62RECONFIGURING ANIMAL SKINSreligious imagery echoing the legendary fight between St. George and
the dragon, a story that established itself in popular culture during the
eleventh century.^74
The animal past-life of this stuffed object was recorded in documents
dating from 1549 and preserved in the parish of Bergamo. The documents
recount that the crocodile lived in the river Serio and that it fed on trav-
elers.^75 Recent research carried out by Don Enrico Caffi, a priest in charge
of the church at Nossa, has revealed, however, that according to a local
legend, the crocodile was killed near Rimini (220 miles from Bergamo)
by a merchant who, in his struggle to break free, invoked the help of the
Virgin Mary. But Don Caffi has also suggested that the crocodile skin
may have been simply purchased somewhere in Rimini (a thriving com-
mercial port during the early Renaissance) and placed in the church to
provide evidential tangibility of the alleged miraculous event.^76
In this specific case, the animal-past is indissolubly embroiled in the
mythical narrativization that instrumentally positions it as an epistemo-
logical tool of theological discourse. As the animal was killed, its skin
entered a process of commoditization and was imbued with theological
value by the church. In this sense, the preserved body was the result of
institutional power, and it functioned as an object of power akin to that
theorized by Foucault in “The Spectacle of the Scaffold.”^77 Suspended
from the ceiling of the church and therefore elevated for all to see, the
animal-object admonished the faithful. It shaped human subjectivity and
defined cultural identity through the production of institutionally con-
structed truths.^78
In this case, the story of which the animal skin becomes the implicit
validation is semantically intertwined with the narratives that brought
it to its current display. Ontologically as well as physically suspended, the
animal-object itself is not imbued with sacred value, but it nonetheless
functions within religious discourses as a reminder of the temporary de-
feat of evil, while simultaneously gesturing toward the greatness of
God. In contrast to the bare specimen function performed by the Medici
hippopotamus, the crocodile of Nossa is an object imbued with tran-
scendentalism—some of the narratives that surround it position it as a
trophy of some description, but its materiality is not simply the eviden-
tial sign of the existence of the animal (fig. 1.3). Emerging as the trace of
entirely different discursive formations, the Medici hippopotamus