The return of a saint's body to its rightful resting place was an event
of civic and spiritual significance retold in Medieval sources and
substantiated by artistic commissions. Legends of Saint Thomas Apostle,
for instance, claimed that the martyred saint had been miraculously
transported from India to Italy during the thirteenth century. However,
Saint Thomas's purported resting place in Ortona, Italy did not become a
major stopping point on pilgrimage or exploration routes, nor did this
event punctuate frescoed life cycles or become a subject for Renaissance
altarpieces as one would expect. Instead, the site of the apostle's
burial in Chennai, India has flourished as a terminus of religious
pilgrimage, where a multifaceted visual tradition emerged, and where a
vibrant local cult of 'Thomas Christians' remains to this day. An
unlikely destination on the edge of the 'known' world thus became a
surprising source of early modern Christian piety. By studying the art
and texts associated with this little-known cult, this book disrupts
assumptions about how knowledge of Asia took shape during the
Renaissance and challenges art historical paradigms in which art was
crafted by locals merely to be exported, collected, and consumed by
curious European patrons. In so doing, Italy by Way of India proposes
that we redefine the parameters of early modern visual culture to
account for the ways that global mobility and the circulation of objects
profoundly influence how cultures see and know each other as well as
themselves.
