Religious Art refers to those productions and artistic works that aim to worship the sacred or divine. Through the centuries of accumulating works, people have tried to find this type of art that wants to achieve. It’s for making perfect every divine aspect through sculptures, mosaics, and paintings. The most common occurrences include Catholicism, Buddhism, Islam among others.
The composition of religious images has greater relations than just serving as an inspiration to the artists. But, they must reveal the basic principles expressed by the Church and the Christian tradition. However, some cases do relate to abstract art with a religious ending.
Differences Between Sacred Art And Religious Art
The first thing we will try to do will be to differentiate religious art from sacred art. They are very united concepts over time, although they have significant differences and that although they are two styles of art that are very united at all times, but have great differences, although both seek, through different representations or manifestations typical of art, being a kind of catechesis so that the common people connect with the mystery and increase their knowledge.
- Religious art: his works are subordinated to faith, to the love he feels for God, there are works of deep religious inspiration that, however, cannot be destined for worship and, therefore, cannot be considered properly as sacred art.
- Sacred art: it is the religious that also has a liturgical, ritual destiny, that is to say, that it has to serve for the divine cult and for this reason in the Sacrosanctum Concilium it will be said that Sacred Art is the summit of the religious, since it is intended for a most important purpose.
Types Of Religious Art
Sacred And Religious Art
As we have commented previously, these two modalities go together even if they are not the same, even so since the beginning of both it has been difficult to make a clear difference. To explain more colloquially what we have said above, This kind of art represented the love and faith they had towards God, meanwhile, the sacred art can be observed that it represented the same but serves as a divine cult.
European Christian Art
This type of art was common in Europe in the middle age stage, although many of the artists were computers by the Catholic Church in the Renaissance. It was at that time that Michelangelo made several of the works that today we know as the columns of the Basilica of St. Peter, or the paintings of the Sistine Chapel, among several other works.
Muslim Sacred Art
As a result of the prescriptions that were against the painting of animals or people, since they could cause worship, he developed a unique personality. He used a large number of primary ways such as flora, Arabic, geometric, etc. This concept reflected a harmonious and balanced vision of the planet. Therefore the spiritual nature is more focused than the physical form of the divine. That is why you will not be able to find any paintings that represent saints, nor stories of the Koran.
Tibetan-Buddhist Sacred Art
If you can observe some Tibetan-Buddhist sacred artwork you will observe that they only made representations of Vajrayāna practice. Tibetan art also makes representations of Thangkas and Mándalas and included paintings of Bodhisattvas and Buddha’s. This art modality is usually done with extreme meditation; the works are not usually signed by the artist who has done it.
