Devotional Art: Mid-1400s through 1700s

Devotional art from the mid-1400s through 1700s is central to what the formal field of art history has termed the Renaissance and Baroque periods. These eras saw not only major achievements in the visual arts generally but also profound events and developments that shaped the history of Christian theology, informing both the use of images for devotion and the manner by which viewers could access images for spiritual contemplation. However, while scholars in art history and religious history, respectively, have treated these topics at length, only in considering the intertwined issues of the proliferation of the visual arts in western Europe and the religious, cult, and theological developments in the period that underscored Christian piety at that time can one come to a proper understanding of works of devotional art as meeting a functional rather than artistic end. While devotional art was united in its functional purpose—to facilitate devotion by way of contemplation of images and other material objects—the forms by which devotional works of art took shape varied greatly according to content and context. Images in ecclesiastical settings most commonly take the form of altarpieces but could also include images for private monastic devotion. Much greater variance exists among images made for secular spaces, such as the private home, which, in addition to small-scale altarpieces modeled on their church counterparts, could also hang on walls of the rooms in the private home and appear in printed and illustrated religious texts. Moreover, while the styles and appearances of religious devotional art mostly followed the trends of the periods in which they were made, other types of objects often neglected in scholarly accounts of the history of early modern art were just as prominent within the landscape of Christian devotion at that time. For instance, this period nurtured the continued emergence of cult devotion toward miraculous icons—some lavishly enshrined in Baroque altar tabernacles—as well toward icon-relics like the Veronica and the Shroud of Turin, which constituted two of the most important Christian artifacts in the West for cult devotion to Christ’s Passion. Consequently, understanding the history of devotional art in the Renaissance and Baroque periods necessitates the continued scholarly expansion of the art history discipline to give a full account of the material means by which the devout could practice their piety.