Theatrical Reliquaries: Afterlives of St Mary Magdalene in Early Seventeenth-century Florence

Author(s):  
Paul Cefalu

The second chapter assesses the early modern reception of the noli me tangere and hortulanus sequences of John 20. Early modern writers such as Robert Southwell, Gervase Markham, Thomas Walkington, and Nicholas Breton all reconstruct the pedagogical lessons vouchsafed to Mary throughout John 20. Mary is petitioned to recall to herself the words of Christ that she has already heard and to await patiently her post-resurrection reconciliation with Christ as Word of God. Several of these sixteenth- and seventeenth-century accounts of Mary at the tomb show a keen appreciation of the method of discipleship misunderstanding used by John, even emulating that rhetorical approach in their treatments of Magdalene’s misplaced grief. Final sections of the chapter discuss the glorification of Mary in Hans Holbein’s Noli Me Tangere painting as well as in the poetry and prose of Richard Crashaw, Henry Vaughan, and Anna Trapnel.


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 29-45
Author(s):  
Juan Luis Burke

This essay analyzes the viceregal Mexican artist Juan Correa’s painting The Conversion of St. Mary Magdalene, from the late seventeenth century. A depiction of a woman explicitly displaying traits of her sensuality and sexuality in a Mexican viceregal artwork, the painting visually conveys symbolic embodiments of the feminine condition. These embodiments refer to religious penitence, self-reflection, mysticism, and the vita contemplativa. Moreover, I examine the episodic nature of the painting, associating it with feminine devotional practices. The painting’s pictorial configuration apparently relates to the Jesuit theological tradition, specifically to the spatial and embodied representations expressed in the engravings contained in the Adnotationes et meditationes in evangelia (1595), by Jerónimo Nadal. The essay underscores how Correa represented, spatially, a series of notions related to feminine affections, sensibilities, religiosity, and spirituality. Finally, this investigation puts forward the thesis that the painting, as an artifact, prompted devotional prayer, fostering notions such as penitence and self-reflection, and aiming to help its worshippers achieve reformatio or spiritual conversion.


2012 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-52
Author(s):  
Aušra Baniulytė

Abstract This article examines the role of myth in Italian cultural politics in the Baltic region during the Baroque era. A special focus for this analysis is the legend about a “kinship” between the Florentine Pazzi family and the Lithuanian noble family of the Pacas (Polish: Pac), known in the sources of the seventeenth century as “the Pazzi in Lithuania.” This legend prevailed particularly in the second half of the Baroque period, having developed under the influence of different political, religious, and social aspects of Baroque culture. It played an important part in the Papacy’s interests in Poland-Lithuania during the Counter-Reformation and in the commercial activity of Italian merchants in the Baltic, which coincided with the expansion of the monastic orders in this region and the cult of St. Mary Magdalene de’ Pazzi, to whom the Pacas family expressed their devotion.


1963 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jozef Cohen
Keyword(s):  

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 236-253
Author(s):  
Wu Huiyi ◽  
Zheng Cheng

The Beitang Collection, heritage of a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jesuit library in Beijing now housed in the National Library of China, contains an incomplete copy of Pietro Andrea Mattioli’s commentary on an Italian edition of Pedanius Dioscorides's De materia medica (1568) bearing extensive annotations in Chinese. Two hundred odd plant and animal names in a northern Chinese patois were recorded alongside illustrations, creating a rare record of seventeenth-century Chinese folk knowledge and of Sino-Western interaction in the field of natural history. Based on close analysis of the annotations and other contemporary sources, we argue that the annotations were probably made in Beijing by one or more Chinese low-level literati and Jesuit missionaries during the first two decades of the seventeenth century. We also conclude that the annotations were most likely directed at a Chinese audience, to whom the Jesuits intended to illustrate European craftsmanship using Mattioli’s images. This document probably constitutes the earliest known evidence of Jesuits' attempts at transmitting the art of European natural history drawings to China.


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