Dextera Dei: visioni sinestetiche e materialità in alcuni esempi di età carolingia

The Vita sancti Evurtii, written at the beginning of the 9th century, relates to the Evurtius, the fourth bishop of Orléans, and is characterised by a strong emphatic and propagandistic tone, in which the recourse to the miraculous vision is specifically adopted to exalt his ecclesiastical authority. The paper examines the appearance of the dextera Dei and its intelligibility in order to demonstrate how the production of images in the early Middle Ages affected hagiographic rhetoric by providing an adequate visual support to the textual narrative. The specific iconographic problem leads to a wide-ranging reflection that goes beyond both the limits of textuality and materiality, and the boundaries of the Frankish city during the Carolingian period, at a time of strong debate on the representation of sacred images, with effects on all European figurative production