THE DECLINE OF MEDIEVAL CHIVALRY AND ITS ICONOGRAPHIC SURVIVAL IN THE MODERN AGE

Abstract

The image of the knight and medieval chivalry is set solid in our collective memory as a paradigm.
Its reverberation and dispersion in the continuity of multiple aspects and ambiences make it an unavoidable bulwark of European cultural anthropology. Art and society are not often so fi rmly united. In the Modern Age, all its culture was fully effective. Medieval chivalry survived and became, aesthetically,
the power of a sublime image, artistically, a topic of literature and iconography, and socially, together
with that nostalgia for personal values, for ancestrally layman ethics which, when glorifi ed, gave rise to the epic and aesthetic aspect that made it the human reference society as a whole dreamed of.