Halo (religious iconography) obsolete "nimbated", like the commoner "nimbate", means "furnished with a nimbus". It is sometimes preferred by art-historians, as sounding more technical than halo. "Aureole", from the Latin for "golden", has been used in English as a term for a gold crown, especially that traditionally considered the reward of martyrs, since the Middle Ages (OED 1220). But the first use recorded as a term for a halo is in 1848, very shortly after which matters were greatly complicated by the publication in 1851 of the English translation of Adolphe Napoléon Didron's important "Christian Iconography: Or, The History of Christian Art in
What Is Art? "vagueness, mysteriousness, obscurity and inaccessibility to the masses". Tolstoy lambastes such works, insisting that art can and should be comprehensible to everyone. Having emphasised that art has a function in the improvement of humanity - capable of expressing man’s best sentiment - he finds it offensive that artists should be so wilfully and arrogantly abstruse. One criticism Tolstoy levels against art is that at some point it "ceased to be sincere and became artificial and cerebral", leading to the creation of millions of works of technical brilliance but few of honourable sentiment. Tolstoy outlines four common markers of bad art: