“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.” (Second Vatican Council, Constitution on Sacred Liturgy, n. 122).
In this interview, David Clayton—an internationally known artist, teacher, writer, and broadcaster—has picked some of the best books on Catholic sacred art.
An Englishman educated at Oxford, David Clayton, is Provost of www.Pontifex.University, for whom he created the unique Master of Sacred Arts program. He holds the post of Artist-in Residence of Scala Foundation in Princeton, NJ. He has major commissions from churches in the US and the UK, including the Brompton Oratory in London, and has illustrated several children’s books, including God’s Covenant With You by Scott Hahn. His popular blog is thewayofbeauty.org and in addition he writes regularly for the New Liturgical Movement website. His books include: The Way of Beauty: Liturgy, Education, and Inspiration for Family, School, and College; Painting the Nude: The Theology of the Body and Representation of Man in Christian Art; and The Little Oratory - A Beginner's Guide to Praying in the Home.
- The Spirit of the Liturgy
by Joseph Ratzinger - God's Human Face
by Christoph Schönborn - Baroque
by John Rupert Martin - Festal Icons History and Meaning
by Aidan Hart - The Way of Beauty: Liturgy, Education, and Inspiration for Family, School, and College
by David Clayton
Sacred art can be understood either broadly or narrowly. Construed broadly, it encompasses sacred buildings, sculptures, paintings, vessels, and vestments. Construed more narrowly, it consists of sacred sculptures and paintings. Which sense do you have mind?
Well, I know more about paintings and sculpture, but including that broader definition is fair. Most of what I am going talk about is visual art. The books that I am recommending are predominantly about painting.
We have reached a low ebb. Now, this is an opportunity. It means we have a clean sheet to start again and create something that is wonderful and beautiful.
What is the current state of Catholic sacred art?
Dire, in one word.
With a few exceptions, I presume.
Some people are bucking the trend, certainly, but, compared to what would have appeared automatically in the past, the standard of what you get in most churches and the knowledge of what even is necessary is very low. The availability of artists is very low as well. We have reached a low ebb.
Now, this is an opportunity. It means we have a clean sheet to start again and create something that is wonderful and beautiful. So, I am not daunted by that. That is why I devote my time to what I do. We have all the necessary ingredients. We have man, with a mission. We have God. We have the materials to make art with. There is no reason why we cannot equal or even surpass, through God's grace, the glories of the past.
In your view, the current state of Catholic sacred sites is quite dismal. What would you put that down to? What are the causes?
I take my cue here from Benedict XVI, an authority on these matters. He does not speak infallibly, as Pope, about these things. Nevertheless, I respect him hugely.
In his book, The Spirit of the Liturgy, he says that the art forms became separated from our worship. The wellspring of Catholic culture, of Christian culture, is our worship. When our worship is in harmony with visual imagery, architecture, music, and the other arts, then you have a very powerful and beautiful “culture of faith”, as he calls it. When that is the case, it can become the driving force for a wider culture, which then engages with people outside the Church. It forms them and primes them for what they see when they come back into the Church.
That was always the case. There was a seamless transition from the culture of faith into what Pope Benedict calls contemporary culture, the wider culture of the time. Previously, the wider culture of the time could be generally described as Christian. There was a break, and the problem was liturgical. It occurred perhaps as early as the outset of the nineteenth century. You could see a separation in the way that people worshipped and their engagement with art. The way in which they worshipped did not engage with the arts. Therefore, the arts became superfluous and, ultimately, neglected.
Artists need to have skill. They also need an understanding of Christian traditions in art and of the way in which art serves the liturgy.
There are many things that Catholics can do to appreciate and promote sacred art: visiting museums and historic churches, or picking an original work of art for prayer at home. Some might even team up to improve the quality of the liturgical art used in their parish. What would you recommend?
I have a two-pronged strategy. One is to offer formation to the artists. They need training. Artists need to have skill. They also need an understanding of Christian traditions in art and of the way in which art serves the liturgy. They need therefore to be producing beautiful sacred art in an enlightened way, so that it strikes people. This can turn people’s hearts, even people who, generally, are not appreciative of art or do not think of themselves as appreciative of high culture. If it is authentically beautiful and linked to worship, it can affect people. People do not need to be educated for it to do this.
Nevertheless, it always helps if you create the market for it. You can form people to appreciate what is authentically beautiful as well. How? Well, to a certain degree, you can have art classes which teach people that tradition.
In that sense, you can offer a similar sort of training for patrons of the arts as you would for artists. Patrons work in partnership with artists and should be doing more than simply supplying the money. They need to understand what is needed for the community for whom they are commissioning the piece.
At the same time, you need a bottom-up process in which you are forming people to make use of the art in the liturgical context. It is through teaching people to pray with art in the liturgy that they understand how to pray with art.
For example, every time a saint is mentioned and there is a picture of that saint, turn, look, and address the saint through the art. Currently, very few do this. We might invoke the name of Mary, in the Mass for example, and no one looks at the statue of Mary. They will typically have their eyes shut. You can teach people to look at the statue.
Part of the reason that I wrote The Little Oratory with Leila Lawler, a great person to work with, was to teach people to pray with visual imagery in the home and to give them some parameters for choosing art which serves prayer well. The premise is that if we pray well, then the sacred art that supports that prayer will, on the whole, be good too.
The reason that I focused on the home is that I do not like to badger priests. They are in service of the Church at the parish. Many do not have the training in sacred art that is necessary, but, frankly, unless they are asking you for information, they have probably got enough on their plates. I am grateful that they are doing what they do. To add another criticism to what they're doing, probably is not the most helpful thing. If they are asking the questions and you have that kind of relationship with the parish, that's terrific. However, it occurs to me that we can pray liturgically and authentically in the home, by praying the liturgy of the hours. If we learn to pray with the art, we are developing communities that will naturally desire what is good. My hope is that this will then come into the parish and seep its way up.
What principles have you followed in drawing up your list of recommended books?
A little story about how I even got involved in this, will help describe the principles.
I started off wanting to serve the Church as an artist, but I could not find the training anywhere. It was difficult enough to get the skills. Eventually, it was just about possible. I could pick icon painting classes here. I went to learn the academic method of drawing and painting in Florence. So, I am carefully choosing individual courses to build up my skills. Even then, you are making a patchwork quilt of training. It is not ideal, but possible, if you are driven and committed. I have seen people do that and develop the necessary skills. But then you need to understand how to direct those skills in the service of the Church and authentic liturgical art. So, the books I have picked are the ones I found most useful in trying to understand and describe the traditions of the Church and the principles that that would direct the artist’s brush when they are painting.
I have included one of my own books. By nature, I am a self-publicist, but I have included it not just for that reason. I found that there was very little information available. So, I had to draw what I was looking for from a whole string of different sources. I put into my book, The Way of Beauty, those things which are not in a textbook on Catholic sacred art. However well or badly I have done this, I believe it fills a vacuum.
1.
The first book on your list is one you have already mentioned: Card. Joseph Ratzinger’s, The Spirit of the Liturgy. It is not about sacred art as such. Though it has sections on sacred art, it focuses on the liturgy, the setting of sacred art. Why have you chosen this book to top your list?
Well, as you say, it is not about art directly. It is about the liturgy. The chapter on art, like the whole book, is immensely rich. He has a way of writing that you can unpack and unpack.
The liturgy, the worship of God, is the highest activity in which we can engage in this life. It is a participation in the heavenly activity of loving God. That is the closest we can get and so it informs everything else we do so by. Through it, all that we do can be part of the activity of loving God and can be sanctified by it. Ultimately, the source and summit of all Christian activity is the liturgy. We need to understand that before we can understand how the art can be placed into that context.
The Spirit of the Liturgy is the best book that I have found, as a first read anyway, to accomplish that. Frankly, you could read nothing else. It is so rich that it gives you a deep understanding of the wellspring of Catholic culture.
The forms that you see in Christian culture are formed from the inspiration of the liturgy. All cultures are of a time and a place. We understand the general through the particular. However, the liturgy is the source of its own culture. It is not simply the external cultures that exist around it. They will contribute to it as well. People talk about Western European culture representing certain things and being inappropriate for other places. Well, to the degree that it participates in what is universal in Christian culture, it is appropriate to all people. So, where there is no Christian culture, it is perfectly legitimate to bring those forms in as they are and then gradually to adapt them to the place and time, as the Spanish did in South or Central America. This is not Europe engaging in cultural imperialism. This is Christianity offering its own culture to others so that they can take it as a gift and then develop it as their own from that starting point.
2.
Second on your list is God's Human Face: The Christ Icon, written by the Archbishop of Vienna, Card. Christoph Schönborn, back when he was an academic. The book is on the theological foundations of icons and explores the theological debates surrounding the iconoclast controversy in eighth-century Byzantium. What are icons? Why are pictural representations of Christ important, and why have they been deemed idolatrous?
It is important that, as Catholics, we understand the basic justification for the use of images. Schönborn covers the development of theology prior to the seventh ecumenical council in 787, and, because it took a while for the pronouncement of that Council on the use of sacred art to take hold, the subsequent hundred years.
The argument over idolatry could not be sorted out until the Christology was sorted out. The arguments for the use of images relate to how Christ is the image of the Father, and we are made in the image and likeness of God. All of this had to be established. Much of the book describes the preceding councils and their development of the teaching that Christ is a single person who has two natures. Once you understand that, then it becomes legitimate to paint the person of Christ as man. He was visible to people and says that we approach the Father through him. We worship the Father through the Son in the Spirit. That is what we do in the liturgy. An image helps us approach God in a similar way. By engaging with something that we can see, we are offering something to a person that we cannot see. Through the Son, we reach the Father. By analogy, through an image of Christ, we reach Christ himself in our imaginations. It allows for that transference of respect, honour, worship, all of which need to be appropriate to what they are given and will change according to the person. We are not worshipping the image. We are worshipping Christ, but we are doing this through the image, which is a guide and help.
The most common objection to idolatry regards the commandment, “You shall not make for yourself a graven image” (Exodus 20:4). People wondered what that means. As I understand it, it means that you shall not make an idol—an image for false worship—because, in the Bible, the next thing that God does is instruct the Israelites to create images as part of their liturgical worship.
It is also clear from the Second Council of Nicaea that sacred art is not just permitted. It is mandated. We are bound to do this. The council fathers believe that if we do not do this, we lose the faith.
Incidentally, one of the reasons why Calvin condemned imagery was that he interpreted that commandment as referring to all images rather than to idols, namely, images of false gods. He was only reading it in translation. That is not the original meaning of the of the commandment.
All of this had to be sorted out. Idolatry can consist in worshipping the image—we don't do that—or in worshipping a false God through an image, and we don't do that either. It is also clear from the Second Council of Nicaea that sacred art is not just permitted. It is mandated. We are bound to do this. The council fathers believe that if we do not do this, we lose the faith. There are many reasons for that belief and I am not going to claim that this is the only one. However, we are now in a situation where sacred art is not at the heart of the Catholic Church’s worship, certainly not in the liturgy. It might be in some devotional prayer. However, it has not been at the heart of worship for some time. We see, in parallel, the faith declining in numbers. If there is one thing that we could do to contribute to building up the faith, it is to have authentic liturgical reform and harmonise it with the veneration of images. That is the part that I am addressing, but I am not saying that it is the only problem.
3.
With the next book on your list, John Rupert Martin’s Baroque, you single out the century of Bernini rather than that of, say, Giotto, Fra’ Angelico, or Michelangelo. Is this because, as John Rupert Martin claims, seventeenth-century European art strikes a balance between the religious and the secular, the natural and the supernatural?
Yes, it is. Going back to my great authority, Benedict XVI cites three authentic traditions in Christian sacred art. One is the iconographic. Icon is just a Greek word for image. The English translation of Seventh Ecumenical Council keeps the word ‘icons’. People think that it is talking only about those images that we see in a Greek Orthodox Church. It is not. It is talking about images in general. The arguments of the Seventh Ecumenical Council apply to all appropriate sacred arts.
Benedict says that there are three authentic traditions. We are familiar with the iconographic style from Greek and Russian icons, but it is part of the Western tradition as well. There are western styles of iconography, such as the Romanesque. He then says that the Gothic style is authentic. I would put Giotto and Fra’ Angelico into that category. It developed out of the iconographic but added greater naturalism. The third is the Baroque style, which had its heyday in the seventeenth century.
You modify natural appearances to suggest to those looking, through their imagination, things that cannot be seen.
John Rupert Martin was a recognised authority on the Baroque style. I do not know what his religious sensibilities were but his was the best book the Baroque style that I found.
It is important to understand the Baroque style because it is a highly naturalistic one. Many people today paint naturalistically for the Church but it is photographic realism. They are not incorporating the changes and partial abstractions that exist in the Baroque style and make it Christian. These are very subtle, but they have an impact and affect how we see art. It is exactly as you described it. There is a balance in Baroque art between authentic visual appearances. If we paint Christ, it needs to look like Christ. We cannot paint an abstract picture of Christ. At the same time, we need to indicate invisible realities through this visible medium. That is where you modify natural appearances to suggest to those looking, through their imagination, things that cannot be seen. You want to indicate that a person has a soul, but is also alive with Christ. You want to indicate both that the person has a human soul, but also that Christ is divine. So, there are other things that you do, stylistically, to indicate these truths. These things are incorporated subtly and well in the Baroque style. However, by the nineteenth-century, they had fallen away and there was almost just straight realism, which is inferior from a traditional Christian point of view. John Rupert Martin makes the distinction very clearly and well. This is in accordance with what Benedict XVI is saying.
4.
For your fourth pick we return to icons. Aidan Hart’s Festal Icons examines the icons of the fourteen major feasts of the Orthodox Church. What would you have to say about this book?
I thought it was important to have, somewhere along the line, a book that just described the iconographic tradition, as it is understood across the board.
Aidan Hart was my teacher and is a good friend of mine. He describes the theology of icons very well and the icons of the main feasts of the Byzantine Rite Churches. He is Orthodox but this applies to the Eastern Catholic Churches, which use icons in their liturgy as well. This book will give Catholics a good understanding of icons.
The theology of icons is really a description of how the style of iconography is linked to invisible realities. A visual vocabulary is developed to indicate all these realities, say, how Christ is more important than the apostles.
Iconography focusses on what John Paul II calls eschatological man. It gives us a sense of man in heaven, in union with God. Our future destiny is portrayed as a reality in the icons. As far as we know, this was never discussed in any detail, not even in the East, until the middle of the twentieth century. They had this tradition of iconography and it started to decline and decay about the same time that Western art did. By the end of the eighteenth century, you were seeing a decline in iconography in Russian and Greek churches. People started to say, “How can we recover it? There is a problem here.” That is the point at which they began to analyse the iconographic style and what distinguished it from what they saw as degenerate forms. They did this in the middle of the twentieth century, from the twenties to the fifties. A group of Russian expatriates, living predominantly in Paris— people like Léonid Ouspeknsky and Vladimir Lossky—developed a set of principles and the theology of iconography that is passed on in most icon-painting classes today.
The question they were asking is not so much, “What did iconographers do?”, but, “How can we learn from them to paint icons now?” The good of this is not so much whether it is a historical account of what icons were believed to be. We cannot answer that. Nowhere do the Church Fathers say, for example,why there is an absence of cast shadow. That was said by Lossky and Ouspensky because, in the icons, the saint is a source of light and this has been accepted in the modern era. The success of what they did is measured in that the iconographic tradition became firmly re-established in the Eastern Churches and the level of iconography in the best iconographers today is as good as it has ever been in history. We can look at our own traditions in the Western Church, the Gothic and the Baroque especially, and say “There is a model of how to re-establish them if we wanted to.”
5.
Number five on the list is your own The Way of Beauty: Liturgy, Education, and Inspiration for Family, School, and College. What are its central theses?
First, the liturgy is the wellspring of Catholic culture. That is where we need to start. Sacred art forms need to harmonise with our worship. Once we do that, then we have the driving force for a wider contemporary culture, one which will be beautiful. We want to evangelise the culture and make it reflect Christian values again. People choose to participate in it because of its beauty. You need to start there.
Then, I describe how icons were re-established and how we can do the same, if we want, for the Gothic and Baroque styles. I suggest principles analogous to those of the Russian expats in the middle of the twentieth century. If you do not accept them, fine. If you think you can do it at least as badly, do it yourself. That is a principle on which I have always worked. I got frustrated because I could not find anybody else who was doing it. So, I just thought that I would have a stab at it.
At the moment, there is no nobody talking about the principles of Gothic art in this way. We have the Baroque, through John Rupert Martin. We have iconography through the Eastern Church. So, there was a big gap as regards the Gothic. I suggest what those principles are.
The other thing is that there is a strong tradition of geometric patterns and decorative art in the Christian tradition. It is just about ignored or unknown, but it contains a lot of symbolism. If you go to churches in Rome, for example, you see ornate patterned floors which contain within them a geometric symbolism. Octagons are placed in such a way that they speak of the Eucharist. Eight represents the eighth day, which is Christ. Christ is the eighth day of creation. Through his birth, death, and Resurrection, he is the consummation of the previous seven. I have described that, as well as the principles of harmony and proportion, which informed all architecture up to the Second World War yet are almost totally forgotten. I have not found any architectural school, including those that focus on classical architecture, that focus on the numerical description of harmony and proportion at all. My hope is that architects will pick that up. That is why I included the book. Those two things, I just don't see anywhere else.
People talk about how, in the past, art transmitted the Scriptures to the illiterate. But it cannot do that. Suppose I describe a parable or read it out and you hear me narrate it. No picture can tell the story in this way.
It is also important to stress sacred art for worship and evangelization because we live increasingly in an image-centred culture. I have noticed over the last few years that students find it increasingly difficult to engage in conceptual discourse. They think very much in visual terms. Do you have any thoughts on this or experiences along the same lines?
I have heard people say they think in terms of stories and witnesses rather than discursive arguments. We can engage people through imagery in this way, but you need the full range. Many people are not going to be ready for art that is created to help well-formed Catholics to worship. If you show it to somebody outside the Church, who is not really inclined to look at the Church at all, it might draw them in. You never know how God can work. But it is unlikely. You need forms that are informed by this, but are appropriate to the context, such as landscapes and portraits.
That would include, therefore, images meant to be seen on the phone. Rather than complaining that everybody is looking at them—I admit that it is not always a great thing, and they do tend to sort of draw us away—but art that speaks to people as a meme on the phone is going to look different than art in the Church. You need to design it differently. The dimensions will be different. The detail you include will be different because you are looking at something that is small, and so it needs to be simplified.
I would hope that artists are thinking about creating art that is specifically meant to engage with people as they see it. It is through its beauty that it will draw people in.
People talk about how, in the past, art transmitted the Scriptures to the illiterate. But it cannot do that. Suppose I describe a parable or read it out and you hear me narrate it. No picture can tell the story in this way. You cannot just show the picture to somebody and they will understand the story exactly, without anyone telling them what is going on. What you can do is engage people’s curiosity so that they want to hear the story behind it. You can also refresh people's memories. If they hear it, then the presentation of an image can bring the full story back in an instant. So, it works in combination with either the written or the spoken word.
In the past, the illiterate would have heard things said. However, the way they recalled what was said was through images. I suspect that is what went on. We need to think in similar terms. People are not illiterate, but they are not predisposed to read anything. They might as well be illiterate until they decide to be literate in Christian writings.
Before going on to the supplementary volume that you recommended, a more personal question. Have you always been interested in sacred art or did you gradually discover your vocation to produce and promote it? Did you enter art school with the intention of dedicating yourself to sacred art?
I discovered it gradually. When I went to university, I studied science. Then, I converted to Catholicism. I had always been interested in drawing and painting, but never really pursued it. I was inspired by the beauty of Catholic culture and the Catholic liturgy. I wanted to be an artist and that is when I started to look at what it meant to be a Catholic artist. Gradually, I discovered what my calling was. It has been a gradual process and I did not go to a single art school. Instead, I did classes here, classes there; a course here; a course there. That is all that was available at this point. As to the understanding and the formation that goes beyond the skills, I have done my own research at each stage. That has given me a greater sense of what I want to do. So, it has been a voyage of discovery for me.
6.
For those wanting a sixth book, you have chosen A World History of Art by Hugh Honour and John Fleming. Presumably, a book of this kind helps one see how sacred art is connected to the developments of art in general. Why have you chosen this over comparable histories of world art? Moreover, why do you recommend the first six editions rather than later ones?
Hugh Honour and John Fleming were two British art historians. As part of my research, I read a whole string of art history books. Gombrich was one that was suggested to me. Most describe history from a culturally Marxist viewpoint. Everything was critiqued in terms of socioeconomics. When they describe fifteenth-century art, most art history books do not assume that being a faithful Catholic has anything to do with the art that was produced. They describe it in terms of the struggles between the aristocracy and servants: effectively, the dialectic of oppressors and oppressed. This works its way through the art world. It is everywhere. It is in the art schools. This is the basis upon which art is described. It is the philosophy by which they understand or describe the forms.
Honour and Fleming at least took it as read that when a Catholic painted Our Lady, he believed that she was the Mother of God. I do not know what their personal beliefs were, but they at least allowed that the faith might be true and that artists were believers. They would critique the art on that basis. It is beautifully written and very thorough. John Fleming died and the company continued to revise the book and steadily introduced the Neo-Marxist critique, so I recommend it only up to and including the 6th edition of the book.
Even in the early editions of the Honour and Fleming book, there is a section on contemporary art that is written by somebody else. They just felt that they were not qualified. I am guessing that they were not interested in it. Even prior to the seventh edition, that chapter has, should we say, the flaws that I described. You need to be aware of that. But, at least up to Cézanne, you get a very good description of the art in this book. It is based upon the understanding that Christianity is true. They try to look through the artist’s eyes and accept that the artist acted for the reasons he said he did it.
They take things at face value rather than apply a hermeneutics of suspicion.
Exactly, that is a very good way of putting it.
Thank you very much for your recommendations and for giving us so much food for thought.
My pleasure. Anyone who wants to get in touch with me, please do. My blog is thewayofbeauty.org. I am very happy to hear from people, talk to them and engage with them.
