Exhibiting Evidentia in Franciscan Polemics between Italy and Flanders: Carolus of Arenberg and Gillis Backereel’s ‘Icones Antiquae’ (c. 1660s)

Eelco Nagelsmit, Ph.D.

This project explores the seventeenth-century use of citation of older works of art as “historical evidence”. Specifically, it focuses on the patronage and function of a series of paintings of Franciscan saints in landscapes, painted c. 1660 by the Flemish painter Gillis Backereel and commissioned by the prominent Capuchin friar Carolus of Arenberg. Once gracing the walls of the Brussels Capuchin church, their life-size saintly figures were copies after thirteenth- and fourteenth-century works of art from around Europe, especially Italy. This project sets out to understand this seventeenth-century harking back to medieval models, by situating it in the context of intra-Franciscan polemics across different media, and elucidating its function as a strategy for exhibiting evidentia, a classical rhetorical, philosophical, and poetic concept, understood in the early modern period as evidentness: clarity beyond doubt. How can it be situated in the context of the emergence of empiricism and historical criticism, and the simultaneous continuity of credence allotted to miracles, visions, etc. as “evidence”? During my stay at the Biblioteca Hertziana, I aim to elucidate the role of these artworks and images in articulating Carolus’ learned position, in the context of its wider importance for the Capuchin mission and the Catholic Reformation at large, as well as for the history of knowledge.