Political Art of the Papacy: Visual Representations of the Donation of Constantine in the Early Modern Period.

Early Modern Art;Donation of Constantine;Political Art;Dissimulation;Gian Lorenzo Bernini;Tommaso Laureti;Humanities (General);Humanities;History of Art

Tita, SilviaTimmermann, Achim ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Early Modern Art;    Donation of Constantine;    Political Art;    Dissimulation;    Gian Lorenzo Bernini;    Tommaso Laureti;    Humanities (General);    Humanities;    History of Art;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/100054/siltivia_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

The famous forged document known as the Donation of Constantine has stirred interest from the inception of its critical fate not long after its creation in the eighth century. The document, most likely a product of the papal scriptorium, stipulated the endowment of the papacy by the first Christian Emperor Constantine (306-336 AD) with imperial prerogatives. In the early modern period, the debate over the authenticity of the document intensified under the pressure of religious divisions and political tensions in Europe. While modern scholars have explored the written discourse on the Donation, the sophisticated contribution of the visual theme of the Donation of Constantine to this heated debate in this period has not captured attention. Neither have the motives of the explosion of Constantinian imagery in this period nor the strategies employed to construct the image of Constantine been sufficiently studied.This dissertation explores the visual theme of the Donation of Constantine within the entire spectrum of Constantinian imagery produced in Rome, mostly at the papal court, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The visual repertoire includes works produced, in a variety of media, by celebrated artists of the time such as Raphael, Rubens, and Bernini, as well as by less famous and anonymous practitioners. The investigation of this repertoire is conducted from the perspectives of the commissioners, the artists who executed it, and the intended audience. Each chapter analyzes a different approach to the visual transposition of the Donation theme and how the historical figure of Constantine was exploited in defense of the Donation. The contention is that the Donation theme was employed not only to vouch for the veracity of the document, but primarily to introduce supplementary arguments into the debate focused on the document and on papal prerogatives. The principal strategies utilized were exegesis and dissimulation. This study proposes that when the debate became so vehement that a defense of the document, either in texts or in images, would have been profoundly detrimental to the papacy, other Constantinian episodes were sought in order to create substitutive ;;host episodes;; and ;;proxies;; for the Donation of Constantine.