This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Sacred art and iconography records a work of visual art, a painting, a carved image, a mosaic, a manuscript illumination, a sculpted figure, made or used within a religious tradition to depict a sacred figure, narrate a sacred story, or serve directly within worship and ritual. An entry distinguishes a work's original devotional use from any later life it may have taken on as a museum object, since a piece moved from an altar or a shrine into a gallery case does not stop having been made for the first purpose, and an entry records both.
An entry records a work's subject and its formal conventions, since a sacred image is very often built from a fixed visual vocabulary a tradition has developed over centuries, particular poses, particular colors, particular attributes attached to particular figures, that let a viewer trained in the tradition read meaning a viewer outside it would not see at all. Where a work's iconography follows an established type rather than an artist's free invention, the entry names that type.
The entry also records where a work currently resides and, where it is documented, how it traveled there, since sacred art has moved between owners, regions and even traditions across long histories of trade, gift, conquest and collection, and an object's custody history is frequently as revealing as its imagery about the world it has passed through.