THE SACRIFICE OF ABRAHAM IN SOME REPRESENTATIONS FROM THE END OF THE MIDDLE-AGES

Abraham's sacrifice. Very early on, this Biblical theme became the subject of a number of representations who did not vary much, having a rich and precocious theology as their base: the sacrifice of Isaac prefiguring that of Christ on the Cross. The anecdotal development is one of the major variants. The dramatization of the scene in miniatures, especially noticeable from the 13th century onward, enriched the stylistic effects. The social changes that took place in medieval western Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries (the place of children, attitudes to death...) provoked a final evolution. The previous embellishments were reorganized to take into account the preoccupations of the day. © 1995.