The invention of the Holy Bodies

At the end of the sixteenth century, the controversy between the archbishops of Sassari and Cagliari over the primacy over the Sardinian Church took on such a harshness of tone as to have repercussions not only on a political level but also on the process of assimilation of the new artistic taste.

Since 1409, the prelates of Cagliari had attributed themselves the privilege of “primate of Sardinia and Corsica”, a fact to which the Turritan prelates immediately opposed, without obtaining concrete results.
In 1588, the Sassari archbishop Alfonso de Lorca appealed to Pope Sixtus V, but the controversy was considered by the Sacra Rota only in 1606, since Andrea Bacallar and Francisco de Esquivel were archbishops of Sassari.

From then on, several actors intervened in the dispute, in a game of plots, subterfuges and recourse to legal quibbles. In addition to the sovereign Philip III, who, through the viceroy, sided in favor of the Cagliari archbishop, the primate of Pisa took part in the controversy, afraid of seeing the rights of his see unknown.

The dispute continued even more violent in 1613 with the appointment as archbishop of Sassari of Gavino Manca Cedrelles, former bishop of Alghero and linked by kinship to the most influential families of the Catalan nobility.

A solution to the problem seemed to come from the “invention” (discovery) of the bodies of the martyrs, whose quantity and renown would have legitimate the supremacy of one of the two dioceses. This was in line with the counter-reform program that, in the discovery of the relics of the first witnesses of the faith, recognized the role of Rome as the fulcrum of Christianity and the guardian of its memories.

The new impetus given to the vast excavation campaign in search of the bodies of the martyrs, in Sardinia as in the rest of Christianity, in addition to reaffirming the correctness of the veneration of saints, contributed to the change in taste in an antiquarian sense. Furthermore, as far as Sardinia is concerned, this antiquarian consciousness favored the birth of an embryonic methodology of archaeological research.

Update

20/9/2023 - 11:26