Book contents
- Saints, Miracles, and Social Problems in Italian Renaissance Art
- Saints, Miracles, and Social Problems in Italian Renaissance Art
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgments
- One Introduction
- Two The Vita Icon Reimagined: New (and Old) Saints, New (and Old) Miracles
- Three Storytelling with Saints: Pictorial Narrative and Viewing Experience
- Four Girls in Trouble: Gendering Possession and Exorcism
- Five Assault, Amputation, Absolution: Visualizing the Power of Confession
- Six Thinking with Julian: Marital Violence and Elite Masculinity
- Seven Bernardino the Peacemaker: Visual Hagiography and Factional Violence
- Eight Cannibal Mothers: Picturing Madness and Maternal Infanticide
- Nine Making Innocence Visible (and Audible) in the Basilica del Santo
- Epilogue
- Bibliography
- Index
Nine - Making Innocence Visible (and Audible) in the Basilica del Santo
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 April 2023
- Saints, Miracles, and Social Problems in Italian Renaissance Art
- Saints, Miracles, and Social Problems in Italian Renaissance Art
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgments
- One Introduction
- Two The Vita Icon Reimagined: New (and Old) Saints, New (and Old) Miracles
- Three Storytelling with Saints: Pictorial Narrative and Viewing Experience
- Four Girls in Trouble: Gendering Possession and Exorcism
- Five Assault, Amputation, Absolution: Visualizing the Power of Confession
- Six Thinking with Julian: Marital Violence and Elite Masculinity
- Seven Bernardino the Peacemaker: Visual Hagiography and Factional Violence
- Eight Cannibal Mothers: Picturing Madness and Maternal Infanticide
- Nine Making Innocence Visible (and Audible) in the Basilica del Santo
- Epilogue
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In 1447, the massari (overseers) of the Basilica of Sant’Antonio in Padua hired the Florentine sculptor Donatello to craft a new monumental high altar for their church.1 The high altar (Fig. 133) consists of seven nearly life-sized bronze figures, including the Franciscan St. Anthony of Padua, placed on a base featuring a number of relief sculptures of various subjects. For the front and back of the altar, beneath the monumental figural sculptures, Donatello created four gilded bronze relief panels depicting miracles of St. Anthony. This focus on the miracle-working power of Anthony was a logical one, as he was the titular saint of the church, and his relics were preserved there within a reliquary chapel. While divergent in medium and format from the vita images examined so far in this book, Donatello’s high altar would nevertheless have encouraged a similar ‘vita’ mode of seeing: the narrative reliefs, with their horizontal format and carefully described detail, would have operated, like predella panels, in a meaning-making dialogue with the sculpted figure of Anthony looming above.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Saints, Miracles, and Social Problems in Italian Renaissance Art , pp. 290 - 329Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023