Mogao flourished over the following millennium, as monks, local rulers, and travelers commissioned hundreds of cave temples cut into a mile-long rock cliff and adorned them with vibrant murals. More t
In the late fifteenth century, votive panel paintings, or tavolette votive, began to accumulate around reliquary shrines and miracle-working images throughout Italy. Although often dismissed as popular art of little aesthetic consequence, more than 1,500 panels from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are extant, a testimony to their ubiquity and importance in religious practice. Humble in both their materiality and style, they represent donors in prayer and supplicants petitioning a saint at a dramatic moment of crisis. In this book, Fredrika H. Jacobs traces the origins and development of the use of votive panels in this period. She examines the form, context and functional value of votive panels, and considers how they created meaning for the person who dedicated them as well as how they accrued meaning in relationship to other images and objects within a sacred space activated by practices of cultic culture.
Formerly a Sister of Notre Dame, Beckett has lived as a contemplative nun at a Carmelite monastery in Norfolk, England, for 40-plus years, and has written several books on religious topics. Organized
This painstaking survey was completed as a PhD dissertation by Baker 75 years ago, in 1937, and has been completely updated and expanded by two conservators of the screens, Ann Ballantyne and Pauline
In their art, Tibetans aimed at faithfully transmitting and preserving Buddhism as a spiritual discipline as they had learned it from earlier teachers. Each thangka painting was a small contribution t
"The book is about a new development in Italian Renaissance art; its aim is to show how artists and humanists came together to effect this revolution, it is important because this is a long-ignored bu
Gesterkamp (Zhejiang U. Hangzhou) presents his 2008 PhD dissertation at Leiden University, exploring The Heavenly Court as perhaps the most important subject in Daoist art. The paintings reflect the a
Underlying the religious art of the Renaissance is a tension between the needs of the Church and the impulse to create great works. This beautifully illustrated book presents sacred images from the 15
This book offers a powerful and searching meditation on the lives of the saints and the images of them painted by Renaissance artists in Italy. Robert Kiely, a distinguished scholar of modernist liter
Drawing on the National Gallery’s comprehensive collection of religious images, A Closer Look: Saints explains the importance of saints and their role in the history of European painting.Erika
When a Zen master puts brush to paper, the resulting image is an expression of the quality of his or her mind. It is thus a teaching, intended to compassionately stop us in our tracks and to compel u
The timeless story of Christmas is beautifully retold through paintings by some of the world’s greatest artists. Borrowing from The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s extensive and rich collect
Boldly reinterpreting the age-old Tibetan and Nepalese art form known as Thangka, Celestial Gallery offers beautifully detailed representations of mandalas, or celestial spheres. Simply gazing upon th
This book documents the remnants of the rich Buddhist cultural heritage of Cambodia after centuries of wars and destruction culminating with the genocide and cultural annihilation of the Khmer Rouge.
The image of the `Madonna of Humility', the Virgin and Child seated on the ground, is widespread in European art, yet it remains mysterious. This book provides a detailed and accessible investigation
Mexico City?based artist Francis Alys (b. 1959) has assembled a group of paintings depicting Saint Fabiola, a 4th-century saint who gave up all earthly possessions and devoted herself to the practice
The Lotus Sutra has been the most widely read and most revered Buddhist scripture in East Asia since the third century. The miracles and parables in the "king of sutras" inspired a variety of images i
Painting the Bible is the first book to investigate the transformations that religious painting underwent in mid-Victorian England. It charts the emergence of a Protestant realist painting in a period