Kissing the Virgin's Foot: Adoratio Before the Madonna and Child Enacted, Depicted, Imagined

• Autores: Joanna Cannon
• Localización: Studies in iconography, ISSN 0148-1029, Nº. 31, 2010, págs. 1-50
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • A consideration of the Virgin's foot in early Sienese painting reveals that the relationship between what was depicted, envisaged, and enacted was a dynamic one, in which devotional thoughts and practices could inform the creation of images, and images, in turn, could stimulate religious sentiment, occasionally expressed through actions. The relationship, however, was not necessarily synchronized or directly reciprocal. Duccio di Buoninsegna and some of his predecessors and contemporaries responded to the devotional practices of their commissioners and helped encourage these practices by depicting or visually facilitating them. For a brief period, at most two or three generations, there appears to have been intense concern among artists, commissioners, and at least some viewers in enacting, or imagining, this adoratio. The theme received its highest visual expression by Duccio in his series of painted devotions to the feet of the Virgin. In also nourishing the imaginations of the faithful and their approach to the Virgin son, however, he may have assisted in hastening a refocusing of devotional attention.