Ut pictura meditatio
The Meditative Image in Northern Art, 1500-1700
Edited by Walter S Melion Edited by Ralph Dekoninck Edited by Agnes Guiderdoni-Brusle
Ut pictura meditatio: The Meditative Image in Northern Art, 1500 -1700 examines the form, function, and meaning of pictorial images produced and/or circulated in the Low Countries, Germany, and northern France as templates for the meditative life and its spiritual exercises. Our epigraph – ut pictura meditatio (as is a picture, so is meditation) – connotes the ways in which pictures facilitated meditative prayer and, conversely, the extent to which such prayer was experienced visually. Our essayists are prominent scholars in the fields of art history, history, literary studies, philosophy, and religious studies, all of whom study the ways in which visual images served to structure the interior religious life of laity and clergy in the early modern period. The volume asks how and why images were used not only to initiate, sustain, and structure kinds and degrees of meditative and contemplative devotion, but also to figure the soul’s cognitive operations, its negotiation between states of being, between interior and exterior sense, between corporeal and spiritual sight. Implicit in this questioning are further explorations of the nature and scope of the interplay among mental, visual, and verbal images, and the subject positions such images allowed the votary to represent and inhabit. These questions touch upon issues of identity, subjectivity, and figuration that should be of interest to historians of art, literature, religion, and society.
Ut pictura meditatio: The Meditative Image in Northern Art, 1500 -1700 examines the form, function, and meaning of pictorial images produced and/or circulated in the Low Countries, Germany, and northern France as templates for the meditative life and its spiritual exercises. Our epigraph – ut pictura meditatio (as is a picture, so is meditation) – connotes the ways in which pictures facilitated meditative prayer and, conversely, the extent to which such prayer was experienced visually. Our essayists are prominent scholars in the fields of art history, history, literary studies, philosophy, and religious studies, all of whom study the ways in which visual images served to structure the interior religious life of laity and clergy in the early modern period. The volume asks how and why images were used not only to initiate, sustain, and structure kinds and degrees of meditative and contemplative devotion, but also to figure the soul’s cognitive operations, its negotiation between states of being, between interior and exterior sense, between corporeal and spiritual sight. Implicit in this questioning are further explorations of the nature and scope of the interplay among mental, visual, and verbal images, and the subject positions such images allowed the votary to represent and inhabit. These questions touch upon issues of identity, subjectivity, and figuration that should be of interest to historians of art, literature, religion, and society.
- Edited by Walter S Melion
- Edited by Ralph Dekoninck
- Edited by Agnes Guiderdoni-Brusle
Other Titles in this Series
The Reformation Unsettled
British Literature and the Question of Religious Identity, 1560-1660
Volume 3
Medievalism and Political Rhetoric in Humanist Historiography from the Low Countries (1515-1609)
Volume 7
In the Footsteps of Christ
Hans Memling's Passion Narratives and the Devotional Imagination in the Early Modern Netherlands
Volume 5
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