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Pienza: Relics, ritual and architecture in the city of a Renaissance pope

The essay examines dedication and ritual aspects of the renaissance city of Pienza, founded by Pope Pius II (1458-64) and renowned as an early example of town planning. Interdisciplinary in nature, it mainly combines history of art with social history.

The paper argues that, whilst Pienza is today famed for its architectural heritage, it is but the material vestige of Pius’s whole conception. The miniature renaissance city provided the scenographic setting for the ultimate foundational act, the performance of religious ritual in time and space, lifted onto a cosmographical plane by the endowment of a sacred relic on the occasion of a holy feast day falling at the autumnal equinox. With the aid of Agostino Patrizi Piccolomini’s Pontificale Romanum, the essay recreates the procession and ceremony on the day of dedication. Research for the paper entailed the study of fifteenth-century relic donation and associated ritual; site visits to Pienza for perambulation of the processional route and the taking of photographs; examination of fifteenth-century manuscripts in the Biblioteca Communale degli Intronati in Siena; analysis and translation (from French, Italian and Latin) of primary source material, published and unpublished. Taking as clues Pius II’s considerable experience as a traveller and his interest in cartography, the methodology adopted owes as much to human geography and philosophical discourse about place and space as it does to architectural history.

The contribution to knowledge (in this secular age) is to draw attention to the role of sacred relics in dynastic power-brokering and to the connection between relic veneration, ritual, the urban fabric and social conditioning. The analysis is grounded in the premise that Pius II thought in terms of motion through space, in terms of the synaesthetic experience of moving through changing vistas, thus the paper follows the processional route in a phenomenological unfolding.