Visual Faith


Book Description

An intriguing, substantive look into the relationship between the church and the world of art.




Religion, Art, and Visual Culture


Book Description

Religion, Art, and Visual Culture is a cross-cultural exploration of the study of visuality and the arts from a religious perspective. This forward looking and accessible collection gathers together the most current scholarship for those interested in art, religion, visual culture, and cultural studies. Inherently interdisciplinary, this reader approaches the study of world religions through the human, meaning-making activity of seeing. The volume oscillates between specific visual subjects (painting, landscape gardens, calligraphy, architecture, mass media) and the broader theoretical discourses which are relevant to Humanities students today.




The Oxford Handbook of Religion and the Arts


Book Description

This volume offers 37 original essays from leading scholars on the crucial topics, issues, methods, and resources for studying and teaching religion and the arts.




Catholica


Book Description

This richly illustrated book provides the visual keys for any art lover to decode and understand the iconography, tenets, sites, and rituals of the Catholic faith through accessible analysis of its visual and material culture. Focusing on a carefully curated selection of Catholic art and artifacts, this volume explores the influence of iconography and the mystic power of a range of ritual objects. Expert Suzanna Ivanic identifies hidden visual symbols in paintings and examines them close-up, building a catalog of key symbols for readers to use to interpret Catholic art and culture. Catholica is organized into three sections—”Tenet,” “Locus,” and “Spiritus”—each with three themed subdivisions. Part one introduces the centerpieces of the faith, surveying symbolism in the artistic representation of the holy family, apostles, and saints in stories from scripture. The second part examines places of worship, identifying the essential elements of the cathedral and presenting evocative images of roadside shrines. The third part explores celebrations and traditions, in addition to personal devotional tools and jewelry. For each of the nine central themes of the faith, introductory text is followed by pages that look in-depth at paintings and artifacts, identifying and explaining the symbolism and stories depicted. As the book progresses, readers build up their knowledge of the entire Catholic visual code—the symbols that define Catholic practice, the attributes of the saints, the parts of the cathedral—allowing them to interpret all Catholic imagery and objects wherever they find them and consequently to better understand the tenets, sites, and rituals of this faith.




Philosophy, Art, and Religion


Book Description

Systematically explores the affinity and the rivalry between art and religion, focusing at length on music, visual art, literature, and architecture in turn.




Signs of Grace


Book Description

Religious imagery was ubiquitous in late-nineteenth-century American life: department stores, schoolbooks, postcards, and popular magazines all featured elements of Christian visual culture. Such imagery was not limited to commercial and religious artifacts, however, for it also found its way into contemporary fine art. In Signs of Grace, Kristin Schwain looks anew at the explicitly religious work of four prominent artists in this period--Thomas Eakins, F. Holland Day, Abbott Handerson Thayer, and Henry Ossawa Tanner--and argues that art and religion performed analogous functions within American culture. Fully expressing the concerns and values of turn-of-the-century Americans, this artwork depicted religious figures and encouraged the beholders' communion with them.Describing how these artists drew on their religious beliefs and practices, as well as how beholders looked to art to provide a transcendent experience, Schwain explores how a modern conception of faith as an individual relationship with the divine facilitated this sanctified relationship between art and viewer. This stress on the interior and subjective experience of religion accentuated the artist's efforts to engage beholders personally with works of art; how better to fix the viewer's attention than to hold out the promise of salvation? Schwain shows that while these new visual practices emphasized individual encounters with art objects, they also carried profound social implications. By negotiating changes in religious belief--by aestheticizing faith in a new, particularly American manner--these practices contributed to evolving debates about art, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender.




Fluid Flesh


Book Description

How do we relate the body we have and the bodies we see to the mind, or to the soul? Fluid Flesh addresses the relationship between the body, religion, and the visual arts, which is one of both love and tension. Are we able (and allowed) to think of the divine in a corporeal way? Isn't artistic expression, which originated from both the human mind and body, intrinsically a bodily matter?Featuring an introduction from James Elkins, Fluid Flesh covers an array of topics including the visual as a spiritual medium today; iconophilia and iconoclasm in the past and present; the human body, religion and contemporary lifestyles; and premodern and postmodern perspectives on anatomy and the visual arts. Several authors address the presentation of the human form in Christian art and ask whether the body may be present in religious art even without figuration. The authors highlight the intertwined and powerful roles of both the image and the body within a contemporary culture that has seemingly devalued language (in favor of the image) and has renewed a "sinful" conception of the body as in constant need of improvement.




Visual Arts and Religion


Book Description

Images have caused uproar, violence and even casualties in the meeting of religions and cultures during the last years. Iconoclasm and iconolatry are on the agenda once more. Late Modern Culture is dominated by images and is understood in concepts such as aestheticization and symbolisation. Theological debate is likewise performed through images, symbols and rituals rather than through doctrines and beliefs. In this book, authors from various research backgrounds seek to clarify the terms of reference, and explore the diversity and disagreements in their use from a Christian perspective.




Philosophy, Art, and Religion


Book Description

At a time when religion and science are thought to be at loggerheads, art is widely hailed as religion's natural spiritual ally. Philosophy, Art, and Religion investigates the extent to which this is true. It charts the way in which modern conceptions of 'Art' often marginalize the sacred arts, construing choral and instrumental music, painting and iconography, poetry, drama, and architecture as 'applied' arts that necessarily fall short of the ideal of 'art for art's sake'. Drawing on both history of art and philosophical aesthetics, Graham sets out the historical context in which the arts came to free themselves from religious patronage, in order to conceptualize the cultural context in which religious art currently finds itself. The book then relocates religious art within the aesthetics of everyday life. Subsequent chapters systematically explore each of the sacred arts, using a wide range of illustrative examples to uncover the ways in which artworks can illuminate religious faith, and religious content can lend artworks a deeper dimension.




Religion and the Arts: History and Method


Book Description

In Religion and the Arts: History and Method, Diane Apostolos-Cappadona presents an overview of the 19th century origins of this discrete field of study and its methodological journey to the present-day through issues of repatriation, museum exhibitions, and globalization. Apostolos-Cappadona suggests that the fluidity and flexibility of the study of religion and the arts has expanded like an umbrella since the 1970s - and the understanding that art was simply a visual exegesis of texts - to now support the study of material, popular, and visual culture, as well as gender. She also delivers a careful analysis of the evolution of thought from traditional iconographies to the transformations once scholars were influenced by response theory and challenged by globalization and technology. Religion and the Arts: History and Method offers an indispensable introduction to the questions and perspectives essential to the study of this field.