(Dr. Christine Ungruh)

Using the example of Italian Thebaid cycles from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which illustrate examples of early Christian hermits in the Egyptian desert, this subproject will analyze artistic and cultural reconfigurations of foreign visual elements of the sacred in functionally distinct contexts in Italy. It will explore first the origin of such iconography, presumably in the Byzantine cultural realm, and the path of its transmission. Over the course of the process of its appropriation, however, the Thebaid probably took on its own inherent artistic value, probably thanks to its foreign subject matter and aesthetic, and developed a charismatic valence that contributed crucially to the attractiveness of the theme.

In order to explore the social effect it produced aesthetically, the material of the study must be examined in terms of its social context, the specific meaning of its motifs, and the formal and aesthetic methods of the cycles, which reveals a systematic recoding. Finally, a social transposability emerges that goes beyond the religious realm: as a free spirit in the wilderness and inhabitant of a natural and spiritual heterotopia, the figure of the anchorite can become a projection screen, a distinctive quality, and a backdrop for social definition, while being presented equally as an element of the Other as a figure for identification or as an anti-image to the perception of the self.