Murray Seminar: Faith, Race and the 'Other' in Northwest Italy, c.1480-1700 - Andrew Horn
When:
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Venue:
Online
Northwest Italy in the early modern period witnessed a flourishing of religious sculptural ensembles, rendered in polychrome terracotta and wood, representing scenes from Christ’s Passion and death. Works of this genre range from intimate scenes of the Deposition and Lamentation above altars in churches, to series of elaborate multimedial chapels situated on the ‘Sacri Monti’, pilgrimage sites at the foot of the Italian Alps. In addition to the main protagonists, the dramatic casts of these ensembles often feature characters whose skin colour, costume or physical characteristics identify as non-European, non-Christian or in some way set apart from European Christian society of the time. Examining a selection of these artworks in relation to devotional treatises, religious plays and historical records of public policy from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this paper considers what the representation of these outsiders––these ‘others’––may reveal about faith and society in premodern Europe. What roles do such figures serve within the drama of Christian salvation history?
Contact name:
Laura Jacobus
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Dr Andrew Horn
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Andrew Horn is an Associate Lecturer in the School of Art History at the University of St Andrews, where he recently completed a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship. Andrew’s research, which focuses on Italian religious art of the late fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, is concerned with the theme of performance in early modern religious culture, and how it informs our reading of the period’s works of art, buildings, and spaces. His first monograph, Andrea Pozzo and the Religious Theatre of the Seventeenth Century, was published by Saint Joseph’s University Press (Philadelphia) in late 2019. His current book project, The Drama of the Passion: Theatre, Sculpture and Society in Northwest Italy, c. 1480-1700, centres on sculptural ensembles in early modern Lombardy and Piedmont and their relationship to religious theatre and devotional practice. In addition to the Leverhulme Trust, his research has been supported by the Association for Art History, the Renaissance Society of America and the Edinburgh College of Art.