A social history of reception, this study focuses on sacred art and Catholicism in Rome during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The five altarpieces examined here were painted by artists who are admired today - Caravaggio, Guercino, and Guido Reni - and by the less renowned but once influential Tommaso Laureti and Andrea Commodi. By shifting attention from artistic intentionality to reception, Pamela Jones reintegrates these altarpieces into the urban fabric of early modern Rome, allowing us to see the five paintings anew through the eyes of their original audiences, both women and men, rich and poor, pious and impious. Because Italian churchmen relied, after the Council of Trent, on public altarpieces more than any other type of contemporary painting in their attempts to reform and inspire Catholic society, it is on altarpieces that Pamela Jones centers her inquiry. Through detailed study of evidence in many genres - including not only painting, prints, and art criticism, but also cheap pamphlets, drama, sermons, devotional tracts, rules of religious orders, pilgrimages, rituals, diaries, and letters - Jones shows how various beholders made meaning of the altarpieces in their aesthetic, devotional, social, and charitable dimensions. This study presents early modern Catholicism and its art in an entirely new light by addressing the responses of members of all social classes - not just elites - to art created for the public. It also provides a more accurate view of the range of religious ideas that circulated in early modern Rome by bringing to bear both officially sanctioned religious art and literature and unauthorized but widely disseminated cheap pamphlets and prints that were published without the mandatory religious permission. On this basis, Jones helps to illuminate further the insurmountable problems churchmen faced when attempting to channel the power of sacred art to elicit orthodox responses.

The painting and carving of altarpieces was one of the most important and characteristic tasks of Italian Renaissance artists.

In Touching the Passion — Seeing Late Medieval Altarpieces through the Eyes of Faith, Donna Sadler explores the manner in which worshipers responded to the carved and polychromed retables adorning the altars of their parish churches. Framed by the symbolic death of Christ re-enacted during the Mass, the historical account of the Passion on the retable situated Christ’s suffering and triumph over death in the present. The dramatic gestures, contemporary garb, and wealth of anecdotal detail on the altarpiece, invited the viewer’s absorption in the narrative. As in the Imitatio Christi, the worshiper imaginatively projected himself into the story like a child before a dollhouse. The five senses, the sculptural medium, the small scale, and the rhetoric of memory foster this immersion.

"Fireflies at dawn. . . Winged essences, charred bodies still on fire." This evocative poetry-essay collection issues a call for a renewed embracement of the reader's own expressive "self." We've each a persona to hear --- a voice to resonate through silences of night and the noises of everyday. Life is a mystery hard to crack. We bang it like a door and strum it like a lyre until it opens some new "portal" through which the voice can authentically sound-out the "truths" of being human. That's the happening of this book. Altarpieces have always been artistic creations to conceive life's "sacred" space. This book follows that tradition, if rather untraditionally. These pieces speak to "hear" life on one's own terms; from one's own altar and cathedral. This "gathering" created a poet-self identity --- called 'Apo'kstrophes'. The essays join with the poems to conceive poetry and the spiritual quest with a renewed existential-eco-romantic perspective; sounding that quest with both feet grounded on "worldly other" Planet Earth. The challenge to grasp life at the core is a wrenching-wrestling match with the "Other," that ever-present dimension of "poetry" on life's path. --- Joining philosophical play with the authenticity of word-pieces as "true orients," O'Kelly's book, with many poets helping along the way, has taken up that challenge with unflinching creativity. Want a spiritual adventure? Fly! Take the ride! "Oh, the ride! Fins spurred in shivers of hide. Life's dearness reined in the roll of the tide."

An illustrated book on the religious altarpieces of the Italian Renaissance. Written in 1898, these essays reveal how the altarpieces were not only beautiful creations but were also the product of developments in painting.