Jan L. de Jong

Jan L. de Jong studies how tombs in Early Modern Rome (1400-1600) did not just function as a place to bury the dead, but as monuments of mourning, memory, and meditation on life, death and the hereafter.

Monuments of Mourning, Memory and Meditation

Tombs in Early Modern Rome (1400–1600)

Focusing on a turbulent time in the history of the Roman Catholic Church, The Power and the Glorification considers how, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the papacy employed the visual arts to help reinforce Catholic power structures. All means of propaganda were deployed to counter the papacy’s eroding authority in the wake of the Great Schism of 1378 and in response to the upheaval surrounding the Protestant Reformation a century later. In the Vatican and elsewhere in Rome, extensive decorative cycles were commissioned to represent the strength of the church and historical justifications for its supreme authority. Replicating the contemporary viewer’s experience is central to De Jong’s approach, and he encourages readers to consider the works through fifteenth- and sixteenth-century eyes. De Jong argues that most visitors would only have had a limited knowledge of the historical events represented in these works, and they would likely have accepted (or been intended to accept) what they saw at face value. With that end in mind, the painters’ advisors did their best to “manipulate” the viewer accordingly, and De Jong discusses their strategies and methods.

Papal Pretensions and the Art of Propaganda in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries

The Power and the Glorification

Karl A. E. Enenkel

Jeannine De Landtsheer

This volume contains sixteen papers from various disciplines dealing with the question how scholars and artists in the early modern period studied and recreated ancient history, as a way of understanding and legitimizing the present. This publication has also been published in paperback, please click here for details.

Episodes from the Greek and Roman Past in the Arts and Literature of the Early Modern Period

Recreating Ancient History

Karl A.E. Enenkel

This volume explores early modern recreations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, focusing on the creative ingenium of artists and writers who freely handled the original text so as to adapt it to different artistic media and genres.

Pictorial and Literary Transformations in Various Media, 1400–1800

Re-inventing Ovid’s Metamorphoses

Catrien Santing

Carmen Fracchia

Kees Zimmerman

The Miracle of the Transplantation of the Black Leg, a posthumous miracle performed by the saints Cosmas and Damian, is best known from the Golden Legend of Jacobus the Voragine (1265). From the early Middle Ages on, artists have been particularly inspired by De Voragine's description of this miracle. Their works can be found in churches, monasteries, and musea, mainly in Italy, Spain, and Southern France. These artful representations have fascinated Kees Zimmerman, retired trauma surgeon, inspiring him to travel through Southern Europe exploring them. In this way he has gathered an impressive collection of photographs of paintings, sculptures, and other art and religious objects. This book offers over 80 reproductions of representations of the Miracle of the Black Leg, quite a number of which have never been published before. Articles by art historians (De Jong, Fracchia), medievalists (Santing), and an Introduction by Zimmerman himself, shed light on different aspects of the legend. This book will therefore be of interest for art historians and medievalists, as well as those who wish to investigate the relationship between medicine and religion in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period. It offers, moreover, a wealth of beautiful pictures to be savored by all art lovers.

Jan L. de Jong

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