Invoking the Sack of Rome at a Distance: Giulio Clovio and the Canons Regular at Santa Maria Maggiore in Treviso, 1532

In the 1532, the artist Giulio Clovio joined his fellow Canons Regular at Sta Maria Maggiore in Treviso to collaborate on a manuscript recording the miracles associated with the image of the Madonna Grande. David D’Andrea has established the principal participants in this collaboration, its importance to Venetian power in the Veneto and its connection to early efforts to defend the use of sacred images. Clovio’s auto-biographical entry, however, provides an account of the Sack of Rome from both a physical and a temporal distance. His description of the sacrilege effected during the Sack, during which relics and other objects of cultic practice were desecrated, amplifies the larger goal of the “Libro IV dei Miracoli” to establish the importance of the shrine to the Madonna Grande at Sta. Maria Maggiore and the veneration of cult images in the early years of the Reformation. This paper asserts that the Canons Regular of the Veneto, supported by the scholarship of Agostino Steuco and the library of Domenico Grimani, were well equipped both to make a learned defense of images and to use their network to draw connections between the miraculous image in Treviso and similar paintings in nearby Venice and Chioggia.