One of the benefits of reading Dr. Dalrymple is discovering things like this circa 1600 painting by the Spanish priest Juan Sanchez Cotan (I had to Google it but the Brit doc gave me the cue). It’s in an essay on the tiresomeness of recent atheist best-sellers by Hitchens, Dawkins and others.
Dalrymple counts himself as an atheist but is educated enough (and tolerant enough) to understand that the religious (insofar as they don’t try to impose their beliefs on others) don’t deserve vilification or confusing meanness for wit. This “… picture is a visual testimony of gratitude for the beauty of these things that sustain us….a permanent call to the contemplation of the meaning of human life.”
The essay is in Dr. D.’s 2008 book Not With a Bang But a Whimper: The Politics and Culture of Decline. In it he doesn’t condemn modern abstract art as meaningless claptrap (which I believe it is), but he does laud realist painters (mostly long vanished in the West’s cultural decline) as alone inspiring serious reflection on reality.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 