Fair Jesus

“This is a book about how Italian artists of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance interpreted the life, teachings, and miracles of Jesus in their paintings—how they saw Jesus.”

Robert Kiely goes through major sections of the Gospels, pausing with the Italian painters to consider Jesus, how he looks, how he stands or sits, how he interacts with other figures and the viewer, how his actions and teachings are interpreted and translated by artists into forms without words. Though seasoned with comments by theologians, and references to poetry and music, painters and their paintings are the guides to Kiely’s text—beguiling, challenging, consoling, instructing—displaying their colors, skill, and perspective while beckoning the viewer back to scripture and to the Jesus “who accepted to be seen.”