Quote:
Originally Posted by xelasnave
Mmmm a luminos cloud would not be hard to replicate...send up some smoke and hit it with a spot light ..
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What you need to remember is that the artist is not painting something that he / she (usually "he" in medieval times!) saw with their own eyes - they weren't "lucky" enough to have seen the apparition themselves, so they painted the scene using the symbolism which had arisen over more than a thousand years of tradition. They are painting a supernatural scene, which is recounted in a book, borrowing from representations by other artists, and all in accordance with strict religious "rules" of symbolism and iconography.
In addition, the book was written well over a 1,000 years before they read the stories contained in it, and had already gone through numerous translations before they read whichever version they had access to - generally Latin, for medieval Christian art. (Aramaic / Hebrew / Greek / Latin and probably a few more before the King John English Bible which many of us know, which precedes the modern "Good News" and other versions.)
What I don't understand is why we seem so ready to ascribe "reality" and "truth" to the mythology and symbolism of Christianity and the other Abrahamaic faiths, but not to the creation mythology of other cultures.
Was the world really created by a rainbow serpent and a burping frog? (Or maybe it was just the continent of Australia, and other regions were created literally as described in their respective local creation mythology and religious texts?)