Veneration: What Makes Going to an Art Gallery Like Going to Church?

AEON MAGAZINE
By Emma Crichton Miller

Abstraktes Bild 809-4. Photo by Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

When art was an adjunct of religion, its power was clear. But from the Renaissance on, painting, at least in the Western tradition, has preoccupied itself as intensely with secular as with overtly religious subject matter, or else with no subject at all. Yet when you are in the presence of an unequivocally great work of art, it seems to open a door to a realm of ideas and emotions not accessible through any other route. It is the psychological power of the framed space that has long made painting, in particular, a natural ally of religion. [link]