A brief history of religion in art - TED-Ed

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Before we began putting art into museums, art mostly served as the visual counterpart to religious stories. Are these theological paintings, sculptures, textiles and illuminations from centuries ago still relevant to us? Jeremiah Dickey describes the evolution of art in the public eye and explains how the modern viewer can see the history of art as an ongoing global conversation.

Lesson and animation by TED-Ed.

It's only been the last few hundreds years or so

that Western civilization has been putting art in museums,

at least museums resembling

the public institutions we know today.

Before this, for most, art served other purposes.

What we call fine art today

was, in fact, primarily how people experienced

an aesthetic dimension of religion.

Paintings, sculpture, textiles and illuminations

were the media of their time,

supplying vivid imagery

to accompany the stories of the day.

In this sense, Western art

shared a utilitarian purpose

with other cultures around the world,

some of whose languages incidentally have no word for art.

So how do we define what we call art?

Generally speaking, what we're talking about here

is work that visually communicates

meaning beyond language,

either through representation

or the arrangement of visual elements in space.

Evidence of this power of iconography,

or ability of images to convey meaning,

can be found in abundance

if we look at art from

the histories of our major world religions.

Almost all have, at one time or another in their history,

gone through some sort of aniconic phase.

Aniconism prohibits any visual depiction of the divine.

This is done in order to avoid idolatry,

or confusion between the representation of divinity and divinity itself.

Keeping it real, so to speak,

in the relationship between the individual and the divine.

However, this can be a challenge to maintain,

given that the urge to visually represent and interpret

the world around us

is a compulsion difficult to suppress.

For example, even today,

where the depiction of Allah or the Prophet Muhammad is prohibited,

an abstract celebration of the divine

can still be found in arabesque patterns of Islamic textile design,

with masterful flourishes of brushwork

and Arabic calligraphy,

where the words of the prophet

assume a dual role as both literature and visual art.

Likewise, in art from the early periods

of Christianity and Buddhism,

the divine presence of the Christ and the Buddha

do not appear in human form

but are represented by symbols.

In each case,

iconographic reference is employed

as a form of reverence.

Anthropomorphic representation,

or depiction in human form,

eventually became widespread in these religions

only centuries later,

under the influence of the cultural traditions surrounding them.

Historically speaking,

the public appreciation of visual art

in terms other than traditional, religious or social function

is a relatively new concept.

Today, we fetishize the fetish, so to speak.

We go to museums to see art from the ages,

but our experience of it there

is drastically removed from the context

in which it was originally intended to be seen.

It might be said that the modern viewer

lacks the richness of engagement

that she has with contemporary art,

which has been created relevant to her time

and speaks her cultural language.

It might also be said that the history of what we call art

is a conversation that continues on,

as our contemporary present passes into what will be

some future generation's classical past.

It's a conversation that reflects

the ideologies, mythologies, belief systems and taboos

and so much more of the world in which it was made.

But this is not to say that work from another age

made to serve a particular function in that time

is dead or has nothing to offer the modern viewer.

Even though in a museum setting

works of art from different places and times

are presented alongside each other,

isolated from their original settings,

their juxtaposition has benefits.

Exhibits are organized by curators,

or people who've made a career

out of their ability to recontextualize or remix

cultural artifacts in a collective presentation.

As viewers, we're then able to consider the art

in terms of a common theme that might not be apparent

in a particular work

until you see it alongside another,

and new meanings can be derived and reflected upon.

If we're so inclined,

we might even start to see every work of art

as a complementary part of some undefined, unified whole

of past human experience,

a trail that leads right to our doorstep

and continues on with us,

open to anyone who wants to explore it.