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How do you paint a figure who is fully human and fully divine? How do you paint Christ? Strangeness and Recognition takes a fresh look at well-known Renaissance paintings of Christ and shows how surprising and deeply 'strange' they can be. This book brings an imaginative and affective theological perspective to the viewing experience as it explores the twin roles played by 'strangeness' and 'recognition' in responding to the challenge of creating and relating to images of Christ. By confounding expectations and defamiliarising subject matter, the ambiguity and mystery of these paintings disturbs viewers' expectations and reconnects them with the extraordinary mystery of the Incarnation. Whil...
How can pictures help people to relate to God, and what can historical Christian images offer the viewer today? A compelling theological encounter between Renaissance frescoes and the modern viewer. Transformations in Persons and Paint looks at images from the viewer's position, standing in a series of Florentine chapels, surrounded by frescoes, and discovering their powerful capacity to communicate what it means to live in a post-Resurrection world. Proving that there is still plenty to say about works by Giotto, Taddeo Gaddi, Masolino, Masaccio, Fra Angelico, and Ghirlandaio, this book uncovers previously overlooked theological content, and demonstrates the rewards of attentive interaction...
The 21st century is a new era for interfaith dialogue. Leaders of many of the world's faiths have begun, often for the first time, to sit down together and consider the possibilities for cooperation and dialogue between the practitioners of their religions. While in the past such encounters might have been stiff affairs contrived to generate a politically expedient photo-op, what is remarkable today is the depth of relationships being formed across historically deep divides. Acclaimed artist Nicola Green has had a front row seat to many of these encounters, spending years accompanying former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams in meetings with religious leaders across the world. In her w...
William Blake famously imagined 'Jerusalem builded here' in London. But Blake was not the first or the last to visualise a shimmering new metropolis on the banks of the River Thames. For example, the Romans erected a temple to Mithras in their ancient city of Londinium; medieval Londoners created Temple Church in memory of the Holy Sepulchre in which Jesus was buried; and Christopher Wren reshaped the skyline of the entire city with his visionary dome and spires after the Great Fire of London in 1666. In the modern period, the fabric of London has been rewoven in the image of its many immigrants from the Caribbean, South Asia, Eastern Europe and elsewhere. While previous books have examined literary depictions of the city, this is the first examination of the religious imaginary of the metropolis through the prism of the visual arts. Adopting a broad multicultural and multi-faith perspective, and making space for practitioners as well as scholars, its topics range from ancient archaeological remains and Victorian murals and cemeteries to contemporary documentaries and political cartoons.
ReVisioning: Critical Methods of Seeing Christianity in the History of Art examines the application of art historical methods to the history of Christianity and art. As methods of art history have become more interdisciplinary, there has been a notable emergence of discussions of religion in art history as well as related fields such as visual culture and theology. This book represents the first critical examination of scholarly methodologies applied to the study of Christian subjects, themes, and contexts in art. ReVisioning contains original work from a range of scholars, each of whom has addressed the question, in regard to a well-known work of art or body of work, "How have particular methods of art history been applied, and with what effect?" The study moves from the third century to the present, providing extensive treatment and analysis of art historical methods applied to the history of Christianity and art.
This book traces how four early Renaissance masters represented the Creation of Eve, which showed woman rising weightlessly from Adam's side at God's command.
This is the first book to be published on the stained-glass art of Thomas Denny. While his name is known mainly within ecclesiastical and glass-making circles, it is likely that Denny's art is instantly recognisable to a great many more. His radiant windows in Gloucester, Durham and Hereford Cathedrals and in many churches and chapels around the UK are arguably some of the art world's best-kept secrets. Denny (b.1956) originally studied painting at Edinburgh College of Art and has translated this painterly experience into a uniquely expressive style of stained glass. His works combine the aesthetic invention of modern British forbears such as John Piper with subtle reference to the medieval and ancient past. Including eleven heartfelt essays as well as poetry and the artist's own testimony, which explore and explain the subject matter, techniques and dazzling effect of Denny's craft, this book will be of interest to members of the thriving community of contemporary glass-makers as well as anyone who has seen and been moved by his work.
Images increasingly saturate our world, making present to us what is distant or obscure. Yet the power of images also arises from what they do not make present--from a type of absence they do not dispel. Joining a growing multidisciplinary conversation that rejects an understanding of images as lifeless objects, this book offers a theological meditation on the ways images convey presence into our world. Just as Christ negates himself in order to manifest the invisible God, images, Natalie Carnes contends, negate themselves to give more than they literally or materially are. Her Christological reflections bring iconoclasm and iconophilia into productive relation, suggesting that they need not oppose one another. Investigating such images as the biblical golden calf and paintings of the Virgin Mary, Carnes explores how to distinguish between iconoclasms that maintain fidelity to their theological intentions and those that lead to visual temptation. Offering ecumenical reflections on issues that have long divided Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox traditions, Image and Presence provokes a fundamental reconsideration of images and of the global image crises of our time.
The Victorians, perhaps more than any Britons before them, were diggers and sifters of the past. Though they were not the first to be fascinated by history, the intensity and range of their preoccupations with the past were unprecedented and of lasting importance. The Victorians paved the way for our modern disciplines, discovered the primeval monsters we now call the dinosaurs, and built many of Britain’s most important national museums and galleries. To a large degree, they created the perceptual frameworks through which we continue to understand the past. Out of their discoveries, new histories emerged, giving rise to fresh debates, while seemingly well-known histories were thrown into confusion by novel tools and methods of scrutiny. If in the eighteenth century the study of the past had been the province of a handful of elites, new technologies and economic development in the nineteenth century meant that the past, in all its brilliant detail, was for the first time the property of the many, not the few. Time Travelers is a book about the myriad ways in which Victorians approached the past, offering a vivid picture of the Victorian world and its historical obsessions.
Lively and engaging new view of London’s Jewish East End through translated stories of its Yiddish writers. In London Yiddishtown: East End Jewish Life in Yiddish Sketch and Story, 1930–1950, Vivi Lachs presents a selection of previously un-translated short stories and sketches by Katie Brown, A. M. Kaizer, and I. A. Lisky, for the general reader and academic alike. These intriguing and entertaining tales build a picture of a lively East-End community of the 30s and 40s struggling with political, religious, and community concerns. Lachs includes a new history of the Yiddish literary milieu and biographies of the writers, with information gleaned from articles, reviews, and obituaries pub...