Art and Miracle in Renaissance Tuscany

Description

In this book, Robert Maniura explores the role and importance of the miraculous image in the art and devotional practices of Renaissance Italy. Using the records of Giuliano Guizzelmi, a Tuscan lawyer, he focuses on his stories of miracles of local shrines, including Santa Maria delle Carceri, a painting of the Virgin Mary on a wall of the town prison, and the relic of her belt in the Prato Cathedral. Guizzelmi's stories build a powerful picture of the visual culture of the period, involving images that were kissed, worn and applied to sick bodies in rituals of healing. They also place his devotional activity in the context of his everyday life. Moreover, the paintings of Guizzelmi's burial chapel also engage with contemporary pictorial conventions and show how his concerns can inform our understanding of contemporary art, notably the works of his late fifteenth-century contemporaries, Ghirlandaio, Perugino and Filippino Lippi.

Robert Maniura is Reader in the History of Art at Birkeck College, University of London. He has been a Fellow at Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies and has held a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship and a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship. He is the author of Pilgrimage to Images in the Fifteenth Century: The Origins of the Cult of Our Lady of Czestochowa (2004) and the co-editor of Presence: The Inherence of the Prototype within Images and Other Objects (2006).

'This book is a treasure-trove of insights into devotional behaviors of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It is well-researched and makes visible a range of rich archives, from civic administrations to personal documents. The author weaves historiographical discourse with primary sources, canonical artworks, and lesser-known objects to render a masterful representation of devotion in Renaissance Tuscany. Each example is part of a narrative that leads the reader to a fuller understanding of the context in which Guizzelmi lived ... this captivating and wonderfully rich volume is a valuable resource for anyone invested in late medieval and early modern devotion.' Sarah Reiff Conell, Contemporaneity 'Maniura brings an exceptionally incisive mind to the question of how miraculous images functioned ... For Maniura, art and miracle together created 'apparatuses of consolation' (190). In this perception he brings a shrewd empathy to the people whose stories he relates.' Mary Laven, European History Quarterly 'Art and Miracle in Renaissance Tuscany is a tightly focused study, and the sharpness of its vision allows the narrative it constructs to resonate within the field of early modern art history more broadly ... This book is expertly crafted: the story moves, the prose flows, and the reasoning is clearly articulated ... This book employs an exciting model of scholarship that will undoubtedly have a lasting impact in the field.' Christopher J. Nygren, Renaissance Quarterly