Visual Arts: Protestant

The story of Protestant visual art begins well before Luther posted the 95 Theses. It is a story bound up with iconoclastic revision and destruction as well as with new ways of telling the Christian story in a distinctly Protestant visual mode. In the centuries since the Reformation, artists have emphasized prophetic themes such as the peaceable kingdom, the abolition of slavery, the suffering of women, and the plight of the homeless.

THE ELDERLY CHARACTERS IN DRAMAS OF TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

One of the disturbing issues represented in Williams’ dramas is old age along with aging. The paper analyzes elderly characters in the network of playwright’s selected texts of different periods, in particular, “The Glass Menagerie”, “Sweet Bird of Youth”, “The Night of the Iguana” and “Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore” as well as his lesser-known works “The Frosted Glass Coffin” and “This is the Peaceable Kingdom or Good Luck God” from the perspective of literary gerontology. The representative of the literary traditions of the American South, Williams demonstrates in his dramas the vulnerability and fragility of aging. The tragedy of old age in Williams’ plays is detected in the old age/youth antinomy. The character of a lonely aging woman or a spinster takes often the center stage. Williams’s treatment of his female characters’ (Princess Alexandra and Flora Goforth) sexuality challenges the ageist assumption that older women do not have or should not have intimate relationships. The dramatist renders the mentioned above characters sexually visible in the older woman/younger man relationships without pretence or concealing the corporeal transformations. The close reading of six dramas by Tennessee Williams demonstrates the anxiety of aging and old dramatis personae reflecting social ills. The study discerns the foreshadowing of the epigraphs (from poetry by E. Cummings, H. Crane, E. Dickinson, W. Yeats) implying the anxious aspects of aging and “third age” in four major Williams’s works; the dramatist’s late style represented by “The Frosted Glass Coffin” and “This is the Peaceable Kingdom or Good Luck God” manifests the explicit gerontophobia through rather grotesquely realistic than poetic imagery in the texts’ plot-lines.

Isaiah in Art and Music

The extraordinary role of Isaiah in Christian art and music, from the ox and the ass on ancient catacombs to Handel’s Messiah, is well known, but there are also significant portrayals of him and his prophecies in Jewish art and music, as well as a few striking illustrations of episodes in his life in Islamic art. This chapter looks first at examples of how the call of the prophet, Sennacherib’s siege of Jerusalem, his martyrdom, and other scenes from his life have been depicted in the art of all three religious traditions, and then Christian portrayals of the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Fall of idols in Egypt, the Passion, and the Winepress with texts from Isaiah, as well as world peace and the peaceable kingdom. Musical settings of texts from Isaiah range from Veni Immanuel, the Rorate, Mendelssohn’s Elijah, and Brahms German Requiem, to modern Jewish celebrations of the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 and popular Hebrew songs like “Mayim be-sason” (12:3) and “Yerushalayim shel zahab.”