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Heaven on Earth: Painting and the Life to Come
T. J. Clark
In *Heaven on Earth*, the art historian T. J. Clark asks how painters have tried to picture the unpicturable - paradise, God's kingdom brought down to the world. Published by Thames & Hudson in 2018, it moves through a handful of intensely examined works: Giotto's chapel in Padua, Bruegel painting amid the horrors of religious war, Poussin's Sacraments, Veronese's shimmering allegories, and, at the close, Picasso's 1958 *Fall of Icarus* for UNESCO. Clark, one of the most searching writers on art alive, is less interested in iconography than in what these pictures actually do to a viewer standing before them. His prose is dense, unhurried, and argumentative in the best way. For readers who want art history as sustained looking rather than survey, this is a rich, demanding book.
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The author
T. J. Clark is a British art historian, professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, and a founding figure of the socially engaged "new art history." His earlier books - The Painting of Modern Life and Farewell to an Idea - reshaped how modern art is discussed, and he writes regularly for the London Review of Books.
The book
Heaven on Earth gathers meditations on paintings that imagine the life to come, from Giotto and Bruegel through Poussin and Veronese to Picasso's Fall of Icarus. Clark's method is slow, close attention: he stands before each work and asks what it promises, withholds, or fears about a world made whole.
How it reads
Reviewers admired its ambition while noting its difficulty; this is criticism that rewards rereading rather than skimming. The reproductions are generous, but the argument, not the survey, is the point.
For more context
Read it beside Clark's The Sight of Death, a diary of looking at two Poussins, for his method at its purest.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- T. J. Clark
- Publisher
- Thames & Hudson
- Place of publication
- New York; London
- Year
- 2018
- Edition
- First edition
- ISBN
- 978-0-500-02138-5
- Format
- Hardcover
- Shelf
- Art
- Location
- Maine