According to common belief, Islam has an absolute ban on images and is hostile to pictorial representations, quite in contrast to Christianity. But is this actually true? Are images categorically forbidden in Islam? And what about Christianity: doesn’t the Second Commandment state “thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image”?
The exhibition In the name of the Image. Imagery and between Cult and Prohibition in Islam and Christianity (Im Namen des Bildes. Das Bild zwischen Kult und Verbot in Islam und Christentum) deals with such questions on a comparative, cross-cultural basis. It traces the strategies Islam and Christianity applied over the centuries to deal with aniconism.
The focus is on the Middle Ages, that is, the period from the 6th to the 16th century. During this time, the question of images was debated extensively by theologians. The 136 works on display cover a geographic area that stretches from Latin Western Europe (Kingdom of France and Holy Roman Empire) to the eastern Mediterranean (Byzantine Empire and later Ottoman Empire) to Western Asia (Persia) and as far as South Asia (Mughal Empire in India).
Complementary to the exhibition, the museum is organizing a series of lectures to address certain aspects in more depth, and in which we get to hear what world-renowned experts have to say on the subject.