| My project fundamentally re-presents some topics in early modern history and art that have already received a fair amount of scholarly attention, such as sixteenth- and seventeenth-century image reform, and the Catholic Counterreformation, and that may seem to have their theoretical questions already answered. And yet, the story told by the evidence uncovered and brought together by my research diverges, in many ways, from the line taken in much scholarship, and may call into question some previously-drawn conclusions about the meanings, means, manifestations and geography of early modern Catholic reforms. Through careful consideration of diverse primary sources gathered largely from archival research, I map out the often unexpected means and directions whereby Catholic reform in the contiguous spheres of hagiography, canonization, sacred imagery, and Eucharistic devotion, were and were not worked out. The resultant inverted geographies of orthodoxy that I delineate collectively call for a recalibration of scholarship's configuration of the Catholic Reformation, and a reconsideration of what Trent and reform meant in early modern Italy and Catholic Europe.;While my entirely new account of Rubens' Chiesa Nuova high altarpiece commission of 1606--08 remains at the heart of my dissertation, my work to analyze the project in the context of previously unknown or unconsidered evidence situates Rubens' altarpieces within a continuum of, and in continuity with, certain artistic, religious and social trends that spanned the Cinque- and Seicento and that, when considered together, might constitute the beginning of something like a reassessment of the history of the Catholic Reformation, or so-called "Counterreformation". My work on the figures of the Beati moderni, popular champions of localized Catholic reform and figures not free of controversy such as Filippo Neri, Ignatius and Francis Xavier, Carlo Borromeo, audaciously celebrated as bona fide saints, on certain kinds of hagiographic imagery figuring the Beati moderni, and on the Roman Curia's little-known censorship of such imagery, fundamentally belies scholarly assertions that these pictures served the Counterreformation's central demands to control authoritatively the meaning of religious images and the cult of the saints. On the contrary, images of the Beati moderni would have carried a distinctly subversive charge. This calls for a reassessment of an entire newly-constituted genre of sacred images and especially altarpieces after Trent that depict the Beati moderni. |
