Dr. Alberto Saviello

Subproject 2 examines artistic representations of the sacred in the negotiation processes of the Catholic mission in India in the 16th and 17th centuries. It analyses both the appropriations of Christian European pictorial forms and media at the multi-ethnic and multi-faith court of the Sunni Mughal emperors, as well as the significance, with regard to missionary stations in southern India, of Hindu rites and representational traditions for the local production of Christian artefacts. The aim is to identify the cultural particularities and commonalities of the visual fields of the religious that emerge especially clearly in negotiation situations, namely in the relationship of tension existing between notions of the sacred and the latter’s aesthetic representation in art.

In using the term visual fields, the investigation takes up works by David Morgan, who understands the “sacred gaze” not as a purely physiological act but as incorporated within a complex “visual field” of physical (multi-sensory), cultural and social relations, within which artefacts and material objects occupy a central place. The concept of the “visual field” thus describes both a historical area of negotiation and a heuristic category in which not only the immanent properties of the objects become relevant, but also their ritual integration, cultural coding and social regulation.

The project assumes that confrontations with the culturally and religious Other not only triggered changes in the respective conceptions held by each culture of its ‘own’ sacred, but also suspects that the aesthetic dramatizations and sublimations of Otherness in visual representations and reifications of the sacred assumed a major importance. It aims to define this potency of the foreign within one’s own culture – described as ‘charisma’ with reference to Max Weber – in more specific terms for the context of Christian art and at the same time to investigate its transferability to religious representations in Islam and Hinduism.

 We shall investigate these questions on the basis of three different areas of focus: 1. The use of reproductions of Christian cult images and of their local translations in missionary work; 2. The transformation and re-evaluation undergone by Christian motifs in the course of their appropriation/adaptation  into the art albums (muraqqa) of the Mughal court; 3. The feedback effects of Christian art produced in missionary areas upon European representations of the sacred and the theological and artistic discourses accompanying them.