Sanctity has always been mediatized. In fact, hagiographic production has always been a narrative construction of the memory of holiness, and the figure of the saint has always been the subject of intersemiotic translations to disseminate his cult, and even as an example to be imitated etc. In the past the elaboration of a saint’s identity was expressed in a polyphonic and multimodal network of texts: books, paintings and sculptures, prints, sacred representations; today this has been extended to include cinema, television, comic books and so on. But how is the identity of the saints built through the media? How do the productive constraints and discursive features of each media affect narrative and figurative choices? And what role do the forms of the different narrative genres and iconographic traditions play in the ways of presenting the character-Saint? We will use as a case study the figure of St. Giovanni Bosco (1815-1888), a priest and educator active in Turin, and founder of the congregation of the Salesians, an interesting case in several respects. He was pioneeringly attentive to communication issues, and he was also a precociously mediatized saint: as educator his figure was proposed to young people by the Salesian publishing in a multitude of hagiographies, illustrated books, etc. Just one year after his sanctification, in 1935, he was the subject of a movie; two others followed in more recent years. In 1951 he starred in a comic about his life, drawn and written by the Belgian cartoonist Jijé. His intermedia diffusion has continued over the years, including a television miniseries about his life broadcast in 2004. To investigate the narrative construction of Don Bosco’s socio-semiotic identity through different texts we will use a model of semiotic analysis allowing us to compare how different texts construct the character’s identity; a model that we have already used to analyze fictional characters as well as personal identities online.
Paolo Bertetti (Tue,) studied this question.