Polychrome Light in Medieval Norwegian Church Art (12th–13th Centuries)

Abstract

This paper focuses on light as a fundamental key to the visual perception of matter and form in the earthly world, its role in a Christian perspective, and how this is communicated in the physical polychrome object as a path to spiritual revelation. These are central themes in the author’s current research into a deliberate visual vocabulary embedded in the polychrome expression of sculpture in Norway. This research examines the perception of religious polychrome objects seen through the ‘medieval mind’s eye’ in its wider original context, and is based on examination of period texts of proto scientific and theologicalphilosophical nature, compared against analysis of original and reconstructed objects.