Page 31 - The mystery of faith

A similar tale explaining the origin of mankind and his attendant evils is also found in Mayan culture.
Here, the gods, having first made man out of clay and bestowing upon him the gift of speech, then went
on to make a second sculpture from wood, to which they gave the gift of conscience. In Argentina and
Chile, the mythology of the Mapuche people tells of how heaven and earth were ruled by two brothers,
Gualicho and Chachao, who, one day, amused themselves by modelling men from clay, and then
breathed life and soul into them, only to be horrified when they saw their creations move, think and
eventually want to be gods.

The creation myths of most religions employ similar metaphors of mankind having been divinely
fashioned out of clay, earth, wood or metal. In every case the sculpture receives the gift of a soul to
differentiate it from an animal. Most often the divine medium was described as clay, probably due to
its ubiquity and overall importance to human survival, used as it was to fashion cooking pots, vessels
for water transport and storage, and so on. This same inert substance also allowed early man to easily
form images of their gods and objects associated with their worship and related ceremonies. While it is
true that cave paintings remain the earliest known pictorial art form, sculpture and its relationship to
faith and spirituality has also existed from our earliest knowledge of human activity.

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T he connection between art forms, specifically sculpture, and human spirituality has evolved
constantly for millennia. The Greeks formed their earliest large-scale images of the gods with an
eye to achieving both an immediate sense of realism and a more transcendent sense of awe, so that
their sculptures would retain their beauty and power for generations to come. The visual arts have
always formed the backbone of any civilization’s body politic, not least because it was through the use
of images that man’s soul could be both exalted and galvanized in the service of territorial expansion.
By modelling their numerous and widely disseminated Imperial portraiture on the traditional
iconography of their gods, Greek and Roman sculptors formed the sculptural tradition that almost all
artists subsequently attempted to follow – a striving for capturing a sense of the constant and the
divine within an image of the physical reality. But while the artist aspired to perfection, he remained
vigilant against offending the gods, be they Christian or pantheistic, with no suggestion of hubris or
disrespect. Subsequently, certain reform movements adopted an iconoclastic attitude, and just as
Moses ordered the Israelites to destroy their Golden Calf, the Byzantine Emperor Leo III forbade the
worship of icons and embarked on a spate of iconoclasm, which he applied rigorously in the east, but
was forced to relax as he continued westwards into Italy. Later, during the Reformation, in Britain, in
Flanders during the so-called ‘Beeldenstrorm’, and particularly in France during the religious wars,
there was widespread destruction of those artworks perceived to be associated with Catholic
‘idolatry’.2 Some religions, such as Islam, banned any and all representations of the human form.

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