‘THE FACE IS A MIRROR OF THE SOUL’: FRONTISPIECES AND THE PRODUCTION OF SANCTITY IN POST‐TRIDENTINE NAPLES

This article investigates frontispiece images of saints, including portraits of would‐be saints, published in saints' and would‐be‐saints' Vite in post‐Tridentine Naples. It argues that these images, together with their accompanying texts, form part of the manufacturing of the new faces of sanctity of Catholic Reform, with specifically local (Neapolitan) overtones. Frontispiece images of saints operated less as passive adornment of the lives they accompany, than as re‐routings of the authority of sanctity in relation to specific‐interest groups within Naples, such as enclosed convents. The city of Naples itself is variously figured in these images, but emerges as a perhaps increasingly significant force. Thus, frontispiece depictions of saints participated in the staging of a new Naples as a pious city in special relation to pious reader–inhabitants. The portrait frontispieces accompanying the Vite of female would‐be saints depart significantly from the textual lives, which emphasize pain‐filled piety rather than ecstatic transports. It is suggested here that they thus evoked both for ecclesiastical authorities overseeing the processes of canonization and for their female devout readers an ideal of modern female religious devotion not as transgressive and miraculous, but as respectable and everyday.