Sacred Image, Civic Spectacle, and Ritual Space: Tivoli's Inchinata Procession and Icons in Urban Liturgical Theater in Late Medieval Italy (original) (raw)
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In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the nascent independent communes of central Italy expressed a new sense of civic identity through the staging of elaborate public liturgical processions that shaped and were shaped by local mythology and idiomatic urban landscapes. The Medieval “Inchinata” Procession at Tivoli: Ritual Construction of Civic Identity in the Age of the Commune examines Tivoli’s Inchinata procession that circled the city every year on the eve of the Assumption Feast. Reconstructing the route and performance of the medieval Inchinata through textual, topographical, and archaeological data, Rebekah Perry argues that the procession evolved as an adaptation of “official” liturgical rites introduced from its rival Rome to a native apotropaic ritual and local narratives embedded in its topography. Through the cosmographical choreography of the procession, the young municipality may have used this amalgamation to invoke the New Jerusalem as an appeal to divine authority for right to self-rule.
Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 2017
In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the nascent independent communes of central Italy expressed a new sense of civic identity through the staging of elaborate public liturgical processions that shaped and were shaped by local mythology and idiomatic urban landscapes. The Medieval Inchinata Procession at Tivoli: Ritual Construction of Civic Identity in the Age of the Commune examines Tivoli's Inchinata procession, which continues to circle the city every year on the eve of the Feast of the Assumption. Reconstructing the route and performance of the medieval Inchinata through textual, topographical, and archaeological data, Rebekah Perry argues that the procession evolved as an adaptation of “official” liturgical rites introduced by Tivoli's rival Rome to a native apotropaic ritual and local narratives embedded in the city's topography. Through the cosmographical choreography of the procession, the young municipality may have used this amalgamation to invoke the New J...
Tivoli’s “Inchinata” procession, featuring a monumental panel painting of Christ Enthroned, was instituted in the twelfth century to celebrate the Feast of the Assumption. Its participants used the city’s topography and landmarks to construct a ritual narrative that expressed the central messages of spiritual salvation and civic autonomy. In the later Middle Ages and early Renaissance, Tivoli’s institutions and built environment evolved, affecting the dialogue between the image-protagonist and its ritual setting in the procession, and adding new layers of meaning for audience and participants. Mendicant religious orders and devotional confraternities played an increasingly prominent role in the organization and performance of the procession. And they founded and patronized hospitals and charitable institutions in locations coinciding with its route. As these new institutions concentrated at the city gates, providing “stage sets” for ceremonies during the procession’s ritual pauses, the Inchinata took on the character of an allegorical “pilgrimage.” This allegory was expressed with increasingly elaborate dramatic and narrative elements that evoke a kind of mobile morality “play” in which contemporary models of Christianity were “performed” by the image. At the same time, the staging of the spectacle was codified by municipal law with increasing rigor and specificity to visually reinforce the social hierarchy and promote public order.
Ritual Form and Urban Space in Early Modern Rome
Late Medieval and Early Modern Ritual Studies in Italian Urban Culture, 2013
This paper considers the role of ritual forms in presaging, even constructing, early modern Rome’s urban development. Its overarching argument is that processional routes, arches, floats, decorations, and performances often formed the living tissue from which new art, architecture, and urbanism drew in its reinvention of Rome. These evanescent and ephemeral forms, through the familiarity of a calendar repetition, forged an identity with the urban spaces in which they took place, in the eyes of their viewers. Inexorably, ritual marked the city’s material fabric with ‘memorative’ spaces, imbued with the collective memories of their iterative enactment. Much of the change in ritual activity in early modern Rome was driven by its popes, as was the city’s urban development. This intertwining of ritual and urban forms in the hands of the papacy worked to remake Rome’s civic fabric in the image of the popes. Spaces reclaimed by reinvented ritual forms became then permanently reconfigured by an attendant architecture, art, and urbanism. Key ritual spaces were widened, regularised, paved, in concert with their ceremonial roles; their surrounding buildings drawn into a choreographed urban scenography by means of new façades and fountains; while the memory of ritual decoration was latent within the forms of their sculptural ornament. Early modern Rome’s urban developments thus embodied in perpetuity the ritual histories out of which they grew. Finally, the paper argues for the potency of visual cultures, both ritual and artistic, in reinventing the identities of urban space.
Late Medieval and Early Modern Ritual: Studies in Italian Urban Culture ed. by Samuel Cohn et al
Parergon, 2014
Carlo taviani* Sed in iure iurando non qui metus sed quae vis sit, debet intellegi; est enim iusiurandum affirmatio religiosa (Cicero, De officiis, iii. 29. 10). 1 Pax igitur, que hominis ad hominem est, id est que inter homines habetur et colitur, et ipsa quoque in tres species propagatur. Una enim pax Egipti, alia Babilonie, tertia Ierusalem. Pax Egipti est malorum in unam pravitatem conspiratio (Rufinus of Sorrento, De bono pacis, Incipit liber ii). 2 * An abridged version of this article was presented at the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference, held on 28 May 2009 in Geneva. I am deeply thankful to Marc Schachter for the revision of the English text.
National imagery developed as a secular substitute for religion, and in modern society there has been a "transfer" of sacredness from religion to politics. This paper focuses on Italy, where, despite the legal separation of Church and State, the "sacral" national apparatus still owes a considerable debt to religion. After a short exposition of some of the main theories on civil religion in Italy, it will analyze a corpus of Italian novels set during the Risorgimento, a period that functions in Italian culture as an atypical founding myth. It will show in particular how civil and religious symbols and rituals intersect in the literary representation of processions. Indeed, the procession is a recurring motif in Italian narrative, and presents peculiar aesthetic features. The analysis of this literary motif will take advantage of socio-anthropological theories and will trace a distinction between ordered and disordered, or enthusiastic, processions. Key words: civil religion; procession; literature; order/disorder; nation; symbols; Italy; Catholicism.
Sacred Imagery, Confraternities and Urban Space in Medieval Naples
Confraternities in Southern Italy: Art, Politics and Religion, edited by David D'Andrea and Salvatore Marino, Toronto, Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies (Eassys and Studies, 52), 2022, pp. 43-102, 2022
In recent years, scholarly research has shown an increasing interest in the confraternal imagery, although studies have mainly concentrated on single case-studies. More comprehensive overviews were attempted for limited areas, such as Central and Northern Italy, during specific periods of time. Medieval Naples, like Southern Italy in general, has received no attention, although historical studies during the last few decades have offered a clearer picture of confraternal movements and other forms of lay associations that were active in the city since the early Middle Ages. Far from filling the gap, this article adopts an art-historical methodology to explore the visual culture, rituality and social composition of confraternities and other lay associations in medieval Naples. The survey focuses on three types of sacred images. Firstly, it discusses the monumental wooden Crucifixes that were on display in the main churches of the city. An essential feature in the visual layout of the church, the crucifixes also benefited from donations of lands and properties from the laypeople, a practice originally reserved in Naples to images of private devotion. Utilizing textual and material evidence, the article examines their relation with the most common kind of secular associations in the churches of Naples during the medieval and early modern periods: the “staurite”, from the Greek word for cross (“stauròs”). They were made of laymen who lived in the surroundings of the church and were devoted to charitable activities for the sick and poor of the district. Secondly, it examines sacred imagery in late medieval confraternities and other forms of lay religious associations by analysing three case-studies: the Disciplina della Croce, one of the oldest and longest living confraternities in Naples, originally formed by flagellants; the Annunziata, founded by a consortium of laymen and women in the fourteenth century as a church and hospital; two fifteenth century confraternities linked to the Dominican convents of S. Domenico Maggiore and S. Pietro Martire, whose members came from the aristocracy and the middle class respectively. Lastly, it presents two ancient images that originally belonged to local confraternities but gained a larger reputation after they proved miraculous in the sixteenth century: a panel with St. Antony of Padua in S. Lorenzo Maggiore, and the icon of the Madonna Bruna in S. Maria del Carmine. The narrative will ideally follow a historic itinerary in the medieval city: from the earlier places of worship in the old Greek and Roman centre, to the late medieval expansion towards the Market Square and the grand church of the Carmelites.
The Rituals of Renaissance: Liturgy and Mythic History in The Marvels of Rome
Medieval Encounters, 2011
The Mirabilia urbis romae offers us insight into the symbolic meaning of the streetscape of Rome from the perspective of a canon of St. Peter's. It should be read alongside the contemporary Roman Ordo with which it was certainly associated in the twelfth century. When read in that context, the Mirabilia serves as a kind of direct and indirect commentary on the papal liturgy. The papal liturgies at Easter and Christmas moved through an environment that was "re-written" by the Mirabilia as a narrative of Christian Roman renewal and of triumph throughout the Mediterranean world. The Mirabilia celebrates both Roman renewal and hegemony in the eastern Mediterranean, giving heightened significance to the liturgical life of the twelfth-century papacy. The papal liturgy, at these most triumphant processional moments, celebrated that historic and, ultimately, eschatological triumph.