- This is the catalogue for a major exhibition, which is the first attempt to show the developing visual cultures of the world religions in the first millennium A.D. both individually and in dialogue with each other
- The catalogue tells both the stories of each individual religious culture and gives some hints as to shared themes and interconnections
- The catalogue contains a fine selection of illustrations, comparing the religions and their art
Religion has always been a fundamental force for constructing
identity, from antiquity to the contemporary world. The transformation
of ancient cults into faith systems, which we recognise now as major
world religions, took place in the first millennium AD, in the period we
call 'Late Antiquity'. Our argument is that the creative impetus for
both the emergence, and much of the visual distinctiveness of the world
religions came in contexts of cultural encounter. Bridging the
traditional divide between classical, Asian, Islamic and Western
history, this exhibition and its accompanying catalogue highlights
religious and artistic creativity at points of contact and cultural
borders between late antique civilisations.
This catalogue 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.