The Gospel Story in Art (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: INTRODUCTION As a boy at college I was reading the Greek Testament, and was suddenly taken aback by the difficulty of bringing two associations ? the one Jewish and the other Greek ? together and then separating them again. The New Testament writer in Greek was obliged to use pagan words for his Jewish and Christian ideas. He had no choice. So, when the Jewish preacher talked in Greek on matters of spiritual connection between the visible world and another, almost all his words had meanings which were not really his own, and which did not represent the Jewish descent of thought. If it were so with the words he used, how much more so it must have been with any attempt on his part to make pictures or statues representing or symbolizing his ideas. And so, when he first began to make pictures of religious subjects, Christian ones, he used pagan symbols, that is to say, those belonging to people around him, and his way of drawing and painting is exactly like that of the most abominable idolatries and immoral representations. The same painters who have left us the frescoes of the catacombs, where they buried their friends in Christian peace, must in the light of day have worked on the walls of their non- Christian friends upon the paintings which we see in the palaces, or in the ruins of Pompeii and Heraculaneum. There is another difficulty introduced; the artist may not express himself easily and completely; his art is not an adequate means. He may be a saint, he may be Paulhimself, or even John, and not be a good painter. These considerations should make us hesitate about any too close and narrow views as to the exact limits between what our vagueness of words calls "Christian Art" and "Pagan Art." Perhaps it may be well again to remember that race has much to do with the appr...