In his The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, the sociologist Émile Durkheim formulated the idea that the division of the world into two domains is the distinctive feature of religious thought, one containing the sacred and the other all that is profane. Durkheim’s distinction cannot be applied to medieval art, however, in which the mixing of secular motifs in religious objects, images, and architecture was characteristic--at least not without complicating the theoretical notion. The senmurf on the eleventh-century reliquary of St. Matthew in SS. Cosma e Damiano in Rome, the figure copied from Orestes on the ancient Husillos sarcophagus above the altar at Fromista, a fragment of victory killing a barbarian from a consular diptych re-used on a 11th/12th century book cover, and the incorporation of diagrams and motifs from natural science in the “aula gotica” in SS. Quattro Coronati in Rome are among myriad examples that document why this is the case.
In one of the best-known texts related to medieval art, Bernard of Clairvaux railed against the imaginative variety of profane art displayed in twelfth-century Cluniac monasteries, which he considered to be a subversion of the moral order of monastic life. Bernard’s diatribe not only confirms the fact that linking the two realms was common but also raises the question of audience and hence also spatiality. As the anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard postulated, sacredness (and therefore the profane) might be considered as situational, in a chronological as well as in a spatial sense. An object considered sacred in a given period may be considered profane or magical in a different time and/or space; decontextualization and reuse are thus also important issues related to the topic. Profane does not always imply anti-sacred. Indeed, given the fact that profanus means “in front of the consecrated enclosure,” the inclusion of secular elements within sacred domains suggests a dynamic interweaving that extends beyond the mere incorporation of motifs and objects. Sometimes the contacts between the two domains was regulated by rites that provided the conditions within which the relationship was made possible (i.e. consecration); other times, as when natural science was assimilated into the choice and manufacture of materials, the overlapping of sacred and profane underlies the processes of art.
In recent decades, historians have explored the uses of subversive elements in sacred art – from marginalia in illuminated manuscripts to coin-imagery and stamping incorporated in Eucharistic hosts. The conference Ars Mediaevalis 2017 sets out to assess the results of the advances made by the new art historiography and, more important, to open up still-unmapped paths for future study of the profane within the sacred during the Middle Ages. Deadline is June 30th 2017.