Heaven on Earth: Painting and the Life to Come
T.J. CLARK
(Thames & Hudson, 288 PP, £24.95)
Tablet bookshop price £22.45 • Tel 020 7799 4064

This is an intriguing concept for a book – a collection of essays examining the idea of an earthly Utopia, “a heaven wholly and only existing in the world we have”, written by an atheist about five paintings from the early fourteenth to the twentieth century, which express, or possibly satirise, or even deny, the idea of Heaven on earth.

It is a slightly bewildering collection: repetitive, personal and dogmatic, but intensely absorbing; a fascinatingly balletic performance, in which T.J. Clark – professor emeritus of the history of art at the University of California – prowls round his chosen paintings, peering at them through the prisms of contemporary politics, prodding the characters which populate them, scrutinising the colour of a robe or the line of a hill, and catechising their spiritual status.