Peter Paul Rubens’s Investigation of the Origins of Idolatry and Iconoclasm in the Jesuit Church of Antwerp, IKON 11, 2018 (original) (raw)
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https://www.routledge.com/Peter-Paul-Rubens-and-the-Counter-Reformation-Crisis-of-the-Beati-moderni/Noyes/p/book/9781472484796 Publisher description: "The Crisis of the Beati Moderni takes up the question of the issues involved in the formation of recent saints—or Beati moderni (modern Blesseds) as they were called—by the Jesuits and Oratorians in the new environment of increased strictures and censorship that developed after the Council of Trent with respect to legal canonization procedures and cultic devotion to the saints. Ruth Noyes focuses particularly on how the new regulations pertained to the creation of emerging cults of those not yet canonized, the so-called Beati moderni, such as Jesuit founders Francis Xavier and Ignatius Loyola, and Filippo Neri, founder of the Oratorians. Centrally involved in the book is the question of the fate and meaning of the two altarpiece paintings commissioned by the Oratorians from Peter Paul Rubens. The Congregation rejected his first altarpiece because it too specifically identified Filippo Neri as a cult figure to be venerated (before his actual canonization) and thus was caught up in the politics of cult formation and the papacy's desire to control such precanonization cults. The book demonstrates that Rubens' second altarpiece, although less overtly depicting Neri as a saint, was if anything more radical in the claims it made for him. Peter Paul Rubens and the Crisis of the Beati Moderni offers the first comparative study of Jesuit and Oratorian images of their respective would-be saints, and the controversy they ignited across Church hierar chies. It is also the first work to examine provocative Philippine imagery and demonstrate how its bold promotion specifically triggered the first wave of curial censure in 1602."
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 2010
(eds), The Idol in the Age of Art-Objects, Devotions and the Early Modern World This dense work, which collects essays from scholars in widely ranging fields, oversteps conventional boundaries, extending past the 16th century and reaching out further than Europe-to which art history is sometimes confined-, opening onto issues of cross-cultural encounters and conflict.
This revisionist account of Peter Paul Rubens' Chiesa Nuova altarpiece commission (1606-08) demonstrates that his first refused altarpiece featured a provocative exegetical portrait of Filippo Neri as a re-embodiment of St. Gregory's doctrine of spiritual martyrdom. This composite Neri/Gregory figure, key to Version 1's composition and meaning, was also its hermeneutical breaking point, the condition of its own undoing. Rubens would perform the semiotic dissection of his first painting, resulting in his second altarpiece. Version 2, at once “in opposition and correlation” to Version 1, figured Neri without visibly figuring him, by subsuming his presence into the initiated beholder's bodily multi-sensorial experience of the altarpiece. Paradoxically, not only was Rubens' artistic presence at the high altar of the Chiesa Nuova, by means of a seemingly contradictory figural [con]version, maximized only after its apparent annihilation, but Neri's figural presence at the high altar of his own church was rendered more potent only after its apparent obliteration.