Click here to register for online attendance via Teams.
Click here to register for in-person attendance at the NIKI, located at Viale Evangelista Torricelli 5 in Florence.
The production of small devotional paintings of the Madonna and Child saw a particular rise in Quattrocento Italy, and Giovanni Bellini is well-known for this type of paintings. Art history assumes that these so-called ‘Andachtsbilder’ were displayed in bedrooms, intended for private devotion, suggesting they incited ‘affective piety’ connected to the spiritual movement of the Devotio Moderna.This presupposes not only artistic but also religious exchange between the northern Netherlands and Italy, specifically the Veneto, in the 15th century which facilitated also the functional development of the ‘Andachtsbild’. However, only the aspect of artistic exchange has been dealt with extensively in art history, whereas religious historians, on the other hand, are fundamentally divided on the possible impact of the Devotio Moderna in the Italian context and the way it influenced visual culture.
These contrasting opinions are related to various conceptualizations of what Devotio Moderna was – whether it constituted a lay movement or rather had the characteristics of a (semi-)conventual reform, how large its geographical expansion might have been, and whether certain religious practices were indeed specific for this movement. This talk will discuss the approaches followed by religious historians, the way these have been applied within the field of art history, and what this means for the use of the Devotio Moderna as a valid explanatory model for the development of the ‘Andachtsbild’ in early modern European art.
About Dr. Arnold Witte
After obtaining an MA in art history at the Radboud University Nijmegen, Arnold Witte defended his Ph.D. thesis at the University of Amsterdam on landscape painting, religious experience and institutional patronage in Baroque Rome. This was published in 2008 under the title The Artful Hermitage, and inaugurated his research on ecclesiastical patronage with particular attention to the role of cardinals, resulting in the edited volume Companion to the Early Modern Cardinal (Leiden/Boston: Brill 2020), in articles in the Burlington Magazine and the Römisches Jahrbuch der Bibliotheca Hertziana, and in numerous chapters in edited volumes. He is Associate Professor at the University of Amsterdam and between 2015 and 2020 was Director of Studies in Art History at the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome. He is the recipient of grants and scholarships, amongst which from the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Dutch Research Council, the Centre for the Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in Washington and the Deutsches Studienzentrum in Venice.