UC Berkeley

This study follows the austere Catholic reformer Carlo Borromeo (1538-1584) on five different Italian pilgrimages in the decades following the Council of Trent. It aims to address the noticeable gap between theory and practice regarding image devotion in late sixteenth-century Italy. Treatises and decrees tend to rehash the oft-cited position of the Council of Trent, in which images are useful meditative and didactic tools, but must avoid ‘licentiousness’, inaccuracy, and any idolatrous confusion between the devotion to the material image and that owed to its heavenly prototype. However, the reality of religious art during this period bears little resemblance to this official position. It instead witnessed a growth in miraculous image cults, revived devotion toward freestanding sculpture, and placed unprecedented trust in the testimonial and sacramental power of art.

Carlo Borromeo, cardinal-archbishop and later saint, is often considered an archetype of Tridentine piety. Although he wrote no artistic treatises, his use of images became a model to the Italian populace through many celebrated pilgrimages and devotions. This project sketches out a theory of art by looking at Borromeo’s image-based behavior during five broadly defined pilgrimages, each using a particular destination to examine one facet of sacred images. We follow Borromeo as he renovates his titular church of Santa Prassede in Rome, revealing a sacramental definition of art, where images functioned, like ritual instruments, to perpetuate the antiquity of the liturgy. Borromeo’s pilgrimage to the Shroud of Turin shows how narrative artworks were pressured to account for artifacts in this period of reform. We trace his devotions at the polychrome terracotta sculptures of the Sacro Monte of Varallo, which Borromeo viewed as the very antidote to idolatry. Borromeo’s pilgrimages to the Holy House of Loreto demonstrate the symbiotic relationship between artists and replicas of miraculous images. Finally, we trace one final itinerary, carried out not by Borromeo but through his posthumous portraits, agents of his sanctity and witnesses in his trial for canonization. Together, Carlo Borromeo’s itineraries carved out a landscape of sacramental, antique, artistic, and evidentiary sacred images that would direct the next century of Catholic image culture throughout its global territories.