Jerome of Stridon’s Epistolario as a Source of Iconological Problems
Elena MUÑOZ
Original title: El Epistolario de Jerónimo de Estridón como fuente de problemas iconológicos
Published in Mirabilia Journal 31 (2020/2)
Keywords: Epistolary, Figure, Flemish painting, Iconology.
Some exegetes of the Late Antiquity used a system of allegorical and figurative relationships to extract Christian meanings from texts, and in this way, writing a historical memory. Later, in the 20th century, historians such as Erwin Panofsky, established the principles of the iconological method through a ‘scientific’ interpretation of figurative arts, that subjected those texts to the historical context, the iconographic code, and the technical medium of each work, in order to ‘reconstruct’ its meaning and, therefore, the history of art. In this essay, based on examples from Jerónimo’s Epistolary, Panof-sky’s theoretical texts, and Flemish painting, we try to observe how –underneath historical contexts and technical mediums– these disciplines can share processes of construction and communication of historical reality content, by means of figures and images.
On the supposed line of development of the medieval portraiture. From the donor to individual portrait
José María SALVADOR GONZÁLEZ, Cristina DE LA CASA RODRÍGUEZ
Original title: Sobre la supuesta línea de desarrollo de la retratística medieval. Del donante al retrato individual
Published in
Keywords: Donor, Flemish painting, Individual, Middle Ages, Portrait, Quattrocento.
This paper aims to assess the problems arisen when trying to talk about the development of medieval portraits. Usually, we tend to think that the donor is typical of the Early Middle Age, and then, progressively, the importance of the subject depicted increases, so that finally we can encounter the Italian, but mostly Flemish, portrait in which the values of modern society, such as the distance taken from the religious principles or the human being’s feeling of superiority, are reflected. Throughout our paper, this so-called perfect evolution will be tested, by doing an initial approach to the concepts of “donor” and “portrait”, so that we can realise that this kind of expressions used by art historiography are just characteristic of narrow-minded visions which cannot be used to reproduce the existing diversity of the Art. Finally, we will analyze the different ways of depicting people throughout the Middle Ages, giving particular emphasis on the line of thought and the philosophy dominant every concept and piece described, with the firm belief that ideas, instead of mere formalist analysis, give us the key points about the human being’s representations throughout history, and in a more precise way, the medieval period.
