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Heaven on Earth: Painting and the Life to Come
In this latest work, now available in paperback, respected art historian T.J. Clark sets out to investigate the different ways painters have depicted the dream of God’s kingdom come: heaven descended to earth.
Clark goes back to the late Middle Ages and Renaissance—to Giotto in Padua; Pieter Bruegel facing the horrors of religious war; Nicolas Poussin painting the Sacraments; and Paolo Veronese unfolding the human comedy, in particular his inscrutable Allegory of Love. Was it ultimately to painting’s advantage that in an age of orthodoxy and enforced censorship—threats of hellfire, burnings at the stake—artists found ways to reflect on the powers and limitations of religion without putting their thoughts into words? Clark takes the reader on a journey starting in the Middle Ages to the nuclear age with Pablo Picasso’s Fall of Icarus, made for UNESCO in 1958, where Picasso powerfully pictures art in an age when all futures are dead.
Clark goes back to the late Middle Ages and Renaissance—to Giotto in Padua; Pieter Bruegel facing the horrors of religious war; Nicolas Poussin painting the Sacraments; and Paolo Veronese unfolding the human comedy, in particular his inscrutable Allegory of Love. Was it ultimately to painting’s advantage that in an age of orthodoxy and enforced censorship—threats of hellfire, burnings at the stake—artists found ways to reflect on the powers and limitations of religion without putting their thoughts into words? Clark takes the reader on a journey starting in the Middle Ages to the nuclear age with Pablo Picasso’s Fall of Icarus, made for UNESCO in 1958, where Picasso powerfully pictures art in an age when all futures are dead.
- GenresArtArt HistoryReligion
288 pages, Paperback
Published May 12, 2020
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About the author
T.J. Clark
35 books62 followersTimothy James Clark often known as T.J. Clark, is an art historian and writer, born in 1943 in Bristol, England.
Clark attended Bristol Grammar School. He completed his undergraduate studies at St. John's College, Cambridge University, he obtained a first-class honours degree in 1964. He received his Ph.D. in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London in 1973. He lectured at the University of Essex 1967-1969 and then at Camberwell College of Arts as a senior lecturer, 1970-1974. During this time he was also a member of the British Section of the Situationist International, from which he was expelled along with the other members of the English section. He was also involved in the group King Mob.
In 1973 he published two books based on his Ph.D. dissertation: The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848-1851 and Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the Second French Republic, 1848-1851. Clark returned to Britain from his position at the University of California, Los Angeles and Leeds University to be chair of the Fine Art Department in 1976. In 1980 Clark joined the Department of Fine Arts at Harvard University. Chief among his Harvard detractors was the Renaissance art historian Sydney Freedberg, with whom he had a public feud.
In 1988 he joined the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley where he held the George C. and Helen N. Pardee Chair as Professor of Modern Art until his retirement in 2010.
In 1991 Clark was awarded the College Art Association’s Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award. Notable students include Brigid Doherty, Hollis Clayson, Thomas E. Crow, Serge Guilbaut, Margaret Werth, Nancy Locke, Christina Kiaer, Michael Kimmelman, Michael Leja, John O'Brian, Bridget Alsdorf, Matthew Jackson, Joshua Shannon, and Jonathan Weinberg.
In the early 1980s, he wrote an essay, "Clement Greenberg's Theory of Art," critical of prevailing Modernist theory, which prompted a notable and pointed exchange with Michael Fried. This exchange defined the debate between Modernist theory and the social history of art. Since that time, a mutually respectful and productive exchange of ideas between Clark and Fried has developed.
Clark's works have provided a new form of art history that take a new direction from traditional preoccupations with style and iconography. His books regard modern paintings as striving to articulate the social and political conditions of modern life.
Clark received an honorary degree from the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2006. He is a member of Retort, a Bay Area-based collective of radical intellectuals, with whom he authored the book Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War, published by Verso Books.[1]
Clark attended Bristol Grammar School. He completed his undergraduate studies at St. John's College, Cambridge University, he obtained a first-class honours degree in 1964. He received his Ph.D. in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London in 1973. He lectured at the University of Essex 1967-1969 and then at Camberwell College of Arts as a senior lecturer, 1970-1974. During this time he was also a member of the British Section of the Situationist International, from which he was expelled along with the other members of the English section. He was also involved in the group King Mob.
In 1973 he published two books based on his Ph.D. dissertation: The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848-1851 and Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the Second French Republic, 1848-1851. Clark returned to Britain from his position at the University of California, Los Angeles and Leeds University to be chair of the Fine Art Department in 1976. In 1980 Clark joined the Department of Fine Arts at Harvard University. Chief among his Harvard detractors was the Renaissance art historian Sydney Freedberg, with whom he had a public feud.
In 1988 he joined the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley where he held the George C. and Helen N. Pardee Chair as Professor of Modern Art until his retirement in 2010.
In 1991 Clark was awarded the College Art Association’s Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award. Notable students include Brigid Doherty, Hollis Clayson, Thomas E. Crow, Serge Guilbaut, Margaret Werth, Nancy Locke, Christina Kiaer, Michael Kimmelman, Michael Leja, John O'Brian, Bridget Alsdorf, Matthew Jackson, Joshua Shannon, and Jonathan Weinberg.
In the early 1980s, he wrote an essay, "Clement Greenberg's Theory of Art," critical of prevailing Modernist theory, which prompted a notable and pointed exchange with Michael Fried. This exchange defined the debate between Modernist theory and the social history of art. Since that time, a mutually respectful and productive exchange of ideas between Clark and Fried has developed.
Clark's works have provided a new form of art history that take a new direction from traditional preoccupations with style and iconography. His books regard modern paintings as striving to articulate the social and political conditions of modern life.
Clark received an honorary degree from the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2006. He is a member of Retort, a Bay Area-based collective of radical intellectuals, with whom he authored the book Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War, published by Verso Books.[1]
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
October 31, 2022
The title and introduction scramble to make all these chapters thematically cohere but I can’t say that the central conceit ever lands for me, in fact it’s never entirely clear what it is exactly. Mostly comes off as a series of vaguely linked essays on five paintings, and a closing essay about left politics that has almost nothing to do with the rest except it mentions the Bruegel painting earlier.
However I think this book is worth reading for the first two essays on Giotto and Bruegel, which are tremendous, and the third on Poussin, which I enjoyed as well (though frankly don’t have that much to say about). I’ve read TJ Clark in the LRB and I think it’s about the same balance of some stuff that’s hard to parse, some stuff that’s unbearably pretentious (like inserting your own poem into an essay about a painting, which he does both here and in a recent LRB essay about poems on paintings, putting his own work in the company of Auden and WCW as he does), and some stuff that is total knockout whopper observations. He is just the king of observing. Most writing on art I have read is broad, zeitgeist-y, and focuses on placing artists in their social contexts. This one does that but devotes 30 or 40 pages to minute exegesis of every element in the painting. By the end of the essays on Bruegel and Giotto you have felt like you have truly seen these paintings, noticed the weight and the shapes, the shadows and the light, the play of shape and color. And it all comes together to make sense for you. I read the first chapter the day after I had gone to LACMA and looked at a Monet painting for a while and I kept seeing new things, new details, new angles, new dimensions. And here it is done for you by someone who notices things you would never dream of.
The last essay about Picasso tries to fold it into some social analysis about the 20th century and comes off pretty muddled. The essay about Veronese I tried to like but honestly I just don’t think I can appreciate these allegorical paintings of simpering cupids and fleshy lovers. I just don’t have it in me at the moment. The coda is basically a call for a left politics with a new vision of the future, or a strange kind of incrementalism. Some nice sentences and sentiments, but basically been there done that.
But the essay on Bruegel’s Land of Cockaigne unlocked something for me, I saw a deep love and humanity in this one and many of his other paintings that I hadn’t seen before when I thought they were just sort of fun, bawdy paintings of fat peasants. I used to like him but now I think I love him. (Inasmuch as you can love a painter you’ve barely seen IRL, I think I’ve only seen the Harvesters at the Met, everything else is in Europe).
I have been going to museums and galleries just about every weekend and I feel like something has shifted in me. Before I enjoyed going to art museums but I felt like I was performing the act of looking, willing something to happen. I was easily impressed by scale and color and detail and wasn’t very good at sitting with things for a long time. Now I feel like I can look and really see. I’m not sure if it’s more of a personal change or if it solely comes from reading great writing on the subject, but it’s very exhilarating and I have writers like Clark partially to thank.
However I think this book is worth reading for the first two essays on Giotto and Bruegel, which are tremendous, and the third on Poussin, which I enjoyed as well (though frankly don’t have that much to say about). I’ve read TJ Clark in the LRB and I think it’s about the same balance of some stuff that’s hard to parse, some stuff that’s unbearably pretentious (like inserting your own poem into an essay about a painting, which he does both here and in a recent LRB essay about poems on paintings, putting his own work in the company of Auden and WCW as he does), and some stuff that is total knockout whopper observations. He is just the king of observing. Most writing on art I have read is broad, zeitgeist-y, and focuses on placing artists in their social contexts. This one does that but devotes 30 or 40 pages to minute exegesis of every element in the painting. By the end of the essays on Bruegel and Giotto you have felt like you have truly seen these paintings, noticed the weight and the shapes, the shadows and the light, the play of shape and color. And it all comes together to make sense for you. I read the first chapter the day after I had gone to LACMA and looked at a Monet painting for a while and I kept seeing new things, new details, new angles, new dimensions. And here it is done for you by someone who notices things you would never dream of.
The last essay about Picasso tries to fold it into some social analysis about the 20th century and comes off pretty muddled. The essay about Veronese I tried to like but honestly I just don’t think I can appreciate these allegorical paintings of simpering cupids and fleshy lovers. I just don’t have it in me at the moment. The coda is basically a call for a left politics with a new vision of the future, or a strange kind of incrementalism. Some nice sentences and sentiments, but basically been there done that.
But the essay on Bruegel’s Land of Cockaigne unlocked something for me, I saw a deep love and humanity in this one and many of his other paintings that I hadn’t seen before when I thought they were just sort of fun, bawdy paintings of fat peasants. I used to like him but now I think I love him. (Inasmuch as you can love a painter you’ve barely seen IRL, I think I’ve only seen the Harvesters at the Met, everything else is in Europe).
I have been going to museums and galleries just about every weekend and I feel like something has shifted in me. Before I enjoyed going to art museums but I felt like I was performing the act of looking, willing something to happen. I was easily impressed by scale and color and detail and wasn’t very good at sitting with things for a long time. Now I feel like I can look and really see. I’m not sure if it’s more of a personal change or if it solely comes from reading great writing on the subject, but it’s very exhilarating and I have writers like Clark partially to thank.
December 23, 2025
3.5 and i’m not sure i would round up because i felt like the conclusion fell a little flat and the coda was as totally unnecessary, though interesting and well-written, but the actual body of the book was so good that i think i will anyways. the giotto chapter was probably my favorite but all four (giotto, bruegel, poussin, and veronese) were excellent and the color plates were really good. joachim’s dream (giotto) and poussin’s femme colonne in the sacrament of marriage i thought were the strongest arguments for clark’s thesis but all the works were well selected. i thought the heaven on earth was well articulated, but the concept of the future wasn’t as much and this is probably why i think the conclusion did not fit as well with the rest of the chapters. i admire what clark is trying to do here and he’d get a true four stars if he concluded better, five if he really made his thesis more of a guide. he’s attempting something very challenging. if you’re not interested in pretentious art history writing this book is probably not for you, but i enjoyed myself. also can we PLEASE use footnotes instead of endnotes i implore you
December 15, 2018
I really think that Clark deserves five stars for what he attempted, and the questions he raised. Ultimately, I gave four because I think his answers, particularly on Giotto and Bruegel are interesting but inadequate. One can learn from error, and error, as Hegel tells us, is part and parcel of the unfolding of truth, 'fear of error is really fear of the truth.' What is Clark attempting? In an age of terror (both by the usual suspects and by ourselves), and a populism that resembles Ortega y Gassett's musings on the "mass man" (in his "The Revolt of the Masses"), or some of Waugh's darker observations of the coming man---see Hooper in "Brideshead Revisited," or Ludovic in his "Sword of Honor" trilogy; Clark turns his gaze to the art of a similarly brutal age of religious war to see if lessons can be learned, or knowledge imparted. He admits that the values of the Enlightenment would be preferable, and 19th Century French art more beautiful, but he suggests that the truth inherent in these is seeming less and less a real possibility in our era. I think it is important to endow art, and art history with meaning, and with meaning that goes to the very heart of living in one's world. It should not be a sterile set of museum walls for the bored---though this may be the case. It is this daring that I applaud in Clark's project. However, I feel it is also perhaps where he becomes doomed to, if not failure, then at least anachronistic interpretation; foisting our views unto an alien world. Of course, this is always going to be the case since, as Tolkien says, "none now live who remember." So there is no standpoint other than that of an interpretation from the present, and that he asks vital questions is still to be admired. I do not think he offers the most plausible interpretations, and some effort should be made to read ourselves into the likely outlook of the past, even if that too is just our interpretation. The focal point of his query will be, as the title suggests, heaven and earth across art history from Giotto to Picasso with some stops along the way, Bruegel, Poussin, Veronese. This question is of vital importance as ee cummings tells us: "there is a helluva universe next door, let's go!" One of the central tenets of any Enlightenment based, secular humanism must be that there is nothing but THIS WORLD---a finite one populated by finite beings. Art as reflection upon, and Clark argues that art can run deeper than philosophical prose, as Wittgenstein of the "Tractatus" would say can "show" what cannot be "said." I suppose I have some doubts about this too, along the line of F.P. Ramsay's retort to Wittgenstein, "if you cannot say it you can't whistle it either." Surely, on weakness of Clark's is that he is a dabbler in philosophy, often a quite competent one, but some of his analyses fall flat on philosophical grounds.
I will dare to contest Clark's interpretation of Giotto's "Joachim's Dream" a representation of which can be found here. https://www.wikiart.org/en/giotto/the.... It will prove too time consuming to lay out Clark's interpretation in detail, and there is really no substitute for reading his chapter on the painting (some 73 pages). Clark views the blue sky as "heavens" the realm of god, and makes much of the angels being seen as real, and relating this interestingly to some passages in Ruskin and of Proust (an admirer and translator of Ruskin) in "Albertine Disparu."
To my mind the tableau is firmly rooted in quite simple messages. Joachim is Mary's father and unable to have children. On despairing hiatus in the countryside he dreams of fertility and upon return his wife Anna is already pregnant with the future Virgin Mary.
(1) There is an overtly material/ sexual/ ordinary interpretation. The craggy cavern is the female organ, the phallic young shepard the sign of fertility and perhaps, if Giotto is daring, of cuckoldry.
(2) More deeply, here is religious foreshadowing. I see this as womb and tomb. The promise of the fertility that leads to Christ, and a sense of his death and resurrection. The shepherds, the sheep, the wilderness all point to Christ's birth and life. And Christ was the "lamb of God" and hence all of these pastoral signs point to this. The miracle of Mary's conception points to the coming miracle of the immaculate conception, which points to the birth of Christ, his temptation in the wilderness, his death, the empty tomb, his resurrection and the triumph of God here on earth (later).
Finally, I think Clark is wrong on God and Angelic being in his interpretation of the painting. This is an example, I think, of Clark being poorly versed in Medieval philosophy. I recommend Etienne Gilson's magisterial, "The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy." (a) God would NOT be equated with the blue heavens in the tableau. God created heavens and earth, and humans and angels and he maintains their being through a constant act of providential grace. Creator is RADICALLY DISTINCT from creation and so God would be beyond the painting. (b) Angels inhabit two worlds, and the interesting point is not that they were thought to be real; of course it is likely that most Christians in 1300 thought them real. What is of interest is that Giottos depiction perfectly squares with my assertion above that the divine and the finite are radically distinct for the angel appears to be popping out of another realm; half in the divine realm have in ours/ creation. This bifurcated being is why they were ideal messengers, and this too foreshadows the coming of Christ who will be God and man, finite and infinite united in this world.
I could post my discontent with his interpretation of Bruegel, but that would be more than is needed here. The book is well worth reading and thought provoking, and Clark offers deep insights and interpretations. I commend this book to all with an interest in art history, and its meaning for our times.
I will dare to contest Clark's interpretation of Giotto's "Joachim's Dream" a representation of which can be found here. https://www.wikiart.org/en/giotto/the.... It will prove too time consuming to lay out Clark's interpretation in detail, and there is really no substitute for reading his chapter on the painting (some 73 pages). Clark views the blue sky as "heavens" the realm of god, and makes much of the angels being seen as real, and relating this interestingly to some passages in Ruskin and of Proust (an admirer and translator of Ruskin) in "Albertine Disparu."
To my mind the tableau is firmly rooted in quite simple messages. Joachim is Mary's father and unable to have children. On despairing hiatus in the countryside he dreams of fertility and upon return his wife Anna is already pregnant with the future Virgin Mary.
(1) There is an overtly material/ sexual/ ordinary interpretation. The craggy cavern is the female organ, the phallic young shepard the sign of fertility and perhaps, if Giotto is daring, of cuckoldry.
(2) More deeply, here is religious foreshadowing. I see this as womb and tomb. The promise of the fertility that leads to Christ, and a sense of his death and resurrection. The shepherds, the sheep, the wilderness all point to Christ's birth and life. And Christ was the "lamb of God" and hence all of these pastoral signs point to this. The miracle of Mary's conception points to the coming miracle of the immaculate conception, which points to the birth of Christ, his temptation in the wilderness, his death, the empty tomb, his resurrection and the triumph of God here on earth (later).
Finally, I think Clark is wrong on God and Angelic being in his interpretation of the painting. This is an example, I think, of Clark being poorly versed in Medieval philosophy. I recommend Etienne Gilson's magisterial, "The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy." (a) God would NOT be equated with the blue heavens in the tableau. God created heavens and earth, and humans and angels and he maintains their being through a constant act of providential grace. Creator is RADICALLY DISTINCT from creation and so God would be beyond the painting. (b) Angels inhabit two worlds, and the interesting point is not that they were thought to be real; of course it is likely that most Christians in 1300 thought them real. What is of interest is that Giottos depiction perfectly squares with my assertion above that the divine and the finite are radically distinct for the angel appears to be popping out of another realm; half in the divine realm have in ours/ creation. This bifurcated being is why they were ideal messengers, and this too foreshadows the coming of Christ who will be God and man, finite and infinite united in this world.
I could post my discontent with his interpretation of Bruegel, but that would be more than is needed here. The book is well worth reading and thought provoking, and Clark offers deep insights and interpretations. I commend this book to all with an interest in art history, and its meaning for our times.
November 29, 2021
Clark gives very personal yet seemingly convincing interpretations of some very fine paintings. No details escape his attentive eyes or his learned mind. His cross referencing of related works (and study sketches) and the hypnotising historicist analyses are most fascinating. It touches on themes such as doubt, mortality, grace, love/lust, hubris, and above the re-imagining of human nature – a perennial pastime. His arguments therefore saturate with dialectics. Although it might seem odd for an atheist to write about theology and ecclesiology he seems very well versed in them. His gives us glimpses of the creative process of great artists, the ethos they are exposed to, and the psychological impact they try to convey. I saw Veronese's Allegories in Love many years ago in London and missed most of the meanings that Clark revealingly points out. His prose really is a marvel in semiotics – and a plethora of knowledge in painting techniques. Each meandering chapter ends with a denouement which is always delightful. The last chapter is a leftist catharsis that the author claims can summarise the book. That's arguable. Four stars.
July 1, 2025
I found this book really enjoyable. I ended up doing my own watercolour sketches of the four Veronese paintings, 'Allergories of Love' which happen to be conveniently close to me at London's National Gallery. see my insta @szczels Also I made a smaller sketch of 'Joachim's Dream' by Giotto. Clark's style is chatty but backed up by a kind of intense observation of every detail of each painting. He is a left leaning atheist... I'd just read Vol 1 of Jurgen Habermas' monumental study of religion as 'philosophy' ('A Genealogy of Postmetaphysical Thinking') so that gave me a useful mind set...
Clarks aim seemed to be to show how the masterpieces he selected were in fact more interested in picturing a materialist world that the spiritual beliefs of their day. In spite of this being heretical if expressed publicly in words at the time. His question is; what can painting think that words can't - with the inevitable double bind of attempting this WITH words. Anyway there is a sense he is enjoying himself and his enthusiasm rubs off even when his argument isn't entirely convincing.
The final essay on left politics is a kind of guilt laded nihilistic porridge.
Clarks aim seemed to be to show how the masterpieces he selected were in fact more interested in picturing a materialist world that the spiritual beliefs of their day. In spite of this being heretical if expressed publicly in words at the time. His question is; what can painting think that words can't - with the inevitable double bind of attempting this WITH words. Anyway there is a sense he is enjoying himself and his enthusiasm rubs off even when his argument isn't entirely convincing.
The final essay on left politics is a kind of guilt laded nihilistic porridge.
May 18, 2020
An absolutely fascinating analysis of works by 5 artists: Giotto, Bruegel, Poussin, Veronese, and Picasso. There is also an addition of an essay 'For a Left with No Future'. The book is illustrated throughout with the beautiful works of art it discusses. This is as visually stunning and intellectually stimulating as it gets.
Like the painters he discusses, Clark abandons hope for utopia, for Heaven on Earth, and in this way comes closer to it than ever before. He urges a modest, entangled view of things, which I think is exactly what we need more of in our lives today.
Furthermore, this book finally opens the door for me to the magic of pictorial representation. The symbolism, the ambiguity, the 'resistance of the world to being named'; all of it is captivating. I recommend this highly.
Quote: "Disinganno is a strong Baroque term. It is the moment of being robbed of one's illusions and seeing the actual sad state of things."
Disinganno is what needed to happen in modern society yesterday.
Like the painters he discusses, Clark abandons hope for utopia, for Heaven on Earth, and in this way comes closer to it than ever before. He urges a modest, entangled view of things, which I think is exactly what we need more of in our lives today.
Furthermore, this book finally opens the door for me to the magic of pictorial representation. The symbolism, the ambiguity, the 'resistance of the world to being named'; all of it is captivating. I recommend this highly.
Quote: "Disinganno is a strong Baroque term. It is the moment of being robbed of one's illusions and seeing the actual sad state of things."
Disinganno is what needed to happen in modern society yesterday.
April 7, 2024
Alongside with Didi-Huberman, Mitchel and Hans Belting (to mention a few ones) T. J. Clark has won the privilege to be considered one of those bold art historians who provide new perspectives to those readers who are in the quest of a genuine artistic nourishment.
His chapters about Giotto and Brueguel deserve to be read carefully, given that they entail a lesson about how to behold a painting from a renewed vantage point. Poussin chapter, on the other hand, offer us the gift of the infinite within pictorical tradition. Veronese and Picasso chapters also have something to teach, although they lack the inspiration of the first ones.
Anyway, and to be absolutely honest, I think that his poetical and postmodern style is not suitable for everyone (is is not translated to Spanish, thus I feel like I didn't catch many details...). Furthermore, I don't find his foundations as vivid and trascendental as Didi-Huberman or Belting's. Finally, the last chapter, in my opinion, is sloppy... (what is it exactly about?).
But, undoubtedly, T.J Clark should be translated into Spanish.
His chapters about Giotto and Brueguel deserve to be read carefully, given that they entail a lesson about how to behold a painting from a renewed vantage point. Poussin chapter, on the other hand, offer us the gift of the infinite within pictorical tradition. Veronese and Picasso chapters also have something to teach, although they lack the inspiration of the first ones.
Anyway, and to be absolutely honest, I think that his poetical and postmodern style is not suitable for everyone (is is not translated to Spanish, thus I feel like I didn't catch many details...). Furthermore, I don't find his foundations as vivid and trascendental as Didi-Huberman or Belting's. Finally, the last chapter, in my opinion, is sloppy... (what is it exactly about?).
But, undoubtedly, T.J Clark should be translated into Spanish.
February 12, 2019
Not uninteresting but kind of a mixed bag of essays revolving around a not particularly closely defined or adhered to theme about life/afterlife. Clark now does close description of paintings, as opposed to his earlier modernist studies that situated them, and I expect these all worked very well as lectures as he talked the audience through the paintings. Style counts. But in the end you’re never quite sure what the point is. A political coda about the need for yet another New Left that will face up to. . .something. . .has the same tone of glib prescription. History is harder than this.
November 29, 2022
Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will? Not any more: because optimism is now a political tonality indissociable from the promises of consumption. 'Future' exists only in the stock-exchange plural. Hope is no longer given us for the sake of the hopeless: it has mutated into an endless political and economic Micawberism.
January 31, 2023
maybe I just didn’t really get it but I felt like the organization of this book was bad- I just didn’t know to what end Clark was arguing anything. I mainly got it to read the chapter on breugel and I did enjoy that part
May 12, 2019
A detailed book about a select few painters from the 1300's to modern Picasso. Vivid whole page illustrations of the paintings complete the picture, so to speak.
July 3, 2020
So strong in the early and middle chapters, and then the last chapter on Picasso and the coda are so different, wooly and self-indulgent. Five stars without those last two pieces.
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May 3, 2019I've only read the first chapter of the book, but I have to return the library book. And, there is only one copy of the book in the 77 Public Libraries in NJ's Bergen, Essex, Hudson, and Passaic Counties! So, I may need to read it. The first chapter, Giotto and the Angel. It has inspired me to visit Padua, Italy - The Scrovegni Chapel (Italian: Cappella degli Scrovegni, also known as the Arena Chapel), a small church, adjacent to the Augustinian monastery, the Monastero degli Eremitani. Clark highlights Giotto's painting - Joachim's Dream. Some quotes:
p. 26 - the fifth painting in a row of six panels telling the story of the birth of the Virgin. Giotto had access to the legend probably in several versions, perhaps including handbooks that have not survived, but the text he appears to have responded to most deeply is one his contemporaries knew as the Liber de Infantia or the Historia de Navitte Mariae, which I shall call The Book of Mary. Readers in Giotto's day believed the book had been written soon after Jesus's death some said by the apostle James, some by Matthew. Nowadays we think it was put together in Latin in the seventh or eighth century.' The Book of Mary lay behind many retellings and embroideries of the tale in the late Middle Ages -- it is the main source for the story in the Golden Legend, which established its hold on the faithful at much the same time the Arena Chapel was being decorated -- but Giotto and his advisers seem to have studied the older narrative first-hand.'
p. 52 "Whenever we encounter in a work of art some awkwardness or abbreviation that strikes us as 'not realistic' or 'not true to life' - as we do all the time....we should at least ask ourselves the question: What other aspect of the thing seen or event imagined does the 'unrealistic' notation make vivid?
p. 53 "Giotto, I said previously, is the master of folds. Joachim's cloak is a typical triumph. Dante in the Paradiso, looking for a way to explain why his language has to admit defeat in the face of heaven's utter strangeness, reaches for a metaphor from painting: 'Because our speech, not to say our imagination, has no colors / To match folds like these." Giotto here may be specifically in Dante's mind: the play of light and shade on a fall of drapery is the very image of 'representation' as the poet understands it. Heaven, at the very end of the Divine Comedy, throws up shadows and highlights that defeat our efforts to reproduce them; but everywhere else -- even in hell and purgatory, as Dante imagines them - God's creation is a kind of unfolding. The great artist is one whose colours show how."
Other chapters include: Bruegel in Paradise, Poussin and the Unbeliever, Veronese's Higher Beings, Picasso and the Fall.
p. 26 - the fifth painting in a row of six panels telling the story of the birth of the Virgin. Giotto had access to the legend probably in several versions, perhaps including handbooks that have not survived, but the text he appears to have responded to most deeply is one his contemporaries knew as the Liber de Infantia or the Historia de Navitte Mariae, which I shall call The Book of Mary. Readers in Giotto's day believed the book had been written soon after Jesus's death some said by the apostle James, some by Matthew. Nowadays we think it was put together in Latin in the seventh or eighth century.' The Book of Mary lay behind many retellings and embroideries of the tale in the late Middle Ages -- it is the main source for the story in the Golden Legend, which established its hold on the faithful at much the same time the Arena Chapel was being decorated -- but Giotto and his advisers seem to have studied the older narrative first-hand.'
p. 52 "Whenever we encounter in a work of art some awkwardness or abbreviation that strikes us as 'not realistic' or 'not true to life' - as we do all the time....we should at least ask ourselves the question: What other aspect of the thing seen or event imagined does the 'unrealistic' notation make vivid?
p. 53 "Giotto, I said previously, is the master of folds. Joachim's cloak is a typical triumph. Dante in the Paradiso, looking for a way to explain why his language has to admit defeat in the face of heaven's utter strangeness, reaches for a metaphor from painting: 'Because our speech, not to say our imagination, has no colors / To match folds like these." Giotto here may be specifically in Dante's mind: the play of light and shade on a fall of drapery is the very image of 'representation' as the poet understands it. Heaven, at the very end of the Divine Comedy, throws up shadows and highlights that defeat our efforts to reproduce them; but everywhere else -- even in hell and purgatory, as Dante imagines them - God's creation is a kind of unfolding. The great artist is one whose colours show how."
Other chapters include: Bruegel in Paradise, Poussin and the Unbeliever, Veronese's Higher Beings, Picasso and the Fall.
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