No comments about Illuminated Haggadot from Medieval Spain: Biblical Imagery And the Passover Holiday.

1 comments about High Renaissance Art in St. Peter's and the Vatican: An Interpretive Guide.

1. It is a very useful guide to the vatican palace and to st peter.
   It is centered in a very particular period. The tremendous richess of ancient art in the palace is completelly absent.

No comments about Christian Art: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions).

4 comments about Iconography: A Writer's Meditation.

1. This is a brilliant book, a must-read for any serious writer, whether her or she is a poet, memoirist, or fiction writer. Susan Neville writes beautiful lyric meditations on par with great contemporary poet-essayists Robert Hass, Mary Oliver and Marianne Boruch. This book is as important to any writer / artist / thinker as Lewis Hyde's The Gift, Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet and Richard Hugo's Triggering Town.



2. Not what I expected. Ms. Neville writes very little about the process of developing an icon, and way too much about her own neuroses. Not inspiring!



3. Fans of Susan Neville's stunning work will find Iconography another sustained meditation on meditation itself. As in her Fabrication where visits to Indiana factories act as conduits to the sublime, Neville here utilizes a nifty frame--that of a two year effort to paint an orthodox icon--to trigger her always surprising, nuanced, strongly felt ruminations on mundane and holy spheres. Neville is a wonder and wonderful. Her work is deeply layered, lacquered, burnished, gold edged, patinaed. This book is a gift, a gift from a sacred and very human space. It arrives as the original holy icons did--out of the clouds, upon the waves--direct from the hand of God.



4. While the book title leads one to believe the book is about Neville's response to her experience with writing an icon, the book has almost nothing about that. Further, it has almost nothing to say about God or iconography. In short, I believe the title is misleading and the book disappointing!

No comments about Byzantine Painting: Historical and Critical Study (The Great Centuries of Painting).

No comments about The Visual Arts and Christianity in America: From the Colonial Period to the Present.

3 comments about Art of Our Own.

1. As an artist, I found An Art of Our Own to be a truly great book by an inspiring, deeply informed writer! If you're serious about learning the fundamental purpose of genuine abstraction, pay no attention to the ridiculous and shallow review from the Library Journal. The quality or value of writing, scholarship and art is subjective, which should be an obvious fact.
   
   Consider this: regarding the great pioneers of early abstraction (Kandinsky, Mondrian, Malevich etc), the "private symbolism" referred to by the Lirbary Journal critic is far from being a merely personal thing, but rather springs from the collective unconscious and is in truth the foundation of all things Universal. As established by Frazer (The Golden Bough), Campbell (Hero With a Thousand Faces) and David Fideler (Jesus Christ, Sun of God), we have common instincts, desires, motivations and beliefs that can and are expressed through symbolism or metaphors.
   
   How these universal ideas and feelings came to be expressed succinctly through the evolution of painting and abstraction is masterfully documented by Lipsey and establishes the initial impetus for modern art. This is essential knowledge for artists interested in learning the traditions from which abstraction transformed representational images and gave birth to an art of our own, as opposed to forms dictated by church, state or the marketplace.



2. I picked up this wonderful book after seeing a recommendation in Arthur Danto's column, which noted that Lipsey is one of the few writers who can address the spiritual in modern art in a clear-cut way. I couldn't agree more. If more writers and critics had this facility perhaps the contempory artists whose work is most enriching (Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, Astrid Colomar, etc.) would be properly viewed those who are most related to the origiginal pioneers of modern painting. As Lipsey demonstrates, the primary impetus for these pioneers was metaphysiscal rather than formalist. Were it not for Lipsey and precious few others, this crucial element of the history of modern painting would be all but lost in the vast majority of contemporary scholarship.



3. Lipsey describes the social and political scene that surrounded each of the major styles in art that have emerged in the twentieth century and describes the art forms and thinking of many of the well-known artists within each movement--Cezanne's relentless pursuit of the essence of nature, Kandinsky's definitions of the spiritual quality of color and form, the poetry of structure in Cubism, Dada and Duchamp in reaction to World War I, the Russian Avant- Garde and Malevich's Suprematism as integral to the Revolution of 1917, and the domination of abstract art after World War II. Lipsey's theme is that "Twentieth century art embodied a stronger and wiser spirituality than we have fully acknowledged," and his choice of artists is governed not by the degree of their fame, but by the degree to which they succeeded in embodying a contemporary spirituality. Modern art is a statement of philosophy that differs from previous eras, Lipsey posits, in part because "t! wentieth-century artists have for the most part worked individually and without formal adherence to religious or spiritual traditions." Lipsey's careful and thoughtful exploration of the spiritual in twentieth-century art has enormously enlarged this reader's ability to see abstract art and benefit from the experience.

No comments about Faith: The Impact of Judeo-Christian Religion.

3 comments about The House of the Lord: A Study of Holy Sanctuaries, Ancient and Modern.

1. An excellent book for those preparing to enter the temple, and for those who have already been.
   Written within the walls of the Salt Lake Temple by one of the greatest LDS scholars, this book is a must-read! This edition is a reprint of the original and it includes interesting early b/w photos of the interior of the Salt Lake Temple.



2. This book is a wonderful well written account on what Mormons believe about temple worship past and present. James Talmage was an Apostle in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the early twentieth century. Good for members preparing to enter the temple.



3. I have read over 400 books on LDS beliefs and this is a Top 25. A must read for all Latter-day Saints. Editor, All About Mormons web site.

1 comments about Imagining the Holy Land: Maps, Models, and Fantasy Travels.

1. The photographs, maps, travelers' accounts, physical reconstructions, and studies of the Bible that are the subject of this book once fired popular fantasies of the Holy Land. Nineteenth century visitors to the Chautauqua Institution used to walk through a large scale model of biblical Palestine, sometimes tucking a blade of grass into their pockets or purses. You can still take a tour and listen to Sunday evening lectures there. At the St. Louis World's Fair of 1904, a replica of Jerusalem covered eleven acres while today, some 300 miles to the southeast, a seven story high Christ of the Ozarks looks over a modern re-creation of the Holy Land set in the hills of Arkansas. For home viewing there were tours via stereoscopic photographs, lavishly illustrated books such as Picturesque Palestine, and the reports of scholars who passed through the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem. All reached for an illusory touch of the "real" in the midst of fantasies about the Holy Land, as may still be seen in a reader friendly book written by John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan Reed, Excavating Jesus. These competing visions of the Holy Land were, and are, shaped by forms of Christianity and Judaism, and entangled with various political and ideological debates at home in America.

   David Gunn, Bradford Professor of Religion at Texas Christian University wrote that Imagining the Holy Land is "remarkable and important...not only pertinent to an understanding of biblical criticism and popular culture in America...but crucially important to a nuanced understanding of American public discourse about Middle Eastern affairs today."