'Religious Art'

David Freedberg, professor of art history and archaeology, and director of the Italian Academy, Columbia University, addresses “Violence, the Sacred, and the Hidden God: Religious Art in the 20th Century."The lecture examines the ancient roots of modern debates on the figuration of god, violence, and conveying the numinous in 20th-century aesthetics.

I could only go to part of this lecture.
But as he was comparing slides of paintings and talking about which ones conveyed what impressions of the divine or not, I wondered...

Does necessitating a 'spiritual' aspect in religious art give us a falsely biased expectation of the divine?
I realize that one must package the entire message of a painting into a frame, and you've got to give people indicators of that message by how the painting conveys it's visual images. So to frame something spiritual, you've got to convey that sense to the viewer.

But, as he flipped through paintings, categorizing them by how they compared to each other in representing the divine by conveying that spiritual or 'numinous quality', I wondered whether we are cheating ourselves out of a greater experience of God (or the divine, if you will) by expecting him to make us feel a certain way in our art.

Because if a painting can make me feel as though it conveys something spiritual, and the painting itself is not God, then who is to say that I experience some aspect of God only when I feel spiritual?

Yes, this is a pretty basic idea, I know.
But it was striking me as being more concrete, and almost directly dishonest.
And though I know this,



I'm pretty sure that the speaker would not consider a picture of some every-day non-dramatic item to be at all spiritual or conveying this 'numinous'ness.

But then two quotes come to mind. One I remember from V for Vendetta, something about how Artists use lies to tell the truth

The other being the theology of a friend of mine, God is that which animates

It's not the things.
God is not in the rain. God is not in the things themselves (oh, Ecclesiastes).
It's the way they twist, and the way we let them twist us.
And we can see the things, but not their twisting.
So I suppose this is what artists must represent.

But I doubt that argument would go far in a discussion of art
(While simultaneously and knowingly underestimating how far a discussion of art can go. hah.)