The Devotional Eye

The chapter explores how the residents of Italian Renaissance homes responded to religious images in devotional practice. It discusses the differences between paintings and sculptures as the focus of prayer and meditation. The fundamental changes in pictorial art during the Italian Renaissance—greater realism through the use of perspective, more naturalistic settings, and the delineation of physical detail—have generally been regarded as strategies for making religious images more worldly and approachable. This book questions such an interpretation. Many families clung to older icons of the Virgin and Child, with their flattened features and gold backgrounds, long after they had fallen out of fashion artistically. Meanwhile, innovations in modes of representation helped devotees to experience meditative or visionary states of mind.