What happens when we push past the surface and allow real, grounded, mutually challenging, and edifying friendships to develop? We need only look at the little-known friendship between eminent Christian thinkers Dorothy L. Sayers and C. S. Lewis to find out. Born out of a fan letter that celebrated mystery novelist Sayers wrote to Lewis as his star was just beginning to rise, this friendship between a married woman and a longtime bachelor developed over years of correspondence as the two discovered their mutual admiration of each other's writing, thinking, and faith. In a time when many Christians now aren't even sure that a man and a woman can be "just friends" and remain faithful, Gina Dalfonzo's engaging treatment of the relationship between two of Christianity's most important modern thinkers and writers will resonate deeply with anyone who longs for authentic, soul-stirring friendships that challenge them to grow intellectually and spiritually. Fans of Lewis and Sayers will find here a fascinating addition to their collections.

The meaning of poetry and the sociological and political significance of art are dealt with in these letters. Jacques Maritain (18 November 1882 28 April 1973) was a French Catholic philosopher. Raised as a Protestant, he converted to Catholicism in 1906. An author of more than 60 books, he is responsible for reviving St. Thomas Aquinas for modern times and is a prominent drafter of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Pope Paul VI presented his "Message to Men of Thought and of Science" at the close of Vatican II to Maritain, his long-time friend and mentor. Jean Maurice Eugene Clement Cocteau (5 July 1889 11 October 1963) was a French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, boxing manager, playwright, artist and filmmaker. Along with other Surrealists of his generation (Jean Anouilh and Rene Char for example) Cocteau grappled with the "algebra" of verbal codes old and new, mise en scene language and technologies of modernism to create a paradox: a classical avant-garde. His circle of associates, friends and lovers included Pablo Picasso, Jean Marais, Henri Bernstein, Edith Piaf, whom he cast in one of his one act plays entitled Le Bel Indifferent in 1940, and Raymond Radiguet.

"Early Byzantine Pilgrimage Art" explores the portable artifacts of eastern Mediterranean pilgrimage from the fifth to the seventh century, presenting them in the context of contemporary pilgrims texts and the archaeology of sacred sites. The book shows how the iconography and devotional piety of Byzantine pilgrimage art changed, and it surveys the material and social culture of pilgrimage. What did these early religious travelers take home with them and what did they leave behind? Where were these sacred souvenirs manufactured and what was their purpose? How did the images imprinted upon many of them help realize that purpose? The first edition of this pathbreaking book, published in 1982, established late antique pilgrimage and its artifacts as an important topic of study. In this revised, enlarged version, Gary Vikan significantly expands the narrative by situating the miraculous world of the early Byzantine pilgrim within the context of late antique magic and pre-Christian healing shrines, and by considering the trajectory of pilgrimage after the Arab conquest of the seventh century.

One of the most important Italian manuscripts in the Getty Museum, the lavishly illustrated Gualenghi d'Este Hours was created around 1649 on the occasion of the marriage of diplomat Andrea Gualengo to Orsina d'Este, a member of Ferrara's ruling family. The devotional manuscript featured brilliant figured decoration of the suffrages--short prayers to saints--and was created by Taddeo Crivelli, one of the most important manuscript illuminators of the Renaissance.
This volume includes reproductions of all the illuminations in the original manuscript plus selected text pages, each with commentary. Kurt Barstow examines the book's vivid devotional imagery in relation to works of art of the period that help explain the Hours significance for the fifteenth-century patrons. This beautifully illustrated book is published to coincide with an exhibit featuring the manuscript that will take place at the Getty Museum from May 9 to July 30, 2000.

Xu Bin Jueyi's sculpture breaks nearly a hundred years of stasis in Buddha sculpting. Using contemporary materials such as metal, resin and wood, Jueyi literally reshapes the aesthetic for Buddha imagery while retaining the compassion and tranquillity that lies behind it. Through the study and sketching of Chinese and Tibetan natural scenery and folk customs, the artist has gained an in depth understanding of the supreme place of spirituality in Buddhist followers' lives. The purity and serenity of their quest, and Xu Bin's own quest, are shown in the sculptor's creative energy which inspire their quests for peace and serenity. The resulting Buddha sculptures bring together contemporary and traditional images and ideas. Simple and clear, they display a minimalism in keeping with the Buddha's life example, while inviting the viewer to delve deeper into the Buddha's expansive teachings.

National Jewish Book Awards Finalist for the Visual Arts Award, 2017. The carved wooden Torah arks found in eastern Europe from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries were magnificent structures, unparalleled in their beauty and mystical significance. The work of Jewish artisans, they dominated the synagogues of numerous towns both large and small throughout the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, inspiring worshippers with their monumental scale and intricate motifs. Virtually none of these superb pieces survived the devastation of the two world wars. Bracha Yaniv's pioneering work therefore breathes new life into a lost genre, making it accessible to scholars and students of Jewish art, Jewish heritage, and religious art more generally. Making use of hundreds of pre-war photographs housed in local archives, she develops a vivid portrait of the history and artistic development of these arks, the scope and depth of her meticulous research successfully compensating for the absence of physical remains. In this way she has succeeded in producing a richly illustrated and comprehensive overview of a classic Jewish religious art form. Professor Yaniv's analysis of the historical context in which these arks emerged includes a broad survey of the traditions that characterized the local workshops of Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. She also provides a detailed analysis of the motifs carved into the Torah arks and explains their mystical significance, among them representations of Temple imagery and messianic themes-and even daring visual metaphors for God. Fourteen arks are discussed in particular detail, with full supporting documentation; appendices relating to the inscriptions on the arks and to the artisans' names will further facilitate future research. This seminal work throws new light on long-forgotten traditions of Jewish craftsmanship and religious understanding.

The Ghent Altarpiece or the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, by the Van Eyck brothers (1432), is recognised worldwide as a great work of art, and one of the most influential paintings ever made. It was the world's first major oil painting, and it is laced with religious mysticism. The work almost reads like an A to Z of Christianity - from the Annunciation to the symbolic sacrifice of Christ, with the 'Mystic Lamb' on an altar in a heavenly meadow, bleeding into the Holy Grail. For the first time, this book gathers together diverse insights on the Ghent Altarpiece, the monumental poliptych that the brothers Hubert and Jan van Eyck realised with the assistance of a large workshop and advisers on the painting's subject matters. This book has the same aim: to bring together experts from the most diverse disciplines. Only by combining the perspectives of (art) historians, philosophers, religious studies scholars, mathematicians and specialists in optics can one fully understand the riches and depth of this masterpiece. Lavishly illustrated, including details that have come to light using state-of-the-art techniques during the current conservation project and are not always visible to the naked eye.

In describing the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, Johan Huizinga said, "Paintings could be found everywhere . . . everywhere except in churches." Although pictures were ubiquitous in the Dutch world, the official religion expressed a fundamental distrust of visual imagery. Indeed, Calvinism and visual culture were both central modes of self-understanding in Dutch society. Investigating this paradox, The Wake of Iconoclasm takes as its main subject the numerous paintings of austere Calvinist church interiors that proliferated in the seventeenth century. Painstakingly crafted and highly naturalistic images of interiors, these peculiar paintings show spaces that were purged of visual imagery during and after the iconoclast riots of the sixteenth century. In essence, they depict the interface of the histories of art and religion. Angela Vanhaelen argues that the main function of this imagery was to stimulate debate about the transformed role of art in relation to the religious and political upheavals of the Reformation and the Dutch Revolt. Paintings of the emptied churches allowed their beholders to grapple with the significant public influence of Calvinism--especially its suppression of past cultural traditions and the new conditions of possibility it created for the visual arts.

Museum visitors today usually see pre-16th-century Italian painted altarpieces exhibited alone, as single paintings. Yet this beautiful catalogue shows that these works were once part of decorative, integrated schemes, and the original experience for viewers of the paintings was significantly different from our own. Focusing on Italian altarpieces from the second half of the 13th century to the very end of the 15th, the book investigates the original functions and locations of altarpieces as well as the circumstances of their dislocations, dismantlings, and reconstructions. Regional variations are also analyzed, and the author examines altarpieces' formal and typological development, taking into account the wealth of related scholarship undertaken in the past thirty years. Published by National Gallery Company / Distributed by Yale University Press Exhibition Schedule: The National Gallery, London (07/6/11-10/02/11)

A provocative study of the iconoclastic impulse in medieval and modern art. From late medieval reenactments of the Deposition from the Cross to Sol Lewitt's Buried Cube, Depositions is about taking down images and about images that anticipate being taken down. Foretelling their own depositions, as well as their re-elevations in contexts far from those in which they were made, the images studied in this book reveal themselves to be untimely-no truer to their first appearance than to their later reappearances. In Depositions, Amy Powell makes the case that late medieval paintings and ritual reenactments of the Deposition from the Cross not only picture the deposition of Christ (the Imago Dei) but also allegorize the deposition of the image as such and, in so doing, prefigure the lowering of "dead images" during the Protestant Reformation. Late medieval pre-figurations of Reformation iconoclasm anticipate, in turn, the repeated "deaths" of art since the advent of photography: that is the premise of the vignettes devoted to twentieth-century works of art that conclude each chapter of this book. In these vignettes, images that once stood in late medieval churches now find themselves among works of art from the more recent past with which they share certain formal characteristics. These surreal encounters compel us to reckon with affinities between images from different times and places. Turning pseudomorphosis-formal resemblance where there is no similarity of artistic intent-on its head, Powell explores what happens to our understanding of historically and conceptually distant works of art when they look alike.

At sixty-two meters the Leshan Buddha in southwest China is the world's tallest premodern statue. Carved out of a riverside cliff in the eighth century, it has evolved from a religious center to a UNESCO World Heritage Site and popular tourist destination. But this Buddha does not stand alone: Sichuan is home to many cave temples with such monumental sculptures, part of a centuries-long tradition of art-making intricately tied to how local inhabitants made use of their natural resources with purpose and creativity. These examples of art embedded in nature have altered landscapes and have influenced the behaviors, values, and worldviews of users through multiple cycles of revival, restoration, and recreation. As hybrid spaces that are at once natural and artificial, they embody the interaction of art and the environment over a long period of time. This far-ranging study of cave temples in Sichuan shows that they are part of the world's sustainable future, as their continued presence is a reminder of the urgency to preserve culture as part of today's response to climate change. Temples in the Cliffside brings art history into close dialogue with current discourse on environmental issues and contributes to a new understanding of the ecological impact of artistic monuments.