My summer series on Donkeys of the Bible comes to an end this week with a selection of works by the artist with the most images of our beast of burden in the Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection--Sadao Watanabe, the foremost Japanese Christian artist of the 20th century. Depictions of donkeys bearing poets, priests, sages and samurai warriors are a commonplace of Japanese woodblock prints and ink drawings down the centuries but few are depicted with the evident empathy you find in Watanabe's hand-painted stencil print studies of my featured creature. In a curious departure from Western artistic conventions, the Japanese Christian artist mostly depicts horses in Nativity scenes, but the donkey truly comes into its own in his numerous prints of the Parable of Good the Samaritan and Christ's Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem. He is the only artist I know to celebrate the animal (top, center) in a scene where a disciple presents a donkey to Christ for his ride into the Holy City. A worthy tribute to an unsung hero of the Bible! (John Kohan)