About the medieval shift in portraying Christ from impassive and serene to suffering and human - there’s a general shift in the Western Rome-based world in the 13th-14th c.s from reason and intellect’s being the primary way we resemble and relate to God to love’s centrality. (I actually talk about this a lot in my A Hidden Wisdom, esp the chapter on Love and the will, with images to show the difference. There’s a lot going on culturally in this period with the privatization of knowledge in the new university system, and development of regional vernaculars in place of Latin, and also just one of those occasional shifts that you get in the history of Christianity between emphasizing God as Supreme Creator and God as personal and like us. The book American Jesus: How the Son of God became a National Icon focuses on another such shift in the US from the 1700’s-late 1800’s and 1900’s. It’s all fascinating to see its impact on art!)
Can you say more about what you’re thinking of as the distinction between internal and external here? The plague obviously functions as an external factor in people finding new resonance with a suffering Christ, but doesn’t it end up generating internal pressure too? If you’re witnessing wide scale suffering and social collapse, it might also spark internal motivation to produce art that mirrors some of that suffering, no?
By "internal" I mean theological or devotional, rather than non-religious historical or cultural events events. Why did the early Christians not place such emphasis on picturing Jesus's suffering?
Ah! I don’t think you can neatly separate the theological or devotional from the cultural. Early Christians were emphasizing the divinity of Christ and his resurrection in part to establish his claim to Godhood. And then the pendulum would swing too far over into Gnosticism and you get Augustine bringing Christ’s humanity back into focus to head off what he considered heresy. Is it just coincidence that this is also a period of wide-spread suffering and tumult as the Roman infrastructure collapses? Or that God’s Sovereignty would come back into vogue when Islam was rapidly spreading? I think it’s always a ‘both and’ when it comes to these things. (Also, you can’t underestimate the power of a charismatic personality for driving religious devotion!)
About the medieval shift in portraying Christ from impassive and serene to suffering and human - there’s a general shift in the Western Rome-based world in the 13th-14th c.s from reason and intellect’s being the primary way we resemble and relate to God to love’s centrality. (I actually talk about this a lot in my A Hidden Wisdom, esp the chapter on Love and the will, with images to show the difference. There’s a lot going on culturally in this period with the privatization of knowledge in the new university system, and development of regional vernaculars in place of Latin, and also just one of those occasional shifts that you get in the history of Christianity between emphasizing God as Supreme Creator and God as personal and like us. The book American Jesus: How the Son of God became a National Icon focuses on another such shift in the US from the 1700’s-late 1800’s and 1900’s. It’s all fascinating to see its impact on art!)
Thanks! I should have guessed you’d have expertise on this! This is still an ‘external, cultural’ explanation for the change, though, right?
Can you say more about what you’re thinking of as the distinction between internal and external here? The plague obviously functions as an external factor in people finding new resonance with a suffering Christ, but doesn’t it end up generating internal pressure too? If you’re witnessing wide scale suffering and social collapse, it might also spark internal motivation to produce art that mirrors some of that suffering, no?
By "internal" I mean theological or devotional, rather than non-religious historical or cultural events events. Why did the early Christians not place such emphasis on picturing Jesus's suffering?
Ah! I don’t think you can neatly separate the theological or devotional from the cultural. Early Christians were emphasizing the divinity of Christ and his resurrection in part to establish his claim to Godhood. And then the pendulum would swing too far over into Gnosticism and you get Augustine bringing Christ’s humanity back into focus to head off what he considered heresy. Is it just coincidence that this is also a period of wide-spread suffering and tumult as the Roman infrastructure collapses? Or that God’s Sovereignty would come back into vogue when Islam was rapidly spreading? I think it’s always a ‘both and’ when it comes to these things. (Also, you can’t underestimate the power of a charismatic personality for driving religious devotion!)
This essay provides a critique of Danto's dismal prognosis.
http://www.adidafoundation.org/essays/the-eternal-war-between-orpheus-and-narcissus.
A related reference:
http://www.adidafoundation.org/news/divina-dot-com-adi-da-with-the-florence-dance-company
I'll do it for you.