Introduction: The Twenty-First Century Vittoria Colonna

Although—unusually, for an early modern woman writer—Vittoria Colonna has long been considered part of the canon, several factors have inhibited a true appreciation of her importance as a literary innovator and model. The current critical moment is conducive to a re-examination of her significance, in the light of recent research on the early modern Italian tradition of women’s writing, on the Catholic Reform movement and its literary expression, and on developments in Italian literature in the last four decades of the sixteenth century. Consideration of these factors reveal Colonna as a figure of wide-reaching influence in her time and a powerful shaping influence on later traditions of Italian literature, in the late Renaissance and beyond.

The Sacrilege of Soot : Liturgical Decorum and the Black Madonna of Loreto

The sanctuary of Loreto, one of Italy’s most renowned pilgrimage destinations, was built to house the relic of the Virgin Mary’s childhood home, but many pilgrims directed their prayers instead to the shrine’s cult image, a Marian statue with a dark appearance. In the late sixteenth century, a time of Catholic reform, many devotees attributed the sculpture’s color to the residue from candle smoke, despite the fact that this departed from reformers’ strict rules of liturgical decorum. The perception of the Virgin of Loreto’s blackened surface as simultaneously sacred and sacrilegious returned agency to the artwork itself. The statue’s sooty accretions suggested negligence and cried out for restoration, but they also defended the cult of images in early modern Catholicism.

Stefan Bauer, The Invention of Papal History, Oxford University Press 2020

Review of Stefan Bauer, The Invention of Papal History: Onofrio Panvinio Between Renaissance and Catholic Reform, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2020