Abstract
Perhaps the first thing to say about Dr Reddaway’s Transformations in Persons and Paint is just how beautiful it is as an object. The book declares itself to be about pictures and how they can, and do, communicate Christian belief and it certainly doesn’t disappoint in this respect, being lavishly illustrated with some 94 colour plates of fine clarity by the photographer Antonio Quattrone. And yet its general visual attractiveness is far from the only reason for forking out for what may seem a prohibitive retail price.
The ambition of the book is large. Reddaway points to the general lack of theological interpretation of historical images as well as to the lack of debate about an appropriate methodology for doing this and sets out to correct our collective failing by offering a new model for viewing such images that combines both ‘period’ and modern perspectives.
The opening chapter, ‘How Should Theologians Look at Pictures?’ concerns itself with why a theological hermeneutic for images is needed in the first place. The proposed model draws on a range of existing practices such as the literary-critical method of reader criticism, the theological approach known as reception studies, cultural history and its counterpart in art history of acquiring the ‘period eye’. Crucially the author determines that a Christian hermeneutic for interpreting images must be incarnational – it must acknowledge the incarnation not only as the central theme in all Christian art, but also as the method by which it interprets this art. Reddaway remarks that such an approach – i.e. one which considers the corporeality and locatedness of its subject – lends itself particularly well to the close study of frescoes as non-portable images fully embedded in their locations.
The author tests and proves her thesis using six fourteenth- and fifteenth-century fresco-cycles in Florence. We are introduced to the Bardi Chapel, Santa Croce and the frescoes of Giotto, moving in the following chapter to the Baroncelli Chapel in the same church and Taddeo Gaddi. We go from Santa Croce to Santa Maria del Carmine and the Brancacci Chapel, and the frescoes of Masaccio, Masolino and Filippino Lippi, and from there to the Convent of San Marco and Fra Angelico.
Consideration of sacred space is included as an essential part of the author’s approach – how space ‘in and around’ images is used to express theological content. There is no better example of the use of such empty space than that seen between the Archangel Gabriel and the Virgin Mary in the Annunciation at San Marco (Cell 3). The theologian Thomas Altizer affirmed that only in such total presence does ‘language move into silence’, and it is evident that Reddaway has tapped into such an understanding here.
Our tour ends with Ghirlandaio at the Sassetti Chapel in Santa Trinita and the Tornabuoni Chapel in Santa Maria Novella, and a concluding section considers the common themes to have emerged and reviews the usefulness of the approach proposed in the opening chapter.
Although written by a specialist primarily for fellow specialists the book will also be of enduring value to the general reader of art and theology. It is a patient and precise examination of the author’s area of expertise. If its intention is to encourage us (i.e. the modern viewer) to attentively look at such devotional images and in that looking to also recognize the value of the ‘physicality’ of that encounter, then it succeeds and succeeds admirably well.