THE VISUAL REPRESENTATION OF SAINTS - CLOSENESS, DISTANCE, IDENTIFICATION AND IDENTITY, TWELFTH-SIXTEENTH CENTURIES

The team aims, within Central European regions, to contrast the way saints were presented to their public through visual representations with the way they were presented in other media. The project can thereby better understand the nature of and relationships between medieval media in religious space The project concentrates on ‘close reading’ of medieval Central European visual representations of saints followed by their qualitative and quantitative analysis. The latter draws on the existing, fully indexed image database of the ‘Institut für Realienkunde’ containing c. 25,000 images. The project starts with research into small localities and regions and figures and progresses towards the comparative study of larger cultural areas. Contextualised, cross‐disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches drawing mainly on textual evidence but other ‘object’ material are applied. In this way, the function of visual images for transmitting religious messages, through the portrayal of saints, and their role in the everyday life of individuals, groups and medieval society are better clarified. The project’s initial analyses concentrates on the comparison of Austrian regions in Austria and individual popular and/or ‘regional’ saints. Having examined the results of these introductory studies, the research is then dealing with larger regions (Austria, Bohemia, Transylvania, Upper Hungary-Central/Eastern Slovakia) to receive, at the end, answers for Central Europe to the following question: What are the differences, if any, in the way in which the visual representations of saints were produced, used, perceived and ‘received’, at various local, regional, ‘national’ and ‘general’ levels?