Empires of Faith in Late Antiquity

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.

Author Biography

Jaś Elsner is Professor of Late Antique Art at the University of Oxford and Humfry Payne Senior Research Fellow in Classical Archaeology and Art at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He has been a Visiting Professor in Art History at the University of Chicago since 2003, and also at the Divinity School since 2014, and was Senior Research Keeper in the Empires of Faith Project on art and religion in Late Antiquity at the British Museum from 2013 to 2018. Since 2009 he has been an Honorary Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2017 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. He works on art and its many receptions (including ritual, religion, pilgrimage, viewing, description, collecting) in antiquity and Byzantium, including into modernity, with strong interests in comparativism, global art history, and the critical historiography of the discipline.