Michele Bacci

The Berardenga Antependium and the Passio Ymaginis Office

The writer proposes that the abbey church of San Salvatore della Bernardino, in the diocese of Arezzo, Italy, was the original location of an ancient panel dated 1215 in the National Gallery in Siena, which is often regarded as the earliest painted antependium in Italian art. As Camaldolese monks asserted the authority of their abbey in the Berardenga area in the first quarter of the 13th century, the antependiums execution was probably conceived as a symbolic act, stressing the power of the monastic institution. Moreover, its iconographic elements were carefully chosen and combined to recall the liturgical rites proper to the abbey of Berardenga, in order to celebrate its local, deep-rooted traditions. The Berardenga antependium, like the cross exposed on the “mensa” in Siena Cathedral on May 3, or the Lucca Volto Santo involved in the Saviours rites, was employed as a useful counterpart to the liturgical lections depicting the Beirut miracle, the story of the Invention of the Cross by St. Helena, and the martyr pope St. Alexander—images it depicts.

The Painted Program of the Armenian Church in Light of Recent Discoveries

This chapter is devoted to a general description of the painted program of the Armenian church and to a new appreciation of its cultural and historical meaning. A special emphasis is laid on those murals which have been rediscovered thanks to the recent restoration campaign, namely the images of Saint Theodore on horseback, Saints Paraskeve and Helena, the vita-icon of Saint John the Baptist, and the Dormition of the Virgin. Each mural is analyzed in its specific iconographical and stylistic features and interpreted in light of its association with Armenian tradition and Famagusta’s specific context of cross-cultural interactions, with a special focus on the authorship of the painted program in its different phases, the connections with Palaiologan arts, the relationship with other painted programs in Famagusta, the worship for both Armenian and Cypriot saints, and the involvement of some images in devotional practices associated with individual or corporate religious life.

Old Restorations and New Discoveries in the Nativity Church, Bethlehem

Since 2010 the Nativity Church in Bethlehem underwent a number of significant restoration works, including the refurbishing of the wooden roof, the consolidation of the Armenian door, and, starting from March 2015, the cleaning and consolidation of the mosaic surfaces. This recent work lead to important discoveries, including the recovery of the figure of an angel which had been hidden under the plastering during the restoration made in 1842. The present article describes and comments on the newly discovered and cleaned portions of mosaics and describes the history of the alterations underwent by them and by their architectural setting since the Crusader period up to our days.

A power of relative importance : San Marco and the holy icons

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, a number of new relics and other holy objects enriched the cultic landscape of Venice. The many pilgrims gathering at the lagoon before embarking for the Jerusalem and Palestine regarded these sacred items as foreshadowing the devotional experience they expected to have in the Holy Land. San Marco came to figure in this expectation only gradually: even if many visitors manifested their admiration for the basilica’s beauty and its sacred treasures, not until the fifteenth century did San Marco’s specific “holy topography”, an internal network of holy attractions, take shape. Based on recent evidence, the present article describes the emergence of new forms of worship for a number of holy icons, namely the Cristo del Capitello, the Virgin Aniketos, and the Nicopea.

Cult-Images and Religious Ethnology: The European Exploration of Medieval Asia and the Discovery of New Iconic Religions

In their exploration of the Mongol Empire during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Western merchants and missionaries experienced for the first time the contact with peoples and cultural traditions which had been almost completely unknown in the times past. Unexpectedly, some features of the Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist use of religious images proved to look quite similar to Western practices and contributed to suggest a feeling of affinity between European and Far Eastern devotional habits. Such a feeling relied on at least three important issues: first of all, the widespread use of three-dimensional statues (instead of icons, as in the Christian East) caught the Westerners’ imagination; second, they were struck by the complex and highly developed iconographic code employed by the religions of the Far East; third, they understood that the “idolaters” of Asia shared the Christian conception of the sacred image as a reproduction of a much older archetype, being an authentic, original, or even “acheir...