“Supposing You Were Unaware of the Painting’s Title”: Navid Kermani and Sacral Paintings

Abstract

Navid Kermani’s Ungläubiges Staunen. Über das Christentum (2015) should be primarily understood as an attempt to create a new religious language and to contain the dominant literary tendency, which is to marginalise religion as a solely historical, aesthetic or exclusive phenomenon. This tendency, termed “iconoclasm” by Bruno Latour results in the disappearance of the ability to describe religious experiences. Kermani mainly refers to the tradition of Catholic baroque art when reflecting on sacral paintings, and invents a literary strategy that aims to free them from the prevalent interpretations, both confessional and secular. He considers the crossing of the boundaries between the two media–image and text – and their being treate as one as a possible way to reach that religious experience which is unintelligible to contemporary readers, and to recreate this experience in a language which rooted in a world of their own experiences, imagination and emotions.