Question about Statues Icons and Images

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Triumphant_Of_Christ

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Hello!, to my Question for the day is why do we make Statues, Icons, and Images/Paintings of Jesus and the virgin Mary and the Saints if we don’t know what they looked like? I mean when it comes making statues of Mary we can’t be 100% sure that she looked exactly like the statue or what about Paintings of Jesus and Icons of the saints if we don’t know if they actually looked the way they do in the images?
 
Art (including statues and paintings) is not simply about making an accurate ‘photographic image’ of the person or the landscape or the whatever.

Various items over time become associated with, for example, saints. The rosary is associated with St. Dominic, various flowers like lilies and roses with the Blessed Mother. Certain symbolic colors can be used; Mary is often seen in blue and gold; Jesus wearing red; animals are associated with the gospel writers, etc. Famous paintings from the Renaissance showed Christ and the apostles wearing ‘contemporary’ clothing, and often faces in the crowd were those of ‘contemporary people.’

It is not all about “I need a picture of Jesus who looked exactly as He did in AD 29 or so, and nothing else can be Jesus or convey Jesus to me.”
 
In addition to the very good answers given by people above, if you believe in private revelations such as apparitions of Mary, she has appeared looking all kinds of different ways. She generally looks like she could be the mother of whoever she is appearing to, because she is mother of us all. Therefore, when she appeared in the approved apparition Our Lady of Good Help in Wisconsin, to a Belgian immigrant girl, she looked like a fair-skinned blonde. When she appeared in the approved apparition Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico, to an indigenous man who had converted to Catholicism, she appeared as a dark skinned, dark haired mestiza, a woman of mixed European and indigenous race, symbolizing the blending of the indigenous culture with the Catholicism brought by the Spanish.

Therefore, the appearance of Mary is often symbolic rather than an attempt to show Mary exactly how she looked when she was living on earth.
 
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I have a statue of Mary with the child Jesus, from Japan, and they both appear to be Japanese. It makes me remember that Jesus is here for all people!!!
 
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