NYU's Medieval and Renaissance Center is pleased to present
a talk by Bronwen Wilson (UCLA).
Sacred and Material Conversions: Jacopo Ligozzi and the Descrizione del Sacro Monte della Vernia (1612)
Abstract:
Cross-hatching converges in inky crevices of rocky escarpments that undulate across folio sheets of the Descrizione del Sacro Monte della Vernia. Turning the pages of this unusual and large volume, which recreates La Verna, the mountainous retreat of St. Francis, virtual pilgrims confront unruly lithic obstacles that provoke uncertainty about the path ahead. Cliffs, surging upward from the surrounding terrain, fracture into perilous shards, accentuating precipitous settings where miracles and visions occurred in the past. Devised by the Florentine Franciscan Lino Moroni and the artist, Jacopo Ligozzi, then employed by the Medici dukes to create designs at the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, the printing project was intended to promote the site as a second Calvary.
Elemental forces manifested in stone played an instrumental role in the process of both reviving the cult and also in the conversion of the mountainous site into a printed book. Still perceived by some to be a living substance, stone attested to the inventive power of nature. Local pietra paesina, for instance, when cut open, revealed landscapes made without human hands. Fissures resemble chasms and subterranean structures are condensed into pictures, not unlike the effect of the burin scratching and digging into the copper plate. Obdurate yet dynamic and sometimes otherworldly in its formations, stone generated artistic experimentation with scale and with time. It becomes a protagonist in Ligozzi’s work for the Observant Franciscans in pietra dura furnishings in Florence and in the printed book. Recreating the sacred landscape from La Verna, the lithic imagery in the Descrizione unmoors beholders and then reorients them. An exemplary conversion machine, as I argue, virtual pilgrims anticipate transformations to come, the book’s moving parts inciting them to return to the journey again and again.
November 2, 2021, 6:00 PM, Zoom link to follow
