Percorsi di salvezza e strumenti di legittimazione. I cicli dei Sette Sacramenti nell'arte del Medioevo. Paths of Salvation and Instruments of Legitimation. Cycles of the Seven Sacraments in Medieval Art

The appearance of the first iconographic series of the Seven Sacraments in the fourteenth century Italian monumental art is a very significant instance, but so far little studied, of the remarkable artistic dynamism that characterized the centuries of the Late Middle Ages. In different contexts and for different purposes, the patrons of the cycles of Florence, Naples, Galatina (Lecce) and Priverno (Latina) appropriated the theme - widely discussed in the philosophical and doctrinal treatises of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but not yet object of concrete pastoral action on the part of the Church - to make it an instrument of self representation of high symbolic value. The book reconstructs the situations and circumstances in which the four cycles were conceived, their purposes and their respective contexts, in relation to the progressive affirmation of the sacramental theme in the Medieval communal religious consciousness.