Reflecting the Hierarchy of Being in Visual Art

Or... Why How We Paint Christ Ought to Dictate How We Paint Everything

In this exploration of Christian art, I summarise the hierarchy of being according to Catholic theology, rooted in Thomistic philosophy of nature, which orders creation from inanimate matter, through plant life, animal life, and humanity, all directing us to Christ, the Creator, who is both perfect man and God. Authentic Christian art [1], shaped by a Catholic worldview and centuries of sacred tradition, reflects this hierarchy by balancing naturalism and idealism, uniting the material and spiritual dimensions of existence. As I explain, traditionally, this balance is first perfected in depictions of Christ, whose dual nature as divine and human sets the standard for all artistic representation. From liturgical icons to secular landscapes, Christian art organically reveals the Creator’s presence, bearing the mark of Christ in every aspect of creation. 

In writing this, as is always necessary in the blog format, I have made assertions that some might feel need justification. I have added numbered footnotes (in square brackets) with further reading for those who wish to delve further in this regard.

The Mocking of Christ, 1628-30, by the Flemish Baroque artist Sir Anthony Van Dyck

Naturalism and Idealism in Christian Art

Traditionally, Christian art has balanced naturalism – conformity to visual appearances – with idealism, a partial abstraction that deviates from strict adherence to visual appearances to suggest the existence of invisible truths associated with whatever is painted [2]. 

With the emergence of the dominant modern art movements of the 20th century, through to the present day, artists have typically rejected this approach, instead leaning toward one extreme or the other. Abstract Expressionism [3], for example, dissolves form into unrecognisable chaos, seeking to portray the soul detached from the body. At the other extreme, Photorealism, with its mechanical precision, reduces reality to mere matter, neglecting the spiritual dimension and presenting a world devoid of meaning. Both approaches conflict with the Catholic understanding of creation as a harmonious union of material and spiritual elements. 

Authentic Christian art integrates naturalism – ensuring subjects are recognisable – with idealism, stylising forms to convey invisible truths, such as the presence of a principle of animation in animal and plant life.

This balance is most fully realised in depictions of Christ [4], who, as the Creed states, is the one through whom “all things were made.” As both divine and human, Christ embodies the ultimate union of the created and the uncreated world. In the Eucharist, where He is present – body, soul, and divinity – liturgical art, designed to deepen our encounter with Him, becomes the highest form of Christian artistic expression. The style used to portray Christ, especially in liturgical contexts, sets the standard for all art, reflecting His dual nature and His role as the source of creation.

Crucifixion by Velázquez, 17th-century Spanish, in the Baroque style.

The Hierarchy of Being – How all created beings bear the mark of Christ, and the importance of this to artists.

Catholic theology recognises a hierarchy of being within creation, with Christ, its Creator, at the apex.

Christ possesses an immaterial divine nature and a human nature comprising both a material body and an immaterial, immortal soul. This Christology reveals Him as the node through which all created beings pass, uniting the material and spiritual in His person. We all unite the material body and the created spiritual soul in our human person. Christ unites this human nature to his uncreated (and therefore Divine) purely spiritual nature. He straddles, so to speak, the divide between heaven and earth. The divide he straddles is between divine and human nature, that is, uncreated and created existence. All of creation bears his mark, his thumbprint is on them as the clay pot bears the mark of the hands of the potter, but the fullness of being – created and uncreated is in Christ alone. All other created beings bear aspects of Christ without possessing existence in its fullness as Christ does. Christ is one with us in His humanity and one with God in His divinity.

Humanity is unique among material beings, possessing both a body and an immortal spiritual soul. The spirit of man, which St. Paul refers to in his letters to the Ephesians and the Hebrews, is the highest aspect of his soul, comprising the intellect and will (according to St Thomas writing in his commentaries on the Epistles), distinguishing humans from animals and all other material beings, and likening us to angels. [5] Angels are created beings, too, but are pure spirit. The reference to the spirit of man names the spiritual faculties of the soul, by which he can be taken up to supernatural destiny. It gives us the capacity for self-awareness – being “aware that we are aware” – and enables spiritual acts such as knowing and loving God, through the full exercise of the intellect and the will. The human soul, immaterial and immortal, survives bodily death and allows humans to engage in rational and volitional acts that animals, with their sensitive souls, which we will refer to in a moment, cannot perform.

The paragraph above describes man’s natural state, but through this capacity of the human spirit to relate and respond to God, Christians have the potential to be raised to a higher state by grace. Through grace, we are deified, partaking of the divine nature. This process is fully realised when we are united to God in heaven, experiencing the beatific vision, and, by degrees, increasing degrees in this life, to the extent that we remain on that path to heaven.

Below man in the hierarchy of being, animals possess what is referred to as a sensitive soul, enabling sensation and movement, but not the capacity to know and love God, which are the higher operations of the intellect and will present in the spirit of man.

Plant life, which sits below animals, has a vegetative soul, governing growth, nutrition, and reproduction, but lacking sensation and movement in the manner of animals.

Inanimate matter, though lacking a soul, which is the principle that gives life to those beings above it, nevertheless reflects the divine order through its conformity to the natural order in its internal structure, which we perceive when we apprehend its beauty. All created beings have an essence (from God) that gives them their defining characteristics. For living beings, that essence is called the soul. All inanimate beings have an essence (which, without ‘life’, is not called soul). Every created essence (with existence) reflects its Creator.

All creation, therefore, to varying degrees, bears the mark of Christ, its Creator. Each being possesses the faculties of all those below them in the hierarchy, with some additional higher faculties that distinguish the higher from the lower beings. Therefore, the human soul includes the powers of the vegetative and sensitive soul. These are assumed by the ‘higher’ soul and are raised to a human level. The one spiritual soul of man is the ‘form’ of the whole body. We are not an amalgam of different souls.

The beauty of the natural created order is in both his material body and his spiritual soul because they are both part of the created order. We perceive both when we interact with each other, and it is the duty of the artist who is devoted to representing what is true to indicate this somehow in the way he paints man.

Crucifixion by Federico Barocci, Italian, late 16th century, in the Baroque style.

This hierarchy of being informs a parallel hierarchy in Christian art. The style developed for depicting the person of Christ as a man – balancing naturalism and idealism – serves as the model for portraying saints, religious subjects, and secular forms, such as portraits, landscapes, and still lifes. Whether painting a saint or a flower, the Christian artist looks to Christ for inspiration and applies principles derived from liturgical art to each piece, ensuring that every work reflects Christ in a way that is appropriate to its subject and is rooted in and points to the Creator. Each subject, therefore, reflects this balance of naturalism and idealism as defined by the representation of the Creator.

The Eucharist as the Wellspring of Christian Culture

The Eucharist, where Christ is truly present, is the source and summit of the Catholic faith and fittingly the primary inspiration for Christian art. Liturgical art, therefore, particularly in Eucharistic contexts, shapes our approach to the mystery of God.

The purpose of liturgical art is to make visible in an image the realities that are otherwise invisible to us, to help us encounter Christ more profoundly in the Mass. Christ is present in the Eucharist, but under the appearance of bread and wine. Sacred art can sit alongside the Blessed Sacrament and show us Christ and, one might even say, supply in some reduced way the missing accidents – ie the outward appearance – of the person of Christ. This helps us grasp the mystery that Christ is present, body, soul, and divinity, in the Eucharist.

Similarly, liturgical art portrays the saints and angels in heaven who participate in the Mass, praying and worshipping alongside us, but are invisible to us. It also portrays the essential narratives of the feasts celebrated in the liturgical cycle and reflected in the rituals of the liturgy, in a way that makes the theological truths associated with the memorial more apparent.

Just as there is a hierarchy of being in the cosmos, so for men there is a hierarchy of activity, which has the worship of God at its pinnacle. Hence, by a similar argument, the form and content of art intended to help us encounter Christ in the Mass become the type for all art. That is, once again, the style used to paint Christ in these settings thus becomes the archetype for all artistic expression, manifesting His body, soul, and divinity.

The style with which we paint Christ for use in the liturgy becomes, therefore, the wellspring of Catholic art, with the stylistic elements cascading down into art for every other subject and every other purpose, as all, in the proper order of things, is derived from and points to Christ present in the Eucharist.

An authentic Christian tradition of art reflects this hierarchy of being and of human activity. An icon of Christ Pantocrator, with its stylised features and golden background, conveys His divine authority, while a Baroque painting of the Crucifixion, with dramatic chiaroscuro, emphasises His human suffering. Although each is very different in style, both unite naturalism and idealism to reveal Christ’s dual nature, guiding the faithful in worship [6]. This Eucharistic foundation extends to secular art. A landscape, with its harmonious compositions, or a still life of flowers, with its attention to natural beauty and symbolic meaning, reflects the same divine order seen in Christ.

The Baroque Style of Painting is Permeated with the Mark of Christ

To illustrate what I have described, let’s consider the Christian tradition of Baroque art. To be distinguished from other naturalistic styles that many this is the art of Frederico Barocci, Caravaggio, Vermeer, De La Tours, Velazquez, Rubens, Ribera, Reni and Tiepolo and Rembrandt and should be distinguished from other naturalistic styles such as Photorealism and 19th-century Realism (such as the work of Bougeureau, whom I consider the godfather of sentimental Catholic kitsch that became the standard for mid-20th century prayer cards).

This style of art was given impetus by some simple directives from the Council of Trent, which closed in 1565, and the Catholic Counter-Reformation that followed, aimed at serving the worship of the faithful in the liturgy. It took several decades for these directives to take hold and for a response to emerge concretely. The tradition evolved from the styles of the masters of the High Renaissance and other notable 16th-century painters, particularly Titian. The result of this integration was a distinctive new style developed first to serve Christian worship. What began as liturgical art, however, quickly became the standard for portraiture, landscape, and still life.

Protestant artists took to this new Catholic art form, too. The Dutch artists to the north of Italy, especially, saw this liturgical art style and, attracted by its power and beauty, quickly adapted it to their purposes, focusing especially on devotional religious art, portraiture and landscape, inadvertently bringing a Catholic form into their Protestant Christian culture.

Caravaggio is credited with popularising the style, beginning around 1600, but perhaps a better articulation of what became the baroque style was done slightly earlier by another Italian, Federico Barocci. (His first name is Federico, not Frederico!) Consider this painting, which depicts St. Jerome and was created in 1598.

Crucifixion by Federico Barocci, Italian, late 16th century, in the Baroque style.

I have never read any historical account that confirms this, but I have often wondered if the mysterious name for the style, baroque, is in part a play on Federico’s surname. Indeed, his work of this period bears all the hallmarks of the tradition and was pioneering. Notice certain features that are the hallmarks of baroque art, and consider that this is not a photographic type representation of nature at all:

The figure of St Jerome is painted with the most naturalistic coloration and is most brightly lit, most detailed in its rendering and most sharply focused. All of these devices are designed to draw the eye to the most important part of the composition.

He draws attention to the figure, further, by contrast with the background for which he uses a limited palette, in this case, one colour, sepia and which he varies tonally only. There is very little detail in the rendition of the background compared to, say, the face of St Jerome. Notice how the brightest colours are in the cloth next to St Jerome. And the sharpest contrast in tone is between the line that is on the edge of his right elbow and traces its way along his shoulder to a sharp point under the right ear. This leads our eye to the face. See also how this contrast is sharpened by making the background very dark immediately adjacent to this edge.

The focus, that is, the sharpness and clarity of expression, varies in different parts of the painting, too. The least focused parts are those on the periphery, and the most focused are those in the primary point of interest, the face and the hands of the saint. These are the primary points of interest within the saint because the face and gesture communicate most powerfully the mood of the person. This is how the artist communicates to the viewer of the painting that this is not a sterile wax model, but a living being with a soul. Ordinarily, we would discern this by observing a person in real time.

We see the same stylistic vocabulary in Rembrandt’s famous self-portrait:

…in a landscape by the Dutch 17th-century artist Albert Cuyp;

And in a still life by the French 18th-century artist Chardin:

To summarise, Christian artistic tradition, as exemplified by the Baroque, in art conforms to the principle that the way we paint Christ is the way we paint all of creation. By balancing naturalism and idealism, Christian art, especially in its liturgical forms, reveals the unity of material and spiritual. From those forms intended to help deepen the encounter with Christ in the Eucharist, the source and summit of the faith, flows a cascade of artistic expression that shapes sacred and secular art alike. Whether depicting a saint, a landscape, or a still life, the artist draws from the same principles used to portray Christ, ensuring that every work bears the mark of the Creator and invites the viewer to contemplate the beauty and truth of the Catholic faith.

Footnotes:

1. Art is not Christian simply because a Christian painted it, or because some Christians like it. There are criteria by which we can say that the content and form are consistent with the Catholic worldview. Regarding how we make a judgment on how both style and content of art conform to a Catholic worldview, read my book, The Way of Beauty, and for an introduction a past Substack: ‘Eastward Ho! How The Catholic Church Can Reestablish Its Liturgical Art Traditions to Replicate and Even Surpass the Glory of the Past.’

2. For details on how Christian art balances naturalism and idealism, read my previous Substack article, Both the Chaos of Jackson Pollock and the Sterility of Photorealism are Incompatible with Christianity.

3. For definitions of Abstract Expressionism and Photorealism, the 20th century art movements, I refer readers to the Tate Modern website, which as a museum that advocates for the value of such styles (unlike me), I will take as representing accurately what artists in those styles were aiming for.

4. For the conventions on how paintings of Christ reveal his human and divine nature, read a recent Substack article: ‘Visual Odes to Joy: How Sacred Art Reveals the Body, Soul and Divinity of Christ.’

5. St Thomas uses the word ‘spiritus’ to describe the human spirit. There is a tradition in Orthodox theology of using the Greek word, nous, to refer to the human spirit. Originating in ancient Greek thought, nous generally means “mind,” but in this context, it is usually used in the sense of “intellect,” or “reason”. For Aquinas, the will and intellect, which comprise the spirit, are not two separate “things”. The will is simply the appetite that flows from, and corresponds to, intellectual apprehension. This is why St. Thomas calls the will the “rational appetite,” which is the appetitive movement towards goodness apprehended by the intellect. The use of the word “nous” in the East to refer to this rational part in man is fitting, therefore, and, it seems to me, consistent with St Thomas’ approach.

6. For details on why the three liturgical traditions of the Catholic Church are considered the Iconographic, the Gothic and the Baroque styles, and how each balances naturalism and idealism, read my book The Way of Beauty.

Worship Spaces vs. Liturgical Dwellings: Church Architecture’s Subtle Language

Last week ago I spoke about William Daniel’s treatment in his book Christ the Liturgy of the meaning of leitorugia as “work of the One for the many” (instead of its mistranslation as “work of the people”). Today I wish to look at some of his insights about church architecture, which are mainly found in chapter 3 — a searching (and often entertaining) inquiry which argues convincingly for traditional ecclesial design from the vantage of modern philosophy and psychology intersecting with biblical and patristic verities.

Daniel is uncompromising about what is at stake in how we build our churches:

The spatial structures we inhabit and the practices by which we inhabit them, as well as those with whom we relate in our environments, are modalities of contingency that incline us to perceive, and thereby understand, what it means to be (alive). (88)

He rejects the idea that architecture could ever be a neutral space, a mere “placeholder.” Even the most empty warehouse already communicates a purpose and a spirit that affects what takes place within it and the people who go there.

Researchers have only recently begun to explore the impact of architecture on the human psyche. What is interesting, however, is that without digging too far beneath the surface to understand the long-term effects of space on human cognition, we know that people’s behavior changes in relation to the space they inhabit. For instance, Jan Gehl has observed that people walk more quickly in front of buildings with blank facades. James Danckert and Colleen Merrifield have found in their work on cognitive neuroscience that people who visually take in a “boring” environment, for instance the plain frontage of a Wal-Mart store or the shadowy glass exterior of a Whole Foods, develop increased levels of cortisol, the stress hormone related to heart disease and diabetes. 8 Not only this, but Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb has discovered that rats living in enriched environments are markedly more intelligent than those that live in more “Spartan” environs…. [H]ow does the space “work on” the worshipper, even, or especially, under the radar of human awareness? (91-92)

He gives many examples, based on research, of how even something as simple as the material and design of chairs and desks affect the mood and productivity of workers. Natural materials such as wood, and the presence of live plants, play a role in maintaining better spirits than obviously artificial materials and a solely man-made environment. In a way this seems obvious when stated, but that which “goes without saying” is very often nowadays simply ignored or denied.

While our individual personalities and habits may work with or fight against such spatial configurations, it is inevitable that the places we inhabit will over time affect our patterns of life, thereby conditioning us to perceive the world and others in relation to their warmth or coldness. (98)

Moving into the ecclesiastical realm, Daniel describes a High Church Anglican chapel, St. Mary the Virgin of Nashotah House Theological Seminary, where he studied for the ministry, and which he obviously found a “warm” space:

Those who inhabit the space as the dwelling place of God, where a person can see, hear, touch, taste, and smell God, experience the connective tissue of the wood, incense, bread, wine, water, chanting, stained glass and much more as a space of freedom, where scales fall from the eyes, burdens fall from the shoulders, and peace is made manifest, not as restrictive but restorative, transformative, extending one’s very body beyond itself as worshippers stand amidst the great cloud of witnesses whose prayers are still savored today.
          Not every liturgical space provides access to this divine, connective tissue. And while I in no way intend to limit the kyriake oikia to the physical structure itself, which too would betray the making involved in the Lord’s house, I seek to wonder here for a moment whether the empty space of the warehouse or strip mall church can be said to be a dwelling place for God, in the sense of ligare noted by David Jones. That is, is cylinder block or drywall conducive to liturgy? Does the warehouse afford the worshipper an attachment to the space of liturgy beyond the scheduled act of worship? If a person walked into the room would it be clear what the space is for, or are such spaces an inadvertent cutting of the ligament that binds the human physically to the celestial, giving way to a kind of spiritual atrophy? (103-4) 

St Mary the Virgin at Nashotah House

 

Mars Hill Bible Church

A rhetorically effective contrast is developed between St. Mary the Virgin and the “Mars Hill Bible Church” in Grand Rapids — a typical multi-purpose Protestant set-up with a stage platform and movie-theatre-like chairs, whose frequenters even nicknamed it “the Shed.”

The minimalist design of the space communicates to the worshipper that while worship does occur inside it remains detached from the building itself. In other words, the space is not a space meant to be inhabited; it is not a place of dwelling. If a person were to walk into the Shed at any other time, there would be no visible markers or signs that allow one to recognize it as a place where worship occurs...
          The contrast between the Chapel of St. Mary the Virgin and the Shed are profound. The former is a space designed to be inhabited by both worshipper and worship, a building that is itself involved in the liturgical action. The latter is transitory by design, which houses a temporary action separable from the space and, perhaps, the worshipper herself. The difference is between inhabiting a space and enacting something within a space. What is missing from the warehouse church is a deep connection with what the Christian worshipper believes and thinks — the tangibility of faith. The visceral sense of the space is impermanent. Its homogenous character neither requires anything from nor offers anything to its occupants. (105) 

Interestingly, the author pivots to a well-known sociological phenomenon — namely, that most people in the Western world, even agnostics and cultural Christians, seek “traditional”-looking churches for weddings — and offers an explanation for it:

It is telling that many who worship in these [“Bible church”] spaces refuse to be married in them. When couples desire a “church wedding,” more often than not they inquire at another local church that “looks like a church,” or they have their wedding outdoors. Why? Because marriage, something intended for a lifetime, needs a permanent space for vows to feel permanent. The temporary space of the abandoned store signals to young couples that their marriage may not last. The expressed desires are “good wedding pictures,” “memories in a holy place,” and “for it to feel like a church wedding.” The message hidden from a couples’ immediate awareness is the need to feel like God is present for their wedding and that their covenant will last. To be and to dwell, as Heidegger notes, are inseparable. (ibid.) 

Returning to the contrast between the Anglican chapel and the Shed, Daniel draws out further implications.

The major difference between the two spaces of worship noted above is that one, the Chapel at Nashotah, is incorporated daily in the making of Holy Eucharist, while I cannot say if this ever occurs at Mars Hill. The irony is that the name Mars Hill invokes a somewhat sacred site, where the Apostle Paul preaches before an altar dedicated to “the Unknown God.” One might speculate that Mars Hill in Grand Rapids bears the marks of an Unknown God, given its lack of symbolism or anything that might disclose the space as Christian. Perhaps the name is deliberate to invoke Paul’s mission to speak amidst the false god of consumer capitalism, witnessed by the abandoned storefront. Nevertheless, the Eucharist — the sacramental action whereby God creates the church — is that which makes any space a space of dwelling. For this reason it is easy to recognize a space that has been designed by and for Eucharistic action. These are not temporary structures separable from the liturgy, even if they lend themselves to more than just prayer and the breaking of bread. Rather, these are eternal structures created by and for an eternal action, an action that remains present even when the building is empty of its people, because it is separable neither from the people who worship there, nor the God whose action the building and people inhabit. (106) 

Then he asks the provocative question: “If worship occurs in a space that conveys temporariness, is the worshipper inclined by the space to treat the liturgical action as temporary?... A utilitarian space breeds a utilitarian liturgy” (107).
 

After a fascinating analysis of tools, economics, and alienation from the process of production (it would no doubt be too Marxist for some, but it seemed to me spot-on, in the vein of William Cavanaugh), Daniel returns to his main theme, this time weaving in a metaphor from viticulture:

Terroir in French has to do specifically with wine making, yet in a deeply cultural sense of the taste of a place, gout de terroir. For this reason, it is actually illegal to label a wine with the name Burgundy if it is not from Burgundy, France. Burgundy is at once the wine and the place; the two are inseparable. The gout de terroir draws the deep connection that the soil and the hands that work it are inseparable from the taste of the wine. In other words, the wine — its fullness of taste and heightening of the senses — cannot be separated from any of the environmental circumstances within which it is produced.
          In like manner, Christian liturgy is inseparable from the space and people intervolved in the action, all of which are intervolved in what we might call the grammar of God. We might even go so far as to call it the gout de Dieu, as it is in, by, and through the Eucharistic space that the worshipper learns what it means to taste and see that the Lord is good. The taste of the place, the smell, the touch, the sights and sounds of the kyriake oikia are all a language that conditions perception in the worshipper as she is spoken into being through them and called to attention by them, as the unspoken language demands not words but, perhaps, silence. (118-19) 

We must continue to develop such tools of analysis for explaining why our traditional church designs are objectively superior and necessary, and cannot be written off as habitual and sentimental models to which we are lazily attached and for which we ought to find (or be content with) “modern” substitutes. If Christ the Liturgy is correct in its argumentation, there can be serious negative psychological and spiritual effects of bad church architecture — and this is before we even broach more properly theological and liturgical questions.

St Albert the Great and the Philosopher’s Stone ... Bloodstone

Following an earlier article about natural pigments, I was contacted by a reader (h/t Nancy, you know who you are!) who has trained as a botanical watercolorist, and who explained how the choice of natural pigments aids the process of imitating natural colors. She mentioned a pigment I had not come across before called bloodstone. She wrote: 

Having taken numerous botanical art watercolor courses there is always discussion of limited palettes and of course, the artist is always striving to match the colors of nature perfectly in this art form which is partly scientific. I recently discovered that Daniel Smith watercolor has a large line of mineral-based watercolor paints called Primatek. These include Lapis Lazuli and many other beautiful and completely natural paints. One that I purchased is Bloodstone which was cherished by Christians as being almost mystical. It is made from the bloodstone which is a dark green stone with spots of red said to have come from or resemble the drops of blood which Christ shed.

Bloodstone is a mineral also known as heliotrope, a conglomerated mineral that consists of silicon dioxide (quartz) in the form of jasper, with red inclusions of iron oxide.

Raw bloodstone

Polished bloodstone

It is described by St Albert the Great in the way that Nancy has described. The Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy entry on St Albert states: 

Albert’s Treatise on Minerals shows that he undertakes his own observations and did not merely collate authorities on the topic. He studies different kinds of minerals and metals as well as rare stones. Beginning with the mineral kingdom, he notes the properties of each mineral specimen, including where it was found along with its cause or causes. Next, he deals with rare stones, investigating the powers of these specimens along with their causes. He then produces an alphabetical list of a large number of these more precious stones. Throughout the treatise, Albert is careful always to proceed from the effects or properties of the mineral world to hypotheses concerning their causes. It is clear from his text that he himself made a number of studies (experiments) with different minerals.

In this treatise, he calls it the Stone of Babylon and quotes Pliny, the Elder, who attributed “magical” properties to the mineral. In fact, some of these properties, such as stemming blood flow, are quite reasonable, given that, as Wikipedia points out, iron oxide is an astringent. Albert the Great was in fact not one to accept such sources uncritically, as the above entry explains, and was a leading figure in developing a systematic approach to natural philosophy in the modern era - what we call today natural science.

There is nothing superstitious about attributing a symbolism to its appearance, as Christians did in the past. This is natural. But we must distinguish between this and the attribution of unverified “magical” properties to the mineral. We might flatter ourselves today that we are past the superstition that Albert sought to dispel, but that isn’t so. Do an internet search on bloodstone, and you will find all sorts of New Age accounts of the “crystal’s ” properties that match anything that the Romans or the medieval produced in terms of irrational superstition.

After all this, as a paint pigment, given the mystique attached to it, it is rather a disappointing warm grey-brown used primarily as a wash combined with other colors. The range of colors produced by Daniel Smith is in watercolor and oil and can be viewed here.

Choosing Color: Should We Reject Modern Chemically-Created Pigments?

Some who do not paint might imagine that there is a range of colors available to artists that match everything you see in the world around us. So if you want to paint a landscape, for example, all you have to do is look at what you are painting, compare it with the range of tubes of paint available at the local art store, and select the match.

In fact, it is not as simple as that. The range of colors available as pigments in paint is limited. Paint pigments are inert minerals that are chosen because they are believed to be stable for hundreds of years. (In sacred art, the intention is that they will last until the Second Coming). The pigment should not react chemically with the binding medium, with air, with light, or with any other pigments that they come into contact with. In practice, there is virtually no pigment that fulfills these criteria perfectly - light especially degrades most colors - so one must always make a compromise. It isn’t just a case of extracting the green that is in vegetation and making paint out of it; what might be beautifully colored in lush vegetation does not have the necessary physical properties to be pigment for paint.

One test of whether or not a pigment will degrade with time is to look at its past use. We can look at these frescoes in ancient Pompeii and see that these pigments have lasted. But even then, there is some doubt, because we don’t always know for certain what the colors looked like when they were applied; colors do change and degrade over time and change, even if they remain bright. 

It is a sign of the scarcity of good pigments that occur naturally (and the value that was placed on good color in paintings in the past) that people were prepared to grind a scarce gemstone to create lapis lazuli blue, as we see here in the robe of the Virgin Mary.

Ambrogio Lorenzetti, 1342-44, Siena, Italy

As with any situation in which demand exceeds supply to create scarcity, this creates a drive to find more to bring the cost down. This could involve looking for more natural deposits, or chemically creating new compounds. One of the by-products of the art of alchemy in the Middle Ages was the discovery of new compounds that were suitable for use as pigments. One example is mercuric sulfide - vermillion. The following video was created by the Getty Museum. Vermillion is the orange-red color in the hand-held bowl in the picture below.

As the field of chemistry developed, especially in the 19th century, the pace at which new pigments were discovered increased. This is one of the things that allow bright colors in paintings of the Impressionists, for example. The blue produced by lapis lazuli was called “ultramarine”, which means “beyond the sea”, because it was mined in Afghanistan, beyond the farthest shores of the Mediterranean (relative to Italy). A chemically created imitation of the pigment was developed in France in 1826 and what is generally referred to as “ultramarine blue” today is this artificial pigment.

Lapis lazuli mineral; ground lapis lazuli; and artificial ultramarine blue

I do not use the word “artificial” here in a pejorative sense, but literally, as in “the product of artifice, made by man.” These new colors enhanced artists’ powers to create beauty. The quantity of ultramarine blue in this Impressionist painting, for example, would have made the painting prohibitively expensive prior to the mass production of the blue pigment, and no artist would have attempted such a landscape.

The Silver Veil and the Golden Gate, by Frederick Childe Hassam (American), 1914 

Continue Reading this Article. . .

The Fallacy of the Claim that Christian Art Generally Portrays Christ as a Northern European

Why I think that those who criticize the Christian artistic tradition for always presenting Christ as a northern European are wrong and it reveals a Eurocentric bias in their interpretation of history.

The following first appeared in January 2016. I am reposting it as a response to the recent highly publicized calls in the US by the Marxist left for the destruction of Christian images on the basis of the idea that they promote a white-European stereotype of Christ as a symbol of oppression. Iconoclasm is a heresy that has appeared before, going back many centuries. This particular justification for image destruction is more recent, dating, to my knowledge, only as far as the period of the Marxist theorists of the US who developed their ideas after the Second World War. The accusation that Christians think Christ is white European is false, as a survey of Christian art shows. The claim seems to be based upon an ignorance of art history influenced, ironically, by a Western, Eurocentric bias in the interpretation of history.

The arguments I made four years ago were in response to some newspaper articles which were anti-Christian, but much tamer in their tone than what we are seeing at the moment. Anyway, here is what I wrote:

I have read a number of articles over the years that criticize the traditional representation of Christ as historically inaccurate and exemplary of historical northern European cultural bias.

Twice recently, I have heard this discussion sparked off by the discovery of human remains in the Holy Land which date from the time of Christ, which have allowed scientists to create an image of the person from whom the bones came. The figure that is recreated is, surprise, surprise, olive-skinned and Semitic-looking, and so this indicates, so the logic goes, what Christ would probably have looked like. This being so, it demonstrates how narrow-minded Europeans are, and how culturally narrow Christianity is for portraying Christ as a white Caucasian.

In short, it would be said, Christ didn’t look like this painting by Sir Anthony Van Dyck, as the Church has often represented:

He looked instead more like this scientific reconstruction of a man, developed from a skull discovered in the Holy Land, according to this article.

Here is my reaction: first, if ever there was a concocted news piece, this was one - do we really need the discovery of a skull as evidence that a Jew living in the Middle East about 2,000 years ago might have been dark-skinned and Semitic-looking? I think nearly every Christian today would at least be open to the idea without feeling that their faith was threatened, and it wouldn’t require the discovery of a skull to convince them.

Second, I think that the argument reveals a narrow understanding of the Christian artistic tradition and a lack of appreciation of just how universally inclusive it is. I will acknowledge that there is a tradition of artists who present Christ as their own race, or the race of those for whom the painting is intended. The idea behind this is to encourage people to believe that Christ is a person to whom they can relate on a personal level. This is natural. Sir Anthony Van Dyck, who was northern European and who spent most of his professional life working in England, might very well naturally paint Christ as a northern European. But why shouldn’t he? I feel that it is as reasonable for a European to paint Christ as European as it is for him to be painted as an African for an African congregation, or as Chinese for a Chinese audience, as in this painting:

This desire to portray Christ in a form that the intended viewers will relate to can manifest itself in other ways. This famous crucifixion by Grunewald shows Christ with the open sores of a fungal infection transmitted through rye grain eaten in the bread of 16th-century France. Those who suffered from this horrible disfiguring disease were given care in a hospital, and this painting was made for the chapel in the hospital. The intention was to give them solace by showing that Christ not only bore the pain of their sins, but was suffering with them physically too. 

On the whole, the depiction of Christ in the Christian artistic tradition does look more like the Van Dyck image than anything else. However, what I would contest the idea that this results from a northern European cultural bias. Look at these two images, first this one:

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Painting Created by Artifical Intelligence Sells For $432K. Is This Art?

As a follow up to an earlier piece about the validity of reproductions as art, here is an article about an image produced by three computer developers with no background in art, which sold for a staggering $432,500. AI - artificial intelligence - is the latest fad artist, it seems.

Artificial intelligence is not intelligence as a Catholic would understand the term. I saw recently saw George Gilder (author of Life After Google) talking to Mark Levin about this, and he gave a good explanation as to why. For all the power of the machine to collect and process data, the way in which it does so is limited by the algorithm, which is, in turn, a reflection of the programmer who created it. He is saying in effect, it seemed to me, that because intelligence is a faculty of a spiritual soul, it can’t be in a machine. The idea behind the AI machine exists in the mind of the person who made it, just as the idea behind a work of art exists in the artist who painted it.

Without a spiritual soul, there can be no inspiration, and hence no authentic creativity. The AI machine, therefore, is an artifact and a sophisticated tool in this painting process, and the programmer is the artist.

So is this art? I say yes, perhaps. The artist, in the case of AI-generated paintings, is not the machine, but the programmer or programmers who created it. They can create a good algorithm or a bad one; the test is in the quality of the work that comes out at the end of the process.

My argument is not that the human element isn’t necessary for the creation of art. Rather, it is that the human element is not absent from AI (or from printed reproductions, from photography etc). All of these are just different ways of controlling the production of an image. And just like painting with a brush, the process by which the image is created can potentially produce good or bad art.

Art is the product of artifice, and is by nature artificial. Artificial intelligence, therefore, is a misnomer. It is a creation of the programmer who created the algorithm but it is not in itself creative. AI is artificial like art itself, and the print is an artifact, but AI is not intelligence.

Is this good art? I would say no. Art is as good as it looks, and if it looks good, it is good. And (this is just a personal opinion) I don’t think this is good.

But that could change, perhaps. The prodution of good art by these means would probably require programmers who understand art, and how to instill in the machine a systematic process of pattern recognition and image generation that is in harmony with good art, and thus controlling the image. If, at the end of the process, someone judges the quality before presenting it for sale, perhaps modifying the process in response to improve the image, you have a more authentic artistic process.

I’m not sure it’s worth the effort, but I imagine the programmers in this instance could come up with 432,500 good reasons to do it.

Aidan Hart on How To Make a Mosaic

The English iconographer Aidan Hart has completed a series of wonderful mosaics for St George’s Orthodox Church in Houston, Texas; I have just read this long article in the Orthodox Arts Journal about the project.

Aidan describes the process by which he made the mosaics, right down to creating the tesserae out of glass. He writes with care and attention to detail, and it is beautifully illustrated. The article is so thorough that one wonders if this is going to appear as an additional chapter in his book on the method of egg tempera and wall painting, a book which might already be the best art instruction book that I have read.

Aidan is primarily a painter, and so his success in mosaic demonstrates a point for anyone interested in being an artist. The fundamental skills of art are those aspects other than the mastery of the medium: drawing, and then the use of colour, tone and line, as well as compositional design. Once these have been mastered, they can be applied in any medium.

It is better to learn to be an artist while becoming a master in one medium only, for example egg tempera painting. Once this has been mastered, then applying those skills in a new medium becomes relatively easy. It is a mistake, I believe, to focus on too many media in the training stage, as the learning of each new medium becomes a distraction from focussing on the underlying skills of creativity in visual art.

This is quite an old article (it is dated May 4th) although it’s content is timeless). I became aware of it because it rose to the top of one of the categories in the newly packaged website. Read the full article here.

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How Do We Re-Establish an Artistic Tradition?

Looking at the 13th Century English Gothic School of St Albans as a Model for the Roman Rite Today

When I have had discussions about reestablishment of beautiful sacred art in the Roman Catholic Church (as opposed to in the Eastern churches), it usually comes down to picking a style from the past, and then using that as a starting point from which a style for today emerges. Some feel that the Western church should adopt the iconographic tradition, and then we get into discussions about which particular iconographic tradition we should go for: should it be the Greek style, the Russian style, or a historic Western style such as the Romanesque? Fra Angelico’s name also often crops up as a model for today. Some feel that he has sufficient naturalism to appeal to the modern eye, and sufficient abstraction for it to seem other-worldly and holy. A third is the style of English illumination in the early Gothic/late Romanesque style of the Westminster Psalter, which was painted in the 13th century.

I first started looking at this latter style when I was investigating alternatives to Greek and Russian icons as teaching models for my painting students, when I was artist-in-residence at Thomas More College of Liberal Arts in New Hampshire.

I noticed that when we studied images from this period, the students engaged with them much more readily; they liked them more than Eastern icons and seemed to understand more instinctively what they were painting. As a result, some quickly developed a feel for what they could change without straying outside the style they were working in. In contrast, most who had not seen the style of the Eastern icons before found it slightly alien, and in class they had no instinctive sense of what they could change while remaining within the traditions. This meant that we had to copy rigidly for fear of introducing error. It was a bit like learning words from a language by rote without understanding the meaning of what you are saying. This is not always such a bad thing; copying with understanding is an essential part of learning art, but at some point the student must apply his understanding in new ways. This latter point seemed to be reached more quickly by these Roman Catholic students when working in the Gothic style. Perhaps if I had been teaching a class of students who had grown up in the Melkite liturgy, the story might have been different!

I refer to this period as the School of St Albans because its most famous artist is a monk called Matthew Paris, who was based at St Alban’s Abbey in England. Here is his self-portrait; below it are other works by him, scenes from the lives of St Thomas Becket and St Edward the Confessor.

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Another Call for Artists - Please Learn to Draw!

One of the most common shortcomings in the works of artists today is poor drawing ability. There is a perception among some, especially if working in the highly symbolic styles of the Gothic, the iconographic or even the style featured here recently, the Beuronese style, that the artist can hide his lack of technical skill behind the stylistic elements. I have heard people say that they signed up for icon painting classes, for example, because they think that they don’t need to be very good at drawing.

The same thing happens in mainstream art schools; students opt for Expressionistic styles because they know that they can’t be held to account for how bad the drawing is, and can hide a lack of skill behind wild and flamboyant brush strokes. Many just forgo the paintbrush altogether, pick up a video camera and go for conceptual art.

This may be acceptable in the context of 20th century art styles, but it is not good enough for sacred art, no matter what style we want to work in.

In fact, it is more difficult to work within a particular tradition and retain accuracy in drawing. It requires the artist to understand both where he must be precise in reflecting nature, and where he must be precise in deviating from natural appearances in accord with the demands of the tradition’s style.

Artists quite often show me their work, and one of the comments I often make is that they need to improve their drawing. It is great that there are more and more people who are looking to traditional forms as inspiration for sacred art, and so I always want to be encouraging. There is hope; drawing is a skill that can be taught. Someone who wants to learn to draw can spend time learning the academic method of drawing, which trains the eye to observe nature and then to render it in two dimensions. Another thing to consider is an illustrator’s course, in which one can learn how to create new images without always having to set up a tableau of figures posed for the image. At some point, the good artist needs to be able to go beyond simply drawing, what he can see, and must be able to draw what is in his imagination too.

Here are two examples of faults that I often see. I don’t like highlighting what is bad in other peoples’ work, so I’ll use examples of my own to illustrate (I have plenty to choose from!)

The first is the drapery of cloth. In sacred art, the figures are often portrayed with draped clothing. It is vital that the folds in the cloth look natural and that there be a sense of a properly proportioned figure underneath. The only way that I know of to understand this is to study how material drapes over the human form. One of my frustrations when I was studying academic art was that we spent so much time studying the nude, but none devoted to studying clothes, which would have helped me.

Have a look at this painting of St Silouan the Athonite. At first glance, the folds in the cloth look natural, but if you look closer you can see that the deep red robe is done incorrectly in the region between the arms. The reason is that I didn’t really understand what I was supposed to be painting, and so just guessed.

In fact, the red robe should have been shown hanging in a U shape between the arms, as it is in this icon of St Hubert by Aidan Hart.

The figure can then be rotated for a three-quarter profile view, as in this figure of Elizabeth Prout, also by Aidan Hart, in which the line drawing in black on a plain brown robe is rendered without additional shading or highlights. 

If we want the figure to look natural underneath the drapery, there are certain pressure points at which the figure supports or otherwise directly acts upon the clothing, which elsewhere hangs free. These are places such as the shoulders, elbows, knees and the crook in the elbow. If these pressure points are not placed in absolutely precise way, the whole figure looks wrong.

We can see how well John Singer Sargent does this in the painting below, a portrait of Mrs Henry White. Much of the dress is swirling away from direct contact with her body. This means that, in order for it to look as though it belongs to her, he has very few of these pressure points to work with, but these must be absolutely right. In this case, they are the shoulders and the tight-fitting waist and her hips. Her left hip is indicated with a tiny little detail, a conjunction of shadow and highlight. If these were not absolutely correct, the eye of the observer would pick it up instantly, and everything would look wrong.

Another common area of error is in the drawing of the proportions of hands and faces. In the example below, I copied a famous icon of St Matthew. When I showed it to my teacher, Aidan, he instantly pointed out that his right hand looked distorted. I replied that I noticed this, but thought that this was how it had looked in the original. Because I didn’t know if I was allowed to change it, I had left it exactly as I thought it had been done by the original artist. (I believed that when I said it, but now that I looked at it, I wonder if I copied inaccurately as well! You can see the original below and judge for yourself). Aidan immediately replied that it didn’t matter; if the original looked like that too, then the original was done badly, and I should be copying errors unthinkingly. Here’s the point: just because we are working in the iconographic style, that doesn’t mean that we accept anatomical inaccuracy. The goal is to be both anatomically correct and to work with the iconographic style, which is what all the great icon painters are able to do.

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Announcing the Apocalypse Art Prize

Artist Gloria Thomas has sent us the following information about the Apocalypse Art Prize, a competition with the book of the Apocalypse as its subject matter.

The first rule of art is beauty.” So begins A Primer of Pictorial Devices in Medieval Painting written by artist Gloria Thomas. The primer is a guide to competitors in the Apocalypse Art Prize. The prizes of the competition total $15,000. The deadline for entry is December 31, 2015. Complete information about the prize and how to submit an entry can be found on the competition’s web site: Apocalypseprize.com

The theme for all entries is Saint John the Divine’s vision of the Apocalypse, the last book in the Christian canon, also called Revelation. The Apocalypse text is filled with metaphorical images that have influenced world literature and art for two millennia. Who has not heard of the “Mark of the Beast”, the “Battle of Armageddon” or the “Harlot of Babylon”? The competition web site lists 86 possible subjects for entrants to choose from the Apocalypse text, offering what Thomas calls “an unparalleled opportunity for imaginative representation.”

The Woman Clothed with the Sun

Subject matter is not the only criteria. The substantial cash prize will go to the artist who is best able to use analogical principles of composition in his or her work. These principles are described in the instructional videos: Revelations: Ideas in Images (Part I and II) also found on the Apocalypse Art Prize web site. Between the hard copy primer available to entrants at no cost and the plethora of resource materials loaded on the web site, participants have more than enough information to carry out the requirements set by the competition designer.

About the Competition Design

Gloria Thomas has spent more than 40 years researching and implementing the principles of pictorial analogy in her works that grace churches, museums and private homes. She now wishes to pass these principles on to other Christian artists, particularly young artists, as a traditional way of making contemporary religious art. Thomas wants to challenge artists to rethink not only subject matter and style, but also, and more fundamentally, how to convey the indescribable through images of things that can be pictorially represented.

There is nothing novel about the objective. Art is continually born and reborn from the desire to express relationships between the seen and unseen through artifact, music and poetry. What is exceptional about the competition is that participants are required to use the language of analogy in their submissions, and the models used to explain analogy are illuminated manuscripts of the High Middle Ages.

Seven Headed Beast from the Apocalypse Tapestries (1382) created by Jean Bondol, housed in the Château d’Angers

Naturalism vs. Analogical Representation

The amount of art created in the Middle Ages about the Apocalypse is immense. The competition invites artists look to these fabulous examples of image metaphor for inspiration, works like the Abingdon Apocalypse, the Visio Santci Pauli Apocalypse, the Trinity Apocalypse, the Bodlein Douce Apocalypse, and the Angers Tapestries. While the images are highly representational, they share almost none of the aspects of naturalism associated with Renaissance painting. It is not simply because these works preceded the Renaissance; they are of a different order.

Antichrist Assault on the Church from the Abingdon Apocalypse (1270) housed in the British Library, London

The appeal of Renaissance naturalism is in its portrayal of the arrested moment, a freeze frame in one-point perspective that presents an illusion of reality. The illusion created by naturalism is that the viewer is an eyewitness to some event or emotion captured in a work of art. By contrast, Medieval religious art uses representation of figures and things poetically in order to describe physical and metaphysical dimensions on the same surface. It is a picture plane similar to a stage on which it is possible to view at once “not only this world and the next, but the involvement of the entire cosmos.” As Thomas says, “Medieval art is not an illusion of reality, but an analogy of it. Its scenes are not ruled by light and shade as in nature. Everything is equally illuminated to create an analogy with the light of the intellect which sees all thought with the same clarity.” Analogy does not show how things are related to each other materially; it shows how they are “related conceptually” by giving thought material attributes.

A similar purpose is served in Eastern Orthodox iconography with its overlapping treatment of time and eternity and of the horizon-less earthly domain couched between heaven and hell. When the invention of the camera overwhelmed the artistic devices of naturalism, a long retreat from representational art ushered in a movement generally known as Modern Art in its many forms. Ironically, early modernists such as Cézanne, Matisse, Chagall, and Derain turned to the icon as a way of recovering the freedom of space, form and color exhausted by naturalism.

Modernists like Marcel Duchamp, however, preached a kind of militant iconoclasm that persuaded generations of artists to embrace contempt for meaning and beauty. “What I have in mind,” says Duchamp, “is that art may be bad, good or indifferent, but, whatever adjective is used, we must call it art, and bad art is still art in the same way that a bad emotion is still an emotion.”

History of the Apocalypse Art Prize

Thomas rejected this doctrine during her graduate studies at Queens College of the City of New York [1968-1970]. She reached instead for traditional aesthetics and her faith. “Having nearly lost my sanity in art school, I returned to things I loved as a child, the wonderful paintings of scenes from Holy Scripture.” Her first project inspired by this return was a series of paintings based on St. John’s vision of the Apocalypse, which she painted in the early 1970’s. In 1994 Viking-Penguin Press published the series under the title “Revelations: Visions of the Second Coming from the Old and New Testaments.” The paintings were accompanied by a text complied from an interplay of biblical prophecy concerning the catastrophes to befall the cosmos at the end of time, leading up to the Last Judgment and the creation of new heavens and new earth.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

The Apocalypse Art Prize is a continuation of Thomas’ abiding interest in these themes. It is also a meditation on how art communicates through its “first rule,” that is – beauty. The very notion is heresy in modernist terms of amorphous pigment splatters and just plain “bad art.” Like Thomas, philosopher Roger Scruton is convinced that art has a higher purpose than shock and disposable amusement. “Through the pursuit of beauty,” Scruton claims, “we shape the world as our own and come to understand our nature as spiritual beings. But art has turned its back on beauty and now we are surrounded by ugliness.”

Benefactors of the Apocalypse Art Prize are hoping artists will respond to Thomas’ encouragement to explore an artistic language with a long shelf life as well as a source of subjects with endless opportunities “for imaginative representation.”

Participation in the competition is free and open to all during the year 2015. Winners will be announce June 1, 2016 and awarded prizes according to the age category of the participant.

A total of $15,000 will be awarded to those artists best able to use the Medieval analogical style in their own work.

For entrants 16 years and above:
First prize is $7,000.
Second prize is $3,000.
Third prize is $2,000.

For entrants 12 to 15 years old, a prize of $2,000 will be awarded to one person.
For entrants under 11 years old, a prize of $1,000 will be awarded to one person.

Persian scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr beautifully articulates the philosophy of the benefactors of the Apocalypse Art Prize and the underlying crisis they seek to address. “Traditional art is a channel of grace, and the sacred art which lies at its heart in a sense compliments the social and legal norms promulgated by the revelation. It reflects the beauty which guides us to the source of all beauty, to the one who alone is beautiful in the ultimate sense … to gain greater insight into the meaning of religious art in a world which has turned its back upon the very principles that govern all existence.”