Curtains, Altarpieces, Relics: Domenico Ghirlandaio and the Cult of the Volto Santo in Lucca Cathedral

• In Event: The Interaction of Art and Relics in Early Modernity I

Abstract

Fictive, painted curtains in Renaissance paintings have long been acknowledged as devices of divine revelation, majesty, and potency. But curtains were also intimately connected with the display and beholding of miraculous images, relics, and altarpieces in early modern Europe. Through a case study of Domenico Ghirlandaio’s 1479/80 altarpiece for Lucca’s cathedral, which prominently includes painted curtains, and that same cathedral’s famed miracle-working crucifix the Volto Santo, this paper explores the connections and interactions between Renaissance religious images and the enduring cult of relics. In this examination, curtains – and Ghirlandaio’s deployment of them – emerge as agents that strongly presage the anticipatory and participatory impulses, as well as the paradox of the revealed, yet concealed, that was fundamental to the viewing and understanding of relics/miraculous images like the Volto Santo.

Author

• Sarah Mellott Cadagin, University of Maryland, College Park