Manichaean art

Manichaeism has a rich tradition of visual art, starting with Mani himself writing the Book of Pictures.[1]

One of Mani's primary beliefs was that the arts (namely painting, calligraphy, and music) were of the same esteem as the divine spirit (Middle Persian: Mihryazd), believing that the creation of art was comparable to god's creation of living forms, and therefore the experience of art was more of a divine act than any other in the material world.[2] Throughout the history of Manichaeism, didactic books of paintings were used to illustrate the religion's teachings and beliefs. From the beginning, the prophet Mani envisioned his religion (which included the teachings of Zarathustra, Buddha, and Christ) as a universal and therefore “transcultural” entity, leading to its vast spread from Europe to Asia. The Manichaean mission employed multifaceted means of communication (including oral, textual, and pictorial) so the beliefs may adapt to the variety of cultures it entered. These picture books covered the primary themes of Manichaeism, such as its dualism of light and darkness, maps of a religious universe, the process of human salvation, as well as various Manichaean prophets and deities, and were considered principal pieces of the Manichaean canon.[3]

On the subject of Mani's original paintings, Dr. Zsuzsanna Gulácsi notes that the “paintings were created first in mid-third century Mesopotamia with direct involvement from Mani ... and were later preserved by being copied and adapted to a wide variety of artistic and cultural norms, as the religion spread across the Asian continent.”[4] Gulácsi points to the Yuan-era silk paintings Manichaean Diagram of the Universe and Sermon on Mani's Teaching of Salvation as examples of sinicized variations of Mani's tradition of using a Book of Pictures as a method of teaching, specifically providing insight into the cosmology of the era's Chinese Manichaeism.[4] After the discovery of fragmentary pieces of Uyghur-Manichean art[5] in the ruins of Turfan, Western Regions, scholars began turning to the newly uncovered remains of Manichaean book art in order to assess through the fragments what could resemble the original style of the Arzhang.[6]