Imagining the Divine: Art and the Rise of World Religions

Jas Elsner (Author), Stefanie Lenk (Author), Ashmolean Museum (Host institution), British Museum

ISBN 10: 1910807184 / ISBN 13: 9781910807187

Published by Ashmolean Museum, 2017

About this Item

232 pages : colour illustrations, colour maps ; 28 cm.
Contents:
Introduction
Religions in the Roman world
The rise of the image of Christ
Jewish art
Envisioning the Buddha
Vishnu: the enigmatic image of a deity
The emergence of Islamic art
Christianity in the British Isles
Conclusion
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.

Seller Inventory # ldp804

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Imagining the Divine: Art and the Rise of World Religions
• Publisher: Ashmolean Museum
• Publication Date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1910807184
• ISBN 13: 9781910807187
• Binding: Soft cover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: New
• Dimensions: 22W x 28H x 1.78D centimeters 22 centimeters width by 28 centimeters height by 1.78 centimeters depth
• Weight: 1134 grams
• Seller catalogs:
  • Archaeology
  • Art
  • Anthropology

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.