What Heaven Looks Like: Comments on a Strange Wordless Book [Hardcover]

An unknown masterpiece of visionary artas daring as Blake or Goya, but utterly differentreproduced in full color, with a commentary by one of our most original art historians

Somewhere in Europewe don't know wherearound 1700. An artist is staring at something on the floor next to her worktable. It's just a log from the woodpile, stood on end. The soft, damp bark; the gently raised growth rings; the dark radial cracksnothing could be more ordinary. But as the artist looks, and looks, colors begin to appearshapeseven figures. She turns to a sheet of paper and begins to paint.

Today this anonymous artist's masterpiece is preserved in the University of Glasgow Library. It is a manuscript in a plain brown binding, whose entire contents, beyond a cryptic title page, are fifty-two small, round watercolor paintings based on the visions she saw in the ends of firewood logs.

This book reproduces the entire sequence of paintings in full color, together with a meditative commentary by the art historian James Elkins. Sometimes, he writes, we can glimpse the artist's sourcesBaroque religious art, genre painting, mythology, alchemical manuscripts, emblem books, optical effects. But always she distorts her images, mixes them together, leaves them incompletealways she rejects familiar stories and clear-cut meanings. In this daring refusal to make sense, Elkins sees an uncannily modern attitude of doubt and skepticism; he draws a portrait of the artist as an irremediably lonely, amazingly independent soul, inhabiting a distinct historical moment between the faded Renaissance and the overconfident Enlightenment.

What Heaven Looks Likeis a rare event: an encounter between a truly perceptive historian of images, and a master conjurer of them.CONTENTS

Preface 6

The Book 8

The Title Page 10

PLATES 12

Postscript: Falls from Faith in the Seventeenth Century 116

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