One of the most telling and illuminating moments shared in class was when we discovered that we can learn as much from what we don't like as we can from what we do like! It was during the class on Jesus Through the Centuries a year or two ago, when images and paintings of Jesus were shown and we listened to how we reacted to them. I don't mean we listened to what we each thought of them - well we did that, but we didn't only listen to what we each said. We listened to what was going on inside us as we looked at images that were unfamiliar, theologically alien to our tradition, at times disturbing.
An artist has done her job brilliantly if in portraying suffering, evil, cruelty, or anguish, the viewer recoils, is disturbed, is affected by sympathy for the sufferer and moved from bewilderment through to outrage at the perpetrators. This is particularly true of religious art, and in Christian art the portrayal of the Passion of Jesus. I had another of those moments of illumination while reading Justin Lewis-Anthony, Circles of Thorns. The book is subtitled Hieronymous Bosch and Being Human, ande the whole book is a series of reflections on one painting, Christ Mocked.
Paintings emerge from a context, and are best understood within that context, whether as reflecting or reacting to the cultural, political, social and religious realities. Lewis-Anthony has lived with this painting for years, reflected and read around the historical context, and now offers an exposition that explores what it means to be human against the background of what it meant for God in human form to be the victim of mockery, abuse and violence leading to death. Along the way he explores politics, psychology, science, religious devotion as these developed in the early Modern period. This means at times having to be patient while the context is constructed and we are given the information needed to know what Bosch was about, and why, and how. But each chapter brings rewards and by the end of the book the reader has been educated in context and enabled to look at the painting as the politically subversive and theologically potent statement it is. And on the way Thomas a Kempis, Terry Pratchett, Bob Dylan, Etty Hilesum, Rowan Williams and Brian Eno are all co-opted into the conversation.
Not everyone is likely to admire Bosch's art - some of his paintings are frankly weird, a kind of proto-surrealism that depicts the nightmares of an age that saw the ravages of war, plague, and political and religious revolution. What this book does is pay attention to one painting, and patiently unfold the mind of the artist, teaching us in the process not only how to read a painting, but in doing so teach us also that great art reads also the human heart.
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