Abstract

After the Council of Trent, Catholic Spain in the seventeenth century increasingly turned to the arts to articulate their identity and mission as a church. Writing for the Spanish Court in the early 1630s, Pedro Calderón de la Barca uses La cena del rey Baltasar to portray the Church as an essential mediator for the relationship between the congregant and the divine, specifically through the use of didactic imagery and authoritative interpretation of God’s word. This essay reviews elements in the play that support this message and articulates the eucharistic and allegorical elements therein. The action of the Biblical narrative and the play culminates in the divine manifestation of the hand of God, a moment also captured in paint by the Catholic Spanish painter Jusepe de Ribera and the Protestant Dutch painter Rembrandt van Rijn. These painted works serve as visual hermeneutics articulating the contrasting views of Catholics and Protestants in post-Tridentine Europe.

Degree

College and Department

Humanities; Comparative Arts and Letters

Rights

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