Heaven on Earth: Painting and the Life to Come

Preeminent art historian T.J. Clark explores how painters since the Middle Ages have portrayed the divine on earth. 

In this latest work, respected art historian T. J. Clark sets out to investigate the different ways painting has depicted the dream of God’s kingdom come: heaven descended to earth. He goes back to the late Middle Ages and Renaissance―to Giotto in Padua, Bruegel facing the horrors of religious war, Poussin painting the Sacraments, and Veronese unfolding the human comedy, in particular his inscrutable Allegory of Love. Was it ultimately to painting’s advantage that in an age of orthodoxy and enforced censorship (threats of hellfire, burnings at the stake) artists found ways reflect on the powers and limitations of religion without putting their thoughts into words? In conclusion Clark brings us into the Nuclear Age with Picasso’s Fall of Icarus, made for UNESCO in 1958, which already seems to signal, or even prescribe, an age when all futures are dead.  c. 94 color illustrations

• Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today
• Chalk: The Art and Erasure of Cy Twombly
• Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future
• The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht
• Bruegel: The Master
• Agents of Faith: Votive Objects in Time and Place
• Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art
• Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor
• Restoration: The Fall of Napoleon in the Course of European Art, 1812-1820 (The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts)
• Anniversaries (Boxed Set): From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl (New York Review Books Classics)