"The first critical examination of Picasso's use of religious imagery and the religious import of many of his works with secular subject matter. Though Picasso was an avowed aetheist, 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. The book will shed new light on a little-known or discussed aspect of one of the central figures of 20th-century art"--