This book looks at what art reveals about the environmental values of Christianity. As western Europe transitioned to Christianity, pagan religious aesthetics changed or were displaced. Focusing on Christian art and architecture from early third-century Rome to seventeenth-century Netherlands, Susan Power Bratton examines this transition. She explores the relationship between Christ and nature in emergent Christian art, the role nonhumans play in this art, and how Christian art represents the ownership and management of natural resources.

The first section of the book discusses Christian...