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Manifest Humbleness: Self-Commemoration in the Time of the Catholic Reform
Abstract
Around the mid-sixteenth century Humanist prelates were conflicted in their efforts to combine the conventions of their cultural heritage and the new religious requirements. In the field of personal commemorations, the humanist praise of humankind--which led to magnificent Renaissance monuments--stood in contrast to the renewed emphasis on personal humbleness. This perplexing situation is reflected in the personality and sepulchral patronage of Diomede Carafa, bishop of Ariano for half of that century, who prepared four tombs for himself. An examination of their iconography, their epitaphs, and some other projects and inscriptions by him produces a picture of a prelate who oscillated between his desire to be remembered, his agreement with the renewed Catholic emphasis on personal humbleness, and his fear of death. While the simplicity of his tomb slabs manifests the patron's meekness, their dead effigies and epitaphs were for him a permanent memento mori reference.
Papal commemoration is intrinsically connected with the perpetuation of the institution of the papacy and later with papal dynasticism. Memorialising past popes simultaneously reasserted the institution’s strength and continuity and allowed papal families to share reflected glory derived from secular authority, social credit, and spiritual charisma. Since the papacy depended in part on the wealth and social leverage of its cardinals and popes and gained from their relatives’ desire to recognise contributions to papal history, there was no practical advantage to limiting papal commemoration. Communities that hosted objects, images, and sites of commemoration then became standard-bearers for families’ long-term goals of perpetuating connections to the elite Church and the papacy, preferably by building a papal dynasty.
Dentro de la nobleza napolitana, los Carafa fueron sin duda los más fieles y devotos a la Casa de Aragón. Desde 1458 hasta 1576, la familia Carafa ocupó el arzobispado napolitano casi sin interrupción. Su mecenazgo –la restauración del ábside y la cripta de la catedral alrededor de 1500, el Succorpo di San Gennaro–, se sitúa en una perspectiva del patronazgo episcopal napolitano a largo plazo. El objetivo es mostrar cómo la fábrica existente de la catedral determinó las acciones de cada patrocinador desde los tiempos angevinos.