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Zurbaran: Celebrating the Glory of God |
| Section: THE ARTS / ART |
| Author: Herb Greer |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 1/1/1988 |
| Size: 2,008 Words, 11,964 Characters |
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Real piety, like happiness, is difficult to achieve, and often seems a mere illusion. That is one reason why it is so closely connected with the arts, and why the sacred is so hard to capture and portray convincingly. The works of old masters that aim at its portrayal have special handicaps in today's public arena, over and beyond the historical dilution and splintering of religious sentiment. The Western world is afflicted by a virulent strain of mystagogic vulgarity, which on the one hand cheapens the figure of Christ into a show-biz superstar and on the other replaces the calm center of genuine faith with a noisy and commercially organized fanaticism. Piety is dragged further into disrepute by certain Catholics and Protestants, clerical and lay, who exploit a neo-Pelagian heresy to dabble in the simplistic politics of so-called "liberation."
The Weave of Faith
One consequence of all this is that the content of much religious art is obscured or weakened, especially art from earlier times, when the weave of faith and non-Sabbath life was much tighter than it is now. This is not to say that these works have become totally meaningless or insipid. If most of them are ...
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...enter of genuine faith, and certainly nourished the miraculous talent and skill of Francisco de Zurbaran. Our respect and reverence, and perhaps even our curiosity, toward such things may be our own confirmation of the divine fire that lies concealed in all of us, to be revealed by the greatest artists, and which neither vulgarity, nor greed, nor political stupidity can ever quite extinguish.
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Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
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The World & I Online is a
comprehensive academic resource that encompasses a broad range of
articles by scholars and experts in the areas of Global Studies,
Liberal Arts, Fine & Applied Arts, General Science, and Spanish.
Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
includes the complete contents since 1986 and continues to publish
a new issue online each month. |
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