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Student Essay Prize for PhD Student Lyndsey Smith

Posted on 24 July 2014

Lyndsey was awarded the European Association of Biblical Studies (EABS) Graduate Student Essay Award at the recent joint EABS/Society for Biblical Literature (SBL) International Meeting in Vienna, Austria

Lyndsey Smith image

She was awarded €250 for the Best Student Paper relating to the New Testament with her paper "Concentration on the Divine and Divine Inspiration in the Arts: St Gregory, St Luke, and St Jerome at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna". The focus of the paper was the theological considerations of concentration on and inspiration from the Divine depicted within the arts through an analysis of the St Gregory with Scribes ninth-century ivory tablet; the St Luke Painting the Madonna by Jan Gossaert (c. 1515 – 25); and the St Jerome painting by Guido Reni (c. 1634 – 35).

'The differing artistic standpoints, stylistic and iconographic contexts and details reveal how the artists simultaneously acknowledged theological debate concerning the making of images, and promoted the status of artist and the depiction of the holy as part of religious veneration and education. While seemingly on different ends of the spectrum due to differences in artistic medium, it is rather the subject matter that is focused on within this paper, as St Gregory, St Luke and St Jerome were all involved in a series of events that are to be considered both as concentrating on, and being influenced by, the Divine, aptly captured by their respective artists as well as revealing a visual commentary by each artist that can be seen as a direct reaction to periods of fluctuating theological debate surrounding the legitimacy of ecclesiastical art.'