In assembling Le Dieu caché: les peintres du Grand Siècle et la vision de Dieu, a collection of 63 French 17th-century religious pictures which can be seen at the Villa Medici in Rome until 28 January, Olivier Bonfait and Neil MacGregor challenge us to take theology as seriously as aesthetics. They also prove that it requires more than a sensitive eye and a generous imagination to understand a picture. The thesis of the exhibition and its catalogue (Edizioni de Luca, 283 pp., 60,000 lire, 18 October, 88 8016 388 4) is that the paintings gathered here express an identifiably French spirituality. The 'God' of the exhibition title is Christ, hidden in the prophecies and prefigured in the stories of the Old Testament, hidden again in his incarnation, and held to be present in the Eucharist. He is the object of a form of worship in which rational thinking supports an intense spirituality.

LRB 30 November 2000 | PDF Download