I used to think religious symbols were universal—like, a circle means eternity everywhere, right?
Turns out, the visual grammar of sacred art is way messier than that. When you start comparing how different cultures encode divine presence, you realize there’s no Rosetta Stone for holiness. Byzantine icons flatten perspective deliberately, stacking gold leaf behind saints to signal they exist outside normal space-time, while Tibetan thangkas use that same flatness but load it with geometric mandalas that function more like architectural blueprints for meditation. Hindu temple sculptures go the opposite direction entirely—bodies twist into impossible poses, limbs multiply, because the gods they depict contain multitudes that linear perspective can’t capture. It’s not that one tradition figured out the “right” way to show the sacred and others got it wrong. Each visual system emerged from specific theological problems: How do you paint something that’s supposedly beyond human comprehension? The answers are definately not interchangeable.
When Absence Becomes the Primary Visual Strategy
Here’s the thing about Islamic geometric patterns—they’re famous for avoiding figurative representation, but that absence isn’t really absence. I’ve seen the tile work at Isfahan’s Shah Mosque, and the infinite interlacing patterns do something portraits never could: they make your eye search for a center that doesn’t exist. Every node in the pattern could be the focal point. It’s visual democracy, maybe, or visual monotheism taken to its logical extreme. Jewish manuscript illumination does something adjacent but not identical: the micrography tradition wraps tiny Hebrew letters into animal and plant forms, so the Word literally constructs the image. The text is the picture. Christianity had its iconoclastic periods too—Protestant churches whitewashed their Catholic murals, replacing saints with plain walls and scripture verses, arguing visibility itself was idolatrous.
The Surprisingly Consistent Problem of Depicting Light and Radiance
Wait—maybe the one visual motif that actually crosses borders is the halo.
Except it doesn’t work the same way anywhere. Christian saints get those flat golden discs behind their heads, which Byzantine artists inherited from Roman emperor portraits (the sacred borrowing from the political). Buddhist art uses a full-body aureole, flames or lotus petals radiating outward, because enlightenment isn’t located in the brain—it suffuses everything. Zoroastrian miniatures show divine figures with rays shooting from their shoulders, not their heads. Hindu deities sometimes have halos, sometimes don’t, depending on whether the artist wants to emphasize their transcendent or incarnate nature. The scholar Oleg Grabar spent decades arguing that these similarities prove some deep archetypal instinct, but honestly, I think it’s more pragmatic: if you’re painting on a flat surface and need to signal “this person is special,” you add light, because light is the one thing everyone agrees feels numinous. It’s not mystical convergence—it’s practical problem-solving with limited tools.
Color Symbolism Refuses to Behave Predictably Across Traditions
Blue drives me crazy.
In Christianity, especially Catholic Marian art, blue is purity and heaven—the Virgin wears it in basically every Renaissance painting because ultramarine pigment cost more than gold and artists wanted to honor her. But in Chinese Buddhist temples, blue-skinned deities like Medicine Buddha represent healing and transformation, not purity. Hindu gods like Krishna are blue because he’s infinite like the sky, or maybe because he drank poison to save the world—the mythology shifts depending who’s telling it. Meanwhile, Islamic architecture uses blue tiles extensively, but more for aesthetic cooling in hot climates than symbolic weight, though Sufi poetry loads blue with longing and melancholy. Red’s just as inconsistent: life-force in Hinduism, martyrdom in Christianity, celebration in Chinese folk religion. The art historian John Onians tried to map color meanings across cultures and basically gave up, concluding that context overpowers any inherent symbolism. A color means what the surrounding visual system says it means, which is frustrating if you’re trying to build a tidy comparative framework.
Anyway, maybe the real pattern is that religious art always tries to solve an impossible problem—making the invisible visible—and every culture decides the rules of that impossibility differently. There’s no shared visual esperanto for the divine. Just local solutions that sometimes rhyme by accident.
