During this class we discussed St. Ursula and how paintings depicting them often told a story or narrative. Oftentimes, these paintings would be painted for confraternities of St. Ursula. We also learned that it was because these paintings often depicted narratives that would progress across either horizontally or on panels, artists found ways on how to make characters recognizable. This was by dressing the characters, or people depicted in the painting, dress the same across the entire narrative. Clothes and the details of their outfits helped to make them stand out and be recognizable especially considering facial features were oftentimes too small to be used as a differentiating factor.
We also touched upon symbolism that is often used in painting of the time. For example, we were told that scorpions were a symbol of duplicity and were used as a symbol for the Jews. The predella we discussed during class also had many symbols that referenced “the others” and equated them to being bad. This to me was very interesting because it seems as if they used a lot of symbols and things would often haven more than one meaning.