
Type : appel à communication
Date limite de l’appel : 20 juillet 2017
Date de l’événement : 30 novembre – 1er décembre 2017
Lieu : Munich
Holy children/Liminal bodies. The status and materiality of infancy in early modern visual culture
(International workshop supported by SACRIMA – The Normativity of Sacred Images in Early Modern Europe @ LMU Munich, 30 November-1 December)
Whether as chubby cherubs, playful toddlers or suffering infants, children have pervaded our visual cultures since antiquity. Instilled with intrinsic emotional connotations and a distinctive aesthetic ambiguity, images of children possess diachronic, transcultural and anthropological relevance. However, Christianity’s attachment to a divine child has catalyzed the reception and visual dissemination of images of children in various forms (little angels, Infants Jesus and St John the Baptist, the Holy Innocents, child saints etc.).
How did Christian visual cultures appropriate and transmute images of children, and how did they transmit and/or impose them to other cultures? How have images of children, putti and holy infants migrated in time and in space? What are the aesthetic values, the emotional effects and the cultural significance of these ubiquitous images? While social historians have explored the changes in status and perception of childhood during the early modern period, an extensive exploration of the visual relevance of this theme in sacred imagery has yet has yet to emerge from art historical studies. Taking the seminal studies by Leo Steinberg on the sexuality of Christ and by Charles Dempsey on the putto as fundamental points of departure, this workshop seeks to explore the visualization and materiality of infancy in early modern sacred art in different medias and from a cross-cultural perspective. Continuer la lecture de Appel à communication : Holy children/Liminal bodies (Munich, 30 Nov-1 Dec 17)