The matter of miracles: Neapolitan baroque architecture and sanctity

By Helen Hills

This book investigates baroque architecture through the lens of San Gennaro’s miraculously liquefying blood in Naples. This vantage point allows a bracing and thoroughly original rethink of the power of baroque relics and reliquaries. It shows how a focus on miracles produces original interpretations of architecture, sanctity and place which will engage architectural historians everywhere. The matter of the baroque miracle extends into a rigorous engagement with natural history, telluric philosophy, new materialism, theory and philosophy. The study will transform our understanding of baroque art and architecture, sanctity and Naples. Bristling with new archival materials and historical insights, this study lifts the baroque from its previous marginalisation to engage fiercely with materiality and potentiality and thus unleash baroque art and architecture as productive and transformational.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Feb 2, 2021
• ISBN: 9781526100399

Helen Hills

Helen Hills is Professor of History of Art at the University of York

Book preview

Prologue: the analogous relic

Mostly running, everyone [made] at once for Naples, like madmen, not, indeed, in the hope that these walls would be sufficient to protect them, but to come to die – as they said to anyone who asked them – in a city populated, and filled with saints’ bodies and relics; there not being, in truth, among those one encountered, a single person with [any] breath or strength [left] to retell what he had seen or heard; but carrying with them nothing other than [their] fear and apprehension, confused, dispirited, and dumbfounded, they could only cry out, without pausing in their flight: ‘Great ruination, great ruination, Last Judgement, death, fire, wrath of God!’ (Giulio Cesare Braccini, Dell’Incendio Fattosi nel Vesuvio, 1632)¹

The matter of the relic

To think of San Gennaro’s Treasury Chapel (Plates 1 & 3) as extensive in physical or temporal terms produces a linear narrative, an orderly description of the chapel, and is to organize it spatially and chronologically into distributed blocks. It orders different parts of the chapel into discrete functions. To think of the chapel as sheltering the relics – of San Gennaro and of the other protectors – is insufficient to them. Relics were not simply moved from one point to another (translation); in that movement they transformed and became (variation). And, on assuming residence in the chapel, each new reliquary statue altered it. The translation of relics represented the acquisition of a power that the community regarded as superior to human nature. Simply to tell such events in linear sequence is insufficient to them.

This book centres on relics as occupying particularly fertile points at the intersection of materiality and spirituality, holiness and spatiality, body and place. The Chapel of San Gennaro, as a treasury for the relics of Naples’ proliferating protector saints, permits a consideration of the relationships between relic and place in both the narrowest and a more extended sense. Rather than think in terms of fixed linear scales and thus of the city as the site of the chapel, and chapel, in turn, as site for the conservation and veneration of relics and their miracles, this book proposes that the economy of the relic produces change in place and place as change. Relic as locus of the sacred does not secure place. Thus the implication of holiness in the architectural production of place is brought into view.

A relic is a trace which guarantees aura (Plate 8). Through the relic intersect orbits of time, movement and place. In other words, relics combine different orders of time and different orders of place. That intersection focuses on a corporeal remnant of the body of a human being deemed to be a saint, which, in turn, permits and requires thinking the interplay of time, movement, and space in relation to the materiality of the sacred. Desire enmeshes one flow with another through the relic. Yet relics emerge as relics only through their staging in a reliquary. Relics are staged architecturally. Architecture stages, comments on, amplifies, and produces the relics that it supposedly simply houses. Though apparently at one step removed, architecture is, on the contrary, essential to the economy of the relic. The Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro forged and sustained such an economy and, indeed, continues to do so. More than this, relics displaced and changed the place of their staging, including the place of architecture. Thus architecture enters forcefully into the configuration. Architecture must therefore be considered in relation to trace and aura, the materiality of the sacred, and the interplay of temporality, spatiality, and movement. This is the challenge that the relic throws down to architecture and that I take up in this book.

For long objects of distaste, especially to art historians, relics are now widely recognized as significant for histories of theology, devotion, art, and architecture. Sofia Boesch Gajano, Caroline Walker Bynum, Patrick Geary, Barbara Drake Boehm, Jean-Claude Schmitt, Peter Dinzelbacher, and Dieter Bauer have transformed the field.² In recent years art historians have followed these scholars. In art history Alexandra Herz and Ingo Herklotz have situated relics and architecture in an archaeologizing and reactionary devotional impulse that they see as characteristic of early modern Rome.³ John Beldon Scott interprets the Shroud as fulcrum for the articulation and consolidation of Savoyard rule and dynastic authority in Turin.⁴ Paul Binski treats Canterbury Cathedral as glorious reliquary and gigantic representation of St Thomas Becket’s relics.⁵ Cynthia Hahn’s study of medieval reliquaries examines a great variety of beautiful reliquaries as ‘containers’ and ‘works of art’ that mediate religious experience and political and institutional demands in terms of ‘representation’.⁶ She is particularly interested in the relationship between the nature of the relic and the form of its housing. Beyond the history of art, remarkable new thinking about relics has come from Georges Didi-Huberman. His reflections on ex-voto artefacts and on the Shroud of Turin have interrogated the indexical presupposition about these objects.

A divide has arisen in relics scholarship. Art historians have concentrated overwhelmingly on reliquaries, while historians are more concerned with the use of relics in worship or for political ends. Early modern historians and architectural historians have focused on a historiographical and archaeological deployment of relics conceived in terms of representation. Thus relics’ role in religious devotion, pilgrimage, and the consolidation of authority by secular and ecclesiastical rulers has received attention.⁷ Inter-relationships between ecclesiastical and courtly power have been approached from the point of view of secular patronage, and thus the spiritual and ecclesiastical are posited as an important mode by which secular power extended and consolidated its claims. Thus relics have been treated overwhelmingly in representational terms. Their strange spatial and temporal capacities have been smoothed out in linear historicism and ignored.

I am indebted to the work of all these scholars, but I depart from them in two significant respects. First, I draw the instability and destabilizing qualities of relics into direct relation with issues of materiality, spatiality (particularly architecture), and temporality. Second, I challenge the way in which what might loosely be termed the ‘religious’ dimension of relics has tended to be condensed too hastily into something called ‘ritual’ seen as an extension of secular power.⁸ This book explores the implication in and through relics of the registers of the theological, ecclesiastical, and devotional in materiality, spatiality, and temporality. Thus I aim to trouble the currently too steady grounding of relic in ‘place’ treated as if that place is fixed and stable and is simply enriched spiritually and politically through close identification with saintly remains. In short, I wish to free the relic from the shackles of representation and to treat it less in terms of identity than in terms of difference and analogy.

In their brilliant book Anachronic Renaissance, Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood argue that alongside the timeless object that resists anchoring in time and whose historicity is unclear is ‘a completely different kind of object whose historicity, its link to a point in time is the entire basis of its value’.⁹ Such an object, Nagel and Wood suggest, is called a relic. Writing of relics in medieval religious culture, Nagel refers to relics as marking ‘a limit point in the system of signs’, seeing them in distinction to images, ‘even the most revered’, which, they suggest, were ‘eminently replaceable’.¹⁰

By contrast with images that tended to propagate their power through replication, the relic, suggests Nagel, ‘was defined as the unsubstitutable sign, a sign whose physical relationship to its origin was a necessary part of its meaning’.¹¹ He argues that as relics were demoted, artworks were ‘raised to relic-status’, but ‘the idea that powerful originals were somehow effective through their copies never died away’.¹² For the purposes of Nagel and Wood’s argument, a great range of objects falls into this category. Nagel and Wood distinguish this sort of object from the ‘structural object’ which ‘hesitates’ between its possible historical identities, not settling on any of them, and thus able to function both as a marker of a great span of time and as a usable instrument in a living ritual. For Nagel and Wood, the artwork most effectively generates the effect of doubling or bending of time, in an event whose relation to time is plural. They show how even ‘irreplaceable’ relics have indeed been replaced. Thus after the emperor Nero stripped many temples of their gifts and melted down images of gold and silver including those of the Penates, the next emperor, Galba, simply had the statues recast.¹³

For Wood and Nagel what is of interest is the way in which artworks maintain identity despite alteration or renovation. This they see as a ‘sustaining myth of art in premodern Europe’.¹⁴ They argue that the power of the image, or the work of art, to fold time was neither discovered nor invented in the Renaissance, but that what was distinctive was its ‘apprehensiveness about the temporal instability of the artwork, and its recreation of the artwork as an occasion for reflection on that instability’.¹⁵ The work is late, they suggest, first because it succeeds some reality that it re-presents, and then late again when that re-presentation is repeated for successive recipients. To many that double postponement ‘came to seem troublesome, calling for correction, compensation, or, at the very least, explanation’.¹⁶ They suggest that in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Christians wondered whether the temporal instability of images made them more or less suitable for religious devotion. Thus while the use of the term ‘anachronism’ implies a requirement to see art in euchronic terms, a coeval witness in relation to a singular time, and history as having an inalienable relationship with historicism, a consideration of the artwork as ‘anachronic’, by contrast, describes what an artwork does, qua art, in a ‘late’ relation to time.

Nagel and Wood’s work lends support to my approach to architecture as something that cannot adequately be dealt with in purely historicist terms and as more than index that points to its own efficient causes. I wish to develop their treatment of the relic through a consideration of its theological and spatial import, to show that the ‘origin’ and ‘place’ of the relic were necessarily plural and unstable.¹⁷ In play here, then, are relics’ productive capacities to destabilize linear conceptions of time and space.

Relics and the Eucharist

Christian theology bases the legitimacy of the cult of relics on the sacred character of the body of Christ destined to transmit a message of spiritual health through his incarnation, the Eucharist, his death, his Resurrection, and the guarantee of the resurrection of bodies on the day of the Last Judgment. The resurrection of the body seems to demand a theory of the person in which body is integral. God became incarnate and died for the sins of others. Thus all bodily events (including the terrible wounds of martyrs) were possible manifestations of grace.

While the cult of relics depends on the Resurrection, it is not focused on Christ’s body. A belief in Christ’s corporal relics is logically contradicted by the Ascension and the Eucharist, as Guibert of Nogent made clear. While the whole body of Christ mounted to heaven, the corpus sacramental, the host, is not a relic, a dead body, but a living body. Aquinas argues that the blood of Christ in its entirety is elsewhere. Christ’s blood, free from original sin, is entirely glorified and revived. He admits, however, that ‘certain churches preserve as a relic a small amount of Christ’s blood. His body is therefore not revived in the integrity of all its parts.’ Aquinas resolves this apparent conundrum: ‘As for the blood that certain churches preserve as a relic, it did not flow from the side of Christ, but miraculously, they say, from an image of Christ [imagine Christi] that someone had struck.’¹⁸ Thus this miraculous blood is superfluous, extra-corporeal, and the image from which it flows is prosthetic, almost cyborgian.

In the West the cult of relics began theologically with St Augustine, but was further defined in the Middle Ages, under the pressure of heretical movements which denied their value.¹⁹ Initially Augustine opposed the cult of relics, but towards the end of his life he became convinced of the relics of St Stephen and their miraculous powers, which he advanced in the final books of De civitate Dei. In effect, Augustine proposes that the power of the saints and their relics, based on the resurrection of Christ, were capable of accomplishing miracles of healing and resurrection of bodies, as sign and guarantee of the possibility of the final resurrection of all bodies through analogy with the resurrection of Christ.²⁰ Thus relics receive theological affirmation in analogical terms. Their analogous capacities are recognized and operate analogically.

Important contributions to the theological significance of relics came from various quarters, but vital for Western European thinking were Gregory the Great and St Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas justified the cult of relics as a consequence of the cult of saints, ‘temples and organs of the Holy Spirit which lived in them and which worked in them’.²¹ God shows his agreement by multiplying miracles in their presence. For Aquinas, as for Gregory, there is no relationship of cause and effect between relic and miracle. The relic does not possess power to execute miracles; through the miracle God reveals the virtues of the saint. The relic is the analogous site of the saint for the divine. Aquinas attributes dignity and sanctity to saints’ bodies ‘because of the soul which once was united with them and now enjoys God, and because of God, of whom the soul and the body were servants’.²² Thus the relic is the privileged site of dislocation as analogy for the divine. But the relic is important, because it is the body. The human person for Aquinas is a tight and integral union of soul and body. Indeed, the doctrine of the resurrection of the body seems to require a theory of the person in which body is integral. According to Aquinas, the soul survives the death of the body, but the full person does not exist until matter (the body) is restored to its form at the end of time. ‘The soul . . . is not the full man and my soul is not I.’²³ What is temporary is not physical distinctiveness – including gender – but decay of material being. It is this conception of body as integral to personhood that helps explain why relics were treated as if they were the saints. Most objects, unlike relics, were not objects of veneratio. Thus images are, in this context, inferior to relics and sacred objects, such as the Eucharist or the Cross, which is a signum and not an imago.

Much debate circulated around the location and quality of virtus. Cyril of Jerusalem (d. 386) and Gregory of Nazianzus (d. c.390) credited relics with a special power of virtus. Cyril refers to the healing power of St Paul’s handkerchief and belt, arguing that saints’ bodies possessed a comparable healing power.²⁴ Virtus was contagious, activated as much as transmitted by touch. According to Gregory of Nazianzus, virtus was present when relics were touched or venerated.²⁵ Later John Chrysostom (d. 407) claimed that martyrs’ shrines could exercise as great a power as the bones they contained.²⁶ Gregory the Great suggested that the saints’ virtus works through their living bodies and through their mortal remains, sanctifying the places marked by their contact. But this virtus, which appears to work spontaneously, is related theologically to God and to faith in God.²⁷

Relics were signs of the non-putrefaction of the saintly body. Each fragment keeps the virtus of the integral whole body.²⁸ Thus a relic was a trace that guaranteed aura; in turn, the auratic made demands. The intense concern with relics is bound to a materialist conception of bodily resurrection, related to both Eucharistic theology and a concern with body as locus of biological process. Far more than simply markers of sanctity or precious objects to be venerated, relics were productive and disruptive spatially and temporally. The metaphors Aquinas uses to describe the work of the Holy Spirit in the relic are architectural and biological. Relics were ‘temples’ and ‘organs’, an assemblage of inorganic, organic, and Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit dwelled in, worked through, and transfused them. Architecture was bound in the relic to the innermost recesses of the body. Architecture, therefore, does not follow after the relic, as has been assumed.²⁹ Relics were already architecturalized. And that architecturalization and incorporation informed their operationality in analogous