1 Broken Bodies and Unruly Images: Representations Of
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BROKEN BODIES AND UNRULY IMAGES: REPRESENTATIONS OF MARTYRDOM IN COUNTER- REFORMATION ROME DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy University College London (UCL) **** VOLUME I - TEXT **** Conor Daniel Kissane March 2019 1 I, Conor Kissane confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr. Maria Loh, along with Dr. Peter Cherry, Dr. Rose Marie San Juan and Dr. Briony Fer for teaching me how to look and for setting me on the path towards some of art history’s least regarded but most fascinating corners. I would also like to thank Barbara Pycinska-Taylor, Tom Snow, Christopher Kissane, Eoin Rafferty, Thalia Allington-Wood, Caroline Cullen and Afonso Ramos for many stimulating discussions and for sharing with me the highs and lows of being a PhD student. I also owe a debt of gratitude to my parents for their unstinting support. Finally I would like to thank University College London for awarding me a Graduate Research Scholarship and so making my research possible. 2 ABSTRACT This project is concerned with martyrdom and its representation in the unique cultural climate of post-Tridentine Rome. The devotional virtues of violent martyrological imagery came to be extolled by many of the most important thinkers in the Roman church in the wake of the Tridentine Council, and depictions of martyred saints proliferated all over the city during the closing decades of the 16th century. Visceral displays of maimed holy bodies were theorised as effective spurs to devotion in ideologically motivated programmes of ecclesiastical decoration, shoring up and even inventing collective memories of persecution for contemporary audiences still preoccupied with the spectre of confessional schism. In this milieu, artists such as Nicolò Circignani would make their entire careers on their ability to effectively image the brutalised body. But the adoption of the unruly medium of representational violence was also problematic, proving to be an uneasily fluid semiotic code that might lead its viewers towards undesirable acts of beholding. As a discursive site that rejected univocal interpretations, the represented martyred body can be seen to encompass many of the contradictions inherent to the reforming Church's promotion of imagery during the Counter- Reformation. Recognising that the concept of martyrdom is discursively flexible, I argue that only a fundamentally interdisciplinary approach to its study can hope to recover something of its complexity as a practice of cultural formation. Accordingly, this thesis proposes a series of inter-medial encounters centred on the martyrological fresco cycle produced by Circignani for the church of Santo Stefano Rotondo in 1582. In exploring both the productive possibilities of Circignani’s violent images and the ways in which these bodies were simultaneously reluctant to speak with the voices they had been assigned, new light will be shed on the complexity of the early-modern visual encounter between beholder and image. 3 IMPACT STATEMENT The interdisciplinary scope of this thesis situates martyrological representation at the centre of a range of contemporary practices of cultural formation in a way that has not been attempted before in any systematic sense. By seeking to draw out the fundamentally intermedial implications of Circignani’s work both from a compositional and hermeneutic perspective, I have attempted to show that the making of visual art was inextricable from the making of other kinds of contemporary devotional stimuli. This insight paves the way for much further research into the ways in which visuality, aurality and textuality interacted during the Counter-Reformation, along with further considerations of the opportunities and challenges that came with exploiting the unique characteristics of each kind of sensory response. The third chapter’s attempt to situate these frescoes on a musical footing in particular proffers a methodological approach that has implications for the way in which the study of art history can be effectively expanded into interdisciplinary and collaborative avenues that exploit the distinctive scholarly skill-sets of other academic disciplines. Moving from methodological considerations to subject matter, the engagement of this thesis with a wide range of primary material that has to date not received extensive study in English language scholarship points the way towards contributions to the field that could be of much benefit to future students of this period. I have undertaken extensive translations of the treatises of Giovanni Andrea Gilio and Alfonso Paleotti in particular, only a small portion of which could be included or analysed in this thesis. Building upon this with an annotated translation of this latter work in particular would make this fascinating primary document available to a much wider audience, and this work would be eminently feasible on the back of the work I have already done in this context. 4 In addition, a scholarly study of the ways in which relic, violence and representation coalesce in Paleotti’s acheiropoetic admixture would have the potential to shed much more light on the relationship between fragmented bodies, devotion and representation during this period. More generally, the study of violence both historical and contemporary is a field of emerging relevance; encouraging critical interrogation of the political ramifications of attempts to exploit representational violence for ideological ends has obvious valence in contexts that extend far beyond the specific historical milieu examined in this thesis. Reaching back to these early-modern negotiations of the complex entanglings of violence, identity and cultural formation has much to tell us about how these same issues have become amongst the most defining features of our own era. By contributing to the study of a period that has historically received unduly short shrift in the scholarship because of its awkward position between the period styles of Mannerism and the Baroque, this thesis also might be seen as a starting point upon which future studies can build. Santo Stefano was certainly not the only martyrological programme undertaken during late sixteenth- century Rome; comprehensive interdisciplinary studies of the fresco cycles painted at San Vitale and Santi Nereo ed Achilleo in the same period (which could not be treated in this thesis) would have the potential to greatly enrich our understanding of the place of the visual arts in one of the most febrile periods of Western history. 5 TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 2 ABSTRACT 3 IMPACT STATEMENT 4 LIST OF IMAGES. 8 INTRODUCTION. SANTO STEFANO ROTONDO AND THE PLURAL BODY OF MARTYRDOM 23 CHAPTER 1. MARTYRDOM, RELIC PROXIES AND INVENTING THE NEW JERUSALEM: MEDIATIONS BETWEEN BODY AND CITY IN POST-TRIDENTINE ROME 54 Intro. Angelo Grillo’s Rome: A City of Risen Bones 55 I. Raising Obelisks, Transforming Bodies 62 II. Blood, the Body and Generating New Urban Geographies 78 III. From Relic to Representation and Back 100 CHAPTER 2. ‘UNA COSA NOVA E BELLA’: TOWARDS AN AESTHETICS OF MARTYRDOM IN THE ROMAN COUNTER-REFORMATION 121 Intro. Martyring Marius: Between Pain and Beauty in the Counter-Reformation 122 I. Negotiating the Beauty of the Broken Body with Giovanni Andrea Gilio 130 II. Vaghezza, Disfigurement and Scopic Pleasure at Santo Stefano Rotondo 143 III. Gabriele Paleotti, Affective Piety and Representational Violence 156 IV. Atrocious Blood Lust, Meraviglia and the Spectacular Logic Of Martyrdom 178 CHAPTER 3. LISTENING TO THE POLYPHONIC BODY: MUSIC, MARTYRDOM AND THE VISUAL ARTS. 189 Intro. Sounding in the Silences: Listening to Images of Martyrdom 190 I. The Reform of Sacred Music in Counter-Reformation Rome 198 II. Towards a Musical and Theological Harmony 215 III. Between Repetition and Variety: Martyrdom, Music and Sacred Time 238 6 CHAPTER 4. INSCRIBING A ‘TERRIBLE ALPHABET’: IMAGE-TEXTS, THE UNGESTALT AND THE SEMIOTICS OF COUNTER-REFORMATION SANCTITY 251 Intro. The Sack of Roermond and the Fragmented Holy Body 252 I. Martyrdom, Violence and the Formless Horror of the Ungestalt 258 II The Amorphous Body of Christ in Alfonso Paleotti’s Explication 270 III. Memorable Dismemberment: Strategies of Corporeal Reconstruction 284 IV. Images, Texts and Uncertain Signs 305 CONCLUSION. MARTYROLOGICAL COUNTER-MEMORIES AND THE MARTYRS OF FANO 316 APPENDIX 1: ORIGINAL ITALIAN PASSAGES 334 BIBLIOGRAPHY 347 IMAGES 411 7 LIST OF IMAGES *Note: The numbers used to refer to Circignani’s frescoes at Santo Stefano follow a clockwise progression of the fresco cycle from 1-30, beginning with The Crucified Christ, and does not include the two later frescoes that replaced the now lost Martyrdom of Saint Polycarp. For the convenience of the reader the frescoes are included sequentially as figures 1-30. Frescoes 9 and 11 are currently under restoration, and have been substituted here with the corresponding engravings from G.B. Cavalieri’s Ecclesiae Militantis Triumphi. Subsequent references to the images in the text will refer back to these figures, except in the case of details. All photographs from Santo Stefano are my own. Figure 1: N. Circignani and M. da Siena, The Crucified Christ Surrounded by Triumphant Saints and the Holy Innocents, fresco 1, Santo Stefano Rotondo, 1581-2. Figure 2: N. Circignani and M. da Siena, The Martyrdom of Saint Stephen, fresco 2, 1581-2. Figure 3: N. Circignani and M. da Siena, The Martyrdom of Saint Peter, Santo Stefano Rotondo, fresco 3, 1581-2. Figure 4: N. Circignani and M. da Siena, The Martyrdom of Saint Vitalis, Santo Stefano Rotondo, fresco 4, 1581-2. Figure 5: N. Circignani and M. da Siena, Christians Dressed in Animal Furs and Attacked by Dogs in Nero’s Circus, fresco 5, Santo Stefano Rotondo, 1581-2. Figure 6: N. Circignani and M. da Siena, The Martyrdom of Saint John the Evangelist, Santo Stefano Rotondo, fresco 6, 1581-2.