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Celebrated due to the aura of mystery attached to his rediscovered works in the twentieth century, Georges de La Tour’s paintings continue to be an object of scholarly interest and public fascination. Exploring the representations of light, vision and the visible in his works, this interdisciplinary study raises seminal questions regarding the nature of painting and its artistic, theological, and conceptual implications. If the visible presents an enigma in La Tour’s pictorial works, this is because familiar objects of visible reality serve as emblems of an invisible, spiritual reality. La Tour’s pursuit of likeness between image and the natural world bears the influence of the Catholic Reform’s call for the revitalization of religious imagery in the wake of Protestant iconoclastic outbreaks. Like the books shown in his paintings which are asking to be read, La Tour’s paintings are examined not just as visual depictions but also as instruments of insight, which ask to be deciphered rather than merely seen. La Tour’s paintings show how the figuration of faith as spiritual passion and illumination challenges the meanings attached to the visual realm of painterly expression. This study shows that La Tour’s emphasis on spiritual insight opens up a broader artistic, philosophical and conceptual reflection on the conditions of possibility of painting and its limitations as a visual medium. By scrutinizing what is seen and how and by questioning the position of the beholder, his works encourage meditation on the role of painting and its engagements with the visible world.

During the past two decades curators and artists have shown a distinct interest in religion, its different traditions, manifestations in public life, gestures and images. Since the early 1990s in Europe and the United States many artists critically re-appropriated religious, motifs, themes and images to produce works that cannot qualify as ‘religious,’ but remains in a dialogue with the visual legacy of mostly the Western, and more specifically the Catholic, version of Christianity. The book explores the complex relationship between contemporary art and religion. It focuses on the ways artists re-appropriate religious motifs as a means to reflect critically on our desire to believe in images, on the history of seeing them, and on their double power – iconic and political. When embedded in contemporary artworks, religious motifs become tools to address issues that are central to the infrastructure of, and the distinction between, different eras or regimes of the image: the rules that regulate the status of images and their public significance, their modes of production, circulation and display. The book examines the important motif of the acheiropoietic image (not made by human hands). Its survival and transformation in contemporary image-making practices provides a conceptual matrix for understanding of the reconfiguring relationships between art and religion. The book discusses a number of exhibitions that take religion as their central theme, and a selection works by Bill Viola, Lawrence Malstaf, Victoria Reynolds and Berlinde de Bruyckere who, in their respective ways and media, recycle religious motifs and iconography, and whose works resonate with, or problematise the motif of the true image.