Yesterday, April 6, was the day set aside to commemorate the two Reformation artists Lucas Cranach and Albrecht Dürer, this being the day the latter artist died. (Are Lutherans the only ones to mark this day? Did these artists get on the Anglican calendar? I believe the ELCA throws in Michaelangelo, the humanist Catholic artist. Does anyone know?)

Read A man for all seasons - Spring 2008 - RA Magazine - Royal Academy of Arts, growing out of the big Cranach exhibit at the Royal Academy that has the contemporary art world all astonished. The article surveys Cranach’s career in an interesting way, though the author does not “get” the Christian part, or how the Reformation put together what this critic assumes is contradictory.

Albrecht Dürer was an even greater and more influential artist. He pioneered highly realistic painting, including the genre of the human-free landscape. He was earlier than Cranach, captivated by Luther’s Reformation when it was brand new and he was in his last years. His most famous work: Those oft-reproduced praying hands.

Wikipedia has some good write-ups, with samples of their work, for both Cranach and
Dürer.

You might want to contrast the work of Cranach & Durer on their special day with another artist much in the news, the late Andy Warhol. The conservative art critic says this about him in a posting entitled Roger Kimball Warhol vs. art:

According to the philosopher and art critic Arthur Danto, Andy Warhol was the nearest thing to a “philosophical genius” that twentieth-century art produced. Why? Because he helped complete the assault—begun by Marcel Duchamp in the early years of the 20th century—on the traditional understanding of art as a distinctive, and distinctively valuable, realm of experience. Whether that activity is best understood as “philosophical” I will leave to one side. It certainly did a lot to change, not to say undermine, practice of art in the later part of the twentieth century. I have always felt that Warhol’s chief talent was not philosophical but promotional. The man had an uncanny talent—genius, even—for publicity. For me, his remark that “Art is what you can get away with” takes us close to the center of his achievement—not, I believe, an aesthetic achievement, or even a philosophical one, but assuredly something special in the annals of shameless cultural hucksterism.
Warholism is not the only perspective determining the shape of the art world today, but it is a strong, perhaps a dominant, force.

Think of that: a dominant force in today’s art world rejects the notion that art is a distinctively valuable realm of experience.

Warhol, of course, is the “pop-artist” of Campbell Soup cans, Marilyn Monroe prints, and films such as “Sleep,” consisting of 5 and a half hours that show nothing more than a man sleeping. That work was dutifully screened in Washington lately.

Christians have been accused, rightly in some cases, of rejecting art, but today it’s the art world that’s rejecting art!

Do you see why Christians have an ADVANTAGE over the secularists when it comes to art?

We may be going from the web to the grid. New technology to be launched this summer may lead to the internet, which still relies on phone-company type switches, becoming obsolete. The new “grid” will eventually run 10,000 times faster than broadband, making possible near-instantaneous downloads, holographic images, and who knows what else. At least according to this.

Charlton Heston, Epic Film Star and Voice of N.R.A., Dies at 84 - New York Times

The night before word of Heston’s death came out, I was watching “Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace,” and marveling at how bad it was. I noticed how that totally idiotic pod race, with 5-year old Anakin Skywalker being drug around a track by two jets on tethers, was modeled after the chariot race in “Ben Hur,” which was a thousand times better. It made me reflect on how good of a movie “Ben Hur” actually was. Charlton Heston was brilliant in that film. He was a great Moses too, the later attempts to dramatize the Exodus making “The Ten Commandments” loom even greater. I think Heston came to be under-rated by later film critics, his stock probably going down once he started his pro-gun rights activism with the NRA. Yes, he did some silly films, such as “Planet of the Apes.” But his remained, literally, an epic achievement in Hollywood.