I found this book fascinating. I don't know much about art and I found this easy to dive into. Recommend for people interested learning more about Renaissance art.

This shows 30 examples of the Renaissance paintings by some of the great artists of the time. These show the different periods of the Bible. Each is very interesting but would think that the paintings would show better in a hardback book than the kindle.

An interesting idea, but a book with flaws.

First off the author's conceptions of what is "Renaissance" and "biblical" art are rather flexible. In terms of art his definition of the period tends well into the Baroque period, a period stylistically quite different from the Renaissance. In the case of one painting it extends all the way to the late 19th Century. His interpretation of biblical is also large, it includes a painting based on an apocryphal story, albeit a famous one, and one scene from the life of St. Francis of Assisi! Aren't there nativities he could have included from the Renaissance? or some of the thousands of other New Testament scenes from the period?

The paintings he chose are all by masters, that's not the problem, but it does the honest seeker after knowledge an injustice to mis-label stuff that is so easy to put right.

Second, the book isn't very well-written. Philip often uses contorted and unclear sentence structure. He uses jargon, including word phrases like "faith-community," almost as if he was afraid to write the word "Jews" when it is the correct term. The articles are short, but often I felt as if he was reaching to pad out the chapters to be the right length because he has so little to say. In one case he quotes at great length a blogger, only identified by his first name. In another chapter he gives us a quote by a contemporary of the artist about the painting. If he has that little to say, he should have picked a different painting.

The structure of each chapter is the same. It opens with the picture and a reference to the passage in the Bible to which it refers. Then the passage or story is told to us. Next the painting is described. Finally we are given a reflection. While the descriptions of the paintings are good, the reflections vary greatly in length, style, and usefulness. Some provoke thought, some can easily get shrugged off, a few seem totally random. This unevenness is another fault in the book.

I appreciate that Philip wanted to give equal weight to the Old and New Testaments, but he could have done much better with the New Testament section of the book. The life of Christ before the wedding at Cana is given a total of one painting, that of the Presentation to Simeon. No Annunciation, no Visitation, no nativities of any kind, no flight into Egypt, no finding in the Temple, no baptism, no calling of the Apostles. You can't tell me there are no paintings of these from the Renaissance, that just isn't true. You can't tell me we can't learn from them, that also isn't true. So why were they left out?

After reading the book I felt as if Philip had learned you could "blog a book" and decided to do one. He took 30 of his blog posts, included the paintings , wrote an introduction, and called it a book. With some attention to the difference between a blog and a book, he could have done much better."

The book is one as a set of meditations by a layperson on Biblical stories, but don't look to it for much more.