Aureola Aureola An aureola or aureole (diminutive of Latin "aurea", "golden") is the radiance of luminous cloud which, in paintings of sacred personages, surrounds the whole figure. In Neolatin languages (as Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and French) the noun Aureola is usually more related to the disc of light surrounding the head of sacred figures and that in English is called Halo or Nimbus. In the earliest periods of Christian art it was confined to the figures of the persons of the Christian Godhead, but it was afterwards extended to the Virgin Mary and to several of the saints. The aureola, when
What Is Art? inclusive: "jokes", "home decoration", and "church services" may all be considered art as long as they convey feeling. It is also amoral: "[f]eelings … very bad and very good, if only they infect the reader … constitute the subject of art". Tolstoy also notes that the "sincerity" of the artist—that is, the extent to which the artist "experiences the feeling he conveys"—influences the infection. While Tolstoy's basic conception of art is broad and amoral, his idea of "good" art is strict and moralistic, based on what he sees as the function of art in the development of humanity: just as