Locating the Body in Medieval Reval

Peer reviewe

Suono e Spettacolo. Athanasius Kircher, un percorso nelle Immagini sonore.

The Society of Jesus made great propaganda efforts throughout the seventeenth century and chose the images and the play as a privileged means to communicate and persuade. Athanasius Kircher, a key figure of the seventeenth century, he decided to dominate the wild nature of sound through Phonurgia Nova, which includes a gallery of powerful symbolic images for Baroque aesthetics. The essay, through the grant of the images from the Library of the Department of Mathematics "Guido Castelnuovo" Sapienza University of Rome, aims to understand, through the pictures offered by Kircher, the sound phenomenon and the spectacle that this produces. In Phonurgia Nova a process of dramatization sound effects takes place, often through machines and "visions" applied to the theatrical reality, as experimental and astonishing environment beloved in baroque. Kircher illustrates the sound through explanatory figures, so to dominate the sound through the eyes. Sound is seen, admired and represented: its spectacle not only takes place through the implementation of sound machines or the "wonders" applied to the theater, but even through images, creating create a sense of wonder in in the erudite person of the seventeenth century

The Lives and Afterlives of Shrine Madonnas

This article explores uncertain histories of three fourteenth-century Shrine Madonna statues. It focuses particularly on the unfixedness of these statues' identities, which, already socially determined, loosen over time and become semiotically exposed. All three started out as cult statues, and all subsequently became suspect, inspiring clerical distrust. One Shrine Madonna transformed from a monastic thaumaturgical image into a mutilated puppet in the theater of politico-religious struggle, and then from a forgotten curiosity into an agent of cultural authority. Another Shrine Madonna changed identity through geographical and denominational shifts: it began as an indulgenced performance object, showered with annual gifts, and became a symbol of a Catholic community, its ideology and its values, finally developing into a visually ambiguous memory. The third Shrine Madonna stayed roughly in the same place for centuries, but transformed outwardly, masked and unmasked, glued shut and dressed, undressed and undone, while retaining its perceived agency with hardly any change—until, that is, its recent removal from the church.

"Rocks of Jerusalem: Bringing the Holy Land Home”

Our focus is a remarkable object – or, rather, a collection of objects, in turn housed within another object, which bears on it representations of yet other things: a reliquary box, once held in the treasury of the Sancta Sanctorum in the Lateran Palace, containing bits of stone, wood, and cloth, labeled with locations from the “Holy Land”. The box, now in the Museo Sacro in the Vatican, has been credited to sixth-century Syria or Palestine. Its sliding lid (obverse) bears a painting of the cross intersected by what appear to be a lance and a reed with a sponge, forming a schematic Christogram, inscribed within a mandorla and placed on the Golgotha hill; Christ’s initials are inscribed in the upper corners, and alpha and omega are painted on either side of the hillock. On the reverse side, which faces the relics enshrined in the box, is a series of images narrating scenes from the life of Christ: the Nativity, baptism, crucifixion, Holy Women at the Tomb, and ascension. These five scenes portray an encapsulation of Christ’s earthly experience with great economy. Altogether, the contents of the box, the monogram, and the paintings function as a threefold conjuring of Christ: in image, name, and material remains made sacred by contact with Christ. Building on Brown’s observations, we consider this box and its contents through the lenses of thing theory and theories of memory. We pay particular attention to the tensions between the individual objects and the ways their arrangement and proximity create a collective; their invocation of distant locales; and their agentic potential