Votive Panels and Popular Piety in Early Modern Italy
Votive Panels and Popular Piety in Early Modern Italy
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USDIn 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
Reviews & endorsements
"Jacobs writes beautifully … through her nuanced investigation of early modern (and current) terminology, she has greatly expanded our understanding of the complex, dynamic relationships of word, image, and piety by means of these little known tavolette and their myriad contexts. The book is a notable contribution to scholarship on sanctity, miraculous images, and the attendant practices of votive donation."
Barbara Wisch, Renaissance Quarterly
Product details
October 2013Hardback
9781107023048
260 pages
260 × 185 × 18 mm
0.75kg
66 b/w illus. 8 colour illus.
Temporarily unavailable - available from TBC
Table of Contents
- 1. Dialogues of devotion: an introduction
- 2. Tavolette votive: form, function, context
- 3. Determining functional value: attestations of fact and faith
- 4. Narrative modes
- 5. Signs of faith, signs of superstition.
