Global Economies of Salvation. Art and the Negotiation of Sanctity in the Early Modern Period

ongoing

GLOBECOSAL investigates how artworks were employed in the process of negotiating sanctity with the Roman Curia in the age of Iberian hegemony by examining the artworks produced with regard to the pioneers of Catholic blesseds and saints in the post-Tridentine ‘global’ context. As the cult of the saints was among the key conceptual battlegrounds in the conflict between the Catholic church and the Protestants, in the post-Tridentine period, saints came to fulfill spiritual, ideological and propagandistic purposes. Art history has paid heightened attention to the adherence of artworks to the models of sanctity formulated by the Tridentine church, leading to an overall neglect of competing local constructions of sanctity, a shortfall particularly momentous with regard to blesseds and saints connected in different ways to the process of European expansion, specifically to the Iberian empires. The hypothesis under examination is that the artworks produced in relation to gaining recognition by the Church of saints first venerated in newly Christianized territories reveal an underlying negotiation of the local Catholic communities’ spiritual status within universal Catholicism. As official recognition affirmed the society which had made a saint its own, artworks related to this process served purposes of self-representation within the broader framework of social identity formation. GLOBECOSAL traces the circulation of material objects and iconographies within and between global networks of knowledge transmission, and combines this approach with a hypothetical ‘global market of symbolic values’ developed on the basis of concepts from critical sociology. Investigating the negotiation of sanctity between Rome and geographically distant areas participates in ‘globalizing’ the history of early modern art and is qualified to challenge established perspectives on Roman Catholicism, colonialism, and the early modern world at large.