ART 235: Pre-Modern Art History

The Art of Faith: a guide to understanding Christian images by Judith Couchman

Saints and Their Symbols by Rosa Giorgi

Saints, Signs, and Symbols by Hilarie Cornwell; James Cornwell; W. Ellwood Post

The Beauty of the Cross: the passion of Christ in theology and the arts, from the catacombs to the eve of the Renaissance by Richard Viladesau

The New Art of the Fifteenth Century by Shirley Neilsen Blum

Religion and Contemporary Art by Ronald R. Bernier (Editor); Rachel Hostetter Smith (Editor) Brings together scholars, critics, and artists who are exploring the rich place of the sacred and the transcendent in contemporary art and visual culture. Sets the theoretical frameworks and interpretive strategies for exploring the reemergence of religion in the making, exhibiting, and discussion of contemporary art. Includes a breadth of case studies, covering themes such as ritual, abstraction, mythology, the body, popular culture, science, liturgy, and social justice, among others.

How Pictures Complete Us by Paul Crowther Despite the wonders of the digital world, people still go in record numbers to view drawings and paintings in galleries. Why? What is the magic that pictures work on us? This book provides a provocative explanation, arguing that some pictures have special kinds of beauty and sublimity that offer aesthetic transcendence. They take us imaginatively beyond our finite limits and even invoke a sense of the divine. Such aesthetic transcendence forges a relationship with the ultimate and completes us psychologically. Philosophers and theologians sometimes account for this as an effect of art, but How Pictures Complete Us distinguishes itself by revealing how this experience is embodied in pictorial structures and styles. Through detailed discussions of artworks from the Renaissance through postmodern times, Paul Crowther reappraises the entire scope of beauty and the sublime in the context of both representational and abstract art, offering unexpected insights into familiar phenomena such as ideal beauty, pictorial perspective, and what pictures are in the first place.