Events

In the early modern period, throughout the process of negotiation that gave shape to sainthood – whether officially recognized or aspirational – images were of paramount importance. Encompassing a wide range of media, from inexpensive medals and woodcuts to costly altarpieces, images were as crucial at the grassroots level of popular devotion as in the context of elite patronage. The conference Picturing Sainthood: Images and the Making of Saints in Early Modern Global Catholicism investigates the role of images in generating, defining, and recognizing sainthood across cultures in the wake of Catholicism’s global expansion during the period of Iberian hegemony (c. 1500–1700). [more]

These study days will question the complex interaction between continuity, discontinuity, survival and rebirth by employing the epistemological tools of art history, visual anthropology and the history of ideas in order to reflect on the heritage, as well as on the creative processes that have ensured the posterity of a strange, complex, changing, close and distant Antiquity. [more]