How Every Painting Is Built, Part 1 of 2: Choice of Medium, and Why It Matters

This is the first of two posts on the visual vocabulary of painting – the fundamental elements every artist works with, and how the way those elements are handled is what gives a painting its style, connects it to (or separates it from) a tradition, and marks it as the work of a particular individual. Next week’s post will take up line, tone, and color. This week, we begin with something that underlies all of those: the choice of medium.

Magistrate of Brussels, Sir Anthony Van Dyck, Flemish, 17th century, oil on canvas. 

The Visual Vocabulary 

Vincent van Gogh, oil on canvas, 19th century. Van Gogh uses oil in thick, doughy, opaque layers of paint, a technique called impasto. This is different from the way Rembrandt or Van Dyck used the medium, with thin layers of translucent paint. 

Medium

Early in the process, the artist must decide on a medium. Very often, he will have spent years mastering one particular medium and will favor it throughout his career, based on a choice made early in training. The recommendation for an artist seeking mastery is to focus primarily on one medium, then, once it is thoroughly understood, adapt what has been learned to other media. The artist who masters egg tempera first will find it easier to incorporate mosaic, fresco, and even carving into his skill set. The very best artists are capable across many media, but some stay focused on their one favored medium throughout their lives.

For the painter – the example I will use throughout this discussion to illustrate points that apply more generally – oil, watercolor, mosaic, fresco, and so on look very different and have distinct qualities that make them appropriate for some works but not for others.

In nearly every type of paint, the source of color is the same. Yellow ochre, for example, is an iron oxide formed naturally and dug out of the ground. To use it, the artist must find a way to get it to adhere to his chosen surface. He does this by placing the pigment in a binding medium that is sticky enough to hold the particles of color and fix them to the surface, and transparent enough for the pigment to remain visible once dry. Placing the pigment into a medium in this way is called tempering. If the medium is egg yolk, the paint is called egg tempera. Oil paint results from tempering pigment with linseed oil. Acrylic paint uses a chemically derived plastic as its binder. For watercolor, the binder is gum arabic. Encaustic suspends pigment in warm liquid wax, which solidifies as it cools. In mosaic, pigment is held within small solid lumps of ceramic or glass — called tesserae — which are embedded in wet plaster to create a pixelated image. In fresco, pigment is suspended in water and applied directly to wet plaster; as the plaster dries, it bonds chemically with the pigment, making the painting part of the wall’s structure. In every case, regardless of medium, the color yellow ochre is produced by finely ground particles of yellow iron oxide. These are some of the more traditional media; new ones are constantly being developed.

Portrait of the Boy Euteches, likely 2nd century AD, painted in encaustic. 

Each has distinct practical properties related to the binding medium, and those properties determine what a given medium is suited for. To begin with, each medium interacts with and reflects incident light differently, profoundly affecting how it looks. We can easily distinguish yellow ochre watercolor paint from yellow ochre oil paint, for example, because their optical properties differ: one looks pale and colors subtly, letting the paper substrate show through, while the other looks rich and deeply colored.

These optical differences also determine how far a given medium allows the artist to create the illusion of depth – and this also has a direct and powerful bearing on style. When Rembrandt layers multiple thin, transparent glazes of dark-colored oil paint over a surface, he creates the illusion of a deep, rich shadow into which we almost feel we could walk. The same technique applied in egg tempera produces nothing comparable – the result tends to look more like soot on the surface. Rembrandt almost certainly did not understand the physics that explain this difference, but he could see it, and that is what mattered to him. The icon painter, by contrast, wants his image to remain resolutely two-dimensional. He does not choose oil but opts instead for egg tempera, mosaic, or fresco, because the flat, stylized quality of those media serves the symbolic purpose of his image.

Samson and Delilah, by Rembrandt, 17th century, oil on canvas.

Alongside these optical properties, the purely physical characteristics of a medium also shape the choice. Mosaic and fresco are durable and permanent, but are fixed to the building’s structure, so they cannot be moved. Egg tempera is equally permanent and, because it can be applied to wooden panels, is well suited to portable images, such as icons carried in procession. Encaustic is more delicate because the melting point of wax is low, but, like tempera, it does not lose its color over time and can also be used for portable works. Oil paint is durable and, unlike the other media mentioned, flexible, so it can be applied to canvas, making paintings comparatively light and easy to transport; however, it is less permanent than other media because the binding medium tends to brown over time. When a 300-year-old oil painting looks dark and dingy, it is usually not dirty – it appears so because the linseed oil is no longer transparent.

All of this raises an interesting historical question. It is often said that the invention of oil paint in the 15th century enabled the development of naturalistic painting. I doubt this is quite right. Both eggs and linseed oil had always been readily available to artists who, until the 19th century, made their own paint (linseed oil, made from flax, is thought to have been in use for around 8,000 years). There is no particular technical difficulty in tempering pigment with either. Artists in any working studio would likely experiment with available materials and soon discover their different properties. As long as the intention is to paint in a highly abstracted style that minimizes the illusion of depth – as in iconographic and early Gothic art – there is no advantage in using oil. Only when an artist wants to paint more naturalistically does oil become the obviously superior choice. But I suggest the desire to paint naturalistically preceded the change in medium. It was the era’s philosophical developments – a changing worldview that sought a new kind of image – that prompted artists to reach for oil and set aside egg tempera. Technique follows philosophy, not the other way around.

A good artist chooses his medium to suit the kind of image he intends to make.

Christ the Gardener, by Martin Earle, contemporary English, in egg tempera

10th century mosaic, Hagia Sophia, Istanbul, the flat look of the images arises from the medium

Imaginary landscape by David Clayton. Oil on canvas. I used multiple thin layers of paint placing translucent thin lighter layers above darker ones to create a misty effect. This is the inverse of a glaze, and is called a scumble.

Winter Sun on Pavey Ark, watercolor by William Heaton Cooper, English, 20th century

Art, Beauty, Creativity and Inspiration – Part 1: What is Art?

Towards A Christian Understanding

This is the first in a four-part series in which I explore what art is, what makes it beautiful, and why beauty matters – not merely aesthetically, but also theologically and even economically.

Over these four posts, I hope to lay out a coherent Christian philosophy of art and beauty, drawing on classical thought, the insights of St Thomas Aquinas, and the living tradition of the Church. This week, I begin at the beginning: with the question of what art actually is. It sounds almost too simple to ask, and yet we live in an age that has quietly abandoned any agreed answer – with consequences that surround us on every side. I will also consider what distinguishes good art from bad, and what makes art distinctively Christian, arguing that a work need not carry an explicitly religious subject matter to be genuinely Christian in spirit.

The Million Dollar Banana, conceptual art, by Maurizio Cattelan, Italian, 2024

We live in an age that has largely lost confidence in its own artistic tradition – an age that fills galleries with objects whose claim to be “art” rests not on beauty, skill, or purpose, but on the artist’s assertion alone. To recover a culture of beauty, we must begin at the beginning: with a clear understanding of what art actually is, what makes it good, and what makes it distinctively Christian. This long article sets out to do precisely that. Drawing on the ancient traditions of both Greece and Rome, on the philosophical insights of St. Thomas Aquinas, and on the living wisdom preserved in the Church’s artistic heritage, we will explore art not as an arbitrary exercise in self-expression, but as a purposeful act of making – one rooted in skill, ordered toward beauty, and capable, at its highest reaches, of drawing the human soul toward God. Along the way, we will consider how beauty is known and judged, why tradition is a more reliable guide to it than individual taste or critical fashion, and why the creation of beautiful things is not a luxury to be weighed against other needs, but a form of participation in God’s own creative work that pays for itself.

What is Art?

The word ‘art’ can have a variety of meanings today, and it might be impossible to come up with a definition that all will accept, but here we will focus on ideas of art that are likely to appeal to the traditionally minded Christian and for which we might find a consensus amongst non-Christians also.

Looking to traditional understandings in Western culture, we find that the ancient Greek techne and Latin ars both denoted “skill,” “craft,” or “technique” – a learned proficiency in creating or producing, encompassing all practical trades, such as carpentry, as well as what today we might call the fine arts, such as poetry or painting. An “artefact” is the product of techne in action, and the artisan is the one who creates an artifact. When we speak of an “artist” today, we typically have in mind someone who creates works of fine art.

But how precisely would we define fine art today? How does the mainstream art world define it? We want to answer this question, if only to be sure that when we discuss art with others, we at least know what they believe it to be.

One might think that the major art galleries would provide a definition, given that their whole raison d’être is the exhibition of art. However, a review of the websites of major art galleries such as MoMA, Tate, and the National Galleries of England and America doesn’t provide much help. In fact, I couldn’t find any definitions. Perhaps they assume we all know what art is and that a definition is unnecessary; or perhaps they hesitate to put anything in words because they struggle to find a definition that applies to all the artifacts they show in their galleries.

The British Museum, which is more traditional in its outlook, provides (albeit buried in a training program newsletter) a good working definition of what we would call fine art, closer to the ancient idea of art as the product of techne, as described above. This can be a good working definition for us. It says:

“The definition of art can vary depending on the context and the cultural, social, and historical background in which it is created. However, art in general can be defined as a creative expression of human skill and imagination that aims to communicate an idea, emotion, or message to an audience. This can include a wide range of media, including painting, sculpture, music, literature, film, and other forms of artistic expression.” 1

Good Art and Christian Art

For Christians, adopting this working definition from the British Museum and building on it, we might then ask: what constitutes good art? And, what constitutes Christian art?

In response, I would say that good art is art (as defined above – “a creative expression of human skill and imagination”) that fulfills a good purpose well. We define a good purpose as one consistent with a Christian worldview. This means that art can be Christian even if it does not explicitly express a religious theme or message. For example, a beautiful landscape that communicates the beauty of Creation is a work of Christian art, even if the artist had no explicitly religious intention in painting it and was not a Christian himself.

We would further say that all art is a manifestation of an idea (which might also be an emotion or a message) or an image that first exists in the artist’s imagination before being fashioned into material form. This picture in the artist’s imagination is, in traditional Christian anthropology, taken directly or assembled as a composite from information gained through sensual experience.

The creation of art, from the Christian perspective, is bound up with the creation of something beautiful. Art requires beauty to fulfill its purpose – if a work is not beautiful, it is not good; this might seem a strange proposition given that there is a place for the representation of ugliness, evil, and suffering in art. However, if the art is to portray a Christian understanding of these things, it must also communicate the purpose of these evils within the economy of grace. God must permit evil in the world for good reason, and it is the responsibility of the Christian artist to communicate that message, too. Otherwise, he is not communicating the full truth

For the Christian, even in the face of evil, suffering, and ugliness, there is hope. When infused with hope, the portrayal of these otherwise ugly realities becomes beautiful. This is exemplified by depictions of the Crucifixion. A well-executed Crucifixion is a beautiful work of art. This beauty is created through the artist's treatment of the image – through skillful choices in line, tone, contrast, and composition, for example. In this way, a good artist presents the greatest crime ever committed without diminishing the profound evil it signifies, but rather by infusing the work with Christian hope – a hope that surpasses all the evil and suffering depicted.

Crucifixion, Pierre-Paul Prud’hon, French, 19th century. Using the baroque style, the artist intentionally contrasts the light on Christ with darkness to symbolize the Light overcoming evil and suffering. This stylistic choice is meant to communicate a sense of hope.

To depict suffering or evil without simultaneously offering hope is, for a Christian, not the full truth. It presents an incomplete picture that can lead to despair. It is through beauty that Christ’s hope is communicated to us, for beauty naturally speaks of God's love (more on beauty later).

Sacred art is the highest form of art, characterized by an explicitly sacred or religious purpose. Liturgical art—created to help us worship God – is the noblest form of sacred art, since worship of God is the highest expression of love for Him and the greatest human activity.

For Christians, the creation of art is intertwined with the pursuit of beauty and divine inspiration. When we recognize the goodness of a work of art, we call it beautiful. As such, good art serves as a sign of the divine – beauty in good art is a visible sign of the work of the unseen God, either as Creator, as seen in the beauty of the universe, or as the God who inspired its creation, through human effort. Therefore, beauty tends to awaken in us a desire for something greater than what we see – the source of that beauty, who is God Himself.

Altar Cards and Portable Altars from Spanish Cathedrals

Given the ecclesiastical climate and the general lack of support for traditional liturgy in Spain, I was not prepared to see, when I visited a number of cities there last July, so many Tridentine altar cards left out on display, as it were. Granted, one might say that they are left there out of sheer inertia, or perhaps because someone thinks they are pretty, but it’s gratifying to notice these artifacts of continuity, which stand as concrete reminders of a tradition lost to these altars for now, but someday reclaimable.

Thus, in the cathedral of Sevilla, we have a side chapel in honor of St. Gregory the Great (you can see in the large center panel the famous scene of his miracle, one of the most frequently depicted subjects in Catholic sacred art), where the Last Gospel and Lavabo cards stand to left and right, while the main card is placed elsewhere in the chapel (note the handsome woodwork):

Already here, beneath the main reredos, we can see a feature that will recur through the churches of Spain: the words of consecration carved into wood or metal and placed right above the center of the altar, as if to ensure that, whatever else may be the case, these essential words are always available to the celebrant, and stand permanently as a verbal testimony to the mystery of transubstantiation.

The same cathedral shows us, elsewhere, a clear example in silver:

Now we come to the famous cathedral of Cordoba, a mosque converted into a cathedral beginning in 1236 (the Christians of the city claim that, prior to the mosque, there was a Visigothic church at the same location). One of the side chapels displays the aforementioned words, this time surrounded by gilt wooden swirls:

Another chapel retains the altar cards in their proper place:

Continue Reading this Article. . .

William Shakespeare, Liturgist

The liturgical rearrangement—or in Peter Kwasniewski’s somewhat more colorful description, the liturgical bloodbath—that recently occurred in Tyler, Texas, has affected me on multiple levels. It affected me personally, because I have a family connection there. It affected me as a member of my local church, because I also live in a place where the Latin Mass seems to be rather unpopular among the diocesan leadership. It affected me as a member of the universal Church, because I love sacred Tradition and have for many years been devoted to the ancient eucharistic rite of western Christendom, which so fully and so poetically reifies that Tradition.

And there is yet another level, one which is not so widely shared as the first three I mentioned, and which perhaps has sent the emotional weight most directly into my heart. It has affected me—has wounded me—as someone who studies and teaches and writes about the dramatic literature of the English Renaissance. It has wounded me as someone who recently stood in front of a classroom full of college students, English majors among them, and spoke at length about Othello. This is a play in which the relentless manipulation of reality leads to appalling destruction. It is a play in which cunning words breed death.

As is my wont when lecturing on such topics, I searched for avenues of passion and beauty and timeless significance that might convince the next generation of parents and artists and scholars that this play—written over four hundred years ago, in language that is often unfamiliar and unclear to them—is still worth their time, is still worth reading and studying and talking about, is still worth pondering and admiring and loving. Imagine how strange, how disorienting, how deeply disturbing it would be if the president of the university walked into my classroom and calmly declared that Shakespeare would no longer be taught. “We have new plays now,” he explains, “and some people consider them simpler, and more relevant, and less likely to offend or exclude, and therefore Shakespeare is abrogated—for the sake of unity. We must all study the new plays now.”

“But Mr. President,” I protest “there are a great many students and faculty members who enjoy and value Shakespeare, and some have even discovered a transformative richness in his works.”

“Of course, yes, we would never—er, well, we will not now completely exclude those who believe themselves to have a preference for old things. An unused room in the basement of Ebenezer Hall will be made available once per month for Shakespeare studies. It seats nine people.”

“But Mr. President, Shakespeare is the most revered author in the history of the English language—and perhaps the most revered playwright in all the world! His works are the beating heart of the English literary experience. They are utterly irreplaceable!”

“And yet they are, as of today, replaced. And lower your voice, please—what are you, some kind of anarchist? Do I not have the authority to decide what will and will not be taught in my university?”

“But Mr. President, the university’s collection of scholarship on Shakespeare is a small library unto itself. Brilliant researchers and scholars of the past and present wrote these books, which help us to understand not only Shakespeare’s plays and poems but drama itself, poetry itself, literature itself—life itself!”

“Those books will not, in the foreseeable future, be disposed of. But you’ll have no need to assign them and no need to consult them. If they then gather dust and end up in storage, that merely confirms their irrelevance.”

“With all due respect, Sir, your logic there seems slightly—”

“Your compliance in these matters is greatly appreciated. It is the duty of the university to guard our intellectual traditions from the threat of disunity.”

“Mr. President, this classroom was united from the first day of the semester until you opened that door.”

“The stagnant unity of the past is not the same as the dynamic unity of the future.”

“But the dynamic unity of the future is, for me, no future at all. I teach Shakespeare. I read and study and esteem and cherish Shakespeare. You have destroyed my professional life, and you have broken my heart.”

“You will learn to cherish the new playwrights. Class is dismissed.”

If you are not able to imagine this scene, don’t worry. There’s really no need to imagine the unimaginable. Something like this would never happen, in a university.

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Dr. Harold Bloom—professor at Yale, preeminent twentieth-century literary scholar, prolific author—was not the most progressive of academics, but he was a thoroughly modern man. He concluded that Shakespeare “wrote the best poetry and the best prose in English, or perhaps in any Western language,” and he saw Shakespeare’s plays as

the outward limit of human achievement: aesthetically, cognitively, in certain ways morally, even spiritually. They abide beyond the end of the mind’s reach.

Bloom is but one voice among many in a chorus of praise that has been heard for centuries and continues to this day. Indeed, the monumental excellence of Shakespearean drama has become a commonplace in our culture; it is woven so thoroughly into the very fabric of modern existence that one might know nothing about Shakespeare and yet live a life that is profoundly enriched by his art.

But surely, multifaceted cultural brilliance of this magnitude doesn’t simply appear in a young Englishman’s restless and uniquely rhetorical mind. Only God creates ex nihilo. What were the antecedents? The residual dramatic energies? The formative influences? Let us not oversimplify; there were many. My intention here is to discuss only one, though it is one which you perhaps have not heard of, and which may be more significant than some would like to admit.

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Though it saddens me greatly to say it, few have seen a Shakespeare play performed in anything approaching an ideal theatrical environment. Early modern theaters looked something like this:

The reconstructed Globe in London gives us an even better idea:

The style is known as a “thrust stage,” whereby the performance area projects out into the audience. The action on the stage can be seen from the front and from the sides. The arrangement is vaguely reminiscent of a traditional sanctuary, wouldn’t you say?

And though it again saddens me to say it, few people, historically speaking, have seen a Shakespeare production that sought to fully and faithfully reproduce the sensory and psychological experience of an Elizabethan theater—and we must remember, as the Shakespearean scholar Sir Stanley Wells pointed out, that Shakespeare was, “supremely, a man of the theater..., a man immersed in the life of that theater and committed to its values.” We learn from Coleridge that in a theater of Shakespeare’s time, “the circumstances of acting were altogether different from ours; it was much more of recitation”; thus, “the idea of the poet was always present.” What we call acting today is often a rather boisterous and busy affair; for Shakespeare, acting was fundamentally recitation, poetry, oratory. There was little need for extravagant scenery; ornamentation was achieved through language and music, with some help from what must have been exceedingly fine costumes and elegantly coordinated movements. The overall aesthetic was one of visual gravity and decorative simplicity offset by consummate verbal artistry; the mind was drawn, thereby, to the essence of the thing.

Can you imagine this? Does it not somehow resemble, in your mind’s eye, a traditional liturgical service? If it does, we need not be surprised: the medieval drama of sacred liturgy led, in the best possible way, to the early modern drama of the theater. That is to say, it led to Shakespeare.

Allow me to share three remarkable statements made by Dr. O. B. Hardison, who was writing not, I emphasize, as an apologist for the Latin Mass. He was writing as a mainstream scholar, and a highly distinguished one at that—an author, an esteemed educator, a professor at Georgetown, and a director of the Folger Shakespeare Library:

In the ninth century the boundary ... between religious ritual (the services of the Church) and drama did not exist. Religious ritual was the drama of the early Middle Ages and had been ever since the decline of the classical theater.

Modern Western drama is the product of a Christian, not a pagan, culture. Its forms, its conventions, and its characteristic tonalities are shaped by this fact. To study early medieval drama is to study the way in which these forms, conventions, and tonalities came into being.

Just as the Mass is a sacred drama encompassing all history and embodying in its structure the central pattern of Christian life on which all Christian drama must draw, the celebration of the Mass contains all elements necessary to secular performances. The Mass is the general case—for Christian culture, the archetype. Individual dramas are shaped in its mold.

I wrote in an earlier NLM article that “traditional Christian liturgy was the heart of Europe’s artistic genius.” We have here yet another example of this, and it is an example that should resonate throughout the artistic consciousness of the entire Christian world. Shakespeare was a playwright, a dramaturgical poet, a “man of the theater”; and the theater was a secularized descendant of the Church’s sacred liturgy—her medieval liturgy.

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I have introduced a complex subject and cannot explore it with adequate length or nuance in this one essay. We will need to return to this topic in the future. Nevertheless, I hope I have at least provided some thought-provoking context for the following statement: marginalization or prohibition of the classical Roman liturgical rites is a grievous threat to human culture, not least because it is a threat to liturgical forms and experiences that served as archetypical precursors to early modern English theater—and from early modern English theater emerged some of humanity’s most compelling, cherished, influential, enlightening, and artistically virtuosic works of literature.

Cardinal Ratzinger said, quite boldly, that “the only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments, namely, the saints the Church has produced and the art which has grown in her womb.” It is unthinkable that we should deprive future generations of the liturgical rites that for so many centuries breathed the breath of life into Christian art. The modernized rites, though currently favored by the ecclesial hierarchy, have demonstrated no comparable ability to inspire great artists, sublimate poetic sensibilities, and elicit artistic masterpieces; given their apparent effects over the past sixty years, we have no justification for assuming that they ever will.

The artistic, and therefore spiritual, crisis in Western Civilization has no simple solution, but a first and crucial step in this solution is simple: Let the Roman Church return full freedom to her ancient and everlasting Mass, which was described by the French playwright Paul Claudel—and perhaps would have been described in like terms by the English playwright William Shakespeare—as “the most profound and grandiose poetry, enhanced by the most august gestures ever confided to human beings.”

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For thrice-weekly discussions of art, history, language, literature, Christian spirituality, and traditional Western liturgy, all seen through the lens of medieval culture, you can subscribe for free to my Substack publication: Via Mediaevalis.

Traditional Art Cannot be Revolutionary: Modern Churches and Traditional Parishes - Guest Article by Mr Joseph Bremer

We are happy to share this article by Mr Joseph Bremer, a PhD student at the London-based King’s Foundation School of Traditional Arts, studying western iconography, and specializing in the art and architecture of the Romanesque period. He also currently teaches theology and history at Holy Family Cathedral School in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

There seems to be no artistic spirit of our age. Future generations of Church historians will have a profoundly unenviable task ahead; for we can examine a 6th century mosaic covered domed cross church and definitively call it ‘Byzantine,’ a 12th century thick walled stone basilica and recognize it as ‘Romanesque,’ or identify a 17th century sprawling marble-clad church as definitively ‘Baroque.’ One could even travel back 30 years and identify our large monochrome iconoclastic churches as definitively modern, but that simply doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. Many Catholic churches currently in use were constructed in the now-outdated styles that dominated the late 20th and early 21st centuries; and it is no secret that most practicing Catholics now find this commitment to post-modern art and architecture deeply problematic. We still inhabit the bones of these modern spaces, but the Church’s architectural turn in the late 20th century is now considered by many priests and parishioners to be a mistake. Our future church historians will have to make sense of a well-meaning, albeit disparate traditional patchwork independent of any overarching style or meaning as we try to patch modern churches with what bits of tradition we can.

Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, Los Angeles

This is especially true in America, where the Church eagerly married itself to the spirit of the age, but the last few decades has seen her, at least aesthetically, widowed. Our artistic inheritance is the fruit of jaded and betrayed post-modern optimism, and now these modern churches have been all but rejected by the very youth they were designed to appease. A new generation of young, eminently conservative, and overwhelmingly well-meaning priests have been assigned to these modern churches, with a strong will to traditionalize them, but the walls and artwork of our churches preach a theology altogether rejected by many of her parishioners and most of her priests. The pulpit is at war with the building it inhabits, and we are all left wondering ‘what now?’

It is an all too familiar question in our day and age: What is a traditionally minded parish, or at the very least a parish that rejects the maxims of artistic postmodernism, able to do if they inherited the all too familiar 70’s square?

Many parishes understandably see the need to construct an entirely new space. One such example is St. Philip the Apostle Church in Lewisville, Texas; a congregation not known for being exceptionally traditional.

The Old St. Philip the Apostle Sanctuary, construction completed in 1977

The parish, over the course of many years, was able to raise the money for a brand new neo-Gothic church in Flower-Mound, the interior of which is currently incomplete and pictured below.

As beautiful and preferable as the building of a new church is for most parishes, this is rarely an option. The recent agglomeration of small local parishes into larger urban ones makes this very difficult. The late 20th century shortage of priests coupled with a declining percentage of mass attendance meant dioceses in the 1970s and 1980s shut down many small local parishes, and built very large, very central and very modern churches in their place. Building a new large church is a monumental expense most parishes simply can’t afford; and it doesn’t help that construction, labor, and land costs are at an all time high with no sign of decline in the near future.

So can a parish traditionalize a space designed to be antithetical to tradition? This question must be necessarily answered on a church by church basis, but let's first examine what is currently being done. An example I am intimately familiar with is the Church of the Incarnation, a parish located at the University of Dallas which serves as a stark archetype for the difficulties and pitfalls of traditionalizing modern spaces. The University of Dallas teaches us three important lessons in the traditionalization of modern churches: the importance of continuity, of artistic telos, and of recognizing the realities of your space.

The church was designed and built by architects Duane and Jane Landry in 1985 in the spirit of most modern churches, with an express emphasis on the community rather than the liturgy. Its circular form was derived from Santo Stefano Rotondo in Rome, but the processional aisle was deliberately placed so that it wasn’t the focal point of the very large narthex. (A cheeky former chaplain reserved the URL www.bigbrowncircle.com for the church’s website) The altar is pushed forward to the center to emphasize communal participation. It is also situated on a North-South axis, and there is no entrance to the church except for from the East. Its paneled walls prevent any other liturgical art but a crucifix. The sanctuary naturally feeds into the narthex, but the narthex rather awkwardly blocks entry into the sanctuary. The sanctuary simply doesn’t feel like the focal point of the church. It is awkward to enter and almost entirely barren.

The blueprint of the Church of the Incarnation 

Continue Reading this Article. . .

Fra Filippo Lippi’s Coronation of the Virgin

Today marks the anniversary of the death in 1469 of the painter Fra Filippo Lippi, at the age of 63. He was born in Florence in 1406; two years later, his mother died while giving birth to his brother Giovanni. The boys were at first entrusted to an aunt, but she, being too poor to raise them properly, placed them in the city’s Carmelite priory in 1414. Filippo eventually joined the order and became a priest when he was still very young, perhaps less than 20. (“Fra” is the abbreviation of the Italian word “fratello – brother”, commonly used as a title for religious priests, as “don” is for seculars.) But he was clearly not well suited for the religious life, and after about seven years, left the monastery, although he was not released from his vows. (Irregularities of this kind were tolerated far too much before the Tridentine reform.)

The Madonna and Child with Two Angels, ca. 1460-65, by Fra Filippo Lippi. It is generally held that Lucrezia Buti, the mother of his children (as mentioned below), served as the model for the Virgin Mary. 

The sort of tour guides who spend more time telling anecdotes about artists than explaining their art have a lot to work with in the person of Fra Filippo. Most famously (or infamously), when he was fifty, and working in the city of Prato, about 12 miles to the north-west of Florence, he began a relationship with a Dominican novice nearly 30 years his junior, Lucrezia Buti, who bore him two children. The elder, a boy named for his father, is traditionally distinguished from him by the diminutive “Filippino”, and became a highly successful painter in his own right, after apprenticing first in his father’s workshop, and then with one of his father’s former students, Sandro Botticelli.

A self-portrait of Fra Filippo’s son Filippino, part of a painting which he added to the Brancacci Chapel in the 1480s, fifty years after Massaccio’s works there were first admired by his father.  

When the elder Filippo was still at the priory, the painter Masaccio was hired to fresco one of its side chapels, owned by a family named Brancacci. The Florentine art historian Giorgio Vasari recounts that Lippi, who had shown no aptitude at all for any kind of study, was so taken by Masaccio’s work that he took up drawing and painting himself. He quickly became good enough at this that he was able to embark on a career as an artist, in which he was very successful. However, his personal and professional conduct were so irregular that he was routinely broke, and therefore unable to consistently maintain a workshop, as an artist of his talent normally would, and as many less talented than he managed to do in those days of Florence’s great artistic flourishing.

The Tribute Money (the episode recounted in Matthew 17, 23-26), 1425, by Masaccio, one of the original paintings in the Brancacci chapel which inspired Filippo Lippi.

In 1439, he landed a very lucrative commission from a canon of the church of San Lorenzo named Francesco Maringhi. This priest was also the procurator of a Benedictine nunnery at a church dedicated to St Ambrose, for which the commission was made. The principal subject is the Coronation of the Virgin, a popular theme for women’s religious houses, and the painting is sometimes known as the Maringhi Coronation. Fra Filippo was also given enough money in advance to hire assistants to make and gild an elaborate frame, although this is now lost, along with all but one of the predella panels. (The frame seen here is modern.)

By this period, the Florentines had largely transformed the classic form of the late medieval polyptych, with Saints depicted each within their own discrete section of the frame, by removing the dividers to create a single continuous scene. Fra Filippo’s Coronation follows a trend set by earlier works such as The Coronation of the Virgin and The Adoration of the Magi by Lorenzo Monaco, and another, very famous depiction of the latter by Gentile da Fabriano.

Polyptych of the Coronation of the Virgin, ca. 1410, by the Sienese painter Andrea di Bartolo (1360/70 - 1428), a work which would have been considered very old fashioned by the artist’s Florentine contemporaries.

The Coronation of the Virgin, 1414, by the Florentine painter known as Lorenzo Monaco (Lawrence the monk), since he was a member of the Camaldolese Order; ca. 1370 - ca. 1425. Notice the opening of the space between the panels, contrasted with Andrea di Bartolo’s retention of the divisions between the sections.

The Adoration of the Magi, 1423, by Gentile da Fabriano

Gentile was an exponent of the International Gothic, a style which revels in rich decoration, and of which the altarpiece shown above is considered one of the finest examples. Filippo, on the other hand, was a typical Florentine, and concentrated his efforts on the solidity and perspective of his figures. This is done especially by greatly varying the shades of the colors within their robes. To give just one example, note how many different blues there are in the robes of God the Father and the Virgin Mary in the upper center.

Different shades of blue are also used to make a rather oddly striped heaven in the background of the lateral sections. This is often described as a reference to the seven heavenly spheres, but there are eleven bands on the left side, and twelve on the right. I suspect that they may rather be a reference to the original striped habit of the Carmelite Order to which Fra Filippo belonged.

I chose this altarpiece as a good example of Fra Filippo’s work partly because yesterday was the feast of the Most Holy Rosary. Of course, no such feast existed in his time, and indeed, the rosary itself was still an emergent custom, but by a happy coincidence, this painting contains not just the last Glorious Mystery, its principal subject, but also the first Joyful one, the Annunciation, in the two small round panels mounted into the frame. This was obviously a very popular subject everywhere, and was worked into countless altarpieces in different ways. For many Tuscans, including the Florentines, the Annunciation also held a special significance, since it was not just a major feast and a break in the austerity of Lent, but also the civil New Year’s Day. (This custom remained in use in Florence, and what later became the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, until 1749.)

I also have another reason to write about this painting today. Several years ago, while looking at it in the Uffizi Museum in Florence where it is now kept, I noticed something interesting about the other Saints included in it: there is one prominent figure for each of the months from June to December. St John the Baptist (June 24), who is a major patron of Florence, is at the extreme right; St Mary Magdalene (July 22) is the women in red in the lower middle, directly beneath the Virgin’s feet. (Although it is not very clearly visible, she is holding a jar of ointment under a veil.) St Lawrence (August 10), whose grill is almost invisible, is to the right of her, and of course, the Assumption is also celebrated in August.

The man mostly blocking the view of Lawrence is St Eustachius, who is celebrated on September 20th together with his wife Theopista (the woman staring out at the viewer) and their sons Agapitus and Theopistus: one of the altars of the church for which the painting was commissioned was dedicated to them. The bishop in green next to Mary Magdalene is St Martin (November 11), while St Ambrose (December 7), the titular saint of the church, is depicted at the lower left in Advent violet.

Assuming this arrangement to be deliberate, October is thus far unaccounted for. One might expect St Francis, whose feast is on the 4th, to make an appearance, especially in Tuscany, where his order was very popular and influential, and a significant contributor to the region’s artistic culture. But he is not present.

After my visit to the Uffizi, I happened to pass a used bookstore, where I found a mid-19th century copy of the breviary supplement for the archdiocese of Florence, which solved the mystery. In it, I discovered that today is the feast of a virgin martyr called Reparata, whose legendary acts say that she was beheaded during the persecution of Decius (250-51 AD) at Caesarea Maritima, a port city on the coast of what is now the northern part of Israel. Parts of her relics were translated to various places in Italy, including Florence, and she was the titular Saint of the city’s previous cathedral. (Extensive remains of this older structure were discovered under the floor of the new church during excavations conducted from 1965-74.)

The woman to the left of Theopista, wearing green and looking down, is usually described by art history books, if she is mentioned at all, as one of the several “Saints without identifiable attribute” in this painting. It seems likely to me that she must be St Reparata, who would complete the series of the months. The woman to the left of her, also without attribute, might therefore be St Pelagia, who shares Reparata’s feast day, and was venerated in many parts of Italy, including Milan, where she was formerly a co-titular of the cathedral.

There are possibly further mysteries to this painting yet to be explored; for example, there does not seem to be any convincing explanation for the presence of Job to the left of St Martin. Suffice it to note for now that the figure on the right kneeling behind John the Baptist, with the banderole that reads “Is(te) perfecit opus – this man completed the work”, was formerly assumed to be Lippi himself, but is now generally thought to be the commissioner. The figure more likely to be the artist’s self-portrait is the man in the white habit looking out at the viewer on the lower left. And perhaps it is not too much to speculate that the other Carmelite next to him, who seems rapt in his vision of God and the Virgin in heaven, indicates Filippo’s awareness of his failure in his first and greater calling, as he himself stares out at the world instead.