Dr. Christine Ungruh

Pictorial representations of the lives of desert saints make a seemingly sudden, unheralded appearance in fresco and panel painting from the end of the 13th century up to the 15th century. As well as asking where these representations have their origins, this project concentrates in particular upon analysing the changes undergone by the pictorial theme within the framework of transcultural processes of negotiation. The goal is to identify the innovations of Italian Thebaid cycles in the specific interplay of the subject with its formal and artistic presentation. The desert environment pictured in these images, and the ascetic lifestyle of the saints, were conceived in deliberate contrast to the primarily urban or monastic worlds inhabited by contemporary viewers. The aesthetically conveyed experience of alterity shall therefore be examined in terms of its significance for the social and religious relevance of Thebaid representations.

We shall also broaden the discussion of the transcultural dimension of Thebaid representations beyond the Middle Ages to a historically much wider reach. The reception of Thebaid images in the context of the Romantic and neo-romantic interest in the Italian “primitives” is an eloquent example of the key category of aesthetic alterity, on the basis of which the distinctions and discrepancies between religious and aesthetic experience can be outlined and described more precisely when studied from a historicizing perspective.