Monday, February 25, 2008

Some of Our Favorite Books for Lent



Last Supper Art by the editors of Phaidon Press. This book presents a sequence of over 100 images of the Last Supper. It demonstrates how each artist responded to the complex challenge of creating a convincing group of individual personalities and expressing their relationships with each other.







Palm Sunday Parade by Martha McKown. The impact of that first Palm Sunday parade will be remembered long after the use of this resource. All ages will recall both the joy and the sadness of that day's events. Church families will experience the rich joyous praise as they become involved in the narrative, the procession and hymn singing.



The Image of Christ by Gabriele Finaldi is a beautifully illustrated, colorful history of how Christ has been portrayed by artists from the early church to the present. the book explores the challenges Christian artists have faced as they have tried to imagine what Jesus looked like. Since no eyewitness descriptions of Jesus' physical appearance survived, the earliest artists' depictions of Christ played on the symbols and images that he used in his parables--such as the Good Shepherd, the Light, and the Vine. Later, artists became concerned with capturing Christ's true physical likeness, based on miraculous relics such as the cloth that Saint Veronica offered him on his way to Calvary, which was believed to be imprinted with an image of his face. These stages in the history of Christian art are described by several art historians in brief essays, each of which is lavishly illustrated.