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This chapter analyzes the processes of ascribing new meanings and values (spiritual and material) to objects by appropriating them into the realm of artistic and historical patrimony. It first focuses on the most revealing example: the campaign for the preservation of religious architecture and art that began in the 1830s and reached its culmination in the 1880s–1900s. One of the main intrigues of this campaign was that the objects of contestation—churches and icons—were supposed to be by definition alien to an essentially secular liberal ideology of public domain. However, in fin-de-siècle Russia, religious art “discovered anew” became a tool of both mobilizing and modernizing society. By making Russian religious art less religious and more aesthetic through the discursive and factual (legal, by nationalization) alienation of churches and their belongings, the proponents of preservation strove to create common cultural ground for the people and the elite.

This chapter opens with a brief historiographic overview of aniconism, then considers the question of definition, and closes by suggesting methods for assessing the existence of the phenomenon. Aniconism is not only ideologically charged, but proves time and again to be a challenging concept. It forces us to accept shades of grey and uncertainty as we attempt greater precision and clarification. At the same time, an exercise in definition is worthwhile, for it establishes parameters for the examination of our evidence. Moreover, in considering matters such as what constitutes an aniconic cult, or how we are to assess the existence of aniconism in the archaeological record, we inevitably also face important broader issues regarding approaches to Greek religious art in general. The chapter offers the opportunity to reconsider some of the fundamentals of Greek art and religion.

This introductory chapter first sets out the book's purpose, which is to explore the phenomenon of aniconism in Greek antiquity. It examines the nature and significance of the phenomenon of aniconism in Greek antiquity by unpacking some of its apparent paradoxes, and by placing aniconism within the broader map of Greek art, religion, and visual culture. The discussion then turns to two issues that are fundamental to this inquiry: the validity of the usage of the key-term ‘aniconic’ and the place of aniconism within the broader scope of Greek religious art. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

The chapter provides an overview of two tendencies in the transformation of the status of religious motifs in art starting with the painting of Caspar David Friedrich and ending with Expressionism. This period was characterised by a major shift in the mutual positioning of art and religion both institutionally and aesthetically. Church art became an increasingly problematic category at the end of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, partly because the clergy objected to decorating churches with the unusual interpretation of religious iconography associated with modernist aesthetics. Considered from this perspective abstract art appeared as an acceptable alternative precisely as opposed to other images with unusual modernist interpretations. The absence of figurative images removes all controversies as to how religious subjects should be interpreted. Religious iconography had a continued presence within the work of numerous artists in the different movements of the historical avant-gardes. While the figurative references to religious motifs in most of the cases were quite critical in their tone (whether this was intended by the artist or not) and used as tools of criticism of the institutions of art and religion, abstract art became the medium for expression of a positive form of spirituality.

According to this chapter, both the nature of art and the nature of pornography can be usefully elucidated in terms of the kind of regard or response intended by the maker of an artefact. In this sense, both art and pornography are ‘in the intended response’ of the receiver. But although the kinds of response demanded by art and pornography differ, this is no obstacle to something's being both art and pornography in a sense that justifies the label ‘pornographic art’. It is, this chapter argues, no more difficult to see how there can be pornographic art than it is to see how there can be religious art, or political art, or indeed art that has any non-artistic primary intended function. In all such cases what makes something art is both the kind of response solicited and the manner in which that response bears upon the content of the work. Given this way of determining when we are dealing with art, we can further classify artworks in terms of those non-artistic purposes that they are intended to serve in virtue of those qualities that make them artworks in the first place.

The heart of this chapter's reply to the previous chapter's is that the analogy the previous chapter offers between, on the one hand, putative pornographic art and, on the other hand, religious or other art possessing a primary non-aesthetic function, is simply overdrawn, and that the ease of fulfilling an aesthetic and a non-aesthetic function at the same time is significantly overestimated in the former case as compared to the latter case. This chapter also outlines some differences with the previous chapter as to how the concept of regarding something as an artwork is to be understood, emphasizing a divergence between how the concept might function in a definition of art and how it functions in modern criticism and evaluation. This chapter's reply to the previous chapter concludes with a few reasons why we may yet be justified in maintaining a fairly sharp division between art and pornography, despite strong briefs offered to the contrary by Davies, Maes, Kania, and others.

The Introduction provides an overview of the central questions and the theoretical framework of the book. Since the early 1990s in Europe and the United States many artists critically re-appropriated religious, motifs, themes and images to produce works that cannot qualify as ‘religious,’ but remains in a dialogue with the visual legacy of mostly the Western, and more specifically the Catholic, version of Christianity. Present-day art does not embed religious images to celebrate them, but in order to pose critical questions concerning central aspects of the rules that regulate the status of images, their public significance, the conditions of their production and authorship, and their connection to an origin or tradition, a context or an author that guarantees their value. The motif of the true image or acheiropoietos (not made by a human hand) is related to central set of features that allow distinguishing between regimes or eras of the image. Its transformations provide a conceptual matrix for understanding of the reconfiguring relationships between art and religion. The introduction provides an overview of the theoretical context, the selection of artworks, bibliography on the subject and the chapters of the book.

While it is generally assumed that the Second Vatican Council did not leave much room for public devotion outside the reformed and newly endorsed patterns of the Catholic liturgy, laid out in the Constitution on the sacred liturgy (Sacrosanctum Concilium), the present essay shows a remarkable case of the survival and transformation of a preconciliar devotional practice. The 3,000 crosses that still decorate the landscape in the Canadian province of Quebec are being maintained and taken care of by Catholic laypeople. In a complex process of selective (re)interpretation and (re)negotiation of what they see as key concepts of the Council–such as lay participation, openness to the world, and a positive attitude toward non-Catholics and non-Christians–these Quebeckers succeed in making the crosses into a new, revitalized expression of their postconciliar religiosity and their own distinct Catholic identity, with little interference from the Church authorities.

This chapter focuses on Byzantine art and architecture. Not all Byzantine art was a luxury art. However, the lasting appeal of its use of gold, silver, enamel, and precious stones is evident from the choice of objects in blockbuster exhibitions and in the admiring reactions of their visitors. The latter represent a response to Byzantine art and architecture that also found expression among the Byzantines themselves, who composed many lengthy and detailed literary descriptions of art works or buildings. Light and color, as well as gold and glitter, are key features in these works, and light is the dominant feature in the description of the newly built Justinianic Hagia Sophia by Procopius of Caesarea—when Byzantines described marble, what they emphasized was its sheen and brilliance. Moreover, a high proportion of surviving Byzantine art is religious. This does not mean that the Byzantines were all religious themselves; rather, it reveals something about patronage and how art was commissioned.

This chapter examines the relation between religious art and metaphysics as studied by Saint Thomas. It aims to uncover the underlying metaphysical and epistemological structures supporting the ability of authentic religious art to provide symbolic expression to the transcendental and the relation of humans to it. The epistemological structure is based on Saint Thomas's distinctive theory of human understanding as a synthesis of sense and intellect.

This book explores the visualization of religious imagery in public art for African Americans in Chicago between 1904 and the present. It examines a number of case studies of black churches whose pastors have consciously nurtured a strong visual culture within their congregation. It features examples of religious art associated with some of Chicago's most historically significant black churches and art in their neighborhoods. It considers how the arts interact with each other in the performance of black belief, explains how empathetic realism structures these interactions for a variety of publics, and situates public art within a larger history of mural histories. It also highlights the centrality of the visual in the formation of Black Liberation Theology and its role alongside gospel music and broadcasted sermons in the black public sphere. Finally, the book discusses various representations of black Christ and other black biblical figures, often imaged alongside black historical figures or portraits of everyday black people from the community.

Historiographic analysis of early twentieth-century literature on Afro-Caribbean religious arts reveals critical struggles among scholars, the popular press, and practitioners with respect to the expression of African diasporic identities. Authors including Fernando Ortiz, Melville Herskovits, Lydia Cabrera, and Rómulo Lachatañeré wrote defining scholarship on Afro-Caribbean religions, including Santería. Notably, the press adopted unverified scholarly language and made ideas such as syncretism, or the conflation of more than one religion, especially relevant to social and political struggles of the time. As a result, religious leaders, including the women featured in this book, adopted multiple distinct belief systems in order to best navigate this history.

Chapter 2 permits an analysis of the 1900 bi-laws belonging to Tiburcia Sotolongo’s cabildo, or religious society, and demonstrates that, in the early twentieth century, women were often held responsible for altar production and the public presentation of the Afro-Cuban religious movement. In spite of police persecution of the male leadership of these societies, close examination of the extant religious altars and artworks in Tiburcia’s home, including altars related to Espiritismo and Santería, demonstrates her ongoing work with Afro-Cuban religious arts. Moreover, examination of Tiburcia’s surviving religious art objects provide an important perspective on the “nested spaces” she relied upon in order to connect and separate these different ritual practices and engage the different interests of her audiences.

Chapter 3 examines the photographic documentation of temporary public altars by Hortensia Ferrer and Iluminada Sierra Ortiz, as well as their established patterns of discourse surrounding this material. In the 1940s and 1950s, Hortensia had a number of her family’s temporary Espiritismo altars photographed and kept these images in her home for her audiences to consult. These photographs capture a period in which Afro-Cuban religious arts became particularly dramatic and sumptuous. Through this exploration of altars, Hortensia, Iluminada, and their religious family plumbed the tensions that existed between the separate practices of Espiritismo and Santería as they sought to create a larger religious community. Analysis of how these women documented their religious community’s altar practices permits insight into the explosion of and anxiety surrounding Afro-Caribbean arts in Cuba and the United States.

This chapter gives elaboration on the title of the book and discussed what made Sirén start his career anew at the age of 40. It looks at the state of Chinese art history studies and practice of collecting during the first two decades of the 20th century. It also discusses Sirén’s first publication on Chinese art and the background of his ideas.

Yuhanna al-Armani is an icon painter whose paintings still adorn a number of churches in Old Cairo. Yet, curiously enough, he is often credited with being behind a revival in Coptic religious art in the eighteenth century. He belonged to Cairo's Armenian community, a community with ancient roots in Cairo, which was sufficiently well integrated into Egyptian society that one of its members could become a leading painter of Coptic icons. This chapter attempts to sketch a biography of Yuhanna al-Armani. Needless to say, Yuhanna's icons, the body of work he produced, remain an important source of information on the man and his times. By taking into consideration the works he painted and the archival material deriving from various sources, one can tie the concrete cultural production to the social and economic conditions of the eighteenth century.

This chapter focuses on religion and the works of art commissioned during and after the epidemic. The strategies adopted by Church and state in Florence were seen as vital to placate the wrath of God, one of the main causes of plague. Indeed, there was close collaboration between Church and state, as each shared the common aim of employing the power of local saints and images to intervene with the wrathful deity. Secular and ecclesiastical authorities also shared similar concerns for public health, by limiting direct participation of the majority of the population in major processions. Official devotion and major processions centred on three major ecclesiastical sites: the Cathedral; SS. Annunziata, which housed the city's main miraculous shrine; and S. Marco, where the body of St Antonino was kept in an elaborate crystal casket. Belief in the power of religion during plague is reflected by the importance placed on artistic patronage in each of these three churches during and following the epidemic. As during previous epidemics, the 1630s plague led to a lasting legacy of commissions of new chapels, altarpieces, frescoes, costly silver candlesticks, and humble ex-voti, reflecting that plague in Florence, as elsewhere, led to the enrichment of churches.