As we consider the topic of the artist as prophet, we travel through history this week from Hitler's Third Reich to the Soviet Empire, where artists posed a challenge to atheistic Communist regimes by making sacred art. Irakli Parjiani was a native son of Svaneti, a rugged Northwestern region of the Caucasus Mountain republic of Georgia, once part of the Soviet Union, with some of the oldest religious frescoes and manuscripts in the country. Growing up with one foot in heaven and the other on earth, Parjiani would become the greatest Georgian metaphysical painter of the 20th century. In defiance of Soviet cultural watchdogs, he set about to create his own handwritten, illustrated copies of the Gospels in Georgian, completing Mark and John and portions of Luke. His visionary, semi-abstract works are imbued with a yearning for portals opening from this world into the next. A small sampling is on view on the new Irakli Parjiani page in the Sacred Artists section. (John Kohan)