The matter of miracles

Neapolitan baroque architecture and sanctity

Helen Hills, Amelia Jones, Marsha Meskimmon

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781526100399
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

This book investigates baroque architecture through the lens of San Gennaro's miraculously liquefying blood in Naples. This vantage point allows a bracing and thoroughly original rethink of the power of baroque relics and reliquaries. It shows how a focus on miracles produces original interpretations of architecture, sanctity and place which will engage architectural historians everywhere. The matter of the baroque miracle extends into a rigorous engagement with natural history, telluric philosophy, new materialism, theory and philosophy. The study will transform our understanding of baroque art and architecture, sanctity and Naples. Bristling with new archival materials and historical insights, this study lifts the baroque from its previous marginalisation to engage fiercely with materiality and potentiality and thus unleash baroque art and architecture as productive and transformational.

Part I

The miracle

1

The matter of miracles: San Gennaro’s blood and the Treasury Chapel

First the body. No. First the place. No. First both. (Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho, 1983)

To the blood of San Gennaro that protects us from famine, war, plague, and the fire of Vesuvius. (Dedicatory inscription on the gateway to the Treasury Chapel)

The miraculous liquefaction of the blood of San Gennaro is at the heart of the Treasury Chapel (Fig. 1). The transformative and productive blood in the miracle is akin to the transformative and productive chapel. Since desire to house Gennaro’s relics appropriately, and since the design of the new custodia preceded even the choice of architect or design for the chapel, this relation has been repeatedly interpreted in terms of the Treasury Chapel’s housing relic and miracle (conceived as one) and thus of following after and, at most, assuming a role of representation in their regard. In contradistinction to that approach, in this book I treat Gennaro’s blood, the bronze, silver, and other materials that constitute the miraculous working of the chapel, not as essences to be excavated, but as qualities to be discovered and invented in relation to each other. This chapter opens that discussion by examining Gennaro’s blood as site of potentiality and part of processes of transformation and their exploration. Materials and place are treated not simply as the marker and limit of what they permit, but as productive and implicated in each other and in the miraculous and its staging.¹ Naples gave San Gennaro devotion, worship, and spectacular housing; in return San Gennaro gave protection and intercession. But he did so prophetically in the miracle. In what ways did the prophetic blood produce the chapel? To answer those questions we must return to the bloody liquefaction.

The manner of the miracle

Cesare D’Engenio Caracciolo lovingly describes the miraculous liquefaction of San Gennaro’s blood in Napoli Sacra (1623). From the arrangements necessary to its occurrence, he moves to its extraordinary transformation:

each time this miraculous blood is brought together with the head of the holy Martyr [Plate 8], or when a priest says the antiphon or when the Mass in honour of the saint is celebrated on the altar where the blood stands, the sediment of dry earth that lies congealed and immobile at the bottom of the little ampoules is returned again to living, vermilion blood.²

That miraculous change encompassed colour, texture, viscosity, temperature, and volume. Matter was transformed and time pulled off its hinges. Old wounds re-opened and blood poured fresh. It is the spilling of the blood and blood as spilled that endures in its miraculous moments, like cuts in time:

[Vermilion blood] permeating every part in liquid form, it fills up the ampoules entirely, and as it irrigates, so it then grows and expands, becoming very liquid, and it boils, just as if it were at that moment in the blow of the executioner’s sword, or at the point of an arrow pulled from the saint’s bust.³

The miracle is violent in the violence of bloodshed and the exposure that sacrifice reveals. Yet it seems that for Caracciolo perhaps its most powerful aspect is the blood’s capacity to return to its erstwhile state in an astonishing volte-face:

And heaping marvel upon marvel, what overcomes astonishment with another [even] greater, is that after the ceremony, mass, praying, and saint’s antiphon, and the encounter with the head, that living blood returns once more to its congealed state.⁴

That radical change of appearance both is and is not also a change of substance. Nature itself hangs its head, unable to compete, outdone and undone in the miracle:

and this shift from one state to another and back again occurs as many times as it is placed in the manner mentioned above [which] is the cause of such an evident miracle, to the amazement and shame of nature itself, as everyone knows.⁵

Caracciolo’s wonderful account gives us much to work with. He emphasizes the undoing of nature that is the miraculous. Gennaro’s miracle is also the matter of prophecy. Here is explored what is made to matter in the miracle.

Death’s dryness becomes life’s liquidity. Clotted blood, immobile, dull, indifferent, and desiccated as dust, shrivelled in the bottom of two small ampoules, moistens, swells, becomes capable of movement, responsive to level and the gauge of an eye, able to dart like an animated thing (Figs 1 & 4). Hot to touch, and brilliant red in colour, it is made to flourish again, and brought into a boiling raging tumult of life. In this revitalization, lifeless, motionless dust is remade as mobile fire and water, as living ‘scarlet elixirs’.⁶ Change itself is brought into view. Through a mysterious encounter death is remade as life and resurrection visibilized. In the transformation of this blood, new witnesses are forged.

The Treasury Chapel takes place in the miracle and the staging of holy matter. For the divine is in place when a miracle takes place; the miracle works as a place of prophecy and to secure the place of place. Thus the prodigy restages relationships between matter and the divine, between place and sanctity. San Gennaro’s relic literally erupts into visibility and reconfigures relationships among the city of Naples, Gennaro as its saintly protector, and threats to that place, particularly Vesuvius.⁷ This chapter relishes the bloodiness of the miracle at the heart of the Treasury Chapel – the liquefying of San Gennaro’s blood – in order to see chapel and blood in a relation of analogical material metaphor. It opens an extended discussion pursued through this book of the relationship between materiality, holiness, and the production of place. This chapter posits the bloody miracle as crucial to an interrogation of those relationships.⁸

The miracle distinguished itself in relation to place. Thus the miraculous blood is examined here as productive in relation to a specific materiality of place, in both the broadest and narrowest of terms. The divine is thus staged, produced, and revealed in relation to material particularity through place and the remaking, even dislocation, of place. The miracle was revelatory in other ways also. It cuts across time, allowing past, present, and future to realign and to affirm the future. And in its changing it opens to question the relationship between matter, change, and the unchanging divine. It works as a material exploration of change and changeability. The relationship with the supernatural recovers the exceptionality of religious experience, and the question of the nature of the relationship between unchanging divinity and passible, sinful humanity is staged and ranged in and through the chapel.

Existing scholarship on Gennaro’s miracle is overwhelmingly devoted either to disproving it scientifically, or to claiming it as a miraculous event, in which case it is consequently assumed to be transcendent and to lie beyond historical interpretation. A less developed thread of scholarship investigates Neapolitan bloody miracles more broadly in terms of cult, interpreted historically, anthropologically, and sociologically.⁹ To date no-one has attempted to interpret Gennaro’s miracle in relation to Neapolitan architecture and urbanism, except in so far as the Treasury Chapel has been unquestioningly treated as a container in which the prodigiosity takes place. Even less has the miracle been related to broader questions of materiality and transformationality in relation to that architecture.¹⁰

This ellipsis is the graver, since blood as holy matter and redemptive was central to theological enquiry into the relationship between God’s presence and humanity. Gennaro’s miracle is related to other bloods – the transubstantative blood of Christ at the Mass and the blood of local saints that liquefied miraculously. In its miraculous changeability San Gennaro’s blood participated in the exploration of the relationship between the immutability of the divine and the changeability of physical matter. Thus San Gennaro’s miracle brings into view blood as vital substance, blood as process, blood as change, blood as sacrifice and salvation; and it brings these into focus in relation to practices of seeing, witnessing, sight, and insight and the production and qualities of material change. Changeability, prophecy and sacrifice, sight and witness can be seen to inform and inhabit miraculous portent and chapel.

Miraculous occasions

There were basically three sorts of occasions when Gennaro’s blood liquefied, or when it significantly failed to do so. First, there were the three principal feast days of the saint: his dies natalis (19 September); the feast of the translation of his relics (celebrated on the Saturday before the first Sunday in May); and, after 1631, the ‘feast of Vesuvius’ (16 December) (Fig. 18).¹¹ Second, the blood liquefied on the occasion of visits by dignitaries or significant visitors to the Treasury Chapel, such as distinguished visitors from Protestant England. Third, it liquefied prematurely or remained obdurately hard during times of peril, thereby warning of impending danger to Naples or to the entire Catholic world. On each occasion, the speed of deliquescence, the viscosity of the liquid, its colour, and other signs were carefully noted and interpreted.

Gennaro operated miracles principally on behalf of the city of Naples, but by no means exclusively for it. Indeed, his reach in the seventeenth century was greater than it is today, extending beyond the Kingdom of Naples to the Mediterranean world, and even, as Girolamo Maria di Sant’Anna claimed in 1710, throughout the Catholic world:

the miracle of the liquefaction of the Blood of San Gennaro is a fact which belongs not only to matters relating to the city and Kingdom of Naples of which he is principal protector, but to the whole of the Catholic world, too.¹²

The celebration of San Gennaro’s blood – the work of the Treasury Chapel – repositioned baroque Naples at the crux of the Catholic world.

Just as the blood’s liquefaction was a signal from Heaven, so, too, was its refusal to liquefy. Non-liquefaction indicated Heaven’s obduracy and foretold threats to the city and Kingdom of Naples and to Catholicism more widely. Failure to liquefy or a partial liquefaction signalled the siege of Constantine by Muhammed II in 1453, the Sack of Rome in 1527, the Ottoman siege of Calabrian cities in 1550, 1555, and 1558 and of Malta in 1571, the terrible famine of 1569 that afflicted the entire kingdom, and the Battle of Lepanto.¹³ The miracle’s wide reach justified its inclusion among the most renowned facts and miracles of the Catholic Church that graced Pope Gregory XIII’s gallery in the Vatican Palace (Plate 10).

But while the miracle’s reach was wide, it was towards the city of Naples that Gennaro’s protection was particularly directed. ‘The Register of Miracles’ invokes the memory of 1656, year of the terrible plague which killed over 400,000 people in Naples: first the blood emerged from the safe already entirely liquid; then, after its solidification, it remained obdurately hard before the head for a long time, refusing to liquefy, ‘demonstrating by the first prodigy the seriousness of the scourge, and by the second the earnestness of the entreaties of his continuous intercession’.¹⁴ Plague, famine, volcanic eruption, earthquake, and even revolt: Naples was unusually imperilled and the blood was able to warn of these threats. That liquid, sensitive as a breath of destiny, indicated the destiny of the city. Failure to liq...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of plates
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: openings
• Prologue: the analogous relic
• Part I The miracle
• Part II Patrons and protectors
• Part III The choreography of sanctity
• Bibliography
• Plates and figures
• Index