| Domenico Beccafumi dedicated thirty years of his career (1519--1551) to the decoration of Siena Cathedral. This study is the first to examine his commissions in marble, bronze, stucco and fresco as a programmatic whole and to consider them in relation to the spaces they articulate and to the purported miracles, relics and rituals that occupied or took place at these sites. Situating the decorations at the nexus between art, politics, and religion in sixteenth-century Siena, my project demonstrates how the form and content of Beccafumi's program memorializes key events, images and liturgical arrangements of the past in a way that constitutes a kind of reconstruction of sacred space. Engaging with current scholarship on the ways artistic styles might become associated with a particular group or ideology, I demonstrate how Beccafumi's distinctive manner was initially adopted by the tyrannical Petrucci regime (1497--1524) but was subsequently appropriated by the renewed republic to promote their ideals and to create a sense of continuity in their rule.;Chapter One examines the historical and legendary foundations of the cathedral site and its development to demonstrate how Beccafumi's works articulate charged loci associated with Siena's civic religion. Chapters Two through Four focus on his Old Testament narratives executed in marble commesso for the pavement and consider the themes of sacrifice, priesthood and the law in light of the tumultuous spiritual and political circumstances of their commission.;Chapter Five demonstrates how Beccafumi's works in bronze, fresco and stucco further articulate the series of sacred spaces defined by the pavement narratives. The bronze candle-holding angels on the piers guide the privileged beholder towards an otherworldly vision in the sanctuary where Vecchietta's bronze figure of the Risen Christ atop the high altar appears to ascend to heaven amid a glory of angels as depicted in Beccafumi's dramatic backdrop of the Ascension frescoed in the apse.;This study proposes new ways of thinking about how Renaissance artists created images that present their fictions as something that unfolds before the viewer's eyes, in this case, by incorporating the architecture and pre-existing decoration of a space into a novel thematic framework that commemorates the past as a means of promoting a powerful new message for the future. |
