EXC 212 B2-10 - The Heavenly Jerusalem as Space of Religious-Political Imagination

Basic data for this project

Description

From the early Middle Ages to the 19th century and up to the research controversies of the 20th century, the project investigates selected examples of religious and political spheres, sacred objects (reliquaries, candelabra etc.), but also heraldic spatial markings that were connected with the topos of the heavenly Jerusalem. The guiding question will be as to which medial intrinsic logics are brought to the discourse about the relationship of religion and politics, ofregnumandsacerdotiumby the pictorial and architectural representations of the heavenly Jerusalem. In the process, it will first be shown how spatial visualisation outlined in Holy Writ was given concrete shape and how it was able to describe medially – through image and architecture – very different, complex correlations of the relationship of religion and politics at different times. While research has hitherto primarily dealt with the heavenly Jerusalem in an iconographic manner and on the level of meaning, the project will focus more on issues of visual language, the possibilities of reception and of functional contexts. Particularly those works that were made in a stately environment will reveal that the medium itself provided a multitude of levels of interpretation and definitions of relations. These elude a simple either/or in the stately valuation of religious visual language or religious subordination of rule in the way that religious visual language and religious subordination of rule form the basis of disambiguating research in the modern conflict of interpretation.