Imagining the divine : art and the rise of world religions / Jaś Elsner, Stefanie Lenk, and others.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Elsner, Jaś, author.

Lenk, Stefanie, author.

Contributor:

Ashmolean Museum, host institution.

British Museum, sponsoring body.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Art and religion--History--To 1500--Exhibitions.

Art and religion.

Religion in art--To 1500--Exhibitions.

Religion in art.

Religions--To 1500--Exhibitions.

Religions.

Exhibition catalogs.

History.

Genre:

History.

Exhibition catalogs.

Physical Description:

232 pages : color illustrations, color maps ; 28 cm

Place of Publication:

[Oxford] : Ashmolean, Museum of Art and Archaeology, University of Oxford, [2017]

Summary:

Religion has always been a fundamental force for constructing identity, from antiquity to the contemporary world. The transformation of ancient cults into faith systems, which we recognise now as major world religions, took place in the first millennium AD, in the period we call 'Late Antiquity'. Our argument is that the creative impetus for both the emergence, and much of the visual distinctiveness of the world religions came in contexts of cultural encounter. Bridging the traditional divide between classical, Asian, Islamic and Western history, this exhibition and its accompanying catalogue highlights religious and artistic creativity at points of contact and cultural borders between late antique civilisations. This catalogue features the creation of specific visual languages that belong to four major world religions: Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism and Islam. The imagery still used by these belief systems today is evidence for the development of distinct religious identities in Late Antiquity. Emblematic visual forms like the figure of Buddha and Christ, or Islamic aniconism, only evolved in dialogue with a variety of coexisting visualisations of the sacred. As late antique believers appropriated some competing models and rejected others, they created compelling and long-lived representations of faith, but also revealed their indebtedness to a multitude of contemporaneous religious ideas and images. Exhibition: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK (19.10.2017-18.02.2018).

Notes:

"Imagining the divine : art and the rise of world religions, 19 October 2017-18 February 2018. In partnership with the British Museum"--Title page verso.

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

ISBN:

1910807184

9781910807187

OCLC:

982536731