Abstract
Diane Apostolos-Cappadona is now assuredly the senior doyenne of America’s current historians of Christian art. Unlike many of her peers, she has long been committed to reaching the widest public constituency. Indeed, this reviewer’s now battered and travel-stained copy of her Dictionary of Christian Art (1994) was probably the first, conveniently portable, paperback primer to appear in English. Now, over 25 years later, she has revisited, reframed and rewritten much of her earlier, pioneering, book. The outcome is no longer a ‘Dictionary’ but rather a broader-based and even more user-friendly ‘Guide’ to Christian art. Her starting point is a substantial (55 pages) yet stylistically succinct overview of ‘Narratives of Jesus Christ and his mother, Mary’. Here, the emphasis is primarily on providing an authoritative, fully indexed and visually relevant commentary on those biblical episodes and texts repeatedly drawn upon by artists. As elsewhere in this book, Cappadona steers us firmly away from both religiose pietism and narrative hagiography, and towards a more art-historically and theologically grounded response to the artworks themselves. For example, she begins a very erudite four-page entry on parables by reminding us not only that ‘these confusing stories challenged the casual listeners to pay attention, and required contemplation in order to learn the hidden spiritual message’ but also that, in any case, ‘the majority of the parables were rarely, if ever, depicted in Christian art’ (p. 29). Only then does she proceed to a detailed descriptive analysis of selected artworks – primarily Byzantine and medieval – that still survive. Here, unfortunately, as throughout the guide, the accompanying illustrations are relatively sparse and often of uneven quality – an inevitable consequence, perhaps, of the paperback’s very modest retail price.
At the heart of Cappadona’s project, and occupying 184 of its 284 pages of closely written text, is a major section simply labelled ‘Themes’. Such a broad descriptive category belies the extraordinary range and depth of theological and art-historical knowledge that informs so many entries. The latter are usefully divided into two broad categories: one is ‘Personages’ (classical, biblical and apocryphal, saints and celestial figures); the second, ‘Signs and symbols’, is even more all-embracing and includes animals (real and imaginary), trees and flowers, the human body, costume, jewellery and even musical instruments. The entries themselves, if densely formatted and closely written, are very thoroughly indexed and help make the book an indispensable adjunct to understanding Christian art, whether in galleries or places of worship, or simply by reading the text independently.
Inevitably, there are some disappointments. One is the author’s relative inattention to sculpture, stained glass and even architecture per se in shaping and sustaining Christian experience and identity. Another is that Christian art beyond the Rococo is seriously underrepresented – no Blake, Friedrich or Holman Hunt, Chagall, Matisse at Vence, Rothko’s Houston Chapel or even Stanley Spencer. Rouault is there, and so, more surprisingly, is James Tissot, whose late mutation, Cappadona tells us, from painter of fashionable society to ‘definitive biblical images’ (p. 284) directly influenced Cecil B. DeMille! The Guide is replete with such arcane nuggets as this, while many British readers will especially welcome what, in his sparkling Foreword, Gabriele Finaldi (its current director) calls the author’s ‘special empathy with the collection of London’s National Gallery’. Many readers of this journal will also welcome this timely, and scholarly, effort to reaffirm Christian art itself as a locus theologicus.