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I think we are all largely on the same page here. Speech, music, art, architecture, dance, film - - these are all languages the human soul/mind uses to express itself and to respond to the world around and within us. Yet, clearly, no one language form completely expresses anything, but serves to describe or communicate it - to another, to oneself, to God/world.... Surely even the tiny word "God" cannot hope to encompass what it describes/names, nor can it adequately distinguish/differentiate among the myriad meanings it has - which is probably at least one unique meaning for each person. My intent was to suggest that a narrative representational work of art depicting a mystical experience would 'reference' that experience, but not encompass it - because that experience must be total. But an artwork (or a piece of music) can create an envronment conducive to a similar experience. I do not know what it was like to enter the Cornaro chapel 350 years ago - - or how staggeringly magnificent it might have seemed to the devout who wandered into its quiet, in from the dirty noisy street. But, if the chapel was open to the devout on a daily basis, and if one spent careful reflective time with it, and while there prayed and/or meditated on Santa Teresa's (or St. Ignatius') writings/experiences .... Who is to say, at this remove, that it was not conducive to moments of transcendence? jm >kwilding wrote: >As I see it, the precise function of pictorial art is to fill in for the >inadequacies of words. Pictorial art is perhaps the only means of >expressing that which cannot be named. >KW and Josef Gulka wrote: >What of the unnameable vocabulary and architechtonic domains of pure sounds... Music. To name/express that which 'cannot be named' with objects and images that can be named, even if the composite sum remains unnameable, seems no more, and sometimes a bit less capable of such expressions than pure sounds which have no such grounded ties. Josef