Jedediah Caesar is an artist and curator based in Los Angeles and Berlin. In this post, he introduces a new artist project on votive deposits and the photographic record, which focuses on the moment of ‘uncovering’….
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,…
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…
Becky Brewis is an artist based in Dundee. She has recently devised an art assignment – open to all – which guides participants through making an anatomical votive in response to this time of physical separation. She tells us about the project and how you can take part…
The Memories for Life project, funded by the Swedish Research Council, was initiated in 2017 to study the hundreds of objects dedicated by non-royal individuals to the divine in the ancient Near East. These objects, inscribed in the cuneiform script in the Akkadian and Sumerian languages, inform us about worship practices and dedicatory traditions spanning…
Eleonora Colangelo is a PhD candidate in Ancient History and Classical Philology at the ANHIMA Centre (Anthropology and History of Ancient Worlds) in Paris and at the University of Pisa. Her research focuses on ancient Greek religion and aesthetics and she is working on a doctoral project exploring the evolution of Eros in ancient cosmetics/aesthetics.…
Tyler Jo Smith is Professor of Classical Art/Archaeology at the University of Virginia. Here she shares some of her ongoing research concerning rock-cut votive reliefs from the regions of northern Lycia and Pisidia, as well as her memories of the day she first encountered the ‘site with 40 horses’. One late summer afternoon in 1992,…
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…
Valeria Motta has a PhD in the History of Art from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. She is an Associate Member of the Centre d’Histoireet de Théorie des Arts (CEHTA-EHESS). I wish to thank Gill Dilmitis for the revision of my English text Despite the fact that the reproduction…
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…
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.…
Welcome to our first TVP audio interview! Alongside our usual blog posts, we’ll now also run an ‘audio stream’ for sharing informal interviews with friends and colleagues who work on votive offerings (as well as other ‘votive sounds’, from rattly terracottas to religious processions). Please get in touch if you’d like to contribute, or if…
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…
Father Gianpaolo Pagano is a Dominican priest based at the sanctuary of the Madonna dell’Arco in Sant’Anastasia near Naples. The tradition of dedicating ex votos at this site dates back to at least the fifteenth century, and it continues today. The shrine walls are covered in painted votive tavolette, and there is a museum of…
Painted votive tavolette are a key feature of a new temporary exhibition entitled Madonnas and Miracles: The Holy Home in Renaissance Italy, which runs from 7th March – 4th June 2017 at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. We spoke to Dr Mary Laven, co-curator of the exhibition and Reader in Early Modern History at the…
Tulsi Parikh is a first year PhD student at the University of Cambridge researching votive assemblages across sites in Archaic Greece. She undertook her Masters in Classical Art and Archaeology and her undergraduate degree in French and Modern Greek at King’s College London. Between 1906 and 1910, the British School at Athens uncovered at least…
Alyssa Velazquez is currently a Masters student at Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture. Her publications include “Tupperware: An Open Container During A Decade of Containment” in Women’s History Magazine and Men and Manolos: Love and Relationships in the Heels of a Hopeless Romantic. In this article for The Votives Project,…
Often, on holiday, I seek out the sacred wells, the ribbon-tied trees and the chapels full of objects and notes asking for help or giving thanks. Out of curiosity, plain nosiness; I’m drawn to the glimpse into another’s life, or death. Why is that? Do I find comfort that someone else has it worse than…
For several years now, a group of women from different spiritual backgrounds in the South of England has been engaged in the honouring of Artemis; as a group in a sacred grove in Kent, and as individuals in their own homes. Part of the ritual tradition has been the offering of votives, and this post…
Urmila Mohan is a postdoctoral fellow at Amnh-Bgc, currently researching the aesthetics, materiality and history of textiles collected by Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson in the 1930s in Bali. According to Jewish tradition there are three kinds of peace offerings. The votive offering (as distinct from the thank and free-will offering) is defined as something…
This week I interviewed Monsignor Pietro Caggiano of the Pontifical Sanctuary of the Blessed Virgin of the Rosary in Pompeii – home to a significant collection of ex votos which has accumulated since the Sanctuary’s foundation at the end of the nineteenth century. Monsignor Caggiano has written about the theology of ex votos, and he is currently curating an exhibition of ancient…
Earlier this week I visited the Catholic sanctuary of the Madonna dell’Arco in Campania on the day of its annual festival, which takes place every Easter Monday (or ‘Lunedi in Albis’). The festival centres around the battenti or fujenti – guilds of devoted pilgrims who walk or run to the church from towns and villages across…
The Votives Project 