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Saints” in Post-Tridentine Italy Helen Hills

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Saints” in Post-Tridentine Italy Helen Hills Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 2008, vol. 3 Demure Transgression: Portraying Female “Saints” in Post-Tridentine Italy Helen Hills wo contrasting images institute an exploratory incision into the Trelation between female holiness and representation in Counter- Reformation Italy: Stefano Maderno’s sculpture of St. Cecilia of 1600 in the basilica of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, Rome (fig. 1) and an engraved portrait of Mother Superior Maria Villani, the frontispiece to the Dominican Domenico Maria Marchese’s Vita della venerabile Serva di Dio Suor Maria Villani dell’Ordine de’ Predicatori, first published in Naples in 1674 (fig. 2). The first is a sculpture of a canonized female saint; the sec- ond, a new genre of image, a portrait frontispiece to the Vita of a recently deceased female would-be saint. Although the constant generation of holy figures was one of the most distinctive cultural features of this period, little attention has been paid to the production enterprises surrounding new saints, especially those whose bids for canonization simply drained into the sands.1 And no attention at all has been paid to their pictorial representa- tion in frontispieces.2 Recent years have witnessed a renewed scholarly interest in Counter- Reformation sanctity, but the degree to which holiness was visually inflected by gender has been largely overlooked.3 This essay explores the visual gendering of post-Tridentine spirituality in relation to this new genre: portrait frontispieces of would-be saints, published in Italy between ca. 1650 and ca. 1750. Part of the energy of Catholic Reform drew from and focused on the recovery and celebration of ancient saints and their relics. Portrait frontispieces of would-be saints depart from the established reliance on 153 154 EMWJ 2008, vol. 3 Helen Hills historical exemplar to emphasize instead observation and introspection, as we shall see in the comparison between the two image types with which this essay opens. The claim to authority represented by the new genre is examined through its relations to representations of canonized saints, traditions of portraiture and to the author frontispiece. That claim is of particular importance in relation to female would-be-saints, with whom this essay is primarily concerned. I further explore the question of the “transgressiveness” of their female subjects, not only in relation to the sharp discrepancies of tone apparent between text and portrait, but also through comparisons with portrait frontispieces of male would-be saints. I show here that portrait images drew on the conventions of aristo- cratic portraiture, of author-portrait frontispieces, and even of altarpiece paintings. While the practice of combining biography with a portrait to bestow fame was well established and readily mobilized in relation to campaigns for canonization, the Counter-Reformation portrait of the venerable in frontispiece form accompanying a Life and a devotional work articulated starkly new forms of spiritual engagement. The Female Martyred Saint In considering Maderno’s sculpture of the martyred saint (fig. 1), to start at the beginning is to start at the end. The sculpture shows Cecilia at the moment of her death, but also at the moment of her body’s subsequent inventio as holy relic—proof of Cecilia’s sanctity (in the uncorruption of her fleshly body) and the potential for redemption of others that a relic gives. Seventeenth-century sources insist upon the authenticity of the sculpture as much as on the authenticity of the relic.4 They insist that the sculpture shows Cecilia’s body as it was found on its excavation from the catacomb: “as we saw, so we recognized and adored,” claimed Cesare Baronio.5 The sculpture portrays her body at the moment of death, of martyrdom, and as relic at the moment of discovery. It thereby seeks to combine historical truth, represented by the archaeological discovery of the saint’s body, with spiritual truth, her martyrdom, thus combining the spiritual “origin” with the historical (archaeological) discovery, and collapsing place and event.6 Or, more accurately, it combines two different sorts of “origins” of the Demure Transgression 155 contact point between human and divine: the end of the human being/ beginning of the spiritual being, and the inventio of the saint’s relics. The sculpture shows spiritual truth both as confirmed by archaeology (history, knowledge, place) and as beyond it (history, knowledge, place are radically reconfigured by sanctity). It transforms place itself into relic, a spring of holiness (like the Holy Land during the Crusades). The basilica of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, where the statue occupies the key position in front of the main altar, is thereby reinscribed, in relation to year zero, back to the beginning, to the origin, and therefore the end of something old and the beginning of something new. St. Cecilia’s body bears the wound of martyrdom (fig. 3).7 That wound is turned to the viewer, even as the face is turned away. That wound, like a mouth replacing the mouth, is an opening to something, as if to utter something of the ineffable. The body lies before us, facing us, chastely beautiful, the face swivelled away, the wound marking the turn- ing point between the body and the head, between the visible and the ineffable, visible wound and unseeable eyes. The wound is the point of entry to the beyond, the point at which spirit and matter become one. The wound that marks the death of the subject marks the opening to martyr- dom, the transformation of body into relic. The relationship between self and Other is presented as this gaping slit, this dumb mouth, a departure from history, that is, from continuity and human time. The main altar thus becomes the point at which historical time (the finding of the body) meets spiritual time through the martyred body (the relic), meeting at that juncture which is severed, at the wound. But it is something “new” that is positioned outside of historical time. It is the end of history and the start of that which is beyond the edge of history. Here visual analogy represents the embodiment of spiritual faith: spirituality is embodied at the point where it is disembodied. This is what the Tridentine concern with the relic proffered, and which has been too hurriedly smoothed out by historians into a linear history.8 Maderno’s St. Cecilia is incontestably a saint: through her martyrdom and through her miraculous relics. But what of contemporary seventeenth- century female would-be saints? How could they be most effectively portrayed when, on their behalf, claims could be made only in terms of 156 EMWJ 2008, vol. 3 Helen Hills exceptional holiness, without the authority and authorization of archaeol- ogy, martyrdom, and canonization? A saint was already a saint while living, but their death constituted a critical moment for their future reputation; and sanctity was specifically manifest through miracles after death. The portrayal of a living saint therefore challenges the orthodox mode of con- struing sanctity. It was not simply that the cult of saints and their visual representation—pictorial, sculptural, and architectural—characterized the post-Tridentine Catholic Church.9 Increasingly, the Catholic Church’s struggle for authority shifted its focus from history and past martyrs to living and future saints. The frontispiece portraits imagine what modern saints and quotidian holiness might look like. Let us now turn to the second image, the engraved portrait frontis- piece of the founder of the convent of Divino Amore in Naples, first pub- lished in 1674, only four years after Villani’s death (fig. 2). Far from Stefano Maderno’s Roman St. Cecilia—concerned with point of origin as authority, focused on history and redemption through a martyr’s death, mobilizing history and place to destroy difference, and showing the silent woman with two mouths (both silenced)—the frontispiece portrait portrays this would-be saint Maria Villani as alive, of this earth, mundane, laborious, dignified, and respectable. The claim to authority is there—even if it can- not be made through martrydom and death. While Maderno’s sculpture dwells on the elongated, prone body of the canonized saint and martyr, all but ignoring her face, the engraved half-length portrait of Villani shrinks from her body, engulfed in folds of her habit, to attend to her face, to her gestures as she writes with one hand and points with the other towards the small crucifix on her desk, and to the books surrounding her in her cell. Like Cecilia, Villani is unmistakably silent: the tight purse of the mouth, that shrewd and uncompromising stare, her bound throat, the ges- ture to the crucifix tell us this. Unlike Cecilia, however, she has a voice—her own writing of her experience of Christ (again her left hand pointing tells us that). Remarkably, Villani is portrayed as a writer and holy intellectual, surrounded by works of theology, theological commentary, and religious devotion, pen poised, and her gesture towards the crucifix tells us that she is not keeping conventual accounts, not undertaking household tasks, but writing about religious experience, about what she believes. Demure Transgression 157 For all the image’s inherent interest, what is most striking to me is the curious disjuncture between its cool detachment, its focus on Villani’s external world, and the heated language and emotive figuration of spiritual experience which drives the accompanying Vita.10 I quote two short pas- sages from that text:
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