Metonymic Agency: Some Data on Presence and Absence in Italian Miracle Cults

Abstract

MIRACLE-WORKING IMAGES RAISE a unique set of theological, philosophical, and art historical issues that more traditional artworks do not. Of principal interest for this study is the question of agency: What agent(s) is (are) ultimately responsible for the miracles that have been attributed to a miracle-working image? The issue of agency has attained prominence among art historians in the last twenty years or so, especially following the publication of AlfredGell’s pioneering anthropological study, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. His breakthrough came by insisting that art ought to be studied “as a system of action, intended to change the world rather than encode symbolic propositions about it.”AsGell noted, cult images have a central place in the discourse on agency, “since nowhere are images more obviously treated as human persons than in the context of worship.” Nevertheless, rigorously analyzing the chain of miraculous agency is difficult. As Gell writes, “it remains a controversial philosophical problem to distinguish between ‘actions’