The Miraculous Image in Renaissance Florence by Megan Holmes (review)

Megan Holmes’s book is an important reminder about the importance of materiality to religious belief during the Renaissance. Focusing on Florentine miraculous images and the cults that developed and surrounded them between 1250 and 1600, she discusses the lived experience of devotion to the miraculous image and what they meant to the artistic and social worlds of Renaissance Florence. In doing so, she argues quite convincingly that the Florentine miraculous image was an essential aspect of lived religious belief to Florentines, and it played an important role in both public and private devotions. She focuses on the artistic materiality and production of the icon from the perspectives of dogma and the unique Florentine experience of late medieval Catholicism. As such, her interdisciplinary approach pulling in multiple different fields and approaches sheds innovative light on how to understand honest religious belief and what these beliefs inspire. Holmes argues that it was the Renaissance period, not the medieval past, where the cult of miraculous images reached its zenith. As such, The Miraculous Image in Renaissance Florence is one of the first works to analyze this key feature of Florentine spirituality.

Holmes divides her work into three sections. The first, titled “Time and Place,” proposes a method for understanding and contextualizing the Renaissance devotional image as a religious icon. Creating a firm distinction between the common Madonna and Child image versus the miraculous images worshipped by Florentines, this first section contextualizes the Renaissance icon into late medieval/early modern spirituality and social life. In doing so, she also catalogues and analyzes every major miraculous image, within Florence and its external territories. Her first section is divided into four chapters, each of which provides historical context to the miraculous images she studies. Consistently reiterating the importance of faith given to these images and the miracles they caused—focusing on such icons as the Madonna Impruneta and the icon of Santissima Annunziata—Holmes uses her first section to situate the Renaissance icon into its immediate historical surroundings, situating each icon into the church and social worlds they developed in. As Florence changes from commune to ducal state, the development, painting, and attitudes towards Renaissance icons change into something more private and glorious, and Holmes tracks this change to emphasize the religiosity of the worshippers as time progresses. Her last chapter in this section reveals that the divine image was not only found in the major, city-based churches: many minor churches outside of Florence had a miraculous image that penitents could pray to and develop a cult around. Holmes emphasizes the fact that the icon, rather than being a narrative depiction of a miracle or a holy scene, was fundamental to understanding religious practices in the Renaissance world. Cataloguing the majority of these images, Holmes sets up the basis for her next, far more analytical section.

Her second section is titled “Sacred Images.” In these two chapters, Holmes looks at the concept of an icon in greater detail. Generating a typology of Florentine religious icons, Holmes fully distinguishes the criteria for a miraculous image, and how the Florentine concept of miraculous images differs from the Byzantine and Russian traditions. This section looks at the materiality of both the icon itself and the miracles they worked to develop a typology of the miraculous image. Focusing on the depicted image as well as the records of their miracles, she emphasizes the relationship between the viewer and the viewed, the holy and the lived, and the relationship between God and man; all of these dichotomies were mediated through worship at a religious icon. Arguing that Florentine spirituality rested on a physical relationship with a miraculous image, Holmes reinforces her materiality argument by taking their beliefs at face value. Instead of ignoring the power of images in Renaissance religiosity, Holmes encourages this methodological view, arguing for its necessity to understand the religious and social frameworks of pre-modern Italians.

Her third and last section, “Frames and Contexts,” looks at how the miracle image was...