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Related Books
Madonna del Fuoco - Our Lady of the Fire (Forlì, Emilia-Romagna, Italy)
Commemorated on February 4
During the night of February 3- 4, 1428, fire broke out in a school in Forlì, and burned over a few days. The gathered townspeople were astonished to find, intact in the rubble, a woodcut of the Virgin and Child which had presided over student devotions. By order of the city governor and the papal legate, the miraculous picture moved to the cathedral the following Sunday. In 1636, a magnificent marble chapel was dedicated to Our Lady of Fire in the cathedral's left aisle. Throughout the region, her image was often reproduced on doorways and carts to protect against fire.
The Madonna of Fire is the patron of Forlì, where her festa lasts from February 4 to the nearest Sunday. The city is ablaze with the blooms of yellow acacias, and stalls in the piazzas sell loaves of sweet Madonna del Fuoco bread baked with anise and raisins.
History
From: http://mavcor.yale.edu/conversations/object-narratives/madonna-fire
Forlì's Madonna of the Fire is a large fifteenth-century woodcut almost twenty inches high and sixteen inches wide.1 Mary is at the center, a crown on her haloed head and a flowered mantle over her shoulder, as she holds Jesus in her right arm and reaches towards him with her left. The Christ child reverses her gesture, reaching above her left hand with his right, and pulling at her neckline with his left. These figures appear under an arch, the top of which is filled with a small scene of the Crucifixion; Gabriel and another image of Mary enact the Annunciation in the spandrel above it. Small paired figures of saints flank the central image of the Madonna and Child, while a row of other holy figures—now damaged and truncated—fill the space below them.
Forlì's Madonna of the Fire is a large fifteenth-century woodcut almost twenty inches high and sixteen inches wide.1 Mary is at the center, a crown on her haloed head and a flowered mantle over her shoulder, as she holds Jesus in her right arm and reaches towards him with her left. The Christ child reverses her gesture, reaching above her left hand with his right, and pulling at her neckline with his left. These figures appear under an arch, the top of which is filled with a small scene of the Crucifixion; Gabriel and another image of Mary enact the Annunciation in the spandrel above it. Small paired figures of saints flank the central image of the Madonna and Child, while a row of other holy figures—now damaged and truncated—fill the space below them.
The print's status as a "religious image" is inflected by certain events in what Igor Kopytoff would call its cultural biography: its recognition and enshrinement as a miracle-working image; the kinetic rituals that moved it around the city; its multiplication and dissemination.2 Though questions about the print's earliest history—who designed, printed, or hand-colored it, where and when it was made, who first sold or bought it—now cannot be answered, we do know that by early 1428 it was tacked to a wall in a schoolhouse in Forlì, a small city southest of Bologna, and that the schoolboys, led by their teacher, Lombardino da Ripetrosa, regularly directed their prayers and lauds to it. On 4 February 1428, a terrible fire destroyed the schoolhouse, but the Madonna of the Fire was unharmed in the blaze. A seventeenth-century account tells us that "all the people" of Forlì witnessed this event, which was understood as miraculous, and the woodcut was taken to and enshrined in the city's cathedral.3 There it became the icon of a flourishing local Marian cult, and, as a fifteenth-century account says, "it makes many miracles."4
In the fifteenth century, Forlì's cathedral was undergoing major reconstruction, and the Madonna of the Fire was placed in an old chapel dedicated to Saint Bartholomew that had been part of a pre-existing church on the site. Two centuries later, Forlì's civic government repeatedly petitioned Rome for permission to build a new chapel in the cathedral dedicated to the Madonna of the Fire. By then, Forlì had been one of the Papal States continously for more than a century; at the same time, the papal bureaucracy had mobilized to promote uniform governance in its states in part by controlling local expenditure. The civic government responded to Rome's denials of its request by insisting both that their fiscal debts would soon be paid off and also that construction of the chapel was "the city's principal debt, with this Immaculate Virgin [now] finding itself in a narrow and poor little chapel."5 In this way, Forlì appealed to the pope both as its secular and its religious ruler. In 1618, the city won permission to allocate 1000 scudi in public funds to build the chapel; the rest of the necessary funding was raised in private donations.
Construction of the chapel was completed in 1636, and on 20 October of that year, a splendid procession including all of the city's major confraternities carried the Madonna of the Fire out of the old chapel of St. Bartholomew, around the city, and into its own new chapel in the cathedral. The route of this procession thus began and ended at Forlì's cultic heart, its cathedral; it encircled the oldest part of the city, the original Roman settlement along and to the south of the ancient via Emilia. Thus the icon's moving presence overtly marked the sacrality of the urban space at Forlì's historical center.
The image of the Madonna of the Fire also appeared throughout and even beyond the city. It was printed in "thousands and thousands" of impressions, molded into ceramic reliefs, painted on walls and monumental gates as well as on small pieces of cloth that her devotees carried.6 One small painting on panel was hung on an oak tree ten kilometers beyond Forlì's walls on the road to Tuscany. The painting began to work miracles in its own right, and a small roadside shrine was built there in 1629. By the early twenty-first century, the shrine was decrepit; in 2009, it was rebuilt. Like the chapel in Forlì's cathedral almost four centuries before, this new shrine "of the Madonna of the Fire in via Firenze" was the result of its local community's persistent and generous efforts.7
Notes
1. This material is drawn from my book manuscript Madonna of the Fire: A Miraculous Print in Early Modern Italy, now being revised for publication. For recent analyses of this print (with references to earlier scholarship), see Lisa Pon, "Place, Print and Miracle: Forlì's Madonna of the Fire as Functional Site," Art History 31 (2008):303-21; Sergio Fabbri, La Madonna del Fuoco di Forlì fra storia, arte e devozione (Cesena, 2003); and David Areford, The Viewer and the Printed Image in Late Medieval Europe (Burlington, VT, 2010), 10-13.
2. Igor Kopytoff, "The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process," in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 64-91.
3. Giuliano Bezzi, Il fuoco trionfante: Racconto della traslatione della miracolosa imagine detta La Madonna del Fuoco, Protettrice della Città di Forlì (Forlì, 1637), 8.
4. Giovanni di M. Pedrino, Cronica de suo tempo, ed. Gino Borghezio and Marco Vattasso (Rome, 1929), 168.
5. Archivio di Stato, Forlì, Comune di Forlì, Consigli Generali e Secreti, 1618.
Description
The best-known print in early times was certainly the miraculous woodcut of Forli in northeastern Italy that became famous as Our Lady of Fire, or Our Lady of the Fire. It is the subject of the earliest monograph on a printed picture, which also fixes the earliest date that can be attached to a surviving Italian print. This book is Giuliano Bezzi’s "Il Fuoco Trionfante," printed in 1637 at Forli, between Florence and Ravenna, and he speaks of the incident remembered as Our Lady of Fire.
“Around the year of our Lord 1420, in a pleasant house by the cathedral at Forli, the devout and learned Lombardino Brussi of Ripetrosa imitated Christ among the disciples at Emmaus by breaking the bread of the fear of the Lord and of humane letters with school boys. Their household devotion turned to the Virgin. They ever began and ended their literary exercises by praising and praying to this great sovereign of the universe. They said their prayers before an image of Our Lady rudely printed from a woodblock on a paper about a foot square. Printing was then new, and who knows if this may not have been the first print by the first printmaker? The simplicity of the image certainly matched the well-mannered scholar’s simplicity of heart. It showed, and still shows, the most Blessed Virgin holding her Holy Infant and surrounded by saints like King Solomon by his guard. Above to the right and left shine the sun and the moon, luminously forecasting that the Virgin was to consecrate this paper with a power like the moon’s over water and the sun’s over fair weather.”
“The worship of the Virgin had advanced these happy boys from easy letters to graver studies when, on February 4, 1428, fire broke out in the downstairs classroom. Whether it started by accident or by design is not known, but certain it is that the outcome so glorified God and His Blessed Mother that fires nowadays cause joy where they burn! When this fire had feasted on the benches and cupboards of the school, it followed its nature to ascend and sprang at the sacred paper. In awe at the sight of the most holy image, the flames stopped and – wonder of wonders – like the blameless fingers of a loving hand, they detached it from the wall to which it was tacked. The fire thought the wall too base a support for so sublime a portrait and longed to uphold the heaven of that likeness, like the other heaven, on a blazing sphere. Above the flames raging in the closed room the unscorched image floated as on a throne. When the fire had consumed the ceiling beams it wafted out the revered leaf, not to burn but to exalt it. With this leaf on its back it flew to the second floor, to the third, to the roof, then through the roof, and behold, the Virgin’s image burst above the wondrous pyre like a phoenix, triumphant and unconsumed! The miracle drew the eyes of all the populace and came to the ears of Monsignor Domenico Capranica, the papal legate, who carried the paper in a procession, accompanied by all the people, to the cathedral of Santa Croce, where it was placed in a holy but simple chapel.”
The building burned to the ground, but the image of Our Lady of Fire was not forgotten. Copies were made of the image, and they could be found in every Christian home in the region. The original print itself was the focus and center of religious life in the town of Forli, which had been blessed to witness such a great miracle.
Source:
Source: James Fitzhenry
Roman Catholic Saints
http://www.roman-catholic-saints.com/our-lady-of-fire.html
Source:
Source: James Fitzhenry
Roman Catholic Saints
http://www.roman-catholic-saints.com/our-lady-of-fire.html