Professor of Art Robert Knight was recently awarded the Architecture, Culture and Spirituality Forum (ACSF) Lindsay Jones Memorial Fellowship. He plans to use the $5,000 award to fund a winter break research trip to Rome where he will continue his project “Le Madonelle: the Sidewalk Saints of Italy.”
An ACSF announcement of the award said Knight “will use photography to document the relationship between contemporary life and religious devotional shrines, specifically the Madonelle, or sidewalk saints that are common throughout Italy. He will explore the relationship between contemporary Italian life and these relics of a bygone era.
“The hope is that this effort will cause viewers to reconsider Madonelle and appreciate them for their idiosyncratic architectural beauty amongst an ever-increasing commercialized landscape,” the project description continued. Knight is compiling the photographs into an atlas highlighting Madonelle by location.
According to the ACSF website, the award is part of the Lindsay Jones Memorial Research Fund (LJMRF), established through a gift from Jones, “a groundbreaking scholar of Mesoamerican architecture.” The grant funds “research on the meaning and significance of the built environment. The LJMRF is intended as seed funding to support long-term scholarly agendas." nd “is intended as seed funding to support long-term scholarly agendas.”
