ABSTRACT
Believed to have been commissioned as a votive offering, Giovanni Lanfranco’s St Luke Healing the Dropiscal Child (Rome, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, c. 1622–23) unusually represents Luke as the ‘beloved physician’ of Colossians 4. 14. Lanfranco underscored Luke’s role as medicus by prominently positioning in the foreground a bound volume of Hippocratic writings and, beside it, Luke’s legendary portrait of the Virgin Mary, an image credited with healing the infirm. 1 Together, the medical text and the miracle-working image can be seen as a visualization of the remedial options available to those seeking good health and well-being in early modern Italy. Lanfranco’s St Luke is not singular in this regard. So, too, do the texts and images of popular votive culture. Miracle books (libri dei miracoli) routinely record a ‘desperate’ supplicant’s turn to a miracle-working image following a physician’s failure to ease the votary’s suffering. Popularly offered panel paintings (tavolette votive) left at shrine sites by or on behalf of supplicants visually affirm the efficacy touted in miracle books. But how much do these paintings—Lanfranco’s St Luke and anonymously painted tavolette votive—actually disclose about the therapeutic landscape of early modern Italy? This chapter considers the question in the contexts of votive culture and the medical discourse, focusing first on Lanfranco’s canvas and then on a distinctive group of seventeen votive panels preserved in the Neapolitan Sanctuary of the Madonna dell’Arco, which, in contrast to the vast majority of tavolette, represent the votary symptomatically and, in some cases, attended by a doctor and/or a priest.
