He goes back to the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, when such issues were life and death – to Giotto in Padua, Bruegel face to face with the horrors of religious war in the Netherlands, Poussin painting the Sacraments, Veronese exulting in the contradictions of Love. Clark sets out to investigate, in Heaven on Earth, the very different ways painting has given form to the dream of God’s kingdom come. Even politics, some reckon, has not escaped from the realm of the sacred: its dreams of the future still borrow their imagery from the prophets. It has survived the worst that reality can do to it. Such a vision of the world seems indelible. Or perhaps, even in advance of paradise, a beachhead will be established on earth by a chosen few. The day will come, say believers and non-believers alike, when the pain and confusion of mortal life will give way to a transfigured community. The idea of heaven on earth haunts the human imagination.
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