Empires of Faith in Late Antiquity: Histories of Art and Religion from India to Ireland

by: Elsner, J.

This book reveals the rewards of exploring the relationship between art and religion in the first millennium, and the particular problems of comparing the visual cultures of different emergent and established religions of the period in Eurasia - Buddhism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Islam, Judaism, Christianity and the pagan religions of the Roman world. Most of these became established and remained in play as what are called 'the world religions'. The chapters in this volume show how the long traditions of studying these topics are caught up in complex local, ancestral, colonial and post-colonial discourses and biases, which have made comparison difficult. The study of Late Antiquity turns out also to be an examination of the intellectual histories of modernity.

Uses case studies to demonstrate the challenges of comparing art and religion across Eurasia in the first millennium
Shows how images need to be brought into discussion of these topics alongside texts and scriptures
Reveals the limitations to scholarship imposed by modern attitudes founded in the fraught history of Eurasia in the last 150 years and enables new starting points to be adopted

Table of Contents
1. Introduction Jaś Elsner
Part I. The Imperial Context:
2. The Gandharan problem Robert Bracey
3. Writing the art, archaeology and religion of the Roman Mediterranean Philippa Adrych and Dominic Dalglish
4. Mystery cult and material culture in the Graeco-Roman world Philippa Adrych and Dominic Dalglish
5. The Viennese invention of late antiquity: between politics and religion in the forms of late Roman art Jaś Elsner
6. The rise of Byzantine art and archaeology in late Imperial Russia Maria Lidova
7. Ferdinand Piper's Monumentale Theologie (1867) and Schleiermacher's legacy: the attempted foundation of a Protestant theology of art Stefanie Lenk
Part II. After Imperialism: Orientalism and its Resistances
8. The road from decadence: agendas and personal histories in the rise of early Islamic art Nadia Ali
9. Connecting art and Zoroastrianism in Sasanian studies Rachel Wood
10. 'Hindu' art and the primordial Śiva Robert Bracey
Part III. Post-colonialist, Old Colonialist and Nationalist Fantasies:
11. Jewish art: before and after the Jewish state (1948) Jesse Lockard and Jaś Elsner
12. Whose history is it anyway? Contests for India's past in the twentieth century Robert Bracey
13. Acculturated natives who rebel: revivalist, Ottomanist and Pan-Arabist engagements with early Islamic art (1876–1930s) Nadia Ali
14. Barbarians at the British Museum: Anglo-Saxon art, race and religion Katherine Cross.

Empires of Faith in Late Antiquity: Histories of Art and Religion from India to Ireland

by: Elsner, J.

• ISBN-13: 9781108473071 / 978-1-108-47307-1
• ISBN-03: 1108473075 / 1-108-47307-5
• Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2020