Word: christly
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Modernized Christ...
Bearded, robed and barefoot, Krishna Venta (real name: Francis Heindswatzer Pencovic) stood before his Seattle audience and, with modest mien, announced that he was Christ returned to earth. As leader of the W.K.F.L. (Wisdom, Knowledge, Faith, Love) Fountain of the World, Krishna went on: "It is true, children, I have served time for committing that bad check . . . that I . . . was convicted for a so-called burglary . . .'' Many in the audience wept; some doubted. One challenged: "Are you the embodiment of Christ?" Replied Krishna: "I cannot lie to you to please you. I must tell the truth...
...CHRIST walked the earth as a human being; yet for 13 centuries thereafter he was painted as a weightless, spiritual being, more in his divine aspect than in his human one. Then Giotto di Bondone, a Tuscan farmer's boy, broke the spell. He changed the course of art by proving that spirit and flesh, holiness and reality, could be pictured together as one image...
Giotto's masterpiece is the Life of Christ, with which he covered the little Arena Chapel at Padua. Of all his major works, it has been least tampered with. The Nativity, though patches have flaked away, retains something of its original hues, and the forms are all there still and all clear (see color). The animals, the dreaming Joseph, the rapt shepherds and the choiring angels together form a kind of halo around the central drama: a mother's first sight of her baby...
...flat, hieratic panels of his teacher, Cimabue, were more Byzantine than Italian, more like presentations of ideas than pictures of events. Giotto made the Madonna smile, for the first time, and weep as well. His Life of Christ is first of all the life of a man, born of woman and in the midst of humanity. The translucent humanness of Giotto's masterpiece reflects Christ's divinity like sunlight in a prism...