THEATRICAL RELIQUARIES: AFTERLIVES OF ST MARY MAGDALENE IN EARLY SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY FLORENCE

Beginning in 1619 and continuing through the 1620s, Florentine grand duchess Maria Magdalena commemorated her name saint’s feast day (22 July) by sponsoring performances of music and short theatrical works on the subject of St. Mary Magdalene in the small octagonal chapel adjacent to her apartment in the Palazzo Pitti. In the years immediately preceding the performances, the grand duchess had ordered a complete renovation of the space, resulting in a chapel in which visual images of St. Mary Magdalene figured prominently, as did the grand duchess’s ever-expanding collection of relics, housed in wall niches covered by paintings on religious subjects, including Mary Magdalene. The surviving musical and theatrical works from this era reveal that audience members heard a speaking and singing Mary Magdalene, giving voice to the saint in a manner unavailable to visual representations. The chapel’s frescoes encouraged the contextualization of that voice through visual reminders of Mary Magdalene’s preaching, and her words, now directed towards a seventeenth-century audience, carried that tradition forward to the present. Although hidden from public view, intended only for the grand duchess and a small circle of her intimates, the Magdalene plays and music - like the relics that surrounded their performance - held the potential for spiritual and political power, activated by whoever possessed them. The saint’s voice thus served as the ventriloquizing medium by which the grand duchess reminded courtiers and family members alike of her name saint’s efficacy as both devotional object and preaching subject.