Alysée Le Druillenec
Alysée Le Druillenec is a contractual doctoral student in art history at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and the Université Catholique de Louvain, under the supervision of Étienne Jollet and Ralph Dekoninck. She published Beatus Christophorus : saint Christophe à la Renaissance dans les églises de l’Eure (Nonant, 2020), co-authored with Nicolas Trotin. She is the author of articles published in the journals Perspective and Histoire de l’art, as well as in the proceedings of the colloquia Ornamenta Sacra : Late Medieval and Early-Modern Liturgical Objects in a European Context (Leuven, Brepols, 2022) and Études et exercices polysémiques autour de La France apportant la Foi aux Wendats de la Nouvelle-France (Montréal, Presses de l’Université Laval, 2022). This year (2022-2023), she is the recipient of the Daniel Arasse Fellowship for the second time, the Éole Excellence Fellowship, a visiting scholar at the Leiden University Center for Arts in Society, and is participating in the 69th meeting of the Renaissance Society of America (San Juan, Puerto Rico, 2023) with the support of the Italian Art Society.
Her doctoral research, the subject of her residency at Villa Medici, is: Porter le Christ. Une affaire de famille au xviie siècle en France (Carrying Christ. A family affair in seventeenth-century France).
Thesis directed by Professors Étienne Jollet (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne) and Ralph Dekoninck (Université Catholique de Louvain)
In the seventeenth century, the act of carrying the Christ Child, which we call Christophoria, was valued as the translation of the conception of the relationship between the bearer and the Christ being carried, but more broadly as that of a certain mode of religiosity, placing strong emphasis on the family dimension. It is the genesis of this valorization that we study in a chronological framework that extends from 1598 to 1715. From the Council of Trent onwards, the cult of Christ-bearing saints took off considerably and the fortune of this posture can be explained in particular by the intense devotional climate in which the pilgrim of the Century wandered. But was it the fact of carrying the Child that was at the origin of their success? In view of our investigations, there is indeed a particular importance attached to this gesture, characteristic of a significant change in the relationship to the Christ figure and to Catholic piety. Our corpus includes paintings of the saints Joseph, Simeon, Christopher of Lycia, Hyacinth of Krakow, Anthony of Padua, Francesca Romana, Rose of Lima, Gaetan of Thiene and Felix of Cantalice, and questions what links these characters to each other beyond the Christophoral gesture: the fact of belonging to the family of the Saviour.
© Maria et Dominique Cabrelli