Designed by Nature? Religious Images Produced by Minerals, Plants and Animals in Western Science and Devotion (14th-17th Century)

ongoing

My project spotlights a category of religious images that has hitherto escaped scholarly investigation: sacred representations that were believed to be a product of nature. Objects of this kind—such as marble slabs whose veining suggested a silhouette of the Virgin, or plants whose shape recalled that of a crucifix—garnered considerable attention in late medieval and early modern Christian culture. Regarded both as divine prodigies to be revered and as natural wonders to be investigated, they were described and reproduced in travel accounts, religious writings, and natural history treatises. Combining sources and methods from art history, religious studies, and the history of science, my research will chart the world-wide geography of these objects, investigate their materiality, and explore their embedding in late medieval and early modern Christian culture. In doing so, it will deepen our understanding of the perception of natural environments and materials in Western culture, and of the evolution of historical ideas concerning the agencies of nature, God and man in the shaping of the physical world. Two internationally recognized research teams, specializing in the geography and materiality of sacred art (University of Fribourg, Switzerland), and in the relationship of visuality and nature (KU Leuven, Belgium), will host the project during the outgoing and the return phase of a 3-year Global Fellowship. An additional secondment to UC Davis, California, will enable me to develop a crucial stage of my research in collaboration with historians of science. The outputs of the project—including webinars, an online exhibition, the first monograph on this subject, and a series of lessons taught at KU Leuven—will counter the divide between STEM fields and humanities by involving side by side scientists and historians; will strengthen the engagement of art history in ecocriticism; and will promote education on the connection between art and the environment.