As is usual at the Sacred Traditions & the Arts Seminar, there will be two papers which are intended to open an interdisciplinary as well as a personal dialogue in which the audience will then be invited to join.

In her talk, Visual Normativity: Archipelagoes of images, Chiara Franceschini will discuss examples from and beyond her recently edited volume Sacred Images and Normativity: Contested Forms in Early Modern Art. She will address tensions and intersections between a never-ending quest for a (theological) normativity in art and the intrinsic freedom, particularity, and locality of artworks, artists, image clusters, and publics in Renaissance and early modern Mediterranean art.

Louise Nelstrop’s presentation, Challenging Visual Normativity in Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love, will examine the ways in which Julian challenges visual normativity in her Revelations of Divine Love. Focusing on some of the graphic accounts of the Passion that we find in the later Middle Ages, and which Alexandra Barratt has suggested are more ‘narcissistic’ than devotionally-beneficial, I will explore how Julian challenges visual devotional normativity through the very images that cultivate it. For example, in Julian’s account the reader still encounters blood which flows from Christ cross but finds that it has become what Vincent Gillespie described as ‘covering mechanism’ to still rather than excite the imagination.

About the Speakers:

Chiara Franceschini has been Professor of Early Modern Art History at the LMU Munich since 2016. She works on Italian and European art in the Renaissance, the role of images, artists, and spaces in the social, political, and religious conflicts of the premodern age and the visual geographies of the sacred in comparative perspectives. Her publications include Storia del limbo (2017), Chapels in Roman Churches of the Cinquecento and Seicento (2020, co-editor), Sacred Images and Normativity: Contested Forms in Early Modern Art (2021, editor). She is currently writing on art and inquisition in the early modern Mediterranean and co-editing a volume on ‘The Other Side of the World: Early Modern Sacred Images in Japan and Europe’.

Louise Nelstrop is Professor of Church History at the PThU and non-stipendiary lecture in Theology at St John’s College, Oxford. She research focuses on Medieval English Mysticism, on which she has published widely. Most recently, Deification and Sacred Eloquence in Julian of Norwich and Richard Rolle, Contemporary Theological Explorations in Mysticism (Routledge, 2020) and ‘The Middle English Myrrour of Symples Soules: More than a “rhetoric” of deification’, Viator, 50/2, 227-259. She has also made an award-winning film, Complete Surrender (2020), which explores why contemporary artists have turned to medieval mystics to elucidate love. Additionally, she set up and helps to coordinate the Mystical Theology Network, which has annual conferences and publications.

About the seminar series:

The seminar on Sacred Traditions and the Arts is a joint venture between the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at King’s and The Courtauld. It seeks to place researchers in dialogue who are working on any aspect of the sacred and visual culture. It is open to all scholars and students who have an interest in exploring the intersections of religion and art regardless of period, geography or tradition.

Organised by Dr Caroline Levitt (The Courtauld) and Professor Ben Quash (King’s College London).

This is a free event and all are welcome to join us, the seminar will be followed by a drinks reception in the Arcade, Bush House.