Politica Sacra
Politica Sacra

Summary/Abstract: This paper is part of a larger study on the development of political thought in Europe from the fifteenth to the twentieth century. The subject of the fragment presented here is the intellectual and emotional world of the ruling aristocratic class and its effort to unify and turn into reality its intense, almost obsessive, relationship to religion. The text explores the dichotomy of the world-view of the late-medieval men of power and their striving to bring together the two worlds they consider to be real: the earthly and the heavenly. The coexistence of the absolute requirements of the Christian faith and the impulses of political reality creates a special imagery of the power, made visible in the art of so-called Flemish primitives. The shock of violence and the idea of divine sovereignty, encoded in the paintings of artists like Rogier van der Weyden, Jan van Eyck or Hans Memling, reveals a worldview that will undergo a painful transformation in the time of Reformation and the early modern period.

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