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The Anglican Church in Tasmania Search |
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a healthy church...transformingLIFE |
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Book review
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This is a book which contains over 1000 works of art, scanning thousands of years and in my experience is unique! It is impossible to read the Scriptures without becoming aware of the neighbouring religious systems to the Jewish people in the Old Testament. Similarly in the New Testament the presence of the Roman and Greek gods become very real. Attempts to portray God in the apocalyptic literature are there in both Testaments and pictorial attributes abound in the decoration of Tabernacle and Temple. The history of the Christian Church has at times been dominated by attitudes towards Christian art, ranging from the over-use of imagery in the Middle Ages to its complete rejection by the Puritans. Representation still has a very real place in worship and one of the merits of this book is that it declares pictorially the essential differences between the Christian faith and the faith of other religious systems. Considerable reflectionConfronted by the art of such diverse religions as Shintoism, Buddhism, Jainism, Rastafarianism, Taoism, Islam, Zaroastrianism and Voodoo, the Christian art tells its own distinctive story! The author, who is artist to the Sacred Land Project in Great Britain has obviously been selective in her choices, but this book presents a wonderful gallery of arts supplemented by some very useful background notes. She has made good use of the great legacy of stained glass windows in Chartres Cathedral. Victorian English religious art is mainly represented by the work of the illustrator James Tissot. I missed Holman Hunt's Light of the World - dear to many, and the more recent surrealist work of Salvador Dali's Christ of St John of the Cross. However, we all have our favourites, and this is still a remarkable book, which demands considerable reflection, but very little reading. It is essentially a very valuable work of pictorial reference, and although some works of art may say more about the author than the subject, it reveals much about the religious beliefs of past and present. If you love art you will enjoy it. If you want to know more pictorially about vastly differing faith systems it will prove to be a very valuable resource. |
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