CiNii Books - Imagining the divine : art and the rise of world religions

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 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 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.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents: List of Contributors
Preface
Encounters
Religions in the Roman World
Gods in Combination
The Rise of the Image of Christ
Jewish Art
Scripture
Word as Image
Envisioning the Buddha
Amulets and Magic
Maidens and Mothers, Virgins and Lovers
Vishnu: The Enigmatic Image of a Deity
Sacred and Imperial Power
Iconoclasm
The Emergence of Islamic Art
Aniconism
Christianity in the British Isles
Sacred Space
Travelling Objects
Chronological Table
Map of the World (Britain to India) c.250 AD
Map of the World (Britain to India) c.850 AD
Index of Geographical Names
Index of Personal Names.

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Imagining the divine : art and the rise of world religions

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