| Summary: | The diversity of languages, cultures, creeds, and competing religions during the Church's rise to power contributed to the use of a visual form of communication to instruct, inspire, and solidify the Christian faith by reinforcing the spoken word. During the millennium between the fifth and fifteenth centuries this visual communication evolved into a highly complex pictorial system, promulgated by the artist to provide instruction in the teachings of the Church. By the fifteenth century this pictorial system known to the modern world as iconography attained a high degree of sophistication evidenced by its use in the Merode Altarpiece. === The purpose of this study therefore is (1) to identify those historical events influencing the evolution and use of the pictorial communication system employed by the artist to communicate the religious teachings of the Medieval Church; and (2) to suggest that an examination of this historical education by means of visual images might be of interest to teachers presently involved in the teaching of visual literacy. === The pictorial symbolism used by the Christians in the first three centuries became the visual communication system of the Church in the fourth century, promulgated by the artist according to a set of rules prescribed by the Church fathers and sanctioned by the Emperor. === Following the Iconoclastic controversy, the bishops in the council of 787 restored the veneration but not the worship of the icons ". . .as a legitimate expression of Christian piety and faith." More significantly for the Western Church fathers, the council sanctioned the use of the pictorial communication system as a teaching tool and placed the system under Church control. "It is for painters to execute; it is for the clergy to ordain the subjects and govern the procedure." === By combining the Platonic concept of the human soul with the Aristotelian treatment of the mnemonic token, the Church could teach those Christian concepts such as the Last Judgment, Paradise, the Resurrection, and the divinity of Christ by the pictorial symbol. Thus, the visual communication system became the useful tool with which the Latin Church reorganized western Europe. === St. Augustine refined Origen's systematic outline of theological doctrine into the educational philosophy of the Middle Ages by allegorical interpretation of the scriptures. This method allowed for the inclusion into the visual communication system of those pictorial symbols already familiar to the various tribes of conquerors by adapting new meanings. === It became a visual language to be used by western artists and poets alike for the next thousand years. It is the only known visual communication system that can be traced from its inception in the fourth century to its culmination in the fifteenth century. === The Merode Altarpiece, created at the beginning of the Rennaissance, stands as the epitome of the visual communication system of the Medieval Church. From its early beginnings in the catacombs of Rome, when the unknown artist first extended the invitation to step inside the representation of Jonah and the Whale, to the Merode of the fifteenth century in which the medieval viewer experienced the Beautific Vision, the pictorial communication system of the Medieval Church was the only common language uniting these "people of God." === Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 41-07, Section: A, page: 2829. === Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1980.
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