‘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.
Continents of Liberty: Emerson and Gerald Vizenor’s Chair of Tears
Ralph Waldo Emerson protested what came to be known as the Trail of Tears in a public letter to President Martin Van Buren in 1838. Th e Cherokee Nation, he argued, had been cheated by a “sham treaty” (Emerson, “Letter” 50), the will of the people ignored, and a false acquiescence to removal written into law. In making a passionate appeal to the highest “chair” of the land, Emerson underscored the great political and moral stakes involved: