I would like to tell you about the connection between religion and art. We can observe that from the beginning the art has the perspectives of knowledge. Art has the objective to give the knowledge from the perspective of religion, to explain in an easy way the sense of the faith, to show the history.
We saw that the Art was used in this way in Antiquity: in Egypt, in Greece, in Rome and it was also used in this way in Christianity. Christianity used art for didactics purposes. The art was something sacred and we needed to be a real saint person in the Medieval ages to realize the piece of art.
The most famous case of the example of the holiness is Fra Angelico. In 1982 Pope John Paul II beatified him. He wasn’t just a painter of the XV century, but also a Dominican monk. He lived in Florence and he painted his abbey with his fantastic paintings. The most impressive in his works of art is the strong spirituality that we can feel observing his paintings.
There is another type of painters that show us not about the life of saints and Jesus but about the Hell, the Punition, and the Revelation scenes. One of the most famous artists in this style is Hieronymus Bosch.
It was the painter of the XVI century. We don’t know much about the life of this Netherland painter, but one can say with certainty that he had a very rich imagination. Every painting of this artist is full of strange monsters. Every monster has an allegoric interpretation.
The aim of all artists of religious art is attracting spectator attention. On the one hand, they want to force us to think about the sanctity of God and saints, to realize our sinfulness, and on the other hand, they help us to realize our proximity to God Jesus. They represent not just in his Glory, resurrection but also as the real human with emotions, compassion, and suffering.
The Orthodox Church guarded till today the veneration of icons. Today the Catholic Church slowly and carefully tries to bring back this tradition that closely associated with spirituality.