Text

theses

This study considers a previously unexplored aspect of what scholars have termed the “Early Christian Revival” in the first decades of the seventeenth century: the site specificity of altar paintings depicting early Christian saints, works intended for a holy site—a tomb, a well, the sewers—associated with that figure. Each of the altarpieces in my case studies (including works by Cigoli, Giovanni Bilivert, and Ludovico Carracci) has been dislocated from its original site in some way, whether through destruction, dispersion, or seclusion. My study focuses on understudied but historically significant altarpieces and placing them within various contexts, including their chapels, their churches, and their places in Rome’s topography. My method to recover the work’s original context combines the close study of surviving artworks, including drawings and prints, alongside contemporary written material like pilgrimage manuals, artistic guidebooks, and martyrologies. I propose that holy sites in Rome could drive specific iconographical and artistic choices in ways heretofore unappreciated—arguing for a holy site specificity in early modern art.
My study enhances understanding of the many ways the Early Christian Revival manifested itself, particularly in the early seventeenth century. I offer compelling evidence that the renewed focus on the holy sites in Rome drove artists to create works that allowed contemporaries, whether devout residents of the sacred capital or pilgrims, to imagine or reenact scenes from the church’s early history. The case studies presented in this dissertation have demonstrated ways in which sacred painting connected seventeenth-century viewers to Rome’s early Christian foundations. Paintings “of the histories of the mysteries of our Redemption,” these altarpieces brought to life those mysteries on the same sacred soil the saints themselves once walked. My case studies demonstrate a remarkable interdependence between image and relic that was particular to the sacred topography of Rome, the heart of Christendom since Early Christian times, as embodied by St Peter’s location, built over the first pope’s tomb. Site-specific altarpieces functioned as essential and active instruments in supporting the agenda of the post-Tridentine Church hierarchy to reaffirm the unbroken descent of church authority from Peter to the present pope, the cult of the saints, and the efficacy of relics.

ETD_9277

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Jeffrey Leonard Fraiman

doi:10.7282/t3-3x5c-fe27

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.