Medieval Realism and the Devotional Object

Shayan Sheikh

Abstract

Medieval realism revolves around the radical presence of the corporal sign in the devotional moment and thus mirrors modern realism in significant ways. While pointing to similar exigencies of physical, visceral descriptions in both modern and medieval realism, I shall explore strains of allegory and metaphysics that distinguish the latter. In the Islamic context, the visceral designs of devotional practices relate to sacrality of the Prophet Muhammad’s body. We have medieval accounts of devotees paying homage to the relics of the Prophet, as if they were literally the person of the Prophet (Richard McGregor 2020). Most emphatically, the genre of Hilye panels from the Ottoman context epitomise devotional realism. Here, a physical profile of the Prophet’s body is evoked for the viewer, in calligraphic poetic glosses and quotations from canonical Hadith sources. Tapping to the corporal underpinnings of spirituality and Prophetic virtue in Islam, such visual regimes echo the machinations of Medieval realism, radically confronting the devotee with the object’s body (Tobias Heinzelmann 2022). In Medieval Islam, we see the power of the ‘concrete detail’, as Barthes claims in the “Reality Effect”, to collude the signifier and referent. My contention is that the focus of such realist practices on the Prophetic agent reiterates religious allegory, unlike the disenchanted paradigm of modern realism derided by Lukacs, where all and every body becomes worthy of representation, conflating the ‘important and unimportant.’