In this book, Diana Bullen Presciutti explores how images of miracles performed by mendicant saints-reviving dead children, redeeming the unjustly convicted, mending broken marriages, quelling factional violence, exorcising the demonically possessed-actively shaped Renaissance Italians' perceptions of pressing social problems related to gender, sexuality, and honor. She argues that depictions of these miracles by artists-both famous (Donatello, Titian) and anonymous-played a critical role in defining and conceptualizing threats to family honor and social stability. Drawing from art history, history, religious studies, gender studies, and sociology, Presciutti's interdisciplinary study reveals how miracle scenes-whether painted, sculpted, or printed-operated as active agents of 'lived religion' and social negotiation in the spaces of the Renaissance Italian city.

"In this book, Diana Bullen Presciutti explores how images of miracles performed by mendicant saints-reviving dead children, redeeming the unjustly convicted, mending broken marriages, quelling factional violence, exorcising the demonically possessed-actively shaped Renaissance Italians' perceptions of pressing social problems related to gender, sexuality, and honor. She argues that depictions of these miracles by artists-both famous (Donatello, Titian) and anonymous-played a critical role in defining and conceptualizing threats to family honor and social stability. They also presented the mendicant saint as both potent thaumaturge and efficacious 'social worker'. Drawing from art history, history, religious studies, gender studies, and sociology, Presciutti's interdisciplinary study reveals how miracle scenes-whether painted, sculpted, or printed-operated as active agents of 'lived religion' and social negotiation in the spaces of the Renaissance Italian city"--

In recent years the study of miraculous images has experienced a substantial re-evaluation of their importance as powerful agents of divine intercession and assistance in Renaissance society. Nonetheless, aspects related to the genesis, devotional use and preferences of these images remain only broadly outlined and geographically constrained. In parallel with the great veneration for miracle-performing Marian and Christological imagery, other saintly figures became the objects of widespread devotion on account of their protective and curative powers, and the images of these saints became cult objects themselves.0This volume fills a void in current art historical research and examines how miraculous images and the imagery of healing saints were crucial to the creation of individual, corporate and collective identities in Florence, Siena, Rome, Naples and other lesser researched Italian centres. The essays in this collection address aspects related to the development of hagiographies, iconographies, cult of relics, and devotion of healing saints. Moreover, it considers imagery related to miraculous events also in terms of material culture in the private and public domains. The images will therefore be studied both as aesthetic objects and as cult objects, in order to interrogate the often tense relationship between mechanical?vision? and cultural?visuality?.0While dealing with specific curative, protective, and miraculous episodes related to the exposition of sacred images, this book unravels questions of patronage, authorship, agency, and tradition

The first to consider the visual culture of foundling hospitals in Renaissance Italy, this book focuses on four institutions in central Italy that possess significant surviving visual and archival material. This study draws on a range of fields and examines a wide variety of visual forms -including book illumination, altarpieces, fresco cycles, institutional insignia, processional standards, prints, and reliquaries - to elucidate the pivotal role played by visual culture in framing and promoting the charitable succor of foundlings.

"Detecting numerous occasions when Joseph is invoked for protection from plague, foreign invasion, and threat to the Church, the author emphasizes the contemporary currency - in both theology and art - of the Maria-Ecclesia typology and concomitant conceptualization of St. Joseph as heroic protector of Mary and the Church. Here challenged are the long-held view of the saint's unimportance prior to the Counter Reformation and old assumption that pre-Tridentine images were often intended to demean him."--BOOK JACKET.

Space, Place, and Motion offers the first sustained comparative examination of the relationship between confraternal life and the spaces of the late medieval and early modern city.

Verrocchio worked in an extraordinarily wide array of media and used unusual practices of making to express ideas.