Medieval Icons: Painting Before the Renaissance

3 units

Portable painting is commonly perceived as an art form of the Renaissance, when artists to an unprecedented degree utilized the surface of canvas or wood panels to create virtual windows onto the world. But Renaissance painting developed in large part from medieval icons, which functioned as objects of religious devotion and veneration. This course traces the evolution of Christian portable paintings from their origins in the late antique and Byzantine worlds to the earliest decades of the European Renaissance. Special attention is paid to the impact of eastern icons on western devotional images in the twelfth to thirteenth centuries. We will be concerned with the function of paintings as much as their aesthetics, examining how the emphasis on their cultic versus artistic value shifted for the medieval to Renaissance periods. Cross-cultural interaction in the Mediterranean world is of particular importance to our discussion, with historical phenomena like the Crusades and the proselytizing efforts of European Mendicant Orders receiving special attention.