The Living Church: Art, Architecture and the Religious Imagination in Thirteenth-Century England

This year's Paul Mellon Lectures will explore key issues in the development and understanding of English Gothic art. They aim to present a cultural history of art and architecture as representational and imaginative forms, between the crisis of Thomas Becket's martyrdom at Canterbury in 1170 and the emergence of the so-called 'Decorated Style'. Becket's Canterbury authorised one influential vision of the Church as a living entity. The idea of the Church as comprising 'living stones' had widespread implications for the Church conceived as a space of the religious, aesthetic and ethical imagination. This conception wlll be traced through the art and architecture, cults of saints, physical expressivity, devotional preoccupations and, finally, crises of the 'long thirteenth century'.

The lectures are the fifth in a series given biennially by an invited specialist in British art, held at the National Gallery and supported by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.