“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In a fashion, those stylized figures that stood for the images of God, apostles, saints, and so forth, were like a kind of formalized abstract form, into which the artist painted all of his emotions and all of his beliefs, all of his hopes and dissatisfactions. Let no one make God the Father look like a mere human, for example! He must be seen in heroic dimensions, while Christ could be shown in divine and human attributes also. The point is that the images the artists were trying to portray were initially mental and emotional ones, and the paintings were supposed to represent not only themselves but the great drama of divine and human interrelationship, and the tension between the two. The paintings themselves seemed to make the heavenly horde come alive. If no one had seen Christ, there were pictures of him.

Art became wedded, then, to phenomena directly before the eyes. Therefore, in a way it could present man with no more data than he had before. Imaginative interpretations seemed like pretensions. Art largely ended up—in those terms, now—as the handmaiden of technology: engineering plans, mathematical diagrams, and so forth. What you call abstract art tried to reverse that process, but even the abstract painters did not believe in the world of the imagination, in which there were any heroic dimensions, and the phase is largely transitory.