ABSTRACT
Reform meant the search for new forms: a desire for new churches, cloisters, seminaries, abodes and territories – not simply new repetitions, but new forms.3 Inventiveness regarding the appearance of Counter-Reformation saints formed part of that search for new forms, new faces and, perhaps more surprisingly, a new sense of place. It is my contention here that the production of the bodies and faces of saints and would-be saints was an essential part of the cultural project of Catholic Reform in Italy and was intimately linked to producing new notions of locality – that is, altered political configurations.4 The visual depiction of sanctity was not simply an added extra – a bolt-on, dispensable, illustrative addition to the nonvisual; it was a fundamental aspect of Catholic Reform informing its very core. To imagine the faces and sufferings of saintly beings, past and present, fundamentally altered what Catholic Reform could be; their visual figuration produced new emotional experiences and changed what Catholic Reform was. Michel de Certeau has argued that ‘the mystical body was the intended goal of a journey
1 This chapter can be seen as an illustrated coda to Peter Burke’s pioneering essay ‘How to be a Counter-Reformation Saint’, which opened up a whole new horizon to scholarship. Burke, The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 48-62.
