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On the 24th of August, the day when Saint Bartholomew takes possession of the waters and the Devil is on the loose, the believers of the 19th century headed to the beaches of Foz do Douro for the holy bath, in search of protection against skin diseases, stuttering or demonic effects. Through the saint, the sins of the former skin were expelled to make way for a renewed soul and body. This act of apotropaic and prophylactic nature was transferred to the cultural practice that we know today: the Cortejo dos Trajes de Papel de São Bartolomeu. This playful and spontaneous manifestation originated in the ancient religious festival, keeping the memory of the stripping of costumes in the waters. Based on the image of Saint Bartholomew from the parish church of São João da Foz do Douro, we intend in this study to reveal the evolution of the cult, the practices and rituals to which it was associated and how it can be understood as a support for cultural permeabilities, reinforcing the need of the study of the image in its context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The passion of the apostle James the Greater is one of the main cycles of his hagiography. It is worth recalling the various medieval texts and traditions that recreated the narrative, although the Passio Iacobi and later the Legenda Aurea should be singled out as the most important sources for the iconographic elaborations. There is also room for the miracle exercised from the thaumaturgic condition granted to James by Christ: the healing of a paralysed man is the decisive motif for the conversion of the scribe Josiah. However, the iconographic representation of this event was not very abundant in the Romanesque and Gothic centuries, as opposed to the baptism of Josiah and, above all, his beheading together with the apostle himself. Apart from possible theological considerations, the lesser fortune of this figurative register must also have been influenced by the synthetic nature of the iconographic cycles themselves, therefore its evocation was necessarily implicit in the inclusion of the conversion-baptism of Josiah. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What can we consider to be common between the sculpture of Jörg Immendorff Fortuna: Läuferin auf der Weltkugel (1989), his painting Ohne Titel (Fortuna) 2000 and /or the different stereotyped figurations of the deity Fortuna throughout Culture and Art in Europe? The iconographies representing Fortuna and/or Tyché are mapped, considering their posture, pose and sketch of movement, as well as their attributes, objects and frames with which they are represented. There is substantive reflection on a compilation of certain selected images fulfilling a chronological arc, initiated in the Greek Antiquity, crossing the centuries and pointing out cases in Modern and Contemporary Art. What for the recurrence, repetition of stereotypes and conventional attitudes in the personification of the deity Fortuna, what contexts that determine it connected with Error… it is as if the world, in such disparate chronologies, was after all a doppelgänger, a small dimension in the face of cosmogonic gigantism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the legend of Saints Cosmas and Damian, patron saints of medicine doctors and their illustration in woodcuts in Portuguese Legendaries of Saints of the 16th century. The legend refers to the case of a cancer surgery with a leg transplant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to describe the Egyptian representations of the afterlife as a path, a journey to rebirth. Although this journey has been described since the funerary texts of the Old Kingdom, is was only in the New Kingdom that its several stages were illustrated and codified in iconography. However, it is only among the pictorial decoration of the coffins of the 21st Dynasty that we find the full development of these themes. Our study focuses on the vignettes used in the decoration of the 21st Dynasty anthropomorphic coffins that illustrate the afterlife of the deceased. Some of this rich iconographic repertoire is only now beginning to be studied. We will focus our analysis on the coffins held at the Sociedade de Geografia de Lisboa. And highlight the narrative character of these representations, describing some of the most important vignettes as episodic allusions to the journey of the deceased in the Duat [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]