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  • Art and the Relic Cult of St. Antoninus in Renaissance Florence by Sally J. Cornelison
  • David S. Peterson
Art and the Relic Cult of St. Antoninus in Renaissance Florence. By Sally J. Cornelison.[Visual Culture in Early Modernity.] (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing. 2012. Pp. xv, 358. $119.95. ISBN 978-0-7546-6714-8.)

A notary’s son and follower of Giovanni Dominici, St. Antoninus (Antonino Pierozzi, 1389–1459) rose rapidly among the Observant Dominicans to become prior of the convent of San Marco (1439–44), archbishop of Florence (1446–59), and one of Renaissance Italy’s leading church reformers. His legacy was complex. The author of a Summa Theologica and numerous devotional writings, Antoninus was renowned as a moralist who championed the poor, ecclesiastical liberty, and Florence’s republican traditions while maintaining cordial relations with Cosimo de’ Medici. Savonarola cited him to justify his own political activism, and the Medici popes Leo X and Clement VII sought to appropriate his memory (and expunge Savonarola’s) by sponsoring his canonization process in 1516–23.

In this finely produced, eloquent, and meticulously researched volume Sally J. Cornelison draws together a wealth of archival and rare materials to trace the development of Antoninus’s relic cult from his death to the completion of the St. Antoninus chapel in San Marco in 1591, designed by Giambologna and financed [End Page 339] by the Salviati family, clients of the Medici. Without losing sight of the competition between Savonarolans and Mediceans to shape Antoninus’s legacy (pp. 5, 89), Cornelison seeks to trace the “longue durée” (p. 1) of his cult, to pull him out of Savonarola’s shadow, and to highlight Giambologna’s religious œuvre by identifying the continuities between Antoninus’s early cult and that defined by the St. Antoninus chapel.

Cornelison challenges the notion that Antoninus’s cult was moribund until his canonization. Highlighting features of his life that were celebrated posthumously, concern for women and the poor, she emphasizes the lavish obsequies bestowed upon him by Pope Pius II and the Florentines, and cites tantalizing evidence of Laurentian projects to have him canonized as early as the 1480s. The “combined efforts” of the Savonarolans and Mediceans that came later were “mostly collaborative” (p. 26), although “myriad discrepancies” in early versions of the saint’s vita may reflect “changing political and ecclesiastical realities and agendas” (pp. 33). These might have deserved fuller discussion. Antoninus’s modest first tomb at San Marco attracted numerous ex votos (many destroyed in 1498), particularly from the poor and from women anxious to conceive (p. 53). His personal effects and writings acquired the status of secondary relics. Images of Antoninus adoring the crucifix collectively “present an emphatically Dominican, if not Savonarolan, vision of holiness” (p. 65). An early post-Savonarolan project to rebuild San Marco, possibly to frame Antoninus as a republican saint, came to naught (p. 89). But even after his canonization Medici plans to honor Antoninus with a rich new relic chapel consistently fell short. Instead, the 1579 commission by their Salviati cousins, although “a far cry from Savonarola’s dream,” was “fully in keeping with late sixteenth-century courtly and Counter-Reformation tastes” (p. 101).

The survival of an accounts ledger (quaderno della fabbrica) and a sharp and appreciative eye enable Cornelison to emphasize Giambologna’s creative control of the chapel building project, supervised by Benedetto Gondi under the watchful eye of Archbishop Alessandro de’ Medici, who kept it free of Savonarolan traces (pp. 125, 127). A chapter touring the chapel and crypt emphasizes “the dynamic relationship between painting, sculpture, and architecture” (p. 185) and is followed by another devoted to Giambologna’s sculpture. Cornelison’s analysis of Alessandro Allori’s clerestory frescos of Antoninus’s life underscores the desire to invoke the miraculous and to appeal to women (pp. 169–81); her critique of Giambologna’s bronze reliefs (especially pp. 225–37) shows a sharp eye for efforts “to promote, and at times manipulate” Antoninus’s saintly persona (p. 201). Cornelison concludes with a detailed analysis of the “carefully scripted” display of Medici family power (p. 284) in the 1589 translation of the (incorrupt) body of Antoninus, honored now as...

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