Imagining the Divine : Art and the Rise of World Religions

A beautiful book exploring the creation of the imagery of the World's major religions

Bridging the traditional divide between classical, Asian, Islamic and Western history, this exhibition catalogue highlights religious and artistic creativity at points of contact and cultural borders between late antique civilisations. The book features the creation of specific visual languages that belong to five major world religions: Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam. The imagery still used by these belief systems today is evidence for the development of distinct religious identities in Late Antiquity.

Emblematic visual forms like the figure of Buddha and Christ, or Islamic aniconism, only evolved in dialogue with a variety of coexisting visualisations of the sacred. As late antique believers appropriated some competing models and rejected others, they created compelling and long-lived representations of faith but also revealed their indebtedness to a multitude of contemporaneous religious ideas and images.

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