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On Baptising the Visual Arts: A Friar's Meditation on Art

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Aidan Nichols OP
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I owe my sub-title to Winefride Wilson, one of the last members of that remarkable English Catholic experiment in the uniting of art, worship and life, the Ditchling Community, That was how she rendered the German name of an important manifesto for the revival of Christian art Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder’s Herzensgiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (1797), ‘Heartfelt Outpourings of an Art-loving Cloister-brother’. Wackenroder’s impassioned appeal for a renaissance of Christian art, so moribund in his period as in our own, has lost nothing of its relevance today. In this article, I propose to indicate, first of all, the significance of this subject; secondly, to place this discussion in its contemporary secular context; and thirdly, to make some proposals for retrieving, and enhancing, the lost riches of the Church’s iconography.

The Second Vatican Council instructs all Catholics that ‘those decrees of earlier times [the reference is to the Second Council of Nicaea, 787, and the Council of Trent, 1545-1564] regarding the veneration of images of Christ, the Blessed Virgin and the saints be religiously observed’. And this bare statement of Lumen Gentium, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, is filled out in its sister text on the Holy Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium. In the latter, we find a distinction (to which I shall return) between ‘religious art’, ars religiosa, and ‘sacred art’, ars sacra, seen as the high-point of religious art at large.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 74 , Issue 868 , February 1993 , pp. 74 - 84
Copyright
Copyright © 1993 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 Wilson, W., Christian Art since the Romantic Movement (London 1965), p. 13Google Scholar. On his work: Tecchi, B., Introduzione agli scritti di poesia e di estetica di W. H. Wackenroder (Florence, 1934)Google Scholar.

2 Lumen Gentium 67.

3 Sacrosanctum Concilium 122. For an overview of the Council's references to images, and allusions in other contemporary documents of the Church of Rome, as G. Rapisarda, ‘Le immagini sacre nelle indicazione del Vaticano II e delle riforma liturgics’, in [Auctores varii] Culto delle immagini e crisi iconoclasta (Palermo, 1986). pp. 153–173.

4 Summa Theologiae IIa. IIae., q 81, a. 7.

5 Masure, E., Le Signe. Le passage du visible à l'invisible (Pans 1954), p. 42Google Scholar.

6 E. Lanne [O.S.B.], ‘Rome et les images saintes’, Irénikon, (1986), pp. 163–188.

7 See my The Art of God Incarnate. Theology and Image in Christian Tradition (London, 1980). pp. 11–12Google Scholar

8 See Rosenblum, R., Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition. Friedrich to Rothko (London. 1975)Google Scholar.

9 See e.g. M. Betz, ‘The Icon and Russian Modernism’, Artforum (Summer 1977). pp. 38–45; and J. Masheck, ‘Iconicity’, in idem., Historical Present. Essays of the 1970's (Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1984). pp. 209–228Google Scholar.

10 Gablik, S., Has Modernism Failed? (London 19840; 1985), p. 13Google Scholar.

11 I take the concept of ‘secular fundamentalism’ here from D'Costa, G., 'Secular Discourses and the Clash of Faiths: The Satanic Verses in British Society', New Blackfriars 71, 842 (October, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Fuller, P., Beyond the Crisis in Art (London, 1980)Google Scholar; Art and Psycho‐analysis (London 1980)Google Scholar; The Naked Artist (London, 1983)Google Scholar.

13 S. Gablik, Has Modernism Failed?, op. cit., p. 77; cf. Fuller's reprint, with a new prefatory essay, in 1990 of his Images of God. The Consolations of Lost Illusions (originally London, 1982)Google Scholar.

14 S. Gablik, Has Modernism Foiled?, op. cit., p. 80.

15 Nostra aetate (The Declaration of the Second Vatican Council on Non‐Christian Religions), 1.

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17 Cf. Fortino, E., ‘The Role and Importance of Icons: a Roman Catholic Perspective’, in Limouris, G., Icons. Windows on Eternity (Geneva 1990, = Faith and Order Paper 147), pp. 124–131Google Scholar.

18 W. Wilson, Christian Art since the Romantic Movement. op. cit., p. 59.

19 Bulst—H, W., Pfeiffer, Das Turiner Grabtuch und das Christusbild I (Frankfurt, 1987). pp. 95–136Google Scholar.

20 I draw this term from Goethals, G., The Church and the Mass Media: Competing Architects of our Dominant Symbols, Rituals and Myths', in McDonnell, J. and Trampiets, F. (eds.), Communicating Faith in a Technological Age (Slough, 1989), p. 77.Google Scholar