The Spirit and the Vision: The Influence of Christian Romanticism on the Development of 19Th-Century American Art (American Academy of Religion Academy Series)

By Diane Apostolos-Cappadona

Book Overview

Christian Romanticism was a response to social changes within nineteenth-century American culture, including women's literacy, spiritual domesticity, and the idealization of childhood. This book examines the work of three artists of the first American landscape tradition -- Washington Alston, Thomas Cole, and Frederic Edwin Church -- and two clergymen -- Horace Bushnell and Henry Ward Beecher. It assesses their understanding of the artist as a social and moral teacher, the didactic role of art in society more generally, and a God who acts in history. The author finds that the art ofAllston, Cole, and Church expressed and served the dominant middle-class religious ideology of the time -- Christian Romanticism. This distinguishes their work from more elitist and regional work.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1555409741
• ISBN13: 9781555409746
• Release Date: February 1995
• Publisher: UNKNO
• Length: 234 Pages
• Weight: 1.01 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 1.0" x 6.3"