‘Ad Honorem et Reverentiam Sanctissimi Patris’: Manno Bandini's statue of Boniface VIII
Abstract In 1975, Carlo Ragghianti published a passionate essay on Manno Bandini's statue of Boniface VIII in Bologna (figure 1).1 Ragghianti's article was spurred by the exhibition of the statue at the Museo Poldi Pezzoli in Milan and the accompanying essay written by Enrico Castelnuovo.2 In the lengthy brochure, Castelnuovo highlighted the propagandistic value of this Trecento statue and its political significance. Ragghianti rejected outright the discussion of the statue in terms of its political meaning and instead stressed its value as a work of art. The author's barely veiled criticism focused on those like Toesca and Venturi who had previously disparaged the statue as ugly and rude.3 Ragghianti, instead, argued that its archaism was in line with contemporary Roman achievements and in particular with the neo-Egyptian style that had entered the art of Rome with the Cosmati and had been given new life by Arnolfo di Cambio. The author mentioned Arnolfo's Florentine portrait of Boniface as an example (figure 2). By way of conclusions, Ragghianti drew attention to Boniface VIII's ears and argued that such an abstract and fanciful construction could not find its raison-d'être in the statue's political significance but rather in its aesthetic essence. The aesthetic essence was, he concluded, meaningful in and for itself.
The Voices of the Saints: Speaking Reliquaries
Although they have often been considered as mere representational labels identifying the relic contained, body-part reliquaries, or what I would prefer to call shaped reliquaries, participate in a fluid exchange of signs, "speaking" much more than their contents. First, they often do not contain what they seem to say they contain. Second, their speech is complexly metaphorical. Third, in that both function primarily as metaphor, there is a peculiar slippage of meaning and importance between contained and container. Fourth and finally, shaped reliquaries of body parts signify specifically through the implied fragmentation of the relic-body, in this way insisting upon a larger whole. Such fragmentation was a problematic but powerful new discourse in the central Middle Ages.
Reid on Hypotheses and the Ether; A Reassessment
In recent years historians of science have come to see that Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man had a profound impact on the development of British methodological thought in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Larry Laudan has argued that Reid was “the first major British philosopher to take Newton’s opinions on induction, causality, and hypotheses seriously”; and that Reid was thereby instrumental in changing the character of British methodological discourse in the Enlightenment.(1) Geoffrey Cantor has examined in detail the influence of Reid’s critique of ether theories and hypotheses in the Essays on leading protagonists in the nineteenth-century debates surrounding the wave theory of light,(2) and Richard Olson has traced the origins of the scientific style of British physics in the Victorian period to the writings of Reid and other Common Sense philosophers. (3) As well as delineating Reid’s influence, Laudan, Cantor, and Olson have attempted to identify the problems to which he addressed himself in articulating his methodology, and they have analysed with some care the internal structure of his methodological views. Thanks to the work of these historians, therefore, we have a fairly comprehensive picture of Reid’s methodology and its fortunes in the nineteenth century.