Aquatic Iconographies: Representing Divine Water in Pre-Modern Art

Water is an essential feature of human life. Across cultures, oceans, rivers, and streams are linked with divinities, and water in all its forms is seen as integral to religious rituals. Yet arguably, water is one of the most challenging natural elements to represent in art. Motivated by recent studies in the Blue Humanities (Menz 2023; Opperman 2023) and the phenomenology of water (LeVen 2022; Purves 2024), this panel explores visual representations of water and its ritual manifestations in the pre-modern world, globally defined between ca. 3000 BCE-1000 CE. Our goal is to consider how artists in diverse ancient cultures conceptualized the power of water. A comparative, cross-cultural approach to the question of water and its sacred representations brings new insights on the aesthetic and religious experiences of a wide variety of individuals in the ancient world.

Themes may include (but are not limited to):

- Anthropomorphism and/or aniconism in representations of water deities and mythological narratives

- The iconography of water deities in specific regions and time periods

- Representations of water as an essential element of religious ritual.

- The relationship between water imagery, medium, and materiality

- The role of water in the production of sacred space and as an element of architectural design

- Conceptual approaches to the iconography of water within/across culturally specific image systems

We welcome papers that engage these topics from a broad spectrum of contemporary scholarly perspectives, including phenomenology, eco-criticism, and intermediality, among others. Comparative studies are particularly encouraged