Before the 19th century, most artistic productions by Jewish makers were aligned with religious observance (“Judaica”) or consisted of printing Jewish texts after the development of the printing press and publishing houses. Over the course of the 19th century, coinciding with increasing Jewish political and intellectual emancipation, painters, sculptors, and graphic artists began to make contributions to visual culture, sometimes with markedly Jewish content, such as biblical subjects or imagery of Jewish life, but also with original contributions to favored artistic movements, such as Impressionism or 20th-century abstract art. Zionism generated a range of energetic contributions to an emerging culture, and Holocaust traumas produced powerful artistic responses. At the turn of the 20th century, leading centers of Jewish art centered on America and Israel but included the wider Diaspora.
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Jewish Art in the Modern Era
Larry Silver and Samantha Baskind
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Judaism and Visual Art
Melissa Raphael
Until the late 20th century, it was widely assumed that visual art could be of only negligible significance to a Jewish tradition that had been principally mediated through written texts. However, by the closing decades of the 20th century, Jewish cultural historians had demonstrated that, while Jewish worship and study is indubitably logocentric, the Second Commandment’s prohibition of the making and worshipping of graven images has not entailed a blanket ban on visual art. Jews have not been uniformly indifferent or hostile to visual art, a category that includes the architectural design and decoration of synagogues; funerary monuments; illuminated manuscripts; embroidery; liturgical seats, pulpits, and the other fittings and ornaments of religious Jewish life at home and at worship; as well as, since the 19th century, drawing, painting and sculpture. Most interpreters now read the biblical texts as prohibiting only the making and worshipping of images of the divine. The Bible forbids idolatry, but is aware that not all images are idolatrous. By around the 3rd century of the Common Era, rabbinical rulings recognized that the danger of Jews becoming idolaters, as they might have done under formerly pagan dispensations, had passed. In short, although in a number of Jewish historical periods and geographical regions there have been good reasons to be reluctant to accommodate visual art within the tradition, there is also ample evidence of visual art in settings that span the entire geography and history of Judaism. Jewish avoidance or neglect of visual art has usually been more historically contingent than theologically necessary. The religious culture of Jews resident in Islamic lands, for example, tended to conform to their hosts’ prevailing, though not historically or geographically comprehensive, tendency to aniconism.
On grounds such as these, it has been argued that the notion of Judaism as an aniconic tradition is a modern one. Kant’s appreciation of the Second Commandment as one of Judaism’s few redeeming features, proscribing any crude urge to see that which exceeds the bounds of sensibility, encouraged western European Jews to advert to Judaism’s lack of art a sign of its pre-eminence as the first enlightened religion. The 19th and early 20th-century claim that Jewish tradition is aural and literary, but not visual, seems to have owed more to the modern German scientific study of Judaism’s use of the Second Commandment to highlight affinities between Jewish and Christian monotheism and to Jews’ desire to integrate into Protestant culture, than to restrictions within their own legal and cultural inheritance.
Perceived violations of the Second Commandment no longer provoke much of a reaction in any but the most conservative Jewish communities. And even among the Haredim, artists have begun to paint semi-abstract pictures that are not considered a deviation from halakhic norms. Yet, while many Jews still regard abstraction as a more permissible form of Jewish visual art than others, it is evident that the art tradition that developed after Jewish civil emancipation in Western Europe has actually been predominantly figurative. A number of scholars have therefore proposed that the Second Commandment has not so much prevented figurative visual art as promoted a distinctive set of styles and techniques, especially those that allow Jewish artists to make images that fulfill their quintessentially Jewish obligation to criticize idolatrous images. Jewish art, it has been argued, exists because of the Second Commandment, not in spite of it.
This essay does not cover Jewish approaches and contributions to film and architecture. It examines both the history and theorization of Jewish visual art and Jewish religious approaches to visual art. The essay uses the findings of this two-pronged enquiry to suggest that Jewish visual art, which is more than art by artists who happen to be Jews, is properly counter-idolatrous art, art that is far from hindered by the Second Commandment but is actively produced by it. Jewish art does more than build cultural, political, and national Jewish identities; it does more than the commemorative work of visually constructing Jewish memory. Visual art made by Jews becomes Jewish when it serves a constructive theological, prophetic purpose and when it uses idoloclastic techniques to produce images that both cancel and restore the glory of the human. This claim counters the prevailing view that there can be no unified or normative theory of Jewish art.
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Kabbalah in Art and Architecture
Batsheva Goldman-Ida
Kabbalah (literally “the receiving” [of tradition]) is an early form of Jewish mysticism. Key concepts include the ten sefirot (heavenly spheres), the Hebrew alphabet, Shiur Qomah (dimensions of the divine body), the archangel Metatron, and the Shekhinah (the feminine aspect of the Godhead).
The main books of the Kabbalah, written in early antiquity, include Sefer Yetzirah (Book of Creation), an early and major source, thought to be from the 3rd century ce, whose commentaries constitute most subsequent Kabbalistic literature and Sefer ha’Bahir (Book of Enlightenment), first published in the early 12th century. Both works discuss the ten sefirot and the Hebrew letters. Other works are the Hekhalot (Palace) literature, which includes the ritual praxis of “descending to the Chariot” and hymns recited in a celestial Temple, the Apocalypse of Abraham, the book of Enoch, and sections of the Dead Sea scrolls. In the Mishnah Hagigah (220 ce), two variants of Kabbalah are mentioned: the study of Creation and the study of the Heavenly Chariot. These two categories are linked to biblical prooftexts: the study of creation to the first chapter of Genesis, and the study of the Heavenly Chariot to the first chapter of the book of Prophet Ezekiel.
Of the Kabbalistic treatises and texts written in the medieval period, the most important ones are the book of the Zohar (Splendor) by Moses de Leon (c. 1240–1305) and possibly other authors, and the writings of Abraham Abulafia (1240–c. 1291) and that of his student Joseph Gikatilla. The book of the Zohar is distinguished by a reliance on the ten sefirot, although couched in esoteric references, while the many books by Abulafia present linguistic mysticism with permutations of divine names. The former emphasis on the sefirot is also known from the ‘Iyyun (Study) Group in Provence, and Azriel of Gerona (1160–1238), whereas in works by the Hasidei Ashkenaz (German Pietists), led by Judah the Pious (1150–1217) and Eleazar of Worms (c. 1176–1238), numerology and angelology are basic tools.
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Liturgical and Ceremonial Art: Preaching and Visual Culture in the Early Modern World
Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby
A challenging issue in the field of religious studies is the relationship between preaching and art, particularly the manner in which preachers used works of art in their preaching and described specific pictures in their sermons; the way theological discourse influenced religious architecture; and the form and function of the preaching platform, whether a pulpit in Christianity, the minbar in Islam, or the bima in Judaism. There is a growing interest in the interrelationships among art, performance, and preaching in the early modern world; there has also been recent engagement in the way visual culture enhanced the power that preachers had over their audiences, and the interactions between preaching and visual culture in the various European and Mediterranean communities. When approaching this topic, one should apply an interdisciplinary approach by focusing across the historical, literary, and art-history fields in the increasingly active area of global studies. One should also consider the interactions between the visual and the verbal; the exchange between sermons and images, preaching and the arts through the lens of performance theory and models of word and image; and the exchange between textual and visual cultures.
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Liturgy and Music at Hagia Sophia
Bissera V. Pentcheva
Hagia Sophia, the former Orthodox Christian cathedral of Constantinople, is the single most important monument that survives from Byzantium. Its daring architecture of cascading dome and semi-domes reflects a unique vision of beauty and power introduced by the emperor Justinian (527–565). Equally impressive is the interior decoration of gold mosaics and marble. Yet, it is the liturgy with its large congregation, officiating clergy, and numerous choirs that brought about the effect of being transported to a place in between heaven and earth. Within its walls, a rich multisensory experience was created through the integration of architecture, music, acoustics, and liturgy. The material fabric of the building and its acoustics together with the liturgy performed by Hagia Sophia’s officiating clergy and the chants sung by the choirs formed the character of the cathedral rite. The architectural form and ritual performed in this space harmonized with the Byzantine philosophical and mystagogical explanations and enabled the religious experience of nearness to the divine.
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Martin Luther and Visual Culture
Elke Anna Werner
In the mind of Martin Luther, images were first and foremost adiaphora and, as such, neither good nor bad. However, Luther spoke out firmly against the worship of images, as did other reformers. Based on his own anthropology, he countered the misuse of images by suggesting correct ways of using them, on the basis that man could only discover true faith through the mediation of images. For many years, researchers emphasized Luther’s negative attitude to images as a medium and highlighted the shift from a pre-Reformation culture of piety to the reformatory emphasis on the Scriptures. However, more recent examinations of liturgical practices and the link between art and politics, involving innovative methods, as well as some degree of imagination, have not only traced the development of a specific visual culture in Lutheranism but also highlighted their identity-creating function in denominational conflicts.
What follows is an overview of the major image and media categories as portraits, allegories, altarpieces and epitaphs which influenced the visual culture of the Reformation. Lucas Cranach the Elder (c. 1472–1553) and his youngest son Lucas Cranach the Younger (1515–1586) were at the very center of this activity, together with their productive Wittenberg workshop. From the very beginning of the Reformation right through to the 1580s, both liaised with Luther, Melanchthon, and other Wittenberg reformers, respectively accompanying and decisively shaping the development of Protestantism with their pictures. What is more and of equal importance, the influence of their work is reflected in the popularity of their style in Protestant territories throughout the Empire during the 16th century.
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Martin Luther and the Arts: Music, Poetry, and Hymns
Johannes Schilling
From the beginning of the Reformation, Martin Luther had a significant impact on church and society through his contributions to sacred music. His intention to spread the gospel among the people through song achieved its manifold purpose. This remains true not only for his own time but for the following centuries up to the present day, all over the world. Other poets, contemporaries and descendants alike, were inspired by Luther’s songs and composed their own hymns. Among these the most significant ones in German literature, poetically and theologically, are Paul Gerhardt (1607–1676) and Jochen Klepper (1903–1942).
Luther’s lifelong love of music was accompanied by an in-depth musical education. He knew secular and sacred songs from an early age, played the lute well, and sang in the convent when he was a monk, as a husband and father with his family, and as a professor with his students. Music was an indispensable part of his life. He first began writing sacred songs in 1523, sometimes composing the melody as well. He also crafted a four-part motet.
Luther was able to assess the composers of his time well. He considered Josquin des Prez (d. 1521) the greatest master, and among his living contemporaries he appreciated in particular Ludwig Senfl (c. 1490–1543). He was also acquainted with other composers and their works.
The incorporation and promotion of music in the schoolroom resulted in a close relationship between church and school, as well as between classrooms and religious services. Pupils took part through chanting at services, and the evangelical hymns in the chantry were spread through the choir’s chanting books. Numerous musical prints originated in Georg Rhau’s printing shop in Wittenberg that carried the Protestant repertoire into the world.
From central Germany, starting in Saxony and Thuringia, the Protestant musical culture covered all of evangelical Germany and later shaped Protestant musical culture. In addition to choir-related music, it cultivated the musical rendering of biblical texts.
Heinrich Schütz and Johann Sebastian Bach are the finest representatives of this specific Protestant musical culture. In addition, the culture of the organ, first cultivated in northern Germany, became widespread. One of several masters of the organ was Dieterich Buxtehude (c. 1637–1707), who established evening concerts in Lübeck, which in turn served as precursors to the bourgeois musical culture.
Luther’s approach to music is formed through the conviction that music is a particularly beautiful and unique offering of the divine creation. Music moves human hearts and allows them to anticipate the heavens. To bring people joy and to praise the Lord is music’s true task and, indeed, its service.
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Material Culture and Religion
David Morgan
The study of the material culture of religion represents a long-established interest in material artifacts as sources of information about religious cultures. But it also has featured a turn since the 1990s toward recognizing that the dominant dependence on texts tends to dematerialize religion by turning it into a system of ideas, a body of creeds or teachings, a worldview, or a discourse. Religions are more than ideas or dogmas, because they are about things, bodies, animals, places, and natural events and forces. These are not mere signifiers of value but the very medium in which religions take shape. The emphasis on texts and ideas reflects the strong influence of classical humanism and Christianity, both of which privilege human agency as sovereign and unparalleled in nature.
Since the late 20th century, scholars in the social sciences and humanities have been rethinking received conceptions of matter, causality, and sociality. As a result, what has come to be called the “new materialism” amounts to a broad effort to reconceive the place of human beings in the natural world by recognizing ecologies as the basic unit of relation in nature: nothing exists in isolation but participates in networks of interdependent interactions. This realization urges that things are not dead matter waiting for the thinking substance of mind to endow them with purpose but rather are indeterminate and emergent actors exhibiting agency in their effect upon other things. Such an approach offers a stimulating framework for the study of religions, because it stresses the importance of materiality.
By training attention on things and their environments, scholars of religion can scrutinize how the material conditions and artifacts of religious practice and belief exert agency, how they change over time, and how they interact with discourse and thought. Things are not stable or unitary. They exist within ecologies of time as well as space. So, the material study of religion is always also the historical study of religion. Artifacts are produced with histories behind them and used within specifiable contexts. But artifacts are never only what their producers intended them for. They are passed down, modified, repurposed, or destroyed. This means that objects exhibit a cultural biography, or even a series of lives. It also means that waste is a category of materiality that is important to recognize.
The idea of “material culture” will seem at odds with the new materialism’s scope to scrutinize materiality far beyond human culture. But the deeper recognition at stake is realizing that human beings are incomplete without things, without their ecological connections to objects, places, animals, and people. Culture is all manner of ways in which human beings produce and are produced by these connections. The materiality of culture consists of the embodied, emplaced, and interactive nature of the connections. The emphasis on things has allowed the recognition of their repressed or overlooked agencies. That is because thingness resists lasting objectification. Human beings and other animals craft objects and places, but they do not last. They change over time, are appropriated by others or repurposed, and they decay and are destroyed. In its capacity to be different kinds of objects, a thing is always more than an object.
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Mexican Monastic Architecture
Niccolò Brooker
Mexico’s 16th-century monasteries, or conventos, occupy a singular place in history. These immense, often complex assemblages of buildings within vast compounds are the first architectural expressions resulting from the great contact between Europe and the New World, that is, between the zealous Spanish friars who conceived them and the extensive Amerindian workforce which constructed them. Reflective to a degree of their European predecessors, the Mexican conventos represented adaptations to unique religious circumstances and, as a result, introduced original architectural adjuncts, the most significant of which was the open chapel, or capilla abierta. Catering to large-scale, outdoor religious ceremonies to which the Amerindians were accustomed, these chapels were instrumental in the conversion of millions of indigenous from pre-Cortesian paganism to Christian monotheism.
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Monasteries, Holy Monks, Tridentine Saints: Port Cities of Seville and Valencia
Karen Mathews
Religious art in Valencia and Seville reflected the international character of these port cities, attracting a diverse patronage base as well as some of the most talented artists in Spain. The city of Valencia turned east toward the Mediterranean and the movement of artists and artworks around the sea reflected its political, economic, and cultural importance in the region. Seville was the administrative center for Spain’s American colonies and its influence spread across the Atlantic. The international scope of these ports meant that their artistic culture played a defining role in Counter-Reformation Spain. This article addresses several interrelated themes in the religious art of Valencia and Seville. The thematic threads explored here include the international character of these cities and their outward focus on the Mediterranean and the Americas, the role of secular and ecclesiastical art patrons in commissions of painting and sculpture, artistic solutions for the representation of complex imagery and the requirements of Counter-Reformation art, and the accommodation of artists to new tastes in art that reflected a changing political and economic climate. The extraordinary wealth of religious art produced in these two cities can be seen as a manifestation of a central tenet of the Catholic Church in Spain—the power of imagery to inspire, teach, delight, and admonish. Artists and patrons collaborated to forge and perpetuate a veritable industry of image-making that served political ends, addressed social concerns, and highlighted the piety and devotion of each city’s inhabitants in the 17th century.
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Museums and Exhibitions: Overview and History
Maia Wellington Gahtan
Much of the art housed in Western museums is religious in nature—the result of how these museum collections were assembled and merged with differing displays over time. The origins of museums and their exhibition activities lie in the vast and myriad collecting histories of ancient, medieval, and Early Modern times, when the avenues of acquisition and display were often intertwined with sacred purposes. As empires, international trade, and missionaries encouraged the movement of people, objects, and ideas, they ensured that the monumental containers meant to preserve and display these collections took on meanings ever more distinct from the original meanings and functions of the individual objects they housed, religious or otherwise. Collections also evolved into “contact zones” between peoples and objects. While the history of display is different from that of museums, because it is premised more on a visiting public than on preservation and study efforts, these approaches to objects merge in the 16th century so that visual comparison and the ordering of displays are seen as a means to develop further knowledge from a collection.
What had been a gradual and eclectic accumulation process was accelerated in the 18th century with a raft of Enlightenment museum projects that identified new political and aesthetic ends for art collections, further decontextualizing objects from their religious and cultural origins and embedding them in more prominent ideological and often aesthetic narratives—what some scholars have referred to as “iconoclasm without destruction.” As more objects became “art” and the concept of art engendered ever more elaborate theorization, the idea of different kinds of visitorship—that an object might be visited for either religious or secular purposes—also took hold. Critics of large Enlightenment museum projects, especially the Louvre, lamented decontextualization on historical grounds, just as the closure of religious institutions left scars in their communities while bolstering attention to the newly formed museum collections. Such events precipitated the spread of the “museum eyes” to which all religious art, even that in situ or in museums associated with religious institutions, was subject.
Recent decades have witnessed museum efforts to recontextualize objects by reclaiming the voices of source communities, identifying shared heritage, and recognizing objects as active interlocutors. Such mediation efforts are meant to restore some of the religious meanings of art while often maintaining secular approaches to museum governance and display. The increasingly broad and nuanced recognition of the intangible dimension of material heritage in general and of religion in particular has enhanced these recontextualization efforts. Ultimately the issues at stake revolve around perceived ownership and the role of the museum in society: Can a secular museum ever fully own a religious object? If not, how can that ownership be effectively shared? Does or should the status of the object and its owner(s) impact its museum audience, which may include a broad swath of society with different backgrounds, beliefs, and expectations?
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Museums Dedicated to Religious Art
Maia Wellington Gahtan
Collections and museums are dedicated to the accumulation and care of religious art for multiple historical and pastoral reasons—reasons that shift over time as institutions change governance and focus. Most museums holding primarily religious art today are the result of long historical processes in which earlier collections of objects intended for religious purposes and functions have been transformed into collections now available to the public. Few such collections remain close to intact, though many enjoy a continuous tradition deriving from their presence in their original locations and their ongoing religious use. Other collections demonstrate how outside forces impact the legal and cultural foundations of collections and institutions, forcing them to change function.
Perhaps the largest distinction one can make between different types of museums and collections dedicated to religious art is between those managed by religious institutions and those which are not, though the latter may once in their histories have been administered by religious institutions. Although it is not a hard and fast rule, religious entities tend to house collections of a more local nature, stemming from their own institutional collecting histories and reflective of the lived religion of their constituents. Nonreligious entities are more likely to house works reflecting a wider geography based on thematic acquisitions, though there are many exceptions to these rules, most notably museums within religious institutions deriving from missionary collections or those which have amassed many foreign objects in their treasuries as a result of pilgrimage or extensive trade.
Since the distinction between sacred and secular collections is a relatively recent one—a consequence of Enlightenment Europe’s desire to categorize objects and thought as sacred or secular—collections and individual objects formed before this period often resist such neat categorization. Sacred collections of objects in religious institutions have always been visited with attitudes that betrayed interests beyond religious ones, and royal palaces housed collections considered to be as holy as the individuals for whom the palaces were built, and many objects themselves that eventually came to partake of collections within religious institutions may not have initially been produced for a religious context but rather came to enjoy second lives as religious offerings.
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Museums, Expositions, and Religion in North America since the 19th Century
Hillary Kaell
Since the mid-19th century increasing numbers of North Americans have had access to new technologies of display that feature religious artifacts. Missionaries and museum curators played an especially important role as cultural brokers in this regard. They often worked together to set up ethnographic collections, although their respective goals differed in terms of spiritual uplift and public education. In the same period, the mediation of religious objects took place in other arenas too, such as recreations of sacred sites and spirit photography. In the 20th century, religious objects were mediated through cinema and television. In each case, the materialization and mediation of religion raises a number of significant questions, including those related to the aestheticization of sacred objects in public museums and the display of things and rituals associated with religious “others.” Since the 1980s, North Americans have engaged in debates about whether to repatriate indigenous objects and human bones to their communities of origin. There have also been significant protests related to the provocative use of Christian imagery in contemporary art. Increasingly, scholars have also begun to recognize and study how museum spaces are more malleable than previously assumed, especially as new publics access them and may even (re)use the sacred objects they house.
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Music and Religion in American Public Life
Jason C. Bivins
Music in American public life is best understood not simply as the formal arrangement of religious texts in sound but as a fluid arena of exchange between performers, participants, and audiences. In these exchanges we note the transformation of religious traditions themselves, as they navigate contact with their others and the challenges of public life or secularism; we also see the emergence of American religious musics as alternate publics themselves, in which new understandings of authority, tradition, and identity are negotiated. What is more, in recent decades American genre music—from jazz to hip-hop—has become a steady arena in which new forms of religiosity are proposed and debated.
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Neoclassicism and Religious Art in 18th-Century Europe
Allison Palmer
The term “Neoclassicism” refers to an era when a large number of artists and scholars across Europe in the 18th century took inspiration from the history and material remains of classical antiquity, which was defined as ancient Greece and Rome. While Neoclassicism is often considered a stylistic trend, artists worked across stylistic categories, yet they were all part of a broad milieu that responded to profound societal changes by seeking out classical precedents for questions posed by Enlightenment thinkers. These questions included the purpose of religion in society, where philosophers including John Locke (1632–1704) and François-Marie Arouet Voltaire (1694–1778) theorized new spiritual modes to examine human existence.
Many religious painters of the 18th century studied at the French Academy of Painting and Sculpture established in Paris in 1648 under royal sponsorship that dictated taste, and these artists were championed for their ability to depict grand expressions of human emotion learned from antiquity and from classicizing Renaissance and Baroque artists, including French painter Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665), who popularized the Roman concept of exempla virtutis. Jean- Baptiste Colbert, the First Minister to King Louis XIV and Vice-Protector of the Academy, promoted this grand classicizing Baroque style as the elevated style of the aristocracy, which laid the foundation for Neoclassicism. For French philosopher Denis Diderot (1713–1784), art could provide pleasure, but a superior artwork provided a visual beauty that inspired virtuous behavior; thus, while not all art served a religious function, artworks often showed examples of virtue. For example, Diderot, who reported on the biennial exhibitions sponsored by the Academy in Paris, praised Jacques-Louis David’s (1748–1825) Oath of the Horatii (1784, Louvre Museum, Paris), a depiction of a 7th-century bce Roman legend, for its demonstration of patriotic sacrifice. Many of these moralizing narratives drew upon stories from classical antiquity, learned by artists trained at the French Academy in Rome (established in 1666) during a period of study sometimes called the Grand Tour.
Neoclassical art was also shaped by the intense cultural questioning that arose with the French Revolution, and it found fertile ground during the Industrial Revolution. Religious art had a complicated historical development in the 18th century given the dramatic changes that disrupted religious institutions and church patronage in favor of secular patrons and new subjects. Nonetheless, the moralizing tendencies of Neoclassicism and the academic favoring of historical painting continued to provide a place for religious art and architecture throughout the 18th century, much of which deserves further study.
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Overview of Architecture and Religion Since 1500
Thomas Barrie
The architecture of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam during the historically significant period of the 16th through 20th centuries reveals many similarities and differences. Particularly important are the architectural languages each employed to materialize, facilitate, and communicate their religion, and how they changed over time. Additionally, the ontological and symbolic roles of architecture and the key theoretical approaches to the subject are relevant contexts. These include typological taxonomies of organizations, path sequences, and historical, conceptual, or symbolic characteristics. Lastly, seven primary roles of religious architecture—historical, authoritative, commemorative, theocentric, cosmological, prestige, and community places–can effectively situate and contextualize particular examples.
During the pivotal 16th century, popes remade St. Peter’s Basilica and the Vatican and transformed Rome into the ecclesiastical and political center of Christianity; Jews built substantial synagogues that reflected their status during the Golden Age of Jews in Poland; and the Ottoman Empire built some of its most significant mosque complexes that expressed the hegemony of the theocratic state. Subsequent periods of the architecture of the Abrahamic religions illustrate particular themes, and explicate the variety of roles, and relative importance, of the architecture at particular periods. Modernism, in particular, produced significant changes in the architecture, where complexity, ambiguity, inventiveness, and oscillations between tradition and innovation reflected the impacts of new technologies, liturgical reforms, and global architectural cultures. Throughout, the capacity of architecture to materialize and communicate ontological, historical, religious, and sociopolitical content and accommodate communal rituals cannot be overstated.
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Pilgrimage Centers and Relics in Catholic Spain
María del Mar Doval Trueba and Barbara von Barghahn
The prominence of the Catholic faith in Spain is evident in the number of basilicas, cathedrals, churches, sanctuaries, monasteries, convents, pilgrimage sites, altarpieces, statues, as well as the municipal commemoration of feast days throughout the country. Spain boasts the third-highest number of major pilgrimage sites in the Catholic world after Jerusalem and Rome.
The season of Easter, extending from Holy Week through Corpus Christi (or Corpus Domini) provides several case studies in veneration and devotional artistic expression related to pilgrimage and relics in Spain. Corpus Christi, a feast celebrated sixty days after Easter, merits singular analysis. The feast utilizes images of the Salvador Eucharistica, an expression of the mystical transubstantiation of the sacred host defined by the Catholic Church. Resplendent altarpieces and devotional works of art in Spain contain many references to the popular veneration of the body and blood of Jesus, providing numerous examples of the themes, motifs, and artistic techniques commonly associated with Catholic devotional art and pilgrimage.
In addition, this article discusses the public adoration of relics related to the passion of Jesus Christ: the holy chalice of Valencia, the tablecloth of the Last Supper, and the Holy Shroud (Pañolón de Oviedo), and the sudarium of St. Veronica and its vernicles.
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Poetry, Prophecy, and Theological Revelation
William Franke
In the history and prehistory of human societies, poets, prophets, and seers (the word vates can cover all three) have often been virtually indistinguishable from one another. From time immemorial, their respective activities overlap and interpenetrate to such an extent that prophets (or mantics or seers) and poets have been closely associated and tend to completely coalesce in many of their functions and modalities. The Sanskrit word kavi (like its Latin cognate vates) embraces both. A certain strand of ideology running through the Bible (at least as interpreted by classical rabbinic texts) aims to drive a wedge between God-inspired prophecy and humanly created poems. Nevertheless, the Hebrew word nabi for “prophet” means “bubbling forth, as from a fountain,” so the vocabulary of the Hebrew Bible, too, is naturally apt to suggest the creative fecundity of verbal imagination. In fact, Amos, Isaiah, Elisha, and Ezekiel frequently produce parables, proverbs, and even love songs.
In primordial cultures, with only minimal social stratification and differentiation of roles, long before any specific mantles as either prophet or poet can be identified and donned, a figure like that of the shaman or even the wizard (Merlin, for example) is often emblematic of a certain undecidability between religious revelation or spiritual experience and creative imagination and invention. Of course, in modern cultures, with their highly differentiated social roles, theological revelation and poetry are typically seen as distinct and often even as opposed to each other in crucial respects. Yet the two still need to be understood together as reciprocal and symbiotic in their origins, aims, and purposes. Throughout subsequent history, the deepest intents of literary and religious practices remain inseparable from each other in their myriad manifestations within our cultural traditions and institutions; they thus stand to be illuminated by such a juxtaposition. Poetry and prophecy together comprise the common matrix of some of the oldest and most fundamental modes of expression of humanity across cultures.
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Popular Culture and Religion in America
Lynn Schofield Clark and Seth M. Walker
“Popular culture” is a term that usually refers to those commercially produced items specifically associated with leisure, media, and lifestyle choices. To study religion in popular culture, then, is to explore religion’s appearance in the commercially produced artifacts and texts of a culture.
The study of popular culture has been a catalyst of sorts in the context of studying religion. Some have speculated that with the increasing presence of religion in commercially produced products and specifically in the entertainment media, religion may be reduced to entertainment. Others, however, have argued that religion has always been expressed and experienced through contemporary forms of culture, and thus its manifestation in popular culture can be interpreted as a sign of the vitality rather than the demise or superficiality of contemporary religions.
Popular culture is worthy of study given its role in cultural reproduction. The study of popular culture and religion encourages scholars to consider the extent to which popular cultural representations limit broader critical considerations of religion by depicting and reinforcing taken-for-granted assumptions of what religion is, who practices it and where, and how it endures as a powerful societal institution. Alternately, popular culture has been explored as a site for public imaginings of how religious practices and identities might be different and more inclusive than they have been in the past, pointing toward the artistic and playful ways in which popular religious expression can comment upon dominant religion, dominant culture, and the power relations between them.
With the rise of an ubiquitous media culture in which people are increasingly creators and distributors as well as consumers and modifiers of popular culture, the term has come to encompass a wide variety of products and artifacts, including those both commercially produced and generated outside of traditional commercial and religious contexts. Studies might include explorations of religion in such popular television programs as Orange Is the New Black or in novels such as The Secret Life of Bees, but might also include considerations of how religion and popular culture intersect in practices of Buddhism in the virtual gaming site Second Life, in the critical expressions of Chicana art, in the commercial experiments of Islamic punk rock groups, and in hashtag justice movements.
The study of religion and popular culture can be divided into two major strands, both of which are rooted in what is known as the “culture and civilization tradition.” The first strand focuses on popular culture, myth, and cultural cohesion or continuity, while the second explores popular culture in relation to religion, power, and cultural tensions.
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Public Art and Religion in America
Kymberly Pinder
Public art in the United States has a long and complicated history through which nationalism and public monuments have often been intertwined. The most prominent public art forms have been statues and murals. Murals, as the more accessible medium, have served both hegemonic and subversive goals. Religious symbols and figures appear alongside fallen war heroes and slain street gang members alike. In considering public, artistic manifestations of religion in America, the terms, “public” and “art” must be carefully defined. As Sally M. Promey has noted, “To discuss publics is thus to deal with entities both kinetic and partial . . . The public display of religion is thus fundamentally interactive, the full range of interpretive responses inherently unpredictable” (David Morgan and Sally M. Promey, eds. The Visual Culture of American Religions [Berkeley: University of California, 2001], p. 32). For the sake of establishing some parameters, this examination considers public to be grounded in issues of accessibility. Public art is that which multiple audiences can see and experience in a public space; it also implies a very specific notion of community or belonging. This definition of public through accessibility implies democratization. “Public art” has shifting meanings and associations that contrast with those for “private art.”
Who engages with the artwork trumps why they engage it. The art is public because these terms can mean many different things to different people. Even the concepts of public versus publics and private versus public engage debates regarding the artist’s intentionality and the audiences’ agency to interpret what they will. In his introduction to Dialogues in Public Art (1992), Tom Finklepearl writes, the word “public” is associated with the lower classes (public school, public transportation, public housing, public park, public assistance, public defender) as opposed to the word “private.” Which is associated with privilege (private school, private car, private home, private country club, private fortune, private attorney). (Tom Finkelpearl, Dialogues in Public Art [Cambridge: MIT, 2000], x).
Adding religion to these equations complicates these dynamics based on the religious, cultural, personal, or political needs of the audience, and the secularization of public space, among other things, has transformed religion’s role in modern society. Religion’s presence in the public sphere may serve different purposes and may be more or less effective, but it still exists, albeit in less traditional forms. Public theology activates these images by giving traditional and historical religious symbols meaning relevant to their specific contemporary viewers. Public religious art, like public theology, engages broader social, political, and cultural concerns that are not always connected to one particular religion. Often these concerns are specific to the location of the public art object and its audience.
