With a View to a Saint: Bernardino of Siena’s Mausoleum at L’Aquila (original) (raw)

Abstract

Bernardino of Siena, itinerant preacher and the Franciscan Observants’ first canonized friar, was one of the major saints in Quattrocento Italy. His funerary monument, an ambitious freestanding structure dating from 1505, however, is little-known. By merging the features of medieval reliquaries with Roman and Florentine sepulchral tradition, the local sculptor Silvestro Aquilano innovatively formed a monumental shrine in an ‘all’antica’-style. Scrutinizing the monument’s functional context sheds new light on the fundamental changes that mark the cult of ‘novel’ Quattrocento saints. Due to an increasing tendency towards visual devotion, Bernardino’s sepulcher was designed to enable an effective ‘closeness’ to the saintly remains that would guarantee the transmission of divine ‘virtus’. The saint’s undecayed body, one of the first not to be fragmented, was displayed by means of sophisticated mechanisms. Analyzing these practices will reveal the mausoleum’s civic and territorial significance as well as its importance as a Franciscan place of pilgrimage.

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