Page 410 - Notiziario del Portale Numismatico dello Stato n. 15/2021

THE PROJECT “RELIGIOUS ‘WEARABLES’ AS MATERIAL WITNESSES

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OF EARLY MODERN MOBILITY (17 /18 CENTURY)”: REMARKS ON:
S. PENNESTRÌ, F.Y. TEKLEMARIAM BACHE (EDS), IL CAMPIONARIO DI
MEDAGLIE DEVOZIONALI DELLA BOTTEGA HAMERANI. SIMBOLI E LUOGHI

DEL SACRO A ROMA E IN EUROPA TRA SEICENTO E OTTOCENTO*

It is a common place to state that since late Antiquity Rome, as the “New Jerusalem” and
seat of the Holy See, has been the centre of at least Catholic Christianity. The charisma that
this city with its numerous places of veneration for the saints developed over the centuries
draw countless people to Rome. The material traces of these pilgrimages are manifold and
can be found, on the one hand, in the city itself in the form of a differentiated infrastructure
for pilgrims, from pilgrim hospices or treasure chambers for votive offerings to production
and distribution sites for devotional objects and pilgrimage souvenirs. The latter belong to
those material traces which, through museum tradition or archaeological evidence, make a
network of pilgrimage visible, and which is becoming even denser in parallel with the written
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sources .However, a number of devotional objects, which are difficult to estimate in quanti-
tative terms, were distributed throughout other networks such as religious orders, brother-
hoods and other corporations. In addition, secondary pilgrimage sites also exist and were
built on copies of Roman images of grace in churches outside Rome or Italy, and “illegal”
copies of Roman devotional objects in other countries. They are references to Rome as well,
but they bear witness to various forms of mobility of religious ideas and currents.
The project of “Religious Wearables”, run by our Institute, gets to the bottom of this
question using the example of archaeological finds of religious medals in Lower Austria . The
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core of the inventory of finds consists of about 400 religious medals and pendants from the
parish cemetery of St. Pölten (Lower Austria), which is probably the largest inventory of finds
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of any site in Europe at present (figg. 1-3) . In order to be able to pursue these questions,
valid information is required at various levels, whereby the question of origin, dating and the
institutional sponsors of production and distribution are of primary interest. In this respect,
it was problematic that there was no central publication on the subject, namely from Rome.
The two volumes of the Notiziario are a milestone not only in this respect, but also, and
specifically, regarding the question on the work of the Hamerani workshop from the 17 to
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the 19 century.
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The starting point is the presentation and processing of the collection from the Museo
Francescano in Rome, which was discovered in 2002 by the director of the collection, Fr. Servus
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Gieben, during renovation works and first published by him in 2006 .This collection of 630 silver-
plated copper plaques, arranged in 24 boxes according to size, could be identified as a sample
catalogue of the medal workshop of the Hamerani family, the most important manufacturers of
religious medals commissioned by the Papal mint. This is a unique reference to the production
range of this workshop, which is here for the first time completely edited in word and image.
Moreover, the two volumes offer an overview of the interdisciplinary state of research
on religious medals in and from Rome with contributions covering a wide range of per-
specitves: archaeological, numismatic, art historical, ethnographic and church historical. Vo-
lume 1 contains individual contributions, volume 2 is entirely dedicated to the catalogue of
the sample collection in the Museo Francescano.

Campionario delle medaglie devozionali K. e T. Kühtreiber

Libro PNS 15.indb 408 03/03/21 18:56