The Beauty of Holiness
Giotto’s Passion Frescoes as a Prelude to the Artistic Afterlife of the Supper at Emmaus
Foreword by Gesa E. Thiessen
Imprint: Resource Publications
In this book, Brian Bishop simply pauses to look at fifty-seven beautiful images that feature the life and death of Jesus and the supper at which he appeared three days after his burial to two broken-hearted disciples. He finds the visual approach to the gospel stories rewarding and attempts to place the paintings in some historical context as an aid to understanding, but, essentially offers pauses for thought and reflection upon world-changing events. The book may be dipped into as time and interest allows. The beautifully produced color images of wonderful works of art provide constant companionship.
Brian Bishop is a retired teacher of English, drama, and world literature. Since retiring, he has gained a master’s degree in theology. In 2017, Wipf and Stock published his book The Continuing Dialogue: an Investigation into the Artistic Afterlife of the Five Narratives Peculiar to the Fourth Gospel.
“Giotto’s wonderful frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel depicting the events of Christ’s suffering and death have long been recognized as marking a deeply significant moment of transition in Western art. In these pages, Brian Bishop takes us carefully through the sequence, commenting with a mixture of artistic and psychological insight, and leading us to see how these paintings draw us into ‘participation’—responding to the very human but also spiritually charged images before us in such a way that the humanity of Jesus in his suffering connects afresh with our own experience of pain and transfiguration. This is a powerful reflection on some of the most deeply affecting pieces of Christian art in the Western tradition.”
—Rowan Williams, Honorary Professor of Contemporary Christian Thought, University of Cambridge
“Brian Bishop takes us on an extraordinary adventure into the processes of stopping, gazing, perceiving, and knowing. In this consumerist and materialistic world of ours, he invites us into a different relationship with time as we are asked to stop and gaze with him at a number of paintings. In these chapters you will be taken on an adventure of discovery as a different theology is shaped beyond the limitations of language and the intellect. The paintings are to be read within a framework of hope and even possibly the expectation that our faith will be enlarged by imagination and the adventure of the heart. Bishop is generous in offering what has been discovered through a number of encounters with art. There is clarity, creativity, and skill of the eye within which the visual touches our central sense of what it means to be alive . In this book you will be invited into a mystery of spiritual adventure which is both complex and precise. I commend it warmly.”
—James Woodward, Principal, Sarum College
“A magnificent achievement, which effortlessly combines formal art-historical method and mature theological reflection to fashion a deeply felt, yet always accessible, fusion of both. Beautifully written and well-illustrated, Brian Bishop’s book is an outstanding addition to that small, but significant, body of recent publications which testify unequivocally to the still powerful interplay between Word and image, and especially that between Christian art, Christian experience, and Christian faith.”
—Graham Howes, author of The Art of the Sacred
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