Outside Reading 2: Art as a Sacred Place

Nathan Bloom: 8 December 2009
Gardner's Art through the Ages

This semester I am taking FNAR 201 or Art History. The text for this book although not outright, it does talk about sacred places and leads me to question the first axiom. My Text begins with cave paintings and moves right through Gothic Cathedrals. The First Axiom says that a sacred place chooses and cannot be chosen, however places such as the Great Pyramids at Giza, the Dome of the Rock(pg344), the Kaaba, and all Cathedrals seem to be chosen. All these places were chosen by the architects who built them. Today they appear to be sacred places so what does this mean for the first axiom? Is it only Circumstantial? Or did these places choose and the architects simply complied? That certainly seems the case in the Dome of the Rock; Muhammad ascended here and Abraham was prepared to sacrifice his son, is this a coincidence? Churches are considered sacred and building Cathedrals all over Europe certainly has the appearance of choosing th place.