Search Results (5)

Soon after the devastating Ansei Edo earthquake in 1855, popular prints known as catfish prints (namazu-e) circulated widely. These prints were rooted in the folk belief that a giant catfish beneath the earth caused earthquakes. Various types of catfish prints were published: some depicted a punished earthquake catfish and served as protective charms against future quakes, while others functioned as sharp social commentary. In the latter type, the catfish was portrayed as a popular deity capable of bringing favorable societal change for people in the lower social class, symbolizing hope for commoners through reduced economic disparities after the disaster. The print “Prodigal Buddha” positioned the catfish as an antihero, criticizing the Tokugawa government’s inefficacy and the failure of religious institutions to provide spiritual salvation. By juxtaposing the catfish—now a newly popular deity—with a thunder god, formerly a fearsome deity but now submissively obeying the catfish, the print effectively visualizes the shift in status between the two. This article examines the criticism directed at political and religious authorities in the aftermath of the disaster, analyzing the layered symbolism of the thunder gods in the print. Full article

This article delves into two Iranian Sufi women’s approaches to the Qurʾān, gender, and visual culture: (1) Parvāneh Hadāvand, a Sufi leader in Tehran, uses visual means to enhance the spiritual–aesthetic–emotional experiences of her students. She challenges gender norms within male-dominated spaces by reinterpreting visual-material objects and asserting her authority as a woman Sufi guide. (2) Mītrā Asadī, a Sufi teacher in Shiraz, problematizes the overall visual culture of gender roles by arguing that, through the spiritual transformation of the human being’s genderless essence (Arabic rūḥ; Persian jān), categories of gender become ephemeral and irrelevant. These two case studies are examined in terms of how these Sufi women utilize aesthetic experience, visual aspects, and visual-material culture in their Sufi practices and teachings. Further, it is investigated how these practices shape Hadāvand’s and Asadī’s gender performativities. Full article

This article attempts to document why the Virgin Mary is symbolically designated by the biblical figure “Ark of the Covenant” (Foederis Arca), as reflected in one of the invocations of the Litany of Loreto (Litaniae Lauretanae). To justify such a designation, the author refers to the systematic analysis of the patristic, theological, and hymnic sources of the Eastern and Western Churches, in which the Virgin Mary is labeled as the “Ark of the Covenant” for her virginal divine motherhood, her supreme holiness, and her supernatural privileges. The perfect coincidence, with which for more than a millennium the Fathers, theologians, and liturgical hymnographers of the Greek-Eastern and Latin Churches alluded to the Virgin Mary through this biblical symbol, demonstrates the strong coherence of the Mariological theses of the Christian doctrinal tradition on the person and spiritual attributes of the Virgin Mary. These coincident interpretations of the Fathers, theologians, and hymnographers of the Eastern and Western Churches will allow us to justify our iconographic interpretations of 10 European pictorial annunciations of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in whose scenes a container appears, almost always with books inside: such circumstance allows us to conjecture that the intellectual authors of these paintings of the Annunciation included in them this container to illustrate, as a visual metaphor, the textual metaphor with which the Fathers, theologians, and hymnographers symbolized the Virgin Mary as the Ark of the Covenant containing the Legislator of the new covenant. Full article

In this text, the author analyzes the convergence between Christian culture and relevant films of Alfred Hitchcock’s suspense filmography. Rather than focusing on Hitchcock’s status as a Catholic director, he makes an empirical analysis that allows him to find certain visual analogies between the Christian imaginary and the frames of certain films of the master of suspense. This article understands cinema as a kind of mental, psychological, or spiritual cartography/geography, and this is how it connects to the theme of space, where cinema is not just as analogous to physical space but the experience of viewing as a space. The Christian iconography of death, understood as participation in an eternal time, helps to understand the projection of the concept of suspension of judgment in constructing suspense that is not only iconographic but also spatially ontological. The author also suggests an epistemological connection between the mysterious nature of space in medieval art and architecture and the aesthetics of perfect crime in films. The allegory of Christ’s Passion will be seen as a recurring thread in Hitchcock’s visual analogies. His cinema and his particular way of seeing reality through space continue to demonstrate the validity of his art in writing new episodes in Western culture. Full article

The purpose of this article is to study domestic devotion in Catalonia in the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, based on the information provided by numerous post-mortem inventories and texts written by coetaneous spiritual authors such as Ramon Llull, Francesc Eiximenis and Saint Vincent Ferrer. Among the objects recorded in the inventories, pieces of furniture and devotional objects laypeople and clergymen used in their pious practices as “material” aid for personal prayer stood out. They were in keeping with the strong visual culture that pervaded the Late Middle Ages. There were retables, oratories and images of religious themes. However, the inventories also listed lesser known but equally recurring objects such as paternosters and Agni Dei. Painted cloths depicting religious scenes that decorated the homes of numerous wealthy Catalan-Aragonese families at that time were also present. Spiritual books such as books of hours and psalters, biblical texts, Legenda Aurea, etc., were mentioned as well. They were part of the incipient libraries of the laity in the Late Middle Ages. Full article