Imagining the Divine. Art and the Rise of World Religions.

Elsner, Jas; Lenk, Stefanie:

ISBN 10: 1910807184 / ISBN 13: 9781910807187

Published by Oxford. Ashmolean Museum. ., 2017

About this Item

232 S. Kartoniert mit Umschlagklappen. Sauberes Exemplar ohne Stempel oder Anstreichungen. Zahlreiche Abbildungen und Tafeln. Sehr gut erhalten. Sprache: eng.

Seller Inventory # KUN64880

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Imagining the Divine. Art and the Rise of World Religions.
• Publisher: Oxford. Ashmolean Museum. .
• Publication Date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1910807184
• ISBN 13: 9781910807187
• Binding: Soft cover
• Weight: 1100 grams
• Seller catalogs:
  • Kunst

About this title

Synopsis

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 recognize 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 catalog highlights religious and artistic creativity at points of contact and cultural borders between late antique civilizations.

This catalog features the creation of specific visual languages that belong to five major world religions: Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism 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 visualizations 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.