Reimagining Divinity: When Black Figures Enter Sacred and Mythological Art

What does God look like?

What colour is sacredness? Which bodies can represent creation, purity, wisdom, beauty or spiritual power?

These questions may appear impossible to answer. Divinity exceeds the limits of the human body, and spiritual traditions have produced countless ways of imagining forces that cannot be seen directly.

Yet religious art has always given the invisible a visible form.

Across centuries of European painting, artists represented God, Christ, the Virgin Mary, angels, saints, classical deities and mythological heroes through bodies familiar to their own cultural worlds. These figures were often shown with European features, pale skin and forms of dress associated with Western history.

Through repetition, culturally specific images acquired the appearance of universality.

A white Madonna could be presented not merely as one culture’s interpretation of sacred motherhood, but as the natural image of sacred motherhood itself. A European-looking God could come to represent divine authority for people far beyond Europe. Classical ideals of beauty became so influential that their historical and geographical origins were easily forgotten.

Contemporary artist Harmonia Rosales enters this visual history with a bold proposition.

What happens when Black women and African-diasporic figures occupy the roles once reserved for white gods, goddesses, angels and embodiments of ideal beauty?

The change is not cosmetic. It transforms the meaning of the image.

Sacred Images Are Never Entirely Neutral

Religious art can feel timeless because it deals with eternal themes: creation, death, love, sacrifice, rebirth and the relationship between humanity and forces greater than itself.

But sacred images are made by people living in particular places and periods. They reflect the assumptions, political structures and visual conventions of those societies.

Renaissance artists did not produce neutral images of Christianity. They interpreted sacred stories through the bodies, architecture, clothing and artistic values of their own world.

Biblical figures from the eastern Mediterranean were frequently represented as Europeans. Heavenly spaces resembled Renaissance courts. Religious scenes included objects, buildings and landscapes familiar to the artist’s intended audience.

This process helped viewers connect distant spiritual narratives to their immediate lives. It made sacred history feel present.

The problem was not that European artists imagined divinity through forms familiar to them. The problem arose when those interpretations were presented as the only natural or authoritative ones.

As European political, colonial and religious power spread, its sacred imagery travelled with it. Images created within one cultural tradition were carried across Africa, the Caribbean, the Americas and other parts of the world. European faces came to occupy the visual centre of Christianity, even among communities whose own bodies and histories looked very different.

Art did not merely illustrate religious power.

It helped establish who appeared naturally entitled to possess it.

When One Image Becomes “Universal”

The word universal can conceal a great deal.

It may suggest that an image speaks to everyone, but it can also mean that one culture has been given the authority to represent everyone. The figure presented as universal is rarely without identity. Instead, their particular identity has become so dominant that it is no longer noticed.

A white figure can be viewed simply as a person, while a Black figure is described as representing race. European mythology can be treated as part of general cultural education, while African spiritual traditions are classified as specialist, ethnic or unfamiliar.

This imbalance affects how audiences interpret art.

When viewers see Michelangelo’s image of creation, they may recognise it immediately as a major statement about humanity. When an artist places a Black woman within a comparable composition, the work may be discussed first as identity politics.

The first image is allowed to be universal. The second must explain its difference.

Harmonia Rosales exposes this unequal arrangement. Her paintings reveal that the supposedly neutral image was culturally specific all along.

By changing the bodies and spiritual references within familiar compositions, she makes the old assumptions visible.

Harmonia Rosales and the Reorientation of the Sacred

Rosales draws upon the visual structures of Renaissance and Old Master painting while introducing Black figures and elements connected to Yoruba spirituality.

Her approach is not based on rejecting European art. She studies its compositional intelligence, symbolic force and technical authority. Familiar poses and arrangements allow viewers to recognise the visual history being addressed.

Recognition is only the beginning.

In works such as The Creation of God, Rosales reimagines Michelangelo’s famous scene from the Sistine Chapel in which God reaches towards Adam. Her interpretation places Black female divinity at the centre of creation.

This shift carries enormous meaning.

The Black woman is no longer the secondary figure, servant, outsider or object of someone else’s gaze. She becomes origin, creator and source of life. She occupies a position historically associated with supreme authority.

The work challenges more than the whiteness of traditional sacred imagery. It also challenges its masculinity.

Western religious art has repeatedly visualised ultimate power through an older male body. Women may appear as mothers, virgins, saints or objects of desire, but they are less frequently presented as the original creative force.

Rosales brings race and gender into the same visual question: who has been permitted to embody the highest form of power?

Her answer is not delivered through argument alone. It is built into the composition.

From Venus to Oshun

Rosales’s The Birth of Oshun recalls Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, one of the most recognisable paintings of the Italian Renaissance.

Botticelli’s Venus arrives on the shore as an idealised embodiment of beauty and love. Her pale body, flowing hair and graceful pose have influenced Western ideas of feminine beauty for centuries.

Rosales retains enough of the visual structure for audiences to recognise the reference, but the cultural centre changes. Venus becomes associated with Oshun, an Orisha connected with fresh water, love, beauty, fertility and prosperity within Yoruba spiritual traditions.

The Black female figure is not placed into the composition merely to demonstrate diversity. She brings another cosmology with her.

This distinction is essential.

If the only change were skin colour, the painting might leave the original system of meaning largely intact. By invoking Oshun, Rosales creates a conversation between traditions. The figure possesses spiritual significance that does not depend on European mythology.

The work therefore operates in more than one direction. It questions the narrowness of the Western beauty ideal while affirming a different cultural source of beauty, power and sacred knowledge.

The image does not ask whether a Black woman can be as beautiful as Venus.

It questions why Venus was allowed to define beauty for everyone.

The Black Female Body as Origin

The history of representing Black women is marked by distortion.

Black female bodies have been exoticised, sexualised, controlled, exploited and subjected to supposedly scientific forms of racial classification. They have often been viewed through narratives produced by others rather than represented as sources of their own meaning.

To present a Black woman as divine creator is therefore a significant reversal.

But reversal alone is not enough.

A figure can be elevated symbolically while remaining simplified as a person. The expectation that Black women must always appear strong, regal or spiritually powerful can become another restrictive image. It may deny vulnerability, ordinariness and individuality.

Rosales’s sacred figures operate within this tension.

Their monumentality responds to a historical absence. They claim beauty and spiritual power where Black women were rarely allowed to possess either. At the same time, viewers must recognise that no single image can carry the full range of Black womanhood.

Representation becomes meaningful through variety.

Black women should be free to appear as gods, artists, thinkers, workers, mothers, rebels, lovers and complex individuals. They should also be free to appear without being required to symbolise an entire race or gender.

Sacred representation expands possibility, but it should not become a new obligation.

Reinterpretation Is Not the Same as Replacement

When artists revisit familiar religious or mythological compositions, the result is sometimes described as replacing white figures with Black ones.

That description is too limited.

Replacement suggests that the underlying meaning remains unchanged while one body is exchanged for another. Thoughtful reinterpretation does something more demanding. It examines the assumptions built into the original image and changes the cultural relationships within it.

A successful reinterpretation asks:

What did the original composition communicate? Why did its figures possess authority? Which cultural values did the image make visible? What histories did it exclude? What new meanings emerge when its symbols are transformed?

Rosales’s work is effective because the viewer can feel both continuity and disruption. Renaissance structures provide a recognisable visual language, but Yoruba references redirect the spiritual meaning.

The old image remains present as a memory. The new image refuses to remain subordinate to it.

This is how historical influence can become creative material rather than creative confinement.

Yoruba Spirituality Is Not Decorative Material

The use of African spiritual traditions in contemporary art requires care.

Yoruba cosmology is not simply a collection of visually attractive symbols. It is part of living systems of belief, knowledge, ceremony, ethics and community. Through historical movement, enslavement and diaspora, Yoruba spiritual traditions have also influenced practices across the Caribbean and the Americas.

When artists work with this material, cultural specificity matters.

An Orisha is not a decorative substitute for a Greek god. Sacred objects and symbols should not be combined carelessly simply because they look powerful together. Different African traditions are not interchangeable, and the continent should never be treated as a single spiritual culture.

Respectful reinterpretation begins with knowledge.

Artists should understand the origin, meaning and living significance of the symbols they use. They should distinguish between personal spiritual connection, inherited cultural knowledge, scholarly research and visual fascination from a distance.

This does not mean that artists can never bring traditions into conversation. Cultural exchange has always shaped art. But dialogue requires more than surface resemblance.

It requires an awareness of history, power and responsibility.

The Difference Between Mythology and Religion

Museums often describe Greek and Roman sacred narratives as mythology, while referring to Christianity as religion. African spiritual systems have sometimes been positioned somewhere between the two—displayed as anthropological material, “primitive belief” or cultural folklore.

These categories are not innocent.

Calling one tradition mythology can make it available for aesthetic reinterpretation without acknowledging that it once involved serious religious belief. Calling another religion can grant it continuing authority and institutional respect. Treating African sacred objects primarily as ethnographic evidence can remove them from the philosophical and spiritual systems that gave them meaning.

An artist reimagining sacred imagery must be attentive to these uneven classifications.

Greek deities, Christian figures and Yoruba Orishas do not enter the museum under equal historical conditions. One may be treated as the foundation of Western civilisation, another as living faith and another as cultural difference.

Bringing them together can expose these inequalities, but it can also reproduce them if the distinctions are ignored.

The aim should not be to flatten all sacred traditions into a single collection of symbols.

It should be to create meaningful relationships while allowing each tradition to retain its depth.

Why Familiar Compositions Remain Powerful

There is a reason contemporary artists return to famous works.

Recognisable images carry cultural memory. A viewer who knows Botticelli’s Venus or Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam brings the earlier work into the encounter. The contemporary artist does not need to reproduce every detail because the original already exists in the viewer’s mind.

This creates a visual conversation across time.

The old composition acts almost like a sentence that the contemporary artist can revise. A change in the body, gesture, setting or symbolism may transform the meaning of the entire statement.

However, the power of recognition carries a risk.

An artist can become overly dependent on the historical masterpiece. The new work may attract attention because viewers recognise the reference rather than because the reinterpretation possesses its own artistic force.

The challenge is to move beyond quotation.

A successful reimagining should survive even when the viewer does not know the original. Its composition, materials and emotional atmosphere must work independently. Historical reference should deepen the artwork rather than become its only reason for existing.

The artist must eventually claim ownership of the visual language.

Sacredness Can Be Constructed Visually

Sacred images create their atmosphere through formal choices.

Symmetry can suggest order and stability. Central placement can communicate spiritual importance. Circular forms may imply eternity, unity or celestial movement. Gold can reflect light and evoke transcendence. Deep blue may suggest the infinite, while red can represent life, sacrifice or transformation.

Raised surfaces, luminous pigments and reflective materials can make an artwork respond physically to changing light. The image no longer appears entirely fixed. It becomes different as the viewer moves.

These techniques have long histories.

Gold backgrounds in sacred art did not merely make paintings look expensive. They removed figures from ordinary earthly space and surrounded them with an atmosphere of spiritual radiance. Halos transformed circles into signs of holiness. Architectural geometry organised human figures within an image of cosmic order.

Contemporary artists can draw upon this visual intelligence without copying its theology.

Sacredness may be suggested through light, scale, stillness, pattern, repetition and material transformation. Digital art, metallic surfaces, gemstone pigments, raised textures and new printing technologies can extend these possibilities.

But visual splendour alone does not create spiritual depth.

Gold becomes empty luxury if it has no meaningful relationship to the subject. Sacred geometry becomes decoration if it is used without understanding. Symbolism becomes confused when too many references compete for authority.

The spiritual force of an image depends upon coherence.

Can an Artwork Be Sacred Without Belonging to a Religion?

Not every spiritually charged artwork illustrates a formal religious belief.

Some artists create images concerned with ancestry, transformation, mortality, nature, cosmic order or the mystery of existence. Their work may feel sacred without asking the viewer to accept a particular doctrine.

This creates space for a broader understanding of spiritual art.

A portrait can become sacred through the depth of attention given to its subject. An image of an ancestor can connect personal memory to collective history. A geometric composition can encourage contemplation. A material that catches and releases light can suggest movement between the visible and invisible.

Sacredness may emerge through relationship rather than declaration.

What matters is the seriousness with which the artwork approaches its subject. Spiritual imagery becomes unconvincing when it uses symbols only to create an atmosphere of mystery or prestige.

The artist should know why the symbol is present. What history does it carry? What cultural or personal relationship supports its use? How does it change the meaning of the work?

A sacred image does not need to explain everything, but its mystery should arise from depth—not vagueness.

Representation Changes Spiritual Imagination

People form ideas about themselves partly through the images surrounding them.

If sacredness is continually represented through bodies unlike one’s own, a quiet separation can develop. Divinity belongs elsewhere. Beauty belongs elsewhere. Universal humanity appears to possess someone else’s face.

Seeing Black figures within sacred art can interrupt that separation.

For Black viewers, such images may offer recognition within visual traditions that historically marginalised them. For non-Black viewers, they can expose how accustomed they have become to seeing whiteness presented as spiritually neutral.

The significance extends beyond personal identification.

Changing the body of the divine changes our understanding of authority. It asks whether spiritual power can be imagined without reproducing racial and gender hierarchies. It reveals how deeply visual culture influences beliefs that may appear purely theological.

Images do not determine faith, but they shape its imagination.

That is why sacred representation matters.

The Artist’s Responsibility

Artists who reinterpret sacred and cultural traditions hold a difficult responsibility.

They need freedom to imagine, question and transform. Art cannot develop if every inherited image is treated as untouchable. At the same time, creative freedom does not remove the need for knowledge and cultural care.

Before using sacred material, an artist should ask:

Do I understand the tradition from which this symbol comes? Is the symbol part of a living spiritual practice? Am I connecting traditions thoughtfully or combining them only for visual effect? Does the work acknowledge differences as well as similarities? Am I challenging a hierarchy or simply creating another exotic image? Can the artwork stand independently of the historical painting it references? Do the materials and composition deepen the spiritual meaning? What responsibility do I have to the communities connected to these images?

These questions are not intended to close down creativity.

They help the artist move beyond decoration towards substance.

Beyond the Old Image of the Divine

Reimagining divinity does not require destroying everything that came before.

Renaissance sacred art contains extraordinary knowledge of composition, gesture, light, symbolism and human emotion. Its achievements remain worthy of study. But admiration should not prevent us from recognising that these images emerged from particular cultures and systems of power.

They are interpretations, not the final appearance of the sacred.

Harmonia Rosales demonstrates what becomes possible when an artist enters that history with knowledge and self-possession. She adopts the scale and compositional authority of European masterpieces while refusing the assumption that whiteness and masculinity are the natural forms of divinity.

Her Black female figures do not stand at the edge of sacred history.

They become creators, embodiments of beauty and sources of spiritual power.

This transformation does not make the old images disappear. It changes our relationship to them. Once we see that divinity can be imagined differently, the supposed neutrality of the inherited image becomes impossible to maintain.

A More Expansive Sacred Imagination

The deepest purpose of reimagining sacred art is not to produce a new fixed image that everyone must accept.

It is to expand what can be imagined.

A truly expansive sacred imagination does not replace one exclusive ideal with another. It allows divinity, beauty and spiritual authority to appear through different bodies, histories and cultural languages. It understands that no single human form can contain what is meant to transcend humanity.

For artists, this opens a vast creative territory.

Historical compositions can be studied and transformed. African and diasporic spiritual traditions can be approached as sources of living knowledge rather than visual decoration. New materials can create forms of radiance that earlier artists could not have imagined. Digital technologies can bring ancient symbols into conversation with the future.

But the work must remain grounded.

The most powerful sacred art does not merely look magnificent. It carries a sense that the artist has considered what the image asks the viewer to believe.

Who is shown as the source of life? Whose beauty becomes an ideal? Whose body is permitted to signify wisdom, protection or transcendence? Who is allowed to resemble the divine?

For centuries, Western art answered these questions within a narrow visual field. Contemporary artists are widening it.

When Black figures enter sacred and mythological art, they do more than appear inside old stories. They reveal that every image of divinity was already an act of imagination.

The future of sacred art begins when more people are granted the freedom to imagine themselves within it.