medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Laura Jacobus makes an important point about considering the activity of a restorer. With regard to repainting after canonization, two further points may be made:
1. The portraits in the roundels beneath Fra Angelico's Crucifixion in the chapter room at San Marco are relatively small and certainly subsidiary. Yet those of Raymond of Peņafort and of Vincent Ferrer either were given full haloes at some time after their painting (presumably after their canonizations) or else had full haloes initially (which would hardly accord with a belief that Dominicans in the 1430s and '40s will, in the case of recent saints, have always strictly observed the convention of restricting full haloes to those accorded papal canonization).
2. Repainting after canonization is not synonymous with repainting immediately upon canonization. With regard to the roundels in this San Marco fresco and assuming that Raymond's and Vincent's full haloes are later additions, it is possible to suppose that Vincent (canonized in 1455) may have received his full halo together with Raymond shortly after the latter's canonization in 1601. In 1601, of course, we are already well into the Counter-Reformation, when there was both an emphasis on coronal splendors of different sorts and a widespread willingness to alter earlier portraits accordingly (think of all the BVMs who received new or greatly enlarged crowns during this period). And even, perhaps, a willingness to alter very subsidiary portraits one thinks unlikely to have been retouched earlier.
Best again,
John Dillon
On Tuesday, November 21, 2006, at 3:17 am (though it was not quite so early in the UK), Laura Jacobus wrote:
> John Dillon and Jim Buslag's point about haloes having been repainted
> after
> canonization triggers another thought. From the televison pictures of
> these
> saints, which scanned them for a couple of seconds in close-up, the
> faces
> struck me as quite heavily repainted. Near-contemporary re-tooling of
>
> haloes upon canonization seems unlikely in the case of what were
> evidently
> quite small subsidiary panels, but I wouldn't put it past a
> nineteenth-century restorer to re-gild the backgrounds with haloes.
>
> The distinction between Beati and Saints looks to be rigidly upheld by
> Fra
> Angelico himself in the National Gallery panel, and also in his two
> Depositions. If memory serves me, one of Gerge Kaftal's several
> volume set
> on images of the saints includes another Dominican panel of beati, and
> goes
> into the halo issue a bit more. It's attributed to someone like 'the
> Master
> of the Dominican Beati'. One would certainly expect the Dominicans to
> be
> strict about these things.
>
> So- two beati, canonised by a restorer, is something to bear in mind.
>
> Laura
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "John Dillon" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: 20 November 2006 21:27
> Subject: Re: Fra Angelico's mystery saints
>
>
> medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
>
> As has already been noted in this thread, some orders extended the
> convention of full haloes for saints to beati whose saintliness they
> were
> actively affirming. Examples already mentioned include the
> Augustinian
> Agostino Novello, shown here in the famous altarpiece by Simone
> Martini (ca.
> 1333-36) :
> http://gallery.euroweb.hu/art/s/simone/4altars/5agostin/1agostin.jpg
> and the Carmelite Albert of Trapani, shown here in a painting of ca.
> 1430 by
> Filippo Lippi:
> http://www.wga.hu/html/l/lippi/filippo/1430/1madonna.html
> http://www.palazzo-medici.it/mediateca/immagine.php?id=38
>
> Is there any reason to believe that Dominicans could not be equally
> latitudinarian in this regard? If they were, then one might reduce
> "loads
> of Dominican beati" to just those Dominican beati whose causes the
> order was
> actively pursuing and/or who may have enjoyed a contemporary cult
> within its
> Roman province.
>
> Best again,
> John Dillon
>
> PS: The Dominican worthies portrayed in roundels beneath Fra
> Angelico's
> fresco of the Crucifixion in the chapter room of San Marco in Florence
>
> include several whose haloes are full rather than radiate (among the
> latter,
> BTW, are the portraits of Jordan of Saxony and of Nicola Paglia I
> noted
> earlier). These were once attributed to assistants, but William Hood,
> _Fra
> Angelico at San Marco_ (Yale U.P., 1993), 187-88, has no difficulty in
>
> assigning them to A. himself. Apart from Dominic, two (Ramond of
> Peņafort,
> Vincent Ferrer) have what appear to be full haloes:
> http://tinyurl.com/yg3wlv
> But these may be due to repainting after their canonizations. For the
> full
> list, see Hood, op. cit., p. 317, n. 66.
>
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