art, religious

Painting, sculpture, architecture, music, dance, poetry, drama, and stories that are created for religious purposes. In its broadest sense, art refers to all that is made by human beings to convey beauty, pleasure, and meaning through its form, whether that be in matter, words, or sound. It even includes such "minor" arts as garden landscaping and jewelry making. All these arts have been given religious signifi cance and have had roles, often very important ones, in communicating religious truths and inducing religious experiences. These arts can be thought of as stained-glass windows. If ultimate religious reality is like pure light, for us truly to be able to understand it, it needs to take color and shape. This is what religious art tries to do. The greater the art, the more it is able to give meaning to the light without weakening it. At the same time religious painting and sculpture have performed several different functions, sometimes separately and sometimes in combination. One is to tell the narratives of the religion. Art illustrates important scenes from the faith's myths, histories, and visions of the future. Think of all the pictures and statues of the BUDDHA at the moment of his enlightenment or of JESUS as an infant in the manger or on the cross dying for the sins of the world. Paintings and statues may also be of other events or fi gures: the lives of SAINTS, prophets, reformers; important shrines or places. As for the future, consider scenes of the Last Judgment in European cathedrals, or of Maitreya, the Buddha to come, in Eastern temples. In times past, when the great majority of people were illiterate, these pictures—in stained glass, in sculpture, in paintings—were, together with the spoken word, literally the storybooks and Bibles. But even those who were able to read frequently found that a visualization helped them hold the scenes of faith in mind. Another role of art is to serve as a focus for DEVOTION. Paintings and statues are treated as divinity. The devout kneel before them, burn candles or present incense, and pray to the saint or deity represented as though present in the object. While few would perhaps think that the spiritual entity is solely contained within the form, the latter does serve as an effective focus for concentration of mind, and is like a window into the heavenly or divine world wherein the sacred being dwells. In EASTERN ORTHODOX CHRISTIANITY, for example, icons or paintings of saints are highly venerated. They are thought of as openings into HEAVEN; the background will be the gold of eternity, and the eyes of the saints will be large to represent their spiritual, all-seeing quality. In ROMAN CATHOLICISM, statues of the Virgin MARY and other saints are worshipped with adoration. In HINDUISM and BUDDHISM, images of gods and buddhas similarly help concentrate the meditative PRAYERS of temple-visitors and provide insight into the splendor of the heavens and the spiritual riches they give the world (see IMAGES, ICONS, IDOLS IN RELIGION). Sometimes art can also represent desired answers for prayers and aspirations. The paintings of animals on the walls of prehistoric caves may have been a form of hunting magic used in rituals to help men slay those same animals in the world above. Some later art offers scenes of heaven, the Buddhist Pure Land (see PURE LAND BUDDHISM), or an ideal city as a focus for hope. Finally, religious art can portray the world the way the religion wants to see it. An outstanding example is the art of ZEN BUDDHISM. Many of the ink-wash paintings associated with it are not of buddhas or even Zen masters, but of scenes of nature: a mountain reaching into empty sky, a bird on a bamboo branch. Yet these are done with a light touch suggesting that although all things are continually changing, nonetheless they all manifest the buddha-nature. Some Hindu sculpture, like the famous portrayals of the god KRISHNA playing his fl ute, or the god SIVA dancing, suggest that the creation and activity of this world may be viewed ultimately as divine LILA, the dance or play of GOD. Religious art takes many different styles. Most often, especially when it is art intended to be used in churches or temples as a part of WORSHIP, it follows certain conventions of style and incorporates standard symbols. Some religious art is more realistic than others. There is, of course, a religious place for decorative art, for abstract art, for art based on symbols, like the Christian cross or the Jewish star of David, rather than living forms. Some Hindu gods and Buddhist BODHISATTVAS have many arms to symbolize their ability to do numerous acts of mercy at once. Some Egyptian and Hindu deities (like the Hindu elephant-headed god GANESA) are in animal form or combine animal and human elements to symbolize certain qualities, like Ganesa's wisdom. With the exception of the Eastern Orthodox icon, Christian art tends to be realistic when dealing with CHRIST or the saints. In some religions, believers object to certain religious uses of art, usually on the grounds that they represent idolatry or the representation of the infi nite God in a particular form at a particular place. JUDAISM, for example, employs decorative art and art for educational purposes but avoids sacred statues or paintings in places of worship. ISLAM rejects any attempt to portray God or the Prophet in art, and in MOSQUES there is only abstract ornamentation, often calligraphed lines from the Koran (see QUR'AN). Protestant churches may have stained-glass windows and prints or paintings, less often statues, as storytellers and reminders but not as objects of devotion in the Catholic or Eastern Orthodox sense. The use or nonuse of forms of art in worship has been a heated issue in religious history, the subject of fi erce argument and even violent persecution. But for all the confl icts, few things have brought more joy to religious believers than the best of religious art within its tradition.