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The Iconic (Re)Turn: Caravaggio’s The Crucifixion of St. Peter between Image, Relic and Martyrdom in Early Modern Italy Simen K. Nielsen Master’s Thesis in the History of Art Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art, and Ideas Supervisor: Associate Professor Per Sigurd Tveitevåg Styve UNIVERSITY OF OSLO June 2017 II The Iconic (Re)Turn: Caravaggio’s The Crucifixion of St. Peter between Image, Relic and Martyrdom in Early Modern Italy III © Simen K. Nielsen 2017 The Iconic (Re)Turn: Caravaggio’s The Crucifixion of St. Peter between Image, Relic and Martyrdom in Early Modern Italy Simen K. Nielsen http://www.duo.uio.no/ Trykk: Reprosentralen, Universitetet i Oslo IV Abstract In September 1601 Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610) signed the contract to produce two paintings for the Cerasi Chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome. Modern art historiography contains millions of such details; Yet, a painting is not simply a painting, in the way history is never just history. Things, like language and words themselves, have histories. These intertwine and mesh with social, religious and cultural practices. Consequently, in order to speak about meaning in historical visual cultures, we must reconstruct and engage with these histories. Such is the aim of this thesis. In 1545, Pope Paul III Farnese called the Council of Trent, a great ecumenical endeavour which would last eighteen years, closing in December 1563. What followed was a so-called Post-Tridentine period. At a distance, these compromise what we know as the Counter-Reformation. Caravaggio grew up in the wake of these developments, when the Catholic Church, more or less finding itself in a constant state of spiritual blitzkrieg, devised a new artistic programme for its visual theology. This thesis seeks to connect Caravaggio’s particular engagement with the subject of martyrdom, and frame the outpourings of a sacrificial iconography which ties into a contemporary cult of early Christianity. My argument is that the veneration of a paleochristian past extends into and shapes the cult of the sacred image, the icon, associated, first and foremost, with an early medieval kind of Christendom. The icon, or rather, the iconic, becomes, I argue, an instance of appeal, or source of pictorial strategies in Caravaggio’s The Crucifixion of St. Peter of 1601, that serve as rudiments in the controversy of the image, which surface during the sixteenth century between Catholic and Protestant confessions. Within this matrix of collisions, conflations, and connections, I regard Caravaggio’s religious imagery as torn between an archaic address to Christian iconic cult practices on the one hand, image and relic, invocation and iconoclasm, the visual and the verbal. On the other, an Albertian conception of artistic, aesthetic and stylistic practices. My desire is not to convey the logic of the latter, which has dominated what I call “the modernist narrative” of Caravaggio criticism, but rather to explore the hermeneutics of the former; how Caravaggio’s Crucifixion of St. Peter, by facilitating a response to the “iconic (re)turn” in post-Tridentine pictorial ideology, produces, structures and reflect meaning(s) embedded in the life-world and visual culture of early modern Italy. V VI Acknowledgements I would first of all like to bestow my gratitude and deep thanks to my supervisor Per Sigurd Tveitevåg Styve, for what has been a formative, enriching and motivating journey; his constructive criticism and immediate belief in the project proved decisive and galvanizing. I am grateful to both the Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas as well as the Norwegian Institute in Rome, through Anne Nicolaysen and Mona Johansen, which provided study and travel grant, facilitating trips to Rome as part of my research. Further thanks are due Professor Trond Berg Eriksen – of whose early intellectual influence this thesis reflects in large measure – for stimulating feedback and opinion. The same goes out to Tom Garretson for insightful comments and criticism. Impossible to omit in general regard is also my profound indebtedness to Professor Einar Petterson, for countless Italian hours spent in analysis of and conversation on the topic of Renaissance and Baroque imagery during my Roman intermezzi. I would also like to credit my fellow friends and MA students, for all their conversation, presence and motivation, and without whom this odyssey would have been another tale entirely: Ane; Anne; Camilla; Gard; Julie; Kristine; Lise and Malin. Finally, parental care and concern cannot go unmentioned. Neither my ever-thankful nod to you who know who you are. Oslo, June 2017. VII VIII Table of Contents 1 Introduction 1.1 Thesis ............................................................................................................................... 1 1.2 Existing scholarship ......................................................................................................... 4 1.3 Theoretical Considerations ............................................................................................... 6 1.3.1 The Image and Visual Hermeneutics: Language and Historicity ............................. 6 1.3.2 Iconicity, Hermeneutics, and Visuality. .................................................................... 8 1.3.3 “The Inseparable and the Silent”: Word and Image ................................................ 10 1.4 Kunst-als-Spiel – Methodological Approach ................................................................. 13 1.4.1 Darstellung and Vorstellung – The Icon and the Picture ........................................ 15 2 The Icon and the Iconic: A History 2.1 Genesis and Genealogy .................................................................................................. 16 2.2 Death and Destruction: Contextualizing Iconoclasm ..................................................... 18 2.3 “Remembering the Middle Ages in Early Modern Italy”: The Salus Populani Romani and the Iconic Legacy in Caravaggio’s Rome ..................................................................... 21 3 Caravaggio in Context: The Sacred Image in the Era of Art 3.1 Phoenix Romanus: Santa Maria del Popolo and The Crucifixion of St. Peter ............... 25 3.2 “An Almost Magical Power”: An Iconography of Essentials ........................................ 30 3.3 Michelangelo vs Michelangelo ...................................................................................... 31 3.4 Princeps apostolorum – St. Peter and the Petrine presence in Rome ............................ 35 4 Martyrdom in Context: Caravaggio and Contemporary Catholicism 4.1 Worship and Violence: Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe ........................................ 39 4.2 Cesare Baronio: Art and Apostolicism ........................................................................... 41 4.3. Spain and Tridentine Spirituality .................................................................................. 46 4.4 Caravaggio’s Work as Pictorial Theology ..................................................................... 48 4.5. Augustinian Illumination vs Franciscan Pauperism: Caravaggio and the Piety of Poverty ................................................................................................................................. 53 4.6 “A Panorama of Horror and Butchery”: Santo Stefano Rotondo and Martyr Iconography .......................................................................................................................... 57 IX 5 Image and Spectator: Caravaggio and Post-Tridentine Theory of Painting 5.1 The Image Question ....................................................................................................... 60 5.3 Luther: Nominalism and the Protestant Image ............................................................... 61 5.3 Giovan Andrea Gilio: A Decorum of Dissonance ......................................................... 63 5.4 Gabriele Paleotti: Nature and Reform ............................................................................ 67 5.5 Spectatorship, Naturalism and the Iconic Return: Bridging the Distance ...................... 72 6 Painting and Particulars: Caravaggio and the Materiality of Devotion 6.1 Change and Materiality in the Late Sixteenth-Century .................................................. 75 6.2 Image and Relic: The Dialectics of Sacred Remains ..................................................... 78 6.3 Matter Matters: Vision and Veneration .......................................................................... 81 6.4 To Materialize is to Animate: Naturalism as Hermeneutical Strategy ........................... 83 7 Epilogue: Martyrdom in Caravaggio 7.1 Martyrdom as Iconoclasm .............................................................................................. 86 7.2 Displacing the Istoria: Subverting the Albertian Tradition ........................................... 92 7.3 Spaces of Violence: The Authority of the Image-Site ................................................... 93 8 Concluding remarks: The Reactionary Radical ....................................... 97 Bibliography ........................................................................................................ 99 Illustrations ....................................................................................................... 115 X 1 Introduction “Die Kunst ist die Vermittlerin des Unaussprechlichen.“ - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
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