What sacred images should surround the faithful at worship, and which images should be made available for instruction, meditation, and prayer? This historical study is driven by questions of genuine catechetical, doctrinal, and liturgical urgency.
In this volume, Aidan Nichols examines the relationship between Christianity and the visual arts, focusing in particular on the development of spiritual art in Europe during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Building on his wider body of work on the history of Christian art, Nichols brings together theology, aesthetics, and history to address the crisis and renewal of sacred art in the modern age.
He traces how, in Russia, the great tradition of classical iconography from the medieval period was paradoxically preserved through persecution and later rediscovered. At the same time, artists in Western Europe began to reassess the so-called primitive masters of medieval Italy, Flanders, and Byzantium. In Britain, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood initiated a profound rethinking of art and aesthetics that challenged prevailing academic norms and reawakened interest in spiritual form and symbolism.
By placing these parallel developments side by side, Nichols offers fresh insight into the spiritual art of the period and the theological principles that underlie it. More importantly, he invites readers to reconsider the role of sacred art in divine revelation itself, to discern what enduring riches this tradition contains, and to reflect on what lessons it offers for the renewal of sacred art in the present day.
This book will be of interest to theologians, art historians, clergy, and all those concerned with the visual culture of Christian worship.
About the Author
Aidan Nichols, O.P., is a Dominican friar of Blackfriars, Cambridge, and one of the most respected Catholic theologians writing in English today. His many works span theology, philosophy, liturgy, and the arts.
His publications include Catholic Thought Since the Enlightenment, Lessons from a Rose-Garden: Reviving the Doctrinal Rosary, and Year of the Lord’s Favour, a four-volume homiliary for the Roman Liturgy.
