Publisher's Synopsis
The theme of The Church and the Arts presents a vast, complex and exciting challenge. The thirty-four responses to this challenge included here are so varied and original that the volume could well serve as an introduction to others on the Church and Music, or Art, or Architecture, or Iconography, or Tomb Sculpture, or the Novel, or Poetry, or the Cinema, or Drama, or even Church Decor and Furnishings, or Church Books and Vestments. The subjects range from Byzantine images and Carolingian illuminated manuscripts to the zodiacal images on a font at Hook Norton, Oxfordshire, and on to the illustrations for the Bishops' Bible ; from fifteenth-century Netherlands composers via Bach and nineteenth-century plainsong to Leonard Bernstein's Chichester Psalms; from twelfth-century treatises to the poetry of Isaac Watts and on to the novels of the twentieth-century navvy Patrick Macgill; from medieval tomb sculpture to the work of Elizabeth Frink, and all manner of ecclesiastical architecture.;The book explores motives, connections, and attitudes - the piety, the patronage, and the politics which underpinned this achievement, the connections between image and indulgence, church decor and devotion, or between the sacred and the profane, and the attitude of the churches to a variety of artistic expression.
