Seeing Salvation: Images of Christ in Art

Description

Without contemporary accounts of Jesus appearance, artists through the ages have been free to create many images of him--images that sometimes reflect the spiritual world of the artist and other times the desires of the patron or the needs of the spectator. In this magnificently illustrated book, Neil MacGregor traces the life of Christ and the development of Christian culture in the work of artists from different times and diverse cultures. Copublished with the National Gallery, LondonNone of Jesus contemporaries made written descriptions of his appearance. Nevertheless, his image is among the most frequently and variously rendered--and perhaps the most instantly recognizable--of all the characters of Western history. Seeing Salvation: Images of Christ in Art is a richly illustrated survey of the ways that artists have imagined Jesus appearance. Brief essays by Neil MacGregor, director of London s National Gallery, and Erika Langmuir Obe, a noted art historian, elaborate the following notion, from the book s introduction: "The greatest artists, in representing the life of Christ, did something even more difficult: they explored the fundamental experiences of every human life. Pictures about Jesus s childhood, teachings, sufferings and death are--regardless of our beliefs--in a very real sense pictures about us." Seeing Salvation offers pointed insights regarding the relationship between artists representations of Christ and the evolution of Christian culture. This sweeping account of centuries worth of history is enlivened by a wealth of detailed observations--such as MacGregor s essay about the ways that Michelangelo s several sculptures of the pieta record the artist s personal evolution of faith and doubt. Still, the most extraordinary things in Seeing Salvation are not its arguments but its beautifully printed illustrations of paintings and sculptures in galleries, private homes, catacombs, market stalls, and churches around the world. --Michael Joseph Gross