Saints, Miracles, and Social Problems in Italian Renaissance Art

Reveals how images of saints' miracles shaped perceptions of social problems related to gender, sexuality, and honor in Renaissance Italy.

Diana Bullen Presciutti (Author)

9781009300834, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 4 May 2023

350 pages
26.1 x 18.4 x 2 cm, 0.98 kg

'One of the most engaging and enlightening books about the visual culture of the Renaissance that I've read in a long time. It is learned, readable and innovative. From start to finish the explication of the images is virtuosic.' Mary Laven, Chair of the Faculty of History, Professor of Early Modern History, University of Cambridge

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.

1. Introduction
2. The Vita icon reimagined: new (and old) saints, new (and old) miracles
3. Storytelling with saints: pictorial narrative and viewing experience
4. Girls in trouble: gendering possession and exorcism
5. Assault, amputation, absolution: visualizing the power of confession
6. Thinking with Julian: marital violence and elite masculinity
7. Bernardino the Peacemaker: visual hagiography and factional violence
8. Cannibal mothers: picturing madness and maternal infanticide
9. Making innocence visible (and audible) in the Basilico del Santo.

Subject Areas: Sociology: customs & traditions [JHBT], Sociology: family & relationships [JHBK], Gender studies, gender groups [JFSJ], Christian aspects of sexuality, gender & relationships [HRCV4], The Early Church [HRCC1], Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700 [HBLH], European history [HBJD], Renaissance art [ACND]