Description
In Heaven on Earth, respected art historian T.J. Clark investigates the very different ways painting has given form to the dream of God’s kingdom come.
He goes back to the late Middle Ages and Renaissance–to Giotto in Padua. Brugel facing the horrors of religious war, Poussin painting the Sacraments, Veronese unfolding the human comedy. Was it to painting’s advantage that in an age of enforced orthodoxy (threats of hellfire, burnings at the stake) artists could reflect on the powers and limitations of religion without putting their thoughts into words?
At the heart of the book stands Brugel’s ironic but tender picture of The Land of Cockaigne, but also Veronese’s inscrutable Allegory of Love. The story ends with Picasso’s Fall of Icarus, made for UNESCO in 1958, which already seems to signal–perhaps to prescribe–an age when all futures are dead.
101 illustrations
