Migrating Art Historians on the Sacred Ways. Reconsidering Medieval French Art through the Pilgrim's Body (original) (raw)
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Peregrinations: Journal of Medieval Art and Architecture , 2022
That which might usually appear only in exhibitions here draws in the reader along ancient paths. Moreover, being the result of a student initiative at the University of Brno, this is truly a model to emulate. May this volume find its way into the hands of those who aspire to experience a new form of scholarship. 1 (Hans Belting, 2019) During the spring semester 2017, a group of twelve pilgrims-students and teachers from Masaryk University of Brno-walked together from Lausanne in Switzerland to Mont-Saint-Michel in France. Their 1540-kilometer journey took more than sixty days of walking, but the whole project was much longer. The walk itselfdivided in three sections-was alternated with moments of scholarly research and workshops in major places of medieval art and culture: Conques, Saint-Benoît-sur-* This article has been carried out as part of the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 101007770-CONQUES:
Modestia est signum Sapientiae Studie nejen o středověkém umění k poctě Dalibora Prixe, 2021
The journey and travel itself represented a popular allegory in ancient as well as Chris-tian culture and mysticism of a human struggle for attaining eternal life or heavenly delights. Physical travel during the Middle Ages represented a long, dangerous and arduous activity. Apart from the physical dangers connected with travel as such, there was the immense threat of sudden death lurking nearby with its potential to cause not only the physical end of the traveler’s body but worse, that of his soul, leading it to eternal damnation. In order to protect the medieval traveler on his journey, fine art played an important role as some of its iconography was believed to have protective power and played an important role in the medieval Art of dying well (ars moriendi). Well-known examples of artwork protecting travelers from the physical dangers in-cluded images of St. Christopher, the Holy Face (Vera icon), the Virgin Mary etc. However, there also were images that were supposed to turn the traveler’s mind to-wards spiritual and moral matters. The article attempts to present a closer view of the specific iconography accompanying travelling people of the Late Middle Ages as well as to address the phenomena of the non-corporeal pilgrimage and the concept of the wandering and erring soul.
Introduction: Pilgrimage as Art, Art as Pilgrimage
Imaging Pilgrimage: Art as Embodied Experience, 2021
While place-based pilgrimage is an embodied practice, can it be experienced in its fullness through built environments, assemblages of souvenirs, and music? Imaging Pilgrimage explores contemporary art that is created after a pilgrimage and intended to act as a catalyst for the embodied experience of others. Each chapter focuses on a contemporary artwork that links one landscape to another-from the Spanish Camino to a backyard in the Pacific Northwest, from Lourdes to South Africa, from Jerusalem to England, and from Ecuador to California. The close attention to context and experience allows for popular practices like the making of third-class or "contact" relics to augment conversations about the authenticity or perceived power of a replica or copy; it also challenges the tendency to think of the “original” in hierarchic terms. Imaging Pilgrimage brings various fields into conversation by offering a number of lenses and theoretical approaches (materialist, kinesthetic, haptic, synesthetic) that engage objects as radical sites of encounter, activated through religious and ritual praxis, and negotiated with not just the eyes, but a multiplicity of senses. Table of Contents Acknowledgments List of Plates List of Figures Introduction: Art as Pilgrimage, Pilgrimage as Art I. Vashon Island – Spain: A Backyard Camino II. S. Africa – Lourdes: Souvenirs as Sites III. England – Jerusalem: Rewilding through Pilgrimage Song and Chant IV. Oakland – Ecuador: Haciendo marcas otra vez-Making marks, again V. Los Altos (Labyrinth) – Beyond: "The end is where we start from" Towards a Conclusion: "As Far as the Eye Can Travel" Bibliography
The Experimental Project of Migrating Art Historians
During the spring semester 2017, a group of eleven stu- dents led by professor Ivan Foletti lived through an astonishing experiment in medieval art. From March to June, the group walked through Switzerland and France, following several ancient pilgrimage roads. The goal of this experience was not to imitate the medieval pilgrim within a world where everything is different. In particular, the lifestyle of Western culture – radically transformed by means of transport and accelerated by virtual communication – has contributed to the increase of the Cartesian dichotomy between body and mind. The ambition was on the contrary to re ect on the elements that human beings have shared throughout the centuries.
Art and the Medieval Pilgrimage
Grove Encyclopedia of Medieval Art and Architecture, 2012
Pilgrimage art is visual culture intended to enhance or direct a pilgrim's experience at a particular sacred site. The artwork is quite varied, but it tends to fall into broad categories including reliquaries and shrines, architectural settings and decoration, and pilgrim costumes and souvenirs. Whether adorning massive, international centers (Jerusalem, Rome, and Santiago de Compostela) or tiny parish churches, works of art were used to direct pilgrims into specific areas of the church and to focus their attention on significant features. The architectural forms, shrines, altars, wall paintings, stained glass, and sculpture coalesced, dignifying and enhancing the sacred spaces. Sculptural capitals directed a pilgrim's view, canopies were lifted to reveal sparkling shrines, and carved doorways framed a pilgrim's view of a miraculous sculpture. The movement, music, and smells of incense and beeswax burning merged to make pilgrimage an extraordinary event.
This workshop tackles the entanglement of science and pilgrimage in the early modern era. It is assumed that pilgrimage was one out of several vectors in the field of early modern science, knowledge and scholarship. Rather than seeing the sacred journey as diametrically opposed to curiosity and early modern travel or viewing these as reconcilable only with difficulty, this workshop is dedicated to pilgrimage as a motor of late medieval and early modern scientific innovations. Despite rather isolated studies that show the persistence of long-distance pilgrimage beyond the reformations and its connections to such innovative fields as antiquarianism and cosmography, it continues to be taken for granted that pilgrims could only be curious and innovative insofar as they were sloppy pilgrims. Besides essentialising piety, such an outlook misses the fact that Christian pilgrimage-pilgrimage to Jerusalem in particular-had since Late Antiquity involved practices that resonated perfectly with early modern science. Those practices included but were not limited to cataloguing (places, stations, heretics, plants, relics), historicizing (places and objects), measuring, collecting (relics, eulogia, artefacts) and the production of credible proofs. Indeed, the importance of autopsy and examination goes back to New Testament rhetoric ("which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched", 1 John 1:1) and was a time-honoured trope in pilgrimage accounts. Christ had sanctified the ground by his feet and blood, which meant that pilgrimages were by definition investigative. As both the terrain and the sacred text were authoritative, the translation of one into the other was a complex operation. Unsurprisingly, then, scientists (apothecaries, cosmographers, philologists, and others) were attracted to the Holy Land. There and in other faraway places the exposed practitioners of the science of pilgrimage were forced to collaborate with all kinds of religious adversaries.
UPDATED Introduction to Imaging Pilgrimage: Art As Embodied Experience (PB version 2023)
Imaging Pilgrimage: Art As Embodied Experience, 2023
While place-based pilgrimage is an embodied practice, can it be experienced in its fullness through built environments, assemblages of souvenirs, and music? Imaging Pilgrimage explores contemporary art that is created after a pilgrimage and intended to act as a catalyst for the embodied experience of others. Each chapter focuses on a contemporary artwork that links one landscape to another-from the Spanish Camino to a backyard in the Pacific Northwest, from Lourdes to South Africa, from Jerusalem to England, and from Ecuador to California. The close attention to context and experience allows for popular practices like the making of third-class or "contact" relics to augment conversations about the authenticity or perceived power of a replica or copy; it also challenges the tendency to think of the “original” in hierarchical terms. The book brings various fields into conversation by offering a number of lenses and theoretical approaches (materialist, kinesthetic, haptic, synesthetic) that engage objects as radical sites of encounter, activated through religious and ritual praxis, and negotiated with not just the eyes, but a multiplicity of senses. The first full-length study to engage contemporary art that has emerged out of the embodied experience of pilgrimage, Imaging Pilgrimage is an important and timely addition to the field of material and visual culture of religion. It is essential reading for anyone interested in pilgrimage studies, material culture, and the place of religion within contemporary art.
Making ‘Sense’ of the Pilgrimage Experience of the Medieval Church
It cannot be doubted that medieval devotion towards the cults of saints was a physical affair, involving touching, kissing and even crawling as a way of coming into direct contact with the intercessory power of the divine. Expressions of the physicality of this type of worship can be seen in the design of the architectural and decorative schemes of medieval foramina-type saints’ shrines, and permeate the artistic elements of these sacred locales. Few survive, but in the stained glass and illuminated manuscripts of the twelfth right through to the fifteenth century, pilgrims are depicted crawling into them, kissing the shrine through its apertures, and bestowing ex voto offerings in the shape of infected or broken limbs. Whilst highlighting the variety of monumental architecture deployed in the space of cult churches, they also demonstrate the importance of the multi-sensory involvement of such locations. This paper will explore the importance of sensory experience throughout the late twelfth to the early fifteenth-century, with a particular focus on the act of bodily participation with the divine, and how this was reflected in the architectural and visual structure of a saintly site. To illustrate the importance of sensory means of veneration towards the cults of saints, several stained glass images from the decorative frameworks of two of the most popular English shrines of the medieval period will be analysed; one of whom was a very locally venerated saint, and the other who was perhaps the most popular saint in the country for the majority of the Middle Ages.