Article
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Moses and the gnosiology of God, according Gregory’s of Nyssa interpretation in Canticum Canticorum
Eirini ARTEMI
Original title: Moses and the gnosiology of God, according Gregory’s of Nyssa interpretation in Canticum Canticorum
Published in Art, Criticism and Mysticism
Keywords: Agnoia, Canticum Canticorum, Gnofos, Gnosiology, Gregory of Nyssa, Ignorance, Knowledge, Moses.
This paper seeks to provide an exposition on Gregory of Nyssa’s work on how Moses could “know” and “see” God. Humanity and God stand on two very different planes of existence. Moses “knew” God, because he tried to leave with God’s order. Every time that Moses made a movement that included a kind of his sacrifice, God appeared to him. God presented Himself to Moses through the burning bush. Gregory underlined that that every person, included Moses, can know the essence of God – one cannot know what God is. However, one can know “that God is” – meaning that we can know that God exists. Moses had many “visions” of God and Gregory explained that it is not possible for any man to describe these God’s revelation to Moses, because “Humans are not capable of this knowledge because it is “other than” or “beyond” them”. Moses wanted to see God all the time. Gregory reminded his audience that erotic desire mirrors spiritual desire only in part; spiritual desire – and ultimately the divine nature – cannot be limited to erotic desire. Thus, Gregory of Nyssa highlighted both God’s imminence and God’s transcendence. Moses wanted to see the same face of God. His desire was expressed to God. He knew that Salvation is achieved through knowledge about God, but in Christian dimension. This knowledge determined both humans and the form and content of their life. The knowledge for God is no longer man’s work in Christian teaching. It is the work of faith to the revealed truth. For this high feat-conquest has as assistant only the faith of man to God and the grace of God to man.
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The myth as tool of persuasion in Plato’s Phaedrus
Barbara BOTTER, Rodrigo Danúbio QUEIROZ
Original title: O mito como ferramenta de persuasão no Fedro de Platão
Published in Art, Criticism and Mysticism
Keywords: Myth, Phaedrus, Plato, truth.
The article aims to analyze Plato’s Phaedrus. Centralizes the importance of myth as a persuasion tool to achieve true dialogue. For this, a reflection took place, through dialogue, the structure of the myth; its symbology and the possibility of Plato recognize the limits of philosophical knowledge in wanting to reach the truth. The philosophical argument used by Socrates is based on the myth erotic speech. This discourse, in its mythical route reaches lovers and persuades regarding the definition of the soul, of its participation in the divine and beauty fashion. Therefore, it is evident that Plato recognizes the influence that non-rational world has about the very possibility of understanding the rational statements. The event that takes place in the dialectical movement of his maieutic.
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The representation of Eroticism in Art and Literature
Almerinda da Silva LOPES, Lívia Santolin BORGES
Original title: A representação do Erotismo na Arte e na Literatura
Published in Art, Criticism and Mysticism
Keywords: Art, Eroticism, Literature, Sade.
The present work is focused representation of eroticism as a literary and artistic genre. For the development of this proposal, it was necessary to define the term eroticism, but also explain how to use this theme in art and literature. To that end, we need to address, commenting since the period of cave painting, through classical Greek art, Roman and Oriental art, until you get to modernism; as well as review the literature in Portugal in the twelfth century, the literature in the Renaissance and the French Revolution and the works of Marquis de Sade.
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History through Image: an iconological analysis of the Saint George’s Altarpiece by Bernat Martorell
Carlos Vinicius Costa de MENDONÇA, Bárbara Lofiego Pimenta LOFEGO
Original title: A História através da Imagem: uma análise iconológica do Retábulo de São Jorge (1425-1437) de Bernat Martorell (c. 1390-1452)
Published in Art, Criticism and Mysticism
Keywords: 15th century, Bernat Martorell, International Gothic, Medieval Art, St. George.
This work aims to establish an iconological analysis based on the art historian Erwin Panofsky (1892-1968) methodology of analysis. The addressed work is the St. George’s Altarpiece (1425-1437) by the Catalan painter Bernat Martorell (1390-1452). The major goal is to data the collection of St George’s legend and the copic texts that tells his life, highlighting the chivalrous ideal represented by this saint in the fifteenth century medieval society. This work also aims to provide a comprehensive overview of this society, which was identified whth St. George’s image, in that particular period.
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Saint Vincent Ferrer (1350-1419) and the philosophical-rethorical efficacy of sermon: Art and Philosophy
Ricardo da COSTA, Gustavo Cambraia FRANCO
Original title: São Vicente Ferrer (1350-1419) e a eficácia filosófico-retórica do sermão: Arte e Filosofia
Published in Art, Criticism and Mysticism
Keywords: Art, Medieval Rethoric, Philosophy, Saint Vincent Ferrer, Sermon.
The aim of this work is to analyze some aspects of the philosophical discourse and the medieval rethoric elements contained in the sermons of Saint Vincent Ferrer (1350-1419), especially his thoughts about a theme currently and universally present in the Christian Middle Ages: the moral virtues or cardinal virtues. For this, we will utilize a specific sermon wrote in Latin language (the Vth Sermon of the IVth Sunday of Advent), in which the preacher relates the four cardinal virtues with episodes of the life and deeds of Christ, as reported in the Gospels. The theme will be related with some artistic representations of the saint: the paintings of Joan Macip (1540-1545) and the most famous, of Alonso Cano (1601-1667), “Saint Vincent Ferrer Preaching” (1644-1645), as well as the central altarpiece of the Dominican Convent Church of Cervera (Segarra c. 1456), which represents Saint Vincent Ferrer and the Mother of God (Apocalyptic Virgin) of Pedro García de Benabarre (1445-1485). Our iconographic analysis is based on the theoretical perspective of Erwin Panofsky (1892-1968), and in the definition of image for the period according with the considerations of Jean-Claude Schmitt (1946- ).
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St. Bonaventure’s aesthetic ideas as possible doctrinal source of Trecento Italian iconography
José María SALVADOR GONZÁLEZ
Original title: Ideas estéticas de San Buenaventura como posible fuente doctrinal de la iconografía del Trecento italiano
Published in Art, Criticism and Mysticism
Keywords: Aesthetics, Iconography, Italian painting, Mariology, Patristics. Medieval Philosophy, St. Bonaventure, Trecento.
This paper attempts to highlight the influence that the primary Aesthetics designed by St. Bonaventure could have had on some paintings of the Italian Trecento. Therefore, the work is divided into two parts essentially linked. Firstly it analyzes in detail the first two levels (of the six proposed by the saint. plus a seventh of pure ecstasy), by which man can and must ascend from the world to contemplate God: on those two initial levels, linked to the sensory knowledge, man uses his sensitivity to appreciate the material things of this created world as footprints and traces of their Creator. In the second part several paintings by Giotto, Simnone Martini, Pietro Lorenzetti, Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Agnolo Gaddi and Taddeo Gaddi are analyzed, in order to see if one can perceive in them some influence of the initial phase of the Aesthetics of Bonaventure, that implies a remarkable enhancement of the physical world and the senses by which we perceive it with full cognitive validity.
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Sacred Architecture and Nature in the Cantigas de Santa María
Ricardo da COSTA, Bárbara DANTAS
Original title: A Arquitetura Sagrada e a Natureza nas Cantigas de Santa María (séc. XIII)
Published in Art, Criticism and Mysticism
Keywords: Cantigas de Santa Maria, Medieval Art, Medieval Literature, Nature.
The Middle Ages was the time of insertion of man in Natural environment. More than that: it was, mainly, the time of the conquest of space, the large land clearance, the architectural constructions (sometimes in the middle of Nature), and the expansions at the expense of the environment. The monastic movements were the drivers of this increase. In this sense, the monks were, par excellence, the pathfinders, the lords, the domesticators of Nature, both subjects as objects to induce this process of understanding, civilization. Theology itself so allowed (“For every sort of beast and bird and every living thing on earth and in the sea has been controlled by man and is under his authority”, Jas 3, 7). The Western civilization was the daughter of this process, of this relationship, of this symbiosis, often unintended, between Nature and Culture, Civilization and Barbarism, raw and cooked. The purpose of this study is to analyze the iconography of the illuminations of two songs and one praise present in the Cantigas de Santa Maria, a work attributed to Alfonso X, the Wise. Our methodology consisted of thematically define the presence of Nature in those three illuminated, so when we fix the following artistic tops: 1) The Sacred Nature (cantiga 10), 2) The Supplicant Nature (cantiga 93) and 3) The Saving Nature (cantiga 7). In order, from Nature that surrounds and adorns the Virgin to Nature, which witnesses the passage of time, in a paradoxical duality between the eternal time of Nature and the fleeting and fickle weather of Art. Meanwhile, the Nature who pleads isolates the leper in his retreat, and, ultimately, the saving Nature is one that involves with his heavenly robe who ask the intercession of the Virgin.
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The anagogical contemplation in Saint-Denis Abbey (XII century)
Ricardo da COSTA, Tainah Moreira NEVES
Original title: A contemplação anagógica na Abadia de Saint-Denis (séc. XII)
Published in Art, Criticism and Mysticism
Keywords: Medieval Art, Medieval Philosophy, Saint-Denis, Suger.
“Bright is the noble work; but, being nobly bright, the work should brighten the minds, so that they may travel, through the true lights, to the True Light where Christ is the true door”. This phrase was inscribe by orders of Abbot Suger (c. 1081-1151) in one of Saint-Denis Abbey’s bronze doors. It emphasizes the anagogical character, provided by Suger to art, at the basilica’s reconstruction. In this philosophical and religious process, described by Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, in the fifth century, the medievals ascend from the physical light, the material, to the spiritual light, immaterial, guided by Art, and then reach elevation. It is a continuous, cyclical movement, produced by the arduous search of entitys towards the Being. In order to accomplish such aesthetic investigation, we propose to analyze three extracts from the Liber de Rebus in Administratione Sua Gestis, by Suger, in which the Abbot describes the reasons of his idealized and directed reedification at Saint-Denis. More specifically, the first addition to the church and the santuary’s doors (I, XXV – De ecclesiæ primo augmento, XXVII – De portis fusilibus et deauratis). Based on them, we intend to defend the hypothesis that, to reform the Abbey with a new aesthetic (later to be known as gothic), Suger used art to convey his interpretation of Christian theology, and so materialize, artistically, tangible means by which one could ascend from the material to the immaterial. By creating this anagogical atmosphere that, by the contemplation of the materials forms occurs the contemplation of the immaterial, of the immutable, Suger managed to express artistically, at the abbey, the celestial hierarchy.
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Imperial administration and acquirement power in Late Antiquity: power agents from the viewpoint of Synesius
José Petrúcio de FARIAS JUNIOR
Original title: Administração imperial e aquisição de poder na Antiguidade Tardia: agentes de poder sob a ótica de Sinésio
Published in Nicholas of Cusa in Dialogue
Keywords: De Providentia, De Regno, Imperial Administration, Synesius of Cyrene, Theodosian Code.
Based on the comparative analysis between the Theodosian Code, specifically the laws promulgated in the fourth century, and the discourses De Regno and De Providentia of Synesius of Cyrene, produced on the occasion of his embassy to Constantinople, we reflect on the strategies of acquiring political power in Late Roman Empire, in view of the legal and non-legal institutional mechanisms that ensured the entry for political office in the imperial administration and how such mechanisms reaffirmed the theory of decline of the Roman Empire by contemporary historiography.
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The All-seeing of Nicholas of Cusa: Icon or Picture?
Anca MANOLESCU
Original title: L’omnivoyant de Nicolas de Cues: tableau ou icône?
Published in Nicholas of Cusa in Dialogue
Keywords: Icon, Path of mystical knowledge, Picture, Theory of image.
The treaty De visione Dei, with the alternative title De icona, was translated in French by Agnès Minazzoli as Le tableau ou la vision de Dieu. The path of mystical knowledge commences indeed with an image of the All-seeing: an image which is „artistic”, „manufactured”, as the one produced by the art of the „great master Roger”. But in the „experiment” for which Nicholas of Cusa gathered his friends, the Benedictines of Tegernsee, is this image regarded just as an artistic picture? Does the „meeting of eyes” between the monks and the portrait not have the intensity of a personal communication? Hence, we wonder if Nicholas of Cusa does not regard this image as both a picture and an icon. The picture manufactured by artistic craft, the icon that houses the presence of the divine – what is the relation between these two instances of image in the cardinal’s thought? It has already been said that Nicholas of Cusa has phrased the content of medieval Wisdom in the modern language of the Renaissance. But doesn’t he also propose a new way of relating to the image of the divine? A way that blends concepts from both Eastern and Western Christianity and still manages to innovate on both „official” theories of image.
