Sacred Art and the Incarnation

"You speak no Latin more than I, belike;
However, you're my man, you've seen the world
--The beauty and the wonder and the power,
The shapes of things, their colours, lights and shades,
Changes, surprises,--and God made it all!
--For what? Do you feel thankful, ay or no,
For this fair town's face, yonder river's line,
The mountain round it and the sky above,
Much more the figures of man, woman, child,
These are the frame to? What's it all about?
To be passed over, despised? or dwelt upon,
Wondered at? oh, this last of course!--you say,
But why not do as well as say,--paint these
Just as they are, careless what comes of it?
God's works--paint anyone, and count it crime
To let a truth slip. Don't object, "His works
Are here already; nature is complete:
Suppose you reproduce her--(which you can't)
There's no advantage! you must beat her, then."
For, don't you mark? we're made so that we love
First when we see them painted, things we have passed
Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see;
And so they are better, painted--better to us,
Which is the same thing. Art was given for that;
God uses us to help each other so,
Lending our minds out." 

-- Robert Browning

I'm thinking of this passage in the light of God's incarnation as Man, the ultimate Self-portrait. I'm thinking about how artists are sub-creators and thus are God's own works of art: creations in His own image as Creator.

"Although now long estranged,
Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.
Dis-graced he may be, yet is not de-throned,
and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned:
Man, Sub-creator, the refracted Light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world we filled
with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build
Gods and their houses out of dark and light,
and sowed the seed of dragons--'twas our right
(used or misused). That right has not decayed:
we make still by the law in which we're made."

 -- J.R.R. Tolkien

I'm thinking about how many more people have been reached and touched by the seed of Truth by the agency of subcreation than by the direct "preaching of the gospel" as it's typically thought of by the evangelical mind. How many minds have been set on the path to the Light through first coming into contact with the work of Shakespeare, or Bach, or Michelangelo, or Pierre de Montreuil--or Tolkien? How many people's hearts have first been moved toward the Holy when Monseigneur Bienvenu shows mercy to Jean Valjean, when Karenin forgives Anna, when Scrooge repents--or when Aslan saves Edmund?

And I'm thinking about how I can participate in it all.