Peter Paul Rubens and the Counter-Reformation Crisis of the Beati moderni

Ruth S. Noyes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351613200
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

Peter Paul Rubens and the Crisis of the Beati Moderni takes up the question of the issues involved in the formation of recent saints - or Beati moderni (modern Blesseds) as they were called - by the Jesuits and Oratorians in the new environment of increased strictures and censorship that developed after the Council of Trent with respect to legal canonization procedures and cultic devotion to the saints. Ruth Noyes focuses particularly on how the new regulations pertained to the creation of emerging cults of those not yet canonized, the so-called Beati moderni, such as Jesuit founders Francis Xavier and Ignatius Loyola, and Filippo Neri, founder of the Oratorians. Centrally involved in the book is the question of the fate and meaning of the two altarpiece paintings commissioned by the Oratorians from Peter Paul Rubens. The Congregation rejected his first altarpiece because it too specifically identified Filippo Neri as a cult figure to be venerated (before his actual canonization) and thus was caught up in the politics of cult formation and the papacy's desire to control such pre-canonization cults. The book demonstrates that Rubens' second altarpiece, although less overtly depicting Neri as a saint, was if anything more radical in the claims it made for him. Peter Paul Rubens and the Crisis of the Beati Moderni offers the first comparative study of Jesuit and Oratorian images of their respective would-be saints, and the controversy they ignited across Church hierarchies. It is also the first work to examine provocative Philippine imagery and demonstrate how its bold promotion specifically triggered the first wave of curial censure in 1602.

1 Among the others

Philip. His acts are attested by the brothers of his order, who bear witness to glorious virtues as well as his extraordinary miracles and all his worthiest faith. However, not only one blessed Philip adorns the noble city of Florence, but among the others with the same name, the founder or our father, founder of our Congregation of the Oratorio in Rome the blessed Philip, last name Neri, [who] because of his sanctity and purity of life, because he is distinctive in his beautiful charity in God and for others, enjoys the fellowship of the saints in the heaven, his miracles are rationally tested.¹

In 1597, Cesare Baronio interpolated the above passage into his forthcoming edition of the Martyrologium Romanum, a Tridentine revision of the Catholic liturgical calendar of martyrs and saints.² In his annotation to the entry for Filippo Benizi (1233–1285), venerable Florentine founder of the Servites, Baronio inserted mention praising the Florentine-born founder of the Oratorians, dead just two years, claiming Neri enjoyed the fellowship of the saints in the heaven, his miracles rationally tested. Antonio Gallonio, forwarding Baronio’s interpolated passage to fellow Oratorian Antonio Talpa in Naples in August a year before the volume went to press, recognized its boldness and warned Talpa not to share it with anyone: “In a few months we will see great things. In the meantime, I pray you, please do not publicize this text until the Martyrologium is printed, which will be soon enough, and this will shortly come to light.”³ That he and fellow Oratoriani kept this interpolation to themselves bespeaks awareness of the potentially subversive, controversial nature of their historiographical revisions. Typological association of Florentines Filippo Neri and Benizi assumes further hermeneutical charge in the context of wider-ranging, near-programmatic ties in Oratorian historia sacra (sacred or ecclesiastical history) connecting Benizi and Neri.⁴ Baronio’s would appear here, then, an uncharacteristically retrogressive methodology, defined by temporal relativity and hagiographic typology, and a “more open and literary than historical” approach to the composition of historia sacra.⁵ His Philippine intercalation in the Martyrologium stands in apparent contravention of the Cardinal’s own ostensible methodological criteria as a compiler of Catholic history, complicating conclusions regarding Counter-Reformation historiography’s avowed rigorous chronology.⁶ The insertion nonetheless exemplifies the typological anachronic method by which promoters of the Beati moderni revised modern would-be saints into the hagiographic historical record through textual, ritual and material-visual means.⁷ Baronio’s gesture also offers an important variation on campanilismo, or local geographic allegiances, as an explanatory paradigm to understand instances of supposed methodological inconsistency.⁸ Rather than adhering to a historiographic directive guided by fidelity to a physical site, the Cardinal exemplified a virtual species of campanilismo, whereby his fidelity to an immaterial “placeless” locality constituted by lived belief in the truth of Neri’s sanctity determined his methods as historian. This virtual locale was nevertheless sited through images, objects, texts and embodied behavior. Philippine cultic verity was thus both the precondition and the product of Baronian hagio-historiography, i.e. historiography by means of the composing of history of saintly figures. His efforts likewise render more subtle Ditchfield’s estimation of Baronio’s guiding maxim, semper eadem (“ever the same”), seeking to legitimize Catholic institutions by demonstrating their continuity.⁹ The Oratorian hoped to legitimize, through the testimony of written, materialized and performed hagio-historiography, the Catholic institution of the cult of saints in the face of protestant criticisms, and the cults of servi di Dio like Neri within the larger institution of the cult of saints in the face of papal and curial censorship. What we might term Beati moderni hagio-historiography, as practiced by the Oratoriani, was motivated as much by intra- as by extra-confessional polemic.

This chapter redefines Beati moderni alternative hagio-historiography, as characterized by the interpolative revision of modern would-be saints into the hagio-historical record through diverse media—text, image, material and ritual—united by a common paradigm of imprinting. Supporters of the would-be saints experienced the twofold loss of their would-be saintly champions, first in death, then in curial censorship. In an attempt to resist this double rupture and fill the resultant deepening void, erudites conventionally considered in step with the papacy in matters of reform constructed a revisionist alternative hagio-historiography that runs counter to much of our current understanding of Counter-Reformation erudition. In so doing, they grappled with concurrent epistemological and philosophical debates about the very possibility of truth in history, and what, if any, kinds of evidence and methods for recording evidence were more or less conducive to obtaining said truth.¹⁰ If the true histories of the servi di Dio, witnessed by the very individuals who redacted these histories, could not be faithfully and successfully (i.e. leading to their canonization) represented and transmitted, what hope was there for doing the same in the case of subjects much more chronologically, geographically or culturally remote? I will attempt to demonstrate, following important recent arguments by Stefania Tutino and Jetze Touber, that notions of truth in history embraced and bodied forth in the work of Baronio and Gallonio, among others, were neither less sophisticated nor, indeed, objective than our own. They were simply different. According to Tutino,

it seems certain that setting up this notion of objectivity as the benchmark against which pre-modern works of history should be assessed does not fit Baronio’s historiography, and indeed it might not be a good framework to understand early modern historical scholarship and ecclesiastical history in particular.¹¹

Functioning largely by means of associative typology, this historiography posited an anachronic paradigm that belies both conventional accounts of the emergence of a modern chronological sensibility, and claims of certain kinds of documentary and interpretive accuracy by its very practitioners. Beati moderni hagio-historiography furthermore operated according to rhetorical strategies such as typology and figuration, conventionally considered more medieval than modern. Their interpolative revisions into the hagiographic record constituted a historiography of resistance, as well as virtual localities of believers that transcended geographic and chronological boundaries, both of which were inherently distrusted by the papacy.

In identifying and describing early Seicento examples of Beati moderni alternative hagio-historiography, what follows seeks to address both Ditchfield’s “problem” of “a teleological approach to the history of hagiography,”¹² to “move beyond positivism and genre,”¹³ and “anachronistic understanding of the distinction between [early modern] hagiography and historiography.”¹⁴ I attempt to do so by adopting as a methodological imperative Alison Frazier’s important statement that “the evidence of past experience that remains is not more factual or true than the evidence of past imagination, ceremony, or symbolic enactment”, and that “cultural characteristics (such as the purpose of martyrdom [or sanctity]) are as much facts as events are.”¹⁵ To this end, and with respect to accuracy, objectivity or empiricism in historiographic practice, let us take Antonio Gallonio’s 1608 edition of the Vita del Beato P. Filippo Neri, seemingly exemplifying factual historiographical method by adhering to rigorous chronology. Gallonio asserted as much in his preface:

I write of events, many of which I have seen with my own eyes, according to the order of years; that is to say, placing them in the sequence in which they happened; and I have done this for three particular reasons. Firstly, so that everyone might see the continuous nature of Blessed Filippo’s sanctity in which he persevered unto the end. Secondly, to show the beginning and growth of our Congregation of which he was the founder. Thirdly, because the more events are recounted in order, the clearer they become to the reader.¹⁶

In this passage, the Oratorian, speaking as an eyewitness using the terminology of methodological propinquity, highlights the three purported principles of Tridentine historia sacra: authenticated immediate sources, legitimizing continuity, and clear sequential presentation. Gallonio sets out a narrative registered in metonymic, rather than metaphoric discourse. I would take issue with Ditchfield’s appraisal of the Vita as “unrepresentative of Gallonio’s oeuvre” because it was primarily “a contemporary document which was integral to the vigorous campaign to promote the canonization of its subject.”¹⁷ Rather, Gallonio’s Philippine hagio-biography is representative precisely because of its role as essential cultic propaganda. As evidence of contemporary perceptions of Gallonio’s ostensibly objective historical method, his self-authenticating Vita was itself taken as evidence of Filippo’s sanctity, even for those who never knew Neri.¹⁸ Due largely to self-declared and subsumed methodological claims to facticity, Beati moderni hagio-historiography—the Vita del Beato P. Filippo Neri b...