I am very interested in the Bible and art history and this book does not disappoint. I did find it a little long but overall the author gets the point across. I love the inclusions of all of the art work and how the author explains theories around how a lot of art was created based on human belief in the Bible and that the art works were created by both masters of the craft and those just creating art for God. Great good, highly recommended.

I wish I had liked this book better. It's on a subject of great interest to me -- religion, beauty and the role they pray in art. I even agree with his thesis and analysis.

But I am only lukewarm at best about it because of its many flaws. First it's supposed to be a book about art, but pictures of the works he discusses are, mostly, lacking. A painter might have 5-10 works discussed in the text but only 1-3 are [pictured. While this isn't a problem if you are familiar with the artist and his works, but what if you are not? The text isn't going to help you. In addition often the reproductions were too small for details that are covered in the book to be seen easily.

Of course these things might not entirely be the author's fault. The overly academic tone is, however. I felt often as if I was reading a not very well-written college textbook. One of those books that try to convince us of the author's intelligence by the use of convoluted phrases and lots of very big words.

I have news for you -- it doesn't work. I found myself, time and time again, wondering what he said, and I understand this stuff! The lack of readability in the book was a crying shame and certainly detracted from his argument.

Finally he used footnotes, lots and lots of footnotes. While I can understand why putting these notes at the end of each chapter would discourage the reader, why weren't they put at the end of the book? The sight of so many notes, there are some on virtually every page, will discourage any reader.

It's a good and important subject and with rewriting for clarity and with better attention to pictures and notes, it would even be one to recommend.

David Lyle Jeffrey’s ‘In the Beauty of Holiness’ represents a lifetime’s scholarship, with the author’s interest in the biblical sources of Christian art evident in his publications as far back as the early 1970s. He humbly states that his is “not a history of art, even of Christian art in the European tradition” but is focused in such a way merely to help illuminate a particular, albeit fundamental, “trajectory for Christian art in the west.”

Even within these limits the breadth and depth of Jeffrey’s review is enormously impressive, encompassing as it does the earliest extant Christian art; the Jewish foundations of, and Hellenistic influences upon, Christian aesthetic theology; medieval cathedral architecture, with particular reference to stained glass windows; Giotto’s alfresco wall paintings; altarpiece paintings by van der Weyden, the van Eyck brothers and Mathhias Grünewald; the impact of the Renaissance and the advent of a more realist northern style; Caspar David Friedrich’s efforts to relocate holy beauty in nature; the attempt to make beauty in art a substitute for religious experience in the work of the Pre-Raphaelites, Gauguin and van Gogh, amongst others; the post-religious scorn of the likes of Munch, Ernst, Dali and Picasso; and the wheel turning full circle with Chagall, Roualt and Arcabas seeking to recover beauty in both an aesthetic and religious sense, so as to return art to the service of meditation and worship. Moreover, although Jeffrey’s focus is on the visual arts he has many interesting things to say on other issues, such as music and poetry. The book is also lavishly illustrated, with almost one hundred and fifty images complementing the text.

Jeffrey regards the Renaissance, rather than the Reformation, as the great discontinuity, writing that, “Until the Renaissance beauty and holiness were intimately conjoined in art for worship, evoking the presence of the holy for believers” but this older vision was in large part fractured by a new aesthetic characterised by competitive acquisitiveness. Moreover, in “the late medieval to the early modern period … biblical subjects and narratives, especially stories with erotic potential … became occasions for an indulgence in beauty ‘for beauty’s sake’ …” signalling “the commodification of sexual beauty and voyeurism.”

In the latter context Jeffrey specifically mentions Massys, Rubens and Rembrandt but, somewhat surprisingly, does not consider Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa given that Pamela Cooper-White is not alone in questioning whether there is “an element of pornography ... in the translation of one woman’s interior, mystical experience into the concrete medium of marble sculpted by a male master?” This is, however, a very minor quibble. One cannot have everything and if Jeffrey does not really discuss Bernini as sculptor he is certainly discussed as architect.

Earthly life is frail, fragile and transient. Its beauty is fleeting because subject to decay. The Bible promises eternal life, and artists inspired by its message of hope have produced 'immortal' works of art which seek to celebrate the marriage of beauty and holiness. In considering “the long experiment in western European Christendom to dedicate beauty to worship, and art to the development as well as communication of doctrine”, Jeffrey has produced a beautiful book of lasting value.

Absolutely beautiful book. The illustrations are gorgeous. The book contains art sintering only from the Great masters but also from the more contemporary artists of religious art. The book gives the artists' possible reflections of the reason for the painting and the how of the painting's creation. An intimate look at the artists and their work and feelings into spiritual art.

A very thorough treating of the connection between beauty and holiness, through the centuries of art history.