Giosuè Fabiano, M.A.
Curriculum
Giosuè Fabiano is a Ph.D. candidate at the Courtauld Institute of Art. His dissertation “Natural Light, Religious Time and Mural Painting in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Italy,” supervised by Prof. Joanna Cannon, examines the lighting of frescoed images in connection to late-medieval calendrical and astronomical knowledge. His interests lie at the intersection of observational sciences (optics, astronomy, meteorology), artistic practices and performative rituals in the medieval and early modern world. He studied for an M.A. in Art History, Curatorship, and Renaissance Culture at the Warburg Institute and National Gallery in London, and a B.A. in Art History at Sapienza, University of Rome. In 2020-21, Giosuè Fabiano was a predoctoral fellow in the Research Group ‘Visualizing Science in Media Revolutions’ at the Bibliotheca Hertziana, led by Sietske Fransen, where he explored the epistemic uses of natural light as part of scientific, religious, and artistic practices. In 2019, he was awarded a fellowship at the Nederlands Interuniversitair Kunsthistorisch Instituut in Florence to inspect meteorological treatises from the libraries of S. Maria Novella and S. Croce. The same year, he worked at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz as a Postgraduate Research Assistant in the Abteilung Gerard Wolf. At the Courtauld, he co-organized the 2021 conference ‘Display and Displacement in Medieval Art and Architecture,’ which asked how reconfigurations in the display of medieval artworks affected their functions and meanings across time. Currently, Giosuè Fabiano is working on an article on optics and the delectation of the senses in late medieval Florence.
Research topic: ‘Radii solis per fenestram’: Experiencing Divine Potency in Late Medieval Architecture
“Just as the sun shines upon all things with uniform strength, light, and heat, so also is the divine Sun within all of humankind, with the strength of the Father, and with the light and wisdom of the Son, and with the heat of the Holy Spirit’s love.” This passage from the Evangelical Pearl, a sixteenth-century Dutch treatise on female mysticism, distillates a millennium of medieval speculations on Divine potency and its sensorial manifestations into human experience. God was rarely seen directly, but his interventions were demonstrated through secondary effects, just like the sun produces heat from an insurmountable distance. To shield human beings from his overpowering Divinity, God intervened in the world through mediation and proxies. In medieval hagiography, angels are described as the effectuators of God’s will. Just as light beams streaming through a window (‘per fenestram’), they enlightened the dark recesses of the human mind. How deeply would church observers understand this metaphor in embodied, physical terms? Through a selection of church interiors from late-medieval Italy, this research investigates how medieval individuals experienced and conceptualized architectural light beams as angelic visitations and mediated manifestations of Divine potency. By scrutinizing a wide array of textual sources (chronicles, exegetical treatises, liturgical hymns, textbooks on optics and astronomy), I will argue that architectural fenestration operated as a man-made medium through which Divine power and presence were made comprehensible and sensorially manifest. Ultimately, I will address a question formulated by St Augustine in the 4th century: why does God choose angels to exert power into the physical world? (Exp. 18 on Psalm 118).
Research results: ‘Radii solis per fenestram’: Experiencing Divine Potency in Late Medieval Architecture
Augustine and its medieval followers conceived God as a source of overpowering illumination, necessitating mediation in order to be humanely understood—a mediation offered providentially by angels. To elucidate this point, I examined the visual and devotional agency of natural lighting in the eleventh-century church of S. Angelo in Formis, Capua. This church provides the earliest example in the Apennine peninsula of a pictorial scheme ostensibly designed to interact with natural lighting on the saint’s dedication feast. Three towering figures of Archangels in the apse, shown in bejeweled Byzantine attire, are selectively illuminated by the triple fenestration in the counterfaçade at sunset of 29 September (Julian Calendar), the Latin feast of St. Michael the Archangel. This view likely unfolded in the midst of the sunset office of Vespers, with the Benedictine monks gathered in the now-destroyed structure of the choir to recite chants specially composed for the Michaelic feast. I proposed that the light phenomenon at S. Angelo projected a Divine, otherworldly appearance (theophania) into the physical site of a church. The term theophania referred to paradisiacal encounters with God, as affirmed by the twelfth-century author Alane de Lille:
“Theophany is said an apparition of God, that is, what angels and saints have of God in heaven; whence John Scotus affirms that in the future God will be seen through those theophanies; because just like the sun is seen in the air by means of the ray mixed with the air, so the divine nature is seen via that illumination that enlightens the minds of men.”
In his Expositio Salutationis Angelicae, Thomas Aquinas had remarked that when manifesting to men, angels “always appear together with light [semper apparet cum lumine].” Medieval viewers would thus be prompted to associate the supernatural radiance accompanying angelic visitations and the physical light rays splendidly channelled by windows into the dimly lit space of a church. In S. Angelo, chanted liturgy would further enhance the experience of angelic brilliance diffusing in the church. The hymn Illuminavit, chanted during the vesper (sunset) office in conjunction to the lighting the frescoes, conjured up visions of Divine radiance: “The Creator of all things, has illuminated this day (…) in the annual commemoration of the Archangel Michael. In the recurrence of the festivity, he returned to the illustrious altar from which this temple shone.”