Biography

Santina Novelli is an art historian interested primarily in medieval art. She received her PhD from the University of Lausanne in 2017. To date, she has worked on three different research projects, both at Swiss and Italian universities, which were dedicated to the artistic production of Northern Italy in the medieval period. Her studies aim to understand the artworks as an expression of their historical and cultural contexts. She investigates their original form and function, dynamics of patronage and history of reception. She is the author of a book on painting and patronage in medieval Lombardy between the 13th and 14th centuries and of essays dealing with different aspects of Italian artistic production.

Project Summary

This project studies the oldest sculptural groups representing the “Compianto” on the dead Christ or his Deposition, as part of a form of translation of the physical place of the Tomb of Christ outside Jerusalem. In fact, these groups were originally part of spatial arrangements, now largely lost, that were intended to evoke the cave in which Jesus was buried in 33 AD. In the European documents the installations that included them are called, with small variations, Holy Sepulchre, Sepulchre of Christ or more simply Sepulchre. They were often wanted in churches or funeral chapels, as monuments in which one could place the deceased under the protection of the risen Christ, and according to some documents of the 15th century, the visit to them could lead to the obtaining of indulgences, qualifying them as destinations for a substitute pilgrimage. To date, the oldest testimonies of this artistic expression, that we can therefore consider a plastic-spatial declination of the iconography of the Holy Sepulchre, are mostly from the 14th century and can be traced in Central and Northern Italy, Switzerland, Spain (especially in Catalonia) and Portugal. This research will try to clarify the origins of this particular form of staging of the Tomb of Christ, researching them in the intercultural context of the Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem; then it will trace the mapping of its spread to the West by interweaving analysis of the artworks, documents and literary sources.