From the late 15th to the mid-16th
century, an impressive corpus of architecture, sculpture, and painting
was created to embellish monastic sites affiliated with the Benedictine
Cassinese Congregation of Italy. A religious order of humanistically
trained monks, the Cassinese engaged with the most eminent artists and
architects of the early modern period, supporting the production of
imagery and architecture that was often highly experimental in nature:
from Raphael's Sistine Madonna in Piacenza to Andrea Riccio's Moses/Zeus Ammon,
from Andrea Palladio's church of San Giorgio Maggiore (Venice) to the
superbly crafted choirstalls of San Severino and Sossio (Naples).


Applying
a network framework to the congregation's infrastructure of monasteries
makes clear that the circulation of sophisticated Renaissance art and
architecture constituted only a segment of the monks' investment in the
arts. Monks also served as custodians of an antique monumental heritage
and popular votive images, assuring the survival of ancient buildings
and artifacts of limited aesthetic value that supplied opportunities for
early modern masters to confront an array of artworks for the
reinvention of reformed Christian art and architecture.


Text in English, Italian and German.