Heaven on Earth Paperback by T.J. Clark

Product Details

• Publisher: Thames and Hudson (2020-11-24)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 288 pages
• ISBN-13: 9780500021385
• Item Weight: 601.02 grams
• Dimensions: 22.61 x 15.04 x 2.29 cm

Preeminent art historian T. J. Clark explores how painters since the Middle Ages have portrayed the divine on earth. 

In this latest work, respected art historian T. J. Clark sets out to investigate the different ways painting has depicted the dream of God’s kingdom come: heaven descended to earth. He goes back to the late Middle Ages and Renaissance—to Giotto in Padua, Bruegel facing the horrors of religious war, Poussin painting the Sacraments, and Veronese unfolding the human comedy, in particular his inscrutable Allegory of Love. Was it ultimately to painting’s advantage that in an age of orthodoxy and enforced censorship (threats of hellfire, burnings at the stake) artists found ways reflect on the powers and limitations of religion without putting their thoughts into words? In conclusion Clark brings us into the Nuclear Age with Picasso’s Fall of Icarus, made for UNESCO in 1958, which already seems to signal, or even prescribe, an age when all futures are dead. 

About the Author

T. J. Clark is professor emeritus of the history of art at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of the seminal The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers and Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism. He writes art criticism regularly for the London Review of Books. He is also the author of Heaven on Earth: Painting and the Life to Come, If These Apples Should Fall: Cézanne and the Present, and T. J. Clark on Bruegel, all published by Thames & Hudson.