COMCON · Communities of Concord: Building Contentment and Belonging through Emotional Images in Early Modern Europe and Beyond

Communities of Concord: Building Contentment and Belonging through Emotional Images in Early Modern Europe and Beyond

The project uncovered case studies shedding light on how images represented European and Latin American identities and communities in the early modern age. It focused on visual and narrative paradigms—in paintings, prints, and illustrated books—devised in Catholic Iberian contexts between the 16th and 18th centuries and used to advance ideals, such as Concord and Perfection. The COMCON project selected and connected images (paintings and prints) and texts (political and religious treatises) produced in the territories ruled by the Habsburgs. COMCON embraced the conception of the Iberian global empire as a universe of constellations of kingdoms and viceroyalties, saints and cults, missionaries and painters, authorities and devotees. The project comprised the islands of Sardinia and Sicily, South Italy, the Iberian Peninsula, the Habsburg/Spanish Netherlands, the Viceroyalty of New Spain, and the Viceroyalty of Peru. Can disseminating the stylistic and iconographic models tell us something about political history / religious ideology? Does the distribution of specific and recurrent visual ideas reveal something significant beyond the mobility of commodities, objects, and beings? Can a state of mind or emotion incorporated in images help us understand the goals of the Catholic Monarchy and the ambitions of missionary orders? What was the role of print culture and illustrated books in transforming the faithful, legitimizing the sovereign, and protecting the empire from disruptive energies? The project offered significant contributions to understanding how images and texts promoted moral virtues and social emotions to propagate a compound idea of emotional community (normative and proactive about discipline and obedience), initially as part of Rome's response to the Protestant Reformation and later as a strategy to gain and control new believers/subjects in the Ibero-American Viceroyalties. The project explored how persuasive representations of Salvation/Triumph and Love/Mercy were employed—and are still used in some cases—in the politics of evangelization, conversion, and allegiance to forge, transmit, and dictate ideal (and convenient) social characteristics of communities.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз