‘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.
The Cult of Relics in the Letters and ‘Dialogues’ of Pope Gregory the Great: A Lexicographical Study
Late antiquity and the early Middle Ages witnessed a change in the Christian attitude toward the remains of the saints. Holy bodies came to be treated less and less as normal corpses, worthy of special veneration but still subject to many of the laws and customs which had regulated the treatment of human remains in pagan Antiquity. They came rather to be viewed as cult objects which could be moved or even divided up according to the demands of religion with little regard for earlier prohibitions of these practices. This change occurred relatively early in the Greek, eastern portion of the Roman Empire. In the mid-fourth century the Caesar Gallus translated a saint's body from one tomb to another, and less than two centuries later Justinian asked Pope Hormisdas for portions of the bodies of the apostles. Despite some outstanding exceptions such as the translations performed by St. Ambrose, the Christians of the West were more conservative in these matters. Nevertheless, by the ninth century at the very latest, western Christians had followed the lead of the eastern church in both translating and dismembering holy bodies.