Images have always made a difference. Art as a carrier of religious, cultic or collective emotions has an important role to play in the transformation of the world. To be tainted by the stain of cult or idolatry, or to enable life and artworks in the first place, through the incarnation of ideas and the transcendent - this is the tension encapsulated in debate over the power of images to this day. They evoke horror and the sacred, and may also banish both. On numerous canvases from antiquity to modernity, this tension is critically striking in both religious and secular contexts. From ancient and Jewish sites as well as through Christian, Islamic and bourgeois evidence, a bridge is constructed all the way to our democratically or authoritatively shaped political present.

• Images of the authentic and betrayal through images - art, image controversy and cult prohibition in cultures since antiquity
• Weighing souls, the Last Judgement and the Resurrection - Jewish, Christian, profane and critical arguments
• Hopes and the plunge into hell in modernity: Crises, catastrophes and the Holocaust in the commemorative cultures of modernity

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