Fredrika Jacobs is a professor of Art History at VCU and on Wednesday, September 30th she gave a lecture titled "Dusting the Madonna and Burning the Devil: Image Efficacy in Renaissance Italy."
The main focus of the lecture was on a superstitious ritual that occurred during the Renaissance in Italy where devotees of the Virgin Mary would rub cotton wading on plaster paintings of the Madonna, burn the cotton, mix the ashes into holy water and then consume the water. This was considered Marian Devotionalism. The Ecumeniccel Council of Trent in 1563 stated that no one should ask or place trust in an image and wanted to stop the superstitious practice of worshiping images of saints and holy people. The second half of the lecture covered exorcism and how in the 16th century, if a priest couldn't call out the demons by name that were possessing a person, they'd have to draw an effigy of the demon on paper and then burn the drawing. The purpose of this lecture and the parallel that Jacobs was trying to make was the notion of presence. The presence of an absence, which is what all portraits are, regardless of whether they depict the Madonna or the devil.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment