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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.

This chapter provides an overview of the transformation of the status of religious motifs in the visual art from Surrealism to the late 1990s. When detached from their initial contexts religious motifs cease to signify religious ideas or content, and acquire new meaning. The critical mode of reference to religion, especially in the second half of the twentieth century, articulates a self-reflexive moment that problematises the status of images and the mechanisms of their circulation and display. In the second half of the century, religious motifs embedded in artworks lost their more direct iconoclastic resonances, and were used increasingly as a critical tool directed towards the institution of art itself. An object as the ready-made situated between being an artwork and an object, brought to visibility the “religious” nature of the conditions of the display of art-objects. The medium of video enabled a re-mediation of older art – both film and culturally loaded iconic religious images. This aspect of the medium was by artists to invoke or create a quasi-mystical experience, or to re-frame existing images and film footage in order to make a critical comment on the tradition.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of medieval political thinking, as well as shifts in the contemporary perspective. The Middle Ages have characteristically figured in the history of Western political thinking as an aberration, as a deviation from the norm, as well as a period in which the “natural” categories of political thinking were pushed to one side by religious motifs of supernatural ideas. However, this text argues that such a view could change if we approach and judge the European and Western political experience in the broader perspective of world history.