»By no means was Teresa what one would call a monastic creature. She was bored as much by the religious books as by the daily recitation of the prayers. Men should be happy down to the heart and cheer up the others, that was her sole wish.«

Today, Rembrandt's significance is unquestioned, he is accepted as one of the great masters. Vincent van Gogh, a great admirer of Rembrandt, once said: »You cannot sincerely love Rembrandt without knowing that God exists.« The theologian Walter Nigg is overwhelmed by Rembrandt's art - and with good reason. No other painter has understood the Bible so thoroughly nor interpreted it so timelessly in paintings and drawings. Nigg's biography shows impressively how much his art was connected to his belief and to his doubts.

The theologian Walter Nigg spent his whole life studying the great religious thinkers – and his sympathy seems to have been with the unsaintly rather than the saintly, and with the heretics rather than the conformists. In Vincent van Gogh, the unorthodox theologian comes to grips with one of the most unorthodox figures of the 19th century, a brilliant painter who was also a heretic, seeker after God and prophet who spent his whole life striving for and bitterly opposing God. Like Tolstoy, van Gogh finally broke with the church and the clergy and lived according to the laws of a self-created, nature-based religion. Walter Nigg's attempt to retrace Vincent van Gogh's life would appear ambitious – there has scarcely been so much written about any other painter, and few paintings are less well-known than his sunflowers. In fact, however, this abundance of literature makes Nigg's book all the more well worth reading, for the originality and insistence with which he describes van Gogh's life from a quite different angle, namely the religious perspective, and the extent to which religious and artistic development merge and blend, are rare in the extreme.