Catherine Barrett
Drawing of the reliquary of the arm of John the Baptist, gilded wood, fifteenth century, from the Cathedral Treasury of Zara in Dalmatia.
Substack Blog:
Of the Blessed and their Buildings
To access the Introduction to my blog on Substack, please click on the link here. From the Introduction you can access all the other essays:
https://blessedbuildings.substack.com/p/introduction
Dear Reader,
I am using Substack as a platform for a personal research project related to those people known as “saints” on the Christian calendar, and to the places and buildings they have influenced through time. The word “influencer” has recently come into vogue for people effective in marketing on social media, and I suggest that we bend the meaning a bit to see the saints as the original influencers of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Not that they were marketing commercial goods—although, as we shall see, there were plenty of profiteers who marketed their body parts after their deaths—but they did have outsize leverage over crowd control and building projects. And to read more, please click on the link above, which will take you to my Introduction on Substack and the other essays I have written, such as the one of Frances of Rome (Week 10), illustrated in part by my drawing below; a portion of a fallen entablature from the Temple of Venus and Rome in the Roman Forum.
