This book explores the historical and contemporary relationship between the arts and Christianity.

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.

This volume explores how the visual arts are presenting and responding to Christian theology and demonstrates how modern and contemporary artists and artworks have actively engaged in conversation with Christianity. Modern intellectual enquiry has often been reluctant to engage theology as an enriching or useful form of visual analysis, but critics are increasingly revisiting religious narratives and Christian thought in pursuit of understanding our present-day visual culture. In this book an international group of contributors demonstrate how theology is often implicit within artworks and how, regardless of a viewer’s personal faith, it can become implicit in a viewer’s visual encounter. Their observations include deliberate juxtaposition of Christian symbols, imaginative play with theologies, the validation of non-confessional or secular public engagement, and inversions of biblical interpretation. Case studies such as an interactive Easter, glow-sticks as sacrament, and visualisation of the Bible’s polyphonic voices enrich this discussion. Together, they call for a greater interpretative generosity and more nuance around theology’s cultural contexts in the modern era. By engaging with theology, culture, and the visual art, this collection offers a fresh lens through which to see the interaction of religion and art. As such, it will be of great use to those working in Religion and the Arts, Visual Art, Material Religion, Theology, Aesthetics, and Cultural Studies.

Art and the Roman Viewer presents a fresh analysis of a major intellectual problem in the history of art: why did the arts of Late Antiquity move away from classical naturalism towards spiritual abstraction? Arguing from a close examination of ancient art images and texts, Jas Elsner shows how an understanding of Roman viewing practices greatly deepens our insight into this fundamental transformation. The sophisticated arts of the early empire, such as Pompeian painting, sculpted reliefs and silverware, entertain the potential for irony, parody, and deconstruction. By contrast, the symbolic arts of the Christian empire, notably the mosaics of Ravenna, eschew irony, while complexity remains, indeed intensifies, as multiple meanings compete to enrich a fundamentally sacred truth. By addressing the subtleties inherent in ancient viewing, this study embarks on a quest to enrich our understanding of an era of profound artistic change.

When early Christians began to study the Bible, and to write their own history and that of the Jews whom they claimed to supersede, they used scholarly methods invented by the librarians and literary critics of Hellenistic Alexandria. But Origen and Eusebius, two scholars of late Roman Caesarea, did far more. Both produced new kinds of books, in which parallel columns made possible critical comparisons previously unenvisioned, whether between biblical texts or between national histories. Eusebius went even farther, creating new research tools, new forms of history and polemic, and a new kind of library to support both research and book production. Christianity and the Transformation of the Book combines broad-gauged synthesis and close textual analysis to reconstruct the kinds of books and the ways of organizing scholarly inquiry and collaboration among the Christians of Caesarea, on the coast of Roman Palestine. The book explores the dialectical relationship between intellectual history and the history of the book, even as it expands our understanding of early Christian scholarship. Christianity and the Transformation of the Book attends to the social, religious, intellectual, and institutional contexts within which Origen and Eusebius worked, as well as the details of their scholarly practices--practices that, the authors argue, continued to define major sectors of Christian learning for almost two millennia and are, in many ways, still with us today.,

This work decodes the key themes, signs and symbols found in Christian art - the Eucharist, the Crucifixion, the Virgin Mary. It also explores the theological and historical background of Christian imagery, from the devotional works of the medieval and Renaissance periods, to the 21st century.

Signs of Change: Transformations of Christian Traditions and their Representation in the Arts, 1000–2000 focuses on the changing relationships between what gradually emerged as the Arts and Christianity, the latter term covering both a stream of ideas and its institutions. The book as a whole is addressed to a general academic audience concerned with issues of cultural history, while the individual essays are also intended as scholarly contributions within their own fields. A collaborative effort by twenty-five European and American scholars representing disciplines ranging from aesthetics to the history of art and architecture, from literature, music and the theatre to classics, church history, and theology, the volume is an interdisciplinary study of intermedial phenomena, generally in larger cultural and intellectual contexts. The focus of topics extends from single concrete objects to sets of abstract concepts and values, and from a single moment in time to an entire millennium. While Signs of Change acknowledges the importance of synthesizing efforts essential to hermeneutically informed scholarship, in order to counterbalance generalized historical narratives with detailed investigations, broad accounts are juxtaposed with specialized research projects. The deliberately unchronological grouping of contributions underlines the effort to further discussion about methodologies for writing cultural history.