Seeing Salvation: Images of Christ in Art

Neil MacGregor with Erika Langmuir

ISBN 10: 0563551119 / ISBN 13: 9780563551119

Published by London: BBC Worldwide Ltd., 2000

About this Item

Condition Notes: Dust wrapper very slightly rubbed at the edges. Text complete, clean and tight overall but the last few leaves have a faint wave to the top corners.; First edition (first printing). Hardback. Dust wrapper over black boards with gilt titles to the spine; Measures 10" x 7¾" (1.2 kg); pp 240; Bibliography; Illustrated by way of: Black & White Photographs; Colour Photographs; || The book is on the shelf, ready to be appropriately packed, and posted from the pastoral paradise of Peasedown St. John, Bath, by a real bookseller in a real book shop - with my personal guarantee and beady eye on the Consumer Contracts Regulations. REMEMBER! Buying my copy means the book shop Jack Russells get their supper! My Book #181907 ||.

Seller Inventory # 181907

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Seeing Salvation: Images of Christ in Art
• Publisher: London: BBC Worldwide Ltd.
• Publication Date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0563551119
• ISBN 13: 9780563551119
• Binding: Hardback in Dust Wrapper.
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
• Seller catalogs:
  • Art & Design

About this title

Synopsis

In this text, Neil MacGregor engages with images of Christ wherever they may be found throughout the world. Through them he follows not only the life of Christ, but also the development of Christian culture since His birth.

Review

Were you, like thousands of others, outraged by Mark Wallinger's vulnerably life-sized Millennium sculpture Ecce Homo which stood in London's Trafalgar Square because it didn't "look like Jesus"? In fact no one knows what Jesus looked like because there was no portraiture in the Jewish tradition. But images of Jesus in art galleries offer centuries of interpretations. Each artist--from late Roman, to Michelangelo, Murillo, Stanley Spencer and the rest across two millennia of Christian history--meditates in, and mediates for, his own times. "The Word made paint" is how Neil MacGregor, Director of The National Gallery, and Erika Langmuir, Open University Professor of Art History, describe it.

Lavishly illustrated, Seeing Salvation was written in connection with a National Gallery Exhibition of the same name (26 February--7 May 2000), a nationwide lecture programme and four BBC TV programmes, presented by Neil MacGregor during April 2000. Yet it stands on its own and requires no knowledge of any of those.

The book is unpretentious and never patronises. It unravels the Christian background, scripture and belief with unobtrusive elegance as it goes along. You don't have to be a believer to respond either. Rembrandt's exquisite Nunc Dimittis, for example, shows old Simeon lovingly holding the infant Christ. He and the prophetess Anna could be any overjoyed grandparents at the end of their lives. The baby is their promise for the future and the sense is universal.

It's wryly witty too. "The learned ingenious devout Rubens", for example, "made a virtue of necessity" when commissioned to produce an altarpiece for Antwerp Cathedral. The sponsors, The Guild of Arquebusiers, wanted their patron saint, St Christopher, featured--but that smacked too dangerously of legend for the Council of Trent. Result: the magnificent Deposition of Christ in which the body is being tenderly and collaboratively lowered from the cross. "Christopher" means "bearer of Christ". --Susan Elkin