Visual Piety: A History and Theory of Popular Religious Images [Paperback]

David Morgan (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0520219325 | ISBN-13: 978-0520219328 | Publication Date: September 25, 1999 | Edition: 1

This fascinating study of devotional images traces their historical links to important strains of American culture. David Morgan demonstrates how popular visual images--from Warner Sallman's "Head of Christ" to velvet renditions of DaVinci's "Last Supper" to illustrations on prayer cards--have assumed central roles in contemporary American lives and communities.
Morgan's history of popular religious images ranges from the late Middle Ages to the present day and analyzes what he calls "visual piety," or the belief that images convey. Rather than isolating popular icons from their social contexts or regarding them as merely illustrative of theological ideas, Morgan situates both Protestant and Catholic art within the domain of devotional practice, ritual, personal narrative, and the sacred space of the home. In addition, he examines how popular icons have been rooted in social concerns ranging from control of human passions to notions of gender, creedal orthodoxy, and friendship. Also discussed is the coupling of images with texts in the attempt to control meanings and to establish markers for one's community and belief. Drawing from the fields of music, sociology, theology, philosophy, psychology, and aesthetics,Visual Piety is the first book to bring to specialist and lay reader alike an understanding of religious imagery's place in the social formation and maintenance of everyday American life.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Fascinating investigation into the history and meaning of popular religious images from the late Middle Ages to the present day. Explores the practices, attitudes, and ideas that are articulated through religious iconography." -- The Art Book Review --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From the Inside Flap

This superb collection of essays challenges the growing tension about religion and the arts by dissecting the intriguing ways religion and the arts have inte frsected in a long, vivid, necessary, and largely positive relationship from the early nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century. The essays here are unusually strong, sophisticated, mature, and insightful. They are remarkably readable, not merely for art historians but for a broadly interested and intelligent audience. The result is a truly fascinating collection whose essays touch on a wide range of important and fascinating topics in the two-hundred year experience of both American art and American religion. --Jon Butler, Yale University, author of Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People and Religion in American History: A Reader.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 283 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (September 25, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520219325
• ISBN-13: 978-0520219328
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #548,166 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

David Morgan (b. 1957) is Professor of Religion at Duke University with an additional appointment in the Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke. His areas of interest are religious history, visual culture, media and religion, and art theory. Morgan is author of four books and editor or co-editor of another five volumes. He has held fellowships in Clare Hall, Cambridge University; the National Endowment of the Humanities; J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship in the History of Art and the Humanities; and the Pew Program in Religion and American History at Yale University. He has also been a Stewart Fellow at Princeton University; a Mellon Fellow at the Library Company of Philadelphia, a Franklin Fellow of the American Philosophical Society, and a Society of Print Collectors Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society. Morgan is an elected life member of Clare Hall, Cambridge, and an elected member of the American Antiquarian Society. He is co-founder and co-editor of Material Religion, an international journal on the material culture of religions, and he co-edits a book series on 'Religion, Media and Culture' at Routledge. He is currently writing a book entitled The Embodied Eye: Visual Culture and the Material Worlds of Religion.