The Art and Visual Culture of Solitude: Interiority and Interior Spaces in Post-Tridentine Europe
Lives of Saints including St. Brendan, MS. Laud Misc. 173, fol. 131v © Repository Bodleian Library, University of Oxford
Intended as a contribution to our understanding of “interiority” and “interior spaces” after the Council of Trent, this subproject focuses on the ways in which the abstract and ubiquitous space of prayer was conceived, imagined, represented, and actually built in the early modern Catholic world. Interior spaces dedicated to the cultivation of the religious self functioned as “anachronic” sites in that they referred to and recreated distant origins and identities – linking the dawn of Christianity to the present age of religious reform.