In an essay critiquing secular approaches to art, Camille Paglia recalls the religious origins of her fascination with human creativity:
My first moments of enchantment by beauty occurred in a church and a movie theater. The interior of St. Anthony of Padua church in Endicott, New York, the upstate factory town where I was born, was lined with richly colored stained-glass windows and niches holding life-size plaster statues of saints in sumptuous robes or silver armor. Paying no attention to the action on the altar, I would stare transfixed at those glorious figures, which seemed alive.
Today she sees art treated "in a reductively ironic or overly politicized way." Her new book, Glittering Images, follows the evolution of Western art during the past 3,000 years and aims to cultivate "the patience to steadily contemplate a single image."
(Photo of the dome of the Hagia Sophia by Brian Jeffery Beggerly)
The Dish 