American award for Renaissance saints book

A book about the role and depiction of saints in Renaissance Italy has been awarded a top award by the American Association for Italian Studies (AAIS).

Saints, Miracles, and Social Problems in Italian Renaissance Art, by Professor Diana Presciutti, received the AAIS Book Prize – Visual Studies, Film, and Media in recognition of its “exceptional expertise, originality and scholarly rigour.”

The book, which explores how depictions of saints shaped Renaissance Italians’ perceptions of social issues, takes an interdisciplinary approach to art history, incorporating sociology, social history, gender and religious studies.

The Award’s judges praised Professor Presciutti for her “unwavering dedication, intellectual prowess, and pursuit of knowledge.”

Saints, Miracles, and Social Problems in Italian Renaissance Art, published by Cambridge University Press in 2023, focuses on saints from mendicant orders, such as Franciscans or Dominicans, who took vows of poverty and depended on alms for survival.

Unlike most monks, mendicant friars were usually based in cities and they are regularly pictured in Renaissance art performing miracles relating to social problems, such as rescuing children, exorcising the possessed or resolving marital disputes.

“I’ve always found saints fascinating, especially their miraculous acts. Because they often involve fantastical elements, like shape-shifting demons and dramatic resurrections, miracle stories can seem bizarre and unbelievable to us today,” explained Professor Presciutti.

“But my work is committed to taking miracles seriously, and understanding how they helped Renaissance people to make sense of their world. Seeing representations of saints resolving domestic crises and responding to urgent needs shaped the way people in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy understood the challenges they faced in their daily lives,” she added.

Drawing comparisons between how such depictions resonated with Italians at the time, and how we respond to images and videos of social problems on social media today, Professor Presciutti said: “Think, for example, about widely-circulated photographs of migrants, and how differently a long-distance shot of a faceless mass of people resonates when compared to a close-up portrait of an injured or dead child.”

Her book explores works by some of the best-known Renaissance names such as Titian, Donatello and Raphael, as well as less famous artists and some whose names are not remembered.

One of those featured is the painter Luca di Paolo. While Luca is well known in his hometown of Matelica, in the Marche region of Italy, he is not widely remembered elsewhere. Professor Presciutti singles out an altarpiece he painted featuring miracles of Bernardino of Siena, including “compelling scenes of a young woman being exorcised, an infant being raised from the dead, and a man having a withered hand restored.”

She described works by these ‘forgotten’ artists as “rich, vibrantly-coloured images filled with anecdotal details – their paintings reveal so much to us about daily life in Renaissance Italy.”

The topic of the book reflects some of Professor Presciutti’s teaching, which also takes an interdisciplinary approach to studying art. Most recently, she taught a seminar on saints, miracles, and social problems in late medieval and early Renaissance Italy in which she encouraged students to think about how visual media shapes our perceptions of social problems today.

Speaking about the resulting student essays, which covered everything from mass shootings to body dysmorphia, Professor Presciutti said: “It helped me think through many of the issues I address in the book – a textbook example of successful research-led teaching.”

Header picture: Antonio Vivarini, St Peter Martyr Exorcises a Woman, ca. 1450-60, tempera on panel, 54.8 × 35.5 cm, courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago (George F Harding Collection)