New Saints in Late-Mediaeval Venice, 12001500 by Karen E. McCluskey;

Author:Karen E. McCluskey;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781351103558
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (Unlimited)
Published: 2021-04-08T00:00:00+00:00

Fama and venezianità

The pictorial language used by both Giuliana’s and Leone’s hagiographers, as well as the textual legacy relating to Giovanni Plebiano, all suggest a common aim for the cults of these Benedictine new saints: to highlight their post-mortem popularity, or fama, beyond the confines of their cloisters using highly emotive imagery to appeal to would-be devotees. As with visual saints’ lives elsewhere, these hagiographers draw on a specific hagiographic trope—the crowd—to authenticate the historical events and prove the fama of their subject. Augmenting these visions of popularity are specific local anecdotes and social types which are built into the narratives, offering an almost documentary-type affirmation of the fact of the cults. Such detail encouraged a sense of connection between the image and the viewer, enabling those who might otherwise feel themselves to be detached observers of a discrete religious text to see themselves in the images of devotees.

Although the use of such devices is not unique to Venice, the use of recognisable topographical features and contemporary people and fashions in Venetian art to give weight to legends has a long history, as noted in Chapter 1 with regard to Mark’s narratives in San Marco. The approach is so pervasive in Venice, it has been coined ‘the Venetian eyewitness style’ by Patricia Fortini Brown.92 In Giuliana’s and especially Leone’s panels, the Venetian setting is clearly announced in this way. Indeed, the Venetian hagiographers go one step further in amplifying the venezianità of these cults. In Venetian hagiography generally, but especially in the visual vitae relating to new saints, local hagiographers use the apparitio 93 trope extensively, endorsing the new saints’ cults within a specifically Venetian religious tradition.

92 Fortini Brown, Narrative Painting, 4–5, 96–97. 93 The miraculous reappearance of a saint’s relics. As a result of her reputation in life as a pious friend of God and local intercessor, Giuliana’s posthumous cult, depicted in the final three panels, is portrayed as instantaneous, popular and dynamic. The sixth, seventh and eighth episodes offer a detailed account of the events from Giuliana’s original burial, her apparitio and the enlargement of the church and convent of Sts Biagio e Cataldo. Collectively, the episodes offer an explicit exposition of her post-mortem fama and continuing intercessory power. The cult’s fama is even more powerfully pronounced in Leone’s vita panels, where almost the entire message is focused on publicising his miraculous relics and, by association, promoting the nuns of the convent of San Lorenzo. With little other biographical detail to distract him, Leone’s hagiographer was able to focus solely on stories relating to the miracle-working body which, laid out below his vita panels, are described in detail in the images through the prodigious events of his apparitio, elevatio and miracles. The cycle emphasises a distinctive cultic personality forged within a specifically Venetian setting to promote the relics’ fama and, as will be discussed, along with the relics of Giovanni Plebiano, to shape a pious and illustrious identity for the patrician nuns of the respective convent.

A good example

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