Prints for Canonization (and 'Verae Effigies') The History and Meanings of Printed Images Depicting Giovanni of Capestrano

Abstract

From the second half of the fifteenth century onwards, the use of printed images in the context of devotion and celebration (understood in the broadest sense of the word) enjoyed a prominent role in the visual strategies of the cult of the saints in general, and in those of the Franciscan Observants in particular.1 The case of Giovanni of Capestrano, by way of those repeatedly ‘broken paths’2 that characterizes his tortured path to canonization (1690), makes for both a privileged vantage point and an interesting case study, however late chronologically. In fact, while we must wait for the seventeenth century for etchings of the ‘Blessed Father’ that were intended and destined for serial circulation (one always confined, however, within the walls of convents and monasteries), here we are also concerned with very rare exempla of earlier depictions, images initially connected to the publication of hagiography, collections of sermons, or volumes dedicated to the history of the Order. Attention has mainly been placed on the reference models used in the construction of these figures, and on the design of the features that characterize them. The chronological arc taken into consideration here reaches from the death of the friar to the time of his canonization (1456-1690), the latter an occasion that inspired a series of celebrative prints tied to the production