artThe ex-voto wallex voto suscepto

Italy holds more than 15,000 ex-voto paintings thought to survive from before 1600. They begin to appear in the 1490s, probably modelled on the small predella panels set below altarpieces — which is to say the format was borrowed from the top of the church and handed to the bottom of it.

They did not stay cheap. In Renaissance Venice the custom rose to the highest officials: the Doge and those below him commissioned, at their own expense, a votive painting showing themselves with the Virgin or with saints, in thanks for reaching office, and hung it in the building where they presided. Giovanni Bellini's Barbarigo Altarpiece of 1488 shows Doge Agostino Barbarigo with the Virgin and Child, two saints and a company of angels; it was made for the Doge's Palace and now hangs in San Pietro Martire on Murano. Titian's Jacopo Pesaro being presented by Pope Alexander VI to Saint Peter was given in thanks for a naval victory. Philippe de Champaigne's Ex-Voto de 1662, now in the Louvre, shows two nuns, one of whom recovered from serious illness.

Inference — the wall of tin panels and the Bellini are the same object at two prices, and the atlas files them together for that reason. Both are a vow paid in public. The difference is that the tin panel names the person who nearly died, and the altarpiece names the person who paid.

Still made and still hung, and now also collected. Milagros — the small stamped body parts pinned to the same shrines — are sold by street vendors and in churches across Mexico, the southern United States, Latin America and parts of Spain, and turn up set into necklaces and earrings. Whether a milagro bought as jewellery is the same object as one pinned to a saint is an argument this atlas reports and does not settle.