Historia y Sentido del Arte Cristiano by Juan Plazaola (review)

BOOK REVIEWS301 perspective on millennialism. This affords some useful insights, since millennialism has been predominantly a Protestant phenomenon. After presenting a glossary of the rather arcane terminology of millennial believers , he introduces his topic by emphasizing the tendency of those believers to form themselves into cults. It is a useful theme, although throughout the book the author tends to overstate the tendency of millennialists to resort to violence . There follows in the first chapters a clear presentation of the evolution of ideas of the Millennium from the Bible through their several important manifestations in the Roman Empire and the Middle Ages. His presentation would have benefited, however, by utilization of Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millennium, a book whose theme is virtually identical with Baumgartner's and while questionable in some of its conclusions, is rich in its evocation of the broader historical context. A chapter on "Millennialism in the New World" succeeds in the difficult task of connecting Indian and Spanish notions of the place of America in the great scheme with those of Puritan thinkers like the Mathers and Jonathan Edwards. Less successful are the chapters on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They are rather arbitrarily organized, so that a discussion of the Utopian thinkers of the French Enlightenment leads direcüy to a survey of their nineteenth century successors,with little effort to show the transforming effect that the French and Industrial revolutions had upon the process. In his preface. Baumgartner recalls as a child visiting the site of Marian apparitions in Necedah,Wisconsin. The experience has led him in an especially interesting chapter to examine more fully the part the atomic bomb and the Cold War played in perceptions of the Millennium, especially among Catholics. One wonders what connection there might have been between the Necedah apparitions of 1950 and the career of Joseph McCarthy, a native of the same region of central Wisconsin, who launched his own "millennial" pronouncements in the same year. In dealing with the bewildering range of contemporary millenial cults, the author wisely concentrates on those he sees having the likeliest significance for those future historians, he writes in his conclusion, who will "need to add many chapters to update this book" (p. 264). Clarke Garrett Santa Fe, New Mexico Historia y Sentido delArte Cristiano. By Juan Plazaola. (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos. 1996. Pp xxii, 1053. Figs.,b/w and color illustrations.) This is an ambitious, single-volume encyclopedia that may be used as a resource for facts, for lists of artists and works of Christian art from its origins to the present, but with caution. It is limited by a largely dated historiography, especially for the premodern periods. 302BOOK REVIEWS The organization of historical periods, partitioned regionally or nationally, into architecture and visual art by media, usually resolves into style histories, intellectual histories, and occasional iconographical commentary, followed by text excerpts. In keeping with an organization that derives in part from its encyclopedic scope and in part from formalist conventions, a limited social or political history that would oblige style to be historicized, limits the interpretive usefulness of such a range of information. For example, the critique of luxury, a powerful modality in ecclesiastic history, is omitted. Eusebius' ekphrasis of the Holy Sepulchre is included among the sources. Jerome's aggressive rejection of luxury building is not, although the history of the Church and its lavish art and architecture is punctuated by this debate, in whichJerome's phrases were periodically revived in disputes that ultimately informed the Reformation. In a work about Christian art, the seigneurial rank of clergy, who exercised broad authority over the spiritual and material lives of their subjects, is absent, and consequently the history of communal rebellions which accompanied the transformation of Europe's topography by ever larger, technically advanced and increasingly lavish churches. Accordingly, new interpretations of images at key sites, Vézelay and Chartres for example, as explicit responses to local and hostile environments is also absent. In its place, represented by Chartres, the entire range of obsolete paradigms and historical myths about community and cooperation are repeated. This is not strictly the author's problem. These myths have had an astonishing...