This is the first critical examination of Pablo Picasso’s use of religious imagery and the religious import of many of his works with secular subject matter. Though Picasso was an avowed atheist, his work employs themes of spirituality—and, often, traditional religious iconography. In five engagingly written, accessible chapters, the authors address Picasso’s cryptic 1930 painting of the Crucifixion; the artist’s early life in the catholic church, trained as a religious painter; elements of transcendence in Guernica; Picasso’s fraught relationship with the church, including a commission to paint murals for the War and Peace Chapel in France in the 1950s; and the centrality of religious themes and imagery in bullfights, subject of countless Picasso drawings and paintings.

Jane Dillenberger is professor emerita of art and religion at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. She studied at the University of Chicago and is author of The Religious Art of Andy Warhol (1998), Style and Content in Christian Art (2004), and Secular Art with Sacred Themes (1969). She curated several exhibitions for the Berkeley Art Museum during the 1970s on spirituality and art.



John Handley completed his PhD at the Graduate Theological Union in 2012; his dissertation focused on the religious art of Stephen De Staebler.

Dillenberger and Handley have addressed a subject that until recently scholars have failed to investigate. Their new study is very welcome for the light it sheds on the Spanish darkness of Picasso’s religious beliefs. Dillenberger is an eminent theologian with a deep understanding of her faith, as well as an art historian, and together they endow their book with revealing new insights.

John Richardson

Hundreds of books have been written about Picasso, but this is the first study of his religious art. Although an avowed atheist, Picasso created works which are spiritual, indeed transcendental

in nature. Jane Dillenberger and John Handley begin their critical study with a discussion of Picasso's competent painting of a girl at her first Communion, done when he was fourteen years old, to his magnificent sculpture of the MAN WITH LAMB, created during World War II, and on to his his life-long occupation with the Crucifixion, and his great GUERNICA mural in which the artist conveyed universal suffering in a single horse's head. The book ends with a discussion of

the Corrida where the bull is 'sacrificed' (from the Latin 'made holy' ) and the allusion to the Christ on the Cross.

Peter Selz