Assembly of the Gods, After Raphael, Kathmandu, Nepal, 10m x 2m, 2012-23

This image draws inspiration from Raphael Sanzio’s The Council of the Gods (1518), reimagining the classical divine summit as a chaotic, transcultural, and hyper-detailed spiritual congress. Set against the Patan Temple complex in Kathmandu, Nepal—a UNESCO World Heritage site—the scene stages an overwhelming visual symphony of gods, prophets, spiritual leaders, deities, angels, demons, and symbolic creatures from across world religions and historical epochs. Hindu deities share space with Christian saints, Buddhist monks, animist spirits, Egyptian gods, and more obscure esoteric symbols, converging in a cacophonous yet reverent montage.

The work could be interpreted as a giant “uber-spiritual conference,” where the divine from all corners and beliefs of humanity have gathered, perhaps to resolve metaphysical dilemmas or bear witness to our fractured modernity. The digitally collaged composition, rich in saturated colour and intricate layering, blurs the lines between myth and reality, sacred and profane, parody and reverence. Like Raphael’s Renaissance idealism, this piece imagines a celestial harmony, but filtered through the fragmentation of post-digital culture. Here, the heavens are pixelated, plural, and precariously united in the shadow of humanity. This convergence of diverse spiritual iconographies and the postmodern fracturing of the sacred echoes David Morgan’s insight into the “multivocality” of contemporary religious imagery and the hybrid nature of spirituality in a globalised world (Morgan, 2005).

Reference:
Morgan, D. (2005). The Sacred Gaze: Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice. University of California Press.