Download or read book Sacred Distance written by Rosemary Muir Wright and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2006-08-08 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book ... is concerned to open up some of the conditioning factors which reveal the concerns of the ecclesiastical authorities for the formal representation of Marian teaching. The following chapters aim to show how the Marian altarpiece was responsive both to developments in dogma and to major stylistic changes in the course of the period 1320-1630. These changes were grounded in the visual strategies by which the spatial and lighting systems of the painting reflected those of the viewer, so as to impart to the painted image the convition of reality derived from sensory experience. The book makes a distinction between the theological and the cult image in order to isolate those aspects of Marian devotion which the Church embraced as doctrinally important."--Preface, p. xii.