Ex Voto
cultural histories of the material world
Cultural Histories of the Material World is a series centered on the exploration of the material turn in the study of culture. Volumes in the series examine the ways human beings have shaped and interpreted the material world from a broad range of scholarly perspectives and show how attention to materiality can contribute to a more precise historical understanding of specific times, places, ways, and means. Peter N. Miller, Series Editor Other books in the series include: Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China, 1500–1800 Peter N. Miller and François Louis, Editors The Sea: Thalassography and Historiography Peter N. Miller, Editor Cultural Histories of the Material World Peter N. Miller, Editor Ways of Making and Knowing: The Material Culture of Empirical Knowledge Pamela H. Smith, Amy R. W. Meyers, and Harold J. Cook, Editors The Anthropology of Expeditions: Travel, Visualities, Afterlives Joshua A. Bell and Erin L. Hasinoff, Editors
Ex Voto
cultural histories of the material world
Cultural Histories of the Material World is a series centered on the exploration of the material turn in the study of culture. Volumes in the series examine the ways human beings have shaped and interpreted the material world from a broad range of scholarly perspectives and show how attention to materiality can contribute to a more precise historical understanding of specific times, places, ways, and means. Peter N. Miller, Series Editor Other books in the series include: Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China, 1500–1800 Peter N. Miller and François Louis, Editors The Sea: Thalassography and Historiography Peter N. Miller, Editor Cultural Histories of the Material World Peter N. Miller, Editor Ways of Making and Knowing: The Material Culture of Empirical Knowledge Pamela H. Smith, Amy R. W. Meyers, and Harold J. Cook, Editors The Anthropology of Expeditions: Travel, Visualities, Afterlives Joshua A. Bell and Erin L. Hasinoff, Editors
Ex Voto: Votive Giving Across Cultures Ittai Weinryb, Editor
Bard Graduate Center New York City
Ittai Weinryb is assistant professor of medieval art and material culture at Bard Graduate Center in New York City. Bard Graduate Center, New York 10024 © 2016 Bard Graduate Center. All rights reserved. Published 2016. Printed in the United States of America 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16
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ISBN-13: 978-1-941792-05-6 (cloth) This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Published by Bard Graduate Center, New York City, and distributed by the University of Chicago Press. This book may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail
[email protected]. Designed by Alex Weiss Hills ∞ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Weinryb, Ittai, editor. Title: Ex voto : votive giving across cultures / Ittai Weinryb, editor. Description: New York : Bard Graduate Center, 2016. | Series: Cultural histories of the material world | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015043732 | ISBN 9781941792056 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Votive offerings. Classification: LCC BL570 .E9 2016 | DDC 203/.7--dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015043732
For Gerhard Wolf
Contents
Series Editor’s Preface
ix
Acknowledgments
xi
Introduction: Ex-Voto as Material Culture Ittai Weinryb
1
one
Fractured Narratives: Writing the Biography of a Votive Offering Jessica Hughes
23
two
Between the Body and the Divine: Healing Votives from Classical and Hellenistic Greece Alexia Petsalis-Diomidis
49
three
Italian Ex-Votos and “Pro-Anima” Images in the Late Middle Ages Michele Bacci
76
four
Renaissance Perspectives on Classical Antique Votive Practices Megan Holmes
106
five
Humble Offerings: Votive Panel Paintings in Renaissance Italy Fredrika Jacobs
140
six Donated before the Gods: Popular Display of Edo-Period Ema Tablets Hilary K. Snow
166
seven
Presence and Narrative in the Ex-Votos of New Spain Clara Bargellini
187
eight
Vows on Water: Ship Ex-Votos as Things, Metaphors, and Mediators of Communality Hannah Baader
217
nine
Nazr Necessities: Votive Practices and Objects in Iranian Muharram Ceremonies Christiane Gruber
246
ten
Procreative Giving: Votive Wombs and the Study of Ex-Votos Ittai Weinryb
276
Contributors
299
Index
301
Series Editor’s Preface
In the previous volume of this series, I described Cultural Histories of the Material World, with a nod to James Clifford, as “a sensorium travelling through space and time.” With Ex Voto: Votive Giving across Cultures, the series moves into a new dimension: the hazy meeting place of folklore, art history, archaeology, and anthropology. The ex-voto, a type of object that comes into focus in antiquity—though perhaps existing in some other guise for much, much longer—has lived on the borderline of scholarly attention: noted, sometimes catalogued, but rarely subjected to thoroughgoing analysis. Was it ignored because ugly (for the art historian) or magical (for the historian) or too commonplace (for the archaeologist)? The reader of this encyclopedic volume will not only come away convinced that the ex-voto is a very interesting class of objects but will also be inclined to apply the insights gleaned to the object world more generally and to our relationship with that world. We have not yet brought religion into the purview of this series— perhaps the closest we came was Rilke’s Duino Elegies in the eponymous third volume, Cultural Histories of the Material World, though that is more spirituality than religion. But religion has been a major focus of material culture from the earliest human experience. And with the ex-voto, we are in the land of religion. These objects were intercessions with the local divinity, propitiating whoever or whatever was deemed responsible for good health to look kindly on the supplicant. Understanding the object means, therefore, understanding the sought-for intervention. In a seventeenth century obsessed with both objects and empirical observation, its action would have been described as “sympathy” and maybe even put to work at a distance—as in Kenelm Digby’s cum Umberto Eco’s “powder of sympaix
x Ex Voto
thy.” Nowadays, scholars might instead talk about the “agency” in objects, but what they are referring to is the same complex, almost ineffable power. Thaumaturgy of this sort is the subject of Marc Bloch’s first book, Les rois thaumaturges (1924), but it is also the explanation behind Julius von Schlosser’s booklet on wax sculpture, Geschichte der Porträtbildnerei in Wachs (1911). Ernesto de Martino built a career studying the persistence of magical thinking in southern Italy. Behind them all stands Aby Warburg, whose recovery of the astrological and demonic in the European tradition helped animate a broad strand of twentieth-century intellectual history. Art historians have been more ambivalent about this: David Freedberg’s Power of Images (1989) tackled head-on the primal power expressed in the ex-voto, while Ernst Gombrich avoided the legacy completely, omitting Warburg’s very name from the index of The Preference for the Primitive, his posthumously published book on primitivism. The ex-voto crystallizes these issues, forcing us to confront the full scope of the human aspiration for power over nature—and despair at our powerlessness over nature. In fact, among the very few to work on these materials, Rudolf Kriss and Lenz Kriss-Rettenbeck, the father and son team who collected, studied, published, and then bequeathed fourteen thousand ex-votos to the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, emphasized the shamanic derivation. Through the ex-voto, then, the student of the human past can move into the realm of emotion and imagination, into the realm beyond words and certainly beyond reason. With this step we broaden our understanding of the meaningfulness of the material in the lives of human beings. Maybe things are not just tools, not just expressions of human dominance over the inanimate world, but are instead media, two-way signals communicating between animate and inanimate. Ex-votos present much for philosophers, folklorists, and anthropologists to ponder. For art historians especially, the materials presented in this volume might constitute a particular opportunity. Friedrich Nietzsche launched himself into a new way of thinking through two “untimely meditations” penned in the middle of the 1870s, one challenging historians and the other philologists to open their narrow disciplinary minds. There was no “We Art Historians” to accompany “We Philologists” and “We Historians.” Perhaps the ex-voto can help us write our own. Peter N. Miller Bard Graduate Center New York City
Acknowledgments
Scholars of the material world will often have first encountered objects as undergraduates seated in large and darkened lecture halls. A lecture on pilgrimage routes in medieval Europe given by Nurith Kenaan-Kedar, my first teacher of medieval art history, opened my eyes to one class of objects, ex-votos. During the lecture, she showed slides of the naively painted panels on the walls of the shrine at the church of Saintes-Mariesde-la-Mer in southern France, one of the most important pilgrimage sites for the Roma of modern Europe. The images, surrounded by the serene stone settings so often associated with medieval France, expressed clearly the dreams, expectations, and anxieties of early modern individuals of whom we would otherwise have no trace. Almost twelve years after that first encounter, a two-day international symposium, “Ex Voto: Votive Images across Cultures,” held at Bard Graduate Center in April 2011, and funded with the generous support of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, revealed the myriad perspectives from which those crudely painted panels at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer—or any other object termed an ex-voto—might be approached. The essays gathered in this volume, which is an outgrowth of that symposium, emerge from a desire to harness objects and perspectives or, better yet, materials and reflections, so that they can lead us to an understanding of what an ex-voto might be. The symposium from which this book originated was the first step in the planning of a large-scale exhibition at Bard Graduate Center in 2017. How we engage objects in these essays has implications for how we seek to display them in the exhibition. Thus, the symposium xi
xii Ex Voto
had the exhibition in mind, and the exhibition will be the result of the symposium, with this volume a conduit that connects, explains, and as in every good academic product, footnotes our own dreams, expectations, and anxieties expressed so vividly in these objects we define as ex-votos. For their support of the symposium, this volume, and the forthcoming exhibition, I would like to thank Susan Weber, director and founder of Bard Graduate Center; deans Peter N. Miller and Elena Pinto Simon; and Amy Ogata and Jeffrey Collins, successive chairs of Academic Programs. Conversations with friends and colleagues at Bard Graduate Center, and especially with Ivan Gaskell, Aaron Glass, and Andrew Morrall, helped shape the project; ongoing conversations with Nina StritzlerLevine and Marianne Lamonaca are helping to shape the exhibition. This book was fortunate to receive the careful attention of Peter N. Miller, the editor of the Cultural Histories of the Material World series, and Daniel Lee, the managing editor of the series. The two anonymous readers poured much critical enthusiasm into the various chapters of this volume, and I thank them for their sharp eyes and attention to detail. The hard work of Carolyn Brown, our copyeditor, and Alex Weiss Hills, graphic designer, is evident on every page. I am grateful to Heather Topcik and Janis Ekdahl for acquiring all the necessary reading materials for Bard Graduate Center’s library. No one reflects the essence of this volume more than Gerhard Wolf. His thinking, inspiration, and guidance have watered the roots of this and many other projects. The expansive nature of this volume reflects the many forms of exchange in which Gerhard has been involved over the past ten years. And so it is with great pleasure that I dedicate this volume in his honor. Ittai Weinryb
Fig. 1. Chains. Notre Dame d’Orcival, France. Photograph: Philippe Malpertu.
Fig. 2. Votive candles. Santa Maria della Salute, Venice. Getty Images. Photograph: Rosmarie Wirz.
Introduction: Ex-Voto as Material Culture Ittai Weinryb Votive pictures have always fascinated me. Everything does go so dreadfully wrong in them, and yet we know it will all be set so perfectly right again directly, and that nobody will be really hurt. Besides, they are so naive, and free from “high-falutin”; they give themselves no airs, are not review-puffed, and the people who paint them do not call one another geniuses. They are business-like, direct, and sensible. —Samuel Butler, Ex Voto (1888)
There is something about those material objects we call votives, whether pictures or other types, something that causes us to puzzle. They capture our imagination in their immediacy, as they point to an earthly need and as their pedestrian nature makes them accessible. Their material condition, however, is unique within the world of crafted material “things.” A set of chains hanging from an exterior lintel of a medieval church in Orcival, France (fig. 1), a wax candle burning before an altar dedicated to the Virgin in Santa Maria della Salute in Venice, Italy (fig. 2), and a crudely painted wooden panel affixed to the Shrine of Our Lady in Altötting, Germany (fig. 3)—these seemingly humble objects are representative of the loosely defined group of artifacts known as ex-votos.1 Deriving from formulaic statements in the Latin ex voto suscepto (from the vow made) or the Latin formulas found in antiquity votum solvit or votum solvit libens merito (vow willingly and deservedly fulfilled), they embody the hopes, dreams, and anxieties of the people who deposited them.2 1
