Votive Panels and Popular Piety in Early Modern Italy

In the late fifteenth century, votive panel paintings, or tavolette votive, began to accumulate around reliquary shrines and miracle-working images throughout Italy. Although often dismissed as popular art of little aesthetic consequence, more than 1,500 panels from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are extant, a testimony to their ubiquity and importance in religious practice. Humble in both their materiality and style, they represent donors in prayer and supplicants petitioning a saint at a dramatic moment of crisis. In this book, Fredrika H. Jacobs traces the origins and development of the use of votive panels in this period. She examines the form, context and functional value of votive panels, and considers how they created meaning for the person who dedicated them as well as how they accrued meaning in relationship to other images and objects within a sacred space activated by practices of cultic culture.

• The images that are the focus of this book, votive panel pictures, have not been discussed by English speaking scholars
• Interdisciplinary study that brings together objects most often talked about by anthropologists and folklorists (the 'low') with works appreciated for their art historical value (the 'high')
• Considers the topical issue of idolatry from the perspective of popular image use, something that has not yet been done in a book-length study