Miraculous Affects and Analogical Materialities. Rethinking the Relation between Architecture and Affect in Baroque Italy

Abstract

This chapter addresses the relation between affect, architecture and place, materiality, miraculous event and ritual in baroque Italy by examining two miraculous liquefactions of saintly blood in baroque Naples. If these interrelationships are treated in non-representational terms, then materiality emerges as central to these relationships and crucial for an understanding of affect. Meanwhile, I suggest below that the role of ritual has been overstated.Thus the chapter thinks art and architecture in relation to affect through its materiality and not in representational terms.

I gratefully acknowledge a Small Research Grant from the British Academy that facilitated research for this chapter. I wrote it in the congenial atmosphere of Smith College where I was Kennedy Professor of Renaissance Studies in 2014 and it owes much to colleagues there. I thank Mary Pardo and Michael Gnehm for invaluable assistance with interpreting Basile’s testing text, and Andrew Benjamin who gave encouraging and perceptive advice at critical junctures.