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Last updated: 3/9/07

Prologue

“[T]he stripping away of the externals of Catholic worship between 1547 and 1553 must often have had a profound if not always conscious effect. . . . [T]he removal of the images of the saints [and] of the altars . . . were ritual acts of deep significance . . . of oblivion.”¹

Introduction

The “deep significance” referred to in the above extract from The Stripping of the Altars is made all the clearer if one considers the following definition of what art is:

“Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. Man's profound need of art lies in the fact that his cognitive faculty is conceptual, i.e., that he acquires [and retains] knowledge by means of abstractions, and needs the power to bring his widest metaphysical abstractions into his immediate perceptual awareness. Art fulfills this need: by means of a selective re-creation, it concretizes man's fundamental view of himself and of existence.”²

The attempt to destroy British Catholicism through censorship of powerful means of communication such as art and imagery has taken many forms since the violent iconoclasm of the sixteenth-century Protestant Revolt. The present murderous Socialist Government's Communications White Paper (now superseded by the Communications Act 2003), for example, confidently asserts that: “[R]eligious [broadcasting] content has a particular capacity to offend those with different views and opinions, or, sometimes, to exploit the susceptibilities of the vulnerable. Religious issues may also shade into matters of political controversy” (4.9.2). It is interesting to directly compare these antagonistic assertions with the kind of propaganda employed by the National Socialists in Germany³.

The subconscious impact of such ideological attacks combines well with seemingly more abstract observations in the cultural realm. Since its enemies assert that religion is something incompatible with free thinking, it has often been suggested that the pleasure derived from Catholic art should be explained in a way which separates it from its theological trappings.

To take but one example, in the book to accompany the El Greco exhibition held at the National Gallery from February to May 2004, Philippe de Montebello and Charles Saumarez Smith, directors respectively of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery, observe that: “Much of the scholarship of the last century has aimed to reverse this divorce of El Greco's art from its context – to counter the myth of El Greco the proto-modern”⁴.

In the same book, exhibition curator David Davies comments, “It is essential to note that El Greco's commitment to the Catholic faith was unambiguous. On his death bed, making his testament, he affirmed, in conformity with Catholic practice: 'I believe and confess in all that which the Holy Mother Church of Rome believes and confesses and in the mystery of the Holy Trinity in whose faith and belief I profess to live and die as a good faithful Catholic Christian'”⁵.

“Christendom's most beautiful churches”

Michael S. Rose, author of Goodbye, Good Men (Regnery, 2002), has located some magnificent photographs of Church architecture for his Web site dellachiesa.com. The first link to Notre Dame de Paris does not appear to work; however, here is the link to a head-spinning 360° view outside the Cathedral at night. (You may be asked if you want to install Apple's QuickTime player software.)

Selected Examples of Catholic Art in Modern Britain

One of the remarkable accomplishments of the enormously successful film, The Passion of the Christ (2004), is director Mel Gibson's fusion of the traditional Catholic iconography of this subject with an acute awareness of the artistic sensibilities of contemporary audiences. Not content with relaying a mere sequence of events, Gibson exploits current audio-visual techniques and technologies, with the kind of restraint that comes with higher artistic purpose, in order to explore the theological significance of the redemptive and salvific rôle of God-the-Son-made-man that puts that sequence of events at the centre of human history⁶.

There follows a selection of similarly inspired works, housed in British galleries and museums, which equally illustrate the enduring modernity of the eternal and unchanging Truth.

Velazquez, The Immaculate Conception, National Gallery, London

Source

Like most Catholic imagery, there is an iconic convention or code attaching to the subject of Our Lady's conception without the stain (Latin, macula) of original sin. Its source, in this case, is the Apocalypse of St. John, chapter 12: And a great sign appeared in heaven: A woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars⁷.

Commentary

“Velazquez's brilliant achievement is to provide handsomely and without reserve for the devotion of the faithful while at the same time giving free rein to his own humane realism and unsparing severity. Here is a Mary as individual as Caravaggio's Christ at Emmaus, 'all fair' with an entirely ungeneralised and unconventional beauty. This is somebody – bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh like the Eve whose sin she cancels”⁸.

Leonardo da Vinci, The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Saint John the Baptist, National Gallery, London

Source

“It is interesting to note that the canonical Gospels never mention Jesus' grandmother. The figure of Saint Anne . . . is described only in the apocryphal tradition, particularly the Protevangelium attributed to James.”⁹

Commentary

“Mary is seated on Anne's knee. This pose places Leonardo's work – although revolutionary in many ways – within the iconographic tradition of “Metterza.” The word comes from medieval Latin . . . : Saint Anne “places [herself] third” ([si] mette per terza) in a group with Mary and Jesus.”¹⁰

Michelangelo, Madonna and Child (“Bruges Madonna”) (cast), Victoria and Albert Museum, London

(The image in the above link to the Web Gallery of Art can be clicked on to zoom in. The actual image here is of the original marble sculpture, which is located in the church of Notre Dame, in Bruges.)

Commentary

“[I]n the Bruges Madonna . . . [Michelangelo] placed a forward-facing, standing Christ Child between the Virgin's legs. . . . readapting [the theme of Virgin and Child] toward a Christocentric focus . . . in accordance with the reformist tendencies of his day.”¹¹

El Greco, Christ driving the Traders from the Temple, National Gallery, London

Source

[A]nd Jesus went up to Jerusalem. And he found in the temple them that sold oxen and sheep and doves, and the changers of money sitting. And when he had made, as it were, a scourge of little cords, he drove them all out of the temple, the sheep also and the oxen: and the money of the changers he poured out, and the tables he overthrew. And to them that sold doves he said: Take these things hence, and make not the house of my Father a house of traffic.¹²

Commentary

“[A]n overturned table fills the front of the picture space, endowing the composition with a skewed, unsettled quality. . . . The old seated man resting on his basket is . . . Saint Peter: he has the saint's characteristic physiognomy and wears the canonical colours of blue and yellow. The contrast between the figure groups is underscored by the sculpted reliefs above them: on the left is the Expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, signifying the fall of humanity, and on the right is the sacrifice of Isaac . . . foreshadowing the redeeming sacrifice of Christ on the cross. So the traders represent fallen humanity and the Apostles the redeemed. . . . The composition . . . recalls the imagery of the Last Judgment: . . . 'And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left' (Matthew 25:31-4) – and each shall have their proper reward.”¹³

Salvador Dali, Christ of St. John of the Cross, St. Mungo Museum of Religious Life and Art, Glasgow

Source

The inspiration for this picture was a drawing by the Spanish mystic and poet, St. John of the Cross.

Commentary

In his own words, Dali claimed, “'My aesthetic ambition in this picture was completely the opposite of all the Christs painted by most modern painters, who have all interpreted him in the expressionistic and contortionistic sense, thus obtaining emotion through ugliness. My principal preoccupation was that my Christ would be beautiful as the God that He is.'”¹⁴

Guercino, The Incredulity of St. Thomas, National Gallery, London

Source

Now Thomas, one of the twelve, who is called Didymus, was not with them when Jesus came. The other disciples therefore said to him: We have seen the Lord. But he said to them: Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails and put my finger into the place of the nails and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.¹⁵

Commentary

By the time Guercino came to execute his version of this famous scene, as John Drury observes, “[Protestant] theologians, suspiciously critical of the physicality of transubstantiation, had made Christ's presence in the Mass into a centre of dispute rather than the assurance of unity. . . . The thrust of Thomas's hand, with a finger penetrating the wound, is like the rough hands which grasped at Jesus on the night of his arrest. . . . The similarities are planned and deliberate. The picture is one of a pair. The other, now in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, shows Christ's arrest. . . . The scene with St. Thomas is no longer a serene resolution. It is one more episode in the long tale of the trials and tribulations provoked and suffered by the presence of incarnate God among faithless and benighted humanity, a more than formal counterpart to his arrest”¹⁶.

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1Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, Yale University Press, 1992, p.494.

2Ayn Rand, The Romantic Manifesto, p.45, quoted here.

This insight into the meaning and purpose of art also helps expose the arrogance of those who would appropriate the word “modern” to describe output that in no way represents the Catholic value-judgments of their contemporaries. More often than not, in all probability, the correct epithet for such works is “Liberal”.

3Compare also the reaction of the Communist Chinese Government to the appointment of a new Chinese cardinal (24/2/06).

4El Greco, National Gallery Company, 2003, p.11.

6Those who would attempt to vilify The Passion through ad hominem attacks on its director have their answer here.

8John Drury, Painting the Word, Yale University Press, 1999, p.175.

9Stefano Zuffi, Gospel Figures in Art, trans. by Thomas Michael Hartmann, Getty Publications, 2003, p.116.

11Alexander Nagel, Michelangelo and the Reform of Art, Cambridge University Press, 2000, p.150.

13Xavier Bray, Keith Christiansen, Gabriele Finaldi, with contributions by Marcus Burke and Lois Oliver, El Greco, op. cit., p.92.

14Quoted in Gabriele Finaldi, editor, The Image of Christ, National Gallery Company, 2000, p.198.

Home	(Please note: CatholicSchool.org.uk is not responsible for the content of sites linked to from this or any other of its pages.)
	Last updated: 3/9/07
	Prologue
	“[T]he stripping away of the externals of Catholic worship between 1547 and 1553 must often have had a profound if not always conscious effect. . . . [T]he removal of the images of the saints [and] of the altars . . . were ritual acts of deep significance . . . of oblivion.”¹
	Introduction
	The “deep significance” referred to in the above extract from The Stripping of the Altars is made all the clearer if one considers the following definition of what art is:
	“Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. Man's profound need of art lies in the fact that his cognitive faculty is conceptual, i.e., that he acquires [and retains] knowledge by means of abstractions, and needs the power to bring his widest metaphysical abstractions into his immediate perceptual awareness. Art fulfills this need: by means of a selective re-creation, it concretizes man's fundamental view of himself and of existence.”²
	The attempt to destroy British Catholicism through censorship of powerful means of communication such as art and imagery has taken many forms since the violent iconoclasm of the sixteenth-century Protestant Revolt. The present murderous Socialist Government's Communications White Paper (now superseded by the Communications Act 2003), for example, confidently asserts that: “[R]eligious [broadcasting] content has a particular capacity to offend those with different views and opinions, or, sometimes, to exploit the susceptibilities of the vulnerable. Religious issues may also shade into matters of political controversy” (4.9.2). It is interesting to directly compare these antagonistic assertions with the kind of propaganda employed by the National Socialists in Germany³.
	The subconscious impact of such ideological attacks combines well with seemingly more abstract observations in the cultural realm. Since its enemies assert that religion is something incompatible with free thinking, it has often been suggested that the pleasure derived from Catholic art should be explained in a way which separates it from its theological trappings.
	To take but one example, in the book to accompany the El Greco exhibition held at the National Gallery from February to May 2004, Philippe de Montebello and Charles Saumarez Smith, directors respectively of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery, observe that: “Much of the scholarship of the last century has aimed to reverse this divorce of El Greco's art from its context – to counter the myth of El Greco the proto-modern”⁴.
	In the same book, exhibition curator David Davies comments, “It is essential to note that El Greco's commitment to the Catholic faith was unambiguous. On his death bed, making his testament, he affirmed, in conformity with Catholic practice: 'I believe and confess in all that which the Holy Mother Church of Rome believes and confesses and in the mystery of the Holy Trinity in whose faith and belief I profess to live and die as a good faithful Catholic Christian'”⁵.

	“Christendom's most beautiful churches”
	Michael S. Rose, author of Goodbye, Good Men (Regnery, 2002), has located some magnificent photographs of Church architecture for his Web site dellachiesa.com. The first link to Notre Dame de Paris does not appear to work; however, here is the link to a head-spinning 360° view outside the Cathedral at night. (You may be asked if you want to install Apple's QuickTime player software.)

	Selected Examples of Catholic Art in Modern Britain
	One of the remarkable accomplishments of the enormously successful film, The Passion of the Christ (2004), is director Mel Gibson's fusion of the traditional Catholic iconography of this subject with an acute awareness of the artistic sensibilities of contemporary audiences. Not content with relaying a mere sequence of events, Gibson exploits current audio-visual techniques and technologies, with the kind of restraint that comes with higher artistic purpose, in order to explore the theological significance of the redemptive and salvific rôle of God-the-Son-made-man that puts that sequence of events at the centre of human history⁶.
	There follows a selection of similarly inspired works, housed in British galleries and museums, which equally illustrate the enduring modernity of the eternal and unchanging Truth.
	Velazquez, The Immaculate Conception, National Gallery, London
	Source
	Like most Catholic imagery, there is an iconic convention or code attaching to the subject of Our Lady's conception without the stain (Latin, macula) of original sin. Its source, in this case, is the Apocalypse of St. John, chapter 12: And a great sign appeared in heaven: A woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars⁷.
	Commentary
	“Velazquez's brilliant achievement is to provide handsomely and without reserve for the devotion of the faithful while at the same time giving free rein to his own humane realism and unsparing severity. Here is a Mary as individual as Caravaggio's Christ at Emmaus, 'all fair' with an entirely ungeneralised and unconventional beauty. This is somebody – bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh like the Eve whose sin she cancels”⁸.
	Leonardo da Vinci, The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Saint John the Baptist, National Gallery, London
	Source
	“It is interesting to note that the canonical Gospels never mention Jesus' grandmother. The figure of Saint Anne . . . is described only in the apocryphal tradition, particularly the Protevangelium attributed to James.”⁹
	Commentary
	“Mary is seated on Anne's knee. This pose places Leonardo's work – although revolutionary in many ways – within the iconographic tradition of “Metterza.” The word comes from medieval Latin . . . : Saint Anne “places [herself] third” ([si] mette per terza) in a group with Mary and Jesus.”¹⁰
	Michelangelo, Madonna and Child (“Bruges Madonna”) (cast), Victoria and Albert Museum, London
	(The image in the above link to the Web Gallery of Art can be clicked on to zoom in. The actual image here is of the original marble sculpture, which is located in the church of Notre Dame, in Bruges.) Commentary
	“[I]n the Bruges Madonna . . . [Michelangelo] placed a forward-facing, standing Christ Child between the Virgin's legs. . . . readapting [the theme of Virgin and Child] toward a Christocentric focus . . . in accordance with the reformist tendencies of his day.”¹¹
	El Greco, Christ driving the Traders from the Temple, National Gallery, London
	Source
	[A]nd Jesus went up to Jerusalem. And he found in the temple them that sold oxen and sheep and doves, and the changers of money sitting. And when he had made, as it were, a scourge of little cords, he drove them all out of the temple, the sheep also and the oxen: and the money of the changers he poured out, and the tables he overthrew. And to them that sold doves he said: Take these things hence, and make not the house of my Father a house of traffic.¹²
	Commentary
	“[A]n overturned table fills the front of the picture space, endowing the composition with a skewed, unsettled quality. . . . The old seated man resting on his basket is . . . Saint Peter: he has the saint's characteristic physiognomy and wears the canonical colours of blue and yellow. The contrast between the figure groups is underscored by the sculpted reliefs above them: on the left is the Expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, signifying the fall of humanity, and on the right is the sacrifice of Isaac . . . foreshadowing the redeeming sacrifice of Christ on the cross. So the traders represent fallen humanity and the Apostles the redeemed. . . . The composition . . . recalls the imagery of the Last Judgment: . . . 'And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left' (Matthew 25:31-4) – and each shall have their proper reward.”¹³
	Salvador Dali, Christ of St. John of the Cross, St. Mungo Museum of Religious Life and Art, Glasgow
	Source
	The inspiration for this picture was a drawing by the Spanish mystic and poet, St. John of the Cross.
	Commentary
	In his own words, Dali claimed, “'My aesthetic ambition in this picture was completely the opposite of all the Christs painted by most modern painters, who have all interpreted him in the expressionistic and contortionistic sense, thus obtaining emotion through ugliness. My principal preoccupation was that my Christ would be beautiful as the God that He is.'”¹⁴
	Guercino, The Incredulity of St. Thomas, National Gallery, London
	Source
	Now Thomas, one of the twelve, who is called Didymus, was not with them when Jesus came. The other disciples therefore said to him: We have seen the Lord. But he said to them: Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails and put my finger into the place of the nails and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.¹⁵
	Commentary
	By the time Guercino came to execute his version of this famous scene, as John Drury observes, “[Protestant] theologians, suspiciously critical of the physicality of transubstantiation, had made Christ's presence in the Mass into a centre of dispute rather than the assurance of unity. . . . The thrust of Thomas's hand, with a finger penetrating the wound, is like the rough hands which grasped at Jesus on the night of his arrest. . . . The similarities are planned and deliberate. The picture is one of a pair. The other, now in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, shows Christ's arrest. . . . The scene with St. Thomas is no longer a serene resolution. It is one more episode in the long tale of the trials and tribulations provoked and suffered by the presence of incarnate God among faithless and benighted humanity, a more than formal counterpart to his arrest”¹⁶.

	(Back to top)