Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Joseph’s Hosen, Devotion, and Humor: The ‘Domestic’ Saint and the Earliest Material Evidence of His Cult
- 2 Satire Sacred and Profane
- 3 Urbanitas, the Imago Humilis, and the Rhetoric of Humor in Sacred Art
- 4 The Miserly Saint and the Multivalent Image: Sanctity, Satire, and Subversion
- Conclusion
- Index
4 - The Miserly Saint and the Multivalent Image: Sanctity, Satire, and Subversion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Joseph’s Hosen, Devotion, and Humor: The ‘Domestic’ Saint and the Earliest Material Evidence of His Cult
- 2 Satire Sacred and Profane
- 3 Urbanitas, the Imago Humilis, and the Rhetoric of Humor in Sacred Art
- 4 The Miserly Saint and the Multivalent Image: Sanctity, Satire, and Subversion
- Conclusion
- Index
Summary
Abstract
Chapter Four discusses scenes of the Adoration of the Magi that uphold ideals of urban nuclear paternity, yet simultaneously subvert these same ideals for their slippage into avarice, a problem of particular social relevance in emerging money economies. Rather than categorizing these depictions as either purely derogatory or sober in message, as prior scholarship has done, the chapter explores how fifteenth-and sixteenthcentury altarpieces, panels, and prints could produce seemingly conflicting messages at once, satirizing Joseph's greed, yet celebrating his important theological and societal role as treasurer. This allows for a reconsideration of the nature of early modern satire; the power of Joseph's satire lies in its ability to subvert institutional ideals, even while supporting that same institution's doctrinal messages.
Key Words: Saint Joseph, Adoration of the Magi, satire, early modern family, money Economy
The Early Modern paterfamilias and the Profit Economy
Among fifteenth-century theologians, Saint Joseph became closely associated with the humble poor and working classes in a positive sense, supported by the ideals of the Franciscans and the Brethren of the Common Life, and reflected in the theological writings of Jean Gerson and Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly, who relied upon the earlier devotion to the saint by Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153). In his Homilies in Praise of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Bernard emphasized Joseph's humility as complementary to that of his wife, which was the reason for her honor as mother of the Redeemer. The notion of humility as the remedy for man's pride through the Savior's human birth, as well as theological fascination with the sacrality of the poor and humble, is correlated with an increase in depictions of Joseph as a working man or as counterpart to the shepherds in scenes of the Adoration of the Shepherds, like the famous Portinari Altarpiece (1475–1476; Uffizi, Florence).
But a St. Joseph of extraordinary relevance to contemporary social concerns likewise grew from the rising centrality of the nuclear family and responsible paterfamilias in the increasingly urbanized market economy of the late fourteenth-, fifteenth-,and political clout, and the resultant waning of clerical power. While the centrality of wit and humor in early Renaissance art may be attributed in part to the nature of the artist's path to success in aristocratic and bourgeois circles, driven by courtly ideals of social exchange still rooted in a foregone feudal gift economy, the gift economy itself was rapidly declining and being replaced by a new, morally complex system reliant on personal profit.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Satire, Veneration, and St. Joseph in Art, c. 1300–1550 , pp. 187 - 224Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2019