Religion & the Arts

Especially since religion and the arts deal with a similar domain - the representation and even illustration of the invisible - they are frequently engaged in demarcating themselves from each other. Religions can be hostile towards images and icons: Aniconism, iconoclasm and the interdiction of image to name only three keywords. The arts, on the other hand, often struggle to emancipate themselves from religious paternalism. At the same time, cultural history is full of strong supra-regional interactions between religion and the arts, and sometimes even symbotic phenomenas arise such as the sacralisation of art in art-as-religion (Kunstreligion).

This focus area in CERES is dedicated to the different relationships between religion and the arts. The research in this area focuses on how different media, for example pictures/images, texts, and architectural figures relate to each other in a religious field.

Current Projects

DiGA

Digitization of Gandhāran Art

The DiGA project will digitize (2D and 3D) and catalogue a corpus of 1,791 Buddhist sculptures from Gandhara currently kept …

Research Focus "Missionary Collections"

CERES researchers, together with colleagues from museums and other universities, are studying the material dimension of cultural and religious contacts …

Teaching-Learning-Project: Between Iconophily and Iconoclasm

On the Role of Images in Religion and Society

This teaching-learning-project studies the objections towards images in different cultural and religious contexts, reaching from a reflected criticism to violent …