The trouble isn’t that art lies, it’s that it tells the truth with an accent, and after a few centuries the accent becomes the whole language. That’s how you end up with Protestant walls quietly hanging Catholic theology, and nobody notices until a Quran verse points it out. The Reformation may have burned plenty of saints in paint, but it still let a few slip past customs. Aniconism tries to solve this by banning the gallery altogether, but push it too far and you get a God so distant you need a lawyer, an appointment, and three notarized rituals just to say hello. The Incarnation was the opposite of that. God showed up with a face, not so we could freeze it in stained glass forever, but so we would stop mistaking the frame for the Friend.
The trouble isn’t that art lies, it’s that it tells the truth with an accent, and after a few centuries the accent becomes the whole language. That’s how you end up with Protestant walls quietly hanging Catholic theology, and nobody notices until a Quran verse points it out. The Reformation may have burned plenty of saints in paint, but it still let a few slip past customs. Aniconism tries to solve this by banning the gallery altogether, but push it too far and you get a God so distant you need a lawyer, an appointment, and three notarized rituals just to say hello. The Incarnation was the opposite of that. God showed up with a face, not so we could freeze it in stained glass forever, but so we would stop mistaking the frame for the Friend.