The Anatomy of Sacred Art: Parts I and II
Part I: Presence, Witness, and Transcendence
"I was there when he laid the earth's foundation; I was beside him like an architect. I was his daily source of joy, always in his presence — happy with the world and pleased with the human race." — Proverb in praise of wisdom
As the Old Testament begins with the Creation of the cosmos and the New Testament with the Incarnation of Christ, the Judeo-Christian world is reminded how the act of making becomes central to our faith. The act of imitating Creation and its Creator has been with humankind since the earliest of all recorded forms and images, and so as architects and artists, we recognize ourselves as the "created," imitating our Creator in this great attempt to pay homage to our God, to our "Cause without Cause." Thus what is "man made" begins as a small part, a means to seek and find our selves at first as separate from our Maker. Yet the second and greater part is to make in order to seek and find ourselves again within the greater "God-made" whole, our communion. Our hopes are that what we make will fuse with what we believe, and both process and product will bring all closer to our Maker. To imitate Creation is to celebrate the very entry of the Mystery into its own Creation.
To make sacred art is to wed one's faith with one's aesthetics in hope, to bring even closer "the created" to our Creator, to shorten the real or imagined gap between "the called" and the Caller. When the artist answers, when this invitation is met successfully, a covenant is formed; the work is sanctified. This covenant is then extended from God to artist and from artist to fellow believers and finally, back to God again. It is this covenant that we wish to explore here. As faith and aesthetic works combine, the work in turn is employed to reflect those beliefs. As culture becomes infused with and by our trust and hope in God, sacred art becomes an indeterminate good, a means by which we may come together and witness the meeting of heaven and earth. Thus, sacred art can never be the same give and take between artist and society as secular art.
As Catholics in America, since the Sixties we have witnessed the wholesale destruction of beauty, of figurative sacred art, in particular classical architecture, statuary, and representational painting. As a result, the reciprocity between our origins and our beliefs seem, all but absent, as if a covenant that once was never existed. These acts, conscious or unconscious, present certain and profound questions not only of aesthetics but also of faith. They now need to be asked and hopefully answered.
First of all, can and did sacred art produce a covenant? What does covenant mean here? How does it differ from the secular "give and take" between artist and society? Does this covenant exist before the art is ever made? Can there be a covenant without value? Can there be a faith without an aesthetic? Can there be sacred art without a willful belief in beauty? Finally, did modernism break the covenant?
All these questions need to be and have been asked in one way or another for the last thirty years. Yet before answering such vital questions, perhaps some discussion of the sacred art of our past and present would help. Although the Church does not have or claim an official style, it has always held that its art and architecture should actively participate in its meaning and its message. Our architecture, sculpture, and painting may indeed be external examples of our faith, extensions of a covenant. Thus, they were never intended to be outside of our worship, at least not until Modernism.
All classicism, with its painting, sculpture, drawing, and architecture, has always been and remains a figurative and representational language. If it is not literal, it is metaphorical as the language of "embodiment." Our body's design, reflected in bilateral architecture thus becomes an extension of body Creation. If the Church has or has yet to choose the classical mode as its official messenger, its preference is clear; in sign and symbol, classical art and architecture have always been corporeal and representative. But more importantly, what is the role of this corporeal sacred art in the Church? Why do we choose the body to reveal the invisible? For the Catholic Church the role and reason of using both the body and its corporeal architecture is triune. Combined, it is when and where the denotation, connotation, and implication join in order to embrace the entire faith.
As Catholics, cross-culturally this triune reason has remained the same for these two millennia; it is presence, witness, and transcendence. As guideposts, they together give the church artist the tools to make works that assist the faithful and guide them to the covenant. Much like its matrix architecture, the function of religious statuary in the church is to provide an experience of presence, give a sense of witness, and lead to a state of transcendence. In order to accomplish this, the classical has continually been employed as the best means. The four attributes of presence are:
- It must be whole, its members inter-related, nothing incongruous, a self-contained entity.
- It must show a proportionate likeness to what is recognizable, what is knowable about the known. It must have similitude.
- Its poise, position, and the composition of place must appear to be a result of its thought.
- It must contain both the average and the ideal.
To be whole, a self-contained entity must have its members interrelated. Nothing appears incongruous as its members and their relativity part to whole have an intelligible proportion. This use of proportion takes on a greater role when and where we find it in sacred art. Everything in Creation is made in proportion to itself along with a proportion to everything else in the universe. As there is nothing without proportion, whether it is matter or void, light or dark, sound or silence, and time, proportion remains an idea in the Mind of Creation.
Alberti speaks to us of "membratura" or the memberedness of a building or body. In representational sculpture and painting, this interrelatedness becomes mandatory. In it we become emblematic of the Mystical Body. We are using the body not only as sign here but also as symbol.
Second, a proportionate likeness to what is recognizable gives reassurance as to what is known and what is knowable about the known. In sacred and secular art, likeness or similitude is the desire to have some likeness apparent to which some value has been assigned. Sacred art, perhaps more than any other art form, has for millennia struggled with this concept of likeness and for very good reasons. How do we represent the unseen without making the visible recognizable?
Classical proportion is the desire to know the comparative relationship of one part or member to the whole, and to its other members; in as much as this is resplendent in sacred art and architecture, there can be no better metaphor for the Church itself. How much is this desire of the part to know its whole like the desire of the faithful to know its part within the "Mystical Body." Thus, everything good seeks to take on a divine proportion because everything has a divine purpose.
Third, poise, position, and the composition of place must appear to be a result of its thought. The placement, arrangement, and composition of sacred art need to reflect their purpose and role in our faith. Just as our liturgy has an order, so must our art assist the liturgy in that order. Here, the physical place has meaning and, through placement, the object helps direct us to the sacred within. St. Ignatius Loyola urges us (Spiritual Exercises, 1548) "to see with the eye of the imagination the corporeal place where the object one wishes to contemplate is found." He calls this "composition, seeing the place." However, when and where composition of place is not combined with purpose, when what we place in the center is not central to our faith, then content and context are no longer reciprocal and the covenant is compromised.
Like its secular partner, modernist liturgical art and architecture became overly dependent on place in order to achieve a sense of content. Just as placing sculpture outdoors didn't make it public art, placing it inside a church didn't make it liturgical. The abandonment of bilateral symmetry discarded the body and made our architecture non-representative; statues cannot be replaced by non-objective works and still be considered statues. Their content and placement must assist us in finding the order within the work, the sacred within ourselves.
Lastly, all representative painting and sculpture contains both the average and the ideal in varying degrees of proportion, one to the other. The Cimabue crucifix, a Franciscan commission, provided a model for both painters and sculptors alike. This notion of gravity, the sense of human weight, of compound convex forms of its members, reinforced the message of the Poverello that one could find the flesh of Christ in one's nearest neighbor. But above all, it contained something of the average and the ideal in its form. Commissioned in 1252 by the Franciscans for the church of Santa Croce in Florence, it was a shift not only from the Christus Triumphans of the Medieval model to the Christus Patiens of St. Francis, but also to an anatomical model that opened the door for sculptors as well as painters. Anatomy had remained buried in the antique now to be unveiled and reinvented through Franciscan spirituality.
The need to demonstrate the effect of gravity on body weight, of convex form, of a greater sense of the average and the ideal gave the artists of the Quattrocento a means to depict the Incarnation. For the artist this means that seeking and finding the average and the ideal in every portrayal is a human attempt to imitate the union of the human and the divine. We the average, the human, seek unity with the ideal, the divine, just as God has revealed the humanity of Christ to all Creation.
If beauty is at the heart of the covenant, it not only speaks of a particular saint or scene from the life of Christ in stone or paint but it draws the whole of humanity into itself to witness its covenant. After all, more people have "witnessed" the Sistine Chapel Ceiling in the past fifty years than in the past five hundred. Yet the idea of witness was always present in classical church art and architecture. Witness differs from presence in the sense that the interior and exterior are in synch. It is where the internal and external experiences are one. The four attributes of witness are:
- The work is open and all-inclusive; that is, it does not alienate the viewer.
- It must look like the action is still with us, still occurring and / or ongoing.
- It has credible impact on the senses and through the senses.
- The experience of the subject depicted is internalized in the viewer.
As the Church is open and inclusive, so must be the arts that represent it. They cannot alienate the viewer. From our beginnings, the earliest Christian art was based on and in, for lack of a better term, a "figurative" language used in painting, sculpture, and architecture. Its reasons for choosing an anthropomorphic language were obvious; it was, as it remains a representative language in which the signs and symbols of Incarnation theology could be best presented. Its vernacular is corporeal. It finds its language in scripture, as scripture is resplendent with metaphors placing Christ, his disciples and us in architectural terms, "foundation," "living stones," "columns," "mansion," "pillar," and "corner stone," all have become part of Christian sign and symbol. This vernacular remains open and inclusive as figurative art and architecture continue to take on the language of the body, its bilateral symmetry, its frontality, and most of all, its proportions. All lend and will always give a most humanized way of representing and expressing the Logos Incarnatus. Without figurative representation we would lose this sense of inclusive embodiment, this sense of the corporeal, and of ourselves within the Incarnate Christ. There can be nothing bodily alien to us here less it loses credibility to our own sense of body. With it we find our place as "living stones" with Christ as the Corner Stone. Thus our bodies as well as our being become evidence that this covenant to make and to make holy exists before the art is ever made.
If the covenant is to speak, the conversation must be ongoing. It must look like the action is still with us, that this silent drama still speaks. Sacred art must be given a voice by artist and architect and speak for all of us. Yet, what is said must be modeled on the Living Word, that is, the voice that can never be meaningless, never be non-objective, and never be non-representational, a voice that cannot be self contradictory. As Donatello spoke to his sculpture of the prophet Habakkuk, his Zuccone, he didn't simply hit the statue with his mallet and say "Parla!" ("Speak!"). Better, he commanded it, "Favela! Favela!" ("Tell the story!") Tell the story in hopes that it, in turn, might speak to others.
All life forms "push out," that is they are convex, full as well as multidirectional in their cross sections. They have a credible impact on the senses and are realized through the senses. Convexity is a sign and tells us that the form is alive, still living, still growing, still breathing. As the columns of the Orders push out, full with entasis, they imitate the convexities and surface tension of living flesh, of ripe fruit, the fullness of life itself. This idea of fullness has always been a hallmark of the classical order in Western art and architecture. As the figures of the medieval world were designed as integrated elements of church architecture, mainly in relief, in clustered columns, and in portals, the figures of the Cinquecento became entities in themselves, fully developed in the round, many appearing to be the same size and in the same air as the worshippers. There was no sense of alienation here.
Concavities interior within the body's skeleton make room for convexities and provide an analogy to the concave interiors of Catholic classical architecture. With their domes, their niches, their naves and their sanctuaries, these interiors are designed to be filled with murals and mosaics, sculpture, and reliefs. But more importantly, they are to be filled with us, with our bodies and most importantly, the Holy Spirit, as we are told in the Constitution of the Church, He "fills the Church, which is His Body and His fullness, with His divine gifts, so that she may grow and reach all the fullness of God." (The Dimensions of the Church, Avery Dulles).
Throughout the centuries, this figurative language has been much more a history of our spiritual evolution than our cultural evolution. It is the language of witness in which the experience of the subject is internalized in the viewer. As we go from early Christian to Renaissance, from Rococo to contemporary classicism, the variety of manifestations have provided us with pictorial, sculptural models from the most static to the most dynamic. The artistic and spiritual goals were to make the best for the Best; the goal always to bring witness. We only have to look at the wall paintings of the first century catacombs and see their resemblance, or lack thereof, to the works of Pompeian frescos. Of course the quality is lacking here but their place never compromised the covenant. The awkward drawing and modeling are crude. Yet we can witness the intention that this was the best offered here. After all, this "underground society" could not employ the best artists of their time openly. But as the early Church was searching for her artists within the flock, the work was to be done by believers, not "hired hands." There is no sense of feigned naiveté in these works, as the experience of the viewed is offered to the viewer.
But presence and witness are nothing and incomplete if they do not lead us to transcendence. For it is here that the cycle, the triune purpose is revealed. It is here where our covenant becomes realized as artifice, and faithful and Godhead take their rightful place. The four attributes of transcendence are:
- The ability or quality to use the visual to express the invisible.
- The work should inspire a personal transformation in order to inspire communal transfiguration.
- A corporeal likeness that is sopra or transmundane in order to show "unlikeness."
- Its message is neither depleting nor depleted but ongoing and endless.
As Alberti speaks of "istoria" to mean the sum of our observations and experiences, works that are transcendental take our spiritual memory, our history, and our spiritual experiences and render them new. We see beauty and truth as new because they make us new. The ability, or quality, to use the visual to express the invisible precludes all sacred art. As the Invisible entered its own creation, took on flesh, and became visible, we are called to make visible so that the faithful may return to the invisible again. Here is where what speaks of beauty will speak of truth. If sacred art is to have a moral aesthetic it must have a visual aesthetic. In his address to artists on the function of art, Pope Pius XII recommends, "Seek God here below in nature and in man, but above all within yourselves. Do not vainly try to give the human without the divine, nor nature without its Creator. Harmonize instead the infinite with the eternal, man with God, and thus you will give the truth of art and the true art."
When we say that a work should inspire a personal transformation, its goal then is to make us feel and realize our place in the Mystical Body. Once this connection to the Mystical Body is accepted by artist and viewer communal transfiguration is realized. From Francis of Assisi on, figures painted and sculpted took on their natural fullness, their biological wonder. Part of this was due to his Canticle to Brother Sun. What St. Francis did was quite different from the pagan anthropomorphism of the Greeks or Romans and beyond the simple personification of the elements. "Brother Sun," "Sister Moon," "Brother Fire," "Sister Water," and of course the birds, his "Brother and Sisters of the Air," were all part of one Creation along with Adam and Eve and most importantly, Christ. Never before had personification in art taken on such impact to include all humankind in one family along with all else created. By renaming them in familial terms, Francis made all Creation one family, something the pagan personification of gods and goddesses could never accomplish, since it was something it could never intend. As Catholics we can experience both the personal and communal transformation. Our "family" is demonstrated, the invisible community is realized through a visual means.
To make a corporeal likeness that is transmundane is to show nothing less than the "Body Electric," our unlikeness now to our anticipated Resurrection in Christ. As artists, we have discovered and will continue discovering the means and metaphors by which this is attained. The image is a simulacrum and represents the subject's characteristics though not a reproduction. We make a world that resembles ours but is different from it. Thus our works, our paintings and sculptures become like prayers and perform much like intercessions between the intelligible world and the perceptual world. The human figure although a focal point, becomes a sublime means to a spiritual realm.
If the Poverello of Assisi gave us the inspiration to depict our human body and the Body of Christ as it was created, again it was Ignatius of Loyola who gave us the courage to flex our muscle. If you thought the flesh of the Quattrocentro was bad, take a look at Counter-Reformation art! Like Francis of Assisi, St. Ignatius tells us nothing of art but gives us an armature in his Spiritual Exercises. He instructs us, "to look at people with the eyes of imagination, to smell and taste the infinite sweetness of God, to celebrate ornament and buildings of the Church, to celebrate images and venerate them for what they represent." Looking at the four parts of the Exercises we begin with the contemplation of our sins, on to the life of Christ, the Passion, and finally the Resurrection and Ascension. As the exercises begin in the dark, in tenebrum, we begin to witness secularization of the transcendental in art and vice versa. The theme of metamorphosis becomes central to Catholic art and architecture. But more importantly it is the use of the mundane, the use of worldly body and the senses to reveal the divine: how much is this like the Incarnation itself!
But before religious or devotional art can be sacred, it must be beautiful and true. Beauty and truth here comprise a reciprocal relationship in that what speaks of beauty also reveals truth and what reveals beauty speaks of beauty. Here the visible and invisible validate each other as what has a visual aesthetic gives way to a moral aesthetic. The irrational space of the mannerist meets the rational of the high Renaissance. The null space of the eastern icon meets the tenebrist void of Counter-Reformation art.
Can there be faith without an aesthetic? Can there be faith without a value? Without an aesthetic, without beauty, the covenant could hardly exist. As Genesis tells us, God made it and said it was good. God as Maker, as Artist, sees his creation and places a value on it. It also tells us two things: that work is good and working well is good. This value and this Creation is ongoing. The Master Artist is still at work on his Creation of which we are part. Tommaso Campanella in his "De sensu verum et magia" of 1604 writes: "The world is the statue, the image, the living temple of God, in which He has expressed his gestures and written His concepts; He has adorned it with living statues, simple in heaven, but complex and weak on earth; but they all lead to Him." This idea of Creation as "art," as God's own "living statue," the earth as his First Daughter, the orb as His favored shape, has always been with us. Now the Imatori Dei is complete. We as artists imitate God as Artist.
In closing, as presence, witness, and transcendence are realized, this covenant made in paint, carved in stone or cast in bronze, becomes a relationship of reciprocity between origin and belief, the continuity of that belief, and the reassurance of that belief in the future. It allows us to project our faith in time, which is hope. These works of sacred art then take their place and simply sit side by side with the history of the Church, with the history of the faithful. As sacred art looks toward the covenant, it is the covenant between the artist, the faithful, the Church, and the Holy Spirit that produces the true soul, the revealed meaning of the work. By means of this covenant, great sacred art continually reveals something about us as it continually reveals something about the mysteries of our faith. It speaks to us, with us, and for us in our ongoing metamorphosis, our ongoing sacred conversation.
Part II: Ad Quid Venisti? Quo V Adimus?
"You are also God's building. Using the gift God gave me, I did the work of the expert builder and laid the foundation, and another aim is building on it. But each of us must be careful how he builds. For God has already placed Jesus Christ as the one and only foundation and no other foundation can be laid." — St. Paul, I Cor. 3:10
The foundation of the cross shelters all who are homeless. "I was a stranger and you received me into your home."
We live in a time in which it is more likely to run into difficulty for doing something well than doing it poorly. Both Church art and secular art have reached an all time low. It is as always easier to understand how this can happen to secular art, but how did it happen to sacred art as well?
As the Church's desire to become relevant culturally between the two world wars grew, the Church in America found itself in a peculiar situation. On one hand it still had what it saw as its second-hand European hand-me-downs of art and architecture. It also had to differentiate itself from Anglo-Saxon Protestant society so prevalent in the US. We became suspicious of our own works as if it were the art under the scrutiny of the Reformation.
Our own nudity and all of its metaphorical meanings have all but disappeared from civic and ecclesiastic art, in particular Catholic art. We have returned to the bushes, shaking, unable to answer God's question as to who told us we were naked. It's as if we had forgotten that by the time Ghiberti had completed his second set of baptistery doors, the four types of nudity established in Church art were being expressed throughout: nuditas virtualis, such as the young Baptist casting off his garments to demonstrate his abandonment of worldly goods; or nuditas temporalis conditional nudity as in the Susanna at the bath; nuditas criminalis, in the expulsion from the Garden, or the drunkenness of Noah; and nuditas naturalis, as in the Creation of Adam and Eve, all took their proper place and role in church art. However, with political correctness abounding, subjects such as the nudity of Noah would not be permissible and would be considered counter-symbolic since it is insensitive to a person's dealing with substance. Theologically, we have remained Catholic. Culturally, we have become Protestant with overtones of iconoclasts. But as Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger so aptly puts it, "Iconoclasm is not a Christian option."
The study of human anatomy was thrown out of the curricula in art schools; and drafting the classical orders was being eliminated from the schools of architecture. Just as the American Renaissance had placed its classical architecture; classical sculpture and painting were to have followed had not both been interrupted by the Second World War. Froth 1950 onward, the figurative languages of both artist and architect, the "anatomy" of both, had become useless tools in the inept hired hands of the modernists. As modernism needed flatness to express nihilism, it was unable to use human anatomy and the orders properly; thus, they were kept from students who wanted to use them. Conversely, the modernist jargon of non-representational flatness became as equally burdensome to Christians as artists of the Incarnation. Yet there were many who believed that this was the new way of the Church! Under the weight of modernism, anatomy, the sense of "embodiment" in both ecclesiastical art and architecture, became all but impossible to find in the American church. Architecturally, when we abandoned bilateral symmetry, we abandoned the body. Sadly, the Catholic Church followed the hired hand of the modernist into fields where the flocks literally were scattered and the good grass was trampled and the waters muddied.
We have learned much by looking to other artists who have heard the call from Eternity and responded as contemporary artists throughout time. If we listen, we can perhaps gain a better idea of ourselves as the created as well as what the Caller asks of us now. Yet we must be mindful that the masterpieces of the past, present, and future are like the stars in the heavens. They can indeed give us our location but we must wait for the darkness and hope for a clear night in order to see them better. Perhaps our darkness was indeed modernism; perhaps our clear night is arriving. Then, once our location in the Third Millennium is learned, the greater question for the maker of sacred arts will be where do we go from wherever we are?
How Modernism Broke the Covenant
As modernism spoke only of the self, it became a gift to self rather than a gift of self.
There were two attributes of modernism that violated the covenant as it was governed by two major conventions of thought. First, there was "traditional modernism," the need to sacrifice, to omit, to discard something in order to make something unique and novel. But to sacrifice does not mean omit. It means to make holy. Just as a contract is not a covenant, a sacrifice is not an omission. The second attribute of modernism, "conventional modernism," was when a risk must be taken, no matter how needless or fruitless. Combined they were to make something "original," something that hadn't been done or seen before. Quality thus came from novelty and replaced beauty with "new" formalist relations.
With originality as its goal, modernism sought to invent its own language; it took metaphor and replaced it with irony. In its need to sacrifice, it took the alphabet of all classical art and architecture and threw out the vowels. In its need to be original, it took this new alphabet without vowels and only consonants, and made words illegible, unintelligible, and unpronounceable, a language that could mean anything, and called it "untitled." We soon came to realize that "untitled" was very much indeed a title. If modernism spoke at all, it said, "I will not serve."
Modernism had convinced an entire populace to expect nothing great from art or artists. Now used to avant-gardism, the public has grown suspicious of themselves if confronted with art they can understand. For Roman Catholics in particular, the modernist collision happened in the sixties when the secular art form, the "pop," the "folk," and the avant-garde styles were adopted and mingled with a most misinterpreted version of the Vatican II message encouraging the use of contemporary art and music in liturgy. Contemporary was never meant to mean modernist; it never meant non-representational. For the first time in history, instead of leading the secular art world as it had done for centuries, the Church now followed it. For the liturgical artist and architect, for the painter and sculptor of religious works, it couldn't have come at a worse time. Its outcome was already being foretold in 1964 by Pope Paul VI, a global advocate for the entire world of sacred arts, in his meeting with artists in 1964:
We can say at times we have placed against you a leaden burden; please forgive us! And then we have abandoned you. We have not explained our things; we have not introduced you into the secret cell where the mysteries of God make man's heart leap with joy, hope, happiness, and exaltation. We have not had you as students, friends, interlocutors, so you have not known us. Thus your language for the world has been docile, yes, but also tied up, labored, incapable of finding its voice. And thus we have felt this artistic expression unsatisfactory . . . We have treated you worse, we have turned to surrogates, oleography to works of art of little value and less expenditure, also because we did not have the means to commission things which were great, beautiful, and worth being admired.
Things seemed to be changing in 1976 at the 41st International Eucharistic Congress hosted by the Exhibition of Liturgical Art in Philadelphia. Both the Archdiocese of Philadelphia and Catholic patrons alike commissioned several works with the centerpiece of the Congress being the commission of one permanent sculpture. It became a standing bronze Christ to be made by Walter Erlebacher and placed in front of the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul. It is an Apollo-Christ, clearly reminiscent of our early Christian world in which a beardless young man with the physical attributes of an Apollo are fused and brought to realization in Christ. It is the Eucharistic Lord, the Second Adam, reborn, as he stands young and old, virile and effeminate, living and dying, with arms extended, still bleeding from his costal wound while offering to all his broken bread. As it was and still remains counter to church renovations of its time, it was definitely contemporary but not modernist.
Yet with its many commissions given to some of the country's most popular gallery artists of the day (all in storage now), the show itself was a hodge-podge of styles of art about art, art for art sake, art about the artist, with only a smattering of that which was truly religious or liturgical. This disdain for quality, for the utilitarian, for the classical, was further echoed in the exhibition's catalogue liner notes as they went on to denounce the Quattrocento: "In fact, what historians might indicate to be the apex of Church art and art in general may actually signal the real decline, possibly the decadence of sacred art in the West . . . the Renaissance."
This argument that the Greco-Roman and the Renaissance periods were pagan in origins and therefore unsuitable or unworthy for contemporary church art and architecture has long needed to be put to rest. Countless Christian attributes predate the birth of Christ, as the Mystery entered Its own creation from the beginning. As we are called on to acknowledge the "anonymous Christian" in those who have not heard the teachings of Christ yet lead their lives in the spirit of Christ, so are we, along with the Church, called to acknowledge the anonymous Christian in art and architecture. The truth is that Christianity has more classical structures than pagan antiquity has ruins.
To follow this anti-classical logic through would call on us to not show our God as having taken on human form, to not show that the Mystery became flesh. After all, the idea of anthropomorphizing one's god was not primarily Christian, as it can be found in both pagan and nature religions predating the Incarnation. Yet it is ironical that these same critics who despise the use of the classical for its pagan origins or "political incorrectness" seem to have no problem in appropriating the designs of other pre-Christian nature religions for our churches. As Stonehenge replaces the altar and sanctuary, and "medicine wheel" seating replaces the nave, our "worship spaces" becomes theaters in the round. When the corporeal reality of place is lost to bad art and architecture, the spiritual reality of place is lost with it. The true freedom to make something beautiful for the Church and its faithful is placed in exile and its faithful with it.
The beauty due in sacred art and architecture cannot be subject to political correctness as if it were a matter of political rationing. Beauty contains the measure of gift within itself, not the percentage allotted in the art budget. Modernist art and architecture will not be catalogued by some future Vitruvius. There will be no Brunelleschi and Donatello traveling to a modernist Rome to measure its proportions. If modernism broke the covenant, it did so simply on the basis of not giving. When faith and aesthetics do not share a common goal, both are degraded. When aesthetics' affairs are so ordered as in modernism that there is no recognition of either the moral or visual aesthetic, there can be expected a belittling of the faithful. The faithful have a right to a response from the artist and architect that is a reflection of their beliefs. Wherever, whenever, and however this right is dislocated, the very notion of a serving aesthetic is sacrificed, omitted, for the sanctity of individualism. Thus, so-called sacred art will have no meaning other than that projected by the artist's ego. There can be no covenant when the goals of the art are separated from the goals of the faith. Sacred art without the faith and faithful being served is a parody and an injustice. The covenant is broken.
The Disregard of Representational Sacred Art
Even with his work among our best religious paintings of the twentieth century, Salvador Dali goes unrecognized for his contribution to sacred art. His "Last Supper" is hung as to not be seen or read as it is placed on a stairwell going to the basement in the National Gallery in Washington DC. Ironically, just as the Christ it depicts, it holds the place of embarrassment, a "stumbling block" that the modernist curator cannot explain to his visitors, that the art historian would rather her students skip over. Yet Dali holds a place for the extension of Catholic art. His was and is the art of ongoing conversion. However it neither received proper notice from the Church officials or the art critics. For the sake of Dada, art history prefers and needs Dali to be its "bad boy" and would rather not be reminded of his slips into religious art.
In his "Discovery of the Americas by Columbus," sometimes called the "Dream of Columbus," Dali depicts the discovering of the New World out of time and place. Here he presents "Christo-Foro, " the Christ Carrier who brings the Ship of Christ with all its crosses as well as his Church to the New World. But simultaneously he, the man, also arrives and discovers this New World found in the Resurrection of Christ. As this Christoforo emerges from the waters of Baptism, he pulls his ship, his cross, to a new shore never to return to his point of departure, never to leave his new discovered true home in Christ. Here this pictorial discovery gives evidence that neither the works inspired by Franciscan or Ignatian spirituality belonged to a certain period of art or Church history. Sadly, in our anxiety to be relevant, this art became unintelligible to us as we allowed modernism to appropriate our Catholic language.
Now through what is called postmodernism, we may have learned that religious, sacred, or liturgical art cannot serve the art community as art does the secular world. The artist of religious work is usually self-educated in the signs and symbols, the forms, the colors and geometry and proportions of sacred art. When we meet others like us, it is the smaller if not the smallest circle of artist friends. Once installed, our commissions are not visited by curators or reviewed by any art reviews. Our works are often reproduced on holy cards, church calendars, and in books, yet we remain "anonymous." Artists and architects may be called "church ministers," but too often, they remain nameless, something that Paul VI knew in the long run hurt the Church more than her artists. If we have learned anything from modernism and our history, we know that religious art does not receive notoriety for being novel, from being ironic, or being clever. To have one's work be such an attraction in the secular world is to be a success. To do so in the religious sector is to have failed at your mission. Obviously this is not work for those without a calling. The paintbrush or chisel in the hand of the "uncalled" is as worthless as the crosier held by the "hired hand." The former would open windows that lead the flock nowhere, while the latter would simply close or renovate our churches and leave the flocks to scatter. We are left with the question as to how people find us.
Yet despite the efforts and arguments made by art historians, critics, galleries, museums, and teaching institutions, as well as those within the Church hierarchy, classicism, like the Church, the Bride herself, cannot be chronologically framed. It, unlike modernism, is not a linear fashion of one style begetting another and another. Here the modernist view would like us to think that Michelangelo if alive today would be a "liturgical mime performance artist."
At best, our recent past can provide us with a sense of where we may find ourselves today. By the end of the second millennium, American artists had been working alongside, if not within the secular, thus being both modernist and puritan: the modernist believing that the artist was freest when not tied to the burden of representationalism and the puritan needing to believe all art is by nature superficial, controversial, and always to appear out of place. By their combined definitions, modernism and Puritanism produced an art from what was only acceptable if and when it seemed shocking, if and only when it was inappropriate, and if and only when it was non-representational, all of which sacred are cannot do if it indeed accepts the Incarnation. Should it be any wonder why the tympani reliefs of Creation for the National Cathedral in Washington DC by Fredrick Hart went unnoticed by both the art world and the religious world alike when unveiled in 1984?
The Church as Bride, Daughter, Mother, and Sister of Christ
But if our works are to find themselves in beauty, that must be centered in love. As St. Paul writes in his letter to the Ephesians, ". . . I pray that you may have your roots and foundation in love, so that you together with God's people may have the power to understand how broad, and long, how high and deep is Christ's love." If we take these dynamics and apply the dimensional aspects of the Christ's love for us in his Church as his Bride, as Daughter, as Mother, and as Sister, we can then apply these same dynamics to our works as artists in Christ.
As Bride she is forever erect, upright. She is always dressed, with her lamp lit and ready for action. Her stature demonstrates her being His chosen. Her height tells of her devotion. Attentive, she is never squat. As she patiently awaits her Master, she wears her veil in the form of a façade. Its design gives us hint to her inner beauty, of her true face, which she takes on as she meets the Groom at the altar. As the Bride of Christ she must be adorned with the finest furnishings, moldings, and ornaments fitting for the holiest occasion. Yet all that she wears from her vaulted ceilings and domes to her tiled floors, points to whom she awaits. In all, she must be well suited for that place where time and eternity meet and heaven and earth kiss.
As the Mother she is the great breadth of the Church as she is also the seat, the cathedra in which she holds the infant Christ Child as well as the Pieta holding her dying Son. Yet as mother to all she is also womb, the place where we are all born in Christ, a chair, a cathedra in which she cradles the Christ child as the Incarnation and as the mother of her crucified Son. As Mater Ecclesciae, all her forms wrap around her children in stone, in words or images, all are durable, substantial, made of the finest materials possible. She would give us nothing less, nothing artificial even as part of the meal or portion of our nourishment.
As Sister with her nave as the deck, she is the length of our ship as she accompanies us on our journey to meet our Brother in Christ. Her spires as masts, her stained glass as portals, she is a mighty ship prepared to take us on this journey and provides us with the proper sacraments and sacramentals. This ship, she says, can take the entire city, no, the entire world along with her.
As Daughter, in her depth she remains in the loving care of the Father. She is the first born of the First Born of the dead. She is the product of the loving will and therefore houses all that was done with loving will. Her artists and artisans listen along with her to the Holy Spirit, and as the New Eve, she with them in turn cares for the Father as He provides for his other children, giving them the works for His family in us.
The Bride Church is a labor of love and faith of the Groom Christ in and for us, His creation. So in kind, our art works, our labors must be of love and imbued with faith if they are to reach others. Like Bride and Bridegroom they must bear the resemblance of the lover and the beloved. If art does not serve the Creator, how can it serve his creation? Conversely if it cannot or will not serve His creation, how can it serve Him?
Does the Church need a Renaissance?
As Meister Eckhart states, "To be properly expressed, a thing must proceed from within, moved by its form." Here form means pure idea. This could be easily seen as absent in modernist works as they became more obtuse and self-centered. Yet they did nothing less than mirror our contemporary liturgies. As the translation of Et cum spiritu tuo, "and with your Spirit," became "and also with you," our art began to imitate our liturgy. Our salutation to the Holy Spirit within each other as community became an individual greeting to the celebrant's ego.
We have learned now that when faith and aesthetics do not share a common good, as happened in modernism and Puritanism, sacred art and architecture degrade the faithful and deprive them of any higher vision. Their view remains no higher than the naked physical properties and processes of the works. The art work fails to rise with the faithful to its higher capacity. Like galleries and museums, many churches still cling to solutions that modernism could never afford, nor was ever willing to give to Ecclesiae. American churches have grown lazy in their search for the best. In many cases, with its order of iconography, it clings to a model that trivializes spirituality, placing catalogue Mary and catalogue Joseph on either side of the altar (or block) as if they were the salt and pepper shakers for the Lord's Supper. The statuary is most often purchased from catalogues for prices beyond the cost of a commission, to have all done by the day of dedication. The only comforting thought that we must continually allow ourselves is the fact that the Church is never complete in time and space. Nor should it be.
As we leave the laboratory of modernism, we face new problems. Like a pickled lab frog connected to the batteries of museums, galleries, and magazines, modernism doesn't know that it's dead, that its kicks are not real. How do we pull the plug? We will have some problems here. Modernism tried and to some extent succeeded in trying to make beauty untrustworthy. As a result, we live in a time whereby we are more likely to run into difficulty for doing something well than for doing it poorly. Thus, conviction and faith must pervade the painting and sculpture of religious art if it is at all to succeed in its mission.
Great sacred art should point to our expectations. In this it remains forever contemporary in its ability to point and lead us to our higher goals. Here, art history and fashion can and will be put aside as the faithful become willing once again to submit to and trust the influence of willful belief in beauty. The only reality for the true artist is true beauty and the only true beauty is God.
The American Catholic Church longs for a renaissance; not a renovation. It longs for a renaissance, not as an art movement to be replaced with another, but a rebirth of its qualities that reflect the covenant. Like our architecture, our painting and sculpture need to bring us closer to and include us in the mysteries of our faith. Their mission, their message cannot be withered and wasted by the desire to be novel or the fear of borrowing from within our own traditions. To deny our qualities is nothing less than a denial of our transfiguration.
Of course the greatest aspect of transfiguration, of transformation, is still the liturgy, is still the ongoing work of the Church. As such, sacred art remains the work of the new in that it is the work that can always be reborn and, like the Church, extend itself. It is an inclusive and open form that allows for rebirth both within and without. Yet if sacred art and architecture are to function as guide posts along the way, then they must point in a guided direction, not a misleading one. If our destination is Eternity, it is inevitable that a renaissance will occur. For now we must wait for the Church to wake up from the slumber of modernism, to regain its ability to distinguish the difference between novelty and renaissance. We may then ask, does the Catholic Church need a "renaissance"?
Ultimately, the answer is always "yes." The Church needs renaissance because the Church is renaissance.
Anthony Visco is an artist who maintains a studio in Philadelphia. Among his liturgical commissions he is currently working on the National Shrine of St. Rita of Cascia. He has taught at many institutions including Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the New York Academy of Art.
copy; The Institute for Sacred Architecture
This item 7466 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org
