Medieval Art and Spirituality

I leave today for Italy to teach a two-week course in medieval art and spirituality. We start in Rome and train up to Orvieto, home base for a week—with day trips to Assisi and Siena. After that...stay tuned to find out.One of the shifts in art I discovered in my preparations was that the church has not always allowed images of God the Father (such as we see in the Sistine Chapel). The introduction of the human male image of the Father in addition to the Protestant removal of Mary has left us not only with human images of the invisible God(!),  but a view of Christianity that makes us think even our Deity is predominately male. If you have about an hour for an interesting history lesson on the subject, check out this lecture on "Visual Heresy: Imagine God the Father in the History of Art" by Wheaton's associate professor of Art History.