Saints, images et lieux dans une vallée alpine de la Lombardie. Le langage de l’art comme lexique du territoire (XVe-XVIe siècles)

This essay proposes a socially contextualized reading of sacred art as a representation of local identities and conflicts, using the case study of an Alpine valley in Lombardy. The territory was structured at multiple levels of settlement and political and ecclesiastical organization: towns and peripheral hamlets within vast polycentric municipalities, dependent villages wishing to become autonomous municipalities and parishes, parishes encompassing chapels scattered in several places. On the one hand, architecture, paintings, and altars, commissioned by the communities, were intended to express pride of belonging, while rivaling in beauty the works created in neighboring towns and villages. On the other hand, articulate iconographic compositions, through the depiction of the patron saints of the various churches in the territory (patron also of the places where the churches stood), arranged organically on an altar, in paintings or in a processional cross, were true symbolic maps, idealizing institutional relations in a sacred order.