ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a problem of misunderstanding of what good religious art is trying to achieve. It then discusses two familiar paintings, one the most commonly reproduced image of Christ in twentieth-century America, Warner Sallman's Head of Christ, and the other what is probably now the best-known painting of the crucifixion, Matthias Grünewald's early sixteenth-century Isenheim Altarpiece. Europe witnessed four major styles of architecture which historically succeeded one another: Romanesque at the turn of the first millennium, Gothic, which dominated the high Middle Ages, Classicism, which attempted to recover the architectural styles of ancient Greece and Rome, and finally Baroque, a style particularly associated with the Counter-Reformation that is essentially Classicism modified to engage more effectively with the drama and wonder of the Christian story.
