Over the past six centuries, the way believers, theologians, and scholars in Europe have produced, received, and studied copies of the Qurʾanic text has evolved alongside changes in how the text is accessed, moving from manuscripts to replicas, and now to online platforms where the Qurʾanic text and related artifacts are digitally available. The investigation of the role and understanding of the Qurʾan—as an artifact—in Europe requires careful attention to its material form and significance during each specific period, from the Renaissance to the modern period.
The Qurʾan has been part of the religious culture of the Western Muslim territories since the beginnings of Islam, as it is expressed, for example, in the manuscript of the Qurʾan copied in the Muslim Palermo in 982–983 ce or the several Qurʾans in Kufic and round scripts written, for example, in Valencia, Seville, or Cordova. Then, it continued to be an object of religious faith copied among the last Muslim communities in modern Spain during the Moriscos periods from the 15th to the 17th century. As a Counter-Reformation measure, the Qurʾan was listed in the Catholic Indices of Prohibited Books in 1559, leading to a ban on both printed and manuscript versions in the Christian West. Similarly, Ottoman authorities banned the importation of printed books in Arabic script until 1588, and the printing and trade of the Qurʾan text in Muslim lands were considered illicit until the end of the 19th century.
In Europe, the Qurʾan was used as the basis for the study of the Arabic grammar by scholars in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. The text was approached in its manuscript form with a paleographic and philological interest that was used mainly at the service of theology in a polemical context. In European history, it was only in the 17th to 18th century that the polemic discourse and philological interest were distinguished as two distinct disciplines. In institutions and private libraries, the presence of the Qurʾan as an artifact went hand in hand with the availability of Qurʾanic manuscripts, resulting from the fruit of collectors to war booty, with its richest period in the 19th and then 20th centuries, thanks to scholars and merchants who traveled to the Middle East. Europe as part of the World Wide Web has reached the peak of its connection with the Qurʾan as a material object in its cultural and artistic value thorough digital images and text since the 2010s.
Article
The Qurʾan in Manuscript, Print, and Digital Form
Alba Fedeli
Article
Race, the Arts, and Religion in America
Craig R. Prentiss
With the slow realization that race was not a category in nature, but rather the fruit of social imagination emerging from colonialism, scholars in the late 20th century shifted their focus to the cultural elements feeding that imagination, including religion and the arts. Although most studies in the field address fairly conventional constructions of religion and the arts (two categories that, like race, have also been destabilized), some studies reveal the potential for these three categories to be co-constituting. Studies addressing religiously themed music, including spirituals, gospel, hip-hop, and a significant portion of country music, have shed light on the ways in which these genres encode and inform racial paradigms. Portraits in theater, dance, and film of ideas and practices associated with Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, and other social groupings have proven active sites for the production of influential, and often competing, conceptions of race. Stereotypes linking religious and racial classifications are perpetuated as well as challenged in these artistic media. Given that the racial imagination in the United States is articulated using the language of color, painting and sculpture have been instrumental in conveying vivid connections between race and religion. For instance, many paintings celebrating Christianity’s triumph over America’s indigenous people concurrently depicted white dominance over them as well. A theological system rooting skin color in divine decree, like the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints did in its Book of Mormon, helped assure a fair-skinned and fair-haired Jesus would populate its art. The politics of Jesus’ color continued to be played out in painting and sculpture in the United States to the present day, and exemplifies the interaction of racial, religious, and artistic categories.
Article
Relics and Pilgrimage in Western Europe
Janet Ellen Snyder
Relics, pilgrimage, miraculous occurrences, the visual arts, architecture, and patronage were closely intertwined western Christendom from the earliest period through the later Middle Ages. Relics have been venerated not only in Christianity but also in many other religions, including Islam and Buddhism. Due to the complex relationship between religious conviction, physical objects, precious materials and containers, wars and political alliances, economic and territorial interests, and the explosion in the number of pilgrimage centers in Western Europe, this brief study of relics, pilgrims, and pilgrimage must be limited to mainstream Latin Christianity, primarily from the later Middle Ages until the Protestant Reformation. Background will be provided to flesh out the special nature of the content. The profound influence on the visual arts of pilgrimage and the veneration of relics is apparent in various aspects of this study: the relics themselves and their containers; reasons and motivations for pilgrimage in the later Middle Ages; accommodations for visitors in churches and along the routes of pilgrimage.
Visual arts and architecture supported the honor and veneration of holy beings and holy sites by pilgrims at reliquary shrines, with textiles, special containers, and altar vessels; painted and gilded exterior and interior sculpture programs made of stone or wood; painted stained-glass windows and wall paintings; and church furnishings. Grand and spacious churches with many formal similarities were constructed during the later Middle Ages along each route followed by pilgrims from Northern Europe to Jerusalem, Rome, and Santiago de Compostela. The development of church plans and the proliferation of chapels around the choir reveal the impact of pilgrimage and the relics pilgrims sought to visit.
Pilgrims undertook their arduous journeys for various reasons. Upon setting out, pilgrims usually intended to return home, though the dangers and difficulties meant that many were unable to do so. Pilgrims obtained authorization from their local bishop to be given hospitality and to be accommodated on their journeys. The later Middle Ages witnessed an explosion in the numbers of participants in extended journeys as well as in local pilgrimages, in all regions of Europe. Thefts and translations as well as pious donations brought a proliferation of relics and reliquaries. The needs of pilgrims—for shelter and sustenance, nourishment and healthcare, and well-maintained roads, bridges, and ferry crossings—meant that the architectural amenities provided in response to pilgrimage had a powerful international impact in the places they visited and upon the homelands to which they returned. The influences not only of souvenirs brought home but also of the pilgrim’s life experience on the visual arts and architecture are complex and have been long-lasting.
Article
Relics and Reliquaries in Colonial Mexico
Gabriela Sánchez Reyes
The cult of saints, through their relics in colonial Mexico, is related to the importation of relics from the great centers of pilgrimage in Europe and the Holy Land. Reliquaries were artifacts made to preserve the relics, avoid their fragmentation, and expose them to the faithful. Since the Middle Ages, different types were created with different forms whose function was to protect and exhibit the content. These designs passed to American territories, where it is still possible to admire some European reliquaries as well as some of local manufacture.
The circulation of relics began in 1521, after the consolidation of the evangelization and the inauguration of the new viceroyalty government. The circulation and donation of relics should be understood as a long process. They were imported objects that were difficult to acquire, as their sale was prohibited by law. Typically, it was necessary to have contacts in the high clergy abroad. Acquiring relics also required a significant investment of funds to cover both the relic’s purchase and the costs of its transfer from abroad.
Despite these difficulties, little by little, the relics of various saints and martyrs made their way to the Americas, some in carton boxes, others in gold urns or even in small paper envelopes. Reliquaries were soon manufactured to house these relics. Their design generally depended on two factors: the quantity of the relics obtained, and the shape of the relics.
The collections of reliquaries with their respective relics were displayed both in the cathedral headquarters and in the temples of the religious orders. Because they were incorporated at different times, they were made in different styles using different materials, and so it is possible to find a great variety in their manufacture. Various types of reliquaries can be classified from this time, from the reliquary chapels to the altarpiece reliquaries, anthropomorphic reliquaries, and medallion reliquaries, and they stand as a testament to the cult of saints in colonial Mexico.
Article
Religious Art and Architecture in 18th-Century Europe
Sean DeLouche
The 18th century was an era of transition for the arts and religion. Monarchs continued to commission religious art and architecture for a variety of reasons, including fulfillment of vows, expressions of faith and piety, and celebrations of dynastic power. The period saw simultaneous trends toward sumptuous decoration and sober display, as well as the rise of new artistic styles, including the Rococo, Neoclassicism, and the Gothic Revival. The Grand Tour brought many northern European Protestants to the seat of Catholicism. Protestant attitudes toward “popish” art softened in the 18th century, due in part to the increasing contact between Catholic and Protestant culture in Rome and to the perception that Catholicism was no longer a plausible threat. As the temporal and spiritual power of Rome declined in the 18th century, the papacy sought to reestablish itself as a cultural authority. The papacy embellished Rome with a number of archaeological and architectural initiatives, linking the popes with classical civilization and casting themselves as the custodians of the shared Western cultural tradition. With a growing art market and the consumer revolution, the populace had expanding access to religious imagery, from fine religious canvases collected by Catholic and Protestant elites, to reproducible prints that were available to nearly every member of society. However, the Enlightenment brought a profound questioning of religion. Religious works of art faced a loss of context in private displays and in the official Salon exhibitions, where they were intermixed with secular and erotic subjects and judged not on the efficacy of their Christian message or function but rather on aesthetic terms in relation to other works. The century ended with the French Revolution and brought violent waves of de-Christianization and iconoclasm. In order to save France’s Christian heritage, religious works of art had to be stripped of their associations with church and crown.
Article
Religious Syncretism and Art in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
Ori Soltes
Religious and cultural syncretism, particularly in visual art in the Jewish and Christian traditions since the 19th century, has expressed itself in diverse ways and reflects a broad and layered series of contexts. These are at once chronological—arising out of developments that may be charted over several centuries before arriving into the 19th and 20th centuries—and political, spiritual, and cultural, as well as often extending beyond the Jewish–Christian matrix. The specific directions taken by syncretism in art is also varied: it may be limited to the interweave of two religious traditions—most often Jewish and Christian—in which most often it is the minority artist seeking ways to create along lines consistent with what is created by the majority. It may also interweave three or more traditions. It may be a matter of religion alone, or it may be a matter of other issues, such as culture or gender, which may or may not be obviously intertwined with religion.
The term “syncretism” has, in certain specifically anthropological and theological circles, acquired a negative connotation. This has grown out of the increasing consciousness, since the 1960s, of the political implications of that term in the course of Western history, in which hegemonic European Christianity has addressed non-Christian religious perspectives. This process intensified in the Colonial era when the West expanded its dominance over much of the globe. An obvious and particularly negative instance of this is the history of the Inquisition as it first affected Jews in late-15th-century Spain and later encompassed indigenous peoples in the Americas, Asia, and Africa. While this issue is noted—after all, art has always been interwoven with politics—it is not the focus of this article. Instead “syncretism” will not be treated as a concept that needs to be distinguished from “hybridization” or “hybridity,” although different modes of syncretism will be distinguished.
Syncretistic preludes to visual artists in the 19th and 20th centuries, suggesting some of the breadth of possibility, include Pico della Mirandola, Kabir, and Baruch/Benedict Spinoza. Specific religious developments and crises in Europe from the 16th century to the 18th century brought on the emancipation of the Jews in some places on the one hand, and a contradictory continuation of anti-Jewish prejudice on the other, the latter shifting from a religious to a racial basis. This, together with evident paradoxes regarding secular and spiritual perspectives in the work of key figures in the visual arts, led to a particularly rich array of efforts from Jewish artists who revision Jesus as a subject, applying a new, Jewishly humanistic perspective to transform this most traditional of Christian subjects.
Such a direction continued to spread more broadly across the 20th century. The Holocaust not only raised new visual questions and possibilities for Jewish artists, but also did so from the opposite direction for the occasional Christian—particularly German—artist. Cultural syncretism sometimes interweaves religious syncretism—which can connect and has connected Christianity or Judaism to Eastern religions—and a profusion of women artists in the last quarter of the century has added gender issues to the matrix. The discussion culminates with Siona Benjamin: a Jewish female artist who grew up in Hindu and Muslim India, attended Catholic and Zoroastrian schools, and has lived in America for many decades—all these aspects of her life resonate in her often very syncretistic paintings.
Article
Ritual
Barry Stephenson
In contemporary scholarship, the term ritual serves double duty. On one hand, ritual is a theoretical concept; on the other, ritual is a catchall term for a diverse set of cultural forms or practices, such as worship, baptism, parades, coronations, and festivals. These two uses of the term ritual are typically intertwined. As a distinct concept and discourse, “ritual” emerges in early modern Europe during the Reformation era, accompanying the emergence of secular modernity, taking its place alongside related concepts such as religion, art, ceremony, culture, and the secular. In the post-Enlightenment period, the intellectual and cultural influences of Protestantism, Rationalism, and Positivism created a general climate of suspicion about ritual’s merits: ritual was often deemed a backward, premodern cultural form, just as religion was considered a stepping-stone on the path from a magical and animistic worldview to modern science. At the same time, however, there emerged within European culture a longing for a perceived loss of transcendence and sociality, which included the urge to recover or reinvent lost or suppressed rites and cultural performances. Running through European thought, culture, and scholarship is a tension between ritual’s conserving and transformative potential. In the 19th century, in the new disciplines of anthropology and sociology, and in the detailed, comparative study of textual traditions, ritual was given considerable attention, although research was largely focused on the practices of non-Western and historical cultures; this research, coinciding with the heights of European colonialism, was often saddled with prejudicial and stereotypical views of ritual. The turn, however, to studying ritual in the field (rather than only in texts) laid the foundation for the emergence, in the 1970s, of ritual and performance studies as an interdisciplinary area of research, shaped in part by feminist, postcolonial, and critical theories. An important feature of this “performative turn” was to explore the connections between ritual and art, especially performative arts such as music and drama. Until the mid-20th century, ritual, under the influence of structural functionalism, was usually theorized as a stabilizing, normative social practice. In the 1970s, there begins an effort, stimulated by the thought of Victor Turner, to develop a more dialectical understanding of ritual, emphasizing both ritual’s aesthetic, expressive qualities; its relationship to other performative genres such as music, theater, and sports; and its dynamic role in processes of cultural change and transformation.
Article
Roman Catholic Art after L’Art Sacré and Vatican II
Inge Linder-Gaillard
The interaction between the Roman Catholic Church and the arts in the period after L’Art Sacré and Vatican II has been eventful. The role of the visual and liturgical arts within the framework of the Catholic context has evolved, sometimes in radical ways. Works of art have been commissioned, curated, and displayed in different types of spaces with varying purposes. These range from modest chapels to huge cathedrals and from small galleries to world-renowned museums and international contemporary art exhibition venues.
The period begins in the 1960s with the end of both the Vatican II Council held in Rome from 1962 to 1965 and of L’Art Sacré, a journal of avant-garde theory and action regarding sacred art published in France from the 1930s to the 1960s. Vatican II made official many of the changes already undertaken by what could be called the Art Sacré movement. However, the 1960s had brought so much societal upheaval globally that the arts were no longer the center of focus in the immediate post–Vatican II moment; most importantly in the Western church were the rise of secularization and the decline of traditional religious practice.
Yet, Vatican II delivered guidelines that addressed the visual and liturgical arts specifically, and it set into motion organizational work within the Catholic Church that has allowed for several different types of artistic action to develop over the years. This quiet moment for the arts in the church afforded the emergence of a new generation of actors who, because of the years of theoretical and logistical groundwork, would be able to deploy the new policies of the Vatican. These could be poetically encapsulated in the via pulchritudinis, “the way of beauty,” referring to 13th-century theologian and philosopher Thomas Aquinas’s terminology. In this spirit, the popes since Vatican II have all engaged with the question of sacred art by calling out to artists to work for the church, collecting their work, and sponsoring exhibitions of contemporary art both at the Vatican and in international venues.
At the same time, in countries like France and Germany where patrimony and heritage are high-stakes issues, cultural politics could be read as becoming an ally of the church—each with its own agenda at play. Both modest and major commissions for art in churches and cathedrals can be observed in this context, whether they be single artworks, series of stained-glass, or multifaceted ensembles. In countries like the United States and Australia, shifting demographics and concerns with cultural inclusiveness have played major roles in the application of liturgical reform and the types of art commissioned for churches. This activity highlights and demonstrates the theoretical premises of Vatican II put into action, sometimes with difficulty and resistance from within the church itself.
This period depends mainly on primary sources for its information and must be seen as a narrow topic within the much broader conversation between contemporary art and religion. Studying it in depth means navigating between isolationist methodology and using comparative strategies associating neighboring topics and fields.
Article
Sacred Place and Sacred Places
Tim Gorringe
Sacred places have characterized most known settled societies. They have been both religious, domestic, civil, and related to the natural world. The Renaissance looked back to both Greek and Roman models, but in Europe, the Gothic model retained its importance. A lively debate as to whether sacred spaces are needed, and if so how to build them, runs from the 15th century to the present. The importance of domestic sacred space has declined for most communities in the West apart from Jews and Eastern Orthodox Christians, and secularization has led to the deconsecration of many religious buildings. However, the late 20th century also saw many inspirational religious buildings that in many ways broke with tradition, and the importance of civil sacred places has increased as secularization has grown. Romanticism, the roots of which can be traced to the 16th century, finds the sacred above all in the natural world, and this has informed both New Age religious movements and developments like the establishment of national parks.
Article
Secularization and Sacred Space
David Bains
Secularization, or the decline in the authority of religious institutions, became a pronounced feature of Western culture in the 20th century, especially in its latter half. Secularization has affected the history of Western sacred space in four ways: (a) It has helped to shape the concept of “sacred space” so that it designates a space that helps generate a personal religious experience independent of religious rituals and teachings. (b) It has caused many houses of worship to use architectural forms not previously associated with religion in order to link their religious communities to the respected realms of business, science, and entertainment. And it has motivated religious communities to craft spaces that encourage worshipers to recognize God at work in the secular world and to demonstrate to others the continued relevance of religion. (c) Many former houses of worship have been destroyed or converted to other uses. Sometimes this occurred not because of declining membership but in order to relocate to a more favorable building or location. Nonetheless, these changes have created a more secular cityscape. Other times destruction and conversion have been the product of state-sponsored regimes of secularization or a decline in the number of clergy or church supporters. The reuse of these former houses of worship often results in the association of religious symbols with commercial or personal endeavors. It also raises challenges for maintaining public space in dense urban environments and for preserving artistic and cultural heritage. Given the increasing closure of churches, in 2018 the Pontifical Council of Culture issued guidelines to guide Roman Catholics in determining best uses for buildings no longer needed for worship. (d) Spaces which are not linked to religious communities, especially museums and monuments, came to be frequently designed in ways similar to historic sacred spaces. For this reason and others, they are esteemed by many people as places to encounter the sacred in a secularized world.
Article
Spirituality and Contemporary Art
Rina Arya
The artworks under discussion detail the scope and breadth of art that can be described as spiritual by virtue of its revelatory, revitalizing and contemplative capacities. Rather than interrogating the relationship between art and religion, more pertinent questions in the contemporary age are: What is the nature of the dialogue between art and spirituality, how do the two come together, and what form does the meeting take? The range of multimedia brings novel forms of encounter that occur outside the gallery and other spaces and involve audio-visual and other means of articulating the spiritual. These new forms make different demands on viewers; they create greater intimacy (often through immersion), both physically and psychologically, and one of the consequences of having greater intimacy can be a heightened awareness that increases presentness and a sense of embodiment. What we learn is that there are potentially as many interpretations of spirituality as there are viewers.
Article
Synagogue Architecture: An Overview
Sergey R. Kravtsov
Architectural history acknowledges a variety of Jewish communal buildings, central among which are the synagogue and its ontological sources the Tabernacle and the Temple. The synagogue architecture of the Renaissance period steadily departed from medieval patterns, drawing instead on Renaissance, baroque, and neoclassicist forms to contextualize itself in the European cityscape. At the same time, it reflected visual interpretations of the Temple produced by theologians, Hebraists, artists, and architects of diverse religious affiliations. Following the emergence of Hegelian phenomenology and the rise of nationalism, synagogue architecture sought a balance between a unique Jewish “national spirit” and loyalty to host nations. More recently, 20th-century and postmodern synagogue architecture has employeda cosmopolitan design vocabulary to reflect themes of retrospection and modernity, mobility and gravity, and the loftiness of ritual space, all while also considering the sustainability of the building.
Article
The Book of Revelation: The Apocalypse of Jesus Christ
Christopher Rowland
The Revelation of Jesus Christ, or the Apocalypse of John, has been extraordinarily influential in Christian life and theology. For example, because of the many hymns sung by the heavenly host, Revelation has, like Isaiah 6:3, been particularly influential on liturgy and also music, for instance, the setting of Revelation 5:12, “Worthy is the Lamb that was Slain,” in Handel’s Messiah. It is one of two biblical apocalyptic texts (the other being the book of Daniel in the Hebrew Bible). Apart from the opening words, a dominant theme of Revelation is prophecy, and its imagery emphasizing what John “saw” on Patmos suggests that the form of prophecy in the first century ce included a significant visionary element, akin to earlier biblical exemplars such as Ezekiel 1:40–48 and Zechariah 1–8. The interpretation and reception of Revelation are closely linked. Like other biblical prophetic books, it became a reservoir for understandings of the future, but alongside it there developed a role as a way of unmasking the imperfections in church and society. This article uses the evidence of its reception to understand the nature and meaning of the book, its theological antecedents, and its relationship to other early Christian writings. Its role as an eschatological guide as well as its importance for political theology, complementing what we find in Daniel, are considered. It has also inspired artists down the centuries, from the time of the first illuminated Apocalypses, and this rich visual tradition captures something of importance about the book itself and the visionary stimulus it has provided.
Article
Nomadic Shelters, Mystical Staircases, and Cosmic Chambers in Iberoamerican Art
Barbara von Barghahn
When Jesus used the phrase “in my Father’s house” in speaking to Jews of future hospitality in paradise, he deliberately invoked a complicated expression, which suggested both a range of types of dwellings as well as an expansive notion of the familial. The domestic metaphor that Jesus invoked was so pregnant with meaning, in fact, that it continued to inspire artists and patrons—among others—many centuries later, and those subsequent Christian generations often imagined the biblical expression at least in part in terms of the contemporary houses and homes that they saw around them.
This article directs attention to some of the tension in that phrase from John 14:2, which reminded Jesus’ audience of Abraham’s history. In Genesis 12, God directed the patriarch to abandon his land, birthplace, and “father’s house” and go “to the land I will show you.” Note that Abraham refers, too, to God removing him from “my father’s house” when he spoke with the Gerarite king Abimelech in Genesis 20, and to his own servant Eliezer four chapters later. The Hebrew letter yud (“my”) suggests possession, while “father’s” (aba) implies the house belongs to another, and thus there is a dual tension hinting at the way that Abraham, in many ways, could have been a stranger in his own idol-worshiping father’s house.
Abraham renounced his paternal inheritance to chart his own monotheistic course, and, of course, the father to which he refers in each of those biblical passages is an earthly one. If anything, the Jewish patriarch could be said to be upgrading a pagan earthly father’s home for one associated with his heavenly “father,” who, incidentally, promises Abraham that he himself will in turn “father many nations” (Gen. 17:4).
Jesus, meanwhile, invokes his Father’s house as only a son could who is heir to, and implicated in, that same home, rather than fleeing it as Abraham did. To put it differently, Jesus reverses the direction of Abraham’s use of the term; where Abraham returns repeatedly to his exit from his father’s earthly house, Jesus invites his followers into his Father’s heavenly abode. As will be shown in the article, the range of homes that Jesus has in mind include several irregular, or at least impermanent, ones, which adds to the richness of the metaphor and its lesson.
Article
Visual Arts: Christian Visual Art
Christine E. Joynes
Defining Christian visual art from the Renaissance to the present is a task fraught with difficulty.
The diversity among Christian groups to emerge makes generalizations impossible, but common themes can be compared and contrasted to shed light on differing beliefs and practices. Widely acclaimed examples of Christian visual art highlight its role in contemplating the divine and offering pedagogical insights. It also functions to critique cultural attitudes and shape identity formation. Despite the decline in religious belief, Christianity continues to inform contemporary works of art in both ecclesial and non-ecclesial settings.
Article
Visual Arts: Abstraction
Paula Wisotzki
For avant-garde European and American artists at the turn of the 20th century, a nexus of developments encouraged the rejection of naturalism, which had driven most of Western art for more than four centuries. Despite the increasing secularization of Western society throughout the 19th century, religious beliefs and practices were one important source for artists’ experimentation with abstracting forms from nature. Christianity and other world religions aided artists who sought to shift the focus of their art from description to expression. Around 1910, certain European and American artists pressed forward to make art that they considered to be fully nonrepresentational. Still, the bridge between abstraction and nonrepresentation was a challenging one to cross and artists frequently invoked religious beliefs to justify leaving the natural world behind.
The evolution of abstraction in Western visual arts was intimately linked to the modern era. As important as religious concepts may have been to individual artists around 1900, artists had gradually moved to the periphery of society in the 19th century, leaving behind the institutions, including churches, that had been their primary means of support. These changing relationships gave individual artists the freedom to explore new ideas but eliminated stable sources of income previously available to them. On the other side of the patronage divide, mainstream religions were already threatened by the radical modernization of Western society, so even though religious dogma was replete with abstract concepts, churches were reluctant to embrace abstraction in the visual arts. At the same time, while artists were committed to expressions of spiritual truth in their abstract art, their objects were rarely produced with a conventional church setting in mind. Emerging in the 19th century, the complex relationship among modern society, abstract art, and religious practices persisted well into the 20th century.
Article
Visual Arts: Modern Art
Jonathan A. Anderson
The dominant histories of 19th- and 20th-century art in the West have tended to depict modernism as making deep and decisive breaks from religious thought, practices, and institutions. There are good reasons for scholars seeing the history this way. On the one hand, the development of modern art coincided with major sociocultural shifts that deeply reshaped not only religion (as established religious traditions became increasingly contested and pluralized) but also the functions of art itself, which thrived in forms and spaces that seemed significantly detached from religious subjects, patronage, and purposes. On the other hand, there were also significant theoretical factors shaping the ways that religion was presented—or often conspicuously not presented—in the writing of modern art history. An especially strong secularization theory (a sociological thesis positing that a society’s modernization necessarily entails its secularization) has tended to dominate the scholarship of modernism, coupled with a heavy reliance on critical models that privilege highly suspicious hermeneutics (in the lineages of Marxian, Nietzschean, and Freudian critical theory), which tend to dismantle whatever “religious” content persists in modern art into questions of social power, ressentiment, sublimated desire, and so on. In all these ways, religious traditions became largely invisible and unreadable in the history of modernism, even in cases where they were important factors.
Since the 1990s, however, several of the key historical and theoretical underpinnings of this depiction of modernism have been increasingly called into question, and a more complicated, ambiguous picture is emerging—one in which modern art and religion remain deeply entangled in fascinating and confusing ways. There are various ways of identifying and understanding these entanglements, which require not only careful reexamination of the particularities of the histories involved but also reconsideration of the interpretive assumptions and priorities through which those histories are construed. There are at least five focal points where the nexuses of art and religion are being reexamined and brought more clearly into view in the histories of modernism—namely, through object-oriented, practice-oriented, artist-oriented, context-oriented, and/or concept-oriented studies of particular instances in those histories. These focal points provide concrete loci for perceiving and exploring the functions, formations, and effects of “religion in modern art”—an inquiry which also can be reversed to explore examples of “modern art in religion,” including instances where major artworks are situated in churches, cathedrals, synagogues, and other religious contexts. There are, however, varying ways that scholars interpret what they find at these focal points and how they discern the larger implications of these particular entanglements of art and religion in the history of modern and contemporary art. These differences are clarified by recognizing at least four interpretive horizons—anthropological, political, spiritual, and theological—within which scholars are understanding these focal points and rereading these histories. Though often diverging in the accounts they produce, these four horizons (and the potential interplay between them) are vital for a continued rethinking of the relations between modern art and religion.
Article
Visual Arts: Postmodernism
Meredith Munson
Postmodernism is notoriously difficult to define in any concise manner. Its start dates (and end dates, for that matter) exist in a state of flux, often varying by decades in the historiographies of major disciplines. In an attempt to begin to understand postmodernism, many theorists, art historians, and philosophers choose to take a rather apophatic approach by describing that which it is not, namely starting by understanding modernism. After all, that is embedded into the term postmodernism itself; at its core, postmodernism is connected to modernism. Essentially, modernism as a movement was predicated upon an avant-gardism that envisioned modern art as the cure-all for the broken world, working toward a utopian ideal. In understanding art’s engagement with religion in the postmodern era, it is also necessary to consider the shifting social landscape of institutional religion and politics at this time. The culture wars of the end of the 20th century both shaped and were shaped by postmodern art, with famous clashes between artists and the emerging religious right and/or prominent political figures dominating the headlines. Largely because of these events, many critical narratives have promoted the idea that art and religion had little to do with each other in this period. While secularization theories are gradually unraveling in the field at large, these ideas still figure prominently in many discussions of modernism and postmodernism. Regardless, artists have continued to engage with religious subject matter throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. The appearance of secularization is imperative to note, particularly as a number of postmodern artists (indeed, some of the most recognizable names in the art world) have engaged with religion in their work. This is not to say that postmodern artworks with religious themes all celebrate religion uncritically, nor do they all examine religion from outside the realm of belief in a strictly anthropological manner. One of the main difficulties in interpreting postmodernism’s rather vexed relationship with institutional religion is the multivalence of many of the artworks. Multiplicity of meaning in both artistic intent (if such a thing is granted) and reception is common in postmodernism, which should caution critics from attempting to make concrete assertions about any presence of pure religiosity or pure secularism. Trends in postmodern artistic practices, such as the mixing of high and low art forms and media, the use of appropriation, pastiche, institutional critique, and more, along with the increasing diversification of artists and contexts, have resulted in the examination of religious subjects in ways that are particularly postmodern.
Article
Visual Arts: Protestant
Bobbi Dykema
The story of Protestant visual art begins well before Luther posted the 95 Theses. It is a story bound up with iconoclastic revision and destruction as well as with new ways of telling the Christian story in a distinctly Protestant visual mode. In the centuries since the Reformation, artists have emphasized prophetic themes such as the peaceable kingdom, the abolition of slavery, the suffering of women, and the plight of the homeless.
Article
Visual Arts: Realism and Naturalism
Linda Stratford and William Dyrness
In the visual arts, realism and naturalism are modes of representation associated with faithfulness to physical fact. From the late medieval period forward, fine art in the West gave increasing primacy of place to realism and naturalism. Within the aesthetic category termed “realistic” or “naturalistic,” depiction is characteristically mimetic, distinguished by varying degrees of literalness. Whether based on clinically observed reality, or technique devoted to relaying impressions of clinically observed reality, artwork considered realistic or naturalistic brings to mind observable phenomena. Recognizably corporeal material such as the human figure, scenery, and objects of visible experience may be carried out as an instinctual, direct response to forms, or may be rendered in a nonidealized manner, thereby emphasizing fidelity to nature. In either case, fidelity to recognizable nature is the overriding concern. Nevertheless, while naturalism employs and asserts the facts of material life, it is not limited to facts of material life in its representations. Naturalism is a broad pictorial ideology, with divergent aims, including assigning symbolic meaning to familiar objects, underscoring the allegorical potential of common articles, and suggesting experience of the divine through encounters with nature.
Importantly, a distinction exists between the use of naturalistic effects, and practices associated with the art-historical movement known as Realism. The 19th-century movement Realism exists as a particular manifestation within the broader category of naturalism. Originating in France, Realism as a category is distinct in its use of realistic effects to capture conditions of contemporary life. In France, painters and sculptors (such as Courbet and Rodin) explored their modern subjects with a reforming zeal, giving representation to the poor most especially, and breaking with the gentility of subjects and treatments long associated with fine art. In the 19th and 20th centuries in France and beyond, artists continued to pursue the democratizing aims of Realism, by addressing public issues, fostering reforming religious piety, and encouraging social vision through the widened employment of pictorially recognizable facts of material life.
