Academic literature on the topic 'Maria delle Lauretane (Church : Rome, Italy)'

Abstract 1622 was a crucial year for the Discalced Carmelite Order. This essay intends to highlight and connect a series of events surrounding the fateful canonisation of the foundress Teresa of Ávila on 12 March 1622. On 6 January of that year, the Congregation of Propaganda Fide had been founded with the fundamental contribution of Carmelite missionaries. On 8 May 1622, the important Carmelite Church of San Paolo Apostolo in Rome was re-consecrated to Santa Maria della Vittoria, with celebrations and popular processions, in memory of the “victory” of the White Mountain in 1620 over the Protestant Bohemian troops, favoured by the intercession of Maximilian of Bavaria’s military chaplain, Carmelite Dominic of Jesus Maria. In the years that immediately followed, numerous male and female foundations dedicated to the newly-canonised St. Teresa proliferated in Rome and Italy, according to common iconographic and conventual models elaborated centrally by the order’s new hierarchies.

Liturgy is one of the more underestimated entries of the Gregorian reform. Surely, this is due to the difficulty of getting a clear view of concrete and detailed liturgical evolutions and renewals. It seems, however, to have been one of the more important elements at stake during the short period of the bitter and hard confrontations between the leading layers of the Church around 1100. Besides, between about 1050 and 1150, Rome saw an intense building activity of new churches according to new plans that seem to have been partly dictated by liturgical renovations. Notably, Pope Innocent II seems to have realized the importance of liturgy as a weapon to be used against his ecclesiastical and secular opponents. Thanks to the remarkable Liber politicus by Benedict the Canon (around 1140), we can have some ideas of the way innocent II used liturgy as a means to install his own imperial papacy. My contribution will have a closer look at Benedict's Liber politicus in its literary context as a means to reimagine Rome. The Liber will prove to be much more than a liturgical manual or a strange collection of disparate writings. Behind it lies a strong view of the political role of the papacy and of liturgy as a means to achieve and express papal supremacy. On cover:Monks singing the Office and decorated initial A[sperges me.]. Gradual Olivetan Master (Use of the Olivetan Benedictines), illuminated manuscript on parchment ca. 1430-1439. Italy, Monastero di Santa Maria di Baggio near Milan, Ca 1400-1775.Beinecke Ms1184: The olivetan Gradual. Gradual. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

This article examines a number of Carolingian liturgical manuscripts (Wolfenbuttel Herzog August Bibliothek Wissenbourg 91, Cologne Dombibliothek MS 138, Vienna Österreichische Nationalbibliothek cod.ser.n. 2762 and Paris Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal 227) each containing texts now known as the ordines romani. These texts are "stage directions" for the liturgy, distinguished by their reference to the practices of the church of Rome. While the ordines romani certainly give precious information about Roman liturgical practice, the Frankish contribution to shaping and displaying these texts inline with their own priorities and usages must be acknowledged too. For example, these manuscripts all combine ordines romani with texts about Roman history and topography. For these readers, the desired imitation of Roman liturgical practice was not about copying any particular text or practice by rote, but a deeper form of participation that involved the construction of an image of Rome across a whole manuscript. The given image of Rome responded to the institutional or personal needs animating the manuscript. These manuscripts compel us to imagine diverse practices of reading within and without liturgical performance. Keywords: pontificals, topography, Ordines, manuscripts, Carolingians. On cover:Monks singing the Office and decorated initial A[sperges me.]. Gradual Olivetan Master (Use of the Olivetan Benedictines), illuminated manuscript on parchment ca. 1430-1439. Italy, Monastero di Santa Maria di Baggio near Milan, Ca 1400-1775.Beinecke Ms1184: The olivetan Gradual. Gradual. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

The Bishop of Warmia, Krzysztof Andrzej Jan Szembek from Słupów (1680– 1740), erected a domed reliquary chapel devoted to the Most Holy Savior and St. Theodore the Martyr (Saint Theodore of Amasea) at the cathedral in Frombork, also known as Szembek Chapel. The entire interior of the chapel is covered with frescoes dating from around 1735 by Maciej Jan Meyer (Mat­thias Johann Meyer) from Lidzbark Warmiński. Educated in Italy, the artist made polychrome decorations in the style of illusionistic architectural paint­ing known as quadrature. In the lower part of the chapel stand busts of saints and the entire figure of St. Theodore of Amasea; in the cupola of the dome is the adoration of the Holy Trinity and the Holy Cross by the Mother of God and the Saints. Using the comparative method, I discuss the decoration of the chapel in the context of quadrature painting, which was developing in Italy and then in Central Europe, especially at the end of the 17th and the first half of the 18th centuries. Influential artists who played an important role for Pol­ish quadratura techniques were Andrea Pozzo (1642–1709) and painters who came from Italy or studied painting there, such as Maciej Jan Meyer. I also show the prototype for the decoration of the chapel’s dome, namely, the fres­coes from 1664–1665 by Pietro Berrettini da Cortona in the dome of Santa Maria in Valicella in Rome, as well as for medallions with busts of saints mod­eled on the structure of the main altar from 1699–1700 in the Church of the Holy Cross in Warsaw, funded by Meyer’s first patron, Bishop Teodor Potocki, primate of Poland.

The Basilica Julii (also known as titulus Callisti and later as Santa Maria in Trastevere) provides a case study of the physical and social conditions in which early Christian liturgies 'rewired' their participants. This paper demonstrates that liturgical transformation was a two-way process, in which liturgy was the object as well as the agent of change. Three essential factors - the liturgy of the Eucharist, the space of the early Christian basilica, and the local Christian community - are described as they existed in Rome from the fourth through the ninth centuries. The essay then takes up the specific case of the Basilica Julii, showing how these three factors interacted in the concrete conditions of a particular titular church. The basilica's early Christian liturgical layout endured until the ninth century, when it was reconfigured by Pope Gregory IV (827-844) to bring the liturgical sub-spaces up-to-date. In Pope Gregory's remodeling the original non-hierarchical layout was replaced by one in which celebrants were elevated above the congregation, women were segregated from men, and higher-ranking lay people were accorded places of honor distinct from those of lesser stature. These alterations brought the Basilica Julii in line with the requirements of the ninth-century papal stational liturgy. The stational liturgy was hierarchically organized from the beginning, but distinctions became sharper in the course of the early Middle Ages in accordance with the expansion of papal authority and changes in lay society. Increasing hierarchization may have enhanced the transformational power of the Eucharist, or impeded it. Keywords: S. Maria in Trastevere, stational liturgy, tituli, presbyterium. On cover:Monks singing the Office and decorated initial A[sperges me.]. Gradual Olivetan Master (Use of the Olivetan Benedictines), illuminated manuscript on parchment ca. 1430-1439. Italy, Monastero di Santa Maria di Baggio near Milan, Ca 1400-1775.Beinecke Ms1184: The olivetan Gradual. Gradual. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

AbstractThe introduction and diffusion of Italian Renaissance forms in sixteenth-century Netherlandish art has usually been described as a process initiated by artists who travelled south, adopted the new style and reaped success after their return to the Netherlands. In giving full credit to the artists and considering this phcnomenon to be a process of artistic exchange in the modern sense, art historians have wrongly disregarded the historical circumstances that caused patrons' preference for the new style. The earliest use of Renaissance forms in the Low Countries on a large scale may be observed in the triumphal decorations of the 1515 Joyeuse Entrée of Charles of Hapsburg, the future emperor, in the town of Bruges. From that moment on, Renaissance forms were used abundantly in objects which served as a kind of propaganda for Hapsburg policy, such as church windows and chimney-pieces glorifying Charles v and the Hapsburg dynasty. Antique motifs fitted well in the imperialist visual language favoured by the Hapsburg dynasty and the Dutch nobles who supported its power politics. Derived from imperial Roman monuments, these forms unequivocally alluded to the absolute power of the ancient ancestors of the Holy Roman Emperor, thus legitimizing his authority. In the author's opinion this functional aspect is one of the main reasons for the ready acceptance and diffusion of the Renaissance style in the Low Countries. One of the first artists to travel from the Netherlands to Italy was the painter Michiel Coxcie (Malines 1499-1592). He stayed in Rome from about 1530 to 1538, painting several frescoes in Roman churches which brought him recognition among Italian colleagues. Only one example has survived: the fresco cycle in the chapel of St. Barbara in S. Maria dell'Anima, which he painted between 1532 and 1534. His mastery of the 'maniera italiana', which is evident in these paintings, is highly praised by Vasari, who met Coxcie in Rome in 1532. Vasari also states that Coxcie transferred the 'maniera italiana' to the Netherlands. Upon his return to Malines in 1539, Coxcie received several prestigious commissions, of which perhaps the most outstanding was to paint cartoons for the stained glass windows in the church of St. Gudule in Brussels, with its decoration of triumphal arches glorifying the Hapsburg dynasty. His ability to work in the high Renaissance style gained him the favour of Charles v and his sister, Mary of Hungary, governess of the Netherlands, who engaged him as a court painter. In the said series of Brussels windows, a remarkable change of style regarding the use of Renaissance forms is to be observed after Coxcie started supplying the cartoons in 1541. The windows completed between 1537 and 1540 had been made under the supervision of Bernard van Orley, allegedly Coxcie's teacher. They were rendered in an early Renaissance style characterized by the hybrid Italianate motifs that were in fashion during the 1520S and 1530s. Upon Orley's death in 1541, Coxcie was appointed his successor as cartoon painter for St. Gudule. The first window for which he was responsible, the window of John III of Portugal in the Chapel of the Holy Sacrament, exhibits a distinct caesura: the architectural decoration is high Renaissance in the Vitruvian or Serlian sense and the human faces and postures are derived directly from the examples of Raphael, Leonardo and Michelangelo. After careful perusal of the documents concerning the production of the windows and study of the stylistic differences between the windows made before and after 1541 (and the related preparatory drawings), one cannot but conclude that Michiel Coxcie was the initiator of the use of the high Renaissance style in the Brussels windows. Hitherto Bernard van Orley has been credited for this, on the assumption that he designed the whole cycle, including all its ornamental details and stylistic features. Although his contribution to the diffusion of the high Renaissance style in Netherlandish art was decisive, Michiel Coxcie's return to the Low Countries should not be regarded as the principal incentive for this process. The general predilection for this style to be found after 1540 could be a consequence of the impressive presence of Charles v and his retinue in the Netherlands during that year. The emperor, who came to quell the Ghent resurrection against the central government, brought with him the style that had been used in the triumphal decorations which accompanied his entries to Italian towns during the 1530S. The influence exercised on prevailing taste by the ephemeral monuments erected on the occasion of imperial entries must have been considerable, as the Brussels windows clearly show.

The five books under review represent some of the recent achievements of Italian historiography of the early modern period. The gradual opening of Inquisitional archives in the 1990s and the growing sophistication of historical analysis of Inquisitorial documents have expanded dramatically our knowledge of and familiarity with the institutional and legal histories of the Inquisition and of the operation of justice in the Italian peninsula. One result of this is that the earlier and innovative work of Carlo Ginzburg in Inquisitorial archives has come under scrutiny. The books under review present a new view of the functioning of the Italian Inquisition, and by so doing shed new light on issues of authority and power in early modern Italy. Implicitly, the books under review also posit themselves against microstoria and address the larger working of power over long periods of time.

This thesis aims to reconstruct the history, building phases, original appearance and role in mediaeval Rome of the church of S. Maria in Aracoeli, from its origins to c. 1400. The introduction describes the topographical setting of the church and traces its historiography . The first chapter investigates previous churches, their documentary sources, archaeological evidence and surviving components of church furniture. Patronage, date and original appearance of the so-called ‘ara coeli’, the extant main altar of the former church, are discussed. The second chapter concerns the present church, constructed by the Franciscans after their arrival on the hill in the mid-thirteenth century. The first section covers the building history from a documentary point of view, while the second provides a formal analysis, dedicating a subsection to each surviving part (nave and aisles, transept and adjacent chapel, facade). Archaeological research, together with graphic, epigraphic, literary and documentary sources, establishes the transformations of the building as well as the original plan and elevation of its lost parts (apse and eastern chapels). The third section critically reconsiders the lost decoration of the original apse, its iconography and the reasons for its success. The fourth section focuses on the workshop: analysis of the building technique is combined with the information on the architect gathered from his surviving sepulchral epitaph; the use of spolia and the adoption of gothic window-tracery are also discussed. The final chapter places Aracoeli in its context: the first section examines the civic role of the church as a setting for communal assemblies and a privileged site for judgement, the second considers its role as a favourite site for burial chapels of important Roman families. This thesis clarifies the history and appearance of the Christian site before the Franciscans, and provides a reconstruction of the building stages and original aspect of the present church (as well as of the function of some annexed structures) which differs radically from previous hypotheses, thus situating Aracoeli in a different architectural and cultural framework.

Thesis (M.A.)--Florida State University, 2005.
Advisor: Dr. Cynthia Hahn, Florida State University, School of Visual Arts and Dance, Dept. of Art History. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed June 8, 2005). Document formatted into pages; contains vii, 70 pages. Includes bibliographical references.