A
ThousandWords

Reflections on Artand Christianity
by Mary Elizabeth Podles

St. James Press
Chicago, Illinois
2023

Copyright © 2023 The Fellowship of St. JamesAll rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in anyform or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, or any information
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Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
A Thousand Words: Reflections on Art and Christianity / by Mary Elizabeth Podles.
Chicago, Illinois : The Fellowship of St. James. 2023. Essays originally published in Touchstone
magazine.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 979-8-218-21383-1
1. Art. 2. Religion. 3. Christian literature. 4. Essays.
I. Podles, Mary Elizabeth II. A Thousand Words. III. Title: TouchstoneBook design by Jerry Janquart
Published in the United States by:
St. James Press—an imprint of The Fellowship of St. James
P. O. Box 410788
Chicago, Illinois 60641

		TABLE of CONTENTSxiii

FOREWORD

1INTRODUCTION

5The ANCIENT WORLD

Christ Preaching Rembrandt 1652

1st–4th Centuries
6

Ara Pacis Augustae 9 b.c.

9

The Pantheon a.d. 126

12

The Colossus of Constantine a.d. 312–315

15

BYZANTIUM

5th–6th Centuries
16

Hagia Sophia a.d. 537

19

Christ of Mt. Sinai a.d. 550

22Apse of St. Apollinaris a.d. 549

25

The Throne of Maximianus a.d. 547

29

The EARLY MIDDLE AGESa.d. 500–1000

30

The Gospel Book of St. Augustine c. a.d. 550–599

33

The Votive Crown of King Recceswinth c. a.d. 660

36

The Alfred Jewel c. a.d. 880

39

The Gospel Book of Otto III a.d. 1000

42

The Beekeepers c. a.d. 1000

45

The HIGH MIDDLE AGES
12th–13th Centuries

46

The Chalice of Abbot Suger 1144

49

Portico de la Gloria Master Mateo 1211

53

BYZANTIUM REDUX
13th–15th Centuries

54

Madonna and Child on a Curved Throne c. 1250

57

Anastasis 1315

60

The Transfiguration Theophanes the Greek c. 1375

63

The Trinity Andrei Rublev c. 1400

66

The Nativity Andrei Rublev c. 140569

BETWEEN GOTHIC & RENAISSANCE
15th–16th Centuries

70

The Madonna in a Church Jan van Eyck 1438–40

73

The Ghent Altarpiece I Hubert & Jan van Eyck 1432

76

The Ghent Altarpiece II Hubert & Jan van Eyck 1432

79

The Ghent Altarpiece III Hubert & Jan van Eyck 1432

82

The Portinari Altarpiece Hugo van der Goes 1476

85

Vision of the Seven Candlesticks Albrecht Dürer 1498

88

Noli Me Tangere Albrecht Dürer 1511

91

The EARLY RENAISSANCE in ITALY
15th Century

92

The Baptism of Christ Piero della Francesca 1439

95

The RENAISSANCE in ITALY
16th Century

96

Vitruvian Man Leonardo da Vinci c. 1490

Madonna and Child with Saint Anne		Leonardo da Vinci c. 1510
99

102

Alba Madonna Raphael 1508

105

La Disputa Raphael 1509

108

The School of Athens Raphael 1510

112

The Sistine Madonna Raphael 1512

115

The Risen Christ Michelangelo 1521

118

Pesaro Madonna Titian 1518

The Submersion of Pharaoh’s Army in the Red Sea		
Titian c. 1520
121

124

Ecce Homo Titian 1543

127

The LATER RENAISSANCE
16th Century

128

The Annunciation Federico Barocci c. 1585

131

The Feast in the House of Levi Veronese 1573

135

The Burial of the Count of Orgaz El Greco 1586–88

138

St. Joseph and the Child Jesus El Greco 1597

141

The AGE of the BAROQUE
17th Century

142

Equation Clock Jost Bürgi & Hans Jacob Emck 1591

The Archdukes Albert and Isabella Visiting		 the Collection of Pierre Roose		
Hieronymus Francken II & Jan Brueghel the Elder 1621–23
145

Fontana della Barcaccia		
Pietro & Gianlorenzo Bernini 1627
148
151

The Holy Family on the Steps Nicolas Poussin 1648

154

The Marriage of Tobias and Sarah Carlo Dolci 1649

157

The GOLDEN AGE of DUTCH PAINTING
17th Century

158

The Denial of Peter Rembrandt 1659

161

Self-Portrait as the Apostle Paul Rembrandt 1661

A Woman Holding a Balance		
Johannes Vermeer 1664
164

As the Old Sing, So Pipe the Young		
Jan Steen 1668–70
167

Still Life with Flowers in a Glass Vase		Rachel Ruysch 1716
170

173

The MODERN AGE
18th–20th Centuries

174
The Assumption		
Cosmas Damian Asam & Egid Quirin Asam 1716–21
177

John the Baptist Anton Raphael Mengs 1777

180

The Nativity Benjamin West 1792

183

Crucifix José Aragón 1820–30

186

Falls of the Kaaterskill Thomas Cole 1826

189

Annunciation Henry Ossawa Tanner 1896

192

Flight into Egypt Henry Ossawa Tanner 1923

195

Chapel of the Rosary I Henri Matisse 1946–51

198Chapel of the Rosary II Henri Matisse 1946–51

201

OUTSIDE the BOUNDARIES

202

Kintsugi Bowl

205

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

207

CREDITSFOREWORD

A

course in anthropology first set my feet on the path that ended inthis book. As an art major, I had learned to look at the history of art
as a self- evolving phenomenon following formal stylistic rules andpatterns, that stood (or fell) on its independent aesthetic merits.
Meaning was a side issue. Only when I began to think like an anthropologist did I understand that objects of religious art were artifacts embedded
in a culture of instruction, prayer, and, above all, the liturgy. It also came to me,
like an unexpected thump between the shoulder blades, that art should be a partof my prayer life as well. So began my long journey torediscover the lost language of art and to integrate it
back into religion and into life.
It was not an easy process. In the academic world,religion was viewed as an abstract and largely incomprehensible concept, and irrelevant anyway. Practicing
Christians, on the other hand, knew next to nothing
about art and were content with a very low common
denominator. So I had art friends and Christian friends
but precious few Christian art friends. And so cameabout the column A Thousand Words: take a single workof art and, within the constraints of a thousand words,
set it in its context and explain those things about itthat you might not know if you had not been studying
art history for the past fifty years. Originally published bimonthly in Touchstone: A
Journal of Mere Christianity, these short, introductory essays attempt to set these works,
like pebbles in a moving stream, in the larger picture of the history of art. My hopeis that by decoding for you the artists’ original intentions and their formal meansof achieving them through line, color, light, space, and composition, I will give you,dear reader, the analytical tools that will render me obsolete.
People ask me how I choose the pictures for the column. Usually they come outof my current reading or research, although occasionally, in the pinch of a deadline,
I fall back on a stash of graduate school papers, not publishable in themselves butcontaining useful insights. Sometimes readers ask me to tackle some of their bestloved works. Some are my old familiars. Some are works I struggle to understand.
As the idea of the book began to come together, I scrambled to fill the gaps in myweaker areas of expertise. And if I have concentrated extra heavily in certain areas,
well, we all have our favorites.

xiii

INTRODUCTION

Christ Preaching
Rembrandt

1652

I

n seventeenth-century Holland, many Protestant preachers were regarded as
popular celebrities, and their parishioners and admirers hung their portraits
on their walls. In response to popular demand, in 1641, the artist Rembrandt
van Rijn published a portrait etching of the Mennonite preacher Cornelis
Anslo (Figure 1). Seeing it, the poet Joost van den Vondel (known as “theDutch Milton”) responded with the epigram Ay, Rembrandt, mal Cornelis stem:
Ay, Rembrandt, paint Cornelis’s voice.
The visible part is the least of him.
The invisible, one knows only through the ears.
Who desires to see Anslo, must hear him.
Without hearing his preaching, we miss the essence of the man. Rembrandt in turn
painted a portrait of Anslo and his wife (Figure 2), in which the silent canvas answers
Vondel’s challenge to convey the impact of Anslo’s voice, to make the image speak.
“To make the image speak.” In a later
etching, Christ Preaching (page 3), Rembrandt
again struggles to make a voice and its effects
visible, this time the voice of Jesus. In the etching, Christ stands at the center, his hands upraised and his lips parted and his head inclined
to one side, a clear reference to the pose of
Christ in Raphael’s Disputa, the Disputation ofthe Sacrament, in the Vatican Palace in Rome.
(See page 105. Rembrandt would have known
it from prints himself.) There, Christ holds up
his wounded hands as the ultimate explication of the sacrament; here, Rembrandt has
transformed the gesture into one of speaking.
Christ, then, is the ultimate Word incarnate.
Christ speaks, and all around him
people listen. With only a few sketchy lines,Rembrandt lets us know just how each person
is listening. Look at their faces one by one.
Some, with their eyes cast into shadow, listen
1with hardened hearts, waiting to trip him up;

1

A Thousand Words

2

another, his face full in the light but his expression impassive, seems, like Nicodemus,to think, “Does our law judge a man without giving him a hearing?” Another tilts hishead and raises his hand to his face as if beginning to be swayed; others lean forward
and listen intently; still others are rapt.
All the lines of the composition focus our own attention on Jesus. The wedgeof figures on the left makes a line that directs our gaze inward to the central figureof Jesus, while on the right, the crowd spirals
upward and around to where Jesus stands in ahalo of light. Everyone’s eyes, ours included, areon Jesus.
Everyone’s but one. A small boy directly below Christ’s feet has set aside his toys and turned
away; it is at him that Jesus is looking and to him
he speaks. The little boy is engrossed in drawing
in the dust. He is an artist. Not only an artist,but, perhaps, the artist, Rembrandt.
Rembrandt, whose face we know well fromhis dozens of self-portraits, included himself
specifically in the painting Christ on the Sea ofGalilee (now, sadly, lost to thieves in a heist fromthe Gardner Museum). The twelve apostles, invarying states of distress, man the boat as Christ
sleeps exhausted in the stern. One bails; others
struggle with tiller and sails or shake Christ awake; one throws up over the side. And
clinging helplessly to the rigging, a fourteenth figure, with the face of Rembrandt,
stares outward at us in desperation.
Why does an artist include himself within a biblical scene, particularly onein which Christ is present? It is a tradition of long standing: perhaps Rembrandt
self-consciously wished toplace himself in the company of the medieval andRenaissance masters.
Or perhaps it reflects
some aspect of his personal
life. In the years before
Rembrandt etched Christ
Preaching, his wife had
died and he had become
embroiled with the widow
hired as his son’s nanny.
She sued him for breachof promise, and in the end
he had her detained in thehouse of correction. In themeantime, he had enteredinto a common-law (andvery happy) marriage with2Rembrandt’s Christ Preaching

Hendrickje Stoffels, a girl originally hired as a maid in his household. The provisionsof his first wife’s will precluded him from remarrying without incurring considerable financial loss, and Rembrandt was, to say the least, not a good money manager.
Hendrickje was called up before church elders and reproached for her irregular
status. Rembrandt, though under strong Mennonite influence (witness the portraitsof Anslo), was officially unchurched and escaped public sanction.
That he was unchurched by no means implies that he was an irreligious man.
Few artists before or since have studied Scripture so closely, or to such effect as
Rembrandt. Perhaps in Christ Preaching the artist gives us a glimpse of his innermind: he, Rembrandt the little boy, has turned his back on Christ, who calls to him
and looks upon him tenderly. But the boy, unheeding, is absorbed in his art. SoRembrandt the etcher draws upon his knowledge of older art, his knowledge of theBible, his observation of the expression of inner psychology in the human face, andperhaps his own personal struggles, to create this image of the Word and its power,
and to make us hear it speak.
“To make the image speak.” In this book, it will be my purpose to examine certain
individual works of art, to try to see how an artist listens to the voice of Christ andconveys the spoken message to us, whether through a language of symbolism which
we no longer understand, through references to older art or to contemporary events,
or simply through the formal means available to him as an artist. I hope that thenthese silent images may again find their voice.

3