"Facendosi fare di cera". Un'euristica dell'eccedenza e della somiglianza tra Medioevo ed Età moderna

In this paper I will analyse a specific category of ex voto: the wax reproductions – often full-size – of the body of the devout Christian. In the late Middle Ages, the typology of these simulacra developed significantly, at least seemingly. Solving the philological and documentary issues concerning their history is often problematic, as the evidence for these objects is mostly indirect, thus textual. Nevertheless, I will put forward a few hypotheses about the historical reasons for the high anthropomorphic and mimetic tendency in the votive statuary of the fourteenth and fifteenth century. Even for full-size votive casts dressed in real clothes and other garments (see for instance the famous bóti of Florence), the imitation of the offerer’s figure did not matter as much as the votive object’s substituting function and its effectiveness in a given working and ritual context did. This brings about the Platonic problem of the mimesis, as it was formulated by Enrst Gombrich: the relationship between imitating and making as well as the one between the likeness and the production of effective signs. Just as the relic and the image “not made by human hands” (acheiropoietos image), the anatomical ex voto expresses and testifies to the mimetic relationship in a structural and almost overwhelming way, despite the great variety of coexisting typologies of anatomical ex voto that bear testimony to the success of these objects through the centuries. Indeed, this subject bears a capital importance in the history of Christianity, as the ideas of image, imprint, reproduction and imitation have been at the centre of the salvation doctrine (Christology) and of religious practice (cult and liturgy) since the first centuries.