Christian Art Wallpaper

Understanding Early Christian Art offers an insightful, erudite and lavishly illustrated analysis of the meaning and message of early Christianity as revealed in the texts and images of its first practitioners. Robin Margaret Jensen examines the motifs and subjects of early Christian art, integrating them with the symbols and themes of Christian literature and liturgy. Beginning with an analysis of the non-narrative subjects of the early art -- the Good Shepherd, the praying figure, fish and birds -- Jensen goes on to explore the narrative images found in Roman catacomb painting, sarcophagus relief sculpture, early mosaics, ivories, and manuscript illumination. Finally, the book examines iconographic themes such as Jonah, Daniel, Abraham offering Isaac, and Adam and Eve.

"Figure and Likeness presents a thought-provoking new account of Byzantine iconoclasm--the fundamental crisis in Christian visual representation during the eighth and ninth centuries that defined the terms of Christianity's relationship to the painted image. Charles Barber rejects the conventional means of analyzing this crisis, which seeks its origin in political and other social factors. Instead, he argues, iconoclasm is primarily a matter of theology and aesthetic theory. Working between the theological texts and the visual materials, Barber demonstrates that in challenging the validity of iconic representation, iconoclasts were asking: How can an image depict an incomprehensible God? In response, iconophile theologians gradually developed a notion of representation that distinguished the work of art from the subject it depicted. As such, Barber concludes, they were forced to move the language describing the icon beyond that of theology. This pivotal step allowed these theologians, of whom Patriarch Nikephoros and Theodore of Stoudios were the most important, to define and defend a specifically Christian art. In highlighting this outcome and also in offering a full and clearly rendered account of iconoclastic notions of Christian representation, Barber reveals that the notion of art was indeed central to the unfolding of iconoclasm. The implications of this study reach well beyond the dispute it considers. Barber fundamentally revises not only our understanding of Byzantine art in the years succeeding the iconoclastic dispute, but also of Christian painting in the centuries to come.