Miracles at the Margins: Miraculous Images in Late Quattrocento Tuscany

At the end of the fifteenth century, images of the Virgin Mary located on the outskirts of Tuscan towns began working miracles and drawing masses of pilgrims from the Florentine territory. The present study situates itself within these types of religious events and attempts to explain the driving forces behind the initiation and continuation of the cults dedicated to the images. My dissertation presents an in-depth examination of three Tuscan paintings chosen for their striking similarities: Santa Maria delle Carceri in Prato, Santa Maria delle Grazie in San Giovanni Valdarno, and Santa Maria delle Grazie al Calcinaio in Cortona. All three images are frescoes of the Madonna and Child Enthroned that were once situated in financially struggling neighborhoods or towns. The artisans, laborers, and people living in the local communities and in the surrounding countryside represented a large portion of the frescoes’ earliest viewers and devotees. Little scholarly attention, however, has been paid to how the miraculous images functioned for and were received by the local inhabitants, particularly members of the humbler social groups. This dissertation subsequently explores the ways in which the frescoes appealed to the non-elite, who utilized religion and its practices to create and lay claim to important sacred sites.

Located on the periphery of society, the frescoes acted as meeting places between diverse social groups and became loci where tensions among the popolo, the local governments, and the territorial elite played out and gained visibility. As a result, the miraculous images offer greater insight into the socio-political situations of the small towns and centers outside Florence.

Since each of the immobile frescoes were deeply rooted in their marginal locations and in their local communities, I adopt a place-based approach and draw on conceptual models from a variety of disciplines, including religious studies, philosophy, and archaeology. My documentary evidence primarily consists of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century archival materials, including miracle books, church inventories, and the statutes belonging to the images’ oratories and to the confraternities associated with the images, all of which allow me to ascertain devotees’ perception and experience of the sacred places. By examining the nexuses of meaning that supplicants created around the images through active story-telling and ritual performances, the present study reveals that the people transformed the frescoes into places where the laity could enact penitential rituals and receive access to sacred objects with a reduced degree of mediation from the clerical and urban elite. This dissertation thus proves that the marginally located miracle-working images offered the popolo an opportunity to gain a certain amount of religious autonomy.