Martor No. 20 / Year 2015
Y a-t-il un corps du péché et de la maladie? La Paresse et la Peste dans l’iconographie religieuse roumaine (XVIIIe-XIXe siècles)
Author: Cristina Bogdan
About the author:
Cristina Bogdan
Chargée de cours à la Faculté des Lettres (Université de Bucarest) et directrice du Département des Sciences de la Communication de la Faculté des Lettres
E-mail: cristinabogdan2010 at gmail dot com
Pages: 155-170
Keywords: religious iconography, body of calamities, wooden churches, icons on glass, the Laziness, the Pest
Abstract:
This paper aims to analyze the image of the Laziness and of the Pest in the iconographic discourse in the Romanian regions during the 18th and the 19th centuries. The capital sin as well as the illness by excellence in the collective imagination of the Romanian people acquire bodies in the decoration of certain wooden churches in Northern Transylvania. Itinerant painters sometimes transport these from one edifice to the other, thus proposing variations on the same theme. The personification of the Pest appears as well on other material supports (icons on glass in Transylvania, drawings on manuscript pages comprising the Life and the Acathistic Hymn of Saint Haralambie, the protector against the unrelenting illness). By means of fieldwork inquiries, which have led to the construction of corpus of images, we propose a historical anthropology analysis, in order to apprehend the junctures and the divergences in the figuration of the two negative entities. Placed under the sign of the feminine (this being imposed by the Romanian gender of these two nouns – the Laziness and the Pest), the characters exhibit their degraded contours under the contemporary sight, which has most often lost the visual code able to ensure an accurate understanding of their message.
How to cite this article:
Bogdan, Cristina. 2015. “Y a-t-il un corps du péché et de la maladie? La Paresse et la Peste dans l’iconographie religieuse roumaine XVIIIe-XIXe siècles.” Martor 20: 155-170.