From Religious Otherness to Universal Fraternity T his text discusses the values and meaning of theological reflection on religious Otherness in the Christian tradition. The analysis opens with the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), an event that in many of its documents emphasized the value of interreligious dialogue, mutual understanding and acceptance as well as commitment to the common good. The second chapter examines the new theological approaches of the Post-council. The teaching of the Second Vatican Council makes a fundamental basis, a starting point, a place that generated questions and new perspectives towards a Christian theology of religious pluralism. This was also indicated in the encyclical letter of Pope Francis Frattelli tutti (2020) to which the third chapter is dedicated. In it, the Pope speaks of the universal dimension of brotherly love and its openness to all. The encyclical as a starting point has the awareness of the universal human family since we all are children of one Creator. In this sense, universal brotherhood is not a goal to be achieved, but a starting point. Pope Francis calls for the rise towards brotherhood and social friendship illustrated in the parable of the Good Samaritan in the New Testament, pointing out that the attitude towards religious otherness has been present in the Christian tradition from its very beginning.

The aim of this research is to examine anti-Semitic themes during the fascist era in relation to the condemnation of Modernism intended as the result of the negative Jewish influence on cultural life. The paper discusses the reconstruction of the instrumental use of the Nazi iconography against degenerate art in journals sponsored by the fascist regime: Il Tevere, Quadrivio, La Difesa della razza. In 1936 the equivalence between modernism in art and “judaization” became explicit and definitive: rationalism, surrealism, abstractionism, metaphysics and magical realism are Jewish creations. One can immediately see the perspective and imitation of what was happening in Nazi Germany at the origin of the anti-Semitic campaign in Interlandi’s periodicals: fascist intransigence seized the opportunity to import the German model, which thus became its touchstone. In the pages of the journals are to be found illustrations taken from Wolfgang Willrich’s tome (Sauberung des Kunsttempels), from Paul Schulze Naumburg’s Kunst und Rasse and from the catalogue for the Entartete Kunst exhibition. These books not only made a theoretical contribution, but they also defined an iconography of the monstrous and degenerate in modern art. The most hardened contributors to Telesio Interlandi’s periodicals drew on this repertoire of images, publishing them exactly as they were found in the books. It is interesting to note how the same monstrosity that the regime had adopted to represent the deformed inferiority of the impure races is found in the expressions of anti-fascist dissidence. In particular, it is found in the representation of the nude as an object of violence, chosen to testify in an iconographic sense to the abuses of despotic power during the tragic years of the war.

Mohammed in Rome and Crusades in the Square: Palace Facade in Piazza Capranica in Rome by Polidoro da Caravaggio and Maturino da Firenze This text examines the possible meanings of the facade painted by Polidoro da Caravaggio and Maturino da Firenze in Piazza Capranica in Rome. Considering some philological and hermeneutical questions still open, the essay highlights the links between the work and the topoi circulating in the cultural production in the pontificate of Leo X that support, more or less directly, the crusade promoted by the pope. To explain the iconographic choices of the artists, characterized by a clear anti-Ottoman connotation, some narrative schemes deriving from the tradition of eschatological thought and well documented in the textual network linked to the reign of Giovanni de’ Medici are analyzed. These schemes thematize the Western victory over the Turkish enemy and the universal conversion to Christianity, considered as necessary precursors for the fulfillment of the prophecy enunciated in the Gospel of John (10, 16: “fiet unum ovile et unus pastor”) and quoted in an inscription that stood out on the prospectus. The last part of the text is dedicated to the images of Polidoro and Maturino that were aimed at a very large audience. The levels of comprehensibility and semiotic efficiency are therefore discussed also in the light of the ‘street’ communication network, made up by professionals of ‘popular’ information such as errant preachers and storytellers, capable of disseminating the knowledge necessary to understand the sophisticated contents represented, creating proto-modern forms of public opinion available for war against the Islamic adversary.

This paper is dedicated to Aby Warburg’s 1920-essay on the relationship between the Italian Renaissance and the German Renaissance in the period of the Reformation. His essay focuses on the use of propagandistic imagery at the time of Luther, in order to elucidate a historical-political and religious problem that Warburg explored against the background of the contemporary cultural debate between Germany and Italy in the years from 1915 to 1920. This was a period traumatically experienced by Warburg, and it led him to reflect, from a different perspective, on his own research focused on the “Survival of Antiquity” (Das Nachleben der Antike), in the rapport between Italian art and the art of northern Europe. It had a notable impact on his studies on the migration from East to West of the astrological tradition, presented between magic and mathematics, that permeated the religious debate of Luther’s time in and beyond Germany, in the cultural and religious clash with the Church of Rome.

This paper is an analysis of the engraving made by Petrus Firens for the cover page of Historia de las Guerras Civiles de Granada (Gines Perez de Hita, Paris, 1606?). The artwork makes use of a particular iconography, portraying a battle against Islam as a Gigantomachy in which references to texts by Virgil are employed to link the victories of Philip II over Islam to the victories of Roman Emperors. What makes this edition particularly noteworthy is its publication in France by a Spanish spy in the service of the French king which leads us to reconsider its political purpose.

The subject of this paper discusses some problems in the art of the famous 16th-century miniaturist Giorgio Giulio Clovio, who illuminated numerous single miniatures and manuscripts for the Catholic Church. The iconography of Clovio’s miniatures is primarily Christian, but it also includes many other elements in the spirit of Renaissance art. The Farnese Hours, illuminated for Cardinal Alessandro Farnese between 1537 and 1546, contains illuminations considered Clovio’s first work for the Cardinal. The Others in the miniatures are the antichi romani and old pagan Roman elements that were included in his iconography. Among many different Roman motifs that can be found in the Farnese Hours I focus on two: the Roman carnival (Feast of Testaccio, fols. 40v-41r) and the blue ewer represented eleven times inside the decorative border of the folios 26v-27r (Adoration of the Shepherds and Adam and Eve in the Earthly Paradise).

This paper focuses on the treatment of historical Islamic buildings in interwar Greece so as to investigate how the notion of Muslim Otherness is (re)produced through practices dealing with monumental management and the iconography of landscape. After the Population Exchange between Greece and Turkey (1924) a preservation initiative for Islamic architecture was launched, yet this clashed with the fact that former Muslim real estate was a financial asset in the implementation of the Exchange. Focusing on the case of Crete, the paper discusses the official and social negotiations that emerged, in this context, over the creation of an otherized heritage. It analyses the means used to re-signify Islamic cultural markers as part of the state’s monumental iconography, but also as historical and mnemonic indicators within changing cityscapes, showing how these means (re)produced a view of Muslims as an historical alterity in the Greek territory. The paper also explores the public effect triggered by such visual prompts, in relation to dominant conceptions of national and local identity. Reflecting on the entanglement between the alterity of the historical marker and that of religious / cultural difference, the paper discusses how discursive constructions of Otherness relate to claims on space and place, elucidating socio-political aspects of the making of the historic landscape.

This study examines the Hereford World Map (c. 1300) in relation to modern theoretical concepts of Otherness and marginality to expose disjunctions between medieval and modern ideologies. As an authoritative synthesis of Classical geographical learning and Christian theological beliefs, the landmasses, islands, and waterways of the Hereford Map are populated by hundreds of tiny icons and inscriptions that represent the world’s cities, biblical and mythological characters, animals, birds, monsters, and more. Among these are many identifiable Others, whose cartographical locations do not fit easily into modern theoretical frameworks but rather signal more complex relationships between Us and Them, and between centre and periphery; especially in England, where the Map was made and displayed. Moreover, Otherness on the Hereford Map is performed not only by the usual actors - the so-called Monstrous Races and non-Christian outgroups-but also by the divine personages dispensing justice in the celestial space depicted at its summit. My analysis of selected imagery reveals that certain of the Map’s figures and places commonly identified by modern critics as marginal in fact lay at the conceptual centre of medieval Christian identity. Moving away from the centre - margins paradigm, I also examine how medieval cartographical strategies of alignment, juxtaposition, and directionality enhanced the work’s didactic value for medieval pilgrims, and I identify examples of lessons that were retrievable with or without the assistance of cathedral guides acting as interpretative intermediaries. I conclude that the presence of Others on the Hereford Map helped medieval viewers locate themselves in its geographical spaces and in its Christian worldview, which suggests that the theoretical concept of Otherness remains a viable tool for expanding our understanding of the cultural and ideological complexities of medieval mappae mundi.

This text proposes a genealogy of the trope of the “Sodomitic Moor” in medieval Iberian culture and its consolidation from the Modern Age onwards, coinciding with the imperialist/colonialist expansion towards America. The object of the study are the literary sources that describe the martyrdom of Saint Pelagius in the 10th century (Raguel and Rosvita of Gandersheim) and the visual representations of the same subject in the 16th-century Spanish painting, specifically the images that make up the altarpiece of Saint Pelagius painted by Master of Becerril, which is now in Malaga’s Cathedral. The analysis of the sources will be carried out considering the contributions of queer theory to the study of medieval Iberian cultures through authors such as Mark Jordan or Gregory Hutchenson. As for the visual analysis, the text reviews the historiography of Spanish art history on the images that make up this altarpiece, as well as other contributions such as Francisco de Holanda’s theory of painting, the persecutions for sodomy that were consolidated at the end of the 15th century with the approval of the Pragmatic against Sodomy by the Catholic monarchs, or the principle of ‘interconnected Otherness’ defined by Victor Stoichita, which allows us to understand how the Muslim religious Other is interconnected with the racialized Indian Other from the end of the 15th century onwards.