The medial status of the body – the body as an image and images of the body: King Kāleb and other Ethiopian saints depicted in Portugal and Brazil in the 18th century

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Margit Kern, since 11/2023
• Subject Area: Art History ; African, American and Oceania Studies
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 435118611

The aim of this sub-project, which links Ethiopian studies and art history, is to examine the intermedial construct of saintliness from the viewpoint of critical whiteness studies. The question about the role that the colour of skin plays in characterising saints in texts and images will be addressed diachronically. A group of Ethiopian saints is at the heart of this study. The unmarked nature of skin colour in Byzantine, Syriac, Arabic and Ethiopic hagiographies from the sixth century onwards and the marking of it in the reception of these sources in the 17th and 18th century are of particular interest. The intention here is not only to trace the medial shifts and semanticisation of figures of saints over the centuries, but to piece together the complex system of relations that played a role in marking (or the lack of it). According to recent research, in 17th- and 18th-century Brazil, Ethiopian saints were used to establish Christian brotherhoods primarily intended to appeal to African slaves. The various systems of relations built around skin in the course of history make it clear that the human body has adopted an intermediate position in medial terms as it has always been the object of cultural interpretation and formation, swinging back and forth between nature and culture. Our image of the human body is subject to formative processes in every cultural context, expressed in such things as our clothing, hairstyle and even how we pose. Thus it is part of a host of processes that create images of us. At the same time, the body has repeatedly been semanticised as being immutable from a biologistic perspective. This situation shows us that it should be seen as a factor in itself in intermedial systems that explore the space between body and image. After all, the image of the human body is not created the moment a portrait of it is made, but much earlier; the pose it adopts shows that other reference images are associated with it as well, which also need to be considered in the processes involved in image creation. Besides examining the logic inherent in media in artistic genres like printmaking and sculpture and analysing the attributions and metaphors found in texts, the project will explore the way in which saints’ bodies were depicted between their earthly state of flesh and blood and spiritual transcendence. In the research group’s own terminology, the body moves in a very specific way at the interface between horizontal and vertical intermediality.What links this sub-project to SP 3, 5 and 7 is its focus on the special role the human body has in intermedial systems. A joint workshop will be run on the mediality of the body in piety-related practices in the Early Modern period. The following publications are also planned: one monograph on the body image of Ethiopian saints in Portugal and Brazil and a dissertation on the transmission of key hagiographical texts, coupled with an edition and and translation of the Gadla Kāleb, plus articles.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 5138: Spiritual Intermediality in the Early Modern Period
• Ehemaliger Antragsteller: Professor Dr. Alessandro Bausi, until 10/2023