Publications by Carla Benzan
Ad Vivum? Visual materials and the vocabulary of life-likeness in Europe before 1800
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Solitudo: Spaces, Places, and Times of Solitude in Late Medieval and Early Modern Cultures, 2018
In the final decades of the sixteenth century the bishop of Novara Carlo Bascapè worked tirelessl... more In the final decades of the sixteenth century the bishop of Novara Carlo Bascapè worked tirelessly to reconceive the Sacro Monte of Varallo as a new kind of 'luogo sacro' that the Italian art historian Pier Giorgio Longo has described in terms of “a search for solitude and reflexive and interior communication with the soul of the beholding pilgrim.” In making this claim, Longo argues that the architectural restructuring of the Passion chapels were the primary means of soliciting the individual reflection of the beholder. This paper complicates current understandings of solitude at this remote alpine pilgrimage site by turning away from Varallo's palaces and squares to the enormous sculptural representation of Mount Tabor in the Transfiguration chapel (c. 1570-1670). Renovating familiar exegetical literature on biblical mountains and ascetic retreat, the narrative of Christ’s Transfiguration offers the promise of true spiritual knowledge at its sculptural summit.
The palpable sculpture of Mount Tabor that presents Christ's miraculous Transfiguration solicits solitude in order to remake pilgrimage. Viewed from behind the screen, Varallo’s Mount Tabor creates an alternative kind of luogo sacro by way of a corporeal surrogate of a biblical mountain that is withheld from the pilgrim’s body. Thus, Bascapè’s sacred place of solitude depended on a new kind of imaginative ascetic activity, supplanting the problematic bodily performance of piety. A more complex reflexivity is produced where the viewer must travel imaginatively, and alone, to Tabor’s summit.
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Breathless Days: 1959-1960
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Essay to accompany the exhibition ' A Risky Jump' by Scott Billings.
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OBJECT: Graduate Research and Reviews in the History of Art and Visual Culture, no. 16 , Jun 1, 2014
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Conference Papers by Carla Benzan
The interface between human and animal is literally raised on the surface of a seventeenth-centur... more The interface between human and animal is literally raised on the surface of a seventeenth-century “Feather Book” that depicts over one hundred birds along with a cast of human figures composed through the intricate application of real feathers and bird skin on the page. Produced circa 1618 by Dionisio Minaggio, the Chief Gardener of the Spanish State of Milan, these feather collages appropriate featherwork traditions from New Spain in the representation of local birds and human figures indigenous to Lombardy.
In this presentation I consider the ethical and political stakes of the Feather Book as an object of conversion. I examine the operation prompted by the material conversion of feather into image in relation to other kinds of ‘naturalistic’ images in northern Italian collections. Pertinent comparisons include: Amazonian featherwork and its appropriation in Milan; highly collectible pietra paesina (stone cut and polished to resemble landscape painting) and figurative painting on stone; the paintings of Milanese Giuseppe Arcimboldo; scientific and sacred images of nature produced al vivo (from life) in Bologna and Milan. Raising the specious divide between nature and artifice, the naturalism of the Feather Book may attempt to tame the local Lombard terrain for its Spanish patron but the presence of the real troubles the act of mimesis, complicating a hierarchical imposition of power through the act of representation.
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Federico Zuccaro’s description of his brother Taddeo’s dream – transcribed in the margins of Vasa... more Federico Zuccaro’s description of his brother Taddeo’s dream – transcribed in the margins of Vasari’s Lives and represented in an extant preparatory drawing – recounts an incident that purportedly occurred during the elder artist’s return from Rome. Overtaken with fever, Taddeo fell asleep near a riverbank and awoke after having a vision that the stones surrounding him were painted like the artworks and facades of the most accomplished artists in Rome; he proceeded to collect the most beautiful examples and carried this heavy burden for the remainder of his journey until he recovered and realized the folly of his delusion. This paper argues that Taddeo’s compulsion to collect the stones works against earlier notions of the generative material world in natural philosophy, pilgrimage, and collection. For Federico, the naturally-formed image on stone becomes an unreliable presence that the artist must discern and master through visual mimesis.
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Moving through space and time, the falling body poses a unique challenge to sixteenth and sevente... more Moving through space and time, the falling body poses a unique challenge to sixteenth and seventeenth-century artists and theorists struggling with new truth claims of visual images. Gian Paolo Lomazzo’s illusionistic fresco the Fall of Simon Magus (c.1571) raises the concept of 'moti' — or movement — with its dramatically foreshortened rendering of the plummeting heretic. Elaborated in his Trattato della Pittura (1584) and Idea del Tempio della Pittura (1590), moti is a complex idea that marries internal and external motion through the affective response of viewers. Lomazzo’s own description of his Fall of Simon Magus further suggests that the ability of images to mimic reality does not require the actual extension of time, which is impossible in the visual image. Instead, the animation of images depends on their capacity to extend the experiential time of the beholder. Significantly, Lomazzo’s conception of moti would be critiqued decades later by the Roman art collector and physician Giulio Mancini in the influential but unpublished Considerationi sulla Pittura (1617-21). Although Mancini directly criticizes Lomazzo for his failure to account for the continuity of time in images of movement (“essendo di natura di moto l’esser continuo in tempo”), he ultimately reaffirms the priority that the earlier writer places on the temporality of viewing. Moreover, Mancini similarly positions the falling body at the centre of his text, describing the ability of Francesco Vanni’s Fall of Simon Magus (c. 1603) to provoke the imagination of temporal continuity through which the image endures in the mind of the beholder.
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A square piece of cloth painted with an image of the Veronica Veil interrupts the sculptural proc... more A square piece of cloth painted with an image of the Veronica Veil interrupts the sculptural procession depicted in the Way to Calvary chapel at the Sacro Monte of Varallo (ca. 1597-1617). Neither an actual relic, nor simply a two-dimensional image, it is closely related to another image at the pilgrimage site: a lifesize replica of the Shroud of Turin. Images of acheiropoetoi at Varallo shed light on the conceptual and material relationship between images and relics. Their proliferation after the Council of Trent was inflected, moreover, by post-Tridentine debates around the epistemological value of sacred images. The treatises of Gabriele Paleotti and Agaffino Solaro blur the distinction between divinely-produced acheiropoetoi and the man-made artifice of illusionistic images. Making contact with the divine through images of acheiropoetoi could negotiate anxieties toward embodied presence at a moment when visual experience was more emphatically implemented at the Sacro Monte of Varallo.
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In the final decades of the sixteenth century the bishop of Novara Carlo Bascapè worked tirelessl... more In the final decades of the sixteenth century the bishop of Novara Carlo Bascapè worked tirelessly to reconceive the Sacro Monte of Varallo as a new kind of 'luogo sacro' that the Italian art historian Pier Giorgio Longo has described in terms of “a search for solitude and reflexive and interior communication with the soul of the beholding pilgrim.” This paper seeks to complicate current understandings of solitude at this remote alpine pilgrimage site by turning away from the piazzas and palazzo of the Passion to the enormous sculptural representation of Mount Tabor in the Transfiguration chapel (c. 1570-1670).
Renewing familiar exegetical literature on biblical mountains and ascetic retreat, the narrative of Christ’s Transfiguration offers the promise of ‘true’ spiritual knowledge at its sculptural summit. The palpable sculpture of Mount Tabor that presents Christ's miraculous Transfiguration, solicits solitude in order to remake pilgrimage. Viewed from behind the screen, Varallo’s Mount Tabor creates an alternative kind of luogo sacro by way of a corporeal surrogate of a biblical mountain that is withheld from the pilgrim’s body: pilgrimage relies on imaginative reflection as much as the embodied, communal experience of pilgrimage. Thus, Bascapè’s sacred place of solitude depended on a new kind of imaginative ascetic activity in order to supplant the problematic bodily performance of piety. A more complex reflexivity is produced here where the viewer must travel imaginatively, and alone, to Tabor’s summit.
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This paper shifts the terms of art historical inquiry concerning the iconography of falling, aski... more This paper shifts the terms of art historical inquiry concerning the iconography of falling, asking how this subject matter could challenge or extend the stakes of images in the early modern period. Moving beyond a moralized spatial metaphorics, this paper argues that falling bodies were crucial sites for the reconfiguration of the relationship between the body and the world in moments of epistemological rupture. Falling bodies could interrogate the material presence of illusionistic visual images at a moment when new knowledge about bodily weight emerged as a problem in art theory, natural philosophy, and theology.
Focusing on Gian Paolo Lomazzo’s Fall of Simon Magus (1571) in the Foppa chapel of Milan’s Church of San Marco, I will argue that the stakes of Lomazzo’s painting extend well beyond symbolic meaning of a heretical threat. In the Idea del Tempio della Pittura (1590), Lomazzo introduces the concept of moti, or movement, which relates to the depiction of falling. In fact, moti suggests an attempt to reconcile visual images with more embodied notions of epistemology that were emerging in competing debates about bodily movement in art treatises. Giulio Mancini, for example, would reflect on the importance of movement to images through the painting The Fall of Simon Magus Before Peter and Paul by Francesco Vanni (1603) in Rome. In the Considerazione sulla Pittura (1621) Mancini writes that Vanni’s painting was an image that “we imagine will move and come crashing down.” Ultimately, the physicality of the falling body ruptures the order of pictorial space and, in doing so, destabilizes the relationship between the beholder and the image.
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In early modern pilgrimage, epistemological tensions surrounding the notion of an animate natural... more In early modern pilgrimage, epistemological tensions surrounding the notion of an animate natural world are worked through on surfaces of stones and images. The sculptural representation of Mount Tabor in the Transfiguration chapel at the Sacro Monte of Varallo recreates a biblical mountainside in enormous lifesize scale using stucco that was deliberately embedded with local stones from the Sesia river valley. Miraculous images that were discovered on stones were avidly collected and represented in early modern pilgrimage accounts, natural philosophical treatises, and art theory. Signaling the charged boundary between nature and artifice at this time, these images 'of' stone and images 'on' stone offer sites where art and materiality intertwine and impinge on one another, mediating between new notions of the visual image and existing embodied conceptions of the material world. Within these strategies of visual mimesis the power of nature to make meaning moves, quite literally, underground.
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The representation of Mount Tabor at the Sacro Monte of Varallo deploys a striking conjunction of... more The representation of Mount Tabor at the Sacro Monte of Varallo deploys a striking conjunction of visual mimesis and corporeal similitude. The sculptural mountainside dominates the depiction of the Transfiguration (ca. 1570-1660). Filling the vast interior of the circular chapel, Mount Tabor is modelled and painted to represent the rough surface of the earth and is even embedded with material in the shape of foliage. Yet it is intriguing that, in addition to this emphatic visual verisimilitude, the stucco itself was deliberately bound with local rocks from the Alpine valley surrounding the pilgrimage site. In this way Varallo’s Mount Tabor forges a palpable connection between the living forces of nature outside the chapels and the artistic representation of natural life inside them. These connections are actively solicited by the terminology of lifelikeness, wonder, and naturalism in seventeenth-century guides to the Sacro Monte. Drawing on the writings of Gabriele Paleotti and Levinus Lemnius, this paper will argue that such accounts reflect early modern understandings of nature and artifice. Ultimately, Varallo’s Mount Tabor argues for the close relationship between artistic creation with the creation of the world in the seventeenth century.
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Between architecture and object, sculpture and image, relic and replica, the Scala Santa at the S... more Between architecture and object, sculpture and image, relic and replica, the Scala Santa at the Sacro Monte of Varallo is a copy based on the measurements of the celebrated Roman Passion relic. Embedded within the Sacro Monte’s version of Pilate’s Palace, the Scala Santa inserts a space of topomimetic replication within the illusionism that dominated Varallo in the early seventeenth century. The insertion of this spatial replica deliberately reintroduces embodied ritual and procession in the midst of the idealized Palace and its illusionistic chapels. Here, Christ’s procession is not only represented but re-enacted. Rather than a neutral passage between the chapels, I argue that the juxtaposition of such dissonant strategies produces new forms of mental and bodily labour in which the pilgrim is prompted to activate the charged space between the replica and its original.
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If there is a mountain time, what is it? It is rhythmic, spatial, bodily, full of interruptions, ... more If there is a mountain time, what is it? It is rhythmic, spatial, bodily, full of interruptions, unstable, multiple, forgetful. It is a temporality that moves.
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An unprecedented depiction of the Veronica Veil was included in the Way to Calvary chapel at the ... more An unprecedented depiction of the Veronica Veil was included in the Way to Calvary chapel at the Sacro Monte of Varallo in the early seventeenth century at a time when the early modern Italian pilgrimage site included increasingly virtuosic Christological chapels. Held suspended in the hands of the lifesize polychromatic sculpture of Veronica, this Veil is simultaneously represented upon and presented by a piece of loose canvas. The veil is rendered with a gilded border, draped folds and curled edges on the hanging cloth whilst, between the threshold of this virtuosic trompe l’oeil image and the physical edge of the quasi-sculptural object, a border of untreated canvas remains.
In this paper I will argue that the Veronica Veil at Varallo produces a site of representational proliferation and semiotic uncertainty that disturbs Varallo’s seventeenth-century program of mimetic realism. The excessive doubling of the veil must be considered in light of the shifting status of the image in Catholic Europe during the seventeenth century and the role of acheiropoieta (images not made by human hands) in these debates. Building on the writings of Louis Marin and Georges Didi-Huberman on the semiotic and theological potency of the contact relic in the early modern period and Gerhard Wolf’s notion of “incarnational dialectics” I argue that the Veronica’s dual status as material presentation and mimetic representation produces a destabilizing hybrid ontology related to that of the contact relic itself.
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The Veronica Veil at the Sacro Monte of Varallo is a physically diminutive but compositionally ce... more The Veronica Veil at the Sacro Monte of Varallo is a physically diminutive but compositionally central inclusion in the enormous Way to Calvary chapel (ca. 1600). A painted piece of cloth held up by a lifesize polychromatic sculpture, this uncertain object constitutes a material interruption that opens up a gap within the narrative progression. Based on its hybrid status as painting and sculpture, the Veronica at Varallo works differently from the sculptures among which it is embedded, offering fertile ground for a consideration of the conditions under which sculpture may be animated. By stopping with the Veronica at Varallo, we catch a glimpse of an apotropaic Gorgon suspended – and suspending - within the midst of Pygmalian promise.
The disruption of the singular, isolated face acts upon the viewing subject at a time when bodily, embodied forms of knowledge (such as relics and icons) were being displaced from the centre of faith. Without the body, it was necessary that the beholder be called upon in new ways, repeatedly and consciously called to animate the Veil through the command of a gaze. Perhaps this is how the animation works at the Way to Calvary, less as a collective re-enactment of bodily proximity and more as an ocular engagement of an individual subject.
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Publications by Carla Benzan
The palpable sculpture of Mount Tabor that presents Christ's miraculous Transfiguration solicits solitude in order to remake pilgrimage. Viewed from behind the screen, Varallo’s Mount Tabor creates an alternative kind of luogo sacro by way of a corporeal surrogate of a biblical mountain that is withheld from the pilgrim’s body. Thus, Bascapè’s sacred place of solitude depended on a new kind of imaginative ascetic activity, supplanting the problematic bodily performance of piety. A more complex reflexivity is produced where the viewer must travel imaginatively, and alone, to Tabor’s summit.
Conference Papers by Carla Benzan
In this presentation I consider the ethical and political stakes of the Feather Book as an object of conversion. I examine the operation prompted by the material conversion of feather into image in relation to other kinds of ‘naturalistic’ images in northern Italian collections. Pertinent comparisons include: Amazonian featherwork and its appropriation in Milan; highly collectible pietra paesina (stone cut and polished to resemble landscape painting) and figurative painting on stone; the paintings of Milanese Giuseppe Arcimboldo; scientific and sacred images of nature produced al vivo (from life) in Bologna and Milan. Raising the specious divide between nature and artifice, the naturalism of the Feather Book may attempt to tame the local Lombard terrain for its Spanish patron but the presence of the real troubles the act of mimesis, complicating a hierarchical imposition of power through the act of representation.
Renewing familiar exegetical literature on biblical mountains and ascetic retreat, the narrative of Christ’s Transfiguration offers the promise of ‘true’ spiritual knowledge at its sculptural summit. The palpable sculpture of Mount Tabor that presents Christ's miraculous Transfiguration, solicits solitude in order to remake pilgrimage. Viewed from behind the screen, Varallo’s Mount Tabor creates an alternative kind of luogo sacro by way of a corporeal surrogate of a biblical mountain that is withheld from the pilgrim’s body: pilgrimage relies on imaginative reflection as much as the embodied, communal experience of pilgrimage. Thus, Bascapè’s sacred place of solitude depended on a new kind of imaginative ascetic activity in order to supplant the problematic bodily performance of piety. A more complex reflexivity is produced here where the viewer must travel imaginatively, and alone, to Tabor’s summit.
Focusing on Gian Paolo Lomazzo’s Fall of Simon Magus (1571) in the Foppa chapel of Milan’s Church of San Marco, I will argue that the stakes of Lomazzo’s painting extend well beyond symbolic meaning of a heretical threat. In the Idea del Tempio della Pittura (1590), Lomazzo introduces the concept of moti, or movement, which relates to the depiction of falling. In fact, moti suggests an attempt to reconcile visual images with more embodied notions of epistemology that were emerging in competing debates about bodily movement in art treatises. Giulio Mancini, for example, would reflect on the importance of movement to images through the painting The Fall of Simon Magus Before Peter and Paul by Francesco Vanni (1603) in Rome. In the Considerazione sulla Pittura (1621) Mancini writes that Vanni’s painting was an image that “we imagine will move and come crashing down.” Ultimately, the physicality of the falling body ruptures the order of pictorial space and, in doing so, destabilizes the relationship between the beholder and the image.
In this paper I will argue that the Veronica Veil at Varallo produces a site of representational proliferation and semiotic uncertainty that disturbs Varallo’s seventeenth-century program of mimetic realism. The excessive doubling of the veil must be considered in light of the shifting status of the image in Catholic Europe during the seventeenth century and the role of acheiropoieta (images not made by human hands) in these debates. Building on the writings of Louis Marin and Georges Didi-Huberman on the semiotic and theological potency of the contact relic in the early modern period and Gerhard Wolf’s notion of “incarnational dialectics” I argue that the Veronica’s dual status as material presentation and mimetic representation produces a destabilizing hybrid ontology related to that of the contact relic itself.
The disruption of the singular, isolated face acts upon the viewing subject at a time when bodily, embodied forms of knowledge (such as relics and icons) were being displaced from the centre of faith. Without the body, it was necessary that the beholder be called upon in new ways, repeatedly and consciously called to animate the Veil through the command of a gaze. Perhaps this is how the animation works at the Way to Calvary, less as a collective re-enactment of bodily proximity and more as an ocular engagement of an individual subject.
The palpable sculpture of Mount Tabor that presents Christ's miraculous Transfiguration solicits solitude in order to remake pilgrimage. Viewed from behind the screen, Varallo’s Mount Tabor creates an alternative kind of luogo sacro by way of a corporeal surrogate of a biblical mountain that is withheld from the pilgrim’s body. Thus, Bascapè’s sacred place of solitude depended on a new kind of imaginative ascetic activity, supplanting the problematic bodily performance of piety. A more complex reflexivity is produced where the viewer must travel imaginatively, and alone, to Tabor’s summit.
In this presentation I consider the ethical and political stakes of the Feather Book as an object of conversion. I examine the operation prompted by the material conversion of feather into image in relation to other kinds of ‘naturalistic’ images in northern Italian collections. Pertinent comparisons include: Amazonian featherwork and its appropriation in Milan; highly collectible pietra paesina (stone cut and polished to resemble landscape painting) and figurative painting on stone; the paintings of Milanese Giuseppe Arcimboldo; scientific and sacred images of nature produced al vivo (from life) in Bologna and Milan. Raising the specious divide between nature and artifice, the naturalism of the Feather Book may attempt to tame the local Lombard terrain for its Spanish patron but the presence of the real troubles the act of mimesis, complicating a hierarchical imposition of power through the act of representation.
Renewing familiar exegetical literature on biblical mountains and ascetic retreat, the narrative of Christ’s Transfiguration offers the promise of ‘true’ spiritual knowledge at its sculptural summit. The palpable sculpture of Mount Tabor that presents Christ's miraculous Transfiguration, solicits solitude in order to remake pilgrimage. Viewed from behind the screen, Varallo’s Mount Tabor creates an alternative kind of luogo sacro by way of a corporeal surrogate of a biblical mountain that is withheld from the pilgrim’s body: pilgrimage relies on imaginative reflection as much as the embodied, communal experience of pilgrimage. Thus, Bascapè’s sacred place of solitude depended on a new kind of imaginative ascetic activity in order to supplant the problematic bodily performance of piety. A more complex reflexivity is produced here where the viewer must travel imaginatively, and alone, to Tabor’s summit.
Focusing on Gian Paolo Lomazzo’s Fall of Simon Magus (1571) in the Foppa chapel of Milan’s Church of San Marco, I will argue that the stakes of Lomazzo’s painting extend well beyond symbolic meaning of a heretical threat. In the Idea del Tempio della Pittura (1590), Lomazzo introduces the concept of moti, or movement, which relates to the depiction of falling. In fact, moti suggests an attempt to reconcile visual images with more embodied notions of epistemology that were emerging in competing debates about bodily movement in art treatises. Giulio Mancini, for example, would reflect on the importance of movement to images through the painting The Fall of Simon Magus Before Peter and Paul by Francesco Vanni (1603) in Rome. In the Considerazione sulla Pittura (1621) Mancini writes that Vanni’s painting was an image that “we imagine will move and come crashing down.” Ultimately, the physicality of the falling body ruptures the order of pictorial space and, in doing so, destabilizes the relationship between the beholder and the image.
In this paper I will argue that the Veronica Veil at Varallo produces a site of representational proliferation and semiotic uncertainty that disturbs Varallo’s seventeenth-century program of mimetic realism. The excessive doubling of the veil must be considered in light of the shifting status of the image in Catholic Europe during the seventeenth century and the role of acheiropoieta (images not made by human hands) in these debates. Building on the writings of Louis Marin and Georges Didi-Huberman on the semiotic and theological potency of the contact relic in the early modern period and Gerhard Wolf’s notion of “incarnational dialectics” I argue that the Veronica’s dual status as material presentation and mimetic representation produces a destabilizing hybrid ontology related to that of the contact relic itself.
The disruption of the singular, isolated face acts upon the viewing subject at a time when bodily, embodied forms of knowledge (such as relics and icons) were being displaced from the centre of faith. Without the body, it was necessary that the beholder be called upon in new ways, repeatedly and consciously called to animate the Veil through the command of a gaze. Perhaps this is how the animation works at the Way to Calvary, less as a collective re-enactment of bodily proximity and more as an ocular engagement of an individual subject.
The first chapter of my dissertation examines the thirty-third chapel of the Ecce Homo (1610) in light of its heightened presentative strategies in order to introduce the interconnection between presentation and representation and to argue that embodiment remained latent in the simulacra at Varallo, particularly through the inclusion of the viewing screen that is usually considered to construct a particularly disembodied encounter. In my discussion I compare the unique strategies undertaken at Varallo in relation to Caravaggio’s Ecce Homo (1605), Rubens’ holy image and frame at the Chiesa Nuova, Rome (1608), and Jesuit printed religious materials such as David Johannes’ Veridicus Christianus (1601).
Although I argue that the embodied state of the pilgrim at the screen produces a hallucinatory mode of vision, the vivid mise-en-scène at Varallo is not a hallucination. Instead, as the Exercises mobilized the body of the practitioner ‘into image,’ the screen enabled the translation of the chapel’s palpable corporeality ‘into image.’ That is, the irrepressible materiality of vibrant trompe l’oeil illusionism and expressive polychromatic sculptures induce the beholder to enter into a game of ‘universal imitation’ that is activated in the mind. Of course this was not purely religious affair, but a deeply epistemological one. As Barthes’ reading of the Exercises revealed, these new structures of encounter were semiotic as well as spiritual. In this, the viewing screen produces a mode of hallucinatory engagement that converted illusion into presence. The beholder becomes a playful conjurer of presence in spite of absence. By kneeling before the screen at Varallo, the pilgrim became a particularly and peculiarly embodied practitioner that attempted to know for oneself, if only by knowing oneself.
The Sacro Monte of Varallo is an early modern pilgrimage site perched above the remote Lombard town of Varallo in northern Italy. Founded in 1491, the Sacro Monte (or Holy Mountain) was conceived as a New Jerusalem: a pilgrimage site that could stand in for the Holy Land then held under Mamluk rule. Varallo’s numerous independent chapels are laid out to topo-mimetically reproduce the sites of Christ’s life and passion as they would have been experienced in the Holy Land. Within each chapel, life-size mises-en-scène depict Christological episodes in multiple dimensions and media, creating the illusion that the painted walls are coming to life before the beholder’s eyes.
It is not surprising that the Sacro Monte of Varallo is most frequently discussed in light of its remarkable hyperrealism. However, the current paper attends to the role played by representation in devotional practices with particular attention to the physical and imagined spaces encountered by the pilgrim at Varallo in the seventeenth century. Pilgrimage is a fundamentally spatial practice that was imbricated within Counter Reformation debates, theological art treatises and mystical thought. In addition to the embodied experience of pilgrimage, the insertion of viewing screens at Varallo around 1600 repositioned the pilgrim in relation to the chapel interiors. Unlike previous scholars who argue that these screens definitively separated the pilgrim from the chapel interior, I argue that they act as a connective fulcrum around which the beholder’s gaze is directed and mobilized. From behind the viewing screen a quasi-mystic “pilgrim gaze” is located in physical space in order to place it memorably in the mind and movingly in the soul.
“It is also not a question of repainting the skies...it is a question of opening up the earth, dark, hard and lost in space.” (Jean-Luc Nancy)
This session seeks to critically engage with the ground in representation (earth, dirt, soil, rocks, stones, cliffs, mountains) and the ground of representation. While related art historical literature has often focused on avant-garde practices such as Earthworks, or has addressed the ground as an articulation of the sublime within the genre of landscape painting, the recent ‘material turn’ in the humanities provides in-roads for addressing the ground within an expanding set of theoretical possibilities and outside of the traditional art historical loci.
Somewhere between matter and form, the ground can be foundational support, marker of territory, and yet also inchoate, anonymous ‘other’. In representation it often seems to display itself as surface, while simultaneously withholding something of itself or other objects from sight or thought. This session invites papers which embrace this difficult silence in depictions of the ground, and made from the material substance of the ground across all historical periods, as well as exploring how the ground might determine represented space and time, as something which implicates the body and provides it with a ‘place’, or destabilizes the historical notion of time which has, until now, determined how we write our histories of art. Following Nancy’s challenge, we seek papers that take on the difficulty of the ground, and its promise.
We are interested in these issues across temporal, geographical and disciplinary categories. Possible topics include but are not limited to:
· Sculptural media from the ground such as terracotta, marble, bronze, pietra dura
· Site-specific artworks using the earth as a medium
· Stones and earth as relics of sacred places
· Artworks that use of soil as a medium or integral support
· Drawings made from direct observation of the earth
· Earth, stones and fossils in the cabinet of curiosity or the museum collection
· Representing the ground in religious painting
· Science and technologies of imaging the ground in maps
· Contemporary photography of the “landscape”
· Walking in performance art, procession, ritual or dance
· Archaeology and the act of unearthing
The deadline for submission is Monday, 10 November. Please email the session conveners providing a 250-word abstract of a proposed paper of 30 minutes, your name, institution affiliation, and contact information.
Conveners: Carla Benzan (carla.benzan.10@ucl.ac.uk) and Catherine McCormack (cath.mccormack@gmail.com), University College London
Medaglie most often circulated according to the complex and often hierarchical conditions of friendship that dominated intersubjective relationships in many early modern networks. However, possible strangerhood and equality of membership also characterize some networks. This shift prompts consideration of the degree to which medaglie were implicated in processes of public formation. The temporally extended nature of this study and the intermediality of the representation of medaglie suggest that, as the medaglie themselves were implicated within forms of sociability, they could be understood as constitutive of proto-publics.