Appel à contribution : “Mobilizing the Sacred – Movement, Meaning, and Ritual Performance of Cult Images in Early Modern Italy”, RSA, date limite le 27 juillet 2025
Type : Paper Panel
Session Abstract (Max. 300 words) : Often reframed in altars, chapels, or tabernacles or made the cultic centers of newly built churches, cult images participated in visual and spatial performances that affirmed their spiritual efficacy during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The ritual movement of images – prompted by liturgical, votive, penitential, or celebratory motives – could animate city streets, church interiors, and other liminal spaces. Whether physically carried in processions or activated in situ through choreographed rituals and framing elements, cult images played a dynamic role in both religious life and urban experience. Cult images also influenced artistic practice in the Renaissance and early modern period. In a culture where painted and sculpted images could be associated with miraculous agency, the analogy between human artifice and the Deus artifex was increasingly alluded to in text and image.
This session explores how the mobilization, reframing, and display of cult images could be specifically strategic and meaningful in the civic, visual, and devotional fabric of Christian societies during the Renaissance and early modern period. As conduits for divine intercession, they served as agents of negotiation, mediating tensions between continuity and reform, local identity and the universal Church, and devotional intimacy and public spectacle. In the context of Counter-Reformation pressures and local religious practices, the reuse and ritualization of sacred images could respond to theological shifts, assert communal or ecclesiastical identity, and sustain collective belief.
The session welcomes papers that examine specific cult images as well as written and pictorial responses to them, processional practices, ritual frameworks, or broader considerations of ritual, spatial, or image theory, to better understand how sacred images actively shaped Renaissance and early modern religious experience.
Please submit your paper title (15 words maximum), abstract (200 words maximum), CV including affiliation and Ph.D. completion year (past or expected) to Kirstin Noreen (kirstin.noreen@lmu.edu) by July 27, 2025.
Disciplines : Art and Architecture ; History ; Religion
Organizer : Kirstin Noreen
Contact Email : kirstin.noreen@lmu.edu
CFP Deadline : July 27, 2025
OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
inayaallioui (25 juillet 2025). Appel à contribution : “Mobilizing the Sacred – Movement, Meaning, and Ritual Performance of Cult Images in Early Modern Italy”, RSA, date limite le 27 juillet 2025. Collectif d'Historiens de l'Art de la Renaissance. Consulté le 11 avril 2026 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/14fhy



