Art Therapy of the Past: Finding Comfort & Consolation in Art

Art therapists today help their patients cope with anxiety, addiction, illness, or pain. Therapists might encourage clients to explore their emotions by drawing, for example, or to reflect on a difficult experience through painting. Art is used to help people express themselves and explore their emotions. In past centuries, however, art therapy took a substantially different form. Maybe it’s time to bring this practice of the past into the present—as a way to move into the future. The Isenheim Altarpiece is a 16th century sculpted and painted work housed in an old convent-turned-museum in the medieval city of Colmar, France—a city with wood-framed houses and winding footpaths that appear to have changed little in 500 years. Altarpieces have long been used to decorate churches and to tell stories, but the Isenheim Altarpiece offered an additional therapeutic function. The religious order that cared for the sick, the Antonites, “prescribed” viewing the altarpiece to those in their hospitals. They led the sick to the choir area of the Isenheim church, where they provided them with fresh bread and saint vinage, an herb-infused wine. In this quiet space, patients could meditate on the paintings that comprised the altarpiece. The Isenheim Altarpiece’s central panel displayed a plague-infected crucified Christ. For Europeans in the Middle Ages, religious art held a particular power over the social imagination. Patients sick with bubonic plague would have derived great c...
Source: World of Psychology - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Publishers Spirituality & Health art Art Therapy Isenheim Altarpiece Source Type: blogs