Imagining the Divine: Art and the Rise of World Religions.

Drury, John

Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

19 October 2017-18 February 2018

The genesis of this splendid show is a four-year research project called 'Empires of Faith', funded by the Leverhulme Trust and based at the British Museum and Wolfson College, Oxford. Eleven of its participants have contributed to the accompanying book. The world religions concerned are Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam and Judaism--in effect big and old religious traditions, for which 'Empires of Faith' may be a more accurate title (though less appealing in post-colonial times) than 'Imagining the Divine'. But the latter is apt and telling for our times when religions are more coherently understood as products of the contextualised human imagination than as manifestations of divine will or wills--as they themselves (with the possible exception of Buddhism) usually announce themselves to be. To put it diagrammatically: religions tend to understand themselves vertically, from the mundane to the transcendant and vice versa. But the contributors to this exhibition, in the spirit of anthropology and 'Religious Studies' rather than of 'Theology', understand them horizontally. They are seen in historical contexts: adapting, overlapping, borrowing and stealing from one another. How on earth, for example, did the seated figure of a Buddhist bodhisattva come to fill a luminous lustre ware bowl from Muslim Mesopotamia? Was this luxury item made for a broad-minded member of the elite? How serious might he or she have been?

Such mundane complexities are made visible by all sorts of items, eloquently interpreted: sculpture, mosaic, jewellery, pottery, textiles (some particularly lovely things here), calligraphy, ivories and coins. The prevalence of patterns in all these categories would have pleased the psychologist Carl Gustav Jung, for whom patterns were not just decorative but a, perhaps the, visual counterpart of the soul and its most direct representation.

Historically the exhibition's scope is the first millennium CE. The opening display is set long after the end of this period when all five religions have settled themselves, each into its own particular and rich visual idiom (the errant, wool-gathering paths they took to get there is for the rest of the show). This first room delights the eye with an embroidered parochet to cover the scrolls of a Torah Ark whose softly harmonious colours are probably the gift of time as well as art. A gorgeous Cretan ikon represents Judaism's child, Christianity, and a delicately patterned and calligraphed pilgrimage certificate, no less than 118 centimetres high, is from their successor, Islam. From further east come a Buddha in rich tempera--a model for meditation--and a long scroll depicting Vishnu and his nine avatars solicited from an Indian artist by a British customer who contributed trite and christianizing little rhymes on each: an entertaining item (religion as entertainment is not a theme explored).

Then the cross-fertilisations begin. A life-size marble Dionysus from Cyrene in the next room holds a bunch of grapes. He is commandingly beautiful and erotically disturbing as the god drops his cloak to partly reveal his genitals--but for other reasons than infant Christs in our own religious art, as once explored by Leo Steinberg. For all that, Dionysiac imagery seeped into early Christian art at the highest level. The huge and magnificent porphyry sarcophagus of Constantia, daughter of Constantine who unified Christianity and made it the religion of his empire, is covered all over by a vine with grapes, among which naked little putti play. (It is in the Vatican Museums and could hardly travel to Oxford). Going the other way about, the mosaic from a Roman house at Hinton St Mary in Dorset shows opulent Roman domesticity invaded by a bust-length image of Christ at the very centre of an otherwise secular mosaic floor. He looks Roman: thick-necked and double chinned. But he has the staring eyes of the Byzantine pantokrators of the centuries to come.

It may be worth warning visitors that as the show goes on the going gets harder. This is partly because most of the exhibits will be more or less strange to one visitor or another. They are meant to be--and having the patient curiosity to understand them is what the show is all about--'crossing cultures', to quote the Ashmolean's mantra. But another reason is that, after this first room, we are not so often exhilarated by beauty. This too is intended. The Indian sculpture of the Buddha's footprints, twice normal size, which advertises the exhibition and is the cover of the book is by no means a thing of beauty. We are used to beautiful Buddhas and there are three of them here, one vandalised by an iconoclast. So perhaps this rather aggressively unpleasing object is from an anti-iconic milieu. Objects are eloquent, if only we could hear exactly what they say.

The sheer vivacity and strength--particularly strength--of religious imaginations in the first millennium sustains the visitor and leaves a lasting impression. Primitive, even crude, technique does not weaken it at all but rather enhances it. The squat figures in the ivory New Testament scenes from the British Museum enact an urgent drama. The mounted god Ahura Mazda tramples on the evil spirit Ahriman, incarnations of Vishnu leap and shove, only the Buddha meditates in serene symmetry. Vital force achieves beauty most strikingly in calligraphy--as expected in aniconic Islam and climactically in the illuminations of the St Chad Gospels from Lichfield with their tight interlacings and knotty metamorphoses bustling and all but bursting from their pages.

As often at exhibitions, it can be a good idea to start at the end. The last room at the Ashmolean contains these terrific gospels along with great standing stones and crosses tellingly displayed against a vast photograph of a treeless northern landscape. The accompanying section of the book, by Katherine Cross, is a particularly clear exemplar of the exhibition's themes and methods. Religions are ambitious and commonly aspire to the vertical. This show, as with good anthropology, keeps to the horizontal as it traces the adaptations, couplings and borrowings that go on among them. Another reason for having the book as well is that the numerous coins are more visible on the page than in the showcases.

The 'Conclusion' of the book, by Stefanie Link and Jas Elsner, is a passionate plea for the inter-connected humanity of religions. They single out one of the exhibits, an Islamic glass seal inscribed with the name of Allah set in the middle of a Christian cross of Western European make in around 800 CE. The Islamuc seal is 'westernised by the cross into which it was placed and yet still authentically the product of Umayyad makers in the Near East.' So it 'speaks not only to a distant past, but to issues quite strikingly present in contemporaneity.'

John Drury is a Fellow of All Souls

College, Oxford

Caption: Silver censer from the first Cyprus treasure, 602-610 [c]The Trustees of the British Museum

Caption: Roundel from the Hinton St Mary Mosaic, early 4th C.