Reconsidering "Romanesque" Art Through the Pilgrim's Body: The Migrating Art Historians Project Five Years Later (original) (raw)
Related papers
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.
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.
In studies on the sensory activation of the sacred, there is a special place for relics. In addition to their evocative power, they have determined many itineraries that converge in places of greater religious pathos. Along with expedients of images and planimetric layout, relics offered the basis for a sort of storytelling that, on one hand, indulged the visual expectations of the faithful and, on the other, reassured the worshipper that he was on the right path. This paper examines the case of one portal, and concludes with an example of an ambulatory closely connected to the Via Francigena. The purpose of this article is to prove that, even without a significant relic presence, the sensory activation of the sacred can take place in other ways. The first part focuses on a Romanesque portal, originally located in the church of San Leonardo al Frigido in Tuscany, now held in the Met Cloisters Museum in New York. The section dedicated to this work of art analyses attributive issues and focuses on the portal’s social role. The conclusion of the article investigates some aspects of the ambulatory in the Abbey of Sant’Antimo.
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.
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.
"La Pierre-qui-Vire and Zodiaque: A Monastic Pilgrimage of Medieval Dimensions"
In 1708, the Benedictine monk Edmond Martène was commissioned to travel around France and Belgium to find archival materials that would support a revised edition of the Gallia Christiana. After the exigencies of the first year, he was granted leave to continue with a companion, a fellow monk named Ursin Durand, in spring of 1709. After four years, they claimed to have visited eight hundred abbeys and one hundred cathedrals in order to gather information. In the process, they also documented the architecture, treasures, libraries, and ceremonies they observed in place as they visited sites where the charters they wished to consult were housed. Martène published a written account of their adventures with a few engravings of particularly impressive objects or documents. 2 A later expedition was launched to the Netherlands and Germany.
Oxford Handbooks Online
An understanding of medieval pilgrimage can be informed by the application of archaeological approaches to the physical evidence. This chapter outlines the evidence of pilgrimage within the historic landscape, demonstrates the existence of an infrastructure for the support of pilgrims, and applies a functional approach to interpreting the sometimes fugitive remains of shrines. Consideration is also given to the impressive material culture of pilgrimage souvenirs, and the evidence that this provides of pilgrims’ travels at home and abroad. Extraordinary insights can also be gained into the life experiences and personal faith of medieval individuals from the excavation of pilgrim burials.