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? 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