Massimo Firpo and Fabrizio Biferali. Immagini ed eresie nell’Italia del Cinquecento.

Abstract

In their immersive book Immagini ed eresie nell’Italia del Cinquecento, historian Massimo Firpo and art historian Fabrizio Biferali take advantage of the finer-grained studies they have produced on heresy and art, placing previous subjects (the Inquisition itself, Giovanni Morone, Giovanni Battista Franco, Titian, Lorenzo Lotto, and especially Juan de Valdés) on a broader playing field to reveal networks resulting in particular works of art and architecture that they call a “new kind of visual preaching” (xv). They present a period in religious thought when different outcomes seemed possible, proclaiming at the outset, “This study is not about the history of art, but rather of history in art and art in history.” Interested in showing connections between the forms of expression of religious dissent that arose in Italy, they trace paths forged in search of access to religious experience that were short-circuited after the Council of Trent. The book investigates how the iconoclastic tendencies of the Protestant Reformation forced artists working south of the Alps, responsible for the important visual and emotional component of communicating religious ideas, to reconsider their roles in the dissemination of religious thought, absent a standard orthodoxy. How were they to approach their subject matter, eliciting and focusing devotion, which was the role of an altarpiece? As the Holy Office’s sensitivity to iconographic minutiae was refocused with each new accusation and trial, artists had to reimagine their charge in creating sacred images that enabled religious experience. The book describes a period in which pious clergymen, ambassadors, nobles, and artisans were engaged in imagining a reformed, Christocentric Catholicism, as well as the painting and architecture that could show what justification by faith alone might look like.