Healing Touch: Clothed Images of the Virgin in Early Modern Portugal

Over the last decades there was a growing interest in religious materiality, miraculous images, votive practices, and how the faithful engaged with devotional art, as well as a renewed impetus to discuss the long-recognized association between sculpture and touch, after the predominance of the visuality approach. Additionally, the neglected phenomenon of clothing statues has also been increasingly explored. Based on the reading of Santuario Mariano (1707–1723), written by Friar Agostinho de Santa Maria (1642–1728), this paper will closely examine those topics. Besides producing a monumental catalogue of Marian shrines and pilgrimage sites, this source offers a unique insight into the religious experience and the reciprocal relationship between image and devotee in Early Modern Portugal, and is a particularly rich source when describing the believers’ pursuit of physical contact with sculptures. This yearning for proximity is partly explained by the belief in the healing power of Marian sculptures, which in turn seemed to be conveniently transferred to a myriad of objects. When contact with the images themselves was not possible, devotees sought out their clothes, crowns, rosary beads, metric relics, and so forth. Items of clothing such as mantles and veils were particularly used and so it seems obvious they were not mere adornments or donations, but also mediums and extensions of the sculptures’ presence and power. By focusing on the thaumaturgic role of the statues’ clothes and jewels, I will argue how the practice of dressing sculptures was due to much more than stylistic desires or processional needs and draw attention to the many ways believers engaged with religious art in Early Modern Portugal.