Iconography and Hagiography: Visualizing Holiness, 14th International Conference of Iconographic Studies, Rijeka, Croatia, May 28–29, 2020
The range of literary sources that concern the saints has been immensely wide over the long period of time and has presented central feature of the Christian literary and visual culture. This conference seeks to explore the ways and mechanisms of the translation of these sources in visual language in Eastern and Western Christianity.
Scholars are invited to present proposals on different topics on the relation between hagiography and iconography. Academic papers that will approach these subjects from interdisciplinary and methodologically diverse angles are welcome. The themes and subjects include:
- lives, martyr acts, hagiographical romances, and edifying tales represented in visual arts in East and West
- Legenda aurea and iconographic programs
- individualization vs. generalization in hagiography and iconography
- group representations of saints as reflections (or not) of the universal or local pantheon
- question and role of gender in visualizing sanctity
- saintly bodies in visual arts
- relics, spectacles, perfomances, and religious devotion
- new research instruments for hagiographical texts and images
- new technologies, digitisation, data-bases and open access repositories
- iconography of new saints
- visual/textual representation of contemporary holy persons
- a reflection of his/her personality, given the availability of biographic information, or conformism to universal patterns
- popular iconography in the age of the printing press (such as for example holy cards from the 17th century – Antwerp - and 19th century - Saint-Sulpice)
- saints and the new media: how images (photo's, movies, comic books etc.) on the web, Facebook, Instagram, etc. function in relation the hagiographical texts, classical lives and legends, and their narrative strategies