Afterword: The Visual Culture of Revelation

Abstract

Th e chapters comprising this book have productively explored a host of interrelated themes – imagination, sensation, fi guration, images, the destruction or banning of images, and the aesthetics of perception and feeling that organize this range of experience. Attentive readers will not have missed that a golden thread running through the fabric of work is embodiment as a fundamental feature of the three religions that occupy the authors: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. To be sure, the traditions diff er from one another in important ways on the treatment of the body as a culturally conditioned and historically constructed set of sensibilities and aff ordances. But in every case, the dynamics of sensation and representation, the use of and anxiety about imagery, and the forms of perception and imagination produce the matrix in which the sacred takes shape, in particular, how both transcendence and revelation are understood to operate. fi the separation the divine.