The early modern age placed great weight on historical evidence in effecting a revival of the ancient art of the past. To an unprecedented degree, this nascent historical consciousness subscribed to the truth value of visual evidence at the same time than iL entertained skepticism about die reliability of written history.1 Notorious instances of altered or misinterpreted documents encouraged [he belief that images provided more reliable insight into historical fact than written sources.

The considerable attention devoted by the post-Tridenrine ecclesiastical program of reform to the image's subject matter fostered a self-imposed medieval character. The reform program sought to regulate not only the format and function of devotional images but also aspects of their istoria in the treatment of many commissioned artists. The post-Tridentine assertion of venerable traditions expressed itself in the creation of artifacts that directly referenced their reflexive contexts, a mechanism that enlisted the specifics of old images to the system of Catholic truth visually argued. Thus, Cardinal Federico Borromeo found theological and didactic value in the engravings made by the sixteenth-century Antwerp artist Marten de Vos that portrayed important chapters of church history, and these became one of the principal instruments of his canon of sacred art at the Ambrosiana Academy in Milan." Early modern artists resolved to reform such post-Tridentine hermenéutica] discourses through rhe expressive models of a substitut] o nal logic meant to self-consciously repurpose antique features in ways that transcended the specific moment of their creation. The subs titutio nal effectiveness of Federico Zuccari's S. Prassede altarpiece The Encounter of Christ and Veronica on, the Way to Calvary of 1594 (Fig. 1) emerged from his ability to recover ancient prototypes and present them as recognizably old with the aid of Renaissance altarpiece paradigms celebrating die artistic merits of Early Christian images.

Despite their differing aims, both ecclesiastical figures arid artists set religious images at the core of debates surrounding the veracity of historical sources. After the Reformation imperiled the historical legitimacy of the Catholic Church, and a generation of powerful popes, such as Paul ? and his successor, Sixtus IV, made classical antiquity a key area of research, historical religious art acquired the task of shedding new light on the past.1 Writing from the vantage point of the Counter-Reformation work of devotion, Peter Paul Rubens pointed to the efforts of Antonio Bossio to convey how the catacombs demonstrated the ungainly and substandard qualities that characterized Early Christian art in the views of many ecclesiastical patrons and theorists.'1 An artist with exceptional scholarly and antiquarian insight, Rubens suggested that he could not defend the visual worthiness of Early Christian images against the grace and excellence of classical antiquity in Bossio's illustrated folio Roma sotterranea (1636). Taking Rubens's conclusion one step further, it was left to the early modern artist to reconcile the devotional power of Early Christian art with its visual crudity in the creation of sacred images. This reconciliation was especially urgent given the new status of visitai evidence as the preeminent historical source for the study of early Christianity.

Scholars generally regard the work of Zuccari as an essentially controlled expression of the classicizing aesthetics of early modernity, rather than as the achievement of an independent artist whose intellectual appetite did not need the stimulation of continuous contact with classical antiquity.5 Not surprisingly, art historians have located Zuccari within the classicist framework expounded by Giovan Pietro Bellori, the distinguished scholar, connoisseur, and theorist who set himself the task of uncovering the errors of ancient scholarship with a view to elaborating his conception of beauty as associated with ideas, or modes of knowledge.'1 Bellori propounded classicism as an approach to form and an aesthetic theory of beauty that had a sustained counterpart in CounterReformation humanism. Prior to this, Giorgio Vasari had initiated an early modern discourse on religious painting in accordance with notions of decorum and appropriateness,7 asserting that artists were to confine themselves to the imitation of the timeless values and perfect style of the ancients." Yet imitation in Vasarian terms did not square with the Renaissance practice of imitatio, keyed to the transmission and re-creation of an authoritative source.9 Even though the advent of print had driven a wedge between reproduction and imitation, early modern theorists and theologians found it impossible to conceive of art outside the parameters of Counter-Reformation antiquarian culture. Central to the project of the Counter-Reformation was the confident highlighting of the age and history of cultural artifacts, regardless of their relative artistic merit. Insisting [ike Vasari and Giovanni Battista Armenini on the retrograde character of Early Christian art, Bellori simply dismissed the significant number of Greek icons present in the west after the fall of Constantinople in 1453.'" Bellori yielded in fact to the temptation of classicist aesthetics and restricted himself to laying stress on the massive unearthing of Roman statues, especially those associated with Italy, and their presentation as foundational in early modern art. He railed against the crudity of ancient artifacts other than those of classical Greece and Rome, asserting the aesthetic qualities of classical antiquity as the driving forces of early modern discourse.

In contrast to his contemporaries, Zuccari, in his painting The Encounter of Christ and Veronica, still in situ in Rome at the S. Prassede Basilica, openly affirmed icons and prints as source material for the modern altarpiece. Zuccari employed the profile portrait of Christ to recall a period of purer Christian art and rearticulate a different kind of ancient image within a modern painting. He inflected his devotional message in terms of a self-conscious backward glance, dependent on deliberate medievalisms that reinscribe earlier Chrisdan imagery into the edifice of the altarpiece. Zuccari took pains to reconcile these ancient forms with cultic function, deriving his work securely from Early Christian sources while at the same time engaging with urgent contemporary concern over true likeness in the realm of religious images. Zuccari's specific sources for Christ's profile in the S. Prassede altarpiece were medallic portraits transmitting Christ's features as they had been preserved in other media and a iate medieval Italian woodcut recognized in the early modern age as an authoritative early modern source for the replication of Christ's image.

Zuccari thematized the relation of prototype to copy in ways that directly responded to the long-standing concern over the authority of religious images in the decades following the Council of Trent. Johannes Molanus, the famous theologian and iconographer of Louvain, had contended. following Thomas Aquinas, that veneration directed to a religious image was nothing other than idolatry if the image did not offer an authentic representation of Christ and the saints. Molanus offered guidance in his 1570 Treatise on Sacred Images on how to represent Christ by accentuating the evidence of his true likeness recorded in proconsul Lentiilus's letter to the Roman Senate and in a bronze portrait described by Patriarch Nikephoros Callistos in the last chapter of his Historia.1 ' Nikephoros, writing in the ninth century, had said that icons produced in his own day were not invented but were true depictions of Christ, invested with the authority of age, contiguous with antiquity and the proclamation of the Gospels.1'2 His observations provided the model and spur for a definition of the icon as artifact, built on his claim of the direct relation between icon and archetype. As Charles Barber pointed out, the key terms introduced by Patriarch Nikephoros in the formalist discourse of Byzantine art allowed for the understanding of the icon as a representation formed in the likeness of an archetype.13

Remarkably, Zuccari managed to reconcile this cultic argument with his adaptation of religious concerns to fit a narrative drama, building on the impetus for the reform of the altarpiece given by Michelangelo, Raphael, and Lorenzo Lotto. Zuccari visualized these points in The Encounter of Christ and Veronica, a scene portraying the dramatic moment when Veronica extends to Christ her famous cloth. Veronica kneels in front of Christ while Simon of Gyrene lifts the cross from his shoulders, presenting the veil in a narrative framework seldom explored in the frontal, centering treatment of other altar paintings that include die relic. This assimilation of the veil to a narrative had been instead the realm of prints and antiquarian culture, at a remove from the altarpiece project of presenting the true likeness of Christ derived from a tradition of acheiropoietic images. A telling example likely familial' to Zuccari was The Aitar of Saint Veronica made between 1524 and 1527 by Ugo da Carpi for Old St. Peter's Basilica. Like the famous, albeit much contrasting, drawing by Parmigianino at the Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, Ule altarpiece shows Carpi's effort to present a portrait of Christ that would imitate Rome's vera icon, the sudarium of Veronica.14 A family of a few portraits of Christ professing to have descended from die veil of Veronica, a cloth that had been pressed against Christ's bloody face, pretended to be the sudarium or the double of the Byzantine Mandylion. The original Mandylion represented the most prestigious acheiropoietic portrait of Christ, having come to Constantinople from Edessa in the tenth century; it resurfaced in two versions simultaneously in Rome and Paris after the fall of Constantinople in 1204. A third portrait said to be the true Mandylion appeared in Genoa in the fourteenth century, where it is still venerated in the church of S. Bartolomeo degli Armeni.15

In the late sixteenth century, El Greco responded to the emphasis on the acheiropoietic dimension of Christ's face with images of the living appearance of Christ on Veronica's veil. There are several versions, one for the high altar of Santo Domingo el Antiguo in Toledo and others with Veronica holding the cloth (Fig. 2). El Greco was heir to a tradition that would continue into the seventeenth cenUiry and beyond in the work of Francisco de Zurbarán and numerous other Spanish artists. Zurbarán, in his frequent repetitions of the theme, appropriated the conventions of trompe l'oeil to impart a convincing sense of the real presence of Christ, materialized before our eyes like the face miraculously imprinted on Veronica's cloth (Fig. 3). i6 The painter's archaism expresses itself in an imitation of the acheiropoietic portrait, reproducing in paint features of the original Mandylion. Zurbarán and El Greco secured the authority of their copies by referring back to the substitut! onal logic of the most venerated ancient prototype, the true likeness of Christ in the Mandylion. By contrast, Zuccari reminded his viewer that the veil is the bearer of a story that precedes the relic venerated in a reliquary at St. Peter's, Rome. Late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century painters did not share his treatment of the vera icon, nor did it have an established tradition in Renaissance altar painting. But, like his contemporaries, Zuccari took pains to make explicit claims about the origins of his painting. His image belongs to the time in which it was made and at the same time to its restaged context, thus narrating its own production history without pushing it into the realm of imitation and emulation. Zuccari's motif had enjoyed its greatest popularity in the late Middle Ages, when Veronica was a character in Passion plays. Her role spoke to a groundswell of popular devotion and a hunger for narrative detail. Zuccari's dramatic and narrative solutions responded directly to this late medieval sensibility and its attendant embellishment of textual evidence in religious imagery. Jacobus de Voragine *s The Golden Legend provided the source for Zuccari's pictorial representation of Veronica's entry on the scene to offer Christ a cloth to wipe the sweat and blood from his face. In Zuccari's hands, medieval imagery acquired a renewed efficacy in the creation of compelling modern narratives.17

Modern Altarpieces Need the Print

In the S. Prassede altarpiece, Zuccari centered the narrative action around a beautiful image of Christ in profile, bearing the cross. The result bears witness to die survival of Zuccari's artistic influences; medieval portraits of Christ that circulated during the Renaissance as engravings and woodcuts. Sixten Ringbom recognized a half-length nordiern Italian woodcut of Christ carrying the CIOSS from die late fifteenth century as a model without precedent north of the Alps, one that would evolve into a major source for Italian Renaissance painting (Fig. 4).18 It seems to have originated in Milan, where its inventor, undoubtedly prompted by new developments in the iconography of the Ecce Homo and Salvator Mundi subjects, created an original formula of a bust-length Christ in regal attire carrying the cross. The Milanese woodcut shows Christ in profile view, emphasizing his meditative stance in stark contrast to the cruelty of the narrative. In Tiie Encounter of Christ and Veronica, Zuccari also portrays Christ in profile, but at a dînèrent moment in the carrying of the cross. Zuccari's dramatic depiction reframes for narrative purposes the mystical features of Christ's face in keeping with the proportions and physiognomy of the woodcut. It represents a convincing attempt to appropriate Christ's image, as captured by the woodcut, for a rival undertaking that will forcefully assert Christ's character and individuality. The altarpiece is its own predecessor and simultaneously its referential context, such that the woodcut is no longer prior but present. The woodcut remains the documentary image to which Zuccari learnedly submitted his painting, thus inscribing it within a substitutional logic that squared his profile Christ with the renowned models of Renaissance antiquarianism.

Accompanying the rise of humanism, an exacting antiquarian preoccupation with true likeness evolved in close kinship with the urgent concern over authoritative religious images. Antiquarian discussions of the authenticity of the referred likeness aggravated worries about the dating of objects, and specifically about the authenticity of Byzantine imports. In this context, the evidentiary status of Christ medals hi bronze allowed them to function as a documentary source for the modern religious image.19 Emerging botii from the reengagement with the Byzantine icon and the archaeological revival of antiquity, the bronze Christ medals derived their expressive power from the true likeness of ancient statues and inscriptions on coins.

For an antiquarian such as Enea Vico, the authoritative status of Christ's medallic portraits derived from a prototype likeness of Christ in the form of a Roman statue; in the same way, he argued, the portraits of kings and emperors on ancient coins were copies of their own freestanding statues.20 In his Discorsi sopra le ?n£daglie degli antichi (1555), the notion that the medallist works after the sculptor lay at the core of Vico's central numismatic argument, namely, that the original corn is a form of evidence that comes in multiples.21 Vico fashioned a creative illustration of his thesis in a woodcut profile portrait of Christ (Fig. 5), placed in an inner roundel that alluded to the front face of a medal and revealed the image's borrowings from a series of renowned Roman statues, including the profile view in Michelangelo's Risen Christ at S. Maria sopra Minerva. That Vico's profile portrait of Christ is not an adaptation or a translation Ls stressed through a comparison with Hans Burgkmair's analogous woodcut of 1510 that replicates the true likeness of Christ transferred from a medallic documentary image. Burgkmair's profile Christ derives its persuasive power from a bronze medal Proßle of Christ by Matteo de' Pasti (1440-50) and the description of Christ in the proconsul Lentulus's letter.22 Vico and Burgkmair are therefore to be numbered among the real antiquarians who were also artists, rather than among the men of letters and interpreters of antiquity of the emerging Co unte r-Reformation age.

To an early modern artist like Zuccari, the ability of images of Christ to capture a true likeness derived from the principles of authenticity and inimitability inherent in the Byzantine icon, whose production history was equivalent to that of the woodcut.113 Zuccari was familiar with Byzantine icons in his native Urbino and through the Venetian collections he was exposed to during his apprenticeship. The official display of sacred images in the post-Tridentine decades reworked the isolated viewing of the icon. The Counter-Reformation church put its most sacred images and relics on public view, blurring the boundaries between devotion and display during the exhibition of the sudarium at the 1575 Roman Jubilee and the 1578 ostentation of the Shroud of Turin.24 This emphasis on the institutional display of the sacred marked the restructuring of an earlier attitude toward icons, when their collection and exhibition was the prerogative of the private collector and donor. The famous collection of Byzantine icons inherited by Lorenzo de' Medici from Pope Paul II served as the primary source for the expressive systems of Renaissance dramatic paintings.25 Such collections furnished an effective backdrop for Zuccari's rearticulation of the medieval image in the modern altarpiece. The icon, collected with the antiquarian and philological zeal of Renaissance humanism, provided a new basis for the authority of the art of painting. These antiquarian interests did not accept the classicist scholars' view that icons lacked artistic value, and as scholars Uke Vico gave visual expression to their antiquarian fascination, they also drew attention to something beyond the age and history of the ancient artifacts: their value as potential objects of artistic imitation.

Like icons, woodcuts constituted a source of authenticity in the early modern age. Christopher Wood has stressed the significance of the woodcut as a means of transferring meaning from work to work and of effecting an assimilation of various kinds of images to a single form.30 The referential relation of the woodcut to other images made possible an extension of the sacred original, amplifying its miraculous powers and visual qualities as well as the substitutional function that the woodcut originally filled. In the context of late medieval piety, woodcuts were primarily efficacious instruments of prayer, reflecting an acknowledgment of die printed image as a worthy substitute for the saint's presence and power.27 In this regard, the woodcut served as a focus of devotion and as a reference to a sacred time and place that waited to be rekindled in both a present guise and in the model, or prototype, situated hi the future.

In The Encounter of Christ and Veronica, Zuccari integrated reflections of the woodcut into the painted altarpiece, reinscribing the image of Christ as an object of modern contemplation. This reinstantiation of the woodcut forms the representational core around which Zuccari constructed his narrative. His ability to create, with the aid of the woodcut, a beautiful Christ that focuses devotional attention within a narrative context is his greatest achievement with this altarpiece.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Zuccari was not an adept of the Counter-Reformation theory of imitation based on the idea of style and decorum, or appropriateness to purpose, but rather an advocate of the continuum between Renaissance and medieval values and the memory of his brother, Taddeo Zuccari, whose erudite combination of tradition and art had a significant influence on Annibale Carracci, Caravaggio, and many Roman painters even after his untimely death in 1566.28 In Zuccari's Lament of Painting, as shown in Cornells Cort's J 579 print (Fig. 6), disegno and intelligenza are not presented as the inspirational and innovative concepts on which an image type would be invented. Zuccari instead identified painting with a nude figure seen from the back, the personification of vera intelligenza as an aspect of execution and the good disegno that painters attain in the art-making process itself. The allegorical representation as an evocative means of expressing original and witty ideas was a commonplace of the Renaissance print. It subsequently allowed for efforts to formulate a compelling statement of the artist's status in the Counter-Reformation's climate of upheaval and uncertainty, as Tristan Weddigen observed.29 In 1572 Cort engraved Zuccari's Calumny of Apelles, in which Zuccari formed an analogy between the classical account of Apelles' calumny and the unfavorable status of the artist in an image oí' pointed allusions to injustice and misunderstanding as the forces hostile to creativity. Zuccari revealed a marked sensitivity to Renaissance printmaking, especially to Andrea Mantegna's convincing plea in support of Apelles1 moral point in his Calumny of Apelles of 1505. The revisions that Mantegna brought to Lucian's ekphrasis were meant to stress the genuine defense of art embodied in the allegory of his drawing/0 U was this real sense of allegorical representation as a feature of the Renaissance print that was reinforced in the Lament of Painting. Zuccari evolved his own apologia for the moral duly of painting, situated within late sixteenth-century concerns over imitation and reproduction.

It was not until 1607 that Zuccari gave his well-known definition of disegno interno in his L'idea da' pittori, scultori et architetti, published in Turin. Inem'ie Gerards-Neltssen has aptly drawn attention to a number of art historians who, on the basis of an unsubstantiated relation with his idea, have misinterpreted Zuccari's Lament of Painting as an apologia for imitation.31 In Zuccari's Lament, the smaller painting in the upper zone shows Faith holding a cross and halting· Fortune at the head of her monstrous train. Here Zuccari maintains a Renaissance tradition according to which Faith is closely associated with Justice. This was not the only occasion when Zuccari made a convincing plea for Faith and Justice as the art of painting's closest allies. The drawings illustrating die life of his brother Taddeo, the Porta virtutis of 1581 (which involved him in a libel action), and the Allegory of the Liberal Arts all established an unequivocal bond between art and virtue.32 The desire for virtù also reflected an interest in a long-standing intellectual and academic tradition meant to raise the status of the visual arts, one that prompted the Carracci Academy to open under the name Accademia degli Desiderosi, alluding to a desire for virtù, only later changed in the 159Os to the Accademia degli Incamminati, or those who had embarked on their studies as academy members.33

The acknowledgment that art belongs to a category different from imitation divided reformers, or adherents of Renaissance values like the Carracci, from advocates of the new principles of Counter-Reformation humanism. A model of imitation involving stylistic invention was striving for recognition, and it soon came to a head in die dispute between Domenichino and Giovanni Lanfranco. Domenichino's Last Communion of Saint Jerome, completed in 1614 for the high altar of S. Girolamo della Carità in Rome (Fig. 7), was ostensibly a reinvention, on the level of style, of the contrasting rendition of the same pictorial subject by Agostino Carracci from 1592 (Fig. 8 ).'*"* When Lanfranco launched his attack on Domenichino, he objected to this "invention" as an act of plagiarism and a deliberate downgrading of the status of Agostino's Communion. Richard Spear's observation that Lanfranco did not see points of convergence between painting and the theory of imitation offers a framework for understanding Lanfranco's irritation at Domenichino's invenzione.^ Lanfranco encouraged recognition of Agostino's Communion as opera prìma, or prototype, through Francois Perrier's etching based on a drawing made by Lanfranco himself (Fig. 9).3ti Lanfranco had grounds for his grievance because the Communion of Saint Jerome had no established pictorial tradition before Agostino Carracci. Indeed, Renaissance painters avoided it as a problematic subject in die wake of Desiderius Erasmus's criticism of die content of two spurious letters perpetuating a legendary story that would be relayed in the two paintings. Ecclesiastical intervention managed to reaffirm the written source, as is made clear by the Hieronymite Fray Miguel Salinas in 1563 and José de Sigüenza, the librarian of El Escorial, in 1595.37

Lanfranco perceived Domenichino's Last Communion to be disengaged from a subs ti national conception of the image's place in time and in relation to a prior work. His complaint echoed the early sixteenth-century mistrust of images that tended to wander from their prototypes or simply disregarded the referential power of artifacts. Yet Lanfranco was less, if at all, interested in canonizing Agostino's Communion than in pointing out Domenichino's lack of a link back to a prototype that would make the contemporary image secure. The observation that Domenichino's mechanism of imitation amounted to theft reveals Lanfranco's fury over a mere reflexive context or an artifact too obviously grounded in the contemporary interest in stylistic invention.

The perception that Agostino's Communion earned a referential status among early modern artifacts was grasped by Lanfranco within the framework of printmaking. Lanfranco's drawing after Agostino for Perrier's etching rested on a novel understanding of the print as the peculiar domain for the artist's choice of models and personal evolution in light of the seminal relationship between Marcantonio Raimondi and Raphael, which brought about a turning point in the thematics of transmissions in print technology/13 Attempts like Lanfranco's to develop as a designer of engravings were especially suited to the maintenance of Renaissance values after the Council of Trent, when these receded in the wake of patrons' demands and a consumerist approach to printmaking that even Vasari would deplore.39 Lanfranco cultivated the perception of printmaking as Raphael's particular domain in a suite of etchings after Raphael's Vatican Loggs1 that he made with Sisto Badalocchio in 1607.40 He dedicated the etchings to Annibale Carracci in order to underscore once more that Raphael was the driving force behind his understanding of the relation of painter and engraver, an understanding that could not but expose the divergence between Lanfranco and Domenichino,41 In his dispute with Domenichino regarding die Last Communion of Saint Jerome, Lanfranco articulated his defense of Agostino's original in terms of the relation between painter and engraver, and he saw in Agostino's Last Communion an authoritative source of (printed) replication.

Zuccari understood the cost of sacrificing free expression to the reinstantiation of prototypes. He aimed for a reflective, self-conscious rearticulation of late medieval imagery within his altarpieces and a dramatization of religious images that would carefully explore the narrative potential of the authoritative prototype, Zuccari's task was complicated in a late six teen th-century context where different temporal models of the image were coming into conflict, nowhere more clearly than in the realm of religious images. We have seen how Domenichino launched one powerful model in proposing the replacement of Agostino's image with his own. Lanfranco railed against the work that reinvented rather than repeated the prior work, for repetition staged difference for him and imposed a challenge to the artistic mind. While Lanfranco propounded an artistic process aligned with the Renaissance, Domenichino became absorbed with the execution of Counter-Reformation paintings connected to the rise of new iconography. Domenichino's Last Communion receded into an ambiguous status, dubious as reliable evidence for die printing process and outside a chain of authoritative substitutions in painting just at the time when truth, not fiction, was most needed for die success of the Counter-Reformation.

Zuccari anticipated Lanfranco's defense of print technology implicit in his attack on Domenichino's Last Communion and at the same time assessed the merits of prints as a foil for the new direction in religious painting. Zuccari's work was tied not so much to the expression of an artistic personality - which lay at the heart of the dispute between Lanfranco and Domenichino - as to the need to juggle the very real demands and expectations of his age. He had inherited the concerns about referen tiality and authenticity peculiar to the Renaissance, and he refused to generate fictions from the tradition. Zuccari's S. Prassede altarpiece is distinguished by its profile portrait of Christ derived from the authoritative prototypes of both the medallic portraits and statues of Christ replicated by printmakers and numismatists such as Vico. His painting reimagines the living Christ on which the profile portrait had been based and also honors the portrait's claim to antiquity as established by his Renaissance predecessors.

Experiments in Renaissance printmaking exerted a tremendous influence on Zuccari in The Encounter of Christ and Veronica. The establishment of Christ as the center of devotional attention had broken entirely new ground in engravings of the Carrying of the Cross, pointing the way to a narrative emphasis on Christ himself rather than on action rotating around him. Albrecht Dürer provided an important precedent in The Little Passion (Fig. 10), in which he highlighted Christ and his encounter with Veronica to a higher dramatic extent than he had in The Great Passion (Fig. 11). Hendrick Goltzius evocatively rendered Christ as the protagonist of the carrying of the cross in an engraving that singles out Christ as the concluding element of the narrative (Fig. 12). Christ bearing the cross here halts all action, establishing a point beyond which human activity no longer appears plausible. Zuccari and the Carracci brothers would have known Goltzius's creative power from the latter's extended trip to Italy. This gave the Netherlandish artist an opportunity to exchange prints and to impress the Carracci Academy with his talent and elaborate technique.'42

Renaissance Antecedents versus the Rise of Legalistic Religious Imagery

In The Encounter of Christ and Veronica, Zuccari's focus on Christ recalls Durer's and Goltzius's stress on figura, or God's presence, in a narrative context. Erich Auerbach has called attention to the transferences of meaning reflected by figura in a series of typological associations in late antique and classical exegesis, with profound implications for the historical reality and consistency of figura as opposed to the figura of the rhetoricians.43 The figura disrupts the flow of discourse in that it belongs to a narrative sequence subordinated to an ultimate truth that is enacting the model or prototype situated in the future. Auerbach also noted that the Greek etymology of figura contained the idea of molding or impressing a form."14 Figura had direct implications for the ninth-century discourse on the icon as artifact. Theodore of Studios used figura and icon interchangeably to contribute to the construction of a strongly formalist account of Byzantine art.40 Condemning as outdated and obsolete all forms of representation that would associate the icon with the sign or symbol, this formalist discourse sought to establish the figura as the essential model of the Christian image.

The argument that the Christian icon directly descends from an archetype had particular relevance for the postTridentine desire to assert the contemporary authority of many religious images. In terms of artistic practice, the call for consistency between icon and archetype was sustained by a notional model of production for which the artifact was a substitute for the original. Zuccari submitted his altarpiece to one such act of legitimate substitution, jus t as his Renaissance predecessors had done when they cast their artifacts in the mold of late medieval images. Riiigbom recognized variations of the Milanese woodcut hi many Venetian formulations of the solitary Christ, as well as in other figurai narratives of the Italian Renaissance.41' These experiments sprang from a fascination with the half-length format of the Byzantine icon, here adapted for the intimacy of the "dramatic close-up" view. A number of fifteenth-century Netherlandish and Venetian paintings explored the affective interactions of characters viewed from close up, making a significant contribution to the early history of portraiture that also had ramifications for the medium of sculpture. Donatello's images of the Madonna and Child combined the half-length format of Byzantine icons with medallic profile portraits. The historical citations in Donatello's Madonna dei Pazzi (Fig. 13), Madonna Chettini, and Madonna Garetti Miniati ; derive from an understanding of figura as a means of dislocating time through replication. Reworking the icon in the medium of sculpture, Donatelle gave to his works the same power as an authoritative portrait of Christ. Jeanette Kohl's observation that Donatello's busts reveal an identity between the portrait and the portrayed that disrupts the particular character of portraiture assumes a full interrelation between the art of Donatello and Forces underlying the immutable beauty of figura.47

In adapting the profile portrait to the dramatic encounter between Christ and Veronica, Zuccari provided a creative synthesis of Renaissance tradition with the early modern revival of late medieval devotional practice. The early modern age encouraged portrayals of Christ carrying the cross, along with the deliberate medievalisms that would shape Zuccari's approach. The power and integrity of medieval religious imagery dovetailed with Renaissance efforts to integrate icons and relics into the representation of Christ. In the sixteenth century, reins tan tiation of medieval images took the form of a dramatization of the Christian icon. Zuccari's determination to strengthen the narrative element of his altarpiece responded directly to the discourse on the benefits of Christ's death for the internal reform of the individual. In the pos t-Triden tine decades, this attitude specifically resumed the late medieval insistence on Imuatio Christiana the accompanying adaptation of the icon.48

Zuccari must have gained access to the important Christ Carrying the Cross by Filippo Mazzola in Parma (Fig. 14), where he was led both by his vivid interest in Correggio and the urging of the Carracci.49 Mazzola's 1504 painting relies on the northern Italian tradition of devozione privata that drove the altarpieces of Antonello da Messina, Giovanni Bellini, and Giorgione. The hold this more personal interpretation of Christian spirituality exerted on these masters resulted in the central position of Christ's image in Renaissance painting. In Parma, the northern configurations of private devotion were heightened by the local embrace of Erasmus's Enchiridion militis chmtiani, which proposed the new ideals of the philosophia Christi.50 The Erasmian unity of eruditio and pietas was predicated on a Christian humanism concerned with recovering both spiritual and intellectual resources. In Parma such ideas were singled out for special comment in the reform-minded quarters that practiced pietas interiorizzala (inward religiosity), insisting on faith in the benefits of Christ's Crucifixion and on a deeper Christian spirituality than institutional practices could offer.51 Mazzola belonged to a Parmesan family of respected artists who were practitioners of this putas interiorizzala.52

Mazzola's Christ Carrying the Cross derives from this Parmesan circle and its interest in establishing the true likeness of Christ. The painting echoes unmistakably the Milanese woodcut in its careful graphic expression and distribution of tonal effects. The graphic quality of the panel refers back to the most striking details of the Milanese woodcut, stressing the roughness of the wooden cross while submitting Christ's likeness as depicted in the woodcut to narrative development. Mazzola emphasized the meditative quality of the image by orienting Christ frontally and showing the haunted expression of his eyes. The panel is replete with powerful descriptive details such as Christ's arched eyebrows and the contrast of his pallor with his locks of dark hair. Christ's regal attire recalls northern renditions of the subject, as does Mazzola's experimental emulation in tempera of the Netherlandish oil technique and the effects of light, color, and texture it could achieve. The artist would have known the many Netherlandish images in collections around the city of Parma.53 While Mazzola had an interest in these paintings' visual effects, he primarily strove to capture not the realism associated with Netherlandish art but its emotional impact through dramatic gestures.

The spiritual ethos embodied in the Imitatio Christi took its most compelling form with Lorenzo Lotto, whose reformminded character stands out as particularly significant among his Italian contemporaries. His Christ Carrying the Cross (Fig. 15) uses the painter's brush to emulate the subtleties of a hand-colored early sixteenth-century Lombard woodcut (Fig. 16).54 Lotto translated into the format of the altarpiece the woodcut's compelling plea that believers embrace the cross in their own Imitatio Christi. Lotto's usage of sfumato in the tormented expression of Christ and of metallic effects in the crown and armor recalls the refinements of the Lombard woodcut. Drawing on a printed image. Lotto was able to highlight the most significant elements of the biblical narrative of the carrying of the cross.

Openness to painted and print media was integral to Lotto's ability to visualize textual sources. The letters in his account book demonstrate the quintessential union between Lotto's paintings and the Italian reform movement. This movement was particularly prominent in northern Italy, where Lotto lived most of his life and where adherence to sola ßdes, or faith alone in the power of the crucified Christ, registered its greatest popularity. As Adriano Prosperi has recognized, the spirituality of northern Italy was a beacon for both reformers and artists seeking a more personal relationship with Christ in a time of historical and confessional crisis.55 Lotto's paintings clearly reveal his profound involvement with the Imitation of Christ, as expounded in Pietro da Lucca's Detto imitar di Christo, which Lotto owned.50

In the post-Tridentine decades, the Roman Catholic Church's official promulgation of doctrinal legitimacy discouraged this view of faith as the personal experience and inner conviction of the benefits of Christ's Crucifixion. It survived, however, in die secret activity of the Italian spirituali, who were both products of the Renaissance and agents of religious reform in close kinship with the theology of the Protestant north.57 The hite sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries saw dramatic changes in the concern over devotional continuity with the Early Christian period that had prompted Michelangelo's own attempted reform of art.58 Michelangelo had proposed simply taking religious images back to their forma antiqua in ways that did not comply with the Counter-Reformation's legalistic affirmation of the continuity of tradition, expressed in the adherence to moral law rather than to personal religious faith. In the context of the Oratorian-led interest in the archaeological remains of the early Apostolic church, intended to demonstrate the continuity with its apostolic origins that the Roman Church had always professed, a new sense of continuity as evidence of the legitimacy of the Roman Church superseded the Renaissance concern with reconstructing venerable image traditions.

The investigations of painters and ecclesiastical theorists served as the corollary to the post-Tridentine Greek campaign of church reform. Pope Clement VIIl1 s interest in the Greek Orthodox Church and Byzantine liturgy was an extension of his broader commitment to the reform of the Roman Church, with the assistance of Saint Philip Neri and Cardinals Cesare Baronio, Robert Bellarmine, and Silvio Antoniano.59 Their efforts constituted the sobering conclusion of earlier attempts at ecclesiastical reform, after the Council of Trent had prohibited actual fusion of the Roman and Byzantine rites. The publication in 1568 of the revised Breviarum romanum, the traditional prayer book for the divine office, acquired institutional force in 1588 when Pope Sixtus V established the Sacred Congregation of Bites ana Ceremonies in his attempt to bring local practices into alignment with Roman authority as part of the reform of the Roman Curia.60

The post-Tridentine reform of the Roman rites and the new sacred history were of immediate relevance to artistic commissions. Emblematic images of the religious order required considerable attention to the history of their subject matter, artfully pegged to the principles of clarity and legible content. The powerful assertion of venerable traditions was necessary to justify this order's power. The church's sense of its own antiquity expressed itself in a dependence on, and fascination with, prototypes, one of these from Byzantine ari, the saintly character placed in the center of the religious image, often with a frontal orientation, became a prime feature of post-Tridentine painting. Many ecclesiastical treatises enthusiastically promoted the antiquity of frontally oriented images. Cardinal Carlo Borromeo played a significant role m formulating the decrees of the Council of Trent, and in his influential Insfructianes fatnicae et supellectilis ecclesiastical libri duo, completed in 1577, he presented the dignity of religious painting as integral to church reform.61 Cardinal Borromeo was not isolated in his efforts to project a postTridentine prospect back onto Early Christian images. The Dominican theologian Giovanni Andrea Gilio, who concerned himself with the recovery of venerable image traditions, defended the old cult of images and prized in particular their frontality, what he called their prosopopeea, in his 1564 Degli errori de' pittori circa l'historié.62

Zuccari participated in tine Greek campaign of the reformers through altarpieces that self-consciously maintained antique features, which he nonetheless reinscribed with the dramatic content of modern painting. His efforts convincingly staged the recovery of ancient Roman art, working within a substitutional field of cross-references between Renaissance engraving and the Byzantine icon. The substitutionai effectiveness of the venerable traditions Zuccari recovered meant they could be both recognizably ancient and functional in a contemporary work. Zuccari's profile Christ at S. Prassede transcends the specific moment of its creation, testifying to the enlistment of old images for the reinforcement of contemporary authority. By contrast, the CounterReformation interest in establishing historical continuity with the Apostolic past implied a sequence of unique creations, where every object or event could be securely anchored in linear time.

The Roman Church's campaign for historicist legitimacy collided with the interests of painters such as Zuccari. The altarpieces that he created for the Basilica of San Lorenzo in El Escorial led to a dispute with José de Sigüenza, secretary to King Philip II and a proponent of the new sacred history of Hapsburg absolutism.63 After returning to Italy, Zuccari nonetheless resumed his engagement with Early Christian images. In his 1594 Encounter of Christ and Veronica, figures and landscape are organized around a vertical axis that focuses devotional and contemplative attention on the figure of Christ. His image has its basis in a dramatization of the frontal aspect of the icon while departing from the frontal portraits of saints espoused by Counter-Reformation art theorists. This reworking of frontality within the altarpiece format presented a rival model to the institutionally mandated cult image. The result was a highly dramatic treatment of the figure of Christ, with a profile view that reveals Zuccari's devotion to Renaissance experiments in altar painting.

Zuccari evocatively adapted the late medieval Milanese woodcut to his S. Prassede altarpiece by giving the profile view a new motivation in a narrative moment, the bearing of the cross. Mantegna had reformed devotional images by turning them into narratives, creating altarpieces that combine the dramatic character of the Albertian intarla with the inwardness of devotional images.64 These qualities allowed the sacred narrative to function both as cult image and as altarpiece. A popular narrative such as the Carrying of the Cross - circulated in miniatures, reliefs, and prints - underwent various transformations, among them Mantegna's and Bellini's inscription of the Milanese woodcut into the Gospel account."65 Mantegna and Bellini repurposed the woodcut to situate Christ's true likeness within a complex narrative. In the post-Tri dentine decades, Zuccari formed a modern link with the same woodcut in an altarpiece that explored the dramatic element of Christ's portrait even as it acknowledged contemporary concerns about the stability of the icon in narrative contexts.

The memory of late medieval images was significant to the practice of early modern artists and theorists. Zuccari's ability to lay stress on a beautifully profiled Christ, and, at the same time, perpetuating the character of medieval images, reflects what reformists in the post-Tridentine decades termed "the beauty of holiness." Zuccari must have been cognizant of the retrospective of Francesco Bocchi's 1592 treatise Opern di M. Francesco Bocchi sopra l'imagine miracolosa (Iella Santissima Annunziata di Firenze. Bocchi asserted that the head of Mary in the late medieval Annunciation venerated at SS. Annunziata in Florence (Fig. 17) rivaled the Renaissance canon in beauty/''1 The Mary of the Annunziata, the central image of the city and its most beautiful landmark, was ostensibly painted by angels as the artist slept. The beauty of holiness celebrated in the Annunziata remained a powerful element in reform-minded circles ai ter Trent, even when the demand for decorous images ended the call for medieval revivals.67

The miraculous Virgin of the Annunciation, with its inherent allusions to the Incarnate Word, provoked an important response at SS. Annunziata, where medieval image rituals perpetuated the memory of the deceased. Mary's mysterious appearance was tied to a ritual of figurai transformation, a long-standing tradition at SS. Annunziata. The image of Mary crystallized archaic gestures and postures generated by natural human fear over the life after death, which prompted people to portray themselves through death masks, as if to apprehend the unavoidable awaiting them. A stable prototype controlled subsequent replications, thus restricting the range of difference carried out in future portrayals. Aby Warburg was the first to draw attention to the tradition of ex-votos as evidence of a central episode in the history of resemblance.'68 Warburg also accepted that, it was worth studying rudimentary art like the waxwork in order to identify a hierarchy of values by which the perfection of Renaissance art was attained. The tradition of ex-votos, or boti, immensely popular in the late sixteenth century, was particularly emphasized at SS. Annunziata. The ex-votos were imprints of a still-living face, based on the age-old technique of the imago, or mortuary effigy, a medieval practice meant to connect the donor with God.69 It was, as Georges Didi-Huberman has noted, a resemblance conceived as a sacrificial gift offered to God in anticipation of die forthcoming life after death. By performing this Imitatia Christi, believers hoped to defeat their own death in the image of the resurrected Christ.70 Notwithstanding the crude and rudimentary character of die waxworks, they deserve attention not only for the light they shed on the history of Christianity but also as a repository of models imitated in Renaissance painting.

The late sixteenth-century survival of the Imitatio Christi was predicated on an interest in truthful and inimitable representations that could reveal an original through a process of reproduction and imitation. Implicit associations between lmitatio Christi and the beauty of holiness, as exemplified by the Virgin of SS. Annunciata, motivated engravers in their engagement with historical art. Portraits such as Virgil Solis's intaglio print of a profile Christ (Fig, 18) possessed the beauty and holiness sought by Zuccari in his own profile Christ at S. Prassede. Solis, one of the most prolific German printmakers of the sixteenth century, celebrated inimi lability as the single most influential quality of his engravings.71 He no longer used the roundel format for his profile portrait of Christ, as in Vico's and Burgkmair's portraits, which gave this visual evidence of the medals as details gleaned from the textual source, nor did he appear interested in the medallic format's suggestion of authenticity. Solis illustrates a higher degree of liberation and emancipation from the philological and archaeological ambitions of the print revealed in the preservation mechanism of the original Christ by treating concrete evidence as an act of creative intervention. Solis belonged to those who divined the danger inherent in replication: that it would make it difficult, even to the besttrained eye, to distinguish between the fabrication of visual evidence and an artist's imitation of a worthy prototype. His bold graphic reinîerpreration of Christ's physiognomy as it appeared in the medallic portraits seemed to him perfectly compatible with his interest in authentic likeness. After all, he still conformed to historical evidentiary standards with a clear identifying label in the form of an inscription at the bottom of the image.

Vico may have admired creative engravers such as Solis, whereas he criticized the fabrication of historical evidence apparent in prints with unfounded titles and inaccurate dates.72 Vico's insistence on authenticity resulted in the earliest systematic treatment of art forgery, an interest he extended from numismatics to his own engraved designs after ancient and contemporary art.73 It was within die framework of this advanced concept of the historicity of the art of engraving that Vico's series Portraits and Medals included a profile Christ of a beauty and serenity that reanimated the late medieval Christian image within the modern religious engraving (Fig. 5). The engraved portraits and their fascination with prototypes may be said to carry on the claims to authenticity of effigies, tombs, death masks, and epigraphic monuments.74 They correlate the ancient understanding of the icon with modern practices of replication, leading to the particularly significant conclusion that their makers' preoccupation with finding authentic images of Christ equaled that of earlier ages. The extension of the referential authority of cult images like the Virgin of SS. Annunziata into the print medium reinscribed the medieval icon within individualized compositions, in a very different manner from the new sacred iconography of the post-Tri den ti ne era. Vico's interest in authentic representation led him to derive his replicated Christian images from ancient portraits of Christ and the saints. A numismatist, Vico corrected and supplemented textual sources with the assistance of Roman and Greek coins.73 He inaugurated the study of a specific aspect of ancient numismatics he called sacred imagery on the basis of his conviction that the deities reproduced on coins bore a true resemblance to Roman statues. Vico formed a link between two types of replication, the discourse on engraving and the reproduction on coins, that would prove indispensable for the truth claims of his printed portraits of ancient figures.

Vico's concern with veracity as the essential attribute of sacred imagery sheds light on the late sixteenth-century concept of the beauty of holiness. For the ecclesiastical program of reform set in motion after Trent, the classical beauty of Greco-Roman statues played an essential role in the effort to demonstrate continuities with the past.70 Luba Freedman has underscored how ecclesiastical patrons and theorists such as Gahrielle Paleotti and Federico Borromeo demanded that artists adhere to the classical beauty of pagan statues in the creation of Christian paintings for the post-Tridentìne canon of sacred art.77 By contrast, for Vico and like-minded engravers, the affecting power of classical beauty constituted a potent reminder of how tied up such an ideal had been to true likeness in both the past and present tense. The beauty of holiness attests, therefore, to the chasm between the stylistic choices of clerics investing Counter-Reformation art with classicist rhetoric for the sake of demonstrating historical continuity and the pursuits of engravers preoccupied with truthfulness of representation.

Vico's Jesus Christ is an authentic reworking of Christ's image that secures engraving as the essential link between ancient past and modern artistic future. Christ's replicated features affirm a new category of cult image that translates Christ's likeness into modern sacred imagery based on the referential authority of the documentary image. The merit of engraving was to reframe Christ icons and to reinscribe them in a process of reliable transmissions referring back to a true effigy of Christ. The print discovered its vocation as a powerful instrument of knowledge and at the same time as a reliable extension of relics, sacred portraits, and miraculous images. s Engravers did not yield to the stylistic choices of many Counter-Reformation ecclesiastical figures and men of letters, instead pursuing the beauty of holiness as a mark of veracity in a series of replications connecting back to the most ancient images of Christ. Around these Renaissance réinscriptions of the icon as profile portrait, Zuccari constructed his narrative of the bearing of the cross.

Architecture and the Creation of Zuccari's Early Modern Altarpiece

Most of Zuccari's contemporaries looked to the past to provide them with an authorized canon of artistic models. We have seen how both Lanfranco and Domenîchîno made reference back to the Last. Communion of Sainl Jeronw of Agostino Carracci in distinctive ways. While Lanfranco made explicit the substitutional character of his drawing after Agostino's opera prima, Domenichuio dismissed the latter in order to ground his invention in the Counter-Reformation's culture of textual authority. Zuccari's interest in authoritative archetypes was reflected in his extraordinary engagement with Renaissance architectural thought. In 1607 he published his treatise L'idea de' pilttm, scultori ei architetti, in which he advised the architect to be both a painter, who must master disegno in its double meaning of drawing and design, and a sculptor, who designs bodies and forms in ways that respond directly to the rules of architecture and the classical orders.79 Zuccari's description of the inextricable bond between architecture, sculpture, and painting would later serve as an inspiration for Diego Velazquez, who deliberately sought to claim the power and prestige of architecture for painting. The concept of the painter-architect would also help Rubens to become one of the most outstanding artistic personalities of his age and the most distinguished disseminator of Italian Renaissance forms in the Low Countries.80

Zuccari explicitly patterned his notion of the artist-architect on Michelangelo, thereby parting company with the classicizing aesthetics then in ascendancy. Zuccari maintained architecture's union with the sister arts of sculpture and painting, endorsing personal creativity as expressed in individualized compositions that established secure links to the past. Cammy Brothers has stressed the singularity of Michelangelo's dependence in architecture on the figurative character of his drawings.81 Michelangelo's continual transformation and refashioning of his ideas were bound up in the rigorous study of formal syntax and the exercise of his deep knowledge of antiquity. He elevated the antiquarian study of architectural monuments to a fundamentally creative enterprise by resisting the conventional canon of established models.82

In his framing of Christ's likeness within the narrative of Veronica's veil, Zuccari acted in the manner of those medieval architects who made replicas of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem to reinstantiate this most prestigious prototype.^ The architectural model of the Holy Sepulchre ensured a fitting context for the Christian cult and, in that sense, was aligned with Zuccari's pictorial efforts to inscribe the true likeness of Christ into the narrative of its making. Zuccari's solution arose from the intermingling of Italian and Spanish culture, on the one hand, and of an emergent classicism with Gothic survivals, on the other.

Zuccari's Spanish sojourn of 1585 to 1588 at the invitation of Philip II to paint the high altarpiece in the Basilica of San Lorenzo at El Escorial, though unsuccessful, gave him renewed assurance regarding the artist-architect theory he would formalize in writing in 1607. Unlike in Italy, where Gothic architecture decreased in viability after the second half of the fifteenth century, the construction of tile cathedrals of Seville (1506), Segovia (1526), and Salamanca (1510, resumed in 1589) ensured the style's continued prestige in Spain throughout the sixteenth century and beyond."'1 As Earl Rosenthal recognized, the cathedral of Granada, designed in 1528 by one of Spain's greatest Italian-trained architects, Diego de Sìloe, was at once an image of the Holy Sepulchre and a Renaissance church that differed from medieval copies precisely in its painstaking recovery of the original architectural plan of the Constantinian monument.S!i The Siloe project combined a traditional nave with a rotunda derived UOm the Early Christian rotunda of the Anastasis. Siloe surpassed his medieval predecessors in basing his cathedral not on the Anastasis alone but on the entire complex of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Siloe implicitly identified his efforts with Renaissance archaeology by imitating the original spatial disposition of the monument, unlike medieval copies that had evinced little interest in its Early Christian state.

The replication of the rotunda and aedicule of the Holy Sepulchre presaged the competing claims between model and nonmodel in the context of Renaissance architecture.87 Print technology reproduced the church's current architectural state rather than the original Constantinian plan of 325-26, when a cupola and aedicule were built to shelter the recently rediscovered tomb of Christ. Subsequent destructions and reconstructions undertaken by either Muslim or Christian rulers remained consistent with the original Constantinian plan of a rotunda, nave, and porch nested together to form one architectural whole. The aedicule reproduced in paiot by Jan van Scorei in his 1528-29 group portrait of the Brotherhood of Jerusalem Pilgrims of Haarlem may provide one reliable depiction.88 This was the architectural framework duplicated in both medieval and quattrocento art. It proved as difficult to suppress the many popular legends surrounding the Holy Sepulchre as to jettison the religious and artistic traditions of die past. Renaissance thought did not banish the many variations introduced by pilgrims' accounts but rather allotted them a fixed place in the typology of the Holy Sepulchre.

Siloe's cathedral was a Renaissance reimagining of the Early Christian form of the Holy Sepulchre, based on the belief that the cruciform choir and rotunda were originally joined and that the church had been built in the Roman style.89 The lack of reliable models stimulated the Renaissance architect to ponder the basic architectural structure of the Holy Sepulchre, from which centrally planned church buildings had derived. Siloe used his design to reconcile the increasing refinements of printed data with die receding power of the structure's myth. He succeeded in placing his new building on an equally authoritative footing with the chain of images of the Holy Sepulchre that had exerted a massive influence on artists for centuries.

The model's survival through reliable replication allowed for the thematizatioii of such transmissions in painting. It was the foil whereby figura, here the profile Christ in the S. Prassede altarpiece, could emerge in a sixteendi-century narrative painting informed by the icon and the achei ropoie tic image. The centrality of Zuccari's Christ figure in his altarpiece may be seen as an interpretation of the centralized plans of Byzantine architecture. Pertinently, the Olgiati Chapel, where 7"Af Encounter of Christ and Veronica still hangs, is the pendant of the ninth-century S. Zeno Chapel, located across from it in the main nave of the S. Prassede Basilica (Fig. 19). S, Prassede was one of many churches in Rome and its outskirts associated with an unprecedented campaign of church building from 380 to 480 that followed the Constantinian expansion of the Roman Empire in the west. Richard Krantheimer noted that church building did not regain the authority it had held in the post-Constantinian age until the seventeenth century."0 Nonetheless, the powerful and enduring legacy of the church under Emperor Constantine manifested itself up to the post-Tri dentine age in the remodelings of Roman churches, a process that exemplified through the centuries the sustained relevance of the fourth- and fifthcentury Roman basilica.91

Clerical writers in the late sixteenth century particularly stressed the continuity of modern cultic sites such as S. Prassede with the early Roman basilicas. The lore of Early Christian religiosity permeating these sites was especially associated with the halcyon days of lhe Church following the reign of Constantine. As John Shearman recognized, the dome and mosaic decoration of the S. Zeno Chapel reclaimed the easteni tradition of die central medallion of Christ Pantocrator.92 The Counter-Reformation joined images that directly addressed the viewer with the immensity of Christ's sacrifice to an obsessive concern with clear and unambiguous content. Such restrictions imposed by convention and decorum cast Christ as the protagonist of a mere historical drama. Amid post-Tridentine attention to sacred iconography, Zuccari confronted the challenge of the highly regulated religious image's frontal character. Alternatively, one might see his solution as an aharpiece reinterpretation of the S. Zeno Chapel that conflates the intimacy of the devotional woodcut with the narrative of Veronica's veil. The creative synthesis of architecture, woodcut, and portrait medallion staged a heightened level of referential power akin to the reactivation of the mosaic on the dome of the S, Zeno Chapel.

Zuccari spared no effort in his attempt to engage the mosaic ceiling of the S. Zeno Chapel without resorting to the actual depiction of mosaic, as had been done in the backgrounds of many significant quattrocento paintings.9'1 The mosaic floor and ceiling decorations of Roman churches such as S. Pudenziana, where Zuccari was charged with the drawings for the restoration of die Caetani Chapel, constituted powerful reminders of the enduring impact of Byzantine art on the west, as preserved in originals as well as in fifteen di-century Cosmatesque reconstructions that introduced Byzantine patterns to the flooring of the churches of Rome and in the surrounding province of Latium.94 Like the icon and the acheiropoietîc image, mosaic shared in the authority granted to antiquity in the Renaissance. The highpitched emotion of late medieval images and references to ancient art were constants of Zuccari's career, both in his stance toward religious images and in his sense of how the revival of antiquity had brought about a renewal of the art of painting. Earlier, we saw how Zuccari represented the acheiropoietic image within the narrative of the medieval legend, a solution utterly different from El Greco's or Zurbaran's archaizing attempts to imitate the acheiropoietic portrait itself in the medium of painting. Zuccari's image, by contrast, narrates its own production history with the same audioritative power as architectural models derived from the Holy Sepulchre complex or die Christ Pantocrator in the dome of the S. Zeno Chapel.

Like any Byzantine vault or dome, that of S. Zeno replicates the likeness of Christ Pantocrator in the medium of mosaic, inscribing itself within the substitutional logic at work in the central plans of Byzantine architecture. The need to adapt the mosaic to figura had become a critical commonplace after Constantine, and it would have ruled Zuccari's logic in die medium of painting. By associating figura with the retroactivating art of the S. Zeno mosaic, Zuccari attempted to affirm the antiquity of his own panel painting and its viability as the medium for the narrative account of Veronica's veil. But his approach departed from the reproduction of fictive mosaic backgrounds in quattrocento painting. Zuccari's chief purpose was twofold: to subordinate his painting to the larger identity of the basilica and to bring his brand of antiquarianism back into association with secure modes of replication.

The Basilica of S. Prassede stands as a particularly revealing case study of Cardinal Baronio's fervent desire to demonstrate the continuity of the Roman Catholic Church with Early Christian practice, articulated as early as Ì 588 in the first volume of his Annales ecclesiastici?*1 S. Prassede served as the model for a number of basilicas restored in the ninth century to house relics transferred from the abandoned Roman catacombs. When. Cardinal Carlo Borromeo set out to redecorate his titular church of S. Prassede, it was the resting place of some twenty-three hundred martyrs whose bones had been rescued from the catacombs by Pope Paschal I in the early ninth century. Paschal's accommodation of an evergrowing cult of martyrs gave eloquent testimony to the esteem in which the medieval Roman church held its Constantinian past.97 The previous fifteen years of church building under Cons tannile had particularly stressed the cult of martyrs and holy sites, bringing about architectural interventions in both the size and plan of the basilicas to reflect their new functions as martyria and funeral halls. Krautheimer noted that the Constantinian basilica exerted a distinct influence throughout Early Christian times, engendering later Roman structures that merged funerary and cultic functions.98 In the early ninth century, when Pope Paschal I combined the martyrium shrine and funeral space at S. Prassede, he decisively reanimated the Constantinian idea. He reinforced this commitment by commissioning large mosaics in celebration of the relics' translation. Like the mosaics at the Roman basilica of SS. Nereo e Achilleo, also commissioned in the ninth century, the S. Prassede mosaics were reflective of the interrelationship between relics and images (Fig. 20).99

Proponents of the Counter-Reformation drew on the tenacity of these early traditions, with the rediscovery of the catacombs as a source of saints' relics suiting their adaptation of historical practices to contemporary imperatives. The new urgency of establishing historical continuities with the early Apostolic church expressed itself in a sustained interest in the catacombs during the late sixteenth century. Their rediscovery brought on a stream of saints' relics largely untapped since the pontificates of Paul I (757-67) and Paschal I (81724).1<M) In the Counter-Reformation, the heroic age of Early Christian history became increasingly associated with the catacombs and the central role they were believed to have played in the activity of the early martyrs who were buried there. The pope himself sought to harness the sanctity of these relics to confirm the Apostolic past of the Roman see and to profit from the rediscovery of venerable traditions. Simon Ditchfield has perceptively observed that the relics were aboveground, and "rediscovery" is a problematic denomination for these acts of relocation and translation.101 Clement VIII attended the closing ceremony of Baronio's carefully staged translation of the bones of the early martyr saints Nereo and Achilleo to the recently restored church bearing their name in 1597, the year when Baronio was made a cardinal.102 Like SS. Nereo e Achilleo, the S, Cesareo Basilica was a product of the Roman Counter-Reformation's interest in restorations.1"3 The resumption of the ninth-century pursuit of relics opened a whole new area of ecclesiastical studies, which has subsequently been termed Christian archaeology. In concert with Baronio's Annales ecclesiastici, this research laid the foundation for the new ecclesiastical historiography and for innovations in the subject matter of religious painting.104

Zuccari adhered to thus culture of relics and cult images, and his S. Prassede altarpiece reverberates with a tragic awareness of the Christian past. But the archaeological rigor of the new religious painting did not suit his ideal of the individualized composition as a re instantiation of the medieval icon. The convention and decorum demanded by the new historiograph)' conflicted with the endeavors of artists like Zuccari, who drew on ancient figurative sources in an attempt to establish them as models worth imitating beyond their age and historical value.

The S, Zeno dome and its Byzantine mosaics modeled one way of enlisting the authenticity of Christian artifacts for the dramatic encounter of Christ and Veronica, rallier than for the static display of a relic. The profile Christ holding the center of devotional attention in the S. Prassede altarpiece represents the modern restructuring of the directed center of the Byzantine dome tradition. Zuccari's Encounter of Christ and Veronica is a compelling substitute for early Christocentric images and for relics of the kind venerated in medieval churches. The creation of religious images devoted to celebrating the artistic merit of Early Christian works was by no means as unconditional as the Counter-Reformation embrace of the cult of relics. In combining a heartfelt devotion to the artistic remains of early Christianity with an acknowledgment of their aesthetic shortcomings, images like Zuccari's altarpiece claimed that a Jack of visual grace might itself be an inducement to piety.

Restaging the Altarpiece Paradigms

Zuccari's Encounter of Christ and Veronica is a dramatic scene populated with a few figures, set outside the walls of Jerusalem on the way to Calvary. The artist focuses on the profoundly wrenching moment when Christ, weakened by the suffering he has endured, falls under the weight of the cross and Simon of Gyrene lifts it from his shoulders. The dramatic core is the encounter between Christ and Veronica, who kneels in front of him to extend her famous cloth. A number of altarpiece paradigms are recognizable in The Encounter of Christ and Veronica. Zuccari reworked Raphael's Ascent to Calvary, also known as the Spasimo di Sicilia, a key narrative interpretation of the carrying of the cross (Fig. 21 ) . By invoking Raphael's Ascent, Zuccari aligned his painting with the reforming trajectory of Renaissance altarpieces that strove for the legible dramatization of religious stories. A prime objective of this reform of the altarpiece had been to use pictorial narrative to reinforce, rather than disperse, devotional attention. Alexander Nagel has stressed how Rogier van der Weyden was resolute in adapting his dramatic and narrative compositions to the icon, and thereby provided a subsequent generation of Italian painters with a meaningful model for die development of the Albertian ¿stona.105 Warburg similarly concluded that the development of Italian altar painting revealed a late medieval religious sensibility in close kinship with the north.106

The Council of Trent gave officia) sanction to this reform of altar painting. The challenge of religious image making thenceforth turned on the reconciliation of an archaic frontality with dramatic istorie. Zuccari advanced the cause of the dramatic composition within religious painting with his altarpiece by creating a successful innovation in a rule-bound age. The Encounter of Christ and Veronica casts aside most narrative accoutrements of the kind advised by post-Tridentine istorie in order to concentrate devotional attention on the suffering Christ. Zuccari brought his protagonist into greater focus by altering Raphael's crowded and dramatic narrative. By contrast, the turned figure dominating the left foreground of Raphael's Ascent indicates movement ont of the altarpiece, distracting us from the mystery of the Passion. Christ's collapse under the weight of the cross and his anguished encounter with the Virgin occupy a narrative continuum, busily populated with many figures and details. Raphael fleshed out narrative incidents for dramatic ends, showing the Roman soldiers as they command Simon of Gyrene to carry the cross and the crowd of attendants supporting the Virgin.

Prints had played a crucial role in emboldening Raphael to challenge the long-accepted convention of the altarpiece as a stable object of prayer and worship. Raphael had associated altar painting with engraving as early as his 1507 work Tlie Carrying of Christ to the Tornì) (F'ig. 22), in which figures appear to move out of die picture in a composition that incorporates aspects of Mantegna's engraved Entombment (Fig. 23). Raphael's adjustments to Mantegna's scene were better suited to the implicit cultic function of the Lamentation he settled on hi the final altarpiece.107 He further responded to printmaking in the Ascent to Calvary, which directly recalls Dürer's model of the Passion, conceived as a continuous story in which each scene exceeds the separate units of medieval art and contributes to the narration of the whole. The effective relation between Dürer's scenes gave Raphael the idea of the altarpiece as a narrative continuum.

While the model of the engraving determined Raphael's challenge to the conventions of the altarpiece, it also reinforced the association of Ascent ?? Calvary with novel dramatic ideas. Ronrad Oberhuber has examined how Raphael advanced the tradition of the Spasimo, or the swoon of the Virgin as she sees her suffering Son, by laying stress on Christ and especially on the Virgin's active compassion rather than passive swooning.1"8 The dramatic unity of feeling that characterized Raphael's Ascent to Calvary recalled northern engravings of Christ falling under the cross. Raphael invoked Durer's Passion cycles hi the pose of his Christ to reconceptualize the spatial organization of the drama. In his rendering of painful gestures and juxtaposition of dramatic action with a delicate background landscape, Raphael revealed his knowledge of prints to be indispensable to his innovations in religious painting. His achievement in the Spasimo highlighted the efficacy of print technology in ways that stimulated painters of altarpieces to ponder the basic nature of their task. The historical interest of the engraving to modern viewers owes much to Raphael's own decisions and the concept of the original that governed his studio.109 The relation between original and replica aimed to strengthen the former through the explanatory and revelatory power of the latter. As Wood has put it, the concept of die original that comes into focus only through the lens of the perfect replica discloses that painting and print were mutually influential.110

Some eighty years after Raphael, Zuccari tapped the potential of prints to reform modern altar painting with Renaissance precedents firmly in mind. The S. Prassede altarpiece shares its principal arguments with his reliquary altars and altarpieces at the Basilica of San Lorenzo in Spain, betokening an intimacy with prints. Zuccari showed how the print might emancipate the image from post-Tri den tine strictures at the same time that it reclaimed Renaissance precedents. He reverentially embraced Raphael's perception that the tradition of a pictorial subject might be strengthened through citations from printed images. Zuccari's pursuits were also akin to those of Lanfranco, who defended and promoted Agostino Carracci's Last Communion of Saint Jerome as the origin of a nascent pictorial tradition. Zuccari developed a modern altarpiece on the basis of the print, employed here as visual source material. His approach is symptomatic of a reform-minded ethos, and his reinstantiation of the venerable woodcut entails dramatizations analogous to those of his Renaissance predecessors. This evolution of the altarpiece was disturbing only to those many Counter-Reformation theorists who insisted on fron tally oriented images.

The post-Tridentine decades were not propitious for the devotional character of Imitatio Christi embodied in the Milanese woodcut. Its features belonged to the domain of private devotion, where it was used as a recipient for prayer and as an aid to meditation similar to the Ecce Homo and Salvaîor Mundi icons of Christ. ' ' ' Zuccari's interest in reform ideas is primarily apparent in his grafting of the iconic Milanese woodcut onto his S. Prassede altarpiece. The Encounter of Christ and Veronica stuns us with a vertical format akin to the traditional Byzantine icon, achieved by a pictorial composition hi which figures and landscape are organized around a vertical axis centered on Christ. In choosing to fuse die beautiful profile of Christ with a dramatic narrative, Zuccari cast his altarpiece as the compelling solution to a fundamental dilemma of modern religious painting. The reference to the print within the pictorial composition preserved the appearance of Christ from medieval images while generating a narrative drama. Although Zuccari never directly reproduced the woodcut in his S. Prassede altarpiece, he decisively adapted its form to the narrative of Veronica's veil.

Zuccari's S. Prassede altarpiece maintained the dramatic power of his Renaissance predecessors while reinstantiating the engraved profile of Christ as a modern object for contemplation and veneration. His integration of post-Tridentine reflections on cultic site and narrative action refocused attention on the late medieval image, not only for its history but also for its artistic value. Zuccari clearly combined the subs ti tuti onal mechanism inherent in such a task with the overt narrative drama that had made Raphael's Spasimo such a remarkable altar painting. Like Raphael, Zuccari depicted the Roman soldier commanding Simon (if Gyrene to cany the cross and the exclamatory gestures of the attendants. Zuccari's determination to present the encounter of Christ and Veronica with Christ occupying the center of the image had analogies as well in the more radical procedure adopted by Michelangelo in his Entombment of about 1500 (Fig. 24). Michelangelo experimented here with narrative and the dramatic means of expressing the discontinuities of time and space inherent in the icon, effectively heightening the sense that Christ remains the fixed point around which human action revolves.1 12 As Nagel has convincingly argued, Michelangelo merged new ideas of narrative painting to form an image that directly recalled the frontal traditions of altar painting."·*1 Zuccari managed to conflate the iconic stability of Michelangelo's Entombment and the narrative drama of Raphael's Ascent to Calvary in a composition that was a corollary of these two seemingly opposed authoritative altarpieces. He responded to the reform-minded solutions of his Renaissance predecessors by insisting on authentic and inimitable representation, as derived from the engraved portrait around which Zuccari constructed his dramatic encounter of Christ and Veronica. The narrative action centers on the beautiful Christ of the Passion, a direct response to the early modern imperative that altarpieces contain within themselves models worthy of imitation. The profile Christ is a reinstantiation of the Milanese woodcut and the portrait medallion, now centrally located at the vertical axis of the altarpiece to hold icon and narrative in equilibrium and reinforce cultic veneration of the host raised before it at every mass.

Zuccari's response to his Renaissance predecessors was continuously mediated by contact with ancient tradition in an exemplary case of substitutional logic. The stability of icons, and even elements of their historical style, were thereby preserved in the creation of individual modern compositions. In post-T ridenti ne Italy, many ecclesiastical patrons and theorists demanded that the image's principal figure be placed in the center of the composition and often oriented frontally. Paintings that strictly adhered to these parameters remained devotional and iconic, rather than narrative and dramatic.114 The most immediate and decisive change that Zuccari effected was to reinscribe the portrait medallion into a profile view appropriate to the dramatic encounter between Christ and Veronica without merely yielding to the antiquarian interests of the Counter-Reformation. In pursuing an assimilation of ancient models, Zuccari proved himself deeply committed to upholding and advancing the istoria, while submitting the narrative action to a Chris toce n trie emphasis indispensable to any compelling rendition of the Passion.

The location of The Encounter of Christ and Veronica across from the dome of the S. Zeno Chapel made a powerful plea for the recovery of Christian martyrs' relics by implicitly associating them with authoritative ancient prototypes, here restaged in an episode of the Passion narrative. Zuccari proposed the idea of a parallel between Early Christian relics and the altarpiece by focusing our attention on an image of Christ derived from the late medieval woodcut, which had served private devotion since its inception. Reflections on the authority of cult images and relics reached their apogee in late Renaissance altar paintings that referred back to medieval forms. Through the cultivation of his dramatic narrative, Zuccari decisively translated these ideas in a manner supported by the early modern interest in visual narrative styles as the ultimate evidence of historical authenticity. Early modern works of art acknowledged "style" as historical evidence, incorporating features dislocated from their own production history. This phenomenon alerts us to the altarpiece as the site of a remarkably original appraisal of Early Christian art and of the value of ancient prototypes as a source for narrative.

Notes

It is with a deep sense ?G gratitude thai I express my thanks to Karen Lang, editor-in-chief of TIu- Ari RuUftin, for accepting my article. My gratitude also extends tf) Michael CoIc for his support and to Adam Eaker and Lory Franke! for their superb editorial skills. I am particularly indebted to the art galleries and image holders who permitted me access to die works of ari in their care. Finally, to Alexander Nagel, Philip Sohm, and Brian Grosskurlh, I thank you, as always, for your continued encouragement, many kindnesses, and sound advice.

I. Francis Haskell, "Historical Narrative and Reportage," in History and Its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the I'rul (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 81-127.

2. Pamela M. Jones, Pedmco Barrotneo and the Amimaiana: Art, Paimnage and Reform in Keventnenth-dentwy Milan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 131-35, 179, 288. 331. Jones notes that many saina treated in the engravings and paintings at the Ambrosiana were to be found in the writings of Saint Jerome or in the Vitae patrum sometimes attributed to him.

3. Roberto Weiss, The Renaisance Discovery of Classical Antiquity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969), 186-87, 190-93.

4. As he noted in a letter of September 4. 1636, Io Nicolas-Claude Fabri tie Peiresc, the famous French scholar and collector of antiquities, Rubens faced this problem when he looked at Bossio's volume. See Peter Paul Rubens, The Letters of Peter Paul Rubens, trans, and ed. Rutti Saunders Magurn (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955), 405. For analogous comments on the very poor quality of the drawings in Roma sotterranm, and the disturbing fact that the paintings of the catacombs were described before they had ever been seen, see Haskell, Hat&iy and its imaces, 107-8; and Simon Ditchfield, Liturgy, Sanctity and History in Tridentine italy: Pietro Maria Campi and the Preservation of the Particular (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 46.

5. A notable exception is Cristina Accidini Luchina t, Taddeo e Federico Z,uccari, fratelli pittori del cinquecertto, 2 vols. (Milan: Jaiidi Sapi Editori, 1998).

6. Giovan Pietro Bellori intervened in the classical debate with his remarkable introductory paragraph to the 1672 edition of his Le. vite de' fattori, scultori e architetti moderni. Comparisons to the Neoplalom'c theory oí' the imperfect character of tiaiure and the art of painters and sculptors surpassing nature in both Bellori's Idea (Rome, 1672) and Federico Zuccari's Idea (Turin, 1607) are drawn by Evelina Borea in her edition of Giovan Pietro Bellori, Le vile de'pittori, sciatori e architetti moderni (Turin: Einaudi, 1976), idea, 13 n. 1. Bellori's Neoplatonic bias is apparent in the beginning of Idea, 14: "For this reason noble painters and sculptors, imitating that first maker, also form in their minds an example of higher beauty and by contemplating thai, ihey emend nature without fault of color or of line [Il perché li nobili pittori e scultori qwl primo fabbro imitando, xi formami anch'essi tifila mente un esempio) di ballezza superiore, ed in esse riguardando, emendano la natura .senza colpa de clolore e di lineameto]." However, Zuccari incorporates in his Idea Augustinian ideas on the primacy of sight that took a compelling form in his definition of dimtgno interna, an activity of the divine origins of the intellect. This marks his emancipation from Plato and his absorption within the Augusiinian direction of the modern age. On Zuccari and his Augustinian orientation, see William J. Bouwsma, Thf Waning of Renissancer 1550-1640 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 248.

7. Jn the 1568 edition of the Ln/fs dedicated Io his patron. Aífssaadro Farnese, in a passage from the Life of Fra Angelini, Giorgio Vasari openly condemned the depiction of "practically nude" figures in a church setting. Vasari, revised' più eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architettori nelle redazioni del 1550 e 1568, ed. Paola Barocchi and Rosanna Bettarini, 6 vols. (Florence, 1966-76), vol. 3, Testo, 274-75. Alexander Nagel identified in Vasari's revised take on Fra Angelico an "opportunist's unerring sense of the shifting ideological winds" and an engagement with Piero Aretino's 1545 early Counter-Reformation polemic on images thai encouraged in artists an ever-increasing artificiality and sophistication meant to formalize and UiteHettuauzc the subject matter. Good ari appeared inermi patible withi religion, and religious an was supposed to adhere to a classicist sense of decorum or appropriateness. Nagel, "Sculpture and Relic." in Michulangelo and the Reform nf Art (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 2000), 192.

8. On imitation as envisioned by Vasari, see Philip Sohm, Style in the Art Theory of Early Modern Italy ((Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 84. Vasari defined siyle as ideal imitation, which resembled the Aristotelian definition by Emanuelle Tesauro, who likened it to PoIyclitus's canon of gathering all perfection into an ideal form.

9. The powerful artistic .sense of imtlafjo in the Renaissance has little Io do with the modern idea of imitation, which lacks the concept of transformation or of a modern sensibility into which that past is reborn. See Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982). 32- On fifteenth- and sixteenth-century artists becoming ihemselves creative authors, and the role of prints and engravings in securing the relays of substitutions and replications, see Christopher S. Wood, Forgery, Replica, l'ïction: Temporalities of Oman Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2008), 12.

10, On Vasari's use of the words gaffa (awkward) and reutt (rough) with regard to Early Christian art, see Patricia Rubin, fìurrgto Vaxari; Art· and History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 281-84. For Giovanni Battista Armenini's castiga t ion of these images, see his De' veri precetti della pittura (Ravenna, 1586) , 188-89. The paintings alla greca. seen by Armenini were Italo-Byzantine icons acquired during the preceding centuries that had been passed (rom generation to generation in Italian families. For more on Armenini and his perception of Byzantine icons as artless productions, see Sixien Ringbom, Icon to Narrative.: The. Rise of the. Dramatic Close-up in Fifteenth-Century Devotional Painting, 2nd ed. (Doornspìjk: Davaco, 1984). 34-35. On Bellori's veneration of statues, see Le vite., 24: "From this springs the veneration and awe men have for statues and images, for this the reward and honors of artists. . . . [quindi nasce l'ossequio, e, (o stupore de, gli uomini verso le statue, e le immagini, quindi il premio e gli onori degli artefici. . . .]."

11. Johannes Molanus, TmM dus saintes images,, trans, and ed. François Boespflug, Olivier Christian, and Benoît Tassel, 2 vols. (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf. 1996), vol. 2, 287.

12. Henry Maguire, The irons oj' TMr Bttdws: Saints and Their Images in JSyznntiîtm (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 11.

13. Charles Barber, Figure, and Likeness; On the Limits aj Representation in Byzantine famaclasnt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 1 10- 1 1 . Barber sheds light on significant aspects of the formalist account of the icon by insisting on the truthfulness of visual représentation. To this end, he focuses on the definition of the icon as an artistic work, or an artifact, and as a made object. Barber's emphasis on the icon made in the likeness of an archetype refashioned the perception of the icon as likeness and representation proposed by Mans Belting in Likeness and Presence: ? History of the Image befare, the Era nf Art, u-ans. Edmund Jephcotl (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

14. Georges Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images: (Questioning tlte Ends of a (attain History of Art, trans. John Goodman (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), 194-99.

15. Herbert L. Kessler and Gerhard Wolf, 7'Af Holy Fare and the Paradox of Rfprexen.tai.ion (Bologna: Nuora Alfa. 1998); and Gabriela Airaldì, " 'Ad mortem fesimaimis . . .': Genova, il Mandylion e Leonardo Montaldo," in Mandfflian: Intorno al ".S'aero Volta, " da Bisanzio a Genova, ed. Gerhard WoIf et al., exh. cat. (Milan: Skira, 2004). 273-81.

16. Jonathan Brown, Franriseo dp Zurbarän (New York: Many N. Abrams, 1976), 112.

17. Zuccari stands out for his endeavor to rework medieval precedents. See Julia Reinhard Lupton, TTw Afterlife, of th? Saints: Holography, Typiiltigy and Renaissance Literature (Stanford. Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 43-52. Lupton's efforts to distinguish the rhetoric of allegory from the historical consciousness of figurai thinking provide an appropriate context for the devolution of the Gulden Ij^ndfrom historical account in the lute Middle Ages to unhisiorical story by the seventeenth century. Whereas in the Renaissance the term legend could eucrorapaiis both history arid liierature. wild the entrenchment of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, legends and, above all, lhe Goldm Le.^md began to indicate neither history nor literature to the seventeenth-century historiographer. For more on the effacement of the medieval legend in the wake of revisions of lhe question of truth and fiction, see William Nelson, Fact aver fiction: Thf Dilemmti of the Renaissance Storyteller (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 197S), 25-33.

18. Ringbom, Iron to Narrative, 148. For a recent assenion of the validity of Ringbom vs ideas, see Alessandro Nova, "Icona, racconto e drairuitif clase^up nei dipinti devozionali di Giovanni Bellini," in Gimirmni Bellini, ed. Mauro Lucco and Giovanni Carlo Federico Villa (Milan: Silvana Editoriale. 2008), 105-17.

19. Alexander Nagel and Christoptier S. Wood, Anacfinmir Renaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2010), 241-46.

20. Luba Freedman, The Revival afilie Olympian Gods in Renaissance Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2003). 30-34, 218. The author points out the interchangeable character of the concepts "religious" and "antiquarian" in the cinquecento as Lhe result of a deeply ingrained notion of the likeness to prototypes.

21. Ibid., 74-79, For n recent discussion of Enea Vico, medals, and the art of forger)', see Nagel and Wood, Anarhronir. Renaissance, 286. The au UiOi-S highlight lhe significance of coins as "historical relics." a value attached to them Ui rough time and beyond the institutions and regimes that issued the original coin: "the historical coin was a special kind of relic thai came in multiples."

22. Nagel and Wood, Antifhnmir Renaissance., 244.

23. A parallel between icon and woodcut is suggested by the perception lhai the woodcut captures the image itself; see Wood, Forgery, Replica, Fictition, 12.

24. Robin Cormack, Pointing the Soul: Icons. Death Mask, and Shrouds (London: Reaktion Books, 1997), H6-27, esp. 123.

25. Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, "What Counted as an 'Antiquity' in the Renaissance?" in Renaissance Medievalisms, ed. Konrad Eisenbichler (Toronto: Center for Reformation and Renaissance Studies. 2009), 60-61.

26. Wood, Fingery, Replica. Firtiun, 12.

27. David S. Areford, "Multiplying the Sacred: The Fifteenth-Century Woodcui as Reproduction, Surrogate, Si m u talion," in The Woodrut in Fiftenth-Century Europe, ed. Peter Parshall (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of An. 2009), 119-47.

28. On Zuccari's singular efforts to restore the original meaning and substance of an arsenal of old and traditional allegories, see David Cast, Th? Calumny af Aptlles: A Study in tin· Humanixt Tradition (New Haven: YaIf University Press, 1981), 159-60. Cast distances Zuccari's conclusions from the standard notions of imitation and invention in the Renaissance. Concerning the notion of emulation in Renaissance ait, sec G. W. Pigman IU, "Versions of Imitation in ihe Renaissance," Renaissance Quarterly 33 (1980): 1-31. On Taddeo Zuccari, see Claudio Strinati, "Annibale e i pittori romani," in Annidale CMirnr.fi, ed. Daniele fienali and Eugenio Riccomini, exh. cat. (Milan: Electa, 2006). 51-57.

29. Tristan Weddigen. "Federico Zuccari zwischen Michelangelo und Rafael: Kunstideat und Bilderkult zur Zeit Gregors XIII." in Federico 'Zurtaro: Kunst wischen Ideal und Reform (Basel: Schwabe, 2000), 196-268, esp. 202-11.

30. Francis Ames-Lewis. The Intellectual Life of the Early Renaissnce Artist (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 194-96. Unlike the version by Sandro Botticelli, who must have been guided by Lucian's text in his response to a classical ekpprasis in his famous Calumny of Apelles (ca. 1495, Florence, Uffizi), Mantegna's subject in his drawing of Apelles' calumny was not an ekphrasis, hut rather his own invented narrative after his revisions of both Lucian's ekpkrasis of Apelles' painting and Leon Battista Alberti 's paraphrase of;" Lucian in his De pittura (1435). Mantegna also re-created the classical account as a relief sculpture, in which he elaborated and emphasized the figures' physical characteristics to reflect their allegorical qualities.

31. Inernie Gerards-Nelissen, "Federigo Zuccaro and the Lament of Painting," Sminiolus 1, no. 13 (19R3) 44-60, esp. 44-46. Nelissen hints at the incorrect explanation of Matthias Winner, according to which Zuccari's Lament of Painting is part of a series extending from Vasari's Minava und Vulcan to Rembrandi's etching Pygmnl'wi. all of them illustrating art theory.

32. Ibid., 51. On the Porta virtulis and its legacy, see Catherine Monbeig Gogue], " 'Maniera Zuccaresca' el reactions individuelles: Observations sur les dessinateurs autour de Federico Zuccari," in Der Maler Federico Zuccari: Ein romuscher Virtuosa von europaüischem Rulan, eds. Maithias Winner und Detlef Heikamp (Munich: Hìnner Verlag, 1999), 105-16.

33. Clare Roberison. The Invention of Annibale Canard (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2008), 70.

34. On the Last Communion of Saint Jerome, winch marked Agostino's debut as a painter of altarpieces, see ibid., 82.

35. Richard Spear, Dnmenk.hino (New Haven; Yale University Press, 1982), 36.

36. Elizabeth Cropper, The Dommichimo Affair: Novelity, Imitation and Theft in Seventeenth Century Rome (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). 5-7. To prove his claims. Lanrranco turned to the press, publishing an etching made, by his pupil François Ferner based on Lanfranco's drawing.

37. Ibid., 53-54.

38. Patricia A. Emison, "Raphael's Multiples," in The Cambridge Companion lu Raphaël, ed. Marcia B. Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), I8fi-2Q6. Emison has highlighted Raimondi's reproductive undertaking as the mark of Raphael's involvement in printmaking, along wilh the prints by Albrecht Dürer that Raphael admired and lacked up around his studio.

39. Ibid., 193, Emison has recognized that after the sack of Rome and the Council ttf Trent, the conditions that Raphael developed in his rale as designer of engravings no longer existed. Printmaking would become the realm of popular consumption, intended for leaching or delighting the viewer rallier than for the artist's personal evolution in the manner of Raphael.

40. Historia del Testamento Vecchio, dipinta in Rama nel Vaticano da Raffaelle di Urbino/et intaglinta in rame da Sisto Badalocchi ni Giovanni Lanfranco (Rome: Orlandi, 1614). On Lanfranco and Badalocchio, see Erich Schleier, "Note sul percorso artistico di Giovanni Lanfranco, " in Giovanni Lanfranco: Un pittore barocco tra Parma. Roma e Napoli (Milan: Electa, 2001), 27-52; and idem, "Lanfranco: L'anno 1614," in Sentii in memtrrin di RaffaeBa Causa: Seggi e dfifumfnit per la storia aeii'nrte 19941995, ed. Ferdinando Bologna et al. (Naples: Electa, 1996), 232-41. On the Roman col labora lion of Lanfranco and Badalocchio, see Leslie Brown Kessler, "Lanfranco and Doraenichino: The Concept of Style in the Early Development of Baroque Painting in Rome" (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1992).

41. On the interpretation of Raphael's style by Lanfranco and Domenich'mo, sec Spear, litmentdiino, 51.

42. Adam von Bartsch, 7'Ar illustrated Bartsrh, ed. Walter L. Strauss, The Nelherlandiati Artists. 3 vols., vol. 1 . Hpndricii Galtzhts (New York: Aharis Books, 1982), 7. On Goltzius and the Carracci Academy, Ins influence on Zuccari and on the engraving technique of Agostino Carracci, see Diane DeGrazía Bohlin, Print* and Related Drawings fry thf Carnicci Family: A Cdtahigitf Kaiwrirtf (Washington, D. C.: National Gallery of Art, 1979), 58-60.

43. Erich Auerbach, "Figura": Semes from the Drama of Kumfimn Literature (New York: Meridian. 1959). 50-59.

44. Erich Auerbach, Mitansis: Thr Representation of Reality in Westrrn IAIerature, Irans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 73-75: and idem, "figura" Archivan Romtitiirum 22 (i938): 436-89. Auerbach draws on the historical implications nfjigttm in translations from the original, or closely related, Greek words srJwtut and thorns and observes that figum takes from choras the notion of impressing a shape from a mold. On the extreme complexity of figura in the biblical exegesis of Tertullian (ca. 160-240), see T. P. O'Malley, SJ. "Figura," in Tertwllian and the. Bible: Language, Imagery, Kxegfsh (Nijmegen: Dekker en Van de Vegt, 1967), 158-66. For Tertullian and his bilingual Latin and Greek) exegesis, figura carries two interrelated meanings: to creale a shape and to figure forth, both integral to Christ, who figures forth in the Old Testament. On the historical existence of figuro as both bodily instantiation and prophecy, see ibid-, 160, 162-63).

45. Barber, Figurr and Lateness, 96-97. Theodore of Studios directly conDccted figura to ihe icon to argue against interpretations of the cross as a form of representation equivalent io the icon. In so doing, Theodore of Studios sought to disclaim all relation between lhe lerm «gri and the forai of die cross, and to condemn all discourse on signs and sjTiJbol.s as belonging to the past.

46. Ringbom, irtm hi Narrative, 148-53. Ringbom broke entirely new ground in art history with his emphasis on figura, or God's real presence, as the mark of many Renaissance narratives originating in the assimilation of Christ's image to altar painting. Such analysis is indebted to comparative literature, namely, to Auerbach 's Mimesis, where figura is seen as the figurai sense of interpretation or the usage of the human figure as bearer of meaning in H narrative context (74). A recent intervention to update Ringbom and Auerbach to the historical and figurai interpretation Is Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, "Interventions: Toward a New Model of Renaissance Anachronism." Art Bulletin 87, no. 3 (2005): 403-15,

47. Jeanette Kohl. "Body. Mind and Soul: On the So-Called Platonic Youth at the Bargello. Florence." in Subprt as Aporia in Early Mndmt Art, ed. Alexander Nagel and Loenzo Pericolo (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2010), 43-69.

48. The popularity of Thomas à Kempis's lmitatia Christi in Italy was ensured by a series of exhortations to take up the cross and follow Christ in die Tratatlo iM beneficio di Cristo, the famous and widely read devotional text of the Catholic Reform, written by Marcantonio Flamini« and Benedetto da Mantova and published in Venice in 1543. During the second half of the sixteenth century, the survival of lhe call lo embrace Christ's Passion was made possible fay private devotional activities. On these efforts, sec Camilla Russell, CUttlJa (iottzaga and the Religtaux Cotitroversies nf Sixteenth-Cetury Italy (Turnhout Brepols, 2006).

49. Cristina Aciduli Luchinai, "Federico Zuccari e i pittori di Roma: Appunti per una storiografia artistica antivasariana," in Parmigianina r it nmnierisma rumfieu: Alii dfl Ctmuegrt Jntemasanale di Stilili, Panna 13-15 giugno 2002, ed. Lucia Fornari Schiaiichi (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2002), 385-91, esp. 388. Zuccari frescoed an Assumption of the Virgin Mary in the cathedral of Reggio Emilia that set out to develop his Tnrmfo eli Mann for the cupola of the S. Giacinto Chapel in S. Sabina. Rome, as a more creative response to Correggio's Parmesan model.

50. Cioncarla Periti, "Nota sulla 'maniera moderna* di Correggia a Parma." in Schianchi, Parmigianino e il manierismo europeo, 298-303, esp. 300.

51. See Elisabeth C. Gleason, Reform Thought in Sixtetn.th-Cfnt.ury Italy (Chico. Calif.: Scholars Press, 1981), 103. on the Beneficio di Cristo and its adherents; and Susana Seidel Menchi, Erasmo in Haliti 7520-/5,VO (Turin: B. Boringheri, 1987) on Erasmus's Enchiridion together with his notes on the New Testament, and how his translations ol" Saint Paul and Saint Jerome found adherents inside the reform circles of northern cinquecento Italy. The tract Beneficio di Cristo represented reforming thought in Italy, including ihe northern Italian Benedictine reforming movement and the Naples circle congregated around Juan de Valdés. It was circulated in manuscript form in 1542; the edition of 1543 enjoyed enorosous populathty until 1349, when the book was placed on the Inquisition's index of prohibited titles.

52. Patricia Sivieri, Felippo Mazola (1460-1505). Cristo ponanvsce. c. 1504," in Correggio, ed. Lucia Fornari Schianchi (Milan: Skin, 2008), 97.

53. Ibid., 98.

54. David Alan Brown. Peter Humfrey, and Mattro Isseco, eta.. Lerenzo Latter Rediscovered Master of the Renaissance, exh. cat. (Washington, DC:.: National Gallery of Art. 1997), 160.

55. Adriano Prosperi. ~The Religious Crisis its Early Sixteenth-CentunItaly," in Brown et al Lorenzo Lotto, 21-26.

56. Pietro Zampeni, ed., Libor di spese diverse ass ag?issnta di letteri e d'olt.o daumenti (Venice: Istiruto per Ia Collahorazione Culturale. 1969), 213, 237, and a letter dated February 1528, 285-86. For inure on Lotto's copy of Pieoo d-a Lucca's text, his spiritual interpretations as recorded in the account book, and his awareness of the sermons and discussions taking place in monastic circles, see Prosperi. "The Religious Crisis," esp. 24.

57. Russell, Giulia Gonzega and the Religienss Contnsvetciecs, 47.

58. Nagel. Michelangelo and the Reform of An, 99.

59. Ludwig F. von Pastor. The History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages, ed Ralph F. Kerr, 40 vola. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; St. Louis: B. Herder, 1952). vol. 24, 158, 195, 228, 262-63.

60. Ditchlield, Liturgy Sanctity, and History in Tridentinr Italy, 17.

61. Evelyn Carol Voelker. GharLt,s 13orromeo's `Inslnwticmes Fahrirae et Stifle/leetilts hcksiastn-ae' 1577: A Translation with. Commentary and Anal y.cis (Syracute, N.Y.: Svractise University, 1977). 229.

62. G. A. Gilio, Doe dialoghi. net primo de'queali si ragiona di le parti morali e civili appartenenti a' letterati cortijaini ... nel secondo si ragiona degli anti de'pittori circa Ihistorie (Camerino, 1564). in Trotatli d'ane del rinejueeenta fin manietismo e cantnniforma, ed. Paola Barocchi ,Svols. (Bad: Laterza, 1961), voL 2.55-56.

63. Roseniarie Mulcahy. "Federico Zuccaro and Philip 11: The Reliquary Altars for the Basilica of Sari Lorenso de El Escorial," Darlington Magaant 129, no. 1013 (1987)502-9.

64. Jack M. Greenstein, Mantegna and Painting as H/stat/cal Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 10. For Mantegna the replesetitational fidelity of pictorial is/ode depended tiot on capturing the physical appearance of the actual event to which the literary relerred hut on investing the pictorial work with the tame sts.tcture of significance that made the Bible a true, figural representation of the created world.

65. Ringbons. Iron to Nan-otive~ 1511. Althoitgh sonic Venetian versions of the Carrying of the Cross assimilated features of Leonardo's Christ figure. the theme nonetheless remained shaped through Mantegna and Bellini.

66. Franceseo Bocchi's Opera...na Imagine miracolosa della Santissima Annunsiata was published in 1592, one year alter his Li bellaze dells cttta di Fia,r,n:o. In die Opera (71). Bocchi concluded that the late medieval Annunciatioii venerated in Florcnce's SS. Annunziata surpasses the works of Michelangelo and Raphael its what could be tn-med the beauty of lscsliness. Bocehi's essay on the stth~ect of 85. Arinssnviaia was anticipated in his guidebook of 1591, The Beauties of the City of florence: .4 Guidebook of! 59!, trans. Thomas Frangetsherg and Robert Wilhams (London: Haney Miller, 2006), 206-7.

67. For Bocehi and the reform circles after Dent, see Zyginunt Waibitiski, "II tntsdus seniplice: Un dibattito soIl' at-s sacra tiorentina intorno al 11300," in Stodi cu Raffoetla: Atti del Congresso !nten,azionale di Snedi, ed. Mieaela Sambucco Hamoud amt Maria Letilia Strocehi. 2 vols. (l.'rbino: Qtiattro Venti, 1987), vol. 1, 625-48; and idem, "L'Asanuociazione della Vergine uclla chiesa della 55. Anntinziata a Fircnzc: Un ctsntributo al tnodenio culto dci quadri." in Renaiscan,'e Studies in Honor of Craig Hugh Smyth, cc!. Andrew Morrogh and Fitsrella Superbi Ginifredi, vol. 2, An and Architeet are (Florence: Gionti Barhera, 1985), 533-52.

68. Any Warburg took the first decisive step toward an anthropology of the medieval insage when he ascertained the affinity of stich Florentine practices with primitive image magic. See E. H. Gombrich, Ahy Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (London: Warburg institute. 1970), 120, 171.

69. For a number of ititetesting insights relevant to the evidence attd vat-i. ely of ex-votos for historical purposes, see Megan Holmes, "Ex-votos: Matei-iality, Memory and Cult," in The Idol in the Age of Art: Objercc, bevat ion.t and the Earls Modern Work!, ed. Michael V. Cole and Rebecca Zoracls (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate. 2009), 159-81.

70. DidL-Hubennnn, Canfsnnting images, 225.

71. Oss Solis. see Adam Bartsch, The illustrated Bartsch: Germon Masters of the Sixteenth Century, S. Jane S, him, yol. 1 (New Yorkt Abaris Books, 1985).

72. Andrew Burnett. "Coin Faking in the Renaissance," it' Why fakes Matter: Essay.s on Problems of Authenticity, ed. Mark Jones (London: British Museum Press, 1993). 15-22, cap 18. This is also quoted in he discussion of Vico and numismatics in Nagel and Wood Anachronie Renaissance, 286.

73. On Vico, see The Illustrated Bartsch: Italian Masters of the Sixteenth Century, ed. John Spike (New York: Abaris Books, 1982), 30.

74. Wood, Fogery, Replica Fiction, 23.

75. Giulio Bodon, Vico fra ,memoria e miraggio della clasicitta (Rome: L'Erma di Bretachneider, 1997). 97-192, 119-29; and Freedmar,, "Andent Testimonies, Coins and Gems,' in The Revival of the Olympian Cods, esp. 75-76.

76. A. W. A. Boschloo, Ann/bale Can-ecu in Bologna: Visible Reality after the Counsil of trans. R. R. Symonds. 2 vols. (The Hague: Government Publishing House, 1974), vol. 1, 128-29,

77. Freedman, The Revival of the Olympian Gods 236-37.

78. Wood, Forgery. Replica, Fiction. 36-40.

79. The idea of the artist-architect is stated repeatedly in Zurcari's Idea as integral to his definition of disegno interno. See Federiro Zuccari, L'idea de pittori, sunttori e architenetti (Turins, 1607), in Scritti d'arte Fe drico Zucraro, ed. Detlef Heikamp (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1961), `229. 25 I, 263. On disegno iotenro within the "ah.olute an," or wlsat Robert Williams defines as representations governed by the principle of variety in unity, of Gian Paolo Lomazzo, Zuccari, and Torquatct Tasso. see Williams. Art, Theory, and Culture its Sixteeuth-Century Italy: From Tessue to Metachne (Cambridge: Cambridge University l'ress, 1997). 123-87, esp. 138. Williams has cogently recognized the process through which Zuccari appropriated the faculty of the senses a-s the origin of his concepts. Zuccari's interests prompted him to assimilate the interpretation by Thomas Aquinas of the Aristotelian Faculty of sense impressions. On the assimilation of Zoccari's idea of the artistarchitect to contemporary painters. see Finns Baudouin. `Peter Paul Rt,bens and the Notion `Painter-Architect,' ` in Rsthen.s in Context: Xeletter! Studies: Liber Memoriales (Lkntwerp): Centrum s'oor de Vlaamse Kt,nst van tie Die en de 17e Ecuw; [SchotenJ: BAT, 2005), 153-74.

80. Batidoitin, `Peter Patti Rubetss,' 169,

81. Cammy Brothers, Michaelangelo, breasting and the Invention of Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 42-43.

82. Ibid., 82-83.

83. The parallel I am drawing between Zuccari and medieval architecrural plans is inspired by Richard Kranthcitner. `Introduction to an lconogt-aphy of Medieval Architeccure,'Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institues (1942): 1-33.

84. Catherine Wilkinson-Zeriter, Juana de Herrera: Architect in Philip II of Spain (New Haven: Yale University Press. 1993), 119; and Fernando Marias, La ezrquitertura del Renodmiento en Toledo (1541-1631). 4 vols. (Madrid: Consejo Superior de tnvesngaciott.es Cientificas, 1985). vol. 1, 195-274,

85. Earl E. Rosenthal, "The Image of the Holy Sepulcher," in The Cathedral of Granada: A Study in the Spanish Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 148-66,

86. Ibid., 152, None of the scanty descriptions, written or delineated, known to have been available by Siloe's thue preseisted an obvious source for the Granada project. The medieval copies were symbolic rather than literal copies of the Holy Sepulchre.

87. Nagel and Wood, Annchronic Renaissance. 54-56.

88. Ibid., 56. The depiction of the aedicule reproduced by Jan van Scorel, who bad been in Jerusalem in 1520, is included in his group portrait of rIte Brotherhood ofjerusalem Pilgri ins of Haarlem.

89. Rosenthal, `The Image of tile Holy Sepulcher." 158.

90. Richard Erautheirner, Early Christian and Byzantine Archetecture 4th rev. ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1981), 178-79,

91. Ibid., 179.

92. John Shearman. `Domes," in Only Connect .. . Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaiasance (Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1992), 149-91, esp. 153.

93, Rotraut Wisskirchen, Die Mrssaiken der Kinche Santo Prassede in Rom, (Mainz: P. von Zabern, 1992); idem, `Zur Zenokapelle in S. Prassede. Rons,' Fruhmittelaterliche Studien 25 (1991): 96-11)8; Gillian Mackie, "The Zeno Chapel: A Prayer for Salvation,' Papers of the British School at Rome 57 (1989): 172-99; and Erik Tisuite, "Santa Prassede," in Meisterwehe der Baukunst von der Antike bis Heute: Festgabe fur Elisabseth Kieven, ed. Christina Strunck (Petersberg: lmhof, 2007), 138-41.

94. David McTavish, "A Drawing in Rennes for the Vault of the Caetani Chapel in Sania Pudenziana, Rome," Bulletin dr 'Assnctalian lift Historiens de l'Art itolien, no, 13 (2008): 5-11. On the significance of the S. Pudenziana apse mosaic, see Rotraul Wisskirchen, "Zum Gerichuaspekl im Apsismosaik von S. Pudeiiziaria, Rum," Jahrbufli für Anlikr -unti Christentum 4l (1998): 179-92.

95. Nagel and Wood, "What Cotimed as an 'Antiquity'?" 53-74, esp. 63. The authors have convincingly argued that the contemporary authority of many images and monuments was bound up with their ancient origins and sustained by a notional creative model of production similar to die one thai sustained sacred portraits and central plan buildings.

96. On the retrospective militancy of die Roman Church and the activity of Cardinal Baronie "to establish sound historical foundations on which to rest the claims of die Apostolic Church revived by the Council of Trent," see Richard Krautheimer, "A Christian Triumph in 1597." in Essaya in ihr History of Art Pmentnd to Rudolf Wittkowtr, ed. Douglas Fraser, Howard Hibbard, and Milton J. Lewine (London: Phaidon Press, 1967), 174-78. For more on the activity of Cardinal Baronio, see Alessandro Zuccari, "Restauro <? filologia bamaiaiii," in Bamnio e l'arte, ed. Romeo de Maio Sora: Centro di Studi Sonni i "Vincenzo Patriarca," 1985), 489-510: and Josephine von Hennenberg, "Cardinal Caesar Baronio: The Arts and the Early Christian Martyrs," in Saints unii Sinners: (amvaggio and the Baroque Image, exh . cat (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 136-50.

97. Krautheimer. Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture, 54-60; Anna Maria Aflanni, La chiesa di Saniti Prasede a Roma; La storia, il rilieviv, il restaura (Viterbo: BelaGamma, 2006); and Mauri/io Cuperna, l.ti basilica di Santa Prassede; Il significalo della virceda architielonica (Rome; Monaci Benedettini Valombrosani, 1999).

98. Krautheimer, Early CJmstinn and Byzantine. Architecture, 60.

99. Erik Thuneo Image and Relic: Mediating the Sacred in Early Medieval Rome (Rome: L'Erma di Bretschneider. 2002). 13-16, 130. The mosaics in die Basilica of S. Prassede were commissioned during Paschal Fs pontificate (817-24). The mosaics in die Basilica of Ss. Nereo e Achilleo, dating to the close of Leo Ill's pontificale, presumably to the year 815, covered the apse and the apsidal arch (the apse mosaic was demolished in 1596).

100. On the fate of the Roman catacombs up to the fifteenth century, see John Osborne, "The Roman Catacombs in the Middle Ages," Papers of the British School at Rom 53 (1985): 278-328.

101. Ditchfield, Liturgy, fianrtily and History. 85.

102. For the program of church restoration under Clement VIII, see Steven F. Ostrow, "The Counter-Reformation and the End of the Century," in Artistir Centern of the Italian Renaissante, ed. Marcia B. Hall (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 246-320.

103. Alexandra Hertz, "Cardinal Osare Baronio 's Restoration of Ss. Nereo ed Achilleo and S, Cesareo di·' Appia," Art BuIMn 70 (1988): 590620. On Ss. Nereo e Achilleo, see Krautiieimer, "A Christian Triumph in 1597," 174-78.

104. Beverly Louise Brown, "Between the Sacred and Profane," in The Genius of Rome, 1592-1623 (London: London Academy of Arts, 2001), 276-303, esp. 282.

105. Nagel, Michelangela and the Reform of An. 62-67.

106. Gombrich, Aby Warburg, 112-27.

107. Nagel, Michelangelo anil the Reform of Art, 124.

108. Konrad Ooerhuber. Raphael: The Paintings (Milan: Electa, 1999), 212.

109. On Raphael's studio, see Hubert Damisch, The Judgment' of Paris, trans. John Goodman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 84-86. On the notion of die creative role of the prim for Raphael, see Emison, "Raphael's Multiples," 186-20R, esp. 188; and Oberhuber, Raphael: The Paintings, 21.2.

110. Wood, Forgery, Replica, Firtion, 17.

111. Ringborn, Icon to Natratrue, 148.

112. Alexander Nagel, "Michelangelo, Raphael, and [he Altarpiece Tradition" (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1993), 9-16.

113. Nagel. Michelagelo and the Reform of Art, 202.

114. On strict decorum in religious painting resulting in didactic and conceptual images, see Stuart Lingo, Federiro Barocci. Allure and Devotion, in Late Renaissance Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 6, 78, 216.

Author affiliation:

Livia Stotmwcu received her JiA ( 1 998) from the University of Fine Arts in Bucharest, her MA (2002) from York University, and her PhO (2009) from Queen 's University. In addition to teaching at York and Queen 's, she conducted research at the University of Toronto between 2002 and 2004 [Department of Art, Qiteen's University, 67 University Avenue, Ontario Hall, Kingston, Ont. K7L 3N6, Canada].