iconographer divinity school yale greece

Thin lines of gold often radiate outwards or inwards from the rim of the halo, and sometimes a whole halo is made up of these. Different coloured haloes have specific meanings: orange for monks, green for the Buddha and other more elevated beings, and commonly figures have both a halo for the head, and another circular one for the body, the two often intersecting somewhere around the head or neck. Tibetan Buddhism uses haloes and aureoles of many types, drawing from both Indian and Chinese traditions, extensively in statues and Thangka paintings of Buddhist saints such as Milarepa and Padmasambhava and deities. In Chinese and Japanese Buddhist art the halo has also been used since the earliest periods in depicting the image of Amitabha Buddha and others.

The rulers of the Kushan Empire were perhaps the earliest to give themselves haloes on their coins, and the nimbus in art may have originated in Central Asia and spread both east and west. The halo and the aureola have been widely used in Indian art, particularly in Buddhist iconography where it has appeared since at least the 1st century AD the Kushan Bimaran casket in the British Museum is dated 60AD (at least between 30BC and 200AD). įurther afield, Sumerian religious literature frequently speaks of melam (loaned into Akkadian as melammu), a 'brilliant, visible glamour which is exuded by gods, heroes, sometimes by kings, and also by temples of great holiness and by gods' symbols and emblems.' In Asian art Hellenistic rulers are often shown wearing radiate crowns that seem clearly to imitate this effect. The Colossus of Rhodes was a statue of the sun-god Helios and had his usual radiate crown (copied for the Statue of Liberty). On painted wares from south Italy radiant lines or simple haloes appear on a range of mythic figures: Lyssa, a personification of madness a sphinx a sea demon and Thetis, the sea-nymph who was mother to Achilles. 450-30 BC, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Depictions of Perseus in the act of slaying Medusa, with lines radiating from his head, appear on a white-ground toiletry box in the Louvre and on a slightly later red-figured vase in the style of Polygnotos, ca. Homer describes a more-than-natural light around the heads of heroes in battle.

Iconographer divinity school yale greece