I'm not sure I really understand what's happening here, but to answer your question: "Gods, saints and other Characters are known to have their specific symbols so you can see a statue or painting of them and immediately know that it is them."
Specifically, this is probably a halo. At least that's the answer that popped into my head straight away. (A lot of your pictures have them as circles around the head I see.) It's used a lot in religious imagery to help people identify the holy.
From uncle Google: "Holy persons in many of the world's religions are represented as haloed, either the Western style disc over or around the head or as a sort of aura affair surrounding the whole body. It's a symbol of the 'spiritual light' emanating from the person in question."
Actually this is a deep rooted idea, gods from Sumer and Akkad, were written to have shone with bright (that was terrifying to mortals) light. It's used in the Bible a lot also.
But are you asking for the class of objects that saint's/gods halos are?