Performing Virtual Pilgrimage: Somaesthetics and Holy Land Devotion at San Vivaldo

Abstract

Chapter Four examines the somaesthetic experience of the Nuova Gerusalemme di San Vivaldo, a virtual holy land that was constructed by Franciscan friars from Florence in a Tuscan forest in the first decade of the sixteenth century. Designed to emulate key aspects of the Renaissance experience of Jerusalem, San Vivaldo offered a performative space for pilgrims to construct personalized memories of the Holy Land without ever touching its soil. The chapter investigates the affective enhancement of devotion through somaesthetic conditioning and questions the Franciscan founders’ political motivations for building such an interactive and full-bodied experience of the Holy Land, particularly in the period after the Medici were exiled from the city and Fra Girolamo Savonarola burned at the stake. As the chapter reveals, the mindful engagement with the artistic program was an effective strategy to legitimate both the place and the whose practiced it.