“The Stained Glass Windows of the Great Cloister of the Leuven Charterhouse: between Memoria and Spiritual Edification"

Falque, Ingrid
(2023) Imago and contemplatio in the Visual Arts and Literature (1400-1700). Festschrift in Honour of Walter S. Melion — ISBN: [978-90-04-40973-6], 116-139, published

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Abstract
Since its foundation in 1491, the Leuven charterhouse benefited from the help of generous benefactors who provided the monastery with land and financed the construction of the monastic buildings and their decoration. Nowadays dismembered and dispersed, the stained glass windows of the great cloister are one of their most important contributions. Executed in several decades and by various artists in the first half of the 16th century, these windows presented a complex typological cycle, mixing scenes of the old and new testaments with several saints’ life et donor portraits. This glazed cloister has been mainly studied from the point of view of stylistic attributions and the role of the benefactors who funded them, leaving aside its consideration as a constitutive element of the visual and spiritual environment of the Carthusian monks of Leuven. This essay considers this cycle of stained glass windows from this perspective. More precisely, I argue that the stained glass windows of the great cloister attest to the survival of the typological method in the 16th century and I aim at taking into consideration the role of these pictures in the spiritual practices of the monks and in their daily (meditative) life.
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Falque, I. (2023). “The Stained Glass Windows of the Great Cloister of the Leuven Charterhouse: between Memoria and Spiritual Edification”. In Stijn Bussels, Karl Enenkel, Michel Weemans and Elliott Wise (eds.) (ed.), Imago and contemplatio in the Visual Arts and Literature (1400-1700). Festschrift in Honour of Walter S. Melion (pp. 116-139). Brill. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/219972