March 20, 2012

Conference

Around a Navarrese Gothic capital. The celestial staircase in the art of the Western Age average . An image of the search for heaven

D. Christian Heck.
Full Professor Art History Department of the Charles de Gaulle University - Lille 3

Medieval art attached great importance to the scene of Jacob's Ladder, described in Genesis: Jacob, asleep, sees in his dream the angels ascending and descending a ladder between earth and heaven, on which God stands. But from an interpretation, appearing in the Fathers of the Church, which makes Jacob's ladder the model of the way proposed to men, another iconographic topic , that of the heavenly ladder, develops in medieval art. From the 4th century to the beginning of the 16th century, the heavenly ladder, which the Christian must climb to approach heaven, appears in miniature, mural painting, sculpture, engraving.... From the writings of the first Christians to those of Saint Benedict, Saint Bernard, Bonaventure or Dante, the heavenly ladder is integrated into various spiritualities, developing in the 12th century in the monastic world, before being associated from the 13th century with didactic and moral works, particularly among the mendicants, and then with feminine mysticism and the devotion of the laity. An allegory of spiritual ascent, the celestial ladder expresses both a fervent desire for heaven and fundamental notions of medieval religious thought; a cosmology and a spiritual topography; a history of the world in which the Fall causes man to lose his original place, and the Incarnation of Christ re-establishes the path that allows the return; a theology and a mysticism, conceiving spiritual elevation as a progression by steps. The works presented show the capital contribution of an original and fruitful iconographic topic to the medieval conception of heaven and salvation.