The art of devotion in colonial Mexico, Central America, and South America—called the “viceregal” period, from the division of the colonies into viceroyalties from 1521 to 1821—arose in the context of reformed Roman Catholicism, especially after the Council of Trent (1545–1563). Devotional images included stand-alone compositions, images from altar ensembles and serial contexts, and works of sculpture that could be the focus of a believer’s pious contemplation or an accompaniment to liturgy. These images document the establishment of the Christian faith and its iconography in the New World, including syncretic elements, principally in the initial decades of colonization and missionization. They embody doctrines and local devotions relating to the Blessed Virgin Mary; the importance of the religious orders to Latin American devotional art; orthodox and heterodox imagery; regional variations; and special iconographies particular to Latin America. The creation of viceregal images was conditioned by issues such as the relative importance of centers of viceregal power versus peripheries, differing ethnic and religious traditions of specific localities, relatively permissive church attitudes toward heterodoxy, and the use of European models.. In the almost exactly three centuries of the viceregal era, artists of the first rank such as Baltasar de Echave Orio, Luis and José Juárez, Alonso López de Herrera, Cristóbal de Villalpando, Juan Rodríguez Juárez, and Miguel Cabrera from Mexico; Bernardo Bitti, Mateo Pérez de Alesio, Angelino Medoro, Baltasar Gavilán, and Bernardo de Legarda from Peru and Ecuador; and O Aleijadinho from Brazil created religious works responding to European stylistic developments but expressing local artistic values even as they nourished an ongoing Roman Catholic devotional life.
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Devotional Art in Viceregal Latin America
Marcus Burke
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Devotional Images of the Virgin Mary in Spain
María del Mar Doval Trueba
Jesus’s mother occupies a prominent place not only on the altars of churches throughout Spain but also in museums, which are full of masterpieces, in different supports, alluding to the Marian theme. The leading role of the Queen of Heaven has inspired many artists, throughout history and to this day, to develop work related to Mary. The iconography has evolved throughout history, but the theme is still alive. In Spain, devotion to the Virgin Mary is deeply rooted and is present in the vast majority of festivities and traditions that populate the calendar. Hundreds of municipalities celebrate their patron-saint festivities in her honor, including Holy Week, in which a host of image makers, embroiderers, sculptors, painters, and silversmiths combine their talents to show all the greatness of their art in images that move when brought into the streets, leading the faithful to the most absolute devotion. It is not surprising that many varied themes are used in her representation. The most common theme usually refers to the Seven Joys of Mary: Annunciation, Nativity of Jesus, Adoration of the Magi, Resurrection of Jesus, Ascension of Jesus, Pentecost (Descent of the Holy Spirit), and, finally, Coronation of the Virgin. The Coronation theme is possibly the least abundant from an iconographic perspective, but it has provided important examples from very early on. The Pope John Paul II based a good part of his pontificate on Mary, even dedicating to her one of his encyclicals, and she is one of the pillars of the presence of Catholic worship in Spanish society.
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Dunhuang Art
Michelle C. Wang
The oasis city of Dunhuang lies at the eastern end of the southern Silk Routes, in Gansu Province in northwestern China. In the 2nd century BCE, Dunhuang was established by the Chinese Han dynasty as a center for military operations and trade. Over time, Dunhuang became an important hub for multicultural trade as well as for the transmission of commodities, ideas, and religions. The status of Dunhuang as an important regional center for Buddhism is demonstrated by a wealth of paintings and manuscripts that provide crucial insights into the unfolding of religious praxis and developments in visual culture over many centuries.
A few centuries after the establishment of Dunhuang as a military garrison, the construction of cave shrines in the area began. Four major groups of cave shrines were constructed in the Dunhuang region: the Mogao, Yulin, and Western Thousand Buddhas caves, and the Five Temples site. The most well-studied of these are the Mogao 莫高, or “peerless,” cave shrines, which are located 25 kilometers southeast of Dunhuang at the eastern edge of Mount Mingsha 鳴沙山 (Mountain of the Singing Sands). From the 4th to the 14th centuries, 492 man-made caves were carved from the sandstone cliffs, stretching 1,680 meters from south to north. They were painted with over 45,000 square meters of mural paintings and installed with more than 2,000 painted clay sculptures. To the north, 248 additional caves were carved. Mostly unadorned, the northern caves served as habitation chambers for monks.
In addition to the mural paintings and inscriptions in the Mogao caves, more than 50,000 manuscripts and portable paintings were discovered in 1900 by the caretaker and Daoist priest Wang Yuanlu 王圓籙 from one cave, numbered Mogao cave 17, popularly though perhaps problematically known as the “library cave.” These objects were dispersed in the early 20th century to library and museum collections, the most prominent of which are the Stein collection in the British Museum, British Library, the National Museum of India, and the Pelliot collection in the Musée National des Arts Asiatiques-Guimet and Bibliothèque Nationale de France. For this reason, the study of Dunhuang art and material culture encompasses both objects held in museum and library collections worldwide as well as mural paintings and sculptures located in situ in the cave shrines. Bringing these two bodies of material into conversation with one another enables a nuanced understanding of Dunhuang as a religious and artistic center, focusing in particular on the Mogao caves.
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Ecofeminism, Religion, and the Arts in the West
Jane Caputi
Since its inception in the 1970s, ecofeminism has maintained a persistent and extensive engagement with the arts. This manifests itself when theorists take up analyses of ecologically relevant worldviews enmeshed in works from the fine arts, literary texts, musical compositions, political activist art, and popular and commercial arts. Many writers, composers, and artists also produce ecofeminist works (implicitly or explicitly). The curator of the 2020 exhibit ecofeminism(s), Monika Fabijanska, lambasted “Western patriarchal philosophy and religions” that legitimate both misogyny and ecocide. In her view, “the foundation of ecofeminism is spiritual feminism, which insists that everything is connected . . . nature does not discriminate between soul and matter.”
In the branch of ecofeminism that pays close attention to spirituality and religion, some seek to reclaim and/or generate an ecofeminist theology, often by invoking a non-heteropatriarchal and decolonial understanding of Mother Nature/Mother Earth as the original terrestrial force/source. This force/source contains female, male, and everything else, and holds powers of creation, destruction, transformation, and rebirth. Art historian Mary Garrard observes that Western culture demoted Nature from a “power” to an “environment.” Arguably, this has been to eliminate a rival, as the ruling notion of God is purely male, a father, heavenly, transcendent, the sole and omnipotent creator, and, as prophesied in the New Testament, the ultimate righteous destroyer of the elements and Earth.
Ecofeminism has evolved to become more pointedly anti-essentialist, intersectional, and decolonial as it makes connections between men’s violence against women (including both trans and cis women) and other marginalized peoples and the treatment of land, animals, plants, and elements. Ecofeminist theorists and artists demand total social, political, and spiritual transformation. Many also acknowledge that the active and intelligent life force/source (sometimes called Mother Nature/Mother Earth) is changing irrevocably in response to the egregious actions of some humans. What is especially apparent in the fusion of ecofeminist and Afrofuturist perspectives is that the exigencies of the current environmental crisis demand awareness that nature is and always has been the “power,” including the power that is understood as God.
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Exhibitions and Displays of Religious Art
Maia Wellington Gahtan
Exhibitions and displays of religious art have been an integral part of religion since the manufacture of the first religious objects and the adornment of the first sacred places. Growing more complex and varied with time, such manifestations within religions provided models for art exhibitions associated with academies, galleries, museums, and other institutions with secular purposes by the mid-18th and 19th centuries. Typically organized around the works of an artist, a group of artists, art academies, or the holdings of private lenders, such exhibitions included works with both sacred and secular subjects. Exhibition design drew on the shapes and materials of the works, privileging formal qualities over meanings, including any religious content, even for works that had once belonged to sacred settings but had migrated to private collections. The final decades of the 19th and early 20th centuries were characterized by both exhibitions organized by religious authorities for the general public and exhibitions of specific genres of sacred art organized by museums and galleries. These, together with international exhibitions and World’s Fairs which showcased non-Western religious objects, helped form the modern notions of material religion that would find voice in the exhibitions of recent decades which have focused on particular faiths in geographical, historical, cultural, and iconological terms. These exhibitions have addressed the major religions of the world, especially Christianity and Islam, in both multi-faith and single-faith contexts. Input from practitioners and source communities at the planning and installation stages, as well as for public programming and events, has helped ensure greater authenticity in the displays and encouraged a movement away from considering religious objects exclusively in terms of art.
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Faith and Devotion: Reading the Ceramic Architectural Programs of the Baroque
Rosário Salema Carvalho
In Portugal, the use of azulejos (glazed ceramic tiles) in architecture has a long history, extending uninterruptedly from the late 15th century to the present 21st century. For more than five centuries, the azulejo reinvented itself periodically to meet the demands of different historical periods, and one of its most expressive transformations took place in the Baroque period (1675–1750). Baroque azulejos stand out not only for the almost exclusive use of blue and white painting, but above all for the exploration of narrative programs, which were displayed in vast ceramic walls. These decorations covered the interiors of different buildings, but mostly churches.
The use of azulejos, dominating the interiors or in connection with other arts, was instrumental in creating a unique spatial form, which echoed Baroque spirituality by appealing directly to the senses and exploring the brightness and color of the tiled surfaces within majestic and lusciously decorated settings. But the azulejo was also a medium for religious painting and, as such, a vehicle for the doctrine and values of the Counter-Reformation, which were dominant at the time. Therefore, these ceramic architectural programs resort both to devotional and visual discourses. On the one hand, azulejo compositions relate to central aspects of Christian faith and liturgy, and particularly to the religious discourse and practice of the Baroque period. On the other hand, their visual features add new layers of meaning, mostly related to the organization of azulejos within a church’s architecture, the frames and inspirational sources, as well as issues linked with the creation and running of azulejo workshops.
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Feminism, Art, and Religion in the North Atlantic
Natalie Carnes
While the terms feminist and feminism originated in the North Atlantic in the 19th century, the practices and ideals of feminism emerged through global circulations of power, goods, and ideas. Outside Europe and North America and in indigenous communities within those continents, people have for centuries been challenging gender norms and promoting the well-being of women, sometimes embracing and other times refusing the label feminist. Within the North Atlantic, the philosophies and movements that comprise feminism were conceived and constructed with and against women, the ideas of women, and the collective actions of women around the world. The story of feminism, in other words, includes its cultural moorings, translations, limitations, and revisions—and religion and the arts have been significant forces in those negotiations.
Religion and the arts have been important to the story of feminism because they provided feminists material they could reclaim, deny, alter and otherwise use to advance feminist ideas and projects . In the case of the three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have birthed, aided, and antagonized feminist movements, as feminists augmented resources within those traditions for affirming women and enlarging their social roles while they defied aspects that diminished and circumscribed women. Feminists’ ambivalent relationship with religious traditions positioned art as a fecund site for reimagining and rechoreographing gender within those traditions. In media as diverse as literature, visual arts, fashion, theater, film, and song, art proved a powerful force for transforming the symbolics of gender and experimenting with new gendered identities and values. Via art, feminists criticized the commitments and visions of religious traditions, and they also sometimes criticized religious art or art engaging religious themes. They critiqued; they constructed. By breaking and making images and artworks, feminist movements nourished and invigorated an imagination of power and identity more favorable to women.
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Film and Religion in America
Eric Michael Mazur
Religion intersects with film not only in film content, but also in the production and experience of film. From the earliest period, religious attitudes have shaped how religious individuals and communities have approached filmmaking as way to present temptation or salvation to the masses. Individual religious communities have produced their own films or have sought to monitor those that have been mass produced. To avoid conflict, filmmakers voluntarily agreed to self-monitoring, which had the effect of strongly shaping how religious figures and issues were presented. The demise of this system of self-regulation reintroduced conflict over film content as it expanded the ways in which religious figures and issues were presented, but it also shifted attention away from the religious identity of the filmmakers. Built on a foundation of “reading” symbolism in “art” films, and drawing from various forms of myth—the savior, the end of the world, and others—audiences became more comfortable finding in films religious symbolism that was not specifically associated with a specific religious community. Shifts in American religious demographics due to immigration, combined with the advent of the videocassette and the expansion of global capitalism, broadened (and improved) the representation of non-Christian religious themes and issues, and has resulted in the narrative use of non-Christian myths. Experimentation with sound and image has broadened the religious aspect of the film experience and made it possible for the viewing of film to replicate for some a religious experience. Others have broadened the film-viewing experience into a religious system. While traditional film continues to present traditional religions in traditional ways, technology has radically individualized audio-visual production, delivery, and experience, making film, like religion, and increasingly individualized phenomenon.
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Film Regulation and the Church in America
William D. Romanowski
Since the dawn of the cinema at the turn of the 20th century, the church and its vicissitudes have been an essential part of the Hollywood story. There is a basic affinity between film and religion; both propagate values and offer visions of life that can—and often do—rival one another. For that reason, religious leaders have always been wary of Hollywood’s effect on the moral and religious character of the nation and its influence around the world. The film industry evolved in tandem with the church and other social institutions as it became integrated into society as a legitimate art. Negotiations with Hollywood were complex as church leaders sought to resolve enduring tensions between profits and the public welfare, freedom and control, art and entertainment, morality and marketing.
Approaches to the cinema embody deeply held religious principles held in some tension. The one stresses freedom of expression and individual conscience; the other a concern with protecting the church and the moral and religious character of American society. Various perspectives that are rooted in different theological-cultural traditions exist along a spectrum. At one end is an emphasis on the individual as the genesis of social change; at the other is a concern with transforming institutions that influence and govern people’s lives. These two tendencies, which are not mutually exclusive, find expression both within religious groups and between them.
In the history of Hollywood-church relations, Protestants favored industry reforms to protect individual liberty and the common good based on a shared recognition of the need for self-restraint and public responsibility. While Protestants stressed the individual conscience in movie matters, Catholics emphasized ecclesiastical authority. Proscribed film viewing and production oversight were deemed necessary to develop the individual conscience and protect parishioners from false ideas and immorality. Evangelicals, in turn, utilized film to evangelize and expected to restrain film production with highly publicized protests and a demonstrable consumer demand for family-friendly movies. Though motivated by different goals and perspectives, these strategies are all in some measure attempts to fuse moral and religious principles with democratic values and market realities: persistent dynamics traceable from the origins of the cinema to contemporary debates.
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Guatemalan Churches: The Maya Legacy in Organic Façades
Carol Damian
Located in the center of Maya civilization and tradition, Guatemala features some of the world’s most spectacular archaeological sites, with extensive pre-Hispanic remains. The Maya of pre-Contact times believed in a pantheistic religion with many gods, and despite violent Spanish subjugation beginning in 1524, many of those traditions still survive. Coerced conversion had mixed results, as the Maya in certain territories often did not replace or abolish their beliefs in favor of Christianity, but rather added this new faith as another layer. This allowed Mayans to participate in their own rituals while maintaining Christian identity, blending religious cultures in a syncretic situation that saw art, music, festivals, and other events as unique and genuine dialogue. Today, contemporary Mayans in Guatemala maintain their linguistic dialects, along with traditional clothing and ceremonies of ancient rituals.
The tenacity of the Maya people in upholding their longstanding customs and beliefs is reflected in the architectural embellishments that adorn Guatemala’s many churches. From small parishes to cities, a profusion of organic details is evident on the façades of even newly built Catholic churches. These flourishes exhibit relationships to Mayan glyphs and produce a unique visual vocabulary based on the ancient beliefs that connected man’s relation to nature as inherent to daily life. Disguised within these Christian landmarks, the adornments uncover the Guatemalan people’s enduring commitment to Mayan beliefs, despite waves of forced evangelization throughout their territories.
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Holocaust Art
Chloë Julius
The category of Holocaust art has been established by asking questions, the most vital of which is whether it should be a category of art at all. This question pursued Holocaust art long before it was categorized as such. Indeed, as a means of describing the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of European Jews by Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945, the word Holocaust itself only came into use belatedly in the 1960s. The category Holocaust art followed at an even further delay. The first major survey was published in 1993 by American art historian Ziva Amishai-Maisels. Her book opened by asking whether an artwork that took the Holocaust as its starting point could obtain any purchase as a form of aesthetic expression.
Although Amishai-Maisels did not provide an answer, her book attests to the manifold attempts by artists since the 1930s to grapple with this most fundamental question of Holocaust art. Other, related questions about the form, style, and temporality of Holocaust art have swirled around the category since its inception. In this new survey, those questions will provide the organizing framework. After the primary question of the viability of Holocaust art as a category is addressed, the subsequent five sections will move through a series of questions framed as either-or propositions: Life or theatre? Sacred or banal? Then or now? Figuration or abstraction? Painting or photography? Each section will pivot around a single instance of Holocaust art, chosen for the artwork’s ability to illuminate the problematics of the given proposition. While these propositions will not be resolved, as a set of questions they will offer a far more coherent narrative for the development of Holocaust art than one provided by chronology or region. But this is only fitting for a category that is as much involved with the art it has named as the questions it has provoked.
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Holy Week and the Theater of Art: Sculpture, Retables, and the Spanish Baroque Aesthetic
Rafael Japón
In the 16th century, the social and political changes derived from the European religious wars between Catholic and Protestant countries, economic crises, and the Counter-Reformation had an enormous impact on the evolution of visual culture. These transformations drastically changed the way in which the Catholic faithful interacted with works of art. The exemplary uses given to the images of Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary, and the saints were promoted as intermediaries between God and people. The intense realism in art served precisely this objective, since the faithful could recognize themself in these figures. In addition, the rise of the brotherhoods and penitentiary guilds led to the popularization of behaviors that imitated the Passion of Christ, such as public self-flagellation. Therefore, the Spanish processional sculpture was fully brought forward by many of these brotherhoods. Processions used theatrical resources and were very successful among the people. In the 17th century, the Hispanic baroque aesthetic was strongly linked to the Catholic Church and was especially evident during Holy Week. The public processions and their artistic resources were very successful, so much so that they have survived to the present, evolving and adapting to each period.
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Iconography and Iconology
Davor Džalto
Iconography and iconology are the ways of describing and interpreting images and their meaning. Although closely related, iconography and iconology can be understood as distinct disciplines. When clearly differentiated, iconography is understood as a method of identifying and describing the themes and motifs (“subject matter”) represented in an image, while iconology is understood as an interpretation of the meaning of images. Especially in the contemporary applications of the method, iconology is often understood as an interdisciplinary enterprise.
In its rudimentary form, iconography has been practiced since the earliest recorded attempts to describe images, conveying “what is depicted” in the medium of language. Already in antiquity is the application of the iconographic method understood as a way of relating depicted visual forms with textual sources, aimed at an identification of the subject matter in images. In the Renaissance, attempts at the systematization and codification of the most commonly used motifs in visual arts are found, resulting in manuals that offered a description of the motifs and an explanation of the meaning of particular symbols or entire scenes. The modern period (especially the 19th and 20th centuries) is the time when iconography was fully developed as a method, but this is also the time of a clearer differentiation (both conceptual and terminological) between iconography and iconology. A series of authors, primarily art historians, contributed to this differentiation and to the development of iconology as a discipline that deals with the meaning in and of images and artworks. Among the most prominent ones are Aby Warburg, Erwin Panofsky, and Ernst Gombrich. Iconology, understood as an interdisciplinary approach to the issue of visual phenomena, has successfully been applied in the interpretation of a variety of visual phenomena, from ancient, medieval, and Renaissance artworks to works of contemporary art and visual culture understood more broadly.
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Iconography and the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible
Ryan P. Bonfiglio
With respect to the study of the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible, the term iconography refers to the visual images produced in the ancient Near Eastern world. Various types of ancient Near East (ANE) images are attested in the archaeological record, including monumental reliefs, freestanding statues and figurines, picture-bearing coins and ivories, terracottas, amulets, and seals and their impressions. These artistic materials, which constitute an important component of ancient material culture more broadly, display a wide variety of subject matter, ranging from simple depictions of human figures, deities, divine symbols, animals, and vegetation to more complex visual portrayals of worship scenes, battles, and tribute processions. Despite the presence of legal texts in the Old Testament (OT) that ban the production of divine images, ancient Israel produced, imported, and circulated a wealth of images, mostly in the form of seals, scarabs, and amulets.
The study of ANE iconography focuses primarily on the subject matter of images, as opposed to issues pertaining to materiality, technique, style, aesthetics, and provenance. Thus the goal of iconographic investigations is to describe the content of a given image and to interpret the message(s) and ideas it was intended to convey. This process often entails analyzing the development of certain motifs over time and how they were deployed in various historical, religious, and social contexts. In this sense, the study of ancient iconography approaches images not so much as decorative pieces that reflect the creative expressions of individual artists, though stylistic creativity of this sort is sometimes possible to discern. Rather, the study of ancient iconography approaches images as forms of communication that were intentionally commissioned, often by the king, to publicly disseminate specific messages, be they political or religious. At a more basic level, the study of ancient iconography can also enhance the reader’s understanding of what objects and places would have looked like in the ancient world.
The relationship between ANE iconography and the OT is complex. With few exceptions (cf. Ezek 23:13), the image-text relation is not simply a matter of biblical authors describing a visual image that they had seen. Neither is it a matter of images being created to depict biblical stories or events. Rather, the connection between ANE iconography and the OT is best understood to operate at a conceptual level. Specifically, literary imagery in the OT often reflects motifs and themes that are also present in the iconographic repertoire of the ancient world.
The use of ANE iconography in the study of the OT is most commonly referred to as iconographic exegesis. This method of analysis first surfaced in the early 1970s through the pioneering work of Othmar Keel, at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, and has since been furthered through the work of loose network of scholars known as the “Fribourg School.” Much of this research has focused on aspects of the canon that are especially rich in literary imagery, such as the Psalms and the Prophets. ANE iconography has also proven to be a valuable primary source in the study of the history of Israelite religion. Of particular interest is the nature and development of ancient Israel’s ban on divine images and the resulting tradition of aniconism—the notion that Yahweh was not to be represented in visual or material form and/or that any divine image was an impermissible idol.
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Iconophobia and Iconophilia
Davor Džalto
Iconophobia (the fear of images) and iconophilia (the love of images) can be found, in a variety of forms, across different cultures and historical periods. Both iconophobia and iconophilia are related to another crucial concept—idolatry (the worship of images/idols)—and the corresponding practices of image veneration and image destruction (iconoclasm). Contrary to the popular view that Judaism and Islam are, by definition, aniconic and iconophobic, while Christianity (especially Orthodox Christianity and Roman Catholicism) is iconophilic, all three major monotheistic traditions have demonstrated iconophilic, iconophobic, and iconoclastic tendencies. Some Judaisms, Christianities, and Islams have been using images in a variety of ways and have been defending them with theological arguments. Other Judaisms, Christianities, and Islams have rejected images, formulating iconophobic theologies, and the most radical tendencies within these traditions have also been physically destroying images that they perceived as “idols.”
In order to understand the phenomena of iconophilia, iconophobia, iconoclasm, and idolatry, it is necessary to situate them within broader historical, cultural, and religious contexts. Within, formally speaking, one and the same tradition (e.g., Rabbinic Judaism or Sunni Islam), one comes across different positions on these issues, depending on the cultural and political climate, the broader set of issues that individual authors were trying to address, as well as on author’s personal preferences.
In the history of Europe, all these tendencies have left their trace. Among the most important episodes in the history of iconophilic and iconophobic tendencies in the West are early disputes on images within the Christian communities of the 1st century ce, iconoclasm in the Eastern Roman Empire in the 8th–9th centuries, as well as the Western responses to this crisis, in the form of Libri Carolini and the Council of Frankfurt (794). The character of modern approaches to both religious and non-religious images, and the development of modern image theories, were under a strong influence of the Protestant Reformation and the Counter-Reformation movement. These were not only religious but also broader cultural movements, exhibiting their iconophilic and iconophobic aspects. Other cultural and political developments, most notably the French Revolution (1789), also exhibited their iconoclastic and iconophilic dimensions, which contributed to the development of modern aesthetics and the concept of “fine arts.” In this sense, in addition to traditional religiously motivated iconophobias, one can also speak of modern secular-religious iconophobia associated with the modern concept of the “artwork” and the phenomena of “disappearance” and “emptiness” in the history of modern art and aesthetics. Many late modern or postmodern concepts and phenomena, such as “simulacrum” or the destruction of monuments associated with political ideologies, religions, or imperial heritage, demonstrate contemporary iconophilic and iconophobic tendencies.
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Idol and Idolatry
Stacy Boldrick
The concepts of the idol and idolatry are historically critical for many religions, playing fundamental roles in religious conflicts past and present. The word idolatry is from the Greek εἴδωλον “idol” and λατρεία “latria,” “service, worship,” which points to its main meaning: paying service to a material object. In Judeo-Christian religions, idols were the objects of forbidden worship—objects designated as “other”—and idolatry was a sin. Idols in contemporary Western popular culture are also remote figures, but they are revered rather than denigrated. Over the course of the Renaissance to the present, the nature and definition of idolatry have dramatically changed, as the material and conceptual forms of the idol also changed over this period.
The terms idol and idolatry have long and wide geographical histories, and an ever-changing relationship with religion and art in the period from the Renaissance to the present in the West; they are best understood within specific temporal and cultural contexts. For example, during the Reformation in England, changes in how idols and the practice of idolatry were defined and scrutinized in churches and in public space demonstrate the complex and paradoxical nature of these concepts in particular places and times. Additionally, the idol and idolatry are important subjects for artists working in a range of media from the Renaissance to the present. In contemporary art, more secular meanings of the terms appear as political and ideological critiques of conceptual idols: the idols of the market, of authoritarian regimes, or of changing contested perspectives and belief systems.
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“In My Father’s House” (John 14:2): Sacred Domiciles and Secular Residences in Iberoamerican Art as Metaphorical Architecture of Devotion
Barbara von Barghahn
At least dozens of masters working in Spain, Portugal, and the Americas between the Renaissance and the 18th-century Enlightenment appreciated the multifaceted nature of Christ’s deceptively straightforward invocation in John 14:2 of “my Father’s house.” These painters drew on a vast and often esoteric array of biblical and mystical motifs, from Noah’s ark and Jacob’s ladder to Ezekiel’s mapping of divine real estate and Teresa of Ávila’s view of the Interior Castle. As Voltaire infamously noted of the “Holy Roman Empire”—that the phrase was thrice a misnomer—these artists, who gave aesthetic form to biblical words, explored the varied architectural implications of dwelling places, while theologians of that period understood Christ’s reference to “father” to be more inclusive of other family and associates.
From the start, “Father’s home” may be identified with a Hebrew sanctuary—whether biblical Tabernacle (Mishkan) and Temple (Beit Ha-Mikdash) or later synagogue (beit ha-knesset) or Christian temple. But the visual metaphor additionally extends to domestic dwellings associated with Christ’s mother, specifically the priestly houses of Joachim and Zacharias, and with his earthly father, Joseph the Nazarene carpenter. The phrase also gestures beyond historical homes of Christ’s family during his infancy and childhood, described in the New Testament and Apocrypha, to the Bethany house where Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead. The adult Jesus actually seems to have regarded Lazarus, Martha, and Mary as extended family members.
Yet another meaning of “Father’s house” concerns nomadic homes, such as the tents described in the Books of Genesis that functioned as moveable dwellings and a reminder that all earthly homes are transitory. From the First and Second Temples of Jerusalem as Yahweh’s formal and symbolic dwelling place to the concept of a Holy House as a place to “grow in wisdom,” the wilderness dwelling encompasses the divinely protected ark of Noah and his nuclear family, which was addressed by Hugh of St. Victor as a mnemonic vessel of mankind’s salvation. Equally intriguing in an analysis of Christ’s words in the Gospel of John are paragones between Jacob’s ladder and palatine chambers of earth reached by private staircases and the means of ascent to cosmic rooms of glory. Jesus understood the definition of spiritual space provided by the prophet Ezekiel, and Teresa of Ávila in her Inner Castle embraces the notion of a mystic staircase for the soul to rise virtuously to levels of the crystalline empyrean, which is God’s effervescent domicile.
By imagining creative ways to map out the many types of dwellings to which Christ gestured in his reference to “Father’s house” onto actual sorts of houses and homes which they observed around them in the real world, these artists of Spain, Portugal, and the Americas in a way realized an aesthetic program that was steeped in imitatio Dei, or at least form that followed sacred content.
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Islam and Art: An Overview
Wendy Shaw
Modern terms like “religion” and “art” offer limited access to the ways in which nonverbal human creativity in the Islamic world engages the “way of life” indicated by the Arabic word din, often translated as religion. Islam emerged within existing paradigms of creativity and perception in the late antique world. Part of this inheritance was a Platonic and Judaic concern with the potentially misleading power to make images, often misinterpreted in the modern world as an “image prohibition.” Rather, the image function extended beyond replication of visual reality, including direct recognition of the Divine as manifest in the material and cultural world. Music, geometry, writing, poetry, painting, devotional space, gardens and intermedial practices engage people with the “way of life” imbued with awareness of the Divine. Rather than externally representing religious ideas, creativity fosters the subjective capacity to recognize the Divine. Flexible enough to transcend the conventions of time and place over the millennium and a half since the inception of Islam, these modes of engagement persist in forms that also communicate through the expressive practices of contemporary art. To consider religion and art in Islam means to think about how each of these categories perpetually embodies, resists, and recreates the others.
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Islam, Art, and Depictions of Prophets
Rachel Milstein
The history of figurative painting in Islamic lands, although limited to certain regions and periods, includes a meaningful variety of saintly iconographies, mostly as book illustrations. Produced from the turn of the 14th to the early 17th century in Iranian capital cities or in the Ottoman Empire, paintings of prophets illuminate manuscripts of universal histories, encyclopedias, didactic poetry, and anthologies of prophetic biographies (Stories of the Prophets). They depict personages, not necessarily prophets, from the Old and the New Testaments, two Arab prophets mentioned in the Qurʼan, and finally Muhammad (and ʿAli, although he was not a prophet). The acts of these figures served as moral and spiritual models for the individual believers and, no less so, for the desired behavior of Muslim rulers. In Iran, the message of the illustrated texts and their paintings shifts from historical to moral, and often to mystical. In the Ottoman Empire, in addition, the prophets were conceived as forefathers of the Ottoman dynasty. In Moghul India, only Solomon and Jesus were depicted, not very often, while Joseph’s story was quite popular in late Kashmir. The impact of Western iconography and style, which characterize the recurrence of Jesus’ image, is seen also in later Iran, where portrayals of Solomon, Joseph, and Jesus were painted mainly on decorative objects, such as pen boxes and book bindings.
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Islamic Relics
Richard McGregor
Relics can be found in every era of Islamic history, throughout the Islamic world. In line with other religious traditions of the Near East, the Qur’an mentions several objects endowed with special power (e.g., Joseph’s coat, the Ark of the Covenant). The earliest Islamic literature, preserving the life and mission of Muḥammad, presents details of several revered objects. These include objects handed down from pre-Islamic prophets as well as the discards of Muḥammad’s person, including clothing, weapons, and hair. Saintly figures, descendants of the Prophet, and his companions have also been sources for relics. Relics are displayed and venerated in devotional contexts such as shrines, tombs, mosques, madrasas, and museums. Relics have been paraded on special occasions such as the festival days of the Muslim calendar, in medieval protest marches, as part of the rituals for relief from drought, and as talismans in battle. Despite the occasional objection from austere doctors of law, devotion to relics has remained commonplace. While a full inventory is impossible, five categories may be proposed for the Islamic relic: (a) Bodily relics include the blood of martyrs, hair, and fingernail parings. Shrines have been built over severed heads—the most famous being that of Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī (d. 680). (b) Contact relics, having collected the baraka (blessing) of their one-time owners, pass those blessings on to any pilgrim who touches them. Several staffs, lances, bows, shields, turbans, cloaks, and sandals attributed to the Prophet have been preserved, some of which were presented as symbols of authority in the early caliphate. (c) Impressions in stone made by feet, hands, fingers, posteriors, and even hooves are preserved. Muḥammad’s footprints saw a brisk trade in the medieval period, and his sandal inspired a minor tradition of devotional iconography first in manuscript copies and later in modern mass production. (d) Inanimate objects, miraculously endowed with speech or locomotion, constitute a fourth category. These animated relics could be speaking stones or moving trees, particularly in the sacred topographies of Medina and Mecca. (e) Many revered places which were the site of important events have been marked off and preserved. More than commemorations, these “stage relics” anchored sacred history and holy bodies in the landscape. The location of Muḥammad’s birthplace in Mecca was until recently a revered stage relic.
