Kategoria BISAC: Art >> Subjects & Themes - Religious

Awarded the Prix Stanislas Julien by the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres

The Wheel of Rebirth is one of the most basic and popular images in Buddhist visual culture. For nearly two thousand years, artists have painted it onto the porches of Buddhist temples; preachers have used it to explain karmic retribution; and philosophers have invoked it to illuminate the contrast between ignorance and nirvana. In Reinventing the Wheel, noted scholar Stephen F. Teiser explores the history and varied interpretations of the Wheel of Rebirth, a circle divided into sections...

Philosophers and theologians have long engaged in intense debate and introspection over the representation of the deity, its possibilities and its proscriptions. "The Forbidden Image" traces the dual strains of iconophilia and iconoclasm, the privileging and prohibition of religious images, over a span of two and a half millennia in the West.

Alain Besancon s work begins with a comprehensive examination of the status of the image in Greek, Judaic, Islamic, and Christian thought. The author then addresses arguments regarding the moral authority of the image in European Christianity from...

Today we take the word "icon" to mean "a sign," or we equate it with portraits of Christ and the saints. In The Sensual Icon, Bissera Pentcheva demonstrates how icons originally manifested the presence of the Holy Spirit in matter. Christ was the ideal icon, emerging through the Incarnation; so, too, were the bodies of the stylites (column-saints) penetrated by the divine pneuma (breath or spirit), or the Eucharist, or the Justinianic space of Hagia Sophia filled with the reverberations of chants and the smoke of incense. Iconoclasm (726-843) challenged these...

More than two hundred photographs provide the visual context for this tour of the world of Buddhist art. Included in the rich variety of forms...

Abraham, son of Terah or Azar and husband of Sarah, is one of the pivotal figures of the Old Testament and is generally seen as the founder of the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim faiths. He was a rich source of inspiration in all three faiths for artists of the medieval period. His life narrative from birth to death is richly recorded in a variety of media dating from the early Christian period to the end of the sixteenth century. As varied as they are numerous, the images in all three faiths show Abraham as father, husband, lover, warrior, politician, refugee, and traveler but most...