Religious painting

“ Possibly religious painting will not now rise to a second renaissance, but it may nevertheless be assumed that the advance in technical 20knowledge may even be useful in Church paintings, if the painter, in his representation of the Deity and the Saints in their manifestations in heaven or upon earth, would replace the dim, poor, and monotonous light of the studio by a brilliant, clear, sunny atmosphere, and delicate, transparent, airy shadows. ”

“ The portrait of the pope, by our American artist Healy, is undoubtedly the best likeness of the Holy Father in the exposition.
What we said of the statuary we may repeat with equal reason of religious paintings. How easy it would be to adorn our churches and chapels with these books of the eye, one glance at which often teaches more than a sermon. The artists at home capable of producing a religious painting worthy of being placed in a church are few, perhaps might be counted on one's fingers. ”

“ It is by no means necessary that the painter of religious subjects should be an ascetic, nor even what is commonly called a religious man, but it is necessary that he should import into his work some of the spirit of Christianity, just as it is necessary for the painter of pagan heroes and nymphs to imbue himself with the spirit of classical art until it becomes a second nature to him. ”

“ The court of France was devoted to pomp and pleasure, and sculpture was used for the glorification of the leaders in all its follies. In one sense this is more agreeable than the art in Italy which we have been considering, for nothing can be more disagreeable than a false religious sentiment in art; it is only when the artist is filled with true devotion and feels deeply in his own soul all that he tries to express in his work that religious representations can appeal to us agreeably or benefit us by their influence. ”

“ But as painting became more of an art, and grew to represent domestic scenes and portraits, artists broke from the confinement of mere religious subjects, or treated them in a mundane manner. Then it was that their imagination so degenerated, that they had recourse to portraits to represent Christ, the Virgin, and the Saints; some of them even fell so far from the ideal of sinless chastity, as to paint their mistresses and women of unworthy life; offering to the worship of the pious, the image of mere physical beauty, without the superior grandeur of moral excellence. ”

“ When enlightenment came, people began to doubt the spiritual power of the Papacy. They did not cringe to it so servilely as before. Religion was not violently embraced as in the Middle Ages, but there was no revolt. The Church held the power and was still the patron of art. The painter's subjects extended over nature, the antique, the fable, allegory, history, portraiture; but the religious subject was not neglected. Fully three-quarters of all the fifteenth-century painting was done for the Church, at her command, and for her purposes.
But art was not so wholly pietistic as in the Gothic age. ”

“ The dislike of images used as objects of worship did not include mere chamber 45decorations, and while independent sculpture found no footing in the Christian world, or at least was applied only to secular and not to religious uses, painting, on the other hand, found encouragement for purely decorative purposes, in the execution of which a characteristically Christian element began to assert itself by degrees. ”

“ And there is another mighty truth which you all know, that he who makes religion his first object, makes it his whole object; he has no other work in the world than God's work. Therefore I do not say that ancient art was more religious than modern art. There is no question of degree in this matter. Ancient art was religious art; modern art is profane art; and between the two the distinction is as firm as between light and darkness.
121. Now, do not let what I say be encumbered in your minds with the objection, that you think art ought not to be brought into the service of religion. ”

“ Effective religious art, therefore, has always lain, and I believe must always lie, between the two extremes—of barbarous idol-fashioning on one side, and magnificent craftsmanship on the other. It consists partly in missal painting, and such book-illustrations as, since the invention of printing, have taken its place; partly in glass-painting; partly in rude sculpture on the outsides of buildings; partly in mosaics ”

“ Starting from that earliest phase of pure spirituality and piety, an art whose aim was wholly absorbed in the expression of such religious emotions, painting proceeded more and more to associate the external life of the world with its religious subject-matter. ”

“ The general motive, then, of painting during the High Renaissance, though apparently religious from the subject, and in many cases still religious in feeling, was largely to show the beauty of form or color, in which religion, the antique, and the natural came in as modifying elements. ”

“ The Church, however, thus having educated people to understand painting as a language and to look to it for the expression of their sincerest feelings, could not hope to keep it always confined to the channel of religious emotion. ”

“ In those lands where religion and the arts go hand in hand, and where the inspiration which guides the painter and the architect is the same that draws the believer to the foot of the altar, it often happens that a glance at a fresco or painting aids the soul more than a sermon in its upward flight, and in accomplishing the very act for which it is prostrate before God. ”

“ And the beauty came, not from without, but like the beauty of the lily it came from the inner growth outward.
The renaissance was not confined to painting; it was the awakening of soul, gifted with new vision, new thought, and looking higher for its inspiration. No wonder painting was considered a divine art. Artists brought a scripture knowledge to their work in chapel, church, wall and window. No immoral person was permitted to work on any sacred edifice. ”

“ The reverence which long ages of worship caused the archaic statues to receive induced the priests, who were the representatives of learning and of wisdom, to make these old types symbolical of divine attributes, and it was considered sacrilegious to attempt to alter what had gradually come to be believed was the true likeness of the god. Thus religion, which was the kind foster-mother of the arts of sculpture and painting, came, later on, to be its most determined enemy. ”

“ As among the painters, so among the musicians, there is an entirely false idea as to the proper manner of treating religious subjects. Painters think, that in truly Christian subjects, the figures must be represented with cramped, narrow contours, and in forms as bleached and colourless as possible ”

“ These various considerations may help to explain why in all ages of the world the arts have been the handmaidens of religion. Not to amplify too much, I have confined these considerations to the three arts of music, painting, and poetry; but they are also applicable to sculpture and architecture. All are attempts by men of vision to interpret to the men who are not equally endowed with vision, what the invisible world about us and within us has for the enrichment of our lives. This is exactly the function of religion: to enrich human lives by making them acquainted with the infinite. ”

“ But if a painter is himself religious; if he feels God in what he is looking at, and in what he is rendering back on his canvas; if he is impressed with the truly divine beauty, infinity, perfection, and meaning of unspoiled material nature—the earth and the fulness thereof, the heaven and all its hosts, the strength of the hills, the sea and all that is therein; if he is himself impressed with the divine origin and divine end of all visible things,—then will he paint religious pictures and impress men religiously, and thus make good men listen, and possibly make bad men good. ”

“ Painting is the art of soul impressions. Everything great, noble, and refined can be better expressed on the canvas than in marble.” The Christian muse, therefore, naturally took to painting. Hence on the walls in the catacombs we find the first efforts of the Christian painters. ”

“ Have painting and sculpture sought to represent objects of refining grace and sublimity? the church of Christ persuaded them to look into the records of the Christian past, and there they found treasures of beauty and splendor, devotion and martyrdom, whose wealth of illustration as examples; incentives, and memorials, art has not exhausted for centuries, and will never exhaust. Christian history is the inexhaustible quarry of whatever is most noble and heroic in man, purified by the grace of God. Has architecture sought to invest stone with the attributes of spiritual and intellectual grace? ”

“ If an artist sometimes produced a picture of the Virgin possessing warmth enough to excite devotional feelings, it was probably the object of his earthly love, to whom he thus paid the stupendous and fearful homage of setting up her portrait to be worshipped, not figuratively as a mortal, but by religious souls in their earnest aspirations towards divinity. ”

“ We find, indeed, in these writers a marked tendency to exalt the religious value of natural beauty, and to disparage the function of art—a premonition, perhaps, of iconoclasm. Pagan art, which was decaying before the advent of Christ, could not, it appears, be quietly Christianised and carried on without a break. ”

“ Whatever there is of literary merit, of philosophic thought, or of poetic depth in the Bible is incidental.
There is the conserved spiritual force of Christian art. The masterpieces in painting, sculpture, music, poetry, and architecture are Christian. ”

“ I worship the beautiful. The pagans' highest expression of beauty which moved the world was in sculpture—cold and pure marble of divine form. That awakened their emotions; one reads they had a number of emotions. The Renaissance people, to take a medium time, expressed themselves by painting glorious colors on flat canvas ”

“ If it were possible in these days, when religious art assumes the most fantastic forms, to create ever so slight a re-action against a school which has perhaps held its own too long—if it were not heresy to set forth as the noblest aim for a painter, that he should depict the deepest emotion, the simplest faith, the most heartfelt devotion, without the accessories of purple and fine linen, without marble columns or gilded shrines, without furniture, without Madonnas and without paste—then we might point confidently to the picture before us to aid our words. ”

“ What, then, is the difference between the two kinds of glass? It is not that the one is ecclesiastical the other secular, the one religious the other profane art. “Sacred Art” is a term consecrated by use; but, strictly speaking, it is a meaningless combination of words, signifying, if it signify anything, that the speaker confounds the art of telling with the thing told. Art has no more a religion than it has a country. No doubt there clings always to the art of the devout believer some fervour of faith, as there may hang about the sceptic’s doing a chill of doubt. ”

“ We are therefore not surprised to find that both the arts of sculpture and painting have been peculiarly fitted to incorporate under ideal form not merely the ancient gods, but Christ as saviour of the world, and individual apostles and saints. That which is the most essential truth in actual life is concentrated to a focus on itself in the determinate embodiment of art, rather than continually forced from its serenity through dependence upon finite conditions. ”

“ It is not the best music, as such, that I want for my divine offices, any more than I wish my priests to decorate the walls of my churches with the chefs-d'œuvre of painting and sculpture simply because they are masterpieces of art. I certainly want, and rejoice to possess, the best that is suitable in art, whether of melody, painting, or sculpture, and even of scientific discovery or invention ”

“ Art and Religion are, then, two roads by which men escape from circumstance to ecstasy. Between aesthetic and religious rapture there is a family alliance. Art and Religion are means to similar states of mind. And if we are licensed to lay aside the science of aesthetics and, going behind our emotion and its object, consider what is in the mind of the artist, we may say, loosely enough, that art is a manifestation of the religious sense. ”

“ This indwelling light of the soul should be recognised in every creation of his pencil, expressive as a spoken word; and in this lies the peculiar vitality of Christian beauty, and the cause of the remarkable difference between Classic and Christian art." "Physical beauty is employed by the Christian painter but as a material veil, from beneath which the hidden divinity of the soul shines forth, illuminating all mortal life with the higher spirituality of love." ”

“ In painting, though there were some portraits and allegorical scenes produced during the Gothic period, the chief theme was Bible story. The Church was the patron, and art was only the servant, as it had been from the beginning. It was the instructor and consoler of the faithful, a means whereby the Church made converts, and an adornment of wall and altar. It had not entirely escaped from symbolism. It was still the portrayal of things for what they meant, rather than for what they looked. There was no such thing then as art for art's sake. It was art for religion's sake. ”