Re-visioning St. Sebastian: Nicoletto da Modena’s Reworked Engravings of St. Sebastian (original) (raw)
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The Double Life of Saint Sebastian in Renaissance Art
The body in early modem Italy, 2010
The body in early modern Italy / edited by Julia L. Hairston and Walter 1. Human body in literature. 2. Human body (Philosophy). 3. Italian literature-History and criticism. 4. Italian literature-To 1400-History and criticism. 5. Italian literature-i5th century-History and criticism 6. Italian li,er.ture-t6,h century-History and criticism. 7. Human figure m art. 8. Art, Renaissanc^-Itaiy. I. Hairston. Julia L. II. Stephens, Walter Acatalog record for, hi, b"=k is available from the British Library. Stephens. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.
Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 2010
entered the thematic repertoire of post-Byzantine mural painting from the West in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Two main iconographic types are encountered in post-Byzantine wall-paintings, both of them popular in Western art: The Ordeal of the Arrows and St Sebastian after the Martyrdom. The infl uences of Italian models on the iconography are obvious. Nonetheless, the loans from Western iconography and Renaissance art concern a limited number of scenes and subjects, because the post-Byzantine painters tried to renew painting within the framework of Orthodox tradition and its doctrinal content. St Sebastian 1 is a new subject of Western provenance that entered the thematic repertoire of post-Byzantine mural painting in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The fi rst images of him are identifi ed in Early Christian times. 2 The iconography 3 was enriched in the Middle Ages, as the ubiquitous fear of cholera led to a proliferation of votive offerings and icons of the healer-martyr. He enjoyed wide popularity during the Renaissance and Baroque periods, being depicted by the most famous painters this time, when an entire iconographic cycle was elaborated around Sebastian's life and activity. 4 1 Symeon Metaphrastes, Opera omnia, MPG 116, 794-816; Nikodemos, Συναξαριστής των δώδεκα μηνών του ενιαυτού, I (Athens 1868) 317. 2 J. S. Northcote and W. R. Brownlow, Roma sotterranea: Die römischen Katakomben (Freiburg 1879) 167 ff.); F. W. Deichmann, Ravenna, Haupstadt des spätnantiken Abendlandes, III: Frühchristliche Bauten und Mosaiken von Ravenna (Wiesbaden 1958) 98 ff.; Ravenna, i mosaici, i monumenti e l'ambiente (Ravenna n.d.) 72-3; E. Mâle and W. F. Volbach, Mosaïques chrétiennes primitives du IVe au VIIe siècle. Rome -Naples -Milan -Ravenne (Paris 1943) pl. XIII etc. 3 V. Kraehling, Saint Sébastien dans l'art (Paris 1938) 9 ff.; G. Nicodemi, 'L'iconografi a di San Sebastiano', Emporium 63 (1926), 163 ff.; L. Réau, Iconographie de l'art chrétien, III (Paris 1959), 1192 ff.; S. Barker, 'The making of a plague saint. Saint Sebastian's imagery and cult before the Counter-Reformation', in F. Mormando and T. Worcester (eds), Piety and Plague (Kirksville, MO 2007). 4 M. Levi d'Ancona, 'Il S. Sebastiano di Vienna del Mantegna', Commentari 28 (1977) 73 ff.; E. Lunghi, Il 'Martirio di San Sebastiano' di Pietro Perugino a Panicale (Perugia 2005); H. Hauvette, Le Sodoma (Paris 1911)
Prayer and Presence in a Small Italian Devotional Panel of Saint Sebastian (ca. 1500)
Source: Notes in the History of Art, 2019
At first glance, a small panel attributed to the Ferrarese artist Gian Francesco de Maineri in the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art presents the standard view of Saint Sebastian, protector against the plague. This paper points to nuanced aspects, including the setting at an altar, and the two figures of Sts Sebastian and Roch standing on an altar behind the larger figure of Sebastian.
St Roch and the Angel in Renaissance Art (2020)
Studies in Iconography 41 (2020), pp. 165-211, 2020
This article investigates the origins, significance and varied inflections of the figure of an angel in Renaissance representations of St Roch. Although presumed to derive from the saint’s biography—specifically, to depict his cure from bubonic plague by an angel—the exact relationship between text and image is more complex than one of straightforward narrative illustration. Textual priority cannot be assumed, as representations of the new saint preceded by nearly two decades the earliest extant biographies. Moreover, these early vite make no mention of angelic involvement in Roch’s healing. Rocketing to success as efficacious plague protector in the late-fifteenth century, Roch has been recently unmasked as a pious fiction. By interrogating the multiple reworkings of the angel—shown blessing, announcing or actively curing with the tools of contemporary medicine—the essay elucidates the processes of saint formation and the key role of visual imagery in shaping worshippers’ conception of the saint and the operation of his protective powers. The essay argues for the origins of the theme in Venetian art, and identifies Andrea da Murano's St Vincent Ferrer altarpiece (c. 1477-79; Accademia, Venice) as perhaps the earliest extant version. Other works discussed include Bartolomeo Vivarini's triptych for S. Eufemia (1480), a watercolour probably by notary, lawyer and print collector Jacopo Rubieri, and altarpieces by Titian and Pordenone. Analysis of the extant lives of the saint suggests that the origins of the theme of Roch and the angel are likely visual rather than textual. Subsequent sections investigate modifications to the theme in Northern Renaissance art, where identification of the angel as Raphael, the “angelic doctor,” encouraged artists to represent him not simply blessing or pointing to the bubo, but actively ministering to the diseased saint, applying a healing salve or even taking up the surgical instruments of his earthly counterparts to lance Roch’s bubo. The final section of the essay highlights the continuing mutability of depictions of saint and angel in sixteenth century Italian art, where the grounded heavenly attendant is replaced by the angel aloft. Works analyzed include paintings by Lombard artists such as Vicenzo Civerchio and Titian's print of c. 1517 for the Scuola di San Rocco.
Early Florentine Engravings and the Devotional Print: Origins and Transformations, c. 1460-85
2012
This thesis aims to reframe the way art historians think about early Florentine engravings from around 1460 to 1485, especially the devotional print. Although some scholars have considered engravings within cultural histories of Florence, on the whole the prints havebeen viewed through the lens of connoisseurship. Most of this scholarship has focused on secular and semi-religious prints; even less attention has been granted to those with religious subjects. This dissertation readdresses these engravings by examining them from severalhistorical perspectives: workshop organisation, artistic practice, trade, the compiling of manuscripts and devotional practices. As a result, it highlights the inventiveness of the early Florentine engravers and shows how they transformed the way people could view images, particularly in the veneration of saints, meditation on Christ and the Virgin and contemplationof God
The Transference of Apollonian Iconography to Images of Saint Sebastian in Italian Renaissance Art
The long observed, yet little researched parallels between the pagan archer god Apollo and Saint Sebastian at once merit consideration because this close connection was not made between Apollo and other male martyrs, such as Christopher or Cosmas and Damian, who had also been tortured by arrows and were similarly invoked against the plague. However, if this transference from Apollo to Sebastian did in fact occur, it did so while also reversing, or ‘Christianising,’ the former’s relationship to the plague: whereas Apollo inflicted the disease through pestilential arrows, Sebastian protected believers against it. Such a reversal may evince what Erwin Panofsky considered the re-interpretation of classical figures, wherein their forms were either invested with a new symbolical content, or they were made subservient to specifically Christian ideas. As a rule, Panofsky posited, such re-interpretations were facilitated or even suggested by a certain iconographical affinity; Apollo, owing to his association with pestilence and arrows, would have thus formed the natural counterpart to Sebastian. While this postulation has yet to reach any semblance of consensus among art historians, I intend to demonstrate that early connections between the two figures did indeed exist, first in literary form and subsequently in the visual arts. Accordingly, Sebastian’s depiction in early Renaissance art as a distinctly Apollo-like youth represented not the random or otherwise thoughtless appropriation of antique forms, but rather the visual expression of factors that had long prompted associations between the two. In the last decades of Quattrocento, however, the increasing emphasis on the failure of the arrows to carry out his martyrdom gradually obfuscated such pagan connections, and the focus of his representation in art consequently shifted to his survival by divine power. Yet it is interesting to note that by the early decades of the sixteenth century, classical forms- often those explicitly appropriated from depictions of Apollo- were again reintegrated into Sebastian’s iconography, resulting in images that were distinctly pagan in form, though devotional in function.