They say “a picture paints a thousand words”—traditional art certainly does. But can a thousand words paint a picture of the lost language of art? American author and retired art curator Mary Elizabeth Podles hopes so.
Since 2012, she’s written “A Thousand Words,” a 1,000-word art column for Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity. Her recently published book, “A Thousand Words: Reflections on Art and Christianity,” features the first 62 articles of her column along with 13 new essays.
In each of the 62 articles, Ms. Podles explores an object of religious art in terms of “how an artist listens to the voice of Christ and conveys the spoken message to us, whether through a language of symbolism which we no longer understand, through references to older art or to contemporary events, or simply through the formal means available to him as an artist.”
Recovering Hidden Treasures
Traditional artworks are awash with messages that most of us can no longer understand. Like hieroglyphics, the rich language of visual art is hidden in plain sight, just waiting for experts, such as Ms. Podles, to excavate it.In the book, she acts as our art translator, guiding us 1,000 words at a time, in the largely lost language of art. We learn this language through icons, sculptures, architecture, paintings, and a variety of objects, including a throne, a fountain, and an astronomical clock.
Steeped in Tradition
Throughout the book, we learn how traditional artists worked—not in isolation, but within a long-held tradition of art. “No art exists in a vacuum,” she declares in her first essay, titled “The Ancient World 1st–4th Centuries.” “The cross-fertilization of eastern and western Christian art is a theme that will recur throughout the centuries to come,” she notes in her “Byzantium 5th–6th Centuries” essay.For example, in the introduction, in which Ms. Podles examines Rembrandt’s etching “Christ Preaching“ (”La Petite Tombe"), she wrote:
“So Rembrandt the etcher draws upon his knowledge of older art, his knowledge of the Bible, his observation of the expression of inner psychology in the human face, and perhaps his own personal struggles, to create this image of the Word and its power, and to make us hear it speak.”
We read later in the book how Michelangelo carved his David based on the elements of the Colossus of Constantine from ancient Rome. The master’s David, of course, influenced artists for centuries to come.
Readers may be familiar with some art motifs, such as the lily representing purity. But Ms. Podles points out subtle symbols, such as the Pantheon’s dome, which when inverted forms a circle, the centuries-old symbol of heaven.
Ms. Podles also discusses how, throughout the ages, there’s been unease with the concept of the pictorial image in religion, a topic still hotly debated today. For example, she notes in her essay “The Gospel Book of St. Augustine” that Pope St. Gregory (540–604) “famously defended the worthiness of religious art, asserting that pictures were effective in transmitting the faith to nonbelievers and in explaining Scripture to the unlettered.”
A Great Art Companion
A thousand words may sound a lot but it’s not, especially when, in these 1,000-word essays, Ms. Podles has had to give explanatory terms before getting anywhere near the meat of the article. Writers know well the idiom “an easy read is a hard write,” and Ms. Podles must have worked hard to keep the word count tight, without compromising each article’s readability. Her gift for writing succinct one-page summaries of often complex art historical periods in the art-era introductions whets the reader’s appetite for the thousand-word essays to come while offering neat standalone articles for anyone wanting to get the gist of an art era.Readers need to be aware that there’s a little repetition of content because the book is a collection of essays taken from a bimonthly column. For example, Ms. Podles wrote about “The Ghent Altarpiece” in three parts and needed to remind her Touchstone readers of some facts each time.
“A Thousand Words: Reflections on Art and Christianity” is a great guidebook and companion to Christian art and is as much about world history and humanity as it is about art history. World history lovers will delight in reading about the societal and cultural shifts that impacted visual art and its traditions. This is a book that will appeal to anyone who wants to see beyond the surface beauty of objects of religious art and understand more about the morals, virtues, and religious messages conveyed within them.
What makes this book special is that Ms. Podles’s essays seem to form part of her spiritual practice, with each artwork that she studies acting as a call to prayer, deepening her faith.
Just as an art conservator faithfully restores a work of art to its former beauty, Ms. Podles hopes to restore visual arts literacy—a thousand words at a time. When we become fluent in the language of traditional art, we can wholly see the art as the artist intended.
