Canvas support as materialization of religious-pedagogic propaganda

Abstract

In Portugal, over the centuries, religion used painting on canvas to evoke its sacred mysteries. Despite that paintings are primarily pictorial, their back can reveal a lot about their contribution for the religious-pedagogic propaganda of the Catholic Church. Based on an interdisciplinary collaboration among Art history and Conservation science on the topic of the material and technology of the weaved support in the Portuguese painting, this paper focuses concisely on how canvas appears to be an exceptional medium for visual materialization of such power and glory.