Sacred Intermediality: Embedded Devotional Objects in Medieval Murals

During the High Middle Ages, a new artistic practice arose that challenged the boundaries of visual media: artisans and patrons increasingly inserted portable devotional objects such as relics and painted panels into the immobile frescoes, mosaics, and architectural sculpture that adorned churches across Latin Europe and the Byzantine East. Yet despite its widespread application—found even in the renowned Arena Chapel in Padua—the tradition has never been systematically studied. In this talk, I offer an introduction to this intermedial practice with a particular focus on the exemplary case of the twelfth-century apse of Santa Restituta in Naples. Picturing a monumental figure of Christ in majesty, the frescoed apse incorporates a wooden panel for the face of Christ. I examine the simultaneity of the apse’s intermedial parts in light of contemporary enshrinement strategies for privileged images and twelfth-century debates involving the mutability of form. Considered together with the devotional concerns of medieval viewers, the mixing of different media had powerful theological consequences. It registers an understanding of the wall surface as a charged site for mediating—and containing—the divine.

Host or Publisher Yale Institute of Sacred Music