Image as Theology: The Power of Art in Shaping Christian Thought, Devotion, and Imagination (Turnhout: Brepols, 2022) (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Concept of the Image in the Old and New Testaments
The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, 2021
It is notoriously difficult to define the term image. Is it an idea, an artifact, an event, or another phenomenon altogether? W.J.T. Mitchell’s influential essay “What Is an Image?” developed a “family tree” of images, including graphic, optical, perceptual, mental, and verbal images (Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987). James Elkins, building upon this model, has suggested an even more diffuse genealogy of image types (Elkins, The Domain of Images. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999). Sunil Manghani synthesized both approaches and has proposed an “ecology of images”, through which one can examine the full “life” of an image as it resonates within a complex set of contexts, processes, and uses (Manghani, Image Studies: Theory and Practice. London: Routledge, 2012). For the purposes of this analysis, we shall accept this model of an ecology of images, encompassing the graphic, optical, perceptual, mental, and verbal images. The fundamental question, then, is this: How do the Old and New Testaments conceptualize the category of image? We shall examine the concepts of “graven images”, theophanies (appearances of God), and the “image of God” within the biblical canon, and argue that the conceptualization of image within the Judeo-Christian scriptures contains both a potent iconophobia on one side and iconophilia on the other.
Introduction: On the Relations of Religion and Images
Entangled Religions, 2023
In this special issue, we explore the role of depictions and images in religious traditions from both theoretical and empirical perspectives, covering a broad spectrum of religious traditions from Asia to Europe. Our focus is on examining the range of religious attitudes towards images, which can range from indifference (aniconism) to admiration (iconism) to outright rejection and destruction (anti-iconism). Our contributors discuss the hypothesis that religious attitudes towards images often fluctuate between these three categories, and that it is not possible to strictly classify a particular religious tradition as either hostile or friendly towards images. This introduction provides an overview of the central and complex concepts that form the basis of the individual contributions, including representation, icons, media and materiality, and an/iconism.
Over the last hundred years or so art history has developed into an increasingly promiscuous field of inquiry. In that time art historians have sought to enrich the formal analysis of their objects of study with the context provided by social history, semiotics, anthropology, post-colonial studies, or any other paradigm of inquiry that offers a fresh perspective on how people have engaged with images. Perhaps surprisingly, these divergent modes of practicing art history have led to a rigorous application of language. Following Michael Baxandall's analysis of how Renaissance merchants leaned on the terminology they used to describe such varied tasks as barrel gauging and dancing to discuss works of art, art historians have become increasingly aware of the fundamental tension that binds pictures to the words used to describe them. Image, picture, icon, medium, body, calligraphy-these terms (and many others) are part of the disciplinary jargon, and though art historians may occasionally disagree about the nuances of these terms, there is a general consensus regarding their connotations within the field. These are the terms used to develop a critical explanation or interpretation of pictures and objects, to engage these objects exegetically, as it were. Despite the numerous methodological parallels that unite art history and biblical exegesis, these two disciplines have struggled to engage one another in meaningful dialogue. Art historians pillage exegetical sources in order to crack the code of obscure biblical subjects, while exegetes invoke images as illustrations of textual praxis. The emergence of rhetography as a mode of biblical exegesis concerned with the imagistic quality of the text offers a unique occasion to reflect upon the considerable overlap between these two distinct disciplines. Both are fundamentally concerned with the problem of images, but they approach this issue from different angles. Art history began with pictures and objects and has come only recently to understand how the squishiness of the term " image " can be put to use in describing a host of non-material images that were nevertheless theorized in historical sources as though they were manufactured pictures. Similarly, biblical exegesis began with textual analysis and has only recently awakened to the power of rhetorical images evoked through parables, ekphrasis, and evocative language (enargeia). Yet while rhetography and art history seemingly converge on a unified concern for " the image, " they often employ this and other critical terms – like vision, visuality, and representation, to name only a few – in ways that reflect a specific disciplinary agenda. By calling attention to the overlapping terminology used by art historians and retographers, this intervention will examine on the one hand how the disciplines might illuminate one another and on the other where inquiry begins to uncomfortably push beyond the limits of interdisciplinarity. If you do not have access to this volume through your library, please email me at cnygren@pitt.edu
Signifying God: Theological Hermeneutics in Devotional Literature and Religious Art Studies
This panel aims to study the representations of the divine, especially non-verbal forms of communication, as theological language. In his foundational work Theological Hermeneutics: Development and Significance, Werner G. Jeanrond writes that "the interpretation of the text or piece of art is a linguistic activity, for it is carried out through language." For Werner G. Jeanrond, "language" interacts with non-verbal mediums of communication "in the broadest possible sense: a sculpture, a painting, a musical score, a ballet, a clown act with its gestures, all these modes of artistic expression use language." In this way, he explains, "the concept of language covers a much broader reality than just verbal expressions." While Werner G. Jeanrond focuses his book exclusively on the interpretation of verbal modes of expression in so far as they are theologically relevant, this panel takes his work one step further by particularizing the ways in which non-verbal forms of human communication invite viewers into a hermeneutical practice. That is, panelists read icons, paintings, sculptures, illustrations, gestures, intonation of voice, displays of drama, and theatricality in liturgies as endowed with theological meaning which in turn invites audiences to interpret them as such. To this end, papers consider images in their multiple art forms as "linguistic activity," that is, as theologically complex moments that participate in the making of Christian history. How do images participate in historical events-such as the various reforms-via their hagiographic and iconographic natures? Can, and if so how can, certain visual artworks be considered as invitations into a hermeneutical process of theology? And how do images in devotional texts cite other artistic modes of sculpture, painting, and performances of the liturgy to call their audiences to enact the image through imagining themselves as at least relevant for if not entangled with it? Particularizing a religious image, each panelist's work relates epistemologies of theology and religion to those of literature and art history. Organized by Alysée Le Druillenec (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne & UCLouvain) and Ailie Posillico (Villanova University)
This 3rd chapter of Early Christian Attitudes toward Images reviews the literature and artistic monuments from the first three centuries of Christian history. What do these witnesses tell us about the attitudes of early Christians toward images? Were they aniconic and iconophobic, as some say, or were they able to distinguish between idolatrous and non idolatrous art and baptize the latter as a means of preaching the Gospel in forms and colors?