Images have caused uproar, violence, and even casualties in the meeting of religions and cultures during the last years. Late modern culture is dominated by images and is understood in concepts such as aestheticiation and symboliation. Theological debate is likewise performed through images, symbols, and rituals rather than through doctrines and beliefs. The authors from various research backgrounds seek to clarify the terms of reference and explore the diversity and disagreements in their use from a Christian perspective.

Hans Alma is a professor of psychology at the University for Humanistics at Utrecht.

Marcel Barnard is a professor of liturgics at the Protestant Th eological University in Utrecht, Netherlands.

Volker Kuster is a professor of communication design at the University Duisburg-Essen.

As Buckfast Abbey prepares to celebrate its millennium in 2018, this new book chronicles the remarkable history of this famous English abbey, today both home to a self-sufficient community of Benedictine monks and a site that welcomes some half a million visitors to south Devon each year. The first monastery was founded in 1018 and absorbed into the Cistercian order in 1147, but was dissolved during the Reformation. The site fell into disrepair, and in the early 19th century a Gothic-style mansion was built on the abbey ruins. A group of exiled French Benedictine monks settled at Buckfast in 1882 and eventually decided to rebuild the medieval abbey church themselves: the first stone was laid in 1907 and consecration took place in 1932. In this elegant, authoritative book, essays by a dozen distinguished historians explore, among other subjects, the history of the abbey from its Saxon origins to the Dissolution; the architecture of the medieval church; the abbey site without the monks; the Benedictine revival; the rebuilding of the abbey under the architect Frederick Walters; the abbey's silver and metalwork; the art and architecture of the Blessed Sacrament Chapel, built in 1968; and the recent redevelopment of the precinct. Generously illustrated throughout with not only plans, drawings and photographs gathered from the vast Buckfast archive but also new images of the abbey church, the plethora of other buildings on site and the meticulously tended grounds, Buckfast Abbey is a fitting tribute to a unique monastery and community.

The 23 chapters in this volume explore the material culture of sanctity in Latin Europe and the Mediterranean between c. 1000 and c. 1220, with a focus on the ways in which saints and relics were enshrined, celebrated, and displayed. Reliquary cults were particularly important during the Romanesque period, both as a means of affirming or promoting identity and as a conduit for the divine. This book covers the geography of sainthood, the development of spaces for reliquary display, the distribution of saints across cities, the use of reliquaries to draw attention to the attributes, and the virtues or miracle-working character of particular saints. Individual essays range from case studies on Verona, Hildesheim, Trondheim and Limoges, the mausoleum of Lazarus at Autun, and the patronage of Mathilda of Canossa, to reflections on local pilgrimage, the deployment of saints as physical protectors, the use of imagery where possession of a saint was disputed, island sanctuaries, and the role of Templars and Hospitallers in the promotion of relics from the Holy Land. This book will serve historians and archaeologists studying the Romanesque period, and those interested in material culture and religious practice in Latin Europe and the Mediterranean c.1000-c.1220.

In 1908, an idea arose during a conversation between Dr Felix Peipers and Rudolf Steiner. Steiner had been lecturing on the healing nature of the Egyptian Goddess Isis, and drew a parallel to the Christian Madonna, Mary. From that, Steiner and Peipers started to formulate a sequence of fifteen Madonna images, primarily by Raphael, which Dr Peipers used effectively in meditative therapy with his patients. All fifteen images are included in the book. This book explores the nature of the Madonna images, addressing topics ranging from the mystery of seeing, beauty, truth and goodness, and Sophia, the divine feminine wisdom, to Isis and Madonna, working with images and Rudolf Steiner's healing mission. There is a special section on Raphael's Sistine Madonna. This book is a perfect complement to Raphael's Madonnas (edited by Christopher Bamford), a beautiful collection of colour Madonna images.

In their own words, Jonathan Bloom and Sheila Blair espouse 'things and thinginess rather than theories and isations'. This book's practical, down-to-earth dimension, expressed in plain, simple English, runs counter to the current fashion for theoretical explanations and their accompanying jargon when exploring the world of Islamic art. Its many insights, firmly anchored in artistic practice in architecture, painting and the decorative arts, are supported by ample technical know-how. The range is wide - mosques becoming temples; how religious buildings reflect politics; Yemeni frescoes and inscriptions; domestic Syrian 18th-century ornament; Egyptian bookbinding techniques; recycling and repair in Damascene crafts; conservation versus restoration; narrative on ceramics; metalwork with architectural motifs; lost buildings reconstructed; how objects speak;Muslim burials in China; the role of migrating potters; Mughal painting; stone carpet weights; the use of metals in Islamic manuscripts, calligraphy and modern artists' books.

This book offers the first-ever survey of artistic depictions of the legend of Saint George defeating the dragon. The earliest existing references to this episode in the hagiography of Saint George date from the 11th century, and the mythical conflict has entertained the imaginations of artists ever since. Copiously illustrated, this book includes varied representations in painting, sculpture, engraving, and more by artists from Raphael and Peter Paul Rubens to Odilon Redon and Andy Warhol. In addition, the artists David Claerbout, Giuseppe Penone, Luc Tuymans, and Angel Vergara Santiago have been invited to contribute their own interpretations of the story, and these new works are also featured. The contemporary perspective is further explored in the book through essays that trace the shifting resonance of the allegory, positing that it has evolved to become symbolic of man's internal struggle as he attempts to fulfill his destiny. Distributed for Mercatorfonds Exhibition Schedule: Musee des Arts Contemporains au Grand-Hornu (10/18/15-01/17/16)

The articles republished in this volume are ground-breaking studies that employ a large body of religious figural imagery of Byzantine lead seals ranging from the 6th to the 15th century. A number of the studies present tables, charts and graphs in their analysis of iconographic trends and changing popularity of saintly figures over time. And since many of the seals bear inscriptions that include the names, titles or offices of their owners, information often not given for the patrons of sacred images in other media, these diminutive objects permit an investigation into the social use of sacred imagery through the various sectors of Byzantine culture: the civil, ecclesiastical and military administrations. The religious figural imagery of the lead seals, accompanied by their owners' identifying inscriptions, offers a means of investigating both the broader visual piety of the Byzantine world and the intimate realm of their owners' personal devotions. Other studies in the volume are devoted to rare or previously unknown sacred images that demonstrate the value of the iconography of Byzantine lead seals for Byzantine studies in general. This volume includes various articles focusing on sphragistic images of saints and on the religious imagery of Byzantine seals as a means of investigating the personal piety of seal owners, as well as the wider realm of the visual piety and religious devotions of Byzantine culture at all levels. A companion volume includes studies dedicated to the image of Christ, primarily found on imperial seals, various images of the Virgin, and narrative or Christological scenes. (CS1086).

Although a century and a half of Christian proselytizing has only led to the conversion of about one percent of the Japanese population, the proportion of writers who have either been baptized or significantly influenced in their work by Christian teachings is much higher. The seventeen authors examined in this volume have all employed themes and imagery in their writings influenced by Christian teachings. Those writing between the 1880s and the start of World War II were largely drawn to the Protestant emphasis on individual freedom, though many of them eventually rejected sectarian affiliation. Since 1945, on the other hand, Catholicism has produced a number of religiously committed authors, led by figures such as Endo Shusaku, the most popular and influential Christian writer in Japan to date. The authors discussed in these essays have contributed in a variety of ways to the indigenization of the imported religion.

One hundred artists showcase their conceptions of the world's all-time favorite bad boy, Satan, in this subversive response to the popular traveling exhibit "100 Artists See God. As the popularity of angels rises, so does their oversaturation in the art world. This is a tongue-in-cheek balancing of the cultural phenomena of angels: 100 devilish works of art, sincere, irreverent, and parodic.

Survey of the growth and development of the magnificent shrines which reached their apogee during the middle ages. The cult of saints is one of the most fascinating manifestations of medieval piety. It was intensely physical; saints were believed to be present in the bodily remains that they had left on earth. Medieval shrines were created inorder to protect these relics and yet to show off their spiritual worth, at the same time allowing pilgrims limited access to them. English Medieval Shrines traces the development of such structures, from the earliestcult activities at saintly tombs in the late Roman empire, through Merovingian Gaul and the Carolingian Empire, via Anglo-Saxon England, to the great shrines of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The greater part of the bookis a definitive exploration, on a basis that is at once thematic and chronological, of the major saints cults of medieval England, from the Norman Conquest to the Reformation. These include the famous cults of St Cuthbert, St Swithun, and St Thomas Becket - and lesser known figures such as St Eanswyth of Folkestone or St Ecgwine of Evesham. John Crook, an independent architectural historian, archaeological consultant, and photographer, is the foremost authority on English shrines. He has published numerous books and papers on the cult of saints.

Rockwell's famous Saturday Evening Post covers, the four Freedoms he painted during the years of World War II, his depictions of American towns, families, and traditions are all represented in this enchanting volume. They offer a picture of America that we hold dear, representing a world of hope and humanity. Fred Bauer writes about Rockwell's message of optimism and the artist's faith in America and its people in a forthright and sympathetic text complemented by numerous Rockwell favorites in all their warmth and color. Bauer visits Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and Arlington, Vermont, talking to the people who lived with Rockwell and posed for his anecdotal pictures, the people about whom the artist said, "If you are interested in the characters you draw and understand them and love them, why, the people who see your pictures are bound to feel the same way." This lovely book enables us to partake once again of that unique love and understanding that Norman Rockwell still communicates to America.

An examination of the passion and crucifixion of Christ as depicted in the visual and religious culture of Anglo-Norman England. The twelfth century has long been recognised as a period of unusual vibrancy and importance, witnessing seminal changes in the inter-related spheres of theology, devotional practice, and iconography, especially with regard to the cross and the crucifixion of Christ. However, the visual arts of the period have been somewhat neglected, scholarly activity tending to concentrate on its textual and intellectual heritage. This book explores this extraordinarily rich and vibrant visual and religious culture, offering new and exciting insights into its significance, and studying the dynamic relationships between ideas and images in England between 1066 and the first decades of the thirteenth century. In addition to providing the first extensive survey of surviving Passion imagery from the period, it explores those images' contexts: intellectual, cultural, religious, and art-historical. It thus not only enhances our understanding of the place of the cross in Anglo-Norman culture; it also demonstrates how new image theories and patterns of agency shaped the life of the later medieval church.

The Sacred Mirrors are a journey through our physical, socio-political and spiritual anatomy. The Sacred Mirrors Cards contains twenty-three meditation cards featuring reproductions of all twenty-one of Alex Grey's Sacred Mirrors paintings plus two additional transformative images: Oversoul and The Angel. Grey's visionary poetry on the back of each card leads the meditator through contemplation of the image on the front of the card, culminating in a one-word theme for reflection. The twenty-three cards in this boxed set are intended to lead the viewer through the process of theosis - that is, coming closer to God - through contemplation of iconic archetypes and seeing oneself, each other and the world as a reflection of the divine. Alex Grey's two books of paintings have already realised massive sales: Sacred Mirrors has sold 90,000 copies and Transfigurations 25,000. His work has been exhibited around the world, including the New Museum and Stux Gallery in New York City, the Chicago International Art Exposition; the London Regional Art Gallery in Canada, the Grand Palais in Paris, the Sao Paulo Biennial and ARK exhibition space in Tokyo. In 1999, the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego honoured Grey with a mid-career retrospective. His art has, also, been featured in venues as diverse as album covers for the Beastie Boys, Nirvana and Tool; Newsweek magazine; and the Discovery Channel. He lives in New York with his wife, artist Allyson Grey, and their daughter, actress Zena Grey.

This book is the first detailed investigation to focus on the late medieval use of Tree of Jesse imagery, traditionally a representation of the genealogical tree of Christ. In northern Europe, from the mid-fifteenth to the early sixteenth centuries, it could be found across a wide range of media. Yet, as this book vividly illustrates, it had evolved beyond a simple genealogy into something more complex, which could be modified to satisfy specific religious requirements. It was also able to function on a more temporal level, reflecting not only a clerical preoccupation with a sense of communal identity, but a more general interest in displaying a family's heritage, continuity and/or social status. It is this dynamic and polyvalent element that makes the subject so fascinating.

Tradition and Transformation in Christian Art approaches tradition and transculturality in religious art from an Orthodox perspective that defines tradition as a dynamic field of exchanges and synergies between iconographic types and their variants. Relying on a new ontology of iconographic types, it explores one of the most significant ascetical and eschatological Christian images, the King of Glory (Man of Sorrows). This icon of the dead-living Christ originated in Byzantium, migrated west, and was promoted in the New World by Franciscan and Dominican missions. Themes include tensions between Byzantine and Latin spiritualities of penance and salvation, the participation of the body and gender in deification, and the theological plasticity of the Christian imaginary. Primitivist tendencies in Christian eschatology and modernism place avant-garde interest in New Mexican santos and Greek icons in tradition.

Long obfuscated by modern definitions of historical evidence and art patronage, Lucrezia Tornabuoni de' Medici's impact on the visual world of her time comes to light in this book, the first full-length scholarly argument for a lay woman's contributions to the visual arts of fifteenth-century Florence. This focused investigation of the Medici family's domestic altarpiece, Filippo Lippi's Adoration of the Christ Child, is broad in its ramifications. Mapping out the cultural network of gender, piety, and power in which Lippi's painting was originally embedded, author Stefanie Solum challenges the received wisdom that women played little part in actively shaping visual culture during the Florentine Quattrocento. She uses visual evidence never before brought to bear on the topic to reveal that Lucrezia Tornabuoni - shrewd power-broker, pious poetess, and mother of the 'Magnificent' Lorenzo de' Medici - also had a profound impact on the visual arts. Lucrezia emerges as a fascinating key to understanding the ways in which female lay religiosity created the visual world of Renaissance Florence. The Medici case study establishes, at long last, a robust historical basis for the assertion of women's agency and patronage in the deeply patriarchal and artistically dynamic society of Quattrocento Florence. As such, it offers a new paradigm for the understanding, and future study, of female patronage during this period.

The fifteenth-century Italian artist Piero della Francesca painted a familiar world. Roads wind through hilly landscapes, run past farms, sheds, barns, and villages. This is the world in which Piero lived. At the same time, Piero's paintings depict a world that is distant. The subjects of his pictures are often Christian and that means that their setting is the Holy Land, a place Piero had never visited. The Realism of Piero della Francesca studies this paradoxical aspect of Piero's art. It tells the story of an artist who could think of the local churches, palaces, and landscapes in and around his hometown of Sansepolcro as miraculously built replicas of the monuments of Jerusalem. Piero's application of perspective, to which he devoted a long treatise, was meant to convince his contemporaries that his paintings report on things that Piero actually observed. Piero's methodical way of painting seems to have offered no room for his own fantasy. His art looks deliberately styleless. This book uncovers a world in which painting needed to validate itself by cultivating the illusion that it reported on things observed instead of things imagined by the artist. Piero's painting claimed truth in a world of increasing uncertainties.

Should Christians even bother with the modern wing at the art museum? After all, modern art and artists are often caricatured as rabidly opposed to God, the church-indeed, to faith of any kind. But is that all there is to the story? In this Studies in Theology and the Arts volume, coeditors Cameron J. Anderson and G. Walter Hansen gather the reflections of artists, art historians, and theologians who collectively offer a more complicated narrative of the history of modern art and its place in the Christian life. Here, readers will find insights on the work and faith of artists including Marc Chagall, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Andy Warhol, and more. For those willing to look with eyes of faith, they may just find that God is present in the modern wing too. The Studies in Theology and the Arts series encourages Christians to thoughtfully engage with the relationship between their faith and artistic expression, with contributions from both theologians and artists on a range of artistic media including visual art, music, poetry, literature, film, and more.

An exciting new account of Irish high crosses This landmark study of Irish high crosses focuses on the carvings of an unnamed artist, the "Muiredach Master," whose monuments-completed in the early years of the 10th century-deserve a place alongside the Book of Kells as great works of their time. Drawing on a wealth of recent research, Roger Stalley describes in vivid detail how the crosses were made, where they were carved, and how they were lifted into place. His lively prose situates the works in their context, identifying patrons and exploring their motives, as well as venturing to understand what the crosses may have meant to those who gazed at them a millennium ago. In doing so, Stalley rejects preconceived notions about the imagery of the crosses, including the extent to which they were inspired by images from abroad. Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Pandemonium: An Illustrated History of Demonology presents for this first time Satan's family tree, providing a history and analysis of his fellow fallen angels from Asmodeus to Ziminiar. Throughout there will be short entries on individual demons, but Pandemonium will be more than just a visual encyclopedia. It will also focus on the influence of figures like Beelzebub, Azazel, Lilith, and Moloch on Western religion, literature, and art. Ranging from the earliest scriptural references to demons in the New Testament through the Enlightenment and Romantic eras when our devils took on a subtler form, Pandemonium functions as a compendium of Lucifer's subjects from Dante's The Divine Comedy to John Milton's Paradise Lost, and all points in between. Containing rarely seen illustrations of very old treatises on demonology as well as more well-known works by the great masters of Western painting, this book will celebrate the art of hell like never before!

Mater Misericordiae-Mother of Mercy-emerged as one of the most prolific subjects in central Italian art from the late thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries. With iconographic origins in Marian cult relics brought from Palestine to Constantinople in the fifth century, the amalgam of attributes coalesced in Armenian Cilicia then morphed as it spread to Cyprus. An early concept of Mary of Mercy-the Virgin standing with outstretched arms and a wide mantle under which kneel or stand devotees-entered the Italian peninsula at the ports of Bari and Venice during the Crusades, eventually converging in central Italy. The mendicant orders adopted the image as an easily recognizable symbol for mercy and aided in its diffusion. In this study, the author's primary goals are to explore the iconographic origins of the Madonna della Misericordia as a devotional image by identifying and analyzing key attributes; to consider circumstances for its eventual overlapping function as a secular symbol used by lay confraternities; and to discuss its diaspora throughout the Italian peninsula, Western Europe, and eastward into Russia and Ukraine. With over 100 illustrations, the book presents an array of works of art as examples, including altarpieces, frescoes, oil paintings, manuscript illuminations, metallurgy, glazed terracotta, stained glass, architectural relief sculpture, and processional banners.

In The Legend of Veronica in Early Modern Art, Katherine T. Brown explores the lore of the apocryphal character of Veronica and the history of the "true image" relic as factors in the Franciscans' placement of her character into the Via Crucis (Way of the Cross) as the Sixth Station, in both Jerusalem and Western Europe, around the turn of the fifteenth century. Katherine T. Brown examines how the Franciscans adopted and adapted the legend of Veronica to meet their own evangelical goals by intervening in the fabric of Jerusalem to incorporate her narrative which is not found in the Gospels into an urban path constructed for pilgrims, as well as in similar participatory installations in churchyards and naves across Western Europe. This book proposes plausible reasons for the subsequent proliferation of works of art depicting Veronica, both within and independent of the Stations of the Cross, from the early fifteenth through the mid-seventeenth centuries. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, theology, and medieval and Renaissance studies.

A vibrant critical exchange between contemporary art and Christianity is being increasingly prompted by an expanding programme of art installations and commissions for ecclesiastical spaces. Rather than 'religious art' reflecting Christian ideology, current practices frequently initiate projects that question the values and traditions of the host space, or present objects and events that challenge its visual conventions. In the light of these developments, this book asks what conditions are favourable to enhancing and expanding the possibilities of church-based art, and how can these conditions be addressed? What viable language or strategies can be formulated to understand and analyse art's role within the church? Focusing on concepts drawn from anthropology, comparative religion, art theory, theology and philosophy, this book formulates a lexicon of terms built around the notion of encounter in order to review the effective uses and experience of contemporary art in churches. The author concludes with the prognosis that art for the church has reached a critical and decisive phase in its history, testing the assumption that contemporary art should be a taken-for-granted element of modern church life. Art and the Church: A Fractious Embrace uniquely combines conceptual analysis, critical case studies and practical application in a rigorous and inventive manner, dealing specifically with contemporary art of the past twenty-five years, and the most recent developments in the church's policies for the arts.