Book Reviews

Roma Felix -  Formation and Reflections of Medieval Rome

by Eamonn O Carragain and Carol Neuman de Vegvar, Eds., reviewed by Hendrik Dey

In their introduction, the editors succinctly state the case for the city of Rome’s striking preeminence in the collective cultural consciousness of western Christians during the Middle Ages, a manifestly important premise which has received less attention than might be expected in the over a century since the appearance of Arturo Graf’s monumental Roma nella memoria e nelle immaginazioni del medio evo.

Sacred Spaces: Religious Architecture in the Ancient World, Ancient Near Eastern Studies Supplement

by G.J. Wightman, reviewed by John W. Stamper

Books on ancient architecture are typically focused on a specific region or culture, whether it is Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman or pre-Columbian. They are written by specialists in a particular field and published for specific audiences. G. J. Wightman’s Sacred Spaces, in contrast, covers virtually every geographic region, time period and culture from the ancient world.

The Politics of the Piazza: The History and Meaning of the Italian Square

by Eamonn Canniffe, reviewed by Thomas M. Dietz

This densely written and well-researched book is unlikely to adorn the shelves of most practicing professionals. This is unfortunate, as Politics of the Piazza offers a unique analysis of a subject that should be a matter of concern to all practitioners—the purpose and origins of the piazza, a component of urbanism that, although particularly significant in Italy, remains recognizable throughout the western urban tradition.

The Beauty of Faith: How Christian Art Reveals the Good News

by Jem Sullivan, reviewed by Christopher Burgwald

In Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel the Idiot, protagonist Prince Myshkin states, “I believe the world will be saved by beauty.” In the Beauty of Faith, Jem Sullivan makes a similar proposal, arguing that it is imperative that we employ the beauty of Christian art to spread the good news of Jesus Christ and his Church.

America’s First Cathedral

by Mary-Cabrini Durkin, reviewed by Philip Nielsen

In America’s First Cathedral, Mary-Cabrini Durkin presents a beautifully illustrated history of the Baltimore diocese’s cathedral from Latrobe’s original designs through its rise as a national symbol of American Catholicism, culminating in years of restoration that have only recently been completed.

Contemporary Church Architecture

by Edwin Heathcote and Laura Moffatt, reviewed by Thomas D. Stroka

Unlike any other building, a church is “an accessible public space amid an increasingly, and occasionally frighteningly commercial and privatized world…”

The Art of the Sublime: Principles of Christian Art and Architecture

by Roger Homan, reviewed by Michael Morris, O.P.

The author of this book, Roger Homan, is professor of religious studies at the University of Brighton in England. For Anglophiles the slim volume will prove to be an absolute treat, for Professor Homan casts new light on English figures and subject matter seldom treated in general surveys of Christian art and architecture. This is done, however, at the expense of omitting major figures and monuments from the modern movement on the Continent and in America, thus rendering the book either extremely chauvinistic or the right book with the wrong title.

Churches for the Southwest: The Ecclesiastical Architecture of John Gaw Meem

by Stanford Lehmberg, reviewed by Norman Crowe

John Gaw Meem, while relatively unknown outside New Mexico, is regarded among New Mexicans as their most significant interpreter of regional forces in architecture. Lehmberg's book, the first to focus on the architect’s ecclesiastical designs, provides a careful account of Meem’s engagement with church commissions from about 1920 until his last church design in 1949. Meem began his career not by designing, but by restoring churches, especially very venerable ones—such as the San Estevan del Rey Mission, the only surviving church built prior to the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, and Saint Francis Cathedral of Santa Fe, erected by Bishop Lamy in the 1860s. It is likely that this early involvement in restoration set Meem's approach to both sacred and secular architecture throughout his career.

Temples for Protestants

by Per Gustaf Hamberg, reviewed by Gretchen Buggeln

In 1955, Per Gustaf Hamberg published in Swedish his Temples for Protestants, an extraordinarily well-researched, nuanced study of the early (sixteenth- and seventeenth-century) Reformed and Lutheran Churches of Northern Europe and Scandinavia. Now, finally, this illuminating and useful book is available in English. As a scholar of early American Protestant architecture, I found myself wishing I had had access to this book years ago. It contains numerous, thorough descriptions of churches and fascinating discussions of important relevant primary texts of the period, many of which are unavailable in English. The translation is fluid, despite minor inaccuracies. Lengthy quotes in Latin, German, French, and Italian are not translated, which is a bit frustrating for the provincial. Nonetheless, this is a necessary book for anyone interested in the religious architecture of this period and its influence on later buildings.

Painterly Perspective and Piety

by John F. Moffitt, reviewed by Duncan G. Stroik

The discovery, or rediscovery, of linear perspective in the Italian Renaissance is usually credited to Filippo Brunelleschi, the architect of the dome of the Florence Cathedral. Another nearby monument that may be the first existing example of one-point perspective is the funerary chapel in Santa Maria Novella painted by Masaccio in 1428. In a complex and theologically rich explication of Masaccio’s Holy Trinity, with the Virgin, Saint John and Donors, John Moffitt argues that the point to which all of the lines converge is placed at the bottom of the picture in order to correspond with the elevation of the host during Mass. Thus God the Father stands on an altar and presents his crucified Son to the viewer within a perspectival architecture that converges on the Eucharist. The consecrated host becomes the liturgical focal point of the chapel and of the painting.

From Meetinghouse to Megachurch: A Material and Cultural History

by Anne C. Loveland and Otis B. Wheeler, reviewed by Lauren Beaupre

Do the increasingly ubiquitous evangelical megachurches that dot the national landscape represent something new in either Protestant architecture or American culture? In their book, From Meetinghouse to Megachurch: A Material and Cultural History, authors Anne C. Loveland and Otis B. Wheeler respond to this question with an emphatic “No.” Rather than representing something new, Loveland and Wheeler contend that evangelical megachurches are part of an ongoing evolution whose antecedents include Puritan meetinghouses, revival tents, tabernacles, and mainline Protestant churches. A sense of continuity that persists even as American church architecture changes is the book’s major theme.

The Architecture of Ralph Adams Cram and His Office

by Ethan Anthony, reviewed by Michael J. Lewis

The historian and the artist bring different questions to a figure like Ralph Adams Cram. The historian wants to understand what social and cultural forces compelled a modern businessman-architect, practicing in the twentieth century, to make buildings in the style of the fourteenth; the artist merely wants to know if they are any good. Do his buildings live—live in the artistic sense—or are they merely clever writing in a dead language, like someone writing Latin verse today? If the answer is that his buildings do not live, then there is hardly any point in trying to answer the first question.

The Renovation Manipulation:  The Church Counter-Renovation Handbook

by Michael S. Rose, Cincinnati, Ohio:, reviewed by Christopher Carstens

Taking to heart the final words of the current Code of Canon Law, that “the salvation of souls, which in the Church must always be the supreme law,” the recent book by Michael S. Rose gives clarity and advice to the troubled soul experiencing a church renovation project. The Renovation Manipulation: The Church Counter-Renovation Handbook attempts, in the words of its author, to “give the average lay Catholic a clear understanding of the renovation process and ultimately the knowledge necessary to bring about honesty and integrity in the renovation of existing churches as well as in the construction of new ones” (p.6).

Rejoice! 700 Years of Art for the Papal Jubilee

by edited by Maurizio Calvesi with Lorenzo Canova, reviewed by Michael Morris, O.P.

REJOICE! is a very dumb title for a very smart book. The Rizzoli publication, which is a compilation of twentyfour essays by a variety of Italian scholars, looks at 700 years of papal artistic patronage for the Jubilee Years that brought pilgrims from around the world to Rome. The superbly illustrated coffee-table book covers both art and architecture.

Art and Crusade in the Age of St. Louis

by Daniel H Weiss, reviewed by Christopher Olaf Blum

Art and Crusade in the Age of Saint Louis treats two significant objects of royal patronage: the Arsenal Old Testament, a lavish illuminated manuscript the king commissioned while on Crusade in the Holy Land, and the Sainte-Chapelle. The author’s contention is that both works are kinds of political and religious propaganda meant to justify the ideal of the Crusade.

America’s Church:  The Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception

by Gregory W. Tucker, reviewed by Fr. Dan Scheidt

At first glance, Gregory W. Tucker’s America’s Church: The Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception might seem to be yet another attractive religious shrine commemorative volume destined to take its place in that inexorably horizontal, closed position where picture book meets coffee table. But both the National Shrine and Tucker’s volume, which lovingly recounts its history, are indeed well worth our more sustained attention.

Sir Ninian Comper: An Introduction to His Life and Work, with Complete Gazetteer

by Anthony Symondson, Stephen Arthur Bucknall, reviewed by Timothy Hook

While little known in the United States, the British church architect Sir John Ninian Comper (1864-1960), after John Betjeman’s championing of his work in the 1930s, received a cult following in his native United Kingdom. Since Betjeman, however, there has been only a smattering of mostly unremarkable, often skeptical reviews of Comper’s work. Anthony Symondson, S.J., and Stephen Bucknall’a new book Sir Ninian Comper: An Introduction to his Life and Work, with Complete Gazetteer comes therefore as a timely breath of fresh air.

Temples ... worthy of His presence

by Christopher Webster, reviewed by Shawn Tribe

It seems only too seldom that people of high ideals make much of an impact on the general populace, let alone realize those ideals. This was not the case with regard to Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin and the Cambridge Camden Society.

Ecclesia: Greek Orthodox Churches of The Chicago Metropolis

by Panos Fiorentinos, reviewed by John Powers

Nature certainly has had its infulence on the art and architecture of Chicago, but in Ecclesia Panos Fiorentinos shows the resilience and dedication of man, despite the hardships and ravages of nature and the Chicago urban landscape, in forming the Greek Orthodox Metropolis of Chicago.