The idea of heaven on earth haunts the human imagination. The day will come, saybelievers, when the pain and confusion of mortal life will give way to a transfiguredcommunity. Such a vision of the world seems indelible. Even politics, some reckon, hasnot escaped from the realm of the sacred: its dreams of the future still borrow theirimagery from the prophets. In Heaven on Earth, T.J. Clark sets out to investigate thevery different ways painting has given form to the dream of God’s kingdom come. Hegoes back to the late Middle Ages and Renaissance – to Giotto in Padua, Bruegel facingthe horrors of religious war, Poussin painting the Sacraments, Veronese unfolding thehuman comedy. Was it to painting’s advantage, is Clark’s question, that in an age ofenforced orthodoxy (threats of hellfire, burnings at the stake) artists could reflect onthe powers and limitations of religion without putting their thoughts into words?

At the heart of the book stands Bruegel’s ironic but tender picture of The Landof Cockaigne, and also Veronese’s inscrutable Allegory of Love. The story ends withPicasso’s Fall of Icarus, made for UNESCO in 1958, which already seems to signal –perhaps to prescribe – an age when all futures are dead.