… For people to then rail on about how “incorrect” a Spanish Virgen de los Dolores or a Russian Virgin of Compunction is for me would almost be blasphemous if it weren’t so ill-informed and sophomoric. Such talk is just as mechanistic as the theories that it seeks to critique: the sacred comes from “doing things correctly”, as if the Holy Ghost were some law of magnetism that one just manipulates with a few wires. That is not how sacred images are treated traditionally: they were not codes created to imbue gnostic secrets to the privileged few. If one has that theory of sacred art, there are going to be a lot of lacunae that it would be very hard to explain away.
