Taking pains to see

...Buechner's very readable text which accompanies the art is and this should come as no surprise quite literary...

...We get very little help with context while looking at the very diverse works which are in this text...

...It is that complex conviction, I suspect, by which we have assurance that Christ can be met and known (in others...

...It seems simple enough until we take pains to see...

...The one thing that I most heartily second, after studying both of these books for some weeks, is Buechner's observation about the face of Christ in the introduction to his book: "Like the faces of people we love, it has become so familiar that unless we take pains we hardly see it at all...

...What Buechner has given us is pertinent and, in places, moving, but in the end it makes us wish for a serious study of Christ in the art of this century...

...And if the latter, then what happens to the notion of tradition...

...Mirico, which pays homage to the Griinewald crucifixion...

...Take pains...

...It is the third world that seems to have the artistic energy today...

...There is more than pulpit rhetoric in the drumbeat insistence that everyone who follows Christ must bear him in their being, see him in others, and extend his presence in the world...

...The once popular Last Supper of the great religious schlockmeister of our time, Salvador Dali, reeked of borrowings from Leonardo and Tintoretto...

...For example, no dimensions are provided and, thus, a sense of scale is easy to lose: a thirteenth-century page from an English psalter gets a full-page treatment as does a large painting like Edouard Manet's brilliant chiaroscuro painting of The Dead Christ with Angels...

...What was the original impulse (liturgical, pedagogical, gallery specific) behind the art of the non-Western world...

...There is a powerful wooden head of Christ with a crown of thorns from Africa...

...others far) as well as the natural world of animals, trees, and mountains...

...Similarly, if a contemporary artist wished to paint, say, a Last Supper, she would have to decide how much of the tradition she wished to shake off as her composition was planned...

...It is sad that we did not have more examples from Latin America or from Africa where, judging from examples shown in some of our national magazines recently, the tradition of religious art is not only well but energetic and innovative...

...Christian art has its own history and that history is not a linear one...

...I kept asking myself whether the many Swedish works were done under church patronage or as museum/collector pieces...

...The Faces of Jesus, by contrast, has a somewhat more ambitious aim: it wishes to instruct and please...

...The Met's Adoration of the Shepherds by Andrea Mantegna forces us to search for the infant Jesus amid a very complex scene which uses not only Jesus and Mary as part of the frame but the shepherds (some close...

...All Christian art is reader-response art...

...Icons are not fundamentally for instruction...

...I worship the creator of matter who became matter for my sake, who willed to take his abode in matter, and who through matter wrought my salvation...

...And, in fact, it requires some pains to see...

...supply the details or dramatize the salient characteristics given by the text: what does a treacherous Judas look like...

...Once one accepts that limitation, it becomes a perfectly acceptable gift for the person who loves beautiful things...

...and The Faces of Jesus (Harper & Row, $19.95,256 pp...

...and a moving ink and watercolor crucifixion by an Italo-American artist, W.C...

...Our task, to borrow the language of Eastern spirituality, is "to gaze...

...or some of the more timid offerings from Scandinavia...

...The Metropolitan's The Life of Christ is, in short, the coffee table book par excellence: glossy photos and minimal text designed for a thoughtful turning of the page with a pause now and then to admire the wonderful works which the museum possesses...

...Cunningham THE MANY FACES OF JESUS The great eighth-century theologian, John of Damascus, defended the use of icons with an appeal to the doctrine of the Incarnation framed, at the same time, as an argument against idolatry: "I do not worship matter...

...What does one "say" in paint in order to depict a face of Christ which, when seen, would convert a person immediately (something Georges Rouault once said he wanted to do...

...in liturgy), as well as the elusive nature of all that Christ is that has led people to try and flesh out the silences that stand behind the text of the Gospel and the glosses upon it...

...We have alluded to the almost campy sentimentality of Dali but we could also point to the saccharine pictures of the German, Otto Dix (why not the Expressionist Emil Nolde...

...The above thoughts ran through my mind as I paged through two new "Christmas books" that came across my desk this fall: The Life of Christ: Images from the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Metropolitan Museum/Scribners, $22.50,96 pp...

...Jesus himself tells us to find him in the hungry, thirsty, imprisoned, and deprived (Matt...

...The Gospel also tells us that we will recognize him as resurrected Lord in the hearing of the word and the breaking of bread (Luke 24:28-33...

...One of the most striking works is a wooden figure of Christ, boxed in a plain rectangular shape, with one arm thrust through the box and pinned by a long nail...

...The complexity, I think derives not from sheer bravado but from a deep insight into the particularity of the Incarnation: the God-man was, after all, a babe who was surrounded by a rather large and not always friendly world...

...At the same time, his presence is tantalizingly allusive...

...The former provides a series of art works with juxtaposed citations from the Gospels (thus narrating a "life" of Christ as the title promises) while the latter has a text written by the well regarded novelist (and ordained minister), Frederick Buechner...

...It is not clear to me when the beardless Christ of paleo-Christian art definitively gave way to the bearded Christ of Byzantium (one finds both in Ravenna), but the shift must have indicated more than stylistic change...

...The "sign value" of Christ, however, is a two-way street...

...Again, a sixteenth-century majolica plate depicting the Magdalen and Christ is reproduced in the same size as a much smaller eighth-century Byzantine reliquary which depicts the Ascension...

...All the photographs are in color...

...There are art works from the great museums of the world as well as smaller works ranging from ivory carvings to fabrics...

...We must beware of those who tell us that he is here or in some other place (Matt...

...His art or at least a good portion of it should be seen in the context of worship...

...John's concern was to establish the orthodoxy of icons in the church, but his insight has a far wider applicability in the Christian Catholic tradition...

...Still, there is much to learn from taking the pains to look at this art...

...as well as a generous representation of children's art...

...The Faces of Jesus is divided into six large sections: Annunciation, Nativity, Ministry, Last Supper, Crucifixion, and Resurrection...

...Nearly a millennium ago, Saint Anselm of Canterbury wrote in the opening pages of his great treatise on the purpose of the Incarnation (CurDeus Homo) that he was always indignant when a poor artist depicted Christ unworthily "with an ugly form...

...There is nothing intrinsically wrong with a blown-up photograph of a small object, but an indication of size does help one appreciate the virtuosity of the artist...

...It also helps one to approach a work of art with sensitivity to the end that the artist had in mind when executing the work: a large painting is a public work in a way that a majolica plate was never intended to be...

...5:31-46...

...they are, rather, windows through which we see the mysteries of Christ in a direct and dialogical way...

...The layout is quite handsome, the photographs are crisp, and the typography is easy on the eyes, with the first page in each section set in large bold print...

...It is in that reciprocal relationship of gazing that the doctrine of icons makes best sense...

...LaLiberte is, for example, an artist with close ties to the liturgical movement in the United States...

...The Metropolitan's Life of Christ is just what you would expect of a book that bore its imprint: handsome, judiciously selected, and lushly illustrated...

...The odd, very nondevotional, felt banners of Norman LaLiberte jolt our preconceived notions of whom Jesus ought to look like, just as Bodini's bronze crucifixion with its horrifically pinned and crumpled corpus seems just the right image of a Christ sculpted in Europe in 1933...

...The entire sacramental impulse roots itself in that truth which stands at the very heart of the Christian faith, to wit, that the evanescent Word became palpably experienced as flesh...

...It is that tension between knowing and not knowing that explains, in large part, why people have produced religious art...

...What is easy to forget, however, is that Christ is looking back at us as we live in a non-gold leaf and very tactile world of misery and pleasure...

...Apart from the intrinsic education (and pleasure) one gets from looking at the pictures, there is little here to nourish or encourage a sense of study...

...Since the Gospels never tell us what any of the dramatis personae look like (apart from Zachaeus whom Luke describes as "short"), the artist tries to LAWRENCE S. CUNNINGHAM is professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame...

...24:23ff...

...an angular Melanesian wooden crucifix (which puts the angular paintings of Bernard Buffet, also shown, to shame...

...Must we pay homage to that past or must there be clean breaks with a tradition read differently...

...What he touched on, in short, was a fundamental insight: Christ is a visible sign of the love of God...

...in prayer...

...Happily, these books give us very few poor artists and, for that reason alone, we are in their debt...

...Buechner is interested in the "story" that the illustrations "tell" as opposed to the formal "story" of the art itself...

...We look over the shoulder of Christ into an infinite distance of gold leaf...

...Some of the more interesting pieces are contemporary ones...

...What is most striking, however, is the vast array of contemporary art from the non-Western world...

...And our contemporary art...

...This work by the Swedish sculptor, Torsten Renqvist and a bronze Last Supper by the Greek artist Dmitri Florentinos with echoes of the formalism of Arp are among the few works in the book which attempt to execute that most treacherous of marriages: between modernism and traditional religious iconography...

...How depict a doubting Thomas or a Mary who "stores up all things in her heart" or an impetuous Peter...

...The illustrations (again, irritatingly, without dimensions) are culled from a wide variety of sources...

...By contrast, traditional icons (there are a number of them in Buechner's book) depict Christ straightforwardly looking out at the world...

...He shows us what the love of God means and we, in turn, see Christ as the template by which we judge our own relationship to God...

...In fact, that instinct for complexity (a hallmark of Northern Renaissance painting) is, in its own oblique way, a witness to the palpable reality of the Incarnation...

...his most recent book, from Crossroad, is Catholic Prayer...

...There are wonderful Japanese serigraphs by Sadao Watanabe, a glorious virgin and child in polychromed wood from Melanesia, and a number of striking fabric works by the American artist, Norman LaLiberte...

...It can be evocative to the extreme once we begin to see: the polychromed virgin and child from Melanesia with its angular Mary with flattened and somewhat desiccated breasts startles until we remember the mothers with children at the breast at famine relief centers in the Sahel...

...Nor is there much in the way of functional analysis...

...It is, however, very much a gift book...

...Christian art stands, inevitably, at the interstices of the Gospel text both as written and as heard in proclamation...

...It is a source for both piety and theological reflections...

...It is, then, more a book about the museum than about the life of Christ...

...Not everything modern works...