Leseprobe

62 Religious art, perhaps more than any other category of artwork, has phenomenal poten- tial to act upon its beholders. From depictions of saints that inspire devotion, to objects that actively perform miracles for the faithful, art’s ability to affect exists somewhere in the relationship between the object and its beholder. But in the churches and ecclesiastical spaces of eighteenth-century Paris, an object’s potential was often artfully amplified through external conditions. Framing devices, controlledmodes of encounter, intention- ally orchestrated viewpoints, and dynamic displays of choreographed objects all served to imbue artworks with a powerful agency. Indeed at their most dramatic, these spaces could be designed to incorporate the beholder, drawing them into immersive phenome- nological experiences where they might encounter the supernatural happenings and complex mysteries of the Catholic faith. This essay explores the agency of objects and the mechanisms of such interactive strategies in three eighteenth-century spaces: the refectory of the Abbey of Saint-Denis, the Dominican church of the Jacobins (now Saint-Thomas-d’Aquin), and the parish church of Saint-Roch. Each space presents different kinds of objects and strategies of display, from single artworks activated by their site-specific locations, to multiple objects staged in diorama-like settings, or multimedia installations where art and architecture work to­ gether to invite viewers to activate the scene. But despite their differingmodes of operation, HANNAH WILLIAMS Staging Belief: Immersive Encounters and the Agency of Religious Art in Eighteenth-Century Paris 1 Research for this essay was funded by The Leverhulme Trust through an Early Career Research Fellow- ship held at Queen Mary University. Thanks to Caroline van Eck, Johannes Grave, and Valérie Kobi for their valuable comments on this essay. My explorations in this essay are drawn from a larger project investigating the role of material culture in religious experience in a book provisionally entitled Art and Religion: Inside the Parish Churches of Eighteenth-Century Paris . For important re-engagements with the vastly underexplored terrain of eighteenth-century French religious art, see: Schieder, Au-delà des Lumières , 2015 and Gouzi and Leribault (eds), Le baroque des Lumières , 2017.  2 On the physical alterations to the canvas, see Gouzi, Jean Restout , 2000, p. 225.