montevideo and Buenos Aires, all of whom possessed copies of the Madonna delle Grazie. Tied as it was to Liguria, the parish of Boca in Buenos Aires (where the Genoese dialect is still spoken to this day) continued to celebrate the annual festival of the image at Sori.94 Meanwhile, in the same Argentinian city, the immigrant population from Sestri Levante, also on the Ligurian coast, was commissioning a carved copy (to replace a version in two dimensions) of the miracle-working crucifix venerated in Sestri.95 Likewise in New York in the 1920s and 1930s, émigrés from Camogli gathered before a copy of the Boschetto image of the Virgin and Child.96 Correspondence in local Ligurian journals confirms that many emigrants to America preserved not only their dialect, but also their attachment to one or another of the cult images that traditionally defined communities in Italy.97 259

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During the mid-nineteenth century, up to the point at which largescale shipping companies were themselves set up by the Genoese, the transport of both goods and migrants (including river traffic on the River Plate) was in Ligurian hands. The Italian presence in the growing cities of the Americas was marked: in 1881, two-thirds of the population (of 100,000) of Buenos Aires was Italian.98 The experience of settlement was varied; but the evidence of the Italian image cults indicates the intensified strength of loyalty felt towards these patronal guardians, stimulated by the nostalgia of distance. Much has been written about the acculturation of diverse immigrant groups in North America, which has been a formative myth in the United States; but the Italians tend to complicate this account, arriving with their respective Madonnas and, in many cases, sustaining lengthy and intense correspondence with their erstwhile neighbours, the keepers of the parent shrines in the homeland. Certainly, many sons who took ship for La Merica lost contact with their grieving mothers; but it is equally the case that the bollettini of image sanctuaries throughout the Italian peninsula, in the early decades of the twentieth century, published thousands of warm messages and expressions of solidarity from devotees in the New World. Often the newly arrived settler turned at once to the patria with a request for a copy of the local palladium in order to christen the new territory as an extension of the old. It is an old saying about the worldwandering Genoese that wherever a few settle they make ‘a little Genoa’. For centuries, one of the most natural ways to do this has been to affix to the door of the house – whether on the shores of the Sea of Azov, on Bleeker Street in New York or at the construction site of a new settlement on the edge of Rio de Janeiro – a copy of the miraculous image presiding over the homeland in Liguria.99 In the case of the Madonna dell’Orto of Chiavari, a sisterhood known as the Gianellini (after a nineteenth-century promoter of the cult) in the early twentieth century distributed countless copies of the image to both Catholic and non-Christian populations of South America (as also to Alaska, China and Burma).100 But individual émigrés were no less assiduous advocates of their respective cults. In Boston, Massachusetts, settlers from the Valle Fontanabuona in Liguria brought with them the cult of the Madonna dei Miracoli of Cicagna, in 1909 consecrating an altar in her honour in the Church of the Sacred Heart.101 These declarations of allegiance consolidated identities which remained strongly loyal to an idea of the distant Italian village or town: an idea somewhat distorted by nostalgia 260

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and a longing for idealized values of community perceived as vulnerable in the new environment. In some cases the cult itself became a means to open up, albeit partially, to other indigenous or immigrant social groups. A settler in South America in 1907, in a remote and wild settlement, received from a friend in Camogli a copy of the Ligurian Madonna del Boschetto. Having mounted it in the fork of a large tree (echoing the original story of the image), he reported that the Tobas people were venerating it as their own gualichù, or spirit of goodness, bringing to it offerings of silver, leather, bone and shell.102 Italian emigration to South America has been in general facilitated by the pre-existing Spanish Catholic presence, and Chiavarese devotees of the Madonna dell’Orto in 1906 founded a Spanish-language publication, Hortus conclusus.103 But in general the evidence tends to evince a continuing strain of passionate loyalty to the Italian place of origin, articulated through devotion to the miraculous image. Countless ex-votos at Italian shrines bear witness to the desire of the emigrant to be remembered in the homeland – by the Madonna of the image but also by relatives and neighbours who, with the passage of time, were only too likely to forget. A painted ex-voto at Montallegro from 1871 depicts three people from Rapallo, all lying in sickbeds in Buenos Aires (illus. 150). On the wall of their room is

150 Ex-voto, 1871, at the sanctuary of the Madonna of Montallegro, Rapallo.

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depicted the copy, which they certainly possessed, of the Montallegro icon: far from home and unwell, their thoughts turned to the image, and once recovered, they commissioned this thank offering for the shrine.104 This mental geography, of the patria extended beyond the ocean by the gaze of the image, continues to be manifested in recent and present times. Among the ex-votos at the sanctuary of the Madonna dei Caffi at Cassinasco, in the province of Asti in Piedmont, are four ears of corn folded in a piece of paper which bears the handwritten legend: This grain was harvested near to the sanctuary of the Madonna dei Caffi; taken back to La Lucila del Mar [near Buenos Aires] in Argentina; sown there and harvested; and brought back as a gift to the Madonna, for the grace received. Vittoria and Lorenzo Basso (Cino) 1986–1987.105

It has been questioned whether miracles reported at sites remote from the physical location of the holy image can truly be attributed to the image itself;106 but all of these testimonies evince precisely that conviction. The territory of the image is defined by the imagination of its devotees.

The Madonna and the Internet New technologies of communication have in recent years altered the geog raphy of the miraculous image, although closer analysis suggests that the change from traditional modes of perception is perhaps less transformative than might have been expected. ‘The Virgin has so many ways to communicate with us. I feel quite overwhelmed that she has “appeared” to me by internet.’ In 2001 these words were written, partly in Italian but mostly in her native Spanish, by a Latin American woman living in the Mexican state of Querétaro. She addressed them, however, to an Internet site based in the Ligurian town of Camogli, devoted to the miraculous local Madonna del Boschetto. Her discovery of this website convinced Graciela Márquez that ‘the Madonna had sought her out’. Happy, thanks to the World Wide Web, to have the painting ‘also here’, Graciela declared herself to be ‘a true daughter’ of the picture in Camogli.107 The opening up of the Internet to a global public since the early 1990s has changed aspects of communication in profound ways which have not left image cults unaffected. For one 262

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in Graciela Márquez’s place it seems there was no question of a face-toface encounter with the painting on the altar of the chapel in Boschetto di Camogli: for her, the image existed in a virtual world in which the possibility of physical contact with the cult object was not an available option. This is a sacred environment in which a fixed terrestrial geography of holy sites has been supplanted by the global ether. The virtual visitor to one or more shrines need not make any spiritual preparation or undergo depriva tions of the journey. She or he need only turn on the personal computer and begin to surf.‘I have visited many virtual sanctuaries . . .Yours is the one which has struck me most profoundly.’This statement of another visitor to the Boschetto website in 2002 might suggest a certain promiscuity (or even indifference) were it not for the fulsome tribute and evident sincerity of the devotee who, at the same time, declared himself not to be a practising Christian.108 The Internet user may not touch the image, but distance is absolutely no object to his seeing it, virtually present on his screen. To some observers, the new technology appears to have profoundly altered the rapport between the devotee and the cult image. Paolo Apolito, who researched a monograph on visions and the Internet, has announced: the relation between Heaven and Earth has thus passed from the ecclesiastical dimension to the technological, which has become the place in which it is really experienced, the measure of ‘truth’ and the fixed point of reference; and it is decisively freed from the control of the ecclesiastical hierarchy.109

The absoluteness of this claim seems to find some justification in the subjective experience of the Internet user. The Web is a self-contained world, which proves its existence only by reference to other parts of itself. Mundane temporality and geography can appear to have no significance here: both are conflated and expanded ad infinitum in the digital economy of space-time. Whereas papal radio broadcasts use technology to perpetuate an institutional vision of the Church, the Internet passes the leadership to whoever chooses to enter this virtual world. The subversion of all hierarchical control over the cult appears to be complete in the world of Facebook and Twitter, in which absolutely anyone is free, at any time and anywhere, to address the venerated image with his or her anxieties or to make friends with networks of fellow devotees in the digital network.The Facebook community of the 263

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Madonna dell’Arco in Naples is ‘liked’ by more than 40,000 people.110 In the period preceding the annual celebration in 2011 of the Madonna Addolo rata venerated in Bonito, near Amalfi, a dedicated Facebook group included prospective attenders of the festival whose declared personal passions, in addition to this Madonna, included football teams, films and foods.111 There seems to be some basis for the suggestion that the new medium has contributed to a greater democratization of religious experience.112 Yet on the other hand, the argument that almost universal access to the most advanced means of reproduction undermines the monopoly interest of ecclesiastical organizations does not, in fact, differentiate the Internet age from its predecessors.This was already true, as we have seen, of the advent of print technology in the early modern period. It is true that the World Wide Web has so far (with the significant exception of certain Islamic states) been largely unregulated by religious organizations, the Catholic Church included; but it has been seen that even in the decades following the Council of Trent, the attempt to monitor the production and veneration of images was in effect no more than a limited check on lay devotional practice. Equally challenging but no less open to question is the claim that the Web, by substituting its virtual self for the real world, has tended to shift the religious experience to a separate and self-contained realm. In the words of Apolito:‘The internet is a new reality, which adds itself and sometimes opposes itself to the familiar one of visionary devotion, but most often it inadvertently substitutes itself.’113 This is the nightmare which was announced in 1985 by Jean Baudrillard, who proclaimed that in a world in the grip of its own ubiquitous simulacra, human beings had ceased to look beyond the image but instead took it for the whole of reality.114 What the philosopher and the sociologist of religion have already adumbrated, the art historian has also begun to catch on to. One art historian has warned that whereas images used to be understood as referring to a reality beyond themselves, it is a pathological symptom of the modern world that its inhabitants are so far the victims of a confusion between illusion and reality, that they tend to lose the ability, and even the desire, to draw the distinction. On this account, modern visual technology ‘frees the image from the memory of reality’.115 But such concerns, although couched in current terminology and in relation to recent technological and social changes, have a familiar ring.The issue is ancient, and since the time of Plato has been a subject of continual debate among intellectuals. These have all tended to share an underlying 264

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premise: that the ‘ordinary’ person – neither a philosopher nor a theologian, neither a sociologist nor an art historian – is too simple to be capable of distinguishing between an image and a concept or metaphysical reality lying beyond that image. The weakness of these arguments rests in their underlying assumptions that the visual sense is more susceptible than other faculties of the human brain (an echo of the formerly supposed impressionability of the female body), and that it operates independently of supposedly higher powers of intellection (a distinction captured in Pope Gregory’s too-often cited dictum that pictures were useful for the education of the illiterate).Yet the complex mixture of motives and responses recorded throughout the history of image cults shows such assumptions to be reductive.The person who treasured a coloured print of the Madonna dell’Orto in Chiavari in 1610, and the one who caresses her immaginetta or who downloads her digital image four centuries later, both bring to their gestures a host of related memories, some visual and many not; and both would say that they understand the Virgin Mary to be both present and not present in the picture they possess. As is revealed by the evidence of response to cult images over a long period, the engagement with the object has always been a rich mixture of stories heard and personal reminiscences shared over a more or less long period; of the connotations of certain pictures, sounds and smells and, on occasion, of the consciously willed abandonment of inhibition: a physical, visceral engagement with the image which lays the subject open and receptive to new experience.

Conclusion: A different atlas The geography of the miraculous image does not conform to the boundaries which appear on any published map.What de Certeau writes of all stories is especially true of the narratives and practices surrounding miraculous images: ‘What the map cuts up, the story cuts across.’116 The resulting vision is encapsulated by the image. Reinforced by legends, stories, memories and a host of sensory associations, the miracle-working picture or statue operates in a temporal dimension which transcends the geographical coordinates of borders and distance.Yet the presence of the image is also experienced by its devotees in the dimension of space.117 It is perceived as a passage for the underlying forces of the natural world. At the same 265

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time, it announces the presence of a supernatural and pre-eminent power. Be it a marble statue, a paper immaginetta or a picture on the screen of a personal computer, the image functions in a particular place. In collaboration with its beholder, it changes the shape of the world.

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Map of Italy showing location of Liguria (in grey).

References abbreviations acag Archivio della Curia Arcivescovile di Genova asg Archivio di Stato di Genova bavacsp Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Archivio del Capitolo di San Pietro bsec Biblioteca della Società Economica di Chiavari

Preface

1 The Time and Space of the Miraculous Image

1 David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago, il, and London, 1989). 2 Gabriele Finaldi, ‘Seeing Salvation:The Image of Christ’, Pastoral Review (January 2010). See also Gabriele Finaldi, ed., The Image of Christ, exh. cat., National Gallery, London (2000). 3 Xavier Bray, ed., The Sacred Made Real: Spanish Painting and Sculpture, 1600–1700, exh. cat., National Gallery, London (2009). 4 Melissa Katz, ed., Divine Mirrors:The Virgin Mary in the Visual Arts, exh. cat.,Wellesley College,Wellesley, ma (2001), quotation at p. 4. A small exhibition of cult images from Rome and its surroundings held in 2012 was occasioned by, and focused on, issues of conservation. Giorgoi Leone, ed., Tavole miracolose. Le icone medioevali di Roma e del Lazio del Fondo Edifici di Culto, exh. cat., Palazzo di Venezia, Rome (2012). 5 ‘Spectacular Miracles: Images of Supernatural Power from Northwest Italy’ was held at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, in 2005–6. 6 Jane Garnett and Gervase Rosser, ‘Representing Spectacular Miracles’, Forum for Anthropology and Culture, 4 (2007), pp. 269–74; Giles Fraser, ‘Forced to Kneel in a Public Art Gallery’, Church Times, 2 December 2005; Paul Davies, ‘Spectacular Miracles’, Renaissance Studies, 21 (2007), pp. 110–13. 7 Jack Goody, ‘Icons and Iconoclasm in Africa? Absence and Ambivalence’, in his Representations and Contradictions: Ambivalence towards Images,Theatre, Fiction, Relics and Sexuality (Oxford, 1997), pp. 35–74. 8 A review of existing scholarship is included in chapter One.

1 Deposition of Clemente Anfossi, aged twelve, to the inquest into the reported miracle of the eyes of the Madonna of Taggia, 2 April 1855. ‘Processo per la statua di Nostra Signora del Sacro Cuore (movimento degli occhi) Taggia’, conducted by the bishop of Ventimiglia, 1855, ms in the parochial archive of Taggia with a modern digital typescript. 2 On Gumppenberg, see p. 39 and n. 86. On the Virgin’s house at Loreto: Floriano Grimaldi, La historia della chiesa di Santa Maria di Loreto (Loreto, 1993); Giorgio Cracco, ‘Alle origini dei santuari mariani: Il caso di Loreto’, in Loreto: Crocevia religioso tra Italia, Europa ed Oriente, ed. F. Citterio and L.Vaccaro (Brescia, 1997), pp. 97–164. 3 The Genoese church of San Siro has for some years contained an altar devoted to images installed by the Peruvian community: authors’ observation. For Muslims coming to the Madonna della Guardia see Graziella Merlatti, La Madonna della Guardia. Un laico chiamato a costruire la Chiesa (Cuneo, 2000), pp. 257–8. 4 Carlo Levi, Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (Rome, 1945), p. 114. 5 Poggio Bracciolini, Facezie, trans. and ed. Stefano Pittaluga (Milan, 1995), pp. 22–5 (no. 12). 6 Michel de Montaigne, Montaigne’s Travel Journal, trans. Donald M. Frame (San Francisco, ca, 1983), p. 107;Wes Williams, ‘“Rubbing Up Against Others”: Montaigne on Pilgrimage’, in Voyages and Visions:Towards a Cultural History of Travel, ed. Ja´s Elsner and Joan Pau Rubiés (London, 1999), pp. 101–23. Further on ex-votos and miraculous images, see pp. 142‒56. 7 Edith Chorherr, ‘René Descartes: “Ante finem novembris Laurettam petam . . .”’, in Frömmigkeit, Geschichte,Verhalten, Zeugnisse. Lenz Kriss-Rettenbeck zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Ingolf Bauer (Munich, 1993), pp. 145–60. Descartes’ decision to make the pilgrimage

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8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20

21 22

23 Observations based upon participation in the annual celebrations at Sori over more than ten years. 24 Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, trans. Michael B. Smith (Chicago, 1992), p. 2. 25 Mitchell, ‘What Do Pictures Really Want?’ 26 See Jane Garnett and Gervase Rosser, ‘Notes from the Field: Anthropomorphism’, Art Bulletin, 94 (2012), pp. 22–4. 27 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ [1936], in his Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt and trans. Harry Zorn (London, 1999), pp. 211–44, at p. 230; and Benjamin, ‘A Small History of Photography’ [1931], in his One-way Street, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London, 1979), pp. 240–57, at p. 243. See the discussion of Benjamin’s idea by Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York and London, 1993), pp. 21, 24, 31, 58. 28 De Certeau, Mystic Fable, p. 10. 29 For discussion of a medieval case of such ambivalence, see Donal Cooper, ‘Projecting Presence:The Monumental Cross in the Italian Church Interior’, in Presence, ed. Maniura and Shepherd, pp. 47–69. 30 Richard Wollheim, Art and its Objects, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 1980), p. 217. 31 Jason Gaiger, ‘Participatory Imagining and the Explanation of Living-Presence Response’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 51 (2011), pp. 363–81. 32 Verity Platt, Facing the Gods: Epiphany and Representation in Graeco-Roman Art, Literature and Religion (Cambridge, 2011), esp. pp. 20, 33. 33 For example, Stephen Pattison, Seeing Things: Deepening Relations with Visual Artefacts (London, 2007); Bissera V. Pentcheva, The Sensual Icon: Space, Ritual, and the Senses in Byzantium (University Park, pa, 2010). 34 James Elkins, The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing (New York, 1996), p. 40. 35 C.G. Ratti, Instruzione di quanto può vedersi più bello in Genova in pittura, scultura ed architettura, 2 vols (Genoa, 1780), vol. i, p. 223. See F. Alizeri, Guida artistica per la città di Genova (Genoa, 1846–7), vol. ii (1), p. 158. 36 Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori scultori ed architettori [1568], ed. G. Milanesi (Florence, 1878–85), vol. iv, p. 372. 37 Ibid., vol. ii, p. 518 (Life of Fra Angelico); Patricia Rubin, Giorgio Vasari: Art and History (Yale and London, 1995), pp. 282–4. Further on the perceived tension between the pious and the beautiful in Italian painting, see Alexander Nagel, The Controversy of Renaissance Art (Chicago, il, 2011), pp. 31‒9.

was triggered by a series of dreams; whether he actually went is uncertain. G. B. Ferrari, ‘La Madonna dei camogliesi nel mondo’, La Madonna del Boschetto. Bollettino del Santuario (1938) (nos 1–2), pp. 1–8, at pp. 1, 5–6. Observations recorded during fieldwork by the authors in 1998 and subsequent years. W.J.T. Mitchell, ‘What Do Pictures Really Want?’, October, 77 (1996), pp. 71–82. Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Age of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago, il, and London, 1994). See the review of the German edition by Michael Camille in Art Bulletin, 74 (1992), pp. 514–17. Gerhard Wolf, Salus Populi Romani. Die Geschichte römischer Kultbilden im Mittelalter (Weinheim, 1990), esp. pp. 65–7. Michele Bacci, Il pennello dell’Evangelista. Storia delle immagini sacre attribuite a san Luca (Pisa, 1998), esp. p. 31. David Morgan, Visual Piety: A History and Theory of Popular Religious Images (Berkeley, ca, 1998), esp. pp. 156, 163, 171. David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago, il, and London, 1989), esp. chaps 6, 7. The relative lack of consideration of historical context in Freedberg’s book was noted by its reviewers, including J. M. Nash in Art History, 13 (1990), pp. 566–70, and Arthur C. Danto in Art Bulletin, 72 (1990), pp. 341–2. Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford, 1998). Caroline van Eck, ‘Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency, Living Presence Response and the Sublime’, Art History, 33 (2010), pp. 643–59. Presence:The Inherence of the Prototype within Images and Other Objects, ed. Robert Maniura and Rupert Shepherd (Aldershot, 2006), p. 6. Paolo Apolito, ‘Dice che hanno visto la Madonna.’ Un caso di apparizioni in Campania (Bologna, 1990); Apolito, Apparitions of the Madonna at Oliveto Citra, trans.William A. Christian (University Park, pa, 1998), esp. p. 91. See further chapter Three. William A. Christian, Apparitions in Late Medieval and Renaissance Spain (Princeton, nj, 1989); Christian, Local Religion in Sixteenth-century Spain (Princeton, nj, 1981); Christian, ‘Images as Beings in Early Modern Spain’, in Sacred Spain: Art and Belief in the Spanish World, ed. Ronda Kasl, exh. cat., Indianapolis Museum of Art (2009), pp. 75‒99; and for Apolito see n. 20 above.

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38 Paul Barolsky, ‘The Theology of Vasari’, Source: Notes in the History of Art, 19 (2000), pp. 1–6; Steven Stowell, ‘The Mystical Experience of Art: Medieval Christian Themes in the Literature on Art of the Italian Renaissance’, D.Phil thesis, Oxford University (2009). 39 Carol Duncan, Civilising Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (London, 1995); Gell, Art and Agency, p. 97. 40 Vasari, Le vite, vol. vii, p. 437.Vasari was evidently uncertain which of the two artists had painted the work; modern scholarship prefers the attribution to Giorgione. Peter Humfrey, Titian:The Complete Paintings (Ghent, 2007), p. 43.The emotive treatment of Christ’s suffering in this image clearly touched a spiritual chord in early sixteenth-century Venice, where the presence of a reformist emphasis on the redemptive power of Christ’s sacrifice was felt. Minna Moore Ede, ‘Religious Art and Catholic Reform in Italy, 1527–1546’, D.Phil thesis, Oxford University (2002), pp. 63–4. 41 Vasari, Le vite, vol. vii, p. 151;Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans. Gaston du C. de Vere with an introduction by D. Ekserdjian (London, 1996), vol. ii, p. 652. 42 For the crowning, see bavacsp, ‘Madonne Coronate’, vol. xxvii ⁄1, fols 13–14. According to these notes in the Vatican, at the beginning of the seventeenth century the statue was on the high altar of St Peter’s church. In the mid-eighteenth century, to make room for other images, it was moved to the first chapel in the right aisle of the basilica, where it remains. For the crown’s removal in 1927, see Charles de Tolnay, The Youth of Michelangelo (Princeton, nj, 1943), p. 147.The artistic impact of the sculpture is reviewed by Ferenc Veress, ‘La fortuna della Pietà Vaticana nel Cinquecento: influsso, interpretazioni, copie e varianti’, Arte cristiana, 100 (2012), pp. 81‒90. 43 Battering the sculpture with a hammer, László Toth shouted ‘I am Jesus Christ’: he understood his action to be religious. Dario Gamboni, The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the French Revolution (London, 1997), pp. 202–4. Another sixteenth-century image which enjoyed a period of appreciation as a work of fine art prior to being reclaimed as a miraculous Catholic cult image was Cranach’s ‘Mariahilf ’; Georg Henkel, ‘Vom Kunstbild zum Kultbild: Mariahilf zu Innsbruck’, in Rahmen-Diskurse. Kultbilder im konfessionellen Zeitalter, ed. David Ganz and Georg Henkel (Berlin, 2004), pp. 143–71. 44 For the process of crowning miraculous images, see pp. 128‒34. 45 A. Baschet, ‘François Pourbus, peintre des portraits à la

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cour de Mantoue’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 25 (1868), pp. 277–98, 438–56, at pp. 441–2. Nicholas Clark, Melozzo da Forlì. Pictor papalis (London, 1990), p. 15. For the image in S. Maria del Popolo, see Belting, Likeness and Presence, pp. 341–2. At the time of the commission, in the 1470s, S. Maria del Popolo was being rebuilt by another devotee of Marian images, Pope Sixtus iv. Antonio Paolucci, Antoniazzo Romano. Catalogo completo (Florence, 1992), p. 46. See also Belting, Likeness and Presence, pp. 342–8, 441–2; Alexander Nagel and Christopher S.Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (New York, 2010), pp. 109–22. Paolucci, Antoniazzo Romano, pp. 42, 46; Andreina Griseri and Franco Peradotto, eds, La Consolata (Turin, 2005), pp. 16–21; Franco Bolgiani et al., Gli ex voto della Consolata. Storie di grazia e devozione nel Santuario torinese (Turin, 1982). See Helen C. Evans and William D.Wixom, eds, The Glory of Byzantium: Art and Culture of the Middle Byzantine Era, AD 843–1261, exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1997), pp. 441–2; Robin Cormack and Maria Vassilaki, eds, Byzantium, 330–1453, exh. cat., Royal Academy, London (2008), pp. 276–9. See also pp. 83‒91. ‘. . . alcuni Quadri alla maniera greca di quella prima antichità’. Placido Samperi, Iconologia della gloriosa Vergine Madre di Dio Maria Prottetrice di Messina (Messina, 1644), pp. 568–72. Belting, Likeness and Presence, p. 197. See Rembrandt Duits, ‘“Una icona pulcra”: The Byzantine Icons of Cardinal Pietro Barbo’, in Mantova e il Rinascimento italiano. Studi in onore di David S. Chambers, ed. P. Jackson and G. Rebecchini (Mantua, 2011), pp. 127–42. Panayotis L.Vocotopulos, ‘L’icona della Vergine Odighitria nel duomo di Isernia. Un’opera ignota di Markos Bathàs’, in Byzantino-Sicula, 3: Miscellanea in memoria di Bruno Lavagnini (Palermo, 2000), pp. 335–43; Ulderico Iorillo, L’icona della Madonna della Luce di Isernia (Isernia, 2009). See further Angeliki Lymberopoulou, ‘Audiences and Markets for Cretan Icons’, in Viewing Renaissance Art, ed. Kim W.Woods, Carol M. Richardson and Angeliki Lymberopoulou (London, 2007), pp. 171–206. Jeremy Tanner, The Invention of Art History in Ancient Greece: Religion, Society and Artistic Rationalisation (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 45–55. Belting, Likeness and Presence, esp. chaps 1, 20. Erik Thunø and Gerhard Wolf, eds, The Miraculous Image in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance (Rome, 2004);

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60 61 62

63 La Madonna della Guardia, ii/3 (July 1897), p. 46. 64 Such was the case of the Madonna del Gazzo, above Sestri Ponente, a vast statue of the Madonna della Misericordia carved by a Capuchin in 1657 and restored in 1873. Luigi Carmelo Conte, Il santuario della Madonna sul Monte Gazzo (Pavia, 1931); P. R. Ravecca, Il santuario del Monte Gazzo a Sestri Ponente (Genoa, 1992). 65 Giovanni Battista Trofello, La Madonna delle Grazie venerata in Corniglia (Milan, 1923), pp. 24–7. 66 Sestri Levante ed il suo Crocifisso. Feste centenarie 1928 (repr. Sestri Levante, 1992), p. 21. 67 V. Turner and E.L.B.Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (New York, 1978), pp. 76–103; J. F. Peterson, ‘The Virgin of Guadalupe: Symbol of Conquest or Liberation?’, Art Journal, 51 (1992), pp. 39–47; Stafford Poole, Our Lady of Guadalupe:The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol, 1531–1797 (Tucson, az, and London, 1995); D. A. Brading, Mexican Phoenix: Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image and Tradition across Five Centuries (Cambridge, 2001). 68 Zenit (Catholic Church news agency) report, www.zenit.org (consulted 5 September 2010); ‘Keeping the Faith: How Bleak does the Future Look for Catholicism?’, Guardian, 5 September 2010. 69 The earliest known account of this image cult was published in 1648.The late date of the first detailed evidence has given rise to a controversy over the historicity of the story and even the existence of Juan Diego, which was intensified by the papal decision to canonize him in 2002. See further Stafford Poole, The Guadalupan Controversies in Mexico (Stanford, ca, 2006). 70 Daniele Menozzi, Les images: L’église et les arts visuels (Paris, 1991), pp. 288–9. 71 Historical summary on the website of the sanctuary, www.madonnadellelacrime.it (consulted 4 September 2010). 72 Flavio Ubodi, La Madonna di Civitavecchia: Lacrime e messaggi (Milan, 2010); Marina Warner, ‘Signs of the Times:Touching Tears’ [1996], in her Signs and Wonders: Essays on Literature and Culture (London, 2003), pp. 188–206. 73 ‘One of our criteria is to separate the aspect of the real or presumed “supernaturalness” of the apparition from that of its spiritual fruits.’V. Messori and J. Ratzinger, Rapporto sulla fede (Cinisello Balsamo, 1985), p. 113. See also René Laurentin, The Apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary Today, 2nd edn (Dublin, 1991), pp. 43–4. 74 Laurentin, Apparitions, pp. 106–8. 75 Martin Luther, Works, ed. Hilton C. Oswald (St Louis, mo, 1974), vol. xix, p. 8.

Ganz and Henkel, eds, Rahmen-Diskurse; Robert Maniura, Pilgrimage to Images in the Fifteenth Century: The Origins of the Cult of Our Lady of Cze˛stochowa (Woodbridge, 2004); Megan Holmes, ‘Miraculous Images in Renaissance Florence’, Art History, 34 (2011), pp. 433–65.The survival of the cult image after the sixteenth century in France is noted in passing by Olivier Christin, ‘Du culte chrétien au culte de l’art: La transformation du statut de l’image (xve–xviiie siècles)’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 49 (2002), pp. 176–94, at pp. 188–9. Fredrika Jacobs, ‘Rethinking the Divide: Cult Images and the Cult of Images’, in Renaissance Theory, ed. James Elkins and Robert Williams (New York and London, 2008), pp. 95–114. Bacci, Il pennello dell’Evangelista; Christine M. Boeckl, ‘The Legend of St Luke the Painter: Eastern and Western Iconography’, Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, 54 (2005), pp. 7–37; Belting, Likeness and Presence, chap. 4. The image passed in 1789 to the Carmelites of Santa Tecla in Genoa, where a relative of the picture’s former owner became prior.With the suppression of the convent in 1797, the picture was entrusted to another individual, and was in 1847 installed in the church of San Pietro at Rovereto. Francesco Bacigalupo, Cenni storici sopra il santuario di S. Causa Nostrae Laetitiae eretto in S. Pietro di Rovereto (Chiavari, 1903), pp. 39–42; Le feste cinquantenarie di Nostra Signora Causa Nostrae Laetitiae celebrate in San Pietro di Rovereto (Genoa, 1905).We are grateful to the parish priest of San Pietro di Rovereto, Padre Giovanni Battista Sbarbaro, for kindly showing us in 1999 the image still venerated as Nostra Signora Causa Nostrae Laetitiae.This appears to be a nineteenthcentury replacement of the older image, which may have been lost in the Napoleonic period.The Bolognese Madonna of St Luke is evidently an early copy of the Roman Madonna Salus Populi Romani in Santa Maria Maggiore, itself reputedly by St Luke.The Venetian image referred to is the Madonna Nikopeia in San Marco, also anciently attributed to the Evangelist. Megan Holmes, ‘The Elusive Origins of the Cult of the Annunziata in Florence’, in The Miraculous Image, ed. Thunø and Wolf, pp. 97–121. bavacsp, ‘Madonne coronate’, vol. xviii (2), fols 433–833, esp. fols 790–91. Per la solenne benedizione del nuovo quadro ‘Quasi oliva speciosa in campis’ del Prof. N. Barabino da lui donato alla chiesa parrocchiale di S. M. della Cella in San Pier d’Arena (Genoa, 1888), pp. 3, 9, 12.

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84 Maria Grazia Ronca, ‘La devozione e le arti’, in Baronio e l’arte, ed. R. De Maio et al. (Sora, 1985), pp. 425–42, at pp. 428–9. 85 Early instances are F. Locrius, Maria Augusta Virgo Deiparae in septem libris (Arras, 1608), vol. v; Felice Astolfi, Historia universale delle imagini miracolose della Gran Madre di Dio (Venice, 1624); Samperi, Iconologia. Later ones are S. Montorio, Zodiaco di Maria ovvero le dodici provincie del Regno di Napoli (Naples, 1715); [F. Corner], Apparitionum et celebriorum imaginum deiparae Virginis Mariae in civitate et dominio venetiarum enarrationes historicae (Venice, 1760). J. Gretseri, De sancta Cruce, 2 vols (Ingoldstadt, 1616) is a catalogue of miraculous crucifixes. 86 Gumppenberg’s project was announced at a general meeting of the Jesuit Order in 1649, and publicized in Guilielmus Gumppenberg, Idea atlantis mariani (Trent, 1655). He corresponded with Jesuits throughout the world to seek information. Realizing the vastness of the undertaking, he first issued (in portable, duodecimo format) a series of 100 images, each engraving being accompanied by a description: Guilielmus Gumppenberg, Atlas marianus sive de imaginibus deiparae per orbem christianum miraculosis, 4 vols (Munich and Ingolstadt, 1655–7).This was issued in a German translation as Marianischer Atlas (Munich, 1658).The larger project (unillustrated apart from the frontispiece) took twenty years: Guilielmus Gumppenberg, Atlas marianus, quo sanctae dei genitricis Mariae imaginum miracolosorum origines duodecimo historiarum centuriis explicantur, 4 vols (Munich, 1672). It is a tribute to the perceived influence of this work that Protestants burned copies in public, as a kind of vicarious iconoclasm. See the enlarged Italian translation, Atlante mariano, ed. A. Zanella (Verona, 1839–47), vol. i, p. 29. A summary of the project is given in Olivier Christin and Fabrice Flückiger, ‘Rendre visible la frontière confessionnelle: L’Atlas Marianus de Willhelm Gumppenberg’, in Les affrontements religieux en Europe du début du XVIe au milieu du XVIIe siècle, ed.Véronique Castagnet, Olivier Christin and Naïma Ghermani (Lille, 2008), pp. 33–44. A modern edition of the Atlas is planned by Olivier Christin: see www.mariatlas.net (consulted 31 March 2012). 87 Costanza Barbieri, ‘“Invisibilia per visibilia”: S. Filippo Neri, le immagini e la contemplazione’, in La Regola e la fama. San Filippo Neri e l’arte, ed. Alba Costamagna (Milan, 1995), pp. 64–79. It may be an indirect testimony to Neri’s perceived association with images that certain of his own portraits acquired the reputation of being

76 Norman Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils (London, 1990), vol. ii, pp. 775–6. 77 For the local pronouncement in the archdiocese of Genoa of the Tridentine regulations on images, see Synodi diocesanae et provinciales editae atque ineditae S. Genuensis ecclesiae (Genoa, 1833), pp. 58 (Archbishop Pallavicini, 1567: unusual imagery to be eschewed, and pictures to be placed away from contamination), 257–8, 264–5 (Cardinal Bossio, 1582: no unprecedented iconography), 590 (Archbishop Spinola, 1603: images not to be placed where they could be easily polluted), 656 (Archbishop de Marini, 1619: images not to be exposed or processed to raise contributions), 717 (Archbishop Durazzo, 1643: no image cults, with ex-votos, to be created). 78 Adriano Prosperi, I tribunali della coscienza: Inquisitori, confessori, missionari (Turin, 1996), esp. p. 684.This monumental work is written in the profound conviction that, in the Italian context, ‘the Church has won’: ibid., p. ix. 79 Ottavia Niccoli, Vedere con gli occhi del cuore. Alle origini del potere delle immagini (Bari, 2011), esp. pp. 63–6, 81–5. 80 G. Galasso, L’altra Europa. Per un’antropologia storica del Mezzogiorno d’Italia (Milan, 1982), pp. 426–7.The extent to which the Council of Trent should be seen as historically transformative has been debated in recent years: see John W. O’Malley, Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era (Cambridge, ma, and London, 2000). 81 Gabriele Paleotti, Discorso intorno alle immagini sacre e profane [Bologna, 1582], ed. Stefano della Torre and Gian Franco Freguglia (Milan, 2002), esp. pp. 66–9. 82 Paleotti, Discorso, p. 118. 83 For example, Paleotti, Discorso, p. 59. On this point and on this genre of writing in general, see Christian Hecht, Katholische Bildertheologie im Zeitalter von Gegenreformation und Barock. Studien zu Traktaten von Johannes Molanus, Gabriele Paleotti und anderen Autoren (Berlin, 1997), esp. pp. 137–8; Holger Steinemann, Eine Bildtheorie zwischen Repräsentation und Wirkung. Kardinal Gabriele Paleottis ‘Discorso intorno alle imagini sacre e profane’ (1582) (Hildesheim, 2006).The first and most influential of this group of writers, Giovanni Molano, was less inclined than some others (including Paleotti) to refer to the miraculous properties of certain images: at Louvain, on the confessional border, he explicitly addressed his defence of images to an audience of Protestant iconoclasts. Ioanes Molanus, De historia sanctarum imaginum et picturarum pro vero earum usu contra abusus (Louvain, 1570).

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the sacri monti see Luigi Zanzi, Sacri monti e dintorni (Milan, 1990). 95 It is striking that the Vatican body established in 1564 to deal with issues arising from the implementation of the decrees of the Council of Trent, the Congregazione del Concilio, which over the ensuing decades handled thousands of queries from local bishops concerning holy orders, non-resident clergy and jurisdictional issues, received no questions at all about the veneration of images.The relevant correspondence is in Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Archivio storico della sacra Congregazione del Concilio, Positiones (Sess.) 1–75; the asv holds modern indices by D.Troiani and P. Caiazza, ‘Indici all’ Archivio Segreto Vaticano’, vols 910–24.This indicates not that the bishops were unaware of image cults in their dioceses – as Borromeo’s experience makes clear – but that they did not feel impelled by the conciliar ruling to court controversy over the issue.The pragmatic approach of the archbishop of Milan was probably typical of the episcopate at large. 96 This is the thesis of the valuable study by Donna Spivey Ellington, From Sacred Body to Angelic Soul: Understanding Mary in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Washington, dc, 2001). For the enthusiastic Mariology of the Capuchin friars and some others at this period, see Massimo Petrocchi, ‘La devozione alla Vergine negli scritti di pietà del Cinquecento italiano’, in Problemi di vita religiosa in Italia nel Cinquecento. Atti del Convegno di Storia della Chiesa in Italia (Bologna, 2–6 sett. 1958) (Padua, 1960), pp. 281–7; but Petrocchi, too, notes that these clerical writers emphasised the Virgin’s subordination to Christ (p. 286). 97 The idea was initially rejected by theologians in Rome, but sixteenth-century Franciscan clergy effectively defended this view of Marian images. D. A. Brading, ‘Divine Idea and “Our Mother”: Elite and Popular Understanding in the Cult of Our Lady of Guadalupe of Mexico’, in Elite and Popular Religion, ed. Kate Cooper and Jeremy Gregory (Woodbridge, 2006), pp. 240–60, at p. 244. On the Apocalypsis Nova, the authorship of which is disputed, see James W. Nelson Novoa, ‘Imagination as Exegesis in the Apocalypsis Nova Attributed to Blessed Amadeus da Silva’, in Faith and Fantasy in the Renaissance:Texts, Images, and Religious Practices, ed. Olga Zorzi Pugliese and Ethan Matt Kavaler (Toronto, 2009), pp. 71–83. Although the Virgin Mary has since the sixth century been believed to have been assumed into heaven, she has been widely understood to be present in and operating through her images, contrary to the argument of Robert Maniura,

miraculous. Claudia Gerken, ‘Vom Porträt zum Heiligenbild. Filippo Neri als “Vivum Exemplar” und die Legitimation seines Bildkultes’, in Rahmen-Diskurse, ed. Ganz and Henkel, pp. 221–49. Federico Borromeo, De pictura sacra libri duo (Milan, 1624). Michael Jaffé, ‘Peter Paul Rubens and the Oratorian Fathers’, Proporzioni, 4 (1963), pp. 209–41; Alba Costamagna, ‘“La più bella e superba occasione di tutta Roma . . .”: Rubens per l’altar maggiore di S. Maria in Vallicella’, in La Regola e la fama, ed. Costamagna, pp. 150–93.The classic study of the reframed image in this period is Martin Warnke, ‘Italienische Bildtabernakel bis zum Frühbarock’, Münchner Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst, 3rd ser., 19 (1968), pp. 61–102. Remarking on the extent to which the painting by Rubens for the Chiesa Nuova (even in its second version, as installed, with the window which can be opened on occasion to reveal the fresco beneath) engulfs the older image,Warnke observes that the Oratorians’ decision was made ‘perhaps less on devotional than aesthetic grounds’; ibid., p. 90. For recent discussion see Klaus Krüger, ‘Authenticity and Fiction: On the Pictorial Construction of Inner Presence in Early Modern Italy’, in Image and Imagination of the Religious Self in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Reindert Falkenburg,Walter S. Melion and Todd M. Richardson (Turnhout, 2007), pp. 37–69; and for some earlier examples see Cathleen Hoeniger, The Renovation of Paintings in Tuscany, 1250–1500 (Cambridge, 1995). Gabriela Signori, ‘Das spätmittelalterliche Gnadenbild: Eine nachtridentinische “invention of tradition”?’, in Rahmen-Diskurse, ed. Ganz and Henkel, pp. 303–29. G. Andenna, ‘I santuari della Lombardia’, in Per una storia dei santuari cristiani d’Italia: Approcci regionali, ed. Giorgio Cracco (Bologna, 2002), pp. 131–47, at p. 137. Visita apostolica e decreti di Carlo Borromeo alla diocesi di Brescia, vol. v: Valle Trompia, Pedemonte e territorio, ed. Angelo Turchini and Gabriele Archetti, Brixia Sacra, 3rd ser., 10 (Brescia, 2005), p. 293. Visita apostolica e decreti di Carlo Borromeo alla diocesi di Brescia, vol. i: La città, ed. Angelo Turchino and Gabriele Archetti, Brixia Sacra, 3rd ser., 8 (Brescia, 2003), pp. 123, 278; Visita apostolica e decreti di Carlo Borromeo alla diocesi diBrescia, vol. ii: Bassa centrale e orientale, ed. Angelo Turchino, Gabriele Archetti and Giovanni Donni, Brixia Sacra, 3rd ser., 11 (Brescia, 2006), pp. 53, 60, 103, 169–70, 184. His patronage of the shrines and images of the sacri monti of Varallo, Orta and Varese were part of the same strategic response to the nearby Protestant presence. On

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‘Image and Relic in the Cult of Our Lady of Prato’, in Images, Relics, and Devotional Practices in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, ed. Sally J. Cornelison and Scott B. Montgomery (Tempe, az, 2006), pp. 193‒212. For a survey of the early modern Catholic Church indicative of recent historiographical trends, see Robert Bireley, The Refashioning of Catholicism, 1450–1700 (London, 1999). Amongst critics of the ‘confessionalization thesis’, see Marc R. Forster, Catholic Revival in the Age of the Baroque: Religious Identity in Southwest Germany, 1550–1750 (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 14ff. La religion de ma mère: Les femmes et la transmission de la foi, ed. Jean Delumeau (Paris, 1992), was fundamental to the construction of this thesis. Rebekka Habermas, Wallfahrt und Aufruhr. Zur Geschichte des Wunderglaubens in der freuen Neuzeit (Frankfurt am Main, 1991), pp. 54–61 (‘The world of the wonder was one of the few parts of religious life in which women played an almost equal role to men’, p. 54). For example, the analysis by Habermas of the recorded beneficiaries of miracles at image shrines in early modern Germany overlooks the role of selection in the lists of these graces recorded in the official miracle books of the respective sanctuaries. Ibid., pp. 49–66. G. F. Mainero, La pietà ligure preconizata, orazion panegirica (Genoa, 1656); Nicola Lanzi, Genova città di Maria Santissima. Storia e documenti della pietà mariana genovese (Pisa, 1992). For the argument that the seventeenth century saw a shift of evangelical emphasis in the religious orders and confraternities, especially in the south of Italy, from a focus on Christ and the Eucharist to Marian devotions, see Mario Rosa, Religione e società nel mezzogiorno tra Cinque e Seicento (Bari, 1976), esp. p. 69. Gerhard Wolf, ‘Kultbilder im Zeitalter des Barock’, in Religion und Religiosität im Zeitalter des Barock, ed. Dieter Brener (Wiesbaden, 1995), pp. 399–413, at pp. 405–6; Steven F. Ostrow, Art and Spirituality in Counter-Reformation Rome:The Sistine and Pauline Chapels in S. Maria Maggiore (Cambridge, 1996); Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Between Renaissance and Baroque: Jesuit Art in Rome, 1565–1610 (Toronto, 2003), p. 10. Belief in the bodily assumption of the Virgin was ancient; Benedict xiv in the early eighteenth century held it to be a probable opinion; Pius xii in 1950 declared it to be infallible dogma. J.W. Langlinais, ‘Assumption of the Virgin’, New Catholic Encyclopedia, 2nd edn (Washington, 2003), vol. i, pp. 797–801. Edward C. Banfield, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society

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[1958] (New York, 1975), pp. 124–5 n.The anthropologist observed: ‘Five Madonnas are honored in Montegrano, and for some people the connection between them and the mother of Christ is extremely vague.’ English pilgrims overheard in the early sixteenth century drew comparisons: ‘“Of all Our Ladies, I love best Our Lady of Walsingham”; “and I,” saith the other, “Our Lady of Ipswich”.’Thomas More, A Dyalogue of the Veneration and Worship of Ymages and Relyques (London, 1529), fol. 22. Stefano Zurlo, Inchiesta sulla devozione popolare (Casale Monferrato, 2003), p. 66. Platt, Facing the Gods; Ja´s Elsner, Roman Eyes:Visuality and Subjectivity in Art and Text (Princeton, nj, 2007), esp. chap. 2. A. Dupront, ‘Pèlerinages et lieux sacrés’, in Mélanges F. Braudel (Paris, 1973), vol. ii, pp. 189–206; Belting, Likeness and Presence, pp. 301–3; André Vauchez, Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 448–53. The Ste Foy reliquary: Peter Lasko, Ars Sacra, 800–1200 (Harmondsworth, 1972), p.105; Ellert Dahl, ‘Heavenly Images: The Statue of St Foy of Conques and the Significance of the Medieval “Cult-image” in the West’, Acta et Archaeologiam et Artium Historiam Pertinentia, 8 (1978), pp. 175–91. Ostensories for relics: Martina Bagnoli et al., eds, Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics, and Devotion in Medieval Europe, exh. cat., British Museum, London (2011), cat. 109–12.The Veronica: Herbert L. Kessler and Gerhard Wolf, eds, The Holy Face and the Paradox of Representation (Bologna, 1998); Giovanni Morello and Gerhard Wolf, eds, Il volto di Cristo, exh. cat., Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome (Milan, 2000). The Turin Shroud: Giuseppe Ghiberti, ‘Il corpo della Sindone’, in Gesù. Il corpo, il volto nell’arte, ed.Timothy Verdon, exh. cat., La Reggia,Venaria Reale (Milan, 2010), pp. 117–23; Ferdinando Molteni, ed., La memoria di Cristo. Le copie della Sindone: verità di fede e verità storica, exh. cat., Santa Maria della Scala, Siena (2000). Christopher A. Ferraone, Talismans and Trojan Horses: Guardian Statues in Ancient Greek Myth and Ritual (Oxford, 1992), discusses the use of statues in civic defences as protection against both plague and military enemies. On wonder-working images in the ancient world, see also: R. Gordon, ‘The Real and the Imaginary: Production and Religion in the GraecoRoman World’, Art History, 2 (1979), pp. 5–34; Elsner, Roman Eyes, pp. 29–48; M. Gaifman, ‘Visualised Rituals and Dedicatory Inscriptions on Votive Offerings to the

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Nymphs’, Opuscula, 1 (2008), pp. 85–103; Platt, Facing the Gods. Jean Wirth, ‘Structure et fonction de l’image chez Saint Thomas d’Aquin’, in L’image. Fonctions et usages des images dans l’Occident médiéval, ed. Jérôme Baschet and Jean-Claude Schmitt (Paris, 1996), pp. 39–57. For the numbers of saints canonized in the early modern period, see Simon Ditchfield, ‘Il mondo della Riforma e della Controriforma’, in Anna Benvenuti et al., Storia della santità nel cristianesimo occidentale (Rome, 2005), pp. 261–427, at pp. 295–7; Ditchfield, ‘Tridentine Worship and the Cult of Saints’, in The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. vi: Reform and Expansion, 1500–1660, ed. R. Po-Chia Hsia (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 201–24, esp. pp. 215ff.The rate of canonization of new saints remained equally low until the end of the twentieth century, when Pope John Paul ii broke with the long-established pattern. See, for example, Belting, Likeness and Presence, p. 308. George Ostrogorsky, ‘Les décisions du “Stoglav” concernant la peinture d’images’, in L’art byzantin chez les Slaves (Paris, 1930), vol. i, pp. 393–411, at p. 399. A similar distinction is drawn between Orthodox and Latin treatments of the icon by Alphonse Dupront, Du sacré. Croisades et pèlerinages. Images et langages (Paris, 1987), pp. 134–43. Belting also emphasises what he assumes to be ‘the different premises of image worship in the west’ by contrast with the Byzantine East: Likeness and Presence, pp. 297–8.The diverse essays in The Sacred Image East and West, ed. Robert Ousterhout and Leslie Brubaker (Urbana and Chicago, 1995), do not amount to an integrated thesis, but cumulatively they tend to blur some of the supposed distinctions between image veneration in Byzantium and the medieval West.The point is also noted, although not developed, by Robin Cormack, Painting the Soul: Icons, Death Masks and Shrouds (London, 1997), p. 166.The comparison at issue here is distinct from the question of the Western reception of Byzantine icons discussed, for example, by Barbara Zeitler, ‘The Migrating Image: Uses and Abuses of Byzantine Icons in Western Europe’, in Icon and Word: The Power of Images in Byzantium. Studies Presented to Robin Cormack, ed. Antony Eastmond and Liz James (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 185–204; and by Belting, Likeness and Presence, pp. 330–48. V. Grumel, ‘Images (culte des)’, Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique (1921), vol. vii, cols. 766–844, remains excellent. That in both Eastern and Western Christianity, ‘the relation between technical theology and the piety of

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ordinary believers was a difficult problem to handle’, is acknowledged in passing by Jaroslav Pelikan, Imago Dei: The Byzantine Apologia for Icons (New Haven and London, 1990), p. 140. On the common roots of Marian imagery in the Orthodox and Latin traditions, see Valentino Pace, ‘Between East and West’, in Mother of God: Representations of the Virgin in Byzantine Art, ed. Maria Vassilaki, exh. cat., Benaki Museum, Athens (Milan, 2000), pp. 425–32. Thomas Špidlík, ‘Les icones dans la tradition byzantinoslave’, Dictionnaire de Spiritualité, vii/2 (1971), col. 1229; Oleg Tarasov, Icon and Devotion: Sacred Spaces in Imperial Russia, trans. Robin Milner-Gulland (London, 2002), pp. 38–9. Vera Shevzov, Russian Orthodoxy on the Eve of the Revolution (Oxford, 2004), pp. 171–213, at p. 213. Sara T. Nalle, God in La Mancha: Religious Reform and the People of Cuenca, 1500–1650 (Baltimore, 1992), p. 269 n. 55, and see p. 154. Paola Vismara Chiappa, Miracoli settecenteschi in Lombardia tra istituzione ecclesiastica e religione popolare (Milan, 1988), pp. 39–41, 43–4. A miracle-working crucifix in a Milanese nunnery throughout the long eighteenth century: Anna Pestalozza, ‘Storia di una devozione: Il crocifisso miracoloso di Santa Prassede a Milano’, Archivio storico lombardo, 117 (1991), pp. 105–24. Maria Stella Calò Mariani, ‘Icone e statue lignee medievali nei santuari mariani della Puglia: La Capitanata’, in Santuari cristiani d’Italia. Committenze e fruizione tra medioevo e età moderna, ed. Mario Tosti (Rome, 2003), pp. 3–43, at pp. 17–18. Pietro Stella, ed., Atti e decreti del concilio diocesano di Pistoia dell’anno 1786 (Florence, 1986), p. 202 (Session vi, para. xvii). Ricci wanted altogether removed any image in which people appeared to invest particular fidelity. See further on Ricci and the Leopoldine reforms Mario Rosa, Riformatori e ribelli nel ’700 religioso italiano (Bari, 1969), pp. 215–44. Agenore Gelli, ed., Memorie di Scipione de’ Ricci, 2 vols (Florence, 1865), vol. i, p. 238. Marta Pieroni Francini, ‘Immagini sacre in Toscana dal tumulto di Prato al “Viva Maria”’, in Culto dei santi, istituzioni e classi sociali in età preindustriale, ed. S. Boesch Gajano and L. Sebastiani (Rome, 1960), pp. 837–72. Ibid., p. 856. Giovanni Marchetti, De’ prodigi avvenuti in molte sagre immagini specialmente di Maria Santissima secondo gli autentici processi compilati in Roma memorie (Rome, 1797); Massimo Cattaneo, Gli occhi di Maria sulla Rivoluzione: ‘Miracoli’ a Roma e nello Stato della Chiesa (1796–1797)

References

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134 Angelo Turchini, ‘Iconografia e vita religiosa. Commitenza e commercio’, in Storia dell’Italia religiosa, vol. iii: L’età contemporanea, ed. Gabriele de Rosa,Tullio Gregory and André Vauchez (Bari, 1995), pp. 517–32. 135 Dante, Purgatorio, iii. 49. 136 Massimo Quaini, ‘La Liguria invisibile’, in La Liguria, ed. A. Gibelli and P. Rugafiori (Turin, 1994), pp. 41–102; Edoardo Grendi, Introduzione alla storia moderna della Repubblica di Genova (Genoa, 1973); Grendi, La repubblica aristocratica dei genovesi. Politica, carità e commercio fra Cinque e Seicento (Bologna, 1987). 137 Edoardo Grendi, Il Cervo e la Repubblica. Il modello ligure di antico regime (Turin, 1993). Grendi was influenced by the school of English local history at Leicester University: Grendi, Storia di una storia locale. L’esperienza ligure, 1792–1992 (Venice, 1996), esp. pp. 11–22. See the historical study of the Valle Fontanabuona above Chiavari by his pupil: Osvaldo Raggio, Faide e parentele. Lo stato genovese visto dalla Fontanabuona (Turin, 1990). 138 Giovanni Assereto, while acknowledging the significance of Grendi’s shift of focus to the political periphery, warns against the possible implication that Liguria was unique in its experience of fragmentation, and against a tendency to ignore the nature and role of the Genoese state. Giovanni Assereto, ‘L’amministrazione del dominio di terraferma’, in his La metamorfosi della Repubblica. Saggi di storia genovese tra il XVI e il XIX secolo (Savona, 1999), pp. 9–76; and ‘Communità soggette e poteri centrali’, in ibid., pp. 77–96. 139 Other than in local works of pious celebration, the Ligurian cults discussed in this book have not previously been studied. 140 Gumppenberg, Atlante mariano, ed. Zanella, vol. vii, pp. 425–78; Palok Plaku, ‘The Holy Legend of Our Lady of Shkodra’, Albanian Catholic Bulletin, 9 (1988), pp. 12–14; website of the sanctuary: www.santuariombc.it (consulted 13 September 2010); Eduard Karuzo, ‘Notizie sul pelegrinaggio nazionale di Genazzano’, Albania News, 3 June 2008.The venerated image at Genazzano is a fifteenth-century Italian fresco. 141 D. Baraz, ‘The Incarnated Icon of Saidnaya goes West’, Le Muséon, 108 (1995), pp. 181–91;William Dalrymple, From the Holy Mountain (London, 1997), p. 191; Bernard Hamilton, ‘Our Lady of Saidnaiya: An Orthodox Shrine Revered by Muslims and Knights Templar at the Time of the Crusades’, Studies in Church History, 36 (2000), pp. 207–15; B. Z. Kedar, ‘Convergences of Oriental Christian, Muslim and Frankish Worshippers:The Case of Saydnaya and the Knights Templar’, in The Crusades and the Military Orders: Expanding the Frontiers of Medieval

(Rome, 1995); and for a contemporary list of 120 Marian Roman street shrines, see P. L. Bombelli, Raccolta delle immagini della Beatissima Vergine ornate della corona d’oro dal R.mo capitolo di S. Pietro, 4 vols (Rome, 1792). At this time, in the same context of anxiety surrounding the presence of the French army, images reportedly moved their eyes in Ancona and other places: Raccolta di varie lettere che descrivono e attestano i prodigiosi segni veduti costantemente in vari luoghi della Marca, in alcune sante reliquie ed immagini, e specialmente in quella della SS.Vergine Maria, posta nella Cattedrale di S. Ciriaco d’Ancona (Rome, 1796). Semo da capo, ‘Sonnetto’, cited in S. Salvi, Le madonnelle (Rome, 1981), p. 7. ‘The Pedacchia’ refers to a street now buried beneath the Vittorio Emmanuele monument; ‘the Monte’ was Santa Maria ai Monti; ‘the Ghetto’ alludes to the church of Santa Maria del Pianto del Ghetto. Bollettino parrocchiale del Santuario-parrocchia N.S. di Apparizione, 56 (August 1948). An episcopal letter of the same period addressed to the entire archdiocese issued a general warning of this kind: ‘Certain processions, protracted for hours and hours amidst the din of a populace called, not to prayer, but to a spectacle of athleticism in the carrying of enormous crosses, are certainly not manifestations of serious piety.’ ‘Lettera collettiva dell’ Episcopato ligure al clero ed al popolo cristiano’, Rivista diocesana genovese, 20 (November, 1930), pp. 307–21. Menozzi, Les images, pp. 263–8; Gamboni, The Destruction of Art, pp. 232–54; Françoise Caussé, La revue ‘L’Art Sacré’. Le débat en France sur l’art et la religion (1945–1954) (Paris, 2010). The Council did not institute a policy of iconoclasm; it did, however, foster anxiety about the place of art in churches. Étienne Fouilloux, ‘Autour de Vatican ii: Crise de l’image religieuse ou crises de l’art sacré ?’ in Crises de l’image religieuse: De Nicée II à Vatican II, ed. Olivier Christin and Dario Gamboni (Paris, 1999), pp. 263–80. Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. ii, p. 842.This officially sanctioned edition and translation of the Council decrees gives ‘worshipful symbols’ as the English for ‘sacrae imagines’ in the Latin text: a rendering which underlines the caution of the decree with regard to the perceived danger of religious imagery. We gathered these views from local conversations with clerical and lay inhabitants of Sestri Levante, Chiavari, Genoa and other places. Sydel Silverman, Three Bells of Civilization:The Life of an Italian Hill Town (New York, 1975), pp. 171–4.

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8 Norman Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils (London, 1990), vol. i, p. 637. 9 William A. Christian, Apparitions in Late Medieval and Renaissance Spain (Princeton, nj, 1981), p.151. 10 Gabriella Zarri, ‘Living Saints: A Typology of Female Sanctity in the Early Sixteenth Century’ [1980], trans. in Women and Religion in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, ed. Daniel Bornstein and Roberto Rusconi (Chicago, il, and London, 1996), pp. 219–303, esp. pp. 248–54; Ottavia Niccoli, ‘The End of Prophecy’, Journal of Modern History, 61 (1989), pp. 667–82.The words of an early seventeenth-century Jesuit capture the changed mood: ‘We must apply strict criteria. How can visions be justified?’ Ottavia Niccoli, Vedere con gli occhi del cuore. Alle origini del potere delle immagini (Bari, 2011), pp. 140–41. 11 Stefano Costa, Il santuario del Boschetto in Camogli (Genoa, 1919). 12 Ottavia Niccoli, La vita religiosa nell’Italia moderna (Rome, 1998), p. 47. 13 The first evidence is that of the archbishop of Genoa’s vicar who conducted an inquiry, reporting in August 1558: ‘ut pie creditur ipsa virgo apparuit indeque reperta fuit quedam tabella cum imagine eiusdem gloriose virginis quando in celum assumpta fuit. . .’. Arturo Ferretto, Il codice diplomatico del santuario di Monte Allegro (Genoa, 1897), pp. 10–11. For local tradition about the events as recorded in the seventeenth century, see Giovanni Agosto Molfino, Di alcune memorie istoriche della miracolosa Madonna celebrata su’l Monte Leto in Liguria (Venice, n.d. [1682]). See further Jane Garnett and Gervase Rosser, ‘A Miracle-working Orthodox Icon in Italy: Comparative Image Cults in East and West’, in Eastern Christian Relics, ed. Alexei Lidov (Moscow, 2003), pp. 351–60. 14 J.A.S. Collin de Plancy, Dictionnaire critique des reliques et des images miraculeuses, 3 vols (Paris, 1821–2). Collin de Plancy distinguished between the truly miraculous image and the mere idol: ‘Je ne cherche à combattre que le culte ridicule des objets extérieurs’ (Avertissement). 15 Marco Fincardi, ‘“Ici pas de madone”: Inondations et apparitions mariales dans les campagnes de la vallée du Pô’, Annales – Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations, 50 (1995), pp. 829–54. 16 Ruth Harris, Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age (London, 1999), esp. pp. 80–82, 279–83. Spain had to wait until the twentieth century for the visions of Limpias in 1919, and those of Ezquioga, in the context of the civil war, in the 1930s.William A. Christian, Visionaries:The Spanish Republic and the Reign of Christ

Latin Christianity, ed. Z. Hunyadi and J. Laszlovszky (Budapest, 2001), pp. 89–100; Annemarie Weyl Carr, ‘Thoughts on Mary East and West’, in Images of the Mother of God: Perceptions of the Theotokos in Byzantium, ed. Maria Vassilaki (Aldershot, 2005), pp. 277–92, at pp. 278–9.

2 The Invented Image 1 Deposition of Baptista Busalla Augustini, sailor, to the inquest held into the reported miracles of the Madonna della Fortuna in the church of San Vittore, Genoa, summer 1636. acag, ‘Grazie e miracoli’, ‘Nostra Signora della Fortuna’. 2 Michel de Certeau, ‘The “Little Saints” of Aquitaine’, in his The Mystic Fable, trans. Michael B. Smith (Chicago, 1992), chap. 8, describes the experiences of these seventeenth-century mystics in similar terms. 3 In general see The Invention of Tradition, ed. E. J. Hobsbawm and T. O. Ranger (Cambridge, 1983). 4 The image was eventually translated into the church of San Pietro. Maria Pia Paoli, ‘Chiara Matraini e pietà mariana nella Lucca di fine Cinquecento’, in Religione, cultura e politica nell’Europa dell’età moderna. Studi offerti a Mario Rosa dagli amici, ed. C. Ossola, M.Verga and M. A. Visneglia (Florence, 2003), pp. 521–45, at pp. 538–41; Guilielmus Gumppenberg, Atlante mariano, ed. A. Zanella (Verona, 1839–47), vol. vi, pp. 264–93. 5 Pierroberto Scaramella, Le Madonne del Purgatorio. Iconografia e religione in Campania tra Rinascimento e Controriforma (Genoa, 1991), pp. 170–72. For an earlier, Byzantine case of similar entrepreneurship, see N. Oikonomedes, ‘The Holy Icon as an Asset’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 45 (1991), pp. 35–44. 6 Elisabetta Gulli Grigioni, ‘L’innocente mediatore nelle leggende dell’Atlante mariano’, Lares, 41 (1975), pp. 5–34; Gulli Grigioni, ‘L’empio giocatore nelle leggende dell’Atlante mariano’, Il Santo, 15 (1975), pp. 345–51. See also Otto Meinardus, ‘A Typological Analysis of the Traditions Pertaining to Miraculous Icons’, in Wegzeichen. Festgabe zum 60. Geburtstag vom Prof. Dr H. M. Biedermann OSA, ed. E. C. Suttner and C. Patock (Würzburg, 1971), pp. 201–32; G. Profeta, ‘Le leggende di fondazione dei santuari’, Lares, 36 (1970), pp. 245–58. While superficial in their analyses, these studies point up the simplified types to which the standard official narratives of miraculous images tended to be reduced. 7 O. Mazzotta, ‘Francesco Colella scopritore di Madonne nel Seicento in territorio leccese’, Lares, 61 (1995), pp. 49–65.

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(Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1996); Christian, ‘Six Hundred Years of Visionaries in Spain:Those Believed and Those Ignored’, in Challenging Authority:The Historical Study of Contentious Politics, ed. M. P. Hanagan, L. P. Moch and W. te Brake (Minneapolis, mn, 1998), pp. 107–19. Antonio Marcone, Storia del Santuario di Nostra Signora delle Grazie presso Chiavari celebre pel movimento degli occhi manifestatosi in essa il 28 giugno 1871, 2nd edn (Siena, 1897). Genova e Maria. Contributi per la storia del Santuario di Nostra Signora della Guardia. Atti dell’incontro di studio 24 nov. 1990 (Genoa, 1992), p. 123. See pp. 104‒6 and references cited.The vision of Lourdes, also, was early turned into a three-dimensional image of the seer and the Virgin, whose standard white forms would become familiar throughout the Catholic world.The same point is evident in the recent cult of the Virgin of Medjugorje, Herzegovina, the subject of repeated visions which in turn have given rise to mass production of the related image: the Madonna of Civitavecchia, the object of a major cult in its own right noted on p. 37, is a plaster representation of the Medjugorje Madonna.The general point about the vision recorded as an image was also noted by H. Dünninger, ‘Wahres Abbild: Bildwallfahrt und Gnadenbildkopie’, in Wallfahrt kennt keine Grenzen, ed. L. Kriss-Rettenbeck and G. Möhler (Munich, 1984), pp. 274–83. Carlo Bitossi, Il governo dei magnifici. Patriziato e politica a Genova fra Cinque e Seicento (Genoa, 1990). For the coronation of 1637 see pp. 99‒101. Agostino Schiaffino, Memorie di Genova, 1624–1647, ed. Carlo Cabella (Genoa, 1996), p. 68. asg, Sommario con pandetto dei fogliazzi di giurisdizione, ms 165/1075, n. 110. acag, ‘Grazie e miracoli’, report of a notary acting for the archbishop’s vicar, June–July 1665. For the 1684 bombardment, see L.-G.-O.-F. Bréquigny, Histoire des révolutions de Gênes, 3 vols (Paris, 1750), vol. ii, pp. 287–304; Il bombardamento di Genova nel 1684. Atti della giornata di studio nel terzo centenario (Genova, 21 giugno 1984) (Genoa, 1988). For the apocalyptic tensions and disturbances of June–July 1688 see asg, as 1149, fol. 44 n. 80; as 1150, fol. 44 n. 81. asg, as 1149, fol. 44 n. 80. The key source for what follows is the transcript of the inquest into the reported miracles of the Madonna della Fortuna, held in the chancery of the archbishop of Genoa between June and August 1636.The extant copy

28

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34 35

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was made in 1735. acag, ‘Grazie e miracoli’, ‘Processo per la statua di Nra. Sga. [della Fortuna]’. Cleaning of the statue in 2010 confirmed that the upper part of the statue (which is supported on an additional piece of wood) had been carved in the form of a ship’s prow.The breasts of the figure have been cut back, evidently in the process of making it suitable for display in church in 1636. Padre Gabriele, priest in charge of the church of San Carlo and San Vittore, personal communication, July 2011. acag, ‘SS.Vittore e Carlo’, ruling of the apostolic protonotary of the cathedral, 6 September 1636. T. L. Zignago, Brieve notizie del successo per cui la chiesa parrocchiale di S.Vittore Martire eretta in Genova, abbia poi acquistata in titolare la Vergine Madre sotto la invocazione di Madonna della Fortuna (Genoa, 1757), pp. 28–42. A second edition of Zignago’s book was published in 1762. Ibid., pp. 43–50. A. Pitto, La Liguria mariana: I santuari di Genova (Genoa, 1884), pp. 293–329. Breve narrazione storica degli avvenimenti riguardanti il miracoloso simulacro di Nostra Signora della Fortuna che si venera nella chiesa dei SS.Vittore e Carlo in Genova (Genoa, 1898); Cenni storici intorno al miracoloso simulacro di NS. della Fortuna che si venera nella chiesa parrocchiale dei SS.Vittore e Carlo in Genova – via Balbi, edito a cura dei PP. Carmelitani Scalzi (Genoa, 1934). asg, Notai Antichi, 6555 (G.T. Peirano), 1637 (no. 198), 4 April. Deposition of Bernardo Cosmelli. The principal evidence for the early cult of the Madonna dell’Orto is contained in the copy of the inquest into the miracles of the Madonna dell’Orto undertaken between July and September 1610.The extant copy dates from the early eighteenth century. ‘Processo della verificazione dei miracoli della Madonna dell’Orto’, bsec, ms 3.y.iv.27. See also Luigi Sanguineti, Nostra Signora dell’Orto. Storia documentata del suo santuario in Chiavari e della diffusione del culto, 2nd edn (Rapallo, 1955); Raimondo Spiazzi, Nostra Signora dell’Orto in Chiavari. Storia documentata della devozione e del santuario (Rapallo, 1994); Spiazzi, ed., Nostra Signora dell’Orto in Chiavari. Memorie e testimonianze (Rapallo, 1995). In addition to the ‘processo’, see the various seventeenth-century accounts cited below, pp. 185‒6, 234‒8; and Sanguineti, Nostra Signora dell’Orto; Spiazzi, Nostra Signora dell’Orto in Chiavari. Memorie e testimonianze. The phenomenon has been most extensively reviewed by Hans Belting, in Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Age of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott

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39 40 41 42

43

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(Chicago, il, and London, 1994), pp. 330–48. See the discussion of icons attributed to St Luke in Michele Bacci, Il pennello dell’Evangelista. Storia delle immagini sacre attribuite a San Luca (Pisa, 1998). Notizia istorico-critica della prodigiosa effigie di N.S.G.C. volgarmente denominata il Santo Sudario che si venera in Genova nella chiesa di S. Bartolommeo già de’ Basiliani armeni, ora dei chierici reg. di S. Paolo, detti Barnabiti (Genoa, 1828); Colette Dufour Bozzo, Il ‘Sacro Volto’ di Genova (Rome, 1974); Dufour Bozzo, ‘Il “Sacro Volto” di Genova. Problemi e aggiornamenti’, in The Holy Face and the Paradox of Representation, ed. Herbert Kessler and Gerhard Wolf (Bologna, 1998), pp. 55–67; Gerhard Wolf, Colette Dufour Bozzo and Anna Rosa Calderoni Masetti, eds, Mandylion. Intorno al ‘Sacro Volto’, da Bisanzio a Genova, exh. cat., Palazzo Ducale, Genoa (2004). Pellegrino Scotto, Traslationi del santissimo volto del Salvatore mandato ad Abgaro Rè in Egitto (Pavia, 1627), pp. 48–53. Agostino Calcagnino, Dell’imagine edessena libri due (Genoa, 1639), pp. 105–6. Calcagnino, Dell’imagine edessena libri due, copy in the Biblioteca Berio, Genoa, F.Ant.Gen.B.61. C. Frugoni, ‘Una proposta per il Volto Santo’, in Il Volto Santo. Storia e cultura, ed. C. Boracchini and M.T. Filieri (Lucca, 1982), pp. 15–48; R. Manselli, ‘Lucca e il Volto Santo’, in Lucca, il Volto Santo e la civiltà medioevale. Atti convegno internazionale di studi Lucca, 21–23 ottobre 1982 (Lucca, 1984), pp. 9–20; P. Lazzarini, Il Volto Santo di Lucca (Lucca, 1982); La Santa Croce di Lucca: Il Volto Santo. Storia, tradizioni, immagini (Impruneta, 2003). V. Podestà, Cenni storici del prodigioso crocifisso che si venera nella perinsigne collegiata parrocchia di Sestri Levante (Chiavari, 1903); A. De Floriano, ‘Il Crocifisso ligneo di S. Maria di Nazareth a Sestri Levante’, Quaderni del Centro di Studi Lunesi, 6–7 (1981–82), pp. 63–76. A.D.P., N.S. delle Grazie venerata in Megli. Memorie storicoreligiose (Chiavari, 1896); A. Ferretto, Il codice diplomatico del santuario di N.S. delle Grazie in Sori (Genoa, 1898); G. Ghio, Il santuario di N.S. delle Grazie in Sori. Cenni storici (Genoa, 1989). For what follows see Giovanni Agostino Molfino, Di alcune memorie istoriche della miracolosa Madonna celebrata su’l Monte Leto in Liguria (Venice, n.d. [1682]), esp. pp. 37–41 for discussion of provenance; Arturo Ferretto, Il codice diplomatico del santuario di Monte Allegro (Genoa, 1897); Alfonso Casini, ‘Nessuno osi trasferirmi da qui’: Storia di Montallegro (Rapallo, 1981). V. Polonio, ‘A Genova tra xiv e xv secolo: Icone e reliquie d’Oltremare’, in Intorno al Sacro Volto. Genova,

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Bisanzio e il Mediterraneo (secoli XI –XIV), ed. A. R. Calderoni Masetti, Colette Dufour Bozzo and Gerhard Wolf (Venice, 2007), pp. 123–34; Karin Krause, ‘Immagine – reliquia: Da Bisanzio all’occidente’, in Mandylion, ed.Wolf, Dufour Bozzo and Calderoni Masetti, pp. 209–35. Maria Angela Bacigalupo et al., Ex voto a Montallegro (Rapallo, 1989), p. 28. I. Arnaldi, Nostra Signora di Lampedusa. Storia civile e materiale di un miracolo mediterraneo (Milan, 1990). Giacinto di Santa Maria, Memorie dell’umile servo di Dio, divoto di Maria, P. Carlo Giacinto di Santa Maria (Rome, 1728), pp. 72–122; L. A. Cervetto, Il santuario della Madonnetta (Genoa, 1920). For the mixture of Christian and Muslim devotees of the shrine of Saidnaya, see p. 6. Giovanni Fragapane, Lampedusa: Dalla preistoria al 1878 (Palermo, 1993), pp. 488–534. An English visitor to Lampedusa in the 1730s found the shrine still tended by a hermit respected by both Christians and Muslims. J. Montagu, A Voyage Round the Mediterranean in the Years 1738 and 1739 (London, 1799), pp. 988–90. Alexei Lidov, ed., Mount Athos Treasures in Russia,Tenth to Seventeenth Centuries, exh. cat., Andrei Rublev Museum of Medieval Russian Art and Culture, Moscow (2004).We are grateful to Alexei Lidov for drawing our attention to this example. J. Ferrari, Histoire abrégée de la Madone Miraculeuse de Taggia (Nice, 1911);Taggia, ‘Processo’. Ferrari, Histoire abrégée, p. 116. Tommaso was the great-nephew of Pietro Orsolino, who had carved the statue of the Madonna della Misericordia of Savona in the early sixteenth century. Letter from Salvatore Revelli to the commission for the inquiry into the miracles of the Madonna of Taggia, 21 April 1855, copy in the ‘Processo’, item no. 116 in the typescript. Ferrari, Histoire abrégée, pp. 149ff. Giovanni Agostino Pollinari (pseudonym of Salvatore Castellino), Narrazione cronologica dell’antichissima chiesa parrocchiale e collegiata insigne di Santa. Maria delle Vigne: primiera esaltazione della statua di Nostra Signora, e sua incoronazione fatta solennemente l’anno 1616 (Parma, 1718); L. A. Cervetto, ‘La chiesa di Santa Maria delle Vigne nel suo svolgimento artistico’, in Santa Maria delle Vigne nelle feste per la sua incoronazione (Genoa, 1920). Elena Parma Armani, ‘Diffusione dei santuari nel territorio della Repubblica e rinnovamento dell’ iconografia mariana’, in La scultura a Genova e in Liguria

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dal Seicento al primo Novecento (Genoa, 1989), pp. 10–40, at pp. 17–18. The diplomatic challenge is mentioned in various sources including the early eighteenth-century Genoese history by Filippo Casoni. See asg, ms 227, ‘Annali della Repubblica di Genova del secolo 17. Descritti da Filippo Casoni’, fol. 250. N. R. Fabbri and N. Rutenburg, ‘The Tabernacle of Orsanmichele in Context’, Art Bulletin, 63 (1981), pp. 385–405; Brendan Cassidy, ‘Orcagna’s Tabernacle in Florence: Design and Function’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 55 (1992), pp. 180–211. A still earlier instance had been that of Siena: Diana Norman, Siena and the Virgin: Art and Politics in a Late-Medieval City State (New Haven and London, 1999), pp. 28–31. Mary had also been promoted as Queen of the Venetian Republic. Eyewitness description of the ceremony in an anonymous contemporary letter: asg Genoa, ms 553, fol. 8–8v. See also P. R. Ravecca, ‘Così Genova divenne “Città di Maria Santissima”’, Studi genuensi, n.s., 8 (1990), pp. 33–58; Nicola Lanzi, Genova città di Maria Santissima. Storia e documenti della pietà genovese (Pisa, 1992), pp. 13–17, 42–7. Statues and paintings showing the Virgin as Protectress were dispatched to churches in subject territories, and to the commercial colonies of Genoese living abroad in Naples and elsewhere (see illus. 1). For the chapel of the Doge’s Palazzo Reale, Domenico Paggi first produced an altarpiece with the Virgin as civic guardian, replaced at the end of the century by Schiaffino’s marble version of the regal statue in the cathedral. The cathedral figure – itself a marble replacement of the wooden effigy produced in haste for the coronation – had been designed in 1652 by Domenico Fiasella, the artist who acted as chief designer of the Genoese civic image at this crucial period. Clario di Fabio, ‘Un’iconografia per la Repubblica di Genova. La “Madonna della Città” e il ruolo di Domenico Fiasella’, in Domenico Fiasella, ed. Piero Donati (Genoa, 1990), pp. 60–84; Clario di Fabio, ‘La regina della Repubblica e la “Madonna della Città”’, in Piero Boccardo and Clario di Fabio, eds, El Siglo de los Genoveses, exh. cat., Palazzo Ducale, Genoa (1999), pp. 258–61. Coins bearing the image of the Queen of Genoa were issued for use in the Republic; her picture appeared in all official contexts; and her feast days were incorporated into the civic calendar.The ceremony of her coronation was repeated at 25-year intervals. Boccardo and di Fabio, eds, El Siglo de los Genoveses, pp. 262–3, 265, 278,

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283. For the silver scudi showing the crowned Madonna with the inscription ‘Et rege eos 1637’, see Agostino Schiaffino, Memorie di Genova, 1624–1647, ed. Carlo Cabella (Genoa, 1996), p. 103. For the commemorative coronations, see Breve storia della solenne funzione che occorre in quest’anno 1796 sulla istituzione, e proseguimento di offerire ogni 25 anni le chiavi della città a Maria Santissima e riconoscerla Sovrana (Genoa, 1796). Open letter from Zaccaria da Salluzzo, osf, to the Genoese Senate, 5 December 1636, in Lanzi, Genova città di Maria Santissima, pp. 28–9. Later in the century the doge and officers of the Republic heard from another Franciscan how the chain of Marian image shrines which surrounded Genoa – including the Madonna Coronata, the Madonna del Monte, the Madonna della Pace, and the Madonna of Savona – rendered the land as powerful as it was devout. G. F. Mainero, La pietà ligure preconizata, orazion panegirica (Genoa, 1656). asg, Sommario con pandetto dei fogliazzi di giurisdizione, ms 168, n. 14 (31). For what follows see M. Remondini, Origine del culto di N.S. del Soccorso nella Metropolitana di Genova (Genoa, 1886); Francesco Patrone, Nostra Signora della Pietà e del Soccorso venerata nella metropolitana di Genova (Genoa, 1908). Daniel E. Bornstein, The Bianchi of 1399: Popular Devotion in Late Medieval Italy (Ithaca, ny, and London, 1993). Some of the Bianchi reported miracles linked to images: ibid., pp. 158–60. bavacsp, ‘Madonne Coronate’, vol. iii, fols 131–8.The picture was at this time wrongly claimed to have been in the cathedral since the early fifteenth century. Remondini, ‘Esame critico’, notes some late seventeenth-century miracles. C. G. Ratti, Instruzione di quanto può vedersi di più bello in Genova (Genoa, 1780), vol. i, p. 49, notices lamps and marine ex-votos around the picture. On 19 May 1944, during an AngloAmerican air raid, a bomb struck the chapel of the image: that the missile did not explode was attributed to the intervention of the Madonna del Soccorso. La settimana religiosa, lxxvii ⁄29 (1947), p. 2; and see the inscription close to the bomb displayed today in the right-hand aisle of the cathedral. Società Operaia di N.S. del Soccorso e S. Gio. Battista fondata nel 1854 in Genova, Consiglio Superiore, verbale della radunanza generale straordinaria, sezioni riunite, tenuta il 28 febbraio 1886 (Genoa, 1886). Nathaniel Hawthorne, Passages from the French and Italian Notebooks (New York, 1871), in Giuseppe Marcenaro, Viaggiatori stranieri in Liguria (Genoa, 1990), p. 120.

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5 Christopher J. Fuller, The Camphor Flame: Popular Hinduism and Society in India, 2nd edn (Princeton, nj, 2004), p. 60. See also Richard H. Davis, Lives of Indian Images (Princeton, nj, 1997), pp. 33–7; Donald Swearer, Becoming the Buddha:The Ritual of Image Consecration in Thailand (Princeton, nj, 2004); John E. Cort, ‘Installing Absence? The Consecration of a Jina Image’, in Presence: The Inherence of the Prototype within Images and Other Objects, ed. Robert Maniura and Rupert Shepherd (Aldershot, 2006), pp. 71–86. 6 For an effective critique of the assumption that ‘ritual’ is by definition irrational, and for the general argument that the practice of ritual should rather be understood as instrumental, see Catherine M. Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (Oxford, 1992). 7 Paul Davies, ‘The Lighting of Pilgrimage Shrines in Renaissance Italy’, in The Miraculous Image in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Erik Thunø and Gerhard Wolf (Rome, 2004), pp. 57–80, at p. 70, citing Diane Finiello Zervas, Orsanmichele a Firenze (Modena, 1996), p. 82. 8 Norman Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils (London, 1990), vol. ii, pp. 775–6. 9 Pietro Stella, ed., Atti e decreti del concilio diocesano di Pistoia dell’anno 1786 (Florence, 1986), p. 202. 10 Madonne della Laguna. Simulacri ‘da vestire’ dei secoli XIV –XIX, ed. Riccarda Pagnozzato (Rome, 1993), p. 35. 11 Notizie istoriche sulla miracolosa imagine di Maria Santissima di sotto gli organi, 4th edn (Pisa, 1846), esp. p. 8; Mariagiulia Burresi and Antonino Caleca, eds, Cimabue a Pisa. La pittura pisana del Duecento da Giunta a Giotto, exh. cat., Museo di San Matteo, Pisa (2005), pp. 130–31, with further bibliography. 12 A. and M. Remondini, I santuari e le immagini di Maria Santissima nella città di Genova (Genoa, 1865), pp. 247–366. A similar catalogue of edicole in the city of Rome in 1853 recorded 1,100. L. Cardilli, ed., Edicole sacre romane. Un segno urbano da recuperare (Rome, 1990), pp. 176–90. See Edward Muir, ‘The Virgin on the Street Corner:The Place of the Sacred in Italian Cities’, in Religion and Culture in the Renaissance and Reformation, ed. Steven Ozment (Kirksville, mo, 1989), pp. 25–40. 13 Charles Dickens, Pictures from Italy (London, 1846), chap. 3. 14 La Settimana Religiosa, 15 September 1872. 15 Joseph Autran, Italie et Semaine Sainte à Rome (Paris, 1840), in Giuseppe Marcenaro, Viaggiatori stranieri in Liguria (Genoa, 1990), p. 75. 16 G. de Fiore, Le luci negli angoli. Le madonnelle (Rome, 1960).

73 Francesco Patrone, Nostra Signora della Pietà e del Soccorso venerata nella metropolitana di Genova (Genoa, 1908), pp. 40–45. 74 For what follows see Genova e Maria. Contributi per la storia del santuario di N.S. della Guardia. Atti dell’incontro di studio 24 nov. 1990 (Genoa, 1992), pp. 120–42; Lauro Magnani, ‘Immagini della Vergine nelle rappresentazioni per il culto, per la devozione privata e per la pietà popolare’, Quaderni Franzoniani, 4 (1991), pp. 95–118; Graziella Merlatti, La Madonna della Guardia. Un laico chiamato a costruire la Chiesa (Cuneo, 2000). 75 La Madonna della Guardia (bulletin of the sanctuary, launched in 1896), i/3 (July 1896), pp. 28, 34, 40; i/6 (October 1896), pp. 41, 45; i/8 (December 1896), p. 59; ii/4 (August 1897), p. 59. 76 D. Cambiaso, N.S. della Guardia e il suo santuario in V al Polcevera (Genoa, 1933), pp. 25, 61–3, 75–6, 86–7. 77 On the diffusion of replicas of the statue group of the Madonna della Guardia, see Cambiaso, N.S. della Guardia, pp. 105ff; and La Madonna della Guardia. 78 Santa Maria delle Vigne nelle feste della sua incoronazione, novembre 1920 (Genoa, 1920).

3 The Activated Image 1 Niccolò Machiavelli, Mandragola, Act v, scene i, ed. G. D. Bonino (Turin, 1979), pp. 65–6; trans. in Laura Giannetti and Guido Ruggiero, eds, Five Comedies from the Italian Renaissance (Baltimore, 2003), p. 110. 2 For the theatrical setting of the image see Eugenio Casalini, ‘La Santissima Annunziata nella storia e nella civiltà fiorentina’, in Tesori d’arte dell’Annunziata di Firenze, ed. E. Casalini et al. (Florence, 1987), pp. 75–95; Laura Petrucci, Santissima Annunziata (Rome, 1992). For the laude sung by the Servites before this image, see Blake Wilson, Music and Merchants:The Laudesi Companies of Republican Florence (Oxford, 1992), p. 106 n. 3 Richard C.Trexler, ‘Habiller et déshabiller les images: Esquisse d’une analyse’, in L’image et la production du sacré, ed. F. Dunand, J.-M. Spieser and J.Wirth (Paris, 1991), pp. 195–231, at p. 215. 4 For David Freedberg, the figural and mimetic function of the revered picture or statue of a holy being is fundamental. David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago and London, 1989), esp. p. 97: ‘Images work in distinctive ways precisely because they are figured or shaped’; and p. 438: ‘Our responses to images [are] of the same order as our responses to reality.’

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17 Mauro Ricchetti, Le Madonnette dei carruggi (Genoa, 1967), pp. 22–3. 18 An abbreviated conspectus of edicole in the centre of Genoa at the start of the twenty-first century: Rita Testa et al., Edicole votive. Un percorso nel cuore antico di Genova (Genoa, 2000). Don Carlo Parodi, parish priest of San Donato in the historic centre of Genoa, has in recent years occasionally led processions with litanies of Mary before her street shrines, thus reaffirming the sacredness of the urban space. 19 Don Federico Icardi, priest-in-charge of the church of Nostra Signora di Bacezza, Chiavari, personal communication, 1999. 20 Ranieri degli Esposti et al., Chiavari marinara dall’epoca eroica della vela, 2nd edn (Chiavari, 1997), pp. 229–34. 21 Inscription against the interior west wall of the Roman church of Sant’Ignazio.The image (or rather a modern copy) is now venerated in a dedicated church, the Santuario del Divino Amore, in Rome, consecrated in 1999. 22 Antonello Ricci, ‘Gli occhi, le luci, le immagini: le madonnelle. Spazio del sacro e pratiche devozionali delle edicole religiose’, in La sacra città. Itinerari antropologico-religiosi nella Roma di fine millennio, ed. Luigi M. Lombardi Satriani (Rome, 1999), pp. 33–75, at pp. 44–56.The testimony of a pilgrim to the shrine in 2008: www.santuariodivinoamore.it (consulted 9 September 2011). 23 Francesco Bocchi, Sopra l’imagine miracolosa della Santissima Nunziata di Firenze (Florence, 1592), p. 53. 24 Bissera V. Pentcheva, The Sensual Icon: Space, Ritual, and the Senses in Byzantium (University Park, pa, 2010), pp. 144–5. 25 Margherita Priarone, Andrea Ansaldo, 1584–1638 (Genoa, 2011), p. 220. 26 Victor M. Schmidt, Painted Piety: Panel Paintings for Personal Devotion in Tuscany, 1250–1400 (Florence, 2005), pp. 37–63 (panel forms), 95 (curtains). 27 An instance witnessed in early sixteenth-century Milan, of a frescoed Madonna in a street, normally concealed by a cloth, which among other miracles was said to have stopped the spread of a fire: J. Snow-Smith, ‘Pasquier le Moyne’s 1515 Account of Art and War in Northern Italy: A Translation of his Diary from le Couronnement’, Studies in Iconography, 5 (1979), pp. 174–234, at p. 217. 28 While it is hard to document the veiling of Christian images before the thirteenth century, antique precedent is likely to have fostered the practice at earlier times. On this subject in general see Victor M. Schmidt, ‘Curtains, Revelatio, and Pictorial Reality in Late Medieval and

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Renaissance Italy’, in Weaving,Veiling, and Dressing: Textiles and their Metaphors in the Late Middle Ages, ed. Kathryn M. Rudy and Barbara Baert (Turnhout, 2007), pp. 191–213; Paul Hills, The Renaissance Image Unveiled: From Madonna to Venus (Edinburgh, 2010). Gert Kreytenberg, Orcagna: Andrea di Cione. Ein universeller Künstler der Gotik in Florenz (Mainz, 2000), pp. 100–02; and for Orcagna’s tabernacle for this image (1352–60), with its additional, sculpted marble curtains framing the picture, see pp. 106–7 and pls 230–34. For the larger context see Zervas, Orsanmichele. Richard Trexler, ‘Florentine Religious Experience: The Sacred Image’, Studies in the Renaissance, 19 (1972), pp. 7–41, notes the explicitly recorded warning of the civic Signoria against bringing the cult image of the Madonna of Impruneta too often into the city, for fear of loss of reverence.The image of the Annunziata today is normally covered by a roll-down shutter, which is lifted each day at 5 p.m. for a short period by an electric device. Schmidt, ‘Curtains’, p. 201. Bilder und Zeichen religiösen Volksglaubens. Rudolf Kriss zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Lenz Kriss-Rettenbeck (Munich, 1963), pl. 80 and pp. 39, 137 n. 65. bavacsp, ‘Madonne Coronate’, vol. xxiii, fols 1145–1214. La Madonna del Boschetto. Bollettino del Santuario, March–April 1940, p. 1; March–April 1941, p. 3; November–December 1941, p. 4; etc. La Madonna del Boschetto, January–February 1942, pp. 2–4; July–August 1942, p. 2; November–December 1942, p. 2; etc. La Madonna del Boschetto, January–February 1942, p. 3: ‘never as in these grey times could I have experienced so beautiful a surprise and such dear and comforting company.’ bavacsp, ‘Madonne Coronate’, vol. vii, fols 32–52. It is common for beneficiaries to report that their recovery began at the moment of taking a vow to the image, while the complete cure awaited fulfilment of the promise. For example, Paolo Cozzo, ‘Regina Montis Regalis.’ Il Santuario di Mondovì da devozione locale a tempio sabaudo, con edizione delle ‘Memorie intorno alla SS.Vergine di Vico (1595–1601)’ (Rome, 2002), p. 345. Gaetano Moroni, Dizionario di erudizione storicoecclesiastica (Venice, 1858), vol. xc, p. 112. acag, fondo: ‘Acquasanta’, ‘Processo’ of miracles at the shrine of the Madonna of Acquasanta, 25–27 August 1672. Giacinto di Santa Maria, Memorie dell’umile servo di Dio, divoto di Maria, P. Carlo Giacinto di Santa Maria

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Agostiniano Scalzo della Provincia di Genova (Rome, 1728); L. A. Cervetto, Il santuario della Madonnetta (Genoa, 1920); Lauro Magnani, Santuario della Madonnetta (Genoa, 1976); Nicolò de Mari, ‘Il complesso genovese di San Nicolò da Tolentino e l’architettura degli Agostiniani Scalzi nella provincia ligure’, Quaderni Franzoniani, 7 (1994), pp. 75–116. For Carlo Giacinto’s Marian concerns, see his Mater amabilis. Motivi di amare Maria per ogni giorno dell’anno (Genoa, 1710). Paul Davies, ‘The Madonna delle Carceri in Prato and Italian Renaissance Pilgrimage Architecture’, Architectural History, 36 (1993), pp. 1–18; La chiesa a pianta centrale, tempio civico del Rinascimento, ed. B. Adorni (Milan, 2002); Santa Maria delle Carceri a Prato. Miracoli e devozione in un santuario toscano del Rinascimento, ed. Anna Benvenuti (Florence, 2005). For the miracle, see Alexei Lidov, ‘The Holy Fire: Hierotopical and Art-historical Aspects of the Creation of New Jerusalems’, in New Jerusalems: Hierotopy and Iconography of Sacred Spaces, ed. Alexei Lidov (Moscow, 2009), pp. 277–312 (Russian with English summary). For the washing and dressing of statues in the ancient world, see Simona Bettinetti, La statua di culto nella pratica rituale greca (Bari, 2001), pp. 137–60. For the Middle Ages, see P. J. Nordhagen, ‘Icons Designed for the Display of Sumptuous Votive Gifts’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 41 (1987), pp. 453–60; and for an example of ‘gold and jewels’ typically honouring a cult statue of the Virgin Mary in twelfth-century England, see Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge, 1989), p. 236. Trexler, ‘Habiller et déshabiller les images’, p. 211. Giovanni Bono Ferrari, L’epoca eroica della vela. Capitani e bastimenti di Genova e della Riviera di Ponente nel secolo XIX (Rapallo, 1941), p. 727. Memorie su’ le due miracolose sanazioni, ed altre distinte grazie operate da Dio ad intercessione di Maria Santissima sotto il titolo della Madonna del Parto, la di cui sagra immagine si venera nella chiesa di S. Agostino di Roma (Rome, 1831). Monique Scheer, ‘From Majesty to Mystery: Change in the Meanings of Black Madonnas from the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries’, American Historical Review, 107 (2002), pp. 1412–40, at pp. 1434–5. Franco Boggero and Piero Donati, eds, La sacra selva. Scultura lignea in Liguria tra XII e XVI secolo, exh. cat., Museo di Sant’Agostino, Genoa (Milan, 2004), pp. 136–7. Alberto Fazzeri, oral communication, August 1999.The restoration of the crucifix took place in 1977–8. Anna

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de Floriani, ‘Il Crocifisso ligneo di S. Maria di Nazareth a Sestri Levante’, Quaderni di Centro Studi Lunensi, 6–7 (1981–2), pp. 63–76. As the art historical account specifies: ‘We therefore proceeded to separate the figure of the Crucified – itself having been detached from the cross – from all the additions which did not belong to it’ (p. 63). The double aspect of this image was already reflected upon by the mid-nineteenth-century author of La Madonna di Santo Agostino sotto l’aspetto della religione e del genio artistico scolpita nel secolo decimosesto da Giacomo Tatti da Sansovino (Rome, 1858).Tourism was evidently beginning to make manifest a tension between diverse perceptions of an image mentioned by Vasari in his Life of Sansovino (Giorgio Vasari, Le vite di più eccellenti pittori scultori e d’architettori [1568], ed. G. Milanese (Florence, 1878‒85), vol. viii, p. 496).The pious writer of 1858 emphasized that artistic quality was inessential to the miraculous powers of the image, but noted that it could help to stimulate the devotion of the people (p. 6). For the presentation of the Madonna delle Grazie al Molo as a work of medieval art, see Boggero and Donati, eds, La sacra selva, pp. 110–11. Anon, Chiesa di Santa Maria di Castello (Genoa, 1990), p. 28; Padre Costantino Gilardi, op, Prior of the Monastery of Santa Maria di Castello, personal communication, 1999. Marco Ruffini, ‘Un’attribuzione a Donatello del “Crocifisso” ligneo dei Servi di Padua’, Prospettiva, 130–31 (2008), pp. 22–49. For the crowning of cult statues in antiquity, see Bettinetti, La statua di culto, pp. 138–9, 141. For fragmentary evidence of the practice in the Middle Ages, see Nikolaus Gussone, ‘Die Krönung von Bildern im Mittelalter’, Jahrbuch für Volkskunde, n.s., 13 (1990), pp. 150–76. Pellegrino da Forlì, L’Apostolo della Madonna, ossia il cappuccino istitutore della pubblica e solenne incoronazione delle sante immagini di Maria (Rome, 1876), pp. 81, 105–9. The Madonna della Steccata had been adopted as the palladium of Parma during the Italian wars in the 1520s. The image had been printed on local coins, with the legend, ‘sub tuum praesidium’ (under your protection). Coins minted after the coronation showed the image with angels holding crowns above the heads of Mary and Jesus. Guilielmus Gumppenberg, Atlante mariano, ed. A. Zanella (Verona, 1839–47), vol. vi, pp. 11–34. Ottavio da Alatri and Anselmo da Remo, ‘L’incoronazione delle immagini mariane’, L’Italia francescana, 8 (1933), pp. 159–80, 308–18, 415–31, 530–42,

References

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58 59

60 61

62 63

64 65

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651–65; bavacsp, ‘Madonne Coronate’, vol. i, ‘Prefazione’ (1863); I(osephus) P(izzoni), ‘De coronatione imaginum B. Mariae V.’, Ephemerides liturgicae, 68 (1954), pp. 301–12; Nikolaus Gussone, ‘Zur Krönung von Bildern. Heutige Praxis und neuzeitlicher Ritus’, Jahrbuch für Volkskunde, n.s., 10 (1987), pp. 151–64. Pizzoni makes the point that late medieval prayers, including the Rosary and the Salve Regina, had helped to make familiar the motifs of crowns and regality in connection with Mary. Moreover, the visual iconography of the coronation of the Virgin by Christ had been widely disseminated in Italy since its invention in the twelfth century. The records of petitions, varying greatly in detail, and of licences for coronations, are preserved in bavacsp, ‘Madonne Coronate’. Ottavio da Alatri and Anselmo da Remo, ‘L’incoronazione’, give a list to 1933; Paolo Bonci, Madonne coronate in Italia e nel mondo (Fiesole, 2004), pp. 39–68, updates this to 1981, when the process ceased to be managed from Rome. Bonci also publishes an illustrated selection of miraculous Madonnas, with brief, unanalytic narratives. For the comparatively very low numbers of saints canonized in the early modern period, see p. 49. Bishops have not felt prevented from crowning Marian images as miraculous without the authority of the Vatican. Maurice Dejonghe, Orbis marianus. Les madones couronnées de Rome (Paris, 1967), p. 367 n. 6. Of the 85 coronations between 1634 and 1699, 66 were Roman. Dejonghe, Orbis marianus, catalogues the Roman crowned Madonnas. For the iconography and the ecclesio-political significance of the crowned Virgin in medieval Rome, see Ursula Nilgen, ‘Maria Regina – Ein politischer Kultbildtypus?’, Römisches Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, 19 (1981), pp. 1–33. The numbers of coronations by period: 1634–1699: 85; 1700–1749: 65; 1750–1799: 85; 1800–1849: 50; 1850–1899: 164; 1900–1949: 542; 1950–1981: 119. Ignazio M. Calabuig, ‘Significato e valore del nuovo “Ordo coronandi imaginem Beatae Mariae Virginis”’, Notitiae, 17 (1981), pp. 268–324. It appears also that the supply of gold left in 1636 by Count Pallavicini, for the making of the Roman crowns, is now exhausted. bavacsp, ‘Madonne Coronate’. Notizie della miracolosa statua di N.S. del Suffragio che si venera nel borgo di Recco e descrizione delle feste per la solenne incoronazione della stessa nel giorno 8 settembre 1824 (Genoa, 1824). bavacsp, vol. xiii, fols 41–59; see also ‘Posizione relativa alla coronazione della statua in legno della B.V. col

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Bambino . . . sotto il titolo di Nostra Signora del Suffragio . . .’, ms transcript (nineteenth century) of archiepiscopal inquest of March 1823, Archive of the Oratorio di Nostra Signora del Suffragio, Recco. Bono Ferrari, L’epoca eroica della vela, p. 721. Notizie della miracolosa statua di N.S. del Suffragio, p. 7. See Il cinquantesimo della incoronazione di S. Maria del Suffragio celebrato in Recco addì 6, 7, 8 settembre 1874. Relazione delle feste e orazioni sacre (Genoa 1875); Nel centenario dell’incoronazione di N.S. del Suffragio in Recco (Recco, 1924); 8 settembre 1949: 125o anniversario incoronazione di N.S. del Suffragio in Recco (Recco, 1949). In 1999 special festivities were held for the 175th anniversary of the crowning. Il cinquantesimo della incoronazione di S. Maria del Suffragio, pp. 108–9. Fausta Franchini Guelfi, Le casacce. Arte e tradizione (Genoa, 1974), pp. 41–2; A. Ferretto, Contributo alla storia del teatro in Liguria. Le rappresentazioni sacre in Chiavari e Rapallo (Genoa, 1898), p. 23; A. Ginella, ‘Le confraternite della Valbisagno tra Rivoluzione e Impero (1797–1811)’, Atti della Società Ligure di Storia Patria, n.s., 23 (1983), pp. 193–320. Further on the (not entirely successful) attempts by clerical and secular authorities to limit the autonomy and the ritual of the Genoese confraternities in the early modern period, see Edoardo Grendi, ‘Morfologia e dinamica della vita associativa urbana. Le confraternite a Genova fra i secoli xvi e xviii, Atti della Società Ligure di Storia Patria, n.s., 5 (1965), pp. 239–311; Grendi, ‘Le confraternite liguri in età moderna’, in La Liguria delle casacce. Devozione, arte, storia delle confraternite liguri (Genoa, 1982), pp. 19–42. Nazareno Fabretti, ofm, ‘Preghiera fra i mortaretti’, in 8 settembre 1949, pp. 16–17. Squilla Sorese, August 1928, p. 1; similar advice from the same source in Squilla Sorese, August 1929, p. 2. For images and modern testimonies, see Luca Zennaro, Portatori di Cristo (Genoa, 2003). acag, ‘Acquasanta’, letter from the vicar of Sant’Ambrogio di Voltri to the archbishop, August 1879; see also the more moderate letter to the archbishop at this time from one of the priests of the Acquasanta sanctuary, Padre Emanuele, who suggested that ‘it would be a waste of time to attempt to persuade the confraternities [to restrain the celebrations], the custom is so ancient.’ For images of the casacce, which are characteristic of Liguria, see Franchini Guelfi, Le casacce; and Zennaro, Portatori di Cristo. Jas´ Elsner, Roman Eyes:Visuality and Subjectivity in Art and Text (Princeton, nj, 2007), pp. 41–2. Further on the

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tree-carrying devotees of Apollo and Dionysius in antiquity, see Louis Robert, Documents d’Asie Mineure, Bibliothèque des Ecoles Francaises d’Athènes et de Rome, 239b (Athens and Paris, 1987), pp. 35‒46, 234, 238‒9. Giovanni Agostino Pollinari (pseudonym of Salvatore Castellino), Narrazione cronologica dell’antichissima chiesa parrochiale e collegiata insigna di Santa Maria delle Vigne: Primiera esaltazione della statua di Nostra Signora, e sua Incoronazione fatta solennemente l’anno 1616 (Parma, 1716), quotation at p. 53. Per la solenne benedizione del nuovo quadro ‘Quasi oliva speciosa in campis’ del Prof. N. Barabino da lui donato alla chiesa parrocchiale di S.M. della Cella in San Pier d’Arena (Genoa, 1888). Existing literature on the ex-voto is predominantly antiquarian and empirical; but for useful overviews, see L. Kriss-Rettenbeck, Ex-voto. Zeichen Bild und Abbild im christlichen Votivbrauchtum (Zürich, 1972); Pietro Clemente and Luisa Orrù, ‘Sondaggi sull’arte popolare’, Storia dell’arte italiana,vol. iii (4): Forme e modelli (Turin, 1982), pp. 239–341, at pp. 279–97; Pietro Clemente et al., Le tradizioni popolari in Italia: Pittura votiva e stampe popolari (Milan, 1987). See pp. 47‒9. Kriss-Rettenbeck, Ex-voto, p. 277. Ex voto marinari del Santuario di Montenero, 2nd edn (Pisa, 1999). Bono Ferrari, L’epoca eroica della vela, p. 721. Francesco Corradini, Breve racconto dell’origine, et di alcune grazie della miracolosissima imagine di Nostra Signora Maria Vergine di Coronata fuori di Genova (Genoa, 1667), p. 172r. Annamaria Rivera, U magu, u santo, la morte, la festa. Forme religiose nella cultura popolare (Bari, 1988), p. 398. Age has also depleted these collections, although sometimes decaying ex-votos were renewed: at the shrine of the Madonna del Monte of Cesena, some ex-votos clearly dating from circa 1800 bear much earlier dates, indicating that these were replacements. L. Novelli and M. Massaccesi, eds, Ex voto del santuario della Madonna del Monte di Cesena (Cesena, 1961), p. 39. This general truth is well exemplified in the 690 ex-votos of the Madonna del Monte of Cesena, in which virtually none of the representations of the miraculous statue show what a conventionally trained art historian would recognize as the revered image. Novelli and Massaccesi, eds, Ex voto del santuario della Madonna del Monte di Cesena, p. 31 and pls. See further chapter Five. Julius von Schlosser, ‘Geschichte der Porträtbilder in

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Wachs’, Jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen Sammlungen des Allerhöchsten Kaiserhauses, 29 (1910–11), pp. 171–258. Freedberg, The Power of Images, chap. 7 and esp. pp. 156–8. Ibid., p. 157. While, therefore, we acknowledge the motives of social distinction and conspicuous consumption emphasized by Megan Holmes, ‘Ex-votos: Materiality, Memory, and Cult’, in The Idol in the Age of Art: Objects, Devotions and the Early Modern World, ed. Michael W. Cole and Rebecca Zorach (Farnham, 2009), pp. 159–81, we also see the collection of ex-votos as demarcating and proclaiming the imagined world of the image’s miraculous potency beyond that of quotidian social relations. Bono Ferrari, L’epoca eroica della vela, p. 710. Ex voto marinari del Santuario di Montenero, p. 53. Bono Ferrari, L’epoca eroica della vela, p. 705. A. Ciarrocchi and E. Mori, Le tavolette votive italiane (Udine, 1960), note to pl. 28. A. Buttitta, Gli ex voto di Altavilla Milicia (Palermo, 1983), p. 13. An example is recorded in the early eighteenth century at the foot of the climb up to the shrine of the Madonna delle Grazie at Megli, near Recco. Bono Ferrari, L’epoca eroica della vela, p. 720. Examples of these standard types of ex-voto image, both painted and photographed, can be sampled in published collections such as Maria Angela Bacigalupo, Pier Luigi Benatti and Emilio Carta, Ex voto a Montallegro (Rapallo, 1989); Giovanni Meriana, Pittura votiva in Liguria (Genoa, 1995); Franco Bolgiani et al., Gli ex voto della Consolata. Storie di grazia e devozione nel Santuario torinese (Turin, 1982); Emilio Bedont, Gli ‘ex voto’ della Madonna delle Grazie di Udine (Udine, 1979). For another example, Gian Vittorio Avondo and Enrico Bertone, Grazia ricevuta: Eventi storici e popolari nelle espressioni di fede degli ex voto nelle Alpi centro-occidentali (Scarmagno, 2010), p. 8, pl. 4. Giovanni Agostino Molfino, Di alcune memorie istoriche della miracolosa Madonna celebrata su’l Monte Leto in Liguria (Venice, n.d. [1682]), p. 95. Ibid., p. 94: the subject of this miracle was Molfino himself. Bono Ferrari, L’epoca eroica della vela, p. 724. Stefano Zurlo, Inchiesta sulla devozione popolare (Casale Monferrato, 2003), pp. 129–30. Francesco Sacchetti, Il trecentonovelle, ed.Vincenzo Pernicone (Florence, 1946), p. 244 (Novella 109). Synodi dioecesanae et provinciales editae atque ineditae

References

105 106 107 108 109 110 111

112 113

114

S. Genuensis Ecclesiae, accedunt Acta et Decreta visitationis Francisci Bossii episcopi Novariensis ann. MDLXXXII (Genoa, 1833), pp. 184–5, 265.The crocodile survived in the sanctuary at Lavagna until the late nineteenth century: Pietro Castellini, Pellegrinaggi al santuario di N.S. del Ponte. Cenni storici (Chiavari, 1908), pp. 15–16. Bacigalupo, Benatti and Carta, Ex voto a Montallegro, pl. 3. Alberto Vecchi, Il culto delle immagini nelle stampe popolari (Florence, 1968), pp. 101–2. Pierroberto Scaramella, La Madonna del Purgatorio. Iconografia e religione in Campania tra Rinascimento e Controriforma (Genoa, 1991), pp. 174–9. acg, ‘Grazie e miracoli’, September 1769: Deposition of Clara Maria Mascenaria. Cozzo, ‘Regina Montis Regalis’, p. 216 and see pp. 176, 177, 180, 191, 220–21. In despite of such theological niceties, the word for exvotos in Hispanic Mexico remains ‘milagros’; in formerly Spanish-occupied Sicily they are likewise called ‘miraculi’. For an instance from ancient Epidaurus, a compilation by a priest of the shrine of Asclepius which gathers votive inscriptions and oral traditions into an authoritative text, see Verity Platt, Facing the Gods: Epiphany and Representation in Graeco-Roman Art, Literature and Religion (Cambridge, 2011), p. 148. Memorie storiche del santuario di N.S. della Misericordia sotto il titolo di Virgo Potens in Borzoli presso Sestri-Ponente (Genoa, 1873), pp. 20–21, 22–3. The role of the cantastorie in early modern Italy is briefly discussed in Ottavia Niccoli, ‘Profezie in piazza. Note sul profetismo popolare nell’Italia del primo Cinquecento’, Quaderni storici, 41 (1979), pp. 500–39, at pp. 506–11. See further Saverio la Sorsa, ‘Folklore marinaro di Puglia’, Lares, 1 (1930), pp. 20–31; 2 (1930), pp. 21–46, at 2, p. 29 (‘and when the cantastorie tells of God’s vengeance on the villain, or the grace worked by a miraculous Madonna on behalf of an innocent victim, many in the audience raise their hats in an act of reverence . . .’); Bruno Pianta, ‘“Una canzonetta vi voglio cantare . . .”. I cantastorie: La marginalità sociale e il canto popolare’, in Le tradizioni popolari in Italia: Canti e musiche popolari, ed. Roberto Leydi (Milan, 1990), pp. 103–12, at p. 112. On 7 May 2011 the Sicilian cantastorie Antonio Cottitto was recorded giving a public rendition, in the piazza of Palma di Montechiaro, of the local legend of the Madonna del Castello (consulted on YouTube.com, 28 March 2012). Agostino Busco, ‘Della historia di Nostra Signora di Chiavari’ (1656, with additions of 1669), Chiavari, bsec,

115 116 117

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ms 3.z.iv.23, preface, fol. 7.The cult of the Madonna of the Garden is discussed more fully on pp. 234‒8. Molfino, Di alcune memorie istoriche, esp. p. 196. ‘Salve, invocata Immagine. . .’, Notizie della miracolosa statua di N.S. del Suffragio che si venera nel borgo di Recco (Genoa, 1824), p. 39.This work was reprinted in 1841. Giovanni Battista Bronzini, ‘Santi e mercanti di mare di Puglia’, Lares, 55 (1989), pp. 5–56, at pp. 24–5.We are grateful to Domenico Ingenito for advice on the translation. For the cult of the Madonna della Libera see Clara Gelao, ed., Confraternite arte e devozione in Puglia dal Quattrocento al Settecento, exh. cat., Pinacoteca Provinciale, Bari (Naples, 1994), pp. 209‒11. See also a collection of similar songs in honour of the Virgin of Acquasanta in Liguria: Canzoni in onore di N.S. dell’Acqua Santa venerata nel distretto di Voltri (Genoa, 1842). James Trilling, ‘The Image Not Made by Hands and the Byzantine Way of Seeing’, in The Holy Face and the Paradox of Representation, ed. Herbert L. Kessler and Gerhard Wolf (Bologna, 1998), pp. 109–27, offers an analogous critique of approaches to Byzantine art.

4 Communion with the Image 1 ‘San Bruno mi ha fatto la grazia!’ H. Duvivier, ‘Saggio del racconto della guarizione di un’ossessa attribuita al Nostro Padre San Bruno’, in Gli spirdeti. Possessione e purificazione nel culto calabrese di San Bruno di Colonia, ed. I. Ceravalo (Monteleone, 1999), pp. 249–52.The case concerned a woman named Maria Antonia, who was carried to the sanctuary of St Bruno at Serra San Bruno (Calabria) in 1904. 2 Gavin Flood, Beyond Phenomenology: Rethinking the Study of Religion (London, 1999), p. 107. See also Mark Wynn, ‘Phenomenology of Religion’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Stanford, nj, 2008), at http://plato. stanford.edu. 3 Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago, il, 1987), pp. 83–118. 4 For late antiquity see Jas´ Elsner, Art and the Roman Viewer:The Transformation of Art from the Pagan World to Christianity (Cambridge, 1995), p. 96. For recent discussion of the theology of images in the medieval West, see Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Anne-Marie Bouché, eds, The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages (Princeton, nj, 2006); and Colum Hourihane, ed., Looking Beyond:Visions, Dreams, and Insights in Medieval Art and History (Princeton, nj, 2010).

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5 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception [1948], trans. Oliver Davis (London and New York, 2004). 6 Jeffrey F. Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (New York, 1998), p. 438; Joanna Cannon, ‘Kissing the Virgin’s Foot: Adoratio before the Madonna and Child Enacted, Depicted, Imagined’, Studies in Iconography, 31 (2010), pp. 1–50; Jean-Claude Schmitt, ‘Entre le texte et l’image: Les gestes de prière de Saint Dominique’, in Persons in Groups, ed. Richard Trexler (Binghampton, ny, 1985), pp. 195–220. 7 Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (New York, 2011), chap. 1 and pp. 105–12. 8 Here we would agree with Stephen Pattison, Seeing Things: Deepening Relations with Visual Artefacts (London, 2007), chap. 2, ‘Touching Sight: Rediscovering Haptic Vision’ (with bibliography). 9 This much-venerated cross is itself a copy: see pp. 127‒9. This and similar scenes were frequently observed during fieldwork for this book. 10 The year was c. 1200. See Elvio Lunghi, ‘Francis of Assisi in Prayer before the Crucifix in the Accounts of the First Biographers’, in Italian Panel Painting of the Duecento and Trecento, ed.Victor M. Schmidt (New Haven and London, 2002), pp. 341–53. 11 I muri di Maria.Tradizioni iconografiche e devozione popolare a Ferrara, ed. R. Fignami and C.Toschi Cavaliere (Ferrara, 1988), p. 60. 12 Bissera V. Pentcheva, The Sensual Icon: Space, Ritual, and the Senses in Byzantium (University Park, pa, 2010), pp. 128–38. On the importance of the eyes in Byzantine icons, see also Robin Cormack, ‘The Eyes of the Mother of God’, in Images of the Mother of God: Perceptions of the Theotokos in Byzantium, ed. Maria Vassilaki (Aldershot, 2005), pp. 167–71. 13 A. R.Verardo, ‘La Madonna della Costa e i sanremesi’, Rivista ingauna e intemelia, n.s., 27 (1972), pp. 35–49.The image was processed in a later major outbreak of plague in 1656–7, and during the cholera epidemic of 1835. 14 See pp. 42‒7. 15 Richard Gombrich, ‘The Consecration of a Buddhist Image’, Journal of Asian Studies, 26 (1966), pp. 23–36. 16 Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford, 1998), p. 120. 17 On diverse models of vision, see Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance, ed. R. S. Nelson (Cambridge, 2000); Suzanne Conklin Abkari, Seeing Through the Veil: Optical Theory and Medieval Allegory (Toronto, 2004); Dallas G. Denery, Seeing and Being Seen in the Later

18

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20 21

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Medieval World: Optics,Theology and Religious Life (Cambridge, 2005); Stuart Clark, Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford, 2007); Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes:The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-century French Thought (Berkeley, ca, 1993). La trasformazione di Maria Santissima ossia veridico racconto delle di Lei maraviglie in una sua antichissima statua operate, la quale si venera nella chiesa arcipresbiterale e plebana di S. Gio. Battista in Cicagna sotto il titolo di Madonna de’ Miracoli (Genoa, 1872), pp. 27–31 (text of the ‘processo’ of 30 September 1537); R. Leveroni, Cicagna. Appunti di storia religiosa e civile (Chiavari, 1912), pp. 101–6. Another image to show signs of life at a particular moment was the medieval crucifix in the church of Our Lady of Nazareth at Sestri Levante: by 1700 it appeared old-fashioned, and the sacristan was about to chop it up for firewood when he reported seeing the eyes of Christ open.The earliest surviving account of this miracle dates from the mid-nineteenth century. Vincenzo Podestà, Cenni storici del Prodigioso Crocifisso che si venera nella perinsigne collegiata parrocchiale di Sestri Levante (Chiavari, 1903), pp. 13–14; P.Tomaini and A. Rossignotti, S. Maria di Nazareth. Parrocchia – Collegiata – Cattedrale – Basilica di Sestri Levante (Sarzana, 1975), p. 333; Paolo Smeraldi, Il Santo Cristo di Sestri Levante (Milan, 2004), pp. 31–3. bavacsp, ‘Madonne Coronate’, vol. xi, fols 44–57 (account submitted for the coronation of the image of the Madonna del Soccorso in 1778).The former gate-image of Nostra Signora delle Grazie at San Giovanni Valdarno in Tuscany twice, in 1478 and again in 1628, was said to have enabled old women who prayed to the Virgin to produce breast milk for small children whose parents had died in the plague. Relazione del principio, e cause della venerazione dell’ immagine della Santissima Vergine detta delle Grazie della Terra di S. Giovanni, da coronarsi solennemente il dì 8 di settembre 1704 (Florence, 1704); bavacsp, ‘Madonne Coronate’, vol. iv, fols 91–7. F. Podestà, Nostra Signora del Mirteto in Ortonovo (Genoa, 1902). Clerical approval was granted for the cult, and a church built around the image in 1540–66. Antonella Granero, Mater Dolorosa.Tra lacrime e apparizioni mariane. Il caso di Civitavecchia, i suoi precedenti, i segreti e i misteri dei veggenti italiani (Savona, 1995); Joe Nickell, Looking for a Miracle:Weeping Icons, Relics, Stigmata,Visions and Healing Cures (New York, 1993), pp. 58–62. P.Toschi and R. Penna, Le tavolette votive della Madonna dell’Arco (Naples, 1971); further examples in Elisabetta

References

23 24 25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

Gulli Grigioni, ‘L’empio giocatore nelle leggende dell’Atlante mariano’, Il Santo, 15 (1975), pp. 345–51; and in Leopold Kretzenbacher, Das verletzte Kultbild. Voraussetzungen, Zeitschichten und Aussagewandel einer abendländischen Legendentypus (Munich, 1977). Gabriele Paleotti, Discorso intorno alle immagini sacre e profane [Bologna, 1582], ed. Stefano della Torre and Gian Franco Freguglia (Milan, 2002), p. 59. ‘Appunti storici della divozione di Genova a Maria SS. xiv’, La Settimana religiosa, 78 (1948). Mario Polia, Per Maria. La Madonna nell’arte sacra e nelle tradizioni popolari della Valnerina (Perugia, 2008), p. 83. In Sardinia in the 1920s, St Antony was made to grant a wish by lighting lamps in front of his image, placing one’s head downwards and tearing one’s breast, while shouting at the top of one’s voice: ‘I wish it: you owe it.’ Stephen Wilson, The Magical Universe: Everyday Ritual and Magic in Pre-modern Europe (London, 2000), p. 439. Gell, Art and Agency, pp. 96‒154, 229–42. See Walter Benjamin, ‘Naples’, in his One-way Street, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (repr. London and New York, 2006), pp. 167–76, at p. 170. Mauro Ricchetti, Le Madonnette dei carruggi (Genoa, 1967), p. 10. Francesco Patrone, Il piccolo santuario di N.S. Della Pietà e del Soccorso in Pallareto (Genoa, 1896). Nostra Signora di Apparizione: Cenni storici (Genoa, 1911), p. 26. Ibid., pp. 26–7. Alberto Fazzeri, ‘Santa Maria di Fossa Lupara’ (typescript booklet, 1991), Preface. Davide Bertolotti, Viaggio nella Liguria marittima (Turin, 1834), pp. 76–82. asg, ms 555, 1701, ‘Regole della Congregatione sotto titolo di N.S. Assunta Protettrice della Serma. Republica di Genova’. Bertolotti, Viaggio, p. 39. The example of Montallegro: Giovanni Agostino Molfino, Di alcune memorie istoriche della miracolosa Madonna celebrata su’l Monte Leto in Liguria (Venice, n.d. [1682]), p. 140; Lorenzo Sacco, Contributo alla storia di Nostra Signora di Montallegro, 2nd edn (Genoa, 1913), p. 46. On medals and the Wars of Religion: Olivier Christin, Confesser sa foi. Conflits confessionnels et identités religieuses dans l’Europe moderne (XVIe–XVIIe siècles) (Seyssel, 2009), pp. 165–74. Further illustrated examples: Bilder und Zeichen religiösen Volksglaubens. Rudolf Kriss zum. 60 Geburtstag, ed. Lenz KrissRettenbeck (Munich, 1963), pls 152–3. On talismans in general, and on the Catholic medal of Catherine

37 38 39 40 41 42 43

44 45

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Labouré’s vision of the Virgin Mary in the Rue du Bac in Paris in 1830 – of which it was reported that 10 million examples were adopted in the first ten years of the medal’s approval – see Marina Warner, Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights (London, 2011), pp. 215–33. A.D.P., N.S. delle Grazie venerata in Megli. Memorie storico-religiose (Chiavari, 1896), pp. 60–61. Nostra Signora di Apparizione. Cenni storici (Genoa, 1911), p. 22; La Madonna del Boschetto. Bollettino del Santuario, 8 (1921), p. 61. La Madonna del Boschetto, 18 (1931), pp. 8–12. Bollettino parrocchiale, Santuario – parrocchia N.S. di Apparizione, 56 (May 1949), pp. 1–2. Nicola Lanzi, Genova città di Maria Santissima. Storia e documenti della pietà mariana genovese (Pisa, 1992), pp. 55–60. acag, fondo ‘Grazie e miracoli’, s.a. 1897.The Madonna of Pompei became a widely popular focus of devotion from the mid-1870s. Antiquity:Verity Platt, Facing the Gods: Epiphany and Representation in Graeco-Roman Art, Literature and Religion (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 74, 88–9. Middle Ages: Millard Meiss, Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death (Princeton, nj, 1951), pp. 105–31. Hans Belting, An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body, trans.Thomas Dunlop (Princeton, nj, and Oxford, 2011), p. 11. Catherine Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast:The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, 1987), pp. 122–3, 201–12, 255–6, 268–9, 273–5; Katharine Park, ‘Impressed Images: Reproducing Wonders’, in Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750, ed. Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park (New York, 1998), pp. 254–71. Stefano Costa, Il Santuario del Boschetto di Camogli (Genoa, 1919), pp. 21–30.The earliest record dates from the following century, at which time the Order of Servites, enthusiastic devotees of the Virgin Mary, had established themselves (in 1612) as guardians of the shrine of Boschetto.The story of the impressed ‘M’, while convenient to the Servites as an apparent prophecy of their role at the site, is at the same time revealing of prevailing assumptions about the operation of sight. At Vicenza in the 1420s, at the origin of the cult of the Vergine di Monte Berico, it was an elderly, married woman who had the experience of a vision in which the Madonna left a mark with her fingers on the shoulder of the seer; the remaining prints were described in the contemporary record as stigmate.

spectacular miracle s

47

48 49 50

51 52 53 54

55 56

57

58

Sebastiano Rumor, Storia documentata del santuario di Monte Berico (Vicenza, 1911), pp. 43–8. Abele de Blasio, Il tatuaggio [1905] (repr. Naples, 1973), pp. 6–9; Esposizione Internazionale di Roma: Catalogo della mostra di etnografia italiana in Piazza d’Armi (Bergamo, 1911), pp. 115–16; Giuseppe Delfino, ‘I tatuaggi dei marinai liguri’, Archivio per le tradizioni popolari della Liguria, 13–14 (1984–5), pp. 25–32; La preghiera del marinaio. La fede e il mare nei segni della chiesa e nelle tradizioni marinare (Rome, 1992), vol. ii, p. 636. Benjamin, One-Way Street, p. 51. Trexler, ‘Habiller et déshabiller les images’. Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary, pp. 23–6; Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, ‘Holy Dolls: Play and Piety in Florence in the Quattrocento’, in her Women, Family and Ritual in Renaissance Italy (Chicago, il, and London, 1985), pp. 310–29. Madonne della Laguna. Simulacri ‘da vestire’ dei secoli xiv–xix, ed. Riccarda Pagnozzato (Rome, 1993), p. 49. Trexler, ‘Habiller et déshabiller les images’, pp. 198–9. acag, fondo ‘cholera’, letter from Giuliano Rolandelli, provost of the church of Maissana, to the archbishop, 10 November 1836. Pietro Cella, Istoria della Madonna di Chiavari (Genoa, 1613), pp. 52–6; Agostino Busco, ‘Della Historia di Nostra Signora dell’Horto di Chiavari’ (1656, with additions of 1669), bsec, ms 3.z.iv.23, pp. 54–6.The Della Torre family subsequently became major patrons of the new sanctuary of Nostra Signora dell’Orto. Memorie storiche del santuario di N.S. della Misericordia sotto il titolo di Virgo Potens in Borzoli presso Sestri-Ponente (Genoa, 1873), pp. 80–82. Deposition of Michele Mingioli, 1841, concerning events of c. 1827. bavacsp, ‘Madonne Coronate’, vol. xiv, fols 246–82. Elsewhere the dresses used to decorate venerated images were held to have other powers, including that of putting out fires. G. Sodano, ‘Miracoli e ordini religiosi nel mezzogiorno d’Italia (xvi‒xviii secolo)’, Archivio storico per le province napoletane, 105 (1987), pp. 293–414, at p. 347 n. Domenico Scafoglio and Simone de Luna, La possessione diabolica (Cava de’Tirreni, 2003), pp. 143, 209, and see p. 162 for the continuing practice by priests in modern times of applying the abitino della Vergine to a possessed person. See also F. Romano, Guaritrici, veggenti, esorcisti (Rome, 1987). Among other deponents to an episcopal inquiry into the image held in 1601, the head of works of the new cathedral building, Martino de’ Martini, reported that at the time of the miracle of its removal, the picture ‘was

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held in great reverence and devotion by the people, who came in crowds to honour and kiss it’. Andrea Astengo, ed., Delle memorie particolari e specialmente degli uomini illustri della città di Savona di Giovanni Vincenzo Verzellino (Savona, 1891), vol. ii, p. 679 and pp. 664–84; Giovanna Rotondi Terminiello, Un’isola di devozione a Savona. Il complesso monumentale della cattedrale dell’Assunta (Savona, 2002), pp. 173–5. For miracles of scrapings from the column, see more extracts from the inquest published in F. M., Maria Santissima della Colonna in Savona, 2nd edn (Savona, 1901), pp. 19–23. Il Santuario di N.S. Incoronata in Polcevera. Cenni storici (San Pier d’Arena, 1907), p. 27. See Carlo Tommaso Piuma, Elogio storico di Nostra Signora Incoronata (Genoa, 1833), p. 19. At Monopoli in Apulia, where legend relates that the venerated Madonna della Madia arrived miraculously from Constantinople on a raft, early twentieth-century sailors still used to swallow fragments of the wood, preserved as relics of this vessel, as protection against storms at sea. Saverio la Sorsa, ‘Folklore marinaro di Puglia’, Lares, 1 (1930), pp. 20–31; 2 (1930), pp. 21–46, at 2, p. 35. Pilgrims at the Spanish shrine of Guadalupe in the early modern period drank water mixed with scrapings from the stone on which the holy image had first appeared.William A. Christian, Apparitions in Late Medieval and Renaissance Spain [1981] (Princeton, nj, 1989), p. 88. Giuseppe Bellucci, Il feticismo primitivo in Italia (Perugia, 1907), pp. 59–62. Guilielmus Gumppenberg, Atlas marianus (Munich, 1672), pp. 251–63 (the miraculous Madonna of Bardolino, on Lake Garda); G. A. Cornachi, Breve istoria della miracolosissima Madonna di Tirano [1621] (Milan, 1747) (the Madonna di Tirano in Valtellina, where the cult began in 1504). Gli ex-voto in maiolica della chiesa della Madonna dei Bagni a Casalina presso Deruta, ed. Grazietta Guaitini et al. (Florence, 1983), esp. pp. 11–15, 24–5. Breve storia del santuario di N.S. dell’Acqua Santa presso Voltri (San Pier d’Arena, 1890). Pellegro Robbio, ‘Principii dell’Istoria della B.V. dell’Orto’ (1663), bsec, ms 3.z.ii.2, pp. 34–5. ‘Processo della verificatione dei miracoli della Madonna dell’Orto, 1610’, bsec, ms 3.y.iv.27, pp. 95–7.The detail of the touching of the image was omitted from the eighteenth-century printed account of this miracle by one of the Discalced Carmelites who then managed the sanctuary: Gian-Tommaso della Croce, Istoria della miracolosa imagine di Nostra Signora dell’Orto (Genoa, 1759), pp. 248–9.

References

66 For a nineteenth-century French example, see Wilson, The Magical Universe, p. 328. 67 Gary Vikan, ‘Art, Medicine and Magic in Early Byzantium’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 38 (1984), pp. 65–86;Vikan, ‘Ruminations on Edible Icons: Originals and Copies in the Art of Byzantium’, in Retaining the Original: Multiple Originals, Copies, and Reproductions, ed. Katherine Preciado (Washington, dc, 1989), pp. 47–59. 68 Paolo Cozzo, ‘Regina Montis Regalis.’ Il Santuario di Mondovì da devozione locale a tempio sabaudo, con edizione delle ‘Memorie intorno alla SS.Vergine di Vico (1595–1601)’ (Rome, 2002), pp. 321, 408. 69 Ibid., pp. 415–16 (letter of 9 September 1595). 70 Ibid., pp. 463–5 (letter of 7 October 1595). 71 See Maria Perosino, ‘Il 1595: Alle origini di un culto mariano’, in Valli monregalesi: arte, società, devozioni, ed. G. Galante Garrone, S. Lombardini and A.Torre (Comunità Montana Valli Monregalesi, 1985), pp. 42–57. 72 See Victor Turner and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropological Perspectives (New York, 1978).The Turners defined the site of pilgrimage as a ‘liminal’ place, outside the realm of normality, and the pilgrim as one who exposes himself to the unfamiliar. 73 Cozzo, ‘Regina Montis Regalis’, pp. 338–9. Like the falling, the ‘turns around the chapel’ became standard elements in the drama of healing at Mondovì: see ibid., pp. 350–51, 375, etc. 74 Pietro Cella, Istoria della Madonna di Chiavari (Genoa, 1613), p. 48. 75 Cella, Istoria, pp. 52–6. 76 See Jas´ Elsner, Roman Eyes:Visuality and Subjectivity in Art and Text (Princeton, nj, 2007), pp. 39–40. 77 Carlo Levi, Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (Rome, 1945), p. 113. 78 A. Pitto, La Liguria mariana (Genoa, 1872), pp. 130–45; Stefano Costa, Il santuario del Boschetto in Camogli (Genoa, 1919), pp. 220–21 (ms history of the Servite foundation at Santa Maria del Boschetto, 1686). 79 Gino Bottiglioni, Leggende e tradizioni di Sardegna (Geneva, 1922), pp. 119–20. 80 The relation of the encounter of the Apostles of Christ with Simon Magus (Acts viii:9–24) was intended to mark out the divide between magic and the power of the one true God. For the later survival of magical beliefs and practices, see Valerie I. J. Flint, The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe (Princeton, nj, 1991); Richard Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1989);Wilson, The Magical Universe; Euan

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Cameron, Enchanted Europe: Superstition, Reason, and Religion, 1250–1750 (Oxford, 2010). Richard Trexler, ‘Florentine Religious Experience: The Sacred Image’, Studies in the Renaissance, 19 (1972), pp. 7–41, at pp. 27–9. Geoffrey Chaucer,The Canterbury Tales, General Prologue, l. 417–18; and see The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson, 2nd edn (London, 1957), p. 661. Dante, Inferno, xx:121–3. In the Christian vision of the poet, these ‘sad women’ are condemned to eternal suffering. David S. Areford, The Viewer and the Printed Image in Late Medieval Europe (Farnham, 2010), pp. 80–83. Luigi Sanguineti, Nostra Signora dell’Orto. Storia documentata del suo santuario in Chiavari e della diffusione del culto, 2nd edn (Rapallo, 1955); Paolo Sanguineti, Notizie storiche del santuario di N.S. dell’Orto, 2nd edn (Rapallo, 1968); Raimondo Spiazzi, Nostra Signora dell’Orto in Chiavari. Storia documentata della devozione e del Santuario (Rapallo, 1994); Spiazzi, ed., Nostra Signora dell’Orto in Chiavari. Memorie e testimonianze (Rapallo, 1995).There had been an earlier, much more localized, cult of this image in the sixteenth century, but in the decades prior to 1609–10, it had been neglected. ‘Processo della verificatione dei miracoli della Madonna dell’Orto.’ Robbio, ‘Principii’, p. 20. ‘Miracoli e gratie: Questi sette sono quelli stati approvati da Monsignore Vescovo. Degli altri non fattine essaminare alcuno.’ See following note. These miscellaneous notes, compiled at and near the outdoor shrine of the Madonna dell’Orto in the summer of 1610, are in the possession of Zeffirino Zali of Chiavari.We are very grateful to Signor Zali for allowing us to study these documents. Franco Bolgiani et al., Gli ex voto della Consolata. Storie di grazia e devozione nel Santuario torinese (Turin, 1982), p. 89. Five of the mid-seventeenth-century ceramic ex-votos at the shrine of the Madonna dei Bagni at Deruta show demoniati healed by the image. In two instances, a priest or friar is depicted in the scene; in the remaining three, a single woman is shown alone before the image.These ex-votos record incidents from around the time of the start of the cult, in 1657. In 1687, a miscellany of earlier ex-votos was replaced by a series, including these five, in ceramic – a local industry, which would thereafter provide the exclusive medium for ex-votos at this shrine. Guatini et al., eds, Gli ex-voto in maiolica della chiesa della Madonna dei Bagni, pls 189–93.

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91 T.Tentori, ‘An Italian Religious Feast:The Fujenti Rites of the Madonna dell’Arco, Naples’, in Mother Worship, ed. J. J. Preston (Chapel Hill, nc, 1982), pp. 95–122. 92 ‘Processo’ of the miracles at the shrine of the Madonna di Acquasanta, 25–27 August 1672, acag, fondo: ‘Acquasanta’. 93 Report of Padre Pietro Francesco Novella, 29 August 1671. acag, fondo: ‘Acquasanta’. 94 The archbishop’s vicar was duly shown the object. ‘Processo’ of the miracles at the shrine of the Madonna di Acquasanta, 25–27 August 1672, acag, fondo: ‘Acquasanta’. An undated memorandum of this period from the priest of the local church of Voltri reported that the man who had vomited a nail and hair had returned home to Arenzano and was said to be recovered. ms beginning: ‘Andando io infrascritto a celebrar all’Aqua Santa’, acag, fondo: ‘Acquasanta’. 95 Michael P. Carroll, Madonnas that Maim: Popular Catholicism in Italy since the Fifteenth Century (Baltimore and London, 1992), pp. 126–7. 96 Scafoglio and de Luna, La possessione diabolica, pp. 123ff. 97 Girolamo Menghi, Flagellum daemonum, seu exorcismi terribiles (Bologna, 1578), pp. 116 (‘ad altare, vel ante aliquam imaginem’), 153 (‘Hic Esorcista habeat imaginem pictam illius Daemonis, qui opprimit obsessum cum eius nomine scripto super caput ipsius imaginis preparatam. . .’). 98 Scafoglio and de Luna, La possessione diabolica, p. 142. 99 So also Dario Gamboni has written in Potential Images: Ambiguity and Indeterminacy in Modern Art (London, 2002), p. 18: ‘The danger . . . is the desire to attribute everything either to the work itself (“fetishistically”) or to the viewer (by “anti-fetishism”), instead of admitting, cultivating and studying the interaction between the two.’

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5 The Power of the Infinite Copy 10 11

1 This small copy (santino) of the ‘Miracolosa immagine di Gesù Nazzareno che si venera nella Chiesa parrocchiale di S. Maria in Monticelli in Roma, la quale aprì gli occhi nel 1854’, is in the authors’ possession. As the printed inscription records, the original image was first seen to move its eyes in 1854; the phenomenon was repeated in 1898 – as this personalized copy of the image bears witness. 2 Jas´ Elsner, Roman Eyes:Visuality and Subjectivity in Art and Text (Princeton, nj, 2007), pp. 237–46. For similar evidence concerning reproductions of the chryselephantine statue of Athena in the Parthenon,

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see Milette Gaifman, ‘Statue, Cult and Replication’, Art History, 29 (2006), pp. 258–79. Gary Vikan, ‘Art, Medicine and Magic in Early Byzantium’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 38 (1984), pp. 65–86, at p. 73. Whitney Davis, Replications: Archaeology, Art History, Psychoanalysis (University Park, pa, 1996), esp. p. 1; Jennifer Trimble and Jas´ Elsner, ‘“If You Need an Actual Statue”’, Art History, 29 (2006), pp. 201–12. Genesis 1:26. Herbert L. Kessler, ‘Configuring the Invisible by Copying the Holy Face’, in The Holy Face and the Paradox of Representation, ed. Herbert L. Kessler and Gerhard Wolf (Bologna, 1998), pp. 129–51; Gerhard Wolf, ‘From Mandylion to Veronica: Picturing the “Disembodied” Face and Disseminating the True Image of Christ in the Latin West’, in The Holy Face and the Paradox of Representation, ed. Kessler and Wolf, pp. 153–79; Gerhard Wolf, Colette Dufour Bozzo and Anna Rosa Calderoni Masetti, eds, Mandylion. Intorno al ‘Sacro Volto’, da Bisanzio a Genova, exh. cat., Palazzo Ducale, Genoa (Milan, 2004). Jacques Derrida, ‘Signature Event Context’, in his Limited Inc, trans. S.Weber and J. Mehlman (Evanston, il, 1988), pp. 1–23. Benjamin’s particular concern was with the massproduced and fetishized object in capitalist culture; but the theoretical point applies analogously to reproductions of a venerated image.Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ [1935], repr. in his Illuminations, trans. Harry Zorn, ed. Hannah Arendt (London, 1999), pp. 211–44, at p. 215 (emphasis added). Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. P. Foss, P. Patton and P. Beitchman (New York, 1983). See also M. Camille, ‘Simulacrum’, in Critical Terms for Art History, ed. R. S. Nelson and R. Shiff, 2nd edn (Chicago, 2003), pp. 35–48. Orsanmichele: see p. 99. Kessler, ‘Configuring the Invisible, pp. 129–51; Gerhard Wolf, ‘“Or fu sì fatta la sembianza vostra?” Sguardi alla “vera icona” e alle sue copie artistiche’, in Il Volto di Cristo, ed. Giovanni Morello and Gerhard Wolf, exh. cat., La Reggia,Venaria Reale (Milan, 2000), pp. 103–14 and cat. iv.13. Dante, Paradiso, xxxi:103–8. Verity Platt, Facing the Gods: Epiphany and Representation in Graeco-Roman Art, Literature and Religion (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 84–5. In this case, however, the static and relatively invisible ‘Athena Parthenos’ did not have the

References

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reputation of working miracles, whereas the portable ‘Athena Polias’ did. Paolo Cozzo, ‘Regina Montis Regalis.’ Il Santuario di Mondovì da devozione locale a tempio sabaudo, con edizione delle ‘Memorie intorno alla SS.Vergine di Vico (1595–1601)’ (Rome, 2002), pp. 392–3. Maurizio Sangalli, Miracoli a Milano. I processi informativi per eventi miracolosi nel Milanese in età spagnola (Milan, 1993), pp. 118–19, 126. Adriano Prosperi, ‘Introduzione’, in La Madonna della Ghiara di Reggio nelle immagini devozionali, ed. G. Ghirardini and S. Andreoli (Reggio Emilia, 1990), pp. 11–25, at pp. 22–3. In his classic account of prints of holy images,Vecchi calls the area of circulation of such copies the spazio sacro of the cult object. Alberto Vecchi, Il culto delle immagini nelle stampe popolari (Florence, 1968), pp. 78ff. We are grateful to Anselmo Crovara for his hospitality at his home in Manarola, where he allowed us to photograph this image in his collection. acag, fondo ‘Grazie e Miracoli’, s.a.1663: ‘S. Francesco Saverio’. Reported by the mother in 2008 to the sanctuary of San Gabriele dell’Addolorata, at www.sangabriele.org (consulted 5 September 2010). Stefano Zurlo, Inchiesta sulla devozione popolare (Casale Monferrato, 2003), pp. 47–56. Pia Unione ed esercizi devoti in onore di Gesù Nazareno che si venera nella chiesa di S. Donato in Genova (Genoa, 1886). The image used to be displayed on the high altar of the church of S. Donato.The engraving now displayed on the altar of the left-hand nave is a nineteenth-century print; the ‘original’ is stored elsewhere in the parish. See pp. 121‒4 and references cited. Copies of the Trapani Madonna were numerous: in the seventeenth century 40 workshops in that city were said to be dedicated to making reproductions. G. Gumppenberg, Atlante mariano, ed. A. Zanella (Verona, 1839‒47), vol. viii, pp. 1138f. Further on the manufacture and distribution of copies of the Madonna of Trapani, see Hanno-Walter Kruft, ‘Die Madonna von Trapani und ihre Kopien’, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Instituts in Florenz, 14 (1970), pp. 297‒322. Compendiosa nozione della miracolosa imagine di Nostra Signora della Salute, quale si venera nella chiesa de’ RR. Padri della Pace (Genoa, 1825); Allegazione per li RR. PP. Minori Riformati del convento di S. M. della Pace in Genova contro l’Arciconfraternita di N.S. della Salute (Genoa, 1835); Bernardo Leandri, Cenni storici dell’origine e del culto di N.S. della Salute che si venera in Genova nella chiesa della

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Visitazione (Levanto, 1910). Copies of contemporary pamphlets and manuscripts relating to the controversy are in the Centro di Studi Francescani in the Franciscan church of the Visitation in Genoa (which, following the destruction of the convent of Santa Maria della Pace as a result of urbanization in the nineteenth century, houses the reputedly miraculous image); we thank Padre Pietro Zerbo ofm for his assistance. See Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York and London, 1993), p. 25, discussing how cinema can have the same effect of concentrating the gaze. For the history of this image, see Maria Tarnawska, Sister Faustina Kowalska: Her Life and Mission (London, 1989). For the downloadable application, see http:// thedivinemercy.org (consulted 25 September 2011). The point is emphasized by Christopher S.Wood, Forgery Replica Fiction:Temporalities of German Renaissance Art (Chicago, 2008), pp. 217–25. Verbale di Messere Giovanni di Michele di Vernacia notaro publico estratto di latino in volgare da Messere Prete Pietro di Biassa relativo al prodigio della Madonna Bianca di Porto Venere (Sarzana, 1999); G. Lamorati, Historie di Lunigiana (Massa Marittima, 1685), pp. 53–5. See also Spartaco Gamberini, ed., La Spezia:Volti di un territorio (Bari, 1992), pp. 726–34 (entry by E. Acerbi); G. R. Terminiello, ed., Nicolò Corso: Un pittore per gli Olivetani. Arte in Liguria alla fine del Quattrocento (Genoa, 1986), pp. 141–3 (entry by Giuliana Algeri).The text of 1513 gives the date of the notarial inquest as 1399, but the print is unlikely to be older than the 1430s. For comparators see Origins of European Printmaking: Fifteenth-century Woodcuts and their Public, ed. Peter Parshall and Rainer Schoch (New Haven, ct, and London, 2005). The crowns on the two central figures, and the inclusion of the two small-scale flanking saints, are perhaps indicative that the print originated as the copy of another venerated Madonna, presumably in the area of Venice to which it is anchored by the dialect of the inscription. Ottavia Niccoli, Vedere con gli occhi del cuore (Bari, 2011), pp. 114–15. In general see Vecchi, Il culto delle immagini. Pellegro Robbio, ‘Principii dell’Istoria della B.V. dell’Orto’ [1663], bsec, ms 3.z.ii.2, pp. 32–3. Robbio regretted the loss both of the engravings, which the devout obediently handed in, and of painted copies of the wonder-working picture, although the latter had not been specified in the ban. He observed of the

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42 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’, in Illuminations, pp. 70–82, at pp. 79, 81.

regulation that ‘it seemed its intention was merely to reduce the devotion and to discourage people from frequenting [the image].’ Maria Perosino, ‘Il 1595: Alle origini di un culto mariano’, in Valli monregalesi: arte, società, devozioni, ed. G. Galante Garrone, S. Lombardini and A.Torre (Comunità Montana Valli Monregalesi, 1985), pp. 42–57, at pp. 53–6. For the beginnings of this cult, see pp. 66‒8. Creighton Gilbert, ‘The Archbishop on the Painters of Florence’, Art Bulletin, 41 (1959), pp. 75–87. Pasquale Iacobone, Mysterium Trinitatis. Dogma e iconografia nell’Italia medievale (Rome, 1997), pp. 218–27. The ban was reiterated in the following century by Pope Benedict xiv. Daniele Menozzi, Les images. L’église et les arts visuels (Paris, 1991), pp. 213–19. Giovanni Agostino Molfino, Di alcune memorie istoriche della miracolosa Madonna celebrata su’l Monte Leto in Liguria (Venice, n.d. [1682]), pp. 21–6; Molfino, Sagre sposizioni sopra la misteriosa, e miracolosa imagine rappresentante il glorioso transito della B.V. Maria, trasportata miracolosamente dagli angeli sù la cima del Mont’Allegro di Rapallo (Venice, 1688). Molfino, Di alcune memorie istoriche, p. 198. Enormous controversy surrounded the publication in 1898 of Secondo Pia’s photograph of the shroud – an image which acquired its own reputation as miraculous. The photographer himself commented in a subsequent letter: ‘Such an unexpected event, that is obtaining the portrait of Our Lord Jesus Christ thanks to the progress of photography, did not allow people who were not competent in the photographic chemical process exactly to understand how it could take place: the confusion that most even now make between a positive and negative copy is natural and comprehensible.’ Roberto Falcinelli, ‘Two Unpublished Letters of Secondo Pia about the 1898 Shroud Photography’, Proceedings of the International Workshop on the Scientific Approach to the Acheiropoietos Images, ENEA, Frascati, Italy, 4–6 May 2010, online publication, at www.acheiropoietos.info (consulted 25 September 2011). Daniel Wojcik, ‘“Polaroids from Heaven”: Photography, Folk Religion, and the Miraculous Image Tradition at a Marian Apparition Site’, Journal of American Folklore, 109 (1996), pp. 129–48. See also E. Ann Matter, ‘Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in the Late Twentieth Century: Apocalyptic, Representations, Politics’, Religion, 31 (2001), pp. 125–53. Gertrude Stein, ‘Portraits and Repetition’, in her Lectures in America [1935] (London, 1988), p. 166.

6 Portrait in an Altered Landscape 1 Leon Battista Alberti, Ten Books on Architecture, trans. James Leoni [1755] and ed. Joseph Rykwert (London, 1955), p. 161. 2 Roger D.Woodard, Indo-European Sacred Space:Vedic and Roman Cult (Urbana, il, 2006);Will Coster and Andrew Spicer, eds, Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2005); David Chidester and Edward T. Linenthal, eds, American Sacred Space (Bloomington, in, 1995). 3 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Stephen Rendall (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1984), p. 117. 4 Jonathan Z. Smith, To Take Place:Toward Theory in Ritual (Chicago and London, 1987). 5 Les lieux de mémoire, ed. Pierre Nora, 3 vols (Paris, 1984–6). 6 Alexandra Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity, and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2011). 7 Émile Durkheim, Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse, first published in 1912. 8 Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, iii. 2. 9 Alexei Lidov, ‘Spatial Icons:The Miraculous Performance with the Hodegetria of Constantinople’, in Hierotopy:The Creation of Sacred Spaces in Byzantium and Medieval Russia, ed. Alexei Lidov (Moscow, 2006), pp. 349–72; Alexei Lidov, ‘The Flying Hodegetria:The Miraculous Icon as Bearer of Sacred Space’, in The Miraculous Image in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Erik Thunø and Gerhard Wolf (Rome, 2004), pp. 273–304. See also Alexei Lidov, ‘Hierotopy:The Creation of Sacred Spaces as a Form of Creativity and Subject of Cultural History’, in Hierotopy, ed. Lidov, pp. 32–58. 10 See Alexei Lidov, ed., New Jerusalems: Hierotopy and Iconography of Sacred Spaces (Moscow, 2009). For the promotion of Catholic Bavaria, with its respective images and other sanctuaries, as a ‘Holy Land’, see Philip M. Soergel, Wondrous in his Saints: CounterReformation Propaganda in Bavaria (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1993), p. 228. 11 See pp. 66‒8. 12 On the local roots of saint cults in early Christianity, see in this respect Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity

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(London, 1981); Patrick Geary, Furta Sacra:Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages, 2nd edn (Princeton, nj, 1990). Jane Garnett and Gervase Rosser, ‘Miraculous Images and the Sanctification of Urban Neighbourhood in Post-medieval Italy’, Journal of Urban History, 32 (2006), pp. 729–40. Gervase Rosser, ‘The Miraculous Image in Medieval Italy: Religious Cult and Source of Social Justice’, Studia italo-polonica, 6 (2000), pp. 7–18. Verity Platt, Facing the Gods: Epiphany and Representation in Graeco-Roman Art, Literature and Religion (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 95–6. See Gervase Rosser, ‘Sanctuary and Social Negotiation in Medieval England’, in The Cloister and the World: Essays in Medieval History presented to Barbara Harvey, ed. John Blair and Brian Golding (Oxford, 1996), pp. 57–79. M. Dejonghe, Orbis marianus, vol. i: Les Madones couronnées de Rome (Paris, 1967), pp. 51–2; A. Paolucci, Antoniazzo Romano (Florence, 1992), pp. 42–3. Marzia Ceccaglia et al., Con gli occhi del cielo. Le Madonne miracolose di Rimini (Rimini, 2009), pp. 30–33. Mauro Ricchetti, Le Madonnette dei carruggi (Genoa, 1967), p. 26. A similar example: L. Novelli and M. Massaccesi, Ex voto del santuario della Madonna del Monte di Cesena (Cesena, 1961), pl. L and p. 76 (no. 123). Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan, ‘Sopra le acque salse’: Espaces, pouvoir et société à Venise à la fin du Moyen Âge (Rome, 1992), vol. i, pp. 617–68. For the resort to a miraculous image as a refuge by immigrants, see p. 61 above. Nicola Lanzi, Genova città di Maria Santissima. Storia e documenti della pietà mariana genovese (Pisa, 1992), pp. 55–6. The meeting of Ndràngata bosses at the shrine was caught on film in September 2009: www.gexplorer.net (consulted 29 September 2011).The condemnation by the bishop of Locri was published in Avvenire, 3 September 2010. Arturo Ferretto, Il codice diplomatico del santuario di N.S. delle Grazie in Sori (Genoa, 1898). Brendan Cassidy, ‘Orcagna’s Tabernacle in Florence: Design and Function’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 55 (1992), pp. 180–211; Diane Finiello Zervas, ed., Orsanmichele a Firenze (Modena, 1996). See Paul Davies, ‘The Madonna delle Carceri in Prato and Italian Renaissance Pilgrimage Architecture’, Architectural History, 36 (1993), pp. 1–18. See also pp. 122‒4. L. Melano Rossi, The Santuario of the Madonna di Vico

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Pantheon of Charles Emanuel I of Savoy (London, 1907); Paolo Cozzo, ‘Regina Montis Regalis.’ Il Santuario di Mondovì da devozione locale a tempio sabaudo, con edizione delle ‘Memorie intorno alla SS.Vergine di Vico (1595–1601)’ (Rome, 2002). Paolo Cozzo, ‘Santuari del principe. I santuari subalpini d’età moderna nel progetto politico sabaudo’, in Per una storia dei santuari cristiani d’Italia: approcci regionali, ed. Giorgio Cracco (Bologna, 2002), pp. 91–114, at pp. 111–12. Vittorio Poggi, ‘Santuario della Pace in Albisola Superiore’, Atti della Società Ligure di Storia Patria, 25 (1892), pp. 165–214; Giovanni Bernardo Poggi, ‘Memorie del santuario della Madonna della Pace’, Savona, Archivio Diocesano, ms (unnumbered), early nineteenth century. Jane Garnett and Gervase Rosser, ‘Sacred Space in the Light of the Miraculous Image: A Case Study from Seventeenth-century Italy’, in Hierotopy: Comparative Studies of Sacred Spaces, ed. Alexei Lidov (Moscow, 2009), pp. 162–76. See also pp. 80‒83 above. ‘Processo della verificatione dei miracoli della Madonna dell’Orto, 1610’, bsec, ms 3.y.iv.27; Luigi Sanguineti, Nostra Signora dell’Orto. Storia documentata del suo santuario in Chiavari e della diffusione del culto, 2nd edn (Rapallo, 1955); Raimondo Spiazzi, Nostra Signora dell’Orto in Chiavari. Storia documentata della devozione e del Santuario (Rapallo, 1994). Ranieri degli Esposti, Chiavari: vicende del territorio, delle istituzioni e degli abitanti (Rapallo, 1991), pp. 24–30, 86–7; asg, Atti del Senato, Sala Senarega, f.1960. See pp. 81‒3 and references cited in n. 34 below. Most remained (and remain) in manuscript form.The principal ones are: Robbio, ‘Principii’; Pietro Cella, Istoria della Madonna di Chiavari (Genoa, 1613); Agostino Busco, ‘Della Historia di Nostra Signora dell’Horto di Chiavari’ (1656, with additions of 1669), bsec, ms 3.z.iv.23. Busco, ‘Della Historia’, pp. 100–04. For the involvement of these great families see Sanguineti, Nostra Signora dell’Orto, p. 85; Spiazzi, Nostra Signora dell’Orto. Storia documentata, pp. 98–105, 114–15; La chiesa di San Francesco e i Costaguta. Arte e cultura a Chiavari dal XVI al XVIII secolo, ed. Loredana Pessa and Claudio Montagni (Genoa, 1998), pp. 11–12, 37–8; Dizionario biografico dei Liguri, dalle origini al 1990 (Genoa, 1998), vol. iv, p. 44; Busco, ‘Della Historia’, pp. 113–20; Cella, Istoria, pp. 66–9. The dated inscription above the scurolo refers to a subsequent collapse of the church roof which, by an

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apparent miracle, left both the people in the building and the image itself unharmed. Carlo Garibaldi, Della storia di Chiavari (Genoa, 1853), p. 123; Gilla Gremigni, Santa Maria di Bacezza (936–1936) (2nd edn, Chiavari, 1936), pp. 31–5; Paolo Gennaro, Il santuario di Nostra Signora dell’Olivo in Bacezza (Recco, 2004), pp. 22–9; Archivio Parrochiale di Santa Maria dell’Olivo e San Biagio, Chiavari, Libro Primo di Conti dei Massari. Agostino Busco, ‘Annali di Chiavari dove si vedono molte cose particolari degne di luce’, vol. i, Santa Margherita Ligure, Biblioteca Communale, Fondo Costa, ms 149 (1–2), pp. 586–8. Giovanni Bono Ferrari, ‘La Madonna dei Camogliesi nel mondo’, La Madonna del Boschetto. Bollettino del Santuario, 16 (1938), pp. 1–8, esp. pp. 2–3. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revd edn (London, 1991). Il concorso quotidiano della Madonna delle Vigne di Genova descritto da Monsignor di Brugnato C.R. (Genoa, 1743); Il santuario di Nostra Signora delle Vigne in Genova (Genoa, 1853), pp. 34–5, 64 n. 31. acag, fondo: ‘Grazie e miracoli’, unnumbered letter of 10 March 1817. Francesco Zaverio omc, I cappuccini genovesi. Note biografiche, i (Genoa, 1912), pp. 419–20. L’Eco d’Italia, 2–3 July 1892; parish bulletin of the parish of Nostra Signora delle Grazie and San Gerolamo, Castelletto, Genoa, July 1999; and authors’ observation during the celebrations. Giuseppe Isola, La rimozione di Porta Pila (Genoa, 1891). L’Eco d’Italia, 9–10 April 1892, and special number, 22 December 1892. On its religious stance, see Roberto Beccaria, I periodici genovesi dal 1473 al 1899 (Genoa, 1994), pp. 186–7. See also Mario Bottaro, Genova 1892 e le celebrazioni colombiane (Genoa, 1984), esp. p. 15.The statue at Stazione Brignole is a modern replacement of the original, now on loan to the new ferry port, where it presides over the harbour. Following a theft of these in 1903, offerings to the Madonna di Porta Pila were subsequently rendered in the church of the Consolazione. La Settimana Religiosa, 21 June 1903. La Settimana Religiosa, 7 April 1878; see also the edition of 8 September 1878 for further lamentation of this decline. For the strong Catholic strain in early socialism in Liguria, see Le origini del socialismo in Liguria, ed.Vito Malcangi (Alessandria, 1995); Giovanni Battista Varnier,

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‘Aspetti della cooperazione “Bianca” in Liguria: Una ricerca sulle società operaie cattoliche di mutuo soccorso’, in Scritti in onore del Prof. Paolo Emilio Taviani (Genoa, 1986), vol. ii, pp. 304ff. La Settimana Religiosa, 24 April and 1 May 1887, 11 May 1952; Lanzi, Genova città di Maria Santissima, p. 52. Bombed into the sea during the Second World War, the statue was rescued and reinstated. It has now been replaced by a copy, the seventeenth-century original being kept in the ground floor hall of the Palazzo San Giorgio, home of the Genoese port authority. Further on the Christian dimension to early socialist movements in Liguria, see Gaetano Perillo, ‘Comunismo, socialismo e cristianesimo sociale nella stampa genovese fra il 1848 e il 1852’, Movimento operaio e contadino in Liguria, 4 (1958), pp. 171–206. asg, Jurisdictionalium, 1718 primo 94, Archivio segreto 1193, fol. 94 n. 63; Luigi Tiscornia, Panegirico in lode della miracolosa imagine del Santissimo Salvatore che si venera nella città di San Pier d’Arena (San Pier d’Arena, 1887). Guilielmus Gumppenberg, Atlas marianus sive de imaginibus deiparae per orbem christianum miraculosis (Munich and Ingolstadt, 1655–7), pp. 190–91. I muri di Maria.Tradizioni iconografiche e devozione popolare a Ferrara, ed. R. Frignani and C.Toschi (Ferrara, 1988), pp. 82–3; and for the Madonna dei Bagni of Deruta, see pp. 180‒81 above. Gregorio Pinucci, Memorie istoriche della sacra immagine di Maria Santissima detta delle Grazie che si venera nella chiesa volgarmente chiamata del Calinajo presso la città di Cortona (Florence, 1792). M. Fanti, ‘La Madonna di S. Luca nella leggenda, nella storia e nella tradizione bolognese’, Il carrobio, 3 (1977), pp. 179–98. F. Del Grasso, ‘Origine del culto alla Madonna d’Impruneta e suoi rapporti con la città di Firenze’, in Impruneta: Una pieve, un paese. Cultura parrochia e società nella campagna toscana. Convegno di studi, Impruneta, 1982 (Florence, 1983), pp. 33–77; Richard Trexler, ‘Florentine Religious Experience:The Sacred Image’, Studies in the Renaissance, 19 (1972), pp. 7–41. Giambattista di San Lorenzo, Cenni storici del Santuario della Consolazione in Reggio Calabria (Rome, 1916). Luciano Antonellis, Cerignola. Guida alla città (Cerignola, 1999). For an admirably measured discussion of sanctuaries in the Mediterranean landscape in an extended time-frame, see Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell,

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al Serenissimo Duce e all’Illustrissima Signoria, al Clero et Popolo di Genova, 1588’, in Synodi diocesanae et provinciales editae atque ineditae S. Genuensis ecclesiae (Genoa, 1833), pp. 503–4. G. F. Mainero, La pietà ligure preconizata, orazion panegirica (Genoa, 1656). See William A. Christian, Apparitions in Late Medieval and Renaissance Spain (Princeton, nj, 1989), p. 19; Christian, Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Princeton, nj, 1981), p. 91. See Giorgio Cracco, ‘Alle origini dei santuari mariani’, in Loreto crocevia religioso tra Italia, Europa e Oriente, ed. F. Citterio and L.Vaccario (Brescia, 1997), pp. 97–164. Paolo Giardelli, Le tradizioni popolari dei Liguri (Genoa, 1991), pp. 171–4. Renato Appi et al., C’era una volta la pietà popolare. Segni religiosi e preghiere del Friuli Occidentale (Udine, 1992), pp. 48, 50, 53, 93. Ibid., pp. 35, 37, 38, 40, etc. Carla Milleschi and Silvia Botticelli, ‘L’oratorio della Madonna del Piano a Sesto Fiorentino’, Critica d’arte, lxvii ⁄21 (2004), pp. 71–88. Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image (London, 1993), p. 557; Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex:The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary [1976] (London, 1985), pp. 262, 265–7. Antonio Ive, ‘Una litania geografica italiana del Medio Evo’, Bollettino della Società Geografica Italiana, 5th ser., 3 (1914), pp. 1315–39; Michele Bacci, ‘Portolano sacro. Santuari e immagini sacre lungo le rotte di navigazione del Mediterraneo dal tardo Medioevo e prima età moderna’, in The Miraculous Image, ed.Thunø and Wolf, pp. 223–48, at p. 227. Bacci, ‘Portolano sacro’, pp. 242–8. Aidano Schmuckher, Folklore di Liguria (Recco, 1990), vol. i, pp. 15–16. See pp. 73‒4, 85, 179. Platt, Facing the Gods, pp. 96–7. P. G. Guzzo, Le città scomparse della Magna Grecia (Rome, 1982), p. 284; Michele Bacci, Il pennello dell’Evangelista. Storia delle immagini sacre attribuite a san Luca (Pisa, 1998), p. 381 n. La Madonna del Boschetto, 18 (7–8) (1931), pp. 42–5. Since 1944, when the statue was removed to the harbour, the Virgin has been represented at the chapel by a mosaic. Jean-Pierre Filippini, ‘Pericolosità del mare e religiosità del marinaio’, in Ex voto marinari del santuario di Montenero, ed. Michel Mollat et al. (Pisa, 1984), pp. 37–46.

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86 Giovanni Battista Bronzini, ‘Santi e mercanti di mare di Puglia’, Lares, 55 (1989), pp. 5–56, at p. 33. 87 Farida Simonetti, Ex voto marinari del santuario di Nostra Signora del Boschetto di Camogli (Genoa, 1992), pp. 25, 88 (no. 12). 88 Emilio Carta, Umberto Ricci and Francesco M. Ruffini, Rapallo sacra minore. Ex voto marinari del santuario di N.S. di Montallegro (Genoa, 1980), pp. 128–9. 89 Cesaro Ciano, ‘Il santuario di Montenero ed i suoi ex voto marinari’, in Ex voto marinari del santuario di Montenero, ed. Mollat et al., pp. 15–26; Rinaldo Luccardini et al., La devozione e il mare. Aspetti di fede e religiosità in Liguria (Genoa, 2000); Bacigalupo, Benatti and Carta, Ex voto a Montallegro. 90 Ex voto marinari del santuario di Montenero, ed. Mollatt et al., pp. 133–4, 136 (no. 82). 91 Ellen Perry, The Aesthetics of Emulation in the Visual Arts of Ancient Rome (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 173–5. 92 8 settembre 1949. 125o anniversario incoronazione di N.S. d el Suffragio in Recco (Recco, 1949), p. 17. 93 Giovanni Bono Ferrari, ‘La Madonna dei camogliesi nel mondo’, La Madonna del Boschetto, xvi ⁄1–2 (January–February 1938), p. 8. 94 Giacomo Ghio, Il santuario di N.S. delle Grazie in Sori. Cenni storici (Genoa, 1898), p. 27. 95 Vincenzo Podestà, Cenni storici sul prodigioso Crocifisso nella perinsigne Collegiata Parrocchia di Sestri Levante (Chiavari, 1903); P.Tomaini and A. Rossignotti, S. Maria di Nazareth. Parrocchia – Collegiata – Cattedrale – Basilica di Sestri Levante (Sarzana, 1975), pp. 338–9. 96 La Madonna del Boschetto, 8 (1921), p. 77; 9 (1922), p. 85; 17 (1930), p. 5; 19 (1932), p. 11. 97 See Robert Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950 (New Haven and London, 1985). 98 Bottaro, Genova 1892, p. 13. 99 Examples ibid., pp. 1–8. 100 Spiazzi, Nostra Signora dell’Orto . . . Memorie e Testimonianze, pp. 67–8. 101 Anon., ‘Maria e i genovesi nel mondo’, i, La Settimana Religiosa, 17 October 1948, p. 4. 102 Bono Ferrari, ‘La Madonna dei camogliesi’, p. 8. 103 Spiazzi, Nostra Signora dell’Orto, p. 68. 104 Bacigalupo, Benatti and Carta, Ex voto a Montallegro, pl. xxvi. 105 Pietro Clemente et al., Pittura votiva e stampe popolari (Milan, 1987), pp. 54–5. 106 Robert Maniura, ‘Image and Relic in the Cult of Our Lady of Prato’, in Images, Relics, and Devotional Practices in

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Medieval and Renaissance Italy, ed. Sally J. Cornelison and Scott B. Montgomery (Tempe, az, 2006), pp. 193–212, at pp. 207–8. ‘La Virgen tiene tantos medios de comunicarse con nosotros. Me dejó bastante impactada que se me haya “aparecido” por internet . . .’, guestbook of a site maintained locally for the sanctuary of Nostra Signora del Boschetto, Camogli, entry no. 20 (27 February 2001), at www.nsboschetto.com (consulted 21 September 2005). Ibid., entry no. 44 (24 July 2002). Paolo Apolito, Internet e la Madonna. Sul visionarismo religioso in rete (Milan, 2002), p. 19. Facebook page of the Madonna Dell’Arco (consulted 27 August 2012). Facebook page of the Madonna Addolorata di Bonito (consulted 8 September 2011). Apolito, Internet e la Madonna, esp. p. 73. ‘Internet è una nuova realtà, che si aggiunge a quella consueta della devozione visionaria, a volte le si contrappone, il più delle volte inavertitamente le si sostituisce.’ Ibid., p. 21. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation [1985], trans. Sheila Glaser (Michigan, 1994). ‘Sie [virtual reality] erlöst die Bilder von der Erinnerung an die Realität.’ Hans Belting, Das echte Bild. Bildfragen als Glaubensfragen (Munich, 2005), pp. 18–26, quotation at p. 22. More recently, Belting has distanced himself from the Baudrillardian tendency evident in the earlier book. Belting, An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body, trans.Thomas Dunlop (Princeton, nj, and Oxford, 2011), pp. 25–7. De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 129. That globalization need not dissolve the sense of sacred locality but may, on the contrary, reinforce it, is also indicated by Manuel A.Vásquez and Marie F. Marquardt, ‘Globalizing the Rainbow Madonna: Old Time Religion in the Present Age’, Theory, Culture and Society, 17 (2000), pp. 119‒43.

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List of Illustrations

12 Chapel of the Madonna Salus Populi Romani, Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome. Photo: Ja´s Elsner. 13 Reliquary statue of Ste Foy, late 10th-century, detail of the head. Church of Ste Foy, Conques, Burgundy. Photo: Bridgeman Art Library. 14 Santini, mid-20th century. Photo: authors. 15 The Madonna delle Grazie, chapel of the Madonna delle Grazie, Sori. Photo: authors. 16 Matthew Seutter (1678‒1757), Map of Liguria, 17th century, engraving. Genoa, Centro docsai, Collezione Topografica. Photo: Albino Crovetto. 17 Vico delle Monachette, Genoa, c. 1900. Photo by Alfred Noack. Collezione Fotografica della Città di Genova (inv. 12675). 18 View of Genoa, c. 1840, engraving by William Bartlett. Genoa, Centro docsai, Collezione Topografica (inv. 3411). 19 Liguria from the air. Photo: Silvana Editoriale. 20 The coast of Liguria near Rapallo. Photo: authors. 21 Coast of Liguria near La Spezia, c. 1890. Photo by Alfred Noack. Collezione Fotografica della Città di Genova (inv. 34632). Photo: Albino Crovetto. 22 The Madonna della Fortuna, former ship’s prow, venerated as a cult image from 1636, painted wood, h. c. 200 cm. Church of San Carlo, Genoa. Photo: authors. 23 The Madonna del Boschetto, c. 1510, oil on panel. Chapel of the Madonna del Boschetto, Camogli. Photo: authors. 24 The Madonna of Montallegro, c. 1500, icon, 15 × 18 cm. Sanctuary of Montallegro, Rapallo. Photo: authors. 25 The Madonna delle Grazie, 15th century, carved and painted wood, h. c. 150 cm. Chapel of the Madonna delle Grazie, Chiavari. Photo: authors. 26 The Madonna delle Grazie, Chiavari. Engraving of 1872 recording the legendary origin of the image and

1 Domenico Fiasella, TheVirgin Mary Queen of Genoa, c. 1638, oil on canvas, 314 × 195 cm. Church of San Giorgio dei Genovesi, Palermo. Photo: Giuseppe Olivieri. 2 Frontispiece to Guilielmus Gumppenberg, Atlas marianus (Munich, 1672). Photo: Governing Body of Christ Church, Oxford. 3 Fiasella, The Virgin Mary Queen of Genoa (illus. 1), detail of Genoa. 4 Michelangelo, Pietà, c. 1498–1500, marble, h. 1.74 m. Vatican, St Peter’s Basilica. Photograph, 1880‒90. Photo: Alinari Archives – D’Alessandri Archive, Florence. 5 Antoniazzo Romano, Madonna with the Miracle of Pope Leo I, c. 1475, tempera on panel, 110.8 × 117 cm. National Gallery, Dublin. Photograph courtesy of the National Gallery of Ireland. 6 Markos Bathas, Virgin and Child (the Madonna della Luce), early 16th century, oil on panel. Cathedral, Isernia. Ulderico Iorillo, L’Icona della Madonna della Luce d’Isernia (Isernia: Iannone Editore, 2009). 7 The Face of Christ, date uncertain (Byzantine frame 14th century), painted wooden panel, 28.8 × 17.6 cm. Church of San Bartolomeo degli Armeni, Genoa. Photo: Paolo Bacherini. 8 Crucifix, 13th century, carved and painted wood, h. of cross c. 2 m. Church of Santa Maria di Nazareth, Sestri Levante. Photo: authors. 9 Andrès de Islas, Our Lady of Guadalupe: Juan Diego Shows the Image to Bishop Zumaraga, 1773, oil on canvas, 223 × 105.5 cm. Image courtesy of the Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa. 10 Pier Paolo Rubens, La Madonna della Vallicella, 1608, oil on slate, 425 × 250 cm. Rome, Chiesa Nuova (S. Maria in Vallicella). © Scala, Florence. 11 The Madonna Salus Populi Romani. Church of Santa Maria Maggiore. Photo: Alinari Archives, Florence.

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33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

44 Madonnas for dressing, 17th–18th century. Museo Diocesano Bernareggi, Bergamo. Photo: Museo Diocesano, Bergamo. 45 Street shrine of the Madonna della Misericordia of Savona.Via Mura delle Grazie, Genoa. Photo: authors. 46 Street shrine of the Madonna.Vico della Fava Greca, Genoa. Photo: authors. 47 Street shrine of the Madonna dell’Orto in an arcaded street of Chiavari. Photo: authors. 48 ‘The Litanies of the Virgin’, engraving by Bartolomeo Pinelli, from Nuova raccolta di cinquanta costumi pittoreschi (Rome, 1816). 49 A street shrine decorated with oranges, tended by a madonnara. Photograph taken in Partinico, Sicily, 1954. Photo: Enzo Sellerio, Partinico, 1954 © copyright. 50 Andrea Ansaldo, Mystic Marriage of St Catherine, c. 1625–8, oil on canvas, 225 × 170 cm. Museo Diocesano, Chiavari. Photo: Curia Vescovile di Chiavari. 51 Tabernacle of the Madonna, 1355–9. Chapel of Orsanmichele, Florence. © Scala, Florence. 52 Creusa leading up to the sanctuary of the Madonnetta, Genoa. Photo: authors. 53 Chapel on the way to the sanctuary of the Madonnetta. Photo: authors. 54 Luigi Garibbo (1782–1869), Church of the Madonnetta, Genoa, watercolour. Genoa, Centro docsai, Collezione Topografica (inv. 2089). 55 Facade and piazzetta of the sanctuary of the Madonnetta, Genoa, in an engraving from Descrizione dei santuari di Piemonte (1822). Genoa, Centro docsai, Collezione Topografica (inv. 1897). 56 Sanctuary of the Madonnetta, Genoa, interior. Photo: authors. 57 Sanctuary of the Madonnetta, scurolo with chapel of the image. Photo: authors. 58 The Madonnetta, late 16th century, alabaster, h. c. 100 cm. Sanctuary of the Madonnetta, Genoa. Photo: authors. 59 The Madonna del Parto, church of Sant’Agostino, Rome, in a photograph of c. 1880–90. Photo: Alinari Archives, Florence. 60 Jacopo Sansovino, Virgin and Child (the Madonna del Parto), c. 1518, marble, as the statue appears today. Church of Sant’Agostino, Rome. © Photo Scala, Florence. 61 The Madonna delle Grazie al Molo, 13th century, painted wood. Church of the Madonna delle Grazie al Molo, Genoa. Photo: authors.

the movement of the eyes in 1871. La Liguria. Strenna delle letture cattoliche di Genova per l’anno del Signore 1872 (Genoa, 1872). Antonio Canepa, The Madonna della Guardia appears to Benedetto Pareto, 1894, plaster sculpture group. La Guardia, Sanctuary of the Madonna. Photograph, c. 1900. Collezione Fotografica della Città di Genova (inv. 10915). Flagellant fraternity and other devotees at the garden shrine of the Madonna dell’Orto, c. 1700, oil on wood. Photo: authors. The Madonna dell’Orto, c. 1490, fresco, formerly on a garden wall, in its transposed, 17th-century setting. Cathedral, Chiavari. Photo: authors. The Volto Santo of Lucca, 11th–12th century, wood, h. 245 cm. Lucca, cathedral. Photo: Bridgeman Art Library/Alinari. Captain Pellegro Peregallo brings the Madonna to Megli, 19th century, fresco, ceiling of the church of the Madonna delle Grazie, Megli. Photo: authors. The Madonna delle Grazie, Megli, late 13th century (the crowns and angels are later additions), painted panel, church of the Madonna delle Grazie, Megli. Photo: authors. Sanctuary of the Madonna of Lampedusa at Castellaro di Taggia. Photo: authors. Chapel of the Madonna of Lampedusa, Castellaro di Taggia. Image and inscription over the door recording the miracle, early 17th century. Photo: authors. Andrea Anfosso Carried Home by the Madonna of Lampedusa, immaginetta, 20th century. Photo: authors. The Madonna Miracolosa del Sacro Cuore, 1851, painted scagliola, h. c. 150 cm. Sanctuary of the Madonna Miracolosa, Taggia. Photo: authors. Church of the Madonna delle Vigne, Genoa, interior, with the chapel of the Madonna delle Vigne. Photo: authors. Tommaso Orsolino, the Madonna delle Vigne, 1616, marble, h. c. 150 cm. Church of the Madonna delle Vigne, Genoa. Photo: authors. Chapel of the Madonna delle Vigne. Photo: authors. Domenico Fiasella, the Madonna della Città, 1653 (based on Fiasella’s first design of 1637), bronze. Cathedral, Genoa. Photo: Archivi Alinari, Florence. The Madonna del Soccorso, c. 1400, panel painting. Cathedral, Genoa. Photo: authors. Prayer booklet of the Madonna della Guardia near Genoa, 1912. Photo: authors. Roman street shrine in a photograph of 1954. © Cinecittà Luce/Scala, Florence.

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List of Illustrations

82 Ex-voto, 1933. Sanctuary of the Madonna of Montallegro, Rapallo. Photo: Maria Bacigalupo. 83 Ex-voto, 1882. Sanctuary of the Madonna del Monte, Genoa. Photo: Archivio Sagep Editori, Genoa. 84 Ex-voto, 18th century. Sanctuary of the Madonna dell’Orto, Chiavari. Photo: authors. 85 Ex-voto, early 19th century. Sanctuary of the Madonna of Bacezza, Chiavari. Photo: authors. 86 Ex-voto, 1879. Sanctuary of the Madonna del Monte, Genoa. Photo: authors. 87 Ex-voto, 1880. Sanctuary of the Madonna del Gazzo, Voltri, near Genoa. Photo: Archivio Sagep Editori, Genoa. 88 Ex-voto, 1903. Sanctuary of the Madonna of Montenero, Livorno. Photo: authors. 89 Ex-voto, 1913. Sanctuary of the Madonna of Montenero, Livorno. Photo: authors. 90 Ex-voto, 1950. Sanctuary of the Madonna of Montenero, Livorno. Photo: authors. 91 Ex-voto, 1821. Sanctuary of Virgo Potens, Sestri Ponente, near Genoa. Photo: Archivio Sagep Editori, Genoa. 92 Ex-voto, 1872. Sanctuary of the Madonna del Monte, Genoa. Photo: authors. 93 Ex-voto, 1871. Sanctuary of the Madonna of Montallegro, Rapallo. Photo: Maria Bacigalupo. 94 Ex-voto,1855.Sanctuary of the Madonna del Boschetto, Camogli. Photo: Archivio Sagep Editori, Genoa. 95 Ex-voto, 1889. Sanctuary of the Madonna of Montallegro, Rapallo. Photo: Maria Bacigalupo. 96 Ex-voto recording an incident in Serbia, 1942. Sanctuary of the Madonna of Montallegro, Rapallo. Photo: Maria Bacigalupo. 97 Ex-voto following the bombardment of Rapallo in 1944. Sanctuary of the Madonna of Montallegro, Rapallo. Photo: Maria Bacigalupo. 98 Presenting flowers to the Madonna, Rome, c. 1940. Photo: Luciano Morpurgo. Raccolte Museali Fratelli Alinari – Donazione Morpurgo, Florence. 99 The Madonna dei Miracoli, early 20th-century replacement of late-medieval original, painted and gilded wooden sculpture. Church of San Giovanni Battista, Cicagna. Photo: Luciano Morpurgo. Alinari Archives, Donazione Morpurgo, Florence. 100 Graffiti addressed to the Madonnetta of Acquasanta (see illus. 71), on the tempietto of the statue, photographed in 2008. Photo: authors. 101 Street shrine of the Madonna del Soccorso in the cathedral of Genoa.Via dei Giustiniani, Genoa. Photo: authors.

62 The Madonna delle Grazie al Molo, photograph, c. 1890. Collezione Fotografica della Città di Genova (inv. 11845). 63 Crucifix, 14th century, wood, h. c. 200 cm. Dominican monastery of Santa Maria di Castello, Genoa. Photo: authors. 64 Crucifix, 1970s, wood, h. c. 200 cm. Photo: authors. 65 The Madonna del Monte, 15th century, painted wood, h. c. 150 cm. The crowns were made for the figures’ coronation in 1829. Photo: authors. 66 The Madonna del Suffragio, Recco, in an engraving of 1875. Il Cinquantesimo della incoronazione di S. Maris del Suffragio celebrato in Recco (Genoa, 1875). 67 The Madonna del Suffragio of Recco on the facade of a house in the town. Photo: authors. 68 Processional cassa of the Madonna del Suffragio, 18th century. Sanctuary of the Madonna, Recco. Photo: authors. 69 Sanctuary of Acquasanta in an engraving of 1833. Collezione Fotografica della Città di Genova (inv. 16808). 70 Sanctuary of Acquasanta, tempietto of the Madonna above the miraculous spring, c. 1700. Photo: authors. 71 The Madonna of Acquasanta, c. 1600, painted plaster, h. c. 150 cm. Photo: authors. 72 Cross-bearers of a confraternity at the shrine of the Madonna of Acquasanta. Photo: authors. 73 Cross-bearers of a confraternity incline their crucifix before the tempietto of the Madonna of Acquasanta. Photo: authors. 74 The cassa of the Madonna about to be carried up the Scala Santa at Acquasanta. Photo: authors. 75 Roadside shrine with flowers, near the sanctuary of the Madonna of Vico di Mondovì. Photo: authors. 76 Ex-votos at the sanctuary of the Madonna of Montenero, Livorno. Photo: authors. 77 Ex-voto, 1912. Sanctuary of the Madonna of Montenero, Livorno. Photo: authors. 78 Ex-voto, 1690s. Sanctuary of the Madonna of Montallegro, Rapallo. Photo: Maria Bacigalupo. 79 The Madonna of Montenero, Livorno, framed by scenes of miracles attributed to the image in the form of ex-votos. Engraving, 1622. 28 × 36.5 cm. Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford, Prints and Drawings, wa 2003 Douce 1303. 80 Ex-voto, 1569. Sanctuary of the Miraculous Crucifix in the monastery of Santa Maria di Castello, Genoa. Photo: authors. 81 Ex-voto, 1875. Sanctuary of the Madonna del Monte, Genoa. Photo: authors.

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spectacular miracle s

102 The Madonna of Apparizione, c. 1400, painted and gilded wood, h. c. 80 cm. Church of Apparizione, near Genoa. Photo: authors. 103 Commemorative engraving of the Madonna delle Grazie of Sori, framed with embroidered roses c. 1920 as a wedding present for the grandmother of the present owner. Photo: authors. 104 The Madonna della Colonna, c. 1400, fresco. Cathedral, Savona. Photo: authors. 105 Outdoor shrine in Umbria, the original frescoed image scraped for medicinal use. Early 20th-century photograph. G. Bellucci, Il feticismo primitivo in Italia (Perugia, 1907). 106 Bags containing scrapings from a roadside image of the Virgin Mary, used for healing and subsequently redonated to the shrine. Early 20th-century photograph. G. Bellucci, Il feticismo primitivo in Italia (Perugia, 1907). 107 Pilgrim’s flask for the miraculous spring water of the shrine of the Madonna della Misericordia, Savona, 1775, painted ceramic, h. 36 cm. Pinacoteca Civica di Savona, Collezione Principe Boncompagni Ludovisi. Photo: Pinacoteca Civica di Savona. 108 Reverse of pilgrim’s flask with inscription: ‘Water of Our Lady of Mercy of Savona 1775.’ Photo: Pinacoteca Civica di Savona. 109 Ex-voto, c. 1700, showing exorcism of a woman before the image. Sanctuary of the Madonna delle Grazie, Megli. Photo: Carla Oberto. 110 Immaginetta of the miraculous image of Jesus the Nazarene in the church of Santa Maria in Monticelli, Rome, 1898, 10.5 × 7 cm. Photo: authors. 111 Immaginetta of Jesus the Nazarene, reverse bearing inscription recording the owners’ witness of a miracle of the image. Photo: authors. 112 Image of the Madonna dell’Orto fixed to a pew in the nave of the cathedral of Chiavari. The original fresco is framed above the high altar in the background. Photo: authors. 113 Facade of the sanctuary of the Madonna dell’Orto (now the cathedral), Chiavari, in a late 19th-century photograph. Collezione Fotografica della Città di Genova (inv. 16191). 114 Ex-voto, 1801. Cathedral church of the Madonna dell’Orto, Chiavari. Photo: authors. 115 Ex-voto, c. 1800. Sanctuary of the Madonna of Coronata, Genoa. Photo: authors. 116 Representation of the Veronica, the head of Christ shown on a cloth preserved in St Peter’s church in the Vatican, Rome, c. 1250, English. London, British

117

118 119 120 121 122 123

124 125 126 127

128

129 130 131 132 133 134

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Library ms Royal 2.a.xxii, fol. 221v. By permission of the British Library. Sheet of printed Veronicas, hand-coloured, ready for cutting out, 15th century. The Royal Library, Copenhagen, Thott 117 8vo. Courtesy of the Royal Library. Processional cassa of the Madonna dei Miracoli, Cicagna. Photo: authors. Immaginetta of the Madonna of Montenero, Livorno, framed and decorated with seashells. Photo: authors. Jesus the Nazarene, 19th century, miraculous print, church of San Donato, Genoa. Photo: authors. Immaginetta of Nostra Signora della Salute, formerly in the Franciscan church of the Madonna della Pace, Genoa. Photo: authors. The Madonna Bianca, church of San Pietro and San Lorenzo, Portovenere, early 15th century, coloured woodblock print. Photo: authors. The Madonna of Maralunga, 15th century, tempera on panel, church of San Francesco, Lerici. F. M. Bussetti and M. Giusi Costa, I santuari della Liguria, i, Provincia di La Spezia (Genoa, 1980). Photo: Cesare Ferrari. The Madonna of Montallegro (illus. 24), detail. The Madonna of Montallegro, mid-17th-century engraving. Photo: authors. The Madonna of Montallegro, mid-17th-century engraving. Photo: authors. Roadside pillar with image and view of Vicoforte, near the sanctuary of the Madonna of Vico di Mondovì. Photograph, late 19th century. L. Melano Rossi, The Santuario of the Madonna di Vico (London, 1907). The Madonna of Montallegro brought by angels to protect the bay of Rapallo, mid-17th-century engraving. G. Molfino, Di alcune memorie istoriche della Miracolosa Madonna . . . (Venice, [1683]). The Madonna of Montallegro, protectress of Rapallo. Detail of illus. 128. Ex-voto, 17th century. Sanctuary of the Miraculous Crucifix in the monastery of Santa Maria di Castello, Genoa. Photo: authors. The Madonna delle Grazie protectress of Sori, 18th-century fresco, ceiling of the parish church of Santa Margherita, Sori. Photo: authors. The Madonna delle Grazie of Sori on the wall of a house near the parish church. Photo: authors. The Madonna del Ponte of Sori. Shrine on the bridge linking the parish church to the chapel of the Madonna delle Grazie. Photo: authors. Sanctuary of the Madonna di Vico, Mondovì. Photo: authors.

List of Illustrations

135 The Madonna di Vico, formerly on a roadside pillar similar to that in illus. 127, in its architectural setting, completed in the mid-18th century. Photo: authors. 136 Chiavari and the Golfo del Tigullio, 1821, pen and ink (Strongwayes). Genoa, Centro docsai, Collezione Topografica (inv. 1784). 137 The first miracles of the Madonna dell’Orto, 19th-century fresco, parish church of San Giacomo, Rupinaro, Chiavari. Photo: authors. 138 The Madonna dell’Olivo, Bacezza, Chiavari. Photo: authors. 139 The Madonna of Castelletto, Genoa. Photo: authors. 140 Porta Pila, the northwest gate of Genoa, late 19th-century lithograph. Genoa, Centro docsai, Collezione Topografica (inv. 2549). 141 The Madonna of Porta Pila relocated above Stazione Brignole. Photo: authors. 142 Edicola with the image of the Madonna della Misericordia of Savona, 18th century.Via Pia, Savona. Photo: authors. 143 Christ the Saviour, 17th century, detached and framed fresco. Church of Santa Maria della Cella, Sampierdarena, Genoa. Photo: authors. 144 Procession for the image of Christ the Saviour in Sampierdarena, 1999. Photo: authors. 145 Rural shrine near Camogli, c. 1870–90. Photo: Alfred Noack. Alinari Archives, Florence. 146 Sanctuary of the Madonna of St Luke, Bologna, with processional colonnade connecting the shrine to the town, c. 1880–90. Alinari Archives, Florence. 147 The Holy House of the Virgin Mary of Loreto in the church of Oregina, Genoa, early 20th century. Collezione Fotografica della Città di Genova (inv. 2531). 148 Procession up the mountain from Triora with the Madonna della Misericordia, c. 1990. Photo: Archivio Sagep Editori, Genoa. 149 Immaginetta after A. Poggi, Festival Procession of Boats to the Shrine of ‘Stella Maris’ at Punta Chiappa, mid-20th-century fresco in the parish church of Camogli. Photo: authors. 150 Ex-voto, 1871. Sanctuary of the Madonna of Montallegro, Rapallo. Photo: Maria Bacigalupo.

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Acknowledgements

its former director, Carlo Bitossi, the Biblioteca Berio, the Archivio Storico del Comune di Genova, the Casa Mazzini and the Biblioteca Universitaria in Genoa. At the Vatican, the curators of both the Library and the Archive, and in Britain, the staff of the Bodleian Library (in particular Clare Hills-Nova in the Sackler Library), the British Library and the Warburg Institute have all been vital to the research. For help with particular images, we thank Alessandra Biagianti of Archivi Alinari, Gabriela Carrea, director of the Collezione Fotografica della Città di Genova, Andreina Serra, director of the Collezione Topografica della Città di Genova, and Carla Oberto, picture restorer and director of the Studio d’Arte di Carla Campomenosi. We are profoundly grateful to Ja´s Elsner for reading our manuscript, and to Hanneke Grootenboer for reading the first chapter. For encouraging us to develop our ideas in conferences and seminars in Savona, Genoa, Prato, Rome, Moscow and London, we are indebted to Ferdinando Molteni, Antonella Granero, Don Claudio Paolocci, the late Bill Kent, Erik Thunø, Gerhard Wolf, Alexei Lidov, Henry Mayr-Harting, David d’Avray and John Sabapathy. Alberto Cerchi and Coca Frigerio helped us in the design and construction of an exhibition – ‘Miracoli dell’Immagine Sacra’ – which the community of Santa Maria di Castello in Genoa generously permitted us to mount in the choir of their church in 2004. Roma Tearne, Barry Bullen and Tom Freshwater urged us to put on an exhibition in Britain, and we thank the directors of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and the Bracknell Gallery for giving us that opportunity in 2005–6, and Anne Bush for helping us to conceptualize it. Paul Sims, now sadly missed, and Joey Sims developed our photographs with extraordinary skill; their help has been fundamental. Myfanwy Lloyd, Alana Harris and Annie Crombie visited, shared experiences in Liguria and gave us great support. Many other friends have asked stimulating questions and have helped us in our thinking: Kitty, Chris, Hugh and Helen Nicholson, Mick Gordon, Giles Fraser, Robin Griffith-Jones, Harriet Harris,Tim Phillips, Anthony Bale, Philip Bullock,William Whyte,

A transformative period of life in Liguria laid the foundations of this book. Feast days of miraculous images marked the rhythms of the year, and then and since we have taken part in processions, attended Masses, talked with other participants and watched fireworks.We have explored churches, roadside shrines and back streets, followed the seventeenth-century defences of Genoa up into the mountainous hinterland, and taken boats on the sea. Our everyday life in Genoa has steeped us in a contemporary Italian culture which – sometimes despite appearances – remains profoundly connected to its past. In a city famous for its reserve, we have experienced enormous warmth. The company and conversation of many friends have informed our understanding and have given us great happiness; we are grateful to them all. For first introducing us to Genoa we should particularly like to thank Rita Cifarelli and Durì Bardola, who took us to Acquasanta on our first visit, and who have been the best of friends to us. Many others have become part of our extended family: the late Giorgio Sola, Anna Giulia De Rege, Marina Uliana, Gabriele Benazzoli, Rosa Sidoti, Taira Gueli, Teresa Musetti, Coca Frigerio, Alberto Cerchi, Maurizio Carrara, Alida Garbarino and Nando Costa. The custodians of the shrines of the cult images we have studied have been, almost invariably, welcoming and supportive. For their help in navigating archives and libraries in Liguria, we are grateful to the late Don Luigi Alfonso and Don Paolo Fontana, successively responsible for the Archivio Arcivescovile of Genoa Cathedral; Don Claudio Paolocci, Director of the Biblioteca Franzoniana; Padre Costantino Gilardi, Prior of the Dominican Convent of Santa Maria di Castello; Don Carlo Parodi, Rector of the Genoese parish church of San Donato; Padre Pietro Zerbo, librarian of the Genoese Franciscans; Signora Campana of the Biblioteca Comunale and Fondo Costa in Santa Margherita; Dottore Grasso of the Biblioteca della Società Economica in Chiavari; Monsignor Francesco Isetti in the cathedral curia of Chiavari; the parish priests and sacristans of all the churches we visited; the staff of the Archivio di Stato di Genova, especially

306

Acknowledgements

Matthew Grimley, Caroline and Tim Mawson, Kitty Hauser, Anna Piussi, Susan Siegfried, Alex Potts, Paul Davies and Donal Cooper.We owe much to our students, who have always made us think laterally, and to our colleagues, past and present, especially Cliff Davies, Jörn Leonhard, Matthew Kempshall, Alexander Sedlmaier, Ari Reimann, Craig Clunas, Alastair Wright, Géraldine Johnson, Hanneke Grootenboer, Rachel Woodruff, Christine Robertson and (especially for her advice and help with images) Vicky Brown. Wadham and St Catherine’s Colleges, together with the University of Oxford, granted us sabbatical leave at the outset and conclusion of this work. The cost of preparing the images for the book has been met in part by grants from the John Fell Fund of the University of Oxford and from the British Academy. We are most grateful to all these institutions.The book’s epigraph is taken from W. G. Sebald, After Nature (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2002). To Michael Leaman, Publisher of Reaktion Books, we owe a special debt for his belief in and practical support of the project. Most long-suffering of all has been our daughter, Cecilia, who has lived with this book for far longer than she conceived possible. We dedicate it to her.

307

Index

Numerals in italics refer to illustrations acheiropoi¯e ta see images ‘not made by hand’ Acquapendente, Lazio, Madonna delle Grazie 119–20 Acquasanta, Liguria, Madonna 120, 136–8, 181, 188, 244, 252, 69–74 Africa 90, 131, 171, 259 Akita, Japan, Marian image in 37 Albania see Genazzano, Romagna, Madonna of Shkodra (Madonna del Buon Consiglio); immigration Albisola, Liguria, Madonna della Pace 234 Alfonso de’ Liguori, St 51 America see emigration of Italians ancient world, cult images in 23, 29–30, 46–8, 124, 128, 138, 142, 162, 191, 201, 250, 256, 258 Andrès de Islas 9 Antoniazzo Romano 28, 226, 5 Apocalypsis nova 43 Apparizione, Liguria, Madonna 53, 14, 102 Arezzo 14, 52 art, definitions of 7, 17–34, 36, 38–9, 53–4, 126–8, 192 art history 7–8, 24, 26, 30, 38–9, 126–7, 191–2, 264 L’Art sacré 54 Bathas, Markos 28–9, 4 bells 73, 120, 132–3, 135, 188–9, 210, 240 Benedict xvi, pope 37 Bergamo 32 Bianchi, devotional movement 102, 210–11 Black Sea 58, 84

Bologna, Madonna of St Luke 32, 248, 146 Borromeo, Carlo, archbishop of Milan 41–2 Borromeo, Federico, archbishop of Milan 41 Bossio, Francesco, cardinal 134, 147, 252 Bracciolini, Poggio 14 brass bands 138, 247, 144 Bridget of Sweden, St 142 Bruno, St 161 Buddhist images 164 Camogli, Liguria Madonna del Boschetto 16, 66, 119, 143, 146, 154, 184, 239–40, 255, 257, 259, 261–3, 23, 94 Madonna ‘Stella Maris’ di Punta Chiappa 256, 149 Canepa, Antonio 105, 27 Caravaggio, Lombardy, Madonna 46, 177 see also Chiavari, Liguria, Madonna di Caravaggio of Rupinaro Carlo Emanuele, duke of Savoy 231–2 Casorate, Lombardy 51 Castellaro, Arma di Taggia, Liguria, Madonna of Lampedusa 88–91, 33–5 Charvaz, Andrea, archbishop of Genoa 70 Chaucer, Geoffrey 184 churches, centrally planned 122–3, 232‒4 Chiavari, Liguria 234–9, 136 Madonna delle Grazie 69, 25–6 Madonna dell’Olivo di Bacezza 115, 238, 85, 138

308

Madonna dell’Orto 16, 80–82, 157, 171, 176, 181–3, 185–7, 196–9, 213–14, 234–8, 247, 260–61, 28–9, 47, 84, 112–14, 138 Madonna di Caravaggio of Rupinaro 237 Cicagna, Liguria, Madonna dei Miracoli 165–6, 260, 99 Civitavecchia, Lazio, Madonna 37 confraternities 42, 44, 71, 73, 75, 102–3, 118–19, 134, 136, 166, 172, 183, 186, 244–5, 247, 72–4 conservation 126–8 Constantinople 28, 83–5, 88, 192, 223, 239–40 copies 17–18, 22, 26, 28–36, 46, 48, 56, 78, 84, 91, 99, 101, 103–6, 115–16, 119, 127, 130, 135, 143, 146, 168–9, 172–4, 191–219, 240, 259–62 see also photography, santini Cori, Lazio, Madonna del Soccorso 166 Corniglia, Liguria 33 Coronata, Liguria, Madonna Incoronata 73, 143, 255–6, 115 Cortona, Madonna del Calcinaio 123–4, 248 Council of Trent see Reformation, Catholic Counter-Reformation see Reformation, Catholic crocodiles 147, 78 crosses, carrying of 73, 136–8, 247, 28, 72–3 Crotone, Calabria, Madonna di Capocolonna 255–6 crowning of images 26, 93–4, 103–04, 128–34, 140, 181

Index

crowns, touching of images with 75, 181 see also touching images Cze˛stochowa, Madonna 36 Daddi, Bernardo 196, 51 dancing with images 134–40, 223, 249 Dante 60, 185, 200–01 demons 72, 75–8, 185–8 see also exorcism Deruta, Umbria, Madonna dei Bagni 180–81 Descartes, René 15 Dickens, Charles 112 Donatello 128 downloadable images 208 dressing images 111–12, 124, 175–7, 44 Durazzo Stefano, archbishop of Genoa 104 eastern origin of miraculous images 11–12, 28, 67, 83–91, 228 eating images 178–81 Edessa 30, 83–4, 192 edicole see shrines emigration of Italians to the Americas 14, 16, 259–62 Enlightenment 14, 32, 51–2, 60, 164 exorcism 63, 72, 75–9, 81, 185–9, 109 see also demons ex-votos 15, 53, 55, 77, 80, 88, 103, 109, 124, 126, 142–56, 169, 171, 177, 187, 198, 203, 227, 234, 256–8, 261–2, 43, 75–98, 105–06, 109, 114–15, 130, 150 madonneri 144–5 eyes, of images 11, 52, 68–9, 93–5, 164–5, 26, 36 falling before images 72, 78, 120, 176, 182–3, 188 Faustina Kowalska, St 208 feast days 20, 34, 55, 71, 102–03, 105, 114, 133, 136, 152, 203, 227–9, 241–2 Ferrara,Virgin of the Willow Tree 248 Fiasella, Domenico 1, 3, 40 finders of miraculous images 64–70 fireworks 44, 78, 133, 140–41, 152, 229, 256, 93 Florence Madonna Annunziata 32, 48, 109, 119, 143

Madonna of Orsanmichele 99–100, 111, 119, 196, 231, 51 flowers for images 46, 73, 114, 142, 146, 165–6, 168, 179, 75, 98 Foggia, Apulia, Madonna of the Seven Veils 51 framing images 41–2, 146, 204–05 Francis, St 163 Francis Xavier, St 205 Gabriele dell’Addolorata, St 205 Genazzano, Romagna, Madonna of Shkodra (Madonna del Buon Consiglio) 61 gender 43–4, 65–6, 136, 174–6 Genoa 15–16, 44, 58, 70–73, 104, 112, 115, 203, 205–06, 241, 244, 250, 3, 17 cosmopolitan connections 15–16, 28, 83–4, 88, 252 Court of Mary 103 creuse 121, 52 gates 167, 242–4, 252, 140–41 Republic of 44, 58, 60, 70–74, 100–01, 178, 235–8, 252 senate 60, 71, 73, 81, 101, 140, 237, 251 vicoli 58, 140–41, 168, 17 see also modernity Genoese images Christ the Saviour of Sampierdarena 245–7, 143–4 Crucifix of Santa Maria di Castello 127, 149, 163, 63–4, 80, 130 Face of Christ in San Bartolomeo degli Armeni 31, 251, 83–4, 7 Holy House of Mary at Oregina 252, 147 Jesus the Nazarene 205–06, 120 Madonna della Fortuna 24, 63, 73–80, 256, 22 Madonna della Guardia see Guardia, Madonna della, on Monte Figogna, Liguria Madonna della Pace 206–7, 121 Madonna delle Grazie al Molo 127, 61–2 Madonna delle Vigne 93–4, 95–9, 101, 104–05, 140–41, 240, 37–9 Madonna del Gazzo 87

309

Madonna del Monte 152, 252, 81, 82–3, 86, 92 Madonna del Soccorso 101–03, 168–9, 41, 101 Madonna of Castelletto 241–2, 139 Madonna of the City 44–5, 71, 99–101, 40 Madonnetta 91, 121–4, 206, 52–8 Virgo Potens 148, 156, 176–7, 91 Giorgione 25 globalization 131, 258–65 Gonzaga,Vincenzo i, duke of Mantua 26 graffiti 167, 100 Guadalupe, Mexico, Madonna 34–6, 9 Guardia, Madonna della, on Monte Figogna, Liguria 14, 32–3, 45, 69–70, 104–06, 173, 227, 27, 42 Gumppenberg, Wilhelm (Guilielmus) 11–12, 15, 39, 65, 258, 2 Gúspini, Sardinia 184 Hindu images 110 Holy Land 11, 88, 90, 223, 255 see also New Jerusalem iconoclasm 26 Byzantine 30 icons 16, 26, 28–9, 36, 49–50, 67, 88, 164, 192, 214–17, 223, 24, 50, 124 images ‘not made by hand’ 30–32, 83–4, 93–4, 192–3 immaginette see santini immigration Albanian immigrants to Italy 11, 61 Peruvian immigrants to Italy 13 Innocent iii, pope 48, 199 Internet 217–18, 262–5 investigations, official 17, 21, 51, 67–8, 75–8, 93–4, 120, 131, 149, 165–6, 182, 186, 214 Isernia, Molise, Madonna della Luce 28–9, 6 Islam and images 13–14, 61, 88, 91, 264 Istanbul see Constantinople John Paul ii, pope 36–7, 45, 131 kitsch 23–4, 56, 111, 194–5 see also Saint-Sulpicerie

spectacular miracle s

Lampedusa, Sicily 88–91 Leopoldine reforms 51–2 Lerici, Liguria, Madonna da Maralunga 211–13, 123 Levi, Carlo 14, 184 Lezzeno, Lombardy, Madonna delle Lacrime 203 lights before images 16, 73, 75, 91, 109, 111, 114–15, 140–41, 146, 168, 186, 240, 254, 256–7 Liguria 12–13, 15–16, 44, 57–61, 69, 57–61, 88, 91, 105, 211, 223, 252–3, 16, 18–21 Livorno, Tuscany, Madonna of Montenero 143, 145, 255, 258, 76–7, 79, 88–90, 119 Lomellini, Giambattista 28 Loreto, Marches,Virgin Mary’s house 11–12, 14–15, 255 Lourdes 68–9, 92, 94 Lucca, Volto Santo 84–5, 30 Luke, St, as painter of the Virgin 18, 28, 31–2, 85, 93, 103 Luther, Martin 37 Machiavelli, Nicolò 109–10 Madonna see Virgin Mary magic 179, 183–5, 188 Marini, Domenico de, archbishop of Genoa 71 Matera, Basilicata, Madonna della Bruna 177 medals, holy 172, 181, 185 Mediterranean 13, 16, 18, 28, 46, 58, 83, 85, 88, 250, 254–5 Megli, Liguria, Madonna delle Grazie 85, 187, 31–2, 109 Melozzo da Forlì 26 Mezzogiorno 14 Michelangelo,Vatican Pietà 26, 4 Middle Ages 16–18, 24, 28, 30, 46, 48, 123–4, 162–3, 181 cult images in 24, 30, 41, 48, 53, 83–5, 199–201, 222–3 Milan 41 Madonna of the Tree 42 see also Borromeo, Carlo; Borromeo, Federico mimesis 29–30, 110, 143–4, 149, 181, 192, 195–9, 208, 218

modernity 11–17, 53, 58, 60–61, 68, 104, 111, 131, 136, 173, 194, 217, 240–47, 258 Montaigne, Michel de 15 Montallegro di Rapallo, Liguria, Madonna 66–8, 85–8, 147, 157, 171, 214–17, 223–4, 257, 261–2, 24, 78, 82, 96–7, 93, 95, 124–6, 128–9, 150 Monte Castello di Vibio, Umbria, Madonna dei Portenti 55 Monterosso, Liguria, Madonna di Soviore 124–6 Moscow 91–2 museum display 8–9, 24 Musignano, Lombardy 51 Naples, Madonna dell’Arco 147–8, 187, 263–4 Napoleonic period 44, 52, 60, 213 neighbourhood 20, 75–6, 81, 114–16, 126, 133, 140–41, 225, 228–31, 234–7, 241–2, 260 Neri, Filippo 39–41 New Jerusalem 85, 91, 123–4 see also Holy Land oil from lamps before images, anointing with 75, 77, 186 ornaments for images 124–8 Orsolino, Tommaso 93, 95, 104, 38 Orthodox Christian churches and images 36, 49–50, 61 Ortonovo, Liguria,Virgin Addolorata 166 Oswald, king of Northumbria 222 Paleotti, Gabriele Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images 39, 167 Parma, Madonna della Steccata 129 Paul v, pope 46 photography 21–2, 145–6, 194, 217–18, 77 pilgrimage 8, 15, 34–5, 48, 81, 111, 116, 123, 133, 144, 172, 181–2, 186, 193, 199, 203, 205, 214, 231, 250, 28 see also processions Pisa, Madonna delle Grazie 112 Pistoia, diocesan council of (1786) 51–2, 111

310

Pius vi, pope 52 Pius xii, pope 36 Polsi, Calabria, Madonna della Montagna 227–8 Pompei, Campania, Madonna of the Rosary 146, 174 Portovenere, Liguria, Madonna Bianca 208–13, 122 possession see demons, exorcism processions 14, 18, 20, 44, 53, 55, 73, 75, 83, 102, 105, 109, 114, 134–8, 173, 186, 201–03, 229, 241–2, 245, 247–9, 256, 28, 68, 72–4, 118, 148–9 promotional literature 32, 44, 79, 103, 105, 119, 141, 156–8, 186, 260–61 see also Gumppenberg, Wilhelm (Guilielmus); religious orders as promoters of religious images Protestantism attitudes to images 8–9, 16, 18, 37, 41–2, 129 attitudes to Mariolatry 43 image miracles in 18 Rapallo see Montallegro di Rapallo, Liguria, Madonna rationality 14–15, 21, 51–3, 60, 110–11, 162, 175 Recco, Liguria, Madonna del Suffragio 131–5, 158, 66–8 Reformation, Catholic 16, 46, 214 Council of Trent 38, 42, 46, 60, 66, 74, 111, 134, 188, 214, 223–4, 254, 264 Reggio Calabria, Madonna della Consolazione 249 Reggio Emilia, Madonna della Ghiara 203 relics 47–9, 83, 142, 177, 188, 201, 224 religious orders as promoters of religious images 38, 41, 46, 64, 71, 75, 79, 101, 104, 109, 128–9, 206–07, 214–15, 232, 238, 252 see also Gumppenberg, Wilhelm (Guilielmus); promotional literature Renaissance 28–30, 122, 126, 143 Ricci, Scipio, bishop of Pistoia 51–2 rings 156, 172, 176–7 Risorgimento 16, 28–30, 44, 60, 134, 232–4, 241

Index

roadside shrines see shrines Rodi Garganico, Apulia, Madonna della Libera 158 Rome 52, 130, 205, 43, 48, 98 Madonna della Consolazione 28, 226 Madonna della Febbre 129 Madonna della Vallicella 39–41, 10 Madonna del Divino Amore 116 Madonna del Parto 126, 59–60 Madonna del Popolo 26 Madonna Salus Populi Romani 18, 26–8, 46, 11–12 Veronica see Veronica, image of Christ Roosevelt, Franklin D. 14 Rovereto, Liguria, Madonna Causa Nostrae Laetitiae 32 Rubens, Peter Paul La Madonna della Vallicella 41, 10 Sacchetti, Francesco 146–7 Saidnaya, Syria, Madonna 61 sailors 74, 85, 114, 119, 124, 133, 135, 154, 156, 158, 171–3, 213, 226, 228, 239, 254–8, 31, 95, 115 Sainte-Foye, reliquary statue of 48, 13 Saint-Sulpicerie 54 Sampierdarena see Genoa San Remo, Liguria, Madonna della Costa 164 sanctuary 226–8 Sansovino, Jacopo 126, 60 santini 54, 80, 119, 143, 159, 168, 172–3, 188, 191, 194, 196, 204–06, 208–11, 239–40, 258–9, 265–6, 14, 35, 110–11, 119, 121 Sassoferrato, Giovanni Battista da 206–07, 121 Savona, Liguria 105, 187, 244 Madonna della Colonna 177–8, 104 Madonna della Misericordia 92, 105, 244, 45, 107–08, 142 Savoy 28, 70, 84, 231–4, 242, 252 scepticism 8–9, 14, 52–3, 109–10, 146–7, 183–4, 192 scraping of images 179–81, 105–06 Second Vatican Council 54 secularization 60, 68, 131, 133–4, 225 senses 21, 161–3, 174–5, 184, 188–9

Sestri Levante, Liguria, miraculous crucifix 33, 85, 126, 256, 8 Sforza, Alessandro, lord of Pesaro 26 Sforza Pallavicini, Alessandro, count of Piacenza 26, 129 Shkodra, Madonna of see Genazzano, Romagna; immigration, Albanian immigrants to Italy shrines roadside shrines, rural 66, 120–21, 157, 163, 179, 182, 231, 253–4, 75, 105–06, 127 street shrines, urban 16, 21, 52, 112–16, 121, 159, 168, 179, 201, 230, 241–2, 43, 45–9, 75, 101, 133, 139 facade paintings 41, 51–2, 55, 64, 80, 118, 133, 168–9, 172, 227, 230, 67, 101, 132 madonnare 114–15, 49 Sicily 28, 144–5, 124, 254, 49 Madonna of Trapani 88–91, 206 Siena 26 Siri, Giuseppe, archbishop of Genoa 173, 227 socialism 103, 106, 244 songs 11, 75, 114–15, 121, 138, 157–8, 167, 172, 186, 188, 201, 254–6 Sori, Liguria, Madonna delle Grazie 20, 56, 85, 136, 228–30, 259, 15, 103, 131–3 springs 138, 180–81, 250, 70, 107–08 storytelling 19–20, 28, 73, 149, 156–9, 166, 184–5, 201, 211, 226, 239–40, 256, 265 street shrines see shrines Symeon Stylites, St 181, 191 Syracuse, Madonna 36–7 Taddeo di Bartolo 99, 39 Taggia, Liguria, Madonna del Sacro Cuore 11, 68–9, 92–5, 36 tattoos 174–5 theology of Christian images 21, 30, 34–42, 49–50, 54–5, 147–9, 168, 192–4, 213–19 Thomas Aquinas, St 49 Titian 25 touching images 163, 175, 177, 181, 189, 196, 265 Trapani, Sicily, Madonna 90–91, 206 trees 17, 41, 138, 179–80, 248, 250, 261

311

Turin Madonna Consolata 28 Turin Shroud 48, 217 Ukraine 16 Urban viii, pope 71, 74, 78 Vasari, Giorgio 24, 29, 196 veiling and unveiling images 51, 109, 112, 116–21, 50 Velletri, Lazio, Madonna delle Grazie 120 Venice 25, 28, 211 Madonna dei Miracoli 227 Madonna del Rosario 176 Madonna of St Luke 32 Vernole, Apulia, Madonna della Sanità 65 Veronica, image of Christ 48, 166–7, 192, 116 Vico di Mondovì, Piedmont, Madonna 144, 149, 182–3, 203, 231–4, 134–5 Virgin Mary, cult of 42–7, 93–5, 167, 222, 254 vision 161–2, 164–5, 174–5 visions 34, 45, 51, 65–71, 74, 92, 105, 121, 169, 174, 177, 185–6, 200, 206, 208, 211, 217, 223, 228, 252 witchcraft see magic