Topograhy, Temporality, and Materiality in the Veneration of Saints in Southern Italy (13th–14th Centuries)

Adrian Bremenkamp

The presence of saints on earth is dependent on images and relics. Relics are material remains of saints and thus a substance that stands between the worlds: still connected to the earth from which they originate, but already partaking of paradise by virtue of their inherent virtus. As mere material, they are semantically deficient: they require the representational power of writing and image, as well as spatial contextualization, in order to activate their mere materiality. The project examines the relationship between image and relic in the context of the cults of saints and their representational media for dynastic or communal legitimation strategies and political identity formation. Southern Italy in the late 13th to the mid-14th century offers itself as a framework for investigation, as the Kingdom of Naples, ruled by the French Angevins since 1266, entered into changing alliances with Hungary and Aragon and the ruling dynasty actively pursued the project of sacralizing their dynasty. The spatial and medial dispersion of sacred political settings will be researched as it is only against this background that the site and media specificity of sacred forms of representation can be addressed in a comparative perspective, thereby making it possible to reconstruct a topography of the veneration of saints in Southern Italy. Complementary to this, the temporality and historicity inscribed in the objects will be examined. Did the site-specific modes of representation chosen for long-established saints differ from those for more recently canonized ones? Which visual media were mobilized to authenticate recent translations and to support and advance unfinished canonization processes? The starting point is a comparison of the pictorial concepts developed for St. Januarius and St. Louis of Toulouse in Naples in the early 14th century, which can be used as examples to illuminate the reciprocal conditionality of materiality, temporality, and site-specificity.