Look Again

Timothy Larson, in his article “Look Again” in Books & Culture, March/April 2007, pages 44-45, reviews two books on Christian art, William Holman Hunt and Painting the Bible. He laments that modern Americans have “impatient eyes” because we have been programmed to expect one picture to be quickly replaced by another as fast as our brains can take them in. “We flatter ourselves that we are the most sophisticated viewers ever, when all the while we demand images so crude, they can be exhausted in the blink of an eye.”

He claims that we are impatient with sacred art in a different way—impatient with its very right to exist. We are afraid of being caught endorsing propaganda that we shy away from art that expresses our own vision of the world, no matter how good it might be. Art, however, has always been a powerful way of communicating the faith. William Holman Hunt was inspired by the atonement of Christ and personal conversion, so much so, that all of his paintings are the result of these sacred realities. Many of his paintings were also sermons, complete with accompany biblical texts.

Larson quotes Ruskin: “We have been so long accustomed to see pictures painted without any purpose or intention whatsoever, that the unexpected existence of meaning in a work of art may very naturally at first appear to us as an unkind demand on the spectator's understanding.”

He quotes Beatrix Potter commenting on Hunt’s paintings: “My father objects to it that he can't understand it, but I had rather a picture I can't understand than one with nothing to be understood.”

He concludes : “Despite all the faux bravery of our endlessly proliferating "post"- movements, it strikes me that it would take far greater courage in our day for a few hearty souls of real intellectual mettle to pursue some daring "pre"- experiment. The Pre-Raphaelites knew that it is harder to recover what was good in the past than to deride what was bad.”


You can read this article at: http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/2007/002/20.44.html