Art and Miracle in Renaissance Tuscany

In this book, Robert Maniura explores the role and importance of the miraculous image in the art and devotional practices of Renaissance Italy. Using the records of Giuliano Guizzelmi, a Tuscan lawyer, he focuses on his stories of miracles of local shrines, including Santa Maria delle Carceri, a painting of the Virgin Mary on a wall of the town prison, and the relic of her belt in the Prato Cathedral. Guizzelmi's stories build a powerful picture of the visual culture of the period, involving images that were kissed, worn and applied to sick bodies in rituals of healing. They also place his devotional activity in the context of his everyday life. Moreover, the paintings of Guizzelmi's burial chapel also engage with contemporary pictorial conventions and show how his concerns can inform our understanding of contemporary art, notably the works of his late fifteenth-century contemporaries, Ghirlandaio, Perugino and Filippino Lippi.

Introduction; 1. Giuliano Guizzelmi: a lawyer of Prato; 2. The Guizzelmi chapel, the large crucifix and the eucharist; 3. The relic of the Virgin: the Holy Girdle; 4. The miraculous image of the Virgin: Santa Maria delle Carceri; 5. Guizzelmi's miracles: badges and prints; 6. Votive offerings: making oneself in wax; 7. Making miracles; Conclusion.

Robert Maniura is Reader in the History of Art at Birkeck College, University of London. He has been a Fellow at Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies and has held a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship and a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship. He is the author of Pilgrimage to Images in the Fifteenth Century: The Origins of the Cult of Our Lady of Częstochowa (2004) and the co-editor of Presence: The Inherence of the Prototype within Images and Other Objects (2006).