Hope for Peace

#83002     183 X 127 cm     ac

• Rene Magritte: “La Grande Famille”, 1963
• Leonardo da Vinci: “Madonna a l’oillet”, Munich, Alle Pinakothek
• “La Vierge aux Rochers.” Louvre, Paris
• Marc Chagall: “La Martyr”, 1940
• “La creation de l’Homme”, 1956-57
• “La Crucifixion Blanche”, 1938

Painter, Architect, musician, hydraulic engineer, geologist, botanist, and anatomist, Leonardo da Vinci (1452 – 1515) is considered the greatest genius produced by the West in the last thousand years. Only 17 of his paintings survive, four of them unfinished.In this unusual blending of icons Chen has selected infant figures of Christ and John the Baptist from da Vinci; a large and transparent dove from Rene Magritte (1898 – 1967), whose surrealism, if religious, is not conventionally so; and a gaggle of other images, including peasant fantasy and a Christian crucifixion from Chagall (1887 – 1984), who was not Christian but Jewish.

The common link, then, is not theology but a universal spirituality that is common to religion and humanity.
The crucified Christ, still hanging on the cross, seems carried heavenward by the powerful wings through which float clouds.

– Lawrance Jeppson