Imagining the Divine: Exploring Art in Religions of Late Antiquity across Eurasia ed. by Jaś Elsner and Rachel Wood (review)

This volume grew out of a research project ("Empires of Faith") and a related exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum (Imagining the Divine: Art and the Rise of World Religions). The focus is on late antiquity, when "religions … defined their religious identities through the creation of new kinds of imagery." The chapters accordingly address "the materialization of religion in manufactured forms" (1). Their geographic scope, in the title ambitiously cast "across Eurasia," is more precisely "from Ireland to India" (93), embracing art-historical specialisms often held separate. Editors Elsner and Wood have actively promoted comparison and collaboration across traditional divides. All chapters are accompanied by a short introduction or response by a colleague in a neighboring field, and two are co-authored by scholars of Christian and Islamic art.

The first chapter, by Salvatore Settis, gathers and discusses examples of "iconoclasm" in Mediterranean art. The second, by Verity Platt, shifts focus from the bodies of Greek and Roman gods to the frames and attributes ("parerga") that mediated viewers' encounters with divinity. Chapter 3 is the first four-handed essay: a parallel analysis, by Umberto Bongianino and Benjamin C. Tilghman, of early codices of the Gospels and the Qur'ān. Chapter 4, by Martin Goodman, updates an essay first published in 2003, arguing that figures of Helios in late antique synagogues are images of God.

The fifth chapter, by Catherine E. Karkov, treats the Franks Casket in the British Museum as a "heterotopia" that embraces disparate "peoples, histories, origins, beliefs, kingdoms or empires, and faiths" (89). Chapter 6, by Elsner, analyzes the visual theology of early reliefs of the Buddha's footprints. The seventh chapter, by Ivan Foletti and Katharina Meinecke, follows facial and figural types shared by the arts of early Christianity and Islam; the intriguing response by Nadia Ali brings Nubian painters and an Abbasid physician to the conversation.

Chapter 8, by Richard Hobbs, is a parallel analysis of the forms and functions of Roman and Sassanian silver. The final chapter, by the historian of religion Christoph Uehlinger, first draws then de-constructs a heuristic distinction between two kinds of religion (T1 and T2), with a focus on the contributions of material culture. Stefanie Lenk's fine concluding response tests the distinction against the late Roman church complex at Djémila.

In their introduction, the editors posit "that the history of these religions … has previously been dominated by text-based theology, while archaeologists have often tended to adopt an excessively secular (economic, political, or social) interpretation of excavated objects. Our declared purpose is therefore to give fresh attention to the role which material objects have played … in constituting religious experience" (1). This forms an interesting contrast to the conclusion by Uehlinger, who posits that "the ultimate concern of a historian working with artefacts will be society, even when focusing on religion" (160).

Where to anchor comparison if not in the social? Authors' answers vary. Settis's chapter, for example, begins from a theological premise: "the divine as such, as inherently immaterial, is essentially an absence" (8). The unspecified source for this claim might be Jewish or Christian; it is in any case firmly "T2." It therefore does not rise to the (excessively secular?) challenge posed by Uehlinger: "freeing one's mind from the mould of assumptions derived from the Bible, Bible-related religious education and/or diffuse cultural memory," in order "to fully expose religio-historical research to anthropological, culture-historical and sociological theory" (161).

Bongianino and Tilghman begin from a cultural premise: "The relative balance between affective and intellectual responses to scripture … was significantly different … Early Islam tended to privilege the transcendent experience of scripture, while Christian doctrine emphasized close readings and complex exegesis of the text" (54). This dichotomy (in brief, a rational West and an emotional East) produces an inconsistent approach to the parerga, which...