Less holy subjects, but no less carefully delineated, are Rembrandt's nudes, male and female, and his depictions of intimate acts.
He consistently attacks the vacuous nature of celebrity, and challenges us to look at our own prejudices through his searing, unflinching deconstruction of society's holy cow subjects.
Having lived in the UK for the past four years, I've largely missed this institutionalisation, and was surprised when, on a visit to Dublin this weekend, I found Diageo's new holy day the subject of so much conversation.
From that vaudevillian exchange, it was a downhill sledge ride all the way until the holy trinity of subjects deemed seemliest for manly mirth were closet homosexuality, cuckoldry and girth.
But in art, there was a "holy trinity" of "content, form and subject" in which abstract form became the subject of the work.
For much of the 20th century, Russian sacred property in the Holy Land had been subject to a Berlin-like division.
The group's story is the subject of "Holy Rollers: The True Story of Card Counting Christians," directed by a former member of the group, Bryan Storkel.
The routines of public life at concerts, baseball games, offices and synagogues at the start of the Jewish High Holy Days are now subject in many cases to the same kind of security as airports.
As recently as last January, at the wedding of his son, Mr. bin Laden, in the course of a long speech on the subject of holy war, implied that Mullah Omar was "the new caliph," the supreme ruler of all Muslims and the rightful successor to the prophet.
