Die marmorne Liegestatue der frühchristlichen Jungfrau und Märtyrerin Cäcilie, die sich seit ihrer Entstehung zum Jubeljahr 1600 an ihrem ursprünglichen Aufstellungsort in Rom befindet, gilt aufgrund innovativer Rahmung und Formensprache als bahnbrechend in der westlichen Kunst. Im Hinblick auf ihren kulturellen, religiösen, sozialen und politischen Hintergrund wurde sie aber bislang noch nie umfassend untersucht. Die vorliegende, interdisziplinäre Studie widmet sich genau diesem Kraftfeld. Es bestimmt die Genese, Bedeutung und frühe Rezeption des Grabbildes Cäciliens wie auch des Stifters, Kardinal Paolo Camillo Sfondrato. Die Figur wirkt nicht nur im gesamten Kircheninnenraum der der Heiligen geweihten Basilika, sondern strahlt in eine wegweisende, frühmoderne Welt aus. Zugleich reflektiert sie Zeitströmungen derart, dass sie als künstlerische Summe ihrer Epoche gelten kann. The reclining marble statue of the early Christian virgin martyr Cecilia, completed by the Holy Year of 1600 and still in its original setting in the Roman basilica bearing the saint’s name, has long been recognised as a seminal work in Western art. Yet its cultural, religious, social and political background has never been comprehensively investigated. This interdisciplinary analysis explores the constellation of forces that shaped the genesis, meaning and early reception of the sculpture – a funeral image for both its donor, Cardinal Paolo Camillo Sfondrato, and Cecilia – as well as its impact on the church interior and the contemporary viewer. The cult image emerges as a synthesis of an epoch that is fundamental to our understanding of early modern culture.

"How did an unmusical saint come to be portrayed as a musician and become the patron saint of musicians and music? Until the beginning of the fifteenth century, Saint Cecilia was perceived as one of many virgin martyrs, with no obvious musical skills or interests. During the next two centuries, however, she inspired many musical works written in her honor and a vast number of paintings that depicted her singing or playing an instrument. Why did so many composers start writing music that honored her as their patron saint? In this book, John A. Rice argues that Cecilia's association with music came about in several stages, involving Christian liturgy, visual arts, and music, and fostered by interactions between artists, musicians, and their patrons and the transfer of visual and musical traditions from northern Europe to Italy. The initial chapters explore the cult of the saint in Medieval times and through the sixteenth century, when, starting in 1502, the first guilds in the Low Countries and France chose Cecilia as their patron. The book then turns to the music and the explosion of polyphonic vocal works written in Cecilia's honor between 1530 and 1620 by the most celebrated composers in Europe, as well as a group of about fifty Cecilian Renaissance motets, mostly by Northern European composers, which are brought together here for the first time. The book also explores the wealth of visual representations of Saint Cecilia especially during the Italian Renaissance, among which Raphael's 1515 painting, "The Ecstasy of Saint Cecilia," is but the most famous example, and concludes with the development of the cult of Cecilia in England. Thoroughly researched and beautifully illustrated, Saint Cecilia in the Renaissance is the definitive portrait of Saint Cecilia as a figure of musical inspiration"--

The aim of the volume is to bring together the latest research on the importance of bishops’ palaces for social and political history, landscape history, architectural history and archaeology. It is structured in three sections: design and function, landscape and urban context, and architectural form and includes contributions from the late Antique period through to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, considering bishops’ residences in England, Scotland, Wales, the Byzantine Empire, France, and Italy.

This book is about the Dominican church in Antwerp (today St Paul’s). It is structured around three works of art, made or procured by Peter Paul Rubens: the Fifteen Mysteries of the Rosary cycle (in situ), Caravaggio’s Rosary Madonna (Vienna) and the Wrath of Christ high altarpiece (Lyon). Within the artist’s lifetime, the church and monastery were completely rebuilt, creating one of the most spectacular sacred spaces in Northern Europe. In this richly illustrated book, Adam Sammut reconceptualises early modern churches as theatres of political economy, advancing an original approach to cultural production in a time of war. Using methodologies at the cutting edge of the humanities, the place of St Paul’s is restored to the crux of Antwerp’s commercial, civic and religious life.

Drawing on recent research by established and emerging scholars of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century art, this volume reconsiders the art and architecture produced after 1563 across the conventional geographic borders. Rather than considering this period a degraded afterword to Renaissance classicism or an inchoate proto-Baroque, the book seeks to understand the art on its own terms. By considering artists such as Federico Barocci and Stefano Maderno in Italy, Hendrick Goltzius in the Netherlands, Antoine Caron in France, Francisco Ribalta in Spain, and Bartolomeo Bitti in Peru, the contributors highlight lesser known "reforms" of art from outside the conventional centers. As the first text to cover this formative period from an international perspective, this volume casts new light on the aftermath of the Renaissance and the beginnings of "Baroque."

This book explores the making of saints’ cults in the early modern world from an interdisciplinary perspective, considering the entangled roles of materiality and globalization processes. It brings together work across diverse media, objects, and materials as well as communities, cultures, and geographies to reframe a more synoptic, materials-centric, and comparative history of the making and remaking of saints’ cults, with a special focus on the long Counter-Reformation. The contributions engage with dynamics of local and universal and draw attention to the vital role of textual, visual, and material hagiographies in the creation and promotion of saints’ and would-be saints’ cults. The book fosters novel conceptualizations and cross-pollination of ideas across traditions, regions, and disciplines and expands hagiography’s horizons by reconsidering canonical saintly figures and reframing lesser-known cults of saints and would-be saints. The book will be of interest to scholars of religious and early modern history as well as art history and visual and material studies.

A Companion to the Early Modern Cardinal is the first comprehensive overview of its subject in English or any language. Cardinals are best known as the pope’s electors, but in the centuries from 1400 to 1800 they were so much more: pastors, inquisitors, diplomats, bureaucrats, statesmen, saints; entrepreneurs and investors; patrons of the arts, of music, literature, and science. Thirty-five essays explain their social background, positions and roles in Rome and beyond, and what they meant for wider society. This volume shows the impact which those men who took up the purple had in their respective fields and how their tenure of office shaped the entangled histories of Rome and the Catholic Church from a European and global perspective.

At the turn of the sixteenth century, the notion of world was dramatically being reshaped, leaving no aspect of human experience untouched. The Nomadic Object: The Challenge of World for Early Modern Religious Art examines how sacred art and artefacts responded to the demands of a world stage in the age of reform. Essays by leading scholars explore how religious objects resulting from cross-cultural contact defied national and confessional categories and were re-contextualised in a global framework via their collection, exchange, production, management, and circulation. In dialogue with current discourses, papers address issues of idolatry, translation, materiality, value, and the agency of networks. The Nomadic Object demonstrates the significance of religious systems, from overseas logistics to philosophical underpinnings, for a global art history. Contributors are: Akira Akiyama, James Clifton, Jeffrey L. Collins, Ralph Dekoninck, Dagmar Eichberger, Beate Fricke, Christine Göttler, Christiane Hille, Margit Kern, Dipti Khera, Yoriko Kobayashi-Sato, Urte Krass, Evonne Levy, Meredith Martin, Walter S. Melion, Mia M. Mochizuki, Jeanette Favrot Peterson, Rose Marie San Juan, Denise-Marie Teece, Tristan Weddigen, and Ines G. Županov.

Peter Paul Rubens and the Crisis of the Beati Moderni takes up the question of the issues involved in the formation of recent saints - or Beati moderni (modern Blesseds) as they were called - by the Jesuits and Oratorians in the new environment of increased strictures and censorship that developed after the Council of Trent with respect to legal canonization procedures and cultic devotion to the saints. Ruth Noyes focuses particularly on how the new regulations pertained to the creation of emerging cults of those not yet canonized, the so-called Beati moderni, such as Jesuit founders Francis Xavier and Ignatius Loyola, and Filippo Neri, founder of the Oratorians. Centrally involved in the book is the question of the fate and meaning of the two altarpiece paintings commissioned by the Oratorians from Peter Paul Rubens. The Congregation rejected his first altarpiece because it too specifically identified Filippo Neri as a cult figure to be venerated (before his actual canonization) and thus was caught up in the politics of cult formation and the papacy’s desire to control such pre-canonization cults. The book demonstrates that Rubens' second altarpiece, although less overtly depicting Neri as a saint, was if anything more radical in the claims it made for him. Peter Paul Rubens and the Crisis of the Beati Moderni offers the first comparative study of Jesuit and Oratorian images of their respective would-be saints, and the controversy they ignited across Church hierarchies. It is also the first work to examine provocative Philippine imagery and demonstrate how its bold promotion specifically triggered the first wave of curial censure in 1602.