Christian Imagery Research Articles

Poems of a Lifetime of Passion and Grumpiness

Poems of a Lifetime of Passion and Grumpiness

Robert Altman: in the American grain

'Iconoclast' and 'maverick' are the epithets perhaps most commonly attached to Robert Altman, a director who consistently pushed against the boundaries of genre. Throughout his career Altman tested the limits of what can and should be done in film, refashioning film noir in The Long Goodbye, the western in McCabe & Mrs Miller, psychological drama in Images, science fiction in Quintet and romantic comedy in A Perfect Couple. In this book, Frank Caso examines the development of Altman's artistic method from his earliest days in industrial filmmaking to his work in television and feature films.Altman's work is easily recognizable to audiences, but what exactly are the distinctive components of a signature Altman film? Caso identifies and analyses more than twenty stylistic features in Altman's body of work, tracing some - such as his use of overlapping dialogue and engagement with Christian imagery - to the very beginning of his career. He also examines Altman's unsettling mix of offbeat comedy with violence, murder, and death; these elements not only contributed to the naturalism and ironic outlook of his work but also provided a mythic, otherworldly undertone to many of his films. This, combined with masterful technique, formed the 'Altmanesque' style that unites films from M*A*S*H to The Player to Gosford Park. Robert Altman: In the American Grain maps the innovations that made Altman a master filmmaker, giving an in-depth yet expansive perspective on the work of this distinctive and ground-breaking American auteur.

Молитва в камне: символы косматеско в базилике Санта-Мария-Маджоре в Риме

All the architectural elements of a medieval temple, like itself, are common symbolic space where all details represent the idea of God and face either the faithful or to the Creator himself. And in this system are not the masters of mosaic floors Cosmati alien element - in fact, it is nothing like prayer, created in stone, but the prayer of living presented in the complex language of mosaic figures of Christian imagery. In the article on the example of the Roman basilica of Santa-Maria-Maggiore are considered rich semiotic cosmatesque opportunity to express ideas and concepts of his age. Author restores the value style characters, based on the texts of the era and the reconstruction of views of the Middle Ages made by historians of art and religion.

Imaginarium religijne w reklamie komercyjnej i społecznej na przykładzie wykorzystania wizerunków Ostatniej Wieczerzy oraz krzyża

Contemporary advertising, both commercial and social, appeals increasingly to religious symbolism as a rhetorical argument. Communicative as well as persuasive effectiveness of advertising depends indeed on the appropriate denotation and connotation of the iconography used in visual advertisements. Religious, and particularly Christian, symbolism is generally clear to the addressees in our culture. This paper aims to answer the question of the consequences which the cultural reinterpretation of Christian imagery in visual advertising brings. The author argues that this process results in a “semantic shift” involving the expansion of the original meanings. On the one hand, Christian iconography loses some of its genetic sacredness; on the other hand, it sacralizes the new reality which is being advertised. The author proves his thesis by means of pointing to the reinterpretation of two established Christian images, i.e. the Last Supper and the Cross.

The Caucasianization of Jesus: Hollywood Transforming Christianity into a Racially Hierarchical Discourse

This essay explores the racial representation of Jesus Christ by Hollywood and the resulting ideological implications. Because historical documentation lacks depictions of Christ's phenotype, filmmakers can freely conceptualize his physical appearance. Hollywood blockbusters, however, have predominantly depicted Jesus as a white man, his most popular American conception. Hollywood consequently contributes to an active transformation process—the Caucasianization of Christ—which perpetuates the dominant hierarchical racial ideology. Redefining Jesus as “white” suggests that Caucasians are superior, a message Hollywood then distributes worldwide. Furthermore, Hollywood's reinforcement of racial hierarchy through Christian imagery undermines Christianity's communicative capacity. As Hollywood's global influence continuously expands, filmmakers must consider the implications of this practice, as well as alternative depictions of Christ.

Spiritualism in Raymond Carver’s Work

Raymond Carver’s work provides the opportunity for a spiritual reading. The article that offers the greatest insight into spirituality is William Stull’s “Beyond Hopelessville: Another Side of Raymond Carver.” In it we can notice the darkness which is dominant in Carver’s early works with the optimism that is an essential part of Carver’s work “Cathedral”. A careful reading of “A Small Good Thing” and “The Bath” can give the idea that they are based on the allegory of spiritual rebirth which can be interpreted as a “symbol of Resurrection”. Despite Stull’s insisting in Carver’s stories allusions based on the Bible, it cannot be proved that the writer has made use of Christian imagery. Therefore, it can be concluded that spirituality in Carver’s work is one of the most confusing topics so far in the literary world because on one hand literary critics find a lot of biblical elements and on the other hand Carver himself refuses to be analyzed as a Christian writer.

Christianity and Cormac McCarthy's The Road

Cormac McCarthy's The Road takes place not before or during but after the end. The novel follows a man and his son as they seek to survive in what remains of the world after some unspecified cataclysmic event. There is almost nothing left: no society, no food, no animals, no hope. Many readers will feel that the question the novel poses is why anyone would wish to continue living under such circumstances. But although that question might be more urgent post-apocalypse, it is in fact one that can always be asked: what, if anything, makes human life valuable and worthwhile? The novel provides answers to these questions, but these answers are contradictory. The reader is left with a choice between powerful arguments for both faith and despair. In The Road, hope is associated with Christianity and hopelessness with an atheistic understanding of the world. Nonetheless, the novel makes it clear that faith is no easy option. This article will begin by discussing the importance of Christian imagery in the novel, focusing on the key symbolic dimensions of fire and darkness, before going on to show how both Christian and atheistic readings are not only made possible, but actively put forward by the text. It will be argued that the novel presents a powerful challenge to both Christian and atheistic views of the world, without ever actually rejecting either.

Object and Apparition: Envisioning the Christine Divine in the Colonial Andes. By Maya Stanfield-Mazzi. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013. xv + 241 pp. $50.00 cloth.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Object and Apparition: Envisioning the Christine Divine in the Colonial Andes . By Maya Stanfield-Mazzi . Tucson : University of Arizona Press , 2013. xv + 241 pp. $50.00 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesIn her monograph regarding the colonial Andean transition from three-dimensional statues of Christ and the Virgin Mary to two-dimensional imagery, Maya Stanfield-Mazzi argues that Andean beliefs became interwoven with Christian religiosity starting in the sixteenth century. Based on the idea that all Andean deities were given a physical form, the author asserts that Christian divine imagery stepped into a vacuum created by the colonial evangelical destruction of mummies and huacas (Andean sacred figures). Catholic imagery, such as the Christ of the Earthquakes credited with stopping tremors, grew even in the former Inca capital of Cusco. As a result, Stanfield-Mazzi concludes, is nearly impossible to isolate any purely non-Christian Andean beliefs, just as it is difficult to find Christian practices not informed by the Andean (177).The strength of Stanfield-Mazzi's book lies in her meticulous approach to material transformation. She asserts that with Spanish colonization, a new, independent artistic tradition sprung up in the Andes under the imperative of visualizing the Christian religion (2). By analyzing images, bultos (statues), and miracle narratives Stanfield-Mazzi explains how Christian imagery became rooted in Andean realities. Painting and other visual imagery was useful to Andean parishioners who must have memorized prayers phonetically, but was based, as was the Virgin of Pomata, on Spanish sculpture of the late Renaissance (67) as well as the inspirations of regional Spanish-trained artists. Stanfield-Mazzi argues that less-accomplished Spanish or mestizo artists trained in the peninsular style (such as those active in mining city of Potosi) may have created the statue. In contrast, Francisco Tito Yupanqui, a descendant of Inca colonists around Lake Titicaca, created the Virgin of Copacabana statute and supposedly engaged in Christian religious instruction. Like other native men who became sculptors by the late sixteenth century, Tito Yupanqui was a central participant in transforming the Christian Andes. Illustrating the integration of European aesthetic into Andean religiosity, Stanfield-Mazzi explains how Andeans donated European textiles to the saint in exchange for miracle work in a process of re-sacralization of the landscape, deepening scholarly knowledge of the Andeans who participated in the evangelization of the Americas.Proving the popularity of Andean Catholicism, Stanfield-Mazzi points to the survival, even to the present, of cults to colonial statues such as Christ of the Earthquakes, and other regionally specific images. By the late sixteenth century, the statues were working local miracles such as bringing back the dead, lighting their own lamps, and changing their facial expressions (119). The relationship between the viewers and the deity drew on European ideas of loyalty and worship as well as Andean reciprocity, with the practice of miracle painting as a form of the devoted's gratitude. In painting, created as early as the 1670s in Cusco and into the eighteenth century in Bolivia and Ecuador, rather than looking up to a statue, these works usually show a beneficiary looking up at a vision of the statue (139). …

On Jacob Glatshteyn's Sacco and Vanzetti Poem

ABSTRACT Jacob Glatshteyn's poem about Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the celebrated Italian anarchists executed for murder on August 23, 1927, is both the greatest poem about the two men and among the least widely known; the goal of this article is to make the poem more broadly available for discussion. The means of arriving at that goal include a rigorously literal translation and a set of commentaries on particular lines of the poem, on its general themes and patterns, and on the relation between this poem and other poems on the subject. Among the themes explored are the poem's temporality, its portrait of the city, its dramatization of character, its shifting refrains, its Christian imagery, and its broad range of pity and curiosity.

Seeing the image of an Eritrean Hero

The paper focuses on the shifts in the iconic representation of war heroes of the Eritrean struggle for freedom, by studying key iconic photographs and their significance to the Eritrean national identity construction process. The article focuses on one of the most famous photographs in the country which has been related to the discourse that indebts peace and freedom of the country to the history of the nation's freedom fighters. The photograph analysed in this paper is that of Hamid Idris Awate, the man credited with starting the 30-year-long Eritrean armed struggle for independence from Ethiopian rule. This image is compared to another photograph taken at the end of the Thirty Years' War. The two images, which have a 30-year gap between them, exhibit a shift from the aspiration of individual heroes and figures towards a collective spirit of sacrifice and achievement in the development of the national Eritrean narrative. This study shows that Awate's photograph ascended to the state of a national icon owing to contextual connotations derived from its content. Early Orthodox Christian imagery is comparatively analysed as a possible factor for the potency of the compositional style in the photograph. Moreover, the essay relates the photograph to Italian pictorial representations of black native recruits and comparatively links it with the visual representation of Eritrean society by Italian colonizers.

Goths and God

Goth subculture is theologically interesting as a form of cultural expression which co-opts religious language and iconography to engage existential themes of darkness, suffering, and death. Goth’s use of Christian imagery is frequently blasphemous and provocative, but also articulates a commitment to core values of individuality, tolerance, and a reflective engagement with issues of suffering and pain which is life-enhancing rather than life-denying. Goth is also regarded by many participants and analysts as having a spiritual dimension expressed through its post-Christian co-opting of religious imagery. In this respect Goth subculture finds resonance with aspects of Christian tradition, as exemplified by Walter Brueggemann’s interpretation of the prophetic tradition, or Henri Nouwen’s concept of the Wounded Healer. Goth subculture thus offers intriguing prospects for theological engagement with a Christian tradition which finds itself increasingly in a subcultural position vis-à-vis the cultural mainstream.

The Camouflage of the Sacred in Hemingway’s Short Fiction

Ernest Hemingway's short fiction illustrates Mircea Eliade's notion that camouflage or even occultation of the sacred and of spiritual meanings in general characterizes all crepuscular eras {Autobiography 153). In short play (Today Is Friday) and four short stories (The Killers, A Clean Well-Lighted Place, Old Man at the Bridge, and Light of the World), light imagery, biblical allusions, and the figure of Christ, reveal hidden imaginary universe. This sacral dimension casts subterranean love that pulsates beneath the terse dialogue of Hemingway's characters.Hemingway grew up in Oak Park, Illinois, town with so many churches that it was known as Saint's Rest. His parents were devout Protestants who belonged to the Third Congregationalist Church. As an adolescent, Ernest rebelled against their moral strictures, ridiculing his mother's religious material as moron literature (McDaniel 21, 40). Later, as young adult, Hemingway converted to Catholicism. Although he distrusted sonorous pieties and theological abstractions, Hemingway acknowledged that he learned to write from the Bible (Maurois 49). The biblical influence was not confined to style, for Christian imagery permeates his fiction.3 Deep down, Hemingway remained Christian, such as in his reluctance to write on Sundays because it brought bad luck (Hotchner 149).Hemingway's fiction, like life, remains elusive and inchoate. We glimpse the inner life of the characters only obliquely. In an interview, Hemingway explained this fragmentary characterization: always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven eighths of it under water, for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg (qtd. in Plimpton 34). This fictional technique is distinct feature of modernism which Peter Faulkner describes as part of the historical process of disassociation from nineteenth century assumptions that posited a stable relationship in which the writer could assume community of attitudes, shared sense of reality (1).In the late nineteenth century, the literary sense that we are transcendentally connected to one another, which had reached its apotheosis in the novel, finally began to unravel. Matthew Arnold expresses consequent feeling of loss in the final verses of Dover Beach (1867):the world, which seemsTo lie before us like land of dreams,So various, so beautiful, so new,Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;And we are here as on darkling plainSwept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,Where ignorant armies clash by night. (517-18)This sense of violence and chaos pervades Hemingway's first collection of stories, In Our Time (1925; expanded edition 1930), which borrows its title from passage in the Book of Common Prayer. Give us peace in our time, O Lord (Maurois 43). In one vignette, the narrator repeats the name of Jesus amidst the shelling, holding it close like talisman:While the bombardment was knocking the trench to pieces at Fossalta, he lay very flat and sweated and prayed oh jesus christ get me out of here. Dear jesus please get me out. Christ please please please christ. If you'll only keep me from getting killed I'll do anything you say. I believe in you and I'll tell every one in the world that you are the only one that matters. Please please dear jesus. The shelling moved farther up the line. We went to work on the trench and in the morning the sun came up and the day was hot and muggy and cheerful and quiet. The next night back at Mestre he did not tell the girl he went upstairs with at the Villa Rossa about Jesus. And he never told anybody. (Complete Stories 109)4The narrator alternates between upper and lower case letters when he invokes the name of Jesus Christ as if mediating between intimacy and respect. …

‘The blood of martyrs is the seed of progress’. The role of martyrdom in socialist death culture in Belgium and the Netherlands, 1880–1940

The rhetoric and forms of representation of martyrdom in the death culture of international socialism is explored in relation to Belgium and the Netherlands, notably in Ghent and Amsterdam, 1880–1940. Press material reveals the way forms of commemoration combined Christian and socialist imagery to galvanise followers and offer them a frame of transcendence. The link between narratives of commemoration and social agitation in relation to strikes and other events illustrates the way claims of martyrdom had distinctive functions in generating revolutionary consciousness. The leaders and militants of the socialist movements in both countries made much of the blood split by national and foreign socialist martyrs and of the repression they had to deal with. The memory of certain martyrs was also used as a divisive force between different currents of socialism.

‘Deconstructing Dogma’: Transgressive religious iconography in South African art

In this article I present a brief theoretical overview of the history of religious imagery and iconoclasm as a background for the works that are displayed in the exhibition ‘Deconstructing Dogma’, held at the University of Johannesburg's Art Gallery from 6–28 May 2014. I explain the strength of feeling ascribed to images that are considered sacred, with the result that they comprise a perfect vehicle for parodic quotation in post-modern terms, leading to a disruption of complacent viewing. The long history of values, idealistic role models and didactic instruction inherent in Christian imagery is thus exposed in such a way as to encourage questioning of how those values may still be informing contemporary social behaviour. A close iconographic analysis of selected examples from the ‘Deconstructing Dogma’ exhibition illustrates the way the chosen artists respond to a broad range of contemporary social ills in South Africa, using art-historic Christian imagery directly or alluding to characters and stories from the Bible. Whatever form the work takes, whether direct parody of specific works or parodic reference to types, this self-reflexive mode of art-making engages both the past and the present in what is often a critical response to both. This article thus presents a rationale for the transgressive quotation and parody of Christian imagery in post-apartheid South African art that responds timeously to current social injustice.

Didron and the Hand Maidens of Iconography in Nineteenth Century Britain

This paper re-visits the seminal iconographic text, Iconographie Chretienne by Adolphe Napoleon Didron (1806-1867), the first part of which was published in France in 1843 but left unfinished at the time of his death in 1867. It was translated into English and completed by two British women between 1851 and 1886. The first part of the paper examines Didron’s iconographic aims and methods and how he applied them in the essays on Christian imagery that constitute the main body of his book. The second provides an account of the work of Ellen Millington and Margaret Stokes, in completing and translating Iconographie into English - the only language in which the full work has been available for more than a century - and its legacy in the iconographic studies of Louisa Twining and Eliza Gutch which were influenced by Didron’s work. The paper argues that Didron’s work and that of his translators and associates in the nineteenth century, anticipated the main assumptions and principles of modern iconography, but have been marginalised in the dominant historiography of iconography which asserts the twentieth century invention of the subject.

Exorcism, or the Road Not Taken

<i>Exorcism</i>, or the Road Not Taken

Diane Victor, Tracey Rose, and the Gender Politics of Christian Imagery

In this paper I propose that transgressive interpretations of Christian iconography provide a valuable strategy for contemporary women artists to engage with perceived social inequalities in post-apartheid South Africa. South Africa’s new constitution is one of the most progressive in the world, with legislation banning all forms of discrimination, including gender-based discrimination. Despite the constitutional guarantee of freedoms indicated in the excerpt above, however, there are ongoing injustices and inequalities, with both women (particularly rural women) and the gay community facing continuing violence, intolerance, and the threat of political and social suppression, due largely to patriarchal traditionalism and prejudice. In addition, continuous reports of domestic violence against women and children and the highest number of rapes reported for any country not currently engaged in armed conflict1 raise doubts about the implementation of the constitution and the effects of legislation impacting on lived experience. I would argue, therefore, that in South Africa today feminist strategies exposing patriarchal controls are still a necessary response to local conditions. The examples by Diane Victor and Tracey Rose,2 discussed in this paper, function as a catalyst for social change by exposing the inherent unequal power relations that have been promoted and normalized through centuries of Christian imagery. They approach Christian imagery using parody and satire to disturb complacent viewing, rather than for the purposes of indicating any devoutness on the part of their makers. Parody works through a system of quotation or repetition. It is a form of self reference that has become a popular aspect of postmodern artworks as the reuse of a work in another context automatically carries the nuances of that work from its original manifestation, while simultaneously imbuing it with new meaning in its borrowed form. Parody thus allows for conceptual richness in works of art through this layering, which Linda Hutcheon (1985:6) has defined succinctly as “repetition with critical distance, which marks difference rather than similarity” or “imitation characterized by ironic inversion.” The kind of parody that Hutcheon (1985:11) identifies as crucial in contemporary artworks is “an integrated structural modeling process of revising, replaying, inverting, and ‘trans-contextualizing’ previous works of art.” This does not rely on mere quotation or imitation but infers building up layered associative meanings that resonate with each other and with the original text through ironic “trans-contextualization” with each coded discourse. Hutcheon (ibid., p. 38–40) notes that parody implies intent on the part of the artist; it functions as a form of “authorized transgression” (ibid., p. 104) where the author/artist acknowledges the contribution of the original work and its meaning in the ultimate understanding of the parody, thus clearly differentiating parody from plagiarism. This is why it is also vitally important for the functioning of parody that the viewer has knowledge of the original. In fact, the success of parody is dependent on a culturally sophisticated viewer who is able to identify the textual references and understand the ironic inversions with which they are employed. Gender and South African Art

The intersection of Christianity and politics in South African art: A comparative analysis of selected images since 1960, with emphasis on the post-apartheid era

This article examines selected examples of art made in South Africa which employ Christian imagery for the purposes of engaging with political and social commentary. Works made during the apartheid era by Azaria Mbatha, Charles Nkosi and Paul Stopforth are discussed briefly and compared to the more critical approach found in post-apartheid works by Diane Victor, Conrad Botes and Wim Botha. Christian iconography is a useful communicative tool because it has permeated many cultures over centuries, and the meanings it carries are thus accessible to large numbers of people. Examples made during the apartheid regime in South Africa appear to adapt the Christian message to support a political agenda, while those made in the transitional phase (from the late 1980s) and after the dismantling of apartheid are more critical of both religious constructs and politics, and could be termed ‘transgressive’. Working in light of Foucault's idea of an ‘ontology of the present’ I investigate the ways in which religious iconography has been implicated in the regulation of society, by revealing how subversive appropriations of Christian imagery expose these controls and offer a critique of mechanisms which produce normative ‘truths’.

Close-Up Gallery: &lt;em&gt;Precious&lt;/em&gt;

Close-Up GalleryPrecious David C. Wall (bio) This issue of Black Camera has a special focus on Lee Daniels's 2009 award-winning Precious.1 The story of the film's production, development, distribution, and (largely) critical and popular success is by now well known. The Close-Up section acknowledges the significance of this film by engaging with the myriad complicated discourses that surround the movie. The essays and commentaries included reveal the multiplicity of readings available to the thoughtful critic as well as the contentious and provocative nature of the film itself. This complexity is further attested to by the artwork on the cover and accompanying this special section. Precious is a difficult film to watch. It has to be acknowledged that a significant part of its power as a work of cinema is in its stark and unrelenting rendering of trauma and abjection. Yet, at the same time, it is filled with moments of quiet joy and dignity. And it is, perhaps, in those moments of joy and dignity that a larger truth of Precious might be found. At the same time, there are very specific African American social, historical, and cultural contexts in which the film is situated. This is, at least in part, a cause of some significant debate surrounding the cultural labor of Precious. Is it an excoriating indictment of a society in which a black underclass is left to rot? Or is it merely one more predictable iteration of the pathology of the black family that panders to white liberal sensibilities? It is, of course, both and more. While implicitly acknowledging the historical and cinematic contexts of the film, Adele Stephenson's portrait of Claireece "Precious" Jones moves away from the more immediate and obvious images of deprivation and despair. The painting positions Precious not only in the milieu of contemporary black urban life but also in the traditions of Western art history, especially as that history relates to images of mother and child. Stephenson's immediate reference point is a painting by Raphael entitled Madonna and Child with Book (ca. 1502), but of course images of motherhood are found in the Western tradition going as far back as ancient Rome when pictures of mothers and children—known as caritas—functioned as visual embodiments of charity and kindness. Our own visual encoding of motherhood is [End Page 220] dominated by images of the Virgin Mary. Indeed, we might argue that all images of motherhood are in some way related to the powerful ubiquity of Christian imagery that for centuries has located Mary at the visual center of discourses of maternity, nurturing, kindness, and humanity. For Stephenson the relationship between Precious and her children became the central element in the film. "I watched the film a number of times before beginning the work. What struck me, what the thread was for me, was a single line of the relationship between Precious and her own children."2 The image of mother and child becomes, then, the central point for the collision of the multiple discourses in the film and the social tensions that are played out through the stultifying intimacy of the domestic arena. Though images of the Virgin and Christ child are ubiquitous, as a genre they offer an almost limitless set of versions, variations, and visions. Modern versions have abounded as a consequence of both the development of technologies of communication and reproduction and, perhaps ironically, the secularization of Western culture that has allowed the image to proliferate through countless utilities of commodification unimaginable prior to the twentieth century. Stephenson's own painting engages with these disparate iterations of the Virgin and Christ child while reaching back to some core elements that express peace, abundance, and, most importantly, hope. It is with this sense of hope that Stephenson has attempted to imbue the image of Precious. Notwithstanding the ruptured vision of motherhood presented by Precious's own mother, the portrait of Precious Jones is designed to encourage a nuanced reading of the character that articulates much more than yet another vision of victimhood. In speaking to the film's broader politics, Stephenson is, thus, making an effort to avoid equating blackness with the...

Les premiers films sur la shoah : les Juifs sous le signe de la Croix

Many films about what we would today call the Holocaust were made in the first five years after the war. However, many resorted to using Christian symbols to represent Jewish victims, and other films that attempted a greater candor were often suppressed or marginalized. This article is an attempt to explain the use of Christian imagery and the various political motivations behind it in the context of the emerging Cold War.