THE BODY IN CHRISTIAN ICONOGRAPHY: THE ALTARPIECE OF SAINT VINCENT OF SARRIA (1455-1460)
Name: MICHELE CORDEIRO DA SILVA
Publication date: 13/07/2017
Examining board:
Name |
Role |
|---|---|
| JORGE AUGUSTO DA SILVA SANTOS | External Examiner * |
Summary: Human forms have always been a source of fascination. They appear as the driving force of numerous discussions for the human sciences and also for the visual arts. Throughout history, societies have customarily produced images of the body. These express a particular form of symbolic construction tied to a particular sociocultural context. For this dissertation, we opted for the analysis of some compartments of the Altarpiece of Saint Vincent of Sarria (1455-1460) produced in the studio of the Catalan artist Jaume Huguet (1414-1492). The polyptych was produced for the parish church of Sarriá and represents episodes of St. Vincent Martyrs life ( 304). The main objective of this work was to analyze the particularities of the concept of body as it was established in the Christian West. The selected works were compared with the hagiographic texts, based on the methodology of iconographic analysis in order to verify how the sacred art dimensioned the body in the representation of the holy martyrs. The present investigation starts from the premise that late Gothic, with strong influence from the dawn of the Renaissance, had some peculiar aspects in the region of Catalonia and that the Altarpiece of Saint Vincent of Sarria (1455-1460) represented a moment in which the Gothic entered in a period of transition in which the representational presuppositions began to be questioned.
Key words: Body, Christian Iconography, St. Vincent, Jaume Huguet.
