Pensées Françaises Contemporaines
2022-2023
Alysée Le Druillenec wurde für den Zeitraum vom 1. Juni 2023 bis zum 31. August 2023 ausgewählt.
Alysée Le Druillenec is a PhD Candidate at the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and the Catholic University of Louvain under the supervisions of Prof. Étienne Jollet and Ralph Dekoninck. She is currently a non-tenant teaching and research assistant at the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne where teaches two lecture courses: on the one hand, art history historiography on the concepts of “poetics” and “hermeneutics”, on the other hand, religious art history in seventeenth-and-eighteenth-century Europe, transatlantic and transpacific evangelization sites through the prism of theological hermeneutics.
Her research develops and focuses on the concept of “christophoria” as it appears in a specific phenomenon happening in the seventeenth century: the rise and canonizations of several Christ-carrier saints such as Joseph, Anthony of Padua, Frances of Rome, Hyacinth of Poland, Cajetan, Felix of Cantalice and Rose of Lima.
Her survey concerns the popularity of these saints’ posture, to carry the Child Christ in their arms, as a phenomenon which causes are, first, the upheaval of beliefs that took place in the era of the Counter-Reformation, and secondly, a new relationship to the Christ Child and children in general in the secular family sphere. One of the consequences of these causes would have been to lead to a re-actualization of Christology, in which the Christ Child acquired a new centrality as it can be observed in her PhD thesis’ corpus.
She published a book on St Christopher (Orep, Paris, 2020), and articles on Saints Joseph’s cult in France (Histoire de l’art, Paris, 2022) and Nouvelle-France (Études et exercices polysémiques autour de La France apportant la Foi aux Wendats de la Nouvelle-France, Montréal, Presses de l’Université Laval, 2023), the concept of Trinitarian Inhabitation according to Teresa of Avila (Perspective. Actualité en histoire de l’art, Paris, 2021) and devotional objects (Ornamenta Sacra: Late Medieval and Early-Modern Liturgical Objects in a European Context, Leuven, Brepols, 2022).
Before receiving the prestigious grant from the “Pensées françaises contemporaines” program of the Europa-Universität Viadrina and the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, her research has been supported by several institutions such as the Villa Médicis-Académie de France à Rome and École française de Rome (bourse Daniel Arasse), the Academia Belgica of Rome, the French-Dutch Network (Éole excellence grant), the Theology and Religious Studies department of Villanova University in Philadelphia, and the King’s College London (the Visual Commentary on Scriptures project). She is currently a guest fellow at the Leiden University Center for the Arts in Society and recently received the Young Research Award 2023 from the Fondation des Treilles, founded by Anne Gruner Schlumberger.
Her research project for the “Pensées françaises contemporaines” program aims is to demonstrate how “christophoria” is an operative function of the concept of “ground”, according to Prof. Étienne Jollet’s definition. To what extent do representations of Christophoric saints present them as pedestals, elements that highlight the Word made flesh? Christophoria as pedestal could thus be presented as a mode of representation of the Mystery of the Incarnation, and the different ways of representing this gesture would make her corpus of images a visual doctrinal discourse, participating in the fundamental theology of the 17th century. Christophoria would then introduce a discourse on Revelation, on faith, on the sources of the Christian mystery in its relationship with the divine Logos, highlighting anthropological, systematic, and biblical dimensions, notably through the figures of Christ-carrier saints.