The Second Commandment problem

"You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above." A tradition forbidden to depict its God, and possessed of the most elaborate account of that God's inner life anyone has written.

This is the pressure that produced everything else in this wing. Forbid the likeness and you do not get silence — you get the DIAGRAM, the letter, the field of colour, the map. Abstraction is what happens to a religious imagination that may not draw a face.