This week’s lecture caused me to question the nature of religious reality with regards to painted portrayals of religious events. Part of mimesis, the portrayal of the natural world through a medium such as painting, has something to do with portraying the entirety of a scene in order to encompass what the eye would naturally process. However, a lot of the religious scenes are (supposedly) not representations of physical events, which complicates the classification of these paintings. Are they still a representation of the real world if, despite their realistic detail, they are depictions of fictional or theoretical events? Does our perception of whether those events were real make the paintings any more or less realistic? I was impressed by the extraordinary details that some of the painters included in their works, from minute patterns on clothing to distant fields far in the background, but if the scenes never really took place, are the paintings still representing the natural world? I don’t have any easy answers to these questions, because I think the answers probably depend upon our views of the veracity of religious events, our definition of reality, and how we interpret artistic portrayals of religious events in conjunction with natural settings.