The Way My Body Feels

Dr Sally Waite is Senior Lecturer in Classical Archaeology and Dr Olivia Turner is an artist and postdoctoral researcher, both at Newcastle University. Sally’s research focuses primarily on Attic red-figure pottery and the history of collecting and collections, working closely with the Shefton Collection of Greek and Etruscan Archaeology at the Great North Museum: Hancock. Olivia is…

Votive Practices at the Temple of the Oxus

Claire Heseltine is a PhD student in Classics at King’s College, London. Her doctoral project focuses on miniature representations of the gods on personal, portable items in the late Hellenistic period, and the importance of these objects as mediators between believer and divine referent. More widely, her research focuses on the material culture of personal religion,…

Introducing… Gods’ Collections

Contributions are invited for a new project on Gods’ Collections… Places of worship of all traditions – here for convenience all called ‘temples’ – have always accumulated collections. Today some temples have generated great art museums, while others just keep a few old things in a sacristy cupboard. This new project will look at why…

New book news: Reassembling Religion in Roman Italy

Readers of The Votives Project might be interested to learn about the publication of a new book by one of the website’s co-founders. Reassembling Religion in Roman Italy (Routledge, 2021) by Emma-Jayne Graham focuses on ancient material religion, and among other things chapters feature discussions of sanctuaries and anatomical votives in ancient Italy, as well…

Making votives: pain and practice

As an artist Garry Barker has gradually evolved an art practice that was initially a response to community needs, such as how to visualise the need for lighting in poorly lit streets or communicating how the community was working to ‘design out crime’; to a practice that visualised stories told to him by people he…

Photographic Votive Offerings in the Alentejo region of Portugal

Milene Trindade is a PhD candidate in History of Art at the University of Évora, Portugal. She is currently writing her thesis on Devotion, Art and Technique: Photographic Ex-votos in the Alentejo Region in the 19th and 20th centuries. (Affiliations: HERCULES Laboratory – Cultural Heritage, Studies and Safeguard, and CHAIA – Centre for Art History and Artistic…

Figure 3 Anatomical votive, hand (V41) from Asclepieion or Lerna, Corinth (Foto: ASCSA.net)

From Corinth to Canindé

Nadja Petersen is a Master’s student at the University of Copenhagen. She is currently writing her thesis on the anatomical votives from the Asclepieion in Corinth. When I began the research for my Master’s thesis in Classical Archaeology, I gathered inspiration from several different sources. I eventually chose the anatomical votives from Asclepieion (fifth and fourth…

Frida Kahlo's drawing 'The Accident'

Frida Kahlo’s ex-voto collection in Making Herself Up, V&A London

Last year’s Making Herself Up (V&A 2018) narrated Frida Kahlo’s life through her personal belongings: family photographs, clothing, shoes, jewellery, cosmetics and – most notably – a significant collection of Mexican ex-votos (Spanish for ‘votive offerings’). In image and text, these tin votives paint scenes of illness, incarceration, hunting wounds, train crashes – any misfortune imaginable.…

Arm and leg votives from Mikata Ishikanzeon Dou, Japan

Yoshiharu Kamino is Professor at Musashino Art University, and former chief of the university museum and library. He specialises in folklore studies and anthropology, and is currently studying Japanese anatomical votives. Shrines and temples are Japanese people’s spiritual hubs, and can be found everywhere. The former generally serve local deities, and the latter as a…

Wax infant votives in Cyprus: ancient and modern parallels

Maureen Carroll is Professor of Roman Archaeology at the University of Sheffield. Her recent research has focused on infancy and earliest childhood in the Roman world, and she is currently working on a project entitled ‘Mater Matuta and Related Goddesses: Guaranteeing Maternal Fertility and Infant Survival in Early Roman Italy’. In this post she discusses…

Shake it till you make it: could votives have been used as rattles?

Kristel Henquet is a research masters student in archaeology and ancient history at Free University Amsterdam/University of Amsterdam & Leiden University. She specialises in votive practices and religious landscapes in Southern Italy and in this post she shares some of the research she has recently conducted at the Royal Dutch Institute in Rome. When I…

Saint Bartholomew of the Groom: The Church as a Votive

Margherita Clavarino is a PhD candidate in the History of Art at the Warburg Institute, where she is researching miraculous prints in early modern Italy. She has an interest in both printed ex-votos and votive offerings related to miraculous printed imagery.  The Church of Saint Bartholomew of the Groom, in the namesake seaside town of…

A new exhibition of votives from Mexico

This week saw the opening of a new exhibition at the Casa del Manzoni in Milan, home of the Fondazione Per Grazie Ricevute. The exhibition is entitled “Buena Suerte – Milagros de México” «Folklore e tradizione negli ex~voto messicani contemporanei», and it presents a colourful series of around 300 votive retablos from Mexico, most of which are…

Miniature mirrors: votive or apotropaic (or both)?

This week, two things reminded me of something that I have been meaning write about for The Votives Project for a while. The first was the excellent Remarkable Things conference at the University of Warwick (10th March 2018), where several papers drew attention to different types of (broadly conceived) apotropaic object. This included, for the ancient…