Imagining the Divine: Art in Religions of Late Antiquity across Eurasia

In Late Antiquity, religious experience was not confined to what people read or heard. Images, manuscripts, carved objects and precious metalwork could give sacred ideas a form that people saw and handled. Between roughly AD 200 and 1000, those forms were changing across a vast region from India to Iberia. Edited by Jaś Elsner and Rachel Wood, Imagining the Divine asks what the history of religion looks like when the objects come first.

An image of the Buddha’s footprints at Amarāvatī, the carved Franks Casket and decorated silver from imperial Rome and Sasanian Iran raise quite different questions about sacred images. Set beside one another, they show why looking at objects can reveal things that religious texts alone cannot. The contributors are interested in how people recognised the divine in material form and how that relationship changed across cultures.