How did artworks participate in the negotiation of sanctity between the Roman Curia and the promoters of saintly figures first venerated in newly Christianized territories? In addressing this question, the project considers, as a hypothesis, to what extent such artworks might reveal an underlying negotiation of the ‘new’ Catholic communities’ spiritual status within universal Catholicism. As official recognition affirmed the society which had made a saint its own, the artworks produced to secure such recognition were vehicles of these communities’ self-representation within the broader framework of social identity formation.
Global Economies of Salvation 