Ex Voto by Weinryb Ittai;

Author:Weinryb, Ittai;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bard Graduate Center

In Historia della gloriosa imagine della Madonna di Lonigo (1605), Giovanni Domenico Bertani notes that the first ex-votos offered to the Madonna dei Miracoli were tavolette that commemorated miracles enacted in 1486 and 1487.24 These dates distinguish Bertani’s miracle book from other texts, which tend to corroborate the story visualized in Carpaccio’s Apparition of the Ten Thousand Martyrs and the St. Roch woodcut. Although available, tavolette were slow to gain popularity. The votive offerings listed in two miracle books—the Miracoli et gratie della gloriosa Madre Vergine Maria delle Charcere di Prato, which recounts 180 miracles and dates to the mid-1480s, and the Libro dei miracoli della Madonna di Tirano, which spans the years from 1504 to 1519 and records 74 miraculous occurrences as having taken place on ground made holy by an apparition of the Virgin—can be taken as representative of the form’s decided lack of widespread use at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Among the donations left by devotees—those who were restored to health, escaped the hangman’s rope, were liberated from demons, and, in a notable number of cases, the parents of briefly resuscitated still-born infants—were a pair of discarded crutches, an ox, a pig, a representation in silver of a baby, a silver plaque bearing the Madonna’s image, gold coins, a chalice, countless candles of white and yellow wax, and a painting (dipinto) honoring the glory of the Virgin. Only a single devotee of the Madonna delle Carceri and, likewise, only one devotee of the Madonna of Tirano offered a painting that can be incontestably identified as a tavoletta.25 By the century’s end, however, tavolette votive had assumed a conspicuous place at a number of sites associated with miraculous healings and sensational thaumaturgic occurrences.26 Today, approximately 1,500 panels datable to the sixteenth century are preserved in sanctuaries and civic museums throughout Italy. The ruinous state of many panels together with the lack of accordance between physical evidence and references to the donation of tavolette in both shrine inventories and miracle books suggests that centuries ago there were many more.

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