The Painter and the Tree: A Biblical Rationale for Visual Art

2013

When the Paraclete comes, the Spirit of Truth who comes from the Father, and whom I myself will send from the Father, he will bear witness on my behalf' (Jn 15. 26). "When he comes, however, being the Spirit of Truth he will guide you to all truth. He will not speak on his own, but he will speak only what he hears, and will announce to you the things to come" (Jn. 16. 1). According to the fourth Gospel, the Holy Spirit will be a disclosive spirit revealing truths of God. In his important work, Fire and Light, William M. Thompson persuasively argues that the saints and mystics are a rich source for theological reflection. 1 In a modest way, our own presentation argues that chisel, brush, and stylus are also key sources for, and hermeneutic vehicles of, religious insight and meaning. Art potentially both discloses and creates religious experience. The artisan's art has had a profound, if not privileged, place in theological reflection and ecclesial life. For almost all Christians prior to the twentieth century, the mediums of art and liturgical behavior were the central vehicles for communicating the Christian story. Stained glass windows, carved wooden statuary, religious paintings, sculpture, decorated missals, and books of hours stimulated the imaginations and shaped the consciousness of the multitude of Christians who were illiterate, incapable of reading biblical stories, or of writing theological and catechetical reflections. These artistic forms and liturgical behavior both told and interpreted the Christian story. At times, they bonded together to articulate, explain, and apply the mysteries of the Christian religion to the great joys, deep turmoil, and the routine happenings of life. For twenty centuries, Christianity's ability to convey its interpretation of life depended on visual and aural artistic heritage and liturgical practice. In short, Christian art was crucial to education and perseverance in the faith. Christian art provided a lifeboat for survival in the tempest-tossed seas of daily existence.

The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in America, ed. Paul Gutjahr , 2017

An artwork picturing biblical subject matter is never a straightforward depiction of a scriptural text. It is a visual translation of it, shaped by available models of interpretation, the aesthetic styles and visual cultures of the era, and the cultural contexts of its production, display, circulation, and reception. This chapter analyzes specific examples of American art to showcase the four primary functions performed by biblical subject matter throughout the nation's history: to deliver moral instruction, engage sociopolitical concerns, assert communal identity, and render cultural criticism. The expansive and varied visual landscape that results testifies to the bible's centrality in American art history.

Art Criticism, 2009

The Bible in America, 2020

Writing in 1983, in the precursor to the present volume, the esteemed theologian John W. Dixon Jr. set some parameters for his inquiry: The problem of "The Bible in American Art" must be distinguished carefully from the larger problem of "religion in American art. " They are not the same thing nor is the smaller question rightly understood as a special case of the larger; they are in some degree different problems, however much the areas overlap. 1 While visual art, and the way we study it, has changed dramatically in the intervening decades, Dixon's intuition remains helpful. Given the multiplicity of ways in which religious themes and questions surface in contemporary art-even just within America-exploring religion writ large would quickly exceed the constraints of this chapter. For those interested in exploring such wider concerns, ranging from the experience of the sublime to civic rituals, my volume Art and Religion in the Twenty-First Century might prove a helpful point of entry. 2 For its part, this essay will restrict itself to identifying some primary, hopefully illuminating, ways in which the Bible appears in recent American art. While it is helpful to set similar boundaries to Dixon's, within these guideposts the terrain looks dramatically different thirty-five years 1. John W.

Bryn Mawr, 2018

In late antiquity, both the nature of images and the treatment accorded to them generated deeply divisive debates. Portraits of human subjects were an accepted convention, but offering reverence to them might be controversial. Art historian Thomas F. Mathews here retells the story from the Acts of John about the apostle's rejection of the pagan-style honours-garlands, lamps, and an altar-given to the portrait secretly made of him, in gratitude for being raised from the dead, by the praetor of Ephesus Lykomedes. The third-century Platonist Plotinus, likewise the subject of a surreptitious portrait, went even further and questioned the very purpose and meaning of creating an image of an image: "Isn't it enough that I have to carry around the image that nature has clothed me with?" (Porphyry, Life of Plotinus 1). As for images of divine beings, Clement of Alexandria condemned the masterpieces of the sculptor Lysippus and the painter Apelles, leading Greek artists of the fourth century BC, as examples of a "deceitful art" that vainly seeks to emulate God's perfection ( Exhortation to the Heathens 4). Nevertheless, the gods continued to be depicted both in statues and on movable wooden panels. Clement specifically mentions lewd paintings of Aphrodite "hung on high like votive offerings" in pagans' bedrooms. Comparison is unavoidable with the emergent Christian genre of the icon. It is to documenting and speculating on these resemblances and possible continuities that Mathews addresses himself in this elaborate and sumptuously illustrated publication from the J. Paul Getty Museum.

Art & Spirituality, 2020

Art & Spirituality Art as an Essential Form of Worship including some Cautionary Thoughts for Christian Artists Abstract Through his works of art, the Christian artist can “magnify the Lord” by “telling of His glory”, often without words, through reflecting on the attributes of God, which are “the radiance of His glory”. This is an essential form of worship which, like other forms or worship and prayer, can act as a bridge – a “Jacob’s Ladder”, as it were – in which a work of art can be used by the Spirit of God as – a door, or a window, or a portal - between the physical and spiritual realms, through which God can reveal Himself? But in all his creative endeavors, the Christian artist must avoid “worshipping the creature rather than the Creator”, being ever aware that “the artist is not superman”, and that “art is not religion”. In order to truly “magnify the Lord”, the artist must view himself and his art – including his understanding of “catharsis” - from a consistent biblical worldview. W.D. Furioso ~ ACTpublications (2020) ~ www.AtChristsTable.org

In the last century or so, the question of the relationship be _ twccn Juda ism and art has been raised within the contexts of two broader 1ssucs. These issues still continue to be lively subjects of debate. First there is the phen ? m enoloaical question: what is the significance of the firm refusal o � Judaism , from t:>Biblical times onward, to worship God through the � edmm _ of an image? What does this allow us to say about the religi � us _ e � penence; mde ? d, about the entire weltanschauung which ensues from this ms1stence and wh1 � h leads to it? For some, this phenomenological problem produces answe-rs m realms presumably removed from the theologi .