A visualization of dissident voices in sixteenth-century Italy: a reflection of the religious debate in art.

The focus of this dissertation is an exploration of the relationship between the Italian Reformation and some sixteenth-century religious paintings. It aims to discover if, when viewed chronologically, they provide a visualization of the course taken by the Italian Reformation. For sometime art historians have been aware that some religious paintings are at odds with the iconography of Catholic orthodoxy, such works are usually treated in isolation from each other. Here they are brought together and analyzed in the context of a widely disseminated religious debate in which artists were participants, if only as members of society, and not necessarily as members of a particular Protestant sect. It focuses on individual works by Fra Bartolomeo della Porta, Jacopo Pontormo, Lorenzo Lotto, Michelangelo, Jacopo Bassano, and Caravaggio. The paintings considered are interpreted in relation to the sermons of Savonarola, the Catechism and One Hundred and Ten Considerations, of Juan de Valdès, the Beneficio di Cristo, Italian evangelism, the spirituali, and radical groups such as the Anabaptists.