Fredrika Jacobs
BA, Smith College
PhD, University of Virginia
--------------
Professor emerita
Virginia Commonwealth University
Email:fredrikajacobs@gmail.com
___________________________________________________________
BOOKS
Votive Panels & Popular Piety in Early Modern Italy, Cambridge University Press, 2013.
The Living Image in the Renaissance, Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Defining the Renaissance Virtuosa: Women artists and the language of art history and criticism. Cambridge University Press, 1997/1999.
-Awarded Best Book Honorable Mention, 1998, The Society for the Study of Early Modern Women.
EDITED VOLUME
Representing Infirmity. Diseased Bodies in Renaissance Italy. Eds. John Henderson, Fredrika Jacobs, and Jonathan Nelson. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2021.
BOOK ESSAYS/CHAPTERS
“Infirmity in Votive Culture: A case study from the sanctuary of the Madonna dell’Arco, Naples,” 191-212, in Representing Infirmity. Diseased Bodies in Renaissance Italy. Eds. J. Henderson, F. Jacobs, and J. Nelson. Routledge, 2021.
“Not Quite Dead: Imaging the Miracle of Infant Resuscitation,” in Picturing Death 1200-1600, ed. Walter Melion. Brill, 2020.
“Memory & Narrative: Materializing Past and Future in the Present,” in Agents of Faith: Votive Giving Across Cultures ed. Ittai Weinryb. Bard Graduate Center/Yale University Press, 2018.
“Attraversare i confine: i tavolette dipinti a
Lonigo,” in Storie di Lonigo. Eds. Giovanni Florio and
Alfredo Viggiano. Verona: Cierre, 2016.
“Humble Offerings: Votive Panel Paintings in
Renaissance Italy,” in Ex Voto: Votive Images Across
Cultures, Ed. Ittai Weinryb. New York: Bard/ Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2016.
“Narrative of Another Kind,” 207-12, in Essays in
Honor of Joseph Connors. Olscheki & Harvard University
Press/I Tatti Studies in the Renaissance, 2013.
“Burning the Devil & Dusting the Madonna:
Reconsidering Image Efficacy,” vol. 2: 147-75, in Push
Me, Pull You: Art and Devotional Interaction in
Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Eds. Sarah Blick and
Laura Gelfand. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2011.
“Sexual Variations: Playing with (Dis)similitude,” in
Sexuality in the Renaissance, vol. 5: 73-94, series on
the History of Sexuality, Ed. Bette Talvacchia.
London: Berg, 2010; reissued 2014).
“Rethinking the Divide: Cultic Images and the Cult of
Images,” in The Art Seminar, vol. 5: 95-114. Theory
and the Renaissance, Eds. Robert Williams and James
Elkins. London & Cork, Ireland: Routledge & the
University of Cork, 2008.
“Leonardo, Grazia and the Gendering of Style,” 197-
219, in Leonardo da Vinci and the Ethics of Style, Ed.
Claire Farago (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2008), pp. 197-219.
“Vasari’s Bronzino: The Paradigmatic Academician,”
101-116, in Reading Vasari, Eds. Anne B. Barriault,
Andrew Ladis, et.al. London and Atalanta: Philip
Wilson and Georgia Museum of Art, 2005.
* Winner Best Book, Southeastern College Art
Conference
“La donnesca mano,” 373-411, in Oxford Readings in
Feminism, Ed. Lorna Hutson. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1999.
SELECTED JURIED ARTICLES
‘Rethinking Giovanni Battista Moroni: the ‘Sacred Portraits,’Predella. Journal of Visual Arts (2020), 1-14.
“Shoes,” RES, vol. 71-72 (Autumn 2019), 284-294.
“Votive Culture and Purposeful Destruction,” Source, vol. 36, nos. 3-4 (Spring/Summer 2018), 212-222.
“(Dis)assembling: Michelangelo, Marsyas and the Accademia,” Art Bulletin, vol. 84, no. 2(September 2002) pp. 426-448.
“Aretino & Michelangelo, Dolce & Titian: Femmina, Masculo, Grazia,” Art Bulletin, vol. 82, no. 1 (March, 2000), pp. 51-67.
"Woman's Capacity to Create: The Unusual Case of Sofonisba Anguissola," Renaissance Quarterly, vol. 47 (1994), pp. 74-101.
"The Construction of a life: Madonna Properzia De'Rossi 'Schultrice' Bolognese," Word & Image, vol. 9(1993), pp. 122-132.
MISC.
Ailsa Mellon Bruce Visiting Professor, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Washington, D.C., 2007 and 2010.
Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Visiting Professor, Villa I Tatti, Harvard University Center for Renaissance Studies, Florence, Italy, 2008.
Paul Mellon Senior Visiting Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2000.
Distinguished Achievement in Teaching, Virginia Commonwealth University, School of the Arts, 1999.
Research grant, American Philosophical Society, 1982.
Renaissance Society of America, Paleography workshop, Florence, Italy, 1978.
Visual Arts Research grant, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 1977-1978.
PhD, University of Virginia
--------------
Professor emerita
Virginia Commonwealth University
Email:fredrikajacobs@gmail.com
___________________________________________________________
BOOKS
Votive Panels & Popular Piety in Early Modern Italy, Cambridge University Press, 2013.
The Living Image in the Renaissance, Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Defining the Renaissance Virtuosa: Women artists and the language of art history and criticism. Cambridge University Press, 1997/1999.
-Awarded Best Book Honorable Mention, 1998, The Society for the Study of Early Modern Women.
EDITED VOLUME
Representing Infirmity. Diseased Bodies in Renaissance Italy. Eds. John Henderson, Fredrika Jacobs, and Jonathan Nelson. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2021.
BOOK ESSAYS/CHAPTERS
“Infirmity in Votive Culture: A case study from the sanctuary of the Madonna dell’Arco, Naples,” 191-212, in Representing Infirmity. Diseased Bodies in Renaissance Italy. Eds. J. Henderson, F. Jacobs, and J. Nelson. Routledge, 2021.
“Not Quite Dead: Imaging the Miracle of Infant Resuscitation,” in Picturing Death 1200-1600, ed. Walter Melion. Brill, 2020.
“Memory & Narrative: Materializing Past and Future in the Present,” in Agents of Faith: Votive Giving Across Cultures ed. Ittai Weinryb. Bard Graduate Center/Yale University Press, 2018.
“Attraversare i confine: i tavolette dipinti a
Lonigo,” in Storie di Lonigo. Eds. Giovanni Florio and
Alfredo Viggiano. Verona: Cierre, 2016.
“Humble Offerings: Votive Panel Paintings in
Renaissance Italy,” in Ex Voto: Votive Images Across
Cultures, Ed. Ittai Weinryb. New York: Bard/ Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2016.
“Narrative of Another Kind,” 207-12, in Essays in
Honor of Joseph Connors. Olscheki & Harvard University
Press/I Tatti Studies in the Renaissance, 2013.
“Burning the Devil & Dusting the Madonna:
Reconsidering Image Efficacy,” vol. 2: 147-75, in Push
Me, Pull You: Art and Devotional Interaction in
Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Eds. Sarah Blick and
Laura Gelfand. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2011.
“Sexual Variations: Playing with (Dis)similitude,” in
Sexuality in the Renaissance, vol. 5: 73-94, series on
the History of Sexuality, Ed. Bette Talvacchia.
London: Berg, 2010; reissued 2014).
“Rethinking the Divide: Cultic Images and the Cult of
Images,” in The Art Seminar, vol. 5: 95-114. Theory
and the Renaissance, Eds. Robert Williams and James
Elkins. London & Cork, Ireland: Routledge & the
University of Cork, 2008.
“Leonardo, Grazia and the Gendering of Style,” 197-
219, in Leonardo da Vinci and the Ethics of Style, Ed.
Claire Farago (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2008), pp. 197-219.
“Vasari’s Bronzino: The Paradigmatic Academician,”
101-116, in Reading Vasari, Eds. Anne B. Barriault,
Andrew Ladis, et.al. London and Atalanta: Philip
Wilson and Georgia Museum of Art, 2005.
* Winner Best Book, Southeastern College Art
Conference
“La donnesca mano,” 373-411, in Oxford Readings in
Feminism, Ed. Lorna Hutson. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1999.
SELECTED JURIED ARTICLES
‘Rethinking Giovanni Battista Moroni: the ‘Sacred Portraits,’Predella. Journal of Visual Arts (2020), 1-14.
“Shoes,” RES, vol. 71-72 (Autumn 2019), 284-294.
“Votive Culture and Purposeful Destruction,” Source, vol. 36, nos. 3-4 (Spring/Summer 2018), 212-222.
“(Dis)assembling: Michelangelo, Marsyas and the Accademia,” Art Bulletin, vol. 84, no. 2(September 2002) pp. 426-448.
“Aretino & Michelangelo, Dolce & Titian: Femmina, Masculo, Grazia,” Art Bulletin, vol. 82, no. 1 (March, 2000), pp. 51-67.
"Woman's Capacity to Create: The Unusual Case of Sofonisba Anguissola," Renaissance Quarterly, vol. 47 (1994), pp. 74-101.
"The Construction of a life: Madonna Properzia De'Rossi 'Schultrice' Bolognese," Word & Image, vol. 9(1993), pp. 122-132.
MISC.
Ailsa Mellon Bruce Visiting Professor, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Washington, D.C., 2007 and 2010.
Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Visiting Professor, Villa I Tatti, Harvard University Center for Renaissance Studies, Florence, Italy, 2008.
Paul Mellon Senior Visiting Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2000.
Distinguished Achievement in Teaching, Virginia Commonwealth University, School of the Arts, 1999.
Research grant, American Philosophical Society, 1982.
Renaissance Society of America, Paleography workshop, Florence, Italy, 1978.
Visual Arts Research grant, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 1977-1978.
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Books by Fredrika Jacobs
Table of Contents
Part 1: Approaches to the representation of infirmity
1. Cancer in Michelangelo’s Night. An Analytical Framework for Retrospective Diagnoses
Jonathan K. Nelson
2. The Language of Medicine in Renaissance Preaching
Peter Howard
3. Representing Infirmity in Early Modern Florence
John Henderson
Part 2: Institutions and visualising illness
4. On Display: Poverty as Infirmity and its Visual Representation at the Hospital of Santa Maria della Scala in Siena
Maggie Bell
5. The Friar as medico: Picturing Leprosy, Institutional Care, and Franciscan Virtues in La Franceschina
Diana Bullen Presciutti
Part 3: Disease and treatment
6. The Drama of Infirmity: Cupping in Sixteenth-Century Italy
Evelyn Welch
7. Suffering Through It: Visual and Textual Representations of Bodies in Surgery in the Wake of Lepanto (1571)
Paolo Savoia
8. Artistic Representations of Goitre in Early Modern Art Italy
Danielle Carrabino
Part 4: Saints and miraculous healing
9. Infirmity in Votive Culture: A Case Study from the Sanctuary of the Madonna dell’Arco, Naples
Fredrika Jacobs
10. Infirmity and the Miraculous in the Early Seventeenth Century: The San Carlo Cycle of Paintings in the Duomo of Milan
Jenni Kuuliala
11. Epilogue: Did Mona Lisa suffer from hypothyroidism? Visual representations of sickness and the vagaries of retrospective diagnosis
Michael Stolberg
Looking beyond the modern category of ‘disease’ and viewing infirmity in Galenic humoral terms, each chapter explores which infirmities were depicted in visual culture, in what context, why, and when. By exploring the works of artists such as Caravaggio, Leonardo, and Michelangelo, this study considers the idealized body altered by diseases including leprosy, plague, goiter, and cancer. In doing so, the relationship between medical treatment and the depiction of infirmities through miracle cures is also revealed. The broad chronological approach demonstrates how and why such representations change, both over time and across different forms of media. Collectively, the chapters explain how the development of knowledge of the workings and structure of the body was reflected in changed ideas and representations of the metaphorical, allegorical, and symbolic meanings of infirmity and disease.
The interdisciplinary approach makes this study the perfect resource for both students and specialists of the history of art, medicine and religion, and social and intellectual history across Renaissance Europe.
Talks by Fredrika Jacobs
Votive Images, Donation and War
Fredrika Jacobs
Within the theoretical frameworks of trauma studies that began to be formulated in response to the 1985 release of Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah, documentaries focused on the devastations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and video works responding to South Africa’s trials of reconciliation, attempts to identify and understand a class of visual works dealing with post-traumatic memory have acquired momentum. In the United States these efforts were galvanized by the tragic events of September 11, 2001. In the wake of this and other catastrophic occurrences spawned by nature as well as wrought by human tyrannies, critics and theorists directed attention first to works of art realized in mediums matching the modernity of the events they reflect and refract. This privileging of the recent may be the consequence of the process of remembrance and the passage of time, which allow lived memory to be recalled in the form of “dispassionate” historical narrative. It may also be the result of the perception that film and installations utilizing image projection are more effective than static images when it comes to drawing a viewer into heteropathic identification with a traumatized subject. This favoring of the present has been challenged by changes in the research landscape. Scholars now look beyond the realist aesthetic structured with and around testimonial film to find expressive language of affect in abstract art. Additionally, the critical lens has been broadened to bring into view - and under scrutiny – images made centuries ago and by the more traditional means of brush and pigment. The expansion in trauma studies comes with a degree of risk. Dissecting fifteenth and sixteenth-century images with a methodological scalpel honed for analyzing contemporary works made in response to distinctly modern situations is arguably susceptible to anachronistic interpretation. Historicization can create dissonance between past and present. While it “nurture[s] insights that would otherwise be inaccessible,” it also dulls the sensate impact of living memory, casting doubt on the possibility that an experienced trauma given visual expression can be grasped beyond its domain. I admit that temporal distance presents certain obstacles, but the modern methodologies of post-traumatic memory need not be one of them. As the history of art history has shown, methodologies are neither era-exclusive nor thematically restrictive.
Focusing on the trauma of war and vacillating between 16th and 20th century images and texts, this paper tests the applicability of modern methodologies, specifically that of sense memory and affect theory, in appreciating the impact of images of traumatic experience made in the past. Although not restricted to votive panel paintings offered to a holy intercessor by survivors (both combatants and non-combatants) of horrific events, particular attention is given to these small pictures, which commonly are referred to as tavolette votive, and, critically, their display within a communal space activated by shared cultic practices. These late 15th and 16th century images are paired with contemporaneous texts, among them: Angelo Beolco’s play The Veteran, ca. 1529, the diary of Pasquier le Moyen, a non-combatant witness of the bloody Battle of Marignano in 1515, and the miracle book from the Neapolitan Sanctuary of the Madonna dell’ Arco, 1608, which has a witnessed account of a votive panel’s donation.
This paper confronts many challenges. Two are especially significant. The first is endemic to all attempts to confront and give expression, whether verbal or visual, to post-traumatic memory. How can the unspeakable be voiced, how can the unbelievable be made comprehensible? The second is specific to the objects under consideration here. Because tavolette votive visualize an individual experience, can they be understood to represent communal response? Put another way, can horror be circumscribed in a way that triggers the psychic process of transferential identification between primary and secondary witnesses so that the latter ‘feels’ the interiorized pain and fear of the former and, if so, how? Does comprehension required the experience to have been shared in general terms if not specific circumstances? In seeking to answer these questions, I use the distinction between “sense” and “ordinary” memory advanced by Charlotte Delbo in her trilogy Aushwitz, and After, written in 1946-47 yet not published in its entirety until 1970. In an effort to cross the divide between individual and communal grief, I consider the installations by Sandra Johnston and Richard Roth, two contemporary artists who address violence and grief in their work. I don’t mean to mitigate the differences between early modern displays of tavlette votive produced by a myriad of hands and contemporary installations created by single artists. My objective is to suggest that modern methodologies might prove useful in our attempts to reconstruct the visual effect of images of post-traumatic memory on viewers long ago, specifically how personal experience was embedded in the fabric of communal understanding.
Catalog entry by Fredrika Jacobs
Table of Contents
Part 1: Approaches to the representation of infirmity
1. Cancer in Michelangelo’s Night. An Analytical Framework for Retrospective Diagnoses
Jonathan K. Nelson
2. The Language of Medicine in Renaissance Preaching
Peter Howard
3. Representing Infirmity in Early Modern Florence
John Henderson
Part 2: Institutions and visualising illness
4. On Display: Poverty as Infirmity and its Visual Representation at the Hospital of Santa Maria della Scala in Siena
Maggie Bell
5. The Friar as medico: Picturing Leprosy, Institutional Care, and Franciscan Virtues in La Franceschina
Diana Bullen Presciutti
Part 3: Disease and treatment
6. The Drama of Infirmity: Cupping in Sixteenth-Century Italy
Evelyn Welch
7. Suffering Through It: Visual and Textual Representations of Bodies in Surgery in the Wake of Lepanto (1571)
Paolo Savoia
8. Artistic Representations of Goitre in Early Modern Art Italy
Danielle Carrabino
Part 4: Saints and miraculous healing
9. Infirmity in Votive Culture: A Case Study from the Sanctuary of the Madonna dell’Arco, Naples
Fredrika Jacobs
10. Infirmity and the Miraculous in the Early Seventeenth Century: The San Carlo Cycle of Paintings in the Duomo of Milan
Jenni Kuuliala
11. Epilogue: Did Mona Lisa suffer from hypothyroidism? Visual representations of sickness and the vagaries of retrospective diagnosis
Michael Stolberg
Looking beyond the modern category of ‘disease’ and viewing infirmity in Galenic humoral terms, each chapter explores which infirmities were depicted in visual culture, in what context, why, and when. By exploring the works of artists such as Caravaggio, Leonardo, and Michelangelo, this study considers the idealized body altered by diseases including leprosy, plague, goiter, and cancer. In doing so, the relationship between medical treatment and the depiction of infirmities through miracle cures is also revealed. The broad chronological approach demonstrates how and why such representations change, both over time and across different forms of media. Collectively, the chapters explain how the development of knowledge of the workings and structure of the body was reflected in changed ideas and representations of the metaphorical, allegorical, and symbolic meanings of infirmity and disease.
The interdisciplinary approach makes this study the perfect resource for both students and specialists of the history of art, medicine and religion, and social and intellectual history across Renaissance Europe.
Votive Images, Donation and War
Fredrika Jacobs
Within the theoretical frameworks of trauma studies that began to be formulated in response to the 1985 release of Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah, documentaries focused on the devastations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and video works responding to South Africa’s trials of reconciliation, attempts to identify and understand a class of visual works dealing with post-traumatic memory have acquired momentum. In the United States these efforts were galvanized by the tragic events of September 11, 2001. In the wake of this and other catastrophic occurrences spawned by nature as well as wrought by human tyrannies, critics and theorists directed attention first to works of art realized in mediums matching the modernity of the events they reflect and refract. This privileging of the recent may be the consequence of the process of remembrance and the passage of time, which allow lived memory to be recalled in the form of “dispassionate” historical narrative. It may also be the result of the perception that film and installations utilizing image projection are more effective than static images when it comes to drawing a viewer into heteropathic identification with a traumatized subject. This favoring of the present has been challenged by changes in the research landscape. Scholars now look beyond the realist aesthetic structured with and around testimonial film to find expressive language of affect in abstract art. Additionally, the critical lens has been broadened to bring into view - and under scrutiny – images made centuries ago and by the more traditional means of brush and pigment. The expansion in trauma studies comes with a degree of risk. Dissecting fifteenth and sixteenth-century images with a methodological scalpel honed for analyzing contemporary works made in response to distinctly modern situations is arguably susceptible to anachronistic interpretation. Historicization can create dissonance between past and present. While it “nurture[s] insights that would otherwise be inaccessible,” it also dulls the sensate impact of living memory, casting doubt on the possibility that an experienced trauma given visual expression can be grasped beyond its domain. I admit that temporal distance presents certain obstacles, but the modern methodologies of post-traumatic memory need not be one of them. As the history of art history has shown, methodologies are neither era-exclusive nor thematically restrictive.
Focusing on the trauma of war and vacillating between 16th and 20th century images and texts, this paper tests the applicability of modern methodologies, specifically that of sense memory and affect theory, in appreciating the impact of images of traumatic experience made in the past. Although not restricted to votive panel paintings offered to a holy intercessor by survivors (both combatants and non-combatants) of horrific events, particular attention is given to these small pictures, which commonly are referred to as tavolette votive, and, critically, their display within a communal space activated by shared cultic practices. These late 15th and 16th century images are paired with contemporaneous texts, among them: Angelo Beolco’s play The Veteran, ca. 1529, the diary of Pasquier le Moyen, a non-combatant witness of the bloody Battle of Marignano in 1515, and the miracle book from the Neapolitan Sanctuary of the Madonna dell’ Arco, 1608, which has a witnessed account of a votive panel’s donation.
This paper confronts many challenges. Two are especially significant. The first is endemic to all attempts to confront and give expression, whether verbal or visual, to post-traumatic memory. How can the unspeakable be voiced, how can the unbelievable be made comprehensible? The second is specific to the objects under consideration here. Because tavolette votive visualize an individual experience, can they be understood to represent communal response? Put another way, can horror be circumscribed in a way that triggers the psychic process of transferential identification between primary and secondary witnesses so that the latter ‘feels’ the interiorized pain and fear of the former and, if so, how? Does comprehension required the experience to have been shared in general terms if not specific circumstances? In seeking to answer these questions, I use the distinction between “sense” and “ordinary” memory advanced by Charlotte Delbo in her trilogy Aushwitz, and After, written in 1946-47 yet not published in its entirety until 1970. In an effort to cross the divide between individual and communal grief, I consider the installations by Sandra Johnston and Richard Roth, two contemporary artists who address violence and grief in their work. I don’t mean to mitigate the differences between early modern displays of tavlette votive produced by a myriad of hands and contemporary installations created by single artists. My objective is to suggest that modern methodologies might prove useful in our attempts to reconstruct the visual effect of images of post-traumatic memory on viewers long ago, specifically how personal experience was embedded in the fabric of communal understanding.
A blog about art, food & history with a focus on the early modern period