When works of art created for religious purposes outlive their original function, they often take on new meanings as they move from sacred spaces to secular collections. Religious art embodies a complicated amalgam of the aesthetic and the numinous, and the fourteen essays in this volume explore how the admixture changes--often
radically--with changes of function, setting, audience, and the passage of time.

Focusing on the centuries in which the phenomenon of collecting came powerfully into its own, these essays analyze the radical recontextualization of celebrated paintings by...