altar
Publié le 22/02/2012
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A place, usually elevated, on which people
offer SACRIFICES. Altars vary greatly. There are
home altars, public altars, portable altars, stationary
altars, freestanding altars, and altars associated
with temples. Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and
some Protestant Christians call the table on which
the EUCHARIST is celebrated an altar, too. At times
this altar has been shaped like a sarcophagus and
required to hold a RELIC.
Many altars have been quite simple. The fi rst
Greek altars were simply piles of ash from previous
sacrifi ces. Other altars have been great works of
art. The Pergamum Altar to ZEUS (164–156 B.C.E.),
now in a Berlin museum, measures roughly 100
by 100 feet wide by 30 feet tall; its seven-foot-tall
marble frieze shows the battle of the gods and
the giants. Some classic early European paintings
are altarpieces. A good example is the Isenheim
altarpiece by Matthias Grünewald (c. 1455–1580).
Vedic Hindus constructed elaborate altars, too (see
VEDA). The scholar Stella Kramrisch once suggested
that piled Vedic altars provided the models
for Hindu temples.