Religious Art East and West^ 



By Benjamin Rowland 



Gleason Professor of Fine Arts, Harvard University 



[With 6 plates] 



The religious art of all peoples and periods has always been the 

 expression in visual form of their belief in unseen supernatural powers 

 governing their lives and destinies. This revelation of the truths of 

 belief may take either a symbolic or an anthropomorphic form, de- 

 pending on the religion and the social conditions of the times. Al- 

 though the artist devoted to religious themes may work within a 

 discipline imposed by tradition, it is always possible that a painter 

 like Giotto or El Greco may impose on timeworn themes such hu- 

 manity or such an aura of supernal mystery as to impel the beholder 

 to belief by this moving pictorial presentation that is in reality the 

 artist's personal interpretation of scripture. Under such conditions 

 religious art becomes a new religious experience. In the same way, 

 an artist working within the framework of a tradition of prescribed 

 iconography and technical procedure may out of his own imagination 

 present such a heightened comprehension, an exegesis of the articles 

 of belief, that his painted or sculptured icon will move the devotee 

 more than an image by another uninspired artisan who simply fol- 

 lows the canons imposed upon him by his tradition. In many of the 

 works to be discussed here, the icons, although not in any sense original 

 inventions, are the works of men who, within the discipline of their 

 craft and using prototypes drawn from many sources, produced crea- 

 tions of compelling splendor. 



It can be stated as a generality that religious art employs the same 

 techniques and styles as what is called secular art, so that, for example, 

 the intricate convolutions on a page illuminated by an Irish monk 

 in the eighth century are no different from the ornaments in gold 

 wrought by secular craftsmen of the same period. Again, the pathos 

 and realism of a saint painted in the Baroque period are also present 

 in the representations of pagan themes in the I7th century. 



1 Reprinted by permission from Midway, No. 16, autumn 1963, and based on a longer 

 and more detailed version in History of Religions, vol. 2, No. 1, summer 1962. 



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