Sacred art for whom: the religious experience and its audience

Apart from the mere iconography or the hermeneutics of religious allegories, it is possible to detect in the religious decoration a semiotic character. The best way to interpret images is to forego reading them as if they were ideograms, for the imaginary question is less about the messages than about the messengers. In fact, the inventory of the functional aspects of the Rococo style employed in the decoration of the Matrix of the Parish of Santa Rita, Rio de Janeiro, shows the ambiguity of the decorative symbolism, despite its eventual decoding. The relationships between symbols, formal variations, social connotations, the different levels of perception and understanding that they require of their observers, among other problems, make it clear that the materiality of the church contains deceptions and ironies, and brings in its wake the hallmark of histo-ricity. Like other archaeologists who have approached the ambivalence of material culture in their works, Christopher Tilley understands that such meaningful ambivalence is peculiar to "solid metaphors." However, ambivalence does not mean illusion, but it is broad. And in the specific case of religious symbolism, the symbol - in attempting to bridge the gap between artistic representation and the transcendent content of the numinous contains within itself the consciousness of its own insufficiency. Such insufficiency, however, does not prevent the numinous from being present through such poor access: hence the symbols say more than they express. This discussion leads to a double question: How does the messenger use the fragility of the symbol to persuade its audience? And what kind of audience is that capable of making aesthetic experience a religious experience?