Saving Leonardo by Nancy Pearcey
In a fascinating overiew of art history Pearcey shows how only biblical Christianity can adequtely reconcile the world of the ideal with the world of the real and everyday. Beginning with the Greeks there has been a Dualism is Western thought which divides the spiritual and the secular. Greek sculptures are not an attempt to depict real people, they the are based
on aesthetically perfect proportions which simply do not exist in the real world. Beginning with Augustine this dualism crept into Christian art. Medieval and Byzantine art is also not intended to portray real people, but rather spiritualized religious subjects. The reformation for the first time insisted that real people in their everyday lives could glorify God and there was a movement towards realism in art. This trend was shortly followed by the Enlightenment which pitted reason and science against religion. The result in art was a bifurcation between those who attempted to turn art into a scientific and objective exercise, where they focused on merely reproducing colors and forms without imposing any interpretation, and the romantic trend in art which attempted to impose a subjective spiritual meaning on its subjects which were not connected to any objective spiritual reality.
This is the second book by Nancy Pearcey which I have read on the subject of the effects of dualistic thinking on everyday life. This book is definitely an intellectual challenge for me and will probably need to be re-read before I can really digest the ideas. Nevertheless I find her writing extremely helpful because it so clearly connects our day-to-day life with a biblical worldview.
