Download PDF | Folda, Jaroslav. Byzantine Art and Italian Panel Painting: The Virgin and Child Hodegetria and the Art of Chrysography. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
358 Pages
PROLOGUE: MANIFESTATIONS OF THE CULT OF THE VIRGIN IN THE YEARS AROUND 1260
ON OCTOBER 24, 1260, IN THE PRESENCE OF LOUIS IX, THE MOST CHRISTIAN king of France, the newly completed cathedral in Chartres was dedicated to Mary the Mother of Jesus. Its full title was "The Cathedral Church of the Assumption of Our Lady," or Notre Dame for short. Elsewhere in France great cathedrals in the cities of Amiens, Bourges, Metz, Paris, and Reims, to mention only a few of the approximately eighty-some Gothic examples, were also dedicated to the Virgin, Lady Mary, in the thirteenth century. Hundreds of miles away, in Siena, a great victory had just been celebrated, the victory of the Sienese over their hated rivals, the Florentines and their Guelf allies, in the battle of Montaperti, on September 4, 1260.
In preparation for this battle, the Sienese had dedicated their city to the Virgin. On September 3. the sindaco of Siena, Bonaguida Lucari, led his citizens barefooted into the cathedral of the Santissima Maria Assunta, where he prostrated himself before the high altar, and prayed the following words: "I most miserable and unfaithful of sinners give, donate, and concede to you this city of Siena and all its contado, its [military] force and its district, as a sign of this I place the keys of the city of Siena on this altar."
Nearly a year later, far to the east, in Constantinople, the Byzantine army of Michael VIII Palaeologus entered the city on July 25, 1261, to retake control of their empire from the Crusaders, who since 1204 had occupied Constantinople and made it the capital of their Latin Empire. On August 15, 1261, the Emperor Michael VIII, just returned from Asia Minor, was led into the city with a procession in which the holy icon of the Virgin Hodegetria was carried at its head.
The icon of the Virgin and Child Hodegetria was the palladium which symbolized her role as safeguard of the city and protectress of the Orthodox Christians of Constantinople. Subsequently the emperor was crowned in the church of Hagia Sophia and the Byzantine Empire was reborn after its liberation from the Crusaders. Meanwhile, in the years from about 1260 to 1262, in Constantinople, in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, in Pisa, and in Siena, the artistic invention of a new image which transformed the Virgin and Child Hodegetria from the human Mother of God, the Theotokos in the Byzantine tradition, to the Virgin as "Queen of Heaven," resplendent in copious chrysography and radiant with divine light, took place.
This image was apparently more or less simultaneously created by Crusader painters in the Holy Land (Plate 16) and in Constantinople (Plates 19, 20) and by Italian painters in Pisa (Plate 18) and Siena (Plates 26, 28) in the early 1260s as images of the Virgin and Child Hodegetria enthroned with angels. By these widely separated historical and cultural events the remarkable importance of the cult of the Virgin Mary was celebrated in Christendom in the early 1260s.
Indeed it seems these events and these works of art can serve to indicate that in some way the apex of the widespread cult of the Virgin was reached in the later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries starting around 1260, a cult which had overspread the east and west of Christian Europe as it gained momentum and intensified in ardor from the early twelfth century onward.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق