Examining the Meaning and Interactive Functions of Art in Urban Public SpacesCase Study: The Church Murals of Medieval, Romanesque and Gothic Eras

Problem statement: 

The murals of the Medieval era have always been reviewed under the influence of the governing religious discourse of this era. In this regard, inter-textual relations are rarely referred to, in the form of art, the city, and the intertextual identities of the works in relation to their regional developments.

This research aims to analyze the semantic visual meanings of concepts that validate the thought discourses by manifesting them in the public urban spaces, and to build purposeful visual narration relying on the identical intertextuality and native textual contexts to be presented in the public space of the city. Therefore, the ‘quiddity’, ‘semantic’, and the ‘way it is achieved in the art of pre-modern cities are being analyzed in two questions: the semantic quiddity of art and the city, and the interactive functions of art in the city, in relation to this concept.        

This research study is a kind of fundamental-theoretical method in terms of purpose, which initiates with a semantic quest in the historical texts of the ‘city and art’, and is based on the history and pictographic connotations of church murals by adopting a descriptive method followed by an interpretive-explanatory one.

Findings of the literature review indicate that the meaning of art in the medieval cities was defined by a solid structure in city-art relations under supernatural power, with a kind of succession relations as follows: God (king, pope), City (castle, city of God) and Art (skill, enigma). Therefore, its interactive functions are established in relation to the city and art with superior power, and the audience, who has a nature below the god, is identified merely in relation to the reader who perceives the message.