Abstract
As one of the first published fruits of King’s College London’s pioneering MA course in Christianity and the Arts, this slender, if somewhat over-priced, monograph, is to be welcomed both in itself, and especially by theologians and art historians. In practice, its reception may prove more problematic. One obstacle is Miller’s over-ambitious interdisciplinarity, ‘combining the subject areas of art history and theory, theology, biblical study, philosophy, aesthetics, physics, metaphysics, mathematics, geometry, optics, physiology, psychology and sociology in greater and lesser degrees’ (p. xi). It is, he confesses, ‘perhaps audacious to set out to take on such a broad area of study and at the same time hope to penetrate to a level that makes a contribution to extant work, but after a lifetime of preparation I am making the attempt’ (p. xi). The outcome, unsurprisingly, is very uneven. There is, for example, very little penetration, let alone critique, of ‘extant work’, but plenty of routine exposition (often overburdened by direct quotation) of already familiar sources – from Michael Baxendall to John Drury, Peter Humfrey to Martin Kemp, John Shearman to Leo Steinberg. Similarly, the artworks cited, although well-chosen and clearly illustrated, tend to be over-described yet under-analysed. As a result, it will be difficult for many readers – except for those few encountering Italian Renaissance painting de novo – to feel that Miller is presenting an original, evidence-based and coherent argument which takes them beyond familiar, extant, art-historical scholarship.
Instead he opts for a more static exposition. An introductory chapter uses the developing style, content and setting of the altarpiece as an indicator of the rebirth of naturalism and rationality within and beyond liturgical practice. Chapter 2, on perspective, usefully, if somewhat predictably, relates Renaissance theory and practice to religious subject-matter in Leonardo, Piero della Francesca, Masaccio and, less predictably, to Pozzo’s late seventeenth-century illusionistic ceiling for the Gesu in Rome. It rightly concludes, quoting directly from Kubovy’s often neglected discussion of The Psychology of Perspective and Renaissance Art (1986) that ‘Perspective often enabled the Renaissance artist to cast the deeply religious contents of his art in a form that could produce in the viewer spiritual effects which could not have been achieved by any other formal means’ (p. 34). Chapter 3, on proportion, provides a clearly written and accessible, if sometimes mathematically taxing, account of how the so-called golden ratios and dynamic root-rectangles ‘helped artists to map out an aesthetic scheme in which the theological content of their work could take shape and be enacted’ (p. 46). Leonardo, Piero della Francesca and Michaelangelo are prime examples here.
The remaining chapters embody three broader, yet not unrelated, interpretations of devotional art in Renaissance Italy and, by implication, North of the Alps and in Spain as well. One focuses on the significance of ‘witness’ as a theme in such art, with special reference to the differing roles of John the Baptist in New Testament narrative, not least in attesting to the physical reality and sexuality of Christ, and, perhaps pre-eminently, at the crucifixion, where, as Miller reminds us, it is in Grunewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece (a reproduction of which hung above his desk) that Karl Barth (so antipathetic to images of God and the Trinity) ‘was struck by the figure of Saint John pointing away from himself to the crucified Christ’ (p. 66). Two final chapters are arguably the most challenging and reflective of the book. The first, drawing heavily upon such theologically alert art historians as Patricia Rubin, John Shearman and Marcia Hall, shows convincingly how, throughout the Renaissance, devotional art, both public and private, could convert the relatively mundane theological notion of ‘threshold’ into something personally transformative. As Shearman puts it, these are ‘fully transitive’ works of art whose subject is completed ‘only beyond itself in the spectator’s space, or even completed by and in the spectator himself’ (p. 78). The resultant sense of ‘presence’ and of what David Jasper, quoted here, has called ‘the intermediary space between presence and absence’(p.93) are identified in a brief concluding chapter, although how much resonance either now carries in Europe’s own post-Renaissance, and post-Christian, culture remains an open question.