Regina Pacis, Ora Pro Nobis!

One of the few sensible changes made to the calendar in the post-Conciliar reform is the exchanging of the places (more or less) of two Marian feasts, those of the Immaculate Heart of Mary and of Her Queenship. Both of these were added to the general calendar by Pope Pius XII, the first in 1944, the second ten years later. The latter was originally assigned to the last day of May because of the popular custom of keeping May as a Marian month, even though there was no general Marian feast within it. The former was placed on the octave of the Assumption for no discernible reason, other than the fact that before it was put on the general calendar, some places kept it on the Sunday after the octave; but the Calced Carmelites, one of the first religious orders to adopt it, had it in the same place it was given in the Novus Ordo, on the day after the feast of the Sacred Heart.

As I am sure our readers know, the Holy Father Pope Leo asked that today be observed as a special day of prayer and fasting for the peace throughout the world. This made me think of a Marian title which has no formal liturgical expression, and so would be covered by the feast of Our Lady’s Queenship, which I am pretty certain is the reason why he chose today, “Queen of Peace.” This title was proclaimed by Pope Benedict XV when he added it to the Litany of Loreto in November of 1915, as the First World War was approaching its second Christmas.

He also commissioned this statue of the Virgin for the basilica of St Mary Major in Rome, the first major public artwork in the city to be displayed with the new title on it. It was completed and unveiled in 1918, the work of a sculptor named Guido Galli. 

Image from Wikimedia Commons by Fallaner, CC BY-SA 4.0

I have always thought there was something very Italian about this statue, the way the Madonna is the one to raise Her hand, seemingly less in blessing, and more as if to say, “End this war!”, the “useless slaughter”, as Pope Benedict himself called the war which did not yet need to be distinguished as the first of its kind. Her other hand extends over Christ’s bare side, covering the place where He will be wounded with a lance by a soldier, as if she were protecting all the young men threatened by the terrible violence of war. Her expression is almost stern, as if to express her disapproval, and makes for a notable contrast with the more cheerful face of the young Jesus.

Michelangelo died in 1564, but even three-and-a-half centuries later, every sculptor who worked in Rome lived under his shadow, and there are some interesting references to and contrasts with his work here. The complicated folding of the Virgin Mary’s robes, especially around her head, the deep spaces to either side of her neck, and the deep cut into the marble under her arm, are all very much a tribute to the great Florentine’s Roman debut, the Pietà.

But Galli was not afraid to do things that Michelangelo did not do, not because he couldn’t do them, but because he couldn’t muster up any interest in doing them. For Michelangelo, there is only one subject worthy of the sculptor’s art, the human form. Galli, on the other hand, included both a dove, the symbol of peace, on the left, and a rather complicated pile of flowers on both the left and right. Michelangelo also believed, with a conviction that could well be described as dogmatic, that sculpture is an art of subtraction, of finding the image and releasing it from the block that imprisons it. For this reason, he absolutely rejected the technique employed here, by which pieces made of other materials are added to the work, such as the metal olive branch in Jesus’ hand, the halos, and the throne, which itself is made of several different pieces of stone, and detailed with metal bosses. 

The whole ensemble, including the panel behind the statue and the lamps to either side, is a rare example of early art nouveau (or “stile Liberty”, as it is often called in Italian) in an Italian church; rare, because with the coming of fascism to Italy in 1922, the whole style fell very much out of fashion, withering under official disapproval of it as American (or French), and therefore decadent.

The Feast of St Petronilla

Long before either the Visitation or the Queenship of the Virgin Mary were celebrated on this day, and before those, St Angela Merici, the founder of the Ursulines, May 31st was the feast day of St Petronilla. Although she is missing from the oldest Roman liturgical books, she is seen in a painting of the mid-4th century in the catacomb of Domitilla, where she was buried, and her name appears on lists of the venerated tombs of martyrs in the sixth and seventh centuries. In the reign of Pope St Paul I (757-67), an ancient sarcophagus containing her remains was translated from the catacomb to the basilica of St Peter, the treasury of which still preserves a large metal reliquary with her skull inside it.

Fresco of the mid-4th century, with the martyr Petronilla on the right, leading a young woman named Veneranda into the garden of Paradise. (Image source.)

The true history of her life and martyrdom has long since been lost, but she was for many centuries believed to be the daughter of St Peter. This idea seems to have come partly from her name and the location of her relics, partly from a Gnostic “Acts of St Peter”, which speaks of a daughter of St Peter, without giving her a name. (In the Middle Ages, this apocryphal document would not have been understood as a work of heretical origin.)

The first edition of the Breviary of St Pius V carried over from its late medieval predecessors two brief Matins lessons of her life, which state that she was miraculously healed of paralysis by her father, relapsed, and while she was recovering again, a “count” named Flaccus conceived a wish to marry her sight unseen. Petronilla, “understanding that the human race’s most bitter enemy was readying an assault on her virginity, which she had dedicated to Jesus Christ”, prayed and fasted for three days, and then, after receiving the Eucharist, died. When St Robert Bellarmine and Cardinal Cesare Baronio revised the Saints’ lives for a new edition of the Breviary, published in 1602, these lessons were replaced with a generic one from the common of Virgins, a clear sign that the traditional story was considered wholly unreliable.

A reconstruction and partial cross-section view of old St Peter’s Basilica, with the mausoleum mentioned below on the far left. This structure was round on the outside, but octagonal on the inside. A narthex was later constructed between the left transept of the basilica and the rotunda, and doors opened up to form a passage from the church into the mausoleum. Another passage connected the mausoleum with its twin next door, also demolished by Vignola in the 1570s.

In the middle of the 5th century, a large mausoleum was built next to the left transept of the Constantinian basilica of St Peter. Six of its eight internal niches later became chapels, with that opposite the door being dedicated to St Petronilla; for a long time, this chapel was under the patronage of the kings of France. In 1498, Cardinal Jean Bilhères de Lagraulas, the French ambassador to the Papal court, commissioned his own funerary monument to be added to the chapel, from a 23-year-old Florentine sculptor named Michelangelo Buonarroti. This is, of course, one of the most loved and admired sculptures in the entire world, the Pietà.

Michelangelo did not know, of course, that only 7 years after the sculpture’s completion and the Cardinal’s death, both in 1499, Pope Julius II and the architect Donatello Bramante would begin (though just barely) the process of replacing the ancient basilica, then in a pitiable state. Much less did he know that, after decades of delays, he himself would take the project in hand in 1545, at the age of 70, and spend the last 19 years of his life working on the monumental church which we have today. Although he lived to an extraordinary age for that era, dying 2 weeks before his 89th birthday, he did know full well that he would not live to see the project finished. It fell to his successor as chief architect of St Peter’s, Giacomo Vignola, to demolish the mausoleum where the Pietà originally stood, in order to make way for the left transept of the vastly larger new basilica.

The Pietà now stands in its own chapel at the back of St Peter’s, and most of the thousands of people who come to see it every day never visit the chapel dedicated to St Petronilla on the opposite end of the building. (The new church is so much larger than the old one that this chapel in the northwest corner stands entirely outside the former footprint of the Constantinian structure.) Around the year 1623, the painter Francesco Barbieri (1591-1666), known by the nickname “Guercino” (“squinty” in the dialect of his native region, the Emilia Romagna), was commissioned to do a painting of the Burial of St Petronilla for this chapel.

Guercino was especially admired for a remarkably vivid blue paint of his own invention, which he uses for two figures in this painting, as well as the sky in the background. In the upper part, it clothes Christ as He receives St Petronilla into heaven. Although the historical St Petronilla was certainly honored as a martyr, as the legendary daughter of St Peter, she is honored as a virgin, but not as a martyr, and here she is shown receiving the crown of virginity, but not the palm of martyrdom.

Below, notice the intense realism of the scene of her burial; we see the hands of a man standing in her grave, but only his hands, reaching up to help lower her body into it. The fellow dressed in blue on the left is the painter’s tribute to Michelangelo, whose most famous sculpture formerly graced the chapel of the same Saint for whom Guercino himself made this painting. The face of this man is taken from a bust of Michelangelo carved by the latter’s disciple Daniele da Volterra, and his massive forearm is very much that of a sculptor. (Even as a very elderly man, Michelangelo never ceased to work in his favorite medium, sculpture in white marble, a labor-intensive and muscle-building activity.) Surely by design and not coincidence, the chapel immediately next to that of St Petronilla in the modern basilica is dedicated to Michelangelo’s name-saint, the Archangel Michael.

Portrait of Michelangelo by Marco Venusti, one of his friends and colleagues, ca. 1535. (Public domain image from Wikipedia.)

Bernini and St Bibiana

Walking along the south side of Rome’s aggressively non-descript central train station, one eventually comes to a church, as one always does in Rome: a relief to see, perhaps, after the station, but in and of itself, not particularly interesting either. (Until about 160 years ago, the area was mostly gardens, and the walk would have been much more pleasant.) The inelegant façade is little more than a square with a pediment sticking out of it; if it were in the center of the city, near the Trevi fountain or the Piazza Navona, it would likely attract no notice at all. And yet, the interior houses a sculpture of the church’s patron Saint, the virgin and martyr Bibiana, whose feast is today, made by one of the greatest artists to grace the Eternal City with his talents, Gian Lorenzo Bernini.

Image from Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

An exterior view of the church as Bernini would have known it, in an engraving by Giovanni Battista Falda (1667-69). The façade of the church is in fact also by Bernini, and shows very well why he was better known as a sculptor than as an architect in his youth. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.)

This church is traditionally said to have been built by a Roman matron named Olympia, on the very site of the house where Bibiana was martyred in the reign of Julian the Apostate (361-63), together with her sister Demetria, preceded in the confession of the Faith by both of their parents. A more reliable source than the written passio of these martyrs, the Liber Pontificalis, states that it was built by Pope Simplicius in 467; Pope Honorius III restored it in 1224, but 400 years later, it was practically a ruin. The restoration of the church was undertaken by Pope Urban VIII, who held Bernini in the highest possible regard, and showered him with important commissions for both the Church and his family, despite the artist’s youth. In 1624, when the restoration of St Bibiana began, Bernini was only 26.

All sculptors in Rome in that era lived under the long shadow of Michelangelo, whose first work in the city, the Pietà, was completed when he was 24. St Bibiana was not Bernini’s first religious work by any means, but it was his first to be commissioned for a Roman church. He therefore devotes a great deal of attention to the folds of the Saint’s dress, since one of the things that had impressed people so much about the Pietà was the complicated folding of Mary’s robes.

At the same time, Bernini, supremely and justifiably confident of his talent, was not afraid to do things which Michelangelo did not. The latter was almost completely uninterested in any subject other than the human body: notice, therefore, how Bernini includes plants at the base of the sculpture, as well as the column to which Bibiana was tied when she was scourged during her martyrdom. In her hand, he places a palm branch made of gilded wood, the classic symbol of a martyr’s victory; Michelangelo, for whom the essence of sculpture was the liberation of a complete figure from the stone that imprisoned it, hated the very idea of this kind of composite.

Image from Wikimedia Commons by Sailko, CC BY 3.0. (This was taken when the statue had been removed from the church for a museum show.)

The figure is extremely solid, representing the solidity and strength of the martyr in the midst of her torments. This is partly due to the fact that the statue had to stay within a niche. But from a technical point of view, it is far less daring than some of the things Bernini had previously done, such as the famous David now in the Borghese Gallery. The window above the niche represents heaven, towards which the Saint placidly looks in the midst of her sufferings, which are now irrelevant to her. In the following years, when Bernini was given much greater resources to work with, he was able to develop this concept into something far more dramatic, as in the church of Sant’ Andrea al Quirinale.

The interior of the church of St Bibiana. (Image from Wikimedia Commons by Sailko, CC BY 3.0)

The interior of Sant’ Andrea al Quirinale, completed by Bernini in 1670, and, as recorded in the biography of him by his son Domenico, the work which he himself regarded as his greatest artistic achievement. Here, painting, sculpture and architecture are all brought together to represent the ascent of Saint Andrew through martyrdom to the glory of heaven. The darker, lower part represents earth, where the martyrdom, depicted in the painting over the altar by Guillaume Courtois, takes place; the white statue of the Apostle represents his soul, rising into the bright dome of heaven. (Image from Wikimedia Commons by Rickcarmickle, CC BY-SA 4.0)

St Augustine and the Translation of His Relics

Many Augustinian congregations, both canons and friars, have traditionally celebrated October 11th as the feast of the Translation of the Relics of St Augustine. For centuries, the Premonstratensians even kept this feast with an octave, although this was suppressed after Pope St Pius X’s breviary reform.

The calendar for October from a Premonstratensian Breviary printed in 1490. The Translation of St Augustine is marked on the 11th; note that because the octave day, the 18th, is permanently impeded by the feast of St Luke the Evangelist, it is permanently anticipated to the 17th. (This may seem like an odd thing to do, but it was a common enough practice once upon a time, and the same is done with St Ursula and Companions on the 21st, since their octave is impeded by Ss Simon and Jude.)

St Augustine died on August 28, 430 A.D., as the barbarian Vandals were besieging the city of Hippo, where he had ruled as bishop for thirty-five years. The Vandals were Arians who often persecuted the Catholics of north Africa, and about 50 years later, their king Huneric expelled many of the Catholic bishops from his territory. Several of them fled to Sardinia, bringing Augustine’s relics with them to Cagliari on the south of the island, its major port and largest city. By the early 8th century, the Saracens had seized control of several coastal cities of the western Mediterranean, including Cagliari, while subjecting many others to continual raids and plunder. The king of the Lombards in northern Italy, one Liutprand, was able to ransom the relics from them in 724, and bring them to his capital city of Pavia, about 21 miles south of Milan. Since that time, they have been kept in the romantically-named church of San Pietro in Ciel d’Oro, “St Peter in the Golden Heaven,” where Liutprand himself is also buried.

From about 1360 to 1400, a monumental reliquary tomb for the Saint was made, of the type which is called an “arc.” (‘Arca’ in Italian; in the past we have shown similar arcs made for Ss Dominic and Peter Martyr.) It is attributed to a group of sculptors working under the brothers Matteo and Bonino da Campione, and Balduccio da Pisa. Originally kept in the sacristy, it was dismantled during the Napoleonic wars, and reassembled as the church’s altarpiece only in 1900. At four meters high, and covered with 90 statues, it is one of the most impressive monuments of late Gothic sculpture in Italy, with a remarkable richness of iconography. These photos were all taken by Nicola de’ Grandi.

Inside the altar is a silver box made by Liutprand for the relics of St Augustine, which were moved to a reliquary in 1833. They are exposed for the veneration of the faithful twice a year, on his principal feast day, August 28th, and the feast of his Conversion, April 24.

Inside the central register of the arc is depicted the death of St Augustine, who is shown in pontifical robes, with a Bible in his hand, surrounded by six deacons who hold his funeral veil. Above him, on the “ceiling”, as it were, of the open space, Christ appears to him, surrounded by Angels and Saints who are about to receive him into heaven. (Details can be seen by clicking the photo to enlarge it.)

The lower register shows the virtues of Faith (with the upside-down cross of the church’s titular Saint, the Apostle Peter, and a chalice), Hope (looking up to heaven), Charity (with a baby) and Religion, (founded on a rock, another reference to Peter.) On the panels between them are paired Ss Peter and John, James the Lesser and Andrew, Thomas and Bartholomew, each holding a scroll with a few words of the Apostles’ Creed. On the upper register are the episodes of St Augustine’s conversion: listening to the preaching of St Ambrose; the famous “Tolle, lege” episode; and the reading of St Paul’s words “Put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh in its concupiscences.” (Romans 13, 14) In the triangles at top are shown various miracles of St Augustine.

On the lower register of the left side are Chastity, Ss Stephen, Paul the Hermit and Lawrence, and Obedience (holding a copy of a religious rule.) In the center, St Ambrose and St Possidius, bishop of Calama, are seen from behind; the latter was an eyewitness to St Augustine’s death, and later wrote a biography of him. The upper register depicts Augustine when he was a teacher of rhetoric at Milan.

St Ambrose died 33 years before Augustine; he is represented as present, along with Ss Jerome and Gregory the Great on the opposite side, to make up the company of the four Saints first recognized as Doctors of the Church. (St Jerome died about 10 years before Augustine, while Gregory was born about a century after his death.)

On the right side, the lower register depicts Meekness with a lamb, and the Evangelists Mark and Luke, with St Paul between them, and Poverty on the right. Above them, Ss Jerome and Gregory the Great (with a dove on his shoulder) are seen from behind. In the upper register, the panel on the right shows Liutprand bringing the relics from Sardinia, and then on the left, into Pavia.

Continue Reading this Article. . .

The Christian Sculptor and His Work: Guest Article by Julian Kwasniewski

The following article forms the foreword to the newly republished edition of Hubert van Zeller’s Approach to Christian Sculpture, reproduced here with permission of the publisher. The new and entirely re-typeset edition is available internationally, directly from the publisher, Barns & Noble, or Amazon. A musician, visual artist, and writer, Julian Kwasniewski is Marketing and Communications Coordinator at Wyoming Catholic College. His writings have appeared in numerous venues, including The National Catholic Register, Catholic World Report, The Catholic Thing, Crisis Magazine, Salvo Magazine, Latin Mass Magazine, and The European Conservative.

When Hubert van Zeller writes that “religious carving is meant to be a plea for light and truth, not for charm,” he expresses a truth which is just as relevant today as in 1959 when he wrote the book you are now holding in your hands. This monk and sculptor was concerned with “the present lack of direction in Christian sculpture” in both technical and spiritual approaches. Van Zeller’s idea that “before a piece of sculpture can be called Christian we must be sure that it can be called sculpture” is of course applicable to all mediums, and unfortunately just as (if not more) forgotten in our day than in his. Consequently, despite the fact that van Zeller and many of his contemporaries who appear on the pages of this book are now nearly forgotten, the problems which this author identifies—and the solutions he proposes for them—remain current.

Van Zeller was a remarkable man, and the more I familiarise myself with his extensive literary output, the more my esteem for him increases. Van Zeller would have been the first to admit that before he an author or sculptor he was a monk. The first two sentences of his autobiography are: “Religion is ordinary or extraordinary according to the way you look at it. So is sculpture.” (Hubert van Zeller, One Foot in the Cradle; An Autobiography (New York; Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1959), xi) Thankfully van Zeller looked at both religion and sculpture in such a way as to find them exciting. In numerous other books he has treated of the first, in the present work he addresses the latter.

Born in 1904 in Egypt to British parents, van Zeller remembers in his autobiography his first experiments with carving as a child. It was at the age of seven or eight that he decided what he “wanted to be good at before all else.” Picnicking and boating with family and friends on a small island was the occasion. But “this time the picnic had no appeal for me. All I wanted to do was to get back to the beach on the mainland where I had seen an Arab boy with a small assortment of knives in his lap cutting bits of black washed-up wood into shapes.” Something about the Arab boy’s task resonated with the young Hubert. Though he “possessed neither material nor tools,” van Zeller promised to carve a face in a piece of wood for a friend, so sure was he “that the power lay somewhere inside” that he “could afford to take risks.” The craze for carving which ensued was so strong that his parents believed it “would burn itself out in a week.” Carving was his passion, not merely a hobby. (Ibid. 39-46)

Van Zeller recognized the intensely therapeutic nature of carving for him, throughout his life. “Whether it was a physical effort or not,” carving was “the outlet” even in times of convalescence from illness. Stone cutting was an activity he pursued his whole life, and he unsurprisingly developed a method and philosophy of sculpture: “working in company has enabled me to benefit by the ideas of others, working in solitude has enabled me to form my own,” he wrote in the preface to this book.

Several aspects of art and its successful pursuit form the burden of this present work. If interest in sacred art was wanting not only in general but was especially “wanting among those who are in a position to steer its course” in the author’s day, the same is true in ours. The result is that “this book is accordingly addressed to a variety of readers. For the layman and priest alike, it is meant to clarify the issues at stake; for the stone-carver it is meant to make more precisely religious the employment of his powers; for the non-Christian it is meant to explain what our artistic tradition and sculptural effort are about.”

It is the final three chapters of this book, however, which form its most valuable contribution to the scene of Catholic art, since they examine the relationship of the Church to the artist and the artist to his work. “It can be claimed,” writes van Zeller, “that sacred sculpture can develop only under certain conditions. Of these the primary condition is collaboration between the Church and the craft.” If the craft of sculpting has not fundamentally changed since van Zeller’s day, what of the Church?

Van Zeller was writing on the eve of Vatican II, and if artistic conventions were being questioned by intellectuals and artisans alike in the decades leading up to that pivotal event, the aftermath of the Council made it seem as if the Church herself had discarded her artistic heritage and ideals, along with many other things relegated to a suddenly rejected past. “Since we cannot expect the Church to help on something of which she does not approve,” van Zeller recognized in 1959, “we must find out how far the Church approves of contemporary movements in sculpture and how much she is committed to their support.” Since, in the ensuing confusion, it isn’t always clear what the Church has approved of, the task of the Catholic artist has been made all the more difficult.

As to its actual texts, the Council took a surprisingly traditional stance on church art:

“Very rightly the fine arts are considered to rank among the noblest activities of man’s genius, and this applies especially to religious art and to its highest achievement, which is sacred art. These arts, by their very nature, are oriented toward the infinite beauty of God which they attempt in some way to portray by the work of human hands; they achieve their purpose of redounding to God’s praise and glory in proportion as they are directed the more exclusively to the single aim of turning men’s minds devoutly toward God.

Holy Mother Church has therefore always been the friend of the fine arts and has ever sought their noble help, with the special aim that all things set apart for use in divine worship should be truly worthy, becoming, and beautiful, signs and symbols of the supernatural world, and for this purpose she has trained artists. In fact, the Church has, with good reason, always reserved to herself the right to pass judgment upon the arts, deciding which of the works of artists are in accordance with faith, piety, and cherished traditional laws, and thereby fitted for sacred use.

The Church has been particularly careful to see that sacred furnishings should worthily and beautifully serve the dignity of worship, and has admitted changes in materials, style, or ornamentation prompted by the progress of the technical arts with the passage of time….

Thus, in the course of the centuries, she has brought into being a treasury of art which must be very carefully preserved. The art of our own days, coming from every race and region, shall also be given free scope in the Church, provided that it adorns the sacred buildings and holy rites with due reverence and honor; thereby it is enabled to contribute its own voice to that wonderful chorus of praise in honor of the Catholic faith sung by great men in times gone by…

Let bishops carefully remove from the house of God and from other sacred places those works of artists which are repugnant to faith, morals, and Christian piety, and which offend true religious sense either by depraved forms or by lack of artistic worth, mediocrity and pretense…

It is also desirable that schools or academies of sacred art should be founded in those parts of the world where they would be useful, so that artists may be trained.

All artists who, prompted by their talents, desire to serve God’s glory in holy Church, should ever bear in mind that they are engaged in a kind of sacred imitation of God the Creator, and are concerned with works destined to be used in Catholic worship, to edify the faithful, and to foster their piety and their religious formation.” (Sacrosanctum Concilium 122-24, 127)

One reads such texts today with a sense of astonishment at how very far in the opposite direction everything went–not just after the Council, but even after 1963 when this document was approved and before the Council even closed. For it was in 1963 that the Consilium was established, which brought with it a spirit at least of questioning and revising, if not rejecting, much that came before.

Van Zeller is clear: “The liturgy…is taken to be the key to the whole thing. It is also the yardstick by which the carvings themselves are measured.” Unsurprisingly, then, art floundered when the liturgy floundered, if it is true that “it will be the liturgy which gives the note to the statues, decoration, arrangement,” as van Zeller puts it. Yet the liturgy remains the key to understanding what standards art should be measured by, and what better body of liturgical rites than than those we know gave rise to the greatest and most legitimate artworks in Western history, the traditional Latin rites of Europe?

Van Zeller recognizes, though, the risks inherent in a liturgical aesthetic, noting “the risk either of drawing liturgy towards aesthetics, which would be bad theology (for liturgy is a directly and essentially religious reality, hence much more than a thing of aesthetical experience), or else of elaborating a non-aesthetic philosophy of art.” Van Zeller then references several Vatican instructions on modern art, which he sums up in the following words: “What all this amounts to, then, is this: let the moderns go ahead with their work, but let them show an acute consciousness of the reverence due to God and to the house of God.” This is achieved by avoidance (in the words of Mediator Dei) of anything which is a “deformation of sane art”, though, as van Zeller remarks, “the point at which sane art leaves off and mad art begins is not altogether clear.”

Prophetically, van Zeller wrote that “the Church has the duty, at this time especially, of being on its guard” because in “the confusion of ideologies, each eventually bringing to the surface its own appropriate expression, the Church can take no risks.” “Artistic expressions must be held up steadily and long before the light of truth,” and “whether a work of art survives the test of time is often a measure of its truth: if it is not true, it is of no consequence and the sooner it perishes the better....Perhaps the chaotic state of modern art, secular particularly but religious also, is the prelude to another great resurgence such as Christian centuries have witnessed in the past.”

One of van Zeller’s main questions is: what ought we to want from sculpture–what is its meaning? “If we look back, we see that all periods of Christian sculpture have meant something, even if it was something which was not immediately understood. Christian sculpture of the present day, however obscure the message which some of it may bring, means something. The truth of it is that the generality of the faithful, whatever the period, want sculpture to mean what they mean. It would be more humble if they wanted it to mean what God means.” Joseph Shaw has recently commented admirably on religious and specifically liturgical “intelligibility” in the liturgy, noting that the understanding of the significance of a text or work of art should not be confused with its direct intelligibility. (See chapter 4 of “Understanding Liturgical Participation” in The Liturgy, the Family, and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays of a Traditional Catholic (Lincoln, NE: Os Justi Press, 2023), 57ff.)

I believe van Zeller expresses the same thing: “The sculptor is trying to get nearer to truth; Catholicism is telling him where to look, and how to get there, and what it is.” One of the things Catholicism’s tradition teaches is that immediate intelligibility is not the highest good when it comes to sacred worship, and therefore by extension, sacred art. Another thing it tells the artist is that he is always drawing upon his predecessors and must harmonise his innovations with theirs. In the words of the author:

Tradition, like nature, is to the sculptor the background against which he works. It does not determine his manner, which is an individual thing, but it probably conditions his having a manner at all. Very few sculptors, however creative, can work entirely out of their heads. Even those who think that they work entirely from their own reserves are in fact drawing upon the law of sculptural heredity. Anyway if they repudiate an ancestry, sculptors will produce only ill-bred, vulgar work.

The idea that religious inspiration dispenses from skill is certainly problematic in all areas of art. For example, in recent years Irina Gorbunova Lomax has written powerfully of this tendency in the world of Iconography. “The sculptor who is true only to his religious aspiration and not to the principles of his craft may produce works of interest, and even of edification, but these will not be works of Christian art.” (Irina Gorbunova-Lomax, The Icon: Truth and Fables (Brussels: Brussels Academy of Icon Painting/China Orthodox Press, 2018))

This brings us to the heart of this book’s relevance today: if sentimental kitsch, grotesque abstraction, anti-incarnational simplicity, or hyperrealistic romanticism continue to dominate the world of religious artwork today, the diagnoses of these ills and the solutions to them that van Zeller proposes remain timely. Prayer, van Zeller ultimately claims, is fundamental for truly religious artwork of high quality, as is dialogue with tradition, mastery of technique, respect and understanding of materials, and fidelity to one’s own artistic sensibilities and vision.

Sculptures of the Madonna and Child and St Joseph by Van Zeller.  

Before I close, I ought to say something regarding van Zeller’s own work and opinions. Van Zeller’s dislike for the Gothic Revival as a style “without fire, sunlight, poetry, music, or anything much else” will certainly surprise readers and perhaps discredit him in the eyes of many today. However, he acknowledged that this is his personal opinion:

Just because I happen to think that the Romanesque represents the peak of Christian sculpture, and that the Gothic Revival represents the depths, I do not demand the agreement of my readers. The most that I would ask of a reader would be the patience to note the reasons which I might advance for my view. Every book about art, as about all subjects that are worthwhile, is a personal book.

I would second this sentiment: even if van Zeller’s artistic output and opinions do not resonate with you, nonetheless his reasons are carefully thought out and worthy of pondering.

In the context of Gothic Revival, his main concern is that it produces false works because it imitates a certain style exteriorly without being able to replicate the interior state which gave genuine rise to the original exterior expression. This is a valid concern for any style, Bauhouse as much as Gothic, Romanesque as much as Art Nouveau. An interior fidelity and harmony is required for an exterior counterpart: “More important than fidelity to one’s material is fidelity to oneself….The sculptor who produces works which do not express himself but someone else is making use not of a creative but of an imitative gift.”

“For a style of carving to be copied, its inspiration has to be experienced,” he writes. “It is no good trying to work out one’s own problem according to another man’s solution. Truth appears to us in its way, and we respond to it in ours” is an idea that van Zeller takes up in his more properly spiritual works Sanctity in Other Words and We Live With Our Eyes Open. In the first he remarks how we can draw inspiration from various aspects of the lives of the saints but can’t ever “photocopy” them in the path of our own life. Each person is unique. The sculptural echo in this book is his statement that “while there is no harm in following one school of sculpture rather than another, there is harm in following one school so closely that the individual creative spark is smothered.”

In We Live With Our Eyes Open, van Zeller comments on truthfulness in prayer and the common desire to use someone else’s words when really we ought to form our own:

God in any case has seen into your mind before you have, and if there is really nothing there for the time being He won’t in the least resent your being honest about it. This is to be true, to be humble; it is what He wants. Certainly it would be a mistake under such circumstances to fall back upon a sentiment which looks the sort of thing one ought to feel, merely for the sake of finding something—incidentally something not quite true—to talk about. (We Live With Our Eyes Open (Stamullen: The Cenacle Press at Silverstream Priory, 2023), 71.)

It would be fascinating if van Zeller had applied this idea to art: that if we have nothing genuine to say, it might be better not to produce than to produce false works of art.

For van Zeller, the Romanesque is the epitome: “in the Romanesque conception, indeed, theology and aesthetics were one. Such a union had not been achieved before, and it has been achieved since only for the briefest periods and in particular regions.” The architectural origins of Romanesque style gave its sculptural aspect “discipline, balance, and three-dimensional design.” If we look to a Romanesque Madonna for “for human loveliness we are disappointed, but we find instead a dignity and power which are far more moving.”

Though we may not agree with the author in this or that particular assessment of his, the reprinting of this deeply reflective book should be welcomed by all Catholics who take interest in promoting or practising the arts, both sacred and profane. As an historical snapshot it provides, along with several other of van Zeller’s books, an important window into his time period, which was one of such promise, effervescence, confusion, and bewilderment–in that way, not unlike our own. As the meditation of a life-long sculptor and Catholic priest, its claims deserve careful consideration. May it inspire not only truer art but truer Christianity in a new generation of readers.

The Feast of St Petronilla

Long before either the Visitation or the Queenship of the Virgin Mary were celebrated on this day, and before those, St Angela Merici, the founder of the Ursulines, May 31st was the feast day of St Petronilla. Although she is missing from the oldest Roman liturgical books, she is seen in a painting of the mid-4th century in the catacomb of Domitilla, where she was buried, and her name appears on lists of the venerated tombs of martyrs in the sixth and seventh centuries. In the reign of Pope St Paul I (757-67), an ancient sarcophagus containing her remains was translated from the catacomb to the basilica of St Peter, the treasury of which still preserves a large metal reliquary with her skull inside it.

Fresco of the mid-4th century, with the martyr Petronilla on the right, leading a young woman named Veneranda into the garden of Paradise. (Image source.)

The true history of her life and martyrdom has long since been lost, but she was for many centuries believed to be the daughter of St Peter. This idea seems to have come partly from her name and the location of her relics, partly from a Gnostic “Acts of St Peter”, which speaks of a daughter of St Peter, without giving her a name. (In the Middle Ages, this apocryphal document would not have been understood as a work of heretical origin.)

The first edition of the Breviary of St Pius V carried over from its late medieval predecessors two brief Matins lessons of her life, which state that she was miraculously healed of paralysis by her father, relapsed, and while she was recovering again, a “count” named Flaccus conceived a wish to marry her sight unseen. Petronilla, “understanding that the human race’s most bitter enemy was readying an assault on her virginity, which she had dedicated to Jesus Christ”, prayed and fasted for three days, and then, after receiving the Eucharist, died. When St Robert Bellarmine and Cardinal Cesare Baronio revised the Saints’ lives for a new edition of the Breviary, published in 1602, these lessons were replaced with a generic one from the common of Virgins, a clear sign that the traditional story was considered wholly unreliable.

A reconstruction and partial cross-section view of old St Peter’s Basilica, with the mausoleum mentioned below on the far left. This structure was round on the outside, but octagonal on the inside. A narthex was later constructed between the left transept of the basilica and the rotunda, and doors opened up to form a passage from the church into the mausoleum. Another passage connected the mausoleum with its twin next door, also demolished by Vignola in the 1570s.

In the middle of the 5th century, a large mausoleum was built next to the left transept of the Constantinian basilica of St Peter. Six of its eight internal niches later became chapels, with that opposite the door being dedicated to St Petronilla; for a long time, this chapel was under the patronage of the kings of France. In 1498, Cardinal Jean Bilhères de Lagraulas, the French ambassador to the Papal court, commissioned his own funerary monument to be added to the chapel, from a 23-year-old Florentine sculptor named Michelangelo Buonarroti. This is, of course, one of the most loved and admired sculptures in the entire world, the Pietà.

Michelangelo did not know, of course, that only 7 years after the sculpture’s completion and the Cardinal’s death, both in 1499, Pope Julius II and the architect Donatello Bramante would begin (though just barely) the process of replacing the ancient basilica, then in a pitiable state. Much less did he know that, after decades of delays, he himself would take the project in hand in 1545, at the age of 70, and spend the last 19 years of his life working on the monumental church which we have today. Although he lived to an extraordinary age for that era, dying 2 weeks before his 89th birthday, he did know full well that he would not live to see the project finished. It fell to his successor as chief architect of St Peter’s, Giacomo Vignola, to demolish the mausoleum where the Pietà originally stood, in order to make way for the left transept of the vastly larger new basilica.

The Pietà now stands in its own chapel at the back of St Peter’s, and most of the thousands of people who come to see it every day never visit the chapel dedicated to St Petronilla on the opposite end of the building. (The new church is so much larger than the old one that this chapel in the northwest corner stands entirely outside the former footprint of the Constantinian structure.) Around the year 1623, the painter Francesco Barbieri (1591-1666), known by the nickname “Guercino” (“squinty” in the dialect of his native region, the Emilia Romagna), was commissioned to do a painting of the Burial of St Petronilla for this chapel.

Guercino was especially admired for a remarkably vivid blue paint of his own invention, which he uses for two figures in this painting, as well as the sky in the background. In the upper part, it clothes Christ as He receives St Petronilla into heaven. Although the historical St Petronilla was certainly honored as a martyr, as the legendary daughter of St Peter, she is honored as a virgin, but not as a martyr, and here she is shown receiving the crown of virginity, but not the palm of martyrdom.

Below, notice the intense realism of the scene of her burial; we see the hands of a man standing in her grave, but only his hands, reaching up to help lower her body into it. The fellow dressed in blue on the left is the painter’s tribute to Michelangelo, whose most famous sculpture formerly graced the chapel of the same Saint for whom Guercino himself made this painting. The face of this man is taken from a bust of Michelangelo carved by the latter’s disciple Daniele da Volterra, and his massive forearm is very much that of a sculptor. (Even as a very elderly man, Michelangelo never ceased to work in his favorite medium, sculpture in white marble, a labor-intensive and muscle-building activity.) Surely by design and not coincidence, the chapel immediately next to that of St Petronilla in the modern basilica is dedicated to Michelangelo’s name-saint, the Archangel Michael.

Portrait of Michelangelo by Marco Venusti, one of his friends and colleagues, ca. 1535. (Public domain image from Wikipedia.)

Two Last Things, Hell and Paradise - Rodin and Ghiberti’s Work Compared

We are now in the Octave of Easter, which is, in effect, eight days of the Eighth Day, that Sunday which which marks first day of Creation and the Resurrection of Christ, celebrated first on Easter, and then on every eighth day thereafter through the year, i.e. every Sunday.

This design, which I think visually summarizes this pattern of interconnecting octaves so well, is from the cover of an Arabic language Bible from the 14th century.

There are so many facets of this central feast that one could dwell upon, of course, but I want to pick up on one theme of the drama of Easter which was prompted by a recent visit to the campus of Stamford University in California. I went to see the sculpture garden dedicated to the work of the French artist, Rodin.

At its center is his giant work The Gates of Hell.

These giant doors are cast in bronze, and are in fact a single piece of metal; they do not open. The weight and immobility of the doors struck me as appropriate in that it suggests a state of permanence for those who are inside. (There are a number of casts of them around the world.)

This, of course, is no barrier to Christ, who went down to Hades, as commemorated in this season, and effortlessly knocked down the doors, as shown in Fra Angelico’s Harrowing of Hell. I love the fact that what might to us be a task beyond human strength is achieved by Christ with the flick of His finger.

While the Rodin doors are impressive, it is difficult to know what we are looking at. People are not named on them, and in all honesty, if I was not told the title of this work, I would not guess what it is depicting. Commentaries say that it was inspired by Dante’s Inferno, but that Rodin decided not to follow its contents directly for his schema. As far as I have been able to ascertain, he didn’t tell us what this was. This is good for art history scholars who can earn credit by speculating intelligently on what he intended, or art critics who are at liberty to disregard what he intended and suggest their own ideas, but it is not good from a Christian perspective. Christian art should be pretty much self-explanatory. Its goal is to reveal the truth, not to hide it by requiring us to guess its meaning or interpret cryptic clues. While interpretation might require some prior knowledge of Christian symbols, this should be minimal so that most Christians who look at it would know what they are seeing. I am assuming that Rodin’s intentions were Christian, given the inspirations cited and looking at his biography it seems he was a man of faith who even considered joining a religious order in France as a young man. Given the quality of the work, it is shame we do not know more about the content of this with certainty. So, note to artists - tell us what you creating or at least name it in such a way that we can tell!

So while there is a sense, from observing his famous sculpture The Thinker at the top, that we are looking at something profound, I do not know precisely what its profundities are. There is something marvelous about the combination of scale and intricate detail as the swooping and diving figures emerge or recede into the plane, and overall the composition does seem balanced, but, I have to say, to what end?

The composition is evocative of Ghiberti’s sculpted doors of the Baptistry in Florence, completed in the early 15th century and named by Michelangelo as The Gates of Paradise. These depict 10 Old Testament scenes, and in contrast to Rodin’s work, the content is well established. This makes it of far higher value as an object of Christian contemplation.

The story of the Patriarch Joseph on the Gates of Paradise.

Bernini and St Bibiana

Walking along the south side of Rome’s aggressively non-descript central train station, one eventually comes to a church, as one always does in Rome: a relief to see, perhaps, after the station, but in and of itself, not particularly interesting either. (Until about 160 years ago, the area was mostly gardens, and the walk would have been much more pleasant.) The inelegant façade is little more than a square with a pediment sticking out of it; if it were in the center of the city, near the Trevi fountain or the Piazza Navona, it would likely attract no notice at all. And yet, the interior houses a sculpture of the church’s patron Saint, the virgin and martyr Bibiana, whose feast is today, made by one of the greatest artists to grace the Eternal City with his talents, Gian Lorenzo Bernini.

Image from Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

An exterior view of the church as Bernini would have known it, in an engraving by Giovanni Battista Falda (1667-69). The façade of the church is in fact also by Bernini, and shows very well why he was better known as a sculptor than as an architect in his youth. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.)

This church is traditionally said to have been built by a Roman matron named Olympia, on the very site of the house where Bibiana was martyred in the reign of Julian the Apostate (361-63), together with her sister Demetria, preceded in the confession of the Faith by both of their parents. A more reliable source than the written passio of these martyrs, the Liber Pontificalis, states that it was built by Pope Simplicius in 467; Pope Honorius III restored it in 1224, but 400 years later, it was practically a ruin. The restoration of the church was undertaken by Pope Urban VIII, who held Bernini in the highest possible regard, and showered him with important commissions for both the Church and his family, despite the artist’s youth. In 1624, when the restoration of St Bibiana began, Bernini was only 26.

All sculptors in Rome in that era lived under the long shadow of Michelangelo, whose first work in the city, the Pietà, was completed when he was 24. St Bibiana was not Bernini’s first religious work by any means, but it was his first to be commissioned for a Roman church. He therefore devotes a great deal of attention to the folds of the Saint’s dress, since one of the things that had impressed people so much about the Pietà was the complicated folding of Mary’s robes.

At the same time, Bernini, supremely and justifiably confident of his talent, was not afraid to do things which Michelangelo did not. The latter was almost completely uninterested in any subject other than the human body: notice, therefore, how Bernini includes plants at the base of the sculpture, as well as the column to which Bibiana was tied when she was scourged during her martyrdom. In her hand, he places a palm branch made of gilded wood, the classic symbol of a martyr’s victory; Michelangelo, for whom the essence of sculpture was the liberation of a complete figure from the stone that imprisoned it, hated the very idea of this kind of composite.

Image from Wikimedia Commons by Sailko, CC BY 3.0. (This was taken when the statue had been removed from the church for a museum show.)

The figure is extremely solid, representing the solidity and strength of the martyr in the midst of her torments. This is partly due to the fact that the statue had to stay within a niche. But from a technical point of view, it is far less daring than some of the things Bernini had previously done, such as the famous David now in the Borghese Gallery. The window above the niche represents heaven, towards which the Saint placidly looks in the midst of her sufferings, which are now irrelevant to her. In the following years, when Bernini was given much greater resources to work with, he was able to develop this concept into something far more dramatic, as in the church of Sant’ Andrea al Quirinale.

The interior of the church of St Bibiana. (Image from Wikimedia Commons by Sailko, CC BY 3.0)

The interior of Sant’ Andrea al Quirinale, completed by Bernini in 1670, and, as recorded in the biography of him by his son Domenico, the work which he himself regarded as his greatest artistic achievement. Here, painting, sculpture and architecture are all brought together to represent the ascent of Saint Andrew through martyrdom to the glory of heaven. The darker, lower part represents earth, where the martyrdom, depicted in the painting over the altar by Guillaume Courtois, takes place; the white statue of the Apostle represents his soul, rising into the bright dome of heaven. (Image from Wikimedia Commons by Rickcarmickle, CC BY-SA 4.0)

The Cathedral of Siena (Part 11): Artworks in the Cathedral Museum

Over the course of ten previous posts in this series, we have seen a great many (but by no means all!) of the artworks that grace the the cathedral of Siena, going back to the 13th century. Some of its more important artistic treasures, however, are no longer in the church itself, having been removed for preservation because of their great age, and replaced with copies. In this post, we will cover the room on the ground floor of the cathedral museum which houses several of these.

In 1287 or 1288, the Sienese artist Duccio di Buoninsegna, who would later paint the famous Maestà for the cathedral’s high altar, was commissioned to make this stained glass window (a rarity in Italy at the time) for the oculus of the apse. The central panel shows the Assumption, which is the church’s titular feast, with the Dormition of the Virgin below, and Her Coronation above it. To the left of the central panel are the Apostle Bartholomew, then much venerated in Siena as a protector of the city, and St Ansanus, its first evangelizer; to the right, the early local martyrs Crescentianus and Savinus; at the corners, the Four Evangelists.

In 1457, the sculptor Donatello, who had previously worked on the font of Siena’s baptistery, returned to the city to take up a new commission, a set of bronze doors for the churches façade, a project which was never completed. At the time, he also executed this tondo sculpture of the Madonna and Child for a door known as the Door of Pardon (Porta del Perdono), the church’s jubilee door. When the door was destroyed in 1660 to make way for the chapel of the Madonna del Voto, the tondo was of course saved.

This mid-14th century sculptural group of Christ in Majesty adored by two angels was originally placed over the large side portal of the so-called New Cathedral, the massive (and failed) expansion project which would have turned the church in its then-current size into the transept of a vastly larger edifice.

In the third post of this series, we saw the pulpit sculpted by one of the most important figures in the history of Italian sculpture, Nicola Pisano. Between 1285 and 1297, his son Giovanni served as the chief-of-works of Siena cathedral, and not only built the lower part of the façade, but also (with the help of a good number of assistants) made statues of several Biblical personages to decorate it. These were particularly vulnerable to weather damage, and have all long since been brought into the museum and replaced with copies.

Among them is this image of Joshua ben-Sirach, author of the Biblical book known to the Latin-speaking West as Ecclesiasticus. Despite the fact that he is one of the very few Biblical writers who explicitly identifies himself as the author of his own book, and despite the broad liturgical use which the Church makes of it, he very rarely appears as a subject in art. The verse written on the banderole in his hand, “Grace upon grace is a chaste and reverent woman” (26, 19), was likely chosen in reference to the Virgin Mary, to whom the cathedral is dedicated.

The prophet Simeon, with the words of the Nunc dimittis “for my eyes have seen Thy salvation” written on his banderole.

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