570 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 196 3 



The artist dedicated to producing religious works of art in a pe- 

 riod of belief will be possessed of a body of iconographical and tech- 

 nical recipes inherited as part of his training or imparted by clerical 

 instruction. This corpus of information makes him an artist compe- 

 tent to express the truths of the faith comprehensible at different 

 levels and in different ways by the learned churchman and the layman. 

 The icon which he manufactures will be imbued with the symbolic 

 attributes necessary to make it at once magically effective as a revela- 

 tion of a divine prototype and touching the heart or inspiring the awe 

 of the ordinary worshiper. This language of religious expression 

 manifests itself within the framework of the style determined by such 

 factors as the society and the background of the artist. 



It is the concern of the religious artist to translate into concrete 

 terms the concepts of Christian and Buddhist doctrine, sometimes of 

 such a transcendent metaphysical nature as to defy an explicit em- 

 bodiment in plastic form. Although every great artist will bring 

 what we describe as imagination or originality to his creation, it is 

 as true of Michelangelo as of the anonymous maker of Buddhist 

 images that he is inevitably affected by his knowledge of preexisting 

 forms that provide models for his guidance. Although some forms 

 of religious art are perforce inventions for which no pictorial proto- 

 types existed, the artists of early Christianity and Buddhism in 

 many instances adopted the vocabulary of earlier religious art for the 

 expression of new ideas. This is the principal concern of this essay. 

 There is, of course, the possibility that craftsmen separated in time 

 and place might independently arrive at a similar solution for pre- 

 senting a like concept, but the history of the development of the style 

 and iconography of Christian and Buddhist art reveals that in the 

 main the artist attached to these religions relied on readymade forms 

 in pagan art or earlier Asiatic art which they found readily adaptable 

 to the solution of their problems. The result of this common heritage 

 is a great number of parallels both in iconography and style, which 

 are of great interest and importance for the study of the interrelation- 

 ships between Buddhism and Christianity in the beginning of their 

 plastic traditions. 



The parallels that exist between religious art in the worlds of early 

 Buddhism and Christianity are partly the result of similarities in- 

 herited from beliefs of previous periods, revealing themselves in 

 similar plastic or pictorial form. In other cases they may be attrib- 

 uted to the transmission of artistic influences, in which the preexisting 

 form may in turn affect belief and its artistic expression. At other 

 times these parallels may be attributed to exchanges in doctrine 

 through the intermediary of faiths like Mithraism and Mazdaism that 

 prevailed in the geographic regions separating East and West, or they 

 may be traced to certain common backgrounds in the religions of the 



