PHAIS Seminar Series Week 21: Professor Diana Bullen Presciutti (Art History)

The PHAIS Seminar Series meets weekly in term time to discuss a paper by a visiting Philosopher, Historian, Art Historian or a member of our academic staff.

The Virgin by the Roadside: Visual Culture, Ecology, and Everyday Devotion in Renaissance Umbria

Professor Diana Bullen Presciutti, University of Essex

As he travelled along the via Flaminia in southern Umbria, Michel de Montaigne described, among other details, the flat plain of the Valle Umbra ‘lying between the mountains’ and various rivers and streams (the Nera, the Topino). Past Foligno, on the eastbound via Lauretana, Montaigne observed a ‘most exquisite view of a thousand varied hills’, and ‘the rugged and inaccessible summits of the Apennines.’ The route taken by Montaigne in 1581 would have been lined wide variety of niches, tabernacles, and small chapels. Many of these so-called edicole viarie housed thaumaturgic Marian images, whereas others demarcated territorial boundaries and signposted important intersections. These roadside edicole served as loci of everyday devotion, operating as intermittent moments of engagement with the divine whilst traveling from one place to the next. As the words of Montaigne underscore, the territory bordering the Apennines in central Italy is exceptionally diverse and quick-changing, with both major and minor roads shifting rapidly from dense forest to open plain, from fast flowing rivers to rocky peaks. Taking southeast Umbria as a case study, this paper elucidates how wayside edicole operated in conversation with these ever-shifting landscapes, enabling both travellers and locals to forge distinct and evolving devotional experiences.

Biography

Diana is a Professor of Art History at the University of Essex, and her primary research addresses the visual culture of social problems, popular piety, and institutional charity in late medieval and early modern Italy (1350-1650), focusing on devotional practices, urban and extra-urban ritual, civic ideology, and intersections of class, gender, and cultural production. She is currently at work on several research projects; her next major project centres on the interplay between everyday devotional practices, roadside chapels, and the diverse topography of the Italian peninsula. This book, tentatively titled Roadside Religion: Visual Culture, Ecology, and Everyday Devotion in Renaissance Italy, uncovers how wayside niches, tabernacles, and shrines worked in productive dialogue with their surrounding environs to structure both quotidian and extraordinary patterns of prayer, invocation, and thanksgiving.

The seminar will be delivered in person, but a Zoom link will be available for those who wish to attend remotely.

Image: Pierantonio Mezzastris, Maestà Bella, c. 1470, Carpello (Foligno), Italy