1 comments about The Old Testament: Through 100 Masterpieces of Art.

1. Lovely book with beautiful photos. 13-year old recipients don't care too much now, but their parents like it, and one day the kids will too.

No comments about Seeing Salvation: Images of Christ in Art.

3 comments about The Psalms: An Artist's Impression.

1. I have been looking all over for works that depict biblical themes through modern art. Anneke Kaai takes Psalms that we are all familiar with and puts a refreshing spin on them. The medium, oils and acrylics on plexiglass, is incredibly unique and beautiful. She captures the emotion of the Psalms in her use of color and contrasting lights and darks. Coupled with passages from Eugene H. Peterson's "The Message," the Psalms spring to life in this book, letting modern audiences identify with timeless Truth and a very good God. :)



2. In the late middle ages, no book of the bible was illustrated as frequently and fully as the book of Psalms. But then the practice went out of fashion. Now, contemporary Dutch artist Anneke Kaai has received the tradition, creating 25 admirable paintings and collages based on interpretations of 25 Psalms. The images, however, are not traditional: I find no scenes of David playing his harp in this tall, slim beautifully printed volume. Rather, the paintings are quite simple and abstract. A single, craggy cliff illustrates Psalm 31. The Psalm 84 is illustrated with small sparrows nest in the lily-shaped capital of the bronze column named Boaz, which stood outside Salomon's Temple. I considered this volume an exquisite expression of the religious art. It is intense and contemplative at the same time.



3. The book ties contemporary images with paraphrased Psalms. I think the Psalms are incredibly beautiful without being paraphrased.

   The audience for this book is probably more of a pre-teen or teenager that is new to Christianity. That's not me.

2 comments about Leonardo's Incessant Last Supper.

1. Leo Steinberg wrote a very intellectual, rigorous book about Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper. I liked the way it gave so many fresh perspectives on how to analyze and interpret the painting. The genius of the book is that is amalgamates an enormous amount of information about the Last Supper...and somehow leaves you feeling that only part of the information has been uncovered. It's a feeling of ambiguity; so much has been learned, but we have so much more to discover. Just like da Vinci would have wanted! Steinberg is a great author for this subject.
   
   I will leave most of the surprises and delights of the book for you to discover, but consider: Steinberg writes about connections between pairs of apostles in the painting (threes are not only significant, and in fact are probably less significant); he shows how Leonardo possessed an advanced understanding of perspective and created an impossible location; and the book contains an overview of (da Vinci) Last Supper copies throughout history.
   
   I do not recall Steinberg discussing John the Baptist as actually being a woman or more speculative aspects of the Last Supper such as secret society messages. Leonardo's Incessant Last Supper attempts to give an analysis of the painting that unearths why and how Leonardo da Vinci painted it, and in my view Steinberg comes closer than anyone I have read. econ



2. You have seen the image hundreds of times. It has been copied and parodied relentlessly for over five hundred years. It shows Jesus at the center of a dining table, flanked by six disciples on either side. Everyone knows _The Last Supper_, but few know as much about it as Leo Steinberg, who has looked and written and thought about it for thirty years. The result of these decades of concentration are poured out in _Leonardo's Incessant Last Supper_ (Zone Books), as close an examination of a painting as you will ever find. The book is not about the painting's history, its decay, or its restoration; it is, in astonishing detail, about the looks of the picture itself and a demonstration of how it continues to be an "incessant" font of thought and speculation as to its meaning. Steinberg's big book is wonderfully well illustrated, with details from the original, a generous gatefold to show it in its current restored state, pictures of how it looks within the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie, how Rubens, Van Dyck, Rembrandt, and a host of others copied the painting (and how they left out significant parts, and what the omissions mean), and plenty of diagrams to show such things as the lines of perspective and the effects of matrices and diagonals on Leonardo's meticulously planned original.

   Steinberg has chapters on the disciples, on feet and hands, on the disciples, and more. The main figure, that of Jesus, bears, of course, the closest examination, and Steinberg details the history of thought about it, with writers weighing in on the meaning of the pose and the timing within the Gospel story of the scene depicted. Over and over, Steinberg shows that to seek a meaning and a timing is in vain. Leonardo has deliberately engineered his work so that any explanation involving a single meaning will be an oversimplification. Jesus's right hand is downturned in a gesture of apprehension. It is close to a mirror image of the left hand of Judas as they reach simultaneously towards the dish by which Jesus will designate his betrayer. It is also gesturing towards the wine, so that it marks the institution of the Eucharist; after reading Steinberg's work, the idea that Leonardo drew these two separate parts of the story together and told them as one is only one of the multiple meanings that seem natural on further reflection. Jesus's left hand is upturned, gesturing toward the bread. It also underlies the portentous hand of Thomas, hovering directly above it. Thomas's hand has an index finger pointing up, continuing the upturn theme of Jesus's left, and indicating, of course, higher things. It is Thomas's index finger that would soon be feeling around for confirmation of Jesus's wounds.

   To read this book is to appreciate a hundred telling details in the painting which one did not notice before, and consequently to admire Leonardo's genius anew. It is also to admire the fruition of the decades of Steinberg's close study. His readers may feel a sense of humility that there was so much to see that had previously escaped them, but his witty, sure, and genial expertise will welcome them into seeing _The Last Supper_ with new vision.

1 comments about Hieronymus Bosch: Garden Of Earthly Delights.

1. I love it. It shows all the paintings and information. I used it for a school project. It rocks. Go buy it .
   IT ROCKS

1 comments about Son of Man, Volume II: Miracles of Jesus (Son of Man).

1. Susan Easton Black and Liz Lemon Swindle have teamed up again to produce a quality, moving account in art and text. A wonderful gift item for all Christians, especially nice when combined with the first volume.

2 comments about The Uncreated Light: An Iconographiocal Study of the Transfiguration In the Eastern Church.

1. This is an excellent historical study of the Icon of the Transfiguration in the Eastern Church. The author, herself an iconographer, examines representations of the Transfiguration from the 6th C. forward to the most famous representation by Theophane the Greek in the 15th C. She discusses all aspects of these representations including the detailed theology of the icon as well as information on the artistic renderings of the various images. The book has good color illustrations as well as a few in black and white.



2. Solrunn Nes's own iconographic work is strikingly her own, yet it is well within the Church's tradition. Her icons are bright, spare, free of busyness and visual "noise," and immediate to the beholder. Perhaps it is the provenance of her work, painted in her homeland of Norway, that inspires something of its luminosity and vibrancy of color.
   
   The highest compliment I can pay her work, though, is that it induces one to pray and to conceive a desire for the True Beauty objectively reflected there. (One can view her work, though reproductions cannot do full justice to it, on the Internet at [...], as well as in her beautiful and informative earlier book, The Mystical Language of Icons, an expanded version of which has been reissued this year.)
   
   "The Uncreated Light" is centered on the Gospel accounts of the Transfiguration, as rendered and interpreted in four representative portrayals spanning the sixth through the fifteenth centuries (and supplemented by four other works).
   
   With this as its focus, it is nevertheless a statement about the human person in his relation to God. One can find the key to Nes's thesis in this: "Theosis [the deification of the believer] does not imply that the difference between the divine and the human is erased. On the contrary, greater likeness with God will make man more human since the deified man has developed his God-given potential. . . . Iron which is heated by fire is still iron, but is different from cold iron in that it can be formed" (emphasis mine). The point is that the human person is not lost, or disintegrated, or broken down, or made to vanish in his encounter with God. Nothing of the truly human, including personal identity, is "left behind," but is taken up, made infinite and more fully itself in communion with the deifying Christ--human iron infused with divine fire.
   
   In the book, Nes does what most art historians do. She gives us insightful descriptions of two sixth-century apse mosaics, an eleventh-century manuscript illumination, and a fifteenth-century Russian icon of the Transfiguration. But the book is richly theological in a way that art history books generally are not. She "exegetes" the art through two theological controversies that stand as historical bookends for the centuries she covers: eighth-century Iconoclasm (the attempted eradication of iconography) at one end, and the fourteenth-century Hesychasm (dealing with matters of mystical prayer) at the other. Without this grasp of the relevant theology, we soon realize, one could miss so very much that is vital to the iconography itself.
   
   The three-part structure of the book--"Ascent," "Vision," and "Descent"--assumes the shape of the Transfiguration accounts and, by extension, the eastern-patristic path of the mystical journey. Nes shows just how multivalent the Transfiguration of Christ is: In other words, she shows how the various depictions themselves elucidate such perennial truths as the Incarnation, the glory of the Cross, eschatology, and human deification.
   
   She reminds us that, in this event, we find delineated that combination of fear and worship that does not threaten to destroy our fragility or extinguish our identity. Our God descended to lift human nature into the uncreated light, and the human person, united to him, is transfigured in a love beyond comprehension. Out of the fear and worship of the holy mountain comes a reassuring word of comfort.
   
   This volume includes an extensive appendix of scriptural and patristic citations and 15 pages of color plates. It belongs alongside other important works exploring the art of the Church, and its theological weight is especially to be appreciated.
   
   
   Addison H. Hart is a Roman Catholic priest, assigned to Christ the Teacher University Parish and the Newman Catholic Center for Northern Illinois University. He is a contributing editor for Touchstone, in which a version of this review first appeared.

1 comments about Angelic Mistakes: The Art of Thomas Merton.

1. Angelic Mistakes: The Art Of Thomas Merton by Roger Lipsey is a descriptive collection and history of works of art created by the mind and hand of Catholic theologian and hermit-monk Thomas Merton during the last decade of his life and which until now has remained largely unknown to the general public. Providing readers with a compendium of Merton's work with each piece being accompanied by an extensive caption, Angelic Mistakes is a "must" for anyone who has read and appreciated Merton's writings, as well as a choice selection as a church, seminary, and academic library "Memorial Fund" acquisition.

2 comments about In a World of Gods and Goddesses: The Mystic Art of Indra Sharma.

1. WE purchased this for my daughter who is an artist and loves the art and Beuaty of this book lots of Full Color pictures and intersting narrative have brought her lots of enjoyment.



2. Just purchased this book. I love it! The beauty of this book is beyond words. For anyone who is interested to discover more about india's rich heritage to the world...buy this book!

No comments about How to Distinguish the Saints in Art by Their Costumes, Symbols and Attributes.