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Frederick Edwin Church (1826-1900) was a devout Trinitarian and Congregationalist. Ministers and theologians were among his closest friends throughout his life. For years a student of Thomas Cole, he left his tutelage in 1846 and established his own studio in Hartford where he heard the sermons of Horace Bushnell at North Congregational Church. In those years Church would have been exposed to the ideas of the young Christian Romantic minister that had just published Discourses on Christian Nurture . I will comment briefly on only one of his paintings. Niagara (1857) is a monumental piece both in physical size and meaning. Painted at a time when America was transitioning from an agrarian to an industrialized economy, and when a new sense of nationalism was in search of an identifiable cultural icon, the significance of Church’s picture of Niagara Falls found a ready audience. While Niagara Falls had been painted many times, even by his mentor Cole, Church brought a fresh a...

Up until the mid-18th century, art functioned as an evolving yet relatively stable language of high culture with a vocabulary of conventional forms (style) and themes (subject matter) familiar both to artists and educated audiences. Because artists used vocabularies already familiar to their audiences, it was possible for them to say something significant and for art to have a serious place within a wider range of overlapping cultural forms and practices such as literature, music, theater, dance, religion, and political festivity. Like all forms of high culture, art also worked not just to reflect shared values but also to redefine them. As an active, creative, inventive force responding to individual patrons, artists, and new social circumstances, art provided a changing, flexible arena in which different social groups could interact, exchange and contest ideas, define new forms of group identity, and formulate new blueprints of "reality" and "maps" for human ex...

Question: Is it possible to do art that "pleases" God and not be a Christian?

I have a new book, actually a booklet, coming out very soon. It's called Art to the Glory of God (Wifp and Stock). It is written for Christian artists who are looking for more than theory about Christianity and art. The booklet offers practical steps the artist can take to do art to the glory of God. Below is the Introduction to the booklet which will give you the general idea. I hope you will look for it when it comes out, likely in February/March. INTRODUCTION Years ago, I was privileged to be a student at the Yale University Institute of Sacred Music. The Institute is an interdisciplinary think-tank that is shared by the Yale Divinity School and the Yale Graduate School of Music. I attended classes in both schools. The principle focus of the Institute is to further study and dialogue on the relationship of Christianity and culture. My role at the Institute also permitted me to take courses at the department of Christianity and the Arts, where I studied art history (principally...

If you have plans to travel to New York before September 27, don't miss the opportunity to see Scripture for the Eyes, now showing at the Museum of Biblical Art. Scripture for the Eyes is the first major exhibition to explore the central role played by printed illustrations of subjects from both the Old and New Testaments in the Low Countries during the sixteenth century. Through approximately 80 engravings, woodcuts, and illustrated Bibles and books by masters such as Lucas van Leyden, Maarten van Heemskerck, Philips Galle, Hendrick Goltzius, and Hieronymus Wierix, biblical prints are shown to be a dynamic force in the transformation of Northern European art between Albrecht Dürer and Rembrandt van Rijn as well as in the intensified attention to scripture in the religious turmoil of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation.

Art historians ask of Michelangelo’s David , “Is David sizing up Goliath, or looking in satisfaction at the defeated giant?” There are political and cultural ramifications to David . He was sculpted during a time of lingering political unrest in the city of Florence, this mostly due to the mess left by the ordeal of Savonarola (powerful and unprincipled Barons stepped in to rule Florence). Michelangelo chose to represent David as an athlete, very concentrated, holding a stone in his right hand, and ready to fight. Michelangelo was devoted to the ideals of the Republic and wanted each citizen to rightfully discharge his or her responsibilities by being committed to returning the city to its former freedom and political greatness. Michelangelo would write in his diary of the commission, “I found myself famous. The City Council asked me to carve a colossal David from a nineteen-foot block of marble -- and damaged to boot! I locked myself away in a workshop behind the cathedral, hammered ...