Lezing 'Staging Religion(s) in the Early Enlightenment: Bernard Picart’s Frontispiece for Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde '

In this presentation, Paola Von Wyss-Giacosa will focus on Bernard Picart’s skillfully staged frontispiece, the Tafereel van de voornaamste godsdiensten der waereldt for the Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tour les peuples du monde. There is a high level of performativity in this dense composition. The large sheet was only presented to the public in 1727 – a few years after the publication of the Cérémonies’ first volumes – and it shows a remarkable convergence of semiotically charged pictorial motifs and (self-)references. What can we say about the iconographic strategies employed by Picart to make the entangled discourses on the ceremonies of religion visible? How does he set and emotionalize the scene? And can we measure whether these discourses, in their specific visual effectiveness and agency, were able to bring about a transformation in the minds or consciousness of the observers, thus contributing to a paradigm shift in the enlightenment discourse on religion?