Affordances of the heart: experiencing religious objects in eighteenth-century Netherlands and New Spain

The thesis analyses the roles a religious image could have had in the individual’s religious experience, especially when that experience is something that happened at a certain period in history; and the modes by which historically situated religious images worked. To do this, Oviedo focused in the visual motif of the heart, and the presence of such motif in two objects: the religious emblem book Jesus en de ziel, composed of texts and images both made by Jan Luyken; and the cancel, a wooden screen, at the main entrance of the Sanctuary of Jesus the Nazarene at Atotonilco, made up of an impressive number of panels containing images and texts painted by Miguel Antonio Martínez de Pocasangre. These objects provide an opportunity to explore theoretical and methodological issues entailed in the study of the religious image, understood as part of an artifact, used by individuals either for religious purposes or in a religious setting, and as a historical phenomenon regarding the development of the religious in the human being. 

The heart belonged to a network of images and mechanisms intrinsic to the object, that conditioned what they could provide. The objects themselves afford possibilities for action of a religious kind where the visual motif of the heart could be connected by the consumer to other images, objects, and structures. The thesis concludes that a first and fundamental step in any account of religious experience is to take seriously the mediation of things and, in particular, what these objects afford.

Dissertation: https://hdl.handle.net/11370/d29f1b4a-1c3f-4066-8f09-7531f4fe7a64