Interesting Liturgical Sights on a Recent Trip to Europe (1): Vienna and Environs

In May, my daughter and I visited a few places in Austria and Italy, and while I wasn’t much of a shutterbug (I’m trying these days to leave my camera mostly unused), I’ll admit that I pulled it out whenever I saw something that I thought NLM readers might enjoy seeing. As usual, click on the images to enlarge.

The ceiling of the sacristy at Heiligenkreuz Abbey. Note how the tormentors of the three children in the fiery furnace are sporting turbans, a reminder that the Turks once ransacked this abbey.

For a place that’s supposed to help priests become recollected for Mass, the interplay between this priest and his server is rather funny!

The Pummerin of Stephansdom in Vienna, the third largest bell in Europe at 44,380 lbs or the weight of 15-20 cars; its metal is from 208 Turkish cannons melted down after the Siege of Vienna.

Our guide took us up to the perimeter of the Stephansdom roof to give us a close look at the tiles.

Here’s the huge room under the Stephansdom roof, above the vaulted nave of the church - it's almost the size of a church in itself.

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The Abbey of St Martin in Disentis, Switzerland

Our resident Ambrosian expert Nicola de’ Grandi recently visited the abbey of St Martin in the town of Disentis, which is located in the central Swiss canton of Grisons, about 35 miles to the southeast of Lucerne. In Romansch, a Romance language which is spoken principally in Grisons, the town is called “Mustér”, which is to say, monastery, after this foundation, which began in the late 7th or early 8th century. The monastery is also dedicated to the Virgin Mary, to St Peter, and to its founders, Placidus and Sigbert, but St Martin is the titular of the main church. Like so many ancient monasteries, it has been rebuilt many times; the current church dates to the late 17th and early 18th century.

The main sanctuary and choir.

The nave seen as one looks back from the crossing.

The altar to the left of the main choir is dedicated to St Benedict

On the opposite side, an altar dedicated to a Saint called Placid, not the disciple of St Benedict, but a local landowner who assisted St Sigbert in the foundation of the abbey, and was killed by the regional governor, a man named Victor.

The preaching pulpit

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The Altar of St Francis Xavier in Rome

St Francis Xavier, whose feast is kept today, died on December 2, 1556, on the island of Shangchuan off the south-eastern coast of China. His body was taken to the Portuguese colony of Goa, India, and now rests in a silver casket in the Jesuit church there, the Bom Jesus Basilica. However, the main Jesuit church in Rome, which is dedicated to the Holy Name of Jesus, and popularly known as the “il Gesù” in Italian, (literally “the Jesus”), possesses a very notable relic of the Saint, namely, his lower right arm and hand, which are displayed on the altar dedicated to him in the church’s right transept. This is the arm with which he personally baptized somewhere around 300,000 people in the course of the years he spent as a missionary in Asia.

The chapel, which dominates the church’s right transept, was built in the 1660s according to a design by one of the most prominent artists of the Roman High Baroque period, Pietro da Cortona. The main altarpiece by Carlo Maratta depicts St Francis’ death; the darker lower part of the chapel with the colored marbles represents this world, and the brighter upper part, heaven. Within the “broken” cornice above the painting, St Francis is represented just as he leaves the world and ascends into the glory of heaven.

The stucco figure of St Francis in the cornice is oriented in such a way that it rises towards this painting of the Holy Trinity in the ceiling above it, a work by Giovanni Andrea Carlone. The interaction of the various artistic forms, painting, sculpture and architecture, in such a dramatic setting was one of the most admired and widely imitated aspects of Rome’s Baroque churches, serving as a model and inspiration for countless other works throughout the Catholic world.

To either side of the central painting, Carlone depicted some of the Saint’s missionary activity: here, he baptizes an Indian princess,

and here, he is shipwrecked during his travels.

The altar seen from the opposite transept of the church, the altar of which contains the relics of St Ignatius of Loyola.

Suffering Without Hope? The War Art of Francisco Goya

Examining Francisco Goya’s portrayal of war’s brutality through a critical Christian lens.

Francisco Goya’s depictions of the horrors of war in early 19th-century Spain, it could be argued, exemplify the Romantic ethos of self-expression, wherein the artist’s personal and emotional perspectives are conveyed through the subject matter. Goya’s harrowing portrayals of human suffering during wartime are widely regarded as successful in communicating the brutality and anguish of such conflicts, and his work is praised by many for doing so. In writing this, I am giving you my personal response to his work. Some may not agree with my assessment of what is communicated through the art, but I hope that they will at least be persuaded of the arguments I make as to what a Christian artist ought to aim to do.

However, from a Christian perspective, one must consider whether Goya’s works effectively convey the whole reality of the situation. Suffering is a reality that we should not sugarcoat, and we should do everything in our power to prevent it and console those who experience evil and pain. But it is also true that through Christ, there is hope that transcends any suffering. For the Christian, faith in Christ does not necessarily remove earthly suffering, but it does provide a consolation that is deeper and more permanent. This consolation, the peace that ‘passeth understanding’, is what inspires martyrs to praise God and bless their persecutors as flames consume them at the stake. This supernatural consolation is available to us all through his Church.

The risk inherent in Goya’s art is that solely depicting suffering without any counterbalancing elements may leave the viewer mired in a sense of despair which runs counter to the Christian message, and leads him into greater unhappiness and an even more bleak sense of hopelessness. This is what I see when I look at his work–hopelessness. Even in the third image, in which a priest is clutching the cross, the artist seems to me to be communicating that his hope was empty.

Goya’s unrelenting vision of despair is not the whole truth. To be fully reconciled with the Faith, it should more obviously situate the depicted suffering within a broader framework of Christian hope and resurrection. This is not a simple task. Expressing anger at the suffering of oneself or others through ugly distortion of the image is much easier to do than communicating the profound truth that one need not suffer, and that there is a beauty in suffering, when viewed through the prism of the Catholic faith. It takes great skill on the part of the artist to be able to do so.

The Christian traditions of liturgical art, for example, the Baroque, Gothic, and iconographic artistic styles, were forged with this Christian end in mind, and had embedded within their forms, quite apart from the subjects they portrayed, styles that communicated this Christian hope.

Contrast Goya’s work with the painting of soldiers blinded by mustard gas in the First World War, by John Singer Sargent, an image I have featured before on this blog. Sargent portrays the horrors of war clearly, but infused with hope. We see it in human interactions: the blind are being led by those who have sight. The light of the sun pierces the gaseous air. I see Christian hope symbolised in this. Sargent was an American who trained in Paris in the mid-19th century and modelled his style consciously on that of the 17th-century Spanish Baroque master Diego Velázquez. The baroque style is one developed specifically to communicate hope in suffering. It is uniquely suited to portray, therefore, the suffering of war without compromising on revealing the degree of suffering, but at the same time ensuring that Christian hope is portrayed too. Still, it takes a special artist to be able to do this. Sargent was not a Christian, but his mastery of this Christian style — regardless, to my mind, he is one of the greatest — enabled him to communicate something good that transcends the suffering that was undoubtedly present.

This painting hangs in the Imperial War Museum in London, and it is worth going to see it there to get the full impact. It is huge – approximately 7’7” inches 20’, which means that the figures are roughly life-sized. To view it properly, you need to retreat right to the back of the large gallery in which it hangs, to see the whole at a single view.

What lessons can we learn from this today? First, we should recognise that it is a myth that physical suffering is greater today than it was in the past. In my opinion, it is a conceit of the modern era that tells us we have suffered more than others, despite the occurrence of two world wars. If you picked any person at random 500 years ago, the chances of an early death and great physical suffering along the way, due to any number of causes such as illness, starvation, and of experiencing brutality at the hands of others, were greater than any individual, again picked at random, even at the height of WW1 or WW2 or in our inner cities today.

The despair evident in the 20th and 21st centuries, often reflected in its art, reflects the zeitgeist of our era, but this is not the suffering of external circumstances. Instead, it is self-inflicted suffering, which is spiritual, and a result of alienation from God. The responsible artist today would not indulge people in such spiritual despair. That is an approach that only exacerbates the situation. The responsible artist should strive to offer the hope of an alternative path, which is the Christian path and is as open to every person today as it was to people in the past. 

That hope is personified in the picture of the suffering Christ, whose sacrifice opens up to us the joy of partaking of the divine nature. A joy that transcends all earthly suffering.

The Church of St Thomas of Villanova in Castel Gandolfo

Today is the feast of St Thomas of Villanova (1488-1555), a Spanish Augustinian friar who was archbishop of the see of Valencia for the last 11 years of his life. After completing his studies at the University of Salamanca, the oldest in Spain, he joined the Augustinians, and served first as prior of his monastery, then visitor general and prior provincial for the regions of Castile and Andalusia. He was well-known as an excellent preacher, and a reformer in an age very much in need of reform. In 1544, when he was offered the archbishopric of Valencia, he had to be compelled to accept the office by his religious superiors as a matter of obedience; his subsequent career proved the truth of Aristotle’s dictum that power is best given to those who do not want it. Throughout his life, he was also known for his extraordinary charities to the poor; the Breviary notes that the very bed in which he died was one he had previously given away to a needy person.

The Charity of St Thomas of Villanova, ca. 1660, by the Spanish painter Mateo Cerezo (1637-66)

St Thomas was canonized in 1658 by Pope Alexander VII, who had been elected to the papacy about 3½ years earlier. Alexander’s predecessor but one, Urban VIII (r. 1623-44), had been the first pope to regularly spend his summers in the town of Castel Gandolfo, about 16 miles to the southeast of Rome, a tradition which has continued on and off to this day. (Among recent popes, both Pius XII and Paul VI died there; Pope Leo has spent a good deal of his time there in his 4½ months.) Pope Urban built the pontifical villa whose main entrance dominates one end of the town’s main piazza, while Alexander greatly enlarged the piazza, and commissioned his friend, the famous architect and sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini, to build a new church for the town, named for his first canonized Saint.

The church and piazza seen from within the central door of the papal villa.

The façade as it appeared before a recent restoration, (note the crest of Pope Benedict XVI over the door)...

and as it appears today. Our reader may remember that the façade of the FSSP church in Rome, Santissima Trinita dei Pellegrini, recently underwent a similar restoration, removing the colored plaster applied to the outside of the building in the late 19th or early 20th century.

Bernini is, of course, the name most associated with the term Baroque, which in our own time is generally thought of as a very busy style. Compared to the sterility of so much modern architecture, including, alas, even the architecture of modern churches, this is understandable. But the artists of the Baroque saw themselves as the simplifiers of art, compared to the very busy Mannerist style that preceded them, and in this church, one of the very few which Bernini designed entirely, we see why. The walls are not festooned with complicated decorations; large parts of them are flat and white. The painting of the Crucifixion over the high altar stands in a transitional place, between the altar itself and God the Father, who appears as a pure white sculpture in the upper part of the reredos. The building is not plain by any means, but there are very few different kinds of things, and very few different colors.

The spandrels under the dome are filled with relief sculpture of the four evangelists, and inside the dome itself are eight medallions depicting events of St Thomas’ life. These events, like the Saint himself, now belong to the kingdom of heaven, represented by the much more luminous upper part of the church.  

One of the side altars is dedicated to the Assumption. For a long time, it was the custom that if the pope was in Castel Gandolfo for the feast of the Assumption, he would celebrate the Mass of the day in this church, a custom happily revived this year by Pope Leo. 

The other side altar is dedicated to St Thomas. 

The stem of Pope Alexander VII on the counter-façade.

A relic of St Sebastian and statues of Saints on the altar of the Assumption.

The preaching pulpit

The baptismal font.

Caravaggio’s St Matthew

The Apostle and Evangelist Matthew, whose feast is kept today in the West, has never had much public devotion in Rome. The one notable church dedicated to him, located on the via Merulana between the Lateran Basilica and St Mary Major, was once a cardinalitial title, but by the later 18th century, it was in terrible condition. When its cardinal was transferred to a suburbicarian see in 1776, it was not given to another; the building was destroyed at the beginning of the 19th century during the Napoleonic occupation of Rome, and never rebuilt.

The Contarelli Chapel in San Luigi dei Francesi. Image from Wikimedia Commons by Geobia, CC BY-SA 3.0.

He does, however, have one chapel which is very notable indeed, the place where the painter Caravaggio made his public debut in the Eternal City. In 1585, a French cardinal named Matthieu Cointerel, whose last name is italianized as “Contarelli”, died and left an endowment to decorate a chapel in honor of his name-saint within the French national church, San Luigi dei Francesi (St Louis, i.e. the IX, of the French), in the very heart of the city’s historical center. The cardinal’s executor originally hired a Flemish sculptor named Jacques Cobaert to carve a marble altarpiece of St Matthew with an angel, and the painter Giuseppe Cesari, better known as Cavaliere d’Arpino, to fresco the walls and ceiling.

Cesari was greatly in the favor of Pope Clement VIII, and after finishing the ceiling, moved on to the far grander commission of designing the mosaics inside the dome of St Peter’s basilica. Cobaert completed his statue, which was rejected in part because it did not fulfill the terms of the commission, and in part because it just wasn’t very good. (It was purchased by the Archconfraternity of the Most Holy Trinity of the Pilgrims, who had St Matthew as one of their patrons, and now sits above the altar of the right transept of the FSSP church in Rome.)

The altar of St Matthew is seen here in the background of this photo, taken during the blessing of a bell at Trinità dei Pellegrini in October of 2021.

Veneration of a relic of St Matthew at his altar after a Mass celebrated for the confraternity in 2022. Photo by our favorite Roman pilgrim, Agnese Bazzucchi.

As the jubilee of 1600 approached, the project, still unfinished after 15 years, took on a new urgency. San Luigi dei Francesi stands on one of the main routes by which pilgrims would enter the city, and it would not do for the French among them to see their national church so conspicuously unfinished. The Italian cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte, who lived next door, then suggested that his private employee Caravaggio would be just the man for the job.

Two important matters of historical context should be mentioned here. The Pope who presided over the jubilee of 1500, Alexander VI Borgia, made his family’s name a by-word for the very lowest depths of ecclesiastical corruption. Luther’s revolt, partly provoked and partly justified by the vices which he represented, broke out in 1517. By 1525, it had already proved shockingly successful in detaching large swathes of Germany from the Faith. The hapless Clement VII Medici was only 47 at the time, and might well have lived to see the jubilee of 1550, but might just as well have wondered how much of a Church would be left to celebrate it by then. His successor Paul III, who was at once thoroughly a product of the vices his era, and one of the architects of their demise, died just before the jubilee of 1550, which opened in a period of sede vacante. Faithful clerics had much cause to tremble for the five-year reign of his successor Julius III, whose papacy was marred not only by his indifference to the urgent cause of reform, but also by scandalous stories of the very worst kind regarding his brother’s adopted son, a street-urchin inappropriately named Innocenzo. (The papal name Julius has never been used again, always a sign of a bad pontificate.)

However, by 1575, the seeds planted by Paul III, who called the Council of Trent and founded the Jesuits, and by many others, were bearing much fruit, and by 1600, the many vices and corruptions within the Church that gave so much grist to the Protestant mill were largely extirpated. And thus, while the jubilee of 1575 might be described as great collective sigh of Catholic relief, that of 1600 was to be a sort of year-long victory party for the spectacular success of the Counter-Reformation.

All of this had a particular importance for the French, whose king, Henry of Navarre, had succeeded to the throne as a Protestant, and begun his reign under a papal excommunication. He converted to Catholicism in 1593, but the political turmoil caused by his former allegiance, and the general state of religion in France, was far from over. For the French pilgrims to Rome, the jubilee of 1600 was also a sign that the Catholic, i.e., universal, religion, restored to health by the Counter-Reformation, would bring a peaceful settlement to the civil wars that had wracked their nation for decades.

This, then, is the stage on which Caravaggio made his public debut as an artist in Rome.

Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.

The first painting, The Calling of St Matthew, catches the Saint at the moment Christ enters into the customhouse and points to him, saying, “Follow me.” The mediating role of the Church and the papacy is emphasized, against the Protestant rejection of them, by including the figure of St Peter, who is not mentioned in the relevant passages of the Gospels. The customhouse is represented as if it were any Roman tavern, but note that the source of the light that bursts into the space in unseen. This is the artist’s way of telling us that it is the supernatural light of grace, which will enable Matthew to walk away from his former life and follow Jesus. This reflects a theme of the highest importance to the Catholic Church in these years: against the predestinationism of Calvin, we see that the light of God’s grace can shine on anyone, and that conversion is always a possibility for everyone.

Note also that Matthew points to himself in a gesture of doubt, as if to say, “Who, me?”, for the Church, a wise mother in her better days, knows that we all have doubts about our ability to correspond to God’s grace. In conjunction with the other paintings in the chapel, we see that even an Apostle was not free of such doubts, but was able to turn from his role as a despised tax collector to become both an evangelist and a martyr. (Caravaggio himself had and deserved a reputation as a difficult character, someone who understood well the difficulties of trying to live a life of grace.) Against the elitism of the early Protestants, we also see here the importance of each individual in God’s plan of salvation. In this particular church, this would perhaps also have reminded contemporary viewers of the importance of one man’s role, that of King Henry, in saving the Catholic faith of an entire nation.

Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.

The second painting, The Inspiration of St Matthew, stands over the altar, and was the last of the three to be completed. What we see in the chapel today is not the original version, which was rejected because it violated one of the rules of Counter-Reformation art, that things should be shown as much in accord with truth as possible. Caravaggio, not much of one for following rules generally, depicted the angel touching St Matthew’s hand, which an angel, who does not have a material body, cannot do. The noble family of the Giustiniani, who lived across the plaza from the church, intervened, purchasing the original, and convincing those in charge of the project to recommission. In the new version, the angel is conspicuously not touching the Saint, who looks heaven-ward for inspiration. He is also dressed more appropriately in the red of martyrdom, rather than the dark brown of the original version. The Gospel book which he is writing is positioned directly over the place where the Missal would be placed for the reading of the Gospel during the celebration of Mass.

A black-and-white photograph of the destroyed original version of St Matthew and the Angel. Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.

The original version was one of six works by Caravaggio owned by the Giustinianis. When Napoleon, modern Europe’s first truly grand cultural terrorist, occupied Rome, he imposed ruinous inheritance taxes on the city’s noble families, many of whom were thus forced to sell off their painting collections. The original St Matthew and the Angel eventually found its way to Dresden, where it was destroyed during the fire-bombing of the city in World War II. No color photograph was ever taken of it.

Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.

The third painting, The Martyrdom of St Matthew, was the first to be completed and unveiled. In the original commission, Cardinal Contarelli had specified that it was to show the violence of the soldiers as they attacked St Matthew while he was celebrating Mass, a reference to the violence with which Protestantism was imposed in many parts of Europe, and the subsequent destruction of countless churches and monasteries. It was also supposed to include “suitable architectural elements”, and a crowd displaying various emotional reactions. All of this would make for a very conventional, late Mannerist work of the Counter-Reformation.

Caravaggio’s real name was Michelangelo Merisi, and like his famous namesake, he understood very well that man, and not architecture, is the protagonist of the great drama of human salvation. Note here that the architectural element is reduced to the barest possible minimum in the background, and the drama of Matthew’s death is thrust forward to fill the space. The humility of a follower of Christ is emphasized by the fact that he lies prostrate on the ground, a trend in Caravaggio’s work which would become more and more pronounced as he progressed. For us today, it is perhaps impossible to appreciate how remarkable this was at the time, to show an Apostle in the midst of his martyrdom not front and center, but lying on the ground, and to give so much prominence to the persecutor. But of course, it is from that position of humility that St Matthew reaches up to receive the palm of martyrdom from the angel above him, whom he sees and the persecutor does not. It is from that humility that he enters into the glory of his Lord.

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.