In our technology-infatuated era, we’ve become accustomed to the idea that whatever is smaller and faster must surely be better.
The slim, omnipotent iPhone is obviously superior to the primitive rotary dial mechanisms that people once used. The whisper-thin laptop looks like an almost comical repudiation of the great beeping, flashing, wall-size computers of the early jet age.
These comparisons do not flatter the old stuff. Even books seem increasingly quaint, and imperiled. What, after all, can a book do for you that a computer or smart phone can’t instantly outdo?
This Easter Sunday I am happy to say that I have an answer, one that perfectly suits the day’s deeper meanings. It’s a monumental book called “Ars Sacra,” first published in late 2010, that weighs almost 22 pounds. Over its 800 pages, this miraculous achievement chronicles the art and architecture of Christianity from the gorgeous mosaics of antiquity all the way through to the computer-designed abstract stained glass cathedral windows of today.
It’s the biggest book I’ve ever held — certainly the biggest I’ve ever seen outside a museum or library (I had to wrestle a bit just to get it into the house). Unlike most glossy art books, “Ars Sacra” is less of a coffee table book than an actual coffee table. You could serve lunch on the thing. Yet you wouldn’t want to, for though the golden, seemingly bejeweled cover would make a lovely tablecloth, what’s inside is more beautiful still.
Here are delicate gilded paintings from 9th century Byzantine manuscripts, precious chalices from medieval Ireland, stave churches from 11th century Norway and painted statuary from the Romanesque period. In stunning photographs, we see the remarkably detailed figure of John the Baptist from a niche high on the Cathedral at Reims and Duccio’s exquisite chronicle of Christ’s Passion from the Cathedral of Siena.
And on it goes, each page more engrossing than the one before: grotesque gothic representations of demons torturing the damned, joyous cherubim dancing across a Renaissance frieze and Masaccio’s achingly sad painting of Adam and Eve in disgrace, from the Brancacci chapel in Florence. You could get lost in the Renaissance era alone — and I plan to — such is the beauty and abundance of that artistic flowering as it appears in these pages.
Not everything is here, mind you – no mortal could print, let alone lift, the book containing all Christian art — and the English translation (from the German) is not always felicitous, but there are treasures almost beyond measure, in stunning photographic detail.
The marvelous solidity of a book like “Ars Sacra” makes technology seem frail and even feeble. Such a compendium is like a physical rebuttal to the Kindle and the Nook. It’s an aesthetic and intellectual rebuke of the Twitterized sensibility that so values breeziness and disposability.
In fact, in subject and physicality, it’s a countercultural book, about the Eternal, for the ages. Once today’s chocolate and jellybean frenzy is over and we’ve finished our feast, I plan to disappear into its pages for the rest of the day. Technology can wait until tomorrow. Happy Easter!
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
