Torn Apart Saints: Making, Recycling, Repairing Religious Figures in Early Modern Italy and Beyond

Florence Larcher, M.A.

The history of western premodern religious art is replete with ordinary, intra-confessional iconoclasms. As if reliving their martyrdom once again, painted images of saints often undergo significant material reworking – from polyptychs and panels dismantled or cut up to better suit their new destination when moved during re-decoration projects, to icons scraped to recover some of their apotropaic material, to holy bodies excavated and reduced to dust to be mixed with the wax used to mold devotional objects. If such ‘torn apart’ saints contributed to the dissemination of the sacred, an alternative to the most extreme interventions – which border on sacrilege – was often favoured: their image was recycled and transformed into the depiction of another figure instead of being completely destroyed. The pre-existing saint is thus transfigured, recomposed part by part, limb by limb – echoing Leon Battista Alberti’s key concept, historia. Due to the stratigraphy of meaningful materiality embedded in their images, ‘torn apart’ saints enable us to question the implications for artistic practices, conservation, and early modern art theory when it crosses martyrology.